Oligo

I very very very much hope that whatever turn-based tactical games still emerge use the we-go system (as in Laser Squad Nemesis and Combat Mission 1&2) as opposed to the crappy I-go-you-go system.

I really liked that statistical presentation, Denoir. But your statistical data does not imply that spiritual healing does not exist, it merely implies that the healing powers of god are weaker than those of swedish doctors.

About that leg-growth thingy: I would love to see x-rays of the leg before and after the healing. Even better would be to feed the patients some mildly radioactive bone-precursors before the healing so that new bone could be distinguished from the old bone in the x-ray. Unfortunately spiritual healers never want to provide such evidence of their genuineness. Ironically enough, such evidence would definitely increase the amount of people attending the meetings. About arthritis: How do you know they really had arthritis? How do you know they didn't just imagine that they got better? I also must point out that as a scientist, nothing would thrill me more than the discovery of previously unknown phenomena like spiritual healing. Imagine, a completely new thing to dissect, analyze and exploit.

There are two circustances in which I would not consider miraculous healing stories unreliable and therefore irrelevant: 1. If I personally was miraculously healed. It's easier to believe something, if it happens to yourself. It sort of eliminates the ugly business of lying on purpose. (Of course I admit that one could still be lying to oneself without knowing it, which is what I incidentally think that most of the healing stories and other miracle stories are all about.) 2. If I was presented with scientific observations (with instruments capable of recording) confirming that a miracle has happened. I'm not talking about dork doctors witnessing crap. I'm talking about taking an x-ray of a broken limb, having a miracle healer heal it and taking an x-ray afterwards. Preferably I would like to be the one taking the x-ray to eliminate the lying factor.

Here is another vague rambling written by a jewish person, which is titled "the future" but could as easily be titled "revelations". It just bristles with hidden meaning, but unfortunately it is a song and not a religious text. Personally I like the style of Leonard better than those little jews who wrote the bible (see below). The Future (by Leonard Cohen) Give me back my broken night my mirrored room, my secret life it's lonely here, there's no one left to torture Give me absolute control over every living soul And lie beside me, baby, that's an order! Give me crack and anal sex Take the only tree that's left and stuff it up the hole in your culture Give me back the Berlin wall give me Stalin and St Paul I've seen the future, brother: it is murder. Things are going to slide, slide in all directions Won't be nothing Nothing you can measure anymore The blizzard, the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul When they said REPENT REPENT I wonder what they meant When they said REPENT REPENT I wonder what they meant When they said REPENT REPENT I wonder what they meant You don't know me from the wind you never will, you never did I'm the little jew who wrote the Bible I've seen the nations rise and fall I've heard their stories, heard them all but love's the only engine of survival Your servant here, he has been told to say it clear, to say it cold: It's over, it ain't going any further And now the wheels of heaven stop you feel the devil's riding crop Get ready for the future: it is murder Things are going to slide ... There'll be the breaking of the ancient western code Your private life will suddenly explode There'll be phantoms There'll be fires on the road and the white man dancing You'll see a woman hanging upside down her features covered by her fallen gown and all the lousy little poets coming round tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson and the white man dancin' Give me back the Berlin wall Give me Stalin and St Paul Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima Destroy another fetus now We don't like children anyhow I've seen the future, baby: it is murder Things are going to slide ... When they said REPENT REPENT ...

The problem is that vague ramblings like "(Rev 6:1,2) Now I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures say, as with a voice of thunder, "Come!" And I saw, and behold, a white horse, and its rider had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer." could be claimed to mean anything in the past world, in the current world or even in the future. If the bible said: "United States of America is one of the four horsemen of apocalypse." you would have my interest. (But then again, no country founded by christians would name itself that if it said so in the bible.) I guess my point is this: If you think that your interpretation of that part of the Revelations is correct, why not try to interpret the rest and come out with a plan to avoid the apocalypse? Since if apocalypse is unavoidable, why should we care about it? When they said repent, I didn't know what they meant.

That sounds like war on Iraq to me.

Then again, when did anybody ever gain freedom without using all out warfare to acquire it? (Not counting Gandhi.) Freedom fighters (or whatever you want to call them) have limited options.

Don't be so certain.

U.S. is appeasing the terrorists? But appeasement is... BAD!

Science does not even pretend to have "all the answers". Scientific process observes the world, then builds hypotheses on these observations and finally proves or disproves the hypotheses with further observation. What we thus have is a gradually evolving description of how the universe and everything in it works. What is so cool about it is that all the observations that were done to build that description can be independently verified by whomever who is suspecting some part of the description of the world. No belief is needed. Everything is based on fact. Thus I don't understand your comments on how according to science, dreaming is not possible? What? Clearly dreaming is a fact that each and every one of us can verify by going to sleep. This is the observation and it must be true. The next step would be hypothesis on how dreaming works and experiments to prove that hypothesis. As far as I know, the mechanisms of dreaming are not yet wholly understood, but that merely means that more research has to be done. The point is, scientific description of the world is not dogma, because it changes all the time as new data becomes available. If somebody treats it like dogma, the that person is treating science as religion, which is a fallacy.

See, speculating that there might be life elsewhere in the universe is one thing and believing all the X-files episodes are true is another thing. Making speculations based on the data available is a part of science. Taking some totally arbitrary "truth" and then believing in it without any proof whatsoever is religion insofar that it utilizes the same responses of the human brain as institutionalized religion. But whateva, rock'n roll foreva, mon! If you honestly cannot see the religious undertones of Morpheus' faith, it really won't fuck up my day.

People who choose to believe in the prophecies of Nostradamus are in some level engaging in a religious process. What is the myth of Nostradamus, but a bud of a religion? What is the myth of UFOs, but a bud of a religion? All those have a dogmatic text, a prophet or prophets, deliverance, etc... Try to think out of the box.

I'm sure the reply to this is going to be: "If you want to make an omelette, you got to break some eggs." Blah.

I hate the extensive legislation, because it forces me to break the law if I want to keep any of my freedom. Anything that can only harm the person doing it should not be banned. Anyway, what do you mean with birth licences? Is it that you have to apply for a permission to have a child? That is actually one law I would very much like to see: No child if you cannot prove that you have resources to take care of it so that other people don't have to pay for your brats.

There is an alternative explanation to Neo's "superpowers" in the real world. Remember when Smith said that he got something from Neo that set him free, when they touched? Well, maybe Neo got something in return: A way to communicate with the machines, like machine network protocols or something? Remember when Neo says: "Something is different, I can feel them [sentinels] now." He isn't necessarily a human, you know, he could be a cyborg or a robot wearing a Keanu-suit. Then again, it's pretty stupid trying to second-guess the plot of a sci-fi movie.

Amen.

How do you propose we can tell whether a person is "good" or "bad"? How can you be 100% certain that somebody is a terrorist and thus should be tortured in order to obtain intel? Please enlighten us.

Watching white moon face The stars never feel anger Blah, blah, blah the end

God I hope the finnish "control every goddamn thing with legislation since people are too dumb to understand anything"-attitude is one of the losing attitudes. I'd pretty much prefer the southern european "who cares what the man says"-attitude.

Hhmmmm, let's see: The humans as depicted in the film, did not have any other religion except the belief on the One (that only some chose to adopt). As far as religions go, worshipping the One fullfills all the landmarks of a religion: temples, prophecies, gifts to the messiah, etc. Unfortunately the whole One-religion was another mind control trick by the machines to keep dissidents like Morpheus the Fanatic under control. Hell, Morpheus might have otherwise dreamed up a plan of his own to cause some real shit to the machines, if he did not blindly believe that the messiah (the One) will deliver everybody as soon as the prophecy is fullfilled and spend all his energy on fullfilling the religious fantasy. And the look on the face of the fanatic (Morpheus), when the prophecies turn out to be bullshit... That really made my day, since I'd like to see that look on the face of every fanatically religious dimwit on this planet. Â

Hhm, this is just a wild theory, but maybe UK has the "we won the last war" syndrome? People are thinking along the lines of: "We won that last war, so damn it if we are going to give in voluntarily to THOSE bastards. We rule forever, ok?" I see a partial manifestation of that syndrome here in Finland. Although we didn't win the double wars we had back in WWII, all people are still taught in school that we practically won, because the big bad soviet union did not occupy or annex us. So these people think: "We practically won the last wars, so damn it if we are going to give in voluntarily to THOSE bastards. We rule forever, ok?" It's like since so many people died to preserve our independence, it has become a holy thing to keep no matter what. If you compare that to the rest of the european countries, most of them got their ass totally kicked by at least once during WWII. If you have no glorious victories to remember, you might be more pragmatic. But then again, I'm probably wrong.

I saw Reloaded yesterday. I thought that the action was very nice, just like in the first movie, and I don't really mind any oh-my-god-it-looks-like-CGI-that-sucks-big-time, since in my opinion even computer games have adequate graphics already (it's the story that matters, graphics are just a tool). The plot was a lot better than in the first movie, especially since they explained some dumb things that were in the first one. And to include themes like "religion is just one type of mind-control" is excellent in my book. Of course you cannot expect to have a really good plot in an action flick, but the plot of Reloaded was a move to a better direction. In my opinion, the shallowness of the characters (they seem a little non-human like a lot of people have whined) is intentional (and even if it is not it fits the movie perfectly). In this way, the characters seem like only half-awake, lost in the question of what is real and what is not, especially since even dreams have the ability to kill you. If you would have to struggle to stay sane every second of your existence, see how human you would appear to your peers. The best demonstration of what I mean is the sex scene, where Neo, engaged in the very basic vertebra level action of screwing, is still unable to shake the anxiety and ends up reliving his vision of Trinity's death (dreams invading the reality again). I think you should be clinically depressed to truly appreciate Matrix:Reloaded, because then you could really indentify with the half-awake-half-asleep characters.

Every response from a human is wholly base on genetics and experience, but cannot be predicted due to the randomness in nature (see the random number thread).

I don't know. What I do know is that I don't want to live in a world shaped by the politicos selected by the voters of U.S. of A. Their view of the world is way too simple to my liking.