Everything Southern Humboldt and more
The TPM headline is uncharacteristically misleading. 30 percent of the youth surveyed did not say they didn’t believe in God. They said they have experienced doubts in God.
Still, I actually think that doubt is healthier than absolute disbelief.
So why is the Boomer generation the only one getting more religious?
 | moviedad on How does vinegar mix with tin… |
 | That Other Anonymous on March against Monsanto this… |
 | Forest Queen on March against Monsanto this… |
 | Anonymous on March against Monsanto this… |
 | Cookie on March against Monsanto this… |
 | bolithio on March against Monsanto this… |
| Forest Queen on March against Monsanto this… |
 | Mitch on How does vinegar mix with tin… |
| moviedad on How does vinegar mix with tin… |
| Mitch on How does vinegar mix with tin… |
 | "Henchman Of Justice… on March against Monsanto this… |
| moviedad on How does vinegar mix with tin… |
| That Other Anonymous on March against Monsanto this… |
| Forest Queen on March against Monsanto this… |
| moviedad on March against Monsanto this… |
283 comments
Comments feed for this article
June 13, 2012 at 9:46 am
Joe Blow
Religion is all they have left.
June 13, 2012 at 10:13 am
Eric Kirk
As opposed to the silent generation?
June 13, 2012 at 10:26 am
AG
Fear of death is the number one issue driving superstitious belief. Additionally, boomers in their lifetime have experienced societal religiosity at its strongest. Religious belief among youth lessens with each year, so senior citizens are likely to always be the demographic with the strongest belief in gods, the strongest adherence to old ideas.
The same is true of many things in a senior’s life, right down to which toothpaste he buys. It’s why marketers focus so heavily on youth, because younger people don’t have brand loyalty, and if you can be their product of choice when they become set-in-their-ways, you’ve locked in future customers. It’s also why Christians are so heavily focused on religious schools and indoctrination, because indoctrinating kids is critical for keeping a religion alive.
June 13, 2012 at 11:33 am
Erasmus
AG refers to “superstitious belief” without spelling out the nature of the superstition. Is the notion of a creator of the universe automatically nonsensical? If so, then a large percentage of eminent scientists would have to plead guilty. Is treating the Bible as a holy book an indefensible practice? As long as fundamentalist readings are eschewed, I see no reason not to mine the Bible for inspiration, as William Blake did, and Milton and Dante before him. Does science provide the material for a worldview that can replace religion? Not at this moment of human history: there are far too many basic questions that lack answers. One example I’ve come across recently: it’s commonly believed among “educated” people that Darwinian evolution explains the existence of human beings, but an authority of the caliber of Ernst Mayr asserts (in the introduction to his ‘Toward a New Philosophy of Biology’, Harvard U. Press, 1988) that “It is a miracle that man ever happened, and it would be an even greater miracle if such a sequence of improbabilities had been repeated anywhere else.” And it is worth noting that England’s foremost atheistic philosopher of the previous century (Antony Flew) wrote a book with the incendiary title: ‘There Is A God: How the world’s most notorious atheist changed his mind’(2007). — As Francis Collins (head of the Human Genome Project) said of Flew’s book: ” .. the church of fundamentalist atheism will be scandalized.” — In brief: “superstition” can take many forms, and implying that “religion” is the sole repository of it may be erroneous.
June 13, 2012 at 11:34 am
JudgeyLiberal
still, I actually think that doubt is healthier than absolute disbelief.
Really? Would you care to even attempt to justify that statement? What’s “healthy” about superstition? You would have no problem making the declarative statement — I do not believe in unicorns — you’d state it without doubt and laugh at anyone who argued with you. The fact that humans have developed religious dogma in an attempt to justify their insupportable superstition in no way argues to the truth of that superstition.
June 13, 2012 at 1:20 pm
Erasmus
Once again, we have “insupportable superstition” anathematized without an enumeration of particulars. No dialogue is possible when name-calling replaces argument.
June 13, 2012 at 2:20 pm
eddenson
Room for doubt may be healthier, but doubt, or shall we say, reasonable doubt, in this case is not healthier, in my opinion. Without a better argument than “everyone else thinks so” or “here’s an old book about it,” it is hard to see a basis for anything but disbelief as you are being asked to believe in something completely at odds with all sensual experience. I agree that the idea of an eternal universe, which is the basic scientific theory at the moment, is also difficult. We’re used to beginnings and endings. But the God normally proposed in Western society, simply moves the problem to heaven, when is not so much eternal than, worse yet, outside of time, so by Occam’s razor disbelief is the rational answer.
June 13, 2012 at 2:21 pm
eddenson
….which is not so much eternal…. Wish I proofread prior to posting.
June 13, 2012 at 2:26 pm
suzy blah blah
-the survey didn’t ask about people’s belief in god(s). And their study doesn’t take into account the increasing number of young neo-pagans, wiccans, gnostics, etc.
June 13, 2012 at 2:37 pm
Erasmus
There are many arguments that go beyond ubiquity of belief or blind acceptance of an ancient book, and I regret that so few people these days are exposed to them. There may very well be no God at the origin of our world, but Occam’s razor would opt for a Designer (by analogy with the human world, in which intricate objects do not arise spontaneously) rather than for Chance (which, in our human world, obeys entropy’s laws). — Jane Austen wrote some lovely bed-time prayers. They aren’t assigned reading in our schools, but a little assiduity will locate them. I mention her name to hint at the vastness of religious and philosophic thought that our materialistic (“sensual”) civilization ignores.
June 13, 2012 at 3:50 pm
Eric Kirk
Is the belief in God at odds with sensual experience? Since the whole concept of a God is an intelligence which transcends physical limitations, it seems to me that the concept is neutral with regard to sensual experience.
June 13, 2012 at 4:58 pm
j67k
No Eric. God is an old man on a mountain who breathes fire & brimstone and farts lightning. He also smites homosexuals & people who complain about the smell when you burn animal corpses on His alter. Also, He turns ladies into pillars of salt for being curious.
That other guy is a hippy.
June 13, 2012 at 6:07 pm
eddenson
Erasmus to the contrary, nothing in our sensual experience indicates there is a God. We do not experience God, miracles are not happening, revelation is not occuring. I know that some mystic practices of fundamental Christianity are believed, by their practitioners, to result in communion with God, but the same practices in Buddhism bring enlightenment instead, and while the poet may say “when you’re in God’s presence you don’t have to be told” that is entirely subjective. As for intricate objects arising spontaneously, first of all nothing occurs spontaneously, everything that occurs has a cause. Secondly we are surrounded by intricate objects which have arisen naturally as a result of evolution in accord with natural laws, and do not require God’s intervention to explain them.
June 13, 2012 at 6:41 pm
suzy blah blah
-god is known within sensual experience through the sacrament.
June 13, 2012 at 6:51 pm
Mitch
Erasmus,
Occam’s razor would not suggest belief in a Designer, capitalized or not, as such a belief does not simplify the question of origins one bit but simply creates an infinite regress.
There may be much wisdom in religion. In fact, I’m certain that there is, when any religion says “be less selfish.” There may even be value in faith in things unseen. But belief in an anthropomorphized god is, in my opinion, unhealthy.
Were you asking for a bill of particulars? OK.
Why is it helpful to believe that the creator of the universe chose to be born as one of us, through an immaculate conception? I’m not asking for evidence, because this is apparently something to be taken on faith. I’m asking what such a belief contributes to our understanding of the world or to our understanding of ourselves. How would we be different if we chose to believe, for example, that the creator of the universe made no such choice, given pressing duties on Alpha Centauri?
Why is it helpful, or even healthy, to believe that the creator of the universe will send us to eternal delight if we believe in Him, but will send us to eternal damnation if we do not, regardless of how we treat fellow sentient beings during our lifetime? And why is belief in the absence of evidence praised, while belief as a result of evidence is ho-hum? Nobody gets credit for believing things fall to the ground when dropped, after all.
What does it say about us that each time we learn that we are not at the very center of some sphere we assumed we were at the center of, we resist such knowledge and understanding to the point that authorities kill the scientists who reach such conclusions ahead of their time?
When it comes to understanding the mind, one of the early beliefs that must be destroyed is that there is a little version of us sitting inside our brain, which interprets what comes in our eyes so that we may understand it. That, like God, is nothing but an invitation to infinite regress, which adds nothing to our understanding of the mind. Only when we accept that explanations must divide and simplify in order to explain anything can we begin to understand how anything can truly be explained. And, of course, we must also understand that the explanations eventually reach bottom, and that the facts at the bottom can no longer be explained, but just are.
You can call that bottom god if you want, but to call it a “Designer” is simply wrong. Anything at the level of a “Designer” can hardly be said to be at the bottom of ANY explanatory search.
June 13, 2012 at 6:52 pm
tra
Yes, and dog is nwonk within sensual experience through the tnemarcas.
Cuz I said so.
June 13, 2012 at 7:02 pm
AG
Erasmus, yes, believing in a god is a superstitious belief. And yes, most of the world’s scientists throughout history have been religious. Neil deGrasse Tyson gave an excellent talk on this subject at the Beyond Belief conference where he detailed numerous famous scientists who were stunted by religion (including his personal hero, Newton). Each of them reached a point where they gave up their discovery and attributed the unknown to their god, even when the unknown was easily within their grasp. To attribute natural phenomena to supernatural causes is, by definition, superstitious thinking.
Regardless, you’re making an appeal to authority, as if I should drink Gatorade because my favorite sports hero drinks it, or believe in gods because scientists living 50 or 100 years ago (or longer) were almost all religious. Huh?
June 14, 2012 at 5:15 am
moviedad
Fools.
June 14, 2012 at 7:44 am
Erasmus
I hope that Moviedad’s ejaculation is meant to apply to me as well as to the cultured despisers of religion who abound in this era of mass education. What fools all of us mortals be, when questions of the infinite, of origins, of human destiny are under consideration! — Rather than persist in name-calling (“superstitious belief”), why not humbly try to figure out why someone like Leo Tolstoy abandoned the hedonistic skepticism of his youth and embraced a nondogmatic brand of Christianity that influenced people as diverse as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.? “True religion is that relationship, in accordance with reason and knowledge, which man establishes with the infinite world around him, and which binds his life to that infinity and guides his actions.” (Tolstoy, “What is Religion, Of What Does Its Essence Consist?). — The “infinite regress” that troubles Mitch is part of Tolstoy’s definition of God. Occam’s Razor does favor the idea of a Creator — otherwise, we are left with the unexplained “laws” of evolution which (as Ernst Mayr realized) are rife with improbabilities (*and Mayr was not a “believer”). I don’t appeal to higher authorities save when I discuss a subject like evolution. As a fool, I try to keep an open mind, and when I come across a writer whom I admire (such as Tolstoy) I give him the benefit of all the doubts that my secular education has implanted in me. To do less seems a kind of ingratitude.
June 14, 2012 at 7:52 am
Anonymous
“the cultured despisers of religion”
that’s an oxymoron if there ever was one. “I have refined my contempt of your personal beliefs into a mode of sophistication far superior to the common outrage of a typical hater. I belong to a culture of hate.”
June 14, 2012 at 8:43 am
Eric Kirk
Erasmus – one of the CS Lewis passages which has always haunted my atheist tendencies was the first chapter of the Screwtape Letters (where a more experienced demon is assisting an apprentice demon on how to keep a soul out of Heaven). Lewis was a brilliant writer, and he and Hans Kung provide a one-two punch which continues to challenge. I’m not caught up so much in the Heaven/Hell aspect of the writing as the call for humility in our assumptions about what we know of the universe.
Fortunately someone was good enough to post the entire first letter, which I think is the strongest of the bunch (the theme does tend to get tedious towards the end, and I needed lunch!).
http://www.bible-reading.com/screwtape.html
The Screwtape Letters – Letter I
My dear Wormwood,
I note what you say about guiding your patient’s reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naif? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons, we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” or “false,” but as “academic” or “practical,” “outworn” or “contemporary,” “conventional” or “ruthless.” Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.
The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result! Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it “real life” and don’t let him ask what he means by “real.”
Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (oh, that abominable advantage of the Enemy’s!) you don’t realise how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years’ work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument, I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control, and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear what He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line, for when I said, “Quite. In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning,” the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added “Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind,” he was already halfway to the door. Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true. He knew he’d had a narrow escape, and in later years was fond of talking about “that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safe guard against the aberrations of mere logic.” He is now safe in Our Father’s house.
You begin to see the point? Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things. Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists. If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology; don’t let him get away from that invaluable “real life.” But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is “the results of modern investigation.” Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!
Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE
June 14, 2012 at 8:48 am
Anonymous
The irony of that letter, eric, is how it applies to your call for more economic consideration within “the environmental movement”.
June 14, 2012 at 8:57 am
Erasmus
The words “cultured despisers….” allude to Schleiermacher’s “On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers.” Once upon a time, the book was well-known. (I’m sure that C.S. Lewis knew of it.) — Thanks for the excerpt from ‘Screwtape’ —- I don’t buy all of Lewis, but he does unsettle my thinking and his prose is a continual delight. (His close friend Owen Barfield wrote just as well and was a deeper thinker to boot.)
June 14, 2012 at 10:20 am
suzy blah blah
@ tra -not because i said so, but because the ancient ritual of the sacrament, by which i mean the ritual of “eating the god”, or in christian terms the “rite of the last supper” has been going on for 1000s of years in many cultures worldwide. What i said has nothing to do with the existence, or not, of God. I was responding to ED and Eric’s statements that the concept of God is “at odds with” or “neutral to” the sensual experience. The rite of the last supper contradicts that.
But suzy gives you a C+ for effort. If you try harder and practice faithfully you will assuredly go far
June 14, 2012 at 2:19 pm
Mitch
Erasmus,
Evolution is rife with improbabilities, which is why it takes eons to operate on macro levels. One of Richard Dawkins’ book titles is “Climbing Mount Improbable.”
The basic driver of evolution is an example of something that makes a fine bottom to a search — all it says is that things that reproduce more become more common and things that reproduce less become extinct. That’s as close to a self-evident truth as anything can be.
You can include an infinite regression as part of god if you like, but that doesn’t eliminate the fact that when you land on one as an explanation of anything, it provides no true explanatory power. So, fine, if you want to state that God includes an infinite regress by all means do so… just don’t think that invoking an infinite regress via God does any better at explaining things than invoking an infinite regress via Dog. It’s still an infinite regress: you don’t explain anything by saying that the universe was created by the creator of the universe, unless you can explain how the creator of the universe was created.
June 14, 2012 at 2:42 pm
j67k
Flowery prose to disguise sadistic crap. If you look within yourself and feel the need to worship something ‘greater’, or are drawn to a certain philosophy, fine.
If you feel the need to push those beliefs onto others, then it’s not about god, it’s about you & your arrogance. Even if you honestly find gods will within yourself, you do not know that I or anyone else have the same instructions from her.
June 14, 2012 at 4:50 pm
Anonymous
Yep.
June 14, 2012 at 4:58 pm
Erasmus
“Sadistic crap”? More name-calling that leads nowhere. — Mitch is hung up on “infinite regress” and claims to see no difference between what has traditionally been ascribed to “God” and what “Dog” might embody. Why this may be a pseudo-problem could possibly be explained by books such as ‘A World Without Time: the forgotten legacy of Godel and Einstein,’ by Palle Yourgrau. An infinite regress cannot take place in the timeless universe that Einstein and Godel constructed (a kind of verticality of time having replaced the horizontality of our everyday lives) — modern physics and logic meet ancient mysticism and poetry. Not a satisfactory answer, but a starting point, perhaps. — In any case, writers such as Karen Armstrong (in ‘The Case for God’) maintain that God does not exist: He is not an object, for a thing cannot transcend another thing, and God is at the very least the space of transcendence; similarly, William James, in “Does Consciousness Exist?” answered “No,” for existence implies standing apart (ex= apart, ist= is). Consciousness is the most immediately evident fact of our lives, yet (according to James) it does not “exist” (and I recommend a reading of his essay). God, to a believer, is what Tillich called the ground of Being. He (like consciousness) cannot be a thing or a being among others. Thus, some of the arguments against Him are invalid. — But I’m sure I’m sounding foolish to some of the sharp minds out there, and I’d better call a halt to my meandering thoughts.
June 14, 2012 at 5:15 pm
suzy blah blah
you don’t explain anything by saying that the universe was created by the creator of the universe, unless you can explain how the creator of the universe was created.
-suzy’s answer to that is that the creator was created by the creation and the creation by the creator … omgod! it’s like totally –interwoven man, so to speak. Just how i see it, not that it explains it any better. In the zen frame it’s like a koan, if you try to think about it to much, you go crazy –in the good way. . But then, what goes up must come down, (don’t ask me to prove that) so you are apt to get the walking blues
June 14, 2012 at 5:27 pm
suzy blah blah
-i meant too much, although to much works too, So does to mush …
June 14, 2012 at 5:48 pm
Buddhaha
Mush doo about Nothing
June 14, 2012 at 7:02 pm
Mitch
Erasmus,
claims to see no difference between what has traditionally been ascribed to “God” and what “Dog” might embody.
When you begin intentionally or unintentionally misstating what I’ve said, maybe it’s time for me to back off. I apologize for the aggressive use of “Dog,” but my point is that infinite regress is infinite regress, whether I’m hung up on it or not, whether it is out of our space-time or not, and on and on. If you hope to EXPLAIN something, as opposed to have FAITH in it, an infinite regress is an impassable barrier.
I often feel bait-and-switched in discussions with believers who I would consider to be sophisticated. The God they assert is one in which I believe myself, because it has been drained of all characteristics and attributions beyond transcendence.
But believing that there is a transcendent immanence in the universe is not the same thing at all as believing in a surprisingly human-like being who provides tablets to prophets and dispatches us to our deserved destinations in an afterlife.
For starters, if there are no characteristics and attributions, there are no rules to follow to be in the club. Religious leaders become nothing more than people who are respected for their wisdom and understanding of how to live a “good life,” as demonstrated by their behavior. They can offer us examples, but can no longer assert that we must follow their rules because of their connection to the ruler of the universe. If there are no characteristics and attributions for God, all of us become able to decide how to behave without any of us getting to claim a special pipeline to the giver of rules.
June 14, 2012 at 7:29 pm
Stephen
Sorry, Mitch, but Suzy’s exactly right while you are like everyone who wants to believe in God as long as God doesn’t exist except as a human concept of the sum total of the Universe.
Without spiritual knowledge, gnosis, you can’t understand our religious past. You don’t get it, don’t understand why people need to believe in stories about God doing this or that, don’t understand why any god at all being necessary to guide humankind via various and sundry Words of God. I didn’t have gnosis until it came to me “by accident”, you might say, but once you’ve been in spiritual communication with God you know that there are no coincidences, it’s all according to God’s Plan. Under the Spirit of God I’ve produced two new Gospels and each one identifies God and the Purpose of God’s Plan. They do it in two different ways but what’s important, why they are Gospels, Good News, is that I have a Judeo-Christian belief system that shows a 3000 year singular direction establishing bit by bit the qualities necessary for transformation from being human beings, members of the animal kingdom with traits from our lives as animals still dictating our social structuring, into humane beings, people fit to live with each other and other communities and the community of Life.
That I have such a clear directive showing through the Judeo-Christian scriptures (plus gnostic ones) proves to me that the Spirit which periodically visits me is pure Truth because what we need today was put in motion 3000 years ago. But it was put into those texts in coded form and one cannot decode scriptures without finding the right Key. I found it and once found it can never be lost again because I am putting the information out to the world. Meanwhile, wait for my book to be published online. Christianity will never be the same again as modern Gnosis replaces blind faith in ancient men’s words.
June 15, 2012 at 3:08 am
j67k
Erasmus… That was a quote from FireFly.
Also, if you could use paragraph breaks while being so long winded, it would help. You invoke a lot of names, but, don’t say much. Most of it is just pedantic.
Religion and philosophy deal with the un-quantifiable. Every time we learn something, like the Earth is not the center of everything or the stars are not holes in Ymirs skull, they alter their focus to other unexplained things. So, pretending to apply a logical proof or disproof to it is a fools game.
BTW- Horizontal & vertical time? Einsteins “timeless” universe? Einstein not only had a time’full’ universe, but he also had the math to show how it “related” to matter and space.
June 15, 2012 at 7:20 am
Erasmus
“A fool’s game” is indeed what it is, but I don’t apologize for playing it: we are all in the dark, trying to pin the tail on a donkey we can’t see. — Invocation of names is a short-cut — otherwise, my “long-windedness” would be truly exhausting. I don’t expect to “convert” anyone (we religion-friendly agnostics are like that), but I hold out the hope that others might be led to read something more philosophically sophisticated than Richard Dawkins. —– A “timeless” universe is not an absurd idea to some physicists (read the book I mentioned). And Suzi (God bless her) understands why “infinite regress” is a red herring.
June 15, 2012 at 9:42 am
Anonymous
“you don’t explain anything by saying that the universe was created by the creator of the universe, unless you can explain how the creator of the universe was created.”
Do you fully comprehend how it is that a squirrel will never, ever ever ever…never ever ever, no matter what…never ever ever be able to understand what a telephone is? A squirrel behaves as though a telephone is soley a physical manifestation of circumstance.
Keep that in mind when I tell you, human beings have a very hard time comprehending true infinity, let alone keeping it in mind when discussing philisophies of all sorts. What created the universe? It’s just always been and will always be…forever into the past and future…infinite in all direction and scope. The game of life as we know it includes the illusion of time.
June 15, 2012 at 9:51 am
Anonymous
“Every time we learn something, like the Earth is not the center of everything”
You cannot prove in any way whatsoever that the earth is not the center of everything. You can only demonstrate associated movement. In fact, being that the universe has no quantifiable size, it is as legitimate to assume any point in space is as centered as any other. “Points in space” are infintesimal as well.
June 15, 2012 at 11:18 am
suzy blah blah
William James, in “Does Consciousness Exist?” answered “No,” for existence implies standing apart (ex= apart, ist= is).
-brilliant!
June 15, 2012 at 1:27 pm
j67k
Erasmus, speaking for myself, if you narrowed it down to 1 or 2 relevant books or essays that you went into at least some depth explaining, I would be far more likely to check them out.
It’s a “fools game” because even if you manage to slap the tail dead center on the donkey’s ass, religious weasels will just say “No, no, the game is glue the hoof on the Llama!” … “The only winning move is not to play.”
A “timeless” universe is an absurd idea, because, at best, it’s solely a semantic argument. I say this because “time”, the thing that we measure with clocks or the rotation/orbit of the Earth, has been mathematically quantified in relativity. So, any dispute would be on how the new “facts” don’t work with some of the old “fantasies.”
Another case of someones “ugly facts destroying someone else’s elegant theories.”
June 15, 2012 at 1:48 pm
Erasmus
A timeless universe is an absurd idea? Yes, unless one has studied the question, i.e. by reading Julian Barbour’s ‘The End of Time’ (Oxford u. Press). The book has been well-received by the likes of Lee Smolin and John Archibald Wheeler. “Religious weasels” have interfered with scientific progress far less than most people think. A good place to begin a study of the issue is the book ‘Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion,’ edited by Ronald Numbers (Harvard U. Press).
June 15, 2012 at 8:18 pm
j67k
Did you read what I said?
You can create a SEMANTIC argument for any absurd idea if you alter the basic meaning of words. Time has an observable, measurable relationship with matter and space. They are linked. You could just as well say a spaceless or matterless universe, it would not BE a universe as we DEFINE universe.
As to ‘ “Religious weasels” have interfered with scientific progress far less than most people think.’ … Really? How much do ‘most people’ think?
Here’s how much I think it did… http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/White/
June 15, 2012 at 10:10 pm
j67k
So, I slogged through “Does Consciousness Exist?”
http://fair-use.org/william-james/essays-in-radical-empiricism/does-consciousness-exist
… Weak sauce.
If only he had ‘World of Warcraft’ back then, so he could see the blatant fallacy of his argument. My WoW characters can only perceive and interact with things in the virtual game-world. I ex-ist separately, yet perceive & interact through them in WoW. There is nothing in his essay that rules out a similar mechanics for a human ‘soul’ or ‘spirit.’
I, personally, think he’s probably right. But, he did not disprove anything. All he did was use circular logic of perception & reality, then end with how he couldn’t imagine a ‘separate’ consciousness. I just think it showed he lacked imagination.
June 15, 2012 at 10:34 pm
Unk John
Erasmus, I can agree that a timeless universe may, in time (forgive me), provide a useful view of whatever this place we all occupy is. I know that Barbour also imagines that there is no space as we presently conceive it.
However, at this time no one seems able to express exactly how the universe operates without them. Not even Julian Barbour. So, in that sense I agree with j67k.
Also, if you want me to believe that religious weasels do not interfere with science as much as “most people think”, please recommend something better than ‘Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion.’ That book is fraught with difficulties and contains nothing of importance in this discussion.
June 16, 2012 at 4:57 am
Stephen
This is a discussion? OK, which one of you atheists is going to answer why “Nature” has evolved human brains to be able to register spiritual experiences? And please, don’t tell me those experiences are delusions because if they are then the experience of great music that sends a physical shock wave through your whole body is another delusion because that’s what it’s like when you receive spiritual revelation. Sometimes the sensation is so strong it makes you shake, hence your Quakers and Shakers. I’ve had it make me break out in sweats like Muhammad also did when receiving spiritual revelation. If you’ve never felt this type of sensation, if you’re tone-deaf or never played poker and had a royal flush with significant money in the pot, then you won’t know what I’m talking about. But this is just the physical sensation of spiritual contact.
The spiritual products of these contacts became the basis of our civilizations. How do they do that if they contain such nonsense? The problem is atheists don’t have a clue what’s going on in our physical universe really believing human knowledge is frozen at the historical point of the atheist’s life and never changes, which is of course the Fatal Flaw of atheism that dooms believers in this irrational idea to become exactly like fundamentalist religious believers, i.e., you can only hold the atheist theology by deliberate denial of the findings of science and the logic of history.
June 16, 2012 at 6:55 am
Erasmus
This is my final comment on this thread. — “Galileo Goes to Jail …” contains nothing of importance in this discussion?! I beg to differ. You may think (and in a free society you have the right) that a book on science and religion written by a couple dozen of the world’s most eminent historians, who teach at universities that most people would have trouble gaining acceptance to, is without value, and that Harvard erred by publishing it —- but I sense a smokescreen being emitted, and I would urge any reader of this blog to find a copy of the volume and decide for herself.—————————————————————————————White’s 19th century book on the supposed “warfare” between religion and science is no longer taken seriously: the “Galileo…..” book refers to it often — to debunk it. And if William James’ essay on consciousness fails to persuade anyone, so be it. If it doesn’t provoke thought, my suspicion is that not enough tinder is present to be sparked into a flame — and that is the goal of philosophic activity, after all (to turns sparks into a warming light). Complete understanding is a mirage (which is why religion will never go extinct).
June 16, 2012 at 8:54 am
j67k
Erasmus Are you saying Galileo was not held by the Catholic church for 8 years or so? If so, don’t you find it weird that Pope John Paul II apologized for it?
Even if that were true, they still burned people like Giordano Bruno for following Copernicus. Not to mention all the others they burned, tortured, or jailed for their beliefs. And I’m only talking about the ones the church itself documented.
Well, at least they recently “let” Copernicus out of Hell.
alsoifyouaregoingtoignoreoneaspectofgrammarwhynotgothewholewayandbereallylazyimeanwhocareshowdifficultyoumakereadingyourpostsafterallyoudonthavetoreadthem…
June 16, 2012 at 9:07 am
j67k
Stephen… please… You are talking about endogenous morphine (Endorphins). It’s the same God-made happy juice you get from jumping out of an airplane or running 5-10 miles.
Try not to confuse physical ecstasy with spiritual contentment, it makes you sound silly.
June 16, 2012 at 9:14 am
Mitch
At 8:18, j67k provides a link to an online version of a book I’d never heard of, A. D. White’s late 19th century work “A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.” White was one of the two founders of Cornell University.
All I’ve scanned so far is the introduction, but I’m already delighted and looking forward to reading the rest. Here’s my favorite quote so far, which utterly sums up the situation that has been largely achieved in Europe and which is once-again failing in the United States. It appears to be quoting Matthew Arnold’s words:
Here is Huxley’s “perennial philosophy,” stripped to eleven lovely words.
The recognition of the existence of “a Power in the universe, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness” is the best framing of my beliefs that I’ve ever seen in print. The only quibble I have is I might prefer the words “not ourselves” to be replaced with “beyond ourselves” or “far larger than ourselves,” because I think we are participants in that Power.
It is what I call “good” as opposed to God.
In the United States, its opposite is thriving, both within and without religious institutions. These days, that’s because of the economic threat scientific facts pose to those who want to strip the planet.
Thanks, j67k.
June 16, 2012 at 10:24 am
Mitch
Stephen,
There’s a wonderful layperson’s book on the neuroscience of music. It was a NY Times bestseller a few years back: This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, by Daniel Levitin.
Scientists experience what you describe as spiritual experience, whether they are atheists or believers. You may be confusing the attempt to UNDERSTAND such experience at deeper and deeper levels with the decision to simply STATE that such experience cannot be explained as other than divine revelation.
Neither view rules out the existence of the spiritual. They differ primarily in when recourse to the inexplicable is forced. Scientists are interested in exploring as far as facts and observations can take them, and welcome new facts and observations. Others are satisfied to state their conclusion without attempting to go any farther.
I was listening to Radiolab the other day, and they had a very interesting program on digestion. In the 19th century, it was thought that digestion could not take place outside the body, because there was some mysterious animal element involved in digestion. Then, science discovered that the mysterious animal element was “just” the chemistry within the stomach.
I put the “just” in scare quotes, because having tagged the mysterious animal element and connected it to a field that allows it to be explored far more deeply does nothing to make it, ultimately, any less mysterious. That “just” is the error; there’s no mistake in connecting digestion to chemistry and reducing it to a lower level of explanation.
The exact same process is now taking place in neuroscience.
Phenomena which had been interpreted as having no deeper explanation than spirit are being analyzed by the new tools available, and turn out to be “just” an example of neural signalling. That doesn’t make them, ultimately, any less remarkable. The “just” is the error, there’s no mistake in connecting conscious experience to neuroscience and reducing it to a lower level of explanation.
The most important questions remain unanswerable to us, at least today. They are “why is there something as opposed to nothing,” “do we have free will,” and, if so, “why is there good and evil.”
Science can be and has been of great moral value to the world, in part by taking many behaviors and diseases out of the realm of “good” and “evil” and into the realm of chemically explicable brain processes. I’d rather see schizophrenia treated by a chemical than by an exorcist.
When your religion is based on a belief that there may be more to the universe than science has yet revealed, I think that’s fine. But much of what is presented as religion is dogma.
June 16, 2012 at 10:38 am
tra
Back to the original topic — the youngest generation having more doubts about the existence of God – what stands out to me in this graph is that the line plunges downward over the last 5 or 6 years. They started out about the same as Gen X and Boomers, but the
Any thoughts on why that is?
And, by the way, anybody here know what year you would have to be born to qualify for each of these categories? Or how they decide these cut-off dates? Does each of these categories span an equal number of years, or are they more subjective than that?
I guess we’ve all heard of the Baby Boomers and Generation X and the so-called “Greatest” Generation (always found that label a bit arrogant), but where does the “Silent Generation” fit in? Between the Boomers and Gen X?
June 16, 2012 at 10:39 am
tra
Sorry, that first paragraph should have ended with “They started out about the same as Gen X and the Boomers, but then began to diverge sharply.”
June 16, 2012 at 10:50 am
Anonymous
“Any thoughts on why that is?”
Do parents who are reading this have any idea what’s in their childrens’ school text books? Information they are required to know by heart to further their “education”. Do parents know what their children are being told during their youngest and most impressionable years about such global activities as climate change (do the textbooks acknowledge it? do they discuss how deforested the planet has become?) armed conflict (nine eleven? afghanistan?) economics (outsourcing? “free trade”?).
June 16, 2012 at 10:51 am
tra
O.K., it appears that these categories are pretty arbitrary. Some consist of a decade or less worth of births, others span several decades. The decision to declare that a new “generation” has started seems to have more to do with whether someone wrote a book that included a clever name for the proposed “generation,” rather than any kind of objective factors.
And apparently the “Silent Generation” was the folks between the “Greatest” and the “Boomers.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation
June 16, 2012 at 10:57 am
tra
According to the wikipedia article, the “Millenial” generation consists of people who were born sometime between the late 1970′s and the late 1990′s.
I’m not sure someone born in 1978 really has more in common with someone born in 1998 than they do with someone born in 1968.
I’d be more interested in seeing a graph that just gave the results by year of birth, rather than in these artificial categories.
June 16, 2012 at 11:16 am
tra
I wonder at what age people begin to get counted in the surveys? 18?
I wonder if the drop-off in the graph mostly represents a lot of individuals who were less doubtful a few years earlier then becoming more doubtful, or whether the apparent “change” is mostly just due to the later end of the “Milennial” generation” reaching 18 and being counted in the surveys for the first time ?
My guess is it’s probably more of the latter, but in order to answer that question, you’d have to see the results broken down by actual year-of-birth.
June 16, 2012 at 12:54 pm
suzy blah blah
White’s 19th century book on the supposed “warfare” between religion and science is no longer taken seriously
-of course not, the guy’s full of shit.
“a Power in the universe, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness”
-uh, no thanks, suzy’s had enough of that crap.
It is what I call “good” as opposed to God
-ew, more Righteousness. this time straight from Mitch, barf!
in the United States, its opposite is thriving, both within and without religious institutions
-he not only believes in Righteousness. He’s against “the opposite of Righteousness”. Because it’s “thriving” –omgosh! LOL!
If you’ve never felt this type of sensation, if you’re tone-deaf or never played poker and had a royal flush with significant money in the pot, then you won’t know what I’m talking about.
-Stephen, i can’t follow your politics but your spiritual thoughts here are pearls before swine. Mostly they get trampled underfoot by narrow minded ciphers. Yet, i know what youre talking about, suzy has had the experience. It floods the body with energy. It’s a kin to baptism, (not the church kind, the real thing). But, there’s nothing you can say to the person who hasn’t had it. It’s like telling a virgin about sex. But to the person experiencing it –it’s proof beyond any doubt of spiritual presence and influence.
Suzy’s had out of body journeys and encounters with flying saucers. I’ve experienced LSD peyote cubensis and dmt. I’ve eaten amanita mushrooms. I never had a royal flush with significant money in the pot though
The gods are within.
June 16, 2012 at 1:26 pm
suzy blah blah
being that the universe has no quantifiable size, it is as legitimate to assume any point in space is as centered as any other.
-ie, suzy is the center of the universe. And so are you.
June 16, 2012 at 2:36 pm
suzy blah blah
It’s the same God-made happy juice you get from jumping out of an airplane or running 5-10 miles.
-if you have to jump out of an airplane or run for miles then that’s not it. This
experience we’re talking about comes on totally spontaneously. You can’t ask for it, you can’t pray for it, you can’t jump out of an airplane for it. It just happens. Or not. –HUGE difference.
June 16, 2012 at 2:38 pm
Erasmus
Out of respect for j67k I’ll renege on my promise to spare Eric’s readers more of my lucubrations. — Believe it or not, I disagree with the Pope’s apology, and here is why: the Church was not opposed to the Copernican viewpoint per se — it did refuse to accept it until it had been proved, which Galileo failed to do. Cardinal Bellarmino , master of controversial questions at the Collegio Romano (rather like the post held by the current Pope before his selection) wrote in a letter to a monk from Naples in 1615: ” if there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the center of the world and the earth in the third heaven, and that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false.” The Church went along with the “scientific consensus” of the time (just as we are urged to believe that human activity is ushering an age of global warming). There are many Bible passages that seem to suggest a flat earth — but Church doctrine had no difficulty in accepting the spherical earth as a matter of course. As the great, radical, anarchist philosopher from Berkeley, Paul Feyerabend, wrote about the Galileo affair: “The Church was on the right track” (‘Against Method,’ fourth edition, p. 132). (Feyerabend was not Catholic — far from it). The Church opposed Galileo’s going public with a then-unproven theory; as Feyerabend writes, “what Galileo suggested was no less than to regard as true a theory which had only analogies in its favor and which suffered from numerous difficulties. And he made this suggestion in public while even today it is a deadly sin for a scientist to address the public before having consulted his peers” (p. 129). As for that notorious trial: “It had no special features except perhaps that Galileo was treated rather mildly, despite his lies and attempts at deception” (p. 127). Don’t trust Feyerabend? Read Arthur Koestler’s chapters on Galileo in ‘The Sleepwalkers.’ Here’s a snippet: ” the attitude of the Collegium Romanum and of the Jesuits in general changed from friendliness to hostility, not because of the Copernican views held by Galileo, but because of his personal attacks on leading authorities of the Order” (p. 477). — But didn’t Galileo suffer unjustly, no matter what his crime may have been? Hardly — as Patricia Fara writes in her ‘Science: a four thousand year history’ (Oxford): “His punishment was the mildest possible for an elderly man. Placed under lax house arrest, Galileo continued his research in a comfortable Florentine villa, palming off on his daughter the weekly duty of reciting penitential psalms” (p. 116). She also writes: “Many astronomers continued to defend either Tycho’s or Ptolemy’s cosmos, reiterating Aristotle’s simple yet persuasive proof that the Earth is stationary: an arrow fired straight upwards lands where it started. Faced with this disagreement amongst scholars, perhaps the Church behaved sensibly by going along with majority opinion and retaining Biblical certainty” (op.cit.). — She concludes” “It was only in the 19th century that scientists converted Galileo into a martyr during their own struggles for power” (p. 117). —– Shame on the Pope; bravo to secular scholars like Feyerabend, Koestler, and Fara.
June 16, 2012 at 2:44 pm
Eric Kirk
Of course, relativity tells us that either is true. The sun and the rest of the universe does in fact circle around us. Or we are spinning. Relativity says that the two are indistinguishable in terms of what we can measure materially.
June 16, 2012 at 3:28 pm
Erasmus
Quite true. The Copernican theory is just more convenient to use. (And not until after Galileo’s death did that become known.)
June 16, 2012 at 8:59 pm
Mitch
Especially for blah:
http://www.hark.com/clips/gjkzncysqt-righteousness-like-a-mighty-stream
June 16, 2012 at 9:06 pm
Mitch
Eric,
You’re definitely a lawyer.
While the rest of the universe is circling about us in accord with relativity, is it just the will of God that the planets exhibit retrograde motion from time to time, or is it some special tongue-in-cheek physics?
June 17, 2012 at 8:33 am
Unk John
I’ve been away, but I would like to jump back in.
Erasmus, my earlier comment about Numbers’s book need not have sounded so abrasive and for that I apologize. However, what I meant by it is that many, if not all of the myths he uses are irrelevant in the scientific community.
It is not commonly held in said community that Galileo was imprisoned, nor is it believed that he was tortured. There is, as is implicit in your most recent post, a huge difference between imprisonment and house arrest. We could perhaps differ in our view of the severity of the punishment. You accept Fara’s view, mild and lax. I’m not so sure.
Most know that he wasn’t tortured, but you must admit that someone with Galileo’s intelligence and knowledge of the machinery of the day might be somewhat unnerved when he is shown the instruments of torture during his trial. Furthermore, he heard testimony from William Lithgow who had survived an experience on the rack after a trial with the Spanish Inquisition. His description is rather detailed and could only have had an alarming effect.
The myth concerning the debate between Huxley and Wilberforce is also a non-issue. Even the late Stephen Jay Gould, not known as an enemy of Darwinism, has stated that the debate was not won by Huxley. I agree that Huxley’s famous response to Wilberforce’s question concerning Huxley’s heritage is perhaps too oft quoted, but I can understand why. It is a zinger.
My point remains. I don’t think that that book is useful when discussing the “problems” between science and religion.
June 17, 2012 at 8:44 am
ED Denson
Stephen, having an experience and understanding what it is are two different things. Also, I’m not sure what the poker hand is doing in your post. Are you suggesting a spritual intercession to give you a winning hand, or that taking the risk of playing the hand gives you a sensation similar to spiritual contact? – puzzled in Alderpoint.
June 17, 2012 at 10:05 am
Erasmus
Unk John —- I’m glad you clarified your position because I’ve learned to respect your opinion and I didn’t want to think that you’d gone off the deep end. From the point of view of working scientists, the exact contours of age-old disputes and narratives are indeed rather insignificant. And your remarks on Galileo and the threat of torture are accurate and important. Why focus on centuries-old stories? To gain a better perspective on current controversies and, perhaps, to learn from humanity’s mistakes. Feyerabend devotes many pages to Galileo and his adversaries in order to point out how undeserved is the pride many of us take in our 21st century tolerance. “Any criticism of the rigidity of the Roman Church applies also to its modern scientific and science-connected successors.” (He mentions the American Medical Association as one example.) Too many modern secularists and rationalists indulge in an unwarranted smugness. We don’t burn heretics at the stake, but we cut off funding, deny tenure, use peer-review to compel conformity, etc.
June 17, 2012 at 10:35 am
Unk John
“Cardinal Bellarmino , master of controversial questions at the Collegio Romano (rather like the post held by the current Pope before his selection) wrote in a letter to a monk from Naples in 1615: ” if there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the center of the world and the earth in the third heaven, and that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false.””
Erasmus, I am familiar with this statement. I am also aware that Cardinal Bellarmine (forgive the Anglicized version) is reputed to be the final authority in the condemnation of Bruno. However, there was a huge difference in the way things were handled when it came to Galileo. Galileo was famous. Very famous. There was no way, politically, to simply deal with him as they had done with Bruno.
Bellarmine had already started to compile “inquiries” about Galileo at least fifteen years before he was brought before the inquisition. The church had already issued proclamations that no one was to “hold or defend” the Copernican system. It was not to be held that the sun was immovable and at the center, etc..
The accusation that he (Galileo) was too quick in “buying into” the Copernican system is, to me, a red herring. He knew what he had observed and it made sense to him. Furthermore, it was his opinion that Bellarmine would not object to his presentation of the Copernican System as a nice way to make predictions while not stating it to be fact.
I agree completely that the church hierarchy, especially Urban VIII, were more than a bit ticked off with Galileo’s “Dialogue on the Great World Systems.” I mean, if I were them and this guy has a character in his book that I believe represents me who is called “Simplicius”, well certainly I would take offense. I would never accuse Galileo of being tactful.
Let’s not forget that what he was doing could undermine their authority. Bellarmine confirms that in the statement quoted by you above. I think that you look at that statement and read that Bellarmine had an open mind on the subject. I look at it as a statement of a worried man. He may have had an open mind, but he also understood the consequences.
I think those statements about the lack of proof were diversions. If they were truly fond of proof, they could have at least afforded Galileo the courtesy of providing some at his trial. They didn’t. They found him guilty, and gave him a “mild and lax” sentence by comparison with the relatively obscure and thus much easier to deal with Bruno.
June 17, 2012 at 10:52 am
suzy blah blah
@Mitch, -MLK could get away with having a big ego because the mission he was on tempered it’s sting. His very inspired and real passion made up for it. But when you come on self-righteous, Mitch, it’s a big turn off. Because you don’t have any “dream”. Or passion of your own, all you have is links to quotes from others.
-if you want to find your real self and not be just a mimicry you need to find a path to walk on that takes you over and through other peoples opinions and quotations. A path that is your own, not buddha’s or MLK’s, or whoever your latest hero is. You need to be much MUCH more creative in order to break the cookie-cutter mold you come from.
-the problem is, you have very little passion. Well, okay you may be passionate about what others said, and about “change”, LOL! but youre not passionate in actively following your own dream. Or even knowing what it is. Or how to find out what it is.
-good luck
June 17, 2012 at 11:06 am
Eric Kirk
suzy – if you don’t think Mitch has big dreams of what could be better then you haven’t met him.
June 17, 2012 at 11:12 am
Unk John
Erasmus,
I agree completely with your post at 10:05 with the exception of the first sentence. There are people who are convinced (myself among them) that I found the deep end many years ago and see it now only in my rear view mirror.
I am not familiar with Feyerabend, but will add that to my list. I mean, who could resist someone who’s name translates roughly to “Partyevening?”
Thanks for your always thought provoking posts. The problem is that you make me tired. It’s real work to deal with you.
By the way (Which means BTW to some readers), have you read Neil Stephenson’s novel “Anathem”? If so, you would understand why once I referred to you as “Fra”.
Speaking of Stephenson, I always like to remark about how much I appreciated the name he chose for his Japanese-African-American main character in “Snow Crash”. How can you argue with “Hiro Protagonist?”
June 17, 2012 at 11:17 am
Mitch
Eric,
In a way, I agree with suzy. I’m fed up with dreams, and prefer work. And I’m not all that much of a fan of passion, either — I’d rather see sincerity, empathy, and humility. I aspire to be just a cloddish worker ant, not a queen bee of her universe.
June 17, 2012 at 11:18 am
Mitch
Oh, I’d thank blah for her concern except for her mean-spiritedness (click her “good luck” link).
June 17, 2012 at 11:19 am
suzy blah blah
-you missed my point Eric, Mitch’s dreams are other people’s! His thoughts are other people’s. His passion a quotation. His life a mimicry.
June 17, 2012 at 11:39 am
Mitch
Most people who have met me consider me passionate to an extreme, probably to my detriment. Blah has seen an online persona in which I get to edit myself, has taken a dislike to it, and has judged me by it.
That doesn’t bother me even a bit, it just seems remarkably ridiculous, particularly from someone who is as fond of particular points of view as blah is.
June 17, 2012 at 12:36 pm
suzy blah blah
I aspire to be just a cloddish worker ant, not a queen bee of her universe.
-you got that right Mitch, suzy is the queen of her universe. And the center of it as well. I only would that others were the center of their own universe too. This sick world doesn’t need any more worker ants, one just like the other, no thoughts of their own, merely clods who are able to mimic the thoughts of others. Those who wake up in the morning all steamed up and ready and willing to follow the dream –of someone else! –ew.
No, a healthy universe needs more individuals who are centered and whole. There’s far too many among us who are off center, immature, and out of balance. Which is no surprise when people are nothing but carbon copies of each other and have to cling to another’s opinion for direction and definition.
I’m not all that much of a fan of passion
-that’s obvious.
I’d rather see sincerity, empathy, and humility.
-you forgot “righteousness”
Most people who have met me consider me passionate to an extreme,
-so then youre not a fan of yourself! You need therapy dude.
In closing Mitch, to try and alleviate your emotional confusion –passion for “change”, isn’t the same as passion for life!
June 17, 2012 at 2:23 pm
Erasmus
Unk John —- the best place to begin an acquaintance with Feyerabend is not his most famous book (‘Against Method’), but his final one, published posthumously: ‘The Conquest of Abundance : A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being’ (U. of Chicago Press, who also published his entertaining autobiography, ‘Killing Time.’). — I think he goes overboard occasionally, but I admire his spirit so much than I have no trouble forgiving him. (My favorite chapter in ‘The Conquest …’ is the final one: ‘Concerning an Appeal for Philosophy,’ in which he inveighs against his own field and derogates Socrates. (I’m afraid it takes tenure to be so outspoken.)
June 17, 2012 at 2:27 pm
Mitch
“passion for “change”, isn’t the same as passion for life!”
Passion for justice may very well be passion for life. It just depends how large you choose to define life.
I guess when you think you’re the queen bee of your universe, it’s easy to feel that others ought to just get out of your way, until and unless (of course) they can discover their own queen-beedom and join you in your marvels.
I’d rather see sincerity, empathy, humility and righteousness. Thanks for the correction. I don’t know how I forgot that last.
June 17, 2012 at 3:44 pm
suzy blah blah
unless (of course) they can discover their own queen-beedom and join you in your marvels.
-i pray that people actually will try to discover their own King/Queen inside, so that suzy can join them in their marvels.
Passion for justice may very well be passion for life
-sheeeeeesh! (rolling my eyes) … i don’t believe there’s any common ground under us Mitch. So suzy’ll let you have the last word. But, just one more thing before i go back to my meditations and rites: a little lesson in justice, right here at this webpage, especially written for non-believing types like you (Mitch was mean spirited and wouldn’t help suzy to learn a little html when i wanted to post to an offsite page last month folks, but i found help from a higher power) –i just pray the link works:
click here
June 17, 2012 at 4:10 pm
06em
Why?
June 17, 2012 at 4:30 pm
moviedad
Ok, while it’s still true that: “Only fools dispute the existence of God.” I must say this has been a very enlightening discussion. What I like about the above proverb is that it doesn’t take sides.
Why am I wasting money at HSU for when I could just be taking notes on “Erasmus” and “Unk John.”?
June 17, 2012 at 8:46 pm
Eric Kirk
Still, I actually think that doubt is healthier than absolute disbelief.
Why?
Something about an open mind and skepticism about any absolute position being healthy. Call me an agnostic.
June 17, 2012 at 9:03 pm
Mitch
So we should all express doubt as to the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, rather than absolute disbelief?
June 17, 2012 at 9:26 pm
Eric Kirk
If there is any logical and/or reasonable argument for the the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, certainly.
June 18, 2012 at 12:14 am
j67k
Yes, I’ve seen flying things, I’ve seen Spaghetti, and I’ve seen monsters[mostly human ones] so, reasonably there ‘could’ be one. Besides, you have to have FAITH Eric.
It’s much easier to believe than something that is ‘everything.’ “I am the Alpha & Omega” By definition He couldn’t be a ‘he’ then, since that would limit Him. Also. according to that philosopher Erasmus made me read, he can’t ex-ist because he would have to be separate.
@Erasmus Paragraph breaks are not optional… They are just as important as punctuation. I assume you read some of the books you quote, I’m going to go out on a limb and say they all probably have paragraph breaks.
The church had no problem accepting that the Earth wasn’t flat???
You didn’t even skim the book I linked to…
“But the strictly biblical men of science, such eminent fathers and bishops as Theophilus of Antioch in the second century, and Clement of Alexandria in the third, with others in centuries following, were not content with merely opposing what they stigmatized as an old heathen theory; they drew from their Bibles a new Christian theory, to which one Church authority added one idea and another another, until it was fully developed. Taking the survival of various early traditions, given in the seventh verse of the first chapter of Genesis, they insisted on the clear declarations of Scripture that the earth was, at creation, arched over with a solid vault, “a firmament,” and to this they added the passages from Isaiah and the Psalms, in which it declared that the heavens are stretched out “like a curtain,” and again “like a tent to dwell in.” The universe, then, is like a house: the earth is its ground floor, the firmament its ceiling, under which the Almighty hangs out the sun to rule the day and the moon and stars to rule the night. This ceiling is also the floor of the apartment above, and in this is a cistern, shaped, as one of the authorities says, “like a bathing-tank,” and containing “the waters which are above the firmament.” These waters are let down upon the earth by the Almighty and his angels through the “windows of heaven.” As to the movement of the sun, there was a citation of various passages in Genesis, mixed with metaphysics in various proportions, and this was thought to give ample proofs from the Bible that the earth could not be a sphere.”
Here’s a link to the whole chapter – http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/White/geography/form.html
It does NOT matter if later they realized that they were being dumb-asses. They were, in fact, dumb-asses for a very long time. Just as now they say that evolution is a theory. NO! Darwin wrote a theory ON evolution, but evolution itself is an observable FACT. Once again, dumb-asses…
June 18, 2012 at 12:44 am
j67k
“Still, I actually think that doubt is healthier than absolute disbelief.”
So, you should never “absolutely disbelieve” anything anyone says? Because, unless God is talking to you, every religion is just the word of some dead idiot. Fine. I don’t “absolutely” disbelieve, I just plain old normal disbelieve. Until I read a religious text that does not sound like they are constantly making shit up, I’ll pass.
When it blatantly contradicts reality, then I have no choice but to despise it. As Scotty said “Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice, shame on me!” If a book says the Earth is flat & 6000 years old, the sky is a tent, every species was repopulated with a genetic sampling of 2, and so on, then I would have to be a complete moron to believe ANYTHING in it.
June 18, 2012 at 7:54 am
Erasmus
Like j67k, I refuse to treat the Bible or any other “holy” book as a literal unveiling of the Truth; too many passages are repellent to my modern,secular mentality. Unlike j67k, I refuse to discard the many passages that stir me (as they stirred MLK, Jr. and the Berrigan brothers). I shall not relinquish the ballast of our civilization because it is imperfect and can be twisted to nefarious ends (our Constitution is similar in this regard). Nor shall I attempt to replace “religion” by a science that is incapable of answering the heart’s call — a science unable to explain the most basic facts of our existence. ———————————————- I saw a bumpersticker a few months ago that said: DARWIN LOVES YOU. How shallowly clever: implying that the Gospel message of Jesus is an old-fashioned precursor of Darwin’s theory, that evolutionary science can be just as consoling as the Sermon on the Mount. Does the bumpersticker’s creator understand that The Origin of Species “does not document the origin of a single species, or a single case of natural selection, or the preservation of one favored race in the struggle for life,” according to Jonathan Weiner in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Beak of the Finch? ———————– Evolution can be found in Christian doctrine if one looks for it: in Augustine’s De Trinitatae we read that “All things were created by God in the beginning in a kind of blending of the elements, but they cannot develop and appear until the circumstances are favorable.” And in On the Literal Meaning of Genesis: “It is thus that God unfolds the generations which He laid up in creation when He first founded it…” Evolution means, etymologically, “unfolding.” No wonder that Michael Polanyi, the eminent Hungarian-Jewish 20th century scientist-philosopher wrote that “The book of Genesis and its great pictorial illustrations, like the frescoes of Michelangelo, remain a far more intelligent account of the nature and origin of the universe than the representations of the world as a chance collocation of atoms.” (Personal Knowledge, U. of Chicago Press).
June 18, 2012 at 8:11 am
Mitch
Nor shall I attempt to replace “religion” by a science that is incapable of answering the heart’s call
Erasmus,
“The heart’s call,” I think, is a good explanation for the ubiquity of personified gods in human culture. It’s not an argument for their reality. The human mind sees illusions and fills in blanks as necessary — the heart’s call cannot be a final verdict on reality, independent of accumulating knowledge.
The mythology of the bible is of great value — the harm comes when people are utterly convinced that they have instructions from the personified God, that others lack those instructions, and that the others must be brought around by any means necessary.
I’ve always been awed and moved by the universe around me. Independent of whether or not a God exists, the creation speaks to my heart.
Eric,
I’m curious which arguments for the Christian god you find to be logical and/or reasonable.
June 18, 2012 at 8:39 am
Bolithio
Once again, from my favorite Band:
I heard them say that the meek shall reign on earth,
Phantasmal myriads of sane bucolic birth.
I’ve seen the rapture in a starving baby’s eyes,
Inchoate beatitude, the Lord of the Flies.
So what does it mean when your mind starts to stray?
Kaleidoscopic images of love on the way.
Brother, you’d better get down on your knees and pay.
1, 000 more fools are being born every fucking day.
They try to tell me that the lamb is on the way,
With microwave transmissions they bombard us every day.
The masses are obsequious, contented in their sleep.
The vortex of their minds ensconced within the murky deep.
Youtube ’1000 more fools’ if you want to hear the song.
June 18, 2012 at 8:49 am
tra
“If there is any logical and/or reasonable argument for the the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, certainly.”
Well, that’s kind of the whole point of the Flying Spaghetti Monster analogy — that there isn’t really any more “logical and/or reasonable” argument for the existence of the Christian version of “God” than there is for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Or Invisible Pink Unicorns. Or, going back a bit further, Bertram Russell’s Celestial Teapot.
Russell’s teapot, sometimes called the celestial teapot or cosmic teapot, is an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) to illustrate the idea that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims rather than shifting the burden of proof to others, specifically in the case of religion. Russell wrote that if he claimed that a teapot were orbiting the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, it would be nonsensical for him to expect others to believe him on the grounds that they could not prove him wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot
Of course Russell’s original Flying Teapot argument (and the FSM, and the IPUs) is, strictly speaking, really only an argument against Theism, not an argument against Agnosticism. But as Russell later clarified, while he was technically an Agnostic, he was “for all practical purposes” an atheist.
In 1958, Russell elaborated on the analogy as a reason for his own atheism: “I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.”
That’s about where I find myself in this debate. I’m technically an agnostic, in the “well, I guess anything’s possible” sense. But as a practical matter, I think that the existence of God (at least a personified God as portrayed by most “believers”) is no more likely than the existence of a Flying Spaghetti Monster contained in a Celestial Teapot, perched atop an Invisible Pink Unicorn.
June 18, 2012 at 8:49 am
j67k
Erasmus, your previous arguments have been that Christianity has not interfered with scientific progress “as much as most people think.” My point is that they have, and still do. They apply a kind of friction that prevents progress, as we constantly have to deal with people clinging to ideas they like, even in the face of proof to the contrary.
I agree that there are valuable lessons and morality in Christian doctrine. If something helps people feel better or act better, I’m all for it. But, the instant they hold up their mythology as a template for “TRUTH” they become a detriment to humanity.
The thing is, they are denying their own faith when they demand that God make reality match their silly little book. Sometimes a story is just a story, there are many “truths” in the fiction I enjoy, but I don’t demand that others accept middle Earth as history.
[But... Frodo Lives!!!!]
June 18, 2012 at 8:55 am
tra
That being said, I don’t really mind if people believe in a God, or Goddess, or Gods and Goddesses, or whatever, as long as they’re not using that belief as an excuse to mistreat others people, other creatures, or the planet as a whole. What matters most to me is not what people say they believe or even what they actually believe — what really matters to me is what they actually do.
June 18, 2012 at 9:01 am
j67k
@Tra, I get why the Spaghetti monster is in the teapot [otherwise the vacuum would separate the noodles ... Duh!]. But is the unicorn Invisible or pink??? Also, shouldn’t it really be a Pegasus? After all, they can fly…
June 18, 2012 at 9:02 am
Eric Kirk
Well, I don’t know what the “Christian God” is exactly, but there are logical arguments for the existence of God which differ from arguments for the existence of the spagetti monster. For instance, I could choose to believe one or more of the thousands who have claimed to personally experience the presence of God, even had a conversation with him.
Rather than the Spagetti Monster, a better analogy would be UFOs. There are thousands of accounts of encounters with UFO’s. I suspect that all of the encounters, kinds first, second, and third, are hoaxes, fabrications, hallucinations, or misunderstanding of visual experiences of more ordinary phenomenon. But I don’t know that. It may be that one, two, a dozen, or a thousand of those accounts were based on bonafide extra-terrestrial encounters.
As for faith, well, I’ve never seen the Carina Nebula. I’ve seen photographs of it taken through the Hubble Telescope, but those photographs could have been manufactured, faked, etc. I have “faith” that the nebula exists, but I also have logical arguments that the photographs have not been faked, all of which make my belief in the existence of the nebula reasonable but none of which constitute proof.
June 18, 2012 at 9:06 am
tra
“But is the unicorn Invisible or pink???”
Well, you see, since it’s invisible, you just have to have Faith that it’s pink.
June 18, 2012 at 9:15 am
Bolithio
Unicorns are white, trust me.
June 18, 2012 at 9:17 am
tra
Racist!
June 18, 2012 at 9:20 am
j67k
Eric, it was a UFO, until we identified it as a teapot… Obviously, they didn’t see the unicorn ['cause it's pinkly invisible]. You really shouldn’t be so disrespectful to peoples faith by mocking the great TFSM [teapot flying spaghetti monster].
And, really?? You have faith in something that you have direct verifiable evidence of?? Sucker! (And, yes, there are ways of verifying that it wasn’t faked.)
June 18, 2012 at 9:24 am
j67k
@Bolithio. Only the visible ones….
June 18, 2012 at 9:25 am
Erasmus
I agree that some Christians do attempt to impede scientific progress (stem cell research, etc.), and I deplore their actions. There are more than a few environmentalists who do likewise (eco-warriors uprooting trial plantings of genetically-modified crops), and I likewise find their actions reactionary.But I don’t condemn environmentalism in toto. —- It’s not an accident that the scientific revolution took place in Christian Europe, and it’s more than just ironic that the great Theory of Evolution has taken on religious overtones. “The Reformation was the scraping of a little rust off the chains which still bind the mind. Darwinism is the New Reformation.” — Thomas H. Huxley, quoted in Barzun’s ‘From Dawn to Decadence,’ p. 24. ——————–As for Russell’s views on religion ….. let’s just say that his pupil and (later) antagonist Ludwig Wittgenstein was much more sophisticated and influential in that area. Talk about flying teapots is simply jejune, unworthy of a gifted mind, a cartoon version of argumentation. Wittgenstein knew how to speak to the heart as well as to the mind (just as Pascal did), and that is why he is studied today in universities (much more than Russell is).
June 18, 2012 at 9:37 am
j67k
Alright, if your point is that not all Christians were/are complete morons, I will graciously concede that. But, the environmentalists who are against putting fish genes into our food grain are not trying to stop, change, or slow technology. They are saying that it is incredibly stupid to experiment, with a barely understood science, on our food supply. Imagine what would have happened if we did that when we started studying radiation. It wouldn’t have just been the Curies & a few other scientists who died.
June 18, 2012 at 9:41 am
tra
“Talk about flying teapots is simply jejune, unworthy of a gifted mind, a cartoon version of argumentation.”
Well I’m not going to argue the relative merits of Russell vs. Wittgenstein, as I don’t pretend to be an expert on either of them. But I would just note that simple, concise arguments can be just as insightful as complicated ones, and often more powerful, more memorable, and more effective precisely because of their simplicity.
People can complain all they want about Russell’s Celestial Teapot argument, and I’ve seen a few do it, usually with superficial, stylistic complaints similar to yours. What I haven’t seen is any effective refutation of his point.
June 18, 2012 at 10:13 am
Mitch
Eric,
As far as I know, the encounters with the JudeoChristian god tend to take place in countries where he is already well-known, or at least evangelized.
Surely it strikes you as curious that, in the same way all little green men look similar with big slanted bug eyes, the JudeoChristian god tends to match the existing understanding of his appearance (as in, Italian renaissance paintings of a person who almost certainly looks nothing like Jesus)?
And you’ve probably heard about the relatively recent work of neuroscientists in mapping areas of the brain related to spirituality: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100210124757.htm.
Although mentioning this may be offensive to some, schizophrenics see and hear imaginary beings with great regularity. What people may not understand is that hallucinations do not label themselves as such. When they are experienced, they are presenting themselves to the mind in a manner identical to non-hallucinatory input from the senses.
It seems completely reasonable to me that the small minority of people who have reported detailed and in-depth experiences of walking with god or hearing his voice are experiencing hallucinations, primed by a great deal of hope and desire. I wouldn’t be surprised if starvation or thirst or severe trauma would contribute to the phenomena.
Once you have a few people seeing something, especially someone with power or charisma, anyone who has read the emperor’s new clothes can predict what happens next.
The difference with the Carina Nebula is that ANYONE, at any time, provided with the proper mechanical assistance and training can observe the evidence of it. No one is told their faith is insufficient to see it, or that it only appears to the elect. You still see the evidence even if you don’t believe it exists.
June 18, 2012 at 10:15 am
Thorstein Veblen
Tried to stay out of this one, but just can’t help it. I believe the old saw ‘follow the money’ applies to religion as well. Its no accident that the Christian view of abundance provided by God for humans to take is also quite profitable both to the ruling classes and to organized religion. Started evolving into current form (capitalizm) not long after Jesus left this world. Ends up as a particular avarice toward natural resources of the planet.
June 18, 2012 at 10:43 am
suzy blah blah
The book of Genesis and its great pictorial illustrations, like the frescoes of Michelangelo, remain a far more intelligent account of the nature and origin of the universe than the representations of the world as a chance collocation of atoms
-absolutely.
evolutionary science can be just as consoling as the Sermon on the Mount.
-sad sterile viewpoint …
“The heart’s call,” I think, is a good explanation for the ubiquity of personified gods in human culture. It’s not an argument for their reality.
-and what’s the consensually agreed definition of reality today, Mitch?
every species was repopulated with a genetic sampling of 2
-sigh, like Mitch j67k also falls back on the old ignorant argument of literalism and then he gets his rocks off by indulging in mean spirited and sadistic name calling. Dude, it’s a METAPHOR! -duh.
June 18, 2012 at 10:43 am
Erasmus
Well, well,well —- it transpires that j67k is just as ill-informed, just an intolerant as those benighted Christians who decry stem cell research. “Fish genes” into a vegetable —- imagine! Unfortunately, there is no such “thing” as a “fish gene” (a gene is not really a thing — as Sue Hubbell writes in ‘Shrinking the cat: genetic engineering before we knew about genes, p, 26: “Genes … are not even ‘things’ at all. They are simply the pattern in which the bases are attached to the ladder’s uprights ….. and the sequence in which those rungs are repeated and alternated, in functional groups of three, along a stretch of chromosome.”) What is a “human” gene”? One found in me? Well, about 99% of them can be found in other animals or in plants. A banana and I have a great deal in common, genetically. This “fish gene” ruse is sophomoric (assuming that most second-year students have not studied genetics). And as for “experimenting” on our food supply …. the mind boggles: that’s what we call agriculture, and we’ve been doing it for thousands of years (without the safeguards of today). Does anyone think that “traditional” crop breeding is risk free? Are people ignorant of the fact that nuclear radiation has been used for decades to create beneficial mutations (and they can be sold as “organic” in health food stores. E.g. Rio Red grapefruit, created by exposing grapefruit buds to thermal neutron radiation at Brookhaven National Lab in 1968. Last month The Economist had an article entitled ‘Nuclear-powered crops’ — the May 5 issue, I think. This is, and has been, going on everywhere. Do “organic” fans know? Do they care?). Genetic engineering is routine in the biomedical field, and no one (to my knowledge) bats an eye. In agriculture, though, people act as if God created corn and wheat as they were grown in the 19th century. ————————– I must say that I’m not surprised by j67k’s ignorance and intolerance. From the French Revolution of 1789 to the Russian version of 1917, the enemies of religion have shown themselves capable of a ferocity that even Galileo did not have to confront, in his Florentine villa.
June 18, 2012 at 11:42 am
Erasmus
TRA —– Russell’s tea pot argument is too trivial to refute. Yes, you may call the previous sentence superficial , if you like, but I’d rather spend my time on the kind of thinking exemplified by Nietzsche. (A good atheist — like Nietzsche — is hard to find. One cannot imagine him talking about flying teapots.)
June 18, 2012 at 11:46 am
j67k
Well, well, well Erasmus, a ‘fish gene’ is a gene splice taken from a fish. And if you knew anything about genetically modified food, you would know that the most common modification is what is called the “terminator” gene, it interferes with a plants ability to reproduce. therefore allowing Monsanto to sell new seeds every crop. It was spliced from the genes of a fish, therefore ‘fish gene’ you numbnuts.
What is a “human” gene”? Really? Do you read anything written in this century? Have you ever heard of the ‘human genome project’? I suggest you look it up, and READ it. We have, in fact, mapped every human gene.
“Genetic engineering is routine in the biomedical field, and no one (to my knowledge) bats an eye.” Yes I’m sure “to your knowledge” that’s true. To “my knowledge”, however, they are only allowed to do advanced research in a hermetically sealed bunker in the desert. And other scientists are constantly batting eyes at it, worried about containment.
“Does anyone think that “traditional” crop breeding is risk free?” It has a few thousand years of data to show it’s pretty solid. “created by exposing grapefruit buds to thermal neutron radiation…” that is kinetic heat radiation NOT dangerous alpha radiation. We know the difference because of many, many decades of research.
If you are unaware of the most basic information of the science, you might not want to make snide comments that expose you as being a moron.
“I must say that I’m not surprised by j67k’s ignorance and intolerance … the enemies of religion have shown themselves capable of a ferocity that even Galileo did not have to confront, in his Florentine villa.” Yes, I’m sure YOU aren’t surprised by much of anything. I don’t care one way or another about religion, I hate STUPIDITY, whatever form it takes. But, just out of curiosity, do you believe that the meany atheists are capable of more ferocity or brutality than the Inquisition? Crusades? All the various and sundry burning at the stake they are so fond of?
Get a grip god-boy, when it comes to ignorant, ruthless brutality nobody, but NOBODY, beats Catholics.
June 18, 2012 at 11:59 am
j67k
If anyone cares to actually read about genetic engineering here is an essay on the basics –
http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/GEessays/WhatisGE.html
June 18, 2012 at 12:11 pm
Bolithio
And if you are interested in Sci-Fi concepts about god, aliens, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering; go see Prometheus!
June 18, 2012 at 12:14 pm
Bolithio
-sad sterile viewpoint …
Suzy – not so! An astronomy professor in college had a eloquent way of describing our billions-of-years-old cocktail, and how we are all the ‘stuff’ of comets ans stars! Hardly sterile.
June 18, 2012 at 12:16 pm
Eric Kirk
Although mentioning this may be offensive to some, schizophrenics see and hear imaginary beings with great regularity.
We assume they are imaginary, because schizophrenia is a mental disorder. And can we assume that all people who claim to have seen what others don’t see are similarly impaired? Or is that just an assumption?
And maybe all people who claim to have seen God are indeed mentally disordered, hallucinating, lying, or seeing what they want to see. But it takes only one exception – one person who doesn’t fit the profile, to make the refusal to absolutely disbelieve reasonable.
The difference with the Carina Nebula is that ANYONE, at any time, provided with the proper mechanical assistance and training can observe the evidence of it.
I assume that is the case, but since I have not sought nor received the assistance, I can’t say so for certain. Yet, I do believe that the Carina Nebula exists and that the photos are authentic. Isn’t that faith? Or is it reasonable?
I am told that if I pray with all earnest desire for the truth, that God will reveal himself to me, and that if God has not been revealed to me, it’s because I did not pray with the right heart. I certainly can’t prove that wrong. But just as I have never accessed the Hubble telescope, I have apparently never made such a prayer.
As far as I know, the encounters with the JudeoChristian god tend to take place in countries where he is already well-known, or at least evangelized.
See, this is the thing. A promenant concept of God (and a discussion such as this is difficult as there are numerous concepts of God) is that “he” appears to people in ways in which they can relate and understand. Even Christianity acknowledges three incarnations of God, appearing and even acting differently in each case. So it would make sense that the “JudeoChristian God” appears as such more often in countries where he is well known or evangelized, and perhaps appears in animal spirit form or other form in other contexts.
In one of the CS Lewis Narnia books there was a character who was not of the Aslan religion, but whom was a devout member of some rival religion. When he met Aslan he recognized him as the God he had worshiped, while the other characters saw him as a lion.
In Inherit the Wind most of us posting here related to Spencer Tracy, while we saw Fred March as the buffoon. But actually, there were moments when Spencer Tracy was stymied in his examination of March. In one instance, he talked about how according to Joshua the sun froze in the sky. And of course, that meant the earth stopped spinning (I believe March actually raised relativity in defense), and therefor the continents slid into each other, the atmosphere was gone, and the earth spun out of its orbit and into the sun. Tracy asked March why that didn’t happen if March believed in natural law. March responded (paraphrasing) that God is transcendent of natural law, and can bypass it, change it, cancel it – whatever he wants. So to use physical limitations to argue against the existence of God is somewhat futile. He can appear to anyone as anything. Right?
It’s all convoluted of course, and you can spend days arguing angels on a pinhead, but the point is, it’s a big universe out there and materialism doesn’t answer all the questions nor does it necessarily conform to common sense in terms of our sensual perceptions. We accept from the big bang explanation that at somepoint everything came from nothing, which certainly contradicts common sense. We accept that out of the swirling mass from supernovae that it’s perfectly natural to expect that it will result in self-aware creatures of various color and shape crawling up out of it – with surrounding balances in which water runs down from mountains into the sea, to be repleneshed in relative equilibrium through evaporation and condensation to bring it back to the top of the mountains – and that the universe just happens to have naturally written into the script the potential for combining of various elements to allow the evolved intelligence to create cars, pizzas, and film documentaries. It’s all there, so we take for granted that it’s natural. And we don’t have anywhere near the knowledge to understand fully the mechanisms, but we take for granted (faith?) that had we more information we would have the understanding, because understanding is theoretically attainable at the material level (which is of course the only level).
It’s a big universe, and I would think the proper take for a scientist as well as a philosopher is to keep an open mind about anything, because we’re hardly in the position to claim a monopoly of understanding no matter how irrational we believe in another perspective. And so my answer to any of the big questions outside my immediate realm of perception – “I don’t know.”
June 18, 2012 at 12:17 pm
Eric Kirk
John – Erasmus is hardly “god boy.” I don’t think he even believes in God. Just saying.
June 18, 2012 at 12:51 pm
Erasmus
As I stated a few dozen comments ago, I am a “religion-friendly agnostic.” — j67k is riled up, and I regret my role in his agitation. After arguing about religion, atheism, flying tea-pots, and who knows what else, I’ll leave the subject of genetic engineering for another day. I once sent an e-mail to an anti-GE website, offering to recant my support of genetic engineering if they could point out one flaw in James Watson’s chapter on GM crops in his ‘DNA: the Secret of Life.’ I never got a reply. j67k’s remarks on the subject betray his casual acquaintance with the subject.( I recommend Nina Fedoroff’s “Mendel in the Kitchen: a scientist’s view of genetically modified foods”). Everyone has been an ignoramus on this subject at one point in his or her life, and I plead guilty to having spouted the “green” party line until a friend who teaches at UC-Davis enlightened me.
June 18, 2012 at 1:18 pm
Unk John
Schizophrenia beats dining alone.
June 18, 2012 at 1:24 pm
Unk John
Erasmus – It was not necessary to qualify Polanyi as an “eminent” Hungarian. All Hungarians are superior people.
June 18, 2012 at 1:30 pm
j67k
Erasmus, I’m ‘riled up’ because you make inane comments like “Unfortunately, there is no such “thing” as a “fish gene” “; ““Genes … are not even ‘things’ at all. They are simply the pattern in which the bases are attached to the ladder’s uprights” That is a stupid thing to say. Yes, genes are a pattern, they are a pattern of amino acids, which are in fact “real things”.
Also, we are not creating new genes from a ‘pattern’ with G.E. we are simply ripping out a portion of existing gene structure and attaching it to another. Please read about what exactly G.E. is before making more ignorant comments.
Eric, when half of everything someone says is about Catholic doctrine, when he attacks people for what he perceives as “anti-religious”, when he defends Catholic persecution of scientists, and names himself after the patron saint of sailors [or possibly a 15th century priest], then I feel god-boy is apt. Perhaps he’s just a Catholic fan-boy though.
June 18, 2012 at 1:43 pm
j67k
Mitch, while I agree with what your saying, maybe the real take away from that is that we should treat Schizophrenia patients better. Maybe some of them actually are talking to God.
I don’t want to be the one who has to explain to God why we kept electrocuting the brains of everyone he talked to…
June 18, 2012 at 2:16 pm
Erasmus
I just typed a long reply that somehow disappeared. —- Matt Ridley’s book ‘Genome’ explains what a gene is better than I could do, and it’s certainly not a pattern of amino acids (see p. 50). Argumentation is fine — but let’s not embarrass ourselves. And there is no ‘fish gene’ that signals: this is a fish. A fish genome is a configuration of genes, not one of which is ‘fish-like’ in any sense. This is all elementary genetics.
June 18, 2012 at 2:36 pm
Mitch
it’s a big universe out there and materialism doesn’t answer all the questions nor does it necessarily conform to common sense in terms of our sensual perceptions
Exactly, Eric. I’m in 100% agreement. But science DOES NOT CLAIM to have any answers outside of the material world. How could it? If something does not interact with material in a measurable way, science simply has no way to know it is there.
I don’t argue that there may be much that is beyond science, but I do argue that once something has a measurable effect on the brain, it comes within the realm of science to study. As I mentioned up-thread, before digestion was understood by science, it was generally treated as beyond the ability of science to understand, because it was a mysterious animal process. Yes, I view the analogy as very close — much closer now than perhaps twenty years ago.
Science cannot answer questions like “what preceded the big bang,” just as we, with only our senses, cannot answer questions like “what’s inside the big box.” But the questions it can answer, it answers well. Activity in the brain is now entering the set of questions science is equipped to answer. If you wish to argue that such activity is due to God, fine, but that enters God into the material universe, and hence makes her interaction with our brains available to scientific study.
Science cannot answer why there is something and not nothing. But science has proven spectacularly successful at answering such questions as why we protect our children, why step-children are at greater risk for molestation, and why we will protect our brother but on average only half as much as our child.
Religion on the other hand, when it attempts to explain material things, is constantly proven wrong. To resort to some power that can change the physical laws of the universe to make exceptions on our behalf is just fine, but those physical interactions must, by their nature, be available to scientific study. That they never seem to be suggests that they never happen.
That people are convinced there is a personal God working for them is, in my opinion, no evidence at all for the existence of a personal God.
People are convinced that walls are solid and that “down” points in the same direction no matter where we stand — that doesn’t make either true, it just means that’s what our mind understands based on the evidence that is available to them. God is, I’m convinced, something similar — it’s a way that our mind fills in a blind spot on our behalf, because the mind’s job is giving us a best-fit hypothesis to the data we have in front of us.
We, as experimenting and theorizing beings, are able to understand more than the initial sense data we are presented with, when we develop intellectual and material equipment to go beyond what our senses normally reveal.
June 18, 2012 at 2:41 pm
Mitch
j67k,
I don’t want to be the one who has to explain to God why we kept electrocuting the brains of everyone he talked to…
But what a great short story it would make.
I wouldn’t want to have to be the one to explain to God why we keep killing people in her name. Talk about embarrassing. Fortunately, she’s omniscient and omnipotent, so it’s all part of her plan of infinite goodness.
June 18, 2012 at 2:46 pm
eddenson
Eric, “incarnation” means being embodied, made flesh (see “carnal”) and only Jesus is thought to have been incarnated. God the Father, and the Holy Spirit are not so reported, although the Holy Spirit it believed to have spoken through the prophets (see the Nicene Creed on Wikipedia for a myriad of versions in English of these concepts. That creed is a kind of pledge of allegiance chanted in Christian churches during services as a means of reminding the congregation of the founding dogma of their faith.)
By the way, judging from the number of comments, I would say that only Reggae excites more interest than God, and Reggae is getting a good run for its money.
June 18, 2012 at 2:48 pm
Eric Kirk
Manifestations. Three manifestations.
I have more to say, but not the time right now. Unfortunately, unlike God, I exist within the time stream in which I have to do things in a certain order.
June 18, 2012 at 3:46 pm
Anonymous
“I would say that only Reggae excites more interest than God, and Reggae is getting a good run for its money.”
…don’t get me wrong, I loves me some good reggae. But damn, that dancehall reggae that was all the rage up until a few years ago SUCKED. At least dubstep has FUNK.
June 18, 2012 at 5:01 pm
eddenson
I agree, manifestations is better, although after reading the Nicene creed I’m wondering if God the Father ever manifests, since the Holy Spirit spoke through the prophets. Whose voice came out of the burning bush, or who told Abraham not to kill his son? God the Father, or the Holy Spirit? I’m just not quite current on the finer points of Christian theology.
And, Mitch, the infinite goodness thing, since you bring it up, is actually an artifact of medieval Scholastic thinking. The theory is something like this: God creates the universe, therefore he is the best God (the only God, too) possible. As the philosopher asks, would you say the universe was created by the 8th best God? Certainly not, since we live in the Best of All Possible Worlds. And the best God possible is perfect since perfection is better than imperfection, and since good is better than evil, the perfect God would be infinitely good, and not at all bad. Angels are almost all good, except for those who rebelled and became devils, humans are good and bad, devils are infinitely evil. I don’t know that the idea of infinite goodness arises in theology outside of this series of reasonings from definition. You can also see this moral hierarchy in space: God is as the poet Utah Phillips said, “way up high”, angels are in heaven and sometimes descend to earth, people live on earth, below them are rocks and dirt which are morally neutral, and below that is hell where the devils live. By the way, this is the best of all possible worlds because a perfect God would not create the 19th best of all possible worlds. They really had it worked out in the medieval days, and since the Enlightenment only fragments of the grand old chain of being system still float around to bedevil us when we try to think about things like God. As for gender, God transcends gender, of course, which makes the phrase God the Father a bit awkward but I think it reflects Scholastic thinking again: men are superior to women, and Fathers are superior to Children, so God would be referred to as the Father, but its just a metaphor. Sort of like “in Christ there is no East nor West” but that doesn’t mean we can’t feel our little group is superior to the others.
June 18, 2012 at 6:02 pm
Bolithio
Speaking of manifestations:
June 18, 2012 at 7:01 pm
suzy blah blah
An astronomy professor in college had a eloquent way of describing our billions-of-years-old cocktail, and how we are all the ‘stuff’ of comets ans stars!
-if that is consoling to you, so be it.
June 19, 2012 at 6:26 am
Stephen
“But believing that there is a transcendent immanence in the universe is not the same thing at all as believing in a surprisingly human-like being who provides tablets to prophets and dispatches us to our deserved destinations in an afterlife.
For starters, if there are no characteristics and attributions, there are no rules to follow to be in the club. Religious leaders become nothing more than people who are respected for their wisdom and understanding of how to live a “good life,” as demonstrated by their behavior. They can offer us examples, but can no longer assert that we must follow their rules because of their connection to the ruler of the universe. If there are no characteristics and attributions for God, all of us become able to decide how to behave without any of us getting to claim a special pipeline to the giver of rules.”
Been away and see that I need to make straight the road to God in our wilderness starting with Mitch’s common secular bitch about Abrahamic religions.
Mitch, a “transcendent immanence” cannot speak or inspire anyone. God does this. Physical things can inspire but you look back in history and you see the major human advancements are not coming from atheistic minds, but came from believers in God and I include Einstein in this group. I’ve put up the challenge here which is being ignored to show us how it is rational or logical to believe knowledge of things stops at the current level of the atheist critic. I’ve put out the challenge to explain how Nature or even transcendent immanence, (talk about religious mumbo-jumbo) evolves in a successfully adapted species brain receptors for non-existent events, and again no takers here. These are two fundamental questions that divide intelligent theists from fundamentalist atheists who, just like their fundamentalist religious brethren, must refuse to look at any factual evidence countering their fundamentalist belief system. You see it here in the avoidance of my intellectual challenge to the atheist mindset. Which I include Mitch’s and all who would deny a spiritual connection between God and humanity.
“I’d rather see schizophrenia treated by a chemical than by an exorcist.”
Well, having heard enough stories by people I know personally of spiritual healing vs. the years of horrible “scientific” treatments of schizoids and others with physical disabilities in their brains to never put absolute trust in doctors vs. shamans and genuine religious healers which do exist. Right here in Mateel River City. Sure there are quacks out there by the scores while doctors do manage to heal people, but seriously, have you no friends with tales of nearly dying at the hands of some doctors or hospital screw up? I have, personally family experience in that one, about three times over. Like everything in life, discernment in choice of options is half the battle. So you gotta pick and choose but my selection categories are larger because I do include the spiritual healers as well the science trained ones.
June 19, 2012 at 7:09 am
Stephen
Suzy, hi. I know you’re with me, like Immanuel. thanx, sis.
“Stephen, having an experience and understanding what it is are two different things.”
Ed, are you talking from experience. Those of us who have had the kinds of spiritual experiences I have had produce religions. Have you had those kinds of experiences? If so, where are the products of your encounters with God? If you are atheist and offer your opinion above it is not based on personal experience so, I have to ask the obvious question, what value is it as given as if you had any authority on the subject?
“Also, I’m not sure what the poker hand is doing in your post. Are you suggesting a spritual intercession to give you a winning hand, or that taking the risk of playing the hand gives you a sensation similar to spiritual contact? – puzzled in Alderpoin
I gave the poker winning hand analogy and the music one to show how a physical, likely adrenaline rush, can accompany spiritual visitation. The sensations I felt when brand new to me spiritual ideas came into my head from God knows where were similar to those I have experienced hearing really good music, that wave that passes from head to toe through you, and that wave that passes through you when you’ve gotten a most excellent hand and won a big pot in a poker game. I’ve never broken out in sweats in any poker game but I have with spiritual revelations coming into me. So did Mohammad.
No, I wouldn’t say poker and spiritual intercession go together. It’s Blackjack that God favors. True story: I am not a grower, haven’t been for well over two decades and consequently have been in the poverty category so I could not finish my spiritual assignment to take Paxcalibur,Sword of Peace, to the Holy Land to do the last sanctification baptism ritual in the Jordan River. I tried three times to raise the money to go but always something came up that took whatever I was setting aside for another critical purpose, e.g. wrecking my truck, no replacement insurance and being without a vehicle, stuff like that. Anyway it took me 14 years waiting to one day back in 2003, three days after I found out my Vision of Christ Josephine matched the Lakota’s prophesy of the return of White Buffalo Calf Woman, I was playing internet blackjack, again, always with the aim of getting funds for a trip to Israel/Palestine. I’d lost I’d say $900 over a ten year period doing this, no big stakes involved because I’m poor basically. Well, I got lucky or something happened that never has happened before or since, I ran up $75 to $1300 over three days of small incremental winning at blackjack . I’ve tried to do this several times afterwards and can’t figure out how I did it. With $1300 hot in my account I immediately bought a rt ticket to Israel. And finished the Paxcalibur mission with its amazing spiritual results that happened in Nazareth at Easter when over 500 Nazarean Christians honored Pax and me at the end of their annual Easter procession through Nazareth. Even Muslims on balconies above the parade route showered Pax and me with flower petals and candies every time I lifted the Sword of Peace and new Word of God up to them. I retell the story to show how spiritual experiences can move out of one’s little skull and become vehicles for many others to share in the original spiritual experience. God needs hands and mouths to make Themselves known which is why these attempts to be spiritual by intellectual effort, e.g. Mitch’s “immanence” conception, miss the mark. The whole point of Deity is for direction in our lives.
Paxcalibur is a new Word of God because it gives God’s direction, “everything made into weapons against peace must be sacrificed”. The sword of war turned into a peace symbol, The plowshares and pruninghooks of Isaiah’s YHWH were remade into swords and spears by Joel’s YHWH, so God has upgraded the icon of peace making it into Paxcalibur that “speaks” God’s will for us without need for any words, such is the universalization of the hippie peace symbol. Pax is going into Jerusalem eventually after staying in Nazareth, then Bethlehem, then Jerusalem. God is Great! Big Spaghetti Monster. Which is so ironic as to make laugh because believe it or not I made a Spaghetti Monster film for my student film project. Made a paper-mache mask and poured spaghetti all over it. Ended up using the negative as base for an experimental animation technique for a 3 minute film that was shown twice in Hollywood’s Cinema Theatre as part of a student experimental film series. So Spaghetti Monsters and God are buds. Now, that farooking One-Eyed Purple People eater, the Yahweh that ate the Canaanites, Canaan producing the purple dye, he’s a bad actor..
June 19, 2012 at 8:09 am
Anonymous
Bolithio, you know what else the youngest generation has? Supposedly intelligent adults like you who continue to champion clearcutting! What a hero you are in historical perspective!
June 19, 2012 at 8:28 am
Not A Native
This is a long thread, not something I’m very interested in but I looked at it when I saw the large number of comments, so I’ll make a few.
Whats most interesting to me in the polling is the large percentage of believers in all categories. When over 70% of Americans agree on something besides seeking to acquire more material wealth, comfort, ease and power over other nations, that’s significant! Guess it also expalins why this thread has so many comments reative to others.
Eric again reveals his fundamental ignorance of the science of relativity. His reference to the supposed symmetry between an earth centered and sun centered solar system being indistinguishable is laughable, except it was actually seriously presented. And apparently accepted here without doubt. To be brief, frames of reference are relative only if they are inertial. Eric’s cited relative frame, standing on the earth, isn’t inertial.
June 19, 2012 at 8:37 am
Mitch
“brain receptors for nonexistent events”
For starters, have you heard of phantom limb? Are you aware of optical illusions?
The mind does the best it can to come up with a best fit for available input. It’s very easily tricked, intentionally and unintentionally.
And evolution often results in side-effects, so any species that has evolved a theory of mind will be able to project that theory of mind onto situations where, intellectually, we know it does not apply.
It’s hard to watch cartoons without thinking the characters have emotion, even while knowing we are seeing only some moving lines projected onto a screen.
It’s impossible (or nearly so) to see two circles, a vertical line centered underneath, and a horizontal line underneath the vertical line without triggering our mental face detectors, but that doesn’t mean they are a face.
June 19, 2012 at 8:46 am
Bolithio
NAN once again shows up to be a dick. What a guy! Thanks for adding something negative to the conversation NAN.
June 19, 2012 at 9:46 am
Eric Kirk
Eric’s cited relative frame, standing on the earth, isn’t inertial.
Actually it is. If the unverse were to circle a “still” earth, the inertial drag of the universe’s mass pulling at the Earth would be identical to that which can be measured with a “spinning” earth and “still” universe. That’s actually the whole point of relativity.
A good book on the subject with excellent language for lay people – Martin Caidin’s The Relativity Explosion, with a very detailed explanation of how the Michaelson-Morely experiments actually disproved the existence of either (when they were intended for the opposite) and dealth with your proposition, which would generate all sorts of paradoxes discussed in the text.
June 19, 2012 at 1:07 pm
Mitch
Still, it’s curious that while the sun, like the rest of the universe, circles the earth, the other planets of the solar system circle the sun.
Maybe they didn’t get the memo.
June 19, 2012 at 2:14 pm
Ernie Branscomb
logic, often, does not dictate how people believe.
June 19, 2012 at 2:31 pm
Not A Native
Eric, the key word in your latest misunderstqanding is “If”. By assuming unobservables you can logically reach any conclusion you care to. Inertial acceleration isn’t virtual, its measurable and the forces that cause it can’t arise from outside the universe(unless you want to postuate more imponderables).
I think its apropos that your willingness to ‘assume’ unmeasurable forces appears on a thread where you scratch your head over how can it be that people believe in the supernatural. Gussy it up with some abstract jargon, but essentially you’re updating the epicycles of the medeival clerics.
And Bolothio, still smarting over the spanking you got over at H. are you? Rather than stamping your feet, maybe you should get to a higher level by passing a High School level economics class. Now that would be a true miracle.
June 19, 2012 at 3:53 pm
suzy blah blah
God needs hands and mouths to make Themselves known which is why these attempts to be spiritual by intellectual effort, e.g. Mitch’s “immanence” conception, miss the mark. The whole point of Deity is for direction in our lives.
-direction from God as opposed to “guidance” from scientific process. Well put Stephen, right on.
logic, often, does not dictate how people believe.
-thank God!
But unfortunately it too often does, because so many people these days still believe in Logic and have Faith in his Absolute Truth and Authority.
June 19, 2012 at 4:08 pm
j67k
Erasmus your arguments are just semantic. All living things(on Earth) are made up of the same elements (mainly C,H,O, & N). When you take a chunk of meat out of a human you could say that it’s not human meat anymore because it’s just common chemicals in a human-like pattern. Most people would say that that is bullshit, because labels are often used to define things based on where they came from. So pieces of Deoxyribonucleic acid that come from a fish are called fish genes, as a way of defining where they originated.
What those other jokers you reference are talking about is that after the genes are grafted and start replicating they are now “new” amalgam genes. This is also BS, because the important aspect of genes is the information. So, it is, the equivalent of saying that if you tear out a page of a book, put it in another book & publish it with the new page, then it is no longer a page from the first book.
Try that out. See what the copyright laws say about that.
June 19, 2012 at 6:23 pm
j67k
Eric, they could also just look up – “inertial reference frames”
June 19, 2012 at 8:07 pm
Stephen
Mitch
“brain receptors for nonexistent events”
For starters, have you heard of phantom limb? Are you aware of optical illusions?
Me: No one on earth has ever been persuaded to follow a phantom limb or an optical illusion. You are scraping the bottom of an irrelevant barrel.
The mind does the best it can to come up with a best fit for available input. It’s very easily tricked, intentionally and unintentionally.
Me: So, you’re saying what exactly? That the mind can be confused? So here we are, confused ancestors or not, please explain why this tendency has anything more to do with the subject of spiritual reception than with, say, the subject of the human mind learning anything or dealing with any phenomena, e.g. learning to drive and distinguishing objects in the rear view mirror?
And evolution often results in side-effects, so any species that has evolved a theory of mind will be able to project that theory of mind onto situations where, intellectually, we know it does not apply.
Me: Oh, you know it doesn’t apply, eh? How do you know this, btw? I could have agreed with you and all atheists when I was myself an atheist that religious mindset seemed to produce asocial behavior in many believers recorded through time. But when you compare the historical record of secular societies or supposedly “religious” ones in actual operation they become the same, e.g. the radicals of the French Revolution, the Communists dictators, you just can’t make any blanket statement religionists are the only ones out of control.
It’s hard to watch cartoons without thinking the characters have emotion, even while knowing we are seeing only some moving lines projected onto a screen.
Me: I cry on cue watching tear-jerkers and human beings have been emotionally involved in imaginative play and stage acting for millennia. It is part and parcel of learning, ask any teacher. And without it, children grow up duller. You want to demonize spirituality by characterizing it as merely “child’s play” but like I point out without “child’s play” human beings did not advance to understanding higher levels of social complexity with the resultant evolutionary success.
It’s impossible (or nearly so) to see two circles, a vertical line centered underneath, and a horizontal line underneath the vertical line without triggering our mental face detectors, but that doesn’t mean they are a face.
Pointless examples as these illusions were equally present in atheists societies and yet many of these non-believers, instilled with anti-religious propaganda from birth, believed with all their hearts, minds, and souls, in the Communist worldwide victory over capitalism. They saw the face of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and thought the Communist illusion was real.
I’m still waiting for someone to challenge my question why Nature would evolve spiritual consciousness in the human brain if there is nothing there to register, to trigger, this consciousness as atheists believe with all their hearts, minds and souls.
June 19, 2012 at 8:33 pm
Thorstein Veblen
June 19, 2012 at 2:31 pm
Not A Native
“maybe you should get to a higher level by passing a High School level economics class.”
No, No,NOOoooooooooooooooooooo!!!!! Thats the problem. The economics you are taught is, at best, faulty and misguided. At worst, it’s intended to justify and perpetuate the system we have and are now taking to its extreme. As if there were no other way of looking at our economic world. How do you think we got into the mess we are in?
People would be better off not taking economics as it is taught today. Common sense is way better. And theres even a shortage of that.
June 19, 2012 at 8:50 pm
Eric Kirk
Eric, the key word in your latest misunderstqanding is “If”. By assuming unobservables you can logically reach any conclusion you care to. Inertial acceleration isn’t virtual, its measurable and the forces that cause it can’t arise from outside the universe(unless you want to postuate more imponderables).
NAN, you’ve totally missed the point. The point is that whichever frame of reference, the inertia is indistinguishable. I didn’t suggest that inertial acceleration is virtual. Acceleration is movement relative to the rest of the universe, and standing still while the rest of the universe is going by you generates precisely the same inertial effect. The point is that there is no metaphysical “right” or “wrong” perspective. You’re taking the Cartesian approach to the universe, but relativity tossed that out.
And thanks John. Wikipedia actually does a pretty good job, but not in lay terms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_frame_of_reference
June 19, 2012 at 10:40 pm
j67k
@Stephen “Me: No one on earth has ever been persuaded to follow a phantom limb or an optical illusion. You are scraping the bottom of an irrelevant barrel.” … WHAT? Seriously?
Have you ever heard of a mirage? Or the concept of heaven? Whether it’s real or not, if people WANT to believe something they have much greater chance of believing it. They also get very angry at people who don’t accept it, because that tends to undermine their fantasy. So, believe what you want. It’s either true or not so that’s 50/50, right? :} (Unk John … Sshhh!)
June 20, 2012 at 4:34 am
Stephen
Still scraping, j67k, and still not addressing my challenge. You guys are out of intellectual ammunition and are relying on cliches now to defend the atheist position which is logically indefensible if evolution itself confirms spiritual reality by having our brains developing special reception capability for this phenomena that atheists say doesn’t exist. Our brains didn’t develop special sensory areas to see mirages as angels of God delivering the Ten Commandments. Yes, indeed there are people who will see the face of Jesus, Mary or Mickey Mouse in the shapes of inanimate objects, but that’s just the brain’s pattern recognition kicking in while logic dictates the vast majority won’t pay much heed to those who do would load neutral objects with special meaning unless the special meaning is warranted, e.g. Paxcalibur, with its Peace Symbol now recognized worldwide as even you and I use this symbol and respond to its “spiritual” meaning. Is that an illusion? Reading peace into a piece of paper glued to a bumpersticker? Is it an illusion? Or is it like religion, something you have to mentally process to get the logical connection.
June 20, 2012 at 6:57 am
Mitch
Stephen 8:07,
One more try.
So, you’re saying what exactly? That the mind can be confused?
I’m saying that the mind can be tricked — that it is an unreliable narrator. When we see something, whether it is there or not, we see it. When we smell something, whether it is there or not, we smell it. That doesn’t make it real.
My example of the cartoon was not meant to trivialize cartoons, it was meant to show how little input it takes for us to treat something as real. That’s not the same thing as hallucination, but it’s a similar principle. We fill in gaps without any conscious awareness that the gaps are there. That’s because the brain has evolved to give us useful guesses fast enough that they are still useful. Internally, we need to say “predator,” and we need to say it fast. It’s OK if we guess wrong occasionally.
The blind spot is a very real part of our visual reception, but we don’t see it. We see the most useful guess of the world that our our mind has “generated” from sense data or from a failure to collect sense data (maybe due to damage).
One aspect of our minds is that we assume things that happen are a result of another mind acting on the world. That’s generally a useful fast explanation for what is happening, and so we are apt to apply it prior to any further analysis, which could be deadly in some situations.
So, when the wind blows, our mind’s first useful guess is that something big and invisible is acting on the world to make the wind. When fluid dynamics comes into play, we can understand what is happening at a deeper explanatory level and no longer have the need to fantasize something as direct agent.
It’s exactly the same with random luck. At some times, we assume the fates are with us or agin us. At others, we have God’s favor or lack thereof.
It’s a mistake to assume that our mind’s first pass at analyzing things corresponds to reality — the more we can supplement our senses, the closer we come to reality. Walls are not solid, but our senses will always report solidity and our mind will always decide the wall is solid. That’s because thinking of walls as solid has always proved useful throughout evolution. If we were the size of a virus and somehow still had a mind, we would see walls differently.
One problem in discussing this is the use of the word “mind.” Obviously, our minds are capable of developing physical understanding that goes beyond what our senses report, but I’m using “mind” in the sense of a fast hypothesis generator — lacking a scientific approach, that’s exactly what it is, and that’s why our naive, built-in “science,” doesn’t match the science that we can develop by slow intellectual reflection aided by experiment and sense-extending equipment.
June 20, 2012 at 7:37 am
Erasmus
It’s time to start a new thread, Eric. Does anyone remember that j67k defined a gene as a pattern of amino acids (thereby putting the cart before the horse) and is now informing us that a gene removed from a fish is a “fish gene”? Of course it is (duh!), but not in the sense that matters to someone concerned about mixing something “fishy” with a tomato. The gene that is extracted from a fish, when examined in isolation, will not be identifiable as having originated in a fish — and THAT is why I said that there is no such thing as a “fish gene.” Call it a mere semantic distinction if you wish, but quarrels are often instigated by such quibbles. (And a chunk of human flesh CAN be identified as belonging to our species,) —- Transferring a “fish gene” into a tomato’s genome will frighten or disgust only those who fail to understand that a fish and a tomato are already related to each other —- they already share a goodly percentage of their genes. I can understand why a creationist would object to transgenic crops, but not why anyone versed in science would. (The fear of vaccines makes much more sense to me. More than a few people contracted polio because of the vaccine they received. There has never been a documented case of anyone dying from a genetically modified crop —– unlike the well-publicized cases of people dying from tainted organic food (as In Germany last year — over 50 deaths, over 700 on dialysis machines).—– Now, Eric, how about a discussion of Roberto Unger, one of Obama’s law school professors, who is calling for his former student’s defeat in November? Unger’s a dyed-in-the-wool Leftist.
June 20, 2012 at 10:25 am
Unk John
j67k,
Yo no se! Yo hablo nada! En boca cerrada no entran moscas!
June 20, 2012 at 11:49 am
suzy blah blah
@ Stephen, -when we speak of spiritual revelations, they don’t get it. Like many others in our surroundings they blindly cling to the woefully narrow concept of equating reality with materiality. So to them the immaterial substance, which at its universal level is called God –isn’t “real”. Ironically some of them even fancy themselves spiritual or “righteous” (eg they have big egos). To them, “oneness” means oneness with materiality. They pompously proclaim that we’re “all one” or the universe is all one –at the scientific level (LOL!) whose highest form is intellectual reason, sheeeesh. And that’s only the beginning …
June 20, 2012 at 11:59 am
Stephen
Mitch, your point is still lost in the fact that it can be applied across the board to human responses to any stimulus. Again, what is your point if your argument does not address spiritual consciousness any more than any other type of consciousness?
Erasmus, read the opening statement of this topic and talk about it instead of trying to hijack this discussion?
June 20, 2012 at 12:12 pm
Eric Kirk
Now, Eric, how about a discussion of Roberto Unger, one of Obama’s law school professors, who is calling for his former student’s defeat in November? Unger’s a dyed-in-the-wool Leftist.
Not familiar with the controversy. It is over the Dream Act-inspired executive order?
June 20, 2012 at 12:19 pm
Erasmus
No — he thinks Obama has betrayed the progressive cause. (He sounds like most of the people who post comments on the CommonDreams website). ————————————– I’m very sorry, Stephen: this thread is quite long, and it’s anfractuous at this point. You have jumped in rather late in the game.
June 20, 2012 at 12:22 pm
j67k
YEs, Elmo. I said amino acid, because they are the basic building blocks for organic molecules…
Amino acids ( /əˈmiːnoʊ/, /əˈmaɪnoʊ/, or /ˈæmɪnoʊ/) are molecules containing an amine group, a carboxylic acid group, and a side-chain that is specific to each amino acid. The key elements of an amino acid are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. They are particularly important in biochemistry, where the term usually refers to alpha-amino acids.
An alpha-amino acid has the generic formula H2NCHRCOOH, where R is an organic substituent;[1] the amino group is attached to the carbon atom immediately adjacent to the carboxylate group (the α–carbon). Other types of amino acid exist when the amino group is attached to a different carbon atom; for example, in gamma-amino acids (such as gamma-amino-butyric acid) the carbon atom to which the amino group attaches is separated from the carboxylate group by two other carbon atoms. The various alpha-amino acids differ in which side-chain (R-group) is attached to their alpha carbon, and can vary in size from just one hydrogen atom in glycine to a large heterocyclic group in tryptophan.
Amino acids serve as the building blocks of proteins, which are linear chains of amino acids. Amino acids can be linked together in varying sequences to form a vast variety of proteins.[2] Twenty amino acids are naturally incorporated into polypeptides and are called proteinogenic or standard amino acids. These 20 are encoded by the universal genetic code. Nine standard amino acids are called “essential” for humans because they cannot be created from other compounds by the human body, and so must be taken in as food.
Since most people know what they are & that they are physical ‘things’, plus they are digested to form adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine, I figured it would help you understand that genes are “things” & that they “exist.”
“(And a chunk of human flesh CAN be identified as belonging to our species,)” And a fish gene CAN be identified as a fish gene. All genes can be identified, once they are mapped.
“I can understand why a creationist would object to transgenic crops, but not why anyone versed in science would. (The fear of vaccines makes much more sense to me. More than a few people contracted polio because of the vaccine they received. There has never been a documented case of anyone dying from a genetically modified crop”
- I won’t bother with the vaccine comment other than to suggest you look up the differences in how we used to make vaccines & how we do now.
Given your other comments it no longer surprises me at all that you “can’t understand why anyone versed in science would.” Read this it’s short.
http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/science_and_impacts/science/what-is-genetic-engineering.html
or this
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/pros-and-cons-of-genetic-engineering.html
One of the big concerns is that, if while rolling the genetic dice, they accidentally come up with something like a strain of corn that uptakes & stores arsenic in its kernels, then we will have a bitch of a time trying to get rid of it. Even though they are storing original seeds in the seed vault, it would still pose a problem trying to farm it, while avoiding crossbreeding contamination.
The basic argument you have is that “no one has died yet…”
June 20, 2012 at 12:29 pm
j67k
@Unk John, Gute! Halten Sie die fliegen in den mund! Vor allem diejenigen über Wahrscheinlichkeiten…
June 20, 2012 at 12:30 pm
Thorstein Veblen
Or, no one has died quickly, that would be another argument.
June 20, 2012 at 1:24 pm
Erasmus
For the record, you stated that a gene was a pattern of amino acids, and that is false. Why you bothered to “instruct” us about the role amino acids play in forming proteins is beyond me. — I agree with the Union of Concerned Scientists, for I am a cautious sort of guy and I would hate to see anyone die from a genetically modified crop, Regulations in this field do not bother me, although one side effect of them is a reluctance of small companies to involve themselves in research, thereby allowing corporations like Monsanto to dominate the industry. The second item you recommend is full of “mays….” I prefer to get my science from the likes of James Watson, E.O. Wilson, Christian de Duve, and scientists of similar (if that is possible) caliber. Richard Dawkins wrote an “Open Letter to Prince Charles” on the subject, and it is worth reading. After 17 years of eating GM food (17! and counting!), we poor folk who can’t afford a constant diet of organic are not susceptible to scare tactics. Read Michael Specter’s “The Organic Fetish” in his book ‘Denialism’ and you too may learn to live with a modern method of genetic modification and understand that it’s no worse than the old-fashioned one. (Specter is a staff writer at that arch-conservative magazine, The New Yorker.)
June 20, 2012 at 1:46 pm
suzy blah blah
@Erasmus, you too may learn to live with a modern method of genetic modification and understand that it’s no worse than the old-fashioned one.
-maybe, but then to fulfill his ego needs he’ll have to find some other PC issue to bitch about. I won’t hold suzy’s breath.
@Stephen, You are scraping the bottom of an irrelevant barrel.
-you can say that again. But by continuing to speak truth to science people like ourselves who can see through it will influence others who’ve not yet been so fundamentally affected by the brainwashing.
June 20, 2012 at 1:59 pm
suzy blah blah
@Stephen -of course many will strive to keep us divided so as to protect their false conclusions and perpetuate the scientific lie in whatever little way they can. Eric’s been moderating my comments now ever since you said:
June 19, 2012 at 7:09 am Stephen
Suzy, hi. I know you’re with me
June 20, 2012 at 2:41 pm
JK
Whatever Elmo. I accept your rebuke that my wording using amino acids was incorrect. But, I find it humorous coming from you. Especially since the actual content of my point was far more accurate than your goofy assertions.
Also, at least my comments are MINE. I don’t just quote & misrepresent what other people say, and use their names like some icon proving the veracity of some insipid claim. Yes, sometimes you can make errors that way, but at least they are your errors.
I prefer getting my science by either taking some college courses, or reading the textbooks for them. I’m sure you are more comfortable not taking the effort that requires.
June 20, 2012 at 2:41 pm
Eric Kirk
suzy – for the record, eveybody in this thread seems to be booted into moderation, when they post in this thread. I have no idea why.
June 20, 2012 at 3:21 pm
suzy blah blah
-Eric, do you expect suzy to believe that? Just on your word? No, my friend, until you can show me some proof, or at least convincing evidence, i call bullshit.
June 20, 2012 at 3:34 pm
Mitch
Stephen,
My point is that science has long since realized that our immediate interpretations of our senses do not necessarily correspond to reality, which is why scientists are prone to measuring things.
So when someone reports that they hear God’s voice, scientists may accept their honesty, but will only believe them if they hear it too, and if it shows up on instruments not subject to the same false positives that our minds are.
It’s exactly the same when we say dogs understand us when we talk; we may believe it, but it’s not necessarily true. So scientists will probe our assertions, and will come up with experiments to see if the dogs (for example) really understand our language, or if perhaps they understand our tone of voice, or perhaps something else.
If you don’t believe in a shared reality (as I gather some folks here don’t) then you have no use for science, because science is about finding things about reality that we mutually observe and agree on. Subjective experience, whether of god or something else, is simply not part of that shared reality.
I don’t doubt people when they state their subjective experience; I just don’t think they are reliable in interpreting it. Studies on split-brain patients and others have demonstrated that people’s brains make up “reasonable-to-their-data” explanations for behaviors that the experimenter knows have other (shared reality) explanations.
For example, patients who are missing an arm but have brain damage making them unaware that the limb is missing — yes, it happens — will make up explanations of why they cannot touch their nose with the missing arm. They aren’t trying to fool anyone — their mind is just developing its explanations as best it can, and lacking the important information that there’s no arm there to move, the mind comes up with stories. They completely believe their explanations as they state them.
We all do this all the time — it just becomes glaringly obvious when an observer has access to additional information. It’s what bigotry via stereotyping is all about. That’s why staking out ground in our shared reality is so important. We CAN communicate about things in shared reality, and using mathematics we can do so precisely. When it comes to our interiors, the best we can do is hope that we can communicate our experience to others, and misunderstanding is easy.
Scientific theories, in the absence of sufficient information, can be equally as wrong as religious dogma. But they get “overthrown” when enough non-compliant information accumulates. So Newtonian dynamics is an excellent match for the environment we find ourselves in, but fails dismally at sizes and speeds we don’t normally experience. As the added data accumulated, new theories were developed that fit all the existing facts as well as Newtonian dynamics, but also fit the new observations. If some new information arrives beyond what we have now, I’m sure whatever physics we have now will be altered to fit the new data.
If instruments tap into a person having a spiritual experience and let others observe that there is no material cause (no change in brain states or any other material component of the person), that would be a good argument for the spiritual, or for designing better instruments. But if a spiritual experience can be understood and then reproduced by having someone excite a particular neural pathway, that’s a suggestion that it is an example of an unreliable narrator — someone who thinks a god has tinted the world red, but who has really just had someone put red-tinted sunglasses on them.
Science reflects the information available to us now, while religion as it is presented to most people — which will not bend dogma to accommodate new facts — insists on the literal reality of the flood, or of the value of throwing salt over one’s shoulder.
I’ll say it again — science can have nothing to say about ultimate causes, but the need to invoke religion to explain why particular phenomena take place recedes every time science advances.
So it’s understandable that many scientists believe in a creator setting up a universe in which evolution takes place, but it’s not understandable how a scientist can accept myth as literal truth.
For example, I don’t see how anyone can believe that the JudeoChristian God spoke to Moses from a burning bush because he preferred Moses’ team to Pharoah’s, or how that same god planted his seed in a virgin and incarnated himself so he could suffer on our behalf, or that we know either of these events took place because they were written down in the Bible.
Sure, they may have — but I have zero worthwhile evidence.
June 20, 2012 at 3:39 pm
Eric Kirk
suzy – whatever.
June 20, 2012 at 3:56 pm
Erasmus
Does anyone remember why JK and I are arguing? It’s not about the safety of genetically modified crops (that’s an issue that mainstream science settled years ago) but about my comment an eon ago: that some environmentalists deserve the condemnation that certain Christians incur (when they block stem cell research, for example) . I used the example of the eco-saboteurs who uproot the plants used in scientific experiments (trial plantings). I think the tone of JK’s comments, the misleading information, the diversionary tactics, all reinforce my point. Intolerance can infect any group. Ideology or religion can cloud the thought-processes. ————————————————————————————————–As the planet warms, as population increases, as soil degrades, we need all the tools we can muster to increase crop yields. If we can achieve success without genetic engineering, I won’t object — why should I? But ruling out a possible solution because of enviro scare tactics based on unfounded fears …… that is unacceptable.
June 20, 2012 at 4:15 pm
suzy blah blah
Subjective experience, whether of god or something else, is simply not part of that shared reality.
-Mitch, a vision is NOT a subjective experience. It’s not something one conjures up subjectively. When one encounters a god, or a devil, or whatever, by means of a vision, it is not, i repeat it is NOT, a subjective experience. You may be having trouble understanding this because you’re not a visionary. But everyone has dreams. Like visions, you don’t make it up subjectively, You don’t invent the happenings in your dreams any more than you invent a tree-branch falling on your car in waking life. It happens to you. Likewise, visions come to you –objectively. Yes, their contents are open to subjective interpretation. But in their original form they’re objective. It’s basic.
June 20, 2012 at 4:19 pm
JK
Eric, I ‘think’ you might have set some setting that activates moderation if it doesn’t recognize words or if there are curse words. You should look through the settings carefully, because I’ve written 2 posts within minutes of each other and had one go through immediately & the other waited for moderation.
@Suzy, Why would he bother to lie? It’s his blog, he can moderate it any way he wants.
@Mitch “science can have nothing to say about ultimate causes, but the need to invoke religion to explain why particular phenomena take place recedes every time science advances.” Nicely put. Also, since religion does not like to recede and fights tooth & nail for each inch, it causes a friction that slows scientific advancement.
And, before Elmo pipes in about GE, there is a marked difference between slowing scientific research & slowing the application of a science before it’s fully understood.
June 20, 2012 at 4:26 pm
JK
@Suzy “it is not, i repeat it is NOT, a subjective experience. You may be having trouble understanding this because you’re not a visionary.” …
I hate to break this to you, but if he can’t understand something because of who or what he is, then by definition it is a subjective concept.
sub·jec·tive [suhb-jek-tiv]
adjective
1. existing in the mind; belonging to the thinking subject rather than to the object of thought ( opposed to objective).
2. pertaining to or characteristic of an individual; personal; individual: a subjective evaluation.
3. relating to properties or specific conditions of the mind as distinguished from general or universal experience.
June 20, 2012 at 4:37 pm
suzy blah blah
@Suzy, Why would he bother to lie?
-if you are serious about wanting to know my answer to that, try listening to what i said.
June 20, 2012 at 4:50 pm
JK
@Elmo “It’s not about the safety of genetically modified crops (that’s an issue that mainstream science settled years ago) but about my comment an eon ago: that some environmentalists deserve the condemnation that certain Christians incur (when they block stem cell research, for example)”
1: No, it is not settled. They are doing it because we live in a society that is controlled by wealth, rather than competence or intellect.
2: There is a huge difference between blocking research & blocking an application of a science that has NOT been fully researched.
The exact same arguments were made for nuclear power. Every bit of research looking into the damage nuclear power generation in the U.S. has caused has either been de-funded or actively blocked, so idiots are free to say “no one has died because of nuclear power … in the U.S.” Which is an obvious load of shit when you look at cancer rates in various areas.
June 20, 2012 at 4:56 pm
JK
@Suzy You said “-Eric, do you expect suzy to believe that? Just on your word? No, my friend, until you can show me some proof, or at least convincing evidence, i call bullshit.”
Suzy, Eric no care what Suzy think. Suzy think Eric tricksy her. But, Eric haves no reason to tricksy her. Suzy free to call bullshit all Suzy likes, it make no bad for Eric.
June 20, 2012 at 4:59 pm
suzy blah blah
but if he can’t understand something because of who or what he is, then by definition it is a subjective concept.
-not “concept” -EXPERIENCE. Sure, it may be a subject concept for you, or Mitch, but it’s an objective experiencefor the one having the vision or dream.
June 20, 2012 at 5:00 pm
suzy blah blah
subjective concept
June 20, 2012 at 5:10 pm
Stephen
JK, why would Eric bother to lie?
For the same reason he censors people like me. I’m enjoying a long run of posting comments here but his usual practice is to let me post a few and then block me after realizing he can’t win in any argument with me. This guy is pal’s with Richard Salzman and Heraldo. They all have zero respect for fair play in their blogs and political actions. Eric poses as their presentable fascade, front man but like Suzy, I wouldn’t put lying past Eric if it won him points. He’s a lawyer after all and lying is a lawyer’s major tool for winning in court as well as in politics. Sorry, but there it is, reaction from blog persecution by terrible Proggies, or is it Progites?
“I’m very sorry, Stephen: this thread is quite long, and it’s anfractuous at this point. You have jumped in rather late in the game.”
Errasmus, if your science is as bad as your observation sacrificed for your ego protection then all your arguments posted here are in vain. Go up to the top of the thread and count the comments until you get to yours then to mine. “Jumped in rather late in the game”? you say..
Mitch, listen to Suzy. I don’t know why it is atheists are just like fundamentalist Christians when it comes to absorbing any science information that counters their dogmas. How many times do you guys have to hear us whose spiritual brain receptors are functioning that you cannot measure spiritual phenomena directly any more than you can predict, set up measurement for the moment a scientist gets a brilliant idea. Inspiration is not under the command of any person. It truly is like the wind, going where it will go. Yes, you can measure the changes in barometric pressure but that’s after the winds moved things around, you’re second-guessing in other words, once you try to pin-point weather conditions after the moment you measure them. This is only analogy. There may come a day when computers can keep up with all the variations possible in weather prediction, just like there came a day when brain scientists found that our brains are hardwired to experience spiritual events. Mine does. It registers them and I can feel it as clearly as I can feel excellent music only sometimes the spiritual experience exceeds that of music appreciation and literally does make your body shake, in what seems to be rarer occurrences, profusely sweat. Something is passing through one’s system and it expressed in the languages of similar spiritual experiences recorded through time to those of us receptive to spiritual phenomena.
And this, why is it so difficult to understand that when a phenomena is recorded by human beings over and over again for literally thousands of years, perhaps millions of documents all totaled, and all referring to human beings experiences Something outside the physical realm, outside their own minds that comes to one, not comes out of one, i.e., it is not subjective as atheists so want to believe. But blind faith in denial of all the products of spiritual encounters is what holds the atheist fundamentalist belief system together just as blind faith in denial of science facts that counter the fundamentalist Christian position is what holds that type of fundamentalist belief together. You all will notice no one yet is answering my challenge of why Nature evolves any sort of spiritual brain receptors if there is nothing there to receive? Evolution favors successful adaptation and animals including humans cannot afford to be spending significant amounts of their time dealing with non-existent invisible forces. And please, not the social bonding argument which has the fatal flaw that “real” activities such as cooking meals and eating them together, making music and dancing, and story-telling all can serve that function quite well without need for invisible entities with supernatural powers.
June 20, 2012 at 5:27 pm
Stephen
One can no more get rid of religion than one can get rid of the sun or moon or stars. They are there and for some of us even the stars themselves are God’s Sign-ature. The Judeo-Christian epic holds a hidden Celestial Torah that I have found only with God’s guidance, synchronicity events placing the right information in my hands at the right time. I could never have discovered it by intellectual effort as it’s not recorded anywhere as such, even in the rabbinical literature except as an original heavenly Torah but not really knowing its purpose. How does one move the spiritual ball forward and advance humanity? It is by periodic input of new spiritual revelations and visions..such as Paxcalibur which now has become a religious icon within the Nazareth Christian community. How does this happen when Christianity has no record of officially sanctioning hippie icons? Spiritual movement, that’s how. Pax spiritually woke up hundreds of people who saw it delivering God’s new Message without need of any words. A real Pentecost type event, not one written as part of a religious propaganda book about events no one can authenticate as historical. Anyway, it’s the End Times of Atheism so perhaps that’s a fitting place for this thread to stop..
June 20, 2012 at 6:10 pm
JK
@Suzy “it’s an objective experience for the one having the vision or dream.”
You seriously did not read the definition I cut & pasted did you? That sentence contradicts itself. A non contradictory statement would be “it’s an objective experience for everyone.”
June 20, 2012 at 6:16 pm
Mitch
JK,
Objectively, it’s not worth bothering.
June 20, 2012 at 8:21 pm
JK
I know… But it’s so friggen annoying.
@Suzy, I give it one final try.
ob·jec·tive [uhb-jek-tiv]
adjective
4. being the object or goal of one’s efforts or actions.
5. not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased: an objective opinion.
6. intent upon or dealing with things external to the mind rather than with thoughts or feelings, as a person or a book.
If this doesn’t help I will assume you are just trying to bait people, because SUBJECTIVELY I refuse to believe someone is truly this obtuse…
June 20, 2012 at 8:30 pm
suzy blah blah
1. existing in the mind; belonging to the thinking subject rather than to the object of thought ( opposed to objective).
-what suzy said doesnt contradict that at all. The vision observed is it’s own self and does not belong to the subject.
June 20, 2012 at 8:36 pm
Eric Kirk
For the record, I have no reason to censor suzy. She never says anything.
June 20, 2012 at 8:52 pm
Anonymous
SMHLOL!
June 20, 2012 at 11:39 pm
JK
Stephen… “I don’t know why it is atheists are just like fundamentalist Christians when it comes to absorbing any science information that counters their dogmas.”… Possibly because they aren’t. Atheist “dogma” is science & rationalism, so, that’s a nonsensical statement. What the hell is it with you & Suzy, I think you guys are doing it on purpose.
“…all referring to human beings experiences Something outside the physical realm, outside their own minds that comes to one, not comes out of one, i.e., it is not subjective as atheists so want to believe.” Stephen, It’s not subjective according to atheists, It’s subjective according to the English language.
Maybe you don’t quit grasp the basic concept behind the word, let me clarify something… A thing that is subjective can still be true.(get it?) BUT, if it’s objective it (by definition) can be observed and verified by anyone. (see how that won’t work with hallucinations… I mean visions?)
Understand, everyone else objectively sees you guys as illiterate clowns, whereas I am just humbly trying to help you.
June 20, 2012 at 11:53 pm
JK
Stephen ” …hear us whose spiritual brain receptors are functioning.”
Well, Stephen, it’s only fair, after all you don’t hear ‘us’ whose other brain receptors are functioning…
June 21, 2012 at 6:13 am
Stephen
Yeah I do. Loud and clear. “Atheist “dogma” is science and rationalism”. And that is pure unadulterated bullshit. You guys are still not addressing the challenge I presented to you that knocks your very unscientific atheist belief system into the toilet of passe ideologies. You won’t look at the scientific evidence and continue to spout your dogma trying to make spiritual events conform to everyday ones, an impossibility that you’ve been told so for decades, perhaps hundreds of years, but it never sinks in because atheism is a fundamentalist belief system that is held only by denial of facts. Science is not on your side, JK. It never was because the true Scientific Method requires an open mind and the atheist mind is a closed one. Agnosticism is the true scientific mindset re God and spiritual reality, not atheism.
To repeat again: Atheism cannot explain why evolution has hardwired the human brain to be able to process spiritual events. Hardwired. Please explain how this happened if there was never anything there to process?
Atheism does not allow for human knowledge advancement but wants to freeze it in the past actually now that brain science has put a huge hole in the atheist arsenal. You see, logic looks at the historical record of human advancement and must conclude that what was known yesterday will not stand forever as time increases knowledge of our world, e.g. the brain science findings. So, while electricity appeared as “magic” to people 200 years ago we know about its properties now. While “romantic love” appeared to be an imaginary emotion, many believing it to be exactly like religion, a fantasy of the mind and not real, science comes along and finds the testosterone/hormonal/brain connection to romantic love. Now science shows that experiences I have have their own dedicated brain processing areas and still we have our atheists trotting out their tired old “if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist” mantra. Sorry, but it’s just the scientific truth: you atheists are mentally deficient in a significant human ability. That left brain has overpowered your right and left you bereft of a range of human mentality that responds to spiritual input.
June 21, 2012 at 10:38 am
suzy blah blah
@Stephen, there’s no getting through to people who are unwilling to do the work necessary to intelligently discuss matters concerning God. Eric, ED, Tra, Mitch, and J67K all ignored the challenges above given by myself as well. All many of them seem capable of is making insults and calling names when confronted with deep truths. Because they are afraid. Scared of having their bubble popped and the narrow box their thoughts exist in exposed. So it’s natural that they run from spiritual truths. It even gives them a little kick –flight and fright syndrome– which they eventually become addicted to. it’s scientific LOL!. The real problem here is that the ego creates a stubborn and ignorant blockage to higher awareness. As long as they continue to cling to it they will exist in the lower realms. The largest obstacles to spiritual awareness are fear and desire, something about which they have no clue, but of which they display an abundance. Not to mention out and out ignorance. Some like J67K can’t even understand the word “objective” and its connotations within spiritual circles. Yet some of them like Mitch still pose as being spiritually aware by posting Buddhist BS and using spiritual sayings such as “we’re all one” etc., LOL! But to them oneness means oneness with materiality. To them “spirit” is something dependent on nutrition and the environment, whose highest form is intellect and reason. If they’re too lazy to do the work of investigating spiritual questions first-hand so that they can get personal knowledge from real experience and observation of such, but can only defer to quotations, book recommendations and cut and paste jobs, then, like i said in the beginning, “pearls before swine”. In the end it’s useless wasting our breath because they truly don’t have the ability to understand. Sad small lives lived within the confines of narrow concepts such as reality equates with materiality, visions are subjective, etc.
June 21, 2012 at 11:03 am
Stephen
Maybe they should take some more LSD:
Wikipedia on Ram Dass, Richard Alpert:
“While Richard did have a bar mitzvah, he was “disappointed by its essential hollowness”.[4] He considered himself an atheist[5] and did not profess any religion during his early life, describing himself as “inured to religion. I didn’t have one whiff of God until I took psychedelics.”[6]
Psychedelics didn’t do it for me but I’ve read enough to know it did do it for many–opened their otherwise dormant spirituality. The original religious conversion experience for me was actually some weird virus in my system that allowed “normal” consciousness to recede enough for spiritual consciousness to emerge. But since then, 33 years ago, I’ve had a great many spiritual visions and revelations, they never seem to stop although there are lulls in between visionary episodes.
Suzy, are you in Salmon Creek?
June 21, 2012 at 12:44 pm
suzy blah blah
Something outside the physical realm, outside their own minds that comes to one, not comes out of one, i.e., it is not subjective as atheists so want to believe.
-exactly right Stephen, it’s NOT subjective. The terminology, mind, psyche, soul, holy ghost, etc. changes from culture to culture and from era to era, but those of us who have personal experience with these things don’t have any trouble mixing and matching. Just like bi-linguists mix and match different languages, and maybe throw in some Latin, Spanish, or Native American to spice their delivery. It’s the understanding that is paramount, not the label. Not that any of the other regulars could understand this Steve, except maybe Erasmus, but your use of the word “own” alludes to an important distinction. Outside of their “own” minds, yes indeed. But that does not mean outside of the Mind. The universal mind extends infinitely. One’s own mind is like your house, it’s very small on a universal scale, nothing to get excited about, others can come in, invited or not, and check out the contents of your mind. (Don’t be afraid guys, it’s called telepathy), goes on all the time, thousands of recorded instances, millions unrecorded. And, wonder of wonders (wink) you can leave your mind, and travel extensively within “the Mind”. It takes overcoming the fear of letting go of the ego though (temporarily), which for a lot people is “uncomfortable”. Yet with great understanding and much patience i am able to hold them as not being guilty of anything except perhaps sloth. Mostly they just aren’t evolved enough yet. It takes time. And more importantly an understanding of time. But innocent as they may be, it’s still too bad and a shame, because only by letting go of their ego will they be able to see outside the box and understand the real meaning of larger truths that they like to yak about and parade forward, such as “freedom, liberty, justice, righteousness”, oh, and don’t forget “oneness”, LOL! .
June 21, 2012 at 1:00 pm
Mitch
Stephen,
To repeat again: Atheism cannot explain why evolution has hardwired the human brain to be able to process spiritual events. Hardwired. Please explain how this happened if there was never anything there to process?
Evolution has not hardwired the human brain to be able to process spiritual events.
Evolution has given humans, and perhaps other animals, the ability to feel, among other things, joy, sadness, and empathy. I won’t bother with the reasons, but any intro textbook will give you the standard explanations.
Once the ability to feel these things exists, they will be felt in response to different situations. Some such situations strike some people as “visions.”
The “visions” are real to the person, as are their emotions.
They have no source outside the person or, if they do, that source has never been identified by objective means.
If you believe they come from God, that’s fine by me. But I’m saying I have no scientifically-acceptable evidence that they do. I’m not clear on why that should bother you, since you are apparently confident of their source.
Many people have told me I’m going to rot in hell. It’s not clear whether that will be because I like putting my penis where God doesn’t want it put, or because I don’t believe in God, or because I haven’t kept kosher, or because I don’t believe Christ died for humanity’s sins, or because I don’t believe Mohammed was her prophet, or because I wasn’t nice enough to Benjy in kindergarten, or because I won’t worship any God who’s idea of justice is eternal damnation for some. I think if the JudeoChristian God existed she’d have a lot of ‘splainin to do about what a mess she’s created, and if we were ever to meet face-to-face I’d be sorely tempted to engage in violence to let her know what I think of her.
No need to try to intervene on my behalf, I’m quite content, destined for eternal damnation or not. Be glad you won’t be with me, and we can go along our separate paths.
(Stephen, that’s the end of my participation in this dialog. Be well.)
June 21, 2012 at 1:20 pm
suzy blah blah
For the record, I have no reason to censor suzy. She never says anything.
-translation: Eric never hears anything. One of the regular commenters hear, Ernie, printed out one of my sohumParlence comments a while back and framed it and hung it on his office wall in downtown Gville. Some quip about love and understanding. Kind of embarrassing but true nonetheless. I wonder how many of Eric’s comments are hanging on walls around town? Maybe someone hung a letter to the editor up, LOL! ya never know, but his epistles are so wordy that you’d have to have a big space for it to fit.
June 21, 2012 at 1:42 pm
JK
No Suzy, I only understand the words meaning in English. I suggest that you expand your lexicon so that you can use properly descriptive words, instead of misusing others.
And by the way, I do believe in something that ‘you’ might describe as ‘god’, but I laugh at pathetic people who try to quantify it. I also laugh at self-absorbed twits who claim that they are closer to the divine & that they interact with it directly. Get a grip. You are not that important. If you were, you would likely have a better grasp on diction.
June 21, 2012 at 1:53 pm
JK
Stephen “Atheism cannot explain why evolution has hardwired the human brain to be able to process spiritual events. Hardwired. Please explain how this happened if there was never anything there to process?”
Stephen, there is no “hard wiring” in the human brain that processes ‘spiritual events. Anyone who says differently is selling something. All you can say is that when people claim to have spiritual experiences a certain part of the brain is active. If you have a machine that can independently verify that an actual spiritual event is happening, I suggest that you market it.
“an impossibility that you’ve been told so for decades, perhaps hundreds of years” Who the F#@% are you talking to? Are you hallucinating right now? Most of us have not been around 1 hundred years, much less ‘hundreds’. If you are speaking to the human ‘gestalt’ I think your at the wrong blog…
June 21, 2012 at 2:40 pm
suzy blah blah
I do believe in something that ‘you’ might describe as ‘god’
-you’re overestimating yourself, dude. What you believe in couldn’t possibly be anything even resembling what suzy knows from personal experience as “god”.
I also laugh at self-absorbed twits who claim that they are closer to the divine & that they interact with it directly.
-it’s a small minded hollow laugh. And based on false information and uncomprehending concepts. No, suzy is not any closer to the divine then anyone else. But i DO interact with it directly. There is absolutely no doubt about that fact. To you there may be a disbelief, to Eric a doubt, but when one is in contact with metaphysical knowledge it is an unmistakable experience. Try to wrap your concepts around this one: suzy knows that she IS god. And that the whole energy that expresses itself in the galaxy is intimate to me. And no i’m not self absorbed. Quite the opposite, it’s the self absorbed people, like you, who can’t let go of their ego. Consequently they don’t feel a part of the whole but separate. They feel a stranger to the world. Trapped inside their ego shell. And so they feel hostile. And then they start to shove things and people around, sadistically. They want to beat up on and bully whoever won’t submit to their will. Self absorbed people are unable to hear the voice of the divine because their ego is in the way making its own noises and obstructing communication with a deeper knowledge. Yes, i talk to the Universe. I talk to the sun and the forest. No, it doesn’t say, “hey suzy what up?” The information is downloaded straight into my cells. Awesome amounts of complex information in telescoped form. Funny thing is, suzy can understand it.
But Stephen, already explained most of this to you better than suzy can and you still flounder with outdated ideas of materialism. Ideas that if pursued aggressively threaten to destroy this precious world as we know it.
June 21, 2012 at 6:50 pm
Stephen
“After spending his early medical career studying how the brain works in neurological and psychiatric conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, depression and anxiety, Newberg took that brain-scanning technology and turned it toward the spiritual: Franciscan nuns, Tibetan Buddhists, and Pentecostal Christians speaking in tongues. His team members at the University of Pennsylvania were surprised by what they found.
“When we think of religious and spiritual beliefs and practices, we see a tremendous similarity across practices and across traditions.”
The frontal lobe, the area right behind our foreheads, helps us focus our attention in prayer and meditation.The parietal lobe, located near the backs of our skulls, is the seat of our sensory information. Newberg says it’s involved in that feeling of becoming part of something greater than oneself.The limbic system, nestled deep in the center, regulates our emotions and is responsible for feelings of awe and joy.
Newberg calls religion the great equalizer and points out that similar areas of the brain are affected during prayer and meditation. Newberg suggests that these brain scans may provide proof that our brains are built to believe in God. Echoing Jung, he says there may be universal features of the human mind that actually make it easier for us to believe in a higher power.”
A neurologist telling us our brains are hardwired for spiritual processing vs. our atheist pundits here who say it isn’t, without offering any proof while brain scans show the proof. On internet religious talkboards where I do most of my ministry I don’t argue with atheists or fundamentalist Christians after delivering the Fatal Flaw news to them because both groups behave exactly alike: they will argue with you until kingdom comes by trotting out and repeating their mantras they’ve sold themselves with while refusing to look at or respond to new brain science information for atheists and historical discovery for religious fundamentalists.
It’s the inability to see that religious beliefs do evolve through time that allows the atheist mindset to project their objections to religions by giving examples of old religious beliefs that have been spiritually out of date for 2000 years. Notice no atheists complain about the pagan religious belief systems in operation before the Abrahamic ones. But these are not only the End Times of Atheism but the End of Abraham is now on the intellectual horizon so spirituality is a whole new ball game now. Expect the division of Christianity to follow the Piscean Age/Aquarian Age divide, as God moves us all along the road to higher consciousness of existence in Creation.
June 22, 2012 at 6:12 am
moviedad
Wow, 190 comments. Ok, I want to say something here at the tail end of this apologia and disputation.
Believe or disbelieve that there are more to things than our senses normally perceive, whatever. But the “epiphany” or the “God-moment” carries its own proof. That is a changed life. A completely new concept of reality. For those who have gone through this metanoia there is the conviction of “knowing.” Throughout history people have gone to their deaths rather than deny the reality of their experience. I notice those who dispute a higher reality, have never experienced a higher reality.
Every day science is coming up with new discoveries that get closer and closer to the realm of the “spiritual.”
The few “common-sense” commentators on this thread have been shouted down by fanaticism. I feel that fanaticism is inconsistent with a genuine epiphany. These almost always bring about concern and compassion for others. That is why the prophet says: “Only fools dispute the existence of God.” Because regardless of what you personally believe: what’s the point? The personal “proof” is unknowable outside of personal experience.
June 26, 2012 at 5:24 pm
grouchy
So how many of you who deny the existence of God/god in any form believe in astrology? (If so, you’re not Scorpios!) Or that an entity loosely known as “the Universe” will give you what you want if you ask it with sufficient sincerity — or failing that, it will guide you to what you should want.
I think the problem with belief in God is that many people equate It with the guy who farts thunderbolts or whatever. We don’t know what God is. That doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist. We have glimpses of something that doesn’t always seem to put humanity, let alone ourselves personally, as Its first priority, which is quite contrary to the Christian beliefs I grew up with, but which I feel is somehow closer to the truth.
I must be an agnostic, although for whatever reason, I feel the existence of God quite keenly.
June 26, 2012 at 5:51 pm
Eric Kirk
I don’t know that I accept or deny the existence of God/god in any form, but I am absolutely convinced that astrology is an industry of fraud.
June 26, 2012 at 7:19 pm
Stephen
12,000 years of recorded astro-labs following the movements of the “wandering” stars against the background of Constellations proves your “industry of fraud” is a foundational science of humankind. Does it matter what you, the man without God in your life, opine about things beyond your experience? It’s twaddle of the ignorant straw boss bystander who stands by and directs as if he knew what he was talking about while the workmen ignore him and continue to work. The Jewish religion which you seem more dearly attached to than others, at least defending its members more than other religions, any other on this blog come to think of it, is like all the rest, also based on ASTROLOGY. Find out the Canaanite name for the Jewish God Most High, EL Elyon, Eric, and then come crawling back with tears of repentence for your boo-boo of stupidity as dear old God Most High is the name of Saturn which is why Jews are commanded to hold the Sabbath as the Jewish holy day of the week, “Sabbath” being derived from the Hebrew word for Saturn.
“Is-Ra-EL”; Isis-RA-EL= Moon, Sun, Saturn, the Egyptian planetary Trinity taken out of Egypt..
June 26, 2012 at 7:54 pm
Stephen
Thank God for Eric without whom I would have no straight man. Bless the stars above for people like Grouchy who has only to read the Gospel of Humanity to find out the identity of God. There’s a sequel coming out that further reveals how God has used the stars as “Signs”, i.e., as a form of heavenly Script for guiding human beings on earth. Is it real? As one living an archetypal Aquarian life I cannot judge for others but it is truth of existence for me. There’s a 3000 year old Highway in the Sky that leads humanity slowly but surely out of terrestial behavior based on control of terra which requires terrorism, and into a higher consciousness that doesn’t need terrorism to hold society together. It’s in the riddle of the Sphinx but not word one but the image one.
June 26, 2012 at 10:52 pm
Mitch
I think astrology is just as effective as homeopathy. And I’m a fan of Rob Brezsny. He has great suggestions, although I doubt his suggestions are better for one month’s children than any other month’s children.
Stephen, I think I get the “Ra” part, but “Is” and “El”? Pardon my boo-boo of stupidity, or at least ignorance. “Great boo-boo of stupidity” is a phrase I just know I’ll enjoy using.
June 27, 2012 at 10:12 am
suzy blah blah
So how many of you who deny the existence of God/god in any form believe in astrology?
-exactly. suzy pointed that out above by pointing at the large influx of people in recent years moving into religions like neo-paganism, wiccan etc. The study is out of date and meaningless except as a spin.
June 27, 2012 at 10:55 am
Stephen
Mitch, Judaism took many religious concepts “out of Egypt” starting with reinventing the Egyptian title “moses” changing it from the Egyptian meaning of “Son” as in a son of a god, e.g. Tutmoses III, conqueror of Canaan about the time of “Moses”, to the Hebrew meaning “drawn out of water”, a concept that only makes sense once you know the astrological connections buried within Torah and Tanakh story characters and events. Otherwise, it’s another Jewish makeover as happened with the Sinai Covenant that subsumed Canaanite EL Elyon, into his son, Yahweh, a merger that produced the very schizoid God of Israel. It happens that ancient Egyptian culture had three major religious observances involving the sun, moon, and Saturn, the sun represented by four gods, Ra, Osiris, Horus, Aten, with Isis representing the moon. Saturn’s long 30 year rotation was marked by a huge 30 year celebration, kinda like the Jubilee of Judaism. Others have noticed the “Israel”= Isis-Ra-EL connections and there is no way to tell at this point if it has real validity. One has only the Jewish scriptures propensity to reinvent pagan gods and even places to make them into “Hebrews”, e.g. “Cush” and “Canaan”, supposedly “sons” of Ham (= Egypt) and of course Abraham, the ultimate remake, turning Vedic deities Brahma and his consort Sarasvati into Abraham and Sarah.
“Benjamin” is sold to Jews and Christians blindly following them as “Son of my right hand” in Hebrew but it really means “Sons of Yamm”, that connection only to be found by those digging into the Canaanite roots of Judaism. Ancients practiced religious Star Wars where their stellar deities and their powers were to be taken like trophies by warring nations. Isis-Ra-El, taken out of Egypt and Canaan to serve the Jewish people’s god, Yahweh.
June 27, 2012 at 12:45 pm
Unk John
I thought I’d make it an even 200.
I would like to ponder this statement by Suzy to Stephen, though.
“All many of them seem capable of is making insults and calling names when confronted with deep truths.”
Subsequent to that statement came many truly mean spirited remarks from both Stephen and Suzy. Perhaps in your interactions with God, you could discuss with him/her the relative value of such actions.
I can understand that both Suzy and Stephen have experienced something in their lives that have shown them the existence of God. I have a harder time understanding why so much animosity must be directed toward people who have not been so lucky to either recognize whatever it was that Stephen and Suzy recognized, or are perhaps not capable of recognizing it.
It seems that many people today are severely restricted by a seeming necessity to have physical proof of the existence of something which is not, in the normal sense, a physical entity. They while away the hours doing weird things like coming up with ideas that allow all of us to discuss this on the internet. They feel more comfortable if they can, as Ernie says, “Hit it with a hammer.”
June 27, 2012 at 1:52 pm
Mitch
Thanks, Stephen. Interesting.
June 27, 2012 at 2:12 pm
Anonymous
“I don’t know that I accept or deny the existence of God/god in any form, but I am absolutely convinced that astrology is an industry of fraud.”
You say that but you humor fortune cookies and horoscopes once in awhile like everybody else. That’s your “god gene”…or whatever you want to call it. You cannot deny particle alignment relating to energy flow. Our galaxy is one big bowl of particle soup…when particles align (or diverge), energy flows accordingly.
In the same way a squirrel will never comprehend a computer, a human will never comprehend _______?
June 27, 2012 at 2:23 pm
Anonymous
unk john @ 12:45, I’m not witnessing much “science hate” on this or other blogs, but I sure see a lot of people insulting “religion”. Can I call the foundation of your beliefs a complete lie, and would you consider such a statement at least a put down? Because many do, just as many see people who defend themselves from such accusations as being “negative”. For example, erik has written paragraphs in this thread insisting people who “believe in god” have been lied to and are lying to themselves and others. He insists it’s healthier to doubt than to believe absolutely. Want to try to get erik to “doubt science” in the same manner?
Here’s where erik demonstrates his double standard….the false science/religion polarity to which he subscribes….erik has no explanation whatsoever as to the nature of the space in which his mind’s eye exists.
June 27, 2012 at 2:25 pm
Eric Kirk
For example, erik has written paragraphs in this thread insisting people who “believe in god” have been lied to and are lying to themselves and others.
Can you refer me to one or two such paragraphs? Thank you.
June 27, 2012 at 2:45 pm
Anonymous
It’s the basis of your argument, eric. “Science” could be lying to you, right now, just the same. A point I’ve tried to get across is how very little a person can prove without entirely relying on the word of somebody thirty degrees of separation down the associative ladder, who has also chosen to believe somebody else….a stream of claims largely based on one’s WANT to believe them. I could dig up your more evident claims like “Christians are so heavily focused on religious schools and indoctrination, because indoctrinating kids is critical for keeping a religion alive.” Is that what christians are all about? Which christians? You say doubt is healthier than certainty, but that exact certainty is keeping people from killing themselves as we discuss this. Why does that person have to be wrong? Why should that person begin to doubt what they KNOW to be true? Look at your archives, why are you so into not being into religion? You and others repeatedly associate religious institutions with religion. I wouldn’t associate you with Dupont’s team of scientists rather than, say, Greenpeace’s team of scientists. My other points stand as well.
June 27, 2012 at 3:22 pm
Eric Kirk
In other words, you cannot actually quote me.
If you want to have a discussion with me, I’m happy to oblige. But if you would rather have a discussion with your own strawman of me, please don’t let me interrupt.
June 27, 2012 at 3:26 pm
Anonymous
I just quoted you, duh. and I’m not going back to your archives for more, there’s plenty of it!
If you do not CARE to follow a line of discussion to which you might have to demonstrate humility in face of an anonymous blogger who disagrees with you, what else would be new?
June 27, 2012 at 3:32 pm
Eric Kirk
You shouldn’t have to look in the archives. You said that I wrote “paragraphs within this thread insisting that people who believe in god have been lied to.” If I said that, you could find it in an instant. But I didn’t say it. You’re making it up.
June 27, 2012 at 3:38 pm
Anonymous
Well, forget I said that…I like to keep the conversation going and I’m not hung up on semantics. I consider the basis of your argument completely counter…if that helps. I don’t want to deter you from discussion, would you care to address my other points? I think they’re very valid, else I wouldn’t have taken the time to type them and address you.
June 27, 2012 at 3:40 pm
Anonymous
(and can I footnote that you come across as one anal retentive SOB without turning you off from responding? Not like you haven’t let your opinions of “people like me” shine when you’re center stage…)
June 27, 2012 at 4:50 pm
Eric Kirk
Well, I’m not hung up on semantics either. The reason I know I didn’t say that is because I don’t think that. I don’t have an argument that people believe in God because they were lied to. In fact, that would be completely inconsistent with a point I made – in this thread.
I have to spend enough energy explaining and defending positions I do take. I really don’t want to spend much time explaining and defending positions I don’t take.
June 27, 2012 at 5:40 pm
moviedad
The nice thing about astrology is that it comes up with considerations that you might not have come up with on your own. Same could be said about Lectio Divina, reading something that takes your thought process in an unexpected direction. Tell me that doesn’t have some value.
June 27, 2012 at 6:13 pm
Eric Kirk
“Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.”
-Clarence Darrow
June 27, 2012 at 6:33 pm
Eric Kirk
“It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.”
-HL Menken
June 27, 2012 at 6:52 pm
Mitch
Anonymous 2:45 tells Eric,
“You and others repeatedly associate religious institutions with religion.”
And here, I think, we finally get to the crux of the matter.
I don’t care what you believe, Anonymous, I really don’t. And I don’t think Eric does either. To each their own, and if you have a belief system that’s working for you, great.
But I get upset when anyone tries to decide political and social policy — policy that impacts me by saying “you have to do this because God says so.” They are granting themself a privileged and unchallengable position, because if I disagree, I “just don’t pay attention to God.”
Why can’t a woman choose to use birth control without the legal system becoming involved? Because God says so. It doesn’t matter if, to the woman, there is no problem in preventing (say) the attachment of an egg to her uterus. It doesn’t matter how many ethicists point to the woman’s freedom of control of her own body, or how many scientists point out the IMO vast differences between an egg and a baby.
If God hadn’t spoken, through the people who apparently hear his voice, the woman would have the same unquestioned right to prevent fertilization of her eggs that I have to decline to eat peas.
Now I’m not talking about religious institutions. I’m talking about people who, by invoking their personal beliefs as those of God, think they are entitled to control over others.
If God is actually talking to some of us, there’s no point whatsoever in democracy. The Islamic countries at least understand that. Why would you want people to (in theory) debate one another to find a proper course of action, when one of God’s representatives on Earth can simply tell us all what God wants. Those of us who are not in communion are prone to error.
So, fine, if you don’t claim privilege over others behavior as a result of your personal belief system, I don’t have any concern whatsoever with what your belief system may be. But the moment you cut off a debate with a statement that something I don’t hear and don’t believe exists trumps any logical argument I can present, I get very concerned with your spirituality. I think that concern ought to be understandable. It has NOTHING to do with religious institutions, and everything to do with subjectivity vs objectivity.
June 27, 2012 at 7:23 pm
Anonymous
I don’t necessarily believe in “god” either, mitch. I’m a hardened realist beyond agnostisism, is how I would categorize myself. Humans are not the top of the food chain, nor are humans the sentient overlords some of us would like to believe (how do you and eric categorize yourselves in the same light you do others?)
I challenge eric to look a former drug addict in the eye…how about a single mother of two kids?…who battles schizophrenic thoughts of suicide every day,and tell her the God she clings to for survival doesn’t exist, and that she is wrong in her belief. Look a person like that in the eye and tell them it would be more healthy for them to doubt their belief in an entity of unconditional love and forgiveness, who they believe wants nothing but for them to persevere.
Extrapolate on that a little, because you all sound like a bunch of narrow minded doofuses who really don’t keep the big picture in mind, always talking about the “right” and the “left”, “liberals” and “conservatives” and “progs” and “greens” and bla bla bla…as if everybody in the world lives on politics. I believe hardened athiests can be rip-off artist assholes just the same as anybody else.
I would challenge mitch or eric to consume some hallucinogenic substances and give the subject some thought, but that could be like throwing a monkey wrench into their machinery at this point in their lives. I have very little experience with “mind altering substances”…a little too profound, if you ask me…but they forced me to challenge everyday perceptions of reality enough to render most common philosophic delimmas moot in my book.
Does “god” exist? Why the HELL not? HEAVEN forbid if it doesn’t matter either way! Why does my tap water stink and where’d all the trees go? Is that gods fault? Is that science’s fault? What a stupid argument! Stop polluting the water and killing the trees!
June 27, 2012 at 7:26 pm
Stephen
Mitch, I am a religious visionary and yes, I do hear the Voice of God periodically telling me things to do to move the spiritual ball forward. That’s the whole point as far as I can see in having religious beliefs and acting upon them. The thing is though, at any given time in history, most people do not think for themselves, they follow their leaders or their traditions. This is why in ancient times prophets were needed to go up against established traditions, again to move the spiritual ball forward. But why move it when it’s become so ingrained in one’s culture as is? Because God doesn’t want us to always be stuck in animal behavior land where terrorism rules society with the mighty ruling the weak, the haves ruling the have-nots. It is unfortunate that human beings cling so stubbornly to outdated ideas as if they were security blankets we still need to hold in our hands while sucking our thumbs. But there it is and even the atheists have their security blankets that keep them from connecting logical dots which do away with the atheist mindset, e.g. the infinity factor that destroys the atheist premise that what is known today remains always unchanged.
But back to the people problem. Instead of bitching about conservative Christians or Muhammad’s Islam as a gangster religion complete with no gang member quitting the gang alive, these two prominent religionists keeping all spiritual development from progressing, why not get organized and get serious about letting past and passe religions keeping the world at war. No religionists will listen to atheists trying to tell them how to act moral, not with the atheist in power track record as bad as if not worse than the theists, but how about teaming up with us religious critics of past religions and get the historical and science information out to the world that destroys their foundational hold on cultures. No, I’m not talking about whether God is real or not, but about ancient religious ideas still operating and controlling modern societies and still triggering violent warfare. You see me hammering away whenever I can at the Zionist moral fiasco which is fed by the Evangelical Christian moral debacle running America’s politics into the ground. Team up with all us religionists who don’t want neo-Con Zionists or closet Mormons creating more and more war. But to attack theists is not to address the real problem with religions which is cultural inertia that will not change as long as there is nothing offered worthy of changing for. Create eutopia, and the people will come..
June 27, 2012 at 7:29 pm
Anonymous
…and how many trash religion on the premis of the third world’s belief in such “nonsense”? Islam, hindi…I don’t even know the sects, but there are plenty. Put yourself in the shoes of somebody living in third world africa, who knows of such a place as the united states…piled to the roof with packaged food in every town while your family starves to death. Are they wrong to believe they are loved by a universal entity, despite being shit on by the keepers of our way of life?
June 27, 2012 at 8:54 pm
Mitch
Anonymous,
I challenge eric… to tell her the God she clings to for survival doesn’t exist, and that she is wrong in her belief.
Sorry, I’m just not following you. Your concern is that atheists will discourage people who need God?
I don’t feel like I’m in a very different spot than your hypothetical. I don’t think there’s a person alive who doesn’t wants to find meaning in life. That’s a great reason for respecting the dignity of every person, but I find it a real stretch to make it an argument against atheism. Or are you suggesting that Santa doesn’t exist, but we shouldn’t say so in front of the children? If that’s the case, talk about presumptuousness!
You don’t need for god to exist to find meaning in kindness, or in working for something larger than yourself. You don’t need for god to exist to hope for unconditional love. You don’t need for god to exist to feel the transcendence of the universe.
There is no way for an atheist to force someone into disbelief. All an atheist can do is point out the lack of objective evidence for any particular god. As ought to be clear to everyone, if you believe, you believe. And the way to strengthen your belief is to confront doubt and come through believing.
I think when it comes right down to it, I’m a believer in a universe that seems somehow inclined to bring forth love. That’s a far cry from “god,” and as a belief system it’s a hell of a lot less dangerous than a god that comes with a policy handbook and a set of spokesmen, as most of ours seem to. Just like god, the idea of a universe that brings forth love purely rests on faith, but unlike God, it’s not faith continually contradicted by all available evidence.
June 28, 2012 at 4:10 am
Stephen
Mitch, your faith is commendable. Here’s the deal. Religion is no longer what you think it is. There’s been a revolution in heaven and now the Great Spirit of God can manifest Themselves in harmony with any known science or historical trail of religious beliefs. I believe science will continue to bridge that gap you atheists require for your belief systems to encompass the new spiritual reality of religion in synch with science. It’s ironic but very true that now the shoe is on the other foot because not only has brain science shown by physical demonstrating shared brain activity patterns between religious believers regardless of particular religions, the logic of history of human discovery and knowledge accumulation leads to this ultimate conclusion: at our present rate of advance in science and technology there will come a time in the future when human beings (in whatever forms we will be in by then) will have gained the power to turn thought into matter which is the primary act of God according to several religious belief systems, e.g. my own Gnostic Christian one and the Hindu Vedic system. Rent the old movie, Forbidden Planet and see the Krell Machine that uses the power of the nuclear core of the planet to power human thought into material existence. Is this science fiction you have to ask yourself now seeing the advancement in human science in just the last 200 years.
Now how does religion tie into this? As a social evolutionary vehicle for establishing a Model Man or Woman or Special Group for human beings to emulate, to look up to as role models, each era producing the best model they could and all of it, all of us actually, pack horses carrying the moral ball forward through time. In my religious belief system there is a model for how the future sends back messengers, angels, to instruct the religious leaders of the past where they are going. “Heaven” is code for our future state of being and prophets like me are the ones instructed by these angels sent back by our future selves as the Great Spirit of Humanity. This is more fully explained in the Gospel of Humanity. Do you believe it not having any spiritual experience in this sort of sci-fi method of teaching? I have to believe it because it’s the only explanation that makes sense and jives with my personal spiritual experiences. Gabriel the angel seems to have guided the Christian writers and Muhammad. For me it was Ariel and many in SoHum still remember my 14 years when I was Ariel, not Stephen, the name of my father with whom I was in political battle with. I changed my name back when my father and I resolved our differences through mutual faith in Christ and God. But Ariel, being an angelic entity, an Archetype, will not go away and still guides me to spiritual truth such as humanity means more than merely a group name for our species, it means our destiny which unites God and Humanity as One at the “End of Days”. Christian Humanism is what’s happening. The Humanitarian Model is our present Model Man and Woman, carried forward through the past religions, Abrahamic and yes, pagan. And at last the Spirit of Christ can be identified with the Humanitarian Model God as Us in the far far future when We created Creation and set this whole thing in motion to create God as ourselves “unbegotten”. Oh, I forgot to mention that there is no “free will”, our world and everything in it is illusion and we are all acting out Scripts written before time began for us. THEY entertain THEMSELVES by sitting on clouds above the 7th heaven and laughing at the antics down below of themselves as primitives on the Creation TV series. Gets good ratings..
June 28, 2012 at 4:25 am
Stephen
Well, you do have to laugh at it all ultimately. Seriousness aside, (thanks, Steve) my original religious conversion experience, three days of non-stop synchronicity events, led me to the lasting belief that I experienced that state of mind known where the world is seen as “maya”, as illusion. It is a fundamental core belief to all religions, people who periodically “see” this state of existence, all of it being illusionary. Science tallies with this now. It’s amazing anything ever “touches” anything else, the distances between “solid” objects being vast, with the “solid” objects evaporating into smaller and smaller systems of what? Anyway, I saw it and it came coupled with visions, revelations from God. It’s some form of instruction from our future selves. I bear witness to this. OK, I will try to shut up but this is my topic above all others and look! It’s getting past the political topics in numbers of comments. God is Good! God is Love, That’s What We’re Saying..
Mitch.
June 28, 2012 at 4:31 am
Stephen
OK, I lied. I’m addicted. I will take the 12 Step Zodiac Pledge. I just wanted to add it’s biblical although you won’t find many bible believers who know this Psalm.
“Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed.
And in Your book they all were written,
The days fashioned for me,
When as yet there were none of them.”
Psalm 139:16
June 28, 2012 at 5:34 am
moviedad
Ok, I wasn’t going to tell you guys since you haven’t fasted 40 days yet…….but “God” is the scientist who created our universe in a petri-dish on his/her desk. We are only in the larval stage of our development and the scientist is growing us, level by level; until we can survive in the scientist’s universe.
So you could say we’re little…”Gods on the hoof.” or “God-lings” or you could liken our spacial existence to embryos who’ve not yet been implanted.
So now you have the secret knowledge that has been kept hidden for eons. Question is; what do you do with it? Ha!
June 28, 2012 at 7:37 am
Anonymous
I don’t mean it as a literal challenge, mitch…sorry I thought that’s obvious. I really do think most of y’all are sensitive types…feel free to extrapolate some positive in what seems like my negative, if we were face to face the tone would make it obvious. I don’t think some people are more important than other people. The entire universe as you know it exists only in your mind, the same as anybody’s. I think is important to keep that in mind when discussing this stuff, else you forget all the people who NEED “god” right this second.
It’s more than belief within me, that humans are not the top of the food chain, that there is a whole lot going on around us that our physical manifestations are incapable of perception, but not awareness or for the most part understanding. I think most people have been programmed as to what the word “god” means. We agree, religious institutions are not representatives of religion. Anybody, from the pope to an overdosing junkie, is just as legitimate. That’s key, too. The “science” duality is stupid…scientists definitely try to trump eachothers’ sciences….has nothing to do with the nature of the universe, more like the description of it.
June 28, 2012 at 8:25 am
Anonymous
“But I get upset when anyone tries to decide political and social policy — policy that impacts me by saying “you have to do this because God says so.” They are granting themself a privileged and unchallengable position, because if I disagree, I “just don’t pay attention to God.”
The case against complacent “scientists” is massive in that light. Look at the industry and infrastructure that continues to be the status quo. That’s “okay by scientific standards”…??? NOT! Clearcut just another several thousand acres, no big deal! dump just another ten thousand gallons into the water, no big deal! raze another grove for some more pavement, no big deal! construct another air conditioned building, no big deal! They are granting themselves a privileged and collectively (important) unchallenged position, and when (not if) anybody disagrees, we are told we don’t understand the “science”.
June 28, 2012 at 10:27 am
Stephen
Subdivide thousands of acres with no e.i.r., no big deal, steal all available dry season water sources, no big deal. Anon, you’re selective targeting of corporate bad science shows the success of local environmental propagandists in diverting your attention away from the actual primary eco-destructive culprits in our county.
June 28, 2012 at 10:35 am
Mitch
OK, 8:25, I think it finally becomes clear what you refer to when you refer to science. I completely agree, “OK by scientific standards” is bullshit as used today, especially any time money is at stake.
Science is nothing more than a method used so that a community can arrive at agreed hypotheses based on shared facts. “Scientific standards” have nothing at all to do with whether something is legitimate. I think you’ll find tons (probably majorities) of scientists who would agree that statements like “OK by scientific standards” are not just ridiculous, but even category errors.
“Scientific standards” are to science as “The Pope” is to religion; the ridiculous assertion of authority based on evidence that is, at best, controversial. Agreed?
June 28, 2012 at 1:20 pm
suzy blah blah
-Mitch, your idea if God is highly flawed. It’s more like an abstraction like “justice” or “righteousness”. Which shows that you haven’t got a clue to the REAL God. So to try and discuss God with you gets no understanding on your part. To have a meaningful discussion you first need to discard your idea of what God is or may be. Then you may be able to see the truth instead of your illusion. Clue, God is not righteous, that’s a lie. God is the good and the bad as well. If you’d eat the sacrament and realize what you’re made of you’d see that you as well as God are both good and evil, the whole thing –One.
June 28, 2012 at 2:06 pm
Bolithio
I dont like the ‘bad’ parts of God. Sorry! And until I get a adequate answer as to why all our omnipotent deity(s) created all this suffering, I will remain skeptical to all Religions that insist God created this mess and that it actually cares about all of us.
And I would add that it is religion that science battles, not the concept of a creator.
Now that the world is so plugged into the news of the world, its even harder to see to the ‘mater plan’. I bet thats a big part of the decline in faith. Considering what we know about this world and human history, I would look right at God (the god who was taught to me at church growing up) and say; “Really?”
June 28, 2012 at 3:12 pm
Stephen
Bolithio, Creation runs on polar opposites including life and death. There is no life form without something dying that it replaces. There is no ability to recognize “good” without contrasting it to its opposite, “bad”. If everything was “good” how would you ever know it? It would be like trying to see a green dot on a wall of green. Our brains are made to recognize things by contrasting them to other things. That, btw, is why it is virtually impossible to really understand the concept of one of anything-without two or more you don’t know what one is.
If higher states of consciousness is the product of our evolution then there is a Plan in effect that is leading us towards increasing ability to control and manipulate our environments in order to survive and prolong our days as a species and as individuals. But look at the odds. No one gets out materially alive and we all face inevitable extinction of our material selves. So so one believes if one hasn’t knowledge, let alone trust, in spiritual reality underlying our material universe.
I just happened to come to God-consciousness by way of experiencing the world as “maya”, illusion. Three days of non-stop synchronicity experiences did this to me and completely destroyed any atheist notion I might have had that the material world is the ultimate reality. I “know” there is more to life than what we see and get. Something else is going on and there are two major cracks in material reality that show this: experiences like mine which I think is where religion actually came from, and n.d.e.s which are again running counter to evolutionary survival instincts. Why would our brains have a “protocol” that makes the experience of dying not scary and something to be avoided at all costs? And why the universal forms of n.d.e.s varying only in cultural archetypes, something science wants to explain away as if these states were like drug experiences. But tell me, who of you knows of any drugs that produce the same set of hallucinatory experiences, the tunnel, Heaven, the Being of Light, people who have gone before and the directive to return for unfinished work in earthly life plus the acquired lack of fear of death? Something else is going on.
Suzy has the right idea for you atheists unable to understand us who have had profound religious experiences. Take some LSD. It’s proven to be able to open up spiritual receptors in human brains. It didn’t do it for me, although I must admit I experienced the most ecstatic state of being ever in my life while under LSD, just putting around in a backyard garden enjoying the plants and flowers, bees and life itself. But it wasn’t God for me. That took a different hammer for God to bust through my atheist walls blocking spiritual reception. But LSD has done it for others and it’s never too late to find God although psychedelics are hard on aging hippie systems which is why I stopped decades ago except for the mild psychedelic and my sacrament, maryjane. But in short, it does take some form of 40 day fast in the wilderness to trigger spiritual consciousness unless you’re “lucky”, ha ha, that’s a good one, and have God come knocking at your door completely out of the blue like I did.
June 28, 2012 at 5:21 pm
Anonymous
“Anon, you’re selective targeting of corporate bad science shows the success of local environmental propagandists in diverting your attention away from the actual primary eco-destructive culprits in our county.”
Not selective targeting whatsoever. It’s integrated industry, acceptable business as usual. “Acceptable” in the manner described…the growing insanity of the status quo as our environment continues to degrade and our resources diminish…right down to specific people in Humboldt County who have no problem clearcutting forests, plotting sprawl etc. Who couldn’t spend hours listing examples.
June 28, 2012 at 5:32 pm
Anonymous
mitch, yeah I agree. But I wouldn’t say “scientific standards”, instead the actual individuals involved in establishing and maintaining those standards…the heirarchy within corporate government who declare the standard based on different “science”, obviously having little such to do with “science”.
If there were plans on the table to build another city of Los Angeles over the course of the next year, who wouldn’t consider that insane? Yet Los Angeles exists, built from the ground up in supposedly insignificant increments. No difference in the grand scheme of things, a blink of an eye historically. The city of Los Angeles even continues to grow, and is basically accepted as a permanent standard of life on this planet. Red flag days on the beach over water quality, red flag days over air quality…insane! That same mode of existence is being perpetuated right here in Humboldt. Open space disappears, buildings go up, more and more people are packed in from out of the area etc. Insane!
June 28, 2012 at 7:13 pm
j67k
@Suzy… “The real god”? Seriously?
Actually, I have the “real” God on the phone right now, and he’s says you’re wrong. He says his name is Quetzalcoatl…
June 28, 2012 at 10:03 pm
Unk John
j67k-You spelled the name right, but your pronunciation was horrible.
June 29, 2012 at 4:07 am
Stephen
Insane is closer to your worldview, anon, which continues to parade a total ignorance of the eco-destruction of “our” people who you don’t list in your bad science rant as if we were not part of the problem too. And really, population doesn’t go down in nations where economic security isn’t available. You get economic security, and populations go downward, e.g. former Japan, former Europe. You don’t address the worldwide economic system which continues to divide rich and poor you don’t address population pressure and of course things get worse.
Why are you ranting at corporations when you’re probably using corporate made everything? Protest does nothing really to change society substantially. Look at what 20 years of protest against Maxxam accomplished. A new owner after Maxxam took most everything it wanted to take despite enviro protests and lawsuits up the yin yang. And all that protest diverted local attention away from the major enviro destruction culprits. Us. Those of us who built homesteads, had roads punched in, ponds built with no expertise, all this clearing of the forest and ground that the rains wash into our creeks and rivers to make way for homesteaders to come in and then further the destruction by tapping into ALL available dry season water sources. Meanwhile, people like you were pointing to THEM, those horrible greedy corporate monsters ripping off the environment.
The corporate economic system is here because it was the most efficient way to create large-scale industrialization. That’s what Russia didn’t learn and China did. You want to change corporate economy you need to learn why it exists in the first place and then create a workable alternative system. Protest just wastes time and energy as the past 20 years should teach all local activists.
June 29, 2012 at 6:45 am
Mitch
Stephen’s first paragraph at 3:12 sounds a lot like the Tao Te Ching.
http://www.wussu.com/laotzu/laotzu02.html
As for LSD, I wish I had some.
I’d advise Stephen, or anyone interested in spirituality to watch Jill Bolte Taylor’s “Stroke of Insight, a 20 minute TED presentation available free online. (Forgive the fact that it’s TED, which I guess is now overhyped.)
No matter where you think you stand in this discussion, it’s a remarkable presentation. Short version, which doesn’t do it any justice, is “neuroscientist suffers stroke and notices her brain noticing the universe.”
But Stephen, sorry to be obtuse, but I don’t think her talk is any indication of the existence of god, not in the way Western religion, at least, always presents her.
June 29, 2012 at 7:15 am
Bolithio
So the answer to finding God is to either eat LSD, or not eat and induce starving/dehydrated hallucinations?
June 29, 2012 at 8:26 am
Anonymous
Stephen, good for you that everything seems on the straight and narrow. The air smells a little bit cleaner today than yesterday, doesn’t it? Prices are down, compensation is up! Are you the same stephen who posted @ 7:29 that a “spirit of pure truth” periodically visits you, that you are savvy to decoded ancient scriptures and such? I don’t think you’re crazy, I would only encourage your beliefs…but you really don’t come across as being all that bright at the same time, to choose to completely insult what I wrote rather than at least acknowledge what truth you do see in my words. That is, if this is an adult discussion, “okay” (4:57)? You want to insult me, mission accomplished. Put your money where your mouth is.
Here’s a cold, hard truth, stephen. Remove the societal element of money from your own rant against me and your argument is nonsense. Money is a pyramid scheme under a pyramid of power. Who facilitates what?
Bolithio, hallucinogens are no more or less an answer than reese’s pieces, but people time and again tell how their views have radically changed forever after exposing themselves to such states of mind. Why bullshit that you don’t understand what I mean, you’re not THAT old. I don’t think anybody’s that old anymore, to not be at least somewhat savvy of “drug culture” by the time they’re mature adults. It’s not all fun and freakouts, you know. Or do you?
June 29, 2012 at 9:33 am
suzy blah blah
-suzy agrees with Eric. There is no absolute, ie whole, without including doubt. Doubt is a part of God. Even doubting the reality of a perfect circle.
Synchronically, listening to Kmud this morning, the elder on the show, Owl, explained how they have now found that the scientists are catching up to the mystics.
@J67K,
–dou·ble neg·a·tive
Noun:
1. A negative statement containing two negative elements (for example didn’t say nothing).
2. A positive statement in which two negative elements are used to produce the positive force, usu. for some particular rhetorical effect…
-there are many many many “real” gods. The false god is the one Mitch worships, ie the idealism of being “righteous” finding “justice” etc. Or in other words the false god is the ego.
June 29, 2012 at 9:39 am
Anonymous
stephen, if my 8:26 comment is too harsh, please read my comment @ 5:21, I believe I addressed your misinterpretation of what I’ve said. Who would I be to tell a homesteader they’re furthering drought? Why would I blame a lone family rather than Target, which wastes a swimming pool’s worth of water daily? Why would I blame a family for buying a flat screen TV and electric heater for worldly woes, when Costco uses more energy in a day than my entire neighborhood combined? Who facilitated all this development? I think I agree with the jist of what you’re saying, I have a hard time placing blame on people who don’t know what they’re doing. City planners, resource managers, politicians etc. know what they’re doing. At least they’re supposed to.
June 29, 2012 at 9:44 am
Bolithio
Actually Stephen, 20 years of protesting MAXXAM had a massive effect on the forest products industry. The climax ended with a new owner that has placed the entire 250,000 acres under a Selection Regime. A complete paradigm shift, really. But thats a whole other topic…
What has 60 years of LSD done for us? Id dare say that its done very little for society beyond artistic inspiration (which is great, but its obviously not the magic pill that is making everyone behave like Jesus/Buddha). Its more about a ‘club’ of people who are convinced they know something others dont. If you have had the psychedelic experience you ‘get it’.
Im not ready to classify the concept of psychedelics as a complete manufactured delusion, but the idea that near death experiences or drugs (that emulate NDE) are what convinces people God exists might be. I mean, if that’s what gets you close, just die right? That is insane.
OK maybe im being cynical about it, and I should say I actually find this topic very interesting. Humans have been using these things for along time. Are they the original inspiration for God? That is being starving, dehydrated, and sleep deprived? Mix in some psilocybin or ergot and Wahm! The Holy Grail appears over the Castle Anthrax!
Its much easier to understand a cosmic connection to the universe, the earth, other people during this (for me) than some sort of explanation for our religious texts and dogmas. And I dont believe scientist, atheist, or whatever would go out of their way to argue against the validity of personal spiritual experiences. Looking through a telescope, or microscope, can mirror that same awe for people who know what to look for…if they ‘get it’.
Its the bearded man and the fundamentalist religions which hinder our society that cause people to doubt the God they were taught in church. The religious are failing to adapt to our cultural needs and become more obsolete each day. A personal spiritual experience however will never be obsolete. I hope all you people in this debate can acknowledge the distinction between these, and how science isnt trying to ruin your spiritual experiences….
June 29, 2012 at 9:50 am
Anonymous
mitch, I did a report on the tao te ching when I was a sophomore in highschool. Needless to say, the wisdom stuck but it eats itself over time like anything. It”s like the passage you linked…you can’t have one without the other (cue married with children theme). “Let silence speak to you the truths of the universe”…might be misquoting another quotable asian geezer. I take it to mean that, talk aside, common sense reigns…we can all see that the City of Los Angeles is anything but good for one’s health. I’ve come to find truth is where I find it. Communication is a two way street…from reading your writing, I think we both understand that. I can’t lie either, sometimes I don’t care to receive communication. I think most bloggers talk TO not WITH. I sure do most of the time.
June 29, 2012 at 10:03 am
suzy blah blah
@Stephen, from my experience, the shaking quaking feeling during visionary experiences came with my first visions. I started having visions when i was about eight. And at that time i would sometimes shake uncontrollably at one point during the experience. But the shaking went away in time. I have now learned that the shaking was due to the spirit entering the body. Or in the case of out of body experience, the soul reentering the body. Unpleasant sensation, but it went away after i’d been consciously out of body three or four times, and it never happens to me anymore. It reminds me of a driver who hasn’t learned to parallel park and she keeps hitting the cars in front and back of her. With experience you figure out how to do it , reenter the body, smoothly.
June 29, 2012 at 10:44 am
Mitch
The search for justice is fundamental to all humans.
It’s true that spoiled brats looking for a low-impact spirituality have latched onto a philosophy of “it’s all good,” and have twisted wisdom like that found in the Tao into a warped support system for their narcissism.
At some point, you learn the difference between equanimity and laziness.
June 29, 2012 at 10:49 am
Mitch
To put it bluntly, “it’s all good,” while people suffer used to go by a different catch-phrase. It used to be “I got mine, Jack.”
June 29, 2012 at 10:57 am
suzy blah blah
-hey Stephen, suzy drew a card from my sacred deck today, asking it to reveal the essence of this thread. And, low and behold, i got the card showing two believers taking the sacrament. The blood of the Christ is in the cup. He is within and without us. Breathe in breathe out …
Cheers!
… and for those who still don’t understand –it’s a METAPHOR! sheeesh, LOL!
June 29, 2012 at 11:19 am
suzy blah blah
-just like he mistakes the ego for the God, and the self for the Self, Mitch doesn’t understand that when suzy says, “it’s all good”, i don’t mean, “It’s All good, duh.
June 29, 2012 at 11:27 am
Stephen
Anon 8:26, your post is garbled and I can’t make sense of it. Guess I’m just not too bright as you say since you seem to understand what you posted. I will take it up with the Spirit of pure Truth next time he comes around. We’re buds, you see. Can I help it if God has given direction to us on how to evolve to that peaceful state of being in harmony with the All? And that it is written in astrological code I’ve decoded that now becomes universally recognizable as the One Way to humanitarian transformation? This has been happening to me for 33 years now, the downloading of spiritual knowledge because I guess I’m dumb or maybe it’s because my brain’s capability to communicate with that Other which is beyond one’s self is functioning. Where do new ideas come from but from “in-Spiration”. Is not Humanitarian consciousness exactly what is needed for worldwide social change from warring nations and individuals to peaceful coexistence? The Gospel of Humanity shows how God and humankind are One. The Gospel of Christ Aquarius that reveals the meaning of the Celestial Torah shows how God has placed Signs in the heavens to guide us on earth towards this very same Humanitarian Model Human Being. I can show you the 3000+ year old trail of Judeo-Christian involvement with these Signs in the heavens. And it is the pure Spirit of Truth that reveals this knowledge because the Celestial Torah knowledge is no longer the monopoly of either Judaism or traditional Christianity, both of them having lost the importance of the Zodiac symbolism without which you don’t know what’s going on with God and have only these massive piles of Judeo-Christian Scripts become word idols in themselves and distractions from Gnosis, from direct spiritual contact with God. I’m re-editing my book now, a long process it’s turning out to be because of the new astrological information that God has added onto my spiritual plate of late. Wonder if Naomi Steinberg will respond to my request for what information she knows as rabbi about the Celestial Torah. I know that Judaism doesn’t know what I know now because if rabbis did, they would be forced to take another look at Christ and Christianity. The Book of Arielmessenger. I will tell you all when it’s online.
June 29, 2012 at 11:34 am
suzy blah blah
@Bolithio, “20 years of protest … 60 years of LSD” -what your missing in your interpretation, understandably, is the flexibility of what is commonly known as “time”. But if you try some cid when you protest then some “real” revolutionary politics can happen. One is intertwined with the other, the creation is the creator and vice verse, the chicken IS the egg –that should be obvious to anybody tripping at a protest … suzy’s sign says,
WE DEMAND TIME TRAVEL
WHEN IS IRRELEVANT
June 29, 2012 at 12:34 pm
Stephen
Suzy, that saying reminds of the Dada slogan: “We demand the hereafter in our own lifetime.” Great minds..eh?
June 29, 2012 at 1:24 pm
Anonymous
“The religious are failing to adapt to our cultural needs and become more obsolete each day. A personal spiritual experience however will never be obsolete. I hope all you people in this debate can acknowledge the distinction between these, and how science isnt trying to ruin your spiritual experiences….”
reads more like you’re trying to ruin somebody’s spiritual exprience. Considering clearcutting is still going on, and considering the lovely city of los angeles is only growing….I’d say whoever’s continuing to facilitate more of the same is failing us, whatever they believe. People talk to eachother real time on video phones…somebody facilitated that. Three trillion dollars were fabricated to resolve corporate debt. Somebody facilitated that. Somebody facilitated a walmart in humboldt county. Somebody facilitated the disappearance of the old growth redwoods. Follow the money, not the godspeak. Place blame where you want or don’t, it doesn’t change what’s happening.
June 29, 2012 at 2:40 pm
Stephen
Suzy, your experience parallels mine. It was the very first religious experience that gave me the most shakes and sweating. Shakes happened a few times after with major visions like Gospel of Humanity’s Son of Man meaning becoming crystal clear, but like you they don’t seem to happen now.
“Actually Stephen, 20 years of protesting MAXXAM had a massive effect on the forest products industry. The climax ended with a new owner that has placed the entire 250,000 acres under a Selection Regime. A complete paradigm shift, really. But thats a whole other topic…”
Bolithio, the reason I persist in correcting the past environmental propaganda that tried to lay most all environmental destruction woes at the feet of Maxxam is simply that it was never ever true. Our beloved enviros such as EPIC, EF!. Humboldt Watershed Council, Trees Foundation, actually at one time there were about a dozen anti-Palco enviro organizations, and I hold them all responsible for misdirecting everyone’s attention towards their Cash Cow Icon, Maxxam. While EPIC made literally millions off of Maxxam while becoming stars in the community our homesteaders went busily on their merry way of wrecking watershed wildlife habitats, and no one protested except me for almost all those 20 years. Now EPIC agrees with me on homestead eco-damage but the damage they did in diverting environmental protection efforts away from homestead subdivisions will last our lifetimes. Here’s something you should know. In 1991, the year I worked for PL as go-between them and EPIC primarily, I suggested to John Campbell that he adopt my “Climax Corridor” plan which would set aside all stream corridors in the PL 230,000 acres then from logging. And PL listened to me and presented EPIC with a plan to set aside 20,000 acres of stream corridor land throughout PL’s acreage. 20,000 acres, much of it containing old growth trees. And what did EPIC do? They turned their noses up at the offer. It wasn’t good enough. Nothing was. And thus 20,000 acres of vital stream corridor old growth trees were cut because our dearly beloved enviros could not be seen tarnishing their image by compromising with PL. I saw the map that showed these 20,000 acres set aside. And it makes me sick to think about it now, how idiots greedy for fame destroyed opportunity after opportunity to change Maxxam’s policies. The final enviro lunacy being their failure, ne attack on our Bear River Heartlands Project which would have saved every single old growth tree on PL lands forever as well as get rid of Maxxam using NA gaming rights to run a special Headwaters Lottery. Enviros are the last people we needed to really protect our environment because they all were in it for social warfare reasons, to act out the enviro heroes against the horrible corporate monster, Meanwhile the real monsters were ourselves, us homesteaders going practically untouched by environmental concern.
Are any of you paying attention to this fact: your local prophet-at-large not only dedicates his life to God but also is a dedicated environmental and social change activist proving that spiritual consciousness and material world saving are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are absolutely codependent in my Christian belief system.
June 29, 2012 at 3:06 pm
Anonymous
“Is not Humanitarian consciousness exactly what is needed for worldwide social change from warring nations and individuals to peaceful coexistence?”
Like I said…you “get it”, I “get it”…mitch “gets it” suzy “gets it”…why pretend there are people who don’t care one way or another about our versions of “humanitarian consciousness”? They are following the voice of their own god, same as everybody. I can’t get you to agree with anything I’ve written, where would it go if I were the one deciding how your next paycheck plays into the grand scheme of things? There is Bolithio, who “prescribes” clearcuts…try to make him see the light regarding that insanity.
June 29, 2012 at 3:54 pm
Anonymous
Susy and Steven, both of your religious experiences parrallel mine. One day I was eating M&M’s and I drew out a green one from the package. I ate it. Then I drew out a second one. I ate it. And then I drew out a third green M&M! I ate it and then I said to God, if the next M&M is green I will know that you exist! Sure enough it was green! I got those shakes and sweating just like I was on an acid trip!
There you go Eric. Proof of the existence of God!
Don’t keep your light under a bushel. Live in the City on a Hill!
June 29, 2012 at 3:55 pm
Mitch
Anonymous 9:50,
For me, some of the pleasure of blogs is getting to “converse” with someone when I don’t know what they look like, what their background is, or anything else about them except how they write. And when, in most cases, they have the same absence of knowledge about me.
On rare occasions, I get fed up with some of the idiocy, but then I remind myself that all reading is voluntary. And even the idiocy makes for a great learning experience… it’s interesting to me to find out what people “out there” think (or will pretend to think).
I also believe that two people of goodwill can almost always find common ground, and that words are a good way of finding it. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. But when someone does disagree with me, I’d like to find out why, if that’s at all possible. Because maybe they’re right.
The shouting and histrionics are pretty easy to filter out, though I’d be lying if I said they never bug me.
June 29, 2012 at 11:07 pm
Unk John
Mitch, I am jealous. I wish I had said that.
June 30, 2012 at 3:10 am
Stephen
When I was a young kid the first book I ever read that made me cry was one called “Atta” which was about a man shrunk down to ant size and forced to survive in the insect world jungle. An ant befriends him and teaches him and in the end sacrifices his life for the man who had gotten shrunk because he had stomped a bunch of ants that had spoiled his picnic with his girlfriend. Made an impression on me that I never got from the few times my missionary aunt dragged us kids off to church when she came to visit on her way north or south to Bolivia where she was one of those First Contact missionaries. In the end it is about sacrifice of self for love of others as no other mindset will ever change things for the better. I’ve been in “Indian Country” long enough now (17 years) to see that tribes too are all having to face this reality. The Sun Dance ritual is the Lakota iconic form of self-sacrifice for love of others and when you read the histories of the major chiefs you see that most of them knew the true meaning of Jesus’ sacrifice and could see the gross hypocrisy of so many “Christians”. The only real Christian communities in the West were the religious communitarians who practiced what they preached without prejudice seen in most all European-American communities towards Native Americans. But who wants to live the Mennonite or Amish lifestyle and be under the rule of a bunch of old men in funny clothes? And Amish are now getting in-breeding diseases like us of Ashkenazi ancestry did for the same reasons, shunning outsiders for centuries upon centuries. How do you get people as whole to be good, to do the right thing towards one another and the life of the land? I was a social change activist long before I became a Christian so religion isn’t the only way. But in my life experience I have found that religious commitment will tell you in the long run who you can trust to be there when the chips are down. The people truly of God-consciousness will help you because God is the Source of goodness, the Source of that wonderful counter survival, counter common sense sometimes, counter selfishness that is willing to reach out and help another person who needs it. There is so much ignorance in the world still and the selfish promote it because knowledge leads eventually to God and to self-sacrifice, the icons have been installed to help us, Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, King, and all those billions of unknowns who are responsible for us being here alive now. God is Good. Not Great, sometimes, not if your suffering in pain but if there is a heaven as we who have experienced God consciousness agree upon, and if our life on earth is our School of Living preparing us for that World To Come, then even suffering has its end in Life and a new beginning. The traditional Christian heaven would become a bore to a thinking person in a few hours probably. Certainly an Eternity of 24/7 singing praises to Him is not my idea of heaven. The World To Come, is. I have no idea what to expect but I do expect continuation and not extinction of this swarm of electrons and atoms and force fields that compose me physically and are ultimately powered by that which I know of as Spirit.
June 30, 2012 at 9:19 am
Anonymous
anon 3:54…correct me if I’m wrong but M&M’s are freely given to children on holidays, and if you’re caught trafficing any amount of LSD you’ll be prosecuted to the same extent as national terrorism. So obviously there’s just a little bit more to the acid experience than a sugar rush. So what you’re really saying is complete baloney. But please, continue perpetuating the idea that taking LSD is a walk in the park. What’s life without a good psychedellic meltdown once in awhile, right? Builds character.
June 30, 2012 at 10:13 am
suzy blah blah
I also believe that two people of goodwill can almost always find common ground,
-no thanks Mitch –suzy prefers the fine ground
June 30, 2012 at 2:07 pm
Unk John
But, I regularly get fine ground from my common grinder.
June 30, 2012 at 6:06 pm
Stephen
“This guy’s sharpening his tools on a grinder and his boss comes along and say’s, ‘Don’t get your ascot in that grinder.” Guy says, “I won’t. I don’t want to buffaload, ya know..”
Well, it was funny as hell 50 years ago after the second joint…
July 1, 2012 at 4:19 am
j67k
Stephen “But in my life experience I have found that religious commitment will tell you in the long run who you can trust to be there when the chips are down. The people truly of God-consciousness will help you because God is the Source of goodness”
Fine. If you require an omnipresent hall-monitor in order to act with goodness, then by all means keep groveling. I don’t need the threat of divine displeasure to be good, nor do I require that I be invited to some kind of after-party in order to behave myself here.
If there is a creator, it gave you life, the ability to think (if you choose to) and remember (mostly), not to mention our very own planet {sarcasm}. Yet, somehow, people feel they should get a “reward” for suffering through their existence without being total douche bags.
Life is the reward. Treat it as such. If there is anything afterward, it can wait til afterward. You never know, it might be a test afterward, so you might want to pay close attention while you’re here. I hope it’s a math test, I always loved those.
July 1, 2012 at 1:51 pm
Stephen
Well, do the math then, j67k. We’re here at 2012 with the ability to walk on the moon and create the energy of the sun. 200 years ago we were driving horse and buggies and wood and coal fires were our energy sources. What do you think we’ll be able to do by 2500 AD or 5000 AD? What defines “God”? Ultimately, it is the ability to create mater from nothing but thought. My Christian religion predicted we will be able to surpass the powers that Jesus had and ultimately, we will become one with God as Jesus did.
“Verily, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do he will do also; an greater works than these he will do, because I go to my Father.”
This is code for the Son of Man representing all of humanity going from the beginning of Creation all the way through to the “End of Days” where we become one with God, a completed cycle from beginning to end. Given the historical record of human progress in the last 12,000 years can you honestly claim that human beings will not become what we call “God” or do your prophetic abilities surpass my mine so that you can tell us, as an authority on the subject of our future, that no, becoming God is impossible because God does not exist because we can’t measure It with our 2012 science. Or if some do measure spiritual reception, they’re lying about it. Suzy and Stephen are lying about it when both of them tell you they have physical manifestation of spiritual reception.
July 1, 2012 at 4:06 pm
suzy blah blah
God is the Source of goodness
-and the source of evil as well. God is the whole thing.
July 1, 2012 at 6:26 pm
Bolithio
I hope it’s a math test
That would be hilarious.
July 1, 2012 at 8:03 pm
suzy blah blah
-the answer is ONE
July 2, 2012 at 5:32 am
Bolithio
No suzy, its 42.
July 2, 2012 at 8:59 am
Anonymous
” If you require an omnipresent hall-monitor in order to act with goodness, then by all means keep groveling. I don’t need the threat of divine displeasure to be good, nor do I require that I be invited to some kind of after-party in order to behave myself here.”
I’ve never seen or heard anybody describe their religious drive in terms of fear. I’ve only seen and heard critics of religion making the kind of claims in the quote above. I do see and hear people of all religions describing their drive to do good for mutual love and acceptance within the realm of their beliefs.
In other words, you’ve got it all wrong. I’m not even “religious” and I understand that much. Fear is often described within religious circles as character to the absence of understanding the collective religious drive.
July 2, 2012 at 9:41 am
Ernie Branscomb
Suffice it to say: I don’t fear God, but I do fear religion.
July 2, 2012 at 11:15 am
Anonymous
What a lame thing to say, ernie. Do you fear religion? Lame.
July 2, 2012 at 11:37 am
Unk John
Bolithio, thanks for the DA reference. I think Suzy was thinking 42 raised to the one over n as n approaches infinity.
Anonymous 8:59, I think you were not raised Catholic and sent to the same Catholic school I was. I often heard, “God will send you to hell for that, Johnny.”
If you believe in eternal damnation consisting of nothing but suffering, it seems to me that even if someone describes their motivation as you say there is still that undercurrent of fear. Our friend j67k is simply saying that he can be good simply because virtue is its own reward.
Again to Bolithio. I think one of my favorite quotes (I’ll have to paraphrase) from The Hitchhiker’s Guide is this one:
“It’s at times like this when I am trapped in an airlock of a Vogon warship with a man from Betelgeuse and about to be asphyxiated in interstellar space that I wish I had paid attention to my mother when I was a child.”
“What did she say?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”
July 2, 2012 at 12:46 pm
suzy blah blah
@ 8:59, -suzy highly disagrees. It’s a shallow understanding that doesn’t fear God. God is NOT all good, God has an evil side as well, just like you do. The idea that God is separated from humans is bunk. God is right here now. And always has been. God is the creator as well as the creation. The Creator is in the Creation and vice verse. God is the whole thing, and that includes a dark side. And that dark side can be terrifying and horrible when it manifests in your life. The source of our suffering isn’t our sins, it’s God –the Creator of our imperfections.
God is not an idea or an ideal or a theory. If you’re interested in investigating and experimenting you can find that God can be verified by empirical data. I’ve met God face to face, objectively. And believe me, God is not always “good”. God is only good insofar as his goodness manifests through us. His moral quality depends on us.
If you really knew God you’d fear him/her. Christianity irresponsibly tries to outsource the dark side and use the devil as a scapegoat. Then you get the frame of mind in which the god vs the devil, and that leads to us vs them. ETC! But it’s not just Christians, many other so-called religious and/or spiritually minded people are in denial of God’s dark side too.
In other words you, as well as many others, have got it all wrong. Anyone who doesn’t fear God is a fool.
.
July 2, 2012 at 4:36 pm
Bolithio
His moral quality depends on us.
When I meet God, Im going to suggest that he do it the other way around next time…
July 2, 2012 at 6:11 pm
suzy blah blah
-like when you were three and you asked your mom if you could eat sugar all day tomorrow.
July 2, 2012 at 7:47 pm
Anonymous
2016 Predictions:
Eric V. Kirk is practicing law in Arcata.
Clif Clendenen has sold his family property, moved to Wash. State and purchased another apple orchard.
Estelle Fennell is running for U.S. House of Representatives.
Richardson Grove cut and paved. Estelle Fennell has a brand new Redwood picnic table.
Carol Bruno, as a new Community Park Board member has a concert planned every week-end of the summer.
(Bummer)
July 2, 2012 at 8:04 pm
Bolithio
Yeh exactly… except there weren’t billions of suffering souls involved.
But, I dont think we are talking about the same Gods. The more I think about what your saying, you appear to be defining God as The Force. We are more or less on the same page for this interpretation. Im just less gushy about the way I experience “God”. Thank God for diversity!
Unk John – Nice. You just inspired me to re-read one of those… Thanks! lol
July 3, 2012 at 10:14 am
j67k
42 is the answer, and “what do get when you multiply 6 by 9?” is the question.
Seems wrong, until you realize that god uses base 13.
July 3, 2012 at 3:49 pm
j67k
Anon “I’ve never seen or heard anybody describe their religious drive in terms of fear.”
You have never heard someone say (or seen it written) “put the fear of God into him…”? How about “Repent your sins or face Gods wrath!”? If you say you haven’t, you’re either lying, or you’ve lived in a cave all your life.
Religion always has & probably always will be about fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of death, fear of not fitting in, without these fears there is no need for religion. Of course nobody (except Suzy) describes their own motivations in that way, because it’s unflattering.
But, this passage kind of gives it away…
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: For thou art with me;
Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies;
Thou annointest my head with oil; My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.”
Whereas I would say…
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: because evil is a subjective concept, and besides, shadows don’t frighten me. Get over it wimps.”
July 3, 2012 at 6:36 pm
moviedad
There sure is a lot of spiritual bragging going on here.
July 4, 2012 at 10:57 am
suzy blah blah
We are more or less on the same page for this interpretation. Im just less gushy about the way I experience “God”.
-
July 4, 2012 at 1:09 pm
Anonymous
j67k, you’re confusing religious institutions with religion, you are not speaking about the universal drive or the understanding. It is not based on fear, not even secularly. Ask anybody who claims themselves to be “religious” if they are content with their understanding and if it was derived through fear. Or are you going to say they do not know they are scared, because you know they are scared? Truth is, people are people…they are not scared same as you are not scared.
But if it makes life easier for you to write it off like that, so be it.
July 5, 2012 at 3:33 pm
suzy blah blah
not speaking about the universal drive or the understanding
-or the universal joint … or the transmission.
July 5, 2012 at 7:30 pm
Anonymous
What does God think of the GPU?