Re: Mind's Eye UFO's: Fact or Fantasy?

What about the Elysian Fields for fallen heroes and the blessed-
mentioned in the Odyssey and Aeneid? I worry about the non-heroes and
esp. those who are massacred and dumped in a pit or potter's grave
with no ceremony. But I do agree, we dabble in heaven and hell during
our lifetimes. For instance, a bad marriage is compared to Hell-
true! :-) A sensory delight of the flesh or palate is compared to
Heaven. The afterlife was popular in early Christianity to give the
poor hope but later you could buy your way into heaven with
indulgences and the guilt remains, perhaps, with charities and
volunteerism. I have a more practical view but let's face it- people
want easy answers, easy fixes/exits.

On Sep 28, 12:17 am, William L Houts <luka...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I wonder if humans do dream of uncorrupted worlds, in general. You'd
> think that would be universal, and it does seem to be borne out by
> Western mythologies, with some exceptions.  For instance, the Greeks had
> Olympus, but except for Heracles no one got to go there; everyone else
> went to Hades, which was gloomy and boring if you were lucky enough to
> land there in general population, and terrifying if the gods put you in
> Tartarus.  And the Romans didn't seem to place faith in any sort of
> afterlife at all, which is one of the main reasons whyChristianity sold
> like hotcakes.  Eastern religions such as Buddhism had various hells and
> heavens, but they were sort of besides the point:  your karma is / was
> supposed to boil down to nothing and liberate you from the Wheel of
> Rebirth, which was supposed to put you  in Nirvana, which was less a
> Heaven than it was a Nowhere. And Taoism doesn't have much to say about
> heavenly afterworlds;  its whole point is to make this world more just
> and balanced and leaves heavens to the individual to figure out.
>
> But as to your question of whether humans long for uncorrupted worlds, I
> think that besides the Abrahamic religions noone takes them very
> seriously.  And I think they've got a point:  I mean, if you're taking
> your present existence at all seriously, then just what is an afterlife
> supposed to be about?  Are we supposed to be eating bonbons all day and
> living in some version of American luxury?  I'd like to believe in
> Heaven  --which for me looks like a kind of liberal college town, with
> libraries and funky old cinema houses-- but all of that seems kind of
> empty if there's no gravitas, no seriousness.   Without death, without a
> final marker which howls at us, Do what you must do NOW and die knowing
> that you've used your life well--without that, I think heaven would
> become kind of slouchy and boring, or worse.  Unless, of course, what's
> waiting for us on the other side is something superrational but
> beautiful, like being absorbed into the godhead, if such there be.
>
> So in answer to your question, I think we do dream of uncorrupt worlds,
> but if we examine them too closely, they tend to be bustable soap
> bubbles. And maybe I lack imagination, but I wonder, how could it be any
> other way?  Frankly, I'd like to be told how. I sound sensible about all
> of this if a little pessimistic, but in reality I'm a scared ex-Catholic
> who is terrified  of death and wants to solve the Big Question before
> they're performing Last Rites on his sorry ass.
>
> --Bill
>
> On 9/27/2012 7:20 PM, rigsy03 wrote:
>
>
>
> > I wonder where you put the mythological and religious other-worldlies-
> > from gods to guardian angels, etc.? Or the construct of Dante's
> > "Divine Comedy", for instance. Do humans long for uncorrupted worlds?
>
> > On Sep 27, 6:23 pm, William L Houts <luka...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I'm with the pragmatists on the question of intelligent alien species.
> >> Many scientists who speculate on this sort of thing --though there
> >> really aren't that many of them-- say that such species wouldn't
> >> resemble anything so comforting as a humanoid physiology, but I think
> >> they're partly mistaken.  Surely there would be surprises in the way
> >> nature cooks up life on other planets with radically different
> >> chemistries than our dear old Mama Earth.  But I think there's reason to
> >> suppose that many alien species would resemble us.  After all, any
> >> species we might imagine has to cope with gravity as it evolves.  So
> >> they're much more likely to evolve some form of locomotion which
> >> involves  two, four or six pedal extremities (as Fats Waller calls them)
> >> rather than three or five:  even-numbered legs are less wobbly and more
> >> amenable to balanced movement which consumes fewer calories. . Also,
> >> sense organs like eyes and ears are likely to be located in or close to
> >> a head, as there is survival value in having sense organs located close
> >> to a brain, or whatever such species might use for brains. Finally,
> >> everyone in the cosmos requires energy to get going, so they're either
> >> going to evolve photosynthesis and take their energy directly from their
> >> sun or suns, or they're going to take their sunbeams indirectly by
> >> consuming something lower in the food chain.  I'm sure there are lots of
> >> evolution pathways I'm leaving out, seeing as I'm a curious poet rather
> >> than a serious scientist type of guy, but I think these notions are, as
> >> Allan named other ideas of mine, sensible provisos.
>
> >> PS.  I left out centipedes and millipedes with their scores of legs, but
> >> I think y'all's get what I'm saying here.
>
> >> --Bill
>
> >> On 9/27/2012 3:57 PM, archytas wrote:
>
> >>> I haven't seen any UFOs and tend not to be much interested in people
> >>> who claim to have - at least without Bill's sensible provisos.  The
> >>> speed of thought as a brain process is slower than light-speed - but
> >>> then I'm basically a tropical fish realist.  I'd have a bet that no
> >>> one in this group would really have much of a definition of light-
> >>> speed and the Ricel curvature tensor, Euler Langrangian and the rest
> >>> of Einstein's field equations.  I mean no offence and don't do much of
> >>> this science myself.
> >>> If you point out to a physicist that the people from the future who
> >>> have invented the time machine are in extraordinarily short supply in
> >>> our present he may come up with some mathematical guff on the shape of
> >>> the universe that explains this or makes time travel only possible to
> >>> the future.  I have seen demons - plodding back to camp after a week's
> >>> endurance exercise with no food for two days I was visually convinced
> >>> the sentries were vampires but still asked them where the Naffi was.
> >>> My guess is that we travel through space as primitive life-forms with
> >>> evolution built-in and waiting to unfold.  We may thus have come from
> >>> a much more advanced civilisation than ours bound by the speed of
> >>> light, capable of the biological engineering but not space-flight much
> >>> more advanced than our own.  Calculations give 28 years as the time to
> >>> reach the edge of the known universe - but this is the time inside the
> >>> ship accelerating to near light speed fairly slowly.   Space is not
> >>> friction free and it's doubtful we or our instruments could take the
> >>> radiation of light-speed flight.
> >>> I rather hope there are some nice, genuinely civilised aliens thinking
> >>> of coming here.  In my speculation, intelligent life tends to worry
> >>> about food chains led by apes as these have been notoriously war-like.
> >>> I'm into bees and ants rather than UFOs at the moment.  Bees use
> >>> 'pharma' to combat fungal infections.  Ants take slaves - killing the
> >>> adults of another species and taking the larvae.  These slaves then
> >>> raise the slaver brood.  Interestingly, the ant slaves rebel and kill
> >>> the pupae of their masters - an act that does not favour the
> >>> individuals a they will die, but does seem to be altruistic in favour
> >>> of other colonies of the enslaved species.  I mention this to suggest
> >>> science is not a human invention, just something in evolution we are
> >>> expanding.
> >>> UFOs remind me of religion generally - people seem to bond around
> >>> ludic claims about golden salamanders and what cannot be proved.  I
> >>> guess we will find life or past life-sign on Mars.  Salvation may come
> >>> from a mother-ship, but my own feeling is that our inability to
> >>> develop science as we could is a more important thought experiment.
> >>> In respect of this problem I recommend 'Bad Pharma' by Ben
> >>> Goldacre,     He finds a �600 billion industry in which more money is
> >>> spent on marketing than on research and development, where the results
> >>> of clinical trials of new drugs are massaged, and in which regulators
> >>> fail to regulate. Papers supposedly by respected academics are
> >>> ghostwritten by drug companies, and patients' pressure groups are
> >>> covertly sponsored by pill manufacturers.
> >>> I can't for the life of me work out why we aren't directing our
> >>> collective towards tapping into the asteroid belt and beyond instead
> >>> of ADMASS.
> >>> On 24 Sep, 20:15, William L Houts <luka...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> I'm placing my bet on thoughtspeed.  It's a great concept and it's a
> >>>> great word.  How could I do any better than that?
> >>>> --Bill
> >>>> On 9/24/2012 7:17 AM, Don Johnson wrote:
> >>>>> I agree with Allan the distance challenge is daunting. In an endless
> >>>>> universe there's also no doubt in my mind there are other inhabitable
> >>>>> planets out there but very unlikely any "aliens" will be visiting us.
> >>>>> But there is hope....
> >>>>>http://www.npl.washington.edu/av/altvw81.html
> >>>>> It's fun to speculate. The ball is in your court.
> >>>>> dj
> >>>>> On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 4:51 PM, William L Houts <luka...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>>> I've been around for a while now, so I thought I'd put in a topic for
> >>>>>> discussion.  I'm very interested in the UFO phenomenon and wonder what the
> >>>>>> singing minds here have to say about it.  As for me, I don't have a dog in
> >>>>>> this fight --I tend to think that there's something to them, something very
> >>>>>> unusual, but I'm not at all certain that they're even piloted.  Jacques
> >>>>>> Valee, one of the more interesting theorists on the subject, says that
> >>>>>> they're something like external dreams.  Well, he doesn't say that exactly,
> >>>>>> but that's how I interpret him. Carl Jung, who was also very interested in
> >>>>>> the topic, says something very similar.
> >>>>>> I have an experience to relate, too.  About fifteen or sixteen years ago, I
> >>>>>> was flying down to Las Vegas on Southwest.  Looking out of my window I saw,
> >>>>>> perhaps 20,000 feet below us, a disc-shaped object. It was
>
> ...
>
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