Reality is a bitter pill when you’ve been fed a steady diet of religious fantasy. While life always was random, I felt safer when I could explain it as “God’s will” or “Satan’s handiwork.” I felt extremely exposed & vulnerable without my Cosmic Big Brother watching over me. Step by step, I learned to own my life. Divorcing religion is painful - but it’s also liberating. I love my life ♥️ #independence#criticalthinking#identity#reality#science#equality#reason#SecularHumanism#atheist#joy
Imagine living in a room where everything in it is invisible but you can throw a visible net that reveals the contours of objects. I learned from psychedelics that physical, cultural limitations prevent us from directly experiencing most of the universe we live in, but language is like that net. It is a powerful tool for apprehending a reality we can only glimpse . Culture, habit mesmerize us into mistaking the net for the reality it only partially describes. #psychedelic#language#reality
Instead of people beating around the bush asking Nikki Hailey (and all of them) about the cause of the US Civil War, why the heck don't people just ask her if she:
Believes states should be allowed to open up slavery or to own people as property.
Believes in equal rights for all humans of all races, colours and religions
I find the media's penchant for avoiding the elephant(s) in the room extremely annoying and I think it enables bad people to keep pushing down bad roads.
Another year has almost passed, and she has not been cleared of charges. Sure, she got out of prison. But she never should have been in. She tried to warn Americans that Russia was interfering in our elections. While Trump is still free to lie & share information with foreign leaders. #Reality
Understand that we are up against a #whiteSupremacist#cult in November 2024. Millions of #Americans have decided that the #Nazis were right, and their #ideology should reign supreme in the #UnitedStates. This isn't #fearmongering. This is the #reality we are facing. Voting Blue is the only hope we have of preserving our #republic. If we fail, we'll never again have another opportunity to #vote.
Nothing that comes out of #Trump's mouth has any connection with #reality. Not one word. Every day it's more #absurd than the last. And yet far too many #media outlets report on it as if it was normal. There should be no #headlines reporting on his words that don't also include a disclaimer that it's a #lie. The media has to be more #vigilant.
The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality
A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas in the universe—the nature of free will, the strange fabric of the cosmos, the true limits of the mind—and each in their own way uncovered a revelatory truth about our place in the world.
This is not a rhetorical question anymore.
This is not a poll because I’d rather 'hear’ people's answer.
Let's say, in an instant, the world suddenly decided to stop using fossil fuels. Everything using fossil fuels burned its last tank and that was it. Done. Forever. All consequences ensue…
Would you be more comfortable with that happening today during a climate that is (debateably) recognizable to the climate pre-Fossil Fuel use and that may return closer to that pre-fossil fuel climate in future generations.
Or
Having the last drop some day in 2050, or 2100, or 2110, when the climate has shifted to something utterly unrecognizable. There is (even more) mass chaos in the world due to all the impacts of climate change, and we have added yet more CO2 to the atmosphere and oceans that will take eons to return to, if it is at all possible.
“Mass #propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in #cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" #quotes#mediaStudies#commOdon#truth#agnotology#history
The masses' flight from reality is a condemnation of the world in which they are forced to live. […] The main disadvantage of reality is that it is not logical, coherent or organised.
~ Hannah Arendt, in "Totalitarianism"
David Bowie - Fall Dog Bombs the Moon (live in Sept 2003) (m.youtube.com)
Filmed for TV2 France, 4 September 2003.