In other words, you started out with a preconception, and actively sought out evidence that supported it, and consciously shunned evidence that undermined it.
This is the very definition of pseudoscience.
No, in YOUR words that is what I did. You seek out the little things in what I’m saying, ignoring it in context to everything else I am saying. This is the very definition of carelessness.
Hey, you might have a mansion in context, but if every third brick is made of Jell-O, it won’t stay upright for long.
Yes, yes! This is good stuff. I think I see it now. Our brains have serotonin 2A receptors, the serotonin 2A receptor is a G-protein linked receptor with seven transmembrane domains, Se7en was a movie with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, Morgan Freeman played God in Bruce Almighty, if man is five then the devil is six and God is seven, and Seven Samurai was directed by Kurosawa, who…
Fuck, I’m lost. TheFonz, help me out.
Why only “some” galaxies?
Mouldering, mostly.
True, but not to the same degree as someone who assumes that everything handed down to us by our ancestors is truth. Quite a bit of the knowledge of the ancients is used every day, because quite a bit of it works. Hell, our entire system of government is built on a foundation laid by the ancient Greeks, and nobody is shy about admiting that. But a lot of it didn’t work. Ancient man did some incredible things with the tools they had at hand, but the undeniable truth is that those tools were far more primitive and crude than the tools we have today, and that’s given us the ability to recognize flaws in the ancient knowledge. Stonehenge was a stupendous achievement if all you have to work with are huge granite slabs and simple bronze tools, but it’s still not going to tell you as much about the universe as a mainframe.
No, wait! I figured it out. I took a wrong turn at the Pixies reference.
…God is seven, this monkey’s gone to heaven, but monkeys don’t go to heaven because they don’t have souls (Ecclesiastes 3:21), and therefore evolution is ridiculous because, (Ha Ha!) we obviously have (electric!) souls.
Did I get it right?
Yes, that’s what’s implied by “in other words.” You’re certainly not going to admit that your entire cosmology is based on wish fulfilment. Your ego couldn’t take it.
Big things are made up of little things. If all the parts of your theory don’t work, you can’t expect the whole to work, either.
Carelessness? Even if we pretend your spin on my posts is accurate, that doesn’t make any sense.
It’s OK, I gotcha buddy. It finishes like this:
if man is five then the devil is six and God is seven, and Seven Samurai was directed by Kurosawa, who also directed Yojimbo featuring a nameless wandering samurai, therefore you are an Asian bodyguard.
Look, Miller, I can prove in five easy steps that your entire argument is bullshit. You claim that TheFonz is “spinning” your posts. Now, electrons can have a spin of + 1/2 or - 1/2, and half and half is composed of half milk and half cream, both of which come from cows, and male cows are bulls and produce feces–you are male, and therefore this argument about “spin” is really just bullshit. Q.E.D.
Yeah! Yeah!
[/flunky]
Oh well though, what say you about our souls? Do we have any? If so, what are they? The electric ether sounds like a good candidate to me, since we have electric currents travelling our nerves and such. Plus indirect evidence of ancient priests manipulating electric fields to do whatever it is they needed to do.
Do you have a better theory?
You have already been admonished for posting insulting taunts. This sort of direct insult is a clear violation of the Forum rules.
This is a Warning that you you will stop this behavior or you are going to lose your posting privileges.
[ /Moderating ]
The concept of a soul is an entirely artificial construction of our human inability or unwillingness to comprehend nonbeing. It may be fully penetrant in human culture, but this is merely indicative of a common human condition–the fact that we realize our own mortality and ruminate upon it at an abstract level. There is no empirical evidence that any aspect of ourselves endures beyond cessation of EEG activity in the cerebral cortex. Though it is impossible to rule out some supernatural permanence of human consciousness, because we cannot detect any such activity, a simpler and more useful model is that the mind dies at the same time the brain does.
Your move.
OK. Every culture from EVERY corner of the globe believed in a soul long before you ever proposed this silly idea that we just can’t accept nonexistence. They even said it was energy, long before we had any understanding of electricity or that it travelled our nerves. This is our religion, billions of people around the world believe in it. Here are the directions on how to build an Arc of the Covenant, as per the Bible:
And they shall make an ark of shittim wood: two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half the breadth thereof, and a cubit and a half the hight thereof.
And thou shalt overlay it with pure gold, within and without shalt thou overlay it, and shalt make upon it a crown of gold round about.
And thou shalt make staves of shittim wood, and overlay them with gold.
And thou shalt put the staves into the rings by the sides of the ark, that the ark may be borne with them.
The staves shall be in the rings of the ark: they shall not be taken from it.
And thou shalt put into the ark the testimony which I shall give thee.
And thou shalt make a mercy seat of pure gold: two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half the breadth thereof.
And thou shalt make two cherubims of gold, of beaten work shalt thou make them, in the two ends of the mercy seat.
And make one cherub on the one end, and the other cherub on the other end: even of the mercy seat shall ye make the cherubim on the two ends thereof.
And the cherubims shall stretch forth their wings on high, covering the mercy seat with their wings, and their faces shall look one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubims be.
And thou shalt put the mercy seat above upon the ark; and in the ark thou shalt put the testimony that I shall give thee.
And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim which are upon the ark of the testimony, of all things which I will give thee in commandment unto the children of Israel.”
To sum it up: “I will communicate with you from above the giant gold seat, between the two conductors attached to the giant capacitor (the acacia wood insulator lined inside and out with gold).” Doesn’t get much more obvious than that.
So if we still don’t understand lightning completely, or where this energy comes from, so how can we understand the energy in our souls before we understand this everyday phenomenon?
Your turn.
Somebody please tell me when we all get to drink beer, dance, and sing the “Na Na NAH Na” song when the inevitable finally occurs…
By the way, your folk etymology grasp of linguisitcs is as poor as your odd misunderstandings of physical science.
While [symbol]pur[/symbol] is Greek for fire and mid is a Latin combining form indicating the center, the actual word came from Egyptian well before the Romans and Greeks began swapping words. Mid is not a Greek form at all and the original word in Egyptian appears to have been something like pimar. Now, the ancient Greeks did mess around with the sort of silly folk etymology in which you are engaged, but they, at least, did not try to combine two languages to discern meaning in a third language; their efforts probed the possiblities of houses of fire or houses of grain (from another similar word), but the “middle” is not any part of even their failed folk etymologies.
This is simply not true. In fact, even Judaism did not conceive of a soul until the sixth century B.C.E..
Interestingly, despite all these “obvious” directions, no one following von Däniken’s silly speculation has actually been able to construct this “capacitor.” Aside from the obvious fact that von Däniken was a fraud and his followers are dingbats, I wonder why that might be?
Who cares? We’re all humans. We’ve all grappled with the problem of our impending deaths. I submit that the concept of a soul is just an archetype. All cultures conceive of certain things because all cultures are derived from human biology. You’re giving me argumentum ad populum and nothing else.
What does this instruction manual for the Ark have to do with the soul, exactly?
You seem to like electricity a lot. Very well. Can you see any problems with the following statement–
The lack of a complete and comprehensive understanding of X does not mean that we lack understanding of Y. Nor does it mean that we lack models for understanding X; it merely means that we have not assembled all of the available evidence describing X. It is probable that humanity will never amass all of the evidence necessary to explain the natural universe. Does that mean we should act randomly, or that the universe does not follow rules that we can describe or model with some accuracy?
No. That’s ridiculous. Every day people use pharmaceutical compounds whose method of action is not completely elucidated. Hell, we are composed of matter which behaves in seemingly incomprehensible ways at a quantum level. But we get by somehow.
If your concept of science is that it must explain absolutely everything for it to be useful, then you have been grossly misled and I am sorry. There is always an ellipsis at the end of every scientific discovery. There is always something left to prove. That’s why people continue to enter the field. If you honestly believe that further study of math or physics will be a detriment to your life… well… I feel sorry for you, really. You blame us all for being close-minded, but you yourself refuse to recognize the grandeur in the experiments that have been performed. And truly, some elegant experiments have been done in our short time in this existence. You refer blithely to electrons–check out Millikan’s Oil Drop experiment sometime if you get the chance. Or Rutherford’s beautiful Gold Foil experiment. If you’re interested in biology, consider the Hershey-Chase or the Meselson-Stahl experiments. These are all elegant, simple tests that generate beautiful, definitive, conclusions about our universe. If you can’t see the beauty in these results–if you must still rely on the paranormal to derive wonder from our universe, well then, I honestly feel bad for you.
I’ll crack one open with you when that hour comes.
You have misunderstood his position regarding Science, completely. His postion is that if Science fails to elucidate the least point of any system of study, it is therefore open season for any crackpot notion to be advanced in place of all the pertinent science, even when the crackpot notions do not actually explain any of the phenomena of which Science has clearly identified, described, modeled, and correctly predicted the actions and results.
C’mon! Pay attention.