"Begin at the beginning,and go on till you come to the end: then stop." (Lewis Carroll, 1832-1896)
Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked."Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat."I don't know," Alice answered."Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."
"So long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation. "Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
"All right," said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. "Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin," thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!"
I am diagonally parked in a parallel universe. Like Arthur Dent from "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy", if you do not have a Babel Fish in your ear this blog will be completely unintelligible to you and will read something like this: "boggle, google, snoggle, slurp, slurp, dingleberry to the power of 10". Fortunately, those who have had the Babel Fish inserted in their ear, will understood this blog perfectly. If you are familiar with this technology, you will know that the Babel Fish lives on brainwave radiation. It excretes energy in the form of exactly the correct brainwaves needed by its host to understand what was just said; or in this case, what was read. The Babel Fish, thanks to scientific research, reverses the problem defined by its namesake in the Tower of Babel, where a deity was supposedly inspired to confuse the human race by making them unable to understand each other.
Beepbeepitsme has been added to The Atheist Blogroll. You can see the blogroll in my sidebar. The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts.
"Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat." - Sir Julian Huxley
"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes and ships and sealing wax; Of cabbages and kings. And why the sea is boiling hot; And whether pigs have wings." - Lewis Carroll
"Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" Alexander Pope
"The primary function of myth is to validate an existing social order. Myth enshrines conservative social values, raising tradition on a pedestal." Ann Oakley
"Some treat their longing for God as proof of His existence." Mason Cooley
"The god of the Christians, as we have seen, is the god who makes promises only to break them; who sends them pestilence and disease in order to heal them; a god who demoralizes mankind in order to improve it. A god who created man 'after his own image', and still the origin of evil in man is not accredited to him." Johann Most
"In love, we worry more about the meaning of silences than the meaning of words." Mason Cooley
"My philosophy is such that I am not going to vote against the oppressed. I have been oppressed, and so I am always going to have a vote for the oppressed, regardless of whether that oppressed is black or white or yellow or the people of the Middle East, or what. I have that feeling." Septima Clark
"Secular humanists suspect there is something more gloriously human about resisting the religious impulse; about accepting the cold truth, even if that truth is only that the universe is as indifferent to us as we are to it." Tom Flynn
"If the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion—I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape." Thomas Henry Huxley
Project Gutenberg is the oldest producer of free ebooks on the Internet. The collection was produced by hundreds of volunteers.
"Give the right man a solar myth, and he'll confute the sun therewith." James Russell Lowell
"Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone. Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon. Show me slowly what I only know the limits of. Dance me to the end of love." Leonard Cohen
"If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination." Mary Daly
"If the people were a little more ignorant, astrology would flourish - if a little more enlightened, religion would perish." Robert Green Ingersoll
"In other words (so to speak): not two and also not not two." Magellan's Log V
"History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology." W.H. Auden
"Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been." Jim Bishop
"To excavate is to open a book written in the language that the centuries have spoken into the earth." Spyridon Marinatos
"Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed." Thomas Henry Huxley
"The place has changed but little since Diana received the homage of her worshippers in the sacred grove. The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough." Sir James George Frazer
"Babylonian king (1792BCE–1750BCE) who made Babylon the chief Mesopotamian kingdom and codified the laws of Mesopotamia and Sumeria." The American Heritage
"We are ourselves history and share the responsibility for world history and our position in it. But we gravely lack awareness of this responsibility." Hermann Hesse
"Astrology: do we make a hullabaloo among the stars, or do they make a hullabaloo down here?" Mason Cooley
"Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare." Harriet Martineau
"The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun." Thomas Paine
"Zoroaster was thus the first to teach the doctrines of an individual judgment, Heaven and Hell, the future resurrection of the body, the general Last Judgment, and life everlasting for the reunited soul and body. These doctrines were to become familiar articles of faith to much of mankind, through borrowings by Judaism, Christianity and Islam; yet it is in Zoroastrianism itself that they have their fullest logical coherence.†- Mary Boyce
"My esoteric doctrine, is that if you entertain any doubt, it is safest to take the unpopular side in the first instance. Transit from the unpopular, is easy ... but from the popular to the unpopular is so steep and rugged that it is impossible to maintain it." William Lamb Melbourne
"With reason one can travel the world over; without it it is hard to move an inch." Chinese proverb.
"Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. Bribery and corruption are common. Children no longer obey their parents. . . . The end of the world is evidently approaching." Sound familiar? It is, in fact, the lament of a scribe in one of the earliest inscriptions to be unearthed in Mesopotamia, where Western civilization was born. C. John Sommerville
"The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago ... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands." Havelock Ellis
"It (myth) expresses and confirms, rather than explains or questions, the sources of cultural attitudes and values... Because myth anchors the present in the past it is a sociological charter for a future society which is an exact replica of the present one." Ann Oakley
"Starry, starry night. Flaming flowers that brightly blaze, swirling clouds in violet haze, reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue." Don McLean
"NOT from the stars do I my judgment pluck, and yet methinks I have astronomy, But not to tell of good or evil luck, Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons’ quality..." William Shakespeare
"Moreover, the universe as a whole is infinite, for whatever is limited has an outermost edge to limit it, and such an edge is defined by something beyond. Since the universe has no edge, it has no limit; and since it lacks a limit, it is infinite and unbounded. Moreover, the universe is infinite both in the number of its atoms and in the extent of its void." Epicurus
"Most people today still believe, perhaps unconsciously, in the heliocentric universe every newspaper in the land has a section on astrology, yet few have anything at all on astronomy." Hannes Alfven
"And sittith on the righthand of god the father almighty, from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead." - Nicene Creed
~*~
Why was the righthand the "right" side and the lefthand the "wrong" side? The reason may go back to some of our earliest observations of the sky.
~*~
In the Northern Hemisphere,the early thinkers and teachers noted that their own shadows moved from left to right, as does the shadow of a stick or a sundial move from left to right during the course of the sun across the heavens.
~*~
In that same northern hemisphere, however, if you want to check the path of the sun across the heavens, you have to face south, and the sun moves from your left to your right. Therefore, our preference for the right over the left may be based in ancient mythology, ancient astrology, ancient sun worship, where the sun was moving AWAY from the left towards the right.
~*~
Ancient sun worshippers in the northern hemisphere, (modern religions were probably influenced by these thoughts too), would have seen their god, the sun, moving steadily away from the left and towards the right. The same pattern can be seen when travelling southwards from the northern hemisphere in a ship.
~*~
When the ship is travelling from the northern hemisphere southwards towards the equator, the sun appears to rise to the left (east), reaches its highest point almost straight overhead, and sets to the right (west). When the ship is far to the south of the equator, then the sun continues to appear to rise to the left (east), reaches its highest point due behind (north), and sets to the right (west).
~*~
That this was the path that the ancients believed their god took, as it moved across the sky, was probably enough reason for them to be suspicious of the left.
~*~
Exodus 15:6 "Thy right hand, O LORD, is become glorious in power: thy right hand, O LORD, hath dashed in pieces the enemy."
Red Hot Chili Peppers - "Road Trippin" (Just a Mirror For The Sun)
A lot of powerful symbolism in that concept. When I was a christian & took an interest in the origins of symbolisms in the scripture, I was discouraged from pursuing that line of thinking. Although, symbolism IS an important aspect in all religions, looking to closely at it is considered dangerous territory. Why would Christians not want to understand their own roots?
I believe that hand preference exists in animals and we merely evolved to be mostly right-handed. Who knows why right is preferred? Tough question! As for words, funny how "left" also means adandoned, as in "left behind"
It wasn't uncommon for people back in the day to be re-trained to use their right hands as opposed to their left hands. There's always been a prejudice against southpaws. As I understand it, most Semitic languages are read right-to-left (but I could be off on this). Strangely enough, my good friend (who's a YEC'er, no less), is a southie. As an amusing sidenote, Ned Flanders on the Simpsons is a right-wing fanatic, but runs a leftorium.
I agree that religious believers are not encouraged to think about the origins of faith, or why certain things are done or believed in. Of course, when it is considered wicked, or bad to doubt faith, it is no wonder that many people do not ask questions.
I read somewhere recently that chimps are predominately left handed. It is interesting that one of our closest relatives shows a preference for the opposite hand. I have no idea why this is so, but it is another interesting part of the puzzle of life.
Of course there are all these theories about how if you are righthanded, you tap into different brain potentials, but I am as yet unconvinced about the authority of this.
Yes, my mother was one of them. And she went to a catholic school where the nuns were able to convince her,not so subtlely in those days, that she should write with her right hand.
Their methods at that time involved a ruler which was applied often to the back of the left hand.
It wasn't a good way to spread the "love and peace of religion" as far as my mother was concerned.
Yes that is right. Interesting isn't it, that a preference for one side or the other is taken to be sinister or evil.
I don't know why the majority of people are righthanded, but from an evolutionary point of view, it may convey an advantage. What that advantage is, if one exists, I don't know.
What I have noticed is that many outstanding thinkers, artists and innovators have been lefthanded. Whether or not there is a correlation between lefthanded and creativity /freethought, I am not sure. But it is interesting, none the less.
Maybe the reason we humans managed to create everything from the printing press to the DVR is because of being right-handed, while chimps are out there creating ... um, great works of impressionist art?
Right-handedness is more common than left-handedness in humans. If we could go back far enough, I think it's probably as simple as that. What's not in the norm, especially before you have the science to study something or explain why something is so, will generally be considered an abhorrence.
My left-handed grandmother for instance (born 1901) had her left hand tied to the chair behind her back at school and she was severely beaten if she tried to liberate it.
My left-handed grandmother for instance (born 1901) had her left hand tied to the chair behind her back at school and she was severely beaten if she tried to liberate it.
15 Comments:
A lot of powerful symbolism in that concept.
When I was a christian & took an interest in the origins of symbolisms in the scripture, I was discouraged from pursuing that line of thinking. Although, symbolism IS an important aspect in all religions, looking to closely at it is considered dangerous territory. Why would Christians not want to understand their own roots?
I believe that hand preference exists in animals and we merely evolved to be mostly right-handed. Who knows why right is preferred? Tough question! As for words, funny how "left" also means adandoned, as in "left behind"
It wasn't uncommon for people back in the day to be re-trained to use their right hands as opposed to their left hands.
There's always been a prejudice against southpaws.
As I understand it, most Semitic languages are read right-to-left (but I could be off on this).
Strangely enough, my good friend (who's a YEC'er, no less), is a southie.
As an amusing sidenote, Ned Flanders on the Simpsons is a right-wing fanatic, but runs a leftorium.
I'd point out that "sinister" means left handed.
I'd like to find out why there is a hand preference bilogically.
RE lt
I agree that religious believers are not encouraged to think about the origins of faith, or why certain things are done or believed in. Of course, when it is considered wicked, or bad to doubt faith, it is no wonder that many people do not ask questions.
RE blueberry
I read somewhere recently that chimps are predominately left handed. It is interesting that one of our closest relatives shows a preference for the opposite hand. I have no idea why this is so, but it is another interesting part of the puzzle of life.
Of course there are all these theories about how if you are righthanded, you tap into different brain potentials, but I am as yet unconvinced about the authority of this.
RE ka
Yes, my mother was one of them. And she went to a catholic school where the nuns were able to convince her,not so subtlely in those days, that she should write with her right hand.
Their methods at that time involved a ruler which was applied often to the back of the left hand.
It wasn't a good way to spread the "love and peace of religion" as far as my mother was concerned.
RE discord:
Yes that is right. Interesting isn't it, that a preference for one side or the other is taken to be sinister or evil.
I don't know why the majority of people are righthanded, but from an evolutionary point of view, it may convey an advantage. What that advantage is, if one exists, I don't know.
What I have noticed is that many outstanding thinkers, artists and innovators have been lefthanded. Whether or not there is a correlation between lefthanded and creativity /freethought, I am not sure. But it is interesting, none the less.
Re: Left-handed chimps:
Maybe the reason we humans managed to create everything from the printing press to the DVR is because of being right-handed, while chimps are out there creating ... um, great works of impressionist art?
Right-handedness is more common than left-handedness in humans. If we could go back far enough, I think it's probably as simple as that. What's not in the norm, especially before you have the science to study something or explain why something is so, will generally be considered an abhorrence.
My left-handed grandmother for instance (born 1901) had her left hand tied to the chair behind her back at school and she was severely beaten if she tried to liberate it.
RE ted
My lefthanded mother suffered a similar fate. Except it was the nun's ruler.
What I have noticed is that many outstanding thinkers, artists and innovators have been lefthanded.
Not to mention great cricketers.
My left-handed grandmother for instance (born 1901) had her left hand tied to the chair behind her back at school and she was severely beaten if she tried to liberate it.
The power of magical thinking!!
Wasn't there something about 'rising to the right hand of gawd' in the gospels?
RE arthur
Cricketers are never great, they just have a natural affinity for being on TV during summer. ;)
RE KA
Yes, quite a few quotes concerning "the righthand" in the bible. Some people say that the righthand of god referecnes the authority of god.
Post a Comment
<< Home