no. 87

"Where there is no imagination there is no horror."

Arthur Conan Doyle, Sr.

no. 86

"You can’t just sit there and put everybody’s lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can’t. You have to do things."

Stephen Chbosky, from The Perks of Being a Wallflower

no. 85

"To me, there is no greater act of courage than being the one who kisses first."

Janeane Garofalo.

no. 84

"I don’t have an issue with what you do in the church but I’m going to be up in your face if you’re going to knock on my science classroom and tell me I got to teach what you’re teaching in your Sunday school. That’s when we’re going to fight… There’s no tradition of scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling the preacher ‘that might not necessarily be true.’ That’s never happened. There are no scientists picketing out front of churches. There’s been this coexistence forever, so to have religious communities knocking down the science door, there’s something wrong there."

Neil deGrasse Tyson - Distinguished astrophysicist, prominent skeptic and host of the PBS show NOVA scienceNow on religion and education

(via)

no. 83

"Yes, it was a stupid thing to burn the Koran, but guess what? The lion’s share of the guilt should be laid on people who then kill over it. It’s like a violent, drunken father. When his kid sets him off and he beats the shit out of the kid, do you blame the kid for setting him off? No, you blame the father for being a violent drunk."

Bill Maher

no. 82

"Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It’s just the best we have."

Carl Sagan

no. 81

"Jesus wasnt born in America, but you dont see Republicans trying to keep him out of the government."

@ispyhannahclark (Hannah Clark)

no. 80

"Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity"

unknown, but they oughta be feted

no. 79

no. 78

"Well, yes, happines isnt happiness without a violin-playing goat".

Julia Roberts as Anna Scott in Notting Hill

no. 77

"Has anybody been watching the debates lately? You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change. It’s true. You’ve got audiences cheering at the prospect of somebody dying because they don’t have healthcare and booing a service member in Iraq because they’re gay. That’s not reflective of who we are."

Barack Obama

Sadly, I suspect that it is who we are. We deserve whatever happens to us.

no. 76

no. 75

"Radio host Thom Hartmann notes that the astronomical salaries commanded by CEOs indicates (by simple supply/demand) some sort of shortage of qualified people. What quality is it that is in such shortage? Mr Hartmann speculates that the necessary characteristic which is in such short supply is sociopathy. One needs to know how to run a company AND to be able to destroy the environment and the lives of fellow human beings."

LarryHart, commenting on a post at Contrary Brin (see previous post)

no. 74

"But in rejecting one set of knowledge-limited meddlers -- 100,000 civil servants -- libertarians and conservatives seem bent on ignoring market manipulation by 5,000 or so aristocratic golf buddies, who appoint each other to company boards in order to vote each other titanic "compensation packages" while trading insider information and conspiring together to eliminate competition. Lords who are not subject to inherent limits, like each bureaucrat must face, or rules of disclosure or accountability. Lords who (whether it is legal or not) collude and share the same delusions."

David Brin, discussing the change (and failure) of American Conservatism.

no. 73

Hermione is not Chosen. That’s the best thing about her. Hermione is a hero because she decides to be a hero; she’s brave, she’s principled, she works hard, and she never apologizes for the fact that her goal is to be very, extremely good at this whole “wizard” deal. Just as Hermione’s origins are nothing special, we’re left with the impression that her much-vaunted intelligence might not be anything special, on its own. But Hermione is never comfortable with relying on her “gifts” to get by. There’s no prophecy assuring her importance; the only way for Hermione to have the life she wants is to work for it. So Hermione Granger, generation-defining role model, works her adorable British ass off for seven straight books in a row. Although she deals with the slings and arrows of any coming-of-age tale — being told that she’s “bossy,” stuck-up, boring, “annoying,” etc — she’s too strong to let that stop her.

In praise of Joanne Rowling’s Hermione Granger series by Sady Doyle

no. 72

"…there are a few other reasons why we clearly don’t get our morality from religion…even fundamentalists have to edit the books.

You come to the golden rule and you say, well this is truly wise…that’s why I’m reading the bible…but if you come something in Deuteronomy(22:13-21) like,

'If a woman’s not a virgin on her wedding night, you must take her to her father’s doorstep and stone her to death.'

…every fundamentalist Christian and Orthodox Jew…has figured out some way to ignore that…[which] proves that the guarantor of the wisdom found in scripture is not in scripture.

Maybe it’s in us."

— Sam Harris, lecturing on The Moral Landscape

(via)

no. 71

"An atheist doesn’t have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can’t be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question."

John McCarthy - American computer scientist, based at Stanford. Coined the term artificial intelligence; received the Turing Award in 1971 for his contributions to the AI field.

no. 70

"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”

Charles Bukowski

no. 69

“When my husband died, because he was so famous & known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me — it still sometimes happens — & ask me if Carl changed at the end & converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage & never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief & precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive & we were together was miraculous — not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… That pure chance could be so generous & so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space & the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me & it’s much more meaningful…
 

The way he treated me & the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other & our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.“

Ann Druyan, talking about her husband, Carl Sagan

no. 68

"If you are trying to choose a boyfriend out of a herd of thousands, you may choose none of them. Or you see someone until someone better comes along. The term for this is ‘trading up.’ It can lead you to think that your opportunities are virtually infinite, and therefore to question what you have. It can turn people into products."

 “Looking for Someone” by Nick Paumgarten

This goes for boys, too. Duh.

no. 67

"Intelligent Design gets everything backwards, it's like saying our hands are miraculous because they fit so perfectly in our gloves."

@Monicks (Monica) 29 Jun via web

no. 66

"No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That’s how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice."

— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

no. 65

"Don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes."

— Stephen Colbert

no. 64

Female student: I do a lot of abstract art, and I don’t understand why we have to draw these boxes.

Professor: You know what I just heard? I just heard ‘I’m full of bullshit!’

atypicalartkid

no. 63

"People that are pro-life and pro-capital punishment, tell me, does it hurt being so stupid?"

wentzpete

no. 62

"Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know."

Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery.

no. 61

"Pope says atheists pick & choose their morals. Correct. Today I will be frowning on child abuse & not having a problem with homosexuality."

mwyarbrough (Michael Yarbrough) via Tweetdeck

no. 60

"We must respect the other fellow`s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."

— H. L. Mencken

no. 59

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one."

-George Bernard Shaw

no. 58

"If all the atheists left the USA, it would lose 93% of the National Academy of Sciences but less than 1% of the prison population."

scott_hurst, 11:53 AM Dec 10th, 2010 via TweetDeck

no. 57

"As Bible-believing Baptists who hold to reformed theology, X and I believe that God is sovereign in choosing who will or will not believe in him, having chosen his people before the foundation of the world (see Ephesians 1), and that his selection is unbreakable and irresistible. If marriage is to mirror this principle, we believe that a woman has no right to select a husband for herself, but that she is to be chosen by a man and marriage is to be an unbreakable arrangement between the man and her father. Based on this reasoning, we have shunned a standard proposal and wedding ceremony, because if I had asked her to marry me (which I did not) then I would have given her the decision to marry me rather than selecting her and taking her myself. Furthermore, if we had exchanged conventional marriage vows, our union would have been based on X’s will and consent, which are not Biblical factors for marriage or salvation. Instead, I asked X’s father for his blessing in taking her hand in marriage. When he gave his blessing, X and I considered ourselves to be unbreakably betrothed in the sight of God. While we had initially intended to consummate our marriage after today’s symbolic ceremony, we instead did so secretly after private scripture reading, prayer, and mutual foot-washing."

This is some serious fucked-up bullshit. One of the primary reasons which I no longer consider myself to be a Christian has less to do with Biblical contradictions than it does with what utter assholes a majority of those who identify as Christians seem to be. If God truly will reward them, then fuck Him. If he will not, then why belong to the club?

(quote via)