Naked Science Forum
On the Lighter Side => New Theories => Topic started by: cheryl j on 05/11/2013 00:44:22
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hahaha. Okay, just kidding. Sorry.
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;)
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Everyone should have one. It's the style nowdays. Guilt used to be a useful emotion telling us when we were doing something wrong, so we could correct our mistakes. Now religious and government authorities exploit this emotion to control us by claiming we are guilty of being politically or religiously incorrect, offending our god or government. Tens of thousands of laws later, the usefulness of this emotion to people has been degraded to the point that guilt in general is rejected. So we identify with serial killers, pimps, zombies and anti-materialism. Or we just spam TNS. They're providing a therapeutic service!
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What is the Origin of Threads About Materialism?
Verbal diarrhoea.
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Well, I have friends who have mystical or religious beliefs that I don't share. But what perplexes me is not that they believe in God, or the supernatural, but why they seem to feel that atoms and molecules are too ordinary or limited to explain the reality they perceive or what their God creates. It's as if they feel that chemical reactions and the physical forces of the universe are second rate, bargain bin materials, like the crappy K-mart brand of crayons, with only eight colours, but the supernatural is somehow the real, quality Crayola Big Box with 96 colours and the sharpener in the back. They talk as though the "simple" material building blocks of the physical world were chopped liver. There must be something "more," they tell me. To them, chemistry and physics are like cheap everyday dishes, okay for meatloaf on Wednesday, but the special dinnerware for dishing up consciousness or human existence is locked away, out of our reach, in God's china cabinet.
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In snooker, a ball that isn't white moves if it's hit by another ball with a chain of causation running back to the cue hitting the white ball. But clearly this materialist, magical explanation is nonsense. The real explanation is supernatural, and not magical.
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Shhh.. we can't make that to be a function of maths or physics..
Embassy the God of Snooker controls the way in which the balls go.. that's why they play for the Embassy Cup.
You have to sacrifice a pint of lager and 2 packets of crisps in order for him to smile upon you with favor for the balls to pass from the material world to his afterlife in the pocket
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In snooker, a ball that isn't white moves if it's hit by another ball with a chain of causation running back to the cue hitting the white ball. But clearly this materialist, magical explanation is nonsense. The real explanation is supernatural, and not magical.
There may be a limit in how far we trace back the chain of causation, but my beef with the supernatural or concept of God is that it aborts the process prematurely.
You may have heard this story before, there are several versions of it, according to Wikipedia. A physicist was describing how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun orbits around the center of stars in the galaxy. An old lady at the back of the room says "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist asks her, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," says the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"
Maybe it is turtles all the way down, to infinity, or maybe they inexplicably end, but I want to see as many turtles as I can. If they do come to some abrupt halt, I don't even really care if you call the unmovable mover God or physics, I just want to find as many turtles as I can. That's why I'm not embarrassed to call myself a materialist.