Slashdot Mirror
Share Your Most Dangerous Idea
GabrielF writes "Every year The Edge asks over 100 top scientists and thinkers a question, and the responses are fascinating and widely quoted. This year, psychologist Steven Pinker suggested they ask "What is your most dangerous idea?" The 117 respondents include Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Daniel Dennett, Jared Diamond -- and that's just the D's! As you might expect, the submissions are brilliant and very controversial."
This is very simliar to this piece from Foreign Policy Magazine in September of 2004 "The World's Most Dangerous Ideas" tcd004
1. Shaving my back with rubbing alcohol and fire+.
2. Testing for the presence of pheromones in ball sweat by putting my hand down my pants, cupping my balls, and holding my hand over my sleeping girlfriend's face while she slept.*
+ I was going to do this while in the shower with the water running off to the side so I could hop into the water in the event of the inevitable accident
* Danger: She's a biter thus the reluctance to tea bag her directly
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
I found David Buss's article interesting. He sums up with the following, "On reflection, the dangerous idea may not be that murder historically has been advantageous to the reproductive success of killers; nor that we all house homicidal circuits within our brains; nor even that all of us are lineal descendants of ancestors who murdered. The danger comes from people who refuse to recognize that there are dark sides of human nature that cannot be wished away by attributing them to the modern ills of culture, poverty, pathology, or exposure to media violence. The danger comes from failing to gaze into the mirror and come to grips the capacity for evil in all of us."
"The hyper-Islamicist critique of the West as a decadent force that is already on a downhill course might be true" - somebody give this guy a research grant.
Why would you trust a testimonial when choosing hosting?
This has to be the biggest "article" submitted to Slashdot ever.
Here's my idea: If you have a Bose-Einstein condensate of heavy atoms, why happens when they radioactively decay? Does every atom decay simultaniously? Wouldn't that be kinda like a bomb?
How we know is more important than what we know.
How about this one: a majority of people will become bisexual as social controls are removed, say over the next 50 years.
Let's make our own list.
/. posters what their most dangerous idea is. :)
My most dangerous idea: Asking
Humor aside, I am serious, let's make a list.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Hold my beer and watch this".
"Better light a match to see where that gas is coming from."
"Yeah honey, you do look kind of fat in that dress."
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Reading Slashdot every day is pretty dangerous as far as ideas go. Never know when you're going to read something insightful, scream "Eureka!" and your head explodes like a nasty toliet.
...was putting ALL my assets into Google.
But the bet paid off. And now I can buy my own island. And a death ray.
Most of these don't seem really dangerous, just some ideas of what might come or be accepted in the future. Ideas that some iconoclasts already accepted but the masses have not. Like the idea of humans having no souls.
The ones that are dangerous are not dangerous in the "omg someone could kill millions with this idea" way. They are dangerous in the "our society will be even more effed up if this idea catches on" way. Like the idea that we can't win the war on climate change. If everyone accepted this how many countries would even try to reduce emissions? Or the idea that there really are fundamental differences between the "races". That would make the next genocide just a little bit easier.
This is funny, but I'm also totally serious:
Several times in my life, I've thought that I might be able to fix a broken object by using the process of melting. No matter how right I thought I was when I started, I've always, ALWAYS, regretted the idea.
Even knowing this, I'll probably try it again.
Dan Gilbert is a bit of a hero of mine. His research basically is about happiness--it's all any of us really, universally, want, so why, after millions of years of evolution, are we so bad at finding it? We should be experts! His stuff on affective forecasting and rationalization is amazing. I highly recommend his papers--and hearing him talk, if you ever have the opportunity, even more so! Anyway, he's a REAL character, and his response betrays that:
DANIEL GILBERT
Psychologist, Harvard University
The idea that ideas can be dangerous
Dangerous does not mean exciting or bold. It means likely to cause great harm. The most dangerous idea is the only dangerous idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous.
We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence.
Well, Dan, have you read Slashdot lately? I think we're still all right. For now.
Intelligent Design. Sorry, I had to.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
This thing seems like a few gems from genuinely insightful people, and a whole lot of buzzword babble junk. My personal favorite so far is the "headaches are like a spoon" drivel that says we should abandon the idea of physical objects and that everything we think we know is just our brain's interpretation, and there's no reason for that interpretation to match reality in any way. Only problem is - the reality of a wolf ripping out my throat is a pretty good reason to evolve senses that give me a good picture of that reality. I swear, the matrix gave this crap a whole new motivation - and it makes me wanna barf.
I shall call it "thought vehicle" or short TV. - Sounds good too.. I should patent this idea.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Many of the ideas published focus on science overcoming religion, or visa versa.
Proper religion is both the gateway to science, and is then inevitably reinforced
by the successes it has. Remember our favorites like 'algorithm' and 'algebra' come from
arabic words back from when Islam was filled with love.
BTW, religion (and the mysticism that goes with it) is the gateway to science because
this universe's Creator created it to be accessible to us. Our human mind is designed to
interact with its Creator. No, we cannot quite fathom It, but there's so much to learn
about the universe itself that we couldn't discover a tenth of it in ten lifetimes.
Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and the door shall be opened.
This isn't just about spiritual pursuits, it's about knowledge itself.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
My most dangerous idea:
Teach people to think for themselves.
Someone hates these cans.
This is for the questions that don't have any answers.
Someone hates these cans.
I'm sorry for responding to my own post, but no argument about freedom would be complete without mentioning the "war on drugs". God forbid that people actually be "allowed" to act in ways that may not be in their own best interest. Even worse, God forbid that they might be "allowed" to decide what drugs might be in their own best interest. Yeah, if not for the war on drugs "we would have so much crime and violence" .... .... .... hmmmmmmmm.
Asking your wife to hold your beer in an underground gas mine so that you can light a match to check if she looks fat.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Well, I'm really busy at the moment, but maybe I'll just check slashdot one more time, just for a quick breather... I'm sure I won't be surfing for too long and will get straight back to work as soon as I've caught up on the news...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
We are increasingly building a world where the rich are free and the poor are subjugated. People who are wealthy and well-connected can command outrageous salaries and bonuses, year after year, even with a history of failure. The middle class are herded by the media through a life of monotonous work and consumption. Poor people, trapped by limited economic mobility, are preyed upon by everyone. We have created a society which is increasingly unequal economically, and I believe this will translate into major social inequality soon. Rich people will enjoy more rights and freedoms, poor people will live in a prison without walls, and the middle class will have satellite TV.
Who is this Gottman prick? And why does he feel threatened by "emotional intelligence"?
Emotional intelligence is not a dangerous idea, merely an expression of maturity without reguard to scholarly learning, as many intellectual elitists are fucking keen on to operate without maturity whatsoever. I believe the notion behind it is that actual ethical good trumps academic research, as academic research is completely fruitless without the purpose to better the lives of the people of the world.
Let me simplify my thoughts: Who is the better man, a simpleton who emulates Ghandi based on emotional intuition, or someone who sharpens his intellect to the point of brilliance if only to raise himself in the world?
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Think about it. Everyone's pissing and moaning about the coming oil shortages, and so on, and NOBODY is thinking about how conveniently flammable alcohol is.
We have an entire Midwest full of Great Plains which are very well suited to growing grains which could produce alcohol.
It has been demonstrated that you can run a car on alcohol. Dragsters do it all the time.
It has been demonstrated that a fuel cell can generate electricity from methanol.
Alcohol doesn't poison the environment if you spill some. It burns clean if you have a darwinian-selection moment and light it up. And in a pinch, you can drink it. Try THAT with petroleum.
Well? Wouldn't an alcohol economy be easier than a hydrogen one?
Just a thought...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I was thinking of installing the latest Longhorn beta, or playing Russian roulette with an automatic - haven't decided yet.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Now, there MAY be a way to use a BEC more destructively. If you have a BEC that consists of pure deuterium, use magnetic containment to prevent the BEC from expanding back out at all, raise the temperature as close to instantaneously as possible to the point where fusion can occur...
The BEC obviously can't remain a BEC at superhigh temperatures, so must unfold to some degree. The structure is guaranteed to move to the lowest possible energy state, because that is what atomic structures do. This is part of why it would be important to raise the temperature rapidly. You want it so that there simply is no valid state with deuterium nucleii.
If deuterium is simply not an option, the nucleii will fuse. They have no alternative. Here is where it gets fun, though. If the energies are high enough and the compression great enough, you can produce elements as far up the periodic table as you like. Unlike normal particle accelerator efforts to produce super-massive atoms, these will actually last for a while - there won't be room for them to fall apart.
The difficulty in producing the correct conditions would be enormous, but if you could crack that nut, there'd be no theoretical reason why you couldn't push for a nucleus with an atomic mass of a thousand or so.
The energy to produce such a monster atom would be guaranteed much greater than ALL of the energy output by the fusion reactions. (Iron takes more energy to fuse than it gives out and we're talking something a couple of orders of magnitude larger.) Sustaining it might even be worse.
The fun part, though, will be in letting it collapse after a time. A very substantial part of the energy put into the fusion of the nucleii would be released in a matter of microseconds over an extremely small space. Current physics predicts that if you exceed a certain energy density, space will "inflate". This might cause the whole of space/time to explode, it might form a pocket universe, or it might do all sorts of other strange things. Nobody knows much about energy densities of that magnitude.
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)
Perhaps you should just mod me to minus infinity now to save society from the terror that such an outlandish notion would inflict.
It's always nice when someone new walks into a process that's been going on for hundreds of years and gets angry that no one sees his simple solution, even though that's where we started and we've been fixing the problems with it ever since.
In public education - everyone talks about what kind of education the kids need, and noone talks about the financial freedom lost in paying for it, or the very influence that such has on the kids.
They're too busy talking about the financial freedom lost when you have a work force of illiterates who can't add.
In social security and medicade/ medical care - everyones worried about how will we take care of the needy and elderly and noone talks about the people that need to be financially coerced to make these systems work.
And your constructive solution is then to let thousands and thousands of people either die or turn to crime? Step one, end social security. What's step two? Please answer. If you've got a way to make this work, please tell us. I really, really want to be on your side, because that's a lot of money.
In the genocide of the poor - noone would even dare mention that the best solution would be to arm them and seciure their right to bear arms first.
Genius! How could that possibly go bad? Combine this with your no-free-schooling idea and we've got ourselves a plan that just might solve everybody's problem.
KAI KRAUSE
"The relative innocence and stable period of the last 50 years may spiral into a nearly inevitable exposure to real chaos. What if it isn't haphazard testosterone driven riots, where they cannibalize their own neighborhood, much like in L.A. in the 80s, but someone with real insight behind that criminal energy ? What if Slashdotters start musing aloud about "Gee, the L.A. water supply is rather simplistic, isn't it?" An Open Source crime web, a Wiki for real WTO opposition ? Hacking L.A. may be a lot easier than hacking IE."
Don't Tread on Me
My ideas that are most dangerous to human life on earth are to invent the transporter, and also warp speed, or impulse spacecraft. Just one spaceship the size of Enterprise A tearing through the Earth at Warp 1 would in theory destroy the earth into a cloud of planet vapour. Transporters would be used to rob every bank devised, and kidnap world leaders. Everyone would have to have a transporter inhibitor, or you'd be kidnapped almost right away, and probably not by aliens, but by the Swords of Righteousness Brigade or their ilk in Iraq.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Just start sending emails about terrorists and oil on the Moon to your grandma. I'm sure the NSA will pass it on, and in due time the Moon will be toast.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
my dangerous idea:
the internet has replaced the encyclopedia
it is replacing want ads, real estate agents, auctions, music companies, publishers, etc.
it will someday replace government
but hold on, there's a catch:
if the internet does this, it will do it the same way it is defeating the music industry: not through any conscience effort, but just a gradual, inevitable, unfightable erosion of relevancy by little efforts made by individuals not even consciously trying to do anything coherent
in other words, if you are actively seeking to defeat government and promote anarchy/ libertarianism/ revolution, or whatever, you are way off
because you are making a conscience effort
because if and when it happens, no one will notice it starting
just like the guys who built the original arpanet in the 1960s didn't say "hey! let's build a radically superior music distribution model that cuts out the middle man and removes the economic incentive!"
except that's exactly what they did
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!
Sorry, couldn't help myself
-Brandon
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Fortunately, the USA is severely hobbled by its patent system and divided by its religious zealots...
Oh well, what the hell...
I was anticipating things that were more destructive. For example, "infecting the human race with a series of 'greedy genes' (as found in some invertebrates - instead of having a 50% chance of being passed to offspring, they cheat and get passed almost 100% of the time), which allow for a simple external cue (chemical, electromagnetic, rhythmic visual or auditory stimulation, etc) for bodily death" or "designing a gene for production of VX gas and infecting diatoms, then releasing them deep in the middle of each large body of water consecutively (Pacific, then Indian, on and on progressively smaller, thus getting a large head start on any attempt to counter the organism". Both of these become more realistic when you consider how quickly people are proceeding along the path of easy to create designer genes, and how already there is amateur genetic engineering. On the non-biological side, you could have ideas such as "Slowly moving the orbits of one or more small asteroids via an ion engine-propelled gravitational tug to impact large NEOs and thus place them onto an Earth collision path"; reduced cost to access space makes this more reasonable for a wealthy individual or moderate-sized company.
When they said "dangerous", I didn't instinctively think "socially dangerous". I thought "wiping out large numbers of species, potentially including humans"-dangerous.
"WANTED: Sinking ship seeks rats."
You are right. The only problem to this is that everyone believes in a religon. Even Atheism has no proof and therefore must be based on "belief".
I submit that religon itself is not a problem. The problem comes when people base it as a sole reason for their actions, or try to force their religous belief upon someone else. Ignorance to facts that contradict your belief are ignored, factons are formed, biases are made, and wars are started. And thus, the danger.
This isn't my idea, can't remember where I saw it.
Suppose a virus grepped your Outlook/Outlook Express address book for people's names. Then it grepped all the emails/documents/spreadsheets/whatever on all drives it could reach for those names.
Once it found a document with someone's name, it emails that document to them.
Imagine the chaos as confidential HR memos, payroll spreadsheets, legal documents, and just plain gossip are indiscriminately sent out.
As one glance at either (or both) Einstein and a person with a typical case of Down's syndrome will tell you, equal mental capacities are not uniformly available.
As one glance at either (or both) Arab women and US feminists will tell you, equal rights are not uniformly available.
As one glance at either Jeffery Dalmer (or both) and Martin Luther King will tell you, equal consideration is not uniformly available.
In summary, the very idea that "we are all created equal" is a mindless, pointless statement that speaks only to turning a blind eye to reality.
I have always thought that we should be saying that we would attempt to afford equal opportunity to our fellows at each set of choices in life, and let them make of it both what they may, and what they are capable of.
But as your premise is trivially demonstrated to be false, you should probably reformulate. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
A quick Google search will confirm that you're not the only one who's thought of burning alcohol as a fuel.
Replacing oil with alcohol would not solve our problems.
Sure, it would invest in agriculture rather than exploiting technology to find, extract and refine crude oil. But It would replace the known problems associated with enriching arab states with a history of bad civil rights, with some unknown problems related to a huge mega-farm raising a monoculture crop. Pesticides, GMO, soil depletion are issues we know would be involved, but what else is involved with monobreed farming on that scale?
There's also the problem that American bio-energy fuel production could only generate a 10th of the fuel supply that the USA currently uses - and that's only gasoline. There are lots of products we get from crude oil that we can't press out of biomass: think about plastics, asphalt, lubricants.
Then there's the issue of what we're fueling in the first place: the realized dream of cheap fuel for vehicle freedom has resulted in a transportation engineering crisis that requires moving around and storing enormous cars rather than people. That creates sprawl that eats up farmland so we can have a parking lot around WalMart and sprawling acres of land devoted to roadways, driveways and freeways to link far flung suburban housing developments and equally sprawling office parks, and the previously mentioned WalMarts. Not to mention vehicle's polluting of the the environment.
And yes you can drink alcohol, but not the 85% Ethanol/15% Gasoline mix we create for cars. It also is only about 30% cleaner than burning raw gasoline, so you might not want to light up indoors. It's also significantly more expensive, even if you ignore the farming subsidies that artificially cheapen it.
Sometimes the simplest solution is also the least well thought out.
I would suggest determining the real problems before offering a solution. A nation designed around cars instead of people is definitely part of the problem, and alternative fuel doesn't solve that particular problem at all.
It's called "fluoride," and not only does it make your tooth enamel nice and firm, but it is also a neurotoxin. It helps people become docile and consentful.
People say that fluoride is "not lethal in small doses" - of course it isn't lethal in 1 or 4 ppm, but that's not the point: it still effects you, especially as the fluoride builds up in your body over time.
Unfortunately, fluoride in drinking water (common in the United States) is only one tiny part of your daily exposure - almost any product processed with water probably contains fluoride, as well as tea.
So, because it is so pervasive, I have given up on trying to avoid fluoride... or is that the fluoride talking?
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
That's utter drivel. My cat knows the difference between being cold and wet and miserable and scared and being cuddled up before the fire in a pair of loving arms. My cat will signal her appreciation in a completely unequivocal manner by purring and loving up. Her level of appreciation is different, but it is not lacking.
Humans are simply animals. We're smarter, certainly, but there is zero evidence that we are different in any other way that makes any difference at all. Personally, I take religion (and astrology, and crystal gazing, and a bunch of other things) as evidence we're not nearly as smart as we'd like to think we are.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Here is an even more dangerous idea.
Forgo alcohol/biodiesel.
Switch to a large number of Pebble Bed Nuclear Reactors like China is doing, and use this energy to run run cars on Hydrogen or electricity.
Believe it or not, Nuclear power is actually CLEANER ounce per ounce than most other energy methods (Try comparing it to coal, for example, which is still currently used, or many other things.) However, most people are scared of it, because they dont understand it.
For those about to reply OMG! Nuclear power ZOMG!!!111!!11One!!! You should perhaps read the wikipedia article.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
The notion that people might actually become educated without the government coercing it on everyone
First of all, stop using the word "coerce." Pick up a thesaurus. Second, most parents aren't qualified to even teach fractions, which makes homeschooling on a large scale impossible, and private school is too expensive for the majority. Again, your solution isn't "radical", it's unworkable.
After all, who could ever possibly accept the notion that millions won't die unless the government coerces people to pay for retirement and health care.
Billy doesn't get his check next week, Billy doesn't eat. Shit ain't free. Solve the problem and people will be thrilled to listen to you. And no one said "millions."
I can see now, that my idea was truely too dangerous.
Fortunately your idea is perfectly harmless because there's an epidemic of partial sanity in this country that we just can't seem to cure. That's another problem you can work on while you're handing out weapons to the droves of people whose income you've just removed. I'm sure they'd be extra grateful if you could point the way to the nearest wealthy neighborhood on your way out.
Your idealism is nice, but maybe the reason "your" (in quotes because there isn't a suburban ten-year-old on the planet that hasn't come up with the same one) idea is so "radical" (another word you need to stop using) is because you refuse to adequately explain to people how your plan works. We need steps. "Freedom good" is hard to make into a law. Explain how we go from social security to no social security without social security-dependent families turning to crime, especially considering all their social security-dependent friends will suddenly be looking to fill the 30 available jobs in the area. You still haven't explained step 2. And please keep in mind that I'm making no assumptions, here. I'm just having trouble understanding how you solve the problem where if you remove that money, you're going to need to replace it somehow by providing jobs, either through pork, which saves no money but does have other benefits, or by some free-market magic, which you'll have to explain to me, both short-term ("I don't get a check anymore. I guess I will buy lunch by _____.") and long-term.
Agnosticism does not create a stance apart from atheism or theism. If you hold a belief in a god or gods, you're a theist. If you don't, you're an atheist. Agnosticism (usually) describes why the proponent doesn't hold a belief, so it's usually simply a description of the atheist stance.
There's a technical reason lying in wait as well; the theism/atheism boundry is defined by belief, or lack thereof. The stance of the self-professed agnostic is one predicated on knowledge, which actually has no bearing on the state of belief. This is why we have believers in UFOs, Phrenology, Homeopathhy, Astrology and so forth — because knowledge is not a required precursor for belief.
Belief is about faith in some degree of the unknown. Knowledge is about collecting, correlating, and developing relationships amongst instances of objective fact. Ther is no requirement whatsoever that they ever cross paths.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Our ideas may not matter much after all, as suggested by John Allen Paulos. His idea is short, sweet, and simple: we are not much more than "nominal, marginally integrated entities having convenient labels." Combine this with the anti-anthropocentric ideas of Irene Pepperberg, the pan-psychism of Rudy Rucker, and the eco-dynamics of Scott Sampson, along with the nuclear doubts raised by Jeremy Bernstein, and it all seems to make sense after all. We build thermo-nuclear devices becuase we need to help Gaia redistribute excess energy, not because we need the weapons for war. So, this dangerous idea implies no matter what our governments do with the stockpile of weapons grade plutonium, its not going to have much impact off-world.
Software freedom...I love it!
That is incorrect. Atheism is the state of being without a belief in a god or gods.
It is the polar opposite of theism — belief in a god or gods.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"Those who attacked Huxley and agnosticism tended to ignore the careful distinctions which he made, lumping agnostics in with atheists, materialists, and other "infidels." Taken in addition to the very traditional and conservative morals of the first Agnostics, who were careful to comport themselves like model middle-class Victorians, the distinctions are important to an explanation of the movement's influence. Where the atheist says that God does not exist, the agnostic says that reason can never be used to prove the existence of a being who transcends reason, and whether or not He exists, He does not intervene in human affairs, making speculation about His existence moot. We are on our own."
Oh well, what the hell...
Oh, LOL. A windows-bashing comment by an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot. How singularly unique and entertaining. I believe I'll go stick my finger in an electrical socket now to complete the experience.
No, there are certainly more dangerous ideas. (Depending on your definition of "religion", I suppose.)
I think the most dangerous is "You are always right." This idea creates sociopaths, yet it is what we are teaching our children under the guise of building their self esteem. Sure, it's almost never worded that way, but the idea is there.
Religion sometimes tells you that you are wrong, that you must change. That's a bit unpleasant. This idea does not tell you that. You are just fine as you are, because you are always right. Other people sometimes tell you that you need to change, they're just stupid and arrogant.
Religion typically puts some diety or system of ideas in control. This idea puts you in control. There is no higher power to tell you what to do, you are it. Forget laws too, except of course the ones you agree with.
With religion, some things are right and others are wrong. If you want something that the religion says is wrong, it's still wrong. Here, none of that matters. You want it, you are right to want it, therefore it is right. It doesn't matter if it was wrong yesterday. It doesn't matter if it was wrong when someone else did it. It's right now.
Some people have a hard time believing this idea, but that's ok. There is a way to ease into it if you're not comfortable. Next time you think you may be or have been wrong, rationalize it. Try to think of some way to interpret the facts that makes it, if not right, at least acceptible. Take it one step at a time and eventually you will always be right.
(And if you disagree with any of this, too bad. I am always right.)
You know very well that's not what parent is saying. He's merely pointing out a fact of history: that more people were killed in the 20th Century by atheist regimes than by any religion. Possibly more than all deaths for religious reasons in all of history, but that would be difficult to calculate for lack of data. At least 60M died under the Maoist and Stalinist regimes alone. (40M and 20M respectively, although that last in particular is a low estimate. See this. Stalin's victims may number as high as 50M.)
And the brethren went away edified.
Wow. Only a psychologist would come up with an idea like this. It's clearly a straw-man argument. The simpler version we've all heard for years: if a tree falls in the forest and noone is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer is of course it does. The weight of the tree crashing against the ground via the force of gravity sends a shockwave through the air. Whether or not a person is in range of the shockwave is completely irrelevant.
This is the highest form of hubris: it takes people/intelligence for quantifications to have meaning. Bullshit.
Take a universe exactly like ours in every respect with the very minor alteration that life never got started on earth. Well guess what? It still takes a minimum threshold of matter to condense and form a burning star. The label we've given to that threshold is nothing; a mere convienience. The real important fact is that matter *can* condense into a burning star, and it will do so even if there's no humans around to pontificate.
End rant.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
My cat knows the difference between being cold and wet...
That's not appreciating the beauty of creation, that's appreciating
being in a comfortable situation.
Humans are simply animals.
They are if they don't ask why they're here. The Qur'an even puts
it as such:
They have eyes that don't see, ears that don't hear and hearts that
don't understand. They are like animals - no they are worse than
the animals.
The reason such humans are worse is because they use our advanced
reasoning and imagining capabilities to act as animals, actually,
more like mammals: pack behavior (gangs, racism and always seeking
to be the alpha male/female) especially.
but there is zero evidence that we are different in any other way that
makes any difference at all.
Well, we use language to discuss concepts and use local experiments to
propose theorems that apply to the fabric of space-time itself.
Specifically, though, the difference is that we have a free will and,
as such, we fall under the Law of Karma while living, and, after death,
get judged for what we have done with our tremendous human abilities.
Personally, I take religion (...) as evidence we're not nearly as smart as
we'd like to think we are.
Well, the Devil has done his work well within the religions, so I agree with
you here, kinda. The fact is that all the atrocities being committed in the
name of religion can in no way be put on their founders who are long dead.
It would be more proper to call evil the result, not of stupidity, but of human
susceptibility to evil impulse. In the end though, we all choose either right
or wrong, to seek our greater purpose (to find God Himself) or to live in the
lesser purposes of the worldly life.
In any event, peace be with you.
bmac
You can keep your greed and "purity" in capitalism. I live in a world where pure capitalism doesn't work, nor does pure socialism. I'm a Canadian, and I'm happy to accept certain compromises in the areas of health care, and public education because I believe the benefits outweigh the downsides. On the other hand, I'll rag on the government for bailing out uncompetitive companies (Air Canada, for example) and creating artificial unhealthy markets. Life is compromise, and sometimes you have to trade efficiency and quality for universality and scope, and sometimes you shouldn't.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Control in a way, and I wouldn't say invented. There is strong evidence that our brains are wired for religion. In other words, religion helped early humans in some way probably by letting them explain the world around them and explaining why certain social norms should be followed. In other words it's the flip side of rationality and logic.
Now that in itself says nothing about it being required or useful in the modern day (or counterproductive). However, one of the above has been replaced with science and the other isn't required (atheists aren't all moraless bastards).
Religious fundamentalism?
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
Wow, quite a list of ideals you'd like to see fulfilled there. It's a shame nowhere in the world really manages to live up to them. No, wait, I think there is at least one.
Somalia has a free market economy with everything privatised, and no government - freedom for all. Let's see how it stacks up:
In monitary policy - everyone seems to think that other measures of inflation and growth are more important, than the freedom from controll that the gold standard offers.
Well there is no real central bank for Somalia anymore as far as I can find, and due to counterfeiting and other problems the Somali currency was so seriously debased that they may as well be using gold instead and use the gol standard.
In public education - everyone talks about what kind of education the kids need, and noone talks about the financial freedom lost in paying for it, or the very influence that such has on the kids.
All education in Somalia is private. It's a free market economy with no government. We get a big check for this one.
In social security and medicade/ medical care - everyones worried about how will we take care of the needy and elderly and noone talks about the people that need to be financially coerced to make these systems work.
There is no government so there is certainly no social security of medicare equivalent. At worst there is a certain amount of foreign aid and World Bank assistance, but I think that counts as outside charity. A big check for this one too.
In copyrights and patents - everyone talks about the poor starving inventor or creator, and noone talks about all the people that need to be coerced to make these systems of incentive work.
We're perfectly good for this one - there is no government of court system to enforce any such thing. A big check here too.
In the genocide of the poor - noone would even dare mention that the best solution would be to arm them and seciure their right to bear arms first.
Wow. That's just what Somalia is! A free for all where anyone at all can arm themselves and take part. Sounds perfect.
And from elsewhere...I'm sorry for responding to my own post, but no argument about freedom would be complete without mentioning the "war on drugs".
A big check for this one too! Somalia seems to have everything you're looking for. No government coercion, just freedom for everyone and a truly free market economy. The imminent arrival of Somalia as a significant player on the world economic stage seems inevitable given it's almost utopian society. It's been without government for 15 years now, but I'm sure Somalia will well and truly be on it's feet any year now. I expect you'll be moving there, given it's fulfillment of your radical dream, very soon, so perhaps you cna help really get the economy moving.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
*Agnosticism* is the state of being without a belief in a god or gods; *Atheism* is the state of believing in godlessness.
[quote]They're too busy talking about the financial freedom lost when you have a work force of illiterates who can't add.[/quote]
... that might be hard for someone to grasp who has been conditioned that the state is everything.
Your arguement is based on several assumptions:
1. You assume that government schools are teaching kids literacy and math. ("public" schools are churing out illiterates who can't add in record numbers. It terms of science, math, and english, are children are getting stupider as government takes a larger and larger role in their education).
2. You assume that the government is the only institution capable of providing education (When in fact, homeschooling, religious schools, private secular schools in the U.S. seem to do better that public schools in teaching math, science, and literacy... There are an infinite amount of possible education models besides the State-Run Prussian Military School model we use in the United States).
3. You ignore the terrible social effects public schools have on children (conditioning them to obedience to authority, squeltching individualism and diversity, taking away their privacy, age and skill segregation). Government schools primary purpose is social conditioning and propogandizing... Education is secondary... at least according to the founders of modern public education in America (check out http://johntaylorgatto.com/ for lots of information on the history and purposes of public education in the U.S.)
We don't all share your absolute faith in government, and government is not the only model of social cooperation that we are able to comprehend. No Government Schools != No Education
[quote]And your constructive solution is then to let thousands and thousands of people either die or turn to crime? Step one, end social security. What's step two? Please answer. If you've got a way to make this work, please tell us. I really, really want to be on your side, because that's a lot of money.[/quote]
Once again, your statement has many assumptions... A Christian says "How are you going to avoid going to hell if you don't except Christ to wash away your sins", and the statement seems common sense to them, because they have already assumed all the premises of Christianity (for example, that hell exists, that there is actually something called sin, and that Jesus can redeem sin, etc. etc.). But if a Buddist, or Taoist, or Athiest hears that sentence, it just sounds silly, because they have not accepted all the Christian assumptions on which this "common sense" is based.
Here are your assumptions:
1. You assume that Medicare is the only social structure capable of providing health care to those that need it. (In fact, there are any number of models of healthcare that we could use, if the government would allow such things... government isn't the only means of social organization).
2. You assume that Medicare somehow makes healthcare more available (instead of, say, pumping money in without increasing supply, and thus raising the price of medical care for everyone - acting as an unofficial government subsidy of big pharma, the people who pay to lobby to increase medicare).
3. You assume that Medicare is a sustainable, viable system. (Social Security, of which Medicare is a part, will no longer be financial viable when the number of people collecting benifits approaches the number of people paying into the system. This is set to happen when the baby boomers stop paying, and start collecting).
I mean, listen to the rhetoric we are using: "If we don't have Medicare, thousands and thousand will die on the street or be commiting horrible crime!" - I mean what kind of sensational reactionary statement is that? Let me do one better:
"You must all send me $10,000 - because if you don't, I will not be able to say my magical incantations, and thousands and thousands of people will be killed by angry spirits! What, you don't want to send me $10,00
Because I'm sure you're serious, I'll do you the courtesy of taking your assertions at face value, and treat them one by one.
Cats affect their environment. This is obvious and trivial. They exhibit numerous traits that we would consider to be environmentally enlightened, from burying their waste to grooming themselves to rarely killing for sport.
Cats can conserve or destroy. They make choices about this as well. For instance, my couch has been conserved. The doorjamb to the bathroom, however, has not. I think this is amusing, and the cat knows this because I take care to demonstrate it to her. From my point of view, the doorjamb is trivial and inexpensive to replace; consequently, I am delighted with the cat's choice of claw-sharpening targets.
Cats have rules/law. Drag a laser pointer across the floor. The cat will follow and play and pounce. Drag the laser pointer across another cat. The original, playful cat will proceed to ignore the laser, even if it was in the midst of crazed play with the beam. There are rules, and one of them is you don't pounce on things that are on other cats. This, interestingly, is a very good rule. Humans can be distinguished, perhaps, by the number of very bad rules we make, but not by rulemaking itself. Any tribe of monkeys has rules, as do many other types of animals, including, as I have shown, cats.
Cats have technology. They will create nests out of raw materials, they utilize knocking your crap off the dresser in order to get your attention. They understand that burial is good for anything that will reveal their presence, and anything that is dead and rotting. Other animals use sticks to fetch ants from holes, and will fashion tools from rocks and sticks. Beavers build dams. Termites build, arguably, castles.
Cats have morals. Mothers rarely eat their young. Cats rarely eat their owners, unless the owner dies. Even then, some cats cannot overcome that predjudice, though they will eat other animals.
Cats don't have religion, near as I can tell, but that's a point in their favor from where I stand, quite seriously. Cats do, however, exhibit faith. Both at the habituation level (they expect their human to come home to them again, because so far, that's what has happened) and they expect their human to take care of them, again because that's been established; and at the abstract level — once trust has been established, many wary behaviours are discarded. This occurs in cat-cat relationships and cat-human relationships, and more rarely, between cats and other species.
We do have science and science is a very complex product of advanced thinking. I don't expect science from cats for that reason. Doesn't change my point; I specifically said we differ in degree here.
Cats also experience every emotion humans do, as well as numerous behaviours and traits we like to think of as our own. They can be both selfish and generous, loving and hateful, vicious and kind, protective and defensive, careless and careful, clever and witless, and so on for quite a long list.
My position is that when we have established a level of hubris that disallows seeing that we are one of the set of animals, we have taken a step back on the very path most of us wish to tread. I recognize it's a handy mental trick when the task at hand is the consumption of a hamburger, but that makes it no more respectable.
One final point: If most humans behaved as well as my cat does, we'd be a damn sight better off. Your statement, in light of this, is ludicrous.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"Creation" is myth — or at the very least, unencountered objective fact. As such, there's no reason to appreciate it. There is reason to appreciate the portion of the universe one can wrap one's head around, and cats and people both do this.
Either we are, or we aren't. It's a question of biological objective fact, not opinion or subject to any number of philosophical angels, pins and dances.
Parrots use language - ours, in point of fact. Topically and with great humor. Cats and dogs use language as well, though they don't speak ours, they certainly understand some of it. As for what is under discussion betwen them, this is a matter of what the particular brain is specialized to do. Aside from language itself, sound processing is not something we're uniformly best at. Cats can do things like locate a sound to within 8 degrees, reliably and repeatedly. It's been useful to them to specialize this way. You and I really suck at this. We use our brains for other things, and frankly, these things would not benefit cats in the roles they have performed to date. Directivity does. That may change, what with our just beginning to get a handle on the control of DNA. Should be fun. :) In any case, mental and language superiority is not the hands-down win you seem to think it is. Then there is body language and sign language and scent language and gifting. It's almost never as simple as people would like it to be when they're trying to pretend they're really, really special. :) Oh, and I should also point out that cats experiment constantly. With how far their human's patience may be stretched, for one thing, but with many other things as well.
You think a cat doesn't have free will? Don't feed it and then tell me what you think motivated it to take a crap in your headphones one time. Or a piss in the toaster. Cat piss in a toaster is worse than mustard gas — press that level down and you've got what we call a serious situation. Classic free will is what every animal has. This one you don't even get a fraction of a point for.
I don't blame the founders for later generations of followers pillaging, raping, flying into buildings and so forth. The founders had the perfectly common motivation to control their fellows, the very same motivation any modern politician, social worker, psychobabbler or cop has; they just had more of it. The thing is, not one of them was smart enough to see that it couldn't work. That's what all religious founders have in common: They were far too optimistic about human nature. I find that pitiful, but not blameworthy. I blame individuals for their own acts. If a Christian plants a bomb, I blame the Christian. If a corporate flunky rips me off because it is company policy, I blame the flunky directly. If a tax agent takes my money for a war I don't support, I blame the tax agent directly. Being a member of an immoral structure in no way magically propogates your own responsibilities elsewhere. It is a common thing to think it does, and that is one of the key reasons society is in such trouble — many people accept this shuffling off of blame by flunkies. Which is not to say that the structure can shuffle blame downhill, either.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It's a bit like taking liquid hydrogen and exerting enough pressure on it to turn it into solid metal. The temperature technically goes up, but it can't remain liquid or convert to a gas because the volume is too small. The most stable state it can enter is a "high-temperature" solid.
In this case, what we're doing is compressing a BEC "superatom" to a temperature in which it can no longer remain a BEC, but it cannot revert to deuterium atoms either. Neither is stable, under the conditions imposed. The only alternative is for the nuclei to fuse together, because it is the only valid way left that they can reduce the space requirements to what they have.
You'd need to be a little careful, though. You don't want to leave any nuclei with no valid state, or you're going to squish the lot into a quark-gluon soup. Again, that could be nasty, as I'm not sure you can magnetically contain the gluons... which ARE going to react with the containment system.
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)
You assume that government schools are teaching kids literacy and math.
I do. I know it worked in at least one case, as I'm able to read your post. Worked in a bunch of others, too.
You assume that the government is the only institution capable of providing education
I assume it's the only institution capable of doing it on a consistent basis at tiny cost to the people that can't afford it. Unless you know of a few thousand private schools that will take kids for free, we don't have much of an alternative. Homeschooling is the only possible option for people without money, but that counts on the parents being well-educated.
You ignore the terrible social effects public schools have on children (conditioning them to obedience to authority, squeltching individualism and diversity, taking away their privacy, age and skill segregation)
Oh, good heavens!
If that's the point of school, they're really not doing as well as I thought.
We don't all share your absolute faith in government
I have virtually no faith in government. It's inefficient, bloated, and corrupt.
and government is not the only model of social cooperation that we are able to comprehend.
Good for you.
that might be hard for someone to grasp who has been conditioned that the state is everything.
Dick.
[quote]And your constructive solution is then to let thousands and thousands of people either die or turn to crime? Step one, end social security. What's step two? Please answer. If you've got a way to make this work, please tell us. I really, really want to be on your side, because that's a lot of money.[/quote]
Once again, your statement has many assumptions
I made no assumptions. I want to know what happens on the second fucking day. Please fill in the gaping holes so we can properly discuss this.
You assume that Medicare is the only social structure capable of providing health care to those that need it. (In fact, there are any number of models of healthcare that we could use,
I'm listening.
You assume that Medicare somehow makes healthcare more available (instead of, say, pumping money in without increasing supply, and thus raising the price of medical care for everyone
You've calculated this in healthcare units? ("Healthies", I like to call them.)
You're thinking economics, I'm thinking child of poor parents breaks his leg.
You assume that Medicare is a sustainable, viable system.
And, for the thousandth time, I'm waiting for the plan.
"You must all send me $10,000...
The only possible response to that is, "You're an idiot." I'm sorry, but if you can't understand that taking the small amount of survivability that people have away from them is going to have negative affects, at least in the short term, you're just not that bright.
Switzerland has the lowest violent crime rate and murder rate of any industrialized nation, and have the absolute highest private ownership of firearms in the industrialized world (basicly, nearly all able bodied men have full access to military style weapons).
All able-bodied men have access to military style weapons after 17 weeks of mandatory basic training. Let's not pretend we're all nations of soldiers. And let's not compare the US to Switzerland at all, because we're very, very different.
You need to try to convince us that gun ownership is bad, not call people stupid because they don't have absolute faith in your belief system.
I would never try to convince you that gun ownership is bad because I don't think it is. I think arming the poor to combat violence is profoundly stupid. I don't know what argument you're extending to this one, but please don't assume I meant to say bad things I didn't say.
When the word was coined, the original meaning of "agnostic" was that one admits to not _knowing_, and being intellectually honest about that, instead of saying that one knows there is (a) god, or knows there isn't. Some people of conscience cannot do otherwise than declare that they don't know, no matter what they still put their faith in.
It is right there in the word: "a-gnostic", where gnostic refers to knowledge, and agnostic refers to the lack of it.
Nowadays, "agnosticism" is often taken to mean declaring a lack of _belief_ either way - and here "belief" refers to "have faith in", not "known to be true beyond doubt". (The word "belief" is itself confusing, because different people take it to mean different things, or even the same people in different contexts, without making those differences plain).
My guess is that this change in the word "agnostic" over time makes sense as more and more people, including devout religious people and atheists, analyse their beliefs to the degree that they accept their knowledge is not absolute, but they have faith or commit to following the implications of their beliefs anyway. In a sense, the original idea "agnostic" has become more widespread, so the word isn't used for that so much now.
The upshot is that "agnostic" does _not_ mean "atheist" in another guise. Because an atheist puts his/her belief (as in motivation/faith) in "there is no god". That is different from the agnostic's belief (as in motivation/faith): "I don't know if there is god" - the latter being more intellectually honest for many people. Some agnostics put their faith in god while acknowledging they don't know if god exists. That is intellectually honest for some meanings of the word "faith", but not others. A genuine atheist would not do that.
I admit the above explanation is a little messy, because I don't define the terms very well, and it's been a while since I thought about the topic. Sorry; I'm tired. The points are valid, but not so well explained in the above. Study theories of knowledge - epistemology - to gain clearer insights into the range of meanings assigned to the terms like "belief" and "know".
-- Jamie
That's not appreciating the beauty of creation, that's appreciating
being in a comfortable situation.
Have you actually looked out of a window lately?
Your "beautiful creation" is, at it's core, nasty. Filled with pain, suffering, stupidity and pointlessness.
Anyone responsible for creating it should be given the middle finger, not worshipped.
BTW, it is no use arguing with me. Rather read what Prof. Huxley said about the matter - he invented the term: http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/guide13.html
Unfortunately, he is long gone...
Oh well, what the hell...
Right under Dawkins (yes the first name I clicked) was this guy "KAI KRAUSE"
My first thought was: what if any really smart set of people really set their mind to it...how utterly and scarily trivial it would be, to disrupt the very fabric of life, to bring society to a dead stop?
The relative innocence and stable period of the last 50 years may spiral into a nearly inevitable exposure to real chaos. What if it isn't haphazard testosterone driven riots, where they cannibalize their own neighborhood, much like in L.A. in the 80s, but someone with real insight behind that criminal energy ? What if Slashdotters start musing aloud about "Gee, the L.A. water supply is rather simplistic, isn't it?" An Open Source crime web, a Wiki for real WTO opposition ? Hacking L.A. may be a lot easier than hacking IE.
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
If a create a worm, then I'm responsible for the damage it causes.
God created the devil, therefore he's responsible for the damage he causes.
Therefore God is evil. QED
"It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons." - DNA
Everything since then is downhill.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Although interesting, the survey was slightly screwed up by lack of clarity of in the question. Some interpreted it as asking for something false which other people believe to be true, others as something true which other people believe to be false. (Thus both "there is a God" and "there is not a God" were posited as dangerous ideas by non-believers.)
A more interesting interpretation is an idea you _hope_ is false but are afraid might be true. I would suggest the following as a dangerous idea: the benefits of liberal democracy are wholly dependent on the immoral economic exploitation of the third world and the unsustainable exploitation of limited planetary resources.
I certainly hope it's false. I would like to believe that the prosperity of the West could be exported to the rest of the world and we could all live happily ever after. But I have this nagging, nasty fear that it's all a short-lived dream based on turning a blind-eye to ruthless economic imperialism and the laws of science.
The fundies demanding special treatment for human beings in these posts have obviously never closely observed another reasonably advanced mammalian species. Our spaniel has a well developed sense of right and wrong and you can easily see the debate ranging in his little mind as he wonders whether he can or should do something he is not allowed to do but wants to. In a small compass he displays much of the typical human behaviour - you can see the roots of religion, society and inquisitiveness.
Unfortunately there is a sequence of ideas here with an evil end. "Mere animals" - "humans who aren't like me so are mere animals" - "it's OK to kill people who aren't like me because they are just animals." You find this thinking wherever you find fundamentalist Semitic religions (mainly Christianity and Islam- this is nothing to do with being Jewish), whereas many Eastern religions are less likely to suffer from this anthroposupremacist error.
Pining for the fjords
I know that Dawkins sometimes plays the shock jock, but his own response to the question is indeed dangerous. It is a fantastically dangerous concept to believe that we are simply the sum of our parts. If a person does not function correctly (as measured by some powerful external social construct), then that person must be repaired. It strikes at the heart of the Holocaust, in which it was supposedly determined that a whole population was broken (and Dr. Dawkins is not so far off the mark, as he views religion of any sort as a mental virus) and the only practical solution was extermination. Dawkins' response fails to take into consideration any respect for individual human beings, hobbled or otherwise.
Just another bit of proof that scientists generally suck at philosophy.
The trouble is that the solution people offer to inequity is usually what caused the problem in the first place.
ok so let me guess... it's government, right! the old 'drown it in the bathtub' boogeyman. distribution of equity is _definitely_ the governments fault. bad government! bad! we surely shouldn't blame generation after generation of capital holders bleeding the GDP of the nation and gaining a greater and greater percentage of total wealth that has left the expanding population with less and less to go around, how should we?.
in the 70's wages was 70% of received GDP... now it's under %50. less money is being paid to more people while rich individuals and corporations further consolidate (and don't spend!) their wealth. governments, in general, spend in ways to reduce this inequality - e.g. social security. i can say that private capitalists are rapacious misers, and that eric raymond is a racist gun nut; and in the end me calling people names is just as childish as you crying tinfoil tears at the government.
hey, who needs causality! I can say 'dogs + chili = economics' but trying to pass it off as cause+effect is nonsense. at the very least, how about some evidential proof of a correlation?
the idea of the state (should be) to foster administration of the wider community for the good of all. the state should be as decentralized as possible; local community leaders should be invested with as much power as possible to determine their own affairs and the (incredibly difficult) job of prioritising the allocation of monies should be determined by a safeguarded, corruption-resistant regime - we call it the beauracracy. most public servants i have met are stout personalities with a sense of due diligence, fairness and social responsibilty. and yes the rest were slackers but the rate has been signicantly less than my experience in prviate organisations, where the majority (more name-calling) are greedy, self-centred ingrates.
If you truly want equality, then you would support decentralization of power, and the reduction and/or elimination of the state. Inequality comes from violence...
decentralization of power=decentralized state. you know, city councils, first responders, utility managers; those awful people who do nothing for us. how about your local social security office, rape crisis centre, orphanage, school. we surely don't need any of _those_ now do we. and we surely shouldn't have rigid protections and assurances of these services via.. wait for it... _government_, now should we?
further decentralization comes from _expansion_ of the state; tribal/cultural leaders, church deacons, scout troops, little leaguers, big sister/brother etc. funding these and similar programs in order to foster them in communities which lack them will give more and more power to _local_ people to make a positive change in their _local_ communities.
and yes it costs more in taxes - so what? is it better that bill gates pays less tax so he can buy him and ballmer a double-headed dildo made of interleaved gold? or is it better that the money raised be given to social workers to help disadvantaged kids and battered women escape their nightmare existences?
oh no! I'm in america! i'm super rich in comparision to everyone in the world! even my poor, poor neighbor earns more than an african villiage! i have unlimited opportunities thanks to my business leaders raping and pillaging the natural resources and labour of poor peoples around the globe! and oh my god i have the lowest income tax rates in the OECD! how _dare_ they take my money from me! they are a wasteful, wasteful, evil beauracracy! excuse me while i drive my three ton truck to the woods so i can shoot near-extinct animals with my lovingly oiled fantasy
Then if your child, that you helped create, is under 18 and murders someone...you should get life in prison (or the death penalty). (Not that that's necessarily a bad idea. I'd imagine that parents would take a LOT more interest in actually raising their children if laws like that were in effect.) ;)
1 is the square root of all evil.
A democracy where the people get to vote on every decision.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
I'll be impressed when I meet a cat that appreciates quantum physics...
By almost any available metric equality simply does not exist. Any reasonably apt person has looked at the standard distribution of intelligence and the mathematically certainty has hit them; 'average is pretty stupid, and half the population has to be less'. Countless other examples exist, including the golden calves of race and gender. These thoughts have been used and abused throughout all history. People react in differing ways, some want to crush those 'beneath them', others want to ignore it and embrace everyone as 'one'.
A thought that weighed heavily on Shakespeare's mind, among many others, were the things that are universal, the things that do bind us as equals. Life and death.
Choice! Aye there is the rub. We do not choose the manner of our birth nor (for the most part) our death. I think it was Adam Johnson who first linked this concept with that of equality. The analogy of birth was taking all the characteristics of humanity; our personality, our physicality, our experiences, our potential and our opportunities and putting them in a opaque bag which, once shuffled, would be redistributed at birth. With this is mind, now design a society, a government, an economy and a culture around this limitation. With this in mind, design how you would wish to live and what kind of world you would want passed on to your descendants.
This is the only way I have been able to retain my sanity and hold the apparently mutually exclusive concepts of 'there is no equality' and 'striving for equality is noble' as both true.
And I applaud this article, because I have long believed that the most dangerous of all things is thought.
>That's utter drivel. My cat knows the difference between being cold and wet and miserable and scared and being cuddled up before the fire in a pair of loving arms.
On the other hand, I can appreciate the beauty of a snowbank in -40 degrees celsius weather. The cat could not possibly care any less, and would far rather be inside.
>My cat will signal her appreciation in a completely unequivocal manner by purring and loving up. Her level of appreciation is different, but it is not lacking.
True, but, I think it is quite significant that the cat is happy in a purely physical way. I can be happy when I am warm, well fed, and not thirsty. But I can also be happy even if I'm colder than I'd like, hungrier than I'd like, and thirstier than I'd like.
>Humans are simply animals. We're smarter, certainly, but there is zero evidence that we are different in any other way that makes any difference at all.
Which is why we're here discussing this on the internet, and not sniffing each other's butts and picking lice out of our hair. Because we're not any different from the rest of the animals, who also have worldwide computer networks and use them to talk to animals on the other side of the world whom they have never perceived in any way besides the imagination and cognitave communication (i.e. no physical senses, you have to use your brain to communicate since reading and writing are required).
Do animals have imagination?
Do animals have an appreciation for anything which doesn't physically affect them (make them feel good)?
I think there's ample evidence of humans being far superior to animals. You're just not looking at it.
Early bird may get the worm.. but the second mouse gets the cheese.
"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."
- Albert Einstein
Actually, if you give one man all of the power, you have complete and exact political equality with one outlier, which can be rejected as statistically irrelevant. Do I win? Do I get a cookie?
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"
--From Hamlet (II, ii, 115-117ish)
Most of the people who are, or will argue with you will likely cite art, and the appreciation of abstract beauty in their proofs. For me, I'd include those, and also that it is what I want to believe.
Why are you attached to the idea of setting us so low?
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
Christianity
Opponents can tell me to RTFA, since I only got as far as page 6, but a lot of what I saw were comments about science overcoming our current social norms. Well, most of those norms (in this country, anyway) are based loosely on Christian beliefs, so (regardless of the writers' actual beliefs) the opinions are generally anti-Christian as well (see the one about marriage for a particularly inflammatory example). I'll admit, there are few, if any, examples of authors coming right out and saying Christianity is bad or wrong, but the undercurrent does seem to be there.
What's funny to me is that this article seems to support my theory that 'smart' people (I leave it up to /.ers to figure out what I mean by that) tend to subscribe less to religion in general and Christianity in particular than Average Joe.
So, picture this. The Book of Revelations is coming true. The Apocalypse is occurring. And all of us are standing around with that 'oh s**t' look on our faces while a small minority of the population (whose average IQ is about 80, perhaps?) start floating away to a bright light on the horizon.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
"well known"? To who?
Sorry but you simply don't understand the meaning of the word. Theist believes in God. Atheist believes there is no God. Agnostic does not KNOW if there is a God. Notice the agnostic definition is about knowledge NOT belief.
To Muslims, Christians were considered "infidels" ie those without faith. If you do not believe in Allah, then some may consider you to be an atheist by your definition. Is this the definition you want? Or perhaps you should consider that the opposite of an idea is not its set complement. The opposite of White is Black, not non-white ... you don't say that light grey is the opposite of White do you?
Bitter and proud of it.
The expression "All men are created equal" comes from the 1st article of the French "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen", now the basis for the Universal Human Rights Declaration:
"Tous les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et egaux en droits."
"All men are born and remain free and equal in rights."
The sentence is to be understood in the context of the French Revolution, as a rejection of the concept of hereditary aristocracy.
Thomas-
The trouble is that the solution people offer to inequity is usually what caused the problem in the first place.
No, there is inequity because that is because people are different.
Government equals power. Remove any official government and all you end up with is the powerful people as government.
Government is a social technology that works. If it didn't, we would not have had it for 6000+ years. If it didn't work you would not notice it evolving, changing to better suit peoples need. More evolution still needs to happen but regressing to a single cell organism while a nice notion isn't going to solve any problems.
Government has gotten bigger over the last 6000 years, not smaller. One perspective of a democratic ideal would be for EVERYONE to be government, which i suppose from one perspective would count as completely decentralized.
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
There was a great racist theory going around for a long time, that sounded remarkably like what you've described above. We didn't understand the language of the African persons, or Indian persons, and as such there was no evidence they were having deep reflective thoughts. And without deep reflective thoughts, they aren't human. (Of course, many African tribes thought the same about the white people. Many still do, basically correctly).
Because we didn't understand their language, we wrote them off completely as being outside the sphere of "us" and undeserving of protection.
Now we're in a similar position with many animals. We know chimpanzees exhibit behaviors consistent with emotions like love, respect, disappointment, devotion, etc. We've seen elephants exhibit behaviors that look like religious ceremonies, and who hold grave sites in high reverence. Heck, I've seen an eel that was so emotionally distraught over it's partner being thrown out of the water to her death during an earthquake that a week later he threw himself to his death too. We've all known household pets that show jealousy and passive-agressive tendencies in no uncertain terms.
How does the argument, then, that these animals have no emotions, and therefore no "soul" still hold water? Because we don't understand their language. We know they have one. Dolphins and Whales are the most obvious examples of mammals with the capability for complex language, but chimps, cats, dogs, birds... basically every animal that we've really spent time studying has shown such capacity, many of which clearly exhibit that capacity in the wild. And if you include gestural languages, the amount of communication going on in the animal kingdom goes up tremendously.
We also know they have higher cognition. They can extrapolate from past experience, they can make predictions about the future based upon incomplete knowledge, they can solve basically all of the puzzles we put in front of them. There is the famous example of the bird that reasoned out the concept of zero on it's own. A bird, mind you, not a chimp or a dolphin. If you've ever seen a raccoon try to reason its way through all of the pitfalls between it and the garbage you're trying to keep from it, you'll see intelligence in action. And again, mathematics, logic, and other abstract functions are not at all beyond most animals.
So yes, the moral of the story is that we don't speak Swahili, we don't know exactly what the black people are saying, but we know they're saying something and what they're doing seems consistent with what we would do so it is reasonable to inferr that we're not fundamentally different.
The ______ Agenda
Measured in bang per character, that has to be the best troll ever, whether you meant it that way or not.
That's clever reasoning, but the dictionary disagrees with you:
atheist: one who believes that there is no deity
agnostic: one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/atheist
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/agnostic
I'm not sure if I would describe cat religion as Secular Felinism or the simple belief that if one is a cat, one is a god. Does it count as polytheism if multiple cats believe that they are each the one and only True God?
Dogs, of course, clearly do have religion.
Basically correctly? Surely you don't agree with them that white people aren't human?
If atheism is a [belief], then not collecting stamps is a hobby.
/repost
//still works
///still true ;P
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Someone call the RIAA. Jefferson clearly stole Mason's lyrics without having obtained the proper copyrights.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
How about these variations. Strong Agnosticism The view that the existence (or not) of a supernatural God (or gods) is not something that can be classified as knowledge. By this definition, a person can simultaneously be a strong agnostic and a theist (or atheist) if he believes that no kind of evidence justifies belief in the existence or nonexistence of God, but chooses believe that God exists (or not) anyhow as a matter of faith or principle. Weak Agnosticism The weak agnostic does not take a position on whether the existence of God is a possible subject of knowledge, but merely asserts that he is not aware of any evidence that justifies belief one way or the other. A weak agnostic could also be a theist or atheist, but will typically hold the position only tentatively on the basis that a proof one way or the other may show up eventually. Non-Agnostic ("Gnostic" not used because it is associated with an early quasi-Christian sect.) Someone who is not agnostic takes the position that there exists an acceptable proof either for or against the existence of God or gods. We might further categorise this as "weak" (the belief that such proof is possible in principle) or "strong" (the assertion that a specific argument constitutes valid proof). Strong Atheism A strict denial of all god-like entities. A bold assertion that no such thing exists. Weak Atheism Scepticism with regard to the proposition that there exists a God or god-like entities in general. Weak atheists feel that the non-existence of godlike beings is more likely to be true than the alternative, but aren't certain about it. Weak Theism Scepticism with regard to the proposition that no godlike beings exist. Symmetric opposite of weak atheism. Weak theists suspect that there is some kind of supernatural God, but lack assurance as to detail. Strong Theism A bold assertion that a specific God or gods exist. Also covers "deism", which is the position that God exists, but is disinterested and/or impersonal. If there is a genuinely neutral position between the weak forms of theism and atheism, I'm neither familiar with its name, nor sure how such a person would behave (although "erratically" springs to mind).
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
You're missing the point. Stalin was an atheist, yes, but that's not the reason he exterminated so many people (including members of his own party, atheists alike). The reason is that he was a nutcase, pure and simple. Same with Mao. On the other hand, the Catholic Church killed thousands of people because they weren't Catholic. (Of course, when the Protestants were in power, they returned the favor.)
Bottom line: Stalin's atheism had nothing at all to do with his murderous tendencies - his mental state did.
As a former religion major, I've got to jump in here. I have yet to see a good definition of an agnostic on Slashdot, so I'll clarify.
Agnostics believe that it is logically impossible to understand God (or the Divine, or Reality, or whatever you want to call it). The argument goes like this:
GIVEN:
1. God is inifite.
Stop right there. As soon you assert that anything has infinite being, that is the last thing you can say about it. Anything else you say about it becomes a limiting factor on the infinite. ("God is male", "God has will", "God wants"...all have counters based on our first assertion.) This is actually the first thing they teach you in Philosophy of Religion, which is why I ultimately decided the entire field was mental masturabtion. (Really. They assert God is infinite, and then refuse to discuss it. The pointlessness of it is staggering.)
Communism (as promoted by Marx and misimplemented by the Russian and Chinese dictatorships) may repudiate the concept of a divine creator, but it's chock full of beliefs that are logically indefensible. Marx believed that there was a mystical inevitability to his worldview, and that whatever he did to promote Marxism would only speed history towards its final destination (Communism, the withering away of the State, etc.), rather than actually changing its course. Marxism also claims to have as its basis some of the weirdist pseudophysics you'll find this side of Scientology.
I don't blame "religion" for all the deaths attributed to it by many of its critics, either. Religion is just one of the many "big ideas" that people use to convince others to devalue other people. But the point is, Communism and religion both make bold claims about the world and about their claims on your heart and mind, then demand that these bold claims be believed without proof.
So from where I stand, as a person who likes to call himself a "freethinker", those murderous Communist regimes have much more in common with religious doctrines than with the philosophies that guide my actions.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Like 99.9% of slashdot's denizens, you've equated religion with a small subset of religion (although hopefully you are not also equating religion with fundamentist Xianity, or making the even worse mistake of redefining the nature of religion to suit American cultural biases).
Talk to a non-murtipujak Jain, or a Zen Bhuddist, or a Unitarian Universalist. Belief in deity is not required in any of those religions. Although belief in coffee is generally a UU requirement.
...here the Libertarians have it nailed down: My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins, barring extennuating circumstances residing entirely outside of the act itself.
The Libertarians have it wrong. Swinging your fists around within inches of my nose is an act of agression. I have no way of telling whether you are just posturing or whether you intend to hurt me until after you have hurt me. Therefore, as soon as you start swinging fists close to my face my rights are violated because I have to drop everything I am doing and pay full attention in order to make certain that I don't get hurt in case I move unexpectedly or you decide to go from posturing to fighting.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
So when Jesus said "I am the way, the truth, and the life" and told us to rid ourselves of our worldly possessions, he just wanted control???
Did Jesus write the bible? Or did someone do so 100-200 years after the fact.
I tend to view Christianity like the Cathars (the people the pope declared as heretics in the middle aages and exterminated), "Jesus is cool and all but the bible and the church is fallable because it has been touched by the hand of man."
It is just as easy for a man to twist the bible and the name Jesus in order to do bad things as it is for one to create good. For your example, I could see a type of leadership using this quote in order to strip the food and land of peasants in order for the greater good of the state leaving them to starve. One must be ever aware of this fact and be able to search for the truth by other means than litteral interpetation.
Otherwise one fails in what Jesus was really trying to teach.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
It is you who seem to be confused. For example:
"animal moral behaviours do not "closely resemble" our own except for an extraordinarily broad interpretation of "closely resemble". Animals do not have organ-transplants to have morals about whether the family of the donor should have to assent, they do not have courts to have moral beliefs about whether they should present false evidence in them, they do not have abortions to debate how close to term the foetus has to be before it has the same rights as its mother, etc etc."
The above are all examples of ethics, not morals. A moral is "it is wrong to kill another person"; whether an unborn foetus counts as a person (and indeed at what stage of development such "person-ness" appears) is an ethical matter. Morals cover broad issues, ethics are an attempt to reconcile morals with situations where the moral in and of itself cannot be unambiguously applied. We thus have a number of situations where certain types of behaviour cannot be shown to be immoral, but are considered to be unethical.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
Free people from a giant, violent, centralized authority like a government, and equality, prosperity, and peace are the natural result.
Not necessarily. Instead, you get many competing violent authorities who pile up a lot of bodies fulfilling the natural human desires to get higher in the pecking order until peace is established by one of them becoming the single giant, centralized authority.
Of course, this is technically a straw man argument about anarchy since you haven't truly argued for statelessness, but constant references to violence in minarchist arguments tend to lead one to the natural assumption that you are arguing against any sort of government violence against the people instead of just the law standing behind the tax collectors.
In a minarchist's perfect world, government only exists to keep men from pursuing direct violence against one another and from misappropriating legally owned private property. This world in and of itself does not guarantee utopia. It all rests on one assumption which you voice right here:
Inequality comes from violence... it comes from situations where people are not allowed to make decisions for themselves and instead are forced to do something under the threat of violence.
Not always. Sometimes people are forced to do things to avoid starvation or lesser problems. The only reason we have a market for menial labor is because it is the only way that uneducated people can feed and clothes themselves and their children. You need to read "Nickled and Dimed" to see how desperate the situation is for the working majority of poor people. There honestly isn't a lot of freedom when you don't have enough money to put down the first month's rent for an apartment and have to instead take the more expensive and less secure option of renting week-to-week at a motel. You can't take time off from work to go to the doctor (even if you could afford it) because you wouldn't earn enough money to feed yourself. You won't tell a cruel boss to shove it and go look for a new job because you don't have the money to survive multiple weeks of unemployment. You can't afford to take time off to retrain and get better skills because you;re working 11-15 hours a day on multiple jobs.
These people already are economically subjugated but not by government. They're subjugated by a largely distributed private sector instead of a centralized government. They don't have opportunities because opportunity requires the ability to have a period of self-sufficiency and free time that aren't available to people in their economic state. Without government or enough private charity funding (which would probably indicate enough of a public sentiment to have government handle it), these people would have no future. If you took away public education, social security, and medicare & medicaid, they wouldn't received back nearly enough taxes to make up the difference to pay for these essential services themselves. Without labor laws, unemployment laws, the minimum wage (which has already atrophied almost to the point of uselessness thanks to inflation), these people would be little more than slaves with the ability to choose their master.
It doesn't take violence to grind away a person's spirit and to make them a slave. The callous apathy of society at large and financial desperation are more than enough. I remember from History what the so-called "Gilded Age" was like, and I personally don't want to see a return of those days when the only law of business was that of the contract and the life of labor was cheap and expendable.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
If you swing your fist towards my face, there is two possibilities. Either you are posturing, or you are trying to hurt me. It is in my best interests to assume the latter, since assuming the former and being wrong will lead to serious injury to me, and act accordingly: dodge and counterattack. This means that threats have the same potential to cause fights as actual attacks, and need to be controlled for the same reason: to prevent people living in close quarters from killing each other.
Furthermore, my personal space extends beyond my skin; the second your fist entered that region of space, you violated my claim to it. If I have a reason to assume that you did so with hostile intention, such as you swinging your fists at me, I have a good reason to assume that you're trying to start a fight, and that I need to defend myself. This should be understandable even to a libertarian, with their obsession on property.
Misbehaving in traffick has a very real chance of causing an accident and getting someone killed. Endangering the lives of others is most certainly a violation of their rights.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.