Associating thoughts!

Nautilus (rather obvious, but it popped up, so what can i do about it?)

Twelve Monkeys

Brad Pitt

Ups. Angelina Jolie

the (Gorgeous) Stavroula!

Predictable (I am, sometimes )

Exactly.

Anyway, my abrasiveness on the matter isn't a result of atheism per se, but more of my absolute disdain for how religion preys on the worse parts of the human condition. Atheism - if you agree with coining it as such - was well explained by a well-known witty author in his recent book "God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion":

"Our belief is not belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because they are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between Prof. Stephen Jay Gould and Prof. Richard Dawkins, concerning "punctuated evolution" and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not my mutual excommunication. (My own annoyance at Prof. Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, for their cringe-making proposal that atheists should conceitedly nominate themselves to be called "brights", is part of a continuous argument.) We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Elliot than in mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature , not scripture, sustains the mind - and since there is no other metaphor - the soul.

We do not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that without these blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way round.) We are reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way and room. We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true - that religion has caused innumerable people to not just conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. [...] There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness.

We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are the relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be "holier" than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty.

Some of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will obviously, if the are serious, bring us into contact with belief and believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman. These mighty scholars may have written many things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago [...]" - Christopher Hitchens

There's very few words here that I don't whole-heartedly agree with.

[edit

Gershwin

Stokowski

John Williams' action stuff since 1997.

You are unbelievable, you know that!?


Sith (-->Star Wars --> Williams' stuff!)

a dish served cold

Hungry

I'm never able to eat in the mornings (or after I get up). It's a pain in the arse when I have early morning lectures. I HATE IT!