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A couple points. Whether or not the big bang theory is true, I tend to feel that there is a higher power that may have caused it, and that we humans could never ever hope to understand how or why. To me though, this universe is far too fantastic to have just been a random result out of nothing...and then a series of billions and billions of coincidences that ended up with me typing this thing right now. Do I think a man in a white beard sat down and made Adam and Eve? Of course not, that's just silly.

HOWEVER, who is to say that COULDN'T be the result, or the proof of some higher force, power, what-have you, that...as you stated, we can NEVER hope to understand? How do you KNOW that isn't God itself??



People always say science and religion are so different...they cannot possibly coexist, or live in harmony. Many scientists say "science makes perfect sense, while religion is just silly fantasy stories," while many religious scholars claim that science is simply ignoring the fact that there is a God.

Here's the thing though:
Science has "theories" that can be disproven, correct? Science has given us "laws" that make perfect sense on Earth, but fall apart when you apply them to space (IE: "String Theory" and Albert Einstein's never ending quest for a unifying formula that he couldn't find)

Science and Religion are both based on faith. Religion has faith in a deity (or many) as the explanation for some of the unexplainable.

Science comes up with theorems, etc to explain things...yet these theorems can be disproven (it only takes one result of "false" to make the entire theory wrong. IE scientists/mathematicians have FAITH in the underlying rules of their craft.

Does E=MC^2? What is that....merely a man-made explanation for a natural phenomenon, with man-made definitions and symbols.

What is God? Man's attempt at explaining the unexplainable, with definitions (or stories) and symbols.

Fix't.


Religion itself is not inherently evil or hypocritical. It is the humans who gain power within the religion and humans who use that religion to promote their own distorted/hypocritical views that need to be stamped out.

I am very cynical but I believe human nature is improvable, evidence being, it has been improved significantly since ancient times.

I believe that culture needs to be engineered, something that used to be done long ago, but isn't really anymore; politicians generally don't think in terms of mass culture on a human level. They look at mass media, but not how people get along, like they did when people thought in terms of the city and people meeting on the street.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

i think you, like many others are confusing the unknown with the divine. just because something is unknown (at the time) does not automatically mean it derives from a mystical force. if you look at trending throughout history, science has discovered conventional means for what had otherwise been attributed to the divine. throughout most of human history, world religions have gone along their merry way claiming divinity for the most monumental of things in an attempt to solidify their necessity on this planet. the rise and fall of the sun, stars, any form of natural disaster, etc. once science stepped in the explain how it REALLY worked, what did religion do? early on, it met science with violent reaction. eventually, as the human race aged, it accepted it with a sardonic grin and patronizingly congratulated science while it moved on to the era's next unexplainable phenomenon, then staked it' claim. within the past 1000 years, science has moved past exponential speed and explained more than religion has staked. at this rate, within another 1000 years (provided the human race survives that long) everything will be explained save one final missing piece. that, my friend is the piece that will ALWAYS be there, and no peoples, races, or religions will ever know what it is. the vast difference between science and religion is that i would like to know what it is, you simply just think it's more than it probably is.



i used to be an evolutionary creationist, and struggled with this theory for quite a long time. but you must understand, there are hundreds of likely explanations for why it happened that, quite simply, can't be proved. yet, the non-religious and religious take for granted unprovable theories every day, such as gravity, or the concept of mass. i won't sit here and refute that science isn't also based on faith, it just provides a finite amount of evidence with which humanity can do the rest. also, i won't sit here and say to you that god did NOT cause the big bang, because obviously, i don't know. i don't really care. the concept of god just doesn't fit in well with particle physics and a more advanced understanding of the universe.

as far as e=mc2 is concerned, that is a poor example as that is a specific set of regulations for a specific set of circumstances. none of which can be described very well on a scale as minute as the earth. but, i see what you're trying to say. e=mc2, or rather, einstein's unifying theory was an attempt to deify science, to challenge the viability of religion. i don't argue that religion shouldn't exist, or won't at some point. i'm just saying that it's place in the world will be continuously challenged. perhaps it our jobs as heathens, to challenge the believers. to solidify their conviction. or perhaps, god is the product of science itself. perhaps god is a rogue sentient being with a very large (from our perspective) ant farm. from an extremely big picture point of view, the universe behaves exactly like the fusion between particles the split second before a star is created. perhaps out entire universe exists within a particle. and perhaps god really did do all those things he said he did and we are the most special people in the entire universe. it's all a matter of how you grapple with likelihood. Occam's razor, yes, but i find god NOT to be the simplest of all explanatons. i find it convoluted, contradicting, and wrought with humanity, the most unexplainable of all equations.

lastly,

i quite agree with you there, but you must understand the sheer scale of things. throw 90 trillion dice on 90 trillion tables every picosecond for 90 trillion years and you've performed only a minute amount of the universe's probabilities. out of chaos comes order.

healthy discussion azelma, and i applaud you. it's been a while since i've stopped posting HATERS GON HATE pictures and used my brain.

I honestly find it quite impossible to believe the universe "just is" and there isn't some higher meaning or order to it.

However, since we see it only from the perspective of being what we are, we can never know, so all we can do is play the game of life.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

why, though? why is it so difficult for human beings to grasp this concept. perhaps it is because of emotion. fear of the unknown. we have attached ourselves emotionally to this planet and this universe, when in the regular scale of universal occurences, our existence is and will be an infinitesimal speck that happened so fast it will be impossible to note it's existence at all.

you're right about one thing, though. the gift of life has been bestowed upon us, by whom or what design we'll never know, but it is best if we play the game and enjoy ourselves while we do. it may happen so fast that no one else will notice, but goddamit, i notice it.

human nature hasn't improved.


people still eat each other.

That's cause humans are delicious.

Because self-awareness and the level of complexity and order in the universe cannot be explained without a higher order or purpose. I differ from most people harboring this opinion in that I believe further conjecture on the topic is frivolous, specious, and should be abstained from. You might as well shoot into the dark.



As bad as people are, the truth is that they are better than they used to be. Exceptions and outrages aside, the level of human decency is greater than what it once was in ancient times. People are definitely improvable through culture. If you want a clear and present example go watch how the Afghans or Africans still live.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

You have obviously never been to New York City.

No. But my mother tells me stories. Like when she would see people faint from heat and everyone would keep walking.

Once, when she was a young girl, before they cleaned up the city, she and her mother were on the subway and a bunch of thugs came in and started grabbing stuff. No one resisted despite vastly outnumbering them. One of them lunged towards her and her mother. Her mother made a swift gesture and said, "NO!". The thug blinked, took a step back, and walked away. He wasn't scared of her, or that she could stop him, he was just...so surprised that someone would have the guts to do that.

This is the same mother who by all accounts did not nurse me - and I actually refuse to believe is actually my biological mother. My personality is in many ways that of a stereotypical motherless bastard.

When my father was dating my mother, he got in a cab to see her, and told the driver where he was going (the barrio). He refused to go there at that time of night. My father said, "I'm not going...anywhere..." and he started unbuttoning his coat...and then his shirt...and then took it off and started to undo his pants.

The cab started moving.

My father did his internship in Harlem. He said he was more scared of the black prostitutes than anyone else, although he really hated the bigoted Hasidim who demanded Jewish doctors but hated him because he was Reform. He recounted a story once, about a bum at the hospital who needed an examination. He told the guy to take off his shirt. He did this and handed it to my father, who immediately shrieked and dropped the shirt.

His chest was covered, neckbone to groin, in a mass of maggots.

"What's wrong, doc?" the bum asked, uncomprehendingly.

My father, saying nothing, took the examination form, and stamped "ADMIT". He did not fill it out. He then handed the bum the form and told him to go down the hall.

I could tell you stories from my own life, but you wouldn't even believe them. I'm sure most of you don't even believe I have such stories.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

I'd like to hear them... but first, I need to do my obligatory dick-head response to Aestu because, for some reason, it's what I do.

Don't you need to have a life, first?

or

Tell us about that time you hooked up with that one girl...

Please, continue.

I have a funny one.

Wasn't funny at the time though.

Off topic:
Didn't notice the flag before.
Lief are you danish?
If so

o/

Once, I spent three months in jail, with a cellmate who killed his own adoptive mother with his bare hands. I know it to be true because I saw his face and name in the newspaper. There was no question.

He was about my age. Very intelligent and civil, a really nice guy.

He did it because he was heavily under the influence of drugs and the suggestion of a strong personality who told him to do it out of malice. His adoptive mother was a weird, weird person who, I got the impression, adopted him and his younger brother because she didn't have the emotional equipment to find a man and raise a family.

His brother and he were both crack babies, his brother much more so. He had the soft, goofy-looking face most crack babies do, and although he was very intelligent and well spoken, his personality would occasionally break down into the sort of very stereotyped behavior consistent with that sort of pathology.

I am very hard with myself, and although what brought me into jail (a misdemeanor) was very marginal, the extraordinary brutality of the incident and my own personality (and decision to appeal, jealous for my record) made it a very lengthy and complicated process. He ridiculed me that he who had his entire life gone because of what he had done, and still looked forward with hope, I was beating myself up over something very marginal.

I gave him advice on how to write effectively and other things; he took care of me and taught me prison arts such as how to fish. I really enjoyed talking to him.

He asked me to stay in contact with him after I got on with my life. I did not do this, not because I was afraid, but because being friendly with people is very hard for me. I am utterly fearless irl, I have no hesitation in getting in someone's face and I don't get cowed easily, but people being friendly with me makes me intensely nervous. This is largely due to terrible parenting and my life history.

One day, we got another cellmate. We were warned that "he's going to be an older guy". He came in, it was this late-middle aged black dude. I treated him with disdain at first, not because he was black, but because I had this idea he would be some senile old geezer that would crap himself constantly. To my surprise, he and the murderer knew each other; he was a revolving-door patron. "You thought I was going to be some old geezer crapping himself!"

He was very amiable and intelligent. Smart, awesome guy. I strongly felt that he was forced into drug dealing by the realities of life.

Later we met on the bus. We didn't have a lot to say. It was an awkward meeting, and we went our separate ways.

There was another person I met - a young black thug. He was totally shallow. You could do anything for him and he'd take it and beg for more the next day. No self-respect. He had expensive tastes and no moral depth at all. He styled himself an artist and was gleefully proud of a mural he was paid to make. Once he drew a woman. It was drawn from behind, with a massively stereotyped black ass and a protruding cameltoe. What made it so unusual, though, was that he didn't mean it to be sexualized. It was like the inverse of a Rorschach test.

I met him, too, later, as I was browsing a flea market. I knew what he was doing there. He proudly showed off his flashy new clothes and fancy phone he bought with...a student loan. "You know you have to pay it back, right?" He stared at me blankly. My own clothes were years old, very plain and formal.

He wasn't stupid. He was fairly bright. I felt strongly this was the product of his craven and brutal background.

I went back to work at the pawn shop. One day, this woman came in. Obviously middle class in troubled times. She tried to hock some mostly worthless junk and begged for more money. The shopkeeper said he could do nothing. After she left, he said, "I wish I could have done more for her."

The shopkeeper was a Nazi. Literally. His brother was a former American soldier who was discharged because the Germans demanded he leave the country. Go figure. He kept around magazines hawking Nazi memorabilia. His rationalization was, "it was cooler, I mean what could be so cool as defeating a man and taking his freaking sword?" He also collected novelty lunchboxes from the 50s. Some of those are actually worth thousands of dollars. Check eBay.

He definitely was a Nazi, though, in political outlook. His chief employee was a black man - a stereotypical study in self-hate. He bitterly hated his boss, his racist beliefs (although the boss always treated him with a sort of quiet, impersonal respect, like a piece of equipment), and what he saw as his failed life - his boss dropped out of high school, he had a diploma from UC Davis. I respected this man - he worked for his family, and had high ambitions for his children. He would often make bitter remarks about their lack of willpower, how they were spoiled and did nothing but watch TV. He also hated what black womanhood had to offer. He didn't particularly like me, either, jealous of my youth and relative advantages in life. I felt deeply that this sad life outlook was a tragedy, but I respected him anyway.

I felt his Nazism provided for him what he lacked - identity, affiliation. He had no father. He had a son, but his wife left him for her alcoholism, so he raised the boy alone. He was in many ways a very intelligent and thoughtful and lonely person. He was a very hard worker. He fought bitterly for what he had. Life offered him little reprieve. Then he saw those who also fought, and had nothing, and then spoiled brats. He had tremendous common sense and street smarts. He was very cautious. He was weasely, but I found him very moral and worthy of respect. He ran an impeccably clean shop.

My prior employer was a German Jew. He was a real gentleman. He had tremendous moral courage and sheer force of will. He had the quality of gravitas - never lost his temper, never lost his patience, never caught off guard, a man who never was without resource. His adventures filled the book he was writing and that I did the technical work for and edited.

He was much more German than Jew. This, too, was his cultivation.

Growing up - when he was about 12 - he boasted he beat up a Jewish kid. His father slowly said, "you know...some day...that may happen to you...you are yourself Jewish..." and that was how he learned. He mentioned it offhand, but I had no doubt he felt his life was a sort of ironic punishment for this. Yet he himself felt he had come so far and had come to a positive view of life.

He was the most manly, strong-spirited, most firmly optimistic man I ever met. This, from the man driven out of his country who turned off the TV whenever Bush started to speak, "I don't want to see that man." Sometimes I expressed an opinion on something, and he would turn away sadly and say, "So young, and so cynical."

How ironic.

Later, I went to work at a private high school. The CFO was a white guy, ironically enough he had driven a French teacher out who was a Polish-Jewish refugee who objected to what she saw as the fascistic way in which they implemented affirmative action. I know because he asked me to destroy illegal evidence of the coverup.

I had so little respect for this guy - a real stereotypical pointy-haired boss - I wasn't even threatened by him. I ignored him and he ignored me, except to give me occasional projects. He wasn't my supervisor anyway.

I remember, occasionally, when we would talk and I would say something totally offhand that happened to demonstrate my vastly superior intelligence and stronger spirit, he would give me this look. It was a most curious look. It was funny how the look bore the closest resemblance to that look you see in the eyes of an angry homeless person - hostis humani generis. Then I thought of that German Jew. I saw this, too, as a failure of cultivation. Even in his stereotyped preppy outfit with the V-neck sweater and dress shirt, he still was in need of uplifting. I found it most creepy how he would sit in his office chair, for hours, totally inert - not asleep, simply inert. I felt greater culture could fix this person.

I have other stories as well - I've lived many lives - but those are the ones that really stuck with me in terms of my conviction that people can be improved.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.