Well if Joseph didn’t do it? Who did?

This article is not intended (or meant) to hurt the religious sentiments of unthinking and gullible Christians especially Roman Catholics. Nevertheless, I suppose I am opening myself to a stint in the clinker (under our secular laws), besides eternal damnation (under Vatican Rulings). Be that as it may, it is time old and current facets of facts (and their consequences) are cited upfront.

Either we have to agree with Justice MC Sharma’s ‘observation’ about Immaculate Conception among the extended family of our National bird or the title of this article becomes important. So important, in fact, that, even asking it, is likely to greatly upset believers right from the illiterate RC down the street up to His Holiness, the Pope in Rome. I am not sure, yet, if blasphemy is punishable able with putting a noose around one’s neck in civilized secular nations?

Maybe it’s something worse, which would largely explain why such questions have never been investigated even in the fictional writings of Canon Doyle? But they don’t burn heretics at the stake anymore. Do they? Because, if they don’t, then it makes the risk worth taking.

I don’t even know if it’s a bad question. Only that my intentions are good. Namely, to politely inform the believers that all these centuries they have been led up the (rather out of) the Eden Garden path. No. No! this has nothing to do with cricket! Nor the wicket, but the wicked. Actually, it was that bloody serpent who did us in. I don’t recall the species now, but wonder if it’s extinct? Which would be sad.

Another puzzle is to get a clue of the location of the Garden of Eden? Obviously, it was somewhere in apple growing country. Could it be in Himachal? No, stupid, even Columbus hadn’t discovered America then, so how Mr Stokes have done that so early in history? Somewhere in the Mediterranean? No apples there 5000 BCE. They say apples originated in the Tian Shan mountains of Central Asia, so may be that is where the Garden of Eden was located? It must have been terribly cold though, but I suppose that since Adam and Eve are always seen naked (except later, for the Mediterranean fig leaves), it must have been a warm summer up there then? Donald Trump does have a point (and he is a great Believer) on all this brouhaha about global warming.

Also, why do they say that the Europeans discovered America in the 15^th Century and ventured much later into Africa? Well, Noah, the great field biologist (before he became an Ark builder), actually knew where to collect good, breeding specimens of various species, big and small, especially endemics found in the Eurasian, African and Indo-Malayan faunal realms of the world. Did he miss out on those South American endemics like the llama and the spectacular toucans of Costa Rica or the undead vampires of Ireland? How Noah made the gigantic one horned rhinos of south central Africa walk up to the Ark in Palestine remains a mystery. Sadly, he left no diary or was it washed away in the Flood?

It has intrigued me no end that if the children of Adam and Eve married amongst themselves (or were there other Homo sapiens around?), then how come the human race has not been able to exterminate itself through an inbreeding depression? Like the lions of Renuka zoo?

Pursuing whether Joseph did it or not, I mean shielding Mary from the ‘Tohomet’ of original sin, is quite pointless now, given that even a highly specialised celestial police cannot unearth missing files buried under two millennia of war and agriculture and recent bureaucracies. Whatever the case, it is good to know that all the rest of us are conceived in fun-filled Sin.

Nodnat

Nodnat – is a pen name that the writer with deep knowledge of Himalayan flora and fauna and a keen environmentalist has adopted. He hails from Kotgarh, in Shimla Hills and retired as Principal Chief Conservator of Forests from Himachal Pradesh forest department.