09:55 – Barbara gave me a haircut this morning, so I’m feeling weak. Only kidding. Actually, the bogosity of the Samson and Delilah myth was one of the first things that caused me to question religion, when I was about three years old. I knew I didn’t feel any weaker after a haircut. A guy who lived down the street from us was former military. He had a crew cut so short he might as well have shaved his head, and he was built like Arnold Schwarzenegger. And, anyway, why should hair length have anything to do with how strong a guy was? That got me started thinking about how clearly bogus a lot of other religious stories were, from the parting of the Red Sea to transubstantiation to dead people coming back to life. I wrote off religion as a bunch of myths and outright lies. I’d learned to question dubious claims and demand evidence for them. I became a scientist in all but name before I started kindergarten.
Sunday, 18 December 2011
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I like the stories using the number 40:
…Noah building the ark prior to the 40 days of rain….
…after leaving Egypt Moses wandering in the desert for 40 days….
…after being baptized, Jesus fasted for 40 days and nights in the Judean desert…
Hey, if they all transpired in 39, or 41, days, I’d be an atheist too.
My own favorite stories are in Samuel and Kings, but I also dig the ones where Jesus is tempted by Satan and where He drives the Gadarene swine off the cliff and the moneychangers out of the Temple.
We could use Him now in Babylon-On-The-Hudson and Mordor-On-The-Potomac.
And I am due for a “holiday” haircut myself now. Let’s see…which holiday…going by the NPR radio broadcasts over this weekend so far, it’s a choice between Hanukkah and Kwanza. Anything But Christian, natch. Let’s here those fund-raising ads again, lefties, shall we?
and that’s “hear” not “here” of course.
Well there’s your mistake right there.
The local NPR (WAMC and the thousand stations they’ve taken over) used to play a lot of classical music with some news and other programs. Over the past 20 years that’s changed to “all programming, all the time”, with “programming” meaning “leftist indoctrination”. It’s probably not a coincidence that WAMC’s boss, Alan Chartock, was a professor of political science at SUNY Albany and a friend of Mario Cuomo. Interestingly, Chartock knows what “Gramscian March Through the Institutions” means, but firmly denies it’s happening. In any event, local NPR is unlistenable by me, and I’m not even conservative, let alone a right winger. (Though I did make myself a “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Proud Member” card back when the childish lunatic made her finger-pointing attempts back in the 1990s.)
I know Chuck has recommended some obscure earbuds which have long been discontinued, but I’m wondering if anyone has a tip for a pair of full headphones with a wide frequency response, esp. for human voice. A friend in India is transcribing your medical history, and he’d like to be able to hear the doctors and wants me to bring him a pair.
He seems to like HD 203 – Sennheiser USAArticle No. 504290 but I’m put off by the price tag.
In case I got the HTML wrong, here’s another link:
http://www.sennheiserusa.com/stereo-headphones-dj-mp3-closed-headphones_504290
OFD, “Mordor-On-The-Potomac” gave me a giggle.
Thanks,
Jim
Yeah, I know about NPR and its programming; we only listen on Saturday nights, formerly for Prairie Home Companion, Joel Najman’s My Place (old-school rock-and-roll) and American Routes, out of Tulane U., a great program of all kinds of classic American roots music. They used to have Thistle and Shamrock, which is what it sounds like, but the show got weird with all kinds of ‘world’ music and anything but Celtic. That was replaced by Routes and was a real good change. Najman is a local personality by way of NYC long ago and does mostly 50s and 60s rock stuff, pretty good most of the time. But PHC has gone downhill a lot in the last couple of years, and without Sue Scott carrying the show, ol’ Garrison would be lost.
On Sunday afternoons we listen to Robert Resnick’s (another local Vermont personality) All the Traditions, more ‘world’ music, but with an emphasis on American folk. A little too much klezmer, which I am heartily sick of hearing, and some shows just plain suck. And that’s the extent of our NPR listening, on weekends, and while we are doing a bunch of other stuff around the house.
And Chartock is plainly lying through his teeth if he denies the Long March that has taken place in Western culture’s institutions of learning, media and the State. I saw it up close and personal during college and four years of grad school in the northeastern Megalopolis. Neo-Marxist-Leninism-Maoism writ large, and celebrated. While the tenured radicals, apologies to Roger Kimball, and hordes of richly remunerated administrators live la dolce vita.
And I see that the childish lunatic has moved on to greater power since her wacky finger-pointing, and can now get whole populations blown away. As bloodthirsty a priestess of Moloch as her wicked troll predecessor, Madeline Not Too Bright.
Without addressing the meat of OFD’s last comment, I have to note that
is a nice bit of writing.
Thanks, I occasionally have a moment of wit, as I grow increasingly witless in my dotage.
Steve:
I agree that Dave’s writing is often fun to read.
Yeah, this whole board is quite erudite and entertaining. I agree with OFD that Routes is quite good. I show my age when I say I lived in Minneapolis when Garrison Keillor was the morning host on Minnesota Public Radio, and the weekend gig was only a local St. Paul radio show. Much of the stuff that ended up on his weekend show came from the daily morning show–like the fake commercials, Lake Woebegone, and a lot of the fictitious characters. In fact, the morning show was a LOT funnier than the weekend stage show–which I think suffered from the fact it had to be rehearsed.
The disappearance of classical on the radio is one of those capitalist-driven phenomena. Nobody (in America, at least) is satisfied with just making a living, and perhaps providing one for a handful of others; they have GOT to make a killing. Classical music and the old instrumental stations, known as “beautiful music” outlets, definitely make a profit. But here is the deal: owners will actually choose to LOSE money chasing the formats that are the most successful, than to go with a format that only makes a modest profit.
Indianapolis has several ‘classic rock’ stations. Only one makes money. A second one has the most popular morning show in the city, so it is highly profitable only during that time period. That money supports the whole rest of the non-profitable day. The other classic rock stations are part of multiple ownerships, so one of their profitable stations supports the losing one. But will anybody play classical to a modest profit? No. They would rather lose money chasing the hope of making a killing, than have a bird in the hand.
What surprises me is that there are still radio stations that make money. I don’t normally listen to the radio that much. In fact, it seems I now only listen to the radio in the car. I don’t spend enough time in the car to bother making copies of my CD collection for the car. For a couple of weeks, I recently spent over an hour a day in the car. I find that there is only one reason I want to listen to people talking in the car. That is to hear about traffic. I found in my driving, that I was likely to see a traffic problem before hearing about it on the radio.
If I spent a lot of time in the car, I would figure out a way to play music from my cell phone at usable volumes. Whether by playing back MP3s, or by listening to Pandora.
The radio? No thanks. I’ve listened to the morning drive show that Chuck was referring to, and I found it to be not all that great. It’s funny, but it’s the sort of crude humor that I find grows old quickly at best.
I think radio is slowly going the way of the newspaper. Which has less and less reason for our business by the way. We take the Sunday paper, but sometimes I wonder why. If I were looking for a job, I’d look at the web, not the classified ads. We use the onscreen guide provided by our cable service instead of the TV section of the paper. So that leaves the funnies, and the coupons. I wonder if the coupons still justify the cost of the paper for us?
Steve Jobs started out life as a Lutheran. Then one day when he was a teenager he asked his pastor, “Is God good?” and his pastor replied, “Yes!” Then he asked his pastor, “Is God all-powerful and all-knowing?” and his pastor replied, “Of course!” Finally, he asked, “Then why does he allow people to starve to death?” The pastor had nothing resembling a decent reply and Steve Jobs never went back to church again.
Not surprising. Religion has no answers. None. There is nothing that we know to be true that we discovered from religion. Nothing, Nada. Zero. Zilch. That does not prevent religion from making truth claims, nearly all of which have by now been decisively refuted.
I have never understood how any scientist could give even the slightest credence to claims that cannot be disproved–i.e., are not falsifiable–let alone continue to believe in false claims that his own science has proven false beyond even the slightest shadow of a doubt. And that’s leaving aside non-scientists, who will believe the most incredible things. (In the original meaning of “incredible” — not credible, not believable, incapable of being believed.) A large majority of fundamentalists say outright that faced with evidence to their own eyes that completely and utterly refutes a claim in their scripture, they’ll refuse to believe their own eyes and instead continue to believe the garbage in their scripture. Such people are, I think, beyond salvage. They never learned to think, and there’s no hope they ever will.
Christianity doesn’t even withstand a philosophical/epistemological analysis. One of the first examples in my Philosophy 101 class I took as an undergrad elective was about Satan and God. The existence of Satan, for example, either means God is not good or that God is not all-powerful. If God is good then he wouldn’t allow Satan and his evil to exist, so Satan exists because God won’t vanquish him (i.e. God’s not good) or because God can’t vanquish him (i.e. God’s not omnipotent). That basic analysis can be applied to God and any evil/bad thing you want to analyze.
Chuck: “Nobody (in America, at least) is satisfied with just making a living, and perhaps providing one for a handful of others; they have GOT to make a killing. ”
This is true in most businesses everywhere. I have, ahem, sources that tell me that companies quite often discontinue products that consistently make a profit because “it doesn’t make enough profit.” That, to me, is a staggering statement. I can see not developing a product that you think will be only modestly profitable, but to actually discontinue something that you’ve already sunk a bunch of money in and which now makes a steady, if modest, profit is bewildering. Yet it happens all the time.
Discontinuing an insufficiently profitable product or service isn’t always unreasonable. If you’re resource-constrained in some area, it makes sense to apply the limited resource most profitably.
Examples I’ve seen in my own work life: A manufacturing plant which is already running near capacity, and in which adding capacity (opening up new facilities, expanding current facility, or putting in more efficient equipment) is impossible or too expensive. An IT consulting company which can easily bring on lumpenprogrammers to fill seats but has trouble finding star consultants to really drive the projects.
(Regarding that last one, one programmer often does the majority of the useful work in developing a product, but it’s the lumpens who bring in most of the consulting company’s revenue.)
There are also non-monetary considerations, especially government interference. If a product is generating a 3% gross margin, it might be worth continuing … until new EPA regulations require monthly reports on the amount of allegedly toxic product used in its manufacture. Or the state, working from new CPSC findings, requires a new license if manufacturing is to continue. The profit may not be worth the aggravation.
Yeah, we MBAs have a lot of things to answer for, but seeking to maximize profitability based on resources devoted isn’t really one of them. The real chimera is pursuit of constant growth, as though growth in itself is, not just a Good Thing, but essential. The reality, of course, is that growth brings its own problems, and many companies have gone bankrupt because they focus on growth rather than the basics of producing a good quality product or service and selling it at a reasonable profit. And it’s not just those companies that have unsuccessfully pursued growth that have suffered. Many companies have grown their operations successfully and ended up bankrupt because they grew too quickly.
That’s why growing, adding employees, and so on is the last thing I’m interested in doing. I’m focused on providing good quality for money and making a reasonable, sustainable profit. Granted, it’s early days yet and I hope to boost sales into the range of maybe 10 science kits per day on average, but much more than that and I’ll start worrying about what I’m getting myself into.
The worst case I ever saw was the wonderful New England chain of stores called Lechmere. It started as one store at the Lechmere stop of the Green Line in Boston, and expanded until they had stores throughout New England, with several in and around Boston. I loved that store. It had cameras, watches, jewelry, books, CD’s, TV’s, Hi-Fi, computers, appliances, fitness equipment, huge selection of kitchen accessories, bed and bath linens, some office and home furniture–it was one of those stores that you could browse and lose a couple hours before you knew it. And they were always redesigning some section of the store, so if you visited once a month, there was always something new to explore.
Moreover, the employees loved working there. I knew a couple people in our neighborhood, who worked at the nearby mall location of Lechmere, and they just simply loved their job.
But, business being business, the chain eventually feel into the hands of financially-troubled Montgomery Ward. Ward’s was obsessed with national chains (they owned Circuit City and Electric Avenue at the time) and tried to sell Lechmere, but found no buyers who would meet their price. Shockingly,–even though there were no profitability problems at Lechmere,–Ward’s announced it was closing all the Lechmere stores and laying off over 1,000 people. A group comprised of management, tried to raise the money to buy the assets and keep things going under employee ownership, but I heard that Ward’s did nothing to help that effort keep Lechmere alive. Montgomery Ward got theirs in the end, as the whole organization went bust and sold the name to someone else that now operates Ward’s as an online-only store.
All this transpired during the late ‘90’s, when we were having significant deflation (from about ’95 to ’01). You might remember that Walmart’s business plan back then, was to warehouse huge amounts of stock, on the theory that we would always have inflation, and whatever they bought today, would be worth more next month. Well, they ended up having to sell the warehoused stuff for less than they paid for it, just to move it. Gas in Boston went down to 99¢/gal then. That business climate prompted Walmart to sell the warehouses and institute ‘just in time’ deliveries from their manufacturers as their new philosophy. I think the times also made things difficult for the Lechmere folks to get the funding they needed to continue.
This was not just one product pulled from the market; it was a whole, profitable company that had its doors shuttered unnecessarily by incompetent owners.
I really liked the Lechmere stores, too. A shame they got dumped. Typical.
“Then why does he allow people to starve to death?” The pastor had nothing resembling a decent reply and Steve Jobs never went back to church again.
Same old dumbass questions, supposedly to easily trip up dumbass Christers, etc. There are answers to these, but I don’t feel like wasting the bandwidth here on it right now. For starters, try looking at free will and the chances, if you will, that people have to do good or evil, the choices they make. And once past Philosophy 101, try a few medieval philosophers and theologians, Christian, Jewish or Muslim; they wrote for ordinary literate people so we should be able to understand them.
And for atheists, assuming they acknowledge the existence of both good and evil in the world, what are their criteria for discerning the difference? And why should anyone give a shit about their criteria?
And for X, assuming they acknowledge the existence of both good and evil in the world, what are their criteria for discerning the difference? And why should anyone give a shit about their criteria? where is X may be any of (Atheists, Shintoists, Zoroastrians, Jews, Jainists, Confucians, Flying Spaghetti Monstrists, Nykayans, Mithraists, Isokoans, Christians)
RBT wrote:
“Barbara gave me a haircut this morning, so I’m feeling weak. Only kidding. Actually, the bogosity of the Samson and Delilah myth was one of the first things that caused me to question religion, when I was about three years old. I knew I didn’t feel any weaker after a haircut.”
Oh come on!
Samson was a Nazirite, so he wasn’t supposed to allow his hair to be cut. God gave him a speial mission – to free Israel from the Philistines. He imposed conditions on Samson, as he was perfectly entitled to do, which included the loss of strength if he allowed his hair to be cut.
Now, you and most people here don’t believe that, which, of course, is your right. But even a three year old budding atheist should have known not to make the fallacious induction from one person to several.
Chad wrote:
“The existence of Satan, for example, either means God is not good or that God is not all-powerful. If God is good then he wouldn’t allow Satan and his evil to exist, so Satan exists because God won’t vanquish him (i.e. God’s not good) or because God can’t vanquish him (i.e. God’s not omnipotent).”
God is perfectly good and omnipotent. He could have vanquished Satan, or prevented the Holocaust, or prevented any number of evils. That he did not do so does not make him not-good or not-omnipotent. It just means we don’t know why he permitted these things to happen. Satan/Lucifer fell by exercising his own free will, which God gave him.
RBT wrote:
“I have never understood how any scientist could give even the slightest credence to claims that cannot be disproved–i.e., are not falsifiable–let alone continue to believe in false claims that his own science has proven false beyond even the slightest shadow of a doubt.”
Given that there are elite scientists who believe in religious claims you could just accept that faith and science are compatible. I can’t prove that Christ raised Lazarus from the dead, and you can’t disprove it. And, of course, there are agnostics and atheists who think it is possible to be a scientist and a believer. You could simply accept that.
As I’ve said repeatedly, faith and science are “compatible” only in the trivial sense that some people are capable of believing mutually exclusive ideas simultaneously. Epistemologically, faith and science are not just fundamentally incompatible, but mutually exclusive.
I don’t have to prove anything. As Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you have zero evidence for that claim. And, as Hitchens said, that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
I don’t think you can choose to say something is factually correct because you dislike the moral implications if it’s incorrect. Sorry, OFD. Besides, I don’t think people will automatically turn to looting, murder and rapine if you take away their benevolent omnipotent dictator.
Regarding haircuts: I feel like I’m rowing a lot slower since I shaved away my multicoloured speed stripes. But it certainly has its advantages: I get less ice frozen in my hair now.
Okay, it may theoretically make sense to cut marginally profitable products to devote those resources to more profitable products. Makes sense.
Usually it ends up with a plant closed and people laid off and the company in trouble because those “more profitable” products weren’t.
I suppose I’m criticizing execution rather than idea.
Given that many people have tried to raise other people from the dead, pretty much proves to me that you can’t do it, as opposed to a claim from 2,000 years ago.
I hate the Free Will argument, it’s like pulling out “Nazi” during an argument. The moment someone does, you realize they just aren’t listening to reason anymore.
Magic doesn’t exist, and God is magic. Do the math.
There are also quite convincing arguments that free will does not exist. Again, not in the trivial sense of deciding to have, say, anchovies rather than pepperoni on your pizza, but in the larger sense of us being biologically programmed to act in certain ways, with no way around it.
Regarding dropping one product to introduce another, I suspect this is akin to dropping one TV program because of ‘bad ratings’ to make room for another. Almost always, the new show does more poorly than the old one. Best example is the old Mary Tyler Moore show from the 1970’s. For years, it captured unheard of shares in the 20’s. In the end, CBS cancelled it when the share fell to under 10. CBS made much hoopla about how they would create a new show which would bring back the old ratings. Guess what? The new show opened to dismal ratings of far less than half the MTM share at cancellation. I followed that time slot for a couple decades, and never did the share rise above half what MTM was at cancellation.
Surely, I thought at the time, this will be a lesson to programmers, that will slow down cancellations of decently-rated shows, in the quest for ever higher ratings. But it did not. Cancellations continued, new shows did worse, and TV viewership fell steadily as time marched on.
My educated guess then, is that most old products cancelled to make way for new ones, probably do worse than just continuing with the old product.
Dave B. says:
What surprises me is that there are still radio stations that make money.
It is only because of cars. Most people have not come up with another alternative of what to do when in the car. At home, I have noticed among my own friends, that people who live alone usually listen to the radio at home, whereas people who live with others do not bother.
The day that some kind of cellular Wi-Fi starts working in cars with a radio like Squeezebox, is the day broadcast radio will be completely dead.
In Europe, portable radios in iPods are unknown, since you have to have a license for any kind of radio. Therefore, manufacturers just do not bother putting them into many devices, as they do in the US (many SanDisk MP3 players have radios built into them in the US, but not in Europe). So in those license-requiring countries, there are seldom any radio ratings from on-person portable devices.
In addition to a decided lack of imagination in radio programming, one of the things I have noticed on returning to the US after 10 years of absence, is the plainness and lack of inventiveness in business everywhere. Nowhere is the starkness of that more evident than in Toys R Us. Until last month, I had not had occasion to enter one of their stores since we left in 2001. What a surprise! I remember going into those stores often with my kids, and being led on a kind of maze trip through a fantasyland of toys. This time, I walked in and could see all the walls of the entire store from the entrance. The store looked small, instead of huge. It was organized similar to the new Staples: like a convenience store.
In the land of Disney, this is the best counter effort retail has against Amazon and the Web?
Okey-dokey, have it your way; God doesn’t exist; the dead cannot be raised. Mentioning the idea of free will is akin to calling someone a Nazi. The Red Sea did not swallow Pharaoh and his armies. Jesus did not turn water into wine and did not walk on water. All those things are magic, and magic does not exist. Or they are physically impossible according to the Iron Laws of Science, which is incorruptible and infallible now that the god Darwin has spoken and a few of his apostles made it all Holy Writ.
And no one is weaker after getting a haircut.
Now if only we could scour the earth of all these billions of pesky believers and fools, O what a wondrous creation it would be! Trouble is, according to the latest Pew stats, the percentage of religious and that of Christians stays pretty much the same from decade to decade despite the herculean efforts of Dawkins, Hawking and the late Hitchens. Atheists are still but a tiny remnant, though this does not make them wrong, of course.
Yeah, it’s amazing how many people believe James Bond was a real person, too.
Actually, I went to school with a Jim Bond. The PE teacher thought it the height of wit to have a jersey made with 007 on it.
As I recall, he hated the movies.
Don’t feel too bad, Davy, but if you were hoping to convert a couple of us to atone for some past sins, you’re out of luck. The distance between any God and me is pretty vast, after watching my wife waste away to a terrible disease. Must have been her Free Will to have caught it, though, since it’s all up to us.
RBT wrote:
“There are also quite convincing arguments that free will does not exist. Again, not in the trivial sense of deciding to have, say, anchovies rather than pepperoni on your pizza, but in the larger sense of us being biologically programmed to act in certain ways, with no way around it.”
So you personally could never have been other than an atheist organic chemist and author? Yeah, some people believe in hard determinism, but I’m not one of them. I think other factors, including the actions of other people, can influence what we become.
The only place I listen to the radio is in the car. If I don’t like what I hear I switch untill I find something I like. If I don’t I switch off. Listening to talkback is for me as nauseating as the great Barry Manilow is to our host.
Heh. I used to know a woman who would periodically announce, “I feel nauseous”, to which I’d always reply, “You are.” One day she finally asked me why I kept saying that. I told her to look up “nauseous” and “nauseated” in the dictionary. She did, and then she hit me.
I am deeply sorry for your loss, BG. Words fail. I’d hesitate to offer theology even to family members or the closest of friends faced with such suffering and loss, and I certainly will not do so here. I beg you to consider, though, that many others of us have also suffered grievous and apparently senseless losses and attempt to find what comfort we may in whatever faith we possess.
And converting anyone here would be a deuced hard sell.
Peace out.
Thank you. Time, as they say, heals all wounds, and while I haven’t seen proof of that yet, it has only been 15 months.
I don’t really give much thought to what other people believe. In fact, I can honestly say that this place is the only place I’ll even talk about it. I personally believe that if you want to believe in God, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Blessed be His Name), that is your decision and yours alone. I also consider it a private decision, and none of my business. But ask my opinion, and you’ll get it. 😀
I just get real tired of the Free Will BS. It’s the worst cop out in debating history.
Why?
If we don’t have free will how can people be punished for crimes (as against putting them away merely for the protection of the community.)
Our host seemed to be saying that we have free will to choose salami or anchovies on our pizza but not when it comes to the more momentous decisions. I’m sure it’s more complex than that, but I don’t believe we’re all running like clockwork on some predetermined path.
RBT wrote:
“I used to know a woman who would periodically announce, “I feel nauseous”, to which I’d always reply, “You are.” One day she finally asked me why I kept saying that. I told her to look up “nauseous” and “nauseated” in the dictionary. She did, and then she hit me.”
I don’t think you ever mentioned before that you eventually clued her in and that she hit you.
I don’t see how you could have agreed with this woman. What she said doesn’t make sense, does it? If she’d said “I am nauseous” you could have agreed.
Free will as determined by men, I can agree with. You choose the anchovies or whether or not to do the crime. Wind up toys we are not, and yet there are certain situations where it appears our course is controlled by forces beyond our ken.
I’m a male. When someone tells me they have a problem, I start to try and figure out a fix. That isn’t my upbringing, or my environment, it’s something far deeper, and that is what I think Bob is talking about. I have been in situations where the innate need to protect has been brought into full play, that’s another thing I don’t really have free will over, as I’ve actually come to the aid of people I personally detest.
I don’t think this is due to any God, but is nothing more than survival mode, and I am no different from the wolf in his den. Nothing is more important than “Protect the Herd”! And that herd can be your spouse, your family, your friends, or encompass all of humanity, much like Niven’s Protectors.
This drove me nuts during my wife’s illness. I was reduced to being an observer of a show I never wanted to see.
I think of freedom and free will as “freedom from external restraint”. I can choose salami or anchovies on my pizza, or to go to Harvard or a local polytechnic, or I can do a high demand high entry score course like law or do a nothing degree like a BA in sociology.
But, of course, even here I am not free of external restraint. If I can’t afford to pay for the pizza my preference for anchovies is irrelevant. If my marks aren’t high enough I can’t get in to Harvard. Am I free? I can’t do what I want but arguably that’s because I’m not smart and/or rich enough.
As a 17 year old high school graduate I had my heart set on studying electrical engineering at the local university but I guess my marks weren’t good enough for that so I took their offer of admission to a science degree. I assume I was free in that situation, just as the university was free to offer the best course for which I was qualified.
The reason I advocate some sort of free will is that I don’t see how people can be legitimately be punished for their misdeeds if they are acting under compulsion.
The thing is, “free will” is illusory. You think you can choose anchovies or pepperoni, but you’re not really choosing. There’s actually been some very interesting experimental work done on this, which confirms that we don’t really decide anything. For example, we can watch people’s brains and see that their “decisions” take place after the action that they’re deciding about.
As to punishment, I don’t care one bit about punishing anyone, merely stopping them. Whether or not they have a choice about what they do is immaterial.
I am in Bill’s camp. One cannot go through what we did, without it confirming that humans are completely on their own. No benevolent omnipotence, hiding beyond death, knows anything about us.
I do find it amazing what people will accept without any reproducible evidence whatsoever.
No anchovies, chicken, or pineapple or any of those weird and strange concoctions on my pizza, thank you very much.
The plain cheese pizza is the RSV Bible and that, along with the New English Bible are bland and as dry as the dust we turn into.
I am for the meat-lovers special, the KJV, 1611 Authorized Version.
Accept no substitutes.
And as a Roman Catholic I have the various missals, but find them not nearly as inspirational to me as the old Book of Common Prayer, a pepperoni and mushroom pizza, with a dash of red pepper flakes.
But hey, YMMV.
I am also deeply sorry about your loss, Chuck. And beg you to know, as I do of BG, that others of us have gone through various scenarios very close if not exactly to what you and Bill have gone through. We believe there is Someone who knows us in all our facets and whose Creation is often beyond our understanding. This is a both a comfort and a curse sometimes.
A long, long time ago, a teenage kid, 17, signed up to work for Uncle and soon enough found himself in the midst of seemingly senseless carnage and destruction, and the loss of comrades and friends. After a repeat performance a year and a half later, much worse, he turned away from all things religious and stayed away for fourteen years. Eventually some combination of Saul on the road to Damascus and getting driven literally to his knees after an extremely painful injury, brought him back to the fold, so to speak, and it has been quite a journey since, through a divorce, the loss of a father in a long decline with early-onset Alzeheimer’s and now a mother going pretty much the same way; having an invalid wife with a terminal disease, and two cancer survivor (so far) brothers and an epileptic sister with a ‘challenged’ son.
And somehow faith grows stronger with each kick in the teeth. Without it, I would be lost. And probably a broken-down drunk laid up in a VA hospital until I died or out in the street somewhere.
And right now that Mexican pizza I saw on the menu of a local restaurant is looking mighty good for takeout tomorrow before I get cranking on the Christmas cooking marathon.
Peace out.
Well, we all deal with the cards we get dealt in our own way. I know a few people who upon being confronted with their imminent mortality found solace in pretty words, and others, like my wife, who found it within themselves. I often wonder where I’ll end up if I am so fortunate, or so cursed, to have prescience of my own doom. Davy, if you find peace within the KJV, have at it. It sounds like you deserve some. Pretty words don’t do anything for me.
RBT wrote:
“The thing is, “free will” is illusory. You think you can choose anchovies or pepperoni, but you’re not really choosing. There’s actually been some very interesting experimental work done on this, which confirms that we don’t really decide anything. For example, we can watch people’s brains and see that their “decisions” take place after the action that they’re deciding about.”
What if I had anchovies on my pizza last week but this time I chose salami? What’s making the decision each time? Chemicals in my body?
Could you have been a physicist instead? What about the equally bright kid next door who became a devout Catholic and conservative Republican? Like Jerry P? He had no real choice in what he became?
I once posited the question of free will within a forum of very bright people.
I asked, “Who or what is it that gets me out of bed each morning?”
Best answer: Your bladder.
That piece of equipment sometimes gets me outta bed before morning, as the years flash by now.
I’m sure that at least once in the early Eighties I slept for 18 hours straight, and hence my bladder could last that long. Alas, eight hours seems to be the limit nowadays.
As our host is wont to say, “Getting old is hell ™”.
If I simply *have* to get up at a certain time I just take a mug of softdrink before bed. Works better than any alarm clock.
There is no omnipotent that can be called anything like good, who either causes or allows the existence of the pain I saw in my beloved mate at her end. The Bible, at its best, is tragedy — tragedy that people make even more tragic by vociferously arguing over.
If there is life after death, I am as confident that no remembrance of this life will be a part of it, nor will be ‘meeting your maker’, as you are confident that somehow serenity and an explanation of this life will somehow appear. No one, IMO, has ever returned from death with that message, and the charlatans of yore — going up into mountains to receive behavioral demands to be enforced on everyone — were no less prevalent than those of today, who demand discriminations against my fellow men in the name of a “mysterious” Maker, contradict the findings of useful science, and predict nonsensical stuff that never comes true.
And I am shocked that people calling themselves Christians, have come forth to so vehemently celebrate the death of Hitchens, one of the world’s most articulate atheists.
Again, I am with Bill. Although I prefer the New Revised Oxford English Bible, I find pretty words provide neither hope nor solace. Those come from within.
I neither celebrated nor mourned the departure of Hitchens. He wrote some good books a while back (about Orwell, Teresa, the Clintons and Kissinger) but *God Is Not Great* was not one of his better efforts, to put it kindly. Not even as good as Dawkins’ *The God Delusion*, and that was a steaming pile of cow manure.
Chuck, are you saying you think reincarnation is possible?
No, not at all. Personally, I suspect that the end is the end. But if life somehow continues after death, then that implies consciousness continues. Now I do not remember anything prior to this life — nor do I know anyone (that I consider sane) who does; — so if consciousness is somehow eternal and continues after death, then most likely, nothing from this experience will continue with us. Few people remember their dreams more than a few minutes after waking, so such a state of affairs seems plausible to me if consciousness transitions (essentially wakes) to another state.
A former roommate of my son’s, is a dedicated biology researcher. Recently, he wrote a little discourse indicating that he has revised his feeling about whether life — as we know it — exists on other planets. The circumstances that permitted life to form on Earth are so complex and opportunely coincidental, that the chance they would repeat themselves elsewhere in the Universe in the order and amounts necessary, is near zero in his amended opinion. We live because of seriously serendipitous happenings.
In all likelihood, nothing exists beyond this life, and eventually, the chance circumstances that make it possible will end. Although some existential events are hard to explain, I do not believe in supernatural forces, and reincarnation requires belief in a governing force beyond that evident to man. That there is a force which created us, and then chose to hide from us while suffering runs rampant, may placate — or, weirdly, even represent a hope to some, — it is a position way too fantastical for me to take seriously.
When he was in about the fifth grade, and becoming cognizant of the greater questions about life, my son posited that we could all be independent actors, created in somebody’s computer game, with certain actions of others — and perhaps even events — controlled by the Player. He even submitted that when the Player put the game in pause, we would be completely unaware of such a hiatus taking place. Few of us would take such a view of life seriously. But yet, to me, that is exactly the level of believability exhibited by the common Christian view of life. Unsupportable in all ways, except by fanatical suspension of logic.
Your biologist friend has fallen prey to Hoyle’s Fallacy, which is essentially a point-of-view error. Humans, naturally enough, think we’re something special. We’re not.
I normally illustrate this by talking about a bridge hand of 13 cards, all of them spades. The chances against being dealt such a hand (assuming an honest deal) are astronomically high. But, and this is the critical part, the probability against being dealt any other hand of 13 specific cards is exactly the same as that of being dealt 13 spades. In other words, every possible hand you can be dealt is equally improbable in a mathematical sense. Of course, no one thinks twice about picking up a hand with 13 cards that are nothing special.
He did not say that it was impossible that life exists elsewhere, just that it is unlikely to be anything on the order of what some people who take the ‘billions and billions’ of planets and assume that other life in the Universe must therefore be common. There is a growing belief that a complete lack of water on planets may be far more pervasive than previously thought. Remove from the deck one of those 13 spades that represents water, and the chances of life out there become even more remote.
The deck on each planet out there is not made up of the same 52 cards, so we are not dealing statistically with dealing out the same cards for each of the billions and billions. So the distribution is not equivalent from planet to planet.
He also made the point that there could be life as we don’t know it — life forms that would not be readily recognizable to us, living in conditions we think would not support life. I should probably have pointed out both of those.
I think most lay people are solely interested in the existence of intelligent life. While the fact that planet XYZ orbiting star ABC has some single-celled organism is certainly cool, I think your average American really wants to hear about little green (or gray) men. Now, the existence of one may affect the probability of the other, I don’t think most people want to get into the mathematics and science of it. They just want to know who is flying that UFO. 🙂
No, man. I grew up on Star Trek reruns. I’m after the hot, green-skinned chicks with little antennas.
No, you’re getting confused. The hotties with the antennas were Andorian, and had blue skin. The green skinned hotties didn’t have antenna and were from Orion.