Leap Of Faith

If the Sun was scaled down to the size of a white blood cell, the Milky Way would be the size of the continental United States. There are between 100,000,000,000 and 400,000,000,000 stars in the Milky Way and it is estimated that there are between 100,000,000,000 and 200,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe. Even if you take the lowest estimates there are about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 sextillion) stars in the universe. Then there are the spaces between galaxies which are even larger than the galaxies. The Milky Way is between 100,000 and 160,000 light years across but the closest galaxy to our own, Andromeda, is around 2,500,000 light years away. The sheer scale of the universe is incomprehensible to poorly-evolved east African primates who only learned to speak properly less than 200,000 years ago. But the most important things to the ‘creator’ of all this are the genitals of one species on one planet that orbits one of these stars and whether one half of said species shows its hair to the other half.

One of the (many) irritating things about the modern incarnations of the three Abrahamic religions is their demand that other people RESPECT their beliefs. No matter that religious people refuse to respect the beliefs of other religions or even the beliefs of other sects of their own religion, let alone the beliefs of agnostics and atheists. The slightest criticism of Islam is met with shrill accusations of bigotry or (hilariously) of ‘racism.’ It is interesting that a great deal of the anti-Semitism in modern Europe comes from people who would scream ‘Islamophobia’ from the rooftops if Muslims were subjected to anything like the abuse hurled at Jews by Islamists. Pointless media gobshite Piers Morgan once demanded that comedy racist Tommy Robinson show ‘respect’ for other people’s religion. As I have said before, I have the same ‘respect’ for religious beliefs as religious people have for values of democracy, freedom and scientific inquiry.

Most of the saner religious groups say that the more ridiculous stories in the Bible are metaphors. Remember though that ‘saner’ in religious terms is strictly relative; they are only saner in comparison to groups who still believe that a couple of penguins waddled all the way from Antarctica to hitch a ride on Noah’s boat and that after the waters receded all the marsupials instantly decamped to Australia without leaving any evidence of the passage between Turkey and Oceania. The mad idea that Creationism should be taught in science classrooms should simply be treated with the contempt it deserves. No-one demands that biologists teach about Prometheus or that the Norse legend of Ragnarok is a legitimate area of study for scientists attempting to make sense of climate change. Claims that the Koran has predicted all the scientific discoveries ever made is simply ex post facto reasoning. No scientist has ever got a discovery from reading the Koran. What’s the point of a ‘holy’ book that can only make predictions about things that have already happened? And this is a book that makes the ‘scientific’ claims that the Sun sets in a muddy puddle and that human sperm is produced in the backbone.

Some religion people assert that scientists ‘believe’ in their findings in the same way they ‘believe’ in the words of the Bible or the Koran. Utter, utter garbage. Probably 99% of all scientific theories that have ever been put forward have been proven wrong. When a scientist comes up with a new idea he instantly goes about trying to prove it wrong. Religions will kill to preserve their fictions. Putting the Biblical and Koranic descriptions of ‘Creation’ up against Darwin’s Theory of Evolution merely demonstrates the limited horizons of the primitive desert dwellers who came up with those stories. I don’t ‘believe’ in the Theory of Gravity in the same way fundamentalists believe that God stopped the Sun to allow Joshua to massacre more infidels. Anyone who doesn’t ‘believe’ in gravity is more than welcome to jump off the Eiffel Tower and hope their god will save them.

I’d like to end with a quote from a far more articulate opponent of religious nonsense than I, the US comedian Bill Maher…

“But here’s the problem with confusing a church with a school. Its mixes the things you believe: religion, with the things we know: education. Then you start thinking that Creationism is science, gay aversion therapy is psychology and praying away hurricanes is meteorology.”