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I’m wondering if that stuff about trolls was mentioned in the film Trollhunter [which was great fun, by the way]. It’s good to get a bit of chat going in the lounge again, albeit for the saddest of reasons. I’ve got a ‘little sadness’ in my life at the moment and, I have to say it’s internet chums that cheer me up more than anything.
Sorry about your ‘little sadness’ Moe, hope it all works out to the good for you.
I agree about the lounge thing, if I’m a bit down I have a good go on the internet (not that I’m very good with it) but I do have a try.Same, here, moehat. What reetlass said.
Sometimes, it’s more difficult to keep a hold of the perspective of eternity, and the advice that ‘Everything happens for the best’ isn’t so easy to take on board.
Re the harbinger, psychic, supernatural business, first, I was fascinated at some details my sister gave me concerning an incident that had happened to her. My mother had told me that my sister, who was very ill at the time, spending much of her time in bed, woke up at about 3.00 am and saw our older brother, Barry, standing by her bedside for a while, just looking at her.
Later, I asked Anna, my sister about it, and she confirmed it, without my remembering her giving any further details, except that he was looking at her as if to encourage her.
Then the other day, I was speaking to Anna on the phone – she and her family and my mother, have been living in Perth, Australia for a long time, now – and she opened up about it quite freely. I think she is very lacking in imagination. You couldn’t meet a more stolid, phlegmatic person,and her religious beliefs are as enigmatic as are those of all the rest of my family.
Anyway, she said that Barry, aka Brother Bung, was so close to her, she could have reached across and touched him. And he was solid, not like a ghost. Then suddenly, he began to fade, so that she could see through him until he disappeared all together. He was smiling at her, encouragingly. He was very stolid, too, but not unimaginative.
Today I had another most encouraging kind of spirituo-psychic ‘light’. I was praying for family and friends, as I always do, and when I came to Cecilia, my late uncle Derek’s girl, who was the mother of a young family and died suddenly for no apparent reason, I sensed a gentle light in my mind’s eye, and she seemed to be tugging gently at my mind, as if to say, "Hold on", since I don’t dwell on the people I’m praying for. I never actually met her, so it’s all the more understandable in Cecilia’s case. Then I rumbled that she was trying to tell me that she was part of the gang who’d met Anthea. And they all loved her to bits and were having the time of Reilly!
I know this will all sound crazy to many of you, but it doesn’t matter. "There are more things in heaven and earth than were ever dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio", quoth/quod the very Bard, himself.
Not crazy at all Grimes. We all need to believe in something, surely that’s what keeps us going. One persons belief might not be the same as someone elses, but what does it matter as long as it works for you.
Not crazy at all Grimes. We all need to believe in something, surely that’s what keeps us going. One persons belief might not be the same as someone elses, but what does it matter as long as it works for you.
Oh, yes, reetlass. I was just saying, it will seem double dutch to many others, to forestall any derisive outcry.
The fuller context is that, I forgot to say that my young, grandniece died last week in South Australia of a wasting disease the doctors couldn’t identify; unknown to the medical people. She had had it for a long time, and eventually died of an infection. I won’t go into the details of how incapacitated she was by that time.
But, what struck me was that all the three people I have mentioned were female members of our extended family, who died prematurely in some degree. True Anthea was 73, but with her very strong constitution and perfect temperament, she would surely have reached beyond a hundred, God willing. Hence, perhaps a specially joyful meeting of the three I felt Cecilia was wanting to indicate to me.
Actually, I think what I was trying to say, reetlass, is that whether my interpretation was correct or just a flight of fancy is of no relevance to my own faith, so I wouldn’t want forumites who think the latter, to think I’m trying to make some kind of claim on their belief with regard to these anecdotes. It’s written for those of us who tend to believe in such matters generally.
when I came to Cecilia, my late uncle Derek’s girl, who was the mother of a young family and died suddenly for no apparent reason, I sensed a gentle light in my mind’s eye, and she seemed to be tugging gently at my mind, as if to say, "Hold on", since I don’t dwell on the people I’m praying for. I never actually met her, so it’s all the more understandable in Cecilia’s case. Then I rumbled that she was trying to tell me that she was part of the gang who’d met Anthea. And they all loved her to bits and were having the time of Reilly!
Why has your God put you through all this painful grief and trauma Grimes?
Have you sinned?
Or is it that Love’s Young Dream being so heartfelt and therefore so intangible angers your He who must be obeyed by rite?
If I knew that, Droney, I’d
be
God!
Does the clay question the potter?
Why is God three persons in one nature? Why did he arrange for himself to be crucified – a particularly hideous death, to save us from our sinfulness?
How could he be true God and true man?
How could he never have left his Father’s side, even while he was being crucified?
Why is time a function of space and the Big Bang?
How can there have been a time before the Big Bang, for it to happen at a particular juncture?
What is the Big Bang Singularity?
Why are cosmology and the quantum world full of paradoxes, mysteries totally repugnant to logic?
… etc, etc, etc.
The more we learn about fundamental matters, even in physics, the more the paradoxes/imponderable mysteries proliferate.
However, the short answer is that, just as we read in the Gospels that Christ learnt through suffering, so do we – or so should we; which, nevertheless does not leave us at liberty to be indifferent to the sufferings of others, still less, to be the cause. The goal is for us to share the very life of the ultimate family, the Most Holy Trinity in unending joy.
Here’s an interesting video clip of an NDE. There are lots on YouTube:
Why are cosmology and the quantum world full of paradoxes, mysteries totally repugnant to logic?
They aren’t really – they are simply concepts and realities that the brains of most humans are currently unable to comprehend.
If people take the time to properly understand what physicists have discovered and hypothesised it does make sense – it isn’t easy to understand though.
After years of trying to understand Quantum Physics I have, finally, found a book which does explain what is currently known in a way I can begin to understand it – it’s not easy and the book has been my bedtime reading for three months now and I’m less than a quarter of the way through it and I often have to read each page half a dozen times times before the penny drops.
Historically "God" was a simple way of explaining away these "mysteries" and paradoxes without having to think about them too deeply and, at the time it served its purpose.
Science doesn’t yet have all the answers but given time it will, at which point God can finally be given his P45.
Why are cosmology and the quantum world full of paradoxes, mysteries totally repugnant to logic?
They aren’t really – they are simply concepts and realities that the brains of most humans are currently unable to comprehend.
If people take the time to properly understand what physicists have discovered and hypothesised it does make sense – it isn’t easy to understand though.
After years of trying to understand Quantum Physics I have, finally, found a book which does explain what is currently known in a way I can begin to understand it – it’s not easy and the book has been my bedtime reading for three months now and I’m less than a quarter of the way through it and I often have to read each page half a dozen times times before the penny drops.
Historically "God" was a simple way of explaining away these "mysteries" and paradoxes without having to think about them too deeply and, at the time it served its purpose.
Science doesn’t yet have all the answers but given time it will, at which point God can finally be given his P45.
I’m afraid, Paul, you are not just a littel wide of the mark, but absolutely wrong. There is no way paradoxes can be understood according to what we understand by the term ‘logic’; they roundly defy it.
I asked questions about the Big Bang and the Singularity, the answers to which are imponderable, since they are paradoxes. The only difference between a paradox and an oxymoron is that a paradox just happens to be true, mysteries to our analatical intelligence though they are. Niels Bohr said that anyone who is not shocked by quantum physics has not understood it.
Secular scientists are simply obliged to accept them and incoporate them into their understanding of the quantum world and the cosmos; being atheists, they cannot reconcile themsleves to the notion that their ‘reason’ is sadly risibly inadequate for the task. In fact, the paradoxes of physics are proliferating at an increasing rate, the greater the understanding the physicists gain; implictly predicted by Bohr, whe he said,
"Two sorts of truth: profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd."
But read the whole Wikiquotes of Niels Bohr and Max Planck. they read like a religious text.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck
And this is the response to a post of mine of poster to a thread on Guardian Comment, who had worked at NASA and studied at Caltech, where he was on close speaking terms with Nobel laureates and other big names in physics. It starts with a quote from Max Planck:
"consciousness is primary, matter is secondary"
Amit Goswami (a theoretical quantum physicist, who was paraphrasing Planck’s words: "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness.£
Thank you, itsawhiskymac. (He had quoted Goswami)
paulbecke
"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it." – Niels Bohr
Are you guys such victims of the the "zeitgeist" sustained by Einstein’s "naive realists" that you’ve become blase about the counter-rational nature of quantum physics?
It’s not about "intuition" or "hunches" in relation to the paradoxes of quantum physics, it’s not "counter-intuitive"; it’s about being counter-rational, totally absurd.
Subliminally, physicists must have accepted the strictures of Bohr in this regard, since they accept the paradoxes as reality and incorporate them in their overall contextual view, and are able to use them to make further successful discoveries; but wittingly or unwittingly, they and their careers are in thrall to the mechanistic dinosaurs, who still fight tooth and nail against the clear implications of Bohr’s quantum paradigm.
"The great extension of our experience in recent years has brought light to the insufficiency of our simple mechanical conceptions and, as a consequence, has shaken the foundation on which the customary interpretation of observation was based."
If only….
The comprehensive purview and inerrance of "science", as predicated by mechanistic physics, is an essential tool of the large corporations in their "manufacture of consent"; not unlike those duplicitously-conceived, political surveys, the French had banned before elections, until, I believe, Sarkozy, an alumnus of the CIA, came along.
Once the corporations allow for intrinsically impenetrable mysteries in science, it opens up the possibility of plausible moral objections to their psychopathic ethos, and a potential reining in of them by religion, in any number of areas, in which they are currently free to continue to act without any kind of moral constraint.
mmuskin – 02:24am Jan 24, 2011 GMT (#196 of 226)
Hear, Hear, paulbecke. I entirely agree. The old Newtonian-style "clockwork universe" was a convenient paridigm for its time but has long been consigned to the historical dustbin by the best and most astute scientists I have personally known. Among those who would agree with us are my late good friends Richard Feynman, Max Delbruck, Gene Shoemaker, and Roger Sperry, among many others who happen not to have won Nobel prizes during their careers as professional scientists. Others I’ve known, like Franz Zwicky, Fred Thompson, Gene Amdahl, Michael Turner, and Kip Thorne, all of whom I’ve known personally and talked with extensively about their own scientific specialties, agree that while science itself is not a religion (and as Stephen Hawking recently commented, inciting some public uproar among religious intolerants, that God was not necessary for our physical universe to have been created) consciousness itself cannot be totally divorced from the comprehensive consideration of physical processes nor any of the physical sciences.Some pure mathematicians I’ve known have been able to sustain for themselves the delusion that not only is a mathematically (logically) complete, self-consistent, and entirely valid structure of axioms, theorems, and their relationships to each other possible to construct and prove valid, but even that the application of such a mathematical structure to the mechanistic and comprehensive description of physical reality is valid, reliable, and unassailable in its potential ability to predict the outcome of any physical process with absolute certainty.
Whether or not one believes Einstein’s famous statement that "God does not roll dice," which I don’t think even Einstein himself believed at the time (having read his excellent book "The World As I See It" in which he clearly agrees with the scientists I mentioned above), the mechanistically absolutist paradigm of physical "law" is untenable and, as you mentioned, has been abused as a means of imposing overly authoritative and oppressive constraints by corporate, government, and ecclesiastic institutions upon the rest of the human race in a truly psychopathic effort on their part to be free of any restraint by other people or laws upon them accomplishing their own selfish will in this world and remaining free of any true accountability for having done such a rampantly abusive thing to others on such a vast scale and for so tragically long.
The best physicists I’ve met (or been fortunate enough to have personally known) will, when the governmental and corporate "suits" are not around, readily admit that this is the case, and that freedom of expression is necessary but not by itself sufficient for true excellence in the scholarly pursuit of the sciences.
Freedom of thought from these artificially narrow constraints and popular fashions of the time, promoted so effectively throughout our society by those who personally profit from discouraging or even prohibiting an individual’s free thought about science, law, ethics, or the role of consciousness (however one wishes to define it) in what we share as our common ground which we call "reality". is also necessary for such scholarly pursuits to yield valid results which can successfully withstand arbitrarily rigourous testing and reliable reproduction of scientific validation (or humane ethics, or equity at law for that matter).
Even a cursory study of the history of maths shows how European scientists and mathematicians so long failed to discover the validity and relevance of fundamental concepts like "zero" or the "imaginary" numbers (as, for example, i is the square root of negative one) that discussion of modern maths in ignorance of such concepts is now rightfully seen as unacceptably clumsy and quite backward.
Try solving simple quadratic equations (each of whose two roots are not both real numbers) using only Roman numerals. Try explaining calculus to someone ignorant of limits and the whole concept of continuity in the very definition of integration. It’s the same when one reads (in my case English translations of) Einstein’s original 1905 paper on Special Relativity or his 1915 paper on General Relativity and notes how his immediate predecessors (including Hertz and Lorentz) were so loathe to discard the false doctrine of an alleged "aether" within which electromagnetic waves were supposed to propagate through space. Several important experiments, including the famous Michelson-Morley test, convinced Einstein and eventually others that this aether did not exist and never had existed. Electromagnetic energy could finally be accepted as capable of propagating itself in a vacuum.
In older interpretations of chemistry, a mythical substance called "phlogiston" was long thought to be the scientifically valid basis for the combustion of flammable materials in fresh air. Once the crucial discovery of free oxygen in the oxidation/reduction reactions which we now know actually cause fire to burn was finally accepted and the phlogiston paridigm discarded, real progress in the study of chemical oxidation could proceed without interference from the former believers in the false paradigm which had been holding back chemical research.
For centuries, misconceptions like the sun revolving around the earth or the energy generated by the sun being derived by the identical chemical processes which caused fire to burn combustible materials in air (instead of the nuclear fusion which we now know powers the sun) were accepted and reasonable alternatives ridiculed as scientific "heresy" until the more valid and "real" explanations successfully replaced them. How are either maths or the physical sciences supposed to progress unless true freedom of thought is not only permitted but openly encouraged?
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itsawhiskymac – 01:23pm Jan 24, 2011 GMT (#200 of 226)
If dropping mathematics …that’s really not the point – the point is dropping the idea that because the maths appears to describe physical processes, the physical processes and the maths are effectively the same. Clearly they are not – they are approximations, with all kinds of a priori assumptions, some of which are so deep-rooted in our scientific and social unconscious that they remain as invisible elephants in the room.
This is surely visible to anyone who applies equations to the natural environment, and who has just the tiniest little bit of imagination? The impications are uncomfortable – at whatever "level" (e.g. physical scale) you make the focus of your equations, then in addition to the known assumtions inherent in the equations, there are always sub-processes that may have absolutely nothing to do with the pseudo-processes that mathematicaly describe their higher level shadows.
When this comes to the biological sciences – and particularly the study of the human organism, we seem to be locked in a Newtonian world. paulbecke ‘s statement that this industrial misrepresentation of science is used for political ends is absolutely spot on.
The two most descructive phrases of the past 500 years…
"I think therefore I am" – thus separating the mind form the body and making the study of consciousness near-impossible
"I’ll believe it when I see it" which should really be something more like "I’ll see it when I believe it"
Grimes, you have a good memory but it was my girlfriend not Northern Sky’s and Mervyn Day was the West Ham goalkeeper. She said to me when he jumped out of his red Ferrari "if he winks at me once more I’m gunna come in my pants"
Anyways, that aside I hope you are coping as best you can at the moment, you were always a fighter so be strong me old mucker.
"Walter, everything is a ******* travesty with you man."
God bless
Slippy
Sorry, coming to this thread late –
Desperately sorry to hear about your loss my dear Grimes, but what a heartening tale! I do hope that little bird, and what must surely be many happy memories, brings you and Simon comfort as time goes by.
Best wishes to you
Gill
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