Prayers for Bobby

I just finished watching Prayers for Bobby...and yes, I did cry a little (so gay). It was touching, and the main character was cute too...so that made it harder. As a non-religious (almost anti-religious) person, this movie frustrates me. I think of all the pain that these people went through--and that people go through everyday-- and all the missed opportunities and wasted time worrying about such nonsense as what some ancient people wrote in a different time and a different place-- and it makes me sad.

People deserve a chance to love and be loved as they are. Thankfully, the tides are a-turnin' and hopefully in 100 years homosexuality will be so accepted that these future people will look back at us and think how wrong we were... just like we look back at plantation slave owners and think how wrong they were. Oh- and they used scripture to justify their actions as well!

I am reminded of a great passage from "Pale Blue Dot" by Carl Saigon. The book tells how they decided to turn the Voyager space probe around to take a picture of earth from beyond Jupiter. The picture shows earth as a pale blue speck on the image (see below). Here is the passage that makes me feel humble and in awe every time I read it:



We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you have ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that in glory and in triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.


Well said indeed...

Much Love,
Steve