Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them - David Hume
When I was studying, inter alia, Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh many years ago, local boy made good David Hume was a name never far any philosophy professor or tutor's lips.
Aeon wrote movingly of Hume's life:
"While Hume was lying aged 65 on his deathbed at the end of a happy, successful and (for the times) long life, he told his doctor: ‘I am dying as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire.’ Three days before he died, on 25 August 1776, probably of abdominal cancer, his doctor could still report that he was ‘quite free from anxiety, impatience, or low spirits, and passes his time very well with the assistance of amusing books’."
I have listened to and would recommend the following podcasts (2015-2018 recommendations to follow):
2014
Many are imagining, some even planning for, the coming of the "singularity". Some are for, some against, many others sceptical that it could ever arrive.
Ray Kurzweil, who inter alia works on Google's machine learning project, predicts that by 2029, humans will be extending their lives considerably or even indefinitely. He also believes the human brain could be enhanced by tiny robotic implants that connect to cloud-based computer networks to give us 'God-like' abilities.
As Good Friday rolls around again, I recall how, as a "good little Catholic" boy I went regularly to confession. However, I'm not sure I committed many of the 48 sins that 19-year-old Isaac Newton self-admittedly “committed” before Whitsunday. I am intrigued by no.7 (did they have supersoakers in the 17th century?) and nos.26 and 44 (poor old Dorothy Rose and Arthur Storer), although on reflection I may have been guilty of 24, 28, 31 and 32, and I couldn't possibly comment on 16...
The always interesting Maria Popova notes that, while the friction between science and religion has always been addressed by some of humanity’s greatest minds, MinutePhysics (who have previously explored, inter alia, whether the universe has a purpose, why the past is different from the and the true science of parallel universes) has now
The 20th century, with its scores of millions of supernumerary dead, has been called the age of ideology. And the age of ideology, clearly, was a mere hiatus in the age of religion, which shows no sign of expiry. Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality- a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. It is straightforward - and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion...The champions of militant Islam are, of course, misogynists, woman-haters- they are also misologists - haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide. And, like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock response, of clichés, of inherited and unexamined formulations. This is the thrust of the greatest novel ever written, Ulysses, in which Joyce identifies Roman Catholicism, and anti-semitism, as fossilisations of dead prose and dead thought. - Martin Amis, http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,725608,00.html
I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death- let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature - Albert Einstein
Faith is something to die for- a doctrine is something to kill for - Tony Benn
What's the big deal about going to some building every Sunday, I mean, isn't God everywhere - Homer Simpson
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further - Richard Dawkins