Isn't it possible that there IS a God who DOESN'T want you to jump through these hoops, but a few people in positions of power on Earth just make that claim as a way to control people?
Posted 7/3/2010 12:14 am
Evolutionary tards state that features evolve from less complex to more complex
The human consciousness, while being light years ahead of even our closest evolutionary cousins, is still at a primitive state. It has only existed for some 30,000 years.
Imagine if you will that we are at the beginning of the journey of the evolution of our consciousness - and the awareness of God is part of that evolution.
Evolutionary tards don't know what they are talking about.
Look at language, for example. Languages are not evolving to greater complexity; they are DEvolving. Ancient Greek was WAY more intricate than modern English is. And ancient Sanskrit was even WAY more intricate than ancient Greek.
A better case can be made that human beings in the last 30,000 (maybe even just the last 10,000) years have been DEvolving from some prior state in which they had far greater awareness and perhaps even communion with the divine.
"Return to a golden age" archetype. Unfortunately it is simply not true. While it is true that ancient Greek is more complex than ancient latin, it is nowhere near as versatile as English, or even French.
The Chinese languages are very old, and very idiomatic - but, the most recent, Mandarin, is suitably complex
Mankind has both evolved and devolved - there are some beautiful artifacts from the Neolithic, and even before, that will make your mind boggle. However, humanity is still learning to explore its consciousness
Unless you want to admit Atlantis, or ancient astronauts, in which case we can bury this thread relatively quickly
It is a good thing that people are reductionists. If we all accepted faith blindly, it would be bad for the world as a whole.
Reductionism is a valid perspective, no matter how limiting it is. The scientific method has produced miracles over the past few hundred years, and it would not exist without the ability to reduce natural phenomenon into repeatable observable phenomenon.
Where science breaks down is in non repeatable phenomenon - for example, ball lightening. However, if we had not evolved the language of science and math, we would be a poor species indeed.
Not true. The romans did pretty good without and advanced ability to do math.
Come to think of it, Roman math compared to modern math is a clear evolution in language I could have pointed out to the dot. math is a language after all, with rules, syntax, and it carries information.
But they used basic science and math for their construction. You have to go before that to see how primitive we were with basically no science and math at all.
I have found, through direct personal experience, that when I pray about stuff to my chosen deity, that stuff ends up working out much better for me. If I want something that seems unreasonable -- an outcome at work, a financial gain, or whatever -- praying about it seems to increase the likelihood that I end up getting my way.
Now, you can say that it is all in my head, and you might be correct. But no one can reasonably dispute the staying power of religion when the world is full of people like me, from whom their religious activity provides positive feedback that something seems to be "working out" for them as a result of it.
Before about 8000BC, human beings were building amazing cities that were so environmentally friendly that when they were abandoned they biodegraded into unrecognizability in just a few thousand years. That's some pretty amazing technology that we don't even have today.
In retrospect, it sure as hell looks as though society "hit bottom" somewhere in the second millennium BC, and since then has only very slowly been regaining what it had lost.
The logical response to that is "self fulfilling prophecy" - however, isn't it interesting how people who are filled with the spirit of God are happy, whereas materialistic people tend to be miserable.
By "filled with the spirit of God" I am not talking about those people who want to kill you for their religion, or anything negative. I mean those people who are honestly spiritual, and, well, there is an intangiable energy to them. You know what I mean, while the faithless will not.
There have been peaks and valleys to Human civilization. It looks like we hit a huge bottleneck at about 10,000 bce that reduced the human species to possibly as few as 2000 survivors.
There was some experimentation with agriculture in ancient egypt circa 13,000 bce, but it was abandoned - you can either read into this a civilization that declined, or a technology that had not yet matured.
let us consider the example of the Vikings on Greenland. They were hearty, and adapted to the conditions, but, they were not able to survive the mini ice age. Humanity and the environment do go through cycles - and I would nearly guarantee (with one possible exception) that modern technology is superior to anything in the past.
The one exception is something I am researching, and I am not entirely convinced it is true.
And eyes have evolved and devolved and became more precise, less precise over time.
There is an evolutionary continuum that is indisputable. Complexity is an emergent property resulting from competition over scarce resources. Whether it is a prion trying to accumulate a few ions or a lion eating a lamb, there is this insatiable "arms race" over consuming resources.
So far, the planet Earth has not been a constraint towards human resource accumulation because population would have begun to decrease.
Posted 7/3/2010 12:41 am
I dont know if there is a god or not. Standing over someone you have just killed, looking at them, there is no soul, no special moment as they die. It is just over. Like stepping on a cochroach.
But those spiritual people believe in all sorts of things, they aren't limited to Xtians. Some are Muslims, some are Buddhists, and some believe that the Earth itself has a conscience. It's also worth nothing just how many "spiritual" people seem happy and serene when everything is going their way, and appear fulfilled on the surface, but suddenly lose that exterior as soon as things start to go wrong.
Posted 7/3/2010 12:42 am
Speaking of cities, I've always had this belief that human civilization began before the ice age. It wouldn't surprise me if we eventually found iron age technology from 30,000 years ago.
There seem to be ancient pre-historic memories of advanced human beings being able to use sonic technologies in ways we today can barely imagine, to cut stone, to cure illnesses and perhaps even to fly. The ancient idea of "mantras" seems to be a throwback to this, a primitive mind's attempt to reconstruct an ancient ancestral memory of a lost technology.
