......peacefully sitting in my office, enjoying a calm morning without the mental burden of work, reading a short story by an award-winning woman author about a quiet little town in eastern Canada........then BLAST, BLASTING, MORE BLASTING.....a loud motorcycle explodes away from the stop light, screaming into and through the neighborhood.....like an unexpected string of thunderclaps.....shattering the peace......what is it about people like that? what kind...
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Good interview. Might be a good book. Excerpt:
"For too long we’ve misidentified the problem. We’ve conceptualized it in terms of conclusions people hold, not mechanisms of belief formation they use. I’m advocating that we reconceptualize the problem of faith, God, and religion (and virtually every other instance of insufficiently evidenced belief) in terms of epistemology—that is, in terms of how people come to know...
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larissaanngreen:
sweet...
...no turkey this year....daughter's a vegan, we are vegetarians, my son is a carnivore........mashed potatoes, misc. veggies, and pumpkin pie......nice cool day, no rain.....have to play with the puppies.....
tareva:
......partner got way too drunk.....toppled over the footrest, did a header into my 1970, classic, McIntosh 2105 amplifier.....entire glass front piece broken.....not happy
Dr. Phil blew it this week. The repressed gay guy who created the fake girlfriend for his football hero...Dr. Phil outed him on live TV. Worse, he conducted a psychological counseling session on live TV. Are not psychologists and psychiatrists bound by professional ethics that including maintaining privacy? Sure, he probably got the guy's permission, but was his patient in a sound enough state to...
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nebuchadnezzar:
Sometimes I feel like these guys would do anything if they thought it would get them higher ratings.
tareva:
Yup.....
Dr. Phil is about 50% good in what he does. It's that other half, when he caves to the publicity machine, that gets to me.
Dr. Phil is about 50% good in what he does. It's that other half, when he caves to the publicity machine, that gets to me.
"Tell me, how does god choose, who's prayers he will refuse?"
Tom Waits
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shiz:
tareva said:
......that general era of history is replete with examples of what i think of as euphemistic atheists....pretty hard stepping all the way out of a closet when stake burning is fresh on the mind....anyone who doesn't cut them some slack isn't identifying all that well....
Cut them some slack? Sure. I'm not in the habit of bickering with non-dogmatic deists. But call them an atheist when they weren't? To me, that's offensive to their memory - as offensive as when Christians try to make them out to have been Christian (though there, at least, both Franklin and Jefferson did indeed name themselves that, even if their version of it clearly falls short of the usual definition). To imagine that any of them could have held a "secret atheism" and not been public about it, is to ignore the many controversial truths they had no fear in proclaiming, and indeed staking their lives upon (not to mention, to ignore the many decidedly deistic statements they made).
tareva:
"...as offensive as when Christians try to make them out to have been Christian..."
Precisely my point. That's what they do all the time....latch onto any microscopic hint of religiosity, then run with it. Suddenly, deism becomes christian forefathers.
In my gut I know that most of those deists, having a conversation, in private, at your home, after dinner, would be atheists at heart. It took 300 years of painful transition to get to where we are now, when it's finally somewhaat tolerable for atheists to speak freely.
Sorry, but I have to think that deism was atheism in disguise. And I'm going to resist any efforts to whitewash that into the faith camp.
Precisely my point. That's what they do all the time....latch onto any microscopic hint of religiosity, then run with it. Suddenly, deism becomes christian forefathers.
In my gut I know that most of those deists, having a conversation, in private, at your home, after dinner, would be atheists at heart. It took 300 years of painful transition to get to where we are now, when it's finally somewhaat tolerable for atheists to speak freely.
Sorry, but I have to think that deism was atheism in disguise. And I'm going to resist any efforts to whitewash that into the faith camp.
"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape--the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show." Andrew Wyeth
"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape--the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show."
Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth
working on my memoirs......just finished the chapter on religion......a single sentence:
"A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension." Oliver Wendell Holmes
yet, the sad thing to think about is all those who are exposed to a broader horizon, but take a pass on the stretching necessary to go there.....why do so many choose the comfort of old...
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"A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension." Oliver Wendell Holmes
yet, the sad thing to think about is all those who are exposed to a broader horizon, but take a pass on the stretching necessary to go there.....why do so many choose the comfort of old...
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It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. On the other hand, if you are open to the point...
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