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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>>>>…Spike wrote:<br>"I had an experience that may be relevant, a commend made by the bride of my friend from Washington who lives near Mount Peak. She was well aware of my philosophical path. Her comment went along these lines: If atheism is right, then the things we do in this life are irrelevant for they all lead to the same place in a short enough time. Even if we think of our children and how to improve their world, that too is irrelevant for they too face the same short time in a meaningless existence with no real destiny, and so on with their children. The notion that all of our existence is all perfectly meaningless is not acceptable. Therefore, we assume there is a point to it all."…<br><br><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#222222'>>>…A lot of people want to be part of something bigger than themselves. And it can be hard for people to understand that it is possible without God. SR Ballard<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#222222'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:#222222'>>…Churches et al have big meetings places often, as in the Catholic, beautiful architechture, beautiful music, and so on - perhaps a sip of wine. No other</span><span style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:#222222'> group that could give </span><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS"'>meaning to life has anything remotely similar. And who</span><span style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS"'> do you see recruiting to such secular groups? bill w<span style='color:#F3F3F3'>fffff</span></span><span style='font-size:12.0pt;color:#F3F3F3'>ffdchur</span><span style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Consider the scenario of a planet a few thousand light years distant, nice place, not too hot or cold, life evolves, eventually consciousness, technology, culture, all the stuff we have here, and they get up to about where humans were in about the 1860s: they figured out a lot of stuff, discovered Maxwell’s equations (those work there too) orbit mechanics (two areas of theory humans had worked out during the 1860s (while the Union and the rebs were popping cannon balls at each other (but well before radio.)))<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Then something bad happened, a disease perhaps that caused societal breakdown, and evolutionary pressure was against increasing intelligence. One could perhaps argue that there has been evolutionary pressure against increasing intelligence in every technologically-advanced human culture for the past 50 to 100 years and that the average intelligence of humanity is declining.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>OK so that level of tech was their pinnacle but they didn’t achieve radio, and so their artifacts are completely on the surface of that planet. They decay with age and are never discovered. No intelligence outside that planet ever knows they came and went. Gone without a trace.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>From our point of view, the lives, struggles, everything about that civilization was completely irrelevant. If they don’t leave something to somehow be visible from the outside, they are irrelevant.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Humans blasted out a signal into space in 1974. That signal is the brightest object in the galaxy at that frequency. If we end up going extinct, we could argue that signal differentiates us from complete irrelevance.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>spike<o:p></o:p></p></div></body></html>