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romansh

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Everything posted by romansh

  1. Not actually a poem ... it's a letter but reads like a poem ... and definitely spiritual April 16, 1887 My dear Friend, I send you some of the most wonderful whiskey that ever drove the skeleton from a feast or painted landscapes in the brain of man. It is the mingled souls of wheat and corn. In it you will find the sunshine and the shadows that chased each other over the billowy fields; the breath of June; the carol of the lark; the dews of night; the wealth of summer and autumn’s rich content, all golden with imprisoned light. Drink it—and you will hear the voices of men and maidens singing the “Harvest Home,” mingled with the laughter of children. Drink it—and you will feel within your blood the star-lit dawns, the dreamy, tawny dusks of many perfect days. For forty years this liquid joy has been within the happy staves of oak, longing to touch the lips of men. Yours always, R. G. Ingersoll
  2. Firstly six sigma is way less than 1 %. I would suggest using an appropriate degree of probability for the subject matter under study rather than some arbitrary number. Regarding the Templeton Foundation ... I can`t point to any particular section, but just take your time to get a flavour of it. It sort of a Discovery Institute 'lite'.
  3. good/evil (bad) moral/immoral God being somehow separate ie traditional theistic beliefs, and to a lesser extent in panentheism Are some of examples of dualistic patterns of thought. Having said that I find language quite dualistic so to some extent that people accept dualism is not that surprising.
  4. The fact that you ask the question is that bad? belies the claim that you usually don't see [think] in dualistic patterns. And what is it? It is an observation.
  5. Nope I am closer to a monist. And you are exhibiting (at least from my perspective) patterns of dualist thought.
  6. I would like to be clear here morally responsible?
  7. So do you see people as morally responsible for their actions? And despite the title ... I don't think my posted video was primarily about consciousness ... hence the the line "I am separate"
  8. Then you will find much of what the science Templeton Foundation funds to of similar dubious quality.
  9. I would classify it as poorly written. It is the belief that we are communing with a higher power that appears to help.
  10. Yours ... very simply (my initial reaction) we are trapped by our desires. As to your comment on ego ... quite often we hear comments about other people's egos etc. Sometimes we have a need to control our egos. Who is it that is trying to subdue our own ego? While I readily admit an ego is a model of what we perceive as our thought patterns (chemistry/physics patterns), I would not be without those patterns. The second video ... for me was a recognition of the illusion of dualistic thought. We are connected regardless of how we might perceive of ourselves as separate. Traditional religions concretize that thought, panentheism subtly enables that illusion to persist.
  11. I must admit my interpretations of the two metaphors are completely at odds to yours ... but that is OK
  12. Joseph I take your point ... the're likely is immaterial in the sense of magnetic and electric fields, gravitational warping of space, particles described as fields, etc. In my experience though many people when reaching for the immaterial are referring to things like love, compassion, empathy and their anti-immaterial hate fear disgust. For me this kind of immaterial is written in the substrate you describe. But then we don't want to go too far down this road for fear of being accused with pejoratives like scientism.
  13. In my opinion unless we can bring some evidence to the table for the immaterial we should dismiss that as woo. Of course at this point we will get into a debate that the mind is immaterial, we may go off in really poor radio analogies. When we say immaterial we are referring to a concept that some of us have trouble in seeing the substrate it is written in.
  14. Yes ... and remember it applies to yours as much as mine. So how do we adjudicate between our various belief systems (or more neutrally the various beliefs that are out there). And this goes back to my comment about having intuitions or throwing chicken bones; we need a reliable method and I accept there is no absolutely reliable method. It just that evaluating our hypotheses by observation and analysis is a better [more accurate] method than just asserting some truth. At least in my perspective. That is why I suggest we look at scientism over centuries if not millennia Yes global warming is very complicated people have dedicated their careers to studying it. So having some Nobel Laureate in the latter stages of career as a reference just does not cut it for me. It is like Linus Pauling advocating for large doses of vitamin C; as brilliant a person he was in this case he was out of his depth and not evidence based. Yes scientists are human too. The problem with spiritualty is, ask a half dozen people what spiritualty is you will get half a dozen different answers. I might think of myself as spiritual in certain respects but it will be very different from that of an evangelical Christian and likely very different from the members of this forum. Even in The God Delusion by Dawkins, and many of his books for that matter, you can find accepting words of some kinds of spirituality, particularly of the Carl Sagan variety. The little bits I have seen of Sagan's Cosmos I found immensely spiritual. A little bit camp but brilliant in my mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGK84Poeynk
  15. I listened to the video and there is nothing there I had not heard before. Well based on glacier loss, the greening (again) of Greenland, loss of sheet ice in Antarcticand Artic (North West Passage) carbonation of the oceans etc Global Warming is definitely occurring. Now the question becomes to what degree has civilization contributed to this warming. Things to bear in mind ... our planet (life) is in a thermodynamically unstable state or far from equilibrium (the bad news), but good news is it is in a quasi steady state where the energy balances balance ... at least roughly. So we could ask ourselves what are the sources of energy fluctuations? The sun is the big one: So here we have data up to 2005 ... not a big variation. Of course over geological time our position in the galaxy and precession of the Earth's tilt etc can have a dramatic effect on global temperatures. But of course this is irrelevant to our current situation. A lack of volcanic activity can also have a big effect as can cleaning up pollution. But the question we should asking is: what effect will a small temperature rise have on our biological system that is far from chemical equilibrium? We can see a positive benefit ie an increase in growth rates consuming CO2 from the atmosphere but on the negative side we will also an increase in decay rates releasing the same recently sequestered carbon and then the previously stored carbon near the surface. Which one is quicker? I don't know. I did not hear your Nobel Laureate address this problem. As I mentioned the oceans are being carbonated ... acidified. This will prevent calcium carbonate forming life from growing shells. They will dissolve as quickly as they are formed at least in the worst case. Regarding being part of the natural cycle ... philosophically I agree with this wholeheartedly, mankind is part of nature and there is nothing that we do that is supernatural or unnatural. We are stardust after all and eventually we will become stars again. And as for manipulating data: An alternative view. http://www.factcheck.org/2015/02/nothing-false-about-temperature-data/ ps forgot to mention the increased release of methane hydrate as the oceans warm a little. Another greenhouse gas ... we don't have a good sense of what the risk is ... but it is not zero.
  16. Not sure what you mean by cancer and vaccines Are you suggesting there is some compelling evidence against global warming?
  17. We can catch scientists saying some piece of corroborating evidence is proof. For me: sad but understandable. But we have the other side of the general public who assert some really strange things without any corroborating evidence. Then use science's missteps or the fact that it does not prove anything, to promote any old junk and then be up in arms or plead special causes when people examine the actual evidence for the claim. If we have a claim regardless how it has come to pass: whether scientific, intuitive, Biblical analysis, throwing chicken bones, there is no better method to examine the validity of the claim than observation and analysis of the data obtained. Nevertheless,
  18. I agree the pharmaceutical industry has problems. Ben Goldacre's book Bad Pharma catalogues in detail the missteps. But as a whole I trust the medical industry (and note I say industry) with my health way more than I would say prayer or any god. Regarding scientism this word is often used as a pejorative as you well know ... particularly among people of "religion" or perhaps with an anti-science bias. Now I can't tell whether you meant it this way, but I suspect you probably were well aware of its impact on the casual reader on this forum. But before I summarize what scientism means to me, I'll give my interpretation of Joseph Campbell's purposes of myth/religion; this is in my words and goes by my acronym assp awe - religion/myth gives humankind a sense of awe of the world/universe we live in. science - religion/myth was the main method of divining the way the universe ticks, of course this was formalized with natural philosophy and of course science as we know it today. society - religion/myth provided and still does to some extent guidelines as to how people within communities might go about their business. psyche - religion/myth provides an understanding of how we as individuals flow from dust to dust and ashes to ashes. Gives us and understanding of how to transition through the various stages of life. Note - that these days science is in a position to provide at least some input to all of these aspects. Scientism (for me) Generally does not assume things without evidence ... and if it does it is explicit in its assumptions. Does use reductionism (but then we all do to some degree), It does not think everything can be explained from quantum phenomena. Scientism uses the appropriate level of reductionism for its explanations. Science is a process (and so is scientism). It does understand that The Truth is evasive, and it is epitomized by George EP Box's quote, All models are wrong, but some are useful. These models are tested to destruction, they are tested against the real world not some imagined one. Just some thoughts
  19. In the last day a post about science hit a nerve ... because it reflects a lot of nonsense that passes as erudite wisdom in some circles. "science in the modern world has become thoroughly corrupted" This is "thorough" nonsense. Now I am not saying there are certain aspects that cannot be criticized: Way science is funded is suspect ... in that there has to be a purpose (or at least a perceived purpose) rather than just curiosity and that there has to be hope of being published. Which in of itself is not a bad thing but certainly skews direction. Science medicine is particularly susceptible to a publication bias. But there is a tremendous pressure from the public at large for the applied biochemistry, biomechanics, medical instrumentation etc. It is the public themselves that are doing the corrupting however innocently. True science (per Karl Popper, a statistical exploration not of truth but of what is the least false) is unfortunately just a remnant of the Rationalist's ideal. It has been replaced largely by Scientism, an absurd modern theology where scientists are immune from human weakness. As much as I agree with Popper there are other aspects. Here the author the statement tries to promote a continued misconception of what science is. Now scientists may fall for believing they striving for truth or even have found The Truth®, in practice they are striving to get closer to the truth by whittling away the false. So the author here confounds science with scientist. The author does not appear to understand science is a process that is measured in millennia and not in a few catchy phrases. I have absolutely no problem with scientism. Also scientists as a whole (not necessarily as individuals) are receptive of criticism of the current issues facing science. I would strongly recommend Sean Carroll's The Big Picture Science grew out of theology Perhaps outgrew theology is more of an apt statement.
  20. I can't see why not. Can you?
  21. That could very well be me.
  22. It would appear Hillary could turned into a divine vessel as easily as Trump. So there we have it, it does not matter who we vote for ... god will (or not) fill that person with divinity. But yet we seem to have to place our bets on someone now. The flotsam of the media circus that passes politics in the US has not washed up anything about Stein and the Green Party on popular Canadian news.
  23. To whom? Malcolm X, is not undeniably obvious to me.
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