Burgers?

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Just don't forget that wonder at the beauty of the universe doesn't always mean the same as spiritual (read: supernatural) awe.

For some people.

I know. I'm deriving something different from it that Sagan might.

ETA: though, I wouldn't define it as supernatural. That implies that what I'm thinking of is somehow separate from it. Transcendent deity makes no sense in a pantheistic framework.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Oh, and you might enjoy this article, which I believe is relevant to the OP: http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2014/03/11/3389411/degrasse-tyson-religion/

Like Tyson, I consider myself an agnostic, for the reason that when you have a condition for which no test can be devised, it makes no sense to me, personally, to arrive at a conclusion about that condition.

Great article. I think one of the most interesting things that NDT has said on the matter is that he doesn't have the time or the energy for promoting non-belief. It doesn't interest him. Whether God exists or not is entirely irrelevant to him. He just flat out doesn't care if there is one or not.

That kind of sums up my position.

I do enjoy hearing other people's takes on Divinity, though.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Oh, and you might enjoy this article, which I believe is relevant to the OP: http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2014/03/11/3389411/degrasse-tyson-religion/

Like Tyson, I consider myself an agnostic, for the reason that when you have a condition for which no test can be devised, it makes no sense to me, personally, to arrive at a conclusion about that condition.

Great article. I think one of the most interesting things that NDT has said on the matter is that he doesn't have the time or the energy for promoting non-belief. It doesn't interest him. Whether God exists or not is entirely irrelevant to him. He just flat out doesn't care if there is one or not.

That kind of sums up my position.

I do enjoy hearing other people's takes on Divinity, though.

I'm still trying to work out the idea myself. I just have this sense that reality itself is God, and the laws of physics are its commandments, and that the meaning of life, if there is any, is that reality can observe itself. Which brings us back to the original point of this thread. Rejection of science for religious reasons is heresy.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

Oh, and you might enjoy this article, which I believe is relevant to the OP: http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2014/03/11/3389411/degrasse-tyson-religion/

Like Tyson, I consider myself an agnostic, for the reason that when you have a condition for which no test can be devised, it makes no sense to me, personally, to arrive at a conclusion about that condition.

Great article. I think one of the most interesting things that NDT has said on the matter is that he doesn't have the time or the energy for promoting non-belief. It doesn't interest him. Whether God exists or not is entirely irrelevant to him. He just flat out doesn't care if there is one or not.

That kind of sums up my position.

I do enjoy hearing other people's takes on Divinity, though.

I'm still trying to work out the idea myself. I just have this sense that reality itself is God, and the laws of physics are its commandments, and that the meaning of life, if there is any, is that reality can observe itself. Which brings us back to the original point of this thread. Rejection of science for religious reasons is heresy.

I like that.

[East Coast Hustle]

Yes, well, this all went rather predictably. Again.

That's OK, I'm no dummy. If every time this discussion pops up my two cents are badly misinterpreted I can only conclude that I'm not doing an effective job of communicating. But it only takes getting kicked in the teeth, like, 15 or 20 times before I learn my lesson.

Twid, thanks for taking me at face value and actually having a dialogue about it. I kind of enjoy talking about this stuff with you.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Yes, well, this all went rather predictably. Again.

That's OK, I'm no dummy. If every time this discussion pops up my two cents are badly misinterpreted I can only conclude that I'm not doing an effective job of communicating. But it only takes getting kicked in the teeth, like, 15 or 20 times before I learn my lesson.

Twid, thanks for taking me at face value and actually having a dialogue about it. I kind of enjoy talking about this stuff with you.

We can all continue to discuss it. I like doing it too, because it helps me define what it is that I'm looking for. I mean, in continuing to troll Yahoo News comments section, some kid was kidnapped and escaped because he sang the same Gospel song over and over for 3 hours straight until his abductor got sick of it and just dropped him off in some random neighborhood. Predictably, the Jesus freaks were all, "The Lord heard his praise and smiled upon him" or "The devil's minions can't stand to hear praise music."

First off, I could be the fucking Pope and if some kid annoyed me for 3 hours straight with religious music I'd want to get rid of him too.
Secondly, it could have been Mary Had a Little Lamb.
Thirdly, the kidnapper could just has well have killed him instead, and we'd never know about the Gospel music.
Fourthly, plenty of kidnapping/rape/murder victims cry out to their God. He doesn't help them.
Fifthly, that means it's unreproducible.
Sixthly, that means that God either favored this kid and not all the other people that begged him to help, or God just doesn't bother in that sort of thing because clockmaker deity, or can't speak English or something else, anything else other than omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent all-loving deity that is able to intervene in horrible situations. If you ask him hard enough and really really believe in it (sounds pretty Wiccan, actually).

Saying that God helped him is absurd. In fact, it's offensive. And I pushed it to the point where I got the whole retarded who am I to question God's will? Um. Human. Just because he's the boss doesn't mean that he shouldn't explain his illogical inconsistency in the prayer answering department. If God answers prayers, he's limited in some fashion. Or he's the devil. I basically implied to this one Baptist that he's a Satanist and doesn't even realize it. So God, if it exists, and for the sake of this thread, we'll work from the assumption that it does, it means that there is something else that it has in mind, and that the world by its very nature and purpose must be impartial in its indifference to our desires and begging.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Just don't forget that wonder at the beauty of the universe doesn't always mean the same as spiritual (read: supernatural) awe.

For some people.

For me, screw supernatural awe.  I'll figure that shit out when I'm dead.  Right now, I'm geeked out on the physical universe around me.  Plenty of time for that other stuff later.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

...That's one way to bring the shut up... Show them that their God is the Devil.

Me gusta.

Also, you gusta'd this not too long ago, ECH. And it's an excellent point:



From the pantheistic perspective, do I have a plan for my intestinal flora, the microbes taking a dump in my eyes, or the prokaryotes that out number my cells in pure numbers and I only win out of pure mass? Nope. I know that they're there. I don't care about them, or even my individual cells, on an individual level. It would be impossible for me. I can get a group of neurons that annoy my totality for something in particular, like, I don't know eat this instead of that even though it's more expensive and less nutritious but tastes the shit, and I can either reward those neurons or patiently explain to them that it's not in our collective best interest to do that. But I'm not talking to individual neurons, and individual neurons aren't able to effectively communicate with me. I'm a collective. They are irrelevant to me as individuals. I don't have to like that, but I'm limited. That's an interesting question. What's it like to be a single neuron?

[Nephew Twiddleton]

It seems like a ridiculous question, but that's analogous to how I consider God at this particular point in my life. We're the individual cells and microbes, or maybe even less than that. Maybe we're nucleotides. Collectively, we can learn something about ourselves, we can change things, but as individuals we're pretty meaningless to the whole. So what does the neuron feel? Are the neurons that are contributing to this particular thought in my brain the atheists and pantheists of my brain cells? It probably is a meaningless question for neurons, because they contain one piece of information and aren't capable of independent thought. But you can kinda see what I'm thinking here and why it is analogous.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Just don't forget that wonder at the beauty of the universe doesn't always mean the same as spiritual (read: supernatural) awe.

For some people.

For me, screw supernatural awe.  I'll figure that shit out when I'm dead.  Right now, I'm geeked out on the physical universe around me.  Plenty of time for that other stuff later.

I like the supernatural awe in this life, but again, I hate that word supernatural. If something exists above nature, it can't exist. Supernatural is a meaningless word. Something exists or it does not exist. Nothing can exist outside of everything.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Another thing that drives me a bit nuts, in a frustrated sort of way, is that we only have contact with one inhabited planet. We know that we're not alone, and we aren't hearing anything. Hearing something would have significant impact on my spiritual perspective. We don't know why the universe is so quiet. Maybe they don't use radio. Maybe that's a weird quirk of ours. Maybe eukaryotic, complex life is fucking aberrant. Maybe technological life even more so.

One of the things that really makes me think, is that all life on Earth is descended from the same common ancestor. Score one for evolution. That was never in question. Step back for a sec. Why did life only emerge once? Why is all life on Earth descended, apparently, from one single fluke organism? It's not even a question of complex intelligent life emerging twice in the course of 4 billion years, it's that it all comes from one single place. One common ancestor. One lonely, unique, prokaryote that just happened to survive.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Another thing that drives me a bit nuts, in a frustrated sort of way, is that we only have contact with one inhabited planet. We know that we're not alone, and we aren't hearing anything. Hearing something would have significant impact on my spiritual perspective. We don't know why the universe is so quiet. Maybe they don't use radio. Maybe that's a weird quirk of ours. Maybe eukaryotic, complex life is fucking aberrant. Maybe technological life even more so.

The Fermi Paradox Charlie Stross has a good take on this in Accelerando. In a nutshell, it's all to do with bandwidth over distance, the further you go from your center, the slower communication becomes so the expansion of any civilisation advanced enough to convert to computronium would hit a finite bandwidth wall, that functions almost like a gravity well, effectively keeping them local.

One of the other answers is that for any technological civilisation, on a long enough timeline, wiping themselves out is inevitable 

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Another thing that drives me a bit nuts, in a frustrated sort of way, is that we only have contact with one inhabited planet. We know that we're not alone, and we aren't hearing anything. Hearing something would have significant impact on my spiritual perspective. We don't know why the universe is so quiet. Maybe they don't use radio. Maybe that's a weird quirk of ours. Maybe eukaryotic, complex life is fucking aberrant. Maybe technological life even more so.

The Fermi Paradox Charlie Stross has a good take on this in Accelerando. In a nutshell, it's all to do with bandwidth over distance, the further you go from your center, the slower communication becomes so the expansion of any civilisation advanced enough to convert to computronium would hit a finite bandwidth wall, that functions almost like a gravity well, effectively keeping them local.

One of the other answers is that for any technological civilisation, on a long enough timeline, wiping themselves out is inevitable 

Well, part of the problem there, from the biological perspective, is that it really is all just random. The mutations that led us here were all entirely well timed accidents. We've been technological for about the arguably x amount of years but it's really taken off in the past 4000-5000. Our technology has actually been asymptotic since then. We just haven't quite hit that "approaches the y axis" bit yet. Thing is. I'm not convinced that we will wipe ourselves out. It's unreasonable to assume that even with the Fermi Paradox. Life's kinda asymptotic too. life forms were not terribly interesting from our macroscopic perspective until the last half billion years. We're eukaryotes. We're going to have a eukaryotic perspective. But this planet was nothing more than a glorified agar dish for most of its existence. Muliticellular life is comparatively recent. Land life even more so.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

To further explain the point-

the Solar System has been around for about a third of the universe's existence. Fine and dandy life could have arisen before then.

Well, no, hang on. We have to start seeding the galaxy with enough iron and what not to even get to that question. How long does that take? To get enough heavy stuff out there and clump it together with a well placed supernova? To get the right sized rock the right sized distance from its star? I don't doubt at all that there are aliens. I think that we must start seriously asking ourselves the question if the reason that we have not seen any evidence of a technological extraterrestrial species, is because... well...

We might be the first. Not even just in this galaxy, but, ever. Someone has to be. The heavens might be silent, because we are the biggest game in town.


Terrifying thought, isn't it?

[Nephew Twiddleton]

There's also the not insignificant atmospheric opacity effect which is why I said, why would aliens use radio?

Do you know why we use radio?

It's for the same reason that we can only see light within the visible spectrum. Radiowaves are obviously a form of light, as are gamma rays and what not. The Earth's atmosphere is opaque to all forms of light except for those that fall with in the visual spectrum, averaged out across all life forms, and radiowaves. That's another proof of evolution from common ancestor. All light sensitive life is sensitive to the same narrow band of electromagnetic wavelengths roughly equivalent to the visual range for humans. Again, the sky would be black at noon at other wavelengths.

That's all due to the gasses in our atmosphere, and how they scatter light. Maybe the heavens are silent because what they consider radiowaves doesn't sync up with us. Maybe their atmospheres are opaque to our radiowaves and vice versa.