do_you_believe_in_people anne-girl as in, other people actually existing not figments of your imagination 040909 ... Lila Pause Are you saying that you actually believe you exist as a real person with genuine thoughts and feelings and that you're not just another cardboard cutout in my own personal version of "The Truman Show"? 040909 ... pete yes 040909 ... MAGICFOREST yes 040909 ... minnesota_chris I try. Too often, they just seem like slack jawed fast food eaters, though. 040909 ... stork daddy sure...sure...sure...but like god...my belief often requires more faith than observation. 040909 ... cheerleaderslut on the whole, if the general population is really as stupid as they make themselves out to be, they wouldn't be able to pull off something like the truman show without slipping at some point. ... at least this is my rationalization. it doesn't entirely rule out the brain in a jar theory however... 040909 ... magicforest falls in love with stork daddy (again) 040910 ... uow i don't know what i believe i don't know if i believe i don't know what belief is i don't know nothing everything is suspect 040910 ... falling_alone i said that as well, uow. but i something tells me to give people a chance, even though i might not want to. 041206 ... (z) (see: solipsism ) 041206 ... sameolme I'm about as bewildered as uow. 041206 ... oldephebe no. i mean i believe in thier inate cpacity for evil, pettiness, rancor, petty despotisms and all that. do i believ in the good in woman/man? no. there are far too few good people in the world. morally and from a humanistic perspective we are still in the dark ages. man' inhumanity toward woman, toward humankind. ... 041207 ... smurfus rex It is illogical to believe in people. Which is why I'm not a Vulcan. It takes faith to believe in people. Faith is the triumph of hope over experience. [quote from someone cooler than I] Experience tells me that people are illogical, despite my hopes for the better. So if it's illogical to believe in illogical people, then it must be logical to believe in logical people. Which brings us back to Vulcans. Vulcans are a fictional people (as far as we know) created by Gene Roddenberry, and it's illogical to believe in fictional things. So if it's illogical to believe in a logical, yet fictional people, then it must be logical to believe in illogical, yet factual people. Therefore, I believe in people. Or, we take a cue from Descartes and eventually reduce the question to "cogito, ergo sum" which doesn't really answer the question. 041207 ... oE my faith has been eroded. i've encountered wo called men and woman of god become as cut throat as a stock broker in order to pursue thier ecumenical ambition. i've experienced so called kind, inocuous christian senior citizens who...well...since they're not here to defend themselves i'll just say they certainly still have tier canines. it is illogical to take a set of experiences and drape them over the potential and hence unverified character of a stranger, true. my hope then has been eroded. i should be lifting up god and cast that over my eyes and my heart and choose to seek out the good in people ... 041207 ... oldephebe and yet i realize my comments are indicative of the so called moral elitism some of us christians arrogantly and disdainfully display. Elitism is a kind of opposition. It is not borne of humility or even empathy or compassion. i regret my earlier posts on this matter. i'm not saying i'll never post comments in that same vien i'm just saying i regret some of the ones i've made. ... maybe i don't believe in people but i do believe it the god who made them ... 041207 ... oldephebe at some point all of us loved with the naive faith that all the evils we fear can simply be circumvented or overcome by compassion and fevered prayers. the vessel of your faith can feel like a pack of saltines being stomped by an elephant there's a sect of the apostolic denomination of protestant faith that rocks back and forth when they pray much like the holy orthodox rabbis of Israel (regretfully, i do not know the name of thier sect) i spent a little time in an apostolic church as a young man and they have this ritual of invoking the power of god by rocking back and forth and praying for hours with a manic fervor, it is believed that the manifestation of this fervor some how opens a channel to the essence of God's Spirit and purges the seekers of all sin, of weakness and gives him/her dominion over power and principalities..and yet in these same citadels of spirituality the same strivings of ego that plague all humankind are there, amidst the weeping and shouting and flailing body quakes of holy ardor. i mean at some point a wind from the coldest, most abysmal reaches of man came and blew out hopes flame upon the wick that could no longer hold it. ... this is why it's so tough for me to "feel" the christmas spirit. ... 041207 ... bird and the Manson CDs "i don't beleive in the things that don't believe in me" 041207 ... marked . 041208 ... realistic optimist i have faith that other people exist. in this, i trust my senses as well as history's influence upon my psyche. i believe in people's capacity to subvert himself in service of an illusion. i also believe in the capacity for people to embody the creative spirit, or to be god. and i believe that until we stop believing we are subverting nature and start focusing on being more natural creatures, actually perpetuating the survival of the speciea, we will require each other's faith to actualize this faith in moments, shared or otherwise. 041208 ... ...... ...... ...... And now I just feel the need to take one industrial sized serving of metamusel and assume the defecatory posture for a real long time to ponder these words. 041208 ... oldephebe Well I mean, I HAVE been repressing these intestinal murmers all day, but I don't plan to injest any metamusel, but I am going to think about what everyone has said especially realistic optimist. ... 041208 ... daxle i believe in 3 people 041208 ... just asking who are the other two? 041208 ... lip curled in cruelty but not now Ok. But you're assuming daxle believe's in him or herself. Perhaps you have privy to knowledge that does not appear on this page such as daxle saying quite clearly..."today it just rained and my cat is sick, my prof won't change the 79 to a B blah bleh but I still believe in me. Or maybe daxle has multi-personality syndron and so he/she doesn't believe in himself but in the 3 other personalities that his mind has broken down into. i don't know. i just feel really anal today 041210 ... daxle = her 041210 ... daxle my sven, my mom, and my love pig i would put them down as emergency contacts, because they are relentlessly there for me 041210 ... ... ...... ...... Damn. Relentlessy there huh? Boy. You don't know how blessed you are. Or maybe you do and I'm just a little envious. But no, I really don't believe in people. 050625 ... i shouldnt BE here god i barely believe in the tombstone tired breaths i lunge for and expell from my quaking thorax ... 050826 ... daxle although i still count on sven and love pig more than most, realistically i can probably only count on my mom on a permanent basis, and imaginably she'll die before i do. i can count on myself a lot more than i could have in the past. i'm a lot less self destructive, less wavering in my path. 050826 ... daf : ) Hello dax. Glad yer still around. I've never failed to have fun here at blather for as long as you were blathing. I'd like to point that out as my EXHIBIT A for why I absolutely believe in the existence of people but not our egos which I believe are figments of our minds' creative tinkerings. I further believe that we create our self as the anchor in our existence out of a sort of fear..perhaps a bit out of loneliness you think? Guess it probably gets lonely being stuck in a skull all of the time. Exhibit B is the absolute inability of anyone to prove the existence of a self empricially via anything other than than the testimony of other self-proclaimed SELVES, making the entire statement "i think therefore i am" a product of extreme bias. A bunch of selves got together and proclaimed their own existence. I demand a recount! : ) Thank you. I believe in every single one of you. 050826 ... birdmad i believe in no-one who has proven to be demonstrably false 050829 ... ferret sometimes when i'm having a conversation with someone, i find it odd that their talking, and not only that, but that i can't make them stop just by willing it. 050829 ... ferret sometimes when i'm having a conversation with someone, i find it odd that they're talking, and not only that, but that i can't make them stop just by willing it. 050829 ... daf ferret made me laugh today. thank you. 050830 ... yours truly daf should read cooking_breakfast_part_vii 050907 ... oldephebe How can nihilism which is purported to be so prevalent when there is a movement amongst some young people and probably those attending liberal Arts colleges--there is the Romantic Idealist revolt against all omnivorous rationalist systems that subsume the soul and heart and independant thought and creativity in the pursuit and celebration of Realism. ... Well I mean that is largely a bit of conjecture on my behalf...I just wnated to contribute something to this blathe page. ... 050908 ... RIC so what you're saying is that even though the currents of the culture seems permeated with an antipathy towards Idealism and Romanticism, that there exists the potential at Schools that are predominately peopled with quixotic liberal arts majors--individuals pre-disposed to mysticism and reality enhancing feats of avoidance and obfuscation. People who instead of cleaning the lense, put the lid/cap over it and get the tubes of high gloss oil based paint and construct thier OWN realities. So is THAT what you're trying to say or posit? 050908 ... oldephebe Uh...yeah. ... 050908 ... *Amy* cannot trust anyone, I don`t want anyone talking to me, asking me, looking at me, those ways of looking... so scary, they just penetrates in my soul, directly in the deep, I don`t want my eyes to find their`s. 050909 what's it to you? who go blather from