Mired in the Middle Ages

by Janet Brazill

Humans are exploring our Solar System! Not physically, but with spacecraft which can provide many answers to our questions. The recent landing of  “Curiosity” on the surface of Mars is giving us pictures in 3D of the Martian surface and performing various tests to determine if life ever existed there. This is only the latest remote-controlled spacecraft to land there.

We are also using an innovative ion-engine propulsion system to explore in the Asteroid Belt beyond Mars. “Dawn” completed the 1.7 billion miles to Vesta in 2011, circled, compiled data, then left to reach Ceres, another asteroid, by February 2015.

Now if humans can explore by using such instruments, who’s to say that reported sightings of UFO’s couldn’t be remote-controlled vehicles from other worlds? Accounts seem to indicate impossible aerial maneuvers – at least for any human occupants. Reports increased during wartime. And numerous paintings from the Middle Ages include image elements that appear to match modern classic UFOs.

So has “something” been watching us earthlings? If so, they can see that we, too, are becoming space travelers. But they must also notice that we are over-populating the earth. I wonder if they can tell that the number of hungry and malnourished people in our 17-billion is roughly equivalent to what they saw as the Earth’s entire human population not long ago in the 1930s. They must worry that we are destroying our polluted, overcrowded home planet.

I’m sure they would be aware of our technological progress – our capabilities for space travel, our knowledge of science, and our medical advances – definite developments since their observations in the Middle Ages.

But wait! What is happening to the women? Just when females are becoming equally educated with the males of the species, they are being tied down by pregnancy! Hasn’t this species discovered the science of pregnancy prevention?

Ah, yes. We have the knowledge, but someone should explain to them that such prevention offends the Catholic religion because allowing it now after previously banning it would threaten the Church’s authority on other subjects. Since statistics show that Catholic women use contraceptives as much as non-Catholics, the Church must attempt to make birth control unavailable for ALL women. It has had fair success at the Population Conferences held through the years, and now Catholics comprise one-quarter of our U.S. Congress. House Speaker John Boehner is a Catholic, as is Rep. Paul Ryan, both committed to budget cuts for contraceptives. They aim to reduce badly needed international family planning assistance and eliminate all funding for Title X which provides family planning services to low-income women in the United States. (5.2 million in 2010.)

Of course, if these space-visitors have been observing over the centuries, they are well aware of the Church’s history of warfare with Science -- the denial of Copernicus' and Galileo’s discoveries, Bruno being burned at the stake. They would have noted that from the time of St. Augustine to Galileo, theology claimed authority over scientific thought, and that in 1615, the Catholic Inquisition put Galileo under house arrest for his discoveries, a wrong not acknowledged officially by the Church until 1992.

Our space-visitors must be amused. Here is a scientifically accomplished space-faring society still promoting religious ideas the visitors witnessed back in the Middle Ages!

Published August 15-22 in the Colorado Springs Independent with the following quotation.

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use."

Galileo Galilei