I can't really bring myself to be too upset by this. The movie ratings system isn't perfect, but it certainly doesn't bother me much, and this sounds similar, on the surface at least. Everyone agrees the parents ought to be ultimately responsible. This (sounds like, if I'm reading it right) a shift from an automatic whitelist with the option of parents to blacklist, to an automatic blacklist, with the option for parents to whitelist. Not sure that's a huge difference, except for the parents who prefer more control.
Sure, kids can get around those things, but if the fact that people break rules is a reason not to have rules, then we wouldn't have any rules at all.
Now I do question the wording of the poll, and I question whether the group involved here would put forth reasonable ratings. And, were I a parent, I'd likely whitelist a lot games for my kids if I knew they could handle it, but I wouldn't really be ticked if my kids needed my active participation to pick up some of the more violent games.
Don't we already have a regulation for movies that's nearly identical to the one proposed here for the games? Kids can't go into that movie by themselves, they need parental accompaniment. As I read the proposal, the law would require kids to have parental accompaniment to buy the games, they couldn't on their own. Currently the kids could pick up those games on their own, with no parental oversight, but they can't go into the movie without parental oversight. Did I read something wrong?
I often have to re-check a map getting someplace the first time, but I can always retrace my steps heading back, and once I've learned the way I almost never forget, even years later.
In my case I know the skill is almost completely unrelated to video game mapping. I did a lot of that, too, but that's primarily because I almost always get badly lost in games (first-person games). I find a huge disconnect between turning around in the real world and trying to navigate a virtual world. Particularly in the older maze games, where you're locked into low-res pictures that tend to repeat, and fixed 90-degree angles, but also even in newer, 360-degree control games. If the game doesn't have a built-in map, I'm lost.
Curiously, I also can get turned around indoors, particularly after stairs or elevators. Outside, where I can see the sky, it's not a problem.
Furthermore, given the preponderance of religion in this world, and the way some sort of higher power is taken for granted by nearly everyone, I'd say there are almost zero atheists who haven't at least contemplated the possibility of god at some point or another. Unless you grow up completely cut off from all theists and indoctrinated by firmly atheist parents, you're going to have lots and lots and LOTS of people telling you about God this and Jesus that and the true meaning of Christmas the other (or whatever the local religion is).
Almost every atheist has to investigate a little, to figure out why nearly everyone they know believes something that the atheist is having trouble believing. It is very easy to doubt yourself when almost everyone seems to have some insight you don't.
I'm not sure whether to laugh because you just compared God to an unpleasant odor, or to argue that the odor itself would be the kind of evidence a lot of doubters would look for. Imagine we go through your story again... except this time there is no odor.
There's nothing. You call the landlord. He finds no leaks. He calls someone to check for dead vermin. There's still nothing. The neighbors report you, the cops are called in. Drugs are suspected. There's still nothing. Then, mysteriously, a few weeks later, there's nothing, again.
That would be a completely crazy story. And that's exactly the sort of thing atheists are trying to argue. Something experienced but unexplained is one thing. But nothing, experienced and then explained as something, well that's just not believable.
There are many different kinds of food: Mexican, Italian, Chinese, etc. Having an empty plate isn't a kind of food at all.
There are many kinds of sports: baseball, basketball, football, etc. It would be foolish to say anyone who's not on a team "plays the sport of not participating in sports."
There are many different political parties. Not being a member of any of them doesn't mean that you're part of the Independent political party.
You can make all kinds of analogies, but they aren't always apt. Not buying into religion is not itself a religion.
I think most evangelical atheists are pushing back because so many religious folks are evangelical about trying to force the atheist to live the way the religious person wants. It would be a double standard to condemn pushy atheists and not condemn pushy religious, wouldn't it?
Or, to put it another way, we've got some things that can be labeled a matter of fact, and we've got a bunch of other stuff that has no facts behind it and is essentially opinion.
You don't have to push too far in the fields of "the purpose of life" or "what happens after death" to realize all that stuff basically boils down to someone's opinion. (Find your own purpose, somebody else says it's X, however it goes.)
The word "opinion" may be more accurate than "stuff people like" just because as mapkinase notes things like hell aren't really "liked".
I am pretty sure, though, that it doesn't require a supernatural realm to explain why people have opinions about things, even with (or despite) an absence of facts.
You're confusing engineering with physics. Engineers can't ignore friction. In physics you can and often do, and that's just fine. Heck, in an astrophysics class we could tend to assume 2 = 10 (or anything greater than one was just another order of magnitude), and get away with it for the purposes of discussion.
There's no such thing as superman or kryptonite, either, but one of the more awesome exam questions I had to answer was to imagine a shard of kryptonite with a field with a certain strength distribution, and then use more math to determine which direction superman should fly to escape the most quickly.
Another exam question involved a punchbowl, partiers who were slowly but steadily spiking the punch while drinking the punch, and some supposition of what alcohol volume would make a person drunk, and solving for the time it would take for everyone to be drunk.
Surgery is a procedure, and should be practiced. Are you saying you wouldn't want your family doctor to look up your symptoms in a book if you had some mystery disease he didn't recognize immediately?
Barnes and Noble have made a pathetic attempt by allowing one time 14 day sharing. Really it's just an advertising tool for the Nook.
While I agree that it's a pretty crummy system, I can also look at my own habits and realize it doesn't matter that much. I hardly ever loan any books to anyone, the books I do loan out almost never go to more than one person, and most of the books I loan never make it back to me. So while it could be improved, their system does cover most of my needs, and actually improves things by guaranteeing I'll get the book back eventually.
Still rather see something like a 3-month limit and, say, 3 loans, and I'd be happier, but hey.
I see the move to e-books in libraries as a bad thing. If anything, it's the antithesis of what a library is for. Libraries exist so that everybody, no matter how poor or disenfranchised can both educate and entertain themselves (LCD = "lowest common denominator").
It's a half-hour round trip to my small-town library, which has kinda lousy hours. While I see your point about books being accessible for the masses being an important thing, it would also be a tremendous convenience for me to be able to get books at home instantaneously instead of having to drive that trip twice (pick up and return). Case in point: I bought a Nook three months ago, but because I have to physically get myself to the library to sign up for the program to borrow books, I STILL haven't made it down there to take advantage of this system.
Also note that ereader prices are dropping quickly and should be affordable enough for most people soon, and that libraries usually have free computers and could easily include ereader software for even the poorest people to be able to see these books. Not a perfect answer, but not an impassible barrier, either.
You know what? I'd be 100% in favor of making that a requirement any time a politician is allowed to speak. I don't want to get my facts from politicians any more than I want to get my groceries from a garbage truck.
Are we talking "grain of salt" as in "not taking it so seriously" or "understanding that some changes to scientific theory and predictions are bound to occur."
I also wonder, by comparison, what we're supposed to take everything else with? A grain of salt for science would mean a bucket of ocean water, minimum, for anything else. Right?
I encourage the spirit of scientific skepticism, but only if we keep our skepticism of non-science in proper perspective.
Never forget that evolutionists are also religious
It always frustrates me when people use linguistic fuzziness about the word "religious" to try to put two very different things on the same plane. Using the word religious to mean "takes a strong stand" and religious to mean "is operating on faith that is by definition disconnected from evidence" and then saying they're the same thing does not actually make them the same thing.
Evolutionists are working with a massive pile of documented stuff and trying to piece together their best interpretation of those facts. Yes, many of them believe very strongly that this process has led them to a reasonably accurate understanding of the issue. But you can't just say "that strong belief can be called religious and religious can be called believing in stuff from the bible, so it's all the same."
6, 7, and 8 - really? You think those only apply to one side? Conspiracy, ad-hominem attacks, and lies have filled both sides of this discussion from the beginning. I find these things really frustrating, because it has greatly muddied the waters of what should have been a more straightforward and less strident discussion.
I find it contradictory that you can claim you're open minded about the subject, but you're incapable of seeing any of those things on your side of the argument because they're very clearly there.
Very interesting points. Don't have much more to add, but it's some stuff to think about.
For the record, if I ever do see a ghost, I wouldn't ever expect anyone to believe me. I'm not sure I'd even admit it to anyone, except as a campfire story.
I didn't really expect a "scientific" argument, as I certainly understand why that wouldn't exist. A "philosophically/logically sound" one was mostly what I was asking for.
I can accept personal experience as a reason for someone to have a belief in something, though I have plenty of reservations there, because personal experience can be potentially fallible. Back in the day I had an experience at the time *I* described as religious, but that now I wouldn't say was in any way supernatural. What people experience, or think they experience, is a fascinating subject, but you can't study it for long without running into a lot of suggestions that people can easily get stuff wrong, or (being more kind) can have wildly different subjective experiences than other people despite being in a very objectively similar situation.
One of the other major problems with personal experience is it's personal. I'm not the type to tell someone else that my knowledge trumps their experience in a realm where facts can't apply, but if I haven't also had that experience myself I'm still left without any real evidence.
If we step away from religion a little, and talk about something maybe less personal, like ghosts, the same thing still applies. I've never seen a ghost. Lacking evidence, I'm not particularly inclined to believe in them. Still, if they exist I'd like to see one. I'd actually take the time to do some sort of ghost hunt, if ever given the opportunity, just to increase the odds of a personal experience.
I know a lot of people who do believe in ghosts, for various reasons, none of them generally backed up by much logic. I've talked to a very few people who claim to have experienced something like a ghost themselves, but it's just not the same as having a personal experience. Plenty of people fabricate those stories to entertain or scare or just as a joke. Even for the one or two people who I know are dead serious, there are plenty of doubts about accuracy.
My own wife, for instance, has a story about staying at a "haunted house" and hearing noises. However, in our own home she often fails to recognize what I consider exceptionally familiar noises--the neighbor outside calling for his dog, which he does every night; the cat, downstairs, clawing at our couch; the cat, upstairs clawing at the carpet; etc. When these noises startle her and cause her to sit upright and ask me "what's that?!" I simply can't take her ghost noises stories as authoritative.
It doesn't help that the subject is flooded with hoaxes, cheesy fakes, and obviously explained phenomena--and I'm just talking the really obvious stuff here, not the classic "I'm a skeptic so I'm dismissing it out of hand" kind of stuff. It's hard to wade through that stuff to get to the genuinely unexplained stuff, and again one person's unexplained (like strange noises) might be another person's obvious.
No. Anything worth studying still deems something to be responsible, in this case it's gravity/dimensions/membranes, but those responsible still gotta come from somewhere. It's not "nothing", even if this bogus theory based on a long string (no pun intended) of hypotheticals is correct.
Yes, as I've heard it, it really did. If you haven't read up on "inflation" -- the hyperexpansion part right after the big bang -- that may be a good place to start. If I recall part of the theory is that the matter energy is created as a balance to compensate for the tremendous gravitational potential involved in the expanding universe (I may not have that quite right, but that's how I remember it).
There's a lot of other good information that happens at that stage. Lots of discussion of the creation of matter and antimatter, and weird asymmetries that may explain why the universe appears to be made primarily of matter without any antimatter around.
We already know that matter/antimatter pairs of particles can and do pop out of nothing and back into nothing, due to quantum effects. Hawking's been talking about that for decades, without too many objections that I've noticed.
None of that is related at all to string theory, by the way. I actually share your distaste for the idea of 11 or 12 dimensions as a way to explain that stuff, but I can't do that math and won't make any personal conclusion about whether it's right or wrong at this stage.
No, ledow is right. Hawking's not talking crazy talk. The stuff you're objecting to is more than adequately covered by a few undergraduate courses in physics. A whole universe can literally appear out of nothing, according to our decades-old understanding of the Big Bang.
And sometimes you can ask "why" when there is no real because. Some questions don't have answers, and it may be a mistake to try to insert one that doesn't belong.
I think sometimes people from your first camp get drawn into (or toward) the second camp as a way to create some space for themselves. Because it's nice to just kind of quietly believe what you like, but it's also very difficult (especially in the states) not to have other people's religion pushed onto you a bit--at the social level it's sometimes completely unintentional, sometimes pretty intentional, at other levels (like political) it's often very intentional. Taking the stance of an active disbeliever may be a way to say, "hey, get your religion out of my life!"
I do think there's a big difference between fighting for some personal space and being dogmatic about it and taking every opportunity to fight over the issue. You're probably talking more about the latter than the former, I realize, but I think there's also a lot of middle ground besides the two camps you mentioned.
As with Pascal's Wager, your theoretical god is not "as likely to exist" as a different god. It's unknown (and many would say unknowable) how likely either of them are. So, you're right in that both gods are in the same boat -- nobody knows how likely it is that either exists. It's incorrect to go from that to "they're equally likely to exist".
True. And yet neither one is more likely than the other, which could be another interpretation of what doshell was trying to say.
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Sure, kids can get around those things, but if the fact that people break rules is a reason not to have rules, then we wouldn't have any rules at all.
Now I do question the wording of the poll, and I question whether the group involved here would put forth reasonable ratings. And, were I a parent, I'd likely whitelist a lot games for my kids if I knew they could handle it, but I wouldn't really be ticked if my kids needed my active participation to pick up some of the more violent games.
Don't we already have a regulation for movies that's nearly identical to the one proposed here for the games? Kids can't go into that movie by themselves, they need parental accompaniment. As I read the proposal, the law would require kids to have parental accompaniment to buy the games, they couldn't on their own. Currently the kids could pick up those games on their own, with no parental oversight, but they can't go into the movie without parental oversight. Did I read something wrong?
In my case I know the skill is almost completely unrelated to video game mapping. I did a lot of that, too, but that's primarily because I almost always get badly lost in games (first-person games). I find a huge disconnect between turning around in the real world and trying to navigate a virtual world. Particularly in the older maze games, where you're locked into low-res pictures that tend to repeat, and fixed 90-degree angles, but also even in newer, 360-degree control games. If the game doesn't have a built-in map, I'm lost.
Curiously, I also can get turned around indoors, particularly after stairs or elevators. Outside, where I can see the sky, it's not a problem.
Almost every atheist has to investigate a little, to figure out why nearly everyone they know believes something that the atheist is having trouble believing. It is very easy to doubt yourself when almost everyone seems to have some insight you don't.
There's nothing. You call the landlord. He finds no leaks. He calls someone to check for dead vermin. There's still nothing. The neighbors report you, the cops are called in. Drugs are suspected. There's still nothing. Then, mysteriously, a few weeks later, there's nothing, again.
That would be a completely crazy story. And that's exactly the sort of thing atheists are trying to argue. Something experienced but unexplained is one thing. But nothing, experienced and then explained as something, well that's just not believable.
There are many different kinds of food: Mexican, Italian, Chinese, etc. Having an empty plate isn't a kind of food at all. There are many kinds of sports: baseball, basketball, football, etc. It would be foolish to say anyone who's not on a team "plays the sport of not participating in sports." There are many different political parties. Not being a member of any of them doesn't mean that you're part of the Independent political party. You can make all kinds of analogies, but they aren't always apt. Not buying into religion is not itself a religion.
I think most evangelical atheists are pushing back because so many religious folks are evangelical about trying to force the atheist to live the way the religious person wants. It would be a double standard to condemn pushy atheists and not condemn pushy religious, wouldn't it?
You don't have to push too far in the fields of "the purpose of life" or "what happens after death" to realize all that stuff basically boils down to someone's opinion. (Find your own purpose, somebody else says it's X, however it goes.)
The word "opinion" may be more accurate than "stuff people like" just because as mapkinase notes things like hell aren't really "liked".
I am pretty sure, though, that it doesn't require a supernatural realm to explain why people have opinions about things, even with (or despite) an absence of facts.
You're confusing engineering with physics. Engineers can't ignore friction. In physics you can and often do, and that's just fine. Heck, in an astrophysics class we could tend to assume 2 = 10 (or anything greater than one was just another order of magnitude), and get away with it for the purposes of discussion.
Another exam question involved a punchbowl, partiers who were slowly but steadily spiking the punch while drinking the punch, and some supposition of what alcohol volume would make a person drunk, and solving for the time it would take for everyone to be drunk.
Surgery is a procedure, and should be practiced. Are you saying you wouldn't want your family doctor to look up your symptoms in a book if you had some mystery disease he didn't recognize immediately?
Well, if registrar A is one of the really enormous ones, it could still be a coincidence.
Barnes and Noble have made a pathetic attempt by allowing one time 14 day sharing. Really it's just an advertising tool for the Nook.
While I agree that it's a pretty crummy system, I can also look at my own habits and realize it doesn't matter that much. I hardly ever loan any books to anyone, the books I do loan out almost never go to more than one person, and most of the books I loan never make it back to me. So while it could be improved, their system does cover most of my needs, and actually improves things by guaranteeing I'll get the book back eventually.
Still rather see something like a 3-month limit and, say, 3 loans, and I'd be happier, but hey.
I see the move to e-books in libraries as a bad thing. If anything, it's the antithesis of what a library is for. Libraries exist so that everybody, no matter how poor or disenfranchised can both educate and entertain themselves (LCD = "lowest common denominator").
It's a half-hour round trip to my small-town library, which has kinda lousy hours. While I see your point about books being accessible for the masses being an important thing, it would also be a tremendous convenience for me to be able to get books at home instantaneously instead of having to drive that trip twice (pick up and return). Case in point: I bought a Nook three months ago, but because I have to physically get myself to the library to sign up for the program to borrow books, I STILL haven't made it down there to take advantage of this system.
Also note that ereader prices are dropping quickly and should be affordable enough for most people soon, and that libraries usually have free computers and could easily include ereader software for even the poorest people to be able to see these books. Not a perfect answer, but not an impassible barrier, either.
You know what? I'd be 100% in favor of making that a requirement any time a politician is allowed to speak. I don't want to get my facts from politicians any more than I want to get my groceries from a garbage truck.
Are we talking "grain of salt" as in "not taking it so seriously" or "understanding that some changes to scientific theory and predictions are bound to occur."
I also wonder, by comparison, what we're supposed to take everything else with? A grain of salt for science would mean a bucket of ocean water, minimum, for anything else. Right?
I encourage the spirit of scientific skepticism, but only if we keep our skepticism of non-science in proper perspective.
Never forget that evolutionists are also religious
It always frustrates me when people use linguistic fuzziness about the word "religious" to try to put two very different things on the same plane. Using the word religious to mean "takes a strong stand" and religious to mean "is operating on faith that is by definition disconnected from evidence" and then saying they're the same thing does not actually make them the same thing.
Evolutionists are working with a massive pile of documented stuff and trying to piece together their best interpretation of those facts. Yes, many of them believe very strongly that this process has led them to a reasonably accurate understanding of the issue. But you can't just say "that strong belief can be called religious and religious can be called believing in stuff from the bible, so it's all the same."
I find it contradictory that you can claim you're open minded about the subject, but you're incapable of seeing any of those things on your side of the argument because they're very clearly there.
For the record, if I ever do see a ghost, I wouldn't ever expect anyone to believe me. I'm not sure I'd even admit it to anyone, except as a campfire story.
I can accept personal experience as a reason for someone to have a belief in something, though I have plenty of reservations there, because personal experience can be potentially fallible. Back in the day I had an experience at the time *I* described as religious, but that now I wouldn't say was in any way supernatural. What people experience, or think they experience, is a fascinating subject, but you can't study it for long without running into a lot of suggestions that people can easily get stuff wrong, or (being more kind) can have wildly different subjective experiences than other people despite being in a very objectively similar situation.
One of the other major problems with personal experience is it's personal. I'm not the type to tell someone else that my knowledge trumps their experience in a realm where facts can't apply, but if I haven't also had that experience myself I'm still left without any real evidence.
If we step away from religion a little, and talk about something maybe less personal, like ghosts, the same thing still applies. I've never seen a ghost. Lacking evidence, I'm not particularly inclined to believe in them. Still, if they exist I'd like to see one. I'd actually take the time to do some sort of ghost hunt, if ever given the opportunity, just to increase the odds of a personal experience.
I know a lot of people who do believe in ghosts, for various reasons, none of them generally backed up by much logic. I've talked to a very few people who claim to have experienced something like a ghost themselves, but it's just not the same as having a personal experience. Plenty of people fabricate those stories to entertain or scare or just as a joke. Even for the one or two people who I know are dead serious, there are plenty of doubts about accuracy.
My own wife, for instance, has a story about staying at a "haunted house" and hearing noises. However, in our own home she often fails to recognize what I consider exceptionally familiar noises--the neighbor outside calling for his dog, which he does every night; the cat, downstairs, clawing at our couch; the cat, upstairs clawing at the carpet; etc. When these noises startle her and cause her to sit upright and ask me "what's that?!" I simply can't take her ghost noises stories as authoritative.
It doesn't help that the subject is flooded with hoaxes, cheesy fakes, and obviously explained phenomena--and I'm just talking the really obvious stuff here, not the classic "I'm a skeptic so I'm dismissing it out of hand" kind of stuff. It's hard to wade through that stuff to get to the genuinely unexplained stuff, and again one person's unexplained (like strange noises) might be another person's obvious.
No. Anything worth studying still deems something to be responsible, in this case it's gravity/dimensions/membranes, but those responsible still gotta come from somewhere. It's not "nothing", even if this bogus theory based on a long string (no pun intended) of hypotheticals is correct.
Yes, as I've heard it, it really did. If you haven't read up on "inflation" -- the hyperexpansion part right after the big bang -- that may be a good place to start. If I recall part of the theory is that the matter energy is created as a balance to compensate for the tremendous gravitational potential involved in the expanding universe (I may not have that quite right, but that's how I remember it).
There's a lot of other good information that happens at that stage. Lots of discussion of the creation of matter and antimatter, and weird asymmetries that may explain why the universe appears to be made primarily of matter without any antimatter around.
We already know that matter/antimatter pairs of particles can and do pop out of nothing and back into nothing, due to quantum effects. Hawking's been talking about that for decades, without too many objections that I've noticed.
None of that is related at all to string theory, by the way. I actually share your distaste for the idea of 11 or 12 dimensions as a way to explain that stuff, but I can't do that math and won't make any personal conclusion about whether it's right or wrong at this stage.
No, ledow is right. Hawking's not talking crazy talk. The stuff you're objecting to is more than adequately covered by a few undergraduate courses in physics. A whole universe can literally appear out of nothing, according to our decades-old understanding of the Big Bang.
And sometimes you can ask "why" when there is no real because. Some questions don't have answers, and it may be a mistake to try to insert one that doesn't belong.
I do think there's a big difference between fighting for some personal space and being dogmatic about it and taking every opportunity to fight over the issue. You're probably talking more about the latter than the former, I realize, but I think there's also a lot of middle ground besides the two camps you mentioned.
As with Pascal's Wager, your theoretical god is not "as likely to exist" as a different god. It's unknown (and many would say unknowable) how likely either of them are. So, you're right in that both gods are in the same boat -- nobody knows how likely it is that either exists. It's incorrect to go from that to "they're equally likely to exist".
True. And yet neither one is more likely than the other, which could be another interpretation of what doshell was trying to say.