A TRULY OFFENSIVE POST
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That’s a galaxy, probably smaller and more compact than our
Milky Way, but a galaxy. It’s so dim that the faintest star you can see with
your unaided eye is 4 billion times brighter. Its distance is
simply numbing; the Universe itself is only 13.7 billion years old, so the
light from this object began its journey on its way to Earth just 600
million years after the Universe itself formed.
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There Are at Least 10 Billion Trillion Stars in the
Universe
For those of you who know a bit of math, that would be 10 to
the power of 22 stars, or written out, it would be
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. There are probably more stars in existence than
grains of sand on all of the world’s beaches. If only 1% of those stars had
Earth-like planets, the universe would literally be teeming with life.
We are made of star dust.
Human beings are literally made out of star dust;
almost all of the chemical elements that make up a person come from the stars.
Any element heavier than hydrogen originated in the stars, and we are
definitely composed of more than hydrogen.
Calcium, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and around 60
other basic ingredients make up a human being. Since hydrogen and helium were
the only elements around before the stars “cooked” up some more, it’s a safe
bet that most of the substance that constitutes the “physical” you comes from
the stars.
Our Earth is Billions of years old
Our planet has been around for quite some time. It’s been
around, in fact, for about 4.54 billion years, give or take 0.02 billion years.
Life has only been on the planet for a short amount of time, but the variety of
life that has crawled, slithered, swam and trod upon the planet is pretty
spectacular — from single celled organisms, to giant sharks and snakes, to
dinosaurs, to mammals. On the scale of a 24 hour clock human life has only
existed in the last three minutes before midnight .
The whole of recorded history would be compressed into less than one-tenth of
one second at the end of the day. The scale is literally beyond human
comprehension.
In the face of such wonder what do the three great
monotheisms have to offer?
For a start, despite all the evidence,[1] it places humankind at the centre of the universe. There is, they all hold, an all seeing all powerful deity who takes a ‘personal’ interest in our affairs. Whether they call him Jehovah, God or Allah, the important thing is that he,[2] provided we do as we are told, will take care of us. This perverse solipsism masquerading as humility lies at the heart of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
But this almighty God, master of the universe, remember all those billions of galaxies, turns up a few milliseconds ago, and not in the great civilisations of China, or Ancient Greece, ignores the whole continents of Europe, America and Australasia[3] but obsesses instead about a small corner of the world, an iron age culture, in what we now call the Middle East. Here he reveals his presence by, amongst other things, choosing a people to be the recipients of his special attention,[4] providing a human sacrifice in the form of his ‘son,’ and through a special representative in the form of an ‘angel’ presents himself to an illiterate travelling salesman whom he designates as his last prophet on Earth, entrusting him with the sum total of all his wisdom, the last word.[5] This wisdom includes very detailed prescriptions about what he allows his adoring followers to eat, who they can sleep with and the amount of times a day they had better get down on their knees and demonstrate their subservience.[6]
I know what you are thinking, enough already, and me too. In a free and open society everyone has the right to believe what they want. What they do not have is the right to demand that these beliefs be afforded special respect or that they be given special privileges. Consequently I respect the right of all religions to hold to the correctness of their particular mythology and, within limits, to propagate these beliefs in the marketplace of ideas. However I also hold that I enjoy the right to say that these ideas are piffle and object to children being brainwashed with this sinister and insidious crap.
When looking at the images from the Hubble telescope, or simply staring up at the night sky I can become overwhelmed by the wonder of it all and the ‘miracle’ of me, this reasoning mammal be possessed of the ability to question and be touched by such wonder. At such times it is possible to speculate about the why and wherefore, to engage with the ‘spiritual’ aspect of my psyche; but set beside this incredible wonder all the mythological stories of all the holy books of the three monotheistic religions seem banal, pedestrian, and sometimes extraordinarily squalid.
[1] Though some
fundamentalists get around this problem by ignoring the evidence altogether,
clinging on to the holy texts in the same way as children suck their thumbs.
[2] And it is invariably a ‘him’, since the one thing that
all three religions share is an extraordinarily unpleasant cocktail of
patriarchy and misogyny
[3] Indeed he ignores
generation after generation who come and go across the world prior to this
period, dying in ignorance of his great jealous wrath, his declared love and
mercy, and his capacity to set bushes alight in the desert.
[4] He gives these people
special dispensation to slaughter other tribes.
[5] I am aware that these
‘facts’ are not agreed upon by the three monotheisms, to the degree that they
have been more than happy to slaughter one another, with God’s blessing, in
disputes about these matters.
[6] It will be argued that I
have caricatured these beliefs, to which I hold up my hands, but in tone only.
What beliefs have I totally misrepresented?
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