thought of the day.120

“To talk about a Superior Being is a dip in superstition, and is just as bad as to let in an Inferior Being or a Devil.

When you once attribute effects to the will of a personal God, you have let in a lot of little gods and evils--then sprites, fairies, dryads, naiads, witches, ghosts and goblins, for your imagination is reeling, riotous, drunk, afloat on the flotsam of superstition. What you know then doesn't count. You just believe, and the more you believe the more do you plume yourself that fear and faith are superior to science and seeing.”

~ Elbert Hubbard

thought of the day.119

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

~Albert Einstein

thought of the day.118

“But the original problem with religion is that it is our first, and our worst, attempt at explanation. It is how we came up with answers before we had any evidence. It belongs to the terrified childhood of our species, before we knew about germs or could account for earthquakes. It belongs to our childhood, too, in the less charming sense of demanding a tyrannical authority: a protective parent who demands compulsory love even as he exacts a tithe of fear. This unalterable and eternal despot is the origin of totalitarianism, and represents the first cringing human attempt to refer all difficult questions to the smoking and forbidding altar of a Big Brother. This of course is why one desires that science and humanism would make faith obsolete, even as one sadly realizes that as long as we remain insecure primates we shall remain very fearful of breaking the chain.”

~Christopher Hitchens

thought of the day.117

“How can we find spiritual meaning in a scientific worldview? Spirituality is a way of being in the world, a sense of one's place in the cosmos, a relationship to that which extends beyond ourselves. In this sense, science and spirituality are complementary, not conflicting; additive, not detractive. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. And, I think science does this in spades.

I am deeply moved, for example, when I observe through my eight-inch telescope in my backyard the fuzzy little patch of light that is the Andromeda galaxy. It is not just because it is lovely, but because I also understand that the photons of light landing on my retina left Andromeda 3 million years ago, when our ancestors were tiny-brained hominids roaming the plains of Africa.

I am doubly stirred because it was not until 1923 that the astronomer Edwin Hubble, using the 100-inch telescope on Mt. Wilson just above us here in the San Gabriel mountains, discovered that this "nebula" was actually an extragalactic stellar system of immense size and distance. Hubble subsequently discovered that the light from most galaxies is shifted toward the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum, meaning that the universe is expanding away from an explosive creation. It was the first empirical evidence indicating that the universe had a beginning.

What could be more awe-inspiring—more numinous, magical, spiritual—than this cosmic visage? For my money, Mt. Wilson Observatory is the Chartres Cathedral of our time, and I recommend that you make the 25-mile trek up Angeles Crest Highway (Highway 2, off the 210 freeway in La Canada, its a public venue so everyone can go) to see it and be moved that our species in our generation was able to widen our cosmic horizons by so much—from 1900 light years in Hubble's time to 13.7 billion light years in our time—the universe grew by seven orders of magnitude in our time alone. That's even more than the federal deficit!

So in conclusion, what science tells us is that we are but one among hundreds of millions of species that evolved over the course of three and a half billion years on one tiny planet among many orbiting an ordinary star, itself one of possibly billions of solar systems in an ordinary galaxy that contains hundreds of billions of stars, itself located in a cluster of galaxies not so different from millions of other galaxy clusters, whirling away from one another in an accelerating expanding cosmic bubble universe, that very possibly is only one among a near infinite number of bubble universes.

Herein lies the spiritual side of science—sciencuality, if you will pardon an awkward neologism but one that echoes the sensuality of discovery. If religion and spirituality are suppose to generate awe and humility in the face of the creator, what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists, and the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionists?

Through a natural process of evolution, and a creative course of culture, we have inherited the mantle of life's caretaker on earth, the only home we have ever known. The realization that we exist together for a narrow slice of time and a limited parsec of space, potentially elevates us all to a higher plane of humanity and humility, a passing proscenium in the drama of the cosmos.”

~ Michael Shermer

thought of the day.116

Authentic “Christ-like” behavior would include failing to condemn fundamental injustices such as slavery, cursing to death innocent life in anger, refusing to help people outside one’s small circle of compassion, demonizing and threatening people who don’t agree with you, dividing families, and promising to destroy the world and torture countless souls for eternity.

thought of the day.115

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

“I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish--where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source--where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials--and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all. . . .

“Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end--where all men and all churches are treated as equal--where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice--where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind--and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.”

~ John F. Kennedy

thought of the day.114

“If religion isn't the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress, what is? Perhaps alcohol, or television, or addictive video games. But although each of these scourges - mixed blessings, in fact - has the power to overwhelm our best judgment and cloud our critical faculties, religion has a feature of that none of them can boast: it doesn't just disable, it honours the disability. People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world, to shield their minds from factual knowledge and make the major decisions of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals designed to intoxicate them.”

~Daniel Dennett

thought of the day.113

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilized interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.”

~Albert Einstein

thought of the day.112

“Christ, according to the faith, is the second person in the Trinity, the Father being the first and the Holy Ghost the third. Each of these persons is God. Christ is his own father and his own son. The Holy Ghost is neither father nor son, but both. The son was begotten by the father, but existed before he was begotten--just the same before as after. . . .

“So, it is declared that the Father is God, and the Son God, and the Holy Ghost God, and that these three Gods make one God.

“According to the celestial multiplication table, once one is three, and three times one is one, and according to heavenly subtraction, if we take two from three, three are left. The addition is equally peculiar, if we add two to one, we have but one. . .

“Nothing ever was, nothing ever can be more perfectly idiotic and absurd than the dogma of the Trinity.”

~ Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)

thought of the day.111

“For the supposed crimes of heresy and witchcraft, hundreds of women endured such persecutions and tortures that the most stolid historians are said to have wept in recording them; and no one can read them to-day but with a bleeding heart. And, as the Christian Church grew stronger, woman's fate grew more helpless. Even the Reformation and Protestantism brought no relief, the clergy being all along their most bitter persecutors, the inventors of the most infernal tortures. Hundreds and hundreds of fair young girls, innocent as the angels in heaven, hundreds and hundreds of old women, weary and trembling with the burdens of life, were hunted down by emissaries of the Church, dragged into the courts with the ablest judges and lawyers of England, Scotland and America on the bench, and tried for crimes that never existed but in the wild, fanatical imaginations of religious devotees. Women were accused of consorting with devils and perpetuating their diabolical propensities. Hundreds of these children of hypothetical origin were drowned, burned, and tortured in the presence of their mothers, to add to their death agonies. These things were not done by savages or pagans: they were done by the Church. Neither were they confined to the Dark Ages, but permitted by law in England far into the eighteenth century. The clergy everywhere sustained witchcraft as Bible doctrine, until the spirit of rationalism laughed the whole thing to scorn, and science gave mankind a more cheerful view of life.”

~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Christian Church and Women.” 1888.

thought of the day.110

"I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally.”

~ Archbishop Oscar Romero, September 23, 1979.

thought of the day.109

“Evil is real, but an external being who causes it is a human projection of part of our own reality into the external world of being. The devil is an excuse, someone to blame, part of the system of control that religious institutions set up to keep themselves dominant.

Belief in an external devil has done more harm than we can imagine. Executing the witches of Salem, Massachusetts, is only one of them.

It is time for the human race to grow up and let go of these childish ideas.”

~ John Shelby Spong

thought of the day.108

Test of Faith. Judges

God made people
A. love each other
B. kill each other

Jepthah gave thanks to God by
A. baptising his daughter
B. killing his daughter

The Israelites found wives by
A. courting them for 40 days to be sure they were equally yolked
B. capturing virgins after killing their families and friends

Judges 7:22, 11:30-40, 21:8-12

thought of the day.107

In this age of environmental crises, the Golden Rule of "treating others as you would like to be treated” might be better understood as “what you do unto others you do unto yourself.”

thought of the day.106

The findings of countless dedicated scientists in the diverse fields of geology, paleontology, biogeography, zoology, botany, comparative anatomy, molecular biology, genetics and embryology all point to the fact of evolution. But the fundamentalist Christian preachers know science better than the scientists and have done their part to encourage half the population of the United States to reject mountains of evidence in favor of belief that man was fashioned from dirt and woman from a rib bone. This denigrating of facts in favor of faith is but one example of the danger of religious leaders.

thought of the day.105

“Free thought means fearless thought. It is not deterred by legal penalties, nor by spiritual consequences. Dissent from the Bible does not alarm the true investigator, who takes truth for authority not authority for truth. The thinker who is really free, is independent; he is under no dread; he yields to no menace; he is not dismayed by law, nor custom, nor pulpits, nor society--whose opinion appals so many. He who has the manly passion of free thought, has no fear of anything, save the fear of error.”

~ George Jacob Holyoake, The Origin and Nature of Secularism, 1896

thought of the day.104

Argument over the idea of a holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost led to a dark history of persecution, murder, war, and an industry (Church) of much nonsense. How much more peace might we enjoy if our holy Trinity was: Be Grateful, Compassionate and Aware.

thought of the day.103

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

thought of the day.102

Test of Faith. 1 Timothy

Women in church are
A. equal to men
B. not allowed to teach men

Women in church
A. are free to speak
B. must keep quiet

Slaves of Christian masters must be
A. set free for it’s a sin to own a human
B. especially obedient

1 Timothy 2:8-15, 6:1-2

thought of the day.101

It seems Reality is deep like an ocean and all we see is the surface—
and even that glimpse is obscured by our human frailties.