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Hawaii Approves Telescope On Volcano Sacred To Indigenous People (reuters.com)
A new $1.4 billion telescope will be built atop a Hawaiian volcano indigenous people consider sacred. The team of scientists fighting for the telescope won approval from Hawaiian officials on Thursday after selecting the site and applying to build there in 2009. Reuters reports: The Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources voted 5-2 to allow construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the summit of Mauna Kea on Hawaii's Big Island, state officials said in a statement. Astronomers consider the summit one of the world's best places to view the cosmos, while Native Hawaiians say the project would disturb holy ground crucial to their connection with ancestors and the heavens. A consortium of scientists initially received construction permits from state officials in 2011. In 2015, the Hawaii Supreme Court voided that decision, saying officials did not follow the proper procedures for a "contested case hearing." That forced the state board to re-evaluate the proposal with more input from opponents. The project calls for building one of the world's largest telescopes atop the dormant volcano.
But at large cost as is often the case.
We will see the usual troublemakers rush back in to try and stir up more protests now.
The same ones who have been missing throughout this actual process, because creating public strife and being the center of attention is what the seek, rather than any actual improvement to peoples lives.
They sent some shaman (or whatever the druggy is called in their religion) to converse with the ancients and they said a gift of a few million bucks could appease them...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A $1million/year is approximately equivalent to a once-off payment of $20 million well invested. That's about 1.5% of a $1.4 billion project.
Bingo! We have a winner!
your religion
Which religion would that be? Let me guess: The only true one! How did you figure that out? Did you compare all the world's religions when you were a kid or did you just pick the one of the people who raised you or that you happened to interact with.
All religions are bullshit and no rational person should put up with any of them!
When 1person suffers from a delusion,it is called insanity.When many people suffer from a delusion,it is called religion
Their so-called 'native religion' is nothing but a pathetic hoax
I wholeheartedly agree! A hoax like all religions!
When 1person suffers from a delusion,it is called insanity.When many people suffer from a delusion,it is called religion
Sorry I couldn't hear you over the sound of the incredibly loud dog whistles coming from your post.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Finally, some good news
The volcano would have blown itself up?
Typically, the narrative would be about evil white male scientists, paving over the sacred native lands to install their phallic, oppressive astronomy instruments.
Only if this is your first debate and you've never looked into this before. Scientists get pushback for many reasons, but "sacred native lands" rarely has support beyond a few local indigenous nutjobs these days.
Your post would be far more relevant in the 1400s
Ancient corpses are only used in building the support arms for the secondary mirror; the primary mirror is entirely corpse free.
All we want to do is eat your brains.
It is simply your own points being reiterated back to you. If it sounds negative to you, then maybe you're the problem...
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Both arguments have been made here in discussions on this topic, repeatedly. But if you're shocked that Slashdotters prefer science to superstition, maybe you need to look into some grounding.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
During one of my long walks one day, it popped in my head that the only religion that was close to being rational was Gaia worship. Whether it's the Druids or Native Americans or flaky New Agers, they are (sort of) of the rational ones.
You can stand on their God. Physical proof! And since we have evolved on this planet, we are a part of it and anything we do to harm it, harms ourselves. So, revering Gaia is actually beneficial to ourselves.
Sure there's hocus pocus nonsense and meaningless rituals - like all religions - but in a way, it has some rational element to it.
AND on May 1, young women dance around naked in some versions! I see no downside.
I always find it interesting that when the (few) native Hawaiians and their opportunistic supporters go up the mountain, they always seem to do it using the roads that the telescope facilities built and manage/maintain. I guess that part of the desecration is just a nice time saver.
to live in Hawaii are not to be messed with. Truth is there is a lot of very tall mountain ranges all around the globe, that are much taller with much dryer air and virtually no light pollution. Here is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Also, the higher the mountain the lesser density of the air, which will always result in better results. Who wants to work in Pakistan, India or Chile, if the world can be convinced that Hawaii has the best place for the telescope.
Presumably less than telescope atop an active volcano...
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Well their religion just got them a lot of money, which is more than I ever remember any of my family getting from theirs. Whoever these guys pray to has better results than God, Allah, Yahweh, Krishna, or most of the other deities people devote their time to.
Itâ(TM)s really hard to fault people for doing what works.
Hawaiian natives don't give a shit either. This "You can't build here because it's sacred" is just their long-standing way of demanding a bribe. You would think a "consortium of scientists" would be smart enough to figure out this is how things work in Hawaii.
No such thing as 'baiting'. The commentary is valid or it is not. How you react is up to you.
"All religions are bullshit and no rational person should put up with any of them!"
Pastafarians are at the other end of the alimentary canal from bullshit.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Did somebody make a Hoffa they can't refuse?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Folks here blow some companies' attempts out of proportion that want to bring more women and minorities into tech into this 'hate white male' attitude or something.
Nope. Folks here point out the obvious hypocrisy of such policies and left wing apologists make strawman arguments.
Many of you people need to get a grip and step out of your bubbles. Your perceptions are wrong.
Heh. Take your own advice. Who advocates for 'safe spaces'? Special exemptions from laws for certain classes of people? Who advocates for people based on divisive concepts like class in the first place? Which group prattles about diversity while downplaying and demonizing individuality, whether thought or action?
in that case it's more likely it would have blown up the entire island.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Leftists have a problem with trash like you using religion to get at minorities. Christians are not being told to bugger off 'back to sand ni**er land'. Most left wingers think that all religions are superstition given unwarranted power. Quite apart from which we had the holy wars in the pig ignorant middle ages and the last thing the world needs now is more war.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Pastafarians are at the other end of the alimentary canal from bullshit.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Bingo! We have a winner!
They are capitalists, merely making money. And if those liberal scientists don't like that, they can build their telescope on a different highest mountain in Hawaii.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Here's the problem with you guys: you seem to be unable to understand that there is an infinity of colors between black and white. To wit, some of us are as liberal as they come, and also ecstatic that this nonsensical superstition of the natives has not prevailed. Unlike you people, we also tend to be consistent in our disregard of all forms of superstition.
Their so-called 'native religion' is nothing but a pathetic hoax
I wholeheartedly agree! A hoax like all religions!
The tricky part is that there really isn't a good way to differentiate. A Pastafarian is every bit as legitimate as a traditional Christian or a fundamentalist one, or Muslim or Hindu, or Jain and so on Nowhere is it written that a god cannot have a sense of humor.
In the Name of the Pasta, and of the Sauce, and of the Holy Meatballs, R'Amen.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
i would suggest having a few Jesuit "brothers" on staff just in case things get a bit err Hot.
Which way does liberal outrage swing these days?
I think the latest algorithm works like this:
Yeah yeah, take whatever group you don't like, and strawman the living fuck out of them. It kind of leaves out my family, who were serious liberals, yet were very religious.
And then there was me, the most conservative one of the bunch, who doesn't have any part of that bullshit fairy tale or any fairy tale for that matter.
Regardless, despite what people have been trained to think, there are right wing atheists, and left wing deeply religious. If a religion has a litmus test of politics, it is a political group more than a religion.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So why did you ask what leftwingers will do?
Reading comprehension fail. GP's question was whether libs are protesting or celebrating:
1) "Is it racist,xenophobic/Nazi?" - lefties should be protesting
2) "is it science triumph over archaic superstition?" - lefties should be celebrating
Which religion would that be? Let me guess: The only true one! How did you figure that out? Did you compare all the world's religions when you were a kid or did you just pick the one of the people who raised you or that you happened to interact with.
Of course it is the one you are exposed to as a child, that what culture IS, packaged messily as religion so you have a framework to build a personal morality from by taking responsibility for you're own shitty behavior. Here, read this book to discover how ugly and cruel humanity can be and figure out how to not to do that.
I've never got why people compare science and religion when they are two different fields of knowledge, one deals with the nature of the universe, the other the nature of humanity.
All religions are bullshit and no rational person should put up with any of them!
Is this from your study of religion? Isn't it also possible you simply lack the imagination and intellect to read the texts that created your culture? That brought forth the morality that crafted the laws that allow you to roam the streets at night in relative safety? That despite it's thousands of years of messy hypocrisy manifested enough civil behavior to lay the foundations for science so you could sit on your computer and criticize it as irrational, which it is, but what does that say about us?
Is it rational to trash someone else's culture because you can?
Rational, as if our society is rational. No, it is not rational because people are not rational and that's why a planet full of crazy primates evolved religion in several flavors so we have a framework for how to behave like a person that other people want to be around and not kill. Anyone who take religions as literal truth is not rational however anyone who cannot take the lessons from religion as archetypical truths about subjective behavior of human beings has little chance of mastering their own culture because they don't know the difference between intelligence and wisdom.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
If they really are capitalists, they can make money like the rest of us by earning it. And by that I mean that this should come down to laws of ownership, eminent domain and what have you, applied equally without any special consideration for religion. If my farm must be bulldozed to make way for a new interstellar bypass, so does your church. If you claim the church has some historical significance, that's fair enough, but I get to make the same claims for my farm. In this case, if there is some sort of regular worship on that mountain that has been going on for centuries and can't be held anywhere else, they could make a good case for historical significance. But seriously "it's just sitting there, but it's sacred!" isn't good enough. Or it shoudn't be.
Sure, it sucks if your nice countryside gets developed, but that's what most people have to deal with at some point. And unlike these folks, people rarely get compensated if they view or enjoyment of the countryside is ruined.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The author of this piece has an agenda, lying by omission. There are several large telescopes on Mauna Kea. The "sacred ground" is already highly developed. The new telescope will be built on the site of one of the existing telescopes, which will be remove.
The original plan was to build on a new site. The compromise is to build on an existing site.
The summit of Mauna Kea isn't sacred like a burial ground. The native Hawaiians never went there. It's sacred like Mount Olympus was sacred to the ancient Greeks (they never went there either).
So, build a telescope on sacred ground and risk disturbing the dormant, but mighty Hawaii god of fire and destruction. Right on the tip of a volcano, where his powers are the greatest. I'm pretty sure I've seen a movie that had a plot like this and I tell you, it didn't turn out well for the scientists.
âoe...so you islanders can kick rocks.â
If it ainâ(TM)t jerbus, officials donâ(TM)t care.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
I predict these comments will be buried.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Win for astronomy, except the Governor made UH promise to close down 25% of their existing sites on the mountain. Because reasons.
And much more importantly, a big win for the rule of law. Public land is public land, and religious considerations can't be allowed to dictate use of public land.
Nobody. That's his point. That's how straw men work. Stop listening to the people who feed you that bullshit. Take a step outside the echo chamber for a while. There's a great breeze out here.
Yeah yeah, take whatever group you don't like, and strawman the living fuck out of them. It kind of leaves out my family, who were serious liberals, yet were very religious.
And then there was me, the most conservative one of the bunch, who doesn't have any part of that bullshit fairy tale or any fairy tale for that matter.
Funny. That fits my family exactly. I remember being shocked when I got to college and there was an association of religious with conservative. All the conservatives I knew were atheists and all the leftists I knew were United Church of Christ, etc., deeply religious.
Mao, Stalin, and the others you refer to were not non-religious like you seem to think. They opposed religious systems which they couldn't control, and sought to replace them with the State, Party, etc. as the centerpiece. But it was still religion, merely cloaked under a different name.
Lol @ Japan. It's true isn't it? A culture that revere's and respects nature.... But f*ck anything that lives in the sea. That sea sh*t aint nature. Lol
The GP's point stands. Trying criticising Christianity, and criticising Islam, and see which gets you more flak.
There are people on the right who hate muslims, and - to a lesser, but correlated, degree - hate brown people. And there are people on the left who hate white people, and - to a lesser, but correlated, degree - hate christians. The people on the right talk about how excellent Christianity is to distinguish themselves from muslims; the people on the left talk about how excellent Islam is to distinguish themselves from christians.
That's our Sacred Mountain.
This is our Sacred Antenna!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Agreed, but the issue is which religions are PC to criticize, and which are protected from any and all criticism. Right now it's open season on Christianity, but every other religion gets a pass. If it were Christianity objecting to this telescope on "sacred ground" people would be waiting in line for hours to throw their two cents of derision Christianity's way. But if this is "sacred ground" to "indigenous people" (they are not) suddenly we have to respect and revere these ancient traditions and protest against this scientific endeavor. If we were consistent we'd call BS on all religious mumbo jumbo instead of reserving whipping boy status only for Christianity.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
The Native Americans spent thousands of years killing each other and taking land from each other before Whitey ever showed up.
Ya, they got to eat a shit sandwich, just like the losers always have everywhere on Earth for all of History. And now we have a country which has enough power and influence to try and change that globally, and all you assmonkeys can do is whine about World Police.
I live in Honolulu, visit Puna on the Big Island pretty often.
Please do not paint native Hawaiians as anti-science, they are not.
The protesters are loud, but they represent a fairly small percentage of the population.
Protests are just part of the process of building new structures here.
Things still get built, believe me. They just take longer.
Ob astronomy reference 1 - the ancient polynesians were master navigators who relied on the stars to cross a huge seas in tiny craft without a compass or a map. They were the geeks of their day.
Ob astronomy reference 2 - Many heavenly bodies discovered in Hawaii have been given Hawaiian / polynesian names. The new scope will doubtless add more.
It is simply your own points being reiterated back to you.
Aaah I see you've reached the 'just make shit up' part of the argument.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Nah, Pastafarian isn't a real religion. There's not enough guilt and self loathing for it to count as a religion. Maybe what you really need is some fundamentalists who run out and bomb all the infidels who don't like Italian food.
ok
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I'm all for a people's right to self-determination. Strangely, that's not what I hear from the protesters. The problem today is the same problem of 1898 -- yes, Hawaiians are culturally distinct from the mainland, but the economic ties are vital to their community in a fairly literal sense. Hawaiians don't like haoles, but apparently they're willing to hold their noses and take their money.
If Hawaii wants to leave the US, that's fine. We can drop them and let PR be a state, and not have to change the flag. This would be a complete economic disaster for the islands, but the same might be said of the former American colonies cutting political ties with Great Britain. If Hawaiians are saying, "give us liberty or give us death," by all means let them be liberated. What I'm not so sympathetic to is, "give us arbitrary and unlimited economic concessions for all time, or we'll stage protests."
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
your witchcraft.
I just invented tacos!
Proving religion to be BS is more the job of logicians than scientists, particularly since most religions claim miracles, which are explicitly denials of and outside the realm of science.
While you're at it, why don't you demand that plumbers prove religion is BS. That would be no less relevant.
All traditional religions involving the supernatural lead to contradictions. That is the proof that the religion in question is BS.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Too bad Susette Kelo didn't think of this dodge.
"My house is the central site upon which my religion is based. Religion trumps eminent domain."
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
"Atheism is a religion" is a claim made frequently by people trying to destroy the intellectual superiority that is inherent to atheism. It's a claim made by people (among others) who are lazy or ignorant, and assume that all beliefs (and even lack of beliefs) are based on nothing more substantial than wishes.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Some religious beliefs - particularly on abortion in some Christian divisions - were set down long before they became political issues. However, even with abortion the boundaries keep shifting. With science showing brain activity at ever earlier times in development, and technology allowing earlier premies to live, some Christian groups have moved from prohibiting abortion at 3-6 months to prohibiting it at conception or a few weeks.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Indian attacks (which went both ways) took place for over 300 years, Your summary skips too much to be meaningful.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
A Pastafarian is every bit as legitimate as a traditional Christian or a fundamentalist one
More so. At least the guy who started Flying Spaghetti Monster admit it was a joke religion. The other religions just keep pretending.
If they really are capitalists, they can make money like the rest of us by earning it.
Oh geesh, I thought the sarcasm was obvious.
If I drop the sarcasm, the people who are claiming that "their" mountain is sacred are just a bunch of racists and grifters, and not only do not want a facility there, they do not want Americans or Asians there, and want to revert to the pre-Hook Hawaii of several hundred years ago. But if they can milk some money out of the "ferners", they'll be happy to do so. https://www.splcenter.org/figh...
http://www.angelfire.com/hi5/b...
They even have a "Kill Haole Day" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Here's a great example - http://dailysignal.com/2015/11... A special election in which Registration to vote was restricted to “Native Hawaiians,” who are defined as only those whose ancestors lived on the Hawaiian Islands prior to 1778.
So no Virginia, Racism and ethnic purity are not concepts only of "white people" These racist mutherfucks are even discriminating against Micronesians. Which is pretty nasty but they demand some sort of date based racial purity that even excludes their own.
So complely dropping the thin veneer of even sarcasm, these people are racists and grifting assholes, and frankly, I would be more than willing to have a military action taken against them. They are evil. Sorry, but the evilz racists 'Murricans were in a Revolutionary war when you decided who "true Hawaiians are, and even more sorry, we don't have to give you back "your" place any more than we have to graft ourselves on to great Britain. Don't like it? well, you know the secession drill.
Now see, wasn't that much nicer when I was just being sarcastic?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You write as if civilization wouldn't have advanced without religion.
There was a time, when we were evolving, that we told each other stories to pass on lessons about the human condition. One day, someone figured out a way to write them down and that became religion. The story of the human condition.
You can criticize religion all you want however what you are forgetting is what it is. Humanity had to tell it's story to itself so it could understand itself and manifest enough order to generate science, and everything else, from the intellect. You have to consider that we went through long periods of time in remote areas without law to bring that order so belief systems are inevitable to help society function.
So what I am saying is if you reason out the amount of time humans have been around it is inevitable that humanity evolved some social system so that it could interact. Religion was that system.
Is there something unreasonable about that as an observation?
Many of history's bloodiest events were in the name of something nobody could prove existed.
By men of power seeking power, this is the story religion tells of humanity. The story tells you men of power use the name of god it to seek power, the idea of not mixing church and state come from a story of what happens when you mix clay and iron.
I'm not interested in selling anyone religion either. What I am saying there is incredible amount of lessons about human behavior in these works if you are capable of reading them and can decode them, because they are incredibly difficult and dense to parse.
It something to confront the full horror of the human condition that is in all of us and know it is in you. Have you confronted it in yourself. How have you tried to evolve? That's what exists.
Remind me again how civilized and rational religion is?
Religion confronts us with a history of our behavior as brutal and blood thirsty as the mammalian part of every human being on the planet capable of manifesting any number of psychopaths at any time can produce. That's what it is reminding us of, the flaws in out nature we need to overcome. How else would you expect to convey a message about the human condition through generations?
Frankly I've no interest in 'mastering my culture' when it's filled with charlatans and hypocrites. Western society is shit.
Because you don't participate and you are apathetic. You've never voted and you certainly haven't done anything to make your community better. You've never written to a politician and expressed your will, never use the democracy put there so you could make things better, you just complain so you can feel entitled. You didn't take personal responsibility.
You stayed anonymous and unknown, you did nothing.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It's science which they distrust vs. "false" religion they don't like.
If they can be bothered to watch at all, they sit back with a bowl of popcorn.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nobody would give a shit about your religion if you didn't constantly try to push it into education and law. Quite frankly, I couldn't care less about some loonies scooting about on their knees in front of a corpse nailed to an IKEA set if they didn't want to force me to do it, too.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Grow the fuck up. This is real life. Not fairy tales.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Nah, Pastafarian isn't a real religion. There's not enough guilt and self loathing for it to count as a religion. Maybe what you really need is some fundamentalists who run out and bomb all the infidels who don't like Italian food.
Isn't it a pity that in the quest for making God in man's image, that we even incorporate humankind's lust for killing other humans into the dogma?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Yeah yeah, take whatever group you don't like, and strawman the living fuck out of them. It kind of leaves out my family, who were serious liberals, yet were very religious.
And then there was me, the most conservative one of the bunch, who doesn't have any part of that bullshit fairy tale or any fairy tale for that matter.
Funny. That fits my family exactly. I remember being shocked when I got to college and there was an association of religious with conservative. All the conservatives I knew were atheists and all the leftists I knew were United Church of Christ, etc., deeply religious.
That's because the "religious right", which is as much a political group as a religion, have somehow managed to usurp the whole definition, turning it into a nasty tempered cherry picking of the Old Testament's baser parts. I've never seen the Sermon on the Mount mentioned unless they are pressed into it, which you would think would be a "Christian's" guiding principles, being marching orders given by the man himself.
I do understand that the Republican party is issuing a new translation of the New Testament, to be known as the Cruz Edition, in which Supply Side Jesus tells the apostles to distribute the loaves and fish among the people, but only those who have passed a drug test first.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Pastafarianism was created as a parody of religion, and is still advocated as such today. People don't join because they actually believe, but because they want to protest the thought process that drives memberships in other religions.
Their souls need saved, and the drive for the truth inevitably takes you to the presence of his noodliness. What's more, he is a kind God, and merely invites you to try the true way for 30 days. If you don't like it, your old religion will probably take you back.
Therefore, it is not "every bit as legitimate as traditional Christian ..." The very center of it is non-religion. Drop the bullshit double-speak because you know damn well this is exactly the case.
So sad. Do ye not want your afterlife reward of fine beer volcanoes and even finer strippers? All you need to is follow the 8 condiments.
As far as dropping the bullshit, well, how can we do that and discuss religion at all?
In the case of pastafarianism, the practicioners don't actually believe a bit of it. In the case of Christianity, the practitioners actually believe. This isn't some surface-level detail, this is the single most relevant distinction between the two, which completely confutes your claim.
Once you drop the bullshit, then we can have a meaningful conversation about how misguided all religions actually are.
Do you think that the politicians who waffle when asked about whether the earth was created 6000 years ago or the other fundy myths actually believe what they tell you?
And I have no idea how to have a meaningful conversation with people who in an earlier time, would have me killed or tortured for not believing as they do, and some of the more primitive members of humanity are still happy to do that.
So in the meantime, I'll settle for ridiculing them, and a pretend religion that is indistinguishable from their realpretend religion is a fine way to do that.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"Atheism is a religion" is a claim made frequently by people trying to destroy the intellectual superiority that is inherent to atheism. It's a claim made by people (among others) who are lazy or ignorant, and assume that all beliefs (and even lack of beliefs) are based on nothing more substantial than wishes.
Atheism is a religion in the exact same way that abstinence is sex.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's not just that. We paint God in man's image then make him infallible and spend the rest of our lives apologising for arbitrary things. Though some religions have a catch-all, apparently some Gods are all forgiving.
It's not just that. We paint God in man's image then make him infallible and spend the rest of our lives apologising for arbitrary things. Though some religions have a catch-all, apparently some Gods are all forgiving.
My grandparents had what is to me a seriously weird belief that once you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior, you were in like Flynn. Nothing else mattered.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Some religious beliefs - particularly on abortion in some Christian divisions - were set down long before they became political issues. However, even with abortion the boundaries keep shifting. With science showing brain activity at ever earlier times in development, and technology allowing earlier premies to live, some Christian groups have moved from prohibiting abortion at 3-6 months to prohibiting it at conception or a few weeks.
It's a short jump from the reductio ad absurdum that these people have chosen to believe to reductio ad insanatum that following that path ensures.
Given that artificial wombs are being developed, there is no reason that every egg needs to be brought to full term.
The argument is as follows. Every human egg is the basis of a human, and while many sperm are used to fertilize an egg ( remember that one is the eventual fertilizer, but many of these sperm are employed in altering the composition of the egg wall to allow that one in) there is no question that the egg is the human. Every egg lost, every menstrual period, is a human life lost.
To argue that an egg is not a human until it is fertilized is abhorrent in God's eyes.
The fundies are just using one of those mental exercises that philosophical vegans fall into. They can argue themselves into a corner they cannot get out of because of some bad assumptions. All life is precious, plant or animal. But I have to friggin eat, and killing even a plant is still destroying life. And declaring a person a human at conception (or even before) ends up requiring criminal investigations of women for miscarriages.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
A Pastafarian is every bit as legitimate as a traditional Christian or a fundamentalist one
More so. At least the guy who started Flying Spaghetti Monster admit it was a joke religion. The other religions just keep pretending.
Sokath, his eyes uncovered. Bless you son, for you have been touched by his noodly appendage.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's not just that, you also see these protests happening without anybody actually checking to make sure what the actual religious beliefs of the locals say about sacred ground--the automatic assumption is pretty much "Build nothing on it anywhere, ever" which is, when you think about it, weird in a racist way given that very few cultures actually have that as their approach to sacred ground...and most of the ones I can think of with that approach are ones which didn't have the ability to do even a temporary devotional structure. (Pooling with a fellow anthro geek gets it to "Some Native American tribes?" but we cannot even be sure there because it may be more that the knowledge of the correct thing to build has been lost...)
It gets really ironic here--Poli'ahu might be actually perfectly fine with a telescope on her mountain, but there ought to be no question if the proposal had been a meteorological, geological, or ecological research station.
But, really, the question of the truth of a religion should be completely irrelevant to the whole issue of being polite about things. The history of science is littered with dead theories that linger on well past when they ought to have been abandoned, even to this day...while many primitive peoples' observations are quite accurate even if couched in their religious terminology. Taboos against building things on a site can easily be because they know it's a bad site--but because of how they understood the universe, they attributed something like 'likely to result in mudslide down the side of the mountain' to 'wrath of deity' instead of 'the soil here just is gonna do that if you build here.' Even with modern tech, some of this is things we only can know in hindsight.
It's the right that is with science and develop things. It's no accident that Russia, the quintessential leftists keeps a close watch on the US Patent office. We rock. Sure, a few are religious. I know a lot of lefties that are way more religious than the people I know on the right. The left also has some really whacked out atheists. Saying only religious people are on the right or they are the only ones that care about religion is a lot like saying all black people are criminals. You wouldn't say that, would you?
The US isn't an imperial power. The US doesn't employ imperial tactics. You obviously flunked civics in school. Fact is they wanted to become a state.
Now don't let facts get in the way. That crazy leftist had some kind of a point to make, even though it's BS.
Disease took most of them in fact.
I saw something ludicris recently. An Indian woman claiming to be a warrior. No, she's a squaw. I could have easily dispatched her by hand.
Right now it's open season on Christianity, but every other religion gets a pass.
I certainly don't feel that Islam is getting a pass right now even though many liberals are treating any criticism of Islam as "racism". Neither in the US nor here in Europe. I do suspect that you might be right concerning indigenous religions. Personally I don't know why people have warm and fuzzy feelings concerning indigenous people. Probably it's because they were and often still are victims of more technologically advanced cultures. What people tend to forget is that a) they are just as human as we are and occasionally just as nasty and b), being a victim does not make you a better person. (For idiots that try to read things into what I say that I didn't say: It also does not make them worse people.) Just look at how Israel is treating the Palestinians.
Just for the record: I am a liberal and "Fuck Hinduism, fuck Islam, fuck Buddhism and fuck $YOUR_RELIGION_HERE!"
When 1person suffers from a delusion,it is called insanity.When many people suffer from a delusion,it is called religion
Exactly. There's pretty much nothing I can do that I can't fix in an hour on a Sunday plus a bit of an apology right as I die. Hell must be a lonely place.
"Frankly I've no interest in 'mastering my culture' when it's filled with charlatans and hypocrites. Western society is shit."
No doubt, most of the world is and has been full of charlatans and hypocrites. But laying the blame on Western society is illogical. You've given no evidence to link Western society to being the cause of that, any more or less than other societies. Maybe you'd like to point to your manifesto on what the utopian society would be. I don't believe that the planet has yet seen one.
Just another day in Paradise
It's mostly an invention of the media and behind-the-scenes influence.
Dude, I lived this shit since I was a little kid. My Grandparents fit the mold of today's modern far religious right. Problem with the "balme the media" straw man is that this was the 1960's, I don't think your evil media meme was so entrenched. In fact, these folks were mostly ignored, not "invented" at the time.
Take the Tea Party for example. Started out as a "hey, have some more influence in the political process, come meet up and just discuss things both sides of the aisle no big deal, we'll be trying to do this once or twice a month, we really just want people to get out and vote and have more understanding in the process and the message that people of different backgrounds are taking from things." Six months later, if you ever went to one of those events, you were labeled by the media as a racist murdering 1%er.
It's a lot easier to control people when you make sure that everyone understands that they all have to fit in a bucket, and you're the one that defines the buckets.
You mean like the bucket you tried to put the media in? Look at thine own self AC, you have met the enemy, and its staring at you in a mirror.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I predict these comments will be buried.
On a volcano, that would be cremated.
Just another day in Paradise
Huh ? Jesus is the guy who does my trees. There's a RELIGION based on him ??? ;)
I thought that was a different religion. I keep hearing people yelling "hey Zeus!".
Just another day in Paradise
I'm sorry, who exactly is saying the bugger off line? Oh, you made that shit up didn't you...got it. As a person who left religion behind when I left my parents home 40+ years ago, I've never met a Christian that used his/her religion to slight anyone, much less minorities. Clearly there's plenty of history of that happening, but within the last few decades, and you give examples? Sorry, nobody alive should be held responsible for crap that happened centuries ago.
Just another day in Paradise
Well, in case you're religious and Christian, is there a way you could be appeased if they razed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to build the observatory?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They arrived here years before us and so just being around them means all our stuff really belongs to them somehow.
...
Also the vast number of generations between those first settlers and the people living in the land these days clearly means nothing.
How compelling
This is what they said when they tossed Jews and Christians into German internment camps never to be seen again.
Nope.
First, there's still a lot we don't understand and can't explain. We can't say everything can be explained by science until we have explained everything scientifically. It's certainly a reasonable world-view, with a lot of evidence behind it, but it can't be proven, and therefore can't be used as the basis of a proof.
Second, there's all sorts of details that we will never know. We can trace evolution pretty well, but we can't determine why each little thing happened. I know a scientist who believes that God guided evolution to produce us, which is not possible to disprove. Again, it's a reasonable world view with lots of support to think it happened randomly, and it certainly could have, but it's not proof.
Third, science can't say there isn't a God, because science can work only on things that are independently and objectively observable. It can use subjective experiences, but only if those are fixed in an objective form. Many symptoms, particularly of mental illnesses, are based on subjective reports, but there's enough of them and they agree well enough so we can say that this is depression and that is schizophrenia, and suggest appropriate treatments.
We can identify religious people based on self-reporting. We can examine correlations with all sorts of things. We can learn a lot about what religion as a human phenomenon is like. What we can't do is determine whether there's anything to it. I have a priest friend who talked about the sense of God, and from what I've been able to figure out it's not a rare thing. This is a subjective account. You can't point a finger and say "Look! God!". (You can cause at least something similar with electrical stimulation in the brain, which may or may not be the same thing. Either this sense is an accident of the evolution of the brain, or it's the real deal. It's not possible to determine which with science, since it's a question of, although I'd be interested in religion as practiced or not practiced by extraterrestrial intelligent beings.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'll grant you that the empirical evidence against an all-knowing, all-powerful, completely benevolent God is very strong, and the Problem of Pain has caused an immense amount of twisted thinking over the centuries.
I don't see the contradictions. Miracles don't contradict science, and if they were scientifically explainable they wouldn't be miracles. Saying that God overrides science in some places at some times isn't a contradiction.
It's possible that your claim is true, but I don't know all the religions that involve the supernatural, so I can't verify it on a case-by-case basis. If you're saying that believing in the supernatural is self-contradictory, I just don't see it.
We can't prove there is nothing supernatural in the sense of thoroughly violating science as we know it. There's actually mountains of evidence for the supernatural in this sense, although it tends to be fairly weak evidence.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
In what sense is it open season on Christianity in the US? I hear complaints about how Christians are persecuted, and they usually wind up being cases where Christianity, or at least the complainer's idea of Christianity, isn't the preferred religion, or cases where the so-called Christians are using their religion as an excuse to be assholes. Other complaints amount to "they're saying mean things about us", and I'm not impressed.
Obviously, this doesn't apply everywhere in the world, but it appears to be true in the US.
Christianity covers a large number of very different people, and Christians say unpleasant things about each other.
In the meantime, I see lots and lots of vituperation directed as Islam and Muslims, so whoever "they" are, "they" aren't stopping criticism of other religions.
Historically, in the US, the usual result of some white guy finding a commercial use for ground the natives consider sacred is bulldozers and shovels, which will be approved of by most of the white folk in the vicinity. (The pattern is must usually seen with white people, although there's nothing to prevent blacks and people of other races from developing sacred land.) Standing Rock is a good example: while lots of people stood with the natives, the ones who didn't give a crap about the "prairie n?gg?rs" won. (Question marks substituted for vowels to get around lameness filter, which is unfortunate since it hinders talking about people's attitudes.)
So, I don't understand what you're talking about. Unfortunately, what you've got is a widely shared delusion.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So far, I've gotten the most flak from my attitude that Islam isn't an inherently bad religion (although the worst flak came from my belief that people can change and deserve second chances). I'm aware that this is anecdotal evidence, but it's the best evidence anyone has brought up in this thread about who you can badmouth. There is this mysterious belief among people that they're being especially picked on.
I haven't seen much in the way of leftists hating whites, although there are some cases. Leftists tend to dislike the current social structure that favors white men, and often talk up things people who are not white men have accomplished, to try to balance out white culture and history.
The leftist attitude towards Christianity is largely about how Christianity presents itself. The loudest Christians in the US tend to be the intolerant irrational fundamentalist types, and if you look in the right places you will find other Christians blasting them. Many leftists don't notice the other side of Christianity, which is why I wind up defending Christianity in various places, and I'm not Christian.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Why do people keep saying "the narrative" like there was only one? Why does it seem like people who talk about "the narrative" select one that makes their opponents look bad?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I was raised Christian, but stopped following over forty years ago, though I still try to be respectful of others beliefs.
As for your example, I haven't read the article, or know enough about the Hawaiian's beliefs to know if that's a similar case. I did raise a somewhat similar question in another post here regarding how we would treat it if taken over and someone wanted to put up something on Arlington cemetery. Yes, I could certainly understand the outrage in either case, though I just don't know enough. Hopefully the TMT can find a suitable home in any case.
Just another day in Paradise
Exactly. There's pretty much nothing I can do that I can't fix in an hour on a Sunday plus a bit of an apology right as I die. Hell must be a lonely place.
Its strange. I've never got much of an answer when I've asked what heaven is like. Usually Something like "Ohhhh, it' a wonderful place, you'll be able to worship God in his presence!".
Is there sex there? "Of course not - sex is for making children!"
How about my loved pets? "Pets don't have souls, so no pets in heaven?
So let me get this straight - I have to worship this guy who likes to kill his greatest creation, or live like a hedon until the last moment so I can spend eternity worshipping him, and that's all I'll be doing? "Yes, isn't that wonderful?
Heaven or hell, it would all be the same thing to me. So if the genocidal angry desert god somehow exists, I don't care where he plans to send me. I'm hoping for going to sleep some day, and then peaceful nothing.
Mark Twain wrote "Heaven for the weather, Hell for the company."
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
A dormant (actually, Maunakea is classified as still active, even though it hasn't erupted for 5000+ years) volcano that already has 12 observatories on it? I'm guessing not much.
You are an idiot.
Atheism isn't the lack of belief. It's the belief that there is no such thing as a god.
For the most part, no. A few will make that strong claim, but most do not. Most only say they do not have belief. Of course, if you don't believe, you're going to act like it doesn't exist, and in many ways those two things are indistinguishable.
But in these discussions someone always comes along and insists that atheism is an active belief in an unprovable theorem, primarily because they're out to paint atheism as just as "religious" or "irrational" as religion. It's a poor argument, and doesn't reflect reality nearly as much as the majority who just say they lack belief.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Give it 3 generations, and then let's see what it's become. One day some kid, raised in it by joking parents, now searching for relief during a 4 a.m. hangover, is going to have a noodly vision and start treating the whole thing as real.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
The people on the right talk about how excellent Christianity is...;
There's correlation between conservativism and putting a lot of weight on group membership. Conservatives are going to feel more strongly attacked by criticism of their group, and be less inclined to badmouth their own team's issues, and more inclined to emphasize the positives.
the people on the left ....
Are more prone to consider self-criticism fair game. They'll readily point out the worst aspects of their own team because they want to improve it, and put less focus on the parts they see as positive and working well. A really big chunk of the left *is* Christian.
talking about Islam ....
I don't have enough of these conversations to comment or generalize. The snippets I've seen are more along the lines of "they're more like regular people and less like the demons you appear to be making them out to be" but my experience may be limited.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Then the followers will throw the telescope's designer in!