134340 Religion “Come wander with me, she said, Into regions yet untrod; And read what is still unread In the manuscripts of God.” - Longfellow I In 1930 the ninth planet was found named Pluto…the Roman God of the underground… after a deity of creation, as all trans-Neptunian objects must be. Now, 76 years later it is relegated to dwarf status prefixed with a number as minor celestial bodies are and renamed 134340-Pluto. Planet: “A celestial body that is in orbit around the sun has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so it assumes hydro-static equilibrium and finally has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit” Pluto fails on the last point. Its been turfed out of the solar system for bad housekeeping. The distant, rural hermit, in the dark banished for a yard full of space junk; rusted fenders, old buses, ancient combines, celestial jalopies ambling around in orbit. II Science has dwarfed religion, a marginal Trans-Neptunian Object, that can’t clear its neighborhood of inconvenient, persistent truths: evolution, that the earth is 14 billion years old. The Pope has pardoned Galileo after 400 years. Once banished for discovering that the sun, not the earth, is the immovable centre of the universe, contrary to holy scriptures. Each advance about the origins of the earth, the universe and humankind, the nature of matter, space and time has been answered by science and followed by a religious retreat. III Science is the sun. Science-our almighty One, we fall at your proven, empirical feet pray to your evidence, Offering answers while the robed men Provide a rickety pedestal of faith and sand to bury one’s head in. The Pope understands that there are many who demand absolutes and constancy. Ever-questioning science offers only change and hypotheses and more change. Some hold fast to the scientific “truth” we learned in school; there were nine planets then. Shaken by Pluto’s downgraded status, they resist the evolution of knowledge and turn instead to sand. IV The stars, named or not Burn a hole in the atmosphere’s ceiling, Of this same vast sky that was gazed upon in 1930. When people’s faith was atrophied or strengthened by the Great Depression when faith was backed up by re-armament, just in case. I look through this alpine night and restore my belief in the universe, the milky way and the ground under my feet are my constancy. I, for the first time, have compassion for a holy man’s fear Invite him up to my observatory to gaze at the celestial bodies on a dark night, to look at the galaxies that his gods did not create.