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I am religious and believe in free will

70 (27.6%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

113 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (24%)

Total Members Voted: 249

[wierd]

My sister and I had a summer job we did, cleaning and trimming horse feet.

I have been on the receiving end of Angry-Nag more times than is easily counted.

[Rolan7]

Goodness!  No, I would not have done that without training.  I was always extremely cautions approaching horses.  I was (unrelated rural living) in my childhood taught how readily they'll kick, thankfully not to anyone's detriment.

I just had a friend, whose family has a farm, and they wanted to take a vacation for the first time in a few years.  And I looked after their dozen horses.  In three shifts - me, one other, and nighttime.  I took the morning shifts.  The horses grew increasingly agitated over the two weeks, and I did more fence repairs day by day.  I never touched the electrified fences - another fear learned from living next to a cattle farm, ha...

Horses are beautiful creatures and this gives me the opportunity to say something I wanted to say earlier:
Brushing their hair was almost as... "valuable"... as brushing my own hair every good morning.
Some things are worth living for.  A lot of things are worth living for.

Death is scary and it's always there, and that's why we live as much as we can.
(And try not to fall into a depression trap about how much we fail to appreciate life)

Edit: This is spirituality.
Edit2: Corralling uncooperative horses into their pens is... a little like Minecraft, but some horses are actually intelligent and learn to resent you for not being their human.  Or not grooming them correctly.

[wierd]

Horses are every bit as smart as dogs.

With both pros and cons.

[Rolan7]

Very true.

[thompson]

The other day I was pondering a rather poetic form of nihilism where the meaninglessness of existence is a blank canvas with maximum potential, and death completes our transformation into a perfect being (in the sense that nothingness is a form of perfection).

There’s something to be said for the Western mangled version of Zen Buddhism, where the theology is completely ignored and replaced by the simple notion of having everything you want by wanting nothing. Well, I look liberties rephrasing that, but you know.

[hector13]

Why did a horse try to drug you?

[wierd]

no silly, drug, as in past tense of drag.  The linguist whores want me to use dragged, but that feels wrong in the mouth.

It is considered OK english as a colloquial dialective though.

I view it in the same family as "Swim, Swam, Swum"  eg, "To day I swim", "I swam yesterday." and "By this time tomorrow, I will have swum."

In this case though, I view it based on who or what is being "dragged".  Eg, if the object of the verb is an inanimate object, and the tense is past tense, I use dragged.

"I dragged the bag to the door."

However, when the object is a person, I use drug.

"Suzie's horse drug her all the way down the hill."

[methylatedspirit]

Alright, I'm not very well-versed in religion (couldn't be assed to read the damn books), but I need to ask something: if the Abrahamic God is omnipotent, would he even be able to change the fundamental properties of math? Would he be able to make the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, pi, not equal 3.141... ?

This is assuming God's using standard notation and meanings that are recognized by mathematicians. Anyone could redefine them, but now you're just playing semantics, and that's not the point. I'm asking if something as fundamental as pi can somehow be changed by God without rendering math meaningless.

[wierd]

The relationship between a circle's radius and its perimeter is an emergent property of the geometry in our universe.

It is similar to say, "The angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees".  Especially in light of the fact that this is only true on a flat plane.  If the surface the triangle is created on is a sphere, the angles do not add up to 180 degrees AT ALL.

Likewise, if the surface on which the circle is depicted is not planar, the radius will not have the same relation, if plotted over that surface (and not through a hyperspace.)

Consider for instance, a circle drawn on the pointy end of an ellipsoid.



If "The universe" only permits paths over the surface of the ellipsoid, then R will not have the same proportionality as if it went through they hypothetical hyperspace of a plane. (as illustrated), and as such, the relationship with the perimeter will not equal Pi.

[methylatedspirit]

I suppose that's done, then. What about making the halting problem decidable, assuming you can only use a Turing machine or anything equivalent to it? That's formally proven to be utterly impossible, how would God go about making that possible without crashing straight into a logical contradiction?

[wierd]

Put the machine inside a godel spacetime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_metric

One could then easily determine if the program ever halts, by looking backward in time, since the future is predetermined and must always match the past.

It would then be decidable, at least empirically. (though probably still not mathematically; sorta like how division by zero is undefined. In this case, you would have two perfectly valid states-- One where the machine halts, and one where it does not-- Similar to the two perfectly valid curves of the division by 0 issue. In the case of the Godel spacetime, you could look to see which the universe has selected, but you would never know WHY.)

[methylatedspirit]

So play some very funny tricks with spacetime, and it's possible to solve the halting problem empirically.

What about rendering Fermat's Last Theorem false? It's completely abstract, and there's no physical trickery that can be done, at least to my knowledge. God just has to pull out some positive integer values of a, b, c and n such that aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ, n > 2. Real easy, I'm sure.

[wierd]

LOL, this is getting silly.

I think you have me confused with a deist apologist, or a deist.

I am an agnostic.  It is very different.  Understanding that there are gaps in our understanding of the universe large enough for a god to potentially exist in, is the only reason why I am not atheist.  Expecting me to be able to pull a god out of my ass is silly.


If I could solve Fermat's last theorem, I would have a fields medal, and would not be wiping asses for a living.

[methylatedspirit]

I mean, I'm mostly screwing around here. I'm just trying to imagine a scenario in which an omnipotent god cannot do something, and trying to negate statements that have been proven true in the most absolute, mathematical sense of the word seems like a good way to show that.

[Egan_BW]

All it would have to do is erase the entire universe and then start anew with different parameters.