Jamie123
-
Posts
2979 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
28
Posts posted by Jamie123
-
-
What do you call a German barber?
Herr Cutt
How many ears did Davy Crockett have?
Three: His left ear, his right ear and the wild front ear
How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Practice!
How did Isiah get his name?
One of his eyes was 'igher than the other
What do you do when you see a space man?
Park in it man
Knock knock
Who's there?
Doctor
Doctor Who?
Errrr....yes!
-
:) :) :)I was born with a smile on my face
the whole of my life's been a pantomime
born with the need to embrace
the life of a clown telling rhymes
La la la la la la la
la la la la la la la
la la la la
-
Africa - all over, but especially South Africa, Kenya and Egypt.There was a thread recently asking where we have been. How about where are we going?
There are plenty of places I want to go, but my top four, not in order of importance, are
1. The Laurel & Hardy Museum in Harlem, Georgia. Can't help myself. I think they are the funniest comedy duo of all time.
2. The Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. Wanted to see it since I saw the Walt Disney movie "Davy Crockett" nearly fifty years ago.
3. The Redwood trees in northern California
4. The monument at Little Bighorn Montana. Someone with my last name was with old Custer that fateful day.
Where are three or four places you'd like to visit before you turn your toes to the sky?
Iceland
Yellowstone Park
Niagra Falls
The western parts of Canada
Australia - all over, but especially NSW
Singapore- My family lived there for a while when i was very young.
-
Your wife is smarter and better educated than you.
The Traveler
Yup, she's one smart lady!
-
Problem is they are emotional responses that can be tested and measured through external external stimuli/ physical response which put them in the wind category. (Fear and anger especially.) Not sure about beauty and humor response being measured but they can be caused by external stimuli.MRI perhaps?
That's a good point, but I wonder if the physical responses you refer to can really be considered "fear", "anger" and "humor" themselves, or merely their by-products.
Of course, you could just as easily say that the rotation of an anenometer is also merely a by-product of the wind. However, we do have a good physical understanding of wind actually is in terms of the flow of air molecules.
Could things like humor and beauty have similar physical explanations which we have not yet discovered, or are they truly non-physical phenomena?
-
Very interesting video.
The first part of it reminds me very much of Russell's "flying teapot" analogy: The fact that we can't disprove the existence of a teapot orbiting half way between Earth and Mars is no reason to suppose that such a teapot is likely to exist. The major problem with this (for me) is that flying teapots don't really explain very much about our existence, whereas God does.
Also I don't think "the wind" is the best example of a non-physical entity. (Although it can't be seen, it can be quantified and measured using physical apparatus.) There are plenty of non-tangible things which we all accept the existence of, like beauty, humor, fear, anger...even ideas themselves. Of all the things this guy could have mentioned, he picks an obvious strawman.
On the other hand, he does make some very good points about religious bullying, pushing God X over God Y etc.
-
LOL - Harry Enfield actuallyWho are you quoting? I'd like to have a word with his mother.
I showed that to my wife last night and she wouldn't talk to me for the rest of the evening!
-
Question 1
"As everyone knows, the over-education of women leads to premature aging, ugliness and beard growth."
Discuss.
-
"It started out like Romeo and Juliet...but it ended in tragedy!"
Milhouse (Bart Simpson's friend)
(Not exactly a movie quote, I know!)
-
"If the Good Lord had intended us to walk, he wouldn't have invented roller skates!"
Willy Wonka
-
The one about the p's and q's really surprised me. This is what I found out on The meanings and origins of sayings and phrases | List of sayings | English sayings | Idiom definitions | Idiom examples | Idiom origins | List of idioms | Idiom dictionary | Meaning of idioms
The date of the coinage of mind your Ps and Qs is uncertain. The OED used to print a citation from 1779 but, as they have now withdrawn it from the online version of the dictionary, presumably they consider it unreliable.
So, the meaning, spelling and coinage of the phrase are all debatable. Now we come to what is really uncertain - the derivation. Nevertheless, it is one of those phrases that people know the origin of. When pressed all that really means is that the person they heard explain the origin had made a random choice from the list of proposed derivations below. As no one knows the origin I'll just list those suggestions - mind your ps and qs probably derives from one of these:
- Mind your pints and quarts. This is suggested as deriving from the practise of chalking up a tally of drinks in English pubs (on the slate). Publicans had to make sure to mark up the quart drinks as distinct from the pint drinks. This explanation is widely repeated but there's little to support it, apart from the fact that pint and quart begin with p and q.
- Advice to printer’s apprentices to avoid confusing the backward-facing metal type lowercase Ps and Qs. I've never heard any suggestion that printer should mind their ds and bs though, even though that has the benefit of rhyming, which would have made it a more attractive slogan.
- Mind your pea (jacket) and queue (wig). Pea jackets were short, rough woollen overcoats, commonly worn by sailors in the 18th century. Perruques were full wigs worn by fashionable gentlemen. It is difficult to imagine the need for an expression to warn people to avoid confusing them.
- Mind your pieds (feet) and queues (wigs). This is suggested to have been an instruction given by French dancing masters to their charges. This has the benefit of placing the perruque in the right context - so long as we accept the phrase as being originally French. There's no reason to suppose it is from France and no version of the phrase exists in French.
- It is advice to children learning to write to take care not to mix up the lower-case letters p and q. Again, the 'd' and 'b' counter argument applies.
- It derived as reminder to children to be polite. This is supposed to be as a form of 'mind your pleases and thank-yous' - 'mind you pleases and kyous'. Pretty far-fetched that one.
- P and q stands for "prime quality." There is, or rather was as this now seems to have also been withdrawn, a 1612 citation which links PQ with 'prime quality'. If that's the origin why isn't the phrase mind your PQ?
The one about "pleases and kyous'" may be far-fetched, but it's pretty much what I was told it meant when I was a kid.
-
GOTCHA!! You tried it didn't you?
LOL - I thought about it, but didn't quite!
-
I found the missionaries that helped to reactivate me after 21 years on Facebook. I was saddened to see a pic of one of the young men with a cigarette in his mouth, long hair and beard. I saw several other pics with cig in mouth or hand.
Really, really bummed.
I'm not sure why his having a beard is so terribly bad, and as for the cigarette....well, I suppose it could have been a fake one!
Seriously though, I've noticed that many of the elders who've tried to convert me over the years are adamant that they know that "it" (*) is true, and demand that all further discussion be based on this assumption. (Since I don't know any such thing myself, this often makes conversation rather difficult.) I can imagine that seeing these guys going against what they say they "know is true" must be a bit of a shock.
Having said that, I agree with Dove that it's not ours to be judgmental. Regardless of whether their message is "true" or not, these so-called "elders" are really only kids at the beginning of their own spiritual journey. I know that if at the tender age of 19 I had been forced to endure 2 years of what these young men suffer, I'd have been more than inclined to "break out" at the end of it!
(*) "It" = "JS was a prophet, Mr. Monson is a living prophet, Christ's original Church has been restored as the COJCOLDS, the BOM is a true record of ancient America, etc..."
-
To begin with, I'm not sure I really understand the meaning of the word "spiritual":
(1) The Latin spiritus literally means "breath" or "air", which is not immediately helpful.
(2) We use "spirit" to mean something like "attitude" or "courage" (as in "Now that's the spirit!"). This seems to apply (1) as a kind of analogy for "life". (Dead people neither breath, nor have much in the way of attitude or courage.) But this doesn't help us very much either.
(3) "Spiritual" sort-of means something like "non-material". "Spirit" in this sense is synonymous with "ghost" - the non-material manifestation of a dead person. Also a "spiritual person" is not concerned with material possessions or wealth.
This seems closer to the mark. But what is a spiritual person concerned with? Anything non-material? But consider...
(a) Knowledge (such as mathematical knowledge) is non-material. Does that make it "spiritual"? There is nothing to stop an atheist from having knowledge. So atheists can be spiritual.
(b) Love is non-material, and I'm sure atheists live their wives, husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, children, pets etc. as much as anyone who believes in God. Again atheists can be spiritual.
But is our definition of "spiritual" sufficient? Maybe it also requires some concept of God, in which case an "atheist" (someone who does not believe in God) cannot by definition be spiritual.
But we cannot go any further without defining what we mean by this word "God".
Some would answer "God is the Supreme Being". But is this helpful? Supposing that Man were the most powerful and intelligent creature in the universe, would this make the most powerful and intelligent man alive God? And if we believed in the existence of this "most powerful man", would this make us theists?
OK...so perhaps God also needs to be "omnipotent". But what do we mean by this? An omnipotent being is one who can do absolutely anything...including the drawing of four-sided triangles and the creation of objects too heavy for him/her to lift. This is obviously absurd.
Some theologians define omnipotence differently, as "God's ability always to achieve His purpose". But suppose my only aim in life were to eat peanuts until I die, and were left for 50 years in a warehouse full of peanuts. Would that make me omnipotent? The more I think about it, the less I think the concept of "omnipotence" is very helpful.
Turning to the specific beliefs of Mormonism (I'm not LDS so please forgive me if I get this wrong), there are supposed to be an infinity of "Gods" throughout the universe, none of whom has any universal supremacy, and none of whom can violate certain universal laws. The being Mormons refer to as "Heavenly Father" is only one of these many "Gods" and therefore has no claim to be considered "The Supreme Being".
So does this mean that Mormons are atheists?
OK - so let's redefine "God" to mean "Local Supreme Being". But suppose there was a tyrant who somehow managed to take total control of a portion of the world - let's say (for argument) the United States. Would this tyrant qualify for the title of "God" within the US, and would those who believed in his existence correctly be called "theists"? And would this form of "theism" have any connection with "spirituality" in the sense of non-material belief? Obviously not.
(I think human thought has gone this way at times: Roman Emperors - the most extreme example was Caligula - were regarded as "gods" within the territories that they ruled.)
In short, I don't think I know the answer to the question!
-
I chose flying. I feel mean for not choosing healing, but flying would be cool.
(Knowing me though, I'd probably get sucked up by a jet engine and cause a million dollars worth of damage.)
-
You're quite right. I's ironic that Lewis' conversion to Christianity did some damage to his friendship with Tolkien. They had some very different ideas about religion: While Tolkien believed very strongly in the authority of the visible Church (meaning of course the Roman Catholic Church), Lewis stressed what he called "Mere Christianity" - the core of belief that all Christians hold regardless of their denomination. Having been brought up in the Church of Ireland (which is a branch of the Anglican Communion), I don't suppose he saw any need to change. Another thing was that as a Christian, Lewis was far more vociferous than Tolkien, who was by contrast very quiet about his faith. You can imagine how irritated he must have got when after years of arguing with the atheist Lewis, the latter became a famous Christian apologist, writing books, giving lectures and radio broadcasts, even writing allegorical stories for children. (Tolkien always hated allegory.)As I understand it, though, the Catholic Tolkien was quite disappointed that Lewis chose Anglicanism. I seem to recall Tolkien complaining that Anglicanism was a "sorry impersonation of the Mother Church", or something to that effect.
(Sorry that this post is totally off-topic!)
-
Thanks for the comments Traveler. I agree this is not really a black and white issue - there are arguments either way. I would suggest that you're making a lot of assumptions about particular types of crime, and the way in which prisons are run - but of course I have my own biases too. My gut feeling is that it is wrong for the state to take a person's life in cold blood - but that is colored by my having been brought up in a society where that does not happen. Perhaps if I'd grown up in the American South I'd feel differently.I was not talking about lowering any standard. You incorrectly pointed out sentencing an innocent person must mean that a guilt person goes free – This is a bad assumption of justice. It is possible that an “innocent” person did cause the death of another and that in wrongly punishing the innocent does not demand that a guilty offender is loose.
Please understand my statement as I gave it. That is that society is better off in punishing one innocent person as to letting one guilty person free in society. I did not suggest lowering a standard – rather I am pointing out the importance of getting just right in all cases – especially the guilty. We all understand the importance of not convicting an innocent person. What many are not willing to consider is the damage that is done in letting the guilty loose and unrepentant to our families and communities – and it is not just the damage that they do but what we teach to others that may be considering unjust actions. This thought has many ramifications. For one it proves the danger and stupidity of those that believe it is better to let 100 murders go free than to convict one innocent person.
The argument that life in prison is better than death is also hard to argue. One can argue that in prison a murder can convert thousands to their way of thinking. And thus someone in a prison for a very minor crime is influenced and converted to the processes of murder. In fact a person exposed to the prison system is much more likely to murder or become more violent than someone that is not.
It does appear to me that those that favor life in prison do not realize that a person is not really removed from society – only placed in a partially controlled subset of society. BTW there are historical societies that did not have murder problems that had no police, courts or any kind of jails. One example of such a society are the Arawaks or “Lucayans” that lived in a very peaceful society until the Europeans discovered them and ended their existence in a genocide because the Arawaks were so peaceful they could not defend themselves from the European Christian mentality which were not ever punished or concerned about their crime of mass murder.
The Traveler
-
I'm for corporal punishment, administered by just people following just laws. Fix the people or laws, don't dump corporal punishment.
I think you mean capital punishment. Corporal punishment means physical chastisement, such as getting the cane at school.
We've not had capital punishment in the UK since the 1960's. (The last executions on British soil took place 2 months before I was born.) Given that justice is imperfect, I think life imprisonment for murderers offers an ideal compromise: Society is protected from them while they're imprisoned, and if they later turn out to be innocent you can let them go.
If a condemned man protests his innocence it could mean one of two things: Firstly he might really be innocent, in which case killing him would be a miscarriage of justice. Secondly he might be guilty and unrepentant (which is always the official assumption), in which case to killing him would deny him any chance of later repentance and of saving his soul. (You might say he doesn't deserve that, bit that's just playing God.)
I'm often reminded of something Gandalf said to Frodo in Lord of the Rings:
Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it.
-
Just for fun... how did you know that your spouse was the one?
She was the only one who didn't dump me!
-
I might actually agree with you there. Though I'm an Anglican, I've always taken the concept of "priesthood" with a pinch of salt. I see the clerical offices (bishop, priest, deacon) as more akin to academic degrees, or to military ranks. The word "priest" actually comes from the Greek word for "elder" in the sense of a senior member of a community. ("President" and "preside" come from the same root.) This need not have anything to do with any divinely bestowed authority.Since their "priesthood" has about as much authority as the Great Priesthood of Vort, I welcome them to bestow such "authority" on whoever or whatever they want.
-
...it is better (safer) for society to execute on error an innocent man than it is to accidentally (on error) let a guilty murder go free.
This is the thin end of a very long wedge. Taken to its logical conclusion, the principle could be stated:
The standard of "proof" required to execute a person should be lowered so as to allow the execution of all murder suspects. The few innocent people executed would be more than compensated by the reduced numbers of people murdered, arising from the fact that more actual murderers had been executed. The net result would be a safer society.
There's something very "Jeremy Bentham" about this argument. ("The greatest happiness for the greatest number".) But it ignores the fact that when the police prosecute the wrong person, the right person goes free and may well murder again. This actually happened in the Rachel Nickell case I mentioned earlier: While the police were pursuing Colin Stagg, the real murderer Robert Napper killed at least twice more. Making things easier for the police, i.e. by lowering the "proof" bar, would increase the likelihood of this kind of this kind of tragedy.
Of course, it's possible that the overall net result would still lead towards a safer society, but this would need to be justified statistically (and I've no idea how you would begin to get the data to do this.) Even if this were the case (and this is just my personal opinion) I dislike the idea of a democratic free society selling its soul and becoming a police state, in return for "safety". I could quote Benjamin Franklin, but if past experience is anything to go by it would only make the Americans on this board angry.
An afterthought: I don't think anyone is suggesting that Willingham should have been "set free" as you put it. If he had been sentenced to life imprisonment he would (even if guilty) have been no danger to society, and could have been released when the true facts came to light. Since he's now dead, there's not much anyone can do for him.
-
I've always been totally against capital punishment, for this very reason: The system can and does get it wrong, and takes horrendously long time to admit that it was wrong. Several examples spring to mind:
- The "New York Jogger" rape incident, when 5 men were convicted - and later cleared - of the crime. After another man had confessed to the crime, prosecuting authorities still fought tooth-and-nail against the acquittals, and again to prevent the cleared men from being removed from the Sex Offenders Register.
- Colin Stagg, cleared of murdering a model Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common, London in 1992. The acquittal was a major humiliation for the Metropolitan Police, and Stagg was subjected to years accusation in the tabloid press, fueled largely by police officers determined to justify themselves. More than a decade later, DNA evidence proved that the murderer was someone else entirely. (The real murderer was sentenced earlier this year.)
- Timothy Evans, in 1950 was hanged for the murder of his wife and daughter, a crime which was almost certainly committed by his landlord John Christie (later discovered to be a serial killer). Despite the evidence of numerous womens' bodies walled-up in Christie's apartments, it took the British establishment over 16 years to accept the possibility that they might have hanged an innocent man. Evans was posthumously pardoned in 1966.
I know we need to have a system, and I'm not convinced that inquisitorial justice is necessarily better than the adversarial system we have in the USA and UK. But I wouldn't bet lives on its conclusions always being correct.
-
Another thought: I'm not altogether sure that John Calvin was a Calvinist at all. He certainly wasn't responsible for the TULIP acrostic: That came years later in response to the Five Points of Remonstrance.
I'm not even sure Calvin was all that big on the idea of predestination. Certainly he didn't make the song-and-dance about it that modern Calvinists do.
-
Interestingly, some Calvinists have wanted to exclude Mormons from being Christian because of this issue. Would these same extreme Calvinists exclude Arminians?
Some extreme Calvinists exclude other Calvinists. Some extreme Arminians exclude Calvinists. A great many Arminians and Calvinists exclude Mormons.
A lot of people exclude a lot of people.
My wife's great photographic achievement
in General Discussion
Posted
My wife just called me at work to say she got the result for her Open University class in digital photography. She worked very hard on her portfolio, and now she has passed with a good grade :) She takes some fantastic pictures, and I am so very proud of her :)