wordsmith.social/jonbeckett

Here we are again – watching the clock slip effortlessly from one day to the next. Our marking of time is a curious thing, isn't it – we place such significance on yesterday, today, and tomorrow – when in reality we're just specks on a ball of mud floating aimlessly through space on a path it has been repeating for millions of our years.

Many try to convince themselves that we are somehow special – the product of a mysterious creator sharing a similar form – a master puppeteer pulling the strings of everything we know.

I've always thought that view tremendously conceited.

We really are specks. Tiny specks on a fairly normal ball of mud in a quiet backwater of a normal spiral galaxy. We are here quite by chance. Yes, we are sentient, but then so are the billions of other creatures that no doubt exist in the far reaches of “space”. Far is of course a relative term – relative to how far we have managed to travel, in timescales we understand.

For nearly a thousand years the rulers of ancient Egypt sold their citizens intricate stories of gods eating each other in the sky – of animal headed beings that birthed the sun in the morning, and consumed it at night. Over time ideas changed – evolved – with early scientists being silenced for daring question the “accepted wisdom” of their day.

We look back now and try to separate ourselves from the powers that fought against Copernicus, Kepler, and Archimedes – but we really haven't moved on. We haven't moved on at all.

Children all over the world are still instructed to believe in imaginary beings in the sky – backed up by weighty tomes interpreted by scholarly liars trained to pray on the gullible and weak. We protect freedom of choice – freedom of thought – freedom of speech. We allow people to be exploited by a placebo that has persisted for millenia – taking different forms on each continent, and in each epoch.

Anyway. Enough mental rabbit hole excavations.

Time for bed.