If you want to be awe inspired.

[hilary]

A friend of mine had this reply to the second video. It sums up exactly what I felt but could not put into words. It's truly beautifully written.


"This may be my favorite quotation of all time:

“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.” 
-Albert Einstein, letter to an atheist (1954), quoted in Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas & Banesh Hoffman 

The "unbounded" admiration. Unbounded is a mathematical term in the Calculus, meaning "from negative infinity through infinity", when working integrals and other related equations. There can be no greater term used by a scientist. And, as Hitchens says, above, it is that admiration, that sense of awe, that moves me far more than anything I felt, or believe I could have felt, as a religious devotee. When I look at a sunset, I know everything that is happening, from a physics standpoint: the process of fusion and the electromagnetic frequencies it produces, the way my eye detects those frequencies and how my brain processes them, and how the earth's atmosphere, full of dust and water, bends those light rays so that I see all those wonderful colors. This makes it more, not less, inspiring to me. More, not less, beautiful.

Forgive me for my droning sentimentality, but Hitchens is right. I love being an atheist.

Edit to add: From testicular cancer to autoimmune problems I have faced for decades now, to motorcycle crashes and even a plane crash, I have known the imminent possibility of death. I am in tears at watching the second video. How magnificent that man was! My hope, when I die someday as we all must, is that in some measure I can be a fraction as grand, and as dignified, as he is there. As he was throughout his bold and yet humble promotion of a freethinking world view.

We have lost so many of our great freethinking heroes, in these past two decades: Einstein, Sagan, Asimov, Vonnegut, Heinlein, Carlin, Adams, and so many more it crushes me to think of a world without them in it. "