Religious Moonshine

The building dedicated to Hekate, who helped the Greeks really understand the moon. Oh, it’s not that religion we’re talking about?

There are no experiments and tests to explain love, empathy, longing, the agony and ecstasy of the heart, the wild and wonderful creativity of the brain, that thing that happens to you when a full moon appears above the sea and is reflected in it. Sorry, but knowing the science of why the moon shines is irrelevant to the experience. Faith is the light of the moon above and that light in the sea, reality and spirituality, both making you tremblingly conscious of forces vast and beyond words. Impertinent scientists cannot know what they speak of.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown explains why she understands the moon far better than anyone who studies it.

If you read the opinion piece by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown then you may well, like me agree with her. Vast areas of questioning and study do seem to be irrelevant to her. As thought experiment lets try and alternative. Let’s pretend she’d spent a day reading about the Moon and went outside and looked at it.

Now as well as the moonlight she’d see the Earth’s partner in a cosmic waltz around the Sun through the inky depths of space. She may recognise that the Moon’s face was constant. The same tidal forces which raise and lower the sea have locked the Man in the Moon’s face forever upon his partner. In the face of the Moon she might see the scars of the distant past, the craters being the pockmarks of ancient impacts which reveal clues as to how our own planet formed

With a little knowledge of gravity she might know that there was no universal ‘up’ or ‘down’ and that from the perspective of someone in the antipodes she was upside down hanging over the Moon held above it by a force which remains a mystery to explore. The same gravity which pins her to the planet is a local phenomenon. If she were able to travel there she’d find that she could leap to superhuman heights and she’d weigh just a sixth of what she had weighed. She’d have to remember to pack a spacesuit, because she would find no atmosphere on the moon, shrouding it in eternal silence. She might even choose to search for the footprints of Armstrong and Aldrin. Humans may have explored many places, but these are the only footprints of the the first people on a landmass that survive. The footprints of Columbus or Cook may have washed away on their beaches, but the vacuum of space means the bootprints of the Apollo astronauts may outlive the human race. It’s a humble monument to a programme of research which started over two and a half thousand years ago when people started thinking that maybe Gods didn’t have the last word.

It doesn’t come without a cost. Assertion is not enough. Questions have to asked and authorities challenged. Things which in the past were considered unquestionable because they were divine, from the workings of the universe to the internal workings of humans had to be studied. The process continues and scientists across the world continue to work to disprove an idea which their predecessors thought right, or never even thought to question. There are uncounted hours spent on science and each one of these hours is an hour which could be spent doing something else. Every hour spent searching for the start of the universe could be an hour spent talking to the Rainbow Snake. Every hour spent creating mathematical models of storms is an hour which could have been spent propitiating the Rain Gods. Every hour someone spends trying to find a cure for a cancer is an hour that could have been spent praying for a loved one not to die.

These were the costs of science in the past, and the same costs of science in the future. The Greeks sentenced people who questioned the divine as blasphemers. Is it time to accept that we were wrong to question whether or not people get sick because they offended the Gods? Should we ask if women were created to do anything other than serve men? With hindsight isn’t it wrong, dehumanising and disrespectful to question the majesty of the moon goddess Hekate? I assume that it’s moon gods Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is talking about because she mentions ‘Faith is the light of the moon above…’ You’d look a bit daft with a column titled ‘What do these atheists understand of religion?‘ if you hadn’t thought about what you meant by religion.

Of course if we do question religion then we risk diminishing human experience in much the same way that I’ve lessened the moon above.