What makes you think you are right about belief?

[Devils' Advocate]

We get what we need to survive and prosper, we've just grown a bit greedy now that we know that there is more. Sounds very human to me.

With a ruler? No? Then how about the length of the electromagnetic spectrum versus the percentage of it we can see. And so on for the rest of our senses. Besides you were the one who said we have enough. How do you measure what is enough?????

 

[A Cup Of Tea]

With a ruler? No? Then how about the length of the electromagnetic spectrum versus the percentage of it we can see. And so on for the rest of our senses. Besides you were the one who said we have enough. How do you measure what is enough?????

Because life has is all around us, and humans have been humans for a very long time. From a human perspective. I don't want to see and hear more because I need to but because I want to.

We got the absolute minimum of what we need to survive and prosper.

So how many percent of the spectrum is 'enough' to 'survive and prosper'?

...whatever they don't want...you can have.

Loot? Hold on, I'll be right there!

 

[wil]

really...

our color spectrum is not enough??

you want infra red, ultra violet, x ray gamma ray? see them all...see all the radio and tv and cell signals...and blue tooth and wifi and quarks flying by?

then what?

and you don't understand greed?

 

[Devils' Advocate]

Cup, we do not know how much of the spectrum is enough to survive and prosper. That is my point. If we only saw black & white, for example. You would say you may want to see color, but you don't need to to get by. You wouldn't be wrong either. What a stunning view of our reality we would be missing out on though. And since we'd never seen it, we would never know what we are missing.

Take that point and raise it to the next level above what we can see. With our very limited senses we have no clue what we may be missing out on. Well, we have a bit of a clue thanks to science.

Wil, you are just being silly. Take a talking point and embrace the opposite extreme. Classic debate tactic.

I never said I wanted to see the entire electromagnetic spectrum. I said being able to see .0035% of it is rather limited.

 

[A Cup Of Tea]

I'm actually very unclear as to what your point is, I feel we have established that we have enough to survive and prosper. Beyond that I don't know what we need.

 

[Devils' Advocate]

I can't state it any more clearly than I did in my last post. If I'm not making sense to you, then I will let it go. Perhaps just as well as we really have gotten off topic.

 

[wil]

Cup, we do not know how much of the spectrum is enough to survive and prosper. That is my point. If we only saw black & white, for example. You would say you may want to see color, but you don't need to to get by. You wouldn't be wrong either. What a stunning view of our reality we would be missing out on though. And since we'd never seen it, we would never know what we are missing.

Take that point and raise it to the next level above what we can see. With our very limited senses we have no clue what we may be missing out on. Well, we have a bit of a clue thanks to science.

Wil, you are just being silly. Take a talking point and embrace the opposite extreme. Classic debate tactic.

I never said I wanted to see the entire electromagnetic spectrum. I said being able to see .0035% of it is rather limited.

No you never did before... but it was implied... and then my point was well stated in this post as that is exactly what you said.

While you are correct...we only see, taste, hear, understand very little, a minute amount of information can we receive and digest....we can't even (most of us) receive and digest all of what we see. Yet you want to see more, and slowly we can with the aid of science...our various visual and radio telescopes and various microscopes and MRIs and xray machines and filters allow us to 'see' representations of another fraction of what we cannot.

I seriously believe that there might be people who can see and hear a helluva lot more than we...but they are autistics, idiot savants, our brains are not designed to filter, categorize, understand all that they are absorbing and various body functions like walking, eating, standing all take a back seat...or we have the higher functioning, they have some degree of which you request, yet they lack social skills...

We as humans are well designed balance of what we take in and what our brains can handle....and yup...when you start wanting more and that wanting take over your thoughts...that is what we call greed.

 

[cristianprince67]

I meditate about my beliefs and the answer usually comes to me intuitively. I always just trust my intuition. That's where I get my beliefs from.

When it comes to beliefs, particularly religious beliefs, there was, from my perspective, a strange aberration about people and their faiths. There were all these different belief systems, and each one was SURE they are right. And everyone of the other religious groups was wrong. About who or what God(s) are. About what is the proper path to salvation. About where you go after you die. And so on, and so on.

How was this possible? Each group could not be right and every other group be wrong. Because the only thing just about all these groups agreed upon is that only one group could be right. It was like I was standing at a huge crossroads, and an adherent from each religion was holding up a sign saying 'Take my path, it is the only one that will save you'.

A crossroads with a thousand paths to choose from. All stating the same thing. My path, and my path alone, will be your salvation.

With one guy separated from all the rest, with a sign saying 'All those other paths are wrong! Reject them all. Every single one of them. My path isn't going to do squat for you. But it will at least give you the real deal about the path. Which is that there is no path'.

In my younger days, the only reasonable choice to make was the last one. Logically all these other paths were delusional, thinking their path was THE ONE, and all the others were false. Better to take the path that rejected the entire concept. This path was atheism, of course.

But my choice always bothered me, because of my experiences in life which showed me that this reality we live in day to day is not the only reality. Or, putting it more properly, the day to day reality was not all there was to reality.

It took many a year, and maturing, amassing what wisdom I could before I realized that my initial choice was wrong after all. It wasn't a matter of rejecting any of the paths. It WAS a matter of rejecting the notion that one and only one of them was the right path. Once one does that, the concern about being right, or about being wrong lost its power over me.

There are many, many, many 'right' paths. People choose a particular path based on their individual needs, desires and strengths and limitations. The choice one makes, if one chooses wisely, is the best choice for that person. If it turns out that your initial choice isn't working for you anymore, choose another. If your path is moving you towards enlightenment, that is one of the right paths for you.

Of course, I could be wrong.....

 

[Hatshepsut]

The part of the electromagnetic spectrum that can excite our photoreceptors happens to be where most of the sun's output is. I'm not aware that any animals have evolved infrared vision, which might be useful at night - Since the excitation is of a protein that changes shape when struck by a photon, there may be biochemical limits on what can evolve. Infrared doesn't have enough energy to bend a protein molecule; yet X-rays have too much energy and smash such molecules. Pit viper snakes can sense infrared with their facial pits, although I suspect only directional information is obtained that way. But it's enough to guide their strike at a warm mouse.

I hope I don't get to thinking my personal beliefs are too right! For instance, salvation concepts don't exist in all religions, nor may the need to be the "only true religion." These ideas seem particularly developed in Judaism and its daughter religions of Christianity and Islam. The "scientific worldview" isn't a religion as far as I know. Scientists may be more likely to lean toward atheism than laypeople are. However, many scientists have religious beliefs without feeling that their science knowledge conflicts with it.

Indeed, logic is fine for those problems it applies to, but may not be the only or best way of knowing in all situations. It's slow, for one thing, and it requires dichotomies.

I don't think wanting more information by itself is necessarily greedy. I like that eyeglasses are available, and don't feel greedy for using them. In Christ's time I would have just stumbled around with poor vision, and perhaps been "deleted" by natural selection after failing to see a pit viper I stepped on. Making eyeglasses the way we do it today is hard on the environment, though. An oil industry to supply the resins, lots of machinery and equipment.

 

[Shibolet]

All three items above may well be true. But only the last one is subject to more or less conclusive verification - we know that people start as fertilized eggs. I can be considered a continuation of my parents' cell lines.

Statement #2 is a matter of definition: the word "universe" is defined to include everything. Yet that doesn't mean that all of the universe is accessible to us. It may have domains from which no information can reach the Earth - and there's no easy way to know whether this is so.

With statement #1, we're in for rough sailing, since we don't really know what time is. Or what matter is. The only things we do know about them is that they are not independent of each other (Einstein, 1915), and that clocks and scales can be used to measure them quantitatively. But note that a quantity of time is measured only relative to another quantity of time - runners on the track versus the stopwatch, say. No absolute standards for either time or mass are known. I see no a priori reason to think that time must have had a beginning. The first principles needed to infer this aren't there yet.

In other words, the Big Bang is a theory based on best available information and understanding. It's accepted as "sound," but never as "proved." At least that's what I'm told by the physics majors.

Yes, we are considered a continuation of our parent's cell lines according to the concept of Causality. Since from the logical point of view, the universe is not composed of only caused elements, it is only obvious that the Primal Cause is real by necessity.

True that ALL the universe is not YET accessible to us. We will be there. There was a time when we thought earth to be flat. Today, in my opinion, no one does.

Time is the concept to figure the distance between matter and matter as matter travels between matter and matter. Hence, the motion of matter. But time is subject to consciousness. Therefore, time is a relative concept. Had not man been created, there would be no time to be computed.

Matter is the element the universe is composed of.

I agree that the big bang cannot be proved and it could at any time become obsolete. It was figured by a theist more to confirm the Biblical assertion that the universe had a beginning than a real event. Therefore, it cannot be proved.

 

[IAM13]

I hope I don't get to thinking my personal beliefs are too right! For instance, salvation concepts don't exist in all religions, nor may the need to be the "only true religion." These ideas seem particularly developed in Judaism and its daughter religions of Christianity and Islam. The "scientific worldview" isn't a religion as far as I know. Scientists may be more likely to lean toward atheism than laypeople are. However, many scientists have religious beliefs without feeling that their science knowledge conflicts with it.

Hatshepsut, me thinks the scientific community might lean more towards a doctrine and belief system based upon math, ever heard of Pythagoreanism? If not, and you love math or numbers, come visit the Pythagorean Order of Death. You might enjoy it.