Hurtling Through Space

This follows on from Part 7.

As mentioned in Part 1, I realised that it’s exactly 20 years since I entered the full-time workforce, and a lot can happen in that time, so thought I’d share my road to reason. This is the final part.

While I can understand how religion appeals to those seeking absolute certainty, there is no proof of any given religion’s validity beyond its own self-referential written text and its adherents. And there are countless religions with their own texts and followers, each claiming to be the truth, and many of them damn non-followers to their own version of hell as punishment for not making a choice in their favour. So a failure to choose correctly, when there is so much confusion and noise all around, religiously speaking, will result in an eternity of torture and brutality. And you call that a caring, just god? I don’t think so.

A book that has “This is the truth” written in it doesn’t make it true. Billions of people claiming that a book is true doesn’t make it true. Even if we might want them to be true.

That’s not to say that all religions are definitely false and that there are definitely no gods — that would be both hubris and an unsubstantiatable belief — but rather there is no irrefutable evidence in favour of them. Welcome to uncertainty: mind your step…

In case someone wishes to raise the question of whether I can afford to take the risk where eternal damnation is the cost, I would simply point to Bertrand Russell’s famous teapot. Just because something can be imagined and the concept of an after-life (with eternal punishment) can also be conceived for it, it doesn’t mean that it exists or that is should be followed. Otherwise, where would it end? Roman pantheism – haven’t we already tried that…?

As I see it, there is no proof or evidence of a god that doesn’t include something like:

• “Look around you… there must have been a creator!“
• “Science can’t explain [something], so it must be god!“
• “How could 2 billion people be wrong?“
• “It must be true, because the [book] says so!“

These are all logical fallacies that prove nothing. Not a sausage. Nada. Zip.

It is for these reasons, founded in actual experience and investigation, that I confidently and unequivocally declare… that nothing is certain. (Anticlimax?) After all, it’s the only truly neutral judgement. All the odds (and evidence so far) are that we created all these gods in our own image and they are mere fantasy or perhaps projections of our own desires, hopes, prejudices, greed, or possibly a coping mechanism for the fears we had when cowering in the caves while thunderstorms raged outside or volcanoes erupted. But perhaps not. To state otherwise would be belief, and that’s a voluntary shackle I’ve chosen to undo.

It brings me to the definition of atheist (with a little ‘a’) from my first post. As I see it, the only neutral position is one that mirrors that point in our lives before our family, friends or teachers impressed (cynics might say infected) the unseen and unempirical upon us. So a-theism means the absence of theism (supernatural belief). Simpler days indeed.

For many atheists like myself, however, it is not enough simply to eschew supernatural thoughts and superstitions, but also the millennia of religiously-inspired rules, laws, beliefs, restrictions and horrors forced upon mankind for no other reason than they appear in one or another translations of that nation’s or continent’s holy book, and they kept its leaders in the lap of luxury. It’s very easy to point to things such as schools, hospitals and charities run in the name of a god, but it’s more distasteful pointing to the slavery, torture, rape, genital mutilation, oppression (race, class and gender), genocide, conquests, and wars that are all happening this very day in the name of any given god and his book. It’s deplorable and shameful.

So a step beyond simply divorcing oneself from such… taint is to look at ways of living that do not involve Stone Age edicts meant to keep superstitious nomadic desert tribes alive in this scientific, largely urban, modern world.

Enter Secular Humanism, a non-theistic system or philosophy of looking at and living in the world with reason, ethics and morality foremost, and without the irrelevant encumbrances of religious or supernatural thoughts or beliefs. It’s about being good and striving for goodness, justness, and morality for its own sake and for your fellow human, not because your fear hellfire or damnation. (Would you really do awful things if you weren’t afraid of a god or eternal punishment? What kind of person does that make you?) And it’s beautifully liberating — you can be a good person and knowing you’re doing it because you can and want to, not because it’ll go into some imaginary ledger for use against you in some Miltonian judgement.

There is enough beauty and majesty, cruelty and suffering in the world. Why do we insist on wishing for more of the former by creating more of the latter?

Instead, perhaps we should marvel in what we have with those we love for whatever time we may have.

I’ve just taken one of those online quizzes of 30 or so questions that determine your political leanings — almost a copy of one I was given in my Engineering Communications class back in university — and then plots your results on a graph with Left and Right as the -x and +x axis and Authoritarian and Libertarian as the +y and -y axis. You answer each multi-choice question with one of 5 answers ranges from Strongly Agree through Neutral to Strongly Disagree. The main difference with this quiz is that it adds a “How much does this matter?” bar which allows you to add a level of importance to your answer, ranging from A lot to A little.

Here are my results for the Political Spectrum Quiz: Your Political Label:

Political Views: Left moderate social libertarian Left: 3.2, Libertarian: 1.81
Foreign Policy Views: -1.9	Culture War Stance: -4.32

For those of you who have been reading this blog for its short life — and those who know me — my results should come as no surprise. The results are almost identical to the tests I’ve taken every 5 or so years since my first such test over 15 years ago.

Interestingly, the results page goes on to tell me that all of my answers are pretty much the average, though it doesn’t indicate how many people have taken the quiz (it could be just 10 people). The quiz doesn’t pretend to be scientific or of greater significance than it is at face value, but I thought it was worth the 5 minutes it took.

Give it a go and let me know how you got on. It might give you an insight into yourself when you go off and search Google or Wikipedia for the precise meanings of whatever your results say.

I felt compelled to share this fantastic video footage, posted to a friend’s blog. I’m not sure where the footage originates, but the music is clearly John Barry’s The Overture from The Black Hole, a film I enjoyed when I was young:

[Edit: Normally I wouldn't make this kind of edit, but Unreasonable Faith posted a similar video that just had to be shared]:

I think it does they do a fantastic job of showing the relative sizes of planets within our solar system, our Sun, and the staggering sizes of nearby stars. The extra-solar stars pictured range in distance from almost 9 ly (Sirius or Alpha Canis Major, and is also the brightest star in the night sky) away to over 20,000 ly (the recently discovered V838 Monocerotis).

To put the video into context: if V354 Cephei were placed at the centre of our solar system, its radius would end somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn. It’s that big. And just look at the final comparison between our Sun and VY Canis Major, which is the largest star that we know about. If placed at the centre, its radius would reach to Saturn. This image puts the relative distances of the inner and Jovian planets into context (image from solcomhouse):

Orbit of the inner and Jovian planets

It’s just mind-boggling how insignificant our own yellow dwarf Sun is in comparison to others in our own galaxy never mind a thought for our home, this pale blue dot hurtling through space around it.