The Center Of The Universe - A Lifetime Journey

Genesis

Proverbs 22:6 - Train up a child in the way he should go, And when he is old he will not depart from it.

Thus does the story begin, for, from childhood, mine was a mind conditions to believe everything taught within the confines of conservative presbyterianism. Growing up in the relative tranquility of an "average sized" town in Central Kenya, that was the center of my universe. Nyeri was my entire world, and Nairobi was the big city which I always viewed with big, envious eyes. My dreams were to own a big house in Nairobi, teach at Nairobi University, and have a beautiful wife. As we very well acknowledge (those who have lived past 30 anyway), life doesn't always work according to a set schedule, if it ever does anyway.

God, our father, made everything, and kept an eye on everything. He was the absolute center of everything, and life on earth played to his whims. He gave life, he took away life. We were all born sinful, and, by his ascent to earth, and birth of a virgin, his son, Jesus Christ, showed absolute humility by living among the most humble of men. By dying on the cross, he took upon himself all of the sin of humanity, and by his "stripes" were we declared healed. I went to church each and every Sunday, and the "gospel" was rammed up my head every day. 

We read religious literature tailored towards the childlike mind - I remember leafing thru the Bible Stories set by Arthur S Maxwell, Uncle Arthur's bedtime stories, et alia. The colorful paintings by Herbert Rudeen and Russell Harlan brought bible characters to life. 

There were, of course, some passages that confused my young and inquisitive mind to no end.

In Book 1 of the 10 part series, there's a passage that reads: He blessed the Sabbath so it would be a blessing to them. He set it apart as a holy day not for Himself, but for them. Even now six thousand years later, all who keep the seventh day holy, find a blessing in it that others never know! This literally implied that the earth was young, no older than 6000 yrs. In the deepest recesses of my mind, this felt wrong. Having grown up in a household that encouraged "reading books," I had come across some books, in our home, that actually explored human evolution, geological epochs and more. I still recall the mention of the Precambrian which suggested that earth was 4.6 billion years old.

Naturally, I was confused, and therefore enquired on all this in relation to what I was reading in Christian texts. Naturally, I got a very christian oriented answer: But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing: that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day (2 Peter 3:8). That tided over my curiosity for a while, but still left many questions unanswered. However, I still was a christian, and, going into my teenage years, was taught to be a straight christian young man. Homosexuality was verboten, and gays were blamed for the spread of AIDS. While resident in the US later in adulthood, I learned that this was to be blamed on the rise of the evangelical right in the US which showed particular animosity towards homosexuality and abortion, the latter of which already was law as decreed by the Roe V Wade supreme court decision in 1973.

Reinforcement

I was in high school, still reading, still learning, but thoroughly indoctrinated. Jerking off was followed by a feeling of extreme guilt, after all, god could see exactly what I was doing and it was a "sin of the flesh." The farcical idea of a voyeuristic creator who could see, knew, and dictated everything, and yet condemned people to great suffering and poverty despite their belief and prayer hadn't occurred to me. My mind was well and truly shaped by my growth through conservative christianity. Devil bad, god good; evolution made sense but that was the devil influencing my mind.

This was all fucking weird, and yet, I believed, and wanted to keep believing, even as it (creation and religion) all made less sense with each passing day. I read articles that further honed my bias on creationism, an intelligent god and examples of perfect intricacies in the "created universe," and belief in religion as a foundation of morality. At this stage of life, I believed in miracles as detailed in religious text, and to such an extent, that, when granted a visa to the US, to my closeted mind, this was a miracle.

Unshackled

Ironically, switching continents was what hammered the nail in my religious coffin. While I still interacted with family and friends who were overtly religious, my first class in college was probably the first that hadn't begun with morning assembly, religious hymns, and a prayer. I was Mr Myself, not just a unit of well-oiled academic machine. I had to perform my own research, form my own opinions, and come up with my own conclusions. This, to me, was like getting out of jail. Maybe I should have gone on and studied what I really wanted to study, but years of indoctrination had taught me that financial success was preferable to personal satisfaction, a decision which had its own ramifications. With that said, out of my all encompassing trap of controlled media, thought, opinions, friendships, and other social influences, suddenly religion had no priority in my daily life. 

Even then, having grown up within religious circles, my mind still wanted to believe in and defend religion, in this case christianity, despite how increasingly farcical it had all started to look. 

Yet there was that famous picture of the pale blue dot, the realisation that earth was not even the center of the solar system, nor was the milky way the center of the Virgo cluster, and the virgo cluster not the center of the Laniakea supercluster. In other words, humanity was not the center of everything, and yet we do not even know the exact nature of the theoretical Oort Cloud. 

True, we have large, sophisticated, and well evolved brains, and can use tools. It is evident on that front, however, that our evolution to where we are today was greatly aided by our early adoption of tools, which greatly influenced bipedalism.¹

Watch out for highly intelligent chimpanzees taking over from humans in 300,000 years (we are a relatively young species, and are still evolving, as are other species around us, some even because of us.²

With this additional knowledge, my mind was gradually unshackled from unproven and biased theories I once acknowledged as fact. From one who believed in a perfect, omniscient, and omnipotent creator, to one who saw imperfection in the very evolution of humanity, my mind has come full circle. I no longer bear the burden of bigotry imposed by my upbring (African christianity is of the kind that would make a 19th century missionary proud), a realization that sexual liberation is not sin, and that you only have one lifetime to make everything count. I stopped worrying about a god who was more concerned with the win/loss record of football teams, and ignored massive poverty in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Indeed, I stopped thinking that my god was the "right one" and that the Muslims are wrong.

Well, they're wrong, of course, but not for the reasons I previously held dear as unvarnished truth.

This story is but a skeleton of my life story. It encompasses a lot in a few, and woefully inadequate words, but it fits the present. Hopefully the future lengthens this account.

Humanity is not the center of the universe.

 

¹https://www.britannica.com/science/human-evolution/Theories-of-bipedalism

²https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/wildlife-watch-news-tuskless-elephants-behavior-change

A little bit of Ricky Gervais to kill the serious vibe.