New NASA Director Swears Oath on Carl Sagan’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Instead of Bible

No, they wanted a federal government without a state religion. Like the church of England. The founders saw it necessary that people have a religious based moral system. The same system and values that they based the government on.

The premise all men are created equal relies on religion to be true. Inalienable rights is a judao Christian idea. Try arriving there with reason. Otherwise the will to power is exploitation of man by man.

The French revolution was based on reason and had a Reign of Terror with a bloody guillotine.

> I have always held Carl Sagan in high esteem without actually having read his books.

Here's a tiny excerpt from Pale Blue Dot. This excerpt elevates the book to high art,

    Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
    
    The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
    
    Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
   
    The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
    
    It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
    
    — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

There is nothing more humbling than to stand on the surface of the moon and blot out the Earth with your thumb. Just another world in the vast cosmos. You cannot study what Dr Sagan did without finding the true humility of the cosmic perspective.

We're starstuff on a tiny speck dreaming self-important dreams and — occasionally — pondering the stars.

Guess what, this conundrum did come up in 2000 years of Catholic teaching:

https://www.catholic.com/qa/why-are-oaths-allowed

Corrected! thanks!

The ultimate source of consequence is your own conscience, though sadly some people don't have one. But some people who otherwise lack a conscience might still be fearful of God, and so that's why the Bible was seen as a great document to make people swear upon, once upon a time.

Though, while the fear of punishment might trump your inclination to do evil, it does not really make you a fundamentally better person. So, while this old ritual might soothe someone's need to feel trust in the person sworn in, it's really not such a great guarantee.

The ritual does several things:

- It's an attempt at manipulating the person being sworn in to uphold his oath, whether he's actually good or not, or whether he's planning on upholding his oaths or not

- It's a way to soothe the population's trust in the person, again a form of manipulation

- It's a way for higher officials too soothe their own trust in the person, and perhaps it thus serves as a form of self-delusion

- It's a nice ceremony to make people come together to witness some institution of power, though, and as such it is indeed a nice and good tradition, which I think is worthwhile to uphold in one way or another

While I have conflicting thoughts about how people are sworn in today, I can understand that the Bible does not hold as much power over most modern human beings as it used to, and especially those who simply aren't Christian at all. So, what should they swear upon? I, for one, would rather make it a book on moral philosophy that you can stand by, which you have read, and that you agree with.

With that said, I think if you really meditate on the moral philosophy of Jesus, then I'm sure that even if you're an atheist, you'll still come to the conclusion that it's not so bad after all. He was of course a complicated human being, but I think his fundamental ideas about The Golden Rule (i.e. that you should treat others as you would like to be treated yourself), and his ideas about how all people are created equal (see the rituals surrounding Maundy Thursday where he washed the feet of his disciples and told them that they should do the same to their underlings as a symbol for how everyone are created equal), as universally good principles that you don't strictly need to be religious to get behind.