Also, this is my way of seeing things in contrast to yours. In the way that you see pain as depravity, I see it as feeling, sometimes pleasure even. All emotion is fleeting, all of it a reminder of the life we are living. I challenge the "greater being," theorists to step off their pedestal of pleasure, joy, and everlasting happiness and accept for one moment that there is something else and it's not always bad...

To Know Him, is to Love Him - to Love Him, is to loose all hope.

I'm not going to get caught up too much in this debate because I simply haven't the time, I have to put my perspective in. I would think that someone who is so completely against and afraid of the idea that we are truly a random act of nature, that some greater being has some greater purpose for us, and that our life will not end with death is the spineless route. It takes more courage to believe that we are alone in this. That there is no god to get back at the people who do us wrong or to keep us in line. All that goes with it, the safety net, the security, and the immortality of it is all so very easy and comforting to accept. Try accepting oblivion. Not just believing in it, but being unafraid of it. Not utter oblivion but conscious oblivion. Stand up against all the challenges life has to offer with THAT understanding of how things might turn out and we'll see how strong your spin really is. Because only then is it a real spine and not a fantasy-fabrication of one.

Guess I could grant you that.

I finally figured out the last line - still working on the rest.

I'm working on some socio-political perspectives that will change in my poetry. For now, this is how I feel about things more often than not and it's a vent for me. It's not how I view life on a regular basis. I have a great deal of emotional maturity, I just don't express all of it in my writing. Interesting that I've inspired such a long string of comments. Er, well...someone has. lol

Except that my name isn't 'Dark Angel', it's '-=Dark_Angel=-'. I went to the trouble of legally changing it, so you might as well get it right.

Thank you, I thought so.

Yes. That is exactly true.

Allow me to talk to you about Dark Angel. Anything you write which he finds clever, smart, true, inspiring, etc., he does not respond to. He waits for your oversight, slip, or weak statement in an area where he knows more, and then he pounces. He has a hundred words for feces and sprinkles them freely in place of your poem, your comment, your idea, your knowledge, or your name. If you show him up or teach him something, he simply ignores you. If he finds error, he attacks the error while ignoring the substance of your statement. He is the Western outlaw before Law. He lives by ruthlessness and therefore wins. Dark Angel will always win because he shoots in the back, kills the easy prey, and there is no law against it. You can ignore him or fight him. Both methods fail in a lawless society like Poemranker. I hope this helps.

can i get an explanation of why you think it doesn't work? Isn't this supposed to be a constructive process?

To say something is unverifiable isn't to say that all possible attempts to prove it would fail. It's to say there are no well-defined observation conditions for its truth, and therefore that the idea of an attempt to prove it true is meaningless. As you know from reading Ayer. Obviously it's a bit of a buncombe notion, which is why you have to have falsifiability as well.

not exactly for me, but it's whatever you make of it... so sure. For me it is about strangulation and pulling tighter as you think about all of the things that you can't do right and all the pressure. They are both forms of self-mutualtion and it works for both. *shrugs* it's up for interpretation

Claptrap. I don't allow for the possibility that a machine could 'detect and measure' an atom. The notion of 'detecting an atom' is really the notion of 'making some observations which, in my model, are explained by the notion of an atoms.' If a soul-believer claimed he had a machine which could detect a soul, he wouuld have to specify what observations the machine was making when it gave a positive. He has three options: 1. Tautology: "It is observing a soul." Buncombe. 2. Mysticism: "It is detecting something that is otherwise undetectable to humans." Buncombe. 3. A proper answer: "It is measuring X observable quantity." If 3, then I say, "Oh, is that all you meant by 'a soul'?" He then has two replies: 1. "Yes, that's all," in which case I say "So you've just given a funny mystical name to the observation of X?" He replies, "But that's just what you've done with an atom." I say, "Yes, an atom is just a funny name for talking about certain observations." 2. "No, but it's an unmistakable sign that a soul is nearby." in which case I say, "But how can you distinguish between this pattern of X spontaneously appearing, and this pattern of X being caused by a soul?" He then has two replies: 1. "This pattern can't appear except when a soul is near," in which case I say, "How can you tell?", and he says "Because every time I've measured it, my machine has detected a soul!!" 2. "There is no difference; that's what a soul is," in which case I reply "So a soul is just a funny name for X?" etc. Q.E.D.

bow'ls