I have been blogging here for some time now and this morning I was looking back at some of my earlier posts, in particular those with video content. I re watched the excellent TED talk by Michael Shermer in this post and decided to look for other lectures by this fascinating man and stumbled across the talk called Why Darwin Matters, below.
After watching it in it’s entirety (set aside an hour and a coffee) I soon became aware that this one video actually summarises my stance on science, religion and education almost perfectly. Watch this and you will - or should - get it. He uses humour, is able to put some of the most complex topics into plain english and has such an easy to follow way of speaking. Michael Shermer is one of my favourite lecturers.
Tags: carl sagan, christianity, churches & cults, creationism, dinosaurs, education, evolution, intelligent design, religion, science, space
Let’s give religion a break - to be honest, it’s a dead issue as far as I’m concerned. There’s enough words written here (and linked to) to provide ample evidence to anyone with an open mind that all gods are man made.
Skepticism interests me more now and the effort needs to be made to debunk and ridicule, where necessary, the kind of silly thinking that humans waste so much time on during their lives. I’ve touched on spiritualism and mediums in other posts - this time I’ll take on the UFO ‘phenomena’.
Firstly, I’m 100% convinced that other sentient life exists in the universe. If you consider the trillions of suns and billions of planets that exist ‘out there’, the odds that our earth is the only one that life and then intelligent life has evolved on, is frankly ridiculous. In our galaxy alone there are around 100 billion stars and there are billions of other GALAXIES - you do the math. But a couple of points are often dismissed by those who believe that we have been visited by aliens is - distance, or the reality of getting from one star or galaxy to another.
As I was updating the random youtube videos today (sorry it’s been so long!), I was watching the Michael Shermer video below and a thought suddenly struck me. If evolution and natural selection in particular are working as we know they do - will humans eventually evolve to lose the need for irrational beliefs?
What I mean is, will humans who prefer to believe in the power of prayer over medical science or vaccination eventually die out due to their beliefs - or am I being too hopeful here? As Shermer discusses in the TED video, our brains have evolved with something he calls ‘patternicity’ that was very useful when our survival depended on it working correctly. I’d argue that because we no longer need this as much as we did, then possibly we may evolve to lose or have it greatly reduced - and this might be beneficial to the species.
I have just watched the National Press Club featuring the British climate change denier Chris Monckton (you can watch it here) in it’s entirety and came away with the sad feeling that it doesn’t matter how much scientific evidence is presented to some people, if they start out with a preconceived viewpoint then you are wasting your time.
I then stumbled upon Bill Maher’s video that uses humour to explain the real problem well. The ‘we must give equal air time to the crackpots because there’s two sides to every story’ problem I mean.
It’s damn funny to boot…
Tags: education, fears, global warming, humour, science
As the evening of the 2011 Census draws very near, I thought I’d echo the thoughts of many free thinkers and add my two cents worth to the Religion Question discussion.
Not having seen this years’s census questions (we decided to do ours online this year. It will be interesting to see whether the site stands up with millions of hits over a short period of time!) - we can only assume it will be the same or similar to the last one, which looked like this:
Tags: atheists, christianity, churches & cults, education, religion
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