I am deranged about Dr. Manuela Dominguez. Her backstory compels me so (as I too am an aspiring physicist who grew up in a regressive religious environment) but her conduct makes me want to engage her in a duel. I have never met anyone else who really seemed to give a damn about her either way and would love to discuss her with you if you ever feel like it. This is an open invitation to rant
HAHAHAH. YOU’VE ACTIVATED MY TRAP CARD.
Listen. I went to Catholic school. From pre-K to 3rd grade. My earliest memories are of being terrified of the light of God. Because all sinners are unable to look upon it without fear. And I knew before anything else that I was a disgusting sinner simply for being born. How else was I supposed to imagine an afterlife, at barely five or six years of age, as being anything but a void of sight and sound. Utter darkness except your consciousness. How else was I supposed to feel when Manuela said “…and ‘let there be light’ the most evil words ever spoken…” but totally and completely understood on a level I never knew possible. Much like how she felt about Maxwell. Speaking words from my soul I never knew were there until spoken. Of course I attached to her and her sermon. Of course I wanted her to accomplish my long held desire to destroy the Sun. And that’s not even getting into how my brother fed into my fear of the monsters in the closet and under the bed at that same age by informing me that they can crawl under the blanket to get you, inciting me to be afraid of sleeping without any light up until I was IN COLLEGE. I was always going to be this way. I was always going to be Dark-aligned. Manuela was always going to be my favorite Avatar. Feeding into my own thoughts? Preaching to the choir??? What else is religious fervor BUT that?
TLDR; every ex-Catholic is an acolyte of the Dark, dipshit, it came free with our fucking guilt.
My friend, I cannot believe you left so much beautiful writing in the tags of your answer, so I’m gonna rb with those & tell everyone to look at the damn tags.
We are on the same wavelength. I was brought up in a different denomination, but between my love for science, my lesbianism, and the simple fact that I was born a girl? I honestly cannot remember ever feeling truly welcome in a church. I cannot recall having ever been comforted more than I was terrified by what I was taught about God.
(I initially wrote a long rant about the most egregious bits of doctrine I was raised on, but decided to cut it out for the sake of brevity. I’m sure you already know most of what I was going to say.)
On the other hand, I often found solace in mentally removing myself from what was happening here, on this little rocky world, and reading about or contemplating the true heavenly bodies— stars and their ilk. When studying physics and astronomy, I sometimes feel a kind of religious ecstasy that I never experienced at Sunday school.
The more I learn about the scope of the Universe, the more absurd it seems that an omniscient, all-powerful, all-loving God would be so invested in the minutiae of humanity’s day-to-day activities. If there was a being who snapped His fingers to trigger the Big Bang, why would he waste his infinite time on the petty affairs of humanity rather than marveling at the beauty of the wondrous phenomena taking place all over the cosmos He had made?
So if you can’t tell, I’m an atheist now as well as a devotee of the Vast (a Vastard, if you will). But that’s not to say I don’t appreciate the beauty and tranquility of the Dark. While I had a normal degree of fear of the dark in childhood, and my vivid imagination conjured for me some interesting monsters (including, funnily enough, a small army of flesh-eating creatures who lived under my bed & would crawl under my blankets and eat me if I didn’t tuck my blankets around me properly), I now hate wasting electricity by turning on the lights, day or night, when I can see and navigate perfectly well in the cool dark of my home. I also enjoy walking and driving at night whenever I can, and my favorite job of all time was giving evening shows at my university’s planetarium.
Anyway. The Daedalus trilogy is perhaps my favorite part of the whole Magnus Archives series, and I understand exactly why Dr. Dominguez evokes such feelings of love and self-identification in you. Jan Kilbride’s statement did something similar to me. Thank you for sharing!
Oooo. Thank you for that!!! You’re reflecting some of my own thoughts and much more eloquently than I.
Truly, Jan’s statement on the vastness of space touched on why I am terrified of space and space travel. Being unable to find the ground beneath you and nothing to keep you from drifting?? Awful.
So yeah. Same. The Daedalus trilogy is peak TMA.