(Link to NASA Title Image)
I’ve had it up to here with climate-change deniers who claim that “climate change is a new religion” or some analogous word salad. As I’ve had occasion to point out more than once, if that were true, it’d be the first case in human history of a religion whose adherents all desperately desire the central tenets of their faith to be proven false.
So.
Let’s form an environmentalist church. I’m serious, or as serious as I can be, writing under pressure on a Labor Day weekend.
Most of the world’s religions posit some sort of supernatural being or presence as part of the package, which is a step too far for rationalist atheist me. I am profoundly disturbed by belief systems which preach hostility to the Real World in its infinite majesty and grandeur.
“I’m often asked by some of my friends on the other side of the aisle about COVID … and why does it seem like folks in Mississippi and maybe in the Mid-South are a little less scared, shall we say,” Reeves said. “When you believe in eternal life — when you believe that living on this earth is but a blip on the screen, then you don’t have to be so scared of things.”
Link
Sheesh.
But I tell ya, I could get behind the Church Of Ancient Light. (C.O.A.L.)
COAL recognizes that we are tiny specks of sentience in a vast universe.
COAL recognizes that our lives are — to the total timespan of the universe — as a femtosecond is to the total timespan of our lives.
COAL encourages its membership to experience these things for themselves, by thoughtfully gazing at the night sky and by contemplating extreme spans of space and time.
COAL encourages its membership to pay careful attention to scientific research, because the proper focus of sacred meditation is That Which Is.
COAL recognizes that historically, religions function in part to control human fertility and in part to offer legitimacy to local political power — and that these areas are outside the remit of the Church Of Ancient Light; they are None Of Our Business.
COAL recognizes that historically, religions also function in part to offer ethical guidance, and in part as a mediating mechanism, helping humans cope with the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual impact of experiencing phenomena infra- and ultra- to our perceptions. The Church Of Ancient Light regards these functions as its proper sphere of activity.
COAL considers it a crime and a sin to unthinkingly destroy things with great temporal mass, such as our planet’s ecosystems and its store of fossilized carbon.
Fossilized carbon is the preserved sunlight of half a billion years ago, and as such is inherently holy. Burning this sacred substance for indiscriminate short-term benefits is a violation of a sacred trust.
Earth’s biodiversity is the result of evolutionary processes that have been ongoing for multiple billions of years, and is likewise inherently holy. Initiating and catalyzing extinction events is likewise a violation of this trust.
I first proposed this idea at a concert.
Ab hone lagyo parabhata sakhi
Ab bole keki kira kokilata
Kusum kamala bikasaata sakhi
Aruna kirana sakhi puraba prakasha
Bhor bhayo nishi jaata sakhi
Now, dear one, morning's light has come
All the different birds are singing
All the different flowers are blossoming
New light shines everywhere
Morning has come, dear one
.
Speculating on light, I want to call your attention to a tree.
Think of a tree as a system for taking sunlight from the sun and water and nutrients from the earth...and turning it into Tree.
Tree is solidified sunlight, growing, reaching toward the source — never attaining it, of course.
Everybody loves a fire in the fireplace, or a campfire. When you put a log in the fireplace and set it alight, you're releasing the sunlight stored in the tree.
Our primitive ancestors — and us, when we go out camping — take logs and pieces of dry wood and huddle around them as the night grows cool, allowing the sunlight released from the log to warm our bodies and cook our food.
I collect wood, and at home, I have a piece of wood from the forests of Avon. It's carbon-dated to 5000 years old. The same sun that shone down on King Arthur and the knights of the round table nourished the oak that surfaced millennia later in an English peat bog.
If I were to set fire to that piece of wood, you'd see 5000-year-old sunlight coming out in my fireplace.
But that's not the oldest piece of wood I've got at home. I've got some pieces of wood called Kauri. It comes from New Zealand.
The logs of the Kauri tree are extracted from peat bogs where they've lain uninterrupted by aerobic decomposition processes for 50,000 years. The sunlight that shone down on the Kauri trees is the sunlight that shone down upon our ancestors before they'd invented agriculture.
As they were in the processes of inventing language, of inventing music, of laying the groundwork for what would become civilization.
If I put a piece of Kauri in the fire you would see the sunlight that shone down on them.
But that's really kind of trivial, isn't it?
Look up.
Our electrical lighting system is a mechanism for converting the stored fossil energy in coal back into light.
Any coal-powered electrical generating plant is taking the sunshine that came down on this earth before the dinosaurs arrived in the carboniferous era. It turned it into trees, and the trees grew up and then died and sank down into layers and became fossilized carbon and we are burning it so that I can read my sheet music.
So that we can warm our houses, so that we can leave our office buildings alight all night long, so that we can have electric billboards telling us to buy lottery tickets, not to drive drunk, to listen to a particular radio station, to GO our particular football team.
I'm not a conventionally religious man, but if I were to start a church I'd call it the Church Of Ancient Light.
Note the acronym: C.O.A.L.
The true value of coal should be ten million dollars an ounce.
And at occasions in our life that demand deep re-connection with the timeless realities of our lives on this planet, one single molecule would be added to the fire. At the time of birth, at the time of adulthood, at the time of marriage, at the time of death, let a single molecule be burned on the pyre. In that way the sunlight that came from a temporally-local neighborhood can be joined with the sunlight that fell upon the earth half a billion years ago, linking us to the past and the present.
(sings)
The True Value of Coal should be $10,000,000 an ounce.
When I die, compost me and bury me so I become a tree.
Light a tiny fire for a moment in my memory, and add a speck of coal dust, no more than $10 worth at the price noted above. Let the liberated light of an ancient sun mingle with that of my own time. Let my body’s molecules rejoin the dance of matter.
Who’s with me?
“Time is a lot of the things people say that God is. There's always preexisting, and having no end. There's the notion of being all powerful-because nothing can stand against time, can it? Not mountains, not armies. And time is, of course, all-healing. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of: all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Remember, man, that thou art dust; and unto dust thou shalt return.”
— Diana Gabaldon, A Breath of Snow And Ashes