...The question of Gay Marriage, Moral Values in government, & the evolution debate in Kansas all derive from absolutism in American thought. In our own way, our society has elements that are worse than those that persecuted Copernicus & Galileo for questioning that the Earth was not at the center of the Universe. There is a belief by some that they know all the answers. I thought I would give my little bit of fortune cookie advice:
"True wisdom doesn't come from knowing everything, it comes from realizing that you will never know everything, and understanding that."
Ask someone a question, and they'll give you a definitive answer. More often than not, most people don't have the courage to say "I don't know". That's why I always find it funny when people write diaries "There Is Definitly A God" or conversely, "God Does Not Exist". Maybe there is a God, maybe there isn't, but we don't know.
An example of how to put all of this in context is one of my favorite quotes, that I've posted in a diary before, from Carl Sagan...
...The picture above shows Earth (the small dot the arrow is pointing to), as seen from the Voyager I space probe 4 billion miles away, near the planet Neptune.
In a passage at the beginning of Dr. Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot, he speaks to how deluded our view of "life" is, in the grand scheme of things, but also to how important it is to fight for what's right if we want our lives to "truly" have meaning...
...Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there -- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
...When we finally understand that, we'll move forward as a people.