Coming Back to Earth Quotes

“In this secular view of the universe, God, along with his heavenly dwelling-place, has lost objective reality. There is no need to postulate a supernatural”
― Lloyd Geering, Coming Back to Earth from gods, to God, to Gaia

“SCIENCE’S NEW HEAVEN AND NEW EARTH But is this all there is to it? Not by a very long way, thanks in large measure to Galileo. During the last four hundred years, as the dualistic world imagined by Christian consciousness has been slowly dissolving, another and much vaster picture of the universe has been replacing it. At the end of the nineteenth century astronomers were beginning to talk about an expanding universe; today we know that it is quite literally expanding and is so enormous that our minds can no longer contain it in the way our forbears thought they could. Our world is a tiny planet in a solar system that revolves around a very average-sized star, one of some ten billion in the galaxy or star-cluster that we call the Milky Way. And ours is but one of ten billion such galaxies. Light from the sun takes less than eight minutes to get here, but that from the next nearest star travels four and a half years to arrive here. Light takes 500,000 years to cross from one side of the galaxy to the other, but the distance to other galaxies must be measured in millions of light years, and our massive modern telescopes can now photograph the light they emitted long before our planet was formed. From all this it should be obvious that the universe beyond our solar system cannot affect our daily life except as a matter of interest and curiosity. And pretty much the same is true of the rest of the solar system. But though it is an insignificant speck of dust in the context of the vast universe, planet earth means everything to us; for”
― Lloyd Geering, Coming Back to Earth from gods, to God, to Gaia