how 'bout some gin-u-wine bic-lit, six-string theory? I close my eyes Only for a moment, then the momen't gone All my dreams Pass before my eyes, a curiosity Dust in the wind All they are is dust in the wind Same old song Just a drop of water in an endless sea All we do Crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see Dust in the wind All we are is dust in the wind, ohh Now, don't hang on Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky It slips away And all your money won't another minute buy Dust in the wind All we are is dust in the wind All we are is dust in the wind Dust in the wind Everything is dust in the wind Everything is dust in the wind The wind
Slip Inside This House Bedoin tribes ascending From the egg into the flower, Alpha information sending State within the heaven shower From disciples the unending Subtleties of river power They slip inside this house as they pass by If your limbs begin dissolving In the water that you tread All surroundings are evolving In the stream that clears your head Find yourself a caravan Like Noah must have led And slip inside this house as you pass by. Slip inside this house as you pass by. True conception, knowing why Brings even more than meets the eye Slip inside this house as you pass by. In this dark we call creation We can be and feel and know From an effort, comfort station That's surviving on the go There's infinite survival in The high baptismal glow. Slip inside this house as you pass by. There is no season when you are grown You are always risen from the seeds you've sown There is no reason to rise alone Other stories given have sages of their own. Live where your heart can be given And your life starts to unfold In the forms you envision In this dream that's ages old On the river layer is the only sayer You receive all you can hold Like you've been told. Every day's another dawning Give the morning winds a chance Always catch your thunder yawning Lift your mind into the dance Sweep the shadows from your awning Shrink the fourfold circumstance That lies outside this house don't pass it by. Higher worlds that you uncover Light the path you want to roam You compare there and discover You won't need a shell of foam Twice born gypsies care and keep The nowhere of their former home They slip inside this house as they pass by. Slip inside this house as you pass by. You think you can't, you wish you could I know you can, I wish you would Slip inside this house as you pass by. Four and twenty birds of Maya Baked into an atom you Polarized into existence Magnet heart from red to blue To such extent the realm of dark Within the picture it seems true But slip inside this house and then decide. All your lightning waits inside you Travel it along your spine Seven stars receive your visit Seven seals remain divine Seven churches filled with spirit, Treasure from the angels' mine Slip inside this house as you pass by. Slip inside this house as you pass by. The space you make has your own laws No longer human gods are cause The center of this house will never die. There is no season when you are grown You are always risen from the seeds you've sown There is no reason to rise alone Other stories given have sages of their own. Draw from the well of unchanging Its union nourishes on In the right re-arranging Till the last confusion is gone Water-brothers trust in the ultimust Of the always singing song they pass along. One-eyed men aren't really reigning They just march in place until Two-eyed men with mystery training Finally feel the power fill Three-eyed men are not complaining. They can yo-yo where they will They slip inside this house as they pass by. Don't pass it by. Tommy Hall- 13th Floor Elevators Keep D&D Lyrical!!
Galaxy Song ~ Monty Python Whenever life get you down, Mrs. Brown, And things seem hard or tough. And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft, And you feel that you've had quite enu-hu-hu-huuuuff! Just - re-member that you're standing on a planet that's evolving and revolving at 900 miles an hour, It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned, the sun that is the source of all our power. The Sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see, are moving at a million miles a day, In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour, of the Galaxy we call the Milky Way. Our Galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars, it's 100,000 light-years side-to-side, It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light-years thick, but out by us it's just 3000 light-years wide. We're 30,000 light-years from galactic central point, we go round every 200 million years, And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions in this amazing and expanding universe. The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding, in all of the directions it can whizz, As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know, twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is. So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth, And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, because there's bugger all down here on Earth.
Me too: The sun is a mass of incandescent gas A gigantic nuclear furnace Where Hydrogen is built into Helium At a temperature of millions of degrees The sun is hot, the sun is not A place where we could live But here on Earth there'd be no life Without the light it gives We need its light, we need its heat The sun light that we seek The sun light comes from our own sun's Atomic energy The sun is a mass of incandescent gas A gigantic nuclear furnace Where Hydrogen is built into Helium At a temperature of millions of degrees The sun is hot... The sun is so hot that everything on it is a gas Aluminum, Copper, Iron, and many others The sun is large... If the sun were hollow, a million Earth's would fit inside And yet, it is only a middle size star The sun is far away... About 93,000,000 miles away And that's why it looks so small But even when it's out of sight The sun shines night and day We need its heat, we need its light The sun light that we seek The sun light comes from our own sun's Atomic energy Scientists have found that the sun is a huge atom smashing machine The heat and light of the sun are caused by nuclear reactions between Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Carbon, and Helium The sun is a mass of incandescent gas A gigantic nuclear furnace Where Hydrogen is built into Helium At a temperature of millions of degrees
Sorry to Disappoint, but I'm Still an Atheist! by Antony Flew http://www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=138 Richard C. Carrier, current Editor in Chief of the Secular Web, tells me that "the internet has now become awash with rumors" that I "have converted to Christianity, or am at least no longer an atheist." Perhaps because I was born too soon to be involved in the internet world I had heard nothing of this rumour. So Mr. Carrier asks me to explain myself in cyberspace. This, with the help of the Internet Infidels, I now attempt. Those rumours speak false. I remain still what I have been now for over fifty years, a negative atheist. By this I mean that I construe the initial letter in the word 'atheist' in the way in which everyone construes the same initial letter in such words as 'atypical' and 'amoral'. For I still believe that it is impossible either to verify or to falsify - to show to be false - what David Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion happily described as "the religious hypothesis." The more I contemplate the eschatological teachings of Christianity and Islam the more I wish I could demonstrate their falsity. I first argued the impossibility in 'Theology and Falsification', a short paper originally published in 1950 and since reprinted over forty times in different places, including translations into German, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Welsh, Finnish and Slovak. The most recent reprint was as part of 'A Golden Jubilee Celebration' in the October/November 2001 issue of the semi-popular British journal Philosophy Now, which the editors of that periodical have graciously allowed the Internet Infidels to publish online: see "Theology & Falsification." I can suggest only one possible source of the rumours. Several weeks ago I submitted to the Editor of Philo (The Journal of the Society of Humanist Philosophers) a short paper making two points which might well disturb atheists of the more positive kind. The point more relevant here was that it can be entirely rational for believers and negative atheists to respond in quite different ways to the same scientific developments. We negative atheists are bound to see the Big Bang cosmology as requiring a physical explanation; and that one which, in the nature of the case, may nevertheless be forever inaccessible to human beings. But believers may, equally reasonably, welcome the Big Bang cosmology as tending to confirm their prior belief that "in the beginning" the Universe was created by God. Again, negative atheists meeting the argument that the fundamental constants of physics would seem to have been 'fine tuned' to make the emergence of mankind possible will first object to the application of either the frequency or the propensity theory of probability 'outside' the Universe, and then go on to ask why omnipotence should have been satisfied to produce a Universe in which the origin and rise of the human race was merely possible rather than absolutely inevitable. But believers are equally bound and, on their opposite assumptions, equally justified in seeing the Fine Tuning Argument as providing impressive confirmation of a fundamental belief shared by all the three great systems of revealed theistic religion - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For all three are agreed that we human beings are members of a special kind of creatures, made in the image of God and for a purpose intended by God. In short, I recognize that developments in physics coming on the last twenty or thirty years can reasonably be seen as in some degree confirmatory of a previously faith-based belief in god, even though they still provide no sufficient reason for unbelievers to change their minds. They certainly have not persuaded me.
turns out that article I just posted is from 2001 when rumors first swirlled about a possible conversion I've found this... http://www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=369 UPDATE (DECEMBER 2004) Flew has now given me permission to quote him directly. I asked him point blank what he would mean if he ever asserted that "probably God exists," to which he responded (in a letter in his own hand, dated 19 October 2004): I do not think I will ever make that assertion, precisely because any assertion which I am prepared to make about God would not be about a God in that sense ... I think we need here a fundamental distinction between the God of Aristotle or Spinoza and the Gods of the Christian and the Islamic Revelations. Rather, he would only have in mind "the non-interfering God of the people called Deists--such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin." Indeed, he remains adamant that "theological propositions can neither be verified nor falsified by experience," exactly as he argued in "Theology and Falsification." Regarding J. P. Moreland using Flew in support of Moreland's own belief in the supernatural, Flew says "my God is not his. His is Swinburne's. Mine is emphatically not good (or evil) or interested in human conduct" and does not perform miracles of any kind. Furthermore, Flew took great care to emphasize repeatedly to me that: My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms. He cites, in fact, the improbability arguments of Schroeder, which I have refuted online, and the entire argument to the impossibility of natural biogenesis I have refuted in a forthcoming article in Biology & Philosophy. So what of the claim that Flew was persuaded by the Kalam Cosmological Argument? Flew "cannot recall" writing any letter to Geivett claiming "the kalam cosmological argument is a sound argument" for God but he confesses his memory fails him often now so he can't be sure. Nevertheless, I specifically asked what Antony thought of the Kalam, to which he answered: If and insofar as it is supposed to prove the existence of a First Cause of the Big Bang, I have no objection, but this is not at all the same as a proof of the existence of a spirit and all the rest of Richard Swinburne's definition of 'God' which is presently accepted as standard throughout the English speaking and philosophical world. Also, regarding another rumor that Flew has been attending Quaker meetings, Antony says "I have, I think, attended Quaker meetings on at least 3 or 4 occasions, and one was at the wedding of a cousin," and thus hardly a religious statement on his part but a family affair. Nevertheless, for him and his family generally, he says "I think the main attraction" of Quakerism has been "the lack of doctrines." On the whole God thing, though, Flew is still examining the articles I sent him, so he may have more to say in the future.
If you knew my wife, you wouldn't need to ask. T-Mac's heroics were just an excuse we took advantage of. Keep D&D Civil!!
if you say so....i'm still reading the book and i am gonna have to re-read it because it is so damn mind boggling. it truly makes you re-evaluate reality and what we are really living in. that article explains some of the points that string theory states should exist but doesn't really give you an in depth reason why they are there. the cool thing about string theory if it works is that it works because it is the only way things can work. so that article gives a decent overview of the basic parts of string theory and the problems with the theory but at the same time you don't really get the explanation of why the parts of the theory are there. they are there because they have to be there which is what the book pieces together for the reader to see.
I've always found it strange why there's so much fuss over the existence of God. After all, what good does that do? Does the existence of a creator really affect how a person lives his/her life? Most likely not. Quite frankly, what's REALLY important about religion is rather how they can affect one's life. So research should be geared towards seeing the affects of prayers(success rate among different religions, maybe?). Or finding the existence of afterlife. Or see how people's actions in life can affect what such a supreme does to the world.
well there is fuss over the existance of god because people want to know that there is something more to this life than just being alive and then dying. it has been something i have been struggling with lately. i think i stopped believing in god when i was like 14 and over time i developed further feelings about it to the point where i just stopped caring about religion and that sort of stuff at all. however, now that i am 24 i have been thinking about life more and i feel like time is passing me by and one of these days i will wake up and be 50 and wonder where the hell the time went. it is difficult feeling that there is truly no purpose to life and coming to realize that you are more than likely right when you look at the futile existance of most life on our planet that simply lives to reproduce and die. while that sounds like i am a horrible pessimist this is something that really hasn't been something that i have focused on until recently...like around the past 4 or 5 months. i dunno...i will stop there from my rantings before i sound like a madman because all of these thoughts and feelings i have are so completely unrefined that i can't really express them accurately without writing a huge winding essay on what i want to express.
I feel you, robbie. Existentialism's a b****. On the bright side, you don't have to live your life trying not to go to Hell. Those guys have got it pretty bad too.
Video Version of Brian Green's The Elegant Universe. 3 segments, each 1 hour long: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/program.html
What does the existence of God have to do with life being more than birth til death? It's simply the difference of God wanting you to live a limited life, as opposed to you simply living a limited life. If anything, I'd feel more depressed knowing that my life is created by some superior being's lab experiment, living inside his little petri dish that we call the universe.
I would just like to put out my findings on some of the questions presented in this thread. So if you don't care about a Christian's viewpoint or want to find out everything on your own, then be forewarned *spoilers ahead*: Why everything?/ Why us?/ Why here?/ Why in this way?: From a human's perspective, it is God revealing His nature to His creation. He doesn't do this out of necessity, but because it is who He is. It's as if He's saying "Everything in it's entirety is a testament of who I Am." How can you know anything about God? Isn't He unknowable?: Even famous athiest scientists know something about Him (or It). God is the first cause. Why can't infinite turtles be God?: If you regress through the creator/created cycle infinitely, you would never come to our present situation. Because we exist, there must have been a first turtle. What does God have to do with life?: If He created life, He should truly know what constitutes a complete, abundant life. The designer or author of his work will have complete understanding of what he has accomplished. (Even the creator of the million monkey typewriting bananza understands what was produced.) MadMax has a nice sig, doesn't he?: I agree, it's a very nice sig.
you could try reading this: Through the Moral Maze: Searching for Absolute Values in a Pluralistic World by Robert Hilary Kane Robert Hilary Kane ’60 is the author of Through the Moral Maze: Searching for Absolute Values in a Pluralistic World (North Castle Books) which is aimed at those “troubled by conflicting points of view on moral and spiritual matters [concerning] the unprecedented challenges of modern life.” This purpose is a personal one for Kane as he reasons through his own struggles with these issues in trying to respond to questions posed by his honor students at the University of Texas at Austin. Kane addresses the moral disintegration of contemporary technological society as secularization and pluralism produce uncertainty, relativism and loss of moral innocence. He also takes up the issues of public vs. private morality, and the political process in the United States. Kane received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1964. Before joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, he taught at Yale, Fordham, Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania. A professor of philosophy, Kane is a leading defender of the libertarian position on free will. He has written extensively on the metaphysics of free will and ethics. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Claudette. They have two children.
People never cease to amaze me with they way the dance around and debate without ever agreeing on the semantics. If you don't even agree on what the meaning of god and universe are how can you debate thier existance? "The universe can't exist with a cause so there has to be a god." "So god can exist without a root cause?" "Yep." "But the universe can't?" "Nope." "Oh, OK." I like The Amazing Randi's quote as a response to the intelligent design argument ( I paraphrase) "Anything sufficciently complex appears to be magic" Why would anyone think that an observer limited to only observation of the human senses, exposed to the natural world for less than the blink of an eye , on the tiniest grain of sand in the fartest corner would have the faintest clue what the true nature of physical existence is. Arrogance personified!
"Those who wish to oppose it have no testable theory to marshal, only speculations about unseen universes spun from fertile imaginations." -- Former outspoken atheist and Harvard PhD, Patrick Glynn Nothing magical about cause and effect.
"Duboius, I have just one word for you, one word," ..... "Fractals." http://www.mathjmendl.org/chaos/
