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If the gun nuts brought the same passion for freedom, the same skepticism for government intrustion, and the same unflagging vigilance to the other nine amendments as they do to the 2nd one, our country would be a much better place. But try getting them riled up about torture-induced confessions or preventing school-mandated prayer and that skepticism towards government vanishes. They're not really anti-government, but anti-anti-gun. They're very articulate and impressive one-trick ponies. So I give my money to the ACLU. It isn't perfect, but 9/10 is 9 times better than 1/10.

And it requires a massively intrusive police state along with a vast prison system and court docket to criminalize table copying. Almost everyone would be a criminal at some point, if copying ideas becomes a felony for all intents and purposes.

All art is based on building on previous ideas. Crafts as well. God knows science is based on godless socialist sharing. IP will bring the growth of our culture to a crawl.

How many American soldiers would be willing to open fire on their hometown for any reason less than a full-blown foreign invasion? A lot less than 100%, I can guarantee.

That's the wrong question. The question is how many American soldiers would be willing to open fire on someone else's hometown? There are cultural and geographical differences in this country. I can see some rural kid, brought up believing that New York City is full of godless gay liberal communists, willing to open fire on said godless liberals if his commanding officer told him to.

I'm not offended.
I joined in 1987, to fight the godless communists. Apparently, this event was enough to push them over the edge, resulting in the fall of their Evil Empire(tm 2006 microsoft).

I was injured during GW1, and got out about the same time it was mainly over. I still think GW1 was righteous, even if it was caused by Bush Sr. giving a wink and a nod to Iraq; that information didn't come out until after the shooting was over.

I don't think I would have participated in GW2; I never thought that Iraq had anything to do.... well, with anything. I would have been OK with going to Afghanistan, if for no other reason than that the Taliban were assholes and were destroying ancient works of art.

If GW2 is still ongoing when my son turns 18 in a couple of years, I'm probably going to look into moving the family to Canada.

...the first cold war never ended.

The neocons prematurely declared victory when the soviets imploded from within with their socialist disaster.

Even more salient is the fact that many of these tribal theocrats that we are fighting in the GWOT are those that our US tax dollars created and propped up ourselves are a counterbalance to the godless commies.

It seems a perfectly valid argument that we never won the cold war, we are still fighting it and paying for it, and war with Eurasia has merely been replaced with a war on East Asia.

If you order the fried chicken and watermellon, do you get beaten by cops before being sent to git-mo?

"we think we have the God given right to change it"
How about leaving God out of it, these are the affairs of men.

"China has it's laws and their citizens have to obey those laws, just as we must obey the laws in our own country"
Except and unless those laws are wrong, then we and they have an obligation to change or violate them. You won't see a change though unless someone is willing to violate them.

"Giving the average Chinese citizen the ability to circumvent those laws is not doing them a service since the Chinese government turns dissidents into organ doners."

The call of the coward, until they know they could be (and others are) made organ donors for merely reading something they will become organ donors in ignorance.

This tool is not the problem, the government of China is.

All people have a right to knowledge, it's the basis of a free society (not a God based theocracy, or a Godless Communist State).

Personally I have over 120 original Xbox games (mostly bought used, but I'm sure 30 of them were purchased new). Yes, I was living in my parent's basement and working. Yes, I do have an HDTV and a surround sound system to go with it. Yes, I have now moved out. No, you can't come over and play.

To Evolution... you are correct, and in other cases I made the point of using the more correct term non-God systems... typically what could be classified as Naturalism. I'm completely open to God using evolution and understand that a thiestic worldview could include various methods for the creation of man.

So to the "I'll do what is in my own best interst all of the time and call that "right".". I used I here simply to pick a place holder... I could have said you... I could have said 'person X'.

What you continue to fail to understand is that you have a set of values you continue to impose on "me". You say "I" can act in my own interst and I'll be a "monster". You've defined certain behaviors that you don't like (that you think are "wrong") and if I do those acts them you think I'm a monster. If I did the same "say not going to a Baptist Church every Sunday morning and Evenign and on Wednesdays" I could say you're a godless monster too... the point is that unless the moral measures are not grounded in some power outside of man, then they're simply relative and up for debate.

You obviously don't believe in God and don't like Christians. That's fine... but debating the activities of Christians or any other relgion is not what I'm going to do here. I've made my point over and over and over again. You can pick any moral standard you want but if you deny a God or higher power you can't claim that the system is universal... at best it's just a calculation for what one should do to best get along in society, but one has to wonder why one would follow such a system if an opportunity arose to further their own lot by breaking one if its rules.

I've also never said athiests were the most evil people in the world bent on world domination and crushing their enemies, friends, and mothers.

You use the term "good people". What does "good" mean and why? If you really think about it... you've just picked behaviors that your society has deemed "good" but their not universal. Other socities have picked other behaviors that are "good" or given preference to their own society. Slavery was acceptable one point in time... some even said it was "good". Murder has been acceptable and right in many societies. Now you'll say "we're more evolved and we've realized that this was not "good"". But really all you're saying is "we have different values and currently we have power, we're alive, and so we say that those things are "bad" and "wrong". In 1000 years another society could look back on you and say you were "evil" because you did not realize that killing weak children and the old was the only way to preserve the good products for the best of men. Your entire morality system is based on your current societal power, it's not universal, it's not permament.

Of course that still doesn't mean you will not do "good" things...

Why should symmetry be appied to behaviors?

Yes, absolutley... "Ceaser" will imprison you if you violate the law. What does that have to do with morality... if you violate the "law" of the land you're going to suffer consequences. This is about living underneath law, not a moral code.

You've got a whole series of issues here... you want Christians aren't morally superior to Athiests in public life, you want to point out that Christians can believe in evolution, you want to make the point that Christians shouldn't use law to force others to apply to their moral views.

I've said none of these things. You apparently have a stereotype of Christians in your head and think I must be one of these Pat Robertson loving abortion clinic bombing... must have prayer and Bible classes in school people. I've tried to keep this thread on the topic of the foundations of a moral system... which has nothing to do with Christianity specifically... and really has everything to do with Thiestic and Transcendental worldviews.

In respect to your paragraphs on Caesar and creation in schools... since science can't really speak to the what created

Thank you for proving mine.

I accused you of not understanding life or thermodynamics because you stated that life violates the 2nd law of thermo. I did not accuse you of anything simply because you're a Christian. You saw fit to gripe about the limits of science, yet you don't understand that science. The 2nd law applies to closed systems, which Earth is not. When energy is dumped into a system, that system can become more organized without decreasing global entropy.

I understand that energy is never created or destroyed, yet it is here. (How can something exist if was never created?)

That's a damned good question. How can God exist if God was not created? If you propose a mechanism for God's existence, I can use that mechanism to explain the existence of a Godless universe -- the universe becomes God, in a sense.

If the best you can do to defend your position is to quote Einstein, you'd better give up. Einstein was not a Christian.

There's a continuum of types of God, and some scientists (but not Einstein) retain the label of "Christian" or "Jew" even when they've abandoned notions of a Christian or Jewish God. The few physicists who label themselves according to a major organized religion are either hypocrites, subscribing to religious beliefs where their scientific knowledge ends, or they are part of a fringe group within their religion where God and religious doctrine has been toned down to such an extent that it does not interfere with scientific thought. I don't know whether you belong to the second group or not. If you do, I would not call you a Christian.

You labeled yourself a Christian, and you don't know physics. You're so consumed with defending your faith that you evidently haven't bothered to read up on entropy and correct your mistaken beliefs. I suggest you obtain Fermi's wonderful treatise on Thermodynamics, cheaply available on Amazon and published by Dover. The big bang? Fine, ascribe /that/ to God if you want. You can even believe that God created life; science cannot prove otherwise. But don't suggest that natural occurrence of life, or the propagation of life, violates thermodynamic laws unless you have a thorough scientific argument or experiment to prove it. Otherwise, you come across as a religious scientific illiterate, whether you are one or not.

I'm old enough to remember when the threat was all the "evil, godless Communists" who wanted us dead.

Actually, I do believe that the Founding Fathers intended future methods of communications to be covered by the First Amendment. And even though they could not have envisioned the Internet and Oprah "being beamed around the world", they lived in a time when there was also an explosion of global communications and commerce. The notion that they were some primitives and we need to revise their vision because of religious fanatics (East or West), is just another excuse to lock down the freedoms they fought for.

Remember, there are people (some of them comment here occasionally), who really don't like the notion of people actually being, you know, free. They'd be much more comfortable being told what to do and what to think. Many of them find solace in Religion because it's a short-cut to having to make your own moral decisions. After all, if all the rules are written down for you, then you don't have to do any of the hard work yourself. Some people like to live like that. None of them were Founding Fathers of this Nation.

The exceptionalists who want to tell us that terrorism is something so new that we have to start doing a little snip-snip on the Constitution are short on understanding of history or short on brains (I guess short on courage is another possibility). There was a time when the Barbary Pirates brought much of the commerce of United States to a standstill, using terrorist tactics. In fact, they killed more people than Al Qaeda did on 9/11, too. And know what? We made it through by treating them as the criminals they were and putting them out of business. The cool thing is that it took COOPERATION WITH THE REST OF THE WORLD to do it. Tell that to the hairless ape that sleeps in the White House. Not that it will sink in..

but them I'm guessing "soft atheism" is synonymous with "agnosticim", no? If not, how are they different? (And don't try defining "agnosticism" as not knowing what you believe, because unless you can show me an "agnostic community" that professes such beliefs, I'm not buying it.

I believe — and by all means, any self-professed agnostics should step in here with their understandings — that agnosticism is the declared position that one cannot know if there is a god or gods.

Here's a link that refers to Huxley; here's another with more detail.

I view the the statement "I don't know if I believe" as an evasion, or an admission of simple-mindedness. I certainly know if I believe, and I've found that both theists and atheists don't seem to have any problems with such knowledge. However, like the misunderstanding of atheism by theists, it may be the case that some people misunderstand agnosticism and declare into, or for, that misunderstanding.

You might have a point about going to the group, however, because I left off the 2nd defintion for atheism: "2. Godlessness; immorality." (I kid you not.)

Oh, I'm quite sure you're not kidding. This is simply gross evidence of what I alluded to earlier, that dictionary definitions have been put in place by the overwhelmingly Christian populace, and are as about as likely to be accurate as are a republican's description of the democratic platform, and for some of the same reasons. In defense of the more scholarly works out there, you will occasionally find a correct definition as well. For instance, Worldnet of Princeton university has "a lack of belief in the existence of God or gods" as definition #2, which is the correct definition.

1) absence of evidence != evidence of absence

2) Strong atheism makes a claim that no god(s) exist. Theistic religions make the claim that a god(s) exist. While only one of these claims can be true, both are falsifiable (you can't tell between a godded and a godless universe based on physical measurements), the default is not atheism but lack of knowledge (because if measurements can't see god(s), absence of data doesn't mean anything w/r/t the hypotheses).

Strong atheism and theism make competing claims - because of the limitations of knowledge, lack of proof of one doesn't constitute proof of the other. They have to be proven on their own. Because of this, strong atheism has a bigger logical problem than strong theism because it is based on an assertion which can't be proven even if a measurement to determine the presence of a god(s) is available. I believe that this is why Dawkins et al. are dissmissive of the "weak theism" argment (the presence of god(s) can't be disproven) and place the burden of proof upon theists - they do not want too much attention paid to the unprovability of their own hypotheses.

It is important to realize that the argument for what atheism means isn't "my" argument. It is the argument of the atheist community in general. And just as you would probably think that taking a Christian's word for what Christianity means is more reasonable than taking an atheist's word for the same, I submit to you that you're better off taking the atheist's word for what atheism means than you are taking anyone else's.

How, when, and where does the "atheist community" meet? I'm guessing they meet on Monday evenings in either an "achurch", an "atemple", or an "amosque", and that a newsletter is the "how". But how does one subscribe and is there a secret handshake? ;)

OK, seriously, I actually do know of an "atheist community" here at UVA (it's a student club), and one of my friends is an officer in it. It never even occurred to me to ask them how they define "atheist" vs. "agnostic" as I naturally assumed they used the "standard" definitions (i.e., American Heritage, Merriam-Webster, etc.). You might have a point about going to the group, however, because I left off the 2nd defintion for atheism: "2. Godlessness; immorality." (I kid you not.) Agnosticism also has a 2nd definition, but it's one that I have no problem with: "2. an intellectual doctrine or attitude affirming the uncertainty of all claims to ultimate knowledge."

Your distinction between hard and soft atheism is adequate, but them I'm guessing "soft atheism" is synonymous with "agnosticim", no? If not, how are they different? (And don't try defining "agnosticism" as not knowing what you believe, because unless you can show me an "agnostic community" that professes such beliefs, I'm not buying it.

As for people who say they "don't know" what they believe, I'm guessing the majority of the time they're really trying to politely say that it's none of your business. (And as I say this as someone who is more likely to offend than to be offended in this regard.)

I would have to agree with this statement. 360 certainly has itself well placed in the current market; good games, good support (even if you have had problems, I think they're doing a good job at addressing the concerns of the community). I can certainly see the 360 becoming the centre of my entertainment system, especially if Microsoft successfully releases a Zune/portable Xbox and puts their IPTV technology into the Xbox. Because as popular as omgwtfM$!!1! may be on /., you have to admit that when they put their minds to something, they have the means to get it done.

They have evil syentifik brain-sucker machines that turn you into babbling Godless drones!

Id further this by saying that the danger of the fearing of a godless society is very tell tale. A supressed child overcompensates when the controling authority goes away.

If the only reason someone does not "sin" is divine justice, then the nautural reaction to the concept of there not being such justice is to act in a most defiling way.

Its best to maintain a healthy societal perspective so that we dont come into chaos when historical evidence is eventually dug up contradicting long held faith in certain religeous institutions.

I find it funny that people who choose not to acknowledge God are the ones who view religion as a set of shackles, a purposefully constructed prison in which to enslave the gullible and the desparate. The people I've encounted who have decided that what the Bible has to say is true and have given their lives over to Christ tell me the exact opposite, that their belief is freeing and revealing. A friend at work who recently had such an experience says that the description of "scales falling from ones eyes" is the best way to put it.

I've had people tell me that my belief is a fairy tale, that I, like so many millions of others through out human history, am simply unable and/or unwilling to face my own mortality and a godless oblivion. They try to convince me that my experiences have all been in my head or that I've chosen to see God's hand in events where it didn't exist. All I can do is disagree and point out that they have no way to invalidate my experiences. That may sound like a student debate team kind of cop-out, but ultimately there's no argument I can give to people who don't want to find out for themselves if all this Jesus stuff is for real.

Most non-believers want some concrete thing placed in front of them that will utterly convince them that God exists. I've read several people on Slashdot say that if God would give them some supernatural sign, they'd believe. I hate to say it, but if you start out from that stance, even a talking, burning bush won't help. Jesus had loads of people following Him around, watching Him perform miracles, and they STILL didn't get who He was. He must have gotten tired of smacking Himself in the forehead out of incredulity over their thickness. Besides, how many people here would pipe up if they did have a supernatural experience? Probably very few, if any. The shouting down one would receive would be loud, vicious, and acerbic. Or they'd simply wave it off.

"Dude! Jesus talked to me last night!"

"Dude, you've got to take a break from those 72 hour WoW sessions..."

On the flip side, I certainly understand non-Christians wanting nothing to do with such a group of apparent hypocrites. There's a song from ages ago that says, "And they'll know we are Christians by our love." A more appropriate rendition nowadays would be "And they'll know we are Christians by our [pomposity, condescension, joylessness, manipulation, lack of caring]." How we act usually has more impact on opinions about us than what we say. My family and I are blessed in that we're part of a church (Southern Baptist, if you feel the need to go find the appropiately-sized skewer) that doesn't just Talk the Talk, and that's all. When we first started attending, I was reminded of a bit from Weird Al's "Amish Paradise": "There's no time for sin and vice, living in an Amish Paradise." These people are busy and use the extra energy it takes to be mindful of *not* appearing pompous, smug, etc, etc, in what they set out to accomplish. Are they perfect? No, but their focus and commitment is unlike any I've seen in a long time. If you want to see Christians living Christ's example, rather than just pretending, I'll send you the URL for their website.

Yes, I'm rambling. Back on track. I can't prove or disprove God to you. I will suggest, though, that if the question of why so many millions of people choose to believe in a fairy tale bugs you and makes your blood pressure rise, perhaps an honest, genuine investigation will help. No churches, no worship services, no well-dressed clergy shoving offering plates at you; just you and a Bible. If you're worried about people you know freaking out ("Why the #$%^ are you reading that crap?!?"), then do your research in private. If you read bits of it earlier in life, I'll bet it won't read the same with your current eyes. I can't tell you what might happen. I can't say that you'll get some overly bright, Spielburgian mist swirling around you and booming, disembodied voices in the room. But God knows all of the attitudes we bring to the table. If you show up with some measure of openness, well...who knows?

The arcs of conversation are so predictable that you could just rehash them from the /. archive with a Python script,