I am in my late
eighties. I have lived for almost a
century, and at this time of life, I tend to look back rather than
forward. The thing that stands out the
most to me is the stupidity of a human race that considers itself intelligent.
About six
thousand years ago, the great apes and humans had a common ancestor. We
are basically advanced apes.
We have
evolved a brain capable of functional intelligence. A majority of humans are capable
of training to perform a task and functioning in a loose society. We have not invented flight, mass
transit, and electronic technology; a tiny, small percentage of us have the advanced
intelligence of thought experiments, and have dragged the rest of us, kicking
and screaming, into the future we now live in.
Our future
should look exciting; but we are the only animals, except for chimpanzees, our
closest cousin in the animal kingdom, that regularly conduct wars and genocide against
their own kind. That propensity will be
our own destruction.
Our greatest
fear should not be AI or asteroids. The inevitability
of a theology with a nuclear weapon will be more likely to bring about the
sixth extinction.
It wasn’t
enough in Jonestown for true believers to drink the Kool-Aid; they had to bring
along all the others with them.
Religion is
a frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, mere reasoning.
Thoughts of
an old man in the wee hours of the morning
the Ol’Buzzard
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COMMENT: Ben Franklin said, "I imagine a man must have a good deal of vanity who believes, and a good deal of boldness who affirms, that all doctrines he holds are true, and all he rejects are false."