im not assuming everyone is christian all religions pray to a higher power most commonly reffered too as god

I wouldnt say all religions have a god. Some, such as budhism and confucianism have no gods.

they meditate then to find their inner peace or nirvana which can be described as finding "god" within themselves persay

1. Actually, your statement about population growth & mortality rates makes no sense at all.

2. Why you would think that my source does anything more than providing a breakdown of the main causes of death for various age groups & regions of the world is beyond me.

3. Reflect upon your use of the term 'civilized country' in this context. For example, look at the statistics for South Asia. India & Pakistan are nuclear powers. India is a democracy.
Take those out of the equation as well then. What about China? Yeah, continue. Go down that route; embrace the conclusion that there's no systemic malnutrition at all and everything is just government corruption. Pretty damn convenient, but still wrong.

4. Why don't you go on and educate yourself about the actual reasons for the high birth rate (and while you're at it, recognize the recent downward trend here which can be attributed at least in part to successful development assistance (e.g. foreign aid in women's education)) instead of just 'looking at it', then? It might keep you from comparing people with rabbits next time, which is not only offensive as fuck but also shows that you're currently talking about stuff you obviously know not nearly enough about, as it just simplifies the issue at hand beyond recognition.

1. zero sense*. What doesn't make sense about it?

2. Perhaps you didn't look at your source long enough to see the facts I've stated coincide with it. Pretty damn good for someone doing rough estimates I'd say.

3. And you don't see us giving a damn about their starvation problems do you? I think those problems are a bit more tragic than Africa. But wait what.. There is government corruption in both China and India. Worse than in the European countries and USA. However, I don't like discussing Asian problems when we're on the topic of Africa, so let's focus. The problem of starvation isn't bad in Egypt when compared to Ethiopia, Sudan, and other countries right? Egypt has the means to feed their starving people and the government in place that could do it if they wanted. Therefore, why worry about Egypt? Same as South Africa. Why not worry about those countries in which the Government is so corrupt and ****ed up to the point people die in droves per day? You want to tackle a problem logically right? If a house was falling apart due to termite damage, why would you replace the siding before replacing the main beam that is falling apart? The question here is not of 'are people dying' The question here is of 'how do we tackle this issue?' As I have stated, that's problematic and near impossible on many counts. Go back and read my 3 points and find a reason to refute all 3 of them and I'll agree to yield this entire argument to you and go to my congressmen and begin pressing them to fix it.

4. High birth rate has always been natural for agrarian societies. Baah, you're right, I should stop using such harmful similes. Surely I should've said: 'Oh man, they repopulate just as fast as you would naturally in an agrarian society in which life expectancy is low.' I apologize wholeheartedly for taking the attributes of a rabbit that has low life expectancy and high birth rate and using it to describe a situation involving a low life expectancy and high birth rate. Clearly, I find that all Africans are are just animals and I compare them to rabbits because I am evil, and I don't respect them.

If THAT is your best insult to hurl at me, then please work on it. There are probably plenty of other things you could get mad about in my posts. I don't believe for a second that you're that paper-thinned skinned Gnullbegg, I do believe you took it out of context and are trying to tell me that I meant something I didn't. If you felt the statement was misconstrued, simply ask me to rephrase it or use a simile not involving animals. Don't jump to some conclusion that I'm ignorant and stupid about the issue at hand, and value Africans as animals.

all of you!!!!!!!


all you people do is comlain and argue you guys are too smart for your own good, ok

you act like assholes, newsflash assholes we give like a billion in aid to africa every year and it jst goes to the warlords mansions thats why we cant help them i can tstand all this arguing i asked for you to stand with the world in this time of tradgedy and if you thinks its not a tragedy then tell the president to put the flags back up to full staff your a bunch of genius jerks sometimes

(not you lowlut and trollusa) (mainly X)

(fizzer please forgive the explitaves)

Can someone please summarize what direction the thread has gone or what loluwu,x,trollusa and gui are arguing about.

pretty much x started being a complete jerkoff about this school massacre he actually laughed about it so everyones ganging up on him

It is probably you that don't know Buddhism...
I've spoken for 3 years with a buddhist master when I was agnostic, and I can say that those are buddhist concepts.
You can agree with buddhist thoughts even without being buddhist for sure, but unfortunately the final aim of Buddhism is the absence of everything that come from the world (just superficialy speaking of course) and even if you (being a superior creature) are really convinced of not living in the world (since the paradox of nihilism is that it is the most idealistic of all the philosophies), I think that we (common people) are pretty convinced of living in the world and of feeling every kind of emotions; this is the reason why in order to get something out of that fragment (as you assume it should be obvious) you have at least to have a mind predisposed for those kind of concepts.

Anyway HellBender even if you don't even understand it, you just proove their critiques.
Even if you don't agree with what they say you cannot insult them without even expressed properly what you think.
In my opinion his noncurance for this tragedy is more dued to immaturity rather than inhumanity (immature guys always want to proove everybody how inhuman they are, inhuman people are much more hypocrite), but even if I don't agree with his points since the conversation might be interesting you should try to answer him with construstive critiques to his arguments and not with insults.

@Hell Bender: Perhaps if we were really getting at it and it turned into just hurling insults (so far from what I can see, I've only be insulted by Myhand and Gnull. Myhand a bit directly, Gnull from a misconstrued understanding of which he flipped offensively on me) it would be time to just stop. Your actions aren't fair. x and company have just as much right to express their opinion just as Trollussa and company do.

All I can do is point out the flaws with their ideas, and so far very little has been thrown back at me. As for x: yeah, we get it Hell Bender, and we addressed him on it. What do you wish to do now? Dip him in acid? We're on the internet. He's entitled to be an asshole just as we are entitled to call him out on it. So far I don't see him pushing it too far, so it's all good.

i gewt it but can we just let this thread die now i cant take it any more

Then don't read it

stop replying

Well that's hypocritical.

You can agree with buddhist thoughts even without being buddhist for sure, but unfortunately the final aim of Buddhism is the absence of everything that come from the world (just superficialy speaking of course) and even if you (being a superior creature) are really convinced of not living in the world (since the paradox of nihilism is that it is the most idealistic of all the philosophies), I think that we (common people) are pretty convinced of living in the world and of feeling every kind of emotions; this is the reason why in order to get something out of that fragment (as you assume it should be obvious) you have at least to have a mind predisposed for those kind of concepts.

These are fair points. (Certainly my perspective is radically different that what is common.) They are certainly an improvement on 'these concepts are Buddhists, therefore they are irrelevent to me'. They are also mostly off-topic. Anyway, the 'final aim' of Ecclesiastes is that we should give over our lives to God, that doesn't mean that it is all completely useless to me.

In my opinion his noncurance for this tragedy is more dued to immaturity rather than inhumanity

>noncurance
>nonchalance?

To the Buddha you account his nonchalance to his weltanschauung, but my identical nonchalance is because of immaturity? I smell an argumentum ad hominem.

For every death in this particular incident that I don't care about, there are a billion that you don't care about. Every human dies. If you think that the death of every human is significant then you must have a lot of problems, because billions have died. Have fun spending your short time on this earth worrying about them.

If you think that some human deaths are significant but some aren't, because they didn't live on the same continent as you or during your lifespan, I wonder how you came to that conclusion.

I am human, all too human. I just don't think humans are so special.

---

If you can't take it from me, and you can't take it from the Buddha, how about Orson Welles?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i47-QBL4Qo

Like all of us, Harry Lime profits from the misery of others. He's just less of a coward and less of a squirming hypocrite.

Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Try to think of them as ... rabbits.

Incidentally, Gui, here's how I (hope I would) face death: with open arms. How do I measure up?

Oh x, a human is bad, but a sociopathic one is worse. I do not care about the deaths of humans, but that is because I am a capybara. Whenever, wherever a capybara dies, I weep profusely. Are you so out of sync with your own species that you cannot identify with them? Do you lack the remotest inkling of empathy?

There are times for sophistry and logic and the aftermath of a tragedy is not one of them. Gui is right to call you a monkey.

For shame.

These are fair points. (Certainly my perspective is radically different that what is common.) They are certainly an improvement on 'these concepts are Buddhists, therefore they are irrelevent to me'. They are also mostly off-topic. Anyway, the 'final aim' of Ecclesiastes is that we should give over our lives to God, that doesn't mean that it is all completely useless to me.

The problem with this argument is that buddhism is influenced by the oriental view upon life, while cattolicism is infulenced by the occidental one, so while I could (but I didn't) assume that a cattolic concept could be properly understood by an occidental guy, the same I couldn't do (and you did) with a buddhist concept (Of course in Orient it would be exactly the opposite, I am not saying that Cattolic Church is better that Buddhism).

---

In my opinion his noncurance for this tragedy is more dued to immaturity rather than inhumanity


>noncurance
>nonchalance?

To the Buddha you account his nonchalance to his weltanschauung, but my identical nonchalance is because of immaturity? I smell an argumentum ad hominem.

To your statement there is already an answer in my last post right after the words you put in italics: immature guys always want to proove everybody how inhuman they are, inhuman people are much more hypocrite.

---

Here it is your logic:

1) No time to mourn for everybody. (wrong)
2) Humans are all equals and making differences between them just because they live in another place is wrong. (wrong)
3) No one is deservable of mourning. (wrong)

No need to say that the fact that this syllogism is wrong is totally confirmed from facts.
Anyway since I always like to have some purely teorical conversation let's examine in a teorical way that syllogism.

1) It is superficial because it has a superficial vision of mourning. Mourning doesn't require to be sad for the whole day or the whole life, as I didn't even when the Connecticut tragedy happened. Mourning is a state of the soul. The soul is a complex thing that cannot be reduced to only black and white. You can mourn also for a second and from that pain you might understand something on yourselves or on what you would like to do in order to solve problems. To mourn doesn't mean just to cry in a corner, but it means to have pain when you think to an event, but when you live you just don't think only to a fixed thing, and even if you do, you can keep on living with a huge pain, but you will still keep on living.
The person that I loved the most was my grandfather who died 8 years ago.
My pain was very intense at the start but now when I live I don't think the whole day to him, but I don't consider myself a superficial person for that; he is still in my heart and for example when I play chess I always think him.
Our lifes are based on simple things, but the fact that these things are simple doesn't mean that they are not important or that they are not sincere.
The same goes for every kind of mourning, mourns has moments of bigger intensity but when the time passes that intensity is not wasted but it is put in our heart / brain and those feeling will come back, prooving that we did care in the end.

2) There is no big need to explain something here.
Objectively humans lifes are all equal, no matters if the person is your mother or a perfect stranger.
Unfortunately our perception upon the world is subjective, and the same it is for people.
To me my mother's life is more important than a perfect stranger one, but if that perfect stranger is a mother of another guy, I can't convince him that mine is more important, because it is not true in general but it is true to me, and since emotions too are subjective, they will be obviously influenced by our subjective priorities.

3) Since both the basis of this last point are wrong, this point is logically wrong.

X, Montagne said A. I said B. It is you who is saying "Happy Buddha thinks A = B." After assuming something I never said you then refute this X-Buddha. I agree. The X-Buddha you created seems a bit stupid.

Fizzer told me "Don't create characters unless it is with your main account." So I created Happy Buddha with my main account. It is a character. You now believe Buddist quotes to be what I really think. So you refute the X-Buddha a second time. Again I agree with you. The X-Buddha's ideas don't make sense.

It was good we could collaborate like this. I made half of a character and you made the other half.

- I disagree that such insight is relative to culture. Catholicism is more alien to me than Buddhism.

- Like I said, there is nothing inhuman about me. I resent that.

I don't disagree with any of this, but we were talking about strangers while you relate something very personal (and if you knew how it made me feel you wouldn't accuse me of inhumanity). But you talk about mourning as if it were weltschmerz, which is no stranger to me.

And you speak of objectivity as if that is worthless in philosophy. If you treated philosophy with the rigour you would a science, you would not make so many faults in logic.

If you want to go around discussing how humans think subjectively then go make a thread about sociology or psychology. If you want to talk about what is objectively true then let's talk philosophy, and you can leave your naturalistic fallacies behind.

If your hand is cold and you put it in warm water, the water will seem hot. If your hand is hot and you put it in warm water it will feel cool. So the water is a different temperature, because that is how we experience it?

Do you think a ruler bends if you put it in water? Or do you see that it is straight before and after you put it in, and deduce refraction?

You now believe Buddist quotes to be what I really think.

Nope, I know the difference between copy/pasting and thinking. You're a little short on the latter. And I know you aren't Buddhist (why must you be to understand that parable?), you can't even spell it.

Montagne said men are in part measured by how they face death. If we measure a man by how he views the deaths of others

Montagne said A. I said B.

If the Montagne line is so completely unrelated to the sentence that follows, why did you bother paraphrasing it? Just namedropping?

Pardon me for assuming that your thoughts follow from one sentence to the next.