Isn't it wonderful to listen to ,and comprehend, a speaker with no hidden agendas and a simple yet concise message. Very enjoyable. Thanks for the post!
Wow, that last statement reminded me of the Nightwish song _The Greatest Show on Earth_ (the one that features Richard Dawkins), where the final lyrics are *We were here!* repeated several times. The human race may not last forever, but the fact that we existed is as incontrovertible as the universe being comprised of stars and consisting of dimesions of space and time.
The à la carte cherry-picking of religious tenets by its practitioners has been more than well-accommodated by those willing to pick up the ball and establish a new variant as is demonstrated by the more than 200 denominations of Christianity in the U.S. and 45,000 worldwide. A good starting point for people to begin to question the supernatural beliefs they are literally being sold. Excellent lecture.
+Psi Clops that's somehow not correct. i never heard about hera being involved in that, but that zeus send him to the underworld because he was killing travelers and guests, which was a violation of philoxenia. there he pissed off ares because he tricked thanatos and chained him (in another version it was hades), so ares had to free thanatos and he returned sisyphus back. then he tricked persephone to release him for a while and hermes had to drag him back. finally the gods were so pissed that they cursed him to endlessly roll a huge boulder up a steep hill..
His narrative is located within societal norms of achievement and ego oriented satisfactions. It also ignores the animal world, and the interests of the earth, as the "good life" as far as non humans are concerned might involve a scaling back of human activity, not its flourishing.i find him too well adjusted to be a great philosopher. The answers for humanity surely lie outside establishment tropes.
You don't get more goats, sheep, and people. You have to include the people part of this discussion, professor Grayling, because the Hebrews of the old testament participate in a lot of war and agriculture and you need human capital for both which is also the reason why the Bible makes no moral case against slavery.
Ah! My hobbyhorse! Professor Grayling mentions Sisyphus and says that Sisyphus was punished because he angered "the gods". No! (Or to say it in French, "No!") Sisyphus did not anger "the gods". Sisyphus angered one god: Zeus. Sisyphus was put in the position of having to either not tell the truth to Hera, which would undoubtedly have resulted in Hera punishing him, or tell the truth and anger Zeus, which resulted in his famous punishment. This became my hobbyhorse nearly forty years ago when I realized that, while people remember the punishment, they almost universally forget the reason for it or, as Professor Grayling has done, generalized it into, "He angered the gods." As a result, I decided that Sisyphus had ceased to be an individual in the story and had become his punishment.
The question is an oxymoron. Good life includes happiness, so how can you be really happy, even if things are going well for you when millions of lives are shattered, hundreds of millions live in misery, under bombs, are maimed, hungry, have no shelter, no clean water, have disease, etc., etc. Those whose actions cause the problems will never adapt the attitude of humanism. There will be rich, poor and some in the middle until mankind allows itself to be destroyed.
Good life doesn’t necessarily mean happiness. If you are burdened with the suffering of others then you do what you can to alleviate it. Just the act of doing for others will give you a personal reward.
I like this guy, but he's too PC. It feels like he doesn't recognize the tyranny of virtue that's grabbed hold of the present generation. He's very charming and interesting, but I get a cuttlefish vibe.
