History of Science DVD Lecture Series

Michael Shermer, noted skeptic and editor of Skeptic magazine, has made available his college course on DVD, called The History of Science. The course consists of three DVDs containing 25.5 hours of MP3 lectures, including topics such as:

* What is Science? Science, Pseudoscience, & the Evolution-Creation Controversy

* Scientific Revolutions, Paradigms, and Paradigm Shifts in Science

* The Meaning of Science in History

The lectures can be ordered here.

Excerpt from Varieties of Scientific Experience, Part Two

More wisdom from Carl Sagan's The Varieties of Scientific Experience:

"By definition, as Ann Druyan has pointed out, an immortal Creator is a cruel god, because He, never having to face the fear of death, creates innumerable creatures who do. Why should he do that? If he's omniscient, He could be kinder and create immortals, secure from the danger of death. He sets about creating a universe in which at least many parts of it, and perhaps the universe as a whole, dies. And in many myths, the one possibility the gods are most anxious about is that humans will discover some secret of immortality or even, as in the myth of the Tower of Babel, for example, attempt to stride the high heavens. There is a clear imperative in Western religion that humans must remain small and mortal creatures. Why? It's a little like the rich imposing poverty on the poor and then asking to be loved because of it." (p. 29)

Excerpt from Varieties of Scientific Experience

I've been reading Carl Sagan's The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, edited by Sagan's widow Ann Druyan.

Sagan was invited in 1985 to give the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology at the University of Glasgow to standing-room-only audiences. The Gifford Lectures were established to "promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term--in other words, the knowledge of God." To be invited to lecture is one of the highest honors in Scottish academia.

Ann Druyan edited Sagan's lectures and published them, and I'm reading them now for a second time. Carl Sagan was a master at melding the scientific with the poetic. He saw such beauty and wonder in everything from the way a bacteria reproduced to the stunning images of a supernova, and he was infectious in inviting us to gaze at them as well.

From the book:

The number of external galaxies beyond the Milky Way is at least in the thousands of millions and perhaps in the hundreds of thousands of millions, each of which contains a number of stars more or less comparable to that in our own galaxy. So if you multiply out how many stars that means, it is some number--let's see, ten to the . . . It's something like one followed by twenty-three zeros, of which our Sun is but one. It is a useful calibration of our place in the universe. And this vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe, in my view has been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion, and especially no Western religion.

Russian has daughter killed over clothing

In a horrible story, a Russian immigrant in St. Petersburg has been charged with hiring a pair of hitmen to kill his 21-year old daughter. Two men abducted the girl, a university medical student, on March 8 and shot her twice in the head. Her crime?

Wearing a miniskirt.

From the article:

Russia has experienced a revival of conservative religious tradition since the fall of the Soviet Union both within its Russian Orthodox and large Muslim communities.

The Brick Testament looks at the Book of Revelations

Rev. Brendan Powell Smith of the popular Brick Testament site takes on The Apocalypse of John, or commonly known as The Book of Revelations. Rev. Smith recreates biblical scenes in Lego, putting a visual twist on familiar bible passages.

This time, Smith has tackled the early chapters of John's visions and--what many believe--our world's near future.



The passages are filled with allegory, as huge bizarre animals populate the throne room of God and, if depicted in a non-Biblical setting, would suggest the influence of mind-altering chemicals.






Smith has cleverly depicted God giving his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse the authority to slaughter one-quarter of the Earth's population, which if it occurred in April 2009, would total 1.7 billion people, all of them killed due to war, famine, and plague.

Holy Week in the Big Picture

The popular image blog Big Picture features photos of Christian believers around the world preparing for and celebrating Holy Week--the last week of Lent and the week leading up to Easter. Rituals vary widely, but what is striking about the set of photos displayed at the Big Picture is the number of people (referred to as 'penitents') who are undergoing some sort of self-punishment--From the skinned knees of someone kneeling on paving stones, to the bloody backs of self-flagellation, to the horrific view of a man's hand punctured with a nail in simulation of Jesus' crucifixion.

Many of these images would no doubt seem normal or even exalted to those familiar with the culture in which they are seen, but to outsiders they appear strange, even bizarre. Such is the way. As Robert Heinlein said, "One man's religion is another man's belly laugh."

Obama: U.S. not a Christian Nation

During his European tour, U.S. President Obama had this to say to reporters in Turkey:

"I've said before that one of the great strengths of the United States is, although as I mentioned we have a very large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."

Sounds like George Washington's famous statement in The Treaty of Tripoli in 1797:

"[T]he government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion…."