Bits 'n' Pieces




Established 1970


Mountaineer Joe Simpson fell and broke his leg while climbing a mountain. He was alone and had to fight to survive. Below is an extract of his talk with Andrew Denton on his show "Enough Rope".

Andrew Denton:
You said you didn't want to die alone. Did you have any sense of God?

Joe Simpson:
My mother was Southern Irish, and I was brought up as a devout Catholic. In fact, at one point I thought I'd become a priest, but I'd have made an appalling priest anyway… At 16, I asked all these monks some serious questions and they didn't come up with the answers, and I just decided I didn't believe in God. And I always thought, you know, if everything hit the fan, then I might turn around and say, you know, a couple of Hail Marys, "Can you get me out of here?" And in all those days, I never did once, not even in the crevasse. I never thought of some God or some omniscient being that'd lean down and give me help, and I feel, actually, if I had believed that, I just would've stopped and waited for it, and I would've died. And so in a way, that's why that loneliness, I think, came in. I was 25, I was fit, strong, ambitious. I wanted to climb the world and I was dying. There was no afterlife, there's no paradise, there's no heaven. It's just dead. And I really didn't want to lose that. I've got immense respect for other people's religions, be it Christian or Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim. I just…I don't happen to have a belief, and I've tested that atheism, so, um, I respect my own lack of belief now. Before, I was never quite sure.
For a transcript of the talk go to: Enough Rope


"Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves."

Bertrand Russell


"When we dropped bombs on the villages I knew that many innocent women and children would die a terrible death; they would be burned alive by napalm, maimed, or buried alive. I come from a very religious family and I often thought of my own wife and children back in Massachusetts. I wondered how I would manage to live with the guilt for the rest of my life. The knowledge that God was with me and that our padre had done everything for my soul's salvation was a constant comfort in these terrible times. Even today I could not survive without the certainty my faith gives me."

Flight Lieutenant McCallum


My neurologist once told me that people with temporal lobe epilepsy are very often intensely religious. Certainly just before I have a grand mal fit I have a 'vision' of such peace, joy and significance that I can only call it God. What does this say about the whole nature of religious vision? Certain episodes in the lives of the saints have acquired a new meaning for me. When Theresa of Avila had her three-day vision of hell, was she simply having a temporal lobe attack? The horrors she saw are similar to those I have experienced, but in her case informed by the religious imagery of her time. Like other saints who have 'seen' hell she describes an appalling stench, which is part of an epileptic aura. Is it possible that the feeling I have had all my life that something - God, perhaps? - is just over the horizon, something unimaginable but almost tangibly present, is simply the result of an electrical irregularity in my brain? It is a question that can't yet be answered, unless it be that God, if He exists, could have created us with that capacity for Him, glimpsed at only when the brain is convulsed. What I can say, however, is that if my 'visions' have sometimes let me into 'Hell' they have also given me possible intimations of a Heaven which I would not have been without.

From "Beginning the World" by Karen Armstrong - former nun.


"To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin."

-- Cardinal Bellarmine, during the trial of Galileo, 1615


To sum up:
1. The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute.
2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him a ride.

H.L. Mencken


...."The sciences are not sectarian. People do not persecute each other on account of disagreements in mathematics. Families are not divided about botany and astronomy does not even tend to make a man hate his father and mother. It is what people do not know that they persecute each other about. Science will bring, not a sword, but peace."

R.G. Ingersoll


HOCUS POCUS -
from HOC EST ENIM CORPUS MEUM
used in the Catholic Mass!


Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends. . . Many times a day I realize how much of my outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give as much as I have received.

Albert Einstein


Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane like all dreams: A God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made everyone of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!

Mark Twain


EXCERPT FROM DEAR BERTRAND RUSSELL by BERTRAND RUSSELL

"......I am afraid that education is conceived more in terms of indoctrination by most school officials than in terms of enlightenment. My own belief is that education must be subversive if it is to be meaningful. By this I mean that it must challenge all the things we take for granted, examine all accepted assumptions, tamper with every sacred cow, and instill a desire to question and doubt. Without this the mere instruction to memorise data is empty. The attempt to enforce conventional mediocrity on the young is criminal."


"Freedom is the name of the game: if adults haven't the common sense to be their own censors, and worse still, wish to dictate what the next person is allowed to read and see, we really are still an uncivilised and unsophisticated bunch of ratbags."

Excerpt from an article by Zigmut Malter


To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world is just as base as to use force.

Hypatia


SOME THOUGHTS OF JOSEPH LEWIS from An Atheist Manifesto

What difference does it make whether one believes in a God or not? It is the difference between being right or being wrong, between truth or surmise, between facts or delusion, between Progress or Dark Ages.

If man is a "fallen angel" by the commission of a "sin" then disease and sorrow are part of God's inscrutable plan as a penalty imposed for his "disobedience". It then follows that life should be devoted to the expiation or softening the penalty. The atonement consists of being as miserable as possible.

Atheists do not believe in human depravity, a tyrant God, hell, heaven or that disease is a punishment for sin. Prayer permits disease to continue and to increase the suffering of the victim.

The fear of the "Lord" produces grovelling slaves. More progress has been made for the welfare of humans in the last 200 years than in the previous 5000?

Religion is the great obstacle in the path of intellectual progress. Intellectual emancipation broke the spell of superstition and ushered in the Age of Reason and the Dawn of Science. Education becomes the primary object of civilisation. The church knows that an educated man is an unbeliever. What perversity justifies the inflicting of pain or suffering? Everyone who has contributed to the relief of pain and suffering has been an infidel to the Bible god. Every new invention and beneficial discovery violates Biblical ethics.

The duty you owe to yourself is to do the best you can and the duty you owe to your family is to endeavour to make them happy. Get all the joy and happiness you can out of life. Enjoy the fruits of your labour.


From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan.
Mammals characteristically nuzzle, fondle, hug, caress, pet, groom and love their young, behavior essentially unknown among the reptiles. If it is really true that the R complex and limbic systems live in an uneasy truce within our skulls and still partake of their ancient predilections, we might expect affectionate parental indulgence to encourage our mammalian natures, and the absence of physical affection to prod reptilian behavior. There is some evidence that this is the case. In laboratory experiments, Harry and Margaret Harlow found that monkeys raised in cages and physically isolated - even though they could see, hear and smell their simian fellows - developed a range of morose, withdrawn, self-destructive and otherwise abnormal characteristics. In humans the same is observed for children raised without physical affection - usually in institutions - where they are clearly in great pain.

The neuropsychologist James W. Prescott has per formed a startling cross-cultural statistical analysis of 400 preindustrial societies and found that cultures that lavish physical affection on infants tend to be disinclined to violence. Even societies without notable fondling of infants develop nonviolent adults, provided sexual activity in adolescents is not repressed. Prescott believes that cultures with a predisposition for violence are composed of individuals who have been deprived - during at least one of two critical stages in life, infancy and adolescence- of the pleasures of the body. Where physical affection is encouraged, theft, organized religion and invidious displays of wealth are inconspicuous; where infants are physically punished, there tends to be slavery, frequent killing, torturing and mutilation of enemies, a devotion to the inferiority of women, and a belief in one or more supernatural beings who intervene in daily life.

We do not understand human behavior well enough to be sure of the mechanisms underlying these relationships, although we can conjecture. But the correlations are significant. Prescott writes: 'The percent likelihood of a society becoming physically violent if it is physically affectionate toward its infants and tolerant of premarital sexual behavior is 2 percent. The probability of this relationship occurring by chance is 125,000 to one. I am not aware of any other developmental variable that has such a high degree of predictive validity.' Infants hunger for physical affection; adolescents are strongly driven to sexual activity. If youngsters had their way, societies might develop in which adults have little tolerance for aggression, territoriality, ritual and social hierarchy (although in the course of growing up the children might well experience these reptilian behaviors). If Prescott is right, in an age of nuclear weapons and effective contraceptives, child abuse and severe sexual repression are crimes against humanity. More work on this provocative thesis is clearly needed. Meanwhile, we can each make a personal and noncontroversial contribution to the future of the world by hugging our infants tenderly.

If the inclinations toward slavery and racism, misogyny and violence are connected - as individual character and human history, as well as cross-cultural studies, suggest - then there is room for some Optimism. We are surrounded by recent fundamental changes in society. In the last two centuries, abject slavery, with us for thousands of years or more, has been almost eliminated in a stirring planet-wide revolution. Women, patronized for millennia, traditionally denied real political and economic power, are gradually becoming, even in the most backward societies, equal partners with men. For the first time in modern history, major wars of aggression were stopped partly because of the revulsion felt by the citizens of the aggressor nations. The old exhortations to nationalist fervor and jingoist pride have begun to lose their appeal. Perhaps because of rising standards of living, children are being treated better worldwide. In only a few decades, sweeping global changes have begun to move in precisely the directions needed for human survival. A new consciousness is developing which recognizes that we are one species.

("COSMOS." FUTURA BOOKS pages 359 & 360)

Webeditor comment. Since the events of the 11th September 2001 I hope Carl Sagan's words will still hold true. So much progress seems to be coming undone.


"Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as a punishment for transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example, would kill one of its foals in order to make the wind change its direction.... asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies"

Aldous Huxley


The essence of atheism is the freedom of the individual. Freedom releases the immense potentialities of human imagination, initiative and effort that lay suppressed under the theistic faith. Free individuals feel masters of situations. The mood of supplication and complaint, inherent in prayer to god end petitions to government, has no place in the atheistic way of life. Atheists always assert; they never surrender. They take no failure; everything is an experience that improves the method for further attempts.

GORA


We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world - its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties and its ugliness. See the world as it is and not be afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely being slavishly subdued by the terror which comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in Church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human-beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world and if it is not as good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages.

A good world needs knowledge, kindness and courage, it does not need regretful hankering after the past or fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by the ignorant. It needs a fearless outlook and free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.


BERTRAND RUSSELL