Excitement for solar eclipse almost as astounding as cosmic event
Being the first generation of humans to meaningfully understand the universe, consuming interest in astronomy is unsurprising, as is religion's resulting insecurity.
Millions around the world stared up into the sky earlier this month in grand anticipation of a total solar eclipse, a “rare” event, at least for the human lifespan.
At the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in Edinburg, hundreds gathered at the sundial on campus, situated at a meeting point connecting its architecturally marvelous Science and Engineering buildings — culminating into a walkway and canopy lined with Oak Trees — with the university’s fieldhouse and physical science building. Oohs and ahhs could be heard whenever clouds cleared, allowing for variegated light to descend, reflecting off architecture. The mass gathering was almost as spectacular as the astronomical event itself.
The common fascination with eclipses by humans can be traced back tens of thousands of years, although we can be certain that they marveled at “the heavens” long before we discovered writing. This is unsurprising, as there is a lot to be fascinated and enchanted by, when it comes to studying and understanding the universe, something humanity has only very recently been able to do.
However, as a consequence of such consuming interest in the universe by millions of working people worldwide, some religious leaders demonstrated bitter, contemptable jealousy, downplaying the importance and beauty of the event, as if astronomy was some boring, dull, uninteresting discipline and theology some kind of groundbreaking knowledge. Some Christian pastors had the gall to look down on the more superstitious of people who believe urban legends about eclipses foretelling bad luck, as if religion had contributed nothing to superstitious thinking, or the persecution of astronomy, over the millennia.
Better yet, some quoted scripture discussing “the heavens” as if their point had been proven by astronomy, conveniently ignoring the fact that they still try to impede study of the Big Bang wherever they feel they can get away with it. One told me in an argument that they can understand what an eclipse is and still believe in “intelligent design”, a propaganda term for creationism, without noticing that while they accept the findings of astronomy in order to look down on the “superstitious”, they just as easily reject the findings of astronomy when it comes to admitting basic truths about the universe, like its age, and implications.
This kind of reaction to April 8’s total solar eclipse highlights the importance and necessity of learning astronomy, and making it more publicly available, in the struggle for establishing a new humanism for the 21st century — the first century humanity has started with real knowledge of our species and planet’s origins.
The unassailable implications one immediately derives from basic study of the universe, in the astronomical sense rather than “astrological” or “spiritual” sense, is that all past attempts to make sense of the cosmos (that’s to say religion, myths and superstitions) were mere innocent, desperate, hopeless, even childish, attempts to explain the hitherto unexplainable. Isn’t it a privilege that we are really among the first generations of human beings to have any real clue what was happening in the sky? Think about it. For hundreds of thousands of years, human
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