Earth is moving at 67,000mph around its star, and still people insist there's no such thing as progress! This site is about looking at rationality and reason, and challenging dogma.
As a godless heathen, many religious people that I know and love expect me to treat events such as Christmas not only as a “normal day” but to be positively antagonistic towards it, and seem surprised that I’m happy to give gifts and participate. While it’s true that last Easter I did (and will continue to) poke fun at one of the popular myths surrounding it, with the exception of religious privilege, none of that really matters to me.
The origins of such celebrations doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate or enjoy the human and relationship aspects of them. With Christmas* — particularly now I live in the northern hemisphere, where the seasons give it sense — I enjoy the symbolism and generosity of giving and receiving gifts and the knowledge that it’s the half-way point of the winter season, as marked by the shortest day. And but for seasonal thermal lag, it’s all downhill from here and the promise of spring is just around the corner.
So whatever your beliefs or philosophy, I wish you and those you love the best of the season this way: Reason’s Greetings!
The time between posts here is an unfortunate side-effect of having to study like mad for the archaeology course I’m doing that is rapidly coming to an end, and numerous projects I’m either doing or starting. Never enough time in the day — particularly when you have to work a day job and maintain a social life, too.
And I’m trying not to just fill the posts with random gibberish or “cool stuff wot I found on the internets” — unless you’re okay with that? (Seriously, please let me know).
So, doing just that I thought I’d take a moment to post something to do with my hero, Carl Sagan. YouTube is a wonderful medium not only for the inevitable popular (and normally copyright-infringing) snippets from popular films and TV shows, but also for historical pieces that are hard to get and for mashups and other creative exercises.
And this is one of the latter — a brilliant homage to Carl Sagan featuring none other than his brilliant British counterpart, Stephen W. Hawking:
As you should know by now — as I’ve quoted him often enough — Carl Sagan is my hero. Here’s something beautiful, humbling and inspiring from a lecture he did in 1994, two years before his untimely death:
