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3 summers ago I was staying in a caravan, a long way from the nearest city
It was usually pitch black at night
I had given my word that I would not smoke inside
so 1 a.m. I stepped outside for a cigarette
After a few minutes of standing in the darkness, I realized that I could see my hands
quite clearly
Something I've noticed that I could not do on previous nights
So I looked up
expecting to see the glow of the full moon
But the moon was nowhere in sight
Instead,
there was a long glowing cloud directly overhead
The Romans called it Via Galactica
The Road Of Milk
Today, we call it The Milky Way. For those who missed the lesson at school that day
The basic facts are these
remembering that one light year
is equivalent to six trillion miles,
our galaxy has a total diameter of somewhere around one hundred thousand
light years
Our sun is located towards the edge of one of the galaxy’s spiral arms
about twenty six thousand light years out from the central bulge of the galaxy
It takes two hundred to two hundred and fifty million years for the sun
to complete one orbit of the central bulge
Surrounding the galaxy, above and below the disk in a spherical halo,
there are approximately two hundred globular clusters
which may contain up to a million stars each
The Milky Way itself contains two hundred billion stars
give or take
These numbers are essential to understanding what a galaxy is
but when contemplating it, some part of the human mind protests
that it cannot be so
Yet an examination of the evidence brings you to the conclusion that it is
and if you take that conclusion out on a clear dark night and look up,
you might see something that will change your life
This is what the galaxy looks like
from the inside,
from the suburbs of our sun
Through binoculars, for every star you can see with your naked eye,
you can see a hundred around it
all suspended in a grey, blue mist
But through a modest telescope, if you wait for your eyes to adjust to the dark
and get the focus just right
you will see that mist for what it really is -
- more stars
like dust
fading into what tastes like infinity
But you’ve got to have the knowledge
seeing is only half of it
That night, three years ago, I knew a small part of what’s out there
the kinds of things, the scale of things, the age of things,
the violence and destruction,
appalling energy,
hopeless gravity,
and the despair of distance
But I feel safe
because I know my world is protected by the very distance that others fear
It’s like the universe screams in your face
Do you know what I am, how grand I am,
how old I am?
Can you even comprehend what I am?
What are you
compared to me?!
And when you know enough science
you can just smile at the universe and reply:
“Dude, I AM you.”
When I looked at the galaxy that night I knew that the faintest twinkle of starlight
was a real connection between my comprehending eye
along a narrow beam of light
to the surface of another sun
The photons my eyes detect, the light I see, the energy with which my nerves interact
came from that star
I thought I could never touch it yet something from it crosses the void
and touches me
I might never have known
My eyes only saw a tiny point of light
but my mind saw so much more
I see the invisible bursts of gamma radiation from giant stars converted into pure energy
by their own mass, the flashes that flashed from the far side of the universe long before
before Earth had even formed. I can see the invisible microwave glow
of the background radiation left over from The Big ***
I see stars drifting aimlessly
at hundreds of kilometers per second
and the space-time curling around them
I can even see millions of years into the future
That blue twinkle will blow up one day
sterilizing any nearby solar systems in an apocalypse that makes the wrath
of human gods seem pitiful
by comparison
Yet it was FROM such destruction
that I was formed
Stars must die
so that I can live
I
stepped out
of a supernova.
And so did you.
In light of this unarguable fact,
this hard-earned knowledge, this partial
but informative truth,
what place then,
in the twenty-first century and beyond,
for the magical claims of organized religion
The first religions were primitive by any definition
For reasons of limited population, communication and plain old geography,
they never grew to be anything other than a local concern
But religions mutate in time and grow in sophistication
as each generation of holy man learn what works and what doesn’t,
what makes people obedient,
and what causes rebellion
What ideas people can easily escape
and which will haunt them
until they have to pray just to stop the nagging fear
when populations grew, due to the slow but steady growth of knowledge,
as if confronted by a bumper harvest the religions went into an arms race
with each other
from gods of wind and thunder and sea
the threats, incentives and claims of power escalate until every dominant
organized religion has a god that is
all-powerful, all-loving, all-seeing and words like infinity and eternity are deployed
cheaply while all other words are open to abuse until they mean exactly
what the religions want them to mean
That night under The Milky Way I who experienced it, cannot call the experience
a religious experience
for I know it was not religious in any way. I was thinking about facts and physics,
trying to visualize what is not what I would like there to be. There's no word
for such experiences that come through scientific and not mystical revelations
the reason for that is that every time someone has such a ‘mindgasm’
religion steals it simply by saying...
Ah, you had a religious experience
And spiritualists will pull the same ***
and both camps get angry when an atheist like me tells you that I only
ever had these experiences
after rejecting everything supernatural
But I do admit
that after such experiences, the moments when reality hits me like a winning
lottery ticket
I often think about religion
and how lucky I am that I am not religious
You want to learn something about god?
Okay
This is one galaxy
If god exists,
god made this. Look at it
Face it, accept it, adjust to it
because THIS is the truth
and it's probably not going to change very much
This is how god works. God would probably want you to look at it,
to learn about it, to try to understand it.
But if you can't look, if you won't even try to understand,
what does that say about your religion?
As bishop Lancelot Andrewes once said:
“The nearer the church
the further from God”
Maybe you need to run
away from the mosque,
away from the church, away from the priests and the imams,
away from the books
to have any chance
of finding God
squeeze
a fraction of the galaxy into your mind and then
you’ll have a better idea of what you're looking for
To even partially comprehend the scale of a single galaxy
is to almost disappear
And when you remember all the other galaxies, you shrink one hundred
billion times smaller still
but then you remember what you are
The same facts that made you feel so insignificant also tell you how you
got here
It's like you become
more real or maybe the universe
becomes more real
You suddenly fit, you suddenly belong
you do not have to bow down, you do not have to look away
In such moments
all you have to do
is remember to keep breathing. The body of a newborn baby is as old
as the cosmos
the form is new and unique but the materials are thirteen point seven
billion years old
processed by nuclear fusion in stars
fashioned by electromagnetism
Cold words
for amazing processes
And that baby was you
is you
You’re amazing!
Not only alive but with a mind
what fool
would exchange this for every winning lottery ticket ever drawn
When I compare what scientific knowledge has done for me and what religion tried
to do...
to me!
I sometimes literally... shiver
Religions tell children they might go to hell and they must believe
while science tells children they came from the stars
and presents reasoning they can believe I’ve told plenty of young kids about stars
and atoms, and galaxies and The Big *** and I have never seen fear in their eyes
Only amazement
and curiosity.
They want more
Why do kids swim in it
an adults drown in it? What happens to reality between our youngest years
and adulthood?
Could it be
that someone promised us something so beautiful that our universe seems dull
empty, even frightening by comparison. It might still be made by a creator
of some kind but religion
has made it look ugly
Religion paints everything not of itself as unholy
and sinful while it was beautifies and dignifies its errors, lies and bigotry
Like a pig
wearing the finest robes
In its efforts to stop us from facing reality,
religion has become
the reality we cannot face
Look at what religion has made us do
to ourselves and to each other
Religion stole our love and our loyalty and gave it to a book, to a telepathic
father that tells his children that love means
kneeling before him
Now I'm not a parent
but I say that those kids are gonna turn out messed up
It cannot be healthy
for a child or a species
We were told long ago and for a long time
that there was only the Earth, that we were the center of everything
That turned out to be wrong. We still haven't fully adjusted
We’re still in shock
The universe is not what we expected it to be It’s not what they told us
it would be
This cosmic understanding is all new to us
but there's nothing to fear-
we're still special we’re still...
blessed!
And there might yet be a heaven
but it isn't going to be perfect
and we're going to have to build it ourselves
If I have something that could be called a soul
that needed saving
then science saved me
from religion
Some people find it
really very depressing that the universe can only support life
for another thirty billion years
Thirty
billion
years!
Are you *** kidding me?!
Original video by philhellenes http://www.youtube.com/user/philhellenes All credits go to him ;)
Polish/English subtitles by JediDave44 Thanks for watching!