Are you surprised to hear that Peter, Paul and all the saints had anger issues? According this post at Triablogue, they all did, just like Jesus, which would be appropriate.
Anger Managment
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Seriously, does any normal human being find this attractive? She looks like a pale, demented, underfed toad.
I told a friend, jokingly I assure you, how to respond to someone who suggested getting together: If you don't want to get with her, tell her you've gone all-virtual and have no physical presence anymore.
Silly, of course. But I believe some of us will have that opportunity, if we live another 30 to 50 years. Whether you would choose to discard your physicality altogether and live in a digital, virtual world is another matter, but you or your children may get a chance to choose just that.
Along the way, here's a fascinating new entry into the virtual world:
The Virtual Forbidden City is a 3-dimensional virtual world where visitors from around the world can experience the Forbidden City in Beijing. You can explore the magnificient palace as it was during the Qing dynasty, which ruled from 1644 until 1912, the end of the Imperial period in China.
The Forbidden City was created to embody the idea of the emperor as the center of the universe, and to evoke a visceral sense of his power. This huge palace complex was completed in 1420 and covers more than 72 hectares (178 acres). It contains hundreds and hundreds of exquisite buildings and historic artifacts. Now, using virtual world technology, you can experience the awe inspired by this vast and amazing space. And rather than experiencing its wonders in isolation, the Virtual Forbidden City allows you to see and interact with other users and a range of helpful automated characters. As you explore the Virtual Forbidden City, you can choose to simply observe the buzz of activity, or you can take tours and participate in activities that provide insights into important aspects of Qing culture.
Check out this beauty!
Any Christian-type person has heard the argument for the Bible being God's word that says we all need an owners' manual since we don't come with one. When I discarded my erstwhile, misbegotten conviction that the Bible was of divine origin, I felt a dramatic sense of freedom, the lifting of a burdensome intellectual folly. And yet I realized that I do, in fact, need an owners' manual of sorts, and I could begin to appreciate the attractions of religion.
How does one avoid life's many possible pitfalls and find oneself on a path to felicitous outcomes unless one has some sort of guide? When facing the myriad decisions of consequence one faces every day, what does one use to weigh options and sift the wheat from the chaff? I decided that I needed to consider what my guiding principles should be and to express them clearly and with concision.
Which led me to admit that the Bible is, in fact, one source of tried and true principles for living this human life. Not the only source, and certainly not a supernatural source; every claim about the existence of spirits and souls, of heaven and hell, of life eternal and vengeful gods can be discarded as fanciful and without a shred of evidence to justify belief in them. But is there not wisdom therein nonetheless? I think so.
Is it not clear to everyone that striving for and possessing qualities like love, patience, self-control, thrift, fidelity, kindness, gentleness and respect et al is more likely to bring about better outcomes for one and all than things like deceit, selfishness, anger, promiscuity, et cetera?
So I will continue to quote and try to live by wisdom from the Bible, without giving obsequious and unnecessary homage to a non-existent deity. What say you?
A plug for the latest Egan novel I've read. Incandescence is about:
A million years from now, the galaxy is divided between the vast, cooperative meta-civilisation known as the Amalgam, and the silent occupiers of the galactic core known as the Aloof. The Aloof have long rejected all attempts by the Amalgam to enter their territory, but have permitted travellers to take a perilous ride as unencrypted data in their communications network, providing a short-cut across the galaxy's central bulge. When Rakesh encounters a traveller, Lahl, who claims she was woken by the Aloof on such a journey and shown a meteor full of traces of DNA, he accepts her challenge to try to find the uncharted world deep in the Aloof's territory from which the meteor originated.Greg fuses some intriguing math and physics in his stories, even as he develops characters that you care about. A very rare set of gifts.
One of Christianity's most over-used arguments for the validity of their belief in God is as follows: If there is no God, you have no basis for judging between right and wrong. You can never deem anyone's actions, no matter how detrimental to you, to be wrong.
The question is then posed: How can a court judge a recreational murderer to be guilty of a crime if he or she is simply acting in accordance with his or her own standards of morality?
First, as a society we have every right to enact and enforce laws that protect us from harm. People who enjoy killing strangers for fun put us all in danger. We don't have to put up with that. Whatever we think about the killer's ability to control his actions, he must be stopped. So we do what we can to stop him. Consider the pride of lions that drives out the animal that has a mental screw loose and likes to kill the cubs. They don't need an absolute moral code. All they need to do is instinctively recognize that the mentally ill lioness poses a threat to the rest of the pride and cannot be allowed to mix with them.
Second, whether or not an absolute standard of morality is good for mankind is irrelevant to the question of God's existence or non-existence. Even if I were to concede that, yes, I really can't logically call anything "wrong" without accepting that there must be an ultimate law-giver (an argument I do not concede, as argued above), this would not make belief in God correct. Such a belief may allow moral judgments to make more sense to some, but that belief is then no more than a convenience, not an accurate description of reality.
