Profile for Or else o'erleap.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Displayed name | Or else o'erleap. |
| Member number | 335 |
| Title | Law Bringer |
| Postcount | 14579 |
| Homepage | http://www.polarisboard.net |
| Registered | Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
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| Author | Recent posts |
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| Do you think there is a Hell? in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Wednesday, April 13 2005 11:59
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Don't try to argue that the Bible is apocryphal. Obviously some people believe that, and others take it literally. That begs the question that we've been arguing about. On the other side, assuming the Bible is true to support your assertion that the Bible is true is also begging the question. The topic started about whether or not we believe in hell, but it hasn't stayed that way, and at no point was the Bible accepted as unconditionally true in the discussion. How much free will do we have if God can play with us like bugs if he wants to? I guess that doesn't take away will, but it still leaves us without any effective means of controlling our environment. Furthermore, what does it say about God that he kills Job's family in order to make a point to an underling? Okay, so maybe they were faithful and would immediately go to heaven even though the concept is not emphasized in the Old Testament. Then why doesn't God strike down everyone who would go to heaven immediately so they can stop suffering on Earth? Once again, it doesn't add up. God is not omnipotent, God is not compassionate, or God is completely beyond our understanding. This last is the only reasonable explanation, but then we might as well throw all attempts to think out the window. —Alorael, who doesn't swallow the doctrine that God gave humans intelligence so that they could exercise their right to not think. Jacob was honored for wrestling with God. Shouldn't everyone else follow his example? Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Confusion on spells in The Avernum Trilogy | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Wednesday, April 13 2005 11:40
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They don't quite seem completely dependent on external sources of heat. They may be weakly endothermic. This is also mostly irrelevant, except while I can see how cold could send the sliths into their semi-torpid state, extreme heat doesn't seem to make them function more optimally than warmth. —Alorael, who isn't sure on the mechanics of cold damage. Do you suddenly suck all the heat out of the target, or is it more like hitting them with very cold ice rocks? How fast does the effect wear off, or does that depend entirely on the thermal conductivity of the slith and its surroundings? How appropriate is the application of physics in this case? Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Two years to the day. in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Monday, April 11 2005 18:50
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quote:I'm sure several bacteria have managed. Ants may have as well. I'm not sure a single species has explored the world, per se, but ants in general are everywhere, number well over 6 billlion, and have been in space. —Alorael, who likes ants. He figures he's better work on his relationship now so they'll take him in when the nuclear disaster strikes. He doesn't want to be stuck out in the cold like the proverbial grasshopper. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| science, philosophy or religion? in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Monday, April 11 2005 18:46
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I was thinking more that shouting at people builds a healthier mental state, but go with whatever works for you. —Alorael, who would like to point out the different meanings of philosophy now. It can be a code of approach to a subject (often how to live), a codified view of life, the universe, and everything, or random pontification, often coupled with severe angst. Take your pick. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Jeff is now a writer (of books) in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Monday, April 11 2005 18:43
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I read its contents, or part of it, when it was free stuff on Irony Central. It wasn't all brilliant, but it definitely wasn't boring. No instructions on proper baby care in sight! —Alorael, who feels pity for Cordelia. Her life will be scarred by this. It had better sell well enough to pay for expensive therapy. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Do you think there is a Hell? in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Monday, April 11 2005 18:32
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If God fixed everything, free will would be trivial. I'm not so sure why we assume free will, though, since an omnisicient and omnipotent God would make much more sense in a clockwork universe. In fact, it could explain the inexplicable bad things happening to good people, too. We're all just puppets, and what happens to us is for the good of the play. Or whatever metaphor you prefer. Ignoring the dichotomy between omniscience, including the future, and free will, I have to say that TM is right. There's no good way to justify the bad things that happen. Maybe it is all according to God's will, and maybe it is all for the better. But that's loss of free will again, isn't it? If God plays with us, why don't we just give up and concede that not only does he have all the advantages, we don't even understand the rules? The only thing that makes any sense at all is that God doesn't intervene all the time. That could go under non-omnipotent or non-good God, but it could also be considered a kind of patronizing view. God could do everything, but we get our chance to make things work or screw up for ourselves. You can argue that that's not good either, but even parents let their kids go live their own lives eventually. God does the same. Going back to the original question (well, a previous question), though, doesn't this non-inteference policy mean miracles don't happen? I'd say yes, mostly. Maybe there's some incomprehensible formula governing when God may intervene. Prayer might be a factor. So might magnitude of action and effect. Holding up the falling piano over the head of the baby is too Biblical for modern times, but maybe on the quantum uncertainty level God is allowed to fudge with the numbers and have the wind swing the piano on its rope so that it knocks the baby out of the way on its way down. —Alorael, who puts God's policies on his list of things to figure out post-mortem. People have been arguing since they had a language to do it in and have no consensus yet. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| science, philosophy or religion? in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Monday, April 11 2005 14:29
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quote:It just means we don't accept each others' philosophical points. quote:And philosophy and religion are 100% accurate? Science is a constant process of replacing wrong ideas with less wrong ideas. Nobody promises to be right. It tends towards cockiness because we don't really have any choice but accepting that our view of the universe is correct. We can't act on what we don't know yet! quote:Again, it serves much the same purpose as philosophy. Organized religion has the ills of any organization, yes, but religion itself is no more or less than philosophy with a spiritual bent. —Alorael, who would not be happy with any of the above components of a balanced life withotu the all-important argument. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| A3 max skill level? in The Avernum Trilogy | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Monday, April 11 2005 13:33
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The real limit is diminishing returns. You eventually have to spend so many skill points per point of skill and get so little for it that it's not worth training any more. [Edit: Should've just written 2^15-1.] —Alorael, who wouldn't be surprised to find that skills are limited to 255. On the other hand he remembers hearing about people managing to get them above that. Maybe the limit is 32767 instead. [ Monday, April 11, 2005 18:51: Message edited by: Universal Specific ] Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Do you think there is a Hell? in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Monday, April 11 2005 13:29
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Nothing is impossible for an omnipotent God, who could locally change the laws of the universe for a while and then change them back. A miracle is something that can't happen without the intervention of God, and it's still equally impossible by the natural laws after it has happened once. —Alorael, who agrees with Stareye. It's a miracle that the Earth is still here, still rotating, and still full of living things. Huge meteors could have crashed into us and sterilized everything down to 30 feet below ground level, but they haven't. Horrible plagues could have wiped out human life, but they haven't. Heck, it's a miracle that the laws of physics work out to be comprehensible and universal! Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Two years to the day. in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Sunday, April 10 2005 16:34
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quote:But we know about the 1/4 we haven't discovered? —Alorael, who understands that an object's existence can be detected before its location or specific composition is known. Still, that statement comes out a bit funny. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| need advice in The Avernum Trilogy | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Sunday, April 10 2005 08:31
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I will say that A2 is less fun if you haven't played A1. Even going through A1's demo gives you enough of a feeling for Avernum to appreciate things like Cotra. —Alorael, who also likes seeing what happens to the various people of Avernum. Meeting Tor in A2 is more meaningful when you remember him from A1, and the New Cotra of A3 means more when you remember the other Cotras and their inhabitants. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Do you think there is a Hell? in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Sunday, April 10 2005 08:28
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There actually was a double-blind trial of prayer healing conducted at the National Institutes of Health a few years ago. Physicians observed two groups of patients, one consisting of individuals over whom a religious community was specifically praying, and the other consisting of individuals receiving no such specific prayer. Neither the physicians nor the patients knew who was and who was not the beneficiary of prayers. The results showed no statistically significant difference between the control group and the prayer-recipient group. This could be due to Thuryl's idea of too many prayers for a few more or less to be noticeable, but it also means that the idea of praying at someone's bedside to cure them is probably only placebo effect. I think the problem of defining miracle comes back to the original problem of whether or not God intervenes. A miracle is an intervention by God, obviously, but since the result occurs in the physical world, there is no quantitative way to determine whether or not the occurrence was miraculous. To me, that means that the only evidence for a miracle is circumstancial. If it's beneficial and unlikely, God did it. If it's likely, it's the ordinary workings of the universe. If it's harmful, God didn't do it. I have trouble accepting the idea that spontaneous remission is God's hand but sudden, inexplicable death is not, though. —Alorael, who will sum up his incoherent lack of definition by saying that nothing outside of the physical world affects anyone in the physical world. A miracle is simply a physical effect with no physical cause, but since causes are often unknown even when they are not considered miraculous and since there is no quantitative difference between miracles and happenstance, the whole mess comes back down to ascribing things to miraculous intervention or to unknown but physical causes. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Do you think there is a Hell? in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Saturday, April 9 2005 18:39
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Take a tissue sample. Provide lab results showing that the man is dead. Now, let's say Lazarus is alive again. Show more tests that verify his living condition. Take another tissue sample. Is it the same guy? Does the DNA match? Everything else? Twins could account for some of it. Questionable lab procedures or biased techs doing the work could make the results meaningless as well. If you really could provide all this in a plausible way, though, there's real evidence for resurrection. Miracles are, by nature, outside of what our current understanding of the world based on empirical evidence predicts. That makes sense if you believe in God, but God is also not empirically plausible. "We can't explain it but it wasn't God" is a reasonable response when "it" isn't something that clearly violated our understanding of the universe. If someone recovers from a cold, is it a miracle? No, it happens all the time. What about a more serious illness? Just because scientists don't know exactly how it happens doesn't mean divine intervention is likely. Mechanisms for recovery have been found already, and it is more likely that there are undiscovered mechanisms than that God is in there. I'll concede that it depends on starting point, though. If you postulate the existence and intervention of God, you have an explanation for the inexplicable. If you postulate the absence of God, you have more work to do to explain the unknowns. Consider Occam's Razor, though, and don't forget how many "miracles" have already been explained by advances in science. —Alorael, who finds Ben's FYT hilarious. Context is very important in these posts! Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| need advice in The Avernum Trilogy | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Saturday, April 9 2005 18:23
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Avernum 2. It has the best plot and the little things like the quest log missing from A1. —Alorael, who really thinks you'd be better off downloading all three and trying them. A3 definitely has its worshippers even though its damage calculation leaves something to be desired. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| The Universe in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Friday, April 8 2005 22:14
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Gas in vacuum expands infinitely, too, much like the universe. We're gas! —Alorael, who wouldn't like to get either lava or strong acid on his face. Cold lava wouldn't be so bad, though, though it might hurt if thrown with enough force or dropped from a significant height. Weak acid is only bad when it's in your eyes, unless it's very hot weak acid, which may cause burns. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Do you think there is a Hell? in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Friday, April 8 2005 22:10
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Or perhaps the Old Testament represents God as a tantrum-prone tyke or even an angry teen. Probably the latter; the New Testament is when He has settled down and had a kid. —Alorael, who can handle the idea of time as a direction much better than meta-time as a dimension. Everything seems to move linearly through time, but that doesn't mean everything has to. (There was a theory a few years back on some subatomic particles moving backwards through time, but it may not have been at all valid. It was interesting, though.) Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| science, philosophy or religion? in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Friday, April 8 2005 11:02
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Science explains how the world works. Religion and philosophy explain what we should do about it. You can't live without some level of science, no matter how basic, and you also can't live (or be allowed to live) without some moral code, no matter how basic. —Alorael, who would call religion a subset of philosophy anyway. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Two years to the day. in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Thursday, April 7 2005 17:29
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Ants are several highly successful species. They've been around longer than we have and they'll probably outlast us. Sharks have been around longer too. What makes us more successful? —Alorael, who doesn't know all that much about dinosaurs. They definitely weren't one species, though, and he'd bet they weren't all one genus either. Maybe not even all the same family? They filled very different niches and the mass extinctions were the result of outside forces, not regular pressures. Yes, a catastrophic meteor strike could end human civilization, but that's not a commentary on human nature. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Two years to the day. in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Thursday, April 7 2005 14:26
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If the Palestinians are given land to form their own state, would it end the violence or would they continue to try to get the entire area that was once theirs? -, saying dominant species get wiped out makes no sense. What do you mean by a dominant species? Not everything suited to its evolutionary niche goes extinct! There haven't been human beings or anything similar before, so how can you know what will happen to us? —Alorael, who has nothing to add to this topic besides these questions. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Do you think there is a Hell? in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Thursday, April 7 2005 14:18
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Never attribute to God anything that can be attributed to human error. Not every scan will be clean of artifacts, and some artifacts may look like tumors. That doesn't mean there was a miracle. There really aren't any verifiable or reliably witnessed miracles that could be nothing but a miracle. —Alorael, who doesn't see the question of where God comes from as any more sticky than the question of where the universe comes from. Neither one has a good answer, except science can try to explain the latter (not yet!) and religion can explain the former (not coherently!). Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Should Nethergate 2 come out after A4 and BOG? in Nethergate | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Thursday, April 7 2005 14:10
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Name a recent better RPG, please. [Edit: A post this short should be hard to screw up, but where there's a will, there's a way.] —Alorael, who isn't being facetious. He doesn't keep up with RPGs very much and the ones he does know of aren't all that great. [ Thursday, April 07, 2005 14:11: Message edited by: East Up ] Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Special Days in The Avernum Trilogy | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Thursday, April 7 2005 14:09
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Note that getting out isn't dependent on the date. That means both that you can't get trapped inside if the day changes and that if you do get trapped inside you shouldn't panic over the non-bug. —Alorael, who would like to know if A3 has different special dates (as it should). He can't remember from playing. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| TOXIC/HITMEBABY/BOOYEAH in Richard White Games | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Wednesday, April 6 2005 16:54
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Fascinating, and even more horrific than Galactic Core. —Alorael, who just says no to RWG spam. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Two years to the day. in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Wednesday, April 6 2005 13:47
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The Middle East is not the seat of the world's overpopulation problem anyway. —Alorael, who believes that there are still some technical problems with permanent settlement of other planets beyond cost. Can a perpetually self-sustaining and self-contained ecosystem be established anywhere yet? Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Well it's been a while. in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Tuesday, April 5 2005 06:05
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You seem to have some problem with the CoC and Drew Carey. Masked profanity is on the infraction list too. Work on using language that doesn't break the CoC, please. You have been warned twice now. —Alorael, who won't lock the topic. It's not enthralling, but it's not a flamewar. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |