“I am made from the dust of the stars and the oceans flow in my veins.”
That line, the opening stanza from a song written by Neil Peart of Rush, may be the most perfect description of my own spiritual beliefs, who we are, and our relationship to each other and the universe.
I believe that every particle of matter which now exists has existed, in one form or another, since the beginning of time. Each molecule in the breath that escapes my lungs will eventually become part of some other living organism in the world before finally returning to the earth to become a part of some other element in nature.
A droplet of water that falls as rain might be absorbed by a plant that will produce food for an animal, which may live out its lifespan and return to the soil, or which may be harvested and become food for another animal before finally being converted back into water vapor, respirated back into the atmosphere to begin the cycle again. Every atom in the world has existed, circulated and recirculated for billions of centuries as parts of solids, liquids, and gases; as part of everything from minerals to complex plant or animal life. Some atoms may exist in a single form for centuries before finally being converted into a new form.
Science has proven to the overwhelming satisfaction of thinking people worldwide that the incredible age of our world, the structure of atomic particles, even the origins of humanity are facts. I find it hard to believe that there are still so many among us who refuse to accept these truths, and yet, there are people in this world who believe the planet is only about six thousand years old.
Science began debunking the superstitious mythologies of the creationist crowd centuries ago, and that troublesome bunch have in turn been jailing, torturing, and killing heretics for the sin of promoting science and knowledge ever since. They may not be able to legally murder those who disagree with them today, but that doesn’t always stop them from doing so or stirring up the least rational among their number.
We’ve suffered a lot of religiously motivated terrorism in this country in recent years, most often at the hands of lily white, Christian fanatics, and I fear it’s only going to get worse. The United States, especially in the more rural parts of the country, is a veritable hotbed of misguided spiritual zealotry. Nuts with names like Tim McVeigh and Eric Rudolph, who committed acts of terrorism against hundreds of Americans in the name of Jesus Christ, seem to spring from the soil fully formed and ready to embark on holy war against those less inclined to believe as they do.
Zealots like David Atkisson, the guy who strolled into a Unitarian church in Tennessee a while back and started blasting people because he disagreed with their perceived liberal politics, or like Scott Roeder, the anti-abortion warrior who gunned down a doctor, inside the doctor’s church, for purely religious reasons. I wonder if any of these men uttered anything similar to “Allahu akbar” (Arabic for “God is great”) as they embarked on their unholy acts. I’m not the first to raise that question in recent days, and I hope I’m not the last.
Extremism and ignorance go hand in hand; they are the foundations of fundamentalism worldwide. The more conservative the church, the less likely its leadership is to seek or accept members who ask the deeper questions. Snake handlers don’t want to know why or how, they only need to know who and what.
The rise of our entertainment driven, passive learning culture has expanded the pool of potential homegrown terrorists. Critical thinking and blind faith are antithetical traits, and I can’t help but thinking ill of those I meet who so rabidly extol the virtue of their faith while painting that of others as evil, malicious, and deserving only of death.
I was never a stellar student in school, mostly because I failed to apply myself, but even a slacker like me learned enough science to know that the Earth is far more than 6,000 years old, that humanity has grown and changed over the course of billions of years – evolving from ancestors much more like modern chimpanzees than like ourselves, and that there are reasonable scientific explanations for everything our forebears considered acts of God or witchcraft. We may not have all the answers, and we may never find them, but science and reason have provided more miracles in this world than any hateful, irrational dogma ever could.
Spirituality has its place in our world. People need some means of grounding and refocusing themselves on the truly important facets of human existence: compassion, charity, community, love, hope, and faith – but it should be a rational faith in the goodness of life and the potential of mankind for improving this world, not faith in the irrational belief that there is only one correct spiritual path to salvation and that leaves the rest of the world condemned to never ending torment or sentenced to death at the hands of a self-righteous few.
All that exists has always been and will always be, in one form or another: everything is everything. The universe, taken as a whole, is so huge that no human mind can ever comprehend it. It is a statistical infinity of which we are only small, insignificant parts. To me, God is the universe, and each and every thing in the universe is a part of God; sacred, deserving our respect and our awe.
“We are stardust, we are billion year old carbon, we are golden, caught in the devil’s bargain, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” – Joni Mitchell, Woodstock
Twinkle.