The mixing of religious and non-religious beliefs in an individual.

March 2009 Blog Posts (23)

I admire

-doone for his dogged devotion to the objective scientific worldview, expressed in countless diagrams and articles.

-Jeff H for his open mindedness and willingness to consider alternate frames of reference.

- doug for his passion and unshakable faith, the sheer totality of his surrender to the absurd.

and having said all that, I'm dropping out of the debates on evolution. I just find them infuriating and futile. RG is to me about collectively building frameworks for the… Read More

Added by gneognostic on March 31, 2009 at 1:16pm — 2 Comments

THE FRIDAY LITERARY SOCIETY

I stared at the Mexicana Airlines clerk in the city of Veracruz in a slight state of shock and momentary disbelief. She had just informed me that somehow my reservation for tomorrow afternoon’s flight from Mexico City to San Francisco ‘se perdió’, had ‘gotten lost’, and neither was my connecting morning flight from Veracruz to the capital on her computer screen. ‘Se perdió’ did not mean that someone, or something, such as the computer in front of this smiling clerk, had lost my reservation. It… Read More

Added by Gordon Christy-Stefanik on March 30, 2009 at 2:41pm — No Comments

Texas choses to hamper science education even more for it's students.

New Texas science standards saddled with incoherent changes

The Texas State Board of Education managed to keep the "strengths and weaknesses" language out of the science education standards, but passed a series of small amendments that provide guidance that is, at times, scientifically incoherent.

You win some, you lose some. That's the message that the scientific community got from the Texas State Board of Education last week, as it voted on new state… Read More

Added by Dane on March 30, 2009 at 1:18pm — No Comments

Major theories prove One.

Well theory of relativity states depending on where you are in the universe is relative to the time it is. So if you step outside the universe time seize to exist. The big bang theory, the universe started as a primeval atom. So if time is relative then we are all still one. but why would we percieve time why do we live? to make choices life is all about balance and the way we control our balance is by choices.

Added by jordan martinez on March 27, 2009 at 4:40pm — No Comments

Evolution

If evolution exist what did the first life form eat? Life feeds on Life feeds on Life feeds on Life.

Added by jordan martinez on March 27, 2009 at 4:31pm — 5 Comments

Quiverfull Evangelical Movement - Womb as Weapon-

Among some conservative Christians, a movement is giving new meaning to the biblical mandate to "be fruitful and multiply."

The movement, called Quiverfull, is based on Psalm 127, which says, "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them."

Those in the Quiverfull movement shun birth control, believing that God will give them the right number of children. It turns out, that's a lot of… Read More

Added by Denita on March 25, 2009 at 4:33pm — 3 Comments

What is an Open-Source Reality? (Imported)

A computer is a machine which uses the most basic juxtaposition in existence in order to express a potentially infinite variety of perturbations. Perturbations of what juxtaposition? Opposites, naturally. This makes it perfect as an analogy for causality, especially when critically analyzing society. The open-source software issue is perhaps the most concrete example of a far larger, more abstract, and inherent issue to our world.

Here are the dimensions of computer… Read More

Added by Gene Johnson on March 24, 2009 at 1:38pm — 2 Comments

Man... Knowledge... demise...

Man=Adam, We are all Adam... We ate from the fruit of knowledge, look at what knowledge has brought us so far. The more we create the more complicated things get, the more pain we cause to ourselves. Ouroboros the snake that eats its own tail, the cycle of life. the greatest creation destroys the whole. What shall be mans greatest creation? AI

The son of man... the antichrist built by the thing we should have never had... knowledge is power, ignorance is bliss.

We are all man we are… Read More

Added by jordan martinez on March 24, 2009 at 12:01am — 1 Comment

Atheism on Rise: Secular Student Alliance, Secular Coalition of America

The month of March has brought interesting news on the front of religion in America today. The National Journal’s cover article highlighted what they call the "Rise of the Godless." The American Religious Identification Survey found that the number of Americans claiming no religion is on the rise. Both instances highlight a growing lack of religions affiliation and belief in America’s youth.

The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS)… Read More

Added by Denita on March 23, 2009 at 4:22pm — 1 Comment

Honesty, authenticity and truth... harder than it sounds

Speaking the truth is one of the spiritual values that is traditional. I think perhaps that it's repeated so often in Buddhist and other religious literature, because it is such a very hard thing to practice.

The central question is: is it always kindness to speak the truth? And if it's not - how does one know when to speak the truth, and when to lie kindly?

I've written several blogposts about this question.

The first one asks the question:… Read More

Added by Katinka Hesselink on March 23, 2009 at 7:14am — 2 Comments

Shamans, religious and political resistance

Why are elements of shamanic practice adopted in people’s ritualization of resistance? First, “shamanism” can be regarded as a native religion, while such “major” religions as Christianity and Buddhism are of foreign origin. In this regard shamanism is chosen as a symbol of the pure Korean cultural tradition. Second, since shamanism has been branded by the state as a superstition and not a “proper” religion, it is identified with the alienated space that is negated by the official discourse of… Read More

Added by Denita on March 22, 2009 at 11:35pm — 2 Comments

The human facet of reality - our reality is our own, but only our own.

Quantum weirdness: What we call 'reality' is just a state of mind

A lifetime studying quantum mechanics has convinced Bernard d'Espagnat that the world we perceive is merely a shadow of the ultimate reality

Are the objects we see just pale projections of quantum reality? Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

I believe that some of our most engrained notions about space and causality should be reconsidered.… Read More

Added by Dane on March 21, 2009 at 5:17pm — 6 Comments

Let the mystery be

Jeff has his christian rappers, Sid has his angry atheist rappers...

I have my agnostic folk singers. Carter Family + Bertrand Russel = Iris… Read More

Added by gneognostic on March 19, 2009 at 5:54pm — 4 Comments

Cloning

Why do people want to be cloned? I mean there is no point in it. I mean there is another one of you, yeah thats awsome to you but to other people, not so much. So why do people want to be cloned? Please tell me.

Added by Jacob Redden on March 19, 2009 at 12:35pm — 10 Comments

Legacy of Henry Corbin, scholar of Islam and imaginal reality

"To be a philosopher is to take to the road, never settling down in some place of satisfaction with a theory of the world, not even a place of reformation, nor of some illusory transformation of the conditions of this world. It aims for self-transformation, for the inner metamorphosis, which is implied by the notion of a new or spiritual rebirth. The adventure of the mystical philosopher is essentially seen as a voyage which progresses towards the… Read More

Added by Denita on March 18, 2009 at 2:10pm — 2 Comments

deficient evolutionary ancestors

Smart crows seem to be able to use causal reasoning to solve a problem, something that has never been documented in chimps, report researchers from the University of Auckland.

Three New Caledonian crows successfully solved the "table-trap" problem presented to them, ie. they had to retrieve food from a set-up where failure meant losing the food down a trap-hole in a wooden table. The crows succeeded even when the equipment was modified. Apes that had been presented with the same… Read More

Added by doug on March 15, 2009 at 10:08am — 1 Comment

The Culture Warriors Get Laid Off, NY Times March 14, 2009

March 15, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

The Culture Warriors Get Laid Off

By FRANK RICH

SOMEDAY we’ll learn the whole story of why George W. Bush brushed off that intelligence briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” But surely a big distraction was the major speech he was readying for delivery on Aug. 9, his first prime-time address to the nation. The subject — which Bush hyped as “one of the most profound of our time” — was stem cells. For a… Read More

Added by Denita on March 14, 2009 at 10:03pm — 1 Comment

The Seperate God is Very Useful as Rhetoric

Mugabe's Reasoning On Death

Added by Gene Johnson on March 10, 2009 at 11:30am — 1 Comment

More Americans Say They Have No Religion

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090309/ap_on_re/rel_religious_america

A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that the Roman Catholic population has been shifting out o of the Northeast to the Southwest, the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all.

Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2… Read More

Added by Sidian M.S. Jones on March 9, 2009 at 7:00pm — 1 Comment

This Sentence is a Lie (imported from Open-Source Reality)

In 1931, Austrian mathematician Kurt Godel destroyed Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica with his Incompleteness Theorems. He used mathematics itself to prove that mathematics cannot be self-contained or perceived in absolute, but is instead a kind of knowledge that is self-actualizing in an infinite variety of forms.

In the near future, humanity will destroy religion with enlightenment. She will use spirituality itself to prove that spirituality cannot be… Read More

Added by Gene Johnson on March 9, 2009 at 5:50pm — 4 Comments