Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	10-Apr-06/6:23 PM
"Thing that explains everything" doesn't mean God to me. "Bearded invisible guy in heaven" means God.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	10-Apr-06/6:22 PM
You already have the idea that we're the rooster and there's something smarter than the rooster, so the comparison seems perfectly reasonable. Try -- just try -- imagining that there is nothing smarter than the rooster. I'm not trying to convince anyone that there's no God, just trying to get you to imagine the alternative. I bet you can't. In other words, I imagine if there's a God walking around Heaven, he's thinking, I know the answers to everything. Would you tell HIM He's just a rooster?
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	10-Apr-06/1:42 PM
It was a gift for you, AlChemy, because you were asking about logical ways of dealing with God a couple months ago. I put it on Dovina's poem because that's where I usually put things.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	10-Apr-06/1:40 PM
You don't need to comprehend how scientifically he did it. I can comprehend a God that can make something out of nothing. I can. It's easy. God thinks, let there be light, and there's light. If he thought, let there be a cupcake, there'd be a cupcake. Poof, like on TV. If there's God, he doesn't have to do things scientifically. Another difference between us is that you SIMPLY DEFINE GOD AS INCOMPREHENSIBLE, and then use that definition to show there is a God who's incomprehensible. Out of all the possible Gods, there are certainly more than a few who are totally comprehensible. The evidence that God is incomprehensible simply isn't there. If I were an eternal being, say, I might decided to create some matter and form it in shapes and put people on them and test them for "good" or "evil" and reward the good ones. Hell, I practically DO -- I have an ant farm. Would I be incomprehensible? No. By Dovina's standard, I wouldn't even be incomprehensible to the ants.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	10-Apr-06/8:16 AM
ADDENDUM: A perfectly valid scientific hypothesis might be "An apple can appear from nowhere only under the conditions that were present in Rio de Janiero on Monday April 10, 2006." That would be fine, in my book.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	10-Apr-06/7:09 AM
No, you can't disprove the God theory for anything. By that line of thinking, every reason for everything is challengeable (ie, you can rule out that wind knocked over the tree, that a bulldozer did, that poor soil quality did) except the reason "Because God did it." Why is that? Because you've defined God as "Unchallengeable Reason for Things". What's more, it's not impossible to prove that a specific butterfly flapping its wings caused the wind. It's beyond our means to study right now, but each step in the process from butterfly to tree is very small and very basic. That's why the universe works. There is no process that means "butterfly flaps wings and knocks over tree", there are only the tiny, tiny processes of atoms bouncing off each other and so forth. Do not misunderstand: Someday it will definitely be proveable. But all this is beside the point, because what I was really saying is you guys make a lot of silly jibes about me and can't understand what my position as an atheist really involves, choosing instead to talk about how I don't believe in reasons for things, while I can understand your positions just fine. And... well... it hurts, guys...
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	10-Apr-06/6:59 AM
As far as I can understand, you're pretty much saying God's beyond our comprehension because he somehow made all the matter in the universe from nothing. How is that beyond our comprehension? I can comprehend nothing (at least in small amounts) and then I can comprehend a lot of universe. So God made that happen. I just comprehended it. If that's not what you're talking about, I've no idea where you're at. Sorry.
Re: a comment on Semaphores from the Chaos by cyan9	10-Apr-06/6:56 AM
I only said one word.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	9-Apr-06/11:33 PM
Sorry, this is in poor taste, but kind of funny: http://content.todayscartoons.uclick.com/?feature=84d4daced92aa29208947f2d93d7b4fb
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	9-Apr-06/8:58 PM
Believing in what usually happens has nothing to do with it. Believing that I don't believe in what usually happens, that I think things happen without "reasons", or the million other things you've suggested about me has everything to do with it.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	9-Apr-06/8:56 PM
Convince me that God is beyond comprehension.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	9-Apr-06/7:56 PM
Yeah, I thought I'd deleted that comment. Anyway, see below for my "reason for existence". I didn't say that there was no reason for anything, only that there was no point to asking for more than the simple, obvious reason for existence.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	9-Apr-06/7:55 PM
Anyway, so things went for a long long long long time until two of those humans happened to have a child that they named "zodiac". They named him zodiac because his dad was named zodiac and his grandfather was named zodiac, and it seemed like an easy thing to call him, and besides, he was more likely to get love, attention, and inheritance with that name. Zodiac grew up and asked all kinds of questions, being a human question-asker. He asked sensible things like "Where should I eat lunch?" or "Should I get a job with the army to make money to buy lunch?" But he also asked other things, like "Why does chocolate taste like chocolate, instead of like poo?" And of course, he asked "Why am I here?" That was obvious enough, since "why" "am" "I" and "here" are pretty much the commonest words in his language. Zodiac didn't feel like that was a very important question to answer, but alot of other humans sure did. They'd made up a thing ages ago to answer the question "Why did my crops die when I worked so hard, while Steve's crops in the next valley didn't die?" They called the thing "A God" or just "God", and ever since they made him up, they'd been adding things to him as they needed them. They made him the answer to "Why do I feel bad when my mom dies?" and the answer to "Why shouldn't I kill Steve and take his crops?" So it was only natural that "God" should be the answer to "Why am I here?" The people who had God raised their children to think God was the answer to all of those things, and even those children who later didn't believe in God (or in the same God, because there were dozens, all made up for the same purpose) had trouble letting go of the idea that the question "Why am I here?" had an answer other than the one I've been giving, and that the answer was God. Zodiac found all of this to be nonsense.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	9-Apr-06/7:54 PM
So the lifes (we'll call them "animals" now) kept producing offspring and kept getting bigger and stronger. Smarter, too, because smartness was a good way of getting away from things that were trying to eat you, especially if you were smaller and weaker than some of them. Over millions and millions of years, and with a LOT of accidents and things happening, one kind of these animals kept becoming smarter. These are what we call "humans", and they had to be smart because they weren't as strong as most things. Fortunately (for the humans) it turned out that being smart was better than being big, because you could figure out how to find food better and stay out of the way of things like glaciers. Among these "humans", the ones who asked questions had greater chances of living than the ones who didn't. These weren't "big" questions in the beginning, just things like "should I hunt mammoth here or there?" or "why don't I move to that valley where there's better food?" Asking questions became an "evolutionary trait", meaning the humans who survived were more likely to have children who asked questions and so on and so on for millions of years, until it was practically certain that you'd be asking questions as soon as you could talk.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	9-Apr-06/7:53 PM
Pretty much everything happens for reasons. That's barking up the wrong tree. The difference between us isn't that you believe in reasons and I don't. It's that if I say, here's a simple reason why I'm here based on things we know, you'll say, no, I don't like that reason, I want a better one. Once again, here's the reason, without "whatsit" words: By some principle we don't understand yet, everything in the universe exploded out of the head of a pin in one instant a long time ago. We see that when there's a lot of stuff really dense, like in a black hole, certain things happen, and it seems this "Big Bang" might be like one of those things. All this stuff that exploded out of the Big Bang had certain characteristics. One of those is that it attracted itself; it had "gravity". As the stuff from the Big Bang zipped around in space, it began to gather together because of gravity. Another of the characteristics of this stuff is that, in its smallest parts, it had even smaller spinning parts. That meant that the stuff tended to gather together in spheres and to have spin. One of the smaller spheres ended up spinning around a large sphere that was big enough with enough gravity that it had begun to crush its insides, creating energy and heat. The position of the small sphere and the big sphere came from the way things bounce off of and attract each other. The small sphere happened to have a certain kind of stuff -- let's just start saying "matter" -- that, over a long long time and a process we don't totally understand yet, became "life". This "life" wanted to eat other "live" stuff, so a set of basic things started happening. The bigger, faster, more mobile life could catch and eat the smaller, weaker life. Life that could form more of itself had a better chance of not getting all eaten, too. So a lot of "live" things got eaten -- a WHOLE lot -- but a couple kinds of life managed to produce more of themselves and, if they were big and strong, they produced big and strong "offspring". It might not have gone this way. They could have all just died, but that wouldn't be much of a story, would it? Maybe that does happen tons of places we never hear from. Anyway, the strongest of the big and strong "offspring" had better chances of not getting eaten and THEY had better chances of having big and strong offspring too. This doesn't mean that only the strong survived. That's never been true about evolution. But you can see how if bigger/stronger lifes have just a 1% better chance of living than smaller/weaker lifes, over a very very long time there are going to be more bigger stronger lifes.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	9-Apr-06/7:12 PM
Tons of things happen for reasons. Science finds reasons for them all the time. If I drop my corndog it will accelerate toward the earth at a predictable rate because masses exert an attraction upon each other according to a formula. My dog died because it was stupid and ate trash. Some matter fizzes because at certain energy levels it is atomically unstable. I could go on, but this isn't the point.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	9-Apr-06/6:50 PM
Look at it this way: Suppose you, human-Dovina, are kept in a cage. Suppose you ask your keeper "Why am I here?" and the keeper says, "Because I'm bigger than you so I'm going to eat you." Are you saying you wouldn't understand that? Now suppose there is no farmer, or he's in the house watching TV. You ask, "Why am I here?" and you get no answer. Do you think, I'm getting no answer because there is no keeper? Or, I'm getting no answer because the keeper's not around? Or, I'm getting no answer because I'm not saying the question right? Or, I'm getting no answer because I'm really just a nosy hen that likes to ask pointless questions about everything? NO! You think, There IS an answer, but I'm just too obtuse to understand it! O Wise and Powerful Farmer! And so on and so on. That's absurd. If you don't presume to start with that you won't be able to understand an answer, you can find - what? - at least FOUR perfectly reasonable answers to the whole scenario. And I don't start with the assumption that an unknowable God is giving unintelligible answers, so I do find all those answers. And that's why we can't be friends.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	9-Apr-06/6:41 PM
Sorry, I don't believe a chicken can ask anything.
Re: a comment on The Battle of Fort Bragg by Dovina	9-Apr-06/6:33 PM
Oh. Well, anyway, consider that a chicken can't ask "Why am I here?" (If it did, its answer would probably be: Because God sucks.") In other words, ask yourself, "Why was I born a giraffe?" "Why was I born on the inhospitable surface of Saturn?"
Re: a comment on Or Outward by MacFrantic	9-Apr-06/6:31 PM
By whom?