I guess what bugs me is that politicians that identify themselves as pro-life consistently vote against health coverage for children, maternity/paternity leave and in favor of death penalty, every war and unrestricted ownership of even automatic guns that can kill a dozen of people in less than a minute. They also keep droning how teenagers that get pregnant "have ruined their whole lives" and then wonder why the later go and have abortions. I ended up voting for Obama, in big part because I think overall he will be most effective in reducing the amount of violence in our society, including war, crime and the number of (legal+illegal) abortions.
What I would like to see instead is a revolution in our culture. Throughout most of the history, children were seen as a blessing rather than a burden - joy of motherhood/fatherhood, fun of play, help with farm/craft work, support at old age. Having an abortion back then would seem as strange as cutting off your arm (unless you knew for sure that the baby will starve to death anyway). How did we come to see things so different in a much more affluent society?
The first problem I think is the number of unrealistic expectations on the parents. Children CANNOT go to work even for reasonable time like 4 hours a day and make some money for the family. You HAVE to buy the latest gadgets like PSP. You HAVE to send you kids to a private university even if you are poor. You can not leave a toddler alone in a childproofed, locked nursery for an hour to go grab some groceries. I am not saying most of those rules are not good in principle, but we are making parents with average IQ and education level feel like they are monsters for going through with pregnancy and just taking care of the kid to the best of their abilities.
Then there is a breakup of community. Until the second half of 20th century in US, and in most places of the world till now, if parents need a break or time to work, they could just drop the kids and neighbors, grandparents, aunts or any acquaintances. Now it's a $1K/month babysitter and everyone is to be feared as a potential child molester (which is 10% reality and 90% sensationalism created by the Lifetime channel).
We must address these social problems rather than just passing laws. Otherwise women will just do illegal abortions, have "accidents" that lead to miscarriage or just neglect their babies pre and post birth. I don't see any prominent figures in pro-life movement working to make a dent on these issues. I don't see abortion clinics surrounded by tents with people offering counseling, job/financial assistance and volunteering to babysit. I would love to see a political candidate who is truly and universally pro-life like Ghandi.
It amuses me to no end that you think it needs to be clarified by adding "fetal" but not, for example, by adding "human".
I am just describing the mind set of a movement that has no intention to value human life after birth. Otherwise, they would be all over universal health care, world food aid, road safety and yes pacifism.
But most people are realistic enough to realize that sometimes war is morally acceptable as a last resort.
When the worlds most powerful the country goes to war with one of the poorest ones, the only morally acceptable war would take form of a police action - soldiers patrolling the streets and arresting violent individuals and using the best known non-lethal weapons before resorting to gunfire. Big "Shock and awe" bombs and missiles which are destroying the whole area without knowing how many civilians are in there should be out of question. Soldiers must have freedom to disregard orders if they think they are about to harm an innocent. All other actions, such as publicly apologizing to the other country or bribing the corrupt leader to resign power in return for lifetime of luxury must be considered before actions resulting in numerous killing are commenced.
Sure, we will suffer many more casualties in such a war. But those would be noble deaths of individuals trying to better the world while protecting themselves to the best of their ability without sacrificing their principals.
Thanks for such a detailed reply. You obviously thought things through and I did look at your web links. Still, I can not agree with a few points:
I think that it's relatively fair to allow the movement that self-identifies as X to define X. I don't go around telling a "pro-choier" what "pro-choice" means. The most damage we can do to our society is to redefine the language itself so that words like freedom, privacy, democracy, right to life and so on do not carry the meaning that was originally intended. How can people fight for something that they can not even express in the language. George Orwell did a good job describing on how people can be controlled by redefining words.
I am sticking to calling the groups in question "pro-abortion" and "anti-abortion" because there is no sign that prominent supporters of either cause show any extraordinary respect for non-fetal life or freedom of choice in other areas such as, say, economic decisions.
The staving children in Africa [link]
Very well, the link is describing corruption of existing aid organizations and the need of Africans to stand up for themselves rather than be beggars. But, what if I just bought a shipload of rice and dal and personally came to Africa to feed only pre-teen children and pregnant women? Certainly you don't expect fetuses and babies to be savvy capitalists and take care of themselves. I would think "pro-lifers" would be all over this task - after taking care of the same problem here in USA.
The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.
True, capitalism is a system powered by greed. It wouldn't work well if people were not greedy and stopped trying to make money once they have enough for a meal and a roof. Instead of looking at our society with rose-colored glasses, why don't we also use lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy and pride as the main foundations of our society? Actually it looks like we are well underway here in US...
And for those that might want to know my personal opinions on the subject, I think Bill Clinton said it best. Abortions should be legal, safe, and above all else rare.
Then you have more shared ground than differences with pro-fetallife camp (I can't call anyone who supports war and death penalty pro-life). Currently, more than a million abortions are performed per year and 1 in 5 pregnancies ends in an abortion. I don't think anyone can call that "rare". Both pro-choice and pro-fetallife camps should launch a large education campaign among teenagers about contraception, oral sex, same-sex experimentation or abstinence to avoid unwanted pregnancies. After that, we should stop stigmatizing single mothers and declare every pregnancy a cause for celebration. Financial support and free daycare by governments or religious organizations would go a long way towards getting women to reconsider. While we are at it, lets motivate the fathers to spend time with their children, not to just serve as wallets for mothers who are just as responsible.
Everyone knows "pro-life" is a stance about abortion and maybe euthanasia. Thanks to the Ministry of Truth for that. Some of their target audiences have read a religious text where their God told them from the beginning of ages not to kill. He then saw his message didn't stick and so he returned a couple of thousands of years ago to clarify that they should love their enemies and turn the other cheek if one is slapped. However, the organizations in control of protecting the rulers of the world from this holy text did their job so well that only a member of another religion applied these principals once in the middle of last century in India, with devastating effects on the country's occupation force of the time.
It takes a real genius to interpret the phrase "pro-life" to permit the government to kill anyone they consider an enemy, at home and abroad and avoid the emergence of society of brotherly love between all people where politicians will be out of jobs. They key, I think, is to take an unpopular group of people and convince the masses that they are second-rate humans and their lives are just not as valuable. Certainly, when God said "Love thy enemy", he meant an office rival, not a gruesome murderer? The burka-clad arabs are not even Christians, a carpet bombing is just about enough due process for every one of them. And those starving children in Africa - well, they are n-----rs for god sake! Let them starve! Besides we are not killing them, we are just standing by while they die, while we could have saved each one for $5/year. The right of life is only a negative right you see.
Oh, and for the record, Ron Paul is extremely pro-life.
Define extremely. Is he against death penalty? Does he even oppose death penalty for teenagers tried as adults? Does he support universal health coverage for pregnant women and small children to bring down preventable infant mortality? How about using embryos that would be destroyed anyway due to being extras artificial insemination to save lives? What is his stance on casualties of war and economic sanctions? Is he going to come through for halting AIDS epidemic in Africa?
I don't know how you can call Ron Paul pro-life unless you assume that life stops at birth.
But the Internet has become too centralized for even basic self-healing envisioned by TCP/IP researchers. Egypt is not an island and should have had many smaller capacity links to it's neighbors as well as satellite connections run by different companies. Every ISP and phone company in the world should have an agreement to provide emergency routing outside the usual patterns.
I was hoping the news would be "cable cut, millions of surfers notice a slowdown in streaming video".
Are you suggesting he would out of a sense of responsibility? No.
Are you suggesting that he would do so out of self preservation? Yes, Hitler was known to brush his teeth.
Are you suggesting that someone who is having sex with all these people (daughters included) would be one that actually listens to the Pope about whether or not to wear a condom? Yes, if a hospital he goes to, which happens to be under catholic direction, tells him his penis is going to rot off unless he protects it during sex.
We live in a real, imperfect world and we are responsible for the effect that our actions will have in reality rather than some imaginary utopia. Tell a man to wear a condom and he may do so out of self-interest to avoid contracting AIDS and dealing with unwanted children. Give him a morality speech and he will most probably go on living like he already does and infect his family. You can always give condoms first and give a speech afterwards.
Similarly, a pregnant woman can do a zillion things to cause a miscarriage, give birth to a very sick child or cause a newborn to die. I don't know if you had a kid yourself, but take my word than many newborns will actually peacefully sleep to their own death unless the mother forces him/her to wake up and eat every two hours. You think an unwilling mother who just went through exhausting labor might accidentally oversleep?
Are we going to lock all the expectant mothers up in jail where they are kept away from alcohol and force-injected with prenatal vitamins? Far better to recognize that an unborn child depends on support of mother's body and, no matter how strongly you feel about what she should do, only the mother herself is able to provide that support. As for 14 year old girls, again give condoms and those artificial hormones first and have a heart to heart talk later.
In many countries, Catholic hospitals are the primary form of healthcare. In a given community, there may not be any other doctors to consult. By denying a man the most realistic option to avoid contracting and spreading AIDS, those "doctors"/nuns are betraying their advertised profession. If these hospitals indeed started to distribute condoms, it would save a lot of daughters from slow and agonizing death.
The man is also opposed to free access to condoms in AIDS-striken nations of Africa. Fine, preach all you want about abstinence and fidelity. But, many men will not listen (why should they, they are not even Christians) and visit prostitutes. Later they go home, have sex with their wives (and sometimes daughters) and have 5 infected children who will die before getting a chance to even consider their own spiritual believes.
Good job slaughtering 5 innocents to get to one sinner. I am tentatively considering myself to be a Christian, but this man should be indicted as a mass murderer comparable in scope to war criminals.
Just because you have a soul does not mean that you are omnipotent. You may not be able to regrow lost limbs or rampantly break laws of physics. However, spirituality can help you come to terms with your injury in ways that modern science can not match. Moreover, doctors agree that positive attitude is a powerful medicine and there are many documented cases where cancers and other illnesses vanished although they should have killed the patient. Who knows about those wheelchairs and crutches at Louvre? Someday, we may explain exactly how electrical impulses in our brains kill cancer cells through stimulating production of various hormones or boosting immune system. Until then, a biology textbook is not the best resource for people who wish to benefit from this effect.
Contacting children for legal or financial matters without consent and presence of a legal guardian should carry mandatory jail time for those responsible, at least if their age was apparent at the time of the transaction. It's easy to see how an 8 year old can be persuades to give out parents' credit card numbers, incriminate themselves needlessly, give false testimony in exchange for promise of a shiny new gadget and otherwise be exploited by a malicious adult. This is a far more serious matter than copyright infringement which only results in a financial loss of trivial amounts of money.
Applying lex parsimoniae one can conclude that the most reasonable explanation is that whatever one is feeling or thinking is a direct result of the biochemical processes running in the brain.
Occam's razor is not science, it is a philosophy that many people use when there are no facts to go by. It leads to wrong conclusions in many cases. You don't get a cold because you were out in a cold. There are no naked women sitting inside your computer monitor. Politicians do not really do things for the reasons they say they do.
Your particular hypothesis is kind of thin on detail. What kind of biochemical processes do you think directly result in consciousness? Any change in chemical bonds? Particular carbon molecules? Domino effect where a single event has a lot of related consequences? Your theory does not seem to confirm to "lex parsimoniae". Do we really need more than 10^23 molecules interacting in a very particular way to bring about effects which are unable to logically decompose? It seems more likely that much simplier structures, like flowers growing on one's grave, would also be conscious like us.
Either that, or there are spiritual forces just like strong, week and electromagnetic interactions that we are at present able to experiment with but can not decompose or describe in terms of anything else. Maybe science will make progress on that later, or maybe our very nature precludes us from studying such things using scientific methods.
Could you provide some evidence that this notion of "spiritual" even exists?
Yes. I have feelings. And then I read a physics textbook and do not see any forces or particles that mediate joy, sadness, love or feeling ticklish. This suggest to me that there are concepts which are not explained and perhaps are not explainable by science, although they can be studied by other means.
What "spiritual methods" are well-accepted and *reliable*?
Well, you could try to appeal to other spiritual entities for enlightenment and share your experiences with others. They can then try to reproduce your experiment and see if they get similar feelings of presence, advice and insights into nature of being.
There is no god (or gods) of any kind. It's a ridiculous concept. You don't have an eternal soul. When your body dies, your consciousness dies with it.
What is a physical construct that you think defines consciousness? Atom? Molecule? Cell? The anatomy of neuron connections? If you do not have an answer, it appears to me that you are not in a position to say what happens to our thoughts and feeling when we die. Atoms for example survive intact for quite a while after we pass away. And your body could be frozen just before your death and all these structures can be kept mostly intact for hundreds of years.
Nothing in modern physics sees anything special in human brain that would make us have feelings when other complex objects like computers do not. When someone formulates a theory about such a distinction, it would be the beginning of a science discipline that unifies physics and spirituality. Or if you assume that there is no such rigorous connection, you are postulating that there is in fact a soul, something extra that makes you conscious besides your chemical make up, although according to you the soul is mortal.
There are many scientists who are actively pursuing how to scientifically explain the origin of all these feelings.
A quotes please. Is there any scientist who has actually explained why electrical activities in one part of my brain feel good and very similar ones are unpleasant. I saw studies that detail how having a particular reaction to a particular stimulus increases the probability of survival and passing on one's genes. We may have mapped the brain and discovered which regions of the brain are activated for particular stimuli and actions and how to influence them with drugs or implanted electrodes. But nowhere did I see a scientific explanation of my actual subjective experiences.
Since when are religious people prohibited from "entering secular institutions"? This smacks of muslim holy sites. An intelligent scientist welcomes a chance to meet any prominent individual, even if they don't subscribe to each other's theories.
In any case, there is currently no unified theory that explains the connection of the spiritual realm ("soul") and physical world. Certainly there are dependencies (healthy body leads to healthy mind), but this still doesn't explain how we "feel" about the various chemical and electric processes going on in our brains. It only makes sense to study spirituality based on spiritual methods just like we study science scientifically. Perhaps some day we will discover more details about the connection between these two realms, but until then the two groups should just get off each others' backs.
I saw a movie of that high-budget trilogy the other day. Those fans just ripped off work of some dead guy. I believe his name was Tolkien. What a bunch of klutz for not coming up with their own characters, plots, universe and situations! Just like the folks in Disney who can not get over old child tales like Little Mermaid, Snow White, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin and just write their own stories.
So about as secure as a doorless prison with no guards.
Good choice of a metaphor, and I would love to see this implemented for least serious offenders. Hardened criminals would of course run, but many people would server a short (say, 3 year) term knowing that their acceptance in the society afterwards would be dramatically improved by knowledge that they did the time willingly.
Similarly, if RIAA had any sense, they would use watermarks to communicate with casual offenders and outside court system. The first time a watermark from a P2P site matches someone, send them a letter telling them that they are either breaking the law or their system is hacked, putting them at serious risk for identity theft. Offer to replace their music with a different watermark free of charge. The next time, contact their school, their employee and a local newspaper to put their reputation in question with credible evidence which may be short of legal proof.
A patriotic thing would be to offer OLPC in US before elsewhere in the world. I am not saying it would be the most practical thing to do, but turning home only after selling everywhere else and some may say after failing to realize the volume is certainly not patriotic.
Slashdot Mirror
In Soviet Russia, YOU rule over trolls.
I guess what bugs me is that politicians that identify themselves as pro-life consistently vote against health coverage for children, maternity/paternity leave and in favor of death penalty, every war and unrestricted ownership of even automatic guns that can kill a dozen of people in less than a minute. They also keep droning how teenagers that get pregnant "have ruined their whole lives" and then wonder why the later go and have abortions. I ended up voting for Obama, in big part because I think overall he will be most effective in reducing the amount of violence in our society, including war, crime and the number of (legal+illegal) abortions.
What I would like to see instead is a revolution in our culture. Throughout most of the history, children were seen as a blessing rather than a burden - joy of motherhood/fatherhood, fun of play, help with farm/craft work, support at old age. Having an abortion back then would seem as strange as cutting off your arm (unless you knew for sure that the baby will starve to death anyway). How did we come to see things so different in a much more affluent society?
The first problem I think is the number of unrealistic expectations on the parents. Children CANNOT go to work even for reasonable time like 4 hours a day and make some money for the family. You HAVE to buy the latest gadgets like PSP. You HAVE to send you kids to a private university even if you are poor. You can not leave a toddler alone in a childproofed, locked nursery for an hour to go grab some groceries. I am not saying most of those rules are not good in principle, but we are making parents with average IQ and education level feel like they are monsters for going through with pregnancy and just taking care of the kid to the best of their abilities.
Then there is a breakup of community. Until the second half of 20th century in US, and in most places of the world till now, if parents need a break or time to work, they could just drop the kids and neighbors, grandparents, aunts or any acquaintances. Now it's a $1K/month babysitter and everyone is to be feared as a potential child molester (which is 10% reality and 90% sensationalism created by the Lifetime channel).
We must address these social problems rather than just passing laws. Otherwise women will just do illegal abortions, have "accidents" that lead to miscarriage or just neglect their babies pre and post birth. I don't see any prominent figures in pro-life movement working to make a dent on these issues. I don't see abortion clinics surrounded by tents with people offering counseling, job/financial assistance and volunteering to babysit. I would love to see a political candidate who is truly and universally pro-life like Ghandi.
It amuses me to no end that you think it needs to be clarified by adding "fetal" but not, for example, by adding "human".
I am just describing the mind set of a movement that has no intention to value human life after birth. Otherwise, they would be all over universal health care, world food aid, road safety and yes pacifism.
But most people are realistic enough to realize that sometimes war is morally acceptable as a last resort.
When the worlds most powerful the country goes to war with one of the poorest ones, the only morally acceptable war would take form of a police action - soldiers patrolling the streets and arresting violent individuals and using the best known non-lethal weapons before resorting to gunfire. Big "Shock and awe" bombs and missiles which are destroying the whole area without knowing how many civilians are in there should be out of question. Soldiers must have freedom to disregard orders if they think they are about to harm an innocent. All other actions, such as publicly apologizing to the other country or bribing the corrupt leader to resign power in return for lifetime of luxury must be considered before actions resulting in numerous killing are commenced.
Sure, we will suffer many more casualties in such a war. But those would be noble deaths of individuals trying to better the world while protecting themselves to the best of their ability without sacrificing their principals.
I am sticking to calling the groups in question "pro-abortion" and "anti-abortion" because there is no sign that prominent supporters of either cause show any extraordinary respect for non-fetal life or freedom of choice in other areas such as, say, economic decisions.
The staving children in Africa [link]
Very well, the link is describing corruption of existing aid organizations and the need of Africans to stand up for themselves rather than be beggars. But, what if I just bought a shipload of rice and dal and personally came to Africa to feed only pre-teen children and pregnant women? Certainly you don't expect fetuses and babies to be savvy capitalists and take care of themselves. I would think "pro-lifers" would be all over this task - after taking care of the same problem here in USA.
The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.
True, capitalism is a system powered by greed. It wouldn't work well if people were not greedy and stopped trying to make money once they have enough for a meal and a roof. Instead of looking at our society with rose-colored glasses, why don't we also use lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy and pride as the main foundations of our society? Actually it looks like we are well underway here in US...
And for those that might want to know my personal opinions on the subject, I think Bill Clinton said it best. Abortions should be legal, safe, and above all else rare.
Then you have more shared ground than differences with pro-fetallife camp (I can't call anyone who supports war and death penalty pro-life). Currently, more than a million abortions are performed per year and 1 in 5 pregnancies ends in an abortion. I don't think anyone can call that "rare". Both pro-choice and pro-fetallife camps should launch a large education campaign among teenagers about contraception, oral sex, same-sex experimentation or abstinence to avoid unwanted pregnancies. After that, we should stop stigmatizing single mothers and declare every pregnancy a cause for celebration. Financial support and free daycare by governments or religious organizations would go a long way towards getting women to reconsider. While we are at it, lets motivate the fathers to spend time with their children, not to just serve as wallets for mothers who are just as responsible.
It takes a real genius to interpret the phrase "pro-life" to permit the government to kill anyone they consider an enemy, at home and abroad and avoid the emergence of society of brotherly love between all people where politicians will be out of jobs. They key, I think, is to take an unpopular group of people and convince the masses that they are second-rate humans and their lives are just not as valuable. Certainly, when God said "Love thy enemy", he meant an office rival, not a gruesome murderer? The burka-clad arabs are not even Christians, a carpet bombing is just about enough due process for every one of them. And those starving children in Africa - well, they are n-----rs for god sake! Let them starve! Besides we are not killing them, we are just standing by while they die, while we could have saved each one for $5/year. The right of life is only a negative right you see.
Oh, and for the record, Ron Paul is extremely pro-life.
Define extremely. Is he against death penalty? Does he even oppose death penalty for teenagers tried as adults? Does he support universal health coverage for pregnant women and small children to bring down preventable infant mortality? How about using embryos that would be destroyed anyway due to being extras artificial insemination to save lives? What is his stance on casualties of war and economic sanctions? Is he going to come through for halting AIDS epidemic in Africa?
I don't know how you can call Ron Paul pro-life unless you assume that life stops at birth.
But the Internet has become too centralized for even basic self-healing envisioned by TCP/IP researchers. Egypt is not an island and should have had many smaller capacity links to it's neighbors as well as satellite connections run by different companies. Every ISP and phone company in the world should have an agreement to provide emergency routing outside the usual patterns.
I was hoping the news would be "cable cut, millions of surfers notice a slowdown in streaming video".
We live in a real, imperfect world and we are responsible for the effect that our actions will have in reality rather than some imaginary utopia. Tell a man to wear a condom and he may do so out of self-interest to avoid contracting AIDS and dealing with unwanted children. Give him a morality speech and he will most probably go on living like he already does and infect his family. You can always give condoms first and give a speech afterwards.
Similarly, a pregnant woman can do a zillion things to cause a miscarriage, give birth to a very sick child or cause a newborn to die. I don't know if you had a kid yourself, but take my word than many newborns will actually peacefully sleep to their own death unless the mother forces him/her to wake up and eat every two hours. You think an unwilling mother who just went through exhausting labor might accidentally oversleep?
Are we going to lock all the expectant mothers up in jail where they are kept away from alcohol and force-injected with prenatal vitamins? Far better to recognize that an unborn child depends on support of mother's body and, no matter how strongly you feel about what she should do, only the mother herself is able to provide that support. As for 14 year old girls, again give condoms and those artificial hormones first and have a heart to heart talk later.
In many countries, Catholic hospitals are the primary form of healthcare. In a given community, there may not be any other doctors to consult. By denying a man the most realistic option to avoid contracting and spreading AIDS, those "doctors"/nuns are betraying their advertised profession. If these hospitals indeed started to distribute condoms, it would save a lot of daughters from slow and agonizing death.
The man is also opposed to free access to condoms in AIDS-striken nations of Africa. Fine, preach all you want about abstinence and fidelity. But, many men will not listen (why should they, they are not even Christians) and visit prostitutes. Later they go home, have sex with their wives (and sometimes daughters) and have 5 infected children who will die before getting a chance to even consider their own spiritual believes.
Good job slaughtering 5 innocents to get to one sinner. I am tentatively considering myself to be a Christian, but this man should be indicted as a mass murderer comparable in scope to war criminals.
Hey, just because he is a cripple doesn't mean he is not a great lover.
No, just shots of the surroundings from the built-in webcum.
Just because you have a soul does not mean that you are omnipotent. You may not be able to regrow lost limbs or rampantly break laws of physics. However, spirituality can help you come to terms with your injury in ways that modern science can not match. Moreover, doctors agree that positive attitude is a powerful medicine and there are many documented cases where cancers and other illnesses vanished although they should have killed the patient. Who knows about those wheelchairs and crutches at Louvre? Someday, we may explain exactly how electrical impulses in our brains kill cancer cells through stimulating production of various hormones or boosting immune system. Until then, a biology textbook is not the best resource for people who wish to benefit from this effect.
Contacting children for legal or financial matters without consent and presence of a legal guardian should carry mandatory jail time for those responsible, at least if their age was apparent at the time of the transaction. It's easy to see how an 8 year old can be persuades to give out parents' credit card numbers, incriminate themselves needlessly, give false testimony in exchange for promise of a shiny new gadget and otherwise be exploited by a malicious adult. This is a far more serious matter than copyright infringement which only results in a financial loss of trivial amounts of money.
Applying lex parsimoniae one can conclude that the most reasonable explanation is that
whatever one is feeling or thinking is a direct result of the biochemical processes running in the brain.
Occam's razor is not science, it is a philosophy that many people use when there are no facts to go by. It leads to wrong conclusions in many cases. You don't get a cold because you were out in a cold. There are no naked women sitting inside your computer monitor. Politicians do not really do things for the reasons they say they do.
Your particular hypothesis is kind of thin on detail. What kind of biochemical processes do you think directly result in consciousness? Any change in chemical bonds? Particular carbon molecules? Domino effect where a single event has a lot of related consequences? Your theory does not seem to confirm to "lex parsimoniae". Do we really need more than 10^23 molecules interacting in a very particular way to bring about effects which are unable to logically decompose? It seems more likely that much simplier structures, like flowers growing on one's grave, would also be conscious like us.
Either that, or there are spiritual forces just like strong, week and electromagnetic interactions that we are at present able to experiment with but can not decompose or describe in terms of anything else. Maybe science will make progress on that later, or maybe our very nature precludes us from studying such things using scientific methods.
Could you provide some evidence that this notion of "spiritual" even exists?
Yes. I have feelings. And then I read a physics textbook and do not see any forces or particles that mediate joy, sadness, love or feeling ticklish. This suggest to me that there are concepts which are not explained and perhaps are not explainable by science, although they can be studied by other means.
What "spiritual methods" are well-accepted and *reliable*?
Well, you could try to appeal to other spiritual entities for enlightenment and share your experiences with others. They can then try to reproduce your experiment and see if they get similar feelings of presence, advice and insights into nature of being.
There is no god (or gods) of any kind. It's a ridiculous concept.
You don't have an eternal soul. When your body dies, your consciousness dies with it.
What is a physical construct that you think defines consciousness? Atom? Molecule? Cell? The anatomy of neuron connections? If you do not have an answer, it appears to me that you are not in a position to say what happens to our thoughts and feeling when we die. Atoms for example survive intact for quite a while after we pass away. And your body could be frozen just before your death and all these structures can be kept mostly intact for hundreds of years.
Nothing in modern physics sees anything special in human brain that would make us have feelings when other complex objects like computers do not. When someone formulates a theory about such a distinction, it would be the beginning of a science discipline that unifies physics and spirituality. Or if you assume that there is no such rigorous connection, you are postulating that there is in fact a soul, something extra that makes you conscious besides your chemical make up, although according to you the soul is mortal.
There are many scientists who are actively pursuing how to scientifically explain the origin of all these feelings.
A quotes please. Is there any scientist who has actually explained why electrical activities in one part of my brain feel good and very similar ones are unpleasant. I saw studies that detail how having a particular reaction to a particular stimulus increases the probability of survival and passing on one's genes. We may have mapped the brain and discovered which regions of the brain are activated for particular stimuli and actions and how to influence them with drugs or implanted electrodes. But nowhere did I see a scientific explanation of my actual subjective experiences.
Since when are religious people prohibited from "entering secular institutions"? This smacks of muslim holy sites. An intelligent scientist welcomes a chance to meet any prominent individual, even if they don't subscribe to each other's theories.
In any case, there is currently no unified theory that explains the connection of the spiritual realm ("soul") and physical world. Certainly there are dependencies (healthy body leads to healthy mind), but this still doesn't explain how we "feel" about the various chemical and electric processes going on in our brains. It only makes sense to study spirituality based on spiritual methods just like we study science scientifically. Perhaps some day we will discover more details about the connection between these two realms, but until then the two groups should just get off each others' backs.
I saw a movie of that high-budget trilogy the other day. Those fans just ripped off work of some dead guy. I believe his name was Tolkien. What a bunch of klutz for not coming up with their own characters, plots, universe and situations! Just like the folks in Disney who can not get over old child tales like Little Mermaid, Snow White, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin and just write their own stories.
So about as secure as a doorless prison with no guards.
Good choice of a metaphor, and I would love to see this implemented for least serious offenders. Hardened criminals would of course run, but many people would server a short (say, 3 year) term knowing that their acceptance in the society afterwards would be dramatically improved by knowledge that they did the time willingly.
Similarly, if RIAA had any sense, they would use watermarks to communicate with casual offenders and outside court system. The first time a watermark from a P2P site matches someone, send them a letter telling them that they are either breaking the law or their system is hacked, putting them at serious risk for identity theft. Offer to replace their music with a different watermark free of charge. The next time, contact their school, their employee and a local newspaper to put their reputation in question with credible evidence which may be short of legal proof.
A patriotic thing would be to offer OLPC in US before elsewhere in the world. I am not saying it would be the most practical thing to do, but turning home only after selling everywhere else and some may say after failing to realize the volume is certainly not patriotic.