“Dangerous does not mean exciting or bold. It means likely to cause great harm. The most dangerous idea is the only dangerous idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous.We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That’s the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we’re in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it’s time to make a run for the fence.”
Quote from Daniel Gilbert, Harvard University, hat tip to John Paczkowski, Good Morning Silicon Valley. I would recommend you also check out the rest of the answers to What Is Your Dangerous Idea? from Edge The World Question Center. If the thinking doesn’t stimulate you there may be something wrong with your neurons.
How about this call to action for scientific pantheism from Carolyn Porco, Cassini Imaging Science Team Leader:
“Imagine a Church of Latter Day Scientists where believers could gather. Imagine congregations raising their voices in tribute to gravity, the force that binds us all to the Earth, and the Earth to the Sun, and the Sun to the Milky Way. Or others rejoicing in the nuclear force that makes possible the sunlight of our star and the starlight of distant suns. And can’t you just hear the hymns sung to the antiquity of the universe, its abiding laws, and the heaven above that ‘we’ will all one day inhabit, together, commingled, spread out like a nebula against a diamond sky?”
Helzerman's Odd Bits says:
April 11, 2006 at 12:04 am
The movement toward political talk in tech blogs, a good thing?
When the most non-political friend I had started sending out newsletters against George Bush, I knew the world was changing.
I was teenager of the very apolitical 80’s. If you asked kids back then what Activism was they’d probably think it …
Robert Carey says:
September 20, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Carolyn Porco has a point, yet she seems to ignore the very same scientific pantheism and its pagan roots that is mentioned. Is it not the case that our current holidays are rooted in Pagan holidays. Xmas is the winter solstice, Easter the spring equinox. Midsummers day is a holiday in some parts of the world.
Even Halloween and Mayday are 40 days (whatever thats all about) after an equinox. These naturally occurring days reflect the deeper connection to the earth, praying to the force of the electron is just getting silly.