Magnificent! The Known Universe by AMNH… [Repost]

This is the simulator done by the American Museum of Natural History, in conjunction with the world-wide work of many others.

It is an outstanding example of multinational academic cooperation, and to me brings hope for our future as a species, however precarious that may be for the next century or two.

Things like this are reasons why I consider myself a citizen of the Earth, not just of a single nation.

MNQ | Monday’s Noontide Query: Conflict in the Skeptics’ Movements

Image via Wikipedia

Even before the recent ascendency of the skeptics’, humanists’, and atheists’ movements through Web 2.0, there have been controversies, whether the “don’t be a dick” debate going all the way back to Carl Sagan, on a similar note, the Confrontationist/Accommodationist argument among atheists, and more recently the debate over sexism, misogyny and privilege in the rationialist movements, some of it rather uncivil, but I think, all of it much needed.

The rationalist communities are diverse, and there is relatively little that is uniformly agreed upon, though there’s a general tendency toward the promotion of science and reason, at least among skeptics and atheists.

This is why I prefer to let other skeptics speak for themselves than presume to do so for them.

Rationalism as a worldwide phenomenon is growing, and growing can be painful when more diversity works its way into the demographics of the movement with some resistance, sometimes along partisan lines, as I think is happening.

Personally, I think this is just “a phase” that the ‘new wave of reason’ as Richard Dawkins has put it, is going through.

Change will hurt, it hurts now, but there’s a good chance that in these days of vicious culture wars, that Reason will win out, that the better, more rational aspects of my species will win out over the urges of the reptile brain, perhaps leading to our surviving the next couple of hundred years to make it to a Type I planetary civilization, and go on to the stars, not back to the caves.

On pain of equivocation, my hope cannot be certain in it’s fulfillment, but I can certainly hope.

So what say you?

What do you think will be the most likely outcome of the current arguments within the skeptical and rationalist communities, in the context of the larger struggle of the escalating Culture Wars?

MNQ is a question that I pose to you, my readers, and is posted each Monday at 12:00 PM. Do feel free to comment, and don’t worry yerselves overmuch… I’m not an ogre and I don’t bite…much.