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 »

The other day, I watched a 3 part special about what makes us uniquely human from the rest of the animals on the planet, namely chimps. It was very interesting and I wanted to share it with you. I’m linking to each full length video and then below I will link to Science Talk’s interviews with Alda about the show and other interesting things.

Here’s some information from PBS:

After some three and a half billion years of life’s evolution on this planet – and after almost two million years since people recognizable as human first walked its surface – a new human burst upon the scene, apparently unannounced.

It was us.

Until then our ancestors had shared the planet with other human species. But soon there was only us, possessors of something that gave us unprecedented power over our environment and everything else alive. That something was – is – the Human Spark.

What is the nature of human uniqueness? Where did the Human Spark ignite, and when? And perhaps most tantalizingly, why?

In a three-part series broadcast on PBS in January 2010, Alan Alda takes these questions personally, visiting with dozens of scientists on three continents, and participating directly in many experiments – including the detailed examination of his own brain. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey Everyone! About a week or so ago, I wrote about the Meaning of Life and also mentioned a set of videos by Richard Dawkins that my friend Rachel had told me about. I watched all 5 videos and thought they were interesting and enlightening so I am sharing them below.

I was on an evolution kick and also found a 3 part program on Nova called Becoming Human, all about the evolution of us. I can’t give you the videos here, but I’m providing the links so you can watch them on PBS’s site. They are very interesting, and were just aired on PBS in November, so they have some new ideas and research.

  • Becoming Human Part 1: First Steps: Six million years ago, what set our ancestors on the path from ape to human?
  • Becoming Human Part 2: Birth of Humanity: New discoveries reveal how early humans hunted and formed families.
  • Becoming Human Part 3: Last Human Standing: Many human species once shared the globe. Why do we alone remain?

Exploring a bit further, I found an interesting article about human evolution called Are We Still Evolving? This is a question that I have been pondering lately. Since we developed agriculture about 10,000 years ago, developed medicines, learned to cook our food, and developed technology, among some factors, more and more babies survive and grow up to reproduce. According to the article, about 98% of all babies born in the U.S., Europe or Japan survive long enough to reproduce and pass on their DNA, so survival doesn’t depend as much on genes.

But in third world countries, natural selection still favors mutations in dealing with deadly diseases. For instance, people with the sickle-cell mutation in the beta hemoglobin gene have a protection against malaria.

One example of more recent evolution in humans is lactose tolerance. This is evidence that we have evolved, even if it’s just in a small but significant way. Read the rest of this entry »

Darwin_2

The other day I was pondering how our bodies have features that are poorly designed. Not to get too personal, but I have a hard time with coughing over the least little thing. Sometimes if I inhale wrong, my uvula freaks out and I start to cough like crazy. It’s horrible.

So I wanted to write down some goofy examples to share with you, as if there were a god, he’s pretty bad at designing. Then my mind kind of fizzled out, so I thought, hell, I’m not the first person to come up with this brilliant idea. I’ll Google it. That’s when I found the following video, which sums it up in about 6 minutes rather perfectly.

Neil deGrasse Tyson did a talk back in late 2006 where he ended with the following: (I have reproduced most of his slides below for your convenience)

Read the rest of this entry »

I saw this comparison of Aldous Huxley to George Orwell the other day. I thought it was extremely well done and thought you might find it insightful:

Amusing ourselves to death by Stuart McMillen – Aldous Huxley, author of “Brave New World vs. George Orwell, author of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”

Huxley-Orwell-01 Read the rest of this entry »

picdump-20Butch and I had Brent and Tim (my fellow Morgantown Atheists cohorts) over for dinner the other night. (oh, and Tim brought his standard poodle Lucy, who was highly interesting to my crazy mutts. They were in love with her sexy Frenchness!) Anyway, over pizza, Tim challenged me to come up with my own personal list of 10 Commandments. The New 10 Commandments.

First let’s look at the old fashioned set that so many people want festooned on government property to hopefully force everyone to be good, obedient, god-fearing christians.

According to the bible, there are 3 sets of commandments by Moses’ god. (see Wikipedia’s page here)

Most of these commandments are the words of an angry, jealous, childish god. They aren’t helpful, moral or ethical. They don’t advance us as a species. In fact they hold us back with threats and superstitions.

So here’s my task, which I will gladly share with you: Read the rest of this entry »

fairy tales are for childrenWiley Drake, a southern baptist preacher in California went on Fox News Radio’s Alan Colmes show on June 2nd and said he’s praying for god to kill President Obama. Drake used to be the 2nd vice president of the southern baptist convention.

Apparently there’s a special kind of prayer from psalms where you ask god to kill people for you, to vindicate your innocence and relieve you of your oppressors. It’s called imprecatory prayer.

Imprecate: To call down by prayer, as something hurtful or calamitous. To invoke evil upon; curse.

Drake prayed to his god for the death of Dr. George Tiller, who was murdered in his church on May 31st. Drake called his death an answer to prayer.

(emphasis of the following quotes are mine, with my comments interspersed)

“Imprecatory prayer is agreeing with God, and if people don’t like that, they need to talk to God,” Drake told syndicated talk-show host Alan Colmes. “God said it, I didn’t. I was just agreeing with God.”

Lame! Cop-out! ‘Don’t blame me, it’s god’s responsibility! I just pestered him till he did what i demanded!’

Asked if there are others for whom Drake is praying “imprecatory prayer,” Drake hesitated before answering that there are several. “The usurper that is in the White House is one, B. Hussein Obama,” he said.

Later in the interview, Colmes returned to Drake’s answer to make sure he heard him right.

“Are you praying for his death?” Colmes asked.

“Yes,” Drake replied.

“So you’re praying for the death of the president of the United States?”

“Yes.”

Colmes asked Drake if he was concerned that by saying that he might be placed on a Secret Service or FBI watch list, and if he believed it appropriate to talk or pray that way.

At least he’s just praying, which we know to be completely ineffectual. Read the rest of this entry »