Posts by Russell Brown
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Albert Einstein (Einstein, The World as I See It), engaging in the apparently foolish philosophical debate about God.
Dawkins deals with this explicitly. In context, the Eiensteinian God is basically the essence of the Universe, and not incoimpatible with knowledge. He quotes Einstein:
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie, which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of our word so far as our science can reveal it."
I'm down with that.
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>Not believing in God is no guarantee of goodness.
Of course. But there's a very large constituency in American society (see the Pew surveys) that believes that not believing in God is actually incompatible with goodness. That seems to be more the more acute point.
There's also no need to throw the baby out with the bath water, there's more mystery now, since the advent of modern science, about the universe and the nature of consciousness than there ever was. All those philosophical questions about existence, morality etc that religious thinkers pondered are still up for grabs.
I agree. The implications of modern science are provocative and astounding, and worth discussing. And it's reasonable to ask about the motivations for morality etc in the absence of religious doctrine. The thing that struck me (so far) about the Dawkins book was how lame the traditional arguments for God's existence actually are.
Interestingly, Dawkins is inclined to be quite gentle on pantheism, which makes sense to me. Attributing some holiness to natural phenomena doesn't disrupt science a great deal. It's just another means of modeling nature. Subscribing to the bitchy, capricious God of the Old Testament, on the other hand, seems so irrational to me that I can't work out why anyone would do it.
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Hmm. The RSS feed doesn't seem to be updating with this morning's post, so perhaps I should just kick off a thread by observing that I finally took delivery of my special Christmas whisky yesterday. Mmmm, Breath of the Isles ...
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Christmas was always a family time and now being away from Godzone it's tough having only our own small family here. I've felt the same pangs of loneliness away from home that you describe.
On the other hand, I have to say that Christmases I spent with friends in London were some of the best I've ever had. Your friends become your family. And, of course, you can be a lot naughtier with your friends than your family ...
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"For the music lover
If you've got iTunes on your computer, then it's easy to make a compilation of music you think they will enjoy and burn it on to a CD. Then, using old magazine pictures or photographs, make a CD cover with a personal message. On the inside of the cover, write your Christmas greetings."
Ha ha!
Guess that makes it okay for us to tell our friends how to get "premium content" for free then ...
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Russ, thanks for shaing that. It bought a smile to my face, and (nearly) a tear to my eye.
I was having a little cry as I finished it. As I said to someone else, the beauty of having a blog is that you can tell the stories you need to tell.
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The thing is, I half expect they'll be wondering at TVNZ why we're not grateful that they've decided how and when we should watch the last episode of the series.
I interviewed Rick Ellis yesterday, and he really couldn't accept that it was an issue for viewers that they'd be waiting until next year to see the last four Sopranos eps so TVNZ could use them as a run-in for the last series.
Try: because that's not how it was made, and because we don't want to feel like third-world chumps waiting around to see something that will already have been on re-run in the US.
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Damn. I just caught myself singing the damn chorus ...
That really is priceless.
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I'll get the EpGuide Queen onto it when she gets home ...
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Thanks dude - keep up the good work. And I'm struck by how the year got stranger as it went on ...
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