I had never seen this short article written by Carl Sagan until today. I’ll leave my comments on it for tomorrow. Until then, enjoy and read:
“A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage”
Suppose (I’m following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you’d want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!
“Show me,” you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle — but no dragon. “Where’s the dragon?” you ask.
By the way, Carl Sagan was one of those people I completely worshipped as a kid. He was smart, specifically knowing a lot about physics and astronomy. Most importantly, he had that show Cosmos which helped reinforce this opinion to, at least, me. If you don’t know who he was, I highly suggest reading about his life a bit over at Wikipedia.
when you were a kid, you believed in santa claus. not because you found pieces of his beard, not because you saw footprints by the fireplace, not because you ever had evidence that he actually existed. and of course, as a physical entity, he doesn’t exist. but his spirit, the spirit of christmas, does exist. i won’t go into the yes, virginia story; you can read that on your own. so whether or not the dragon exists in some physical manifestation that we as humans can understand and prove is not really the issue. rather, it’s the faith that people have in the dragon, and therefore, whether the dragon then becomes more than a dragon, and in essence, a spirit that lives within us all.
Hmmm… the godless geeks website is down today. Perhaps a little retaliatory lightning strike from an angry god — or a firey blast from an angry dragon?
I read the essay yesterday when the site was up. It’s a good one. Fits right in with stuff I’ve been thinking about lately since reading Richard Dawkins’ THE GOD DELUSION, which your baby sister got for Xmas but I got to read first (she’s too busy with biology, calculus, text messaging, and such). Thanks for bringing such an intelligent, logical and entertaining little essay to my attention!
Hmm. If the godless geeks website continues to be flakey I might have to steal that essay and republish it here. I didn’t because I don’t know if it is copyrighted. If anyone reading ever can’t get to it, just search google for sagan the dragin in my garage.
You mean “sagan the DRAGON in my garage”.
Hey, got an idea for making this blog more user-comment friendly. Add some HTML automated stuff, so people can do links like you did just now without knowing HTML code. You know, click a button to add a link.