An Open Letter To My Yet Unborn Child, Hattori Yuki

Welcome, child.

               

                Welcome to this planet.

                This is your home. This is where you will live, this is where you will learn, and this is where you will love.

                Everything you will ever see, everything you will ever touch, everything you will ever taste, everything you will ever smell, everything you will ever hear... You will find it on this planet.

                This planet is old. It is vast. It has been the cradle from which our species was born. It has been the nursery that helped our species to take its first steps. It has been the school that helped to teach us everything we know so far about ourselves and about reality.

                Every triumph and every defeat of our species has taken place here. Every dizzying euphoric high we have experienced has happened on this soil or because of its gifts. Even when we slipped the bonds of gravity, we did it because of the gifts of this planet.

                Every tear shed, every drop of blood spilled has been soaked up by its soil.

                This is your home.

                On it, you will meet many more of you... Many more of us.

We are not old. We have not been here for very long. The planet has barely blinked, and we are here, spreading across its plains, crossing its oceans, building monuments to ourselves, or our ingenuity, and our ability to adapt.

We come in many different guises. Some of us have dark skin. Some of us have almond shaped eyes. Some of us have hair the colour of Straw. We don’t look alike. But look into the eyes, and you see it. You see your link to them, and to their ancestors, and yours... Stretching all the way back to those of us who first came down from the trees.

We have spread. From a hot, sun baked continent we marched across the planet and colonised virtually every place it is possible for us to live on. We endure wildly varying temperatures, angry and violent seas, the wrath of the bowels of the planet itself. We face diseases, scarce food and water and still we endure.

We may not be old, but we are here, and we endure, and we are great in number.

We have potential that is almost limitless. In our short time on this rock, we have gazed further than any other creature that has lived here before. We have gazed so far that we can almost see the beginning of time itself. Maybe one day we will see how everything began.

We have touched dizzying heights with our discoveries. We have realised that we are all kin. We are all connected. We have found ways to take those scarce resources and multiplied them. We  have peered into the heart of our world. We have nearly doubled how long just one of us stays here to know, to explore.

And we have sunk to appalling lows. Our discoveries have made it easier for us to squander the gifts of this planet. Our discoveries have made it far easier for us to distance ourselves from our lowly beginnings, as if hoping to detach from them totally, and detach from nature. Our discoveries have made it far easier for us end millions of the lives of this species.

We can be a great people. We wish to be. It seems that we only lack a guiding light.

In the face of this lack of light, we turned to our fears. We turned to our superstitions. We turned to the darkest corners of our imaginations. We turned to our cruelty and our malice, and our will to dominate. We dressed up these concepts with words like omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent, even though we knew, we had to know that not only were these not true, they were not possible.

We turned to the worst of ourselves, hoping that somehow these would bring out the best of us.

You may say, child, that we could be forgiven for that. We were so much younger, we didn’t know. How could we know? How could we look at something as brilliant and enigmatic as the sun and not think that there was a bigger better version of us, pulling it across the sky, looking down on us and passing judgement? How could we not think that? If it was us up there, that’s what we’d do.

You’d be right to be so forgiving of our nature in the early morning of our species. Ignorance was a good excuse, because back then, we didn’t and couldn’t have known better.

But we have much less of an excuse when we started learning more about ourselves and reality. By that time, we’d given names to these manifestations of the worst part of us. We called them things like Odin, Zeus, and Yahweh. And we got it even more wrong. We gave up all responsibility of our actions to them.

We made these characters so powerful that not only did they create everything we saw, they also created everything we thought and felt. We gave them the power to control things like our innate capacity for good, our innate capacity towards altruism and helping our kindred. We saw tribal leaders and kings, and made them bigger and more powerful versions. They were the lawgivers, we merely followed the laws.

But these laws, like these characters were written by us. We are great, we are filled with potential, but we still get it wrong, so the last thing we should have done is given these beings, who were omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent the power to make laws, because we gifted them with one more thing.

We made them infallible.

You laugh child. You laugh at the stupidity of what we did. How could we have created things to govern over us that thought like us, but could never be wrong? Why didn’t we just destroy them as easily as we created them? They weren’t real, so how could they have dominion over us?

We gave them a way to be indestructible. We gave them a weapon.

We gave them faith.

Faith elevated them above simple questions and answers. It elevated them from ever being proven wrong. No more now for these characters to face the indignity of a mere mortal questioning if they were there at all. That didn’t need to be proven. All that was needed was for that mortal to believe. And not just that mortal, but many others. They all had to believe, and it was made into law. Believe or face the consequences... And with those consequences, we gave them the power of fear.

Thus was born religion.

And we faced heavy consequences. These beings were just like every tool we’d created. We were eventually going to use them, and all that had to happen was for the poorest in character to stumble upon the means of using these tools.

Those who wished to control, to enslave, to oppress, those who wished to inflict cruelty and their will found that these Gods made it that much easier. We may obey whips, but we obey whips far more readily if we fear further punishment from beyond.

Our species lust for more manifests itself in some brilliant ways, like curiosity. Curiosity is what got us to this point now. Curiosity is why we know what we know. Curiosity is what drives us, and will continue to keep driving us forward. It will make us strive to know more, and in that process, we will grow, we will expand, and we will understand.

But one way that our species lust for more manifests itself in a negative fashion is our quest for power. Those with it always want more. Those with a God on their shoulder want nothing more than the very power that that God itself possesses.

We have warred upon each other for many other reasons; Resources, land, but no other wars of ours have ever been quite so destructive as the wars we have over our ideas, and no ideas are quite so divisive as our Gods.

We fought. We killed each other mercilessly. We cried to the heavens in the names of our Gods, making the land drunk with blood. And we did this for centuries. Every time promised ourselves “not again,” yet again, we fight in the name of our Gods even today. People still die because we gave products of our imagination almost limitless power, and then we armoured them with faith.

But there are some who resisted. And there are some who resist today.

You will hear names like Darwin, Galileo, and Hawking. You will hear names like Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, Benedict Di Spinoza, Emma Goldman... These are people who fight back. And there are many more of them out there.

They fight by asking questions. They fight by asking the questions that Faith armoured Gods against in the first place. They chip away at that armour because they’ve already totally destroyed another layer of that armour. They destroyed fear.

They were not always without fear. Religions got so powerful that to question them was to be put to death, but there again... That lust for more... That curiosity...

Curiosity is the most powerful weapon you will ever wield against a system of belief. Even if the curiosity leads you to just wanting to know about another religion... That could be the path to you finding out that this other God claims to be all powerful, and maybe worse still, claims your God is false... They can’t both be right, can they?

Curiosity inevitably leads to knowledge, and knowledge destroys fear. When you understand something, you will cease to fear it. You may respect its great power, you may feel consternation at its lethality, but you will not fear it. And nor should you.

So child, welcome to this planet. Welcome to this species. I am sorry that I cannot bring you here under happier circumstances, but the light that shall lead us to becoming the great people that we wish to be was there all along inside each and every one of us, and thus, the day the dawn breaks will be soon. Maybe not in my lifetime, maybe not even in yours, but for your children, and your children’s children, we must continue to seek out that light.

It is with some regret, and some hope that I hand you Humanity’s greatest weapon. I hand you the sword of human curiosity. I hope that as you wield it, you will cut away what is unnecessary, and keep what is good and useful.

Welcome to the Planet, Child.