Peterkin

I don't accept that. The events in dreams are not random; they are the continuation of real life experience and/or cogitation and/or emotional preoccupation. Dreams have a narrative and an internal logic that has meaning for the dreamer. That meaning may be expressed in symbolic imagery and therefore, to some degree liberated from physical laws: You may be able to walk underwater or float among the clouds, but your motion is forward and below is down; the sacrificial lamb that has its throat cut bleeds red, though perhaps it does not die; it may speak with a human voice, but the language is one you understand. Some control. But this tends to happen only when one is close to waking, so the dream is already disintegrating when he takes conscious control. I do some of this, and have discussed t with others who do; have not yet encountered anyone who has total control, except at the beginning or end of a dream sequence; what happens in between is directed by the unconscious mind. The introspection would have to be consciously undertaken, visualized and focused on a specific subject area before falling asleep. Then the dream would begin to form during the NREM stage, so that the REM stage had a theme to take up. After that, unexpected events are likely to take place, but these might shed light on the issue that the sleeper is investigating, and might, in the semi-conscious end-stage be recalled long enough to record for conscious analysis. No, it's not someone else, though it may be one's own alter-ego. Most of us have several, some of us have many alter-egoes, or aspects of personality that play different roles in one's private, social and working life, or are are indulged only in fantasy, or suppressed altogether. There is no 'pure randomness'. You have definite images of known objects, and plausible events. Randomness has no meaning, while dreams are rich in meaning. The point of that is not being someone else (and even other characters don't do things randomly: they have motivations and aims) but the question itself. "Why did I do that?" Wish fulfillment? Frustration? Revenge? Aspiration? Fear of temptation? You have a reason for doing that in your dream: either the action was a response to something that happened to you, or else an experiment or rehearsal of something you might do in certain situations. So we in lucid dreaming have limited control over our actions, and some control of the environment, however we are not necessarily a true reflection of ourselves. What and where is a "true reflection" of any self? If you're controlling, as in conscious life, you are not considering at the same time. The introspection comes either before (What can I do? What should I do? What do I want to do? What am I prepared to do?) or after the action (What was I thinking?! Could I have done better? Would I have done that if I'd known...?) but not during. I don't see how. Every author knows about creating and controlling characters; every fictional character we manipulate has motivations and aims upon which we have reflected through introspection ("What would I do in his place?") and that thought-process doesn't either fuse us with our characters (who are already buds off our own) or confuse us in our identity. Isn't that psychoanalysis? Rorschach test, word association, mood journal, dream log, hypnosis...? Just so!!

It would be fun to see them duke it out for food-chain dominance. But what's the point of being a god if you can't see your creations suffer? Earth ideology imposed on other planets, the way European powers imposed Christianity on the savages of the New World, because they believed that it was good. Once you've contaminated the galaxy with plagues and pestilences, you'll establish a policy of non-interference (unless it's a tactical exception, or there's science to test.) How magnanimous! Remember, one of the many variables you cannot predict is whether there is already developing life elsewhere - maybe not on your target planet, but on a neighbouring moon, or solar system - another is whether your messenger microbes will evolve into virulent pathogens that hitch rides on comets, travel to other inhabited planets and wipe out the native species, who will not have developed a resistance to them. Life can be brutish and nasty.

It's science done in the service, not of potential new knowledge, but of ideology. Science is a method, a tool - it can serve whatever purpose people want.

If knowledge ever comes back. Otherwise, it's missionary work.

Anyone who understands the distances,time periods and variables involved.Even if you artificially speed up the process, by the time ET phones home, there will be nobody here to answer. is absolutely correct.

That's what happens when you put unpaid interns in the collating room! (Though it's hard to imagine poor Hungarian eel-fishers in hovercrafts to begin with.)

But Google isn't on the street, reading the sign. A tourist with a cellphone would read the google version; one with a pocket dictionary would not. In the making of signs, there are cultural and economic assumptions, just as there are in idiomatic speech. In the case of the lanes merging, the driver has no options: whatever it means, he has to squeeze into that one lane. In the case where someone is looking for a green space to have his lunch, he's found the wrong venue.

It can be from movies, I suppose. But the word 'park' is ambiguous in itself. In how many languages is it a verb? In how many languages can it be passive? In how many languages is it associated with vehicular traffic? So is 'attend' - that's a verb, so 'attendant' might be an adjective as easily as a person. 'Heated' is all right, translated literally, but which of the other things is being warmed, and why? They are also both metaphors. Neither is commonly used in my part of the world, where the second would be understood more readily than the first. Canadians have an appreciation of cold, but we're not particularly naval. Metaphors, either from the language of a specialized field, or from popular literature, enter idiomatic communication all the time and become an accepted part of the cultural medium of exchange. Then they don't need context or background, because everybody knows what they mean. Some are place-specific and relate to the history and lifestyle of a people, while others, like Biblical and Shakespearean quotations, are widely used. Of course, lately, broadcast journalist coin words and phrases that may be entirely devoid of meaning (Snowmageddon? Perfect storm of doubt?) yet instantly become familiar parlance through endless repetition.

It does mean both earthly and land-dwelling. I don't see the application to this thread, or to my quoted comment.

By 'we', you mean those familiar with the concept and practice of assisted temporary automobile storage.

The specific named characters, no. The circumstances* and conditions prevailing in the period, yes. Roman colonial history is quite well documented. I have never claimed more than conjecture based on available circumstantial* and historical evidence, most of which I cited. * yes, I do know what 'disinterested' means, and I'm also aware of how large a part circumstantial evidence (I know what that means, too) plays in historical reconstruction, scientific theory and criminal prosecution. Nobody's asking you to believe Christian lore.

Only because it's grammatically incorrect.

Much of language acquisition and development is un- or sub-conscious. I worked with a young doctor once who had recently come from Poland. She had learned English before she emigrated and continued to study it after she settle in Canada. She told me she felt at a disadvantage because she would always have to translate in her head before pronouncing an English sentence. One day, she answered a question so promptly that I asked, "How was that in Polish?" She had to stop, think and translate. What we do daily, the practical things we communicate about for work, food shopping, transportation, banking, etc. become second nature very quickly. You might not even notice that you're thinking in a foreign language, and that you had accumulated a whole new non-congruent vocabulary of all the things and activities that had been unfamiliar in your previous life. That's why older immigrants mix English words with their native speech. It's the abstractions and idioms that are difficult to formulate and to understand - partly because of the semantic aspect, but mainly because of the cultural shorthand for assumptions, references and associations that native speakers pick up without even knowing that these expressions make no objective sense to an outsider.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised if there were a certain amount of hand-washing between the local authority (whether puppet king or governor or high priest) and the colonial prefecture, doing one another favours for the overall purpose of keeping peace and stability in the region. That system broke down several times during the 1st c CE: After Herod's death, Palestine was divided into two or three separate regions, ineptly governed by his children. There is some confusion in the NT whether 'Jesus' was judged by Herod or his son Antipas. That also pushes the probable time of execution up into the CE, and closer to the revolt - perhaps even a contributing factor. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jesus/Jewish-Palestine-at-the-time-of-Jesus I'm relying heavily on Britannica for these references, because it's clear, concise and reliable.

The web of neural connections in our brains. Humans are all made very similarly, just as all crows are similar and can communicate with one another. Incubation and infancy are similar for all of us: if we survive to language-acquisition, it's usually because mature caregivers talk to us and respond to us. So we learn their words for the physical aspects of our surroundings, and their method of relating to those physical realities. Our parents share an environment; interact with one another, conduct business and rituals together: they all share frames of reference, which we inherit. Later on, we may change locales, social contacts, beliefs and attitudes, but by then we have the tools and skills to adapt our communication style. The later in life a relocation takes place, the more difficult it is to pick up nuances of meaning in a new environment, the more we must rely on physical realities, rather than esoteric references. For example, I have a pretty good which demographic would get my Patsy reference above - to most of the world, it would mean nothing. Cat, OTH, is fairly universal. And i have to keep editing, because every typing mistake alters the meaning i wished to convey.

Not really. It could become that, if we were serious about it --- but we're not. If anything, we tend to hear less of the message than is being sent, rather than more. If there are too many words, we simply stop listening. If it's too complicated, we peel away the intellectual parts and hear only what makes us happy or angry, that reinforces what we already believe, or reinforces what we think of the sender. The generals were not paralyzed into inaction - ever; not even if the messenger was shot en route (poor Patsy will have died in vain after all). They did attack - and if one was fifteen minutes late, that could have unintended consequences for good or ill. Language can be, and sometimes must be very precise, as when we need to convey a formula for a drug or explosive or chocolate chip cookie, but most of the time, we don't need precision. Most of the time, we can get by with sloppy speech, because we share enough environment, culture and experience to recognize the other person's references.

Thank you for that. Anthropology, history and mythology are interesting. I've learned a few more interesting facts while looking things up for this thread, so it's not been a waste as far as i'm concerned. My original source for early Christianity was Gibbon, and his sources were contemporary Roman archives. Very little was written about Judea before the revolt of 67CE - certainly no splashy miracles were recorded. But that doesn't really clash with the gospel stories, since the apostles keep their leader's miracles 'in the family' as it were; even the leper and the dead man were down in the poor people's marketplace. Jesus never did walk across Herod's swimming pool; never gave a command performance. Reformers, prophets, preachers were common. Mostly unremarked, unless they were seen as a threat to public order or the establishment. They would not, generally, have been regarded as a threat to Rome. The local governors and priests did not have the authority to decree capital punishment against blasphemers - which, in any case, they would have done by stoning. Crucifixion was a Roman method, usually reserved for sedition and insurrection. So, at some point in this time-line (I'm guessing more like a few decades into the Christian Era, rather than BCE), some rebellious voices are being herd briefly, silenced, then heard again someplace else. And all of those stories are later folded into the stories of religious reformers, miracle workers, healers, teachers, opposers of the status quo. Remember that in the Judean tradition, religion, national identity and legitimacy of rule are all intertwined. All the OT prophets kept exhorting the kings for breaking faith with their god and that's why they lose wars... against way bigger, better armed, better supplied, and better organized imperial armies. For them, adherence to religious law is intensely political. It's not hard to imagine, in the years leading up to that disastrous revolt, would-be religious reformers preaching sedition. (BTW - there is nothing warm and fuzzy about martyrdom. People who believe that deeply in something have a reason as well as a need.)

Because it's irrelevant. Theirs is not an evidence-based culture. Different priorities, different POV, different perspectives.

If you already understand the religious mindset so thoroughly, why bother discussing the origins of religious myth?

One or more humans, yes. Not gods, not demigods, just itinerant preachers, carrying a message that people found hopeful in a difficult period of their history. It was the wrong message for most Judeans, who had been waiting and hoping for a rebel leader - a new king for the liberated Jews. The rebellion didn't materialize for another 30 years, and it was crushed. By then, of course, Christianity had sailed and they were not on board. But the message got through to other occupied peoples. More importantly, it got through to the Roman underclass, who were likely fed up with paying for all those far-away wars and palace intrigues; who had had their belief in the Roman pantheon eroded by bad emperors and diluted by the importation of pagan deities and primed for a fresh new religion. Every one of these people had some tradition of atonement through sacrifice and some tradition of a fertility deity who dies in winter and rises up again in spring. For a good organizer and authoritative leader like Paul, it wasn't that hard to synthesize all these elements and pack in a good wallop of "It's all your fault. It'll be okay if you repent." Why? How many gods, in which mythologies are supposed to have indulged in diaries or correspondence. They decree; they dictate; they send angels to announce. People wouldn't have expected written communication from their gods. (And, of course, I never once suggested that there was any supernatural entity involved - so why the "if God" condition?) The high priests and scribes valued documentation; the mendicants and common people didn't. Maybe he/they/some of them could have, by why would they want to? They were preachers in the present, not prophets for the future. Different perspective. They didn't think so, then. All that big importance is down to Roman hard sell, a few centuries later. All this man/these men were responsible for is starting a small cult with a few local cells. Nothing significant until Paul took them in hand and created disturbance is the empire - vandalism, mainly; disrupting religious services; getting himself arrested a lot - and recruited more malcontents. Eventually, Constantine took over and rolled over Europe. Different perspective. That's not how spirituality works. Evidence is either subjective or irrelevant. Religion is emotion-based, not reason-based. Different standards, different metrics, different requirements, different perspectives.

I changed wanting to smoke to wanting to not smoke, and I don't smoke anymore... but still sometimes dream about lighting a cigarette, because, one layer down, I never really stopped wanting to smoke. Some desires may disappear from the surface, without really going away.

Universal health care? Diplomatic solutions to conflict? Climate change amelioration? That's a piece of cake. People are eager to believe in eternal life and unconditional love. They swallow the bait before the hook begins to hurt. You hear any US news in the past 6 years?

It's being done every day. Unhappily, there is nothing I know of, so far, to speed bone healing. You're still looking at 6-8 weeks of healing after each surgical procedure. So, if the change can be affected with a minimum of interference with bone structure, and preferential lipo- or silicone treatments, hormone and exercise therapies, I would seriously consider those alternatives, or some combination. The even worse news is prices. In some provinces and states, some procedures are covered by public health insurance, but you have to study up on the fees and co-pay options before you decide on a regimen. The prices are truly daunting! I would think three or four times, and consider all the other options, before jumping into pelvic reconstruction. The much better news is that health-care community takes this issue seriously and there is a ton of information as well as support. Here is a very mainstream overview of what's available. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/21526-gender-affirmation-confirmation-or-sex-reassignment-surgery. The link I gave you earlier is advertising a more extensive and expensive range of services. I do get that. You can't be on discussion boards without encountering that granite wall of prejudice. Obviously, part of the solution is altering public perception - but that takes time, co-operation and media attention, and you can't wait another century for acceptance. I wonder why. How's it any skin off their... Do they feel you're deserting to the enemy - or what? Anyway, that's a whole 'nother can of Spaghetti-O's. Yes, future technology, including stem cell remodelling, will make it much easier. But people who are desperately unhappy right now, that's little consolation. Such people need to access whatever help is at hand where they live.... plus perhaps consider the option of relocating to some place where they're more readily accepted or better served. But that's another avenue closed by this forever pandemic.

Yes, it might well be interpreted that way. ID is not the same thing as religion; it's just one recent product of religious PR. Yeah. That always works out for the best. After all, the atmosphere didn't burn off - that time.

Obviously, you do. Uncritically. Sure, why not? Yes. Only, that wasn't the question. What I asked was: Why send germs into outer space, if you can never know what they might become?