Most people are asleep.
They never questioned what they were told, and what they are told shapes their psyche that interprets and acts on the billions of bits of information they process throughout their lives.
They live, marry, work, and die in their sleep without waking up.
Honesty begins with yourself and those who love you unconditionally. It is not rewarded on a stage full of onlookers who neither care nor love you enough.
Sir Isaac Newton's argument against atheism ✍️
Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds beasts & men have their right side & left side alike shaped (except in their bowels) & just two eyes & no more on either side the face & just two ears on either side the head & a nose with two holes & no more between the eyes & one mouth under the nose & either two fore leggs or two wings or two arms on the sholders & two leggs on the hipps one on either side & no more? Whence arises this uniformity in all their outward shapes but from the counsel & contrivance of an Author?
Whence is it that the eyes of all sorts of living creatures are transparent to the very bottom & the only transparent members in the body, having on the outside an hard transparent skin, & within transparent juyces with a crystalline Lens in the middle & a pupil before the Lens all of them so truly shaped & fitted for vision, that no Artist can mend them?
Did blind chance know that there was light & what was its refraction & fit the eys of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it? These & such like considerations always have & ever will prevail with man kind to believe that there is a being who made all things & has all things in his power & who is therfore to be feared.
-- as mentioned in "A short Schem of the true Religion"
📷 a copy of Newton's painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller (1689)
Michaela Coela: “Write the tale that scares you, that is uncomfortable. I dare you. In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others, do not be afraid to disappear from it for a while and see what comes to you in the silence.” #writing
For most of human history, we lived in an environment of information scarcity
Then there was a brief period of information abundance as the internet was getting started
But now we’re in superabundance, which paradoxically looks a lot like scarcity
In both cases, you can’t find the information you need when you need it, you’re forced to rely on hearsay and social proof to decide what’s true, and are forced to fall back on tradition and convention
This is why lessons from history are still relevant: when information is too superabundant, it might as well be scarce and not exist at all
Five great signs of intelligence:
• You're not afraid or ashamed to find errors in your understanding of things.
• You take mistakes as lessons.
• You don't get offended with accepting the facts.
• You are highly adaptable and very curious.
• You know what you don't know.