What a Great Feat!

(attached link to BBC new report on landing of 2nd Nasa probe on Mars)

Reading this news item is really enlightening. And it reminds me of what Issac Assimov once said. It was something along this line.

In thousands of years of human history, religions had only words to offer the world - telling us how great each religion is, the feats/miracles their idols had done, and what great future mankind will have if we follow their words. But what history had proved is that the world had progressed little when those religious fellas were in charge, and all the progress
mankind made only came about in the last couple of hundred years of modern science and medicine, and rational thoughts (by the way, one faithful once told me he is not sure if rational thought is the way to look at the world. Then I say why do we think God gave our brains to us? All that just to be able read one book and say faith is all you need?)

I also remember a few favourite claims of a certain religion:
- that this entire existence is created for humans
- some of their idols can do miracles like parting the sea.

Of course, they have a hard time convincing people like me. For one, if this existence is for man's pleasure, then what the heck had those religious faithfuls been doing all this while? Of all such people I have the opportunity to know, it was nothing. Ziltch. They know nuts of even the simplest of astronomy! They send around chain mails with quotes from their one book (the only one they really read, I suspect) but I had never seen anything from them admiring real life accomplishments like that in the news article above (perhaps they think those were all cheap thrills or conspiracies to bluff fools like me!)

Secondly, if those idols of theirs were so great why didn't they pass on their skills to their millions of current day faithfuls? (I know some of these fellas are damn sure they are faithfuls!). Then, they won't have to do much convincing. No, they didn't. Perhaps the truth is more like those Chinese swordfighting novels where the masters fight and die trying to keep their 'kung fu skills' from all and since then foolish chinamen had been fantasising about flying through air and blowing up things with a wave of their hands? I mean, can you imagine how 'green' this world would have been if those chinese kung fu masters had passed their skills to us? We would not need cars, ships and planes. Heck, we don't even need WMDs! (I can never stop laughing when I think about these kung fu movies!)

That notwithstanding, given the scale of the world around us, parting sea is small trick for supposedly godlike super humans. I mean if these fellas' book tell me that one of their idols went universe hopping with his bunch of followers and he parted a few galaxies along the way, then I say, hey may be that was something. But no, these fellas didn't even know how to make a telescope to look at the moon & sun until our friend Galileo came along. And they even had the gall to call Galileo a liar!

So now, which do you think is a greater feat? Writing stories about parting seas (or kung fu masters, depending on which is your fancy) or sending probes to Mars?