i just watched this documentary tonight and enjoyed it.
it's amazing to me the number of gun-related murders in the us... over 11,000 in one year.
i don't remember the exact figure, but canada, japan, and germany combined had less than 500 gun-related murders.
Moore's conclusions don't have to be 100% accurate for the data he uncovers to be frightening.
And while you have to feel sorry for Charlie Heston...it's still a ballsy move by Moore.
I don't think he really draws strong conclusions... except that the US is different in the gun-violence category and no one knows exactly why.
who is willing to harm another person in order to get what they want?
Hey, Frank, kiss it :)
We all know people who are self-centered enough to cause emotional pain just to have their way. Who doesn't know someone like that?
within a few weeks i leased a condo on the banks of the willamette river just out side the city of portland.
as she got into her car she looked at me funny again, laughed and just shook her head.. .
i told him that if i said i was sorry, i knew that is what they wanted to hear but it was not the truth.
Rock on, Dave. Great installment yet again!
Needs a bit of proofreading for typos that spellcheck doesn't catch - FYI - doesn't detract from the impact of your wonderful storytelling in the slightest.
who is willing to harm another person in order to get what they want?
Are you referring to physical harm? Or emotional harm?
hi guys & gals
ive been watching the forum for a few weeks and think its about time i joined and jumped in with both feet.
faint heart.." and all that!
more welcomes from the NW - hiya, Gigs.
many ancients including confucious and lao tzu took opposing views about this subject and their arguments are fascinating to read.
their arguments are nearly 2,500 years old.
the greeks also lively debated this question.. of course, as dubs (and in fact, in most christian faiths) we were taught that man was born inherently evil, and the quest is to overcome that and work towards the good.
OK, Dawg, still not clear on which of those you were saying was the Bible view...but:
"It's the "tendency" to be either good or not good from birth that I'm interested in debating."
This is from the original post - and I'm still not clear on your position on it, I'm afraid - although you brought up a parallel question, I don't get your response to this one yet.
.
do you believe in free will?and if you do can you explain how it works?.
i can't see how free will could work.our motivation for doing things good or bad seems to come from a mixture of genes and enviroment, and through a long and complicted process cause us to perform all the actions we experience in life.when we feel a prompting to do something ,eat sleep have sex etc, this is accomplished by our body using chemicals in our bodies to give us a feeling that we then act upon.the degree to which these chemicals prompt us is related to genetic makeup and environment.. so some people have a bigger desire to eat than others because they lack the chemical stimulation that tells them to stop eating.or some will eat less (often when ill) because the chemicals that prompt you to eat are lacking.in normal life lots of over factors will be involved to like say an important phonecall at lunch time .if your brain feels the information from that call is important enough it will send out different chemicals that will cause you to attend to that situation first if serious enought.. knowledge can modify how our bodies react to certain situations, for example a child may see an icecream van and run into the road because his body has yet to learn of the danger of running into a road.when taught how foolish this by a nasty experience or hopefully , taught about the dangers by its parents, then the body will send out a meesage to look at the road first.. our bodies tell us which ideas are good and bad according to the information it holds and we react accordingly.we can fight desires but the will to do so is caused by other desires which are prompted by the body.. to have true free will neither our genes or enviroment could effect what we decide to do.. we have to be able to do things irespective of what promting we recive from our bodies or what information we have learnt and has thus modified our bodies response.. maybe there are but i can not think of any situation where or actions or reactions can not be explianed by genes mixed with environment (often in a very complicated way).nor can i understand how free will could work,unless free will is just a random action which could not be free will in the true sense.. if there is no free will then if there were a god and we are judged on what we do then this is entirely unfair as we really have little say in what we do in life.
Wow, Dan, you've gone more philosophically materialist than me at my most extreme after I left.
So we are talking about a philosophical question - what is consciousness? Dan posits that this question dictates the answer to the free will question, and he may be right.
Dan seems to think (please check me, Dan) that life is a mechanistic process that can be likened to a physics problem, like balls on a pool table, and if you know the initial states and you know the properties of the balls and you control the vector (momentum + direction) of a new ball on the table, you can predict where all the balls end up. In this model, consciousness and "self" are side effects - noise in the neurons.
A field that might affect your outlook here, Dan, is chaos theory. It still keeps the conversation very clinical and, in my mind, "two-dimensional", but it will go into detail on unpredictable scientific events. I would also suggest Ken Wilber's A Brief History of Everything (or, if you're a big reader, the full-length version: Sex, Ecology, Spirituality.
So, Dan, without addressing your question directly, I'm curious - do you live your life as if you have no free will?
many ancients including confucious and lao tzu took opposing views about this subject and their arguments are fascinating to read.
their arguments are nearly 2,500 years old.
the greeks also lively debated this question.. of course, as dubs (and in fact, in most christian faiths) we were taught that man was born inherently evil, and the quest is to overcome that and work towards the good.
Helps? I got so lost reading that, afterwards I had to dribble on my chin to figure out which way was up!
"Man does evil, because he is evil! He is not evil, because he does evil. This is the historic Christian view taught in the bible."
Huh? I don't get it...
i'm interested to know which category we are in.
i am fading fast and no longer reporting time or going to meetings.
Thanks, lisa.
But what about "and you'll have to eat your lunch all by yourself"?
this is especially for farkel, whose good name has been stolen but who has not been robbed of the affection so very many of us have for him.. recently we've been treated to philosophy that has been a bit opaque to many.
i thought i'd expose you to the german philosopher johann wolfgang von goethe (sounds somewhat like gert.uh).
he really makes sense most times, once in awhile i think him out to lunch.
Nice post, maximus.
COMF, I'd rather live life as if I don't have limits and be wrong, than act as if I do and be right.
Now, I know this statement could be taken to the level of the ridiculous, and that's not what I mean. But far, far too often, we THINK we know our limits, and we are wrong. Too often, we decide that we're not capable of things that we see others doing - and if they can do it, usually we can too.
Someone once asked Henry Ford how to be more successful, and he replied, "Double your failure rate".
