tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72224968648560786542024-02-20T19:24:39.713-05:00Jared's Quote ListUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger33125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-42128874030764756592021-02-05T18:28:00.007-05:002021-02-05T18:28:58.452-05:00The Progress of Lazy Men -Robert A. Heinlein<p>Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-58587324558304051652018-04-29T17:10:00.002-04:002018-04-29T17:10:26.672-04:00George Bernard Shaw from Man and Superman on The Unreasonable Man.The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-88354016528767893032016-08-17T01:23:00.000-04:002016-08-17T01:23:18.763-04:00Stephen Jay Gould from The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural HistoryI am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-27969028211264093312014-04-13T05:30:00.000-04:002014-04-13T05:52:20.758-04:00Richard Feynman on GodI think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit If I can't figure it out then I go on to something else. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell possibly, it doesn't frighten me. From: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YltEym9H0x4">Richard Feynman on God</a> on YouTubeUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-30734181956002962432014-04-08T23:25:00.000-04:002014-04-08T23:25:44.848-04:00Sam Harris on the Difficulty of ProgressWe have barely emerged from centuries of barbarism. It's not a surprise that there are shocking inequities in this world. It is hard work to climb down out of the trees, walk upright and build a viable global civilization when you start with technology that's made of rocks and sticks and fur. This is, this is... a project and progress is difficult. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITTxTCz4Ums&t=6m40s">From this video on YouTube.</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-16976406090128682612014-04-03T22:30:00.000-04:002014-04-04T10:30:11.997-04:00Michael Jordan on TeamworkTalent wins games, but teamwork wins Championships.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-77540395470725404512014-04-03T21:30:00.000-04:002014-04-04T10:29:20.374-04:00Georg Wilhelm on PassionNothing great in the world has been accomplished without passionUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-84427870408462801362013-08-21T08:26:00.003-04:002013-08-21T08:26:38.008-04:00Jacob Bronowski on Civilization from The Ascent of ManThe hand is the cutting edge of the mind. Civilization is not a collection of finished artifacts, it is the elaboration of processes. In the end, the march of man is the refinement of the hand in action.<br />
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The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he loves to do it better. You see it in his science. You see it in the magnificence with which he carves and builds, the loving care, the gaiety, the effrontery. The monuments are supposed to commemorate kings and religions, heroes, dogmas, but in the end the man they commemorate is the builder.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-26551941021005734842013-08-08T23:16:00.002-04:002013-08-08T23:16:24.066-04:00Jacob Bronowski on Science & MagicMan masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-70656113198888518292013-08-08T23:14:00.004-04:002013-08-08T23:14:39.809-04:00Jacob Bronowski on ConformityHas there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-61091858172484809522013-08-08T23:11:00.003-04:002020-10-24T11:33:38.273-04:00Jacob Bronowski on RealityDream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simply by taking sides.<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-8578392662667694912013-04-03T08:53:00.005-04:002013-04-30T18:17:55.042-04:00The Dalai Lama on Reason & Evidence from The Universe in a Single Atom<span style="font-family: inherit;">There is a dictum in Buddhist philosophy that to uphold a tenant that contradicts reason is to undermine ones credibility. To contradict empirical evidence is a still greater fallacy.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-23648077256890262062012-08-21T04:30:00.000-04:002012-08-22T14:54:27.900-04:00Sam Harris on Conceptual Revolutions from The End of FaithA few minutes spent wandering the graveyard of bad ideas suggests that such conceptual revolutions are possible. Consider the case of alchemy: it fascinated human beings for over a thousand years, and yet anyone who seriously claims to be a practicing alchemist today will have disqualified himself for most positions of responsibility in our society. Faith-based religion must suffer the same slide into obsolescence. What is the alternative to religion as we know it? As it turns out, this is the wrong question to ask. Chemistry was not an “alternative” to alchemy; it was a wholesale exchange of ignorance at its most rococo for genuine knowledge.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-88384679713122884662012-08-20T23:30:00.000-04:002012-08-22T14:56:33.698-04:00Sam Harris on Dogma from Letter to a Christian Nation<br />
Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of political and racial dogmatism.<br />
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It is time that Christians like yourself stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. One need not accept anything on insufficient evidence to find the virgin birth of Jesus to be a preposterous idea. The problem with religion—as with Nazism, Stalinism, or any other totalitarian mythology—is the problem of dogma itself. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.<br />
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While you believe that bringing an end to religion is an impossible goal, it is important to realize that much of the developed world has nearly accomplished it. Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. Insofar as there is a crime problem in Western Europe, it is largely the product of immigration. Seventy percent of the inmates of France's jails, for instance, are Muslim. The Muslims of Western Europe are generally not atheists. Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' human development index are unwaveringly religious.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-87026193084434038802012-07-26T00:58:00.002-04:002012-07-26T00:58:42.176-04:00Christopher Hitches on his Code of EthicsBeware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for youUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-56075876695641943642012-07-17T05:39:00.001-04:002012-08-21T11:19:03.085-04:00Lawrence Krauss on Joshua 10:9-14 from A Universe from NothingIf immutable laws governed the universe, the mythical gods of ancient Greece and Rome would have been impotent. There would have been no freedom to arbitrarily bend the world to create thorny problems for mankind. What held for Zeus would also apply to the God of Israel. How could the Sun stand still at midday if the Sun did not orbit the Earth but its motion in the sky was actually caused by the revolution of the Earth, which, if suddenly stopped, would produce forces on its surface that would destroy all human structures and humans along with them?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-60550109625020772352012-06-08T19:46:00.000-04:002012-08-10T15:47:39.197-04:00Isaac Asimov on violence from his novel FoundationViolence is the last refuge of the incompetent.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-13711651486486602732012-05-05T02:26:00.000-04:002012-05-07T03:25:57.951-04:00Bill Bryson on Isaac Newton's Principia from A Short History of Nearly EverythingOnce in a great while, a few times in history, a human mind produces an observation so acute and unexpected that people can’t quite decide which is the more amazing - the fact or the thinking of it. Principia was one of those moments.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-2552127369073329942012-04-22T12:26:00.003-04:002012-04-30T12:17:08.400-04:00Carl Sagan on our self-consciousnessWe are a way for the cosmos to know itself.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-88149940058233116712012-04-16T19:14:00.000-04:002012-08-10T15:48:20.643-04:00The end of the Note to the Reader by Sam Harris from Letter to a Christian NationThe truth, however, is that many of us may not care about the fate of civilization. Forty four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry here on earth. It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves—socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-43804342185952050042012-04-11T23:54:00.000-04:002018-12-13T21:45:02.263-05:00Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species - The entangled bank passageIt is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-80578223549587038912012-04-11T04:26:00.002-04:002012-04-11T04:37:00.163-04:00Sam Harris on Jainism and Martin Luther King, Jr. from Letter to a Christian Nation<p>Take the religion of Jainism as one example. The Jains preach a doctrine of utter non-violence. While the Jains believe many improbable things about the universe, they do not believe the sorts of things that lit the fires of the Inquisition. You probably think the Inquisition was a perversion of the "true" spirit of Christianity. Perhaps it was. The problem, however, is that the teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). <a href="http://www.awitness.org/books/luther/luther_jews/14_jews_persecuting_christians.html">Martin Luther</a> and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches.</p>
<p>You are, of course, free to interpret the Bible differently - though isn't it amazing that you have succeeded in discerning the true teachings of Christianity, while the most influential thinkers in the history of your faith failed? Of course, many Christians believe that a harmless person like Martin Luther King, Jr., is the best exemplar of their religion. But this presents a serious problem, because the doctrine of Jainism is an objectively better guide for becoming like Martin Luther King, Jr., than the doctrine of Christianity is. While King undoubtedly considered himself a devout Christian, he acquired his commitment to nonviolence primarily from the writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi. In 1959, he even traveled to India to learn the principles of nonviolent social protest directly from Gandhi's disciples. Where did Gandhi, a Hindu, get his doctrine of nonviolence? He got it from the Jains.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-91711636330072865882012-04-07T00:51:00.000-04:002012-04-11T04:32:07.804-04:00Sam Harris on Christian Literalism from Letter to a Christian Nation<p>The dubious link between Christian literalism and Christian values is belied by other indices of social equality. Consider the ratio of salaries paid to top-tier CEOs and those paid to the same firms' average employees: in Britain it is 24:1; in France, 15:1; in Sweden, 13:1; in the United States, where 80 percent of the population expects to be called before God on Judgment Day, it is 475:1. Many a camel, it would seem, expects to pass easily through the eye of a needle.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-67533161875446774302012-04-05T02:37:00.001-04:002012-04-05T02:37:36.818-04:00Richard Dawkins on Evolution by Natural Selection from The Greatest Show on Earth<p>It is no accident that we see green almost wherever we look. It is no accident that we find ourselves perched on one tiny twig in the midst of a blossoming and flourishing tree of life; no accident that we are surrounded by millions of other species, eating, growing, rotting, swimming, walking, flying, burrowing, stalking, chasing, fleeing, outpacing, outwitting. Without green plants to outnumber us at least ten to one there would be no energy to power us. Without the ever-escalating arms races between predators and prey, parasites and hosts, without Darwin’s ‘war of nature’, without his ‘famine and death’ there would be no nervous systems capable of seeing anything at all, let alone of appreciating and understanding it. We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random natural selection – the only game in town, the greatest show on Earth.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7222496864856078654.post-8194643977021065082012-04-05T02:37:00.000-04:002012-08-13T11:00:17.729-04:00Richard Dawkins on DeathWe 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?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0