Blank

Checks and balances. While I despise the moral character and general demeanor of the current U.S. president, you can see the checks and balances of the other branches of federal government expressing themselves in a clearer way right now. There are attempts by the president to alter policy through executive action and vetoing, but then you have in the general public a broader discussion of executive branch overreach which should have been happening 40 years ago. A more philosophical correction may be taking place. Anecdotally, I have overheard more constructive political discussion around town than ever before. So while I may not like a move here or there, or maybe there are a few moves I think are on the right track, and while I may despise the man, I also see how there are positive outcomes from such a disasterpiece in office.

- https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/the-solar-eclipse-coincidence/ I like to think about this sometimes. Because of this, we were able to test Einstein's theory of relativity in 1919: -https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity

Impressive.

Now please understand that I am not unsympathetic to people who have no "faith" in God. I comprehend the doubts and questions. I have struggled with them myself. I have seen my close friend who grew up in the same faith as me decide that he did not believe it anymore, and yet we are still close friends. I understand where he is coming from with his questions. But I suppose God has "revealed" himself to me in "ways" that are "real" to me. My friend has not had God "reveal" himself in the same "ways" and so does not find him as "real" as I do. The "ways" I sense that God has "revealed" himself are more than I can attribute to explicable things that are not God. It would not be honest of me deep down in my soul if I told you that the "ways" I have "experienced" God were explicable to me by reasons other than God.

Here is another question. If God is love, but you do not have love for your brother who you do see, how will you understand who God is, God who you cannot see? Another interesting idea would be to propose that God is only found if people seek him with their whole heart. So if people never seek him, how will they know whether or not he can be found? ---------------------------------------------------- 1 John 4: 8"Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." ... 12"No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us." ---------------------------------------------------- Deuteronomy 4:29- "But if from there you seek the LORD your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul."

------Excerpt from Lilith, by George MacDonald------ "How DID I get here?" I said--apparently aloud, for the question was immediately answered. "You came through the door," replied an odd, rather harsh voice. ... "I did not come through any door," I rejoined. "I saw you come through it!--saw you with my own ancient eyes!" asserted the raven, positively but not disrespectfully. "I never saw any door!" I persisted. "Of course not!" he returned; "all the doors you had yet seen--and you haven't seen many--were doors in; here you came upon a door out! The strange thing to you," he went on thoughtfully, "will be, that the more doors you go out of, the farther you get in!" "Oblige me by telling me where I am." "That is impossible. You know nothing about whereness. The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home." "How am I to begin that where everything is so strange?" "By doing something." "What?" "Anything; and the sooner you begin the better! for until you are at home, you will find it as difficult to get out as it is to get in." "I have, unfortunately, found it too easy to get in; once out I shall not try again!" "You have stumbled in, and may, possibly, stumble out again. Whether you have got in UNFORTUNATELY remains to be seen." "Do you never go out, sir?" "When I please I do, but not often, or for long. Your world is such a half-baked sort of place, it is at once so childish and so self-satisfied--in fact, it is not sufficiently developed for an old raven--at your service!" "Am I wrong, then, in presuming that a man is superior to a bird?" "That is as it may be. We do not waste our intellects in generalising, but take man or bird as we find him.--I think it is now my turn to ask you a question!" "You have the best of rights," I replied, "in the fact that you CAN do so!" "Well answered!" he rejoined. "Tell me, then, who you are--if you happen to know." "How should I help knowing? I am myself, and must know!" "If you know you are yourself, you know that you are not somebody else; but do you know that you are yourself? Are you sure you are not your own father?--or, excuse me, your own fool?--Who are you, pray?" I became at once aware that I could give him no notion of who I was. Indeed, who was I? It would be no answer to say I was who! Then I understood that I did not know myself, did not know what I was, had no grounds on which to determine that I was one and not another. As for the name I went by in my own world, I had forgotten it, and did not care to recall it, for it meant nothing, and what it might be was plainly of no consequence here. I had indeed almost forgotten that there it was a custom for everybody to have a name! So I held my peace, and it was my wisdom; for what should I say to a creature such as this raven, who saw through accident into entity?

I find it hard to answer your question unless you further explain to me what you refer to when you say "real proof." What does "real proof" mean to you? For example, perhaps after reading this, suppose you did experience "lights in the sky or some kind of manifestation of an entity." Would that change your question at all? And maybe what I am saying is that there is importance in the turn of phrase, "weight of evidence." You may have many factors that you consider when you decide something is "real," and when you believe something is real, it is because you have taken into account at all those factors, and have concluded, based on them, that something is real. What factors do you consider when you are taking into account the evidence about whether something is "real" or not?

Never could resist "religion" threads. Apparently that hasn't changed. Now back to chemistry homework.

"Roughly speaking, the word faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it means simply belief--accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people--at least it used to puzzle me--is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue. I used to ask how on Earth it can be a virtue--what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence, that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid. Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then--and a good many people do not see still--was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith; on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other... Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of evidence is against it. That is not the point at which faith comes in. But supposing a man's reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair; some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments where a mere mood rises up against it. Now faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian, I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable; but when I was an atheist, I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why faith is such a necessary virtue; unless you teach your moods "where they get off" you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of faith." --C.S. Lewis

As I mentioned in the game thread, I want to keep a place for you all to discuss the goingons of things outside of the game, out of character. We will try to keep the other thread free from the poor-witted banter you are all so insistent on poisoning the internet with. Thank you for obliging. Peace, Blank

Out of Character: Answers to some questions you all may have after I came out of nowhere to rekindle this game: 1. I have all of your information that you ever sent me and that I ever sent you. (WorstUsernameEver, this includes your character sheet and background) 2. I will make an Out of Character thread so we don't inundate this thread with our OOC inanity. 3. I am incredibly busy with school. 16 credits in Organic Chemistry, General Chemistry, and Physics I, with lab classes for each. However, I am not going to abandon this game as I did before when I got busy. My goal is to post at least once a week for at least two of the characters in this game. This game does have six different characters, including the NPC's I am working on, so a big part of this time is taken looking up the rules and filling out basic information and backgrounds for some of these critical and non-critical characters. 4. I have no doubt that this game will be hilarious and fun. You guys are too ridiculous for it not to be. I look forward to seeing what happens as we go. For now, I have only posted for Tigs and Walsy, but Worst, you are next, along with either awesomeness, Iwanttehkotor3, or deadlynightshade. 5. I don't even know if everyone will still be playing, but I am going to put the effort forth, and we do have Cant who could possibly fill in as substitute if absolutely necessary. Considering nothing has actually happened with the characters yet, it is possible that we will move on from a couple characters depending on their activity (read: they aren't playing), and incorporate Cant or someone else who is active with their own character. Cant may make an appearance with his awesome character he has developed for another game that could become an important part of this one. Anyway, that all depends on the actions you all take in this game. We will see what happens. Peace, Blank

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cqOEr_yfak"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cqOEr_yfak

Walsy- Ridge Theophilus Butterfat. You are wet, and cold, and tired. After hitchhiking with a surprisingly kind group of Kobold-skin traders, you find yourself in the vast and famed city of Neverwinter. Except, at the moment, you are not impressed. It is nighttime, and raining heavily. Standing in the middle of a dimly lit road, you see some street lanterns swaying back and forth in the wind and the rain. One of them goes out as you watch. It's a bleak sight, mostly because you haven't eaten since that morning. And now your stomach growls as you remember a scene with the Kobold-skin traders just before town, when one of them, Smurtle, (or was it Gertle?) generously offered you a morsel of Kobold stew, which you now wish you had not declined (though who could blame you). Suddenly, you hear blood-curdling bleating in your ear. You turn and see your two angry sheep. They look awfully hungry, and awfully as tall as you are, because you are a gnome, after all. Unfortunately, you don't have any food on your person, or on your Buckner. Buckner. Your... Camel. Because you are a gnome who owns a camel... of course. Ahead of you is a unique-looking building, larger than the houses and makeshift hovels around you. Half of it looks like an average stone building, and the other half looks like the base of a tower. Indeed. as you squint at it and see the sign, it says, "THE FALLEN TOWER." While you look, a drunk man stumbles out of the door and heads down a different street, barely able to walk without falling as his feet seem to only just lift out of the mud. Dim light pours through the building's windows, and the yellow hue promises warmth. It appears there is a lean-to on one side of the building, where perhaps Buckner and the sheep could sit temporarily while you ask for directions, or food, or a place to stay. But before you can do anything else, (rolls...) you notice from slightly behind, to your left that there is a young boy of rough appearance and scraggly clothes moving quickly at you, and he is not slowing down. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tigranes- Torin the dwarf. Almost invisible in the shadows of the alleyway, you tip the random beggar a copper coin, as he gave you some helpful information on where you could find some treasure in town. After all, your skillset serves you when it comes to procuring such things. So you were on your way to The Fallen Tower tavern, where you heard that a couple chests of treasure may to lie beneath. All one has to do is gain access to the trap-door in the tower-base side of the building. Someone can pay the tavern staff 4 gold coins for access to the dungeons beneath, where "none return from," but you have a good feeling this rainy evening that you will have no trouble slipping into the dungeon unnoticed, for free, and scoping the place out. You know, because dwarves are known for sneaking and making no noise. But maybe that's just it, your whole life, people have never expected you to have honed any skills of stealthiness. On the other hand, maybe you want to keep exploring the cold, rainy Neverwinter you are now in, and perhaps you will find something of interest elsewhere. Suddenly, you see a child come out of the shadows across the street in another alley. You see him, and he sees you and looks away, uninterested... or intimidated. You recognize the look in his eyes, the fierce desperation that comes from living off the street, trying to supply a bite to eat, any way to survive. The kid looks hungry. Clothes are tattered. Shoes are non-existent. But before you can look at him any more, he starts sprinting toward some objects down the alley from both of you. As you watch the scene unfold, you see the objects are... a camel? And two sheep? You are unsure why these animals are sitting in the rain in the middle of the street, and you are even more unsure why the poor boy is sprinting after them. It is hard to see everything from the alley you are in.