Lionsgate has released a movie trailer for Larry Charles’ documentary Religulous, which follows Bill Maher as he travels around the globe interviewing people about their God and religion. It looks well produced and extremely clever. Seeing so many religious points of views strung together serves to illustrate the absurdity of these widely varied beliefs. I clearly is not workable for all these religions to co-exist… in fact, the film appears to illuminate the bigotry of religious groups towards each other’s faiths. I hope this movie is able to find wide release. Look for me with my large popcorn.
Truth conquers all… I wish. Clearly this is one of those maxims that requires its own brand of faith to believe. The difficulty of the problem is compounded by the sheer number of “truth-tellers” that do little else than to spread myths, half-truths, and downright lies.
I certainly have faith that this human race will slowly become enlightened. The number of rational thinkers currently on this little blue marble FAR outnumber those at any prior period in human history… and that number continues to increase not just in absolute terms, but also in relative terms.
That’s all I have for today… thanks for reading. Incidentally, do me a favor and let me know you stopped in by dropping me a comment. I enjoy doing this for the cathartic effect, but wouldn’t mind an intelligent discourse on occasion as well. Cheers!
I just watched Frank Miller’s ‘300′ again today. It truly is an impressive work. This story is impossible to tell without the extreme violence. To the filmaker’s credit, they tone down the gore and blood quite a bit by stylizing the spurts and splashes into mostly dark brown droplets. There is hardly any bright red in the movie other than the capes worn by the Spartans. It’s very artful, clever, and historically significant (if not 100% accurate). This is an important chapter in human history that occurred a mere 2,500 years ago and it was about freedom.
What caught my attention more than the viseral imagery and over-the-top Persians was the story and the characters. King Leonidas, his wife Queen Gorgo, and Dilios are fantastic characters. Xerxes the outlandish megalomaniac scoffs at the idea of a few hundred Spartans stopping his advance.
And so the Spartans and the Persians meet at Thermopylae. I won’t drag you through the whole history, but except for the dramatic visualizations, the movie brilliantly tells the tale of several incredible days of battle for freedom. See Wikipedia for an impressive retelling of the Battle of Themopylae.
My point in bringing all this up is the quote by Dilios at the end of the film. It is now a year later and the Greeks are several thousand troops strong and resisting another invasion by the Persians. In the final moments of the movie, he says:
This day we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny and usher in a future brighter than anything we can imagine…
What a shame that things didn’t quite work out that way… but imagine… what if we could rid the world of superstition and myth? Truly, that would be the dawning of a future that I look forward to and desperately want to be a part of.
The extraterrestrial is my brother… So the Catholic Church seems to believe that extraterrestrial life is a possibility. How long before they come around on biological human evolution?
The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.
“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Funes said. “Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ’sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be part of creation.”
This piece ran in my local paper over the weekend, but I like this version better because it’s not as heavily edited. Please to enjoy:
Story of evolution can be seen as comedy of errors –
Scientists say intelligent design doesn’t account for amusing anatomical quirks
By FAYE FLAM Philadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA — “Oh what a piece of work is man,” wrote Shakespeare, long before Darwin suggested just how little work went into us. Somehow, that same process that gave us reason, language and art also left us with hernias, flatulence and hiccups.
One argument scientists often make against so-called intelligent design — the idea that evolution cannot by itself explain life — is that on closer inspection, we look like we’ve been put together by someone who didn’t read the manual, or at least did a somewhat sloppy job of things.
Viewed as products of evolution, however, our anatomical quirks start to make sense, says University of Chicago fossil hunter and anatomy professor Neil Shubin, author of the recent book Your Inner Fish. And by focusing on our less lofty traits, evolutionary biology can help dispel one of the most egregious and even tragic fallacies surrounding Darwinian evolution — that it moves toward perfection, with man at the apex of some towering ladder.
Evolution of hiccups
That misreading of evolution has been connected to the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, with the Nazis extending the man-as-ideal notion to blue-eyed blond German-man-as-ideal notion.”Darwin didn’t believe it, but some, who saw it through a more religious light, tended to want to interpret evolution as a steady march toward the pinnacle of humanity,” says University of Pennsylvania ethicist Art Caplan, who has written extensively on the eugenics movement.
By today’s understanding, evolution by natural selection doesn’t march toward anything — it just modifies existing creatures to better compete in ever-shifting environments.
Understanding something as seemingly trivial as the evolution of hiccups can help clear up some profound misperceptions on the nature of life and humanity.
The sound of a hiccup echoes back to our very distant past as fish and amphibians some 375 million years ago, says Shubin. It’s really just a spasm that causes a sharp intake of breath followed by a quick partial closing of our upper airway with that flap of skin known as the glottis. It’s best if you can nip it in the first couple of hics, he says.
It’s much harder to stop once you’ve let yourself get up to 10. By that point you’ve reverted to an ancient breathing pattern orchestrated by the brain stem that once helped amphibians breath, letting water pass the gills without leaking into the lungs.
“Tadpoles normally breathe with something like a hiccup,” Shubin says.
The theme of his book is that we owe much of our anatomy to our animal ancestors. “Parts that evolved in one setting are now jury-rigged to work in another,” he says. “When you look at the human body, you see layer after layer of history inside of us.”
The first layer is what we share with chimpanzees and gorillas. The next goes back to mice and cows, while further down, you get to the relatively underappreciated layers we share with fish — which include the backbone and basic layout of the body.
And the people replied…