Feb 26, 2012

Welcome to Sunday Mass…that is not Mass…Instead, enjoy your weekly, healthy prescriptive dose of Atheism!

There are many reasons. The human species, being conscious and posessing a neocortex, has more awareness to question and to probe. What is that “giant orb in the sky”? People deduced that the solar system was heliocentric long before Copernicus, but religion (and other sources of misleading confusion) thwarted that truth from emerging. Indeed, to this day, in 2011, hundreds of thousands (yes that apallingly high number is accurate) of religious people actually are so clouded and lost and misled that they believe that the 4.6 billion year old planet Earth is somewhere in the temporal vicinity of 6,000 to 10,000 years old. To me, that type of lie, is the equivalent of an adult believing in not “the spirit of” but the actual existence of Santa or The Easter Bunny. But more importantly, I love understanding how things work. The only thing I’ve discovered about the workings of religion and its followers is that its perpetuated because of reiteration, this toxic concept called “blind faith”, and fear (of celestial punishment). Those lies don’t interest me. What does is the actual astronical functioning of our existence! Did you know that the moon’s illumination, the light we see from the moon, has two sources: the earth and the sun? That’s fascinating! What an uttelry fascinating truism! Yes, the moon is illuminated from rays of light from the sun and (this is the part that most people don’t know about ) the moon is ALSO illuminated BY THE EARTH!! Amazing eh?! I thought so.

This link illustrates with a nifty graphic animation how “Earthshine” works, but basically, you know how the moon can be crescent (or gibbous) but their occasionaly is a faint glow around the “hidden” part of the moon? That glow is illumination from earth! Sun rays bounce off earth and to the moon, providing it with a faint glow . But when most people talk about moonlight almost always they’re refering to the strong rays of light illuminating it from the sun.
The orbitting locations of the planets confused me for a LONG time (and it’s a big concept because we’re on the planet so it’s difficult to think of and visualize things outside of it). This part may be obvious to you but it took me awhile to grasp, despite being pretty clear on a good amount of scientific concepts. The earth rotates (and revolves) and when the part of earth that you’re on is not facing the sun (night-time) the rays of sunlight are hitting the opposite side of the globe and (with the exception of during an eclipse) continuing on past the earth hitting the moon. The revolving moon (around the earth) and it’s placement in relation to the earth gives the moon it’s phases (new to waxing crescent to waxing gibbous to full to waning gibbous to waning cresceent to new again).

It took me awhile to visualize the simple fact of the rotating earth and the fact taht it’s facing away from the sun but those sun rays still continue on (in th vacuum of space) until the come into contact with something (like *cough* the moon) took me awhle to comprehend, mainly because of phrases like “The sun is rising!” “The sun “gives off” light”. Little silly phrases like that make the sun out to be this magical lightbulb in the sky (and while it’s life-giving powers, of providing heat and light to earth are profoundly useful) it’s just a gigantic rock (star) with tons of fusion (molecules combining and giving off light and heat, the opposite of fission, the separation of molecules) reactions and it’s own gravity holding it together. The laws of physics, planetary eliptical motion, and relativity should be referenced instead of phrases like “the sun is rising”; it doesn’ rise!!! What people should be saying is “the earth has rotated in view of the sun and thus it’s upper lumb is approaching the planetory sphere’s horizon” (or something more descriptively accurate like that!).

Those truisms are concealed by religion. It’s just so disgustingly and apallingly evil to cloud one’s mind with fabricated creationist rubbish when the astronical-physical-biological-chemic-scientific truth is so much more uplifting and fascinating and inspiring.

Up to a certain ago (like age 10) believing that the earth was made by God, Santa exists, and the third orbitting sphere from our Sun is 10,000 years old is okay, but as far as I gather, hundreds of thousdands of adults really believe Santa (and other fictional deities) exists. Believing in a compassionate spirit or upholding a virtue of being compassionate is, I guess, acceptable, as long as it’s economical compassion (one can easily, as I have done believe it or not, devote a large portion of their life and time to helping others while catastrophically neglecting their own needs, economic compassion remedies such a misalignment of focus).

So conclusively, religion is sad and depressing not in just it’s fallacious tenets and beliefs and ideology, but in its destructive mind-distorting non-scientific mission. The argument “Well religion gives people hope, meaning, and inspiration” is invalid because you can derive and experience inspiration from so myriad other forces, truths, people, and experiences. How could one not feel inspired or awed seeing the majesty of some of the everyday feats of nature, physics, natural science, and the mathematical beauty therein?