Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It’s a little easier if you’ve got a god to forgive you.[Ian McEwan; Sunday New York Times Magazine;
02 December 2007]
Category Archives: memes
Catching up on New Scientist the other evening I spotted an interesting piece attached to an article entitled “God’s place in a rational world“:
An Alternative reading of literature
Religion is not the only aspect of the human condition that could do with a little more rationality, said some delegates at Beyond Belief II [a symposium of scientists who don’t buy into the god meme]. Jonathan Gotschall, who teaches English literature at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, proposed marrying literary studies with a scientific style of inquiry.
Gottschall has already made waves among his colleagues by conducting an experiment on how people respond to literature. From interviews with readers about their responses to books, he has shown that in general people have similar reactions to a given text. This runs counter to the conventional idea that the meaning readers take from literature is dependent more on their cultural background than what the author intended. It also appears not to make sense, as literature is grounded in subjective rather than objective experience.
Gotschall, however, argues that the same can be said for literary criticism: the field is awash with irrational thought, he says, largely because most literature scholars believe that the humanities and science are distinct. As a result, literary theorists rely on opinion and conjecture, rather than trying to find solid, empirical evidence for their claims, he says. By adding an element of scientific thought to literary criticism, Gottschall says, we could unearth hidden truths about human nature and behaviour.
Interesting idea. Needs thinking about. My literarist friends please note!
Arthur C Clarke – Threat to Humanity
There’s an interview with SF author Arthur C Clarke in the current edition of BBC Focus magazine, which contains the following …
What’s the greatest threat humanity faces?
Organised religion polluting our minds as it pretends to deliver morality
and spiritual salvation. It’s spreading the most malevolent mind virus of
all. I hope our race can one day outgrow this primitive notion.
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Friday Five: Attack of Randomosity
What is something you collect? Why?
I don’t really collect anything these days. Although I suppose you could count books. But the book collecting is fairly random apart from a couple of areas of interest, but even these aren’t collected fanatically.
If you could make one ice cream flavor, what would the ingredients be and what would be the name?
1. Avocado. If it could be made green enough then call it “Green Slime”.
2. Grapefruit, Clementine and Lime. “Citrus Burst”
What can’t you go a day without?
Sleep. Lots of sleep.
What position do you sleep in? [back, right side, left side, stomach …]
Difficult one. I prefer to sleep on my stomach and I usually (until recently) used to go to sleep on the right side of my front. But I need to (re)train myself to sleep on my back or side — I have Obstructive Sleep Apnoea which means I need a CPAP machine and mask at night, and sleeping on my front disturbs the seal between mask and face.
What is your typical morning routine before work?
Wake up. Try to ignore the day. Eventually get up. Shave (if going in the office), wash and dress. Breakfast (fresh fruit or muesli with fruit juice). Try to remember to take tablets. Work. All condensed into as little time as possible so I get the maximum time in bed. 🙂
[Brought to you courtesy of Friday Five.]
Friday Five: Racing on the Thunder
1. Do you dance? No. I never have except at the occasional disco as a student. My knees wouldn’t do it now.
2. Would you consider yourself religious? Not in the least. I am anti all religions. I believe they are only devil worship, unnecessary and do more harm than good.
3. Do you talk about politics? Not if I can help it; after all politics is only another religion.
4. When is the last time you asked for forgiveness? Haven’t got a clue. I generally don’t need to be forgiven as I seldom if ever do anything wrong. 🙂
5. Friday fill-in:I’m holding out for a big lottery win and retirement. 🙂
[Brought to you courtesy of Friday Fiver]
Quote: All that we are …
All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.
[Dhammapada, Chapter 1:1-2]
Zen Mischievous Moments #134
Sign seen recently in a bookshop:
Fantasy Fiction — 2 for the Price of 3
What is Your Dangerous Idea?
Steve Mirsky has written an interesting column in the”Antigravity” series in September issue of Scientific American. It talks about a book with the title What is Your Dangerous Idea? edited by John Brockman in which scientists and intellectuals pose what they consider to be dangerous (mostly intellectual) ideas.
Some of the ideas quoted in the article include:
The planet is fine. The people are f*^#ed … the planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
The idea that we should all share our most dangerous ideas.
Test the hypothesis first posited as a child that a red towel tied around the neck will indeed confer the ability to fly.
Mirsky ends with
Bertrand Russell’s truly treacherous notion: “I wish to propose … a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it true.” The danger of ignoring this doctrine can almost certainly be found in the politics or world events stories on the front page of today’s New York Times. On whatever day you read this.
You can find the full article here.
So what is your dangerous idea? Add a comment to tell us! If nothing else it’s a fun game!
Oh, what, mine? Well let’s start with: Ban the motor car and the aeroplane!
Avatar
OK, the current meme wins; I’ll play the game!
I never thought about being in The Simpsons, but here I am …
Zen Mischievous Moments #130
Another piece from this week’s New Scientist but this time from a mainline article.
The article is titled The Last Place on Earth … and gives 17 examples of the last place you can find various “things”. I print the whole of number 7 below, it is so off the wall.
The last place on earth where you can still hear the strangest languages
ever spoken
The death of any language is a tragedy, but some are a more distressing loss than others. A handful of endangered languages are the last refuges of odd linguistic features that, once their host language disappears, will be gone forever.One is Tofa, spoken by a handful of nomads in the Eastern Sayan mountains of southern Siberia. Starting in the 1950s, the Soviet government forced the Tofa people to learn Russian and abandon their traditional ways of life. Now, there are only 25 Tofa speakers left, all elderly. When they die, one utterly unique feature of Tofa will disappear: a suffix, -sig, that means “to smell like”. In Tofa you can add -sig to the word ivi-, (reindeer) to describe someone who smells like a reindeer. No other language in the world is known to have this kind of suffix.
Linguist K David Harrison of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania has documented similar examples of endangered “information packaging” systems in his book When Languages Die. One of these is the body counting system used in an estimated 40 languages in Papua New Guinea. In languages like Kaluli and Kobon, the words for numbers are the names of body parts. So 1 to 10 in Kobon are “little finger, ring finger, middle finger, forefinger, thumb, wrist, forearm, inside elbow, bicep, shoulder”. To count higher, you count the collarbone and the hollow at the base of the throat – and then right down the other side, all the way to 23. You can count to 46 by counting back the other way and even higher by starting over and doing it all again. So 61 in Kobon is “hand turn around second time go back biceps other side”.