The Gun Counter

Just watched "The Immortals" episode. Pretty interesting until he got on his soapbox about manmade glue ball worming. Then, CLICK, over to Will Smith and The Wild, Wild West.

What a blowhard, asshole. A shame, since this show had some promise.

What was so great about the original Cosmos was that it was about teaching, not preaching. It pretty much avoided the obsessions of the day to focus on the wonder of science and the journey.

Anything less than that cheapens the legacy.

If you think there was no preaching going on in the original Cosmos, I would suggest your cultural radar is long overdue for overhaul.

"The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be..."

Really, Dr. Sagan?
Sounds like a lot of assumptions, which are opinions, which are informed by prejudices, which is to say they're religious statements, not scientific statements.
Science tells me that if I cool ordinary water to 32F at 1Atm it will solidify.
I can repeatedly test that hypothesis, and go 100,000,000 for 100,000,000.
Telling me how and by whom or what water came to be is philosophy, not science.
And that's just the first 2 seconds of Epsiode 01, Season 01, of the original series.
So, please, let's not get all nostalgic just because Carl Sagan is dead.
If you can bring him back and chat with him now, I daresay his statements on the topic of philosophy would have a good bit more observational data, one way or the other.


But damn, a show so bad you'd watch Wild, Wild West instead?? On purpose?!?

The only way to get harsher on that invariably starts with "Yo momma..."

Aesop wrote:If you think there was no preaching going on in the original Cosmos, I would suggest your cultural radar is long overdue for overhaul.

"The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be..."

Really, Dr. Sagan?
Sounds like a lot of assumptions, which are opinions, which are informed by prejudices, which is to say they're religious statements, not scientific statements.
Science tells me that if I cool ordinary water to 32F at 1Atm it will solidify.
I can repeatedly test that hypothesis, and go 100,000,000 for 100,000,000.
Telling me how and by whom or what water came to be is philosophy, not science.
And that's just the first 2 seconds of Epsiode 01, Season 01, of the original series.
So, please, let's not get all nostalgic just because Carl Sagan is dead.
If you can bring him back and chat with him now, I daresay his statements on the topic of philosophy would have a good bit more observational data, one way or the other.

I wondered about that too. Atheism. Nuclear Winter. If he were still alive he'd probably be big into climate change.

Every time someone gets up there and says "I believe every word of the bible is literally true and you shouldn't be allowed to teach children otherwise" they make it worse.

I have a brother-in-law who believes that, that the earth is 8,000 years old (or some similar number gotten from counting begats and adding up ages), that dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans, etc.

I wonder though, did science embrace the anti-religious Left because scientists saw an existential threat, or did the anti-religious Left convince scientists of that threat to get them on their side. Religious folks can circle wagons too.

The rise of fundamentalism (at least in the US) came about as a result of Darwinism. It's one thing to say humans evolved from lower forms of life, and quite another to say humans evolved from lower forms of life and this proves there's no God. No one really thought about the Bible as being a literal history until religious people came under attack. The question of who Cain married isn't a paradox until you assume the Bible tells you everything that happened.

I'll note that there are precious few fundamentalist/literalist Jews, a people who've lived with the Old Testament stories a long time before the Christians made the scene.

CByrneIV wrote:To say the second great awakening was a reaction against the theory of evolution would be both inaccurate in general and oversimplified...

...for one thing, it began several decades before the publication of "on the origin of the species" (the "first great awakening" began in the 1730's, the second in the 1790s and was fever pitched by the 1840s. "On the origin of the species" wasn't published until 1859)...

HOWEVER, at least a part of the motivating force and at least a part of what brought many adherents to it... sometimes a very large part... was a reaction against the theory of evolution, yes.

It was more a reaction against deism, humanism, and secularism in general, but evolution is a good focus point for that as a whole.

I was thinking more of the rise of Fundamentalism, Pentacostalism for instance, but also among the Presbyterians (in Princeton I believe?), in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

For the human-caused climate change true believers, I like Chris' act as if test.

By and large, they tend to fail.

MarkD wrote:I have a brother-in-law who believes that, that the earth is 8,000 years old (or some similar number gotten from counting begats and adding up ages), that dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans, etc.

Lots of Christians who hold to that timeline don't really know where the idea comes from. There were many scholars who wrote on it, but one of the most noted was James Ussher

James Ussher (sometimes spelled Usher, 4 January 1581 – 21 March 1656) was Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between 1625 and 1656. He was a prolific scholar, who most famously published a chronology that purported to establish the time and date of the creation as the night preceding Sunday, 23 October 4004 BC, according to the proleptic Julian calendar.

Just for "kicks and giggles", ask your B-I-L if he's ever heard of Eridu Genesis, the Utnapishtim episode in the Epic of Gilgamesh, or Deucalion.

MarkD wrote:I wondered about that too. Atheism. Nuclear Winter. If he were still alive he'd probably be big into climate change.

He was into it back then. I had the book (may still be at my folks' house) and watched every episode of the original, and I remember lines like "The Earth's albedo is changing" and ominous passages about Venus and runaway greenhouse effect.

(Edit to add): Even now I have a soft spot in my heart for Dr. Sagan, but he was full of it in some important ways.

For the umpteenth time: "Aliens Cause Global Warming" by Michael Crichton.

Dead seven years when it was given, Carl Sagan was nonetheless the poster child for that whole lecture.

Termite wrote:

MarkD wrote:I have a brother-in-law who believes that, that the earth is 8,000 years old (or some similar number gotten from counting begats and adding up ages), that dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans, etc.

Lots of Christians who hold to that timeline don't really know where the idea comes from. There were many scholars who wrote on it, but one of the most noted was James Ussher

James Ussher (sometimes spelled Usher, 4 January 1581 – 21 March 1656) was Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between 1625 and 1656. He was a prolific scholar, who most famously published a chronology that purported to establish the time and date of the creation as the night preceding Sunday, 23 October 4004 BC, according to the proleptic Julian calendar.

Just for "kicks and giggles", ask your B-I-L if he's ever heard of Eridu Genesis, the Utnapishtim episode in the Epic of Gilgamesh, or Deucalion.

We don't have these discussions, for the sake of peace in the family.

Nor do we discuss how I can look at the Andromeda Galaxy that's about 2.5 million light years away, which means the light left 2.5 million years ago, if the universe is only 6-8,000 years old. The light wouldn't have gotten here yet, so I shouldn't be able to see it. Or did God create the light en route too? To test the faithful no doubt.

Nor do I point out that we're told specifically at the end of John's Gospel that Jesus did many more things that weren't recorded, so many that a book describing them wouldn't fit in the world, but we're to believe we're told everything about Creation in the first couple chapters of Genesis. So we're NOT told, nor COULD we be, everything Jesus did over three years of public ministry, but we ARE told everything God did over seven days of creation (not even getting into how we define a "day" when there's no earth to rotate as yet).