'He' is all around

[avandonk]

Never mind here is a bit of Li to ease your disturbed mind. If that does not work we have something heavier!

Bert

[phobos (John)]

Originally Posted by Rodstar

Thanks for posting the video RB.

I think it is a great metaphor that expresses what billions of people in the world today believe. It also seems to me, in the context of the original post on this thread, to be an entirely reasonable response.

phobos, I certainly would not have thought that your dismissive comment, and the apparent hatred underlying it, had any place on our forum.

There is no hatred Rodstar. Everyone is entitled to their beliefs no matter how irrational they are. Religious proselytizing has no place on a site like IIS where impressionable minds inspired by science and the mind blowing nature of reality visit regularly. Keep the video for church and keep IIS a place where freethought and critical thinking skills are encouraged and promoted.

[bigjoe (JOSEPH)]

Originally Posted by phobos

There is no hatred Rodstar. Everyone is entitled to their beliefs no matter how irrational they are. Religious proselytizing has no place on a site like IIS where impressionable minds inspired by science and the mind blowing nature of reality visit regularly. Keep the video for church and keep IIS a place where freethought and critical thinking skills are encouraged and promoted.

Caffeine addict.

After all this, I need a Schott of Boron. Umm. I mean Bourbon..

[Steffen]

Originally Posted by AstralTraveller

He is a finite resource.

We could make more He from H, but what to do with all the excess energy freed up in the process?

Cheers
Steffen.

[Steffen]

Originally Posted by bigjoe

Caffeine addict.

After all this, I need a Schott of Boron. Umm. I mean Bourbon..

I hear you. The best shot glasses are made from Schott glass

Cheers
Steffen.

[bigjoe (JOSEPH)]

Originally Posted by Steffen

I hear you. The best shot glasses are made from Schott glass

Cheers
Steffen.

Xe actly!
Salute Steffen.

[Octane (Humayun)]

Hey, leave me alone!

H

[tonewalk (Tony)]

Originally Posted by AstralTraveller

He is important to science. He is flowing through a GC and EA in my lab right now. He is needed for NMR spectrometers. He is not naturally found on the surface of the Earth. He is only obtained from deep petrolium wells. He is a finite resource. Yet He is wasted in party balloons.

BTW I'm reminded of the Van Der Graaf Generator album - H to He Who Am The Only One.

As a fan of the band I'm thrilled by the coincidence of a post with reference to them followed immediately by a post with containing part of the chorus to one of their songs - e to the power of i times pi plus one is zero. ['Mathematics', from the album 'A Grounding in Numbers'.]

[LewisM]

U Ar Al Lu Na Ti C S

Uuu, Th At W As Si Li

[rally]

Noble sibling family rivalry

I Ar must protest on behalf of the family
It is not He but me
. . .
What !
Ar ?
Not you but me - Ne
. . .
No, No, No not Ne its I, Xe
. . .
Kr may hide, but I protect the largest kingdom of noble subj e- cts tightly - so it is I who Rn s the place !

Shoot me for posting this

[LewisM]

Consider yourself shot, like myself

[avandonk]

I am quite disturbed at the way this thread is going. Why not just say all organised religions are a human construct. They have no more validity than the tooth fairy or the easter bunny!

The only thing that really works is Science! Science has the property of not being absolute such as religious dogma written by ignorant primitive goat herders or any other group of nitwits.


There is no point just alluding to this conundrum. It has to be faced head on.

Humanity should put it's very primitive superstitions where they belong in the graves of our ignorant ancestors.

I find it most perplexing that anyone can be so ignorant of history that they cannot work out that the enlightenment started three hundred years ago.

Please catch up!

If anyone needs to believe in a higher force of whatever complexion then I feel you have not understood.

The real Universe is even more strange than we can imagine. We do not need fairy tales made up by people with very limited minds.

This also includes my opinion! So I am most probably completely wrong! Stuck in a paradigm of my own delusions.

Bert

[bigjoe (JOSEPH)]

Avandonk, All.

A lot of people just do not want to offend others religious beliefs openly.

And some of us, have to conceal or disguise our thoughts.

Look at Copernicus. Making sure his works were not published till after his death, for

fear of the church. Galileo also had to make an argument about the absurdities of

accepted dogma (Simplicio) etc, about the Sun, Moon, Earth and so on.

Galileo was finally pardoned for this and we ALL know he was correct, but he was a heretic.

Beliefs invented perhaps to keep people happy and law abiding? For if there is no

afterlife to look forward to, then some will think that they can commit crimes

etc, without fear of punishment or wrath in an afterlife or the present.

Just my 2 cents.

[sjastro]

I'm intrigued that people with religious beliefs are perceived by some as being intellectually inferior. Perhaps this is a result of equating faith exclusively with fundamentalism, but as has been demonstrated fundamentalism can be seen in both sides of the argument.

It doesn't seem to address the obvious issue about scientists that were also deeply religious.
How can dumb people make profound advancements in Science?
While Issac Newton was theorizing about gravity he was also investigating the Bible to find the date of creation.
Georges Lemaitre a Jesuit priest formulated the Big Bang Theory.
Then there was Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk who was the father of modern Genetics.

The list is by no means exhaustive.

Then there is this article that not all scientists are like Richard Dawkins.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/o...ating-atheists

Regards

Steven

[Steffen]

I don't think this has anything to do with fundamentalism.

Until not so long ago virtually all scientists were religious, because everybody was religious by default, through upbringing and indoctrination from early childhood. Many scientists probably lost their superstitious beliefs (which are central to the religious dogma) throughout their years of scientific work, but kept hanging on to the "spiritual" side, whatever that means. I suppose it means token-religiousness for the sake of keeping the peace.

Scientists like Kepler died frustrated because they never managed to shake the superstition. Kepler in particular tried till the end of his life to explain the motion of celestial bodies through some set of geometric bodies suspended in an intricate nesting. The work he is famous for these days was his mathematical analysis of Tycho Brahe's observations, not something he thought of very highly himself.

Einstein failed to appreciate the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, because it didn't gel with this view of the creation ("Gott würfelt nicht!").

It doesn't mean that any of these people were stupid (obviously), but it means that superstitious indoctrination and failure to grow out of it can affect one's work as a scientist.

Materialist-dialectic epistemology (the practice of which is also known as "the scientific method") appears to be the only way to iterate towards the truth. Religious scientists apply that method, too, even though they visit their temple of choice with the rest of the parish and reverently listen to their preacher telling obvious untruths.

Cheers
Steffen.

[sjastro]

This has nothing to with the scientists themselves but rather the fundamentalist attitudes adopted by both camps of the atheism versus religion debate.

A symptom of a fundamentalist attitude is claiming some form of superiority over the other side even if there is no evidence to support it.
For example the "religious right" claim that since morality is a preserve of religion, atheists have no morals. This is clearly a fallacious argument.

Similarly some atheists claim that religious belief is a lack of critical thinking, hence religious belief and the ability to think are some how mutually exclusive.
This line of thinking obviously fails as there has been religious practitioners who have also turned out to being scientists of the highest calibre.

This formed the basis of my argument.

Regards

Steven

[Shark Bait (Stu)]

42

[phobos (John)]

Originally Posted by sjastro;

<snipped>

Similarly some atheists claim that religious belief is a lack of critical thinking, hence religious belief and the ability to think are some how mutually exclusive.
This line of thinking obviously fails as there has been religious practitioners who have also turned out to being scientists of the highest calibre.

This formed the basis of my argument.

Regards

Steven

It can be argued that they failed to apply their critical thinking skills and skeptism to their religious beliefs.

[joe_smith]

Thomas Nagel, sums it up for me in his book "Mind and Cosmos" he maintains the real threat to science is not religion but the "Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature" its a good read if you are interested in the debate.

We are all stuck in a paradigm of our own self delusions. Its what makes us human, its what makes me, me and its why we can have debates like this. Other wise we would be lost souls swimming in the fish bowl.

[Zaps]

Why is it that those who insist we respect their beliefs and opinions invariably refuse to respect our own?

Originally Posted by bigjoe

A lot of people just do not want to offend others religious beliefs openly.