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News Briefs 18-12-2013

By Rick MGon

This is my last news briefs for 2013. Thank you for reading my mad wanderings & eclectic finds. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season. So until next year, here are a few of my favourite things…

Thanks to the trickster of pronoia.

Quote of the Day:

I have some discomfort both with believers and with nonbelievers when their opinions are not based on facts. I am extremely uncomfortable with dogmatic atheists, who claim there can be no God; to my knowledge, there is no strong evidence for that position.

I’m also uncomfortable with dogmatic believers; to my knowledge, they don’t have any strong evidence either. If we don’t know the answer, why are we under so much pressure to make up our minds, to declare our allegiance to one hypotheses or the other?

~ Carl Sagan (Amazon)

Rick MG
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15 Comments

  1. Tyson & Einstein join Sagan in rejecting atheism
    Neil deGrasse Tyson explains why he is an agnostic, not an atheist:
    http://tinyurl.com/7v5kcrw

    Albert Einstein: “I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. … But I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.”

    “There are people who say there is no God, but what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views. I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what that is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the most intelligent human toward God.”

    1. Dappled light
      Cheers Rob. I like Sagan’s quote particularly for this:

      If we don’t know the answer, why are we under so much pressure to make up our minds, to declare our allegiance to one hypotheses or the other?

      We’ve been banging this drum here at the Grail for years. I’ll swim with the mystics any day of the week before I’ll sleep with an atheist (although I’m open to the experience!); but I’m happy mucking about here in the big blue ocean of open-minded but-not-quite-gullible agnosticism.

      To be honest, some days I really don’t want to know. It’s enough to just be. Humility in the presence of the Big Wow. I like being a kid in a library.

  2. “Why do some people think science can explain everything”
    I have that thought so many times. My guess is that those people do not allow themselves objective awareness of more/other than the physical.

  4. How refreshing the President
    How refreshing the President of Uruguay…

    Not a greedy power driven narcissist! And fascinating his thought about the war on poverty aka trying to raise everybody’s consumption level to the degradation of the world. Good perspective I never specifically considered. Basic relativism in his philosophy that one is only poor when one is chasing materialism, making them a slave to labor. He chooses to live austerely and be freed from worries and values his time. I know time speeds up with each passing year relative to the time we’ve lived, but it accelerates exponentially once children are thrown into the mix. Chasing the money, working the job, rushing to kid’s activities, studies, fulfilling their needs – all one big mad rush from morning to night, the days become a blur of weeks and months. I like this guy, though admittedly I like my materialist comforts too.

  6. sacred history
    I actually quite enjoyed, and occasionally revisit, his 2009 work “The Secret History of the World” and I was amazed how it was just ripped to shreds (in some cases perhaps literally) by the reviewers from the UK. I look forward to this book as well.

    1. re: Sacred History
      [quote=LastLoup]I actually quite enjoyed, and occasionally revisit, his 2009 work “The Secret History of the World” [/quote]

      Thanks as I didn’t make the connection. I have that book.

      Bad-ass cover on the new one

        1. The EVP article writer
          The EVP article writer appears to be ignorant of the state of the art as evinced by the more masterful crews such as Ghost Adventures. There isn’t anything vague or ambiguous about some of the EVP’s they have collected. Some of them are clear as a bell and quite “intelligent.” I have to wonder how a serious journalist on this subject can write an article about it that does not include such crews of paranormal researchers some of whom have whittled EVP down to an art.

          1. EVPs
            Do you watch Haunted Highway? If so did you see the one were they were investigating the Black Angel grave and they kept getting the EVP screaming “MURDER”? I think the science is getting better. Tesla once thought of a way to set up a telegraph system to talk to spirits, now we have EVPs and I have become fascinated with the history. A friend of mine does EVP sessions on her ghost tours and on the one I went with her we got on saying “WHALE” as we were near an old fishing town.

            Always interesting…

          2. I have been watching Haunted
            I have been watching Haunted Highway a bit, but those kids are not exactly what you would call real savvy about spirit phenomena. For instance, the black angel IR images they were getting were probably caused by the absorption of sun heat through the day, and then it showed up on their IR cameras at night as the statue slowly cooled down. That sort of thing mars their investigations, but they do get some really good stuff every now and then. They will mature over time one hopes.

          3. the sun
            [quote=emlong]For instance, the black angel IR images they were getting were probably caused by the absorption of sun heat through the day, and then it showed up on their IR cameras at night as the statue slowly cooled down.[/quote]

            Yeah that I knew, and I find myself yelling at the TV a lot “It was probably a raccoon!” Little “common sense” things on that show bug the crap out of me, like when they were on the island prison and found a thick old chain which they thought was a prisoner’s. Absolutely no knowledge of island life or seafaring…it was a mooring chain, so a boat could dock to it. Maybe I’d be a little more fascinated if I didn’t live 15 minutes away from a shipyard, but…It’s not a bad show for the time being until the new seasons of other shows come back in a few weeks.

          4. The blunder into some very
            The blunder into some very intriguing things, but “blunder” is the operative word here. They are intended to attract a very young and enthusiastic if often gullible audience, so I get the point of using them to anchor a series.

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