I think your general sentiment is fine, but you have things backwards. This must come first:
I'll agree at the same time, there needs to be a streamlined method of legally getting citizenship (hopefully the end goal of all immigration)...and make it easier to get a temporary visa which would allow the above to be set up for a legal immigrant worker.
At the moment, the situation for people wanting to immigrate legally is ridiculous. The only legal immigrants you're getting are people who love dealing with paperwork, bureaucracy, and lawyers, and don't mind waiting in line for years. Cracking down on illegals makes sense, but first make sure that there are sensible policies in place for dealing with legal immigration. Otherwise, whatever is done is doomed to failure. For some reason, in the immigration area people love to act as though unintended consequences don't exist -- as though you can just draw a bright line around a free country and make everyone toe that line with laws. Real life is not so simple.
You may be right, although I've never worked at a company large enough to operate that way, so I wouldn't know. Keeping files on people's past actions is so Stasi, I'm surprised people put up with it.
I don't know anyone named Simonetta, so the criterion you suggest is useless to me. For all I know, that could be your last name, or a completely made up name (newsflash: my name is not "alienmole"). In general, there's no way to determine someone's gender from a screen name, particularly since people often deliberately select misleading or uninformative names. In any case, I hadn't noticed your username, nor was it onscreen when I was commenting. In fact, I still don't know whether you're actually the person to whom I was referring, since I haven't bothered to go back and look at the thread.
That is why I used "he" in the generic sense. In English, the typical alternatives in a case like this are unsatisfactory: generic "they" would not make sense; "he or she" is clumsy; second person ("you") is not an option, since you were a third person in that sentence; pluralization doesn't work; and replacing the pronoun with "Simonetta" would have required going back to the thread to find the username. Perhaps the best solution in the Slashdot context is to use "the OP" in a situation like this. I often do that. Apparently, I chose not to in this instance.
The parent post is correct, but neglects the salient point that when I was a kid (i'm 37), a valid response to the conditions noted would be to send the kid to a military school where they'd do the beating for you.
Ah, good old abuse perpetuation. You poor baby. I'm truly sorry for your terrible childhood. However, try not to take it out on the rest of society.
I heard this 'news' a couple of days ago. My first thought was 'Wow, ESR still think's he's relevant.' My second thought was 'Wait, there are people who still use Fedora Core?'
You should remove Firefox immediately. Prolonged use of Firefox has been linked to reduction in compliant consumer behavior. The Attorney General's office keeps a close eye on people like that, and has suspended habeas corpus specifically to be able to deal with them more expeditiously.
For the full Windows Experience(tm), complete with commercial messages and free utility programs from our many, many affiliates, you must run Internet Explorer.
You don't need this drivers page, all you need is to disable those pesky security dialogs and go surf the web for a while. Be sure to click "Yes" or "OK" on any messages that pop up. Pretty soon, everything you need to run Vista will be downloaded and installed on your machine automatically!
This is very similar to secular science which attempts to arrive at conclusions about things unknown based upon observable data.
The difference is that the "observable data" in the religous case is at least in part based on individual faith, which is not subject to experiment or reliably repeatable between people of different faiths. That's precisely why the "conflict" between faith and science is really not that great: faith is personal, and by its nature, subjective. Science attempts to be impersonal and objective.
One article of faith for rational scientists is that even if there is a deity, it would not be messing with the behavior of universal laws on a regular basis. This means that experiments can produce repeatable results, and thus a kind of objective truth can be reached. In ideal situation, this truth is agreed on by all scientists, although of course not all science is that straightforward. Problems between faith and science typically arise when those of faith insist on explanations for things that are clearly at odds with observable evidence. Literal creationists are a classic example of that.
Yes, and so does the faith of countless other churches and religions who disagree with them on various things, both big & small. My response to such people is that they should take it up with the other churches and religions. Once they've sorted it out amongst themselves, then they can come and bother the rationalists. Until then, there's no point talking to people who don't acknowledge the right of others to have different beliefs, or even the fact that it's possible that their beliefs are wrong. In particular, rationalists should not be going beyond logic and science in their arguments, because that plays into the idea that scientific beliefs are equally faith-based.
Fundamentalists, being extremists, are tempted to go after extremists on the other side, which amount to low-hanging fruit, instead of the much more threatening (to them) and less easily attackable moderate churches. It's not strategic to give them the satisfaction of playing their game. Don't engage them except where you have to, e.g. in the political arena, when fighting over school curricula (hey, Kansas just came around). Let the religions fight amongst themselves. It's not as if there's ever going to be a winner (until the Rapture comes, that is, and Stephen Colbert decides which of us is going to heaven).
These people are supposed to be adults, aren't they?
Not really. They hire 'em young, and indoctrinate them into the cult. That's not just Google, same goes for Microsoft and even, back in the day, IBM (with employees singing company songs first thing in the morning). Remember, these people are nerds who live largely inside their heads really don't want to have to pay attention to the real world, so a company that coddles them and lets them focus on coding plus some "fun" can seem like an ideal setup.
A correction: I didn't assert that the creation story is clearly metaphorical, only that the Bible clearly contains some metaphor and allegory. The point being that the moral force of the Bible doesn't depend on whether a particular story, such as the creation story, is or is not metaphorical; belief either way doesn't affect the Bible's moral force.
As for getting along with religious believers, I think that will be easier if we're not making overly strong claims for logic and science, otherwise it just becomes a battle of extremists against extremists -- which thanks to people like Dawkins, is already somewhat the case. But I'm happy that logic leads me to be on the same side as large, moderate churches which have reconciled their beliefs with evolution. I'm fairly sure that those churches would disagree with the idea that the Bible has lost any moral force for them as believers, and I see no justification, logical or otherwise, to take a different position on that issue.
Moral absolutists have a problem: given that different churches interpret the Bible differently, and given that the only way to choose the "right" church (assuming one accepts that such exists) is via faith, moral absolutists have no grounds for arguing their morals outside the context of their own faith[*]. I'd remind them of that, because it points out that their problem is not just with atheists, agnostics, or other disbelievers, but in fact with every church and religion other than their own.
[*] Except perhaps where those morals are so universal as to not be in dispute -- although even "thou shalt not kill" has its interpretive exceptions, recognized by many religions & churches.
What I meant is that, because evolution contradicts a literal reading of Genesis, it opens the entire book up to considerably more interpretation. Simple directives like "thou shalt not murder" or "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" no longer have the force of the absolute and immediate Word of God behind them.
There may still be a God who left directions for us in the Bible, but contradiction of the facts gives you wide latitude on the implementation of those directions. You can choose to follow them, but you can no longer use the argument that I must follow them, because the Creator of the Universe said so.
The contradiction of facts you mention goes far beyond the creation story, so even without belief in evolution, the Bible requires interpretation. Christian churches have been interpreting the bible almost since it was written, long before Darwin had his bright idea. Multiple churches existed before that time, reflecting multiple interpretations. Evolution doesn't change anything in that respect, and certainly doesn't "remove the moral force of the Bible."
In particular, the creation story is one of the most obviously metaphorical stories in the Bible, and again, was treated as such by many religions before Darwin -- e.g. the idea that "seven days" did not refer to the ordinary 24-hour days we know. While some people do of course believe that it should be taken literally, the idea that it's metaphorical has never been a big surprise to most people, and doesn't in itself undermine the veracity or moral force of the Bible, if you accept that the book contains at least some metaphor and allegory (which it clearly does).
For that matter, any text requires interpretation: consider the U.S. Constitution, for example, which has meant job security for many a judge. What did the founders mean by what they wrote? What was their intent? Since we haven't heard from the founders for a while now, do new circumstances justify a new interpretation? All of these same issues apply to the Bible. However, just as judges are treated as arbiters of the meaning of legal texts, churches and figures such as the Catholic Pope act as arbiters of the meaning of the Bible, and many of them have reconciled their interpretation of the Bible with evolution. Of course, belief in the divine inspiration of those arbiters is required, but that doesn't introduce anything new into the equation.
P.S. I realized that you may see the agument as being with people who believe in evolution in general, rather than with atheists (which was me projecting), so perhaps you believe that the Christian churches who have reconciled with evolution are somehow being deceptive when they claim that they don't see a conflict in this area. I think that would be a very strange position, but I won't argue it preemptively. If you feel like clarifying, I'd be interested.
The doctrinal problems you raise have all been addressed to the satisfaction of many major Christian churches, so your argument in this area is not just with atheists. See e.g. this summary of the Catholic position on the subject. For example, they address the issue of human origin with the belief that souls are created by God, independently of our physical bodies.
My point is simply that belief in evolution does not preclude religious belief in general. It may preclude certain specific beliefs, such as the belief in a very literal interpretation of the creation story in Genesis. So if that's your issue, then I agree with you, you can't believe in evolution as well as in the creation of the Earth and humanity in six 24-hour days as we know them. But that doesn't preclude belief in a Christian God, as many Christian churches demonstrate, and it doesn't have anything to do with morality.
As for "where can morality be for evolved animals with evolved behaviors", if I understand you correctly, that's an entirely unrelated question about the nature of morality in the absence of a deity. I'm not arguing that point; I'm saying that you can believe in a deity that lays down moral laws, and also believe in evolution, and that as you put it, "no, really, there's no conflict!" I don't see why that position should be worthy of less respect than a position which claims that belief in evolution inevitably removes all moral force from the Bible. The latter position has no logical basis that I can see.
Talking about "warped ideologies", what about the millions of starving children in Africa? They are not dying because of "communism" (or even "Communism"). No, it is capitalism that is doing them in.
The issue is much broader and deeper than "capitalism". Quite seriously, I think that the monkeysphere theory explains this better. Regardless of the ideologies at play, when people who don't know each other and don't belong to the same community exchange goods and services, it's common not to worry much about the needs of the other party: each party is considered responsible for themselves. This is human nature, not "capitalism". There may be some relatively wealthy people who have the luxury of worrying about whether people they don't know are or aren't being exploited, but the average person really doesn't have that luxury.
What capitalism does is allow this general indifference to strangers to scale up, if you will: so that by handing over $1.99 for a pack of tube socks at Walmart, I can efficiently exploit child labor (etc.) in a foreign country that I don't know anything about, and unless I have an unusually well-developed conscience, I don't even have to think about it. So the vaunted efficiency of capitalism is also a major flaw: it's efficient, and that efficiency cuts both ways, amplifying the human attitude to people outside their own group (family, town, country, religion...)
These issues are rooted in human nature, and no ideology will overcome that on a large scale. If you want to deal with it, you have to build realistic ways of handling it into whatever system you're using. Neither communism nor capitalism does that.
Slashdot Mirror
You may be right, although I've never worked at a company large enough to operate that way, so I wouldn't know. Keeping files on people's past actions is so Stasi, I'm surprised people put up with it.
I don't know anyone named Simonetta, so the criterion you suggest is useless to me. For all I know, that could be your last name, or a completely made up name (newsflash: my name is not "alienmole"). In general, there's no way to determine someone's gender from a screen name, particularly since people often deliberately select misleading or uninformative names. In any case, I hadn't noticed your username, nor was it onscreen when I was commenting. In fact, I still don't know whether you're actually the person to whom I was referring, since I haven't bothered to go back and look at the thread.
That is why I used "he" in the generic sense. In English, the typical alternatives in a case like this are unsatisfactory: generic "they" would not make sense; "he or she" is clumsy; second person ("you") is not an option, since you were a third person in that sentence; pluralization doesn't work; and replacing the pronoun with "Simonetta" would have required going back to the thread to find the username. Perhaps the best solution in the Slashdot context is to use "the OP" in a situation like this. I often do that. Apparently, I chose not to in this instance.
His "permanent record"? That's an intimidation tactic used to keep schoolchildren in line. Zoeller's not in high school.
Actually, that was a variation on a quote attributed to Winston Churchill. More info here.
Copied Winston Churchill perhaps Yoda did.
I thought perhaps the word "Australia" in the award might also be a clue. Sounds foreign. Is it Swahili?
Ouch. That cuts like a knife.
That is a criticism up with which they are unlikely to put.
You should remove Firefox immediately. Prolonged use of Firefox has been linked to reduction in compliant consumer behavior. The Attorney General's office keeps a close eye on people like that, and has suspended habeas corpus specifically to be able to deal with them more expeditiously.
For the full Windows Experience(tm), complete with commercial messages and free utility programs from our many, many affiliates, you must run Internet Explorer.
You don't need this drivers page, all you need is to disable those pesky security dialogs and go surf the web for a while. Be sure to click "Yes" or "OK" on any messages that pop up. Pretty soon, everything you need to run Vista will be downloaded and installed on your machine automatically!
One article of faith for rational scientists is that even if there is a deity, it would not be messing with the behavior of universal laws on a regular basis. This means that experiments can produce repeatable results, and thus a kind of objective truth can be reached. In ideal situation, this truth is agreed on by all scientists, although of course not all science is that straightforward. Problems between faith and science typically arise when those of faith insist on explanations for things that are clearly at odds with observable evidence. Literal creationists are a classic example of that.
Failing haiku form /.
You will be moderated
As Troll on
Yes, and so does the faith of countless other churches and religions who disagree with them on various things, both big & small. My response to such people is that they should take it up with the other churches and religions. Once they've sorted it out amongst themselves, then they can come and bother the rationalists. Until then, there's no point talking to people who don't acknowledge the right of others to have different beliefs, or even the fact that it's possible that their beliefs are wrong. In particular, rationalists should not be going beyond logic and science in their arguments, because that plays into the idea that scientific beliefs are equally faith-based.
Fundamentalists, being extremists, are tempted to go after extremists on the other side, which amount to low-hanging fruit, instead of the much more threatening (to them) and less easily attackable moderate churches. It's not strategic to give them the satisfaction of playing their game. Don't engage them except where you have to, e.g. in the political arena, when fighting over school curricula (hey, Kansas just came around). Let the religions fight amongst themselves. It's not as if there's ever going to be a winner (until the Rapture comes, that is, and Stephen Colbert decides which of us is going to heaven).
n/t
A correction: I didn't assert that the creation story is clearly metaphorical, only that the Bible clearly contains some metaphor and allegory. The point being that the moral force of the Bible doesn't depend on whether a particular story, such as the creation story, is or is not metaphorical; belief either way doesn't affect the Bible's moral force.
As for getting along with religious believers, I think that will be easier if we're not making overly strong claims for logic and science, otherwise it just becomes a battle of extremists against extremists -- which thanks to people like Dawkins, is already somewhat the case. But I'm happy that logic leads me to be on the same side as large, moderate churches which have reconciled their beliefs with evolution. I'm fairly sure that those churches would disagree with the idea that the Bible has lost any moral force for them as believers, and I see no justification, logical or otherwise, to take a different position on that issue.
Moral absolutists have a problem: given that different churches interpret the Bible differently, and given that the only way to choose the "right" church (assuming one accepts that such exists) is via faith, moral absolutists have no grounds for arguing their morals outside the context of their own faith[*]. I'd remind them of that, because it points out that their problem is not just with atheists, agnostics, or other disbelievers, but in fact with every church and religion other than their own.
[*] Except perhaps where those morals are so universal as to not be in dispute -- although even "thou shalt not kill" has its interpretive exceptions, recognized by many religions & churches.
The contradiction of facts you mention goes far beyond the creation story, so even without belief in evolution, the Bible requires interpretation. Christian churches have been interpreting the bible almost since it was written, long before Darwin had his bright idea. Multiple churches existed before that time, reflecting multiple interpretations. Evolution doesn't change anything in that respect, and certainly doesn't "remove the moral force of the Bible."
In particular, the creation story is one of the most obviously metaphorical stories in the Bible, and again, was treated as such by many religions before Darwin -- e.g. the idea that "seven days" did not refer to the ordinary 24-hour days we know. While some people do of course believe that it should be taken literally, the idea that it's metaphorical has never been a big surprise to most people, and doesn't in itself undermine the veracity or moral force of the Bible, if you accept that the book contains at least some metaphor and allegory (which it clearly does).
For that matter, any text requires interpretation: consider the U.S. Constitution, for example, which has meant job security for many a judge. What did the founders mean by what they wrote? What was their intent? Since we haven't heard from the founders for a while now, do new circumstances justify a new interpretation? All of these same issues apply to the Bible. However, just as judges are treated as arbiters of the meaning of legal texts, churches and figures such as the Catholic Pope act as arbiters of the meaning of the Bible, and many of them have reconciled their interpretation of the Bible with evolution. Of course, belief in the divine inspiration of those arbiters is required, but that doesn't introduce anything new into the equation.
P.S. I realized that you may see the agument as being with people who believe in evolution in general, rather than with atheists (which was me projecting), so perhaps you believe that the Christian churches who have reconciled with evolution are somehow being deceptive when they claim that they don't see a conflict in this area. I think that would be a very strange position, but I won't argue it preemptively. If you feel like clarifying, I'd be interested.
The doctrinal problems you raise have all been addressed to the satisfaction of many major Christian churches, so your argument in this area is not just with atheists. See e.g. this summary of the Catholic position on the subject. For example, they address the issue of human origin with the belief that souls are created by God, independently of our physical bodies.
My point is simply that belief in evolution does not preclude religious belief in general. It may preclude certain specific beliefs, such as the belief in a very literal interpretation of the creation story in Genesis. So if that's your issue, then I agree with you, you can't believe in evolution as well as in the creation of the Earth and humanity in six 24-hour days as we know them. But that doesn't preclude belief in a Christian God, as many Christian churches demonstrate, and it doesn't have anything to do with morality.
As for "where can morality be for evolved animals with evolved behaviors", if I understand you correctly, that's an entirely unrelated question about the nature of morality in the absence of a deity. I'm not arguing that point; I'm saying that you can believe in a deity that lays down moral laws, and also believe in evolution, and that as you put it, "no, really, there's no conflict!" I don't see why that position should be worthy of less respect than a position which claims that belief in evolution inevitably removes all moral force from the Bible. The latter position has no logical basis that I can see.
The issue is much broader and deeper than "capitalism". Quite seriously, I think that the monkeysphere theory explains this better. Regardless of the ideologies at play, when people who don't know each other and don't belong to the same community exchange goods and services, it's common not to worry much about the needs of the other party: each party is considered responsible for themselves. This is human nature, not "capitalism". There may be some relatively wealthy people who have the luxury of worrying about whether people they don't know are or aren't being exploited, but the average person really doesn't have that luxury.
What capitalism does is allow this general indifference to strangers to scale up, if you will: so that by handing over $1.99 for a pack of tube socks at Walmart, I can efficiently exploit child labor (etc.) in a foreign country that I don't know anything about, and unless I have an unusually well-developed conscience, I don't even have to think about it. So the vaunted efficiency of capitalism is also a major flaw: it's efficient, and that efficiency cuts both ways, amplifying the human attitude to people outside their own group (family, town, country, religion...)
These issues are rooted in human nature, and no ideology will overcome that on a large scale. If you want to deal with it, you have to build realistic ways of handling it into whatever system you're using. Neither communism nor capitalism does that.