Friday, April 22, 2011

"Some believers accuse skeptics of having nothing left but a dull, cold scientific world.  I am left with only art, music, literature, theater, the magnificence of nature, mathematics, the human spirit, sex, the cosmos, friendship, history, science, imagination, dreams, oceans, mountains, love and the wonder of birth.  That'll do me."
- Lynne Kelly

Thursday, April 7, 2011

"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring"
- Carl Sagan

Saturday, April 2, 2011

think about it

"The concept of 'God' invented as a counter-concept of life -- everything harmful, poisonous, slanderous, the whole hostility unto death against life synthesized in this concept in a gruesome unity! The concept of the 'beyond,' the 'true world' invented in order to devaluate the only world there is -- in order to retain no goal, no reason, no task for our earthly reality! The concept of the 'soul,' the 'spirit,' finally even 'immortal soul,' invented in order to despise the body, to make it sick - 'holy'; to oppose with a ghastly levity everything that deserves to be taken seriously in life, the questions of nourishment, abode, spiritual diet, treatment of the sick, cleanliness, and weather! In place of health, the 'salvation of the soul' -- that is, a folie circulaire [manic-depressive insanity] between penitential convulsions and hysteria about redemption! The concept of 'sin' invented along with the torture instrument that belongs with it, the concept of 'free will,' in order to confuse the instincts, to make mistrust of the instincts second nature!"
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo