Lawsuit Over Prayer Is Settled

[shagdrum]

Well, if the stories you make up are good and clever enough, you can be a Professor Too!

...if that is what passes for an "academic" now...

Here's more on the Moses high on hallucinogens thesis.
I don't find this unbelievable based on the influence of these substances in other religions.

The problem is, the burden of proof is logically on those proposing this idea, and their "proof" is nothing more then their own beliefs and spin. No hard evidence cited. There "evidence" is totally dependant on their interpretation, and as such is very weak. All that needs to be done to disprove it is cite an different interpretation from the given evidence.

 

[04SCTLS]

Well there is no hard proof that Moses injested this substance.
The only hard proof is that these substances exhisted and still exhist and some of their effects are vivid hallucinations
that have been incorporated into mostly ancient religious ceremonies as a glimpse of the Allmighty.

 

[shagdrum]

Well there is no hard proof that Moses injested this substance.

Exactly!

The only hard proof is that these substances exhisted and still exhist and some of their effects are vivid hallucinations
that have been incorporated into mostly ancient religious ceremonies as a glimpse of the Allmighty.

Yes, those are really the only two facts. They don't even imply a connection. That connection needs to be there for this to be taken seriously. Otherwise, it is just unfounded speculation.

 

[04SCTLS]

Might make for some interesting graduation prayers! LOL!
Oh just kidding.....

 

[04SCTLS]

And now ahem, I think I'll go meditate and listen to
The Dark Side of the Moon and contemplate that Great Gig in the Sky.....
All that you touch, all that you see, all you create, and all you destroy, all that's to come, and everything under the sun is in tune....

 

[fossten]

Now it's starting to make more sense to me:
Maybe this should be added to the religious curiculum along with the peyote tribes and the Rastafarians.

Moses was 'on acid'
A top academic says Moses was high on hallucinogenic drugs when he received the Ten Commandments from God.
Prof Benny Shannon believes Old Testament tales are records of visions brought on by plants similar to an acid trip, reports The Sun.
The psychology don at Jerusalem's Hebrew University says the Bible's stories suggest "ancient Israelites regarded psycho-active plants in high esteem".
Prof Shannon claims Moses got high on a drink called Ayahuasca, made out of potent plants that grow in southern Israel.
He said: "They constitute the key ingredients of one of the most powerful psychedelic substances in existence."
The professor came up with his theory after trying the drink, still used in religious rituals by the Amazon people, and having similar visions.
He claims five events in Moses' life were inspired by the drug, including the Ten Commandments and the Burning Bush miracle.

This is nothing but red meat for the atheist community. It's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. "Prof" Benny Shannon knows less about the Bible than I do. Interesting that he came up with the theory after drinking the drug. Only somebody high on drugs would come up with such an idiotic theory.

 

[04SCTLS]

fossten,
you lack imagination and curiosity about the mystery
of life beyond what's in the Bible. You should lighten up a bit.

Some of the greatest discoveries of mankind:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dna+discovered+on+lsd&btnG=Google+Search

Crick Was High on LSD When he Discovered DNA Double Helix

Francis Crick, Nobel Prize winner and a pioneer of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he deduced the double-helix structure of DNA.

Crick, who died in 2004, told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD, then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy, to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA.

Crick was a devotee of novelist Aldous Huxley, whose accounts of his experiments with LSD and mescaline became cult texts for the underground drug culture of the 1960s. Crick was a founding member of Soma, a group dedicated to the legalization of marijuana named after a drug that appears in Huxley's novel "Brave New World.

or how about Kary Mullis

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

Kary Banks Mullis, Ph.D. (born December 28, 1944) is an American biochemist and Nobel laureate.
Dr Mullis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993 for his development of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), a central technique in biochemistry and molecular biology which allows the amplification of specified DNA sequences. Dr Mullis subsequently was awarded the Japan Prize that same year.

In a Q&A interview published in the September 1994 issue of California Monthly, Mullis said, "Back in the 1960s and early '70s I took plenty of LSD. A lot of people were doing that in Berkeley back then. And I found it to be a mind-opening experience. It was certainly much more important than any courses I ever took."[citation needed] During a symposium held for centenarian Albert Hofmann, Hofmann revealed that he was told by Nobel-prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis that LSD had helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences.[citation needed

Awards and honors

• 1990 - William Allan Memorial Award of the American Society of Human Genetics | Preis Biochemische Analytik of the German Society of Clinical Chemistry and Boehringer Mannheim
• 1991 - National Biotechnology Award | Gairdner Award | R&D Scientist of the Year
• 1992 - California Scientist of the Year Award
• 1993 - Nobel Prize in Chemistry | Japan Prize | Thomas A. Edison Award
• 1994 - Honorary degree of Doctor of Science from the University of South Carolina
• 1998 - Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame [14] |
• 2004 - Honorary degree in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology from the University of Bologna, Italy

Ronald H. Brown American Innovator Award[15]
Mullis has also received the John Scott Award, given by the City Trusts of Philadelphia to other Nobelists, as well as Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers.[16]

Then of course there was Carl Sagan
look him up.

To me it's not hard to imagine other great thinkers and scientific luminaries throughout history to have experimented with pscychedelics and been smitten by revelations and insight like the above examples.

 

[04SCTLS]

From LSD to OSX

A few servings of iTunes jelly.
I’ve spent the past week or so enjoying the delights of Leopard, the 10.5 iteration of Apple’s OS X operating system, but have only just noticed the new Visualizer patterns in the latest version of iTunes. I don’t use the Visualizer much, especially since the introduction of Front Row, Apple’s home media management system, but it’s always nice to know it’s there. The original Visualizer isn’t so far removed from the graphic tricks I used to laboriously program into my old Spectrum computer in the 1980s, simple repeated shapes with coloured lines, albeit a lot faster and with far more detail and animation than a 48k Spectrum could ever manage. The latest Visualizer has been significantly supercharged, however, and the new “Jelly” setting creates some really beautiful (and it should be noted, trippy) patterns, reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters UFOs or James Cameron’s Abyss inhabitants.
I can’t help but see a direct line of continuity here from Apple’s origin in the head culture of Sixties and Seventies’ California to the present. Writer John Markoff examined some of the connections between psychedelic culture and the nascent computer scene in What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry where we find Apple CEO Steve Jobs saying that “TAKING LSD WAS ONE OF THE TWO OR THREE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS HE HAD DONE IN HIS LIFE.” Given this, the glowing, pulsating mandalas in the new iTunes can be seen as a vestigial remnant of that era, and it seems fitting that those patterns are integrated into a music player; it was upon the Sixties’ music scene, after all, that LSD originally had its greatest cultural impact

 

[04SCTLS]

PLAYBOY: When you were at Harvard, did you frequent the Combat Zone, home of hookers, drugs and adult films?
GATES: That's true. [Laughs] But just because I went there doesn't mean I engaged in everything that was going on. But I did go there. It's easy, you just take the subway. And it's pretty inexpensive. I ate pizza, read books and watched what was going on. I went to the diners.
PLAYBOY: Ever take LSD?
GATES: My errant youth ended a long time ago.
PLAYBOY: What does that mean?
GATES: That means there were things I did under the age of 25 that I ended up not doing subsequently.
PLAYBOY: One LSD story involved you staring at a table and thinking the corner was going to plunge into your eye.
GATES: [Smiles]
PLAYBOY: Ah, a glimmer of recognition.
GATES: That was on the other side of that boundary. The young mind can deal with certain kinds of gooping around that I don't think at this age I could. I don't think you're as capable of handling lack of sleep or whatever challenges you throw at your body as you get older. However, I never missed a day of work.
_______________________________________________

Amazing what these "idiots" have come up with.

 

[hrmwrm]

but your arguements imply moses existed. take a look at my link to zeitgeist. in it they explain a commonality between many religions. after all, scripture is just writing. anybody could come up with stories.

 

[04SCTLS]

religious controversy again. alright. let's try this link.
http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/
goes a little beyond just religious. but raises some interesting things. this is the newer version. the old one is still on google.

This movie is a lot do digest and comes off as the conspiracy of all conspiracies stretching as it does over so many generations to the goal of an all menacing ruthless world government.
Although seemingly well presented it stretches credulity to the point of being too fantastic an achievement to be thought possible.

 

[shagdrum]

PLAYBOY: When you were at Harvard, did you frequent the Combat Zone, home of hookers, drugs and adult films?
GATES: That's true. [Laughs] But just because I went there doesn't mean I engaged in everything that was going on. But I did go there. It's easy, you just take the subway. And it's pretty inexpensive. I ate pizza, read books and watched what was going on. I went to the diners.
PLAYBOY: Ever take LSD?
GATES: My errant youth ended a long time ago.
PLAYBOY: What does that mean?
GATES: That means there were things I did under the age of 25 that I ended up not doing subsequently.
PLAYBOY: One LSD story involved you staring at a table and thinking the corner was going to plunge into your eye.
GATES: [Smiles]
PLAYBOY: Ah, a glimmer of recognition.
GATES: That was on the other side of that boundary. The young mind can deal with certain kinds of gooping around that I don't think at this age I could. I don't think you're as capable of handling lack of sleep or whatever challenges you throw at your body as you get older. However, I never missed a day of work.
_______________________________________________

Amazing what these "idiots" have come up with.

So...we've gone from Court cases about school prayer....to constitutional interperetation...to religious "conspiricies"?...to...LSD and it's use by brilliant people in their youth (and beyond?)?

This thread is all over the place!

 

[hrmwrm]

This movie is a lot do digest and comes off as the conspiracy of all conspiracies stretching as it does over so many generations to the goal of an all menacing ruthless world government.
Although seemingly well presented it stretches credulity to the point of being too fantastic an achievement to be thought possible.

the conspiracy of the second half is stretching, but the beginning half does present a credible case of religions and belief. similarities of many are beyond coincidence. understanding the stucture for control of masses by imparting a common ideal is what created many religions. egypt was ruled in this way and many sprang stories and their own doctrine from these ideals. the only thing i haven't looked into very well is whether societies sprang from religious ideals or religious ideals came from societies becoming larger and needing a central control. i've only looked into history and roots, not causes.

 

[Mick Jagger]

Those were used as a background, they don't override the Constitution, or add laws to it.

You apparently have no idea what the common law rules of construction were when the Constitution was being made.

They were used as a for a procedural framework; taking a lot of theories and concepts as well as procedure from them to form a new legal system in the US. Common law from Britan doesn't establish or create law in this country.

No. The rules of construction were used to ascertain the will of the lawmaker at the time the law was made.

Only in issues of procedure

The rules have little to do with issues of procedure. They have to do with the will of the lawmaker when the law was made.

or in clarifying a definition of a term used by the framers

.

The framers didn't define the terms they used in the Constitution.

the Framers own writing and the writings of the time are the primary sources for interpreting the constitution. the common law stuff is only for procedure, or clarification of what a certian term or phrase was ment to be. It doesn't establish laws.

There is no evidence whatsoever that the framers understood, believed, assumed or intended for the meaning of the Constitution to be ascertained from their own writing and the writings of the time, unless those writings were admissible under the rules of construction.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of document by the framers and people of the time debating, breaking down and otherwise clarifying the understanding of the constituiton by the Framers and the general population at that time.

What do those documents say about whether the rules of construction should be used to interpret the Constitution?

From another message board I post on:

The terms used in the constitution were deliberated on at great length and are not ambiguous and undefined...

There's a lot of ambiguous language in the Constitution, dude.

 

[Mick Jagger]

Where are you basing that on?

The word religion in the Constitution and the first three rules of construction.

I have never come across that definiton of "religion".

It was defined that way in the "subject matter."

Give me the textual basis.

The first clause of the First Amendment and the no religious test clause.

Also, how do the free exercise and establishment clause give religion a broad pass from the law?

Beats me, dude.

Where are you getting that? Are priests not subject to the law if they are molesting little kids?

How is that religion?

 

[04SCTLS]

So...we've gone from Court cases about school prayer....to constitutional interperetation...to religious "conspiricies"?...to...LSD and it's use by brilliant people in their youth (and beyond?)?

This thread is all over the place!

Just thought I'd add some color to the prayer debate.
I think religions and pscychedelic substances have crossed paths in the past.
Since I was dismissively put down about the Moses theory which cannot be proven or disproven I decided to list current luminaries in the sciences who's self admitted use of these substances led to great leaps in knowledge and advancement for mankind.

Oh and welcome "Mick Jagger" to the board.

Your posts are certainly of a high caliber however your responses to questions seem too brief to fully explain your positions.
A little more detail would be helpful.

 

[Mick Jagger]

Just thought I'd add some color to the prayer debate.
I think religions and pscychedelic substances have crossed paths in the past.
Since I was dismissively put down about the Moses theory which cannot be proven or disproven I decided to list current luminaries in the sciences who's self admitted use of these substances led to great leaps in knowledge and advancement for mankind.

Oh and welcome "Mick Jagger" to the board.

Thank you, sir.

Your posts are certainly of a high caliber however your responses to questions seem too brief to fully explain your positions.
A little more detail would be helpful.

Ask and you shall receive. What would you like me to explain?

 

[04SCTLS]

Thank you, sir.



Ask and you shall receive. What would you like me to explain?

I was refering to shagdrum's questions.
Your answers seem as brief as possible and not very elaborative.
I can't speak for shagdrum and personally am not as keenly
interested in the constitution and it's framing el al.
Perhaps he's getting the answers he wants.

For instance:

Quote:
Give me the textual basis.
The first clause of the First Amendment and the no religious test clause.

Not everyone here is going to be looking up the constitution so if you quoted the first clause and the no religious test clause in your answer it would be more enlightening to the casual reader here.

 

[Kbob]

Just thought I'd add some color to the prayer debate.
I think religions and pscychedelic substances have crossed paths in the past.
Since I was dismissively put down about the Moses theory which cannot be proven or disproven I decided to list current luminaries in the sciences who's self admitted use of these substances led to great leaps in knowledge and advancement for mankind.

And what of the Egyptian nation during the plagues as recorded in the Bible? Did Moses spike their drinking water with a hallucinogen and they all had the same bad trip?

I realize that events in the Bible are widely regarded by those of other faiths (I include atheism in this term) as "fairy tales". But pseudo-scientific attempts to disprove Biblical accounts are quite prolific on so-called science channels. The most recent that comes to mind is the show about the gospel of Judas. Never mind that this "gospel" was written some 200+ years after Christ. Attempts to "revise" history have been around for centuries, even millenia.

I could go on and on, but who has the time and what's the point? Any discussion about Jesus and the Bible boils down to faith in every instance. Some will place their faith in pseudo-science and marginal theories. I place my faith in Jesus.

Also, I submit that these great minds that used hallucinogenic drugs may have been depressing their intellectual abilities by using these drugs. They may have been able to accomplish much more had they refrained from these drugs by simply applying themselves as 99.99% (of course I don't know the exact number, but I'm quite confident that this percentage errs on the low side) of all other great minds did, and still do. Sounds like a good theory to me.

 

[shagdrum]

You apparently have no idea what the common law rules of construction were when the Constitution was being made.

I know what common law is and it's influence in our nations founding. As to the rules of constrution, I have never heard of that before, and unless you can provide a better explanation (and maybe a few links to info on it), I have to assume you have no idea what those are.

No. The rules of construction were used to ascertain the will of the lawmaker at the time the law was made.

Again, need more then just your unsubstantiated assertion. When determining the meaning of the constitution the Framers original intent is what is looked at, through the paper trail I showed.

The rules have little to do with issues of procedure. They have to do with the will of the lawmaker when the law was made.

Again, you are spinnin your wheels and not makin any progress here, unless you can expand on this (again, with some sort of link, or source, please).

The framers didn't define the terms they used in the Constitution.

No, they didn't need to. They had an understanding of what those terms ment. Common law can be used to figure out what some terms ment to them (when the terms are vauge or understood differently by todays standards.

There is no evidence whatsoever that the framers understood, believed, assumed or intended for the meaning of the Constitution to be ascertained from their own writing and the writings of the time, unless those writings were admissible under the rules of construction.

That is just common sense. If you wanna understand what someone said or wrote (and why they did so), you look at their explanation for it.

What do those documents say about whether the rules of construction should be used to interpret the Constitution?

I have yet to find anything about "rules of interpretation". I am beginning to wonder if you made that up.

There's a lot of ambiguous language in the Constitution, dude.

DUDE!...that is why you go back and look at the explanations and clarification they wrote down and/or published.

 

[04SCTLS]

Also, I submit that these great minds that used hallucinogenic drugs may have been depressing their intellectual abilities by using these drugs. They may have been able to accomplish much more had they refrained from these drugs by simply applying themselves as 99.99% (of course I don't know the exact number, but I'm quite confident that this percentage errs on the low side) of all other great minds did, and still do. Sounds like a good theory to me.

These people all said hallucinogenic drugs enhanced their intellectual abilities
so I'll take them at their word. They also used them moderately and sparingly and not chronically like say Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd who's daily and heavy use fried his brain. The Air Force and Navy give their pilots small doses of Dexedrine (an amphetamine) to sharpen up their performance so one cannot just blithely say all drugs are bad and don't have a good use.
Soldiers on both sides in WWII also took amphetamines to keep going and win.
I'm sure Hitler's blitzkrieg was fuelled by these stimulants that the Germans had synthisized in 1927.
When you send out bomber crews and 40% of them aren't coming back conventional morality takes a back seat to winning at all costs when the stakes are so high.

Christianity has been around for 2000 years so I'm sure it will withstand any onslaught. The essence of faith is believing in the unprovable.

The first part of your post seems to argue against the Moses on drugs theory but your last sentence says:
"Sounds like a good theory to me"
So which is it?

 

[shagdrum]

It was defined that way in the "subject matter."

What "subject matter"?




You need to expand on your claims. You are not providing explanations, just answers when the question isn't all that clear. All you are doing, effectively is confusing the issue right now. It seems you may have a lot to offer, but you are just making quick statements without explanation.

I DID finally find the context of that definiton of religion at this link:
http://www.plymrock.org/leadership.html

George Mason submitted the first draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights to the committee assigned to present such a declaration to Virginia's first state constitutional convention in 1776. That committee's amended Article 18 reads:

That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and, therefore, that all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience, unpunished and unrestrained by the magistrates, unless under color of religion any man disturb the peace, the happiness, or safety of society.
​

Basically this is talking about free exercise of religion within certian limits. But even further down on the page, it talks about those limits, and how that was changed:

James Madison was a member of the Declaration of Rights committee, And, as reported in the documentary record, his thought was that "toleration was a grant, freedom a right." 1 In proposing amendments to the original language of the committee's draft, the documentary record says that Madison started with the phrase "that all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion", He drew two lines through "should" and above it wrote, "are equally entitled to," He then deleted the four words "the fullest toleration of" and before the noun "exercise" inserted the adjective "free."

The record refers to the phrase "unless, under color of religion any man disturb the peace, the happiness, or safety of society" as a "gaping loophole clause" because it obviously would given any civil magistrate the right to render his personal opinion with respect to someone's free exercise of religion. In the committee, the "entire loophole clause, beginning with 'unpunished and unrestrained' ... was excised -- any delegate could agree that a clear and present danger [in the original toileting language] justified forceful response."
​

This is consistent with the ruling in Employment Division v. Smith (1990).


If you are saying that religion, as an idea can't be tried in court directly, and as such is above the law, then yes that is accurate and I would agree with you. If you are trying to imply that religion can be used as an excuse to break the law (or a justification for that), then that would be inaccurate and wrong.

Please, clarify and explain what you are getting at here.

 

[shagdrum]

Since I was dismissively put down about the Moses theory which cannot be proven or disproven

Didn't mean to be dismissive, sorry 'bout that. But I felt it needed to be pointed out that if you are gonna try to intellectually challenge religion, you can't base the argument on the fact that your claim can't be disproven, that isn't logical.

I know that leads to the claim that religion is based on the argument that it can't be disproven, and that is the logic given by some, which is again, a logical fallacy. However, religion has never been ment to be based in reason, it is about faith, which is inherently unreasonable, so logic isn't applicable. If you are gonna intellectually attack religion, then logic is applicable to your argument, but not to religion.

I know it is a double standard, but it is justified, as what is being compared (an intellectual challenge v. religion) is comparing apples to oranges, on a number of levels.

 

[shagdrum]

Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd who's daily and heavy use fried his brain.

I didn't know that. Maybe that is why some of their music seems to just ramble on (instrumentally) and not neccessarily go anywhere, sometimes.

 

[04SCTLS]

Syd was out of it by 1967 way before Pink Floyd's greatest albums.
He's the crazy diamond in Shine on you Crazy Diamond.
Their early stuff is unrefined IMO.
Dark side of the Moon 1973 which I saw performed live in 1975 is regarded by some as the greatest album of all time having spent 14 years on the Billboard Chart.
I also really enjoy most of the 1972 album Meddle, tracks Echoes and One of these Days. This album really set the tone for all subsequent Floyd albums.