I have an opinion, but I'm not going to express it in protest of you quitting the GaGa thread because you were losing.

I think you'll have difficulties keeping the G-man out, as a belief in Him will fundamentally change a man's view on how the universe works and a man's ideal position in it.

Try to be a good person, strive to enjoy your own life, respect other's on their merits, follow the golden rule, contribute most positively to the society you believe in as you are able. :)

Or, as Abe Lincoln succinctly put it in the movie which gave me my moniker, "Be excellent to each other and party on, dudes!"

Realy, not to wax religious or not, but life kind of boils down to the old Tanakhic hortation to be fruitful and multiply. Biologically, our purpose is to spread our genetic materiel as widely as possible. There are a number of strategies for achieving this aim, but most of them are cultural versions of the choice faced by early life: whether it is more successful to create many offspring with a lesser chance of surviving and thriving in the competion for resources, or fewer offspring with greater odds of success.

I definitely plan to go with the 'fewer' option. ^^

Strive to be more than you already werre. Evolve, learn about science, take responsebility for your life and be kind and honest to others.

"learn about science,"

Yes, learn about science. Ignore everything else ^^

@rlumley:

I'm not going to troll a thread along arguing about the G-Lady when my thoughts aren't sticking, but if you want to put threads in wins and losses instead of the more-appropriate "we're having a discourse"...fine, I "lost," there you are.

A few folks here say we should really enjoy life and be good to our fellow man...but is that all? I mean, we can do that now, whereas Plato's Philosopher King or the Knight of Faith is a vision of what man could turn into, that's more what I mean, don't you think we can do better than being the kind of beings we are?

A sculptor looks at a stone, sees a statue and chips away everything that isn't the statue.

Man should likewise look at himself, see an ideal, and chip away everything that does not conform to that ideal.

It's that simple really,

If I want to be thin, eat better foods, reduce my caloric intake and exercise more.

If I want to be wealthy, be frugal, live well below my means, put away a certain amount of money so that I can exist if I lose my job, make fairly safe long term investments, and keep at accumulating wealth.


If I want to be a good anything, take the time to find out what a good representative of that group is and have the discipline to follow the plan.

If I want to be a good individual, take the time to decide for myself what is/or isn't good about myself (through intropection, discussion with those whom I respect, or study of whatever sourches available to me) and strive to increase the good while reducing the bad within myself.

Accept that whatever changes that I make within myself will be short term changes if I have short term goals, thus work on personal discipline overall while using short term goals as ways to reassure myself that I'm moving in the right direction.

"don't you think we can do better than being the kind of beings we are? "
What do you mean?

Probably that at heart humans tend to not be a pretty selfish and quarrelsome lot.

**Tend to be selfish and quarrelsome** rather

"Man should likewise look at himself, see an ideal, and chip away everything that does not conform to that ideal. "


That is backwards, living is not a wasting process, it is a building process. You start off not as an unsculpted rock, but as a blank canvas; you don't chip away at the bad, you paint on the good.

I think both 'unsculpted rock' and 'blank canvas' is a way of saying pretty much the same thing

I think that's a fundamental nature vs. nurture disagreement. I'll admit that I oversimplified the first statement, but both analogies are flawed as infants are neither products entirely of genes nor of external conditions.

I am completely okay with painting the sculpture though.

I think our generation must take on the task of 'cleaning up after ourselves'. We are destroying the world. Pick up beer cans at the lake! I sometimes don't even enjoy fishing anymore when I see trash around. And this whole oil spill thing? I'm often embarrassed to be human. Currently, I think the earth would be better in the hands of pigs.
We have to rid ourselves of the 'end justifies the means' lifestyle. We have to stop teaching children that making money is what life's about. If I have to work for one more greedy bastard whose only motivation is money at the cost of respect for fellow man and the environment, I may stop 'contributing' to the society that we have built. I've got food in the fridge ,a thousand bucks, a great family and many friends. Anyone who thinks you need more than that is a contributor to our troubled times.

Why do I have to strive to "become" anything? Why isn't it acceptable to just live my life and be happy on my own terms without having to meet others ideals? it seems like this notion of "becoming" something is usually some outside judgment looking in, when in reality it would probably be a much nicer world if we would start looking in and see what *truly*makes us happy. If we look within, we'll realize that happiness isn't being the first guy you know with a stupid new iPhone or some crap like that...I find the question out of line! [ In other words, be more like Jesus!!! :P ]

KIDDING!!!!!

The advancement of knowledge and technology has to be the primary goal. Life is an extremely delicate thing. In the history of the Earth there have been many mass extinction events killing off the higher forms of life. Humanity a few tens of thousands of years ago had been reduced to a couple of thousand members by a relatively small scale event. The history of the UK has seen several failed colonisation attempts when its climate killed us off.

There is no such thing as natural harmony. There is no natural balance. Life exists on a knife edge and the only thing with a chance of stopping another lump of space rock or the life cycle of the sun from destroying it all is humanity. There will be mistakes along the way, there will be oil leaks and nuclear accidents and animals lost to history, but the moment we give up on progress is the moment when all hope for life is lost.

We are the intelligent apes. Whilst weaker creatures feared the dark and hid, we created light and defeated the night. There is not a single climate we have not colonised, and not a single predator who does not fear us. For the first time in history life has evolved a creature that has the potential to become masters of its own destiny. And that, my friends, is what we must strive to be.

I think the operant question though, at least it seems so to me, is what should that destiny be. Further survival of the species? Why should I care if another human takes my place when I die?

So if we are to trim the fat from man now to form that "greater" man, what should we trim?

And what should we grow?

Me myself- I think the first thing man should do is to stop perceiving means to ends as the ends themselves, ie, people pursuing money or a job or a mate as a source of happiness, when in fact they are merely tools, you spend the money or work the job for money and happiness and work the mate...for happiness... ;)

But it's still the means, and people thusly are not as happy nor as evolved as they could be when they stop so short, striving for the car and stopping when they get it, forgetting that they wanted it *really* as, say, a means to freedom or a conveyance to a certain place where they might feel happy. To say "I want the car to be happy" and to thus stop at the car only fulfills half that...

Also, on an education front- Plato hit it on the head 2,000+ years ago.

Train at what you are good at/love the most, and then a basic knowledge of other skills, but focus on those one or two things you love and/or are gifted at and able to accomplish best, and so you can sharpen a blade all the more that way; a "well-rounded" student is comparatively dull and unproductive, a drone in the workforce, and indistinct (and you all know how I feel about indistinctiveness and its role in human suffering...)

Shakespeare didn't waste time learning a little bit here and there, from what we know he went to simple school (if that) and learned mostly stagecraft and writing and ancient stories and myths...and he turned out all right focusing on one thing...

Niels Bohr, one of the leading theorists on the early atomic theory, was so terrible at writing and speaking that he had to have his mother write whatever he'd say at receptions and such held for his discoveries- but when it came to physics he was far ahead of his time, and paved the way for modern atomic theorists.



So teach kids all basic literature/English composition and math and a bit of science and enough history that they know what their country is about and has done-

And then specialize them, kids are smarter than most people give them credit for, with guidance I believe most will be able to find what one or two fields they are suited for, and then they can take all the best classes with the best teachers and an abundance of materials with it, as resources won't be spread about making sure every kid knows the anatomy of a frog or what the quadratic formula is or what a feminist interpretation of "The Taming of the Shrew" would be like.

I'm commenting mainly in response to the American system- I'm curious as I don't know it, how do you English teach your children? Do you stick them all in common grade schools that allow for Honors and regulars but still have to teach all the curiculum like in the States, or do you let them specialize at a certain age like Plato wanted (well, to be fair, adapting what Plato wanted for the modern day and to maek sense, as somehow I think we can all agree state-run nursuries and telling kids that they are born with a metal inside them that tells them waht careers they are suited for is just not going to work for anyone.)

Really, I'd like to know if there's a real reason (other than people wanting to make sure everyone gets taught "equally" so no one can claim discrimination and people sue and get their feelings hurt) if anyone can think of a good reason to put kids that are so one-way talented through the rigors of the other side. If you're Stephen Hawking-brilliant at math and yet you can't tell Kierkegaard from Captain Kirk, do you really need to waste classes at age 15 or 16 or 17 trying to just memorize enough to squeak by so you can continue learning all those quantum mechanics or wahtever it is math geniuses learn? And if you're like me and can generally grasp just about any Western writing pretty quickly and analyze it for ideas and write about it relatively fluently (and not captialize every other word or write mega-paragraphs) do you really need to have trigonometry hammered in instead of using those classes for extra literature study or, just as good, learning a trade so you can get a job?

I've yet to come across a prospective employer at the entry-level who really cares if I know tangents from cosines, but they DO ask if I have any training...which I could've had in school if they let me take that instead of another algebra class before I graduated...just saying, as a college student trying to break into out already-broken economy, and where they really want experience and training, public schooling maybe could've prepared me a bit better if they taught the sort of thing entry-level employers looked for at my school and not crammed me into Algebra II just so I could meet some arbitrary "standard."

"No Child Left Behind," try "More Childen Left Out" for our economy...

Specialization is for insects.

maybe that´s the way he looks at humans, like looking at insects :-)