A Word In Edgewise: Musings of a Facebook Fan
I like Facebook. I use Facebook. I find ideas, images, news–friends–and have learned much that makes me continually ponder the nature of the universe.
I read recently that the LDS Church (Mormons) together with the National Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention, filed amicus curae briefs with the US Supreme Court asking that the justices ignore the growing scientific evidence that same-sex parents are equally as qualified as opposite-sex parents to raise children.
From US vs. Windsor: “By their nature, such policy questions cannot be definitively answered by science, professional opinion, or legal reasoning alone,” and that therefore, “nothing in the Constitution requires [government] to accept as truth the most advanced and sophisticated [scientific] opinion.”
Facebook has opened doors to images and articles revealing the amazing spectrum of our planet’s plants and animals, their riot of shapes, colors, sounds and, behaviors that burst the confines of man’s religious dictates.
One image displayed forty-one fantastic mushrooms, frilled, gilled and gilded; another, leafy and weedie sea dragons, sea horse cousins; delicate snails with lavender bodies and shells; Calenea majors, or flying duck orchids. I’ve learned that birds, seals, and butterflies use stars as their compasses, that humble dung beetles navigate by the Milky Way. Beyond our modest planet, scientists have located the largest object in the observable universe–a group of 73 quasars four billion light years across.
The more I glimpse of the infinite variety about us, the harder it is to listen to those claiming to know God’s will. No wonder girls and women today under various religious regimes are literally dying for an education– knowledge can lead to power and freedom from superstition and cant.
Disregard science? The universe is science. Human belief systems can, by nature, be only collections of fragments limited mortal minds glimpse of the whole, too often used to dominate, disrupt, and control.
I would not lay down my life for an orchid or lavender snail, but I believe we are equal in the eye of the creative force, and although humankind enjoys a transitory dominion over Earth, Earth was never made to be under our collective thumb. We would be better served guided by stars and the Milky Way than than divisive dogmas.
