Acriku

My summer was a blend of working full-time at a supermarket and working out to P90X. Had a knee injury during an extended lunge (ow) and took a 3 week break to fully heal and repeated the second phase (out of three) and was on my way to completing it before school backhanded me into a lack of time for the long workouts (1-1.5 hours). But I also got to get into Lost (finished season 3 just this week) and love it so far!

Actually Slashdot came out with an article of some controversy concerning the developer of the Minecraft game, Notch alias, that PayPal is withholding upwards of 600k pounds of his from customers buying the game. Might have to try this game out, it seems pretty innovative!

And now we have an idiot in my state who is a pastor declaring a burning of a Quran book. The burning has been put on hold thankfully, but the damage is already done with anti-American rallies all over Afghanistan and possibly other dominantly Islamic countries. People are requesting that the US Government go in and stop the burning, but that raises a whole set of new issues with government and church relations. I don't think the government has any authority in this incident, but I do hope the pastor sees that he's putting America under the light of offensive maneuvers once again.

Anybody play this game? It's a free game that you can optionally invest a few dollars to buy certain champions that you don't want to spend the ingame currency on, and various skins for each champion. It's based off of DoTA mod from Warcraft III and is very fun! Sign up and queue with me (Acriku) as I am usually on late nights and my off days.

Yeah I worked all day, too. But double pay bitches!!

Here's mine I took 6 years ago (it was centered on my shoulder then, now it's shifted) It says "Auri Sacra Fames" or "An Accursed Hunger for Gold." Arrr.

I doubt anyone would want the government to step in and stop a religious establishment. It would be a disastrous precedent. But why call it House Cordoba? I'm still confused since that brings up only conquest and conversion in its history. It's not a good message for "inter-faith relations." edit: I just watched the Olbermann video (love the guy by the way) and he quotes the developer calling it "Park 51" instead of Cordoba. Good call.

It was more of an attempt to reverse the situation. Instead of thinking and hoping and fixating on what the afterlife might be like, what if this is the afterlife? And I don't mean simply reincarnation into the same world. I'm talking about our world being that fantastical realm on the other side. Then the mystery shifts to what kind of world and existence did we have before coming here? Was it a smaller world, a world so different that our existence here and now is such a dream that even the worst life we can have here is so greater? Were we simple-minded creatures that were rewarded (or punished if you prefer) this life now, with the time and condition based on how we performed in the beforelife? Just a fun exercise in imagination. That's all we can do with discussing the afterlife.

A never-ending journey has its downsides, perhaps a more limited journey in time? Perhaps a piece of time where you get a chance to make something beautiful and share it among others. Or a chance to do nothing. A time when you can have a world that plays against you, or a world that you make for yourself. During this limited existence of an afterlife, you spend your time (or not) with people who have fallen into place at their determined times and with people who are about to reach the end of their time there. Maybe I'm talking about some plane of existence that we can hope for when we die, or maybe I'm talking about our time here and now. This plane. This existence. We are the afterlife.

On the topic of what we can or cannot call the afterlife, I would have to consider what we call the self. The brain is such a vital instrument in determining our self that without it I cannot fathom how we can remain our self. If you physically alter the brain, you can literally change the personality of that person, or remove important memories. If an energy or misty cloud leaves our newly dead bodies and returns to a nexus of life or spirit, what goes with it? Not memories. Those are physical, and we're learning more and more about how they are laid out in our brains. Not our personality. Our specific mapping and structure of our brain, with our experiences and memories, shape our personality. Those are all physical. What leaves our bodies that we can still call our selves? Is it an afterlife for us or for the energy that inhabited us? If an afterlife exists, I fear it is not for us to experience. At least, the us we came to know. Whatever leaves our bodies, if we cannot connect with it in life then I doubt we can connect with it in death. If I really think about it, perhaps our afterlife is simply our broken down structure being used by other structures. Our return to Mother Earth, if you will. Before I get all pantheist here, I do like the idea of my body giving birth to so much activity that continues the cycle. Cremating is such a waste of good fertilizer (fertilizer? I hardly know her).

From http://thinkprogress.org/2010/08/14/peter-king-gz-mosques/ What I like about it is what it's going to comprise of: With a stern approval from President Obama prefacing the beginning of Ramadan, and some of , this may actually bring inter-faith relations to marginalize radicalism.Then of course, the name of the mosque does not assuage any nay-sayers from views of radicalism. House Cordoba is the intended name, which is a city in Spain that was earlier conquered by Islamic fighters and where a great mosque was constructed on the grounds of a Christian cathedral. The city later retaken, the mosque was converted back to a cathedral. From "an article (original in Arabic) published by Iraqi-American Khudhayr Taher." Taken from a source even I feel dirty using.

The difference Edric is the time between the attack and the construction. Then again I'm not entirely unhappy if a lot of churches went unbuilt ;) How this could not be an issue is somewhat ignorant of the amount Islam is affecting and being affected by the US in this past decade. We're occupying two dominantly Muslim countries following a terrorism plot conducted by Muslim extremists (Saudi or otherwise). We're in a war against established Muslim fighters. It would at least merit critical thinking on how the community surrounding this new Muslim establishment will react so close to the attack site. If it leads to religious tolerance then so be it. But it will most likely lead to more violence, which is a depressing view on my country.

I just wanted to understand how you view sin and morality Eras, since that is so entwined with afterlife consequences (even with some of the more natural theories purposed in this thread where "sin" develops a guilty hallucination experience at the time of death). Now, we all align ourselves to different moralities based on outside and inside influences. I see good and bad where I've learned to see it, and with enough experience can judge an event or action as good or bad based on my morality. When I see the "ONE and ONLY way that the Universe can work correctly" leading to first-borns being killed as a coercion for the Pharoah to let Moses and his people go, I judge that as bad. If you remove the biblical elements, and the metaphysical causes, and ask anyone with enough experience to judge that event, they will tell you that it is barbaric, evil, and tragic. In the book Calculating God, there are alien creatures that are naturally adept at deciphering morality problems - just as we are naturally adept at solving mathematical problems. To them, this would be a very simple problem, akin to [X2 + 4 = Y, Y + 3 = X] for example. If we can create a better alternative to God's Ultimate Morality, what does that say of Him? If I was asked which morality to trust, the one portrayed in the Bible or my own, I would invariably trust my own.

Nice man! Good to hear your progress.

Do you see sin as good and bad, or as what God commands us to do / not to do? Or perhaps the latter, which happens to fall into the former?

No, it's quite the real situation. Not sure which stereotype I'm reinforcing since I mentioned neither race nor gender, but this is definitely a sad situation. I'm pretty sure a 400$ wedding cake wasn't what EBT food stamp programmers thought about when constructing the program. The fact that you can save that much in EBT proves you do not need it, and other people definitely do.

Oh my store gets tons of food stamp users. And the irony is that the majority of them use it for crab legs, massive birthday cakes, frozen shrimp, and other ridiculous food items. It's a system that is being taken advantage of daily.

Aw man, you just let out the biggest secret of religion. The Cargo Gods will smite you!Cargo Cult, how gods and religions appear

Is there a chance of you doing the same thing but without the allure of eternal reward? Nope.

Dammit Dante. That's hard to get rid of in my head :'(

BBC reports a scheme to build a mosque a few hundred feet away from Ground-Zero. The attempt to squash it failed, failing to give the site landmark status. It is intended to be a 13-story Islamic cultural center, to show good inter-faith relations. I'm all for religious freedom, but they're going to be vandalized to the ground if it becomes realized. To expect a city of people to separate extremists from the core religion is negligent, especially with such a sensitive issue as 09/11. What do you guys think? Too soon? Too close?

I'm kind of weird about karma myself. It's a simple little concept that really begs the question of who is governing when and how karma takes effect, but I just can't completely ignore it. I'm damn near superstitious about doing anything that puts me into the line of fire of the karmaic expression "you'll get what's coming to you." Is it consistent with my naturalistic worldview? No. Yet, it doesn't have to be a mystical balance of the universe. In fact, the very concept breeds self-actualization where I can be punished by another person because that person thought that he should in order to bring some balance against something I've done. Perhaps I'm more timid about how another person would react to my actions rather than having a negative karma counter placed on me. Regardless, it's an infectious way to avoid being a total dick. :)

Yeah they made it up for their generosity 8) I don't bake, I shop at the bakery where I work ;D

It's my birthday, and I'm the one cooking ??? Somebody tell my friends how this is supposed to work!