2) overlooked conversion costs. The enormous number of books that are still useful, but would become obsolete if no one knew miles, feet, inches, etc. anymore. Just think of all the obsoleted cookbooks alone.
Pish, tosh. You just have conversion tables where necessary - Australian cookbooks still often have these up the back of the book, a generation after we switched to metric. Older ovens often have the conversion printed on them or people would pin up a converstion table on the fridge. Sure, it's irritating, but if we could handle it, I'm sure you Yanks could too.
The cultural cost. This is the most overlooked, but there are so many books and poems that are an important part of our culture that would be less accessible if people weren't familiar with the units. To give a small example, I don't ever use leagues, so this was the first time that I realized that the 20000 Leagues in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea is nearly ten times the diamter of the Earth! To some extent conversions can be done, but losing personal familiarity with older units does cost some understanding of the text for most readers.
That's a fair point (I didn't realise that about 20,000 Leagues under the Sea! Well, I'm sure I must have checked in my geeky childhood but have forgotten. I guess then it refers to the length of the submarine voyage around the world, rather than the depth under the sea, as I had always assumed.)
But even so lots of people here still know what a mile is, what a foot is and so on. I still express my height in feet and inches, not cm, because it's familiar and customary. But we use metric for all the important stuff:) What I'm saying is that even a fully metric system does not preclude the use of some customary units on an informal basis.
Umm, either he killed all the first borns AND is God, or it didn't happen. If it happened, then you have no right to say whether or not it was good, because by definition, it was.
Sorry, but if that's God's moral code, well, my own moral code would not permit me to worship such am evil being, even if I knew for a stone cold certainty that he existed. If he's going to make me burn in Hell for calling something evil when I see it - well, again, he's no deity that deserves my worship.
How about all those miracles he did, the most significant of which was raising himself from the dead? If he didn't rise from the dead, don't you think the Jewish and Roman authorities would have jumped at the chance to put down the upstart religion by revealing his body? Why did his disciples die in excruciating pain for the sake of the gospel, if it was a lie?
The Bible is an historical document, composed by humans. Why should I take Biblical accounts of miracles as the Gospel truth (as it were), and not every other non-Christian supernatural occurance on record as well - some of which are far better attested than 2000 year old events which we may not even have firsthand accounts of?
The only reason to believe that the Bible is an accurate record of miraculous events is if you believe in God to begin with. Therefore to a non-believer it is not evidence of anything.
The point is not so much that beliefs shouldn't be based on careful reasoning and analysis, it's that usually they aren't. Most people don't study all the religions on offer and make some sort of rational choice between them, they vaguely follow the belief of their parents, or some not dissimilar belief with which they are culturally comfortable. Yes, some do made a decision; that's why, in an odd way, I have more respect for born-again Christians who have made a conscious decision to be baptised into their faith, than (say) Catholics who are born into it. (And I say that as an agnostic lapsed Catholic who probably holds markedly different political and social views to most born-agains...) But even then, I still doubt they would have seriously considered Shinto, animism, voudoun or whathaveyou as an alternative to Christianity.
Just enter any combination of UFO and god/bible/demon/angel etc into Google and you will find a whole mess of sites on this topic. (Here and here are just two.) IIRC, some well-known evangelist/fundamentalist back in the 70s wrote a very popular book about how UFOs were literally the work of the Devil, signs of the end times and so on. (Wish I could remember his name... I MAY be thinking of Billy Graham, who seems to have suggested that UFO occupants are angelic, but I can't seem to find if/when he wrote a book about it.) But, anyway, while it may not be an orthodox belief, it's not an uncommon one either.
I was talking about biological life based on one or more cells. In the context of the SETI research this requires an entity advanced enough to build and operate a communication device that utilizes some form of electromagnetic or other energy we can detect.
Fair enough, but again, you shouldn't have then said "ALL life" if that's not what you mean.
The stubbornly persistent belief by mankind, historically and presently, in non-biological life, such as gods, devils, ghosts and such is just that, a belief that may well be based on the existence of such things. However, until someone builds a working ghost detector, these life forms remain outside the realm of what most people consider to be science.
Yes! But God-with-a-capital-G is different because... why?
If other imaginable or unimaginable intelligent life forms do exist, why would they resort to slow, primitive means of communication by any known energy form, limited as far as we know, to the speed of light?
Because (again, as far as we know), that's the fastest means of communication possible?
The men and women of science who laid the foundations about 200 or so years ago were not atheists, but believed at the very least in a rational Creator having made the world they were endeavoring to explore. Some of them, such as Newton, Pascal, Faraday and many others were in fact devout Christians. Einstein believed in God, and his ideas of God caused him much consternation when quantum physics was discovered.
I never claimed that they were atheists, nor would I deny that devout Christians can be good scientists. But they cannot be if they insist on freighting their religion into science. That is the point I am trying to make - methodological materialism is the proper (and most powerful attitude) to take. You even agree with this yourself partly when you say "Attributing things we do not understand (yet) to God and leaving it at that is NOT scientific thinking" but then go on to flatly contradict yourself by saying
that "more research is required, but it should be directed by the perfectly reasonable assumption that there is a Creator". How do you propose to reconcile these two statements? (Oh, and please give up the old "random chance" chestnut. Scientists do NOT ascribe things we don't understand to random chance, unless there is evidence that it is so.)
If there is a God, is it so unreasonable to assume that He would be pleased to have us explore the world He has made and by this exploration perhaps come to an understanding and appreciation of Him?
No, that's not unreasonable - if there is a God. Since we don't know there is, do your assuming in private, not in the lab. It's irrelevant to science at best and probably harmful.
If the stars were to be jumbled up that drastically in one rotation, you would expect (to some degree) to see galaxies that are fuzzy balls rather than spiral with arms. My understanding has always been that an arm revolves as a whole unless stripped apart by other forces (speaking generally here). If it did not rotate as a whole, you would not see these communities like the stars of the Orion nebula.
Cool, something to do... I'm stuck at work at 1am doing a restore on a crashed server:(
Well, I had thought that the standard interpretation of spirals arms is not that they are dynamically stable features - ie stars moving along together - but rather density waves (Frank Shu). Ie, something like (longitudinal) sound waves. The density of the stars is what is moving. In fact, now that I think about it, the fact that the arms would dissipate after a few galactic rotations was put forward as one of the arguments against your interpretation.
Oh, and the stars in Orion are very young (the whole stellar nursery thing), so they haven't had time to separate yet I guess.
Eh, the restore is still only 73% complete. Time to find something else to do to keep me awake...
Hmm, it's a while since I was in astro but I think you are taking the "rotates like a wheel" analogy too far. It's talking about the bulk properties of the galaxy, not the stars of which it is composed. Yes, the rotational angular velocity stays pretty constant, but this doesn't imply the stars are fixed with respect to each other, or even nearly fixed - it's only an average velocity and there will be a spread of velocities, even assuming they are in the same plane and direction. Just doing a simple-minded calculation, if two stars are initially neighbours but their orbital velocities differ by 1 km/s, then over 1 galactic rotational cycle (225 million years) I get that they will have
diverged by about 200 parsecs. Clearly then, over the lifetime of the Sun you shouldn't expect it to remain with the stars it began life with. (Now of course it's a different matter entirely if the original group of stars were gravitationally bound together.)
A similar situation is the way dust and meteoroids will spread out along an orbit from the parent comet.
Of course I could be wrong, as I said it's been a while - and I don't have Binney and Tremaine to hand! Show me a good reference saying otherwise and I'll admit defeat:)
Well, Lindbergh's was hardly a modest aeroplane in 1927 - that was the point, to push the state of the art. Now, as I have just finished writing a thesis which touches on this point, I am obliged to point out that the person who started this trend was Lord Northcliffe, a British press baron, who announced a series of prizes for the first person to acheive various aeronautical feats, the first being a thousand pounds for crossing the English Channel, which was won by Louis Bleriot in 1909. Not bad pay for less than an hour's work!
If you read it again you will note that I wrote ".. the chemistry we know.." One can always speculate about other chemistries and postulate multiple universes. I was talking about the kind of life we KNOW about as it exists here.
I did read it again; and before you said that you said
"To have a planet have *ANY* kind of life requires some very detailed design just to have the proper environment where life could exist." And none of your other statements are even remotely qualified - they all say conditions "must" be thus. So the post is not just describing the limits of our current knowledge, it's making a larger claim about "*ANY* kind of life". You even do it again in this very post: "ALL life needs to have water available in its liquid form..." If you are only referring to life-as-we-know-it then do not then slide into making blanket statements referring to "ALL life". This is an obvious rhetorical dodge.
Your points about water, temperature, gravity, etc are fair enough - for life like us. But it doesn't have to be just like us. It is possible to imagine life that can exist in the atmosphere of Jupiter (you wouldn't survive in the depths of the ocean either, yet creatures do), and one of the fascinating things to come out of the 1990s was the survivability of microbial life under what was considered to be unsurvivable conditions (eg deep underground).
Even if you are only interested in intelligent life, and so want complex organisms who can make fire or whatever, and so think you need a pretty much Earthlike planet (a respectable position, but unproven), we still don't know how common Earthlike planets are (or, I stress again, exactly how Earthlike they need to be). We have only started discovering extrasolar planets in the last decade and yet you are happy to claim to dismiss the possible results of this research in advance.
You can believe (an act of faith) that everything came together randomly if you wish, but if you do the math, you'll find that the probability of this earth and everything on it coming about by chance is unimaginably small.
You can believe whatever you want to too, but if you do the math properly, you'll find it's not so improbable as you think. In the end you are doing the same thing here as you are above - pre-empting the results of ongoing research to fit your own agenda. Sorry, this is utterly transparent creationist garbage and I'm not buying it.
As I see it, it takes more faith to believe that all the complexity science studies in all fields came about by trial and error than to believe that a transcendent Creator put it all together. Science studied from this point of view is just as exciting and can produce just as many, if not more benefits to humanity.
Rubbish; it's only when scientists explicitly began leaving God out of science that real progress began to be made. It gets you nowhere to say "God did it"; it's the ultimate cop-out and explains nothing. No predictive power, completely unfalsifiable. It's not scientific. If that offends your religious beliefs, tough.
In the end we only have one example of life; we can't just extrapolate from that to say life is possible/common elsewhere or life is impossible/rare. What we need (and the fact that I need to be arguing this on Slashdot staggers me) is more research.
Speaking as somebody with a graduate degree in astrophysics... WTF are you talking about? We don't know
for sure what is needed to support life, or don't you read the news? We certainly don't know that life needs "specific gravitational and magnetic fields", for example. And your statements like "any such planet must have a chemistry friendly to life" are meaningless. Of course it must, by definition, but that tells us nothing about what range of chemistries are friendly to life or how common these are.
Oh... I see where you are coming from... "intelligent, purposeful. design". Sorry. I'll let you get back to your prayer meeting.
I even know someone who bought the first release, KNOWING he was going to buy the extended edition in a few months time as well! (And no, it wasn't me!!!!) That's just silly.
Re:Military Potential of D&D
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Wow, I would have thought playing Diplomacy would have ended up with you wanting to rip each other's throats out! That's how it always ended with us, and we weren't locked in a submarine with the same people for months on end. Of course, we were teenagers...
Re:Question from an "outsider"
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Mmm, MERP. I never liked the system itself but the adventures and campaigns did a geat job of recreating the feel of Middle Earth. In particular I just loved the maps - I have never seen any Middle Earth maps since then which felt anything like as Tolkienesque, they were simply gorgeous. Of course, I stupidly sold off my MERP stuff many years ago, probably to fund my next roleplaying or wargaming purchase. I see that a good selection of secondhand MERP stuff can be bought here... ooh, I wish I hadn't found that! Must... restrict... purchases... of nostalgic... and useless... RPG supplements... to... Classic Traveller...
I think ICE had its Middle Earth license revoked and/or went out of business... ironically just about the time the movies came out, IIRC.
No, it doesn't mean anything much, it's a global problem. The CO2 produced by a city doesn't just sit above it in a big clump, it spreads out around the world. Conversely, while there will be slightly higher CO2 around cities (because the spreading out isn't instantaneous), the temperature at that city is more dependent upon large-scale weather patterns than on the amount of heat trapped at the surface by the greenhouse effect. But when you start increasing that amount little by little, all over the world, it increases the average energy in the system, changes weather patterns, and so on. Then you get all sorts of strange weather happening.
Maybe if one looked at the data carefully enough, there might be a correlation between population density and rise in temperature. But I doubt you would be able to tell just by looking at a picture! (BTW, cities are in fact apparently hotter than surrounding areas - the "urban heat island" effect. But this is sometimes used to argue against greenhouse, because it is suggested that higher urban temperatures are due to lots of concrete in cities retaining heat or lots of cars and people etc producing heat and so on... and not due to any climatic change.)
In some places, the tailpipe emissions from an SUV is cleaner than the ambiant air.
Nooooo, this is referring to driving an SUV inside the exhaust stack of a coal-burning powerplant. Errm, assuming the SUV brought along its own air, that is.
Re:The religion of "Humans are Evil"
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I am not obligated to also say "I don't believe the other side" when I tell someone I don't believe their claims.
Of course you aren't. It's just my advice for a less inflammatory, and perhaps more effective, style of argument. Letting people know you are open-minded disarms them, to a degree.
If you'd like a good read on why there's no such thing as an "agnostic", then check out this page.
Sorry, that page is a crock. Huxley had his tongue in cheek when he coined the word "agnostic"? Rubbish, he struggled for years to come up with a suitable term to describe his position (his previous attempt was "the unknowable") and he continued to clarify and refine the concept right up until his death. The immense popularity the word quickly obtained showed that many people felt atheist did not adequately describe them either. Her basic argument seems to be that no one can say for sure whether there is a god or not (which I agree with), and that she doesn't know anyone who thinks there isn't a god (which just means she needs to get out more - I do, and I need to get out more too!); therefore everyone's an agnostic and so the term is too broad to be meaningful. She quotes a dictionary definition of agnostic as someone who "holds that one cannot know for certain if [God and heaven] exist or not" and says this is true of everybody. Rubbish; that may be all they can legitimately claim, but despite this there are plenty of people who hold that they can and do know for certain that god exists; the same goes for the non-existence of god. The point is belief (I mean, duh): people believe they know. And atheists (strong atheists, if you must) are believers just as Christians are, and are just as lacking in proof.
But our positions are pretty much the same AFAICT - we are just arguing about words. If you want to ignore the common definitions of these words and call yourself a weak atheist instead of an agnostic, go right ahead... but be prepared for this argument to keep cropping up.
I'm not so sure about that. You know as well as I that "global warming" is a core Leftist belief, and Leftists are using fear of it to punish humans for the evils that they've committed to Gaea. This is the superstition that I hate, and the whole "global warming" fiasco stinks to high hell of it.
No, I don't know that it's a core leftist belief, or else what did leftists believe before the concept of global warming came around? It's certainly a common> belief amongst the left, just as belief that it is not happening is common amongst the right. So what? It comes down to the evidence, not the political beliefs of those who subscribe to it.
And I reiterate, the climatologists I know are not leftists (well, some of them are no doubt pink around the edges, this being a university and all) , do not hate mankind, civilsation or technology, are not gaians, or anything like that. They have studied the evidence, and this is their considered - albeit provisional - and professional opinion. As I said, doesn't mean they are right, but you cannot just lump them in with such people.
Re:The religion of "Humans are Evil"
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No, it is not semantics. In your version, you are putting forth a claim. In my version, I am making no claims. Therein lies the difference. It is subtle and crucial.
OK, but then you should make it clear that you also don't believe that humans are not influencing climate change. You only seem to be attacking one side of the controversy, and your language is a little, um, unrestrained (see below). Maybe you are equally skeptical about the non-anthropogenic school of thought elsewhere and I shouldn't judge from this thread. If so, sorry.
We non-believers are not required to prove the nonexistence of God. I never claim, "I believe there is no god." Someone else claims, "There is a god," and the response is, "I don't believe you." My failure to believe does not make my opponent's claims "true by default", no matter how much Christians and "global warming" acolytes would love for that to be so.
Who said it does your oppenent's claims "true by default"? Certainly not me. FWIW, I'm philosophically an agnostic who inclines towards atheism. Why don't I just come out and say I'm an atheist? Because one can't prove there is no god. To my mind, an atheist does have to prove the non-existence of god - because that's what they believe in. So it depends upon what sort of non-believer you are. (Again, if somebody says, "I believe there is no god", do you say "I don't believe you" to that? If so, then we agree on something at least.)
Just because I don't believe their claims does *not* mean that I am making the opposite claim and does *not* obligate me to support a claim that you think I'm making.
OK, fair enough, but if that's so then you shouldn't use such laden terms as "superstitious" or "acolytes". You may not think we have enough evidence yet to come to a final conclusion on the matter, but a lot of (non-leftist/green/religious or whatever it is you dislike) climatologists don't agree - I know and work with some. Doesn't mean they are right, but they are not superstitious acolytes. From your language, it is hard to avoid the impression that despite your disclaimers, you have indeed made up your mind on the subject. I admit I misread your position, but that's yet another good reason to tone down the rhetoric, it adds uneccessary heat to the discussion when it needs more light instead.
OK, well we seem to disagree less than we originally did...:)
Well, it's true that even in private, Hitler grandstanded and postured for the benefit of his cronies, and so what he said then still has to be taken with a grain of salt. But surely it is more likely that what he said would approach the truth more closely when he was relaxing in private with fellow Nazis who enjoyed and agreeed with his rants, or discussing what should be done about the churches in the present or in the future, than in radio broadcasts or political rallies where he is appealing to a mass audience - speaking for very public consumption. He may have been a megalomaniac, but that doesn't mean he never meant what he said. You just need to examine the context carefully.
As for Mein Kampf, as you suggest that's still propaganda, a political tool designed to persuade - not a coherent and factual account of his life or ideology. You might well ask why didn't he bash Christians in Mein Kampf as he bashed Jews and Bolshevists, if he despised them so much? My suggestion would be that it's precisely because he bashed Jews and Bolshevists - if he alienated Christians also, well, there wouldn't have been many Germans left who did not fall into one of those three categories. This would make it hard to gain political support. Also, Hitler liked to present himself as a respectable bourgouis gentleman, and a conventional Christianity was part of that facade.
As for not tolerating alternative power bases not under his control, you are exactly right, and of course this is what the "Church struggle" of 1936-7 was all about (eg hundreds of priests were put in concentration camps, the church hierarchy was forced to toe the line, etc). In this context, Ian Kershaw (in Nemesis (London, 2001), pp. 39-41) refers to Hitler's radical instincts on the issue, although it concerned him much less than it did Goebbels and Rosenberg. And although he did attempt to restrain his underlings - because a fight with the Churches was not politically opportune at the time - as Kershaw notes, his anti-Christian rhetoric encouraged them to believe they were carrying out his wishes - eg in 1937 he said that 'Christianity was ripe for destruction' (according to Goebbels' diary).
I agree he would have had a hard time eliminating Christianity; in fact he couldn't have. But that would not stop him from trying... he looked forward one day to 'the destruction of the clerics' at the hands of the Nazis. (Again, according to Goebbels' diary).
Anyway, none of this fits in with the "Hitler was a Christian" line.
45 years is a long period of time. Think of how much the world has changed 1959.
Oh yes, it's changed so much that we are using more oil than ever. This helps... how?
Re:The religion of "Humans are Evil"
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Where did I say that I belived that our actions weren't affecting our environment to a measurable degree? Let me print what I wrote: "I do not believe that the actions of humans are effecting "global climate change" in a measurable degree." My position is skepticism, not belief. It is you, not I, that has some (superstitious) belief, and it is you, not I that must defend it.
Semantics. Let me rephrase what you said: "I believe that the actions of humans are not affecting "global climate change" in a measurable degree." Means precisely the same thing as what you actually said, but it highlights the fact that you believe in a position just as much as your opponent does. (Incidentally, the same goes for atheists vs. religious types.) Now cut the rhetoric and start talking about evidence, one way or the other.
This thread is wildly off topic and should be finished.
'Nuff said.
With a 4-digit ID you should know better than that:)
With all due respect, you weren't simply "refuting... that Hitler was against all religions" - that may have been your original intent but then you went on to say that the other quotes you provide showed that Hitler "saw the Christian church as his source of inspiraton and strength and thought it was important for the nation as well". Which, I'm sorry, just is not true: he despised Christianity and thought it made Germany weak. He needed the support of the churches while he was consolidating power and during the war, but after that he had plans for them. Just about any historian of the Nazi period will tell you that.
Anyway, I'm no Christian but an agnostic-cum-atheist, so I have no particular axe to grind here, other than historical accuracy.
I don't doubt that the quotes are accurate, but Hitler was a master propagandist, and was quite happy to lie to gain the support of anyone he needed. In particular, all the quotes you give (and the pictures you link to) are for public consumption (with the possible exception of the last quote, but it looks like he was trying to reassure a Catholic that he was not going to persecute them). Speaking as a historian, you can't always take words at face value, particularly when they come from a bare-faced liar like Hitler; you need to examine the context in which they were said or written. And most historians agree that Hitler was privately extremely hostile to religion. Here's a section I transcribed from Michael Burleigh's The Third Reich: A New History (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 717-8, for another mailing list a while back:
National Socialism, like other totalitarian dictatorships, parodied
many of the eschatological and liturgical attributes of redemptive
religions, while being fundamentally antagonistic towards the Churches:
rivals, as the Nazis saw it, in the subtle, totalising control of
minds. However, the overwhelmingly Christian character of the German
people meant that Hitler dissembled his personal views behind preachy
invocations of the Almighty, and distanced himself from the radically
irreligious within his own Party, even though his own views were probably
more extreme. During the Weimar period, he periodically traduced the
Roman Catholic Centre Party for engaging in coalitions with "atheist
internationalists" in the SPD. In reality, his views were a mixture
of materialist biology, a faux-Nietzchean contempt for core, as distinct
from secondary, Christian values, and a visceral anti-Clericalism.
Even though he disdained a confrontation with wearers of "petticoats
and cassocks", in the long term a showdown would come:
The war will be over one day. I shall then consider that
my life's final task will be to solve the religious
problem. Only then will the German nation be entirely
secure once and for all. I don't interfere in matters of
belief. Therefore I can't allow churchmen to interfere
with temporal affairs. The organised lie must be smashed.
The State must remain the absolute master. When I was
younger, I thought it was necessary to set about matters
with dynamite. I've since realised that there's room
for a little subtlety. The rotten branch falls of itself.
The final state must be: in St Peter's chair, a senile
officiant; facing him, a few sinister old women, as gaga
and as poor in spirit as anyone could wish. The young
and healthy are on our side.
Rude though they were, these views were roughly congruent with
the heated rhetoric of nineteenth-century Church-State conflicts.
But, in what followed, Hitler forsook this terrain for things
Emil Combes would have found horrible: "Christ was an Aryan"
rather than a Jew; St Paul was responsible for mobilising the
"criminal underworld" on behalf of "proto-Bolshevism". Christianity
signified nothing but "wholehearted Bolshevism under a tinsel of
metaphysics". "What is this God who takes pleasure only in seeing
men grovel before him?" What was the Christian heaven compared
to that of Islam? Christianity was "an invention of sick brains",
"a negro with his tabus is crushingly superior to the human
being who seriously believes in Transubstantiation". He continued:
By what would you have me replace the Christians' picture
of the Beyond?... The soul and the mind migrate, just as
the body returns to nature. Thus life is eternally reborn
from life. As for the "why?" of all that, I feel no need
to eternally rack my brains on the subject. The soul is
unplumbable... Man judges everything in relation to
himself. What is bigger than himself is big, what is
smaller is small. Only one thing is certain, that one is
part of the spectacle. Everyone finds his own role.
Joy exists for everybody. I dream of a state of affairs
in which every man would know that he lives and dies
for the preservation of the species.
Slashdot Mirror
Pish, tosh. You just have conversion tables where necessary - Australian cookbooks still often have these up the back of the book, a generation after we switched to metric. Older ovens often have the conversion printed on them or people would pin up a converstion table on the fridge. Sure, it's irritating, but if we could handle it, I'm sure you Yanks could too.
The cultural cost. This is the most overlooked, but there are so many books and poems that are an important part of our culture that would be less accessible if people weren't familiar with the units. To give a small example, I don't ever use leagues, so this was the first time that I realized that the 20000 Leagues in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea is nearly ten times the diamter of the Earth! To some extent conversions can be done, but losing personal familiarity with older units does cost some understanding of the text for most readers.
That's a fair point (I didn't realise that about 20,000 Leagues under the Sea! Well, I'm sure I must have checked in my geeky childhood but have forgotten. I guess then it refers to the length of the submarine voyage around the world, rather than the depth under the sea, as I had always assumed.) But even so lots of people here still know what a mile is, what a foot is and so on. I still express my height in feet and inches, not cm, because it's familiar and customary. But we use metric for all the important stuff :) What I'm saying is that even a fully metric system does not preclude the use of some customary units on an informal basis.
A Case of Conscience ?
Sorry, but if that's God's moral code, well, my own moral code would not permit me to worship such am evil being, even if I knew for a stone cold certainty that he existed. If he's going to make me burn in Hell for calling something evil when I see it - well, again, he's no deity that deserves my worship.
The Bible is an historical document, composed by humans. Why should I take Biblical accounts of miracles as the Gospel truth (as it were), and not every other non-Christian supernatural occurance on record as well - some of which are far better attested than 2000 year old events which we may not even have firsthand accounts of?
The only reason to believe that the Bible is an accurate record of miraculous events is if you believe in God to begin with. Therefore to a non-believer it is not evidence of anything.
The point is not so much that beliefs shouldn't be based on careful reasoning and analysis, it's that usually they aren't. Most people don't study all the religions on offer and make some sort of rational choice between them, they vaguely follow the belief of their parents, or some not dissimilar belief with which they are culturally comfortable. Yes, some do made a decision; that's why, in an odd way, I have more respect for born-again Christians who have made a conscious decision to be baptised into their faith, than (say) Catholics who are born into it. (And I say that as an agnostic lapsed Catholic who probably holds markedly different political and social views to most born-agains ...) But even then, I still doubt they would have seriously considered Shinto, animism, voudoun or whathaveyou as an alternative to Christianity.
Just enter any combination of UFO and god/bible/demon/angel etc into Google and you will find a whole mess of sites on this topic. (Here and here are just two.) IIRC, some well-known evangelist/fundamentalist back in the 70s wrote a very popular book about how UFOs were literally the work of the Devil, signs of the end times and so on. (Wish I could remember his name ... I MAY be thinking of Billy Graham, who seems to have suggested that UFO occupants are angelic, but I can't seem to find if/when he wrote a book about it.) But, anyway, while it may not be an orthodox belief, it's not an uncommon one either.
Fair enough, but again, you shouldn't have then said "ALL life" if that's not what you mean.
The stubbornly persistent belief by mankind, historically and presently, in non-biological life, such as gods, devils, ghosts and such is just that, a belief that may well be based on the existence of such things. However, until someone builds a working ghost detector, these life forms remain outside the realm of what most people consider to be science.
Yes! But God-with-a-capital-G is different because ... why?
If other imaginable or unimaginable intelligent life forms do exist, why would they resort to slow, primitive means of communication by any known energy form, limited as far as we know, to the speed of light?
Because (again, as far as we know), that's the fastest means of communication possible?
The men and women of science who laid the foundations about 200 or so years ago were not atheists, but believed at the very least in a rational Creator having made the world they were endeavoring to explore. Some of them, such as Newton, Pascal, Faraday and many others were in fact devout Christians. Einstein believed in God, and his ideas of God caused him much consternation when quantum physics was discovered.
I never claimed that they were atheists, nor would I deny that devout Christians can be good scientists. But they cannot be if they insist on freighting their religion into science. That is the point I am trying to make - methodological materialism is the proper (and most powerful attitude) to take. You even agree with this yourself partly when you say "Attributing things we do not understand (yet) to God and leaving it at that is NOT scientific thinking" but then go on to flatly contradict yourself by saying that "more research is required, but it should be directed by the perfectly reasonable assumption that there is a Creator". How do you propose to reconcile these two statements? (Oh, and please give up the old "random chance" chestnut. Scientists do NOT ascribe things we don't understand to random chance, unless there is evidence that it is so.)
If there is a God, is it so unreasonable to assume that He would be pleased to have us explore the world He has made and by this exploration perhaps come to an understanding and appreciation of Him?
No, that's not unreasonable - if there is a God. Since we don't know there is, do your assuming in private, not in the lab. It's irrelevant to science at best and probably harmful.
If the stars were to be jumbled up that drastically in one rotation, you would expect (to some degree) to see galaxies that are fuzzy balls rather than spiral with arms. My understanding has always been that an arm revolves as a whole unless stripped apart by other forces (speaking generally here). If it did not rotate as a whole, you would not see these communities like the stars of the Orion nebula.
... I'm stuck at work at 1am doing a restore on a crashed server :(
...
Cool, something to do
Well, I had thought that the standard interpretation of spirals arms is not that they are dynamically stable features - ie stars moving along together - but rather density waves (Frank Shu). Ie, something like (longitudinal) sound waves. The density of the stars is what is moving. In fact, now that I think about it, the fact that the arms would dissipate after a few galactic rotations was put forward as one of the arguments against your interpretation.
Oh, and the stars in Orion are very young (the whole stellar nursery thing), so they haven't had time to separate yet I guess.
Eh, the restore is still only 73% complete. Time to find something else to do to keep me awake
Of course I could be wrong, as I said it's been a while - and I don't have Binney and Tremaine to hand! Show me a good reference saying otherwise and I'll admit defeat :)
Well, Lindbergh's was hardly a modest aeroplane in 1927 - that was the point, to push the state of the art. Now, as I have just finished writing a thesis which touches on this point, I am obliged to point out that the person who started this trend was Lord Northcliffe, a British press baron, who announced a series of prizes for the first person to acheive various aeronautical feats, the first being a thousand pounds for crossing the English Channel, which was won by Louis Bleriot in 1909. Not bad pay for less than an hour's work!
I did read it again; and before you said that you said "To have a planet have *ANY* kind of life requires some very detailed design just to have the proper environment where life could exist." And none of your other statements are even remotely qualified - they all say conditions "must" be thus. So the post is not just describing the limits of our current knowledge, it's making a larger claim about "*ANY* kind of life". You even do it again in this very post: "ALL life needs to have water available in its liquid form ..." If you are only referring to life-as-we-know-it then do not then slide into making blanket statements referring to "ALL life". This is an obvious rhetorical dodge.
Your points about water, temperature, gravity, etc are fair enough - for life like us. But it doesn't have to be just like us. It is possible to imagine life that can exist in the atmosphere of Jupiter (you wouldn't survive in the depths of the ocean either, yet creatures do), and one of the fascinating things to come out of the 1990s was the survivability of microbial life under what was considered to be unsurvivable conditions (eg deep underground).
Even if you are only interested in intelligent life, and so want complex organisms who can make fire or whatever, and so think you need a pretty much Earthlike planet (a respectable position, but unproven), we still don't know how common Earthlike planets are (or, I stress again, exactly how Earthlike they need to be). We have only started discovering extrasolar planets in the last decade and yet you are happy to claim to dismiss the possible results of this research in advance.
You can believe (an act of faith) that everything came together randomly if you wish, but if you do the math, you'll find that the probability of this earth and everything on it coming about by chance is unimaginably small.
You can believe whatever you want to too, but if you do the math properly, you'll find it's not so improbable as you think. In the end you are doing the same thing here as you are above - pre-empting the results of ongoing research to fit your own agenda. Sorry, this is utterly transparent creationist garbage and I'm not buying it.
As I see it, it takes more faith to believe that all the complexity science studies in all fields came about by trial and error than to believe that a transcendent Creator put it all together. Science studied from this point of view is just as exciting and can produce just as many, if not more benefits to humanity.
Rubbish; it's only when scientists explicitly began leaving God out of science that real progress began to be made. It gets you nowhere to say "God did it"; it's the ultimate cop-out and explains nothing. No predictive power, completely unfalsifiable. It's not scientific. If that offends your religious beliefs, tough.
In the end we only have one example of life; we can't just extrapolate from that to say life is possible/common elsewhere or life is impossible/rare. What we need (and the fact that I need to be arguing this on Slashdot staggers me) is more research.
Oh ... I see where you are coming from ... "intelligent, purposeful. design". Sorry. I'll let you get back to your prayer meeting.
But it's enough of an atmosphere to have weather, so I too would say that Mars is not "essentially airless".
I even know someone who bought the first release, KNOWING he was going to buy the extended edition in a few months time as well! (And no, it wasn't me!!!!) That's just silly.
Wow, I would have thought playing Diplomacy would have ended up with you wanting to rip each other's throats out! That's how it always ended with us, and we weren't locked in a submarine with the same people for months on end. Of course, we were teenagers ...
I think ICE had its Middle Earth license revoked and/or went out of business ... ironically just about the time the movies came out, IIRC.
Maybe if one looked at the data carefully enough, there might be a correlation between population density and rise in temperature. But I doubt you would be able to tell just by looking at a picture! (BTW, cities are in fact apparently hotter than surrounding areas - the "urban heat island" effect. But this is sometimes used to argue against greenhouse, because it is suggested that higher urban temperatures are due to lots of concrete in cities retaining heat or lots of cars and people etc producing heat and so on ... and not due to any climatic change.)
Nooooo, this is referring to driving an SUV inside the exhaust stack of a coal-burning powerplant. Errm, assuming the SUV brought along its own air, that is.
I am not obligated to also say "I don't believe the other side" when I tell someone I don't believe their claims.
... but be prepared for this argument to keep cropping up.
Of course you aren't. It's just my advice for a less inflammatory, and perhaps more effective, style of argument. Letting people know you are open-minded disarms them, to a degree.
If you'd like a good read on why there's no such thing as an "agnostic", then check out this page.
Sorry, that page is a crock. Huxley had his tongue in cheek when he coined the word "agnostic"? Rubbish, he struggled for years to come up with a suitable term to describe his position (his previous attempt was "the unknowable") and he continued to clarify and refine the concept right up until his death. The immense popularity the word quickly obtained showed that many people felt atheist did not adequately describe them either. Her basic argument seems to be that no one can say for sure whether there is a god or not (which I agree with), and that she doesn't know anyone who thinks there isn't a god (which just means she needs to get out more - I do, and I need to get out more too!); therefore everyone's an agnostic and so the term is too broad to be meaningful. She quotes a dictionary definition of agnostic as someone who "holds that one cannot know for certain if [God and heaven] exist or not" and says this is true of everybody. Rubbish; that may be all they can legitimately claim, but despite this there are plenty of people who hold that they can and do know for certain that god exists; the same goes for the non-existence of god. The point is belief (I mean, duh): people believe they know. And atheists (strong atheists, if you must) are believers just as Christians are, and are just as lacking in proof.
But our positions are pretty much the same AFAICT - we are just arguing about words. If you want to ignore the common definitions of these words and call yourself a weak atheist instead of an agnostic, go right ahead
I'm not so sure about that. You know as well as I that "global warming" is a core Leftist belief, and Leftists are using fear of it to punish humans for the evils that they've committed to Gaea. This is the superstition that I hate, and the whole "global warming" fiasco stinks to high hell of it.
No, I don't know that it's a core leftist belief, or else what did leftists believe before the concept of global warming came around? It's certainly a common> belief amongst the left, just as belief that it is not happening is common amongst the right. So what? It comes down to the evidence, not the political beliefs of those who subscribe to it.
And I reiterate, the climatologists I know are not leftists (well, some of them are no doubt pink around the edges, this being a university and all) , do not hate mankind, civilsation or technology, are not gaians, or anything like that. They have studied the evidence, and this is their considered - albeit provisional - and professional opinion. As I said, doesn't mean they are right, but you cannot just lump them in with such people.
OK, but then you should make it clear that you also don't believe that humans are not influencing climate change. You only seem to be attacking one side of the controversy, and your language is a little, um, unrestrained (see below). Maybe you are equally skeptical about the non-anthropogenic school of thought elsewhere and I shouldn't judge from this thread. If so, sorry.
We non-believers are not required to prove the nonexistence of God. I never claim, "I believe there is no god." Someone else claims, "There is a god," and the response is, "I don't believe you." My failure to believe does not make my opponent's claims "true by default", no matter how much Christians and "global warming" acolytes would love for that to be so.
Who said it does your oppenent's claims "true by default"? Certainly not me. FWIW, I'm philosophically an agnostic who inclines towards atheism. Why don't I just come out and say I'm an atheist? Because one can't prove there is no god. To my mind, an atheist does have to prove the non-existence of god - because that's what they believe in. So it depends upon what sort of non-believer you are. (Again, if somebody says, "I believe there is no god", do you say "I don't believe you" to that? If so, then we agree on something at least.)
Just because I don't believe their claims does *not* mean that I am making the opposite claim and does *not* obligate me to support a claim that you think I'm making.
OK, fair enough, but if that's so then you shouldn't use such laden terms as "superstitious" or "acolytes". You may not think we have enough evidence yet to come to a final conclusion on the matter, but a lot of (non-leftist/green/religious or whatever it is you dislike) climatologists don't agree - I know and work with some. Doesn't mean they are right, but they are not superstitious acolytes. From your language, it is hard to avoid the impression that despite your disclaimers, you have indeed made up your mind on the subject. I admit I misread your position, but that's yet another good reason to tone down the rhetoric, it adds uneccessary heat to the discussion when it needs more light instead.
Well, it's true that even in private, Hitler grandstanded and postured for the benefit of his cronies, and so what he said then still has to be taken with a grain of salt. But surely it is more likely that what he said would approach the truth more closely when he was relaxing in private with fellow Nazis who enjoyed and agreeed with his rants, or discussing what should be done about the churches in the present or in the future, than in radio broadcasts or political rallies where he is appealing to a mass audience - speaking for very public consumption. He may have been a megalomaniac, but that doesn't mean he never meant what he said. You just need to examine the context carefully.
... he looked forward one day to 'the destruction of the clerics' at the hands of the Nazis. (Again, according to Goebbels' diary).
As for Mein Kampf, as you suggest that's still propaganda, a political tool designed to persuade - not a coherent and factual account of his life or ideology. You might well ask why didn't he bash Christians in Mein Kampf as he bashed Jews and Bolshevists, if he despised them so much? My suggestion would be that it's precisely because he bashed Jews and Bolshevists - if he alienated Christians also, well, there wouldn't have been many Germans left who did not fall into one of those three categories. This would make it hard to gain political support. Also, Hitler liked to present himself as a respectable bourgouis gentleman, and a conventional Christianity was part of that facade.
As for not tolerating alternative power bases not under his control, you are exactly right, and of course this is what the "Church struggle" of 1936-7 was all about (eg hundreds of priests were put in concentration camps, the church hierarchy was forced to toe the line, etc). In this context, Ian Kershaw (in Nemesis (London, 2001), pp. 39-41) refers to Hitler's radical instincts on the issue, although it concerned him much less than it did Goebbels and Rosenberg. And although he did attempt to restrain his underlings - because a fight with the Churches was not politically opportune at the time - as Kershaw notes, his anti-Christian rhetoric encouraged them to believe they were carrying out his wishes - eg in 1937 he said that 'Christianity was ripe for destruction' (according to Goebbels' diary).
I agree he would have had a hard time eliminating Christianity; in fact he couldn't have. But that would not stop him from trying
Anyway, none of this fits in with the "Hitler was a Christian" line.
Oh yes, it's changed so much that we are using more oil than ever. This helps ... how?
Semantics. Let me rephrase what you said: "I believe that the actions of humans are not affecting "global climate change" in a measurable degree." Means precisely the same thing as what you actually said, but it highlights the fact that you believe in a position just as much as your opponent does. (Incidentally, the same goes for atheists vs. religious types.) Now cut the rhetoric and start talking about evidence, one way or the other.
With a 4-digit ID you should know better than that :)
With all due respect, you weren't simply "refuting ... that Hitler was against all religions" - that may have been your original intent but then you went on to say that the other quotes you provide showed that Hitler "saw the Christian church as his source of inspiraton and strength and thought it was important for the nation as well". Which, I'm sorry, just is not true: he despised Christianity and thought it made Germany weak. He needed the support of the churches while he was consolidating power and during the war, but after that he had plans for them. Just about any historian of the Nazi period will tell you that.
Anyway, I'm no Christian but an agnostic-cum-atheist, so I have no particular axe to grind here, other than historical accuracy.