read the bible daily?
honestly do you?
or is it collecting dust on a table or shelf somewhere?
can you leave something which never was?
once I discovered the probability that Jehovah was never more than my own sub consciousness, I could not leave what never existed.
as to the bible, I have since relegated it the level of cultural mythology and find no desire to read it daily.
any religion that claims it is the only correct one is obviously wrong.
by it's arrogance it becomes mutually exclusive of any other religion.
when one steps back they can see that the contradiction of one religion over the others is a proof that they all must be wrong.
humans are ignorant, no if ands nor butts about it.... however we want to believe we are knowledgeable and many spend a great deal of time trying to be knowledgeble sounding.... and some seem to be very knowledgeable and more importantly they are CONfident about that they say and people want to be CONfident too...so they gravitate to those who are.... there are always those who seem like natural born leaders and always have people fawning[?] all over them.... the Gorilla Alpha Male leader of the pack mentality it not out of our gene pool as far as many would have us believe.
throughout history there have been many what we now call bi-polar people who while in the manic phase of their disease become super CONfident, sometimes having very vivid hallucinations as well....they become magnets which people are either drawn to or repelled by, there is seldom anything in between with these....and they cause revolutions and sometimes tragedies...often both.
An example I recall was a Jew in 1666 who in his manic phase started speaking very religious things which drew quite a following thinking he was their long awaited messiah... his followers founded the reformed judhaism movement still existant today.
how many crazy people have altered the world? who knows, some for good some for harm but mostly because people want to believe that someone knows what is going on so they can have the hope that one day they will know what is going on too.
many say, when you die, then you will know!
ha!
I doubt it.
.
its a yahoo free site so it cant take a lot of traffic.
thoughts?
....................at the moment lifes great, i feel really happy for the first time in a long time, im in a beautiful area, with fantastic views, weve just bought a beautiful house and the relief of not being in the borg anymore, well i dont think things could be better.. but im quite nervous, why do i feel things will go wrong, im not talking about the material stuff, but somewhere deep down i feel in the end you have to pay when your happy.
i have always felt like this.
maybe i dont feel i quite deserve it, espacially when terrible things are happening to other ppl.
if you think of the universe as a zero sum game...for every happiness there is some suffering to acheive it.... if you dont want anything you dont need to suffer to get it...but if you want something you have to put some sort of effort and expectation and anticipation into it which causes some suffering, which is why buddhists recommend the middle path, staying between the extremes as much as possible to avoid the deep lows associated with the great highs.... as is often the case a very great high is very short lived and takes a lot of lows spread out to acheive it, and often feels like we were cheated.... like waiting in line for 2 hours for a 1 minute thrill ride at disney (^_^)
mankind has had a pretty good track record of tackling the problems of life on earth.
different folks have tried different strokes.
you might say that life has been the crucible for testing an idea as to efficacy and the legacy of any idea is how well it worked.. .
Here is an illustration of the brain's ability to "see" what is NOT there automatically.
we are dreamers
mankind has had a pretty good track record of tackling the problems of life on earth.
different folks have tried different strokes.
you might say that life has been the crucible for testing an idea as to efficacy and the legacy of any idea is how well it worked.. .
I am not about to start a new religion or waste time trying to convince others that these things happen. It is simply my experience. It does not in itself cause me to believe in a deity or fate or luck. How or why I had access to such detailed information is open to debate.
personally I dont believe the future exists as more than guess work....yet things like you described have happened to me as well.... I have only a few plausible beliefs that make sense to me now....but I am open to the possibility I may be completely wrong.
1. that what we are about to do has some sort of substance in a realm some call the astral plane and some are able to access that realm and see what is about to happen.... however that will not explain how you can know something that is not planned before it is planned...
2. that we are reading some sort of 4-dimensional book which is already written out and perhaps allows for us to alter the story to some degree, or not...
3. there are many possible world history lines and when we make choices we elminate some of them and open others and some can see down the line?
all my life I have tried to make sense of the world rationally much as terry has, but in the end, I find that just paying attention and keeping uncertainty and an open mind to work best
mankind has had a pretty good track record of tackling the problems of life on earth.
different folks have tried different strokes.
you might say that life has been the crucible for testing an idea as to efficacy and the legacy of any idea is how well it worked.. .
This is what happens to your mind when you read Fritjof Capra and the TAO OF PHYSICS!
no, actually you are wrong once again.
we all try to make sense of the only world we know, the one we experience and make beliefs about to try to explain it to ourselves
and when you have had some freaky experiences such as I have had, you will try to make sense of them too... until then, you can stay with what seems to work for you.
when I left JWs I returned to some of my agnostic roots and thought I had everything figured out to a degree where pure materialism could explain everything known to mankind... including hallucinations etc... .but then something or someone made something vanish right before my eyes and it turned up in another room... there was no indication of who or what this mystery force was. a few years later, this same invisible something or other grabbed the inside of my hands and forced me to fail a job interview which required typing, which lead to a job ten times better.... its stuff like this which is not testible by science as it happens rarely and uniquely and is not repeated ever that causes many of us who have had such experiences to know with a certainty as great as your own that something more than the material realm exists and any explanation of reality which ignores this is missing something... sure rational assessments of the experienced world work fine for most of the time and under most circumstances, but they are not the end all and be all.
there is also the past life regerssion which I underwent which had me experience something I had never learned about history and was able to verify as factual to my suprise.
finally the one aspect of this realm which eludes any explanation is consciousness itself-- brains boil down to data manipulators, computers made out of meat, chemicals and some small electrical charges dynamically changing structure with incoming data.... but like any computers they all come down to moving symbolic bits of data around a circuit and there is no explanation of what is actually conscious of the end result, the world we experience. no amount of ones or zeros can give the feeling of pain nor pleasure, nor any other perception that makes up the world we seem to share.... there is something fundamentally missing from the brain in this regard.... not only that, each neuron is isolated electrically from all others by a gap where only neural transmitter chemicals can pass making a unified overal experience seemingly impossible as there is no central location which can perceive enough data to make a unified world simulation that we often mistake for reality....or rightly view as a dream while we sleep.
so while there are many reasons we need to deal with the only world we know as we experience it, there are plenty of reasons to suspect that the world as we know it is only a mental invention which cannot tell us everything that is going on in the true reality which makes the world we know...this is where mystical experiences arise and cannot be ignored complete as they make profound impacts on us.
hard as it is to believe, our increasingly brain-dead government is seriously considering allowing sharia law to pass in cana-duh.
for those who aren't familiar with this islamic law, it's an "arbitration" that allows muslims the opportunity to settle disputes concerning family, property and other civil issues in a forum that considers their cases against the backdrop of the qur'an and muslim interpretation.
in other words, muslim women and children here in canada, a supposedly free country, will become shit under their husbands robes if he so chooses.
to be truly a free country the rights of religions to practice must exist, however the rights of individuals must also
exist at the same time....when a conflict between individual and religious rights arises, the individual must win.
so if a muslim arbitration allows the beating of a wife, her right not to be beaten must be first.
[unless of course she is kinky and wants to be (^_^)]
mankind has had a pretty good track record of tackling the problems of life on earth.
different folks have tried different strokes.
you might say that life has been the crucible for testing an idea as to efficacy and the legacy of any idea is how well it worked.. .
Science is rational because there is a measurable ratio between the claims and the testing and the data. Anybody anywhere can look at it and repeat the experiment. In fact, they MUST have repeatable results or it isn't considered science!
in some fantasy world this may be true, one of your own subjective invention perhaps? are you dreaming this is so or can you actually prove it? can you prove that other people actually exist and you are not dreaming everything you know, including their agreement with your dreamed tests?
objectivity is a myth that science was once based upon, but quantum physics has cast much of that mythology aside by showing we cant know more than we can measure and how we measure always interfers with the results... heisenberg demonstrated quite adequately that there are significant boundries to knowledge which no one under any circumstance can go beyond and to date no one has proven him wrong.... there are still bizzarre beliefs associated with quantum physics held by reputable scientists as they cannot yet find any other rational means of explaining the results of their tests....
yet and still all of this is based on the assumption that others actually exist and that what we perceive and measure in common bears any resemblance to reality....
if we are all sharing a matrix like dream the best we can do is to test what is in it, which may not resemble reality one bit.... a possibility, Terry, you consistanly ignore... yet your distain for such a possibility and rejection of it does not make it vanish...not can it...
and you are not being rational nor logical by whole sale rejection of a possibility simply because it does not fit your world view.
mankind has had a pretty good track record of tackling the problems of life on earth.
different folks have tried different strokes.
you might say that life has been the crucible for testing an idea as to efficacy and the legacy of any idea is how well it worked.. .
Fuzzy logic is essentially irrational and yet it is superior to traditional binary because it works faster in real time
and the reason it does so is because it works as we must....it gambles. Fuzzy logic does not wait around for a clear yes or no
answer as reality rarely gives such clean data.... it takes ranges of possibilities and looks for overlaps and then guesses.
and when all is said and done we do no different, no matter how sure we think we are, every move is a gamble to some degree
