The Fear Of Seeming Inconsequential

I recently watched a documentary on the Hubble space telescope. The information and science they are gathering on the universe is truly staggering. The enormity of the cosmos is incomprehensible to most of us without an MIT degree in astrophysics. At on point in the film, the scientists had decided to point the telescope to an area in space that seemed utterly empty. An area that was the comparable to the size of a grain of sand if you were to look up at the night sky. It was the only spot in the sky devoid of any planets, stars or galaxies. When the processed the photos and information, what they discovered was incredible. The scientists counted 3000 galaxies and each one of them contained hundreds of billions of stars. This was discovered in deep space in an area of the sky smaller than a pinhead.

When processing this information it's hard not to feel a little temporary and small. As a matter of fact our individual lives are rather insignificant when applying it to the sheer vastness of space and time. A lot of people equate this to the hand of God. They believe that only a supreme creator could have made a universe so vast and that studying it only creates quandaries and paradoxes. Why seek truth and knowledge when it is just easier to believe God. When talking to most religious folks about des choses de nature philosophique they will often come back with quips like give it up to God. It's God's will. God only knows. I think that they are just plain scared.

Now being the nerd that I am, I always find solace in humor. I believe that Monty Python offers more answers than the Roman Catholic Church or any other world religion for that matter. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWVshkVF0SY Please watch video and tell me you don't feel a whole lot better about being a speck of microscopic dust traveling on another slightly larger speck of microscopic dust that is swirling around with 100 trillion other specks of dust in an area the size of Arizona that is constantly expanding.

Finished?
Felling Better, right? I told you.

Religious people who don't get the humor in the song are the ones who are the most insecure. And I believe people with deep seated insecurities can be the most dangerous. Why they are insecure is sort of baffling though. If one is so sure that they will go to heaven and live in Shangrala in the afterlife then why would they give a rat's ass about whether I believe it or not? Well I think that I know why. It's because they can't know for sure. All they have is faith based on unsubstantiated fact and myth and they get angry when I tell them that I don't believe it. This goes against everything that they were raised to believe. The fear of Hell and being tortured for eternity is a real fear. I know! I had this fear as anyone raised a Christian did. That's why the church created it. The Church of tolerance and forgiveness where an all knowing spiritual being looks down upon us and loves all of us equally can also throw you into a pit of fire for eternity if you don't do what it says.

You can have faith. You can believe in God and that you're going to heaven. That is totally fine and cool. But don't tell me that it is a fact and that it should be taught in public schools as science.  It is a perpetration that is destroying our country and our society. We are becoming a joke in the eyes of the world. We are getting our asses kicked in math and science. The rest of the world is moving away from us because we are not inquisitive and problem solvers anymore. We deny climate change. We are not moving away from fossil fuels. We are not taking an active role in bettering our society. We are not looking through the Hubble telescope with wonder and awe. We are burying our nose in an ancient book of stories written by primitives 2000 years ago and trying to teach our children that it's true. It's okay to feel inconsequential. It's alright to admit that you don't understand what is going to happen to you when you die. It's alright to be scared.

Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Liberal? or Fear Of Obamafacismarxocommunimuslimism

I keep being told how dangerous Liberals and progressives are. I myself am actually shocked at how menacing I could be. Here are some of the things that I hear:


"So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research. ... Eugenics. In case you don't know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. ... The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening." Glenn Beck.

"Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots." Ann Coulter.

"Our fiscal ruin and resulting loss of world leadership will, in [liberals'] eyes, be not a tragic event but a desirable one." - Mitch Daniels.

"The objective of the liberals is to destroy this country." - Herman Cain.

"That is [liberalism's] goal — to destroy the family… [liberals] just made up this gay marriage thing… gays are natural conservatives." - Ann Coulter (again)

I had no idea that I was an anti-American Marxist out to destroy this country. Well I guess the only thing left to do is to round us up and put us somewhere where we can't topple our democracy. I know! A camp!! But not a nice sleep away camp, it's got to be someplace where they can isolate us and concentrate our numbers down so they can properly deal with us. I am not sure what we'll call this place, but it will come to me.

If liberal and progressive thought is so destructive and dangerous, then who are all the dangerous Liberal leaders and henchman? Who are these radical men and woman who are making conservatives in this country want to arm themselves to the teeth and prepare for revolution? What radical Marxist social ideology are they teaching our young people to turn them into brainwashed Maoist puppet people? Well the answer is even more insidious then you could ever imagine. Here are 3 of the nastiest elitist progressive voices conservatives fear:

Jimmy Carter- Mr. Carter is an evil anti-Semite who loves terrorists. He is the cause of all the problems in the Middle East. Conservatives believe that the unrest in the region began in 1979 with the overthrow of the Shah in Iran. They will also tell you that it took two terms for Ronald Reagan to undo all the damage that was done by Carter. Of course they completely forget about the recession that he inherited and the terrible apathy the country was in after the Watergate scandal. Conservatives even blamed Carter for the current fiscal crisis!! They claim the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977 was the cause of the bank meltdown in 2008. Wow! That Jimmy Carter was really evil. Passing legislation that would bring down the economy 31 years later. You have to hand it to conservatives, they eat this bullshit up.

Al Gore- Nothing gets a conservatives blood boiling with fear and loathing more than even the mention of Al Gore's name. Right off the top he believes climate change is a real phenomenon that will have devastating consequences to the environment if left unchecked. Of course this all a left wing, liberal conspiracy bent on destroying god fearing, American capitalism. Everyone knows that the U.S of A runs on oil and the blood of our sweet lord Jesus. Solar and wind power are just fantasies that have no place in a creationist...oops, I mean intelligently designed world. Oil was injected into the earth’s crust by God the same way a baker squeezes sweet jelly into a luscious donut for us to enjoy. The earth warming is a good thing as it will create more sunny beaches and happiness!! Mr Gore and those elitist scientists don't understand God's simple plan. Jesus loves Americans and he will always protect us because we pray to him. Those who don't put complete faith in him (liberals, progressives, and educated people) are doomed.

George Soros
Nothing scares a conservative more than a European. In fact George Soros is pure European evil that hates America and wants to destroy it from within. Conservatives and Tea party nuts believe he lurks in the shadows as an all powerful socialist puppet master bent on destroying economies, controlling elections and strangling the life out of innocent benign American capitalism with his powerful 80 year old Hungarian penis. Why he even gave up Jews to the Nazis during WWII in Budapest when he was 10 years old!! Of course all this is complete bullshit. But it doesn't matter because the giant Fox News anus keeps squeezing out hot steaming turd after hot steaming turd of regurgitated talking points and lies. Of course the Fox news listeners can't get enough of putrid smell and try to tell you that it smells like sweet tea but we progressives know it's just a pile of shit.

Now there are many more liberal voices that will send chills down a conservative’s spine causing them to loosen their bowels in terror. The Clintons, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Bernie Sanders, Rachael Maddow, this list could go on forever but the reality is that conservatives are just plain scared. Conservative, Right Wing Radio and Fox News also realize this and they feed the fear to their listeners. They create tales of barbaric abortion clinics and leftist woman's rights advocates with the claims that they are evil immoral people yet they offer no solutions to solve the problem of unwed teen mothers, hungry children and poverty. Wait, I'm sorry they do have a solution. Cut welfare, social programs to help young working single mothers and children's healthcare. They blame labor unions as the cause for all the woes of the American worker, yet they stand behind large corporations who ship jobs overseas and expect American citizens to compete for jobs with Asian workers making a dollar a day. They demonize teachers for demanding a living wage to educate our children. They dare to point their lecherous fingers at the President and call him a communist, a terrorist and even question his citizenship to this country.

But I guess it isn't really me they fear. They fear the illusion of me. The filthy liberal. The stupid progressive. The other. But these fears are false and unrealized. What Fox News and Right Wing Radio want us to fear is ourselves. We are teachers and union members and mothers and fathers. Most of us are hard working citizens just doing the best we can for ourselves and our families, but they want us to fear the immigrant and the homosexual and the atheist and the poor even though they are part of us! Tea Partiers always talk about "We the people", yet they always side with big business against their own interests out of unproven, unrealistic fear. Don't be afraid of me. Don't be afraid of brown people. Don't be afraid of gay people. You know what? How about you try not being afraid at all. Let's all try and work together and try to fight against the things that are really wrong with this country.