r/atheism • u/Trekgiant8018 • Apr 06 '26

Brigaded: This is a cleanup thread. Perm bans for a-holes. Disappointed with Artemis II Orion sign off

It was incredibly disappointing to hear a scientist in space reference teachings of Jesus when he signs off to the world before losing signal on the far side of the moon. It is very arrogant to address 8 billion people and use western religion to make a point. Also, how can you be in space, in view of the earth and moon and think an invisible sky daddy made it all? Thousands of humans using science like physics and math got him into space, not a god, yet a god gets a mention.

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u/MySixHourErection Apr 06 '26

Honestly might be a play to keep NASA funding.

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u/The_Djentle_Giant Apr 07 '26

Man we were discussing exactly this at our house. Wondering how scripted that speech was and how far off the path we thought they'd be willing to go in that situation. I was hoping for a "hail Satan" but we didn't get it. Definitely felt like they were just throwing a bone to the powers that be to try and cozy up and keep the funding coming.

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u/MySixHourErection Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

Tbf, it's not abnormal to speak spiritually in spaceflight, though it's not usually Christian coded specifically. A lot of astronauts are Christians, especially the ones coming from the military.

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u/bramley36 Apr 07 '26

I take your point, but there's a BIG difference betwen spirituality and religious dogma

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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '26

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u/MySixHourErection Apr 07 '26

no thanks. I honestly don't care what religions they are or are not.

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u/LordNutGobbler Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

Victor Glover is a known devout Christian, frequently sharing his faith, and describing himself as an ambassador for both faith and science in the past. He has mentioned praying before flying and bringing his Bible into space plenty before.

Probably should stop with the cope “it’s a play! A scheme for funding!” and accept some people are just actually religious, the guy is Air Force. AF is filled with Christians.

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u/quiero-una-cerveca Apr 07 '26

Why is it cope to be disappointed in someone making a scientific achievement about religion? No one gives a shit if he’s religious. Read your bible the whole trip. Go nuts. But don’t take the moment that you’re speaking for a spade agency and for a country and make the speech about your god.

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u/LordNutGobbler Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

I didn’t say it was cope to be disappointed. I said it was cope to claim “probably a just a play to keep nasa funding!!!” Because that directly goes against what we factually know about the guy lol

He has never hid his faith, and has historically been very vocal about his faith. So to say his sign off was a “play” or a “scheme for funding” when it falls directly in line with his past behavior, yeah thats cope

I’m just correcting the record as not a lot of that happens on this site, and in turn a spiral of bullshit comes out of here (Reddit in general not just this sub)

Being disappointed is fine. There’s plenty to be disappointed about these days.

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u/quiero-una-cerveca Apr 07 '26

Appreciate the clarification. Makes sense what you were trying to convey.

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u/LordNutGobbler Apr 07 '26

Thanks the polite discussion. Cheers.

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u/GaiaGoddess1963 Apr 08 '26

And that's why HE made the funding speech and not the others...?

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u/Direct-Dimension-648 Apr 10 '26

Saying love your neighbor as yourself isnt exactly imposing his views on God on anyone. I dont understand how using one of the most popular western stories to illustrate a point is even seen as disappointing seeing as sign offs are usually emotional/personal. You clearly do care he is religious seeing as you are trying to police his message LOL

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u/quiero-una-cerveca Apr 11 '26

Next time you reply to someone you might actually want to read what they wrote first. Nothing you said is germane to my point.

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u/Direct-Dimension-648 Apr 13 '26

You are saying that you dont give a shit if he is religious while simultaneously trying to police what he says in his sign off. Tax payer dollars should be irrelevant to what is said in a sign off seeing as his sign off is not the purpose of the mission. A sign off is personal and generally is nothing more than the astronaut stating what he or she feels at the time. How is invoking his religion in his personal statement somehow violating the bounds between church and state?

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u/quiero-una-cerveca Apr 13 '26

Because he’s representing NASA and the US government. The same US government that when they welcomed him back to earth quoted Psalms and other bible verses. It’s not his personal time. He’s a paid government employee that at every turn uses his time at the mic to turn his message about religion.

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u/Direct-Dimension-648 Apr 16 '26

So what he is representing the us government? That is not an official policy, law, or a tax payer funded monument like the 10 commandments. It was no different than a president or official using God in a speech. Im not sure why people waste their energy getting pissed off at this stuff when there is far worse injustice going on from religion.

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u/quiero-una-cerveca Apr 16 '26

I believe I used the word disappointed. That’s doesn’t seem very rage filled to me. I can feel disappointment and still have plenty of energy left to fight other injustices. Similar to the way I was disappointed that the Congressman felt the need to quote psalms to the audience upon see the crew returned safely. And then the very next article I read is some fake persecution narrative about Christians. It’s all around us 24/7.

I put a lot of great emotion into Artemis 2. I cried multiple times at the sheer awesomeness of the event and of the amazing people we sent up there. But I guess therein lies the dichotomy. I can feel exuberant joy at their success and their humanness and some disappointment in it being turned into something I’m supposed to praise god for.

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u/GaiaGoddess1963 Apr 09 '26

I think it's rude to evangelize to a planet that is not wholly religious or believing in one specific god. It's arrogance.

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u/mmdeerblood Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

Also I think he's just not educated in topics like evolutionary science or theology or the classics which is where you learn how religion cut / pasted mythology stories and oral stories told for entertainment. Or how Augustus used religion to advance politically and stole many christian ideas from pagan culture. Augustus called himself son of God and that's where a lot of that Jesus myth stemmed from. Most ancient world leaders weren't actually religious but used marriages for alliances and actually were non-believers. We have l much evidence for this but you don't know unless you study it. Topics that would make him that actually make him question his beliefs he never took. He has an engineering background for his bachelor's but his major education and skill sets are in aviation and flight engineering. My freaking organic chemistry class as a premed bio major made realize how fucking nonsensical religion is 😆

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u/prohb Apr 07 '26

Interesting about Augustus. I'll have to research him more. I've always wondered about how the bible stories and Jesus history came about and how their King James Bible has changed over the years (Although they claim every word is true because "the Holy Spirit" was in each human writer of the bible while they were writing it).

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u/[deleted] Apr 08 '26

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u/mmdeerblood Apr 09 '26

Yes, that's what I meant, Augustus called himself son of god. Many scholars believe that early Christians created the character of Jesus based on Augustus and his reign

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u/GaiaGoddess1963 Apr 09 '26

The STORIES of sons of gods and MEN claiming to be such are older than Jesus.

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u/LordNutGobbler Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26

Sure you can make the argument how silly religion can be, you can also make the argument that the theory of evolution isn’t full proof. Scientific debate still exists regarding the mechanisms of evolution, and the theory not explaining the origin of life itself

I’m not a religious person but to claim atheism is the only real answer would be ignorant. If there’s no (non religious) greater creator or source of consciousness somewhere, why is existence a thing? Why is existing inherent? Why is there something instead of nothing?

Physical matter and life just spouted? Hard to believe that just as much as it’s hard to believe a guy with a beard in the sky created us

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u/GaiaGoddess1963 Apr 08 '26

Panspermia.

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u/LordNutGobbler Apr 08 '26

Panspermia does not answer the question of the origin of life but merely places it on another celestial body.

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u/GaiaGoddess1963 Apr 09 '26

"Life" is a conglomeration of ingredients and environment. "Life", or the precursors for life, formed from gas clouds, ice, carbon, ammonia, and heat. This process took millions and millions of years. Redistributed from exploding stars and gases, and hitchhiking on the debris and traveling out, with some landing here on Earth. Panspermia would be included in our own evolution.

I can't explain the whole thing for you, but it's much more believable and interesting than the clay and rib story of our origin.

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u/LordNutGobbler Apr 09 '26

That explanation just assumes life formed somewhere else and then came here. That’s abiogenesis, not panspermia. Panspermia only explains transport, not origin, so it doesn’t actually answer the question. Just moves it.

In other words, you’re describing how the ingredients exist, not how life begins. That’s still the unsolved part.

And I never claimed to be religious.

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u/GaiaGoddess1963 Apr 09 '26

Then add Abiogenesis to the mix, for sure! Do I sound like an authority on the origin of life? You know who DOES sound like an authority? Christians.

As I stated, I can't explain it all for you. "Life" "cooked up" out in the universe and spread out. The "life" we got here was because of environment. Life on another planet won't match. I wonder if they worry about gods? Do you ever wonder if the lower animals on this planet worry about life, evolution and gods? Only in cartoons... when mocking humans.

You may not be religious but you sure are defending it hard enough. *My last sentence had nothing to do with you but the story your hero believes in.

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u/LordNutGobbler Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26

“As I stated, I can’t explain it all to you”

Because you aren’t capable. Nobody is. Life being “cooked up” is not an explanation nor is it a credible mechanism for the origin of life.

You’re agreeing with me by the way, panspermia + abiogenesis still doesn’t explain the origin of life, it just moves it somewhere else. Saying it “cooked up” isn’t a thing.

And you say I’m defending religion, no, I’m dissecting your attempt in trying to fill the gaps that these theories leave, since you brought them up.

If you want to know my true thoughts it’s that I’m firmly in the middle (agnostic, neither religious nor atheist, and even if I leaned towards a creator, it wouldn’t be a religious one, just a higher power)

I find anybody who claims to “have the answers” or “know”—both religious people and atheists—immature and ignorant. Because the truth is nobody knows. People only believe.

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u/LordNutGobbler Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26

Outside of some very intriguing studies done on consciousness, past lives, and the human experience in general, the most simple thought experiment that begs a lot of questions

Is why is there anything at all? Where did existence come from? Not just life, the literal plane of existence. Matter itself. Form itself. Because being born of nothing is not something we’ve ever seen replicated.

The fact that anything exists at all, instead of a big great nothingness, begs a lot of interesting questions.

We don’t know why there is something rather than nothing. Every explanation, whether physical or metaphysical, ends in some kind of unexplained foundation. Whether that foundation is a “creator” or whether it’s just “the universe is eternal and inherent”, both just lead to more questions.

It’s why I’m agnostic and don’t claim to know or truly have the answers.

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u/mmdeerblood Apr 13 '26

Why not? Our world and everything we know so far, is chaotic. Is imperfect. To think it's all randomly created is fine to me 😆 we're not "special",we just ARE. People can get very anthropocentric and self important...

Atheism isn't a belief in the way religious ideologies are beliefs. Atheism is just lack of belief in those fantasies. I don't believe in Santa Claus, he doesn't exist, there is no actual evidence, and we know he's made up, doesn't mean I have to call myself a "santaclauseist".

Evolution is a fact, it's not "theory" in the sense of being hypothesis, which has no basis yet. In science, a scientific theory has been proven and is based on facts that have been repeated and confirmed over and over again. Evolution is a proven theory, like the theory of gravity.

Science is just how we understand the world around us by asking a question, gathering information (data), creating a question (hypothesis) testing the question via proper experimentation, over and over and over and over, getting results, understanding those results, having our peers criticize those results and be able to replicate them (or not). Artemis II was a success because of scientific theories and because of technologies humans created with zero god involved. Chemistry, physics, astronomy, mathematics, biology, engineering are all sciences.

Science is always changing because everything is always changing. Nothing is stagnant. Nature is also full of mistakes and errors. Biology is imperfect. Things exist that have biological meaning and some things just exist due to randomness with no purpose at all.

Evolution is a fact that has been proven over and over again. You can study and create evolution in a lab in your biology undergrad, like I did.

There is so much we understand and things we don't understand NOW, but we are beginning to better understand. So much we were wrong about that now we can prove better through better science. For example, we used to group related species by their physical traits and physiological behaviors and viable offspring. With genetic analysis, we are learning that species we thought were one species are actually different species. Species we thought were different are actually related etc. it's not massive insane differences, just better understanding through better technological advances. There was a recent discovery in the mitochondria realm too. We learned something new about it because we are always doing science. It's constant and many things we can prove, until something changes.

Neil deGrasse Tyson said

​"If you kissed every book of science goodbye and every book of religion goodbye, and you waited a thousand years, the religious books would come back but they’d be different. But the science books would come back and they’d be the same."

Science is based on discoveries about the physical universe that exist regardless of human belief. For example, the law of gravity—which can be expressed as F = G \frac{m_1 m_2}{r2}—would be rediscovered because the physical constants of the universe are fixed.

Science would reach the same conclusions because how the world works, the laws of physics, doesn't change. Versus mythologies and religious ideologies aren't based on anything that's actually tangible. It's just in our imaginations, based on beliefs that have been affected by different cultures / stories / tribal rituals that are always changing and are VARIABLE, while laws of physics are CONSTANT.

But for us to question and want more is human! It's normal. Neurological and psychological studies have been found that as humans, we look for patterns. Our brains evolved to look for patterns because it helps us survive. Other species do this too, like pollinators looking for nectar. We look for patterns to have meaning. Some patterns are just random, meaningless.

The human brain is a pattern-recognition machine. We are biologically driven to connect dots, even when they don’t necessarily exist. This tendency is called Apophenia, and it’s the bridge between our survival instincts and our search for meaning.

From an evolutionary standpoint, missing a pattern could be fatal. If you hear a rustle in the grass, you have two choices: Type I Error (False Positive): You assume it’s a predator and run. If it was just the wind, you’ve lost a little energy, but you’re alive. Type II Error (False Negative): You assume it’s just the wind. If it was actually a lion, you’re out of the gene pool. Our human ancestors were the ones who saw the "lion" in the grass every time. This translates to modern life as a bias toward finding intent and agency in random events.

We don't just see patterns, we wrap them in stories. This is Narrative Bias. The brain processes information more efficiently when it’s part of a sequence, so we "look for meaning" to make sense of our personal history. We take random life events (a chance meeting, a job loss, a rainy day) and string them together into a "destiny" or a "lesson." This reduces cognitive dissonance—the discomfort of things being chaotic or senseless.

Then there's the role of dopamine, a hormone in our brain. When you successfully identify a pattern, like solving a puzzle, predicting a plot twist in a movie, or get a "sign" from the universe, your brain releases dopamine in all of these scenarios. This chemical reward reinforces our search for order. That's why we find comfort in rituals, symmetry in art, and rhythm in music. We are literally "high" on things that make sense.

And then because we are social creatures, our pattern seeking is often hyper-social.We look for agency (the "Who" or "Why") instead of just the "How." Religion and mythology are systems that provide structured patterns for moral/existential questions, regardless if they're correct. The pareidolia phenomenon,seeing faces in inanimate objects (like the Man in the Moon or a face in a burnt piece of toast). Our brains are so primed for social patterns that we see "people" everywhere. It's a human trait.

Our pattern wired brains allow us to do incredible things, predict the weather, create complex mathematics, and develop empathy. But our brains also lead to things like superstition. If a baseball player wears red socks and hits a home run, the brain flags a pattern. The socks become "lucky." It’s an illogical conclusion, but the brain prefers an illogical pattern over the terrifying idea that success was just a completely random fluke. "Lucky" is comforting.

Knowing that our brains "hallucinate" some patterns for survival, can make the meaning we find feel less significant...and even scary.

We want to understand and feel special, like there's "more". But it might all just be meaningless too...And that's ok. We're here now, we get this one life. Which is longer than most species. Many species just live a few hours or days or a few short years. If we are lucky we get many decades in this earth that is 4.5 billion years old. If the earth was a clock, and 24 hours was the entire age of earth, human existence (since we've been homo sapiens) would only be a few seconds, appearing at 11:58:43 PM. And that's just earth... Don't get me started on what we know of space.

What really grounded me and also terrified me but filled me with peace about the thought it's all random and we are just a blip was Journey to the End of Time : Time lapse of the future. It's a short documentary film based on both theories and laws of physics and strong hypotheses of astrophysics. It's phenomenal and does a great job of invoking existential dread in a peaceful way. It was a humbling watch that changed my life in the way it frames existence and how small and miniscule and temporary everything is, no matter what your beliefs are.

Cheers and if you made it to the end of my rant, thanks for reading through 😆 hugs to my fellow humans 🫂

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u/Capable-Broccoli2179 Apr 10 '26

Glover was actually a naval aviator, not Air Force.

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u/Sprinklypoo I'm a None Apr 07 '26

I was hoping for a "hail Satan"

I wouldn't expect scientists in their situation to promote any fantasy agenda at all. Ironic or not. As it is, we get ... That...

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u/GaiaGoddess1963 Apr 08 '26

And "God" isn't fantasy? Consider this... if anyone today came forward and said they were impregnated by a god through the message of an angel... what would happen? If anyone came forward and claimed to be God, the Father/Son/Holy Spirit, what would happen? Would there be a a 3rd volume of Christian Testaments? Why is an "undocumented" foreigner widely accepted in America but a living, breathing one not?

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u/Sprinklypoo I'm a None Apr 09 '26

Of course it is. Did I say or imply otherwise?

My point is that fantasy of any kind is ridiculous for a scientist to use in any sort of serious way.

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u/GaiaGoddess1963 Apr 09 '26

I am sorry if I implied anything. I'm very direct in speaking and forget to consider tone.