Santa vs God

I wrote a post few months ago titled Santa Claus - the Gateway Drug. Today I found that someone else had much the same idea: 

What does it feel like to fly over planet Earth?

This is a...time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet at night. This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy.


It's said that many of those who have been in space have felt the Overview Effect which has been described as a transcendental, euphoric feeling of universal connection reported by some astronauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from orbit or from the lunar surface. Since I have never been in space it's vids like this that convey a slight glimpse of what they might be perceiving; that and sitting in a planetarium watching a sky show or on the rare nights when the sky is dark enough (in the vid you can see the large mass of manmade light that hinders our seeing the stars these days) and clear enough to see what some call the backbone of the night. Our Earth is small and fragile compared to the enormousness of the universe as we can see here and we must take care of it as it's the only planet we have, at least for the foreseeable future.


I wonder if this feeling of a "cosmic connection", this view that the whole cosmos is an interconnected quantum web, where consciousness is not separate, but a part of the Universe, is a true phenomenon or simply something that can be explained by neuroscience? But as Carl Sagan said, we are starstuff and I believe we are driven to journey out there, to connect...if the religious far right doesn't hinder this, or our desire to take care of our homeworld, with their anti-science attitude.