Re: Welcome to the "Last Word Café".
Posted: Fri Jan 21, 2011 5:26 pm
I think I found this room.
Forum for Mitsubishi Delica owners and enthusiasts.
https://delica.ca/forum/
FalcoColumbarius wrote:Oh great, now I need therapy.Aciled wrote:I was always a little curious about this thread.....
I'm thinking of amalgamating them and producing an e-book for my ipad. Very interesting ideas.
Some posters may be interested in completing this on-line survey....
http://psychcentral.com/therapy/
No, you didn't.glenn wrote:I think I found this room.
I guess that depends on your "Creator". If you are talking about the old man with the big beard in the clouds with a big bin full of lightning bolts to strike us down because we deserve it ~ then yes, I couldn't agree with you more. In fact it is really an absurd notion worthy of comic relief. But if we consider the "Creator" as a collective conciousness creating itself as a concept then perhaps there is more to intelligent design than some might give credit to.Mr. Flibble wrote:Actually, that is exactly what we are talking about. The argument that 3 cars with the same plate could not come together by chance is the same argument that the Creationists use to suggest that the world was "intelligently designed" by a creator.
Yes.Mr. Flibble wrote:Correlation gives you cause to investigate further - it does NOT give you cause to draw a conclusion from the data set at hand!
Yes, you certainly can find patterns everywhere you look, which brings us to the Golden Mean. Let's start with "nipples". Why does Mankind have nipples? Well, for the female it is an obvious answer, to feed the offspring, but what about men? Why on Earth do men have nipples? When one looks critically at the human body it doesn't take long to appreciate that both genders come from the same template. In fact it doesn't matter what shape, size, race, gender ~ all human beings work off the same formula.Mr. Flibble wrote:You can find patterns everywhere you look. And so what if the solar system lines up? Lots of celestial things happen all the time! People always seem to attribute the way certain bodies move in the heavens as relevant to their own lives - when of course, they are not. The solar system does not give a whit about our lives - and it is not even likely to be able to care. It is a bunch of inanimate matter moving around according to newtonian mechanics! (Perhilion advance of mercury and relativity included here for those who like to nitpick.)
I was in England at the time, must of missed it.Mr. Flibble wrote: I am referring to the bestselling book "88 reasons the Rapture will happen in 1988" Huge bestseller. Everyone has totally forgotten it.
Blind conjecture? Yet the very things that support my argument are the very rules you refer to that have promulgated since the ancient Greeks. Those super novas out there in space follow the same Golden Section as our very DNA helix as the snail and the sunflower ~ so I suppose that what we need to establish here is what you mean by "evidence".Mr. Flibble wrote:We should absolutely throw the baby out with the bath water!
Why?
Because there is no evidence for any of these things - to simply rely on blind conjecture without proof is akin to following voodoo or similar things.
This internet we are typing on, our delicas, modern medicine and medical cures, longer lifespans - everything that makes our life better than our ancestors is based on a process of thought known as science. This scientific method can be distilled down into a set of rules that I listed on this thread before. These rules have been validated for about 3000 years since first starting to appear from the Greeks.
Of course. Although, in light of all the evidence of the universe ~ there is much to be said about "having a gut feeling".Mr. Flibble wrote:.....To stray from this process is exactly what leads to all the hoxes and pseudoscience - like the horrific woman Jenny McCarthy who supports "Vaccines Cause Autism". What a crone. Children have *DIED*. *DIED*!!! Think about that! Children died because this woman did not know to follow the critical thinking rules and promoted a hoax.
I think we need to throw those ideas out, bad thinking kills people.
"....is believed by some to have been the original Number of the Beast.... " Would be the operative phrase here. Like the Alchemists and "turning lead into gold", a metaphor for turning ignorance into enlightenment ~ 666 and reference to "the beast" is not about some balrog from the deep but a geometric reference to the human beast that operates only on base instincts and not enlightened thought, which as a scientist ~ I would have thought you would appreciate.Mr. Flibble wrote:Why? Why not? That is a better question! After all, if you think about it, those civilizations already came to an end! Their calendars were way off on that count! Why even attribute anything of signifigance to those calendars at all? It makes as much sense as people attributing signifigance to the number 666 as shown in Revelations, without actually being aware that it represented Emperor Nero, or the fact that the original number was in fact, 616!
But people still give signifigance to this number, blissfully unaware of the original meaning.
These "outdated" calendars, which have been more astronomically accurate than our "modern" one, yet we still don't know why.... Maybe it's because we are superior because we are newer..... I think it is that attitude that is "dangerous" ~ it tells us that with all the technology we have developed we still haven't learned many basic lessons in life and are doomed to repeat them. Of a matter of course it should be acknowledged that more often than not it is the victor that records history and that "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past" *. So when we look to the ancient Mayans as savages who brutally sacrificed humans ~ remember who recorded that, while burning the Mayan history in the name of the Inquisition. Even today we are finding evidence that the so-called "primitive Celts" had a far more sophisticated society than the Romans, so much so that the Romans, after slaughtering and enslaving the Celts (one reason for this was because the Celts gave power & land to their women, which the Romans thought as an abomination), adopted much of the Celtic social standards as their own ~ such as their monetary system.Mr. Flibble wrote:So, why even give meaning to outdated calendars? Is there a reason to even give them meaning at all? Especially when the Maya themselves did not even give them the same meaning that modern people do? And, if you are giving them an end of the world meaning, why? Hey, maybe it means when they all come together ice cream will rain down from the sky for all! Just like Manna from heaven! Or maybe there will be a sudden outbreak of peace all across the world, or on the convergence all forms of cancer will be cured by science, or maybe we will suddenly achive cold fusion...
Or not.
I see no reason to give meaning to the value of a sequence of random number, and for the same reason I see no value to give meaning to the convergence of the end of some calendars. It makes no sense to give them an arbitrary meaning.
CloudMountain wrote:"The tao that can be spoken is not the true tao"
I guess you shouldn't have said anything.
glenn wrote:Perhaps I need to start using emoticons! If only I could figure out how to do it.
You don't have to have a deity to have a religion. Look at Buddhism or Atheism. As far as "salvation" goes, that's kind of a Christian thing really ~ and even then Jesus says in the Gospel According To St. Thomas:solanoid wrote:Falco,....
...One comment, on the subject of religion; its a fact that all religions are based upon the same fundamentals. However Tao is not a religion because there are no dieties, thus it is more of a philosophy, as with nihilism. Anyone who demands real answers to lifes questions as opposed to rhetoric must look closely at these beleifs.