Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
jstan
climber
|
|
A friend, I think originally from Canada, is selling his SB house to live on their island in BC. He has dual citizenship so out of curiosity I pulled up the state department page on this.
You can continue to have dual citizenship as long as you have not indicated you wish to surrender US citizenship
and
the state department has not concluded your actions have led them to believe you wish to resign US citizenship.
This couple is leaving because in BC they will not be forced to garden twelve months out of every year.
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
well Tony, apparently you're not going to be fooled, keep on trusting those experiences my friend...
as for the levitation "party trick," I've actually participated in such a thing, once as outlined in the nice quote you gave us above (although we did it on the first try), and once when it wasn't such a trick, we were lifting speakers off of a stand when I worked as a stage hand to make some extra income as a graduate student... but the same thing, only one difference: at the party it was a surprise to do it, and backstage it was expected that we could do it, though I suspected we lifted more than at the party.
One expects that the party trick isn't going to work, one has no experience on just how much you can lift... taking a 160 pound person 4 people are lifting 40 pound each, not an extraordinary weight... we can up the person to 200 lbs, that would be 50 lbs each, once again, done correctly that's not very amazing... backstage we probably lifted close to 100 lbs each, maybe a bit more, but we knew what we were doing and it wasn't so amazing.
As far as "lifting up a 5,000 lb car" well, it simply wasn't what happened, though some weight was lifted, enough to drag a person out from underneath the car, considerably less than the entire weight of the car, and probably not a large amount, though certainly larger than anyone involved suspected they could manage. Just how many people failed to lift the car dooming the person trapped underneath? oh, that would be using statistics to obfuscate the true meaning of the witnessed "miracle." My bad...
As far as a "1930 experiment" I wouldn't diss that decade, lots of good things happened then in science that are a part of our "Standard Model" today in particle physics, and some strange things explained... like why is Neptune's orbit so wierd (hint: it isn't because of the paranormal)... a few tidbits:
1930 Tombaugh discovers Pluto
1930 Pauli suggests that the neutrino exists
1931 founding date of the Radiation Laboratory at UC Berkeley
1932 Chadwick discovers the neutron
1932 Anderson's discovery of the Positron confirms Dirac's theory
1934 transmutation of chemical elements
too bad that the paranormal research came up so lame...
...the history of work in paranormal phenomena is remarkable in its ability to explain why the effects do not happen more than why they do, and what causes them.
Tony, do you have anything except for your party tricks?
|
|
jstan
climber
|
|
This is way off topic but I refuse to disinterr the monster thread.
AN ATHEIST IN THE WOODS
An atheist was walking through the woods.
'What majestic trees!'
'What powerful rivers!'
'What beautiful animals!'
He said to himself.
As he was walking alongside the river, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him.
He turned to look. He saw a 7-foot grizzly bear charge towards him.
He ran as fast as he could up the path. He looked over his shoulder & saw that the bear was closing in on him.
He looked over his shoulder again, & the bear was even closer.
He tripped & fell on the ground.
He rolled over to pick himself up but saw that the bear was right on top of him, reaching for him with his left paw & raising his right paw to strike him.
At that instant moment, the Atheist cried out:
'Oh my God!'
Time stopped.
The bear froze.
The forest was silent.
As a bright light shone upon the man, a voice came out of the sky.
'You deny my existence for all these years, teach others I don't exist and even credit creation to cosmic accident.'
'Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament?'
'Am I to count you as a believer?'
The atheist looked directly into the light, and said: 'It would be hypocritical of me to suddenly ask you to treat me as a Christian now, but perhaps you could make the BEAR a Christian?'
'Very well', said the voice.
The light went out. The sounds of the forest resumed. And the bear dropped his right paw, brought both paws together, bowed his head & spoke:
'Lord bless this food, which I am about to receive from Thy bounty through Christ our Lord, Amen.'
|
|
High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
|
|
In the film, In Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion Robert Thurman (Dept of Religion, Columbia U, Indo Tibetan studies) makes the point that Buddhism (esp Original Buddhism) is an education system not a religious system.
BTW, Robert Thurman (also at TED Talks and Beyond Belief) is Uma's dad.
|
|
FRUMY
Trad climber
SHERMAN OAKS,CA
|
|
its funny the bear does the same thing to anything it wants to eat no matter what they believe.
And we all hope to be saved.
if not john wayne wouldn't have a job.
|
|
Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
|
|
Riley-
Thanks for your wonderful comparison of science and the world of meditation!
What they both share, which gets lost in the religion vs. science debate is that the methods developed by eastern yogis, gurus, and buddhas (and a few western hermits here and there) are the result of many people's personal experimentation. Their methods were closer to the scientific method than to religion with all its unquestioned presuppositions.
I would be careful however, in labeling certain ideas as superstitious. Once you go down that path, you end up so rationalizing everything that the magic of life disappears for most people. When that happens, large numbers seem to end up turning to drugs for relief.
If you or anybody else is interested, I've just had an article published about the sacred Sherpa valley I lived in which discusses the integration of the pre Buddhist and Buddhist religions with notions of the sacredness of the landscape. Their views are definitely prescientific, magical even, yet tolerant and supportive of the locals, and almost certainly charming to the outsider. I have it in pdf form.
|
|
FRUMY
Trad climber
SHERMAN OAKS,CA
|
|
jeepers --- everyone's buttons are pushed by just seeing the names, & so full of themselves that they forget the question. the question was pope vs. hawking - witch in itself is pretty idiotic. hawking is a devout Catholic. he has had many special visits to see the pope. there is no vs. there just is.
|
|
Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
|
|
I'm really enjoying John's jokes, anyway.
|
|
FRUMY
Trad climber
SHERMAN OAKS,CA
|
|
ditto
|
|
Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
|
|
I don't see a lot of difference between Hawking's views and Buddhist views of the nature of the universe. Of course many before me have predicted that the religion of the future will look a lot like Buddhism though it may be called by other names.
|
|
High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
|
|
So I finished The Moral Landscape. An okay read. Sam's a good writer. Nothing particularly new, however. Subtracting notes and index, there's really only about 80 pages in 5 chapters. At Borders, book runs $27 plus tax, somebody's making money somewhere, at that price who would buy from the physical "brick and mortar" store anymore, amazing!
Even over the internet at Borders, it's $19.
I was attracted to the book in large part because of the great reviews that came in very fast relatively speaking at amazon.com. But I think this was really a measure more of Sam's celebrity (he's got a following now) than the value of the read.
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
".... but also suggested the existence of God was unnecessary to explain the origin of the universe ..."
Yes this is how they do it, (explain).
There is no God, but now "I" become God and tell/speculate the world how the Universe was originated.
You can't get rid of God, it's totally impossible.
The minute they try to so called eliminate God from the equation the imitator god steps up to the plate tries to take the place and fuks everything up.
Plus the imitators all bat .000 and end back up as the mascot dog.
|
|
FRUMY
Trad climber
SHERMAN OAKS,CA
|
|
I GOT THE IDEA THAT HE WAS CATHOLIC FROM HIM.
radical i see lots of words but i don't see much depth.
& you've missed the depth of my few words.
|
|
Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
|
|
i will grant you one thing, ed. the contractor i've worked for over the last few years saved thousands of dollars in forklift rental because his latino crew understood, a little better than most gringos, the human potential for lifting in unison. still, they all used both hands, placed them to the greatest mechanical advantage, strained hard, felt the weight (usually a heavy wooden beam), and struggled. i always cringed when the show started ascending ladders, and positioned myself for quick escape, but the need never arose.
moss prescribes a unique choreography and the placing of the hand palm-downward, resulting in the least mechanical advantage for the arm and hand as employed in usual human lifting. in her words:
the seated person will be lifted from two to four feet into the air, without any effort being experienced by the lifters. Usually, the participants are astonished, and the seated person experiences a sensation of lightness and exhilaration.
is this the way it was done at your party?
proceeding to your usual non-sequiturs, i would have to guess, by your logic, that i could argue that the thoroughly witnessed levitations of joseph of cupertino eclipse newton's observations about gravity since, after all, these things occurred contemporaneously. but i won't.
-------------
now there's a telling quotation, riley:
Hawking compared religion and science in 2010, saying: "There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority [imposed dogma, faith], [as opposed to] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."
hawking's remark reflects a very british take on religion, a catholicism shorn of its mysticism and brought into the service of caste state monarchy. there have been a number of reformations against the church of england, such as presbyterianism and methodism, simply because it has never amounted to more than a weak echo of catholicism.
interesting, HFCS, how atheists generally have to resconstruct morality, even to the point of seeing a hidden "scientific law" in it. if they'd step back and look at it culturally, they would find themselves recreating the religious morality with which they were inculcated in their youth. moralities vary from culture to culture, nothing essentially "scientific" about them except that they address the need to modify behavior for a functioning society. anthropologists, if you can consider them scientists, attempt to define these things. i think atheists tend to overcompensate. their take on morality becomes even more repressive and dismal, as it did under communism, without pleasantly anthropomorphic divine personages to lord it over them.
"hard science" people often get out of their element when they attempt to deal in theology and philosophy. hawking's suggestion about some sort of a nonpersonal god has been thought a zillion times before, and you can bet he won't be having any real insight about it in the future. people look to him for his achievements and extraordinary mastery of a difficult realm, but he can't be expected to leap beyond that realm. for him, "religion" means what was taught at st. albans, "god" is what they preach from the anglican pulpit. the field is wider than that.
|
|
High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
|
|
"Introspection (or, for that matter, meditation) offers no clue that our experience of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, depends upon voltage changes and chemical interactions taking place inside our heads."
"And yet a century and a half of brain science declares it to be so."
-Sam Harris
.....
"What will it mean to finally understand the most prized, lamented, and intimate features of our subjectivity in terms of neural circuits and information processing?"
I don't know, but it suggests to me that a makeover - a belief system makeover - is in order. -One that encourages us, in part, (a) to acknowledge that our ancient forebears got some things wrong and (b) to change our attitudes in some respects concerning "what is" and "what matters".
Looking around the world today, I'm inclined to say, "So hurry up with it!"
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
Ha ha just see ....
They think the brain is where it happens.
Ever "see" the "GUY" who writes firmware to the brain.....
|
|
High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
|
|
re: 1 consciousness 2 ghost in the machine (incarnate spirit)
"While the ultimate relationship between consciousness and matter has not been settled, any naive conception of a soul can now be jettisoned on account of the mind's obvious dependence on the brain." -Sam Harris
"Does the soul of a person suffering loss of language ability (aphasia) still speak and think fluently? This is rather like asking whether the soul of a diabetic produces abundant insulin." -Sam Harris
Hahaha.
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
While the ultimate relationship between consciousness and matter has not been settled
Only to Western gross destructive materialism which completely lacks any comprehension beyond the material sphere of the senses.
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!