"A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. But a wise man finds a smart man and learns from him how to avoid the mistake altogether."
—Roy H. Williams
Here's Carl Sagan talking about that Pale Blue Dot again. This time he's critiquing man's tendency, typically through a religious lens, to see our appearance on the cosmic stage as something terrifically intended - by a creator perhaps.
Sagan argues for the godless science of observation and logic, and the fallacy of human wishful thinking, and he does it reasonably but - to my mind - not entirely convincingly. But I say that does not matter. What strikes me is that in this video we find a man who has so much more wonder, and perhaps even spiritual insight, than most religious people that I know, and his sense of wonder is enriching and inspiring... and yet he is no friend of religion.
This is nearly ten minutes of monologue, so it's probably worth making a fresh brew first. But it is a worthwhile listen. I commend it to you if you are a thinking person. (If you're not a thinking person, then what the frakk are you doing reading this?)
11:49 PM
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