Imagine

O Insignificant Me (And You!)

Blog post August 9, 2016

 “Each of us is a tiny being, permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the sun.”  – Carl Sagan

This little quote from Carl Sagan popped up on my Twitter once. It’s so totally cool!  Sagan was a master at speaking the truth and telling us about the universe and our teeny place in it.

The hardest thing humans seem to be able to do is to recognize how totally insignificant not only their own life is, but the entire human species, and our planet.  We are nothing.  Our lives are a teeny event in an obscure part of an insignificant galaxy among an infinite number of galaxies.  Get it right, people!

Christians–and other religions–have a very skewed and wrong-headed view of the world and themselves.  Their ‘God’ is supposed to care for them and love them more than any entity in the universe.  Looking at such an idea from outside it’s incredibly absurd.  If a god did exist, a ‘creator’ god, then such a being would be so immense and beyond comprehension that it/he/she would so NOT be focused upon such a speck within a speck.  It’s impossible to comprehend how small our planet is within the universe.  Anyway, there’s not one shred of evidence that such a ‘creator’ exists and a huge amount of evidence one can’t and doesn’t.

At about 1/100 the area of the full moon, the Hubble deep field sampled only about 1/15,000,000 of the 41,000 square degrees of the entire sky. Even so, this single image reveals thousands galaxies. – NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

During the time I was floundering around trying to understand reality a few years ago, slamming up against the fact that there must not be a god and I’d been wrong all my life, I came across a single picture that changed me forever.  It was a NASA picture from Hubble called the Deep Field Survey.  Son’of’a’bitch that was the most amazing and humbling picture I’d ever seen in my life.  Since the first one was made there’ve been other deep searches.  The images show a minuscule sliver of our universe and reveal that the number of galaxies in it are beyond our ability to number or comprehend.  The universe has been known to be infinite ever since people started really looking up and rejecting religious silliness but the Hubble Deep Space pics show that we really didn’t know just how big it is.  I knew, the second I saw that picture, that the idea of some entity ‘creating’ the universe was just plain stupid.

This is an old story for me, of course, but it’s what it is.  You may as well believe your room is full of fairies and trees speak English as to believe there’s a ‘creator.’  It just ain’t so.

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