Field of Science

Showing posts with label atheism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label atheism. Show all posts

Dennett just made my day...

Fragment of Dan Dennett's priceless musings during a Templeton-funded session at the Darwin Festival, via Pharyngula:
"I had an epiphany at the end of the session, but I kept it to myself: The Eucharist is actually a Recapitulation of the Eukaryotic Revolution. When Christians ingest the Body of Christ, without digesting it, but keep it whole (holistier-than-thou whole), they are re-enacting the miracle of endosymbiosis that paved the way for eventual multi-cellularity. And so, dearly beloved brethren, we can see that by keeping Christ intact in our bodies we are keeping His Power intact in our embodied Minds, or Souls, just the way the first Eukaryote was vouchsafed a double blessing of earthly competence that enabled its descendants to join forces in Higher Organizations. Evolutionary theology. . . . I think I get it! I can do it! It truly is intellectual tennis without a net." - Dennett


(although, a very minor correction: Prokaryotes too have achieved multicellularity; eukaryogenesis is merely a likely prerequisite to our type of multicellularity. If that. But we can still honour the event by eating crackers and reading Tom Cavalier-Smith's massive 2002 review of Eukaryogenesis and the Neomuran Hypothesis...)

A new community is born -- come join us!

Some drama on a forum I used to frequent (will elaborate on and analyse eventually) has led to the birth of new site with a forum:

Atheist Refugees

We intend to make it a friendly community of free thinkers with a front page articles on science, history, news, atheism, etc. Feel free to join us -- we don't bite! (especially after we've JUST been all chewed up)

We're at the fresh, friendly part of the community life cycle. Seems they have a limited lifespan, the end of which ends up plagued with censorship, dirty politics and general utter chaos... hopefully we'll get to last a while before that happens!