We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. Continues… time-lapsed

“Am I an Atheist, you ask? Labels are mentally lazy ways by which people assert they know you without knowing you.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Belief is one of the best human muscles” (because it moves us to act) but it’s also the explanation of our intolerance. We need to work on that…

We have to try harder to “see out of” our respective belief-bubbles and even to pop them when they prevent mutual understanding.

Our brains and nervous systems constitute a belief-generating machine, a system that evolved to assure not truth, logic, and reason, but survival. The belief engine has seven major components…

•The learning unit•The critical thinking unit•The yearning unit•The input unit•The emotional response unit•The memory unit•The environmental feedback unit

“Reality does exist and limits the kinds of games that can be played.” Wittgenstein

Science is not “the only approach to investigating the world…”

“Doubting, by its nature, is done within the realm of believing something.”

“There is no human nature because there is no God to have a conception of it.” Sartre

But why can’t the “blueprint” of our nature(s) be a work perpetually in progress?

Too bad we can’t cross the channel to settle that with the man himself.

Nature evolves. Human nature evolves.

“In a godless universe there is a desperate need for each of us to be moral.” Simone de Beauvoir

Albert Camus‘s great theme was the absurdity of living in a world of repetitive meaninglessness, only then to die.

The Don Draper (or Bogart) of existentialism-

Meaning is where you make it and life is absurd. What Camus wanted wasn’t new: just liberty, equality, and fraternity. But he found a new way to say it.

-Adam Gopnik, “Facing History: Why we love Camus”- New Yorker 4.9.12

Telling Sisyphus he’ll get that stone up there someday is an empty hope. He won’t…

Accepting that the boulder is always going to roll back down, Camus put a tragic mask on common sense, and a heroic face on the daily boulder’s daily grind. It may have been the handsomest thing he ever did.

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work or my children. I want to achieve it by not dying”… Woody Allen

It is only we, with our capacity to love, who give meaning to the indifferent universe… And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying, & even to find joy from simple things like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more.

Crimes & Misdemeanors“Professor Levy”

The end of Doubt, the point of doubting, is to live, with a clear and curious intellectual conscience. Its purpose is to summon as much freedom and dignity as befits a questioning, questing, aspiring social species. “The only thing such doubters really need, that believers have, is a sense that people like themselves have always been around, that they are part of a grand history.” Point taken. May the conversation continue.