*quality idea! so many great under appreciated videos hiding in all those pqueues

pqueued reggae, great for a slow, hot summer day like this (30* celcius here):

http://www.videosift.com/video/Burning-Spear-Marcus-Garvey

siaiaia (or whatever your name is), you are in dire need of an education in both religion and epistemology. Not all knowledge is scientific knowledge. One can have historical knowledge, knowledge of art theory, the knowledge of the human condition which has informed so many poets and novelists, musicology... The list goes on and on. Which is to say that there is no reason why one should expect that a religious truth (if such a beast exists) should be classified as scientific.

Furthermore, your understanding of religions as primarily sets of doctrines--systems beliefs--is profoundly inadequate. Let's ignore the Eastern religions, for all of which that's not clearly not true, and look at an example from Western history. In the first century BCE, Roman orator and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote a book entitled De Natura Deorum, or On the Nature of the Gods. In it, he portrays a fictional but plausible conversation between himself, a Stoic philosopher, and an Epicurean philosopher. Throughout the dialogue, it becomes starkly clear that, though all three follow the Roman religion, they can barely find a single belief about the gods that they hold in common. This detachment of doctrine and religion--of dogma and religious practice--was the norm throughout the ancient Mediterranean world.

Only with the rise of Christianity does anything like your criticism of religion become even coherent, let alone plausible.




With regards to the palestinian bomber - why did the IRA not do suicide bombing?? Eh? Because the palestinian bomber believes he is doing something in the name of God, and doing a righteous thing before he dies.

Or maybe because it's one of the few acts that a Palestinian can take with any effectiveness against Israeli oppression.

Suicide bombing was not invented by Muslims, but by Hindu Tamils. And not for religious reasons--both murder and suicide are strongly enjoined every Hindu tradition I'm familiar with. The problem was that one group--the native Sinhalese (primarily Buddhist--a pacifistic religion)--was oppressing the Tamil minority. They invented the suicide bomb as a technique by which a minority could strike at a militarily powerful oppressor.

There are strong parallels between the Palestinians and the Tamils. In both cases, the rulers speak a different language than the oppressed minority, having a different culture right down to religion. In both cases, the majority overwhelmingly outguns the minority. In both cases, oppression of the minority is acceptable to the populace of the majority group.

It is unsurprising, then, that the Palestinians should have adopted the suicide bomb--no matter what their religion. There was a complex set of circumstances replicated in both circumstances which produced the kind of attitude which gives rise to a suicide bomber.



This does not, of course, apply to the 9/11 hijackers, the Taliban, or a number of other groups. Nonetheless, I think my point is clear: fixating on a single aspect of a society, like religion, to explain complex social phenomena is a huge mistake.

First principles, MikesHL13. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular post, ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? Funny?

No, that is ince-den-tal.

Congratulations on your well earned new star.

Oh, and MikesHL13, just one more thing! Love your suit....(wink)

Very good point Kagenin,

However the problem is that there is a difference between a philosophy and a religion.

If Jesus or Buddah had just written a book telling people to chill out and be nice to each other, that would have been great. The problem lies in that they (or the people who wrote their specific "holy text") took it a step further and said, this is MAGIC! Then, over the centuries that came after, people who had NOTHING to do with Jesus or Buddha came up with an endless chaotic list of random shit that had nothing to do with the original philosophy in order to solidify their own power and greed: gays are evil, priests can't get married, kill the infidels, kung fu is awesome.

The problem is that the so-called "legitimate" religions are just as tainted by imperfect humans who came up with their own bullshit in order to control people, gain wealth, and solidify power. To say that the American Evangelical Right, with all its hate-mongering, torture supporting, assassination endorsing has anything to do with Jesus is ludicrous.

Yes, Jesus, Buddha, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Aristotle, Siddhartha, etc. all had excellent ideas, not all of them ended up being religions.

I'm not saying that Scientology is somehow legitimate, I'm just saying that the Boston Catholic priests were just as much pederasts as L. Ron Hubbard and their white-bearded god seems fine with an endless cavalcade of sex-abuse victims whose lives have been forever ruined by those who were supposedly "chosen by god" to serve in "his" name...

man, I love my sarcastic quotes and ellipsis!

- "What is your aim in philosophy?---To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle."
- "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

“To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution”
~ Marcus Aurelius

Tags for this video have been changed from 'miles davis, mr pastorius, amandla, marcus miller' to 'miles davis, mr pastorius, amandla, marcus miller, kenny garrett' - edited by Ornthoron

Well I posted it because it was a nice model of ED - and I don't see how 16K polys is 'high' - You could certainly render this realtime.

As far as videogames go - high poly modelling is more important now - If your platform supports pixel shaders you can (like in Gears) render the high poly model to a lower poly model, giving you millions of polys of detail minus the rendering cost. In Gears Marcus Felix is 15000 polys (a higher poly 5,000,000 or more poly model is used to create a normal map)

It's a nice model of ED-209

What pisses me off the most about this video is actually at the beginning where the preacher claims that Marcus Aurelius was "a christian" even though he came long before christianity even existed in its present form. He basically makes up some shit on-the-stop about how people can be christians "without knowing it."

Sorry, but I call bullshit on that one. If you look back into the history of the christian church, you will see time and again references to the pagans being either in limbo or worse, hell, specifically because they came before a time where they could be saved by jesus. Vidal is spot on calling the christian god a blackmailer because that is exactly what he is. Believe in me or else.

Fundamentally, what I like better about the way Dawkins addresses these silly arguments is that he doesn't concentrate on this christian-centric view. His best argument it is that it is all dependent on where you happen to be born. You are born in a christian country, you are likely going to be christian, you are born in an islamic country, you are likely going to be islamic, etc. Of course, there are many who say that worship is worship, but it seems to me that each religion is BASED on the assumption that THEY have the "story" right. So even the half-assed religious people who are okay with other religions still adhere to their own under that assumption.

Frankly, I feel that missionaries are probably the most honest of all types of religions people because they seem to understand the problematic nature of the fact that most of the world doesn't think like them and they are actively trying to do something to spread the world... at least that has some logic to it.

But anyway back to this video... I suppose my main point is that there isn't uniformity even within one so-called faith. Christianity is so varied that it is total bullshit for that guy to say that Marcus Aurelius was somehow inspired by the christian god to do compassionate things... There are just as many, if not countless more "christians" who would state that Marcus Aurelius is in hell for all eternity for nothing more than being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'lone survivor, SEAL, fox, glenn beck, texas, dasy' to 'lone survivor, SEAL, fox, glenn beck, texas, Daisy, Mark, Marcus, Luttrell' - edited by MarineGunrock

Thus Spoke Zarathushtra - Nietzsche
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Stranger - Albert Camus
The Dhammapada
Othello - Shakespeare
The Divine Comedy - Dante
The Fabric of Reality - David Deutsch
Sophie's choice - William Styron
Le petit Nicolas - Jean-Jacques Sempé

"In reality, those who repudiate a theory that they had once proposed, or a theory that they had accepted enthusiastically and with which they had identified themselves, are very rare. The great majority of them shut their ears so as not to hear the crying facts, and shut their eyes so as not to see the glaring facts, in order to remain faithful to their theories in spite of all and everything"

-Marcus Arthus, Philosophy of Scientific Investigation, 1921


"la, la, la; la, la, la; I can't hear you"

-American Public, 2009

Memory tricks like these have been around a long time. Marcus Tullius Cicero, the famous Roman orator and philosopher, was supposedly so skilled in using them that he was able to memorize hour-long speeches and repeat them verbatim.

Even though I love Dylan, I'll be the first to admit that his 1970 double album Self Portrait is absolutely, positively AWFUL. 24 songs, almost all covers, that really can't be described. And this from a man who had released a string of fantastic albums in the 60s and would continue to do so in the 70s.

Greil Marcus, one of Dylan's biggest fans, summed it up pretty good when he started his review for Rolling Stone with: "What is this shit?".

It should be noted that Dylan later claimed that Self Portrait was a joke, far below his standards simply to get people off his back and stop labelling him the "spokesman of a generation". He has also given other, contradictory accounts of his motives.

Here's an example:

I can never, ever remember the best ones when quizzed like this. Same goes for best movies etc.

Ones I have liked of late are (in no order):
The Dark Tower series: Stephen King
The Book Thief: Marcus Zusak
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Dave Eggers (Currently reading another of his books actually)
The Mars Trilogy: Kim Stanley Robinson
LOTR: Tolkien
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: Douglas Adams
Many Discworld novels: Terry Pratchett
Dune: Frank Herbert
The Dressmaker: Rosalie Ham (An Australian gothic novel, just brilliant, I'd love to see this made into a film)
2010: Arthur C Clarke (Yeah, I like it better than 2001, sue me)


But inevitably someone will mention some book and I'll go 'AAAH, yeah, LOVED that one'!... so yeah, there are many others that I'm sure should be here, and probably in place of others here... (I just scrolled up and added some that others had put, because I'd forgotten them)...

Catch 22 : I just wanted to say that for all the praise that this book gets, I couldn't get through it. He made his points, set up his things, and then seemed to repeat the same damn jokes/observations over and over and over again to the point where I just stopped reading it... sorry, but it bored me. Good start, lost me soon after.

^No, all wrong. He and the kid from the Shining released the Neiman Marcus cookie recipe after getting credit card charged $250 for it.

It was a pretty unremarkable recipe, IMO.