Why do people find themselves so smart?

why not? lol

 

It's one of those "mystery of the Universe" things, like why is there always room for jello.

 

i guess there are things we will never know...but it doesnt hurt to wonder.

 

Wonder's a wonderful thing.

 

My dad's got a Ph.D. in biophysics and is currently the director of the NMR facility at PSU. My grandfather was drafted out of Princeton in WWII so the army could put him back to work on exactly the same stuff he was doing before (physical chemistry- he helped design the nickle plated filters to enrich Uranium Hexaflouride gas in Los Alamos). My other grandfather is an engineer and my grandmother on that side was one of the first women to make the bar in Indiana (Evelyn ?Ray? Maiden name?). I happen to think science describes the physical way that God behaves most of the time- although there might be exceptions (and there might not be- who knows? IANG...).

I'm inclined to say "Yet" to your comment. Wait. Here you go: Yet.

Atheists who do not believe in God have their head in God's sand as well. God does not readily appear to you because you are repulsed by God (you fear God). Instead God creates the illusion of "No God" in your mind because of your fear, although eventually you are gonna be faced with the absolute certainty of God's existence. All atheists deny their fear of God because to admit fear of God would be to admit to themselves that God exists (and the existence of God is that which they fear).

Now me, I'm rational. I both love and hate God depending on whether God is doing something that annoys me (like not bringing me something I want) or doing something that pleases me (doing something I enjoy). Of course you can look at my hate as hellfire and my love as heavenly whatever... I've got the keys to both.

 

hmm, i used to believe, and i used to have the fear of god, after all, i was once a little kid. then i befriended something better than god, logic. and it works out alot better to believe in logic than imaginary friends.

 

The whole bar!?!


(Sorry. no self control.)

 

Well, I hate God and I love God. There is no reason to fear God, you just gotta be wary for one of God's fucked up mind games to pop up. God is an asshole, after all.

Logic can be used to obscure facts (like God's existence) just as much as it can clarify facts. It's like an adjustable microscope for the mind- if you don't focus it right, you are gonna get a blurry picture. And you aren't gonna focus it right if you think it is the be all end all- Logical systems are never complete, they can always be adjusted to get finer details (like a lens can always be made better, even when some moron thinks it is impossible).

 

Lol. Amazing, wasn't she?

 

I'm kind of jelouse. Mine just made cookies.

 

Muhaha!!! Mine made cookies too!

 

Did I say close? No. I said, we've come a long way, fast, from where we started.

You aimed your post, unexplicitly, at atheists, and then inferred that they are arrogant, sarcastic, and self-proclaimed heathens, then talking about the "actualities" of life (which religion has NO answer whatsoever for other than a non-existant god) that you bash the rest of us for TRYING to understand.

You never implied they were a heathen? LET ME REFRESH YOUR MEMORY WITH A QUOTE:

Why don't you point out the threads where people call themselves heathens, and mean it, other than in mockery of religious folk? When we call ourselves heathens, it's a mockery of the fact that religious folk call us heathens. It's the same story as black dudes who call eachothers niggas. It's a play on past insults. Black dudes don't actually like being called niggers, but since they get called that all the time, they've turned it around for their own benefit.

Let me quote you once more.

You have *concluded,* WITHOUT A DOUBT, that there *is* a God, from your own personal experience. That means, you have NO DOUBTS WHATSOEVER that there is a God, and since you have officially concluded it, you're rendering all other options as impossible, and dismissing them. And, after doing that, you say nobody should believe anything blindly? Look at yourself, bud!

The argument, "What is known vs. what is not known" is NOWHERE NEAR logical or physical or even DISPUTABLE evidence to suggest that a higher power is at work. Here is what is KNOWN:

There are no reliable records of a higher power ever being observed, nor is it logical to conclude that there is one based on religious texts which contradict the things they preach.

And with damn good reason: Because you don't say anything to argue against me, you just keep saying the same thing yourself: You keep saying that I keep saying the same thing.

Well, no shit, I'm going to KEEP saying the same thing until you give me an answer, a reason to NOT have to keep repeating myself.

It's like I'm talking to a brick wall, honestly.

Oh, and what's up with that "you're truly very stupid?" You only say that, you give no reasoning behind it or evidence that suggests it. Instead, you just DODGE all of my rebuttals.

 

I am glad science doesn't see it like this. Otherwise, we'd still be living in the Stone Age with the volcano gods running the show.

I take it you aren't a huge fan of philosophy?

 

hmm, i think people think they are so smart because they can prove things the bible or any other holy writ cannot.

 

Imo science and religion are just two different approaches to answer the questions about life and death, about the universe and how it all connects to each other.
Neither of them has found the "ultimate truth" yet and maybe never will.
Since both are inventions of and run by humans, they also share a lot of the same flaws.
In their institutionalized form science as well as religion holds back knowledge, misinforms and uses it's influence to control and manipulate people, in order to maintain power.
Believing something to be true/the truth, just because scientific experiments have 'proven' it, is imo as delusional as believing something just because it is written in the bible or any other holy scripture.
And to dismiss something as being impossible, just because our science or religions hasn't observed it yet is very ignorant.

Two things that came up in this thread I like to comment on are "lifespan" and "faith".

Increased lifespan is often used as an argument for the benefits of our scientific progress. The problem with this argument is, that we actually don't know what the lifespan was in ancient/prehistoric time, since there are no records about it.
We only started keeping records about births and deaths in the middle ages and that is what we compare our lifespan to today.
The reason why the lifespan in the middle ages was quite short is strongly related to changes in the society though. People from different places in the countryside were moving into cities that didn't have the necessary sanitary facilities and were a breeding ground for all kinds of diseases.
No wonder that many people died at an early age.
There are a lot of very old people in India and other places of the world, where our scientific progress hasn't reached and they are healthy and happy without all the medication, devices and so called improvements that supposedly increase our lifespan.
And who sais that it is good to keep people from dying, by putting them on a live-support machine, anyways?

Faith is a word with many meanings and get's used very differently by religious and non-religious people.
For a non-religious person faith usually means believing something without any evidence, whereas religious people may use the term to describe their believe that they have knowledge of God, based on their own experiences.
To generally say that faith is based on ignorance is ignorant itself.

Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true.
The Buddha

 

well actually we were debating my mental stability, something that's pretty consistantly baffled science.

So what was wrong with the stone age and why are you bagging on eruptarians?

"philosophy, is a walk on a slippery rock"

"all men are philosophers. Most are poor ones"--aristotle

"There are more things in heaven and on earth and at wallmart then are dreampt of in your philosohy, hiratio"--shakespere (?)

"Lambs eat oats, and does eat oats, row row your boat now, gently down the stream,
So says Reverie"--reverie

 

I think philosophies a great tool if it can get you past needing it.

Most of the philosophy majors I knew in college (I only knew a cpl) didn't seem to be internalizing anything of the principles. Seemed more like they were using the words they'd learned to rationalize what they already believed, like some memebers of any other religion.

 

Yeah, confirmation bias and argumentum ad ignorantium. Two KEY ELEMENTS to defending any faith.

 

Ok, lets look at how "far" we've come from the tribal-scale days of society.

*The worlds monetary system is based on something because it is shiney and rare.
*Wealth distribution is the most skewed it has ever been (causing the most suffering)
*People must work twice as long to produce enough to survive.
*We have effectively destroyed nearly 1/2 of the worlds rainforest and total species.

Now for science: Here's a little real world example using space travel as the base since it has the most cutting edge science/physics assiociated with it.

The fastest man has ever traveled was about 25,000mph. Light travels at 670,616,629mph. This is about 25K faster than man has gone. It takes light about 8 minutes to reach the Earth from the Sun, a distance of roughly 90 million miles. The closest star is 4.4 light years away. Travelling at 25K mph it would take nearly 100K years to get there. This is just the closest star in our own universe. Our science doesn't seem so great does it?

Heck, the very most efficient internal combustion engines are only %20 efficient. It's been what, 200 years and %20 is supposed to be good???

Math:
Our system is so lacking there still is not a proof able to prove that you only need 4 colors to color a map.

I could go on and on. In the end this "progress" has done more harm than good for humanity. I think this is something the almost all hippies can agree on. The science itself appears real at first glance, but how can you build up something with no foundation? I think the reason why you are having such a hard time grasping this is A) You haven't ever studied/taken an interest in higher physics or math or B) You simply don't have the capacity for it.

Next:

First off the word is implicitly. Second, I said that they SARCASTICALLY called themselves "heathens." This means that they were being sarcastic when they said it. Again, this is why it is so frusterating debating with you. Apparently you don't comprehend the English language. I'm not bashing anyone for trying to understand the natural world, I'm trying to understand as well. The fact simply remains that no one does understand, yet millions pretend/assume they and society knows.

Threads in which people call themselves heathens:

http://www.hipforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88670&highlight=heathens

http://www.hipforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=95238&highlight=heathens

http://www.hipforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=95828&highlight=heathens

http://www.hipforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88246&highlight=heathens

I could keep going and going, but that is not neccessary.

Yes, this is completely true. I (yes again I, for what, this is probably the 10th time I've said "I personally?") have no doubt that there is a God. I'm not sure what other "options" you are referring to, but if you mean that there is no God, then yes, you're correct, I am dismissing that. How does this in any way constitute me believing blindly? Your train of logic seems to be severly lacking.

Hmm, really? One of the basic "laws" of the universe is that of entropy, yet life has evolved into incredibly complex and organized forms, using the single most efficient way of organizing information currently thought possible in their DNA; by chance? Science is full of these "catch 22s" which are often completely ignored.
Why is it that when 2 scientists observe something via instruments this is reliable, but when hundreds of people witness a miracle or spritual phenomen it is not reliable??? The reason lies within man's need to control. It is simply not acceptable to modern man that there are things beyond our control, so they are written off as false, hallucinations, etc. You could pose the question on this board (in fact someone probably has) about people witnessing "supernatural" phenomena, and quite a few members would no doubt respond. Does this mean that they are all lying?
Weird that the supposive order of evolution corresponds exactly to the order named in Genesis. Now, stop your arguement of "7 days" right there, the Bible clearly states that 1 day to God is comparable to a huge amount of time to man, so it *is* very possible to have creation taking place over a long period of "man's time."
Reliable records? The Bible actually has thousands of verified stories, yet curiously there are almost none which have been disproved, at best they are neither provable, nor disprovable.

And...if we're going to get into provable things, nothing in the realm of epistomology is truly "provable." Not that I want to take on another group of people in debate, but it's my guess that the philosophy skeptics that popped up in this thread haven't gone far enough into it to see how it is applicable to everything.

I've given you answers time and time again, but you consitently have proved unable or too defensive to actually take a second, and try and comprehend what I am saying. I'm guessing you are the type of person that in a conversation begins formulating his rebuttle before the other person even has a chance to finish, and thus you miss half of the other persons arguement.

 

Heh?
I have merely been stating a fact, which you can easily confirm by talking to different people and also by reading up the meaning of faith in various encyclopedia. I haven't been favouring, or dismissing anything. I didn't even say what faith means to me. The one who is biased and ignorant is you, because you fail to acknowledge, that the term faith has many different meanings and get's used by people in different ways.

Btw are you still going to verify the claim you made in another thread, that science has proven that monogamy is unnatural, or was that just a loose statement of yours?