BANANACUE
REPUBLIC
Vol I, No.
12
Nov 24, 2004
social criticism
by
Vicente Soria de Veyra
Science's Perpetual Crucifixion
JUST THIS YEAR, the first radio telescope dish antenna that’s going
to be part of a 64-antenna giant radio-telescope project called ALMA was
delivered to Roman Catholic Chile, the Chile of Pablo Neruda’s socialism
and what activists described as anti-Allende feudal priests. The Chile of
today, you see, provided Llano
de Chajnantor as project site to the consortium of scientific groups from
the United States and Europe that’s building the miracle eye beholder.
Zona de Chajnantor is a plateau high in the Andes Mountains east of the
cock-crowing village of San Pedro de Atacama,
This
giant telescope, or telescope composite involving 64 telescope antennas
each with a 12-meter diameter dish, will have its 64th antenna
piece delivered by 2010 yet, so it’s going to be a little while before we
get to see in our Newsweek copies pictures of those galaxies or planets or
stars that tickle scientific fancies.
So, why this obsession with outside
stellar societies quite more enormous than our cosmopolitan amalgams, and
perhaps to involve entities more expansive than our standards referencing
the human form as the ultimate form qua the male God’s likeness?
When the
telescope becomes available for use, the stars will of course be so much
nearer than ever, appearing to the telescope viewer almost as if the
object/subject were merely in the next block or were the next-door-girl at
her window, to possibly create a compendium of lovely theories that will
perhaps remain as theories for a long time.
Giant
radio-telescopes. To some religious eyes, these could be the new century’s
“Babylonian tower”, considering that in order to realize such a
far-reaching project it must stand on high ground, literally, specifically
an elevation of over 16,000 feet -- scientists are constructing ALMA as
the highest telescope ever built on Earth. Astronomers at the site will,
however, have to bear the cross of temperatures ranging from below
freezing point at night to desert heat during the day on this plateau. But
with the air at the site specially dry and clear, making it one of the
world's best spots for observing the stars (Hollywood is another),
scientists will joyfully regard their new plateau haven as . . .
heaven.
The
world's largest radio telescope it’s going to be, then, to be called ALMA
(Atacama Large Millimeter Array). An array, yes, that’s what it’s going to
be, specifically of 64 giant radio-telescope antennas together acting as
one telescope via online networking, combining the zoom-ins and zoom-outs
that each will specifically do for the collective eye.
As of
today, however, people are still more familiar with optical telescopes --
those that use lenses and mirrors. Even scientists
are themselves still busy building bigger and bigger optical telescopes.
The largest optical telescopes today are on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano,
site of the sacrifices of boys for the god Pele. These include twin
reflecting telescopes called Keck. But there are other Extremely Large
Telescope, or ELT, projects being planned still — each intending to better
the aperture of the Keck telescopes by between 3 to 10 times, and all of
them are at more or less “Babylonian tower” altitudes and almost always
employing multi-lingual scientists.
The
paradoxically-named Earthbound which is however nicknamed the "eye on the
sky", is also called the Very Large Telescope, or VLT. Like ALMA, it is
also located high in the mountains of Pablo Neruda’s Chile.
ALMA probably was inspired by the Earthbound, since it is made up of four separate optical telescopes, constructed such that the light from the four separate telescopes can be combined and focused. This combining will produce an image equal to the image that one would get from a much larger (but harder and much more expensive to construct) optical telescope. Right now the four main VLT telescopes are in use, and three auxiliary telescopes are still being put into place to create much larger images of the heavens. But like ALMA, it will still be within a few years that the VLT will be fully operational. In the meantime, we have to content ourselves with the awe of religious wars as TV spectacle of our times.
BUT,
YOU SEE, this isn't entirely new. For mankind has always had this desire
to enlarge its eyes and vision of things beyond the mundanely palpable.
However, it has always been science that’s been the martyr of our
progress. Martyred, because though often well applauded at moments of
production, it is also often stoned at moments of conception.
Still,
it is comforting to see science continuing to do its eye- and
vision-enlargements better than religion, despite the malicious
referencing of movies with stereotype crazy scientists. Better, indeed,
considering that religion’s wont to put words into God’s mouth (a mode of
wisdom-claiming that as a matter of course spits at science’s open-ended
theorizing) has constantly given itself the ready go-ahead to order
weapons of all types from the companies of the US Republican Party to
create wars. Which party, incidentally, also supports religious wars of
all types, be they against terrorists defying the party’s own terrorism or
against local female abortion claimants and gay dissenters and
birth-control activists.
So-called
“strong faith” is only possible, therefore, through a defiance and
dismissal of awe towards the embrace of comfortable and mind-numbing
simplifications called dogma. For if God had intended us to know Him and
hear His words, why hast He allowed to happen upon us the pangs of His
eternal elusivity? Why does an abundance of religions on earth continue to
manufacture wars through the different racist Gods’ subjects, all of these
subjects insisting on divine titles to promised lands? Doesn’t God,
perhaps, demand of us the more apt respect for this elusive godhead as our
first step to salvation and peace with other men? For isn’t the Bible
itself full of contradictions if we are to give way to the interpretations
of an amply salaried preacher? I often wonder why I see or feel more of
God by watching the wonders of nature on the Discovery and NGC channels
and less, much less of Him, in the religious preachers’ channels? In the
religious channels, I see and feel nothing less than more of human
corruption at play and man’s propensity to lie about the source of his
income and the desperate psychological state of his targeted market.
SIGH.
SCIENCE, alas, with its obsessions with large telescopes and new
quasi-Babylonian desires to touch God, will forever be regarded as the
enemy of religion. Even as it continues to actually show us the way to
experience religious wonderment and prayer via an honest awe upon nature
strengthened by the concept God. It has also showed us how religion can be
an arrogant enemy of God’s elusive enormity and awesome character via
religious insistences upon its own readings of nature. It’s been quite a
long time now since science deposed the religious insistence that it’s the
Sun that revolves around the earth, yet we don’t see the possibility that
more Galileos will be freed from the village culture of nations’ societies
insisting that science equals rock ‘n’ roll in defying religion.
To
the antipara of religion, God can only be seen in specific
fee-collecting places and in edicts from a hierarchy and in centralized
dogmas and laws governed by linguistic analysts holding microphones. To
science’s eyes, on the other hand, be they the microscopes of labs or the
telescopes of mountains, God is out there and in here, on Mount Banahaw as
well as in the spaghetti sauce, awesome as well as palpable, beyond the
words of what religion would always insist are of the Word.
I
often wonder why the Bible would always be interpreted as anti-"idols",
for instance, as in being against the idol made by the people Moses left
behind in his visit to a burning bush. As if it were psychologically
possible for human beings to worship a sculpture. Doesn’t the idolatry of
an "idol" qua a god-symbol itself a psychological act of being faithful
towards a new God concept represented solely by a sculpture, a concept
thereby created to be no less worthy than one’s own? For one to say that
one’s polity’s God concept is the truer God concept, one must needs be
God, shouldn’t he/He? Unless he be nothing more than a political god or an
instrument of one.
My
proposal to the new century’s world is this. Let there be more science and
poetry in today's and tomorrow’s religions, and less – ideally no more –
of politics and the vermin of profits. For is it not even possible to read
the Tower of Babel’s Fall parable as symbolic not of a God’s wrath upon a
people’s mere hunger to reach Him, but as suggesting His/Her/Its mere
refusal to be known by men’s simplistic “ivory towers” of belief?
I
plea for these considerations, for
once science as a mental practice cum philosophy is assimilated into
religions as a way of living, then perhaps there will be less use of
faiths by corrupt men seeking wealth or fame or power via the
non-questioning teachings of dogma. Instead there will be more use of
faiths by peoples seeking simple joys in the sunrise, and yet more joys in
the sun’s setting into a night of wondrous and indescribable star-studded
heavens. Sheer dogma can't give that to them, unless one considers the
appreciation of nature's ecological peace and beauty during those moments
of dangerous dissidence and possible burning at the stakes.
# # #
Read more about the ALMA
telescope at http://www.riverdeep.net/
Posted 11/23/04. Send comments to:
bananacue_republic@yahoo.com
". . . once science
as a mental practice cum philosophy is assimilated into religions as a way
of living, then perhaps there will be less use of faiths by corrupt men
seeking wealth or fame or power via the non-questioning teachings of
dogma."