I actually think that art is great source to tell us about "human condition", especially secular art like in works of Shakespeare. Religion hardly comes up in Shakespeare, the greatest poet of the English language. Often romantic love is the inspiration for great poetry, as when Romeo calls up to Juliet from her garden at sunrise,
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
That is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she.
Dumb people think of science as cold and impersonal. Reality is that scientists have pointed to the beauty and majesty of nature and the great pleasure and inspiration that science brings to its practitioners. Just think of TV show Cosmos, where astronomer Carl Sagan extolled the grandeur of the universe, life, and the human brain.
In his book Pale Blue Dot, Sagan asks, "How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."
Or take Richard Dawkins who wrote: "The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that makes life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living it is fragile."
Dawkins wrote it in his book "Unweaving the Rainbow" title of which he took from a poem by John Keats:
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow . . .
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
That is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she.
Dumb people think of science as cold and impersonal. Reality is that scientists have pointed to the beauty and majesty of nature and the great pleasure and inspiration that science brings to its practitioners. Just think of TV show Cosmos, where astronomer Carl Sagan extolled the grandeur of the universe, life, and the human brain.
In his book Pale Blue Dot, Sagan asks, "How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."
Or take Richard Dawkins who wrote: "The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that makes life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living it is fragile."
Dawkins wrote it in his book "Unweaving the Rainbow" title of which he took from a poem by John Keats:
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow . . .
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
