My Thing About Mars

I have a confession to make. I have a thing about Mars.

I can't get enough of those Rover pictures. Nearly every day I'm on the NASA website, checking out the latest transmissions back.

Why, you might ask, am I so fascinated by Mars? And it's kind of you not to suggest that it's because it might be my home planet. Maybe it's because it looks so much like certain parts of Arizona. I can almost picture myself there, shagging golf balls.

One of the best sci-fi novels of all time was Robert Heinlein's Stranger in A Strange Land. I know...of course a Libertarian would like that one. The way the Red Planet was portrayed therein turned out to be very different from what it's really like. But it still seems, to me, to be someplace human beings not only could go, but might find fairly hospitable once we got there.

Scanning the landscape as far as the eye can see, I sometimes like to imagine that I'm in the driver's seat of one of those Rovers. Where might I explore today? The sun falls on the boulders, hills and dales of Mars pretty much the same way it does here. All that beauty, and for a bazillion years, nobody to behold it but maybe some tiny virus, swimming in a puddle here or there.

I believe that scientific inquiry is a form of worship. What a crying shame it is that so many Christians find science so repugnant. In all the awesome vastness of space, nothing can hide the glorious presence of God. That Soviet astronaut, years ago, who claimed that because he saw no giant eyeball looking back at him in space, God therefore must not exist was a moron. God is not impaired by the need to peer through any eyeball detectable by our own.

Why did God make so many worlds upon which no life at all -- or at least nothing with an I.Q. greater than mold -- exists? To what purpose do these globes spin?

How sad that some so-called Christians think we must not think too long or hard about things like this. What cowards they are, and what utter frauds. They boast of a faith that has never been anything but a fiction.

Glory be to God for every supernova, every black hole. I will probably never realize my dream of traveling to Mars. The prospect of space travel is a scary thing to many, but I believe that even in the biggest black hole, we would find God.