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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jan 20, 2010 - 02:05am PT
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...able to realize who God is, and to show us His true Holy nature!
Doesn't this sound just a little strange? That a god would have to create something to realize who he is and what he's like?
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MH2
climber
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Jan 20, 2010 - 03:38am PT
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Might have to reclassify J.A.P. as a second-rate journal. Or at least admit I may have misjudged one study.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect
"Later, signal modulation was found to produce sounds or words that appeared to originate intracranially."
stranger than fiction
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MH2
climber
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Jan 20, 2010 - 04:13am PT
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from Ed's link
"her object in the book is to interrogate and critique the assumption informing the conversation in which these are the standard contentions"
This kind of language upsets me. Too complicated. I had a look and what I think the underneath-it-all deal is, is that people are not very familiar with non-transitive relationships.
The same issue was treated by the guy who won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating that there is no such thing as a perfect democracy.
There are many things you simply cannot rank unequivocally.
You may choose A over B, B over C, but still choose C over A.
So which is best? It depends on how you rank whatever properties A,B,and C have, and that may be clear in a pairwise choice, but not necessarily when trying to choose among 3 or more things.
So science and religion could have differing emotional, cultural, social, intellectual, utilitarian, or other appeal and if you don't want to choose just one basis on which to judge them, you aren't going to be able to say which is better overall.
But that is a side issue, anyway. We don't need to choose religion or science. We can enjoy parts of both. Or neither.
The real issue, not for me but for many, is pressure from religion. I think this is what Dr. F, jstan, and maybe some others are looking at.
Here is how A.C. Grayling says it:
"Where politeness once restrained non-religious folk from expressing their true feelings about religion, both politeness and restraint have been banished by the confrontational face that faith now turns to the modern world."
And he is a first-class optimist. And speaking about Britain. So the problem isn't just found in the U.S. Canada doesn't seem to have it so bad.
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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Jan 20, 2010 - 08:47am PT
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Selective hearing is the way to go, or it's too much!
Music or noise?
We can grieve the Holy Spirit!
Whatever is pure holy and righteous think on these things...
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Jan 20, 2010 - 10:32pm PT
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MH2-
I just wanted to say thanks for all your interesting posts on the brain. They in turn have led me to a lot of other reading that I am still trying to digest.
In the process it strikes me that one of the next things to be done in spiritual research is to try to distinguish between physical phenomena (electrical and biochemical), genetic anomalies and potentials, as well as the outer boundaries of sense processing in the brain on the one hand, and other phenomena like precognition that seem to be based on something outside the brain. It strikes me that part of the confusion, is that we haven't even sorted out the physical brain aspects yet and they are getting confused with higher level phenomena.
If we're interested in this kind of research, we should all be making provisions to donate our brains to science after death along with notes about such experiences or the lack thereof, and exposure to drugs and electromagnetic energy.
I walk my dogs on military bases jam packed with various types of antenna, dishes, bowls etc. for receiving and transmitting, and the Navy has a station here that beams very low frequency sound out into the ocean. I've always wondered what the effect of all that might be, especially now, given your info on some people being able to "hear" microwave energy. Happily, although I'm around it, I've never had that phenomenon. I can however when listening to very high pitched music, Paganini's violin compositions being the best for this, feel the auditory part of my brain being stimulated. It doesn't quite tingle, but something like that, only more subtle. I've only noticed it the past few years so either my brain is getting more sensitive or perhaps deteriorating with age?!
One other odd phenomenon I wanted to mention which is much more sobering is that one night in the late '80's or early '90's while lying on the floor, back in the dayswhen I was heavily into meditation, a low but very powerful rumbling began which I could hear but more so feel that went on and on for 5-6 minutes. I knew instinctively that the only thing that it could be, compared to the earthquakes I had already felt, was an atomic explosion. I searched all the newspapers the next few weeks and nothing. I decided that if the Chinese had done an underground explosion, it would have been publicized critically by the U.S. and neither the U.S. nor Japan would do anything underground on the ring of fire. Therefore, it must have come from further off with the best guess being French Polynesia since sound travels best through water. Perhaps the Israelis have rented some of those atols?
Later I remarked on this to a group of military intel students during one of our class breaks to see what kind of a reaction I would get, and sure enough, one of the senior Navy NCO's got a stricken look on his face. Later he said to me, "I can verify that was no earthquake that you felt, but don't ask me anything else about it".
So who knows what all this stuff, most of which we're not even aware of, is doing to our mental and physical evolution?
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Gobee
Trad climber
Los Angeles
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Jan 20, 2010 - 10:53pm PT
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-Love is the only thing that can be divided without being diminished.
TOP TEN PREDICTIONS FOR 2010
1. The Bible will still have all the answers.
2. Prayer will still work.
3. The Holy Spirit will still move.
4. God will still inhabit the praises of His people.
5. There will still be God-anointed preaching.
6. There will still be singing of praise to God.
7. God will still pour out blessings upon His people.
8. There will still be room at the Cross.
9. Jesus will still love you.
10. Jesus will still save the lost.
God whispers in your soul and speaks to your mind.
Sometimes when you don't have time to listen, He has to throw a
brick at you. It's your choice: Listen to the whisper, or wait for
the brick.
Proverbs 20:13, Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor
will himself call out and not be answered.
Daily Readings from the Life of Christ (vol.2) By John MacArthur http://www.gty.org/Radio/Archive
The King Rejoices in the Lord's Strength
To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David.
Psalm 21, O Lord, in your strength the king rejoices,
and in your salvation how greatly he exults!
2 You have given him his heart's desire
and have not withheld the request of his lips. Selah
3 For you meet him with rich blessings;
you set a crown of fine gold upon his head.
4 He asked life of you; you gave it to him,
length of days forever and ever.
5 His glory is great through your salvation;
splendor and majesty you bestow on him.
6 For you make him most blessed forever;
you make him glad with the joy of your presence.
7 For the king trusts in the Lord,
and through the steadfast love of the Most High he shall not be moved.
8 Your hand will find out all your enemies;
your right hand will find out those who hate you.
9 You will make them as a blazing oven
when you appear.
The Lord will swallow them up in his wrath,
and fire will consume them.
10 You will destroy their descendants from the earth,
and their offspring from among the children of man.
11 Though they plan evil against you,
though they devise mischief, they will not succeed.
12 For you will put them to flight;
you will aim at their faces with your bows.
13 Be exalted, O Lord, in your strength!
We will sing and praise your power.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jan 21, 2010 - 01:01am PT
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In the process it strikes me that one of the next things to be done in spiritual research is to try to distinguish between physical phenomena (electrical and biochemical), genetic anomalies and potentials, as well as the outer boundaries of sense processing in the brain on the one hand, and other phenomena like precognition that seem to be based on something outside the brain. It strikes me that part of the confusion, is that we haven't even sorted out the physical brain aspects yet and they are getting confused with higher level phenomena.
Pretty much assuming the sale on precognition and "other [esp] phenomena". Doesn't seem like a very objective approach.
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TripL7
Trad climber
san diego
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Jan 21, 2010 - 02:04am PT
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weschrist- "existence is only known through interactions"
"Interaction is a kind of action that occurs as two or more objects have an effect upon one another." Wikipedia!
Gobee- "Sometimes when you don't have time to listen, He has to through a brick at you."
Just say-in, might wanna start wearing your hardhat...could be a brick coming!
BTW, I got alot of lumps on the back of my hard head.
But all joking aside, He does want to interact with you...if you ask Him.
"You didn't choose Me! I chose you!" John 15:16.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Jan 21, 2010 - 02:18am PT
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healeyje-
I already talked about this upthread and the fact that I have experienced precognition even though the latest from the physicists is that it doesn't exist. So I don't claim to be objective. If I have anything to offer it is my subjective experience and my cross cultural knowledge. And I'm donating my brain to science when I'm done - along with copious notes. That's all.
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MH2
climber
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Jan 21, 2010 - 04:18am PT
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TOP TEN PREDICTIONS FOR 2010
Damn! No reference whatsoever to the Dow Jones.
Will the Bible ever have any new answers, Gobee? Or is a book from 2,000 years ago all we will ever need?
My primary question is: if I want to find something out who do I ask, or where do I go to look, or could I figure it out myself?
Following a thread of this sort is helpful, to me, because posters raise questions and occasionally post information that I wouldn't come across otherwise. I'm not looking to settle anyone's hash, I just want to hear interesting stuff. There are questions I would go to Karl for the answer, others to Jan, etc. A lot of knowledge falls outside the well-founded constructions of science (and a lot that is mistaken for science is not well-founded).
One day, perhaps today, the speed and breadth of the internet will allow groups of people to work on tough questions with better result than the Ouija board dynamics we see here. Yes, math and physics and other groups do it now, by communicating quickly over great distances with many participants, but non-human elements may become increasingly important. I notice that content-addressable-memories are now used in routers, that Google uses a Markovian operator of some kind to rank web pages, the Viterbi algorithm has current uses, and Teuvo Kohonen's self-forming feature maps are alive and well and have offspring, although military cloaking veils the specifics. If the internet itself did develop a consciousness we of course would possibly be no more aware of its structure, activities, or purposes than a cell within our body is of ours.
In the meantime we have a version of David Marr's Mountain Climbing in a Probabilistic Landscape, simulated annealing, and ant colony optimization to try, among other approaches to finding optima, or minima if you prefer. Some of our participants appear stuck in local minima, Gobee.
Others seem impatient with our rate of cooling.
We also don't have a lot of ants.
And scaling up to larger numbers of participants looks nightmarish.
And we probably won't get anywhere interesting to the group, other than in the trivial sense that the process has produced intermmediate results.
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TripL7
Trad climber
san diego
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Jan 21, 2010 - 08:10am PT
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"Perfection is attained not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away!" St-Exupery
"Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever." Hebrews 13:8
"For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths." 2 Timothy 4:3
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Norwegian
Trad climber
Placerville, California
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Jan 21, 2010 - 08:23am PT
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edit to delete derogatory prose.
sorry christians. i eat those words.
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jstan
climber
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Jan 21, 2010 - 11:57am PT
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Potpourri:
Jan's senses:
Detectivities vary widely between individuals and between specie for every stimulus. In an erect
posture humans have to maintain balance using signals from our semicircular canals and it is a
very noisy servo-control problem. In a standing position small earth disturbances are buried in
that servo noise. For some years here in SB I slept on the floor, a slab. I could tell the difference
between s-waves and p-waves and could even get a directional fix on an earthquake.
Snakes:
I presumed we developed a specie aversion to snakes as tree shrews because at that stage we
would have made a meal for a snake small enough to be an effective tree climber.
MH2: The future
Everyone can foretell the future and no one can foretell the future. I'll try a little here.
For a good 15 years, as I watched the decay of our public education and our decreasing exports,
I have been persuaded the US is on track to become a neo third world state. But I did not quite
see how it would all work. This seems a little clearer now. As I have said recently, I think religion
and politics in this country are now melded together and this spells the end of effective public
governance. Religion is antithetical to compromise and compromise is the only known way to
avoid violence and disorder among our specie. Special interests have gained control and will, in
all cases, work to benefit themselves. To the citizen on the street this will assume the form of
pervasive corruption.
The lives we all have enjoyed for the last twenty years came about because, as I have before
alluded, eighty cents out of every dollar saved in the world has been coming to the US. Right
now reports indicate continued strong sovereign nation purchases of US debt but there are also
reports of investments now leaving the US in substantial amounts. Americans investing abroad.
This is what would be expected if it is believed the dollar will not fare well and if it is expected
that increasing corruption will be a fact of life in the US. Standards of living will continue sinking
back toward the world average and dissatisfaction and stress among the people here will further
hamper any attempt toward good public governance. This will be especially severe for so long as
americans continue to believe, without basis, we are " superior beings."
This is the reason I was extremely distressed to see the US's attempt to indebt our way out of the
2008 collapse of the US financial system, which had gone with adequate control since Reagan's
regime. Besides actually increasing the total pain ultimately to be endured it also removed our
last good chance for us all to learn there are consequences and to see once again that
compromise is less painful than is rigidity.
So now the task for each of us is to seek our own path through this that features something like 80%
confidence of an acceptable result.
It was a minor event but in the 1970's I had great good fortune and the chance to see a great
people, technical rock climbers, face a problem squarely and work together to make a future. On
a much larger scale this is exactly what is needed today, but it will not happen.
As a people
we are now too small.
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rectorsquid
climber
Lake Tahoe
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Jan 21, 2010 - 12:03pm PT
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"Prayer will still work."
Not for the mothers and fathers that lost children in Haiti.
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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Jan 21, 2010 - 12:59pm PT
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I can however when listening to very high pitched music, Paganini's violin compositions being the best for this, feel the auditory part of my brain being stimulated.
Well, no mystery there. Paganini was well-known to have made a deal with the devil, so the fact that you hear things in his music that others can not hear is a clear indication that you must be a witch!
Extrapolate from that and pretty soon all the precognition falls into place (seeds planted by Satan, of course), likewise your ability to set off nuclear explosions from afar, and...
If the Christians ever find out about this, you're going to find yourself tied to a stake and watching them pile faggots about your feet.
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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Jan 21, 2010 - 01:04pm PT
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Yes rectorsquid, prayer will still work for those who have lost family in Haiti.
And therein lies the fundamental insanity of the whole Christian religion (and probably others as well).
God is all powerful, present everywhere, and all-knowing. Capable of creating and running the entire universe. And when he runs it in such fashion that a hundred thousand die in an earthquake you say the survivors should take comfort in his love for them.
That is so sick it's disgusting.
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TripL7
Trad climber
san diego
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Jan 21, 2010 - 01:56pm PT
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weschrist- "Narrow mind..."
"Wide is the path to destruction."
~777~
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TripL7
Trad climber
san diego
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Jan 21, 2010 - 02:05pm PT
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weschrist- "Early on he said, you are capable of handling this one on your own, you don't need fairy tales anymore..."
Yea, that' one of Satan's trademark lies! Don't be a fool!
~777~
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WandaFuca
Social climber
From the gettin place
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Jan 21, 2010 - 02:09pm PT
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Before Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, etc. the christians didn't have a problem. Every christian could agree on a strict literal interpretation of the bible.
But with every discovery, christians had to choose to either dig in their heels or constantly back-pedal on biblical meanings.
You christians either cling with blind and wilful ignorance to the belief that your oh so personal god just shazammed! everything--as is--into existence, or you believe in a distant god that has become, and with each new discovery will continue to become, less and less relevant to day to day life, until it is no god at all.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 21, 2010 - 04:05pm PT
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Pray for old Norton, for he cannot pray for himself, the worthless PAGAN.
In bed with heating pad and oxycodone.
I am SO sick and tired of my spine falling apart and fuking hurting.
Just looking for some sympathy.
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