Views from Crestmont Drive

• Recalling some of Carl Sagan’s cosmic perspective;
• Trump thinks bike paths are DEI; pretend Christians; Christians who raise people from the dead; renaming Lake Ontario; Robert Reich on Trump; shutting down research; how Trump is revolting against the Constitution.

I have a bunch of Trump/MAGA kibble today, but I’ll start with two quotes from the enlightened fringe of humanity.

Carl Sagan, from his book with Ann Druyan, SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS. (Which I reviewed here.)

“We humans are like a newborn baby left on a doorstep, with no note explaining who it is, where it came from, what hereditary cargo of attributes and disabilities it might be carrying, or who its antecedents might be. We long to see the orphan’s file. Repeatedly, in many cultures, we invented reassuring fantasies about our parents—about how much they loved us, about how heroic and larger than life they were. As orphans do, we sometimes blamed ourselves for having been abandoned. It must have been our fault. We were too sinful, perhaps, or morally incorrigible. Insecure, we clung to these stories, imposing the strictest penalties on any who dared to doubt them. It was better than nothing, better than admitting our ignorance of our own origins, better than acknowledging that we had been left naked and helpless, a foundling on a doorstep.
As the infant is said to feel it is the center of its Universe, so we were once sure, not just of our central position, but that the Universe was made for us. This old, comfortable conceit, this safe view of the world has been crumbling for five centuries. The more we understood of how the world is put together, the less we needed to invoke a God or gods, and the more remote in time and causality any divine intervention had to be. The cost of coming of age is giving up the security blanket. Adolescence is a roller coaster ride.”

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