Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Yuri! (Gagarin!)

   Yuri Gagarin was said to have said, of his first voyage to space, "I looked and looked, but I could see no God." While that is a neat nihilist quote that never really was said, I think it misses the point. When you're in space, the sky ceases to be above you as there ceases to be an "above" when gravity cuts out. The sky is thus around you- not only above you, but also below you and to your right and left. You are in the sky.

   Now, traditionally, God was the sky. In Greek mythology, the sky god was always the ruler of all other gods, from Uranus to Zeus. Uranus was literally the sky itself. While Cronus, Uranus's sun son (sorry, I got hung up on the sky thing) and Zeus's father,  isn't really said to be a sky god, I think it's pretty clear that he could be said to be based on his relatives and their sky-y positions. Cronus jealously swallowed any children he had so as to avoid being overthrown the same way he overthrew his father until he swallowed a stone instead of Zeus, who promptly overthrew him because of this. It was, after all, the Greeks who invented irony.

   So, my point is, if you can't see God when you're in the sky, that's because you're in God's belly.

   The end.

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