New Testingstan

Epiphany of the obvious:

Certain atheists harp on religious people, calling them cowards (or nicer things that amount to pretty much the same thing) because they're too scared to confront an uncontrolled universe, so they cling to some 'god' for safety and mental comfort.

Except you could almost say the same thing for certain atheists: They're uncomfortable with the fact that they really know ridiculously little about the universe around them, so they cling desperately to deterministic constants, reassuring themselves that the universe is orderly and predictable, and they've determined the right set of rules it goes by.

Different paths, same end-result, hilarious blindness to their own hypocrisy.

ja

sure they lack religulons or gods but use other concepts as crutches for their inadequacies or whatever

its a ver human thing to do

instead of blindly believing in a god that will save them from Life's uncertainties

they blindly believe in a deterministic, rational universe supposedly safe of uncertainties

all this arrogance and insecurity makes them pretty tense and unchill and ungroovy and square and shit and they can't jive smoothly

expectations i had of darth wong actually replying to me = 0

anyways

i have something of a bee in my bonnet about saying we ought to act like free will existssince humans will act as if free will exists anyways, because the trouble with saying that we ought to act as if people had magical freely-choosing souls even when they obviously don't is that to me that's basically the same as constructing any other kind of fantasy to live in (why, god may not exist, but i would try to act like a moral person even if He didn't exist, so i'll structure my metaphysics around His existence anyway) except in this case you know that it's just a membrane of feel-good bullshit to allow you to continue on autonomously when there isn't support for it beyond a wish that it be the case

shit's unseemly

instead of blindly believing in a god that will save them from Life's uncertainties

they blindly believe in a deterministic, rational universe supposedly safe of uncertainties

the important thing is you've found a way to feel superior to both

They that if a man where to gaze upon Creation, it would drive him insane

I say, let them be humbled and learn their true place

Nietzslime wrote:i have something of a bee in my bonnet about saying we ought to act like free will existssince humans will act as if free will exists anyways, because the trouble with saying that we ought to act as if people had magical freely-choosing souls even when they obviously don't is that to me that's basically the same as constructing any other kind of fantasy to live in (why, god may not exist, but i would try to act like a moral person even if He didn't exist, so i'll structure my metaphysics around His existence anyway) except in this case you know that it's just a membrane of feel-good bullshit to allow you to continue on autonomously when there isn't support for it beyond a wish that it be the case

shit's unseemly

I never had the pretense of saying that my morale system is perfect. I know how full of hole it is. But in the end, I just follow what I feel is the good thing to do.

the important thing is you've found a way to feel superior to both

Yeah, sure.

i don't feel superior to both which is why i am superior to both

"The stasis room creates a static field of time. See, just as X-rays can't pass through lead, time cannot penetrate a stasis field. So, although you exist, you no longer exist in time, and for you time itself does not exist. You see, although you're still a mass, you are no longer an event in space-time, you are a non-event mass with a quantum probability of zero."

That sums up that thread for me.

I was on the central line once, sitting opposite these two muslim guys who were going home after friday prayers. One of them was pretty obviously a recent convert - he kept going on at the other guy 'oh, you don't know how lucky you are to have been born in Medina, I'd give my right arm' etc etc.
and the other guy, who was obviously born into it, was getting uncomfortable & a bit embarrassed by the way his friend was going on and on.

I think with a lot of these atheists it's a lot like that, they feel the need to prove that they're part of the in-group of smart people who've seen the darkness, so they constantly harp on about it. You know, the guys who are all 'lets go bother this christian webforum'

and I know it's a cliche used by some fundamentalists, but I also get the impression that some of those guys are doing the rabid atheist thing as a form of rebellion more than anything else.

Aaron wrote:"The stasis room creates a static field of time. See, just as X-rays can't pass through lead, time cannot penetrate a stasis field. So, although you exist, you no longer exist in time, and for you time itself does not exist. You see, although you're still a mass, you are no longer an event in space-time, you are a non-event mass with a quantum probability of zero."

That sums up that thread for me.

this thread, or that thread ?

Oxymoron wrote: I never had the pretense of saying that my morale system is perfect. I know how full of hole it is. But in the end, I just follow what I feel is the good thing to do.

maybe its cool to chill and shit and not getting bogged down by pedantic bullshit that won't actually be ooooh profound on your life, since rather than mixing up minutiae, you'll be doing more important stuff in life. like living

well, like with anything, for a few years to you it's a new idea, and a dangerous idea, and an exciting idea, so you want to bring it up all the time and can't figure out why no one cares as much as you do about these amazing new insights about god and the world a junk

it's atheists (and theists, i guess) that remain like that well into adulthood and keep at it that i don't understand

it seems exhausting

Oxymoron wrote:

Aaron wrote:"The stasis room creates a static field of time. See, just as X-rays can't pass through lead, time cannot penetrate a stasis field. So, although you exist, you no longer exist in time, and for you time itself does not exist. You see, although you're still a mass, you are no longer an event in space-time, you are a non-event mass with a quantum probability of zero."

That sums up that thread for me.

this thread, or that thread ?

SDN. Its page after page of gibberish

Shroom Man 777 wrote:

Oxymoron wrote: I never had the pretense of saying that my morale system is perfect. I know how full of hole it is. But in the end, I just follow what I feel is the good thing to do.

maybe its cool to chill and shit and not getting bogged down by pedantic bullshit that won't actually be ooooh profound on your life, since rather than mixing up minutiae, you'll be doing more important stuff in life. like living

Funnily, I'm in therapy these days, and one of my "problem" if I can say, is that I have to learn to stop wanting to "control" my surroundings ; and I'm also working on stopping to procrastinate and being here & now, doing things instead of in my own universe where I control everything.

Applied to this discussion... funny, isn't it ?

evilsoup wrote:I think with a lot of these atheists it's a lot like that, they feel the need to prove that they're part of the in-group of smart people who've seen the darkness, so they constantly harp on about it. You know, the guys who are all 'lets go bother this christian webforum'

and I know it's a cliche used by some fundamentalists, but I also get the impression that some of those guys are doing the rabid atheist thing as a form of rebellion more than anything else.

maybe not simple as rebellion, but a need to find self-identity and shit because really, we're all just confused, and our actions and shit - be it fatso going blargh QED, or me going blah blah buncha fatsos blergh - are just us... conveying ourselves and figuring out who we are

in nuersing we had therapeutic communications where you ask patient open ended questions, and aside from providing you with informations, the patient would actually be able to reflect on himself and shit thanks to conveying what he's thinking and feeling and what he experienced and shit

Oxymoron wrote:They that if a man where to gaze upon Creation, it would drive him insane

I say, let them be humbled and learn their true place

in one of those TEO sci-fi threads i was, as usual, bemoaning on the staleness and the lack of weirdness in sci-fi, and how modern sci-fi is so full of hubris and lacks wonder in discovering things greater than man

and then someone was like, too much weird is too scary or something

like, depicting the granduer and incomprehensibility of forces would be too depressing or too frightening or too much or something


so i was thinking, this whole lovecraftian archetype

why do these great inhuman and incomprehensible vast things, supposed to be "lovecraftian", have to be malignant or scary or so whatever that those people who see them must die or go crazy or be negatively fucked up?

this betrays who lovecraft was, a pansy afraid of the ocean (like me)

he was full of insecurities, neuroses, and fear

if you encounter something great and incomprehensible and vast, like the ocean (which i guess lovecraft drew heavily from in his conveying of alien things, because of the strangeness and his inherent fears), or a being similarly as incredible, sure a whole lot of people would get scared out of their minds by it

but i'm sure some would also find it wonderful, beautiful, sublime

i posit that when encountering these immeasurable things, while a lot of people would go crazy, there would be quite a few who would go the other way and discover enlightenment or some kind of divine epiphany

this is why jodorowsky is superior to lovecraft in this respect

yes, he depicts weird and gruesome and messed up things too

but he also depicts weird yet vast yet beautiful and amazing and captivating and wonderous

all incomprehensible as hell and strange and inexplicable

but sometimes, we don't have to be afraid of it

why must we live in fear

Oxymoron wrote: Funnily, I'm in therapy these days, and one of my "problem" if I can say, is that I have to learn to stop wanting to "control" my surroundings ; and I'm also working on stopping to procrastinate and being here & now, doing things instead of in my own universe where I control everything.

Applied to this discussion... funny, isn't it ?

because all of these things are reflections of our lives, and we are all struggling, trying to overcome isolation and problems and inadequacies and insecurities, trying to be better and trying to just live

Shroom, I love you

in a non-homosexual way



Yes, that thing about "lovecraftian" entities always being "evil" tend to bother me as well.

I must say that, when discussing of these subjects, I always have this vision of these Cosmic Coral Reefs you evoked one day, with these vast things inhabiting it, and you being dwarfed by it all, not even a tiny speck of dust in the grand scheme of things. And this vision I have, the things I see ? They are beautiful. Wondrous. And scary as hell, because you discover that your existence, your whole world that you take for granted, is just the product of some randomness, the equivalent of mold colonizing a stale yogurt - and that as with mold colonizing stale yogurt, someone might one day open the fridge, see the mess and threw everything to the trash in disgust.

You remember this story idea i talked you about, with these two "Monsters" locked in an eternal battle, for which Humanity is only a pawn to be used ? And how these two "Monsters" who play chess by manipulating our whole species to their end are themselves only insignificant goldfishes in the Grand Scheme of Things ?


Man, I really have to get writing one of these days...

Well, Lovecraft had it pretty well nailed. He went out of his way to point out that the things he wrote about weren't 'evil' in terms as most people viewed malignancy, they were just so far outside human comprehension, and humans figured so little on their own priority scale, that their actions, motives, and sometimes very nature seemed evil from a limited human perspective. Hell, he wrote a pretty nice essay on the nature of fear, and how the most pressing fear was that of the unknown. I can totally relate to his fear of the ocean, I admit to being a bit of a sensation junky and getting a kick out of the emotional rush that actual fear provides. One of the best 'fixes' I'd ever found was swimming to the middle of a small but surprisingly deep lake my grandparents used to live on, diving straight down as deep as I could get, and becoming promptly terrified at having pretty much all my senses cut off, with complete darkness below, only a slight murky gray/brown above, with maybe a few high-reaching fronds of underwater weeds brushing against me, and knowing there were lots of living things, some probably fairly large, below me in the darkness.

So yeah, take that and multiply it by the depth of the ocean, Lovecraft had something right there.

Aaron wrote:"The stasis room creates a static field of time. See, just as X-rays can't pass through lead, time cannot penetrate a stasis field. So, although you exist, you no longer exist in time, and for you time itself does not exist. You see, although you're still a mass, you are no longer an event in space-time, you are a non-event mass with a quantum probability of zero."

That sums up that thread for me.

I'm getting an error in my mind. Something about not enough cannabis in the system to process that data. I'm not good at all this wibbly wobbly timey wimey crap!

So, fatsos + Lovecraft =


http://youtube.com/watch?v=juntpaPbbcQ

right ??

Am I the only one who got a general understanding of what that line was trying to convey, regardless of whether or not it was scientifically accurate?

I don't know the context of the quote so I dunno

Is it from ringworld? Reminds me of that for some reason, anyway.

Djinnkitty83 wrote:Am I the only one who got a general understanding of what that line was trying to convey, regardless of whether or not it was scientifically accurate?

No, I understood it, but it's not very clear. This is one area where the general incompetence of genre writers acts to their disadvantage.

So how 'bout that Harvey Birdman trying to pretend he's not a spear-carrier for investment bankers, eh?

Red Dwarf