"I now understand the need for faith—pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith—as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it."
I don't always remember why I marked something. This is one of those cases. I'm sure the context of the story played a part.
However.
There is something that I believe all people who claim a religion need to realize.
You (we) are making a choice. A wildly irrational choice. A choice that does "fly-in-the-face-of-reason."
Nobody can say, "I know God exists" and expect to be taken seriously. We believe God exists, but we cannot prove it. And guess what, that's OK! It's called faith for a reason.
Facts matter. If you are going to make a choice to believe something that goes against facts you need to realize what you are doing. And you should not under any circumstances claim your belief is a fact without the ability to back it up.
Claiming something is a fact is an invitation for others to question your statement. Be it religion or your views on welfare. If you can't prove it, don't call it fact.
That said, I still think the line is pretty cool. We as humans need to believe we are more than the sum of our cells and believe that we are more significant than the cosmological scale would lead us to believe. Otherwise, we are lost.
In the sequels to Ender's Game.....
(Spoilers: Highlight if you want to read)
In the sequels to Ender's Game there is an intelligent species nicknamed the Piggies. Every so often, different groups go to war and kill piles and piles of their own kind. The reasons for these wars was deeply personal to each and every creature fighting.
Then the truth came out. A virus-thing that was deeply imbedded in the DNA of every living thing on the planet was actually creating a balance via the Piggy wars. No matter the reasons for the war, the Piggies had no choice. It was beyond their power to stop.
This shook them to their very cores.
The humans struggled to remind one particular Piggy that even if this virus-thing was the mechanism that caused the wars the way the Piggies viewed their history and their motivations for current battles, mattered.
(End Spoilers)
If humans don't attach meaning to our pathetic little existence we truly are at the mercy of a universe that doesn't really give a shit.
There is a TED Talk out there, I'm looking for it, in which the speaker makes the audience say something along the lines of, "I am more than the sum of my genes."
We better be.
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