How Do They Do It?

New pictures of Centaurus A from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 have given us an incredible view of another galaxy~ I can't help but wonder how those people who think the actions of any one person have a cosmic importance to the 'creator' of the universe can keep thinking that when seeing these pictures...

The answer is easy, really; they DON'T see the pictures. They don't understand the scale of these things, of how truly microscopic our existence really is, and how powerful this human imagination and lust for information and discovery really is. I don't think they want to.

When one begins to understand what 'cosmic' really means, how vast our universe is, and how small we are in relation, the real question for the religious should be "why would it care?" Do we take notice of that individual grain of sand somewhere in the beach? That individual grain is everything we've ever known, every human who's ever lived, every dream that's ever been dreamt.. Our entire existence is that single grain, a single drop in a cosmic ocean, and truly we never take heed to such an insignificant thing.

"but god DOES care!" they will say~ but why? What justification is there to care? Surely when you paint, you must focus on a single pigment, right? It's arrogance, not faith, that drives this notion of self importance~ It's fear, not love, that perpetuates this ignorance.

Accept the truth. Accept that we are only significant to ourselves, and not to the cosmos. Understand that when one stands at the level they prescribe to their god, that we aren't even noticeable~ we blend invisibly into the larger picture, and even that is an understatement. We toil and spend our lives doing things confined to this rock, things that will NEVER have consequence (at least for the foreseeable future) on a level as small as our solar system, let alone our galaxy~ or the hundreds of billions of galaxies outside of it. The door to our human imagination is only open once we discard these trappings of self importance, once we discontinue the inane act of observing ourselves in relation to our superstition, and begin to focus on the world around us, and the reality in which we exist~ there is so much there that I suspect there is no room for the supernatural...

When confronted with pictures of other galaxies, images of something so mind-numbingly large that we have no physical way of truly comprehending it, believing in a self-importance that extends beyond those things is truly the height of arrogance~ an arrogance disguised as pious humility.

~Dillinger