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

Every think we hear, see, touch, smell and taste is a ilusition. Its all based on how your brain interperpts things/ For some people blue is green and vice versa.


Adib

Hmmmm. How would they know? How would you know, for that matter?

i don't think god is the kind of idea which can be subjected to the same proofs we apply to things like math. there's just no magic formula for god. to quote someone much wiser than myself, "god is not found at the end of a syllogism."

i think there's a whole element of faith and mystery involved in religion and the religious experience, christian or non-christian. as such our religious sense cannot be reduced to it's strictly psychological aspects.

that being said i take the stance of why not god? i've heard of stranger things.

I disagree completely. If you don't know what you mean by 'God' you don't know what you believe or deny. The evidence is there. God/electron, neither is visible, both can be inferred from the evidence. Point made at length further back in this thread.

Math
Take a look a current figures of death age in third world countries and tribes not up to modern techniques. this could give us a clue about life expectancy in our own middle ages.

do we actually now how old people used to live to thousands of years ago? we now that we used to think that 30 was an old age but developed methods of making us live longer, we can tell how old we used to live to by a)bones, we can use them to see how old the person(s) were/was but do we know if it was ever younger than 30?

oops, i forgot to put b

well here we r

b)historic records writtin by people of that era

Hi Hasselfree

If it were only that easy. Unfortunately our Third World countries are plagued by too many of the modern world's ills. Take Aids for instance which is scything its way through Africa. Malnutrition caused by centuries of colonialism ain't helping none either. Add to that the over-reliance on chemical fertilisers and the Antibiotic Effect (i.e. the elimination of natural population control through cycles of disease) and there is no way we can draw a comparison with the Middle Ages.

Comparisons with aboriginal/tribal populations is also problematical for these have been pinned into the margins of existence and their present state is no reflection of what it was before the coming of 'civilisation'.

Archaeological evidence now points to a pre-Roman Celtic population in the UK of about 20 million! This was maintained by a sophisiticated system of organic agriculture and a well-organised social system. Such a system cannot have flourished if the average age of death was 35.

Blessings,
Matholwch the Apostate /|\.

"Archaeological evidence now points to a pre-Roman Celtic population in the UK of about 20 million! This was maintained by a sophisiticated system of organic agriculture and a well-organised social system. Such a system cannot have flourished if the average age of death was 35."

Yes it can.
Since the average replacement rate was higher than it is today.

No contraception.
thirty five years is quite long enough to pass skills onto your sons and daughters, especially as there was no other diversions, like TV, books, computers and farming your food meant the difference between life and death.

I'm not particularly refering to death by plague, we have aids no doubt they had their contemporary illness's that wiped them out in a similar way. As we find cures we get new diseases.
but the aging of survival., look at the average Afghani woman at 35 and she is an 'old' woman, made so by the struggle merely to stay alive and I'm not only referring to war.
not receiving enough food or the right type of food from birth hastens the aging process.

Hi Hasselfree .

Ah, but why then does all the surviving documentary evidence from the ancient, 'dark' age and early medieval periods refer to the onset of old age being around sixty? If, as you propose, most people died in the thirties or forties and looked old by the time they were 35-ish, then this would be considered old, but it was not. Afghan women look old in their thirties because their country is in ruins and has been a more or less constant war for over 100 years. Malnutrition, no sanitation, a harsh environment and poor medical care has taken its toll on them.

Archaeological evidence from thousands of gravesites has shown that those adults that didn't die from war would, on average, died in their sixties or seventies (not too different from today if you take a mean across our population). What I was saying originally is that the myth of average death age being 35 comes from skewed figures as the statisticians included all the infant and child mortality into their calculations.

Global pandemics were incredibly rare, mostly because fewer people travelled far, and generally people's diet, health, immune systems and fitness were greater than ours. As I said earlier the only well-known pandemic was the Black Death and that was because a brand new disease strain was introduced that no-one had any resistance to.

A similar event occurred in Meso-America when the Conquistadors brought Small Pox to the New World. In Europe up to 15% of the population were carriers, yet most survived because of generations of immunicological evolution. In Mexico it killed two-thirds of the population in a year! Previously the Mexica had lived long and productive lives in a highly organised civilisation. Tenochlitan had a population of 1 million (making it, with Beijing, one of the two largest cities in the world). Examination of gravesites has revealed that, barring infant mortality, people who reached adulthood could look forward to living well into their sixties (a better situation than now exists in the slums and shanties of modern day Mexico City, unfortunately).

Blessings,
Matholwch the Apostate /|\.

Thats what happens if you don't take you black seed oil.

Adib

Hi there iffy. Written records haven't been around all that long, but it's easier to age the remains of younger ones. Things like wisdom teeth are still appearing into the thirties. Even so, I tend to agree with a lot of the folks writing here: a lot of kids died young and the rest probably survived for a decent time. No doubt this is easily checked. Good eras and bad (ice ages) would probably have made quite a difference in their times. I think worsening weather finished off the population of Greenland at one time. They'd apparently have been OK if they'd switched from farming to fishing when the crops failed!

I am a Christian ( you know, the name kind of gives it away), and I don't think that God is going to (lovingly) throw you into hell because you don't belive in Him.

It is much more complicated than that, and still much simpler. (It's a Zen kind of thing!)

Hi Father Brendan .

And welcome to the debate!

I think that you will find that there are quite few Christians here that would agree with you. It must also be said that there are one or two who will not. My friend Justin for one, who is positive that I (as a practicing druid) am headed for the Lake of Fire, along with all those who never even heard the Word of God (including the babies which I alluded to earlier).

I am afraid that my Apostate status is a one way ticket to Hell in his eyes. But never mind there are so many other more pleasant things to talk about .

Obviously we do not expect you to trawl through the last 4500 posts so is there any aspect of the divine or rational approach to this debate you want to try your hand at?

Blessings,
Matholwch the Apostate /|\.

mwpulley
good job of stating my position, also. I am also encouraged by a posting further on by father Brenden, (a little more wiggle room in the catholic church than the one I was raised in) where we free up god to do whatever he thinks is right rather than what we think is right

has anyone here read "the physics of immortality" by dr. frank j. tippler?

it's pretty interesting stuff. not being a quantum cosmologist myself i had trouble keeping up with the math but the idea behind it, that is, the relationship between the new physics and theology, was really interesting.

and thanks diversity, i was beginning to think nobody was listening.

This stuff moves on way too fast! I'm replying to toxxin, posting 4479.

I asked can anyone tell fact from fiction at a complex level of entity, such as personality. Toxxin says "Truth = to say of what is, that it is; and to say of what is not, that it is not. My personality IS. No problem there except exactly what the word 'personality' means."

Trouble with "is" . . . to say that something is, says nothing about it. Nobody's any the wiser.

Do numbers exist? Negative numbers? Irrational numbers? Imaginary numbers? All you can say is "yes they have their uses" or "I can't see any use for that" but it makes no difference to anything whether they have something called reality or not.

Sure thing, you have your personality. No problem, except what is it? Fact or fiction?

If it's something you create, protect, develop, project . . . so is my novel.

Still waiting for an answer.

It's not so much a question of whether the personality itself is a fact or fiction, it's the status of any description of it that's going to be difficult to classify. And Toxx's (or anyone else's) personality is not a thing, it's a property.

Noggin

It's not so much a question of whether the personality itself is a fact or fiction, it's the status of any description of it that's going to be difficult to classify. And Toxx's (or anyone else's) personality is not a thing, it's a property.

Noggin

Noggin -- can you see a distinction between "whether the personality itself is a fact or fiction" and "the status of any description of it"? -- I can't. Not much.

Nor is thingness or propertyness going to answer the question: how to distinguish fact from fiction in complex things (or properties).