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bc
climber
Prescott, AZ
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Feb 22, 2008 - 10:44am PT
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Minerals, perhaps I didn’t make myself clear in that post (obviously I didn’t if you’re lumping me into the creationist camp. I am an atheist/agnostic). My comment was in response to John and other faith-heads who claim that god is in control of everything but obviously lets some really bad things happen. They talk about evil and suffering as if it could be eradicated by greater faith or really good prayer (note John’s comment following the one of mine you referenced). I realize they are mostly talking about the evil people do, but this ignores the greater amount of suffering we face due to natural causes. Why do religionists cry “miracle” or “God watched over him” etc. whenever somebody is found to have survived some disease, disaster or accident? If god was really around why didn’t he stop the disaster in the first place? God (or angels) always seems to arrive just in time to save the day ala Superman or Mighty Mouse, but never stops the actual disaster. Thousands may be killed, but a lone survivor becomes god's miracle?Presumably he knows when bad things are going to happen since he knows everything. But why does he let them happen? Religionists haven’t come up with any convincing answers as to why god lets us suffer to the degree that we do suffer. Couldn’t he make earthquakes or tsunamis just a little bit weaker and less widespread? Couldn’t he make diseases a little easier to defeat or just get rid of some of the nastier ones? The answer is, there is no god watching over us, it’s all natural as you say. It’s the way things are and we should deal with it on those terms and not waste time appealing to some imaginary sky fairy. If you’ll notice I recommended using the word “horror” instead of evil.
bc
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bc
climber
Prescott, AZ
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Feb 22, 2008 - 11:21am PT
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From the evidence one would think he prefers our suffering.
The bigger assumption of course being thar "he" exists at all.
bc
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cintune
climber
Penn's Woods
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Feb 22, 2008 - 12:21pm PT
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"Evil" is an emotionally loaded version of "bad."
"Horror" is fear of the unknown.
"Terror" is fear of the known.
"God" is an imaginary entity created to assuage the horrors and terrors of evil.
"Science" is a method of objectively demystifying all of the above.
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Minerals
Social climber
The Deli
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Feb 22, 2008 - 01:37pm PT
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bc, I didn’t mean to lump you in with the creationists; for the most part, I think we’re on the same page. Sorry about that. Yes, I did notice that you instead used the word “horror” but from my perspective, it’s not much different than “evil.” My comments were not directed at you personally, but to a general audience. For some reason, our society seems to view catastrophic events with a fair amount of negativity – this is where I disagree.
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John Moosie
climber
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Feb 22, 2008 - 02:33pm PT
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pc, like you I would prefer not to be lumped in or generalized. If you have a specific question for me, then I would be happy to try and answer.
As for why does God not stop all physical disasters? This is a complex subject but it revolves down to free will. We are meant to learn how to be God. We are much like children, who have all the aspects of their parents, but are not yet their parents.
When your child is truly young, you do a lot to protect them from their mistakes. You make their play area very safe. Yet as they mature, you allow them greater and greater freedom. You understand that this puts them in some danger, but you also understand that this is the only way they can truly learn.
Then there comes a point where the child is old enough to go out on their own. You are always there to help them, but you realize that they must attempt things on their own if they are to learn anything.
All suffering on this planet is a direct result of choices we made. Either in this lifetime or in past lifetimes. This includes natural disasters. They are a direct result of our mass consciousness. They do not need to occur.
Let me ask you this. How do you know that God has not stopped disasters from happening? Would you even be aware?
Yes, disasters happen. They are a direct result of our choices. If you have a reluctant child who refused to learn, at some point you would realize that they will have to learn from the school of hard knocks. You do everything you can to protect them, but you realize they must grow up, so you put them out in the world, even knowing that they will make mistakes and possibly do some things that appear to be truly disastrous.
Yet what if you truly were God and you knew that what appears to be a disaster is not really a disaster. As a human example. Your child drives too fast. You know this and you have done many things to get them to slow down, but they refuse. Now they are a young adult with their own car. They go out and drive too fast and wreck it. Bad. Yet they survive and finally learn to be a bit more careful.
Was this a bad experience for them, or worthwhile? Now what if you knew there was no such thing as death. That death was an illusion. Would you worry about some mistake that might lead to the physical death of your child?
It is spiritual death that is the primary problem. Yet even that is not that big of a problem because there is no permanent hell. There is only the hell that we as God's children create, and it is not permanent. I do understand that many religious people believe in a permanent hell. This is why I would prefer not to be pigeonholed.
There was as study done a number of years ago in the Washington DC area. In it, if I remember correctly, 8,000 people decided to meditate on a daily basis for peace in the DC area. They were able to reduce crime by 25 percent over the length of the experiment. This reveals the mass consciousness.
Another experiment was done where a group of people prayed for specific people to get well. It appeared to show that prayer did not work. This is correct because prayer doesn't work against Karma, unless the person doing the prayer is willing to take on the karma. This is much the same as a parent wanting to take the illness of a child, but can't. Many think they would, but what if they realized that the illness was there to help the child learn a lesson that child was refusing to learn? And what if this lesson was a very important lesson, one which would keep the child from experiencing even more difficult times ahead. Much like a parent lets a child fall when learning to walk, so they can really learn to walk and not have to crawl for the rest of thier lives.
It is much more complicated then this and I would have to write books on this, but I hope this helps some.
We are responsible for what we experience. If God took the experience away from us, then we wouldn't have the opportunity to learn. Even from so called natural disasters. Which aren't truly natural but are a direct result of our group consciousness. Even global warming is a direct result of our mass consciousness. The greed, the arrogance, the fear we put out in the world is reflected back by the world in the only way it can, physical experiences.
This is explained in these two short videos titled "The Greatest Secret about the Universe".
Part one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O5TJFw2CXc
Part two.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uvavCc2lTo
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hafilax
Trad climber
East Van
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Feb 22, 2008 - 04:08pm PT
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I'm getting sucked into long posts today.
Re: http://www.gosai.com/science/failure-of-science.html
The article's thesis:
" Scientists generally insist that all phenomena can be described, in principle, in terms of measurable quantities which can be calculated using simple mathematical laws, thus reducing the universe to a mechanism and humans to complex submechanisms whose will and feelings correspond to nothing more than patterns of chemical interaction among molecules. The vast majority of these scientists are bent on eliminating the concept of God from all descriptions of reality and it's creation."
That article is as flawed in arguing against science as Dawkins 'The God Dillusion' is at arguing against god. The author defines his version of science and then argues against that. The very thesis is a straw man argument with little basis in reality IMO. The underlying theme is that we don't have a complete concrete understanding of the way the world works therefore all science is wrong or at least misguided. I also believe that he misrepresents Einstein and other great scientific minds in his interpretation of their words. It argues on the semantics of the word theory which has a different meaning in science than in common usage as pointed out earlier in the thread.
Inconsistencies in a theory are what drives the improvement in our understanding of the world. It is not what we understand that makes science interesting but what we don't understand. If we knew everything there would be no research. People have been trying to advance the Standard Model of particle physics for decades because we know that it is a simplistic model and that there is more to learn. When we show there is something beyond the Standard Model that does not make it obsolete. It will still make tremendously useful predictions about physical processes.
The article points out that Newton's theory of gravitation has been superseded by Einstein's theory of General Relativity and that Quantum Theory has been improved by Quantum Field Theory. The author seems to think that an inadequacy in a theory is reason to give up on all science. Of course theories will never be perfect and although science aims at complete understanding it is no different that wanting to achieve Nirvanna or becoming the perfect subject in God's eyes.
Similarly it is the evidence that counters Evolution theory or Big Bang theory that will drive us to improve on them so that they can be used to predict future physical events. At the present these theories have been very successful.
The article states that scientists tend to try to pull out the results that they want from their experiments and in individual cases this can be true but repeated experiments by those who are skeptical always show which results most accurately predict the true outcome. A classic example is Cold Fusion in a Test Tube. The originators of the theory made claims of cheap unlimited energy from water which is very desirable by all, but experiments (which are still ongoing) have repeatedly shown the claims to be false. You might say that we want the results to be negative but the end result is that cold fusion doesn't happen.
The article makes all kinds of wild claims like "However, when concepts such as consciousness, a creator intelligence and soul are introduced as viable concepts, the scientists demand that they be detectable by experimentation." Viable concepts of what? When you try to argue against scientific theory but don't provide a testable alternative it is the same as arguing against faith by discounting that faith exists. Science endeavors to make predictions in the physical world based on things we can measure. If you present an alternative theory, such as creation by a higher power, then the scientific community is going to ask how this theory predicts the outcome of what we can test. If it can't be tested then it can't be disproved. That is fine. Creationists often seem to want to discount science without presenting an alternative theory that accurately answers a question that puzzles the scientific community.
The following statement is just patently false:
"When Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, imaginary numbers and other non-verifiable conceptual models are accepted by our scientific friends, what is the problem in considering such concepts as the spiritual soul? Consciousness is the symptom of the spirit soul's residency in the body of the living entity. It is a fundamental aspect of reality which cannot be ignored in any valid scientific explanation of reality."
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle has been used with great success in predicting the outcome of experiments whereas the Theory of the Soul(?) has been, let's say, less successful. Again this goes back to the Dawkins argument. You can't discount science outright and then demand that science prove something that can't be proven with science. What has the Theory of the Soul predicted that would make it a 'scientific explanation of reality'?
The article then goes on to point out a bunch of shortcomings of Big Bang theory and Evolution theory but doesn't point out any of the successes or any alternative theories. This is an incomplete argument against science and if anything just shows that we have lots of work to do in improving our understanding. The greatest success of Inflation Theory, for example, is in predicting the structure of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. As discussed above, Evolution Theory does a good job of explaining elephants with short tusks and the domestication of foxes. Are we to ignore these results because we can't conclusively present a transitional fossil or create life from a simulated primordial ooze or even state without question the state of the universe prior to the Big Bang?
My understanding of Einstein is that he had an attitude of humble amazement at how elegantly the universe works. I find that the religious interpretations of his words really bridle this enthusiasm and belittle his views of the world. His use of the word god is far larger than a personal god or a creator and can't be contained within such a structured definition.
If you couldn't tell, reading that article really pissed me off. It epitomized all of the ignorant arguments against the scientific method that don't hold any water (although in the same spirit I find scientific arguments against god to be in vain as well). I could very well be misguided in thinking that science has improved our physical wellbeing and that ones spiritual life can be worked on in parallel with science.
I hope that the author shuns all the fruits of modern technology since he seems to think Quantum Mechanics is wrong, without which we wouldn't have computers. Why the divisive attitude? Although I don't agree with many of the views of Fritjof Capra expressed in his book 'The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism' I agree with the sentiment from the epilogue that states 'Physicists do not need mysticism, and mystics do not need physics, but humanity needs both.'
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John Moosie
climber
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Feb 22, 2008 - 04:17pm PT
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"I could very well be misguided in thinking that science has improved our physical wellbeing and that ones spiritual life can be worked on in parallel with science."
This is Not misguided.
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cintune
climber
Penn's Woods
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Feb 22, 2008 - 04:23pm PT
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Apart from being a good hook to sell books, that's absurd. What good has mysticism ever done that couldn't have been done without it anyway?
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 22, 2008 - 08:31pm PT
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Life is a jigsaw puzzle. The material scientists will never find the missing pieces, for they did not make the puzzle.
But the puzzle maker holds the missing pieces ......
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cintune
climber
Penn's Woods
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Feb 22, 2008 - 08:54pm PT
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Lois, there are plenty of mystical parasites out there who would be glad to take your friend's money in exchange for some nebulous snake-oil or other. Sounds to me like the dude might just need to form some genuine interpersonal relationships to create the missing meaning in his lifestyle. But then, some people just aren't capable of that, so they stock up on their stocks and toys instead. Not everyone necessarily reaches self-actualization.
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cintune
climber
Penn's Woods
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Feb 22, 2008 - 09:12pm PT
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Well, I don't know the guy, but as a card-carrying humanist, I just shy away from the mumbo-jumbo and cosmic debris that gets passed around under the aegis of mysticism and metaphysics and whatnot. Bottom line is that all we've really got is ourselves and each other, and what we make of our lives is a matter of how we impact others for good or bad. "Getting right with God" is a cop out for a bad conscience, as far as I've ever seen. Like the creeps on death row who found a new friend in Jesus, I mean, big effing deal, it changes nothing.
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cintune
climber
Penn's Woods
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Feb 22, 2008 - 09:44pm PT
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There's always SSRIs to help with that sort of thing, too.
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Largo
Sport climber
Venice, Ca
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Feb 22, 2008 - 10:38pm PT
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He wrote: "Bottom line is that all we've really got is ourselves and each other."
How do you know that is all we have?
JL
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cintune
climber
Penn's Woods
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Feb 22, 2008 - 11:10pm PT
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It all just comes round to the god vs. science thing again. Neurochemistry is a strange thing, admittedly. So is gravity.
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 22, 2008 - 11:18pm PT
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It's not god vs. science.
It's god = science.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Feb 22, 2008 - 11:19pm PT
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Largo, I think it's a kind of a metaphor.
All we have is each other meaning that we need to get along nd work together towards a common goal of perfection. This is impossible by definition but the road to achieving it is enriching enough.
If we can't learn the basics of working together, we're screwed and will have to live until we learn it.
/God
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Largo
Sport climber
Venice, Ca
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Feb 23, 2008 - 12:01am PT
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"All we have is each other meaning that we need to get along nd work together towards a common goal of perfection. This is impossible by definition but the road to achieving it is enriching enough."
I totally agree. However, the deepest drive for many people (some would say for ALL people) is transcendence, for a connection with a power greater than themselves. When this connection is sought from other human beings, impossible expectations are set in motion that can cause us all kinds of havoc.
What part of this is all or nothing, black or white, this verses that? If it were only that simple . . .
JL
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cintune
climber
Penn's Woods
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Feb 23, 2008 - 12:07am PT
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I was actually thinking more literally. An imaginary superfriend will only get you so far, but if that's all you've got, I guess it's better than nothing.
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 23, 2008 - 12:11am PT
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An imaginary superfriend.
Only to you ...... cintune
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