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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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Jesus; Almighty, Alpha and the Omega
Revelation 1:8, “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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he probably would have said: "I am the Ālaph and the Tau" in Aramaic....
Philosophy that is based on the authority of a person or a set of people, and that is selective in it's choice of who is allowed as a member of that philosophical sect, the acceptance of "revealed knowledge" or the adoption of a particular code... all of these things are problematic to me.
As a scientist I am trained to be suspicious of the subjective, of our internal "knowledge" and seek empirical evidence which is explainable by rigorous mathematical logic to the body of knowledge of the physical universe. This is a work in progress, we do not know how to explain everything in such a manner. It is also provisional because it depends on observations and experimentation that has finite resolution. Science recognizes these limitations and is provisional because of these limitations. Often the mathematical logic does not exist and has to be created, but by the strictures of mathematics. We are inventing new parts of the language too, to describe what we need to explain.
All this is open to anyone. Science is not a hidden or protected system, nor is mathematics. Everyone has access to nature, and can experiment and observe and do mathematics. For the most part, the science and mathematics is published in the open literature, you just have to go down to the library to gain access to it, or surf around on the web.
How well you have done is judged by others, your peers, looking at your result and seeing if the logic supports your conclusions, this is not a subjective judgment, but an analysis based on the rules of mathematical logic. In principle, everything you have done is available to be looked at, and you have described what you have done so that anyone else could do it. If you have any emotional attachment at all, it is that you'd like to know if you're right or wrong, and spend as little time being wrong as possible.
Emotionality, intuition, subjectivity, sloppy thinking... all these things we try to confront and reduce. Many think this reduces our experience of the world around us and shuts us off from what is real, I do not think so, I think exactly the opposite, that it opens us up to the greater unity of nature, and to a more elegant and powerful vision of what the universe is.
It is just possible that we don't need miracles to explain anything...
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WBraun
climber
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The science of God and the individual soul is open to everyone.
Anyone that follows the "bonafide" system will come to the same conclusion of the existence of God and the soul.
Just by having the word "miracle" means there is miracle.
Just as the word "water" describes water and water does exist, but the word water alone will never quench ones thirst ....
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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"I don't need faith, I have experience," Joseph Campbell.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Ed-
You do a really great job at explaining science. No one can read what you have written and claim they don't know what science is or how it operates. Clearly this is also your path in life, and seemingly the source of most of what you believe in. I can also understand why you would think this superior to the "God spam" that goes on here.
What I'm not clear on is statements like "Emotionality, intuition, subjectivity, sloppy thinking". These could also be applied to art, music, poetry etc. Am I correct in assuming that you are not against the latter, but they just don't interest you as much as science?
And if that is the case, then why do you feel so much more strongly about the religious claims based on "Emotionality, intuition, subjectivity, sloppy thinking". Does this stem from it's connection to past abuses of power, that you find it lacking in aesthetics compared to art, music or poetry, less functional etc?
I'm not trying to argue any particular point here, just refine some of my own views since I haven't thought about a lot of this for many years.
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WBraun
climber
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No miracles have been observe in the modern world
You're not even good at making a simple sentence.
Bone dry mental speculation with no life is what make Dr F dry up in the desert pricked by the cactus of knowledge.
Even your cactus has more understanding then you.
That's why you cultivate them ......
Pascal will destroy you.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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If you want to understand the universe...
but if you want to understand humans you interact through human expression. While how the mind works may be subject to science and ultimately explainable, what that mind produces probably cannot be determined. That expression is probably not as free as we think it is, a question that many philosophies address.
Art, literature, emotion, all express what goes on inside of humans, the human experience. It is ultimately limiting, and perhaps a bit self-obsessive, but it is what we have, it is what we know. No doubt there are many legitimate science topics trying to understand these things. But the product of our minds, that is our thought, is safely concealed by the vast complexity of it's making.
I appreciate art, music, literature, and all forms of human expression even as I strive to separate them from my thinking of how the universe is put together. I don't strive for truth, I strive for understanding.
But so much revolves around human-centric thinking that it is hard for us humans to properly gauge our role in the universe... that we misguage that role is not unexpected.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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any system that leads you to the "right" conclusion is not a real system, it is a dogma
a system that produces knowledge free from preconception of what the answer is, I believe, is absent in philosophy and religion... except one, science.
Is it really an adventure, Werner, when you know where you're going and how to get there?
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WBraun
climber
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We have seen your Psychologists.
No one wants to go near one
Fort Hood
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WBraun
climber
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a system that produces knowledge free from preconception of what the answer is, I believe, is absent in philosophy and religion...
Then you have never seen real knowledge.
You are projecting your own limited self onto how knowledge should be knowledge.
Limited is the key word.
Once one is free from all limitations then the adventure begins.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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So Ed, it seems the scientist would not perceive religion and philosophy as different from art, music, and literature if they understood themselves as expressions of human understanding and creativity rather than some form of universal Truth? And of course, if they could be disconnected from political power?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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political power is another human expression.
I think the problem is in the need for truth and a greater meaning to existence. The need for a higher authority as an inducement to "do the right thing." And a desire to separate from what appears to be the savagery of the natural domain.
The rejection of our origins, and the ideal of human exceptionalism have very negative consequences in human activity.
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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No one is completely free, your still in a body in a world with natural laws, and civil (mans) laws?
God has His spiritual laws, and the Bible tells us what they are, the science (or study) of them helps us live in harmony with God and are brothers and sisters! But you have to follow them if they are going to work!
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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This life is not all there is, there are no U-HAUL'S on a hearse!
So don't invest all you are here, because you will have to leave it behind!
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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I think Gobee meant to say "I believe that there is more than just our life..." he cannot make a factual statement based on anything but that belief, which is cool.
Werner, how do you know that pursuing a line of scientific reasoning is not, in fact, freeing oneself from the illusion of everyday existence?
I think you have studied well, but incompletely, shutting off the possibility that there may be many ways to understand just how our uneducated perception misrepresents reality.
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MH2
climber
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Ed, it is really great to have you as exponent of the power and beauty of science. When you used the phrase 'mathematical logic' I cringed, though, since I believe that it took somewhat over 400 pages of exposition in Principia Mathematica to nail down a proof that 1+1=2 using that approach.
I have only a lay understanding, but in a book for people like me, The Mathematical Experience, Philip J. Davis says that almost all practical examples of mathematical proof contain intuitive leaps.
Excerpts from another favorite author quoting others:
My favorite writers are the Taoists such as Laotse, Liehtse, and Chuangtse. They give neither analogies nor any rational explanations whatsoever! In total defiance of all logic, they soar their merry way upward like birds in free flight.
"If an ordinary man, when he is about to die, could only see the five elements of consciousness as void; the four physical elements as not constituting an "I"; the real Mind as formless and neither coming nor going; his nature as something neither commencing at his birth nor perishing at his death, but as whole and motionless in its very depths; his Mind and environmental objects as one - if he could really accomplish this, he would receive Enlightenment in a flash. He would no longer be entangled by the Triple World; he would be a World-Transcender. He would be without even the faintest tendency toward rebirth. If he should behold the glorious sight of all the Buddhas coming to welcome him, surrounded by every kind of gorgeous manifestation, he would feel no desire to approach them. If he should behold all sorts of horrific forms surrounding him, he would experience no terror. He would just be himself, oblivious of conceptual thought and one with the Absolute. He would have attained the state of unconditioned being."
text in quotes from John Blofield transl., The Zen Teachings of Huang Po (New York: Grove Press, 1958), pp. 45-46.
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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"Once one is free from all limitations then the adventure begins."
-Now we're talkin'!
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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"-Now we're talkin'! "
Two guys drinking in a tall building in New York.
One guy tells the other, on windy days like today you can float on the winds, and steps over the rail and floats a 1000 feet up, then comes back to the rail. He tells the other guy that he can do it too.
So he gets the nerve, climbs over the rail and steps off and fall to the ground!
The Bartender says Superman your a jerk when you get drunk!
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d-know
Trad climber
electric lady land
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a priest and a rabbi
are sittin' at a park
bench when a boy walks
on by.
the priest says:
"should we screw him?"
the rabbi says:
"out of what?"
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WBraun
climber
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Dr F -- "I want to talk to one"
You wouldn't recognized one if you were talking to one.
You're stuck in a deep well, and that's the extent of all your knowledge.
A frog in a well thinks that the well is all in all. Then when the frog is told there is an ocean it can not even conceive of such a thing.
Thus it remains in the well happily ever after ......
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