DescentBB

Now the Satanic Temple says because of the Hobby Lobby decision, they should be able to exempt themselves from those anti-abortion Christian-based mandates that many states have recently passed in the hopes of stopping abortion. I hope they prevail, even though I'm not a Satanist.

http://theweek.com/article/index/265471 ... rtion-laws

lol

parody religions don't count

Burlyman wrote:parody religions don't count

All religions are based on fiction, so who can say which is a parody?

Hmmmm. How about Scientology? Technically it's a cult, which is technically the same as a religion, but close enough. Psssst, don't tell Tom Cruise.

exempt them all. hell all you need to do to currently get an exemption is know the right person anyways

What? No slippery slope argument?

would you feel better if I made one up

CUDA wrote:exempt them all.

All? No qualifiers? Okay, for the sake of argument:

If I'm running "Business X" and I declare that healthcare (in part, or in entirety) is against my new just-now-made-up religion... I should be exempt from having to pay for it?

Doesn't this get back to equality and fairness issue in the other thread here? Should we treat interest groups differently, ie. unequally, when applying the law because different people view some as illegitimate and some as legitimate? If so, who is it that gets to define legitimacy? The people, the law, the government?

Foil wrote:

CUDA wrote:exempt them all.

All? No qualifiers? Okay, for the sake of argument:

If I'm running "Business X" and I declare that healthcare (in part, or in entirety) is against my new just-now-made-up religion... I should be exempt from having to pay for it?

right now all you need to get exempt is Nancy Pelosi's phone # this law has not been implemented equally since it's inception

wow, I hope no one thinks CUDA was serious......you WERE being sarcastic, right, CUDA?

Why not, if Pelosi had to talk to a couple of million individual voters, maybe she would stop acting the phool.

Foil wrote:

CUDA wrote:exempt them all.

All? No qualifiers? Okay, for the sake of argument:

If I'm running "Business X" and I declare that healthcare (in part, or in entirety) is against my new just-now-made-up religion... I should be exempt from having to pay for it?

Honestly, I'm okay with it. If you make up your religion that doesn't believe in cancer and wants to refuse to pay for cancer coverage, assuming it's "reasonably" available to your employees (that was part of the ruling) and you're clear about disclosure I don't really care. Smart employees will expect larger paychecks so they can provide their own coverage, or they will leave... I see this as part of the "good benefits" vs. "bad benefits" spectrum.

So, I guess my qualifiers are that a company's "exceptions" need to be clearly disclosed, and the coverage needs to be "reasonably" available elsewhere.

callmeslick wrote:wow, I hope no one thinks CUDA was serious......you WERE being sarcastic, right, CUDA?

vision wrote:

Burlyman wrote:parody religions don't count

All religions are based on fiction, so who can say which is a parody?

Atheism is a religion

Sometimes I forget that the 99% are still in the dark ages with respect to science and religion

You relativists will get all the proof you need when the fallen angels come back through the veil... I hope you have enough time to prepare your detectors before they attack you.

I've learned in life that no matter how much evidence people are given, they don't want to know the truth, just their "truth."

Burlyman wrote:You relativists will get all the proof you need when the fallen angels come back through the veil...

I really just need one angel, fallen or not, to show themselves before me and I will become a lifelong follower of whatever religion they offer. Shouldn't be too hard for them, right?

They are going to torture you for five months.
You can't convince me that you'd accept the truth. I've seen grown men do some pretty stupid things just because their ego was bruised when they found out that they were wrong and I was right. Most people don't really want to know the truth... just their "truth"

Read the book of Exodus and see how even the Israelites doubted God no matter what they saw.

Burlyman wrote:Read the book of Exodus and see how even the Israelites doubted God no matter what they saw.

I still need to see something. Please pray to your god have have one of his angelic servants reveal himself to me. That's all it takes. I'll be a lifelong believer then. I can't rely on 2nd or 3rd hand information when it comes to something as serious as faith and a soul, can you? Seems unwise.

you wouldn't believe even if you saw one with your own two eyes.

Burlyman wrote:Read the book of Exodus and see how even the Israelites doubted God no matter what they saw.

A lot of what the Israelites saw could be explained scientifically today. Back then, any natural catastrophic disaster would have been attributed to God or supernatural forces because no one had a complete understanding of how the physical world worked. Everything was mysterious back then.

CUDA wrote:you wouldn't believe even if you saw one with your own two eyes.

Actually, this is exactly what I need to believe. If I witnessed an event that left no doubt in my mind that a god is real I would have no choice but to believe. Having an angel visit me would be enough. And I don't mean interpretively, I mean actually visit me with all the fanfare and lights and magic -- just like in the bible. A simple request for infinitely an infinitely powerful being.

Speaking of convincing someone to the point where they have no choice but to believe…

Any of you who do not believe in the existence of a life force (and I chose that term as a generic to mean anything you wish to insert…soul as one example)

I will ask one simple question…

What feels pain?

Sub atomic particles
Atoms
Chemicals
Molecules
Cells
Organs
Bodies

One simple question….What feels pain?

Convince me…

My Ass,

Lol

Spidey wrote:I will ask one simple question…

What feels pain?

Sub atomic particles
Atoms
Chemicals
Molecules
Cells
Organs
Bodies

One simple question….What feels pain?

Convince me…

Questions of the soul aside, that's a very simple question: the brain. Your nerve cells transmit signals through your spinal cord up to your brain, which then interprets them depending on the source. For pain, that would be the sensory cells responsible for touch/pressure or heat, depending on what type of pain you're talking about.

Does the brain feel pain, or does it just interpret the signals?

Your brain is what interprets the electrical impulses from individual nerve cells into what our consciousness experiences as "pain," so it's the most important thing. Hell, it can truthfully be said that the brain is more responsible for "seeing" than our actual eyes are, given how much processing is done on the raw signals produced by our retinas.

TopGun's got this one. It's fairly straightforward to tell what feels pain and to what degree once you have a working definition. If pain is a physiological response to stimulus then "what" feels pain probably extends to the very simplest of structures. If you are talking about awareness of pain, that probably coincides with consciousness and a sense of being, which seems to be a gradient correlating to the complexity of an organism.

I appreciate your answers, but I’m not convinced.

Really, I thought about those answers a long time before I responded, and I just can’t glean the information I was looking for from them.

Spidey wrote:Speaking of convincing someone to the point where they have no choice but to believe…

Any of you who do not believe in the existence of a life force (and I chose that term as a generic to mean anything you wish to insert…soul as one example)

I will ask one simple question…

What feels pain?

Sub atomic particles
Atoms
Chemicals
Molecules
Cells
Organs
Bodies

One simple question….What feels pain?

Convince me…

I'd say organisms. I'd define "pain" as a negative response to a stimulus - so I think an organism as a system is required to meet that definition. A couple examples: You prick your finger, and react by pulling it away. A dog gets hit and responds by whimpering and putting its tail behind it legs. A plant comes in contact with a chemical and retracts away from it. A bacteria flees from another attacking cell.

But at what point did all of those other things I listed become something that can experience pain?

That answer does nothing for me either.

if the Brain is what feels the pain, then why does it feel pain in limbs that don't exist??

There are people who don't feel pain at all, and yet they are alive and sentient. They have what's called CIPA, or congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis. That genetic failure indicates that the brain and it's connecting nerves have to be working properly to detect something that's damaging to the body in order to feel pain. Also, diabetics don't feel pain in their extremities because of the nerve damage caused by high blood sugar. What I'd like to know is, do people with CIPA feel any pleasure, because pleasure and pain are very closely associated in the brain.

CUDA wrote:if the Brain is what feels the pain, then why does it feel pain in limbs that don't exist??

three reasons. maladaptive plasticity, conflicting signals, and memories of the missing limb.

CUDA wrote:if the Brain is what feels the pain, then why does it feel pain in limbs that don't exist??

coz what goes on inside of brains doesn't necessarily have strong ties with the real world outside.

Take pain for instance, it's not a real physical thing, it only exists as a brain phenomenon, and nowhere else.
Brains don't directly sense anything real at all, there's no direct sensing of the outside world, your brain can't reach out and touch anything.

You ask why phantom-pain exists. I ask you how you're even sure your body really exists. All of your sensations could be a trick. You could be a brain in a jar, being fed nothing but a slew of fakey fake fake signals from a virtual world that doesn't actually exist.
All of your sensations (including sentience) exist merely as phenomenons within your brain. It's all make believe, thus it's when something goes wrong (eg: phantom pain) it's not really that weird, business as usual really. Just think of how weird your dreams are.

Our hodgepodge biology is so weird, i often stop and ponder in amazement that we even function. it's amazing we all share a consensus reality at all.

Spidey wrote:
I will ask one simple question…

What feels pain?

Sub atomic particles
Atoms
Chemicals
Molecules
Cells
Organs
Bodies

One simple question….What feels pain?

Convince me…

I think spidey that we can rule out your first four candidate. There are nothing in them that would qualify as a receptor to receive a pain signal. They would more likely serve as parts of a pathway to transmit pain signals. It is when we get to cells that one has to look closer and here we see the basic organization to start defining pain. Cells such as nerve cells and glia cells take a stimulus like a burn and send a signal to the reactionary part of the organism that they have to move away from the heat source. Evolution has determined what stimuli are harmful to what type of organism and has made a system whereby the organism feels the stimuli as pain and can react accordingly.

If we look at the brain as a organ then we can say this is where the buck stops. The brain is the recipient of the cell(s) signal that something bad is happening and causes the body to react to the signal (pain). Then one has to define what a brain is. In higher animals it is very complex. In single cell organism the brain is nothing more than a collection of pathways that are precursors to higher animals brain structure.

So I guess the answer to what feels the pain, would be the brain. Though on a deeper look the brain too is a collection of cells but the body needs this particular set of cells to feel the pain.

CUDA wrote:if the Brain is what feels the pain, then why does it feel pain in limbs that don't exist??

...you've basically answered your own question here. Because the brain is where our consciousness exists, and what actually produces what we recognize as "pain," having the physical limb there isn't even a necessity. If nerve endings are damaged or flat-out missing, as in the case of an amputation, there can certainly be sensations of "phantom pain" from extremities that no longer exists.

Like roid said, the bottom line here is that what a lot of sci-fi and cyberpunk has posited, everything from The Matrix to Ghost in the Shell, is absolutely true: if you could find a way to remove a person's brain and keep it alive, and if you sent the proper signals to it, that person would have no way of knowing that they weren't physically experiencing the sensations they observed.

Nothing feels pain. Pain is purely in the software, the only point of confusion here is attempting to assign pain to some specific part or region of hardware when it exists only in the software.