Tuesday May 03, 2011

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"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."
Richard Dawkins
VIEW 8 of 8 COMMENTS
wander:
interesting
knives2meatyou:
My brother-in-law just died (not a good past year and a half here), and I will use this quote at his memorial. Thanks for posting it. I don't personally believe in the concept of "god" as some guy with a beard and a kid who wants us to pray to him, but I respect that other people do believe and I recognize that I don't know any more about the nature of the universe and the multiverse than they do, so I respect their faith.

But whether one believes in a deity, or does not, or believes, as I do, that we are not capable as humans to understand matters that well exceed our cognitive capabilities and thus we compensate by asking dead people and nonexistent things to help us, we can all appreciate that we are here at all to debate such stuff. Thanks for letting Richard Dawkins remind us of that.

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