Then why are so many atheists evangelical? Seeking to impose their belief system on others?
The problem with atheism and science is that atheism provides no philosophical basis for science.
As far as I was aware, the American Family Association was formed in the 20th century. Washington Irving wrote in the 19th century and thus pre-dated them by somewhere around 100 years. There was a movement in the 19th century to develop scientific theories that supported the idea that there was no God. There was a conscious effort by members of that group to denigrate religion and rewrite history to show all opposition to new scientific ideas as being religiously based (when it was usually based on academic turf wars).
Hate to break it to you, but atheism is the only theological position supported by science.
There is where you make your mistake. Just because science does not support another theological position, does not mean that it supports atheism. The question is, what theological position supports science? Atheism does not, because atheism provides no underlying reason to believe that we have the ability to understand and make sense of the universe.
Basically, atheists say that the universe makes sense and we can understand it because random chance resulted in some molecules coming together and those molecules gradually combined to create life, which gradually, by random chance, developed the ability to understand and interpret a universe that we have no reason to believe actually follows any rules of logic.
Galileo had a problem because he was a jerk. He had a scientific dispute with another scientist over his findings. Galileo was rude and insulting to his rival. His rival had the backing of the Jesuit order and threatened Galileo with them. Galileo trumped that by calling on his friendship with the Pope. The Pope decided to resolve the issue by asking/ordering Galileo to produce a pamphlet presenting the best arguments for both the geocentric centered view and the heliocentric view. Galileo's response was to write a pamphlet which put the arguments for geocentrism is the mouth of "Simplicio" (which had the implication of "simpleton"). Simplicio appeared to be a caricature of the Pope. Thus Galileo offended his friend and defender at a time when the Pope was facing increasing threats to his power (and life). This was not a case of religion supressing science. This was a case of a politically connected scientist using his connections to get another scientist's findings suppressed (an equally connected scientist who ridiculed his connections at the moment he needed thier support).
No, the conflict between science and religion is a false conflict created by atheists as a way to denigrate religion and make it seem as if atheism is supported by science. For example, the idea that the Christian Church taught that the earth was flat and that Christopher Columbus had to fight against that religious bias in order to get funding for his trip was a creation of Irving Washington (an atheist) in the 1800s. The fact of the matter was that those who opposed Christopher Columbus did so because, according to thier calculations of the size of the globe, he would run out of food before he reached the Far East. Columbus had done his own calculations and concluded that the Earth was 1/3 smaller than it actually is. If the Americas did not exist, Columbus' opponents would have been correct. The premise upon which Columbus based his proposed his voyage was wrong. During the same time period (as Irving Washington), many atheistic archeologists believed that the Bible was wrong when it discussed the Assyrians (as a matter of fact, it was believed that the Bible had entirely fabricated the existence of the Assyrians) because they had not found any archelogical evidence of the Assyrians. It turns out that the Biblical record of the Assyrians is fairly accurate.
Perhaps you should read a little history of the area that Abraham lived in at the time and realize that sacrificing one's child to one's god was a common practice in the area. Then you would realize that this story was rather revolutionary. It was a statement that the God of Abraham does not demand child sacrifice. If Abraham did not sacrifice Isaac, than neither should his descendants sacrifice thier children.
You make a good point, but you failed to mention that child sacrifice was common among the people living in the area that Abraham was living at the time (and among which his descendants lived). The Canaanites surrounding the Israelites would have been saying to them, "How can you claim that you are truly devoted to your god, if you are unwilling to sacrifice your children to him?" This story is their answer to that, "We are willing to, but not only does our God not ask us to sacrifice our children to Him, he will miraculously provide us with sacrificial animals for us to sacrifice instead."
My point being that those conventions are meaningless because many of those who have signed them have no intention of ever abiding by them. Even those countries which nominally abide by those conventions make it clear, by supporting membership on the "enforcement" commission of violators, that they only do so because of the political exigencies of the moment. The fact that a country has signed the UN human rights conventions tells you absolutely nothing about that country's actual human rights policies nor to what level that country actually treats people with human dignity. What it tells you is that the country's political establishment probably considers multinational agreements as something that need to be followed only insofar as other countries are willing and able to make a country pay a price for violating them, and even then, only when that price is high enough that it can't be ignored.
Can one drive on Federal roads without Auto Insurance?
If those federal roads are within the borders of a state that does not require auto insurance, the answer is "yes". There is no Federal mandate to buy auto insurance. However, that argument still does not work because if you don't own a car, you do not need to buy auto insurance. Additionally, the auto insurance you are required to buy covers damages you cause to other people and their property, not damage to yourself or your car (you can buy such insurance, but you are not required by law to do so).
It is not bait and switch, the channels that are getting bundled with the "required to support" channels pay to be there. Therefore, the cable company has no justification to charge anything more than base price for including them. You are not paying for those channels. What I object to are the channels like ESPN that require the cable company to pay a fee for each subscriber the cable company has, even if those subscribers do not want ESPN. What really gets me is that ESPN has successfully moved this model to thier webpage (ESPN360, or somesuch). Either your ISP pays ESPN a fee for each subscriber they have, or none of their subscribers can navigate to ESPN360 (or whatever they call the website).
Let me see if I get this right, those channels which pay the cable company to be on basic cable will be on basic cable, but those that charge the cable company will cost me extra? I am not sure how this is not exactly what I am asking for. There are a lot of channels in my package that I am not interested in, but if they have no impact on the cost of the package, I don't care.
Right now there are two channels I would like to get, but in order to do so, I have to pay for the next tier up from the one I have and they are not worth it. If I could get only the channels I want out of the tier I am in, plus those two by paying only for those channels, I would be happy. I have no problem with the cable company throwing in those channels that pay them to be included. I probably won't watch them, but as long as the cable company is not charging me to include those channels, I don't care and there are a few channels that I am not interested enough in to pay for that I might watch occasionally.
The thing is that there does not exist an international organization that has not demonstrated that it would be as bad or worse as the U.S. government on these issues.
You do realize that the worst abusers of human rights in the world have signed those "UN conventions on human rights"? That those governments have been put on the UN Human Rights Commission (the UN organization that is supposed to investigate and sanction governments for violating human rights)?
If you are a large business owner, you can easily afford the regulations (although a large corporation can even more easily afford the costs). However, if you are a small business owner (say, a child having a lemonaide stand in the front yard), the regulations will be prohibitively expensive.
You know, you've got a perfectly good summary going on an important issue, and you go and make yourself look like a child by calling General Motors "Government Motors". Why?
Because GM is now owned by the government and management decisions are made in Washington. Even if the government has sold its stock in GM, the way the "bailout" was executed, it is obvious that the conditions of ownership are at the discretion of the President.
I remember a story from a while back where the FBI was able to use Onstar to listen to conversations going on in a car without the occupants knowing about it. The only problem arose if someone in the car attempted to use Onstar while this was happening (I don't remember what happened when they did that, only that it raised problems for listening without the people in the car knowing about it).
When they say "as originally written" they are referring to each of the documents in question. Generally those who hold that belief believe that each of the books of the Bible was composed by a single author (or perhaps in a few cases, editor). This belief is pretty well accurate for the books of the New Testament. The authorship of the books of the Old Testament is significantly more ambiguous.
My big gripe with Spotify is that you can subscribe for $5 / month and listen all you want on your desktop machine. If, however, your end point is your phone, they charge $10 / month. I really don't understand what difference it makes to them if the stream end point is my phone or a computer.
That is easy. Those who get Spotify accounts for streaming to thier phone are willing to pay more than those who get it to thier desktop machine. To phrase that slightly differently, the number of people who will not get a Spotify account to stream to thier phone at $10, but would at $5 is less than the number to make up for the decreased revenue per customer from that price reduction. On the other hand, the number of additional subscribers for desktop machines who will pay $5 a month but not $10 a month more than makes up for the decreased revenue per customer.
Regulations are collars put onto the people by the government. They are the embodiment of people becoming serfs to the government.
I am not opposed to all government regulation. However, we have reached a point where government regulation diminishes individual freedom to a greater extent than it helps the health and well-being of the general populace.
Well, you see some of the Arabs who lived in the area found some of thse manuscripts in secondary areas before the archeological teams did and sold them on the open market. There have always been people who are interested in collecting antiquities and some of these ended up in their collections. The thing you have to understand is that not all of the Dead Sea Scrolls are on parchment. I know that some of them are on sheets of metal and I seem to recall that some of the fragments were on stone and/or pottery.
I generally agree with the points you are making. However, there is one more reason why they were not made more available to the public, many of the "scrolls" are fragile. There is no conspiracy here. It is a combination of various factors that have lead to the delay in the publishing of this material. Actually, part of the reason for the delay is contrary to what an earlier poster said. Many people anticipated the Dead Sea Scrolls containing information that would clearly contradict some orthodox Christian beliefs, but in actuality scholars found nothing there that showed any orthodox Christian beliefs to be later additions.
The key factor about why those books were not included in the canonical bible is that they were written later than the canonical gospels. The one possible exception to that is that there are some who claim that the Gospel of Thomas was written before the Gospel of John. However, this is a very disputed position. I do not have my source material available, but I am pretty sure that the earliest known reference to the Gospel of John in external writings is somewhat earlier than the earliest known reference to the Gospel of Thomas. The other canonical gospels were clearly written in the mid 1st century, while the other non-canonical gospels were clearly written in the late 2nd or 3rd century.
Basically what it comes down to is that if you study the history of the Christian canon you discover that it is those books that the overwhelming majority agreed were scripture before any attempt was made to formalize the canon. The excluded works are those which either the overwhelming majority rejected because of contradictions with the writings that everyone accepted, or, they were only considered scripture by a small group (while the overwhelming majority was only vaguely aware of thier existence). Additionally, one finds that the canonical writings all have evidence that suggests they were written in the 1st century (there are a couple of writings that there is some reason to argue were written in the early 2nd century--however, that evidence is ambiguous because there is also reasons to argue they were written in the 1st century).
Political campaign finance reform does not help. Campaign finance reform makes it harder to displace incumbents (after each campaign finance reform law was passed, the percentage of incumbents losing re-election went down). Incumbents are more susceptible to corporate influence for a variety of reasons (the longer one is in office the more time lobbyists have to find what buttons to push to get you to see things thier way, the longer one is in office the more one learns how to use the clout of office to get things from companies--and thus obligate oneself to deliver "goods" to corporations).
The most effective way to reduce corporate influence over government is to reduce the degree to which the government manages the economy and the regulatory burden that companies labor under (this would have the ancillary effect of significantly boosting the economy). If the regulatory burden was reduced the financial incentive for corporations to influence political races would be reduced. At current regulatory levels it is incumbent upon corporate officers to spend large sums of money to minimize the cost of regulations and to get regulations written in such a way as to fall disproportionately on any competitors who are not taking similar action.
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Then why are so many atheists evangelical? Seeking to impose their belief system on others?
The problem with atheism and science is that atheism provides no philosophical basis for science.
As far as I was aware, the American Family Association was formed in the 20th century. Washington Irving wrote in the 19th century and thus pre-dated them by somewhere around 100 years. There was a movement in the 19th century to develop scientific theories that supported the idea that there was no God. There was a conscious effort by members of that group to denigrate religion and rewrite history to show all opposition to new scientific ideas as being religiously based (when it was usually based on academic turf wars).
Hate to break it to you, but atheism is the only theological position supported by science.
There is where you make your mistake. Just because science does not support another theological position, does not mean that it supports atheism. The question is, what theological position supports science? Atheism does not, because atheism provides no underlying reason to believe that we have the ability to understand and make sense of the universe.
Basically, atheists say that the universe makes sense and we can understand it because random chance resulted in some molecules coming together and those molecules gradually combined to create life, which gradually, by random chance, developed the ability to understand and interpret a universe that we have no reason to believe actually follows any rules of logic.
Galileo had a problem because he was a jerk. He had a scientific dispute with another scientist over his findings. Galileo was rude and insulting to his rival. His rival had the backing of the Jesuit order and threatened Galileo with them. Galileo trumped that by calling on his friendship with the Pope. The Pope decided to resolve the issue by asking/ordering Galileo to produce a pamphlet presenting the best arguments for both the geocentric centered view and the heliocentric view. Galileo's response was to write a pamphlet which put the arguments for geocentrism is the mouth of "Simplicio" (which had the implication of "simpleton"). Simplicio appeared to be a caricature of the Pope. Thus Galileo offended his friend and defender at a time when the Pope was facing increasing threats to his power (and life). This was not a case of religion supressing science. This was a case of a politically connected scientist using his connections to get another scientist's findings suppressed (an equally connected scientist who ridiculed his connections at the moment he needed thier support).
No, the conflict between science and religion is a false conflict created by atheists as a way to denigrate religion and make it seem as if atheism is supported by science. For example, the idea that the Christian Church taught that the earth was flat and that Christopher Columbus had to fight against that religious bias in order to get funding for his trip was a creation of Irving Washington (an atheist) in the 1800s. The fact of the matter was that those who opposed Christopher Columbus did so because, according to thier calculations of the size of the globe, he would run out of food before he reached the Far East. Columbus had done his own calculations and concluded that the Earth was 1/3 smaller than it actually is. If the Americas did not exist, Columbus' opponents would have been correct. The premise upon which Columbus based his proposed his voyage was wrong. During the same time period (as Irving Washington), many atheistic archeologists believed that the Bible was wrong when it discussed the Assyrians (as a matter of fact, it was believed that the Bible had entirely fabricated the existence of the Assyrians) because they had not found any archelogical evidence of the Assyrians. It turns out that the Biblical record of the Assyrians is fairly accurate.
Perhaps you should read a little history of the area that Abraham lived in at the time and realize that sacrificing one's child to one's god was a common practice in the area. Then you would realize that this story was rather revolutionary. It was a statement that the God of Abraham does not demand child sacrifice. If Abraham did not sacrifice Isaac, than neither should his descendants sacrifice thier children.
You make a good point, but you failed to mention that child sacrifice was common among the people living in the area that Abraham was living at the time (and among which his descendants lived). The Canaanites surrounding the Israelites would have been saying to them, "How can you claim that you are truly devoted to your god, if you are unwilling to sacrifice your children to him?" This story is their answer to that, "We are willing to, but not only does our God not ask us to sacrifice our children to Him, he will miraculously provide us with sacrificial animals for us to sacrifice instead."
My point being that those conventions are meaningless because many of those who have signed them have no intention of ever abiding by them. Even those countries which nominally abide by those conventions make it clear, by supporting membership on the "enforcement" commission of violators, that they only do so because of the political exigencies of the moment. The fact that a country has signed the UN human rights conventions tells you absolutely nothing about that country's actual human rights policies nor to what level that country actually treats people with human dignity. What it tells you is that the country's political establishment probably considers multinational agreements as something that need to be followed only insofar as other countries are willing and able to make a country pay a price for violating them, and even then, only when that price is high enough that it can't be ignored.
Can one drive on Federal roads without Auto Insurance?
If those federal roads are within the borders of a state that does not require auto insurance, the answer is "yes". There is no Federal mandate to buy auto insurance. However, that argument still does not work because if you don't own a car, you do not need to buy auto insurance. Additionally, the auto insurance you are required to buy covers damages you cause to other people and their property, not damage to yourself or your car (you can buy such insurance, but you are not required by law to do so).
It is not bait and switch, the channels that are getting bundled with the "required to support" channels pay to be there. Therefore, the cable company has no justification to charge anything more than base price for including them. You are not paying for those channels. What I object to are the channels like ESPN that require the cable company to pay a fee for each subscriber the cable company has, even if those subscribers do not want ESPN. What really gets me is that ESPN has successfully moved this model to thier webpage (ESPN360, or somesuch). Either your ISP pays ESPN a fee for each subscriber they have, or none of their subscribers can navigate to ESPN360 (or whatever they call the website).
I usually watch the local NFL team, yet I rarely watch ESPN. I would happily give up ESPN if it was not bundled with other channels I want.
Let me see if I get this right, those channels which pay the cable company to be on basic cable will be on basic cable, but those that charge the cable company will cost me extra? I am not sure how this is not exactly what I am asking for. There are a lot of channels in my package that I am not interested in, but if they have no impact on the cost of the package, I don't care.
Right now there are two channels I would like to get, but in order to do so, I have to pay for the next tier up from the one I have and they are not worth it. If I could get only the channels I want out of the tier I am in, plus those two by paying only for those channels, I would be happy. I have no problem with the cable company throwing in those channels that pay them to be included. I probably won't watch them, but as long as the cable company is not charging me to include those channels, I don't care and there are a few channels that I am not interested enough in to pay for that I might watch occasionally.
The thing is that there does not exist an international organization that has not demonstrated that it would be as bad or worse as the U.S. government on these issues.
You do realize that the worst abusers of human rights in the world have signed those "UN conventions on human rights"? That those governments have been put on the UN Human Rights Commission (the UN organization that is supposed to investigate and sanction governments for violating human rights)?
If you are a large business owner, you can easily afford the regulations (although a large corporation can even more easily afford the costs). However, if you are a small business owner (say, a child having a lemonaide stand in the front yard), the regulations will be prohibitively expensive.
You know, you've got a perfectly good summary going on an important issue, and you go and make yourself look like a child by calling General Motors "Government Motors". Why?
Because GM is now owned by the government and management decisions are made in Washington. Even if the government has sold its stock in GM, the way the "bailout" was executed, it is obvious that the conditions of ownership are at the discretion of the President.
I remember a story from a while back where the FBI was able to use Onstar to listen to conversations going on in a car without the occupants knowing about it. The only problem arose if someone in the car attempted to use Onstar while this was happening (I don't remember what happened when they did that, only that it raised problems for listening without the people in the car knowing about it).
When they say "as originally written" they are referring to each of the documents in question. Generally those who hold that belief believe that each of the books of the Bible was composed by a single author (or perhaps in a few cases, editor). This belief is pretty well accurate for the books of the New Testament. The authorship of the books of the Old Testament is significantly more ambiguous.
My big gripe with Spotify is that you can subscribe for $5 / month and listen all you want on your desktop machine. If, however, your end point is your phone, they charge $10 / month. I really don't understand what difference it makes to them if the stream end point is my phone or a computer.
That is easy. Those who get Spotify accounts for streaming to thier phone are willing to pay more than those who get it to thier desktop machine. To phrase that slightly differently, the number of people who will not get a Spotify account to stream to thier phone at $10, but would at $5 is less than the number to make up for the decreased revenue per customer from that price reduction. On the other hand, the number of additional subscribers for desktop machines who will pay $5 a month but not $10 a month more than makes up for the decreased revenue per customer.
Regulations are collars put onto the people by the government. They are the embodiment of people becoming serfs to the government.
I am not opposed to all government regulation. However, we have reached a point where government regulation diminishes individual freedom to a greater extent than it helps the health and well-being of the general populace.
Well, you see some of the Arabs who lived in the area found some of thse manuscripts in secondary areas before the archeological teams did and sold them on the open market. There have always been people who are interested in collecting antiquities and some of these ended up in their collections. The thing you have to understand is that not all of the Dead Sea Scrolls are on parchment. I know that some of them are on sheets of metal and I seem to recall that some of the fragments were on stone and/or pottery.
I generally agree with the points you are making. However, there is one more reason why they were not made more available to the public, many of the "scrolls" are fragile. There is no conspiracy here. It is a combination of various factors that have lead to the delay in the publishing of this material. Actually, part of the reason for the delay is contrary to what an earlier poster said. Many people anticipated the Dead Sea Scrolls containing information that would clearly contradict some orthodox Christian beliefs, but in actuality scholars found nothing there that showed any orthodox Christian beliefs to be later additions.
The key factor about why those books were not included in the canonical bible is that they were written later than the canonical gospels. The one possible exception to that is that there are some who claim that the Gospel of Thomas was written before the Gospel of John. However, this is a very disputed position. I do not have my source material available, but I am pretty sure that the earliest known reference to the Gospel of John in external writings is somewhat earlier than the earliest known reference to the Gospel of Thomas. The other canonical gospels were clearly written in the mid 1st century, while the other non-canonical gospels were clearly written in the late 2nd or 3rd century.
Basically what it comes down to is that if you study the history of the Christian canon you discover that it is those books that the overwhelming majority agreed were scripture before any attempt was made to formalize the canon. The excluded works are those which either the overwhelming majority rejected because of contradictions with the writings that everyone accepted, or, they were only considered scripture by a small group (while the overwhelming majority was only vaguely aware of thier existence). Additionally, one finds that the canonical writings all have evidence that suggests they were written in the 1st century (there are a couple of writings that there is some reason to argue were written in the early 2nd century--however, that evidence is ambiguous because there is also reasons to argue they were written in the 1st century).
The traditional position taken by those who say the Bible is errorless is this: The Bible as originally written is without error.
Political campaign finance reform does not help. Campaign finance reform makes it harder to displace incumbents (after each campaign finance reform law was passed, the percentage of incumbents losing re-election went down). Incumbents are more susceptible to corporate influence for a variety of reasons (the longer one is in office the more time lobbyists have to find what buttons to push to get you to see things thier way, the longer one is in office the more one learns how to use the clout of office to get things from companies--and thus obligate oneself to deliver "goods" to corporations).
The most effective way to reduce corporate influence over government is to reduce the degree to which the government manages the economy and the regulatory burden that companies labor under (this would have the ancillary effect of significantly boosting the economy). If the regulatory burden was reduced the financial incentive for corporations to influence political races would be reduced. At current regulatory levels it is incumbent upon corporate officers to spend large sums of money to minimize the cost of regulations and to get regulations written in such a way as to fall disproportionately on any competitors who are not taking similar action.