(December 3, 2013 at 1:46 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote:

(December 3, 2013 at 3:42 am)DOS Wrote: Do you think the works of Dostoesvky have some point?

The question was about what YOUR point is, not Dostoevsky's. Is that too straightforward a question for you to answer directly?

(December 3, 2013 at 3:06 am)DOS Wrote:

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"There was, they say, here on earth a thinker and philosopher. He rejected everything, 'laws, conscience, faith,' and, above all, the future life. He died; he expected to go straight to darkness and death and he found a future life before him. He was astounded and indignant. 'This is against my principles!' he said. And he was punished for that... that is, you must excuse me, I am just repeating what I heard myself, it's only a legend... he was sentenced to walk a quadrillion kilometres in the dark (we've adopted the metric system, you know): and when he has finished that quadrillion, the gates of heaven would be opened to him and he'll be
forgiven-"
"And what tortures have you in the other world besides the quadrillion kilometres?" asked Ivan, with a strange eagerness.
"What tortures? Ah, don't ask. In old days we had all sorts, but now they have taken chiefly to moral punishments- 'the stings of conscience' and all that nonsense. We got that, too, from you, from the softening of your manners. And who's the better for it? Only those who have got no conscience, for how can they be tortured by conscience when they have none? But decent people who have conscience and a sense of honour suffer for it. Reforms, when the ground has not been prepared for them, especially if they are institutions copied from abroad, do nothing but mischief! The ancient fire was better. Well, this man, who was condemned to the quadrillion kilometres, stood still, looked round and lay down across the road. 'I won't go, I refuse on principle!' Take the soul of an enlightened Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the prophet Jonah, who sulked for three days and nights in the belly of the whale, and you get the character of that thinker who lay across the road."
"What did he lie on there?"
"Well, I suppose there was something to lie on. You are not laughing?"
"Bravo!" cried Ivan, still with the same strange eagerness. Now he was listening with an unexpected curiosity. "Well, is he lying there now?"
"That's the point, that he isn't. He lay there almost a thousand years and then he got up and went on."
"What an ass!" cried Ivan, laughing nervously and still seeming to be pondering something intently. "Does it make any difference whether he lies there for ever or walks the quadrillion kilometres? It would take a billion years to walk it?"
"Much more than that. I haven't got a pencil and paper or I could work it out. But he got there long ago, and that's where the story begins."
"What, he got there? But how did he get the billion years to do it?"
"Why, you keep thinking of our present earth! But our present earth may have been repeated a billion times. Why, it's become extinct, been frozen; cracked, broken to bits, disintegrated into its elements, again 'the water above the firmament,' then again a comet, again a sun, again from the sun it becomes earth- and the same sequence may have been repeated endlessly and exactly the same to every detail, most unseemly and insufferably tedious-"
"Well, well, what happened when he arrived?"
"Why, the moment the gates of Paradise were open and he walked in;
before he had been there two seconds, by his watch (though to my
thinking his watch must have long dissolved into its elements on the way), he cried out that those two seconds were worth walking not a
quadrillion kilometres but a quadrillion of quadrillions, raised to
the quadrillionth power! In fact, he sang 'hosannah'."
The Brothers Karamazov by Fedor Dostoevsky

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(December 3, 2013 at 2:02 pm)Kayenneh Wrote: My, my, aren't you a thick one. Let's try this again:

Why did you feel the need to put that particular Dostojevski quote here? What meaning does it have to you? What do you want to point out with it?

(December 3, 2013 at 2:10 pm)DOS Wrote: what meaning does it have to you.

(December 3, 2013 at 2:10 pm)DOS Wrote:

(December 3, 2013 at 2:02 pm)Kayenneh Wrote: My, my, aren't you a thick one. Let's try this again:

Why did you feel the need to put that particular Dostojevski quote here? What meaning does it have to you? What do you want to point out with it?

I put that quote so the everyone else may read. That's the point.
The quote as if it asks you - what meaning does it have to you. That's the point.
I don't want to point out much with it as I can't say much better than Dosotoesvky? Do you athiest? That's the point.

Try it.

(December 3, 2013 at 2:10 pm)DOS Wrote: "The essence of religious feeling has nothing to do with reason, or atheism, or crime, or acts of any kind—it has nothing to do with these things—and never had. There is something besides all this, something which the arguments of the atheists can never touch."
Fedor Dostoesvky

(December 3, 2013 at 2:35 pm)Chuck Wrote:

(December 3, 2013 at 2:10 pm)DOS Wrote: I put that quote so the everyone else may read. That's the point.
The quote as if it asks you - what meaning does it have to you. That's the point.
I don't want to point out much with it as I can't say much better than Dosotoesvky? Do you athiest? That's the point.

Try it.

From his posts and his tag line I get the impression that he is trying pretend a literature major, as it were, would make a better scientist than a scientist.

He is trying to defend this narcissistic, self indulgent fantasy of an intellectual weakling by claiming there are parts of science that can never be reached by science, but must be reached by mushy headed wishthinking such as what defines the outer limits of his capabilities.