59 new of 323 responses total.
I believe that Dick Cheney's energy council is working on a way that bodies of poor people can be converted directly into oil, without needing to decompose for lots of years first.
Before or after they're finished with them?
That depends how successful "compassionate conservatism" is, but just the executions in Texas should allow them to have Hummers for some time to come.
My brother-in-law died and was cremated earlier this year. We hired a boat and had a party on Tampa Bay, and distributed his ashes there: appropriate too, as he had a degree in marine biology. This apparently against the law, but the wind was too high to go out into the Gulf. I think that they fear that Tampa Bay would get filled in, if it is allowed. But then they could build more condominiums on, say, Ash Acres.
Re #265:
I thought they were going to make red, yellow, and green food wafers
out of them instead.
Just the terrorists
re 262 Actually being buried isn't environmentally unfriendly. But the way that people are burid in modern times is.
Yeah. I don't agree with cremation, as I don't see it as natural, any more than I see the opening of a coffin at a funeral natural. And if it's a case of not bothering to delay the inevitable, you might as well get someone to shoot you now; you're going to die sometime anyway.
#272...cremation is a lot more natural than spending thousands of dollars so you can be buried whole in a fancy box with a marble monument to yourself, taking up eternally a piece of land that you don't possibly need. It is also a fact that there are not enough cemetaries or places for cemetaries left anyway. You can always be frozen. Ted Williams was frozen. Then his daughter sued his son. The son wanted him frozen. The daughter wanted him thawed out and cremated. They settled out of court. Ted is still frozen. He's taking up space in a refrigerator, which is using electricity. Total waste.
So buy a wooden box.
As for Ted Willians, being buried fashionably must be about the most decadent thing one can arrange for on God's polluted Earth.
I think cremation has a lot of beauty to it. Your substance returns quickly (if spread) to the natural world from which it came. It is the ultimate personal recycling. Above-ground burials - laying out - is similar, but in crowded area creates some danger. Indians and Zorastrians practiced this. The recycling is also rather rapid as scavengers eat what they need. Re #272: what's unnatural about cremation? All humans on earth will be cremated in the distant future when the sun expands into a red giant. Also, I was speaking of the inevitable for inanimate objects - bodies. I have no reason to deny people living out their natural lives. But when one dies, that is the end of the person's conscious presence. I see no sense in extolling the corpse.
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.
You like better the idea of it decomposing into a putrid glob of bacteria and molds?
Yes. Not in the kitchen, but in the ground, yes.
Who cares what ideas you like?
I'd like to know from twenex the precise bases for his preference for corporeal putrifaction over combustion.
I don't think it's natural. I believe the link between spirit and body is too strong to justify breaking it by incineration of the body.
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.
Re #282: if you believe in "spirits", for which there is no evidence. When an animal dies the only thing we know that remains is useless flesh. Why invoke mystical "spirits" out of nothing?
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.
Re #285, I think it's more like some people confusing "evidence" with "anecdotes" or "wishful thinking." There's no reason to suppose there is a connection between consciousness and a "spirit" any more than that there is a connection between emotions and a "spirit" or having eyelashes and a "spirit."
How can my computer do calculations if it doesn't have a spirit?!
It is totally sufficient to consider consciousness as a physical function of the brain. That's what "mind" is too, so why invoke something else? What's "spirit" made of and where does it come from and go? Be real. I can understand ancient humans with little understanding of how the universe functions inventing mystical qualities to explain complex facts, but we don't need them anymore. What's different about emotions? They are functions of mind, which is a function of the brain, which is biology, which is chemistry and physics. Nothing else has ever been found. This understanding does not, of course, in any way make the functioning of mind less awesome (to us emotional creatures). In fact, what I consider most awesome is how the substances created in the nuclear furnaces of stars have properties that led to the initiation of life and the evolution of the brain (and supporting structures). Of course, if they didn't, we wouldn't be observing it.
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.
Corrobated=corroborated, of course.
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.
Re resp:285: Evidence is stacking up that some animals have a primitive form of consciousness, too. Many species have been shown to have reasoning and problem solving abilities, and a few have even been shown to have self-recognition and body image. If consciousness is evidence of a "spirit" or "soul", how do you reconcile this with the religious belief that only humans have souls? Re resp:289: Much of the Theory of Relativity has, in fact, been tested with experimental observations. Can you suggest an experiment that will test the theory that God exists?
"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.
Re: #292. I don't believe that only humans have souls. If what I have said implied it, then that was bad wording. No, I can't suggest a scientific experiment that will prove that God exists. But then I can't suggest a (practical) scientific experiment that will prove that you're not a computer, or that homosexual marriage is either beneficial or detrimental to society, either.
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.
I don't know if "religion" is a basic component of how the Universe works, but that part of religion that attempts to explain Man's connection to his wider world is, in my opinion, just that.
C'mon guys! This is the MOVIES thread. How 'bout creating a metaphysics thread for this discussion.
Good idea.
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?
This discussion has been moved to Item #1041. Religion plays to emotions. It's arguable that without emotions, much of our society (it's ills and its boons) would not exist. I have never understood the presence of religion and mysticism in Vulcan philosophy, as it's supposedly based entirely on logic (not that it matters, Vulcans being fictional), but I believe that true harmony can only exist with a balance between the emotional and the rational.
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).
Past lives neither require that nature "go out of her course", nor that people who have them are telling lies, if one defines lie as "a statement made with deliberate intent to deceive". It could be (a) that they are mistaken, or that (b) the connection to past lives is a normal part of nature. One would expect nature, by our reasoning, to always "work", but the fact that I am disabled doesn't prove that I don't exist.
Finally saw Harry Potter 3 at the Village Theater in Ann Arbor. Well worth the $3 and the drive from Plymouth. Now will read the book...
Getting back to movies, I saw Vincent Gallo's "THE BROWN BUNNY" over the weekend. Vincent Gallo is a very talented young director who lives here in Brooklyn. He directed the wonderful if quirky "BUFFALO 66" among others. In this movie, he stars as a professional motorcycle racer driving across country from New York to California for a race. He is a lonely introvert haunted by guilt over an old relationship, a guilt which makes it impossible for him to commit to relatonships in the present. So he races motorcycles, a metaphor for racing from his past. The movie is a cross country roadtrip where he is heading home to california and back into his past, and meeting women along the way, whom he wants to be with but can't because of his overwhelming guilt over this past relationship. It leads to where we meet his old girlfriend, Chloe Sevigny, and discover the reasons and source of his guilt. The key scene in the movie is a graphic oral sex scene involving Sevigny and Gallo, and while it sounds er..excessive if you read press reports...the scene is artfully done and key to understanding Gallo's character and the demons he hides within. This is a dark movie about how some people are trapped in the past and can't ever escape it, they can never live in the moment, in the present, because the past is always there. "BROWN BUNNY" is a really good movie, not as good as Gallo's earlier effort, "BUFFALO '66", but Gallo remains one of the best, most cutting edge directors out there working today IMO. Worth seeing.
re #304 Is that the one with John Doe, Iggy, Tim O'Leary, etc?
On Morning Edition today, one of the stories was on film restoration. 'Twas noted that Star Wars was so popular that so many copies were made from the negative that the original is now unusable. There is so much dirt and so many scratches on _every_ frame that restoration is impossible.
Oy.
That's bull. From what I've seen on Bravo and other channels, the original is used only to create a master copy which is used to make distributed copies. Also, if restoration was impossible, that means the DVD set coming out would be pretty crappy, and you know that's not gonna happen.
The DVD set is based on the 1997 release, not on the original one. I still think Lucas has a good copy stashed away somewhere that he'll trot out when it's financially convenient.
I doubt it. He was never really happy with the original outcome, which is why he kept fiddling with it. To go back and re-release the original would be like selling a draft version, in his eyes.
re #310: Consensus opinion seems to be that when George Lucas's artistic integrity has to duke it out with conflicting financial incentives the artistic integrity rarely wins the fight. I believe if there's enough money involved he'll overcome his perfectionist streak.
#311...McNally, that is ridiculous. George Lucas is a billionaire or close to it. Why would he pick financial incentives over artistic integrity when he doesn't need the money? He'll never be able to spend the money he has now in his lifetime. His motivations are artistic, these films are his legacy and he wants both trilogies to fit together so that future generations will see the films as a WHOLE six film arc. So he tampers with the older films to make them fit better. It makes artistic sense.
George Lucas's ten year delay in making the first trilogy
was totally financial. The wife he divorced would have California
'community property' of the intellectual property.
Jedi mind trick. Palpatine could do it. After all, Anakin's
mom was the hottest *woman* (with a speaking part) in Episode I.
Sporting wood at Star Wars is just *wrong*, Tim! ;)
re #312...Lucas busy during the delay between the two trilogies. He was producing the Indiana Jones trilogy. Spielberg directed those movies, but Lucas was the producer in charge of everything and co-scriptwriter. Those movies also made a ton of money. Funny he didn't stop working altogether during his divorce isnt it?
Anakin's mom was the only woman (with a speaking part) in Episode I. (There was a child-queen that had a bigger part).
Interesting, I just read a CNN article about the changes Lucas made for the DVD editions of the first trilogy. It appears that in the Empire Strikes Back, the Emperor is in fact (trivia question!) played by a woman wearing an Emperor mask, with the voice being done by actor Clive Revill. In Return of the Jedi of course, as well as in the first trilogy, the Emperor is played by actor Ian McDiarmid. So now, by the miracle of modern technology, McDiarmid now has the part in Empire Strikes Back. Lucas has also been tinkering with Jabba the Hut, and we get a new, improved, and better Jabba.
Sigh. I liked the original three movies in their original form. I didn't think the gee-whiz special effects were an improvement.
Personally, I would have preferred to get the movies as I saw them originally. Why mess with success?
The song that Sny Snootles does in Jabba's Hut is also different, as is the Ewok Celebration.
You might not have noticed, but the "victory song" from #3 (ROTJ), with the Ewoks and all, which I did think was "funky", was replaced by a different song when episodes 4-6 were re-released prior to episode 1.
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Re resp:320: That was the worst change of all. It doesn't move the plot along and the aliens are about as convincing as Muppets.
You have several choices: