A great answer that my atheist prof once replied with when I asked him if he was worried about what happens to him after he dies.
Is there a difference?
I have a question for those who define life in strictly biological terms. How do you account for all the colorations of meaning the word has in everyday use? It seems to me to be a lot closer to the word “experience” than some people are willing to give credit for. Life experience. The tumebof your life. It’s my life and I’ll do what I want. Real life. FML. None of these phrases suggest anything remotely biological from what I can figure.
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You are really making an embarrment of yourself by continuing to Weekend At Burnie’s this very dead thread. The only one here who has a problem with understanding word definitions is you.
That was pretty ignorant. Who is embarrassing who? If you don’t want to respond with some intelligence, than don’t respond. Simple.
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You are the one who is pounding away on a straw man that says your opponents don’t understand that words can have more than one definition. That is something that exists only in your head. We *know *that. The problem is that you are unwilling to pick one definition and seem incapable of understanding that that is a problem. As for not responding, you may note that almost everyone has settled for that solution hundreds of posts ago. So I’ll go for that solution, too. Soon it will be only you giving a sad little “oh yeah?” bump every couple of days withno replies from anyone at all.
You seem to have a lot of hostility when you post. Too bad, because you otherwise seem like an intelligent person.
And you seem to have cornered the market on passive-agressive.
Whatever works. Who will get the last word? Beats me.
The smart money is on it being tomndebb!
CMC fnord!
Boy, that would be a bolt out of the blue. Life does throw curve balls sometimes.
You all lose.
Enough with the cracks. No more personal cracks or it will go poorly for both of you.
I will get the last word on negative aspertions towards other posters’ character. Stop doing it.
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ninja’d by JC!
Nice work, JC and Bone!
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Bone Bone Bone.
You only get the last word on other MODS.
Otherwise it’s first come, first serve.
This is a good point actually.
I believe I missed this response from a couple of weeks ago. It seems you get the new age concept that NDW was trying to get across. I’m not saying I totally buy into it, but I certainly believe the Judeo-Christian concept of God I grew up with is antiquated. The idea of Mother Earth or Mother Nature is certainly pretty common, again anthropomorphizing things of the natural world. Why not equate Mother Nature to life itself? There seems to be a lot of overlap.
Like I said in another thread;
The Akkadians/Sumerians had Anu, the supreme god, who wasn’t really a ‘god’ per se originally, but the Universe itself (‘who contains all things’). Then there was the Mother Goddess, who was the Earth, which then created the Son (life). This concept was clearly very early and got spread to other cultures (including the Egyptians) in the form of the wife/mother (Earth) and the Son/Husband (life), in which the son died (per the seasons) and was brought back from Sheol (the grave, not an afterlife) by the Mother/Wife. Not as an adult, but as a child (new life).
The Universe gives birth to the world, which gives birth to life. The cycle of descent into the underworld or grave is the cycle of life on Earth, in which crops die in the fall (or hot dry desert summer in Sumeria) and then are reborn with the seasonal rains and river floods.
In Greek mythology, Persephone was the daughter of Zeus (the supreme god) and Demeter, the goddess of grain and fertility, who then ended up spending half the year in the underworld, married to Hades. Same story, more or less, different mythology.
In Egypt, it was Isis and Osiris, with Horus as the child.
And of course, we being Humans, it gets messed up, twisted around and reinterpreted by successive generations and different nations. Under the Hebrews, the Mother stops being a goddess yet remains a virgin mother (as all previous Earth mother goddesses were) and the Son descends himself into the underworld to rescue humans from their own sins and folly, rather than returning life and crops to the world.
Thanks for sharing this, Chimera. There seems to be much that connects human civilizations, including the use of metaphor in mythology. Life is indeed fascinating.
Good LIFE, you people. If you don’t want to play with this guy, don’t play. Nobody’s forcing you to so much as open this thread! Life!
I’ll actually answer this seriously, by directing your attention to the word “drive”.
From etymonline.com we learn that the word originated as a verb in Old English: “drifan”, which means to push or move something forward. This evolved into a noun - ‘cattle drive’, as a way to describe or mention a specific act of driving something.
When people invented automobiles, the big huge difference they had from the carriages that preceded them is that they moved themselves. (It’s right there in the name - auto-mobile = self move.) They pushed themselves forward, and thus were self-driving; the part that pushes them forward is the drive train - there’s a lot of driving going on. So it’s unsurprising that when you go get in your horseless carriage and direct it to push itself and you along in particular directions, you are “driving the car” and “going for a drive”.
The “pushing things” aspect of the word also became the standard way of describing an other specific kind of push - of golf and baseballs. A “driver” in golf is the hitting-things-stick that you use to make the ball really move, as opposed to just giving them a little shove (Scottish: put). And of course a line drive is when you use that other hitting-things-stick to push that ball really hard so that it moves in nearly a straight line.
Having come to be associated with the kind of pushing motors do due to cars, the term eventually adopted another meaning as well. Drive motors have been used for various things, but one specific usage they’ve had was to push certain ferromagnetic disks around really really fast, so that all the parts of them could be under a read/write head at basically the same time despite them being two feet across. There are a lot of ways these things could have ended up being named, but those motors were loud enough that you were never going to forget they were there, so the devices were named after their motors. The ones with rigid platters got called “hard drives”. The ones with floppy platters (look around in a museum for them) were called “floppy drives”. The collective class of them? Drives.
And so a word got a bunch of different meaning, both noun and verb, all deriving from the same general meaning but getting warped and mutated and changed along the way. That’s how languages work; that’s how they come to exist! (Except for French and certain other manufactured languages, anyway.) Does this mean that you can ride your computer’s persistent storage around town, or do better at golf if you try to hit the ball with your car? Yes! It absolutely does! No, wait, that’s a total lie. That would be a really dumb way to conflate the various meanings of the word.
Before you ask, the reason I didn’t just trace the etymology of the word ‘life’ itself is because even back in Old English the world already had a ton of meanings - the same ones it has today. The word is just too old to be able to closely examine the fun ways its meaning has changed - about the only modern examples are when it’s gets the ‘new meaning’ of being the trademark label for things. For example there’s this one board game, what one was it…