mitchellmckain

I posted the following in response a very different topic, but I did not receive any comments. So I thought it would be good to make it the focus of a new topic. So what are your thoughts about where evolution is taking the human race? When you look at the human body where are the X-men? By forming a community of cells, we have allowed some cells to evolve fantastic specialized abilities that could not exist if they had to survive on their own. The neuron is a great example. I believe that the liberation from the need to satisfy the requirements for individual survival is a key stimulus for the next stage of evolution. In this case, where are the true X-men in today's humanity? Are they not those we call handicapped? Do not those who are blind develop their senses and abilities in ways that other people do not. I saw this special on TV this week about people with Williams syndrome, and in addition to physical difficulties they also had above average abilities in other areas like sociability, hearing and music. As our society learns to accomodate and provide active social roles for the handicapped are we not changing the rules of evolution. Could we be creating the conditions for the next stage of human evolution where we will see the real X-men of our future.

All this is useful info, but....Won't the chmod and blank index.html block my own easy access too? Does the 'no indexing' just block the web crawlers or does it just mean you cannot see the directory contents of the subdirectory?The idea is to have a subdirectory only I know about so I can easily call it up on the web and as long as no one else knows the name of the subdir they cannot get to it. So I guess I just need to block the web crawlers since apparently (if I understand you) the index.html blocks public access to the directory listing of the public_html directory. So no one can find out the name of the subdirectory if they do not know it already, right?how do the webcrawlers find it?

I know that subdirectories in public_html are accessible to the public on the web if you know their name (the name of the subdirectory). The question is whether there is any easy way to get at them if you do not know their name. Files in these subdirectories are conveniently accessible to you on the web, but how secure are they? Do web crawlers find them and make them accessible to a search even if they contain no html files?

The inability to edit posts is fustrating sometimes. The following quote are corrected sentences in my previous post.

The idea of some people being literalists is a myth. Everyone interprets. Everyone. The real question is how seriously do people take the Bible and what is their interpretive key. The people who take the Bible most seriously take their interpretive key from the Bible itself. The largest group that do this are what I call the Pauline consensus. These take their interpretive key from the writings of Paul. Since these writings are particualarly clear they form a basis of interpretation which a very large group of christians from many denominations can agree upon. Now it is true that these writings have very little to contribute when it comes to the issue of evolution versus creationism so the position of different people in this Pauline consensus will tend to vary. They can be divided in to two camps those who still adhere somewhat to protestant liberalism and those who are fundamentalist reactionaries. Of these two the fundamentalist reactionaries take the Bible far more seriously. They are reacting against the philosophical impact of evolution and against historical and literary criticisms of the Bible, precisely because these effectively reduce the Bible to the status of a fairy tale. They are not insane, they are rebeling against what they perceive to be the tyrrany of academia. Anyway, their problem is not literalism but an outright rejection of evolution itself. The essence of protestant liberalism, on the other hand, is to find new meaning for the scriptures within the changing context of modern life. It tries reconcile the christian belief system to the discoveries of modern academia. Evolution has made this position nearly untenable. And the reason is that evolutionary philosophy sucks the life out of christianity at the roots. It makes a serious attitude toward the bible rather difficult. The root motivation for chritian belief fades considerably. I see much to admire in both traditions. I love the vibrant and living faith of the fundamentalist reactionaries and I like the open minded thoughtfulness of protestant liberals. I believe that evolution is the knife that divides them by cutting christianity from academia. I believe that this division directly results from a mechanistic interpretation of evolution that just as blindly dogmatic as fundamentalism. I think that this mechanistic interpretation of evolution, itself arises from fundamental ignorance shared by evolutionist and creationist alike. It is an ignorance about what it means to be alive. I think that that if this were understood then the absurdity of both positions would be apparent. For example, consder the stacks of bright red tomatoes in your local grocery store. Were they created or did they evolve? The creationist points to their bright red color and pefect size and shape and says that clearly these tomatoes were manufactured according to the careful blueprints of a talented engineer. The evolutionist claims that these tomatoes are product of natural law and the end result of a long history of competition between individuals for scarce resources. Both positions are absurd. The tomatoes are a fruit of living organisms. They are not manufactured; they grow by themselves but not in a vacuum. They interact with an are reponsive to an environment that includes farmers and geneticists. Without the farmers and geneticists the tomatoes would not be what they are. They would they exist at all. They are created but there are no blueprints. Live all living things, the tomatoes are both responsible and responsive. Take another example: engineers. Are engineers created or do they evolve? They make the effort that makes them what they are, so you could say they create themselves, and yet do they not owe a debt of gratitude to teachers, parents and authors who made it all possible? The traditional vision of God as the great watchmaker is fundamentally flawed because watches are not alive, but we are.

This is a perfect example of how I think this conflict has reached the status of war, where no one is looking for compromise. This situation is created by fear. I think compromise is essential and I can see the logical equivalence with freedom of religion, but will I be able to vote that way? My difficulties are nothing compared to those for many Americans who will not be able to accept the equivalence of Gay rights and freedom of religion. We desperately need a middle groung on issues like abortion and gay rights, before people elect a dangerous maniac for president who uses these issues for a hidden agenda. Wait, maybe that has already happened.

You are mostly right about that. I was raised in an extremely liberal family and became a Christian on my own. So while I understand and sympathize with both viewpoints, it is the Christian viewpoint that I defend most. It is first and foremost a sexual activity. People can have all sorts of experiences and try different things but that does not define them. From there it can become a choice or a habit. Calling it is a disease or genetic is pollitically motivated. Calling it genetic lays the foundation for gay rights equal with race and sex. On the other hand it occurs to me that as an activity it might have a claim to equal footing with religious freedom. This compromise intrigues me the more I think of it. Religion is now prohibited in the same places where I think homosexuality is inappropriate. It sounds kind of funny but I kind of understand what you mean when say we are all inherently bisexual. Most people would say that we are inherently heterosexual for obvious reasons. I think the body chemistry is inherently heterosexual but the human mind is more powerful than the chemistry and so I think it is the good or bad experiences we have that really makes the difference by pulling us or pushing us one way or another (or neither). I have to agree with the county council. But according the the compromise I have suggested above, perhaps we should ask whether this council has the same policy regarding expressions of religion.

I think you do not get a lot of what I am saying. The war I am talking about is a war of ideas where the possibility of compromise is becoming nonexistent. Our system of governement cannot exist without compromise. Without it we will swing back and forth between extremes which most people cannot live with. The increasingly anti- democratic methods of political parties like geryandering and the election of a barely sentient president is a perfect example of this. We are in a right wing swing that scares me. You misunderstand me completely. I have a friend in California who was denied an engineering simply because he made a comment in a required public class that he did not think that it has been proven the homosexuals are genetically predisposed. It was not even a matter of following public policy. He was denied his livelihood because his beliefs did not conform to this politically dominated public program. Ego? Give me break. Phobias are caused by bad experiences. When we are talking about the experience of being prey, this has nothing to do with men and women who try so hard to make themselves attractive in order to get what they want. The experience of being prey is one of being targeted by what could be called sexual harassment. And well yes, I have managed to avoid women like you describe, and my only bad experiences were of the other kind. Look I think people should pretty much mind their own business. I think it is sad that our society has become so uptight about displays of affection for fear of sexual interpretations. But there are places for open sexuality, because participation should be voluntary. And there are place where open sexuality is not appropriate (like in schools and workplace) because the question of voluntary participation becomes confused. For example, I do not think it is appropriate for a teacher to tell his or her students that he or she is homosexual. I think the only possible purpose for doing so is make the teachers beliefs about sexuality a part of a program for social engineering. I can sympathize for some very valid reasons for it, because of the history of hate crimes against homosexuals. You are quite right that my grudge is with liberal activists. But a change of public policy is what will give them the power I fear and oppose. And it has everything to do with open sexuality and preferences. It is their obsession with open sexuality and preferences that I do not want forced down my thoat.

Well, what I was talking about was physics and I don't believe that anything about spirits or life after death can be found in phenomena of physics. All physics really does is describe the mathematical relationship between measurable quantities. I don't think this comes close to describing the totality if existence as we experience it. So you might say that I believe there are physical phenomena that can be described, measured and often predicted by the methods of physics and there are non-physical phenomena that cannot. Here is an analogy. The physical description of the world is like a tv display, which is a three dimensional array of dots (one dimension being time). And the non-physical phenomena exists in between these dots which the tv does not display, but which we experience in the way we connect the dots with meaning and purpose. Now many people argue that their is nothing between the dots and all the meaning and purpose we see is just in our heads. The tv screen will never prove otherwise. But to me this kind of thinking is a dead end which goes no where, to no purpose, and is without meaning. But maybe what you are seeing (when you talk of spirits) in the physics, is exactly what I see and that is an endless sea of gaps between to dots, in which there is complete freedom to believe (or not) in the non-physical aspects of existence, however, we choose.

Wow, what a loaded topic! Physics, chemistry, and biology. Actually nothing is so simple, every rule has exceptions and works only under certain conditions. Carbon atoms remain carbon atoms as long nuclear reactions do not come into play. 99.99999...% of the time (especially in creation of a baby) this hold true. But there is the occasional cossmic ray that will create or destroy a carbon atom, not to mention the rare carbon 14 which will occasionally decay into nitrogen. The rare events described above also involve the change of a small amount of mass into energy or energy into mass. It is the meaning of the equation E=mc^2, that mass can be converted into an equivalent amount of energy and visa versa. Total conversion of mass into energy occurs when matter meets antimatter. There is an interesting article in July issue of Scientific American, "The Mysteries of Mass" which talks about how mass is the product of something called a Higg's field or Higg's boson. In fact theories of cosmology say that all the mass in the universe is a small remnant left from the annihilation of the matter and antimatter first created by the Higgs field in the big bang. So what about energy. Energy is never created or destroyed right? Well, mostly. That is over the long run yes. But in very short periods of time, no. In fact, the shorter the period of time in question, the greater the quantity of energy that may not be accounted for. In very short periods matter and antimatter may appear then annihilate in perfect vacuum which contains no energy at all. These are called virtual particles. The work which made physicist Stephen Hawking famous, was a consequence of this. He discovered that black holes radiate energy. This is now called Hawking radiation. The idea is that the intense gravitational differential around a black hole will rip apart these matter-antimatter pairs of particles that constantly form in empty space so that one member of the pair goes into the black hole while the other escapes, preventing the pair from annihilating and disappearing back into nothingness. The black hole pays for this by losing the energy which escapes so in the long run no energy is created.

My only disatisfaction with google is that it is not finding my site. It finds my old university site that I no longer have access to (with its outdated info and offerings) but not the new one at Xisto. And I cannot see a reason why.Question: Will getting my own domain name help google to find it?

Asking for a recommendation like this without giving any kind of parameters makes it quite a shot in the dark.If you want to play with other people, starcraft is one of the best strategy games ever made. It has a great campaign editor with great flexiblity.Age of Empires and the Star wars version Galactic Battlegrounds is prettly good. It has a greater variety in the kind of resources you collect and in the different ways you can win. But its campaign editor is nowhere near as good and the different factions you can play have only minor differences between them compared to starcraft.Another great old strategy game that is really unique is Netstorm, but this may be a bit difficult to get a hold of.Command and Conquer or its upgrade Red Alert is certainly an old classic and that would be the way to go if you prefer modern convential warfare to science ficition, aliens and ancient warfare.For single play I like Pax Imperia a lot for the space arena and the ability to design your own races. Alpha Centauri is another strategy game that I have enjoyed a lot in single play but since it is turn based I cannot recommend it for multiplayer.

This is easy yet interesting enough to be a good programming challenge. I am already thinking about what kind of algorithm is needed. If I think up one I may code it. Lol. Ok I wrote a quick one. I don't solve these puzzles so I don't know if it is adequate Anyway check it out. Unfortunately my Xisto website is not letting me ftp so I put it on http://www.ssh101.com/ at the bottom of the page you will see Download ace file 867KB: sudoku.ace

I think that pokemon was a great game for many reasons. I got it for my kids though I played it myself to make a game we could play together. I enjoyed the game myself. I had to stop playing because it gave me a bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome. I particularly liked this game as a parent because reading was an important part of the game. I hate video games because they are too mindless.I understand why they try to keep milking this great idea for all they can get but its the great new ideas which will always rule the day.Oh the card game was terrible, but my kids still watch the tv show. The tv show always was a bit childish but still infinitely better than Yuhgio or however you spell it. I don't know about the game but this tv show with players anouncing their strategies is absurd. That is not how games are played.

My conscience is bothering me to much about that last post. I must say that I am quite ashamed. I think I insulted a lot of decent people by suggesting that an idiot like Bush could handle cleaning toilets.

John Kerry makes me want to vomit, but I would rather vote for the vomit than Bush. I don't know a lot about Nader but I would have voted for him if it wasn't so important to vote against Bush. So I voted for Kerry. I must say that Bush made Kerry look quite intellegent in that TV debate. Well Bush would have made an Baboon look good in a debate.What's wrong with Bush? Look I don't like being an intellectual snob, and I firmly believe that everyone is smart in their own way. But someone smart at cleaning toilets should stick to it and not pretend he is good at running the country. I think having someone this stupid in the presidency is a bad idea, but if that was all I wouldn't be nearly so appalled. I think Bush or the people behind him are criminals and con men, out to make a buck at the expense of everyone else. His conspiracy with the bin Laden family to make a power grab in the middle east is just sickening. He got his oil pipeline in Afganistan and I guess He and his people thought they needed a puppet that was more easy to control in Iraq. But what do you expect, his father got away with it, why not the son.

Gosh you don't have to tell me it is not unbreakable, its just the first idea I thought of that I could implement. My first idea was to get location on disk but then realized that one disk defrag would render it inoperable. I was looking for ideas and from what you have said you don't think there really is anything better other than to make the code which computes the comparison number difficult to trace. In any case, I am realistic. The purpose of copy protection is like the lock on your front door, to discourage the casual intruder. I did not spend a lot of time making my comparison number calculation difficult to trace, so maybe I will discourage the cracker with boredom.

Calvary Chapel is the church I stopped going to over my dissatisfaction with their political leanings. I know they are only human, but I cannot help being disappointed. I love the study of religion, for I think it is vital part of understanding people. A couple of my favorites are Hassidic Judaism and the Quakers (as they were a long time ago). One of the things I like to see most in a religion is melding of conservative and liberal contrasts. In the case of Hassidicism it the return to strict lifestyle combined with a desire to experience joy in one's relationship with God. In the Quaker's it was strong committment to honesty and righteous lifestyle with the radical belief in the divine spark living within each of us. I thought I saw a little of this kind of melding in Calvary Chapel between one of the most serious attitudes towards the study of the bible I have ever seen with the commitment to break out of cultural stereotypes (take their "bikers for christ" for example). Ah well, I still love their style of worship and I will probably go back as soon as my disgust cools a little or the political situation changes.

I stopped going to my church over this political situation. It (the bush) sickens me. I do know that a lot of the religious right is pro Israel and consequently anti - Islam to some degree. Whether that plays a role in this I do not know. I think it may be the old familiar self - righteousness rearing its head again, thinking that, just because Bush says he is born again, he must be on God's side. Anyway I think they are blind. I suspect that issues like abortion and gay marriage are what they really care about, but I really don't know anymore. Frankly I think this war is just Bush fortune hunting abroad, since his economic ventures in the states did not fare too well. What I would give for a decent conservative like Gore right now.

First I would like to point out that the topic "What do you believe" and "What is your religion" do not mean the same thing despite the first post by Magesictreefrog who request the latter duplicating latter thread. Religion is both a lot more than and a lot less than what you believe. Religion may include some beliefs, but more important aspects include choices, lifestyle and identity. The beliefs are not always clearly distinct from these others and looking for reasons are like looking for the reasons for love. Beliefs in religion are often not based on reason but are accepted on faith like the axioms upon which mathematics is built. To clarify the last of these aspects of religion mentioned above, identity, consider your astrological sign. I am a Gemini. Does this mean that I believe that astrology can predict my future? No. I believe that the most important role of astrology is what I call a personality game. A personality game is a healthy psychological activity in which we look at ourselves and think about who we are and what we are like. When I call myself a Gemini, I am not putting myself in a box so that people can look it up in book and by this know who I am. I am of course identifying myself only with certain aspects of the usual descriptions of the Gemini. And it has less to do with accuracy than it does just giving me a way to think about myself. For most people there are a lot of things that we believe that have nothing to do with our religion. Besides political issues there is philosophy, which often asks many questions that are not a part of religion. For me in particular beliefs have very little to do with my religious faith and much more to do with science and philosophy. As for my religion I will quote the other thread. To truly answer the question of "What I believe" would take a long time. But I could say that I am an existentialist like Kierkegaard and Albert Camus, and a pragmatist like Charles Sanders Pierce. But my most cherished beliefs are in the areas of metaphysics and especially the philosophy of mind. For both of these a draw a great deal of implications from physics, especially quantum physics and chaotic dynamics. For me the most important (or interesting) question is: what does it mean to be alive? I think that living is a type of process or activity which is self organizing. A living organism constantly takes in material or information from its environment to build, repair and reinforce its own dynamic structure. Since changes in the environment force the organism to change its structure or die, living organisms must choose, adapt, and learn. I believe that everything that makes us human, intellegence, communication, creativity, consciousness, and feelings are simply our own ways of experiencing these basic characteristics which all living organisms possess. I believe that this life activity is a quantifiable process in terms of volume of input, complexity of structure, and adaptability. I think this means that we can say that a human being is more alive than a bug because of these quantifiable differences but that the human being is not qualitatively different from the bug. The bug is also intellegent, communicates, is creative, is conscious and has feelings in it own way, only on a much smaller and slower scale, which is actually measurable. I think that the human mind is (at least potentially) a living organism in its own right, building and maintaining its structure from the sensory input of the human body. I think that most animals (and possibly some human beings) do not have a mind, in the sense that the activity of information processing in their brains do not constitute a living organism in its own right. The key point is independence from the environment, for when an organism is dominated by environmental changes, it is no longer alive. We see something as alive when it does things for its own reasons and not simply because it is made to do so by its environment. The environment of the human mind is the human body with all its hormones and other chemicals and if these dominate the activities of the mind then it is not alive but dead.

Yes everything is working now. Great!

I received an email that everything was back up and running but my website is still not there and it is not accessible by ftp either.http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

I looked up some some of the stuff on the internet. Reading his essay "Freedom and Truth" http://www.ewtn.com/library/THEOLOGY/TRUEFREE.htm And found nothing offensive. So the accusation that this "appeared in the book 1848 - Erbe und Auftrag, published by AULA, a far right, neo-Nazi publishing house which openly denies the holocaust" is kind of like saying a man must be gay because he shook hands with one once. It is absurd. Oh yes these people that deny the holocaust sicken me too. It is vital that we learn from history. But the lesson is about human beings and what they are capable of. Yes the pope is a Nazi and I don't think he would deny it. But I am also a nazi and so are you, because the nazis are an example of what human beings are like. We all have this terrible habit of villifying other people and denying what is good and valuable in their lives by labeling them. We do this for much the same reasons that the people, who are denying the holocaust, are doing what they do. We make other people villians so we can believe that we are good. We don't want to accept the fact that the ugliness, we see in other people, is right there beneath the surface of our own skins. When we tell the tale of who we are, we play down the mean and viscious thing we have done to paint a rosier picture. It is a lie. So when I see people calling the pope a "nazi pope", I hear voice of Hitler awakened from his grave. When I see anti-catholic literature, I smell the smoke of burning human flesh from the ovens of Auswitch. But to be honest, I must look down at my own hands with horror.

I have been avoiding this topic because it is painful. I think this issue is tearing our country apart. I voted for Kerry but I didn't like him and I am not surprised he lost for one simple reason: he was from Massachusettes.Now I don't think that homosexuality is any worse than hetersexuality. But, I think they both bad. I suppose I am a little homophobic, because I don't like being prey. But on they other hand, I don't like the idea of women being prey either, which is why I think heterosexuality is just as bad. I am offended by the whole idea of sexual preference, as if we were talking about our favorite flavor of ice cream. Sexuality is a difficult aspect of human life, it involves physical, psychological and social desires, needs and functions. But I think it is absolutely essential that the social function be dominant. The reason is that the object sexual desire is a human being, and so when personal reasons dominate (whether physical or psychological), it becomes the moral equivalent of canibalism. Public homosexuality is no more appropriate than public heterosexuality. Just like pornography both should be considered a type of sexual harrassment in both school and workplace. I don't see the need for people publicly demanding acceptance as homosexuals any more than there is the need for people to publicly demand acceptance for how they have sex with their husband or wife.From an objective point of view I see the need for some sexuality neutral ways of handling significant others in many rules and regulations. I think that any two or more people should be able call themselves a family and should have a way of getting legal recognition and rights as such.However, objectivity is no longer an option. The liberal right and gay right activists have gone too far. Horror stories from friends in california have made me realize that that these groups want nothing less than "thought police" to tell us what we must believe. In fighting for gay rights, they are demanding equal status for sexual preference with race and sex. They demand that we accept their belief that they are born different and have choice in being what they are. These demands are offensive and unacceptible and they always will be. I will NEVER accept anyone telling me what I must believe.The result is nothing less than war. Recently there was an initiative in utah against homosexual rights and while from an objective point of view, it was bad legislation, I still voted for it. As I said it is war. To hell their rights. My rights take precedent. I am afraid we are in for some dark times ahead.

You are careful not to say whether this is a good thing or not. Evolutionism would seem to suggest that this is a bad thing. I think that the social darwinism of the last and early part of this century which was accepted so readily by academia (even in many seminaries) is largely responsible for the reactionism of the the christian right which no longer trusts in the academic sciences and have even begun to build a counter science to fight back. As a christian I understand the motives, but as a scientist this appalls me. The same kind of reactionism has led to America voting for the stupidest candidate calling himself a christian that they could find. As much as I hate and fear what has happened. I also think it is only natural. Academia and other "non-religious" aspects of our society have been too hostile to the dominant religious viewpoint of this country. This country was built by compromise and understanding between widely different viewpoints and this gaping rift between viewpoints is quite capable of destroying it. What is happening to our country reminds me of what happened in Germany when people elected an insane person named Hitler to power in their country.