h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Fathom

I think the word 'also' refers just to those who look after the household anyway, and decide 'also' to work part-time, i.e. 'with an appropriate work schedule'. I would say the key idea is not 'also', but rather policies oriented towards facilitating the above.

Hi Andrew,

I don't doubt that but there's a subtle insinuation that women cannot adopt the father's traditional role of working without looking after the household. Role-reversal is not an option.

F

Hi Fathom

I don't think there's any 'cannot' anywhere. It's not an uncommon situation, a woman looking after the household. The letter is only addressing what happens and looking at ways of solving problems that arise. Certainly role reversal *is* an option.

I wonder whether we count 'energy' as being material. OK, it can be converted into mass, but even so. Then how about information? It seem that it can be transmitted faster than light. Consider quantum entanglement. Recent experimental demo I think.

We have to be prepared to think outside the box. Most of the universe is plasma, after all. Our commonplace states of things aren't all there is.

toxx

Hi all, hope you don't mind me throwing in my thoughts. In reference to the comment on information, something to bear in mind is that ultimately information does exist as something material, whether its paper and ink, electronic signals, or even the human brain structure.

Hi, NSPA. Great to have you aboard. So how material is information when it is travelling faster than light from one subatomic particle to another? It can't have mass 'cos of Einstein's relativistic problem - the mass would become infinite. Have you read about quantum entanglement/computing?

UWE? Is that Plymouth?

toxx

Quantum entanglement is a bit mysterious but I think the jury is still out on that one. Roger Penrose has recently suggested that wave-particle duality is an illusion and that 'particles' in the way we think about them don't really exist. If he's right then quantum entanglement may not occur in the way we think it does and the experimental evidence may have another explanation.

A photon has no mass and travels, by definition, at the speed of light. It is nonetheless material and the energy it contains represents a mass. Decaying nuclei can lose mass in the form of gamma ray photons even though those photons have no mass themselves. Energy is very much a part of our universe and is very definitely material.

Most of our universe may well be plasma but that doesn't alter my argument; if god is made of anything then where did the stuff come from? I don't mean just anything we are familiar with but anything at all. If god is made of nothing then how does something made of nothing become omnipotent and omniscient? Where does he store the information generated by his omniscience? Where does he store the energy required for his omipotnence and how does he control it? If god experiences a time dimension then why doesn't it suffer the same infinity problem as our time dimension? If god himself is infinite then why doesn't he encounter the same logical difficulty that we do with infinities - that you can have theoretical/imaginary infinities but not real ones? If not then what are the boundaries?

F


F

What happened to the page width? Was it something I did?

Put it down to an act of god...

F

Hi RDO
<>

I noticed your trenchant response to Adelaide's post. I'm not sure that it was aimed at the right person, as your arguments seem to be very specifically aimed at Catholics.

It's true that women cannot become Catholic priests, bishops, etc. On the other hand there is nothing else closed to women; they can govern nations, for instance, and have done so for centuries, including places where the Church could conceivably have objected had it really viewed women as second-class citizens.

As for those passages in the Old Testament, it was implied earlier that Catholics follow it (or ought to) in all its details; but this line of reasoning completely ignores the New Testament, the history books, and much else. This is trivial, really, and I suppose you knew that anyway.

Are you guys still at?
What seems to be the consensus?
Is it fact or fiction?
Because you guys could be talking about string theory for all I know.

Fathom


As I've said, God is immaterial and eternal in one of its senses. This has to be the case for whatever caused/created the material world. The only alternative is to suppose (impossibly) that the material world has always existed.

There is no physics of the immaterial. The boundaries of the material world and those of science are the same. Your questions suggest that you are trying to eff the ineffable. There's no point in trying to assimilate God to the rules of the material world.

The best we can do is to attempt to figure out what kind of thing He is. He is not infinite, having no size. For me he is not infinite in time, being timeless.



Any place and way He bloody well likes. That's what being omnipotent is all about.

toxx

Re the epistle of the grand inquisitor

The problem with this letter and the dogmatic position of the christian church as a whole is that the asumption is that men will not, nor prehaps should take on the role of homemaker and carer, and that if women want to do other things somehow they will have to fit in being a homemaker as well.

Recent Psychological studies have shown interesting differences in the ways male and female brains function, i.e women are generaly better at multitasking. It strikes me that in the pre-agricultural pre-industrial world that multitasking would have represented a strong survival trait. There is also good evidence that multi tasking is not something inherently female, there are a minority of men who are able to match women in this skill. The Jury is still out but it seems that the main similarity between men with the skill and women with the skill is their upbringing rathr than any inbuilt wiring.

There is also good evidence that up until the 2nd millenia BC the role of women in the social order in europe was at least equivalent to that of men, if not superior. The rise of helenic culture is regarded by many historians as the end of the era of homage paid to mother goddesses, the Greeks themselves replaced her with the Father God in the form of Zeus. I am currently of the opinion that aspects of the 'new covenant' of Jesus was a reaction to this, and he identifed women as able to become equal to men.

To cut a long story Short, the supression of the agenda from the gospels of Thomas and Mary Magdalane of 'making women Men' by the roman off shoot of the original Jerusalem church. Fitted in with the Helenic suppression of the mother goddess by Greek and Roman society and has been going on ever since. This has had the net result of making Men on the whole fundamentaly lazy, Personaly I do not think a hard day at work with Just one thing to think about, matches the hard day at home with three children and all the other things to think about. I find it very frustrating to hear men grumbling that they don't want to change a nappy because they have had a hard day, or that it feels too much like hard work to cook a meal when they come in from work.

The answer to this is not to say womens work in the home should be valued, but that it should be shared. Men should feel as able to stay at home with their children, cooking the meals and making beds ect ect as much as women should.

There is no doubt that the work in question should be valued, but if it is to be valued it should also be shared. The entire premise of the inquisitors letter is that it should be a womans job, and no matter what the fine sentiments and 'permissions' which are overlaid on this the underlying premise remains the same. It is that fact which I find so offensive. I am only consoled by the spectacle of the RC Church and its cardinals and inquisitor squirming on the hook as they struggle frantically to reconcile their assertion of the literal truth of the bible with a modern world 2000 years removed from the lives experiences and assumptions of the people who wrote the new testament.

Many religious texts have valuable truths in them, the NT is no less so, BUT (and its a big but) those truths must be viewed through the lense of history not the other way round as the Church appears to insist on doing. The texts obscure the truth of history: History however illuminates the truth of the texts.

Oh and re the Pope being allways wrong,

This seems to me a natural consequence of the assertion of Papal infallibility, any individual who claims to allways right must by definition allways be wrong since the first proposition is an expression of at the very least omniscience if not omnipotence and since this brings infinity into the equation, and the human mind is limited and not infinite, it is therefore impossible for the claim of infallibility to be true, therefore the arrogance of the claim leads to the necessity that all pronouncements by said individual being in question, and can only ever be accepted as truthful when they happen to coincide with the pronouncements of a more reliable and less arrogant source.

Being right by virtue of coincidence would not seem to be a viable position for any 'authority' to work from.



Athena Toxxin The logical formulations you have been wrestling with have an interesting assumption behind them, i.e. that a universaly cnsistant logical framework can be devised and understood. I would like to throw some additional connundrums into the mix.

Might there be a way to acknowledge through logic that the context of the development of argument and proposition takes place in a fundamentaly chaotic environment which is massively sensitive to initial conditions. As such the logical premises constructed can only tenuously apply to the context in which they are drawn up and whilst the pattern they represent might well emerge in another time and/or place there is only limited possibilitys of predicting this emergence.

I would use in example the umbrella:

Statement

1) It is raining outside, I go out carrying an umbrella

Therefore

2)If I go outside carrying an umbrella it must be raining.

The two don't follow and this difficulty arrises because of the sensitivity to initial conditions.

In this context the logic allows multiple results from the logical equation

Statement 2) could be rephrased as: If I go outside carrying an umbrella, on past experience it may well be raining, but a different pattern may emerge.

I know that this does not necissarily fit with the rules of the development of a Logical argument but it does strike me that many texts on Logic e.g. the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, were written many years ago now and (1921) and whether the more modern ideas of Barthes or Foucault who discuss human systems in terms that physiscists such as Schrodinger might have recognised have themselves been superceded.

One difficulty that I have with Logic as you frame it is that in a similar way to Physics at attempts to distill 'Laws' of nature out of argument. I am currently wondering if the so called 'laws' of physics are any such thing, it seems to me the assertion that at the moment of the 'big Bang' that the 'laws' of physics break down, implies that these 'Laws' are in fact rules of thumb which apply in some circumstances but not in others. In relation to objects/entities which can only be observed throught the social world whether or not they were created by that world, the rules which applie can only be more uncertain, therefore it is next to impossible to quantify 'God' in any meaningful sense.

All that can be said is that God is = to X at this moment in this place for me as an individual, in the next moment or another place and for different people this will be FUNDAMENTALY different. Beyond that the argument recedes into infinite regression.



Oh and Occams Razor, A concept I am ambivalent about it seems to me that there may well be times when the comlex explanation holds more water than the simple one.

"Therefore,"If I put sugar and sewage in my tea, it will taste better." That can be proved logically to be a correct deduction."

how, toxx? It seems to me you've got an undistributed middle in there.

SD



That is not only invalid in context, but is the logical error of 'affirming the consequent'. All you are entitled to say is: "If I don't go out carrying an umbrella, it isn't raining."!

The 'laws' of nature are human abstractions based on our observations.

Occam's Razor is a criterion of last resort given two+ hypotheses that are equally supported by the evidence.

toxx

"In the New Testament, I can think of *one* woman who could be called "evil", and her husband is in it with her! (Ananias and Sapphira...)"

if one was dealing with personalities, I'd agree. However, there are Paul's generics about :
(1) the wives of deacons must not be malicious talkers (1 Tim 3:11)
(2) the widow who lives for pleasure is dead even while she lives (1 Tim 5:6)
(3) younger widows get into the habit of being idle (1 Tim 5:13)
(4) women should remain silent in church (1Cor 14:34)
(5) women should be submissive and will be kept safe only through holiness (1 Tim 2:11-15)

This shows women as a lower order. Indeed, the last text cited makes that explicit.

HS. The 'undistributed middle' applies to syllogisms, fine. My example is a conditional in the first-order propositional calculus.

I won't go on about the difference, but suppose 'If p, then q', you surely can conclude 'If p&r, then q' and also 'If ~q, then ~p. What you can't conclude is 'If p, then q&s' or 'If ~p, then ~q'!

~ is the logical NOT.

toxx

hi Andrew,

<> (RDO to Della)

<> (Andrew to RDO)

I'd say it was aimed at the right person. RDO has known Della and the rest of us for quite awhile now.

Meanwhile, I am sure it will come as a huge comfort and relief to all those women, who are told by the Catholic church that they have to take care of their households and husbands first and foremost, that they are actually also allowed by their church to govern nations.

az

StrontiumDog

I think you're being a bit unfair to the Greeks there
The Eygptians, Babylonians etc all had male gods at the head of the pantheon
I think it was a case of as societies developed and came into conflict a warrior caste came into being and as it came to dominate society gods in its image became more important

Its interesting how so much of the anti-women message in Christianity seems to originate with Paul. Then again without Paul there probably wouldn't have been any Christianity since Jesus seems to have seen his mission as having been to the Jews.

"I was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel and to them alone" Matthew 15:24

"I have come not to abolish [the Law and the Prophets] but to complete them" Matthew 5:17

<>

Maybe it's because what you see isn't that apparent to me... No, I am not that bothered about the Old Testament, simply because we have the new one. That makes a major difference!
In my view, the word 'sect' is derogatory - the preferred term is denomination...

<<(1) the wives of deacons must not be malicious talkers (1 Tim 3:11)>>
Doesn't it go without saying that that applies to the deacons as well?

How about Galatians 3:28?
"Galatians 3
28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
(That is the verse a woman I knew in the Salvatian Army used when challenged about her preaching.)
And... some more verses about women from the NT.
"Some of the Jews were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a large number of God-fearing Greeks and not a few prominent women. Acts 17:3-5)"
"Romans 16.12 those women who work hard in the Lord"
"Phil 4.3 help these women who have contended at my side in the cause of the gospel,"
There are many others, all showing women as simply ordinary people - just as men are. Nothing odd or oppressive at all.