They are the latest victims in a series of deadly attacks on secularists since blogger Avijit Roy was hacked to death by suspected Islamists in February. Both publishers published Roy’s work.

While it would definitely be wrong to put all Islamists in the same fanatical and bloodthirsty category, it nevertheless says something about the nature of this religion when it is able to incite some its followers  to such barbaric and murderous measures in order to defend their faith.

I seem to recall that Nietzsche said once that “morality is a function of a herd’s instinct to self-preservation”  and clearly, the Muslim herd feels under threat here,  and is resorting to deadly measures   to defend itself against attacks based on reason and critical thought.

Presumably, this demonstrates once again the necessity for certain religious beliefs to be based on fear as opposed to having a foundation in truth, if only because there is none to be found.

Andromeda Galaxy

I say this because it is my belief that poking around in the farthest reaches of the universe will not get us any answers about the origin of the cosmos, what it was that brought us about, and all that this might represent to us; that kind of information is likely not to be found out there. Why not?

Well, it is all about the nature of the information we are in search of. I believe we are necessarily limited in our ability to describe and interpret the universe beyond this being a function of the conditions that brought us about and defined the scope of what it is we are able to see, interpret and understand.

The nature of our perceptual apparatus is a successful response to these conditions, and our ability to gather, discern and interpret the data provided by it. Our survival as a species continues to depend on managing this information successfully, allowing us to see what we need to see, hear what we need to hear, etc.

Consequently, the universe that we see out there is very much of our own making, at least in terms of our conception of it, and to think we can extrapolate that to the larger hypothesis encompassing the very origin of the cosmos seems a bit of a stretch to me, notwithstanding some very smart people out there, including Stephen Hawking and his singularity theorems introducing such hypothetical entities as infinite space-time. But do we really understand what we are talking about here? I doubt it.

So where am I going with this? Not much further than to say that – to find the answers to the larger questions concerning our reason for being – we need to go in the opposite direction: into ourselves. We need to go into our own inner space and start cultivating the  fertile ground of our thoughts about who and why we are, with the hope that one day we might be able to grasp the significance of whatever it is that we represent as a living entity in the cosmos.

At the core of our being and in every atom in our bodies – and not hiding out in some far off corner in outer space – lies the origin of the cosmos, and the drive and determination that fueled the process that brought us here, and with it the meaning of all that we are and all that we can be. So very close to us – we cannot be separated from it – yet, clearly, still so very far away.