The Hindus are different because they have a bunch of gods, some of whom are blue. They even have one with an elephant head, which is really weird because who thought that was a good idea?
"Hey, let's take an elephant head and slap it on a person body and, bam!, we got ourselves a god! That's one more down. How many left?"
The story goes that Ganesha's mom, Parvati, took a bath, collected up the dirt and molded it into Ganesha. (Okay, first off, that's a lot of dirt. If you have that much dirt on you - I've been dirty. I've seen dirty Earthlings - If you have so much dirt on you, you can make a whole other person out of it, you need to be taking way more baths.)
Anyway, Parvati sends Ganesha out to guard the door while she finishes her bath. She wasn't even done! What the heck was she was doing that got her that dirty? That's crazy dirty.
So Ganesha is out guarding the door and Parvati's husband, Shiva, comes home and is like, "Who the heck is this guy?" So he cuts Ganesha's head off. Parvati comes out and is like, "Wah!" So Shiva's like, "Crap!" and grabs an elephant head and slaps it on there. Which makes sense as a stop gap measure. Gotta stop the bleeding. But they leave it there. Jeez mom, take another bath. Wad up another head. Go roll in the mud a little. Would it have killed her?
I don't know. Maybe Ganesha liked the new head. Maybe once you have a prehensile nose, there's no going back to the bump. I don't know. I think I'd stick with it.
Which brings up a whole other thing. Who of these Earthlings, way back ago, thought it was a good idea to evolve away from prehensile tails? Man, I would never have done that. How many times have they been wrapping presents and thought, "Man, if only I had one more hand, just to hold the tape." A prehensile tail would take care of that.
Or, they're carrying groceries in and they drop their keys and they don't want to put anything down because there's snow or it's raining? Bam. Prehensile tail saves the day.
Of all the arguments they have about evolution and intelligent design, I'm not sure where this would fall. If I had a prehensile tail, there would be no way you'd talk me into evolving away from that. I'd take the walking upright and the frontal lobe, sure. But I'd be keeping the tail. And if I had to choose? Tail.
I think a prehensile nose would be better, though.
It maybe falls on the side of intelligent design, but only if the god that made them didn't think of the tails until after he made Earthlings and was working on monkeys.
"Oh man, this is so cool. I wish I'd thought of this for people. Darn it. Oh well."
Pause.
Hey! What if I stuck this on an elephant face? And with big floppy ears. That would be funny! I am so going to do that. Hee-hee!"
Elephants are what happens when a creator god stays up too late.
