Amazing? How many times did you just contradict yourself? Could I get permission to use your post on IIDB? I think it'll lay to rest once and for all the debate that atheists have rationality on their side.
>>It's not a conscious decision to believe or not believe in a god. It's done by your subconscious
>>The more you educate your brain, the less likely you are to believe in a god
>>Actually, everyone is born an atheist
You also should really learn how to format your posts before making an idiot of yourself. While you'll still be just as wrong, you won't look nearly so much like the mouth breather you may or may not be.
>>You don't have to "choose" anything when you are faced with an unknown.
Read the Will to Believe (http://books.google.com/books?id=6OAWAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA327#v=onepage&q&f=false)
Sometimes you don't. I don't have to choose whether or not I think your favorite color of roses is red or white. But if I'm buying flowers for my wife, all of a sudden I *am* forced to choose, and without enough evidence to really satisfy me.
Believing in God (or any moral code for that matter) *is* a forced decision. You make moral choices many times every day, and you can't abstain from them. And abstaining from believing in God (or actively belittling him, as most atheists do inside the Slashdot groupthink) is also a decision.
>>The Bible was written 300 years after Christ's death
You don't really know anything, do you? The Bible was written relatively quickly. It was compiled into a codex much later.
If you're based your hatred for religion on astonishingly wrong facts like this, it's no wonder you're angry and bitter. It's like those morons on here that rant about teachers all secretly conspiring to eliminate all critical thinking from schools, while not having any personal experience or done any research on the subject, but just repeat their screed anyway.
>>True faith is about maintaining a belief no matter what tests it,
You know what they call people that just repeat whatever they hear, don't question it, and repeat it louder and louder when people tell them that they're wrong?
It's not faith, it's dogmatism. Which is exactly what you're guilty of.
Believe it or not, many Christians have questioned their faith and chosen to believe in it anyway on the balance of the evidence. Unlike fucktarded atheists like you that just repeat anything they hear the other cool atheists say, because you "want to be like them".
>>Sorry, but faith is NOT based on evidence. Faith is WITHOUT reason.
No; not in the slightest.
It's rather impossible for people to believe in something that they think is entirely counterfactual or without evidence.
The closest you can come to that is as William James put it: at a certain point, all the evidence and facts and logic can only take you so far. At a certain point, you have to choose between all of your plausible options.
Call that faith, if you'd like. But the standard Slashdot notion that faith is the belief in something without evidence is complete and utter nonsense.
>>People come to believe in gods because they are gullible and ignorant.
And people like you don't believe in gods because you're gullible and ignorant and love to follow the cool kids in school.
>>Unfortunately, religion is not about evidence, it's about faith. Which is why religion has caused humanity so much suffering over the milleniums.
That's why us fact-based science types rejected the Biblical notion of hygiene, because we don't believe in invisible particles that can cause sickness!
Ignorant scientists have probably killed 10 times as many people due to their arrogant ignorance than all the earth's religions put together.
Wasn't this the whole basis for the EPR paradox? Using two different measurements of location and momentum with entangled particles to build a complete state?
>>the full electric is going to pay off big time over even a decent mpg econobox.
You getting free electricity?
In California electricity is... not free.
And while you may have friends that are interested in it, the results on Priuses and etc. are pretty clear - the average driver of a Prius makes six digits, so subsidies to Prius owners basically are going to the rich. Not that I mind, particularly, but liberals always like to pretend they're for the hard working Union worker who barely pulls in $120k a year as a longshoreman.
>>He wrote he wanted to be "relevant" - doesn't sound like he's asking about some hobby project that interests him.
But the answer might very well be "a hobby project". If he's an all grognard, maybe he could learn GUI programming by writing a client for his model railroads or miniature wargames or whatever he does with his time in retirement.
The basics of programming don't change - if you know algorithms, logic, and how to think about edge conditions to avoid bugs, you can pretty much do whatever. Walk through a tutorial online on how to build a GUI, and there you go. PHP, Python, Java, etc. are all easy to learn, and have good online tutorials.
>>I am a state employee doing IT work and I am easily paid well below what I would make in the private sector doing the same work.
How many years of experience and college do you have? A lot of people overestimate what they could be making in other jobs.
My college roommate started at $65k out of college as a high school math teacher. Another friend of mine graduated with an EE degree and made $35k a year in the private sector.
In college, I recall them both thinking the opposite would be the case.
>>Most times the authors are against it because the publishing houses offer them a tiny flat fee and no percentage of the sales
I just chatted with a neat author (Maxwell Alexander Drake; http://www.maxwellalexanderdrake.com/) at Comicon. We was opposed to coming out with an e-book since he was afraid of piracy, but after a while came around and did it anyway after someone pointed out to him that if people are trying to steal your stuff, that means they want your stuff. I think his royalties (~$1/book) are roughly the same for the hardback, trade paperback, paperback, and e-book. Give or take 25% or so.
His publisher sells his book directly for $5 (http://shop.imaginedinterprises.com/), this lets them avoid the cut from Amazon. (Amazon also screws over small publishers on physical books too, but the Kindle debate made the front page on/.)
I've been reading his book; it's pretty good if you like fantasy.
>>Apparently California can't afford to pay government employees, but can afford to give money to people who buy electric cars?
And to people that buy houses, and to people that buy efficient lightbulbs, and to people that buy new appliances for their house, and to people who install solar panels (50% subsidy), and to people who duct test their houses, and for free healthcare and subsidies for people that don't work, etc.
California state employees are paid too much, so the furlough days are sort of a workaround for not being able to cut their salaries across the board. Apparently, it's "too difficult" for the payroll system to handle, says their top people that would get their paychecks cut.
From www.ebudget.ca.gov...
Proposed CA Budget for 2010-2011: Income: $118B (est) Expenses: $122B By Dept (minor ones not listed): Legislative, Judicial, Executive $6B Business, Transportation & Housing $12B Natural Resources $6B Environmental Protection $2B Health and Human Services $34B Corrections and Rehabilitation $9B K-12 Education $36B Higher Education $13B General Government $6B
Let's compare this with the budget just five years ago (2005-2006): Income: $108B Expenses: $117B Legislative, Judicial, Executive $5.5B Business, Transportation & Housing $8B Natural Resources $3.6B Environmental Protection $1B Health and Human Services $33B Corrections and Rehabilitation $7B K-12 Education $36B Higher Education $13B General Government $6B
It's interesting, because even with the strong economy we had going in the 2004-2006 time period (~7% growth, IIRC), they still couldn't balance the damn budget.
There should be a better way, indeed. I used to work doing Java development.
Java was built with the braindead/naive idea that it would run equally on all platforms. So when we found that the implementation on some obscure platform had a bug, we couldn't just #define a way around it like you can in C. Therefore you have to use more hackish tricks like these.
If you really want to horrify Java coders, think about what would happen if all the com.sun libraries got renamed to com.oracle. =) =)
Christianity is responsible for the concept of natural rights, i.e. rights which are unalienable due to being endowed by a creator God. This is a slightly different concept than civil rights, which are rights granted for being part of a nation, and therefore can be revoked by a state. France, for example, doesn't believe in natural rights, only civil rights, and therefore does things like revoke freedom of religion (students cannot wear crucifixes to school, for example) on a whim.
The development of natural rights influenced thinking on civil rights (we've always had civil rights, so to speak - Roman Citizens were quite proud of it, for example) leading to greater freedom than we'd seen before in human history. Christianity was responsible for the ending of slavery, for example, as our ethical policies flowered from the root concept of Universal Charity to determine that it was antithetical to their natural rights as a human to be enslaved from birth.
A lot of people automatically associate Android with Google because the first line of Android-capable phones (G1, Hero, myTouch3G) were marketed that way. In fact, I think the release of the Droid on Verizon officially put a stop to that trend, but I'm not entirely sure about that.
Nope, the Droid still has the Google logo branded on it. Along with two Verizon and one Motorola logo.
I'm talking about the atheist urban myths surrounding Galileo v. the Pope, for example, and the notion that Christianity is somehow antithetical to science. Which is almost entirely false, except in the cases where science arguably steps outside of ethical norms.
Modern atheism has rewritten history to make it sound like a battle between the forces of ignorance and the forces of enlightenment, which is more or less bullshit.
The evolution of civil rights and increased freedom for citizenry stems directly from Christian thought.
>>I've checked into the "tax exempt" provisions. I don't qualify. So I'm being taxed to support your religion, and don't expect me to believe that this is fair. ALL religions should be taxed just like any other entertainment. THAT would be fair.
Hmm, why do you not qualify for tax exempt status? Hell, my wife's softball team qualifies. The barrier is really low.
If it's because you engage in political activity, then I'd absolutely agree with you that that clause shouldn't exist. All speech at some level is political, and it gives the IRS the power to control religion. Power to tax is the power to destroy and all that.
>>And, yes, Christians were dragged along, though some of them resent it
You got it backwards.
Secularism is a very recent phenomenon - all this ethical flowering from Christianity took place, hmm, starting around the 1300s or so, but really kicking off as the result of the 80 years war, if I'm remembering it correctly. There was a philosophical reaction to the pointless slaughter of Christian on Christian - and there was no secular movement to talk of back then, so it's very hard to ascribe credit to it for anything other than the expansion of Christian ethics.
>>Your mistake is in labeling it "Judeo-Christian code of ethics". It's not. It has certain things in common - all the "do not kill" etc stuff, which generally boils down to "no unnecessary violence, try to be cooperative", and is an evolved trait in social animals such as humans. There's no surprise that all religions have captured it in some form, it's just basic common sense.
The lower levels of morality are certainly seen worldwide. I'm dubious as to how much of higher ethical behavior you can claim is evolutionarily derived, especially given the rather wide codes of conduct seen in indigenous peoples around the world, and would certainly argue that only religious people generally demonstrate higher ethical behaviors, such as Loving Thy Enemy, or the rather similar Mother Doctrine of Buddhism (all people were once your mother, so you should love everyone).
It's easy to not hit someone with a rock so that they don't hit you back (ethical level 1) or because you don't want to break a law (ethical level 2), but it's very rare to see anyone outside of religious circles loving the person beating them with a rock (ethical level 3).
Slashdot Mirror
No, no, no. Haven't you read the Slashdot summary?
Allowing Saudi Arabia to eavesdrop on everyone's communications has "eased their concern" about security issues.
Amazing? How many times did you just contradict yourself? Could I get permission to use your post on IIDB? I think it'll lay to rest once and for all the debate that atheists have rationality on their side.
>>It's not a conscious decision to believe or not believe in a god. It's done by your subconscious
>>The more you educate your brain, the less likely you are to believe in a god
>>Actually, everyone is born an atheist
You also should really learn how to format your posts before making an idiot of yourself. While you'll still be just as wrong, you won't look nearly so much like the mouth breather you may or may not be.
>>You don't have to "choose" anything when you are faced with an unknown.
Read the Will to Believe (http://books.google.com/books?id=6OAWAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA327#v=onepage&q&f=false)
Sometimes you don't. I don't have to choose whether or not I think your favorite color of roses is red or white. But if I'm buying flowers for my wife, all of a sudden I *am* forced to choose, and without enough evidence to really satisfy me.
Believing in God (or any moral code for that matter) *is* a forced decision. You make moral choices many times every day, and you can't abstain from them. And abstaining from believing in God (or actively belittling him, as most atheists do inside the Slashdot groupthink) is also a decision.
>>The Bible was written 300 years after Christ's death
You don't really know anything, do you? The Bible was written relatively quickly. It was compiled into a codex much later.
If you're based your hatred for religion on astonishingly wrong facts like this, it's no wonder you're angry and bitter. It's like those morons on here that rant about teachers all secretly conspiring to eliminate all critical thinking from schools, while not having any personal experience or done any research on the subject, but just repeat their screed anyway.
>>True faith is about maintaining a belief no matter what tests it,
You know what they call people that just repeat whatever they hear, don't question it, and repeat it louder and louder when people tell them that they're wrong?
It's not faith, it's dogmatism. Which is exactly what you're guilty of.
Believe it or not, many Christians have questioned their faith and chosen to believe in it anyway on the balance of the evidence. Unlike fucktarded atheists like you that just repeat anything they hear the other cool atheists say, because you "want to be like them".
>>Sorry, but faith is NOT based on evidence. Faith is WITHOUT reason.
No; not in the slightest.
It's rather impossible for people to believe in something that they think is entirely counterfactual or without evidence.
The closest you can come to that is as William James put it: at a certain point, all the evidence and facts and logic can only take you so far. At a certain point, you have to choose between all of your plausible options.
Call that faith, if you'd like. But the standard Slashdot notion that faith is the belief in something without evidence is complete and utter nonsense.
>>People come to believe in gods because they are gullible and ignorant.
And people like you don't believe in gods because you're gullible and ignorant and love to follow the cool kids in school.
>>Unfortunately, religion is not about evidence, it's about faith. Which is why religion has caused humanity so much suffering over the milleniums.
That's why us fact-based science types rejected the Biblical notion of hygiene, because we don't believe in invisible particles that can cause sickness!
Ignorant scientists have probably killed 10 times as many people due to their arrogant ignorance than all the earth's religions put together.
Really old school is the arcade museum in the Fisherman's Wharf area of San Francisco.
"I'm dancing! I'm dancing!"
I wonder if the guys who made Borderlands had seen this video.
Wasn't this the whole basis for the EPR paradox? Using two different measurements of location and momentum with entangled particles to build a complete state?
If not, what am I missing?
>>This story is just FUD and troll. I would've expected it to come from kdawson, but apparently I gave Taco too much credit.
It's news, because... it's about Starcraft 2? Kinda?
Why not run a story about how Quake 1 is killing modern computers? The last time I ran Quake it was somewhere above 300fps with vsync disabled.
>>the full electric is going to pay off big time over even a decent mpg econobox.
You getting free electricity?
In California electricity is... not free.
And while you may have friends that are interested in it, the results on Priuses and etc. are pretty clear - the average driver of a Prius makes six digits, so subsidies to Prius owners basically are going to the rich. Not that I mind, particularly, but liberals always like to pretend they're for the hard working Union worker who barely pulls in $120k a year as a longshoreman.
>>He wrote he wanted to be "relevant" - doesn't sound like he's asking about some hobby project that interests him.
But the answer might very well be "a hobby project". If he's an all grognard, maybe he could learn GUI programming by writing a client for his model railroads or miniature wargames or whatever he does with his time in retirement.
The basics of programming don't change - if you know algorithms, logic, and how to think about edge conditions to avoid bugs, you can pretty much do whatever. Walk through a tutorial online on how to build a GUI, and there you go. PHP, Python, Java, etc. are all easy to learn, and have good online tutorials.
>>I am a state employee doing IT work and I am easily paid well below what I would make in the private sector doing the same work.
How many years of experience and college do you have? A lot of people overestimate what they could be making in other jobs.
My college roommate started at $65k out of college as a high school math teacher. Another friend of mine graduated with an EE degree and made $35k a year in the private sector.
In college, I recall them both thinking the opposite would be the case.
>>Most times the authors are against it because the publishing houses offer them a tiny flat fee and no percentage of the sales
I just chatted with a neat author (Maxwell Alexander Drake; http://www.maxwellalexanderdrake.com/) at Comicon. We was opposed to coming out with an e-book since he was afraid of piracy, but after a while came around and did it anyway after someone pointed out to him that if people are trying to steal your stuff, that means they want your stuff. I think his royalties (~$1/book) are roughly the same for the hardback, trade paperback, paperback, and e-book. Give or take 25% or so.
His publisher sells his book directly for $5 (http://shop.imaginedinterprises.com/), this lets them avoid the cut from Amazon. (Amazon also screws over small publishers on physical books too, but the Kindle debate made the front page on /.)
I've been reading his book; it's pretty good if you like fantasy.
>>Apparently California can't afford to pay government employees, but can afford to give money to people who buy electric cars?
And to people that buy houses, and to people that buy efficient lightbulbs, and to people that buy new appliances for their house, and to people who install solar panels (50% subsidy), and to people who duct test their houses, and for free healthcare and subsidies for people that don't work, etc.
California state employees are paid too much, so the furlough days are sort of a workaround for not being able to cut their salaries across the board. Apparently, it's "too difficult" for the payroll system to handle, says their top people that would get their paychecks cut.
From www.ebudget.ca.gov...
Proposed CA Budget for 2010-2011:
Income: $118B (est)
Expenses: $122B
By Dept (minor ones not listed):
Legislative, Judicial, Executive $6B
Business, Transportation & Housing $12B
Natural Resources $6B
Environmental Protection $2B
Health and Human Services $34B
Corrections and Rehabilitation $9B
K-12 Education $36B
Higher Education $13B
General Government $6B
Let's compare this with the budget just five years ago (2005-2006):
Income: $108B
Expenses: $117B
Legislative, Judicial, Executive $5.5B
Business, Transportation & Housing $8B
Natural Resources $3.6B
Environmental Protection $1B
Health and Human Services $33B
Corrections and Rehabilitation $7B
K-12 Education $36B
Higher Education $13B
General Government $6B
It's interesting, because even with the strong economy we had going in the 2004-2006 time period (~7% growth, IIRC), they still couldn't balance the damn budget.
There should be a better way, indeed. I used to work doing Java development.
Java was built with the braindead/naive idea that it would run equally on all platforms. So when we found that the implementation on some obscure platform had a bug, we couldn't just #define a way around it like you can in C. Therefore you have to use more hackish tricks like these.
If you really want to horrify Java coders, think about what would happen if all the com.sun libraries got renamed to com.oracle. =) =)
>>France never banned crucifixes. It was Italy. It's also not about wearing them, but about having them on the school walls.
Get your facts straight.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/rt_franc2.htm
Christianity is responsible for the concept of natural rights, i.e. rights which are unalienable due to being endowed by a creator God. This is a slightly different concept than civil rights, which are rights granted for being part of a nation, and therefore can be revoked by a state. France, for example, doesn't believe in natural rights, only civil rights, and therefore does things like revoke freedom of religion (students cannot wear crucifixes to school, for example) on a whim.
The development of natural rights influenced thinking on civil rights (we've always had civil rights, so to speak - Roman Citizens were quite proud of it, for example) leading to greater freedom than we'd seen before in human history. Christianity was responsible for the ending of slavery, for example, as our ethical policies flowered from the root concept of Universal Charity to determine that it was antithetical to their natural rights as a human to be enslaved from birth.
>>Face it, the facts are against your claims.
Read up, Judah Ben Hur -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_science
>>yet major religion (especially Christianity) is still hung up on not allowing women to take certain positions within the church.
My church has female pastors, so I'm not sure I need to defend that.
Nope, the Droid still has the Google logo branded on it. Along with two Verizon and one Motorola logo.
I'm talking about the atheist urban myths surrounding Galileo v. the Pope, for example, and the notion that Christianity is somehow antithetical to science. Which is almost entirely false, except in the cases where science arguably steps outside of ethical norms.
Modern atheism has rewritten history to make it sound like a battle between the forces of ignorance and the forces of enlightenment, which is more or less bullshit.
The evolution of civil rights and increased freedom for citizenry stems directly from Christian thought.
>>I've checked into the "tax exempt" provisions. I don't qualify. So I'm being taxed to support your religion, and don't expect me to believe that this is fair. ALL religions should be taxed just like any other entertainment. THAT would be fair.
Hmm, why do you not qualify for tax exempt status? Hell, my wife's softball team qualifies. The barrier is really low.
If it's because you engage in political activity, then I'd absolutely agree with you that that clause shouldn't exist. All speech at some level is political, and it gives the IRS the power to control religion. Power to tax is the power to destroy and all that.
Doesn't take much effort to find him being a prick.
First hit on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UwcLienBNs
Heh
>>And, yes, Christians were dragged along, though some of them resent it
You got it backwards.
Secularism is a very recent phenomenon - all this ethical flowering from Christianity took place, hmm, starting around the 1300s or so, but really kicking off as the result of the 80 years war, if I'm remembering it correctly. There was a philosophical reaction to the pointless slaughter of Christian on Christian - and there was no secular movement to talk of back then, so it's very hard to ascribe credit to it for anything other than the expansion of Christian ethics.
>>Your mistake is in labeling it "Judeo-Christian code of ethics". It's not. It has certain things in common - all the "do not kill" etc stuff, which generally boils down to "no unnecessary violence, try to be cooperative", and is an evolved trait in social animals such as humans. There's no surprise that all religions have captured it in some form, it's just basic common sense.
The lower levels of morality are certainly seen worldwide. I'm dubious as to how much of higher ethical behavior you can claim is evolutionarily derived, especially given the rather wide codes of conduct seen in indigenous peoples around the world, and would certainly argue that only religious people generally demonstrate higher ethical behaviors, such as Loving Thy Enemy, or the rather similar Mother Doctrine of Buddhism (all people were once your mother, so you should love everyone).
It's easy to not hit someone with a rock so that they don't hit you back (ethical level 1) or because you don't want to break a law (ethical level 2), but it's very rare to see anyone outside of religious circles loving the person beating them with a rock (ethical level 3).
>>Civil rights, along with most human progress, has been in spite of religion, not because of it.
Incorrect. This statement is more or less an urban legend generated by the modern atheist movement.
>>That's just your assertion.
Backed up by my study of history.
Based on your above statement, you've never really made a study of it.