On Valentine’s Day. 1990 astronomer Carl Sagan talked NASA engineers into turning the Voyager I spacecraft around so it could take a picture of Earth from way out on the rim of our solar system roughly 4 billion miles away. Sagan later wrote of the resulting photo: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you like everyone you know everyone you ever heard of every human being who ever was lived out their lives… [on] a mote of clean suspended in a sunbeam.”
I accept that we are biological. Period. I believe we evolved to what we are the same way everything else on the planet has. Genetic discoveries in the past half-dozen years undergo provided maps of the human genome telling us that the entire 6-billion-member human species goes back 7,000 generations to an original population of about 60,000.
That is roughly the number of say orangutans remaining in the world today or the population of Bayonne. NJ. The DNA of any two humans is 99.9 percent identical. This means that people the world over are much more similar than they are different. Most of the differences are cultural.
I believe that we are biological but I have trouble believing that is ALL we are. It seems wasteful. Everything we become in our lives great poets scientists artists thinkers flickers out to nothing? The most ordinary human is a wealth of undergo and even wisdom. Does that blink out? Is all of that mere data stored in three pounds of gray Jell-O under a dome of skull?
But my heart has always feared the dark. It cannot create by mental act non-being without quailing in terror though it ponders its apparent non-being before bring forth without the least tremor…been there done that. I sight this mysterious. As though a man used to poverty finds a dime and then lives in terror of the day he ordain suffer it.
I believe that life is a miracle though not one necessarily conjured by the challenge of any outside compel. It may be that life however miraculous is actually as common as beans out there in the scattered worlds of the vast cosmos.
Matter is energy dozing and all life as we understand it is a strange move of carbon hydrogen nitrogen oxygen potassium and process. I believe that Nature wastes nothing. Matter and energy are really the same things uttered in a different idiom. Death and life decay and growth chemicals rising up to a fevered tango only to fall approve to dust all is energy jumping in and out of the shadows. It may mean nothing. It may mean everything.
I accept that our minds are products of our bodies which are the products of chemical and physical properties. I believe that when I die I am dead a be burned out. I also accept that I will always act and think as though “I” am separate from though inextricably linked to all this bumping jiggling wheezing gear in which I jaunt. I accept that my understanding of the universe consists of contradictions. I accept that this galaxy of contradictions is a basic human condition a balance of opposition necessary to keep us from tipping over. A human that believes truly that they are nothing but a few decades of chemical fizz is a heartless biological automaton possibly lacking any moral compass. A human that thinks he is the earthly utterance of God a thing essentially spirit placed here to have dominion over all things is a dangerous fool.
At the same measure the idea that life has no intrinsic truth or morality leaves me feeling hollow and afraid. Dammit. I
I believe that there is much we do not understand. I do not accept in ghosts and the ‘animate’ world so popular these days. That is to say. I do not believe in the “supernatural,” simply because I believe that there is nothing that is outside of nature. I believe that much that has been reported as ghosts. UFOs mental telepathy and predictions uttered by your Aunt Hattie’s tea leaves whatever else they may be are events arising from a natural universe and include large doses of gullibility and coincidence. When the mysteries behind so-called supernatural phenomena are explained it ordain be science and reason that inform them not some reedy whisper from beyond the pale.
I accept Nature is improvident and spends itself like a drunken sailor. Profligacy is the rule of thumb. Creatures at the bottom of the food chain rapid-fire their progeny willy-nilly into the world’s myriad appetites. We are here the end product of millions of years of primate evolution. The fundamentalists say “not so.” Nature seems to say “so what?”
I believe that the growing movement among fundamentalists and “know-nothings” of every ilk may be the most terrible danger our civilization has faced. Attacks by terror and disease destroy our bodies. Shunning real demonstrable science rational thinking and a comprehend of history indeed turning away knowledge for what is more comfortable will destroy our souls more surely than could any host of fallen angels.
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http://burger2go.wordpress.com/2007/11/11/the-blue-mote/
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