In other words, the wise conservative student outwits the mush-brained liberal professor and humiliates him in front of everyone, just by stating the facts! In reality, of course, the professor would just steamroller over any argument or fact thrown at him, and keep right on going. Anyone who has met the type knows exactly what I mean.
This sounds like something right out of Snopes. I'll bet I could find a variant of this exact story if I looked hard enough.
True enough. Let me help:
An atheist professor's test to disprove god goes wrong, so he runs out of the room while the lone Christian assumes the professor's place and talks about Jesus to the class: http://www.snopes.com/religion/chalk.asp
A lot of it looks like fantasy wish-fulfillment, where a student trumps an arrogant professor in a dramatic fashion. It seems popular in conservative circles to "disprove" the know-it-all atheist/feminist/liberal professor. While arguments like these may or may not have taken place, I think it's highly unlikely that a professional under tenure would storm out of the class and get a student booted out for simply humiliating him or her.
How many people here truly think that if there were an anomaly that they would be able to survive...
I live in the woods anyway, huge garden, plenty of animals to slaughter for tasty bbq and we have a very high water-table with multiple ponds around. Not the cleanest but I'd figure out a way to survive.
Oh, please don't turn this into a zombie apocalypse survivalist fantasy! Yes, yes, your supply of canned goods and guns are going to ensure your survival, while all of us are going to die miserably. Whatever helps you sleep at night!
Lumping each of these atheists into a single category is a lousy basis of forming a relationship. Atheism has no central dogma. It is like drawing nasty generalizations about dog-lovers, hockey players, or computer programmers: it is a logical fallacy based on limited experience.
Even if they didn't believe in gods, these "atheistic" murderers still followed a different form of religion that allowed them to carry out their malign schemes: nationalism, fascism, and other forms of state-worship.
To paraphrase Sam Harris, none of these regimes suffered from the problem of having "too much" skeptical inquiry and rational discussion. Those ideas are the hallmarks of modern, responsible atheism, though detractors (like the parent) have led some modern atheists to differentiate themselves by using the labels "bright" or "free-thinker."
So yeah, "it's god" still works pretty well for differing values of "god."
It is quite dickish to delete the data of tons and tons of people without notice, free or not free.
But data is not the same as physical property (see the "theft is not the same as copyright infringment" argument that is so popular on Slashdot), so laws relating to eviction from physical space shouldn't apply to eviction from digital space.
The intent of an eviction notice is for humanitarian reasons. Eviction notices allow renters to make arrangements to live elsewhere without having to suffer through temporary (and frightening) homelessness. Without a place to store their property, it could be stolen or destroyed, not to mention the welfare of the individual.
Data can be backed up at relatively no charge, so "finding a new place to live" for the data isn't a problem. It can (and should) be safely stored while the owner shops for a new digital residence. While a company website might lose temporary traffic, companies also shouldn't be using a free service. Free website hosting is intended for small, personal uses, which is not a critical service (like having shelter during a storm).
Laws to prevent data loss from happening are unnecessary, as long as the company makes some effort to communicate that they cannot guarantee permanent hosting.
It doesn't have to be a revolution to make changes, nor do the changes have to be profound. If enough people can be made to believe a new proposition, that usually does the job.
Yup, I'm with you. In the end, breastfeeding in public isn't something I would really want to see, but whatever. But posting pictures of yourself breastfeeding just seems like being deliberately provocative.
This is an opinion, and it usually is a male opinion. To a mother (and feminist philosophy, I would guess), breastfeeding is not sexually provocative, but rather it is a response to the child's needs. The needs of the child outweigh Victorian ideas of public exposure.
With public breastfeeding, a common suggestion is: "Can't you do that somewhere more private, like in a bathroom?" One wouldn't tell a co-worker to take his meal into the bathroom, even if the smell of his food is repugnant, the sound his lips make is gross, or whatever.
Ever had to adjust your crotch in public? Do you let it bother you that people might see you do it? Are you willing to suffer through the discomfort just so other people feel more comfortable around you? Or are you just going to say, "Screw 'em" and fix it as soon as you notice nobody is looking?
Now what if your crotch cried loudly if it was left "unfixed"? I think that's approaching the mother's attitude to breastfeeding: screw the rest of them, Baby Needs Food Badly.
"My [thing] crashed sometime between [t] and [t+1] on Dec 31, 2008 which remarkably corresponds to within at most 20 seconds of the New Year in GMT. I have been running this same [thing] non-stop for more than [long_time] and other than the occasional [maintenance_operation], it has not crashed more than 1 or 2 times in [toDays(long_time)] of cumulative uptime. Nothing other than [default_operations] were running at the time of the crash. Could this be a coincidence or was there some 2008/2009 rollover issue going on here? Has anyone (other than Zune 30GB owners) noticed similar year-end issues with their [things]?"
You kid, but this is pretty good support for the intelligent design theory. Here we have multiple organisms evolving human traits independently... as if following some pre-determined path to a completed, human state.
Wrong, unless that "completed, human state" also looks like a super-intelligent squid capable of toppling the feeble empires of man.
The only reason there isn't a super-intelligent, man-eating squid race is because we beat the squids by a few evolutionary epochs, and their ancestors (who are currently living but less than super-intelligent) will probably go extinct before they have a chance to grow a better brain and develop an oceanic civilization of their own.
But rest assured, I'm sure they would have hypothesized an intelligent designer of their own. Only their intelligent designer would have tentacles on its face, and he would live under aquatic heat vents in heaven while sending the unfaithful to those hellish clouds way above the water.
Too many captchas generate unreadable garbage, requiring you to waste time by refreshing the page (and re-entering passwords, etc.). I have seriously considered searching for whatever it is spammers use to beat captchas and download it for myself.
"The Ultimate Steal?" Is that how they think they can woo back the teenage pirate crowd?
"Dude, I was totally surfing Pirate Bay for some free music, and then all of a sudden I remembered my biology assignment due Monday! Oh wait, bro, check out this ad for the ultimate steal! Whoa, MS is totally mah n*gga!"
Even fanatical Christians celebrate New Year's and Christmas Eve, so "holiday season" is an accurate term to describe a number of separate single days usually associated with revelry and gift-giving. Some people even use these days for traveling and vacationing.
Since my birthday also falls in December, and since we got off school for weeks at a time, as a child I assumed the whole month of December was one big holiday.
Notice: I didn't even have to talk about the winter solstice, Roman festivals, Jews, Africans, or the War on Christmas to dispel your arbitrary outcries.
Everyone knows that blindsight is an extraordinary ability, which can be used to operate effectively without vision. It might be a form of sensitivity to vibrations, acute scent, keen hearing, or echolocation. It even makes concealment and invisibility (even magical darkness) irrelevant to the creature with blindsight.
That leaves us in doubt as to whom is actually running the bits.
Well I don't know about the bits, but I sure know about the bytes. The bites. The strings. You know, string theory. That is, the spaghetti strings. That you bite. They also fly, kind of like a flying monster.
I used to be obsessed with this idea when I was a kid (I was a very strange kid). Except not photons, but a beam of light. How can I trap it between mirrors?
My final idea was to shine a beam of light in a box or sphere of mirrors, figure out a trajectory to keep the light from shining back out my hole for like a second, then shut the lid really quick (which has a mirror to block the escaping light).
Why couldn't someone have just explained to me the simpler way of solving this problem?
Firstly, even the three main monotheistic faiths are a lot more complicated than that. Don't confuse loud fundamentalists nut-jobs with actual religious people.
Fair enough, but please don't confuse actual religious people with theologians and church authorities. The people who fill out "Christian" on a survey tend to have a far different set of beliefs when it comes to God, the after-life, angels, prayers, and miracles, while the average religious scholar struggles with dilemmas that are far out of the mainstream's reach.
Go watch "Seventh Heaven" (is that even still on?) and then sit down with something written by Thomas Aquinas to see what I mean.
Cause that makes sense. A company that develops software would have need of its employees being knowledgeable in any religion.
It helps knowing about another culture or belief system if you want to deal with diverse people. I can see this falling under a form of "diversity training" (like it or not), though I strongly disagree with focusing on a particular belief system with the intensity that is described in the article.
I would say Atheism is a form of religion due to it being dogmatic in nature.
Religion is not defined as a dogmatic practice, even if a good deal of religions have dogmatic features. I don't think that Buddhists, Unitarians, or New-Agers are particularly dogmatic (dogmatism defined as "positiveness in assertion of opinion especially when unwarranted or arrogant," and "a viewpoint or system of ideas based on insufficiently examined premises"). Unitarians, in particular, stress the use of reason and diversity, whether or not you or I agree with them.
Even if you're stuck in a certain frame of mind (like a New-Ager who believes in auras and healing crystals), I'd point to the lack of a centralized, specific, instructional dogma or institution as responsible for those beliefs.
Atheists are in the same camp. There are as many forms as atheism as there are atheists, and to lump them into one dogma does no justice to the reality of the situation. Even to say that all atheists believe in rationality and science is a misnomer: I've met plenty who do it just because they think religious people are stupid, or it's how they were raised, or as a form of rebellion against parents/church, or as a form of conformity to appeal to an atheist member of the opposite sex.
Atheism firmly and adamantly believes there is no God. If you're Agnostic, you don't care one way or the other and thus open minded.
Modern, thinking atheists usually don't hold to the absolute notion of no gods. They just don't think that the Christians, or Hindus, or Greeks have it right. They might even disagree with the word "god"--an entity of incredible power might still exist somewhere in the uni/multiverse, though it would abide by natural laws, even if we don't yet know those laws. A personal god who performs miracles, listens to prayers, and created humans is not believed, because the evidence points elsewhere.
The difference between Atheism and Agnosticism is in that one explicitly denies God exists while the other just doesn't care nor has no opinion about it.
Agnostics are not necessarily defined by a lack of opinion. Strong agnosticism points to the idea that it is impossible to know whether gods exist, so don't waste your time with the question. So I wouldn't let agnostics off the hook if you just think they're lazy. They can irritate even atheists.
Slashdot Mirror
But can it power a flux capacitor?
For an example of a keyboard for a non-Latin alphabet, look at the alternate symbols on this Japanese keyboard:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MacBookProJISKeyboard-1.jpg
Obviously, that's not a real Japanese keyboard, because it's missing they keys for ^_^, o_O, and =3.
In other words, the wise conservative student outwits the mush-brained liberal professor and humiliates him in front of everyone, just by stating the facts! In reality, of course, the professor would just steamroller over any argument or fact thrown at him, and keep right on going. Anyone who has met the type knows exactly what I mean.
This sounds like something right out of Snopes. I'll bet I could find a variant of this exact story if I looked hard enough.
True enough. Let me help:
An atheist professor's test to disprove god goes wrong, so he runs out of the room while the lone Christian assumes the professor's place and talks about Jesus to the class: http://www.snopes.com/religion/chalk.asp
A young Albert Einstein proves the existence of god and renders his professor silent: http://www.snopes.com/religion/einstein.asp
A group of students outwit an arrogant professor by turning the tables on him: http://www.snopes.com/college/admin/recorder.asp
A variant where the professor gets back at students who think they're so smart: http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/eraser.asp
A lot of it looks like fantasy wish-fulfillment, where a student trumps an arrogant professor in a dramatic fashion. It seems popular in conservative circles to "disprove" the know-it-all atheist/feminist/liberal professor. While arguments like these may or may not have taken place, I think it's highly unlikely that a professional under tenure would storm out of the class and get a student booted out for simply humiliating him or her.
How many people here truly think that if there were an anomaly that they would be able to survive...
I live in the woods anyway, huge garden, plenty of animals to slaughter for tasty bbq and we have a very high water-table with multiple ponds around. Not the cleanest but I'd figure out a way to survive.
Oh, please don't turn this into a zombie apocalypse survivalist fantasy! Yes, yes, your supply of canned goods and guns are going to ensure your survival, while all of us are going to die miserably. Whatever helps you sleep at night!
"According to... flirtatious text messages... a superficial model... will... love... the end."
Sounds like the plot for Galatea 2.2. Ah, humanist-in-residence or writer-in-residence, it's all the same: where can I sign up?
Lumping each of these atheists into a single category is a lousy basis of forming a relationship. Atheism has no central dogma. It is like drawing nasty generalizations about dog-lovers, hockey players, or computer programmers: it is a logical fallacy based on limited experience.
Even if they didn't believe in gods, these "atheistic" murderers still followed a different form of religion that allowed them to carry out their malign schemes: nationalism, fascism, and other forms of state-worship.
To paraphrase Sam Harris, none of these regimes suffered from the problem of having "too much" skeptical inquiry and rational discussion. Those ideas are the hallmarks of modern, responsible atheism, though detractors (like the parent) have led some modern atheists to differentiate themselves by using the labels "bright" or "free-thinker."
So yeah, "it's god" still works pretty well for differing values of "god."
It is quite dickish to delete the data of tons and tons of people without notice, free or not free.
But data is not the same as physical property (see the "theft is not the same as copyright infringment" argument that is so popular on Slashdot), so laws relating to eviction from physical space shouldn't apply to eviction from digital space.
The intent of an eviction notice is for humanitarian reasons. Eviction notices allow renters to make arrangements to live elsewhere without having to suffer through temporary (and frightening) homelessness. Without a place to store their property, it could be stolen or destroyed, not to mention the welfare of the individual.
Data can be backed up at relatively no charge, so "finding a new place to live" for the data isn't a problem. It can (and should) be safely stored while the owner shops for a new digital residence. While a company website might lose temporary traffic, companies also shouldn't be using a free service. Free website hosting is intended for small, personal uses, which is not a critical service (like having shelter during a storm).
Laws to prevent data loss from happening are unnecessary, as long as the company makes some effort to communicate that they cannot guarantee permanent hosting.
So, should Facebook allow explicit images of the "natural human act" of copulation?
Only doggy-style. Everything else is a sinful abomination invented by the devil.
Actually, missionary style is more proper, even though it's not generally found in the animal kingdom.
Then again, humans aren't derived from animals, because evolution is wrong.
Whew, that was close. Almost lost it. Now my arguments are air-tight!
It doesn't have to be a revolution to make changes, nor do the changes have to be profound. If enough people can be made to believe a new proposition, that usually does the job.
It's not illegal if my clothes are on fire.
Yup, I'm with you. In the end, breastfeeding in public isn't something I would really want to see, but whatever. But posting pictures of yourself breastfeeding just seems like being deliberately provocative.
This is an opinion, and it usually is a male opinion. To a mother (and feminist philosophy, I would guess), breastfeeding is not sexually provocative, but rather it is a response to the child's needs. The needs of the child outweigh Victorian ideas of public exposure.
With public breastfeeding, a common suggestion is: "Can't you do that somewhere more private, like in a bathroom?" One wouldn't tell a co-worker to take his meal into the bathroom, even if the smell of his food is repugnant, the sound his lips make is gross, or whatever.
Ever had to adjust your crotch in public? Do you let it bother you that people might see you do it? Are you willing to suffer through the discomfort just so other people feel more comfortable around you? Or are you just going to say, "Screw 'em" and fix it as soon as you notice nobody is looking?
Now what if your crotch cried loudly if it was left "unfixed"? I think that's approaching the mother's attitude to breastfeeding: screw the rest of them, Baby Needs Food Badly.
"My [thing] crashed sometime between [t] and [t+1] on Dec 31, 2008 which remarkably corresponds to within at most 20 seconds of the New Year in GMT. I have been running this same [thing] non-stop for more than [long_time] and other than the occasional [maintenance_operation], it has not crashed more than 1 or 2 times in [toDays(long_time)] of cumulative uptime. Nothing other than [default_operations] were running at the time of the crash. Could this be a coincidence or was there some 2008/2009 rollover issue going on here? Has anyone (other than Zune 30GB owners) noticed similar year-end issues with their [things]?"
You kid, but this is pretty good support for the intelligent design theory. Here we have multiple organisms evolving human traits independently... as if following some pre-determined path to a completed, human state.
Wrong, unless that "completed, human state" also looks like a super-intelligent squid capable of toppling the feeble empires of man.
The only reason there isn't a super-intelligent, man-eating squid race is because we beat the squids by a few evolutionary epochs, and their ancestors (who are currently living but less than super-intelligent) will probably go extinct before they have a chance to grow a better brain and develop an oceanic civilization of their own.
But rest assured, I'm sure they would have hypothesized an intelligent designer of their own. Only their intelligent designer would have tentacles on its face, and he would live under aquatic heat vents in heaven while sending the unfaithful to those hellish clouds way above the water.
whooooooooooooooooooooooosh
guess what that sound is?
The sound of the intelligent designer running away before we find out that he's just a big fat fibber?
Too many captchas generate unreadable garbage, requiring you to waste time by refreshing the page (and re-entering passwords, etc.). I have seriously considered searching for whatever it is spammers use to beat captchas and download it for myself.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
This is going to make my D&D games kick ass.
"The Ultimate Steal?" Is that how they think they can woo back the teenage pirate crowd?
"Dude, I was totally surfing Pirate Bay for some free music, and then all of a sudden I remembered my biology assignment due Monday! Oh wait, bro, check out this ad for the ultimate steal! Whoa, MS is totally mah n*gga!"
Please. Kids aren't that stupid... then again...
Even fanatical Christians celebrate New Year's and Christmas Eve, so "holiday season" is an accurate term to describe a number of separate single days usually associated with revelry and gift-giving. Some people even use these days for traveling and vacationing.
Since my birthday also falls in December, and since we got off school for weeks at a time, as a child I assumed the whole month of December was one big holiday.
Notice: I didn't even have to talk about the winter solstice, Roman festivals, Jews, Africans, or the War on Christmas to dispel your arbitrary outcries.
Everyone knows that blindsight is an extraordinary ability, which can be used to operate effectively without vision. It might be a form of sensitivity to vibrations, acute scent, keen hearing, or echolocation. It even makes concealment and invisibility (even magical darkness) irrelevant to the creature with blindsight.
Don't believe me? Well, it's RAW.
That leaves us in doubt as to whom is actually running the bits.
Well I don't know about the bits, but I sure know about the bytes. The bites. The strings. You know, string theory. That is, the spaghetti strings. That you bite. They also fly, kind of like a flying monster.
It sounded funnier in my head.
I used to be obsessed with this idea when I was a kid (I was a very strange kid). Except not photons, but a beam of light. How can I trap it between mirrors?
My final idea was to shine a beam of light in a box or sphere of mirrors, figure out a trajectory to keep the light from shining back out my hole for like a second, then shut the lid really quick (which has a mirror to block the escaping light).
Why couldn't someone have just explained to me the simpler way of solving this problem?
I.e., go outside and do something productive.
Firstly, even the three main monotheistic faiths are a lot more complicated than that. Don't confuse loud fundamentalists nut-jobs with actual religious people.
Fair enough, but please don't confuse actual religious people with theologians and church authorities. The people who fill out "Christian" on a survey tend to have a far different set of beliefs when it comes to God, the after-life, angels, prayers, and miracles, while the average religious scholar struggles with dilemmas that are far out of the mainstream's reach.
Go watch "Seventh Heaven" (is that even still on?) and then sit down with something written by Thomas Aquinas to see what I mean.
Cause that makes sense. A company that develops software would have need of its employees being knowledgeable in any religion.
It helps knowing about another culture or belief system if you want to deal with diverse people. I can see this falling under a form of "diversity training" (like it or not), though I strongly disagree with focusing on a particular belief system with the intensity that is described in the article.
I would say Atheism is a form of religion due to it being dogmatic in nature.
Religion is not defined as a dogmatic practice, even if a good deal of religions have dogmatic features. I don't think that Buddhists, Unitarians, or New-Agers are particularly dogmatic (dogmatism defined as "positiveness in assertion of opinion especially when unwarranted or arrogant," and "a viewpoint or system of ideas based on insufficiently examined premises"). Unitarians, in particular, stress the use of reason and diversity, whether or not you or I agree with them.
Even if you're stuck in a certain frame of mind (like a New-Ager who believes in auras and healing crystals), I'd point to the lack of a centralized, specific, instructional dogma or institution as responsible for those beliefs.
Atheists are in the same camp. There are as many forms as atheism as there are atheists, and to lump them into one dogma does no justice to the reality of the situation. Even to say that all atheists believe in rationality and science is a misnomer: I've met plenty who do it just because they think religious people are stupid, or it's how they were raised, or as a form of rebellion against parents/church, or as a form of conformity to appeal to an atheist member of the opposite sex.
Atheism firmly and adamantly believes there is no God. If you're Agnostic, you don't care one way or the other and thus open minded.
Modern, thinking atheists usually don't hold to the absolute notion of no gods. They just don't think that the Christians, or Hindus, or Greeks have it right. They might even disagree with the word "god"--an entity of incredible power might still exist somewhere in the uni/multiverse, though it would abide by natural laws, even if we don't yet know those laws. A personal god who performs miracles, listens to prayers, and created humans is not believed, because the evidence points elsewhere.
The difference between Atheism and Agnosticism is in that one explicitly denies God exists while the other just doesn't care nor has no opinion about it.
Agnostics are not necessarily defined by a lack of opinion. Strong agnosticism points to the idea that it is impossible to know whether gods exist, so don't waste your time with the question. So I wouldn't let agnostics off the hook if you just think they're lazy. They can irritate even atheists.