Someday I'll finish watching DS9. I do believe it's the best ST show, though that's not saying much IMO. I wish there were a list of episodes that actually further the overarching plot, so I could skip all of the filler episodes.
That's part of what put me off on DS9. You never knew if you were going to get a story arc episode, filler, or filler posing as a story arc episode. That and I kind of hated the Bajorans. I got where they were coming from with it all, but their main trait as a species seemed to be pitching fits and being annoying.
I think DS9 would have worked better as a non-Trek show too. Its ambitions at its best moments do not mesh at all well with how Trek had developed to date.
Someday I'll finish watching DS9. I do believe it's the best ST show, though that's not saying much IMO. I wish there were a list of episodes that actually further the overarching plot, so I could skip all of the filler episodes.
That's part of what put me off on DS9. You never knew if you were going to get a story arc episode, filler, or filler posing as a story arc episode. That and I kind of hated the Bajorans. I got where they were coming from with it all, but their main trait as a species seemed to be pitching fits and being annoying.
I think DS9 would have worked better as a non-Trek show too. Its ambitions at its best moments do not mesh at all well with how Trek had developed to date.
I don't love the Bajorans but they don't bother me the way they do you. I think Kira Nerys is one of the best female characters ever created.
I get what you mean about not feeling like Trek, and it was the first created after Roddenberry died in like '91.
I guess when you like the characters as much as I do, nothing feels like filler. Or very little anyway. Like, the first season is almost ALL filler. The second season is episodic, but it's easily as good a season of episodic television as any Next Generation. Third season on about 50% of episodes are arc or contribute to the arc, and the other 50% are character development. Like some of the best episodes don't contribute directly to the main plot, but they enrich the atmosphere of the show. Case in point: Duet from Season 1.
DS9 was sort of caught between trying to be more serialized/arc-based and episodic like Next Gen before it. It was still largely syndicated as UPN wasn't everywhere yet. Pretty much starting with the last episode of Season 5 (A Call to Arms) it's almost all one episode leads into the next with brief reprieve between arcs.
The quality of acting is really top-notch though.
Light is both a particle and a wave, this is accepted but yet unexplained physics as far as I'm aware. If this is true, then why is it difficult for some to see that one being could be three persons, especially if said being is God Himself?
Jesus first claimed to be God in Mark 14.
Mark 14:55-64 (KJV)
55[And the chief priests and all the council sought for witness against Jesus to put him to death; and found none.] 56[For many bare false witness against him, but their witness agreed not together.] 57[And there arose certain, and bare false witness against him, saying,] 58[We heard him say, I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands.] 59[But neither so did their witness agree together.] 60[And the high priest stood up in the midst, and asked Jesus, saying, Answerest thou nothing? what ] is it which[ these witness against thee?] 61[But he held his peace, and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?] 62[And Jesus said, ] I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. 63[Then the high priest rent his clothes, and saith, What need we any further witnesses?] 64[Ye have heard the blasphemy: what think ye? And they all condemned him to be guilty of death.]
God called himself, "I am", numerous times in the Bible. One good example is Exodus 3:14.
Exodus 3:13-14 (KJV)
13[And Moses said unto God, Behold, ] when[ I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What ] is[ his name? what shall I say unto them?] 14And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.
What's written in Exodus came a long time before Jesus was on Earth. Both the High Priest and Jesus would've known the implications of calling oneself, "I am", probably more than anybody else. This is reflected by the High Priest tearing his robe and calling blasphemy.
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Mark wrote his gospel, though, so there's little chance of that.
Lemme step in about trinity. The bible says that God is literally three beings in one. They have such perfect harmony that their natures and identities are inseparable from one another. Understanding this helps us understand why God deals with us the way he does. God is perfectly trusting and perfectly performing. Each 'member' of the Trinity serves the others with no regard to himself. To us it looks like one person.
This impacts the Gospel. The Father decides to gift a new creation to his son as a reward for his faithfulness. But sin screws up the plan. So the son decides to sacrifice himself to make a way for this church to reconcile with God.
Debate round starting. More after.
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I never 'got' the Holy Spirit anyway. It felt to me like someone thought, 'Hey, Trinities are the new hotness, how do we add a Trinity to our religion?' and someone else said, 'God, Jesus and Mary?' and someone else was like, 'Uh, no, no women, please.' and so they kind of made up the Holy Spirit to cater to the Trinity fad, and now, millenia after the Trinity fad is so, so over, we're stuck with it, like the pair of bell-bottoms in the back of your moms closet.
As for the 'best captain' side-debate, Kirk, although my favorite Trek crew-person overall would be Jadzia Dax.
Mark wrote his gospel, though, so there's little chance of that.Mark is believed to be the earliest Gospel, but it still dates to around 70CE. It was traditionally ascribed to Mark the Evangelist, but that's widely questioned these days. Even if so, that Mark was not an Apostle, nor present for the events in the Gospels, so the Gospel must come from other sources. It's not an eyewitness account or written immediately after the events. Therefore it can't be taken as a reliable word for word account. Even eyewitnesses aren't all that reliable, but 3rd party accounts from close to 40 years later barely qualify as hearsay.
Unless you're relying on divine inspiration, in which case the debate is pointless.
OTOH, 40 years isn't a huge amount of time. A lot of the people who were around when Jesus was would still be alive. You'd think if it was BS someone would have called him on it. Rather than, say, getting martyred because they believed it.
Mark wrote his gospel, though, so there's little chance of that.Mark is believed to be the earliest Gospel, but it still dates to around 70CE. It was traditionally ascribed to Mark the Evangelist, but that's widely questioned these days. Even if so, that Mark was not an Apostle, nor present for the events in the Gospels, so the Gospel must come from other sources. It's not an eyewitness account or written immediately after the events. Therefore it can't be taken as a reliable word for word account. Even eyewitnesses aren't all that reliable, but 3rd party accounts from close to 40 years later barely qualify as hearsay.
Unless you're relying on divine inspiration, in which case the debate is pointless.
Exactly. All the canonical gospels are anonymous works that got religious urban legends appended to them. (We are actually fairly sure that the guy who wrote Luke also wrote Acts, but we still have no idea what his given name was. He's just a more prolific Anonymous.) Those histories are on exactly the same level as stories about Area 51's alien occupants or the assigned names of the magi. (If you've seen Evangelion, you know them: Balthazar, Caspar, Melchior.)
Not that the contents of the canon are, as a rule, what anybody without religious commitments otherwise would call great history. But it's especially funny when the layers of fan fiction run three or four deep.
Someday I'll finish watching DS9. I do believe it's the best ST show, though that's not saying much IMO. I wish there were a list of episodes that actually further the overarching plot, so I could skip all of the filler episodes.
That's part of what put me off on DS9. You never knew if you were going to get a story arc episode, filler, or filler posing as a story arc episode. That and I kind of hated the Bajorans. I got where they were coming from with it all, but their main trait as a species seemed to be pitching fits and being annoying.
I think DS9 would have worked better as a non-Trek show too. Its ambitions at its best moments do not mesh at all well with how Trek had developed to date.
I don't love the Bajorans but they don't bother me the way they do you. I think Kira Nerys is one of the best female characters ever created.
I get what you mean about not feeling like Trek, and it was the first created after Roddenberry died in like '91.
I guess when you like the characters as much as I do, nothing feels like filler. Or very little anyway. Like, the first season is almost ALL filler. The second season is episodic, but it's easily as good a season of episodic television as any Next Generation. Third season on about 50% of episodes are arc or contribute to the arc, and the other 50% are character development. Like some of the best episodes don't contribute directly to the main plot, but they enrich the atmosphere of the show. Case in point: Duet from Season 1.
DS9 was sort of caught between trying to be more serialized/arc-based and episodic like Next Gen before it. It was still largely syndicated as UPN wasn't everywhere yet. Pretty much starting with the last episode of Season 5 (A Call to Arms) it's almost all one episode leads into the next with brief reprieve between arcs.
The quality of acting is really top-notch though.
I'm a poor judge of actorship, but what I like about DS9 is probably why Samnell says it would have worked better as its own universe: it feels slightly slightly rougher around the edges than other Trek shows, it has a bare droplet of comic relief in the form of the ferengis, and of course it has Sisko's epic They-Call-Me-Emissary-But-I-Don't-Really-Believe-It plot.
I'm a poor judge of actorship, but what I like about DS9 is probably why Samnell says it would have worked better as its own universe: it feels slightly slightly rougher around the edges than other Trek shows, it has a bare droplet of comic relief in the form of the ferengis, and of course it has Sisko's epic They-Call-Me-Emissary-But-I-Don't-Really-Believe-It plot.
Yeah, I think it suffered from both ends: If it got too edgy and arc-driven, it was no longer "Trek" and felt very strange as a Trek show since not going where it needed to made the incongruities show worse. Ferengi comedy episodes, the fact that Risa is pretty much a tropical brothel planet but they can't say it because Trek is notionally "family" TV, serious conflicts come off as cheap because Trek trained us to expect everything resolved at the end of the episode.
The last plays into one of my strongest memories of DS9, in fact. Any time anything happened on DS9 which was meant to be serious we had to have the soundtrack and Ben Sisko's constipated tone of voice tell us. (Seriously. I generally think well of DS9's acting, but Avery Brooks pulled that trick so many times you'd think they forgot how to make laxatives in the future.) The show could almost never sell gravity on its own. The most we usually got were blank-faced extras standing around, moving just slightly like they were waiting in line for ice cream or to use the toilet:
"We don't care about the Kai. The crapper in Quark's is backed up! We need to go now, O'Brien! Half of us didn't put on brown tights this morning, I swear!"
But I do think DS9 produced one of the very best hours in the entire franchise: In the Pale Moonlight. It still came off very strange because it's a rule of Trekdom that the Captain always knows the right answer and has a magical way out of any ethical or moral dilemma. That and the fact that the episode went out of its way to implicate Sisko as little as possible, if I remember it right. He's still got dirty hands and let it happen, but they passed the buck and let Garak make the real hard choice.
That and the fact that the episode went out of its way to implicate Sisko as little as possible, if I remember it right.
Yeah, but pair it with "For the Uniform" the previous season, where Sisko not only invents a plan of launching bioweapons at Maquis colonies as a way to pressure Eddington, but actually launches them. Kirk or Picard would have had the out of their opponent declining to call the bluff; Sisko, on the other hand, wasn't bluffing.
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OTOH, 40 years isn't a huge amount of time. A lot of the people who were around when Jesus was would still be alive. You'd think if it was BS someone would have called him on it. Rather than, say, getting martyred because they believed it.
Mormonism and Scientology both got off to a roaring start despite being eminently disprovable in their own times.
People are not rational. Building an argument based on the idea that they are is doomed to failure.
A few responses:
And what about deciding that something MUST exist despite it being a contradiction?
Empiricism and rationality don't always go together: this is why philosophy doesn't work in science without the experiment. The universe is a very screwed up, counter intuitive place that gets just plain WEIRD sometimes. Science manages to deal with this by amassing overwhelming evidence for the weird and screwed up... evidence that is very much lacking for a triune god.
Its not that people absolutely can't accept something so irrational, its that the irrationality is a definite impediment and there just isn't anything sensible to overcome it.
Indeed, people vastly more intelligent and wiser than either of us believe. Food for thought.
The list of highly intelligent people who essentially drank (alcohol) themselves to death is pretty long. Should I consider that too?
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Indeed, people vastly more intelligent and wiser than either of us believe. Food for thought.The list of highly intelligent people who essentially drank (alcohol) themselves to death is pretty long. Should I consider that too?
Ecelent point - a great number of smart people do "dumb" things, so the very fact the someone smart is doing something dosen't mean that it's a smart thing to do.
Plus, the argument that "intelligent people are belivers so maybe they know something that we don't" is... well.. pointless. because indeed, people vastly more intelligent and wiser than any of us don't believe. Food for thought.
this thread has a misleading title!
What gaming teaches about the holy trinity is that you need tanking, healing and DPS.
this thread has a misleading title!
What gaming teaches about the holy trinity is that you need tanking, healing and DPS.
And DS9, too.
those that persuade one of low intelligence and great wisdom.
I'm curious as to who you would use as an example of this.
I'm asking, because right now it seems like you're trying to use "wisdom" as a word defined in such as a way that is tautological.
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No, just customarily.
I'm chaotic. Screw custom.
Which is, of course, why religion makes a distinction between facts and truth that some consider important and others sophistry.
Every religion makes the distinction only for itself, not religion in general. That should tell you something.
There is a reason they call it META-physics, after all.
To give an impressive sounding name to pulling things out of one's keister?
This depends largely if not entirely on your particular sensibilities, BNW.
It is not. People make these kinds of calls all day, every day when they don't give complete strangers their bank numbers, don't buy some magic rabbit's foot that's going to make all their problems go away, and don't try to strap on a red blanket and fly through the air.
Indeed, people vastly more intelligent and wiser than either of us believe. Food for thought.
It is not food. It is splenda. It is the vacuous, reverse chirality appearance of food with none of the substance. Its an appeal to authority. Worse, its an appeal to an unnamed authority. It also completely ignores the smart people who, for whatever reason, DIDN"T believe as you do... an no matter what you believe thats most of the planet and most of the smart people.
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There is a reason they call it META-physics, after all.
Yes. Because Aristotle's book on the subject was traditionally placed immediately after his Physics in collections of his writings, thus getting the name, "after Physics". Just like afternoon is called that because it's after noon.
You want to play etymology games, first learn actual etymology.
those that persuade one of low intelligence and great wisdom.I'm curious as to who you would use as an example of this.
I'm asking, because right now it seems like you're trying to use "wisdom" as a word defined in such as a way that is tautological.
Wisdom always seems to mean "agree with my position regardless of how strange or nonsensical it is, while nodding as if profound."
Aristotle wrote FOURTEEN books on it.
Wisdom always seems to mean "agree with my position regardless of how strange or nonsensical it is, while nodding as if profound."
those that persuade one of low intelligence and great wisdom.I'm curious as to who you would use as an example of this.
I'm asking, because right now it seems like you're trying to use "wisdom" as a word defined in such as a way that is tautological.
Making it a tautology.