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.
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