What I believe.

There are things that I simply don't believe, such as magic, the supernatural or any gods..

But there are things that I DO believe!
This is a small essay about what I believe. About my Faith. No, not about Faith Lehane. Though she's extremely hot. And cool.

I believe that we, being all sapient beings,

• regardless of origin, culture or destination;
• regardless of condition, ethnicity or color;
• regardless of gender, gender preference or gender identification;
• regardless of philosophy, religion or politics; and
• regardless of wealth, social status or tastes,

• Should, because we are the gift of the past to the world we borrow from the future, respect and protect ourselves, other life forms and the world by honoring these basic freedoms and those that can be derived from them:
• Freedom of expression;
• Freedom of conscience;
• Freedom from want; and
• Freedom from fear.
• Can really get to know ourselves and the universe through science, whose method can include the cycle of:
• Observation;
• Hypothesis;
• Experiment;
• Theory;
• Prediction; and
• Evaluation by scientific community.
• Have learned, through science, that:
• Our reality of space/time started out with a Big Bang billions and billions of years ago.
• We came into being through Evolution and that we continue to evolve.
• Know that in the future
• There will be a day when we will leave our cradle Earth and spread out through space, colonizing it in order to increase our chances to survive as a species.
• That one day we won't be us anymore. We will have died out or we will be changed. For change is inevitable. We might even, even more so than now, be the engineers of our own evolution and we might even be the creators of our own successors, hoping they will be kind to us.
• Also, fathom that one day there will be an end:
• That the universe as we know it will come to an end, and at this moment we just don't know how yet exactly. In all likelihood Earth itself will be gone by then.
• Can enrich our lives, celebrating existence through esthetic expression and enjoying that using all senses, emotions and our minds. To seize the day.
• Can and will continue, in a way, after we no longer live. Not through the supernatural or some other form of afterlife, but through our genes and maybe even more so by our memes. And the matter of our bodies, what it was and what it will be, is part of the universe and will continue be a part of it. We are stardust.

• The term 'sapient beings' is inspired by the fact that we humans are not the only ones that might have a certain level of 'sapience' on this world. Several fellow primates share that with us to a certain degree and the same goes for several other species. And I think the term is also 'future proof'. One day we might encounter beings that are as sapient as we are. Maybe not from our world. Maybe of our making. Development of artificial intelligence continues, and the day may come we will create a peer intelligence. Or one that surpasses ours.
• All that 'regardless' stuff in inspired by the first article of the Dutch constitution: "All persons in the Netherlands shall be treated equally in equal circumstances. Discrimination on the grounds of religion, belief, political opinion, race, or sex or on any other grounds whatsoever shall not be permitted."
• The basic freedoms I mentioned are of course inspired and based on those Four Freedoms formulated by the Roosevelts in the wake of World War II. They are the bases of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• The cycle of scientific method is well established in the last couple of centuries and science is the BEST tool to understand the universe. Science gives us a better understanding of the world. Much better than mythical tales. We learn about life, the universe and history, and a great deal more.
  I've read a great number of books and saw a fair number of television programs on these subjects and they enlightened me and delighted me. One of the first and perhaps the greatest of them all was Cosmos, A Personal Voyage and the book based on that show, produced and hosted by Carl Sagan, easily one of the greatest of my personal heroes. Speaking of which, there are a great number of them. You can find them on my Cosmos.tips website.

Some further reading: