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There are some factors that need to be considered, foremost being belief, tenacity, feasibility, and capacity.
So, if a person believes something will happen; their belief is tenacious enough to affect their actions; the event is feasible; and a local network of systems capable of responding with the effect is sufficiently dense enough to receive the person's input: the event will happen. In fact, our interactions with our environment rely heavily on predictive reasoning - with our automatic predictions rooted in the consistency of our experiences. There is the foundation of "cause and effect" as a concept.
If the subject of a prophecy is possible, with enough time it will be fulfilled. I would say the limit of your capacity for action within the prophecy is your degree of access to systems that put out the effect.

I get a little giddy when I think about how many systems there are displacing and deforming each other tectonically around us. The impression is that we exist in a very precarious medium, a kind of lagrangian point between universal extremes. It seems like everything subtly bustles and jostles as it's heated and cooled like phlegm on a radiator. Life is a bezoar of space dust accreted in the moist and tattered range between gravity and vacuum.

Self-fulfilling prophecy:
When someone tells you a thing will happen, and you act in such a way that ensures that outcome.

Example:
Prophecy: One day the Jewish people will reclaim the holy land, exist as a "pure" Jewish state, and then god will return in his present form to Meggido and Armageddon will commence, where god raptures 12,000 chosen people from the 12 tribes of Israel up to heaven, and brings about the end of the world and an eternity of suffering and hell for everyone else.

What makes it self fulfilling. When the effort to establish racial and theological "purity" turns your country into an apartheid state, kills lots of people already living there, poses a hostile threat to all your already dangerous neighbors, further destabilizing the entire region into unresolvable conflict, it indeed does make life hell on earth for millions of people, and adopting a doomsday policy of all-out global nuclear annihilation as an appropriate response to any aggressors is setting the mousetrap for ushering the end of the world.

Slde note, I chose this ex. because having a Jewish heritage, it's familiar, lets see if we can keep this on-topic though, yea?

>>9593
That's a good example. Religion in general is a great study of self fulfilling prophecies, and while diverging into a religious discussion would be off topic, I do think it's a great model for analyzing the effect self fulfilling prophecy has on a culture.
It seems any person or group who vehemently believes in something will have an effect on their environs. Therein lies a great moral dilemma that I think warrants its own thread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Graffin

He seems okay.

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"Although Graffin is not religious, he prefers to identify as a naturalist rather than as an atheist. "Naturalism is a belief system. A lot of scientists bristle at that. We all have to believe we can find the truth. Evidence is my guide. I rely on observation, experimentation and verification."

Human's where not men't to "work".

It's called alienation of work.

Welcome to capitalism, bitch!

>>9380
OP here , thanks- I appreciate your response.

As I was recently informed, greentexting non-quotes is bannable, so yeah.

As for your post, I feel that atheism and antitheism are the only legitimate religious stances.

Don't we already have a big megamix thread dedicated to these sorts of discussions? And greentexting. Don't do that anymore if you're not quoting anyone, really. As for your question, I'm not religious, or irreligious, I just don't give two fucks.

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The internet allows us to say what we want, usually without repercussions. We can say what we wouldn't dare say around actual people. So there is no limit because there are not any societal norms on the internet to abide by.

>>9448
i know plenty of people who openly speak there mind's regardless of IRC, Or not.
Myself for instance.

IRL*

>>9440

>We aren't even "a part" of as much of the universe as we CAN see. Take as much of the universe as we have documented, then realize that nothing our ENTIRE species does will ever touch the vast majority of that in ANY way, let alone what you are capable of as an individual.

Yes we are part of what we can see, and otherwise, weather we know it or not.

>Your life has zero aggregate effect on THE UNIVERSE.

this is subjective....
If a person believes they have meaning in-there life, then they do, If not they don't

Ether way both side's are delusional.

>>9441
Inaccurate. One is free to assign as much meaning as one wants to anything one wants, but it all comes back to the ultimate meaninglessness of everything.

All 'meaning' is is an artificial construct to help humans deal with the fact that they are sacks of meat living on a mediocre planet orbiting an insignificant star in an entirely average galaxy which is a member of a rather small cluster of galaxies in an easily ignored part of a universe that will eventually, long after the last human is dead, experience heat death.

>>9442

Exactly. How much "meaning" one believes one's life has, has no impact on the solar cycle of Alpha Centauri.

The only context in which humanity has any "meaning" is very limited in both time and space. Does that mean we should consider humanity pointless in that context? Of course not, we ARE humanity and we are living in that context, right here and right now.

We are a part of the universe. A very, very, very, very, very small part. We don't notice when a single blood cell in our body dies, and the universe will not notice when we are gone.

>>9353

Except the mechanisms and sensory apparatus for these things are different. It is erroneous to say that because different types of data can be gained from the act of touching something, those very different types of data processed by separate channels are a single "sense". Your sense of temperature, your sense of contact pressure, your sense of pain, all are handled by separate types of receptor.

I perceive objective reality as an inter-stellation of energetic forces. The overall distribution is probably chaotic, but regional structure is apparent. Structure is a product of energetic interaction, primarily electromagnetic. Systems arise temporarily because it is probable, something I attribute to a complex density of combinatorial possibilities.
With a sufficient stacking of complexities, a medium sufficiently diverse for life develops (the "primordial soup"). Diverse life eventually develops a memory capable of storing sensory data as mnemonic symbols, leading to active self analysis and language.
Essentially, reality is chaotic energy, and our place in it is a pocket of temporary complexity. Complexity develops simply because it is probable. It is completely feasible that there are regions of reality without the initial combinatorial range to develop complexity.

Subjective reality is human reaction to reality. All reactions to reality are inherently subjective and inaccurate to some degree. Objective reality is suggested by synchronous interpretations of sensory input, and becomes more "real" the more consistently the input can be predicted.
Belief systems generate lenses that have the potential to pathologically skew sensory input. Errors in the appraisal of reality are a direct result of the inherent bias of referential interpretation, or more simply as a conflict between what is predicted and what is.
Active processing of reality is limited in that the scope of information present is far greater than the range of a person's focus. For the benefit of survival, much information is discarded from the conscious thought loop in lieu of priority input. The intersection of belief systems with the short-term memory leads to thought structures dependent on the needs of the thinker. This accounts for the diversity of religions, languages, cultures, etc... that populate the range of human thought.
Basically, belief systems provide thought sinks for trivializing low priority thought and conveniently explaining anomalous experiences, allowing the thinker to focus on survival.


>>9353
The medium used to gather data is not equal to the act of interpreting the information. For instance, our sense of balance could loosely be construed as "touch", but the function of the cochlea is incredibly complex, and the resultant sense is a rich synthesis of information (primarily oscillation, barometry, and sight) that combines the input into something completely unlike touch. Contrariwise, scent could be construed as "tasting with the nose", and both scent and taste could be further eschewed into "the refined touching of gaseous suspensions". The end interpretation is the functional "sense", and we have many more than 5.

>>9359
hmm
i agree

context

There is no difference between one and the other, yet there is.....its this whole....wibbly wobbly.....thing

>>9362
very articulate :p

Association fallacy and Reductio ad Hitlerum

Godwin's law

guy 1 got fkn ownt

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

Guys its Revelation there is only one. It's the Book Revelation According to John. Obviously none of you can read. That being said, you all also missed the point of the Book of Revelation. There was, at the time of its writing, a genre of literature that was very popular. Apocalyptic writings were common and not considered prophetic. In fact, many of the early Christian church leaders had another apocalyptic book as a part of the new Biblical canon. It was called The Shepherd of Hermes. It along with The Didache, were in pretty much everyone's version of the Bible for the first couple centuries of Christianity. So really what I'm saying is that Revelation was not meant to be taken literally at all. Ever. It was actually just John bitching about Rome without John explicitly bitching about Rome so that he wouldn't die.

A predetermined event does not necessitate a lack of free will. If we take free will to mean "The free choice of action within personal and environmental limitations", and consider events with extremely high likelihoods (eg: the sun will rise tomorrow), it's clear that while those events sculpt the range of your limitations, they don't predetermine which available actions you will select.
If the made up fantasy nonsense in the bible turns out to be true, the apocalypse is a prearranged event, and while god gives people knowledge of the event as an ultimate punishment, it doesn't force us to choose the right actions, otherwise there would be no need for punishment (automata don't feel or think, and therefor cannot be punished)

There is a deep point contained in this question that was at the heart of Henri Bergson's view of the world and the metaphysic that we desire of it.

From Aristotle and the beginning before him we have had a certain enchantment with the conceptualization of Galileo: that the world consists, immediately, of a timeless representation of the totalized dispositions of physical bodies and of their relationships. We view the future as a simple mathematical derivation of the present, wherein nothing is added except additional values to the differential equations ds/dt, dx/dt and dy/dt. We are all subject to a *natural* equation of ourselves with the future, with our own genetic replications; but capital asks that we understand ourselves in completely different terms, those of productive units or capital accumulation, as a site of self-understanding that is identical with the site of purchase and speculation upon our own reified natures presented as "stock."

The world of selfhood today is a marketplace filled with confusions and bewilderment; we desperately seek a foundation, a determinate substance, in order that we may branch out from satisfaction into success. Without the implicit concept that we are part of such a non-standard grouping, there is no motivation for the creation of a determinate substance or the creation of a determinate opposition.

The nature of our political being is helpless in the face of our total decisions: in Italy, the fascist state reigns supreme through the most pointless innocence. Berlusconi and his government is either guilty or innocent on the basis of meaningless sex parties; the procession of military police into politics and limitless violence into democracy is nothing next to the spectacle of Bunga Bunga. Emergency itself is a mere reality television show that represents the state while actuality retreats into a Cold War sense of universal threat dealt with only by "Doomsday Preparatives".