It's Time To Replace The Phrase "American Conservative" with "American Cruelist"
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Contemporary "Conservatism" And Gratuitous Feel-Good Cruelty
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Why Trumpistas Can't Escape Trump's Orbit: A Quora Question, Answer And Comment
Patrick McCabe, former US Army (Retired) & Combat Veteran (RTO Vietnam) (1965-1986)
A lucky few will escape their bamboozlement as Ann Coulter did: Ex-Trumpista Ann Coulter Lambastes Trump's "Joke Presidency Scam" - "No Legacy Whatsoever"
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Compendium Of Best Pax Memes About Trump-Putin
Compendium Of Best Pax Posts About The Relationship Between Trump And Putin
Duh.
Compendium Of Pax Posts About Russian Electoral Manipulation
Compendium Of Best "Pax" Posts On Trump, Putin And Russian Meddling
In Rural America Vladimir Putin Is Decidedly More Popular Than ANY Democrat
Trump Will Go Full-Throttle Fascist Following The First Major Terror Attack.Putin Knows This. (He Also Knows How To Hack The United States.)
The Borowitz Report: "Putin Starting To Wonder If His Puppets Are Smart Enough To Pull This Off"
Trump’s Russian Laundromat
Trump's Impedance Of FBI Investigation Of Russia's Electoral Manipulation.
Azerbaijan: Will The Construction Of This "Trump Hotel" Topple Despicable Donald?
Compared to Trump's scandal de jour,
Hillary's missing emails are meaningless distraction.
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Cartoon: Trump, Putin And Syria
Compendium Of Best Pax Memes About Trump-Putin
https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/12/compendium-of-best-pax-memes-about.html
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https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/12/compendium-of-best-pax-memes-about.html
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Snopes: Did Putin Just Send Two Supersonic Nuclear Bombers to Venezuela?
Did Putin Just Send Two Supersonic Nuclear Bombers to Venezuela?
Claim
Russian president Vladimir Putin sent two supersonic nuclear bombers to Venezuela in December 2018.
Rating
On 10 December 2018,
Origin
On 10 December 2018, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that they had transported two Tu-160 strategic bombers to Venezuela:
Two Tu-160 strategic bombers, An-124 heavy military transport aircraft and Il-62 long-haul aircraft of the Russian Aerospace Forces, flew from airfields in the Russian Federation to the international airport of Maiquetía of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela on December 10.
The TU-160s are long-range supersonic planes capable of carrying conventional or nuclear-tipped cruise missiles — a set of facts that led to the creation of memes suggesting the move was intended to place Russian bombers in range of the United States:
The technical facts stated in this meme are accurate. It is true that these bombers were flown to Venezuela: the flight was monitored by the Norwegian air force, announced by Russia, and denounced by the United States. The TU-160 is indeed “capable of carrying conventional or nuclear-tipped cruise missiles with a range [of] 3,410 miles.”
It is also true that Florida is 1,763 miles away from Venezuela.
These bombers, given the nickname “Blackjacks” by NATO forces, have been in service in the Soviet or Russian air forces since 1988. They have most recently seen combat, armed with conventional weapons, in Syria.
This occurrence was not the first time Blackjacks had been spotted in South America, either. In November 2013, Colombia formally protested to Russia that two Russian Tu-160s, traveling between Venezuela and Nicaragua, were in violation of their airspace:
Colombia is preparing a letter of protest to Russia after two Russian bomber planes twice entered the Andean nation’s airspace without authorization when flying between Venezuela and Nicaragua, President Juan Manuel Santos said …Military sources told Reuters the planes were Russian-made Tupolev Tu-160 bombers flying from the Venezuelan coastal city of Maiquetia to Nicaragua’s capital, Managua. The sources said the bombers flew into Colombian airspace over its San Andres y Providencia archipelago in the Caribbean Sea.
While the technical facts about the Tu-160s are not in dispute, the implication that the most likely reason for their transport to Venezuela is to bomb the United States is dubious. Russia, a close ally of the embattled Venezuelan government, has sold a substantial amount of arms to that country going back to the early days of former President Hugo Chávez’s tenure, and Russian has vested interests in supporting the current government, as argued by U.S. Naval War College Professor Nikolas Gvosdev in National Interest:
[Former President Hugo] Chávez, in order to gain greater maneuvering room, turned to Russia as an alternate source of investment in the country’s energy and mining sectors, and as a source of military hardware to equip his defense and security forces. In turn, access to Venezuelan oil and gas has become an indispensable part of Russia’s state oil company Rosneft’s strategy to turn itself from a Eurasian provider of energy into an international major [provider] …Long-term contracts to equip the Venezuelan military and the party militias that [current President Nicolás] Maduro increasingly relies on for security are also important for the Russian defense industry. In short, over the last several years, Russia has acquired in Venezuela, as it has in Syria, a need to preserve the current regime in order to safeguard its investments.
According to the Associated Press, the reason for the transport of the bombers from Russia to Venezuela is unknown, but internal political factors in both countries that do not involve the United States could easily be playing a role. The Russian Ministry of Defense did not indicate how long the planes would be there, disclose whether they carried any weapons, or describe their purpose for being in the country:
Minister of Defence of the National Armed Forces of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela General-in-Chief Vladimir Padrino López and representatives of the Russian Embassy in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela took part in a solemn welcome ceremony of the Russian Tu-160 strategic bombers crews at the international airport of Maiquetía.
Highlighting the U.S. military’s role in providing medical support to Venezuelan refugees fleeing the country’s crisis, Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Rob Manning drew a contrast between Russian military support and the U.S. presence in the region, telling reporters on 10 December 2018 that “The Venezuelan government should be focusing on providing humanitarian assistance and aid to lessen the suffering of its people, and not on Russian warplanes.”
Sources
- Ministry of the Defense of the Russian Federation. “Long-Range Air Force Aircraft fly from Airfields in the Russian Federation to International Airport of the Republic of Venezuela.”
10 December 2018. - Isachenkov, Vladimir. “Russia Sends 2 Nuclear-Capable Bombers to Venezuela.”
Associated Press. 10 December 2018. - Vergun, David. “DOD Spokesman: As U.S. Provides Aid to Central, South America, Russia Sends Bombers.”
Defense.gov. 10 December 2018. - Moore, Jason Nicholas. Soviet Strategic Bombers: The Hammer in the Hammer and the Sickle.
Fonthill Media, 2018. ISBN 1230002408811. - Reuters. “Colombia Says Russian Bombers Violated Its Airspace.”
5 November 2013. - Gvosdev, Nikolas K. “Why Venezuela Proves That Russia Is Still a World Power.”
The National Interest. 7 June 2017.
PUBLISHED 20 DECEMBER 2018
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Cartoon: Trump Wins!
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Cartoon: The White House As "Safe House"
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Cartoon: Trump's Christmas Carol
Alright, I Was Wrong... Mexico Will Pay For The Wall
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Cartoon: Putin Pitches Trump
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"The Short List" Of Best Trump Memes Created By "Pax On Both Houses"
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Reprise: Lest We Forget... Trump Raped His First Wife
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Colombia's Donkey Libraries
Alan: Thanks to friend Mary Wilbur for bringing this story to my attention.
Colombia's Donkey Libraries
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Bertrand Russell, Religion, Eternal Punishment, And Hell-Gehenna
Dear Fred
Thanks for your email.
I wish you a happy third day of Christmas - with or without 3 French hens!
Here is the Russell link. https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/12/how-to-grow-old-by-bertrand-russell.html
I have a curious "relationship" with Russell.
Although he is dismissive of religiosity, the rest of his thinking strikes me as remarkably sound.
Notably, Russell has helped me see the colossal downside - and intrinsic cruelty - of "eternal punishment."
At minimum, a loving God would insure that "the damned""pass out of existence,"the "equivalent" of medically-induced coma.
But then, we humans are more merciful - more compassionate - than the "Christian" God of fire and brimstone.
What can the purpose of punishment be if it offers no hope... of hope?
The Thinking Housewife: "We Can Be Pretty Sure That Many Good People Are Roasting In Hell"
(Alan: Note that The Thinking Housewife is content to roast GOOD people in Hell.)
Bertrand Russell
Wikiquote
On Russell's Wikiquote page, I encourage you to key-word search "religion."
"I should like to believe my people's religion, which was just what I could wish, but alas, it is impossible. I have really no religion, for my God, being a spirit shown merely by reason to exist, his properties utterly unknown, is no help to my life. I have not the parson's comfortable doctrine that every good action has its reward, and every sin is forgiven.
My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter."
Greek Exercises (1888), written two days after his sixteenth birthday.
Trump's America Is A Deliberately Cruel Place & "Christian""Conservatives" Are The Cruelest
Although the following quotation is not Russell's, it is pertinent.
Have you noticed that conservative Christians want "easy salvation" by "armchair" proclamation: "I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior."
They call such salvation "salvation by the cross."
Why is it that Yeshua spent 3 years teaching-and-modeling "right attitude" and "right behavior" (to use Buddhist terminology), and only spend three hours on the cross?
But Lo!
Three years teaching-and-modeling mean NOTHING whereas "coming forward" at a "Billy Graham rally" to mouthe "the magic formula" means everything.
The formula washes them clean in "the blood of the Lamb" - once and for all!
"The Soul-Crushing Burden Of Billy Graham," The Rolling Stone
Here in The Bible Belt, your family tree may not fork, but you are "Saved!"
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Many Christians Live In An Unbreakable Bubble Of Biblical And Theological Dunderheadedness
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The Christian Doctrine Of Damnation... And The Destruction Of Christ-Spirit
The Christian Doctrine Of Damnation... And The Destruction Of Christ-Spirit
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Most "Christians" of traditionally religious orientation are terrified of "eternal punishment" and find the simple expedient of "salvation assurance" -- "salvation by the cross" -- captivating by its simplicity and inter-relatedly by the need to do NOTHING but "proclaim."
In fact, not only do you do nothing in exchange for "Certain Salvation," you get to be cruel - and feel good about it!
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Pax et amore
Alan
PS Here is how Christianity tries to combine "punishment" and "goodness."
In ancient Israel, the word for "hell" (within the Jewish "Jesus Sect") was "Gehenna" - Jerusalem's municipal dump, "the place where fires never went out."
I remember the town dump in Honeoye, New York (where my family spent summers), a dump that was caretaken-and-scavenged by two aging bachelor brothers living in an adjacent shack.
The Honeoye dump was, literally, the place where the fires never went out: mostly they emerged as smoke from subterranean fumaroles... but were "always" breaking out in fire - first here, then there.
Although the following article is ultimately a defense of "eternal punishment," it contains a remarkably thorough review of Gehenna in Old and New Testamental scripture.
On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 1:31 AM Fred Owens wrote:
This Bertrand Russell piece is quite profound....please send me a link
On Tuesday, December 25, 2018, Alan Archibald <alanarchibaldo@gmail.com> wrote:Dear Marsh, Patrick and Steve,You might enjoy this parody of "Away In A Manger." https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/12/away- in-manger-2018-parody.html Setting parody aside, check out Bruce Cockburn's "Christmas" album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzs-tXZqsv8 Bruce's self-composed Christmas song, "Shepherds," is one of my favorites."Cry Of A Tiny Baby" is another of Bruce's Christmas songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmZlYiMCvSc And although the following song by America's most (?) under-appreciated composer-musician, Tom Russell, is not a Christmas song, it comes close...
"California Snow"Wishing you and yours a Merry Christmas.Pax
AlanOn Sun, Dec 23, 2018 at 11:59 AM Marsh Hardy ARA/RISK <mhardy@ara.com> wrote:May be worth reading some or all aloud in a group.
“How to Grow Old” by Bertrand Russell
In spite of the title, this article will really be on how not to grow
old, which, at my time of life, is a much more important subject. My
first advice would be to choose your ancestors carefully. Although both
my parents died young, I have done well in this respect as regards my
other ancestors. My maternal grandfather, it is true, was cut off in the
flower of his youth at the age of sixty-seven, but my other three
grandparents all lived to be over eighty. Of remoter ancestors I can
only discover one who did not live to a great age, and he died of a
disease which is now rare, namely, having his head cut off. A
great-grandmother of mine, who was a friend of Gibbon, lived to the age
of ninety-two, and to her last day remained a terror to all her
descendants. My maternal grandmother, after having nine children who
survived, one who died in infancy, and many miscarriages, as soon as she
became a widow devoted herself to women’s higher education. She was one
of the founders of Girton College, and worked hard at opening the
medical profession to women. She used to tell of how she met in Italy an
elderly gentleman who was looking very sad. She asked him why he was so
melancholy and he said that he had just parted from his two
grandchildren. ‘Good gracious,’ she exclaimed, ‘I have seventy-two
grandchildren, and if I were sad each time I parted from one of them, I
should have a miserable existence!’ ‘Madre snaturale!,’ he replied. But
speaking as one of the seventy-two, I prefer her recipe. After the age
of eighty she found she had some difficulty in getting to sleep, so she
habitually spent the hours from midnight to 3 a.m. in reading popular
science. I do not believe that she ever had time to notice that she was
growing old. This, I think, is the proper recipe for remaining young. If
you have wide and keen interests and activities in which you can still
be effective, you will have no reason to think about the merely
statistical fact of the number of years you have already lived, still
less of the probable shortness of your future. As regards health, I have
nothing useful to say as I have little experience of illness. I eat and
drink whatever I like, and sleep when I cannot keep awake. I never do
anything whatever on the ground that it is good for health, though in
actual fact the things I like doing are mostly wholesome.
Psychologically there are two dangers to be guarded against in old age.
One of these is undue absorption in the past. It does not do to live in
memories, in regrets for the good old days, or in sadness about friends
who are dead. One’s thoughts must be directed to the future, and to
things about which there is something to be done. This is not always
easy; one’s own past is a gradually increasing weight. It is easy to
think to oneself that one’s emotions used to be more vivid than they
are, and one’s mind more keen. If this is true it should be forgotten,
and if it is forgotten it will probably not be true.
The other thing to be avoided is clinging to youth in the hope of
sucking vigour from its vitality. When your children are grown up they
want to live their own lives, and if you continue to be as interested in
them as you were when they were young, you are likely to become a burden
to them, unless they are unusually callous. I do not mean that one
should be without interest in them, but one’s interest should be
contemplative and, if possible, philanthropic, but not unduly emotional.
Animals become indifferent to their young as soon as their young can
look after themselves, but human beings, owing to the length of infancy,
find this difficult.
I think that a successful old age is easiest for those who have strong
impersonal interests involving appropriate activities. It is in this
sphere that long experience is really fruitful, and it is in this sphere
that the wisdom born of experience can be exercised without being
oppressive. It is no use telling grownup children not to make mistakes,
both because they will not believe you, and because mistakes are an
essential part of education. But if you are one of those who are
incapable of impersonal interests, you may find that your life will be
empty unless you concern yourself with your children and grandchildren.
In that case you must realise that while you can still render them
material services, such as making them an allowance or knitting them
jumpers, you must not expect that they will enjoy your company.
Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young,
there is a justification for this feeling. Young men who have reason to
fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in
the thought that they have been cheated of the best things that life has
to offer. But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and
has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is
somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it -so at least it
seems to me- is to make your interests gradually wider and more
impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life
becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human
existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained
within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over
waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the
waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break,
they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual
being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not
suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will
continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the
thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still
at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and
content in the thought that what was possible has been done.
[from “Portraits From Memory And Other Essays”]
//
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Trump Bragged To Service Members In Iraq About A 10% Pay Raise They Hadn't Been Given
| Trump Bragged To Service Members In Iraq About A 10% Pay Raise They Hadn't Been Given It is a falsehood that President Trump has repeated before. |
By Eli Rosenberg • Read more »               |
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"While You Obsessed Over Emails, I Installed A Puppet As Your President"
David Cay Johnston: "Trump Is Not A Loyal American... There Is A Traitor In The White House"
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
Ex-Trumpista Ann Coulter Lambastes Trump's "Joke Presidency Scam" - "No Legacy Whatsoever"
https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/12/ex-trumpista-ann-coulter-decries-trumps.html
https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/12/ex-trumpista-ann-coulter-decries-trumps.html
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The Borowitz Report: "Putin Starting To Wonder If His Puppets Are Smart Enough To Pull This Off"
In Rural America Vladimir Putin Is Decidedly More Popular Than ANY Democrat
Compendium Of Pax Posts About Russian Electoral Manipulation![While You Obsessed Over Emails I Installed A Puppet As Your President | made w/ Imgflip meme maker]()
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Compendium Of Best "Pax" Posts On Trump, Putin And Russian Meddling
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Cartoon: Trump, Putin And Syria
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Trump Will Go Full-Throttle Fascist Following The First Major Terror Attack.
Putin Knows This. (He Also Knows How To Hack The United States.)
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspo
Trump’s Russian Laundromat
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspoTrump's Impedance Of FBI Investigation Of Russia's Electoral Manipulation.
Villainy Or Treason?
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Neils Bohr On Physics,Subjectivity Objectivity And The Uses Of Religion In A Secular World
“The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
Nobel-Winning Physicist Niels Bohr on Subjective vs. Objective Reality and the Uses of Religion in a Secular World
In the autumn of 1911, just as the dawn of quantum mechanics and Einstein’s groundbreaking theory of relativity were unsettling our understanding of existence, some of the world’s most influential physicists were summoned to Brussels for the Solvay Conference — an invitation-only gathering that would become a turning point for modern physics and our basic understanding of reality. The conference was such a towering success that it became a regular event, with twenty-five installments over the next century. The most famous was the fifth, convened in 1927 and chaired by the Dutch Nobel laureate Hendrik Lorenz, whose transformation equations had become the centerpiece of Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Of the 29 attendees that year, 17 would become Nobel laureates; Marie Curie, the sole woman since the inaugural gathering, would become the only scientist to win two Nobel Prizes in two different disciplines. (It was at the first Solvay Conference that Curie had met Einstein — the inception of a lifelong friendship in the course of which he would buoy her during a crisis with his splendid advice on how to handle haters.)
One evening during the 1927 conference, some of the younger attendees — including twenty-seven-year-old Wolfgang Pauli, who was yet to co-invent synchronicity with Carl Jung, and twenty-six-year-old Werner Heisenberg, who had just published his revolutionary uncertainty principle earlier that year — stayed up at the hotel lounge and launched into a swirling conversation at the borderline of physics and metaphysics, ignited by the young physicists’ unease about Einstein’s views on God. (Three years later, Einstein himself would traverse that borderline in his historic conversation with the Indian poet and philosopher Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.) They collided with the difficulty of reconciling science and religion, some adamantly insisting that the two were simply incompatible, for religion is a vestige of a pre-scientific world of superstition, while others suggesting that science can never supplant but can only complement the essential moral guidance by which theology strengthens society.
The unresolved question stayed with Heisenberg. After the conference, he recounted the conversation to quantum theory founding father and Nobel laureate Niels Bohr(October 7, 1885–November 18, 1962). Bohr surprised him with a nuanced and uncommonly insightful take on the subject, which Heisenberg recounts in Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations (public library) — part of the pioneering World Perspectives series envisioned by philosopher Ruth Nanda Anshen as a canon of books by the world’s great “spiritual and intellectual leaders who possess full consciousness of the pressing problems of our time with all their implications,” with a board of editors including Robert Oppenheimer and Bohr himself.
Bohr tells Heisenberg:
We ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.
With an eye to the monumental impact of Einstein’s relativity and to the profound shift in thought which quantum theory’s notion of complementarity introduced, Bohr adds:
That is why I consider those developments in physics during the last decades which have shown how problematical such concepts as “objective” and “subjective” are, a great liberation of thought. The whole thing started with the theory of relativity. In the past, the statement that two events are simultaneous was considered an objective assertion, one that could be communicated quite simply and that was open to verification by any observer. Today we know that “simultaneity” contains a subjective element, inasmuch as two events that appear simultaneous to an observer at rest are not necessarily simultaneous to an observer in motion. However, the relativistic description is also objective inasmuch as every observer can deduce by calculation what the other observer will perceive or has perceived. For all that, we have come a long way from the classical ideal of objective descriptions.In quantum mechanics the departure from this ideal has been even more radical. We can still use the objectifying language of classical physics to make statements about observable facts. For instance, we can say that a photographic plate has been blackened, or that cloud droplets have formed. But we can say nothing about the atoms themselves. And what predictions we base on such findings depend on the way we pose our experimental question, and here the observer has freedom of choice. Naturally, it still makes no difference whether the observer is a man, an animal, or a piece of apparatus, but it is no longer possible to make predictions without reference to the observer or the means of observation. To that extent, every physical process may be said to have objective and subjective features. The objective world of nineteenth-century science was, as we know today, an ideal, limiting case, but not the whole reality. Admittedly, even in our future encounters with reality we shall have to distinguish between the objective and the subjective side, to make a division between the two. But the location of the separation may depend on the way things are looked at; to a certain extent it can be chosen at will.
This, Bohr notes, is why the language of objectivity doesn’t belong in religious rhetoric — religion and its pluralities are best understood, and best applied to human life as an instrument of moral enrichment rather than one of dogmatic constriction, through the lens of complementarity:
The fact that different religions try to express this content in quite distinct spiritual forms is no real objection. Perhaps we ought to look upon these different forms as complementary descriptions which, though they exclude one another, are needed to convey the rich possibilities flowing from man’s relationship with the central order.
A quarter century before mathematician Lillian Lieber demonstrated how mathematical abstractions like infinity, which have no correlate in physical reality, offer an analogue for moral questions, Bohr considers whether or not the tenets of religion can similarly offer useful abstractions, even though they are not to be taken as objective truth:
In mathematics we can take our inner distance from the content of our statements. In the final analysis mathematics is a mental game that we can play or not play as we choose. Religion, on the other hand, deals with ourselves, with our life and death; its promises are meant to govern our actions and thus, at least indirectly, our very existence. We cannot just look at them impassively from the outside. Moreover, our attitude to religious questions cannot be separated from our attitude to society. Even if religion arose as the spiritual structure of a particular human society, it is arguable whether it has remained the strongest social molding force through history, or whether society, once formed, develops new spiritual structures and adapts them to its particular level of knowledge. Nowadays, the individual seems to be able to choose the spiritual framework of his thoughts and actions quite freely, and this freedom reflects the fact that the boundaries between the various cultures and societies are beginning to become more fluid. But even when an individual tries to attain the greatest possible degree of independence, he will still be swayed by the existing spiritual structures — consciously or unconsciously. For he, too, must be able to speak of life and death and the human condition to other members of the society in which he’s chosen to live; he must educate his children according to the norms of that society, fit into its life. Epistemological sophistries cannot possibly help him attain these ends. Here, too, the relationship between critical thought about the spiritual content of a given religion and action based on the deliberate acceptance of that content is complementary. And such acceptance, if consciously arrived at, fills the individual with strength of purpose, helps him to overcome doubts and, if he has to suffer, provides him with the kind of solace that only a sense of being sheltered under an all-embracing roof can grant. In that sense, religion helps to make social life more harmonious; its most important task is to remind us, in the language of pictures and parables, of the wider framework within which our life is set.
Physics and Beyond, though out of print, is a fascinating read in its totality and well worth the search for a surviving copy. Complement this particular portion with pioneering nineteenth-century astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way for women in science, on our conquest of truth, Carl Sagan on science and spirituality, Richard Feynman on why uncertainty is essential for morality, Simone de Beauvoir on the moral courage of atheism, Alan Lightman on transcendent experiences in the secular world, and Sam Harris on spirituality without religion.
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Carl Sagan On Mystery: Why Common Sense Blinds Us To The Universe, And How To Live With The Unknown
“We are bathing in mystery and confusion on many subjects, and I think that will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.”
Carl Sagan on Mystery: Why Common Sense Blinds Us to the Universe, and How to Live with the Unknown
Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
In our recent On Being conversation, NASA astrophysicist and exoplanet researcher Natalie Batalha said something that stopped me up short: as sentient beings endowed with awareness, we are “the universe itself becoming aware.” Echoing poet Diane Ackerman’s lovely notion of “the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else,” Dr. Batalha added: “It took 13.7 billion years for the atoms to come together to create the portal to the universe which is my physical self. So in that statement is this idea, or the fluidity of time and space. And I kind of see it all at once. And I don’t know what ‘me’ is. I just feel part of everything. And I feel such deep gratitude for being able to take this conscious look at the universe — at myself as being part of the universe.”
The sentiment reminded me of a beautiful interview Carl Sagan (November 9, 1934–December 20, 1996) gave shortly after the premiere of his epoch-making documentary Cosmos, later included in Conversations with Carl Sagan (public library).
In late August of 1980 — two years after he conducted Susan Sontag’s most dimensional interview and nine years before his magnificent conversation with Leonard Bernstein — interlocutor extraordinaire Jonathan Cott visited Sagan’s home in Los Angeles to interview him for Rolling Stone. In the soaring the conversation that followed, Sagan stepped into his native nexus of the scientific and the poetic to contemplate our understanding of the universe and of ourselves, the nature of reality and of human knowledge, and how to live with the unknown.
Sagan tells Cott:
It’s a critical moment in the history of the world… We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution. And we resonate to these questions. We start with the origin of every human being, and then the origin of our community, our nation, the human species, who our ancestors were and then the riddle of the origin of life. And the questions: where did the Earth and Solar System come from? Where did the galaxies come from?Every one of those questions is deep and significant. They are the subject of folklore, myth, superstition, and religion in every human culture. But for the first time we are on the verge of answering many of them. I don’t mean to suggest that we have the final answers; we are bathing in mystery and confusion on many subjects, and I think that will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.
To be sure, understanding the whole of the universe seems like too grandiose an aspiration when we are continually struggling to understand the tiny subset of the universe that is ourselves. Three summers before this interview, Sagan had spearheaded The Golden Record — a poetic attempt at such self-comprehension, mirroring humanity back to itself. Now, with an eye to another landmark triumph of self-reflection made possible by scientific progress — the iconic Earthrise photograph taken by the astronauts of Apollo 8 in 1968 — Sagan considers the immense and paradoxical gift of cosmic perspective:
You saw [Earth] for the first time as a tiny blue ball floating in space. You realized that there were other, similar worlds far away, of different size, different color and constitution. You got the idea that our planet was just one in a multitude. I think there are two apparently contradictory and still very powerful benefits of that cosmic perspective — the sense of our planet as one in a vast number and the sense of our planet as a place whose destiny depends upon us.
In this awareness resides a humbling and disquieting reminder of our creaturely limitations. We navigate the world by our common-sense perception, but that perception has blinded us to reality again and again. We have mistaken our sensorial intuitions for facts of the universe — for millennia, we held wrong beliefs about Earth’s shape, motion, and position, because it feels flat and static beneath our feet, and central to the order of the cosmos. We have mistrusted processes and phenomena beyond the boundaries of what we can touch and feel with our limited senses — from evolution, which unfolds on scales of time too vast to be visible within a human lifetime, to quantum mechanics, which operates on subatomic scales imperceptible and almost inconceivable to the human observer. Long before Sagan equipped us with an antidote to the “common pitfalls of common sense” in his timeless Baloney Detection Kit for critical thinking, he tells Cott:
Common sense works fine for the universe we’re used to, for time scales of decades, for a space between a tenth of a millimeter and a few thousand kilometers, and for speeds much less than the speed of light. Once we leave those domains of human experience, there’s no reason to expect the laws of nature to continue to obey our expectations, since our expectations are dependent on a limited set of experiences.[…]We have to be very careful not to impose our hopes and desires on the cosmos, but instead, in the scientific tradition and with the most open mind possible, see what the cosmos is saying to us.
Sagan points to one particularly blatant obfuscation of reality driven by our self-centered hopes, desires, and delusions — astrology:
[Astrology is] like racism or sexism: you have twelve little pigeonholes, and as soon as you type someone as a member of that particular group, as long as someone is an Aquarius, Virgo or Scorpio, you know his characteristics. It saves you the effort of getting to know him individually.
Sagan ends by considering the nature of human knowledge itself. Drawing on its past, he projects its future:
Human knowledge is a set of successive approximations… There are all sorts of things that we’ve gotten wrong, and all sorts of mind-boggling things that we can’t even glimpse that will be the established fact in a century or two.[…]There are two extremes to worry about. One is the extreme in which everything is known and there’s nothing left to do. The other is where everything is so complicated you can never begin to do anything. We are lucky to live in a universe were there are laws of nature and things to discover, but they’re not impossibly difficult, so we can understand them to some extent. But they’re also difficult enough so that we’re nowhere near understanding them all. There are exhilarating discoveries yet to be made. It’s the best possible world.
Complement with Diane Ackerman — a favorite poet of Sagan’s, who was her doctoral advisor — on our longing to know the universe beyond ourselves and Primo Levi on the spiritual value of space exploration, then revisit Sagan on the value of uncertainty, the enchantment of chemistry, and the most important perspective in the human world.
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