In that case I love some of your quotes

If you were my husband I would put poisen in your tea.

If you were my wife I would drink it.

Classic

I like the chickens experiment.

We are hard wired to look for patterns – cause and effect. This IS an evolutionary advantage. However we very rarely have all the information, and some people don't KNOW that they don't have all the information, and make poor links between cause and effect. A lot of human culture is based on this 🙂

I don't know why people get killed in natural disasters

I think thats the most appropriate of your comments.

I believe in fate. Last June (2009) I had an epileptic seizure while in bed at home that lasted over 45 minutes before the ambulance finally ran me to the local A&E. 8 year old son was downstairs watching TV, wife wasn't in work that day, the first annual leave she'd taken in over 3 months. Son claims to have not known anything was wrong until ambulance arrived. Under usual school day circumstances it would have just been me & Josh in the house. Arrived at hospital to discover that the neurosurgeon on call was the clinical lead & specialises in my type of condition (another piece of luck/fate).

molgrips – I watched a program where they did it. About a dozen chickens in seperate boxes and they all developed different rituals to get the corn to drop even though it was random.

When they introduced new chickens the experienced chickens taught them the ritual and they repeated it.

Can't remember what happened when they mixed chickens with different rituals but I am guessing some kind of holy war.

Yesterday is Saskatoon, a housewife cut her finger whilst chopping vegetables. At EXACTLY THE SAME MOMENT in Surbiton, someone opened a bag of peanuts and spilt them all over the ground. What are the chances of that????? Eh? Eh?

BigBikeBash, could you watch your spelling please. That is a STW warning

I wont tell you who I was earlier this century

Proof if proof were needed that Hora is in fact 8 years old.

So tell us then, what famous person were you from early this century?

Yesterday is not Saskatoon.

Maybe Yesterday WAS Saskatoon but from memory it was Monday

Tuttle, Buttle…..

missingfrontallobe – what about all the people that DO die on their own with no-one to help them?

Are you suggesting that you are somehow more special than them?

I would suggest that perhaps you are just more fortunate than them. After all, they don't survive to make up bullsh*t theories and post about them on forums 🙂

I wont tell you who I was earlier this century
Proof if proof were needed that Hora is in fact 8 years old.

So tell us then, what famous person were you from early this century?

FAIL 😆 I meant last century oops.

Yesterday is Saskatoon, a housewife cut her finger whilst chopping vegetables. At EXACTLY THE SAME MOMENT in Surbiton, someone opened a bag of peanuts and spilt them all over the ground. What are the chances of that????? Eh? Eh?

Strangely this reminds me of Amelie the film

People who claim to be reincarnated almost always claim to have been someone really famous.

Well your hardly going to be Missus Miggins from the local pieshop 😉

no, she's still alive, I saw her in the post office this morning
what a coincidence…

Absolutely everything is happening all at the same time. Without significance. 😉

I actually saw Craig Charles in Manchester city centre on Friday afternoon.

I didn't know if it was him playing him or Lister, or Lister pretending to be on earth….

I had to turn the programme off, not because it upset me but becasue of the way some people were describing the carnage and loss of life.

One guy who was cradling a woman, clearly overcome by shock and was unwilling to leave her as he believed that she was still alive was described by another woman on the scene that he should leave her alone and help her because "she was obviousley very, very dead"

Now i understand that people deal with things differently but It all came across a bit unfeeling and would hate for any of my family to be described like that

What program?

Our lives are full of these weird and wonderful chances. Some good some not so good. Each of us are full of things like, what if a particular ancestor didn't/did walk down that road, did/didn't catch that cold, go to the shop/not go to the shop etcetera? Times that by your life, your parents lives, and theirs and theirs and it's all a lottery of chances, it just depends more on how we view it.

My little story yesterday could have been interpreted as fate I guess by some. However I'm not that way inclined so it's just a coincidence to me 🙂

Orena – what part of that story is fate? I mean, it doesn't realyl have any bearing on your life, does it? I mean it's not like you met your life partner or something..

If there's some God up there manipulating things with amazing precision just so that we can go 'ooh look at that, I recognise that number' he's got a pretty weird sense of humour.

molgrips – I thought I would try being a God for a while so built an ants nest, well got some ants to do it. It was quite entertaining for a few weeks feeding and watering them and doing the occaisional ANGRY GOD destructive events.

I then got bored. I suspect that if there is a God he would have got bored by now too. This theory is possibly backed up by the fact most significant God stuff happened a long time ago.

the fact most significant God stuff happened a long time ago

Really? Presumably you have evidence of this. 🙄

God does exist. Not as man wants God to exist though.

Molgrips – God works in mysterious ways lol!

Ok admitedly not fate (but I did stay an extra couple of minutes at my mum's discussing this, so what if I avoided someone crashing into me on the way home?).

I just meant that it's also the kind of thing certain types of people might put down to there being a 'higher being'…like those who see Jesus in toast (actually, why doesn't anyone ever see Muhammad or Vishnu in food??!)

why doesn't anyone ever see Muhammad in food

Because you'd die.

I didn't see the programme, but surely believe in 'fate', is just belief in a deterministic universe, and no more or less rational than belief in a non-deterministic universe.

God does exist.

Thanks, i appreciate the recognition. 😉

Ok admitedly not fate (but I did stay an extra couple of minutes at my mum's discussing this, so what if I avoided someone crashing into me on the way home?).

Coincidence and luck aren't the same as fate- there's no sense of an inevitable event in these anecdotes.

Fate is not the same thing as determinism. Fate is meaningless in a deterministic environment. As is free will…. (discuss).

I obviously don't know what I'm taking about…think I'll go back to taking about bikes 😆

I thought about this on my way home last night. Many people see death as a bad thing, an end, whereas for a believer in reincarnation surely death should be viewed as a beginning.

So, looking at the deaths from eg the tsunami in Asia and asking where is the (good) god(s) in that, is possibly the wrong question. Perhaps a better question to ask as a challenge to the notion that there is a 'good' god/gods is why are the vulnerable allowed to suffer? and perhaps the answer to that is that they were bad in a previous life.

BTW, not preaching, just an interesting subject for discussion.

Incidentally, the early christians believed in reincarnation. The Roman emperor, I think, Constantine, and his mum decided that they couldn't use hell and damnation to subdue the population effectively when the aforesaid population believed in many lives (to get it right) – so he changed the bible.

I think (to put it very simplistically) that if you are honourable, brave, courteous, honest etc that you do affect your surroundings and other people and I believe that what goes around comes around.

I frigging hope so.

Fate is not the same thing as determinism. Fate is meaningless in a deterministic environment. As is free will…. (discuss).

It's the same as unusual or individual determinism though. Which it's why it's remarkable in a non-deterministic environment.

EDIT: It's remarkable because it (supposedly) happens in spite of a non-deterministic environment.

petesgaff – When you do eventually die as we all with and if you are reincarnated you should come back as a dog with seven dicks* for the way you have behaved and the example you have set.

*to avoid any confusion, this is a good thing.

bear in mind the likelihood of something happening that has already happened is 100%

believing in reincarnation doesn't make it more likely to be true

Depends on what you consider fate to be. If it's some mysterious mechanical force innate to the universe, then perhaps. If it's the will of a god, then it's just the free will of some being.