response 277 of 323:

Sep 13 14:00 UTC 2004

The chances of anyone being alive by the time the sun expands into a red giant
are not good.

I don't like cremation. It may be irrational. But I don't like the idea of
a body burning up like that.

response 279 of 323:

Sep 13 15:32 UTC 2004

Yes.

Not in the kitchen, but in the ground, yes.

response 281 of 323:

Sep 13 15:40 UTC 2004

I'd like to know from twenex the precise bases for his preference for
corporeal putrifaction over combustion. 

response 283 of 323:

Sep 13 15:58 UTC 2004

Getting back to MOVIES...

Finally caught Shrek 2 at the dollar show Saturday.  Really enjoyed it.
 To me, the commercials I'd seen didn't impress me much, but those folks
at Dreamworks have a knack of fooling you that way.  Like the first,
there's a lot to take in, but it's worth it.  There's more good tunes,
in-jokes, and a twist on the whole Fairy God-Mother persona.  If you
liked the first, Shrek 2 is definitely worth adding to your movie list.

response 285 of 323:

Sep 13 16:10 UTC 2004

There is evidence. It's just that atheists and materialists choose to ignore
it, or confuse "evidence" with "proof". If there's no such thing as a spirit,
why do people have a consciousness? Why aren't they just like the totem poles
the Native Americans constructed, or the statues Abraham's father worshipped
- or, at most, like mindless automata? Even animals have emotions, and anyone
who says they don't probably hasn't spend more than 2 seconds with an animal.

response 287 of 323:

Sep 13 16:19 UTC 2004

How can my computer do calculations if it doesn't have a spirit?!

response 289 of 323:

Sep 13 16:40 UTC 2004

There is evidence (not proof) that certain people have memories from past
lives; indeed, there are accounts of a writer writing fictional books set in
Ancient Egypt whose details have been corrobated by independent experts as
correct, without doing research but simply by remembrance of such lives.

If such accounts are true, then the only reasonable explanation for the
existence of a non-corporeal spirit is that the person in question "wasn't
quite dead". Given that in this case we are talking not only of a span of
thousands of years, but of people whose birth within living memory can be
proven, which is more likely?

When one does not have proof, one uses evidence which one does have to come
to a reasonable conclusion. The only other option is to deny that something
is true in the face of evidence to the contrary, which is surely less "real",
if you want to be nasty about it, than reaching a conclusion based on the
available evidence. We have discovered that even ideas that were arrived at
by "the scientific method" have been proven wrong, whilst even that Giant of
Scientists, Albert Einstein, is most famous for something which has not even
been proven: The Theory of Relativity. If it were proven, it would in
accordance with scientific nomenclature be called a "Law".

Now, denigrate Einstein on the basis that his theory is not proven, if you
dare.

response 291 of 323:

Sep 13 17:07 UTC 2004

There exist a lot of explanations of that "evidence" other than the
existence of a spirit, although that is certainly one possible
explanation.  There is also "evidence" of several billion people who do
not have memories of past lives.  How shall we interpret this?  Maybe
people with souls are rare, and most folks don't have one?

I don't accept your "law/theory" distinction as meaningful in this
context, but there is certainly much to condemn Einstein for, such as
his rejection of much of quamtum mechanics.  But that's OK, science
is a process and it doesn't depend on individual people to be perfect
in order for it to work.

response 293 of 323:

Sep 13 17:16 UTC 2004

"science is a process and doesn't depend on individual people to be perfect".

True. I also believe that, if we ever develop an ultimate, all-encompassing
theory of the Universe/Reality, it will include evidence for the spiritual.
It may be that we are never able to produce a theory that explains everything,
(and i mean, /everything/), but that's just a function of how small and
limited we are. You'll probably find that if it were possible to link the
knowledge and/or consciousness of everyone who had ever lived, the knowledge
thereby gained would be "greater than the sum of its parts".

I don't believe that anyone has no soul. What I do believe is that some
people, or at least their conscious, "intellectual" mind, are divorced from
it.

As for "condemning" Einstein for being wrong about quantum mechanics, I hope
you'll be as sanguine if anyone in the future decides to "condemn" you for
theories which were proven false.

The fact is that the true nature of reality either depends on your point of
view (which would seem to fit with the Theory of Relativity, or at least my
limited understanding of it) or simply hasn't been discovered yet. If it had
there would be no need for philosophers, artists, and poets to explore it,
or philosophers, politicians, and scientists to debate it anymore.

response 295 of 323:

Sep 13 17:27 UTC 2004

A practical experiment to prove I'm not a computer would be to obtain my
address, visit me, and punch me in the nose.  Computers don't bleed. ;)
 Homosexual marriage is a social issue, and that's an entirely different
realm of science.  If you're going to compare religion to the Theory of
Relativity and to Quantum Mechanics, you're saying that it's a basic
component of how the Universe works.  As such, it ought to be testable,
just like those theories are.

The interesting thing about scientific theories that are widely
accepted, then proven wrong, is that they often turn out to be correct
for certain situations.  For example, the equations derived from the
Theory of Relativity agree quite nicely with Newtonian physics if you
assume an unaccellerated frame of reference.  Newtonian physics wasn't
*wrong*, it was just limited.  I suspect some day quantum mechanics and
relativity will both turn out to be similarly limited explanations of
something more complicated.  There really isn't much overlap (and hence
conflict) between them; quantum mechanics deals primarily with very
small scale effects, and relativity with large-scale ones.

response 297 of 323:

Sep 13 17:33 UTC 2004

C'mon guys!  This is the MOVIES thread.  How 'bout creating a
metaphysics thread for this discussion.

response 299 of 323:

Sep 13 17:34 UTC 2004

There are some who say that Einstein's rejection of much of quantum
mechanics was not driven by scientific skepticism but religious
superstition ("God does not play dice with the universe.")  I see no
problem with criticizing others for being irrational and would want
others to do the same to me.

Yes, Newtonian physics is correct for those limited frames of reference
where it is correct.  So is phlogiston theory and flat Earth theory.
And a broken clock is right twice a day.  So what?

response 301 of 323:

Sep 13 17:49 UTC 2004

The Special Theory of Relativity follows from Maxwell's equations for
electromagnetic fields if you insist that they apply in the same form in
different inertial coordinates. The intermediate concept was the Lorenz
Contractions. The experimental support for this came from the
Michelson-Morley experiments. I would say that General Relativity is a
Law, if you want to be fussy. However scientists are not hung up with what
they call a theory and what they call a law. After all, the existence of
atoms is called the Atomic Theory. These are just word games of no
significance. Scientists know what the supporting evidence is for their
"generalizations", whether called laws or theories.

The central scientific quandry currently is reconciling General Relativity
and Quantum Theory (which should be called a "law", as it is vastly more
precisely confirmed (to something like 11 significant figures) than
General Relativity or anything else that is called a "law"). 

In regard to people having memories from past lives...I go along with
Thomas Paine who wrote "Is it more probable that nature should go out of
her course, or that a man should tell a lie?" (from Paine's "Age of
Reason", Part I).