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And nobody has a right to force their religion onto another.
It's easy to talk about karma when you're rich and have comforts, but when you live in continual poverty karma is an easy thing to abuse.
In mathematics, "infinity" is often treated as if it were a number (i.e., it counts or measures things: "an infinite number of terms") but it is not the same sort of number as the real numbers. In number systems incorporating infinitesimals, the reciprocal of an infinitesimal is an infinite number, i.e. a number greater than any real number. Georg Cantor formalized many ideas related to infinity and infinite sets during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He also discovered that there are different "kinds" of infinite sets, a concept called cardinality. For example, the set of integers is countably infinite, while the set of real numbers is uncountably infinite.
Originally posted by 547000
No, if you studied math, you would know infinity is not a number; if it were, you could construct the number which is infinite + 1, which is greater than infinity, contradicting the hypothesis that infinite is a number greater than all real numbers. Just because the symbol is treated like a number in many contexts of continuous math doesn't make it a number. The limit can go towards zero, as the value you plug in gets larger and larger, but infinity has no set magnitude.
edit on 9-9-2010 by 547000 because: (no reason given)
Originally posted by adjensen
I have seen a number of people on ATS remark that, in their view, absolute morality doesn't exist. That is to say that morality, which are the principles and behaviours that we apply to determine what is right, and what is wrong, is fluid, and that there is no absolute (constant and unchanging) right and wrong.
If one thinks of the sexual abuse of children, I, for one, am physically sickened by the idea. It bothers me more than most other things that I can think of. But when I think back on my life, I can't remember anyone ever drilling the lesson of how vile child abuse is into my head. Can't even remember anyone ever even discussing it to any degree. But I also can't think back to a time in my life when I didn't find this behaviour horrifyingly repugnant.
My take away of that is that this particular absolute morality points to something which underlies it -- something which is a fundamental piece of who I am, and which not only directs me to the absolute moral position on the subject of child abuse, but which makes me an extremist on the matter. So I'm left to assume that my absolute morality is not a result of an adoption of a non-absolute morality, and that if I had grown up in a society where child abuse was acceptable, I would still find it repugnant.
Infanticide is interesting. It is not uncommon for other species to kill their young who appear to be a likely "drag on the system." If morals were simply an application of "what's best for us," one would think that even an intellectualized species would not shy away from this. Civilization needs to be pretty far along before sufficient resources are available to care for non-sustaining group members. And yet, this moral absolute once again seems fundamental, and seems to have been around for a very long time.
I chose logic instead. Common sense. The universal rights of man.
M'eh. Loads to think about, will come back to this later on.
Originally posted by SarK0Y
everything is natural in the Universum, my friend ways to Death is no less natural than ways to Life
When they say X approaches infinite, they mean X increases without bound.