Supernatural Events

There might be non-supernatural explanations for Jesus, I do not know. But I do know that a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from miracles (I call this "Clarke's Third Law as modified by Deep Thought"). So in the numerators vs demoninators fallacy there are two points I'd like to make:

1. If thing A happens to one and all things "not A" are a lot more common than thing A then I agree it doesn't mean that thing A had to happen but please take note of all the people that thing A did not happen to and think about it

2. If thing A appears miraculous then it might still not be supernatural by Clarke's Third Law as Modified by Deep Thought

This is what Richard Feynman had to say:

Once we were talking about the supernatural and the following anecdote involving his (Feynman's) first wife Arline came up. Arline had tuberculosis and was confined to a hospital while Feynman was at Los Alamos. Next to her bed was an old clock. Arline told Feynman that the clock was a symbol of the time that they had together and that he should always remember that. Always look at the clock to remember the time we have together, she said. The day that Arline died in the hospital, Feynman was given a note from the nurse that indicated the time of death. Feynman noted that the clock had stopped at exactly that time. It was as the clock, which had been a symbol of their time together, had stopped at the moment of her death. Did you make a connection? I asked NO! NOT FOR A SECOND! I immediately began to think how this could have happened. And I realized that the clock was old and was always breaking. That the clock probably stopped some time before and the nurse coming in to the room to record the time of death would have looked at the clock and jotted down the time from that. I never made any supernatural connection, not even for a second. I just wanted to figure out how it happened.

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Related true story: in 1992 a manager of mine died due to cancer. I never knew him very well and we didn't get on too good either. One morning I got up, and there really was an awful smell in my London flat (worse than usual :-), like a rat had died or something - I recall opening all of the windows to try to get the smell out, the windows had been closed all night, the fresh air cleared things up. It was really strange. At Waterloo station I looked at my wrist watch for the first time that day and I noticed that it had stopped the previous evening at 00:03, which was odd as it had never stopped before. So I corrected it to 07:30 or so and it never stopped again, for years after that. When I got to work I found out that the manager, who had been ill had died in the night. A friend of mine, who was friends with the manager, found out that written on the hospital death certificate was time of death 00:03. The two events, "smell of death" plus "watch stopping" plus I guess the fact that this guy hated me (the young thrusting brat I was back then) - gave me pause for thought.

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I guess I am uncomplimentary when folks say "it's the devil who is trying to cast doubt in your mind about whether religion X is true" because that is exactly what extreme Muslims say has
happened to us infidels, that we have fallen under the spell of the devil. It's hard to kill yourself by flying an aircraft into someone, but I imagine it's a whole lot easier if you think you're crashing an aircraft into someone who is in the employ of Satan. Likewise, it might be easier to treat others in a way that you would not like to treated, if you think that other is working for the enemy, either knowingly or not. So I think this is very dangerous and divise thinking.

Whenever I hear someone say that stuff I run for this hills, I have a right to believe in Christianity or not (and take any consequences to boot), I don't believe that the devil has got anything to do with it. I guess if it says in The Bible that the devil does this to ordinary humans then I don't believe it, I know the devil tried it on with Jesus but does The Bible say he associates with normal humans? Or is this a popularist hollywood view of Satan?

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I wonder if there's an inverse relationship between intelligence and the ability to be content and caring for each other? The more we know, the more we know to be selfish and protective of our stuff? I don't know ... just a thought.

And a very interesting one. I said in a previous post that God wants us to be innocent shiny people - having NOT eaten from the tree of knowledge. However, this is against the learning I am saying we need to undertake to achieve a global implementation of The Golden Rule. Is there such a thing as emotional intelligence perhaps? Perhaps we need to be simple in emotion but intelligent in other aspects, or the other way around? Your thoughts on this are appreciated as it's an important point against The Golden Rule.

The problem is: if we are not intelligent in other aspects then we will not build a technology defence against the wormwood (the stone that will make extinct much of life on Earth and set us humans back technologically) - and all the wormwoods that hit us on average every 30,000 years or so all the way out to 6 billion (US) years in the future. At that distant time we better be off the Earth as the limb of the Sun is expected to expand to the orbit of Mars, engulfing and destroying the Earth in the process.

We could pray to be saved from these things, but that's like praying for hurricanes and tsunamis not to happen - these are natural events which seem to happen regardless of prayer. We need technology to survive as a species. Perhaps we should be like Bak'u in the Star Trek 9 movie (Insurrection) - simple village dwelling folk on the face of it, but with very advanced technology they hide, use of which is frowned upon by them, but they pull it out when necessary?

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There is a lot evidence stacking up that indicates (to me) that big climate changes are coming. It's funny though, the thing that worries me the most is a radio interview I heard with a very simple eskimo man - the eskimo was explaining (in a delightfull accent I might add) how the ice cap had receeded since 1969 to the present day, and how that impacted the lives of him and his family .. they have to travel further to cut holes in the ice etc. This particular man, who was ancient, blamed the loss of ice on the moon landings. He said they had caused an affront to some spiritual being or something.