In a Sandbox

If they build a sandbox themselves, chances are that parents will make it from four to six feet square and about a foot deep. They will fit it with a narrow ledge with the edges rounded off, and they will fill it with the cleanest sand they can find, to a depth of eight or nine inches. At a toy store they will buy some small, colorful shovels and some small, colorful buckets.

Few things are installed with greater optimism and a purer love than sandboxes. Parents expect their sandboxes to be places where their children can play joyfully, harmlessly, and safely, usually with their friends.

But small children haven't been around long enough to pick up all the behaviors that later will allow them to disguise the natural savage state of our species. Soon enough squabbles may set in, and a little later the kiddies begin to fight, climaxing that by making a very unintended use of the sand that brings on the most hellish screams of outrage. Apparently, judging by this, one unpublicized property of sand is that it must be thrown into a playmate's eyes.

If there is enough of that behavior, the parents take up the sandbox and use the materials for other purposes, while wondering why they ever thought that providing the sandbox was such a good idea.

If a presiding deity is likewise still in or around the Solar System, instead of in a distant galaxy where it would be more relaxed, it most likely thinks exactly the same thing about a certain well-known area on this planet with lots of sand, stretching from Pakistan to the Mediterranean and Red Seas -- the region where it was tricked into allowing the first instances of what humans to this day disingenuously call "civilization."