But then Galileo had the bad taste to look up in the sky and see that something revolving around another heavenly body, how impolite was that? For that gross breach of etiquette he was place under house arrest for the rest of his life. Not so long, in his case. How foolish was he for actually seeing something that contradicted what everybody knew what true?
Not long after that, Kepler came along and showed that we weren’t the center of our solar system. In his case, he made sure he was dead before his ideas were published. Smart man!
It took a long time for that idea to really be accepted, but, since then, in the last two centuries, the our demotions, in the physical world have come faster and faster. We’re not the center of our solar system. Now our sun is one among countless other stars, in no way better or special, at the outskirts of our galaxy, again, not unusual or special in any way, among countless other galaxies, in a universe so vast, with numbers so large, that the mind simply can’t comprehend how insignificant we humans actually are.
If that wasn’t enough. For a long time, it was figured that we had one of the rare, of not the only habitual planet. Turns out that planets are a common as dirt, with at least as many planets as stars, and the number of habitual planets is, again, so large as to be boggle the mind.
Next we find that life isn’t limited to existing in the relatively narrow band of environments we were familiar with. We have found simple life forms living in space, in the deep oceans, and far underground, miles underground, far from any sunlight, in environments so hostile and toxic, in temperatures and pressures so extreme, that anything we’re familiar with would be destroyed in a matter of moments. This tells us that life could exist in many different places in our solar system alone, not to mention the rest of the universe. Things are not looking good for our civilization! Though many still want to cling to the belief that we are the most intelligent and advanced thing out there, that is looking less and less likely every day. It’s probably only a matter of time until we find proof that we are not alone. What a blow to our ego!
If that wasn’t enough, a more subtle revolution is also going on. It’s funny, in a way, because it’s been going on for centuries, but most people haven’t noticed. You would think that the major world religions would be fighting this new view, but they generally have nothing to say about it. I believe the reason are that they, for the most part, don’t recognize it as a threat. Most of the faithful accept their human-centered theology so thoroughly that they can’t conceive and any other point of view. Religious leaders are so confident in their singular point of view that they only worry about threats from other religions, like them.
In my view, the limitations of Christian theology become more and more obvious, the more you look into it, and the attempts to resolve these problems end up going down one of two paths: In one, they double- and triple-down on the basic premise of one universe and one afterlife, where you go to heaven to hell, depending on a fairly arbitrary set of rules, and where the justifications and explanations of this structure and these rules are so Byzantine in their complexity that they freely admit that no one understands them. “It’s Gods’ will,” they say with a shrug. In a way, this resembles the bizarrely complicated schemes that medieval astronomers came up with to explain the moments of the heavenly bodies, necessitated by the assumption that everything had to revolve around the earth.
One the second path, theologians start to deviate from the simplistic assumption that our human experience is the only experience there is. One can’t step too far down this path and still be acceptable to the Church, or any religion. It seems that, at it’s heart, every religion, no matter what it says, can’t quite let go of the idea that they are the “best” or “only” way to….what, be “saved,” “enlightened?” That, I suppose, is part of human nature, to assume that whatever makes sense to you is the best and only sensible option. Despite this assumption of followers of every religion that theirs is the “best so far,” a sea-change is in the works.
The first first sign on this change is noticing that every religion and faith is just one among many. Not first or best, just but one among many possible faiths. And that there is no objective measure, or reason of any kind, to promote one over any other, other than “This is what I believe.” This is just as hard for the faithful to swallow as the idea that the earth revolved around the sun was for medieval europeans. As I said, the battle isn’t really on yet, for most people don’t see it coming. Most people think that there is a “war” between the sacred and the secular, but that’s an illusion. What’s really going on is a blending of materialism and spirituality, resulting in a new worldview that is putting the squeeze in the millennia-old dogmatism of western religions.
What we are starting to see, derived from research into reincarnation and NDEs, (Near Death Experiences) our human experience is just one tiny part of a much large tapestry. Far from there being one “reality” and one “afterlife,” there are an uncounted number possible realities we could be born into, and what we call “the afterlife” is much larger, richer and more varied than we are capable of imagining. Just like in the physical universe, where we have been demoted to just a single species, on a insignificant planet, drifting on the outskirts of an unremarkable galaxy, floating among uncounted billions of other galaxies, our human experience is just one among countless experiences a soul can, and does, have, and is no more important to the grand scheme of things than the life of a bacterium to the cosmos.
That’s not to say we are unimportant, we are, just not in the ego-driven, human-centered way we want to believe. We are part of something so much greater than we can imagine, and we each contribute to this whole in our own special way. Like a small child who doesn’t understand the contribution she will one day make as President, we do not comprehend our ultimate power and destiny, once we mature. In the meantime, we would be best served by learning the lessons beyond the material, the promote the best of us, elevate the worse of us, and contribute to all those around us.
