Fatwa

Tell them this. A Fatwa for thee. It is difficult to grasp the scope of the revolution we are amidst. The earth now orbits the sun. Time is no longer fit to a human scale -- two generations forward, two back -- but is now infinite. A drop of water has been revealed to swim with as much structure as the starry sky. And the sky: in each dot the size of a pencil's point swim 1500 galaxies. We realize that the troposphere, lying teeming and fecund on the earth, is only as thick as a sheen of oil on a thousand kilometer deep lake. We understand that language, tools, community, culture -- reason even -- are ordinary phenomena amongst living communities. We know, as demonstrated so vividly by Shoemaker-Levy's plunge into Jupiter, that our equilibria are indeed punctuated. Species come, they go; we're just one more. We are awake now, we are self-aware. We realize that rulers have no divine rights. We know that a secular, plural state has the benefit of putting aside factional, tribal, ethnic, and religious strife. We can look at our grim, fractious, primate past and see our fratricidal, hierarchical, territorial, symbol-soaked nature. We are beginning to have perspective on the period of our dawning collective self-awareness and its cognitive baby steps: our fawning worship of symbols, words, books, anthropomorphic deities, and idols. Wallace's line, the Jedburgh unconformity, the deep space field, the crater at Chicxulub; these are shattering revelations for Homo sapiens sapiens. We do know all of this right?