George Carlin - Life is worth losing.

This album is infamous for his "Owners of America" skit, wherein he spends a portion of his mic time explaining the way America works within a range of "wealthy business interests, that control everything and make all of the important decisions."

1. "A Modern Man"
2. "Three Little Words"
3. "The Suicide Guy"
4. "Extreme Human Behavior"
5. "The All-Suicide TV Channel"
6. "Dumb Americans"
7. "Pyramid Of The Hopeless"
8. "Autoerotic Asphyxia"
9. "Posthumous Female Transplants"
10. "Yeast Infection"
11. "Coast-To-Coast Emergency"

George Carlin - Life is worth losing.


Thnx for the jokes.

Atheism: Jonathan Miller's brief history of disbelief.

Jonathan Miller visits the absent Twin Towers to consider the religious implications of 9/11 and meets Arthur Miller and the philosopher Colin McGinn. He searches for evidence of the first 'unbelievers' in Ancient Greece and examines some of the modern theories around why people have always tended to believe in mythology and magic.

So few representatives of atheism provide a compelling and earnest account for unbelief, let alone with the lucidity and intellectual vigor of Jonathan Miller. He is sincere and moving in this attempt to explain and understand the origins of the truth of disbelief of religious superstition and faith.

Part 1 - Shadows of doubt.


With the domination of Christianity from 500 AD, Jonathan Miller wonders how disbelief began to re-emerge in the 15th and 16th centuries. He discovers that division within the Church played a more powerful role than the scientific discoveries of the period. He also visits Paris, the home of the 18th century atheist, Baron D'Holbach, and shows how politically dangerous it was to undermine the religious faith of the masses.

Part 2 - Noughts and crosses.



The history of disbelief continues with the ideas of self-taught philosopher Thomas Paine, the revolutionary studies of geology and the evolutionary theories of Darwin. Jonathan Miller looks at the Freudian view that religion is a 'thought disorder'. He also examines his motivation behind making the series touching on the issues of death and the religious fanaticism of the 21st century.

Part 3 - The final hour.

Richard Dawkins - Queerer than we suppose...

Richard Dawkins is Oxford University's "Professor for the Public Understanding of Science." Author of the landmark 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, he's a brilliant (and trenchant) evangelist for Darwin's ideas.

In this talk, titled, "Queerer Than We Suppose: The strangeness of science," he suggests that the true nature of the universe eludes us, because the human mind evolved only to understand the "middle-sized" world we can observe.

Queerer than we suppose: The strangeness of science.

The Indian rope trick.

There are different accounts of the Indian rope trick in circulation, but apart from minor changes in the settings and the participants, the basic trick remained the same as described below.

In the simplest version of the trick, the magician would hurl a rope into the air. The rope would not fall but stand erect. His boy assistant would climb the rope and then descend.

A more elaborate version of the trick would find the magician (or his assistant) disappearing after reaching the top of the rope, then reappearing at ground level.
The "classic" version of the trick, however, was even more detailed: the rope would seem to rise high into the skies, even disappearing from view. The boy assistant would climb the rope, and soon be lost to view. The magician would call back his boy assistant, and on hearing no response, would become furious. The magician then armed himself with a knife or sword, and he would also climb the rope and disappear in the thin air. An argument would be heard, and then human limbs would start falling on the ground, presumably cut from the assistant by the magician. When all the parts of the body, including the torso, landed on the ground, the magician would be seen climbing down from the erect rope. He would collect the limbs and put them in a basket, or simply collect all the limbs in one place and then cover them with a cape or blanket. Soon the magician’s boy assistant would appear, miraculously restored.

Descartes originally claimed that consciousness involves an immaterial soul, which observes a representation of the world in the pineal gland of the brain. Under this notion, the soul plays the role of a homunculus, a creature with self-directed will power.

Dennett says that, when the dualism is removed, what remains of Descartes' original model amounts to imagining a tiny theater in the brain where the homunculus, now physical, performs the task of observing all the sensory data projected on a screen at a particular instant, making the decisions and sending out commands. And all that is left is a Cartesian Theater. Who's driving the car?

Professor Daniel Dennett's - Lecture on consciousness.

Richard Dawkins: An atheist's call to arms.

The session was titled "The Design of Life," and the TED audience was probably expecting remarks about evolution's role in our history from biologist Richard Dawkins.

Instead, he launched into a full-on appeal for atheists to make public their beliefs and to aggressively fight the incursion of religion into politics and education. Scientists and intellectuals hold very different beliefs about God from the American public, he says, yet they are cowed by the overall political environment. Dawkins' scornful tone drew strongly mixed reactions from the audience; some stood and applauded his courage. Others wondered whether his strident approach could do more harm than good.

Richard Dawkins: An atheist's call to arms.