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Creationists Manipulating Search Results
reallocate writes: It looks like some Creationists are manipulating search results to ensure websites pushing religion are appearing in response to queries about science. Ask Google "What happened to the dinosaurs?" and you'll see links to Creationist sites right at the top. (And, right now, several hits to sites taking note of it.) Google has a feedback link waiting for you to use it.
The answer is that they're still here, SEO-ing the search results.
Dinosaurs, the ones related to lizards, can be traced through the fossil record to a number of extinction events.
Dinosaurs, the ones related to creationism, can be traced through the search results to the pages they've tweaked for rankings.
you'll see wackadoos talking about how carbon dioxide is not to blame for global warming!!
"Everyone trying to manipulate search results"
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Don't worry, subby was doing the same thing.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
The actual article seems to only say that one web site, titled "What really happened to the dinosaurs", appears in response to one particular search query, "What happened to the dinosaurs".
That's annoying and stupid... but it's not the same as the hyped headline "creationists manipulating results."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Maybe the anti-creationist, anti-Christian witch hunters set this bogus thing up, just to have an excuse to go after the Christians. Something looks bogus, but I'm nowhere near convinced that some church is responsible for it.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I'm sure every ideologue out there wanting to brand their dogmatic bullshit as truth is doing the same thing.
That what it seems to be from TFS:
Ask Google "What happened to the dinosaurs?" and you'll see links to Creationist sites right at the top."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Look into the website growth by the cult of Scientology when they first got wind of how many people could find the inner secrets of the galactic emperor, Xenu, and how all our sickness and bad thoughts are the re-incarneted "thetans" slaughtered by Xenu.
I talked to their webmaster, Jurian Massena, when he left the cult. Jurian and his colleagues made www.scientology.org so big to flood the search engines that it crashed Google databases.
Their zeal to push their bullshit in a vain attempt to still appear relevant. Kinda like dinosaurs in a tar pit... how fitting.
Maybe someone should tell them that nobody outside the US even remotely takes that "controversy" serious? I do not know a single politician outside the US who would think that even remotely considering pushing an agenda as harebrained as creationism is anything but political suicide. Hell, even our ultra-conservatives would not even touch that shit with a 10 foot pole, knowing that they'd be looked at like they just claimed the tooth fairy existed.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There was Cedric. He built an ark. He put two of the dinosaurs, the unicorns, the other magical creatures in it: All boys so there was no hanky-panky. Then, there was a flood: All the girl dinosaurs, girl unicorns and other girl magical creatures died. God issued DMCA notices so no-one could read about Cedric and God's stupidity.
Science is learnt via a narrative, just like mythology. So the same rule applies: Publish or perish.
that ranks sites and pages based upon actual facts they contain isn't operational yet.
It would be a major national news story. There would be editorials in news outlets large and small. Fox News and the right wing press would call it a terrorist act. There would be hearings in Congress, and calls for laws protecting religion. It would be a three ring media circus.
All truths are not created equal. Some points of view are more equal then others.
Why is Snark Required?
"anti-Christian witch hunters"
ROTFLMAO
Defacing public works or knowledge is a crime.
It is called "graffiti"
Can someone please contact the appropriate authorities and have these selfish idiots charged with the crime of defacing public property?
C'mon guys. you just can't make that kind of shit up. There isn't enough weed on the planet for that. It must be divinely inspired.
Wow, look out this is some heavy science. The good folks at CreationInGenesis (https://answersingenesis.org/dinosaurs/) are providing citations to bolster their case! Feast your eyes....
"A thin slice of T. rex bone glowed amber beneath the lens of my microscope . . . . The lab filled with murmurs of amazement, for I had focused on something inside the vessels that none of us had ever noticed before: tiny round objects, translucent red with a dark center . . . . Red blood cells? The shape and location suggested them . . . "
Apparently scientific publications in the field of Paleontology include full dramatizations of performed lab work.
I thought it was cosmetic, but deeply threaded discussions are really messed up as can be seen here.
Posting in this discussion as it's both the most recent and a boring one.
"I find the defendant not guilty. As for Science versus Religion, I'm issuing a restraining order. Religion must stay 500 yards from Science at all times"
I had a vision from God about the dinosaurs. He made it clear that Chuck Norris killed all them all.
Maybe the anti-creationist, anti-Christian witch hunters set this bogus thing up, just to have an excuse to go after the Christians. Something looks bogus, but I'm nowhere near convinced that some church is responsible for it.
Who else would care? Fundamentalists have long lost the science war, so they go for the court of public opinion .
Also noted your completely whacked conspiracy theory that a group of anti-cheristian witch hunters set this up so they have another thing to go after.
Seen any suspicious rainbows lately? This might fill you in on what the governmen is doing I hear it targets Christians:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
but i went and googled it and low and behold, there's the bogus creationalist CRAP as the first link. so i sent my feedback detailing how i just sat there and shook my head in disbelief ...
"Paleontology (the study of fossils) is much like politics: passions run high, and it’s easy to draw very different conclusions from the same set of facts." M. Lemonick, Parenthood, dino-style, Time, p. 48, January 8, 1996.
And I felt just like waking up from a priest/pastor's best wet dream (sans pre-pubescent kids). Lord Baby Jesus. Fucking politics. I think I laughed for like 2 minutes straight like a nutcase. Imagine voting for your favorite paleontologist for the best excavation. Creationists have THE best comparisons ever. Period.
This just in!
Google provides websites related to your search, not answers to your questions.
Film at 11.
Clones are people two.
The real problem is, in an infinite, probabilistic universe, even the smallest chance that God exists is a certainty.
Not any god that a christian would accept. Their god is outside the universe, and created it.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
identified Christians as potential extremists
Identified specific Christians as potential extremists. And they do exist - why is this in any way a surprise? Every faith-based ideology (Marxism obviously falls into this category) eventually attracts violent nutjobs. Even Buddhism has violent extremists, some of whom are currently hard at work ethnically cleansing a Muslim minority in Myanmar. There are also left-wing environmentalist extremists, along with Maoists and anarchists, all of whom the DHS and FBI also track.
Among other things, I find it curious that DHS was searching so hard for "non-Islamist" extremists - almost like Islamist extremists had DHS tacit approval.
The fact that most worldwide religious extremists are currently Muslim does not mean we should give a free pass to domestic extremists just because they happen to follow your preferred religion. (And what makes you so certain that the DHS wasn't investigating domestic Islamists too?) Since Christians are an overwhelming majority in the US, it is certainly logical to look for extremists in that population, especially since they may have an easier time blending in, and there are existing organized extremist groups, some of which have a long history of violence. (I should note that Timothy McVeigh was an "honorably discharged military veteran".)
Creation, evolution... it is all based on belief since you can't prove either.
Can you pick which one has vastly more evidence for it?
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
If creationists want to be taken seriously they need to stop arguing science on points that aren't disputed.
If creationists wants to be taken seriously they need to create a reason for God to exist, that doesn't fall back on weak, shallow, sad logic paradoxes which don't make sense.
If creationists wants to be taken seriously, they need to prove aspects of there given religion.
The problem is, no creationist has ever been able to do this, they always have to result to shallow, weak, sad and pathetic arguments, against topics they don't understand and using logic that doesn't work. Just saying a theory doesn't make sense, doesn't make it false and doesn't make valid controversy. You can't just radically claim that Dinosaurs don't exist and never once provide evidence of that, that isn't a separate view, it's just a wrong view until you have evidence. Creationism has become the new face of the uneducated adult, and the worst part about this is that it's being pushed onto kids. Creationism can't be taken seriously until it starts making serious, adult arguments. Just because a creationist is to scared to grow up and drop the security blanket, doesn't mean they have a point, they don't.
Your theory requires that the universe be infinite. No proof of that yet, and maybe never.
What is so hard to believe that we created the "god" myth? It's been done many times over the ages, so we have more proof of that than the other way around.
Otherwise, who created god?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I'm pretty certain that DHS was NOT investigating any Muslim groups because the puppet master in the White House is a Muslim. And, by "puppet master" I am not referring to Obama - he is the puppet!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
anti-Christian
witch hunters
Hnnng!
Ask Bing the same question and you get the same results. But you can't flag them. Google's algorithm got hacked. Good on the Creationists for getting creative. Good on Google for having a feedback mechanism to flag it.
Obligatory MC Hawking link... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I do not believe in God but I have no problem with the concept. Your comment made me think, though...
If particles can be in more than one place and controlled simply by measuring or observing them then could we humans have, perhaps, created a God? The whole thing about the statistical chances of this being an accident is interesting but not a part of this. By worshiping a deity could humans have created a deity? It seems unlikely but, well, who knows? I think it would make an interesting science fiction plot...
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
That's...plausible.
But maybe the Creationists set it up just to make it look like the anti-Christian witch hunters set it up so that then they could say, "Look how we're being made to look stupid and a little evil by the anti-Christian witch hunters who are all hiding in plain sight just steps away from the Christian churches that are on every other block throughout the United States.
You are welcome on my lawn.
using that logic there is an equal chance every one elses god exists and the same chance that only one god exists how do you know yours is the correct one Sinner?
Yes, but all those other people who created gods were just making them up, whereas the god we made up is the Real Thing!
You are welcome on my lawn.
Actually, there was a big stunning double rainbow over Dublin last week as the people of Ireland rejected the teachings of the Church and approved same sex marriage.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/u...
Texas, on the other hand, outlawed gay marriage and got deadly floods and tornadoes.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/26/...
Coincidence?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I think they (the creationists) are doing what they believe in, a disservice. They make it easier for more people to see how lost they are in the reality of our universe.
The real problem is, in an infinite, probabilistic universe, even the smallest chance that God exists is a certainty. Of course, there is no shortage of conflicting, self defeating pseudo-science airheads that will believe anything else rather than making an attempt at living a Christian life with a little less ego.
I do not think that this "probability" means what you think it means.
I will try to tell you. No, it is too much, I will sum up.
Suppose you have an infinite barrel of marbles, 10% of which are green. Then the probability of drawing a green marble is (wait for it) 10%. This isn't a particularly small probability. If there is a single green marble, somewhere in the barrel, the probability of drawing it is asymptotically zero, statistically neglible, less than the chance of winning the lottery, and winning the lottery in one try is far from certain. If the probability that God exists is 1 x 10^{-403} in an infinite, probabilistic Universe, then the probability that God exists is (gasp) 1 x 10^{-403}. This is most definitely not certainty. Certainty isn't the "smallest chance", it is probability 1. It is the largest (possible) chance.
Even 1 x 10^{-403} isn't in the same ballpark as "the smallest chance", by the way. It is enormous compared to the probability that all of the air molecules in the room I'm in will suddenly (by pure chance) happen to bounce in just the right way to form a big blob of liquid air in the middle of the room and leave me gasping in a vacuum as air molecules outside of the house by strange chance miss all of the myriad pathways into the room. Which in turn is unbelievably, awesomely hugely enormous compared to the probability that the infinite, probabilistic Universe is in fact determined and known at the subatomic level by a perfectly organized, uncreated, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent superbeing that created it all by pure magic from nothing.
Oh, wait -- that's a contradiction, isn't it! If the Universe is infinite and probabilistic, then it can't be infinite and deterministic and hence known by an omniscient, omnipotent being, because there is nothing less probabilistic than something that is completely determined by an all powerful, all-knowing being. So your premises directly contradict your conclusion, in addition to demonstrating nothing more than the simple fact that you have absolutely no clue about probability distributions on continuous spaces.
Ego aside, you might want to contemplate learning something about probability and reason itself before you argue in favor of something empirically, logically, and statistically indefensible. God (as a concept) is all three.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Texas, on the other hand, outlawed gay marriage and got deadly floods and tornadoes.
Don't forget another state blessed by God, Oklahoma. They are getting hammered too.I think that falls under the "working in mysterious ways" escape clause.
Seriously I do feel awful badly for those folks. I hate when bad things happen to anyone, even if they hate me with a passion.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
We need to work together to manipulate all search results to lead to whichever xkcd is most relevant to the topic.
Glorious outrage comrade! Only party-approved thinkers should be able to promote their thoughts using standard search result optimisation strategies.
An interesting science fiction plot that has been used so many times it is hackneyed.
It is also a horrendous abuse of the concepts of quantum theory. The problem with the hypothesis of God is that there has been no reproducible, objective, measurement or observation of God. Quite the contrary. The Universe unfolds precisely as if there were no such thing as God, with truly awesome, mind-boggling consistency, follow rules known only approximately (so far) as the "Laws of Nature" which leave no room whatsoever for God, unless it is God's will that the Universe evolve in time as if there were no God.
This is a far cry from asserting that the Aharanov-Bohm effect implies God, even allowing for the imprecision of stating that particles can be "controlled" by observing them, and worshipping something has never, as far as I know, caused that something to come to be.
Finally, there is an information-theoretic argument that proves it quite impossible to create a God by any means such as you suggest. It is quite literally as impossible as reconstructing an encoded string a gazillion bytes long from a single tiny fragment of that encoded string. The information content of God has to be greater than or equal to the information content of the Universe (this is literally the God-property of omniscience). I am a (very) finite part of the Universe. I have enormous (information) entropy relative to the Universe quite aside of the possibility that I have in some sense a quantum indeterminacy in my state. God (if God exists) has zero entropy, quantum Universe or not. There is simply no way the former can generate the latter. Violating the second law of thermodynamics is an understatement.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
When you do a little digging (and if you do so in earnest without letting your past 'education' cloud your judgement), you'll find out rather quickly that there is little, if any direct evidence to support the evolution hypothesis, and much, much, that's directly contradictory.
And - in response to the inevitable follow-up comment "give me an example" - you are more than capable of finding them on your own - there's no shortage.
haha.. hahahaha......hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Thanks dude, I needed that. I'm surprised your neck can take the strain of a light breeze, having spent years holding up an empty cavity.
I'll take "Poor Thinkers are Also Poor Spellers" for $1000, Alex.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
DuckDuckGo gave its top result to a fruitcake link saying "Genesis can explain everything...."
Phil Collins or Sega?
I agree. However, I am reminded of the story of the farmer who's trying to show someone how to train a mule. He starts by walking up to the mule and whacking it on the head with a club, knocking the mule out. When the pupil asked him, "Why did you do that?" the farmer said, "Well, first you have to get his attention."
One has to wonder if a theoretical compassionate God is trying to get Texas and Oklahoma's attention. But then, considering the annual number of tornadoes and other natural disasters that hit Texas and Oklahoma, you'd have think He'd just give up by now and smite the whole region and leave it to the armadillos.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The information content of God has to be greater than or equal to the information content of the Universe (this is literally the God-property of omniscience).
That's not how God's omniscience was explained to me. It's more "all seeing" than "all knowing". It's not that God knows every detail of everything in the universe as much as that he can know anything he needs. It's like having a debugger.
Perhaps you missed the fiction part? Either way, do not think it bothers me. I truly appreciate your reply and am grateful for it. It is nice to read it and I even picked up something new from it so it is of great value to me personally.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Also on slashdot:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/05/25/2150208/can-bad-scientific-practice-be-fixed
And - in response to the inevitable follow-up comment "give me an example" - you are more than capable of finding them on your own - there's no shortage.
No, give me an example. We can make this about my refusal to do your work for you, or we could make it about this alleged evidence you speak of.
Evidence against Evolution:
-Irreducible complexity of many structures, like the eye.
-DNA containing a multitude of safeguards against mutation.
-Not a shred of scientific evidence of creation either of life from non-life (spontaneous generation was disproved over 100 years ago) or a new kind (science defined by the scientific method (Hypotheses, experiment, evaluate results, repeat).
-No scientifically observed creative mutation, either in nature or in the lab (fruit flies mutate to get more heads, more wings, more legs, but never a stinger or a tail or anything not already in their genes). There are a few dozen destructive mutations that have been beneficial in some limited way that we know of, but again, these created nothing new, they removed or damaged something that was pre-existing in the organism.
Whether it was an all powerful God that spoke the universe into existence, or an alien race that seeded Earth with all of the organisms a million years ago, I wasn't there, but Evolution is a shit THEORY proposed before we understood genetics and it has massive holes that make it almost certainly invalid. The problem is science has no better answer, so they circle the wagons and defend the junk science instead of openly admitting that it needs to be shit canned and that science needs to get out of business of telling the past, for which it is wholly inadequate and un-prepared, and just describe the natural world as we can observe it today. That is what science was created to do. That is all science can do. Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of shit. And probably looking for more grant money from the tax payer.
On Bing, my response to
What happened to the dinosaurs?
(no quotes) is pretty benign - pbs, wikipedia, and national geographic in that order, and then Answers in Genesis.org, followed by slate. Only 2 of the 8 links on the first response page are fundamentalist, the AIG site and a kiddie site. Finally, while I don't agree with Answers in Genesis, they are certainly not a stealth site, and I don't think it is objectionable just by itself that they in the mix.
Of course, "Your results are personalized" so other people may get different responses.
I've run out of jizz jacking off to my candid photographs of Randall Munroe.
If you have an infinite barrel of marbles, you can't make a statement such as "10% of them are green".
There is nothing to infer a statement such as "the chances are 1 in 10"..
You're kind of obnoxious. We all took math in high school.
You don't seem to understand infinity is not simply a big number.
No, I got the bit about fiction. I just finished reading recent science fiction that utilizes very similar plot lines in several distinct stories, that's all. Even in the movie "Merlin", Mab's existence was contingent on belief. I think American Gods by Neil Gaiman is pretty much precisely that as well. To quote from its Wikipedia page:
The central premise of the novel is that gods and mythological creatures exist because people believe in them (a form of thoughtform).
So as I said, yes, you are quite right, it is (or can be, a premise for a good science fiction/fantasy novel. And has been, several times. And quite a number of bad ones as well. It's a very interesting philosophical/ontological problem -- does belief precede or follow existence?
Personally, as a physicist, I have to say that correct/best belief (as opposed to fantasy) follows existence, and ultimately is empirically founded on it. Religion is the other kind, the one where there is plenty of belief but no solid evidence for the existence of the objects of the belief.
To paraphrase Austin Power, I may believe in a gold plated potty but that doesn't mean that one exists, not even in an infinite Universe where it is possible that one exists.
Or, to toss in a reference to Russell, it is possible that there is a silver teapot floating around in an orbit around Saturn. I might, if I were un-sane enough, believe in such a teapot, and write out an entire mythology based on the teapot and how it got there and what its existence means for the Universe in general. But even if I convinced every human alive on Earth that I must be right, that as an authority on all matters concerning the Sacred Silver Teapot my word on this cannot be doubted, not even the deep and profound belief of every person in the world has the slightest chance of either creating the teapot from nothing but the belief itself or increasing the probability that the teapot exists from a number so close to zero that their kids go to the same school, noise from parties in zero's yard keep the probability up at night, they argue about who is going to trim the hedge and who is providing the beer...
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
We need to work together to manipulate all search results to lead to whichever xkcd is most relevant to the topic.
I think this Sunday Morning Breakfast Cereal would be perfect.
Bon Ki-Moon? Could this be a misspelling? Hmm... Bonk I Moon... Bonky Moon!
The First Full Moon
First Full Moon in June
Is called the Bonky Moon.
With buttocks a-flutter
Please pass the butter
Then jam in your putter.
Or your tiny pee-nutter.
Bonking left and right
Bonking throughout the night
Do it wrong then do it right
Mooning the Moon, what a sight.
If put off because of Rain
Bonk anyway, again and again
But if you feel a sudden pain
It's Bain.
The First Full Moon
First Full Moon in June
Is called the Bonky Moon.
I might agree to follow the Silver Teapot religion, I like me some tea. Just think, we could have a TeaParty. It would be an excellent art project.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Just because it isn't always easy to see, every rainbow is a "double rainbow"
If you have an infinite barrel of marbles, you can't make a statement such as "10% of them are green".
You absolutely can. Let me give a simple example: the positive integers. That is, unquestionably, an infinite set. And it also is quite clear that precisely 10% of them are divisible by 10.
Mathematically, here's how we would describe it. Consider the set of integers from 1 to N. Let x(N) be the fraction of members in that set that are divisible by 10. It's quite easy to show that as N->infinity, x(N)->1/10.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Hello, anyone?
the puppet master in the White House is a Muslim. And, by "puppet master" I am not referring to Obama - he is the puppet!
Um... what? I can't tell if this is satire or not.
You're kind of obnoxious. We all took math in high school.
Not any god that a christian would accept. Their god is outside the universe, and created it.
Panentheism (meaning "all-in-God", from the Ancient Greek pân ("all"), en ("in") and Theós ("God")) is a belief system which posits that the divine – whether as a single God, number of gods, or other form of "cosmic animating force"[1] – interpenetrates every part of the universe and extends, timelessly (and, presumably, spacelessly) beyond it. Unlike pantheism, which holds that the divine and the universe are identical.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
Although you might have taken math in high school, evidence suggests that you failed it. Badly.
The author of this post gives no evidence that creationists are manipulating search results...it is all is opinion with no factual basis.
The bible sites are generic with no captcha really. SPAM :)
well, if any of you bothered to recall - this whole tactic was first employed by the American left to smear George Bush. And *now* you're all outraged? Girl, please!
That rabbit-hole goes far deeper:.
It was really the Anti-anti-Christian-witch-hunters who set it up to make it look like the Creationists set it up just to make it look like the anti-Christian witch hunters set it up so that they'd blame the anti-Christian witch-hunters.
Follow the money...
Required reading for internet skeptics
Reality is real, whether or not a group of blinkered idiots try to force it not to be so. If these people really had faith, then they wouldn't mind; they would accept that since God had created the world and everything in it, anything you learn about His reality teaches you more about God. The idea that the Bible - a hodgepodge of stories carefully selected to support a religious/political agenda over 1000 years ago - must, aboslutely must, be true to the very comma, is a modern invention, and a particularly pathological one too.
Creationists are liars to themselves, more than anything else. Fundamentalism is equally vile, whether it decorates itself with the name of Christ, Muhammed or any other famous person. The objectves of creationists are of the same evil nature as those of IS or al Qaeda - the methods may vary, but they all want to subdue your freedom to think and choose on you own, by spreading falsehoods. I am not going as far as professor Dawkins and saying that all religion is by nature bad - I have known honest, religious people - but there is line that is very easily crossed.
hmmm...so, Satanic witch hunters? Since no Christians are witches, that implies that this person would both have to be anti-Christian and also a witch hunter, since witches are a separate "religion" as well. Maybe a fundamentalist Muslim who hunts Wiccans? Or are they using "witch" just as a adjective and don't realize that there are people who refer to themselves as "witches" aka Wiccans...
Creationists shouldn't use computers or the internet, since that technology relies on science as opposed to "God magic".
Even if God exists, there is an even smaller chance that It would be the one described in the current Christian Bible. If one looks at all the disasters, plagues, wars, etc and puts those in the "God did this" column, it really looks more like God just barely tolerates humanities existence and doesn't really like us very much. He seems very distant, passive-aggressive, and sometimes very violent and genocidal. I personally am unable to "worship" any entity like that, nor do I wish to spend an eternity with an entity that endorses all of the horrific acts in the Old Testament.
when someone posted a picture of some wood left hanging in Moore, OK after the tornado...people got upset that I thought that IF this was a sign from God, IF God put this "cross" there, then He also caused that tornado...like a signature at the bottom of a painting. And that obviously God doesn't like the people in that area very much. The more they pray, the worse the weather gets.
These creationist idiots pay for ads by the click. So get clicking.
A special interest group rigging search results? Oh, gosh, how could this ever happen? OFFS.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
However you could reorder the natural numbers so that the limit above x(N) -> p, for any p between 0 and 1. So, no, its is not clear that the integers divisible by 10 account for 10% of the integers. In fact that, there are exactly the same number of integers divisible by 10 that there are integers: the mapping n -> 10n provides a bijection.
If the Universe is infinite and probabilistic, then it can't be infinite and deterministic and hence known by an omniscient, omnipotent being, because there is nothing less probabilistic than something that is completely determined by an all powerful, all-knowing being.
There are sections of Christianity that believe in a non-deterministic universe. Omniscient and Omnipotent are defined differently by different people. Basically the two terms are so polluted with different definitions that they are all but useless. For example, by what definition is God omnipotent? Most Christians will assert readily that God can or will not act outside his character. For all intents and purpose that wipes out most definitions of omnipotent. There is more to it than this(the limits of omniscience are debated within christianity and there are other issues), but I think there is disconnect between your understanding of the words and a Christian's understanding. You are using the same words, but they mean different things and thus there can be no understanding on certain topics.
Most atheists/agnostics at this point will insist upon their own definitions. It becomes a semantic argument, and if you insist upon your own definitions, you have effectively erected a straw man. Perhaps this is not the best approach.
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
Meet the Christian counterparts of Muslim Salafis/Wahhabis - the Creationist kooks. Their main distinguishing trait is that they are convinced that their holy scriptures are literally true, word for word.
The powers of a supreme being by definition would enable all kinds of violations of mathematics and physics. If we look at all that surrounds us it is an unbelievable display of supreme artistic creations. For example now and then I see a stunning young girl at 16 or 17 years of age that simply oozes with beauty and grace. It is as if God used his best sculpture and paints to create such a being. Such stunning beauty has no reason de etre at all. It isn't about reproduction at all. Females tend to reproduce even when they look like a wrecked garbage truck. We see the same effect in rocks. Most rocks are sort of dull and unremarkable but then we see opals and rubies and other stones of remarkable beauty. We see it in wildlife as well. So many animals are just plain beautiful even if deadly. It is as if God just could not help but show a glimpse of His artistic skills. So just how does one try to apply statistics or probability to such a situation? And just who created the possibility of mathematics even existing?
Google ranks by popularity, not by truth. No need to fiddle with that. If you think the page at place 1 tells you the truth, you have other problems than the page at the top of the google results.
It's funny because the people who carried out witch hunts were christian. Fine upstanding c*nts that they were.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The real problem is, in an infinite, probabilistic universe, even the smallest chance that God exists is a certainty.
That might be a problem for you. But the universe is 13 and a bit billion years old, and maybe somewhere around 100 billion light years in diameter. So it fails the infinity test.
You would also have to specify what God you're talking about. I would be more than a little surprised if it turned out to be one made up by bronze age goat herders on an unremarkable blue planet around an unremarkable yellow sun in an unremarkable galaxy.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Having creationists do what advertising has done should simply highlight an existing problem.
Oklahoma gets flooded every decade or so. Some parts even more often (the next town over floods almost every time it rains... it's a poor town so people can't afford to move).
It's because of a mixture of terrain and weather patterns. Large parts of the state are fairly flat with wide, shallow river basins. The Arkansas river near here is very wide and usually only a couple feet deep - you can walk across it and not get your shirt wet. People take their 4x4s out on it and drive between the sand bars. Canoeing on it involves getting out and dragging your canoe every half a mile or so. So when we get a lot of rain, which happens every few years, the water has nowhere to go.
It's no different than tornadoes or drought. You live here, you get used to it. Unless you live in Moore, which is rapidly becoming a running gag around here.
You can blame God for it if you like (or Obama, he gets blamed for everything around here), but that's like blaming God for earthquakes in Tokyo and California, or hurricanes in the Caribbean. The "ways" aren't exactly mysterious. You live in the great plains, you're going to get floods and tornadoes.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Exactly. Please mod up parent post. The problem is that when you have to deal with infinite most of you think should be obvious, it's not. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Adding the keyword BRILLO to your searches effectively locks out 'intelligent design' search results that have been deliberately seeded to rank among science articles. It thrusts you into the bizarre world of people who call themselves brillo-head, folks making fun of popular culture. Also some money saving coupons! Also a great many documents in Spanish. Brillo even makes a shoe shine product, so anyone researching boot problems.
Came to mind because the company who made its fortune bringing relevance to online search results just decided to name their new project in such a way as to aggravate people searching for specific technical topics on it, until the end of time. Instead of choosing a nonsensical name. If you want to name a new project Google, please Google it first. Or connect a USB Ouija Board and ask Lewis Carroll to think one up for you.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
POT: That kettle is Black. Kettle: Say what?!
I'm sure forensic scientists will find that rationale interesting next time they try to figure out how someone died if there weren't any witnesses around to see it.
Whenever the credulous complain to me about attacks on religion, I ask them to count the pyres.
Most atheists/agnostics at this point will insist upon their own definitions. It becomes a semantic argument, and if you insist upon your own definitions, you have effectively erected a straw man. Perhaps this is not the best approach.
I think you have it exactly backwards. The meaning of omniscient and omnipotent are perfectly clear and are contained in any dictionary. As you say above, every religion, including the many sects and branches of "Christianity", faced with the obvious fact that their god(s) is/are not possessing of either quality in its true formal meaning, adopt some weaker definition, so that God isn't all-knowing (the literal meaning of omniscient) or all-powerful (the literal meaning of omnipotent) or all-good (omnibenevolent) or ubiquitous (omnipresent) or "perfect" or any other infinite quality that would get them in the kind of obvious trouble any sort of infinite attribute is likely to lead to. At the same time, they have to assert that this really really big, mostly knowing, somewhat powerful, occasionally incredibly cruel being was knowing enough and powerful enough to be the proximate cause of the entire visible Universe as well as any still unseen invisible parts, which he (masculine gender usually assigned) created out of nothing, because otherwise most of us wouldn't consider even a really big, really smart, mostly good space alien to be a god, we'd consider them to be somebody like us, living in time's stream with every moment mostly a surprise because our finite information capacity is "infinitely" smaller than the information content of the Universe.
So yes, I've learned the hard way that there is little point in discussing Christianity in a reasoned way with a Christian. The fact that they are still a Christian is de facto proof that they have already arrived at a state of cognitive dissonance wherein all the myriad contradictions in (e.g.) the Bible itself or between bald assertions in the Bible (old and/or new testaments and/or apocrypha) and mere reality are smoothly elided and rationalized by doing what you're doing, bending the clear definitions of the simple terms used to describe God with a capital G.
One has to do this, because otherwise the problem of theodicy is a crushing burden for any religion claiming any significant fraction of the "omni"-properties conjoined with the assertion that god is good. One has to literally turn off one's common sense to believe that a being exists that on the one hand created the entire Universe out of nothing in some sort of state of knowledge of its future course (in most of the Bible, it is pretty clear that this state is supposed to be perfect knowledge beginning to end, alpha and omega and predestination and all that) but who created the Universe filled with evil as experienced by humans (undeniable) but was at the same time all-good and who runs things so that one can never detect Its existence because the visible Universe appears to follow rigorous rules that are never violated and that are utterly indifferent to human suffering.
That's actually the more interesting aspect of Chrisitianity in particular. Since Jesus is advanced as being God and Human and all-compassionate and perfectly good, and since the New Testament is full of direct quotes of Jesus asserting that he can do literally anything (and so can all of us) just by "having faith" and wishing it into being, Christians have to engage in the most incredible mental distortions to explain the mind of God/Jesus in such a way that there is room for the existence of human suffering on Earth and Hell for unbelievers and all of the other madness while the principle parties remain hidden.
So next time somebody dies slowly of cancer, next time a baby is born in innocence with the terrible affliction of Down's syndrome, the next time a small child dies of starvation or from malaria or from being bitten by a snake, the next time you are directly confronted with the cogniti
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Many people approach religion from what they want to believe. Logically, that has no bearing on whether that religion is right or wrong. Much of modern Christianity looks at God as one who loves everyone and ignores passages which you refer to. But the truth is that the Bible teaches that things like death are in this world because of sin and the God is just in condemning people. I can understand why someone would want to believe in a God that meets his or her standards of goodness, but that doesn't mean it coincides with reality.
The problem is, even with an infinite universe, not everything is possible. What do you define as a Christian? By Christian, do you mean - I don't believe a word of the bible, but I've got a vague spirituality and was born into a christian family, so I guess I'm christian. Do you have a list of the bits of the bible you have to take as fact and those that are allegorical? Why is one bit (earth is 6000 years old) unbelieveable, and another bit (God impregnated Mary) to be the cornerstone of the faith?
Sit a god botherer in a box and keep them there until you can measure accurately their faith level. Until you can do this, you don't even have a mechanism that could work.
Search results adapted to your search terms and clicks, do you have an interest in creationist sites?
Ya...no direct evidence...except for:
-Fossils
-DNA, aka the universal genetic code
-Common traits and stages of life across species
-antibiotic/herbicide/pesticide resistance in bacteria plants
-ability to change the characteristics of living things through breeding
-long term evolutionary experiments, such as Lenski's E Coli experiment
http://www.scientificamerican....
http://humanorigins.si.edu/evi...
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
That's just it, I don't wish to and refuse to "argue" over anything. I'll discuss and you'll learn and appreciate or you won't. According to Wikipedia: "Empirical evidence is information that justifies a belief in the truth or falsity of a claim." Well, I guess I've found this since... I truly do feel justified in my beliefs.
I reckon you hold it's more unlikely that all the air would glob into liquid in the center of the room that to form our universe complete with all it's complexities, just in our solar system, such as you reading this. That's illogical.
Statistically indefensible? Seriously? Did you know that 10 out of 10 atheists don't believe in that "concept" of GOD? Lordy, lordy, that makes it true and I guess I have no defense for that...
Atheist's ego's blind them to truth, because they've made projected themselves as GODs in their own minds that they are capable of understanding all, even though they have zero empirical evidence, zero logical evidence or nothing of any statistical meaning yet declare themselves final authority. A little ironic, don't you think?
1. There is no irreducible complexity in the eye. In fact, it's an organ with so many common defects if it was intelligently designed, the designer wasn't very good. How many people do you know who need glasses/contact lenses/laser surgery? Cataracts? The list goes on.
2. Of course it has some safeguards, as rampant mutation would be very unlikely to yield viable offspring. No mutation would have yielded a very fragile species which could be entirely wiped out if their living conditions changed even slightly. Clearly any branches of the tree of life with those traits would be far less likely to exist, hence you making your point.
3. Abiogenesis (the creation of life from non-life) is not part of evolution. It is a separate theory. As for creating new species, that has been observed in nature (the London Underground mosquito springs to mind), and in the lab (many different fruit fly experiments leading to new species).
4. That makes no sense. Of course there haven't been any observed changes of such scale, as that would take hundreds or thousands of years even with the rapid reproductive cycle of fruit flies.
The theory of evolution is only "shit" if you don't understand it, which you clearly don't. That hasn't stopped you lashing out at it, however. As an answer goes, the theory is not complete, but without it we would have no biology or medicine.
Please, educate yourself. You are dangerous, and your school failed you.
When I searched for the very same examples, the only links I got that were creationist were paid placement. If you don't like that, tell google you don't like paid placement. It doesn't have anything to do with creationists.
How lucky you were born to a family that happened to pick the right one. Your joke isn't funny in the slightest, it's unfortunately how religions work.
Since when is a standard marketing technique considered manipulation? I thought all websites do that all the time. ..
It is, of course not possible for words to have specific meanings within specialized contexts.
I am going to put it another way: If a [Insert person whose philosophy/religion/texteditor you disagree with] wants to use a word and you wish to understand their point of view, then you must let them define their terms. You don't get to define the terms.
Language is somewhat fluid. We don't have words for everything, and specialized vocabularies develop quite easily. In this case, not least because the source documents are not English.
If, however, you have no interest in understanding, but just like to rant on slashdot, don't let me stop you. Carry on.
This is the entirety of my point. I feel I have adequately made it, and I have no real interest in discussing the other topics you bring up, as they are tangential.
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
So, by injecting god you can make up any old shit. Are you really saying "God shares the same subjective tastes as me", and "I invoke god thus your science is invalid". Statistics are real, we have all seen them, So just why does one try to apply god to such a situation?
Well define omnipotent and omniscient then if it's not the same as a dictionary. I guess this is how christians get to make up their own meaning for theory too. If you don't mean omnipotent just say very powerful, if you don't mean omniscient say very knowledgeable. Don't redefine words then get upset when the rest of the world carries on with the original definition.
If god exists, he's a myopic jerk. He hates so many people, but whenever he tries to hit them with a disaster, he causes more collateral damage the the US air force.
However you could reorder the natural numbers so that the limit above x(N) -> p, for any p between 0 and 1. So, no, its is not clear that the integers divisible by 10 account for 10% of the integers. In fact that, there are exactly the same number of integers divisible by 10 that there are integers: the mapping n -> 10n provides a bijection.
Nice try but parent is right. The integers divisible by 10 do, in fact, compose 10% of the integers. If you take a random sampling of integers, 10% of them will be divisible by 10. Integers are that much more frequent than integers divisible by 10...
And yes, both the integers and integers divisible by 10 are countably infinite, and thus equal in a sense. Naively, 10% of infinity is infinity.
I suppose you could count 1, 10, 2, 20, 3, 30, 4, 40, 5, 50, 6, 60, 7, 70, 8, 80, 9, 90, 11, 100, ... it wouldn't surprise me too much if you can modify the relative frequency of two different infinite sets by rearranging them.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
The "ways" aren't exactly mysterious. You live in the great plains, you're going to get floods and tornadoes.
Sure - be serious! But since we're here, my thoughts on exactly why places like yours tend to the religious.
A drive through the countryside in my area will show a lot of farms with presumably fundamentalist religious owners, if the signs are to be believe. Plenty of "The wages of sin is death" friendly reminders to see.
Giving some thought to the matter, who more likely to be really religious. Religion is the desire to influence events that you have no influence over. A Farmer has to have some sort of trust that the rains will come, the temperatures will moderate, and the crops will grow. Economic and some times actual life critical.
So they pray a lot, and in earlier times, when weather patterns were not known, it was not outside the realm of reason that abundant years were signs of Godly approval, and bad years were signs of offense.
But then you have the odd happening of the "faithful" being hammered by nature like this. Then it becomes silly season. The leaders scurry to find blame and attach it to the usual sources (Katrina, The mess in New Jersey, and Haiti come to mind).
So we have the elite, gay loving people of the northeast getting pummeled by a hurricane as proof of gawd's wrath against homosexuals, and it's accepted by the devout.
And there will be some insane excuses regarding these floods in Texas and Oklahoma that might be completely opposite in nature, but likewise gobbled up as proof of gawd's something something.
But let's take Haiti. One of gawd's mouthpieces, Pat Robertson gave the massive earthquake in Haiti as divine retribution http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/01/...
Now the fact that haiti sits on a shallow plate of geology that has been there long before there were those Hatians that presumably made a pact with the devil, apparently has nothing to do with it.
I wonder what Pat's comments on the present day mess in Texas and Oklahoma are? It will probably be along the lines of having to purge the sinners among the faithful, or if not fully prepared, back to the old "Mysterious ways" catchall.
So back to Oklahoma and Texas. They don't want to believe they have no control over these disasters, they see the destruction, and since humans have this strong approval blame thing going on, they feel they need to do something. Religion to the rescue.
Whereas the smart money says move elsewhere.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Most terrorist attacks in the US have been committed by christians frankly the islamists have only had a couple of successful attacks. In fact the US has killed more innocent US citizens than islamist have in the same time. In the UK you have more to fear from people who don't agree with you that a bit of biscuit changes to flesh or not when you eat it. One name shows that the US needs to fear military veterans and christians: Timothy James McVeigh Your argument seems to say that if you worship a zombie or shot a gun for your country you should get a free pass to kill who you want?
I think the point was to convey the idea that such a being's limitations in doing anything is not in terms of ability, but in terms of character. This concept is common across all theological systems that I have encountered. God could do anything but there are things he won't do, because then he would not be God. Trivial example - if God chose to cease to exist.
Omniscient has a wider range of meaning within Christianity, though all affirm the word. For example, a calvinist would agree with your definition, while a non-calvinist might take it to mean that the end is known, but not necessarily all internal states. There has been some discussion on the topic for some time with extreme positions on both side. It is controversial even within Christianity
As I pointed out to the other poster, specialized vocabulary is not unique to Christianity. You also have to remember that your average nutter crying out in the street that "evolution is just a theory" is not representative of the state of academic or philosophic Christianity. He is, in fact, as far as I can tell, an export of America.
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
You think I was trying to be funny?
You are welcome on my lawn.
To admit that climate change is real?
Everything relies on GOD. Yes, even "science", as biased and agenda driven as it is. Maybe idiot atheists shouldn't use computers or the internet, since they might think everything on it is true.
Creation, evolution... it is all based on belief since you can't prove either. No body knows for sure how dinosaurs all died.
Decent troll attempt. Evolution is a fact, creation is a big pile of bollocks. Turns out they're really different and you apparently know fuck all, because you equate them.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
You forgot to include evidence against evolution in your word salad drivel.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Science war? Those two words shouldn't touch each other in a sentence or the first one ceases to have any value. Wait, too late, we've all lost "the war" since much of science is not much more than propaganda. And I just feel the need to point out, atheists are excellent projectors; why we've just experienced a bogus attempt to blame Christians for astro-turfing the web in order to persuade public opinion.
Thank you for neatly summarising the mental state of the average AGW denier.
But christians are supposedly not supposed to lie. SEO of that sort is a form of lying.
Most Christians I know defend the daily duplicity in their lives by pointing out that, in the ten commandments, they are admonished to not "bear false witness" which is not the same as lying in general, but a specific, particularly onerous type of lie: lying about others to defame, smear, or incriminate. Some will even argue that it means don't commit perjury in court, and will happily run a smear campaign against people they don't like, destroying their reputation through lies, and blissfully expound on how they're going to heaven because they don't break any of the commandments, since they didn't lie in a court of law.
In my experience, religious people lie a lot more than non-religious people, about a lot of stuff (much of it trivial even), and are some of the nastiest when it comes to tearing down others. I guess all that lying to yourself makes it easier to lie to others. In any event, if someone says "praise God", don't expect honestly. Watch your back instead.
They aren't guessing, they are lying in order to control. And Germ resistance is evolution in real time. Case closed.
So, people who are strongly convinced that they are right, and the other guy is wrong, try to convince the other guy any way they can, and make fun of them?
I'd never have guessed...
I read The Fine Article twice just in case I missed it, but it does not in fact claim that "creationists [are] manipulating search results" and it presents zero evidence that this is happening. Mr. Laden's panties are chafing him because the inscrutable wizardry behind search rankings has put a web site that he doesn't like near the top of the search results. He then invites his readers to manipulate the search results with their feedback.
And the Earth is only 600 years old, you're in good company with Palin there.
Tell me, have you put any nonbelievers to the sword this week? If not you better get on that, also women are property, and stone your kids to death if they disobey you.
Fun times.
I am posting anonymously for the obvious reason. I am a Creationist. I believe a divine being created everything. That said, I do not fall in line with these literalists with Creationism. I don't believe the world is 6000 years old, I am quite sure Genesis is not so literal. I also believe that our Creator uses the natural laws to create things...and time has no meaning to Him, hence having the Earth and other planets be millions or billions of years old is no big deal. Adam and Eve were the first humans, but that doesn't mean humans have not evolved since then over the millenia. As for Noah, sure, I'm sure he was flooded and rescued a bunch of animals from his area, but I don't believe the entire Earth was flooded...only his local area. It is conceivable to fit 2 of every animal from a small geographic area into his ark with him. The Earth is changing, creatures are evolving, and I am sure His plan is working just fine. I also believe in the Big Bang and figure that is how He chose to start this universe.
So many extremists on both sides of Science vs Religion.
actually... what's now "top news" for when you search "what happened to the dinosaurs" is... greg's post and associated discussions...
Creationists are simply pointing out that there is no hard evidence for evolution. Evolution is an assertion that is not based on facts. This posting which claims that creationists are manipulating search results is also an assertion not based on facts. It would seem that there is a common theme running here.
What's the point of having a discussion on religion without that Babs Hudson chiming in?
Can't you just live and let live?
You don't seem to realize that you are as ignorant and intolerant as the bible-thumpers you so despise.
Go away, you fucking cunt.
They evolved into birds....
STFU n' quit cryin bitch, face the music here http://linux.slashdot.org/comm...
STFU n' quit cryin bitch, face the music here http://linux.slashdot.org/comm...
STFU n' quit cryin bitch, face the music here http://linux.slashdot.org/comm...
The Christians understand evolution just fine. The T-Rex will not kill you, but the antibiotic resistance might. But good luck with your Purple Barney Disneyland wedding. Just don't make any kind of casual contact - I hear the vaccines aren't what they're cracked up to be.
No True Scotsman up in here.
You absolutely can. Let me give a simple example: the positive integers. That is, unquestionably, an infinite set. And it also is quite clear that precisely 10% of them are divisible by 10.
Mathematically, here's how we would describe it. Consider the set of integers from 1 to N. Let x(N) be the fraction of members in that set that are divisible by 10. It's quite easy to show that as N->infinity, x(N)->1/10.
It may be "quite clear", but your reasoning unfortunately fails, and can be used to show that it's some percentage other than 10%. The problem is that your argument implicitly relies on a property other than it being an infinite set, namely an implicitly defined ordering of that set. There are other equally-valid orderings which would imply different percentages if you applied your exact same argument. Consider the following ordering of the positive numbers:
First 99 numbers: smallest 99 numbers *not* divisible by 10. ... and so on ...
100th number: 10
Next 99 numbers: next-smallest 99 numbers *not* divisible by 10.
200th number: 20
Applying your same reasoning to *this* ordering, you find that x(N) is 1%, in the limit of N going to infinity. By choosing the appropriate ordering, you can use the identical reasoning to "prove" that the percentage is anything from 0.0 to 1.0, inclusive. The set of positive numbers being infinite really *does* make the statement that 10% of them are divisible by 10 meaningless ... unless you impose additional conditions other than the mere fact that the set is infinite in order to get around the problem.
I think you're overthinking matters.
Of course, there's no way to be sure why people in the bible belt tend to be religious, but living here most of my life has given me some clues.
We've got 3.5 million people in Oklahoma. Half of those live in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. The other half lives in smaller towns or rural areas.
The type of people who were able to survive and thrive here in the early days are the type of people that tend towards religion; hard-working, self-reliant, conservative types. Church was often the only social contact they had in a typical week. Education beyond the very basics wasn't readily available and generally deemed unnecessary. Hospitals were few and far between. Law enforcement was negligible - you protected your property and family yourself. Flooding, tornadoes, drought, violence, crime, and sickness would take loved ones and destroy the efforts of labor, sometimes taking entire towns. Then add the dust bowl and the depopulation of the western part of the state. If the only place to turn for help is God, then that's where people will turn.
Our current leaders are only a generation or two behind those events. We have access to good education and hospitals, and the towns are larger now, but attitudes change over generations. Give us time.
Kansas is a bit older, but its history just means that people were in the position that early Oklahomans were in for longer. Kansas didn't really begin to modernize until around the same time as Oklahoma. I suspect the same applies to much of Texas and Nebraska, although Texas has some older, larger cities where religion isn't necessarily the norm.
As far as Pat's comments (or Falwell's concerning Katrina), that's just the same old bullshit warmed over and re-served that religious leaders have been spouting forever. The oldest example of that I can think of is the obvious one - Sodom (there is archaeological evidence that it was a real city). It's unlikely to attract any followers, but it works on the believers. I doubt any of the mouthpieces will use the "mysterious ways" line - they'll just get people to pray for our poor, damp and bedraggled selves and play it off like it's a bigger deal than it is (while there is some major damage and loss of life, the vast majority of us are fine and we have systems in place to deal with it. Like I said before, this isn't exactly a rare occurrence.).
And those guys that paint messages on their fenceline? Yeah, I dunno about them. You see that more in Kansas than Oklahoma. My personal theory is that it's because the evangelical churches have flourished here, with their doctrine on "spreading the word." You know the old saying - the loudest aren't necessarily the majority.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
(giggle)
I'm honestly not certain whether you're being serious or sarcastic. I hope the latter, because as a parody of religious thinking that was hilarious. "I saw a sexy underage girl, therefore God must exist," is not what I would call a good example of logical reasoning.
But in case you really were being serious, what other explanations have you considered? You've made an observation: there are things in the world that appear beautiful to you. You have suggested one explanation for that observation: they were all created by a supreme being who is an artist and "could not help but show a glimpse of His artistic skills." That is, I suppose, one possible explanation. But it certainly isn't the only one. So what other explanations have you considered? And then, how can you determine which of the possible explanations is correct?
To give just one example: perhaps beauty is not an intrinsic quality of an object. Perhaps, as the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and whether you find something beautiful is strictly a property of you, not of the thing itself. That's easy to test. If true, there should be lots of disagreement about what is beautiful. There should be things that you find beautiful but many other people don't; and likewise, things that some people find beautiful but you don't.
Care to conduct that experiment?
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Woah there big fella!
A mathematical property of numbers does not say anything about an uncountable set of objects - something that is a fantasy anyways. These concepts are unrelated.
If a property of the uncountable set of marbles defined that every 10th was green, then we'd be on the same territory.
I am going to put it another way: If a [Insert person whose philosophy/religion/texteditor you disagree with] wants to use a word and you wish to understand their point of view, then you must let them define their terms. You don't get to define the terms.
I disagree. I say the burden is on the person who wishes his philosophy/religion understood to present his message in a way that can be understood, even by those who disagree with him.
Why? For asking for some evidence? That out of all the gods that man has had, that even ONE of them has some actual basis in fact? Because I'm not willing to believe in any of them just because someone says that their bible says so (the fallacy of argument from authority).
Many of the same people who refuse to accept tons of evidence for global warming) accept the bible without a shred of evidence. "You gotta believe ." No, I don't. It's not intolerant to point out that the emperor hasn't had clothes for thousands of years, any more than it was "intolerant" to denounce slavery or child-beating in opposition to that same bible.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Actually, we can quantify faith, although it's normally from self-reporting. We could presumably use EEGs and other devices to make this more objective. There appears to be a biological basis for religion, and that can presumably be measured.
What we can't measure is whether there is any such thing as God.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You do know that the majority of terrorist attacks on US soil have been committed by (non-Muslim) Americans, right? You should be glad that someone in our government is doing something right, for once.
P.S. Please google before asking me for citations. That's what I'd have to do, and I've already done the reading.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
That actually sounds plausible. We all know Christians have a persecution complex.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
We have discovered some principles called Laws of Nature. We do not understand them fully. If we did, we could derive psychology from physics. Instead, we assume that things proceed according to the Laws of Nature, and that when we come to something that looks wrong we can refine our knowledge of them. We assume that everything happens according to those laws. These assumptions are generally good ones, and have driven a lot of incredibly successful and useful thoughts and experiments. Assuming that something happens because it's God's will and for no other reason is dangerous to scientific reasoning. (This is why I don't believe in compiler errors without extensive verification - while compiler errors do happen, they usually don't, and suspecting them is bad for the debugging process.)
While these are excellent assumptions, they aren't necessarily true. God could influence human thought, for example, and we're not nearly good enough at brain physiology to tell if anything unnatural is going on. God could pull off a few miracles and we'd think there were errors in perception, mass hysteria, false reporting, coincidences, or some purely natural freak of nature. We wouldn't know. We do know that perceptual errors, emotional disturbances, and the rest are possible.
I believe that the best thing to do is to keep religion out of science and science out of religion.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
How do you do that? I've never been able to figure what that means.
If you define a way to generate a random sampling of integers from a range, which you can do, then as the range expands the probability that an integer from there is divisible by 10 does indeed go to 0.1.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
bigfoot. of course.
do not read this line twice.
Now take it easy with all that probability and logic talk. I have proof my deity exists, there's no P(x) tomfoolery involved! Not only that it exists it embraces a fantastic diversity.
http://www.barilla.com/possibl...
His noodleness will forgive you!
It is absolutely disgusting that people who think differently to us should be allowed a voice. They should be silenced at all costs as the fount of all wisdom and knowledge resides with us not with them.
Next they will be wanting us to believe that the universe did not create itself from nothing! God help us all if such a concept excapes into the wild.
Hi I've got a website that discusses a scientific theory of mine. I have NEVER claimed it is anything but a theory, but lately I've been pretty beat up by the new google SEO techniques. Like I'm some kind of carnival barker. There are four kinds of knowledge in this world. Google's new plan only acknowledges one of them. 1. Fact - Information that is reproducible and verified. 2. Theory - Information that is reproducible, but not yet verified. 3. Failed Theory - Information that has been proven false. 4. Faith - Information that has no mechanism of reproduction. Problem is Google's new system only considers #1. So everyone else is freaking out. Google's target is #3 and is squashing #2 and #4 as collateral damage. The experiment failed. Back out Google!
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
And yet so many will tell us that marijuana is safe and effective. Birds may be descended from dinosaurs, but science has conclusively proven that overdose participants definitely are not.
Want to see something interesting? Do a Google image search for "black couple", now search for white couple. Results are likely what you'd expect, results filled with black and white couples respectively.
Now let's see if there's any Country specific PSYOPS going on. Compare a search for "American black couple" to a search for American white couple. The "American Black Couple" search results looks similar to the "Black Couple" results, but the "American White Couple" results are primarily pictures of multicultural couples.
Why are the mixed race couples present in "American White Couple" but not for "American Black Couple"? This is not-so-subtle psychological manipulation. It's yet another bullet point on the long list of "anti-white" propaganda. There's nothing wrong with being an interracial couple, IMO; What troubles me is the racist application of the PC agenda. Searches for American Black, Hispanic, and etc. minority couples aren't populated with interracial images, only white couples.
Oh, perhaps it's a fluke you say? Well, then let's try this again using "British" instead of "American" searches, and compare the results: "British Arab couple", "British White Couple". The first search produces the results you'd expect, but the latter results are full of interracial couples, interestingly so is "British black couple" Results are clearly being influenced, most likely due to a psychological operation (PSYOP). In the United States propaganda is being pushed hard for white & black interracial couples, while in Brittan Arab and Indian couples are left "pure" while the PSYOP pushes black and white couples to be more interracial. Now that you're aware of this you'll likely see more examples of said PSYOP in other forms of media.
For some fun, let's try out Russia: Russian Black Couple Wow, interracial and gay, heh. Isn't homosexuality what PC propaganda is primarily focusing on in Russia? "Russian white couple" results seem tainted with "white Russian" the drink and a white building famous for the exhibitionist couple in its window. "Russian Couple" turns up primarily heterosexual white Russian couples, but just look at how many more homosexuals there are in "Russian straight couple" Ah, that must be the other term the PC PSYOP is Google bombing. From the search results I would guess that Russia is under far less PC pressure and influence than the USA and Brittan; Wouldn't you say that's a fairly accurate political prediction?
I've noticed many other such political manipulations occurring over the years, primarily it was news media furthering the Politically Correct Narrative, but now it can also be seen in search results and comment sections full of political shills. Not even our schools are safe from
so kind of like Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark....
not necessary to the story as without him it turns out exactly the same?
bazinga!
So what? Nothing like getting a bunch of psuedo-science /.'ers panties in a twist over search results.
Are you really that insecure about your 'science'?
you can't make a statement such as "10% of them are green"....You don't seem to understand infinity is not simply a big number.
And you don't seem to have much of an imagination. Can't you think of a single formulation that would produce 10% green marbles in an infinite set?
What if we had a barrel that was infinitely deep, and filled with marbles in sequence: 9 red, 1 green, 9 red, 1 green...?
You're kind of obnoxious. This is /. - we all took math in university. This kind of pedantic crap is like arguing over "who" vs "whom" in any conversation not already centered on linguistics. It makes you feel smart, and no one cares.
Last post!
You can disagree all you like, but you miss the point. Few of the reasonable are interested in making you understand. You are completely free to continue in your ignorance of other points of view. Go ahead, I got no problem with that. Your opponents certainly don't understand your POV. Fair is fair.
Should you wish to engage with Christians or other philosophies to your own, you will need to adjust your attitude. The trouble is, because your fundamental set of assumptions are so wildly different from those you argue with, you don't even realise how little sense you make to them, or vice versa.
I make the claim to have some understanding of both Christian and naturalistic philosophy, and I am much happier for it. It may frustrate you however. I don't speak for you.
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
The Pharaoh was in the Bible and you've seen the bones of King Tut (plus many others). I guess you're a believer now?
Genesis 12:14-16 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
14 It came about when Abram came into Egypt, the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful. 15 Pharaoh’s officials saw her and praised her to Pharaoh; and the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house. 16 Therefore he treated Abram well for her sake; and gave him sheep and oxen and donkeys and male and female servants and female donkeys and camels.
You forgot to include evidence against evolution in your word salad drivel.
Please state any scientific evidence against evolution that you might have. I'm OK being surprised, because that makes life interesting.
I'm bad with sayings, so just go live life for crying out loud.
http://www.newser.com/story/20... Sad, but true. The devout religious are struggling to survive...
Is this for Real!!! Are we back here again. Is there a real reason for this stupidity. Are we in dark ages, or is this a fools play on life. It is bad enough that we have to listen to this anal buffoon. Anal because that is what he stupidly preaches out, just loads of crap. And this is not even funny, just loads ironic conjectures that are meaningless. This was one of main reason I moved out of the US., I did not want my kids to learn BS. We have enough of that with politician and there greedy agendas, making more stupidities. Of panic and terror of other cultures to justify the theft land and resources for capital gains. Just make a search fro troglodytes, and another one for people with commonsense called homosapiens. and use a logo that they can understand a witch doctor on and on the other the symbol of infinity. There is to much miss directed info already, this just to obtuse and degrading for the 21's century. I know that every millennium people go thou a culture clash, but this like moving back to 13's century. OK let just bring back the inquisition, jail all the scientist, bring back all the land barons. No actually that is what is happening now, but instead barons we have oil companies and banks and corporations. So we are 2 out of 3 and you are pushing the intellect to end of no return. So what is Google. The way to ignorance and medeocrity.
His noodleness won't need to forgive me of anything. I'm perfectly aware of the correlation between piracy and global warming, and what more evidence does one need? And who can deny the reality of fettucini, especially when made with loving hands?
Unless, of course, one is inclined to think of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs as being the incarnation of deity. Or Xenu. Or Krishna. Or Odin. Or Vishnu. Or Allah. Or Jesus. Or Zeus. Or Quetzacoatl. Or Yahweh. Or...
His divine noodleosity makes as much sense as any of the named possibilities, and serves well to emphasize that with the exception of mavericks like Benjamin Franklin who supposedly believed a little bit in "everything" and are N-n for some value of n, everybody is an N-1 atheist except for real atheists who are N.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
The inference is that there has been some sneaky, underhanded tactics employed to cheat or 'game' the system somehow. What evidence does anyone have that this is the case? As far as I can see, Creationist have created a SEO-friendly website which covers what they sincerely believe about dinosaurs, and let Google do the rest.
Surely Slashdot isn't calling for Google to start censoring unpopular points of view?
Wouldn't the proper response be for those nay-sayers to create SEO-friendly websites stating their own version of dino history, and put it out there!?
You've seen Big Ben, haven't you? Well, remember that scene in Deathly Hallows where they scoot through London and you see Big Ben?
I guess you believe that wizards really DO live among us muggles now, huh?
" If the probability that God exists is 1 x 10^{-403} in an infinite, probabilistic Universe, then the probability that God exists is (gasp) 1 x 10^{-403}. This is most definitely not certainty. Certainty isn't the "smallest chance", it is probability 1. It is the largest (possible) chance."
No no no!
The probability that such a god exists somewhere in an infinite universe is one.
The probbility that you, as a finite human, could ever explore such a universe and really encounter this god is near zero.
"It is enormous compared to the probability that all of the air molecules in the room I'm in will suddenly (by pure chance) happen to bounce in just the right way to form a big blob of liquid air in the middle of the room and leave me gasping in a vacuum as air molecules outside of the house by strange chance miss all of the myriad pathways into the room. "
I dunno. It seems to me there is so much entropy in just a roomfull of space and air molecules that the chance of this occuring is much lower than the proposed 'god' chances.
"God (if God exists) has zero entropy, quantum Universe or not."
Zero entropy would mean this god is a static fact and could never ever interact with anything in this universe.
" The information content of God has to be greater than or equal to the information content of the Universe
But the universe contains entropy, so god must also contain entropy.
The problem with the statistical approach is that theistic belief holds that God is necessary - therefore, statistics don't really apply - either God is necessarily true (and the origin of all) or necessarily false. To use a lottery example: let's suppose that you're running a raffle with an infinite number of entries. Each entry has an asymptotically zero chance of winning... yet when you draw the winning ticket that particular ticket has in fact won, despite it's infinitely small odds. Let's suppose that you *could* calculate the odds of God existing (1 option among n) - one option must indeed be true, and if the one where God exists is true, then it's true despite your calculated odds.
The original assertion was that in an infinite, probabilistic universe if there exists any chance at all that God exists (one ticket in your raffle - I would guess that the author was thinking of a raffle with finite options) then the infinite nature of the universe means that all tickets must be drawn, meaning that the one where God exists will also be drawn. My problem with this assertion is the necessary nature of the existence of God - naturalism and theism are mutually exclusive and cannot coexist, despite the size of the universe - because they are axioms that apply to the entire universe, of which you only get one.
Slashdot Editorializing The News
But, oh wait, this isn't news.
Dinosaurs could not have died out before people appeared because dinosaurs had not previously existed; and death, bloodshed, disease, and suffering are a result of Adam’s sin (Genesis 1:29–30; Romans 5:12, 14; 1 Corinthians 15:21–22).
So, before Adam's sin, did animals not eat other animals? Did Tyrannosaurus not only coexist with Adam, but also eat kale? Mighty sharp teeth for peeling a banana, gotta say...
Ask Google "What happened to the dinosaurs?" and you'll see links to Creationist sites right at the top."
In that case why don't google regionalise the response?
Those nearest the creationist campus can type p0rn and get taken to the nearest convenience places that creationists click on.
Just out of academic interest, as well as other nefarious reasons, I'd like to know what results come out on top when IP addresses from creationist colonies are linked to words like p0rn :)
This problem is not new any way. Not too long back type in Linux and you get to see microshaft fanoboyees have been clicking on goatse sites all day and all night to shift their carp to the top.
Point your magic wand at a flying car and you will find your wizard ass locked away in a very real Azkaban.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/blinding-light-the-us-crackdown-on-not-so-harmless-laser-strikes/
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/03/california-man-who-lasered-two-helicopters-to-face-14-years-behind-bars/
John 6:41-51 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
41 Therefore the Jews were grumbling about Him, because He said, “I am the bread that came down out of heaven.” 42 They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does He now say, ‘I have come down out of heaven’?” 43 Jesus answered and said to them, “Do not grumble among yourselves. 44 No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day. 45 It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught of God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me. 46 Not that anyone has seen the Father, except the One who is from God; He has seen the Father. 47 Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread which comes down out of heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread also which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh.”
Which we may or may not use based on whether we do or don't believe that the universe was created, or "just happened".
We wouldn't know. We do know that perceptual errors, emotional disturbances, and the rest are possible.
You are simply saying that we cannot disprove God, that absence of evidence is not conclusive evidence of absence. Sure. But so what? We can go down an enormously -- actually uncountably infinite -- list of propositions for which we have no evidence. If we are sane, we do not grab arbitrary entries from this list and promote them to plausible beliefs, no matter how pretty a story they make.
Your argument is, of course, ancient and has a name. You are arguing for a God of the Gaps. As human knowledge has expanded, thing after thing that was attributed to God in ancient scripture has been shown to have natural causes. Furthermore, "natural causes" have been shown to have a rigorous, inviolable consistency so much so that when we look hard for cases where our existing laws fail, or where there are still pernicious inconsistencies that suggest that they are not quite right and will require future revision.
Since all of the "easy" gaps have been plugged, you are stuck following this chain:
Laws of Nature (microscopic nuclear + E&M and QFT) -> nuclei and nucleons
Laws of Nature (E&M/QED) -> atoms and molecules (Chemistry!)
Chemistry -> Inorganic and Organic chemistry
Organic chemistry + classical E&M and mechanics -> biochemistry and biophysics
Biochemistry and biophysics -> evolutionary biochemistry, neurophysiology etc (Biology)
Biology -> neuropsychology, anthropology, medicine, (Psychology!)
Psychology & information theory & mathematics -> Intelligence and cognition, Artificial intelligence, etc.
At this point, you take the fact that the science is incomplete to extend the quite correct observation that we don't understand all aspects of human consciousness (yet!) in full detail as a "gap" in which you can insert God. Consciousness is only possible with God, God can communicate with humans by directly manipulating microscopic physics, chemistry, biology, psychology laws in ways that directly violate the second law of thermodynamics, and so on. Forget whether or not there is any good reason to think that this is true. Forget the fact that we have an entire, consistent, empirically validated chain of physical law and reasoning stretching from the microscopic to the macroscopic. If you hear voices in your head, it could be God instead of (for example) your right brain talking to your left brain or some other perfectly natural thing. Hence in your mind, there is a reason to believe, and furthermore to invent a whole new "logic" to explain the fact that your conclusions can be held independent of the mere common sense that leads to the development of consistent science.
Obviously -- seriously -- you are mistaken. What you are doing is called the "Mind Projection Fallacy". To quote wikipedia:
Once one has grasped the idea, one sees the Mind Projection Fallacy everywhere; what we have been taught as deep wisdom, is stripped of its pretensions and seen to be instead a foolish non sequitur. The error occurs in two complementary forms, which we might indicate thus: (A) (My own imagination) (Real property of Nature), [or] (B) (My own ignorance) (Nature is indeterminate)
Welcome to B, with an admixture of A. Our ignorance is not an excuse for assuming that Nature is indeterminate and there is room for e.g. violations of the first or second laws of thermodynamics at the whim of a Deity, and your imagination of God filling the gaps in our knowledge is neither evidence nor (worse!) certainty that that which you imagine is a real thing.
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Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.