Big History

Physicist Murray Gell-Mann: “We live in an age of increasing specialization…Humanity keeps learning more about each field of study; and as every specialty grows, it tends to split into subspecialties. However, there is also a growing need for specialization to be supplemented by integration. The reason is that no complex, nonlinear system can be adequately described by dividing it up into subsystems…In academic life, in bureaucracies, and elsewhere, the task of integration is insufficiently respected.” “Narrative is the chief literary form that tries to find meaning in an overwhelmingly crowded and disordered chronological reality.” -William Cronon

TheraminTrees: Terror Management studies (Death Psychology)

Conversations with History - Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly

"Whatever my fate, I'll go to it laughing." — Herman Melville

"Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!"
— Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

"...and Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending."
— Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

"With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."

"Possibly, if you do answer it, and direct it to Herman Melville, you will missend it -- for the very fingers that now guide this pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it on this paper. Lord, when shall we be done changing? Ah! it's a long stage, and no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But with you for a passenger, I am content and can be happy. I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality."

Melville letter to Hawthorne

To be steeped in natural history

"To be steeped in history is to cease being Protestant."
Cardinal John Henry Newman

The Cardinal stops too early. A Jewish person or a Pagan could say to be steeped in history is to cease being Catholic as well. And the more you research and study history dogma seems rather provincial, tribal and solipsistic.
The gods of the human primate from this little blue planet in the universe seem to be too small, too human and too petty to be the ultimate force in this giant cosmos.
Human gods do not even cover the scale of the earth and its history much less the universe.

"A general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the god portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy much less of a universe."
Carl Sagan

"I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E.O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruelest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth."
Dr. Lovelock

"The importance of the Scientific Revolution for philosophy is beyond question. Modern philosophy the work of both rationalists and empiricists would have been impossible without great advances in physics. Analogously, therefore, we could anticipate that the Darwinian Revolution will have important implications for philosophy. Indeed, I would go further and say that we might expect Darwin's work to have even greater implications for philosophy than those of physics. The theory of evolution through natural selection impinges so directly on our own species. It is not just that we are on a speck of dust whirling around in the void but that we ourselves are no more than transformed apes. If such a realization is not to affect our views of epistemology and ethics, I do not know what is. As I said in the Preface, I find it inconceivable that it is irrelevant to the foundations of philosophy whether we are the end result of a slow natural evolutionary process, or made miraculously in Gods own image on a Friday, some 6,000 years ago. "
Dr. Michael Ruse

Do not go gentle into that good night (Dylan Thomas read by Anthony Hop...

The Grey - Hoka Hey

Once more into the fray,

into the last good fight I will ever know.

Live and die on this day,

Live and die on this day.

-The Grey(2012)

Quotes Archive

"The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful."
Edward Gibbon

"The first ideas of religion arose not from a contemplation of the works of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life, and from the incessant hopes and fears, which actuate the human mind...the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst of revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries. Agitated by hopes and fears of this nature...men scrutinize, with a trembling curiosity, the course of future causes, and examine the various and contrary events of human life. And in this disordered scene, with eyes still more disordered and astonished, they see the first obscure traces of divinity."
David Hume

"The black hole teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, That time can be extinguished like a blown out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as sacred, as immutable, are anything but."
-John Wheeler

The Universe Is Expanding

God is the gossip of the living

God is the gossip of the living. Religion and faith are the aims of a short lived mortal animal with a higher awareness. As Freud put it man is the wishing animal. To be dead is to be without faith. The dead require no faith or religion only what is true.

"To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer."
E. M. Cioran

To be steeped in natural history (Two Steps from Hell - Heart of Courage)

Cosmic Light (narration by paxxyguerra)

SOMETHING FROM NOTHING [OFFICIAL] Richard Dawkins & Lawrence Krauss [H...

Ernest Becker - Escape from Evil

At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life, has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and appendages with which to acquire food. Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed -- a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh.

Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person’s life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all the he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening. To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.

Beyond the toothsome joy of consuming other organisms is the warm contentment of simply continuing to exist -- continuing to experience physical stimuli, to sense one’s inner pulsations and musculature, to delight in the pleasures that nerves transmit. Once the organism is satiated, this becomes its frantic all-consuming task, to hold onto life at any cost . . . . this absolute dedication to Eros, to perseverance, is universal among organisms and is the essence of life on this earth.

Man is cursed with a burden no animal has to bear: he is conscious that his own end is inevitable, that his stomach will die. [Herein we have the origins of civilization] As soon as you have symbols you have artificial self-transcendence via culture. Everything cultural is fabricated and given meaning by the mind, a meaning that was not given by physical nature . . . . [but] the terror of death still rumbles underneath the cultural repression. What men have done is to shift the fear of death onto the higher level of cultural perpetuity . . . . men must now hold for dear life onto the self-transcending meanings of the society in which they live . . . a new kind of instability and anxiety are created.

In seeking to avoid evil [(death)], man is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is man’s ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.

Ernest Becker from his book Escape from Evil

Newt Gingrich & American Christianity

Newt Gingrich is proving that American christianity is a form of neo-victorianism. In that it finds it more distasteful to talk about adultery than it does to committ adultery. This redemption is a form of relativism. "We are all fallen. We all sin." This sickly relativism is American christianity's flexibility...as long as you speak the language of the tribe. If you are outside the tribe you are judged for your sins. If you are within the tribe you are given a pass.

This provinical and tribal theology allows for corrupt double standards and outright hypocrisy.

What is paramount is that one swears fidelity only to the spoken ideology. Your life and integrity is secondary.

The Story of Science vs. the Story of Religion

The narrative of the natural sciences is not only more likely than the supernatural narratives it also possesses greater explanatory power.

The advantage that religious narratives have is their cultural & emotional identity connection usually developed in childhood and in family units. The religious narrative also has the advantage that it directly consoles the existential anxiety due to human consciousness and its propensity to metaphysical meaning and security.