Beautiful Richard Dawkins quotes

[el_bryanto]

"After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings."

While obviously I disagree with Dawkins on the place of religion, his intoxication at the wonders of the world around him and the understandings offered by science are truly impressive.

I also really like this quote.

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"

Very well said.

Bryant

[cbayer]

1. He is inspiring when speaking of science and his philosophy on life.

Thanks for posting this.

[trotsky]

4. And yet you still wish he'd go the way of the dinosaurs.

Do you wish to retract/modify that statement now?

[skepticscott]

5. And when he fights to defend those things

against the blatant, imposed ignorance that can only come from religious "faith".

And you attack him for that too, which makes your praise here seem hollow, empty and insincere. Why not just stick with calling him a "bigot"?

[Th1onein]

2. Jesus H. Christ.

In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"

Beautiful. Just beautiful

[hrmjustin]

6. What does the H stand for?

[rug]

7. Hossanah.

[dimbear]

9. Actually lost in the mists of history, there are of course various theories.

Most trace it back to the IHS symbol, which is sort of an acronym of Jesus in Greek.
It's also a little like Harry S. Truman, where the S stands for nothing whatever.

[pokerfan]

10. The Master speaks...

TLDR version: No one knows.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/30/why-do-folks-say-jesus-h-christ

[Th1onein]

15. Aich.

[arcane1]

3. Lovely. The second one reminds me of a Lewis Thomas quote that I love:

From the book "The Lives of a Cell"

"Statistically, the probablilty of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existence would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely out-numbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places... Everyone is one in three billion at the moment, which describes the odds. Each of us is a self-contained, free-standing individual, labeled by specific protein configurations at the surface of cells, identifiable by whorls of fingertip skin, maybe even by special medleys of fragrance. You'd think we'd never stop dancing!"

[rug]

8. This quote has a great windup.

The population of the US is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the US leads the world by miles. You would think that a country with such resources, and such a field of talent, would be able to elect a leader of the highest quality. Yet, what has happened? At the end of all the primaries and party caucuses, the speeches and the televised debates, after a year or more of non-stop electioneering bustle, who, out of that entire population of 300 million, emerges at the top of the heap? George Bush. - "Bin Laden's victory " The Guardian (March 22, 2003)

Over the plate!

[Rob H.]

11. Reminds me of this cover for The Daily Mirror in 2004

I found myself wondering the same thing (I'm sure a lot of people did).

[rug]

12. Remember this?

http://sorryeverybody.com/index_old.shtml

[Rob H.]

13. Nice!

That really takes me back--I'd forgotten all about it.

[cbayer]

14. I was in Europe when this happened and things got very ugly very fast.

It didn't take me long to figure out that I needed to tell people I was from Canada.

[pokerfan]

16. He's so strident!

[el_bryanto]

17. IN fairness - there are plenty of other quotes that are a bit . . . well more forceful shall we say?

But I am focusing on the positive.

Bryant