Posts by Ross Mason
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@Roger.
Yeeee Haaaa!!
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Russell: And you can be as teeth-achingly literalist as you like, but what a person thinks of when they gaze out to sea is their own business.
Ditto. I see the beauty in the colours, the sounds, the movement be it calm or violent. I think about all those little fish, big fish, mammals. The chemical mixture, the plankton, the bio-luminescence, how there can be kilometres below me as I sail the surface. An unmapped void between wave and ocean floor. I think wow, this is all happening with quarks - charmed and otherwise - screaming about their nuclear space and interacting on a fantastic scale. (Which we only thought of in the last 50years and are no doubt about to confirm. A somewhat shorter time whence fire, water, dirt, air and a decreed immovable celestial sphere was all that made up our world.) That is enough in itself to admire without any earthly reason to bring some invented deity into the discussion.
Three score and ten years is too short to decide if heaven or hell is the place for eternity. Thinking of that is a crutch. Just accept that you are just a temporary collection of atoms gathered in one place in the form of you. Relax. Enjoy it. You are dead a long time.
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Timely from Sciblogs: Science and the folly of faith. Review
“the conflict between science and religion should not be regarded as a conflict between reason and unreason” – as some people present it. “The distinction between theology and science is in the objects on which to apply reason. Nothing can be learned from reason alone. A logical argument contains no information not already embedded in its premises.Reason and logic must be supplement by additional hypotheses about the nature of reality and the sources of our knowledge about that reality. In the case of science. that source is solely observation. In the case of theology, that source is primarily faith, with some observation thrown in as long as it does not conflict with faith. Theology is faith-plus-reason, with some observation allowed. Science is observation-plus-reason, with no faith allowed.”
Added:
“Science is not going to change its commitment to the truth. We can only hope religion will change its commitment to nonsense.”
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Rubbed out: rubbish.
;-) ;-)
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Whereas when I was a child I was counted as a Presbyterian, even though I wasn’t religious, and I suspect that’s very common.
The important point is that you were not BORN a presbyterian. It is how we become tainted is the fuse we should have a tendency to blow.
Edit: My grandad was at Galipoli. He didn't think much of what god did there when he came back.
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Well done Lilith__
I have bookmarked that cracker!
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I was disappointed the pocket protector and horn rimmed safety specs were missing.
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Pascals wager is no longer a 50-50 toss of a coin. I suspect it is more weighted to no god by the odd zillion to one. So why bother (with) god?
Poetry Russell. Given my thoughts long ago on that. Got no problem with tangaroa in a poem. But I have great difficulty accepting that tangaroa** should be consulted before sailing away. Or, keeping it local, that a taniwha needs to be considered before a road or river is moved. The fact that 1) the media pick up such a fight and 2) that media seem to support the idea that this spiritual "object" should be considered is the bit we should be discussing here. It has no other description other than superstition, supernatural, spiritual and/or religion. And yes, I realise that a taniwha may have been invoked at that place to keep people from harm because there may have been a death. But the chances are that there will be a physical and rational explanation for the death. How that impacts on shifting a road beats me.
**Feel free to put any other religious deity in place of any mention of tangaroa or taniwha.