Jamie123

Very droll! 🤣

...this bugs me a lot worse than it ought to. I know there are bigger injustices in the world, but this really gets to me: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7049035/Well-wishers-raise-nearly-50-000-model-railway-club-smashed-yobs.html?ico=pushly-notifcation-small £50,000 pounds is a lot of money, but a hundred times that amount wouldn't replace the loving effort these guys put into their hobby. I'd like to see a few medieval torture methods revived for people who do this kind of thing. Normally I despise the Daily Mail, but on this occasion...

Just two points: I'm still a little unclear what you think agnostics are concluding. Are you saying that an agnostic concludes that religion is flawed, but differs from the atheist in that he/she has nothing to put in its place? In other words: "I don't know what the answer is, but it's not that?" Are you saying that if there were no "false" religion in the world, but only "true" religion (by which you presumably mean Mormonism) then there would be no agnosticism because no one would be able to fault Mormonism the way they fault traditional Christianity?

Thanks Anatess - that's quite helpful to me too. I did a little bit of searching too, and it also seems the incident of Jess Phillips "laughing at male suicide" was not quite that. What she was actually laughing at was (as she explained at the time) the idea that men lack opportunity to discuss male issues. Whether that is true or not, it does put a different light on the matter. However, you are now immediately faced with another question: if Jess Phillips deserves to have her words and actions placed in their proper context, why doesn't Carl Benjamin?

It certainly sounds like it to me too - I expect there are nuances to what Wolfgang Smith is saying that I'm missing at the moment. There's a lot in the book that I haven't referenced in my short summary, because I don't at the moment get it. Also, he speaks as if the "hidden variables" theory were still a going concern, while I thought that had been refuted back in the 1980s. (This edition of the book is copyright 2005.) I totally agree with you, but for me the God who could come and stand before me and shake my hand etc. would be Jesus Christ: "God in man made manifest" as the hymn goes. But of course I'm a Trinitarian Christian, and I know Latter Day Saints have a different view on the matter.

As a shameless excuse to "bump" this message, I've drawn a diagram of what I think Carl Benj...er...I mean Wolfgang Smith is talking about: We move clockwise (could just as easily be anticlockwise) around the circle* as past progresses to future. (Well, actually the circle represents space-time, so "past" and "future" are actually the four dimensional past and future light cones, but those are impossible to draw.) Clockwise is the direction of "horizontal" causality: events influence other events clockwise of them, and are influenced by earlier events anticlockwise of them - if you see what I mean. God is in the middle of the circle, influencing the perimeter of the circle - our space-time - via the "spokes" of the wheel. His causality - "vertical" causality - is at 90 degrees to ours, so it doesn't interfere with the natural progression of cause to effect. (Just as an object's horizontal movement is not affected by vertical forces - and vice-versa - vertical causality has no effect on horizontal causality.) OK - time to go home now before my wife starts fretting... *For what it's worth, I'm bothered about the future wrapping around to become the past - a point Smith doesn't much dwell upon - but let's put that aside.

After she said she was a rape survivor I was fully expecting her to lay into him for daring to make light of her experiences. For her to take that line instead was like a breath of fresh air. From what I can gather his "offensive joke" was to say "I wouldn't even rape Jess Phillips" as part of his criticism of her for laughing about male suicide. This got widely reported as "a joke about raping Jess Phillips" - which strictly speaking it was the polar opposite of.

Amazing - watch this and see if you're as amazed as I was at what came out of this young woman's mouth.

Playing devil's advocate: We've only explored a tiny proportion of space, and have not yet discovered Bertrand Russell's flying teapot.However, we cannot conclude that the teapot probably does not exist, since we still have the remaining 99.99999....however many 9's% of space still to explore. Being annoyingly pedantic: Agnosticism is not a conclusion, but the absence of a conclusion.

x = the number of whole numbers greater than 5 y = the number of whole numbers greater than 10 Now they are both infinite, but x is nevertheless greater than 7 because there are 5 numbers greater than 5 which are not greater than 10. The relationship between them is x = y + 5. Not all infinities are the same. When I was at college, our maths professor (a wonderfully enthusiastic "academic bum" who wore a grimy college scarf, spoke with a mouthful of gravel and always pronounced calculus "carculus") once got talking about numbers being "countably infinite" (like the natural numbers 1, 2, 3...) and "uncountably infinite" (like the set of fractions). A classmate put it a little more prosaically, saying "countably infinite numbers are countable if you're stupid enough to go on counting".

Exactly - it doesn't. "That young man is now in hell!!!" is probably the most unsubstantiated statement ever made from the pulpet.

Beautifully done - thanks Vort! Originally Kenobi addressing Vader as "Darth" reinforced powerfully that they were once friends - which I think was Lucas' intention. The scene loses some of its impact when you know that "Darth" is a title, not a name. I feel sorry for the poor stormtrooper who got killed in the corridor. And the one who fell into the "pit". (Imperial Health and Safety will be on Vader's case for not installing a hand rail!) Nobody seems to care about them!

I've recently finished reading a very interesting book called "The Quantum Enigma" by Wolfgang Smith. I bought it at Easter, from the bookshop at Quarr Abbey. (Quarr Abbey BTW is a Benedictine monastery on the Isle of Wight - suppressed by Henry VIII but reestablished in the 1900s by French monks fleeing persecution.) I certainly wasn't expecting to find any physics books there, but there were several by this guy Wolfgang Smith whom I'd never heard of before, but who apparently taught mathematics at UCLA and MIT before he retired, and also worked as an aerospace engineer. He is also a very devout Catholic - which doubtless explains why his books are on sale at an Abbey. The book definitely deserves a second (and probably a third) reading - there's a lot I didn't really understand - but here's my attempt to condense what I think I gained first time around. (BTW, some of this could be interpolations/extrapolations of my own - I often put things my own way to understand them better, and sometimes I get it wrong.) The medieval Scholastics (influenced by Aristotle) taught that the "corporeal world" (the world we experience with our senses) is the genuine reality. In other words, things really are as they seem: roses have a genuine quality of "redness", water has "wetness", ice is "cold". In the 17th Century Rene Descartes put a stop to all that, saying that such things are "phantasms" which only exist in our perception. Roses, for example, are only red in a sense that they create a sensation of redness when a person looks at them. The reality is in what Smith calls the "physical world", the world as a physicist sees it. He uses the example of a billiard ball: this is a "corporeal object" - you can hold it, feel its weight and texture and otherwise experience its behaviour with your senses. But that "object" is actually a phantasm which only exists to you. In reality the billiard ball is a "physical object" consisting of its mass, diameter, elasticity etc. Smith calls this idea "cartesian bifurcation". Furthermore, physical objects always behave in a predictable manner. If you know the mass, diameter, elasticity etc. of a billiard ball, then you can (in principle at least) predict how it will behave under any given conditions - and thus what "corporeal phantasms" it might produce in those who observe it. The billiard ball is not "free" to do anything else. This "cartesian bifurcation" idea worked fine through the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras, but ran into problems in the 20th Century due to the discovery of quantum effects. Theory showed - and experiment suggested - that on a very small scale events are not predetermined by causality. The decay of atomic nuclei - and the corresponding clicks of the Geiger counter - cannot be predicted, but only described in terms of probability. Moreover all possibilities exist in a "superposition" until we observe which of them has actually occurred - the so-called "collapse" of the wave function. (This is illustrated by the famous Schrodinger Cat paradox: since we do not know whether an atom has decayed, it is in a superposition of decayed+not decayed, and thus the cat is in a superposition of alive+dead.) Smith rejects that we can "explain" all this with the non-explanation of "quantum strangeness". He argues instead that we are looking at it the wrong way: through the eyes of Descartes, and that the Scholastics who preceded him would not have been confused by it. He thus reintroduces the idea that corporeal objects are the "reality" and that physical objects are secondary to them. He also introduces two new ideas: the "subcorporeal" and the "transcorporeal": A "subcorporial object" is a physical object "behind" a corporeal object: for example the "physical billiard-ball (consisting of its mass, diameter etc.) is "subcorporeal" to the actual corporeal billiard ball. A "transcorporeal object" is a physical object with no corresponding corporeal object; for example an atomic nucleus cannot be described as "corporeal" because we cannot (usually) experience it directly with our senses. We can only describe it in terms of a physical model. Now suppose an atomic nucleus decays (or does not decay) creating (or not creating) a click on the Geiger counter, causing the poison to be released (or not released) and the cat to die (remain alive). Now the Geiger counter, the poison vial and the cat are all corporeal objects, and in disintegrating the nucleus has become part of that corporeal system. It has in fact been "instantiated" (if only temporarily) as a corporeal object, having previously only being a potential corporeal object. This is an action of what Smith calls "Vertical Causality"; that God standing outside space-time causes events to happen - in this case a potential corporeal object becoming - if only for an instant - an actual corporeal object. He has a lot to say about vertical causality - in fact he's written another whole book on the topic. In this book though he invites the reader to think of space-time as a kind of loop or circle (four dimensions reduced to one for the illustration) with temporal ("horizontal") causation operating clockwise around it. God sits in the middle operating along the "spokes" of the wheel, His mode of causation (working miracles and making quantum-level events happen) being at right-angles to the causation we normally experience. This is in fact what divine creation actually is; it is not something which happened in the distant past - it is something going on continuously throughout history! Well that's my ultra-crass first-reading impression of the book, and I'm sure I've done poor Wolfgang a terrible injustice with it. But I thought maybe some of you might be interested. I'm definitely going to re-read the book - but I think I first need to get better informed about Descartes and Scholasticism first, which are not things I know a great deal about. It's going to take time but I think it may be worth it!

Every idol has feet of clay.

Very interesting talk. It takes a brave man to say stuff like that. It puts me very much in mind of a case that hit the newspapers a few years ago - a guy called Tudor-Miles had had his home raided by police. They took away his PC to look for evidence of - well, whatever they were looking for evidence of - didn't find it, but DID find some pornographic images of adult women Photoshopped to look like teenage girls. He was tried, and sentenced to 15 months for "creating and possessing indecent images". Now its hard to find a lot of sympathy for Tudor-Miles (though I suppose as Christians we should do our best). He was a creepy customer with a string of convictions for real sex crimes, including raping an 11-year-old girl at knifepoint. And whether creating fake kiddie-porn really deserves a prison sentence, one could hardly call what he was doing "very healthy". On the other hand, the judge said in sentencing (I forget the exact words, but this is the gist of it): "The enjoyment of child nudity is obviously still part of your make-up, so I am sentencing you to a further custodial sentence". I daresay it really was "still part of his makeup", but was giving him yet another prison sentence - especially for something which did nobody any harm but himself - really going to change that?

Nice idea - and good to see it presented by someone who really was a porn addict, not someone who says he "never did porn 'coz Jesus". But I can't help being a bit skeptical; how long before that wheedling voice tells you to dig out the ancient tablet from the back of your cupboard (that you never bothered to put Covenant Eyes on - ostensibly because you never thought you'd use it again) and engage in a bit of naughtiness "just this once" while your wife is off at her PCC meeting and the kids are at their Judo? Yes - if you're as hopeless a liar as I am, you may find it difficult to keep a straight face next time you meet your "ally", but you can always avoid him. And in any case, the guilty conscience is just as good a monitor whether you have Covenant Eyes or not. P.S. I like Hamster Man best.

I was wondering that myself!

"Speak of the devil and he doth appear" https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6985387/Tommy-Robinson-attacked-milkshake-Bury.html?ico=pushly-notifcation-small If people kept dousing me with milkshake I can't say I wouldn't get a bit "fisty" with them. (Not that I could knock the snow off a rope!)

I never know quite what to think about Tommy Robinson. If you actually listen to what he says he seems to make a lot of sense, but he also doesn't do himself many favours with his antics. His address at the Oxford Union is on YouTube - it's well worth listening to.

I was a bit flippant the other day when Anatess called me out for "believing the fake news" (sorry Anatess) but this new story about Carl Benjamin (UKIP candidate in the European elections we shoulddn't even be having) has been a bit of a wake-up call for me. Carl Benjamin btw is known on YouTube as "Sargon of Akkad". This is the Daily Mail article here: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6967747/Now-Ukip-candidate-said-wouldnt-rape-Labour-MP-says-OK-sexually-abuse-boys.html And this is the Sun chipping in: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8956117/top-ukip-candidate-says-its-ok-to-rape-young-boys-in-sick-youtube-rant/ The Mail claims that this was from "a YouTube broadcast". The trouble is it is actually bits (not all of them accurately quoted) taken from four different YouTube broadcasts spliced together to make it mean something totally different. Here is an explanation of how it was done: (Be warned though that whatever else he may be innocent of, Benjamin is a bit of a potty-mouth.) Now admittedly this comes from Carl Benjamin's own YouTube account, but the evidence is nevertheless there. You certainly expect "spin" from the mainstream media, but not outright deception like this. To be fair, I don't think the Mail (or even the Sun) did this deliberately. I suspect the quote came from "one of our sources" and in light of the other things Benjamin has said, seemed too plausible to be worth the bother of checking. (Yes Anatess - I know what you're going to say - mea culpa.) You'd think now that it's been exposed, that the Mail would have the sense to take the article down (or at least remove some large sections of it), but it's still there intact and appearing at the top of the Google search results.

Back in 1984 policewoman Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead in the street from a window in the Libyan embassy in London. A few days afterwards I distinctly remember hearing on the radio that British Intelligence had intercepted a satellite transmission from Gaddafi telling embassy staff to "cover the streets of London with blood" - but that this had not been decrypted soon enough to prevent the tragedy. When I mentioned this to my father: Me: (What I had heard on the news.) Dad: "No, no, this was nothing to do with Gaddafi. It was one crazy individual acting on his own initiative". Me: "But I heard this on the news!" Dad: (Shaking head) "No, no, no." Me: "Well just you wait till the news comes on again!" Well the news did come on again, and there was no mention of any encrypted messages from Gaddafi. And I never heard anything about it again... ....until a couple of years ago when it was all over the news that investigations had "revealed" that (you've guessed it) "in 1984 British Intelligence had intercepted a satellite transmission from Gaddafi telling embassy staff to "cover the streets of London with blood..." My theory is that I caught an early edition of the news that hardly anyone heard. In the meantime the secret services stepped in and censored the story, so it was not on the main news. After all, you don't want to advertise what ciphers you can and can't break!

I knew a guy once who was convinced that Jesus said "neither a borrower nor a lender be", and built quite a serious religious argument on it. When I told him this was actually a line from Shakespeare he seemed quite surprised. But I mean Shakespeare/Jesus - they're both part of the mish-mash of cultural information that people half remember from school/church/TV etc. It reminds me a bit of a scene from Blackadder: The Prince: (talking about Baldrick) No wait Blackadder. Perhaps this disgusting degraded creature is some sort of blessing in disguise. Blackadder: Well if he is it's a very good disguise. The Prince: After all did not our Lord send a lowly earthworm to comfort Moses in his torment? Blackadder: No. The Prince: Well it's the sort of thing he might have done. "Moderation in all things" is pretty much exactly what Epicurus taught - but maybe it's the "sort of thing" Joseph Smith might have said.

It sounds a bit like "I do" in the marriage ceremony (the BoCP marriage ceremony that is - I have no idea how the Mormon one goes) or "money is the root of all evil" .

There are a great many of those: for example... Sherlock Holmes never said "Elementary, my dear Watson!" Nobody in Casablanca ever says "Play it again, Sam". Neither the Captain Pugwash books, nor any of the TV adaptations contain any sexual innuendos, and neither is "Pugwash" Australian slang for...urm...something not very nice. (John Ryan, author of the Pugwash books actually won damages from newspapers who claimed the stories were "filthy".)