Monthly Archives: February, 2010
Thoughts provoked by the movie Avatar
Like millions of others I succumb to peer pressure when it comes to seeing movies: Not just the media and reviews, but a goodly number of friends exert subtle pressure on me to see the movies I decide to see, and this was no exception. I did not regret the three hours of my life, …
Inspired Thoughts and from Famous Poems
Thomas Gray (in Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard) “Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” My inspiration: Full many a place unseen by human eyes Marvelous interstellar space doth …
Comments on Charles Taylor’s Comments
1. < To understand something you have to love it because understanding is never a completely disengaged stance but springs from inspiration.> I think I understand how light emerges from electronic transitions in atoms and how earthquakes result from tectonic buckling. I don’t know that I love either the electron or earthquakes. 2. <Reason is …
Kim Stanley Robinson Equates Science and Religion
News Item: <“It’s a religion in the sense of religio, it’s what binds us together. It is a form of devotion: the scientific study of the world is simply a kind of worship of it, a very detailed, painstaking, and often tedious daily worship, like Zen,” award-winning science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson…> in a …
Conversation on Dawkins et al.
<Michael Shermer, Michael Ruse, Eugenie Scott and others are probably right that contemptuous ridicule is not an expedient way to change the minds of those who are deeply religious.> Dawkins is too intelligent not to understand the thesis of the soft-talkers. So it is not surprising that he concedes, albeit probabilistically, that they are right. …
An Exchange on Haiti
Thanks for that deeply felt and carefully considered analysis, Jerald. I did read Brooks’ piece in the NYT, and agree with him (and you) on the general points you make. And here are some of my further thoughts on the matter. 1. <I gather from what Brooks says that compassion, charity and doing the Lord’s …
On the Armstrong-Harris Debate
As often happens when two intelligent people debate both are right from their respective understandings/convictions/definitions of the issue they are debating, each impervious to the other’s perspective. To Sam Harris the word religion evokes witchcraft, cannibalism, superstition and such. It cannot be denied that these have been aspects of religion in the past, and still …
On God and Non-God
The recognition and experience of the splendor of the world and wonderment about its beauty and variety is what I choose to describe as a theistic reaction to the world. Acknowledging a complex universe without any experience of wonderment, reflection, and awe about an existence that includes love and joy would be a drab and …
On Why, Ontology, and How
For at least two thousand years keen human minds in many cultures explored, discussed, and debated why the universe came about, why humanity is there, why there are patterns in the world, why there is good and evil, why there is beauty and ugliness, why there is pain and pleasure, enjoyment and suffering, and many …
