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

"Are you asking whether we're being manipulated by an almighty?"
no this is not my thought, I don't believe there is any manipulation. I believe that coincidences are little sign posts along the road to make us stop and think a bit.

for instance I thought about this whole thing about creation being an evidence of a godthing and the answer that it's all a happy accident and that if these happy accidents (millions of them) hadn't happened we wouldn't be here to pose the question.
this seems a fair enough response, until I happened to click on the tV last night and caught the end of something about the Universe with Sam Neil as narrator.
It is not only the past that contains coincidences that allow for life on earth, but also in the present. The earth travels at speed through the galaxy, up and down like a roller coaster. Narrowly avoiding black holes, gas clouds, massive ice chunky comets. Meteorite smash around the galaxy and it is only this set of continued coincidences that allows for life to continue. The happy coincidence of the placing of Jupiter has saved us all from existinction on a million occassions.
I wonder , taking all the pitfalls into consideration from the beginning of time, what the odds would be for not only life beginning on this little blue green planet BUT for life continuing. I expect that the odds would be very, very unfavourable.

Hi Della ,

"Ah, but I believe everyone gets there in the end! How about if your gods are angels, and therefore are agents of the being you call old Jehovah? (I can hear you from here, is that an anguished scream, or a cough of polite disbelief?)"

If our gods are angels they are definitely in BIG trouble with the old man. Especially as they are so far 'off-message' that even New Labour would have problems spinning them correctly .

How about if your God is just a Near Eastern nomads deity who got himself a damn good PR firm? He saw a market opportunity, went for it and has been riding the wave ever since. Now he's worried that people have started to notice that his promises are just like any other politician's....

Is that an anguished cough I can hear?

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\.

By the way math isn't terrifying, he's just not very pretty.

hi Della,

A question. Do you perceive your God to be an entity outside of yourself? I ask because I know some Christians who believe that God is something they can pray to for comfort but in the end they also tend to believe that this concept of a Christian God is also who they are. As in - the Kingdom of God is all around us. That we are all God. They believe in Christianity but also in the idea that they and God are one. So they believe they are 'one' with their god concept, yet also keeping it as something 'out there' to pray to, even while knowing that perhaps they are praying to themselves.

Does that make sense to you? It somehow makes sense to me.

az

ps
If you respond to this posting can you put my name at the top of it? I like reading your postings every morning when I get up but due to the time difference between NZ and Europe, and since so many postings happen over a 24-hour period, I often have no idea who you are responding to.

Jordan. I wonder if you would be prepared to apply that reasoning to some of the terms in the Drake formula: N = R* x fs x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L

This one has a numerical rather than probabilistic answer.
The meanings of the terms are to be found here: http://www.fellowship.net/jerrynixon/documents/theDrakeEquation.htm

Just because there are many terms in a formula doesn't mean that the outcome is necessarily unlikely. This one is not all probabilities, of course. R* is a vast number. Oh yep, it's a calculation of how many other planets with intelligent life forms exist in our galaxy.

toxx

Toxxin:

> I would say 'all circumstances' unless you would care to argue
> otherwise.

No, not really. All I meant was that it's not usually the case that the objective history is the only means of establishing a difference between two objects, and it's generally the case that either it isn't particularly relevant or it just isn't available to us. In practice, if you don't have the information, you can't make an informed choice, which is why our thought experiment has been so useful.

Hi Moth!

Well, that's better. I have a , a , a cigarette and 8 hours' sleep behind me. Let's try again!

"We're the drop of water of the quantum consciousness that could be described as an ocean."

I'm afraid you lost me shortly after this. I was fine as far as the bit about the ocean is the quantum consciousness and we're the same as an individual drop. Then we become a different drop of the same quantum consciousness upon reincarnation.

but what is the quantum consciousness conscious of? You say personality is ego (which I don't entirely agree with, but that's another argument altogeher) We observe that the different drops which are people are all different - presumably you would say this is ego - so in what way does being a part of the quantum consciousness affect us while we are a person? What do we recall of this, how do we access it and what effect does it have?

Things go on in our own minds which we are not conscious of.

There seems no reason to suppose that what communicates between consciousness and consciousness is itself conscious.

The universe just *is* a system of connections.

Noggin

Toxx-

"Jordan. That default 0.5% is a fallacy. Consider the following. I have a bag containing some (from 0% to 100%)green marbles and ditto in red marbles. What is the probability that a randomly selected marble (with replacement) will be green? You're gonna say 0.5, OK. Now I say that there are also blue marbles. Same question; you're gonna say 0.3' where ' means recurring. Now I say the blue ones have gone but there are dark red and light red ones as well as green. You will stick with 0.3'. I then point out that this is the same bag we started with when you said 0.5. The only value you can assume for unknown is 'unknown'!"

Could you point out exactly how this changes the evaluation of unknown probabilities to be useless? This might be me being stupid, but all I saw there was a perfectly sound mathematical example (except the last two sentences...)

Here's some bait for you statisticians.


The anthropic principle.


Fire away.

We're here.

Therefore the Universe must be such that it is possible for us to be here.

100%

Noggin

Eh?
Anthropic principle?
Eh?

See 13010

Math, I know you're not terrifying, you're just cuddly. (Except when in your Professor Calculus aspect...
You should check out a group called Universelles Leben (sorry I don't have the URL) They sent me some stuff last year, which I was re-reading. One of their pamphlets dealt with stuff similar to your 'dear God' thing - and they're Christians!

I recently came across an amusing website about some of the kinds of people on discussion forums. Some of the descriptions definitely reminded me of a few people.
http://www.winternet.com/%7Emikelr/flame1.html

I think quite a few of the Warrior descriptions apply well to Justin:Stone Deaf, Deacon, Palooka, Tiny Yapper, Troller, Troglodyte, Ego, Ideologue, Filibuster, Ferrous Cranus, Godzilla, Bong, God

Many also applied to Hoovooloo, though most of the attributes he only showed to those of us that he regarded as enemies, while being reasonable with evewryone else:Jerk, Nitpick, Big Dog, Archivist, Ferrous Cranus (in his centrifugal force argument, at least), and was later forced by H2G2 staff to become Stealth.

Though I didn't witness it myself, I hear Hoo was also a Duelist with someone called Tango. He certainly treated me as a duelling opponent. (When we all took that belief-test, he quoted his results including 100% Secular Humanist and 0% Jehovah's Witness. Recently I looked back at that, and played with the belief test to try to determine what answers he must have selected. By answering as I believed Hoo would have done, I could get the 100% for Secular Humanism, but even fiddling with the answers a bit, the lowest mark I could get for Jehovah's Witness was 28%. I now believe he forged the score of 0% as an excuse for his launching a barrage of insults at every little thing I posted.)

Matholwch I have come to view as a Troller (regarding Christianity, anyway) and Stone Deaf, ever since the Hellfire Incident*.

Someone has definitely been a xenophobe/howler a few times, but I can't remember who it was who said to any newcomers, "That's already been covered, read the previous 5000 posts then come back.'

Some have been acting as Therapists lately, not bothering with any evidence for or against God but discussing what psychological factors are responsible for people believing in God - seemingly overlooking the rather crucial factor of logic.

I can't remember who it was I once engaged in another forum trying to explain what the Christian definition of faith was, but he was certainly a Stone Deaf and a Filibuster.

And myself - well, my opinion on my past would hardly be impartial, but I'd certainly now describe myself as a Lurker, and have been for a while. With Hoo's departure, and the Hellfire Incident* showing that Math was no longer worth replying to, and with so much already having been pointed out and usually ignored, there didn't seem that much to say anymore. But if I think there's a humourous point (like the site I am currently pointing out) or a brief insight to offer, or such a simple and obvious fallacy to point out as the one a few days ago that Christians don't call on Jehovah, I speak again, then return to the shadows.



* What I call the Hellfire Incident is when Math said to me something along the lines of 'But if it turns out you're right, I'll be there at Sulphur Outfall No.4 etc. etc.' What was wrong with this reply, you ask? He said it in reply to a very long post I had written against the hellfire doctrine. For at least an hour I had written about how the Hellfire doctrine didn't originate with and wasn't present in early Christianity, and about how unbiblical and God-dishonouring the whole idea was, and why no Christian should believe it. In reply Math said, 'If you're right, I'll go to hell.' Clearly none of it (or, indeed, any of my many previous posts on the subject) had been paid any attention to, so why point it out any longer? Clearly Math has the view that Christianity is bad because Christians believe in horrible ideas like Hellfire. All the evidence that this belief is not truly Christian he ignores, since it doesn't fit his view. Why present it?
That's why I ignored his post a week or so ago asking questions about how someone can believe in Christianity - I could have answered (or showed to be invalid) his questions, but it wouldn't make any difference to how he views Christianity, so why rise to the bait?

azahar, hi! (Waves, offers and )
Yes, I do see God as being outside me, in terms of havinbg an independent existence, not just part of my consciousness. But I also visualise God as a white light in my brain, or the more convential Catholic idea of God in the .
God is definitely outside, objectively real, but inside when invited!

Wow, toxxin, that's a fascinating link. I am maths phobic, but I like it...

Heathen
I think it's just the way I try to explain a very difficult concept. for example how many of us could begin to imagine a state of no ego?

"but what is the quantum consciousness conscious of?"
Everything. It creates everything. The quantum consciousness is the fabric of the Universe. The universe acts more like thought than matter.

"We observe that the different drops which are people are all different - presumably you would say this is ego - so in what way does being a part of the quantum consciousness affect us while we are a person? What do we recall of this, how do we access it and what effect does it have?"

Ego and the physical form. We effect the quantum consciousness when we have ego. We effect that outcome of events. (see prayer program thursday to see if there are any results re this )We know everything that the quantum conscious knows but have forgotten it for the purpose of the experience we want when we are physical and ego . We can recall and access it through various means, (meditation. prayer, chanting, drugs) which lower the use of the temproal and partiel lobes which are the firewalls between single ego and quantum consciousness.

I'm not certain what you mean by the last question - what effect does it have. Lowering the 'firewalls, means we lose our sense of self/time/space. If that is what you meant.

Jordan

>>Are there any that come almost exclusively at night, particularily at some time just after midnight, and fill people's minds with new models of cognition, mathematics, poetry and an intense desire to conquer the planet because you /know/ it's the only way you're going to make a difference? If so, I'd like you to have a word with them and ask, could they please lay off doing it so late so I don't have to write so much down and miss all my lectures the next day?<<

Sounds to me as if you have a bad case of Athene

Seriously, if you want Her to keep coming, then invite Her at another time of day. Maybe you are only listening at that time... One of the beings I hear once said to me, in disgust at the noise emanating from West Kennett Long Barrow, that if these celebrants would stop asking people to speak to them and just SHUT UP occasionally, they might get somewhere...

Set aside a time and turn off the noise, turn out the electric light and settle yourself in a quiet mood, and let Her come in a time when it is good for you both.

Or ignore me, as you choose

Jez - heathen and witch.

Re - The individual 'feel' of a particular entity

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A1903303

Jezreell - who wrote, learnt and sang in public ritual a forty stanza piece of epic Anglo-Saxon verse on the instructions and under the direction of a particular entity (in under ten days) - and, like Sceptic, feels like trying something like that again... But not quite yet...

Interesting!