🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sat, 5 Jul 2008 02:30:25 +0100, "Smiler" <Smiler@Joe.King.com> wrote
in alt.atheism:

>
>"The Natural Philosopher" <a@b.c> wrote in message 
>news:1215166412.23766.2@proxy01.news.clara.net...
>> rbwinn wrote:
>>> On Jul 3, 6:27 pm, hhyaps...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>> On Jul 3, 7:38 pm, rbwinn <rbwi...@juno.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> On Jul 3, 4:08?am, The Natural Philosopher <a...@b.c> wrote:
>>>>>> Steve O wrote:
>>>>>>> "BuddyThunder" <nos...@paradise.net.nz> wrote in message
>>>>>>> news:486c4bcc$1@clear.net.nz...
>>>>>>>> rbwinn wrote:
>>>>>>>>> God has eternal life, something atheists do not believe in and do 
>>>>>>>>> not
>>>>>>>>> want. ?The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints teaches that
>>>>>>>>> members will inherit all that the Father hath if they are faithful,
>>>>>>>>> which means that members of the church will also inherit eternal
>>>>>>>>> life. ?So members of the church can become like God, something that
>>>>>>>>> was commanded also in the New Testament. ? Be ye therefore perfect,
>>>>>>>>> even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect. ?So there is
>>>>>>>>> nothing new in any of these doctrines. ?They were taught by Jesus
>>>>>>>>> Christ in his lifetime.
>>>>>>>> We would probably want it if it could be shown to be anything other
>>>>>>>> than wishful thinking.
>>>>>>> I wouldn't want it at all.
>>>>>>> What the hell are going to do on your
>>>>>>> 1000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00�?0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,�0?00,000,000,000,000th
>>>>>>> day in eternity that you haven't already done a million times 
>>>>>>> already?
>>>>>>> Good grief, you'd be bored shitless, if not driven insane by the 
>>>>>>> sheer,
>>>>>>> mind-numbing boredom.
>>>>>> Ah, but its eternity. It's timeless.
>>>>>> Actually this stuff all makes perfect sense to me, but not in the
>>>>>> context of a supernatural being..unless you want to call the Universe 
>>>>>> such.
>>>>>> The original philosophers and shamans who tried to describe the world
>>>>>> were not stupid: they just lacked the vocabulary.
>>>>>> For stupidity, you have to come down past the political religions like
>>>>>> Christianity, to the mere followers like our Robbo, who hasn't really
>>>>>> got a clue about the philosophy and mysticism that underlies the 
>>>>>> belief
>>>>>> set and worldview he so desperately clings to.
>>>>>> Religious texts are well worthy of study as long as you throw away the
>>>>>> interpretations of *churches*.
>>>>>> I've skimmed most of the worlds esoteric knowledge base..I eschewed
>>>>>> Christianity because it was so blatantly stupid, until last. Then I
>>>>>> found that it had much in common with other world religions: There is 
>>>>>> in
>>>>>> all a basic structure that pertains to something. Its just that
>>>>>> Christianity, and Islam, have both overlaid it with a huge amount of
>>>>>> utter rubbish that they insist is the pure literal truth.
>>>>>> You will get a far more interesting slant on religion from an atheist:
>>>>>> who may have actually stuidied the subject dispassionately: with a
>>>>>> Christian or Muslim (excluding the Dervish movement) its a package 
>>>>>> deal,
>>>>>> by and large, Buy it or not. There is no room for understanding: Just 
>>>>>> FAITH.
>>>>>> But Faith is just a small tool on one step of a ladder of 
>>>>>> understanding.
>>>>>> Not the be all and end all of it.
>>>>>> Its like science, where people want to be told 'whatever is the case'
>>>>>> (Wittgenstein). The truth is no one knows. We are also operating in
>>>>>> ultimate ignorance, using a set of rules and tools that produce 
>>>>>> results,
>>>>>> without any real confirmation that those rules and tools have any real
>>>>>> correlation with the underlying reality (if indeed there is such) of 
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> universe.
>>>>>> It gets worse. Largely reality is *what you think it is* because so 
>>>>>> much
>>>>>> of it is interpreted into your worldview and belief system: enough so
>>>>>> that an Epiphany CAN totally change someones subjective life: that
>>>>>> little trick is traded on by every priest there ever has been..to
>>>>>> demonstrate the reality of their particular brand of snake oil.
>>>>>> I can levitate certain objects. Sounds impressive, and so it would be 
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> a stone age man. You would instantly spot the remote control devices 
>>>>>> in
>>>>>> my hand...;-) HOWEVER I could in principle use that as the basis of a
>>>>>> system to impress hunter gatherers that I had direct access to 
>>>>>> whatever
>>>>>> power they believed existed already, and thereby create a religion and
>>>>>> my own position in it.
>>>>>> Its been done so many times..
>>>>>> Don't throw out babies with bathwater: Religious material has matter 
>>>>>> of
>>>>>> interest. Just bypass the interpretations of the Faithful, and make up
>>>>>> your own mind.
>>>>>> Eternity is a state of mind in which the faculty to organise things in
>>>>>> an event stream is not operating. You can by one or more of various
>>>>>> approaches experience this yourself. To the practitioner this leads to 
>>>>>> a
>>>>>> possible conclusions that time itself is a anthropocentric issue: it 
>>>>>> is
>>>>>> not an absolute. Remove life, and you remove time. Ergo after death
>>>>>> there is eternity. ?In a sense.
>>>>>> Or to say it in another way, the totality of the experience of life 
>>>>>> can
>>>>>> be transformed via something akin to ?Fourier transform, in which the
>>>>>> time element is transmuted into a position in some other dimension
>>>>>> somewhat like 'frequency' or 'colour'. .. a co-ordinate system that
>>>>>> encapsulates the totality of a lifetime as a single pattern in which 
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> time element is not present in terms of linear progression of events.
>>>>>> We don't normally operate in that mode: but many people will assure 
>>>>>> you
>>>>>> that we CAN. "my whole life passed before my eyes in an instant" says
>>>>>> the drowning man..its from experiences such as this that the concepts 
>>>>>> of
>>>>>> the old shamans were born, transmuted and corrupted by years of
>>>>>> translation and repetition into the utter garbage you find in the 
>>>>>> Bible.- Hide quoted text -
>>>>>> - Show quoted text -
>>>>> I think that Jesus Christ would be the best one to explain your idea
>>>>> to.
>>>>> Robert B. Winn
>>>> Whenever you get stuck in the mud, you want Jesus to come.
>>>> But your Jesus is your god, surely you are the one to drag him here to
>>>> listen....
>>>> Can you?- Hide quoted text -
>>>>
>>>> - Show quoted text -
>>>
>>> No, we Christians will just wait until he returns the second time.
>>> That was what we were told to do.
>>
>> S'all right Ronbbo, I had him on the spiritual hotline, and he is gonna 
>> wait till all the churches are dust and ashes, and come and save the meek 
>> instead.
>>
>No, no. You misheard....It was 'the GREEKS shall inherit the Earth' :-)

The geeks will just make it work.

>Blessed are the cheesemakers.
>
>Smiler,
>The godless one
>a.a.# 2279 
>