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Mark
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Re: youtube

Post by Mark » Thu Dec 04, 2008 3:52 pm

Mark wrote:
In this book I am reading, "Irrelligion" the author states, "I was scufffling with my brother when I was about ten and had an epiphany that the stuff of our two heads wasn't different in kind from the stuff of the rough rug on which I'd just burned my elbow or the stuff of the chair on which he'd just banged his shoulder. The realization that everything was ultimately made out of the same matter, that there was no essential difference between the material compositions of me and not-me, was clean, clear, and bracing."
Larry wrote:
That must be why we don't think the deaths of 50 million unborn babies in 35 years means all that much. There's no "essential" difference between that and, say, mowing down a wheat field. I guess it just depends on what you think is "essential' and where you "draw the line".

I think what the author was saying is that we are made of carpeting, or that like the Bible says, man was made from clay. God could have just as easily made us from chairs or maybe he did use clay, the way wheat is made from clay. Or he can reverse the process, say turning people into salt, or water into wine. You start to see scientifically, "we" are indeed all made of the same thing, what else could we be made of other than the things around us.
We turns cows into people, it's just disguised a bit. Or you could say people are made from corn. Nobody wants to be decended from atoms or clay; however, even some carpet particles along with PCBs are finding their way into our bodies, but that's just the way it is. Tsunamis turn people back into water, and the cycle repeats itself. That's what I see.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goxwQ890gbQ
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Re: youtube

Post by larry cottrill » Thu Dec 04, 2008 4:25 pm

Man, what a nice video montage! One of my favorite old songs, too. Haven't heard that one for a long time.

What a job that must be, just sitting there all day looking for stuff like this ;-) (Actually, I guess there must be more to it than that.)

Well, maybe I took the observation wrong, it just struck me as basically a naturalist/materialist statement. But to my mind, there's no shame in being made up of atoms. Some of them might be atoms Jesus breathed, or Hitler for that matter. In the physical sense, we all end up in recycling. I think the problem is that so many have come to the conclusion that it's all material, that there simply CANNOT BE anything transcendent about what we are. That's one of the most basic questions everyone faces, really, and your answer determines an awful lot about how you deal with the world and people around you. It isn't whether we're dust, it's whether we're anything else besides. Whether transcendence is an overarching reality or a figment of the imagination.

L Cottrill

metiz
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Re: youtube

Post by metiz » Thu Dec 04, 2008 9:49 pm

larry cottrill wrote:Death is the transition from existing in a bounded time and space to existing in an unbounded time and space.

Of course, that's really cooking it down ;-)

L Cottrill
Wow thanks, you could have made this like 10 times harder for me :P

Ok so when you are alive you exist in this plane of reality and when you are dead you exist in a other. Where does "death" come in to play in that analogy? my definition of death is ceasing to exist. But that description realy helps me. You see, YOU can describe death. you can imagine wat it will be like after dead for the people around you. however, you can not imagine "death" for yourself. You cannot imagine not existing. Your brain is not build that way. Even worse though is your subconsious. the force protecting you 24/7. you experience pain because there is danger for you as a person so pain is not comfortable; you move away from pain. Your reflexes tell you to pull your foot up is you step in to a piece of glass. Same goes with emotions. If you experience euphomism with a action you take, you tend to do things like that more often. if you experience grief or a other emotion, you try to distance yourself from the actions that make those emotions surface. This is a defense mechanism. If you are angry, your adrenaline rises so your strength goes up temporary and gives you a better chance to defeat your fo. Back to death. Thing is, you can describe death, you know what it is but you can not comprehend it. no one can. your brain is not build for thinking when you are dead, becuase you are dead. It only understands life. So when you sacrifice yourself for someone, at the core, you have no idea what you are getting yourself into. Now think of this. If you do NOT sacrifice yourself to safe a loved one, or even someone you do not know, you contience will knaw at YOU. this is a negative emotion and you'll want to avoid that, henge sacrifice. If you are in the process of sacrification so to say, you know it is the end but you do NOT, you CAN NOT comprehend death. your subconcience is only thinking about the afterwards, the not feeling of a negative emotion. maybe even the feeling of euphomism for saving a life. This is what thrives you to do these acts, subcontiencly. Even when you think about it, it's still your sub c calling the shots even though there is no such thing as "afterwards"

Also think of this - relegious people are more likely to sacrifice themselfs to save another. this is even easier. They do not think of death as the end but just a transition to another place (i.e heaven)
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Re: youtube

Post by metiz » Thu Dec 04, 2008 11:19 pm

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Re: youtube

Post by larry cottrill » Fri Dec 05, 2008 2:11 pm

If you wanted it difficult, you should have asked a theologian ;-)

Tesla has been a hero of mine since I was maybe 14 yrs old and built my first Tesla coil. What a kick that was! But we all have our blemishes. The excellent video doesn't mention that one of the ideas Tesla got carried away with was the notion of eugenics, as promoted by Ms Sanger. Of course, this became a very popular "cause" in the early Twentieth Century (basically the final days of Empirialism) and culminated in German National Socialism under Hitler. This is not a charge that Tesla was particularly evil; I have done worse. Which, of course, is the problem.

The trouble with most Christians is that we tend to think that what we believe is so sensible and reasonable that anyone who receives a clear explanation of it will see the light and simply drop what they're doing and come over. But I have no such illusions. If I had been raised Hindu for the first twelve years of my life, it would undoubtedly seem completely logical to me to have 300 million gods and goddesses. After all, every possible circumstance in life would be covered. What could be more reasonable? Ravi Zacharias has said that if you can't find anything valid about another man's religion, all that proves is that you have failed to understand it.

Anyway, I'll stick with basic Arminianism. It gives you a nice balance, or tension if you will, between Deistic sovereignty and human responsibility, and that's enough to seem reasonable to me. The idea that we are motivated by nothing but internal chemical responses seems to me far darker than the grimmest brand of Calvinism. Ha. That provides no proof that it couldn't be true, of course.

However, transcendence is hard to suppress for long. Say I have an old LP in my hand -- say, Charles duTrois conducting Toronto in Beethoven's Ninth. It is, after all, a purely physical thing: a piece of vinyl with a squiggly groove on each side. Yet a devout atheist friend listening to it might find it a "spritual" experience, and might even say so if he knew me well enough to know I wouldn't take the statement too literally. At an obviously superficial level, it's just a physical process from a mechanical groove in motion to an electromagnetic/mechanical generator to an electrical signal to electronic amplification to an electromagnetic/mechanical transducer to pressure wave motion in air to oscillatory motion of tiny hairs in the cochlea to neuroelectric transmission to the brain. But then, there is cognition -- the mystery of which has never been resolved satisfactorily by any scientific explanation. How is it that you can be so carried along by the "spirit" of the work that you just stop noticing the innumerable clicks and pops from a hundred replays? You can explain that, too, in terms of extra endorphines, I suppose, but what makes that explanation meaningful? Great art always offers something more, something just beyond the reach of reason.

Similarly, a religion that could pass every conceivable logical test would be pathetic, not admirable.

L Cottrill

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Re: youtube

Post by metiz » Fri Dec 05, 2008 5:44 pm

larry cottrill wrote:If you wanted it difficult, you should have asked a theologian ;-)

Tesla has been a hero of mine since I was maybe 14 yrs old and built my first Tesla coil. What a kick that was! But we all have our blemishes. The excellent video doesn't mention that one of the ideas Tesla got carried away with was the notion of eugenics, as promoted by Ms Sanger. Of course, this became a very popular "cause" in the early Twentieth Century (basically the final days of Empirialism) and culminated in German National Socialism under Hitler. This is not a charge that Tesla was particularly evil; I have done worse. Which, of course, is the problem.

The trouble with most Christians is that we tend to think that what we believe is so sensible and reasonable that anyone who receives a clear explanation of it will see the light and simply drop what they're doing and come over. But I have no such illusions. If I had been raised Hindu for the first twelve years of my life, it would undoubtedly seem completely logical to me to have 300 million gods and goddesses. After all, every possible circumstance in life would be covered. What could be more reasonable? Ravi Zacharias has said that if you can't find anything valid about another man's religion, all that proves is that you have failed to understand it.

Anyway, I'll stick with basic Arminianism. It gives you a nice balance, or tension if you will, between Deistic sovereignty and human responsibility, and that's enough to seem reasonable to me. The idea that we are motivated by nothing but internal chemical responses seems to me far darker than the grimmest brand of Calvinism. Ha. That provides no proof that it couldn't be true, of course.

However, transcendence is hard to suppress for long. Say I have an old LP in my hand -- say, Charles duTrois conducting Toronto in Beethoven's Ninth. It is, after all, a purely physical thing: a piece of vinyl with a squiggly groove on each side. Yet a devout atheist friend listening to it might find it a "spritual" experience, and might even say so if he knew me well enough to know I wouldn't take the statement too literally. At an obviously superficial level, it's just a physical process from a mechanical groove in motion to an electromagnetic/mechanical generator to an electrical signal to electronic amplification to an electromagnetic/mechanical transducer to pressure wave motion in air to oscillatory motion of tiny hairs in the cochlea to neuroelectric transmission to the brain. But then, there is cognition -- the mystery of which has never been resolved satisfactorily by any scientific explanation. How is it that you can be so carried along by the "spirit" of the work that you just stop noticing the innumerable clicks and pops from a hundred replays? You can explain that, too, in terms of extra endorphines, I suppose, but what makes that explanation meaningful? Great art always offers something more, something just beyond the reach of reason.

Similarly, a religion that could pass every conceivable logical test would be pathetic, not admirable.

L Cottrill
I'd love to reply to your post but I can't because your writing is a level above mine and I do not realy understand it (dutch)
but regardless. This knowledge, in the end, is completely and utterly useless. It will not change the way you live and if you ponder about it long enough, you will go insane (and that will not exactly help with the whole survival thing - ha.) Asuming you did manage to let it alter the way you live, then you'd become a social outcast. Again, not promoting the reason you changed your lifestyle in the first place. I myself have been raised a Christian, but lost fate at maybe age 12 and I'm about as atheistic as can be. I do not believe in anything but science. However, living (sensibly) with a religion, having a fear of a god, might be a good thing. It will help you controll your lifestyle and be a "good" person.

My version of the definition of "what is good and what is evil"

good and evil are like heaven and hell. If you are good you go to heaven, bad and it's hell for you. Hell and heaven are symbolic. Do good and you get to have friends, a good social life, a partner to spend your days with a good job etc etc. All in all a fulfilling life. (heaven) Do bad, on the other hand, and you get shunned. nobody like's you, you can go to jail you don't have a lot of friends if any and you're the outcast of society (hell)

"Evil" is what is considered not uniform to social standards. If you do not help others, not share or contribute and are not thankfull, others feel neglected by you and you are branded evil, shunned. Help others on the other hand like doing community service and whatnot and you are branded a hero.

Yeah that's a fairly good definition. If you make others feel bad, you're evil. Make others feel good and you're a hero.
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Re: youtube

Post by Mark » Sat Dec 06, 2008 9:26 pm

Presentation is Everything

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Re: youtube

Post by Mark » Sun Dec 07, 2008 3:28 pm

Presentation is Everything

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The Great Offense (Re: youtube)

Post by larry cottrill » Mon Dec 08, 2008 2:45 pm

metiz wrote:I'd love to reply to your post but I can't because your writing is a level above mine and I do not realy understand it (dutch)
Apologies, my friend, it's my fault, not yours. It isn't that my writing is above yours. I get to work in my native language (being ignorant of almost all others), and I throw around things like "Arminianism" without taking into account that my audience might not have any reason to know about it.
My version of the definition of "what is good and what is evil"

good and evil are like heaven and hell. If you are good you go to heaven, bad and it's hell for you. Hell and heaven are symbolic. Do good and you get to have friends, a good social life, a partner to spend your days with a good job etc etc. All in all a fulfilling life. (heaven) Do bad, on the other hand, and you get shunned. nobody like's you, you can go to jail you don't have a lot of friends if any and you're the outcast of society (hell)

"Evil" is what is considered not uniform to social standards. If you do not help others, not share or contribute and are not thankfull, others feel neglected by you and you are branded evil, shunned. Help others on the other hand like doing community service and whatnot and you are branded a hero.

Yeah that's a fairly good definition. If you make others feel bad, you're evil. Make others feel good and you're a hero.
Forgive me for not answering immediately. I hesitated because you have now forced me to commit The Great Offense, i.e. to proclaim the very statement that makes real Christrianity so hated and rejected.

Saying that, I also have to admit that a lot of "Christian" people really believe nothing different from what you have said here. It all seems so reasonable. Your good stuff is weighed against your bad stuff, and if you come out OK, you get heaven; if not, you get hell (whether they're real places or just something "symbolic"). All of the other great religions in the world (as far as I know) are based on some version of this scheme (even Buddhism provides some reason for "good" behavior to be rewarded over "evil" behavior), though I can't pretend to be an expert on other belief systems. Please understand in what I say here that my belief does not make me think of people as "good" or "evil" per se, but rather, simply whether they are "right" or "wrong" in terms of what I hold to be true. (You surely don't believe that "truth is relative" -- if it were, everyone's first pulsejet would start right up the first time and then run perfectly! Ha.)

Further let me say that I, along with most everyone else, would certainly find it admirable for someone to live like that as best he/she can. From a human perspective, there logically should be rewards for helping the helpless, feeding the destitute, standing up for justice, etc. It is entirely understandable that people believe this. Certainly Jesus taught the virtue of these things, as did Gotama Buddha, Confucius and many others. Yet Jesus predicted that his followers would present to the world a great offense that would bring them before judges, and even condemn them to death. And this has been true. More people were killed in the Twentieth Century simply for being Christians than in all 2000 years before that, combined. If Jesus simply taught this moral principle, then why should this be?

You might think that the offense is that Jesus definitely taught that heaven and hell are real, eternal places. Jesus taught much more about hell than heaven, and it was always declared a place of eternal torment. However, this idea of eternal punishment vs eternal reward is certainly not unique to his teaching -- it is exactly in line with what Judaism has taught from time immemorial, exactly as we would expect from a Jewish Rabbi. And many other religious systems teach something that vary from this only in the details. So this concept is not at the heart of the offense he said would come. No, it is much more personal, as he made very clear in New Testament scripture, from which all the following is derived:

The Great Offense:

There is no scale where your bad stuff is weighed against your good stuff. Period. The REAL God, the God Who Is There, is so holy that "all my righteousness is like filthy rags" to him. The problem is that our debt is so great, we can never pay up. People who live "godly" lives to try to get God to pardon them are living in futility. It's just not going to happen. Sure, hell is filled with people like Hitler and Pol Pot, but it's also filled with untold millions who convinced themselves they were good enough. But there isn't any "good enough". People say, "A loving God would never send anyone to hell." But God's love is NOT more essential than his holiness (which is the single most fundamentally true characteristic of God). Of course, if that's all there was to it, there would be no one in heaven but angels -- all humans would be consigned to the pit without remedy.

Instead of a scale, there is a single question: What did you do with my Son? It is your answer to this that determines your eternal destiny. This is the hated truth that is at the heart of genuine Christianity. It is at this point that all human pride is burned away; the sum total of all our good deeds cannot stand in the heat of this question. According to New Testament scripture, there are only two answers, and no middle ground at all: "I accepted him as your free gift of complete and total pardon" or "I helped crucify him." It is that stark, and that simple. It is that question which man in his pride can never face; it is utterly offensive because it is only in utter humiliation before God that we can give the right answer. This is precisely the stumbling block that prevents most people from deciding for Christ.

Instead of religious duty, there is only a cross. We cannot repay our hopeless debt. But we can accept the payment made for us, which he said satisfied the demands of a holy God. We have only one expression that is acceptable: To willingly receive the free gift of 'PAID IN FULL' stamped in blood on the bottom line of our account. That's all there is. It is spitting in God's face to try to pay for the gift he has given, the gift so overwhelmingly expensive that only his own son was qualified to pay it! In a purely natural sense, man cannot comprehend the meaning or magnitude of this transaction. Oswald Chambers, in the early 20th Century, wrote:

"Forgiveness is the divine miracle of grace. The cost to God was the Cross of Christ. To forgive sin, while remaining a holy God, this price had to be paid. Never accept a view of the fatherhood of God if it blots out the atonement. The revealed truth of God is that without the atonement He cannot forgive -- He would contradict His nature if He did. The only way we can be forgiven is by being brought back to God through the atonement of the Cross. God's forgiveness is possible only in the supernatural realm." - Oswald Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, reading for November 20.

Did you see Mark's post of the Jesus poster that says, "Love me or burn?" That's funny in a way, but only because it's so tragically "wrong way round." The real message of Jesus is "Accept my love for you (that I proved by my death) or burn." Billy Graham once said, "Jesus went to hell so you wouldn't have to." This is just another way of saying the scriptural passage, "He became sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God" (emphasis mine, of course).

As you can see, this has nothing whatever to do with what "brand" of Christianity you subscribe to or what other, possibly completely different, tradition you were brought up in. It has everything to do with choosing to believe something utterly supernatural, using only the logic of the supernatural realm. It is this that makes Christianity unique, and it is this that makes it the Great Offense to everyone, at least when we first encounter it.

Again, my friend, I apologize for delaying my response because of my own fear of offending everybody (which it undoubtedly will ;-). Only one of many sins that require the atonement to assure his forgiveness. But, now you know what I think.

L Cottrill

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Hilariously Funny Man

Post by larry cottrill » Wed Dec 10, 2008 12:57 pm

If, somehow, you have never seen Senor Wences, you are in for a real treat:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJiYZ6QIAtY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4pdJ0dn8mg

This guy was doing early versions of his stuff on the old Ed Sullivan Show back in the 1960s, maybe earlier. The original Gianni ("Johnny") was nothing but his extended hand and he'd draw two eyes and lips with dark lipstick to start his routine. I thought he was hilarious then, and it made me laugh hysterically to see him again, 40-odd years later. Wonderful!

L Cottrill

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Re: The Great Offense (Re: youtube)

Post by Mike Everman » Wed Dec 10, 2008 2:48 pm

larry cottrill wrote: It has everything to do with choosing to believe something utterly supernatural, using only the logic of the supernatural realm. It is this that makes Christianity unique, and it is this that makes it the Great Offense to everyone, at least when we first encounter it.

L Cottrill
Larry, though I'm not a believer, that's the sanest essay I've read on the subject. I do believe that there are amazing things going on just outside our perception, and occasionally within, and I suppose that's supernatural.

One can say "gravity is weak and air is thick, and that is why we can fly" two unpopular suppositions that lead to a conclusion. Suppositions that are not supernatural, but do go against common opinion, and are subject to the scale one considers to make ultimately a true statement.
Mike Often wrong, never unsure.
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Re: The Great Offense (Re: youtube)

Post by larry cottrill » Wed Dec 10, 2008 3:16 pm

Mike Everman wrote:One can say "gravity is weak and air is thick, and that is why we can fly" two unpopular suppositions that lead to a conclusion. Suppositions that are not supernatural, but do go against common opinion, and are subject to the scale one considers to make ultimately a true statement.
Mike, that's great. Our thinking about (at least physical) things often breaks down at some point because we fail to think about the implications of scale. In my old copy of Amateur Telescope Making, Book Three, contributor G. Dallas Hanna offers a short article on elutriation of optical abrasives. One of the greatest bugaboos of optical workers, amateur and professional, is the appearance of deep scratches during fine grinding that just won't "grind out" (and therefore, certainly won't disappear in final polishing). Popular wisdom is that these are from dust, hair, etc. that happens to fall on the exposed glass surface during grinding (optical grinding is analogous to "hand lapping" of two surfaces). Hanna contends that it is, rather, the tendency of particles of abrasive to clump together that is the culprit (and of course, he offers a simple remedy). In a final Editor's Note, the following appears:

[In a private communication Hanna says: "We use our abrasive alongside roughing mills and never take any precautions such as taking a bath before fine grinding, yet it has been so long since any of us has had scratches on glass that we have forgotten." It may prove that flocculated brickbats have been the cause of scratches that have baffled some workers almost beyond endurance.
...
(The respected expert S.R.B. Cooke) was asked, "Why don't the flocculated particles fall apart at once when put under pressure between two surfaces being worked?" Reply: "Because in the finer sizes the surface forces are greater than the gravitational and fluid forces." It remains difficult for human beings to think in terms of the microscopic world where the forces with which we are familiar exist in different proportions; forces trivial to us outweighing gravity; ask an insect or even a bacterium, which knows from experience in a world of forces we are little aware of. Also see cognate considerations in D'Arcy Thompson's classic work "Growth and Form," chapter on "Magnitude."]

Thank you, sir, for the kind words!

L Cottrill

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flying lawnmower????

Post by redneck » Wed Dec 10, 2008 11:30 pm

hooowee that was loud! do it again!

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Re: flying lawnmower????

Post by larry cottrill » Thu Dec 11, 2008 12:36 pm

Man, I just had to laugh! The old U-control modellers used to say, "you can fly anything if you can put enough power on it". I guess it must be true in R/C, too!What a blast. Thanks!

(I'll bet that mower isn't exactly "stock", though ;-)

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Re: youtube

Post by metiz » Sat Dec 13, 2008 11:37 am

Larry,

to further support my beliefs on the meaning of life:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... lines.html

kinda weird they actually research these things and are supprised by the results. animal biologists have known this stuff for years :lol:

see, the women have full controll over what they choose but yet they are greatly influenced by their natural urges.
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