Engineering Safety Book

Most of what I can say about this very good thought provoking book comes for the things I have written down from the book. The following are my reading notes.
You can argue for or against an interpretation or a proposition; you argue for or against an experience. You can only seek to understand it. Every experience therefore involves sensation, interpretation and response.
Different ways of using humour to lighten a situation should be explored. Eye contact to make people think that I am talking to them. Stop being so down what is the point – no one will like you. Even if she is being a bitch to you and ignoring you, you are the only person who is suffering. Grow up looser.

Christianity regards the Old Testament as a revelation that is only made complete by the teaching of Jesus. Islam sees both Judaism and Christianity as expressing teaching of enlightened prophets leaning up to the final revelation given by Muhammad.
William James 1902 To the “sick person” He looks at the healthy minded soul (the person who is naturally happy and positive) and the sick soul ( the person who is depressed and negative) to the sick person the healthy soul is blind and shallow not focusing on the realities of life.
Just because your paranoid doesn’t mean there not out to get you.
Marx” Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creative. It is the opium of the people.”
Rutledge on Humanism “the key feature here is the denial of another order beyond the world”
Don Cupitt “A modern person ought to be spiritually strong and healthy enough to live and die without superstition. Nothing hidden. The world is ours, there is nothing conspiring against us.
Close to Buddhist view that spiritual happiness is possible and suffering may be overcome only one has to come to terms with a realistic recognition of the limited and transient nature of life.
Kant arguments for the existence of God
Ontological; based on a person alone
Cosmological; based on general fact of the existence of the world
Teleological; based on the particular features of the world
Greek terms:
Sarax the physical body (flesh & blood)
Soma the organisable body, with activates and characteristics
Psyche the sensational & emotional
Pneuma the rational, spiritual aspects of mankind
Nous the thinking mind.
Descartes “I Think therefore I am”
Materialism the minds are unreal; there are only bodies.
Idealism Bodies are unreal there are only minds.
Dualism There exists both bodies and minds distinct from each other but linked together in someway.
Materialism reductionist approval. A person is nothing but a brain, attached to a body and nervous system, so that a person is reduced to these things.
Ryle; mind and bodies are one. A university is a collect of buildings and people; but more. A person is a collection of traits and experiences the mind is not a separate entity it is the whole.
Differences between Ryle & Cupitt
Ryle basically reductionist Cupitt Post modern view point language and communication as the basis of reality. A person is therefore a series of events of communication, given coherence only by being presented together. Cupitt “A person is only a story and stories are inherently ambiguous.

Buddhism story. Boy goes on pilgrimage and his mother asks him to return with a holy relic. He forgets but picks up a bone from a dog. His mother believes it is the real article and as a result of her devotion many great healings are performed. Hume concludes that it really is quite miraculous how many people are willing to suspend their rationality in order to continue to embrace religion. Why people do indeed continue to be religious and what it says about the limited place of rationality in the whole stance of human experience.

The world is not a safe place in which to live, but the only place in which to live.
Either god is not all powerful or god is not all lairs or suffering is unreal, necessary or a means to a greater good, or the wholes idea of an all loving, powerful creator god was a mistake in the 1st place.


Mel Thompson's web site.