How do you know?
Posted on 12/07/2002 9:46:51 AM PST by beckett
Can we buy a verb?
How do you know?
‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath’ ( Mark 2:24)
"Except for God himself, there is nothing in the practice of religion that is more sacred than humanity. Men and women lose their dignity under any regime that sanctifies anything above men and women."
"In Communism, and Fascism the... system---is everything. The individual is subservient to the plan; to the state."
"Years ago a novelist, Barbara Goldberg wrote:"
"You see that bridge; that huge red naked thing of steel? Magnificent eh?
And there-no, there, right at the top. A little dot that sways and crawls along,
fearful lest it lose its dizzy head, and dash into oblivion. Pitiful isn't it?
That pygmy being with its two small hands, and smaller brain,
you see him? Well, he made the bridge!"
"People are greater than things. They are not like bridges; they build them! It is therefore as it should be, that God, when he sought to reveal himself to the world, did so through a human personality-the noblest thing in all creation. Not only were human beings honored by the incarnation, they were dignified by Jesus' own treatment of his fellows. Habitually he reserved his kindest attentions to human life in its frailest forms. Jesus gave the world a spiritual perspective that every religious obedience secondary, to our duty to care for one another."
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Good News For The Day
‘Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers on mine, you did for me’ (Matthew 25:40)
"A distinctive feature of Jesus regard for people, was his habit of reserving his best and kindest attentions for personality in its frailest forms. Lepers, in Jesus' day, had no few friends. They were tolerated, but seldom loved. Their life's work amounted largely to just staying out of other people's way. The rights and freedoms of healthy individuals were not permitted them. But Jesus treasured the lepers. He put his hands on their rotting flesh, to heal them. To him they were precious."
"Some of the harshest words Jesus spoke were directed against those who treated their weaker brethren badly. Witness his scathing rebuke of the scribes and pharisees who made life hard for widows by insisting on their obedience to many details of ritual law. In a time when few others did so, Jesus revered women, children, beggars, and aliens. He was the defender, protector, champion, and redeemer of the most oppressed and inglorious examples of humanity."
"Just as in his own day, Jesus now, is a... challenge---to the way society is structured."
"Governments, laws, traditions, and institutions both religious and secular, would be made better servants of humanity by striving to enact the ethics of Jesus. Jesus is far more than a topic or a theme for contemplation among religious hobbyists. He stands before this present world with a beautiful Spirit with which to live life; unequaled goals for service, and magnificent ideals to strive for."
Since science and reason are inherently agnostic, if practiced honestly,
why should anyone presume they are in conflict with spirituality?
Good question. However we see much presumption made in that regard, do we not? And it's my feeling that most of it comes from the materialist side, whose impatience with the incompleteness of their knowledge drives them to lash out a bit.
I agree. Both atheism and theism are articles of faith, but it's been my observation that atheists are less likely to be honest about it.
It's almost enough to make a reasonable man presume toward spirituality.
Cows.
(At least she's not doing the knock knock jokes anymore.)
Here is a good example:
Honest physicists will admit that they have no idea why there is something rather than nothing. After all, what produced the quantum forces that supposedly made creation possible? "No one is certain what happened before the Big Bang, or even if the question has any meaning," Steven Weinberg, the physicist and Nobel laureate, wrote recently.
Next questions: Why does the universe look this way rather than some other way? Why does it adhere to these laws of nature rather than to some other laws? Altering any of the universe's fundamental parameters would have radically altered reality. For example, if the cosmos had been slightly more dense at its inception, it would have quickly collapsed into a black hole.
A smidgen less dense, and it would have flown apart so fast that there would have been no chance for stars, galaxies, and planets to form. Cosmologists sometimes call this the fine-tuning problem, or, more colorfully, the Goldilocks dilemma: How did the density of the universe turn out not too high, not too low, but just right?
This begins with the nihilisticly absurd notion that "nothing" is an alternative to "something." Of course, "honest physicists will admit that they have no idea why there is something rather than nothing," because it is a question none of them would have thought of (they are scientist, they deal with what is, not with what is not) and only a crackpot pseudo-intellectual posing as a philosopher could suggest "non-existense" was a possibility. If we pretend to take the question seriously, always knowing that is not honestly possible, the answer is, "well, because there is something."
As for the rest, it just a list of variations of the same mistaken notion that anything can be other than what it is. In every case where one asks, why does X have quality A rather than quality B, it is because if X had quality B it would not be X. The universe has the laws it has, because it is this universe. If there were other laws, it would be a hypothetical "other" universe, but since there is no "other" universe, the question is meaningless.
All of this can be reduced to the logical fallacy which claims the universe could be both A (existense as it is) and non-A (existense as it is not). It is a simple logical error disguised as a philosophical question in an attempt to obfuscate the irrationality of mysticism.
As Gary Boldwater indicated, this whole thing is a defiance of the law of identity #2. As thinktwice suggested, this guy, and anyone who admires him, needs to check his premises. #5 Hank
Been there (20's) three times. As for the rest of your guesses, science and mathematics are nothing more than mataphorical descriptions of material touchable world, without which, there would be no abstract concept "7." Before man could conceive "7" he had to discover how to count to 7, and the possible existense "7" can have is as a symbol (such as this 7, or one printed on a page), or as the abstract concept for a collection of objects, with one more than 6 in it, or the doubly abstract notion of measure, such as 7 inches or 7 lightyears.
Without material things to count and measure, no numbers would exist. Mathematics is nothing but an intellectual (conceptual) method for identifying and dealing with certain qualities and phenomena of the very real touchable material world without which mathematics would be meaningless.
Mathematics can be used to measure the world, but first you have to have a world. Of course I cannot give you a 7 anymore than I could give you "uncleness." However, I can show you someone with the quality of being an uncle, and I can show you many examples of things with the quality 7.
Hank
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