Posted on 09/19/2005 3:32:59 PM PDT by blam
I've never regretted being big. It's always been a big plus.
As pointed out by another poster, the Roman mile was a bit shorter at about 4850 feet.
When they put me in a box once in a terrible place, I thanked my star that I am not tall, because I could uncross my legs and lay on my side. But the others were taller and could not, and they suffered brutally. Mais cela est une autre histoire.
Thankfully, I haven't been placed in any boxes yet. And, this brings to mind one place and time I'd rather not be big, flying the not-so-friendly skles.
We have always had anesthesia.
It is called "whisky", and at high doses it is highly effective.
Ahhhhhhhh...if only there was a time machine! I'd love to see how things really were, but never would I choose to stay in the 1200s nor the 1600s; since neither era appeals to me.
If I had a time machine and could have only one trip, I know PRECISELY where I would go, and what I would do.
Preferably it would have a cloaking device so that I could observe without affecting the proceedings.
If you think about it, it's pretty clear what that one trip would HAVE to be.
I don't feel like waiting for the response.
In my time machine-cum-cloaking device, I would go back to Palestine, circa 34 AD, and I would hang out for a couple of nights in a tomb with a dead guy, and watch what happened.
I would hope to see him stand up and walk out.
That would determine one course for the rest of my life.
But if I saw the door open and a bunch of soldiers steal the body, that would determine another.
Indeed, that piece of information would be the most precious of all.
The cloaking device is absolutely necessary! Changing even the smallest of things, on a trip back, would probably change history completely and perhaps not for the good.
That's a point.
I'll go on.
If, on that trip, I saw the body stolen, and I got a second trip, I'd take it further back.
I'd go right back to some time circa 1300 BC and hang out on a mountainside, and see if a booming voice and a pillar of fire really did shout out to Moses and a bunch of bedouins.
If so, that would force another trip.
If not, I'd still want to take another trip.
The third trip would be inside a tent somewhere in the Arabian desert, watching Mohammed in his nights. Is he talking to an angel or is he just going out of his mind?
(By the way, I need a universal translator to make the trip.)
If, the result of all of those trips was a stolen body, an empty hillside with a thunderstorm overhead, and a whacked out bedouin talking to himself, well, I'd be done with that sort of trips, and done with religion.
The next time trip I would take would be to the day after tomorrow. I would pop up right in town and buy the newspaper. And then I would go buy a ticket with the winning lottery numbers.
I'd repeat as often as I was allowed to play.
And I'd invest the winnings in next week's star stocks.
Through directed gambling with certain results, and perfect investment, I would become the richest man in the world within a year.
And what's more, I would be completely liberated of all religious scruples by my earlier trips. So, I would by a tropic island and populate it with a large harem.
I would track forward day by day until I saw what I was going to die of, then I'd change the cause. Etc.
In between these diversions, I would write history books.
I'd take a trip to the Grassy Gnoll. And take a FILM, and stash it away, and then "discover" it as my own proof for my book.
I'd take a trip to the Red Fox and follow Hoffa to his gravesite.
What other mysteries are there to solve?
I was in Korea for four months in 1988, and at 6'3" I was the tallest man in the country, looking down on 43 million heads of black hair. When I got on the bus in Seoul, I had to tilt my head to the side so as not to hit the ceiling.
Your first posts were interesting and thoughtful. This one id dreadful! You can't profit from time travel, nor change history by any means. That you want to do so, doesn't speak well for you.
According to your rules of time travel, perhaps.
But remember, I've used the machine to discover whether or not there really is a master religious law I'm bounf to respect. And if not, well, then why not get rich, profit and change the future to suit my own selfish desires?
You have decided that if Christianity and Judaism, and even Islam ( which is a stretch, because most of us consider it to be bogus anyway !) are all bunkum, then you can do whatever you feel like; even to attempting to change your own death. But you never once gave a thought to what the ramifications would be, to the rest of the world, if you acted out your peculiar fantasies. And that is WHY your last post smelled up the place and makes you look ugly and vile.
Oh well.
I expect that if I had a time machine and discovered there was no truth to my religion that I would in fact BE ugly and vile, because there would be no reason not to be.
If there were not an IRS and taxes were completely voluntary, I wouldn't pay them either.
If paying for gas were optional, I'd opt to not pay.
Etc.
Which is probably a very good reason why, if there's a God, there'll be no time machine!
Are you only "good" and do what is expected, then, because there's an invisible, yet "real" gun to your head? That's amazing!
I do many things that I do not want to do, and do not consider to be good for me, from my perspective, because I am forced to by the superior power of other men.
Likewise in matters of religious morality. There are plenty of things that my religion ordains as immoral, evil, bad, that I don't think are immoral, evil or bad, and would not abstain from (or feel guilty about if I don't abstain from) but for the fact that my religion says that they are bad.
Not everything. I have no desire at all to go out killing people. If my religion were definitively proven untrue, or if the law could not see me somehow, or if I were King all of a sudden, I still would not go out and kill anybody except in self-defense. Nor would I burn down somebody's house, or go in and take his car, or rob him.
But there are other things that my religion says are immoral that I would prefer it didn't, and if I saw that the religion wasn't true, that there really wasn't a God who gave a damn, then I would cease to have any compunction about doing them. And if it made other people ANNNGRY...well, that would be too damn bad, their problem to get over, not mine.
I am "good" in some cases because I am really good.
I am "good" in other cases because I am coerced by human force.
And finally, I behave according to certain standards that I do not want to keep out of fear of God and conviction that He exists and cares that I keep to a path that is stricter than I personally prefer or think necessary.
I don't think I have met anybody else in life who is any different in these regards, although I've met some folks who say they are.
But you've shown why religious and secular laws are so important to a civil society. For without them, you would not behave all that well.
Correct.
Without the fear of the rod and the fear of God, there are a good number of things I would do that are currently illegal or immoral.
The human law does not, in my eyes, make anything "good" at all. It is merely the application, by force, of the opinions of some men on all the rest of men. For things to work well there have to be laws. Some of the laws I would change, and some of the laws I oppose I would (and will) break if I can get away with it. I do not consider this to be a moral issue at all. Men do not have the power to establish the moral rules, of what is good and what is bad. They only have the power to enforce their opinions. Where I agree, I do not "obey"; I merely do what it is that I was disposed to do anywhere. Where I disagree, I obey or not depending on my estimation of the risk of getting caught and punished. Thus, I never cheat on my taxes, because that is a fool's game in the age of computers. Even though I think my taxes are far too high for what little I get back for them, and if they were voluntary I would cut what I pay by about 2/3rds.
But on the other hand, when on an empty highway in the middle of the night, I never drive at the 55 mile an hour speed limit. I drive at 75 (not 120), because I want to get there, and there is no reason on God's green earth for me to obey that rule of men, not a moral rule, just because somebody posted a sign and says "It's the law". Yes, it's the law. But the human law is an opinion. If I don't share the opinion - that 55 is necessary on an empty highway in the middle of the night - I make a calculation as to whether or not I can get away with following my own opinion of what's appropriate. And in that instance, I do what I think best. I've never gotten a ticket, either, which demonstrates to me that I am correct in my assessments.
When it comes to God, it's a different matter. God is the only being with the power to establish rules of what is right and what is wrong. I notice that He exempts Himself from them (eg: I am not allowed to kill or maim anybody, but He who has the power kills everybody and gives babies spina bifida). This puts me in a bad humor about Him, but it does not mean that He does not exist. I think He does. Further, I think He has revealed His opinions to us on everything, and that his opinions are not just God's Law, but also define what "good" and "bad" are. Which means, if He exists, there are some things that I want to do which are bad, according to His standards. I refrain from doing them out of fear and respect, not because I agree with His opinion. He's God. I'm not. Presumably He knows what He's doing even if I don't like it or agree with it. I can accept that.
But I do still want to know if He's REALLY there.
Obviously if the body was stolen from the tomb there was no Resurrection, and therefore Jesus was not God and we can chuck the New Testament. Obviously if there was no booming voice flaming down from the mount to the Hebrews then we can throw out the Old Testament. I already expect that Mohammed didn't talk to any angel, or if he did, a bad one, but I would want to see it to give it any credence. I have not even a scintilla of doubt that any of the other religions of the world might be true. They are obviously all fables, in my eyes, so I would not bother to hang out to see if Zeus was ever hanging out on Mt. Olympus, etc.
Since I can't know factually whether the Resurrection, etc., really are factually true or not, I have to make a choice. Currently, the Shroud of Turin and the miracles at Lourdes are sufficient evidence to me that, yeah, the Christian God is God, and that therefore, yeah, I have to obey those rules I don't want to obey, for precisely the same reason that I show up for work: the consequences of not doing so are really nasty.
There are those who devote a whole life of philosophizing trying to tear down whatever support for religion exists.
They are secularly minded, but generally think of themselves a moral people.
What they don't understand is that they are playing with fire.
The fire is not, perforce, that God will smite them.
Rather, it is people like me.
You take away the guardrails of FEAR of superior power in Heaven, and I am not going to be nice and draw between the lines if I don't like the lines. Because if God didn't draw the lines, I am sure as hell not going to respect the opinion of some other hairy little MONKEY, some other MAN, to decide what I ought and ought not do.
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