Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[kennyc]

Thanks Tom. It's one of my favorite quotes and guiding principles.

[Ralph Sir Edward]

Hero trapped deep in a mine, talking to the chief engineer outside the mine via phone.

"The (water) pump is making noises."
"You're pumping against too much pressure. The pumps above you are out. Soon the pressure relief valve will open and it will be recirculating."
"Can I dog it down?"
"No, it's internal, you can't get at it."

Quote

"I could eat a handful of iron filing and puke a better design than that!!!"

E.E.Smith PHD - First Lensman

[WT Sharpe]

.....Contrary to Julian’s belief, Christianity did not require state power to survive. There seems, in fact, to have been an inverse relationship between the bishops’ power to wield the emperor's sword against their enemies and their ability to resolve internal disputes themselves by peaceful means.
..........— Richard E. Rubenstein (1938 - ), author, University Professor of Conflict Resolution and Public Affairs at George Mason University. When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome (2000).

[Hamlet53]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Here you go, from Wikiquote:

* It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
o "On the Method of Theoretical Physics" The Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford (10 June 1933); also published in Philosophy of Science, Vol. 1, No. 2 (April 1934), pp. 163-169., p. 165. [thanks to Dr. Techie @ www.wordorigins.org and JSTOR]
o Variants: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.
o This may seem very similar to Occam's razor which advocates the simplest solution. However, it is normally taken to be a warning against too much simplicity. Dubbed 'Einstein's razor', it is used when an appeal to Occam's razor results in an over-simplified explanation that leads to a false conclusion. It is also similar to what has become known as the KISS Principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid! Note that the naming of the KISS principle obeys Einstein's razor, ending with a redundant letter S, which is needed to add power to the idea!

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

I personally do not see any difference between the two statements. Then my interpretation of Occam’s Razor is accept all entities (hypotheses) needed to explain the system and no more. So as applies to God an religion;

Is an invisible sky spirit with magic powers needed to explain the world around us and if not . . .

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

I personally do not see any difference between the two statements. Then my interpretation of Occam’s Razor is accept all entities (hypotheses) needed to explain the system and no more.

Neither do I, but I guess we'll have to take that up with Einstein, and last I checked, he wasn't taking any calls.

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

So as applies to God an religion;

Is an invisible sky spirit with magic powers needed to explain the world around us and if not . . .

The universe is a mysterious place, and I'm no expert on the nature of Ultimate Reality. Did a Supreme Being set the rules in motion? I have no idea, but the answers to such questions are outside the realm of current science. Even assuming (and I see no reason to) that there is a Supreme Intelligence behind the veil, that doesn't answer the question of how it came to be, how it works, and how it evolved to what we see about us today. God or no god, here's still plenty of work for the scientists and philosophers.

[kyoryu]

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

I personally do not see any difference between the two statements. Then my interpretation of Occam’s Razor is accept all entities (hypotheses) needed to explain the system and no more. So as applies to God an religion;

Is an invisible sky spirit with magic powers needed to explain the world around us and if not . . .

Given that Occam's Razor is more correctly quoted as "do not multiply entities unnecessarily" (compared to the common "the simplest solution is likely correct") it's very close to the Einstein quote - especially with the "unnecessarily" clause.

[WT Sharpe]

For Memorial Day (United States), May 31, 2010:

.....Our flag is red, white and blue, but our nation is rainbow—red, yellow, brown, black and white—we’re all precious in God’s sight. America is not like a blanket—one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt—many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.
..........— Jesse Jackson (1941- ), American minister, political leader. Address to the Democratic National Convention (1984).

[kennyc]

Nice, appropriate and excellent quote Tom.

[kennyc]

And on a completely different topic:


A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

- E.B. White

(sorry I ran across this but do not have the source reference)

[poohbear_nc]

Originally Posted by kennyc

And on a completely different topic:


A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

- E.B. White

(sorry I ran across this but do not have the source reference)

If memory serves, this is very close to a description of burlesque given by Gypsy Rose Lee (don't have the source - but your quote triggered the hazy recollection)

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

If memory serves, this is very close to a description of burlesque given by Gypsy Rose Lee (don't have the source - but your quote triggered the hazy recollection)

It's all entertainment...it's all good.

[WT Sharpe]

.....Christianity's first sin was idolatry: It turned what Jesus was about into Jesus himself. It took the mystery he proclaimed—the utterly unfathomable mystery of God's disappearance into humankind—and reduced it to the Procrustean dimensions of the one who proclaimed it. By elaborating functional christologies initially and ontological christologies eventually, Christianity turned Jesus, in the phrase of the third-century theologian Origen, into hê autobasileia, the kingdom-of-God-in-person.
..........— Thomas Sheehan, Ph.D., Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University. The First Coming - How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity.


.....Jesus is ultimately dispensable. He is not irreplaceable—in fact, he demands to be displaced so that one can get to what he is about. Jesus is not the object of the message he preached. The proclaimer of the kingdom gives way to the reality he proclaimed. "The kingdom of God" is a language, an interpretation of human existence that was preached and lived by Jesus in the past and that can be reinterpreted and lived out by people today.
..........— Ibid.

[sbaum4853]

"To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interweave, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement demolishing workmen periodically wrench open into daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances."
From Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem.

[kennyc]

Nice one, thanks sbaum!

[WT Sharpe]

.....I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.
..........— Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), Prussian philosopher. Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785). There are many variant translations.