I'm moving tomorrow. My new place is centrally located between the kids, college and work. As much as I hate packing and unpacking, I'm looking forward to cheaper rent and being able to put more money in the bank each payday. I got my own phone line and I'm no longer saddled with paying for my sister's phone which will save me about a hundred dollars a month. Yay!
One of my relatives has been taking offense to my posting pix from "I fucking love science" or anything about atheism on facebook. She seems to take it as a personal attack when I'm just posting things that interest or amuse me. She really dislikes my posts of Neil deGrasse Tyson and Isaac Asimov. I didn't start a fb account to argue with my family. But I'm sorely tempted when I read people's posts about not believing in science, but 'god' is 100% real. It just....boggles....science isn't a 'belief' that you can arbitrarily dismiss.
It reminds me of this:
In his essay entitled “Science and Beauty,” Isaac Asimov takes Walt Whitman to task for his poem about “the learned astronomer.” In this poem, Whitman implies that learning facts about the stars from an astronomer’s talk is terribly boring, that there is no beauty in this sort of exercise, and furthermore that science destroys beauty by illuminating it. [[Asimov replies in somewhat poetic language of his own:
The trouble is that Whitman is talking through his hat, but the poor soul didn’t know any better.
I don’t deny that the night sky is beautiful, and I have in my time spread out on a hillside for hours looking at the stars and being awed by their beauty…. But what I see--those quiet, twinkling points of light--is not all the beauty there is. Should I stare lovingly at a single leaf and willingly remain ignorant of the forest? Should I be satisfied to watch the sun glinting off a single pebble and scorn any knowledge of a beach?
Those bright spots in the sky that we call planets, are worlds. There are worlds with thick atmospheres of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid; worlds of red hot liquid with hurricanes that could gulp down the whole earth; dead worlds with quiet pock-marks of craters; worlds with volcanoes puffing plumes of dust into airlessness; worlds with pink and desolate deserts--each with a weird and unearthly beauty that boils down to a mere speck of light if we just gaze at the night sky.
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