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Lynne Leichtfuss
Trad climber
Will know soon
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Oct 10, 2009 - 06:45pm PT
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Thanks, HowweirdDean.
A storm hits and washes over the forest. It leaves in it's wake destruction, but along with destruction fresh washed air, replenished rivers and streams and nourishment for the land.
A huge wind blows in the desert. It scours the earth, rock and vegetation.
It clears away the dross and makes things new and clean.
When Dan died, well that was my storm/wind. I watched death, experienced death and it was shattering to participate in the death of my best friend.
As I then tried to go forward with my life I found that for me, I had to first go backward. I started with death. I asked myself, "what is Important ?"
For me there were only two things. God, if he indeed existed, and people. Power, fame, money, things, position, work were Nothing, are nothing when you see death and begin to understand the brevity of each persons life. (Oops, I forgot sex, drugs and rock and roll. Not meaning to be funny but they can be quite consuming.)
After intense soul searching I found that my jesus was still there and indeed People were the priority. I began to get rid of the wrappings in my life physically and philosophically. The wind and storm had come and got rid of much of the extraneous brain and thing stuff. The word simplify and simplicity became very important to me.
I saw clearly it was not my life or calling to judge others. I did not realize how very often each day I was guilty of this and I did not realize how strongly jesus felt about this until I spent many hours with him and the bible over the past 22 months.
Did you know that in Proverbs 6: 16 it says the lord hates 7 things ...."a proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, plotting wrong/evil schemes, eagerness to do wrong, a false witness, and sowing discord among bros."
Interesting. Have heard few messages on these topics. (I wonder why we pick and choose what and who we attack.) Reading the new testament part of the bible it's not so much about attacking and judging people as it is caring and loving your bro and your enemy.
The "famous at many weddings" I Corinthians 13 ends by saying ..."three things remain....faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."
Even tho the Bible has a ton to say about faith and hope the greatest is love. That's my jesus .....love. He loves lynnie and cared enough to rescue me when I could Not do it on my own. Peace.
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Trad climber
Will know soon
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Oct 10, 2009 - 07:16pm PT
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Dr. F, what if God were at the bottom and the top ? :D jess asking cause I think he is.
I have thoroughly enjoyed reading all the posts and learned much. I'm not sure exactly how the earth and the universe were formed or how long it took. I'm not sure about us, except we are here. I guess my bottom line is that God from the up down or down up did it. How I don't know. Could be all or some of the theories and hypotheses expressed on this Thread were enjoined in the action.
All these ideas are very significant to many and I understand now much better why and respect why it is so important.
As individuals we all bend to a different breeze depending on where we are planted and what kind of tree we are. People today, now, this moment are my calling. But I totally respect the science and the scientists that have their own whispers of wind pulling them along the path to discovery.
Ciao, lynnie
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corniss chopper
Mountain climber
san jose, ca
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Oct 10, 2009 - 07:45pm PT
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The beard scratchers have written tons on this subject.
for instance:
RELIGION is not in a robust state of health
in modern civilization..
...been in a perennial state of decay in those
circles of society in which physical ease and
cultural advantages combine to make
intellectual scruples more pressing than moral
ones...
Extreme orthodoxy betrays by its very frenzy
that the poison of scepticism has entered the soul
of the church; for men insist most vehemently upon
their certainties when their hold upon them has
been shaken...
From: Does Civilization need Religion -1927
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=74098575
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Oct 10, 2009 - 09:00pm PT
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GO covered my initial thoughts, that our very genetic makeup has been determined by our social interconnection. Genes related to speech, etc, all are literally a part of us, whether or not we use them, and they come from the genetic assembly that defines our species.
On my walk I also thought that the question Dr. F poses is nonsensical in a very important way, were we to be born and dropped in the cave, we would die without some societal support. This issue, the "cost" of raising children, is an essential part of our societal relationship. It is one of the biggest issues between female and male. The fact is that we are not ready to be independent of our parents and community until relatively old. You cannot be "unconnected" and survive.
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Trad climber
Will know soon
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Oct 10, 2009 - 09:21pm PT
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I can vouch for that Ed Hartouni. One must stay connected to past or current (or both) connections and/or find new connections as life unfolds ...connections are not just important, they are necessary.
Cheers and thanks yo all for your connectedness. It has been life, joy, adventure and peace to this gal. lynnie
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WandaFuca
Social climber
From the gettin' place
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Oct 10, 2009 - 09:38pm PT
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Join me in a moment of irreverence.
A crowd was preparing to stone a woman who had been caught committing adultery.
Jesus tried to stop them by saying, “let whoever is without sin among you, cast the first stone.”
Just then a stone came flying from the back of the crowd and struck the woman.
Jesus blurted out, “Mother, I’m trying to make a point here.”
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Trad climber
Will know soon
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Oct 10, 2009 - 09:43pm PT
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It may be funny, Wanda, but it ain't truth. Don't want anyone thinkin' it is. Jesus saved that gal, running the self righteousness stone throwers off.... and the gal weren't his momma. :D
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Patrick Sawyer
climber
Originally California now Ireland
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Oct 10, 2009 - 10:35pm PT
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Hey, what's that I just picked out of my nose?
EDIT
My apologies. It's 3:30 in the morning and I can't sleep.
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MH2
climber
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Oct 10, 2009 - 10:51pm PT
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Has anyone here read Martin Gardner's book, Why I am not an Atheist?
I haven't but I suspect he has something of interest to say.
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corniss chopper
Mountain climber
san jose, ca
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Oct 10, 2009 - 11:13pm PT
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"wise men don't know how it is to
be thick as a brick"
corollary: --the upside is the 'thick' can be
easily tricked
into voting for anything/anyone.
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GOclimb
Trad climber
Boston, MA
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Oct 11, 2009 - 01:02am PT
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Ed - I couldn't agree more. We're as much a social animal as bees or wolves.
Individually, despite our relatively large size as animals, we're pretty pathetically weak, slow, and fragile. But together, we quite literally rule the world.
Well... aside from the bugs. Maybe it's the cockroaches who rule the world, but you gotta admit, we're at least a close second?
GO
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Oct 11, 2009 - 01:03am PT
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Ed said: "If the non-physical affects the physical, then it is physical, no?"
Well, it's Saturday night and time to let my mind run - this could get dangerous . . .
The words "exist," "real," and so on all concern what I was earlier refering to as content, stuff, things, material which science can measuere, with this "content" extending to include qualities, aspects, dependent, independent and random variables, and so forth. Whatever the mind can postulate, it ("stuff") "exists" in some "real" (measurable) way, or at any rate, "it" can be said to have a presence or relationship to "real" and material things.
Now when we normally think of brain or mind, we think in terms of a kind of mega-processor riffling off information from brain stem (sensation/instinctual), limbic (emotional/feeling) and cognititive (thinking) centers. Science will tell us that all of these have a physical footprint. All are the fruit of an evolved brain that PRODUCES the content and, by way of remarkably complex soft and hardware, produces the holographic meta functions of self-awareness, consciousness, and other such things. What's more, the thinking goes, things like awarenss are different than the brain itself in the same sense that a tune, while a real thing with a sonic signature, is different than the trumpet or a piano that "produced" it.
Now looping back to "mind," the first question is: what is the nature of mind, consciousness, awareness or any of it? Invariably you will at first get stuck on - you guessed it: content. What's with the thoughts? How does the brain yada yada. Eventually, if you can get quiet enough for long enough, you realize that all thoughts, things, as well as the brain that creates them, are impermanent. They all come and go. Some might complain that, say, the laws of physics are in fact permanent, but of course said laws have no "existence" seperae from the stuff from which the law is derived. The law in fact IS the stuff - the seperation only exists as an idea, not a physical fact.
If you claim for instance that there is a "non-material" non-thing called gravity, that exists seperate from apples falling off trees and collapsing stars and dark matter, even here you're stuck with a hypothetical particle called a graviton - which is said by some (doubtful) to mediate gravity. Plato (Platonic "forms") and Jung (archetypes) would disagree here, but apparently neither man every got past the content of their own minds.
Anyhow, with enough quite time you will start getting a vague sense of a no-thing from which content arises and to which it falls. Everything, including awareness itself, is a cloud arising and falling back into this emptiness. Anyone capible of watching the trajectory, arising and vanishing of thoughts know they (thoughts) are not one "thing," that they are every bit as evanescent as electrons.
Electrons, we are told, seemingly exist in different places at different points in time. It is, some insist, impossible to say where the electron will be at a given time, just as it is impossible to say what thought will arise in our awareness. At time t1 the electron is at point A, then at time t2 it is at point B, yet without moving from A to B. It seems to appear in different places without describing a trajectory. Therefore, even if t1 and A can be pinpointed, it is impossible to derive t2 and B from this measurement.
In other words: There seems to be no causal relation between any two positions - a concept that makes perfect sense to anyone who has carefully watched their own thoughts, which any reductionist will assure you are the product of your evolved brain, meaning thoughts have a material footprint composed of the very electrons we've just described.
But getting back to the most interesting part: electrons seem to be able to go from point A to point B instantaneously, without pasing "through" the space/time continum. Now what the hell does this imply, really? Our tendency is to think of an elecron as a tinny weenie baseball, and if the ball travels from first base ("A") to second base ("B"), it would have to have passed through space, and take a fraction of time, to get there. But apparently an electron is not "solid" in the normal sense of the word, and it can apparently instaneously "arrive" somewhere without having "traveled." What's more, even if you could exactly peg this electron in space and time, that measurement would not detrmine the next "arrival" of the electron. While it is fairly predictible that the electron will not leave it's orbit, meaning the number 5 Camalot will not suddenly become a Stopper, there seems to be no causal link, that is, the electrons position at this moment does not cause or "produce" the following position.
So what does the Zen master mean when he says: Every moment arises instantaneously, brand new, from nowhere. This moment is not dependent on the last moment in any way whatsoever.
JL
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Trad climber
Will know soon
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Oct 11, 2009 - 01:21am PT
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I really enjoyed the last sentence about the zen master and after much directed thought over the past year think I must agree.
The zen master and the world of absolute science may not always operate on the same plane of thought, but I do believe they are both valid. If perhaps they overlapped more, the concepts of life, science, invisible life, philosophy and more would take on a fuller, greater meaning.
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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Oct 11, 2009 - 01:27am PT
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It's funny that we don't do anything to keep all this going at all. Breathing happens, your heart beats.
The world spins, things grow, we rise we sleep, were at its mercy.
Most times when I'm deep in thought I forget about my body, other times I'm fully in it. Seems were just passing through.
It's all a miracle. Miracles happen at all times, by God.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Oct 11, 2009 - 01:31am PT
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gravity exists, and there is probably a quantum theory of it for which the quantum is called the graviton... I have no doubt of it, nor does any physicist, of course....
electrons can be localized in space and time, and they do have definable momentum and energy, that isn't the point of quantum mechanics, which does an excellent job telling us what the probability that an electron will be somewhere at sometime, propelled by the electromagnetic force which is mediated by the quantum we call a photon as described, elegantly, by quantum electodynamics (QED). (I always wanted to do that! (mathematician joke)).
The description of an electron, its "state" is a bit different than what we might think if it were a billiard ball. The ball is described in space and in momentum, and moves through this state space along a trajectory which evolves in time. So if we give its position and its momentum and account for all the forces outside of the ball, we know where it's going to be at any time.
Quantum mechanics is a bit trickier. We have the state, but now we must account for all the possible paths at once, and we calculate a probability that it is in each of those states as a time unfolds. We carry all of the possible states along... once a measurement is done and we find the electron in some state, the probability that it is in the other states is zero... and we start again.
We can make a precise calculation of electrons, and any other atomic particle (and subatomic) using quantum mechanics. Our most precise theories of physics are quantum mechanical, and make predictions which are verified by experiment.
It is a poor analogy for the describing a mechanism to generate awareness. I think what we will eventually know will be much more interesting.
I was with you John as you described the separation of thought from the mechanism that produces it. You seem to say that if thought is the result of a physical mechanism, that it must be mechanistic, deterministic, etc. Of course that is not true. I do not have any problem imagining that thought is produced by an electro-chemical process that results in the flights of fancy we experience.
My suspicion of experience is quite profound, and I am ready to accept your observations of being in deep meditation. I would interpret the whole exercise as exploring just what you can do physically to alter your thought, your perception of the world. Your exercise, however, is quite real and quite measurable. The correlation of that thought with that state is also a common result, but it does not have to correspond to the physical, as you say. It can be real as thought, but it may not be any more real than that.
The interpretation of that state has been attempted by many different cultures, religions and philosophies. The key problem, as I see it, is the attempt to justify it as something outside of ourselves but not of the physical universe. My question is: does it really need to be bigger than just what is inside of us? That is marvelous enough for me...
My training as a physicist does lead me to believe that we must question what we observe and perceive, to understand it before we can use it to understand something about the physical world around us. Mind and consciousness and awareness are all the result of an evolutionary process which is far from producing a monolithically designed being. We are a patch work of things used and reused and altered for other uses... our mind and our thoughts all are a result of that, and are equally patched together... it makes figuring it out difficult, and will make the answer fascinating.
But please don't torture quantum mechanics into some mystical explanation, even in analogy, it is really a humble tool we use to approximate what we see when we look at atoms. That world is different from the one on this side of the "microscope" but we know how to get from there to here, and some of those who so journey have told the story.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Oct 11, 2009 - 03:23am PT
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Geez, I was going to let this pass but here goes anyhow. I'm not torturing quantum mechanics, Ed. Virtually all of those thought experiments I have laid out are stolen from people in QM who constantly contrast this process with other aspects of "reality," especially consciousness. My sense of this is that while we can locate things and measure certain functions and posit predictions so forth on the quantum level, no one has the any certainty about many of the fundemental things about particles, such as how they can instantaneously appear here and there. The idea or contention that we have the qauntum game remotely dialed is to my understanding, almost total hogwash. Two of the people I ride with all the time (one workds at Cal Tech and the other at JPL) are QM nuts and I get an earfull of this stuff every ride - more than I care for since it's still content and is bacially just beginners stuff in terms of consciousness work.
"I was with you John as you described the separation of thought from the mechanism that produces it. You seem to say that if thought is the result of a physical mechanism, that it must be mechanistic, deterministic, etc. Of course that is not true. I do not have any problem imagining that thought is produced by an electro-chemical process that results in the flights of fancy we experience."
Now Ed, I've said it as plainly as I can: There is NO separation of thought from the mechanism that produces thought. Thought IS matter.
There is no separation between the thought and the "electro-chemical" pocess that "results" in cognition. There is no thought floating around disembodied and non-substantial (again, Plato and Jung would disagree) in the same sense that there is no gravity separate from the "stuff" from which the term "gravity" is derived.
As a material reductionist, you must live and die by what in philosophy they call one-way causation. In terms of the evolved brain, your are left believing that atomic activity "produces" or causes thoughts, and this causation works "one way." It does not work the other way, I.E., thinking does not "produce" or cause the existence of your actual brain matter. The reason my QM friends like to site the spontaneous arising of electrons at point A and B and so forth is that the "one way" causation just described does not seem to hold, that is, "there is no causal position between the two positions" of A and B.
But all of this is still the basic stuff, the starter stuff. The intermediate stuff is the idea that every moment arises instantaneously, brand new, from nowhere. This moment is not dependent on and was not created by the last moment in any way whatsoever.
The advanced course is that the mind and matter itself are both entirely "empty," and have no independent existence. Whatever exists, arises (like the instantaneously arrival of an electron) from and returns back to this emptiness. Awareness, consciousness, rocks, cars and brains are all content in this regard. So the question then becomes: what is the nature of this emptiness?
JL
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Jennie
Trad climber
Elk Creek, Idaho
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Oct 11, 2009 - 05:06am PT
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"Athiests have the lowest crime rate as a group of all religions"
"Athiests were also found to have a higher level of ethical standard which they live their lives"
"Fact"
There are, in fact, no well grounded studies that prove atheists are less or more prone to crime and ethical behavior than the religious. There are more people in prison who claim a religion than people who assume atheist beliefs. But that statistic can hardly be used to draw useful conclusions since there are more people in the U.S. population who claim religion than atheism.
Religion attracts desperate individuals in a society because it offers them comfort. And desperate people are much more likely to commit crimes than those who are not desperate. But desperate people tend to ignore the ethics and "do unto others" part of religion, thus aren't truly converted or commited to a religious faith.
Such studies are usually flawed with poor procedures and irrelevant data. Terms like "crime", "atheist", "Christian" are loose terms with indefinite, hazy boundaries. Often those conducting such studies already have a purpose in mind and slant the data that supports their point of view. The demographics and data examination methods are not mentioned. White collar crimes, such as tax evasion, mail fraud are harder to detect and thus many get away with these offenses, which farther confuses the question since atheist numbers tend to be higher among white collar workers.
And the conclusions wrought by these studies are commonly rife with logical fallacies.
Logical fallacy? Consider this:
No one is born believing in God....
So everyone is born atheist
All criminals were born
Thus all criminals are atheist (or were at some time in their life)
"Surely atheism should be outlawed, especially among infants !"
or:
Josef Stalin, Atheist, 20 to 60 million dead
Adolph Hitler, Atheist, 26 million dead
Fidel Castro, Atheist, 1 million dead
Kim Il Sung, Atheist, 5 million dead
Mao Tse Tung, Atheist, 40 million dead
Pol Pot, Atheist, 2.5 million dead
Pope John Paul, Christian, 0 dead
Pat Robertson, Christian, 0 dead
Mel Gibson, Christian, 0 dead
Jackie Joyner, Christian, 0 dead
Sean Hannity, Christian, 0 dead
Lynne Leichtfuss, Christian, 0 dead
"When will people get it ? Atheism= Mass Murder !"
.......apples and oranges? Cherry picking? Logical fallacies? Those fruit sour and corrupt any bowl.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Oct 11, 2009 - 06:15am PT
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JL and Ed-
Here's a book I found that would seem made for the both of you.
The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics.
Author- Leonard Susskind
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Patrick Sawyer
climber
Originally California now Ireland
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Oct 11, 2009 - 07:41am PT
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Jennie, that is totally stupid.
So since I am an atheist I am going to kill millions? Religions have killed multi-millions. You totally cherry picked headcases who have committed genocide to suit your agenda/argument.
Mel Gibson? I am totally rolling on the floor laughing my ass off. Where did that one come from? Just for example.
I tell you what Jennie, you believe what you want and leave me alone.
And BTW you ponce, Hitler was not an atheist. Get your facts right.
I would guess that you are coming from left field big time but you no doubt are a right-whinging right-twit coming from RIGHT field.
Go shoot a fecking elk or something, just don't make it a human. You are really weird.
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