Jobs cofounded a company that built useful things, occupied a position of influence in its industry, made many employees and stockholders wealthy, and satisfied many customers.
I like how all of the links on the site are blocked by our proxy server at work for "Job Search/Careers"
Wow. I simply cannot wrap my head around the notion of working for any organization that would implement such a measure. To me, it would be like a slap in the face. It would force me to understand that, at some point in my history of life choices, I made at least one terrible mistake, possibly several, and that I'd better turn things around before it's too late.
At the very least, I'd make sure that the day a web search was blocked by a filter for being related to "Job Search/Careers" would be my very last one at that company.
Makes you wonder why so many people fervently believe in it.
Whatever. Do you have a response to the GP's point? The market for medical devices is about as "free" from government interference as your average Soviet gulag.
The language of computers is over 2000 years old. Is it too old? Has its usefulness expired?
No, because unlike superstition, formal logic and Boolean algebra actually work.
Yeah, that's not a knee-jerk reaction or anything. That's quite a bold assertion to make, especially considering you state it as if it were self-evident.
Really? Read the Bible, then imagine the same guys with nukes.
I don't actually disagree with your main point, though, in that if one is not prepared to offer an alternative, it's pointless to complain. However, Dawkins and others like him believe that rationality is sufficient for us, and I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary yet.
It's too bad Dawkins and his parrots don't understand that history, society, and government are complex.
You have it precisely backwards. We do think that these things are complex. Far too complex, in fact, for religion to be useful as a tool for understanding and navigating them.
Depending on whom you ask, we live in the Atomic Age, the Space Age, or the Information Age. One thing that's certain is that we need to stop relying on Bronze Age fairy tales for moral guidance. We need to be smarter than those guys were, or the age we're living in now will be our last as a civilized species.
Actually, its pinned not only on the whole religion, but on "religion" as a concept.
I have this crazy theory. It goes like this, "If people had the sense to reject the blind faith advocated by priests, they would also have the sense to reject the blind ideology advocated by politicians."
This is what I meant earlier when I suggested that religion and Communism are just two exploits of the same mental bug. I don't see a distinction between what's depicted here and what's depicted here. None at all. And that's without even dragging North Korean juche symbolism into the picture.
Regardless of whether I'm personally taking the comparison too far, the idea that the Stalinist purges were done in the name of "atheism" is at once incomplete, insulting, desperate, and silly. Allowing it to stand unchallenged is unacceptable.
So if it's killing in the name of atheism, it's actually killing in the name of religion
That is exactly what it was. There's room for only one infallible authority in a totalitarian state, and that means no Gods allowed. Also, no typewriters, copy machines, or radios that didn't have the dial glued in place.
Atheism was a common feature of the Communist personality cults, but this is no more relevant or enlightening than the fact that Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and Kim all drank milk as children.
I didn't ask any questions in the first place, but yes: what the hell history books have you been reading?
Evidently ones that weren't published by Bob Jones University.
The fact is that the French Revolution occurred when a broad coalition of classes from merchants to peasants to intellectuals laid siege to a fiscally-berserk government. The rebels were loosely united around the same Enlightenment philosophies of individual freedom and self-determination that inspired the American founders. The Revolution was not televised, tweeted, or posted on YouTube, and had nothing to do with an atheist crusade or whatever else they told you it was about in Bible study.
Also, the Earth is over three billion years old, humans arose from earlier hominids, the Moon is not made of cheese, and Jesus did not ride a dinosaur to work.
In a Stalinist personality cult, deities are treated as threats to society because they compete with the authority of the infallible leader. These systems are atheistic only in the most literal, technical sense, because the leader acts as a God-substitute in all ways but the purely spiritual.
North Korea takes the above idea and mingles it with spirituality as well. Their official state faith is more like some sort of wacky variant on ancestor worship than a classical theistic religion.
Ultimately it doesn't matter whether you're living in Pyongyang, North Korea or Lynchburg, Virginia. Faith-based bullshit corrodes civilization.
Yeah, because we're genetically different from the people who started the Inquisition, the people who fought in the Crusades, the people who burned other people at the stake over literally nothing, and the people who shoot girls for doing to school today. Those people were some other kind of ape. We're different. It can't happen again, and it can't happen here.
Civilization is a gift, one that comes from the same nonexistent God that we serve with our bodies and our bullets.
Note: I don't go to church because I don't like organized religion. It's not to my liking... so I don't participate. Simple.
See, that's where you're wrong. You participate. I participate. Every American taxpayer is forced to participate in organized religion, as long as things like this are considered acceptable. Civilization itself is at stake, or soon will be, and the option to "live and let live" has been taken away from us.
Religion fucks up everything, starting with the government. They evidently don't teach history in public schools anymore, or people wouldn't have forgotten that.
Exactly. Much of the "lost" DNA is still very much available, in the form of the dinosaurs' descendants.
Not only that, but any sample of nontrivial size will contain plenty of redundant DNA strands. This "half-life" business can be dealt with through instrumentation and data analysis, if not through chemistry or biology alone.
It actually explains what I'd rather do, which amazingly enough neither involves laughing, or killing them.
You would rather ignore the problem and wait for it to diminish on its own, as more and more religious people "accept that the beliefs they were brought up with may need some modification as our scientific understanding of the world advances." Right?
Question: Just how many more Congressional positions do you think we can afford to lose to these sorts of people? Because their numbers are increasing.
There needs to be a severe social penalty for anyone who admits to voting for people like Rep. Broun. Any solution you propose that does not make this happen is one that I'll reject out of hand. The time for passivity is over. It doesn't work.
4) Mozilla's obsolete-plugin detector works about as well as most of their stuff does these days, which is to say it doesn't.
That stupid banner still doesn't go away on my system even after I install the latest Acrobat Reader plugin. It still claims "Some plugins used by this page are out of date" anytime I open a.PDF.
And no, nobody wants to hear some geek lecture them about it being a bad idea to open.PDFs in the browser. That ship has sailed.
The problem with atheists in general and new atheists in particular is that they don't study war doctrine, otherwise they'd know that winning is most of times a matter of a) not causing otherwise neutral parties to ally with your enemy because you made yourself seem more dangerous than them; or, better yet, b) causing those neutral parties to ally with you.
There is only a miniscule number of genuine "neutral parties" in this debate. Most people were successfully "imprinted" with their local religion from earliest childhood. A few weren't.
Within the latter population, very few indeed are sitting on the fence, trying to decide whether to accept reality or indulge in fairy tales. There aren't enough of these pathologically open-minded folks to matter, IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
Jobs cofounded a company that built useful things, occupied a position of influence in its industry, made many employees and stockholders wealthy, and satisfied many customers.
Romney did what for his money, again?
I like how all of the links on the site are blocked by our proxy server at work for "Job Search/Careers"
Wow. I simply cannot wrap my head around the notion of working for any organization that would implement such a measure. To me, it would be like a slap in the face. It would force me to understand that, at some point in my history of life choices, I made at least one terrible mistake, possibly several, and that I'd better turn things around before it's too late.
At the very least, I'd make sure that the day a web search was blocked by a filter for being related to "Job Search/Careers" would be my very last one at that company.
Don't forget that Android makes several billion dollars a year for Microsoft in the form of patent royalties.
Makes you wonder why so many people fervently believe in it.
Whatever. Do you have a response to the GP's point? The market for medical devices is about as "free" from government interference as your average Soviet gulag.
The language of computers is over 2000 years old. Is it too old? Has its usefulness expired?
No, because unlike superstition, formal logic and Boolean algebra actually work.
Yeah, that's not a knee-jerk reaction or anything. That's quite a bold assertion to make, especially considering you state it as if it were self-evident.
Really? Read the Bible, then imagine the same guys with nukes.
I don't actually disagree with your main point, though, in that if one is not prepared to offer an alternative, it's pointless to complain. However, Dawkins and others like him believe that rationality is sufficient for us, and I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary yet.
It's too bad Dawkins and his parrots don't understand that history, society, and government are complex.
You have it precisely backwards. We do think that these things are complex. Far too complex, in fact, for religion to be useful as a tool for understanding and navigating them.
Depending on whom you ask, we live in the Atomic Age, the Space Age, or the Information Age. One thing that's certain is that we need to stop relying on Bronze Age fairy tales for moral guidance. We need to be smarter than those guys were, or the age we're living in now will be our last as a civilized species.
Actually, its pinned not only on the whole religion, but on "religion" as a concept.
I have this crazy theory. It goes like this, "If people had the sense to reject the blind faith advocated by priests, they would also have the sense to reject the blind ideology advocated by politicians."
This is what I meant earlier when I suggested that religion and Communism are just two exploits of the same mental bug. I don't see a distinction between what's depicted here and what's depicted here. None at all. And that's without even dragging North Korean juche symbolism into the picture.
Regardless of whether I'm personally taking the comparison too far, the idea that the Stalinist purges were done in the name of "atheism" is at once incomplete, insulting, desperate, and silly. Allowing it to stand unchallenged is unacceptable.
So if it's killing in the name of atheism, it's actually killing in the name of religion
That is exactly what it was. There's room for only one infallible authority in a totalitarian state, and that means no Gods allowed. Also, no typewriters, copy machines, or radios that didn't have the dial glued in place.
Atheism was a common feature of the Communist personality cults, but this is no more relevant or enlightening than the fact that Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and Kim all drank milk as children.
I didn't ask any questions in the first place, but yes: what the hell history books have you been reading?
Evidently ones that weren't published by Bob Jones University.
The fact is that the French Revolution occurred when a broad coalition of classes from merchants to peasants to intellectuals laid siege to a fiscally-berserk government. The rebels were loosely united around the same Enlightenment philosophies of individual freedom and self-determination that inspired the American founders. The Revolution was not televised, tweeted, or posted on YouTube, and had nothing to do with an atheist crusade or whatever else they told you it was about in Bible study.
Also, the Earth is over three billion years old, humans arose from earlier hominids, the Moon is not made of cheese, and Jesus did not ride a dinosaur to work.
See http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0103/p01s04-woap.html, for example.
In a Stalinist personality cult, deities are treated as threats to society because they compete with the authority of the infallible leader. These systems are atheistic only in the most literal, technical sense, because the leader acts as a God-substitute in all ways but the purely spiritual.
North Korea takes the above idea and mingles it with spirituality as well. Their official state faith is more like some sort of wacky variant on ancestor worship than a classical theistic religion.
Ultimately it doesn't matter whether you're living in Pyongyang, North Korea or Lynchburg, Virginia. Faith-based bullshit corrodes civilization.
Clue time: Go to North Korea and try selling atheism. They will send you home in a cheap pine box.
Communist personality cults are religious in nature. Same mental bug, different exploit.
The French Revolution had nothing to do with religion or lack thereof.
Any other questions?
You've invented data compression.
Now, off to the patent office!
Yeah, because we're genetically different from the people who started the Inquisition, the people who fought in the Crusades, the people who burned other people at the stake over literally nothing, and the people who shoot girls for doing to school today. Those people were some other kind of ape. We're different. It can't happen again, and it can't happen here.
Civilization is a gift, one that comes from the same nonexistent God that we serve with our bodies and our bullets.
Am I doing it right?
Note: I don't go to church because I don't like organized religion. It's not to my liking... so I don't participate. Simple.
See, that's where you're wrong. You participate. I participate. Every American taxpayer is forced to participate in organized religion, as long as things like this are considered acceptable. Civilization itself is at stake, or soon will be, and the option to "live and let live" has been taken away from us.
Religion fucks up everything, starting with the government. They evidently don't teach history in public schools anymore, or people wouldn't have forgotten that.
Exactly. Much of the "lost" DNA is still very much available, in the form of the dinosaurs' descendants.
Not only that, but any sample of nontrivial size will contain plenty of redundant DNA strands. This "half-life" business can be dealt with through instrumentation and data analysis, if not through chemistry or biology alone.
If it wasn't religion, it would be something else.
Yes. It would be something else. Something that's not magically immune to criticism, perhaps.
The article illustrates no such thing. The article illustrates that we have an idiot on the house committee on science, space, and technology
Gee, I wonder how a thing like that could have happened?
it's only the fundamentalist Christians and the atheists that don't think things through that believe that
<rolleyes> Yeah. Teach the controversy. </rolleyes>
It actually explains what I'd rather do, which amazingly enough neither involves laughing, or killing them.
You would rather ignore the problem and wait for it to diminish on its own, as more and more religious people "accept that the beliefs they were brought up with may need some modification as our scientific understanding of the world advances." Right?
Question: Just how many more Congressional positions do you think we can afford to lose to these sorts of people? Because their numbers are increasing.
There needs to be a severe social penalty for anyone who admits to voting for people like Rep. Broun. Any solution you propose that does not make this happen is one that I'll reject out of hand. The time for passivity is over. It doesn't work.
4) Mozilla's obsolete-plugin detector works about as well as most of their stuff does these days, which is to say it doesn't.
That stupid banner still doesn't go away on my system even after I install the latest Acrobat Reader plugin. It still claims "Some plugins used by this page are out of date" anytime I open a .PDF.
And no, nobody wants to hear some geek lecture them about it being a bad idea to open .PDFs in the browser. That ship has sailed.
This is a country where the vast majority of people consider themselves religious.
Yes, and as the article illustrates, we need to change that.
We can do that by laughing at them, or by killing them.
Which do you prefer? I prefer the former.
Communist personality cults are religious in nature.
Same mental bug, different exploit.
Truly, you have a dizzying command of mental health diagnostics.
Those things fit within what I pointed: US cultural influence abroad
OK, well, we're done here, it looks like.
The problem with atheists in general and new atheists in particular is that they don't study war doctrine, otherwise they'd know that winning is most of times a matter of a) not causing otherwise neutral parties to ally with your enemy because you made yourself seem more dangerous than them; or, better yet, b) causing those neutral parties to ally with you.
There is only a miniscule number of genuine "neutral parties" in this debate. Most people were successfully "imprinted" with their local religion from earliest childhood. A few weren't.
Within the latter population, very few indeed are sitting on the fence, trying to decide whether to accept reality or indulge in fairy tales. There aren't enough of these pathologically open-minded folks to matter, IMO.