I have a new favourite blog. It’s the Bad Astronomy Blog, and recently Phil posted a rant about this little gem fromThe View. (Edit) — Damn, the You Tube link doesn’t work anymore. Basically, one of the hosts of the show started talking about how she didn’t know if the earth was flat or not, and that she doesn’t “believe” in evolution, “period”.
It really makes the mind boggle.
You may or may not know, but I was raised in a very religious Irish Catholic household. Six kids. Catholic school all the way through. Church every weekend. And even as a kid, I could tell that the reason I could never call Church “mass”, no matter how many times my dad corrected me, was because I didn’t really believe in any of it. Of course, for a long time I just went along with it all, because I had no other frame of reference for living my life. Then Year 12 happened, my final year of high school. I had the pleasure of attending a very liberal-minded Catholic School, and I am very thankful for my time there. In particular, the Religion class I took in Year 12 opened my eyes to a lot of misconceptions, and my feelings of disbelief finally had backup. For some reason, I was still uncomfortable with labeling myself as an atheist. To this day I have a strong interest in religion — I like to read about it, learn about it and think about it. But after reading (well, listening to) The Life of Pi earlier this year, followed by Alex’s comment on feeling guilty about the agnostic thing, I really felt like I had to let go of that label as well. I was hiding under the agnostic umbrella because a lot of people (particularly the ones I grew up with) just can’t, or don’t want to comprehend that I’m quite okay with the idea of a godless universe.
I’m still looking at all these ideas in my artwork. I feel a bit like Aaron from Wonderfalls — the atheist theology student… I have no doubt I’ll be exploring these things for a long time. I know I’ve posted this print before, but I thought it was kind of apt for this post. It represents a whole bunch of universe theories throughout time. There are also a couple of (deliberately) fictional references in there, which I was reminded of when reading the comments to the Bad Astronomy post. This one in particular made me smile:
I don’t see a problem-
The Earth can be both round and flat at the same time. It shouldn’t matter to the elephants holding us up.
I don’t know if anyone’s picked this up, but I’ve actually referenced Terry Pratchett’s Discworld as a little in joke for myself in the print. The solvent transfer along the bottom third of the paper was my turtle reference (I thought the patterning was reminiscent of a turtle shell), and on the top of that are four of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s elephants being swallowed by boa constrictors. They hold up the space/time chart, which in turn holds all the other theories of the universe.
