#human progress

[punishedsaints]

[falckie]

Have you cried watching the Artemis II mission?

Yes

No

Voting ended onApr 7

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"100-200 years ago, people ate organic unprocessed food and didn't have vaccines... ... and lived to the ripe old age of 'died in childbirth.'"

-

"Nature wants 5 of your 7 children dead. It wants you dead by 50. Everything better than that is brought to you by science & technology." -- David Frum

[a-typical]

“The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

[undeadentropy]

Can you imagine what science can do if we dismantle capitalism? Like has anyone really ever thought about it? What it means for science to benefit humanity? When research isn't profit driven? When Innovation isnt about giving more power to the rich?

We can look to the edge of the universe where time itself began, and see into the quantum realm that writes the very laws of our reality. We could map the oceans and the stars, and look deep into our own genetic code for answers to life itself. We have absolute geniuses in every possible field physically vibrating at the chance to make incredible things happen if they only had the grants. We are on the cusp of a scientific revolution that will make the Italian Renaissance look like a underfunded school science fair.

If people realized just how good we could have it, we'd have a global communist revolution tomorrow.

[secretlykim]

Such true words for this holiday season and the rest of the year too.

[onenakedfarmer]

BERTRAND RUSSELL Why I Am Not a Christian

That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so. I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case the Catholic Church says, "This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children." Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.

That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is to not make people happy.