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Geocentrists Convene To Discuss How Galileo Was Wrong
rollcall writes "'Galileo Was Wrong' is an inaugural conference to discuss the 'detailed and comprehensive treatment of the scientific evidence supporting Geocentrism, the academic belief that the Earth is immobile in the center of the universe.' The geocentrists argue that 'Scientific evidence available to us within the last 100 years that was not available during Galileo's confrontation shows that the [Catholic] Church's position on the immobility of the Earth is not only scientifically supportable, but it is the most stable model of the universe and the one which best answers all the evidence we see in the cosmos.' I, like many of you, am scratching my head wondering how people still think this way. Unfortunately, there is still a significant minority of Western people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe: 18% of Americans, 16% of Germans, and 19% of Britons."
I hope there is live blogging from the conference.
Ah, but they do cluster, and vote, and then take over boards of education.
Actually, it just takes one of the nutters in your kid's district to bring education to a stand-still. Our local school official policy, luckily, is that you can contest a book, but the teacher can go on using it until the process has completed. And they've got librarians in at every step of the way. Don't mess with librarians.
Your anger is misdirected completely. These are merely things that we've (humans) have written over the years, regardless of motives. Such a record should be studied. Such a record reveals what humans were over a long period of time. It's a good window into our own psychology. It's how the powers that were decided that history should look like. It's really quite fascinating. Enough with the fear mongering, as basically, you sound just as fanatical and arrogant as the people you're trying to describe.
If you gave me a survey with questions like that, I'd claim to be a Republican and tell them I thought Obama was a kenyan muslim who worshiped Stalin and wanted to make America a sharia-communist country. Especially if they conducted it over the phone and irritated me. What people believe and what they claim on surveys are entirely different things.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
--- A. C. Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
Have you ever gone door to door in a rural environment and met people? Seriously, you select your friends, your friends select you, your family members were raised by the same people, there's a lot of bias going on.
Fair enough, but then I don't see why atheism (as practiced in OT discussions on countless bulletin boards, if you prefer) shouldn't qualify as a "religion" as well.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Atheism isn't a religion, in the same sense theism isn't a religion.
Correct.
But just as it's obviously impossible to find a theist who does not in fact have a religion, I think it's not possible to find anyone who is "only" an atheist.
Once again - correct. How do you get from that, to calling atheism a religion?
That communists aren't "only" atheists are obvious to all - except communists themselves, a rather important exception.
I'd say it's obvious to communists, also.
There were several problems with soviet-style "atheism":
1. You cannot legislate belief. You can persecute people, the way most religions have done to eachother for thousands of years, and you can get those whom you're persecuting to say that they now believe what you believe, but you can't actually make someone believe something by threatening or harming them.
2. Atheism without religion is meaningless. Every child is born an atheist, but there's a massive difference between the atheism of a newborn, and the atheism of, say, Richard Dawkins. Atheism based on ignorance is no better than religion.
So you would deny yourself the vote as you think it is in another man's best interest to implement this new law you think is in his best interest?
Anarchists never rule
I'd have to agree. Atheism doesn't have to be a religion, but when some people start a new thread on 4-Chan asking for quote wallpapers, ten times in a row, and whichever anonymous poster begins each thread always starts it off with a pro-atheist/anti religious quote, and not a quote about anything else, and they say that the only meaningful quotes about anything are about how bad religion is, that's the actions of religious fanatics. If your point of view has numerous religious fanatics who claim to speak for everyone else, it becomes a religion. If you don't distance yourself from the nutters because they claim to be part of your group, then it becomes your religion.
That said, I'm a Zen Gnostic Episcopalian myself. I want to distance myself right now from the WBC, the people who don't want a mosque within 2,000 miles of ground zero, and really, anyone who thinks God wants you to hate for Him. I can logically prove Jesus is superhuman*, and have a separate proof for Apollo's existence**. The rest, I'm not sure about.
*OK, here goes: Jesus' teachings were perverted to support the crusades, the inquisition, and the witch trials. The earliest of these happened about 1,000 years after Jesus was executed. Darwin's teachings were perverted to support the Eugenics movements and Naziism. The earliest of these took only about 40 years after Darwin's publication of his first book to become life destroying monstrosities. It's 39 years from Einstein's first relevant publication to the A-Bomb, and about 43 to the cold war. Ergo, Jesus was roughly 25 times better than some of the very smartest humans we know at avoiding his work being perverted into something loathsome by stupider humans. That's superhuman, although in a somewhat limited sense.
(OK, if you accept that orthodox Christians destroyed the library at Alexandria and killed its head, we can reduce the ratio to roughly 300 years to 40, so Jesus would only be about 8x an incredibly smart human, not 25. Alternately, is it fair to blame anybody for how other people, years after their death, interpret their sayings or writings?).
** The Delphic Oracle guided Greek civilization for at least 500 years. The job was filled by a series of 12 to 15 year old girls, who got blind frackin' stoned day in and day out breathing the fumes they found in a cave. We're talking stoned Emo chicks of the sort who write bad poetry, and obviously, ones who thought nobody understood them, as they kept a host of translators around just to interpret their cryptic utterances. (In fact, this is where cryptic utterances originated). They also played with snakes by some accounts. Everyone believed these immature, spaced-out bints when they claimed to speak for Apollo, and followed their advice. Instead of this promoting one ultimate level massive clusterfrack, it led to an era generally considered surprisingly peaceful and enlightened, and the foundations of what became modern democratic government, formal logic and science. Ergo, Apollo at least was real at that time, because that's an obvious incredible major miracle on a par with everyone on all sides agreeing with the US plan for peace in the Middle East. (Thanks to Alan Moore for this one) .
Who is John Cabal?
Try looking at General Relativity a bit more closely. Results are the same either way.
You are mistaken. Translation is relative, but rotation is not. Rotation us absolute and measurable.
There is for example the Sagnac effect used in some inertial navigation systems. A laser is placed in a ring with light circling in both directions. The laser will lock on a reinforcing frequency where the light takes an integer number of wavelengths around the ring. After making a loop around the ring there is constructive interference as the standing wave overlaps itself. The light going around in both directions will have the same frequency and wavelength. Now lets give the ring some rotation. The light going around in opposite directions need to cover different distances around the ring to return to the laser which that has advanced during the that time. The wavelength of the light in one direction must increase and the wavelength of the light in the other direction must decrease in order to maintain the integer-number-of-wavelengths constructive interference.
If the ring is not rotating then the light going in the two directions locks at the identical frequency. If the ring is rotating then there will be a difference between the two frequencies, and that difference is exactly proportional to the rate of rotation.
This is not merely theoretical, it is the actual foundation of existing navigation systems.
Rotating reference frames are currently a bit of a mess in General Relativity. There isn't a single well defined way to define simultaneous time across a rotating disk, leaving no single well defined measure of length either. If you Google relativity rotating frames the top result is a $360 book on the multitude of often contradictory models attempting to define rotating reference frames in General Relativity.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The problem is that for all the good religious institutions have collectively done for science, they have done at least as much bad. It would be reasonable to argue that without religion's involvement, mankind would be more intellectually and scientifically advanced today. And I'm not counting the work of individual scientists who happened to be religious as contributions from religion, as they could have done the same work if they were atheists (and maybe could have done more work if religious institutions weren't causing them trouble - Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin immediately come to mind).
And what about religion's general negative effects on science? "Oh no need to investigate that, god did it!" "Why do you question this, is your faith weak?" "Man shouldn't play god!" are all lines we still hear today, and in the western world theists are a lot less fundamentalist than they were in the past.
For at least the last 200 years religion has only been yanking the brakes on the science train, so for today it would be safe to say that with religious authority out of the picture, intellectual advancement would flourish.
Another poster further down argues that it's just idiots who happen to be religious that stifle science. I agree that many stupid people would be anti-scientific with or without religion, but religion's ability to organize and support people with such viewpoints (and even encourage these views in some cases) can't be ignored. In a world without religion, if all the anti-scientific idiots formed The Organization for the Abolition of Scientific Thought (TOAST), they'd be no more powerful than any other similarly-sized think tank of idiots. But in the real world if the pope says investigation into the origin of the universe is an attack on their religion and their deity's authority, this is much more powerful.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Erm, if there was no religion, there would be no need to hide some selected intellectual works in monasteries.
If there was no religion the Library of Alexandria would still be standing.
The poor understanding of history is on your side. We know a lot about what kind of works were lost during the dark ages from the references to the documents that don't exist anymore. We know that there were works in which scholars argued that stars are like the sun, but very far away. We know that there were other Homeric books around. We know of the lost works of Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, Aristophanes and many more. You can read the handful of their works that survived - and they are works of genius - and wonder how much brilliance was lost.
The dark ages we are talking about are not to be praised by how works were preserved, but condemned for how many books were lost and destroyed. Go read your Name of the Rose again because that is the true picture of the ages.
On a side note, you're mixing up two different parts of the Middle Ages. The first part of it, the High Period, was actually more liberal both in religion, sexual behaviour, and generally more tolerant towards different cultures. The Augustinian movements, like other misogynistic and other radical positions weren't taken so seriously. The Decameron, which was written in Italy during that period, could be considered Pornographic by today standards and yet was freely available for public consumption. Our collective imagination of such period has been actually created during the beginning of the Low Period, which roughly starts some year after the end of Italian Renaissance.
After the economical collapse of the previous liberal Principalities in continental Europe, due to the side effects of Black Death and the inability to cope with the growing economical power of Spain coming the recently discovered American continent, the most extremist religious positions filled such power vacuum : On a side we got the Protestantism, that tried to recover and "stiffen" most of the theological and religious position of that period, and the other side we got the Council of Trent, which was most interested in recovering the political and cultural relevance of the Catholic Church. They basically rewrote parts of history and used for this the most violent and radical groups, like the Inquisition, which till the 16th century was quite limited in his powers. Most of our opinion regarding the Dark Ages originated then. (And, as you can see, we don't need to wait for a war with Eurasia to observe the phenomenons about control and language illustrated by G. Orwell in 1984. In a sense, the Low period of the Middle Ages could be considered the first post-apocalyptic society ever).
Galileo operated right after their rise in power. Most of the church couldn't care less about the factual truth behind Galileo positions, they were just interested in maintaining an absolute, even if formal, power.
TL;DR: there isn't actually any contradiction between the way the Church operated, we're speaking about really different time periods, and in a sense a totally different organization.
Oh, and when the economy collapses and the turmoil becomes apparent, the extremists take the power. Which reminds me of something relevant in today politics.