Judith

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.

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.

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! :-) )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry -- mistake on my part. I rhyme "water" with "daughter". All of those words are indistinguishable for me. How might one make them different?? Thin. I've NEVER heard anyone say "thanks" using the other "th" sound, no matter where in the country (or the world) I've been. Please don't forget the questions in my previous post! :-) Judith

What is this 'NT-type' personality? The "intuitive, thinking" personality type in the Myers-Briggs personality profile. There's a discussion of the profile on OL here: http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=2798 Judith

Do you think there is such a thing? I am seriously questioning it at this point. Unless one has seen it for one's self, would NT-type personalities such as we tend to be here ever really be able to believe based on others' experiences? What would these similarities prove? We already know that religious experiences are not unanimously alike. If I were surrounded by people, 95 percent of whom repeated seeing almost exactly the same thing that I did not see, I would conclude that I lacked some faculty -- that I was in a sense color-blind. But in the absence of a large number of people seeing the same thing, what conclusions could we justifiably draw even if there were some similarities? And how many similarities would justify which conclusions? Sigh -- some of these questions are rhetorical, I suppose, although if you have interesting answers, please give them! :-) I'm just interested in what's really out there, if anything -- I don't have any vested interest in the argument coming out either way. Judith

Do I pass? :-) From whence do I hail? How would one pronounce "hoarse and horse", "merry and Mary", "rider and spider", and "penny and any" differently? Are you sure you have that right? As far as I can tell, the ONLY thing distinguishing the two words' sounds is the "t" versus the "d". How would the VOWELS differ? Judith

I've been looking back over the many contributions to this thread from the past several days and this one caught my eye. George, I'm curious what exactly you would do differently if you had a first-hand experience that convinced you of the existence of God. How would you handle reporting it? Judith

So where can we take this test and get the answers? Judith

Have you studied Kabalistic theory much? With what specifics other than what you mentioned above do you agree or disagree? Judith

Um -- how? Other than to do what Ken Wilber suggests and dedicate my life to intense meditation for the next twenty or thirty years, with no guarantee that I'll live that long and no guarantee that I'll have any sort of transcendent experiences even if I do that... I'm inclined to think that those who have done research on temporal lobe epilepsy and its relationship to religious experiences may be on the right track. Some people's brains may be more likely hard-wired for these kinds of experiences than those of others, and if you ain't got it, you ain't gonna have a religious experience no matter how much time you spend in the lotus position. I'd LOVE to have a transcendent experience. Judith

What a great image! I have never been able to read or look at porn without laughing hysterically. I'm firmly convinced that, to indulge in it, one absolutely has to put one's self in a mental state of fog. If you manage to come out of that fog and look at it with any sort of clarity at all, it's absolutely hilarious. And that clarity would, of course, destroy its intended purpose. Judith

I really liked Eddie. During the early parts of the novel where Dagny is walking forlornly around New York mourning her loneliness and the barren cultural landscape, I wanted to grab her and shake her and say, "You bloody fool! Why aren't you dating Eddie? Or at least engaging in a social friendship with him! Go out for coffee together! Listen to the music of Richard Halley together!" Judith