The Kurdish flag has red, white and green horizontal stripes with a yellow sun in the middle.
The sun in the middle of the Kurdish flag with its 21 rays, like the 21 fire lamps on the pillars of Minare Park, is linked to their old pre-Islamic Yazdani religion in which fire- the source of light- symbolized their god.
This divine symbol represented at the center of the Kurdish flag became the center of an interesting debate I had with one of the shuttle drivers here one night, who told me that angels were made of light, and spirits were made of fire. But fire is light, I thought. The light from a fire and the light from a lightbulb are the same basic element; they are both manifestations of one electromagnetic force. But he was convinced otherwise, and I can understand why: a fire burning on the hearth seems to be so different from the electric light shining from a streetlamp, say. But the example of the three different forms of water (liquid water, gaseous clouds and solid ice) is proof that in nature a single element can take on several seemingly unrelated forms.
This divine symbol represented at the center of the Kurdish flag became the center of an interesting debate I had with one of the shuttle drivers here one night, who told me that angels were made of light, and spirits were made of fire. But fire is light, I thought. The light from a fire and the light from a lightbulb are the same basic element; they are both manifestations of one electromagnetic force. But he was convinced otherwise, and I can understand why: a fire burning on the hearth seems to be so different from the electric light shining from a streetlamp, say. But the example of the three different forms of water (liquid water, gaseous clouds and solid ice) is proof that in nature a single element can take on several seemingly unrelated forms.
If you're a lot like me, you would have gone home and googled it, and found out that the light that you see from a fire (campfire, the sun, a match) is indeed the same element as the light from an electric source (bulb, lightning); ie: firelight = electric light. To be precise, firelight is evidence of fire, but the fire itself is a chemical reaction involving fuel, oxygen, and heat. When the fuel gets hot enough, it starts decomposing (burning), and the carbon and other elements that rise into the air during burning emit light, which is the only part of the reaction that we can physically see. So simply put, a fire and a lightbulb are both different sources of the same light.
Thus, assuming angels and spirits exist, and assuming the driver was right in saying that the former are made of light while the latter are made of fire, then it follows that (since fire and light are in essence the same thing), angels and spirits are not completely different beings, but only as different as humans are to say dogs. Humans and dogs are very different in in structure, but we are both made of the same element- which in the driver's “Old World” views, is earth. And in mine? Well that depends on the results of the Large Hadron Collider, doesn't it?
3 comments:
I guess saying that radio waves are also the same thing and asking what they represent would have been pushing a bit too far.
I believe that everything in our universe is composed of something I just pulled out of my ass called Zing-dongs. A zin-dong is the basic building block of energy (and therefore matter) as well as all the other stuff in the universe that we don't understand or haven't discovered yet. Angels, devils, dragons, spirits, fire, and electricity are all made of the same stuff. The stuff I just invented.
Hmmm... I'm going to go eat a bunch of zing-dongs now in the form of a greasy slice of pizza.
Aaron - just replace Zing-dongs with the word string and you'll be a cutting edge physicist.
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