A REASON FOR HOPE, SMALL ONE

When I did the Spiritual Exhaustion entry several days ago, that’s just exactly how I was feeling. Between the religious bullshit and the political bullshit I was feeling flatter than roadkill. Well, the bullshit is still there topped with a letter from the pentagon to congress detailing how much it's costing the military (an us) to investigate the nonexistent Behghazi scandal.  We can't afford to feed and house the poor but we can pour millions down a rathole trying to find something that  isn't there. It's enough to depress a hyena. 

Other current events are split down the middle right now. World Vision announces that they’re going to employ candidates who are in gay marriages and gets slammed by the religious right. The organization already had a policy that insisted that single employees abstain from sex until marriage and that married employees be faithful to their partner. So they looked around, decided that they were a charitable organization not and church and decided to add married gays

And I mean they are really getting slammed. Granted that most of the demo that reads Christianity Today will probably be pushing up daisies in another twenty years. If they don't kick the bucket early from terminal bile poisoning. Trouble is,  the majority of evangelicals don’t seem to have heard the old saw ‘when you find yourself in a hole stop digging.” Too many of them only put down the shovel to replace it with a backhoe. And forget to listen to other believers who are just about where I am. Throw in the towel, let the whole damn, misbegotten mess crash and burn. Maybe when the smoke clears we can find a phoenix in the ashes waiting to take wing. Never mind the Millennial generation that's heading for the exit door in disgust over the support for hate and discrimination that seems to drive their elders. 

On a much more cheerful note. The new Cosmos is a worth successor to the original series. Tyson doesn’t have quite as much time to work with, remember the original was a PBS series. No commercial breaks. We’re only at the third episode but the programs seem more a bit more focused.

This week it was how our perceptions of comets have changed over the centuries accompanied by a short, but complete bio of Edmund Halley. The man who worked out that the comet that bears his name appears every seventy six years. He also mapped the stars of the Southern Hemisphere, invented a diving bell, worked out the distance from the earth to the sun and worked to publicize Isaac Newton’s Principia which included the math to support the Theory of Universal gravitation.

I kind of wish that Tyson has spent a little time explaining HOW Halley worked out the relationship between the orbit of Venus and the math that gave him the answer. In any case his theory was confirmed later in the 18^th century when observed the transit of Venus across the sun during his first voyage.

And the intro to the third episode is, I believe an homage to Sagan’s Shadow’s of Forgotten Ancestors because that “orphan” baby in the basket is straight of the cover of the book where Sagan describes humanity as being like an orphan left on a doorstep with no information. No name, nothing but the baby. Cosmos, both series, is part of the search for our identity and place in the universe, 

Image courtesy of Amazon.