Let's Think.....Wednesday 12 March 2014

Let' Think.....8 March 2014

"God and immortality, the central dogmas of the Christian religion, find no support in science. No doubt people will continue to entertain these beliefs, because they are pleasant, just as it is pleasant to think ourselves virtuous and our enemies wicked. But for my part I cannot see any ground for either. I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist; so may the Gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them. I shall not enlarge upon this question, as I have dealt with it elsewhere."

-Bertrand Russell "What I Believe" (1925). 

What I Believe was published as a little book in 1925. In it, Russell wrote in the preface, ‘I have tried to say what I think of man’s place in the universe, and of his possibilities in the way of achieving the good life. In human affairs, we can see that there are forces making for happiness, and forces making for misery. We do not know which will prevail, but to act wisely we must be aware of both’. In the New York court proceedings in 1940 What I Believe was one of the books presented as evidence that Russell was unfit to teach at City College. Extracts from it were also widely quoted in the press, usually in such a way as to give quite a false impression of Russell’s views.

Let's Think...25 February 2014

Let's Think....Saturday 22 February 2014

Let'Think....Friday 21 February 2014

If adopting a delusion yields some benefit, this doesn’t mean that there’s a lawful correspondence between the delusion and external reality—only that the delusion is socially useful in certain contexts. Valuing consequences more than truth opens the floodgates to believing what we want to believe. The net effect of this is that we move further from reality and become less likely know if the external conditions we’ve authored actually contribute to human wellbeing.

...the lack of forthright speech has been partially responsible for the never-ending the torrent of irrationality inundating every aspect of our lives. Many ideas are dangerous and stupid, and we shouldn’t hesitate to label them as such. When we become more concerned with other’s feelings than with accurate descriptions, dangerous ideas multiply. We ought to be more concerned with the accuracy of our terms than with people’s sensitivities.

- Peter Boghossian -

Let's Think...17 February 2014

Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

-Bertrand Russell

Let's Think... 15 February 2014

"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty--a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show."

-Bertrand Russell "The Study of Mathematics" (1902)