This nine-minute piece was created by DogmaticCure, which has produced a number of rationalist videos. It touts rationality and science as a palliative for the fear and divisiveness produced by ideology and religion. It’s essentially a visual presentation of Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature, though it doesn’t really mention the decline of violence in the last few centuries. I also like to think of it as the victory of fact over faith.
Sadly, among the byproducts of human rationality that this film promotes is the realization—unique among all species—that we’re going to die. And that makes us scared in a way that’s hard to overcome. So long as we can’t, religion will stay with us.
Very good short film. I’m pretty sure those scenes of the early apes tossing the bones around are the same as in the movie 2001.
Yeah, that opening sequence is from Kubrick. All that’s missing is the black monolith and the bone being tossed into the sky turning into a space station set to the strains of Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.
WOW. Amazing.
When we are really able to accept that death is a FACT and that there is no after-life, then there is no point in being afraid of dying. It just is. Life then becomes more precious.
Evolution does seem horribly cruel in a way. It’s given us big brains, an intense curiosity, and a strong will to live. What it hasn’t given us is an ability to cope with our deaths (other than through denial). We are all trapped in our bodies with no way out.
Our best hope I suppose is pharmaceuticals. If science can’t cure death, maybe it can cure our fear of death. Some magic drug that will make us perfectly rational and remove all fear. I think that’s the best humanity can achieve.
Soma?
Victory Gin?
Soma IN Victory Gin ?
A gram is better than a damn, as A. Huxley used to say.
I really should move that book up in my “to read” list.
Its called alcohol.
We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.
So it’s an FDR allegory? No wonder one of the apes resembled Eleanor. 🙂
I highly recommend the thoughts of Lucretius as a palliative to the fear of death…
Life’s a gift to no man, only a loan to him.
Look back in time. How meaningless,
how unreal, before our birth.
In this way Nature holds before our eyes
the mirror of our future after death.
Is this so grim? So gloomy?
Is it not a rest more free from care than any sleep?
Less eloquently… After we die it will be just as it was before we were born. That wasn’t so bad was it?
I had to turn that morbid video off … 9 minutes of deadly violence with someone trying to propound on reasons!? I gave myself a break.
Speaking of being morbid and – something that seems to be shared among death scared – sad, if those feelings need to be experienced perhaps they could be portioned out every passed day? Sort of the opposite of the nonexistence/existence dichotomy you handle so well, but for the same purpose.
I agree with you and also highly recommend the reading of Lucretius to everyone.
Rowena,
Fear of death is the impetus for the power of Western religions today. Eternal life is the carrot. Eternal damnation is the stick. It’s a pack of lies, but few people doubt it. Lucretius met the problem head on and eloquently. He provided comfort to people, like me, 2,000 years later. I hope you have read “The Swerve”. If not, I highly recommend it. It’s a joy to read.
Steve Kern, Indianapolis, stevekern@att.net
Nice poem, thank you for posting it.
Must read: “The Denial of Death” by Ernest Becker. One of the most important books written in the 20th Century, perhaps in history.
I haven’t been worried about death, besides the lost opportunities, since I stopped being worried about the dark as a child – really about falling asleep.
It is a nice contingency of evolution that we are trained to accept loss of consciousness on a very regular basis.
I wonder why it evolved though.
I’m sure there must have been histories written that carefully documents the rise and spread of belief in a soul and an afterlife of reward or punishment, but I haven’t seen them.
That combination of belief in a soul that survives the physical body and an afterlife in which justice finally prevails has, throughout history, caused radical movements trying to speed the process along for us all, whether we believe in it or not. Prepare for the Second Coming, y’all!
Wonderful as consciousness is, too much for too long without sleep is dangerous. Excessively sleep deprived, most of us display characteristics that can be considered aspects
of mental illness. Some scientists are finding evidence brain processing build up detritus that requires sleep time to be cleaned out.
Rowena,
I responded to your response to the Lucretius quote above. I hope you will go back and take a look. I believe that Lucretius’ insight is an antidote to the need for western theism. But, how do you spread his ideas? Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Swerve” is a good start.
Steve Kern
I loved that video. (Maybe I should marry it.)
I liked the video, but feel compelled to mention that not a single woman was featured.
Because, as we all have been carefully taught, women are not hunters, warriors, thinkers, great producers of science, etc. We stay at home, cook and clean, are vessels for sex, and producers of children. We also should wear clothing that disguises or covers up feminine characteristics that may cause lustful thoughts or actions by men. And, we should be seen and not heard.
No wonder mothers in some cultures are treated as slaves by their male children and that those male children often are removed early on in life from the influence of their mothers.
Do you think that the rules for female slaves
promulgated recently by ISIS should be implemented by the more conservative religious and political elements in the U.S. who already are trying to exert control over the female body?
I don’t fear death, but I do hope to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers.
😀
You agree, then with Woody Allen who said, “I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
Good video. DogmaticCure is clearly a fan of Phil Hellenes videos.
Love it, all we need is to cure Death and we’ve cracked it.lol
“We need to stop pretending that we are part of a divine purpose and that we are going to be rewarded with eternal bliss.”
Those two sentences summed it up nicely and made the 8 minutes worthwhile.
I am not afraid of terrorists, I am afraid of what the fear of terrorism is doing to our society.
Around the 6:00 minute mark, a series of faces is shown, faces important in scientific discovery, and not one of them is the face of a woman. How sad to be so overlooked.
Ah! I watched a couple more, one focusing on Christopher Hitchens, and it brought up male and female faces. Very nice. These are inspiringly well done.