Some quick points for you atheists / satanists.

[eye exaggerate]

i would call the christian looking at my skepticism as poverty and his high and mighty stance as him having bank for the afterlife (the rich man)

Unless all you Christians start giving away all of your belongings and wealth, none of you are going to "heaven".

“I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Matthew 19:23-24

i

The riches are 'things' whereas spiritual currency means having enough wherewithal to make it through life - this is my current level of apprehension. It'll change.

 

[eye exaggerate]

Then why are you so sure that Jesus even existed? He could just be one big metaphor.... I mean, it's fact that the gospels were written (at minimum) decades after Jesus' death... and the average life span was... oh..... 30-35 tops?

Have you ever played the telephone game? You know, the one you used to play when you were kids sitting in a line and one person says a sentence to the next person in line, and they have to repeat it to the next person, and you see what the sentence has turned into when the last person tells everyone what they heard? That's how I see the bible.

Let's talk about the fact that it was written in a time when people thought disease was gods wrath, and slavery was A O.K. How much stock can you really put into these accounts? How much stock do you put into the religious claims of any other religious book? Hmmmm....

I put tons of stock into all religious books. How couldn't I to try and grasp what everyone else says on the matter to gain a better perspective.

 

[eye exaggerate]

i would call the christian looking at my skepticism as poverty and his high and mighty stance as him having bank for the afterlife (the rich man)

Unless all you Christians start giving away all of your belongings and wealth, none of you are going to "heaven".

“I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Matthew 19:23-24

i

I am as poor as everyone else, otherwise I would not critique my own thinking. I am as skeptical as anyone else also. I only know what works for me.

Side note: I've always felt that your avatar was the best picture ever taking in the history of the world...

 

[Heisenberg]

I put tons of stock into all religious books. How couldn't I to try and grasp what everyone else says on the matter to gain a better perspective.

An alternate approach is doubt; put no stock into any book. Doubt is the proper companion to curiosity, and yields a perspective that is relative rather than ambiguous.

 

[Heisenberg]

I am as poor as everyone else, otherwise I would not critique my own thinking. I am as skeptical as anyone else also. I only know what works for me.

Skepticism is not simply a state of mind, but also a skill.

"Thinking is skilled work. It is not true that we are naturally endowed with the ability to think clearly and logically—without learning how, or without practicing… People with untrained minds should no more expect to think clearly and logically than people who have never learned and never practiced can expect to find themselves good carpenters, golfers, bridge-players, or pianists." --Alfred Mander

 

[Beefbisquit]

Side note: I've always felt that your avatar was the best picture ever taking in the history of the world...

My avatar? lol

Gotta love Michael Bolton....


[video=youtube;GI6CfKcMhjY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI6CfKcMhjY[/video]

 

[Hepheastus420]

You know what the bible is good for?

Rolling paper.

Well yeah same for books and newspaper. If you're atheist or even some religions no matter what you do or learn your brain shall be consumed by little worms.

 

[cannabineer]

Well yeah same for books and newspaper. If you're atheist or even some religions no matter what you do or learn your brain shall be consumed by little worms.

I just wish the little bastards would have had the decency to wait until I'm dead. cn

 

[eye exaggerate]

Well yeah same for books and newspaper. If you're atheist or even some religions no matter what you do or learn your brain shall be consumed by little worms.

...or with the little worms of fire as per your signature

 

[eye exaggerate]

An alternate approach is doubt; put no stock into any book. Doubt is the proper companion to curiosity, and yields a perspective that is relative rather than ambiguous.

Stock = energy from here. I feel the need to read and understand these matters. I have almost stopped looking at titles to reduce the possibility of a 'tinting'.

...today while driving home i contemplated your avatar. I had an intuitive response to it and thought "suns melt glaciers" - referring to a quote I read on it. In the split second it takes to think that, a car passes with a plate that read 'meltman'.

I feel this is an example of axis mundi. Could I have your take on that for perspective?

 

[Wrekstar]

WOOOOOOO my threads famous.

 

[Hepheastus420]

WOOOOOOO my threads famous.

I hate to tell you this dude, but your thread isn't famous it's infamous, .
But I guess any attention is good attention, .

 

[Wrekstar]

I hate to tell you this dude, but your thread isn't famous it's infamous, .
But I guess any attention is good attention, .

Doesn't matter

 

[Meraxes]

for example atheists believe that believing in satan is even dumber than believing in god. so yeah, infamous, you know like Hitler, or jeffery dahmer

 

[Luger187]

Stock = energy from here. I feel the need to read and understand these matters. I have almost stopped looking at titles to reduce the possibility of a 'tinting'.

...today while driving home i contemplated your avatar. I had an intuitive response to it and thought "suns melt glaciers" - referring to a quote I read on it. In the split second it takes to think that, a car passes with a plate that read 'meltman'.

I feel this is an example of axis mundi. Could I have your take on that for perspective?

so you think it was some divine power that made the guy with that license plate drive by as you were thinking that?

Why people believe that invisible agents control the world
Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspirators, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?

The answer has two parts, starting with the concept of “patternicity,” which I defined in my December 2008 column as the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Consider the face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled-cheese sandwich, satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real. Finding predictive patterns in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids.

The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.

But we do something other animals do not do. As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a theory of mind — the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others — we infer agency behind the patterns we observe in a practice I call “agenticity”: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. We believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness). Together patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.

Agenticity carries us far beyond the spirit world. The Intelligent Designer is said to be an invisible agent who created life from the top down. Aliens are often portrayed as powerful beings coming down from on high to warn us of our impending self-destruction. Conspiracy theories predictably include hidden agents at work behind the scenes, puppet-masters pulling political and economic strings as we dance to the tune of the Bilderbergers, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers or the Illuminati. Even the belief that the government can impose top-down measures to rescue the economy is a form of agenticity, with President Barack Obama being touted as “the one” with almost messianic powers who will save us.

There is now substantial evidence from cognitive neuroscience that humans readily find patterns and impart agency to them, well documented in the new book SuperSense (HarperOne, 2009) by University of Bristol psychologist Bruce Hood. Examples: children believe that the sun can think and follows them around; because of such beliefs, they often add smiley faces on sketched suns. Adults typically refuse to wear a mass murderer’s sweater, believing that “evil” is a supernatural force that imparts its negative agency to the wearer (and, alternatively, that donning Mr. Rogers’s cardigan will make you a better person). A third of transplant patients believe that the donor’s personality is transplanted with the organ. Genital-shaped foods (bananas, oysters) are often believed to enhance sexual potency. Subjects watching geometric shapes with eye spots interacting on a computer screen conclude that they represent agents with moral intentions.

“Many highly educated and intelligent individuals experience a powerful sense that there are patterns, forces, energies and entities operating in the world,” Hood explains. “More important, such experiences are not substantiated by a body of reliable evidence, which is why they are supernatural and unscientific. The inclination or sense that they may be real is our supersense.”
We are natural-born supernaturalists.

 

[eye exaggerate]

so you think it was some divine power that made the guy with that license plate drive by as you were thinking that?

No, I feel this is a conjunction of thought and matter.

 

[Heisenberg]

No, I feel this is a conjunction of thought and matter.

I'm going with hyperactive pattern recognition coupled with misunderstanding of odds when dealing with large numbers, and appealing to the fact that 'coincidence happened, therefore thought influences matter' is in essence a meaningless proposition, or at the very least is missing a logical operator.

 

[Luger187]

No, I feel this is a conjunction of thought and matter.

so... your thoughts forced that license plate to change? how exactly does the conjunction of thought and matter work?

 

[cannabineer]

I'm going with hyperactive pattern recognition coupled with misunderstanding of odds when dealing with large numbers, and appealing to the fact that 'coincidence happened, therefore thought influences matter' is in essence a meaningless proposition, or at the very least is missing a logical operator.

Never underestimate the "casino principle". I don't know if this is a formalized psychological phenomenon, but the fact that it is recognized by a certain sort of designer impressed me the first (and only) time I passed through Vegas. I noticed how much noise and commotion winning slot machines made, and this prompted me to make the effort to determine how large the apparently winning subpopulation was. It required a sustained effort! This made me aware of the grim phalanx of losers silently, almost invisibly feeding coin after coin after coin into the oiled clockwork of the casino's "production floor".
Casinos use a cognitive analog of a sort of optical illusion. The lines really are straight andor parallel despite some clever geometric misdirection. The misdirection in casino design, both in the playing facilities themselves (wheels, tables, monobrachial revenue concentrators) and the cartoonish opulence of the room itself, make it feel like wall-to-wall winners. The sensation of being in such a lucky place can override reason in quite the same way a stout dose of heroin coddles our limbic reward system. That is intentional.
The casino principle gave me insight into why things like astrology have traction. Our brains are still those of a plains predator not at the top of the local food chain. Our minds involuntarily latch onto commotion (pig? leopard? an evening's company?) and filter out the harmless/wealthless static background. In a casino this means it takes conscious effort to see the losers, the cash cows held in thrall by the limbic certainty that the next pull will be the big one. In a "discipline" like astrology, which is based on concealing randomness behind arcane labyrinthine interrelationships of many mutable variables, the human psyche tends to automatically amplify both the frequency and effect of the "hits" simple chance dictates must happen.
We have inherited a brain structure that is predisposed toward apophenia (Heis' hyperactive pattern recognition) and animism ("agenticity" is just that). It takes will, effort and discipline to choose rationality over an instinct toward magical thinking.
cn

 

[eye exaggerate]

I'm going with hyperactive pattern recognition coupled with misunderstanding of odds when dealing with large numbers, and appealing to the fact that 'coincidence happened, therefore thought influences matter' is in essence a meaningless proposition, or at the very least is missing a logical operator.

from wiki

A pattern, from the French patron, is a type of theme of recurring events or objects, sometimes referred to as elements of a set of objects.
These elements repeat in a predictable manner. It can be a template or model which can be used to generate things or parts of a thing, especially if the things that are created have enough in common for the underlying pattern to be inferred, in which case the things are said to exhibit the unique pattern.
The most basic patterns, called Tessellations, are based on repetition and periodicity. A single template, tile, or cell, is combined with duplicates without change or modification. For example, simple harmonic oscillators produce repeated patterns of movement.
Other patterns, such as Penrose tiling and Pongal or Kolam patterns from India, use symmetry which is a form of finite repetition, instead of translation which can repeat to infinity. Fractal patterns also use magnification or scaling giving an effect known as self-similarity or scale invariance. Some plants, like Ferns, even generate a pattern using an affine transformation which combines translation, scaling, rotation and reflection.
Pattern matching is the act of checking for the presence of the constituents of a pattern, whereas the detecting for underlying patterns is referred to as pattern recognition. The question of how a pattern emerges is accomplished through the work of the scientific field of pattern formation.
Pattern recognition is more complex when templates are used to generate variants. For example, in English, sentences often follow the "N-VP" (noun - verb phrase) pattern, but some knowledge of the English language is required to detect the pattern. Computer science, ethology, and psychology are fields which study patterns.
"A pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists. Each of the chemical elements is a pattern integrity. Each individual is a pattern integrity. The pattern integrity of the human individual is evolutionary and not static."
R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), U.S.American philosopher and inventor, in Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), Pattern Integrity 505.201


Observable paterns
Any of the five senses may directly observe patterns.

Visual
Visual patterns are very common such as simple decorative patherns (stripes, zigzags, and polka dots). Others can be more complicated, however, they may be found anywhere in nature and in art.
Penrose tilings

Art
One recurring pattern in a single piece of art may constitute a motif.
The golden ratio (approximately 1.618 is found frequently in nature. It is defined by two numbers, that form a ratio such that (a+b)/a = a/b (a/b being the golden ratio). This pattern was exploited by Leonardo da Vinci in his art. The golden ratio can be seen in nature, from the spirals of flowers to the symmetry of the human body (as expressed in Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, one of the most referenced and reproduced works of art today. This is still used by many artists).
"Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern."
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), English philosopher and mathematician. Dialogues, June 10, 1943.
Patterns of abstraction may not be directly observable - such as patterns in science, drama, maths, english

Mathematics
Mathematics is commonly described as the "Science of Pattern." Any sequence of numbers that may be modeled by a mathematical function is considered a pattern.
In Pattern theory, mathematicians attempt to describe the world in terms of patterns. The goal is to lay out the world in a more computationally friendly manner.
Patterns are common in many areas of mathematics. Recurring decimals are one example. These are repeating sequences of digits which repeat infinitely. For example, 1 divided by 81 will result in the answer 0.012345679... the numbers 0-9 (except 8 will repeat forever — 1/81 is a recurring decimal.
Fractals are mathematical patterns that are scale invariant. This means that the shape of the pattern does not depend on how closely you look at it. Self-similarity is found in fractals. Examples of natural fractals are coast lines and tree shapes, which repeat their shape regardless of what magnification you view at. While the outer appearance of self-similar patterns can be quite complex, the rules needed to describe or produce their formation can be extremely simple (e.g. Lindenmayer systems for the description of tree shapes).

Yes, hyperactive pattern recognition. Agreed.