Anyone that thinks there would be evidence of feces and campfires from 4000 years ago in Saudi Arabia, has CLEARLY never been to the desert. Go out to New Mexico or Arizona sometime, see a desert much less harsh than the ones being described, and take a look at the ruins and see the SANDBLASTING they receive at the hands of the wind. These are meant to be permanent structures and are around 1000 years old, and much more sturdy than a turd.
Erek
Scientists have been able to find and carbon date places where a small group like a family had lived in the desert thousands of years ago; using space technology they can find sites under the sands. There is no evidence of large groups of people; and why any one would wander in a desert for 40 years even 40 days makes one wonder why, and to feed and provide drink for thousands of people would be next to impossibe God was supposed to send down manna from heaven to them… pretty hard to swallow.Water was another thing to consider.
Monavis
Been there. Nothing blown around? Nothing buried? Nothing sheltered by rocks? No bodies buried anywhere - remember almost all those who left Egypt had died by the time the Jordan was crossed.
Not too likely.
Oh, and are you of the opinion that we turned right after the Sinai? I think I’ve heard that somewhere. I do remember, that at the time of the 6 Day War, several people wondered why Moses wasn’t smart enough to stay in Saudi Arabia, instead of choosing the one place in the Middle East without any oil!
That makes me laugh, Voyager. Yeah, having a source of income like oil would have changed things a lot. And yes, that is what the movie is all about. These two men sneaked into Saudi Arabia and found 1) water 2) altars 3) acacia wood trees, etc…
oil… tee hee!
If you are interested, for you and you only (what with you being located in deep space and all), I can mail you my copy of the video, and you can come back and tell all of us all the resons it is a big hoax and the film was doctored… if you’re up to the challenge. ;j
By the way, about my previous post about hell, the third sponsor on the bottom of this page seems to have the same opinion for the most part. Good times!
Because no one is perfect, no one really belongs in heaven with God, no matter how good you think you are. I personally am probably the worst sinner here in this forum. Look at the facts: I told God I hated him, I mutilated my body, I attempted suicide three times, I broke promises to my best friends, I cheated in my high school algebra class… in my very nature I am self-consumed and often too prideful.
Because of these things and many like them, I don’t belong in heaven. I deserve to be punished for a while, and then cease to exist. Sounds fair, even to me. The only reason I believe I won’t be going to hell is not because I’m any better, but because I believe God loves us, he saw my woeful condition, saw that I could not save myself, and he made a way. He sent a perfect person to take my place in hell (for three days), who then was resurrected and is now waiting for me to cash in my free pass to heaven. You can have that, too, if you are desperate enough to believe this stuff.
I gathered that. You’ve presented your personnal beliefs as if they were facts. That’s one tecnique in a debate. At some point, in the pursuit of an honest descussion you might acknowledge that your beliefs are not the “truth” but merely your belief.
I think some on the other posters are getting some emanations from you.
Mine as well. My reference was entirely in jest. I have claimed my right to decide for myself what my beliefs are. I extend that privilage to others as well. I do believe that there is “Truth”. I think it would be very unwise and unrealistic of me to think that I, you, Voyager, or anyone else know anything but a small portion of what that is.
I agree that there is a lot wrong with much of oraganized religion. I have family and friends who are conservative Christians and I can tell you that *their *foundation is love. We walk a winding intellectual, emotional, spiritual path with many trails that intersect. We have to be cautious when making a judgement call about who might be ahead or behind on that path.
In a book I’ve been reading it is proposed that God did not create the physical universe. We did, when we believed that we were seperate from God and each other. I find that pretty interesting and every bit as credible as “God created everything”
Thanks for the offer, but no. I’m still trying to find the time to watch the half hour of the Dylan documentary I missed last week when I was away. I think I’d get to this sometime about 2016.
If they had published their speculations in a peer-reviewed archeological journal, then it would be more interesting. That’s what peer review is for - if you publish, you have to pay your dues by screening the dross, to protect people like me.
I’ve never thought that either mswas or cosmosdan were anything close to fundamentalist Christians. You are safe.
As I have just begun to say:
I don’t claim having access to ultimate truth. I don’t even claim to know how much I have in my checkbook.
Having just discovered what the bank says I have and what MS money say I have is not the same, this was particularly profound 
No, I said merely that I BELIEVED them to be facts, and was only arguing that the standard atheist argument was not made with greater rationality than many of my arguments.
That’s the great thing about infinity, it goes on forever. The thing about ‘facts’ is that they are these little reference points we use to measure the world around us. However, those measures are all completely relative to whatever reference points we establish. Myself, God, The Sun, the Earth and the Moon are my primary reference points.
Yeah, I don’t think that I am ahead or behind on the path from Voyager or Der Trihs, we are on paths that interleave and cross one another’s. I do however believe that many of Der Trihs’s arguments are tragically flawed and rooted in his subjective emotional bias. Not that I believe mine are not, only that I am not claiming that they are not. That’s the difference I see often in this argument. People of faith are willing to say “I believe” and others say “Your belief is not rational”, when they have no rational basis by which they say such a thing. Especially since this argument always devolves into semantics.
I disagree with that, I think the seperation is an illusion, and that once we realize that we are not seperate, that is when we are united with God.
Take RGB in monitors as a metaphor. We can seperate the colors out of sync, but if we calibrate them then we get a larger world of greater color. I think the assumption of seperation is merely miscalibrated perception.
Erek
Voyager: I woke up this morning thinking about this discussion.
What I was thinking of was simply that I don’t think of nature as impersonal. I feel that I am intimately connected and a part of it, and that conversely it is an extension of myself, and that with increased awareness I have greater control over the way nature behaves.
Once I was very secure in myself and a bee came and bothered my wife, and I told the bee to go away, and it did. When I am settled and calm and centered, mosquitoes don’t bite me, I don’t get sunburned. I stare directly into the sun regularly, and I still have extremely good vision.
I don’t feel that I know everything, nor that you don’t know many things that I do not, but I do know that when most people say ‘impossible’ they mean ‘not in my experience’. So I tend to distrust someone’s idea of impossible. I also distrust it when people try to sell me quantum physics while telling me that Qabbalah is bullshit, because Qabbalah addresses concepts addressed by Quantum Physics.
What is a consistent framing of this debate that I do not like is that mystics are always judged by the lowest common denominator, i.e. the crystalgazing hippy or evangelical christian, whereas the scientist is judged by the masters such as Newton, Einstein, Planck or Sagan. If we judged every martial artist by the braggadocio of the yellow belt, we wouldn’t believe that a person like Bruce Lee could exist.
Erek
Ok, but if you change your mind…
Also, real quick, to clarify, I didn’t realize that the sponsors change every time you refresh the page… so, the third sponsor I was talking about on my page is probably not the same as on any of yours. Darnit.
No argument here. I don’t think believing in something based on personal experience is irrational. I think everyone does it pretty much every day. In some cases when there is heavy evidence to the contrary it may be irrational.
We all establish reference points through our personal experience and choices, concious and subconscious.
I agree. The thing about religious and/or spiritual beliefs is that for some it seems to require an assertion that their beliefs are the eternal truths that everyone must accept. They claim the right to believe as they will and out of some twisted sense of what I think is ultimately insecurity, they need to insist their beliefs must be “right” “The truth” “God’s will” Too often when people of faith say “I believe” there is the unspoken, “and everyone else should too”
I understand your point though. Several times here on the SDMB I’ve felt the disdain and smugness of a few members who view anyone with spiritual beliefs as some gullible crackpot. That seems to be the exception to the rule though, just as the Christian extremists are not representative of Christianity as a whole.
Then you agree with the premise of the book. I said we* believed* we were spererate not that we actually were.
The difference is that in this book it is suggested that the physical universe is a product of our mistaken belief that we are seperate from God rather than God’s creation.
Those are two different statements. I do think that nature is impersonal, in that it is not directed by thought, and doesn’t care about us (which is still incorrectly personalizing it - it is easy to do.)
But we are definitely connected to nature - we are part of nature. If we build a city we are just building another ecosystem for cockroaches.
It’s very dangerous to think we aren’t - that’s where global warming, the creation of deserts and extinctions come from.
I don’t get sunburned either, and I don’t attract mosquitoes either. I bet I came from the same place you did. My wife, who has Swiss and north European ancestry, gets sunburned easily. I think there are better explanations than connectedness to nature. As for the bees, you can do an experiment. More below on this point, which is the crucial one.
You don’t think that many physicists thought quantum physics was bullshit when it was first proposed? The reason we don’t today has nothing to do with popularity, and everything to do with the fact the quantum physics successfully explains the world. It predicts things to an incredible level of accuracy. Without qm transistors would not work. It has nothing to do with science vs mysticism, and everything to do with passing the tests of countless experiments. Okay, it does have to do with science, since this is what science is all about.
If any sort of mysticism could predict anything, it would have better acceptance. Forget about the mechanism - if telepathy were proved to exist, we could figure out ways of explaining it. I think you, and Madonna, and a bunch of other people just don’t get this, which is really no different from my inability to hear notes or draw.
I haven’t noticed this. This is something else I don’t think you get about science - personalities don’t matter. The work stands on its own. I’ve given a couple of talks to Arno Penzias, and read a lot of his stuff when he was head of Bell Labs. I wasn’t impressed. I think he got lucky - but no matter, what he and Wilson found was important.
Here’s the process:
You have a hypothesis, make a claim. This can come from dreams, from LSD, from looking at the evidence, from anywhere.
You figure out the implications of your claim. If I were right, I should see this.
You figure out a way of testing your claim. If I’m right I’ll see X, otherwise I’ll see Y.
You do an experiment. Ifd you get X, you try to show that you made a mistake. You design it to minimize the chances of messing up, but if you get it, you repeat it.
You share your results by publishing them, to let other people get X also.
Figure out a new hypothesis, explaining more stuff.
None of this can’t be done for a mystical hypothesis too. You think you can influence bees - design an experiment. If you can, it will be a tremendous breakthrough. If you can’t, you’ll have learned something. It’s a no-lose proposition!
Then why does my state of mind affect the outcome?
See this is what you don’t get. It’s that people were explaining this shit thousands of years ago, and with the lack of mass-media we were relegated to some “mystical” texts. I cannot verify whether or not the writers of the Sefer Yetzirah verified it based upon something similar to modern critical analysis, but that doesn’t make them wrong, and that doesn’t mean that they weren’t touching on some of the same themes.
Again, it’s you that doesn’t get it. I am not talking about science. If something is provable, it’s scientific, I am perfectly aware of that. However, just because something hasn’t been proven doesn’t mean it’s not provable. What I am arguing against here is not science. I am arguing against people who THINK they are being scientific when they are not. I’d say your arguments tend toward being more reasonable, but miss the mark from time to time.
Erek
Your state of mind is a parameter that might have to be considered. If you divert bees if you are happy but not sad, you should be able to design a repeatable experiment., possibly stretching over months.
This is similar to why science fiction writers don’t really predict the future. If enough ancient people say enough things, many fuzzy, someone today will dig out a prediction/belief that kind of maps into something we have today. Democritus is often credited with being right about the atom, but his model wasn’t that close to reality, and was developed for all the wrong reasons.
I’m not a physicist, but I’ve read things from those who are who hate, hate, hate it when mystics etc. use QM as evidence for their beliefs. They usually get QM wrong, just to start.
No, nothing makes the texts wrong, and they may well be touching on common themes. But only some sort of verification, today, would make us believe the texts are right, and not just interesting and perhaps moving.
If you can prove it it is not science, it is math. And you are right, that something has not been demonstrated yet doesn’t mean it won’t be. And many, many people don’t understand science at all.
But we need to distinguish between beliefs that can even possibly map into truth and those that do not. If I say that the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the greatest piece of music ever written, you can agree or disagree, and give reasons, but we’d never expect to come to the truth of this matter. On the other hand if I say E = mc**2, I can derive it and experimentally measure it. It is not proven, but it can be shown to the point that no reasonable person disagrees.
When you say we are all connected, that the universe is conscious, it sounds like a statement of the second type. If you mean it to be one of the first type, I withdraw my request for evidence.
I’d also say that this statement is not one that falls into the class of statements that can be considered either rational or irrational.
One more thing - the bee claim is definitely one of the second type, and can be experimentally verified or not. There is nothing irrational about the claim that you can influence bees. It may or may not be true, (and verification just points to truth or falsity) but it is very rational.
Well, the best way to do it would be to come up with an experiment that can verify Chi flow. It would probably be better to take a Tai Chi master and hook him up to some machines and see what he can do. Me, I can only do it sporadically, I am not yet a Tai Chi master. However, I pushed the bee away with my Chi, that’s how I got it to go away.
As for Qabbalah, it is not reasonable to just dismiss it as science fiction. The Kabbalah offered by the Kabbalah center is not that well respected even within it’s own field. If you’d open up the Sefer Yetzirah even once you’d see that there is a lot of math involved in it. The truth of the matter is that most of the people doing the deriding haven’t even cracked it open.
If you even care, which I don’t suspect you do, the best translation I know of for the Sefer Yetzirah is by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan. Basically these books are the scientific texts of their day, and I find it pretty arrogant for anyone to just dismiss them out of hand not having opened them even once. Mysticism is more experiential whereas science is more analytical. I think anyone on either side of the equation that thinks there is a conflict therein, simply is ignorant. There is no conflict, most of the time this conflict is presented by ignorant atheists that know nothing of mysticism and are using junk science.
As for my claims, I am just relating to you my experience. You can believe it or not, but that doesn’t stop us from being able to discuss the ideas that are presented. I am not bound by any responsibility to verify for anyone but myself that I am correct. I have found thus far that I have a pretty good understanding, and I do know what I am talking about, and that usually it’s the semantics that get in the way.
I myself have never studied quantum physics, and what little I do know, I find a little specious, like the idea of Planck’s Time and Length. I see a purpose that it serves, but there are some problems I have with it. If you want you can read the thread about multiple universes and reincarnation to hear my problems with it. However, the thing I find is that things that I say oftentimes bring up quantum mechanics for people who know something about it. I will read “In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat” someday, but I haven’t yet.
Basically all these concepts have been talked about for millenia, and throwing out what the ancients had to say about it is throwing out the baby with the bath water. Just because they had different methodology from you doesn’t mean they were wrong, and doesn’t relegate it to mere conjecture. Remember in antiquity it was the temple priests that were pursuing what you now call science, and it’s many different rules that have been applied one after the other that make up the set of tools we call “Critical thinking”. I’m not saying you need to go out and study these things, but I do believe they deserve the same respect you would give a modern scientist. Simply because you do not understand the language someone else is using does not make what you know smarter or more rational.
As for Science Fiction, science fiction doesn’t predict the future, it determines it. People read science fiction, and then they oftentimes very consciously attempt to fit their world to things they liked about the society in that book. I met Neal Stephenson once and he said that he thought that Snow Crash didn’t really predict the fate of the world very well, and I told him that I wholly disagreed, because the culture that I live in was very similar to the culture that he described. Certain aspects were different but some were very relevant. I know lots of hackers, politicos and rock star wannabes that live like Hiro Protagonist. Hell, I lived in a storage unit for a while.
My argument still stands that just because something hasn’t been explained doesn’t mean that it can’t. And I know what science is, and how it works, if you want to keep explaining it to me you’re welcome to, and I will keep explaining the parts you are not getting.
Erek