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….how do cats celebrate?
In the case of our Bonnie, jumping on one of our laps purring his head off for then next hour or so.
…and I chat with him about it as well.
Rob
Do birds sing because they have to or because they want to?
An evolutionary necessity or simply a celebration of being alive?
Or both?
I don’t know the answer to that question but I can think of plenty I wish didn’t bother, Celine Dion & Mariah Carey to name but two
gc
Adoptive father of two. The patron saint of lower-grade fare. A gently critical friend of point-to-pointing. Kindness is a political act.
Do birds sing because they have to or because they want to?
An evolutionary necessity or simply a celebration of being alive?
Or both?
.. birds sing because they are stupid and don’t know any better.
years ago our cat killed a fledgeling; I disposed of it somewhere but soon afterwards I saw the mother bird in the garden frantically looking for it so I put it in the garden where she could see it; when she’d flown over to see it she flew away and didn’t come back….not exactly a mind blowing event I know but it has always stayed in my mind..on the subject of cats would like to hear more about your wegie, firefox..I’m catless at the moment and if I did get another was thinking of a wegie or a ragdoll…..
Do birds sing because they have to or because they want to?
An evolutionary necessity or simply a celebration of being alive?
Or both?
.. birds sing because they are stupid and don’t know any better.
Or are they communicating in a language all of their own which man, with all his science, is wholly unable to interpret? No so stupid as they can fly unaided – again unlike man. And the only way man can kill them is with assistance, usually a gun. Not very clever that is it?
Granted Firefox, but can you show me a bird that can throw a nine-dart-finish, shoot a 147 break, or keepie-uppie beyond the fabled "500 barrier"?
.. birds sing because they are stupid and don’t know any better.
Cock Robin, come take this worm from my hand, look me in the eye and ponder if you will:
What is it, this matter of life and death that troubles me so?
‘tweet tweet’ his merry reply
where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise
We established long ago that cats are wankers, and cat owners regaling tales about their cat’s ‘personality’ are not far behind.
With that said, I send warm and heartfelt Seasons Greetings to all (including cat lovers).
Grassy, you hate cats, you hate the flat, if that was that, then you could write a comedy song. But you hate comedy songs too…
Have just re read this thread because I have lost someone who was very special in my life and my head is totally scrambled; this person was just an internet chum, but one with whom I shared many interests and thoughts and beliefs; in fact if I had a long lost brother this was he;now, if this person was just words on a computer screen I can’t get my head around the fact that those words and thoughts will no longer appear, and that the knowledge that this person had will no longer exist….that if I have a question to ask or a joke to share I can no longer send the words and words will return…how much of us as human beings is about communication……
I am a commited Christian, church goer, racegoer (mostly point to points) occasional lay preacher and a great believer in the scientific principles of this world as well as did the likes of Faraday, Newton and Galileo.
I don’t bet but love racing for what it is, I love God for what I believe he is and scientist for the fascnination of it, all of it great.
Did you know that elephants mourn when they come across the bones of a deceased elephant they knew?
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TjtrdpSwEUY
Here is an interesting article on secular fundamentalism. (I expect most of us are aware of the extraordinary distortions of some putatively Christian "fundamentlaist" sects/cults in the US, also known as "fundies").
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/feb/26/religion.uk
"What guided Einstein was that, in his mid-twenties, he found the unknown intriguing. He felt compelled to comprehend what might have been intended for our universe by The Old One (as he referred to his notion of God).] We are in the position, … of a little child entering a huge library, whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different languages. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend but only dimly suspects."
(From this website: http://www.landofwisdom.com/author/albert-einstein/)
is the elephant thing part of the Echo series from the bbc series; it followed the lives of a herd of elephants for about 20 years; fascinating stuff…I’m still grieving big time for my deceased friend and can’t get my head around anything at the moment…….
Came across this in The Spectator this week which some may find interesting.
"Studying Islam Has Made Me An Atheist" by Douglas Murray…
Just over a year ago I told a lie. In print. In this magazine. I was one of those asked by The Spectator last Christmas whether I believed in the virgin birth. Since it had always seemed to me that if you believed in God a ‘pick and mix’ approach to the central tenets of the faith was pointless, I said ‘yes’. But in fact I felt ‘no’. It wasn’t that I had been wrestling over the doctrine of the incarnation, I simply felt that if I didn’t believe in the virgin birth, I would not believe in God. The truth is I didn’t and don’t. The guilt has been lingering since. This is my atheist mea culpa.
Many people hold on to belief as an unquestioned part of their make-up. They never have to confront the source of their belief, and as long as nothing actively pushes them into addressing it, they keep it as something which rarely does much harm and might actually do some good. I have been an Anglican since birth — and not just a cultural Anglican but at times (rarest of things) a real, worshipping, believing Anglican. Like a lot of believers, I knew that there were parts of my belief that wouldn’t stand up to analysis. But that was fine. I didn’t need to analyse them. I only lost faith when I was forced to.
Charles Darwin didn’t do for God. German biblical criticism did — the scholarship on lost texts, discoveries of added-to texts and edited texts. All pointed away from the initial starting-block of faith — that the texts transmitted immutable truths. Realising that ‘holy’ texts are, like most other things in life, the result of an accretion of human effort and human error is one of the most troubling discoveries any believer can make. I remember trying to read some of this scholarship when I was younger, and finding it so terrifying, so ground-shaking, that I put it off for another day.
But it found me via another route. Some years ago I started studying Islam. It didn’t take long to recognise the problems of that religion’s texts — the repetitions, contradictions and absurdities. Unlike Christianity, scholarship on these problems in Islam has barely begun. But they are manifest for anyone to see. For a holy book which in its opening lines boasts ‘that is the book, wherein is no doubt’, plenty of doubt emerges. Not least in recognising demonstrable plagiarisms from the Torah and the Christian Bible. If God spoke through an archangel to one illiterate tradesman in 7th-century Arabia, then — just for starters — why was he stealing material? Or was he just repeating himself?
Gradually, scepticism of the claims made by one religion was joined by scepticism of all such claims. Incredulity that anybody thought an archangel dictated a book to Mohammed produced a strange contradiction. I found myself still clinging to belief in Christianity. I was trying to believe — though rarely arguing — ‘Well, your guy didn’t hear voices: but I know a man who did.’ This last, shortest and sharpest, phase pulled down the whole thing. In the end Mohammed made me an atheist
Though it was a supplementary realisation, the problems that these texts have caused cannot be avoided either. Where else does your real bona-fide bigot find his metier? Anyone can repress a woman, but you need ‘dictated’ scriptures to feel you’re really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you’ve got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious ‘Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve’-style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different to you.
Anyone can be a bigot. But divine bigots must count as the most intractable — the most infuriatingly impervious to reason. Besides — to a bibliophile, indeed bibliomaniac — the idea that there is any book ‘wherein is no doubt’ is insulting as well demonstrably untrue.
Even when I stopped believing I pretended I did, or said I did for a bit, for fear of the break in the dike. Like many people, the first thing that troubled me about leaving religion was fear of meaninglessness. Where would ethics come from? If nothing was revealed then surely everything would be relative — and that way lay nihilism. As it happens, it becomes clearer the more I look at it that religious texts are not only unnecessary to the ethical life. More often than believers like to admit, they are directly contrary to it.
Then there is the loss of the guiding hand. It is the one utterly irreplaceable aspect of belief. Without God, where is the enduring melody — the cantus firmus — of life? Alexander Herzen asked, ‘Where is the song before it is sung?’ It is impossible to replace the belief in a deity’s plans for you. Though less comforting, it is simply observably truer that there is no song before you sing it — no path before you tread it. You make the song as you sing it. You make the path as you tread it. It makes life more precarious, certainly — but just as the risk of falling is greater, so, likewise, is the possibility of soaring.
My final fear was one which I think a lot of Christians in this country feel, particularly as they see Islam re-emerging and gaining adherents in spite (or perhaps because) of its intransigence and intractability. It is, I suppose, a sense of cultural abandonment. We know how much of what we enjoy and relish comes through Christianity. Can we really go on without it? Doesn’t it leave our building without foundations? Slowly I discover that it doesn’t. I still can’t pass a country church or cathedral without going in. The texts are still essential to me. They are just (and ‘just’ hardly does the job here) no more divine than Shakespeare.
The question of how, without believing it, we transmit the good of our historical faith to another generation is certainly problematic. Perhaps like many Jewish people who rejoice in their identity but don’t believe in God we could be better — and franker — at being cultural Christians. I tried it this year, at my first atheist Christmas.
I went to church on Christmas morning, and went with my family to the carol service a few nights before. The readings were comforting not only because of their familiarity but because taken as great stories they still transmit, like all great literature, truths which you can live by. The momentousness and simplicity of Adam’s fall was as tragic and resonant to this atheist heart as it once was to the believing one.
Fundamentalist Islam challenges us politically. But tackling literalism of one kind with literalism of another doesn’t work. Complexity is harder to accept, but more evident to the eye. After long struggle, I find reason enough.
My first non-believing Christmas was different, certainly. Different — but, contrary to my fears, no shallower. Quite the opposite. Things this year seemed both more open and more possible. More fragile and more precious. It also struck me, in ways which are hard to explain — and the religious language cannot be avoided — that it was all, if anything, even more miraculous.No wonder you lost your faith, insomniac. The brain is not competent to understand the supernatural. The further we penetrate even the physical universe, at both macro and micro levels, the paradoxes proliferate, and it becomes a matter of managing the paradoxes.
Read "The Perennial Philosophy" by Aldous Huxley. It’s a fascinating analysis religion, in general, and the mainstream religions in particular – a comparative study. Although Huxley became a Vedantist Hindu, the book was very instrumental in reconverting me to Christianity. I still have issues with my Church, since although divinely instituted and maintained, it is also human, and no less an authority than St Thomas Aquinas asserted that we must not accept authority blindly. But it’s a matter of emphases. As far as doctrine is concerned, the accumulated wisdom of the Catholic Church is literally (which is unsual usage) awesome.
Basically, our salvation depends not upon credence (in the formal intellectual sense), still less credulity – it’s about religion at a much deeper level: commitment, a commitment to helping those in need of any kind, and ideally, a growing personal relationship with God in prayer.
But read Matthew 25, Christ’s own description of the Last Judgment, the only one in the Bible, and you’ll see it’s not enough to cry out to God, "Lord, Lord", but, in the final analysis (and Last Judgment) it is enough to see Him in "the least" of our brothers and sisters and to behave towards them accordingly, i.e. with love. Not affective love, but charity, selfless empathetic love.
Here is another interesting letter on a website called Haggis Hunt:
Lindsay Watt (Letters, 31 March) puts the argument for faith much more coherently than Alan Grant (Letters, 27 March) and suggests the contention between religion and science has been represented too simplistically.
The key word is "authority", used twice in the letter. This is where we differ. Religion claims absolute and unquestioning acceptance that there is an "authority" whose presence, by definition, cannot be proved or disproved. Nor can the dogma purporting to be the law of that "authority".Because science recognises that "reasoning is just an electro-chemical operation" in brains, it requires evidence to be adduced to support any hypothesis, and requires any experimental data to be reproducible by others. What emerges from this process is as near as humans can currently get to "truth" about the universe we’re in, remembering always that scientific "truths" evolve (as does the universe). In that sense, they could be regarded as unreliable and unworthy of "faith". This is just a recognition of our limitations. In a believer, this might be called humility.
CHILTON R INGLIS"
In fact, when we turn on the light in a room, it is an act of secular faith, since we don’t know if the bulb has blown. But we know there is a good probability that it won’t have.
I believe that a man called Heisenberg proved that all scientific knowledge (other than the "a priori" knowledge of mathematics) can only be statistical).
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