The Orthodox Religious

At the risk of being offensive, I believe that people of orthodox religious views have very little imagination. Why do I think that, you might ask - and rightfully so. No, its not just to be offensive. But consider the following comical definition of a person of orthodox religious views:

They have a deep and unwavering belief that the supreme being, the omnipotent and omniscient creator of the entire universe and everything in it has a very personal interest in their sex lives.

Now this sounds funny when you read it, but when you really think about it, it is true. The orthodox religious truly believe that the creator of everything cares about their sex lives, whether they have sex before marriage, whether they have abortions, whether they use contraception. Come on people! It must strike some of you that this is completely absurd.

So, how do I connect this with a small imagination. Well, it strikes me that such people cannot truly fathom the scope of the universe. It is my opinion that this is a general feature of religion and began …from the beginning. Consider that when the story of genesis was written it was likely believed that the Earth was the center of a very small universe. The heavens, including the stars, existed more or less on the surface of a sphere surrounding the Earth. In effect, sort of a small galactic onion with the Earth at the center. In this case, a God would only have a single planet to think about, a very small ‘universe’ with a very small population.

In fact, this view persisted through until the middle the last millennium and the scientific renaissance began by Copernicus and others. Even now, although we know the universe is infinitely larger, unless one really spends time thinking on it, it is difficult to truly get any feel for what that means. I’m sure that the average, non-science fiction reader/watcher, non-astronomer, really has never thought about it and has very little feel for what an infinite universe means. To consider that our solar system is probably already larger than what the ancients believed the entire universe to be. Then consider that that solar system is completely unnoticeable compared to our galaxy, which is some 80,000 light years in diameter (or more than 469,967,132,160,000,000 miles across – for comparison, the distance from the Earth to the Sun is 93,000,000 miles). Then consider that our galaxy is one of billions of other galaxies of similar size. Then, to make things even larger, consider that the spaces between the galaxies are larger than the galaxies themselves. If you can fit even a fraction of that in your head you quickly realize that any creator of the universe is not going to care about your sex life any more than it cares about the sex life of a creature on some distant planet of the 85,694,234th galaxy. Consider that, if there is only ONE intelligent species per galaxy (a very real possibility at any particular period of time), then there are still BILLIONS of intelligent species in the universe. And this god that many humans worship is supposed to take a deep personal interest in each and every member of each and every species!?!? Well, either the orthodox religious have a much smaller imagination than I do, or they have an infinitely larger one!

Void Surfer