well said.



what a self-diminishing point of view. my life does have purpose to it, and i don't need a god for that. On the Stargate: Atlantis episde Sunday, George Fabrica was quoted: "Death comes to us all, but great achievements, they build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold."



read the story of Phineas Gage.



Read about A Cyborg's Manifesto.



ultimately i'm ambivalent (latin for "both frames" - the idea being that you grasp multiple understandings and feel torn between them). i feel it's important to make a legitimate effort to understand systems of thought internally. there's no such thing, at least among human beings, as unlimited perception (omniscience). the best we can do is try to learn from each other. and that doesn't come down to facts; that comes down to processes. (i've heard that when Einstein first published his work, he had 'German math' that the prevalent English, American and French and physicists couldn't really follow at first; it's not that his algebra was terribly off or anything like that, but rather they had a hard time grasping how the math translated into a linguistic concept - the point illustrating that while mathmatic operations may be universal, their meaning is still only as meaningful to human subjectivity allows).

that said, there are some perspectives i favor as either more truthful or more beneficial, and indeed some i can't seem to understand. 'non-deistic scientific naturalism' might be a good way to describe the most dominant valence in my life now, but i'm a little more complicatedly simple than that.

when i was very young, like elementary school, i don't think i 'beleived in' god per se, so much as i talked to him because everyone else did. it did bring hope and comfort from time to time, i won't lie. but by middle school, i wasn't really interested in christianity. by high school, though, i was curious. for a while i got into new-age kind of stuff, but no crystal-child space-cadet stuff for me. i learned to read tarot though; i've even made people cry at points because i've hit such deep things in their lives. i had a lot of rage. for one thing, i was stuck very deeply in the closet, not even consciously aware that i was gay. looking back i know i was looking for a way out. that was but one source of the anger. i was also on the fringes growing up in a lot of ways. i grew up in Santa Ana, CA, east of the rich Orange County cities of Laguna Beach and a few others. and yes, the people are incredibly shallow there. however Santa Ana is predominately Chicano and working class/working poor, my highschool comprising 86% Hispanic/Latin, as well as 13% southeast Asian (mostly Cambodian and Laosian). i'm a Euro-mutt, so i got to grow up with (the incredibly badly named term) "reverse" rascism. it wasn't horribly by highschool, though, but middle school was pretty bad. my father was also an asshole supreme with a side of dickhead. pardon my french. i lived with him until i left for college, which i primarily viewed as the best way to get the hell out of there.

during the summer before my senior year of HS, i started going to a Vietnamese Buddhist temple. meditation changed my life. i let go of all that rage i had. i stopped resenting my past and cursing my life. eventually i even stopped hating society utterly. yes, i also forgave my father... only shortly before he died of a perforated ulcer. i never got the chance to make him believe i forgave him.

you see, during my first year of college, he crashed a county-owned car. he'd bounced from so many jobs, he'd ended up a park janitor. it's respectible work and i don't speak lowly of it, but he had a college degree, whereas my mom never got one but managed to own her own home childcare business for 16 years. but there marriage had mostly gone to shit by the time i have my first memories; she was just always so afraid to leave him, for lots of reasons. but when he crashed the car and lost his job, she broke. they were putting me through college, after all. she started plotting to poison him to death, what psychologists call a psychotic break. she had a physical shortly after that, and when her BP was some horrible figure in the 300s and i can't even remember. her doctor asked what'd changed so quickly, and she spilled everything. she volintarily committed herself to a 3-day 5150, and when she got out promptly proceeded to divorce his ass, grab my 16-year-old younger brother and move. it broke him; he told me later he'd always thought they'd grow old together. i looked at him and couldn't comprehand it. what marriage had he lived? looking back on it, he had some significant psychological problems. at the very least, he suffered borderline personality disorder. at any rate, it was like he'd become a ghost of himeself after she separated. a little more than a year later, he became afflicted with an ulcer in his large instetines. he had a few diabetic episodes in the two months before he went to the hospital for the last time. it'd perforated and slowly exposed his blood to the toxins in his feces. he technically died of systemic organ failture. the doctors said he would have been in a great deal of pain. i was 20 when he died, and my younger brother was 17.

for some time i un-hesitatingly called myself a Buddhist and truly believed it. meditation has something in common with prayer: the transformation of ego. i don't really care if there's anything "beyond" that, because i don't live there (not yet at least, if there is). in time, however, i had to awknoledge that there are parts of Buddhism(s) that are completely metaphysical and supernatural. they use the term atman (soul), but more speficially they have the doctrin of anatman (no soul). Buddhist canons state that atman (which is yet another only minutely different term for self, soul, ego, essense, spirit, agent, subject), that atman is an illusion caused by attachment, both love and hate, and only by cutting off your attachment can you liberate your Self from suffering. in fact, from existence itself: nirvana literally means 'blowing out.' the metaphoric question is asked: what happens to a flame when the candle's wick runs out? nothing: it just goes out. they still relied on Hindu concepts of karma an reincarnation; karma is the result of ego-driven actions and the force that makes you seem like a persistent entity in the wheel of samsara (rebirth).

in the traditional view, the Buddha is not a god, only a man who's achieved perfect wisdom and perfect compassion. his name was Shakyamuni Gotama. anyone can achive Buddha-hood, and the Mahayanaists believe that all sentient beings are Buddhas yet to realize it. they say the next Buddha will be named Maitreya.

so. because i went through it for nigh on seven years, i can articulate all those ideas quite easily, and they can make perfect sense to me. but i imagine if you've never had anything but the popular dipiction of Buddhism, it may have been a bit confusing or even proposterous. and indeed, i can't even say anymore that i unequivically believe all that, not in that wholeheartedly faith kind of way. but that certainly doesn't mean i don't think the ideas and practices have been useful.

Albert Einstein and Arthur C. Clarke both thought very highly of Buddhism. personally, i love some of my Buddhy friends, but i find the frequent westerner-gone-Buddhist a total twit. after my education, i had to consider myself a scientist as much as anything else. universities today, good teachers at least, don't force a belief on you at all; they present different ideas and encourage you to develop your own (my education emphasized critical reasoning). there's a reason it takes at least 4 years to get a bachelor's, rarely as few as 4 more for a PhD, and a lifetime to be a scholarly expert: the few well-informed dilatants we have are some of the best human resources alive.

so i hope you can see, i have a soft spot for "religion." i didn't share all that about my life for Ss & Gs, and it wasn't all that easy, no. i don't want pity, and i don't need sympathy from people i've never met. but i hope to make it clear that i've arrived at my beliefs after a long and hard search, despite great difficulties. i'm not some naive kid, even at just 25. i'm risking the chance i've earned the latitude by now to say this candidly and hope i'm not thought arrogant, but i'm a smart guy. i was IQ tested at age 6, before kindergarden, at 186, but IQ tests are crap. they fail to measure a great deal of what an individual really intelligent, such as knowing themselves or each other, musical talent or grace of movement. besides my adolescent miscreance and occasional propensity to pick a street fight (i'm so luck i kept my good looks  actually, i also had a bit of a weight problem), despite my problems i was also a great student (3.8 in HS, 1510 on my SATs, senior class president, captain of the academic decathlon, under secretary general of the model U.N - half the school could barely speak english, so i was bored, and i wanted to get to college, remmeber?).

i was never sheltered and certainly not spoiled. i got through college on loans and grants. but i hope it's not too hard to see that i don't bear any general grudges, not even to most ideas of god. i try to value respect mutual admiration, celebrate others' lives and beliefs, and find tremendous beauty if this life and this world.

but when other human beings demean me by thinking my eyes are somehow clouded (judge not...), that i'm evil or wretched (let he who is without sin...), or that i'm in any way inferior (the meek shall inherit the earth), all i have to say is a long list of places you can shove it. 'do unto others' is the advice because i've found, it's based on the truth. karma doesn't have to be supernatural to have captured an accurate think about life: you can't do something to another without doing it to youself internally, not without being utterly inhuman. if your actions leave you with inner deamons, your only weapons will be sad denial and senseless aggression, or genuine penitence and jumble acceptance. wouldn't i have liked the comfort of the Fireman Story's god? ohhellyesiwould. there were more times in my life that i needed comfort than i can even start to count. but i'm not a sick dying boy, i'm an adult. it's not that accepting atheism is a part of growing up, not by any means. but there comes a point when you need to learn to love and comfort yourself (god helps those...). but the real point is, i won't accept that comfort because i can't believe in god; i'm not willing to pay the cost of my integrity. i've seen too much to have complete "faith" in damn near anything. if i'm not even here, then this is all an illusion, then what the hell does it matter if i act like i am here? might as well proceed on an as-if basis through life. and in this life, it seems i have at least some measure of something called freedom.


...so, does that answer your question?   

/rant

did you guys see V for Vendetta?

really? exactly what do you think it would change?

When is the last time anyone here listened to Jimi Hendrix "All along the Watchtower" ?
"There must be some kinda way outta here, said the Joker to the Thief"

There is a way out, but not by telling jokes while you get your pocket picked.

"We can all hang together, or we can all hang seperately"
-Thomas Jefferson

You don't think it is amazing how for some darn reason when the molecules, carbohydrates, lipids, DNA, protein formed my now 26 year old body, as it has formed in billions and billions of other bodies, that this body was to house my consciousness?
I mean why exactly am I me and not you???



Countless parents have sex across the globe. Now why, when sex has occured billions of times in the past, did I not come into existence until January 10, 1981? Why is it that when your parents had sex, that it was you and not me that came into existence then??

I am just trying to see if there is a GOOD scientific, non higher power, non God, non soul explanation as to why exactly I am who I am. To me, the idea of a soul makes more sense than "your parents had sex and you were the result" I mean countless parents have had sex and I didn't result then right? Surely there is a better argument?

I'm not certain that I'm not the result of millions of 'random recombinations' of dna. In that sense we are all the children of everyone that ever had sex, including the first enterprising sea-slugs. There's nothing wrong with that, but I might add that if someone were to take the self-centered view, it would be easy to assume(probably a mistake) they were not. There are no absolutes that can justify an absolute, because absolutes are simply labels for something not understood or difficult to express. They are not absolutely absolute, because everything is a process, no thing(<-absolute label) stays the same. Life is change. Even the mountains change, even Galaxys. The Universe is alive, though not in the way we can express it. Self-examination is just another phase of another process involving just another tiny molecule in the big picture we can't see; no more and no less.

If you can (hope I used the can correctly this time) see a rock grow by gazing at it with an empty mind (meditation), then you may see the mysteries of the Universe. It's easier than being a rock trying to look at itself even as it changes from moment to moment. That ought to keep you busy for a while.   

[/quote] I don't think it's amazing at all. You are the result of the DNA and life experiences that you had.

Maybe it's because I don't smoke pot, but there is nothing at all deep about this. You are you because if you were someone else, you'd be wondering why you were them and not you. You weren't predestined. If a tree falls over, it's not amazing that it fell in the particular way it did because that's just the way it happened. If I drop a book and it opens up to page 59, there is nothing that needs explanation about that.
[/quote]

So sure are you? Maybe I was predestined? Is there at least a chance that I was meant to be pre-destined? A chance their is a God? I will acknowledge that I suppose their is a chance I am me, "just cuz" (which just doesn't seem like much of an argument, but hey maybe it was written into my DNA to not think that "just cuz" or "you are you because if you were someone else, you'd be wondering why you were them and not you" were good arguments at all)

I am not trying to prove God, I know that is impossible. I am just trying to show why I think a higher power or God or soul is more probable at least in my mind than "you are you and that just is!!!! But, you cannot at least acknowledge the chance for "souls" or the chance for a God?

We know now that atoms, protons, neutrons, and electrons exist. 300 years ago, nobody had any clue what protons, neutrons, electrons, and atoms were. Not a single one of you would probably argue with me as to whether or not neutrons, protons, electrons, atoms, etc. did in fact exist 300 years ago. Yet, if I went back in time and tried to argue that protons, neutrons, atoms, etc. were real and existed even though we can't see, hear, or otherwise directly observe them, I imagine most people would just say "ludicrous!" they don't exist! when in fact they do. I wonder if even one person 300 years ago would say to me that yeah, I guess they could exist?

Is the argument, "well it doesn't exist because I can't see, hear, smell, touch, or feel it a good one? How do you guys know death is the end to your conscious existence? Is the argument that we can't smell, hear, touch, taste, or see a "soul" or "afterlife" or "God" a good argument? We couldn't observe atoms, neutrons, protons, and electrons 300 years ago, but that doesn't remove the fact they that did exist 300 years ago. Surely there is a chance a soul, God, after-life does in fact exist?

One final thought: many great minds of our time speak of the possiblity and even the high probability that a higher dimension universe exists. If many great scientists talk about higher dimensions that we cannot possibly observe, then certainly there is a chace for God?

argument against evolution.................


there was a video i watched that had a whole bunch of facts on christianity and y it makes sense
in the video was a section on y evlution wouldnt work.....

there is this fish (cant remeber the name)in some river somewhere (cant remeber that either) that has a very very veeeeeery precise way of capturing smaller fish to eat.
It literaly floats just a few inches above the riverbed for hours and hours waiting for another smaller fish to come along. When one does eventually come it takes such a small fraction of a second to reach out and open its mouth and snatch the fish that u literaly cant even see it on a regular camera (like seriously, u dont even see a blur it happens so fast) u have to use a high speed camerea..........

whats this got to do with evolution.......

well if it takes several millions of years for a being to evolve into something more complex, how would this little fish survive...

if it needs to eat on a daily basis using only this method..........and it took millions of years for it to perfect this method.......how does it even exist today if has to use that small window of time to capture its meal?

it would simply die before it could get anything to eat!

Thats just how it does it today, its ancestors did something abit diffrent. Its decendants will do it diffrently too. sorry mate its just a bad arguement you got above cause it lacks a showing of looking for any flaws in the statement.

If ya got to argue something against evolotion try using the missing gap examples they have better facts on that. Or even quote Einstien like, "god doesnt play dice."

i at least awknowledge both of those as possibilities, and i don't think "you are who you are and this just is". you are who you are, obviously. the "just is" part isn't all that useful a thought though. Hitler and Gandhi both 'just were', but we expect more thoughtful reason for why the former because so dispicable and the later so noble. but biographical and social reasons can explain that as easily -or better- than spiritual reasons.



another straw man fallacy: this isn't how evolution works at all. that fish evolved its eating behavior as a part of evolving into what it is today. that's up there with saying "if we evolved from Apes, why can't they speak English?" its ancestors most likely (and most assuredly if you go far enough back) had different methods of eating, or the method they employ was a better source of food in the past. i couldn't really tell you for sure without know what fish you're talking about. living things, in the view of some evolutionary biologists, frequently evolves to fill empty ecological niches because there's less competition in such niches.

here's an argument for evolution: domesticated animals. if all animals were created during the first times described in genesis, and evolution doesn't happen, they why have been been able to observe it in progress? such examples include British peppered moths and Russian silver foxes.

And how do you think domesticated animals got here in the first place? if God created them, why did he only create them in certain places? and why are there virtually no larged domesticated animals indigenous to sub-saharan Africa, the Americas or Australia? according to evolutionary archaeologists, it's because domesticated animals are the result of long interaction with human beings. not any old animal is fit for domestication: in general, they must start out as relatively tame pack animals, not prone to panic, and with a rigid hierarchy that humans can take control of. of course, house cats, the Chinese silkworm moth, and Andean guinea pigs are exceptions because they're not large and were never bred to be beasts of burden. domestic goats have differently shaped horns than wild mountain goats; domestic pigs lack the tusks of wild boars; domestic cows have shorter fur than did their anscetral aurochs (now extinct).

these animals and many others lived side-by-side with our evolutionary anscenstors, and thus had plenty of time to evolve a natural fear or suspicion of humans. when modern humans finally made it to Australia (mega-marsupials) and the new world (among others, horses, which were reintroduced by the Spanish), we killed off the native probably species of large mammals because they couldn't adjust to our fully evolved hunting abilities.

yes. that's the point i was arguing, in favor of evolution, in response to Sushistrip. i realize i had a couple poorly constructed sentences in there, but i still think that was pretty clear.

I have to laugh at this part. I talk to a quite a few pagans who believe that druids serve nature or some line like that. I often talk about the extinction of the aurochs and the great cat of Europe and how the Celtic peoples were responsible for a great deal of those "losses", let alone how many trees they cut down!



This make it sound like humans stopped evolving. I would say that these other species just could not adapt in time to the hunting skills of our ancestors. We don t really know if we will always be the dominate species.

It is a scientific fact, that there is an after life. You become dirt.

You answered your own question; Man. Man does create and can influence nature in powerful ways. When the last time you saw an ape riding a horse excluding the "Planet of the Apes" films.
Man have also learn to make hybrid species (selective breeding) but I believe this is called "artificial selection" not natural selection.