Okay, so I already made an entry which I thought would be my last. I can't leave in such a wimper.
Richard Dawkins needs to be elected president of the United States. We need to ammend the consitution right now to allow British Oxford professors who have made gigantic contributions to science and rational thought to lead this country. His two-part documentary series The Root of All Evil? is a brilliant masterpiece of how religion is inherently extremely dangerous to civilization. No, there really is nothing harmless about people believing in a god. In the words of Stephen Weinberg, without religion good people do good things, evil people do bad things, but to get good people to bad things takes religion.
(Lest it be noted the title The Root of All Evil? was forced upon Dawkins by television producers wanting to stir controversy. Dawkins pointed out that to say anything is the root of ALL evil is ridiculous.)
Also, get yourself a copy of the brilliant documentary The God That Wasn't There (2005). Watch videos of Carl Sagan. Watch James Randi debunk Uri Geller. Buy Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer; pick up a subscription to Skeptic magazine. Buy Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach. Buy The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. Light the candle in the dark.
There is no such thing as the paranormal. Ever since Houdini there have been prominent figures who have put up HUGE sums of money for anyone to demonstrate a paranormal ability in a properly controlled environment; currently, in "spirit" of that, James Randi has a $1 Million challenge. Thus so far in history, no one has ever passed such a challenge. The paranormal doesn't exist. God is paranormal. Yes, I'm telling you to follow through the logic. If you say, "We don't know"you lose! The burden of proof lies squarely on YOU to demonstrate the paranormal exists; it's not on me the skeptic to "disprove" your claim. There are millions of things we can't disprove.
"Science can't disprove the existence of god, but that does not mean that god exists. There are millions of things we can't disprove. The philosopher Bertram Russell had an analogy. Imagine there is a china teapot in orbit around the sun. You cannot disprove the existence of the teapot because it's too small to be spotted by our telescopes. Nobody but a lunatic would say "Well, I'm prepared to believe in the teapot because I can't disprove it." Maybe we have to be technically and strictly agnostic but in practice we are all teapot atheists. But now suppose that everybody in the society; the teachers, the tribal elders; all had faith in the teapot. Stories of the teapot have been handed down for generations as part of the tradition of the society, there are holy books on the teapot. Then somebody who said they did not believe in the teapot might be regarded as eccentric or even mad. There's an infinite number of things like celestial teapots that we can't disprove. there are fairies, there are unicorns, hog goblins. we can't disprove any of those but we don't believe in them anymore than nowadays than we believe in Thor, Amun-rah, or Aphrodites. We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in; some of us just go one god further." -- Richard Dawkins
if ever religion were to lose its tight grip on humanity and for atheism to gain traction, we need to demonstrate how people are inherently good, naturally altruistic, even without god, and that's exactly what scientists are doing.
Richard Dawkins needs to be elected president of the United States. We need to ammend the consitution right now to allow British Oxford professors who have made gigantic contributions to science and rational thought to lead this country. His two-part documentary series The Root of All Evil? is a brilliant masterpiece of how religion is inherently extremely dangerous to civilization. No, there really is nothing harmless about people believing in a god. In the words of Stephen Weinberg, without religion good people do good things, evil people do bad things, but to get good people to bad things takes religion.
(Lest it be noted the title The Root of All Evil? was forced upon Dawkins by television producers wanting to stir controversy. Dawkins pointed out that to say anything is the root of ALL evil is ridiculous.)
Also, get yourself a copy of the brilliant documentary The God That Wasn't There (2005). Watch videos of Carl Sagan. Watch James Randi debunk Uri Geller. Buy Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer; pick up a subscription to Skeptic magazine. Buy Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach. Buy The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. Light the candle in the dark.
There is no such thing as the paranormal. Ever since Houdini there have been prominent figures who have put up HUGE sums of money for anyone to demonstrate a paranormal ability in a properly controlled environment; currently, in "spirit" of that, James Randi has a $1 Million challenge. Thus so far in history, no one has ever passed such a challenge. The paranormal doesn't exist. God is paranormal. Yes, I'm telling you to follow through the logic. If you say, "We don't know"you lose! The burden of proof lies squarely on YOU to demonstrate the paranormal exists; it's not on me the skeptic to "disprove" your claim. There are millions of things we can't disprove.
"Science can't disprove the existence of god, but that does not mean that god exists. There are millions of things we can't disprove. The philosopher Bertram Russell had an analogy. Imagine there is a china teapot in orbit around the sun. You cannot disprove the existence of the teapot because it's too small to be spotted by our telescopes. Nobody but a lunatic would say "Well, I'm prepared to believe in the teapot because I can't disprove it." Maybe we have to be technically and strictly agnostic but in practice we are all teapot atheists. But now suppose that everybody in the society; the teachers, the tribal elders; all had faith in the teapot. Stories of the teapot have been handed down for generations as part of the tradition of the society, there are holy books on the teapot. Then somebody who said they did not believe in the teapot might be regarded as eccentric or even mad. There's an infinite number of things like celestial teapots that we can't disprove. there are fairies, there are unicorns, hog goblins. we can't disprove any of those but we don't believe in them anymore than nowadays than we believe in Thor, Amun-rah, or Aphrodites. We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in; some of us just go one god further." -- Richard Dawkins
if ever religion were to lose its tight grip on humanity and for atheism to gain traction, we need to demonstrate how people are inherently good, naturally altruistic, even without god, and that's exactly what scientists are doing.