Wednesday (July 20th) was the 40th anniversary of the NASA moon landing.
This reminded me of my first and only formal debate which took place in Miss McCulloch’s grade seven class at Queen Elizabeth Public School in Ottawa. I was arguing that the NASA moon landing was a fake. I had assumed this position because I had recently seen the movie Capricorn One, in which OJ Simpson and a scattering of other near stars of the 70’s played astronauts who were forced to stage the landing by the government and then ran across a desert to try to escape their evil grip. If I remember correctly, OJ might have eaten a snake in a cave in order to survive.
I thought it was a completely awesome movie.
At any rate, I had little to no proof that the moon landing was fake, I just wanted that to be the case. And after I had made my presentation which was based entirely on a fictional Hollywood movie, Mark Wingate, a known trouble-maker, asked, “Mike, why would they bother to fake it?” I had no answer to this so I retreated to my default setting when defensive which was sarcasm, “ I don’t know Mark, why would they?” This back and forth went on until the entire glass began to groan with frustration and the teacher called it off. My debate team was defeated in a landslide.
It does strike me now that it’s strange that over the 40 years since the lunar landing, we never once tried to return to the moon. It just seems contrary to human nature, but I’m also entirely disinclined to believe in conspiracy theories. I mean, it’s virtually impossible to keep a secret amongst a half dozen friends, let alone thousand and thousands and thousands of people over the vast sweep of time and circumstance. People like to talk, and are encouraged in every conceivable regard to do so, so how could the truth behind something as massive as a faked moon landing actually be contained?
Of course, conspiracy theories will always thrive. The notion that there is some grand force, be it malevolent or benevolent, presiding over the affairs we feel so powerless to control is appealing, perhaps even necessary. It’s a search for order, and conspiracies have the merit of making a kind of sense, even if first you have to invent that sense.
Most often I see this type of world view in religious thinking.
When I look at the Christian Bible I see first a work of literature. I don’t see it as an immaculate document dictated by God, but a stitched together collection of observation, poetry, historical account and moral instruction written by many different and unknown authors over the course of many centuries and then pieced together as if it was a unified whole. Personally, I cannot imagine, or rather I choose not to imagine, a God that would ask from his creation behaviour that he did not seed in them, and then reward or punish them based on their adherence to this impossible standard, or as Einstein said, “ A God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.”
And what is with all the tension between punishment and forgiveness, anyway?
Which one is it?
No matter, what we have now is a kind of surreal marriage between the highly technological and the primitive. Very intelligent and sophisticated people are trying to bang square pegs into the round holes of the Bible—written thousands of years ago by unknown sources with unknown goals, and seen by many as an immutable truth– manipulating whatever rhetoric or technology is at their disposal, attempting to clone a cow to fulfill a religious prophecy or initiate end times with an atomic detonation, all in the service of supporting a belief system that they need to be true, rather than know to be true.