I am
breathing in,
breathing out,
like all the other
living creatures
sharing this planet
and this air.
But more,
that air has been
shared by all the creatures
who ever lived,
been refreshed by
all the plants
that ever grew,
since the beginning
of Earth time.
Each new breath
combines all the
old breaths of creatures,
and people, long gone.
Each breath is a kind
of immortality,
existing long after
each of us has
taken our last breath,
passed on to each of
us taking our
first breath
He who is
tired of learning
has been doing
it for seventy
three years and
needs to rest
Students I once thought of
as the younger generation
are now all professors.
Unlike me.
Strange how some event which is a “wake-up call” leaves everyone sleeping just as soundly as ever.
The young
kangaroo
following his
mother has
no idea what his
life will be when
she finally
leaves him behind
After seventy-odd (and seventy odd) years of life I keep thinking I have seen and heard all the worst of human stupidity. But then I read something said by a woman in a red cap, or a crackpot fundamentalist (of any religion), or a loopy flat earther, or a mad-brained creationist, or a Dunning-Kruger climate change denier, or a lobster-potted Peterson follower, or an addled anti-vaxxer, and I realise there is absolutely no depth to which human stupidity cannot sink.
So it is blasphemous to “insult” an imaginary being that doesn’t exist, but it isn’t blasphemous to attack science, rationality, and the real world?
If religion was purely a matter of individual private belief it could be just dumped in with all the other irrational thought patterns that so bedevil Homo sapiens (and presumably sapiens ancestors, though the other apes seem to be purely rational), a curiosity for psychological investigation perhaps. The problem is that one essential part of the religion virus causes its carrier to attempt to force all the other carriers of slightly different religion viruses (or none) to switch their beliefs, by force if necessary (and it usually is). This makes it as lethal as any of the other killer viruses that have haunted human history – Black Death, Smallpox, Cholera, Polio, Typhoid fever. Unfortunately, while we have vaccinations for these other killers, a search for immunity to religion has so far proved unsuccessful.
Throughout history, and over most of the world, societies have been divided into left and right, poor and rich, workers and bosses, globalists and nationalists, humanists and racists, atheists and the religious, thinkers and followers, socialists and fascists. The important thing for all of us is to decide early what side we are on.
All over the universe, planets capable of supporting life will have evolved intelligent organisms. All over the universe those organisms will have invented systems of living that enable a small number of them to gain a very large share of the resources of the planet. All over the universe those systems will develop patterns of consumption of resources that make the planet incapable of supporting life and result in the eventual extinction of all the life forms on the now dead planet.
