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

"Religion gives you hope death is not the end"

Oh I do hope death is the end...imagine if the next life were worse than this one! Quite honestly I could do with a rest from "it all" right now, but as the big sleep is a one way ticket i'll have to be satisfied with a ordniary sleep and then nose back to the grind
stone.


And talking of sleep...


"that you will see your dead loved ones again."

Sleeping is when i tend to get my most vivid images of dead loved ones. When I have those dreams I often wake feeling a mixture of overwhelming warmth and cofort tinged with sdeness that even the short nights re-union has passed and its back to the mored faded waking memories, but I can still see my dead loved ones and everything we shared.



"As well as giving you the idea that you´re not on your own,"

I've got a girlfirend and a mobile phone the only time I get to get away from it and her is when Im in a class full of children or Im playing rugby...you should try being in the middle of a scrum there is nothing further from lonliness than that.


"there´s a big guy in the sky looking out for you2

Was he looking out for the new born children of slave wommen murdered to to save their rapist slave owners from the embarrasment of people knowing they were the fathers? Was he lloking out for the children killed in the passover? What about the sleeping children killed by the Boxing Day Tsunami? The children being abused in church orphanages. What about the Children killed in the Nazi death camps?

The evidence of history and the things Ive seen with my own eyes draws me towards to conclusions that this "big guy" who people think is lookiing out for them couldnt give a shit or tha he isnt really there at all.

My loved one though they are gone did look out for me comfort me and protect me as much as they knew how. For that I am grateful to them and them alone. The lessons they taught me sustain me still and I have had no better teachers or guides since.

one love

anhaga asks:
"forgive me, ~jwf~, but . . ."

Rudest Elf suggests:
"You can fool some people all the time...?"

Full points that man!

Other correct answers would have included:
"I like Willy Nelson."
"~jwf~ is such a w"
"Amazing what Utoob offers as 'related' videos."
"How does an un-hard-boiled egg balance on its end."
"There's a sucker born every minute."
"It's still possible to make a living as a con man."
"Some people will believe anything."
"Honesty is the best policy."
"Money is the root of all evil."

And of course, "~jwf~ had the wrong link in his copy buffer
and hit send prematurely.

It's nice to have choices ain't it.


~jwf~

PS: The guy who buys into the egg trick is a little appreciated
'celebrity' (Larry Hovis) who began his career with a pop chart
success many (far too many) years ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npMeVUyoKl8

Blicky: I said religion gives people the impression they are looked after, not that they are.

Yeah...I know that it's why I used a direct quote from your post

What I was illustrating was how I have gotten all those things you mentioned despite not enteraining the "idea" of a supernatural deity.

Did anyone else watch The Cell on BBC4? Presented by Dr. Adam Rutherford. First of a series of 3.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00m5w92

(only available to UK posters on iPlayer. I know sorry)

It was fascinating for the history it showed about the invention of the first microscope in the 17C by van Leeuwenhoek, a textile merchant who invented the first lenses to enable viewing of microscopic organisms, they were tiny matchbook sized engineering invention thingies containing his lenses. It then goes on to show Hooke's wonderful early drawings of single celled organisms with his slightly later microscopes .

What fascinated me was how long it took them to overcome medieval thinking once the science got going. The drawings some made of sperm, imagining containing a tiny man...and it was only after Pasteur in the 19C, showed that spontaneous generation couldn't occur, by ingeniously using a swan shaped neck to a flask of nutrient media, which trapped incoming microscopic spores.

Fascinating programme which demonstrates how 'thinking' from a previous age, ie the medieval period, can take a few hundred years to be debunked, despite advances in science.

We really have advanced incredibly in our thinking in some ways. Even in uncontroversial areas, the tendency to go on past authority was astonishingly strong. Dickson's "History of Number Theory" begins with one person after another repeating easily correctable falsehood (on perfect numbers). Today's best middle elementary school kids seem smarter.

I read somewhere that Aristotle's theory of motion could have been debunked simply by watching a spear being thrown from off to one side, so you could see its trajectory. Guess that's what's so great about empiricism.



Meanwhile..

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-mooney11-2009aug11,0,6581208.story

"Must science declare a holy war on religion?"

"...But it's also fair to ask: Who in the United States will read Dawkins' new book (or ones like it) and have any sort of epiphany, or change his or her mind?

Surely not those who need it most: America's anti-evolutionists."

Tactical considerations of how to educate the wilfully ignorant aside, I've never really seen how the 'New Atheism' is so strident. Picking holes in shite arguments is aggresive *how*, exactly?

>Picking holes in shite arguments is aggresive *how*, exactly?<

I think it's the way its done Pedro. We've been here before. Putting aside the ludicrous literalist creationist nonsense and the more extreme aspects of Catholicism involving edicts against contraception etc which deserved to be confronted head on, I feel uncomfortable with any sneering and ridiculing of more gentle and tolerant aspects to a sense of the spiritual which people have. I'm not arguing they are true, just that many people have a need for these things in their lives, so what's the real motive for trying to take that abruptly away from people. If you look at things in terms of the overall life quality of someone's life there aren't black and white answers. Human beings in many ways are 'dreamers'...this is also part of what it means to be alive. So it all depends on how you channel this dreaming quality. We're not all the same in our emotional needs.

The programme I linked to above was inspirational and exciting; although it highlighted how medieval thinking was gradually overcome, the guy presenting it, who was rather actually, didn't mention religion once.

Inspirational...

Like this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAVjF_7ensg&feature=channel

Tal. Mind blowing; it really is hard to get your head around all those galaxies in one tiny area, millions of light years away and yet we are just one miniscule part of one galaxy. I just can't comprehend it. (But just a slightly churlish point, shame about the rather ghostly sounding background music in the film )

***

Something a bit more down to earth people maybe interested in, is that the Natural History museum in London are at present moving their collection of 20million plant and insect specimens to the new Darwin Centre in the museum, which opens in September. Apparently the centre has an area known as the 'cocoon' where members of the public can see into areas of the museum that were previously hidden ie the collection areas and the research labs, which wraps around into the actual museum areas, normally open to the public.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8184270.stm

The short film is worth a watch. I actually have some specimens of a species of caddis fly larvae in the collection, that I collected in the high Pyrenees in France as part of my final year research project I did for my biology degree

Effers, I wholeheartedly agree about the dreadful background music on that vid.

Why, oh why people feel compelled to add appallingly horrid 'music' to their otherwise fairly good clips, I just don't know....

~~~

Many years ago, I was privileged to be taken on a personal guided tour of the non-public sections of the museum in Victoria, BC, by no less a personage than the head curator hisself.

I'd visited the museum seeking information about a flint spearhead I'd found that summer whilst playing ducks and drakes along a BC interior riverbank.

I've often thought I would enjoy working in a museum

Unfortunately I got sidetracked into Psychology...

when I was about 5, I think, I wrote a letter to the curator of the natural history museum in London asking how I could become a curator!
I'd been taken there on a day out and was much impressed.
Forget being a train driver or soldier or whatever, I wanted to run a big museum!

Such ambitions we have when young.

p.s. on the strident atheism thing and poking holes in shite arguments I think there is a difference in world view that makes it a problem. To the rationalist/empiricist the argument is a seperate thing from the person. It isn't part of that person as such. Poke holes in the argument and you are not having a go at me, you are having a go at the argument.

But for those who are ruled more by head than heart the identification with a belief or argument is much more personal, they seem to internalise it much more and thus when you hole their argument below the water it feels a lot more personal and as if it is an attack on the person.

For the empiricist/rationalist it is the process of arriving at conclusions that is part of the person, that is internalised. But for the emotive believer it is the conclusion itself that is internalised.

The believers arguments are simplistic and illogical. I've had the arguments with liberal theologians who say things like effers has above about the beliefs being wrong but people needing them and thus it being wrong to even attempt to disabuse them of them. Yet in most cases I have come across (won't say all because I can't instantly remember all discussion I have had on the subject) what these people who get safety and security from the beliefs are actually getting is more humanism than anything else.

The belief that the world can be better. The belief that humans should be nice to each other, should help each other. The actual acts of kindness and friendliness and of no strings assistance. Of altruism basically. They dress up it up in robes and sandals, but if you look at what the moderate, tolerant people are after and find reassuring there is no need for the divine in it. It is just set dressing.

They could have everything they feel they need without all the superstition. Yet it is tied so firmly in their minds together that people think that arguing against religion is arguing against the comforting factors people get from it.

In my experience, and in my arguments, it isn't. The problem is that those one argues against (and appologists for them) take offence where there is none because of their assumptions, not because of our arguments.

Hi Ictoan,

>For the empiricist/rationalist it is the process of arriving at conclusions that is part of the person, that is internalised. But for the emotive believer it is the conclusion itself that is internalised.

I've noticed the same thing. I've lost count of the number of times that I've carefully explained that it's not the conclusion (e.g. God exists) that I have a problem with per se (I don't 'hate God') - it's the process of reaching that conclusion.

Gif

I just realised I got
"But for those who are ruled more by head than heart the identification with a belief or argument is much more personal"

the wrong way round! Make much more sense if it said "those ruled more by heart than head"

Yes that little Freudian slip amused me Icky

>(e.g. God exists) that I have a problem with per se (I don't 'hate God') - it's the process of reaching that conclusion. < Gif

Monotheism is a particular Abrahamic form of woo. People can have a sense of the spiritual that doesn't fit into that, to my mind, especially oppressive variety. Many cultures around the world, and our own before the coming of Christianity, had a much more pantheistic and nature orientated spirituality, that was orientated towards the seasons of the year for good pragmatic reasons. And indeed Christianity has layers of this still within it. Harvest festival was always a big thing at my school.

To be honest though these discussions go nowhere, and I often get tired of them. I'm perfectly at ease in having a strong instinctual liking for the kind of spirituality that means something to me, and others I know, as well as having a strong rational side that takes immense pleasure in what objective knowledge gives us.

I've been involved in discussions with kea on other threads about contradictory realities, and her knowledge of native peoples spirituality in NZ. But she hates this thread and won't come here. I think being human is often about conflict and contradiction because we have a subjective emotional self. I think for some of us holding two ways of seeing the world at once is just... well.. 'normal'. And it becomes pointless to keep on arguing with people who think that it is just...well...crazy. *shrug*

Freudian? Nah, just a slight malfunction of my phonological loop, what comes of trying to concentrate on too many things at once.

"Monotheism is a particular Abrahamic form of woo."
Interesting, I mean Yahweh wasn't originally the only jewish god, or even the principle one. And there was that pharoah who went took ancient Egypt down the monotheistic route for a bit. And then there's Mithras, not sure how old that religion is? And isn't Zoroastrianism monotheistic? Sikhs are as well aren't they?

Zoroastrians are dualist. And you're thinking of Akhenaten: A511679. Mithraism is slightly older than Christianity, but not much.

Gif

so Akhenaten's not far off when the Jews received the Talmud then? Both around 3000 soemthing yr ago?

Interesting. Judaism is the first to be monotheistic then? Or at least amoungst the first given we don't know exactly when they went that way?

Hi Icky,

You're not the first to have noticed that! It has been hypothesised - on, it has to be said, very little evidence - that Akhenaten (or his father, Amenhotep III) may have been Joseph's Pharaoh.

The Torah seems to have reached something resembling its modern form around 600 BC onwards, so around 700 years after Akhenaten.

Going by Ussher's timeline (via AiG), Joseph lived in 1700 BC - about 400 years before Akhenaten.

More realistically, it's not likely Joseph existed at all. The Hebrews in 600 BC know about the Egyptians because they had been Egyptian vassals a few centuries previously - but in Canaan, not Egypt!

Gif

Just a little suggested reading interruption:


'Constantine's Sword' by James Carrol ( http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Constantines-Sword-Church-Jews-History-James-Carroll/9780618219087-item.html ) is at once a fascinating history of the Catholic Church and the Church's connection to anti-semitism and a moving autobiography. It falls down a bit toward the end where Carroll: shows his lack of familiarity with Darwin (choosing to lift Darwin's words from current authors rather than actually looking at Darwin's own writing); makes sweeping recommendations for a hypothetical Vatican III; and, perhaps (this one is for Edward), where he discusses Marx and Marxism at length.

But, all in all, a fine 600+ pages.