An Erred Perspective of the Heavens

deconversionmovement:

christ-is-god:

I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how a man could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.

― Abraham Lincoln

I can’t blame Lincoln for saying this; I really can’t.  He didn’t have our telescopes; he didn’t have our technology.  He didn’t know of black holes, gamma ray bursts, hypervelocity stars, rogue planets, etc.  He didn’t know there were not one, but two belts filled with millions of debris—each capable of impacting the Earth.  He didn’t know that Sun rays cause skin cancer; he didn’t know that our Sun will go through a Red Giant phase and pull the Earth into it.  He didn’t know Andromeda’s course toward our galaxy.  We can look at the Earth and say there is no god; we can look into the heavens with our modern day knowledge and say there is no god.  How many times do I have to tell you that your god doesn’t exist?  Do you actually think some Bronze Age war god created our universe?  Can you fathom how miniscule he is when compared to the grand scope of our universe?  It’s easy to post a quote you agree with, but it isn’t easy to defend the indefensible.  The heavens declare the glory of an indifferent universe that doesn’t give a damn who you believe in.  The universe will run an asteroid, a red giant, even a galaxy (!) through your beliefs and there’s nothing Yahweh can do about.  Come to grips with the facts.  I’m glad impending doom is billions of years away; I wouldn’t want zealots holding us back when death is knocking on humanity’s door.  By the time humanity is seriously threatened by some catastrophe, Christ and his religion will be long dead, but more importantly, forgotten.

A gem from what Dawkins called “the poverty-stricken arsenals of the religious imagination”.