Previously: General Thoughts on Secular Solstice.

This blog post is my scattered notes and ramblings about the individual components (talks and songs) of Secular Solstice in Berkeley. Talks have their title in bold, and I split the post into two columns, with the notes I took about the content of the talk on the left and my comments on the talk on the right. Songs have normal formatting.

Bonfire

The Circle

This feels like a sort of whig history: a history that neglects most of the complexities and culture-dependence of the past in order to advance a teleological narrative. I do not think that whig histories are inherently wrong (although the term has negative connotations). Whig histories should be held to a very strict standard because they make claims about how most or all of human history functions.

The song describes morality in terms of an expanding circle of [...]

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Outline:

(00:35) Bonfire

(00:38) The Circle

(03:40) Life Is Too Short to Fold Underwear

(05:27) Time Wrote the Rocks

(06:05) Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

(06:12) Bold Orion

(06:27) Embers

(06:30) The Fallen Star

(07:39) On Wanting Things

(07:55) Night

(07:58) Bitter Wind Lullaby

(08:44) Hymn to Breaking Strain

(09:03) For Every Ailment Under the Sun

(09:09) No One Survives

(09:15) Songs Stay Sung

(10:34) Call and Response: Defiance

(11:17) Dawn

(11:20) Brighter Than Today

(11:30) Half Monkey, Half God

(11:37) Song of the Artesian Water

(12:55) I Have Seen the Tops of Clouds

(13:06) Morning

(13:09) We Will Not Die of This

(13:18) Ballad of Smallpox Gone

(13:33) Tomorrows

(13:48) Level Up

(13:59) The Orange

(14:05) The Great Transhumanist Future

(15:48) Five Thousand Years

(16:42) Summary by MC

(16:52) What a Wonderful World

The original text contained 12 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.