Old Man Infinity and Ms. Nada

What created the universe?
(The original question)


The universe is a result of a surfeit of non-existence. Think of it as a old married couple. Old infinity is the man, and non-existence is his wife. When you breed infinity with non-existence you get reality. Pretend instead of non-existence, you pair infinity with an apple. You get an infinite variety of apples, including red ones, green ones, blue ones, ultra-violet ones, square apples, tubular apples, apples that look like umbrellas, apples that TASTE like umbrellas, follow this list infinitely and you get the whole multiverse. You can do the same thing with non-existence; when you run out of all the non-existent types of non-existence you start to get all the existent types of non-existence, which is what I call the surfeit of non-existence.

The question is, do you believe in the infinite, and that my friend (unfortunately for you) is the God question again

The Creation Story (again)

The Original Question: Can infinite regress be applied to anything?

Infinite regression only applies to things which are infinite. I am a believer in God, but I agree with Dawkins that infinite regression - as I understand it, which is called eternal recurrence - applies to God. That which goes on forever loses all character and becomes a gray melange, everything and nothing, EXCEPT FOR ITS FINITE PARTS. So an infinite thing is no thing (nonexistence) and the surfeit of an infinite nonexistence is EXISTENCE (if something is infinite it becomes all possible - and impossible, versions of itself (which is exactly the infinite regression problem) so that the very thing that he uses to demand there be no creator DEMANDS a universe CREATED OUT OF NOTHING. 

We, those things that exist, are the absurd tip of non-existence, which is a vast ghost ship, as it were, of all our nonexistent potentials; in other words - God. 

God is above mere existence and is not the pantheist's delusion but more than everything and nothing COMBINED.

What is your personal philosophy of the universe?

The Original Question

The universe is a surfeit of non-existence. God swallows the flame ball of eternal recurrence for us and we serve as the valve that allows God to be discrete (meaningfully finite.) Man's finite and imperfect idea of God is our greatest gift to our creator. 

We live, like our creator as disembodied spirits, consciousness without color or shape, tied to a concrete body that identifies and serves us. Our body is our greatest asset. It allows us to be specific things. Limitations make us whole.

Our mind includes a conscience (usually) and an ability to identify patterns, (reason.) Life is meant to be lived, despite the relative misery that comes from the brevity of physical pleasures. Pleasures of the mind are more durable, but everything is an exercise, to be played with dignity and skill, like a game. In the end we go back to that dreaded infinity.  

The formula for beautiful life is finite from left to right and infinite from top to bottom. As Oscar Wilde said, we are all in the gutter but some of us are staring at the stars. 

Thank you for asking the question. I wish someone were able to figure out what I am taking about.

More refuting "theories" of creation

How can atheist live in a world created for no reason?
See the original question

I resent the idea you start with that a degree makes you worthy of discussion and my lack of one devalues my opinion. As a non-atheist, you make a strong case for the atheist BY USING THEIR TACTICS. 

If everyone who knows science better than me is a better judge then your opinion is an outlier and I should ignore it and go with the statistically more consistent answers.

Contradictions in particle physics and the disconnect with the theory of gravity give string theory and the multiverse traction, which by your logic is worthless (which also throws out the unprovable creative intelligence theory.) So rather than trying to use minimalism and reductionism to defeat well accepted theories, why not admit that if God is a cubit or a Higgs particle it diminishes God and your minimalism and disdain for theories is much more atheistic than anything you are arguing against. I believe God can only be encountered by faith and those who wrap God in "theory" are swindlers or fools. Which are you?

If you woke up one day as an atheist,,,

The Original Question (from Yahoo Answers)

I am not a Christian, but I find the people whom I know that are atheists are angrier and distrust a universe that coincidentally gave them a perfect environment to live in and supermarkets filled with food. 

They seem to have a Somali pirate mindset in a Disneyland environment.

It is worth maybe being delusional just to be less paranoid. What I would do differently if I were an atheist, is I would not rely on that part of my brain that is hardwired for faith (which apparently gave my ancestors an evolutionary advantage) and I would say "it's just you, no one or nothing else is going to help you, care about you or even leave you alone in peace." It is not faith in God my atheist would be lacking but faith in his fellow humans. 

If I thought other people's spiritual (moral) instincts were valid I would not need to question their faith and I would be an agnostic and a friend to faith rather than an enemy and parser of the values of others.

Addendum to Perils of Twitter

con·flate: \kən-ˈflāt\ verb

From Latin conflatus, past participle of conflare to blow together, fuse, from com- + flare to blow — more at blow

Date: 1610

transitive verb

1 a:  to bring together, fuse; 1b: confuse;  2: to combine (as two readings of a text) into a composite whole.

So in response to my asking why are you conflating ISIS with all of Islam (or in my exaggeration with the black community as well) my friend replies "I am sorry to disappoint you but I just hate them."

Who are THEM?

Hate ISIS? Sure. Hate all of Islam? Stop using math and science then (oh wait, I take that back, they will be banning higher math and science next) Hate the fact that the liberal media gives some blacks a pass on violence? Reinstitute Jim Crow Laws, and don't allow them out after dark. I mean after all, conflating a criminal group with a whole community (or in the case of Islam about 20 communities) is an appropriate response and a MEASURED RESPONSE is just a sign of weakness.

I have discovered first hand what I already knew about the left (that they cannot hear anything but their own side,) is equally true of the right. 

So Twitter away, reinforcing what you already believe and damning language with your nonsense shorthand. I'm done.

It's just with society polarizing and speaking different languages, I am left (right of center) with nobody to talk to.

But I will be voting for Hillary Clinton I assure you. Nixon was the last free president (free of the IMF that is) and Clinton was the last SANE president. I'm gonna get in my time machine I vote for the Clintons (as I never did in the nineties) and see if maybe they will bring some sanity back.

As the divide between left and right becomes a chasm, Russia, and other petty dictators around the world are smiling (and killing babies, but the media is only hyping ISIS.)

The Perils of Twitter

The Perils of Twitter
By Happy Hiram 

Okay so I am sitting here with my phone service stalling as it always seems to be when I am not on the highway somewhere, thinking about the state that the idiocy of Twitter has gotten me into.

First, why bother then? My friends and I have a normal interchange and then I go on twitter and they say things that they would never dream of passing off in any other form of communication. So I feel compelled to respond... And then I get stuck on the stupid format.

My friend, my reasonable friend, retweets things that say "Islam is a violent religion" and site ISIS as an exemplar. I wish I could find the sequence of posts but twitter is like the Atlantic Ocean and each post is like that one hypodermic swimming around. You respond to being poked and the poke and response end up on opposite ends of the coast.

Anyway I respond by saying "ISIS and Islam do not equate." Except somehow I can't fit equate in 140 characters (after all the names of the retweeters) so it goes in as = WHICH IS NOT THE SAME THING. It's okay, they'll tell ya, its Twitter shorthand. No, it is not okay to sacrifice sense to mere speech. That is why I am responding in the first place. Because what was SAID was ridiculous IF MEANT, but of course when you separate MEANING from communication you don't have any IDEA what was meant. 

So my friend replies "I take ISIS at their word. WTF does that have to do with the question? How do you functionally say "what you are saying is a non-sequitur and has no merit to the subject at hand which is that the conflation of a hate group with a WHOLE SERIES of cultures makes the respondent a hate group instead of just having an opinion." Even if you could BASTARDIZE that into 140 wrds you have to take out for the names you are RESPONDING TO.

So then my friend retweets "a white person is 250% more likely to get assaulted by a black person than a black person by a white."

If I have eight friends and one of them is a red-head, if I swing a cat and throw it I have a slim chance of hitting a red-head. If HE SWINGS a cat at US, he has a 100% chance of hitting a non-redhead. That alone makes him 12 times more likely to hit me. Black on black crime is higher than black on white crime, so see, poverty and ghettoization WORKS! Add the super high rate of drugs in the ghetto and you have a formula for 250%.

On average, most black Americans have less wealth than white Americans. So I post that I should have been robbing poor people instead of people with money because I was messing the statistics up completely.

No response. Is that good or bad? How do I know if anybody even read what I wrote? On blogger I get stats. On twitter I get piecemeal promos like "7 people were interested in your tweet" Six months from now that seven number will be meaningless. I won't even know what week it was.

So in response to the ISIS "take them at their word" canard I reply "ISIS is not Islam" to which I get "They say they are... I'll take them at their word."

To which I reply, "The Black Panthers say they represent the black community, so does that make all blacks black panthers?"

Now, I know my friend, he is a good guy, not out to entrap me or make me look foolish or anything. He responds: "if you said all black panthers were black, I'd agree with you..."

Does he mean:

A) you wrote your argument wrong ways round (ignorance?)

B) I am willfully pretending to not understand you (arrogance? Not really his style) 

C), well, I can't really think of a C. The point is that now I don't know if I am being fucked with or my smart friend can't read.

So I respond "saying 'all A's are B' is not the same as saying 'all B's are A' but by the time I mangle that into a tweet it has lost all sense of meaning.

"I don't know what you are saying." He replies. Wow, you think?

I reply (of course you can't cut and paste out of the twitter app so this is long form) "'If Nation of Islam members are black and ISIS represents Islam, then all black people are terrorists' is the kind of logic you are proposing." You can just imagine how distorted THAT gets in 140 (minus the sendees) wrds.

So is communication by twitter possible? I think not. I mean who is ever gonna read this article? It has WAY MORE THAN 140 CHARACTERS!

The response will quote where I am misquoting (due to lack of access) the original tweets, or their sequence. Well I can't ACCESS the original tweets nor copy them if I could. So if you think I am somehow wrong, it is twitters fault again. Don't blame me.