Happy Carl Sagan Day!

Today is Carl Sagan's birthday! He was born November 9, 1934. Over the past several months, my wonderful husband Butch and I watched the Cosmos series on Netflix instant view. I never saw them when I was a kid, and I never even knew about Carl Sagan until I was an adult. When I was in school I loved science but didn't think it was anything I could pursue.

In the last couple of years I've discovered the world of citizen science. And I've also discovered skepticism and, as you know, many wonderful podcasts that have inspired me with talk of great men like Carl Sagan. If I had to choose, astronomy is not the most interesting subject to me, but the Cosmos is wonderful. And Carl Sagan made everything fascinating. Watching Cosmos recently, I was filled with so much inspiration and wonder about the universe and our humble, small place in it. Cosmos has been seen by a billion people in sixty countries, according to the Carl Sagan Portal. What a legacy!

The 11th episode of Cosmos, The Persistence of Memory, is probably my favorite, even though I found them all to be excellent and still relevant today.  Here is the episode in 6 parts. If you can, watch the whole series. You'll be glad you did! See below for some quotes from this awesome man that is such a wonderful inspiration.

Part 1


Part 2

Great Reason or Atheist or Science Quotes Needed

I need your help. I'm going to church soon with my Religion of the Month Club (a subgroup of Morgantown Atheists) and I have the idea of putting an envelope in the collection plate when it comes around. In the envelope I want a few really AWESOME quotes from brilliant people. Preferably not nasty, but very smart. I am asking for your suggestions! Which reason/atheism/brilliant/freethinker quotes should I put in the envelope?

A Bit of Dawkins

One of my Facebook friends posted this to his feed today. Richard Dawkins waxing eloquent:

‎"The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces ...us that the time we have for living is quite finite."

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"

"An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."

JFK Had the Right Idea

I stumbled upon a transcript on the National Public Radio site awhile-back. It was a speech made by John F. Kennedy in 1960, given to a group of Protestant ministers a few months before the election. JFK was a devout Catholic, but he was also had a solid understanding of the separation of church and state; this speech has some excellent excerpts that exemplify this. JFK was the first Catholic elected president, and during the elections other religious groups (primarily the Protestant group) were concerned about rumors that he would send an ambassador to the Vatican and be taking direction from the Pope. As it turned-out, it was Reagan who established the first ambassador to the Vatican in 1984.

What Is Your Favorite Quote or Story From the bible?

What a strange question from an atheist, huh? But I really mean it. Which quote is your favorite, or do you prefer a story from somewhere in the bible? Here's my favorite at the moment:

Psalms 137:9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

Look, I made it into a motivational poster so we can all be inspired by the "good book".



Lovely, huh? The text at the top was inspired by my husband Butch, no god involved. I turned it into a t-shirt (and other stuff, of course) too! :)

No god, Know Peace by SirLeeTees

Know god, No Peace; No god, Know Peace. This is the correct wording. :)

So that's the "good book" that gets cherry-picked by ignorant christians every day. Full of barbaric, hateful, delusional and amoral people from 2,000 years ago.

Which story sums up the bible for you? Or which quote says it all? And why?

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver - My Favorite Poem

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

from Dream Work by Mary Oliver
published by Atlantic Monthly Press
© Mary Oliver

Why am I sharing this?

99% of christians Are Hypocrites

I think if you're a christian, the most important parts of the bible would be Jesus' teachings. So why are there churches? Why do christians demand that there is prayer in school and insist on praying openly? Why are there TV evangelists openly crying out, "In Jesus' name" every other slimy sentence? Because they are all Blasphemers and Hypocrites.

Matthew 6:1-7. Read it, christians. Take it to heart, or do you have more hypocritical lies to twist the words of your own savior so that you can do what you like?

Let's Pick Out The Lies - Part 2

This is part two of a forwarded email I received the other day. Part One is here.

The rest of this email was all added on sometime in 2006. It was NOT said by Ben Stein. This kind of stuff drives me crazy. People forward emails because they blindly believe what is being sent. They just accept that it's all true and important, so they send it to me, and you, whether we like it or not. I really can't stand spam when it comes from someone I know.

Anyhoo, the following is a combination of older items about a TV appearance of Anne Graham Lotz (Billy Graham's daughter) made just after 9-11 and the false claim that child care expert Dr. Benjamin Spock's son committed suicide.

In light of the many jokes we send to one another for a laugh, this is a little different:  This is not intended to be a joke;  it's not funny, it's intended to get you thinking.

Talking about an invisible man in the sky does not really require thinking. It is blindly believing in fairy tales, but I digress.

Let's Pick Out the Lies- Part 1

Personally I don't like to talk to friends and family about politics or religion. The older I get the more strongly I feel about certain issues. While I try to remain open to more information, and am willing to learn and grow and change my thinking, my tolerance for certain behaviors in those around me wanes.

Anyway, the other day I got an email from an acquaintance. She hasn't emailed me in about 2 years, but I guess this was so important to her that she just had to send it to her entire email list. Instead of deleting it, I thought I'd share it with you.

Here's the email in its entirety, with my commentary thrown in after each "quote".

Subject: is quite impressive , what do you think
Remarks from CBS Sunday Morning (everyone should read!)
I can only hope we find God again before it is too late!!

(oh lordy I'm so glad I got this email! Now I can see the light of god and I'm saved from hell! Oh wait, no. It was just a seizure.)

Knowledge and Beliefs Are Stored Differently In The Brain

This is so fascinating to me. I heard this a bit ago and wanted to share it with you. It's a rough quote, because I'm not good at dictation:

"Studies strongly suggest that beliefs are encoded in the brain differently than facts. Different parts of the brain seem to light up when we recall facts than when we recall thematic beliefs or emotional conclusions or beliefs about things." Dr. Steven Novella, an academic neurologist from the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, episode 163, September 3rd, 2008.

How cool is that? I've always kind of vaguely wondered if there was a difference with how a believer thinks as opposed to an atheist. Now, before you go tearing me apart, Steven Novella said that this is all very new and not set in stone at all. If you know of any studies, let me know. He also mentioned that most of the studies were done with FMRI which is hard to do right, so you have to wade through the questionable techniques and stuff.

Still, all that aside, that's pretty interesting to me, and I wanted to share it with you.

"I Kinda Respect Hitler"

My in-laws were in town for the past week. We went out to dinner and over margaritas that's what my sister in law said. "I kind of respect Hitler. I have no problem with him. I don't understand what the big deal is."

Um, WTF!? For some reason I was shushed from expressing my opinion. (Maybe because I was only having iced tea and wasn't drinking margaritas?) My husband and his cousin shushed me and took over trying to explain "what the big deal with Hitler is."

I was astonished that anyone could honestly believe this kind of nonsense. The thing is, this person, whom I love as my own sister, is walking around thinking that Hitler wasn't such a bad guy, that he wasn't allowed to be an artist, so that makes it all ok. Oh, and that the systematic extermination of anyone non-Aryan didn't really happen.

You Don't Have To Pass An IQ Test To Be In The Senate

Stumbling around the web, I found this snippet of Bill Maher's interview with Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas for the documentary, Religulosity:



So this senator, who helps run the country, believes in a snake talking to Eve in the garden of eden 5,000 years ago. The senator makes a funny though. Yeah, really funny.

About the Holy Bible

"Someone ought to tell the truth about the Bible." This was written by a man back in 1894. His name was Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll and he was a Civil war veteran, an American political leader and an orator during the Golden Age of Freethought.

His radical views on religion, slavery, woman's suffrage, and other issues of the day effectively prevented him from ever pursuing or holding political offices higher than that of state attorney general. Illinois Republicans tried to pressure him into running for governor on the condition that Ingersoll conceal his agnosticism during the campaign, which he refused on the basis that concealing information from the public was immoral. (this is obviously a foreign concept in today's day and age!)

Anyway, in 1894 he wrote "About the Holy Bible" which I found Here.

Here it is in all its timeless brilliance:

The Founding Fathers - Atheists and Freethinkers

Several of the Founding Fathers of the United States were Freethinkers, even Atheists. I've collected a small sampling of quotes from them. When faced with the tired argument that America was founded as a christian nation, this is a primer on refuting that lie.