What I despise about ID is the fact that it has an agenda. Pure science has no agenda other than knowledge. And if it doesn't have an agenda, why are its proponents so reluctant to subject their work to peer review? Because science doesn't lie, but people do. If it isn't falsifiable, then it isn't science. End of Story.
I don't wish to be "hating" on you as you call it. I'd prefer a peaceful dialogue to harsh words any day of the week. It doesn't take much to start a fight, nor does winning a fight depend on whose actually the toughest. The real winner of any fight is the one who can resolve the issue without any violence at all.
"To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."-Sun Tzu, the Art of War
In the interest of keeping yourself a free man, I doubt you talk this tough without a computer screen to hide behind either, young man. They have laws like assault and battery that prevent this attitude in the real world. Leave the thug persona behind and relate like a human here please, or you will find that equality in text is a very real thing. My keyboard is tougher than yours.
I've pretty much boycotted professional sports for a long time now. The first baseball strike in the eighties made me think too much about what they make for what they do. Just me, but you'd better nearly die every game for $4 million if I'm shelling out $100 a seat.
Life is hard. The single most hateful anyone can do IMO is to intentionally go out of their way in order to make it harder for other people.
By the same token, when we do things for others to make life easier without expecting any reward, I think this is the best and noblest thing anyone can do.
Anyone who has seen the movie Pay It Forward knows what I'm talking about. This world would be a much better place if people could just do things for other people just because they can. Imagine this coming from somewhere inside you without the need for religion or reward or self-interest.
Imagine then, if, well, maybe not everybody, but a lot more people did this kind of thing. Would that be a world you want to live in?
We approaching a place where more and more people are empowered to pull each other up by their bootstraps. All it takes is to get the ball rolling.
Neils Bohr was convinced at the time that Heisenberg was on the road to a working fission device. The only reason Heisenberg didn't win the race is that he was convinced heavy water was necessary, which is not the case. Heavy water is necessary for Plutonium enrichment, but a fissile U-235 device was possible without heavy water. Heisenberg was misguided, for which I am extremely thankful.
Some of the inventors of explosives have gone on to regret their inventions for the use humanity puts them to. The Nobel Prize was founded and is named after the inventor of dynamite. Nobel didn't invent Nitroglycerin, however he just invented a safer way of using it.
It seems a lot of atheists have an agenda of hate for religion that I simply can't buy into. As long as people leave me alone to believe (or not believe) as I wish, I will do the same for them.
When they try to legislate their beliefs, the only RATIONAL action I can take is to dissent, but until such time, I accept their faith as an intrinsic part of a whole. Believers aren't ALL about belief. They must still function as a part of society, and as such, they have an equal right to their humanity as do I.
I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don’t have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.— Isaac Asimov
Oh, that our mortal coil shall sigh, That unwilling, live, and unwilling, die. That 'twixt the mountains and the plain, There is no loss if there is no gain. Balanced, a knife's edge cutting deep, Is there more to life than work and sleep? When bored, and thoughtful, wistful flight, Imagination takes us high into the night. Fancies flying on summer's thin slant, A dream of dreaming, dogs breath pant, A walrus wearing a colander 'pon his head Be happy, fruitful, before you're dead.
I figure you get to be whatever in dog years you can handle a little ribbing on your birthday. If you cant, then well, you know what they say about people who cant take a joke.
It's a Zen thing. Life is irony. The least effort is rewarded by the most gain. Everything else is a tempest in a teacup, and to personalize it is just vanity.
The trick is to discern the illusion of attachment. How can you separate cause from effect? How can you affect the cause? You cannot, you are the cause AND the effect, and any interval is illusion.
Thomas Hobbes wrote that without government human life "is nasty, brutish and short" because our state of living would thus be the war of "all against all".
But it doesn't have to be that way. We just make it that way by being a**hole to one another if we have the opportunity. But, then again, maybe not. I grew up in an area of Oregon where we learned to take care of our own without much official government, because the Official government didn't get back up into the sticks in time to be worth much.
So we did for ourselves, and kept to ourselves. It wasn't really all that bad.
Robert Frost wrote that good fences make good neighbors. And locks only keep honest people honest. But honest people don't expect to get more than they give.
And that's the root of the human condition. Greed, Anger, and Stupidity.
Gandhi once said, "Live simply, so others may simply live." I think that phrase is becoming more critical to contemplate as the population continues to grow. American's hardly ever think about the true cost of the things they take for granted. Maybe its time to be learning some hard lessons. Tightening our belts, and doing for our own.
It's a funny thing, humanity. We have such noble dreams, but as a species, we are by and large, bipolar. People have a tendency to look at things in black and white, and we try often to force the world into our vision of absolutes.
These (often unconscious) absolutes that we live by are what constitute our karma.
But absolutes don't exist in a world that appears solid, but is really just a complex hologram. Matter is, for all practical purposes, largely empty space. Ultimately a projection on the underlying screen of a deeper reality.
So it is this struggle between seperate versions of our absolutes that blends the world into the participatory universe that it tends to be. By our merged visons of absolutes we create our collective karma. By changing or eliminating these absolute definitions in our life, we change our Karma.
This is where faith comes in, nd a will for, first of all, an inner, personal revolution. Finally, discipline to follow through.
No. I will be accused of "washing down or debunking" established religious dogma.
These sorts of things are personal, and I remain a humble witness to daily "miracles" without the necessity of religious dogma to prop up my experiences with "god did it" BS.
Thanks for the invitation, however. Nothing personal to yourself.
Galactic_bodhi Forum Posts (9,196)
A Pragmatic Faith