Search
Archive Calendar
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |
Archives
Categories
- A Government That Can Force You to Buy Health Insurance Can Make You Do Anything (3)
- a protein wisdom philosophy primer (3)
- academics (25)
- armadillo (8)
- Friday Fiction 100 Word Challenge (51)
- from the protein wisdom conceptual series (136)
- identity politics (33)
- If Republicans Win the Senate in 2014 (1)
- in which celebraties comment on current events (67)
- language / intentionalism (88)
- legal (6)
- My brief conversations with inanimate objects (130)
- NSA / FISA (46)
- One Term to Serve, the 2012 Revival (6)
- Overheard in a Fallujah bunker (27)
- Poems from 196x, Revised by the Ghost of Richard Brauti (27)
- protein wisdom's DNC coverage (30)
- protein wisdom's RNC coverage (29)
- protein wisdom: the movie Lists (20)
- Provocateurism (16)
- real-time empirical observations (51)
- red pills found behind the sofa cushions (42)
- Scenes from my driveway (61)
- Talking back to 80s music (41)
- The Martha Stewart Chronicles (58)
- The protein wisdom interviews (10)
- The protein wisdom original poems (142)
- Uncategorized (20,046)
- Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, abridged (34)
Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
- In The Mailbox: 12.23.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll truly IS a sad, embittered psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- In The Mailbox: 07.18.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
Thanks Darleen. I’ll quit complaining about my hip now.
“There’s just nature, doing what it does.”
“Without God, humans are but animals.”
Without an overarching plan or a life trajectory, atheists are but manageable beasts; managed by their own kind: other beasts. Having faith in God, non-atheists have better plans, and a sustainable-through-suffering, directed life trajectory.
Choose wisely. Your mental health (and your soul) could well depend on your choice.
“Choose wisely. Your mental health (and your soul) could well depend on your choice.”
The smarter atheist then uses that as the reason man created god, not the other way around. A useful fiction for the weak minded, like telling children of Santa Claus to give them comfort and joy.
Along the same lines as Jeff saying “the Creator” mentioned in the Declaration of Independence need not be a real creator, just a useful touchstone we agree to believe in for the sake of an orderly society.
There really is no persuasive argument against such assertions, one can only shrug your shoulders and remember it is faith that saves, not hard proof.
And if we were all polytheists, the smarter atheist would be right.
Y’all should read Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”. It details his experiences during the Holocaust and being in one of the concentration camps.
The first half is the story of the camp and the its liberation. The second deals with his theories of why God allows us to suffer and what it is to be human. It’s excellent.
I have nothing to say to atheists, and they nothing for me. You see, nothing to discuss.
From my own standpoint as an early agnostic, “what do you mean, Jesus loves me yes I know for theBible tells me so? That’s a book! through several close calls in serial and too many things happen naturally through all that doubt is simply not possible.
I concluded atheists haven’t died enough times.
Not that dying will convert an atheist, and not that it matters, but not dying, and not dying, and not dying, and still not dying, just might.
When I was stricken and lain up I had just got my first apartment, the very first time in my life that I lived all by myself. A horror to my father. He could not imagine being alone. There was no furniture. So I decided maybe I had just get furniture so at least visitors would have a place to sit. I have tons of friends. And that worked. People do have lives of their own, they’re all very busy in fact, and over time visits diminished and faded altogether almost to none, but I was never alone.
Never.
Although completely alone for very long periods not once was I lonely. Not once. And I honestly do not know why not.
One moment almost informs me, went like this. I was dreaming and very active in conversation, completely engaged and enjoying myself with another person and I began to feel a physically discomforted and I recall saying, I have to go now. Where? I have to go to the bathroom, then half-asleep I realized I was in hospital and the bathroom door was open and it would take a bit of effort to get there, but still half-asleep I didn’t want to break it off, but then I was fully awake and in the hospital room and standing on the floor headed toward the bathroom but it is darkened with one corner lit, the bathroom door open, and I’m still in conversation, I am awake and I ask, “Don’t you have to go the bathroom too?” pause for an answer, “Oh, ha! That’s right, you don’t do that.”
An atheist will say I dreamed a companion, my psychology needed one.
I’ll say, there are hundreds odd similar things. And you’ll find a materially-focused answer for all of them, and I can go on and on and on and wear us both out with them. Here, pull up a chair and let’s start at the beginning. *runs*
And I simply cannot go to church. They’re not religious enough. And their dogma is all wrong. Their canon is off. And that group thing that they all do is not for me. My brother asks, “don’t you want to fellowship?” The very word gives me the creeps. “Thank you, but no thank you.” My relationship with deity is personal, and I don’t even know what it is.
And all of your prayers are strange.
Mine are not like that at all. Not one bit .
And group prayers that I see, like on tv are embarrassing.
Yet a prayer group entered my hospital room and asked if it is okay and I said, “Please yes” and I have no doubt at their direct prayers directly helped me directly. That night in CU was all very direct. Thank you for that, lovely Christian people.
And another time I was told to admit myself, so I did, and the woman put me straight in a wheelchair and asked me, “are you open to prayer?” St. Josephs, they do that. I thought it odd to ask. And I’m being admitted, do I look that bad? Apparently. “Yes. But honestly…I don’t know what to pray for.” What do you mean? “I don’t know if I should pray to help me live or pray to help me die well.” The woman, a black woman if you must know, looked directly at me and with the tremendous sympathy in her visage and said, “Honey, maybe you can pray for His will to happen.”
Good grief, that was so clear. Why didn’t I think of that? It’s the obvious thing! And that’s what I did. And as you see, I lived.
My big problem, was being told that a single omniscient invincible immortal omnipotent being was so unlikely as to be absurd, followed by m-brane theory, based on string theory, proposing that everything was compressed “congealed” energy caused by oscillations of a mysterious tiny, non-material object ,called a string, that has never been directly, or indirectly, observed, and that it all happens in a three dimensional cross-section, of a 7 dimensional cloud, suspended in an 11 dimensional bulk void sort of thing, and that two of the dimensions aren’t worth tracking, because they somehow contract into near dimensionless “points” and so don’t count, besides serving as a finagle constant to explain energy loss in the equations describing the whole thing. This multidimensional thing is a bubbling mass of infinite universes, in and infinite degree of variety, all with their own physical laws, and extremely rarely interacting in ways that are visible in our universe, no having been observed to date beyond the big-bang which is observed and inferred indirectly, and all proceeding from an infinite amount of starting conditions, and changes between duplicates of objects in the many universes somehow conserve information that should be lost in events that physics cannot describe yet should not be lost because of a presumption of conservation..
That is supposed to be the more credible, less exotic, simpler explanation for how we got there than one universe and one omnipotent gos which was way beyond the pale.
There is no current evidence for brane-theory and it supposedly “exists” as a a series of theoretical transformations of one aspect of physics to another with no empirical foundation for the transformation beyond the mathematician doing the transformation. The hope is that brane theory will lead to math that will provide a way for the theory to bootstrap itself into being provable. At present the theory has the status described as “not even wrong”.
And the people who told me that god was a problem due to his being indirectly observable until he reveals himself are happily swallowing this brane stuff despite the lack of anything being observable. The people who told me that god was an embarrassing singularity if he exists have a whole continuum of the damned things and accept it with no reservations. They say that sometimes the truth is far stranger than what we can come up with while insisting that God is an absurd concept.
That tells me that credibility was never the problem and that atheist materialist empirical scientists are easily seduced by faith and intuition as long as they find that faith aesthetically pleasing.
In short the arguments against the existence of God should also function against the m-brane stuff, yet they don’t, implying that either the m-brane stuff is a religion and that atheists have no special talent for resisting religion or that the arguments employed against God were disingenuously embraced only because they were arguments against God.
And no, I don’t understand brane theory beyond noting that it fails the tests that were was used to discredit the existence of a god, including complexity, a non-reliance on observations, lots of infinities,and a need for revelation/divination to proceed further and link it to obervations somehow.
[expression of aggreement and assent vocalized in authentic frontier gibberish, accompanied by an emphatic arm gesture]
What bour3 and palaeomerus said. Individuals will have to work out their own strategies, with or without troubling ‘fellowships’, be they atheists who gibber and mock in their lab coats, or Christians in their suits and vestments, or Jews in their kipas. The fellowship-group won’t be there when you meet your maker, or enter eternity, or are reborn as a snail. When all is said and done, you will be alone, or not alone.
If that’s troubling, you might get lucky and come back around as an individual in a hive-mind of honeybees.
Wait…
And the people who told me that god was a problem due to his being indirectly observable until he reveals himself are happily swallowing this brane stuff despite the lack of anything being observable. The people who told me that god was an embarrassing singularity if he exists have a whole continuum of the damned things and accept it with no reservations.
Those people are not scientists and mathematicians. Those who happily believe in theories of advanced physics that border on (or cross well into) metaphysics are just pretending to be rational, and choosing to have faith in math they can’t comprehend, rather than in a traditional Divine.
But let’s not pooh-pooh the work being done by physicists and mathematicians, who are continuing to offer and defend their various theories and mathematical formulas in their quest for a better understanding of the universe.
I was raised a good Protestant, and can more than hold my own in any Bible study group you’d like to throw me into, but I drifted away from my faith in my 20s and I haven’t returned. I have no patience with militant atheists who insist that their view is the only correct one, for the same reason I have no patience for any zealot who demands I take it on faith that his way is the only way. I’m just an old-school skeptical agnostic, who is perfectly happy to file a whole lot of stuff in the drawer marked “unproven.”
So go ahead and classify me as an animal. Anything you can do to dehumanize your opponents is a good tactic, as you’ve no doubt learned from watching the Jarrett gang over the last few years.
That’s Darwinist thinking.
/riff
zoön politikon, Darwinist?
That’s social Darwinist thinking
/riff (rev)
“So go ahead and classify me as an animal.”
Well you aren’t a mineral…
The thing is mathematicians don’t tell you useful stuff about the universe unless they adequately model the aspect of the universe they wish to illuminate. They just tell you about following rules and assumptions to a logical conclusion, eliminating the possibility of there being a logical conclusion, mapping whereabouts a logical conclusion is most likely to be found by mapping extrema or means, or tracking changes over some sequentially progressive axis like time passed in some sort of dimensional manifold that describes a point of view in a system.
Physiscists depend on obervations to back up their theories or at least relate them to the observable. They are not above finagling their way to harmony here and there though sometimes they find evidence that the finagle is a real thing like in the case of he cosmological constant. Einstein hated it but scientists now think they’ve pretty much confirmed that there is a repulsive force.effect acting at huge scalesat about the value that Einstein required .
M-brane is more of a natural philosophical hypothetical toy set. Nothing is falsifiable. They start from strings and try to build something that could produce this universe and what they came up with is wilder and sillier than God and yet they didn’t discard it.
“So go ahead and classify me as an animal.”
Am squids the vegetable? Or is this “Luminous beings are we. Not this crude matter.” territory? And do you think Christians classify atheists as subhuman? I think humans are naturally depraved so expect them to rebel against God, deny God, fail to see God, mistake God for something else, etc. The bible is full of people who want to be faithful doing that even in the midst of serving God. It’s not an inhuman trait at all to be unsure of God or hostile to God as a concept.
Let’s see an animal try this…
S. Kierkegaard
If we ain’t animals then we must be robots. Meat robots.
Whaddaya want, epicycles?
They were at least an interpretation of something observed. Phlogiston was an attempt to explain combustion and exothermic reactions. They were falsifiable.
M-Theory is cosmological jerking off because the standard model has been stuck for while. It’s math for its own sake. There’s nothing to even test. It’s a competing faith dressed up like science.
Ellipses are fine with me.
Ellipsis is fine with me. too…
And do you think Christians classify atheists as subhuman?
I was riffing off the “Without God, humans are but animals” quote.
What a friend they have in jizzes.
Okay, your pun was better than mine. I will show submission and go sit with the betas.