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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 26, 2014 - 11:03am PT
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For instance it can be bad business to publicly advertise your unpopular beliefs,
Christians from the start have been murdered for speaking out in public forums. It's no wonder the majority only share through whispers, and the obscurity of a voters booth. "Declare unto Caesar what is Caesar's!", and Love your brother as you love yourself, and don't do anything if it causes your brother to sin. Evolutionary's terms of only the strongest survive can't comprehend these sentiments. Bad for business?? You bet! Show me anywhere in business where its profitable to give without expectation for receiving. Then there's "Forgiveness", "sharing", and Love. You'de be hardpressed to hear these sentiments cross the lips of an accountant or taxman!
Man didn't move past monkey status by being humble..
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Dec 26, 2014 - 11:25am PT
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Yeah, Christian's are still soooper scared of the Romans, what, with the last martyr being only 1700 years ago and all. I just don't know how those few (thousand) brave televangelists get up the courage to do what they do.
Since then it seem the Christians have been doing most of the killing.
Cathars, Crusades, Inquisition, witch trials, pro life killings - share the love!
You know what they say. The best defense...
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Dec 26, 2014 - 11:31am PT
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Western civilization: less mystical - but WAY more entertaining (actually, it doesn't seem like Japan, Korea, or China peg the mystical meter these days - whatever that might entail).
Thank the gods for America, though - the last mystical hold out in Western Civilization. From reincarnation to the Angel Moroni - we've got it all right here.
The most popular religious doctrine in America today: "I believe in something, though I don't know what that something might be."
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 26, 2014 - 11:58am PT
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Since then it seem the Christians have been doing most of the killing.
Cathars, Crusades, Inquisition, witch trials, pro life killings - share the love!
do you wanna throw in the Iraqi war, and Afgany war, and Synarian war as christian killings to?
dont you know what jesus told peter after reattaching the severed ear back on the cops head?
the jesus i know would not condone the acts of what you mentioned. do you believe He would? Why not call them for what they are. killings by men hiding behind the cloak of jesus.
Percentage wise "christians" may be the majority in america, but america is no where near a living example of being "Christ-Like"!
edit; did santa bring you a new drone?
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Dec 26, 2014 - 12:50pm PT
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I know the 'Christ Like' version of Jesus - that's the version my Catholic school subscribed to. I'm down with it, but I'm not sure how well that works in a kill or be killed environment, though.
Given that Jesus exists only in one's head (he's not standing next to you...I hope), his historical existence doesn't really matter much, does it? Fictional or not, Jesus remains an idea - and it's that idea, not his birth certificate, that matters. Given that, their ain't much difference between this atheist and your average 'Christ-like' believer in either values or action, I'd wager.
I don't do the Christmas presents thing (consumable gifts only) - the whole 'what should I get them?' and 'why did they think I'd want this?' thing just f*#ks Christmas up IMO (I have plenty of comparative data to support that), but I do love the big gatherings. They're a good excuse to perfect new recipes. I nailed the sh#t out of mushroom bacon + goat cheese and pear strudel this year. Totally f*#ked up the homemade donuts, though, but I haven't given up.
I did get some kitchen items as gifts - stuff I must have mentioned in passing I was on the hunt for but had since already acquired - from Chez Goodwill, of course. Nice stuff, but I secretly wish the money had gone to better use.
Mostly though, I tend to get rid of stuff around Christmas time. Fighting back the tide of accumulation is a constant battle - even for the hording averse. Stuff fills the volume like a gas.
Santa's gonna bring me a new camera to replace my broken one.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 26, 2014 - 01:08pm PT
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^^^Re; santa..
Santa brought us a new Chromebook, and Mindcraft!! lol, i mean Minecraft.
It' all the rage with the 8yro's!
has anyone here played this?
It would be a fun experiment; We can all meet there under our avatars and "Create A New World"
Ho Man! That would be some bellyrolls!
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 26, 2014 - 01:40pm PT
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Hey. I'm back from my solo wandering in the desert. Not forty days and nights, but half way there. I have to do this every year to keep my head clear. The desert is absolutely quiet most of the time. You would be amazed at how often silence is broken by the sound of jets flying over, though. The desert silence is so absolute that it seems to have weight. You feel it through and through.
BB, you might point out that Christians are always getting picked on, but in this country it almost never happens. Certainly people aren't going around killing people for being Christians. The Muslims are after Americans, not Christians. That's why you don't see them committing these acts in churches.
You could argue against this if you like, but this country is overwhelmingly Christian. Now, our framers were some pretty bright guys. The Constitution clearly protects religious freedom. You can pray to whomever you like in this country, and by law you are protected.
The only time we get sideways on that issue is when a government agent or agency does something overtly Christian, such as here in Oklahoma when they put the ten commandments on the capitol lawn. That is unconstitutional because it clearly favors Christians. It really isn't that big of a deal either way, but in the Oklahoma case, there is a Satanic group with probably ten members who want to put their own Satanic monument on the Capitol grounds.
Clearly, you open up a can of worms here. We don't really NEED the ten commandments written in stone. Most everyone in these parts has already read them plenty of times.
When you cut away the fluff, it is clear that protecting Christians, Jews, Hindu's and even devil worshipers is important. Most people have some sort of belief, and in real life guys like HFCS, or even me, are rarer than this thread would suggest.
Would you agree that it is important to protect atheists? We all know that the Koran clearly gives the green light to killing apostates, but Christians have the same rule in Leviticus. I need to read that book again. The first half is how you atone for your sins by sacrificing animals. The second half of the book has a number of life rules.
I thank modern Christians for NOT shoving Leviticus down my throat. That was last done during the Inquisition, not Christianity's finest hour.
I had a great trip, and had many sunsets to myself and my notebook. Largo would have been proud of me. I even meditated. It is hard not to in that beautiful landscape.
Cold as HELL at night, though. Miserable. Brings back bad memories of alpine bivies.
For some reason, modern Christians practice very few of the rules and laws that you will find in Leviticus. Only the most fundamental of the fundamental follow those rules, but they are clearly in the Bible's old testament.
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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Dec 26, 2014 - 02:16pm PT
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The desert silence is so absolute that it seems to have weight. You feel it through and through
Nice post, Mark. Thanks.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Dec 26, 2014 - 02:51pm PT
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Not too exciting a photo, but the taste makes up for it. Fairly simple recipe:
Sautee chopped 1 lb criminis n 1/4 sweet onion in grapeseed oil, toss in 3 tblsp cream or half and half, and 3 tblspn sherry - simmer away liquid. Pepper and thyme to taste.
Fine chop and, fry, and drain 1/4 lb bacon.
That's filling #1
Filling #2 is simply goat cheese and thin sliced bartlett pear
Wrap in 8 sheets of phyllo - lightly brushing each sheet with 1/2 melted butter n grapeseed oil
Bake 20 min at 375.
Sprinkle goat cheese n pear with a cinnamon.
I bake them in open foil on a pizza stone, then transport them on the pizza stone to keep them warm.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 26, 2014 - 03:14pm PT
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Jesus remains an idea - and it's that idea, not his birth certificate, that matters.
i guess telling you how my long passed grandfather taught me how to fish at age 6, would be an idea too. If i told you his secrets for catching the lunkers. It would then be your idea too. But you wouldn't know if pouring bacon grease on ur fly works or not until you actually try it!? Right?
i'm trying Jesus everday and He works. jus say'in
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 26, 2014 - 03:17pm PT
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I love the desert.
I used to go into Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, which covers SW Arizona, and take off with 5 gallons of water and 7 extra large Snickers Bars. Always around New Year's day. A 100 mile sprint from Ajo to Yuma, or a big loop or whatever. Just take off and go up the various valleys.
Edward Abbey is buried in there. The military has a huge gunnery range along the north side of the Refuge, and on the east end you lay in your sleeping bag watching F-16's dogfight all night. On the west side, it is the Marines with their Harrier jump jets. Those suckers are LOUD.
You hear A-10's in the distance, and that gigantic gattling gun sounds kind of like a burp when they fire off a burst.
The whole place is littered with shell casings from old .50 cal up to the 20mm cannon shells that the A-10 Warthogs fire. They make nice drinking cups. To get your permit, you have to sign your life away because of all of the live bombs and missiles lawn darted into the desert pavement. I have a great pic of a sidewinder missile sticking out of the ground in there.
For some weird reason, the military presence doesn't seem to matter. It damn sure keeps people out of there, and like many things in the desert they just ARE.
No water in there. It is a sprint from Ajo to Yuma. The second that you start sweating, you stop. With care, you will have enough left over water to shower with on the other side. The trick is to move quickly but do not sweat. The days are short, so it is kind of a balancing act.
Abbey loved the place, and he wrote a nice essay (with the usual Abbey exaggerations) called, "A Walk In The Desert Hills." He tries to hide the location by making up names, but it was there. I've followed Abbey's footprints around the southwest for the last twenty years. Many of those places are either trashed by illegals or loved to death. Organ Pipe National Monument supposedly looks like a garbage dumb from the air from all of the discarded water bottles. The Border Patrol went on full war mode about ten or so years ago, and after running into them too much, I quite going in there.
The Maze district in Canyonlands is now so popular that you have to make reservations with the park service ahead of time. You even have to carry out your own feces. At that point, I say it is no longer really wild, nor lonesome, nor quiet. All of the features that make the desert so powerful. Abbey wrote a great story about going into the Maze at the end of his "Desert Solitaire."
The Sonoran Desert is a lush desert full of Saquaro cactus, many species of the evil Cholla, and weird trees that can hold water.
That desert has what they call "shell roads." You will be walking through endless creosote and then notice that you are on a beeline straight path. A very old path. Just a straight line through the creosote bushes. Along them you will find pieces of sea shells now and then. Apparently the Indians used to have a brisk trade from the Sea of Cortez all the way north to the Pueblo tribes in the north. I've seen bracelets made of sea shells in the museum in Blanding, in SE Utah.
In the Blanding Museum, they have a museum that has a sash made up of thousands of Scarlet Macaw feathers that was found in Grand Gulch. They traded the feathers from down in Mexico's jungles all the way to SE Utah. They even traded the live birds.
I've been out there in Cabeza Prieta and all of a sudden, out in the middle of nowhere, you will come across a small site with lots of pottery shards and stone tools. I would report their location to the guys at refuge headquarters. They were dozens of miles from any possible water. Perhaps the climate was different when humans lived there. Those guys didn't care that much about it.
The refuge guys really freaked out the first time I went in there. Lots of illegals have died trying to cross that desert, which has almost no water.
I can see how people become spiritual in a place like that. You are at the mercy of a sparse land. Something as simple as rain can be as important as life and death to the very few inhabitants. If you just shut your mouth and settle down, the land seems very powerful. It just IS. And you just ARE. You feel very small out there alone. Big country. Small human.
So many of the world's big religions came from that small area of desert in the Middle East. Life must have been hard. Putting it all together in your head must have also been hard. That leaves a big vacuum in your "spirit" just waiting to be filled.
I love the desert, though. Like T.E. Lawrence said, he liked it "Because it is clean."
In Cabeza Prieta, there are a lot of aluminum covered wooden tow targets that they would practice shooting down back in the 40's and 50's. I know of one valley that absolutely glitters with them.
I was hiking along one day, fifteen miles or so from town, and found this inscription carved on one of the tow targets:
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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Dec 26, 2014 - 03:42pm PT
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Programming fun.
;>)
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Dec 26, 2014 - 04:24pm PT
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http://www.rense.com/general69/holoff.htm
Jammer, that was a fun post but it won't find much traction here, where most people are marching in the opposite direction, and calling that clarity. My sense of it is clarity exists in all directions if the observer is up to the task. If not, it's all mud wherever we go.
I used to run into David Boehm in grad school. He came to CGS many times and it took many times to get hold of his "implicate order" and other slippery views. Fascinating guy. He lacked language skills so postulating his concepts in understandable terms was a challenge to him - and us.
JL
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 26, 2014 - 04:34pm PT
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Base and then Jgill: The desert silence is so absolute that it seems to have weight. You feel it through and through.
Nice post, Mark. Thanks.
Most of the time, even here on this very thread, people don’t live out their lives scientifically. We live our lives out emotionally (irrationally), instinctually (pre-cognitively), and through stories (mythologically), AS WELL AS scientifically (mental-rationally). It’s all together, not just one perspective.
We don’t commonly go walking around talking to each other in formulas or with scientific terminology about science. We talk about our lives, what’s important to us, what we think is right morally, about our preferences.
When we do talk about science, as we might technically here now and then, we seem to do so as though science is an interesting story for us, as perhaps a TV show or football game is interesting to us. We may even “do” some form of science as a job or profession (analyst, geologist, spreadsheet jockey, coder, etc.), but I have doubts that we are “living science.” Science is a form of description or a way of seeing for us, but I don’t think we live science. It might be more accurate to say that science lives us, but we very much live in our emotions, our instincts, and in stories and melodramas (which are degenerate forms of myth).
No disrespect intended, but HFCS seems to me to be a person who is very concerned about the state of the world. In a slightly wrathful way, he seems to me to be a compassionate person with his concerns. Everyone does so here, each with their own views and preferences and pet theories.
Our passions, compassions, stories, feelings, and values (whatever it is that we believe is important) ARE NOT SCIENCE. Science is supposed to be a valueless methodology, an approach to truth, to finding what is real (meta-physics), a philosophy of empiricism.
I’ve been reading down the thread today, and it struck me just how human all of the comments are. Not very scientific, if you know what I mean. This is not a complaint or a criticism. (It’s all good.)
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 26, 2014 - 05:46pm PT
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but HFCS seems to me to be a person who is very concerned about the state of the world.
your speaking of the material world right? i don't think he's so concerned with starving african children, as much as he's concerned about a finite amount of resources. Scientifically he understands to further the technological modern lifestyle there are far to many people for the amount of resources the planet has to offer. To bring the entire population up to the comforts and pleasures we have today in the US would give mother-nature a stroke.
Does Man have the capability to burn the earth to death through climate-change?
Seems a bit egotistical.
The earth and mother-nature have been rolling along for over 4bil yrs with almost a perfectly constant climate. Long enough and Constant enough to allow plants to crawl out of the water and oxegenate the atmosphere to the point when plants could start breathing and seeing and diversify into every living being we see here today. It is a staggering track record to say the least! All that time and work with no plan to speak of. If that's true, is it irony that Man comes along with an ability to plan, and destroys it all?
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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Dec 26, 2014 - 05:55pm PT
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The earth and mother-nature have been rolling along for over 4bil yrs with almost a perfectly constant climate. Long enough and Constant enough to allow plants to crawl out of the water and oxegenate the atmosphere to the point when plants could start breathing and seeing and diversify into every living being we see here today. It is a staggering track record to say the least! All that time and work with no plan to speak of. If that's true, is it irony that Man comes along with an ability to plan, and destroys it all?
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 26, 2014 - 06:31pm PT
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All that time and work with no plan to speak of.
Another absolute given by the hypocrite who says no one knows.
The hypocrites always claim they know and always say "No One Knows" .....
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 26, 2014 - 07:10pm PT
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"Imagine a world in which we are all enlightened by objective truths rather than offended by them." -Niel deGrasse Tyson
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 26, 2014 - 07:45pm PT
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^^^ A-(cough)-hem, i said that! Quack Quack!
i think i bring up a good point. Before Man and his reasoning and writing, animals and plant life were never a threat to the environment. Atleast not to the point of exhaustion. Pardon the pun. The World over billions of years has grown and prospered life all on its own without direction, supposedly. In the last few weeks the worlds climate-change scientist have announced that if we don't change our ways, within 50yrs life will start dying off. Man is decreasing earths ability to breathe and purify itself. We're plastering her face with concrete and blacktop. We're taking water out of the cleansing cycle and sticking it in our toilets, pools, radiators, pipes. and the air is getting clogged by our Co2's. We've eat'in animals into extinction that have been here for millions of years.
It is obvious that modern Man is a detriment to the society of Nature. One would also reason that if the Atheist believing in the evolutionary code of the strongest will survive really cared about survival. He would do his duty and drink the red kool-aid.
vvv loL(lots of Love) Merry Xmas Norton!
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Norton
Social climber
quitcherbellyachin
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Dec 26, 2014 - 07:58pm PT
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Nice post, Blue
agree
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