Judith

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  1. I'm fairly certain that in either "The Passion of Ayn Rand" or "Judgment Day" this individual was identified as Leonard Peikoff. Don't ask me for a citation; I'm providing this comment only as a potential source for those who care to follow-up.
  2. I just found out about Nathaniel's death yesterday and I am still in shock. I attended some of his small-group intensives when I was in my early- and mid-20s, after having read his books. Having come from a severely dysfunctional family, I was still working through what my life could and should be. Nathaniel had a profound influence on me, not only by what he said, but by his way of being. I learned what was possible from him. A line from one of Ursula LeGuin's books (perhaps not precisely quoted here) comes to mind: "I give you the gift of yourself." Thank you, Nathaniel, for my life.
  3. Hmmm -- Ed, if you're in your 50s, I think you mean you're well into your SIXTH decade... Ah, fathers and daughters. No one will ever, ever love you the way that your daughters will during their pre-adolescent years. You are the king of their world. Enjoy it -- and remember that you are the most important man in their lives and will influence how they see men (and themselves as women) for the rest of their lives. (And try to keep perspective when you get demoted from king to tyrant-dictator when they turn into teenagers! :-) )
  4. She's wearing in-ear protection. It provides better protection, if properly worn (which she's not doing, since they're not all the way in her ears), than the more sophisticated over-the-ear muffs. The best of all, of course, is to wear both. Ack! Semiautomatics hold MAGAZINES, not CLIPS! Judith
  5. There was a project similar to this one in the '90s that looked quite promising for awhile but eventually went belly up for lack of funding. It still has a web site: http://oceania.org/ Judith
  6. Neil, would you then say that the vast majority of people in the world cannot, rationally speaking, have any basis for believing in any god, since the vast majority of people have no direct experience of god, never have, and never will? Judith
  7. Neil, forgive me if this question has been asked and answered previously in this thread; the sheer volume of material is such that information is easily buried. When you say that "prior events" gave you benchmarks for testing the experience as real or unreal, are you referring to the experience in which God manifested to you and told you to stop praying so hard or he would take your life, and the dream in which you were on trial, and the experiences regarding Simpson? Or are you referring to other experiences, and if so, can you say what they were? When you say that "subsequent events" gave you benchmarks for testing the experience as real or unreal, can you say exactly what events these were and why they supported your conclusion? Judith
  8. Michael, that's an excellent idea, and I agree with it wholeheartedly. My observation on OL, unfortunately, has been that when people try to illustrate their points by analogy or by references to stories, films, or the like, others refuse to get the point and waste time nitpicking on details of whether the comparison is apt, whether the originator of the story used is a trustworthy source, etc. Judith
  9. Those of us who admire Ayn Rand are surely aware that a short work of art can often convey more than thousands of words of didactic argument. Judith
  10. Good god. The confusion deepens. They report: As far as I'm concerned, North and Force are ENTIRELY the same vowel, along with board, coarse, hoarse, door, floor, course, pour, oral, more, historian, moron, glory, and Thor, but quarter, war, warm, warn, aura, and aural are in the "other" class. Judith
  11. All the same "ah-y" to my ear. Unless it's too subtle for my ear to pick up, which is entirely possible; I don't have much of an ear for accents, but I DO know what you mean in terms of diphthongs, etc. Judith
  12. Not bad! I'm from the Northeast, and the reason it's not more specific is that when I was a teenager I picked up variants from friends' speech that I preferred to that of my family's speech. That combined with television English and voice training have created my current accent. Judith
  13. Neil, you suggested that George make use of you as a lab rat and examine you and your experiences. Can you suggest, beyond the experimental protocols you've already written, what kinds of experiments he or others of us might make that we might find useful, interesting, or helpful using you as a lab rat? Judith
  14. The biggest problem I see with Hume's approach is that our knowledge of natural laws is itself fallible and evolving. Too many things have been dismissed out of hand as being "impossible" because they appeared to defy conventional wisdom. Many of the most important breakthrough inventions have been made by people outside the field because these people didn't know which things were "impossible" and therefore proceeded to do them. By dismissing testimony of miracles out of hand as the testimony of people who were either lying or deceived, we might miss asking the question, "WTF really happened?" And the answer to that question might be one for science, not one for religion. Judith
  15. Thanks for the quote. That was beautifully written -- so much so that I just went to Amazon and ordered a copy of the book. ATCAG was, as I've said previously on OL, important in cementing my relatively new atheist beliefs when I was in my 20s, and I look forward to reading this book. Judith