There is a well-known story about a woman who attended a lecture, and heard the lecturer say that the universe was going to self-destruct in a hundred billion years. The woman fainted immediately. After being woken up she was asked whether the reason she fainted had to do with the hundred billion years mentioned. She replied with a sigh of relief, saying, “Thank God! I thought he said a hundred million years.”
The Earth looks quite different from space. If you go far enough, it looks so different up to the point it doesn’t show at all. Generally speaking, things look very different when you look at the bigger picture.
This is true in particular for religious contents that are based on local and current observations. One could argue that the stones of Jerusalem are sacred, traditionally used to start the “creation”. Looking from a distance, these are mainly the remains of billions of small marine creatures from The Cretaceous, some one hundred million years ago. Looking still further, Earth itself is no more than a re-created celestial body, possibly made of the remains of an ancient star that exploded billions of years before.
Many religious verdicts and discussions are based on the exact measurements of the Earth spin (time of day) or the lunar cycle (month). Zooming out we find out that these are just points on a big graph. Earth is slowing down and the moon is gradually escaping. The dinosaurs saw a much shorter day. Early reptiles observed a much bigger and faster moon. Zooming out more, both the Earth and the moon represent no more than an insignificant point in the huge history of the universe.
And so on and so forth, our “immortal truths” are far from immortal. In fact so are we ourselves. Looking at the history of Earth, the era of human kind is a hardly seen dot around the position of one third of the segment representing this history. Comparing to the history of the universe, Earth’s era itself boils down to nothing.
Thus we should be extremely humble when quoting the so-called “gods” about our alleged rights and superiority, ahm.