Echoes of Thoughts

A post at Pharyngula has this rather beautiful comment:

I just can't seem to get past how small and constrained the theists seem to want to make the universe, like their creation myth is actually more impressive that what is really out there. Their great god just comes across as this petty ignorant bully doing bad slight of hand, and I just can't see the great part. They seem to think if they tell me often enough it might some how be true. How does any of that compare favorably to trillions of stars, billions of years, billions of interlocking evolving life forms, resulting in a being capable of appreciating the irony of just how pathetic religion is? I just don't get it. ~Venger

I might not have stated it exactly this way, but I've had the same reaction. Literalist Christianity comes across as this tiny, dank box that seems to think that it's a jewel-studded palace. I look at a tree, and I'm filled with awe to think of its ancestry going back millions of years; of the competition it faced to make it down into this age; of the trees that might have been had a storm not hit at the wrong moment, or a volcano not gone off; of the sheer heritage and history represented by that one lifeform.

To posit a "Creator" of trees cheapens it. It's nothing more than a descendant of a glorified lamp-post built not so long ago. No heritage. No life. Just another dead thing in a dead landscape. It's like the little kid at the Soda-Geyser. He turned up his nose at the geyser as "man-made." I don't see "god-made" as any different. It didn't come to be of itself; it was forced into being, enslaved into its current form. A tree that grows from other trees, that grew from still simpler lifeforms, that came originally from molecules that no one would recognize as living, now that is something miraculous and awe-inspiring. It is what it is, and no one made it what it is; it just is.

ADDENDUM: Speaking of Trees...