How many more times can they reuse the Mario, Zelda and Metroid characters?
As many as it takes to get people to stop buying them. Which, if I'm any indication, is probably a good, long time. I bought the GC when Legend of Zelda: Windwaker came out, and I'll buy the Revolution when Legend of Zelda: The Spatula Of Tomorrow comes out.
What you're asking seems, to me, to be similar to "how many more times can they reuse the same Coca-Cola logo," or "how many more times can McDonald's call it a Mc-something?" The characters are just brands, they've got nothing to do with whether the game is adventurous or not. Really, what gameplay similarities does Metroid share with Metroid Prime? Or Legend of Zelda with Windwaker? There are common themes, of course, and a similar atmosphere, but the important part, the gameplay, is quite different.
Nintendo has managed to do what all companies want to: create brands that have a following, and they (pretty much) do a good job of making sure that the stuff they slap those brands on meets the demands of the brand loyal.
You're kidding, right? Of the Bill Of Rights, the only amendment that isn't violated on a routine basis is the 3rd (and that only because we've let government finagle itself a way to maintain a standing army despite the fervent wishes of the founders).
And I'm pretty sure the only thing that could scare the powers that be more than a literal and honest interpretation of the 2nd would be a literal and honest interpretation of the 10th.
This would be true if it wasn't the government taking the TV away from them in the first place. The concern is the people who already did "go out and work for it," but are now, by government edict, unable to use what they went out and worked for. It's sort of like eminent domain on a smaller scale: if they're going to bulldoze your property, the least they can do is pay you for it.
Now, if you want to talk about whether or not there should be the "go digital" government mandate in the first place, I suspect you and I would see eye-to-eye in our views of government intervention vs free market forces.
Your dad's Jetta is hardly typical of automobile fuel efficiency. The only vehicles I'm aware of that are similarly efficient are diesel cars (obviously), hybrid cars, and motorcycles. That's not an insignificant number of vehicles on the road, sure, but it's still a small percentage. Most people who own motor vehicles (at least, in the US) get somewhere between 18-38 (ish) mpg.
Actually, it is a hybrid. The wings are use to produce lift, necessary because the vehicle is heavier-than-air. The "blimp" part of the concept just means that it's not much heavier than (the volume of) air (displaced), which, of course, is why the lifting surfaces can be so small.
So, it is heavier-than-air (they say fully charged with helium, it stays grounded in a 30 knot crosswind), and it does use wings to provide lift. Perhaps not the bulk of the lift, but a necessary portion thereof - which makes sense, for a hybrid, because if it perfectly met both your standards of planehood, then it would just be (wait for it) a plane.
That's more than slightly unusual. If it opened in, I very much doubt his (or anyone else's) ability to open a door against a foot-thick layer of sand.
Dick Gordon: No, that's the FBI. We're not chartered for domestic surveillance. Martin Bishop: Oh, I see. You just overthrow governments. Set up friendly dictators. Dick Gordon: No, that's the CIA. We protect our government's communications, we try to break the other fella's codes. We're the good guys, Marty. Martin Bishop: Gee, I can't tell you what a relief that is, Dick.
But not all violations of law are of equivalent importance, impact, or newsworthiness. In your case, for example, an improper cookie meant a lawsuit to the tune of $500,000. That's important.
But what would it have meant if your board of directors were found to be embezzling funds, engaging in insider trading, defrauding your clients, and hiring corporate "security" teams to assassinate the CEOs of competing firms?
If they happened at the same time, which do you suppose would be newsworthy?
The NSA is getting hammered for the former, while being given a free pass on the latter.
How anyone can spend any time on this issue, when it's almost certainly a case of plain old screw-up that neither did any harm to anyone nor had any appreciable risk (as opposed to the cookies you were working with, which, if abused, possibly stood to inflict financial harm or material privacy violations) is beyond me. I don't think I'd even understand it in a vacuum, but to expend any effort worrying about this while the NSA is simultaneously throwing down no-warrant wiretaps on American citizens strikes me as almost surreal.
but someone thought it was important enough to put into law.
Strikes one and two. First, it was put into White House policy, which is not the same as law. Second, it's a good bet that not even the person who did it thought it was important, they just thought it was good PR because the unwashed masses for some reason think cookies are evil.
This way, they could, with a straight face, talk about how the NSA was protecting your privacy while simultaneously listening to their no-warrant phone tap on your home line.
Which, I suppose, is "important" in the sense that PR is important to the person relating publicly, but not "important" in any sense that anyone willing to expend a modicum of rational thought would think of the word.
As has already been pointed out, the cookie isn't "against the law," it's against White House policy. Unless someone burned the Constitution while my back was turned, we haven't slid so far yet that statements from the White House have the force of law.
Of course, the fact that it's the President's policies that are being violated sort of makes your whole "hold the President to the rule of law" argument somewhat irrelevant even if they did have the force of law. I mean, holding the lawmaker responsible for other people breaking the laws is a little...um, strange, shall we say.
To analogize: say a CIO is reprimanded for opening a personal email with a virus attachment and infecting the company. His replacement promulgates a policy that no employees are to visit/. on company time. By your rationale, when an IT employee then visits/. on company time, the new CIO should be equally reprimanded for that.
No matter how much it might help your "neener neener told you so" argument, the NSA setting cookies on visitor's machines in violation of governmental policy really isn't in any way equivalent to the President perjuring himself in violation of federal law.
I don't suppose you're located in Madison, WI and looking to hire somebody who's spent the last four years in what turned out to be an IT career dead-end, are you?
You know, I'm not sure what that had to do with my post, which basically asserted that neither the US nor anyone else will follow rules when at war (unless they can afford to), but I'm glad you got it out of your system.
I hesitate to say this is the way things should work (in an ideal world, none of this would be necessary), but it's as close as we're likely to come. The EU agreeing to shift their frequency off the US' is the best apparent way to acknowledge the MAD-like reality of the situation while simultaneously decreasing the likelihood of it ever happening.
The US is just like any other country: if at war, it's going to attempt to disable whatever weapons the enemy is using. This is not an unreasonable stance to take, really - in fact, it's sort of the definition of the word "war."
With this in mind, if the EU puts up a GPS constellation that can't be jammed/shut off without simultaneously doing the same damage to the US' GPS constellation, and if the European GPS system is being used by an enemy during an active military campaign, then the US would shoot down the satellites. Alternatively, the EU can design the system such that its use can be denied an enemy without actually destroying the system.
Which do you suppose is preferable?
Is this a "demand?" Sure it is: it amounts to "we can do this the easy way, or the hard way." But the demand is just a reflection of reality, not of malice. If actual open war broke out, the US would do everything within its capacity to win. One of the things in its capacity is shooting down satellites.
By contrast, the alternate position is not reflective of reality. That is: we're going to make available to everyone this neat weapon, and if it's used against you, we expect you to just grin and bear it despite being able to prevent it, because the rules say you should.
Of course, if rules were being followed, there wouldn't be any war...so expecting the combatants to follow rules while engaged is a bit Pollyana-ish.
Sorry for the double reply, but I forgot to add something.
Atheism - that is, the firm belief that God does not exist, is a religion insofar as it holds to be absolute truth that which is, by definition, unprovable. This is as distinct from agnosticism, which is a simple lack of willingness to believe in anything that can't be proven.
Agnosticism is a perfectly rational response to the proposal of the existance of something which is beyond proof. Atheism is a counter-belief system. It's one thing to say "I don't believe in God, because no one has demonstrated He exists." It's entirely another to say "I know God doesn't exist, because no one has demonstrated He exists."
The latter is belief-based, the former is empirical.
Also, following your argument, belief in Astrology would be equivalent to belief in e.g. the supernatural powers of Jesus. Can you prove Astrology to be false? Or the FSM?
Astrology, yes, since it purports to make predictions regarding events which can then be observed and compared to those predictions. The FSM, no, and if someone actually wants to believe they've been touched by his noodliness, more power to them. I, of course, think they're wrong, but you won't see me on street corners railing against belief in the FSM.
Basically: as far as I'm concerned, you can believe anything you want, and unless I can prove (within the bounds of "proof" accepted by science) you're wrong about it, I'll leave you alone. I reserve the right, of course, to take issue with any actions you undertake that are harmful, but I won't criticize your beliefs.
Then by definition you are not a Catholic, and you are in fact a heretic. Sorry, but that's the way your religion works. And that's what your children may well end up being taught by zealots while your back is turned.
I'm on my way to a Christmas - whoops, sorry, HOLIDAY party, so I don't have time to respond to your whole post. However, you have a grand misconception of how Catholicism works. There is, within the faith, a process by which one can stay Catholic and not believe in/agree with almost anything the Catholic Church holds true. The only exceptions to this are the "core" beliefs that are held to define Catholicism (things like Jesus is the son of God and himself divine, the virgin birth, Mary's assumption, and the like). The evils of masturbation, for example, aren't among those core beliefs.
Expecting God to follow the rules of identity that obtain in his creation isn't necessarily wrong, but it isn't necessarily right, either. If one is going to believe in something that's fundamentally outside the realm of provability (and, hence, outside all the rules of the universe), I don't see any logical difference between believing that 1 == 1 outside the universe and believing that 1 == 3 outside the universe. Of course, I also believed my Algebraic Structures of the Number Systems professor when she told us that unique prime factorizations are simply a feature of our common-use number system, and didn't necessarily pertain to other ones...
Yes, transubstantiation is a hitch. Moreover, it's pretty obviously an artifact from the RCC's desire to emphasize its importance. It's one of the things that contributes to my being something of a fallen Catholic. But it's not a belief that, as far as I can tell, does any harm, so I don't feel compelled to really worry about it that much.
Now, the RCC's policy on contraception is another matter entirely, insofar as I find it irresponsible at best, reprehensible at worst. The people who are most likely to buy into everything the Church says without questioning it are the same people who can least afford to practice Church doctrine in this regard. But that's a different topic entirely.
Well, yes...but it's easier to teach how to program if the students actually get a chance to, you know, program. Which means using a programming language.
SO
Given that you're going to learn to program and learn a programming language in the process, there's no harm in choosing a programming language that you think you might want to know later on.
And what about when people teach their children that masturbation is wrong; that women are unclean during menstruation; that infidels should all be killed; that unelected leaders must be obeyed unconditionally; that young girls' must be castrated; that homosexuals are evil; that unbaptisted children go to hell; that people who commit suicide will go to hell. The list goes on and on and on.
And yet, I believe not one of those things, while simultaneously being Catholic. Meanwhile, I'm sure I can find plenty of non-religious totalitarian regimes that do believe some of them.
If I, a secular person, said any of these things to anyone, especially a child, I would be thrown in jail. There's is clearly a line somewhere that is being crossed daily, using religion as a legal and constitutional loophole.
No, you probably wouldn't, at least not in the U.S. (with the possible exception of your "infidels should all be killed" bit, which might qualify as actionable hate speech...whatever that means). If you went ahead and actually started castrating young girls, that would be a different issue entirely, of course.
Prove something that is by definition unprovable? That's a derisible statement. It's even lower down on the scale than people who believe in UFO's, vampires and ghosts. At least they make attempts to subject their beliefs to science and experiment. I might not be right, but you're certainly standing on shaky ground.
I have to admit, I don't know what "derisible" means, and I can't tease out of its context what you mean by it (and I don't get any hits on google define:), so I can't really rebut it.
You do seem to take offense at being asked to do exactly what you're asking the religious to do, though. You deny the existence of God because I can't prove it...yet you ask me to accept the non-existence of God despite your inability to prove it. The fact that you can't prove it either way is exactly my point.
You believe something you can't prove, that God doesn't exist. My point is that I do not understand how this is conceptually any different than anyone else believing something he can't prove. Why is your unprovable belief superior to mine?
I am intolerant of injustice, and I see many people perpetuating injustice in the name of religion.
Hey, fancy that, I'm also intolerant of injustice. You know, injustices like attacking people for their unprovable beliefs because they don't agree with your unprovable beliefs. Like dismissing the opinions, thoughts, intelligence, and very worth of people because they don't agree with your unprovable belief system.
I'm not going to start a crusade, but I will speak my mind.
Good for you. Keep speaking your mind. Right up until you start claiming I shouldn't be able to speak my mind (you know, like claiming that teaching my children is evil and immoral), I'm fine with that.
And the only reason "people like me" are not as damaging as religious leaders in the past is because democracy and the rule of law hold sway in our society.
Funny how you dismiss your atheistic religious intolerance as made benign by democracy and the rule of law, while simultaneously assuming that theistic religious intolerance can't be made benign the same way. Again, it intrigues me how much better your unprovable belief is than everyone else's unprovable beliefs.
[Democracy and the rule of law] are coming under attack from the kind of people that promote ID.
Ignoring the hint of melodrama, you're right, they are. Of course, you might want to consider that the set of all people who adhere to ID is not the same as the set of all people who aren't atheists before you resume your little tirade.
I fail to see how believing in an indeterministic universe is less complex than believing in God
Do you accept that there exist phenomena whose behavior could be explained by probability theory, such as radioactive decay?
If not, then we have nothing further to discuss, since you're dismissing evidence.
If you do, however, we're discussing fundamental properties of the universe, and that can be useful. If you wish to propose that events which appear random occur the way they do because God makes them, that's fine. This is similar to proposing that objects which have weight in a gravity well have it because God makes them. All that's happening is you're identifying inherent properties (probability, mass) as the hand of God.
You won't get any argument from me, since your explanation of weight is indistinguishable from mine, that objects have mass.
But really, this just amounts to Thomas Moore's (IIRC) first causes argument: go back to the first cause you can explain. Go one cause before that, and there you find God. God exists in the unkown, as has always been the case.
Personally, I believe in a God whom we'll find not just in the unkown, but the unknowable: He created the universe for us to explore and study, so He created it susceptible to experimentation, and behaving according to rules that we can (someday) understand. After all, I can conceive of no greater being than one who can create a handful of fundamental particles and a short list of rules, knowing that just from these the entire universe would naturally follow. To me, that's like writing a hundred lines of code, knowing that if you just run it for long enough, it will accurately simulate all of human history.
I don't believe in a capricious or interventionist God. In my mind, God's smart enough to create the rules such that he doesn't have to break them to have things happen the way he wants. I don't buy into a God capable of creating the universe, but who has to keep tinkering with it to keep it running.
Talk about splitting hairs...yes. Insofar as a certain neutron hitting a certain atom at a certain time can only cause a certain isotopic change, you're right, it's not random. It's pure cause and effect, and, in some sense could be predicted if one had enough information.
(I could make a Heisenbergian argument that not only don't we have enough information, we can't have enough information, and, in fact, that information doesn't exist in the first place, but since you deny the very existence of randomness, I expect you deny Heisenberg's research, as well, so I won't bother)
HOWEVER: from the point of view of evolution, these changes are random, insofar as they are completely independent of the process being studied. They are neither caused by nor affected by the results of that process.
But if it will help, I'm willing to stipulate that "random mutations" can be referred to as "mutations with causes orthogonal to the process of evolution."
Slashdot Mirror
How many more times can they reuse the Mario, Zelda and Metroid characters?
As many as it takes to get people to stop buying them. Which, if I'm any indication, is probably a good, long time. I bought the GC when Legend of Zelda: Windwaker came out, and I'll buy the Revolution when Legend of Zelda: The Spatula Of Tomorrow comes out.
What you're asking seems, to me, to be similar to "how many more times can they reuse the same Coca-Cola logo," or "how many more times can McDonald's call it a Mc-something?" The characters are just brands, they've got nothing to do with whether the game is adventurous or not. Really, what gameplay similarities does Metroid share with Metroid Prime? Or Legend of Zelda with Windwaker? There are common themes, of course, and a similar atmosphere, but the important part, the gameplay, is quite different.
Nintendo has managed to do what all companies want to: create brands that have a following, and they (pretty much) do a good job of making sure that the stuff they slap those brands on meets the demands of the brand loyal.
The 9th and 10th Amendments apply here.
You're kidding, right? Of the Bill Of Rights, the only amendment that isn't violated on a routine basis is the 3rd (and that only because we've let government finagle itself a way to maintain a standing army despite the fervent wishes of the founders).
And I'm pretty sure the only thing that could scare the powers that be more than a literal and honest interpretation of the 2nd would be a literal and honest interpretation of the 10th.
This would be true if it wasn't the government taking the TV away from them in the first place. The concern is the people who already did "go out and work for it," but are now, by government edict, unable to use what they went out and worked for. It's sort of like eminent domain on a smaller scale: if they're going to bulldoze your property, the least they can do is pay you for it.
Now, if you want to talk about whether or not there should be the "go digital" government mandate in the first place, I suspect you and I would see eye-to-eye in our views of government intervention vs free market forces.
Your dad's Jetta is hardly typical of automobile fuel efficiency. The only vehicles I'm aware of that are similarly efficient are diesel cars (obviously), hybrid cars, and motorcycles. That's not an insignificant number of vehicles on the road, sure, but it's still a small percentage. Most people who own motor vehicles (at least, in the US) get somewhere between 18-38 (ish) mpg.
Actually, it is a hybrid. The wings are use to produce lift, necessary because the vehicle is heavier-than-air. The "blimp" part of the concept just means that it's not much heavier than (the volume of) air (displaced), which, of course, is why the lifting surfaces can be so small.
So, it is heavier-than-air (they say fully charged with helium, it stays grounded in a 30 knot crosswind), and it does use wings to provide lift. Perhaps not the bulk of the lift, but a necessary portion thereof - which makes sense, for a hybrid, because if it perfectly met both your standards of planehood, then it would just be (wait for it) a plane.
He had a room where the door opened out?
That's more than slightly unusual. If it opened in, I very much doubt his (or anyone else's) ability to open a door against a foot-thick layer of sand.
Actually, it was a Harrier.
For a jumbo jet, I would never have drunk 4,140 cubic meters of Pepsi.
And then Opera would have to lie to those sites about what browser it is...functionality which it already has, IIRC, for "IE-only" sites.
I don't see this as a big stumbling block.
Now, Opera may not want to piss off various other companies by doing something like this, but that's a different issue entirely.
No, you're thinking of the FBI
;)
Dick Gordon: No, that's the FBI. We're not chartered for domestic surveillance.
Martin Bishop: Oh, I see. You just overthrow governments. Set up friendly dictators.
Dick Gordon: No, that's the CIA. We protect our government's communications, we try to break the other fella's codes. We're the good guys, Marty.
Martin Bishop: Gee, I can't tell you what a relief that is, Dick.
Fixed that for you.
Yes, they should.
But not all violations of law are of equivalent importance, impact, or newsworthiness. In your case, for example, an improper cookie meant a lawsuit to the tune of $500,000. That's important.
But what would it have meant if your board of directors were found to be embezzling funds, engaging in insider trading, defrauding your clients, and hiring corporate "security" teams to assassinate the CEOs of competing firms?
If they happened at the same time, which do you suppose would be newsworthy?
The NSA is getting hammered for the former, while being given a free pass on the latter.
How anyone can spend any time on this issue, when it's almost certainly a case of plain old screw-up that neither did any harm to anyone nor had any appreciable risk (as opposed to the cookies you were working with, which, if abused, possibly stood to inflict financial harm or material privacy violations) is beyond me. I don't think I'd even understand it in a vacuum, but to expend any effort worrying about this while the NSA is simultaneously throwing down no-warrant wiretaps on American citizens strikes me as almost surreal.
but someone thought it was important enough to put into law.
Strikes one and two. First, it was put into White House policy, which is not the same as law. Second, it's a good bet that not even the person who did it thought it was important, they just thought it was good PR because the unwashed masses for some reason think cookies are evil.
This way, they could, with a straight face, talk about how the NSA was protecting your privacy while simultaneously listening to their no-warrant phone tap on your home line.
Which, I suppose, is "important" in the sense that PR is important to the person relating publicly, but not "important" in any sense that anyone willing to expend a modicum of rational thought would think of the word.
As has already been pointed out, the cookie isn't "against the law," it's against White House policy. Unless someone burned the Constitution while my back was turned, we haven't slid so far yet that statements from the White House have the force of law.
/. on company time. By your rationale, when an IT employee then visits /. on company time, the new CIO should be equally reprimanded for that.
Of course, the fact that it's the President's policies that are being violated sort of makes your whole "hold the President to the rule of law" argument somewhat irrelevant even if they did have the force of law. I mean, holding the lawmaker responsible for other people breaking the laws is a little...um, strange, shall we say.
To analogize: say a CIO is reprimanded for opening a personal email with a virus attachment and infecting the company. His replacement promulgates a policy that no employees are to visit
No matter how much it might help your "neener neener told you so" argument, the NSA setting cookies on visitor's machines in violation of governmental policy really isn't in any way equivalent to the President perjuring himself in violation of federal law.
I don't suppose you're located in Madison, WI and looking to hire somebody who's spent the last four years in what turned out to be an IT career dead-end, are you?
You buy 500 movies a year?
Crikey
I thought I bought a lot of books, but I don't average more than a book a day...where do you find the time to watch all these movies?
And I can't help asking...at that rate of purchase, I have to assume you don't rewatch many movies. Wouldn't it be cheaper to rent?
You know, I'm not sure what that had to do with my post, which basically asserted that neither the US nor anyone else will follow rules when at war (unless they can afford to), but I'm glad you got it out of your system.
Exactly.
I hesitate to say this is the way things should work (in an ideal world, none of this would be necessary), but it's as close as we're likely to come. The EU agreeing to shift their frequency off the US' is the best apparent way to acknowledge the MAD-like reality of the situation while simultaneously decreasing the likelihood of it ever happening.
The US is just like any other country: if at war, it's going to attempt to disable whatever weapons the enemy is using. This is not an unreasonable stance to take, really - in fact, it's sort of the definition of the word "war."
With this in mind, if the EU puts up a GPS constellation that can't be jammed/shut off without simultaneously doing the same damage to the US' GPS constellation, and if the European GPS system is being used by an enemy during an active military campaign, then the US would shoot down the satellites. Alternatively, the EU can design the system such that its use can be denied an enemy without actually destroying the system.
Which do you suppose is preferable?
Is this a "demand?" Sure it is: it amounts to "we can do this the easy way, or the hard way." But the demand is just a reflection of reality, not of malice. If actual open war broke out, the US would do everything within its capacity to win. One of the things in its capacity is shooting down satellites.
By contrast, the alternate position is not reflective of reality. That is: we're going to make available to everyone this neat weapon, and if it's used against you, we expect you to just grin and bear it despite being able to prevent it, because the rules say you should.
Of course, if rules were being followed, there wouldn't be any war...so expecting the combatants to follow rules while engaged is a bit Pollyana-ish.
Sorry for the double reply, but I forgot to add something.
Atheism - that is, the firm belief that God does not exist, is a religion insofar as it holds to be absolute truth that which is, by definition, unprovable. This is as distinct from agnosticism, which is a simple lack of willingness to believe in anything that can't be proven.
Agnosticism is a perfectly rational response to the proposal of the existance of something which is beyond proof. Atheism is a counter-belief system. It's one thing to say "I don't believe in God, because no one has demonstrated He exists." It's entirely another to say "I know God doesn't exist, because no one has demonstrated He exists."
The latter is belief-based, the former is empirical.
Also, following your argument, belief in Astrology would be equivalent to belief in e.g. the supernatural powers of Jesus. Can you prove Astrology to be false? Or the FSM?
Astrology, yes, since it purports to make predictions regarding events which can then be observed and compared to those predictions. The FSM, no, and if someone actually wants to believe they've been touched by his noodliness, more power to them. I, of course, think they're wrong, but you won't see me on street corners railing against belief in the FSM.
Basically: as far as I'm concerned, you can believe anything you want, and unless I can prove (within the bounds of "proof" accepted by science) you're wrong about it, I'll leave you alone. I reserve the right, of course, to take issue with any actions you undertake that are harmful, but I won't criticize your beliefs.
Then by definition you are not a Catholic, and you are in fact a heretic. Sorry, but that's the way your religion works. And that's what your children may well end up being taught by zealots while your back is turned.
I'm on my way to a Christmas - whoops, sorry, HOLIDAY party, so I don't have time to respond to your whole post. However, you have a grand misconception of how Catholicism works. There is, within the faith, a process by which one can stay Catholic and not believe in/agree with almost anything the Catholic Church holds true. The only exceptions to this are the "core" beliefs that are held to define Catholicism (things like Jesus is the son of God and himself divine, the virgin birth, Mary's assumption, and the like). The evils of masturbation, for example, aren't among those core beliefs.
??
Expecting God to follow the rules of identity that obtain in his creation isn't necessarily wrong, but it isn't necessarily right, either. If one is going to believe in something that's fundamentally outside the realm of provability (and, hence, outside all the rules of the universe), I don't see any logical difference between believing that 1 == 1 outside the universe and believing that 1 == 3 outside the universe. Of course, I also believed my Algebraic Structures of the Number Systems professor when she told us that unique prime factorizations are simply a feature of our common-use number system, and didn't necessarily pertain to other ones...
Yes, transubstantiation is a hitch. Moreover, it's pretty obviously an artifact from the RCC's desire to emphasize its importance. It's one of the things that contributes to my being something of a fallen Catholic. But it's not a belief that, as far as I can tell, does any harm, so I don't feel compelled to really worry about it that much.
Now, the RCC's policy on contraception is another matter entirely, insofar as I find it irresponsible at best, reprehensible at worst. The people who are most likely to buy into everything the Church says without questioning it are the same people who can least afford to practice Church doctrine in this regard. But that's a different topic entirely.
Well, yes...but it's easier to teach how to program if the students actually get a chance to, you know, program. Which means using a programming language.
SO
Given that you're going to learn to program and learn a programming language in the process, there's no harm in choosing a programming language that you think you might want to know later on.
And what about when people teach their children that masturbation is wrong; that women are unclean during menstruation; that infidels should all be killed; that unelected leaders must be obeyed unconditionally; that young girls' must be castrated; that homosexuals are evil; that unbaptisted children go to hell; that people who commit suicide will go to hell. The list goes on and on and on.
And yet, I believe not one of those things, while simultaneously being Catholic. Meanwhile, I'm sure I can find plenty of non-religious totalitarian regimes that do believe some of them.
If I, a secular person, said any of these things to anyone, especially a child, I would be thrown in jail. There's is clearly a line somewhere that is being crossed daily, using religion as a legal and constitutional loophole.
No, you probably wouldn't, at least not in the U.S. (with the possible exception of your "infidels should all be killed" bit, which might qualify as actionable hate speech...whatever that means). If you went ahead and actually started castrating young girls, that would be a different issue entirely, of course.
Prove something that is by definition unprovable? That's a derisible statement. It's even lower down on the scale than people who believe in UFO's, vampires and ghosts. At least they make attempts to subject their beliefs to science and experiment. I might not be right, but you're certainly standing on shaky ground.
I have to admit, I don't know what "derisible" means, and I can't tease out of its context what you mean by it (and I don't get any hits on google define:), so I can't really rebut it.
You do seem to take offense at being asked to do exactly what you're asking the religious to do, though. You deny the existence of God because I can't prove it...yet you ask me to accept the non-existence of God despite your inability to prove it. The fact that you can't prove it either way is exactly my point.
You believe something you can't prove, that God doesn't exist. My point is that I do not understand how this is conceptually any different than anyone else believing something he can't prove. Why is your unprovable belief superior to mine?
I am intolerant of injustice, and I see many people perpetuating injustice in the name of religion.
Hey, fancy that, I'm also intolerant of injustice. You know, injustices like attacking people for their unprovable beliefs because they don't agree with your unprovable beliefs. Like dismissing the opinions, thoughts, intelligence, and very worth of people because they don't agree with your unprovable belief system.
I'm not going to start a crusade, but I will speak my mind.
Good for you. Keep speaking your mind. Right up until you start claiming I shouldn't be able to speak my mind (you know, like claiming that teaching my children is evil and immoral), I'm fine with that.
And the only reason "people like me" are not as damaging as religious leaders in the past is because democracy and the rule of law hold sway in our society.
Funny how you dismiss your atheistic religious intolerance as made benign by democracy and the rule of law, while simultaneously assuming that theistic religious intolerance can't be made benign the same way. Again, it intrigues me how much better your unprovable belief is than everyone else's unprovable beliefs.
[Democracy and the rule of law] are coming under attack from the kind of people that promote ID.
Ignoring the hint of melodrama, you're right, they are. Of course, you might want to consider that the set of all people who adhere to ID is not the same as the set of all people who aren't atheists before you resume your little tirade.
I fail to see how believing in an indeterministic universe is less complex than believing in God
Do you accept that there exist phenomena whose behavior could be explained by probability theory, such as radioactive decay?
If not, then we have nothing further to discuss, since you're dismissing evidence.
If you do, however, we're discussing fundamental properties of the universe, and that can be useful. If you wish to propose that events which appear random occur the way they do because God makes them, that's fine. This is similar to proposing that objects which have weight in a gravity well have it because God makes them. All that's happening is you're identifying inherent properties (probability, mass) as the hand of God.
You won't get any argument from me, since your explanation of weight is indistinguishable from mine, that objects have mass.
But really, this just amounts to Thomas Moore's (IIRC) first causes argument: go back to the first cause you can explain. Go one cause before that, and there you find God. God exists in the unkown, as has always been the case.
Personally, I believe in a God whom we'll find not just in the unkown, but the unknowable: He created the universe for us to explore and study, so He created it susceptible to experimentation, and behaving according to rules that we can (someday) understand. After all, I can conceive of no greater being than one who can create a handful of fundamental particles and a short list of rules, knowing that just from these the entire universe would naturally follow. To me, that's like writing a hundred lines of code, knowing that if you just run it for long enough, it will accurately simulate all of human history.
I don't believe in a capricious or interventionist God. In my mind, God's smart enough to create the rules such that he doesn't have to break them to have things happen the way he wants. I don't buy into a God capable of creating the universe, but who has to keep tinkering with it to keep it running.
Talk about splitting hairs...yes. Insofar as a certain neutron hitting a certain atom at a certain time can only cause a certain isotopic change, you're right, it's not random. It's pure cause and effect, and, in some sense could be predicted if one had enough information.
(I could make a Heisenbergian argument that not only don't we have enough information, we can't have enough information, and, in fact, that information doesn't exist in the first place, but since you deny the very existence of randomness, I expect you deny Heisenberg's research, as well, so I won't bother)
HOWEVER: from the point of view of evolution, these changes are random, insofar as they are completely independent of the process being studied. They are neither caused by nor affected by the results of that process.
But if it will help, I'm willing to stipulate that "random mutations" can be referred to as "mutations with causes orthogonal to the process of evolution."