The Gold of the Gods (20 page)

There is only one solution to this problem: immediate and rigorous birth control. The leaders of large and small religious communities oppose this as if they had come to a global cartel agreement. Every community counts its sheep and more sheep mean more power, even if the attendant misery cannot truthfully be represented as willed by God. What is allowed to happen here in God’s name is power politics played with the most miserable of creatures; it is a crime against humanity. Against men made in God’s image?

Ought not man to conceive of himself as an essential part of the cosmos at last? Starting from this position he would acquire a more balanced sense of his own importance, he could hold on to his world as home and at the same time make a more daring reach for the stars. The future will bring space travel—the moon landings were only a beginning—because we shall need raw materials and also space. But space travel will also bring with it, with a probability bordering on certainty, the encounter with the “lord from the other star.”

This
encounter has no place in the doctrines of the 20,000 religions and sects, for the faithful sheep, man, must remain the summit of creation. But what if intelligent beings far superior to us exist on other planets without the benefit of the divine act of creation? Is it so difficult to say goodbye to familiar and well-loved fairy stories?

In a devilishly clever way “they” try to sabotage space travel and its goal. “They” warn against the results of research aimed at this goal. This way of thinking is so insidious that many clever critics of plans for space travel no longer realize who is guiding their pen when they put forward their arguments.

What are we to do then?

Are we to blow up the temples, demolish the churches?

Certainly not.

In all the places where men gather together to praise the creator, they feel a beneficent strengthening togetherness. As if roused by the note of a tuning fork, the shared sense of something transcendent echoes silently through the interior. Temples and churches are places for contemplation, spaces for the communal praise of the indefinable, of IT, which for want of a better word we have learnt to call God. The places of assembly are necessary, but the rest is superfluous.

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