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Xeno-x - another construct manufactured concurrently with the idol God
is the notion that belief somehow equates with the quality of the individual. Too many believers have demonstrated otherwise over my lifetime for me to ever swallow this self serving whopper, just as too many non believers have demonstrated that they are very good people.
posted by
gomedome
on April 3, 2006 at 11:35 AM
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judging from what you and my son, Kooka express
atheists seem closer to the real god than believers
believers' god is a construct, an idol (check out my 10 commandments)
posted by
Xeno-x
on April 3, 2006 at 11:17 AM
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Xeno-x -- your comment basically outlines how I would descibe God
God as a conscious entity is something that I just cannot buy into.
posted by
gomedome
on April 3, 2006 at 10:58 AM
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evolution
it's all in the past --
buried -- or destroyed
like certain archaeological periods
there's much missing simply due to external forces destroying it.
you should check out my explanations of GOD AS THE UNIVERSE AS AN ORGANISM
a specific "god" that somehow is apart and yet a part of the whole kaschmiel is untenable.
personally I like the idea that the whole kaschmiel is the whole kaschmiel --it's everything -- matter, energy, forces, thoughts -- these are all parts of that whole kaschmiel.
and it's an exercise in futility to try to desceibe it
it just is.
and that's "god" -- god "just is".
it all happened and grew "organically" -- just a growth and evoutionary process.
no "intelligent design" or planning.
it's like a river flowing -- all moves along in the Great Current, and all is part of it and the Current acts upon and is acted upon by everything within it.
that's the best way I can describe it.
but then I give up beyond that -- I can only relate what I can experience.
that's all anybody can do.
sometimes it just doesn't do to try beyond that.
posted by
Xeno-x
on April 3, 2006 at 10:18 AM
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Xeno-x - as I mentioned in this post, neither creation or what is currently
known of evolution are adequate answers for me.
When I look at all of the plant and animal species on earth, with so many having such simular DNA but having such dissimular appearances, I have to wonder how anyone can accredit this variety to one sole creator. Not to mention that many insist that all of these species were designed intelligently. It looks a lot more like trial and error by committee to me. I completely dismiss the notion of a singular omnipotent creator because even if one insists that a conscious entity designed all of the species we find on earth, it has to be obvious that more than one opinion was involved. But multiple creators is not something I buy either, it is merely a much better explanation than one single, magical, omnipotent diety deciding to up and invent everything in 6 days. We will probably never know the full history of the origin of existing species but to deny the influence of evolution on their existence is nothing more than willful blindness. Too bad the theory of evolution has an entire link missing.
posted by
gomedome
on April 1, 2006 at 9:32 AM
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i wrote abouit dogs once
any dog species dna is exactly the same as wolves -- and all other dogs, yet look at the differences.
genetics is still hard to explain.
yet dogs and horses and cows and cats and other animal species show how easy differentiaton is with no perceptable difference in dna.
so a 2% is pretty large it would seem when looking at it from such a perspective.
besides, we're looking back as much an 10 ,illion years.
we've seen how certain drastic changes can happen in less than hundres (cauliflower, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and one other all came from the same ancestral plant -- now they're all different plant "species".
so imagine what can happen in 10 million -- it's somewhere back there than an ancestral species emerged -- what??? -- is it to be found???? can it be found????
we keep asking the unanswerable.
keep frying our minds trying to find the answer.
maybe some day.
lots has been discovered in the past few decades.
more to come.
posted by
Xeno-x
on April 1, 2006 at 8:22 AM
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Gome....
I'm more inclined to believe that there never was a beginning and there never wil be an ending. Birth-life-death are purely the structure of our short lives. The universe knows nothing of time, therefore, it knows nothing of begin-middle-end. The universe just is, always has been, and always will be.
Life, as a result, just travels from suitable environment to suitable environment where it germinates, flourishes and always dies.
DM
posted by
Dennison..Mann
on March 31, 2006 at 7:51 AM
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The_Devils_Advocate - welcome to Blogit
When you ask at the end of your comment if you can have my CSS? The stylesheet used in this blog is Blogit standard issue. I haven't even written in the mouseover effects yet. But if you meant that you were looking for a template for your blog, I have 2 infinitely customizable templates that you can use and have posted the source code with modified stylesheets for one of them online. I'm working out a few details on the second one before I post it. Let me know if that is what you meant and I will direct you to the links to check it out.
posted by
gomedome
on March 31, 2006 at 7:47 AM
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Dennison_Mann -- Your comment, which is a blog in itself, more or less
encapsulates my thinking on this.
In the last line of this post I state that neither evolution of man as traditionally explained with the missing link, or creationism are adequate answers for me. I feel that we will never know the full history of how we came to be but may in fact discover the precursive conditions that propigate life. This is an easy extrapulation from the progression of the collective knowledge base of our species. What has been discovered scientifically in the last 100 years is on an exponential tragectory. The accelleration of this knowledge continues at a rate where we can no longer dismiss the artificial propigation of life from basic materials as an impossibility. We may have in fact come to be from a series of materials, circumstance and conditions being favourable to support life, an influencing event cannot be dismissed either but one omnipotent skydaddy? I'm open to any plausible explanation but do not consider one omnipotent being as plausible.
posted by
gomedome
on March 31, 2006 at 7:42 AM
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Blowing away monkeys and stamping on dandelions
Why waste a bullet on one when you can kill hundreds with a smart bomb? Why waste a smart bomb one hundreds when you can kill thousands with an atom bomb? I would like to shoot down your theory but it has some merit. You missed the right option: once humanoids' brains were sufficiently developed, the “Stars” fell like lightning from heaven and look up residence in their neural networks. Their main task was to create a global neural network suitable for “God”. They succeeded.
As for the Dandelion solution I would like to blow it away but so much effort was put into it. One observation though. US scientists would have us believe that HIV resulted from humans trying very hard to mix their DNA with apes in the old fashioned way. What a load of b*ll*cks. It is obvious that the US was field testing its biological weaponry. Just like its sub-oceanic explosives that caused the tsunami in 2004. Just like the emergency preparedness exercises that “coincided” with the 9/11 attacks and the London bombings. B*st*ards!
Can I have a copy of your .css files, please?
posted by
The_Devils_Advocate
on March 31, 2006 at 5:19 AM
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The Dandelion Philosophy
I came across a dandelion growing through a crack in a large asphalt parking lot. The weed seemed very healthy despite the austere growing conditions. I wondered how it could have arrived at this most unlikely place to grow, and grow so lushly! After all, its leaves were full and green, its stem was thick and sturdy, and its yellow flower appeared like a tiny burst of sunlight on a field of hard, hot blackness. 'How could anything choose to grow here,' I wondered. The answer? Given the minimum right conditions, life can thrive just about anywhere. The dandelion didn't choose to live anywhere. Conditions converged to bring the dandelion to life in the middle of the most unlikely places.
In the big picture, conditions on earth converged to bring all that we see to life. Like the dandelion seed, the spores of life on earth likely hitched a ride on solar winds, or on the tails of comets, or simply floated about space until the gravity of earth sucked them in and they found suitable growing conditions. Life can thrive just about anywhere.
Chimps and men coexist because we didn't evolve from one another. Rather, we evolved from a common root. The common root isn't just genetic material, but also the favorable conditions for life on earth.
Have you ever wondered why we never see dogs and cats impregnating one another to create a mixture of dog and cat, like a cog or a dat? They can't breed with one another because their genetic coding has diverged so widely that one set can no longer recognize the other set for recombination. (Occasionally, we can recombine certain DNA sets to produce hybrid animals like a hinny. But the hybrids are almost always sterile or produce nonviable offspring.)
I wonder, if aliens bred with humans to produce monkeys, then why can't humans breed with monkeys to produce what? Honkeys? Well, the answer lies within the genetic coding. The two sets of DNA cannot recognize one another because they are so different from one another, even though the percentage of difference is rather slight. If the genetic codes for recombination do not match then recombination cannot occur.
(By the way, a fun question to ask creationists is this: if humanity finds that it can breed with alien species--say the way a vulcan and human bred on Star Trek--would the zealot view it as bestiality?)
So, if monkeys and men cannot have babies then how did we come to share so much genetic material? That answer is quite easy: we emerged from the same gene pool at around the same time. Conditions for the survival of both men and apes were ripe. Likewise, conditions for the survival for both men and sharks were also ripe. But those conditions will not stay ripe forever. The dinosaurs obviously enjoyed ripe conditions for quite some time. We don't see too many of them around anymore. (The crocodile or alligator being the last likely descendants of dinosaurs; pythons and other snakes to a lesser degree.)
We see those survival conditions changing with every passing century, though. We see the extinction of species occur rather rapidly, but we don't see the emergence of new species so rapidly because that process takes a longer time. We can't sit and watch a single celled organism evolve into a viable living creature with forty legs and seven eyes because that process takes quite a long time. On the other hand, we can watch polar bears vanish from our planet because conditions suddenly change and their survival relies on just the right delicate conditions...the way a dandelion thrives in the crack of an asphalt parking lot.
Imagine the months it took for that dandelion to germinate, dig its roots in, emerge from the dirt, grow tall and lush and then blossom. Then imagine how a new layer of asphalt put down in a matter of minutes could kill that dandelion forever.
Life emerges slowly. Death comes swiftly.
Men and apes emerged from the same gene pool and then diverged widely, the way graduates from the same university might diverge on separate career paths. Try getting an English major and a math major to agree on something professionally...they can barely understand one another in their separate disciplines. Genetic coding resembles those university graduates. Sure, men and monkeys both have genetic codes (or knowledge) but they can barely understand one another in their separate disciplines.
DM
posted by
Dennison..Mann
on March 31, 2006 at 2:11 AM
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