Slashdot Mirror
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.
"Everyone trying to manipulate search results"
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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
I'm sure every ideologue out there wanting to brand their dogmatic bullshit as truth is doing the same thing.
"anti-Christian witch hunters"
ROTFLMAO
Shhh, you don't want them to go all ISIS and start lopping heads off folks, kidnapping and burning women that won't go all PR0N for them do you?
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"?
nobody outside the US even remotely takes that "controversy" serious
Hell, most scientists inside the US don't take the "controversy" seriously, or even notice it most of the time. The only reason most of us care is because those fuckwits keep trying to legislate their mythology into the public schools, otherwise they'd be worth no more thought than, say, flat-earthers or faith healers. And in large parts of the country, e.g. liberal urban areas like the one I live in, it's not even an issue in schools either. (God knows our public schools have enough other problems...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think they are anti-porn, when asked in public. If you check their internet history, you are likely to get a different version of events...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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."
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.
Funny, how you, and many of your kind, never consider that you may be the ones burning in Hell. Lying, even to ourselves, would seem to be a mortal sin (if we are to believe in the holy books as you are suggesting). Wanting something to be true, even wanting something to be true really, really passionately, is not the same thing as knowing something is true. Science, so far, is the best system we have to find those truths. The fact that "The Scientific Method" has found (continues to find) its mistakes is not its weakness, it is its strength.
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective