Blueblades,
I'll have to look out for the DVD box set.
I have the digitally remastered 7- disc collector's edition of CARL SAGAN'S "COSMOS." 13 one hour episodes from the landmark tv. series.
I've just finished reading the book of the series, and it is superb, with a number of swipes at religion. Here are just a couple of quotes:
"Many hypotheses proposed by scientists as well as by non-scientists turn out to be wrong. But science is a self-correcting enterprise. To be accepted, all new ideas must survive rigorous standards of evidence ... Science is generated by and devoted to free enquiry: the idea that any hypothesis, no matter how strange, deserves to be considered on its merits. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundamental new insights." (p. 91)
And again ...
"In his book On Ancient Medicine, Hippocrates wrote: "Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things."" (p. 179)
Ouch! Wonderful.
"All the elements of the Earth except hydrogen and some helium have been cooked by a kind of stellar alchemy billions of years ago in stars, some of which are today inconspicuous white dwarfs on the other side of the Milky Way Galaxy. The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff." (p. 233)
And ...
"Life on Earth runs almost exclusively on sunlight. Plants gather the photons and convert solar to chemical energy. Animals parasitize the plants. Farming is simply the methodical harvesting of sunlight, using plants as grudging intermediaries. We are, almost all of us, solar-powered. Finally, the hereditary changes called mutations provide the raw material for evolution. Mutations, from which nature selects its new inventory of life forms, are produced in part by cosmic rays--high-energy particles ejected almost at the speed of light in supernova explosions. The evolution of life on Earth is driven in part by the spectacular deaths of distant, massive suns." (pp. 234-235)
Now that's what I call truly inspiring.
Finally, a quote concerning the attitude of early Christianity towards higher education, and how WT's policies are not really so new after all ...
""Superstition [is] cowardice in the face of the Divine," wrote Theophrastus, who lived during the founding of the Library of Alexandria ... Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centred on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries.
"There is no other species on Earth that does science ... It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised ...
"Only once before in our history was there the promise of a brilliant scientific civilization. Beneficiary of the Ionian Awakening, it had its citadel at the Library of Alexandria, where 2,000 years ago the best minds of antiquity established the foundations for the systematic study of mathematics, physics, biology, astronomy, literature, geography and medicine. We build on those foundations still. The Library was constructed and supported by the Ptolemys, the Greek kings who inherited the Egyptian portion of the empire of Alexander the Great. From the time of its creation in the third century B.C. until its destruction seven centuries later, it was the brain and heart of the ancient world ...
"The Ptolemys did not merely collect established knowledge; they encouraged and financed scientific research and so generated new knowledge. The results were amazing: Eratosthenes accurately calculated the size of the earth, mapped it, and argued that India could be reached by sailing westward from Spain. Hipparchus anticipated that stars come into being, slowly move during the course of centuries, and eventually perish; it was he who first catalogued the positions and magnitudes of the stars to detect such changes. Euclid produced a textbook on geometry from which humans learned for twenty-three centuries, a work that was to help awaken the scientific interest of Kepler, Newton and Einstein. Galen wrote basic works on healing and anatomy which dominated medicine until the Renaissance. There were, as we have noted, many others ...
"Here clearly were the seeds of the modern world. What prevented them from taking root and flourishing? Why instead did the West slumber through a thousand years of darkness until Columbus and Copernicus and their contemporaries rediscovered the work done in Alexandria? ... [T]he mob came to burn the Library down, there was nobody to stop them ...
"The growing Christian Church was consolidating its power and attempting to eradicate pagan influence and culture ... [and] learning and science ... were largely identified by the early Church with paganism ... Cyril [the Christian Archbishop of Alexandria] was made a saint.
"It was as if the entire civilization had undergone some self-inflicted brain surgery, and most of its memories, discoveries, ideas and passions were extinguished irrevocably. The loss was incalculable ... Of the physical contents of that glorious Library not a single scroll remains." (pp. 332-336)
The rising influence of the Christian church plunged the Western world into the Dark Ages as they sought to exterminate scientific knowledge and ideas and substitute their own myths and superstitions.
Who knows what might have been, if the Christian church had been more tolerant and enlightened? A cure for heart disease and cancer five hundred years ago? Intergalactic travel two hundred years ago? Human colonies on Mars or other planetary systems within the Milky Way?
How sad, so many wasted lives, so much wasted time; because a few men saw an opportunity to enslave the mass of superstitious minds.
Of course, Sagan's words equally apply to the Watchtower Society today.