Up@dawn 2.0

Sunday, March 17, 2024

With a twist

https://www.threads.net/@secularstudents/post/C4ldY7RpyuK/?xmt=AQGzS4EPsZQrPIeTnFjkg65_dfbvAoTPAeUoISINPLSjvQ

Religion is losing influence in public life, 8 in 10 Americans say | Pew Research Center

 Overall, there are widespread signs of unease with religion's trajectory in American life. This dissatisfaction is not just among religious Americans. Rather, many religious and nonreligious Americans say they feel that their religious beliefs put them at odds with mainstream culture, with the people around them and with the other side of the political spectrum...

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/03/15/8-in-10-americans-say-religion-is-losing-influence-in-public-life/

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Colbert and Simon of faith, gratitude, happiness, sublimity

 This interview is "incredible"-meaning delightful

I don't agree, I do think happiness (not sublimity) is the more profound "goal"… but I respect Stephen's thoughtful (if slightly manic) reflections here. And his experience, and his pain and suffering. And I share his gratitude. I just don't think I owe it to a god.

But as Montaigne said, "Que sais-je"… I don't know, and neither do you. Believe what you will.

Paul's a Yankee fan and a scorekeeper, and his gratitude is unconditional. He and I are co-congregants in the Church of Baseball. Time to cue up Graceland...



Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Ripples: Terry Pratchett

'No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away... The span of someone's life is only the core of their actual existence.' The great humanist author Terry Pratchett. He was our patron and is sorely missed. He died #OnThisDay 2015. GNU Terry Pratchett.

https://www.threads.net/@humanists_uk/post/C4ajxc3I9ur/?xmt=AQGzKkiKd2K0_NxXdYXJBmuxbTDFt3-Xw8wBpkH7flo3kg

Thursday, February 8, 2024

This is us (on the cosmic calendar)

I don't want this story (ours or Harvey's) to end. But of course, time will march on – with or without us. Eventually without, no doubt. As Russell says, we must in the meantime turn our attention to other things.

"…In the closing second of the cosmic year there's industrialisation, fascism, the combustion engine, Augusto Pinochet, Nikola Tesla, Frida Kahlo, Malala Yousafzai, Alexander Hamilton, Viv Richards, Lucky Luciano, Ada Lovelace, crowdfunding, the split atom, Pluto, surrealism, plastic, Einstein, FloJo, Sitting Bull, Beatrix Potter, Indira Gandhi, Niels Bohr, Calamity Jane, Bob Dylan, Random Access Memory, soccer, pebble-dash, unfriending, the Russo-Japanese War, Coco Chanel, antibiotics, the Burj Khalifa, Billie Holiday, Golda Meir, Igor Stravinsky, pizza, Thermos flasks, the Cuban Missile Crisis, thirty summer Olympics and twenty-four winter, Katsushika Hokusai, Bashar Assad, Lady Gaga, Erik Satie, Muhammad Ali, the deep state, the world wars, flying, cyberspace, steel, transistors, Kosovo, teabags, W. B. Yeats, dark matter, jeans, the stock exchange, the Arab Spring, Virginia Woolf, Alberto Giacometti, Usain Bolt, Johnny Cash, birth control, frozen food, the sprung mattress, the Higgs boson, the moving image, chess. Except of course the universe doesn't end at the stroke of midnight. Time moves on…"

— Orbital by Samantha Harvey
https://a.co/5Rz69NL