An English fireworks company with a flare for showmanship and drama.
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The inaugural show was designed to be absolutely stunning. It included approximately twenty individual pyrotechnic displays, each transitioning from one to the other in serial order. There were traditional fireworks like we see today on holidays, of course. But Pain went much, much further. He created elaborate scenes using props and meticulously prepared burning powders, in what essentially amounted to a display of nighttime art that you might expect would be possible only using multicolored LED lights. His Mammoth Silver Fire Wheel measured 51 feet in diameter and had concentric circles that would all change color, with certain colors appearing to travel from the inside to the outside and back, like the lights on a modern Ferris wheel. The 40-foot-tall Fairy Fountain had gold and silver jets streaming out of it. Perhaps the most amazing display was the recreation of what appeared to be an entire riverboat moving as it paddled its way along a river.
Over 100,000 people came to Coney Island that July Fourth, many expecting to see Pain’s show or perhaps take a ride in Professor King’s novel hot air balloon ride, also being inaugurated at Manhattan Beach. But the crowds would have to wait. A strong summer storm appeared that evening, preventing the Pains from putting on their show and the professor from giving rides to any of the 2,000 people who were eagerly waiting. The heavy rains even damaged some of the Pains’ props.
Undeterred, the Pains went ahead with their second show on Saturday, July 12th, and augmented it with a naval battle that really amazed audiences. In it, as a damaged warship tried to fight off its opponent, streams of lights arced out of each ship as they fired on each other. The scene culminated with the damaged ship being rammed by the attacker and sinking. For the rest of the 1879 season and the next several seasons, the Pains performed this show every Saturday evening. Some of the props changed from season to season, but the overall show remained largely consistent.
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atheism in america
Why are Americans so distrustful of atheists and what do atheists believe?
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Daniel Seeger was twenty-one when he wrote to his local draft board to say, “I have concluded that war, from the practical standpoint, is futile and self-defeating, and from the more important moral standpoint, it is unethical.” Some time later, he received the United States Selective Service System’s Form 150, asking him to detail his objections to military service. It took him a few days to reply, because he had no answer for the form’s first question: “Do you believe in a Supreme Being?”
Unsatisfied with the two available options—“Yes” and “No”—Seeger finally decided to draw and check a third box: “See attached pages.” There were eight of those pages, and in them he described reading Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza, all of whom “evolved comprehensive ethical systems of intellectual and moral integrity without belief in God,” and concluded that “the existence of God cannot be proven or disproven, and the essence of His nature cannot be determined.” For good measure, Seeger also used scare quotes and strike-throughs to doctor the printed statement he was required to sign, so that it read, “I am, by reason of my ‘religious’ training and belief, conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form.”
By the time Seeger submitted his form, in the late nineteen-fifties, thousands of conscientious objectors in the U.S. had refused to fight in the two World Wars. Those who belonged to pacifist religious traditions, such as Mennonites and Quakers, were sent to war as noncombatants or to work as farmers or firefighters on the home front through the Civilian Public Service; eventually, so were those who could prove their own independent, religiously motivated pacifism. Those who could not were sent to prison or to labor camps. But while Selective Service laws had been revised again and again to clarify the criteria for conscientious objection, they still did not account for young men who, like Seeger, refused to say that their opposition to war came from belief in a Supreme Being.
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My experience is that most are nutty and combative like the 'new-age atheists'. Rather they've come to the conclusion that a deity is unlikely or impossible and go on with life not worrying about spending time with stories that aren't credible. If practices that wy it's not even a religion.
05:02 in General Commentary, history, Religion | Permalink | Comments (0)