Forums | Chat | News | Contact Us | Register | PSU Social |
PSU: I see nothing!
Forums | Chat | News | Contact Us | Register | PSU Social |
Home | Forum | Chat | Wiki | Social | AGN | PS2 Stats |
|
|
View Poll Results: What do you identify yourself as? | |||
Atheist/Skeptic/Agnostic | 151 | 70.89% | |
Catholic | 21 | 9.86% | |
Protestant | 24 | 11.27% | |
Jewish | 5 | 2.35% | |
Muslim | 2 | 0.94% | |
Philisophy (Such as Buddhism) | 10 | 4.69% | |
Voters: 213. You may not vote on this poll |
|
Thread Tools | Search this Thread | Display Modes |
2012-04-25, 06:28 AM | [Ignore Me] #556 | |||
First Lieutenant
|
|
|||
|
2012-04-30, 08:35 PM | [Ignore Me] #558 | ||
Colonel
|
Was sitting in one of my IRC channels. Bill Nye in Texas
__________________
[Thoughts and Ideas on the Direction of Planetside 2] |
||
|
2012-04-30, 11:12 PM | [Ignore Me] #560 | ||||||||
Colonel
|
There are three options. 1.The universe sprang, for absolutely no reason, from a nothingness so absolute even labeling it belies its true nature. 2.The universe has always existed in some form. 3.Something created the universe, or the state of another universe led to the formation of ours. Whichever is true, the mere fact that something exists at all(including the option of a god) is both staggering, and utterly ridiculous, and its possible we may never know the answer.
Secondly, it does NOT mean someone is right. If anything its proof that they're all wrong, since nobody agrees with anyone else, and every single religion, including the dead ones, has claimed it is the truth. If we'd come over to america and they had bibles and were quoting jesus, that would be proof. Religions formed because they were a useful tool for early man to compel behavior(don't lie, cheat, steal, kill are all fairly common proscriptions), were a way to explain the unexplainable(humans do not like not understanding something. God did it settles the matter simply without further thought), and were a way to take the edge off the grief of loss... at a time of such extreme emotion people will believe anything that gives them a dose of comfort, especially in this sad, cruel world.
You'll note evidence of our nocturnal/subterranean nature. Check your eyes. Odds are you wear glasses. See, mammals lost much of the use of their eyes, being subterranean, and we had to reevolve them to a certain degree. Avians, who branched off from dinosaurs somewhat after mammals did, and never went through a nocturnal/subterranean period, kept their eyes. The difference? They don't focus with their lens, they focus with the far more flexible eyeball itself, which also doesn't lose flexibility as they age. Consequently, avians have nearly perfect vision their entire lives. There is another difference as well. All species of birds have color vision
Writing was actually a huge technological innovation for humans. Hell, many native american cultures never even figured it out. The advantages that language confer on a pack animal should be obvious. How did language come about? By grunts and squeals and yells, at first. Vocal chords exist for a reason, communication. Most animals are limited to communicating primal emotions. Anger, fear, danger, etc. Some animals take names. Theres a particular species of parrot, for instance, where each individual has a unique name. Bees can communicate such things as direction and distance of a food source. Humans aren't unique in their ability to communicate, they are just unique in the depth of their ability. As for tool use, nobody is sure, but there are hypothesis. Pre humans were a species of ape that took to scavenging for food on the planes. We developed into bipeds because the forelimbs that had evolved as a response to living in/among trees were ill suited for locomotion on land, and while being bipedal is slower and less agile than using four limbs, it is more efficient. Efficiency is not a useful trait for a predator, or for prey, but it is a very good trait for a scavenger. Limbs not used for locomotion were instead used more and more for grasping and manipulating and carrying(possibly to carry food found back to the pack/young). Eventually.. they started picking up rocks and sticks. Further support of the plains dwelling nature is our eyes. We're one of the few primates with color vision, and our vision is much more acute. Forest dwelling apes do not need to see for long distance, since they live in trees for protection.
Yes we have to take a lot on 'faith'. Not because we want to, simply because we all live in a state of functional ignorance. There is vastly more information to be known than a single humans capacity to know it. If we took nothing in good faith, we could get nothing done. Sometimes we have to accept that people know what they are talking about. The difference(and its a biiiiiiig difference), is that the type of knowledge we take faith has empirical evidence to support it. If I wanted to, if I didn't trust their word, I could look at their evidence and judge for myself if their conclusions were poor. A lot of people have spent a very long time doing exactly that. There is nothing scientists love more than proving other scientists wrong. The only reason you have no faith in the scientific explanation of the evolution of man is because of some ancient book. So you call it a 'theory' and mock trusting that explanation as faith. Tell me. Do you not believe in gravity either? The theory of gravity. Thats right, its a theory, because to this day we don't exactly know how it works. We can measure it, predict it, even have to account for its time dilation effect to make sure that GPS on your dash is right. Do you believe the electromagnetic spectrum exists? The photoelectric effect? How about internal combustion engines? Your bible is silent on all of these matters. Fundamental to our day to day lives. You'd think god might have said something about fission or fusion, or even atoms, or that the earth rotated the sun, or hey, maybe even something useful to ancient peoples like germ theory. You know, wash your hands before delivering babies and operating on people. Closest it came to that was don't eat pig. If you want answers on any of those things, and a great many more, you must turn to science, because the bible is completely silent on those matters. And there's nobody you can ask to clarify them. Who are you going to trust. A few lines in a book written over 5000 years ago? Or the volumes upon volumes of evidence and research by many thousands of scientists and researchers that continue refining their theories to this day, most of which you have access too and can read. Are they all out to misinform you? Are they all wrong about their observations? How can you even sit there and question this, when your life is filled with science that you trust your life to. They're right about everything except evolution? Preposterous. |
||||||||
|
2012-04-30, 11:13 PM | [Ignore Me] #561 | |||
|
||||
|
2012-05-01, 04:17 AM | [Ignore Me] #563 | ||
Lieutenant General
|
The one thing Duke doesn't want to accept - which is ironic in so many ways - is that if we don't know the answer, we'd LIKE to know the answer, but won't claim to already HAVE the answer.
And this is called arrogant, while it is far more arrogant to go through steps 1 and 2 (don't know, would like) and then claim to already HAVE an answer and treat people as dumb/fail/noobs for not believing in a random, inconsistent, farfetched, illogical, circumstantial, local, unverifiable, hearsay... claim. Because that's all it is and all it ever will be. Religious doctrine is extremely arrogant, I don't think there's anything more arrogant than claiming to have the absolute truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Pun intended. |
||
|
2012-05-01, 07:55 AM | [Ignore Me] #567 | ||
Second Lieutenant
|
God of the Gaps.
The sad thing I keep finding is that devoted believers like Duke fall so easily into logical traps that really anyone should, at this point, be aware of. Have you really never applied critical thought to the things you believe? We don't know what 'caused' the big bang largely because of the fact that we simply haven't gotten there yet. Admittedly, the math starts getting really heavy the closer you dial back the universe, because it starts leaving the realm of experience we're all familiar with. I'll give you an example: Time is a factor of this universe as much as energy and matter are. They all interact and effect each other in little ways. We experience time as 'flowing' from the past towards the future largely because that is how we perceive it, but in our case our perception is not technically one of the true nature of the thing. Time isn't a flowing river. Now, because time is a product of the current nature of the universe, things start getting funny when you try to dial it back to the creation of time; after all, it wasn't there before the universe was. So when you ask "What was before the big bang?" you may as well be asking "What sound does justice make?" or "How big is a sack full of anger?" or "What does the number 2 taste like?" It's a silly, nonsensical question. There wasn't a before, because there wasn't time to have befores in. Now I imagine we will eventually figure out the tru nature of the 'big bang' and maybe in what state the universe existed in. We might figure out if there are other universes, ones that don't operate under the same laws we've come to understand and be familiar with. Maybe there are universes without gravity, without time, or with numerous other dimensions our brains aren't evolved to contemplate or even imagine. It'll be a fascinating journey of discovery. And in the fringes, there's you clutching a book that was written, piecemeal, over the course of a couple thousand years by hundreds of totally anonymous authors, transcribed and translated by thousands of anonymous scribes throughout history, detailing the "divine perfect truth" of how homosexuals are bad, we should stone unruly children to death, and that some guy who lived to the age of about 30-ish was, in fact, the Son of God, representing Heaven's ultimate gambit to Save Humanity From Itself, through using a human sacrifice in one of the most arid, inhospitable regions of the world, completely ignorant of the already-flourishing civilizations in China, Korea and Japan, to say nothing of the millions living in the Americas, the pacific islands, Australia and more. I'm sorry, but it's boring. It's a silly, boring story, and the fact that you have 'faith' in it isn't inspiring or virtuous. In this day of GPS and atom smashers and string theory, it's just kind of sad. |
||
|
2012-05-01, 02:58 PM | [Ignore Me] #568 | |||
PSU Staff
Wiki Ninja |
But for the record, Bill Nye is a fucking idiot and a terrible representative for science. His programs are fine, but he is so bad going off script. |
|||
|
2012-05-01, 10:02 PM | [Ignore Me] #570 | |||||
Colonel
|
And please don't say humans don't know what they're talking about in scientific terms. Sure theories are disproven and refined over time. That doesn't render everything we've learned and accomplished irrelevant. You said earlier I had faith in peoples knowledge. I agreed then, but after considering it, no, thats not the correct word. I don't have faith they are correct. I trust they are correct. I trust them because they've proven their knowledge correct enough in other areas(generally with reproduceable results), so until I'm given reason to distrust them, I believe what they say. Last edited by CutterJohn; 2012-05-01 at 10:05 PM. |
|||||
|
|
Bookmarks |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
Display Modes | |
|
|