On the Nature of Things | Forum

Endovelico wrote:It may take quite a while but I expect us to get there sometime in the future.

This is the faith statement that has taken the place of the future kingdom of heaven in the secular mind.

1. I do not believe in God until someone can prove He exists. 2. I believe in God until someone proves He doesn't exist. Which of the two is more reasonable? Neither has anything to do with reason. In both examples, people make a decision based on an emotional reaction, and when confronted with a c...

But the reasons religions give us are good only for the more primitive minds. All this nonsense about everyone else in the whole world throughout history being primitive simpletons except for us has been said before. Usually by people whose own civilization and way of life was running on fumes. But...

But the reasons religions give us are good only for the more primitive minds. All this nonsense about everyone else in the whole world throughout history being primitive simpletons except for us has been said before. Usually by people whose own civilization and way of life was running on fumes. But...

Your military is killing people in these places, and you're paying for it. Might as well learn the names, right? Its like college football, knowing more about your rival's state helps with the insults if nothing else. It's not even at the level of a sporting event here. There are probably competiti...

Rationalist philosophers have, in every age, tried and miserably failed to come up with convincing and meaningful rational substitutes for the passionate, irrational, and functional myths they destroy. It goes like clockwork. A religion emerges out of a dark age and darker impulses to structure a ma...

Taboo wrote:...but godless rituals and priests and tithes and chants, no thanks.

*pops Prozac*

Thank God I make my money helping the US government kill people.

my inner redneck says that insolvent and ungovernable are admirable qualities, they dunna call it leverage fo nuttin. If it's good enough for Latin America it's good enough for me? I read a bunch of quotes from Greeks expressing shock that the US would willingly go the way they had gone before. Tha...

Some of you people are genuflecting crazy. Haven't we already tried reforming humanity by killing off all the ones we didn't like? Several times? And did it work those other times? I'm starting to think you aren't actually trying to improve anything and maybe you just like to see certain people kil...

It's not that gun laws cause more or less crime, statistically speaking. I don't care about that. Violent crime is a reality, and citizens ought to have a right to protect themselves to the utmost.

Enki wrote:for those who manage to do well in the foundational skills that our society requires such as literacy, numeracy and the capacity to suss out bureaucracies.

Right.

Old types of jobs disappear, new types of jobs emerge. This is going on for a long time now. Where does it hurt? :? It's a matter of pacing. Does job creation move at the speed of job destruction? If half the jobs in America are automatable then that's going to leave a mark. It also comes down to w...

My time in Asia has given me the impression that Western conceptions of Buddhism are mostly selective and flawed. Its really a subset of the New Age movement, for the most part. I never know quite how I feel about this. On one hand the fake little ersatz eastern religiosity touted by New Age popula...

Mr. Perfect wrote:Maybe you guys should think of trading for a living. IMO it is a very easy lifestyle.

I hear sex trafficking in underage girls is a laid back lifestyle as well. I'll pass on both, thanks.

The cause of poverty is the unequal endowment of intelligence and ability among men. You cannot 'tackle the cause' of that, you can only try to mitigate its consequences. Nonsense. Support your statement. Do you think people are endowed with equal intelligence and ability? Or do you think that diff...

Challenging the protestant work ethic is my life's mission. ;) The protestant work ethic is simply slavery made to sound pretty. And believe me in about ten years my ideas will be mainstream. Whether or not I get credit is irrelevant, but pretty much everyone is going to be recognizing that the pro...

People are so determined to define God as impossibly remote that I think they create their own separation from the divine. God is outside of time, but so are we. I do not see a paradox between God being outside of our 'world' and our souls being directly connected to God. But back to Progress. A go...

Mr. P, assume for a moment that everyone agrees with you that Obama has turned out to be a Bush clone, that he sucks, that his foreign policy sucks, that he lied in his campaign and continues to lie today.

What would your posts look like?

The cause of poverty is the unequal endowment of intelligence and ability among men. You cannot 'tackle the cause' of that, you can only try to mitigate its consequences.

Challenging the protestant work ethic is my life's mission. ;) The protestant work ethic is simply slavery made to sound pretty. And believe me in about ten years my ideas will be mainstream. Whether or not I get credit is irrelevant, but pretty much everyone is going to be recognizing that the pro...

Not wanting to kill brown people makes you a crazy racist... or at least an anti-Semite if those brown people happen to be rivals of Israel.

I take 'made in God's image'. Not to mean, "Fashioned in the likeness of God.", so much as, "God used himself as the raw materials for creation." i.e. We are LITERALLY made inside God's image. This kind of syncretism is popular among those who want to see western religion as jus...

I think I've said it already in this thread, but one of the most important things to know if you're going to understand non-modern/non-western cultures even a little bit is that not everyone believes that conscious awareness is the end all of the human organism. Jaynes, for example, believed that co...

But even if the senses work the exact same, it is difficult for me to even understand what is being said when I hear of the Walbiri living in a world that does not consist of a grid of homogenous space through which they travel different points of interest, but that those points of interest are the...