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f03a744
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Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
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earth
humour
unfashionable
watches
primitive
cosmology
galaxy
digital
perspective
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Douglas Adams |
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541101c
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"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?" Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way." A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."
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religion
science
god
cosmology
epistemology
organized-religion
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Carl Sagan |
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ac1a0b8
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The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.
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hindu
vedantism
vedas
cosmos
cosmology
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Carl Sagan |
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18cdbb5
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And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don't even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in you life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means they are so small you don't have to take them into account when you are calculating something.
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science
life
cosmology
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Mark Haddon |
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f7f1a8e
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Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call 'soul' or 'spirit,' is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the 'soul' or the 'spirit' ceases likewise. I expressed these ideas long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in Russia and by Watson in the United States, proclaimed their new psychology. This apparently mechanistic conception is not antagonistic to an ethical conception of life.
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universe
mind
nature
spirit
religion
science
life
behaviorism
behaviorists
first-cause
ivan-pavlov
ivan-petrovich-pavlov
john-b-watson
john-broadus-watson
stimuli
john-watson
pavlov
cosmology
astronomy
watson
goal
environment
determinism
ethics
theology
dogma
materialism
naturalism
consciousness
science-and-religion
life-after-death
physics
psychology
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Nikola Tesla |
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1e57939
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I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.
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existence
science
cosmos
cosmology
informed
knowledge
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Carl Sagan |
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fcf383f
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It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!
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stars
science
humor
cosmology
physics
creation
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George Gamow |