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Imagine.
Imagine what it was like for those who came before us.
At the dawn of humankind.
When the earth was flat.
When the moon and sun were our mother and father.
And when the stars were just pinholes in the curtain of the sky.
When we drew our history with primitive pictures.
When we fashioned our shelters
Inside the cold rock of the landscape.
When a long life was thirty years.
When everything we saw was a sign.
A flash from the sky meant God was angry.
When the earth shook: the spirits were displeased.
The flood waters came, and we begged for forgiveness.
The volcano erupted, and we appeased it with sacrifices.
We suffered sickness and disease, and we called it a curse.
When loved ones perished, and we called it judgment.
Everything was beyond our understanding.
Mysterious, strange, wondrous, terrifying, unknown.
Yet somehow we believed
That we were the center of all things.
And then we began to see our world with new eyes.
The moon was a place we would one day visit,
And leave our footprints in the dust.
The sun was brilliant cascade of helium and hydrogen.
A star. A single solitary star,
Among billions of other stars,
Inside a single galaxy,
Alongside hundreds of billion of other galaxies,
In a universe born billions of years before us.
The tempests above us, the fire beneath us,
They became explainable, measurable, often foreseeable.
Our crude illustrations gave way to rich expressions
Of picture and verse that ignited the imagination.
We built our shelters from wood, mortar, glass and steel.
We discovered living worlds beyond the naked eye,
And we inhabited that world to understand
And begin to conquer sickness and disease.
We began to unlock the code of our very being,
And discovered the bond we share with all living things.
We celebrated long lives of over 100 years.
Our age is a new age of enlightenment.
At this very moment, humankind is beginning
To grow beyond the childish fears of its infancy.
To refuse to be satisfied with unanswered questions.
To acknowledge a universe much grander
And more wonderful than the superstitions
Of our ancestors would ever allow.
And to understand that even though we occupy a tiny planet,
Inside a vast universe, we are still part of it.
We are growing. We are Learning.
We are achieving. We are evolving.
To finally understand that we are not
The center of all things.
If we long for our planet to be important,
there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by
the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.
(Carl Sagan, Cosmos)
narrated by: L. Harvey Gold
written and produced by
The Thinking Atheist