Significant Anniverary

That speech was transformative. Here it is again, for reference:

quote:

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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

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The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

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Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

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The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

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It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

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-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

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As a believer, I imagine that if Jesus, among our many"supreme leaders, confidant ideologies and religions the unique cosmic visitor---actually was (and is) here, we are still left to deal with the fact that every apologist, every reformer, every Biblical teacher that ever lived lived out their lives here--- and so will we. Covid-19 underscores the necessity of global human cooperation, and yet I fear that as competition for resources increases and quality of life becomes challenging for each nation, we may well have yet one more attempt at securing our spot...to our eventual demise.Which all boils down to one or both extremes:

Either Jesus is and was our only hope to get it together

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or we ourselves are our only hope to survive

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or perhaps a combination of these two realities. There is no fantasy option.

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Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

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The only way I know to drive out evil from the country is by the constructive method of filling it with good.Calvin Coolidge
"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." ~Mark Twain "
As the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, so the denial of God is the height of foolishness.-RC Sproul, Essential Truths of the Christian Faith

- You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. Anne Lamott
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.~Andre Gide