Mr. Deity Greets Christopher Hitchens at the Gates of Heaven

in Comedy, Religion | July 11th, 2012

Christo­pher Hitchens left us sev­en months ago. Maybe, just maybe, that’s enough time for the light­heart­ed humor to begin. Enter Mr. Deity, the satir­i­cal video series that looks at the mun­dane strug­gles of our Cre­ator. In the new­ly-released sev­enth episode of Sea­son 5, Mr. Deity bum­bles his way through the lat­est dilem­ma — how to wel­come Hitchens to the heav­ens. Hitch remains, it turns out, as scrap­py and argu­men­ta­tive in death as in life. And, of course, there’s some­thing funny/ironic about a hard­ened athe­ist mak­ing a ruckus in the after­life. But per­haps you did­n’t need me to point that out.…

If you’re not acquaint­ed with Mr. Deity, you can start with the ear­li­est episodes here.

via Richard Dawkins

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Explorer David Livingstone’s Diary (Written in Berry Juice) Now Digitized with New Imaging Technology

in History, Religion, Science, Technology | June 7th, 2012

One of the 19th century’s most intrigu­ing fig­ures, the Scot­tish explor­er David Liv­ing­stone may be best known for words uttered by a reporter when the two men met on the shores of Lake Tan­ganyi­ka: “Dr. Liv­ing­stone, I pre­sume?”

David Liv­ing­stone dis­ap­peared in Africa for six years before meet­ing the famous­ly quot­ed Hen­ry Mor­ton Stan­ley. He was a hero in Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land for his rags-to-rich­es sto­ry of an impov­er­ished boy who went on to become a sci­en­tif­ic inves­ti­ga­tor and anti-slav­ery cru­sad­er. Liv­ing­stone became impas­sioned about the poten­tial of Chris­tian­i­ty to erad­i­cate the slave trade in Africa and took his mis­sion­ary work into the African inte­ri­or.

An avid chron­i­cler of his adven­tures, Liv­ing­stone left behind a num­ber of jour­nals, but one of his most vivid accounts—of a mas­sacre hit wit­nessed in 1871—has been inac­ces­si­ble until now. Liv­ing­stone’s 1871 Field Diary cap­tures a five-month peri­od when the explor­er was strand­ed in a vil­lage in the Con­go. He had run out of paper and ink to main­tain his usu­al jour­nal, so he impro­vised by writ­ing over an old copy of The Stan­dard news­pa­per using ink made from the seeds of a local berry.

In col­lab­o­ra­tion with British and Amer­i­can archivists, the UCLA Dig­i­tal Library Pro­gram used spec­tral imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy to dig­i­tize the del­i­cate mate­r­i­al. Over­all the site offers an inter­est­ing pre­sen­ta­tion of Livingstone’s work, though the diary pages them­selves aren’t too leg­i­ble. Crit­i­cal notes are abun­dant and intrigu­ing, and diary pages appear side-by-side with tran­scrip­tions. View­ers can zoom in to study Livingstone’s spi­dery script writ­ten per­pen­dic­u­lar to the news­pa­per copy. The spec­tral imag­ing process itself is worth a look. With­out this tech­nique, the diaries appear as noth­ing more than ghost­ly scrib­bles.

Pre­vi­ous to keep­ing this field diary, Liv­ing­stone embarked on a mis­sion to find the source of the Nile Riv­er, which he misiden­ti­fied. But his the­o­ries about cen­tral African water sys­tems are fas­ci­nat­ing. Liv­ing­stone was the first Euro­pean to see Mosi-oa-Tun­ya, “the smoke that thun­ders,” water­fall, which he renamed Vic­to­ria Falls after his monarch. His diaries pro­vide a peek into a time when explo­ration was dan­ger­ous, dif­fi­cult and even dead­ly. Liv­ing­stone died of Malar­ia in present-day Zam­bia, where his heart is buried under a tree. The rest of his remains were interred at West­min­ster Abbey.

Kate Rix is an Oak­land based free­lance writer. See more of her work at .

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Delivers the Greatest Science Sermon Ever

in Astronomy, Physics, Religion | May 29th, 2012

Just when you think you’ve had enough Neil deGrasse Tyson, anoth­er not-to-miss video comes along. This one comes from the 2006 Beyond Belief Con­fer­ence, and it fea­tures the astro­physi­cist giv­ing what’s been called the “great­est sci­ence ser­mon ever.” As a young­ster, Tyson stepped into the Hay­den Plan­e­tar­i­um (the insti­tu­tion he now runs) and he felt an unshak­able call­ing to study the uni­verse. It was­n’t unlike the feel­ing some­one under­goes when they’re reli­gious­ly born again. And ever since, Tyson has expe­ri­enced rev­e­la­tion after rev­e­la­tion, epiphany after epiphany, when study­ing the uni­verse, and espe­cial­ly when­ev­er he’s remind­ed that, chem­i­cal­ly speak­ing, we are in the uni­verse, and the uni­verse is in us. We’re all made of the same star­dust. How can that not leave us with an incred­i­bly spir­i­tu­al feel­ing?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

Stephen Col­bert Talks Sci­ence with Astro­physi­cist Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson & Richard Dawkins Pon­der the Big Enchi­la­da Ques­tions of Sci­ence

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Daniel Dennett (a la Jeff Foxworthy) Does the Routine, “You Might be an Atheist If…”

in Philosophy, Religion | May 28th, 2012

The Amer­i­can come­di­an Jeff Fox­wor­thy has a well known com­e­dy rou­tine called “You Might be a Red­neck If,” where he lists the self-mock­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties that answer the ques­tion. For exam­ple: You Might be a Red­neck If …

  1. Your wife has ever said, “Come move this trans­mis­sion so I can take a bath.”
  2. You own a home­made fur coat.
  3. You think a sub­di­vi­sion is part of a math prob­lem.
  4. You’ve ever financed a tat­too.
  5. You have ever used lard in bed.

The philoso­pher and cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist Daniel Den­nett picked up on this schtick when speak­ing at the Glob­al Athe­ist Con­ven­tion in Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia. And he asked a series of ques­tions meant to show that peo­ple might be a lit­tle less reli­gious, or a bit more athe­ist, than they might care to admit. So here it goes: You Might be an Athe­ist If…

  1. You don’t believe that Jesus is lit­er­al­ly the son of God.
  2. You don’t believe God actu­al­ly lis­tens to each and every­one’s prayers.
  3. You don’t think God picks sides when coun­tries go to war (or when foot­ball teams play each oth­er).
  4. Or, to put things dif­fer­ent­ly, If you believe God isn’t a per­son­al God, but rather is a benign force, a con­cept that enrich­es peo­ple’s lives.

You get the gist. By the time you’re done with the 45 minute talk, you’ll know whether you’re indeed a the­ist, or per­haps an athe­ist after all. It’s a real­i­ty check either way.

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Alan Watts On Why Our Minds And Technology Can’t Grasp Reality

in Philosophy, Religion, Technology, Television | April 13th, 2012

“The world is a mar­velous sys­tem of wig­gles,” says Alan Watts in a series of lec­tures I keep on my iPod at all times. He means that the world, as it real­ly exists, does not com­prise all the lines, angles, and hard edges that our var­i­ous sys­tems of words, sym­bols, and num­bers do. Were I to dis­till a sin­gle over­ar­ch­ing argu­ment from all I’ve read and heard of the body of work Watts pro­duced on Zen Bud­dhist thought, I would do so as fol­lows: human­i­ty has made astound­ing progress by cre­at­ing and read­ing “maps” of real­i­ty out of lan­guage, num­bers, and images, but we run an ever more dan­ger­ous risk of mis­tak­ing these maps for the land. In this 1971 Nation­al Edu­ca­tion­al Tele­vi­sion pro­gram, A Con­ver­sa­tion With Myself, Watts claims that our com­par­a­tive­ly sim­ple minds and the sim­ple tech­nolo­gies they’ve pro­duced have proven des­per­ate­ly inad­e­quate to han­dle real­i­ty’s actu­al com­plex­i­ty. But what to do about it?

Using an aes­thet­ic now rarely seen on tele­vi­sion, A Con­ver­sa­tion With Myself cap­tures, in only two unbro­ken shots, an infor­mal “lec­ture” deliv­ered by Watts straight to the view­er. Speak­ing first amid the abun­dant green­ery sur­round­ing his Mount Tamal­pais cab­in and then over a cup of cer­e­mo­ni­al Japan­ese green tea (“good on a cold day”), he explains why he thinks we have thus far failed to com­pre­hend the world and our inter­fer­ence with it. In part, we’ve failed because our “one-track” minds oper­at­ing in this “mul­ti-track” world insist on call­ing it inter­fer­ence at all, not real­iz­ing that the bound­aries between us, one anoth­er, our tech­nol­o­gy, and nature don’t actu­al­ly exist. They’re only arti­facts of the meth­ods we’ve used to look at the world, just like the dis­tor­tions you get when dig­i­tiz­ing a piece of ana­log sight or sound. Like ear­ly dig­i­ti­za­tion sys­tems, the crude tools we’ve been think­ing with have, in Watts’ view, forced all of real­i­ty’s “wig­gles” into unhelp­ful “lines and rows.” He sums up the prob­lem with a mem­o­rable dash of Bud­dha-by-way-of-Britain wit: “You’re try­ing to straight­en out a wig­gly world, and now you’re real­ly in trou­ble.”

(If you’d like a side of irony, pon­der for a moment the impli­ca­tions of absorb­ing all this not only through human lan­guage, but through tech­nol­o­gy like iPods and Google Video!)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alan Watts Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to Med­i­ta­tion & East­ern Phi­los­o­phy (1960)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Richard Dawkins Rallies for Reason in Washington DC

in Current Affairs, Religion, Science | March 27th, 2012

This week­end, an esti­mat­ed 20,000 agnos­tics, athe­ists and ardent sec­u­lar­ists gath­ered on the Nation­al Mall in rainy Wash­ing­ton DC. They were attend­ing the first Rea­son Ral­ly, an event intend­ed to “uni­fy, ener­gize, and embold­en sec­u­lar peo­ple nation­wide, while dis­pelling the neg­a­tive opin­ions held by so much of Amer­i­can soci­ety… and hav­ing a damn good time doing it!” Lawrence Krauss, Michael Sher­mer, Eddie Izzard — they all spoke to the crowd. And then came Richard Dawkins, the high priest of rea­son, the author of The Self­ish Gene, who spent decades teach­ing evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy at Oxford. In the mid­dle of his 16 minute talk, he tells the audi­ence, “We’re here to stand up for rea­son, to stand up for sci­ence, to stand up for log­ic, to stand up for the beau­ty of real­i­ty, and the beau­ty of the fact that we can under­stand real­i­ty.” I’m with you Richard on that. But then comes the scorn we’re now so accus­tomed to (“I don’t despise reli­gious peo­ple; I despise what they stand for.”), and my guess is that chang­ing per­cep­tions of agnos­tics, athe­ists and sec­u­lar­ists will need to wait for anoth­er day.

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30 Renowned Writers Speaking About God & Reason

in Books, Literature, Religion | January 30th, 2012

This past sum­mer, Jonathan Parara­jas­ing­ham, a neu­ro­sur­geon in Lon­don, cre­at­ed a mon­tage of 100 renowned aca­d­e­mics, most­ly all sci­en­tists, talk­ing about their thoughts on the exis­tence of God. (Find it in two parts here and here.) Now’s he back with a new video, 30 Renowned Writ­ers Speak­ing About God. It runs 25 min­utes, and it offers as much a cri­tique of ortho­dox reli­gious belief as it does a lit­er­ary trib­ute to human­ism and ratio­nal­ism. Isaac Asi­mov, Arthur C. Clarke, Salman Rushdie (who kind­ly tweet­ed us this week­end), Mar­garet Atwood, Philip Roth — they all make an appear­ance. The full list of writ­ers appears below the jump.

And, before we close, let me say this. When­ev­er we post videos like these, we get the ques­tion. Why the occa­sion­al focus on atheism/rationalism/humanism? And the sim­ple answer comes down to this: If you cov­er writ­ers, aca­d­e­mics and sci­en­tists, the think­ing skews in that direc­tion. Yes, there are excep­tions, but they are in short­er sup­ply. But if some­one pulls them togeth­er and makes a mon­tage, we’ll like­ly fea­ture it too. H/T RichardDawkins.net

Note: As you may have noticed, we have been expe­ri­enc­ing inter­mit­tent out­ages over the past cou­ple of days. Our host, Dreamhost, has been stum­bling more than we’d like. So we’re fig­ur­ing out alter­na­tives and hope­ful­ly mak­ing a move soon. Our apolo­gies for the incon­ve­nience!

(more…)

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Alain de Botton Wants a Religion for Atheists: Introducing Atheism 2.0

in Philosophy, Religion | January 26th, 2012

Last sum­mer Alain de Bot­ton, one of the bet­ter pop­u­lar­iz­ers of phi­los­o­phy, appeared at TED­G­lob­al and called for a new kind of athe­ism. An Athe­ism 2.0. This revised athe­ism would let athe­ists deny a cre­ator and yet not for­sake all the oth­er good things reli­gion can offer — tra­di­tion, rit­u­al, com­mu­ni­ty, insights into liv­ing a good life, the abil­i­ty to expe­ri­ence tran­scen­dence, tak­ing part in insti­tu­tions that can change the world, and the rest.

What he’s describ­ing kind of sounds like what already hap­pens in the Uni­tar­i­an Church … or The School of Life, a Lon­don-based insti­tu­tion found­ed by de Bot­ton in 2008. The school offers cours­es “in the impor­tant ques­tions of every­day life” and also hosts Sun­day Ser­mons that fea­ture “mav­er­ick cul­tur­al fig­ures” talk­ing about impor­tant prin­ci­ples to live by. Click here and you can watch sev­er­al past ser­mons pre­sent­ed by actress Miran­da July, physi­cist Lawrence Krauss, author Rebec­ca Sol­nit, and Alain de Bot­ton him­self.

If Athe­ism 2.0 piques your inter­est, you’ll want to pre-order de Bot­ton’s soon-to-be-pub­lished book, Reli­gion for Athe­ists: A Non-Believ­er’s Guide to the Uses of Reli­gion.

Thanks to Elana for send­ing this our way.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Athe­ism: A Rough His­to­ry of Dis­be­lief, with Jonathan Miller

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