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A Choice of Worldviews

In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition of religions--which is to say, for a lot of us--to be religious is to look at the world as people understood it about 3,000 years ago.  


It was a three-storied universe:  God and all his angelic cohorts up in the sky, Satan and all his demonic deviltry down under the earth, and all of us caught here in the middle, exhorted by God, tempted by the Devil, with our eternal destiny dependent on what we do.

Our son, Daniel, used to be afraid to walk on the grass in front of the neighboring Lutheran Church, keeping himself centered in the sidewalk, because he had learned, over there across the street, that the Devil lived under the ground.  

Every time Denard Span, center-fielder for the Minnesota Twins, gets a hit, he looks up at the sky and and thanks Somebody Who is a Twins Fan.  Not out.  Not inside.  Up there where God is.  He still lives in a three-storied universe.  

Aside from religions, most people do not think that is how the cosmos is arranged.  We speak of the Big Bang, of quasars, and galaxies, and novas, and red giants.  The earth is not the center of our universe.  We are a planet around a medium star out at the edge of an ordinary galaxy.  There are more galaxies than we can count, and comprehend.  Up and down is a local convention.  We are made from star-dust.  

Here is the most perverse part about being religious:  you have to understand the universe as Semites, 3,000 years ago, thought it was.  Heaven is up there.  Satan is under the ground.  Angels and demons talk to you.  And when you die, God who loves you, might assign you to hell if you don't believe it.  

God, and angels, and Satan, and Gabriel, and imps, are the furniture of a three-storied universe.  It isn't just heaven-up, and hell-down, and heavenly choirs and boiling in hell that belong to that cosmology:  it is a package.  All those critters, archangels and demons and gods and ghosts and ghoulies, aren't afterthoughts:  they belong to those primitive worldviews.  

What a horrible choice!  Think like a Semite, or go where evil Semites go:  to hell.  

Human decency is not a cosmological choice.  It is to choose to be kind, and fair, and caring, wherever you are:  in our case, out here at the edge of our accidental galaxy.  Here, in this amazingly old, stunning universe.

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