Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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?
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.