Stephen Fry On God

Just wondering. So abrahamic god is not a one size fits all phenomena and this has been one of my points here. Clearly the same but viewed differently? Clearly the same to who? The one might not recognize what the other sees. Your clarity here is theoretical at best. I want to point out that you are assigning personal properties to religions as in judaism views it one way and islam views it another and christianity views it another way. None of those things being names of religions have a view. Persons view. So this is a fundamental distortion.

The thing that makes the three abrahamic when taken together is not a similar belief in the qualities of god but that they all suggest god revealed itself to abraham and that is it. The beliefs and traditions associated with that simple statement are so varied as to be not recognizable to each other in many forms.

You are saying gates of heaven yet In traditional Christianity, heaven it is considered a state or condition of existence rather than a particular place somewhere in the cosmos. To say the pearly gates of new jerusalem would be more unassuming. You are getting a level of commentary there that doesn't appear in the book so we wonder as to it's source.

You are not talking about hard and fast descriptions. You are referring to versions adopted by some denominations as though they were standards accepted by all. New jerusalem and heaven are not identical entities to many. I will point out again that there are 41,000 different denominations affiliated with the title christian.

This whole treatment of the subject from Fry's point and those who argue for him comes from a pop or sensationalist view and not a scientific one or one deeply appreciated except for the normal attachment to personal opinion. In many ways it appears some have been instructed as to meaning by seeing Charlton Heston play moses in a movie. It is a kind of stereotyping.

 

I am saying kind is not one of the attributes listed in wikipedia nor is beneficent. Neither does Tommy A. nor louis berkhof. The "christian understanding," is a myth of person hood, like giving personal qualities to a corporation

I don't want anything from you. I point out that what you are using as standard isn't. I also don't think you appreciate the fundamental contribution of your own thinking as you reason an argument. In the case of the catholic 1.1 billion and the protestant or other 1 billion the fundamental authority of the church is not the same. There is no papal lineage in protestant faith and no official catechism. It is not that the position is not good enough for me it is that it is not substantially or fairly considered in it's entirety. Like I said that kind of treatment will fit your argument but the argument doesn't stand up when all things are considered.

I say again that there is no such thing as a christain source but the christain speaker and to think otherwise is a fundamental confusion between adherent and the corporate brand.

Again you don't make Fry's arguments and it has nothing to do with starting memes. Fry made his argument in the video. Perhaps you build a case for Fry?

 

I love that phrase, i'm not getting into semantics. Semantics is the study of meaning. Certain qualities associated with the listed attributes? Who is making the associations?

I know what generalizations are and they don't speak to specifics. Is a generalization a specific? It seems so according to the standard you put forward that we should accept a generalization as a community fact. Yes everything I speak is according to my personal thinking, I don't claim to make some one else's argument for them. The analogy holds because corporations aren't personal entities but they provide cover for personal liability in the same way a generalization doesn't account for individual variances.

What are the personal qualities that a christian possesses that can be generalized as a group? Do you mean beliefs?

Not a cohesive group but many groups variously cohesive. You are allowed to draw all the conclusions you want obviously my point is that they are yours not someone else's.

You obviously quote the sources you quote. My position is that the positions quoted are not standard as suggested as there is a great variety of thinking on the subject. It is not that I don't want you to contribute your own thinking. Your personal thinking is all you can contribute as you make the distinctions that form your argument is also the point I make.

In my view "by this they shall know you are my disciples, that you love one another." No dogma apparent.

Due to the now obvious complexity of the phenomena is where some say that the treatment of the subject by fry is naive.

 

I don't, but you treat it as so.

I don't recall any questions I haven't answered. Excuse me if I missed any it was not on purpose. I am not saying there are no similarities, A similarity is not an exactness. For example the trinitarian view of god is a unique idea among the three.

I am sharing variety of belief I am aware of.

I am discussing them to the extent that it be made known that you can't generalize on this subject and be accurate. I don't bring up specifics except to demonstrate the contrary case or that there is another way to see it. I would not seek to build a case on such generalizations. It is not a very rigorous route to understanding and ripe for the expression of personal prejudice. What other subject allows stereotyping as legitimate statistic? You would be right in my thinking to call me on not providing every nuance of every denomination if I were to take that tack.

Well we don't know what you mean by "in this regard," and as I have said I speak from my own thoughts. I have shared the awareness of a variety of beliefs. Meaningless is a determination by one who fails to find meaning. I know it can be wearying to defend a definite position in the midst of a subject consisting of so many profound abstractions and divergences of detail.

Respond or not at your leisure.

No offense taken.

 

Bleurgh.. that wasn't fun.



Ok. Case in point, we're not here to be pampered by the world, but we have evolved enough to be able to choose. Right now, old habits of humanity are the only things standing in the way of finding our own evolutionary niche. We've dug ourselves a hole and it's only getting deeper.

I'm not sure about the knowledge of mass extinctions, nothing further than the fact the we recognise they happened which I think is more than enough to raise an eyebrow at our current situation. I know DNA is biological hard drive, but what kind of information and how it presents itself can only be imagined. Not to discredit the imagination, it can be used well, just as reason can be used badly.
Again on this subject, I also like the theory of Morphic Resonance, but I haven't really followed that up. I know it caused quite a stir in the scientific community but I know for myself it makes sense.

Concerning dark matter, I feel it's a physical echo of our subconscious. You probably winced at that, totally get it but the fact remains that our conscious experience is only the tip of our iceberg. Going back to DNA, the possibility exists that this is where it's stored. Psychological trauma is known to be stored in the body, animals shake like hell after being chased by predators and it's known that stress is linked to health issues.. even to the reasonable extent of stress induced sleep deprivation resulting in weakened bodies.. etc etc.

The idea of the universe discovering itself, I also get the scepticism. A common element I see when talking about the universe is that it's somehow thought of as a giant living in the hillside, a concept distant from our waking life and, from that perspective, things can seem a little far fetched.. but we are the universe, a part of the magnificent whole. Our bodies may only occupy a miniscule amount of space within the (currently)unimaginable vastness of the cosmos, and we may pale in significance to the enormous power of a black hole, but our minds can conceive of, learn and study these phenomena. We can even go back on ourselves and say things are wrong. I, personally, find that fantastically amazing.

By the very fact of human recognition, things have already been anthropomorphised. Human consciousness is a singular absolute attribute of the universe, relative to our own perception, which is all we can honestly say we have. All we can ever worry about is ourselves, even if it's something outside of our body, because it's our own unique interpretation of the phenomena that we're worrying about.

Where does that come from? A biological mutation of DNA, which as far as we know or recognise is out of our control. A delicate balance of brain chemistry processing information received from organic sensors, each with a specific bandwidth(yet picking up on the same fundamental resonance) all of which is being kept alive by a system of organs that gain energy from consuming further biological mutations we have come to know as "food", and it all results in consciousness. Which is knowledge, which is expanding and complexifying.

 

Interestingly enough, during the flu period I had a dreams of my body "telling" me what was wrong. Weird fractal images and feelings suggested CNS(I collapsed with weakness the night before and couldn't move for around half an hour), hints at intestines, liver and pancreas. I dismissed it at the time and just thought it was cool, but about 2 days after, once the fever had broken, I was left with diarrhea, which is only just clearing up.

Make of that what you will, but I think it's quite interesting. Seems plausible since your consciousness is a product of the body, I think self diagnosis is very much a possibility if we pay enough attention to ourselves.

 

What do you mean by self diagnosis? Certainly consciousness is a bodily function. All informative functions are a matter of communication and coming to know is the conscious function. The body is a product of communication or becoming familiar, the biofeedback loop. The course of disease is self limiting in appearance and duration.

 

I would note that our, we, and ourselves are are plural forms of a singular recognition, they are not separate estates. We share our thoughts and we can honestly say we have the other in mind when we are concerned with ourselves.

 

Self diagnosis, being in tune - knowing what's performing less than optimally and why. It is communication.

Bit different to listening to an engine and hearing what's out of rhythm, but similar principle.

Elaborate?

 

I hear you, wrong is a qualification, not a diagnostic. We have a comfort zone. Out of rhythm would be a misnomer. Uneven rhythm is an apt description and such perturbations are cause by uneven heating, peripheral example the fever.

In elaboration the body develops acquired immunity through the immune reaction.

 

We also have access through imagination to immuno-technologies like vaccinations which make the rigors of body processing less severe. So where acquired immunity involves defense in accompaniment with the appearance of reactive symptoms, we may also assume immunity through what might be called right action which doesn't require the same degree of overwhelming feedback to get the point across so to speak. The symptoms of sickness are far down the chain of being aware of body sensations.

 

More on self limiting appearances that also applies to your sense of well being at the time. We have a range that goes from peak to peak beyond which we either pass out or expire in terms of body identification. Consciousness in all it's iterations can be quite rarefied in terms of our ability to perceive it's depth and breadth and height and many of these states rely on the ability to dissociate from body sensation or conscious identification at that level.

 

We are adaptable to many environments but we have already found niche(s), particularly in our cities. In terms of population, protection, etc. We thrive in that environment, although there is obviously the downside if you ascribe to global warming.

In regards to extinctions, many of these animals live in climates which I do not think we are even suited to understand, how does one even approach survival in the abyss of the ocean for instance?

It is an interesting idea but I think morphic resonance is mostly regarded as pseudoscience or fringe science by many scientists.

The universe doscovering itself is a poetic notion but I think it's a bit hyperbole if taken literally and I think this type of hyperbole can be detrimemtal to us. It creates a certain type of complancey, the similar type which let's us place aliens in command of our history rather than better understanding the innovations and knowledge of our ancestors.

 

On morphic resonance it is an idea that comes from the subjective space, in this case possibly assisted by the psychedelic experience. The pseudo element comes in by discounting the subjective experience as not testable at a distance. However we can share experience as we have the same processing equipment and I came to the same interesting observation before I ever heard of Sheldrake although I hadn't given it a name other than memory. Some people call elements of this experience reviewing past lives even though there is nothing past in current experience. I guess the science part of pseudo science comes in when you give it a scientific sounding name when presenting the idea to scientific circles. I don't consider any information to be pseudo just yet to be thoroughly understood.

 

I am much for making yourself the subject of the experiment in the vein of John Lilly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly

 

I disagree, we're far from our niche. We're emotional creatures and cities and the requirements needed to keep the cities running make maintaining an optimal emotional state very difficult for the vast majority. Stress levels are high, depression is not uncommon, the foods we eat are toxic and speaking of toxicity my dog just farted ew.

The food thing is cultural, not specifically city related but cities are a product of the same mentality. We are not thriving, we are taking over in a reckless manner in a pursuit to find a state to thrive within.


I agree to an extent with instilling a sense of complacency but I feel that's more of a repercussion of the way culture has evolved.. not enough people are asking the question Why. Complacency is there to begin with. Again, we are not thriving. We are inquisitive by nature but it's easier to numb your mind in front of a flashing box.

 

No, we are not thriving as well as we should be.

 

We far outnumber any mammal on the planet, by evolutionary standards we are thriving.