No Links From MeToday...
Poor Simon Gear.
The television weatherman hosts a midnight-to-four talk show on Radio 702, and I wake up early enough to catch the tail end of it, sometimes.
This morning the poor man read out, for a laugh, an email he’d received from a listener who wanted to know if the later rising of the sun these days was due to global warming, or was it because of the tsunami?.
He’d hardly had one chuckle, when some woman called in to say that she too was worried about the sun getting up later in the morning recently.
That’s funny, I guess.
What’s not so funny is the reflection that these two women are not alone-they’re not even a small minority.
There are millions of people in this world who just don’t bother to do any thinking in their entire lives
What has this got to do with atheism?
Pretty obvious really.
If this is how a lot of people conduct their lives-and I have every experiential reason to believe that many do, if not in degree then in kind, well then we shouldn’t be too surprised when they soak up all the dogma, all the unauthenticated stories, all the simple lies of religion. I used to do it-expect that learned people whose business it was to know these things really did know what they were talking about.
I got the shock of my life when I finally began to grow up, around the age of 40, and actually investigate these claims for myself. Not too good for a scientist.
Many, many people suppose, in the same way that I once did, that credentialed folk really know what the fuck they’re talking about.
Fact is, they frequently don’t, and are either perpetuating deceits of long tradition, or they have neglected to do the research thoroughly.
In some cases, notably the fundie creationists, I suspect that they’re making things up, and know that they’re lying.But it doesn’t seem to matter to them.If it gets souls for their master, it’s rationalized.
Thanks, but I’ll take note myself of when the sun rises, and investigate the reason for it. I’ll go with the honesty of atheism, and in some cases agnosticism, every time. As I’ve already mentioned elsewhere-it’s very difficult bow for me to accept the word of a theist on anything at all anymore.Even if she’s a physicist, I’ll be more inclined to do my own research before I accept their word, if they’ve proved themelves so disingenuous on other matters
The television weatherman hosts a midnight-to-four talk show on Radio 702, and I wake up early enough to catch the tail end of it, sometimes.
This morning the poor man read out, for a laugh, an email he’d received from a listener who wanted to know if the later rising of the sun these days was due to global warming, or was it because of the tsunami?.
He’d hardly had one chuckle, when some woman called in to say that she too was worried about the sun getting up later in the morning recently.
That’s funny, I guess.
What’s not so funny is the reflection that these two women are not alone-they’re not even a small minority.
There are millions of people in this world who just don’t bother to do any thinking in their entire lives
What has this got to do with atheism?
Pretty obvious really.
If this is how a lot of people conduct their lives-and I have every experiential reason to believe that many do, if not in degree then in kind, well then we shouldn’t be too surprised when they soak up all the dogma, all the unauthenticated stories, all the simple lies of religion. I used to do it-expect that learned people whose business it was to know these things really did know what they were talking about.
I got the shock of my life when I finally began to grow up, around the age of 40, and actually investigate these claims for myself. Not too good for a scientist.
Many, many people suppose, in the same way that I once did, that credentialed folk really know what the fuck they’re talking about.
Fact is, they frequently don’t, and are either perpetuating deceits of long tradition, or they have neglected to do the research thoroughly.
In some cases, notably the fundie creationists, I suspect that they’re making things up, and know that they’re lying.But it doesn’t seem to matter to them.If it gets souls for their master, it’s rationalized.
Thanks, but I’ll take note myself of when the sun rises, and investigate the reason for it. I’ll go with the honesty of atheism, and in some cases agnosticism, every time. As I’ve already mentioned elsewhere-it’s very difficult bow for me to accept the word of a theist on anything at all anymore.Even if she’s a physicist, I’ll be more inclined to do my own research before I accept their word, if they’ve proved themelves so disingenuous on other matters
1 Comments:
actually - the sun does rise a bit later than it used to... kind of.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2005-009
Have a look at that, the length of a day is 2.68microseconds shorter than before, as a result of a change in mass distribution or something. What probably happened was, someone heard that the tsunami caused the length of a day to shorten slightly - and assumed this meant "by a few hours".
Cheers!
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