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Politics : DON'T START THE WAR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zonder who wrote (24453)	5/26/2003 1:37:21 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25898

I am not an atheist, and I NEVER said I was. Not with that exact word... However, I derived that impression of your views from you very own words as a aherent of science: Remember, we don't like uncertainty. Of course there is free will. Because God does not exist. Message 18936480 atheism Atheism is traditionally defined as disbelief in the existence of God. As such, atheism involves active rejection of belief in the existence of God. skepdic.com Kind of curious how I can be accused of intrepreting the above as anything other than active atheism.. And it's certainly not Agnosticism, which lays out the possibility of the existence of God, but demands more proof.. (and it's not like that's nearly as bad as being French.. :0) Example: Japanese kamikazes. Were they lured by "promise of heaven", or were they trying to "improve the gene pool"? I guess you have little concept of Code of Bushido, which guided the lives of Samurai warriors, including Kamikaze pilots... Bushido is based upon several religions, including Shintoism, Confuscianism, and Zen Buddhism.. aikido-world.com Nationalists and militarists alike looked to the past for inspiration. Delving into ancient myths about the Japanese and the Emperor in particular being directly descended from the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu Omikami, they exhorted the people to restore a past racial and spiritual purity lost in recent times. They were indoctrinated from an early age to revere the Emperor as a living deity, and to see war as an act that could purify the self, the nation, and ultimately the whole world. Within this framework, the supreme sacrifice of life itself was regarded as the purest of accomplishments. bbc.co.uk uwec.edu Thus denial of self, combined with belief that they were the vassals of a living god, as well as seeking the approval of spirits of their ancestors, all provided a sense of a "promise of heaven".. And in addition, I believe that Samurai warriors were told that if they died bravely, their spirits would be welcomed to reside in the Emperor's palace.. That sounds like a "promise of heaven" to me... It certainly did to them.. Or is there PERHAPS another possible reason why people might accept their death in war, which you have NOT covered in your little analysis of the situation? I'm waiting for you to enlighten us.. No wait. I don't want to know. That's apparent.. "Logic" is NOT "I think there are other dimensions, and you cannot prove there are not beings living there, so my logic says God exists". According to who's definition?? Since when does "logic" equate strictly to what is "experimentally provable"?? It wasn't a requirement for Aristotle who perceived the elemental threory of matter (even while other Greeks philosophers were laying the groundwork for modern Atomic theory).. So who are you say that it's not logical for someone to extrapolate that entities that may, and likely do, exist in other dimensions would have no desire to interact with us lowly 3-D creatures?? After all, do we not draw in 2-D? Do we not paint in 2-D? Do we not render 2-D to appear as 3-D in our computer art?? We "meddle" in the first and second dimensions all the time... In fact, we perceive them as our creation. Thus, by sheer deduction, it can be construed as "logical" that extra-dimensional creatures influenced the 3 lowest dimensions in a way that neither you, nor I, can readily prove? I perceive that you possess an extremely deprecatory perpective of people who acknowledge the (possible) existence of a spiritual realm (which would be, by deduction, extra-dimensional)... I don't know what you experience has been which made you so actively prejudicial towards spirituality, but I have my OWN personal experiences which confirm it in my own heart and mind. I don't claim that I can properly describe such interaction, but logic dictates that higher dimensions can interact with lower dimensions, just as we do with the second and first. But just as any entity possibly existing on those lower two dimensions cannot prove, or explain how, their very existence is created and manipulated by we 3-D creatures, we cannot prove, or directly explain, how our own dimension is created and/or manipulated by higher dimensional creatures. That's all I'm saying.. And in a scientific sense, a reason to find common ties between spiritual belief and scientific principles. Hawk