Pigorilla Power!
60
26 – 01 -2010
I never really know what or where things are going and am
only comforted by the knowledge that those who think that they do know are very often proven wrong by facts.
Facts are made up of irrefutable evidence
that can generally prove something or disprove it. They are also extremely useful at pointing in a good direction to continue searching. For instance....in the all to recent tragedy of a disaster in Haiti, specialists and dogs were brought in to listen for cries in the rubble in order that when an area was found where a cry or a sigh had been heard, that is where the firemen and volunteers would remove rubble to look for people that were still alive. It wouldn’t make much sense for a sound reader to pick up a cry for help in one area and then the operator send everyone off to another area to find the person, would it? It is a simple application of factual scientifically derived knowledge to look where the instrument directs us.
Science has helped us with putting a stop to deaths like Anne Darwin, who it is believed eventually died of tuberculosis in 1851 after having deteriorated from contracting scarlet fever a few years before with her two sisters. Poor Charles, with so much scientific acumen within him, stood not a chance at helping her with Gully’s water cure in the Worcestershire spa town of Great Malvern where her little ten year old body is buried. Thank goodness for science. I watched my mother dying when I was ten years old and I would hate for the roles to have been reversed. The pain of losing a child to a slow death that is totally out of your control must be unbelievably intense.
While we have made huge inroads into the curing of disease and improving Human longevity, there are still diseases out there that we are struggling with. I am, however, very grateful that the same cancer that took my mother has had so many more millions of pounds committed to the disease and my sister now stands a so much better chance of beating it with early diagnoses and effective chemo-therapy that seems to be doing its job all too well. While it is not an exact science, I am very grateful that I have people that have studied and specialised in the disease looking after her. Combatting the disease is so much further along the line than it seemed thirty years ago. I remember my mothers all too upsetting remarks on the mercy of Jesus and how her faith in God would pull her through. I hope this helped her, because it didn’t make any sense to me; not before, or after she died.
In a way, I am fortunate, because I have been at the “raw” end of religion and with having had someone that had such ultimate belief in the religious system. I took a break at the beginning of this paragraph and switched on CNN who had a documentary running on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Ethiopia and other African countries. Despite most of these barbaric rituals occurring in Islamic countries there is no order to commit them in the Koran. Imams, however, are insisting that it is there in the Koran and this helps them control women in these countries by using religion. Hellllooooow!!! Is this news? Religion has been used to control people since the beginning of religion. Perhaps it was the only way to keep some sort of organised control and perceived to be a good way of instilling a value system, but ultimately, it has created more division amongst the Human Race than any other factor.
We are hurtling towards extinction! If we don’t buck up our ideas and start to work together as a planet soon, we will be the source of our own demise. Although my Christian friends and I will have different thoughts when that mushroom cloud is hurtling towards us, a few moments after that, we will all be stone dead. Whether those thoughts a few moments earlier were of the great rapture finally being upon us or not will mean very little.
There is starting to become too much at stake for us to have belief systems that are no longer valid in the world in which we live. While I wasn’t impressed with Bill Mahers film Religulous, I am grateful for the initiative he took. Humans appear to have a deep need to believe in something greater than themselves, and trying to get people to distance themselves from a belief system that they think works for them is very difficult. For the greater good of the human race we need to start taking responsibility ourselves and look towards common sense for divine fodder.
We have lots to learn and science does not know everything, but very much has been learnt and understood and accepted without a shadow of a doubt. ...enough, in the mind of many of the worlds intellectual thinkers to totally discredit much of what is in the different books of religion. They are, for the most part, far too similar to be different stories, and yet have often been used as the basis to pit nations against each other. If I was a non free thinking person in Afghanistan right now, I would be a Muslim. I have a very good fundamentally Christian friend who accepts that had he been born in Afghanistan, he would be a Muslim fundamentalist and would no doubt be preparing himself for all the lovely virgins once he blew himself up in Allah’s name. If it is possible to accept that our belief is dictated to by an overwhelming extent by our place of birth, surely it cannot be too much of a different, difficult step to break the shackles and accept that we have been led to believe in one big fairy tale?
Does religion suite people so much that reason is no longer effective? I believe that the rule of law and democracy is enough to keep people in check. There is no need to have been born with sin and the risk of eternal damnation to follow certain basic ethics and values. Some of the ten
commandments have been broken by many of my Christian friends. Before one judges my friends too harshly, read them again. Is that the best an omnipotent God could come up with? Come on! I could rattle off ten commandments better suited to todays life on earth in five minutes, if you feel that it is indeed commandments that we need.
None of our old religious books can help us anymore. In my mind, we live in a far more humane caring society. The raw injustices of our developing years to date have been rough at best. It is time to distance ourselves from them. Perhaps they have been a help, perhaps they haven’t, but I feel that the time has come for all people to work together in a positive light towards a future we will have to make for the generations to come. I hate to tell you, but we will not be part of that future....not as a son, a father, or even a ghost. Do good, because you want to. Don’t chase possessions more than helping your fellow compatriots along the road with you. Think of all people in your actions; not only the living and the dead, but especially those still to come. Believe in yourselves, that is where the responsibility goes no further and most importantly, try and make the most of all the good things that you do.
The search for alien life continues and we are coming to realise how many galaxies that there could be out there and that certain stars are likely to have been around more than twice the four to five billion years that Earth has been in existence. I am pleased that SETI (search for extra-terrestrial life) enthusiasts are coming to agreement on the messages that we should be sending out into space. Planets similar to ours may be a couple of hundred light years away which would leave any respondents to messages dealing with a few generations down the line from ours.
It wouldn’t be right to send out the wrong signals.
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