Revelation on a football saturday evening: Lucky to be alive!

Saturday evening.

I finished the leftover home-cooked food, loaded up and ran the dishwasher, and enjoyed a hot shower.  There was nothing left to do but to settle in front of the television.

I switched it on.  

I channel-surfed past the football games and ended up at C-Span's BookTv--it was a few minutes into the After Words program with Richard Dawkins.

Who would want to miss watching an interview with Richard Dawkins.  And watch football instead?  Not me. No, sir!

Dawkins was being interviewed about his latest book, which is a memoir, part one.  Even normally, he is a good storyteller, and in this he was even more relaxed.  The ground that was covered was not anything new--from life and science, to atheism, to justice.  And, of course, about meme.

Dawkins' points were yet again a reminder on how lucky we are to be alive, given the randomness of it all.  (For you lazy people, I have clipped that segment here from the program that is available in its full length.)

He refers to how even a sneeze could have resulted in a different world history sans Hitler.  And uses sneeze as that metaphor so much that I wondered why he didn't quote Martin Luther King, Jr. who talked about the sneeze as well. In the powerful "mountain top" speech the day before he was assassinated, King talks about getting a letter from a young girl, a white girl, who wrote to him after he survived the stabbing by a crazy woman.  Referring to the NY Times report that King could have died if he had even sneezed, the girl wrote to him that she was happy that King didn't sneeze.

So, yes, a sneeze is all that matters, metaphorically and literally sometimes.

When discussing the remarkable odds against which we have come to exist, Dawkins recited that old Aldous Huxley poem.  The genius and polymath that he is, Dawkins has it all in his memory.  A lesser mortal that I am, I later googled for it:

A million million spermatozoa,
All of them alive:
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.
And among that billion minus one
Might have chanced to be Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne—
But the One was Me.

It was the first of the million million to reach the egg and won the race.  Who knows how I would have turned out if it had been one of the others, eh!  

Thus we are born. Out of randomness. We evolved out of random events.  Life itself evolved in a random manner.  

Who better than Monty Python to put this all in perspective ;)

Why is Pope Benedit like Argentina's Pinochet?

Benedict will be in Britain between September 16 and 19, ...

[Richard] Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.
The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.

What is the case here with Pope Benedict?

The lawyers believe they can ask the Crown Prosecution Service to initiate criminal proceedings against the Pope, launch their own civil action against him or refer his case to the International Criminal Court.
Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said: “This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence.”
Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, said: “This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment.

Wikipedia on Pinochet's arrest in Britain, and his trial(s)

Richard Dawkins' next book

"Dear Juliet," ... "Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the sun and are really far away? And how do we know that Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the sun? The answer to these questions is 'evidence.' "

Apparently that is how Richard Dawkins' next book begins.  It "will be for 12-year-olds, an expansion on a letter about the importance of critical thinking that he wrote to his daughter, Juliet, now a medical student, when she was 10."
Should be great.  Am reminded of the book Sophie's World--I bought that for my daughter when she was in her mid-teens.  Am not sure whether she read that; I did :-)

The Secular Right

We often hear about the "religious right".  But, rarely about the "secular right".  It is simply impossible that there are conservatives who are not religious, right?  After all, it simply cannot be the case that all atheists are only lefties.

While far from a conservative myself, I found it simply fascinating a few years ago to read an essay by Heather Mac Donald in which she discussed why she is an atheist.  I had read a few essays by her in the City Journal, and almost always I disagreed with her.  Mac Donald comes to issues with a Reason-like rigid libertarian perspective and, while there is a lot of libertarian in me, well, there are issues where I lean left.

But, it was not that much a surprise because it is easy to imagine libertarians as atheists.

It is, therefore, not an eyebrow raiser by any means to read that Mac Donald is a contributing blogger at the Secular Right.  

I hadn't heard about this blog until earlier today.  Their mission sounds like it was time Conservatives were reminded of this:

We believe that conservative principles and policies need not be grounded in a specific set of supernatural claims.  Rather, conservatism serves the ends of “Human Flourishing,” what the Greeks termed Eudaimonia. Secular conservatism takes the empirical world for what it is, and accepts that the making of it the best that it can be is only possible through our faculties of reason.

I wish these people lots and lots of luck.  A reformed GOP will be far more constructive than the current one held hostage by the "religious right"

Mac Donald will certainly not get any invitations to Rick Warren's Christmas party after writing pieces like this:

Since believers give credit to God for answering their prayers when they are saved from catastrophe or illness, they have to explain why he answered their prayers and not those other people’s prayers, why he saved these children from a tsunami and not those other children.  Any believer who today thanks God for making sure that his coronary bypass operation was successful has to explain why God allowed at least 37 peasants to be buried in a Guatemalan landslide on Sunday.  

In another post, Mac Donald notes:

The teen birth rate has started climbing again. As usual, it’s highest in red states and states with high black and Hispanic populations and lowest in New England blue states. In 2006, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas topped the list, with 68, 64, and 63 births for every 1000 female teens, respectively, compared to 19 births per 1000 female teens in New Hampshire and 21 in Vermont and Massachusetts.

Will more religion cure this scourge? Not by itself. Mexican-American teens have the highest birth rate—93 births per 1000 girls—compared to 64 births per 1000 black girls and 26 births per 1000 white girls. Decadent secular Europe and non-Christian Asia lag far behind. In 2003, Japan’s teen birthrate was 3.9 births per 1000 girls. Italy’s rate was 6.9 per 1000, and France’s, 10 births per 1000 girls.

You go, girl!