A new heaven and a new earth : Comments
By Peter Sellick, published 2/2/2017

Yuyutsu quotes Sellick: As the author clearly explained, "we all give ourselves to something" and in doing so perpetuates his mistaken presumption that all humans are theists of one kind or another. I'll wager it would be at long odds if a message of his could be found without such an admonition. It seems to infuse into him a frisson of glee that he has a penetrating insight denied the atheist that pertains to the latter's lamentable spiritual deficiency. The author has clearly explained nothing.

That he presumes to speak for those who rejoice in religious faithlessness reveals an immature presumption of smug patronage and simultaneously disrespects their conviction that the supernatural and the spiritual realms are constructs of a timid human imagination more inclined to obsequiousness than to self-assured intellectual independence.

As theists face the charge from theists of having no way to "prove" they reject the concept of supernatural beings, so Yuyutsu has no way to "prove" he has no secret hebephilic inclinations. If he feels outrage at such a suggestion then he has some idea of how the atheist feels when advised he has secret, unacknowledged yearnings for godliness. It is most unlikely he suffers such affliction. I use the analogy as a demonstration of the situation and in retort to: "So if for example one needs to believe in heaven-after-earth in order to stop murdering babies or robbing the innocent, then it is a good thing, whether or not such a heaven actually exists."

Yuyutsu further writes: "This does not make former theologies wrong - only outdated." Such glib convenience deserves censure. The choice of words clearly indicates that theologies change as dress fashion changes, are flexible as a feather for interpretation's purpose and to raise the immutability of god's eternal and omniscient word is anathema when raised at inconvenient juncture.

A new heaven and a new earth. This title is a precise indicator of how the self-absorbed can be meticulous in their fantasy life yet exhibit a disturbing lack of respect for convention in the real world.

Sellick grandiloquently accords respect to his fantasy world with punctilious capitalisation, yet sees it as beneath him to accord the same courtesy to the planet that is his home, has made his birth possible and has nurtured him to now dispassionately but with spectacular success. His family since time immemorial rejoiced in that provisioning and nurturing, all his friends, colleagues and pets. Nothing of humankind [and we include Peter Sellick in that lowly station despite his protests to the contrary] would exist without its home, Planet Earth. No other member of our solar system has accomplished this astounding feat, yet we capitaise the names of every one of them. This respet we extend to every feature of the Cosmos, except for the tiny ark that we provisionally inhabit.

But it's par for the course among Sellick and his ilk that meticulous attention to the theological niceties is more likely to ensure a first-class ticket on the Glory Train than acknowledging one or two secular niceties.

I was raised in an age when there was no truer statement than "Manners maketh the man" [and woman now presumably]. Uncapitalised "earth" is the name of the unconsolidated covering of our planet's land surface. Earth is our home, more than our nation, more the than the biosphere that parasitises it, more than the deposits of di-Hydrogen oxide that fill its dimpled surface.

“We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring." Carl Sagan.