Monicks: Unleashed

Nobel Prize-winning philosopher/mathematician, Bertrand Russell, explains why he does not believe in God.

It deals with a game that [Theodore] Roosevelt and I used to play at Sagamore Hill. After an evening of talk, perhaps about the fringes of knowledge, or some new possibility of climbing inside the minds and senses of animals, we would go out on the lawn, where we took turns at an amusing little astronomical rite. We searched until we found, with or without glasses, the faint, heavenly spot of light-mist beyond the lower left-hand corner of the Great Square of Pegasus, when one or the other of us would then recite:

That is the Spiral Galaxy of Andromeda.
It is as large as our Milky Way.
It is one of a hundred million galaxies.
It is 750,000 light-years away.
It consists of one hundred billion suns, each larger than our sun.

After an interval Colonel Roosevelt would grin at me and say: ‘Now I think we are small enough! Let’s go to bed.’

– William Beebe, The Book of Naturalists, 1944

“The Greek Gods” tells of the history and mythology surrounding the deities of ancient Greece.

Exposing the devoutly religious beliefs of pagan cultures and how greatly they parallel the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

via smbc-comics.com

The Royal Television Society Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture

01 December 2010 BBC2

Professor Brian Cox uses this year’s Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture to address the main challenges in bringing science to television. He tackles the risks in simplifying science for a television audience, the perils of abandoning fact in the name of balance and the importance of making science on television intellectually and emotionally engaging.

Can praying improve your reasoning? I once questioned a student about his suspicious behavior during a logic examination. He confessed that he was praying for the correct answer. I felt this was cheating. Even if God did not give him the answer, the student was soliciting the answer from Someone Else.

– Dartmouth philosopher Roy Sorensen, in A Brief History of the Paradox, 2003