God Said It. I Believe It. That Settles It.

I remember this statement in Sunday School class growing up.. I think this really sums it all up for so many people... The BIBLE: - "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." Is this the way we want to view reality? Isn't there a talking donkey in the Bible? Really? Reality? How drastically different is this than honest scientific inquiry?

The one thing I've learned as I've grown older is to be more skeptical about things. The first thing to go into the ash heap personally were tales of supernatural stories involving supernatural beings or supernatural places. Fantasy first to go. I think it's natural for one growing up so deeply religious to cling to the next best thing: New Age belief. I wasn't a big crystal worshiper or anything but I think I was blindly open to ideas that had no factual basis. These ideas lacked sufficient (key word: *sufficient) evidence. If you look at my body (please do not literally do this) you will see it's littered with tattoos of a spiritual order. So don't ever get tattoos, kids. My parents were right. You will regret it when you change your mind about the Mayan prophecies being real enough to etch permanently onto your skin.

So these New Age ideas were the next ideas to get tossed into the ash heap. Conspiracies one by one fell slowly into this as well. I remember arguing with my father once about the JFK assassination. How could he not think it was a government conspiracy?!... He believed the official story. Well, he was right. There is a really good Noam Chomsky video debunking this conspiracy. I no longer believe in the Oliver Stone version of that. And trust me.. I never thought I would see the day I let go of JFK conspiracies or even 9/11 conspiracies. Yeah, that's right I was a "Truther" at one time. No more, obviously. Once you look at all of the evidence the Alex Jones' conspiracy doesn't hold up. We make connections and draw parallels where there are none. We see faces on Mars or the moon, our brains see patterns, we connect dots that don't really connect. That's the nature of the human animal.

The hardest part to accept about this universe we live in is the razor sharp fact that the universe is cold, vast, and indifferent. Cosmology has given us the glaring truth: We are not special. We are nothing more than a pale blue dot. We have to come to grips that yes we are rare (a living species/ products of evolutionary processes/ using our big mammalian brains to come up with mathematics and scientific tools to observe the cosmos) but as Lawrence Krauss points out, rare events happen all the time in a universe this vast.

(Since this is all about me, let's get back to it.) -

So here I am now, left floating in space with no idea what "this is all about" and I'm OK with that, because, unlike the arrogant claims of the religious, I DON'T KNOW!. And they don't either. they just "have faith" that they do. Faith is nothing. The religious claim they have the answers. The holy books are the Truth. These contradicting holy books are the basis for such statements as: "God said it. I believe it. That settles it."

It takes quite literally 10-15 seconds of using our adult brain to reason away that nonsensical way of thinking. In this age of scientific reasoning this is a damning, childish way to view the world. It hurts more than helps. Do I need to list the evils of following literal translation of Holy Books? We are beyond these barbaric notions. Let's leave these books in the ash bin of history.

So on this day of Ray Bradbury's death, the author of "Fahrenheit 451" (a book about a future when all books are confiscated and burned) let's throw these archaic holy books into the ash bin of history and move on. We have bigger fish to fry. Not literally (if you are vegan) but we all need to look forward to the day when we can sit around this ash bin with a full blazing fire. All of us laughing and remembering stories (some good and some bad, mostly bad I think) of when we used to believe in fairies, angels, elves, gods, divine purpose, scapegoats, blood sacrifice, and this notion that we are the center of it all. We have been humbled. Science has brought us to our knees. So lets not worship now that we are down on both knees, let's get up and explore some more.

*Originally written 6/05/2012