It's now the party of anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, and racism, all things that were anathema to those old time conservatives.
I'm not gonna be some MSM conspiracy kook here, but seriously - you really think that 48% or whatever of Americans are anti-intellectual xenophobic racist apes? Citation needed! There are a lot of people left in the Republican party who are a whole lot closer to those old time conservatives than you think, and if they don't get noticed, it's only partly their own fault and largely the media's fault. And I mean both the left and the right media, both of whom focus on the extremists to the exclusion of all others - although at least the left-leaning media does focus on their own moderates once in a while.
I don't think your distinction between facts and truths completely holds up - facts by your definition being incontrovertible facts about the universe and truths being larger, more vague general statements. First of all, Obama's definitions almost certainly wasn't thinking of a distinct fact vs truth perspective, and secondly, even facts (by your definition) are almost guaranteed to be somewhat vague, which is why adding more and more facts together can be used to support two different truths.
Personally I think it has to go both ways - facts have to drive science which drives more (and possibly bigger to the point of reaching your definition of truth) facts, which drives more science, etc, etc. I think Obama's point was to sound clever and scientific - maybe I'm just cynical when it comes to politicians (even when every other word is hope and the rest are change), but I don't see any reason to narrow down the definition of the word "facts" to make a political speech actually make sense...
If I pay for this research, then everyone gets the benefits. If someone else pays for it, then everyone still gets the benefits. But what if everyone waits for someone else to pay for it?
You're completely ignoring the opportunity cost of the research - if everyone spends their own money, then everyone gets their own benefits. This nebulous "research" is just a way to generate discussion, argument and hopefully goodwill - if we don't pin down what the money's spent on, all you're really guaranteed to get is a Slashdot discussion and some publicity (which of course is exactly why any politician would make a statement like this).
In reality, maybe you'll get some benefit from it, maybe not, but guaranteed you'll get the benefit of your tax money if it doesn't get taxed in the first place. By the above logic, we should all give as much of our money as possible to the government and let them spend it for us, that way everyone pays fairly and everyone benefits the maximum amount... your optimism is touching, but in my world, a government is the least efficient possible way for any citizen to get anything with their own money.
It's not like Obama and the rest of the Democrats were... you know... in power or presumptive nominees and leading the charge for the bailout even in Bush days... no, it's Bush's screw-up, Obama's just going to fix it by allowing Bush's friends to have their little fun and then (probably next year) he's going to get responsible and stop the waste and... ummmm... fix the planet and... dry our tears and... give us *sob* hope *sob*... In the meantime, he'll restore the "economy's" confidence by getting really angry that a company fulfilled some of it's on-the-books obligations as fully permitted by the bailout dollars and he'll do everything he can to get that tiny percentage of them back!
Not only are these retention bonuses, as other posters have pointed out, but don't you think maybe if the government was going to control how the bailout dollars were spent, they should have done so beforehand? Nothing like a little retroactive outrage and clawbacks to give the industry confidence to move forward...
(What I'm saying is, outrage, yes, but why against AIG, which is only fulfilling its contracts, doing its thing, and not against the government, which pushed this massive bill through in record-time because it was absolutely necessary and if you questioned it on items like this you were an "obstruction" and "partisan" and...).
You really think that a 700 billion dollar bank bailout is the most effective way to keep people from dying of hunger? How about the longer term implication of trillion dollar deficits (yeah, if the economy starts growing fast enough over the next couple of years, I'm sure politicians will be spending wisely to bring us back into the black)?
I agree 100% about not buying the reasoning - where do you get off comparing GDP to pure deficit spending?
I disagree about the foreign nationals thing - to me, that's the same issue as giving out bonuses - AIG had obligations, the fed bailout didn't have any strings attached, now they're trying to retro-actively attach them, which is NOT a power we really want politicians to have...
And purely out of curiosity, I'm wondering how much money congress's time spent trying to recover this bailout bonus money is worth (ie, how much it cost the taxpayer, not how much it should have cost the taxpayer...) - political theater at its finest...
As noted by other posters both here and elsewhere, it's far from obvious (although an over-simplification may make it seem so). To me, though, even though it's not obvious, it's irrelevant - the only thing that really matters with respect to free will is "are we responsible for our actions?" And to that, I say yes, whether or not we really have "free" will, in order for a society (or person) to function, we have to take (or in some cases, be made to take) responsibility for what we do, think, etc... we can't blame it on some quantum randomness in our brains, even though it's entirely possible that I've been deluded into writing this post by a bunch of electrons that are no more "exercising free will" than I am right now.
The loans covered by CRA tended to have the same risk profile as other bank loans.
True, but also a red herring. If other bank loans were also influenced by the CRA to give out the same low-quality loans, the CRA is still at fault. It's quite possible that the CRA triggered the stampede by showing what was possible (and profitable... for a time...) and is thus still quite culpable without being directly responsible for the results.
But it was nice of you to try to make Bush look a little less incompetent.
Notice that even your list does that... Bush I and Clinton both figure into that list, Bush II didn't have the wisdom/competence to turn the stampede, but it's arguable whether any president would have. Hopefully I'm proven wrong, but Obama so far seems to be encouraging it rather than turning it or just not noticing it.
The worst president in history still needs a kind word every once in a while.
I have a feeling you made up your mind about that one before deciding that the CRA was a red herring, and that there may be a causal relationship in there somewhere as well... I'm not gonna argue that Bush II's domestic policy was a financial disaster (for the deficits caused by someone who shoulda known better, not as the final cause of the current global financial meltdown, although those deficits did rob the States of some potential cushioning and paved the way for the even worse than the Bush deficits bailouts). I'm far enough off topic already; I won't get into his foreign policy...
On almost all points you make here I totally agree
Looks like I chose the wrong post to pick my argument with:D.
On the other hand, the constant claims that the Democrats were forcing banks to make bad loans to people is unsupported nonsense.
As are the claims that it's all the evil banker's faults or all Bush's faults and that the Democrat congress smells like the proverbial rose... from what I've seen, whose fault it is depends mostly on the political views of the person assigning the blame. I guess I just don't like seeing the crisis used to push the 'regulatory' (currently Democrat) agenda, when "deregulation" per se was not to blame (incorrect regulation, greed, etc, yes, but from what I've seen of government, anything more than a bare minimum of regulation is almost guaranteed to be misguided in some way, likely including any regulations that are pushed through in current wave of "anti-deregulationism")... and your post seemed like as good a place to vent as any!
Did you even bother to read my post that you originally responded to?
Not really... this is slashdot. Actually, I was trying to point out that you're trying to invalidate (or so I thought) an entire line of reasoning based on one word which isn't necessarily the key to that line of reasoning.
if they weren't required to make these loans it invalidates all the claims of people saying they were requiring the banks to make these loans.
Really NOT - if they were in any way encouraged (intentionally or unintentionally) to make these loans, then the argument of the people saying that the CRA is culpable to a much larger degree than popularly acknowledged may still be a valid argument even though they overstated the strength of one of their premises by using the word required.
My only point was to ask the person to back up their claims that the CRA did require banks to make these loans which so far no one has been able to do.
If that's the case, then fair enough, we have no argument. In my experience, most people don't argue that the CRA didn't require the bad loans and then concede that the CRA still contributed in a material way to the housing crisis, which leads me to my final quote (sorry it's out of order):
And in fact many studies on this subject show that the loans made due to CRA were actually a minority percentage of all the bad ones.
So the argument is the degree to which the CRA contributed. Most may not say that the CRA didn't contribute at all, but they will say, like this does, that it was a minor contribution. My point is that even if it was a minority percentage, I'm not sure that that percentage couldn't have pushed a larger portion of the bad loans (whether because of a herd mentality or because the bad loans did work... for a while), and wouldn't have assured the actual issuers of those bad loans that they were good loans at the time ("I heard it was in the law..."). Like I said, I haven't seen those issues studied (if you have, feel free to correct me), and I'm not sure if they can be quantitatively studied, but I can very easily see a scenario where the damage done by the CRA is much larger than the small percentage of bad loans which it directly encouraged.
I'm not sure why you're so hung up on the word required - the government doesn't have to requireanything in order to move a market. And once that market's moving, the capitalist system pretty much ensures that everyone's going to jump on board, whether required to or not. In short, I've heard a lot of arguments that the CRA isn't at fault because it didn't hold a gun to anyone's head and force them to issue a bad mortgage... no, it didn't, but there are a lot more ways to motivate people than guns, so while that statement may be true, it in no way proves that the CRA wasn't at least a contributing factor to the current crisis.
My understanding was that the water coming in was the energy from the sun (ie, a constant, or at least uncontrollable with current technology - increased albedo would be part of expanding the drain)... polluting less would let natural processes work on unclogging the drain, and we may or may not be able to really bail out enough water to help with that... and yes, at this point it's definitely time to get BadAnalogyGuy involved:D. The analogy helps understand the science, but has nothing to do with the real benefits and costs of the solutions, which is what the OP was completely ignoring.
So if they keep hacking, what does that say about the hackers? Are the hackers sponsored by the IFPI, meaning they'd never listen to a request from the Pirate Bay? Or are they really just clever Pirate Bay hackers masquerading as IFPI hackers, in which case, they still wouldn't listen? Or could they possibly be IFPI hackers pretending to be Pirate Bay hackers masquerading as IFPI hackers?? It's so simple, really - all you have to do is divine from what you know of hackers...
I'm not a proponent of anthropogenic climate change because it's what I believe or because it's something I want to be true. I acknowledge that anthropogenic climate change is likely to be occurring because the overwhelming majority of climate scientists whose job it is to sift through all of the data, good and bad, and critic all of the theory have reached a consensus that it is a real phenomenon.
I'm not current enough on the research to either agree or disagree, but even if you're a proponent of anthropogenic climate change, that doesn't imply that you need to be a proponent of anthropogenic climate fixing (or whether that's even possible, or if it needs to be fixed), let alone the method of doing so. The problem with the global warming debate today is that it gets sidetracked on proving the problem and assumes that any "fix" at all is better than no fix, so any action on climate change is good action... which is so wrong it should be laughable...
If you can understand why a bathtub can overflow when you leave the faucet running, even if the drain is open at the same time, then you should be able to understand why greenhouse-induced climate change is inevitable. If this is beyond your powers of comprehension, I think they're probably hiring janitors at Rush Limbaugh's radio station...
Your argument seems to be that it's 'obvious' that humans are causing warming based on radiative forcing (ie, human activity is allowing more heat to enter the earth's atmosphere than to leave it). Using your analogy, there's a natural state in which the bathtub is receiving as much water as it allows to drain, but human activity is shrinking the drain... do you see the weakness in your argument yet, or does that take an 11-year-old comprehension??
Your assumption is that we're shrinking the drain, whereas even wikipedia's IPCC-approved graph shows that we both shrink and enlarge it, and that measuring the exactness of both is far from an exact science (although we do our best). Just off the top of my head, there could be significant factors other than those shown that fit in the anthropogenic category, there could be natural factors that far outweigh the anthropogenic ones that make warming inevitable anyways, and the error in the known anthropogenic categories can be legitimately scientifically debated.
I'm not saying your conclusion (we're causing the earth to warm somewhat) is wrong - I'm saying your oversimplification and childish dismissal of opponents is a great demonstration of everything that's wrong with the global warming movement. Of course, if your conclusion is actually that the Kyoto Protocol is correct and good and will solve all of our problems, then I guess yes, I am saying your conclusion is wrong.
Besides this the assumption that your debate opponent will accept your vague, unsubstantiated premise is considered terribly bad form.
Point taken, but sorry, this is an internet - worse, Slashdot! - post, not a doctoral dissertation (maybe someday:D).
I doubt it given your casual oversimplification and dismissal.
A fairly casual dismissal in and of itself, but I guess I'm asking for that by only putting in a few premises and a few of the conclusions I've reached and not the full argument - however, in the interests of time and me keeping my job, sorry, but that's likely to continue...
For the rest of your post, thank you - there are some well-reasoned points in there, and I can tell you've given this some thought and not just taken the easy way out (which, incidentally, is my main beef with most atheists/agnostics - it's pretty easy just to follow the crowd and trust the men in the white lab coats...) Your problems with religion and organized religion are very understandable (I have the same problems with most of the large organized churches/religions out there - action speaks much louder than words, to me), and the suspension of skepticism is indeed troublesome not just to people from a Jewish background.
At least somewhat counter-balancing that is the actions of other religious people who do indeed act out their beliefs in a very admirable way, and the desire to understand, not necessarily at a scientific/physical level, but at a more intellectual level, why it is that I do the things that I do, and why others do the things that they do. To me, the "lack of need" doesn't stop the curiosity - I can't be like a child in a play structure and just play with the shiny physical toys and not speculate on what else could be out there (even if it's just for my own satisfaction)...
Anyways, hope that's hand-wavy and vague enough for ya - I'm very much still at the beginning of my intellectual journey, and I recognize that, and looking at the length of this post - it's also a very large subject... one final point:
Think Plato's writings on the four elements and all the false "science" nonsense like that spawned.
Definitely nonsense and a false road in hindsight, but it did lead to modern science eventually. It seems to me, looking through history, that the road to any truth is generally not an easy one (even if the truth is almost self-evident). I see no reason to believe that it's easier on a personal level, and no reason to assume that we as a culture have arrived there yet.
"Why is the Universe here" is a totally different question from "Can life come from chemistry."
The real question is, when do you stop questioning?;) If I could figure out the answer to why the universe is here, then I have the 'ultimate' answer, the ultimate cause (including of life and consciousness). If I figure out that the answer to can life come from chemistry is yes, that leaves me with figuring out where chemistry comes from to get to the ultimate cause (or be satisfied with "it just is"... or "42"...)
That's a shorter explanation, not a simpler explanation.
Agreed.
Making life a question of energy and chemistry doesn't require anything else
It does require chemistry and energy, though, and then you end up in quantum physics and relativity and on to string theory, etc, etc, along with some far from simple mathematical constructs required to get us there - dig into any definition far enough, and the only conclusion I can come to is that life itself is far from simple...
And all the major religions of the world have absolutely no evidence for them. So if they're all equally likely, then the best conclusion is that they are equally false.
You're mistaking scientific, physical evidence with logical and/or experiential evidence (which in the end we all have to resolve on our own). If one religion doesn't jibe with my experience of human behavior and/or is provably (to me) a historical sham, then even though there's no physical evidence for it, I'm fine with discarding it as fake - to me, it is. Other religions aren't dismissed quite that easily. In fact, you could lump atheism in with "all religions" (by definition, there can be no physical evidence there is no God of any kind whatsoever), and be left with agnosticism, which isn't all that intellectually satisfying either (I may know I don't know, but I'm an optimist - I'll never stop looking and thinking).
The simplest explanation is that life is exactly as it appears to be: a very, very complex self-reproducing chemical reaction that is powered by the sun. THAT is the simplest explanation that fits the facts that we have.
All depends what you mean by simple - if you want to boil it down, "God did it" is an even simpler explanation. Having an effect without a cause (or, alternatively, having a real understanding of space-time where there is *no* beginning), which is what the scientific explanation comes down to if you have a linear understanding of time (which seems to be hard-wired into most of our brains) isn't exactly simple, either... And proving that something like math or music exists on its own with no actual material existence is something that's been done for the last 2500+ years, so what makes the possibility of a God existing (without being materially sense-able, but being 'spiritually' detectable to some) impossible?
Slashdot Mirror
It's now the party of anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, and racism, all things that were anathema to those old time conservatives.
I'm not gonna be some MSM conspiracy kook here, but seriously - you really think that 48% or whatever of Americans are anti-intellectual xenophobic racist apes? Citation needed! There are a lot of people left in the Republican party who are a whole lot closer to those old time conservatives than you think, and if they don't get noticed, it's only partly their own fault and largely the media's fault. And I mean both the left and the right media, both of whom focus on the extremists to the exclusion of all others - although at least the left-leaning media does focus on their own moderates once in a while.
I don't think your distinction between facts and truths completely holds up - facts by your definition being incontrovertible facts about the universe and truths being larger, more vague general statements. First of all, Obama's definitions almost certainly wasn't thinking of a distinct fact vs truth perspective, and secondly, even facts (by your definition) are almost guaranteed to be somewhat vague, which is why adding more and more facts together can be used to support two different truths.
...
Personally I think it has to go both ways - facts have to drive science which drives more (and possibly bigger to the point of reaching your definition of truth) facts, which drives more science, etc, etc. I think Obama's point was to sound clever and scientific - maybe I'm just cynical when it comes to politicians (even when every other word is hope and the rest are change), but I don't see any reason to narrow down the definition of the word "facts" to make a political speech actually make sense
If I pay for this research, then everyone gets the benefits. If someone else pays for it, then everyone still gets the benefits. But what if everyone waits for someone else to pay for it?
You're completely ignoring the opportunity cost of the research - if everyone spends their own money, then everyone gets their own benefits. This nebulous "research" is just a way to generate discussion, argument and hopefully goodwill - if we don't pin down what the money's spent on, all you're really guaranteed to get is a Slashdot discussion and some publicity (which of course is exactly why any politician would make a statement like this).
... your optimism is touching, but in my world, a government is the least efficient possible way for any citizen to get anything with their own money.
In reality, maybe you'll get some benefit from it, maybe not, but guaranteed you'll get the benefit of your tax money if it doesn't get taxed in the first place. By the above logic, we should all give as much of our money as possible to the government and let them spend it for us, that way everyone pays fairly and everyone benefits the maximum amount
"I want to be sure that facts are driving scientific decisions, not the other way around,"
Ummm ... I personally would rather that science was driving our facts first of all, instead of "facts" driving science ...
Unfortunately it's already over-qualified to replace congress ... :(
It's not like Obama and the rest of the Democrats were ... you know ... in power or presumptive nominees and leading the charge for the bailout even in Bush days ... no, it's Bush's screw-up, Obama's just going to fix it by allowing Bush's friends to have their little fun and then (probably next year) he's going to get responsible and stop the waste and ... ummmm ... fix the planet and ... dry our tears and ... give us *sob* hope *sob* ... In the meantime, he'll restore the "economy's" confidence by getting really angry that a company fulfilled some of it's on-the-books obligations as fully permitted by the bailout dollars and he'll do everything he can to get that tiny percentage of them back!
Not only are these retention bonuses, as other posters have pointed out, but don't you think maybe if the government was going to control how the bailout dollars were spent, they should have done so beforehand? Nothing like a little retroactive outrage and clawbacks to give the industry confidence to move forward ...
...).
(What I'm saying is, outrage, yes, but why against AIG, which is only fulfilling its contracts, doing its thing, and not against the government, which pushed this massive bill through in record-time because it was absolutely necessary and if you questioned it on items like this you were an "obstruction" and "partisan" and
You really think that a 700 billion dollar bank bailout is the most effective way to keep people from dying of hunger? How about the longer term implication of trillion dollar deficits (yeah, if the economy starts growing fast enough over the next couple of years, I'm sure politicians will be spending wisely to bring us back into the black)?
I agree 100% about not buying the reasoning - where do you get off comparing GDP to pure deficit spending?
...
...) - political theater at its finest ...
I disagree about the foreign nationals thing - to me, that's the same issue as giving out bonuses - AIG had obligations, the fed bailout didn't have any strings attached, now they're trying to retro-actively attach them, which is NOT a power we really want politicians to have
And purely out of curiosity, I'm wondering how much money congress's time spent trying to recover this bailout bonus money is worth (ie, how much it cost the taxpayer, not how much it should have cost the taxpayer
To me, it's obvious that free will doesn't exist.
As noted by other posters both here and elsewhere, it's far from obvious (although an over-simplification may make it seem so). To me, though, even though it's not obvious, it's irrelevant - the only thing that really matters with respect to free will is "are we responsible for our actions?" And to that, I say yes, whether or not we really have "free" will, in order for a society (or person) to function, we have to take (or in some cases, be made to take) responsibility for what we do, think, etc ... we can't blame it on some quantum randomness in our brains, even though it's entirely possible that I've been deluded into writing this post by a bunch of electrons that are no more "exercising free will" than I am right now.
The loans covered by CRA tended to have the same risk profile as other bank loans.
True, but also a red herring. If other bank loans were also influenced by the CRA to give out the same low-quality loans, the CRA is still at fault. It's quite possible that the CRA triggered the stampede by showing what was possible (and profitable ... for a time ...) and is thus still quite culpable without being directly responsible for the results.
But it was nice of you to try to make Bush look a little less incompetent.
Notice that even your list does that ... Bush I and Clinton both figure into that list, Bush II didn't have the wisdom/competence to turn the stampede, but it's arguable whether any president would have. Hopefully I'm proven wrong, but Obama so far seems to be encouraging it rather than turning it or just not noticing it.
The worst president in history still needs a kind word every once in a while.
I have a feeling you made up your mind about that one before deciding that the CRA was a red herring, and that there may be a causal relationship in there somewhere as well ... I'm not gonna argue that Bush II's domestic policy was a financial disaster (for the deficits caused by someone who shoulda known better, not as the final cause of the current global financial meltdown, although those deficits did rob the States of some potential cushioning and paved the way for the even worse than the Bush deficits bailouts). I'm far enough off topic already; I won't get into his foreign policy ...
On almost all points you make here I totally agree
Looks like I chose the wrong post to pick my argument with :D.
On the other hand, the constant claims that the Democrats were forcing banks to make bad loans to people is unsupported nonsense.
As are the claims that it's all the evil banker's faults or all Bush's faults and that the Democrat congress smells like the proverbial rose ... from what I've seen, whose fault it is depends mostly on the political views of the person assigning the blame. I guess I just don't like seeing the crisis used to push the 'regulatory' (currently Democrat) agenda, when "deregulation" per se was not to blame (incorrect regulation, greed, etc, yes, but from what I've seen of government, anything more than a bare minimum of regulation is almost guaranteed to be misguided in some way, likely including any regulations that are pushed through in current wave of "anti-deregulationism") ... and your post seemed like as good a place to vent as any!
Did you even bother to read my post that you originally responded to?
Not really ... this is slashdot. Actually, I was trying to point out that you're trying to invalidate (or so I thought) an entire line of reasoning based on one word which isn't necessarily the key to that line of reasoning.
if they weren't required to make these loans it invalidates all the claims of people saying they were requiring the banks to make these loans.
Really NOT - if they were in any way encouraged (intentionally or unintentionally) to make these loans, then the argument of the people saying that the CRA is culpable to a much larger degree than popularly acknowledged may still be a valid argument even though they overstated the strength of one of their premises by using the word required.
My only point was to ask the person to back up their claims that the CRA did require banks to make these loans which so far no one has been able to do.
If that's the case, then fair enough, we have no argument. In my experience, most people don't argue that the CRA didn't require the bad loans and then concede that the CRA still contributed in a material way to the housing crisis, which leads me to my final quote (sorry it's out of order):
And in fact many studies on this subject show that the loans made due to CRA were actually a minority percentage of all the bad ones.
So the argument is the degree to which the CRA contributed. Most may not say that the CRA didn't contribute at all, but they will say, like this does, that it was a minor contribution. My point is that even if it was a minority percentage, I'm not sure that that percentage couldn't have pushed a larger portion of the bad loans (whether because of a herd mentality or because the bad loans did work ... for a while), and wouldn't have assured the actual issuers of those bad loans that they were good loans at the time ("I heard it was in the law ..."). Like I said, I haven't seen those issues studied (if you have, feel free to correct me), and I'm not sure if they can be quantitatively studied, but I can very easily see a scenario where the damage done by the CRA is much larger than the small percentage of bad loans which it directly encouraged.
I'm not sure why you're so hung up on the word required - the government doesn't have to require anything in order to move a market. And once that market's moving, the capitalist system pretty much ensures that everyone's going to jump on board, whether required to or not. In short, I've heard a lot of arguments that the CRA isn't at fault because it didn't hold a gun to anyone's head and force them to issue a bad mortgage ... no, it didn't, but there are a lot more ways to motivate people than guns, so while that statement may be true, it in no way proves that the CRA wasn't at least a contributing factor to the current crisis.
allowing more water to come in.
My understanding was that the water coming in was the energy from the sun (ie, a constant, or at least uncontrollable with current technology - increased albedo would be part of expanding the drain) ... polluting less would let natural processes work on unclogging the drain, and we may or may not be able to really bail out enough water to help with that ... and yes, at this point it's definitely time to get BadAnalogyGuy involved :D. The analogy helps understand the science, but has nothing to do with the real benefits and costs of the solutions, which is what the OP was completely ignoring.
So if they keep hacking, what does that say about the hackers? Are the hackers sponsored by the IFPI, meaning they'd never listen to a request from the Pirate Bay? Or are they really just clever Pirate Bay hackers masquerading as IFPI hackers, in which case, they still wouldn't listen? Or could they possibly be IFPI hackers pretending to be Pirate Bay hackers masquerading as IFPI hackers?? It's so simple, really - all you have to do is divine from what you know of hackers ...
I'm not a proponent of anthropogenic climate change because it's what I believe or because it's something I want to be true. I acknowledge that anthropogenic climate change is likely to be occurring because the overwhelming majority of climate scientists whose job it is to sift through all of the data, good and bad, and critic all of the theory have reached a consensus that it is a real phenomenon.
I'm not current enough on the research to either agree or disagree, but even if you're a proponent of anthropogenic climate change, that doesn't imply that you need to be a proponent of anthropogenic climate fixing (or whether that's even possible, or if it needs to be fixed), let alone the method of doing so. The problem with the global warming debate today is that it gets sidetracked on proving the problem and assumes that any "fix" at all is better than no fix, so any action on climate change is good action ... which is so wrong it should be laughable ...
If you can understand why a bathtub can overflow when you leave the faucet running, even if the drain is open at the same time, then you should be able to understand why greenhouse-induced climate change is inevitable. If this is beyond your powers of comprehension, I think they're probably hiring janitors at Rush Limbaugh's radio station...
Your argument seems to be that it's 'obvious' that humans are causing warming based on radiative forcing (ie, human activity is allowing more heat to enter the earth's atmosphere than to leave it). Using your analogy, there's a natural state in which the bathtub is receiving as much water as it allows to drain, but human activity is shrinking the drain ... do you see the weakness in your argument yet, or does that take an 11-year-old comprehension??
Your assumption is that we're shrinking the drain, whereas even wikipedia's IPCC-approved graph shows that we both shrink and enlarge it, and that measuring the exactness of both is far from an exact science (although we do our best). Just off the top of my head, there could be significant factors other than those shown that fit in the anthropogenic category, there could be natural factors that far outweigh the anthropogenic ones that make warming inevitable anyways, and the error in the known anthropogenic categories can be legitimately scientifically debated.
I'm not saying your conclusion (we're causing the earth to warm somewhat) is wrong - I'm saying your oversimplification and childish dismissal of opponents is a great demonstration of everything that's wrong with the global warming movement. Of course, if your conclusion is actually that the Kyoto Protocol is correct and good and will solve all of our problems, then I guess yes, I am saying your conclusion is wrong.
Besides this the assumption that your debate opponent will accept your vague, unsubstantiated premise is considered terribly bad form.
Point taken, but sorry, this is an internet - worse, Slashdot! - post, not a doctoral dissertation (maybe someday :D).
I doubt it given your casual oversimplification and dismissal.
A fairly casual dismissal in and of itself, but I guess I'm asking for that by only putting in a few premises and a few of the conclusions I've reached and not the full argument - however, in the interests of time and me keeping my job, sorry, but that's likely to continue ...
...) Your problems with religion and organized religion are very understandable (I have the same problems with most of the large organized churches/religions out there - action speaks much louder than words, to me), and the suspension of skepticism is indeed troublesome not just to people from a Jewish background.
...
... one final point:
For the rest of your post, thank you - there are some well-reasoned points in there, and I can tell you've given this some thought and not just taken the easy way out (which, incidentally, is my main beef with most atheists/agnostics - it's pretty easy just to follow the crowd and trust the men in the white lab coats
At least somewhat counter-balancing that is the actions of other religious people who do indeed act out their beliefs in a very admirable way, and the desire to understand, not necessarily at a scientific/physical level, but at a more intellectual level, why it is that I do the things that I do, and why others do the things that they do. To me, the "lack of need" doesn't stop the curiosity - I can't be like a child in a play structure and just play with the shiny physical toys and not speculate on what else could be out there (even if it's just for my own satisfaction)
Anyways, hope that's hand-wavy and vague enough for ya - I'm very much still at the beginning of my intellectual journey, and I recognize that, and looking at the length of this post - it's also a very large subject
Think Plato's writings on the four elements and all the false "science" nonsense like that spawned.
Definitely nonsense and a false road in hindsight, but it did lead to modern science eventually. It seems to me, looking through history, that the road to any truth is generally not an easy one (even if the truth is almost self-evident). I see no reason to believe that it's easier on a personal level, and no reason to assume that we as a culture have arrived there yet.
"Why is the Universe here" is a totally different question from "Can life come from chemistry."
The real question is, when do you stop questioning? ;) If I could figure out the answer to why the universe is here, then I have the 'ultimate' answer, the ultimate cause (including of life and consciousness). If I figure out that the answer to can life come from chemistry is yes, that leaves me with figuring out where chemistry comes from to get to the ultimate cause (or be satisfied with "it just is" ... or "42" ...)
That's a shorter explanation, not a simpler explanation.
Agreed.
Making life a question of energy and chemistry doesn't require anything else
It does require chemistry and energy, though, and then you end up in quantum physics and relativity and on to string theory, etc, etc, along with some far from simple mathematical constructs required to get us there - dig into any definition far enough, and the only conclusion I can come to is that life itself is far from simple ...
And all the major religions of the world have absolutely no evidence for them. So if they're all equally likely, then the best conclusion is that they are equally false.
You're mistaking scientific, physical evidence with logical and/or experiential evidence (which in the end we all have to resolve on our own). If one religion doesn't jibe with my experience of human behavior and/or is provably (to me) a historical sham, then even though there's no physical evidence for it, I'm fine with discarding it as fake - to me, it is. Other religions aren't dismissed quite that easily. In fact, you could lump atheism in with "all religions" (by definition, there can be no physical evidence there is no God of any kind whatsoever), and be left with agnosticism, which isn't all that intellectually satisfying either (I may know I don't know, but I'm an optimist - I'll never stop looking and thinking).
The simplest explanation is that life is exactly as it appears to be: a very, very complex self-reproducing chemical reaction that is powered by the sun. THAT is the simplest explanation that fits the facts that we have.
All depends what you mean by simple - if you want to boil it down, "God did it" is an even simpler explanation. Having an effect without a cause (or, alternatively, having a real understanding of space-time where there is *no* beginning), which is what the scientific explanation comes down to if you have a linear understanding of time (which seems to be hard-wired into most of our brains) isn't exactly simple, either ... And proving that something like math or music exists on its own with no actual material existence is something that's been done for the last 2500+ years, so what makes the possibility of a God existing (without being materially sense-able, but being 'spiritually' detectable to some) impossible?
Why do you need "hope" in *anything*
Your sig makes that statement just a little bit ironic ... :D
At least, until you read the title of the article your commenting on - "The Universe is 13.73 Billion Years Old" - not infinite ...