beyelzu

Why did you quote my post?


Which of my conclusions, either in this thread or in general, are based on "childish frustration?"

Are you saying that I am paranoid, and if so, what do you base tis opinion on?

In short, I am having trouble following your reasoning, and if it wouldnt be too much trouble could you post again, with a little more coherence this time.

I particularly dont undestand why you take exception to my post as it is a point by point rebuttal of old man's post.

Selsaral

Yeah you've made a great point. I would say it is clearly indoctrination. All humans are indoctrinated in their own culture. Most of this happens during childhood. Notice how incredibly gullible children are? How they need to be taught everything from scratch? They believe Santa is just as real as the christian god. My own favorite example is, as a child, when I learned the Chinese eat with chopsticks I was completely flabbergasted, I broke out laughing. I just thought it was so incredibly absurd. Now that I'm a bit older, I don't feel any of that incredulity, and I can sort of see objectively how I was reacting. I was indoctrinated in my own culture, where we eat with forks and knives. Human beings do all sorts of ridiculous things, but the ridiculous things we have been indoctrinated with seem perfectly natural to us. I am not specifically talking about religion here too, I mean all the aspects of culture including how we eat, how we sleep, how we have sex, how we use the bathroom, how we clean ourselves (or not) etc. It's extremely difficult to look objectively at ourselves, but looking outside our culture we get closer to an objective viewpoint. I often wonder 'how would a martian think of this?'

Ptarmigan

Any form of religious extremism is going to screw your mind over. Talk show host Michael Savage said it well about being a religious purist. It messes up your mind and you become repressed. He says it as like a drug addiction.

VonEvilstein

It seems to me that the jury is still out on that one. There have been indications (interference patterns generated by a single photon, for example) that such things might be possible. However, wise and learned heads still need adequate time to examine this. I'm prepared to give them that time, before discounting this possibility.

Although I will agree that the whole idea sounds very far fetched. The universe (or perhaps multiverse) is often a lot stranger than anythign we could have thought up.

This was merely to illustrate that there are plenty of possible explanations, before one has to start invoking entities.