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GOLDEN_SPIRIT

Quote from a "Mr. Skeptic" article in "Scientific American":

  There are many ways to be spiritual, and
  science is one, with its awe-inspiring
  account about who we are and where we
  came from. "The cosmos is within us. We
  are made of star stuff. We are a way for
  the cosmos to know itself," began the
  late astronomer Carl Sagan in the opening
  scene of Cosmos, filmed just down the
  coast from Esalen, in referring to the
  stellar origins of the chemical elements
  of life. "We've begun at last to wonder
  about our origins, star stuff
  contemplating the stars, organized
  collections of ten billion billion
  billion atoms contemplating the evolution
  of matter, tracing that long path by
  which it arrived at consciousness.... Our
  obligation to survive and flourish is
  owed not just to ourselves but also to
  that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which
  we spring."

  That is spiritual gold.

"Mr. Skeptic Goes to Esalen -- 
Science and spirituality on the California coast"

[ref]



A quotation from a Bruce Sterling interview:

   [...] spavined pop science-ese.     
   The kind of lame language that says
   something like [holds up digital
   camera]: "You know, if you could
   see the tiny grooves that have been
   carved on the chip of this digital
   camera, why they would stretch to
   the moon and back three-and-a-half
   times!"
                                       
   It's the Carl Sagan school of trying 
   to pump mystic scientism into the    
   dryness of physics. There's just     
   something phoney-baloney about it    
   because it's taking an intellectual  
   process that's very much about       
   methodically stripping the mystery   
   out of natural phenomena and then    
   trying to re-mystify it by           
   approaching it from some more        
   'friendly' sensibility. And there's  
   just something bogus about that. It  
   has the bogusness of an adult telling
   a pre-pubertal child about the birds 
   and the bees without talking about   
   the burning needs of sexuality.      
                                        
   That's what a lot of pop science     
   writing is like. It talks down to the
   reader, and it covers the stark      
   majesty of Euclidean insight with    
   redigested pap.                      

"Child of the Diaspora: Sterling on Ballard, Part 1"
[ref]
 October 2005 


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