DISQUS

So crazies'n'druggies see what's real, but overlooked, maybe....
Different mental perception modules activated, different hot/cold mental bias.
Same reality.
Religious visionaries (like witch doctors, mediums...) as well?
It's a long-standing, nagging fear for many folks, I think.
The fear that THEY'RE NOT JUST CRAZY, IT'S NOT JUST THE DRUGS, etc.

Relativism: true?
Well, that's ONE way to look at it....
Who's to say?
;-)

Calm down, 'Lima.'
'Monkeyboy' likes to play the troll.
Spewing invective in response is, perhaps, entertaining for you and him, but not so much for the rest of us.

I *heart* telekinetic dwarves working for hot dogs.
:-)
Bit of a tangent, but...
I remember seeing a similar argument about taxes, something like: it's not really YOUR money, since you depend on society for enabling you to make it, and on the gov't for printing it, etc.
Therefore, don't complain about taxes: taxation doesn't mean the gov't is taking YOUR money, it just means the gov't is KEEPING some of ITS money.

Um, you seem to assume there's some stash to loot, which seems doubtful.
And also to imply that Michael Jordan was defeated at baseball by opponents who were angry about his basketball career. More doubtful still.
The God'n'Guns reference is...well, I really don't know what that's supposed to mean. You disapprove of God? Or guns? OK, so...how d'you feel about devils'n'roses, then?
;-)

Bush is very good at rope-a-dope. It's a favorite move of his.
Any plan he proposes will suffer bitter, cornered-rat hostility from his political opponents. So he'll get them to tire themselves out chasing and barking at trial balloons before he sends his real plan into the arena.
After the anti-Bush pundits and pols have vented all the knee-jerk spleen they can vent, he'll know their strong and weak points. The general public, meanwhile, tires of such wonky drivel and ceases to pay attention. Hell, I wearied of Social Security debates the minute I heard one.
But I think Bush has a mind to do something about it, so I'm sure something will get done.
Whether it'll be an improvement...eh...who knows? I, for one, don't care enough to worry about it.

Yeah!
In other words:
I am agitating for the government to create everyone's happiness.
I am, therefore, good.
Because we know that the gov't will do whatever we tell it to do.
And if I tell it to do something good, it will.
Therefore, if I tell the gov't to make everything nice for everybody, right now, then I deserve to win a million dollars for doing such a good thing.
Therefore, the gov't should take your money and give it to me.
Because it owes me a million dollars, right?
And where else will it get a million dollars from?
The million dollars is something you give me for being good, or it's something the gov't makes up, right?
So why won't you give me your money, dammit?

Uh, let's see...we got some nouns, verbs, gerunds....
Less facetiously, Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" is a good book.

If "you can't understand more complex phenomena in terms of less complex," then in what terms DO you propose to understand it?
Only understanding complex phenomena in terms of equal or greater complexity? This seems self-evidently false.
Although it would make grade-school math classes more fun: "Children, I need you to take this equation and turn it into a much more complicated equation."
English classes would suck, though: "Your book report must be as long as, or longer than, the original book. And you must use more vocabulary words than your author." Though, come to think of it, that seems to describe a lot of po-mo lit-crit.
I just think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
We DO need to beware of 'just-so stories.' Cultural evolution is Lamarckian, not Darwinian. This doesn't mean evolution is false, nor sterile, nor that we can learn and infer nothing at all from our animal heritage.

Are you building on sand or rock?
Yeah, we can rise above our primal instincts.
I'm all for it.
But, if you try building a society and culture without taking those underlying instincts into account, don't be surprised when it collapses.
Like the U.S.S.R., for example.

The evolutionary-psych approach clarifies and resolves a lot of 'nature vs. nurture' debates.
It gives a reason why, and predicts when, the 'tabula rasa' theory will be wrong about human behavior.
If vertebrates generally exhibit behavior X, then 'tabula rasa' is definitely wrong about that behavior in humans. If just a few other primates exhibit behavior X, 'tabula rasa' is only questionable...if 40% of mammals, if 2 out of 3 great apes: very likely, probably, etc....
Many of the predictions, while falsifiable in princible, are difficult to test in practice, given the moral hazards of experimenting on humans.
That said, there will always be 'just-so stories' made up to 'explain' things in 'evolutionary' terms.
Caveat emptor!
Remember, evolution was a philosophical idea BEFORE Darwin discovered natural selection, and Darwin knew nothing of DNA.

"Ad hominid"
I like that.
I like the article too, "ad hominid" as it may be....

"Party in the city where the heat is on
All night on the beach till the break of dawn
Welcome to Miami
'Buenvenidos a Miami'
Bouncin in the club where the heat is on
All night on the beach till the break of dawn
I’m goin to Miami
'Welcome to Miami'"

Depends on the theist.
I don't, others do.

I wish!
No, it's just in the Declaration.
Close, but not enough to justify case law....

P.S. That was me, McClain, talking all that trash just now. Don't know why my name didn't show up....

Fear of hair plugs is funnier than fear of nuclear annihilation.
Also, you can get all the hair plugs you'll ever need with a single nuke.
But one hair plug won't even get you on the subway.

Oh, and 'monkyboy:' in your eagerness to play the troll, you've tripped over your own metaphor.
What's the difference between a hair plug and a nuke?
I'm sure you'll be able to puzzle out that riddle if you sit still and think about it a little bit....

Okay, doom'n'gloom boyz!
America's going to hell in a handbasket, boo hoo.
Read a little history, do a little traveling, and get back to me on that, OK?
Wish I could bet money against that sort of wishful pessimism. Oh wait: I do! Stock market's lookin' pretty good this year....
;-)

"The United States will be spending more on its military than the rest of the world combined.

And its doing it on money borrowed from foreigners."

That's hilarious! The rest of the world are massive chump suckers to let us screw them over that badly.
Sucks to be them....
:-)

No, I'm pretty sure a poem is just another sort of widget.

I give up: why do you find it less convincing, Mr. McGrew?

Poems aren't widgets?

Hell isn't Christian, necessarily.
The name "Hel" belonged to the Norse goddess of the underworld. Like Yule logs, mistletoe, and bunny eggs, it's now part of the larger, mainstream, Christian cultural tradition.
The afterlife was not, originally, a central point of concern for Christians.
(What is and always was?
Love.
With a capital "L.")
Nor is there, to this day, any ecumenical consensus on what happens to a Christian after death.
Jehovah's Witnesses, and some others who pride themselves on their biblical literalism, believe we all die, full stop. Just stone dead, like an atheist would think.
At some future time, the Lord will return, Heaven and Earth will pass away, and the righteous dead will be raised into new life.
The unrighteous will just stay dead forever.
The Catholics have their "Purgatory," which mitigates their fear of 'damnation.'
The Calvinists think it's all 'predestined' anyhow. And so on....

The passages where Jesus speaks of the Lake of Fire, Sheol, or Gehenna are, like the rest of His parables and aphorisms, not normally regarded as flat statements of plain and simple fact.

For what it's worth: I, as a Christian, have faith that God created me, God will kill me whenever He pleases, and I'm happy for God to save whatever aspects of me are worth saving, destroy the rest, and send whatever subsequently constitutes "me" wherever He sees fit, seeing as how He has a better handle on what's best than I do.
So I just don't worry my pretty little head about the afterworld.

At the risk of belittling some of my more fervently pious co-religionists, I'd agree that people who claim to believe in eternal damnation, yet don't act like it, are either lying to you, lying to themselves, or just fucking bat-shit crazy.

A secret, pantheistic mysticism disguised as orthodoxy is probably far more common than meta-atheism.
And I second Matt's assertion that a lot of us 'religious types' don't worry much about the next world.
We're in this one for a reason.
"Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."
One world at a time.

Cheers!
Here's to many more - (*swigs scotch*)