All of you I’m sure have seen the TV commercial being run by Amazon Web Services where these small children look at things and ask, “how do they do that”, or “how do they find that”, or “how do they know that”.

Every time I see it, I think these small children are exhibiting the inquisitiveness that the thinking animal (us humans) must have had from the very beginning of time. Very early Homo Sapiens must have looked at all of the things going on in The Universe that they didn’t understand, and did not have knowledge of, and asked all of those “how” questions.

And as we now know, they answered most of these how questions with invented Gods who controlled the world they lived in, just as Amazon Web Services is beginning to control the world we live in.

Today I got yet another catalog from The Great Courses and I ran across one of the courses that is really interesting. It is called “Origins of Life.” Here is the brief introduction to this course.

“Four billion years ago, and infant Earth was a seething cauldron of erupting volcanoes, raining meteors, and hot noxious gases, totally devoid of life. But a relatively short time later — 100 million to 200 million — years the planet was teaming with primitive organisms. What happened? Professor Robert M. Hazen, one of the nation’s foremost science educators and leader of a NASA-supported team that is studying the origins of life in The Universe, leads you on a 24-lecture expedition to find the answers to this momentous question.”

And as we all know and accept, Evolution is the process that took this early life and over the next 4 billion years created you and me and all the other 7+ billion humans on the face of planet Earth.

The only problem is that we are still using the ancient solutions create by those early humanoid animals to answer their how questions with Gods.

My question is, isn’t it time here in the 21st century to begin to create new ways of thinking and the full acceptance of the reality in which we live?

I find it ridiculous to propose that an all powerful God created microscopic life and then it took another 4 billion years for Evolution to create us. Just the advances in the last 500 years shows that it is human knowledge that causes Evolution of our civilization to speed up.

I acknowledge that religion is a powerful force and has a powerful hold on the vast majority of the people on Earth. However, if you will carefully look at your religious practices, you can almost duplicate them exactly and leave God out of the situation, by just changing a few words. I don’t think Professor Hazel is going to tell us how life started and I don’t think anyone is going to be able to totally explain our connection to The Universe out of which we evolved. But honoring that connection, knowing that we ourselves are made of chemical elements created in the explosion of stars, and knowing and accepting our brief life and total annihilation in death, should cause us to treat all other human beings respectfully, humanely and justly. And only that, not salvation by some God or religion, is what will allow humans to keep evolving.

Learning to play your part and play it correctly is ……….What Matters Most.

Originally published here.