thought of the day.131

Reduce meat consumption and reduce suffering. What an easy way to make the world a better place.

..

Call on Hormel to make changes for animals!

thought of the day.130

There is no more dysfunctional parent figure in all of literature than the God of the bible. This often petty, more often angry and violent, and always jealous character, doesn’t want independent children but forever dependent ones forbidden to grow up and think for themselves.

thought of the day.129

“There is not sufficient love and goodness in the world to permit us to give some of it away to imaginary beings.”

~Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human, 1878

thought of the day.128

"Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is - whether the victim is human or animal - we cannot expect things to be much better in this world. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing, we set back the progress of humanity".

- Rachel Carson

thought of the day.127

The Origin of Heaven and Hell

Dreams about the deceased (understood by ancient people as communicating with the dead, and therefore not so dead) gave rise to the general idea of an after-life and our innate desire for justice in an often unjust world inspired the specific ideas of a heaven and hell where justice would ultimately prevail.

thought of the day.126

“We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a 'higher answer'--but none exists.”

~Stephen J. Gould

thought of the day.125

Church is for seekers of comfort, science for seekers of truth.

thought of the day.124

“For years many a thinking people have had gloomy forebodings as to the result of the immense power of the church in our political affairs. . . And the first step in the disestablishment of the church & of all churches is the taxation of church property. The government has no right to tax infidels for everything that takes the name of religion. For every dollar of church property untaxed, all other properties must be taxed one dollar more, and thus the poor man's home bears the burden of maintaining costly edifices from which he & his family are as effectively excluded--as though a policeman stood to bar their entrance, and in smaller towns all sects are building, building, building, not a little town in the western prairies but has its three & four churches & this immense accumulation of wealth is all exempt from taxation. In the new world as well as the old these rich ecclesiastical corporations are a heavy load on the shoulders of the people, for what wealth escapes, the laboring masses are compelled to meet. If all the church property in this country were taxed, in the same ratio poor widows are to day, we could soon roll off the national debt. . . .

The clergy of all sects are universally opposed to free thought & free speech, & if they had the power even in our republic to day would crush any man who dared to question the popular religion.”

~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

thought of the day.123

“Father [George] Coyne, [the Vatican astronomer] amazingly, admitted to me that there was literally no good reason at all to believe in God. Of course I promptly asked him why, then, he did believe. His answer was very simple: "I was brought up Catholic."’

~Richard Dawkins

thought of the day.122

To say that one’s actions can please or disappoint God is to say that one can control—at least to a degree—God.

thought of the day.121

“The last superstition of the human mind is the superstition that religion in itself is a good thing . . . [When the] shadow of religion disappeared forever . . . I felt that I was free from a disease.”

~ Samuel Porter Putnam, My Religious Experience, 1891

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)