"Here we are, matter yearning for meaning, each of us a fragile...

"Here we are, matter yearning for meaning, each of us a fragile constellation of chemistry and chance hurtling through a cold cosmos that has no accord for our wishes, takes no interest in our dreams. “I can’t but believe that all that majesty and all that beauty, those fated and unfailing appearances and exits, are something more than mathematics and horrible temperatures,” Willa Catherwrote to the love of her lifewhile watching the transcendent spectacle of Jupiter and Venus rising in the summer sky. “If they are not, then we are the only wonderful things — because we can wonder.” That we can wonder is what saves us. The price evolution had us pay for our exquisite consciousness is an awareness of our mortality — an awareness unbearable without the capacity for wonder at the miracle of existing at all, improbable as we each are againstthe staggering odds of never having been born, alive on an improbable world unlike any other known. Wonder is the religion nature invented long before we told our first myths of prophets and messiahs, the great benediction of our fate as borrowed stardust on short-term loan from an entropic universe."

So wrote Maria Popover, in her introduction to the article on Charles Darwin Entitled “ The Messiah on The Mountain” in her Newsletter
”The Marginalian”
Link:https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/05/19/darwin-messiah/?mc_cid=468fb69c30&mc_eid=f075ae0703


"“natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society,”


"A century before the pioneering neuroscientist Charles Scott Sherrington formulated his notion of“Natural Religion,”placing at its center our capacity for and responsibility to wonder, before Rachel Carson insisted thatwonder is our greatest antidote to self-destructionand that“natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society,”the youngCharles Darwin(February 12, 1809–April 19, 1882) discovered that experiences of wonder — which he defined as“a chaos of delight”— are profoundly spiritual and come most readily in raw nature."


I hope it is of interest as blessed relief from the endless proselytising and intellectualisation on these threads.

I found it to be uplifting.