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* Nancy Todd of New Alchemy: "Gaia is the only metaphor [both] scientific and mythological enough to see us thru our present crisis and lead to a re-sacralization of the world."
In 1990, 32 prominent scientists, led by Carl Sagan, signed "An Open Letter to the Religious Community." The manifesto briefly recounted the story of escalating human impact on the environment. "We are close," it said, "to committing—-many would argue we are already committing—what in religious language is sometimes called 'crimes against creation.'" Problems of such magnitude "must be recognized as having a religious as well as a scientific dimension . . . . Efforts to safeguard and cherish the environment need to be infused with a vision of the sacred."
* Carl Sagan: "The time has come for a respect, a reverence, not for just human life, but for all life on the planet."
Sagan, Demon-Haunted World: "In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide buildup of knowledge over time converts science into something only a little short of a trans-generational meta-mind.
Spirit comes from the Latin word "to breathe". What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word 'spiritual' that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything outside the realm of science. On occasion, I will feel free to use the word. Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality."
Quote from Page 32, Paperback ed.
Albert Schweitzer said, "We are not truly civilized if we concern ourselves with the relation of man to man. What is important is the relation of man to all life."
"If we're not to do so, we must have a plan. And just such a plan has been formulated by environmental scientists. They call it the World Conservation Strategy, and it rests on three very simple propositions.
Were the human race to receive a report card for its stewardship of the Earth at the dawn of the third millennium, it would likely read, “Does not play well with other species.
"The future may require not so much having a new idea... as stopping having an old idea." ~Edwin Land
Modern scientific understanding is important to me: the concept of stellar nucleosynthesis means that the carbon atoms on which our
molecules are based were made in red giant stars that lived
and died before Earth was formed. That is an astonishing, beautiful truth. ~voltaire1729 (Doug, of the Yahoo UU Club)
========
Ecologists believe that a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand. Stanley Pearson.
When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only of how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. -Bucky Fuller.
How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph, if the disputants had dared to define their terms. -Aristotle
The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there's no good evidence either way. -Bertrand Russell
"When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted that uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions --that is the heart of science." -Sagan, in "Cosmos"
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma; a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."
Umberto Eco
"It is the things for which there is no evidence that are believed with passion.
"Nobody feels any passion about the multiplication table or about the existence of Cape Horn, because these matters are not doubtful.
"But in matters of theology or political theory, where a rational man will hold that at best there is a slight balance of probability on one side or the other, people argue with passion and support their opinions by physical slavery imposed by armies, and mental slavery imposed by schools."
Bertrand Russell
The trouble with the world is that fools are so certain, and wise [men] have so much doubt. ibid
"Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself."
Richard Feynman
"There are no problems outside of the mind."
Krishnamurti
Going to [church] doesn't make you a [Christian] any more than going into a garage makes you a car. -J.L. Peter
La Rochefoucauld: Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.
GB Shaw: Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
Kung Fu Tze: Five things constitute perfect virtue: gravity, magnanimity, earnestness, sincerity, kindness.
ibid ("in the same place"): I have yet to meet a [man] as fond of high moral conduct as he is of outward appearances.
ibid, again (writes a lot, don't he?) Wisdom, compassion, and courage,--these are the 3 universally recognized moral qualities.
Charles Darwin: I ought, or I ought not; constitute the whole of morality.
Hemingway: No weapon has ever settled a moral problem.
Edith Stein: "Empathy is a correction to self-deception. ...a means to obtaining compassion." (Frank Pommersheim: "Sympathy takes no risk."
It's easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor. -Eric Hoffer
All cruelty stems from weakness. From the Kyodai Mahjongg computer game!
A religion can no more afford to degrade its devil than to degrade its god. -Hevelock Ellis
You will always find it (hatred) strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture. -Johann Goethe
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there. -Clair Booth Luce
Evil often triumphs, but never conquers. Joseph Roux
May West: "When I got the choice of two evils, I pick the one I never tried before."
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [men] to do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts, but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted." -Frank Herbert, Dune
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. -H.L. Mencken
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. -Rene Descarte
Thomas Huxley, who first coined the term "agnostic", said:
. "Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle.
. Positively, the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable."
"There is a time in every [man]'s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide..."
Emerson
Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.
Ludwig Borne
Your subjective experience can't be considered proof, no matter how certain you are of it. (my paraphrase of something seen on the net)
Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
Sagan
"The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts."
Bertrand Russell
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does
knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know
much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
C. Darwin
The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.
Thomas Huxley
Skepticism's bad rap arises from the impression that,
however necessary the activity, it can only be regarded as a
negative removal of false claims. Not so... Proper debunking
is done in the interest of an alternate model of explanation,
not as a nihilistic exercise.
Stephen Jay Gould
We are all tatooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe... indelible. You cannot educate a [person] wholly out of the superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, sr.
You never need think you can turn over any old falsehoods without a terrible squirming of the horrid little population that dwells under it. ibid.
Coleridge: To doubt has more of faith ... than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and meeting trotters.
"Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits."
Dan Barker, a former evangelist.
A 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments."
Ayn Rand
Bertrand Russell: What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite.
Doubt is the beginning of wisdom. -?-
Voltaire: doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.
A religion is a defense against a religious experience. -Joseph Campbell
We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Joseph Campbell?
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
"Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them." (WOW!)
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler."
"The wiser you are, the more you believe in equality, because the difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to all that is unknown."
"If faith is (part of) the methodology, shouldn't all (unreasonable) claims be accepted, to keep one's methodology consistent?" 2THINK.ORG
Hans Kung, Theologian
"There will be peace on earth when there is peace among the world religions." Anon
"Religious tolerance is not religious indifference. Tolerance means to value the right of another person to hold beliefs that you know are absolutely wrong. fulla crap."
"...tolerance is the assumption of superiority" Wendell Wilkie, American politician (1892-1944)
Vilfredo Pareto, comment on Kepler: "Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections."
===JKH: "Value other's rights to an opinion, even/especially when you don't value the opinion."
Even the quotes that now seem trite, were genius when first devised. -JKH
Eldridge Cleaver, "Soul on Ice"
"The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less."
"The great decisions of government cannot be dictated by the
concerns of religious factions.... We have succeeded for 205
years in keeping the affairs of state separate from the
uncompromising idealism of religious groups and we mustn't
stop now. To retreat from that separation would violate the
principles of conservatism and the values upon which the
framers built this democratic republic."
Senator Barry Goldwater, SEP-16-1981
"Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom." Herbert Spenser, British philosopher, 1820-1903
"In Germany, the Nazis first came for the Communists, and I did not speak up, for I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak up, for I was not a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak up, for I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak up, for I was a Protestant. And then they came for me, and by that time, no one was left to speak up."
Martin Niemoller
"Today, I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
Adolf Hitler (Reichstag speech, 1936)
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful."
Seneca the Younger (4? B.C. - 65 A.D.)
"The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it."
George Santayana
"The right to be heard does not include the right to be taken seriously." -- Hubert H. Humphrey
"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars."
Charles Darwin
Process and stability, however, are compatible only if the processes form rhythmic patterns - fluctuations, oscillations,
vibrations, waves. The new systems biology shows that fluctuations are crucial in the dynamics of self-organization. They are the basis of order in the living world: ordered structures arise from rhythmic patterns.
Fritjof Capra
Harry Overholtzer (friend): "Sedentary agriculture is the first assault on nature."
Several from Alan Watts:
The Earth is not a big rock infested with living organisms any more than your skeleton is bones infested with cells. The Earth is geological, yes, but this geological entity grows people, and our existence on the Earth is a symptom of this other system, and its balances, as much as the solar system in turn is a symptom of our galaxy, and our galaxy in its turn is a symptom of a whole company of other galaxies.
(Sounds very Gaian, doesn't he? So don't differentiate yourself and stand off and say "I am a living organism in a world made of a lot of dead junk, rocks and stuff." It, including you, all goes together.)
How could a centipede control a hundred legs at once?
Because it doesn't think about it!
Consciousness is a rather specialized form of awareness. (or is it vice versa?)
The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.
By myth, I mean an idea or an image in terms of which people make sense of the world.
There are five fundamental relationships to the material world: farming, cooking, clothing, housing and lovemaking.
Scottish scientist James Hutton, in 1785:
"The practice of science is that of testing guesses; forever
iterating around & towards the unattainable absolute of
truth."
"God is playing a comic to an audience that's afraid to laugh."
Probably the most Zen thing Voltaire ever said.
I shall live forever or die trying.
Voltaire (and one like Woody Allen! Wow!)
Bertrand Russell: "People are lumps of impure carbon and water, dividing their time between labor to postpone their normal dissolution, and a frantic struggle to hasten it for others."
* Tao Te Ching: "He who knows he has enough is rich." And only he?
Socrates: "Be what you wish to seem (to be)."
GBS: "We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it, than to consume wealth without producing it."
The world is a beautiful book, but of little use to him who
cannot read it.
Carlo Goldoni (to 1793)
The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting
for our wits to grow sharper.
Eden Phillpotts
The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by
stealth, and have it found out by accident.
Charles Lamb
"No possession ever helped a person to become a more enlightened being. Enlightenment is a matter of how far down the road you walk, not how fast you drive it in your Corvette."
From: Alan Seaver, CFO, Gaia Church
* It'll be easy to bring life to Mars. What will be hard is to bring Mars to life.
Is it ok for me to need external validation?? (Think about it...)
Mark Twain: "Man has made a graveyard of the globe, trying to smooth his brother's path to heaven."
John Scotus, Erigenia, of the 9th century, said "No vice is found but in the shadow of some virtue." None. He says that every vice is found in that shadow, and only there.
Fredrich Brown, sci-fi writer.(I love this one! It is the most selfless statement I've ever heard!)
"I wish that, with no change whatsoever to myself, I be made the most poor, unhappy, sick, and ugly person on Earth."
* Lord Acton's dictum: "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
"One who understands the universal law of causation can find no reason for any outside interference with nature."
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limits."
In "The World As I see It" 1934: "The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no god conceived in Man's image.... It is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with the highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints."
"God is the sum total of all physical laws."
"If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. ... It is always misleading to use anthropomorphical concepts in dealing with things outside the human sphere - childish analogies. We have to admire in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of this world - as far as we can grasp it. And that is all."
Albert Einstein (letters of 1954 and 1945)
* Emerson: "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."
* Aristotle: "The good life depends upon intimacy and small number."
The moment the [child] is concerned with which is the jay and which is the sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing. -Eric Berne
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it."
. Aristotle
* "Evolution is a non-random trend of a species toward adaption, based on successful transmission of random mutations that confer survival." [ darn, no source... magazine from about 10-89. Dawkins? Gould?]
Unknown reference. "Believe the person who is seeking the truth; doubt the one who says he's found it."
* H.G.Wells: "Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo."
* Churchill: "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."
* AND: "This we know: the Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the Earth. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of Earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to that web, he does to himself."
The right-wing and war: "An assault upon reason makes inevitable an assault upon order." a quote from a guest on Bill Moyers' "A World of Ideas."
Joseph Campbell on Moyers' PBS show: "This distinction between God and the world is not to be found in basic Hinduism or Buddhism."
Campbell quotes the Upanishad: ""Then he realized, I indeed am this creation, for I have poured it forth from myself. In that way, he became this creation. Verily, he who knows this, becomes in this creation, a creator." That's the clincher there! When you know this, then you've identified with the creative principle yourself, which is the God-power in the world, which means in you."
And, on metaphor: "It's by eating the forbidden fruit that man becomes the initiator of his own life. Life really begins with that."
And: "Whatever you do is evil for somebody."
And: "Every religion is true in this sense: it is true as [being] metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery. But when it gets stuck to the metaphor, then you're in trouble. All are true for their time. If you can find what the truth is, and separate it from the temporal inflection... just beat your same old religion into a new set of metaphors, and you've got it."
And: "A Polynesian saying comes to mind: standing on a whale, fishing for minnows. We are.... [doing that, not seeing reality.]
And: "Myths have to do with relating man to his environment."
"One rule is: if you're falling... dive."
* Voltaire: "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one."
"Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth." ~Ludwig Borne
"It's what you do with your illusion of choice that counts." ~Kevin Lessek
Hope, finally, lies not in the denial of hopelessness but in our perception of it."
Erich Harth
"If acorns start growing into theologians, or if women begin turning into pillars of salt, then we may wish to hypothesize about a supernatural influence. But until such time as nature becomes hopelessly unintelligible and unpredictable, we need look no further than nature itself for explanations." ~George H. Smith
Nothing is as firmly believed as that which is the least known. -Michel de Montaigne (1533-92)
For every credibility gap, there's a gullibility fill. -Richard Clopton
Michael Wood on PBS "Legacy": "The theologian and the executioner have been intimate throughout history."
"I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves." -John Wayne
I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. -John Wayne