Which Way Would You Like Your Mind Boggled?

When I consider people who have rejected traditional religions as preposterous, one thing that strikes me is how often they themselves believe things even more preposterous. Yesterday I mentioned the Jesus Seminar. The people there don’t believe Jesus said all those hard-to accept things, but then they do believe, in effect, that He spent His whole life in virtual silence. They do believe (apparently) that the Apostles lived and died for something they had largely made up. Or, for another example, a woman I know has rejected Catholicism (okay, so far, so good) but astrology, now that she can believe in! Some friends of my son’s were once amazed to discover that I believed in demons, ee-YEW! How stupid and disgusting was that? Half an hour later they began telling ghost stories and it turned out they all believed in ghosts. Or people who find it impossible to believe in God (with whom I really sympathize, because by “God” they mean somebody’s wacko version of Him), think this world was made just by chance.  Now to think of even one cell coming to be by chance is mind-numbing enough, but to believe that, you also have to believe in an infinite number of universes in addition to our own - for which there is not a shred of evidence! - because the chance of all the conditions being just right for life as we know it in any given universe is something like one in umpteen quadrillion gazillion bazillion.  Infinitesimal.

One of my favorite cartoons shows two astronomers sitting beside their giant telescope. One says to the other, “Sometimes I think there’s life out there somewhere, and it boggles my mind. And then sometimes I think we’re all alone in the universe, and that boggles my mind!"

Things just are mind-boggling, whichever way you view them. It seems to me you don’t get a choice between blowing your mind or not; only which way it blow it.