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*beg

Sending this video to Beggar's Canyon to plea for a little attention - beg requested by original submitter shveddy.

Saying you are ignorant and weak before a hypothetical perfect being seems to me an empty gesture of humility. Of course you are. Everyone would be. "Nobody's perfect." There. That was easy.
What is hard and humbling is admitting you may be wrong about your most deeply-held beliefs.

Basically : "Everything in the bible is true. No questions asked. Heres my humble, non-arrogant, thoughtful and logical interpretation of the conclusions we can draw from that arrogant, pompous, ignorant and completely unlikely to be true-assumption."

By the way, this guy kinda looks like Edward Current, and he like the perfectly serious version of him.

Yeah, I've heard this analogy about how we might be insignificant compared to god/aliens/whatever, and it is complete and utter crap.

A piece of clay cannot reason. It has no concept of self, it has not figured out even the most basic mathematical or physical principles, and we have no way of communicating with it.

Humans have achieved all those things. As Eddie Izzard said "When you [Americans] landed on the moon, that was the point when God should have come up and said hello. Because if you invent some creatures and you put them on the blue one and they make it to the grey one, then you fucking turn up and say, ‘Well done.’ It’s just a polite thing to do."

I'm willing to admit that there's a possibility we are just infants in our understanding of the universe. In fact, I hope that is the case, although I fear we've actually covered a lot of the basics and there may not be anything truly life-changing left to discover (i.e. it's almost certain we will never find a "warp drive").

Either way, a superior being should be able to communicate with us in a meaningful manner. Even if it is like talking to a particularly stupid child for them, *we* still manage it. We communicate with beings of lesser intelligence all the time (small children, animals, republicans).

If we are so far below god that it is unable to make us understand him, then that's his failing, not ours.

*beg

Sending this video to Beggar's Canyon to plea for a little attention - beg requested by original submitter shveddy.

➰

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued - promote requested by chingalera.

This might be a dumb post.

Disclaimer: I am not religious, I hate organized religion to a point of (self-recognized, regretful) prejudice, and believe that nothing is certain. Not even "god", or the absence of such.

That said: you kind of touch on this later in your post, and herein lies the eternal futility of arguing with religion, but who is to say we are not clay?

The fact that you're posting this on the internet would suggest that you are not clay.

I appreciate the vote for my intelligence, but I was hoping my intended conclusion would be more understood.

What I basically meant by that was: what if what clay is to us in the difference of perceived intelligence, happens to be what we are to a supposed higher-being.

You can never rule out the impossible, and as much as I believe in human kinds miracle of existence and legitimate accomplishments on the human-scale, I can never agree to be so egotistical as to not accept the possibility that I am far less consequential than a molecule in some other unfathomably-complex creatures universe.

In the end: doesn't much matter! We should just all have sex to our hearts content, and make sure everyone like us is warm at night and well fed.

The term "made of clay" is a figurative or metaphor used loosely as a description. I doubt that God meant it literally. Clay can be shaped, it can be formed into something. Each of us has our own interpretation, God may have intended it to be that way. As for organized religion, I don't believe in it especially if its' a 501c3, paper idol worshipping.....

Actually, I did get your intention, and I'd planned a much longer response, but I got distracted and just ended up posting that pithy comment.

But yes, I understand the argument is not so much "we are clay" as "we are as clay".

I can completely accept the possibility of some kind of hyper-advanced species that absolutely dwarfs us in intellect. In fact, I think it'd be really cool if such a thing existed. But I have a sneaking suspicion that actually, it doesn't really get a whole lot better than us. But that's only because I'm a cynical bastard and tend to believe that most species wipe themselves out before attaining that level of awesome.

But let's say that there is some kind of hypothetical super genius race/being out there. They should *still* be able to talk down to us. There are certain fundamental mathematical truths that are constant in the universe. As dumb as we are, we have already figured out ways to communicate using these (CETI, etc). Surely super intelligent beings would be able to respond even if it felt like talking to a particularly stupid child to them. Again, even we manage a very primitive form of communication with animals.

Moving this video to shveddy's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

*beg

Sending this video to Beggar's Canyon to plea for a little attention - beg requested by original submitter shveddy.

upvoted for the conversation sparked, not the video in and of itself.

Just to throw my two cents in: I think the vast majority of civilizations out there probably have intelligences similar to our own just because that is what evolution would dictate. This is of course based only on observing our own evolutionary path which is unfortunately the only model we have access too. But it does actually tell us quite a bit, based on an environment similar to ours it would appear that intelligence would plateau at a certain point because it just isn't beneficial to beings in early societal stages. Ie: you only need a certain amount of intelligence to outsmart a mammoth, this does not involve an innate understanding of complex mathematical principles.

That being said, since there are (probably) billions of planets that could support life I'm sure there are a couple outliers whose intelligent life has a more innate understanding of complex knowledge. It would "probably" be more nuanced than just beings whose intelligence completely dwarfs our own. Parts of their brain (or however you want to translate it to extraterrestrial anatomy) which handle physics or mathematics etc. may be larger giving an added dexterity to problem solving in that SPECIFIC cognitive fields. Similarly to how certain people have added capacity in one portion of their brain or another but does not make them gods in comparison to other.

The reality is that we probably already have met the superior godlike species and we created them. Computers already excel vastly over us in many areas and I'd assume it's only a matter of time before they surpass us entirely.

But hey there are almost assuredly an near infinite amount of planets out there, so maybe there is one where GOD evolved?

*nochannel *religion

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he ends with pacals wager?
seriously?
i didnt understand the the title until that last minute.

i want my 10 mins back.

he told me to think about what its like for a piece of clay to tell other clay what the potter was like. i thought about it for a moment and thought "wow, he's stupid" and stopped watching,