Looooove....

That's the way I often used to write the word love, given how little it means to most people it seemed to me to be a word that ought to be blurred most of the time.

I also wrote about feeeelings, which apparently caused most people to think that I was saying that they should be avoided. It's easy to point out that disagreeing with people being ruled by feeelings is different than avoiding feelings or trying to master or deaden your feelings and so on. A common mistake of ascetics is to consider deadening one's feelings to be self-mastery, although ironically you haven't mastered your feelings at all, instead you're just killing yourself.

On the other hand hedonists wallow about in their feeelings yet wind up in a similar state of emotional death after they will away all rational and principled limitation. I think that most people think it better to be a hedonist than a legalist these days, perhaps feeeling that it is better to experience the highs of bipolarity even given its lows. This is the sort of thing that keeps therapists in business, the supposed doctors of the soul and mind that often harm more than they help people already ruled by their feeeelings. "How does that make you feel?"

Well, it makes me feel like many therapists are part of the disease that they purport to cure, like bipolarity. Should one be surprised that there are poles to being ruled by your emotions? Of course hysterical laughter can have a sinister edge of anxiety and fear fueled by hysteria and so on.

The emotional and the rational are actually complementary patterns which lead to a better sense of the sensuous but the hedonistic mind seeks to eliminate all rational/logical reasoning out of fear that it will feeel unhappy. Ironically if it succeeds it will wind up feeling unhappy anyway. For what good would it do for a person to pursue happiness and gain the whole world, yet lose the soul through which they sense it? The poor souls... that type of mind will always need more even if given the whole world because it's eating itself away.

The reason I would write of loooove when writing to such a mind is because it lacks the integrity of true love and the difference between the two should be defined. Although none of us truly love the way God does and most people define who or what they "love" as whoever or whatever makes them happy, even selfish people mainly concerned with their own happiness can still see that true love is less selfish than: "Now I feel happy so I love you." and "I feel unhappy now so I don't love you." It seems that the bipolarity of being ruled by feeelings often emerges in selfishness because selfishness is rooted in feeelings of the Self and nothing more.

It's ironic that a more selfless person who shapes their feelings based on external principles will actually be a happier person. Being happy isn't the be all, end all, there are many things in life more important than being happy.

How does that make you feeel? ;-)

An interesting article....

Here's an article to read if your brain is on your mind.

Another comment....

I've actually been around, just not blogging.

A biologist said: "Irreducible complexity has been soundly refuted."

Only if you believe that citing your own imagination is sound evidence as is typical to Darwinian "reasoning."

Despite feats of imagination the fact remains that what is observed empirically is irreducible complexity, i.e. you take component parts away from an organism and you can observe empirically that it typically loses function. Only given Darwinian reasoning can one simply imagine a little story about the past and begin to treat your own imagination as the equivalent of empirical evidence when the story actually goes against empirical evidence. The basic structure of one Darwinian argument: "If I cannot imagine how an organism came about then my theory absolutely breaks down. But fortunately it seems that I can always imagine something!"

BioProf:
"The 'design' in nature is a product of a few billion years of biological evolution, and before this, several billion years of stellar evolution."

I'll borrow what some with the urge to merge call their "universal acid" that eats away all intelligence and the like. I think that hypothetical goo is a more apt description than "unversal acid" but I'll borrow such reasoning for a moment to say that the symbols and signs of design that you are trying to communicate now are the product of natural selection operating on some worms. And given that we are imagining an unbroken chain of cause behind your words instead of admitting to basic facts of our experience like sentience and intelligence let's imagine that the worms ate some excrement, as worms often do. So it would seem that your words may as well be excrement.

Worms in your words might be fitting, naturally, given that those who have tried to adhere to "biological thinking" in the past may as well have had excrement for brains. The curious reader might try thinking without words to get some sense of how those with the urge to merge tend to do away with all distinction, specification and species.

"That is what the science tells us."

Scientia/knowledge cannot be divorced from sentience, although I'm willing to adhere to Darwinian reasoning long enough to divorce *your* sentences from your sentience. If you think such reasoning is correct then you can be the first to adhere to it.

Bioprof:
"Afterall, the punishment that you are to inflict upon someone who breaks the commandment 'thou shalt not kill' is death. How does this make sense logically?"

Maybe it's worms slithering in your words that cause you to fail to understand the distinction between murder and killing. It seems that a metaphoric snake has slithered into Darwin's so-called "Tree of Life" after trying to claim all knowledge/scientia for itself.

"The creation account is totally off. If god really was omniscient and inspired the writing of the Bible. Why didn't genesis read: 'The universe began as a point of infinite curviture, whose initial expansion began time and space. ...After more years than can be counted, more complex life arose, until you, dear reader. I set these events into motion, and watch eagerly the unfolding of my universe.' "

The Genesis account is obviously the work of a highly intelligent artist and an ancient genius, if nothing else. It's not a science text because it was never meant to be. It's likely that if God did give man technological or scientific knowledge without any poetic and artistic narrative with moral lessons that we'd all be dead already. I have no idea why God does what God does but there is a lot of evidence that the existence of man and perhaps free-will is intended and cared about on some deep level.

It's ironic that Sagan took his words from the same book to describe the mythological narrative of naturalism which he believed in and you almost cry a little tear about that, yet you also insist that the Bible is poorly written and so on. Of course it isn't, as you'd agree if it said what you want to believe. Given the literature of its day it has even more layers of meaning than we can now know, etc. The real problem is that you don't like and disagree with what it says, not that it is meaningless or poorly written or the product of "ignorant nomads" as the Nazis put it.

It's obviously the product of highly intelligent writers if nothing else.

Bioprof:
"What is actually written is clearly the understanding of the universe as a person would 2,500 years ago-not at all."

Not exactly, all ancient creation myths are not created equal... and I wouldn't portray ancient people as all that stupid anyway. E.g., there is the icon and myth of the "Cave Man" but if you were stripped of civilization and found shelter in a cave that wouldn't make you any less intelligent. There is plenty of evidence that the iconic "Cave Man" was intelligent, not to mention the fact that the icon probably came about mainly because ancient people buried their dead in caves and not because they actually lived there.

"A truly loving god would also not allow one to hold slaves, and would not have his creations stone someone to death for working on Sunday, or disobeying their parents."

Or as Darwin put it in one of his ventures into negative theology: "God wouldn't make cats play with mice or make parasites, therefore natural selection is true or somethin'."

It's odd how the Darwinian mind works, negative theology is okay and can be used to support a scientific theory. Yet then when someone replies with positive theology or argues that a scientific theory comports with positive theology the average Darwinists seems to go a little insane. I think that type of lack of integrity has to do with the urge to merge more than anything. They seem to have a sort of cosmic Oedipus complex in which the main goal is to do away with "Father God" in order to crawl back into the womb of Mommy Nature, thus the lack of integrity and irrationality of some of their statements.

"My point, to the last commenter is that if the god hypothesis is beyond the reach of science, it is certainly way beyond the realm of the theologian."

No it isn't. Throughout your wormy writings you act as if theologians can just imagine up anything just as Darwinians sometimes do with their little stories about the past and so on, yet that actually isn't the case. Theologians are limited by language and text that has been specified for millenia, although some go to great lengths to avoid such limitation it is still there. Darwinians do not seem to be limited by their hypothetical goo, nor have they specified the theory of natural selection in the language of mathematics and then verified it to be true in the trajectory of adaptation in groups of organisms and so on. For all that mewling and murmuring about how Darwinian reasoning is the equivalent the Newtonian reasoning and how the theory of natural selection is the equivalent of the theory of gravity and so on, it isn't.

"Again, you can't falsify the unicorn, as you can't falsify god(s), but that doesn't make either likely to exist."

You say things like that, yet in the next breath you'll be engaging in negative theology as if you could falsify God and the like. That's mainly because God has some specification given the Bible or other religious texts. Therefore you could argue in some puerile and ignorant way: "Rectal parasites exist but I read that the God of the Bible is loving, so I don't think that God exists!" Etc. You would have to read more about how the God of the Bible is specified to avoid silly arguments but that isn't the Darwinian way. At any rate, the first thing that those who tend to engage in Darwinian "reasoning" need to do is to stop engaging in negative theology in order to support a "scientific" theory while at the same time hypocritically censoring all positive theology.