3 ms·

"Atomic nuclei consist of electrically positive protons and electrically neutral neutrons. These are held together by the strongest known fundamental force, cal

"Atomic nuclei consist of electrically positive protons and electrically neutral neutrons. These are held together by the strongest known fundamental force, called the strong force. The nucleus makes up much less than .01% of the volume of the atom, but typically contains more than 99.9% of the mass of the atom." [1] No need for the wave-particle duality. Not sure where the straw man is. Doesn't Buddhism use "karma" to justify slavery?, doesn't Hinduism use the caste system as in a MMORPG?, didn't Christians use Apostle Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, VI, 5-7 "Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh" to justify slavery?, doesn't Islam treat 50%+ of the world population as property (although women are viewed as property in most religions)? and so on. If I were to use the software of a robotic arm that sometimes does what I ask of it, but sometimes beats me to a pulp, I wouldn't call that software as well designed, and I would stop using it at all. In just the same manner, religions were badly designed, they are codifications of behaviour made by people who didn't even know they were on a planet after all, so it's understandable, pitiable in the final instance (and the modern religions are just ridiculous parodies, from Mormonism to the Unification Church, when not downright murderous cults, from Theosophists to NXIVM). I am not sorry to hurt your sensibilities, you are free to have whatever beliefs and religion you like, but just don't tell me about the Sky Daddy while using machines which were born from the collective sweat and genius of the humankind, machines for which most of their inventors would have been killed by various religions across times (putting aside that the bigotry risen from religion killed Alan Turing). No, there are no two ways or more of understanding reality. We can build for ourselves whatever framework we need to encompass all and everything (even if the final framework will be somewhat self-contradictory as in the wave-particle duality), from the femtosecond event happening in a hadron collider to the trillions and trillions of future years which await the universe. But it is us, humans, tailless primates, conscious agents, and our tools who are doing the understanding. Nothing more, nothing less. [1] https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsnuclei#:~:text=Atomic%20nuclei%20consist%20of%20electrically,the%20mass%20of%20the%20atom https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsnuclei#:~:text=At....

b800h 4y ago
Strong recommend: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/863971 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/863971
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
  No need, I have read David Bentley Hart's sources: Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac the Syrian [1], Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory Palamas †. Great thinkers, the "fathers", they really did a bang-up job merging Judaism and Greek Neoplatonism. Can't say you can't hear Plotinus' One every time Christians speak of God's Unity 3-in-1 and Filioque [2]. Lev Shestov's classical Athens and Jerusalem is a good summarization of the whole process. My absolute bang-up theologian is however Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, he/they really took Plotinus to the max: "God is not only the cause of all being, but also of all non-being.", "The Divine Names", Chapter IV, section 7. That Greek ouden, non-being, taken shamelessly from the thoughts of Anaxagoras and Parmenides. However, all these great Generative Pre-trained Transformer ramblings of the theologians (ChatGPT is the best theologian of all times, it can go on and on, till the gods come home) have nothing to do with the practice of religion. For all the books that I have read and hoarded, all the major religions, and some minor ones, would burn me at the stake, they are very jealous of each other. The fact of the matter remains: for the past 3-4,000 years, probably as a side effect of humans coming together in such large numbers (5,000 years ago, the city Uruk had 50-80,000 inhabitants, absolutely unimaginable how they lived), this mental parasite, this bug (as in software) of a "Beyond", probably a remnant from the hundreds of thousand of years of searching for food beyond that hill, has plagued everything about us: our behaviour, our mores, our concepts. And in more recent times, it has allowed for the most vile of us to control all of us, from the Borgias to the House of Saud, not forgetting the local pedophile priest. † I have also read Mr. Hart, of course, his best work is probably his thesis "Beauty, Violence, and Infinity: A Question Concerning Christian Rhetoric", all the core ideas are there: the atemporal fall, the salvation as free for all eschaton. [1] I particularly remember this quote from Isaac the Syrian: "There will be a time when even the word 'god' will be forgotten". In one of his Ascetical Homilies. [2] "The One is the absolute principle of all things, the ultimate ground of being, the transcendent source of all existence. It is the beginning and end of all things, the unchanging and eternal reality that underlies all that is mutable and transitory." (Enneads, V.3.1) The Enneads were written around the year 240, 400 years before Maximus the Confessor. [3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BF%E1%BD%90%CE%B4%CE%AD%CE%BD https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BF%E1%BD%90%CE%B4%CE%AD%C...

b800h 4y ago

Strong recommend: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/863971 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/863971

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
No need, I have read David Bentley Hart's sources: Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac the Syrian [1], Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory Palamas †. Great thinkers, the "fathers", they really did a bang-up job merging Judaism and Greek Neoplatonism. Can't say you can't hear Plotinus' One every time Christians speak of God's Unity 3-in-1 and Filioque [2]. Lev Shestov's classical Athens and Jerusalem is a good summarization of the whole process. My absolute bang-up theologian is however Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, he/they really took Plotinus to the max: "God is not only the cause of all being, but also of all non-being.", "The Divine Names", Chapter IV, section 7. That Greek ouden, non-being, taken shamelessly from the thoughts of Anaxagoras and Parmenides. However, all these great Generative Pre-trained Transformer ramblings of the theologians (ChatGPT is the best theologian of all times, it can go on and on, till the gods come home) have nothing to do with the practice of religion. For all the books that I have read and hoarded, all the major religions, and some minor ones, would burn me at the stake, they are very jealous of each other. The fact of the matter remains: for the past 3-4,000 years, probably as a side effect of humans coming together in such large numbers (5,000 years ago, the city Uruk had 50-80,000 inhabitants, absolutely unimaginable how they lived), this mental parasite, this bug (as in software) of a "Beyond", probably a remnant from the hundreds of thousand of years of searching for food beyond that hill, has plagued everything about us: our behaviour, our mores, our concepts. And in more recent times, it has allowed for the most vile of us to control all of us, from the Borgias to the House of Saud, not forgetting the local pedophile priest. † I have also read Mr. Hart, of course, his best work is probably his thesis "Beauty, Violence, and Infinity: A Question Concerning Christian Rhetoric", all the core ideas are there: the atemporal fall, the salvation as free for all eschaton. [1] I particularly remember this quote from Isaac the Syrian: "There will be a time when even the word 'god' will be forgotten". In one of his Ascetical Homilies. [2] "The One is the absolute principle of all things, the ultimate ground of being, the transcendent source of all existence. It is the beginning and end of all things, the unchanging and eternal reality that underlies all that is mutable and transitory." (Enneads, V.3.1) The Enneads were written around the year 240, 400 years before Maximus the Confessor. [3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BF%E1%BD%90%CE%B4%CE%AD%CE%BD https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BF%E1%BD%90%CE%B4%CE%AD%C...