Messages

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General Discussion / Describe Your Utopia

« on: November 14, 2005, 02:21:20 pm »

The happy life is thought to be one of excellence; now an excellent life requires exertion and does not consist of amusement. If Eudaimonia, or happiness, is an activity in accordance with excellence, it's reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence, and will be that of the best thing in us."

Aristotle, "Nicomachean Ethics" (from Wiki)

Whatever your take on his ideas, the principal that pleasure is not the same as happyness, and that true happyness is achieved through struggle (as he stated, "requires exertion").  Of course this brings the question of what do you struggle AGAINST?  Who or what provides this struggle?  For early man, it was the environment itself, and the constant struggle to survive.  Later, we struggled amongst ourselves (and continue to).  But what later?  What will provide the struggle when base needs are gone?  Will we continue to struggle amonst ourselves, forever?  Is that a bad thing?  Whereas this struggle can be destructive, as in War, it does not need to be, as in sport.  Competition itself doesn't require death, but can instead compel us to reach ever-greater heights of achievement.

But overall it needs to be within a moral framework.  Unbridled competition results in a society where prestige is the only reward worth having, and thus any actions are possible, and justified in the pursuit of such.  Thus the illusion of "total freedom" is just that: an illusion.  You will never achieve as much unbridled as channelled into what your potential can unlock.

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General Discussion / The meaning of life (split from the Stupid Question topic)

« on: November 04, 2005, 05:20:09 pm »

Fine. The answer is self preservation. At some point, we all have to die, but our genes do not. Not for a very long time anyway. We have kids, who have kids, who have kids. It preserves "our" DNA on long past our deaths.

But why does that have worth in itself?  That's an effect, not a cause.  We preserve our genes.  Whoohoo.  Now what?  Just keep doing it?  Why?


Why, why, WHY??

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General Discussion / The Abortion Thread Ex Ultra!

« on: November 04, 2005, 04:45:55 pm »

That would be like keeping hanging a viable death penalty when there are much more sucessful and painless ways to do it.

Just to add another level of de-rail, why is a painless death penalty important?  Why NOT have it painful?


(P.S. I'm actually against the death penalty, but it's still a fair question)

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General Discussion / The meaning of life (split from the Stupid Question topic)

« on: November 04, 2005, 04:44:27 pm »

Yes, but why do we wish to continue the race?

You ask an excellent question, despite the title of this thread.

And yet you never answer it with any more than "because that's what life has always had a biological need to do.  You do a great job of enumerating what has occurred when you throw intelligence into the mix, but at the end of the day you still have not answered it beyond the biological urge.

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General Discussion / The Abortion Thread Ex Ultra!

« on: November 03, 2005, 07:43:00 pm »

You realize that all this is going to become is a "what is life" thread

Hence why I already went there at the end of the previous page.  It almost always comes down to that.  Either that, or quality of life.

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General Discussion / Religious discussion split from "Why did Porre Invade?&

« on: November 03, 2005, 05:01:30 pm »

That's why I respect religions or parents who enforce 'morals', not because it's "God's will", but because it's smart.

More and more in today's societies, "traditional" values are being shown again and again to be the safest, and to produce the most stable households, with the best results for the children of such (success, crime rates, etc).  Perhaps God was right?  Who'da thunk it?

Sure, alcohol or drugs may be the easy way out, but since when was the easy way out the best? It comes with too high a cost, I'm warning you.

That's actually an axiom you can take even if non-religious: if you're given an easy and a hard choice in a moral situation, the hard one is probably the right thing to do.  Heck, even Yoda said it.

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General Discussion / The Abortion Thread Ex Ultra!

« on: November 03, 2005, 01:58:54 pm »

You guys get WAY too complex on this.  The implications may not be simple, but the base principal is: When do you have the right to take another human life?  The (fairly) simple answer: when other lives are in danger.  Hence you can kill somebody that's going around with a gun randomly shooting others, or to kill somebody that is trying to kill you.  Ultimately you are valuing human life itself, and trying to secure as much of it as possible, as all other "rights" are somewhat meaningless without the right to life itself.

Now the complex part about that is that you value HUMAN life.  Not "quality of life", or intelligence, RACE, or other factors that you can decide to exclude others upon, but only the fact that human life itself is worth preserving.  Some of course don't even agree to this point, such as supporters of suicide, euthanasia, and such, where quality of life matters to whether their life is worth preserving, and not the concept of merely being human.

But once you're at the "life" part, then the only determinant left is fairly simple: what constitutes human life?  At what point do your reproductive cells (fusing with your mate's) become human life, and are no longer merely tissue?  Some say conception, others say when neural activity occurs, still others say when the baby is viable outside the mother's womb, and others say not until the birth itself has the organism passed into "humanity".

And to me that's the only part worth talking about with Abortion.  My religion has a very strict say on what is human, but from a scientific perspective, there are arguments that make sense.  From such a perspective, neural activity is where I'd fall, as it seems the most reasonable.  Viability is NOT, as that varies according to technology level, and even spot in the world.  Basically that measure would say a fetus is human earlier in the developed world than it is human in the 3rd-world, which seems rather non-sensical.  I would be more for a measure where the organism themselves through their objective traits (not technology-dependant) signals when it has made the transition into humanity, rather than something that changes depending on technology level.

But if the valuation of human life itself isn't there, then the rest of the conversation really does become trivial.  What are you even arguing for anyways then?



And ya, you should make a political forum.  General is getting really polluted with that, and IMO it should be seperate.

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General Discussion / Do You Believe in "God"?

« on: November 02, 2005, 05:11:27 pm »

That brings up something I never quite got about Christianity. Jesus says that he is the son of God, and also God. That seems like a paradox to me, but it's not really what my question is. Jesus is said to have cried out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" when he was executed. If he was God, what possible line of reasoning could lead to that question? The only logical reason to ask that question would be if Jesus was not in fact the same as God, else he would know his own will. That sentance may be a bit awkward, but I think you know what I'm getting at.

Try this link.  Not necessarily that un-confusing either, but it was a near-top hit on google.  =D

Basically the gist of it is that Jesus is mirroring earlier scripture, not calling out for his own sake, or own belief.  Now that in itself proves nothing more than he's trying to fufill existing prophecy, but the fact that he dies MOMENTS afterwards (as is foretold), IS the "miraculous" part, in that he chose his own time to die.  The statement "why have you forsaken me" is just so that those present realize what he is referring to.

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General Discussion / Do You Believe in "God"?

« on: October 31, 2005, 06:21:38 pm »

Kind of a low turnout on the "poll" part of this thread.  Lots of responses addressing it, but actual votes is low.

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General Discussion / Can Anyone Guess Where This Came From?

« on: October 25, 2005, 01:22:54 pm »

FF1?

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General Discussion / Should I play FF7?

« on: October 24, 2005, 04:46:05 pm »

I'll believe it when I play it. The FF8 hate sounds strangely like Cross hate in its expression.

I downloaded the PC demo, and decided NOT to buy it based on that.  When the DEMO (which is supposed to make you LIKE the game) gives a bad feeling, then that's a REALLY bad sign.  In addition, a friend at school had it, and said "I have to finish to see what happens, but I won't play it again."

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General Discussion / The Virus

« on: October 24, 2005, 12:48:18 pm »

And add prions into the mix, and you REALLY have an "unstable" definition of life on the microscopic scale.  They don't have their own genetic material, and yet they "make" more of themselves through "altering" existing proteins.  The way prions affect organisms they infect certainly BEHAVE like other infections (bacterial or viral) to the one that is infected (you get sick and/or die), and yet they are very different.

Read this article for a short primer on them.  But know that they are still a little-understood cause of disease.

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General Discussion / Maestro J’s Classical Music Appreciation Hall

« on: October 19, 2005, 12:37:45 pm »

My favorite piece is The Moldau (Vltava) by Bedřich Smetana.  It's quite a moving piece that while it's possible you've heard it before, it's quite possible that you haven't as well.  Soft, yet powerful.  Interesting reading the Wikipedia Article on him in that he became deaf later in life, and yet kept composing.

Not necessarily one of the more famous pieces around, but extremely solid.

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General Discussion / Yes or No?

« on: October 18, 2005, 04:16:30 pm »

Could be.  See if you can get her into something akin to Kid's outfit for halloween, then send THAT picture.  

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Characters, Plot, and Themes / The Unification of the Dimensions

« on: October 17, 2005, 03:36:31 pm »

fxar99, it's completely possible the "powers" just went ahead and "picked one" for each inconsistency, rather than your idea of both needing to be as they were.  And there's precident for such: Final Fantasy V.  In that, you merge two worlds together that were once one.  Basically what happened is a lot of ocean disappeared, and some landmass did too.  So the "merge mechanism" WAS choosing what it "wanted" in the merge, rather than saying "both must continue to exist."

So your "well they didn't merge because..." statements are meaningless.