I appreciate your attempt to defend Wisconsin - I like it, which is why I'm still here - and I even appreciate your efforts to talk up Madison - my g.f. lives there, so I'm hoping to relocate there soon. Nonetheless, no one with any knowledge of the city would consider Madison "rural."
Sure, plenty of people from around the country (most of whom don't even know where Wisconsin is, aside from somewhere in the part you fly over to get to the "real" states) think Madison is rural, but it's got a couple hundred thousand people and a notably high average income. It also happens to have the highest number of restaurants per capita of any city in the nation.
More importantly, it's staunchly liberal (if you're from WI, you must have heard the term People's Republic of Madison, right?), which isn't exactly a hallmark of rural America. It even comes complete with USSResque propaganda on billboards (picture a KMFDM-video-style black and white drawing of an African American man looking bravely up and to the left in front of a red background featuring a star-in-circle of slightly darker red...with the caption WORK! in big, block letters...)
Exactly. Somewhat apocryphally (from the reader's POV) since I can't be bothered to dig up the links: I seem to recall theoretical max on scramjet tech being Mach ~20. I also recall reading a paper on orbiting tethers for boosting into LEO stating that you could increase the payload from ~1% of total launch mass to ~4% of total launch mass if you could drop the target velocity from Mach ~23 to Mach ~18.
So if the rocket only has to get from Mach ~20 to Mach ~23, I would imagine the payload increase to be significant (the increase is, of course, offset by needing to have the scramjet and initial lifting bodies as well as fuel therefore...but the initial/scramjet stages don't have to carry oxidizer or reaction mass, which gives them a huge mass advantage over conventional rockets).
Yes. A rocket is entirely self-contained: its fuel and reaction mass are both stored internally (and are generally the same thing, in point of fact)*. The scramjet carries its fuel onboard, but the reaction mass is the atmosphere.
*Actually, it's possible that the term "rocket" specifically means that the fuel and the reaction mass are the same thing, but I'm not certain of that, since I've seen terms like "nuclear rocket" used quite often (though perhaps incorrectly), and those do decouple fuel and reaction mass.
Liquid gasoline doesn't even burn. You can only have combustion with gasoline vapor. Any gasoline "explosions" are a matter of gasoline vapor remaining relatively concentrated while mixing with the air for a period prior to ignition.
You can test this yourself with a coffee can and some gasoline: fill the coffee can halfway with gasoline, wait around a few minutes, then toss a lit match in (from a little distance). You'll get a moment of blue flame and a *fwoomp*, then nothing.
Then repeat the test, but fill the coffee can full and throw the match in right away: you'll just put the match out.
Anecdotally, they had this problem when filming Payback: there's a seen where Gibson lights a rivulet of gasoline from a punctured fuel line by dropping a lit cigarette into it: on screen, you see the trail of flame race towards the car, then the huge detonation when it reaches the tank. In reality, they tried using gasoline, and it just kept putting out the cigarette. They ended up having to use rubber cement.
More anecdotally (and conversely): you have to be careful with your standard gasoline cannisters. A friend of mine had a two-gallon cannister half full of gasoline, with the spout open and the cap off. In this case, a cigarette (I don't remember whose) lit the fumes outside the spout, and we had a sustained torch for several minutes (I'm guessing the flame drew vacuum, pulling air through the open cap into the half-full cannister, evaporating the gasoline and mixing with it to continue the fire, but I don't actually know).
Also interestingly, you can drink gasoline with no ill effects. Just don't breathe the vapor for longer than you can help.;)
On a per-mass basis, yes. But, under normal circumstances, you're dealing with far less mass of hydrogen than you would be with gasoline (density being what it is).
Aside from an unignited hydrogen leak dispersing itself harmlessly, you'd always be dealing with less hydrogen (by mass) than you would be with any of the hydrocarbons (particularly gasoline, which can be treated pretty much as octane for mass purposes: C8H18, fifty-seven times as massive).
So not only is hydrogen as fuel safer due to secondary effects, it's safer due to lower total energy available under circumstances you'd see in use.
There would be extra staffing cost, at least at the outset. Although something like RFIDs (I know, I know, RFID is the Great Technological Satan, but bear with me) in the tickets themselves would solve this problem: the RFID gets associated with a particular showing as the ticket is printed. The theaters have readers in the door frames that raise a visible/audible alarm (probably just visible so as not to disrupt the movie from a cheater going in late) if the wrong RFID walks through.
Then you only have to pay for enough extra staffing to note the alarms.
Compared to the cost of renovating theaters with better sound systems, seating and projectors, I have to think this investment would be doable, and I believe you're right in that tiered pricing would increase net profit.
It's so apparent to me, actually, that the fact that no one's done it makes me suspect that there are contractual/licensing reasons that thaters can't do this sort of thing.
Slightly off topic, but in regards to the movie industry's goals, I've often wondered why it's the same price to see every movie at a given time. Why aren't movies competitively priced regarding their quality?
It's not like they have no idea ahead of time which movies are going to be bigger draws; they know which movies to put on multiple screens, have midnight showings of, etc.
As it stands, I don't know anyone who goes to the movie theater to see "something." We go to see a specific movie that has piqued our interest. But if movies ranged in price from a couple bucks to $10, it might be worth my while to go to a theater just to see what's playing and maybe see an oddball film for a $2.
I have to think that getting more eyeballs on the screen, even for a crappy flick, is a win for all involved. The theater sells more popcorn, the publisher sells more ads, the creators increase exposure for later DVD sales. And this is assuming that money is lost in straight ticket sales, which I would think you could comabt by informed price setting.
Makes me wonder if I'm missing a huge aspect of the industry, or if it's just a case of "this is how we do it."
But DVDs cost varying amounts, as do video games...even CDs don't all cost the same. Why are theaters different?
For a long time now, I've doubted the validity of that assertion, but I don't know how I'd go about getting an answer for it.
Theoretically, sure, one leaked copy of something means everyone can get it. But the same is true of the Ebola virus, and the vast majority of the human population is still here. Ditto AIDS, Herpes, Gonorrhea, Chlamydia (sp -2), etc.
I seem to recall reading about bioweapons research, and being able to reliably predict the scope and extent of the infected area. Why shouldn't the same thing be true for copies of movies/music online? Just replace "communicability" with "popularity," and I think the analogy holds remarkably well. After all, it's not like your computer on the P2P network do jour is actually in communication with every other peer on the network, and certainly not reliably.
Take Halo 2, for example. A friend of mine downloaded a copy after the leak, while I didn't (I claim no moral high ground, here, he's got a modded XBox and I don't. Notably, we both purchased it Tuesday. But I digress). So if your P2P client runs across his box and not mine, you can have a copy. Vice versa, and you can't.
What this all boils down to is I believe that yes, content owners stopping everyone they can from having illegal copies of their so-called "property" will make a dent in piracy.
I could be wrong. But I just don't buy into the "losing one copy is the same as giving it away to everyone" theory.
Maybe I'm missing something, but...what are you going to do to light the freeway, now that you've erected a Sun Blocking Machine over its length? Keeping streetlamps on all the time sort of defeats the purpose.
Now, what would be cool is a material tough enough to pave roads with, yet transparent enough to have solar cells underneath it. That would be neat.
But I don't think we're ready for glass roads, just yet.
I don't think I'm understanding you correctly - do you actually mean that you're unsure if there exists a limit to the amount of things the brain can remember?
I don't think that's anything like an open question. There is a finite number of states the brain can take on, which automatically puts an upper bound on how much information it can possibly contain. The effective limit is presumably orders of magnitude lower (since a vast number of those states involve the brain being dead or otherwise non-functional), of course, but I don't think there's any question as to whether or not a limit exists.
The problem with biometric security is always the same: once it's hacked, you're Screwed(tm) (that's a security-industry technical term).
Given that nothing is unbreakable/unhackable/unspoofable, the real danger is putting into widespread use something that people believe to be unbreakable/unhackable/unspoofable. When you go to court because your gun was used in a shooting, everyone will "know" that you did it, since "no one else can fire the gun." Except we all know that no system is perfect, and someone else could have.
Just as bad is the case of identity theft; the more that biometrics become used to verify identity, the more vulnerable you are to having your identity easily stolen. After all, it's perfectly reliable, so there don't need to be any other checks. The fingerprint/retina scan/brainwave pattern says the person is you, therefore s/he is. Even worse, once your identity has been suborned in this fashion, you can't get it back, since you can't change it.
You can potentially address this by adding something like a PIN or password into the system, but that loses both the supposed benefits of the biometric identification and simply shifts the burden of security back where it's always been: remembering a unique piece of information that no one else has.
No, I cannot show you Biblically where you are incorrect - but then, that's not my point. Christianity does not rest on the Bible, it rests on the belief that Jesus is the son of God and died for the sins of mankind.
This is a story told in the Bible, but that doesn't mean the Bible is its source. The source is that it happened.
Moreover, I don't reject the doctrine of original sin, I reject the doctrine that it was caused by one particular woman who tempted one particular man. Which is really a natural conclusion given a belief in an all-just God, isn't it? For the record, I also reject the doctrine of Hell, since it is obviously impossible to merit infinite punishment for finite sin, given perfect justice (and I'll leave out for the moment the all-merciful God).
The point of original sin is that we, as humans, are flawed, and make wrong decisions. We are, through the death of Christ and baptism, forgiven the flaw, but we are thereafter expected to personally not submit to the flaw. When we fail to do so, we need to seek forgiveness for the specific wrong which we did.
WRT to your Superman analogy, you're exactly correct. But Roman Catholicism, to pick the Christian faith with which I am most familiar, has comparatively few articles of dogma which one must accept in order to be Catholic. That Christ is God become man, for one. The virgin birth and the Assumption, for two more. It has tons of doctrine that you are taught to believe, but need not to be Catholic. In point of fact, there's a specific procedure for rejecting certain beliefs within the Church.
Christianity as a whole is even less restrictive. Anyone who believe in Christ as the son of God and the general tenets of the Judeo-Christian ethic is a Christian.
As I'm sure you were sure, I was raised by a Catholic family. I was also raised by two Catholics who each have a graduate degree in chemistry (one a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry, one an MS in organic). Personally, I have a BS in computer science (and a complete lack of sufficient ambition to pursue a postgrad degree...but I digress). I don't say this as some sort of bragging, but to try and explain that in no way do I wish to diminish or disagree with the scientific method, scientific thought, or empiricism. I consider myself both rational and logical (of course, who doesn't?), as well as at least reasonably intelligent.
As such, I look around at a universe which not only contains no evidence of God, but also appears more and more to be entirely explicable absent God. The further we push the bounds of human thought, the clearer it becomes that God need not exist for the universe to make sense.
Anyone who argues with that statement is demonstrably wrong.
And yet, despite that, I still believe in God. Yes, it's possible that I'm an unwilling victim of indoctrination, and cannot help but think this way. I wouldn't know.
On the other hand, it's also possible that I simply believe that there is a purpose in the incredible beauty and wonder that the universe reveals to us with every discovery. I can marvel at the incredible - almost literally - elegance of a system wherein a very few fundamental particles introduced in sufficient quantity, along with (I believe) a few simple rules (which we have yet to tease out of the universe's structure, but I which I believe exist) have necessarily formed the universe as we perceive it. Not because someone tinkered to make it work, but because the very nature of the system demanded it.
To me, the universe is awe-inspring. As a programmer, I know the difficulties in setting up a complex system such that it does anything interesting whatsoever. The fact that the universe not only exists as it does, but that it has to, and that it all sprang from such a comparatively simple set of basic "settings," as it were, is humbling in the extreme. Even more impressive, to me, is that the system is complex enough to give rise to a subset of the system capable of analyzing the system itself.
And that is God. I don't appeal to God because I don't know what happened to start the universe. I appeal to God because the universe is beautiful, and it wouldn't have to be. Have you read Just Six Numbers, by any chance? If you haven't, I recommend it, it's an excellent book. Even if not, I assume you're familiar with the idea that there are a few fundamental numbers that "just are," and because of those numbers, the universe as it is exists. The fact that those numbers are what they are is equally likely to be sheer happy chance as it is to be divine intervention, as far as we are able to determine.
Personally, I prefer to thank God that the universe is than to thank an odds-against roll of the dice. But it's those sorts of things that are God - not the unknown, but the unknowable. God is the one who set the initial conditions, knowing what would result. God is the one who knows the position and vector of every particle in the universe.
God is not, in my view, and explanation for anything. He can't be. We are expected to explain the universe on our own, it's why we're reasoning creatures.
I'm rambling and disjoint, and I apologize. I'm trying to explain the ineffable...and I'm at work.
What it comes down to is that I have ultimate faith in science to explain the how of anything, given enough time. I have no faith in science to provide a why for anything, regardless of time. Science provides ever-more-accurate representations of what is. Religion, however, attempts to provide a reason for what is.
Of course, it's easy to believe that there is no reason, that it's all pure chance. But that's the point - that is a belief, and is unrelated to science. To me, the belief that creation has no reason is no m
Yep, there are 300 million others out there that don't have the same beautiful face I do in the mirror.
And they can all go vote for who will help them most, while I vote for who will help me most, and when the dust settles, the candidate that most people fell will help them most will be in office.
I hate bullshit "don't just vote for yourself" arguments, since voting for yourself is precisely what the system depends on you doing.
We all know the voting system is borked, but attacking the very basis of a voting-based system isn't the way to fix it.
Blatantly false. You equate a non-vote for Kerry to be a vote for Bush. By similar logic, a non-vote for Bush is a vote for Kerry. Thus, a vote for a third party must, logically, be a vote for both Bush and Kerry.
In which case, if it means I get two votes, I'll vote for a third party every time!
Your post exhibits some of the worst logic I've ever seen on slashdot. And that's saying something.
Semantically, you are obviously correct. However, in my experience, most people who consider themselves "atheists" maintain not that they don't believe in a God, but rather that there is not a God.
However, it's possible that the self-styled atheists I've encountered are a biased sample, since they're only the ones who are aggressively atheist.
That aside, the problem of discaring religion still exists. It's one thing to claim that belief in God is irrelevant, it's another to claim that it's incorrect. Some degree of belief is required of all things, or you end up with nothing. Consider empiricism itself. Why should the past be an accurate predictor of the future? Because it always has been.
This is more than a trifle circular.
I find the example of the henhouse particularly illustrative: the chicken has every reason to believe that sunrise causes the farmer to come out and spread corn. Right up until the farmer comes out and wrings the chicken's neck.
All that being said, I don't subscribe to Hume, I accept causality, the validity of the scientific method, and even macro evolution. But that's not the point. As you say, you can't know anything for sure.
If it all comes down to beliefs, then why is a belief in an unprovable deity better or worse than a belief in an unprovable assertion that our senses relay accurate information to our brains? The only answer is because the latter leads to successively more complete theories and progressively more functional devices. Which is spectacular, but doesn't change the faith-based nature of the system.
As I alluded to earlier, if someone wants to claim that belief in God is irrelevant, more power to him/her. Belief in God does not lead to further, refined belief in God or in any tangible results. But dismissing it as wrong requires faith just as much as accepting it as right does.
But again, my objections to atheism are based solely on the atheists with whom I have conversed. A more benign version of atheism may well exist which wouldn't cause me these problems.
Nonetheless, I have so far found arguing with atheists just as incredibly frustrating and obnoxious as arguing with creationists.
"Superiority" has nothing to do with it. I'm not an agnostic; I'm a Catholic. I'm fine with believing things you can't prove.
I object to atheists considering themselves superior to theists because they only accept that which can be proven, while simultaneously believing that there is no God.
In that sense, I do consider agnostics superior, insofar as I respect a person's ability to simply up and say "I don't know" when confronted with an unknowable. If someone chooses to only believe in the provable, then, naturally, that someone will not come to a determination on the existence of God. More power to him/her.
If that someone then proceeds to live as though there isn't a God, this is also a natural consequence in only accepting what can be proven. Again, more power to him/her. S/he has chosen a path, and is sticking to it, being entirely consistent.
Atheism, however, is in my experience espoused by those who, for some reason, hate the idea that other people believe in a God, as they themselves believe there isn't a God. This sort of competition of beliefs is pointless.
In any event, to address your further points regarding God as a viral concept with no validity: firstly, I'm certain you accept the progress of science and engineering over human history. We no longer believe that the sun orbits the Earth. By the same token, religion no longer holds that the sun is God's eye. Why you should feel that progress in thought in one area of human endeavor is valid, while "debunking" another based on it's state millenia ago is a little curious to me. By your rationale, I should discard all scientific discovery because three thousand years ago scientists thought the Earth was flat. Clearly, this is ridiculous.
Secondarily, the comment from anti-theists that God is used to explain that which is beyond human understanding has, believe it or not, been addressed by theists long ago. It's known as the God of the Gaps Heresy, and is explained elsewhere in comments on this article. Briefly, it states that using God solely to fill in the gaps in human understanding is a heretical limitation of God (since that would mean that expanding human understanding diminishes God, which can't happen). God, then, must be believed to be in all things, whether or not we understand them.
This does not prevent, of course, some people from resorting to God exclusively when discussing something they don't understand. On the other hand, science doesn't prevent "scientists" from claiming they've invented perpetual motion, either. But when someone does claim that, it is quickly disproven by science as a whole. Similarly, such wrongheaded relgious thinking is disowned by religion at large.
That doesn't follow unless you presuppose the absolute nature of time.
Allowing for eternity, there isn't any problem. God isn't so complex as to require a creator; God has always existed.
*shrug*
By definition, you don't get to impose the constraints of the universe that is the creation (i.e., time & causality) on the being postulated to have created the universe and, hence, the constraints.
It's semantically clever, but it doesn't really mean anything.
Slashdot Mirror
"This is stupid. If you need natural language as a crutch to program, you shouldn't be programming."
"This will open the door to everyone programming, and spell the end of Micro$oft's monopoly."
"This will suck because performance will be crap. Just like Java. Real coders write ASM."
"I remember when they designed FORTRAN and COBOL, so I am qualified to say that this will never work, just like those didn't."
"This will be cool as soon as someone writes a GPL'd version of it."
"IANASECSLOIAOWQTGAEO (I Am Not A Software Engineer, Computer Scientist, Linguist Or In Any Other Way Qualified To Give An Educated Opinion), but..."
"Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of natural language in Soviet Russia jokes?"
(Me? Post flamebait? That's unpossible!)
What crap.
If you can't prove a negative, how do you know that you can't prove a negative??
You're right on about the subs, though...Big Mike's puts every other sub chain to shame. Not even close.
(Now, if only I could manage to get a job in the Madison area, I could do my own "outskirts of the city" thing...)
Sure, plenty of people from around the country (most of whom don't even know where Wisconsin is, aside from somewhere in the part you fly over to get to the "real" states) think Madison is rural, but it's got a couple hundred thousand people and a notably high average income. It also happens to have the highest number of restaurants per capita of any city in the nation.
More importantly, it's staunchly liberal (if you're from WI, you must have heard the term People's Republic of Madison, right?), which isn't exactly a hallmark of rural America. It even comes complete with USSResque propaganda on billboards (picture a KMFDM-video-style black and white drawing of an African American man looking bravely up and to the left in front of a red background featuring a star-in-circle of slightly darker red...with the caption WORK! in big, block letters...)
(For anyone who knows the city, by "heart" I mean a couple blocks awaye from Chase and Oklahoma)
HTH
HAND
;)
So if the rocket only has to get from Mach ~20 to Mach ~23, I would imagine the payload increase to be significant (the increase is, of course, offset by needing to have the scramjet and initial lifting bodies as well as fuel therefore...but the initial/scramjet stages don't have to carry oxidizer or reaction mass, which gives them a huge mass advantage over conventional rockets).
*Actually, it's possible that the term "rocket" specifically means that the fuel and the reaction mass are the same thing, but I'm not certain of that, since I've seen terms like "nuclear rocket" used quite often (though perhaps incorrectly), and those do decouple fuel and reaction mass.
And now you know that it probably should.
You can test this yourself with a coffee can and some gasoline: fill the coffee can halfway with gasoline, wait around a few minutes, then toss a lit match in (from a little distance). You'll get a moment of blue flame and a *fwoomp*, then nothing.
Then repeat the test, but fill the coffee can full and throw the match in right away: you'll just put the match out.
Anecdotally, they had this problem when filming Payback: there's a seen where Gibson lights a rivulet of gasoline from a punctured fuel line by dropping a lit cigarette into it: on screen, you see the trail of flame race towards the car, then the huge detonation when it reaches the tank. In reality, they tried using gasoline, and it just kept putting out the cigarette. They ended up having to use rubber cement.
More anecdotally (and conversely): you have to be careful with your standard gasoline cannisters. A friend of mine had a two-gallon cannister half full of gasoline, with the spout open and the cap off. In this case, a cigarette (I don't remember whose) lit the fumes outside the spout, and we had a sustained torch for several minutes (I'm guessing the flame drew vacuum, pulling air through the open cap into the half-full cannister, evaporating the gasoline and mixing with it to continue the fire, but I don't actually know).
Also interestingly, you can drink gasoline with no ill effects. Just don't breathe the vapor for longer than you can help. ;)
Aside from an unignited hydrogen leak dispersing itself harmlessly, you'd always be dealing with less hydrogen (by mass) than you would be with any of the hydrocarbons (particularly gasoline, which can be treated pretty much as octane for mass purposes: C8H18, fifty-seven times as massive).
So not only is hydrogen as fuel safer due to secondary effects, it's safer due to lower total energy available under circumstances you'd see in use.
There would be extra staffing cost, at least at the outset. Although something like RFIDs (I know, I know, RFID is the Great Technological Satan, but bear with me) in the tickets themselves would solve this problem: the RFID gets associated with a particular showing as the ticket is printed. The theaters have readers in the door frames that raise a visible/audible alarm (probably just visible so as not to disrupt the movie from a cheater going in late) if the wrong RFID walks through.
Then you only have to pay for enough extra staffing to note the alarms.
Compared to the cost of renovating theaters with better sound systems, seating and projectors, I have to think this investment would be doable, and I believe you're right in that tiered pricing would increase net profit.
It's so apparent to me, actually, that the fact that no one's done it makes me suspect that there are contractual/licensing reasons that thaters can't do this sort of thing.
It's not like they have no idea ahead of time which movies are going to be bigger draws; they know which movies to put on multiple screens, have midnight showings of, etc.
As it stands, I don't know anyone who goes to the movie theater to see "something." We go to see a specific movie that has piqued our interest. But if movies ranged in price from a couple bucks to $10, it might be worth my while to go to a theater just to see what's playing and maybe see an oddball film for a $2.
I have to think that getting more eyeballs on the screen, even for a crappy flick, is a win for all involved. The theater sells more popcorn, the publisher sells more ads, the creators increase exposure for later DVD sales. And this is assuming that money is lost in straight ticket sales, which I would think you could comabt by informed price setting.
Makes me wonder if I'm missing a huge aspect of the industry, or if it's just a case of "this is how we do it."
But DVDs cost varying amounts, as do video games...even CDs don't all cost the same. Why are theaters different?
Theoretically, sure, one leaked copy of something means everyone can get it. But the same is true of the Ebola virus, and the vast majority of the human population is still here. Ditto AIDS, Herpes, Gonorrhea, Chlamydia (sp -2), etc.
I seem to recall reading about bioweapons research, and being able to reliably predict the scope and extent of the infected area. Why shouldn't the same thing be true for copies of movies/music online? Just replace "communicability" with "popularity," and I think the analogy holds remarkably well. After all, it's not like your computer on the P2P network do jour is actually in communication with every other peer on the network, and certainly not reliably.
Take Halo 2, for example. A friend of mine downloaded a copy after the leak, while I didn't (I claim no moral high ground, here, he's got a modded XBox and I don't. Notably, we both purchased it Tuesday. But I digress). So if your P2P client runs across his box and not mine, you can have a copy. Vice versa, and you can't.
What this all boils down to is I believe that yes, content owners stopping everyone they can from having illegal copies of their so-called "property" will make a dent in piracy.
I could be wrong. But I just don't buy into the "losing one copy is the same as giving it away to everyone" theory.
Now, what would be cool is a material tough enough to pave roads with, yet transparent enough to have solar cells underneath it. That would be neat.
But I don't think we're ready for glass roads, just yet.
Why the bowl?
I don't think that's anything like an open question. There is a finite number of states the brain can take on, which automatically puts an upper bound on how much information it can possibly contain. The effective limit is presumably orders of magnitude lower (since a vast number of those states involve the brain being dead or otherwise non-functional), of course, but I don't think there's any question as to whether or not a limit exists.
Given that nothing is unbreakable/unhackable/unspoofable, the real danger is putting into widespread use something that people believe to be unbreakable/unhackable/unspoofable. When you go to court because your gun was used in a shooting, everyone will "know" that you did it, since "no one else can fire the gun." Except we all know that no system is perfect, and someone else could have.
Just as bad is the case of identity theft; the more that biometrics become used to verify identity, the more vulnerable you are to having your identity easily stolen. After all, it's perfectly reliable, so there don't need to be any other checks. The fingerprint/retina scan/brainwave pattern says the person is you, therefore s/he is. Even worse, once your identity has been suborned in this fashion, you can't get it back, since you can't change it.
You can potentially address this by adding something like a PIN or password into the system, but that loses both the supposed benefits of the biometric identification and simply shifts the burden of security back where it's always been: remembering a unique piece of information that no one else has.
This is a story told in the Bible, but that doesn't mean the Bible is its source. The source is that it happened.
Moreover, I don't reject the doctrine of original sin, I reject the doctrine that it was caused by one particular woman who tempted one particular man. Which is really a natural conclusion given a belief in an all-just God, isn't it? For the record, I also reject the doctrine of Hell, since it is obviously impossible to merit infinite punishment for finite sin, given perfect justice (and I'll leave out for the moment the all-merciful God).
The point of original sin is that we, as humans, are flawed, and make wrong decisions. We are, through the death of Christ and baptism, forgiven the flaw, but we are thereafter expected to personally not submit to the flaw. When we fail to do so, we need to seek forgiveness for the specific wrong which we did.
WRT to your Superman analogy, you're exactly correct. But Roman Catholicism, to pick the Christian faith with which I am most familiar, has comparatively few articles of dogma which one must accept in order to be Catholic. That Christ is God become man, for one. The virgin birth and the Assumption, for two more. It has tons of doctrine that you are taught to believe, but need not to be Catholic. In point of fact, there's a specific procedure for rejecting certain beliefs within the Church.
Christianity as a whole is even less restrictive. Anyone who believe in Christ as the son of God and the general tenets of the Judeo-Christian ethic is a Christian.
As such, I look around at a universe which not only contains no evidence of God, but also appears more and more to be entirely explicable absent God. The further we push the bounds of human thought, the clearer it becomes that God need not exist for the universe to make sense.
Anyone who argues with that statement is demonstrably wrong.
And yet, despite that, I still believe in God. Yes, it's possible that I'm an unwilling victim of indoctrination, and cannot help but think this way. I wouldn't know.
On the other hand, it's also possible that I simply believe that there is a purpose in the incredible beauty and wonder that the universe reveals to us with every discovery. I can marvel at the incredible - almost literally - elegance of a system wherein a very few fundamental particles introduced in sufficient quantity, along with (I believe) a few simple rules (which we have yet to tease out of the universe's structure, but I which I believe exist) have necessarily formed the universe as we perceive it. Not because someone tinkered to make it work, but because the very nature of the system demanded it.
To me, the universe is awe-inspring. As a programmer, I know the difficulties in setting up a complex system such that it does anything interesting whatsoever. The fact that the universe not only exists as it does, but that it has to, and that it all sprang from such a comparatively simple set of basic "settings," as it were, is humbling in the extreme. Even more impressive, to me, is that the system is complex enough to give rise to a subset of the system capable of analyzing the system itself.
And that is God. I don't appeal to God because I don't know what happened to start the universe. I appeal to God because the universe is beautiful, and it wouldn't have to be. Have you read Just Six Numbers, by any chance? If you haven't, I recommend it, it's an excellent book. Even if not, I assume you're familiar with the idea that there are a few fundamental numbers that "just are," and because of those numbers, the universe as it is exists. The fact that those numbers are what they are is equally likely to be sheer happy chance as it is to be divine intervention, as far as we are able to determine.
Personally, I prefer to thank God that the universe is than to thank an odds-against roll of the dice. But it's those sorts of things that are God - not the unknown, but the unknowable. God is the one who set the initial conditions, knowing what would result. God is the one who knows the position and vector of every particle in the universe.
God is not, in my view, and explanation for anything. He can't be. We are expected to explain the universe on our own, it's why we're reasoning creatures.
I'm rambling and disjoint, and I apologize. I'm trying to explain the ineffable...and I'm at work.
What it comes down to is that I have ultimate faith in science to explain the how of anything, given enough time. I have no faith in science to provide a why for anything, regardless of time. Science provides ever-more-accurate representations of what is. Religion, however, attempts to provide a reason for what is.
Of course, it's easy to believe that there is no reason, that it's all pure chance. But that's the point - that is a belief, and is unrelated to science. To me, the belief that creation has no reason is no m
And they can all go vote for who will help them most, while I vote for who will help me most, and when the dust settles, the candidate that most people fell will help them most will be in office.
I hate bullshit "don't just vote for yourself" arguments, since voting for yourself is precisely what the system depends on you doing.
We all know the voting system is borked, but attacking the very basis of a voting-based system isn't the way to fix it.
In which case, if it means I get two votes, I'll vote for a third party every time!
Your post exhibits some of the worst logic I've ever seen on slashdot. And that's saying something.
However, it's possible that the self-styled atheists I've encountered are a biased sample, since they're only the ones who are aggressively atheist.
That aside, the problem of discaring religion still exists. It's one thing to claim that belief in God is irrelevant, it's another to claim that it's incorrect. Some degree of belief is required of all things, or you end up with nothing. Consider empiricism itself. Why should the past be an accurate predictor of the future? Because it always has been.
This is more than a trifle circular.
I find the example of the henhouse particularly illustrative: the chicken has every reason to believe that sunrise causes the farmer to come out and spread corn. Right up until the farmer comes out and wrings the chicken's neck.
All that being said, I don't subscribe to Hume, I accept causality, the validity of the scientific method, and even macro evolution. But that's not the point. As you say, you can't know anything for sure.
If it all comes down to beliefs, then why is a belief in an unprovable deity better or worse than a belief in an unprovable assertion that our senses relay accurate information to our brains? The only answer is because the latter leads to successively more complete theories and progressively more functional devices. Which is spectacular, but doesn't change the faith-based nature of the system.
As I alluded to earlier, if someone wants to claim that belief in God is irrelevant, more power to him/her. Belief in God does not lead to further, refined belief in God or in any tangible results. But dismissing it as wrong requires faith just as much as accepting it as right does.
But again, my objections to atheism are based solely on the atheists with whom I have conversed. A more benign version of atheism may well exist which wouldn't cause me these problems.
Nonetheless, I have so far found arguing with atheists just as incredibly frustrating and obnoxious as arguing with creationists.
I object to atheists considering themselves superior to theists because they only accept that which can be proven, while simultaneously believing that there is no God.
In that sense, I do consider agnostics superior, insofar as I respect a person's ability to simply up and say "I don't know" when confronted with an unknowable. If someone chooses to only believe in the provable, then, naturally, that someone will not come to a determination on the existence of God. More power to him/her.
If that someone then proceeds to live as though there isn't a God, this is also a natural consequence in only accepting what can be proven. Again, more power to him/her. S/he has chosen a path, and is sticking to it, being entirely consistent.
Atheism, however, is in my experience espoused by those who, for some reason, hate the idea that other people believe in a God, as they themselves believe there isn't a God. This sort of competition of beliefs is pointless.
In any event, to address your further points regarding God as a viral concept with no validity: firstly, I'm certain you accept the progress of science and engineering over human history. We no longer believe that the sun orbits the Earth. By the same token, religion no longer holds that the sun is God's eye. Why you should feel that progress in thought in one area of human endeavor is valid, while "debunking" another based on it's state millenia ago is a little curious to me. By your rationale, I should discard all scientific discovery because three thousand years ago scientists thought the Earth was flat. Clearly, this is ridiculous.
Secondarily, the comment from anti-theists that God is used to explain that which is beyond human understanding has, believe it or not, been addressed by theists long ago. It's known as the God of the Gaps Heresy, and is explained elsewhere in comments on this article. Briefly, it states that using God solely to fill in the gaps in human understanding is a heretical limitation of God (since that would mean that expanding human understanding diminishes God, which can't happen). God, then, must be believed to be in all things, whether or not we understand them.
This does not prevent, of course, some people from resorting to God exclusively when discussing something they don't understand. On the other hand, science doesn't prevent "scientists" from claiming they've invented perpetual motion, either. But when someone does claim that, it is quickly disproven by science as a whole. Similarly, such wrongheaded relgious thinking is disowned by religion at large.
That doesn't follow unless you presuppose the absolute nature of time.
Allowing for eternity, there isn't any problem. God isn't so complex as to require a creator; God has always existed.
*shrug*
By definition, you don't get to impose the constraints of the universe that is the creation (i.e., time & causality) on the being postulated to have created the universe and, hence, the constraints.
It's semantically clever, but it doesn't really mean anything.