CelticBear’s Musings

A recent post of the BadAstronomer bog:

Bad Astronomy Blog » Plowing through the electromagnetic spectrum

has me awestruck and amazed at the literal power and energy found in the universe on galactic scales, and the figurative power these things have over me.

It’s about a massive eruption from a mega blackhole in a super galaxy in the center of a galaxy cluster! And how only through the use of multiple imaging techniques can the true magnitude and effect of this phenomena be seen, and how it only becomes revealed when a scientist is looking at something else and notices a little, “eh, what’s that all about?” oddness.

Pardon me for a moment while I use this to expand on how this kind of thing affects me spiritually and reveals the absurdity of religion.

Reading things about these kinds of events leaves me more fundamentally touched than any ultra-emotional religious experience I had when I was a Christian. Countless, countless times as a teen I had experiences that made me literally weep in both sorrow and joy from religious experience. Countless times have I felt emotionally in commune with Christian friends as we gloried in the love of Jesus. And yet, in my very core of being complete unconscious, I knew something was wrong. Stuff didn’t make sense. The dogma and scripture and very textual basis for my religion seemed contrived, absurd, extraordinarily… human. From Genesis to the Laws of Moses, the prophecies, the Gospels, the Acts, the letters of Paul, Revelations, it all seemed so fundamentally human. Human created. Human contorted. Human imposed and manipulated.

I’d always been a lover of astronomy, of physics, chemistry. If my I had a more mathematical mind I’d have gone into one or a couple of those fields. My brain wraps around the concepts and theories just fine, but doing the math…I suck. Anyway, so, I knew about super novae and black holes and at that time meager but growing proof of the Big Bang, General Relativity, the paradox of time and place in quantum mechanics, the at that time hints of something called dark matter and dark energy–cosmic bodies and events that no human could possibly dream up on their own without
having evidence of such things. And deep in my consciousness I found it harder and harder to reconcile the religion of Creationism, talking mules, human sacrifice, arks and floods, divine commanded genocide, slavery, absurd rules, internal contradictions, contradictions with reality, with a universe that seemed to make these stories and laws from this collection of scrolls all written within a 2- to 4,000 year period look exactly what I had eventually come to realize:

The Christian Bible (as with all religious texts) is a completely and wholly human created expression of human fear, hate, mysogeny, bigotry, power struggle, myth, fables. Attempts of an ancient people trying to explain human nature, the world they knew, natural phenomena. And the extraordinary humanity of it all just explodes from the rough seams.

God, if he exists, could not in my mind create an infinite universe in which megablackholes rip holes in clouds of gas larger than galaxies, create novae that spark the birth of new stars that eventually may explode into new novae, a literally endless fabric of space filled with massive and utterly impersonal events of mind-boggling scale with absolutely no care and acknowledgment of we human insects clinging to a tiny speck of dust in the arm of a single galaxy…. and then turn around and give us laws that include things like how to kill your family if they try to turn you from believing in him. Laws that tell you how to sell your daughter. Would kill a man because he didn’t impregnate his sister-in-law. Would use his cosmic power to slaughter children with bears because they made fun of a prophet of his. Would set up a system in which he creates humans with “free will” supposedly knowing we’d use it to deny him, condemn us for that nature he created in us, and then kill himself on a cross to convince himself that we should be forgiven of that nature he created in us in the first place.

Oh my god. I feel sick inside that I actually once believed all that. I literally feel sick.

Now that the scales are removed from my eyes, so to speak, it simply amazes me that there are millions of people who believe this painfully obvious human-created mythology. Billions of people believing in one of many human created mythologies and fables and dogma. I just don’t understand how people can revel in the cognitive dissonance that is required to believe this stuff after finding out just how awesome, amazing, fascinating, mysterious, beyond comprehension the universe really is.

Either God is in a Bronze Age collection of stories from a small group of people advocating racism and bigotry and sexism and intolerance and arrogance regarding being such, or God is in the cosmic microwave radiation remaining from the Big Bang and intergalactic eruptions from super massive black holes and quasars that put out galactic level energy.
Guess which one I’m going for.