If you don't use Tomato or DD-WRT on your router you obviously don't really care about security anyway so who cares? The OOB ROMs on most consumer routers are full of more holes than a breadboard.
A) Citation needed. B) Apparently youre not aware of the issues that historically plagued DD-WRT, what with their broken HTTPS daemon which would either spike your cpu to 100% or require you to use HTTP only. Thats some mighty good security there. C) Apparently youre also not aware that the old WRT-54Gs were the starting point for DD-WRT, and were linux based. What makes you think theres more security in DD-WRT? D) Security has never been a chief concern of either Tomato or DD-WRT.
According to what I could dig up (memory, and corroboration here), snapdragons use about 500mw at idle. Thats one quarter to one sixth the power consumption of intel's offering.
Doing some research, it looks like Tegra3s use about.5w per core as well. Again, Intel is pretty far back if theyre throwing out a single core and hitting 2-3 watts.
I will start with my conclusion, since if you have time for only one more response or to read one more comment, I would prefer it be this, and would be happy to leave it here:
This whole discussion started off with you stating that people who believe in religion suspend logic, and are in fact illogical. We have gone back and forth for several posts, and I feel you have been courteous enough. At the end, though, I wonder: do you feel that I have shown an inability to reason? Would you say I have been illogical?
And now on to the wall of text.
Just as Rainbows were considered signs from the heavens, but now we understand them as a product of refraction
Non sequitur-- there is no law I am aware of that says each thing can only be one thing at a time. A rainbow could have existed before the flood, and then post-flood been declared a sign of a new covenant; it can simultaneously be the result of water droplets acting as a prism and refracting light into its constituent parts. Likewise, God could have created the universe, and have used methods that are observable to use today (a burst of energy and matter from a single point).
The scientific method is always applicable.
Thats just plain not true. Quick: Apply the scientific method to Nihilism, or post-modernism. Guess what, you cant, since it only works with testable hypothesis. You are trying to shoehorn a scientific device for testing into all areas of life, when it is not designed to play that role. You can be rational without trying to find a testable, quantifiable, measurable hypothesis in every single thing.
It makes up the part where there is a God.
Begging the question. It would simplify things and make for much shorter posts if we left out the parts where assumptions are made which at the get go rely on my being wrong. Its circular, its not helpful, and it just generates more argument.
does you beleiving that I have an apple make it more likely I have a magical wand?
It is a good deal easier if instead of "likely" we use the word "confidence", as statistics and mathematics have nothing to do with whether something is or is not true. We can talk of our level of confidence that it is, and I would say that in your example your truthfulness in one area adds some small degree of confidence to your other claims; but not enough for me to believe them. If on the other hand, having known you for 50 years (as say a brother) I had never known you to be anything other than perfectly honest, and perfectly sane, it would carry a much greater degree of weight. If another friend who had likewise been perfectly honest had witnessed it from afar, and I knew you two had not collaborated, it would shift the balance to me cautiously wanting to see the thing for myself.
The bible generates a great deal of confidence for me in the way that it self-verifies: parts of the OT and NT agreeing in subtle and not easily noticed ways; predictive prophesy prior to events that end up being remarkably true; measurements and descriptions that are startlingly accurate (such as a vessel's measurement that indicates a working knowledge of pi as 135/43, or 3.1395); dates and names that are accurate; minor details that do not read as a work of fiction or legend, especially given the time period and literary styles; etc.
To state that it loses your confidence because "it declares a God, and clearly God does not exist, thus the Bible is not reliable and therefore there is no God" is not fair at all.
Because Julius Caesar didn't do impossible things.
Once again, begging the question: whether something is impossible or not in this case depends on whether the Bible is true or not.
All of them. Tricks, coincidences, phonomena we have later explained.
Or else that scientific models that begin with the assumption that there is nothing aside from the observable, "natural" universe are begging the question?
By the way, I would never make that assumption; Paul in Romans seems to imply that everyone has some degree of "religious awareness", and each chooses what they do with it. Im well aware of how atheists can get, but then everyone can be irrational in the heat of an argument, and I do not think it is any more fair to blame all atheists for the fallacies of one, any more than it is fair to blame me for the inquisition.
Often enough people get so into an argument that they let their rigorous grasp on reason and the thread of their thought slip; I do not hold that against what they believe, just against their argument.
God and religion have no evidence, reproducable and observable experiments, just old books and stories.
Julius Caesar has no evidence, reproducable and observable experiments, just old books and stories. Guy Fawkes has no evidence, reproducable and observable experiments, just old books and stories. Abraham Lincoln has no evidence, reproducable and observable experiments, just old books and stories. The Magna Carta has no evidence, reproducable and observable experiments, just old books and stories.
Hmmm, surely something is amiss here. Possibly your lumping of historical documents into "just old books and stories" is problematic?
We don't - we can only say that if the document is true, then that is what happened.
Which is why the scientific method is not applicable in every instance.
Religion simply makes something up to fill the gap, rather than admitting we don't know for sure.
Not to sound insulting, but that sounds ignorant of what the bible actually says. The Old Testament is largely a narrative, and as I stated before we have very strong external evidence to support big chunks of it. It is generally regarded as an accurate historical document (which parts are accurate are disputed of course). Im not sure what you mean by "make something up to fill the gaps".
Yes, lots of the bible might be right. That doesn't make it all right.
The fact that large parts are right are "evidences" for the credibility of the other parts. One trusts the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society because it has a long history and is regarded as credible; that is not "proof", but you cannot apply the scientific method to "are they likely to tell me lies".
As to why they acted like that, it's possible they didn't, and it's also possible they truly believed he was the son of God, and was raised from the dead. It doesn't make it true. It doesn't make it true.
Ah, but they claimed on pain of death that they saw this, as did many others. So we either have people who of a sudden decided that they wanted to lie more strongly than they wanted to live; or else we have a group hallucination; or else we have many fabricated accounts of the rise of christianity and it has nothing to do with the resurrection of Jesus; or else they were telling the truth.
As to the first and second points, those both seem EXCEEDINGLY unlikely (you are aware of the torturous death Peter received, and the banishment John received, right?), and the third is even more unlikely-- there is no doubt that Peter and Paul were killed for preaching the rise of Jesus by the Romans. That leaves either the fourth option, or indecision. The question becomes, how clear would the evidence have to be to convince you? Would ANY amount of evidence suffice, if you are determined that the Biblical account cannot be right? And how does that square with a rational thought process?
The bible claims that Jesus is the son of a God, with no evidence other than his word and supposed mirracles.
There are several corroborating accounts. That is all you can EVER have in the majority of historical cases; and here it is being brushed off as hearsay. Why believe that there was a Julius Caesar, by your reasoning, since all we have is the words of men?
He could have lied, the miracles could have easily been tricks. This is far more likely given these miracles are not reproducable.
You would need to state more clearly which miracles you think were tricks-- walking on water in a tempest, and then silencing the storm? Thats one heck of a gag. Raising a man from the grave? Good luck getting a Jew to go into a tomb and remain there for a day. Faking his own death? Yea, good luck staying alive after a crucifixion, a scourging, and being impaled in the side; anyone attempting such a stunt would die horribly of blood loss or infection within a day.
You offer many alternatives to corroborated historical accounts, and yet each of them is far less likely if only you did not have this unfounded refusal to accept that the accounts could be correct. What you are doing is unfair and unscientific: you are discrediting a pile of evidence with no cause whatsoever other than your preconceived assumptions. How then would one EVER convince you?
What was illegal is that Microsoft was using its Windows monopoly and its pre-installed state to unfairly gain dominance in another area: internet browsers. By preinstalling IE on Windows, they ensured that every single computer that was purchased from an OEM had IE already on it.
The fact that IE was free was never an issue; MS got hit for Windows Media player in Europe, and removed it from the stock install, but they kept it free-- thats not illegal.
but says nothing about Google's monopoly in web advertising nor the fact it's using its monopoly revenues to pump a new market with a free product (Android),
I was with you till here. In what way is Google leveraging its search engine de-facto monopoly to push android? I am unaware of any way in which Android is unfairly pushed. You can get google apps for any of the major phone OSes, and they dont sell Android at Google.com.
You were on a roll, but thats just too much of a stretch.
It is well recorded throughout history that religion has been used to control the general populace.
Weasel-words (recorded by whom, when, what, etc), and anecdotal. Just because it HAS been used that way does not mean it always is. I can show you examples of where pride in ones nation is used as a tool of agression, that doesnt mean it always is.
You didnt address the fact that religions seem to spring up universally, whereas what you are talking about is more specific. In what way is the shinto or buddhist religion used to control its people? Last I checked, the CCP was feverishly trying to stamp out religion.
I'm waiting for documented and tested evidence. I don't fall into *any* of the groups, because I simply don't believe in fairy tales
In other words, "My belief is correct because its not a fairy tale; QED." Sorry, that doesnt hold water. Your belief requires as much evidence as any other, and you are giving it a bye because it happens to be what YOU believe.
I found none to be based in reality.
Thats all fine and good, I maintain your study of Christianity must have been shallow indeed if you think it is pleasant stories to make us feel better. I also maintain that, even if that is the conclusion you came to, you are giving way too much slack to your belief in raw secularism and not maintaining the standard of evidence that you are demanding from super-naturalist belief systems.
Disappearing gods are just a plot device for authors to excuse the fact that they have no evidence.
Interestingly enough, and unique to christianity and the abrahmic religions (AFAIK), the Old Testament recognizes the existence of other "gods" and mocks them as worthless objects of wood and gold, capable of no action or thought. Im not aware of any other religion that makes that statement.
Ive been there, its not bull. They monitor literally every cell conversation, every webpage. The great firewall is no joke. They even redirect www.skype.com to a customized version that reports everything you do to big brother.
Believe me, I know people who are on a VPN 24/7 because of the government's shenanigans, and they even screw with the VPN to make it lossy and bad.
Evidence or lack thereof does not make anything real or not real. Something's existence is independent of our ability to discern it. We should get that clear right off the bat.
There is no inherent belief in humans that there is a deity of any sort. That is a trained belief.
If you mean that as an absolute statement, it is demonstrably false: Who taught the first person to believe in a deity? And why does belief in a deity exist in every single human culture in existence, both historical and current?
Men who study this sort of thing-- both athiest and secular-- generally do not deny that there is a human tendency to believe in something outside of the "natural" world, and that it is innate, not trained. I would check that belief of yours, and think about why you believe it-- what evidence do you have for this?
Or... Every child is born an atheist. Religion is forced upon them after that.
Thats an ignorant statement, and Im not sure how to respond to it, other than to say I know many many personal examples of where that is just plain wrong (ie, people who grew up in an athiest household who now hold different religious views). Bold statements like that will get you into trouble when you run into someone whose life story contradicts you.
They are fables; mythology; legends; fictional stories that we have made to comfort ourselves.
Theres very little comforting about the Old Testament story on the face of it. Once again, these are statements typically made by people who have very little knowledge about these topics.
In that every religion is different should be enough explanation that none are right.
That argument only sort of works because you have made a fake classification which excludes YOUR beliefs. Why are your beliefs any more likely to be correct than the other 10,001?
Either way, the logical choice, according to his wager, is to follow this new religion.
Go read his wager, theres not much point in an argument when you dont understand what he was arguing. Im explaining it badly, and I suspect I have already misrepresented him; its been a while since I read it, so I will not try to do so again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager I will note that the wikipedia summary indicates that the thrust is that you should believe; whereas I note that Pascal assumes there is nothing on either side of the coin that can give you a clue to the right answer, which I dispute. I took from this that at the very least, his wager correctly indicates that you MUST wager, and your wager is utmost importance. I rather suggest you read it yourself, without commentary, and make up your own mind what he is saying.
One beleives in the most likely explanation of a given situation. If someone claims to have seen a ghost, the other options are far more likely.
A-ha: on what principle do you state this? How are you quantifying the likelyhood of an intrusion by the supernatural into the natural? What principle could you possibly wield in these circumstances to rule out the possibility based on nothing more than the hypothesis ("I have seen a ghost")? Mind, I am not saying that evidence to the contrary would not be a determining factor; but you seem to think the hypothesis itself is enough to determine it false. (I would also agree in the normal case, it is quite right to be skeptical given the tendency for people to make such a thing up; but that is an example of "evidence to the contrary")
It's not - the scientific method should be used in all things.
It cannot. You have a document, by a man claiming to be called Herod, describing a meal he had. The name appears in other literature, the timing is right, but there is no other supporting or contradictory evidence. It is too recent to apply carbon dating. Quick: use the scientific method on this. Wikipedia notes that key to the scientific method are measurement, experimentation, and observation. What methods do you intend to use?
Or better yet, the existence of multiverses has been hypothesized. How do you intend to go about testing something like that, since you cannot communicate information into or out of our own universe?
You are right, we must take historical documents and try to gague their reliability, but the Bible gives us no good reason to beleive the religious parts. They don't fit with our model of the world, they are not reproducable.
Evidences: 1) The verifiable parts of the bible (have extra-biblical support) have been verified. They tend to be remarkably accurate. 2) Meticulous geneological records were kept, and these also match up. 3) They accurately depict how real men would behave in those instances with less extra-biblical support: they are believable. They do not depict OT Israel as some utopia, but rather as a theocracy that, on its people's demand, became a monarchy, which within a generation became corrupt. This fits with exactly the kind of pattern we expect-- you can see the patterns in Rome, the Catholic church, and anywhere else a "benevolent dictator" approach was tried. 4) Alternative explanations for the history recorded often require a stretch of imagination. Take the disciples after Jesus' crucifixion. They scattered, and denied him on fear of persecution; but then 3 days later they started preaching his "gospel" and claiming that the man had risen from the grave. This in the end resulted in severe persecutions (by Paul, by Rome, etc-- peter himself was crucified for it, and when Paul converted, he too was executed). This leaves the question: what explanation accounts for this behavior? Did they all simultaneously develop a masochist tendency? 5) I think it is w
I'm sorry, but I reckon WB could have purchased a LV bag and used it without paying a penny for licensing and LV would have been delighted at the free coverage..
Can a lawyer confirm this? Inquiring minds want to know.
Also: Could they have used the fake bag and just not mention the trademarked name? Like wearing levis in the movie, but never mentioning them?
How do you explain the success of "free software" or the success of the Debian project that is coordinated through emails and chat messages instead of dollars
I look and realize that RedHat (and its clones) are far, far, far more popular than Debian, and that perhaps thats telling?
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't use Tomato or DD-WRT on your router you obviously don't really care about security anyway so who cares? The OOB ROMs on most consumer routers are full of more holes than a breadboard.
A) Citation needed.
B) Apparently youre not aware of the issues that historically plagued DD-WRT, what with their broken HTTPS daemon which would either spike your cpu to 100% or require you to use HTTP only. Thats some mighty good security there.
C) Apparently youre also not aware that the old WRT-54Gs were the starting point for DD-WRT, and were linux based. What makes you think theres more security in DD-WRT?
D) Security has never been a chief concern of either Tomato or DD-WRT.
According to what I could dig up (memory, and corroboration here), snapdragons use about 500mw at idle. Thats one quarter to one sixth the power consumption of intel's offering.
Doing some research, it looks like Tegra3s use about .5w per core as well. Again, Intel is pretty far back if theyre throwing out a single core and hitting 2-3 watts.
I will start with my conclusion, since if you have time for only one more response or to read one more comment, I would prefer it be this, and would be happy to leave it here:
This whole discussion started off with you stating that people who believe in religion suspend logic, and are in fact illogical. We have gone back and forth for several posts, and I feel you have been courteous enough. At the end, though, I wonder: do you feel that I have shown an inability to reason? Would you say I have been illogical?
And now on to the wall of text.
Just as Rainbows were considered signs from the heavens, but now we understand them as a product of refraction
Non sequitur-- there is no law I am aware of that says each thing can only be one thing at a time. A rainbow could have existed before the flood, and then post-flood been declared a sign of a new covenant; it can simultaneously be the result of water droplets acting as a prism and refracting light into its constituent parts. Likewise, God could have created the universe, and have used methods that are observable to use today (a burst of energy and matter from a single point).
The scientific method is always applicable.
Thats just plain not true. Quick: Apply the scientific method to Nihilism, or post-modernism. Guess what, you cant, since it only works with testable hypothesis. You are trying to shoehorn a scientific device for testing into all areas of life, when it is not designed to play that role. You can be rational without trying to find a testable, quantifiable, measurable hypothesis in every single thing.
It makes up the part where there is a God.
Begging the question. It would simplify things and make for much shorter posts if we left out the parts where assumptions are made which at the get go rely on my being wrong. Its circular, its not helpful, and it just generates more argument.
does you beleiving that I have an apple make it more likely I have a magical wand?
It is a good deal easier if instead of "likely" we use the word "confidence", as statistics and mathematics have nothing to do with whether something is or is not true. We can talk of our level of confidence that it is, and I would say that in your example your truthfulness in one area adds some small degree of confidence to your other claims; but not enough for me to believe them. If on the other hand, having known you for 50 years (as say a brother) I had never known you to be anything other than perfectly honest, and perfectly sane, it would carry a much greater degree of weight. If another friend who had likewise been perfectly honest had witnessed it from afar, and I knew you two had not collaborated, it would shift the balance to me cautiously wanting to see the thing for myself.
The bible generates a great deal of confidence for me in the way that it self-verifies: parts of the OT and NT agreeing in subtle and not easily noticed ways; predictive prophesy prior to events that end up being remarkably true; measurements and descriptions that are startlingly accurate (such as a vessel's measurement that indicates a working knowledge of pi as 135/43, or 3.1395); dates and names that are accurate; minor details that do not read as a work of fiction or legend, especially given the time period and literary styles; etc.
To state that it loses your confidence because "it declares a God, and clearly God does not exist, thus the Bible is not reliable and therefore there is no God" is not fair at all.
Because Julius Caesar didn't do impossible things.
Once again, begging the question: whether something is impossible or not in this case depends on whether the Bible is true or not.
All of them. Tricks, coincidences, phonomena we have later explained.
Im not aware of an exp
Or else that scientific models that begin with the assumption that there is nothing aside from the observable, "natural" universe are begging the question?
By the way, I would never make that assumption; Paul in Romans seems to imply that everyone has some degree of "religious awareness", and each chooses what they do with it. Im well aware of how atheists can get, but then everyone can be irrational in the heat of an argument, and I do not think it is any more fair to blame all atheists for the fallacies of one, any more than it is fair to blame me for the inquisition.
Often enough people get so into an argument that they let their rigorous grasp on reason and the thread of their thought slip; I do not hold that against what they believe, just against their argument.
people are taught the idea of a god,
This would require the human race to have existed eternally, having always been taught by the previous generation about a deity.
God and religion have no evidence, reproducable and observable experiments, just old books and stories.
Julius Caesar has no evidence, reproducable and observable experiments, just old books and stories.
Guy Fawkes has no evidence, reproducable and observable experiments, just old books and stories.
Abraham Lincoln has no evidence, reproducable and observable experiments, just old books and stories.
The Magna Carta has no evidence, reproducable and observable experiments, just old books and stories.
Hmmm, surely something is amiss here. Possibly your lumping of historical documents into "just old books and stories" is problematic?
I would argue that your personal evidence was colored by what you learn in your infancy ,
Now, what makes you think I learned what I believe in my infancy?
Yes, and Samsung is a huge teddy bear in all of this, and Oracle is playing the part of Santa Claus.
Seriously, dont pretend Apple is alone in their shenanigans.
We don't - we can only say that if the document is true, then that is what happened.
Which is why the scientific method is not applicable in every instance.
Religion simply makes something up to fill the gap, rather than admitting we don't know for sure.
Not to sound insulting, but that sounds ignorant of what the bible actually says. The Old Testament is largely a narrative, and as I stated before we have very strong external evidence to support big chunks of it. It is generally regarded as an accurate historical document (which parts are accurate are disputed of course). Im not sure what you mean by "make something up to fill the gaps".
Yes, lots of the bible might be right. That doesn't make it all right.
The fact that large parts are right are "evidences" for the credibility of the other parts. One trusts the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society because it has a long history and is regarded as credible; that is not "proof", but you cannot apply the scientific method to "are they likely to tell me lies".
As to why they acted like that, it's possible they didn't, and it's also possible they truly believed he was the son of God, and was raised from the dead. It doesn't make it true. It doesn't make it true.
Ah, but they claimed on pain of death that they saw this, as did many others. So we either have people who of a sudden decided that they wanted to lie more strongly than they wanted to live; or else we have a group hallucination; or else we have many fabricated accounts of the rise of christianity and it has nothing to do with the resurrection of Jesus; or else they were telling the truth.
As to the first and second points, those both seem EXCEEDINGLY unlikely (you are aware of the torturous death Peter received, and the banishment John received, right?), and the third is even more unlikely-- there is no doubt that Peter and Paul were killed for preaching the rise of Jesus by the Romans. That leaves either the fourth option, or indecision. The question becomes, how clear would the evidence have to be to convince you? Would ANY amount of evidence suffice, if you are determined that the Biblical account cannot be right? And how does that square with a rational thought process?
The bible claims that Jesus is the son of a God, with no evidence other than his word and supposed mirracles.
There are several corroborating accounts. That is all you can EVER have in the majority of historical cases; and here it is being brushed off as hearsay. Why believe that there was a Julius Caesar, by your reasoning, since all we have is the words of men?
He could have lied, the miracles could have easily been tricks. This is far more likely given these miracles are not reproducable.
You would need to state more clearly which miracles you think were tricks-- walking on water in a tempest, and then silencing the storm? Thats one heck of a gag. Raising a man from the grave? Good luck getting a Jew to go into a tomb and remain there for a day. Faking his own death? Yea, good luck staying alive after a crucifixion, a scourging, and being impaled in the side; anyone attempting such a stunt would die horribly of blood loss or infection within a day.
You offer many alternatives to corroborated historical accounts, and yet each of them is far less likely if only you did not have this unfounded refusal to accept that the accounts could be correct. What you are doing is unfair and unscientific: you are discrediting a pile of evidence with no cause whatsoever other than your preconceived assumptions. How then would one EVER convince you?
That is not illegal.
What was illegal is that Microsoft was using its Windows monopoly and its pre-installed state to unfairly gain dominance in another area: internet browsers. By preinstalling IE on Windows, they ensured that every single computer that was purchased from an OEM had IE already on it.
The fact that IE was free was never an issue; MS got hit for Windows Media player in Europe, and removed it from the stock install, but they kept it free-- thats not illegal.
OH! Or Jitterbug!!!
Theres always blackberry.
but says nothing about Google's monopoly in web advertising nor the fact it's using its monopoly revenues to pump a new market with a free product (Android),
I was with you till here. In what way is Google leveraging its search engine de-facto monopoly to push android? I am unaware of any way in which Android is unfairly pushed. You can get google apps for any of the major phone OSes, and they dont sell Android at Google.com.
You were on a roll, but thats just too much of a stretch.
Apple behaviour is pretty disgusting and,
Thats like getting mad at some fellow at gettysburg because he fired his rifle.
Everyones firing off shots, I think its a bit much to go after Apple like theyre the sole bad actor in the IP wars.
It is well recorded throughout history that religion has been used to control the general populace.
Weasel-words (recorded by whom, when, what, etc), and anecdotal. Just because it HAS been used that way does not mean it always is. I can show you examples of where pride in ones nation is used as a tool of agression, that doesnt mean it always is.
You didnt address the fact that religions seem to spring up universally, whereas what you are talking about is more specific. In what way is the shinto or buddhist religion used to control its people? Last I checked, the CCP was feverishly trying to stamp out religion.
I'm waiting for documented and tested evidence. I don't fall into *any* of the groups, because I simply don't believe in fairy tales
In other words,
"My belief is correct because its not a fairy tale; QED."
Sorry, that doesnt hold water. Your belief requires as much evidence as any other, and you are giving it a bye because it happens to be what YOU believe.
I found none to be based in reality.
Thats all fine and good, I maintain your study of Christianity must have been shallow indeed if you think it is pleasant stories to make us feel better. I also maintain that, even if that is the conclusion you came to, you are giving way too much slack to your belief in raw secularism and not maintaining the standard of evidence that you are demanding from super-naturalist belief systems.
Disappearing gods are just a plot device for authors to excuse the fact that they have no evidence.
Interestingly enough, and unique to christianity and the abrahmic religions (AFAIK), the Old Testament recognizes the existence of other "gods" and mocks them as worthless objects of wood and gold, capable of no action or thought. Im not aware of any other religion that makes that statement.
Or Liu Xiaobo.
When another country attacks us and destroys a major landmark in our biggest city, how would you propose we respond? With a UN censure?
You know basically all of those figures include civilians killed by the other side, as well, right?
You didnt? oh.
Ive been there, its not bull. They monitor literally every cell conversation, every webpage. The great firewall is no joke. They even redirect www.skype.com to a customized version that reports everything you do to big brother.
Believe me, I know people who are on a VPN 24/7 because of the government's shenanigans, and they even screw with the VPN to make it lossy and bad.
Lack of evidence does not make a deity real.
Evidence or lack thereof does not make anything real or not real. Something's existence is independent of our ability to discern it. We should get that clear right off the bat.
There is no inherent belief in humans that there is a deity of any sort. That is a trained belief.
If you mean that as an absolute statement, it is demonstrably false: Who taught the first person to believe in a deity? And why does belief in a deity exist in every single human culture in existence, both historical and current?
Men who study this sort of thing-- both athiest and secular-- generally do not deny that there is a human tendency to believe in something outside of the "natural" world, and that it is innate, not trained. I would check that belief of yours, and think about why you believe it-- what evidence do you have for this?
Or... Every child is born an atheist. Religion is forced upon them after that.
Thats an ignorant statement, and Im not sure how to respond to it, other than to say I know many many personal examples of where that is just plain wrong (ie, people who grew up in an athiest household who now hold different religious views). Bold statements like that will get you into trouble when you run into someone whose life story contradicts you.
They are fables; mythology; legends; fictional stories that we have made to comfort ourselves.
Theres very little comforting about the Old Testament story on the face of it. Once again, these are statements typically made by people who have very little knowledge about these topics.
In that every religion is different should be enough explanation that none are right.
That argument only sort of works because you have made a fake classification which excludes YOUR beliefs. Why are your beliefs any more likely to be correct than the other 10,001?
Either way, the logical choice, according to his wager, is to follow this new religion.
Go read his wager, theres not much point in an argument when you dont understand what he was arguing. Im explaining it badly, and I suspect I have already misrepresented him; its been a while since I read it, so I will not try to do so again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager
I will note that the wikipedia summary indicates that the thrust is that you should believe; whereas I note that Pascal assumes there is nothing on either side of the coin that can give you a clue to the right answer, which I dispute. I took from this that at the very least, his wager correctly indicates that you MUST wager, and your wager is utmost importance. I rather suggest you read it yourself, without commentary, and make up your own mind what he is saying.
One beleives in the most likely explanation of a given situation. If someone claims to have seen a ghost, the other options are far more likely.
A-ha: on what principle do you state this? How are you quantifying the likelyhood of an intrusion by the supernatural into the natural? What principle could you possibly wield in these circumstances to rule out the possibility based on nothing more than the hypothesis ("I have seen a ghost")?
Mind, I am not saying that evidence to the contrary would not be a determining factor; but you seem to think the hypothesis itself is enough to determine it false.
(I would also agree in the normal case, it is quite right to be skeptical given the tendency for people to make such a thing up; but that is an example of "evidence to the contrary")
It's not - the scientific method should be used in all things.
It cannot. You have a document, by a man claiming to be called Herod, describing a meal he had. The name appears in other literature, the timing is right, but there is no other supporting or contradictory evidence. It is too recent to apply carbon dating. Quick: use the scientific method on this. Wikipedia notes that key to the scientific method are measurement, experimentation, and observation. What methods do you intend to use?
Or better yet, the existence of multiverses has been hypothesized. How do you intend to go about testing something like that, since you cannot communicate information into or out of our own universe?
You are right, we must take historical documents and try to gague their reliability, but the Bible gives us no good reason to beleive the religious parts. They don't fit with our model of the world, they are not reproducable.
Evidences:
1) The verifiable parts of the bible (have extra-biblical support) have been verified. They tend to be remarkably accurate.
2) Meticulous geneological records were kept, and these also match up.
3) They accurately depict how real men would behave in those instances with less extra-biblical support: they are believable. They do not depict OT Israel as some utopia, but rather as a theocracy that, on its people's demand, became a monarchy, which within a generation became corrupt. This fits with exactly the kind of pattern we expect-- you can see the patterns in Rome, the Catholic church, and anywhere else a "benevolent dictator" approach was tried.
4) Alternative explanations for the history recorded often require a stretch of imagination. Take the disciples after Jesus' crucifixion. They scattered, and denied him on fear of persecution; but then 3 days later they started preaching his "gospel" and claiming that the man had risen from the grave. This in the end resulted in severe persecutions (by Paul, by Rome, etc-- peter himself was crucified for it, and when Paul converted, he too was executed). This leaves the question: what explanation accounts for this behavior? Did they all simultaneously develop a masochist tendency?
5) I think it is w
I'm sorry, but I reckon WB could have purchased a LV bag and used it without paying a penny for licensing and LV would have been delighted at the free coverage..
Can a lawyer confirm this? Inquiring minds want to know.
Also: Could they have used the fake bag and just not mention the trademarked name? Like wearing levis in the movie, but never mentioning them?
How do you explain the success of "free software" or the success of the Debian project that is coordinated through emails and chat messages instead of dollars
I look and realize that RedHat (and its clones) are far, far, far more popular than Debian, and that perhaps thats telling?
Which is why China's economy is doing so much better than ours.
Oh wait.
(TLDR: US is #7 in the world, China is #90-something.)