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The Existential Clash Between Childhood and Adulthood
And the bittersweet stakes of growing up.
One of the big choices in life and in history is between believing one of the following:
(a) the human adventure means something to the universe, consciousness is the primary stuff of being, or God created the world to test our faith
(b) none of that is true.
In a couple of big words, this is the choice between “anthropocentrism” and what weird fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft called “cosmicism.” Either our kind of life is cosmically important or it’s not. If it’s not, it’s an awful comedown.
Our Collective Stone Age Youth
This choice wasn’t always available or so pressing because prior to the development of advanced tools and techniques for gathering data, such as the telescope and scientific methods of inquiry, anthropocentrism was intuitive and even self-evident.
The Sun seemed to revolve around the Earth and after hundreds of thousands of years of foraging in the wilderness as just another animal species, we seemed to dominate the planet with our civilizations. We couldn’t see how large or old the universe really is, so we naturally presumed that humankind is metaphysically primary, that everything happens for a…