# To Touch the Face of God  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Kendrick Oliver]] - Full Title:: To Touch the Face of God - Category: #books ## Highlights > You must see it as a prayer because when we launch that thing it’s like praying.”1 It was late May 1964, and the NASA astronaut Theodore Freeman ([Location 83](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=83)) - Note: Freeman died after flying into a goose > died after his airplane collided with a wild goose. At his funeral, all the other astronauts coolly told Fallaci the same thing: that it could have happened to any of them. They accepted the chance of death as the price to be paid for living in the future, for the privilege of claiming the cosmos as their own. She, in turn, accepted the lesson that Heaven doesn’t exist, Hell doesn’t exist, goodness doesn’t exist, but life exists, and continues to exist even if a tree dies, if a man dies, if a Sun dies. Didn’t you believe it too, Theodore? I do, now. I do. And you must too, Father. Believe it, please, Father. Believe it together with me. Don’t leave me alone to believe it alone with them. They’ve convinced me, they’ve bent me, they’ve converted me, they’ve made me join them, and they frighten me so, Father. Because reason is on their side. And reason is always so frightening. ([Location 114](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=114)) - Note: Freeman died > “You didn’t care whether they were marching in Mississippi,” remembered the Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean. “We never talked about anything but space.”20 ([Location 168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=168)) - Note: Same issues in for all mankind. > But any attempt to claim for that program a truly transformative role eventually must contend with the knowledge that so many of its principal managers and advocates ended up disappointed men, sorely feeling their marginalization within a culture that had moved on. ([Location 188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=188)) - Note: First, man never left space, just spacemen. Second, our machines are so much more powerful than man. We stopped sending men, but we sent imagination, ingenuity, & determination into space instead. > The space age was constituted from an unstable compound of popular attraction, ambivalence, and unconcern. ([Location 193](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=193)) > How Americans regarded the Apollo enterprise was influenced by a range of variables external to the program, most obviously the state of the national economy and the temper of Cold War relations but also, at a more granular level, the local circumstances in which they lived and worked and their own individual habits of thought and belief. Investments in hardware to be sent to the moon could look very different to the residents of America’s impoverished city centers than they did to the suburban aerospace engineer surfing a long spring tide of NASA-funded R&D. ([Location 195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=195)) - Note: For all mankind, anger at cost and putting people out of work. The US has never been good at caring for displaced workers. Finland, OTOH, pays them 70% of their salary, healthcare, relocation, and retraining. Yes the show is fictional, but it highlights the dangers of change without bringing everyone along. > Religious convictions were assumed, if not actually to be dying out, then at least to be losing their salience across the public life of the nation. ([Location 204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=204)) > And this was true of most accounts of the space program in the Mercury-Apollo era, which seemed implicitly to accept Fallaci’s proposition that men who had fashioned the means to deliver themselves unto the stars had no real need to trust in the care of God. ([Location 208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=208)) > The standard histories of the program at best gesture briefly in the direction of the faith of John Glenn, the reading of Genesis by the crew of Apollo 8, Buzz Aldrin’s celebration of communion after the first lunar landing, and Jim Irwin’s epiphany of God’s presence as he walked on the moon and then return to their secular themes: the Cold War competition with the Soviets; the development of spaceflight technology, concepts, and technique; the astronauts’ encounters with risk; the scientific yields; and finally, more painfully, the termination of the endeavor in an era of economic limits. ([Location 209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=209)) > Only Robert Poole, with his interest in how the program revised mankind’s apprehension of its cosmos, has offered much more than vignettes of astronaut piety and surveyed the intersections of spaceflight and spirituality from a wider angle of view. ([Location 214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=214)) > discursions, though, not much more than marginalia; the real action, it is evident, lies elsewhere, with Vatican II and its impact on American Catholicism, with the religious motivations, language, and rituals of the civil rights and antiwar movements, with the rainbow spiritualities of the counterculture and the nascent New Age, and with the surprising muscularity of conservative evangelicalism as the long Sixties neared its close. ([Location 222](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=222)) > For David F. Noble, the development of new technologies has almost always expressed a hope of redemption, of recovering the divinity that man forfeited in the Fall. ([Location 228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=228)) > The point was proved, he thought, by the presence of committed Christians across the ranks of NASA employees. ([Location 230](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=230)) > Did Americans really conceive of spaceflight as a means for mankind to return to God? ([Location 235](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=235)) > Or was Oriana Fallaci right to identify the launch of a rocket as a blasphemous act, an expression of man’s growing conviction that no metaphysics could constrain his mastery of the cosmos? ([Location 235](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=235)) > Or was it possible that religion neither inspired the nation’s space program nor perceived it as a threat, indeed that these two realms of human activity, for all their shared interest in the heavens, did not speak to one another in any significant way? ([Location 236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=236)) > four major themes. ([Location 250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=250)) > Firstly, it considers the question of motivation, exploring the role played by religious faith and values in the work of the pioneers of aviation and rocketry, in the development of national space-exploration goals during the 1950s and 1960s, in NASA’s institutional culture, and in the careers of American astronauts in the Mercury-Apollo era. ([Location 251](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=251)) > second theme: the implications of spaceflight for religious thought and belief. ([Location 254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=254)) > Thirdly, and more elemental than the abstractions of religious doctrine, there was the prospect that travel into space would admit new opportunities for spiritual experience, not just for the astronauts but also, through the real-time technologies of mass communication, for the watching public at home. ([Location 257](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=257)) > By the time of the first moon landing, the question of whether the space program should function as an auxiliary of religious faith or tend to default to secularity had become highly controversial. ([Location 263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=263)) > The final theme of this book is the way in which the survival of a spiritual dimension to the program became a subject of organized concern at the religious grass roots. ([Location 265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=265)) > Could faith in the supernatural sustain itself in the face of mankind’s efforts to naturalize the heavens? ([Location 274](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=274)) > Could the program flourish on a basis of material achievements alone? ([Location 274](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=274)) > Woodruff prepared a paper entitled “The Myth of Apollo 11: The Effects of the Lunar Landing on the Mythic Dimension of Man.” ([Location 282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=282)) > Eliade had concluded that the motif of “magic flight” was a universal feature of ancient religion and myth: it was evidence of a “longing to break the ties” of human bondage to the earth that was actually “constitutive of man.” ([Location 286](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=286)) > in its potential for rescuing modern man from his condition of provincialism and relativism and restoring to him the consciousness of cosmic myth and symbol that had grounded the societies of his ancient ancestors. ([Location 289](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=289)) > It was an abiding theme of Eliade’s writings that if modern man were to experience a spiritual renewal, he would have to work back from these vestiges to the complete mythologies that had provided his forebears with a coherent paradigm of being. ([Location 299](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=299)) > Later, in the wake of the 1970s evangelical revival and survey returns that indicated that Americans had refused to dispense with their belief in God, the secularization thesis ([Location 327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=327)) > was widely regarded, even by those who once had been its advocates, as a prophecy that had failed. ([Location 328](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=328)) > In other versions of the thesis, secularization might be evidenced not so much in the dissolution of religious faith itself but rather in the diminishing salience of that faith to activities and thought in arenas—politics, work, leisure—located beyond the physical perimeters of church and temple. ([Location 330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=330)) - Note: ! > It matters also whether their beliefs were actually relevant in their work. ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=339)) > Thus the “classical task of religion” was to construct “a common world within which all of social life receives ultimate meaning binding on everybody.” ([Location 345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=345)) > Amid all the public piety of the American 1950s, professing a religious vocation may have been an act of social pragmatism rather than a marker of genuine commitment and belief. ([Location 362](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=362)) > Habits of speech and gesture that have devolved from sacramental practice may subsist within the secular culture precisely because their religious meanings have become degraded. ([Location 364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=364)) > they may be secularizations of the sacred, not sacralizations of the secular. ([Location 367](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=367)) > The technological revolution in the West, famously asserted the historian Lynn White, began with the Benedictine rule. In the classical tradition, a moral distinction had been made between the work of the body and the work of the mind. But for the monks of St. Benedict, to labor was to pray, and thus their intellects could turn to the practical problems of power and production in fulfillment of their calling rather than as a diversion from it. ([Location 383](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=383)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > “The promised land flies before us like the mirage,” wrote the reformer Henry George. “The fruits of the tree of knowledge turn as we grasp them to apples of Sodom, that crumble at the touch.” ([Location 399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=399)) > In industrial environments, which were increasingly specialized, it was the injunctions of management or vocational codes and routines, not the transcendental claims of the church, that seemed most salient to most workers most of the time. ([Location 406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=406)) > Engineers, these studies asserted, tended to be narrowly educated, careerist, and only shallowly integrated into the broader communities in which they lived. ([Location 409](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=409)) > Even for those who questioned such typologies, who pointed to the spiritual gratifications that engineering could often provide, the model was not so much the monks of St. Benedict, conceiving their labor to be a prayer to God, but the Zen Buddhist with his quiet, careful reveries: the engineer, utterly absorbed in his machine and in the rational, ordered process by which he will make it work. ([Location 412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=412)) > He was described as an angel, a redeemer, who had arrived from the heavens to give new hope to societies that had lost their convictions and squandered their virtue in the debacle of the Great War and the debauches of the Jazz Age. ([Location 458](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=458)) > Yet Lindbergh himself, by the time of his flight and for a decade or so thereafter, maintained neither confidence in God nor an attachment to any church. ([Location 462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=462)) > Charles Lindbergh wrote privately of his admiration for the Führer, and in 1938 he accepted a medal from Air Marshal Hermann Goering in recognition of his services to aviation. ([Location 474](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=474)) > “God is my co-pilot,” asserted Colonel Robert Scott of the US Army Air Forces: “My personal ambition is that He permit me to go again into combat against the Jap or the Hun; that He help me just a little to shoot down a hundred Jap ships—even a thousand.” ([Location 482](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=482)) > And in the United States, John Whiteside Parsons invented the first safe and practical solid rocket fuel, while privately nurturing an enthusiasm for black magic and the occult. ([Location 505](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=505)) > Verne himself is best characterized as a kind of Catholic deist, deeply intrigued by the idea of God but unconvinced that he was at work in the world; and Verne was largely uninterested in the figure of Christ. ([Location 512](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=512)) > In both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, certainly, rocket enthusiasts, like aviators, readily declared their allegiance to new ideological cults, and a few became fanatics, but for many it was simply a pragmatic choice. It was only through the state, and specifically the military, that rockets could be brought to a mature stage of development. ([Location 523](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=523)) > Charles Lindbergh, declaring religion to be the essential source of the moral law that man required if he was to survive his own scientific and technological inventions. ([Location 542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=542)) > In the early postwar era, from the late forties to the dawn of the sixties, the United States experienced one of its periodic seasons of religious revival.86 Thousands of new churches were established, with billions of dollars invested in church construction. In the 1950s, church attendance increased by more than 30 percent, compared with a 19 percent growth in the total population. ([Location 547](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=547)) > denominations identified themselves as evangelical or fundamentalist, their recruitment efforts aided in part by the state- and citywide revival campaigns of preachers like Mervin Rosell and Billy Graham. ([Location 550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=550)) > It is also difficult to dissociate the cultural salience of religion in this period from the ideological currents of the Cold War, which worked to organize the world into the categories of the god-fearing and the godless. ([Location 555](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=555)) > For those who professed no faith in God, life in the 1950s palpitated with the threat of excommunication from this national church: it was hard for Joseph McCarthy and his confederates to conceive of an atheist whose beliefs had not been cued by a reading of Karl Marx. ([Location 565](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=565)) > Certainly, ministers could assert, as Billy Graham did to President Eisenhower, that the safety of the republic required the toughening up of its youth through compulsory physical and scientific training in the schools. ([Location 575](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=575)) > In particular, the expansion of the federal government’s role in education could be expected to degrade the moral autonomy of the individual, the family, and the locality and to obscure the constitutional line of separation between church and state, which allowed God’s word to freely work its effects throughout American society. ([Location 580](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=580)) > Better to pitch the program as if it had been inspired by the passion for exploration and the thirst for knowledge and let the world infer a lesson about the power and self-confidence of the nation that was ready to direct massive resources to the pursuit of wonder and enlightenment. ([Location 594](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=594)) - Note: Either you are exceptional or you are not. If you are, there is no reason to talk about it. Exceptionalism is self-evident. > opinion. Individual astronauts could, within reason, say what they liked about God or say nothing at all, for that—as Kennedy observed following John Glenn’s orbital flight in Friendship 7—reflected the religious liberty in which they lived and worked. ([Location 602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=602)) > Christopher Kraft, director of flight operations at the Manned Spacecraft Center, served as a lay reader at his local Episcopal church, but he admitted that these two offices seemed to exist in separate worlds: “I tried teaching a Bible class, but I lacked the fundamentalist verve and drove people away when I tried too hard to relate the early church to more modern interpretations. It was hard not to be modern when I spent my working days sending man into space.” ([Location 635](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=635)) > It was a point noted by one NASA scientist, an evangelical, on the eve of the first moon landing: “If the space program can be faulted for anything,” Rodney W. Johnson told Christianity Today, “it is that it has ignored man’s spiritual yearnings.” ([Location 663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=663)) > Norman Mailer, ([Location 666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=666)) > As an institution NASA was inscrutable. ([Location 667](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=667)) > if there was one guiding principle behind the development of NASA’s manned space capability, it was that as little as possible should be left to the work of prayer; ([Location 683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=683)) > There was something in such professionalism that spoke of a dissolution of self in performance of a sacred trust. ([Location 686](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=686)) > To Mailer, the agency’s personnel behaved like “true Christians”; to Oriana Fallaci, they “constituted a religious sect: ready to sacrifice and deaf to irony.”127 ([Location 687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=687)) > But the crowded pews of the suburban churches did not convince everyone that across the crab-grass frontier a true Christian faith was in full bloom. This was the era of the suburban jeremiad, which cautioned that the mission of the suburban church was in danger of ([Location 721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=721)) > becoming degraded. ([Location 723](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=723)) > The MSC complex was constructed and staffed in just over two years, and once it was established, its employees became habituated to often punishing work routines.153 For many of their families, then, a double dislocation was involved: they moved to the Houston suburbs, and thereafter husbands and fathers absented themselves from the household almost entirely for long stretches each week. Local churches came to play an important role in the lives of these families. ([Location 765](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=765)) - Note: Church as Day care for wives to prevent day drinking. > One local minister organized a prayer league, largely funded ([Location 775](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=775)) - Note: Like a bowling league? What supplies do you need to pray? How do they keep score? > Christian moral teaching seemed to exercise no traction at all. ([Location 814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=814)) > According to one minister, infidelity was so common that it had become a community joke. ([Location 818](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=818)) > The local chamber of commerce complained that McIntire had actually driven convention business away with his ban on the sale of alcohol in the Freedom Center Hotel, which was Cape Canaveral’s largest conference facility. ([Location 829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=829)) > His account of his experiences in space was sincere but clinical. ([Location 837](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=837)) > Norman Mailer offered this characterization of the astronaut: “powerful, expert, philosophically naïve, jargon-ridden, and resolutely divorced from any language with grandeur to match the proportions of his endeavour.” ([Location 843](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=843)) - Note: The Crown, prince Phillip has an audience with the 3 Apollo moon flight. He was expecting romantic tales. Instead he got detailed information on the engineering problems. > It came as a surprise to these men that religion might be thought relevant to their work.182 As their enthusiastic embrace of the carnal pleasures readily available to an astronaut in the bars and motels of Cocoa Beach indicates, it was not even very influential in their private lives. ([Location 873](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=873)) > Aldrin reflected on the “symbolic aspects” of the Apollo 11 mission and quoted from Psalm 8: “When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him?”198 ([Location 909](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=909)) > Aldrin’s involvement with Webster Presbyterian presented him, perhaps, with a rare chance for social integration, for performing a role within the community for which the cues were easily readable and precedents well-established. His faith, Norman Mailer asserted, “was as predictable as a flow-chart he had designed himself”; its purpose was “to restore emotional depletions.”200 ([Location 916](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=916)) > But the thesis that the program was conceived and brought to term in anticipation of a Christian millennium, enforced by analogous movements of ascent and promises of immortality, is not persuasive. ([Location 936](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=936)) > faith was rarely an inspiration for the project of spaceflight; it was salient mostly as a source of validation. ([Location 937](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=937)) > Without risk, no faith,” declared the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard in the 1840s. “If I am able to apprehend God objectively, I do not have faith; but because I cannot do this, I must have faith. If I want to keep myself in faith, I must continuously see to it that I hold fast the objective uncertainty, see to it that in the objective uncertainty I am ‘out on 70,000 fathoms of water’ and still have faith.” ([Location 958](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=958)) > “objective uncertainty,” as Kierkegaard ([Location 964](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=964)) > Many, as it turned out, preferred to be assured that heaven could be situated in real space and real time, that man was still subordinate to the caring authority of God, and that Earth remained a site of special creation. ([Location 979](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=979)) > This perception produced, not a recession of religious belief, but rather the further dissolution of theological authority over the field of religious thought. ([Location 982](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=982)) > This hardly cancels the need for our attention, for it is possible to tender a broadly similar characterization of another, much more notorious strain of American theology that emerged in the 1960s: the theology that argued, on a variety of grounds, that God was dead. ([Location 989](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=989)) > Christians could think of their God as existing beyond the natural world. Alternatively, they could think of him as existing within the natural world as a kind of divine essence, but as often as not he was seen as its overlord too, physically inhabiting its commanding heights and participating in its history. ([Location 997](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=997)) - Note: Epictetus on whole earth philosophy, Golden Sayings of Epictetus Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web. (Location 1204) > For those who paid attention, the notion of a three-tiered universe, with heaven above and hell below, was reduced to the status of metaphor by the Copernican revolution: ([Location 1001](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1001)) > God said to reside principally in a heaven up above the earth could be regarded as no more than a local deity, ([Location 1005](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1005)) > The first orientation was toward a natural theology that identified God as both immanent and creative in a process of “becoming” that linked all entities in the world. ([Location 1011](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1011)) > The second, in dramatic and deliberate contrast, favored a neo-orthodox insistence on the extreme otherness of God and the impossibility of discovering him in the natural world. ([Location 1013](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1013)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Indeed, if God was not “with us,” performing the role of protector and guide, then what was the point of paying him heed? ([Location 1026](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1026)) - Note: Cosmic Butler, Astro-psychologist. > serenity. As C. S. Lewis observed, “If God—such a God as any adult religion believes in—exists, mere movement in space will never bring you any nearer to Him or any farther from Him than you are at this very moment.” ([Location 1044](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1044)) > failed to provide them with a concept of heaven that could survive the space age and stand up to Soviet mockery. ([Location 1048](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1048)) > neopagan groupings, “we recognize that the entire Earth is a vast living entity: Mother Earth, Mother Nature, The Goddess.” ([Location 1065](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1065)) > In Anders’s famous photograph Earthrise, of a partly shadowed blue-and-white earth appearing over the desolate, grey lunar horizon, it is the earth, and not the moon, that appeals more to the eyes. ([Location 1080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1080)) > Robert Heinlein’s science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. ([Location 1086](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1086)) > which, in the words of Archibald MacLeish, allowed mankind to see the planet “as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence in which it floats,” ([Location 1093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1093)) > But it was not the turn to belief in the immanent divine, Christian or non-Christian, that was most notable in the religious culture of the late space age; it was the return to a belief in a transcendent God. ([Location 1111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1111)) > the methods and instruments used in these disciplines were incapable of proving conclusively that the supernatural did not actually exist. ([Location 1118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1118)) > wider spiritual marketplace of the late 1960s the best business was being done by conservative and evangelical churches, ([Location 1122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1122)) > In December 1969 an editorial in Christianity Today asked the question, “Has God Forsaken the World?” “Darkness has begun to descend upon the earth,” it observed, “and the voice of God seems silent, his Spirit’s restraining power lifted. Men grope in the darkness, reaching out to touch the hand that doesn’t seem to be there, straining to hear the voice that doesn’t seem to speak.” ([Location 1128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1128)) > Just as a man traveling into space could be variously regarded as profaning the heavens or attaining a closeness to God, so too did an ambiguity persist over the religious significance of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, reported sightings of which dramatically increased in number in 1973 and 1974.46 ([Location 1138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1138)) > NASA’s reach for the stars had, at the very least, diverted attention and talent from the challenges of alleviating poverty, cleansing the nation’s waters, and defouling its air. ([Location 1274](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1274)) > Even on the morning of its greatest triumph, then, the promise of space technology was beginning to congeal; it had handed man the moon but perhaps also helped to cost him the earth. ([Location 1278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1278)) > instead. It was Buckminster Fuller who first invented the notion of a “spaceship Earth,” on which life was sustained as a consequence of the synergy between its multiple interlocking parts but which, in order to slow the process of entropy, also required the careful conservation, recycling, and regeneration of resources. ([Location 1283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1283)) > NASA has spent billions to provide the moonbound astronauts with the ecology of the ‘good earth’—pure air, pure water and careful disposal of waste. Each spaceship, in effect, is a model and a reminder of what earth should be like.” ([Location 1288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1288)) > As Eric Sevareid commented on the CBS Evening News: “So the three astronauts head home across the desert of space, their oxygen and water running low. Perhaps the story will be seen one day as a parable. This earth is also a spinning spaceship, all of us are astronauts, and our oxygen and water are also diminishing. But we have no place to go.”80 ([Location 1292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1292)) > Small, alone, and watery blue, in these images Earth seemed more vulnerable, contingent, and provisional than it did when it occupied the horizon and supported man from beneath his feet. The same was true of man himself. ([Location 1296](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1296)) > Man had forgotten that his dominion over the natural world was a gift held in trust; it was a stewardship, not an open invitation to plunder. ([Location 1338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1338)) > Though other worlds were incorporated into the cosmology of the Mormon Church, the Vatican elected to keep its own counsel. ([Location 1391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1391)) - Note: The expanse & the Mormon ship > “We are trying to cross a bridge,” declared C. S. Lewis, “not only before we come to it, but even before we know there is a river that needs bridging.” ([Location 1396](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1396)) > life? It was knowledge of the size of the cosmos that provoked Nietzsche’s madman to cry “Where is God?” and to declare that he was dead. ([Location 1413](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1413)) > “If there are any gods whose chief concern is man,” declared Arthur C. Clarke, “they cannot be very important gods.” ([Location 1418](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1418)) > Inevitably, the anthropic principle was turned into an argument for design: over the vast reaches of cosmological time and space, what God had intended all along was the emergence of man on Earth. ([Location 1471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1471)) > What the space age had actually revealed, wrote Rodney W. Johnson, an evangelical scientist employed on the shuttle program, was “the truth of the biblical account of creation” and “the uniqueness of man and our divine origin.” ([Location 1475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1475)) > Each of the Mercury astronauts had passed through an intensive selection process designed at least in part to exclude anybody with a psychological disposition that might lead them to become overly excited by the experience of spaceflight. ([Location 1546](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1546)) > Although he believed that the “hugeness” and “orderliness” of the heavens confirmed the existence of “a God, some Power that puts all this into orbit and keeps it there,” his knowledge of those attributes of size and system remained essentially secondhand. ([Location 1554](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1554)) > “The Apollo veterans have become poets, seers, preachers,” Time magazine asserted, “all of them evangelists for the privileged vision from space that Edgar Mitchell calls ‘instant global consciousness.’ “14 ([Location 1573](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1573)) > As C. S. Lewis had observed early in the space age, whether or not an astronaut found God in space depended very much “on the seeing eye”—who that astronaut was and what he already believed. ([Location 1577](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1577)) > bearer would come back a different man. Some Apollo astronauts reported that in matters of mind and spirit they had been changed by their missions hardly at all. ([Location 1582](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1582)) > James Irwin enjoyed a season of successful religious ministry, while Edgar Mitchell attained the status of a guru in the more cerebral precincts of New Age spirituality, but by the late 1970s neither could claim an audience commensurate with his original ambitions. ([Location 1586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1586)) > In part, this was a response to the vitality of the new “religions of the heart”—Pietism and Methodism—which challenged individuals to seek their own direct revelation of God and not to rely on the pharisaic structures and practices of the church. ([Location 1602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1602)) > In combination with a rapidly evolving body of scholarship that historicized both the composition of the scriptures and the emergence of orthodox church doctrine, identifying them as the products of human rather than divine agency and inspiration, this critique of natural theology presented believers with a poignant problem. If they could no longer argue from design or trust in the infallibility of church and scripture, from what source was their faith to receive validation? ([Location 1606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1606)) > Although Kant had declared that God could not be recognized in the world, his philosophy allowed for an intuitive grasp of a transcendent principle in matters of aesthetics and morality: there are certain objects that all men would view with pleasure, and our apprehension of a particular action as good or evil is drawn from an innate awareness of a universal moral law. Here was an opening for Christian apologetics. ([Location 1609](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1609)) > In America, the conviction that affective experience offered a distinctive and constitutive basis for religious belief drew support from a philosophical tradition that ran from Jonathan Edwards to William James, via the transcendentalists. ([Location 1624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1624)) > William James published The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he argued that the origins of such experiences were a less productive subject for empirical study than their effects. ([Location 1634](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1634)) > There was also a turn toward experiential novelty, accessible through participation in the “new” religions of the East, native spirituality, nature worship, and the occult. ([Location 1662](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1662)) > A similar apprehension seems to have tormented Meriwether Lewis during his journey with William Clark across the Louisiana territory, as a landscape consistent with republican values of harmony and order—with the image of the garden—devolved into a wilderness, a ravaged and malign terrain of forbidding mountains and jagged cliffs, suffocating heat and violent storms, menacing beasts and relentless biting insects. Lewis descended into a depression, broke off his journal, and, soon after his return from the expedition, died a broken man, likely by his own hand. ([Location 1695](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1695)) > After Hume and Kant, it was hard to argue for a natural theology, and after Darwin, harder still to celebrate it. ([Location 1713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1713)) > For Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist and explorer, contemplation of the intricate yet global matrix of life on Earth, which connected the bird singing in a garden to the presence of a particular species of plant and onward to the chemistry of the local soil, geological formations, and systems of climate and weather, was an exercise in spiritual communion that required no thought of a creator. ([Location 1715](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1715)) > Still, as Henry David Thoreau observed, no journey to a far meridian was required for such intuitions; mind could meet the spirit in living nature just as readily on a walk near Walden Pond as in a survey of the western mountains. ([Location 1720](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1720)) > Nature religion, with its conviction that whatever divinity abided in man was sourced from and shared with every other element of life on Earth, has maintained a significant presence in the American spiritual marketplace ever since.43 The epiphanies of unity and belonging that attended the perspectives made available by the space age—the views of the whole earth, the sense of man’s incorporation into the universe—shared in this tradition even as they added something radical and new. ([Location 1725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1725)) > Walt Whitman attested, to watch a locomotive rolling by and to hear the reverberation of its shrieks across the hills was to encounter a form of sublimity: “Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! pulse of the continent!” ([Location 1738](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1738)) > In the 1950s, with the advent of jet aircraft that routinely ascended to the upper troposphere, clinical research pointed to the existence of a “break-off phenomenon,” experienced by about 35 percent of military pilots. It was characterized “as a feeling of being isolated, detached, or separated physically from the earth.” The pilots “perceived themselves as somehow losing their connection with the world.” ([Location 1753](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1753)) > Put out my hand and touched the face of God. ([Location 1765](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1765)) - Note: Unmediated, not religion > for it revels in the experience of another kind of communion—between the pilot and his plane—that was accessible only to those with the necessary natural skill. ([Location 1769](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1769)) > “I have sensed,” wrote Charles Lindbergh, “the harmony of muscle, mind, and mechanism which gives the illusion of life to substance until levers move with thought as hand or foot, until the rhythm of an engine is geared to the beat of one’s own heart, and wing in turning flight seems an extension of one’s own body.” ([Location 1775](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1775)) - Note: Man with any machine. The thrill driving, the oneness with auto. The art of driving a black top, two lane, at high speed at night. > For Frank Borman, an air force research pilot, then NASA astronaut, “the wonderful, almost indescribable feeling created by being in perfect harmony with your machine” was unique to the experience of flying, whether in the skies or in space.58 ([Location 1784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1784)) > realm. “The feeling of flesh is gone. I become independent of physical laws—of food, of shelter, of life. I’m almost one with these vaporlike forms behind me, less tangible than air, universal as aether.”60 Eventually, Lindbergh “re-formed slowly as a man again, returning from spatial distances to my plane and body, condensing and collapsing into earthly qualities.” ([Location 1793](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1793)) > Lindbergh turned back to the ground and turned into Thoreau, regularly venturing out into nature and wilderness to seek intuitive experience of an immortal “life stream” that connected a man to all men and to the environment of the earth and the cosmos beyond. ([Location 1831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1831)) > “You get a feeling,” asserted the CBS News correspondent Eric Sevareid just before the crew of Apollo 11 left for the moon, “that people think of these men as not just superior men but different creatures. They are like people who have gone into the other world and have returned, and you sense they bear secrets that we will never entirely know, that they will never entirely be able to explain.” ([Location 1882](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1882)) > By the early space age, astronomers had reached no final determination as to the size of the universe, but even their provisional calculations—in a range of billions of light-years—made a comedy of the Christian cosmological tradition. ([Location 1888](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1888)) > Yet it was possible still to look through a powerful telescope and maintain a pious eye. ([Location 1890](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1890)) > After all, it was frequently asserted, had not Columbus’s report in March 1493 that he had discovered a new world awakened the people of a fractious and moribund western Europe to fresh, green horizons of social possibility; had it not prompted the revival of science, philosophy, and religious faith? ([Location 1909](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1909)) > Moreover, for the duration of an actual mission, the astronaut would have to be kept busy and stay in constant communication with the earth to preclude his mind’s taking an inward, pathological turn. ([Location 1965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1965)) > They also had to ensure that the astronaut did not become so overwhelmed by the experience of traveling in space that he ceased to function effectively. ([Location 1970](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1970)) > jet transport planes, which, following a parabolic trajectory, ([Location 1985](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=1985)) - Note: Vomit comet > “If I dream,” Wally Schirra told Oriana Fallaci, “if I get lost in wonder at the sight of a sunset, a color, I waste the flight and maybe my life.” ([Location 2009](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2009)) > astronauts. “Lieutenant, what do you think of imagination?” she asked Roger Chaffee. Imagination, he answered, was necessary for the invention of machines: “But imagination must be held in check by a consideration of what is logical and useful, otherwise it becomes a childish instrument. And none of us are children.” ([Location 2012](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2012)) > Scott Carpenter. Here was an astronaut who was not hostile to the psychologists, who willingly crammed his mission plan with observations and experiments, who greeted the first sensation of weightlessness with an exclamation of delight, who joyfully drank in the sunsets and the sight of the earth below, and who later described his flight as a “spiritual experience.”108 But in operational terms Carpenter’s performance left much to be desired, though it was hardly catastrophic. He used too much fuel wheeling his capsule around reporting on the view, and reentering the atmosphere under manual control, he couldn’t get his angles right and so overshot his projected landing point by 250 miles.109 An astronaut was permitted to make errors, but not because he had become engrossed in nonoperational concerns. “That sonofabitch will never fly for me again!” declared NASA Flight Director Christopher Kraft, and Carpenter never did. ([Location 2016](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2016)) > They could not sit for a morning in the manner of Thoreau, slowly incubating epiphany. Inside the capsule there was an unending series of systems checks to perform, particularly when the mission hardware was new. ([Location 2083](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2083)) > The odor that accumulated inside Apollo 16 had become so noxious by the time the astronauts splashed down in the sea that the first swimmer to reach their capsule slammed its hatch back in their faces. ([Location 2109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2109)) > “Life magazine doesn’t tell you about these things,” observed the command-module pilot Ken Mattingly, but across the memoirs of Apollo veterans the spacecraft as a site of squalor and the unclean, uncomfortable body of the astronaut emerges as a rather common theme.15 “I began to smell like a restroom, … It got so I couldn’t stand my own company,” attested Jim Irwin.16 Grimy, rank, and acutely self-conscious—in such a state of being, was the astronaut a plausible subject for a hilltop experience, even before the most transcendent of panoramas? Was it possible, despite all this, for him to feel that he was bathed in grace? ([Location 2111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2111)) > Collins looked at the earth “in wonderment, suddenly aware of how its uniqueness is stamped in every atom of my body.” ([Location 2176](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2176)) > Only occasionally did they evoke—as John Glenn had earlier in the program—the role of an ordering hand that had set the earth and the planets and stars in their relations to one another, and even on those occasions Glenn’s conviction was missing. ([Location 2182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2182)) - Note: Copernican view > “We’re like ants on a log,” Anders said. “How could any earth-centered religious ritual know what God’s truth is?”30 ([Location 2192](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2192)) > “The entire world was within fifteen feet. And there was nothing else. That was a really powerful sensation. Never seen anything like it.” ([Location 2200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2200)) - Note: Also sailing big water > Mitchell perceived the universe. “It occurred to me,” he wrote, “that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft itself were manufactured long ago in the furnace of one of the ancient stars that burned in the heavens about me.” ([Location 2216](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2216)) > For Mitchell, space travel was “an extension of the same universal process that evolved our molecules.” ([Location 2219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2219)) > If everything was connected, having emerged from a common source, there was no fundamental divide between the realms of spirit and matter, religion and science. ([Location 2223](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2223)) > Scott wiped away some of the dust covering the rock and saw that it was composed of large, white crystals, an indication that it had once belonged to the moon’s primordial crust. “I think we found what we came for,” he told mission control.58 Later the rock would be dated at more than four billion years old, close to the age of the solar system itself, and given the name Genesis Rock. To Irwin, the peculiar placement of the rock—“it seemed to say, ‘here I am, take me’ “—was evidence that its discovery had been the will of God. ([Location 2270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2270)) > 1972 Irwin brought forward his retirement from NASA because of a scandal surrounding the unauthorized carriage of four hundred commemorative envelopes aboard Apollo 15 and their subsequent sale by the crew. ([Location 2287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2287)) - Note: Beginning of Irwin as a send me a dollar preacher. > Perhaps this was evidence that they had also been more profoundly affected by their experiences in space, a circumstance that Scott thought attributable to the greater operational responsibilities borne by the commanders. Simply put, the lunar-module pilots had more time during the flight to let everything sink in. ([Location 2301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2301)) > Buzz Aldrin, the first lunar landing represented the culminating achievement of his engineering career, but contrary to his hopes prior to the mission, it yielded no philosophy, no gleam of enlightenment, from which he could derive meaning and a sense of purpose when he fell back to Earth. ([Location 2305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2305)) > Bean had been too busy setting up experiments and collecting geological samples to really reflect on where he was.70 Later, gazing up at the moon from Earth, he would wish for “some mystical feeling, but there never seems to be.”71 It is almost as if he became an artist in order to burnish and correct his own memory, to invest the Apollo expeditions with a romance and luminosity that, for most of the hard-driven astronauts, they could not have possessed at the time. ([Location 2313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2313)) > The mystic, noted William James, is often skeptical of the efforts of others to detail and analyze mystical states of feeling. ([Location 2354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2354)) > A reasonable income could be earned from recycling anecdotes and reflections in memoirs, media interviews, after-dinner speeches, and other public appearances. Apollo veterans who tried to stay away from that circuit, or who ([Location 2367](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2367)) > preferred to offer their audiences something different, such as an induction into contemporary astronautics, could become objects of resentment.86 “Tomorrow,” wrote the New York Times on the eve of the first lunar landing, “we should know how, in fact, it feels to walk the moon.”87 Forty years on, it was an experience that the Apollo astronauts were still being asked to describe and explain. ([Location 2369](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2369)) > The exception was Bill Anders, who, through all the sermons and accolades that followed the voyage of Apollo 8 and its crew’s reading from Genesis while orbiting the moon, maintained a public silence about the dwindling of his own personal faith. ([Location 2409](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2409)) > In 1978 the same astronaut who had discovered the four-billion-year-old Genesis Rock on the lunar surface and perceived in that discovery the workings of providence endorsed a fundamentalist text that argued that the moon, along with the earth, had been created by God no more than ten thousand years earlier. ([Location 2559](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2559)) > Edgar Mitchell scrutinized quantum theory for clues to the divine. ([Location 2577](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2577)) > Mitchell’s notion of divinity was esoteric and recessive; it was too implicit in the substance of nature to do the work of saving souls. ([Location 2579](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2579)) > “It’s not the same God.” ([Location 2580](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2580)) > “What you watch is a biblical scene,” commented Eric Sevareid on the CBS Evening News: “There’s a gratitude, a thanksgiving, really a reverential sensation as you watch this.” ([Location 2613](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2613)) > The laureate of uber-rationalism, Ayn Rand, however, disdained these sorts of consecrations. “What we had seen, in naked essentials,” she declared, “was the concretized abstraction of man’s greatness.” ([Location 2620](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2620)) > “You can see it that way,” asserted Eric Sevareid, “you can hear much of it, but you can’t feel it.”160 The visual experience was reduced in scale, frame, and intensity: the flames did not burn so brightly, the roar of the engines did not stampede. Doubtless, some affect was possible. “I identified with the rocket!” ([Location 2640](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2640)) > The famous photographs Earthrise and Blue Marble, then, did not issue from the reflexes of astronauts in epiphany; nor did pictures of the earth taken by satellite or a robot camera onboard the unmanned Apollo 4 capsule during its flight in November 1967.170 These images were generated because somebody in NASA predicted they ([Location 2673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2673)) > would have an appeal. ([Location 2676](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2676)) > “For Earth people only: 12¢ off Tang,” ran one magazine advertisement in April 1969. There the planet was, partly shadowed and hanging in space, below it a rectangular coupon to be cut out and used in-store. ([Location 2693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2693)) > The earth looked so good in part because the heavens looked so bad. ([Location 2696](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2696)) > The highlight of the Apollo 8 mission, for audiences back on Earth, was the crew’s prime-time broadcast from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. While the camera scanned the landscape below, the astronauts offered their personal impressions of the moon and described some of its key features. Then, toward the end of the broadcast, they took turns reading the opening passage from Genesis, concluding with the tenth verse, “And God called the dry land earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas; and God saw that it was good.” Frank Borman signed off: “We close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good earth.” ([Location 2721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2721)) > Lewis Mumford declared that popular interest in the mission had been stimulated by “a morbid thrill in the ever-present possibility of a spectacularly violent death.” For Reinhold Niebuhr, the landing, though a “tremendous technical achievement,” represented “a defective sense of human values.” ([Location 2755](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2755)) > post coitum omne animal tristis est (after sex, every animal is sad). ([Location 2767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2767)) > As Joseph Campbell observed, “We have actually been born from space, since it was out of primordial space that the galaxy took form, of which our life-giving sun is a member.” He judged that “outer space is within us inasmuch as the laws of space are within us; outer and inner space are the same.” ([Location 2859](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2859)) > Carl Sagan declared: “We are made of starstuff…. The deep human need to seek and understand our connection with the universe is a goal well within our grasp.” ([Location 2862](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2862)) > The Apollonian perspective, against some early expectations, had failed to supply a common map to the divine. ([Location 2874](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2874)) > The capacity of manned spaceflight to recharge the mind with new, unprogrammed thoughts about beauty, order, and scale, about Earth, God, and cosmos, is modest but real. ([Location 2881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2881)) > What was needed, Agnew declared, was a new, “grander overarching goal”: “what I propose is a national priority to search the heavens and, before the year 2000, to find God where He lives. We can call the program—‘Go for God.’” ([Location 2889](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2889)) > scientific and technological objectives. Furthermore, only one constituency of significant size seemed to be actively engaged with the space program at this time, and it was made up of Americans who wished to defend its religious content. ([Location 2900](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2900)) > National network television news ignored even the largest of the petitions, and coverage in the preeminent metropolitan newspapers was limited to occasional brief agency reports buried deep on the inside pages. ([Location 2918](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2918)) > In the 1960s, the secularization thesis encouraged commentators on American religion to immerse themselves in debates about the death of God, the secular city, and the fundamental challenge presented to Christian witness by the problems of race, poverty and war and to dismiss those who sought simply to maintain themselves in their conventional faith, and their country in its, as arrayed on the wrong side of a contest with modernity. ([Location 2923](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2923)) - Note: Always being put upon, victims. Grievance culture. Who stopped astronauts from expressing faith? > Similarly, those scholars interested specifically in the origins of the New Christian Right, though they frequently make reference to a portfolio of grievances assiduously compiled by conservative Christians over the course of the 1960s and early 1970s—the Equal Rights Amendment, access to abortion and pornography, and the prohibition on school prayer—have generally failed to locate much evidence that these grievances were converted into substantial grass-roots religious mobilization prior to the Carter presidency. ([Location 2938](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2938)) - Note: Wm f Buckley jr, au h20, Bob Welch, national review, John birch society, > Many of those writing to NASA, or later to the FCC, shared with the eventual leaders of the New Christian Right an opposition to the expansion of the liberal, regulatory state and were similarly aggrieved at the failure of that state to protect and promote traditional religious liberties and values. ([Location 2957](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2957)) > Right. After all, most accounts of that movement tend to explain its emergence with respect to other factors and issues, especially the insistence of the Internal Revenue Service in 1978 that private schools that claimed exemption from tax, many of which were run by conservative religious organizations, should prove that they did not discriminate on racial grounds. ([Location 2964](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2964)) - Note: Segregation academies > Moreover, NASA was an adjunct of the federal state at a time when that state seemed to be increasingly secular in thought and deed, indeed when it reasonably could be regarded as an agent of the secularizing process in American society at large. ([Location 2991](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2991)) > The ambiguous place of religion within the space program and the ambivalent attitudes of many Christian Americans toward NASA as an adjunct of the secular state are most sharply revealed in the story of Apollo 8. This flight is commonly held to have presented the program in its most reverent guise, as its crew, orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve, 1968, concluded a live television broadcast by reading the first ten verses of Genesis. ([Location 2996](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2996)) > At the time of the mission, all three members of the crew—Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders—were committed Christians, active in their local churches. ([Location 2999](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=2999)) > For Borman personally, the turn to scripture was less an expression of faith than a pragmatic solution to a basically secular problem: what to say to the world on Christmas Eve. ([Location 3033](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=3033)) > It was also reflected in the broad protections proposed in the 1964 Becker Amendment, which asserted: “Nothing in this Constitution shall be deemed to prohibit making reference to belief in, reliance upon, or invoking the aid of God or a Supreme Being, in any governmental or public document, proceeding, activity, ceremony, school, institution, or place or upon any coinage, currency or obligation of the United States.”44 ([Location 3083](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=3083)) > Since that decision, in which the Supreme Court declared the reading of both the Lord’s Prayer and the Bible in the public schools to be unconstitutional—O’Hair had developed what amounted to a proprietary interest in the cause of American atheism, as well as a reputation for intransigence on the question of church-state separation. ([Location 3088](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=3088)) - Note: . Prohibited? ? No, mandatory prayer was prohibited. > it was also entirely possible for participants to discount the veracity of the Genesis story and still cherish its reading as a ritual expression of the belief that however he had done it, and to whatever time scale, God had created the heavens and the earth for man.94 It was apparently in this spirit that the Apollo 8 astronauts themselves viewed their chosen text. ([Location 3256](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=3256)) > The petitions were received politely by NASA officials and then hastened quickly into warehouses. Those who had organized the campaigns, meanwhile, appear to have been viewed as well-meaning naifs, and ([Location 3301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=3301)) > not—as perhaps they should have been—as conduits to a potentially valuable reservoir of public support. In 1969 religious observances remained at best a contingent feature of NASA’s activities, incidental to its immediate purposes. ([Location 3302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=3302)) > We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved good-bye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”4 ([Location 3435](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=3435)) > There were persuasive secular reasons to be ambivalent toward the country’s enterprise in space, but those reasons came to seem persuasive in part because the program largely failed to articulate its purposes in noninstrumental terms and to make a case for exploration of the heavens that spoke to the actual spiritual commitments of Americans in the long Sixties. There was not much evidence that the inspirations of church and scripture had any significant purchase on the space-flight policymaking process or NASA’s operational routines. ([Location 3485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=3485)) > Nor did many space workers—engineers, managers, astronauts—make sense of their dedication by explicitly referring to a transcendent goal. ([Location 3489](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07DFQPR7G&location=3489))