There was a clear problem in that you didn't care for any characters. The most likable character was the homicidal robot, which is a failure in my book. In the original Aliens, you grow to like Ripley and you like the camaraderie going on in the beginning of the movie, even if most of them were fucktards. The marines in Aliens were also likeable, even if you sorta recognized them as the dickheads from high school - some of them were our hook into the world, ripley, hicks, hudson all good. Even in alien 3, you still ahve ripley to hang on to, even if it's a desolate despairing film. Alien 4 you have Winona Ryder-robot to like, where ripley is more.. well, alienated.

in prometheus, I liked the Captain Janek and in a twisted way Fassbender-bot, because he was played well. All their motivations didn't make all that much sense though. I hated Holloway, hated Shaw, hated Vickers, fucking hated all of them. Gah, it's so irritating, because the universe of it is so interesting! aaargh.
>> ^Fletch:

In reply to this comment by EvilDeathBee:
I think there could have been a much better movie with the same source material, I think the concept could be really cool, but it's beyond a simple reedit repair job. The characters need a total rewrite to not be selfish, unlikable fucktards. There needs to be a lot more explanation and more time spent soaking in each of the more important subject matters and not this jump from one scene to the next with no flow and no reason.

I don't know. It seemed like it needed more "epicness". Like you said (or, as I understood you), more time for the viewer to parse the implications of the much bigger picture before they throw up a scene of some slimesnake tickling someone's uvula. Maybe a scene where they just stand around and go "OMFG! We've discovered the greatest discovery in the history of mankind! Oh, shit! That's a fucking alien structure! The first one ever discovered!! This is fucking amazing!!" They just didn't seem too impressed with anything. And I wish they had left the Alien stuff out completely. They didn't need it. There's just a bigger, better story here than the one we've already seen again and yet again in the sequels. Most of the characters did have that ST:TOS red-shirt aura about them, and really served little purpose outside of biting it in creative ways. Could have been better, but I still dug it, and I think the sequel(s) has a chance to be great. I just hope the Engineer homeworld isn't overrun with alien queens or some dumb shit like that.

In reply to this comment by EvilDeathBee:
I think there could have been a much better movie with the same source material, I think the concept could be really cool, but it's beyond a simple reedit repair job. The characters need a total rewrite to not be selfish, unlikable fucktards. There needs to be a lot more explanation and more time spent soaking in each of the more important subject matters and not this jump from one scene to the next with no flow and no reason.


I don't know. It seemed like it needed more "epicness". Like you said (or, as I understood you), more time for the viewer to parse the implications of the much bigger picture before they throw up a scene of some slimesnake tickling someone's uvula. Maybe a scene where they just stand around and go "OMFG! We've discovered the greatest discovery in the history of mankind! Oh, shit! That's a fucking alien structure! The first one ever discovered!! This is fucking amazing!!" They just didn't seem too impressed with anything. And I wish they had left the Alien stuff out completely. They didn't need it. There's just a bigger, better story here than the one we've already seen again and yet again in the sequels. Most of the characters did have that ST:TOS red-shirt aura about them, and really served little purpose outside of biting it in creative ways. Could have been better, but I still dug it, and I think the sequel(s) has a chance to be great. I just hope the Engineer homeworld isn't overrun with alien queens or some dumb shit like that.

In reply to this comment by EvilDeathBee:
I think there could have been a much better movie with the same source material, I think the concept could be really cool, but it's beyond a simple reedit repair job. The characters need a total rewrite to not be selfish, unlikable fucktards. There needs to be a lot more explanation and more time spent soaking in each of the more important subject matters and not this jump from one scene to the next with no flow and no reason.


EDIT: Oops, hit the wrong damn button. Meant to quote and post in the thread. Oh well...

I don't know. It seemed like it needed more "epicness". Like you said (or, as I understood you), more time for the viewer to parse the implications of the much bigger picture before they throw up a scene of some slimesnake tickling someone's uvula. Maybe a scene where they just stand around and go "OMFG! We've discovered the greatest discovery in the history of mankind! Oh, shit! That's a fucking alien structure! The first one ever discovered!! This is fucking amazing!!" They just didn't seem too impressed with anything. And I wish they had left the Alien stuff out completely. They didn't need it. There's just a bigger, better story here than the one we've already seen again and yet again in the sequels. Most of the characters did have that ST:TOS red-shirt aura about them, and really served little purpose outside of biting it in creative ways. Could have been better, but I still dug it, and I think the sequel(s) has a chance to be great. I just hope the Engineer homeworld isn't overrun with alien queens or some dumb shit like that.

What is the point of you? This is a great human accomplishment and should be celebrated without any reservation. Enough petulant whining about it being too corporatized or insufficiently scientific. Get that dick out of your mouth and revel in the remarkable things mankind is capable of.

Less self-indulgent cynicism, more energetic humanism.

I actually gotta say i'm really not impressed. I'm not going down the "She's wasting her life" route, she dedicated herself to something and saw it through, good for her.

What i'm not impressed by is the fact that this qualifies as a world record. It's always been a silly notion to me, everything can be qualified as a world record. There's at least 40+ world records having to do with sitting, one of them being "Longest phone call with ones dad while sitting on someone elses shoulders."

I mean.. really? To me, a world record only matters to things that truly push the limits of human beings. People being able to run faster, jump farther. Hell, even people that can eat more than others. Something that actually includes an inkling of skill and a small step towards the bettermant of mankind through its action, this only just falls under that category because It's somewhat demanding physically to do so.

But I still maintain that world records are by and large a joke.

Velocity5 sounds like one of the "people" who wrote the helpful suggestions to mankind found on the Georgia Guidestones.....

Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
Unite humanity with a living new language.
Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
Balance personal rights with social duties.
Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.

I have a suggestion there for ya, sparky?? Perhaps what you perceive as some career or discipline that benefits mankind would be perceived as detrimental to the planet for someone else....What if your concept of reality is based on perceptive dysfunction distilled in you through an engineered psycho-cybernetic mind-fuck in order to create a member of the machine who sees only practical application and duty to the whole as beneficial?

The world needs insects. They carry out dutifully, tasks necessary to the functioning of systems....
She also needs artisans, musicians, and quantum theorists, eh? There's a balance to consider here Chim-Chim....Thank God for people working in refineries and perky chicks poppin' flips, so I may continue my tenure here on "PLANET PRACTICAL" with some relief from the CORN-COB-UP-ASS types determined to make it uncomfortable and boring.
Rather be here than in the Terminator world, Slim!

Nice idea but if only measure is money, then it's gonna be dystopia. Economic superpowers aren't looking for happiness, end of poverty etc. They are looking for profit. Less people to share that profit means.. yes, more profit. They don't care about poverty, poverty means more profit. If persons value and importance is measured by materia, everyone is then forced to gather more and more stuff just to appear to be in the same level as your peers.

That's why you want that new iPhone.. You don't actually need it. Once you bought it you find things that are handy but you managed to those exact things perfectly fine before. So now every brokeass mom with two jobs and barely enough money to feed their young have the latest smartphones..

Just stupid, technology should be used to better mankind not to invent more needs we didn't have before. We have enough of them already.. Once we have provided food and shelter for everyone on this planet then start inventing that secondary stuff.

So yes, i'm positive too, we COULD get an utopia but money can't be the sole value in that society.

*promote

This is most likely the most AMAZING filament eruption to be caught on video. It is caused by a little process called magnetic reconnection. It's a little process that gives us our solar flares, these filaments, CMEs (Coronal Mass Ejections), auroras, and the possible potential for very dangerous radiation storms every few millennium--give or take a few. Basically, plasma flows along these field lines of magnetism. When things get out of hand, then those field lines distort and change and all of a sudden things get very dangerous (AND sometimes beautiful). The faster the magnetic field changes the faster the particles will travel making them more and more dangerous as the events unfold fast enough giving them more energy (kinetic & heat), which in turn if directed at us means it penetrates much further into our protective field and anything outside of the field, crispy--in the shredded DNA, cells, you name it sense.

Occasionally, Earth's magnetic field breaks down a bit (if I remember why correctly it was a certain "sequence" within our magnetic shield and it reacts badly with the Sun's--don't quote me though, I really need to look it back up again it was a very long time ago I remember this from), if a large solar flare directed towards Earth ever happened before Earth had enough time to fully build back it's strength we would be FAR more in trouble than usual, but this would be a rare event. Usually what happens is that the charged particles follow Earth's magnetic lines and go to the poles, which is the one place on Earth where you do suffer the most radiation from the Sun (basically wherever the poles are as the plasma follows the polarity or "field lines" of Earth's magnetic field). It's also why the closer you are to the poles the better your view is of the aurora as the particles streaming in, if there is a sufficient quantity moving very fast (the more energy, especially kinetic--speed, the farther the penetration into the atmosphere and the lower the aurora becomes visible), will enter the atmosphere and begin to be absorbed by various elements that our atmosphere is compromised of like Nitrogen.

Here's a quick explanation. Basically, the particles collide with atoms of molecules/elements or anything in the higher atmosphere, exciting their electrons into higher energy levels, which is known fundamentally in science as quantum leap/atomic transition/electron transition it's one of the atom's most fundamental abilities dealing with "extra energy" being pushed into a system that wants balance (this is a very common process that happens ALL DAY long, EVERYWHERE around you; it transfers photons essentially--pure energy--BUT, what is the energy in the form of as it's energy level makes it do very many different things; you could see things, what you consider the normal range of light--it's EXACTLY how light goes THROUGH a window--it doesn't go through the window it is transferred via the atoms from one side to the next, this is ALSO why people are trying to get invisibility to work as it just might; HEAT is another one that is transferred all the time--it literally radiates outwards from our bodies and then we are surrounded by excited electrons and the infrared range of light we are putting out, the heat of a human body...or any animal; this goes on and on, it happens everywhere and as I said ALL-THE-TIME, it's perhaps one of the most critical processes and abilities of the atom and how photons also transfer their energy between areas in a direction; a little off-topic information for those that don't realize how much is going on, everywhere, all the time, at any given second...it's a complicated, but beautiful world)), and making them give off light that we see when the charge they've taken on finally returns the molecule/element's electrons to their normal orbits in the electron shell; the color depends on what molecule/element was being bombarded and how much energy was involved from the particle that hit it). This of course transfers all the energy that those particles had and we get a nice light show.

/I thought I'd fill my promote with something useful; ...on why these happen...
//edit-For a little more clarity, grammar and a bit more information that I hope some will appreciate if it helps anyone learn something or atleast go look up some of this and learn some on their own; taking an interest in science, it's one of the most important things in the world that we have.
///Spreading science is just as important; it's the one literal thing we do/use that has ever allowed us to deal with the worst problems we have: fear, pain, death, disease, sorrow, despair, ignorance, etc... Science IS the light in the dark. It is our best hope for mankind's continued existence and a good life. It is the single most important activity we now do as a group; it's our savior from us and what's out there...

So you're saying you think there's a situation in which throwing peanuts at someone and saying "this is how we feed the animals" is acceptable behavior?

Part of why I sorta just view the entire conservative jihad as one giant threat to mankind is this way you guys always rally around people you identify as part of your tribe, no matter what kind of horrible thing they've done.

The only thing you guys condemn your own for is ideological apostasy -- bigotry, corruption, cruelty, even murder doesn't really seem to bother conservatives, at least when it's done by a conservative. But if a conservative says the rich should pay more taxes, or that global warming is real, or that gay people have the right to legally marry -- if they do something like that, then you'll immediately grab your torches and pitchforks and run the guy out of town.

>> ^bobknight33:

You and I don't know why they threw peanuts.

@shinyblurry

Of what you said above in the first two paragraphs about the consequences of accepting meaninglessness as reality, just about all of it I fully agree with. For clarity, I’ll mark the exceptions:

the closer you are to death the less happy and hopeful you will become
and
Eventually, when enough tragedy happens to you, you will break down and the future will become more and more like a millstone around your neck.

I found these to be presumptuous. They do happen to some people, maybe even most people, but they don’t happen to all. Many people of no religion, and despite immense tragedies, live happy and fulfilling lives, and feel happy and fulfilled on their death beds. I’d further argue that people with religious faith also get depressed. I suspect you’d counter that anyone who is depressed has insincere faith. That seems tautological to me, but either way, it’s moot, for now.

Further, you comment that, "people become depressed because of a lack of hope."

Some people do, at least in part. It’s a lot more complex than just a lack of hope though. For some people it’s due to a tragedy, or overwhelming cognitive dissonance, or it’s simply chemical, and has no correlation with anything in their lives at all. Maybe I’m nitpicking. I just want to make clear that depression is a mental disorder and is not a synonym for, "lack of hope because I don’t have God in my life."

For all of our so-called progress, humanity is just as sick and depraved as it always has been. Evil is increasing, not decreasing, and mankinds destructive appetites will never be satiated. There is no hope in man, but there is in God. I think you know that.

Here you slipped into metaphysical talk that means nothing to me, full of judgemental words ("sick and depraved") and terms that I had just told you I don’t accept as objective concepts ("evil"). You also know that I don’t think there’s any hope in your Yahweh God since he’s a mythological character, so I’m not sure where that’s coming from.

(Also, not that it’s critical to the discussion, but I’d like a reference for your poll about young people not knowing who Hitler was.)

All that is to say I pretty much agree with your view of what meaninglessness implies, and if there’s any bits that you want to explore more, I’m all for it.

Now, about "bliss". I didn’t define what I meant by that, so you didn’t understand it. I’ll make up for that now. By “bliss”, I don’t mean immediate pleasure, or instant gratification, or fulfillment of a goal, or basically anything you mentioned. I do mean a great powerful feeling of being centred, being in tune, achieving self-fulfillment, overflowing joy, love, inner peace, elation, connection, lightness, "harmony", "rapture" or a feeling that many describe as "doing what I was born to do/meant to be doing" or "transcendent". It’s the kind of happy that boosts your immune system and makes people around you feel good about themselves as well. (The words in quotes aren’t words I tend to use myself—I’m employing them to help clarify the concept I’m talking about.)

If you understand now what I mean by "bliss" (as opposed to instant gratification, etc.), you’ll understand that people don’t follow their bliss and rape people, nor find inner peace by beating their wives, and so there’s no need to append any rules about not hurting. I can’t imagine how anybody’s bliss could ever include causing harm to other people, but I’ll even address that hypothetical, towards the end of this comment.

Lots of people do bad things to others and themselves, and later on, some may consider what they did was bad, or they might not. If they still think it was OK, it’s because they’ve used some kind of justification, like, "She did it to me first," "She was teasing me. What did she think would happen?" or, "He had it coming," or "I had no choice," And so forth. These are all rationalizations after the fact, justifications that allow them to still consider themselves as good people rather than change their behaviour or take responsibility for having done something wrong. These don’t address the real reason these people did these things. In all cases, whatever they did, it was because they were feeling bad about something, weren’t centred, and reacted from "lizard brain" instincts of individual survival rather than from human compassion.

I believe that the natural and best state for a human being to be is happy (and here again, I mean blissfully happy). Every bit of programming we have nudges us towards certain actions by rewarding us with feelings of happiness, or reduced misery. We only live once, so I would modify your description only slightly to, “taking what bliss you can when you can”.

Divine morality isn’t necessary. Having any collective understanding of what is good and what is bad is enough. For most of humanity’s existence, even up to now, there hasn’t been a clear standard. In patches of geography where there was one, it only applied well to that time and culture. Just as ordinary people supplanted kings and emperors as absolute leaders without society collapsing, and just as ordinary people supplanted religions are sole arbiters of the law without society collapsing, ordinary people can supplant religion as arbiter of what is good and what is bad as well, and society will continue not to collapse.

And better than a list of what’s good and what’s bad is a system that determines for us what’s good and what’s bad. I’ve seen one model that I like, delivered by Sam Harris. The most salient bit starts at about 10:00 and runs to around 27:30. If you don’t want to watch it now, I’ll summarise the most important ideas: For a moral code to have meaning, it has to apply to some form of consciousness – it cannot apply to rocks and dust. Then there’s the central point which requires you to imagine "the worst possible misery for everyone", and assume that this situation is "bad". "Good" is then defined in terms of moving people away from this "worst possible misery for everyone". That’s it. I recommend hearing it from Harris himself.

The three advantages that occur to me of this system over Yahweh’s morality are that it’s a simple system rather than a long intricate list, so it’s quick to teach, easy to absorb, understand and reference, hard to corrupt, and all-inclusive; there’s absolutely nothing random about it, so odd details like not being allowed to wear garments made from two different thread types won’t make it in and there’s nothing objectionable about it from the standpoint of people who just want to do the right thing; and it’s truly universal in that it applies equally well now as it would have in 4000 BC China, in 30 AD Mesopotamia, or will in 12 000 AD Mars, so it’s broadly acceptable too. Every act that is good makes things better for people. If an act makes the world worse, then it’s bad. Simple. Lots of generalities can be derived from it, like killing people is bad, respecting other people’s property is good, and there’d be no arbitrary crap about touching pig skin being bad or extra-marital sex being bad.

Even more generally, we clearly don’t require any god to tell us what’s good and what isn’t. We already have a conscience inside us that tells us what’s good and what isn’t regardless of laws. I know you believe that Yahweh made our conscience for us. Even if that were so, it doesn’t change the fact that if properly relied upon, a conscience precludes the need for an external set of laws. Any law that echoes what everyone naturally feels already is superfluous. Any law that contributes to human misery is morally wrong and deserves to be disregarded.

You state that without a divine moral standard that exists outside our consciousness, there is no objective justice. This is true by definition. Without a true objective moral code, you further argue that nobody can condemn any action as bad without being hypocritical, so in effect, everything is permissible. This is not the case, however. Although the moral code I advocate isn’t "objective" in the sense that it exists beyond our consciousness, it is universal among humans. And if we’re only attempting to determine moral behaviour for humans, then a universally accepted standard among humans suffices, regardless of where we think it came from.

The arguments I make here don’t describe a perfect system. That’s wasn’t my intention. I believe they do, however, answer your concerns about non-objective morality being insufficient to guide humans.

@ChaosEngine

Oh sweet irony, I'm being called wilfully ignorant by a young-earther.

I'm not going to refute you. I don't need to; @BicycleRepairMan has already done an excellent job of it.

An excellent refutation? He cherry picked one sentence out of my reply, a reply where I had demonstrated the fallacy of his argument from incredulity by proving his assumption of the constancy of radioactive decay rates was nothing more than the conventional wisdom of our times. Is this what passes for logical argumentation in your mind? He posited a fallacious argument. I exposed the fallacy. He ignored the refutation and cherry picked his reply. You seem to be showing that in your eagerness to agree with everything which is contrary to my position that you have a weak filter on information which supports your preconceived ideas. Why is it that a skeptic is always pathologically skeptical of everything except his own positions, I wonder?

@BicycleRepairMan

...and to see an exampe of such a racket, check the flood "geology" link.

Seriously, you cant see the blinding irony in your own words? So, things like radiometric dating, fossils, geology, astronomy, chemistry, biology are all just parts of a self-perpetuating racket confirming each others conclusions in a big old circlejerking conspiracy of astronomical proportions.. well, lets assume then that it is. So they are basically chasing the foregone conclusion that the universe is over 13 billion years old and that life on this planet emerged some 3,6 billion years ago and has evolved ever since. But where did these wild conclusions come from? Who established the dogma that scientists seems to mindlessly work to confirm, and why? And why 13,72 billion years then? Why not 100 billion years, or 345 million years?

The thing is, what you have here is an alleged "crime" with no incentives, no motivation.. Why on earth would all the worlds scientists, depentently and independently and over many generations converge to promote a falsehood of no significance to anyone? it might make some kind of sense if someones doctrine was threatened unless the world was exactly 13.72 billion years old. Or if someone believed they were going to hell unless they believed trilobites died out 250 million years ago.. The thing is, nobody believes that.

The truth is pretty much staring you in the face right here. The conclusions of science on things like the age of the earth emerged gradually; Darwin, and even earlier naturalists had no idea of the exact age of the earth, or even a good approximation, but they did figure this much: It must be very, very old. So old that it challenged their prior beliefs and assumptions about a god-created world as described in their holy book. And thats were nearly all scientists come from: They grew up and lived in societies that looked to holy books , scripture and religion for the answers, and everybody assumed they had proper answers until the science was done.If scientists were corrupt conspirators working to preserve dogma, they be like Kent Hovind or Ken Ham. Ignoring vast mountains of facts and evidence, and focus on a few distorted out-of-context quotations to confirm what they already "know".

Not only was your prior argument fallacious, but I refuted it. Now you're ignoring that and cherry picking your replies here. Seems pretty intellectually dishonest to me? In any case, I'll reply to what you've said here. I was going to get into the technical issues concerning why scientists believe the Universe is so old, and the history of the theory, but so far you have given me no reason to believe that any of it will be carefully considered.

Instead I'll answer with a portion of an article I found, which was printed in "The Ledger" on Feb 17th 2000. It's interview of a molecular biologist who wanted to remain anonymous

Caylor: "Do you believe that the information evolved?"

MB: "George, nobody I know in my profession believes it evolved. It was engineered by genius beyond genius, and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book! Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise."

Caylor: "Have you ever stated that in a public lecture, or in any public writings?"

MB: "No, I just say it evolved. To be a molecular biologist requires one to hold onto two insanities at all times:
One, it would be insane to believe in evolution when you can see the truth for yourself.
Two, it would be insane to say you don't believe evolution. All government work, research grants, papers, big college lectures -- everything would stop. I'd be out of a job, or relegated to the outer fringes where I couldn't earn a decent living.”

Caylor: “I hate to say it, but that sounds intellectually dishonest.”

MB: “The work I do in genetic research is honorable. We will find the cures to many of mankind's worst diseases. But in the meantime, we have to live with the elephant in the living room.”

Caylor: “What elephant?”

MB: “Creation design. It's like an elephant in the living room. It moves around, takes up space, loudly trumpets, bumps into us, knocks things over, eats a ton of hay, and smells like an elephant. And yet we have to swear it isn't there!”

Here are some selected quotes:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin

"In China its O.K. to criticize Darwin but not the government, while in the United States its O.K. to criticize the government, but not Darwin."

Dr. J.Y. Chen,

Chinese Paleontologist

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."

S. C. Todd,
Correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999

"Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it."

Steven Pinker,
Professor of Psychology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA., "How the Mind Works," [1997]

"Biologists are simply naive when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with its predictions. These facts will invariably be ignored and their discoverers will undoubtedly be deprived of continuing research grants."

Professor Whitten,
Professor of Genetics, University of Melbourne, Australia, 1980 Assembly Week address.

"Science is not so much concerned with truth as it is with consensus. What counts as truth is what scientists can agree to count as truth at any particular moment in time. [Scientists] are not really receptive or not really open-minded to any sorts of criticisms or any sorts of claims that actually are attacking some of the established parts of the research (traditional) paradigm, in this case neo-Darwinism. So it is very difficult for people who are pushing claims that contradict that paradigm to get a hearing. They find it hard to [get] research grants; they find it hard to get their research published; they find it very hard."

Prof. Evelleen Richards,
Historian of Science at the University of NSW, Australia

Speaks for itself, I think..

I'm glad you enjoyed the video and I appreciate your thoughtful reply. I'll reply by saying that if you accept meaninglessness as a fact, then there are many implications to such a belief. For instance, if it true that life is meaningless then it is also true that there is no such thing as justice. It means that any truly terrible things that happen to you will never be adequately recompensed, and that frequently, the purveyors of such will get away with it scott free. It means that ultimately, might does make right, and he who has the gold makes the rules. If you are smart enough to get away with it, or powerful enough to avoid the consequences, you will never face any justice for any evil that you've done.

It also means that everything you have worked for and dreamed about could be randomly taken away from you at any moment, and so could all the people you love and care about. One moment you are an eternal optimist, the next, you get into a car accident and become a parapalegic. Now, you can say that this could happen to you even if there is a God, since it obviously happens to people all the time. This is true, but, if this life is all you have then it means that the hope you have is a very limited and fragile commodity. Hope is not a limited commodity for a Christian. For instance, the closer you are to death the less happy and hopeful you will become. When you're young, you don't concern yourself with it as much, even though it could happen at any time. As you get older, you start to realize how little time you have left to accomplish your goals. Your mobility starts to decrease, the sharpness of your intellect and your beauty fades. You become less desirable to others and to society in general. What this means is that your happiness is always situational. Eventually, when enough tragedy happens to you, you will break down and the future will become more and more like a millstone around your neck.

Yes, some people are able to squeeze some happiness out of desperate circumstances, and more power to them, but they have no real hope. A meaningless universe provides you with zero hope in the end. Many people believe they will achieve some lasting legacy but think about all the people you remember from the last century. Shockingly, a poll done by college age kids from America and Germany showed that many of them had no idea who Hitler was. If no one can remember Hitler, they probably won't remember you either. Where does that leave you? Your best case scenario is that you lead a completely pointless life where you hopefully experience a modicum of pleasure before expiring prematurely, never having reached anything near your true potential, with all your love and dreams being cruelly erased from existence forever.

People become depressed because of a lack of hope. If you look at the world today, and constrast it to our history, you will see that nothing has really changed on planet Earth. For all of our so-called progress, humanity is just as sick and depraved as it always has been. Evil is increasing, not decreasing, and mankinds destructive appetites will never be satiated. There is no hope in man, but there is in God. I think you know that.

Now, you make an argument about following your bliss, but if what is good to do is simply what makes you feel good, then you could excuse some of the worst crimes in history. People murder, rape, cheat, steal, etc because it makes them feel good. I'm sure Hitler took a lot of pleasure in what he did, and was following his bliss for aquiring absolute power. You can't use what feels good as a compass for what is right. Now, I think you're trying to insert the caveat that we shouldn't do what causes harm to people, but what if it is someones bliss to harm people? You would be stopping their bliss and thus violating your own rules. In short, there is no way to impose any absolute standard of morality when you are determining it by a completely arbitrary standard. In a meaningless Universe there is no right and wrong, so why shouldn't you just do whatever you want? Why waste your time trying to navigate some moral landscape that you don't even believe exists? Why not just take what you can, when you can, before you lose the opportunity?

For myself, what led me to start thinking about what was true was to notice how much this world was going down the tubes, and with seemingly no one in the drivers seat. I noticed the love I felt from this world being slowly drained away, year by year. I saw that humanity was on a collision course with ultimate destruction if nothing changed. If life is meaningless then it doesn't matter. But deep down, you don't really believe its meaningless, and neither did I. That's probably another reason why you're depressed. Your head says its meaningless but your heart tells you that this is a lie. Until the two reconcile you will never be happy and you will never be truly free. It's only Christ that can reconcile them, because He knows the reason that you're here, and only He can point you in that direction. It is only by discovering the meaning of your life, the reason that you're here, that will lead your mind and heart to agree with one another.

>> ^messenger

Meet the animal that will one day evolve to replace mankind after we are extinct.

And ya I was totally picturing it using that fork like a wizard's staff!

Being an Englishman living in America, man did I get funny looks from my colleagues when I used the phrase "cock up" in a training seminar. Everyone thought I'd said the rudest thing in the history of mankind, while I was all, "what?">> ^Quboid:

>> ^spoco2:
Ahh, "It'll be alright on the night", that was a great show that I remember from my childhood.
On the topic of the particular video though... how could they not have actually demonstrated to him how he was supposed to use the carton before going on tv to demonstrate? Ineptitude

This was great stuff. Especially pleasing to hear crusty old English gentlemen say "cock up". That's a phrase that needs to come back.

Thank you for the quality, lampishthing! I was away for the weekend and couldn't respond
In reply to this comment by lampishthing:
THIS IS THE BEST THING MANKIND HAS EVER CREATED *QUALITY