07-15-2015, 09:29 AM
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#10 (permalink)
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Toasted Poster
Join Date: Oct 2014
Location: SoCal by way of Boston
Posts: 11,332
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Quote:
Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth
agreed
especially siberian tigers
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Reminds me:
Quote:
I come now to the last question in our discussion of Cosmic Purpose, namely: is what has happened hitherto evidence of the good intentions of the universe? The alleged ground for believing this, as we have seen, is that the universe has produced US. I cannot deny it. But are we really so splendid as to justify such a long prologue? The philosophers lay stress on values: they say that we think certain things good, we must be very good to think them so. But this is a circular argument. A being with other values might think ours so atrocious as to be proof that we were inspired by Satan.
Is there not something a trifle absurd in the spectacle of human beings holding a mirror before themselves, and thinking that what they behold so excellent as to prove that a Cosmic Purpose must have been aiming at it all along? Why, in any case, this glorification of Man?
How about lions and tigers? They destroy fewer animal or human lives than we do, and they are much more beautiful than we are. How about ants? They manage the Corporate State much better than any Fascist. Would not a world of nightingales and larks and deer be better than our human world of cruelty and injustice and war? The believers in Cosmic Purpose make much of our supposed intelligence, but their writings make one doubt it. If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of all my efforts.
Man, as a curious accident in a backwater, is intelligible: his mixture of virtues and vices is such as might be expected to result from a fortuitous origin. But only abysmal self-complacency can see in Man a reason which Omniscience could consider adequate as a motive for the Creator. The Copernican revolution will not have done its work until is has taught men more modesty than is to be found among those who think Man sufficient evidence of Cosmic Purpose.
- Bertrand Russell 1935
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__________________
“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
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