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The Sky

For at least 100,000 years, perhaps 250,000, we humans have looked into the night sky and wondered what it meant.

We wondered if the stars were distant campfires of other people. We wondered if they were lights in the Bowl of the Sky for our enlightenment. We wondered if there were messages there for us to decode.

We saw the moon wax and wane, and wondered what effect it had on our daily lives. The women went into menstruation on the full moon, surely the celestial bodies influenced our lives.

We invented stories about the constellations. We knew enough to see their progressions, and the retrogressions of the planets.

But only recently, in the last 15,000 years or so, did we keep records of the astronomical phenomena, and applied this knowledge to our benefit.

We plant when the days become longer, toward that day when the day and night are equal in length. We harvest and store food when the days become shorter toward and beyond that time when the day shortens to the length of the night. We had an intuitive idea of the calendar before the Egyptians and MesoAmericans invented it.

But now we know so much more. In the lifetimes of many people on this forum, we have discovered the Big Bang, the stages of the stars and galaxies, the size and status of our galaxy, and other galaxies.

We have peered into Deep Space and discovered the age and nature and size of the Universe. In only the last hundred years or so, we have been removed from the center of a small and homocentric Creation to a part of much larger, far more glorious Universe.

What hubris exists among us to think that a god capable of creating the Universe we know now actually cares one whit about us, much less sent himself/his son to die a gruesome death for some vague and difficult benefit to us.

The days of religion are fading. It will go the way of aristocracy and feudalism. Slowly, violently, but it must fade. Religion cannot stand to reason, and we are ramping up reason exponentially.

A new, brighter day is upon us. The world into which we were born is not the world in which we live, and the world of even the near future is a glorious and wonderful world of knowledge and exploration.

We are lucky to be alive now, and future historians will confirm that we saw the Awakening to our place in the Universe. What a shame it would be to waste it by clinging to ancient superstition.


DF
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