Lets liven things up a bit on MIMF...

Corno Dolce

Admiral Honkenwheezenpooferspieler
Hi Dorsetmike,

I can accept your thinking about the discussion in this thread because I once toyed with the same thoughts as you shared. But I can never let myself to just sit down and be quiet - I am extremely inquisitive by dint of character. Conversations run into trouble when they become dogmatic, ergo, not letting open questions remain open questions.
When open questions are closed, the process of inquiry ceases to exist, which is one of the reasons why the Roman Catholic Church got into so much trouble with its dogged insistence that the Earth was at the center(Geocentric), when in reality the Sun is at the center(Heliocentric). Copernicus faced so much fiery wrath for his discoveries and it wasn't until 1992 the Roman Church fully relented on its previous stance...Mind you, Copernicus was Polish and Pope Karol Woytila(John Paul II) was Polish so it took a Pole to exonerate a Pole ; -D

And now for the next inclusion:

Because if this belief — this structure — had a totally different content (even, say, if it was a belief that there is no beer in the fridge) but had the same neurophysiological properties, it would still have caused that same action of going to the fridge. This means that the content of the belief isn’t a cause of the behavior. As far as causing the behavior goes, the content of the belief doesn’t matter.
 

Corno Dolce

Admiral Honkenwheezenpooferspieler
Kommissar Kolin,

The way I see things, there is species specific evolution going on right before our very eyes... e.g. why many pesticides don't even faze certain types of insects that wreak havoc with the food supply. Br. Colin, you mentioned that you are an engineer...God Bless you for having such a noble background.
 

JHC

Chief assistant to the assistant chief
Kommissar Kolin,

The way I see things, there is species specific evolution going on right before our very eyes... e.g. why many pesticides don't even faze certain types of insects that wreak havoc with the food supply. Br. Colin, you mentioned that you are an engineer...God Bless you for having such a noble background.
Sorry comrade I was an engineer but changed careers when I landed in NZ and have been retired for a few years now.
Pesticides are one example so is the bacterial resistance to penicillin, and as you said this is one chance we have of seeing change aka evolution in action. Now I will add something Was there anything before the BB????? Ha got ya.:grin:




The way I see it is that it all happened so long ago that there's nothing we can do about it now, so why waste time and effort worrying about it? Each opinion has its followers many of whom appear to take the stance of "don't confuse me with facts, my mind's made up" so discussion rarely achieves anything except sometimes alienating friends.

Sorry but I can’t agree Mike, I find the subject fascinating and not at all divisive in itself, just another debate and a chance to hear other points of view and if it gets heated so what ?All debates on any subject can do that even music. And the post is headed “lets liven things up on MIMF” you never know I may become religious.
 

John Watt

Member
I'd like to add, have you ever seen a nuclear explosion where it wasn't the dust cloud,
where it looks like a dimension of space you can't see through,
coloured clouds, coloured round objects, not seeing anything like that until the Hubble Space Telescope
got pointed out into open space.
That really is a universe, small, and very temporary, but it's all there, trying to stabilize,
until the weakness of it's formation, a smashed atom, causes it to lose coherence, what makes it a weapon.
Your brain has so much more synaptic and electronic functions of an overwhelming complexity,
if you are uploaded into empty space, or heaven, you could expand far more universally than one atom.
Some natives think your soul becomes a star, the center of a universe,
and it's interesting that all around the world, natives who speak or point to a star or star cluster,
are usually aiming at the same stellar star space.
And the River Styx was hopefully named for Buddy Rich, and they're still waiting.
I heard his mummy is still being propped up for performing with college orchestras.
 
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Corno Dolce

Admiral Honkenwheezenpooferspieler
Fair question Kommissar Kolin - Let us just remember that Fr. Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian Jesuit Priest had his morning tea with crumpets and then proceeded to establish the notion of the Big Bang, which of course was hotly denied by many scientists and religious observers for many decades. Fred Hoyle had a good run with his Steady-State Theory but even that did not fare well in the process of inquiry. Before the Big Bang? Since there is no "settled science" but lots of conjecture I must leave it as an open question. What do I think personally? Before the Big Bang there is God, who was there before the beginning of Time and Space, who is now with us, and will be after the end of Time and Space. For me, Religion and Science are not mutually exclusive but very much inclusive. Again, we run into problems when the discussions become rigid and dogmatic, when the opposing sides are locked in "mortal combat", unable to walk a fortnight in the opposing sides shoes.

And now for the final inclusion of discussion material:

Evolution will have resulted in our having beliefs that are adaptive; that is, beliefs that cause adaptive actions. But as we’ve seen, if materialism is true, the belief does not cause the adaptive action by way of its content: It causes that action by way of its neurophysiological properties. Hence it doesn’t matter what the content of the belief is, and it doesn’t matter whether that content is true or false. All that’s required is that the belief have the right neurophysiological properties. If it’s also true, that’s fine; but if false, that’s equally fine. Evolution will select for belief-producing processes that produce beliefs with adaptive neurophysiological properties, but not for belief-producing processes that produce true beliefs. Given materialism and evolution, any particular belief is as likely to be false as true.Right. In fact, given materialism and evolution, it follows that our belief-producing faculties are not reliable. Here’s why. If a belief is as likely to be false as to be true, we’d have to say the probability that any particular belief is true is about 50 percent. Now suppose we had a total of 100 independent beliefs (of course, we have many more). Remember that the probability that all of a group of beliefs are true is the multiplication of all their individual probabilities. Even if we set a fairly low bar for reliability — say, that at least two-thirds (67 percent) of our beliefs are true — our overall reliability, given materialism and evolution, is exceedingly low: something like .0004. So if you accept both materialism and evolution, you have good reason to believe that your belief-producing faculties are not reliable. But to believe that is to fall into a total skepticism, which leaves you with no reason to accept any of your beliefs (including your beliefs in materialism and evolution!). The only sensible course is to give up the claim leading to this conclusion: that both materialism and evolution are true. Maybe you can hold one or the other, but not both.
So if you are an atheist simply because you accept materialism, maintaining your atheism means you have to give up your belief that evolution is true. Another way to put it: The belief that both materialism and evolution are true is self-refuting. It shoots itself in the foot. Therefore it can’t rationally be held.


So dear friends, I have shared what I perceive to be, a part of the process in search of the Truth. Let us remember that Truth is Absolute, not opinion! As you may have noticed, I have not bashed anyone on the head with a smoking gun aka The Bible. I cannot give Faith, only God gives Faith. The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of all Wisdom. I have found that when I seek Wisdom from God's hand, He demands that I trust Him first, then He has given me but a small key to unlock a small door which gave and gives me a small view of a part of the Infinite glory of His Kingdom. He demands that I develop my talents, whether it is Astrophysics or Music. Only when I am in the process of developing my talents does He let me peek into His creative process. We will never see the Living God as a Being, for He is like Gamma Radiation, destroying anything and everything that tries to witness Him as a Being. He does not want anyone to imitate Him. Therefore He sent His Son, Jesus Christ who lovingly shared that: "Those who have seen Me have seen the Father."


 
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JHC

Chief assistant to the assistant chief
Comrade you have posted more than I can get my head around in one sitting and I have an appointment with the Diabelli variations in half an hour, allow me time to think.
 

JHC

Chief assistant to the assistant chief
This may come over as muddled but here we go.
CD,
You say before the BB there was God so lets work with that and accept that the BB theory is correct, if you wish to forward a different theory that will be fine but will muddy the water, can I add that I do have problems with the BB in that “how is matter created out of nothing” I have read that in controlled conditions matter has been observed to come into existence and also disappear but that is not the same thing sorry I digress.
From the start we can not prove this ( BB or Creator) one way or the other also we cannot make observations of a time that did not exist so we are only left with questions.
Why did God make the UV or many UVs was God bored was God just mucking about was it to impress other Gods (if any) etc none of these makes sense to me but as there has never been any evidence of a creator we are left in the dark. The BB gets my vote at the moment.
 
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Corno Dolce

Admiral Honkenwheezenpooferspieler
Kommissar Kolin,

We are at the point where science splits hairs about what was "there" before the Big Bang. I mentioned earlier that there is plenty of conjecture from the science community in re before the Big Bang - I must leave it as an open question in re to a scientific explanation of what was before the Big Bang. The way I see it is that God executed a Supreme Action because He can. What I have just said will cause rolling of eyes and choking on coffee but even with my education and research in Astrophysics with all the analytical tools I had to learn and utilize, I cannot explain what or why or how God did what He did. I can only look upon it through Faith. Of course, its is absurd for any rational human being to grapple with something/someone that is so totally beyond control and comprehension.

When I opened this thread and began sharing discussion material, my aim was to come to terms with atheism and agnosticism. I will never know why people choose one or the other, I can only perceive that atheism and agnosticism always shoots itself in the foot. For me, its a cop-out to hold either of them as a weltanschauung(worldview). When we see the evil that plagues this world, I perceive it as a lack of not being able to relate to something outside of oneself. At the end of the day people will feel comfortable going back to their old habits, be it atheism or agnosticism.
 
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Dorsetmike

Member
Much of the "evil that plagues the world" is due to the blinkered views of some religious fanatics, in the past the inquisition and persecution of jews and other minorities and currently the Islamic extremists.
 

John Watt

Member
This is one of the most inspiring narratives I've read, maybe ever, what this thread became.
I can only quote this, because I can only expect this, what faint eternal light I see.
"In Him was life, and the life was the light of men".

I wrote a song called "True Believers",
about true believers always knowing the truth.
To quote a new chartbuster: "Happiness is knowing the truth".
I'd bump that up to happiness is living the truth.
I see god as the operating system, live and evil, as of the Eve of mankind,
uploading our electrical brains into heaven.
There's a reason why the Holy Bible doesn't tell you
what happened when you looked into the eyes of Jesus of Nazareth.
 

JHC

Chief assistant to the assistant chief
It seems we have reverted back to “there is only God” I am surprised to say the least.
I was looking forward to some enlightening arguments as to why this is so but in the end it is ’belief’ pure and simple and not one shred of a theory to back it up.
To my way of thinking the belief in a “God” and the belief in “No God at all” belong in the same camp as neither can prove one way or the other at least the agnostic accepts this.
 

Corno Dolce

Admiral Honkenwheezenpooferspieler
Br. Colin,

See, I proved that I am not in possession of the Philosopher's Stone - I am but a traveler in search of Truth. Now, my wish is that you could look yourself in the mirror and think about how you can make your life and the life of those around you so much better. Of course, I don't say this because I think that you make life miserable for yourself or for those around you but as a humble suggestion that we all as individuals can strive for better personal and professional situations.

A situation:

There once was an agnostic who was walking through the woods when suddenly a grizzly bear came charging. The agnostic started to run for to escape the bear but the bear kept gaining on him. The agnostic tripped on a tree root and fell down. The bear pounced on the agnostic. The agnostic shouted: "Help me o Lord - Don't let me perish like this." The birds stopped singing and everything was silent. At once, the bear backed off and sat down. The agnostic heard a peaceful, small voice saying to him: Why should I help you? You deny me day in and day out. Why don't you ever pray to me? I saved you from bankruptcy proceedings but you never thanked me or at least acknowledged me. So why should I help you? The agnostic said: I just find it so hard to accept that you exist. The agnostic then noticed the bear was praying aloud saying: Bless, o Lord this food for which I am about to partake of.

Br. Colin,

Let me ask you then what can you say about a woman with a husband and three young girls, the youngest being 13 months, the middle one three, and the eldest five. The woman had a total mastectomy to try stopping the metastasizing cancer cells from spreading and then given a prognosis that she had 3 weeks left to live since the doctors had no other procedures they could employ. I was part of a group of 500 people who prayed so that woman would become well again. That very same evening after we had prayed for her, she was rushed to the Emergency Room with a raging fever. For the next week she was comatose and then in the middle of the night one week later the coma broke, her fever disappeared and she sat up and was helped onto her feet by her husband and the attending physician. A team of physicians from Europe and other American hospitals were at the hospital in Honolulu, curious as to how her cancer had been blotted out. They could not explain it medically. I saw the woman a week later walking with her husband and children, with a bright shiny face. She was so grateful to be alive after having been in a near death experience. I understood then that the power of directed prayer is unfathomable. One could feel the energy in the room before she was sent to the E.R.
 
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JHC

Chief assistant to the assistant chief
First you don’t have to believe in god to do good
Second I would be astounded that the Bear understood English I would then ask why God let me go bankrupt in the first place. Then I would shoot the Bear.
Thirdly what would you say if I told you I saw a UFO land and a humanoid figure alighted and communicated with me via telepathy saying he had come to check on the crops.
Sorry CD but we are different sides of the same coin.
 

John Watt

Member
The easy thing to say is that god created it all, or all is in god.
It's the losing of the flesh that inspires me.
What if, like the particulate matter of our bodies,
we and our solar system, our universe, is part of a higher living being that can interact with us?

"There once was a girl whose heart was a frown,
because she was crippled for life and couldn't make a sound,
until one day she drew her wheelchair to the shore,
and to her legs she smiled you won't hurt me no more,
but suddenly a sight she had never seen before made her jump up and say,
look, a golden winged ship is coming my way,
and it didn't even have to stop, it just kept on going.
And so castles made of sand slip into the sea, eventually.

third verse, "Castles Made of Sand", Jimi Hendrix

We all slip away... eventually.

After some pondering, wondering, and re-reading, the big bang theory, hmm.
Two single consonant words, a kind of rhyme, goes over big in the countries of bigger bangs,
right up there with Einstein posters with E=MC squared, yeah, right on.
The biggest banger. The biggest bang for your buck.
Believing in the big bang theory means you accept that the original light is still out there,
as old as it is, even if evolving, fading, losing travel envelope, like any electrical or atomic signal,
doesn't affect it, even if it's measurable in our solar system.
If our sun is part of the big bang it should be expanding too, for eternity,
but we're told it's going to die in the future, turning into a black hole.
And this from a country where over 3,000 people died from non-levee construction, easy technology.
Instead of looking at the universe as a measurable, usable thing,
we should see it as dimensional, with interior worlds in our atoms,
and exterior worlds composed of our universe.
Mayan brujedos could disappear and reappear, transcending dimensions.
When Jesus of Nazareth was in the middle of a hostile crowd, Roman soldiers or Jewish priests,
he could turn to become invisible and walk away, evading capture.
When he underwent a transformation after the crucifixion, coming back in human form,
even his disciples didn't recognize him, until he convinced them.

But don't worry. I don't. Let's blame the 90% of our brain that we aren't meant to use,
where we would be seeing into the atomic, looking up and down the light spectrum,
and see the surrounding spiritual life of those who have gone on before,
plus the rare appearance of other spiritual beings.
Don't pay tax dollars to "look for life in outer space".
Please donate to your local adaption home.
We have been shown by example it's all about the love above.
"In Him was life, and the life was the light of men".
In Him was strife, and the strife was the plight of women. Yes, I just typed that.
 
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JHC

Chief assistant to the assistant chief
Nano technology offers us a lot John perhaps the purpose of life is intelligence?
 

John Watt

Member
I'm not going to comment about nano technology,
but if you want to grow in the love you share,
strangely enough, what we are told we need to get closer to god,
to withstand the light of his love,
you need to get more intelligent, that's for sure.

The new Canadian Oxford dictionary says intelligence "of a person or animal".
Inscrutable is nice, wholly mysterious, impenetrable. Such is our lives.
Remember Spock mind-melding with the alien diplomat in a box,
lamenting the fact that as humans with individual souls, we are so alone?
Not nano, a little lala technology, as in La-la land, as those Siliconers say from deep in their valley,
we got the ideas from watching Star Trek.
 
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JHC

Chief assistant to the assistant chief
Without technology born of intelligence you would not have posted your message
 

John Watt

Member
You're just trying to goad me on, you goad herder you.
What came first, the bullet or blood transfusions?
 

JHC

Chief assistant to the assistant chief
That is a very deep question JW, bullets came first afaik but are you hinting @ you must have bad to get good or out of rottenness goodness will come?? cause the bible says first there was good, now look what is happening.
 
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