Angry Atheists

[maxdprophet]

Two secular prayers

“If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you only just scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. Keeping that awestruck vision of the world ready at hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay centered, and engaged, you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will indeed be a better person. That, I believe, is the secret to spirituality and it has nothing to do with believing in an immortal soul, or in anything supernatural.” - Daniel Dennet

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. […] We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?” - Richard Dawkins

patheos

[laughter]

May 17, 2016 10:38:00 GMT -5 maxdprophet said:

Two secular prayers

“If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you only just scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. Keeping that awestruck vision of the world ready at hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay centered, and engaged, you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will indeed be a better person. That, I believe, is the secret to spirituality and it has nothing to do with believing in an immortal soul, or in anything supernatural.” - Daniel Dennet

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. […] We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?” - Richard Dawkins

patheos

I like Dennet's awe as I remember and still feel that, but the one who would be awed is none other than the Christian devotionalist. One who would surrender is faced with a life time koan, stated as "is this God's will, or mine?". Dennet's secular version would presumably include the obviously forgivable sin of sometimes forgetting the scale within which one is operating, and acting from other than that place of awed humility.

Dawkins is just hyperminding though and in it he's run away from his roots. The mechanism for expressing those genetic combinations naturally involves more complex instances emerging from simpler ones over time. Mankind himself, as a conscious agent, now offers an alternative medium in terms of his creations in which this process can, and eventually will, accelerate. Where Dawkins ends, is in shame, as his appeal to humility is invited by comparing the current form with one unmanifest but far greater.