Re: Numbers In Heaven by Dovina	23-Mar-06/8:31 AM
"Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark, where he was not sure of his footing, where he suddenly might be walking on water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown." - Flannery O'Connor
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	20-Mar-06/3:29 PM
Well, crap, I'm never against wasting time. I love wasting. And of course I kissed her.
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	20-Mar-06/3:11 PM
For the sake of specificity, here are the relevant parts of my wedding ceremony: "zodiac/mrs zodiac, do you wish to always strive to understand mrs zodiac/zodiac; to want to learn more about him/her; to make decisions with him/her and compromise when necessary; to evaluate your life together on a daily basis; and to communicate fully and fearlessly, even if it seems easier not to do so? zodiac/mrs zodiac: We do. And do you both wish to journey into your future together, to be friends and lovers [in the physical sense], to be concerned for each other’s happiness, to join each other’s laughter with your own, to make things together, and to trust that your relationship will handle the challenges that you will face? both: we do. This is the understanding you have been creating ever since the first days of your relationship. You’ve never been bound to it by anything stronger than your own daily choices, and you never should, for no legal contract will be as strong as your honest desire."
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	20-Mar-06/2:54 PM
"I see you changed happy to love." I'm not sure I did, but I'd like it back to happy now -- which, as I've said, is knowable and irreducible, while love is apparently everything from what you do to your wife to what you do to pie. My marriage literally calls for a certain happiness. It doesn't call for a certain kind of love, so I guess you don't know everything about marriages, do you, Al?
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	20-Mar-06/2:42 PM
He was hardly considered the 'local boy' at the time, as I recall.
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	20-Mar-06/2:41 PM
My wife is, in fact, the tickle monster.
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	20-Mar-06/2:39 PM
Yes, but that's what I'm saying. A chemical reaction making you happy still leaves you, well, happy. Yes, it's just a brain reaction, even under the best circumstances. So? If you mean why should I worry about anything beyond my own life like my wife's happiness, well, that's the clincher. On the most basic level, I worry about my wife's happiness because she makes me happy and I want to protect my arrangement with her. Is there more level? Maybe! Who cares? If you mean why am I not just a nihilist and fuckall -- well, just because I'm interested in my own happiness on earth and don't believe a God is keeping score to let me in heaven, that doesn't mean I have to fuck up other people's lives. My personal experience is fucking up people's lives doesn't make me very happy, and that they have a right to be happy as much as I do, to say nothing of the possibility that my fucking up their lives will cause them to kill me or something. It's all very social-contracty, you see?
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	20-Mar-06/2:35 PM
I love pumpkin pie. Marriage is something you do to one person you presumably love, not the thing you do to everything you love. Who's bullshitting whom?
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	20-Mar-06/2:32 PM
"aliens are mentioned in the bible." -- Well, that clinches it. "In genesis." -- You mean giants, not aliens. Or you mean in Ezekiel. "In a famous biblical painting,I don't remeber the name of it,if you look closely you will see a UFO in it." -- It's da Vinci, and not biblical, and it's not exactly like the painting was done by Moses or something. "In ancient eygpt(bad spelling)they are said to had the light bulb." -- Said by whom? You? "How do you think they were able to see in those deep dark tunnels in the pyramids? A torch would have caused a lot of smoke without ventilation." -- Arabs breathe a lot of smoke. You should try riding on an Egyptian bus with the windows all up. "There is some much that is not being told to the public." -- By the Egyptians? "I do belive in god thats for sure." - That's nice. He believes in you, too. "all of these different translations of the bible I'm sure there is stuff being left out." -- We may never know whether Moses preferred strappy sandals or loafers, for one! "The original bible was written in greek and hebrew." -- Hey! You actually said something almost true! "King james was british." -- And again! So close to true! But he was Scottish! "My personal religon is made up" -- Cool! "Thats my truth but I an an open-minded person because there is alot of room for error." -- I bet you're not going to be very open-minded about this! "I'm not being angry with anyone right now I just had to say my piece." -- Thanks, but this is our conversation.
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	20-Mar-06/2:21 PM
A flash: AlChemy dies and finds himself standing before a bright bright light. "God?" AlChemy says. "No," says the light, "I'm just the computer. But, hey," its light grows brighter and, somehow, more interested, "do YOU have any ideas about God? Because we're all wondering about him here, too..."
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	20-Mar-06/2:12 PM
Oh, well if it's in an Isaac Asimov story... I still wouldn't say that's God. "I'll know the same way you know you love your wife." Because He makes you happy?
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	20-Mar-06/1:22 PM
No it's not. If I say "I'm happy right now" (and I am) then yes, I could be ignorant of bad things in the world or my own life. I could be going insane. Someone could have secretly filled my office with odorless laughing gas. I could be unreasonably happy on finding out that my microwave corndog got cooked all the way through. If I'm halfway self-aware, though, I AM in all of those cases irreducibly, unassailably happy. Yes, if I say "I'm happy because of the corndog" or "I'm always going to be happy" or "all is well in the world" or "if the number of good things I know is greater than the number of bad things, I should be happy" or "happiness is the most important thing in the world," then I'm going to be talking crap. That's not what I'm talking about, though. I'm talking about feeling happy.
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	20-Mar-06/1:14 PM
Yes, I'm open to the possibility of God existing. I'm open to the possibility of all kinds of things existing. The next question is, what qualities need to be present in order for you, AlChemy to call something "God" or "a god"? In other words, suppose there is a computer floating in space which is programmed to randomly produce different arrangements of matter of any mass or size - from where or according to what rules is immaterial. After a trillion years the computer destroys them and creates another arrangement. Obviously, given infinite cycles, one of those arrangements will eventually be our physical universe, with the conditions necessary for life to start on this planet. All randomly; ninety-nine times out of one hundred it just produces a huge mess, most likely. Is the computer God? Suppose, for another example, a computer floating in space is programmed to randomly cause one physical law to be broken for a short duration anywhere in the universe. Suppose the computer produces one of these law-breakings every milisecond. Again, it decides where the law is to be broken, what law, and for how long totally at random. Given the size of space, obviously law-breakings don't occur in the vicinity of Earth very often, but since the computer is RANDOMLY selecting places, there is the possibility that any number of law-breakings can happen on Earth in, say, one century. On Earth, it happens that law-breakings have taken the form of people levitating, objects transmogrify, or people return from the dead. Is the computer a God? Suppose again that all human beings are actually, for whatever reason, implanted by a scientist with electrodes to make them believe that they're humans living on earth when they are, in fact, immortal Zorgonians living on the planet Zorgon. The scientist's experiment calls for a subject to be disconnected from the electrodes and returned to normal Zorgonian life whenever it "dies" in its fantasy-earth. Is Zorgon heaven? Is the scientist God? If you've answered no -- and hint: you should -- then universe-creation, life-creation, miracle-causing, maker-and-controller-of-human-existence, and keeper-of-the-afterlife are not the qualities that mean "God" to you. So what IS the defining thing or things? To paraphrase -=Dark_Angel=-, how do you know "God" when you see him?
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	20-Mar-06/12:29 PM
"So God's just a romantic notion" No. Consider it this way: There is the possibility of alien life. Any specific idea about what alien life is (say, on Star Trek) is a romantic notion. ACTUAL alien life may be anything or nothing -- superintelligent floating gasclouds, rock-dumb microbes, something we wouldn't even technically consider "alive", nothing. ACTUAL alien life is not at all affected by people's ideas that aliens are supposed to look like Star Trek or whatever. The actuality of alien life is not a romantic notion. People have for centuries now tried to make educated guesses about what aliens look like. Mostly people guess that aliens look like something on earth, which is absurd of course. The best educated guess is that there is the possibility that aliens exist, which is not a romantic notion.
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	20-Mar-06/12:12 PM
"I was more refering to the insistant stile, how he already seems to know what heaven's like." She. And it's Absurdism, which is assuming that God is exactly like the God of the Old AND New Testaments, which is the only reasonable way of handling God in literature.
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	20-Mar-06/12:07 PM
"Wow, you're starting to sound like Amanda. I wonder what you think god is." I don't see sounding like Amanda. I thought she took issue with me on the same topic last week. God is two things, which is why your conversation on the other page goes around in circles - because you won't make any distinction between the two. The first God is whatever God out of the set of all possibilities for God actually exists. This set includes 0, infinity, and a turnip, among infinite other things. The second God is people's idea of God. People's idea of God is like hearing you got a St Crispin's Day present from an unknown admirer and spending all your time between now and St Crispin's Day trying to guess what it is. The odds that you're going to guess it correctly are virtually nil (hint: it's an infinite number of antique shoehorns arranged in a particular order, but good luck guessing anyway!), so basically whatever you guess, you're going to be in for a surprise, anyway. This even goes for people who guess that God's infinite, or who base their ideas of God on mystical faith-experiences, because the reality of infinity is naturally going to be a big surprise, too. In the meantime, all you're going to have done is annoy all your friends speculating on the 1/10000000000000000 chance that you guess the right present - when, as far as I can tell, you'd get the present anyway even if you guessed wrong.
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	20-Mar-06/11:54 AM
You have us backwards. Dovina would never. I would.
Re: a comment on REM Sleep by mystic enoch	20-Mar-06/11:53 AM
Yeah, I just answered this on the other thread, but I'd rather answer it again here. The other thread gives me a headache now. I believe in happiness - or, rather, the potential for and value of happiness. My wife makes me happy. I believe seeking healthy kinds of happiness is the most worthwhile thing you can do. Yes, I use words like "love" to describe my relationship with my wife, and who knows, I might even continue to be with her someday even if my time with her stops being happy, and maybe that will be love. I also desire to make my wife happy (which also happens to make me happy), and not totally in some mutual exchange-of-happiness way, so maybe that's love. It's all rather wishy-washy and personal, which is why it's stupid to talk about. Talking about it doesn't make either of us have more or less of it. I don't "make more of life" because I don't believe life has base status to "make more of". I make more of my life than most people. I make more of my life than the base assumption about what you're supposed to make of life held by most people. But I imagine that's not what you're talking about.
Re: a comment on Numbers In Heaven by Dovina	20-Mar-06/11:44 AM
Talking to you is like trying to talk to a machine programmed to say sensible-sounding phrases utterly at random. I could say, "This thread has never had the appearance of dialogue, even when I wasn't on it," and you're just going to say, "I get a bright shine with Ajax!" The number of times you've seemed to answer sensibly on this site is, like, 5, which is about what you'd expect for utter randomness. I blame myself for believing in those times.
Re: a comment on Numbers In Heaven by Dovina	20-Mar-06/11:36 AM
Oh, because that's like my job or what I like to do? Romance is believing in the capability of human beings to change, to affect their lives. Romance is believing in the potential for happiness, however fleeting, false, or self-deceptive. Happiness is the only irreducible thing.