Slashdot Mirror
Supernova 1987A Decoded
bluevector writes "Electric Universe News is reporting that scientists claim to have proof that 'supernovae are catastrophic electrical discharges focused on a star' and not the result of giant stars undergoing gravitational collapse and subsequent explosion after having spent all of their nuclear fuel as previously thought."
Come on this is big news and I'm an astronomy student help me out here.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
Is this April 1? I'm so confused.
Welcome our new electric overlords
having trouble buying this with no fa, especially since it seems to go against all current astronomical data regarding supernovae.
so... does it run linux?
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
Supernova 1987A Decoded
I haven't heard about anything like this before and will likely remain skeptical until a link is provided.
I hate the one hundred and twenty character limit for signatures with an all-enveloping, all-destroying, incredible pass
This is ridiculous. Is there really no link?
If anyone knows the where abouts of one Tolian Soran UFP Security is looking for him in connection with the artificial supernova 1987A. Soran is considered armed and dangerous and may be responsible for previous supernova, which can only be caused by external electrical forces directed at stars, and not their own gravity.
Poor sci-fi writers. Half of the (bad) sci-fi deals with supernovas being collapsed stars. What will they do now, use them as a power station?
And I for one welcome our new... electro-magnetically generated Supernova 1987a overlords.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
So instead of stun gunning a burglar, you can also stun a pretty big object like a star? That is one heat resistant stun gun!
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Would it have killed the poster to come up with an fa?? I mean, seriously...especially for a claim of this significance, they'd better have some heavy shit to back this up!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Electric Universe is a well-known crackpot site, built on the most absurd pseudoscience. They're the same outfit that predicted a large explosion when Deep Impact hit Tempel 1.
As usual, the /. editors display their utter inability to distinguish between science and pseudoscience. Idiots.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
...those stars are being blown up by the Death Star.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Chemical Brothers are reporting that they are now able to convert water into gold.
Whre is the article?? Oh, wait, the nes is that some /.'er posted such a wild baseless claim?
It must be the Death Star!!
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
Since the submitter didn't bother including one, and the editor didn't do any better, here's one:
n z1
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=re6qx
It's already running so slow it's useless. What I managed to get screams crackpot:
24 August 2005
Supernova 1987A Decoded
13 July 2005
Comet Tempel 1's Electrifying Impact
03 July 2005
The Deep Impact of Comet Theory
26 March 2005
The Dragon Storm
08 February 2005
Columbia downed by Megalightning
05 February 2005
Saturn's Strange Hot Spot Explained
30 January 2005
Titan - A Rosetta Stone for early Earth?
25 December 2004
Megalightning at Saturn
25 November 2004
Titan puzzles scientists
27 October 2004
The True State of the Universe
24 August 2005 Supernova 1987A Decoded
Supernova 1987A is the closest supernova event since the invention of the telescope. It was first seen in February 1987 in the nearby Magellanic cloud, a dwarf companion galaxy of the Milky Way, and only 169,000 light years from Earth. Close observation since 1987 has now provided proof that supernovae are catastrophic electrical discharges focused on a star.
>> IMAGE CAPTION: The enigmatic and beautiful structure of SN1987A with its three axial rings. The brightening of the equatorial ring is obvious. The two bright stars are just in the field of view and are not associated with the supernova.
A supernova is one of the most energetic events witnessed in the universe. The accepted explanation is that it occurs at the end of a star's lifetime, or red giant stage, when the star's nuclear fuel is exhausted. There is no more release of nuclear energy in the core so the huge star collapses in on itself. If sufficiently massive, the imploding layers of the star are thought to rebound when they hit the core, resulting in an explosion, and the blast wave ejects the star's envelope into interstellar space. The bright equatorial ring is caused by the collision of exploded matter from the star with the remnants of an earlier stellar "wind." The two faint rings are a problem. The best that theorists have been able to manage is to postulate some kind of rotating beam from an assumed supernova remnant, sweeping and lighting up a shell of gas expelled at an earlier epoch. The ad hoc nature of these explanations is obvious.
The detection of a pulsar remnant after some supernovae is explained by the implosion of the stellar core to produce a neutron star. Pulsars emit bursts of radiation up to thousands of times a second. It is believed that a pulsar must be a super-collapsed stellar object that can spin up to thousands of times a second and emit a rotating beam of X-rays (like a lighthouse). Commonsense suggests that this mechanical model is wrong when some pulsars rev beyond the redline, even for such a bizarre object.
A recent example of conventional thinking can be seen on the Chandra website. On August 17, a news story was posted: Supernova 1987A: Fast Forward to the Past.
Recent Chandra observations have revealed new details about the fiery ring surrounding the stellar explosion that produced Supernova 1987A. The data give insight into the behavior of the doomed star in the years before it exploded, and indicate that the predicted spectacular brightening of the circumstellar ring has begun.. The site of the explosion was traced to the location of a blue supergiant star called Sanduleak -69Â 202 (SK -69 for short) that had a mass estimated at approximately 20 Suns.
Subsequent optical, ultraviolet and X-ray observations have enabled astronomers to piece together the following scenario for SK -69: about ten million years ago the star formed out of a dark, dense, cloud of dust and gas; roughly a million years ago, the star lost most of its outer layers in a slowly moving stellar wind that formed a vast cloud of gas around it; before the star exploded, a high-speed wind blowing off its hot surface carved out a cavity in the cool gas cloud.
The intense flash of ultraviolet light from the supernova illuminated the edge of this cavity to produce the bright ring seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. In the meantime the supernova explosion sent a shock wave rumbling through the cavity. In 1999, Chandra imaged this shock wave, and astronomers have waited expectantly for the shock wave to hit the edge of the cavity, where it would encounter the much denser gas deposited by the red supergiant wind, and produce a dramatic increase in X-radiation.
The latest data from Chandra and the Hubble Space Telescope indicate that this much-anticipated event has begun. Optical hot-spots now encircle the ring like a necklace of incandescent diamonds. The Chandra image reveals multimillion-degree gas at the location
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/0 3/1246254&tid=160
Summary of the previous discussion: the electric universe theory has as much scientific support as geocentrism.
This should not be news on slashdot I suppose, but since it is, I guess we're going to spend some time bash.. I mean challenging the electric universe theory once more...
Where's the FA so I can do the usual skip RTFA operation? I'm hanging here!
The page seems to be down and it's not in the Google cache. However, browsing Google's cache of other pages on that site caused my Quack Sense to tingle. A Google on "Electic Universe" gave me this. It seems to be somewhere between protoscience and pseudoscience. However, since the announcement of the new "proof" doesn't seem to come from a trusted journal, I'm going to bet on the latter.
Article is slashdotted.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
(from Google's cache, text-only version: http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:2FYbHIvbi1YJ:ww w.holoscience.com/news.php%3Farticle%3Dre6qxnz1+&h l=en&lr=&strip=1)
Supernova 1987A Decoded
Supernova 1987A is the closest supernova event since the invention of the telescope. It was first seen in February 1987 in the nearby Magellanic cloud, a dwarf companion galaxy of the Milky Way, and only 169,000 light years from Earth. Close observation since 1987 has now provided proof that supernovae are catastrophic electrical discharges focused on a star.
>> The enigmatic and beautiful structure of SN1987A with its three axial rings. The brightening of the equatorial ring is obvious. The two bright stars are just in the field of view and are not associated with the supernova.
Credit: NASA/STScI/CfA/P.Challis.
A supernova is one of the most energetic events witnessed in the universe. The accepted explanation is that it occurs at the end of a star's lifetime, or red giant stage, when the starâ(TM)s nuclear fuel is exhausted. There is no more release of nuclear energy in the core so the huge star collapses in on itself. If sufficiently massive, the imploding layers of the star are thought to âoereboundâ when they hit the core, resulting in an explosion, and the blast wave ejects the star's envelope into interstellar space. The bright equatorial ring is caused by the collision of exploded matter from the star with the remnants of an earlier stellar "wind." The two faint rings are a problem. The best that theorists have been able to manage is to postulate some kind of rotating beam from an assumed supernova remnant, sweeping and lighting up a shell of gas expelled at an earlier epoch. The ad hoc nature of these explanations is obvious.
The detection of a pulsar remnant after some supernovae is explained by the implosion of the stellar core to produce a neutron star. Pulsars emit bursts of radiation up to thousands of times a second. It is believed that a pulsar must be a super-collapsed stellar object that can spin up to thousands of times a second and emit a rotating beam of X-rays (like a lighthouse). Commonsense suggests that this mechanical model is wrong when some pulsars rev beyond the redline, even for such a bizarre object.
A recent example of conventional thinking can be seen on the Chandra website. On August 17, a news story was posted:
âoeSupernova 1987A: Fast Forward to the Past.â
>> Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/PSU/S.Park & D.Burrows.; Optical: NASA/STScI/CfA/P.Challis
Recent Chandra observations have revealed new details about the fiery ring surrounding the stellar explosion that produced Supernova 1987A. The data give insight into the behavior of the doomed star in the years before it exploded, and indicate that the predicted spectacular brightening of the circumstellar ring has begun.. The site of the explosion was traced to the location of a blue supergiant star called Sanduleak -69Â 202 (SK -69 for short) that had a mass estimated at approximately 20 Suns.
Subsequent optical, ultraviolet and X-ray observations have enabled astronomers to piece together the following scenario for SK -69: about ten million years ago the star formed out of a dark, dense, cloud of dust and gas; roughly a million years ago, the star lost most of its outer layers in a slowly moving stellar wind that formed a vast cloud of gas around it; before the star exploded, a high-speed wind blowing off its hot surface carved out a cavity in the cool gas cloud.
The intense flash of ultraviolet light from the supernova illuminated the edge of this cavity to produce the bright ring seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. In the meantime the supernova explosion sent a shock wave rumbling through the cavity. In 1999, Chandra imaged this shock wave, and astronomer
It's to slashdot the site, nuking it off of the face of the earth.
/. editors display their utter inability to distinguish between science and pseudoscience. Idiots.
Electric Universe is a well-known crackpot site, built on the most absurd pseudoscience. They're the same outfit that predicted a large explosion when Deep Impact hit Tempel 1.
As usual, the
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
The proper link is here. While checking on this, I took the opportunity to have another look around the website. These guys really are chewing the carpet; for instance, their page on the CHANDRA X-ray observatory shows a failure to grasp even the most basic aspects of X-ray emission in astrophysical plasmas.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
en tee.
FTFA:
The crucial evidence for the electrical nature of supernovae must come from experiment and observation. Anthony L. Peratt, Fellow, IEEE, published a seminal paper in the IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, Vol. 31, No. 6, December 2003. It was titled Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High-Current, Z-Pinch Aurora as Recorded in Antiquity. In it he explained the unusual characteristics of a high-energy plasma discharge. He discussed mega-ampere particle beams and showed their characteristic 56- and 28-fold symmetry. He wrote: "A solid beam of charged particles tends to form hollow cylinders that may then filament into individual currents. When observed from below, the pattern consists of circles, circular rings of bright spots, and intense electrical discharge streamers connecting the inner structure to the outer structure."
*sigh* I seriously doubt that 'supernovae are catastrophic electrical discharges focused on a star', and think that this is instead more unsubstantiated guesswork on the part of the Electronic Universe Theorists.
While we're at it, can we please get some reliable investment opportunities in Nigerian oil firms?
I'm sure that's why they didn't post a link to the article then.
I am a black hole stage of a former class O supergiant you insensitive clod!
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
This article for me is the last straw when it comes to slashdot. The occasional duplicate I could live with. Then we started having articles from The Onion. Now we have articles from a crackpot website. Slashdot has just been deleted from my bookmarks.
Our little girl Susan is a most admirable slut, and pleases us mightily - Samuel Pepys (1633-1703)
a story without a link
a fringe crackpot theory on the front page
no monty python foot
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Fools! They fail to understand that a supernova is caused by shock waves emitted when the turtle at the bottom of the stack of turtles that make up the universe is squashed by all the turtles above it. As new turtles come into being at the top of the stack, their weight eventually crushes the bottom turtle, causing the whole stack to drop jarringly. The resulting compression wave is felt by all the turtles, and sometimes causes the familiar flash of light mistakenly interpreted as a stellar explosion. Stars can't "explode" because they are merely holes in the firmament. Whoever heard of a hole exploding! Such foolishness!
And I suppose that the discharge is the result of an alien "nuclearite war?"
(for those who haven't seen Grease 2, one of the main chars. seduces a girl into a fallout shalter after his friends blare the air-raid sirens. He then unsuccessfully attempts to get laid, based on the premise that the world is about to end and he about to go out and die in the fight for glory... But he is so out of touch that instead of "Nuclear War", he calls it "Nuclearite war")
Seems kinda like the same deal here!
bash: rtfm: command not found
Yikes, this changes quite a few things. I wonder how much our computer models are wrong since supernova are what keeps the universe alive. Were we wrong all this time? :)
--gks
90% of the Electric Universe site is bullshit - even if there are some nuggets of gold there, it's still bullshit.
Remember, in true science if *any* part of your theory is disproven, you need to discard or rewrite the theory - you can't just say "most of their predictions about..." and cherry-pick the correct answers!
Idiot.
Look. This is Slashdot, where no one reads the f-ing article. The only reason we click the thing is in the hopes that we can see the mushroom cloud go up when some poor bastard's server gets nuked.
So the editors figure they'll save the site the agony since no one's reading the page anyway, and you go and throw it back up on the page. Way to go, moron. I hope you're proud of yourself!
I don't know if these electric universe guys are right or wrong, but it seems VERY scientific to me to come up with new theories about how things work...
I have a new theory: jim_v2000 is an ignorant fuckwit who is incapable of assessing the validity of pseudoscientic claims. There you have it, folks: science in action.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
So I guess if this is even true, that instead of waiting 5 billion years + until our sun runs out of fuel, the sun can have one of these discharges at any seocoGI'WOIQF+IHWJFW>F(&"&)"#$')"'#(%
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I thought we had agreed that Slashdot should stop posting stories from the Onion. Looks like they've picked up feeds from any number of other wacky humor sites to compensate.
Good prank, ScuttleMonkey, but next time don't forget the Monty Python foot. You seem to be a new guy so I guess you're allowed a couple mistakes.
No, no, it's psuedoscience. Thier explanation of the behaviour of comets shape simply does not match reality. Nor does thier explanation of the solar wind (which they claim is positively charged if I recall, it is infact electrically neutral).
Thier predictions about Deep Impact were so vaguo they would make a astrology cringe, so to claim they got that right is absurd.
These people don't open themselves up to peer review. We aren't talking about a bunch of little Einstiens the world wont accept. These are genuine crackpots.
I have a new theory: jim_v2000 is an ignorant fuckwit who is incapable of assessing the validity of pseudoscientic claims. There you have it, folks: science in action.
There's the scientific method in action there...if you can't make a logical response to something, attack the poster!
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
[Wheeze]Your lack of faith is disturbing[Wheeze]
"I am Heisenborg. You will probably be assimilated"
It's too bad god didn't give you good grammar or spelling abilties.
However this new concept is interesting, but leaves a lot of questions. How are these "catastrophic electrical discharges" occur and funciton? Why and how do they stars to supernova?
I attampted to conduct some research on the subject, but only found concepts on ESD (Electrostatic Discharges), which pretty much is static. I did find out that it is capable of more than just shocking and irritating you. Though possibly relating to this subject, it is not what I seek.
Here are some interesting articles that I found:0 predictions-scarring.htm
http://www.reade.com/Safety/esd.html
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2004/arch/04123
http://www.fixedearth.com/electric.html
e x.html
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/mccanney/ind
Yeah, these people are total crackpots
Stop judging so fast !
There's the scientific method in action there...if you can't make a logical response to something, attack the poster!
You mean like your original comment above where you said "Actually, you would appear to be the troll here"? Yousa genius!
Headline screams Supernova 1987A Decoded
/.
tfa extrapolates to supernovae are catastrophic electrical discharges
a few? most? or just this one on our say so?
Stuff that matters like truth in journalism? Oh sorry, this is
Who but the Flying Spaghetti Monster could possibly have a hair dryer powerful enough to destroy a star when He drops it in His Noodly Bathtub?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
The story of Peter Pan doesn't change either, let's all go live in Fairy-Land :-)
Geez man.. the Bible is not Science, and never will be.
Some ludicrously misapplied scientific terms come to the front when Googled, too. Take "Birkeland current," one of the ideas put forth as some sort of power transmission line throughout the galaxy; a brief bit of research indicates that the phenomenon is referred to solely in a terrestrial context (at least, on non-out there sites)
Another one? The paper referenced towards the end, entitled "Characteristics for the occurrence of a high-current, Z-pinch aurora as recorded in antiquity," and published in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, relates solely to a large terrestrial aurora discharge.
Still, it would be great if we could get a pro in here to thoroughly debunk this. Any astronomers want to step up to the challenge?
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
This is crazy talk. I studied gravitational collapse TypeII supernova explosions in grad school. It's not an electrical phenomenon: it's a gravitational bounce outward from the solid (neutron) core after fusion peters out at Iron burning. From there, for sufficiently massive stars, you either get a neutron star or a black hole. Hans Bethe got the Nobel for explaining process the energy release(~10^51 erg). Aside from some of the 3d fluid dynamics of collapse and ejecta composition, the important parts of the process are fairly well understood.
Why do I have the image of Cartman going home, eating his rug, and saying "Well, I've been lickin' this carpet for 3 whole hours and I don't feel like a lesbian"?
I just read Robert Heinleins 'Tunnel in the Sky'. Heinlein wrote the now quote famous Starship Troopers.
This book is in the same vein. Using 'stargate' type technology (but without silly jelly effects) a simple door can be created between worlds, and pioneers are set out to try and reduce the strain on the worlds population growth.
---SPOILER WARNING---
Anyway, a supernova occurs [millions of light years away, but reaches them at that point] in a survival experiment at a school - and this knocks the focus of the gate, and after 5-10 days the kids are supposed to be picked up (those who survived). Yet they end up starting their own colony.
OK
So read some Heinlein books.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Well clearly this disproves Evolution, then.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
After you RTFA and think to yourself "I haven't heard that much non-sensical technobabble since Star Trek!" head over to Wiki's Plasma Cosmology page. Or this more detailed page. Its contested, mainly because this is a contested field and the article is overly broad, but I think it fills in some of the holes.
Honestly if their predictions are true it will change everything in cosmology. And if my predictions are true I'll win the Lotto. I'm not sure who has better odds....
You'll eat anything, won't you?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/ 10/0341237&tid=198&tid=164&tid=137
I mean - it's on the internet - it must be true - right?
.. theories saying "supernovae are caused by giant stars undergoing gravitational collapse" are dying.
Art Makers Just an excuse to show photos of naked women !!
Robert Heinlein's 'Tunnel in the Sky'.
must have more typo/mental errors too. wow. slashdot editors suck don't they... I mean, no link... just a 'oooh weird title, lets use it'. Laaazy.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
No, my friend, your ad hominem came first when you accused me of trolling, with nothing to back up your claim. Read through the rest of the posts for this article, and it should become pretty apparent that the electric universe hypothesis (I won't dignify it with the label 'theory') is fringe science. The claims of these 'scientists' are barely coherent, indicating a total absence of familiarity with how science is prosecuted and presented, irrespective of the specifics of the claims themselves. The fact that they present their hypotheses as press releases, rather than in peer-reviewed journals, should set alarm bells ringing.
In your original post, you referred to 'those who dared say that the earth was round hundred of years ago'. In the interests of educating you about science, just a little, you may be interested to hear that the spherical circumference of the Earth was measured by Eratosthenes, well over 2,000 years ago. Unfortunately, people ignorant of history and science seem to believe that Columbus was the first to make the outrageous claim that the Earth was round. In fact, it was well accepted at that time that the Earth was round; the only uncertainty lay in the precise size.
Ultimately, the fact that pseudoscientific claims draw ridicule from mainstream science does not make these claims any more plausible. Sure, some outrageous hypotheses that are subject to ridicule are later found to be true. However, this happens only in very rare cases, and once the evidence is provided to back up the claims, the ridicule evaporates.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
200 years ago, most of the USA was filled with people who could not read or write. Yet, they formed a country with great prosperity. And they believed in GOD.
Good thing God gave them all those slaves, eh?
Peter Pan did not walk the earth. Jesus did. God has given miracles.
He did, too. I read it in a book. A lot of other people have read it. That makes it true. And Peter Pan taught people to fly, man. If that's not a miracle, I don't know what is.
If they did not manage to publish in a reputable physics journal, it is not physics, not even science fiction!
So does this mean we have a new easy to use torrent site?
No?
Darn.
Hacker Media
say hi to timothy and cowboyneal for me.
Mother Theresa is going to be sainted for her works.
This is the same Mother Theresa who refused to administer painkillers to those dying in her hospices, even though her organization had millions of dollars in unspent donations? The one who only cared about converting more people to Christ? I hope that bitch rots in hell.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Here's what looks like the abstract of their precious journal article (it's a PDF):http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/downloadsCo smo/peratt2004ICPS.pdf
As far as I can tell, there's no reference to any sort of interstellar events - just a very strong aurora, which would exhibit certain symmetries according to current research in plasma physics; ancient societies might then be inspired to inscribe this auroral event in petroglyphs. The paper then puts forth support for this idea by showing that the positions of these symmetric ancient drawings are well oriented with a theorized auroral event.
I'm no plasma physicist, but I would be very suprised if even the extreme forces of a supernova, located many thousands of light-years away, would be able to do a fraction of what the solar wind of a star eight light-minutes away could achieve. If the conclusions of this paper are correct, and there was some sort of massive auroral event in antiquity, I would expect a better explanation to lie in variations the Earth's own magnetic field or in high solar activity; after all, that's what well-confirmed theory tells us produces the aurora.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
200 years ago, most of the USA was filled with people who could not read or write ... And they believed in GOD.
Exactly. The uneducated, stupid people believed in god. You put it perfectly.
I'm impressed. The link to The Onion that was marked Google instead of Humour was a bit of a low point for Slashdot. But a story about a bunch of cranks that doesn't even include a link is a whole new record. Are you guys having a competition?
Tomorrow's Stupid News article: RocketRainbow writes about a staggering discovery: "Some guy in a bar told me that he made a time machine". The implications are astonishing.
*#*#*#*#*#******* I love peanut butter sandwiches!
Did you ever notice how science changes its anwsers so damn often. But the Bible stays the same.
2 1234547.htm
Actually, real scientists have used this event to prove a hypothesis. In 1999, Chandra X-Ray center suggested that the shape of the rings resulted from a cavity, caused by the explosion, in the dust and gas surrounding the star. They predicted that the supernova explosion would produce a shock wave which would hit the edges of the cavity and produce a dramatic increase in X-Rays. This is happening as predicted. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/08/0508
You see, that's the difference between science and superstition. Science makes predictions which can be tested. That's why it sometimes changes. Superstition is not testable. That's why it stays the same.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Finally, a Slashdot post (not an Ask Slashdot or a book review) where I don't have to RTFA, because there is no TFA!
So at what point is someone allowed to dismiss something as wacky b.s. without being being one of those evil "closed minded dogmatic scientists"? Since this guy's electrical universe hypothesis is so clearly contradicted by observations, and the currently accepted theories are actually able to predict phenomena, I think it's safe to say that the former is wrong. New theories are supposed to explain things better than the old ones, not worse.
Peter Pan did not walk the earth. Jesus did.
Then it's obvious who was the more magical, isn't it?
I agree Mother Theresa was a good person. If she did all her good work because she was inspired by the Bible.. good for her.
But this does not make the Bible true, nor prove the fact that God exists, not prove that miracles were ever performed.
I've been raised as a Catholic, but beause of what I've seen and experienced , turned into an Atheist. I have my own moral standards, and think for myself. I do not need a book to tell me what to think.
I'm guessing you're one of the Intelligent Design people, believing every word of the bible.
The bible is a good book to teach moral, but nothing more.
If you think of the bible in terms of science, then you're way off.
Did you ever notice how science changes its anwsers so damn often. But the Bible stays the same.
That's true. No matter how long human civilization lasts, the Bible will always hold an accurate record of God's chosen disciple, Lot, fucking his daughters. Nice choice, God - you picked a winner there!
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Tinkerbell!
Who ordered that?
From TFA..."Stars are an electrical plasma discharge phenomenon. Electrical energy produces heavy elements near the surface of all stars. The energy is transferred over cosmic distances via Birkeland current transmission lines. The energy may be released gradually or stored in a stellar circuit and unleashed catastrophically. It is these cosmic circuits that are the energy source for the supernova explosion not the star."
Even if TFA was mildly belivable there is still the problem of where does all the electrical energy come from, where is the "power station" at the other end of the "Birkeland current transmission lines".
Skip to the end of the article and it starts dribbling on about the geometry of Stonehenge. The fact that it was posted seems to indicate that slashdot will soon have an astrology section.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Did you ever notice how science changes its anwsers so damn often. But the Bible stays the same.
That's funny. The Koran stays the same, the Hindu Vedas stay the same, and many other religious texts which have nothing to do with the Christian god stay the same too. Does the quality of being static mean something to you?
When I went to college, they taught some stuff in biology, chemsitry, and physics that is wrong. They graded our papers, and gave us low marks. Why? They did it to everyone. In my Chem class, and "A" was a 38.7%. That is about 4 out of 10 points on a test. The curve was fucking rediculous.
What, exactly, does this have to do with anything? Hundreds of years ago Christians believed the earth was flat and that women should be burned alive. And you're complaining that either you couldn't learn or that your professor couldn't teach?
God said they would persecute us. And they are doing that.
Who are "they"? And what are "they" doing exactly?
I would rather take comfort with God than with the here_today, gone_tomorrow of science.
That's fine. Kids take comfort in teddy bears and imaginary friends too. Would you prefer a static stock market if change is too difficult for you to understand?
Why not live in a happy moral time, with good families, and worthwhile occupations. Why live in horrible times, working for in the factory of an atheist for minimum wage?
False dilemma much? Why not live in a happy non-religious time, where everybody gets along? Why live in the constant fear and guilt that Christianity teaches?
THINK ABOUT IT. WHAT IS DIFFERENT TODAY? NO PENSIONS AT JOBS. NO GOOD JOBS. And there is less of God too. He is letting us know.
Ah yes... that *clearly* is the *only* thing different today. Yes, *nothing else* has changed in history. Any other pearls of wisdom to share, oh swine of knowledge?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
it's a gravitational bounce outward from the solid (neutron) core after fusion peters out at Iron burning.
Actually, recent models show that the bounce doesn't cause the explosion, since the outward-propagating shockwave stalls at some point within the stellar envelope. The current idea is that the explosion is caused by the neutrinos from the core, that get absorbed by the outer envelope and heat it up to crazy temperatures. Sure, the cross section for an individual neutrino to interact is miniscule; but with so many neutrinos being produced, enough of them interact to cause the explosion.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
but i also recently learned that the earth has a harmonic simultaneous 4-day time cube!
it's amazing what you learn about astronomy from teh intarwebs
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I sent an email on this subject to Phil Plait at www.badastronomy.com, someone I consider an authority on astronomy and in particular supernova 1987a (it was the subject of his PhD).
Hopefully Phil will have the time to examine the claims and comment on their truth or falsity on his web site.
If you ever have a few hours to kill and want to read about some fascinating astronomy topics check out his web site. He spends a lot of time debunking claims made by "scientists" regarding such things as the face on Mars, the moon landing "hoax" and many other hugely engrossing topics.
I'm not arguing this point in the least. My favorite line is when they say "in order for it to be science you have to be able to prove it wrong!" Well that's just silly... why believe anything that you can prove wrong. ;) (that's 75.345% joking)
But of course the Bible isn't science (lowercase). Science is humanity blindly stumbling forward through a dark room trying to locate the coffe-table with it's shins. Wouldn't it just be easier to turn on the light?
I think you'll find that Jefferson, Franklin, Washington and the others who lead the revolution and formed the republic were all highly literate people.
The bible then contradicts itself in Leviticus 03:020:012:
"And if a man lie with his daughter in law, both of them shall surely be put to death: they have wrought confusion; their blood shall be upon them."
The bible is what it is - a violent fairy tale.
"Yet, they formed a country with great prosperity. And they believed in GOD."
Jesus H Christ on a pogo stick. That neocon bollocks is really sinking in, isn't it?
THE FOUNDING FATHERS OF THE US WERE NOT CHRISTIANS!
Read some history! The US was not founded on christian principles! The signers of the declaration of independance where mostly freemasons, and it is not a coincidence that there is only one reference to god in the constitution, one which is best attributed to 'habit' and 'the way things were done at the time' than any religious thought.
Shit, even a cursory knowledge of history will show that the US was inhabited by people fleeing religious persicution in Europe and that they really, REALLY did NOT want a country founded on religious principles, but one where there was a seperation of church and state and where no religion could gain so much power that it could encroach upon any other religion.
The rest of your post is fine, but thgis one point has been spouted by the neo-con movemenet so often that now it looks like a lot of americanss actually are starting to really beleive it.
Just like it was the americans who captured the first Enigma machine.
*grumble*historicalaccuracy*grumble*
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
it's a space station!
"Did you ever notice how science changes its anwsers so damn often. But the Bible stays the same."
.. but its possible) but the amount of rewrites due to political slanting and posturing , making bits fit the ideas of the current church and plain old translation errors have made the thing a total mess.
... if it was the work of god then I'm fairly sure it could afford someone to handle continuation .. and why would a perfect being make a mistake and need to correct it with a new testament ..
That is a whole crock of nonsense if ever i have heard it.
Compare older versions of the Torah in Hebrew to the old testament.
Compare the old and new testaments , even compare different modern versions of the bible.
It has been shown that the Jewish faith as early as 800BC was perhaps not monotheistic .
The rules of the many Christian churches have changed so often it isn't funny.
In essence the bible has been rewritten so many times , that perhaps at one stage it may have contained the truth (I don't know , and i don't believe
The bible if anything is the work of man
Science may change , but so does your faith . the only difference is science changes based on understanding and advancement . The bible changes based on confusion and politics .
Take the core of your belief , the love , the helping others and faith in a higher power out to help us and use that . Don't use the confusing mess of a book that has caused countless deaths.
God and science , the twain shall never meet . you can enjoy science and a strong faith in a higher power. Science is not something to put faith in , it is something to take understanding from.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Outrageous hypotheses end up being vindicated fairly often. A few examples:
But otherwise, I agree with the basic premises of your Ignorant Fuckwit Theory. There's a world of difference between oddball hypotheses and bullshit pseudoscientific babble, and it's not that hard to tell the difference. A major clue here is that something as important as a new theory of how supernovas occur is going to be in a good scientific journal, not a random web page.
This is the same Mother Theresa who refused to administer painkillers to those dying in her hospices, even though her organization had millions of dollars in unspent donations? The one who only cared about converting more people to Christ? I hope that bitch rots in hell.
I agree with your sentiment but not on those points. Mother Theresa often said that AIDS was just punishment for sex before marriage.
Religion is no excuse for wickedness.
pCOALITION FORCES ENTER THE MEGELLANIC
Allied forces put an end to the continued Magellanic resistance to peace keeping troops in the Middle Magellanic, a million years ago.
"Once again the significant investment in Deathstar technology is proving itself in the field." a coalition spokesperson told GNN.
Coalition commanders in the Magellanic say their troops are still meeting some resistance but it is very patchy. "We have struck a devastating blow to their terror network. The ability of their terror cells to function have been severely limited, now they have no nuclear-terror storage facility." quoted one high ranking commander.
A Milky way journalist who has visited 1987A say resident worlds there told him they were prepared to surrender to advancing Coalition forces, rather than lose their nuclear energy reserves (the sun).
A journalist from the Earth Solar System news agency EFP said a tribal world leader near 1987A told him to convey a request to the Coalition troops to stop blowing up suns and allow local leaders time to negotiate the surrender of Magereenic fighters still loyal to Zaphod.
UGS marines are reported to be fighting Magellanic forces, including Y fighters, on the southern outskirts of SK-69, about 140 light years (822,444,234,277,022.1 miles) north of 1987A. SK-69, once the pleasure capital of the Magellanic , is believed to be a possible remaining stronghold of Zaphods's regime and there has been speculation that troops loyal to the deposed leader might be planning a last stand there.
A Milky Way journalist with the UGS forces told GNN: "It's a very, very significant attack. They've brought forward a great number of Vipra assault X wings and the Deathstar (large round peace keeping spaceship) is in orbit."
Helium 3 and Gigarod mining operations and new mining construction in nearby worlds has been unaffected by the latest fighting.
COALITION FORCES ENTER THE MEGELLANIC
Allied forces put an end to the continued Magellanic resistance to peace keeping troops in the Middle Magellanic, a million years ago.
"Once again the significant investment in Deathstar technology is proving itself in the field." a coalition spokesperson told GNN.
Coalition commanders in the Magellanic say their troops are still meeting some resistance but it is very patchy. "We have struck a devastating blow to their terror network. The ability of their terror cells to function have been severely limited, now they have no nuclear-terror storage facility." quoted one high ranking commander.
A Milky way journalist who has visited 1987A say resident worlds there told him they were prepared to surrender to advancing Coalition forces, rather than lose their nuclear energy reserves (the sun).
A journalist from the Earth Solar System news agency EFP said a tribal world leader near 1987A told him to convey a request to the Coalition troops to stop blowing up suns and allow local leaders time to negotiate the surrender of Magereenic fighters still loyal to Zaphod.
UGS marines are reported to be fighting Magellanic forces, including Y fighters, on the southern outskirts of SK-69, about 140 light years (822,444,234,277,022.1 miles) north of 1987A. SK-69, once the pleasure capital of the Magellanic , is believed to be a possible remaining stronghold of Zaphods's regime and there has been speculation that troops loyal to the deposed leader might be planning a last stand there.
A Milky Way journalist with the UGS forces told GNN: "It's a very, very significant attack. They've brought forward a great number of Vipra assault X wings and the Deathstar (large round peace keeping spaceship) is in orbit."
Helium 3 and Gigarod mining operations and new mining construction in nearby worlds has been unaffected by the latest fighting.
Interesting. Wikipedia has this to say about her:
Many of Teresa's donors were evidently under the impression that their money was being used to build hospitals. In 1991, Dr. Robin Fox, then editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, visited the Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and described the medical care the patients received as "haphazard". He observed that sisters and volunteers, some of whom had no medical knowledge, had to make decisions about patient care, because of the lack of doctors in the hospice. Dr. Fox specifically held Teresa responsible for conditions in this home, and observed that her order did not distinguish between curable and incurable patients, so that people who could otherwise survive would be at risk of dying from infections and lack of treatment.
Fox conceded that the regimen he observed included cleanliness, the tending of wounds and sores, and kindness, but he noted that the sisters' approach to managing pain was "disturbingly lacking". The formulary at the facility Fox visited lacked strong analgesics which he felt clearly separated Mother Teresa's approach from the hospice movement. There have been a series of other reports documenting inattention to medical care in the order's facilities. Similar points of view have also been expressed by some former volunteers who worked for Teresa's order. Mother Teresa herself referred to the facilities as "Houses of the Dying".
In contrast to the conditions at her homes, Mother Teresa sought medical treatment for herself at renowned medical clinics in the United States, Europe, and India, drawing charges of hypocrisy from critics such as Hitchens.
Worthy of sainthood? Doesn't quite sound like it. But it doesn't really matter, since the ceremony doesn't mean anything.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
Outrageous hypotheses end up being vindicated fairly often.
I respectfully disagree. While I agree that every hypothesis you listed was at one point considered outrageous, these are a tiny proportion of the number of scientific hypotheses that are advanced, and then tested, each year.
But your point about the difference between an oddball hypothesis, and pseudoscientific bullshit, is spot on. Even when incorrect, scientific hypotheses remain scientific, rather than the obtuse gibberings that pseudoscience has to offer.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Well that's just silly... why believe anything that you can prove wrong. ;) (that's 75.345% joking)
Because you haven't been able to yet. (That's for the other 24.655%)
... 'supernovae are catastrophic electrical discharges focused on a star'...
Someone pointed the Matrioshka brain in the wrong direction again!
Ah, /., pure rational discourse
the Bible will always hold an accurate record of God's chosen disciple, Lot, fucking his daughters.
You must have a different Bible. Mine says the daughters were sluts, treated their dad badly 'cos he wouldn't let them have fun in town the night before. But then that town got zapped by one o' them electric discharge thingies, so maybe tfa is right...
I know I should try to respond to that with some sort of "ass" joke. Butt, at this late hour, all I can think of is getting my booty sleep. So, I'll have to pass on that for now.
This space unintentionally left blank.
Capella has gone supernova! Repeat, Capella has gone supernova! Get to the jump node NOW!
Well that's just silly... why believe anything that you can prove wrong.
Why believe in anything that can't be proven right?
Science is humanity blindly stumbling forward through a dark room trying to locate the coffe-table with it's shins. Wouldn't it just be easier to turn on the light?
If there was a light, science would turn it on and look. Subjects of faith, by comparison, preclude illumination.
Who ordered that?
Clearly we need to start some classes in trolling. This is a perfect example of the decline in trolling quality that we've seen at slashdot in the last few years.
How, in the name of all that is holy, can you have a Bible troll like this without at least one direct reference to male homosexuality or bestiality! And there isn't even an attempt to blatantly steer the debate to make it a debate on abortion or prayer in schools.
At long last, do you have no sense of troll decency sir? Oh usenet trolls of alt.athiesm, why have you abandoned us?
I don't know where you studied history, but the literacy rate in colonial America was the envy of Europe. Franklin didn't print his almanac, and Samuel Adams didn't distribute his vitriolic firebrand political pamphlets for people who couldn't READ.
You are right that our forefathers did believe in God. America is a christian nation founded upon christian principles. This is a hard fact that leaves the neo-bolshevik nimrods that comprise the modern left in fits (which are regrettably not fatal). The left hates christianity precisely because it is the cornerstone of what they call bourgeois society, the destruction of which is an absolute prerequisite for the introduction of the socialist dystopia they have planned for our future. Care to take a guess at why I would shed not a single solitary tear were all of them to meet a most gruesome end, despite the fact that I myself am not a Christian? I'm not a fan of organized religion, but I'll take it any day of the week over a political and economic pseudo-philosophy that is as clear a proof of the existence of evil in this world as anything I've ever seen.
Don't let the contingent of moonbats here get you down. History will remember them as fools. It is easy to hate them, but pity is a more appropriate attitude. But for the saving grace of common sense and the capacity for logical and critical thought go all of us.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Too bad EuroPeon slave traders were the middlemen in that transaction.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Of course first Enigma machine was not captured and decoded by Amewicans...
It was famous Wussian scientist that cweated first decoder for Enigma, in same facility where they kept nuclear wessels.
- Pavel Checkov
One might point out that it seems that the religious oppressors, rather than the oppressed, moved over here. I doubt many places in the Western world have anything close to the zeal, compliancy and rabble mentality our neo-con movement has.
The believe in a concept of "God" should have nothing to do with pre-existing concepts such as Christanity. God, in an abstract, could mean the deity in any monothestic faith. Ignorant and self-absorbed followers will automatically assume you believe in their "God" if you profess a belief for it.
Masses and masses of ignorant and rabid followers would translate the use of "God" to mean only the Christian view and leaves people like me with an opening to have cheap fun at their expense.
Yeah, and I'm sure they would be proud of the current batch of believers. Really have served us well, haven't they?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
One nation under God: Iran
... to metamoderate ScuttleButt out of existance as an editor? Please?
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Genesis 19, verses 30-38.
Of course, he could be a Troll saying stupid things just to rile people, but Catbert, Evil Director of Human Resources sheds this wisdom:
"Cynicism is practically the same thing as experience. Just try thinking the worst about people, and you'll usually be right."
Assuming thusly, the discussion on the validity of his post boils down to which is worse: stupidity or intentional misconduct?
Captured it? What are you talking about? We conceptualized it, designed it and produced it. Germans Shmermans.
Just like it was the americans who captured the first Enigma machine.
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
Too bad EuroPeon slave traders were the middlemen in that transaction.
Spoken like a typical right-wing American: you don't want to accept responsibility for anything. Blame the Europeans, blame Islam, blame the Chinese, whatever, but you can do no wrong; how could you? You are a God-fearing citizen of The Greatest Nation on Earth. And it is The Greatest Nation on Earth because it can do no wrong. QED.
Mental note - don't let anything pointed at our sun run on Windows. Just in case we've got a doomsday virus just trying to disprove the electrical discharge supernovae theory.
Yes it's a cooky theory, but just in case...
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.
200 years ago, most of the USA was filled with people who could not read or write. Yet, they formed a country with great prosperity. And they believed in GOD.
They also didn't shower regularly. This uncanny association really makes you wonder, doesn't it? Maybe it was poor personal hygiene after all, rather than a belief in GOD, that made them prosperous.
They make a decent attempt in sounding scientific, and one would almost be inclined to consider it a viable hypothesis...untill they start introducing Stonehenge.
That was just a wee bit over the top, guys. Next time, try to hold back on that, and some people might actually be fooled.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Some of them were Christians. Some were deists. Some were out right atheists. Just as the grandparent shouldn't make vast generalizations neither should you. How do you classify someone such as Jefferson? Jefferson was by most accounts a deist. Is he Christian? He published a red letter edition of the new testament in which all of Jesus's moral teachings were well--highlighted in red. Yet he ignored the "mystical" elements. So was he religious or not? depends on your definition of religion mroe than anything.
Ever read the Declaration of Independence?
You are basically right--the Constitution and future government of the US was meant to be free of religion, and to protect freedom of religion. This does not mean that many of the founding fathers were not deeply religious men, nor that religion was universally reviled.
I'm also curious about your point about "no religion could gain so much power that it could encroach upon any other religion." What about anti-semitic laws, catholic/protestant anti-miscegenation laws, and more, that we've had for years? Until relatively recently even.
One must remember that the early American context was largely white (of Western European extraction), male, protestant. Other groups come into prominence later--be they black slaves, women, Irish, Catholics, Italians, Jews, etc.
This is not to disagree with your basic point, but I would take issue with many of your assumptions (and incidentally, you've been reading too much Davinci Code with regards to masons--my grandfather was a mason, and the man attended church every week of his life--what's the correlation? none..read about freemasonry and you'll see what I mean)
Electric Universe News is reporting that scientists claim to have proof that 'supernovae are catastrophic electrical discharges focused on a star' and not the result of giant stars undergoing gravitational collapse and subsequent explosion after having spent all of their nuclear fuel as previously thought.
Well, they would, wouldn't they?
.
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
But that does not mean God (if exists) approves that action. The Bible has many references to human behaviour, either as examples or counterexamples. That the Bible shows that human behaviour traits are almost unaltered for the last few thousand years, it means something for biology and evolution, at least!
Hey, they *earned* those slaves! They worked hard to afford slaves. Nobody gave them anything.
Too bad EuroPeon slave traders were the middlemen in that transaction.
Yeah! You hear that all you Euro Peons out there! You were the middlemen! Damn Euro Peons. They had no right to have taken the Afri Cans out of their homelands to Ame Rica.
Seriously, get your head out your ass. It's European.
A time machine?! WOW!
Somebody submit this! Slashdot has got the scoop of the century! Quick, before someone goes back in time and submits it first!
It's not quite so clear. There are also cases, including the pelgrims on the Mayflower who moved from Leiden (in the Netherlands) to the UK and then on to the US, because the religious climate was too liberal in their opinion. Note that there was no religious prosecution in The Netherlands at that time (and ever since). There was religious prosecution almost everywhere else though, but also in those cases it was the strongly religious who fled, the moderates just changed their ways. Of course there is more to it, living conditions in crowded Holland were not as good as those in the New World. (Interestingly enough two centuries later most Islamic immigrants think the Netherlands is too liberal and we have similar problems, but I guess almost everyone outside of the Netherlands thinks we are too liberal)
This sig is just as redundant as the rest of this posting
Similar to a rape victim having sex with the rapist. Lot's daughters got him incoherently drunk and getting themselves knocked up. It makes your post seem kind of silly.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
A few years ago, I came across a car with one of those "God is my co-pilot" bumper-stickers. The circumstances were such that I got to leave a note under his/her windshield wiper asking, "If God is your co-pilot, why didn't He tell you that you left your lights on?" I'm still all warm and fuzzy over that.
Ahh so, like with the conventional model; there isn't enough matter in the galaxy to explain how it moves based on gravity.
Oh wait, no, they just created a fanciful magical dark matter and dark energy to make up the short-fall.
Yep, that's solid science that is.
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
That's no moon....
"I would rather take comfort with God than with the here_today, gone_tomorrow of science."
When I was a kid, hiding under the bed would make me feel safe as well. I never really saw the boogie man, because - you know - he doesn't exist. And neither does god. I take more comfort in "atheist science" than in lies - damn lies - that have kept humankind down, led the world to pain, war and destruction for the last 5000 years over and over again.
Look further, accept and embrace your human condition.
IANAL, but imagine a beowulf cluster of in Soviet Russia all your belong are base to us welcoming the new SCO overlords.
"Did you ever notice how science changes its anwsers so damn often. But the Bible stays the same."
Congratulations! You're one step closer to rational thought!
Unlike religion, science doesn't claim it's explanations to be correct. It claims them to be the best explanation we can find given the current evidence.
Science is a method for trying to explain why something is the way it is best on testing a hypothesis.in a repeatable way.
Unlike religion it does not say "this is the way it is", it says "this is the best explanation we have for why this happens".
The difference is that there's actually evidence involved in science. Religion just has books of mostly unverifiable claims by people long dead with no supporting evidence except... more mostly unverifiable claims by other people long dead!
On the other hand there are many good moral teachings in religion that virtually anyone can agree on. It's just a shame they're mixed in with so much crap.
I'm not sure what being freemasons has to do with being christian? The few freemasons I've met are also christians. Granted a couple anecdotal experiences doesn't make me an expert.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
Did you ever notice how science changes its anwsers so damn often. But the Bible stays the same.
A self-correcting way to knowing? That's freakin' awesome! What else?
When I went to college, they taught some stuff in biology, chemsitry, and physics that is wrong. They graded our papers, and gave us low marks. Why? They did it to everyone. In my Chem class, and "A" was a 38.7%. That is about 4 out of 10 points on a test. The curve was fucking rediculous.
I know, right? I'm with you on this one. I would much rather see this kind of question:
Did God do it?
a.) Yes
b.) Praise the Lord
c.) You betcha'
God said they would persecute us. And they are doing that.
Who's persecuting you? Last time I checked (and believe me, I check OFTEN) you guys were pretty much in charge of everything. What? No prayer in schools to our Judeo-Christian deity? PERSECUTION!!!! You mean we can't burn witches anymore? PERSECUTION!!!! We can't send all atheists to China?! PERSECUTION!!! I can't express my religiosity? Oh, wait, I can! Shit.
Why not live in a happy moral time, with good families, and worthwhile occupations. Why live in horrible times, working for in the factory of an atheist for minimum wage?
I'm sorry, but, what the FCUK? Maybe someday there will be a time when most people are retarded and this kind of logic will seem valid to everyone. How do you guys come up with this stuff?
The bible if anything is the work of man ... if it was the work of god then I'm fairly sure it could afford someone to handle continuation .. and why would a perfect being make a mistake and need to correct it with a new testament ..
Sounds like someone needs to teach this 'God' character how to use CVS.
Unless you believe the US filem crap.
Polish scientists were the main cracers of the Enigma system, though their techniques would not work well enough for the Navy version. The UK kept updating the work the polish had done for earlier versions of the Enima machine, so it was quite a joint effort.
Right.. ehm.. you gotta be pretty drunk not to remember. I'd say he knew pretty good what was going on...
Genesis 19, verses 30-38.
Now Lot went up out of Zoar, and dwelt in the hills with his two daughters, for he was afraid to dwell in Zoar; so he dwelt in a cave with his two daughters. And the first-born said to the younger, "Our father is old, and there is not a man on earth to come in to us after the manner of all the earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve offspring through our father." So they made their father drink wine that night; and the first-born went in, and lay with her father; he did not know when she lay down or when she arose. And on the next day, the first-born said to the younger, "Behold, I lay last night with my father; let us make him drink wine tonight also; then you go in and lie with him, that we may preserve offspring through our father." So they made their father drink wine that night also; and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he did not know when she lay down or when she arose. Thus both the daughters of Lot were with child by their father. The first-born bore a son, and called his name Moab; he is the father of the Moabites to this day. The younger also bore a son, and called his name Ben-ammi; he is the father of the Ammonites to this day. (Genesis 19:30-38 RSV)
Did you ever notice how science changes its anwsers so damn often. But the Bible stays the same.
No it doesn't! Haven't you heard about the process called 'translation'? The meaning of many passages has changed as a result of copying errors. The classic one is the substitution of the word 'virgin' for the word 'almah' which should really mean 'young woman'.
Also, use of common words in many languages change meaning with time.
So, sorry, but the bible is not static.
Got a friend who is a mason and is certainly not Christian. My impression from talking to him is that you must believe in a higher being of some kind, just not one dictated by any particular religion. The are some rules about not talking about religion or politics in many settings. It probably stops many arguments from ever happening and it also debunks the crazy idea that they are some sort of world dominating secret society (would be tough to organize without discussing either).
And if anyone believes that organized religion is anything but another government, theyre are totally kidding themselves.
One wonder how they managed reproduction.
Yeah, there is a reason why he is one of the very few people on my foes list.
He demonstrated his ignorance many times before.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
How the heck am I supposed to know which way to mod you if you don't take clear sides?
<G/D/R>
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Does it always have to be so serious that everything they do, they do it with their reputation on the line? What kind of tightasses are there that don't allow any kind of playing or fooling around once in a while?
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
Next thing you know they'll be saying that the Big Bang never happened.
Oh wait, Alfven already said that.
There's serious work going on detecting and characterizing solar-, nebular-, galactic-, and galactic-supercluster- scale current flow that the Electric Universe people are happy to co-opt. Regardless of how supernovas happen, what you end up with really are huge clouds of electrically-conductive plasma at widely-varying densities, compositions, and degrees of ionization, that spontaneously organize. Forms routinely observed in laboratory plasma experiments, scaled up many orders of magnitude, are unmistakable in such nebulae, just as is also seen on a smaller scale in our own solar system (e.g. the aurora), and on an immensely larger scale in the galactic core.
Yeah, and while we're at it - which women were there for Adam's and Eve's offspring? All I can say is "Wow Mom, you're HOT". I must say the creationists are always god for some laughs.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
The bible stays the same? Fine, show me the original.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I think Pastafarianism is great! It's a high-humour way to get people thinking about origins for real.
Another one I like to point out is Periannan Senapathy's warm little pond, which is mathematically far more reasonable than Gradualism. It approaches the abundant inconsistencies in both Atheist and Theist viewpoints from the serious end, and can make people really stop and think. My goodness, how that must hurt some of them. (-:
Perhaps next year's funny randomness cult can revolve around a Holy Hamburger Patty engraved with the powerful sigil IHS ("In Hot Sauce") and served with spinach as a testimony to Pope I?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Come on, give the guy some karma...
I guess today is a passable day to die.
I think I prefer the Bad Astronmer's term antiscientist... it tells it more like it is.
Well, if you want to be really dull about it, the Polish smuggled the original 3-disc Enigma out of the factory piece by piece before the war even started. Top move, and the most vital break of the lot.
The 4-disc Naval update was first seized by the British, along with a codebook. They subsequently got another after the scheme had been modified.
The US finally managed to blag the third naval variety, which is the event that U-571 is very, very, very loosely based off.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
When Jayne shot out the breakers on that 'net they were headed for, I just KNEW there was something bad that was going to happen - all that electricity must've refocused on a nearby star and crushed it just like they wanted to crush Serenity. If he hadn't shot out the cockpit, too, then the baddies could have just gone on wrecking firefly class transports, not inadverently blowing up an entire gorram star.
Heck, makes about as much sense as the article.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
- supernovae just happen to match what would happen to a star under gravitational collapse when it runs short of fusion to support itesf.
- we just happen to have the distribution of elements that would happen to a star under runaway fusion in spherical shells....
- supernovae just happen to put out scads of neutrinos, just what would happen under runaway fusion.
- supernovae just happen to push waves of matter in front of them, at the speeds and in the quantities expected under runaway fusion.
I'm an astronomy news bottom-feeder, and even I see the problems with an "electrical" theory of supernovae.You may want to read a little on the Masons. I think most people who know anything about their organization would have to conclude that they have a distinct Judeo-Christian flavor.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
I'll admit... I couldn't make it through this entire beast of an article, but this should stuck out:
"Stars are an electrical, not a thermonuclear, phenomenon."
Is this for real?
aoeu
- American (the USA) was not "filled with" people; there were far less Americans of any kind than there now are Australians.
- The Americans who could not read and write did not need to. They were Indians, and had more effective and complete ways of passing along information. The Americans who could read and write brought them whiskey, rifles and venereal diseases -- what a brilliant combination!
- America's literacy rate has never recovered since mandatory, factory-style formal schooling was introduced. Today, their (Western society's, basically) illiteracy rate is at least five times as high as it was then.
What education is doing is teaching us to not believe in God; or to put it another way, that nothing we do, cosmically speaking, matters. Big surprise, we have steadily increasing social problems to match our steadily longer and more rigorous educations.Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
read about freemasonry and you'll see what I mean
I would like to but not being a freemason, I CAN'T gain access to the real documents.
My grandfather also was a freemason, and I know how closed and secretive they are. I would love to know lots about them, so would many many other people, but without becoming one and then taking the oath to not reveal it to outsiders you can not get the real dirt and information about the society.
Personally, I have seen enough about freemasons to know that if you are one you get the better jobs, promoted more and will go farther in life professionally if you are one. Freemasons hire and promote freemasons way above anyone else... Thus is why I told my nephews in college to join up asap if they want to become really sucessful in engineering.
This is extremely evident in the civil engineering and other engineering fields. I have not seen many masons in the It/IS field... but noticed that many C*O's are freemasons. (hint look at their hands, freemasons have a distinctive ring.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
what the fuck is this crankpot bullshit doing in my "news for nerds?"
'supernovae are catastrophic electrical discharges focused on a star'
But will these discharges provide the 1.21 Gigawatts I need for my time machine?
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
As it turns out, the Founding Fathers generally did believe in God. This is not a big achievement; according to James 2:19, the demons also believe. I don't think this is referring to Apache or BIND.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
200 Years ago the US literacy rate was significantly higher than it is today.
The sight of those taut young thighs and that soft, warm chest behind the tantalizing veil of a thin night-dress... well!
Info about freemasons: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_138.html
It is similar to the Homer / Lisa conversation -
Just because Homer believes the rock keeps away tigers it is now true to him and yet it is patently not true. Just because someone believes Jesus walked the earth does not make the bible true. The simple weight of people who have read a book does not magically make that book any more or less true.
Actually, my link between Homer / Lisa and the PP/GPP may be slightly tenuous, but I hope people understand what I'm trying to say.
That's seriously messed up. I know I wouldn't want to be friends with someone who keeps calling others fuckwits.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
..when I read an article which starts by saying that [some | many| a group of| concerned] scientists are claiming that $SOME_NONSENSE, I reach for my Browning.
No but, yeah but, no but...
Actually, that is incorrect. The 13 colonies, and in particular the Northern ones, had very high litteracy rates. Massachusetts had universal schooling, even for girls.
Yet, they formed a country with great prosperity.
Again, incorrect. The U.S. was quite poor; it wasn't even considered a nation of importance until the time of Teddy Roosevelt, i.e. the 20th Century. Before then Americans were considered to basically just be country bumpkins by people in the powerful countries of the day (UK, France, Germany). It didn't become a superpower until after the second world war. And that was to a large extent because of the efforts of imported, secular, German and Eastern European scientists.
And they believed in GOD. They thanked him for what they had.
I infer that you think that we should "go back" to a society where religion dominates all political thinking and public life. I would suggest that you look at the Middle Ages, or even the Dark Ages for an example of what life in a theocracy is like... For 1500 years they believed in God to the point of letting the church dominate all life - and lived in total squalor.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
The people who formed the US as it is today were primarily George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Adams, Gouvernor Morris, and John Jay. All of them quite well educated, and many of them (Franklin and Jefferson certainly, as well as Paine) Deists, not Christians.
I remember reading that the flux of neutrinos is enough to kill a human out past the range of Jupiter's orbit. (And heavy lead jammies aren't going to help.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
This appears to be the Birkeland in question. Nobel Prize nominee seven times, figured out how the polar aurorae worked, invented the gadget we use to manufacture nitrate fertiliser, and so ons.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Slashdotters are lucky to get out of bed, much less actually read the f'in article. Now they're all bent outta shape when it's missing.
Is this irony?
I like to be friends with those capable of a Score:5 - Funny.
Of concern to christian religous leaders worldwide was the inclusion of two pages at the beginning of the book.
The first read - "To my darling wife, without whom this book would not have been possible"
The second page read - "Any characters, situations or places depicted in this work of fiction that resemble persons, living or dead or places are purely coincidental and have no basis in fact."
You're right. And I knew you were right when I posted. Thing is, we're dealing with spin here, and it needs a simple answer. If I had remained factually correct on every point, I'd have to add caveats with every single sentence in my post. Sorry.
/., not a tract for my thesis).
I know a lot of people were religious at the time. Pretty much impossible not to be (although I do suspect many of the founding fathers would have been athiests [who would have read the bible and the other 'great books'...yaddayadda] had they grown up in this time instead of then, but that's idle speculation).
As for the laws...same reason the USSR was a dictatorship even though it was based on Marx.
As for the Da Vinci Code...I revile it. But it must be said it's actually gotten quite a few people to go read actual good books on the subject, by actual historians who did actual validated research on the matter. I know where freemasonry comes from; the name is a dead giveaway (as is the symbolism) that they are descended from the cathedral builders (yeah, simplification...I'm writing a post on
So, I oversimplified. Fact is that an awfull lot of people have started believing in the past 5 to 8 years that the US was founded by a bunch of christians who wouldn't have minded the ten commandments hung up in courtroooms. For those people, oversimplification may be whats needed. Maybe not. I just don't know. Got any tips?
PS: I wasn't oversimplifying the 'just one refference to god' bit; it's right at the beginning, something about 'the year of our lord'...and thats it.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
I must say the creationists are always god for some laughs.
Dear Sir or Madam, I find your theory of creationist polytheism very intersting and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Nobody came out it smelling of roses.
200 years ago, most of the USA was filled with people who could not read or write. Yet, they formed a country with great prosperity. And they believed in GOD.
Good thing God gave them all those slaves, eh?
Slaves, slaves, everybody always bitches about the slaves. If a farmer paid the equivalent of a freeman's salary for a year to buy a slave at least he had to protect his investment. Same as grease, oil changes and other maintenance on the tractor.
What about the potato famine Irish? Get a factory job in the U.S. like a Chinese sweat shop working seven days a week at starvation wages until a flywheel belt takes off your arm and you bleed to death because there aren't any OSHA laws. No maintenance. You find another Irish the next day after you've gotten the blood mopped up. 100% on their own until a mean death in a short life and no cost to the factory owner.
Basically, the 19th century sucked no matter what your research watching Little House on the Prairie would lead you to believe.
Don't even get me started on the Indians. Give them a smallpox infested blanket and they'll give your whole clan free farms. They were pathetically easy shooting compared to, e.g. the Zulu, and "gave" us an incredibly rich continent to exploit.
God worked in mysterious ways to bring great prosperity to America.
...that article links to a description of Birkeland currents, which might give you a big tip about what the relatively coherent parts of the article are on alluding to. If Earth's Birkeland currents routinely hit a million amperes, can you imagine what the Sun's must be like? Nice shot of Jovian aurorae, too.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
God said they would persecute us. And they are doing that.
Oh my god, you're right! They're after us!! No place to run... They'll find us, wherever we go! If we don't want them to get us, we must GET THEM FIRST! Everyone, arm yourself! We'll show them who's boss!!
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Several years ago, I read an Isaac Asimov novel called The Currents Of Space, written in the 1950's or 60's, which dealt with a planet whose star was about to undergo a supernova event, thanks to (you guessed it) a Birkeland Current. If I remember correctly, the current was deviated and missed the star, saving all involved.
Curiously, there was an author's foreword that discredited the scientific content along lines like this:
"The Birkeland Current theory was in vogue during the time this novel was written. However, science advances and astrophysics is no exception, as current theories better explain the origin of supernova events".
Goin' full circle, everything old is new again! However, in the novel, any star could go supernova if hit by the Birkland Current, so these guys today have done quite a bit of fine-tuning.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
Oh, by the way, who exactly is prosecuting us? Y'know, I don't have enough ammo to kill 'em all, so I thought I'd ask.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
The sad part is I had to go with an old article since /. already posted their current front page story.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Playing around is fine - you don't have be be serious all the time, of course not. But playing around and pretending you're serious is another matter.
Ya gotta make 'em a little more subtle these days.
It's here.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Actually it was us lunatic right wing Americans that ended slavery by invading the south. Lincoln was a REPUBLICAN.
This is my sig.
Ok...umm.... only a goat-screwing faggot would decry the word of GOD like that. Perhaps you like aborting babies too?
wow...this is a dooooooozy of an uninformed post.
Compare older versions of the Torah in Hebrew to the old testament.
you are, of course, aware that modern Old Testament translations are translated from the oldest extant Torah/Hebrew texts, but that Jewish copyists were so meticulous that it doesn't much matter? that the corruptions that snuck in were single words and minor misspellings, and that even over the 2,800 year spread between current press runs and the earliest manuscripts and pottery shards, there are stunningly few differences, especially when compared to parallel texts (Homer and the presocratics, for instance)
It has been shown that the Jewish faith as early as 800BC was perhaps not monotheistic.
Somewhat true - but it was also not what we would call polytheistic - what many scholars now believe is that the pre-literary (1000bc+) Jewish believers may have lent credence to the existence of other supernatural beings, but believed theirs was the highest God - the creator and ruler; their understanding of other 'gods' was closer to what modern fundamentalists would call demons - things other people worship that have powers, but not what we would refer to today as an omnipotent God. of course, oddly enough, much of that understanding comes from texts in the scriptures which were not erased by subsequent believers, which seem to indicate a diversity of opinion.
In essence the bible has been rewritten so many times....the amount of rewrites due to political slanting and posturing , making bits fit the ideas of the current church and plain old translation errors have made the thing a total mess.
that's just plan wrong. the bible has certainly been reinterpreted, but all mainline groups (eg, excluding Marcionites, certain Gnostic sects and the like) have faithfully transmitted the text, even if they chose to ignore inconvenient sections. which is why fundamentalist Catholics using circa-16th century Latin/Vulgate texts which where recopied zillions of times until the invention of the printing press, and Jewish scholars poring over scraps of the Torah dug up in 5th century BC tombs argue about interpretation and not content. there are, in fact, probably only about half a dozen passages in the Old Testament where the Hebrew and Greek/Latin traditions vary by enough to affect the understanding of the passage...and none of them affect the message of the passage, just its nuance.
the rest of your post is presented as opinion, so i don't see the need to correct it - as you're entitled to your opinions. but please don't present completely erroneous nonsense as historical fact.
Republican in those days (those, great days) didn't mean lunatic right wing.
Where's a socially conscious fiscal conservative to go now?
The Republicans were leftists then.
Black and grey are both shades of white.
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
-- U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864
That's why Karl Marx wrote favorably to Lincoln:
"From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?"
The Republicans of today have nothing in common with the radical abolitionists of the 19th century.
It is doubtful that any Indians died as a result of smallpox infected blankets. See Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontiac's_Rebellion#S iege_of_Fort_Pitt for details.
Indians were not the noble people portrayed today. Keeping in mind there were many tribes: they fought violently among themselves, engaged in cannibalism, failed to develop either the wheel or metalurgy, and exploited their environment as much as the could given their lack of technology. In other words, they were much like the Europeans had been during the neolithic period - basically "cavemen".
Before anyone gives me any crap for being "insensitive" or "racist", I am part Cree. Read some Bad Eagle (http://www.badeagle.com/html/warrior_thing.html or http://www.badeagle.com/html/white_women.html) to learn more.
Lincoln was a REPUBLICAN.
If you think your party has stuck to the same ideals it had in the 19th century, you're pretty far beyond help. A present-day Lincoln, I imagine, would spit on both parties.
protestant
You do realize that Calvinism is only protestant in the sense of "not Catholic"? Hell, even Quakers didn't subscribe to Luther's famous 95 Theses.
And now it's punishment for blood transfusions in third world countries, marrying someone who had sex before marriage, marrying someone who had sex outside of marriage, marrying someone who divorced someone who had sex outside of marriage, marrying someone born to someone who had sex outside of marriage. Or a blood transfusion. Or sharing needles, or sharing dentists. Heck, there's at least one case suspected to have been caused by sharing a razor.
If you believe AIDS was "god's punishment" your god is one sloppy asshat.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
There is no "W" sound in the Russian language, and they are perfectly capable of pronouncing both "R" and "V" sounds.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
For those of you interested in what supernovae core collapse might look like, there are some simulated animations in the link below. Very pretty too.
http://www.astro.le.ac.uk/~rt53/work/index.html
Cheers,
Roger
Do you have any better hostages?
Following this story, I was thinking about this gravitational collapse thing this morning.
It seems odd to me that falling matter can bounce back into a big explosion under gravitational power. Naively, you'd expect it to bounce back to the same "height". I guess some/most of the matter is staying at a lower potential energy, so that a small amount can be ejected with a large amount of energy?
Could you or anyone else give me a hint as to what I'm missing here? If it is the above scenario (most matter staying 'low'), could a similar effect be achieved on a smaller scale, in (a zero-g) lab (by allowing some fluid to collapse in on itself?).
What *do* we see when a star undergoes gravitational collapse and subsequent explosion after having spent all of its nuclear fuel?
SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP! God gave us the light bulb and immunizations and antibiotics and the printing press and the Internet. What did those damed bolshevik, nazi, homosexual atheists ever do for us?
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Dude, that's a Red Dwarf reference, whereas this article is about Supernovaes. Quite inappropriate.
Scientists don't like to play with theories that are obviously wrong, as this one is. Science is a search for how the universe really works, and bullshit purporting to be truth is deeply offensive to that goal.
Did you ever notice how science changes its anwsers so damn often. But the Bible stays the same.
Yep, that is because Science deals in realities and the bible deals in dillutional fantasies and silly superstition. When you are trapped in a world of silly superstition you will not have to change your world view as your learn, since you are not learning, you are just perpetually ignorant.
Why not live in a happy moral time, with good families, and worthwhile occupations.
When are those times? When the church rules? The more power the church has, the more ignorance you see in the world. Generally knowledge is frowned upon by the most conservative religious people, since knowledge leads to questions and doubt. In religious times questions and doubt is a bad thing, you are supposed to blindly accept "truth" as set in stone somewhere.
Truths coming out of such blind ignorance is always interesting to watch, and includes gems such as
More religion equals more ignorance and more suffering. Science, and science alone, has extended the average human life span in this country by about 30 years just in the last 100 years. Have the church run the world and the average US male will live to become about 40, leave it to scientists and the average US male will live almost until he is 80.
Please don't give me that shit about religion and religious institutions running the world better than when scientists are allowed to work it. It is thanks to scientists that most of us are alive at all.
God is a human invention that stems from fear and ignorance. Grow up. Drop God.
Many of the most important founding fathers were Deists, Atheists and Agnostics. Furthermore even the religious members of the founding fathers all agreed on the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Ammendment to the US Constitution - which Thomas Jefferson described as "erecting a wall of Seperation between Church and State" to preserve the rights of the citizens and the dignity of both organizations
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
No true at all ,
.I have also read texts which agree with you , I however do not
,then there are numerous articles online.
.. though still if they are refereed to as divine beings then there is an argument for polytheism .
.. the whole thing is up in the air . .. just as you have.
Translation well after the fact can cause many many inaccuracies and there have been many many alterations to the texts . there have been numerous theses written on this and perhaps you do not accept them , but because my opinion differs does not make it ill informed .
There is likely no definitive answer to this , as an Agnostic I am more inclined to believe in the alterations having occurred and having been significant
speaking three languages and having read certain books in two or more i can see large differences between texts not even 10 years old . That however is pure anecdotal evidence , If you want something more concrete on the belief in the changing versions
On the mono-poly debate , well the books i read did differ on a few things . Some espousing the (As i like to call it ) Mrs. God theory others more in line with demonic theory
the last point , well again you will find arguments for both views (and a few other views.. some involving lizard men.. but i try to avoid those) . It is part of a much larger debate.
I am more than certain that you (as could I ) parry each of these opinions back and forth for years on end , citing study after study , archaeologist report after report . My opinions are as much based in fact as your opinions are . I can not state them as fact neither can you , as there is little solid evidence either way and all the studies are (since this is such a fiery issue) heavily subject to personal bias.
I could read genesis and exodus and come off with the idea of god as a child murdering psycho , where as you could read it and see a heroic liberator of slaves
I did not present them as facts only opinions based on texts i have read
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
To answer your post with a quote from it: "science changes". As our understanding of the universe increases, so does our understanding of what has already been learned. The bible is absolute. Its denotation is firm and un-changeable. The only flexibility is in connotation that those who preach its word give.
My point is: It is a grievous error to state fact when you should be proposing hypothesis.
If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into your own beliefs?
Parent bases his entire argument off presumption, bigotry and blatant falsehood.
You can stop reading the post right here "America is a christian nation founded upon christian principles." as that statement is 100% FICTION.
The Constitution of the United States was written upon ENLIGHTMENT Principles by people that were christian, deist, agnostic and atheist - and the "Seperation of Church and State" [Thomas Jefferson] was universally agreed upon.
So before Parent opens their mouth EVER again I suggest they LEARN HISTORY.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
you don't want to accept responsibility for anything
I'm certainly not accepting responsibility for somethihng that happened two hundred years before I was born.
African blacks captured rival tribes and sold them to the Europeans, who resold them to the Americans (both North Americans and South Americans).
Yet most people, whether African, European, or American, did not own slaves.
It was the rich people who owned slaves. It was the rich people who owned the sweatshops. And it has always been the rich people who owned and ran governments - - ALL governments from Australia to Canada.
The love of money is the root of all evil. The rich are not Christians, whatever they may think.
With the electrical charge being directed at the star, are they saying that it is being shot by something/someone in some manner? Perhaps by ET's or a evil rival star? Or perhaps it is a planet much like Jupiter that wants to be a star, but the star it is revolving around doesn't want to be a binary?
The story of Peter Pan doesn't change either, let's all go live in Fairy-Land :-)
Geez man.. the Bible is not Science, and never will be.
they are looking for comfort not truth. uncertainty is frightening, that the bible doesn't change gives them a crutch to lean on. whether or not the bible is correct doesn't matter to them, because they have their security blanket to fall back on when science changes, and it turns out what they thought they knew about science wasn't correct.
okay message is coming in...let me pull out my super secret decoder ring..
. ..T....I...N...E...
D..R..I..N..K.....M...O..R...E......O...V...A...L
drink more ovaltine?! what a jip!
www.omglolh4x.com
The Europeans brought slavery to America, but Americans are to blame for it?
Slavery was wrong, but it existed in America long before it was a republic, and claiming America is to blame for it glosses over who is truly responsible.
Why aren't you screaming about the lazy Euros who deemed it necessary to build a society on the backs of slaves, then refused to own up when said society was found to be unsutainable?
"And I knew you were right when I posted. Thing is, we're dealing with spin here, and it needs a simple answer. If I had remained factually correct on every point, I'd have to add caveats with every single sentence in my post."
So, not only did you lie, but you lied with full knowledge that you were lying, and then gave a pathetic excuse.
When are you running for president?
IMHO, religion was created to provide an organizational structure that could endure language barriers, and to establish and centralize power over conquered people through the "fear of God", and as a way to generate revenue through tithes in Catholicism and zakat in Islam, etc,to support the infrastructure and stimulate growth. Decent business model, actually.
...because Plutonians are teh suck
Please! Isn't far simpler to think of stars being part of some invisible array of high power lines (we'll have proof some day, don't worry) and that neutrinos and heavy elements are being generated by some sort of electrical thingy. Stars explode and discharge mass through an electrical discharge which means the vacuum of space has an electrical potential of some sort that varies from place to place, once again we can't prove it but we know you are wrong.
Now compare this to the misguided THEORIES of those scientists who try to suppress us! Instead of our wonderfully complex and gap riddled ideas they would have you believe it is as simple as gravitational compression. Arrogant fools! Common sense demands that the simpler explanation be dropped.
Stop being fooled by MAINSTREAM scientists with their experiments, controls, peer reviews, data, exhaustive studies, hard work, successful predictions, working theories, revisions, and hard evidence.
Next week, how refrigerator magnets can cure arthritis.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
You mean their slaves worked hard so they could afford MORE slaves.
"America is a christian nation founded upon christian principles. This is a hard fact"
You have a typo in there "fact" should be spelled "LIE". Another possibility would be "pathetic attempt to rewrite history by idiotic religious zealots who never bother to learn facts because with religious idiots, fervor is more important the accuracy" but I think "LIE" works best there.
Americans were considered to basically just be country bumpkins by people in the powerful countries of the day (UK, France, Germany).
A tradition that stands to this day.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
There is likely no definitive answer to this , as an Agnostic I am more inclined to believe in the alterations having occurred and having been significant .I have also read texts which agree with you , I however do not
.. though still if they are refereed to as divine beings then there is an argument for polytheism .
.. the whole thing is up in the air .
I did not present them as facts only opinions based on texts i have read .. just as you have.
i'm responding to you as a scholar, though - forget Christian/Agnostic/Atheist - we have early texts (Dead Sea Scrolls for OT, papyri scraps for NT), and we have current texts - in the same languages (Hebrew/Aramaic, Greek), and we can line them up and go word for word. The transmission is, for the most part, faithful; and that IS a definative answer. That's just indisputable - and yes, I have personally done so. I majored in Classics - Greek/Latin with a little bit of Hebrew, and i greatly enjoy puzzling through the critical apparati in modern printings, where all major variants are listed. it only takes basic literacy to read a passage and check the footnote, where it lists the texts that omit "the" or add an "and."
that doesn't mean there weren't alterations in the deep Old Testament (which references several thousand years of history before its first extant texts). Meh. Maybe there were. But by the middle of the second century AD, there were enough independant textual transmission lines that modern scholars can speak with great pride and authority when discussing their texts. it doesn't much matter if someone in the 4th century altered a text, when you have unaltered, earlier texts.
It's much like you saying you've seen changes in the past 10 years in a text -- so long as you still have the version from 10 years ago, you can release a critical version today, which undoes those changes. or you can publish a blended version which lists both variants, and footnotes which texts include each. but to say "we can never know what it said 10 years ago because it has been altered!" would be silly.
On the mono-poly debate , well the books i read did differ on a few things . Some espousing the (As i like to call it ) Mrs. God theory others more in line with demonic theory
there's certainly a lot of disagreement on the point; mostly stemming from our lack of sources which describe how closely tied Judaism was to local polytheistic religions which shared names for deities. the bell curve of theories peaks around Henotheism these days (ref http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henotheistic), which describes prehistory Judaism as a one-God faith which believed in the existence of other gods; a hypothetical corrollary would be a Greek who worshipped only Jupiter, and thought Jupiter could overcome all other Greek deities -- polytheistic in one sense, but practicing and believing as if only one god matters, and functionally having that god on a higher pedestal. my demon analogy is probably overreaching; "lesser deities" would be more precise. meh. i'll drop the point. back to the meaty stuff:
I could read genesis and exodus and come off with the idea of god as a child murdering psycho , where as you could read it and see a heroic liberator of slaves
No no no no no. "coming off" indicates interpretation, wherein personal biases do wreak havoc. but questions of textual transmission accuracy are not debatable things where opinion matter. questions of biblical COMPOSITION are - theories abound - but TRANSMISSION is a done deal - we can say with 100% certainty, atheist, agnostic or Christian, that the text has not been altered in the past 1800 years. I can say the same thing about Homer, the Qur'an, the New York Times, and Dr. Seuss (for different periods of time) -- once you have multiple, independant transmission lines (e.g.: publication with promulgation),
Maybe as it rushes inwards, the increasing compression causes a burst of fusion. The extra energy causes the material's bounce to overcome gravity and spread out.
Just a guess.
Read my post above; the explosion is due to absorption of core-generated neutrinos, causing the outer envelope (which does not collapse) to heat explosively.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Actually, the Republican Party that Lincoln formed, and he did "form" the Republican Party, was very conservative. Only after his second term in office and the death of his child did Lincoln begin to move towards the middle on many of his policies. This is all in the history books for you idiots to read. Every member of the republican party during that era was very conservative and their policies were conservative. Lincoln fired one of his Generals early on in the war for emancipating slaves in an area of the country in which he defeated the southern army. Only after much bloodshed and the realization that he could not keep most of the border states, i.e. Virginia, from leaving the Union did he decide to move away from his party. The Republican that ran against him for the second term election wanted to make a compromise with the South. If Sherman hadn't started his march, Lincoln would have lost his own party's nomination.
Nothing like geeks spewing disinformation on a history they do not fully understand.
Uh, there were no Americans (in the sense of inhabitants of the United States, or of the colonies that would become them) yet. A bunch of Europeans brought slavery and genocide to the continent and then became Americans.
In the long view, Americans are Europeans; inheritors of Western civilization, or what passes for civilization, anyway. In the history books a millenium hence, the U.S. may end up a footnote to the British Empire the way the Constantinople was a footnote to Rome.
(Assuming there's anyone left to read history. And it probably won't really be in book form...maybe some long peptide chain absobed directly into the brain, who knows?)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
SBB writes "Green Universe News is reporting that scientists claim to have proof that 'supernovae are the direct catastrophic result of Global Warming on Earth' and not the result of giant stars undergoing gravitational collapse and subsequent explosion after having spent all of their nuclear fuel as previously thought."
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
And yet I suspect most of us would rather take that factory job and be free, rather than be subect to slavery.
Besides, unlike tractors, slaves are self-reproducing. Heck, you could just go ahead and rape the slave women and breed yourself a new generation of 'em. So on a large plantation, if you shot or beat one to death occasionally, no great loss.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Well said.
The European Enlightenment is widely considered to have started when God destroyed Lisbon's churches on All Saints Day. Smarter Europeans decided we'd have to start taking responsibility for finding truth, and no longer putting faith in such a beast.
New Orleans, by the way, being 70% black and 40% illiterate, has always had a very high church attendance rate -- and those churches have pitched their message towards congregations many of whom cannot read, which tends to keep the preaching basic and simple. Boy has God (and His prophet, Bush) had fun with that!
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Lot's daughters grew up in Sodom, and it seems to have had an effect. Lot took his family and fled Sodom before it was destroyed, as he was warned to do. After it was destroyed, his his daughters got him drunk and slept with him. If they were spared as the only "good" people in Sodom, maybe there was something to its destruction?
Genesis 19: 30-36
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
HOWEVER, it is certainly reasonable to act on the assumption that this article is false as it is the more complicated theory and fails to explain a significant range of observations regarding supermassive stars. As such, it does seem to fail the litmus test.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...mention of a Tesla coil and aliens. So disappointed.
I agree on many your points being valid , though i still disagree on a few key issues (such are these issues ) . my point about the personal biases in the last paragraph i see was not that clear.
..
I should have mentioned that what i was inferring is that the way someone translates a phrase (as translating word at a time will give you pure gibberish) it is open to the persons personal interpretation.
for example (since you speak some latin) the phrase "Igne Natura Renovatur Integra" a direct translation would be " fire nature renewed whole" , my interpretation could be "Nature is renewed by fire ".. even in English that phrase is up for to debate as to its meaning. Or i could translate it as " wholly renewing nature requires fire" and so on
Even if all the scholars agreed in their interpretations of the ancient Hebrew and the ancient Latin texts , the books currently used in the practising churches are a far cry from the scholarly text , and vary amongst themselves .
A single misinterpretation of a word or phrase can drastically change the meaning of an entire chapter of a book.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
That static cling's a real bitch. Ever get a pulsar stuck to the back of a sweatshirt?
About your sig:
>> "Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?"
A base pair has four combinations. E.g., A=T != T=A
It's a double helix, but the two strands contain the same information. That's why they count the base pairs, not the bases. It's basically like using RAID 1.
So that should make 12 GBit right? ( 12 20 so your arugment still stands, of course. )
Lets get real people! When people start using Stonehenge as evidence in their modern astronomy papers they you have a real crackpot. I mean this guy uses a preface from H.P. Lovecraft in his preface!
Next think you know this guy is going to be claiming that the moon landing never happened. Oh, wait.... Perhaps calling his website hollow-science would be more appropriate.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
What? Every blood Christian sect that pops out of the wood work has their own particular interpretation. As to science, paradigm shifts are so rare that I can't really think of one right now. The rigours any theory has to go through to even earn the name "theory" is far greater than your average chump's "the Bible is so wonderful because..." that I can't see you seriously writing this. It amazes me that some people are actually proud of being ignorant.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You see your god punishing people, I see a government that has allowed huge corporations to run roughshod over the people. I see corporations that have more rights and less responsibilities than the citizenry itself.
You take comfort in the stability of your god and have a desperate fear of change, and I see archaic and draconian social mores being forced on the general public in an attempt to silence dissenting opinions and revert the US to some "700 Club" version of "Leave it to Beaver".
You seem to see your god as a punisher and I really feel sorry for you. My sister is the same way and she is not a happy person. My wife and kids see god and religion as something to be happy about, and I as an atheist am rather amused at your juvenile crack about atheist factory owners. Such a complete disconnect from reality is truly priceless.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act!" -- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
I suppose it's a sign of the times that I now have to endure this sort of remark and thread everytime a science article is raised on slashdot *sigh* Don't get me started on the creationist "arguments".
I guess I see it as a deliberate noise-generator by the religious so that most attempts at discussion of science becomes embroilled in discussions about science rather than the science at hand. There's not much of an indepth discussion on slashdot; these arseholes are determined to sink what little there is on these topics.
I know I've just done it...but don't feed the trolls again, please. It only satisfies their cravings and, in this case, their larger purpose.
Maybe persistent trolls should be ejected from slashdot? At least it would inconvenience them into getting a new account and fragmenting (i.e. inserting noise into their work).
FTR, the poster incriminates himself with every sentence. Science isn't a set of morals; it's a set of explanations. Science changes because that's the way it works. The poster was shit at science, so he's being persecuted. The economics bit is interesting. Is he saying that all factory owners are atheists? Step forward
* Dick Cheney, ex-head of Halliburton, devout christian, chickenhawk and, oh, boss.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney
Cheney joined the American Enterprise Institute after leaving office in 1993. From 1995 until 2000, he served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton, a Fortune 500 company and market leader in the energy sector. He also sat on the Board of Directors of Procter & Gamble, Union Pacific, and EDS.
* Donald Rumsfeld
http://www.defenselink.mil/bios/rumsfeld.html
From 1977 to 1985 he served as Chief Executive Officer, President, and then Chairman of G.D. Searle & Co., a worldwide pharmaceutical company. The successful turnaround there earned him awards as the Outstanding Chief Executive Officer in the Pharmaceutical Industry from the Wall Street Transcript (1980) and Financial World (1981). From 1985 to 1990 he was in private business.
Mr. Rumsfeld served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of General Instrument Corporation from 1990 to 1993. General Instrument Corporation was a leader in broadband transmission, distribution, and access control technologies. Until being sworn in as the 21st Secretary of Defense, Mr. Rumsfeld served as Chairman of the Board of Gilead Sciences, Inc., a pharmaceutical company.
* George Bush. Weeell, this guy is pretty much a loser but it seems that he's employed people in oil and gas and "managed" a baseball team. Uh, that's it. Industries not exactly renowned for their ethical practices.
I guess the common factor in all these companies is that none of these companies are particularly ethical in the way they employ people and the way they do business. Or maybe you think christians make better bosses? I cannot say for certain if all slaveowners - on both sides of the Atlantic - were christian but I'm pretty certain that it was the case. In fact, christians profited from the slave-trade as much as anyone else.
Facts never get in the way of a good troll, do they now?
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Ah, thanks for that. That seems to make more sense.
It does leave the question as to what people were thinking when they thought a post-fusion model the best explanation, but "thats not important right now".
Hmm. God Bashers... Hmm.
It is so. Distressing to me how many people are so rational when it comes to most parts of life, but then, when it comes to God, are all. Hmm. Anti. Just Anti.
How often do we complain about lack of education for poor kids? Do we say "oh, you are poor, so you must be stupid?"
Since when does uneducated = stupid?
As to non-stupid people. Newton? Sir Issaac? He was stupid? I cant really vouce for the source but it doesnt stray from what I Have read about newton (http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Newton. html):
I mean, fine. You dont believe in God. All good. So you will burn in hell. No big deal. But, why, oh why be so anti somone who DOES believe in God (not the troll whose comments I havent bothered reading, he is just a flamebait mark him so with mod points. But all the other Theists out here)? And, sheesh, if you ARE going to be anti, at least be clever about it, instead of implying that the uneducated are neccessarily stupid.
Man. I hate sounding like a bible thumper. But well. Say that that is a good example is like saying people on slashdot all advocate kiddy porn. Sure, it is sometimes brought up here. I dont think anyone really SUPPORTS it, though. The whole story of Lot Fucking his daughters (or, if you stick to the text, his daughters fucking him). Is. Portrayed in a rather negative light.
First of all, let me just say that despite my earlier posts, I am a fan of modern science. Though I feel that it is sometimes too quick to dismiss those ideas that run contrary to popular opinion.
But mainly, I want a better explanation for this photo, other than NASA's assertion of "comera wobble."
That'd be a lot more useful than debunking yet another "fake moon landing"-level article. This is like making fun of the "intertial dampeners" on Star Trek, or complaining that pro wrestlers couldn't really inflict "pile drivers" without neck injuries.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
All talk about crackpots and kooks, etc. makes me wonder don't the scientist ever want to relax a little and just play around with numbers and alterantive theories just for fun?
Nice troll. I almost took the bait.
If this is true about electrical discharge what is this is a weapon?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Ok. Listen, I tend to read at +3, so I didnt actually read this Guys Posts. I was just annoyed at the Rabid (and stupid, and uninteresting except to incest Fetishests. And modded up by people who just like to be anti-God, as) Anti-God Stuff that get play time here. I mean. I am not saying I think that the guy who posts his silly "SIX THREE FOUR FIVE WHO DO WE THINK IS MIGHTY ALIVE GOOOOOOOOOOO GOD!!!!!!" Cheers is all that intersting. Mostly I dont want to be associated with him. So, in saying that people who are talking about Lot and stuff are just full of it. I dont want that to come off as, I support the God Squad. Just, I think the group af "Anti" is well. They are the ones who were stupid and got modded UP.
It is so. Distressing to me how many people are so rational when it comes to most parts of life, but then, when it comes to God, are all. Hmm. Anti. Just Anti.
There is nothing RATIONAL about belief in the supernatural or magic or 'god'. So it's no wonder that all the rational people you meet don't believe in god.
BTW, look up Secular Humanism. It's a pretty good philosophy of life. Certainly more useful, and more 'real', than Christianity or any other such mythological superstition.
Slashdot has been taken in by yet another bunch of kooks, proving that the editorial crew are either about as knowledgable as dodos, if somewhat less extinct, or they're just a bunch of hit-mongering crackheads. You decide.
crackpots and very sad it got /. cybertime.
Most of the founding fathers were Deists, not Christians. And Thomas Jefferson in particular was an outspoken critic of Christianity (a paraphrased quote: "I do not find in the peculiar myth of Christianity one redeeming value").
Other founding fathers were Unitarian (we've had six Unitarian presidents in fact, more than we've had Catholic presidents by far). Yes, a few were Christian, but this was NOT a "Christian Nation" founded by "Christians" in any sense. You're just flat out wrong there.
Stop believing lies.
"Uh, there were no Americans (in the sense of inhabitants of the United States, or of the colonies that would become them) yet. A bunch of Europeans brought slavery and genocide to the continent and then became Americans."
Yes, Captain-can't-understand, that was my point.
America was populated by Europeans, who brought slavery with them. But NO ONE ever screams about how they were ultimately responsible for slavery, and instead those very same Euros blame Americans, who were only doing the best they could with the system forced on them.
Being insulting in addition to being wrong doesn't make you any less wrong. Lincoln was a moderate in most respects.
I'm not sure what the point of your patronizing history lesson is, so please tell me if there is one.
I, for one, welcome our lying politician overlords...
This was hysterical, I had lots of fun debunking it for myself and I'm not even an astronomer. This anti-science (or late April Fool's joke) is bad for science though.
:)
It suggests to people that this is how science actually is conducted and reported, and therefore contributes to Intelligent Design, Scientology, and other modern pseudo-scientific religious movements (or as some of us say, tom-foolery). Or is this a narrative trying to show how ID is similarly silly?..
Anyway they are mainly linked to from UFO sites and a site that looks for wacky pseudo-scientific explanations of interesting astronomical photos.
They went a bit too far when they say:
Stars are an electrical plasma discharge phenomenon. Electrical energy produces heavy elements near the surface of all stars.
and they somewhere note I believe that stars are bright because they are lightbulbs strung on interstellar wires.
They finally give up with smiles with the last masterful paragraph which imperceptibly and yet oh so achingly, sexily, *glides* right from descriptions of particle physics into discussion of ancient stone circles, which finally proves their point!
The author is obviously sane, though perhaps at times not so due to substance abuse, has not a qualm about mixing metaphors, has a poet's sense of timing, a matador's bravado and ice-cold calculation, a bard's sense of infinite majestry, and a joke-teller's need for a punchline. Did I miss any? I think it's all there!
Maybe I can't remember correctly, but wasn't Lot's family selected by "God" as the only one in an entire city worthy of saving from destruction? That seems like a ringing endorsement of their behavior to me.
Yep, they definitely sound like quacks to me. I'm sure that electro-magnetic forces play an important role in what goes on, but anyone who thinks that stars give off light because of electrical currents and NOT fusion is an idiot.
Sorry, secret societies are just too much fun to not parody. Apologies to whomever gets offended, but don't you think you need something better to do in life than get offended at something _I_ say?
"So you will burn in hell." If you were actually wondering why we don't like you, that would be it right there. You're all about fear and condemnation. If you just shut up and lived your own damn life, nobody would ever bother you again.
>>You see, that's the difference between science and superstition. Science makes predictions which can be tested. That's why it sometimes changes. Superstition is not testable. That's why it stays the same.
I dunno about superstition being untestable. I have this superstition about a particularly lucky set of underwear. And when I wear it things go pretty well. But sometimes I think I shouldn't be so superstitious, so I take them off. And that's when it all goes wrong.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
Many scientific breakthroughs began as heretical views. Obviously this does not imply that all heretical views are scientific breakthroughs. However, an idea should not be derided as a quack because it is heretical. Even Galileo was forced to abjure his views that the Earth rotated around the sun. Any scientific idea, outlandish or otherwise, should be peer-reviewed, tested (as empirically as possible, whether it be by laboratory means, or otherwise).
OK. Hmm. I am all Happy with "the Founding Fathers" (aka, Franklin, Jefferson etc.). Not being particularly relegious. And,certainly there isnt much about God in the Constitution (I rather thought there was no reference to God in it, but ok. Dec. Of independence I know has one. But meh).
However. To claim that the PEOPLE who were here were not deeply relegious. Is well. Not so right. I would believe that there were some communities which were not relegious. But by and large, the Early Towns had Churches that were ALSO meeting houses. Sure, in some official way, in washington, if you will, there was this grand idea of seperation between church and state. But certainly most communities were very church-centric.
And just. A little pre-emption. The claim "well everything happened in the church, but people didnt really believe anything, they just went there for the cool bondfires (Am from a town a little south of Salem)." Not a good claim. People who read, mostly did so so they could read the bible. Cause they did believe, not just cause well, it was the only book lying around. The roots of this country, are, in fact, very relegious. The People who worked the farms, sold the cotton, blah blah blah. Were really Quite relegious.
You're right about masons--nothing about being a mason says you HAVE to be a christian or you have to NOT be a christian. That was my only point. They have masonic lodges across the world--one was actually bombed in Turkey a few years ago (it was seen as un-Islamic).
Why not live in a happy non-religious time, where everybody gets along? Why live in the constant fear and guilt that Christianity teaches?
AGENT SMITH: Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.
http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonskopf/Flatea rthsociety.htm
Water. Regardless of which train of thought you follow, it covers over seventy-five percent of our planet's surface. And the atmosphere, also a fluid, covers the entire surface. The difference is why. While flat-Earthers know that the ocean is really just a large bowl, (with great sheets of ice around the edges to hold the ocean back), and the atmosphere is contained by a large dome, the backwards "round-Earth" way of thinking would have you believe that all those trillions of gallons of water and air just "stick" to the planet's surface.
Conventional thinking would suggest that the water would just run down the sides of the Earth (to use the analogy again, like droplets running down the sides of a beach ball) and fall into outer space, while the air would dissipate. Using the earlier mentioned idea of "gravitational charge" gives some credibility to the theory. If the fluids were static, then exposure to the gravitational field for a long enough period of time would allow their molecules to align themselves with and be pulled in by the field.
But fluids are not static, especially not in the atmosphere and oceans. Great ocean currents run both at the surface and deep below, carrying water across huge basins, keeping the solution far from stagnant. Jet streams of air travel at hundreds of miles per hour through the atmosphere. And windblown rainclouds carry vast quantities of evaporated seawater across miles of ground, releasing their load far from its starting point. Water or air that (according to "round-Earth" theory) starts on one side of the planet could end up completely on the other side in a matter of only a few days. With all this turbulence and motion, if the world were round, the oceans should all fall "down" into the sky, leaving the planet dry and barren, and the atmosphere would simply float away. Why, just look at the moon. It is round, like a ball, and yet it has no atmosphere at all.
And that's the way it is, for September 6, 2005...
Your assertion that the Bible has changed is somewhat incorrect. The source documents for the English translation of the Bible have not changed. There have been many translations, which sometimes are different from one another. This is the nature of translations. Translations are man-made documents.
Other than the adding of vowel pointing to the Torah, the Hebrew scriptures are remarkable in the _lack_ of change over the last couple of thousand years. The greek and aramaic sources for the New Testament are amazing in the fact that they agree with each other so closely. Take all the thousands of source docs for the Gospels and you will have only a dozen or so differences between them. Very cool considering the hand-copied nature of books back then.
To summarize: Translations aren't the same as the source documents! The Bible _wasn't_ written in English and there aren't any "divinely inspired" translations! And please don't bring up the KJV. Its OK considering the limited sources they had to work with, but there are much more accurate translations than the KJV!
If you can't read Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic (and Latin so you can check out the Septuagent) you can't read the Bible! You're just reading TRANSLATIONS.
As far as you assertion that Yahweh needed to correct himself... hmmmph. He didn't change the message because he made a mistake. He changed the contract He made with humans, because _we're_ not perfect.
This sig kills fascists.
and how are you so sure that this is so wrong? what conclusive proof is there of that fact. in fact the current Electrical Universe theory makes far more sense than the gravity-based model. Seeing as how astronomers have had to invent black holes, dark matter, dark energy and many other exotic particles just to make their theory fit, while the electric universe thoery can explain events without making up some bizarre matter, I'm personally more inclined to go with them.
"As far as you assertion that Yahweh needed to correct himself... hmmmph. He didn't change the message because he made a mistake. He changed the contract He made with humans, because _we're_ not perfect." ;) but shouldn't It of known that .being omnipotent and omnipresent and all that jazz
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
And who fought tooth and nail - and for millions, outright rebelled at dire risk to their own lives - to defend that system.
Son, a woman is a lot like a refrigerator. They're six feet tall, 300 pounds... they make ice... umm...
"Supernova 1987A Decoded"
Have you learned nothing from your time here on Slashdot? Everything is hacked around here. Cars. Toasters. Clock radios. Come on, follow the rules man.
"Supernova 1987a Hacked" is by far a cooler sounding story anyway.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Well. The US, as a country, was perhaps, Poor. Individuals (If we are to believe Adam Smith's "the wealth of nations" which I cant be bothered to find and quote right noww). Were actually quite well off. They had a virtually (this, before 1776) unlimited supply of farmable land, and decent weather. So they could grow a lot, and sell a lot. And were, therefore, overall. Quite wealthy (as individuals)
I'm just being a pedantic idiot here, but there is no such thing as a theory that is obviously wrong. There are only theories that do not fit well with observed conditions.
You can have any number of competing theories and none of them are obviously wrong. There will, however be those that best fit the majority of our observations and will be considered the best theory. Those that have a hard time time explaining observed conditions will not be accepted by the majority of scientists, but no theory is ever obviously wrong.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
OK, so "soon" either the main shock wave will hit the inner ring and we'll see a lot of X-rays or "I do not expect the ring to grow as a shock-wave-produced ring would be expected to. Some bright spots may be seen to rotate about each other and to merge. It is an opportunity more rare and valuable than a diamond to be able to verify the electric discharge nature of a supernova."
"outright rebelled at dire risk to their own lives - to defend that system."
First of all, the Civil War was about states rights, not slavery. Only those people interested in ignoring historical fact for the benefit of rhetorical convenience fail to admit that. Attempting to rewrite history, especially when you can easily be proven wrong, is just dumb.
I'm sure you're just such a person, but I'll continue anyway.
The POINT was that EUROPEANS were responsible. If the south fought to keep slavery, it was the Euros fault as well, because they CAUSED slavery. Get the picture? More importantly, what choice did the south have? Give up their way of life and ruin the southern economy? Sure. Try selling that one.
No, the Euros did it. It all runs back to them, and if there is any blame to be laid for slavery, WHY don't the Euros get any?
"I take more comfort in "atheist science" than in lies - damn lies - that have kept humankind down, led the world to pain, war and destruction for the last 5000 years over and over again."
Sincerely,
Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong
Sorry. That was meant and toungue in Cheek. I am a Jew. We dont have so much hell. I mean, some do. Depends which sub-group. The Briskers (and I am not really a Brisker, just closer to them than anyone else), dont worry so much about heaven and hell.
It was a "Fine, you dont believe in God? So you will burn..."
Oh, it just doenst come across right... Ah well.
Like, fine, you dont believe in God so? Big Deal, so you will burn in Hell, everythings even. But, you know, if you want to criticize. At least be clever about it. Sort of the juxtaposition of the relative value of burning in hell, VS. getting a criticism right. It was supposed to be funny. Doesnt come across I guess. Oh well.
This particular theory was first applied to Unreal Tournament 2004, but I believe it can be generalized for much of the IntarwebNet.
sudo eat my shorts
Newton? Sir Isaac?
Newton was hardly a role model for Christians. He also believed in the Bible Code, alchemy, astrology, scrying, and other attempts to "rediscover" supposedly lost ancient occult knowledge. There was a quote that I like about him, I forget who said it: to paraphrase, "Newton was the first of the great scientists, but the last of the great magicians."
Anyways, if you look at statistics, the more education a person has, the less likely they are to believe in God. Only a miniscule percentage of scientists believe in a "personal god", although about a third are theists and a third agnostic (depending on what survey you look at, the ratios vary, but they're generally consistant).
Son, a woman is a lot like a refrigerator. They're six feet tall, 300 pounds... they make ice... umm...
Science is not about how the universe REALLY works, it is about coming up with new models when the old are found not to match new empirical data. New models have replaced old, NOT because the old were wrong and the new correct, but because the new models simply had greater predictive power or predicted a wider variety of phenomena. There are no theorems in the natural sciences - only theories.
Splitting hairs maybe, but dogmatism about science grates on me just as much as in the religious context.
And the proof of that is in your post!
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
That doesn't have pseudo scientific nonsense I recommend going here, http://www.bautforum.com/ No I'm not trying to plug a forum but the electric universe theory is nonsense
Jim,
You are the idiot.
You say this guys' science is science because he invents theories about how things work. You have obviously not read any of them.
Let's take his theory that Comets are hot and dry; not cold balls of dirty ice. Taken from Badastronomy
You use a spectroscope, you can measure the temprature of an object. Object of different tempratures have a different spectrum. Also using a stectrascope you can also tell what an object is made of. Different materials have a differnet spectrum.
In something is observed in nature, then a theory do describe it. They that theory is tested and/or modeled. The people practicing pseudoscience skip the last part. Comets emit light, therefore they must be hot? You have a theory there. Now show me the rest of your evidence? McCanney does a bunch of technobabble, but he's never pointed a stectrascope at one and actually measured the temprature. He just babbles on about magnetism.
It is unscientific to ignore observations, and just keep making stuff up.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
google the article and you will be directed to religous websites.
the electric universe theory has as much scientific support as geocentrism
and more scientific support than Young Earth Creationism.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
In 1984 it is said "He who controls the past controls the present, and he who controls the present controls the past".
the Theofascist movements of various religions around the world are trying to exercise this concept - grandparent is an example.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Actually, you remeber MOSTLY correctly. But only Mostly. God decided to Destroy all of Sodom And Gemorah. Cause they were EVIL. And he Came to His man Abraham. And said "Abe, I gonna blow this Joint". And Abe says, what you gonna kill everyone, surely there are good people there. How you gonna kill the good with the bad?"
And God and abe argue for a bit, and the bottom line is that there arent even 10 decent people in Sodom. At best, 8 passable ones.
Lot and his family are the 8. So as a favor to Abraham, God Pulls them out. And even they arent so good. It is sort of, in comparison to the rest of Sodom and Gemorah, these 8 are ok. But look how bad THEY are. THEN you will get an idea about how TRULY evil Sodom and Gemorra were.
That is mostly the Gist of that portion of the bible (there are other things too. If you feel so inclined, go read it. But yea. Lot&co. arent held out as really good people. Just good in Comparison to the TRUE evil of sodom and gemorrah)
"Look further, accept and embrace your human condition."
I thought that was the whole point of religion to begin with.
Real men use vi, slimy emacs lusers!
Which time might you be talking about where there was more god, and good pensions?
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I dont claim that Belief in God Is particularly Rational. Nor is belief in really anything.
Not what I am arguing about. Just saying. When you are going to criticize. Dont say stupid shit like "illeterate.... that is right people who believe in God are stupid and illeterate."
I mean, people who believe in God are all sorts of things. Some are stupid. Some are quite bright. Some are good, some are bad blah blah blah. I know a lot of rational people who are a lot of things. Many people who are otherwise quite articulate, when it comes to God, are, well. Quite bigoted.
I mean, so you dont believe in God? So what? So I do. So what? Does that mean there cant be a conversation about it that doesnt devolve to calling me stupid, and calling you evil? There is a lot more nuance to it than that. It drives me nuts when people just. Categorize so quickly. That was the point of my original post. Look what it says. I am responding to a guy who just called all people who believe in God stupid and uneducated. Ok ok, the "so you will burn in hell" apparently didnt come across at all. The "no big deal part, I guess didnt mean much. So I get called a Troll, for saying to a guy who is call all relegious people stupid, dont be so anti.
Meh. Meh meh meh.
fanciful magical dark matter
That's right. Fanciful, crazy dark matter.
I mean, c'mon! It's ludicrous! Particles that have mass, barely interact with anything, and don't emit photons. What a stupid idea!
Yes, neutrinos are not the dark matter that they're suggesting. But it's not like they're suggesting a ludicrous kind of matter the likes of which we've never seen. Pauli's proposal of the neutrino is in fact almost a direct analog of dark matter: proposing a new particle to explain the failure of classical physics in a regime where it should be accurate.
Thank You for proving my point. You showed your ignorance by not understanding what your read and keeping to your dillusional points of view on what actually occurred in history. I gave you examples of his 'conservative' policies. Lincoln actually formed the Republican party to be a conservative party in response to what he felt was correuption within the federal government at the time. He did not start moving his policies to the more moderate side until after much bloodshed in the war and the death of his child. I will not rehash all of these items to defend my position, they are in the original argument. I was not being 'patronizing', I was merely pointing out fact. The point of my so called 'lecture' was to actually add some fact instead of ignorant inuendo into the conversation. The problem I see is that most people make the mistake of taking popularized inuendo as historical facts. If Lincoln had not made the shift to the middle towards the end of his first term, he never would have been the great leader he ended up as in history. Of course at the time, he had moved so far away from his "Republican" party, he almost lost the party's nomination fo the second term. I could spew some more facts for you, but they would only fall on deaf ears. Because like most people of today, you would rather believe your inuendos and fantasies about this point in time because it does not jive with today's moral doctrines. Did you know his successor was a Senator from Tennessee? Can you even name the Presidents before and after him? Keep living in your fantasy 'blame America' first world if it assauges your guilt.
Peace:)
The primary presumption is incorrect. The literacy rate in the US 200 years ago was, if anything, almost certainly as high as it is today, if not higher, and perhaps much higher. It is a common misperception that illiterate America was rescued from its ignorance by 'modern' public education.
For example, Thomas Paine's 'Common Sense' had a distribution to something like one in five non-slave, non-'Indian' persons. The equivalent of a book sale of some 55 million copies today. Given the publication and distribution system then available, that is astounding, that is simply astouding. The current senior Senator from Massachusetts has entered into Congressional record the testimony that, prior to forced public education in 1850, the literacy rate in that state was higher than it has ever been since.
Now, if you try to rescue your point by saying you are talking about Indians, how do you reckon that with the presumption that they believed in God (a safe presumption being that you are referring to the Judeo-Christian God)?
Though there is no way of knowing the exact percentage, it is safe to say that the presumption that most Americans 200 years ago were illiterate is not founded in fact, even after slaves and native Americans are counted. I may not have paid your post the proper introspection, yet at first blush I might suggest you consider your statements a little more closely.
Exactly!
I would add that a thousand experiments "proving" a theory right are useless, but it takes only ONE experiment to a theory wrong. In fact, if there is one fault with scientific research as it is practiced today, it is that most experiments are designed to prove a theory correct, not to prove it wrong. The assumption should be that a theory is correct and the experiment should be designed to prove it wrong. Einstein did that when he proposed a test of his Special Theory by predicting that if his theory is right the position of a distant star would be shifted by a certain angle as the starlight grazed the limb of the Sun during an eclipse. If his theory was wrong the expected shift would not be observed. His proposed experiement allowed for falsification. Many theories, both scientific and religious, cannot be falsified because appropriate experimental conditions cannot be setup or deduced from existing data. Adherents on both sides accept their theories on faith if they cannot be falsified.
Probably worth noting that overall, the colonies (and the rest of the country as it grew, right up until the Industrial Revolution) had a much higher literacy rate than we do now. Also far, far higher rates of multilingualism and firmer grounding in classical education.
I'm not sure where this stereotype of the uneducated American hick came from, but the fact is that just about any 18-year-old 200 years ago was much better educated than his/her modern counterpart.
*grumble*historicalaccuracy*grumble*
;-)
...
If I had remained factually correct on every point, I'd have to add caveats with every single sentence in my post.
Thank you! I really needed a good laugh today
PS: the 'year of our lord' reference is not 'right at the beginning' of the constitution. It's at the end.
Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none. --Benjamin Franklin
This idea isn't being dismissed because it's heretical. It's being dismissed because it's crap.
We detected neutrinos from SN 1987a with the thermal spectrum expected of a cooling neutron star. From the number of neutrinos detected, we know that the energy released in neutrinos was enormous (about the gravitational binding energy of a neutron star). Emission of neutrinos with a thermal spectrum requires an emitter that is at least one neutrino scattering length thick. This requires extreme density, which means a core collapse must have occured.
That electromagnetic bullshit wouldn't have produced neutrinos like this. The observation falsifies this theory. Indeed, any competent astrophysicist would have realized this almost instantly, which is why we can confidently label the theory as obviously wrong (in the same sense the Flat Earth theory, or the 'I'm the Pope' theory, are obviously wrong.)
Wow man ... wow, all I can say is wow.
Look, I believe the Bible, too, but I also believe science, which is simply a tool to understand the physical world. The Bible is definitely a tool to understand the spiritual world. A lot of people can tell you or me where we can stick our spiritual world, but heck -- that's their right as free-thinking creatures, and best of luck to them.
Now, don't discredit science or its foundation, math. The same patterns that run through the natural world run through the Bible. Take fractals, for instance. Jesus uses the illustration of fractals in the form of a tree and a branch to describe how we're all connected to God. Patterns run through the Old Testament as well in the form of foreshadowing archetypes of Christ, such as Moses (leads the Hebrews across the Red Sea to the Promised Land just as today Christ leads the Church across death into Heaven).
Evolution does not contradict the Bible. Science says that life was probably brought about by lightening, which in the Bible is often used to illustrate God's power -- think metaphorically. The book of Genesis says that God told the ~water~ and the ~land~ to produce living creatures -- he didn't produce them directly, he did it through a medium. He recreates the world through a medium as well: Christ.
As spiritual beings, we're told to evolve -- a pattern which once again parallels the physical world. Christ describes himself as the "Son of Man", not of a particular man, but of mankind: a conscious evolution of spirit.
God relays truth through word-pictures (visions in the Old Testament, parables in the New, etc.). These word pictures often come from nature. Don't think the Bible as a law-book -- the Word is Christ, not the pages of the book. It's a compass to point you to Truth, not a map to lay out truth for us like some sort of constitution of mathematical formula.
And by the way, if you take the Bible as completely literal, then you must believe according to Genesis that Satan is a physical snake.
Good luck, loosen up, take a breather, go for a walk in the woods or something.
And don't feel threatened so much by science. Some scientists will often try to draw metaphysical claims from science about exo-Universe origins and whatnot, but don't confuse such musings with science itself, which is neutral.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
And everyone has missed the obvious.
The star was destroyed to make way for a galactic superhighway.
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
Yes, you're right, there was an element of states' rights to the Civil War -- but that was a political line. Few people actually FOUGHT for states' rights, even if that was what the politicians fed them and the pamphlets talked about.
There's a terrific book on the subject called What They Fought For, by James McPherson, which goes through thousands of letters -- all original sources -- from soldiers in both armies in the civil war. The insights these letters give into the base REASONS behind the war are amazing. It's a compelling read, and if you are interested in the truth of the matter, you should check it out.
But to say the civil war wasn't about slavery is appallingly ignorant. I just concluded a very in-depth study with a professor of history from the University of Washington who specializes in the Civil War and reconstruction era. He's also conservative and Christian, since that probably means something to you. If you actually delve into original sources and read the letters, the pro- and anti-slavery arguments from the era, the debates, the pamphlets, I guarantee you'll emerge with a different view.
While few people actually vocalised slavery as the cause, it was always lurking, and behind most of the political forces that ultimately caused the war.
Look into it before you lecture. Finally, the "Euros" didn't "cause" slavery any more than the Jews or Assyrians or any other culture in history "caused" slavery. Slavery is a historical human institution, which many nations have recently had hte insight to do away with. To blame the Europeans is to blame ourselves, for we ARE europeans. We are responsible for importing slavery with us. Yes, it was a different world back then, with different social conventions, and as such I don't harbor the same hate for the historical south, especially given the hypocrisy of most of the northern critics. Yes, the south was in a difficult position, because they depended on their slaves for a lot of their congressional power via the Three-Fifths clause, and depended on slave labor for their economy -- or at least, thought so.
But they DID have a choice. And it certainly WAS a huge issue in the war.
So I get called a Troll, for saying to a guy who is call all relegious people stupid, dont be so anti.
Oh calm down, I was just fighting troll with troll.
I'd like to point out that the Bible has changed many times throughout it's lifetime.
http://myweb.lmu.edu/fjust/Bible/English_TranslatI submitted this controversial article, and I suppose I ought to poke my head up and offer a few observations.
/.'s main page, was missing a link to the article hosted by holoscience.com, it's not my fault, as I did include one, but the story as submitted (expectedly) underwent heavy editing before it was displayed for public consumption, and the editor must have accidentally dropped the link. By the time I visite Slashdot today, the mistake was corrected.
/. that pointed to thunderbolts.info's "Deep Impact predictions" page. I'd never heard of "plasma cosmology" and the "Electric Universe" theories before . . . and so began to read about them. I discovered that there is quite a spectrum of thought that makes up this fringe scientific camp.
First, if the story, as it showed up early this morning on
I've seen many replies under this story crying "crackpots!" and "quacks!".
But I haven't read even one yet that suggests some simple principles or facts which can be used to debunk the basic claim of the plasma cosmologists and the Electric Universe proponents: that plasma physics (i.e. electrodynamics as embodied in the behavior of plasmas) is not given enough credit when scietific models and theories that attempt to explain stellar and interstellar phenomenon.
And I am all ears. I studied physics in college and was well on my way towards a B.A. in that discipline when I decided to try my hand as an entrepreneur during the dot-com boom. I think I've developed a fairly sensitive internal "b.s. meter" over the course of my lifetime. And I try to "keep up" in my personal (albeit hobbyist) study of science, with space physics and cosmology being my dominant interests. I read stuff on the "popular science" level and I am also comfortable reading papers of a more technical nature. I self-admittedly have a more philosophical bent in my musing upon these matters, but that is not a variant of the excuse, "I'm not so good at math" -- I am actually fairly competent when it comes to advanced mathematics.
Several weeks ago, I read the story on
On the one hand, you have the plasma physicists/cosmologists that believe that the behavior of stars, galaxies, galactic clusters, etc. are governed not primarily by the gravitational force but rather gravity AND electrodynamics, with electrodynamics dominant in many contexts. And they pretty much stop with that assertion and confine most of their work to exploring it.
The Electric Universe enthusiasts go farther, and are trying to develop an all-encompassing framework in which they see every aspect of the universe (from the subatomic to the intergalactic) and its history as governed by the "Electric Force."
Am I true believer in the so-called "Electric Universe?" No. I actually find members of that end of the spectrum in question to be a bit too eager to engage in polemics, and that doesn't impress me. On the other hand, I will say that I find myself highly sympathetic to the work and claims of plasma physicists like Dr. Anthony Peratt.
Here's why, in a nutshell: Since I was a little kid I've been fascinated by ideas like black holes, neutron stars, the "big bang," grand unified theories, etc., etc., etc. In fact, it was my reading Timothy Ferris' Galaxies when I was in the 2nd grade that planted the seeds for my future interest in pursuing physics as a career. I read Hawking's A Brief History of Time in the 6th grade, "understood" it, and from there began a more rigorous self-directed study into more advanced treatments of physics and mathematic
IC XC NIKA
I'd like to see these crakcpots explain the observations of neutrinos generated by a supernova...
Actually, the country was for the most part founded by a bunch of Christians who would not have minded the ten commandmens being hung up in courtrooms. The establishment clause has been blown way out of proportion these days.
The federal government was not as strong then as it is today, and states often had religious references in their laws and constitutions. Each state had laws that best fit the needs and wishes of their citizens. (Utah was founded as a Mormon Theocracy, for instance.) The establishment clause was meant to limit the federal government, as anti-federalists understood that one size does not fit all.
Federalists soon interpreted "Congress shall make no law" as applying to state law-makers as well. The Civil War led to a stronger federal government, and the civil rights movement led to the "equal protection under the law" amendment, which is now being misinterpretted. What a mess!
even a cursory knowledge of history will show that the US was inhabited by people fleeing religious persicution in Europe and that they really, REALLY did NOT want a country founded on religious principles, but one where there was a seperation of church and state and where no religion could gain so much power that it could encroach upon any other religion.
The people fleeing religious persecution did not want separation of church and state. What they wanted was their kind of church to be in charge.
In their own words:
In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereigne Lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britaine, France, and Ireland king, defender of the faith, etc., having undertaken, for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith, and honour of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northerne parts of Virginia, doe, by these presents, solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politick, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enacte, constitute, and frame such just and equall laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time as shall be thought most meete and convenient for the generall good of the Colonie unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names at Cap-Codd the II. of November, in the year of the reign of our sovereigne lord, King James of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fiftie-fourth. Anno. Dom. 1620.
To make your point, you ought to focus on the Europeans who colonized America not for religious reasons, but to make a quick buck.
"To blame the Europeans is to blame ourselves, for we ARE europeans. We are responsible for importing slavery with us"
NO, I AM NOT. I am asian (siberian) and my grandparents were ALL immigrants. No one in my family lived here prior to 1947.
So, to blame Euros is to blame YOU, which I do. Slavery as basis for the economy didn't exist here until you came, and even the slavery that did exist wasn't the same thing.
I find it funny that you accuse me of "appaling ignorance" when you want to emphasize what you think are important facts (by the way it WAS states rights, not slavery, and all the after the fact revisionism can't change that) then go on to lump ME into a category to which I do not belong. Who's ignorant NOW? (that would be YOU in case you were wondering)
"While few people actually vocalised slavery as the cause, it was always lurking, and behind most of the political forces that ultimately caused the war. "
And the implication here is that I haven't "looked into it" because I don't agree with you. Well, fuck you. The historical experts agree with me, as do sociologists, political scholars, and lawyers. The FACT is that states rights were the cause. Deny until you turn blue, it doesn't change history. More importantly, you're applying your view of what you think people thought was "lurking" which is, as I am fond of saying. useless. You don't know. NO, you don't. NO YOU DO NOT.
And save your pathetic personal attacks, they were obvious despite your attempt to be subtle.
... the articles I have submitted which were rejected, and then see this piece... I feel good... like the rejection was a sort of compliment.
THANKS!
-pyrrho
Ah. Sorry for jumpin' on ya, then.
And to answer your question, the first 80 times we all had this conversation, we were both clever and nice, but then 81 responses of "God's real, and I'm his favorite-est, and nothing you say can change that," wore us down. Now all we can manage is, "You're an idiot." And most of us would stop, but they keep bringing it up, and they're always so dang smug about it.
Well if you believe in God, I have it on higher authority that the recent disaster in the US is His Will and should teach you some humility and not to attack other countries for no good reason.
If you don't comply, He'll take the US down another notch or two. God's Own Country? Not on your continent anymore.
There wasn't much uncertainty over the size. Almost everyone knew the approximate size, in particular, there was no way Columbus could carry enough food to reach India going west. He was quite rightly seen as an idiot, and just happened to be lucky in smacking into a landmass as he was running out of food with about 2/3 of his voyage still to go.
I am trolling
these "scientists" are the ones supposed to test their theory!
we are not obliged to test everyone's theory... and this... this is... well, such obvious crap that...
if they come up with any evidence I'll be shocked and amazed.
slashdot has sunk to a new low! hahahah.
just kidding about that last bit.
-pyrrho
geeks as stupid as humans now. :(
-pyrrho
I don't know where you studied history,
I don't know where you studied anything, the depth of your ignorance is so tremendous and frightening.
America is a christian nation founded upon christian principles.
This statement by itself is absolutely false.
In fact, you can read the documents surrounding the founding of our nation and the people who wrote our constitution will tell you themselves that it is *in no way* based upon your religion or any other.
Take a look at every other religious based society in the history of the world, and you will not see anything like our constitution.
You will see brutality, oppression, torture, murder and the like. You will not see any freedom, since that is not how churches work.
This is a hard fact that leaves the neo-bolshevik nimrods that comprise the modern left in fits (which are regrettably not fatal).
Ahhh, I'm beginning to understand.
You aren't just ignorant and misinformed, you are completely detached from reality.
.
A rightist is one who feels that the proper use of the power of the state is to prevent equality and to keep the poor down.
A leftist believes that the power of the state should be used to promote equality.
A Liberal believes that people are equal, but doesn't feel like using the power of the state for much of anything.
So, now you've been taught the basic terminology which you didn't even know yet still insisted on using.
Now then, lets see if we can salvage anything approximating sanity in your post...
So in your mind, somebody who believes in freedom is a "neo-bolshevik nimrod".
Clearly, that's wrong and insane.
The left hates christianity precisely because it is the cornerstone of what they call bourgeois society, the destruction of which is an absolute prerequisite for the introduction of the socialist dystopia they have planned for our future.
More insane rantings, but it does demonstrate how completely out of touch with reality you are.
First off, if you're a right winger, then it is not possible for you to be a Christian. This is, again, a simple matter of knowing what these words mean.
Jesus was the worlds biggest leftist. You and those like you who froth with blind hatred at everything he stood for and try to demonize those who think he had some good ideas are truly sickeningly deluded scum.
What the left (as well as every single decent intelligent person with any knowledge of history) hate is religion as a part of government.
I'm not a fan of organized religion, but I'll take it any day of the week over a political and economic pseudo-philosophy that is as clear a proof of the existence of evil in this world as anything I've ever seen.
See, now you're trying to confuse support for freedom and equality with being a neo con.
Typical of your sickening anti-human type.
Maybe you should move out of your mom's basement and try to learn a little bit about the world before you spout off blatant and obvious falsehoods little troll.
yes, there is no proof outside of mathematics.
THERE IS however "demonstration".
A theory is worthless without demonstration, except as intellectual play.
Demonstration is what separates good theories from bad... and certainty is not required, only relative certainty.
-pyrrho
Yeah, what a nice Freudian. I noticed it the second I clicked 'Submit' but then thought I'd leave it as an exercise to the AC. ;)
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
if you just make stuff up, anything is "true".
-pyrrho
(PhD astronomy/astrophysics, a practicing observatory operator):
"Bullshit. Supernovae involve way too much energy for that. Now, if you're talking about novae (which are really entirely different from supernovae), then I might at least be willing to read the article before saying it's bullshit."
Myself, I took Astronomy 101. I don't know nuthin' at this level.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
I'm left wing.
But we can agree Europe screwed the world up first... we just carried the ball.
Now Europe is all like, "yes, very sorry 'bout that."
And their empire collapsed like a flan in a cupboard... (thanks Eddie!)
-pyrrho
Lincoln was anti-slavery for years before attaining the Presidency, and has famous debates on the issue... but you know that since you read them written down things.
-pyrrho
... progressives at least.
-pyrrho
just tell me about this TIME MACHINE!
:)
wow!
-pyrrho
I'm not an astronomer or astrophysicist, so a lot of the bullshit in this pseudosicence-y article, I could have potentially fallen for. But then at the very end, they have this choice little piece:
And, for me, that's where they give the game away. They write as though they've somehow conclusively, incontrovertably shown that there's a connection between electric supernovas and frickin' Stonehenge. I mean, if that's not NewAge malarky, then I dunno what is.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
[shudder]
I'm sorry, but pardon me? Save my personal attacks? My entire post is an attempt to help you investigate the truth, since you profess to be interested in it. This is a low moderated thread -- I'm not writing for anyone else, and I have plenty of things I could be doing with my time.
I'm sorry I called you European. Please see instead the history every other culture -- yes, including Native Americans -- has of enslaving peoples and using them to form an economic force.
What revisionism? I have supplied original source documents. By definition, this is not revisionism. You have said "Nuh-uh! NUH-UH!!!!" This is not logic, it's peurile.
Finally, what historical experts agree with you? What sociologists? What political scholars? And finally, who gives a flying f*** what lawyers think about the history of slavery and the civil war?
Yes, we do have an idea of what people thought, because we have their letters to their wives and children, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. They offer deep insights into the mores and motivations of the letter-writers. Please, investigate the source I'll provided, or at least provide some counter-argument besides "You don't know. NO, you don't. NO YOU DO NOT."
I made no personal attacks, veiled or not. You, on the other hand, have made ad hominem the cornerstone of your argument. Please don't attempt to divert the argument by accusing me of things.
Absolutely. The prevention of discrimination based on religious belief was very important to many of the colonists who had left their countries due in order to be able to worship as they saw fit.
The US hasn't always been the best at upholding this freedom of religion, as you can see by how the Mormons were treated. People would argue the same about the Branch-Davidians. I guess it's more freedom to worship how you see fit, so long as it's not too weird or cultish.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
For example, let's say that you're a juror on a murder case. The prosecution presents a good case, and you're convinced that the defendant is guilty. However, the defense shows even more credible evidence that the defendent was in jail at the time, and that he could not have committed the murder. But you're unwilling to change your mind due to the new evidence. Oh well, it's better to stick to your convictions than to allow an innocent man to go free, right?
Science is all about finding new evidence, and throwing out old convictions when they no longer fit the evidence. (Note that this is probably the opposite of how you view science, but it is how scientists view it.)
Insanity (and seemingly a lot of current American Conservativism and Evangelical Fundamentalism) is all about continuing to think the same way, despite mounting contradictory evidence.
And if you think you live in horrible times, you're definitely ignoring a ton of evidence to the contrary. How many people do you know who don't have enough to eat? How many people do you know who don't have shelter? How many people do you know that have to work every waking moment? How many people do you know that are enslaved and beaten? How many people do you know who live in filth and disease? In contrast to most people in the history of this planet, we live like gods.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
http://www.skepticality.com/ They've had Phil on twice so far, I believe.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Since you were bumped up as informative, I'm assuming either you or your moderators have empirical evidence of this you would like to share with the rest of the class.
It's called money. Greedy people go where the money is. Conventional views of space are upheld by the government and government funding (in north america). Other countries, through science, have widely differing views. Only americans seem to think it's 'the god's truth'. Then again, they tend to swallow stuff that's pumped through them in school, media, etc...
haha, and the fact that 'gravity' changes depending on scale. Hey, if gravity and inertia are exactly the same force why do we call them different things?
Whose the crack pot who modded this insightful when there is absolutely no insight as to how it's incorrect. This is just baseless opinion.
So even though it was 'europeans' who brought them over, it was americans who decided to keep them and treat them like shit.
According to the article stars are powered by an electrical not a thermonuclear phenomenon. The science of thermonuclear phenonmenon that powers stars was tested thoroughly in 1945 with the development and use of nuclear weapons. Stars are driven by thermonuclear fusion and this article is absurd.
The devil, is as they say, in the details. Americans can appeal to diffusion of responsability, but when you check the details, they are the only ones responsable for their deplorable behaviour.
Crap man, we've known columbus was wrong for how many centuries?
Did you ever notice how science changes its anwsers so damn often. But the Bible stays the same.
Oh really. Then I suppose there's no need for multiple Bible translations. We can all make do with the King James Version, because that's completely infallible, right? And there's no controversy, is there?
And there's no need for the study of theology. Because whatever they decided back in the council of Nicaea or Trent or wherever, remains valid. And there's no such thing as Protestants, because the Bible never changes and all Christians believe the same thing.
At least with science we have mainstream science, the researchers who have strange theories because they're at the cutting edge of science, and the crackpots. With religion we have all these schisms with no obvious way to rejoin them.
The staticness of the Bible cannot in any sense be used to imply its inerrancy; neither can the evolution (no pun intended) of science be interpreted to mean that it is inaccurate. Science has the ability to adapt, and we would think that it's improving itself. A belief in Biblical inerrancy (notwithstanding that the Bible is self-contradictory at points and updates itself) would force one to refuse cheeseburgers. And I can't believe that you've never eaten a cheeseburger.
Why not live in a happy moral time, with good families, and worthwhile occupations.
Hahahaha. You want to live in a theocracy? Very well then, spend some time in Iran and tell me how you liked it. And if you object to Iran, name any theocracy that's ever existed that you like. I guarantee Iran's better.
It's so much more convenient -- for liberal arguments sake, anyway -- to just ignore history.
Besides, he's just twisting history to improve the lives of those poor, black children anyway. To do otherwise (or to disagree in any other way) is simply to continue this nation's history of racism.
First let me say that the slashdot story is about a couple of crackpots, not about any genuine science news.
Did you ever notice how science changes its anwsers so damn often.
Sure science changes. It increases in knowledge and understands and explains more. The very computer you're typing on wouldn't have been possible a hundred years ago. Spacecraft to other planets wouldn't have been possible a hundred years ago. And on and on. The fact is that science works, and it's always improving.
But the Bible stays the same.
The Torah and Koran stay the same too.
They graded our papers, and gave us low marks. Why? They did it to everyone. In my Chem class, and "A" was a 38.7%. That is about 4 out of 10 points on a test. The curve was fucking rediculous.
Have you considered the possibility that your regional highschools provided an inadaquate background in science (and or math), and that the reason that the curve was so rediculous was that the college would obviously have had a shitfit had the teacher properly FLUNKED THE ENTIRE CLASS? Students in any field will fail in any college level class if their highschool did not provide them the required foundation for the subject.
In my highschool chemistry class we had to understand the periodic chart backwards and forwards understand the structure of the electron orbitals and how those orbitals establish the structure of the periodic chart and do basic chem and organic chem and nuclear chemistry and pH and nuclear chemistry and build and balance equations and calculate energy and reaction rates and calculate equlibrium states and more, most of which required not only algebra but skill in logarithms as well. And you needed to test at 90% on all of that to get an A.
working for in the factory of an atheist
Atheists are practically zero percent of the US population. Are you suggesting they have some super advanced abilities above normal people that enables them to own and run all of the factories? Are you suggesting that people of faith are somehow incapable of owning or running factories?
moral
The atheist prison rate is about half the rate of the general population. SO either atheists are half as likely to commit crime, or atheists are some sort of super geniuses that somehow manage not to get caught.
Oh, the atheist divorce rate is also substantially lower than that of any major religion.
There are certainly other definitions of "morality", however those are the only two I can think of offhand for which I can get population statistics.
And there is less of God too. He is letting us know.
Amen brother. As Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said, God gave us what we deserve with the 9/11 attacks.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Of course, supernova is manifestation of Flying Spaghetti Monster getting angry or something like that. I can't believe anyone can think otherwise.
We're talking about gravity on a galactic scale dumbass, not here on earth. Once you get out past a certian distance gravity would be too weak to have an effect on distant objects. And example I've seen is this. put a dot on a piece of paper, that is our sun, now put another dot on another piece of paper 3 miles away, that is the distance to the next closest star to ours. Now think of that on the scale of our sun and you can see why gravity would have no effect at that distance.
Yep, single words and minor misspellings. Like, for instance, the Number of the Beast. Turns out it was 616 in earlier editions. Never mind, just a minor misspelling of a single word. Doesn't change anything, really.
This is what leads me to completely reject both the intelligent design and global warming theories. I also have my layman's doubts about black holes.
I do believe science invests far too much confidence in what seems to appear on a chalkboard without much in the way of direct physical evidence. Yes, there is some observation, but it's also selective observation (picking one star out of millions that fits a certain 'predicted' profile). Mainly for the seemingly undeservedly high confidence level attributed to much of astrophysical science, I will take time to listen to alternate theories. Doesn't matter to me how many PhD's line up to support something, that alone isn't enough. Peer review in that community is far too monolithic as it is. In it's time, many PhD's have scientifically supported eugenics, race/intelligence links, global cooling, Gaia, and many various global catastrophe theories. A good track record overall, but some dismal misses included.
For example, I have my (admittedly amateur) doubts about the true existence of singularities. I don't doubt relativity or the existence of objects for which light is bent around and/or cannot escape. Many of these things have been pretty much directly observed, and relativity has been well lab-tested. The singularity is the thing however which is the practically 'mystical' aspect of black holes and serve to make them sound so mysterious. I've read alternate theories about matter that state that there could be one more plateau of stability beyond neutronium for which there is no test to detect. It's possible in theory then that a ball of this stuff is what is inside of a black hole, and not a singularity. The matter is so densely packed together that light cannot escape, but it IS still a form of physical 3-dimentional matter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_matter
The belief in singularities are based on extrapolations of chalkboard charts and graph trends. Newton made a similar type of mistake thinking his equations and graphs of classical physics extended to the very big, the very small, and the very fast. In reality, the charts don't extend out, other phenomenons take over, namely quantum dynamics and relativity--some new thing just arbitrarily takes over after certain extremes are passed. When we eventually made direct observations that conflicted with the classical theory, we came up with a more refined theory. So, if we somehow get clever and find a way to peek inside a black hole (maybe collide two together or something), then we will have definite evidence. Until then, I have to reserve some skepticism against a 'mystical' claim that isn't based on direct evidence, just charts and graphs that extrapolate out that way.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, however, there is. -Berra
Sad truth is, there are STILL millions of "slaves" out there. Apparently a lot of "lifelong indentured servitude" (== slavery) in Africa. Interesting article in Smithsonian. One woman describes how she was supposed to hold the tent up during storms to make sure the family didn't get wet. And if she screwed up, she was beaten.
Uh, the only ones who had slavery forced on them were the slaves. Americans could have chosen to end the practice of slavery when they founded the new nation; it was a hot topic in the construction of the Constitution.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Where do your statistics come from? What leads you to deduce cause and effect rather than correlation?
Incidentally, here in the UK, the largest Christian Unions (student Christian societies in university) can be found in the more intellectual universities in each region, such as Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews, Queen's University Belfast, etc. And within those universities a very large proportion of Christians are scientists, mathematicians, engineers, lawyers and medics. Possibly the greatest of the Puritan Christians was John Owen, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University.
At the end of the day, intellect and education rather has nothing to do with whether you believe in God or not.
haha, you're dumb :) We're both arguing the same point.
that's actually precisely the sort of transmission error i'm referring to as being minor - something which is exegetically helpful when corrected, but also something which has little to no affect on the interpretation of the text -- it's commonly assumed by Christians that the wacky stuff in Revelations refers somewhat obliquely either to Roman officials or future events, or (most commonly) both. finding that the passage actually refers to Caligula instead of Nero (hypothetically) is quite interesting historically, but in no way changes the interpretation or application of the text.
the same can be said of other likely interpolations, such as the ENTIRE woman-caught-in-adultery passage (containing the old adage, "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" -- which is absent in the earliest manuscripts). discarding such passages changes nothing - the hypocrisy of sinners accusing other sinners of sinning is pounded on by Jesus half a dozen other times, and this example, while more visually memorable than the others, is mere reinforcement. take it or leave, the message of the passage stands.
all to say, we can list errors till kingdom come, but in 2000 years of history we have yet to see a religious sect (from any tradition - Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist) arise out of poor textual transmission - Protestantism came out of the return of a Pauline/Augustinian spirituality, Mormonism out of the interpolation of new texts, the Gnostic revival out of added texts and reinterpretations, Sunnis/Shiites out of doctrinal differences; etc etc etc -- it's only modern pop-culture scholars that think transmission errors miraculously and suddenly render a 1000-page text unusable -- errors which, by their very nature, sneak in because they're inconsequential enough not to catch the eyes of people reading the text.
Then there is of course most of the population enslaved to jobs that for the most part have nothing to do with acquiring the essentials of survival, but more to do with just maintaining the machine.
Seriously, everybody is important, where would we be without those telephone cleaners?
Please tell me when gravity no longer has any effect, can you calculate the distance, and what would be the units. Yes, it's a trick question. ;P
Yes, I said it.
A name is just a label. "Native American" is a label just as "Indian" is. Neither is wrong. Or, perhaps both are equally wrong - my ancestry isn't "Native American" it is Cree. There were no people here at that time who would have responded to the name "Native American".
Are the French criticized for calling England "Angleterre"? Are we critized for calling Deutchland "Germany"? No, different people have different labels for the same thing. It's not a big deal.
Political Correctness is an Orwellian trap to deceive people about what really is important. No one with any sense pays attention to PC any more - the 90s are over.
I've been sent from the future to tell you that time machines are the source of all the dupes we've been seeing on Slashdot.
I've seen probably about half a dozen studies, and could probably relocate some for you if you thought it was important. One, from a while ago, was in Scientific American. Another one was posted recently on Slashdot by a religious organization, and even they (including things like "computer science") had a 38% atheism figure, in an article trying to show that theism and science aren't mutually exclusive.
What leads you to deduce cause and effect rather than correlation?
What leads you to believe that I deduced cause and effect rather than correlation?
Son, a woman is a lot like a refrigerator. They're six feet tall, 300 pounds... they make ice... umm...
Yeah! How dare he imply that Zeus is not real! From high atop Mount Olympus he will smite thee!
Slashdot really needs some more scientifically literate editors. You guys keep jumping on crank bandwagons and making yourselves look foolish.
200 years ago, most of the USA was filled with people who could not read or write. Yet, they formed a country with great prosperity. And they believed in GOD. They thanked him for what they had.
There's a common misconception that the founding fathers wanted us to have a Christian Nation. A lot of people even use the fact that we have "In God We Trust" our national motto - but they don't realize this is a modern vision, not one of our founding forefathers. The word "GOD" doesn't appear once in the original "The Constitution of the United States" or "The Bill of Rights" (the first ten amendments to the constitution) as written by our founding fathers. As a matter of fact, the only mention of "religion" in either of these documents is in the first amendment:
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The statement "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" serves to disavow Congress (or the Federal Government) from favoring or establishing or regulating religions. In otherwords, a separation of church and state -- No preference for God or Allah or Vishnu or even Xenu.
That's right -- search for yourself. "GOD" isn't there. As a matter of fact, the constitution still remains free of the word "GOD" despite every amendment that's been passed to this date.
Furthermore, the original Pledge of Allegiance appeared in 1892. The phrase "under God" was not added until 62 years later 1954 at the height of the McCarthy era and in the midst of his "Red Scare" as a way to distinguish the US from our "Godless" enemies.
There is a further misconception on the words "In God We Trust" on money. For nearly 100 years, the US mint did not print those words on coins or bills. There are two theories on how this wording was added to our money. The first involves records of letters from 1861 from a minister to the Sec. of the Treasury suggesting a single coin with the motto which was eventually minted in 1864. The second commonly held theory is that the idea "In God We Trust" came when the US was switching from a gold and silver standard to purely "virtual" (unbacked) monetary standard and the removal precious metals from coins. One senator asked, "Who can you trust if my paper bill isn't worth gold?" and another answered, "We can only trust in God". Anyhow, the motto "In God We Trust" was added to ALL coins in 1908. It wasn't mandatory on bills at all though until 1955.
The motto "In God We Trust" wasn't actually made our national motto until 1955 as well. Again, it was seen as a way of distinguishing ourselves at that time from our godless enemies, the communists.
Many individual politicians, presidents, and judges have seen fit to express their belief in God. I believe it is their right to express those beliefs as long as they don't force them upon others. However, NOTHING written into LAW by our founding fathers suggested that we, as a nation, be guided by "GOD". The only acts and laws passed have been much more recent and possibly less enlightened than our founding fathers. All of these laws and acts are subject to being found in violation of the Constitution (Amend 1 - separation of church and state) since they are mere laws and not amendments to the Constitution. Any could be overturned if the Supreme Court so ruled.
Maybe "In God We Trust" is a great motto, but we have the 1950's congress to thank for that as a motto and the Congress of 1908 to thank for adding it to our coins (bills were again in 1955), not our founding fathers.
"hint look at their hands, freemasons have a distinctive ring"
Wait a moment. Weren't they supuosed to be a SECRET society?
Or are you just crocoach?
I didn't say "implication," I said "evidence." And while one particular vision of divinity can be disproven, most surviving views are inherently untestable.
And besides, everything breaks down when you consider that Zeus and Olympus were themselves often viewed as metaphors in their own time. The human search for meaning will always be left open to human interpretation, and you can't justifiably use science to promote one interpretation over another, even if that interpretation is "there is no god."
and how are you so sure that this is so wrong?
By the way it is utterly incapable of explaining the neutrino observations.
Massachusetts did have schools. Ever been to one of the still standing ones? They bare the following similarities to modern schools: A) Walls B) Ceilings C) Floors (Optional) ...and that's about it.
Education in Massachusetts cannot hold a candle to modern public schools. And our schools are hardly the best. Kids drop out and while many can barely read, that is only in comparison to 12th grade reading levels. Most have a reading level the 1700s kids would have needed an expensive and not generally available education to match. To say nothing of the fact that the 1700s kids would have had no real exposure to a number of subjects.
It didn't become a superpower until after the second world war. And that was to a large extent because of the efforts of imported, secular, German and Eastern European scientists.
No, it was a great power earlier than post WWII. After the war it was the only superpower other than the USSR. While the scientists helped get the bomb, that didn't really mean much of anything. It scared the hell out of Stalin, and did little else. We could have used conventional bombs on Japan if we really needed too. A solid firebombing was just about as effective as a nuke at that time - google Dresden. It would have taken a bit longer, and Russia might have gotten involved, but Japan wasn't a major economic factor in our own prosperity for years.
The real reason the US is a superpower is the economy. And that has precious litle to do with atomic weapons. It's a function of the large scale industrialization of the US, it's MASSIVE natural resource advantage, and good economic policy. What major natural resources does the US *NOT* have at least some of? The US has metals, gems, petroleum, wood, food, coal, water, and others. It uses more petroleum than it drills, which is a weakness, but that's about it. That is also a problem for just about every other country in the world that is not a member of OPEC, which is most of them.
Policy isn't perfect, but in short it is better than a lot of places and sufficient for what the US has.
I would suggest that you look at the Middle Ages, or even the Dark Ages for an example of what life in a theocracy is like... For 1500 years they believed in God to the point of letting the church dominate all life - and lived in total squalor.
And I would suggest that you look at the USSR and North Korea, for seeing what an anti-religious state got you. They gave different reasons for killing you for being or thinking different but the result is the same. You do not need theocracy to have a pitiful existance. (This is to say nothing of the fact that feudal Europe was not a true theocracy, and that the church was one of the few places where a non-aristocrat could -at least theoretically- even learn to read.)
If that's your theory of science, it is obviously wrong.
Newton's theory was not obviously wrong for a few centuries, but once a few very precise measurements were made, it was obviously wrong. A vast array of other examples could be provided by someone more patient than I.
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
No, he offered them a slave, actually. A slave-wife (concubine) to be more exact. You do know what those are, right?
And, err, as for "inconveniencing" the angels, they meant to rape them, as is *quite* evident in the story. You do remember that they managed to kill the poor concubine, right? I can't imagine his guests doing much better (well, save that they might've gotten the fire & brimstone [brimstone == sulpher, for those wondering] sooner...).
Granted, I don't think what he did to the concubine was right, but I still blame the mob, not the poor guy beset by the rape mob.
Perhaps you ought to read that story again? Your understanding of it appears to be distorted.
95.2% if you count ability to do any kind of reading and writing as "literate", which I don't.
Literacy correlates fairly directly with income, rather than with intelligence. Evidently, belief in God is not driven by material largesse.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...and at least some of the the Kuiper belt, too.
The direct answer is: not AFAIK, but if Velikovsky is anywhere near right about Venus, Birkeland currents might have had a hand there even if only as a catalyst or secondary destabiliser. It'd be an interesting question to study. Jupiter's weather's gone all funny since Shoemaker-Levy slapped it about, maybe we'll get to see a re-enactment? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Traditionally, Atheistic regimes have been responsible for several times the death tally of all Theisms combined. Your point was?
I understand that the correct answer for this is:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I don't quite follow.
We don't want to waste our time constructing experiments to test crack-pot theories, but if a prevailing theory can be justified or refuted by an experiment then that is a perfectly valid way to make scientific progress.
Consider the Michelson-Morley experiment. Aether is a good theory or it's not. The experiment was done, the theory went down the tubes. A fundamental scientific breakthrough was the result. A null result can be a very powerful scientific argument.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
If I can see a rainbow, that is a fact. Theory is what explains how that rainbow got there.
One theory might say that millions of tiny water droplets in the sky act like prisms and create a rainbow. Another theory might state that rainbows are painted on the sky by the Jolly Green Giant using a giant rainbow roller brush. After further observation and gathering of facts, one theory will fit the observations better than the other, but neither is obviously wrong.
Like I said, I am being a bit of a pedantic fool here. But you cannot state that a theory is wrong without showing how it is wrong. Conversely, a theory is never obviously correct; it has to explain the world around us better than any competing theory to be accepted as generally correct.
Your example is actually the perfect proof of this. Newton's Laws did the best job of explaining why we saw what we saw in the heavens. His explanation of gravity did a very good job of explaining the movement of the planets. But when we started getting more detailed measurements, his theory no longer provided the best explanation. Thus, when Einstein's theories of space/time came along, they provided a better explanation of the observed facts.
You can still use Newton's laws to calculate planetary orbits or a flight path for a spaceship. If his theories were obviously wrong, then they wouldn't provide answers usable in the real world. The theory isn't obviously wrong. It takes a lot of detailed observation to see that it doesn't provide the best explanation. Nothing obvious about it!
Check out the debate between the Steady State and the Big Bang theories. Which one was obviously wrong sixty years ago? And which one do most cosmologists say does the best job of explaining the universe today? But even now, you have some scientists that do not believe the Big Bang does the best job of explaining the universe, so something is not obvious to them...
If the answers were obvious, we wouldn't need science.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
Science without all of that fairy-tale based morality:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele
Aren't you glad we have science instead of God!
Just like it was the americans who captured the first Enigma machine.
*grumble*historicalaccuracy*grumble*
Even if it were true (which it's not), it doesn't of course matter. Because the breaking of the Enigma codes relied on a combination of faulty operation of the code engine (the predictable weather reports for example) and sophisticated maths analyses. The operation was speeded up by getting the code books, but only until the next code book change ; the code books were in no sense essential.
While we're talking about historical inaccuricies, let's quickly examine the success of British cryptographers in breaking Enigma. That's the Enigma code whose methodology for breaking was developed by the Polish secret service in the mid-late 1930s.
Not belittleing the Bletchley Park work, but it was built on the work of other people.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The very existence of this article, and the holoscience.com article which it references, is an example of social engineering and underhanded advertising, trying to give their debated-and-rejected ideas more credibility by publishing and thus claiming a "controversy" that doesn't (or no longer) exists. I'd fully expect this tactic from people emotionally invested in, say, Intelligent Design "theory", but this is coming from an unexpected quarter. The motivation here should be ridiculously obvious.
I'm very ashamed for the integrity of Slashdot at the moment.
well that's all nice and stuff, but i think i'll stick with Process Physics.
cf the Correspondence Principle: a new theory has to account for all the measurements made in support of the accepted theory. It's not enough just to cover the areas in which the accepted theory is inelegant. A theory that doesn't meet this basic criterion can be ignored without requiring debunking.
In the case of the Electric Universe theory I would ask its proponents to explain why decades of Space Physics experiments have failed to find and measure the kind of charged-particle flows to and from the sun that would be required to convey enough energy to power it. Until they've adequately explained where they are, I don't feel the need to take them seriously.
point;membership in masonary REQUIRES a belief in A supreme being , known as the "great architect of the universe...
A government's purpose is to protect its citizens and to insure the country's growth. It collects a portion of your income to fund these. If you dont pay your taxes and follow the rules you will be denied the benefits of that government, like going to prison.
CTRL+C, CTRL+V
A religion's purpose is to protect its members and to insure the religion's growth. It collects a portion of your income to fund these. If you dont pay your tithes and follow the commandments you will be denied the benefits of that religion, like going to Hell.
They both have laws, taxes, territory, and citizens. Some religions have Presidents like the Pope or Ayatollah. Both fight the forces of "evil". Both like to stop you now and then, seemingly just to annoy you. Go check out the origin of the worlds smallest country. We wouldnt have to talk about separation of church and state if the would quit trying to become the state.
Yeah, right. People go into science because it's a great way to get rich. [rolls eyes]
Explain again why the government, or any religion, has a stake in the core-collapse theory of supernovas?
Seems to me you prefer facile, but ridiculous, conspiracy theories as a substitute for actual understanding.
Pardon my hubris, but I am sure I am not confused in any way. Perhaps you have confused proof with disproof, right with wrong. (Sorry, that's a bit heavy.)
Sure, no theory is ever proven right. Newton looked mighty good until the scope and accuracy of the tests were able to prove him wrong. Once we could measure the different between 5600 and 5557 seconds of arc per century, Newtonian gravity was obviously wrong. The claim I'm arguing against is your statement that "there is no such thing as a theory that is obviously wrong."
I wouldn't have thought that my powers of perception were extraordinary, but if I see a rainbow form (which I have) and don't see a Jolly Green Giant, then to me the latter theory is obviously wrong. (Any appeals to an invisible JGG will be directed to the definition of "green.")
I'm not claiming Einsteinian gravity is right (let alone "obviously right"), but it's more accurate in some regimes and no less accurate in others.
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
This is an alarming load of crap, even for Slashdot. Are you guys going to start covering actual science any time soon, or can I safely stop reading altogether?
Um...how so? check this page for some explanations: http://www.electric-cosmos.org/sun.htm
Scientists know most theories are wrong. They are tools to help us understand things, not rules the universe follows. Quantum theory? Models, not laws. Speed of light? Even that's just a model - it's often violated on the quantum level.
"Toy" models are very helpful in getting a handle on a situation, and even fully developed models that are clearly "wrong" (e.g., radiation-reaction) can provide very useful results and very useful ways of looking at things.
--LWM
To me something is obvious when it needs no further proof. The dog is wet; ice is cold; rainbows are in the sky; there are millions of different species on this planet.
The explanations for the obvious are what are not obvious to me. They require observation and reproducible results to verify they are our current "Best Theory". So, because it is not obvious to me that we got the plethora of species on this planet today from Natural Selection, it requires observation to make me believe it is the best theory.
To me, saying some theory is obviously wrong without any examination is a subjective decision, and subjectivity should have no place in science. Objective, rational observation should be what determines if a theory is more or less correct. Thus, I can't say that a theory is obviously wrong, but I can say that it is obvious that it does not explain what I observe. I just have to prove that first!
BTW, you don't see the JGG because he paints so fast it is not possible to see with the human eye...
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
How can there ever be a seperation of Church and State when the President is so religious. The Christian right seem to have control of the state, there does not seem to be any seperation right now.
You seem to forget that Americans (baring of course the native tribes ) are mostly bloody Europeans who moved over there , and not all European countries had slavery on the statutes ,Sweden i believe had abolished it around 400 years before the colonisation of America , .. hopefully soon it will be , but definitely was not then .
Europe is a continent and not a country
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Status quo is status quo, figure it out. EVERYONE has a stake in keeping the status quo. Can you believe what would happen if say 90% of the population found out that their jobs really are totally meaningless and unnecessary? That it wasn't necessary to suffer? (both science and mainstream religion are big on suffering).
Read again, i'm not suggesting a conspiracy theory, it's just what is. Why the hell are people always so big on science and then start infering things without any basis. Stop trying to read between the lines when there isn't anything there!
You're right, you fucking alcoholic, illiterate, good for nothing drain on the economy dipshit.
there is a degree of uncertainty in everything.
There is a degree of uncertainty in the statement "The Sun will come up tomorrow"... uncertainty introduced semantically and uncertainty introduced because of astrophysics.
But it's a good bet. The theory of evolution will be futher refined, but that something of an evolutionary mechanism is in play is very well demonstrated.
Demonstration is possible. Proof is not.
But... we don't need proof. We don't need proof the sun will come up tomorrow to place our bets on it.
-pyrrho
You're new to trolling aren't you? Try again, it takes a lot more than that to get under my skin.
Slavery's a long, long tradition that predates history. The Egyptians had slaves. The Assyrians had slaves.
One of the epistles in the Bible (probably written in the first or second century A.D.) gives advice on the proper handling of a runaway slave.
You can't blame Europeans or the Americans for it; it's been part of human culture around the globe for thousands of years. If you had lived in those times, you probably would have just accepted it as the status quo, just like most of the world did.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Ah, the things i do to try and make a stupid useless point. :)
I was following the article and trying to understand what it was saying.....then I got to the Stonehenge part and my Bullshit alarm went off!!!
I shall assume you have read the previous comment about Lot's family not being so perfect. The writer misspelled "Gomorrah" but I suppose, sine the original language of that area didn't necessarily use the same alphabet, the point is moot.
Continuing our story though and you shall find how his daughters aren't so perfect:
Genesis 19, V. 30-38 (KJV):
And Lot went up out of Zo'ar, and dwelt in the mountain, and his two daughters with him; for he feared to dwell in Zo'ar: and he dwelt in a cave, he and his two daughters.
And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth:
Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.
And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.
And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger, Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.
And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.
Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.
And the firstborn bare a son, and called his name Moab: the same is the father of the Moabites unto this day.
And the younger, she also bare a son, and called his name Ben-am'mi: the same is the father of the children of Ammon unto this day.
This is not exactly what I would call "consentual sex," and incest is not considered a very good idea, though royal families have used this to justify it.
But I have heard it said that Lot and Abraham are essentially one in the same, that Lot is the name used for Abraham not living as a saintly man. The best verse I can pull out of my hat to suggest this is Gen. 19, V.29:
And it came to pass, when God destroyed the cities of the plain, that God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in the which Lot dwelt.
Of course beware: Quoting the Bible (or any other "sacred scripture") is liable to misinform.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Answers in Science (with a capital "S") are supposed to change. That is why, when you do Science, you state your findings in what's called a "theory." And one of the most important things about scientific inquiry is that one's statement of theory must be disprovable by observations.
Religion, on the other hand, doesn't have to use theory. Religion can state things like, "suicide-bombing innocent people is the will of god and will get you into paradise."
Now, of course I'm writing this on September 11th but I'm also reflecting on the Pope's orders to sack Constantinople (sack means loot, kill, destroy and rape, for those of you interested). He stated that all who died in this "holy war" would be granted eternal life.
The lack of decent benefits in jobs has been caused by corporate boards and executives deciding to not be good corporate citizens. That is usually a result of those corporate executives deriving great quantities of pay from stock price increases, which changes the way they do business. And that has nothing to do with stating scientific theories or religion. Being a good corporate citizen is a moral responsibility that these executives have but they tend to not act on it. And they don't act on it because there are no laws requiring these actions. And they hire lobbyists to prevent such laws from being enacted.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.