I've gone to church for a few years. And I see no women staying silent, nor any man telling them to. I really don't care about "tradition" and would voice serious concern if these type of crap happens in the modern church. Believe me, my church sisters takes no crap from the brothers. And I don't really see much old-school practices except communion, and that's not far-out unacceptable a tradition considering its purpose.

I (or at least hope to) continuously carry a critical eye & mind on these social-issue things as in many others at the church. Church "doctrine/tradition" is no excuse to justify bad social/inequality/bigotry behavior. For me, discussion on why the heck Paul wrote these words is fine, it's good to find faults how those people who lived 2000 years ago and evolve the modern church practices to align better with Jesus' intention.
Overall, in my church, I think most people are pretty grounded in real-life struggles... but hey, I fully understand these are subjective opinions... we all have our blindspots. I think we're all better man/woman if we can take in criticisms.

I can't for the life of me understand the U.S. "Christian Right" (but I'm Canadian, so I'm just a passive observer, as I can't vote on US politics) nor, from my understanding of Him, Jesus (as a preacher of love & peace) could be a far/alt-right-winger. But oh, sorry, I don't mean to talk politics... just hope to convey from which side of the discussion I come from.

It's foolish (and arrogant) to take the Bible literally... so much contradictions, inconsistencies, if read this way. And really, I keep thinking - WHY LITERALLY? - I don't dare listen to my pastors and think their words MUST be what God/Jesus meant. Martin Luther's movement freed us from those chains of mindlessness from the church preachers' power over us.

Akways look to the intention of Jesus, which for me, is honestly good, relevant and much in demand, and do those as the Christian mission. The Bible can be confusing, but the message is crystal clear. And that's love & compassion towards our neighbors, go a preach THAT! Not hate/fear-filled "damn this, damn that"/"End of the World is nigh"-type rhetorics.

Seriously man, looking from a distance (again, Canadian here) those loud-voice Christian Rights in the States scare the hell out of me and most of my brothers & sisters, the general thought around me is that they've move way far out from the Christian's way that Jesus want us to be (that I know of)... makes me so sad.

I meant exactly what I wrote; I was evoking the image of a priest being ordained in his robes.


Yeah, that sentence above doesn't parse right either. You can be ordained, and you can be in robes, but you don't really "ordain something in robes". You just don't. Maybe "shrouded in vestments"? Feel free to disagree with me on this, it obviously doesn't matter.

My point, continuing a previous conversation with gwiz, is that people put faith in science much as religious people put faith in religion.


I'd say they put way, way more faith in science than religion. And they're right to: science brings us all kinds of amazing things every day. When I get on a plane, I'm relying on all sorts of science and engineering that I don't fully understand. My three year old knows to put chocolate milk in the fridge or it will go bad. People have long histories of relying on science and things working out. They have long histories of seeing something amazing, having no idea how it works, but later using that science and technology in their own lives.

If people got anywhere near that level of positive feedback from their religions, religion wouldn't be slowly dying in the developed world.

There are no legitimate demonstrations of quantum levitation that highlighted some of the features present here...


Well, yes, there's more stuff happening here than in previous demonstrations - but that's what people are used to with science; a progression of more features.

If it steps over the line, even a micron, it becomes pseudo-science. Yet you are willing to suspend your disbelief based on other past results you may not understand.


Very few people are going to understand all of the science and technology they use. I don't know how my anti-lock brakes work, or fully understand even the (what I assume is simple) tech in an airbag (what's the gas it inflates with? I don't know). And I may one day rely on those things to save my life. Almost anyone getting medical treatment is relying on very, very shakey knowledge of how the medicine or procedure actually works, or why things are done a specific way.

And they're not fools to do so. With science and technology, you can build a web of trust based on demonstrable results in the past. I know that there's standards bodies that test airbags, and medical associations that understand and approve procedures; I don't have to confirm this kind of thing personally on a case-by-case basis, nor could any one person fully understand all the technology in their lives. Hawking has to hire some tech guy to fix his voice box.

But that doesn't mean that things aren't tested or that there's "blind faith" involved. There's faith backed by reason.

Back to this video in specific: people may have thought this video was real, but very few would have sent off a cheque to buy one without knowing a lot more, without seeing it reported on by someone they have some trust in. And look at how fast it was brought down. How many people still believed after reading all the comments? Similarly, when scientists emerge trumpeting some new unlikely discovery, they're treated by other scientists with very appropriate and high levels of skepticism until their results are independently validated.

Could you benefit from a medium-term, important scientific hoax? Yes, with some real effort. But history has a lot more examples of people seeing big success using science for their religious hoaxes (from Greek temples on down to scientology). Even if people have the "amazing science" in hand with which to try to trick, they recognize where people's real blindspots are and aim for those.

Indeed. But who the fuck cares. No one.. 'cept you. and that other guy maybe.

In reply to this comment by Gallowflak:
Your sarcasm does you no credit. Anyway, it's not about being forced to do anything, and you know that. It colours the conversation, the discourse, and increases the distribution of shinyblurry's fetid bullshit across the comment threads. That's all.

In reply to this comment by GenjiKilpatrick:
Yeah, I bet it's really annoying to be FORCED, against your will, to read his and my comments.

Woe is you, and all because of my want of a few lulz. Shame on me.

In reply to this comment by Gallowflak:
>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/shinyblurry" title="member since January 21st, 2011" class="profilelink">shinyblurry
So if Humans are Yahweh's greatest creation..
Why do octopuses/octopodes have perfect eyes with no blindspots.. but we don't?


So often, you're shinyblurry's enabler. And it's becoming really annoying.

>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

@shinyblurry
So if Humans are Yahweh's greatest creation..
Why do octopuses/octopodes have perfect eyes with no blindspots.. but we don't?


So often, you're shinyblurry's enabler. And it's becoming really annoying.

@shinyblurry

So if Humans are Yahweh's greatest creation..

Why do octopuses/octopodes have perfect eyes with no blindspots.. but we don't?

Just too add to this.

Drivers should be looking in both directions at *every* green light, any driving instructor worth their salt will hammer this in to you but it is still often quickly forgotten. This is not only for the sake of emergency vehicles, having any presumption about how other drivers will behave is a very silly thing to do.

Look up how much red light cameras make in your area, your perspective of a red light will perhaps change. The delay they leave between lights helps avoid most crashes but it won't prevent all.

Simple habits, like checking your blindspot, 3-second gaps, half a second checking a green light. All the common accidents would be avoided. So simple. >> ^Xax:

>> ^Trancecoach:
Sure, the ambulance might have slowed down before going through the red light, but according to reports, the ambulance was on its way to hospital with a 7-month-old baby and his parents and medical crew on board.
All the more reason for the ambulance driver to exhibit more caution, no? Don't get me wrong, the driver of the van fucked up, but ambulance drivers can't assume everyone is going to drive properly and just plow through red lights. I've never seen an emergency vehicle drive straight through a red light without slowing/stopping to make sure it was safe, first.

>> ^nibiyabi:
And how do you think we interpret these signals? With our feet? The blindspot by itself is really just a function of the eye, yes, but our ability to detect a continuous bar when our eye is utterly incapable of doing so could only be thanks to our wonderful pattern-seeking brain.

If you've got a horizontal bar and you cut out a chunk in the middle and then stitch the remaining ends together, what would you expect it to look like? Seems like a stretch to call this #brain to me, but fair enough.

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:
I dont think magic even exists, but this, like the above mentioned tricks and illusions, has that "wow, thats magic!" feel to it, so I placed it in magic. It also feels mysterious, and I never mentioned Psychology.

I guess I don't feel it's magic because it's not deliberate. It's not sleight of hand or smoke and mirrors or whatever; they're just pointing out an anomaly. They've given it sort of a magic presentation, I'll give you that. In fact, that sort of bothers me.

#mystery is "Videos that deal with unsolved mysteries, crimes, or the unexplained." Don't feel it fits despite the "Woah! How'd that happen?" response it might illicit in some.

You didn't label it psychology but they call it such twice in the video. That, of course, is just ridiculous.

>> ^WaterDweller:
Heard about the blindspot before, and that it could be easily pointed out to someone, but never knew how. This seems to be working for making my fingertip or webcam vanish as well, now that I know roughly where it is. Fun to move things in and out of the spot, watching them disappear.

Its also fun to do the trick on others, get a pencil with a red rubber on the end (or something similar), tell them to cover their eye, look at nose with the other. Move the pencil slowly around the area where their blind spot should be, which should be on eye-level and slightly to the side.

Heard about the blindspot before, and that it could be easily pointed out to someone, but never knew how. This seems to be working for making my fingertip or webcam vanish as well, now that I know roughly where it is. Fun to move things in and out of the spot, watching them disappear.

It's not brain, it's eye.
Our brain "fills in" that blind spot most of the time, which is why it takes an experiment like this to discover it.

It's not magic, not a mystery and not psychology, it's basic biology.

Nor is spoonbending, levitation, cardtricks,or vanishing acts "magic". I dont think magic even exists, but this, like the above mentioned tricks and illusions, has that "wow, thats magic!" feel to it, so I placed it in magic. It also feels mysterious, and I never mentioned Psychology.

It's not an illusion.

Our blindspot isnt, but the feeling that we dont have one IS actually an illusion, because, as I say, our brain "fills in" that blank spot, and thats actually also demonstrated with the black stick in the video.

And how do you think we interpret these signals? With our feet? The blindspot by itself is really just a function of the eye, yes, but our ability to detect a continuous bar when our eye is utterly incapable of doing so could only be thanks to our wonderful pattern-seeking *brain.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'head, vanishing, illusion, blindspot, cross' to 'head, vanishing, illusion, blindspot, cross, optic disc' - edited by xxovercastxx

>> ^yourhydra:
those guys make me puke in my mouth. i would never consider touching any of them and if any girl would shes f'd up


It would seem that every female i have ever met or known was f'd up. Given the choice between a nice guy and a jerk, every girl i've ever known has chosen the jerk. It's as though they have a jerk blindspot.

Perhaps it's because a nice guy doesn't TRY to be a nice guy, he doesn't flaunt being a nice guy, he's just a nice guy. He'll help an old lady across the road, he'll treat you with a quiet respect, and you'll never notice it happening.

But the jerk knows that she WANTS a nice guy, so in his jerkish fashion he goes out of his way to do nice guy things in front of her, and it just slips past her blindspot.

Every girl that i've ever known but 1 did this. And the 1 person that didn't, i screwed up with, blew my opportunity, and she's been with a jerk ever since. The worst thing is that now i feel bad that she's ended up with a jerk!

This world is doesn't play fair, and i'm taking my ball home.

As promised, here is the transcript, to the best of my transcripting abilities. I've shrunk the text size to keep it from being any more gigantic than it has to be. Copy and paste it if it's too small to read.

It's interesting when people speak of areas of evolution for which we have no explanations. All the fundamental concepts of the evolutionary process are understood at least at some fundamental level. Now, are there gaps? Not gaps in the sense that people think. People, now, speak of gaps, for example, in the record. You know... we don't have fossils from before the Camrbian Explosion, but so what? The record is complete; it's not complete by means of fossils. You see in Darwin's time the only way to reconstruct evolutionary history was by studying fossils, by comparative anatomy, comparative embryology, biogeography. It was 150 years ago; science has advanced tremendously. We can now reconstruct evolutionary history with much more powerful methods; the methods of molecular biology, by looking at DNA, by looking at proteins and with these methods we have reconstructed the record completely. We can go back to the organisms, a group of organisms, called LUCA ('L' 'U' 'C' 'A') for the Last Universal Common Ancestor. We can find the common ancestors of all animals, common ancestors of all plants, of all fungi, of all bacteria. We can find the... we can reconstruct the histories of the common ancestors of plants and animals and fungi and bacteria going back to the very beginning. We don't know all the details, because who wants to know all the details? If you are studying the Rocky Mountains, you don't want to have, necessarily, a map where every st.. every tree and every rock is there. If you want to know the details of a particular area within the Rocky Mountains you can go there and study as much as you want and find every little rock, every little leaf, every little tree, every little plant there. The same with evolution. We can now look at any area of evolutionary history and we can understand it with as much detail as we wish. The methods of molecular biology are so powerful, are so quantitative, and also so redundant, we can study anything we want with as much detail as we want. Now there another way in which the people who propose.. propound intelligent design speak of as... about, um... you know, gaps in the record. How did the eye come about? Well we understand now at the genetic level [unintelligible], we actually understand that at almost every other level, they make the unwarranted and erroneous assumption that if something is complex, and every part depends on every other part, that it could not have come about by evolution. It's like a watch. It does not help to have one little piece, or the other piece, or the other piece. You have to have them all or you don't have a watch, but that's not so with organisms. So we have in mollusks today, these are snails and clams and so.. and squids, we have an example.. an example of eyes which go from the simplest to the most complex. I'm going to speak about eyes because the eye is one example they use, unless you have everything, unless you have the cornea and the lense and the retina and the... and the optical nerve, having one part of this alone doesn't help. Well in mollusks, and in some mollusks called limpids, they have something that you can call eyes. They're just a few pigmented cells linked to single neurons, nerve cells, which carry the information to the primitive brain of these creatures. Just a few pigmented cells. Then we have mollusks which have more pigmented cells and some of them forming a kind of cup which allows to detect the direction of the light. Then we have what are called pinhole eyes which are this cup, still a little more extreme and a little more sensitive-to-light cells, and more nerve cells, and then you have... we have animals, still speaking about mollusks, which have just simple refractive lense as well as the sensitive... light-sensitive cells which eventually in advanced organisms they advanced to the... gave rise to the retina. And you go all the way to octopus and squids which have an eye very much like ours: has cornea, has a lense, has a retina, has muscles to move it, has a.. a optic nerve. Curiously enough the eye of the squid is better than ours in that we have a substantial imperfection that they don't have. For historical reason, that's for evolutionary history of how the human eye came about, the neurons that register the signals in the retina are inside the eye. So for those signals to go to the brain, these nerve cells get collected in the optic nerve, the optic nerve has to cross the retina so we have a blind spot. Now squids and octopuses have the nerve cells connected to what is the retina from the outside. So they collect into what is the optic nerve and they send the signal to the brain without having any blindspot. Well the... the point I am making is that there are complex organs and functions that we may not know in detail, but any time we investigate one of those we discover the details. And it's again, I'm going to put it bluntly, blasphemous to try to think of a God who is there waiting for something from time to time to come and intervene: "now I'm going to make an eye". Primitive organisms don't have eyes so God waited a few thousand million years - 2 and a half, 3 thousand million years - in order to have organisms with eyes, then later on did this and that. This is what the theologans in the old times called the "God of the gaps". Heresy, trying to justify God to account for things we don't know. You know, fill in the gaps. For things we don't know and aren't knowlegable by scientific research... we have science, we should do scientific research. We should not be putting this God as an engineer that is trying to fix little things from time to time. What sort of vision of God is that? Moreover there is another problem and it is that the implication of intelligent design is that God is a very, very bad engineer. Think of the example that I was telling you a moment ago, of the human eye. I mean, an engineer that could have designed an eye with the optic nerve having to cross the retina would be fired. You better do it the octopus way. An engineer that would have designed the human jaw would be fired. Our jaw is not big enough for all our teeth, so we have to pull the... the... the wisdom teeth and very often have to straighten the others and the orthodontists make a very good living straightening the teeth because we have too many teeth, too large for our jaw. An engineer that would have designed the jaw that is not big for the teeth would be fired. God making these trivial, obvious mistake in a universe of design. Well their God does these things, certainly not mine. I don't want to have to worship a God that did this... um, not smart enough to do as well as a human engineer.