| Re: We win by innovation, not by protectionism |
http://groups.google.com |
| The Danimal (dmocsny@mfm.com) |
2004/02/01 10:27 |
"la n." <nilita2004@yahoo.comNOSPAM> wrote in message news:<9_xSb.11$6X2.8@clgrps13>...
> One thing that Danimal lacks as an atheist is faith;
Everybody lacks most flavors of faith. You, for example,
lack the faith that Osama bin Laden has in all its specific
details, even though you agree with his hatred of the
United States. There are thousands upon thousands of specific
flavors of faith you lack. And all their adherents think you
are the worse for it.
If you can disregard their points of view, I can as easily
disregard yours.
"Faith" is not just one thing which a person either has or
does not have, but that was a nice attempt, Ms. False Dichotomy.
There are infinitely many beliefs a person can form without
any supporting evidence. There is no doubt I harbor a few
such unexamined beliefs myself, which I have not yet managed
to root out of the nooks and crannies of my mind. Most people
have brains chock full of all sorts of received beliefs, and
they could not explain why they believe most of them.
The history of scientific discovery has been a history of
surprise. Scientists routinely discover things that contradict
prevailing beliefs. That means, before some scientific discovery,
some number of people were previously settling on just one
particular hypothesis out of the many possible hypotheses
before enough evidence was in to rule the others out.
A good example is the way bats "see" with their ears. This
wasn't finally verified until the 1930's, although a few
earlier scientists had suspected it and were generally
ridiculed.
If you plug a bat's ears and let it fly around a room strung
with wires, the bat will crash into the wires and eventually
fall to the floor and give up trying to fly. Without the plugs
in its ears, the bat can easily flit around the wires at high
speeds in total darkness, performing astoundingly quick and
precise aerobatic maneuvers far exceeding the capabilities of
any artificial flying machine so far. Bats can easily pluck
a spider off its web without getting stuck with any strands
of sticky spider silk; bats can even tell *which side* of the
web the spider sits on.
It took a lot of careful scientific experimentation to prove
that bats "see" with their ears, because at first that idea
seemed utterly ridiculous to people, too ridiculous even for
faith.
> and with a lack of faith, there is a lack of hope.
Hardly. Look around yourself: you're surrounded by the products of
doubt. No ancient book containing religious revelation could tell
anybody how to build a computer, or exactly how to keep your house
warm in the harsh Canadian winter, or even how to get millions of
white people to Canada in the first place. You're probably sitting
in a building (a large artifact) full of thousands of other
artifacts, almost every one containing a large chunk of doubt,
and designed and built through a completely atheistic process
(even if some of the people who carried out the atheistic design
process are religious kooks when they are off the clock).
It doesn't require any "faith" to understand you can stay
warmer inside your artificial house than by going outside and
praying to God to keep you warm.
It's easy to hope your house will still be warm tomorrow, because
your hope is based on something real. In contrast, if you were
outside praying to God to keep you warm, you would quickly lose
the ability to hope.
> One definitely sees that in his
> long lamentations about his self-described loser guy status and
> his diatribes against his usenet "adversaries" (such as myself) who
> don't buy into the "i'm garbage" "my life is hopeless" schtick.
What does your Bible say about humbling yourself before the LORD?
What did the Apostle Paul write about being a wretched man?
Should I think I am a better man than the Apostle Paul
said he was?
My life is not altogether hopeless---there are some interesting
things I can do. But there are many other things for which my
probability of success is Nil. (As in, Nil=0.) A good example
would be having Halle Berry fall hopelessly in love with me.
Note that if Halle Berry fell hopelessly in love with me, then
in an important sense her life would be hopeless, because falling
in love tends to occupy a lot of a person's thought, and thus
becomes a large part of her life.
Nilo, when you have fallen hopelessly in love with other people
besides yourself, did you view your life as being hopeless at
the time? Technically, it was (after all, you didn't say you
were hopefully in love), but you probably weren't sharp enough
to get that.
> One wonders at times if Danimal (and a couple of his soc.
> cohorts) aren't on a multi-year sabbatical
> from ... well .... life.
I'm on a sabbatical from self-aborbed egomaniacal self-worship.
Of course to you that *would* be a sabbatical from life.
-- the Danimal
P.S. Thanks for making me feel less wretched by comparison.
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