Article 18

Posted on by

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Nothing raises hackles quite like talking about religion. It is deeply personal and yet so often we are in each others’ faces about it. For some, it is terribly offensive that others do not experience the divine as they do, or worse, do not experience it at all. Wars have been fought over religion. Entire populations wiped out (the genocide of the Americas’ indigenous people was largely justified using religion.) Almost every religion has mandated disenfranchising at least one segment of the population. Very often, one of those is half the population of the planet: women. Religious organizations have, often successfully,  demanded excluding those that disagree with them from the public discourse.

It is something we will never be able to completely agree upon. People within the same sect rarely agree about everything. Yet some over the years have been unable to accept that. Given the horrors we have visited one another over the years in the name of faith, I am a little surprised that it took the men and women (OK, men) of the United Nations until the 18th Article to address it. Perhaps they thought if they tabled it just a little while, cooler heads would prevail. Obviously they did enough for this to be accepted into the Declaration, just not enough for religion to no longer be doing damage.

Please do not mistake me. While I am a non-believer myself I have known far too many decent, loving people who critically reflect on their beliefs to paint all, or even a large minority of believers, with a broad brush. In my adult life however I have seen physicians gunned down, thousands murdered in terrorist attacks, and a portion of people in a country founded in part on religious freedom denied their basic human rights.  Around the world some people live in theocracies, or monarchies supported by religion. Religious tolerance varies in these countries, but just the fact that one faith is given favor over others creates an oppressive atmosphere for those that do not share the official faith. Sometimes the oppression is much more obvious.

Religion can be a wonderful source of inspiration. I have been fortunate enough to know many people for whom their faith is a call to treat all human beings, even those that do not share their belief set, as brothers and sisters. It is a deeply personal relationship with the divine that no one should infringe upon or foist upon another. Sometimes it is difficult to see when seeking to avoid the former does the latter. We will not always succeed in this, but for all the reasons mentioned above we should always try. Article 18 was the first time when a truly diverse group of individuals did so.

The Whole Wide Universe (and our place in it)

Posted on by

…the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose.

J.B.S. Haladane

We live in a positively gigantic world. I don’t just mean this planet Earth, and certainly not the little personal worlds we make up for ourselves, consisting of our wants, needs, families and cultures, which are certainly huge when we look at them from our own very limited perspective. No I am talking about the entire Universe itself. When compared to just our galaxy our planet is not even a grain of sand on an entire beach.

I bring this up because of some recent numbers crunching I did. Inspired by a National Geographic article I read recently I wondered how likely it might be that there were more planets like Earth out there. Given that this planet is 600 light years away, I supposed that distance for each world in that “sweet spot” for life as we know it. In that case I assumed a radius for each galactic neighborhood containing such a world to be 300 light years. I figured out the area of that neighborhood, and then the area of the galaxy in square light years using its radius, found on Wikipedia. I divided the latter by the former and came up with over 100000 planets in that sweet spot. If only one percent of those actually manage life and only one percent of those manage intelligent life that suggests 10 other intelligent life forms just in our galaxy.

Now this was some pretty quick and dirty math. Really in the grand scheme of things it is overly simplified. There are all sorts of variables that I left out, mostly because I do not have the proper training to account for them. One variable I left out that is significant, though, was the fact that Earth was supporting life far earlier than we have supposed in the past as evidenced by the discovery of the world’s oldest fossils. Given that according to this information a far more hostile world can support life the assumption of only one percent of those planets in the “sweet zone”, or even the need for it to be those planets, supporting life is far too conservative. It is possible that we are alone in the universe, but the assumption of such is arrogant beyond all belief.

I wonder how we will treat these beings if and when we meet them. We don’t exactly treat ourselves very well between obsession with melanin, our need to fight over metaphysical principles, or the disenfranchisement of half the human population. I am not hopeful that anytime soon we would be able to deal with an entirely new intelligent species in an open and compassionate matter. Hell we have some of our greatest thinkers already committing to anthromorphic xenophobia (I would like to point out that while Stephen Hawking is a beyond brilliant mathematician and physicist, he is no more learned in the social sciences than most people.)

I hope we do get over all these problems soon. I don’t think we can even explore our tiny corner of the galaxy unless we do. It seems like it would be difficult to do so if we don’t learn to share what we have here and to accept each others’ differences. I dream about that day a lot though. Maybe it will come in my lifetime the day we can accept our commonality and dream together of going out into the Universe together, riding the solar winds and braving cosmic storms to learn how vast it is and learn that its enormity does not make us smaller, but greater.