metal_gear08 Wrote:The final statement of your rant is a contradiction. The very basis of religion (mine, at least) is that wee weren't born of some cosmic accident. The fundamental principle is that wee were deliberately created and live our lives with a purpose. If there is no randomness and no supernatural force how did wee come to be? There surely wasn't any big bang because that was randomness, and there wasn't any divine creation because because that's the product of unknown or supernatural forces.

what i meant
is that the fact that any religion exists in the first place, is that people don't know what happened so they search for a solution based on their current knowledge and conclude that it must be the only truth (based on their current knowledge). i heard though that, for almost everything in religion, if you consider it symbolic rather than literal then it all makes much more sense based on our current knowledge. but then again, if you look at it that way, it can mean anything because it can be interpreted any way you want so then it doesn't really get us anywhere either.

by the way i don't 'think things through' when im writing this stuff, and i can't really keep up with my thoughts either so i skip a lot of conclusions and make a lot of assumptions (though i could explain all those assumptions if i took the time)

and yeah i love to be proven wrong or challenged because anything you say can be used to fortify my point of view

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:Actually, wee need to make a LOT of assumptions to even begin to think of such things.  For example, wee generally assume wee exist, and that wee can think for ourselves.  There are a whole load of other pre-assumptions wee must make.
Religion can be thought of as just some differing assumptions/beliefs which may be true - no-one knows whether it's true or not, how useful it is etc etc.
Personally though, I don't have a religion.

i'd like to see anyone define 'religion' in one line without making a LOT of assumptions. i could go into greater detail of course, but i won't cause the more i say the less sense it makes. so then i might as well say nothing and omit that part though :P

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:Lol :)

well actiually that definition fits religion as well... why would ppl otherwise go to church and stuff? if you think of it all as symbolic, than the 'gods' and stuff are symbols of the slight chance that luck happens, and by making them happy people believe the chance will grow. sort of. in general. again, this is just a small fraction of the entire story but it sort of makes sense to me.

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:Not really.  Philosophy is trying to reason things which aren't yet known, for example, finding logical proofs of whether a God exists or not.  I find philosophy interesting, and it's actually also interesting to see the attempts made to logically proove God's existence or inexistence. (that's if you're interested)

hm yeah i guess my definition doesn't cover it all at all (reading back, most of what i wrote still makes sense to me but some things need revising, remember it was past midnight when i pulled all this b******t out of my a**.

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:Actually, theology cannot be considered to be a science, so your initial assumption is incorrect :P

*reads back* "the study of trying to uncover the unclear links between occurrences in different cases and in different ways." i think in a way theology does fit this description cause even though i don't know spoon about it, i suppose what they do is try to explain holy writings and phonomenons by studying them. but if you assume that religion all began with imagination, then if theologists used scientific methods (hypothesis, research, hypothesis false » change hypothesis ... etc) then they would eventually be forced to conclude that it is in fact based on imagination. sort of?

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:I wouldn't say it that way, as generally people can accept some differing views, but, yes, people tend to be biased towards their own opinions.

do you see what i meant though? what i meant was that you can never transfer a message objectively because humans arent capable of being objective. because everything humans perceive in any way always passes the brain and is compared to previous knowledge. i actually read this in a book by the way, and it makes a lot of sense to me. all your brain does is compare things to each other and conclude new stuff... so that means if there are enough influences of one kind that the brain can eventually be made to take these over partly but never entirely. i can explain with math as well. person A has a value of 75. person B wants the value to become 0. so then when a 0 is sent to person A, it is compared to 75 and the average of 37.5 is concluded. then person B keeps sending 0's, and eventually the thoughts in person A keep getting averaged with the 0's to become very close to 0, but never exactly 0. the average of 0 and 0.00000000000000---------» whatever will still never become exaclty 0, and that's even after a lot of 0's have succesfully arrived at person a. « so in the end, there are never enough 0's in ones life to convince the entire world (or a smaller group of people) of a certain idea. or, in other words, i can't be f*ucked to spend my time sending 0's all over the place

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:Actually, you can't... without making a tonne of pre-assumptions.

nice find, but its not what i meant. what i meant to say is that wee are somehow here now, i didnt literally mean 'placed' or 'born into' or whatever.

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:Lol.  An over-simplistic look there :)

of course, isn't this all over-simplistic?

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:Oh, and you can't simply say philosophy and these thoughts have no purpose.  Just as you cannot say that video games have no purpose.

well when i mean they have no purpose i actually mean they do not work towards your final objective (in life). if you think of it as a game.. hmm lets take a game that everyone knows... yeah. GTA Vice City. Your final objective is basicly to defeat the missions. however, by doing other things such as driving taxi's around or exploring the city, or beating up people, you can get money. even though it doesn't matter for the missions, you can use the money to buy guns which will make the missions easier. now compare that to video games in real life, their purpose is to trigger certain emotions and feelings such as being relaxed or something, entertainment, but at the cost of spendingwasting time, that could have been used to do stuff that works towards your final objective (ie the missions), but achieving your final objective would be far more difficult or impossible without playing games (« the missions would be too hard if you didnt have a gun).

so in the end, its all about the definition of 'purpose'. what i meant was that they have no -direct- purpose (or something)
but i can't really say that unless i know what the final objective in life is which i don't really so theres not much point in saying anything about this at all.by the way about epistemology, that's a compulsory subject for me next year so i guess ill be having more of these things then :P

"and yeah i love to be proven wrong or challenged because anything you say can be used to fortify my point of view"
that's a little fundamentally narcissistic, when you will only approach someone else's comments from your perspective, and not consider it from theirs.
from your point of view, yes, anything i say can be used to fortify your point of view, but any kind of meaning or context i was trying to convey is lost. be very careful about that. by approaching this type of argument in an overly self-important way, you lose anything you were trying to gain by arguing in the first place. your goal in bringing any of this up was for perspective, clarity, argument, right?

i just finished reading the thread up to this point. Ge64, i share a lot of opinions with you, but i word them very differently for myself. while the jist of your idea base centers on the lack of randomness, i like to think in terms of most everything being comparable to an organism. the thoughts behind both are pretty similar. you conclude randomness is inexistent because of the inherent influence everything has on everything else.

none of the stuff in this section has any clear connection to the things i am trying to say, but they are connected, because everything is connected. iko iko all day.
___________
i fart in a room, the particles from my donkey that smell like fart drift off into the atmosphere. sure, it may no longer smell like fart, but those particles are still there somewhere. perhaps a few were tangled in a tornado in tennessee while a few others got caught in some car's air conditioning intake. (okay i wrote this out, it didn't really illustrate my point like i was hoping it would, but i don't want to delete it.)
better example: a father beats his son, the son grows up a sad, angry man, and beats his son. that's thinking of it in forward progression, but it clearly shows cause and effect. lets take it from the other direction. a wise old man is contentedly dying on his deathbed, pondering his various accomplishments. this wise old man is truly (in his own mind) at peace with his end; he is not crying or screaming, or dreading anything. he feels fulfilled for whatever reason. stepping back in time, this old man was once a man in his prime. maybe he formed a company and made bank, or maybe he fathered a son and raised him to be a good person. the important thing isn't what he did, but how he felt about it, in his heart of hearts, or his soul if you will. the only way a person truly knows anything (for the record, i don't think i have ever felt this. it's something people trick themselves into believing they feel all the time because they lack a real foundation of self-importance. my take on it.) now stepping back in time again, let's make him the son of the first man. he was whipped as a child, beaten to a pulp at the drop of a hat, and lashed out at everyone around him. perhaps at one point in his life, he hit rock bottom. let's say he lost every friend he ever had and wound up in prison or something. then let's say he made a decision for himself and realized (USING TRUE OBJECTIVITY) there was noone or nothing he could blame for what he had done to himself. perhaps for years he would think about his father beating him, or torturing him emotionally, how unfair life was. then he realized that at some point, those negative influences were no longer there, but he still felt and was as chocolatety as he felt back then. stepping back, wee see the boy being abused, stepping back wee see the angry, sad father, stepping back wee see him as a boy, being abused but never figuring out what was happening or why, only knowing he was angry.
__________

"however, if all humans were to completely forget everything, and simply remember that randomness is inexistent and EVERYTHING has a cause in some way, then things such as gods and therefore religion would have NEVER EVER existed. and thus i conclude, that religion is based on ignorance."
if you are atheistic, or agnostic, or have atheistic/agnosticistic tendencies, how do you rationalize things going back? i assume you believe in the theory of evolution... going way way way back, did it start with the big bang? is there something further back that wee haven't glimpsed or thought of yet, some explanation that just happens to elude us? is it GOD in his omnipotent sense, or is it god in his "wee can't possibly understand him" sense? or maybe there is something more primal and lasting than gods themselves (the endless, the rules the endless exist for/choose to live by? shout out to my homeboy V)

______
i was working on this, but lost what kind of point i had intended on making, and the people i was babysitting for got back so i got to go. will continue this thought later. thanks ge64, i like this stuff!

(This post was last modified: 02/06/2007 07:49 PM by iggrull.)

Ge64 Wrote:i'd like to see anyone define 'religion' in one line without making a LOT of assumptions. i could go into greater detail of course, but i won't cause the more i say the less sense it makes. so then i might as well say nothing and omit that part though :P

According to Encarta Dictionary:
[quote]religion beliefs and worship: people

"I don't know if you do it there, but here, wee learn about all this bias poo poo in English."

if schooling in america were about anything other than standardized testing, treating every child the exact absolute same so you don't have childish parents hounding the administration, and teaching kids to avoid responsibility and maintain appearances (surviving in a corporate setting 101), wee would live in a much healthier, smarter america.

i agree with your statement that randomness is inexistent

the reason that randomness is inexistent is because everything is indeed connected one way or another and the mind like you said up there auomatically connects those point without you knowing why and you call it "random" everything is connected, one way or another there is an invisible thread that runs through everything, i fist noticed it in my senior year when our econ teacher asked us:
     how are milk and gasoline related?
and i thought double you tee eff?
'thier liquids they are fuel for different things, milk gives us humans calcium wich builds our bones and keeps us healthy, gas is a fuel for machines that take us from one place to another, to buy milk maybe.'
     the answer he was looking for was:
'gas prices go up, transportation for milk goes up and so the sale price goes up.'
simple econ answer,

after that i started formulating ideas and i figured that everything is connected somehow you could say by a thread, and the thread doesn't just run in one straight line it splits and divides and connects again, it hadnt previously occured to me that randomness is therefore inexistent but its true now that i read your post

the luck and religion connections are described in the satanic bible which i am a proud owner of :mdr: anton szandor lavey made the point that because of a positive outcome to something in someones life and its unexplained, usually the mind leans towards religion and its dietys as the cause of your good-luck.

so i agree with all you said and am quite surprised that you made such connections, though maybe not the first one too, its the first time i learned something cool in a long time and also the first time i read something in such detail, on a forum.

you should write a book

Again, current Quantum theory states that uncertainty or randomness does exist.

Best thread ever.
Anyone who dissagrees can die.

Good Times!
Any time you meet a payment.
Good Times!
Any time you need a friend.
Good Times!
Any time you're out from under.

Not getting hastled, not getting hustled.
Keepin' your head above water,
Making a wave when you can.

Temporary lay offs.
Good Times!
Easy credit rip offs.
Good Times!
Scratchin' and surviving.
Good Times!
Hangin in a chow line!
Good Times!
Ain't wee lucky wee got 'em,
Good Times!


(That's me on the far right.)

i r not smrt...

BernNadette Stanis
Role: Thelma Evans Anderson



:he:

(This post was last modified: 07/06/2007 05:51 PM by ZiNgA BuRgA.)