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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (96453)	4/26/2003 4:37:28 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

> But Plato was not a scientist, and certainly not Enlightenmnet Science and Enlightenment were your arguments not mine. All I said was that creationism cannot prove its point if you don't have faith and if you do have faith, then there is no need for the proof. I find this kind of reasoning unacceptable. As well, I find that it is not internally self consistent and contradicts the real world evidence. > No, that isn't why you don't believe in creationism. I like you Jacob, but now you are being very presumptuous. Nothing of the sort went through my mind. In fact I find the materialistic and secular view of life highly unsatisfying. One of the greatest appeals of Buddhism for me was liking the initial assumptions of it: namely that everything in the world has Buddha Nature and that Buddha Nature is peaceful and powerful. Among the 3 major religions, I find the some segments of Muslim Sufis most agreeable. They too have a fundamental belief in God being in everything. Their view of the universe can be seen in this statement, "just like light which is a separate entity from fire but also part of fire, every particle of the universe is God and simultaneously is not God". Like Buddhists, they believe the only way to understand God is through personal experience. In Sufi writings this has been described as "the way cold iron can understand fire is to be immersed in fire and in time, it will glow like fire and radiate heat like fire, and being fire, it will know what it means to be fire". This is similar to the Buddhist goal of striving to achieve Buddhahood. I have also read some papers on early Christian sects that had similar views. I find such ideas more acceptable than secular atheism. So I think I am a lot more holistic than you thought. I don't believe in Bible because it does not provide a self consistent view of observable universe. I have gotten all sorts of emails from Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists that somehow "prove" their rightness based on how the latest scientific discovery was described in some holy scripture. I think of such proofs about the same as they think of each other's proofs. I am willing to accept on faith something that I have insufficient reason to believe. I am not willing to accept on faith something that I find logically unbelievable. > It won't take 10 years... It may take less than 10 years to disprove it, but it will take at least that long to prove it. If tomorrow all hell breaks loose and by next year we are living amidst raging global terrorism, then it has been disproved. But if nothing happens, then we can't say it has been proven. It would also be stupidly stubborn to go on indefinitely opposing it because "we just don't know yet" or because "logic says it can't be so". I think 10 years is a reasonable time. > Many new ideas came out of the 1960s The 60s rediscovered many ideas, but I can think of no new ones that survived. Feminism comes close, but that too left a bad taste in many women's mouth and had to be modified. I would have said that is the idea that survived, except that at the time it was either "free love" or it was "I can do whatever a man can". Both ideas were discredited and had to be modified. As for environmentalism, did you know that the Zoroastrian's "10 commandments" are along the lines of "thou shalt not pollute water. Thou shalt not pollute the land. Thou shalt not pollute fire. Thou shalt plant trees whenever you can" and so on? Seems very environmentalist to me. May be that should be rediscovered religion for our times. > I feel lucky, to be living in what is probably the most interesting time in human history ever. I agree. During our life time we have all seen some very incredible things. I wonder what the future generations think of our times. ST