Carl Sagan

Da WikiPedia:

Sagan era notoriamente uno scettico in materia di religione.
Famoso un suo articolo, dal titolo "C'è un drago nel mio garage", in cui mette in guardia contro i facili finalismi e la pretesa di voler credere in certe cose solo perché la loro non esistenza non è dimostrabile; spiega attraverso la storia di un uomo che sostiene di avere un animale mitologico nel garage ma che non lascia alcuna traccia reale per essere percepito che, con simili premesse, si potrebbe sostenere l'esistenza di qualunque cosa.
Sagan ribadisce pertanto che l'onere della prova sta a chi asserisce l'esistenza di qualcosa, non in chi la nega (il problema venne già affrontato da Bertrand Russell nella sua famosa storia della Teiera di Russell), ragionamento basato sul concetto popperiano di falsificabilità di una teoria (scientifica, di solito).

Sagan scrisse frequentemente riguardo alla religione ed il rapporto che essa ha con la scienza, esprimendo il proprio scetticismo riguardo al comune concetto di Dio:

    Alcune persone pensano che Dio sia un gigantesco patriarca dalla pelle chiara, con una lunga barba bianca, che siede su di un trono da qualche parte lassù nel cielo, occupato a registrare la caduta di ogni passero.
   Altri, per esempio Baruch Spinoza ed Albert Einstein, considerano Dio essere essenzialmente la somma totale delle leggi fisiche che descrivono l'universo.
   Non conosco nessuna prova convincente per un patriarca antropomorfo che da qualche punto d'osservazione celeste controlla i destini umani, ma sarebbe follia negare l'esistenza di leggi fisiche.

Nonostante il suo scetticismo nei riguardi della religione, Sagan ha sempre negato di essere ateo, affermando che:
« An atheist has to know a lot more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no god.
By some definitions atheism is very stupid. »
« Un ateo deve sapere molto di più di quello che so io. Un ateo è qualcuno che sa che Dio non esiste. Secondo alcune definizioni, l'ateismo è molto stupido. »

Sagan si definiva "agnostico".


Da WikiQuote:

Noi siamo l'incarnazione locale di un Cosmo cresciuto fino all'autocoscienza.
Abbiamo incominciato a comprendere la nostra origine: siamo materia stellare che medita sulle stelle.

Affermazioni straordinarie richiedono prove straordinarie.

Le più importanti religioni della Terra si contraddicono a vicenda riguardo a molti punti.
Non possono essere tutte perfette. E se fossero tutte sbagliate? È una possibilità, sapete.
Ci si deve preoccupare della verità, esatto?
Ebbene il modo per vagliare tutte le diverse opinioni è l'essere scettici.
Riguardo alle vostre convinzioni religiose non sono più scettica di quanto lo sia riguardo a ogni nuova idea scientifica di cui vengo a conoscenza.
Ma nella prassi della mia professione, sono definite ipotesi, non ispirazione e neppure rivelazione.

Contact

C'erano degli eccessi nella scienza come ce n'erano nella religione.
Un uomo ragionevole non avrebbe perso la testa né per l'una né per l'altra.
C'erano molte interpretazioni delle Scritture e molte interpretazioni del mondo naturale.
Entrambi erano stati creati da Dio, perciò dovevano essere compatibili l'uno con l'altro.
Dovunque sembrasse esistere una discrepanza, o uno scienziato o un teologo – forse tutt'e due – non aveva fatto bene il suo lavoro.
(p. 129)

Tutto quello che lei non capisce, signor Rankin, lo attribuisce a Dio.
Dio per lei è dove si spazzano via tutti i misteri del mondo, tutte le sfide alla nostra intelligenza.
Lei spegne semplicemente il suo cervello e dice che l'ha fatto Dio.
(p. 155)

Ci sono enormi bilanci pubblicitari solo quando non c'è nessuna differenza tra i prodotti.
Se i prodotti fossero davvero diversi, la gente comprerebbe quello migliore.
La pubblicità insegna alla gente a non fidarsi del proprio giudizio.
La pubblicità insegna alla gente ad essere stupida.
(p. 210)

Vede, le persone religiose – la maggior parte di esse – pensano davvero che questo pianeta sia un esperimento. È quello che tramandano le loro fedi.
Un dio o l'altro sta sempre brontolando, combinando pasticci con mogli di artigiani, consegnando tavole sulle montagne, comandando di mutilare i figli, dicendo alla gente quali parole possa pronunciare e quali no, costringendo la gente a sentirsi colpevole del proprio piacere e così via.
Perché gli dei non possono star tranquilli? Tutto questo intervenire e infastidirsi puzza di incompetenza.
Se Dio non voleva che la moglie di Lot si voltasse indietro a guardare, perché non l'aveva creata obbediente, così avrebbe fatto quello che le diceva suo marito?
O se non avesse fatto Lot con quella testa di cazzo, forse lei gli avrebbe dato più ascolto.
Se Dio è onnipotente e onnisciente, perché non ha fatto funzionare l'universo fin da principio così sarebbe venuto fuori come voleva lui?
Perché sta continuamente aggiustando le cose e lamentandosi?
No, c'è una sola cosa che la Bibbia chiarisce: il suo Dio è un artefice maldestro.
Non ci sa fare nella fase progettuale e non ci sa fare nella fase esecutiva.
Dovrebbe ritirarsi dagli affari, se ci fosse della concorrenza.
(p. 264)

Il mondo infestato dai demoni

In assenza di prove fisiche, la scienza non ammette spiriti, anime, angeli, diavoli o corpi di dharma del Buddha. O visitatori provenienti da altri mondi.

Una delle mie vignette preferite mostra un'indovina che esamina il palmo della mano di un cliente e poi sentenzia: "Lei è un credulone".

Edgar Lee Masters

Dio! Non chiedermi di elencare le tue meraviglie.
Ti riconosco le stelle e i soli
e i mondi innumerevoli.
Ma ho misurato le loro distanze e li ho pesati
e ho scoperto la loro materia.
Ho inventato ali per l'aria,
e chiglie per l'acqua,
e cavalli di ferro per la terra.
Ho accresciuto milioni di volte
la vista che tu mi desti,
e l'udito che mi desti,
milioni di volte;
ho valicato lo spazio con la parola,
e preso dall'aria il fuoco per farne luce.
Ho costruito grandi città e perforato colline,
e gettato ponti su acque maestose.
Ho scritto l'Iliade e l'Amleto;
ho esplorato i tuoi misteri,
e ti ho cercato senza posa,
e ti ho ritrovato dopo averti perduto
in ore di stanchezza,
e ti chiedo:
ti piacerebbe creare un sole
e l'indomani avere i vermi
che ti brulicano in mezzo alle dita?

Edgar Lee Masters

"I Giorni e Le Notti" - Articoli vari su Albert Camus

Su questo Blog: http://www.igiornielenotti.it troverete molti articoli di e su Albert Camus (http://www.igiornielenotti.it/?tag=camus) e tutti splendidi.
Visitatelo per conoscere i retroscena del nostro passato e vi accorgerete che inizierete a conoscervi meglio anche voi stessi.

LexMat

Il Perfezionismo Uccide la Creatività

Da "http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/11/22/bird-by-bird-anne-lamott/" :

Bird by Bird: Anne Lamott’s Timeless Advice on Writing and Why Perfectionism Kills Creativity

by Maria Popova
 

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.”

Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (public library) is among my 10 favorite books on writing — a treasure trove of insight both practical and profound, timelessly revisitable and yielding deeper resonance each time. Lamott adds to the collected wisdom of great writers with equal parts candor and conviction, teaching us as much about writing as she does about creativity at large and, even beyond that, about being human and living a full life — because, after all, as Lamott notes in the beginning, writing is nothing more nor less than a sensemaking mechanism for life:

One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.

What makes Lamott so compelling is that all of her advice comes not from the ivory tower of the pantheon but from an honest place of exquisite vulnerability and hard-earned life-wisdom. She recounts her formative years and where she headed once she encountered that inevitable fork in the road where we can choose between being shut in and shut down by our traumatic experiences, or using them as fertile clay for character-building:

I started writing when I was seven or eight. I was very shy and strange-looking, loved reading above everything else, weighed about forty pounds at the time, and was so tense that I walked around with my shoulders up to my ears, like Richard Nixon. I saw a home movie once of a birthday party I went to in the first grade, with all these cute little boys and girls playing together like puppies, and all of a sudden I scuttled across the screen like Prufrock’s crab. I was very clearly the one who was going to grow up to be a serial killer, or keep dozens and dozens of cats. Instead, I got funny. I got funny because boys, older boys I didn’t even know, would ride by on their bicycles and taunt me about my weird looks. Each time felt like a drive-by shooting. I think this is why I walked like Nixon: I think I was trying to plug my ears with my shoulders, but they wouldn’t quite reach. So first I got funny and then I started to write, although I did not always write funny things.
[…]
All I ever wanted was to belong, to wear that hat of belonging.
In seventh and eighth grades I still weighed about forty pounds. I was twelve years old and had been getting teased about my strange looks for most of my life. This is a difficult country to look too different in — the United States of Advertising, as Paul Krassner puts it — and if you are too skinny or too tall or dark or weird or short or frizzy or homely or poor or nearsighted, you get crucified. I did.

So she found refuge in books, searching for “some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic way of seeing the world and organizing it in [her] head.” To find that, she became a writer and began fantasizing about getting published, about “the thrill of seeing oneself in print,” as the highest form of existential validation. When she published her first book, she awaited the affirming grandeur of public approval and secretly thought that “trumpets would blare, major reviewers would proclaim that not since Moby Dick had an American novel so captured life in all of its dizzying complexity.” Of course, none of this happened — not with the first book, nor the second or third or fourth or fifth. Instead, what Lamott found was a deeper kind of reward — that sensation “unmerited grace” that Annie Dillard so eloquently captured in her timeless meditation on the writing life. Lamott echoes Ray Bradbury on rejection and reflects:

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do — the actual act of writing — turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.
[…]
I tell my students that the odds of their getting published and of it bringing them financial security, peace of mind, and even joy are probably not that great. Ruin, hysteria, bad skin, unsightly tics, ugly financial problems, maybe; but probably not peace of mind. I tell them that I think they ought to write anyway.

But, one might wonder, why? Lamott answers beautifully:

My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.
But I also tell [my students] that sometimes when my writer friends are working, they feel better and more alive than they do at any other time. And sometimes when they are writing well, they feel that they are living up to something. It is as if the right words, the true words, are already inside them, and they just want to help them get out. Writing this way is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it.

For her, the essence of writing is about something simple, something immutable about being human:

Good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.
[…]
Hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate. Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong.

At the heart of writing, Lamott argues, lies a capacity for quiet grit and a willingness to decondition the all too human tendency to get so overwhelmed by the enormity of the journey that we’re too paralyzed to take the first step. She recounts this wonderful anecdote, after which the book is titled:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

In this bird-by-bird approach to writing, there is no room for perfectionism. (Neil Gaiman famously advised, “Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.”, and David Foster Wallace admonished, “If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.”) Lamott cautions:

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.
[…]
Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here — and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing.

Lamott echoes Susan Sontag (“That’s what a writer does — a writer pays attention to the world.” and offers a beautiful definition of what it means to be a writer:

Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on.
[…]
The writer is a person who is standing apart, like the cheese in “The Farmer in the Dell” standing there alone but deciding to take a few notes. You’re outside, but you can see things up close through your binoculars. Your job is to present clearly your viewpoint, your line of vision. Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense. Then you can recognize others.

In a sentiment reminiscent of E. B. White’s timeless words on the responsibility of the writer, Lamott considers the core of being a writer:

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

That is, one needs to have a moral position. (I myself have long believed that the role of a great writer — or editor, or “curator,” or any other custodian of cultural values — is to frame for people what matters in the world and why.) George Eliot famously observed, “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?” — a notion Lamott considers in the context of that necessary moral position:

As we live, we begin to discover what helps in life and what hurts, and our characters act this out dramatically. This is moral material. … A moral position is a passionate caring inside you. We are all in danger now and have a new everything to face, and there is no point gathering an audience and demanding its attention unless you have something to say that is important and constructive. My friend Carpenter says we no longer need Chicken Little to tell us the sky is falling, because it already has. The issue now is how to take care of one another.

She finds in writing what Carl Sagan found in science — profound awe, deep reverence, a source of spiritual elevation:

In order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? … Think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. Think of those times when you’ve read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone’s soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of — please forgive me — wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious.
[…]
There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness. . .

Most of all, however, Lamott sees in writing not a selfish act of personal gratification but an act of warm generosity — which is, after all, what drives all of us who wake up in the morning to put something we love into the world and go to bed at night glad that we did:

If you give freely, there will always be more. … It is one of the greatest feelings known to humans, the feeling of being the host, of hosting people, of being the person to whom they come for food and drink and company. This is what the writer has to offer.

This mutual gratification is where the mesmerism of literature lies:

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

Bird by Bird is an absolute must-read, and must-reread, in its entirety. Complement it with Annie Dillard on writing, which inspired Lamott, and Dani Shapiro on the pleasures and perils of the creative life, which was inspired by Lamott.
For more notable advice on writing, see Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing, Walter Benjamin’s thirteen doctrines, H. P. Lovecraft’s advice to aspiring writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter to his daughter, Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing, David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, and Susan Sontag’s synthesized learnings.

Come trovare il proprio scopo nella Vita

Da "http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/11/04/hunter-s-thomspon-letters-of-note-advice/" :

20-Year-Old Hunter S. Thompson’s Superb Advice on How to Find Your Purpose and Live a Meaningful Life

by Maria Popova
 

“It is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it.”

As a hopeless lover of both letters and famous advice, I was delighted to discover a letter 20-year-old Hunter S. Thompson — gonzo journalism godfather, pundit of media politics, dark philosopher — penned to his friend Hume Logan in 1958. Found in Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience (public library) — the aptly titled, superb collection based on Shaun Usher’s indispensable website of the same name — the letter is an exquisite addition to luminaries’ reflections on the meaning of life, speaking to what it really means to find your purpose.
Cautious that “all advice can only be a product of the man who gives it” — a caveat other literary legends have stressed with varying degrees of irreverence — Thompson begins with a necessary disclaimer about the very notion of advice-giving:

To give advice to a man who asks what to do with his life implies something very close to egomania. To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal — to point with a trembling finger in the RIGHT direction is something only a fool would take upon himself.

And yet he honors his friend’s request, turning to Shakespeare for an anchor of his own advice:

“To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles…”
And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you’ve ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don’t see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect — between the two things I’ve mentioned: the floating or the swimming.

He acknowledges the obvious question of why not take the path of least resistance and float aimlessly, then counters it:

The answer — and, in a sense, the tragedy of life — is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you.

Touching on the same notion that William Gibson termed “personal micro-culture,” Austin Kleon captured in asserting that “you are the mashup of what you let into your life,” and Paula Scher articulated so succinctly in speaking of the combinatorial nature of our creativity, Thompson writes:

Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.
So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis?
The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all, or not with tangible goals, anyway. It would take reams of paper to develop this subject to fulfillment. God only knows how many books have been written on “the meaning of man” and that sort of thing, and god only knows how many people have pondered the subject. (I use the term “god only knows” purely as an expression.)* There’s very little sense in my trying to give it up to you in the proverbial nutshell, because I’m the first to admit my absolute lack of qualifications for reducing the meaning of life to one or two paragraphs.

Resolving to steer clear of the word “existentialism,” Thompson nonetheless strongly urges his friend to read Sartre’s Nothingness and the anthology Existentialism: From Dostoyevsky to Sartre, then admonishes against succumbing to faulty definitions of success at the expense of finding one’s own purpose:

To put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.
But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors—but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal. In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires—including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.
As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal) he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it (rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks, he has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires).
In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a pattern of his own choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life — the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.

Noting that his friend had thus far lived “a vertical rather than horizontal existence,” Thompson acknowledges the challenge of this choice but admonishes that however difficult, the choice must be made or else it melts away into those default modes of society:

A man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance. So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else. But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life. But you say, “I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.”
And there’s the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don’t know—is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by DECIDING TO LOOK, you go a long way toward making the choice.

He ends by returning to his original disclaimer by reiterating that rather than a prescription for living, his “advice” is merely a reminder that how and what we choose — choices we’re in danger of forgetting even exist — shapes the course and experience of our lives:

I’m not trying to send you out “on the road” in search of Valhalla, but merely pointing out that it is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. There is more to it than that — no one HAS to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life.

Both reflecting and supporting Usher’s heartening echelon of independent online scholarship and journalism at the intersection of the editorial and the curatorial, Letters of Note is brimming with other such timeless treasures from such diverse icons and Brain Pickings favorites as E. B. White, Virginia Woolf, Ursula Nordstrom, Nick Cave, Ray Bradbury, Amelia Earhart, Galileo Galilei, and more.
 

* See Anaïs Nin’s equally delightful disclaimer about the usage of the g-word.