Pale Blue Dot

So I've made over 60,000 hits with Pale Blue Dot on YTMND. It's a site where people upload a picture (often an animated gif), a sound and some text to typically amuse but sometimes to make a point whether it be political, religious or otherwise. I've got a lot of feed back in the comments to the site and it's obvious I need to clear some stuff up. But before I do that - here's the picture (furthest "sun-beam" right and just over half way down) and the quote.



"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot


To me that is an incredibly moving quote. It makes our trivial differences even more preposterous than ever before. But if you post it on YTMND you get over 1000 comments - most of which are postive - but a sizeable portion tell you that you are going to hell.

I'm going to write a longer response - but for the time being let me make some points.

1) I am not trying to disprove God. Not Odin, Yahweh, Allah, Ra, The Godhead or even Thor,or I'm only trying to give an insight into how one (brilliant) atheist thought, as a guide to how atheists see beauty in the world.

2) I'm not calling religion small minded. I am calling the faith that Whestone (and admittedly many like him) hold to be small minded. I know that may offend people. But if your faith can not take a little criticisms then you have to wonder how strong it is in the first place. I found the statement that all "Infidels" (Whestones olde worlde word for atheist, despite the fact that the majority of people he "quoted" were all deists) realised they were going to hell on their death bed ridiculous, offensive and laughable. But religious beliefs (or lack off) should be no more protected than political or ideological beliefs of any kind.

3) The quote is about how we need to come together to survive on our little pale blue dot. And that means we have to learn how to take criticism from each other. The target, if anyone, of the site was against the people who just wanted to outright ban whestone. A stance I do not believe in.

Anyway - I need to work. But I will put more thoughts here later.