I’ve been looking through a dull but well-intentioned book from 1937, 101 of the World’s Greatest Books. That is, five to ten page summaries of them. They were the ones you would expect from the era which continued with Great Books of the Western World, whose numerous volumes filled many library shelves even in small towns because teachers and librarians thought these were the books that everyone ought to know about to be considered educated. Great novels, epic stories, great scholarly works, great plays, great works of philosophy, almost all of which were outdated even in 1937. I wasn’t expec ..read more

  In the previous essay, I tried my hand at humorous creativity to shoot down the idea that a benevolent God is in control of the world. But who was I to think I could do a better job than Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known as Mark Twain? I looked through a collection of Twain’s unpublished writings. He left as many unpublished scribbled sheets as he did published books, if not more. This demonstrates that the success rate of a genius (assuming that is what he was) is probably below fifty percent. In many cases, I can see that these works were unpublishable. They just did not have the compe ..read more

I recently became aware, years later than everyone else, about a story that religious people use to “prove” that there can be life after death. It is about two twin fetuses in a womb. One of them is an agnostic, the other a believer, in Life After Birth. The same reasoning used by the two fetuses could be used by us in our discussions of Life After Death. It is a really clever story. The skeptical fetus says, “What evidence is there for life after birth? We have not seen the outside world, even if there is one, nor has anyone come back into the womb to tell us about it.” The other fetus mainta ..read more

Strasbourg, France, where I now live, is justly proud of Johannes Gutenberg (about 1406-1468), who invented the printing press. He was born in Mainz, nearby in what is now Germany, and returned to it later, but his crucial first steps in developing the printing press were taken in Strasbourg, where a statue and a plaza commemorate him. One would think that Gutenberg’s idea for a printing press would have been a flash of insight that everyone would have immediately appreciated. But he did his initial work as a sideline and without funding from other people, as far as we know. His main work seem ..read more

I recently posted an essay (July 4), on my other blog about how the Founding Fathers thought they had found a natural basis for government: natural selection leads to democracy. This was a flawed idea, but an advance over all previous European thought about government. Americans often  make the erroneous, and dangerous, assumption that America became strong because of the cultural, maybe even biological, superiority of immigrant white Europeans over Native Americans. The Europeans beat the Natives, and that is why America is mostly white, or the descendants of slaves or later immigrants ..read more

Of course we will. But it might be a profoundly different kind of celebration. Donald Trump consistently refuses to recognize the legitimacy of ANY election that does not go in favor of Him or His Chosen Followers. He says any election (or court case) that He loses is fraud. And His Christian devotees agree with Him totally on this point. Whether Trump wins or loses in the November election, He will declare Himself the legitimate ruler of America. If He loses the popular and electoral votes, He will urge His devotees to take swift and decisive action against the American government, as He did ..read more

Jesus famously said that “by their fruits you shall know them.” He made it clear that what he meant was that good people do good things, bad people do bad things, and that is how you tell them apart. You cannot be good by just saying good and doctrinally correct things; you have to actually do them. Nothing in religion could seem more fundamental than this. But right-wing American Christians do not believe this. They reject what Jesus said. The most obvious place to see this is in politics. Right-wing fundamentalist Christians are almost all Republicans. Many Republican politicians do evil thi ..read more

I have just finished reading my third science fiction novel by the twentieth-century French writer René Barjavel. I have written previously about his novel Le Voyageur Imprudent. A time traveler accidentally kills his own grandfather in the past and thus finds that he does not exist and has never existed. This novel also included a glimpse into a very distant nightmare utopia. Other Barjavel novels dealt straight on with the main issue of the writer’s time, nuclear disaster. In La Nuit de Temps he wrote about a previous utopian world that destroyed itself by nuclear war, but also the explosion ..read more

I am not afraid to die, even though I am agnostic about the afterlife, if there is one—about judgment, bliss, suffering, and all the other elements that tradition has accreted onto the afterlife, creating Heaven and Hell. I am afraid of dying, the process of life coming to an end. If it occurs by gentle decline, I will be okay with it; I am already trembling and weak and have many old-man emergencies. Nobody escapes these things. I just don’t want to die in any of the spectacularly painful and outrageous ways that we hear about on the news literally every day all over the world, whether it is ..read more

This is the phrase that celebrity physicist Richard Feynman used to describe the joy of scientific research. But it also describes the joy of science education. Feynman was as brilliant of a scientist as you could hope to meet, and to him mathematical equations were as obvious as the nose on your face. But he knew very well that science education did not consist of learning piles of facts. He knew it was a matter of joy: professors and students alike should share this joy. This is what I always tried to do as a science educator, even to the extent of trying out what some colleagues thought of ..read more