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Big Chuck
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Dec 8, 2021 22:47
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 17:34 |
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It seems to me that the very vastness of the cosmos that leads us to suppose for sheer probabilistic reasons that it harbors other life also poses an insurmountable obstacle to ever detecting that other life. We're situated not only in a very small corner of space but also in a very narrow slice of time. Imagine that on two separate occasions over the course of a century, someone starting from an unknown position got lost in the Sahara, the wind blowing their footprints away behind them so they couldn't be followed, and you're one of the two. You don't know if you're the first or the second person, and both your survival and theirs are uncertain. Proportionally speaking, this analogy greatly understates the mutual isolation of life in space. One might say that contact of any sort would be miraculous in itself.
Bongo Bill fucked around with this message at 10:45 on Jul 23, 2022 |
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Jul 23, 2022 10:36
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I think if you were wanting to have a productive conversation about bad experiences you've had with religious people, you made a mistake in bringing up the topic the way you did.
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Aug 31, 2022 00:48
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Today's Existential Comics seems relevant.
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Sep 19, 2022 21:06
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Is the world ready for "Evangelicalism is a heresy" discourse to enter the mainstream?
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Sep 28, 2022 20:52
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The rich are better able to avoid pain and seek pleasure, but if you're saying that pleasure is the same as happiness then you should expect to be receptive to learning about the many reasons why many religions disagree with you about that. Wealth doesn't exist in a vacuum, nor does it arise spontaneously. The power of the powerful came to them from somewhere in the world and is contingent upon the position they occupy in the world. Those connections are limits to what they can do, and because the money depends upon them, money can't exceed those limits. Having enough money to do whatever you want often means that there are certain things that you can't want, though this varies from person to person.
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Oct 28, 2022 19:23
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A rich person who fears entropy has the means to alleviate that fear by, for instance, taking an extraordinary amount of drugs so that they don't think about scary entropy, or by ensconcing themselves in a bubble in which entropy is always said to be reversible. However, there are those who do not respond to their fear of entropy in these ways, or in any other (assumedly for the sake of the argument) effective way. What is your explanation for why they do not do this?
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Oct 28, 2022 21:45
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You can earn a million dollars, but the only way to get a billion is by stealing it.
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Nov 1, 2022 09:23
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The ancient world had several means of execution that were said to be more tortuous than crucifixion, but none of them would have been nearly as efficient to deploy at scale, so obviously the Romans wouldn't have liked those.
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Nov 28, 2022 04:28
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Language is a tool. We use it in specific ways to exert specific influences on the world around us. Sometimes language is made more effective by embedding a hypothetical model of the universe within it. However, the effectiveness of communication based on such a model not evidence that the model is useful for other purposes, let alone that it's accurate. That's because the model embedded in the communication is based on a model embedded in the communicator's mind, which is a continuously-evolving heuristic applying to a specific and limited experience of existence. Language is cool and interesting and useful, but... at best, language relates to metaphysics the way cartography relates to geography.
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Jan 9, 2023 00:00
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It's difficult to generalize from modern hunter-gatherer peoples to prehistoric ones because there's an incredibly huge selection bias effect going on there.
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Feb 6, 2023 23:36
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Importantly, it's not about the amount eaten either, either absolutely or relative to need.
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Feb 15, 2023 22:53
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There was Ibn Sina's "Proof of the Truthful," as well.
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Mar 10, 2023 00:45
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I notice that Muslims were asked about, but not polled.
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Mar 17, 2023 17:53
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Makes sense to me.
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Apr 14, 2023 21:48
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You are perhaps thinking of this quote attributed to Genghis Khan: "O people, know that you have committed great sins, and that the great ones among you have committed these sins. If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you."
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Apr 19, 2023 04:35
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There are lots of things that can be done with an emotion other than feel it. This is the basis of, for instance, cognitive behavioral therapy. The creative process for many involves the recollection, examination, and depiction of emotion; and the audience might then, for instance, recognize it and empathetically mirror it. It's complex and subtle. If there is some component of your thought that you have observed either to cause you suffering or to spur you to behavior you regret, then it may be worth trying to rise to the challenge of grasping that complexity and subtlety.
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May 16, 2023 22:54
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sinnesloeschen posted:hi can i hear more about this plz I don't know much about the Hindu perspective, but the term "Kali Yuga" would be the relevant phrase to start research from. The ancient Greek poet Hesiod once outlined a similar history of the cosmos, which was later repeated by the Roman poet Ovid, called the Myth of the Ages, which goes a little something like this: Although the titan Cronus was cruel to his children, he was kind to humans, and in the earliest age of mankind, called the Golden Age, they lived freely with the gods who created them. Nature provided abundantly for them with no need for toil, they lived immensely long lives and died peacefully, and, living with wisdom and piety, it was an age of peace and justice. When Zeus overthrew Cronus and reordered the universe, he introduced the seasons, obliging the humans of what is called the Silver Age to learn the art of agriculture, so that they were forced to work for their livelihood. The humans of this period practiced impiety, but the punishment of the gods soon rectified that. The human lifespan shrank during this period to about a century. Perhaps in response to the hardship and toil of the prior age, humans invented warfare, giving way to what is called the Bronze Age (which, however, has no particular relation to its archaeological namesake). During this third age, although pious, mankind was also violent, and destroyed each other with their warlike ways. The survivors of the Bronze Age had a worse lot still, for while they continued the violence of their ancestors, they also abandoned piety, inaugurating the Iron Age. In this worst of the ages, which Hesiod and Ovid considered themselves to inhabit, wickedness and shamelessness predominate, and there is strife even between siblings, between parents and children, between guests and hosts. The gods in this age have forsaken humanity, who have no help against evil. Unlike the Hindu perspective, these writers did not view this as a cyclical history in which the good times would eventually return, merely a narrative of continuous decline (possibly punctuated by the occasional generation of heroes). Hesiod in particular expressed what modern readers would consider a rather pessimistic and resigned outlook. His work includes the very first almanac, so I see him as attempting to answer two of the most pressing questions facing an ancient farmer: "Why does life suck?" and "When should I plant my crops?"
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Jun 15, 2023 05:23
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quiggy posted:Alright I have to know now: is there a contingent of vegan Catholics who believe in literal transubstantiation and how do they square that circle? Most vegans don't consider it a violation of that principle to eat an animal that consented to be eaten.
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Jul 7, 2023 16:55
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The culture in which Christianity arose was very familiar with a tradition of animal sacrifice in which part of the sacrificial animal would be eaten. That aspect may also be relevant.
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Jul 19, 2023 22:57
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Early Christianity spread in large part on the basis of offering relief, both spiritual and material, from the adversities of life under empire, and still carries the theological legacy of that time. A proselytizer with such a pitch inevitably has to contend with the way their religion is described by other, more culturally entrenched religions. In antiquity, that meant slander and ridicule from mainstream paganism; but in the present day, it's that the biggest and loudest churches are the ones whose conduct determines how Christianity as a whole is perceived. A steady decline in the number of believers is a pretty strong sign of how appealing that perception is, fair or not.
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Oct 22, 2023 11:14
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zhar posted:in a similar vein im pretty sure ive seen people asking for prayers from this thread if you want a prayer why would you pick posters of the something awful forums over someone with the bona fides of a literal saint I feel like the Parable of the Prodigal Son would be relevant to any serious answer to this question.
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Oct 22, 2023 22:56
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Coolness aside, you should be careful not to conflate grammatical gender with personal gender, and that's a difficult error for English speakers to avoid since English has only one of those two concepts.
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Nov 22, 2023 19:05
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Human law is pragmatic in origin: justice belongs to the king, so that the armed forces he can muster won't deplete themselves by pursuing endless cycles of retribution on each other. The original purpose of criminality isn't to reflect morality, but to protect the authority structure from internal societal dysfunctions, some of which are coincidentally immoral. The conceptualization of divinity as resembling human systems of authority would suggest a notion of "divine law" analogous to human law. But if you want to explore such an idea further, you'd want to understand the purpose of the "law," which might or might not also be something other than a reflection of morality.
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Jan 18, 2024 20:07
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The Great Vowel Shift was still ongoing when the King James Bible was published. It might have sounded more musical with Early Modern English phonology. Nearly all traditional forms of recitative art in English predate this change, and you can really hear the difference if you listen to something like Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation, or somebody reading Chaucer or Beowulf. It may be that it's also affected by a tendency for treating translation as something done to the written rather than to the spoken form of a language. Modern English does have a distinctive sound in music, though it's hard for a native speaker to hear it. In 1972, the Italian pop musician Adriano Celentano quipped that Italian listeners would make any song a hit, no matter what it was about, as long as it was English, and to prove the point, composed a song with nonsense lyrics designed to sound like American-accented English. The song, "Prisencolinensinainciusol," was a hit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQDY3HFkh_Y Bongo Bill fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Jan 26, 2024 |
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Jan 26, 2024 04:24
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Squizzle posted:i think that imputing any sense of materiality to an eternal domain of existence is a mugs game. do not use the terminology of physical existence to describe anything that exists eternally or fundamentally, unless you have mastered advanced (and/or forbidden) rhetorical maneuvers I never metaphysics I didn't like
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Mar 2, 2024 20:42
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Putting the "divine" in "divination"
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Mar 25, 2024 17:54
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Orbs posted:Wait, this seems to be saying it's the job of Christians to consume the land to the point of exhaustion? I hope I'm misinterpreting you. The quoted post used sarcasm.
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Apr 1, 2024 17:43
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Traditionally, the Bhagavad Gita is included in the Mahabharata, the world's largest epic poem and nothing else even comes close. A major part of the story concerns the legendary Kurukshetra War, and the Bhagavad Gita is framed as the advice given to Arjuna by Krishna on the eve of battle.
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Apr 16, 2024 17:12
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 17:34 |
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Well, it's not much of an interruption, since Krishna was there to participate in the battle, as Arjuna's chariot driver.
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Apr 16, 2024 18:16
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