WOTMS: A Reassuring Fable

Although a great piece Brian, it was a bit hard to swallow the 2 x being compared at the same level. Sagan is eons ahead of the super delusional idiot!

The side-by-side comparison gives a great juxtaposition. I'm a huge fan of "The Demon-Haunted World", and I think that it's more relevant now than when it was published; Carl Sagan saw the trends in the culture for what they were. Thank you for posting this!

I recently finished recording an album with my band, and part of my prep work was to tune a set of congas--something that I would record in my own home studio and then send out to the master studio. I tuned the two congas to what sounded great - a perfect third. And then I realized it. The two congas sounded fantastic together, no matter what absolute note they were (and they were likely completely off-pitch from a true note.) But what mattered, like it does here on earth, is that we as humans are really just tuned for each other. There doesn't have to be this external absolute; this external goal or metric. Our lives have purpose and meaning when we find the tune in, around and between us. Far too many continue to waste their lives measuring up to a standard that was never there.

He appears to feel entitled to the supposed torture and death of the Jesus character. He hopes that Jesus died for him so much that he believes it.

CS is the source of my deconversion

Excelent! You already know how much I esteem Carl Sagan. This ju-jitsu counterpoint couldn't be more perfect. At this point of his evangenital career, Craig sadly epitomizes another of Sagan's sage perceptions: "If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken."