After posting yesterday about religious experience being a part of the brain, and emotion being biochemical but no less important than thinking it’s mystical: I find this video today, and it made me weep.
I was so filled and swamped with emotional reaction to this I left my office for a bit.
THIS is what I have been talking about for the last four years:
Every time I’ve raged against the machine, complained about people ruining the country, railed against dogma and absolute certainty, fought against arrogant absolutist belief, despaired about war and greed and hate and bigotry and intolerance, it’s because of my understanding of the pale blue dot. This is one of the reasons why Carl Sagan who wrote the book Pale Blue Dot which inspired this video, is one of my greatest heroes. He, and too few others, understood that human arrogance and self-righteous importance is the foundation of our inexorable slide into self-destruction.
Our beliefs in absolute ideologies. Our faiths in self-certitudes and righteousness is the source for the short-sighted hate and intolerance. Beliefs that MY people are right and will live forever, that the world is a perfect divine creation protected from anything we can do to it, that the THEM is deserving of eradication because God is on my side. How much pain, wars, destruction, carnage, can we suffer as a human race before we realize how insignificant we are to the universe and vitally important we are to each other?!
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