"God doesn't listen to half-hearted prayers," when xxovercastxx asked.

I find a related thought experiment disconcerting. I picture a child upset because god hasn't come to her. She is honest, kind, lives by the bible, but she has not felt the touch of God. She asks the religious men why and they say "god doesn't listen to half-hearted prayers." From that day on, she spends her entire life praying, for 6 hours every single day, waiting for the touch of god, yet never feels it. And on her deathbed she dies knowing that she has not been accepted by god, and will not see heaven.

How do you know whether xxovercastxx was being sincere or not? You're so quick to assume not. She/he could honestly and openly invite god into her/his heart every single day and never feel god's touch. Would you sit there over the child from before, telling her "no, still not sincere" as she wastes her life in god's service?

If such a person feels no touch, then they are either insincere or god does not exist.

There may be millions of people that invite god into their heart every night.. some may even repent their sins for safety. In fact, i'm sure there are many people who identify as religious and feel like that. People who, unlike you, are not able to convince themselves that they feel god, but live religiously because they can't bear the alternative and desperately WANT to feel god.

Would you say that they are all insincere, every single one?

I fear the answer will be simply "yes." Anything else must surely make you question your faith, that god could ignore an honest soul asking for help?

8 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

>> ^Zifnab:

Well I think it's a dupe (a great vid though), so discuss if you disagree with me.
dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Six-60-Second-Adventures-in-Thought-by-the-Open-University


Maybe they're actually the SAME video, just in a superposition state... ?

see, i still get the impression that if you were born another place, you'd be defending the finer points of lord krishna or loki's behaviour instead of god's "might makes right" episode with job. all this to me just reads like "because i know it in my heart to be true". this i suppose is true for any follower of any religion, people around them believe in the same things so that must make it true..?
my final fall/departure from the religion was reading the bible really thoroughly, two different english translations and one norwegian in parallell. that took away everything divine about the religion for me. there still might be a god or gods, but the religion and the book to me is just so shallow and human.


>> ^shinyblurry:

You are still just a follower of your local mythoogy... maybe one day you will realise that the universe wasn't made with you in mind, and your god doesn't have a special plan just for you. After that realization, be free to enjoy reality :-)
Those were my previous thoughts; experience convinced me otherwise. The material world is the very thinnest of veils, and sin is slavery. The only freedom is in knowing your Creator, in Jesus Christ, who laid down His life to take away the sins of the world and set us free.
and you will not live forever. just like the egyptian pharaoes' religion didn't make them immortal and just like the vikings are not in valhalla fighting and drinking and feasting forever.
We're all immortal, it just depends on where you will spend your time. The myths that people have invented since the beginning do not invalidate the truth.
I think all religious texts were written by people with sincere beliefs... so whats the difference? the number of different authors of the bible makes it more valid than other religion's texts? and whose christianity is the right versions of the textsts and interpretations? After 2000 years of pondering the texts does christianity stand together as a united whole?
The difference is, outcast suggested it was a conspiracy. The early church is the model for Christianity..it is no real suprise that whatever man does, he spreads conflict and dissent..but again, the truth of the gospel remains the same.
>> ^lavoll:
You are still just a follower of your local mythoogy... maybe one day you will realise that the universe wasn't made with you in mind, and your god doesn't have a special plan just for you. After that realization, be free to enjoy reality :-)

You are still just a follower of your local mythoogy... maybe one day you will realise that the universe wasn't made with you in mind, and your god doesn't have a special plan just for you. After that realization, be free to enjoy reality :-)

Those were my previous thoughts; experience convinced me otherwise. The material world is the very thinnest of veils, and sin is slavery. The only freedom is in knowing your Creator, in Jesus Christ, who laid down His life to take away the sins of the world and set us free.

and you will not live forever. just like the egyptian pharaoes' religion didn't make them immortal and just like the vikings are not in valhalla fighting and drinking and feasting forever.

We're all immortal, it just depends on where you will spend your time. The myths that people have invented since the beginning do not invalidate the truth.

I think all religious texts were written by people with sincere beliefs... so whats the difference? the number of different authors of the bible makes it more valid than other religion's texts? and whose christianity is the right versions of the textsts and interpretations? After 2000 years of pondering the texts does christianity stand together as a united whole?

The difference is, outcast suggested it was a conspiracy. The early church is the model for Christianity..it is no real suprise that whatever man does, he spreads conflict and dissent..but again, the truth of the gospel remains the same.

>> ^lavoll:
You are still just a follower of your local mythoogy... maybe one day you will realise that the universe wasn't made with you in mind, and your god doesn't have a special plan just for you. After that realization, be free to enjoy reality :-)

>> ^marbles:

Well you got it mostly right, the fact is we're not suppose to be a democracy. We are suppose to be constitutional republic of individual sovereign states with democratic checks and balances. Democracy ≠ freedom.

Exactly. The premise of the video, that 5% of the time the "loser" won the election, is only true if you define "winner" as the candidate with the most popular votes. In fact that's a pretty arbitrary definition, even in a democracy. Even if you abolish the electoral college, you'll find all kinds of strains on fairness.


Continue the thought experiment: you'll probably want to start by wiping out the Senate, since it grossly overrepresents the vote of a Hawaiian relative to a New Yorker. Next, onto the Supreme Court. A whole *branch* of government unelected! Where's the democracy?

Now that we're casting our votes for Scalia or Kagan, there's a thorny problem with the numbers. Somehow, even with the electoral college gone, we're still ignoring the will of the 24% of the population under the age of 18. Don't forget the 20 million immigrants living legally in the United States. What happened to one person, one vote? Under what definition of "fair" do only adults and citizens get to determine their own destiny democratically?

After you've rectified that "indefensible" affront to democracy, you'll still find that, because of the typical ~55% turnout, 51% of the popular vote really only wins about 28% of the population. Why should that candidate be president, they don't even represent the will of the majority! How is that democratic?

Don't assume that electing the president by popular vote is somehow more fair. It's not, it's just more direct, and a different set of arbitrary rules. What we should really be concerned about is the same thing the Founding Fathers were thinking about: coming up with the most *effective* system of government within the framework of a constitutional republic. That may not be the Electoral College, but directly electing the president doesn't necessarily make anything better, or more fair.

I think this is rather some sort of thought experiment show... It even asks you at the end .. what do you think?

And for that its pretty cool.... what if suddenly you realize something you believed in your whole life isnt true??

Where did this guy go? I like his thought process before he goes off on a multi-comment rant.>> ^Cronyx:

(I split the following up into a few posts because it was too large.)
I don't claim to be an expert, or an authority on this stuff. I will say that I've been fascinated by it on a personal level for over ten years. It started back in the ZDtv days (before TechTV), when Michio Kaku was on an episode of Big Thinkers. I read anything I can get my hands on, and watch all material that comes my way.
Take the following for what it's worth, I'm not trying to proselytize an agenda, just share some of my private thoughts.
I've got a number of analogies I could use here for describing the entire (11 dimensional) universe. Two of my favorites are a VHS tape and hologram baseball card. They both kind of work the same way in so far as how they relate to the thought experiment. I'll explain both.
In the case of the VHS tape, it has your favorite movie on it. You know it word for word, line for line. You've seen it a hundred times. But no matter how many times you watch it, the story will always end the same way. But, from the point of view of the characters (I'm talking in a 4th wall sense; the characters themselves, not the actors playing them), have no idea what will happen next. In fact, the same was true for you the first time you saw the movie. There may have been some foreshadowing, but hell, there's some of that in real life too.
The point is, with the tape, you can fast forward, rewind, pause, browse the timeline however you choose. But the characters are oblivious to this. You aren't really manipulating their timeline, you're just browsing it for your own perspective. If you eject the tape though, you're holding the entire timeline. You've collapsed their universe into a 3 dimensional object. It only has a 4th dimension when you put it in the VCR. When you watch it. But even during the novel first experience of the initial viewing, the end of the story was there. It was always there, predetermined at the end of the tape.
On to the baseball card for a moment. Now, given various factors in the developing process, that hologram card has a lot more information than what you can see at one time, flat on. You have to tilt it one way or an other to get a different view -- to access more of the data. And yet, viewing the different angels don't create that data. Knowing they're there doesn't make them exist. It only makes you aware of them. Holding the card, you still hold all the potential that image has all at once, in that one object, even if you can't be privy to it all at once.

Actually I don't think the issue of representation is critical here. I think it's very easy to point out where Ariane went wrong:

"What are the odds that the random number generator would spit out the Shakespeare number? About 1 in infinity."

That's our intuition, but it's wrong. That's why this thought experiment is interesting. The likelihood is perhaps 1 in 10^10000000, but it is very much not "about 1 in infinity".


>> ^Sotto_Voce:

>> ^Ariane:
Pilkington is right. It would never happen. Lets just reduce this whole idea to mathematics. The complete works of Shakespeare can be translated to a number, by converting every character to ASCII, and ASCII to binary, so you end up with a really large binary number, which you can convert to decimal if you are so inclined.
So we have one number representing the complete works of Shakespeare. Then instead on Monkeys with typewriters, we have a random number generator, that can spit out any number from 1 to infinity. What are the odds that the random number generator would spit out the Shakespeare number? About 1 in infinity. Or for you calculus geeks, the limit of 1/x as x approaches infinity = 0.
So what happens if you ran the number generator an infinite number of times. Turns out infinity x infinity = infinity. Or again to be more exact aleph-naught times aleph-naught equals aleph-naught. So we are still at 0. What if we had an infinite number of number generators. That would be aleph-naught cubed, which is still equal to aleph-naught. Therefore, the odds are still zero.

You're using the wrong probability distribution. If we do what you suggest and convert each possible string of characters into a binary number, then the monkey experiment will not give us a uniform distribution over the binary numbers. It won't be like a random number generator. The monkey experiment gives us a uniform distribution over individual characters, and this does not translate into a uniform distribution over strings. As an example, consider the string "ee" vs. the string corresponding to Tolstoy's "War and Peace". Each of these corresponds to a single binary number, and if your random number generator analogy is right, then they should be equally likely. But obviously a monkey is far more likely to type "ee" than "War and Peace".

you're probably right... i made a longer list initially and realized it was entirely composed of writers. i couldn't decide if it's because those are the people i've paid the most attention to in my life or if its because the nature of success is so incredibly different for a writer than a ceo. >> ^dag:

Maybe it's only the inventors. Da Vinci, Edison and Jobs fit that bill. Deep thinkers and pure artists are pretty different. >> ^peggedbea:
I'm pretty sure kurt vonnegut was at least reasonably kind. He wrote so many books about the value of human kindness.
crispin glover is also unabashedly sensitive and kind and contains all the charm of someone who is not at all charming until they're speaking about something they love. i guess you could argue that he is not a genius, but then i would just tell you to attend a viewing for one of his insane art house films and stick around for the three hour Q&A he'll host when it's finished. genius.
oh i bet neil degrasse tyson is only slightly prickish, and only in the kindest most charming of ways.
>> ^dag:
Just as a thought experiment - can you name one who was well thought of as an all-around nice guy? Edison was an asshole. I've heard that Da Vinci was a real prick.>> ^quantumushroom:
But do geniuses need to be assholes?
No. No they don't.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Maybe it's only the inventors. Da Vinci, Edison and Jobs fit that bill. Deep thinkers and pure artists are pretty different. >> ^peggedbea:

I'm pretty sure kurt vonnegut was at least reasonably kind. He wrote so many books about the value of human kindness.
crispin glover is also unabashedly sensitive and kind and contains all the charm of someone who is not at all charming until they're speaking about something they love. i guess you could argue that he is not a genius, but then i would just tell you to attend a viewing for one of his insane art house films and stick around for the three hour Q&A he'll host when it's finished. genius.
oh i bet neil degrasse tyson is only slightly prickish, and only in the kindest most charming of ways.
>> ^dag:
Just as a thought experiment - can you name one who was well thought of as an all-around nice guy? Edison was an asshole. I've heard that Da Vinci was a real prick.>> ^quantumushroom:
But do geniuses need to be assholes?
No. No they don't.

I'm pretty sure kurt vonnegut was at least reasonably kind. He wrote so many books about the value of human kindness.

crispin glover is also unabashedly sensitive and kind and contains all the charm of someone who is not at all charming until they're speaking about something they love. i guess you could argue that he is not a genius, but then i would just tell you to attend a viewing for one of his insane art house films and stick around for the three hour Q&A he'll host when it's finished. genius.

oh i bet neil degrasse tyson is only slightly prickish, and only in the kindest most charming of ways.

>> ^dag:

Just as a thought experiment - can you name one who was well thought of as an all-around nice guy? Edison was an asshole. I've heard that Da Vinci was a real prick.>> ^quantumushroom:
But do geniuses need to be assholes?
No. No they don't.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Just as a thought experiment - can you name one who was well thought of as an all-around nice guy? Edison was an asshole. I've heard that Da Vinci was a real prick.>> ^quantumushroom:

But do geniuses need to be assholes?
No. No they don't.

@NetRunner Ya, because the real objective of the wall isn't about government size, to them, but about some other, for whatever reason, elevated core ideal. It is odd, and inconsistent, and pretty much impossible to nail down. The basket of ideas people draw from to make decisions is pretty troublesome when trying to make a system that both works and is consistent. This problem of idea interchange is at the heart of the thought experiment I am devising for my new middle out approach to a government. I am starting around the idea of what a human needs to be a human, and working out from there. Already, I note that families and friends are a more powerful, and legitimate force in life than a government of distant strangers. How to leverage that force? How to make it not utter chaos? How to avoid powerplay and gaming, I'll get back to you in 2 years on that

I have had the thought experiment that representative democracy is like outsourcing your opinion. Don't have a better way, mind you, but the entropy of letting someone else care for you seems to be the mess we are in now. Taking to the streets also doesn't really seem to present solutions either, though. I have been to a couple of "rallies" now, and they seem to be for people who like being seen instead of people who like to devise solutions. Rallies seem to be for emotions rather than solutions.