Dreams and subliminal religious surveys
Jul. 14th, 2005 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
woodfaceI'm not entirely sure what my dream was about, but ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
perihawk had a pet spider that happily jumped on people and crawled in their breast pockets. It was a friendly spider and all, but it freaked me out and I spent the better part of dream running away from the lurking, hyper jumping spider.
Subliminal messages in spam? I get this spam email that somehow makes it into my inbox. It's a Chocolate Survey with the subject 'Hershey's Or Ghirardelli?' So I'm kinda amused and wonder what idiot would send that question to a belgian. I open the email and instead of finding anything in it about chocolate, all I see is a blank page. Until I realised there are greyish striped on the email. Frowning, I highlight the text and there's a very long message in it. The first part is about what appears to be departure times of ships, then followed by weather reports and then suddenly there's this weird email sort of message about God and science.
the Physics2005 conference in Warwick, U.K., alpha has indeed been on the rise. Murphy says the new measurement is 10 times more sensitive than the atomic clock experiment. You can read more about all that by visiting (post-)Dr. Murphy's page, and there you will also discover that his research is partially funded by... The John Templeton Foundation. We can't know, of course, why Sir John's outfit is putting up the money for (post-)Dr. Murphy's research. Based on what we do know, however, we can probably assume that somebody thinks that studying the possibility of changing universal constants will lead to some sort of evidence of God. Which, you know, I think is great. As long as the research is intriguing, and the experiments are rigorously performed, and so long as it's their own money and not mine, who the hell cares why the money is put up? And I'll tell you what, I'm in a hell of a lot better position, as an atheist, if they do prove God exists than a believer would be. I mean, then I could go, "Oh. Okay. What do you know? There's a God." The believers, on the other hand, would have a cataclysmic crisis of faith, which is to say they wouldn't have any faith at all anymore. How can you have faith in the existence of something that you already know exists? I'd stay away from the subject, were I them. But, hey, it's no skin off my nose. The horror for me would be if everything the most obnoxious, radically-right, fundamentalist, fire-and-brimstoner types say about God turns out to be true. You know, being a mortal, if my situation gets so god-awful I can't stand it anymore, I can at least kill myself and flee into the eternal peace of oblivion. If, however, I am immortal and I am faced with an eternal being that demands I love him no matter how despicably he behaves... well, where you going to go then? There's Hell, I guess, but from what I hear that ain't no picnic. You're looking at eternity, pal, either burning in Hell or sucking up to a right-wing nightmare. (For more on this, see: Michael Tolkin's The Rapture.) So, let me just say that if Sir John or his ilk do discover a God, I hope to Him He's the decent sort of Fellow a lot of decent people I know seem to believe in. Keep it up, Sir John. Keep funding that legitimate research. Of course the fan in me hopes that what you find is the Alien Civilization, but I could take a decent and truly loving God, in a pinch. See, here's the real evidence of Intelligent Design, in my opinion. We live in a culture where crackpot millionaires spend their own money methodically researching out-there questions, and maybe in the process they find answers that will take us to places we never dreamed of being able to go. Coming up with a culture like that takes some brains. Well, except I guess if we are going to be completely honest, we have to admit that the culture out of which Sir John springs wasn't really designed or anything. It just sort of, you know, evolved.
It's actually an interesting remark. But what is it doing in a spam email about chocolate? The next two messages are kinda odd and incomprehensible without knowing what they seem to be an answer to. The latter is about Iraq and the Australian and English troops.
Still, it doesn't answer my question. What is a religious debate doing in a chocolate survey? Where is the chocolate survey anyway? And why hassplash_the_cat seemingly stopped emailing me links to her webcam?
perihawk had a pet spider that happily jumped on people and crawled in their breast pockets. It was a friendly spider and all, but it freaked me out and I spent the better part of dream running away from the lurking, hyper jumping spider.Subliminal messages in spam? I get this spam email that somehow makes it into my inbox. It's a Chocolate Survey with the subject 'Hershey's Or Ghirardelli?' So I'm kinda amused and wonder what idiot would send that question to a belgian. I open the email and instead of finding anything in it about chocolate, all I see is a blank page. Until I realised there are greyish striped on the email. Frowning, I highlight the text and there's a very long message in it. The first part is about what appears to be departure times of ships, then followed by weather reports and then suddenly there's this weird email sort of message about God and science.
the Physics2005 conference in Warwick, U.K., alpha has indeed been on the rise. Murphy says the new measurement is 10 times more sensitive than the atomic clock experiment. You can read more about all that by visiting (post-)Dr. Murphy's page, and there you will also discover that his research is partially funded by... The John Templeton Foundation. We can't know, of course, why Sir John's outfit is putting up the money for (post-)Dr. Murphy's research. Based on what we do know, however, we can probably assume that somebody thinks that studying the possibility of changing universal constants will lead to some sort of evidence of God. Which, you know, I think is great. As long as the research is intriguing, and the experiments are rigorously performed, and so long as it's their own money and not mine, who the hell cares why the money is put up? And I'll tell you what, I'm in a hell of a lot better position, as an atheist, if they do prove God exists than a believer would be. I mean, then I could go, "Oh. Okay. What do you know? There's a God." The believers, on the other hand, would have a cataclysmic crisis of faith, which is to say they wouldn't have any faith at all anymore. How can you have faith in the existence of something that you already know exists? I'd stay away from the subject, were I them. But, hey, it's no skin off my nose. The horror for me would be if everything the most obnoxious, radically-right, fundamentalist, fire-and-brimstoner types say about God turns out to be true. You know, being a mortal, if my situation gets so god-awful I can't stand it anymore, I can at least kill myself and flee into the eternal peace of oblivion. If, however, I am immortal and I am faced with an eternal being that demands I love him no matter how despicably he behaves... well, where you going to go then? There's Hell, I guess, but from what I hear that ain't no picnic. You're looking at eternity, pal, either burning in Hell or sucking up to a right-wing nightmare. (For more on this, see: Michael Tolkin's The Rapture.) So, let me just say that if Sir John or his ilk do discover a God, I hope to Him He's the decent sort of Fellow a lot of decent people I know seem to believe in. Keep it up, Sir John. Keep funding that legitimate research. Of course the fan in me hopes that what you find is the Alien Civilization, but I could take a decent and truly loving God, in a pinch. See, here's the real evidence of Intelligent Design, in my opinion. We live in a culture where crackpot millionaires spend their own money methodically researching out-there questions, and maybe in the process they find answers that will take us to places we never dreamed of being able to go. Coming up with a culture like that takes some brains. Well, except I guess if we are going to be completely honest, we have to admit that the culture out of which Sir John springs wasn't really designed or anything. It just sort of, you know, evolved.
It's actually an interesting remark. But what is it doing in a spam email about chocolate? The next two messages are kinda odd and incomprehensible without knowing what they seem to be an answer to. The latter is about Iraq and the Australian and English troops.
Still, it doesn't answer my question. What is a religious debate doing in a chocolate survey? Where is the chocolate survey anyway? And why has
splash_the_cat seemingly stopped emailing me links to her webcam?
