sep 28 - 9pm
just to relieve the boredom, I'll write about the ufo/spirit/whatever stuff. I actually do have some opinions.
I think there are probably some UFOs out there, but "out there" is likely to be many (millions? tens of millions? hundreds of millions?) of light years away. It seems quite unlikely that there are many other planets with life that has developed sufficient technology to travel very far, and the real problem is the distances involved, and the fact that interstellar (and especially inter-galactic) travel takes practically forever (in terms of human lifetime) because of it. So if there are indeed little green men, they're probably somewhere very far away and we'll never see them, and they'll never see us.
Add to this the prodigious human imagination, and it's not hard for me to beleive that ALL ufo sightings and reports and whatnot are either hallucination or wishful thinking or mistaken identification or dreams or some other such thing. The numbers just aren't in favor of us ever meeting someone from another place. Even if the numbers are in favor of there actually having been quite a few other civilizations that have evolved over the past 13 billion years that the universe has been around, we just aren't gonna see them. And it's a shame, because life from another place is about the most interesting thing there would be to learn about!
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The concept of a "soul" or "spirit" is interesting, in that we can each have such different ideas of what it might be, yet use the same words to talk about it. As far as I can tell, we think using our minds, which are something that happens in our brains. Whatever is happening in our heads is a chemical/electrical process. It sure doesn't seem that way, but neuroscience has got a pretty good handle on what's going on in there, and the gray matter seems to be necessary and sufficient for this thing we call "consciousness".
But what about those qualities about other people, and even ourselves, that seem to be somehow "apart" from the mundane thinking? Is it really a separate thing, or is it just a large amount of information about the person? It seems to me that we do each have a soul, but there is no reason I can think of that it is anything other than mere information--what others know about us, how we behave, what we know, what we would do in different situations, what we've been through. And our souls do live on after we die! we can even call this a ghost--it's in the minds of those who know us now, and our behavior patterns and appearance and what we say and how we feel live on after we're gone.
This can all happen without resorting to the "supernatural". We may not understand it, but that doesn't mean it's beyond our understanding! although it seems to me that many people would like it to stay unexplained, then they can be more successful at selling whatever magic they are into. Religion has worked this way throughout human history, the priest or shaman has exclusive right to understanding the mysteries, and so they have the ultimate power over the rest of the people. With the advent of science, the power of these annointed few has diminished somewhat, but not nearly as much as you might expect--because many people seem to want the mystery!
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Is there a God? or are there many Gods? that's pretty hard to say, because we can't figure out just what a god is! apparently it's something that we can't observe, and so it might have any attributes we care to give it. And it turns out that if we look at the various religions that humans have developed over the past thousands of years we find an incredible variety of gods with quite different powers. Are all these people wrong about their god, except for one group? or is even that one group wrong? A common saying among atheists is "I just believe in one fewer god than you do". Think about it.
I notice that faith is highly valued among many people. I think faith is over-rated, and I won't have anything to do with it myself. I think that is a result of my honesty. I really want to know what's true and what's false, and it seems to me that holding any belief with faith, rules out the possibility of ever knowing if that belief is false. If I'm wrong about something, I want to know! don't you?
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So you can see, I have rather wierd views about the world. I happen to believe they're accurate, and if I'm wrong I do want to know. But I won't take it on faith that you're right, you will have to find a way to explain and demonstrate that your beliefs are accurate. And so far the only way I've seen to reliably discover what's really going on, is with science. The method is to always question what's going on, is there something affecting the experiment that we're not aware of, are we making assumptions we shouldn't, are we ignoring something that might be important? Can others repeat our experiment and get the same result? is our hypothesis testable? we can come up with all kinds of different explanations for a certain phenomenon, but without finding a way to test each one and observe what happens, we can't come to any confident conclusions.
The difference between science and religion is that religion works on faith, and science works by taking nothing for granted. Religion gives you the answers you start out with, while science gives you the answers that have been hidden away in nature awaiting discovery. I think that science has a lot more to offer the inquisitive mind, so I shun religion. Perhaps I'm an odd duck because I CAN shun religion....it seems many people cannot.
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