Star Trek: 50 Years of Humanism

One of the major reasons I've been a Trekkie for over half a century. It is time to put away childish things like Bronze Age mythologies so that we can one day boldly go where no human from the planet Earth has gone before. We must become progressive not regressive.

Laniakea

Scientists have just announced we are part of a supercluster they've named Laniakea, a Hawaiian word meaning immeasurable heaven. Just look at the immensity of what's out there - how can anyone studying this think that all this was created just for humans living on the third rock from the sun? And to have this immensity be created just 6,000 years ago? Ridiculous.

A Detailed Simulation of Our Universe

Wow!!! Reality is far more fascinating and impressive than anything found in those Bronze Age mythologies.

 

Letter from the Universe

LOL. Wish I had one plus a complaint department and a user's manual too. 

 

The Center of All Things (Not)

Ooh I like this. It's a visual version of much of what I've been saying in previous posts. I'm glad that there are others out there who share the same outlook. May its message spread far and wide.

Everything You Need to Know About Planet Earth

Love this vid. It explains quite clearly how the Earth came to be. You can see what a thin biofilm humans are a part of compared to the size of our homeworld.



There is no need for superheroes aka gods to explain this; we are no longer in the Age of Ignorance but fifty years into the Space Age...unless we let the fundies drag us back.

The Cool Green Hills of Earth

I recently finished reading a fascinating book titled A Garden of Marvels by Ruth Kassinger with a paragraph that truly got to me: There are vastly more chloroplasts on Earth than stars in the universe. All these chloroplasts owe their lives to that one eukaryote that engulfed an indigestible cyanobacterium that lived 1.6 billion years ago. That single creature's descendents turned the rocky continents into our leafy, green world, without which none of us could exist. 

I love that - we owe our existence to a minuscule eukaryote that existed over a billion years ago not some imaginary deity that supposedly created everything 6,000 years ago (and the same goes for all the other creation myths). If forced to worship something it would be that eukaryote that started our incredible chain of life all those eons ago. Thank you little cell...you did good.

Oh the Stupidity

Creationist Ken Ham declared "You see, the Bible makes it clear that Adam's sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam's sin, but because they are not Adam's descendants, they can't have salvation."

Take a look at the Earth compared to the rest of the universe.



To think that a mythological human on a third rock orbiting an ordinary star in a typical galaxy among possibly a trillion galaxies with who knows how many life forms could affect the entire universe is absolutely ridiculous. Believers in Bronze Age mythologies like Ken Ham need to put away such childish things and grow up or, if they force us backwards like they are trying to do, we'll never get to explore what actually is out there.

Ten Beautiful Lies About Jesus

I came across an early version of David Fitzgerald's Ten Beautiful Lies About Jesus and have been slowly reading it these past few days. I'm now more than ever convinced Jesus never existed. Before I thought he might simply have been an apocalyptic preacher who roamed the Galilee preaching the coming of god who would cast the Romans out of Jerusalem and establish his kingdom on Earth and was executed by the Romans for stirring the masses against them but now I think he was just the result of the imagination of spiritual people in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd centuries before Christianity became the state religion and gained power, convened the Council of Nicea, which decided what would go into the Bible, and went downhill from there. My favorite bit concerns Joseph of Arimathea. Biblical scholars have never discovered exactly where Arimathea was. A writer named Richard Carrier claims Arimathea is an Aramaic pun: ari- (best) mathai- (disciple) -a (town/place) so in effect Joseph came from Bestdiscipleville. 

The Superheroes of Yesteryear

Thousands of years ago, in the Age of Ignorance that lasted into the Bronze Age and Iron Age and even into today (look at the fundamentalists who believe every word in the Bible to be true), our ancestors may have lacked science but they did have storytellers, imaginative storytellers who rivaled Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (the creators of Superman), Stan Lee, Alan Moore and many others. These storytellers created the fictional superheroes of their day with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men but, in their nescience, they did not call them superheroes but gods. Some of these ancient gods are now correctly called superheroes like Thor and his fellow Asgardians. Will the comic book heroes of today be thought to be our gods millennia from now? And when will more of us realize that that's all there was to the "gods" of yesteryear? When will we grow up?

The Unfolding

For the past few weeks I've been thinking deep thoughts and out of my subconscious has surfaced a memory of reading (or trying to) Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father. An ardent feminist, she rejected not only the gender identification of god but also the concept of god as a static noun (supreme being) rather than active verb (Be-ing). To be honest I never quite got it (perhaps because I simply could not finish the book) but upon thinking about this once more I've come to the conclusion that it's not Be-ing that should be used to describe god/the universe but the verb becoming.

We now know the universe is forever expanding, changing, evolving, unfolding*. Some religions have acknowledged this; for instance, according to the Buddha, all things are impermanent and change is the natural order of things unlike the Catholics who believe, "As it was in the beginning is now, and ever shall be, world without end." All that there is began some 14 billion years ago in the Big Bang; the universe is certainly not as it was then nor as it will be billions of years from now. We tend to think of ourselves as the end all, be all of evolution but we are just part of a biofilm covering the third rock of a minor star in a galaxy among 100 billion to one trillion others. Our brief span of existence, whether as an individual or even as a species, is less than a blink of an eye compared to the large amount of time our universe will exist, ever changing, on a time scale we find hard to grasp. We are insignificant mayflies which bothers many of us who prefer to see us as the reason for all existence, the center of it all.

The universe is continually becoming something different from what it is now and we are becoming something different too. This journey began long ago and where it will end no one knows but we are part of it, here on spaceship Earth, and I sincerely hope our species survives to enjoy the show and perhaps contribute to the end result whatever that might be.

Everything is in motion though on our level it's so easy to ignore as our senses can't/won't register it. Electrons orbit the nucleus and the planets orbit suns which revolve around the center of galaxies which are both flying away and toward each other. The timescale of the orbits of electrons is extremely fast while the timescale of galaxies is very long. To find out what truly exists in the universe we need science not mythologies from the Age of Ignorance. As Carl Sagan once wrote, “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known” and I want to know it.

*The English noun evolution (from Latin ēvolūtiō "unfolding, unrolling") refers to any kind of gradual change.

Our (Near) NeverEnding Journey

This is reality. We are part of a biome that developed and is still developing on the Earth as it journeys through space. Who knows where we're going but the fun will be in finding out and that requires science not clinging to Bronze Age mythologies like so many are doing these days *sigh*

The Bi(b)le

For those who insist that The Bible is the true source of morality they should be made to read this. As James T. Kirk once said, "Above all else a god needs compassion" but there is none in that sadistic, misogynistic deity.

PACT

After the decision by the Supreme Court (consisting mostly of male Catholics) the other day I have lost all patience with people who cling to Bronze Age mythologies in the 21st century; they are no more to be respected than adults who insist on believing in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. 

The fundamentalists of the Abrahamic religions basically just want to control women, to have us be nothing but baby makers, keeping us ignorant (the Saudis have passed a law denying women access to libraries) and subject to men. This may have been acceptable centuries ago but not now in the 21st century. It is time to put away childish things and grow up before something like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale becomes reality. 

Ever wonder why I continually to use the phrase "put away childish things"? It's actually from the Bible - 1 Corinthians 13:11: When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. (King James version). For once the Bible has it correct. Let's do it (women too).

Noah's Ark

When I was a little girl attending Sunday school the teachers loved talking about the story of Noah and the ark as they could hand out coloring booklets and we would color in the cute animals. This worked for a while but as I grew older I'd ask more questions like how did they get the pandas from India, the kangaroos from Australia, the llamas from South America, the bison from North America etc and then return them once the flood was over. They'd pat me on the head, shush me so I wouldn't cause others to question the legend and tell me I'd understand when I'm older.

A bit older I'd ask if, since at the end of the flood, there were only 8 people on the planet did that mean the Chinese, the Indians, the Native Americans, the aborigines, the Africans etc. were Jewish? Again with the head patting and the rest.

Finally, shortly before I declared I did not believe in god at age 10, it occurred to me that though a few were allegedly saved, the vast majority of innocent kittens and puppies and bunnies and babies and pregnant women drowned just because god was peeved at some people. Why couldn't he just strike them down himself? Why did the innocent have to die so horribly? So much for the sanctity of life.

Now that I am older I understand that the flood myth was a common legend in the Middle East with the earliest versions being the Eridu Genesis with a hero named Ziudsura and the Epic of Gilgamesh with a hero named Utnapishtim. Traders and conquerors probably made the stories common among the various peoples in the region. I have little doubt that at some point in the history of the Middle East there was a devastating flood but it was NOT a worldwide one as the fundies are trying to prove these days. It's ironic that the story they feel is one of the most valid is the one that basically drove me to non-belief.

It's also ironic as they search Mt Ararat for the remains of the ark that they apparently have not read their Bible which says that Noah's ark came to rest among the mountains of Ararat. I have this picture in my mind of them going over Mt Ararat inch by inch while on a nearby mountain some shepherd is caught out on a cold night and burns some wood he found to keep warm.

Ann Druyan

Wonderful article by Ann Druyan writer of "Cosmos". "We have not resolved the trauma of losing our infantile sense of centrality in the universe. And so as a society we lie to our children. We tell them a palliative story, almost to ensure that they will be infantile for all of their lives." That's what the fundies want to do to us...make us gullible children who will obey what they claim their Bible says. We have to grow up and put away such childish things.

The Age of Transition

Thousands of years ago, we humans lived in tribes all around the globe, in an age of ignorance. We had no way of knowing how we came to be or why the seasons changed or why thunderstorms or earthquakes etc. happened. We did not have science...but we did have storytellers and the error in thinking that people like the creators of Superman or J.K. Rowling existed only in the modern age has caused many of us to deny the fictionality of so many legends the religious maintain are factual.

At night we gathered around the campfires and told stories as there was little else to do. These stories were handed down through countless generations eventually becoming "true". Most tribes developed their own deity or deities, their own creation myths with many having their own versions of Adam and Eve. Other times actual events were relayed down through the centuries gaining layers of fiction in a generational game of Telephone. "The Illiad" would still be considered merely a Greek myth if Schliemann hadn't found Troy but the discovery of Troy no more proves the existence of the Olympian gods then the discovery of King David's stable proves the existence of the Jewish deity. 

Some found that if they claimed an ability to manipulate or speak to or for the deity or deities they could gain power and not have to work in the fields or go hunting as the majority of people had to do. This power was often passed on to their offspring thereby creating a hereditary caste of priests or shamans. Power does corrupt as we still see in the leaders of various religions. 

About 400 years ago we began to develop the technology to investigate the world around us and beyond with the invention of the microscope and the telescope. Science was born, giving humanity the true reasons as to our origins and the answers to many questions that had plagued us for centuries. We entered the age of transition and the balance began to shift as science gained more credence and religion less so but those in power were and still are reluctant to give it up and are fighting tooth and nail to stop progress, to drag us back to that time of ignorance when we believed in made up beings. 

It should never be science vs creationism but Christian creationism vs Moslem creationism vs Indian creationism vs Native American creationism vs Aboriginal creationism etc. Let the Bronze Age mythologies duke it out and leave science alone. As matters of faith they are all equally valid; as matters of reality they are all equally invalid. It is time to put away childish things and grow up, to enter the age of science. Will we let those who want us to regress continue to dominate us or will we stand up so we can go forward; to return to the moon, to explore the other planets and beyond or will we remain a backwards planet ruled by superstitious nonsense? Will we ever be able to go boldly where no human from the Earth has gone before?

Cosmic Consciousness

I came across a post the other day titled Are Religious Beliefs Going To Screw Up First Contact? My first response was yes especially if they learn about the Mormon religion where dead Mormons are thought to become gods on other planets - I don't think that would sit too well with aliens. Then I thought they probably won't bother with us until the majority of humans have outgrown such nonsense. In the article the writer says:

"...clinical neuropsychologist Gabriel G. de la Torre now argues, we're not quite ready to make contact just yet. The problem, he says, is that most of us haven't come to grips with our place in the universe. He calls this the "cosmic consciousness" — a term that Canadian psychologist Richard Bucke defined as "a new evolutionary step beyond self-consciousness." Now while this sounds a bit new-agey, there's some substance to this idea. As Torre writes,

More than one hundred years ago, Bucke went further and described a new concept of cosmic consciousness as a new evolution [sic] step beyond self-consciousness. According to Bucke, by virtue of self-consciousness, man is not only conscious of trees, rocks, bodies of water, and his own limbs and body, but he also becomes conscious of himself as a distinct entity apart from all the rest of the universe. Further, by means of self-consciousness, man becomes capable of treating his own mental states as objects of consciousness. The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is, as its name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe.

For many of us it's so true. There are still people who believe that Earth is the center of everything and the sun orbits the Earth! We must grow up and attain space awareness or cosmic consciousness, accepting our place in the universe and realizing we are simply part of a biofilm clinging to the third rock from a minor star in an ordinary galaxy, one among possibly trillions. Until then our egos will continue to let us ruin our world and kill off other species because to the way of thinking of the religious we are the important ones created by a deity or deities and what we want is all that matters...after all, according to one of the major religions, we were given dominion over everything on Earth to do with as we please because our planet is unimportant and it's the afterlife that counts. We must one day put away such childish things.

The Universe

Astronomers at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have created the first realistic virtual universe using a computer simulation called "Illustris" beginning a mere 12 million years after the Big Bang (a short amount of time considering the universe in some 13+ billion years old). Read more about it here. 



This is the universe we live in. One of the reasons why I posted this is answered in my next post.

The Evolutionary Tree of Myth & Religion

Came across a webpage of The Evolutionary Tree of Myth and Religion. Many of the dates are estimates but it does give a general idea of how these ideas have evolved over the millennia. We now live in the space age and it's time to put away these childish things we have inherited from our ignorant ancestors.