Last words of eminent athesits

And unfortunately legally as well according to their tax exempt status.

 

Is the Force a religion or what?

 

To allude to another prominent source of fables, your pearls are probably sour anyway.

Wolfsbane, how much critical attention have you given Scientology? From my limited study of the organization, it strikes me as somewhat of an anti-religion in that it seeks to eliminate the emotional component of the human personality. This seems to be right up your alley.

 

Yes, it pretty much is. As if you didn't know already.

 

I wonder if Cullenism has become a real religion yet...

 

Holy crap! It really is a religion: it's like a parody of itself! I was literally just ripping the piss!

 

Oooh, felt that one I did. Fuck you

I've never written anything about removing emotions from humans. I do believe, though, that arguments based upon "feeling" (as in intuition or "having a hunch") is invalid in most debates UNLESS they are backed up with reason and logic.

Religion and emotion are two differen things. Religion might depend on emotions sometimes when forming arguments or when trying to make fairytale stanzas stick better, but emotion in itself has no ties to religion. Why would I seek to remove that which makes us human? I'm pro-human and somewhat anti-religion, you know.

 

I normally don't mind watching either, but certain people go out of their way to antagonize and I tend to fall for that type of shit too easily I'm afraid.

Glad to see you're not in a ditch somewhere bud.

 

On the former latter original topic,

 

Also in Thus Spake Zarathustra, where Zarathustra is surprised upon discovering that the saint in the forest has not heard this.

There are no true Believers, really. People tolerate what they perceive as religious conviction, but see true belief as synonymus with utter insanity. Like when Hume argues that there are no true sceptics, by virtue of the fact that they are not completely torpified by their scepticism, there are no men of Faith without a large degree of madness: if you were to break your bone and rely on medical care as superior to faith in supernatural religious healing delivered by God in his omnibenevolence (which, all moany theological arguments aside, should occur through Faith, as distinct from 'faith' alone), you are choosing Man over God; and if you do immerse yourself completely in your faith and reject medical care in favour of divine healing, you are mad. And don't even start with any of this 'God would want me to go to the hospital &c.' crap, cause that's not Faith at all.—

 

I may be vain, but I do believe that post was about me.

I did as much as you did, quoted specific examples of blanket statements made about people. After that, I left it alone in pursuit of my own tangent. Why doing so is acceptable for you but forbidden of me is frustrating.

Antagonize? No. I'll poke and if one takes it in stride, the merriment continues:

From this I gathered that a large portion of your anti-religion stance stems from the terrible acts committed for religion's sake. This reminded me of a piece of Sceintology that claims that decisions such as whether or not to wage war are too important to be made with emotions, so it is a person's responsibility to rid himself of them. I didn't mean to ascribe to you the same quality that you want to rid humanity of its emotions, but I thought you'd appreciate Scientology's view on the matter.

Also frustrating is how Jungle Japes refuses to play ball.
"You maintain and indefensible position," others claim.
"I have a defense," replies Jungle Japes.
"What is it?" the others cry.
"I'm not telling you," Jungle Japes announces.

Not to mention that I bristle at being likened to dogs and swine.

 

Bristle away, discussing my personal spiritual experiences would be pointless because we all know how such a discussion would go. If I said I had witnessed something miraculous, you'd say there was a scientific explanation. If I told you I had heard the voice of God or seen some physical manifestation of His presence, you'd chalk it up to insanity. My experiences have been far more subtle, things like answered prayer, divine guidance and provision, changed lives, inexplicable joy and peace in the face of adversity, things that you would write off as self-delusion or coincidence because you haven't experienced them for yourself. So no, I'm not going waste my time trying to make a pig find value in a pearl.

 

Respect, Jungle Japes. Why should you 'play ball' with your core beliefs, after all? Especially when the game is "Let's discredit religion."

But I'll play, even if it is just baiting dogs...

When I was 17 I was very sick and I had a fevered dream... An hundred billion coffins orbited the star of Truth, grinding away the numbers to find the equation which led to the star. As I watched, the constant in the equation was found to another decimal place, and a coffin vanished, only to reappear slightly closer to the star. I realised then that we could only get infinitely close to Truth and never touch it. Yet we were bound to the star, projections of it rather than seperate from it. In that moment, I disappeared from my coffin in space and a bright light engulfed me and I felt what I can only describe as One With Everything. For a long, long time, I laughed in my sick bed, nearly laughed myself to death, because of the foolish, futile, wonderful pride of everyone who had ever lived, me included.

The universe itself seems like a practical joke after that: Ooh, look out! We're ignorant, sufferring mortals... Nah, just kidding, we're all God. Good joke, eh?

 

The game is (was?) an argumentative discussion about religion. In such a discussion, arguments and views are exchanged. If Japes claims to have empirical data of God/the supernatural and refuses to share it, I say he's full of shit. If he did share his experiences, I might of course also say a number of things, depending on what he'd write.

Well... While I do agree with the first part of the sentance, I do not agree with the rest of it. War is too serious to be governed by emotions, but we don't have to rid ourselves of emotion just because of that.

 

Ah yes, the fevered dream: the corner stone of established epistemological certainty. Elegant in that not only is it based upon a contingent premise, it begets a contingent conclusion, and all under the irrational banner of faith. The great thing about faith is, it doesn't need to be proven or rationalized; but, then again,

and faith of equal magnitude in there not being a Truth leaves us with a sort of problem, doesn't it? Especially along the lines of God's divine attributes being in a sort of contradiction here; God couldn't really love me that much if he's willing to grant me a life of suffering when enlightenment is in his power all this time, without us needing to learn from experience; and it's odd that I could disbelieve in the concept of God at all, definitively. But, I'm forgetting: it's all part of the great big mystery which we've established through God through ourselves through Faith; and who's gonna contradict that?

 

I don't think it proves anything, except possibly that I'm insane.

However, the conclusion I made, that we are all One, has shown itself to be a very practical working theory.

For instance, it helps me to see everyone's point of view.

 

Ironically, I have a very similar view; though I wouldn't have expressed it so— dogmatically; but the fact that it is a working, pragmatic system is merely consequential, possibly of the same concept but almost certainly so at least in and of itself neccessarily, as a system definitively, and not under some grand Truth.