Ever listened to Onyx? How about Redman? Or Tupac? What about Ice T?
All of these artists create music which fits Signal 11's generalization, which hasn't got a damned thing to do with race. And generally speaking, I like it. Not as much as I like the Beatles, or Otis Redding, or Bach, for that matter, but it's good stuff.
Signal 11's post was not an attack. It was humor, as much at ESR's expense as anyone's.
Na.
If you don't know this is Dr. Skald... Ain't shit changed motherfucka... pack your own heat... supply your own ammo, hacka...
"People of African descent" are quite self-aware, and their self-parodies are often a lot harsher than this. And no, I, for one, am not a suburbanite. If you like, I'll go get a real, live black person (like my girlfriend) to tell you this is funny.
A small, round satellite may be orbiting the earth.
NOW THEY WANT IT TO GO TO WASTE!!!
Okay, you may not realize this, but in 1997 French high-school students built a replica of the original Sputnik satellite. It was put into orbit with the help of Russian Cosmonauts in November of that year, and its battery died late that December.
As far as I'm aware, it's probably still up there!!!
So here's my plan. If everyone on Slashdot sends me just a little money (and some of you make a lot, so don't be cheap-asses!), I may be able to get some Cosmonauts to replace the battery. I took a semester of Russian once, so Russians tend to like me, making this a very plausible plan!
Alternately, if they can't find the thing, I can definitely reprogram one of the Iridium Satellites to go, "Beep... beep... beep..." And I swear I'll GPL the code. For God's sake, there are 66 of them, the least they can do is let us use one for a good cause!
Think it over. Why not direct your money towards helping establish the world's first Open-Source imitation Soviet satellite? Anyway, my car needs painted.
Most of my professors are platonists, but none of them have any good reasons.
My reasons are as good as any I've found. Which isn't saying all that much, but it's something. And as a non-mathmetician, I can find no ulterior motives I'd have for being a Platonist, which is encouraging. But none of that's very relevant to the topic at hand.
I think they chose to be platonist because they did not really consider physics as a part of the question. IMHO this is a big mistake in the history of mathematics.
I'd like to disagree, but I'm not qualified to. I really need to buckle down and learn some math.
A set of religious values, contained, perhaps, in a holy text, may provide the tools for a believer to seek happiness, heaven, whatever.
My point was that no one is activly working on these tools. They are just discussing interpretations or something which is on the egenering side by my analogy.
As a field matures, there are naturally fewer discoveries to be made, and less work gets done in that field. This phenomenon is common to both the sciences and the humanities. It doesn't mean the corpus of knowlege which was discovered during the field's heyday is then useless for engineering. To the contrary: it's better, because it's better understood.
I still don't see that religion lacks the divide. "What is true?" and "what should I do?" are different questions, distinct in the minds of most religious thinkers, and the former informs the latter.
I agree it is dangerously cirular, but all these arguments are dangerously circular.. and we all must go home and make our philosophical decisions based on practical physical experence at some point.. Oh the irony!
Indeed. I'm skeptical regarding the very possibility of empirical knowledge, but I still open doors before I try to walk through them.
But if you don't credit the scientific method with something better than velcro, you don't have much of a case against belief systems which don't include it (the method, that is, not the velcro). Organized religion, for instance.
The above cicularity seems pretty typical of philosophical arguments which is why I beleive physics is prior to philosophy..
You've surely thought of this, but physics is predicated upon the belief in a world external to the viewer, a world which is predictable, and governed by laws which may be known through the senses. Various other assumptions are necessary as well... about the nature of probability, for instance. For these reasons, I cannot consider physics to be prior to philosophy.
that and the fact that it just makes a lot of sence evolutionarily speaking.
Again, fairly obviously, evolution is a theory born of empiricism. My last point applies here.
Stick to the point of the conversation, please. You remark about the "rationality" of Mathematics, while cleverly casuistic, is completely off-topic.
Well, at least you credit it with cleverness!:-) I promise, I am aiming at the point of the conversation, and will return to it.
Weezul has alleged that a religous system of beliefs is not a rational system of beliefs. I would like to show that this is not so, and thus am inquiring into the nature of rationality. I regard this as a fairly necessary preliminary. After all, it'd be hard to defend organized irrationality.
The post was wholly on-topic, though it wasn't obviously so.
The key difference is, with science, one can always investigate the beliefs for themselves, and confirm or deny them based on the evidence at hand.
You certainly can't investigate all of them. Or even all the ones which create the conceptual framework by which you're evaluating the experiment you're presently performing. There are quite a lot of them.
With religion, you're still stuck with "the Bible tells me so, and it feels right, so it must be true."
Oh, no you aren't. Don't be silly. Maybe with certain totally unphilosophical branches of Christianity. That this is not the case with most religions is pretty self-evident.
Ha, multiply all the trouble and strife that goes wiv a wife by four! This is an argument against Islam.
Yes, this had occured to me.:-) Nevertheless, it doesn't require you to have four, so I take freedom to be a good thing. Also, it's an argument that Allah has a good sense of humor. "Go ahead... you can have four wives... sucker!"
And all that food and drinks you are not allowed to have!
I don't drink, or eat much pork, so I'm not inclined to care. But good point.
But Islamic banks have 0% interest rates.
That I dislike. Usury laws retarded economic growth dreadfully in Europe of the Middle Ages. But then, I'm one of those laissez-faire capitalism-uber-alles guys.
And there are the massive conversions because it is a better living. 13th-century Bosnia, 8th-century Spain, Marx' ancestors,...
Hey, don't think I'm not for sale. You're talking to the guy who used to put "religious cult leader" on questionnaires about career aspirations back in high school.
Now I'm just a Slashdotter... I guess I didn't wind up the cult leader...
I hate to start a flame war or anything, but when exactly was slavery outlawed in Virginia?
Lol... no offense at all, your point is most apropos. The Emancipation Proclamation took effect January 1, 1863, freeing all slaves in the United States.
The reference to slavery was surely not accidental. The "founding fathers" of the United States were all too aware of the paradoxical nature of what they were doing, and of the blatant contradiction between their lofty beliefs and the reality of slavery. Patrick Henry's full purpose in saying this is an interesting question for historians to debate.
When your god commands you to kill, what are you going to do? This isn't "in the abstract" - just read the words, and pay attention!
You're presuming a lot... though with some justification, I suppose. I'm not a particularly religious person, ironically. To say the least, if God commanded me to kill, I'd be surprised.
How long has it been since you read the Old Testament, which is the basis upon which much of Christianity and virtually all of Judaism is built?
I've never read the whole thing... parts like Leviticus are just too damned boring. But taking your question generally, not long ago at all. I love it. It's amazingly profound, weird, great in that way that only the product of thousands of brilliant minds can be.
And yes, it's wonderfully violent. Lots of folks getting smitten by God's wrathful hand.
You forgot "unjust"! Solomon has lots of strange wives, dabbles in other religions, just has a good ol' time, and God says, "Now Solomon! Naughty! You just cut that out!" But Job is "blameless before the Lord." And for a lark, God lets Satan have his way... Job is sticken with leprosy, his children are slaughtered, his house is burnt, and to top it off, his idiot friends come along to say, "cheer up!"
How can you not love this book?
Anyway, I'm getting off the point. First off, there's more to religion than that. Buddhism, Daoism, Jainism, about a thousand flavors of Hinduism, and so on. Your points are too narrow.
Second, Jesus said, "let him among you who is without blame cast the first stone." There's a lot in Christianity to explain, and I'm not the one to do it, but it seems to me more pacifistic than anything. Scripture is a matter of much debate, but the wiser Christians I've known are tolerant, peace-loving people, and I'm not willing to condemn their religion without compelling reason.
Judaism seems a little rougher, but I like it. There is a lot more to the Jewish scriptural tradition than the "Old Testiment", as Christians like to call it, and again, I'm no expert.
I'm even less so with Islam, and I'd love to gain some insight from someone who was. Muslims I've known have assured me that theirs is a non-violent religion, and that corrupt leaders are perverting it when the use it to espouse terrorism.
Anyway, sorry to hear about your negative experiences. I can only suppose that had you been raised, say, a Mahayana Buddhist, you might have been happier and have come to a brighter outlook on religion. But may you find happiness in your philosophy.
BTW, Pardon my ignorance, but whilst I grew up with Mr Heinlein, who is Mr Henry ?
Patrick Henry (1736-1799) was, amongst other things, governor of Virginia, but he was best known as an orator... "The Voice of the Revolution". A real troublemaker, whose boundless eloquence helped incite the American Revolution.
His most famous quote might sound familiar:
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! - 1775
ROFL! Nice one... I'm impressed. More so if you didn't cheat and go peeking at a bunch of the posts as you made your chart.
OTOH, I must argue that the process is a good one, if an old one. I would argue that philosophy is a process more than a field of study. Finding the intelligent posts, considering them, arguing them and learning from them is one of the best uses of Slashdot. That there's not much original to it (including this post) doesn't matter much to me.
Anyway, I guess Ad-Banner-Revenue is a good thing, since it funds the site.
Yes, "irrational" is tricky to define and mathematics is a sticky point, but I think it is safe to think of our rules of logic as a "physical" theory based on our experence.
That's an interesting outlook. Personally, I'm inclined to say just the opposite: I'm a Platonist at heart, and I regard logic and mathematics as posessing a transcendant, non-physical reality.
But from my understanding, mathematcians have come to have their own definition of Mathematical Platonism. Apparently it holds that since mathematics is real, certain branches of mathematics which deal with possible worlds which contradict other possible worlds are invalid. I certainly don't agree with that.
But then, I'm not a mathematician, so what do I know?:-)
Anyway, I would classify any system of beliefs which does not contain contradictions as a rational system. Theological systems may therefore qualify. Integrating them with a significant system of beliefs about the tangible world is a separate issue, though an important one to most theologians.
We have only one real theory of logic, we test the hypothosis frequently, it works out frequently, so we continue to use it.
An empirical logician? You sure you're a graduate student in math?:-)
The scientist is only supposed to build and test theories, but the engener actually needs to figure out what to use.
Not only that, his work involves purpose, an objective. Not the sort of thing which can ultimately be arrived at empircially.
The science provides the engeners with something concreate to argue over the relivance to a specific problem.
True. But then science is only one field which may provide the tools with which to achieve one's aims. Number theory may provide the tools for a cryptologist to make a cypher. A set of religious values, contained, perhaps, in a holy text, may provide the tools for a believer to seek happiness, heaven, whatever.
This stands in contrast to religion where there is no science side (or they are combined in the case of new religions and cults which can change their rules). The divide between science and engenering helps both stay more objective.. and religion lacks this divide.
I believe the relationship you're describing is that between facts and objectives. Science and engineering are a special case. And raising scientific fact above religious tenet isn't going to be very easy, either. You can't praise it as rational... you choose to define rationality as a physical theory based upon our experience. The argument becomes circular. You need somehow to connect rationality with truth.
I agree the above ideas are not water-tight. It was a psychology professor who first pointed this out to me.. he used it to prevent people from discussing religion and public policy in his classes.. execpt when he wanted them to talk about those things.
First off, you should know I'm a great lover of science and technology. I regard the scientific endeavor as hugely important to anybody aiming at The Truth. Just not all-important.
Please, don't think of science as a way of living or a code of ethics or anything like that - all that science is is a tool for learning about and describing the world.
I don't. But then, that's really one of science's big limitations, isn't it? It can't tell us what to do, only how to do it.
Religion and philosophy can, for good or ill.
Religious leaders and their followers, on the other hand, _do_ kill in the name of their religion, and some religious sects actually require killing in some circumstances.
Sure. They also save people in the name of their religion... but, of course, not in the name of science. Religion (and I'll keep throwing in philosophy, too) is important to providing human motivation to do anything. So criticizing religion, in the abstract, for killing people is just as unreasonable as it would be for science.
And I would certainly argue that most religions have a serious problem with wantonly killing people, at least if you equate the religion itself to the scripture it's based on. I would go so far as to call the others a "lunatic fringe". People, on the other hand, are much less particular about killing people, and they come up with all kinds of reasons.
HELL, let's try and use science to justify killing a bunch of people because Our God Said So!
I've got a better idea: how about killing a bunch of people in order to protect the genetic integrity of the human race? The final solution to the Jewish problem...
I can't see/touch/hear/measure/understand it, but the bible tells me so
How many of your scientific beliefs have you personally empirically verified? And how many of them have you gotten from books? Did On the Origin of Species tell you so?
And that's just scratching the surface of the problems with science and knowledge.
But I really think this argument is in danger of becoming a matter of semantics. How do you define faith, and how do you define reason? Those are the real questions which must be answered before you can make meaningful statements about them, or their relationship.
Like it or not, there's no real reason to prefer christianity over islam, scientology, or greek mythology.
Ok, first of all, in Islam you can have 4 wives, in Christianity you can only have one. Islam beats Christianity.
Homer's Greek is better than God's, but it's not God's first language. Hades isn't as bad as Hell, but it's more inevitable. Tough call. I'm going to give the nod to Christianity, because I'd rather piss off Zeus than Jehovah.
John Travolta is a Scientologist. Greek Mythology is better than Scientology.
There. You just can't take the shallow view of these things.
Further, they conflict with each other, so no, they 'cant all just be friends'
Greek Mythology conflicts with Scientology? Damn. I wonder if you can be a Unitarian Druid?
People will try to do this with any belief system, but an irrational system (i.e. not using the scientific method) will make it much easier.
I hate to be pedantic, but you're surely you don't mean to define a irrational system as one which doesn't use the scientific method? What about math?
People still abuse the social interpretation of scientific theories (extreams of social darwinism for example), but the fact that people understand the distiction between a scientific theory and a social interpretation of it makes this harder to do.
Do they? What is it?
Please don't be annoyed; take it as flattery. I thought your statements held enough water to be interesting... but I don't think they're water-tight. And I think the answers to these questions are important.
Probably killed just as many people as it's ever helped.
Wow... again, sounds like science!
Like the man said though, the problem is the people who are too arrogant to admit that they could be wrong.
Hey... sounds like some (I said some) scientists!
After all, isn't science what's made possible the bloodiest wars in the history of mankind? Zyclon B, Thalidimide, the machine gun, heck, atomic weaponry! Say what you will about religious zealots... by themselves, they'd never find the means to make the human race extinct.
Let's not get carried away. Both science and religion offer positive and negative. I'd argue they both offer much more positive. But whatever the case, neither should be dismissed out of hand.
I truly beg to differ - I found Edward Scissorhands, The Nighmare Before Christmas, and especially Ed Wood were all strongly visual yet fundamentally story/theme driven.
I haven't yet seen Ed Wood (and I've been meaning to forever), but I thought both the other films meandered quite a bit. And I'd certainly say they were fundamentally visual. Though I liked them, mind you, story and all, and I hope I'm not appearing too harsh.
We'll probably just have to agree to disagree here. I've always been struck with Burton's talent, but his movies never seem, to me, really polished, never quite perfect. I think he could really use an editor. I think the right team could take Burton's films to the next level... greatness. Sort of like what George Martin and Phil Spector did (IMHO) for the Beatles.
Actually, you know an author whose work would be perfect for Burton to adapt? E.T.A. Hoffmann. Nutcracker and the King of Mice - the original, not the silly opera - would be a great Burton project. Dark, weird, somewhat offbalance itself, but compelling, and intensely visual.
Yeah, not much of a contingency plan when there's only one female and she gets the bad freezer. Duh.
Not to mention the fact that females reproduce serially, while males can reproduce in parallel. Serious performance bottleneck, even if she'd survived.
It seems to me that if this is as cool as they say it is, it's a good solution to a more general problem. Why just apply this to translating binaries? It could work for interpreted languages as well.
When you run a Perl program, for instance, it actually compiles and then runs... unlike most interpreted languages, which translate and run instructions one at a time. Instead, a Perl script could begin to run translating one instruction at a time, go until it hit a trace condition, increment the counter, and so on.
Following the Perl example, the down side is that Perl does some compile-time error checking, which wouldn't be done if you used this algorithm.
I'm speculating off the top of my head, mind you... but then, if I'm not talking sense, I'm sure someone will let me know!;-)
I Feel it is My Duty to Clarify this Nonsense
on
Perl 5.6.0 Out
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· Score: 3
why say you randall schwartz is felon?
He was convicted of three felony counts of computer crimes against his employers a few years back. Here's a page with details.
To put it mildly, many hackers thought Randal was the victim in the whole affair... but read, and decide for yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
All of these artists create music which fits Signal 11's generalization, which hasn't got a damned thing to do with race. And generally speaking, I like it. Not as much as I like the Beatles, or Otis Redding, or Bach, for that matter, but it's good stuff.
Signal 11's post was not an attack. It was humor, as much at ESR's expense as anyone's.
Na.
If you don't know this is Dr. Skald... Ain't shit changed motherfucka... pack your own heat... supply your own ammo, hacka...
Lighten up.
NOW THEY WANT IT TO GO TO WASTE!!!
Okay, you may not realize this, but in 1997 French high-school students built a replica of the original Sputnik satellite. It was put into orbit with the help of Russian Cosmonauts in November of that year, and its battery died late that December.
As far as I'm aware, it's probably still up there!!!
So here's my plan. If everyone on Slashdot sends me just a little money (and some of you make a lot, so don't be cheap-asses! ), I may be able to get some Cosmonauts to replace the battery. I took a semester of Russian once, so Russians tend to like me, making this a very plausible plan!
Alternately, if they can't find the thing, I can definitely reprogram one of the Iridium Satellites to go, "Beep... beep... beep..." And I swear I'll GPL the code. For God's sake, there are 66 of them, the least they can do is let us use one for a good cause!
Think it over. Why not direct your money towards helping establish the world's first Open-Source imitation Soviet satellite? Anyway, my car needs painted.
My reasons are as good as any I've found. Which isn't saying all that much, but it's something. And as a non-mathmetician, I can find no ulterior motives I'd have for being a Platonist, which is encouraging. But none of that's very relevant to the topic at hand.
I think they chose to be platonist because they did not really consider physics as a part of the question. IMHO this is a big mistake in the history of mathematics.
I'd like to disagree, but I'm not qualified to. I really need to buckle down and learn some math.
A set of religious values, contained, perhaps, in a holy text, may provide the tools for a believer to seek happiness, heaven, whatever.
My point was that no one is activly working on these tools. They are just discussing interpretations or something which is on the egenering side by my analogy.
As a field matures, there are naturally fewer discoveries to be made, and less work gets done in that field. This phenomenon is common to both the sciences and the humanities. It doesn't mean the corpus of knowlege which was discovered during the field's heyday is then useless for engineering. To the contrary: it's better, because it's better understood.
I still don't see that religion lacks the divide. "What is true?" and "what should I do?" are different questions, distinct in the minds of most religious thinkers, and the former informs the latter.
I agree it is dangerously cirular, but all these arguments are dangerously circular.. and we all must go home and make our philosophical decisions based on practical physical experence at some point.. Oh the irony!
Indeed. I'm skeptical regarding the very possibility of empirical knowledge, but I still open doors before I try to walk through them.
But if you don't credit the scientific method with something better than velcro, you don't have much of a case against belief systems which don't include it (the method, that is, not the velcro). Organized religion, for instance.
The above cicularity seems pretty typical of philosophical arguments which is why I beleive physics is prior to philosophy..
You've surely thought of this, but physics is predicated upon the belief in a world external to the viewer, a world which is predictable, and governed by laws which may be known through the senses. Various other assumptions are necessary as well... about the nature of probability, for instance. For these reasons, I cannot consider physics to be prior to philosophy.
that and the fact that it just makes a lot of sence evolutionarily speaking.
Again, fairly obviously, evolution is a theory born of empiricism. My last point applies here.
Well, at least you credit it with cleverness! :-) I promise, I am aiming at the point of the conversation, and will return to it.
Weezul has alleged that a religous system of beliefs is not a rational system of beliefs. I would like to show that this is not so, and thus am inquiring into the nature of rationality. I regard this as a fairly necessary preliminary. After all, it'd be hard to defend organized irrationality.
The post was wholly on-topic, though it wasn't obviously so.
You certainly can't investigate all of them. Or even all the ones which create the conceptual framework by which you're evaluating the experiment you're presently performing. There are quite a lot of them.
With religion, you're still stuck with "the Bible tells me so, and it feels right, so it must be true."
Oh, no you aren't. Don't be silly. Maybe with certain totally unphilosophical branches of Christianity. That this is not the case with most religions is pretty self-evident.
Yes, this had occured to me. :-) Nevertheless, it doesn't require you to have four, so I take freedom to be a good thing. Also, it's an argument that Allah has a good sense of humor. "Go ahead... you can have four wives... sucker!"
And all that food and drinks you are not allowed to have!
I don't drink, or eat much pork, so I'm not inclined to care. But good point.
But Islamic banks have 0% interest rates.
That I dislike. Usury laws retarded economic growth dreadfully in Europe of the Middle Ages. But then, I'm one of those laissez-faire capitalism-uber-alles guys.
And there are the massive conversions because it is a better living. 13th-century Bosnia, 8th-century Spain, Marx' ancestors,...
Hey, don't think I'm not for sale. You're talking to the guy who used to put "religious cult leader" on questionnaires about career aspirations back in high school.
Now I'm just a Slashdotter... I guess I didn't wind up the cult leader...
Lol... no offense at all, your point is most apropos. The Emancipation Proclamation took effect January 1, 1863, freeing all slaves in the United States.
The reference to slavery was surely not accidental. The "founding fathers" of the United States were all too aware of the paradoxical nature of what they were doing, and of the blatant contradiction between their lofty beliefs and the reality of slavery. Patrick Henry's full purpose in saying this is an interesting question for historians to debate.
You're presuming a lot... though with some justification, I suppose. I'm not a particularly religious person, ironically. To say the least, if God commanded me to kill, I'd be surprised.
How long has it been since you read the Old Testament, which is the basis upon which much of Christianity and virtually all of Judaism is built?
I've never read the whole thing... parts like Leviticus are just too damned boring. But taking your question generally, not long ago at all. I love it. It's amazingly profound, weird, great in that way that only the product of thousands of brilliant minds can be.
And yes, it's wonderfully violent. Lots of folks getting smitten by God's wrathful hand.
You forgot "unjust"! Solomon has lots of strange wives, dabbles in other religions, just has a good ol' time, and God says, "Now Solomon! Naughty! You just cut that out!" But Job is "blameless before the Lord." And for a lark, God lets Satan have his way... Job is sticken with leprosy, his children are slaughtered, his house is burnt, and to top it off, his idiot friends come along to say, "cheer up!"
How can you not love this book?
Anyway, I'm getting off the point. First off, there's more to religion than that. Buddhism, Daoism, Jainism, about a thousand flavors of Hinduism, and so on. Your points are too narrow.
Second, Jesus said, "let him among you who is without blame cast the first stone." There's a lot in Christianity to explain, and I'm not the one to do it, but it seems to me more pacifistic than anything. Scripture is a matter of much debate, but the wiser Christians I've known are tolerant, peace-loving people, and I'm not willing to condemn their religion without compelling reason.
Judaism seems a little rougher, but I like it. There is a lot more to the Jewish scriptural tradition than the "Old Testiment", as Christians like to call it, and again, I'm no expert.
I'm even less so with Islam, and I'd love to gain some insight from someone who was. Muslims I've known have assured me that theirs is a non-violent religion, and that corrupt leaders are perverting it when the use it to espouse terrorism.
Anyway, sorry to hear about your negative experiences. I can only suppose that had you been raised, say, a Mahayana Buddhist, you might have been happier and have come to a brighter outlook on religion. But may you find happiness in your philosophy.
Patrick Henry (1736-1799) was, amongst other things, governor of Virginia, but he was best known as an orator... "The Voice of the Revolution". A real troublemaker, whose boundless eloquence helped incite the American Revolution.
His most famous quote might sound familiar:
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! - 1775
OTOH, I must argue that the process is a good one, if an old one. I would argue that philosophy is a process more than a field of study. Finding the intelligent posts, considering them, arguing them and learning from them is one of the best uses of Slashdot. That there's not much original to it (including this post) doesn't matter much to me.
Anyway, I guess Ad-Banner-Revenue is a good thing, since it funds the site.
Yes, "irrational" is tricky to define and mathematics is a sticky point, but I think it is safe to think of our rules of logic as a "physical" theory based on our experence.
That's an interesting outlook. Personally, I'm inclined to say just the opposite: I'm a Platonist at heart, and I regard logic and mathematics as posessing a transcendant, non-physical reality.
But from my understanding, mathematcians have come to have their own definition of Mathematical Platonism. Apparently it holds that since mathematics is real, certain branches of mathematics which deal with possible worlds which contradict other possible worlds are invalid. I certainly don't agree with that.
But then, I'm not a mathematician, so what do I know? :-)
Anyway, I would classify any system of beliefs which does not contain contradictions as a rational system. Theological systems may therefore qualify. Integrating them with a significant system of beliefs about the tangible world is a separate issue, though an important one to most theologians.
We have only one real theory of logic, we test the hypothosis frequently, it works out frequently, so we continue to use it.
An empirical logician? You sure you're a graduate student in math? :-)
The scientist is only supposed to build and test theories, but the engener actually needs to figure out what to use.
Not only that, his work involves purpose, an objective. Not the sort of thing which can ultimately be arrived at empircially.
The science provides the engeners with something concreate to argue over the relivance to a specific problem.
True. But then science is only one field which may provide the tools with which to achieve one's aims. Number theory may provide the tools for a cryptologist to make a cypher. A set of religious values, contained, perhaps, in a holy text, may provide the tools for a believer to seek happiness, heaven, whatever.
This stands in contrast to religion where there is no science side (or they are combined in the case of new religions and cults which can change their rules). The divide between science and engenering helps both stay more objective.. and religion lacks this divide.
I believe the relationship you're describing is that between facts and objectives. Science and engineering are a special case. And raising scientific fact above religious tenet isn't going to be very easy, either. You can't praise it as rational... you choose to define rationality as a physical theory based upon our experience. The argument becomes circular. You need somehow to connect rationality with truth.
I agree the above ideas are not water-tight. It was a psychology professor who first pointed this out to me.. he used it to prevent people from discussing religion and public policy in his classes.. execpt when he wanted them to talk about those things.
Lol! Crafty devil.
Please, don't think of science as a way of living or a code of ethics or anything like that - all that science is is a tool for learning about and describing the world.
I don't. But then, that's really one of science's big limitations, isn't it? It can't tell us what to do, only how to do it.
Religion and philosophy can, for good or ill.
Religious leaders and their followers, on the other hand, _do_ kill in the name of their religion, and some religious sects actually require killing in some circumstances.
Sure. They also save people in the name of their religion... but, of course, not in the name of science. Religion (and I'll keep throwing in philosophy, too) is important to providing human motivation to do anything. So criticizing religion, in the abstract, for killing people is just as unreasonable as it would be for science.
And I would certainly argue that most religions have a serious problem with wantonly killing people, at least if you equate the religion itself to the scripture it's based on. I would go so far as to call the others a "lunatic fringe". People, on the other hand, are much less particular about killing people, and they come up with all kinds of reasons.
I've got a better idea: how about killing a bunch of people in order to protect the genetic integrity of the human race? The final solution to the Jewish problem...
How many of your scientific beliefs have you personally empirically verified? And how many of them have you gotten from books? Did On the Origin of Species tell you so?
And that's just scratching the surface of the problems with science and knowledge.
But I really think this argument is in danger of becoming a matter of semantics. How do you define faith, and how do you define reason? Those are the real questions which must be answered before you can make meaningful statements about them, or their relationship.
Ok, first of all, in Islam you can have 4 wives, in Christianity you can only have one. Islam beats Christianity.
Homer's Greek is better than God's, but it's not God's first language. Hades isn't as bad as Hell, but it's more inevitable. Tough call. I'm going to give the nod to Christianity, because I'd rather piss off Zeus than Jehovah.
John Travolta is a Scientologist. Greek Mythology is better than Scientology.
There. You just can't take the shallow view of these things.
Further, they conflict with each other, so no, they 'cant all just be friends'
Greek Mythology conflicts with Scientology? Damn. I wonder if you can be a Unitarian Druid?
I hate to be pedantic, but you're surely you don't mean to define a irrational system as one which doesn't use the scientific method? What about math?
People still abuse the social interpretation of scientific theories (extreams of social darwinism for example), but the fact that people understand the distiction between a scientific theory and a social interpretation of it makes this harder to do.
Do they? What is it?
Please don't be annoyed; take it as flattery. I thought your statements held enough water to be interesting... but I don't think they're water-tight. And I think the answers to these questions are important.
Sounds just like science.
Probably killed just as many people as it's ever helped.
Wow... again, sounds like science!
Like the man said though, the problem is the people who are too arrogant to admit that they could be wrong.
Hey... sounds like some (I said some) scientists!
After all, isn't science what's made possible the bloodiest wars in the history of mankind? Zyclon B, Thalidimide, the machine gun, heck, atomic weaponry! Say what you will about religious zealots... by themselves, they'd never find the means to make the human race extinct.
Let's not get carried away. Both science and religion offer positive and negative. I'd argue they both offer much more positive. But whatever the case, neither should be dismissed out of hand.
I thought so. At the bottom of it, a worthless, gutless, halfwit coward. Go find a clue, and some balls to go with it.
Hey, I found the script of the original online!
Zira: You wouldn't hurt me, would you Taylor?
Taylor: *squish*
I haven't yet seen Ed Wood (and I've been meaning to forever), but I thought both the other films meandered quite a bit. And I'd certainly say they were fundamentally visual. Though I liked them, mind you, story and all, and I hope I'm not appearing too harsh.
We'll probably just have to agree to disagree here. I've always been struck with Burton's talent, but his movies never seem, to me, really polished, never quite perfect. I think he could really use an editor. I think the right team could take Burton's films to the next level... greatness. Sort of like what George Martin and Phil Spector did (IMHO) for the Beatles.
Actually, you know an author whose work would be perfect for Burton to adapt? E.T.A. Hoffmann. Nutcracker and the King of Mice - the original, not the silly opera - would be a great Burton project. Dark, weird, somewhat offbalance itself, but compelling, and intensely visual.
Not to mention the fact that females reproduce serially, while males can reproduce in parallel. Serious performance bottleneck, even if she'd survived.
When you run a Perl program, for instance, it actually compiles and then runs... unlike most interpreted languages, which translate and run instructions one at a time. Instead, a Perl script could begin to run translating one instruction at a time, go until it hit a trace condition, increment the counter, and so on.
Following the Perl example, the down side is that Perl does some compile-time error checking, which wouldn't be done if you used this algorithm.
I'm speculating off the top of my head, mind you... but then, if I'm not talking sense, I'm sure someone will let me know! ;-)
He was convicted of three felony counts of computer crimes against his employers a few years back. Here's a page with details.
To put it mildly, many hackers thought Randal was the victim in the whole affair... but read, and decide for yourself.