Faint Light for the New Year

2008 must be a year of profound change in America. The world is threatened as the planet's population exponentially explodes. Billions demanding more and more of less and less beckon for science not fundamentalism to lead. Seven years of evangelical ruin has left America internationally paralyzed and domestically polarized. Science holds the answer while our own elections, coupled with term limits, hold our hope.

Another violent act -- the death of Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto -- has left her country feeling vacant, angry, desperate, and hopeless. Like the suffering people of Iraq, Darfur, and even Bush's America, Pakistan's people are searching for a better tomorrow. Benazir's impassioned speeches flood the Internet. Humanity has failed her proactive populist's vision. Violence erupts. The war in Iraq has crippled America's international influence to help carry on Bhutto's objective of a better day; that was 2007. Humanity needs its own a New Year's resolution.

Even with the world weeping, New Years Day arrives. Millions of people will be realigning their personal priorities with hope of making 2008 better. Resolutions to lose weight, stop smoking, or any number of noble causes, can quickly fall away as addictions demand to be fed. Humanity's habit of violence is counterintuitive to progress. Now more than ever we need a choice to leave the religion behind in favor of science and fact. Perhaps then humankind can see its way clear of the bloodshed that has plagued man since written history.

Violence such as Bhutto's death and the Iraq war, jar change on a political scale, but science can stir truthful, meaningful change. The space program's most arresting image proves just how far science, not superstition, can take mankind.

On February 14th 1990 NASA turned Voyager one's cameras around to capture humanity's most poetic image. The portrait is called "Pale Blue Dot" -- less than half a pixel of light that is our planet Earth. Photographed from just beyond Saturn, the Earth was cosmically as near to Voyager as your two fingers pressed together, but our Earth already looks as far away as the faintest, smallest star.

Alone floating in space, reflecting a faint glow of light, we appear inconsequential; no God looking down, just us alone waiting for evolution to tell its next tale. Carl Sagan's narration is worth six minutes of your year.

Change your perspective and alter our world.

Happy 2008.

Read more New Year's posts from HuffPost bloggers

Comments

[darcy]

So...what do we do about testosterone and its attendant male aggression? How do we implement mandatory birth control?

Sorry, dude, but the die is cast. The pale blue dot will be fine, but many humans and other animals are going to die when the climate changes. Very sad but seemingly unalterable now.

[UVRayburn]

Authoritarian christians have always hated knowledge and intelligence. Most of these people have a stupidity complex. To make themselves look good they have to say others are bad. What fools, the hatred that they spew only makes themselves look bad. God and Jesus will both deny the evangelicals that try to pass themselves off as Christians. The Bible time and time again warns us about evangelical christians like Mike Huckabee and the religious right. I hope America listens to the Word of God and gets rid of the Republican rule of terror once and for all eternity.

[epistrophy]

thank you for the inspiration this morning...

unlike most who have responded, the film lifted my mood and i smiled, hearing those words about the "momentary masters on a fracture of a dot"...

there is no fight, no right, no wrong...

"imagine".­..

be here & love somebody..­.it'll be over in a minute...

thankxx tom...

[research]

I have a “scientific” religion:

I go for the collective consciousness theory of spirituality myself. According to neural network theory : we are all one mind, one soul. I then add the collective Pattern of the natural world to that collective consciousness. When we die, we live on in the memories and mind of the people still living and our imprint on the natural world. God, the “one God” is the Ideal collective Soul. God is our greatest aspirations as a people in this universe. God is what we Will the collective Soul to be. So we are all a part of God.
Everyone should see ZEITGEIST. The first half is a really new way of looking at the origins of religions. Everyone on earth should see it. The second half is a very reasonable 9/11 conspiracy theory, which may upset some people. I don't think a 9/11 conspiracy beyond BushCo ignoring Clinton's warnings about Bin Laden is necessary, but they bring up the best evidence I've seen. The whole movie is very entertaining and well done. You can go to their web site after to see the supporting documentation.

[Sundialsvc4]

Religion has always been a part of our nature, and I see no good reason to expel it from our psyche for the sake of "science," especially when the word "science" when used in that way is merely another religion.

I'm willing to embrace the fact that I do not know everything; that I never will, and neither will Science. The last thing that I would want to do is to focus my life-view around my own blindness and ignorance.

[eddiestardust]

Ghandi said that if Christians truely acted in a Christian manner then no one would want to be a Hindu.

It's not the message of Christ that is at fault it is however that many are only "Cafeteria Christians" picking a choosing which Christian precepts to believe and live by and letting all the others fall by the wayside.

I believe that many Christians try hard to live a Christian life but none of us are perfect and we have to keep trying every day.

That is why prayer or communication with God is so important. The grace or help that God gives us helps us to be better Christians.

God created everything, science included.

[ScienceLady]

Belief without evidence is harmful to humanity.

[Rocku]

I dont know... Some people seem to read more into some things then others. If you think fundamentalism of the type that says the earth is only 6000 years old and evangelicals who espose this type of thinking are OK, and that is YOUR brand of religion then I guess you would take offense at what Mr. Gregory said. I believe he said science should lead us away from that type of thinking which is polarizing, not away from religion in general which does not have to be polarizing.

Nowhere did Mr. Gregory say that the US or its administration was responsible for the death of Bhuto so I dont know where some of you got that either.

As to whether science or religion has killed more people, though not part of Mr. Gregory's presentation, you have to remember that even the religious used science to kill others... Hey, even a crossbow was advanced science at one time!

However, he did seem to indicate that we are an insignificant group of creatures on some tiny speck of a planet in the vast reaches of space so one might wonder why does it matter if some of us assinate one another now and then.

Well... this is the only world I have, the only one I care about, and how we conduct our affairs does matter to me. We certainly have too many people on this sphere at this time to be sustainable (science), but some religions encourage us to keep on breeding like minks anyway which will eventually lead to a total collapse of the ecosystem and the demise of a couple billion people so I guess it all evens out in the end. None of us think WE will be the ones who die though, or even suffer any deprivations while the others drop like flies. Aint faith grand!

[BeerHolder]

It's amazing that god hates all the same people we do. Religion is just another excuse to hate a certain group of people whether they're AIDS victims, blacks, Mexicans, Gays etc. I outgrew religion a long time ago just like I outgrew pop music and hunting. Growing up means realizing that this is the only life we have, this is the only world we have and NOW is the only time we have.

Go take a look at the "Pale Blue Dot" picture and see if you can find yourself. Pick out your state or even your country. Only then will you understand how fragile life is.

[Jane22]

In viewing this video, I find myself feeling the finite condition we live with as one species living here. The vastness of our universe, when kept in mind, does give a larger perspective for consideration. While I do have much background in the study of religions, belief systems, philosophy, it all becomes meaningless if we cannot choose to agree to live with basic principles to guide our collective behavior. I choose to respect other folks beliefs and choices even as I consider religions to be a rather narrow, fictional way of understanding life.

Our chief issue is that so many do not live by the tenets they profess to believe. I believe that we need to find ways to choose honest communication over violence. We need to come to realize, in greater numbers, that resources ARE finite and sharing wisely can lead to Peace. An honest love and compassion for others is, for me, the only way we can realize the collective dream we all possess inside our spirits-for PEACE. Science and any other thought construct are means to evolve when used together for the progress of all. The problem with religions is that people are choosing to kill rather than love one another. This is the nightmare dishonest and criminal "leaders" have created for power and economic control over the masses to the peril of ALL. The short-term selfishness and greed are simply other facets of the failure to choose compassion and love as guiding principles. Peace

[mouselion]

I'm afraid your trying to make science its own religion --
"Violence such as Bhutto's death and the Iraq war, jar change on a political scale, but science can stir truthful, meaningful change."
-- when what needs to be recognized is that 'science' is a language (or actually a set of languages), just as 'religion' is, 'art' is, and 'communication media' is.

When you understand the language at hand, you can decipher what is true, false, functional and dysfunctional with thesis posited in the respective language.

This is how you approach on working with the rest of the world to solve problems. To think you'll be able to eradicate a 'language' (especially religion), is idealistic --and both unrealistic and actually destructive on human levels beyond the scope of political persuasion.

[Mort]

So your answer for man's inhumanity to man is to promote bigotry and the "us vs them" philosophy that's tearing us all apart? Hmmm... How progressive!

[Mikie]

Tom, You are so wrong. "Science holds the answer?" Science can only define process it cannot define purpose.

I think therefore I am; I believe therefore I matter.

Apart from God humanity is just part of a process and we are completely and utterly irrelevant. Apart from God there is nothing left to save because humanity doesn't really exist. We are, as Dawkins points out, just gene cases. We are just the current manifestation of our genes.

[January]

The drama of religion versus science is so yesterday. The point of view taken in this article, that science is good because it has truth and that religion is bad because it is superstitious, reeks of 16th Century political conflicts.

Science is no saint. Religion is no devil. Appealing to such for an explanation of current horrors is so simple-minded it is embarrassing to read. And all this time I thought binary solutions were the peril of religion. Some mental habits continue to haunt the insipid.

[ofthewoods]

I don't know about you, but I don't see any evangelical ruin here in my low-rent apartment. What I do see is ample evidence of secular society's failure to give people reason enough to avoid self-destructive and violent behaviors, failure to include the least of us in a hopeful vision for the future, and failure to humbly put community before proud, narrow, and selfish interests. It is rational science, informed by atheistic pessimism that has given us the means to wipe so much of the life from this tiny little, life-supporting, only-place­-we-can-li­ve, still-so-m­uch-to-be-­learned-fr­om, full-of-mystery, and hope-our-g­reat-grand­children-d­on't-think­-Waterworl­d-and-Mad-­Max are-true-stories dot we call a planet. I'll take the message of Jesus and the Buddha anyday.