"The Danimal" <dmocsny@mfm.com> wrote in message
news:cac1ad88.0402010927.1a76c9e7@posting.google.com...
> "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.
I am going to leave the above for Davey to explain, as he has
already so many times before.
>
> > 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 belief is that when you humble yourself before the Lord, you
"bottom out" in a way in that you admit your powerlessness over
many things - whether it be your physical defects, your lack of
resources, ability to influence supermodels to love you, etc.
With that kind of humbling, there comes a kind of freedom
in that you don't have to have that kind of power in order to
be content.
>
> 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.
So, that's not the end of the world, right? And yet, you focus - it
appears - many hours a day lamenting not having supermodels
when that kind of energy that you have could be put to more
purposeful ventures.
>
> 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.
You spend a lot of thought energy on Halle, without even
being in the same State as her, and ... for what?
>
> 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.
Dan, you equate lack of self-loathing for being in love with
one's self. False premise. BTW, when one falls in love, in
a way it is "hopeless" or "helpless", in that one seemingly has
no control over that feeling, only on how one deals with that
feeling. I could be like you who is hopelessly in love with
Halle Berry so much to the point that you lock yourself in
a basement room with your pc writing lamentations of the
hopelessness of the prospect of winning her love, day after
day after day.
>
> > 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.
Really? You write long expositions trying to convince the
audience of your superior knowledge and insight and those
that don't buy into your propaganda are ... garbage!
>
> Of course to you that *would* be a sabbatical from life.
If I were to fall into the trap of self-loathing, as you would
have me do, that would be a sabbatical from life. To use
your own words about myself, I'm an "ugly old woman".
Should I give up on life? Or should I acknowledge that
there are a bazillion other ways to enjoy life with a certain
amount of contentment which has nothing to do with
buying into the culture of Usenet where people such as
yourself, miKKKe, and Sharon feel it's your full-time
job of attacking, ridiculing, and putting down other
people with the hopes of inflicting some damage.
>
> -- the Danimal
>
> P.S. Thanks for making me feel less wretched by comparison.
I shouldn't have to make you feel *anything*. If you feel
good or bad about yourself, it should come from within
and not by anything *I* say about you. You don't seem
to get that point because you have faith that your insults
and lies directed to my person are going to cause me some
sort of psychic pain. Hint: You are not my Higher Power.
la n.
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