The Reason Project
To do my part to spread the things that I believe should exist in abundance…
I made the sudden decision to SPONSOR A CHILD.
Why? It’s simple. I find myself dwindling my money away on whatever things, I don’t know where they’re gone to, so they were probably not used for any meaningful purposes or whatsoever… So I decided to sponsor a child. A one-time donation annually, to send a child to school. To receive an education. To open a world of opportunities to someone whose RIGHT was violated due to all the shit going on around in this world. It’s the least I can do right now. I mean, I believe in things like Liberty, Love, Reason, and etc. And I believe that we should act on our beliefs as well. So this is my first step.
Can anyone ever argue against the fact that more love, more education, more opportunities made available, will always make the world a better place?
It was quite an annoying task, because I DO NOT for a second wish to help someone, in order to SPREAD the LOVE of God. Oh my Holy Jesus. I do not wish to spread a goodwill along with indoctrination and faith. I do not wish to heal the human condition and then divide and corrupt it. Alright, that’s in MY OWN terms.
I’m definitely looking forward to it. Waiting to hear about how I’m gonna send a cheque over, and stuff. And I’m really pinning on, finding the time to head down and volunteer at the site myself, too. The most amazing thing about this entire affair is how everything so fits my principles perfectly. Secular. Check. 100 percent of the money goes to the family. Check. Sustainable development. Check. And they even have some sort of a MICROBUSINESS in operation. Now that’s what I’m REALLY looking into. Microfinance. Microcredit. Turning the conventional banking system upside down.
But that’s looking at the long term aspect of it,
and in the EVEN LONGER TERM, I just joined the mailing list for THE REASON PROJECT. Kick-started by Sam Harris and his fiancee. They have the likes of Richard Dawkins, Dennis Dennett, Rebecca Goldstein, Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Steven Pinker, and Steven Weinberg on its advisory board. ALL BIG NAMES to me. ALL PEOPLE I LOOK UP TO. ALL INTELLECTUALS. You can consider them my SEX SYMBOLS even. ^.^
Sincerely,
the discovery of knowledge, the delight of Truth, is orgasmic.
The Reason Project will soon be a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. The Reason Project will draw on the talents of prominent and creative thinkers in a wide range of disciplines — science, law, literature, film, journalism, information technology, etc. — to encourage critical thinking and wise public policy. It will convene conferences, produce films, sponsor scientific research and opinion polls, award grants to other non-profit organizations, and offer material support to religious dissidents and public intellectuals — all with the purpose of eroding the influence of dogmatism, superstition, and bigotry in our world.
Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He was voted Britain’s leading public intellectual by readers of Prospect magazine and was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” for 2007. Among his books are The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, A Devil’s Chaplain, The Ancestor’s Tale, and the New York Times best seller The God Delusion.
Daniel C. Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Breaking the Spell, Freedom Evolves, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Consciousness Explained, and many other books. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987.
Rebecca Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist. She is the author of eight books, including, The Mind-Body Problem, Properties of Light, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, and Betraying Spinoza. In 1996 Goldstein received a MacArthur Fellowship (popularly known as the “Genius Award”). In 2005 she was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship. Goldstein holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” and Reader’s Digest’s European of the Year for 2005. She is the author of The Caged Virgin and the New York Times best selling memoir Infidel. Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia where she escaped an arranged marriage by immigrating to the Netherlands in 1992. She later served as a member of the Dutch parliament from 2003 to 2006. In 2004, together with director Theo van Gogh, she made Submission, a film about the oppression of women in conservative Islamic cultures. The airing of the film on Dutch television resulted in the assassination of van Gogh by an Islamic extremist. Ms. Hirsi Ali continues to speak and write about the importance of freedom of speech, the need to reform Islam, and the rights of women.
Christopher Hitchens is an author, journalist, and literary critic. He regularly writes for Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, The Nation, Slate, The New York Times Book Review, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other journals. He is the author of the #1 New York Times best seller God is Not Great (a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award). He has also written Why Orwell Matters, Letter to a Young Contrarian, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and many other books. In 2005 Mr. Hitchens was named one of the world’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines.
Ian McEwan is a writer of worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany’s Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics’ Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday.
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Until 2003, he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and Slate, and is the author of seven books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. Mr. Pinker was named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” in 2004.
Salman Rushdie won the Booker Prize for Fiction for his second novel, Midnight’s Children. In 1993 the book was judged to have been the ‘Booker of Bookers’, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the award’s 25-year history. Rushdie’s third novel, Shame (1983) won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize as well. The publication in 1988 of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, lead to accusations of blasphemy against Islam and demonstrations by Islamist groups in India and Pakistan. The orthodox Iranian leadership issued a fatwa against Rushdie on 14 February 1989, and he was forced into hiding under the protection of the British government and police. The Satanic Verses won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1988. Mr. Rushdie is the author of many novels and works of criticism. He is Honorary Professor in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has received numerous awards and eight honorary doctorates. He was elected to the Board of American PEN in 2002.
Steven Weinberg holds the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a member of the Physics and Astronomy Departments. His research on elementary particles and cosmology has been honored with numerous prizes and awards, including in 1979 the Nobel Prize in Physics and in 1991 the National Medal of Science. In 2004 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society, with a citation that said he is “considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive in the world today.” He has been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences and Britain’s Royal Society, as well as to the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of over 300 articles on elementary particle physics. His books include The First Three Minutes (1977); The Discovery of Subatomic Particles (1983, 2003); Elementary Particles and The Laws of Physics (with R.P. Feynman) (1987); Dreams of a Final Theory—The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (1993); a trilogy, The Quantum Theory of Fields (1995, 1996, 2000); Facing Up — Science and its Cultural Adversaries (2002); and most recently Glory and Terror—The Growing Nuclear Danger (2004). Articles of his on various subjects appear from time to time in The New York Review of Books. He has served as consultant at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the JASON group of defense consultants, and many other boards and committees.
I’M SO GONNA PARTY WITH MY INTELLECT, WITH MY ONE AND ONLY PASSAGE THROUGH EARTH, IN THIS LIFETIME.
So, back to short-term, I really don’t think I’m ready to commit full-blown, 4 years full-time, in University, yet. I need to see more of this world, experience more, so that by the time I really enter the University, one or two years later, I’ll know what I’ll be toiling for. Those 4 years of my time will then be worthwhile. I don’t wanna mug mug mug, get a degree, then go 9-to-5, just like everyone else.
I want a meaning much deeper and richer than that.
Rather than 9-to-5, rather than starting families to pass my genes on, rather than being just another human, rather than letting other people tell me what to do, I choose to be no one else, but me.
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