We know what Socrates thougth about reality and probably more than we needed to know. George Fox, Bacon, Origen, Plato, Ptolemy, Augustine, Vico, Kiergaard, Garvey, but how about you..?

Behind all the idioms, rhetoric, jargon etc. what do you think of life?

Remember the less said the more impression it will make. In a nutshell and we can get off onto.

We certainly are influenced by others but at some point we must begin to see for ourselves through the screens and filters we acquire from various sources.

"Our birth is actually the beginning of our march to death..."

Life, Death, Peace, Happiness, Humanity....

I do not believe but I suspect the system works on reincarnation.

YouTube - Brian Weiss 01

This has lead to some peculiar research and deviant lines of thought.

It is curious how JC was in conflict with the religious leaders of his time. What if religious leaders are just pretenders running mind games and actually don't know any more about what is going on than anyone else?

We don't need separation of Church and State, we need the separation of God and Religion. Each individual must walk the path for him/herself. You are stuck with the job of figuring out who is talking BS.

umbra

Well umbra, you only suspect, and have no belief..."what if" will get you started toward figuring our what is bs and what is fact..that is if you desire.

deviant lines of thought are not exclusive to matters of religion umbra. they come through science, medicine, humor, commerce, well just about anything imaginable can lead to a deviant thought.


mind games and not knowing curious group there umbra.

You might be on to something though with the separating religion and God. If I am correct the word religion is only found about 5 times all but one unflattering. I am not so sure God would not appreciate that umbra.

Umbra, maybe you can help me out here....just a question concerning umm religion. most on here are quite anti religion and suppose it to be brain washing merely.

but you know um to me if I were not a religious person, i jolly well think that I would really like others to be so. though religious people are not so much unlike other people, they kill, lie, steal, cheat, decieve, commit all the vices of un or non religious men.

and you know um, figuring out who is bs'ing is not so hard...know what i mean..?

s'funny but we haven't seemd to get any closer to the meaning of life than plato did....it's even funny that plato could have gone so far.....


it's as cogent to say that the meaning of life is the number 52 or pie ...than it is to give a long tretise on it...

...I remember reading on the net some where, some body comparing

star treks federation with life ..Star Wars vs Star Trek Essays: The Philosophy of Star Trek

treat everything you read here with a pinch of salt ( a very big pinch of salt )

perhapes the meaning is self better ment

Yeah Mike, I know that Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and the boys were able to sit and gaze at it and take it all in at a supposively simpler time. And man did they come up with a complicated way of explaining it to us who don't have 20 minutes any more to sit down and read a portion of a treatise.

To many schemers now aday mike, no purists.

I was thinking yesterday at a coffee break after a conversation about men of valor that once roamed the earth. They are no more.

The ego is so strong in our drive now until valor seems a weakness.

You have people who are willing to destroy dialogue because of a comma or capital letter misplaced. Worried about what someone else will think of the race of the misplacer. And in a huff declare a death wish on a generation that would surely include their own beloved. I do understand Mike that not many realize the power of speech and write of idle talk as being hip.

But the issues of a man's heart erupts from his throat.

We are in trouble all around.

One thing though mike, I have always felt that the world was better off with me being me. It certainly takes effort sometimes to stay focused, but I enjoy being able to keep control even as the world tries to wrest it from me.

China is pulsing mike...Africa is a gem in it's eye......watch who makes the deals with her and their rise. all the same though....swiss banque accounts and lavish villas in foriegn places with proxy hanger oners raping the mother land....

Here is where I have a problem with this dude and probably the majority of people.

Quote:

The problem is not that Fed Religion is internally inconsistent, but that it is inconsistent with reality. NO human civilization has been able to erase the religious impulse from the minds of the majority of its people. NO human civilization has successfully combined lock-step totalitarian government with soft, fuzzy good feelings and compassion. NO human civilization has successfully combined excellence in all areas of human endeavor with collectivist, socialist economics and politics. I just can't believe it.

One thing about Star Trek and most good science fiction is that it is FUTURE ORIENTED. Plenty of people have barely gotten their thinking beyond 1900. The 20th Century has given us a phase change in knowledge, technology and potentials and to make a comparison to any human civilization before 1900 is nonsense. Before 1900 we did not know the structure of the atom though the Greeks had thought about the concept. Before 1900 we did not know there were other galaxies. But this clown is going to talk about what NO civilization is going to do in the next 300 years. There can never be another FIRST MOON LANDING.

The reason we haven't made good use of the technology is that most people can't figure out what to do with it and the corporations just want to brainwash us into buying junk designed to fall apart. So what kind of society/culture we could really create with this technology is TOTALLY UNKNOWN.

Our nitwit economists can't even tell us what we have lost on depreciation of automobiles over the last 50 years so what sense does it make to speculate what a society with replicators would be like? I haven't bothered going to an auto show in 30 years because I don't give a damn what the cars look like since the laws of physics don't change and human beings don't change shape. So most of the changes in cars are just marketing bullshit like changing women's fashions. But how many people think like that?

CONSUMERISM IS THE MEANING OF LIFE

That was one thing nice about watching Star Trek. No placement ads in the program. At least until Tom Parris started building a Comaro on the holodeck.



Some people accuse Star Trek of being communist but no one asks what Karl Marx said about the effect of planned obsolescence on the Gross Domestic Product.

um

You make some excellent point Umb.

Especially the one about our not knowing what to do with the technology. The more knowlegable man becomes the further he slips into the abyss.

No one is in charge. No one can say let's digest this and cultivate that.

Economists are driving with the numbers game and predicting who will fall behind.

The big picture is really the narrow one.

Doesn't the old Babel Tower scene speak to our present predicument?

A confounding of communications...the "you can't tell me shyt" syndrome.

Umb, the only thing that makes brothers of men are castastrophes and then some are in glee at the event.

There is hope bredder....

there's no hope unless capitalism ends, that the only salvation for mankind.

meaning of life?

it has no meaning everything is abstract when you really look at it.

we are born, and we die we struggle in the middle. we are rotating on some ball, we are weak biologically, cant even survive a minute in space without some suit. we havnt even made any proper progress to discovering whats out there. a species that are driven by thier sexual drive isnt an intelligent one to me.
and lemmi tell you lott something? we'll be wiped out sometime. i doubt we'd exist in say 1 million years time.

nothing now has meaning- everything, ever concieved about life, the cars we drive,religion,love etc, is all a perception. it dont matter, we envision and make something out of nothing and find meaning out of it. lets just say the meaning of our lifes should be to make it as simple as it can be for our selfs. your parents and your children are nothing, your cars and houses and love are nothing. just some percetion, finding a meaning to something to give our lifes a reason. meaning of life? yes finding something out of nothing or making sense (in our view of something which isnt really meaningful) an alien could land and not understand anything about what we own.

[quote=umbrarchist;1461245][size=3]Here is where I have a problem with this dude and probably the majority of people.

One thing about Star Trek and most good science fiction is that it is FUTURE ORIENTED. Plenty of people have barely gotten their thinking beyond 1900. The 20th Century has given us a phase change in knowledge, technology and potentials and to make a comparison to any human civilization before 1900 is nonsense. Before 1900 we did not know the structure of the atom though the Greeks had thought about the concept. Before 1900 we did not know there were other galaxies. But this clown is going to talk about what NO civilization is going to do in the next 300 years. There can never be another FIRST MOON LANDING.

The reason we haven't made good use of the technology is that most people can't figure out what to do with it and the corporations just want to brainwash us into buying junk designed to fall apart. So what kind of society/culture we could really create with this technology is TOTALLY UNKNOWN.

Our nitwit economists can't even tell us what we have lost on depreciation of automobiles over the last 50 years so what sense does it make to speculate what a society with replicators would be like? I haven't bothered going to an auto show in 30 years because I don't give a damn what the cars look like since the laws of physics don't change and human beings don't change shape. So most of the changes in cars are just marketing bullshit like changing women's fashions. But how many people think like that?

[there was a book you posted a link to bout something about this sometime ago, . whats it called again? something about the tricking of the modern man or something, about how manufacturers where producing crap on purpose. what 's the book called?

oh soul, man that is pretty depressing to be sure. ahhhgggggaaggggg....

cuse me.....

ok.

[quote=the soul machine;1461569]yeah man,

the future..

hmmmmm....

is that sort of like the check that is in the mail that buhs sent?

we will not become pliant to the recession because we have a future expectation that a check is coming...

buhs is not as dumb as we think he is huh? he must be a scfi man