Very funny stuff! If you’re new to Mr. Deity, I recommend starting at the beginning at Season 1. Go to MrDeity.com and watch them all.
Also, there’s a Newsletter you can get now.
One of my Facebook friends posted this to his feed today. Richard Dawkins waxing eloquent:
”The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces …us that the time we have for living is quite finite.”
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
“An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” Read the rest of this entry »
Happy Darwin Day everyone! Today is Darwin’s birthday and in honor of him, I thought I’d post this article about Liquid Glass, which could possibly be the coolest nanotech material I’ve seen in some time. I think it’s so cool mainly because of its versatility and the fact that it’s already in use in Germany, the UK and Turkey.
Why am I talking about nanotech on Darwin’s birthday? If you think about it, without evolution, we wouldn’t be able to manipulate our world so deftly and with such finesse. About 195,000 years ago homo sapiens first appeared in the fossil record. We started leaving Africa about 70,000 years ago, and migrated as far as the Americas 14,500 years ago.
A mere 10,000 years ago, we were mostly hunter-gatherers in nomadic groups. The first proto-states were developed only 6,000 years ago. Think of that! Look how far we’ve come in such a short time!
Think of how we lived just 100 years ago in 1910.
- By 1910 many suburban homes were wired up with power and new electronic gadgets.
- Vacuum cleaners and washing machines had just become commercially available, though still expensive for middle class folks
- The telephone was new, and millions of American homes were connected by manual switchboard
- People relied on the paper for their news, but radio technology was in its infancy
- The age of the airship was in full swing. Only 7 years previously, the Wright brothers had flown at Kitty Hawk
- Henry Ford introduced the Model T 2 years before and sold about 10,000 of them this year
- Advances in the use of gases meant the first electric refrigerators and air conditioning units.
- Neon lighting was debuted in Paris
- Inventions included: escalators, teabags, cellophane, instant coffee and disposable razor blades
- Women still had another 3 years of corsets
Things they didn’t have in 1910: Read the rest of this entry »
by Bertrand Russell
Russell delivered this lecture on March 6, 1927 to the National Secular Society, South London Branch, at Battersea Town Hall. Published in pamphlet form in that same year, the essay subsequently achieved new fame with Paul Edwards’ edition of Russell’s book, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays … (1957).
As your Chairman has told you, the subject about which I am going to speak to you tonight is “Why I Am Not a Christian.” Perhaps it would be as well, first of all, to try to make out what one means by the word Christian. It is used these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some people mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life. In that sense I suppose there would be Christians in all sects and creeds; but I do not think that that is the proper sense of the word, if only because it would imply that all the people who are not Christians — all the Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans, and so on — are not trying to live a good life. I do not mean by a Christian any person who tries to live decently according to his lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. The word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.
What Is a Christian?
Nowadays it is not quite that. We have to be a little more vague in our meaning of Christianity. I think, however, that there are two different items which are quite essential to anybody calling himself a Christian. The first is one of a dogmatic nature — namely, that you must believe in God and immortality. If you do not believe in those two things, I do not think that you can properly call yourself a Christian. Then, further than that, as the name implies, you must have some kind of belief about Christ. The Mohammedans, for instance, also believe in God and in immortality, and yet they would not call themselves Christians. I think you must have at the very lowest the belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men. If you are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not think you have any right to call yourself a Christian. Of course, there is another sense, which you find in Whitaker’s Almanack and in geography books, where the population of the world is said to be divided into Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, fetish worshipers, and so on; and in that sense we are all Christians. The geography books count us all in, but that is a purely geographical sense, which I suppose we can ignore.Therefore I take it that when I tell you why I am not a Christian I have to tell you two different things: first, why I do not believe in God and in immortality; and, secondly, why I do not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant him a very high degree of moral goodness. Read the rest of this entry »
I have some videos to share with you today. All three are created by John Boswell and are different, interesting, inspiring and thought provoking. You can find the videos with the lyrics and downloads of the songs in different formats at his site: The Symphony of Science. Here’s what the site says:
“The Symphony of Science is a musical project by John Boswell designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form. Here you can watch music videos, download songs, read lyrics and find links relating to the messages conveyed by the music.”
The first time I heard A Glorious Dawn was on the Reasonable Doubts podcast. I didn’t care for it for the first few seconds but it grew on me very quickly. When I watched the videos I was inspired. Basically Carl Sagan and other awesome scientists are singing in a synthesized way. There’s a special program that does this, but I can’t think of what it’s called at the moment. Ozzie and Cher have both put out albums using this same technique to save their sagging voices. But here John Boswell turns speech into music.
All three are awesome. I hope you try them out. Go to the website to download the music. A Glorious Dawn is also available on iTunes! Read the rest of this entry »
Oh what a mistake it was adding ‘In God We Trust’ to the United States currency.
It started with coins in 1864, gained new legs with the motto in 1956, then made its debut on paper currency in 1957. Read the rest of this entry »
Leviticus 11: [29] These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind, [30] And the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole.
Neece posted on the Codex Sinaiticus a few days back. One of the books or letters that made it into the Codex is the Epistle of Barnabas.
In the era of early Christian writing, instead of ignoring the old testament laws, he is set on reinterpreting them. Vorjack over on Unreasonable Faith has a funny article on it; and I just couldn’t resist sharing the weasel excerpt: Read the rest of this entry »
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