I agree. There are folks that think God/gods exists and those that don’t think God/gods exists. That was my point (or jest).
Them too. All are welcome. All are welcome.
I think of our lives being less like ‘fate’ and more like a really huge BIOWARE game, there is a beginning and an eventual end; but the choices you make along the way determine who will join you along your journey and what the eventual ending will be.
A more spiritual and less video game response would be…
Sure I do believe that there is a ‘soul-mate’ out there for each of us, but because we have free will we do not always follow the ‘optimal’ path that has been laid out for us. And so many never meet them, but that does not mean that there are not many other good matches out there, or that someone who does not follow the ‘path’ cannot live a happy or contented life.
Sometimes I used to view life as a cross country drive. Sure there are signs to guide you, and even a nagging GPS. But we all have the free will to turn off of the interstate anywhere we wish and explore the world and choose our own route. It may not have as smooth a road, there may be traffic, and we may have a few accidents along the way. But we will all reach our destinations in our own unique and personal way.
LOL; and if you are of the reincarnation crowd… We will keep doing it over and over again until we get it right! 
Enough metaphysics, time to read or watch Netflix, good night all. 
Please be advised,
Australians do NOT drink Fosters!! That, Sirs and Madams, is an evil myth construed by the Gods of marketing to sell beer to other colonials and the mother country that we antipodeans wouldn’t touch if it were poured by the buxomest barmaid on the face of the planet.
That is all I shall say on that topic, whilst I open another Coopers Sparkling Ale…nectar of the Gods…hic…
Now that the big issues are dealt with ;), I am pretty excited about a new Blade Runner movie making an appearance. There really is so much in that “world” to work with. So many dropped references… “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate”…Just to start. Wouldn’t even need to involve the Deckard character at all. I’m thinking Replicants waking up to themselves and making the journey to Earth, for starters. Be really interesting to see what they do with the BR name!
Gaf
Without taking sides in the debate, in the hilarious “Naked Pictures of Famous of People,” Jon Stewart wrote as Karl Marx, “Religion is the opiate of the people, and who couldn’t use a little opiate every now and again?”
I really liked Coopers Ale while I was in Australia. Tried both the dark and the light ale at The Wellington in North Adelaide. Yum!
I’ve really enjoyed this arc, and wanted to add that Bender’s Big Score is also a pretty fun time travel movie.
I don’t want to start a lot of contention, but wanted to address the subject of Calvinism and election. The basic idea is that people are so corrupt that they have the inability to seek God on their own without his intervention, and therefore he elects their salvation. The performing of works/deeds is not to ensure election (since we have no ability to affect that), but as an expression of thanks. There are some finer details involved, and it does not mean that everything has been determined for us (ie we are still responsible for our actions). There is still a pretty strong contingent of “calvinists” in the Presbyterian/Reformed tradition, and has been on the rise in recent years.
All in all, enjoyed the cast. Thinking back through some things that I’d like to have changed in my past, I’m pretty sure my life would have been vastly different if I could have a do-over. I’m actually pretty glad I don’t have this as an option, as I’m sure I’d manage to screw some things up;)
Audra, those Zork-style text games are known as “Interactive Fiction” these days. The BaF archive has a ton of them, including various contest winners.
Getting back to discussing history, there were comments about giving Balloons to the Romans, but you could use a ballista or a catapult to shoot it down. Balloons were used for observation in the Amreican Civil war and on the Western Front during WWI. Regular artillery wasn’t that effective against the balloons, you needed another flying machine to shoot them down. So I’m not worried about the Romans shooting one down.
Great Show so far. I’m in the middle and find the morality/ethics of time travel a very important topic, especially how much it might effect the course of history. Have to think back to this funny Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode where Homer traveled back in time a lot of times and how it affected (No BEER??!!! :eek:) the future.
Here are some more classic time travel moments:
http://www.ugo.com/movies/the-simpsons-homers-toaster-takes-him-back-in-time
So far I had TWO hivemind moments with Sean: In his pause when he talked about who should better not be the director of the new Blade Runner, I thot: “MichaelBay, MichaelBay, MichelBay”.
And when Chuck mentioned KFC, I also thot about the FastFood-Chain for a second before my mind could translate the acronym.
As I asked on Twitter, wouldn’t Charlie Sheen make a great end-of-life Replicant for Blade Runner 2?
http://twitter.com/#!/ShooterGWC/status/45951317742600192
~Shooter Out
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… AFLAC slips and fliers down at the studio where we used to film the show. I’ve watched tiger blood bleed from the my hands near the Studio Gate… all those things and more, like awesomeness lost in the rain. Time to win.”
Eeeexcellent… Another GWC’er of discerning taste…
I have to agree with 'talos, although not necessarily in the way he means it. Atheism takes something huge purely on faith: that human senses and logic can determine the absolute lack of a supernatural entity. It takes the blind faith away from the unseen and puts it squarely on one’s own ability to deny the existence of the unseen. IMO, only agnosticism is really the only “belief” system that can be undeniably not a religion, as it’s based entirely on the notion that human beings just can’t know the objective truth of reality with our limited minds and tools.
So you’re both wrong. Bow before The One True Faith!
Not believing something that has zero evidence takes a leap of faith? Reeeeeeeeeeeeeally
That’s what “supernatural” means: outside of nature. How can you scientifically analyze anything that exists outside of time and space? The speed of light and the age of the universe limits how far into space we can see, so how can we really be sure what’s beyond that limit? We make assumptions, admittedly using rationality and scientific methods, but they’re assumptions, all the same. And an assumption, by any other name, is a leap of faith.
The ‘a’ beginning means ‘lack of’. I have a lack of religion, I am a-theistic. It’s as much a religion as baldness is a hairstyle, or “not collecting stamps” is a hobby.
Yes, the “a-” means “lack of”, but the “-the-” means god, not religion. It’s the belief in the lack of a god. Atheism, by its very nature, in a belief in one’s own intellect being the determining factor in understanding the objective reality or lack thereof of all existence. If that’s not a huge leap of faith, I don’t know what is.
Agnosticism, OTOH, essentially means not knowing. It’s an acceptance of one’s own limitations to understand things on a cosmic scale. Agnostics may firmly believe in God or gods — or just as firmly not — but that’s secondary to the certain knowledge that we really can’t know for sure either way.
It’s not one owns intellect though it’s the collective intellect of mankind.
Which is still finite. And considering that that “collective intellect” has several billion different answers to these sorts of question, how “collective” is it really?
Is baldness a hairstyle?