Communion on the Moon: The Religious Experience in Space
Our secular endeavor of space exploration is flush with religious observance. Why is that?
Jul 16 2012, 2:05 PM ET
Rebecca J. Rosen
Before the launch this weekend of three human beings into the ether of space around the Earth, before they boarded their Soyuz spacecraft, and before the rockets were fired, precautions were taken. Not the humdrum checklists and redundancies of space exploration -- assessing the weather, the equipment, the math -- but a preparation with a more mystical dimension: the blessing, by a Russian Orthodox priest, of the spacecraft, as it sat on the launchpad on the Kazakh steppe.
The scene, as shown in NASA photographs such as the one above, presents a tableau that seems incongruent, but may just be fitting.
The discordance is obvious: Here we are, on the brink of a new expedition to space, a frontier of human exploration and research that is the capstone of our scientific achievement. "The idea of traveling to other celestial bodies reflects to the highest degree the independence and agility of the human mind. It lends ultimate dignity to man's technical and scientific endeavors," the rocket scientist Krafft Arnold Ehricke once said. "Above all, it touches on the philosophy of his very existence." His secular existence.
And yet here is a priest, outfitted in the finery of a centuries-old church, shaking holy water over the engines, invoking God's protection for a journey to near-earth orbit. That these two spheres of human creation co-exist is remarkable. That they interact, space agencies courting the sanction of Russian Orthodox Christianity, is strange.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/communion-on-the-moon-the-religious-experience-in-space/259826/#
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That is a GREAT one!
Blessing of the Fleet - St Bernard Parish, Louisiana
However, the adjective form may properly be defined as "that which presents itself as a deity". The simile is important here.
Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins were/are both fond of the word. I, too, have adopted it as that characteristic of nature that shakes one to the bone -- there is something going on here that is important, something that humankind should learn about, something that could transform our culture for generations, something that could enable humans, and our followers-on, to survive when over 90% of our forebears have not.
No, our progeny, millions of years hence, will not likely be human. But, today, we humans -- possibly, but not likely -- have a chance to rig the dice in our progeny's (and many other Terran lifeform's) favor.
The only reason why the world today is not populated by reptilians -- no matter what Billy Meier and the Raelians say -- is that the dinosaurs did not have a space program.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
