trish123 Forum Posts (13,724)

RE: Does anyone from UK..have feedback on Prince William's engagement?

They have six or seven people to do the job cos theres usually about four of them taking time off due to stress and the grievances procedures

Send em for a spell down 'th mines I say - ooops sorry, we dont have any of those left do we

RE: dead christmas trees- a disgrace

oh how informative for the children

RE: dead christmas trees- a disgrace

yep, thats the one - all night for that, you flippin lightweight

RE: Garlic Bread

Can anybody find the Peter Kay vid about garlic bread being "the future" I looked on youtube but am too dumb to find it

RE: dead christmas trees- a disgrace

I still like the one you posted a pic of a couple of yrs back - it was made of beer bottles empties of course

RE: Does anyone from UK..have feedback on Prince William's engagement?

RE: Does anyone from UK..have feedback on Prince William's engagement?

Private as in opposed to state wedding is what I meant - not private as in 'keep yr bloody nose out'

RE: Does anyone from UK..have feedback on Prince William's engagement?

Yes, thats very true too - didnt I hear reports recently about the troops having to foot the bill for their own equipment

RE: Does anyone from UK..have feedback on Prince William's engagement?

RE: Does anyone from UK..have feedback on Prince William's engagement?

Go and try to wind somebody else up sweetie - youre wasting your time with me - white collar crime costs this country infinitely more than than benefit discrepancies - you are just using the bandwagon for your own campaign - stuff it where the sun dont shine hey

RE: Does anyone from UK..have feedback on Prince William's engagement?

A friend of mine who works at the benefit office is pulling her hair out - far from seeing her clients as scroungers and cheats, she wonders where the heck these people are supposed to find jobs in the first place

RE: Does anyone from UK..have feedback on Prince William's engagement?

Exactly

The only poeple making anything out of this farce will be those who are already wealthy to begin with - we wont even get a piece of cake and will have to put up with months of drivel in the media - I wonder if this wedding frock is going to have 10,000 pearls hand sewn too (I wonder how much they cost and how much a homeless hostel costs) and I still wonder what they will bring in through the parliamentary back door while everybody is preoccupied - Charles and Di's wedding, 30 yrs ago cost £30 million reputedly and to my mind, no matter whos footing the bill, thats dosh that could be better spent than on a massive publicity stunt for the royals....... This is a private matter, not a state wedding and accordingly, the entirety of the bill should be footed by the couple and their family, not the taxpayers - apart from that little lot, like I would wish any other young couple well, I extend the same wishes to these two.......

RE: dead christmas trees- a disgrace

hahaha

Hey look at what I just found for a different take on the happily ever after stuff

RE: dead christmas trees- a disgrace

I saw some cut branches of deciduous wood sprayed silver and decorated earlier this week - they looked really neat and dont of course have the carbon footprint problem of plastic anything....

RE: dead christmas trees- a disgrace

The Pagan Origins of Christmas
By Royce Carlson



Many of our modern Christmas traditions began hundreds of years before Christ was born. Some of these traditions date back more than 4000 years. The addition of Christ to the celebration of the winter solstice did not occur until 300 years after Christ died and as late as 1800, some devout Christian sects, like the Puritans, forbade their members from celebrating Christmas because it was considered a pagan holiday. So what is the history behind these traditions?

The Christmas tree is derived from several solstice traditions. The Romans decked their halls with garlands of laurel and placed candles in live trees to decorate for the celebration of Saturnalia. In Scandinavia, they hung apples from evergreen trees at the winder solstice to remind themselves that spring and summer will come again. The evergreen tree was the special plant of their sun god, Baldor.

The practice of exchanging gifts at a winter celebration is also pre-Christian and is from the Roman Saturnalia. They would exchange good-luck gifts called Stenae (lucky fruits). They also would have a big feast just like we do today.

Mistletoe is from an ancient Druid custom at the winter solstice. Mistletoe was considered a divine plant and it symbolized love and peace. The tradition of kissing under the mistletoe is Druid in origin.

The Scandinavian solstice traditions had a lot of influences on our celebration besides the hanging of ornaments on evergreen trees. Their ancient festival was called Yuletide and celebrated the return of the sun. One of their traditions was the Yule log. The log was the center of the trunk of a tree that was dragged to a large fireplace where it was supposed to burn for twelve days. From this comes the twelve days of Christmas.

Even the date of Christmas, December 25, was borrowed from another religion. At the time Christmas was created in AD 320, Mithraism was very popular. The early Christian church had gotten tired of their futile efforts to stop people celebrating the solstice and the birthday of Mithras, the Persian sun god. Mithras’ birthday was December 25. So the pope at the time decided to make Jesus’ official birthday coincide with Mithras’ birthday. No one knows what time of year Jesus was actually born but there is evidence to suggest that it was in midsummer.

So, if you are celebrating any of the western traditions of Christmas this year, remember that you are actually enjoying the rituals and activities of several ancient religions whose traditions have been borrowed by the Christians over the years for the celebration of the birth of Christ.

Happy Holidays!

RE: Smoking

Oh brilliant - Im happy to have helped - thanks for saying so

RE: alone

Its very much my pleasure to let people know of these things Thank You

RE: alone

Thank You

RE: Whats your weather like?

Its just grey nothing but nonedescript...... grey

RE: alone

I hear you - my very first comment to him was to take care of what he says on a public forum - these arent the first people from Iran who have brought the plight of their people to the forums.....

RE: Mature Women like what's bad for them??

Almost everything we like is bad for us one way or another - It never stopped me yet and I dont intend changing at this late stage

RE: alone

I did consider that earlier on but am just not sure

RE: alone

The whole threads a bit screwed in my opinion Steve

RE: alone

Are you just a wind up merchant then cos last I heard there is a woman in your country suffering for something she didnt do and is under threat of death - she is not the only one either..... how can you say women there are always right?

RE: alone

RE: Aetheism...genuine or a cop out?

The whole of the above can be found either in my blog here

Mind, Brain, Soul and Atheism.

or at

RE: Aetheism...genuine or a cop out?

Hiya Lilylady

two things - the info I put on fractals covers personal experiences you mention and I think this (below) is possibly the correct version of the research you refer to;

Part 3: The God Part of the Brain


The Neurobiology of Religious Experience
Temporal Lobe Transients
Dr. Michael Persinger's "God Helmet"
Seeking to understand the neurological basis for religious experience, researchers Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili performed an experiment. Finding a group of eight volunteers who were Zen Buddhists, they asked them to meditate in the peace and silence of a darkened room. These Buddhists had claimed that, through meditation, they could reach a state called satori in which they experienced a sense of transcendent bliss along with a feeling of timelessness and infinity, as if they were a deeply interwoven part of all of reality. Newberg and D'Aquili wanted to find out what was going on in their minds when this happened.

When the volunteers reached the apex of their meditative state, they tugged on a string, which was Newberg and D'Aquili's cue to inject a radioactive tracer into their blood through an IV line. This tracer traveled to their brains and became bound to the neurons that were most active, creating a snapshot of brain activity at that particular moment that could later be imaged through a technique called SPECT (short for single photon emission computed tomography). When the imaging was performed, it showed, unsurprisingly, that brain regions responsible for concentration were highly active. However, there was one other consistent result that stood out. In all eight subjects, a particular region of the brain, the superior parietal lobe, showed a sharp reduction in activity.

The role of this brain region was already known. As discussed in Part 1 of this essay, the superior parietal lobe is the brain's "where" system. Its job is to orient a person in three-dimensional space and help them move through the world; as part of this task, it must draw a clear distinction between "self" and "not-self". For this reason, Newberg and D'Aquili call it the "orientation association area", or OAA for short. In all eight volunteers, the OAA had been inhibited by their deep meditative state, deprived of the sensory information it needs to build a coherent picture of the world.

What would be the result of this? Without the OAA, the brain is unable to perceive the physical limits of the self - unable to tell where the body ends and the world begins. (One of the meditators who took part in the study described the experience as feeling "like a loss of boundary" (Holmes 2001, p. 26)). And "n that case, the brain would have no choice but to perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses. And this perception would feel utterly and unquestionably real" (Newberg and D'Aquili 2001, p. 6).

Intrigued by the possibility of a biological basis for religious experience, Newberg and D'Aquili broadened their study to include Franciscan nuns who claimed they felt a sense of closeness with God while deep in prayer. The experiment was repeated, and the results were the same: both the Franciscans and the Buddhists experienced similar drops in activity in the OAA, producing a sense of infinite self which both groups then interpreted through the milieu of their own religious beliefs.

RE: alone

Well said I did speak with care and concern too but am not sure if it was taken how it was meant - people truly do get disappeared from the streets in Iran, I have spoken of their plight many times on CS over the years

RE: alone

Take care what you say on a public forum then

RE: Smoking

This stuff is £4.20 for a 2 oz pack and I quite like it too - the pack will last months as well so the cost compared to ordinary ones is negligible They make real ciggies too which are less than £3 for 20 - its a bit like having alcohol free beer I guess - but I sure aint goin down that road