Category Archives: Sunday Morning Reading

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Sunday Morning Video: “But, the psychic knew things no one else could know!”

Derren Brown demonstrates to people from America, to the UK, to Italy, just how a psychic reading actually works.

From Wikipedia:

Cold reading is a series of techniques used by mentalists, illusionists, and con artists to determine or express details about another person, often in order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject than they actually do.[1] Without prior knowledge of a person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal of information about the subject by analyzing the person’s body language, age, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. Cold readers commonly employ high probability guesses about the subject, quickly picking up on signals from their subjects as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, and then emphasizing and reinforcing any chance connections the subjects acknowledge while quickly moving on from missed guesses.

Richard Dawkins conducts a extended interview of Derren Brown. In the interview Brown discusses cold reading, charlatans, true believers, etc.  Fascinating stuff. (As an aside, just look at how mild-mannered Richard Dawkins is. Where does that “angry atheist” label come from anyway?)

More information on cold reading:

The Skeptic’s Dictionary

How to Cold Read (12 steps)

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Sunday Morning Reading: Sagan, Voltaire, Astrology, Village Idiots and more!

Some tidbits from the Field of Science blog network, which describes itself thusly:

Field of Science lacks a grand manifesto/mind numbing contract/long winded code of conduct. We’re also without a marketing department, a revenue stream, an editorial hierarchy, or corrupting force of any sort as far as I’m aware. In fact, if you look closely, you’ll discover that the network itself is more or less just an allusion craftily assembled in order to give the appearance of some sort of official looking structure from which we propel our blog posts from the homely state of obscurity to the lofty realms of authoritative infallibility–which, as everyone knows, is the key to successful science blogging.

  • The Astronomist: Our Terraqueus globe - Carl Sagan and Voltaire – good read, two beautiful videos
  • Large Picture Blog - Gorgeous space photos. Click on link and scroll.
  • Lab Rat: Targeting dormant bacteria - Non-lab rat that I am, even I understood this post. (Okay, I didn’ t understand all the  sciencey words, but that’s what a dictionary is for.) Basic idea: current antibiotics only target active bacteria, but leave dormant bacteria alone. By targeting a bacteria’s cell membrane, energy synthesis is thwarted and bye-bye bacteria.

Maven adds her 2¢ about the “new” astrology: A 13th Astrological Sign? Your Astrology Defense Kit is here

A Minnesota community college astronomy instructor – Parke Kunkle – recently made headlines simply by pointing out something that has been known for about the last 2,000 years – that the earth wobbles on its axis and precesses, causing a different alignment between the earth and the stars than the way it was when the zodiac signs were first conceived.

In astronomy, precession refers to any of several gravity-induced, slow and continuous changes in an astronomical body’s rotational axis or orbital path.

The information is old news to anybody with a rudimentary education in physical sciences – which seems to exclude millions of believers in the United States and around the world. Astrology – the oldest of the pseudosciences – dates back thousands of years, before modern observational knowledge demonstrated its’ implausibility. That so many people still believe this in a Third World country is understandable, but in a modern country like the U.S. or even Europe is puzzling.

The reactions I’ve seen from many out there is along the lines of “You’ll get my astrological sign when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.”  Yeah, I know.  My initial thought when I heard about the “changing” astrological signs was this bit from Julia Sweeney’s Letting Go of God one-woman show where she tells the audience that when she was thirteen she finds out that her mother had been lying to her for years about her birthdate (originally changed by one month so that Julia could start kindergarten “early”):

More on astrology from the Skeptics’ Dictionary

Given his background, he knows whereof he speaks. Frank Schaeffer on the “fifth column of insanity.”

 ”A village cannot reorganize village life to suit the village idiot.”

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Sunday Morning Reading: Smorgasbord

A few posts I think are worth your time…

Anglachel: Where Can I Piss? 

Spousal Unit commented that the Wilentz article reminded him of something his own professor, John Schaar,  said in response to a student’s question about why the Civil Rights movement’s use of very lofty ideology wasn’t a liability. Schaar responded it was because the high-minded rhetoric was always joined to very concrete aims like “where can I piss, you know?” Civil Rights mattered not because of the concept that all men are created equal, but because equality is enacted or denied in the most mundane circumstances, such as being able to relieve yourself in a private and sanitary manner, or order some eggs and toast when you are hungry, or sit on the first available seat on the bus, or have a sip of water from the cooler on this floor, not the one in the basement. The right to vote is, ultimately, the right to piss where everyone else does.

But how do you make bathrooms available to everyone? You have to institutionalize the normalcy of taking a piss. It’s not something exceptional, it’s not special treatment, it’s not a zero sum game where my gain is always and automatically your loss. It’s just about ordinary human affairs – you eat, you eliminate. To normalize a particular activity or condition means that it is institutionalized. Institutionalization is the proper goal of a political movement.

Atheist Camel: Probability or Purpose?: How do your religiously infected friends explain this?

Want to know how deeply your theist friends have swallowed the Kool Aid of unquestioning religious non-think? Want to gauge exactly how encompassing is their self delusion and surrender to vacuous apologetics? Want to witness what complete abandonment of reality sounds like? Ask them to explain Zahra Baker, then stand back and watch the dance of denial.

Glenn Greenwald: Democrats and the rule of law 

Obama took a Constitutionally-mandated oath of office that he “will to the best of [his] ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”  I wasn’t aware that Constitutional guarantees and the rule of law could be dismissed with the wave of a presidential hand because members of the President’s party in Congress want it to be.  If that is true, then that reasoning justifies most of what Bush and Cheney did as well.  The whole point of having a Constitution is that the Government is barred from doing certain things (e.g., depriving someone of liberty without due process of law) even when majorities demand it.  This is Obama’s doing; he ran on a platform of restoring the rule of law and the Constitution even when political expediency demands otherwise; and nothing forced him to abandon Holder’s decision.

Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone): Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners

You’ve heard of Too Big to Fail — the foreclosure crisis is Too Big for Fraud. Think of the Bernie Madoff scam, only replicated tens of thousands of times over, infecting every corner of the financial universe. The underlying crime is so pervasive, we simply can’t admit to it — and so we are working feverishly to rubber-stamp the problem away, in sordid little backrooms in cities like Jacksonville, behind doors that shouldn’t be, but often are, closed.

And that’s just the economic side of the story. The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis — and, of course, in capitalism we’re not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let’s mention it anyway — shows a culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computerized greed and unchecked financial violence. The monster in the foreclosure crisis has no face and no brain. The mortgages that are being foreclosed upon have no real owners. The lawyers bringing the cases to evict the humans have no real clients. It is complete and absolute legal and economic chaos. No single limb of this vast man-­eating thing knows what the other is doing, which makes it nearly impossible to combat — and scary as hell to watch.

Related to Taibbi’s piece . . .

Ian Welsh: Wiping out property law and destroying counties to save the banks 

I’ll spell out some of it here: the major banks are bankrupt.  Bankrupt.  Still.  This is a massive giveaway to the banks if it occurs, and it will bankrupt most American counties, permanently, as well as putting record keeping on who owns and owes what not in the hands of a third party, but in the hands of MERS, a creation of the lenders.  Given how the lenders have relentlessly engaged in fraud to try and foreclose on houses they do not have title to, this seems… unwise.

Riverdaughter thinks outside the box: I support overturning Roe v. Wade and so should you

But the parties have no intention of getting rid of Roe.  The Republicans have just as much to gain from keeping it as a whipping girl as the Democrats need it as bait.  Roe will just become a specter and personally, I don’t want even my proxy rights to be degraded into nothingness.  It’s hard enough being a woman in the corporate R&D world, let alone as a second class citizen of the United States whose rights are negotiated away on a daily basis. As long as Roe is the law of the land, the focus will always be on “morality”.  Whose morality?  Does the state get to decide morality for everyone or just women?  Are women always going to be at the mercy of someone else’s conscience?  Does the establishment clause in the first amendment apply only to men? Those are the questions that need to be answered, not whether you have the right to decide in private to do something you do not have the means to carry out.

Yes, it’s scary to dump Roe.  Yes, a lot of women depend on it to move forward in their lives.  But killing Roe would send shock waves through the country.  We should not be afraid to stand up for ourselves and demand recognition as free and equal persons, competent and able to decide  for ourselves our own religions,  consciences, bodily integrity and destiny.

So, take it down.  Take it down now.  The sooner the better.  Give the Supreme Court a reason to reverse it.  I not only dare you.  I WANT you to do it, John Roberts.  I have two daughters and I am not afraid of losing Roe.  I’m more afraid that they will lose everything else.

The Heraclitan Fire: Language and the Will to Power – Part 1

I’m bemused by the trend, in recent years, of obfuscating, conflating and downright deliberate abuse of our language – especially our political language. It has left people confused (perhaps intentionally) about some basic terms and that, in turn, has left them confused about the realities of our current social/political/economic situation. This may seem picayune to some, after all harping on the language used to describe events can’t hold a candle to actually dealing with those events, right? Well, not so much; to the extent that we use and abuse language we define or obscure what we’re talking about. This is done in two ways: first by ignorance, people who are not clear about their subject or the definitions of the words they are using are red meat for the propagandists. The second way is by design. This is the special world of propaganda/advertising where the word and the meme are deliberately twisted to serve a commercial and/or political end. As Orwell pointed out, this is an unparalleled tool for establishing and maintaining control of a market or a society. And tyrannies of the left and the right have used it assiduously even a casual look at history will provide numerous examples.

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A Sunday Morning Reading & Video: Christopher Hitchens

Photo for Vanity Fair by John Huba

Hitch’s first essay since his cancer diagnosis in June: Topic of Cancer

I had the time to wonder why they needed so many boots and helmets and so much heavy backup equipment, but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady. Within a few hours, having had to do quite a lot of emergency work on my heart and my lungs, the physicians at this sad border post had shown me a few other postcards from the interior and told me that my immediate next stop would have to be with an oncologist.

[ . . . ]

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application in my case.

[ . . . ]

The bargaining stage, though. Maybe there’s a loophole here. The oncology bargain is that, in return for at least the chance of a few more useful years, you agree to submit to chemotherapy and then, if you are lucky with that, to radiation or even surgery. So here’s the wager: you stick around for a bit, but in return we are going to need some things from you. These things may include your taste buds, your ability to concentrate, your ability to digest, and the hair on your head. This certainly appears to be a reasonable trade. Unfortunately, it also involves confronting one of the most appealing clichés in our language. You’ve heard it all right. People don’t have cancer: they are reported to be battling cancer. No well-wisher omits the combative image: You can beat this. It’s even in obituaries for cancer losers, as if one might reasonably say of someone that they died after a long and brave struggle with mortality. You don’t hear it about long-term sufferers from heart disease or kidney failure.

Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

Do read the entire essay.

In this interview with Anderson Cooper, Hitch expands on the themes touched on in his essay, comments on those who are praying for him, and discusses his atheism and the potential for a deathbed conversion. Hint: Don’t believe any posthumous rumors (or in Hitch’s case: rumours).

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A Sunday Morning Reading: My journey to peace

My journey began with the Bradleys. Mrs. Bradley lived down the street and she was our sometime sitter when my aunt wasn’t available. They were a church-going family and they took me along with them to the South Bay Church of God in Torrance. I went to Sunday School and Vacation Bible School. I sang “Jesus Loves the Little Children” Red or Yellow, Black or White, They are precious in His Sight. And oh my goodness, I loved the songs.

I glued cotton balls on paper lambs, and glitter on Stars of Bethlehem. I colored Joseph’s coat with a rainbow of colors using broken crayons from the crayon can. I even got bitten by the theater bug when I was cast as a scolding teacher in our play about the life of Jesus.

I loved going to church. I loved the people and the songs and the stories. I loved dropping my nickel into the offering box. I loved praying to my heavenly Father who I was sure heard my prayers. After all, He loved me. The Bible told me so. Or was it my Sunday School teacher?

When I was five months shy of my 7th birthday, my mother transported my younger brother and me to Hawaii. While mom was getting settled in and finding a job and a place for all of us to live, my brother and I lived with a Filipino family who attended church every Sunday.  Until mom found a house that we could visit on the weekends, he and I were in church every Sunday. Lather, rinse, repeat the aforementioned scenario of Sunday School, singing, crafts, not to mention, cookies and punch! I was, if  you’ll pardon the expression, in heaven. 

I was, in a word, hooked.  And like a junkie always on the prowl for their next fix, I spent the next several decades of my life looking for that high.

In grammar school I made friends with kids whose parents took them to church. I tagged along whenever I could.  In an August 2008 post on the importance of Church and State separation, I gave a brief history of my Christian bona fides.

My mother must’ve been feeling some guilt over her single-parent status, so every-once-in-awhile she made a stab at finding us a church. It never came to much. Still, I kind of missed the “happy god feeling” of attending church. In my teen years my best friend became a Christian and since I spent a lot of weekends over at her house, I went to church with her. Her Sunday School teacher was a lady so happy and loving, what was not to like? At fourteen I was “born-again.”  This was at the height of the Jesus Movement and it dominated the rest of my high school years and much of my early adulthood as well.  I moved from church to church and finally settled on the Pentacostal side of the Christian bandwidth. (The Wikipedia link above was a trip down memory lane for me!) 

And when I use the word “dominate” I really mean it. I wasn’t a Sunday morning Christian. I was there every time the doors opened. I sang in the choir, played in the bell choir, taught Sunday School. I street witnessed. I wrote rapturous letters about Jesus to my family. I read my Bible every day and underlined and highlighted constantly. I memorized scripture,  participated in Bible Studies and intercessory prayer. I fasted and spoke in tongues. To this day I can ace most every Bible category on Jeopardy!   In college I was involved in Campus Crusade for Christ, Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, was baptized in the warm Hawaiian ocean (twice!),  and attended Calvary Chapel in both Honolulu and San Diego. I hung on the words of my teachers and pastors, wept with emotion in our services and felt connected to God.

I wasn’t a slacker. And I believed. Being a Christian gave my life meaning.

Everything in my life was suffused with meaning.  And I mean everything, from knowing where I was  going to go when I died,  to finding a parking spot in a busy shopping center. I praised God for everything because I was told, and believed, that everything works for good for them that are called.

But there was a problem. I read The Book.  

And, non-slacker that I am, I needed to reconcile what appeared to be contradictions. Simple stuff, really. Nothing my pastor couldn’t clear up for me, or so I thought. For instance: I belonged to a “spirit-filled” church – that is, a non-denominational fellowship that believed in the baptism of the Holy Spirit as manifested by speaking in tongues. And we did it. All the time. Individually and collectively. Our church services were filled with the harmonies of believers lifting their voices in “heavenly languages” unknown to any, and to this day, I remember how beautiful it sounded. But I kept tripping over Paul’s admonition to the church at Corinth that the church shouldn’t all speak in tongues at the same time, because a stranger might come into the church and think the believers were all crazy. One person, or at the most, three, should speak in tongues, and only, Paul said, if there was someone to interpret. That wasn’t what we were doing, and in fact, this little fellowship was pretty out there when it came to the gifts of the Holy Spirit, so, in my earnestness, I popped into my pastor’s office and asked him Why? Why are we doing something that we’ve been exhorted [bluelyon: 'exhorted' is a  word that gets tossed around a lot in fundie circles] not to do?

After trying to explain why we could do what was so clearly a violation, and finally tiring of my but it says heres, my pastor dismissed me with this answer: You just have to take it on faith.

Huh? Wow, was that the wrong answer.  I wanted my faith to be strong. I wanted it to be clear. And I wanted it built on a rock, not sand.  And, if the Bible was the Word of God, I wanted to make sure I was following it correctly. And clearly, we were missing the mark, according to Paul, whose words we hung our hats on All The Time. There were other contradictions too.

On the one hand, we were told that we were saved by faith alone, and on the other, faith without works was dead. In the same book. Jesus himself told us that just because we looked like believers and did mighty things in His Name, it didn’t mean we were going to get the golden ticket. On the one hand, we were told to turn the other cheek, but at the same time, Jesus told us he came to pit family members against each other, and that he didn’t come to bring a peace but a sword.

“Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it.” (Matthew 10:34-39 NASB)

So much for the Prince of Peace.

I let it go. I kept attending church. By then I was married to a fellow in the Navy. Church was where I did all my socializing, and when my (then) husband was deployed, they provided me with comfort and friendship.  I worked in the ACE school they founded. At the end of his enlistment Then Husband left the Navy, we moved to Oregon, and struggled to find a church that “fit” us - but eventually did – and we settled into the routine of Sundays, Wednesdays and Bible studies. I pushed away my doubts. We lived in the Portland area for two years, and it was there that I suffered a miscarriage and had my open heart surgery to correct my congenital defect. Then, when the economy started tanking, Then Husband re-enlisted in the Navy and off we went to San Diego. It was the summer of 1982 and I had just discovered that I was pregnant with my daughter.

At about this time, I was recognizing that there were some problems with my marriage. Okay, even before that, but it’s a truism that bringing children into an already weak marriage will not make it stronger.  The problems: Then Husband was not as devout as I was.  Oh, he talked a good talk when around our Christian friends, but when they weren’t there, pfft. He smoked, he drank, he stayed out late. He spent money like water. So there I was, thinking that God had brought us together and since what God has brought together let no man put asunder, I was stuck. And yet, it appeared it was my very own husband doing the sundering, so to speak. It was clear to me that we were not on the same path with the same goals.

Two years later we moved to the Bay Area., Then Husband had an old friend from his BC (Before Carissa) days who was a strong believer and belonged to an Assembly of God church. Easy as pie we started attending, and like the church we belonged to in Hawaii, the fellowship became my social center, especially when Then Husband was deployed.

Church was good, and yet, stuff kept happening that would trip my BS detector. But my belief in God, regardless of what others thought or believed, still held strong.

But the marriage didn’t get better, and it finally fell apart after ten years of trying (at least on my part).  I am convinced that my religious mindset kept us together much longer than we would have had we not been believers. Heck, I doubt we would even have gotten married because there would have been no belief that God had brought us together.

And then came The Divorce. After years of trying, I finally gave up. And in doing so I let go of church too. My marriage had been, I believed, ordained by God, and here I was telling God, “No.”  Further, I knew what every single person at my church thought of divorce, and it was easier to just stay away rather than having well-meaning people (or just busybody types)  coming up to me, holding my hand, and (sigh) offering to pray for us, exhorting me to stick with my marraige (there’s that word again). And yes, I was disappointed. I’d followed all the rules. I’d done it just the way I was told God wanted me to do it. I held up my end of the bargain. WTF?

And so, I just walked away from anything “god” for a few years. But I still believed in the idea of god. I just didn’t want to have anything to do with him. Or her. Or it. Whatever.

But addiction repressed doesn’t mean addiction removed. And I was still hooked on the idea of god and oneness with him/her. I loved the idea of finding peace outside myself. And so, I continued my search to find that place where I fit.  Over and over again, I’d been told that God is Truth. God is the ultimate answer. God was looking out for me and wanted the best for me. All I had to do was tap into God and all would make sense.

I never expected that life would be all roses and song, but I believed that if I worked at it long enough I’d find that inner peace that everyone kept telling me was findable. I began to look beyond my fundamentalist world.  I embraced the idea that God was in everything, but that didn’t seem satisfactory. If god was in everything, then where was the everlasting protector and answerer of prayers? 

For awhile I studied A Course in Miracles. I liked the idea that everything is an illusion and that the only thing that was “real” was Love.  But pretty soon my BS detector was going full throttle. A Course in Miracles teaches that there is no Evil in the world, just that we perceive it as evil and that if we could look beyond the smoke, we’d see the love. Or something like that. Everything is an illusion? We create our own reality? Even the poor little starving child in Africa? Now, granted, ACIM’s proponents push the idea that if we all tapped into the love and pushed aside the smoke we’d all live in happiness and plenty, but the premise that everything is an illusion, smacked of denialism to me. Nope. No good for me.

I tried matching my inner morality to an individual church. I cast about and finally found a Methodist church that was everything I wanted. Liberal, gay-accepting, big on social justice, etc. And yet…  I was really having a hard time with the whole God thing. Even this church, which strove so for social justice and openness, still pushed the idea that God is all-loving and doesn’t want to see humanity suffer. So, I had to ask, why does he continue to let it happen? When does our cosmic lesson end and he waves his magic wand to make it all better? Is this all we have? A lifetime of striving, with what appeared to be no help from the man upstairs? How was I to reconcile my belief, my hope, with what I was seeing with my own two eyes?

Around that time I attended the inaugural meeting of the Network of Spiritual Progressives held in the fall of 2005 in Berkeley, CA. It was a direct answer to the religious A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith is Dying & How a New Faith is Being Bornright who had co-opted religion for their own political ends.  At that conference I heard Bishop John Shelby Spong speak. He electrified the place, and me. Immediately after the conference I raced to Borders and picked up A New Christianity for a New World: How Traditional Faith is Dying & How A New Faith Is Being Born,  in which he pretty much decimates every myth of Christianity, up to and including supernatural theism yet still embraces the concept of God:

I have moved into dangerous and religiously threatening places. I have walked beyond theism, but not beyond God.  . . . I begin a search for the words that will enable me to talk of a post-Theistic God, the God who is not a person but the source of that power that nurtures personhood, not a being but the Ground of Being, the source from which all being flows.

Shelby concludes that we can still go on as Christians, but in a new way.

When our understanding of God shifts, so will the moral ground beneath our feet. The traditional basis for ethics will disappear. For if there is no theistic being who rules the universe, then there is no law-giver, no dispenser of eternal ethical principles, no fiery finger that inscribed the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone or wrote unchanging laws into the texts of holy scripture. So all those claims must also be abandoned. Those who have simply quoted the Bible to solve ethical problems will discover that the moral compass is askew, and rampant anxiety will result.

. . . Those claims, which evolved as coping devices to deal with the trauma of self-consciousness, no longer keep our fears under control. There is simply no theistic deity whose will we must seek to obey in order to gain divine protection. There is no heavenly parent whose goodwill and blessing we must seek through virtuous living, who will reward our frightened, fragile, yet obedient lives. So the ethical debate must find a new ground to which it can be moved and a new context in which it can be viewed.

. . . In this new morality mindless prejudices can no longer be affirmed by quoting sacred sources.  . . . The persistent theological search for truth is of God for it expands life, while religious claims to possess exclusive truth are sinful because they thwart truth itself and allege that God can be boxed inside our thought-forms.

I liked that. But then, Spong goes on to say how he basically keeps all the outer trappings of his Christian faith, while at the same time giving them a completely different meaning than what is commonly accepted by everyone else about what constitutes Christianity.  So, why bother?  Why not just be an ethical human being? From my link above:

After years of searching, reading, deep thought, looking for God everywhere, attending “liberal” Christian churches,  and desperately trying to link my already existing personal morality to a “faith-based” morality I finally came to realize that I didn’t need any religion to validate my internal morality.  

And so I kept reading.

It was Sam Harris’ The End of Faith that did it for me. Followed by Dawkins, Hitchens and freethinkers across the blogosphere. Finally, with sadness, I gave up on looking for god. I see no evidence of a god who intervenes in human affairs or even in the universe. The world operates just as one would expect if there were no god. I am an atheist.

Leading my life with the conviction that this is all there is and that it is up to me to make this world a better place to live, makes me all the more committed to working for social justice, to being kind to my fellow human beings, to being truthful and ethical.  I have no hope of heaven, nor any fear of hell.

I am at peace. Finally.