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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Nov 24, 2010 - 11:02am PT
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ah, those vatican hypocrites. a mortal sin is a mortal sin, go directly to hell, do not pass "go", do not collect 200 days indulgence. even i know this, and i haven't been a catholic for 30 years.
so, forget about the condom and stick with altar boys. they won't be infected with HIV unless the other priest has it.
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sorry for that preface, jan. on to the okinawean creed. i vote against the kantian ethics. the human race doesn't work that way. we have a strong streak of self-interest and ritual murder. it's built into the species. it isn't good, it isn't evil, it's what we do and it must be engaged realistically. it will rear its ugly head in the most unexpected ways if you try to stamp it out, something we've been trying to do since the 18th century.
here's the best suggestion i've heard to date. you'll find it in ecotopia by ernest callenbach. ecotopians combine ritual war and football. like so many injuns, they dance and howl and paint and get on the warpath. basically a high school pep session, but more serious. then they face off against each other in two football-like "teams", except they're using shields and spears instead of pigskin and padding. the battle is strictly hand-to-hand, it doesn't get too involved, and it's called at the first real injury.
there are tribes, i believe in your very neck of the pacific, who engage in something a lot like this, and it's probably a good idea. in ecotopia, the injured man gets to recuperate in a nice hospital and invariably falls in love with his nurse. when he gets out, he realizes she caught him at a vulnerable moment.
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FRUMY
Trad climber
SHERMAN OAKS,CA
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Nov 24, 2010 - 11:07am PT
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mike pope - stephen hawking I LIKE HAWKING but pope gets my vote.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Nov 24, 2010 - 11:14am PT
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Dingus - priding himself once again as the fly in the ointment. Or is it the rust and grime in the camalot?
An incredibly shallow post.
.....
EDIT
"it's built into the species. it isn't good, it isn't evil, it's what we do and it must be engaged realistically"
What the modern age can do is adapt, it can develop (and eventually codify) life strategies as part of a new and improved belief system for dealing with that - with the two lower houses of the evolved "triune" brain.
And insofar as they prove to work through trial and error, through experience, you can learn to trust them, to "have faith" in them. That is part of the new attitude.
But you have to get off the pot and "get around to it" to actually develop such a thing, i.e., a modern, updated belief system. It doesn't grow on trees all by itself. And as you develop your adapted beliefs or advocate for them, you have to be careful not to let the naysayers of the world (or the "flies in the ointment" of the world) eager to say, It's crazy, forget it, it's impossible, get in the way with their negative energy.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Nov 28, 2010 - 10:26pm PT
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Interesting isn't it, when I try to find a common denominator with the atheists of what they believe and how that could be made into a positive force for the future, they're all silent and instead rush to resurrect the other God threads so that they can argue once again with the fundamentalists?
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Nov 28, 2010 - 10:40pm PT
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Jan, you HAVE found a common denominator with at least this atheist.
I like what you posted above, a lot.
And I wish to join the church you propose, and vote for you to head it.
Norton
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Nov 28, 2010 - 10:46pm PT
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Hope you're not referring to me, I posted. Mine was the so-called "thread-killer." Till just now.
EDIT
Probably not though, as I'm really no "atheist" - as I believe in Astrophes, Diacrates and Hypercrates. -All three different god concepts. What's more, I believe in a "cosmic governance" that I sometimes call God.
BTW, what led me in my soul searching journey to these three "deifications" was the realization that... Hawking won... yeah... and it is ovah for Jehovah.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 29, 2010 - 12:15am PT
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i'm not much into creeds...
...and your's is a bit too human centric for my tastes if you ask me. And it is hard to view things from the standpoint of establishing a religion, going to the ubiquitous Wikipedia we learn:
Religion is a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of life and the universe...
of these, science may provide information on the cause and nature of life in the universe, if "cause" refers to the origin, but of the purpose of life, I think most scientists would eventually come to the conclusion, as Steven Weinberg is quoted above, that there is no purpose to life, at least no purpose beyond what we appear to be able to give it ourselves.
to the extent that we have "responsibilities," of course, we do not in this peculiar view... but we are capable of understanding what consequences our actions have, and we have a hope of modifying our actions to prevent, avoid or mitigate outcomes which would significantly affect life on this planet, at least. whether or not our understanding is achieved in time to avoid what would play out on a grand scale what any high school biology student (if they actually taught biology in high school anymore) could reproduce in a Petri dish is quite another matter. One could, later, assign fault but too late
in recognizing the inter relatedness of the working ecosystem that is Earth, we could manage that ecosystem, but to what end? to provide the best possible place for humans? it doesn't matter in the stretch of time, of which there has been 4 billion years of dominant single cell life and a very brief time, maybe 3 to 4 million years of us... and that time will end, too...
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Nov 29, 2010 - 10:18am PT
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"they're all silent and instead rush to resurrect the other God threads so that they can argue once again"
Some atheists are like some Israelis, for example, or some Palestinians. They know battle, they draw their identity if not their livelihood from it. So their interest is for it to continue.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Nov 29, 2010 - 10:35am PT
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Ah, Steven Weinberg!
Bears repeating:
Without God, September 25, 2008
"It is not my purpose here to argue that the decline of religious belief is a good thing (although I think it is), or to try to talk anyone out of their religion, as eloquent recent books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have. So far in my life, in arguing for spending more money on scientific research and higher education, or against spending on ballistic missile defense or sending people to Mars, I think I have achieved a perfect record of never having changed anyone’s mind. Rather, I want just to offer a few opinions, on the basis of no expertise whatever, for those who have already lost their religious beliefs, or who may be losing them, or fear that they will lose their beliefs, about how it is possible to live without God.
First, a warning: we had better beware of substitutes. It has often been noted that the greatest horrors of the twentieth century were perpetrated by regimes—Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China—that while rejecting some or all of the teachings of religion, copied characteristics of religion at its worst: infallible leaders, sacred writings, mass rituals, the execution of apostates, and a sense of community that justified exterminating those outside the community.
When I was an undergraduate I knew a rabbi, Will Herberg, who worried about my lack of religious faith. He warned me that we must worship God, because otherwise we would start worshiping each other. He was right about the danger, but I would suggest a different cure: we should get out of the habit of worshiping anything.
I’m not going to say that it’s easy to live without God, that science is all you need. For a physicist, it is indeed a great joy to learn how we can use beautiful mathematics to understand the real world. We struggle to understand nature, building a great chain of research institutes, from the Museum of Alexandria and the House of Wisdom of Baghdad to today’s CERN and Fermilab. But we know that we will never get to the bottom of things, because whatever theory unifies all observed particles and forces, we will never know why it is that that theory describes the real world and not some other theory.
Worse, the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.
What, then, can we do? One thing that helps is humor, a quality not abundant in Emerson. Just as we laugh with sympathy but not scorn when we see a one-year-old struggling to stay erect when she takes her first steps, we can feel a sympathetic merriment at ourselves, trying to live balanced on a knife-edge. In some of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, just when the action is about to reach an unbearable climax, the tragic heroes are confronted with some “rude mechanical” offering comic observations: a gravedigger, or a doorkeeper, or a pair of gardeners, or a man with a basket of figs. The tragedy is not lessened, but the humor puts it in perspective.
Then there are the ordinary pleasures of life, which have been despised by religious zealots, from Christian anchorites in the Egyptian deserts to today’s Taliban and Mahdi Army. Visiting New England in early June, when the rhododendrons and azaleas are blazing away, reminds one how beautiful spring can be. And let’s not dismiss the pleasures of the flesh. We who are not zealots can rejoice that when bread and wine are no longer sacraments, they will still be bread and wine."
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Nov 29, 2010 - 10:54am PT
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"I think most scientists would eventually come to the conclusion, as Steven Weinberg is quoted above, that there is no purpose to life, at least no purpose beyond what we appear to be able to give it ourselves."
Steven Weinberg warns to beware of substitutes. Another warning he might have mentioned is to beware of "purpose" too narrowly defined. We are goal-seeking creatures. By nature. That means we are fully capable of developing, defining, living, achieving, etc. our own purpose or purposes.
Our purposes do NOT have to hinge on any frame of reference that is NOT of our choosing.
EDIT Purpose certainly does NOT have to hinge on how any Abrahamic, Hindu or Voodoo system, for example, defines it.
That is the new attitude.
.....
That's right. Give purpose to life, YOURSELF.
Make this your code, your creed. In part.
EDIT
"in recognizing the inter relatedness of the working ecosystem that is Earth, we could manage that ecosystem, but to what end? to provide the best possible place for humans?"
A thing of beauty is... this will sort out - in time - one way or another. -Just wish I could be around to "collect samples." ;)
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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An interesting, oft-forgotten, point Carl Sagan made in Demon Haunted World:
"Of course, reducing everything to a vital force (or to a discarnate ghost, spirit or soul) is no less reductionist."
Wow, how seldom we remind ourselves of this relevant point. Why is that? What, do we forget? Maybe we just space it out because of all the other issues confronting us. At any rate, amazing.
Yeah, Sagan was indeed a candle in the dark. Still is, even in Dec, 2010.
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Crodog
Social climber
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By Philip Pullella – 1 hr 14 mins ago
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – God's mind was behind complex scientific theories such as the Big Bang, and Christians should reject the idea that the universe came into being by accident, Pope Benedict said on Thursday.
"The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe," Benedict said on the day Christians mark the Epiphany, the day the Bible says the three kings reached the site where Jesus was born by following a star.
"Contemplating it (the universe) we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God," he said in a sermon to some 10,000 people in St Peter's Basilica on the feast day.
While the pope has spoken before about evolution, he has rarely delved back in time to discuss specific concepts such as the Big Bang, which scientists believe led to the formation of the universe some 13.7 billion years ago.
Researchers at CERN, the nuclear research center in Geneva, have been smashing protons together at near the speed of light to simulate conditions that they believe brought into existence the primordial universe from which stars, planets and life on earth -- and perhaps elsewhere -- eventually emerged.
Some atheists say science can prove that God does not exist, but Benedict said that some scientific theories were "mind limiting" because "they only arrive at a certain point ... and do not manage to explain the ultimate sense of reality ..."
He said scientific theories on the origin and development of the universe and humans, while not in conflict with faith, left many questions unanswered.
"In the beauty of the world, in its mystery, in its greatness and in its rationality ... we can only let ourselves be guided toward God, creator of heaven and earth," he said.
Benedict and his predecessor John Paul have been trying to shed the Church's image of being anti-science, a label that stuck when it condemned Galileo for teaching that the earth revolves around the sun, challenging the words of the Bible.
Galileo was rehabilitated and the Church now also accepts evolution as a scientific theory and sees no reason why God could not have used a natural evolutionary process in the forming of the human species.
The Catholic Church no longer teaches creationism -- the belief that God created the world in six days as described in the Bible -- and says that the account in the book of Genesis is an allegory for the way God created the world.
But it objects to using evolution to back an atheist philosophy that denies God's existence or any divine role in creation. It also objects to using Genesis as a scientific text.
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rrrADAM
Trad climber
LBMF
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Again...
Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître ( lemaitre.ogg (help·info) July 17, 1894 – June 20, 1966) was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, honorary prelate, professor of physics and astronomer at the Catholic University of Louvain. He sometimes used the title Abbé or Monseigneur.
Lemaître was the first scientist to propose what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his 'hypothesis of the primeval atom'.[1][2]
. . .
He died on June 20, 1966, shortly after having learned of the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation*, which provided further evidence for his intuitions about the birth of the Universe. * which he had also predicted decades earlier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre
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Crodog
Social climber
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Apr 25, 2011 - 11:11am PT
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A rumor is floating around the physics community that the world's largest atom smasher may have detected a long-sought subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle."
The controversial rumor is based on what appears to be a leaked internal note from physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17-mile-long particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland. It's not entirely clear at this point if the memo is authentic, or what the data it refers to might mean — but the note already has researchers talking.
The buzz started when an anonymous commenter recently posted an abstract of the note on Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit's blog, Not Even Wrong.
Some physicists say the note may be a hoax, while others believe the "detection" is likely a statistical anomaly that will disappear upon further study. But the find would be a huge particle-physics breakthrough, if it holds up.
"If it were to be real, it would be really exciting," said physicist Sheldon Stone of Syracuse University.
Hunting for the Higgs
The Higgs boson is predicted to exist by prevailing particle-physics theory, which is known as the Standard Model. Physicists think the Higgs bestows mass on all the other particles — but they have yet to confirm its existence.
Huge atom smashers — like the LHC and the Tevatron, at Fermilab in Illinois — are searching for the Higgs and other subatomic bits of matter. These accelerators slam particles together at enormous speeds, generating a shower of other particles that could include the Higgs or other elemental pieces predicted by theory but yet to be detected. [Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]
The leaked note suggests that the LHC's ATLAS particle-detection experiment may have picked up a signature of the elusive Higgs. The signal is consistent, in mass and other characteristics, with what the Higgs is expected to produce, according to the note.
However, some other aspects of the signal don't match predictions.
"Its production rate is much higher than that expected for the Higgs boson in the Standard Model," Stone told SPACE.com in an email interview. So the signal may be evidence of some other particle, Stone added, "which in some sense would be even more interesting, or it could be the result of new physics beyond the Standard Model."
Too soon to tell
Stone was quick to point out that the note is not an official result of the ATLAS research team. Therefore, speculating about its validity or implications is decidedly preliminary.
"It is actually quite illegitimate and unscientific to talk publicly about internal collaboration material before it is approved," Stone said. "So this 'result' is not a result until the collaboration officially releases it."
Other researchers joined Stone in urging patience and caution before getting too excited about the possible discovery.
"Don't worry, Higgs boson! I would never spread scurrilous rumors about you. Unlike some people," Caltech physicist Sean Carroll tweeted today (April 22).
While it's still early, some researchers have already begun to cast doubt on the possible detection. For example, Tommaso Dorigo — a particle physicist at Fermilab and CERN, which operates the LHC — thinks the signal is false and will fade upon closer inspection.
Dorigo — who said he doesn't have access to the full ATLAS memo — gives several reasons for this viewpoint. He points out, for example, that scientists at Fermilab didn't see the putative Higgs signal in their Tevatron data, which covered similar ground as the ATLAS experiment.
Dorigo feels strongly enough, in fact, to put his money where his mouth is.
"I bet $1,000 with whomever has a name and a reputation in particle physics (this is a necessary specification, because I need to be sure that the person taking the bet will honor it) that the signal is not due to Higgs boson decays," he wrote on his blog today. "I am willing to bet that this is NO NEW PARTICLE. Clear enough?"
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10b4me
Ice climber
Happy Boulders
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Apr 25, 2011 - 12:36pm PT
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as soon as I read "The Pope said. . . . ",
I knew it was bs
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