Eviora

Oh! Close up, it looks like a clock - this character, Kurumi, is a spirit with time-based abilities. The weird eye plays into that! Sorry about your OCD. =p

Ready, set.... go!

Oh. Well. I wasn't expecting that at all. I can't say we know each other well enough that I feel there's a whole lot for me to forgive. I think your issues are with others, and I won't presume to know enough about those issues to offer my commentary. I certainly do know what it's like to play the whole "conceal, don't feel" game, though, so I'm glad you can move beyond that.

I might be the only person here who voted that she doesn't celebrate Halloween but that she does like it. The reason for that is, while I don't dress up or go trick of treating or anything, Halloween inspires the release of horror movies/stories, which I do enjoy. =p I like having a month that inspires scary stories!

I now have a bunch of levels uploaded! Overall, I think they're mostly challenging, but hopefully pretty fair. I'll list them below. Keep in mind that you only need to enter one code to play them all; just click my Mii's avatar on the level select screen to see the rest! Bowser Jr's Armada: E126-0000-0043-E910 Fractured Fields: B0B2-0000-0033-6F85 Koopa Climb: 3F54-0000-0027-8973 Prickly Pond: 2D68-0000-0039-BA1C Fearsome Fortress: BEF8-0000-003F-4F66 Night and Day: 6CD3-0000-0053-525E Bowser Battles 1: 0362-0000-0044-16FE Perplexing Puzzles: BDF3-0000-0048-5400 I believe these last two would especially benefit from a checkpoint system - fair warning! Airship Assault: F3C2-0000-005E-E540 Bowser Battles 2: 789F-0000-006A-4635 I appreciate any and all constructive feedback! Please star the levels you deem worthy! ^.^

GLaDOS is too awesome to not mention. I'll second Alex from Golden Sun. I'd also like to mention Yggdrassil from Tales of Symphonia... no spoilers, but he is SO well done.

Thanks! The end can be a bit difficult... but it can be done in more ways than one. Here's a challenge for those of you who like such things - beat the level I posted without getting any powerups, killing any enemies, or using any springboards! I also made one more level which is much easier but has an alternate path that's fairly difficult. I don't have the code written down yet, though. xD I still need to get to your levels, too!

Oh goodness. That would have been awful! I only managed to get the mushroom once, and after that I died from having my head hit the ceiling while I was trying to make the following jump. xD I didn't bother trying to get it again.

I tried both your levels earlier and liked them, Solarance. ^.^ That first mushroom on the Bowser Castle level is deadly! xD

Doesn't anyone else have this game? I've been having a blast with it - we should share levels and stuff! My first level is here: 3F54-0000-0027-8973 I believe it's moderately challenging but not unfair. I'd love to get feedback! ^.^

You wouldn't be any less human because of replacing your limbs with mechanical ones than you would be if you simply lost all your limbs - that is to say, you'd be 100% human. The things most people consider their intrinsic traits are stored in their brains. Thought experiment! If you were turned into a vampire, would you still consider yourself human?

What do I think about this? I hope it becomes widely accessible before I die. To bastardize a Voldemort quote, "Only everyone can live forever".

I agree that we have no empirical evidence of god either existing or not existing, just as is the case for the multiverse. As for the fine tuning argument, that doesn't generalize for a reason you hinted at yourself - they could just be fundamentally different. They could have magic or something, or dream world type logic, or whatever. And there's also a chance that there is another perfect set of constants for a life sustaining universe, or that our universe came from another one that has no life in it. The possibilities are basically endless. As for the rest... well, it's just an appeal to emotion as far as I can see. I don't believe any gods exist at all, let alone that one died for me. That disbelief is born entirely out of a lack of evidence. The whole line "God, I don't think you can and therefore I'm not going to give myself up to you unless you show me something" is not the sort of thing I'm saying at all because I don't talk to beings I don't believe are real. Even aside from that fact, the whole narrative just doesn't make any sense to me. God died to save us from... what? Damnation by his hand? The sinful nature he gave us? Why exactly did have have to die to do that, anyway, if he's omnipotent? With ultimate power comes ultimate responsibility. I don't believe it's any more acceptable for a god to hurt his creations than for a parent to hurt their child. I don't buy into the whole "god's morality's is objective" thing, and honestly find it a bit appalling to worship a being who tries to convince his worshipers of how unworthy they are when he made exactly the beings he intended to.

How are scientific hypotheses substantiated? Through empirical studies. How many empirical studies have we done outside of this universe? None. Therefore science cannot definitively speak on other universes. We only know our laws apply to this universe. Even if there were evidence otherwise, the moment we open the door to the supernatural it could just be tricking us and muddling our scientific results. Once again, who says other universes, multiverses, etc have the same properties as ours? If that can't be established, the beginning of our universe could be rooted in one of those. If you have evidence that all universes, multiverses, etc must have the same laws as ours, please provide it. So here's the thing about free will. Any god with the 3 "omni"s would know whether each individual being ends up in "heaven" or "hell", assuming those "places" exist. Therefore, at the moment of creation, that god would know exactly which creatures would, through their own free will, end up in eternal suffering and which, through their own free will, would end up in paradise. A benevolent god would not want any of his creations to suffer eternally, so he would only create beings that would end up in paradise. I can already hear the complaints that that denies all of us free will, but actually, regardless of where everyone ends up, the god would know the outcome. If Gary and Lance went to heaven but Fern went to hell, god would know that, too. Everyone has precisely the same amount of free will regardless of where they end up because god knew where they all ended up at the moment of creation. if you were thinking of having a child, and before the child was even conceived, you were given the certain knowledge that that child's suffering would be infinitely greater than their happiness, would you truly have the child anyway? That would be callous in the extreme, and is exactly the dilemma a god with the 3 "omni"s would face when deciding to create beings who were going to suffer eternally.

I agree with you that being told the right answer doesn't rob you of free will, and would go further by saying any benevolent gods could then get away with making their existence abundantly clear without robbing us of our free will. I find "free will" to be the biggest cop out answer used in apologetics, so I am quick to argue against that when I believe I see it being misused. You can say god is eternal. I can say the multiverse is eternal. I see no reason for me to treat one of those statements any differently than the other. It's nonsense to try to use Genesis as historical evidence for the existence of a god. There weren't any humans around to witness the creation of the universe, and a society of two people wouldn't have kept records, anyway. There's also no evidence that the multiverse is losing any energy if it exists, exactly the same as any gods. The biggest problem with "First Cause" arguments is that they end by violating their own assumption that everything has a cause. If there's a god that has no cause, then clearly not everything has a cause, and we can just throw that assumption out the window, killing the entire argument. Trying to place god in his own special category is just special pleading. Can you answer the Problem of Evil without appealing to free will arguments? Because from a logical standpoint those are pretty easy to destroy if the god in question knows the future, which he should as much as he does the present if he's outside time.

Oh, I'm more than familiar with such vague responses. We were talking specifically about the case where god did decide to be transparent. Obviously no gods have done this to any satisfying degree, so the discussion is purely theoretical. That said, can you explain carefully how being told the correct answer would rob you of your free will? It doesn't do that for any other questions when the one giving you the answer is a human. I really don't buy that a large portion of the "meaning" in our lives is necessarily rooted in trying to solve some supernatural guessing game without any strong evidence. It seems to me that we make our own meaning - many people find great fulfillment in their relationships with family, or in chasing their dreams, or whatever else they do. If you want to claim those things are trivial, you'll have to explain to me the meaning of "meaning". =p

I certainly don't agree that god provides sufficient answers for all phenomena. I can think of tons of questions to be asked that I've never heard a good answer for, but I don't have to be very creative for this one - the "Problem of Evil" argument is more than enough. Every answer I've ever heard to it tries to dance around the question without using the "omni" traits to their fullest potential - in fact, the answers tend to erode god's supposed power. Further, no theory about gods I've ever heard provides me a satisfying answer to the question: "How did god come to be?" The response "god is eternal" (or similar) is no more helpful than "the multiverse is eternal". It's nonsense to suggest an omnipotent and omniscient god wouldn't be able to answer every single question skeptics asked if he decided to be transparent, but you're certainly right that people would try to disprove him - and that just shows him being so transparent would not rob us of our free will. =p Anyhow, if I had to pick a conception of god that makes the most sense to me, it wouldn't be that of a god worshiped by any religion I know of. I think I'd either go with a deistic god or a god who is a huge troll and just messing with us for the lulz.

I'm not familiar enough with all these studies and findings to comment on them any time soon, so I'll refrain from doing so. I'd say the biggest problem with the argument you just presented is right at the beginning, where you say there isn't enough empirical science backing the multiverse theory to consider it. I could say exactly the same thing about the god theory - I don't see any scientific evidence whatsoever in proof of that, just a bunch of purely logic-based arguments that seem flawed to me. The point of the hydra heads comment was that I am decidedly not committed to the multiverse theory, because I also feel it's not supported by sufficient evidence - just as I feel about any other crackpot theory I could come up with. The way to prove your theory of choice would be to provide mountains of evidence that are actively in favor of it or to offer an absolutely impregnable logical argument, which is nearly impossible because the nuances of how we each view individual words tend to be different enough that, when you combine too many in context that require precision, the thing you're saying and the thing I'm hearing end up being quite different. One strategy that I don't think can work is a process of elimination strategy - hence the hydra heads. There are just too many possibilities, literally more than any of us could even think about in our lifetime. Without special evidence to make one theory drastically stand out from the rest, they all appear to be unsupported hypotheses that should neither be believed nor entirely dismissed.

Oh, I just got thanked for spouting random nonsense. That feels weird. Usually I just get called crazy (which is fair, because I am crazy). Well, you're welcome! xD Anyhow, yes, direct attacks are usually not my style. I'm just a stickler for arguments that have no holes, and tend to irritate people by poking at said holes until they fix them. I'll look through and answer your argument directed at KosherKitten, but after I address the Kalam one - that order just makes more sense to me, because I may use some of the same random examples and they're easier to introduce in the context of Kalam. --- So, Kalam... I'll just grant the first assumption even though I'm not 100% convinced of it. The second one is where I really have objections. If there is a multiverse, its laws may be wildly different from the ones our universe operates under. Since we don't actually have any hard proof that other universes or multiverses exist, we don't know anything about their laws of physics. One possibility I don't feel I have reason to dismiss is the possibility that the Big Bang was the beginning of the current iteration of our universe yet also the end of a different iteration, for which it would be the Big Crunch. If that were the case, I wouldn't say the Big Bang was really the start of the universe - it was just a new chapter in the story. The energy fueling all of this could be coming from another universe or some external multiverse. And, of course, if you should surprise me by showing that idea to be nonsense, I can always come up with something else. Crazy theories are like hydra heads - in the time it takes to refute one I've come up with two more! Even if I were to accept the Kalam argument, I don't see how the list of five qualities you suggest the cause must necessarily possess is justified, especially the "uncaused" one. Another weird idea I've come up with is that maybe our universe is the science experiment of an incredibly technologically advanced alien species based in the universe next door. How did that universe come to exist? Maybe it was created by another alien race from another universe - and the chain continues infinitely! Obviously, I don't actually believe all this, but it's an idea I don't think we can disprove. And even if we were to discover that divine being(s) did create our universe, that wouldn't tell us anything about what those beings are like. --- After looking over the argument addressed to KosherKitten, my objections are largely the same as those to the Kalam argument above - the multiverse doesn't necessarily have the same laws we do, and therefore you can't safely extrapolate to it the same law you do to our universe. The multiverse also may be eternal, so it does not necessarily need to have a creator. Even if it did, I could just propose a meta-multiverse next (that is, a structure containing lots of multiverses in the same way the multiverse would contain many universes.) And then I could go for a meta-meta-multiverse... and so forth. It's really easy to go infinite when it comes to all this metaphysical stuff!

My position on the creation of the universe is a simple "I don't know how it happened." Sorry! I can think of a bunch of crackpot ideas for how the universe might have formed (For instance: there could be some eternal multiverse in which there exists a cycle of expanding and contracting of a particular universe, namely ours) but, of course, I don't believe and can't prove any of them are necessarily true. That said, the example I gave is a candidate for an explanation of the origins of the universe that needs not follow the scientific laws of the universe yet doesn't involve anything I would call a miracle. --- On Occam's Razor - I stole this like from Wikipedia, italics mine: "The principle states that among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove to provide better predictions, but—in the absence of differences in predictive ability—the fewer assumptions that are made, the better." Occam's Razor is not a rule of logic, it is a tool used for problem solving. To see this, imagine one of those crazy detective movies, but without a genius detective - the crime may have actually been committed in a stupidly complicated manner, but a less skilled detective who sees a simpler and equally (or more) likely solution could pin the blame on the wrong person. Further, my extreme skepticism doesn't make any assumptions at all. It does not dismiss the possibility that the Resurrection could have occurred exactly as you say, but it also doesn't favor that explanation over other weird ones. I'm essentially declaring that I find Jesus "not guilty" of ascending as opposed to innocent of it - he might have done it, I'm just not convinced. Since I'm not going with any definitive explanation of the event, I'm essentially not making any claims and therefore have no burden of proof. That whole business about dealing with texts is entirely distinct from the logic of the issue. I don't need texts to make claims, much less to offer possibilities, and I can acknowledge the existence of texts suggesting that the Resurrection occurred without conceding that their authors were correct. Sheer volumes of texts aren't enough to establish a claim - a simple internet search would lead me to thousands of accounts of ghostly apparitions and alien abductions (which you may or may not believe in). --- So this new framework of with which to view "maximally great" allows for an amusing example that I'd like to throw your way. It shows how silly these "maximal" arguments can be if you aren't really careful. Premise 1: If there is a maximally great being, that being must be so stinky that you can smell it everywhere at all times. Premise 2: There must be a maximally great being. Conclusion: Therefore, said being must be so stinky that you can smell it everywhere at all times. ...But I don't smell anything! =p The point is, I can substitute pretty much any quality in for benevolence in this argument and prove that said being is maximally whatever I want by the same reasoning that's used in the original argument. For instance, I could claim the being is maximally cruel. (Cruelness is a quality that's just as quantifiable as benevolence.) If you don't want to open the floodgate to a bunch of strange and random qualities, you need to be really precise about which qualities do fall under the umbrella of maximal greatness. Note that if said qualities appeal to some sense of what is "good", then your definition of "good" cannot be reliant on any following conclusions, because otherwise your argument would just be circular. Of course, all of this is contingent on that fact that said maximums even exist. As someone who had studied lots of proof-heavy math, I have a very particular idea of what that would mean which may not particularly mesh well with yours.

Oh my, that's quite a lot of history. I must admit, I'm not all that familiar with that subject... I do recognize some of it from one of my theology classes in high school, but I took that ages ago. So rather than go and study up on all those claims and do a bad job of it in my haste to respond this year, I'll just assume you're right about all the non-supernatural claims you've made about the life of Jesus and the events following his death. I can't accept miracle claims as factual based only on documentation, though. Even thousands of reports don't have the explanatory weight to support the supernatural - the supposed miracles may actually have scientific explanations that the witnesses were unaware of, or they may simply be stories. Quite a lot of religions make miracle claims, after all. That said, let's give special attention to the one you probably care about most - the Resurrection. I could point out that the lack of an apparent explanation for a missing body doesn't itself justify arriving at a supernatural conclusion, but that's kind of boring, don't you think? So let's just say the Resurrection happened to the following extent: The body got up and started walking around, holding conversations, and showing people its wounds, clearly helmed by an intelligent being with a strong understanding of Jesus' life. Can we really be sure that being is Jesus? This is the part where a lot of people dismiss me as a troll or whatever, but I'm actually dead serious. If a powerful supernatural entity exists it could lead us along the path of its choosing with disgusting ease. And it could be just about anything - we'd have no way of knowing. It could be exactly what it claims it is, a demon trying to manipulate us as a race into some long term folly, or just an entity that was a bit bored and wanted to see what would happen if it made Jesus' promise appear to be true. As far as I can tell, this is just a dead end. We no longer have any experience to draw upon. This thing could have the ability to delude us in ways we can't even understand. This, I openly acknowledge, gives Mr. Benevolent God a really tough challenge to overcome if he wants to convince me he actually exists, so I can understand how it might be just a teensy bit extremely frustrating to you as an earnest believer who isn't quite as omnipotent as said supposed god. The truth is, this high degree of skepticism really isn't especially interactive (though I don't ask if demons are tricking people who say my Scrabble word isn't in the dictionary, promise!) - and that goes both ways. It makes it quite challenging for me to relate to positions that stand on much of any faith, even more mundane ones. I'm a really hard person to convince of things, and I don't entirely understand how that process works myself - sorry for the lack of warning! xD Anyhow, to briefly address that last remark, I thought you were using "maximally great" as just a descriptor for beings who are omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenvolent, so I don't really know what expanding has to do with the term and I'm not sure what you're trying to argue there.