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WBraun
climber
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Oct 20, 2009 - 11:56am PT
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If they were "intelligentely designed"
"If" means you ultimately don't know.
Mental speculation
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WBraun
climber
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Oct 20, 2009 - 12:04pm PT
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Another mental speculation.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Oct 20, 2009 - 12:29pm PT
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Wanda wrote: "To paraphrase,
That of a flying blue jack-o'lantern-headed, Christmas-eve, tooth-fairy bunny nature does not "exist" because it (for lack of another word) is unborn. The flying blue jack-o'lantern-headed, Christmas-eve, tooth-fairy bunny never "came into existence" at some point in space and time, nor will "it" ever vanish. The Of course none of this makes "sense," because "sense" is limited to "things" we can measure, contrast, and work over and adorn with our evolved minds and senses. That's why trying to investigate spirituality through standard thought processes will reveal nothing at all. simply IS, that's why all wisdom traditions relate flying blue jack-o'lantern-headed, Christmas-eve, tooth-fairy bunnys to being, not thinking.
Absolute nonsense."
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The above was in response to this: "Of course none of this makes "sense," because "sense" is limited to "things" we can measure, contrast, and work over and adorn with our evolved minds and senses. That's why trying to investigate spirituality through standard thought processes will reveal nothing at all."
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Viola! "Nothing at all" somehow becomes "flying blue jack-o-lantern-headed, Christmas-eve, tooth fairy bunny."
Been working a little of the Olde English there, Wanda??
What this underscores is people's compulsion to try and frame spiritualty in terms of things their evaluating mind can grasp onto, and second, their mind will project onto said "things" whatever they have been told to believe per "religion."
One way you might find some traction here (beyond pumpkins and suck) is to ponder what is meant by the term "being" in human being. This might get you started.
JL
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rectorsquid
climber
Lake Tahoe
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Oct 20, 2009 - 12:53pm PT
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My mom told me that God created the heavens and the earth and that God's power is beyond my comprehension. My mom also told me that when all parts of my body are no longer functioning, that there is a soul that remains and goes to heaven and that I will be better off. She also told me that to speed up this process is evil and that if I kill myself to be closer to God and to be in heaven, that I will instead go to a place where I will be tortured for all eternity. She had some graphic pictures to go with the story.
My dad said that he has no idea how life came to be and that there is some evidence in fossils and in biology that we are very closely related to other primates like chimps. he said that many scientists think, because of how our genetics relate to those of other creatures and how often genes are thought to change, that we came from a common ancestor with chimps about 6 million years ago, give or take a few million years. He had some pictures to go with the story too.
Dave
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dirtbag
climber
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Oct 20, 2009 - 01:05pm PT
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Why, are you looking for a new way to meet women?
;-)
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jstan
climber
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Oct 20, 2009 - 02:11pm PT
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Jeff has carefully neglected to specify what it is the hot GOP ers believe in.
Attila the Hun?
After reading some of the amazing stuff posted above:
Kearney quotes someone who does not seem to have any idea what science is. That text is spin, of course, specifically directed at that part of the population having that difficulty.That there are errors of one sort or another in science so it is entirely wrong. We are therefore left to THINK it is better to ACCEPT something that has no evidence for it at all and may well be entirely wrong. Because we know PERFECTLY that it is true. How do we know it perfectly?
Because someone told us it was true. We don't even know who it was that told us this.
In its grand and imperfectly known outline life has proceeded from single celled organisms up through many of the higher forms, the so-called ontogeny of life. And when the human blastosphere( the initial clump of dividing cells of the human fetus) assumes a shape, it proceeds through shapes vaguely like this series of higher life forms. The fetus goes through a phase wherein it looks vaguely like a fish. This is all stuff we learned in high school.
There have been unfortunate results because of this path of development. The design of and routing of nerves in our middle and inner ear areas are so constricted, complex, and exposed to damage because this area in the fish has these characteristics. We adopted that design in that stage of our evolution and never evolved away from it. If man had been intelligently designed in one grand swoop
we would not be built exactly as we are.
If there were a god who had done his work, I would not have suffered from Meniere's Disease and Bell's Palsy.
None of this, of course, is something one can "BELIEVE" as a "PERFECT" fact. But if you go and look in Gray's anatomy you will come away asking who the hell designed this?
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WBraun
climber
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Oct 20, 2009 - 02:22pm PT
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Yes, go get a date with a monkey.
No human ever evolved from monkey/ape to human.
Pure utter total bullsh'it.
There is absolutely no evidence anywhere of such nonsense.
Darwin's concept, he used the natural selection, but he doesn't go far enough what that nature is. He has no clue what nature is nor where comes from.
All mental speculations based on imperfect scientists and their imperfect machines.
And they accept this nonsense, "Well this is all we've got"
"In the future" "We will"
Everything is going on perfectly without rascal scientist speculating and misleading people down the drain of only gross physical bodily consciousness.
Their whole science is defective from the very start.
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dirtbag
climber
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Oct 20, 2009 - 02:24pm PT
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What's wrong with the fossil and molecular evidence?
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cintune
climber
the Moon and Antarctica
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Oct 20, 2009 - 02:42pm PT
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Rectorsquid: So you had to choose between a story that came from a book whose authorship is attributed to a supernatural being, or a story that came from contemporary observations of material facts.
A lot depends on one's upbringing, of course.
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dirtbag
climber
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Oct 20, 2009 - 02:47pm PT
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"Werner,
My urge to climb is no doubt derived from my distant cousin Ardi.
The evil one "
That's where my urge to have sex with chimps is derived!
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jstan
climber
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Oct 20, 2009 - 02:53pm PT
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"If this Planet was made in SIX(6) days... (COUNT THEM PLEASE!!!)...
How come we have Fossil evidence that dates back more than SEVEN(7) days???..."
I must say. This crew is hard to deal with.
I don't know how public school teachers manage to stay sane.
Oh oh!
Maybe they aren't.
Masochistic surely.
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wack-N-dangle
Gym climber
the ground up
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Oct 20, 2009 - 04:05pm PT
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I remember learning about homeobox genes in school:
From Wikipedia:
"Diversity
The homeobox genes were first found in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and have subsequently been identified in many other species, from insects to reptiles and mammals."
The scientists who found the sequence controlling heart development named it "Tinman".
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Brian Hench
Trad climber
Anaheim, CA
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Oct 20, 2009 - 04:08pm PT
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I've been mulling over some of the things that have been said in this thread about "truth" and how we, as humans, "know" things.
What does it mean to know? What is truth?
A few thousand years ago a boy asked his father, "what makes things fall?". The father said, "it doesn't matter what makes them fall, they just do, now get back to work".
A student asked Aristotle why things fall and Artistotle said, "they fall because they are heavy, the heavier they are the faster they fall". The student was satisfied and said, "now I see!".
One of Galileo's students aked him the same question and he said, "good think you asked. I did some experiments and I found that all objects fall and that the rate at which they fall is independent of their mass". The student walked away feeling enlightened.
A student of Isaac Newton asked him why things fall and he said, "all objects have mass and the force acting between them is called "gravity". The force is proportional to product of their masses times a constant and inversely propotional to the square of the distance between them". The student said, "yes, now I understand".
One of Albert Einstein's students asked him about gravity and was told, "all massive objects warp the space around them". After Einstein's death the student went on to confirm some of his mentor's predictions, including that light should be bent by suitably massive objects like stars.
A student of one of today's particle physicists approached his mentor about gravity and was told that gravitons are exchanged between all massive objects and they carry the force between them. The student asked if they have been observed but was told, "no, but we hope to deduce their existence through gravitational waves and in future experiments in the Large Hadron Collider."
Each student was told the truth, as it existed at the time. The truth was a model of reality. It was the very best model of reality that existed at the time the question was asked. The model evolved and changed over time.
Each model was able to explain more and more observations than the one that came before it. Each was was a truth.
How does WB define truth? Truth is what God says it is.
How do we know what God says? It is written in the Holy Book.
Who wrote down the words in the Holy Book? They were written by prophets who were divinely guided. The words they wrote were God's words.
How do we know they weren't making this stuff up? Stop asking questions and believe what I am telling you!
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GOclimb
Trad climber
Boston, MA
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Oct 20, 2009 - 04:27pm PT
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JStan - here's the trouble: the scientific method, as successful as it is for both its practitioners and its beneficiaries, is simply unappealing to the vast majority of the population.
Most folks want capital "T" Truth as adults, in the same way they understood it as children. Sadly, science is worse than useless for these people. Not only worthless because science doesn't operate like that, but worse than worthless because it denies the validity of that method of belief - a method which is at the root of how these people get through each and every day!
Attempting to change that for adults is not only impossible, but I doubt that you or I would like the results. Would you want to see a successful adult lose all of their coping mechanisms? Think of Lynne, or of Werner. Think of what they do on a daily basis.
You will have to answer the question yourself, in your own way. But for me, no thanks - I have absolutely no interest in trying to convince them to think differently. In my opinion it's counterproductive at best, at worst - destructive!
GO
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GOclimb
Trad climber
Boston, MA
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Oct 20, 2009 - 04:31pm PT
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Brian H - nice post.
GO
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cintune
climber
the Moon and Antarctica
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Oct 20, 2009 - 05:03pm PT
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The risk in letting everyone believe whatever batsh#t-crazy voodoo they want comes when those believers start fighting over their beliefs, or decide that nonbelievers must be converted at any cost. Most modern religions, with one notable exception, have left behind most of the bloodthirsty zeal of their earlier incarnations, but whenever dogmas start forcing themselves into public policy, the risk of theocratic fascism can't be discounted. Biblical creationists trying to force their hodgepodge apologetics into the teaching of science was the origin of this thread. The rest is a matter of personal choice.
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jstan
climber
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Oct 20, 2009 - 05:17pm PT
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GO:
You may be right or you may be wrong.
We have people on the site who have said they went from believing as children to not believing at some point.
Questions for those who have made this transition.
How did it come to pass?
How did it affect you?
As you made the transition were you at any time unable to cope?
If it were possible to forcibly remove a believer's belief they might have difficulty coping. Not sure if that is possible. but have not seen evidence here of that.
I believe Mr. Sawyer it was commented on his inability to cope when he was forced to follow church commands. Comments about that kind of coping problem we have heard from quite a number of people.
Like I said, you may be right or you may be wrong. But it is certainly a subject that can be examined.
EDIT:
I have already recounted the single incident when I was asked if I wanted to go to church a second time. As I said, I told my mom I didn't have time. No pressure was ever applied to me and I have not the slightest doubt I would have offered considerable pushback. If I had been forced, I would have tried to take homework to do while in church. Something with which I could properly use the time.
My mother grew up in poverty with the threat of hunger, and she raised herself up out of that state. She was a doer and knew she had the ability to make her own way even at the time women were first getting the right to vote. She needed no support group. If I had wanted to go to church, I could have gone.
I didn't.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 20, 2009 - 05:21pm PT
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How old was I? Age five. No regrets, feel great about the decision then,
and right to this day.
How did it happen? Preponderance of evidence available as a first grader.
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dirtbag
climber
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Oct 20, 2009 - 05:24pm PT
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How did it come to pass?
I was only a mild believer. My Dad was a non-believer, and we had many discussions about the Big Bang, evolution, etc. It made a lot more sense to me than creationism and the evidence was overwhelming.
How did it affect you?
It's a lot easier to be a Christian in this society than to be an atheist. Otherwise, it bothered me about as much as coming to grips with the fact the Easter Bunny wasn't real.
As you made the transition were you at any time unable to cope?
Nope, life goes on. The truth will set you free!
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Oct 20, 2009 - 05:50pm PT
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I was never a believer despite the typical Irish catholicism and schools; I knew it was all just a ridiculous charade from the start. The logic behind that view crystalized when I was 11 as some nun kept jabbering on about how "we're made in god's image" and it dawned on me - 'if I'm made in god's image, then god must be a lot like me'. I then realized 'WTF? I wouldn't setup or run the world this way. I mean why good and evil? Why not good and better? Why not apple juice and orange juice instead of apple juice and hemlock juice?', and concluded god really isn't like me and I must not be like him after all. And if the "we're made in god's image" line was bullsh#t, so must the whole crock of it must be as well.
Pretty much right after that it occured to me that when you looked at the history of nations, war, and god's role, it was clear that god was simply a manifestation and projection of man's will, desire, ego, and the ordination of manipulative power rooted in and spawned of fear. I instantly started ditching church and my father finally told me that's fine so long as I found out who said the mass so I'd get it right when I lied to my mother.
I find the whole schtick and instrument of religion repugnant, vile, and frightening almost beyond words. It's clear evidence we have never conquered the fear of the unknown and darkness lingering just outside the cave entrance and likely never will. That the scariest thing to most people is unanswered questions - individuals and societies fear unanswered and unanswerable questions so much they'll invent and / or believe almost any outlandish pap or hallucination to plug those voids.
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