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Religions Are Tough. Either They Make No Contentions Which Are Subject To Disproof Or They Quickly Redesign Doctrine After Disproof. ... Near The Core Of The Religious Experience Is Something Remarkably Resistant To Rational Inquiry.

-Carl Sagan

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Religions Are Tough. Either

Carl Sagan

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Religions Are Tough. Either They Make No Contentions Which Are Subject To Disproof Or They Quickly Redesign Doctrine After Disproof. ... Near The Core Of The Religious Experience Is Something Remarkably Resistant To Rational Inquiry.

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Both The Freudian And The Platonic Metaphors Emphasize The Considerable Independence Of And Tension Among The Constituent Parts Of The Psyche, A Point That Characterizes The Human Condition.

Science Is A Collaborative Enterprise, Spanning The Generations. When It Permits Us To See The Far Side Of Some New Horizon, We Remember Those Who Prepared The Way - Seeing For Them Also.

The Values Of Science And The Values Of Democracy Are Concordant, In Many Cases Indistinguishable. Science And Democracy Began - In Their Civilized Incarnations - In The Same Time And Place, Greece In The Seventh And Sixth Centuries B.c. . . . Science Thrives On, Indeed Requires, The Free Exchange Of Ideas; Its Values Are Antithetical To Secrecy. Science Holds To No Special Vantage Points Or Privileged Positions. Both Science And Democracy Encourage Unconventional Opinions And Vigorous Debate. Both Demand Adequate Reason, Coherent Argument, Rigorous Standards Of Evidence And Honesty.

Any Faith That Admires Truth, That Strives To Know God, Must Be Brave Enough To Accommodate The Universe.

The Cosmos Is Within Us. We Are Made Of Star Stuff

We Began As Wanderers, And We Are Wanderers Still.

We Can Make A Similar Examination, But With Greater Uncertainty, Of The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis That Holds That A Wide Range Of Ufos Viewed On The Planet Earth Are Space Vehicles From Planets Of Other Stars.

If Some Good Evidence For Life After Death Were Announced, I'd Be Eager To Examine It; But It Would Have To Be Real Scientific Data, Not Mere Anecdote. As With The Face On Mars And Alien Abductions, Better The Hard Truth, I Say, Than The Comforting Fantasy.

The Earth Is A Place. It Is By No Means The Only Place. It Is Not Even A Typical Place.

I Don't Know The Answer. Maybe No One Knows. Maybe When You Grow Up, You'll Be The First To Find Out.

Modern Science Has Been A Voyage Into The Unknown, With A Lesson In Humility Waiting At Every Stop. Many Passengers Would Rather Have Stayed Home.

My Long-time View About Christianity Is That It Represents An Amalgam Of Two Seemingly Immiscible Parts-the Religion Of Jesus And The Religion Of Paul. Thomas Jefferson Attempted To Excise The Pauline Parts Of The New Testament. There Wasn't Much Left When He Was Done, But It Was An Inspiring Document.

We Are Like Butterflies Who Flutter For A Day And Think It Is Forever.

Time Spent With Children Is Time Well Spent. Their Little Minds Are Not Constrained By 'reality' Or Focused Upon Goals. Anything And Everything Is Possible. Imagination Will Often Carry Us To Worlds That Never Were. But Without It We Go Nowhere.

When Kepler Found His Long-cherished Belief Did Not Agree With The Most Precise Observation, He Accepted The Uncomfortable Fact. He Preferred The Hard Truth To His Dearest Illusions, That Is The Heart Of Science.

We Need To Reduce Military Budgets; Raise Living Standards; Engender Respect For Learning; Support Science, Scholarship, Invention, And Industry; Promote Free Inquiry; Reduce Domestic Coercion; Involve The Workers More In Managerial Decisions; And Promote Genuine Respect And Understanding Derived From An Acknowledgement Of Our Common Humanity And Our Common Jeopardy.

Common Humanity

We Are, In The Most Profound Sense, Children Of The Cosmos.

I Would Be Very Ashamed Of My Civilization If We Did Not Try To Find Out If There Is Life In Outer Space.

All Colours Are Arbitrary.

It Is All A Matter Of Time Scale. An Event That Would Be Unthinkable In A Hundred Years May Be Inevitable In A Hundred Million.

It Does No Harm To The Romance Of The Sunset To Know A Little Bit About It.

He Didn't Want To Believe. He Wanted To Know.

History Is Full Of People Who Out Of Fear, Or Ignorance, Or Lust For Power Has Destroyed Knowledge Of Immeasurable Value Which Truly Belongs To Us All. We Must Not Let It Happen Again.

We Are One Species. We Are Starstuff.

Real Patriots Ask Questions.

If All The Suns But Ours Collapsed Tonight, How Many Lifetimes Would It Take Us To Realize That We Were Alone?

If You Are Only Skeptical, Then No New Ideas Make It Through To You.

If There Is Life, Then I Believe We Should Do Nothing To Disturb That Life. Mars Then, Belongs To The Martians, Even If They Are Microbes.

The Prediction Of Nuclear Winter Is Drawn Not, Of Course, From Any Direct Experience With The Consequences Of Global Nuclear War, But Rather From An Investigation Of The Governing Physics.

One Of The Reasons For Its Success Is That Science Has A Built-in, Error-correcting Machinery At Its Very Heart. Some May Consider This An Overbroad Characterization, But To Me Every Time We Exercise Self-criticism, Every Time We Test Our Ideas Against The Outside World, We Are Doing Science. When We Are Self-indulgent And Uncritical, When We Confuse Hopes And Facts, We Slide Into Pseudoscience And Superstition.

In A Complex Universe, In A Society Undergoing Unprecedented Change, How Can We Find The Truth If We Are Not Willing To Question Everything And To Give A Fair Hearing To Everything?

The Universe Is A Pretty Big Place. If It's Just Us, Seems Like An Awful Waste Of Space.

On The Day That We Do Discover That We Are Not Alone, Our Society May Begin To Evolve And Transform In Some Incredible And Wondrous New Ways.

Those With The Courage To Explore The Weave And Structure Of The Cosmos, Even Where It Differs Profoundly From Their Wishes And Prejudices, Will Penetrate Its Deepest Mysteries.

We've Arranged A Civilization In Which Most Crucial Elements Profoundly Depend On Science And Technology.

A Still More Glorious Dawn Awaits / Not A Sunrise, But A Galaxy-rise / A Morning Filled With 400 Billion Suns / The Rising Of The Milky Way

The Idea That God Is An Oversized White Male With A Flowing Beard, Who Sits In The Sky And Tallies The Fall Of Every Sparrow Is Ludicrous. But If By 'god,' One Means The Set Of Physical Laws That Govern The Universe, Then Clearly There Is Such A God. This God Is Emotionally Unsatisfying... It Does Not Make Much Sense To Pray To The Law Of Gravity.

Many Religions Have Attempted To Make Statues Of Their Gods Very Large, And The Idea, I Suppose, Is To Make Us Feel Small. But If That's Their Purpose, They Can Keep Their Paltry Icons. We Need Only Look Up If We Wish To Feel Small.

There Are More Potential Combinations Of Dna [physical Forms] Than There Are Atoms In The Universe.

We Are, Each Of Us, A Multitude. Within Us Is A Little Universe.

Who Are We? We Find That We Live On An Insignificant Planet Of A Humdrum Star Lost In A Galaxy Tucked Away In Some Forgotten Corner Of A Universe In Which There Are Far More Galaxies Than People.

An Atheist Is Someone Who Is Certain That God Does Not Exist, Someone Who Has Compelling Evidence Against The Existence Of God. I Know Of No Such Compelling Evidence. Because God Can Be Relegated To Remote Times And Places And To Ultimate Causes, We Would Have To Know A Great Deal More About The Universe Than We Do Now To Be Sure That No Such God Exists. To Be Certain Of The Existence Of God And To Be Certain Of The Nonexistence Of God Seem To Me To Be The Confident Extremes In A Subject So Riddled With Doubt And Uncertainty As To Inspire Very Little Confidence Indeed.

We On Earth Have Just Awakened To The Great Oceans Of Space And Time From Which We Have Emerged.

A Millennium Before Europeans Were Willing To Divest Themselves Of The Biblical Idea That The World Was A Few Thousand Years Old, The Mayans Were Thinking Of Millions And The Hindus Billions.

A General Problem With Much Of Western Theology In My View Is That The God Portrayed Is Too Small. It Is A God Of A Tiny World And Not A God Of A Galaxy Much Less Of A Universe.

I Can Find In My Undergraduate Classes, Bright Students Who Do Not Know That The Stars Rise And Set At Night, Or Even That The Sun Is A Star.

The Secrets Of Evolution Are Death And Time-the Deaths Of Enormous Numbers Of Lifeforms That Were Imperfectly Adapted To The Environment; And Time For A Long Succession Of Small Mutations.

If Our Long-term Survival Is At Stake, We Have A Basic Responsibility To Our Species To Venture To Other Worlds. Sailors On A Becalmed Sea, We Sense The Stirring Of A Breeze.

We Are, In A Way, Temporary Ambulatory Repositories For Our Nucleic Acids. This Does Not Deny Our Humanity; It Does Not Prevent Us From Pursuing The Good, The True And The Beautiful. But It Would Be A Great Mistake To Ignore Where We Have Come From In Our Attempt To Determine Where We Are Going.

The Hindu Religion Is The Only Of The World's Great Faiths Dedicated To The Idea That The Cosmos Itself Undergoes An Immense, Indeed An Infinite, Number Of Deaths And Rebirths.

If We Teach Only The Findings And Products Of Science - No Matter How Useful And Even Inspiring They May Be - Without Communicating Its Critical Method, How Can The Average Person Possibly Distinguish Science From Pseudoscience?

The Lifetime Of A Human Being Is Measured By Decades, The Lifetime Of The Sun Is A Hundred Million Times Longer. Compared To A Star, We Are Like Mayflies, Fleeting Ephemeral Creatures Who Live Out Their Lives In The Course Of A Single Day.

Human History Can Be Viewed As A Slowly Dawning Awareness That We Are Members Of A Larger Group.

We Have Heard The Rationales Offered By The Nuclear Superpowers. We Know Who Speaks For The Nations. But Who Speaks For The Human Species? Who Speaks For Earth?

We Are All Made Up Of Star Stuff.

All Of The Books In The World Contain No More Information Than Is Broadcast As Video In A Single Large American City In A Single Year. Not All Bits Have Equal Value.

Sailors On A Becalmed Sea, We Sense The Stirring Of A Breeze.

There Are Many Other (besides Testosterone) Behaviour-eliciting Hormones Fundamental For Humen Well-being, Including Estrogen And Progesterone In Females. The Fact That Complex Behavioural Patterns Can Be Triggered By A Tiny Concentration Of Moleculas Coursing Through The Bloodstream, And That Different Animals Of The Same Species Generate Different Amounts Of These Hormones, Is Something Worth Thinking About When It's Time To Judge Such Matters As Free Will, Individual Responsibility, And Law And Order.

If The Constellations Had Been Named In The Twentieth Century, I Suppose We Would See Bicycles And Refrigerators In The Sky.

We Humans Appear On The Cosmic Calendar So Recently That Our Recorded History Occupies Only The Last Few Seconds Of The Last Minute Of December 31st.

If We Are Not Able To Ask Skeptical Questions, To Interrogate Those Who Tell Us That Something Is True, To Be Skeptical Of Those In Authority, Then, We Are Up For Grabs For The Next Charlatan (political Or Religious) Who Comes Rambling Along.

Don't Judge Everyone Else By Your Own Limited Experience.

People Are Not Stupid. They Believe Things For Reasons. The Last Way For Skeptics To Get The Attention Of Bright, Curious, Intelligent People Is To Belittle Or Condescend Or To Show Arrogance Toward Their Beliefs.

Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, And Albert Einstein Made Serious Mistakes. But The Scientific Enterprise Arranges Things So That Teamwork Prevails: What One Of Us, Even The Most Brilliant Among Us, Misses, Another Of Us, Even Someone Much Less Celebrated And Capable, May Detect And Rectify.

There Are As Many Atoms In One Molecule Of Dna As There Are Stars In A Typical Galaxy.

It Is The Responsibility Of Scientists Never To Suppress Knowledge, No Matter How Awkward That Knowledge Is, No Matter How It May Bother Those In Power; We Are Not Smart Enough To Decide Which Pieces Of Knowledge Are Permissible, And Which Are Not.

The Romans Called The Christians Atheists. Why? Well, The Christians Had A God Of Sorts, But It Wasn't A Real God. They Didn't Believe In The Divinity Of Apotheosized Emperors Or Olympian Gods. They Had A Peculiar, Different Kind Of God. So It Was Very Easy To Call People Who Believed In A Different Kind Of God Atheists. And That General Sense That An Atheist Is Anybody Who Doesn't Believe Exactly As I Do Prevails In Our Own Time.

The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is A Kind Of Skywriting. At First It Seemed To Spell Out Our Continuing Complacency Before A Witch's Brew Of Deadly Perils. But Perhaps It Really Tells Of A Newfound Talent To Work Together To Protect The Global Environment.

An Atheist Is Someone Who Is Certain That God Does Not Exist, Someone Who Has Compelling Evidence Against The Existence Of God. I Know Of No Such Compelling Evidence.

It Would Be Wryly Interesting If In Human History The Cultivation Of Marijuana Led Generally To The Invention Of Agriculture, And Thereby To Civilization.

The Illegality Of Cannabis Is Outrageous, An Impediment To Full Utilization Of A Drug Which Helps Produce The Serenity And Insight, Sensitivity And Fellowship So Desperately Needed In This Increasingly Mad And Dangerous World.

Dangerous World

Some 5 Billion Years From Now, There Will Be A Last Perfect Day On Earth... Then The Sun Will Begin To Die, Life Will Be Extinguished, The Oceans Will Boil And Evaporate Away.

Because Men, Compared To Male Chimps, Have Such Relatively Small Testicles (large Testicles Indicate A Species Where Many Males Mate, One After The Other, With The Same Female), We Might Guess That Promiscuous Societies Were Uncommon In The Immediate Human Past.

She Had Studied The Universe All Her Life, But Had Overlooked Its Clearest Message: For Small Creatures Such As We The Vastness Is Bearable Only Through Love.

Small Creatures

The Brain Is Like A Muscle. When It Is In Use We Feel Very Good. Understanding Is Joyous.

For Myself, I Like A Universe That, Includes Much That Is Unknown And, At The Same Time, Much That Is Knowable. A Universe In Which Everything Is Known Would Be Static And Dull, As Boring As The Heaven Of Some Weak-minded Theologians. A Universe That Is Unknowable Is No Fit Place For A Thinking Being. The Ideal Universe For Us Is One Very Much Like The Universe We Inhabit. And I Would Guess That This Is Not Really Much Of A Coincidence.

We Are At A Crossroads In Human History. Never Before Has There Been A Moment So Simultaneously Perilous And Promising. We Are The First Species To Have Taken Evolution Into Our Own Hands.

Our Loyalties Are To The Species And The Planet. We Speak For Earth. Our Obligation To Survive Is Owed Not Just To Ourselves But Also To That Cosmos, Ancient And Vast, From Which We Spring.

We Live On A Mote Of Dust Suspended In A Sunbeam

All Of Us Cherish Our Beliefs. They Are, To A Degree, Self-defining. When Someone Comes Along Who Challenges Our Belief System As Insufficiently Well-based - Or Who, Like Socrates, Merely Asks Embarrassing Questions That We Haven't Thought Of, Or Demonstrates That We've Swept Key Underlying Assumptions Under The Rug - It Becomes Much More Than A Search For Knowledge. It Feels Like A Personal Assault.

Embarrassing Questions

When Permitted To Listen To Alternative Opinions And Engage In Substantive Debate, People Have Been Known To Change Their Minds. It Can Happen.

Better The Hard Truth, I Say, Than The Comforting Fantasy. And In The Final Tolling It Often Turns Out That The Facts Are More Comforting Than The Fantasy.

The Hindu Religion Is The Only One Of The World’s Great Faiths Dedicated To The Idea That The Cosmos Itself Undergoes An Immense, Indeed An Infinite, Number Of Deaths And Rebirths. It Is The Only Religion In Which The Time Scales Correspond, No Doubt By Accident, To Those Of Modern Scientific Cosmology. Its Cycles Run From Our Ordinary Day And Night To A Day And Night Of Brahma, 8.64 Billion Years Long, Longer Than The Age Of The Earth Or The Sun And About Half The Time Since The Big Bang.

I Think The Discomfort That Some People Feel In Going To The Monkey Cages At The Zoo Is A Warning Sign.

The Immense Distances To The Stars And The Galaxies Mean That We See Everything Ins Pace Int He Past, Some As They Were Before The Earth Came To Be. Telescopes Are Time Machines.

If We Could Travel Into The Past, It's Mind-boggling What Would Be Possible. For One Thing, History Would Become An Experimental Science, Which It Certainly Isn't Today. The Possible Insights Into Our Own Past And Nature And Origins Would Be Dazzling. For Another, We Would Be Facing The Deep Paradoxes Of Interfering With The Scheme Of Causality That Has Led To Our Own Time And Ourselves. I Have No Idea Whether It's Possible, But It's Certainly Worth Exploring.

'in His Celebrated Book, 'on Liberty', The English Philosopher John Stuart Mill Argued That Silencing An Opinion Is "a Peculiar Evil." If The Opinion Is Right, We Are Robbed Of The "opportunity Of Exchanging Error For Truth"; And If It's Wrong, We Are Deprived Of A Deeper Understanding Of The Truth In Its "collision With Error." If We Know Only Our Own Side Of The Argument, We Hardly Know Even That: It Becomes Stale, Soon Learned By Rote, Untested, A Pallid And Lifeless Truth.'

If We Do Not Speak For Earth, Who Will? If We Are Not Committed To Our Own Survival, Who Will Be?

One Glance At A Book And You Hear The Voice Of Another Person, Perhaps Someone Dead For 1,000 Years. To Read Is To Voyage Through Time.

For Years I've Been Stressing With Regard To Ufos That Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.

We Are A Way For The Cosmos To Know Itself.

We Should Be Teaching Our Children The Scientific Method And The Reasons For A Bill Of Rights. With It Comes A Certain Decency, Humility And Community Spirit.

Whatever The Reason You're On Mars, I'm Glad You're There, And I Wish I Was With You.

I Went To The Librarian And Asked For A Book About Stars.... And The Answer Was Stunning. It Was That The Sun Was A Star But Really Close. The Stars Were Suns, But So Far Away They Were Just Little Points Of Light.... The Scale Of The Universe Suddenly Opened Up To Me. It Was A Kind Of Religious Experience. There Was A Magnificence To It, A Grandeur, A Scale Which Has Never Left Me. Never Ever Left Me.

We Are Star Stuff Which Has Taken Its Destiny Into Its Own Hands. The Loom Of Time And Space Works The Most Astonishing Transformations Of Matter.

We Are The First Species To Have Taken Our Evolution Into Our Own Hands.

Arguments From Authority Carry Little Weight – Authorities Have Made Mistakes In The Past. They Will Do So Again In The Future. Perhaps A Better Way To Say It Is That In Science There Are No Authorities; At Most, There Are Experts.

There Is Never Only One Of Anything In Nature.

Across The Sea Of Space, The Stars Are Other Suns.

The Visions We Offer Our Children Shape The Future.

Clutching Our Crystals And Religiously Consulting Our Horoscopes, Our Critical Faculties In Steep Decline, Unable To Distinguish Between What's True And What Feels Good, We Slide, Almost Without Noticing, Into Superstition And Darkness.

Maxwell's Equations Have Had A Greater Impact On Human History Than Any Ten Presidents.

If We're Capable Of Conjuring Up Terrifying Monsters In Childhood, Why Shouldn't Some Of Us, At Least On Occasion, Be Able To Fantasize Something Similar, Something Truly Horrifying, A Shared Delusion, As Adults?

We Are Rare And Precious Because We Are Alive, Because We Can Think As Well As We Can. We Are Privileged To Influence And Perhaps Control Our Future. I Believe We Have An Obligation To Fight For Life On Earth - Not Just For Ourselves, But For All Those, Humans And Others, Who Came Before Us, And To Whom We Are Beholden, And For All Those Who, If We Are Wise Enough, Will Come After.

Extinction Is The Rule. Survival Is The Exception.

Mass Extinction

Exception To The Rule

We Are The Product Of 4.5 Billion Years Of Fortuitous, Slow Biological Evolution. There Is No Reason To Think That The Evolutionary Process Has Stopped. Man Is A Transitional Animal. He Is Not The Climax Of Creation.

I Hold That Popularization Of Science Is Successful If, At First, It Does No More Than Spark The Sense Of Wonder.

The Politicians And The Religious Leaders And The Weapons Scientists Have Been At It For A Long Time And They've Made A Thorough Mess Of It. I Mean, We're In Deep Trouble.

It Is Said That Men May Not Be The Dreams Of The God, But Rather That The Gods Are The Dreams Of Men.

Every Kid Starts Out As A Natural-born Scientist, And Then We Beat It Out Of Them. A Few Trickle Through The System With Their Wonder And Enthusiasm For Science Intact.

All Civilizations Become Either Spacefaring Or Extinct.

Extraordinary Observations Require Extraordinary Evidence To Make Them Believable.

They (i. E., The Pythagoreans) Did Not Advocate The Free Confrontation Of Conflicting Points Of View. Instead, Like All Orthodox Religions, They Practised A Rigidity That Prevented Them From Correcting Their Errors.

Books Permit Us To Voyage Through Time, To Tap The Wisdom Of Our Ancestors.

Every Thinking Person Fears Nuclear War, And Every Technological State Plans For It. Everyone Knows It Is Madness, And Every Nation Has An Excuse

The Impediment To Scientific Thinking Is Not, I Think, The Difficulty Of The Subject. Complex Intellectual Feats Have Been Mainstays Even Of Oppressed Cultures. Shamans, Magicians And Theologians Are Highly Skilled In Their Intricate And Arcane Arts. No, The Impediment Is Political And Hierarchical.

The Cosmic Calendar Compresses The Local History Of The Universe Into A Single Year. If The Universe Began On January 1st It Was Not Until May That The Milky Way Formed. Other Planetary Systems May Have Appeared In June, July And August, But Our Sun And Earth Not Until Mid-september. Life Arose Soon After. We Humans Appear On The Cosmic Calendar So Recently That Our Recorded History Occupies Only The Last Few Seconds Of The Last Minute Of December 31st.

We Live In A Society Exquisitely Dependent On Science And Technology And Yet Have Cleverly Arranged Things So That Almost No One Understands Science And Technology.

Information Society

It's Sometimes Easier To Reject Strong Evidence Than To Admit That We've Been Wrong, This Is Information About Ourselves Worth Having.

What Does It Mean For A Civilisation To Be A Million Years Old? We Have Had Radio Telescopes And Spaceships For A Few Decades; Our Technical Civilisation Is A Few Hundred Years Old ... An Advanced Civilisation Millions Of Years Old Is As Much Beyond Us As We Are Beyond A Bushbaby Or A Macaque

Life Is But A Momentary Glimpse Of The Wonder Of This Astonishing Universe, And It Is Sad To See So Many Dreaming It Away On Spiritual Fantasy.

Except For Fools And Madmen, Everyone Knows That Nuclear War Would He An Unprecedented Human Catastrophe.

I Think If We Ever Reach The Point Where We Think We Thoroughly Understand Who We Are And Where We Came From, We Will Have Failed.

The Surface Of The Earth Is The Shore Of The Cosmic Ocean.

Where We Have Strong Emotions, We're Liable To Fool Ourselves.

There Are Wonders Enough Out There Without Our Inventing Any.

The Evidence, So Far At Least And Laws Of Nature Aside, Does Not Require A Designer. Maybe There Is One Hiding, Maddeningly Unwilling To Be Revealed.

If You Want To Make A [rhubarb] Pie From Scratch, First You Have To Create The Universe.

Your Religion Assumes That People Are Children And Need A Boogeyman So They'll Behave. You Want People To Believe In God So They'll Obey The Law. That's The Only Means That Occurs To You: A Strict Secular Police Force, And The Threat Of Punishment By An All-seeing God For Whatever The Police Overlook. You Sell Human Beings Short.

Is It Fair To Be Suspicious Of An Entire Profession Because Of A Few Bad Apples? There Are At Least Two Important Differences, It Seems To Me. First, No One Doubts That Science Actually Works, Whatever Mistaken And Fraudulent Claim May From Time To Time Be Offered. But Whether There Are Any Miraculous Cures From Faith-healing, Beyond The Body's Own Ability To Cure Itself, Is Very Much At Issue. Secondly, The Expose' Of Fraud And Error In Science Is Made Almost Exclusively By Science. But The Exposure Of Fraud And Error In Faith-healing Is Almost Never Done By Other Faith-healers.

There Is No Other Species On Earth That Does Science. It Is, So Far, Entirely A Human Invention, Evolved By Natural Selection In The Cerebral Cortex For One Simple Reason: It Works. It Is Not Perfect. It Can Be Misused. It Is Only A Tool. But It Is By Far The Best Tool We Have, Self-correcting, Ongoing, Applicable To Everything.

I Believe That In Every Person Is A Kind Of Circuit Which Resonates To Intellectual Discovery-and The Idea Is To Make That Resonance Work

How Is It That Hardly Any Major Religion Has Looked At Science And Concluded, “this Is Better Than We Thought! The Universe Is Much Bigger Than Our Prophets Said, Grander, More Subtle, More Elegant?” Instead They Say, “no, No, No! My God Is A Little God, And I Want Him To Stay That Way.” A Religion, Old Or New, That Stressed The Magnificence Of The Universe As Revealed By Modern Science Might Be Able To Draw Forth Reserves Of Reverence And Awe Hardly Tapped By The Conventional Faiths.

Virtually Every Major Technological Advance In The History Of The Human Species - Back To The Invention Of Stone Tools And The Domestication Of Fire - Has Been Ethically Ambiguous.

Stars Are Phoenixes, Rising From Their Own Ashes.

A Book Is Proof That Humans Are Capable Of Working Magic.

I Am Not An Atheist. An Atheist Is Someone Who Has Compelling Evidence That There Is No Judeo-christian-islamic God. I Am Not That Wise, But Neither Do I Consider There To Be Anything Approaching Adequate Evidence For Such A God. Why Are You In Such A Hurry To Make Up Your Mind? Why Not Simply Wait Until There Is Compelling Evidence?

Personally, I Would Be Delighted If There Were A Life After Death, Especially If It Permitted Me To Continue To Learn About This World And Others, If It Gave Me A Chance To Discover How History Turns Out.

A Religion Old Or New, That Stressed The Magnificence Of The Universe As Revealed By Modern Science, Might Be Able To Draw Forth Reserves Of Reverence And Awe Hardly Tapped By The Conventional Faiths. Sooner Or Later Such A Religion Will Emerge.

Teller Contended, Not Implausibly, That Hydrogen Bombs Keep The Peace, Or At Least Prevent Thermonuclear War, Because The Consequences Of Warfare Between Nuclear Powers Are Now Too Dangerous. We Haven't Had A Nuclear War Yet, Have We? But All Such Arguments Assume That The Nuclear-armed Nations Are And Always Will Be, Without Exception, Rational Actors, And That Bouts Of Anger And Revenge And Madness Will Never Overtake Their Leaders (or Military And Secret Police Officers In Charge Of Nuclear Weapons). In The Century Of Hitler And Stalin, This Seems Ingenuous.

Ufos: The Reliable Cases Are Uninteresting And In The Interesting Cases Are Unreliable.

Nobody Listens To Mathematicians.

Otherwise We Don't Run The Government The Government Runs Us

If We Long To Believe That The Stars Rise And Set For Us, That We Are The Reason There Is A Universe, Does Science Do Us A Disservice In Deflating Our Conceits?

The Cosmos Is All That Is Or Was Or Ever Will Be. Our Feeblest Contemplations Of The Cosmos Stir Us -- There Is A Tingling In The Spine, A Catch In The Voice, A Faint Sensation, As If A Distant Memory, Of Falling From A Height. We Know We Are Approaching The Greatest Of Mysteries.

We Live In An In-between Universe Where Things Change All Right...but According To Patterns, Rules, Or As We Call Them, Laws Of Nature.

If We Continue To Accumulate Only Power And Not Wisdom, We Will Surely Destroy Ourselves.

The Cannabis Experience Has Greatly Improved My Appreciation For Art, A Subject Which I Had Never Much Appreciated Before.

Understanding Is A Kind Of Ecstasy

It's A Lazy Saturday Afternoon, There's A Couple Lying Naked In Bed Reading Encyclopediea Brittannica To Each Other, And Arguing About Whether The Andromeda Galaxy Is More 'numinous' Than The Ressurection. Do They Know How To Have A Good Time, Or Don't They?

The Universe Forces Those Who Live In It To Understand It. Those Creatures Who Find Everyday Experience A Muddled Jumble Of Events With No Predictability, No Regularity, Are In Grave Peril. The Universe Belongs To Those Who, At Least To Some Degree, Have Figured It Out.

We Go About Our Daily Lives Understanding Almost Nothing Of The World.

We Are The Universe Experiencing Itself.

Humans - Who Enslave, Castrate, Experiment On, And Fillet Other Animals - Have Had An Understandable Penchant For Pretending Animals Do Not Feel Pain.

We Are The Custodians Of Life's Meaning.

I Would Love To Believe That When I Die I Will Live Again, That Some Thinking, Feeling, Remembering Part Of Me Will Continue.

I'm Only A Four-dimensional Creature. Haven't Got A Clue How To Visualise Infinity. Even Einstein Hadn't. I Know Because I Asked Him

Science Is A Way To Not Fool Ourselves.

Humans Are Very Good At Dreaming, Although You'd Never Know It From Your Television.

Religions Contradict One Another-on Small Matters, Such As Whether We Should Put On A Hat Or Take One Off On Entering A House Of Worship, Or Whether We Should Eat Beef And Eschew Pork Or The Other Way Around, All The Way To The Most Central Issues, Such As Whether There Are No Gods, One God, Or Many Gods.

All Over The World There Are Enormous Numbers Of Smart, Even Gifted, People Who Harbor A Passion For Science. But That Passion Is Unrequited. Surveys Suggest That Some 95% Of Americans Are "scientifically Illiterate." That's...the Same Fraction...of Slaves Who Were Illiterate Before The Civil War.

Maybe It's A Little Early. Maybe The Time Is Not Quite Yet. But Those Other Worlds - Promising Untold Opportunities - Beckon. Silently, They Orbit The Sun, Waiting.

A Stars Rich In Europium; Of Distant Galaxies Analyzed Through The Collective Light Of A Hundred Billion Constituent Stars. Astronomical Spectroscopy Is An Almost Magical Technique. It Amazes Me Still. Auguste Comte Picked A Particularly Unfortunate Example.

Some Racists Still Reject The Plain Testimony Written In The Dna That All The Races Are Not Only Human But Nearly Indistinguishable. . . .

A Proclivity For Science Is Embedded Deeply Within Us, In All Times, Places, And Cultures. It Has Been The Means For Our Survival. It Is Our Birthright. When, Through Indifference, Inattention, Incompetence, Or Fear Of Skepticism, We Discourage Children From Science, We Are Disenfranchisin G Them, Taking From Them The Tools Needed To Manage Their Future.

If Intelligence Is Our Only Edge, We Must Learn To Use It Better, To Shape It, To Understand Its Limitations And Deficiencies -- To Use It As Cats Use Stealth, As Katydids Use Camouflage -- To Make It The Tool Of Our Survival.

My Deeply Held Belief Is That If A God Of Anything Like The Traditional Sort Exists, Our Curiosity And Intelligence Are Provided By Such A God. We Would Be Unappreciative Of Those Gifts (as Well As Unable To Take Such A Course Of Action) If We Suppressed Our Passion To Explore The Universe And Ourselves. On The Other Hand, If Such A Traditional God Does Not Exist, Our Curiosity And Our Intelligence Are The Essential Tools For Managing Our Survival. In Either Case, The Enterprise Of Knowledge Is Consistent With Both Science And Religion, And Is Essential For The Welfare Of The Human Species.

I Would Love To Believe That When I Die I Will Live Again, That Some Thinking, Feeling, Remembering Part Of Me Will Continue. But As Much As I Want To Believe That, And Despite The Ancient And Worldwide Cultural Traditions That Assert An Afterlife, I Know Of Nothing To Suggest That It Is More Than Wishful Thinking.

He Sought A Way To Preserve The Past. John Hershel Was One Of The Founders Of A New Form Of Time Travel.... A Means To Capture Light And Memories. He Actually Coined A Word For It... Photography. When You Think About It, Photography Is A Form Of Time Travel. This Man Is Staring At Us From Across The Centuries, A Ghost Preserved By Light.

Nature Does Not Always Conform To Our Predispositions And Preferences, To What We Deem Comfortable And Easy To Understand.

We Humans Look Rather Different From A Tree. Without A Doubt We Perceive The World Differently Than A Tree Does. But Down Deep, At The Molecular Heart Of Life, The Trees And We Are Essentially Identical.

We've Begun At Last To Wonder About Our Origins, Star Stuff Contemplating The Stars, Organized Collections Of Ten Billion Billion Billion Atoms Contemplating The Evolution Of Matter, Tracing That Long Path By Which It Arrived At Consciousness Here On The Planet Earth And Perhaps Throughout The Cosmos. Our Obligation To Survive And Flourish Is Owed Not Just To Ourselves But Also To That Cosmos, Ancient And Vast, From Which We Spring.

It Means Nothing To Be Open To A Proposition We Don't Understand.

Be Grateful Everyday For The Brief But Magnificent Opportunity That Life Provides.

The Old Appeals To Racial, Sexual And Religious Chauvinism To Rabid Nationalist Fervor, Are Beginning Not To Work.

The Fact That So Little Of The Findings Of Modern Science Is Prefigured In Scripture To My Mind Casts Further Doubt On It Divine Inspiration.

Goddard Represented A Unique Combination Of Visionary Dedication And Technological Brilliance. He Studied Physics Because He Needed Physics To Get To Mars. In Reading The Notebooks Of Robert Goddard, I Am Struck By How Powerful His Exploratory And Scientific Motivations Were - And How Influental Speculative Ideas, Even Erroneous Ones, Can Be On The Shaping Of The Future.

I Don't Want To Believe. I Want To Know.

The Claim Is Also Sometimes Made That Science Is As Arbitrary Or Irrational As All Other Claims To Knowledge, Or That Reason Itself Is An Illusion. As Ethan Allen Said Those Who Invalidate Reason Ought Seriously To Consider Whether They Argue Against Reason With Or Without Reason; If With Reason, Then They Establish The Principle That They Are Labouring To Dethrone. If They Argue Without Reason, Which They Must Do, In Order To Be Consistent With Themselves, They Are Out Of Reach Of Rational Conviction, Nor Do They Deserve A Rational Argument.

But The Fact That Some Geniuses Were Laughed At Does Not Imply That All Who Are Laughed At Are Geniuses. They Laughed At Columbus, They Laughed At Fulton, They Laughed At The Wright Brothers. But They Also Laughed At Bozo The Clown.

Somewhere, Something Incredible Is Waiting To Be Known.

Atoms Are Mainly Empty Space. Matter Is Composed Chiefly Of Nothing.

The Universe Is Not Required To Be In Perfect Harmony With Human Ambition.

There Are No Forbidden Questions In Science, No Matters Too Sensitive Or Delicate To Be Probed, No Sacred Truths.

For A Long Time The Human Instinct To Understand Was Thwarted By Facile Religious Explanations.

The Total Number Of Stars In The Universe Is Larger Than All The Grains Of Sand On All The Beaches Of The Planet Earth.

We Can't Help It. Life Looks For Life.

The Fossil Record Implies Trial And Error, An Inability To Anticipate The Future, Features Inconsistent With An Efficient Great Designer (although Not With A Designer Of A More Remote And Indirect Temperament)

Trial And Error

The Suppression Of Uncomfortable Ideas May Be Common In Religion Or In Politics, But It Is Not The Path To Knowledge; It Has No In The Endeavor Of Science. We Do Not Know In Advance Who Will Discover Fundamental Insights.

One Trend That Bothers Me Is The Glorification Of Stupidity, That The Media Is Reassuring People It's Alright Not To Know Anything. That To Me Is Far More Dangerous Than A Little Pornography On The Internet.

At The Heart Of Science Is An Essential Balance Between Two Seemingly Contradictory Attitudes-an Openness To New Ideas, No Matter How Bizarre Or Counterintuitive They May Be, And The Most Ruthless Skeptical Scrutiny Of All Ideas, Old And New. This Is How Deep Truths Are Winnowed From Deep Nonsense.

I Set Before You Two Ways: You Can Use Your Technology To Destroy Yourselves Or To Carry You To The Planets And The Stars. It's Up To You.

The Understanding Of The Intent Of The Artist Which I Can Achieve When High Sometimes Carries Over To When I’m Down. This Is One Of Many Human Frontiers Which Cannabis Has Helped Me Traverse.

We Are Prodding, Challenging, Seeking Contradictions Or Small, Persistent Residual Errors, Proposing Alternative Explanations, Encouraging Heresy. We Give Our Highest Rewards To Those Who Convincingly Disprove Established Beliefs.

I Believe That The Extraordinary Should Be Pursued. But Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.

There Is Perhaps No Better A Demonstration Of The Folly Of Human Conceits Than This Distant Image Of Our Tiny World.

You Could Just As Well Say That An Agnostic Is A Deeply Religious Person With At Least A Rudimentary Knowledge Of Human Fallibility.

Science Is Merely An Extremely Powerful Method Of Winnowing What's True From What Feels Good.

The Simplest Thought, Like The Concept Of The Number One, Has An Elaborate Logical Underpinning.

What Distinguishes Our Species Is Thought. The Cerebral Cortex Is In A Way A Liberation. We Need No Longer Be Trapped In The Genetically Inherited Behavior Patterns Of Lizards And Baboons: Territoriality And Aggression And Dominance Hierarchies. We Are Each Of Us Largely Responsible For What Gets Put In To Our Brains. For What As Adults We Wind Up Caring For And Knowing About. No Longer At The Mercy Of The Reptile Brain We Can Change Ourselves. Think Of The Possibilities.

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