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This Godless Universe


GoddessWhispers

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This Godless Universe

"And for me to look into the depths of the night sky is to behold something far greater than your religion could ever allow for."

- Rev Chuck, alt.atheism newsgroup

On a clear, cold, moonless night drive out into the countryside. Find a quiet spot and lie on top of your car, looking up and out into the night sky. What do you see? Some might see romantic twinkly stars. Some might see the Glory of the Creator`s handiwork. Some might see the spirits of their ancestors looking down upon them, watching and waiting. Some might find inspiration for a poem, song or painting. I am an atheist, and (as my wife would surely testify) not a very romantic one at that; so what do I see?

Do I see rocks moving in curves, stars slowly using their fuel until they're snuffed out, life popping into a pointless existence only to be destroyed by a meaningless accident, tiny points of white light illuminating dead worlds that we will never see, galaxies flying away from each other for no good reason?

To a certain extent, yes. But there is more than that. Much more.

I see a myriad of coloured suns. Stars are not just twinkles of white. All the colours of the rainbow are up there for you to see, their hue determined by their age, size and chemical makeup. From the monstrous Supergiants like Antares, with a radius three hundred and twenty times that of our Sun, to Red Giants like Betelguese in the constellation of Orion, to brilliant White Dwarfs barely the size of Jupiter.

I see chunks of rock, iron and ice; pebbles that have been circling the Sun for a billion years, being drawn into the gravity well of our planet, plunging into the atmosphere and exploding in a streak of silent light. Lying on top of your car, you see one burn across the sky every few minutes, leaving a ghostly, glowing trail suspended miles above the cloudtops. Thousands burn up in the sky every day, their dusty remains drifting down to the ground. While you're sitting in your office, or watching Oprah, or choosing a new brand of toilet paper, ancient bits of the solar system are being violently annihilated a few miles above your head.

I see the Earth hurtling along its orbital path at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, creating a bow-shock as it pushes through the thin gases surrounding Sol, and leaving a trail of hydrogen in its wake. Charged particles from the Sun pour into the Earths magnetic field, grounding at the North and South Poles as dancing curtains of light. I see our Moon, pock-marked and white, its rotation halted by millions of years of gravitational braking as it tried to drag our oceans around with it, washing our shores with the daily tides. Inch by inch, every year, it falls away from us.

I see the Sun itself hurtling along its orbital path around the galactic core, dragging along a shoal of planets, comets, asteroids and moons, ineffectively showering them with neutrinos. Four million tons of hydrogen are burnt in this stellar furnace every second as it performs its alchemy, breaking down light elements and rebuilding them as iron. Sudden bursts of magnetic energy release huge flares and prominences of fire, extending thousands, millions of miles into space before falling back to the surface. I see our Milky Way, just one of a hundred billion others ploughing through space in a great river of galaxies, driven by forces on a scale that the human mind can barely begin to comprehend.

I see galaxies colliding, slowly and inexorably, their contents spread so thinly that it is hard to think of it as a collision at all. On a different scale, they smash into and through each other, ripping themselves apart and sending their stars swirling off to form elongated curls and spirals, eventually settling down into new galaxies and clusters of stars.

I see space distorted by the weight of a cluster of galaxies, forming a lens hundreds of thousands of light-years across. A giant magnifying glass creating multiple images of distant stars that would otherwise be obscured by the very galaxies forming the lens.

I see millisecond pulsars - exotic objects billions of light-years away, spinning hundreds of times a second and pumping out flashes of light at a regularity that our best technology would struggle to match. I see quasars - bizarre creations throwing out more energy than the stars of a hundred galaxies combined.

I see vast glowing nebulae, huge clouds of gas slowly condensing and heating - the birthplace of stars. The universe was not formed with a fixed set of stars - they are dying and being born every day, and their planets along with them. A good pair of binoculars will show you the stellar nursery in the Orion Nebula - a glowing patch of sky that is home to newborn stars.

I see black holes spinning at unimaginable speeds, dragging the stuff of space-time around with them; warping and bending space; slowing and maybe even stopping time itself. As they spin, they pull in gases, asteroids, dust and any stars unfortunate enough to be caught by this irresistible force. The matter joins a disc spinning down into the multi-dimensional whirlpool faster and faster, until it is destroyed and releases a scream of X-rays. The lucky particles that escape are ejected from the disc as twin jets of matter travelling at speeds exceeded only by light itself.

I see binary star systems. A tiny but brilliant white dwarf and a massive but dull red star spinning around each other like mismatched ice-skaters holding hands. Spiralling closer and closer, eventually they may collide, or one will suck the life out of the other, connecting the two via a bridge of plasma and burning hydrogen. Periodically, the dwarf will take more matter than it can absorb, and vast quantities of matter and energy are thrown off in a supernova explosion, leaving the skaters to continue their dance.

I look up, and for each and every star I can see on the clearest of nights, I know that there are a million galaxies that I cannot see. Too distant and too faint, moving away from us so quickly that their light is shifted out of the tiny visible spectrum. Only seen by powerful computer-guided telescopes that can focus on a tiny patch of the sky for day after day, collecting photons one at a time. Our galaxy contains an almost incomprehensible number of stars, but this is just one galaxy of hundreds of billions just like it. We can estimate and write down the total number of stars in the universe, but it's nothing more than a number on a piece of paper. There are more stars than our imaginations are capable of dealing with.

I see Andromeda, our nearest neighbour galaxy. With the unaided eye barely a faint glow on the clearest night. The pale light falling from it into my eyes is two million years old - a shame to waste it. Humans did not even exist when it began the journey, and our entire evolution to Homo sapiens, the development of language, civilisation and science has occurred during the flight of these photons across the cold intergalactic void.

I see planets orbiting a distant sun, detectable only by the tiny wobbles they create in the motion of their host. Are they tiny burnt cinders like Mercury, or toxic hellholes like Venus? Are they cold, dead worlds like Mars or massive gas-giants like Jupiter and Saturn, with a core of metallic hydrogen protected by storms that rage for a thousand years? Are they so cold they have seas of liquid methane, or mountain ranges of frozen ammonia? Do they have deep, warm seas teeming with life - odd creatures being selected by evolution for their ability to survive out of the water, crawling up an alien beach under an alien star, the first faltering steps on stubby limbs that might be fins or might be legs?

I see stars finally exhausting their fuel and collapsing as their nuclear engines can no longer overcome the pull of their own gravity. The star falls in on itself and explodes in a catastrophic supernova, expelling iron, carbon, silicon and all the stuff of life out into the universe. (In the night sky, a star suddenly brightens until it outshines the full moon, dazzling the tiny amphibian stumping up the muddy beach.) The shock waves from this destruction compress nearby gases, starting them on the long journey that will see them condensing into hot, spinning clouds. Clouds that will eventually form new solar systems and give rise to life that can look up and out into the clear night sky. And think, and wonder, and let their minds take them on a journey that their bodies can never achieve.

Carl Sagan said, "We are made of star stuff". Religion teaches that we are Children of God, and the heavens declare His Glory. The reality is, as Rev. Chuck said, "far greater than your religion could ever allow for".

This is a godless universe and it thrills me that I have the chance to ride along with it, even if only for my few decades of awareness. Many people turn to religion saying, "But there has to be more to it all than this." To them I say, "Look around you! What more could you ask for?" In terms of Truth, Beauty and Wonder, all the worlds religions cannot compete with a clear, cold, moonless night.

We are star-stuff, you and I. We are children of the supernova and our beginnings lie in the death of a star.

©Adrian Barnett, 1998

Further Reading:

"Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe"

by Erik J. Wielenberg

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A ha! But I have the wonder and glory of all this, AND the knowledge that god exists, through personal experience. Why are the two contradictory, and why should i settle for one or the other?

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I don't think the OP was asking you to make a choice. I think it was speaking from the author/an Atheists, point of view and how they can see majesty in life, without having to masquerade it in the anthropomorphic facade of a god or dogma, for it's cause. :)

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I don't think the OP was asking you to make a choice. I think it was speaking from the author/an Atheists, point of view and how they can see majesty in life, without having to masquerade it in the anthropomorphic facade of a god or dogma, for it's cause. :)

Gw As diety free , i find nothing more inspiring or moving then nature and all its simple wonders, our family actually have nature observations as a regular part of life at least 6 dauys a week my kids and bethrothed have nature outings to model resepct and really It costs nothing and its the most fun the kids have ..we do not need or require a diety to have a deep and lasting experince. we spent the day at the Santa Monica pier and beach today....my son and I often home school ocean side.......or go on nature hikes alot or to parks adn lay under trees and enjoy the sky etc......

Edited by Supra Sheri
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A ha! But I have the wonder and glory of all this, AND the knowledge that god exists, through personal experience. Why are the two contradictory, and why should i settle for one or the other?

Now thats the way to tell it. Settle for everything or give into anything.

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Gw As diety free , i find nothing more inspiring or moving then nature and all its simple wonders, our family actually have nature observations as a regular part of life at least 6 dauys a week my kids and bethrothed have nature outings to model resepct and really It costs nothing and its the most fun the kids have ..we do not need or require a diety to have a deep and lasting experince. we spent the day at the Santa Monica pier and beach today....my son and I often home school ocean side.......or go on nature hikes alot or to parks adn lay under trees and enjoy the sky etc......

No, you don't need a diety for any of that... does that have something to do with an atheist lifestyle? I'm totally confused :D

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No, you don't need a diety for any of that... does that have something to do with an atheist lifestyle? I'm totally confused :D

miss wells i was concuring with my mon amie that one doesn't need a diety to enrich life....I'm not an athiest, i don't do labels... I think its safe to say its universal that one can simply enjoy life...

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miss wells i was concuring with my mon amie that one doesn't need a diety to enrich life....I'm not an athiest, i don't do labels... I think its safe to say its universal that one can simply enjoy life...

I know someone that doesn't call themselves a christian, however they have a meditating christ statue in their pagan altar room as their only deific symbol. She told me her cathedral ceiling is the universe, it's foundation is this planet, the angels are everyone alive, and her rituals and prayers are given in how she lives her life. I love this woman, because she is one of the freest and happiest woman I've yet to meet.

She's so healthy she glows, I'm not kidding. No makeup, because her complexion doesn't need to be colored to highlight her beauty. I've known her for 3 years and have never heard her raise her voice. She's soft spoken, so much so it sounds like a whisper but yet, when she's talking to you you can hear her as clear as a bell. Hard to explain actually, but she loves jesus for the metaphor he represents, and she lives as close to what one imagines is "in the spirit" as anyone I've ever known. And her name, is Legend.

Go figure. :lol:

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I totally agree with him.

Those stars up there, according to the speed of light, are not really there .................. or are they?

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Bumhawk, that has always puzzled me. Something about the stars we see are already dead. !!! Ahhh, my brain goes crazy at the thought of that.

I think a lot of atheists are too critical of people who are religious. I think there is a huge misconception that being religious means you think there is a real person behind what God is. I am religious. I take communion every Sunday. I don't go to church because I want, I get paid to sing in the choir. But, being exposed to it has made me create my own spirituality through the things I do in the church service. I have started to feel a connection with Jesus. ANd it's not that I feel a connection with a real person, Jesus. I feel a connection with what Jesus represents. Once after I took communion, I closed my eyes and started "praying". In my minds eye, or whatever it is, I saw a face come right up to me. It was startling! At the time I had no idea what it was. Still I don't know what that was, but it was cool! Anyways, I feel like being religious isn't about worshipping anything, or thinking that someone is keeping track of my sins, etc. I feel that it is the realization that all of us are connected, that our thoughts have power, and the power of prayer is really much more metaphysical than people realize. I think christians use very recognizable terms to describe the things they are doing, but really a lot of it is very similar to new age beliefs. It's sort of funny that they all kind of hate each other when they are all doing the same stuff. I speak the Nicene creed and I believe what I am saying every time I say it. But I don't believe that there is some manifestation of God sitting on a cloud watching over me. I believe that God is the energy in all of us that we all have power from and we just have to use it together. If we all did what Jesus told us about (I'm more a gnostic when it comes to Jesus) we would sure be a happier place.

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Stars are kewl. Friends are kewl. Drinking beer is kewl. Drinking beer under the stars with friends is kewl.

Remembering drinking beer with those friends under the stars so many years ago is kewlest of all.

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miss wells i was concuring with my mon amie that one doesn't need a diety to enrich life....I'm not an athiest, i don't do labels... I think its safe to say its universal that one can simply enjoy life...

Ok, got it now! See, I said I was confused. :D I might need to work on my reading comprehension.

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I know someone that doesn't call themselves a christian, however they have a meditating christ statue in their pagan altar room as their only deific symbol. She told me her cathedral ceiling is the universe, it's foundation is this planet, the angels are everyone alive, and her rituals and prayers are given in how she lives her life. I love this woman, because she is one of the freest and happiest woman I've yet to meet.

She's so healthy she glows, I'm not kidding. No makeup, because her complexion doesn't need to be colored to highlight her beauty. I've known her for 3 years and have never heard her raise her voice. She's soft spoken, so much so it sounds like a whisper but yet, when she's talking to you you can hear her as clear as a bell. Hard to explain actually, but she loves jesus for the metaphor he represents, and she lives as close to what one imagines is "in the spirit" as anyone I've ever known. And her name, is Legend.

Go figure. :lol:

Beautiful story GW.....I agree I have no labels as i find all paths have value how could one choose but i do have alot of buddhas around and one would think I'm a buddhist or a hindu but i just love the symbols and i have hindu statues also...and i also have a collection of the different canons they have been gifts from dear friends, i celebrate the diversity of my freinds and cherish the tokens of the most important parts of their lives shared with me.... amazing what we don't know on a forum, i bet there woudl be many here that say i am intolerant and hateful *giggles* wow would they be surprised...

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:lol: I know what you mean. I have art work, tapestries, statues, etc... all through my house. Stained glass windows with imagery, that captures the dawn light so that all the panels colors the whole room, in moving rainbows every morning. And tonal wind chimes hanging from the ceiling, where the panel windows are cracked just a bit, so the breeze wakes me up with the birds in the oaks that surround the west end.

My friends are tickled when they come over because it's like walking into a giant hug. I think it's excellent actually. You wouldn't know I'm an Atheist by the look of it, but that's very cool because I'm not into living like a billboard advert. either! Big arrow pointing at my roof, flashing neon: "No god inside" :lol: Yeah, right! Subtle. :P

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:lol: I know what you mean. I have art work, tapestries, statues, etc... all through my house. Stained glass windows with imagery, that captures the dawn light so that all the panels colors the whole room, in moving rainbows every morning. And tonal wind chimes hanging from the ceiling, where the panel windows are cracked just a bit, so the breeze wakes me up with the birds in the oaks that surround the west end.

My friends are tickled when they come over because it's like walking into a giant hug. I think it's excellent actually. You wouldn't know I'm an Atheist by the look of it, but that's very cool because I'm not into living like a billboard advert. either! Big arrow pointing at my roof, flashing neon: "No god inside" :lol: Yeah, right! Subtle. :P

ha ha ha ha ha "no god inside' God is simply a generic term to mean many things many many things contrary to popular beleif LOL...

Sounds beautiful GW for a beautiful person.....

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No one can prove w 100% certainty that a God does or doesn't exist. Any such claim, in my thinking, is a statement of faith. However I do see what some of you mean about reverence for nature and the workings and glory of the Universe. I feel the same way.

I agree we humans tend to look at the world and our Universe through anthromorphic lenses. At the same time, I think the question of whether or not there's a God cannot be easily determined, based on our limited knowledge of the Universe. And as humans, we are limited by our human vantage point. We are like a single grain of sand w/in all the collective deserts on the planet. I don't think science to date, has accumulated enough info to definitively declare that there is or isn't a force that is God or God-like, behind (or part of ) the major forces of nature, IMO.

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But even if you had the ultimate, irrefutable 100% proof that god exists who would you be telling this proof too and who would be telling it?

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:lol: True.

Although there are a few that have published, in an attempt to do just that. Heaven is so real (link)

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No one can prove w 100% certainty that a God does or doesn't exist. Any such claim, in my thinking, is a statement of faith. However I do see what some of you mean about reverence for nature and the workings and glory of the Universe. I feel the same way.

Stating the obvious!!!

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I'd say that the gods probably sit around in awe of the universe they live in. Even if you are into the whole supreme creator thing, can you really say the composer never listens to his own symphony?

:)

Regardless to where it came from, it's still a top shelf thing. :)

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I agree Rev.

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But even if you had the ultimate, irrefutable 100% proof that god exists who would you be telling this proof too and who would be telling it?
Actually this aligns w/the point I just made. There is a fixed lack of universal consensus as it regards who is qualified to test the 'God Hypothesis', and who is qualified to judge the evidence. This creates a serious hinderance to the collection of "irrefutable proof". This is part and partial of my statement about irrefutable proof being evasive.
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those that see a godless universe are just that godless ,one should see yes the mother but without your father in you they will never see the true god our father.

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