The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor o… - Carl Sagan

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 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.

Kita memang cenderung menciptakan kosmologi yang akrab bagi kita. Meskipun telah berusaha keras, kita tidak terlalu kreatif. Di dunia Barat, Surga itu tenang dan seperti awan, dan Neraka itu seperti di dalam gunung berapi. Dalam banyak cerita, kedua alam itu diatur oleh hierarki dominasi yang dipimpin dewa atau iblis. Kaum monoteis berbicara tentang raja di atas segala raja. Di setiap budaya, kita membayangkan sesuatu seperti sistem politik kita sendiri yang menjalankan Alam Semesta. Tidak banyak yang mencurigai kemiripan ini.

And if our naïve self-confidence is a little undermined in the process, is that altogether such a loss? Is there not cause to welcome it as a maturing and character-building experience?