REFLECTIONS

Peace
"Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarreled with him?"
-Blaise Pascal

"The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations."-David Friedman

"The sage does nothing but nothing is left undone"-Lao Tsu

UU Blogs: Great resource.

http://www.philocrites.com/archives/003616.html

I make this chief distinction between religion and superstition, that the latter is founded on ignorance, the former on knowledge; this, I take it, is the reason why Christians are distinguished from the rest of the world, not by faith, nor by charity, nor by the other fruits of the Holy Spirit, but solely by their opinions, inasmuch as they defend their cause, like everyone else, by miracles, that is by ignorance, which is the source of all malice;
thus they turn a faith, which may be true, into superstition.

-Spinoza Letter 21 (73) to Henry Oldenburg , November (1675)

There is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense
for him to prove it. - H. L. Mencken

A man said to the universe: "Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

by Stephen Maria Crane1871-1900, written in 1899

"We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces... I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir."
~Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)

This I Believe:

“Of course I believe evolution.But that is different from believing in evolution.To believe in something takes faith, trust, effort, strength. I need none of these things to believe evolution. It just is. My health is better because of medical research based on evolution. My genetic code is practically the same as a chimpanzee's. My bipedal feet walk on an earth full of fossil missing links. And when my feet tire, those fossils fuel my car.”

Holly Dunsworth … Paleoanthropologist.


http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=90311455&m=90354919

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King Jr.