If you have ever read some of the papers in environmental science on how they do their work, you'd be rightly appalled at how loosey-goosey they are.
For example, testing for extinction. Put a rope around a small field. Count the number of insect species in it. Come back a year later. Do it again. Assume that any species you don't see the second year are extinct. Extrapolate the extinction rate of the planet from it.
Feynman put it best when he based the soft sciences. You could probably look up the quote yourself.
>>Please, which ineffable things can religion eff but science cannot?
You're coming in a few centuries late to the IS/OUGHT debate.
Science empirically describes what is. Ethics/Philosophy/Religion describe what ought to be.
Different issues entirely, and neither in conflict. Science can inform ethics, and ethics can provide, well, ethical restrictions on science, and so together they benefit.
>>It is more-or-less taught as the value of knowing truth emotionally rather than and in spite of science.
Not in my church. In fact, we rather look down on someone that can believe in something irrationally, against the evidence. Read your CS Lewis for a lot of thoughts along these lines... in essence he said that if you're firmly convinced God cannot possibly exist, then it would be quite stupid for you to become a Christian.
I'm sure you're telling the truth about your church - a lot of churches, especially fundie ones, teach it this way, and it's a real shame. But if you're setting out strawmen based on members of a group being ignorant, you can tar and feather anyone.
>>I personally have an axiom: people who knowingly reject the axioms of science are insane.
That's fine. I've met more atheists than Christians that are that way.
>>If Christianity were really, truly, purely Christianity, I would agree with you. Jesus was an awesome guy with a pretty modern, ethical message for his part. A Christianity based on something like the Jefferson Bible would be mostly fine by my reckoning.
Well, that's why I try to do my part to fight ignorance. =) Most Christians don't have a very good grasp of theology, often just parroting what their pastor says (wine is the work of the devil!) Atheists are often worse, parroting what Dawkins thinks the Bible says, which starts to end up being like a blasphemous version of Telephone.
>>you still get all the baggage of those unambiguously barbaric bits
If you were making an argument about Judaism being stuck in the bronze age, I might be inclined to agree with you. Orthodox Jews have a lot of issues like this, though it bears pointing out they never actually stoned anyone to death for disrespecting their parents (take that as you will). It's also important to understand where Jews are coming from: God made a covenant (i.e. contract) with Abraham - he would worship God, and God would give him lots of descendants. A gay guy is a covenant breaker. When you look at the OT from this perspective, a lot of the weirder passages (to the modern eye) make sense. No eunuch can become a Jew - that one always puzzled me (my pastor told me it was a cult ritual thing, and who knows? He could be right, too.)
If the OT contained an ethical message for the bronze age, Jesus brought an ethical message that was the equivalent of grad school - no hard and fast rules to follow, but everyone being held to a much higher ethical standard. A Jew could just say, "Sorry, bleeding dude, can't help you. It's the Sabbath." A Christian would be morally obligated to help bleeding dude. His parables make this abundantly clear - the law was to serve man, to try to elevate him to a higher level... not man to serve the law. To paraphrase some passage or other. So I don't think that a Christian following the Bible precisely would kill a gay guy.
And please don't get me started on the sex thing - Jesus very explicitly said that chastity had to be a voluntary sacrifice, but the RCC made it mandatory for their leadership (for a good reason 1000 years ago, but no longer a good reason now), and a lot of the havoc in the church is directly a result of their ignoring some very good advice in the Bible. Likewise, the notion that one man should only ever be with one woman (and more importantly vice versa) is exploded by OT law, and Jesus implicitly going along with it when questioned about marriage in heaven. I suppose I could provide a reference if you'd like, but you seem pretty well read on the subject, and probably know what I'm talking about.
As for the Jefferson Bible thing, I do incline a touch towards Deism, at least from the point of view that it seems like a lot of people ascribe God's direct involvement in things a bit too readily. I don't think he doesn't involve himself at all, though. Also, it seems a bit disrespectful to be chopping up a Bible with scissors, but I guess nowadays you could do the same thing with Word.
Your brother shouldn't have just run in and thrown a punch, but he was still trying to do the right thing. As soon as normal people stop trying to care for their fellow man, that's the end of civilization, man. You think the police by themselves can keep a civilization running when it doesn't want to?
A week or so ago I found a naked drunk guy passed out on the asphalt at 2AM, in cold weather. I woke him up, probably saved his life, but he attacked me for my help. I got tagged a couple times when he came into my car after me when I tried to leave (after dodging his clumsy attacks for a few minutes), but I'd do the same thing again tomorrow if I had to.
In other words: fucking suck it up and be a good man, even if it does end up with you being arrested or punched in the face.
>>I can't think of a single scientific organization in the world that has researched the subject that doesn't agree with the IPCC findings
Let's assume you're ignoring all of the parts of the AR4 written by non-scientific interest groups like the WWF, and the various other issues with the glaciers and all that. You probably didn't know they were included in the report, but who cares?
The real issue is: How can you disagree with predictions? If the top people run some models and produce a collection of results based on different CO2 levels in the future, then how can anyone disagree with them?
It's been 20 years since AR1, so we can actually look back at their predictions and see that they predicted a temperature rise around 50% higher than what we got (Real Climate.org called the prediction "a bit warm"), but don't let me stop you from believing predictions are infallible. And it's not like the planet *didn't* warm up in the meantime (AGW is very likely true), but the real story here is about how angry climate scientists get when you point these kinds of problems out to them, because it's inherently not a very scientific field (you can't run experiments in real life to test your hypothesis), and I think deep down they all know it.
They do like to call each other scientists though. That makes them feel better.
Trying to use science as a basis of ethics is one of the most dangerous things we could do as a culture. We do it all the time - look at the debate over if vegetarianism is ethical due to the length of the human intestine, or studies of homosexuality in animals, or etc.
The reason why religion has led to the greatest ethical advance any human civilization has seen is because we hold certain rights to be inalienable, endowed by a creator.
In a purely scientific, materialistic society, there are NO inalienable rights. We're all collections of atoms, nothing more, and if my scientific theory of action says that I should kill you, wear your clothes, and impersonate you because Mynah birds can mimick people, then there's nothing stopping me from doing it.
Ethics, religion, and philosophy can be informed by science, but they can never be solved by science. Science deals in the world as it is, ethics/religion/philosophy deal with the world as it should be.
Science doesn't deal in truths, but theories. This is the point that you miss, and the general public gets, but misunderstands.
Scientific theories are generalizations that attempt to be best fits to the data we have available. The Standard Model is (what a lot of people think is) our best guess about the subatomic world, but it's possible it is wrong in more ways than just cutting down the error on some of the terms.
What really annoys the public is when scientists present theories as truth. The scientific community concludes that global warming will result in +0.3C gain per decade! (1991) Oh, but we only got +0.2C per decade. So how people react to this takes different forms: 1) Global warming is proven false. Because the +0.2 gain was right on the bottom of the error bars for the AR1 best guess prediction. 2) Global warming is proven true. Because a +0.2 gain was included in the error bars. 3) I can't trust scientists because they said something would be true, and it wasn't.
The really fucked up thing is that for people who say that global warming was proven true because the actual numbers fell within the range of the predictions would then have to say that global warming was false if we'd actually gotten +1.0C gain. Because it got too hot! It was outside the range of predictions! Contrawise, the AR4 predictions include +0.0C change in their prediction, so if we have no warming at all, people can say that the AR4 report was happily accurate.
See where the problem is? No? Ok, here it is in a nutshell: 1) Scientists like you present their theories as truth, when it's not. 2) People have grown distrustful of scientists because of this, and gain an unfortunate lack of faith in perfectly good scientific theories as the result. 3) The media presents all theories equally, so people don't understand when we should have confidence in a result (like the charge of an electron or the shape of DNA) and less confident results (like all those various epidemiology hand-waving studies).
>>Gaming and coding are two completely different things, only tangentially related by the thinnest of connections.
Not true. The connection is this: when you play a game long enough, you start discovering its flaws. If you have the right kind of personality, you get a burning desire to fix them.
For example, suppose that in chess, there was a way of always winning in 3 moves. You might make a quick fix rule to disallow that combination, but a creative person would start thinking of ways of rewriting the game so that it was still fun and balanced. People have been doing that kind of stuff for years, but with video games it's a lot harder. It's called "modding", and requires you to have a good set of coding skills for most of them. Look at the sheer number of addons written for WoW that modify its behavior.
That's the parent's entry into the whole thing, IF the kid has the right personality type. If he doesn't, then he's just never going to be a good programmer.
>>It is often considered a threat to Christianity because without a literal Adam and Eve there was no "fall" and therefor we didn't inherit a "sinful nature"
Nope, sorry. St. Augustine and Origen both considered Genesis to be allegorical, and they wrote long before the Darwin debate came up.
>>Logic fail: The Christians were Romans. Or do you suggest that the Roman government was running around setting their own record-keeping buildings on fire? The idea that Julius Caesar burned them down accidentally is one of the least-supported theories, and is considered well-debunked. In any case, Wikipedia gives four different explanations and none of them are amazingly well-supported. The issue is complicated by the fact that there were multiple libraries at Alexandria.
This is honestly one of the stupidest statements I've ever read on Slashdot. Are you honestly claiming the original manuscripts of the New Testament were destroyed in Julius Caesar's time? The man died in 44BC!
If not, please explain.
Also, logic fail: Christians were nominally Romans (depending which place and time), but not all Romans were Christians. You might want to go back to a basic logic class again.
>>It's not even a disproved theory. At its core, ID is simply "somehow something somewhere is wrong with evolution". Other than a rather vague claim that some structures are too complex to have evolved naturally, ID makes virtually no positive claims at all, and I don't even that vague claim can possibly be considered positive.
It is a theory. Or it can be, depending on how you formulate it. For example: "Evolution is true, but something interfered with the natural process" is a positive claim that can be tested.
In fact, we'll need tests like that in the future if we're to tell if the West Nile 2100 virus was man-made or natural. We could easily apply such tests to any DNA historical archives we can put together.
>>False. There are no reputable historical sources for his existence.
Most every mainstream historians believe there was a historical Jesus. Atheist historians think he wasn't the son of God, but I think even idiots like Hitchens admit that he existed (IIRC).
There are extant writings from people who worked with the apostles, so it's very very hard to claim that Jesus never existed. (And the writings of the apostles themselves, but you're using special pleading to disallow them.)
>>It wasn't the atheists that I was being critical of. I'm critical of Christians who think Christianity and their culture is better than Islam.
Are you honestly making the claim that all cultures are of equal ethical value?
Cultural relativism is a dark and windy path to walk down, my friend. Next thing you know you'll say it's wrong to stop islanders from Figi from kidnapping small boys from other islands and tying them to the tops of their masts, where they either die from exposure and vomiting, or survive and get brainwashed into joining their army. I mean, after all, stopping this is a form of cultural imperialism - by stopping their source of recruits, you're destroying their culture.
A similar analogy exists for Islam. Nobody cares that they don't eat pork, or wash their hands before dinner, or any purely cultural things like that. It's when their culture interfaces with our's, in a context of historical conquest, kidnapping and brainwashing (the Balkans experienced situations similar to the Figi example above for centuries) or modern day terrorism, that Christianity has responded to it. You can't simply call it cultural imperialism, because cultural interfaces work two ways.
Or are you just giving Islam special protection? Like everyone else does?
>>That never happened. Christianity never learned anything >>They were thrown out of governments for good
Bullshit. What mythical atheist army removed the Christians from power? Think about that for second and realize how stupid that statement is. Given atheists were nearly non-existent at the time that the various protection laws for religion rolled around, which were a CHRISTIAN answer to a Christian problem, I find it fascinating that you would think that Christians got somehow thrown out of power.
>>Give Christianity back the power they had a in the dark ages and in a decade or two "peaceful" and "tolerant" Christians will be burning heathens on crosses in the name of their lord
Utter and total bullshit.
>>tldr; It is Islamic states (or generally religion+state) that are the problem, not Islam per se.
Islam is a large part of the problem. When a Christian runs around beheading people for not converting to Christianity, you can point out where they're wrong using the New Testament. When a Muslim does the same thing, the moderate has a hard time arguing it, because of the various passages advocating violence. Since they were written later in Muhammad's career, they take precedence over his peaceful passages (when he was still small and afraid of the Jewish communities in his area).
>>I sure find people who believe all atheists are Richard-Dawkins-wannabes annoying as hell
To be fair, all those Richard-Dawkins-wannabes here on Slashdot ARE annoying as hell.
The groupthink on/. is intolerable in its intolerance of religion.
I don't believe I've ever beheaded a person for not converting to Christianity, stoned someone to death for adultery, or tried to get local area bars shut down for serving alcohol on Sundays, but the moronic groupthink here hits all Christians on/. with that paintbrush, even though NONE of the above is actually a Christian activity to do.
>>So much so that most atheists just call themselves agnostic to avoid being confused with an anti-theist.
And as a Christian, I tend to keep my mouth shut because it's just not worth people assuming a thousand incorrect things about me by when I call myself a theist.
>>But religious moderation has always struck me as intellectually and (if your morals are religiously-grounded) morally dishonest
It depends what religion you mean. In Christianity, there's no concept of trying to convert by the sword - Jesus and his crew went out and talked people into converting. If you follow Jesus, you don't behead them if they don't believe in you. In Islam, well, there ARE passages that are quite hard for the moderate to deal with.
I really hate when atheists conflate Christianity with Islam. They're two different religions, and have two vastly different philosophies. Jesus was a brilliant man, peaceful, smart, and a healer. Mohammad was a lying warlord who married a very young girl. Christians getting back to their roots don't have to deal with all that convert-or-die stuff that modern day moderate Islam does.
>>The fundamentalists of a given religion are the true adherents of that religion.
No. Fundies follow the Bible much less closely than other mainstream religions. They're a modern invention created in response to rising scientism in our society. If you want to understand what Christians actually believe, you will have to take your atheist hat off for a second and realize the mouth breathing people you see on TV don't represent traditional Christian thought. Read instead the writings of the Catholic Church, especially the early fathers. They wrote long before the whole "Darwin vs. Religion" pseudo-debate happened, and considered Genesis to be metaphorical instead of literal. Read your St. Augustine or Origen or Polycarp or whatever. They obviously haven't been touched by modernism, and they disagree with fundies. The Catholic Church got nearly every theological point right except when it came to their invented doctrine of purgatory, saints, and sex. The church is forbidden from forcing church elders to be chaste. The RCC ignores this, and gets pedophiles as the result.
Fundies are the loudest, but they're not actually "Bible Christians" as they claim. Jesus turned water into wine. They consider alcohol to be the work of the devil. Etc., etc., etc.
>>but you still want to have monogamous sex with her. If that's what you want, then you don't really want a marriage, because marriage is this big complex institution that comes with all (or most) of those trappings you just said you don't want.
To be fair, most if not all of the modern day churches get the sex issue wrong. Oddly enough, this is the most common complaint about Christianity. Well, perhaps not that oddly.
>>Likewise, many religious moderates don't want all the medieval (hell, sometimes stone-age) trappings that come with their religious traditions
However, your core point is wrong. There are not "stone age trappings" in Christianity. But Christianity was amazingly modern for its time, and still is an ethical standard much higher than most people live by today. Honestly, there's only two fundamental rules in Christianity: 1) Love God above all else, 2) Love other people as much as yourself. All else is window dressing.
You could make an argument that Judaism is caught in "stone age trappings", except Maihamondes said something nearly identical to the above. And he was writing in the 1600s.
>>They don't control Foxconn, and, last I checked, Apple didn't have a standing army or a special ops unit that could force Foxconn to do what Apple would like them to do.
>>I thought that phenomenon was caused by the curvature in space-time, so IMHO it wasn't "interaction" per-se.
Gravity is just curvature of time-space.
Maybe.
The really interesting thing about photons, to me, is that time doesn't pass for them (because they're massless). So if you were a photon, would you experience all points in spacetime simultaneously?
>>Having been poked in the eye with a stick once, I have to say, activating a game online induces far less blindness and ball-shriveling pain than being poked in the eye with a stick.
Was this the same weekend when Dragon Age: Origins came out, and my internet connection went down for a week?
Slashdot Mirror
If you have ever read some of the papers in environmental science on how they do their work, you'd be rightly appalled at how loosey-goosey they are.
For example, testing for extinction. Put a rope around a small field. Count the number of insect species in it. Come back a year later. Do it again. Assume that any species you don't see the second year are extinct. Extrapolate the extinction rate of the planet from it.
Feynman put it best when he based the soft sciences. You could probably look up the quote yourself.
>>Please, which ineffable things can religion eff but science cannot?
You're coming in a few centuries late to the IS/OUGHT debate.
Science empirically describes what is.
Ethics/Philosophy/Religion describe what ought to be.
Different issues entirely, and neither in conflict. Science can inform ethics, and ethics can provide, well, ethical restrictions on science, and so together they benefit.
>>It is more-or-less taught as the value of knowing truth emotionally rather than and in spite of science.
Not in my church. In fact, we rather look down on someone that can believe in something irrationally, against the evidence. Read your CS Lewis for a lot of thoughts along these lines... in essence he said that if you're firmly convinced God cannot possibly exist, then it would be quite stupid for you to become a Christian.
I'm sure you're telling the truth about your church - a lot of churches, especially fundie ones, teach it this way, and it's a real shame. But if you're setting out strawmen based on members of a group being ignorant, you can tar and feather anyone.
>>I personally have an axiom: people who knowingly reject the axioms of science are insane.
That's fine. I've met more atheists than Christians that are that way.
>>If Christianity were really, truly, purely Christianity, I would agree with you. Jesus was an awesome guy with a pretty modern, ethical message for his part. A Christianity based on something like the Jefferson Bible would be mostly fine by my reckoning.
Well, that's why I try to do my part to fight ignorance. =) Most Christians don't have a very good grasp of theology, often just parroting what their pastor says (wine is the work of the devil!) Atheists are often worse, parroting what Dawkins thinks the Bible says, which starts to end up being like a blasphemous version of Telephone.
>>you still get all the baggage of those unambiguously barbaric bits
If you were making an argument about Judaism being stuck in the bronze age, I might be inclined to agree with you. Orthodox Jews have a lot of issues like this, though it bears pointing out they never actually stoned anyone to death for disrespecting their parents (take that as you will). It's also important to understand where Jews are coming from: God made a covenant (i.e. contract) with Abraham - he would worship God, and God would give him lots of descendants. A gay guy is a covenant breaker. When you look at the OT from this perspective, a lot of the weirder passages (to the modern eye) make sense. No eunuch can become a Jew - that one always puzzled me (my pastor told me it was a cult ritual thing, and who knows? He could be right, too.)
If the OT contained an ethical message for the bronze age, Jesus brought an ethical message that was the equivalent of grad school - no hard and fast rules to follow, but everyone being held to a much higher ethical standard. A Jew could just say, "Sorry, bleeding dude, can't help you. It's the Sabbath." A Christian would be morally obligated to help bleeding dude. His parables make this abundantly clear - the law was to serve man, to try to elevate him to a higher level... not man to serve the law. To paraphrase some passage or other. So I don't think that a Christian following the Bible precisely would kill a gay guy.
And please don't get me started on the sex thing - Jesus very explicitly said that chastity had to be a voluntary sacrifice, but the RCC made it mandatory for their leadership (for a good reason 1000 years ago, but no longer a good reason now), and a lot of the havoc in the church is directly a result of their ignoring some very good advice in the Bible. Likewise, the notion that one man should only ever be with one woman (and more importantly vice versa) is exploded by OT law, and Jesus implicitly going along with it when questioned about marriage in heaven. I suppose I could provide a reference if you'd like, but you seem pretty well read on the subject, and probably know what I'm talking about.
As for the Jefferson Bible thing, I do incline a touch towards Deism, at least from the point of view that it seems like a lot of people ascribe God's direct involvement in things a bit too readily. I don't think he doesn't involve himself at all, though. Also, it seems a bit disrespectful to be chopping up a Bible with scissors, but I guess nowadays you could do the same thing with Word.
>>But no, everyone here has to put on their tin-foil hat and cower in fear because the government is actually trying to give a damn.
Government spying vs. a chance to take Comcast down a notch?
My lord, man, stop! You'll cause their heads to explode!
>>Fuck it, better to be safe than sorry ...
Coward.
Your brother shouldn't have just run in and thrown a punch, but he was still trying to do the right thing. As soon as normal people stop trying to care for their fellow man, that's the end of civilization, man. You think the police by themselves can keep a civilization running when it doesn't want to?
A week or so ago I found a naked drunk guy passed out on the asphalt at 2AM, in cold weather. I woke him up, probably saved his life, but he attacked me for my help. I got tagged a couple times when he came into my car after me when I tried to leave (after dodging his clumsy attacks for a few minutes), but I'd do the same thing again tomorrow if I had to.
In other words: fucking suck it up and be a good man, even if it does end up with you being arrested or punched in the face.
Very well put, my friend.
>>I can't think of a single scientific organization in the world that has researched the subject that doesn't agree with the IPCC findings
Let's assume you're ignoring all of the parts of the AR4 written by non-scientific interest groups like the WWF, and the various other issues with the glaciers and all that. You probably didn't know they were included in the report, but who cares?
The real issue is: How can you disagree with predictions? If the top people run some models and produce a collection of results based on different CO2 levels in the future, then how can anyone disagree with them?
It's been 20 years since AR1, so we can actually look back at their predictions and see that they predicted a temperature rise around 50% higher than what we got (Real Climate.org called the prediction "a bit warm"), but don't let me stop you from believing predictions are infallible. And it's not like the planet *didn't* warm up in the meantime (AGW is very likely true), but the real story here is about how angry climate scientists get when you point these kinds of problems out to them, because it's inherently not a very scientific field (you can't run experiments in real life to test your hypothesis), and I think deep down they all know it.
They do like to call each other scientists though. That makes them feel better.
Trying to use science as a basis of ethics is one of the most dangerous things we could do as a culture. We do it all the time - look at the debate over if vegetarianism is ethical due to the length of the human intestine, or studies of homosexuality in animals, or etc.
The reason why religion has led to the greatest ethical advance any human civilization has seen is because we hold certain rights to be inalienable, endowed by a creator.
In a purely scientific, materialistic society, there are NO inalienable rights. We're all collections of atoms, nothing more, and if my scientific theory of action says that I should kill you, wear your clothes, and impersonate you because Mynah birds can mimick people, then there's nothing stopping me from doing it.
Ethics, religion, and philosophy can be informed by science, but they can never be solved by science. Science deals in the world as it is, ethics/religion/philosophy deal with the world as it should be.
>>Truth isn't slippery. Truth is absolute.
Science doesn't deal in truths, but theories. This is the point that you miss, and the general public gets, but misunderstands.
Scientific theories are generalizations that attempt to be best fits to the data we have available. The Standard Model is (what a lot of people think is) our best guess about the subatomic world, but it's possible it is wrong in more ways than just cutting down the error on some of the terms.
What really annoys the public is when scientists present theories as truth. The scientific community concludes that global warming will result in +0.3C gain per decade! (1991) Oh, but we only got +0.2C per decade. So how people react to this takes different forms:
1) Global warming is proven false. Because the +0.2 gain was right on the bottom of the error bars for the AR1 best guess prediction.
2) Global warming is proven true. Because a +0.2 gain was included in the error bars.
3) I can't trust scientists because they said something would be true, and it wasn't.
The really fucked up thing is that for people who say that global warming was proven true because the actual numbers fell within the range of the predictions would then have to say that global warming was false if we'd actually gotten +1.0C gain. Because it got too hot! It was outside the range of predictions! Contrawise, the AR4 predictions include +0.0C change in their prediction, so if we have no warming at all, people can say that the AR4 report was happily accurate.
See where the problem is? No? Ok, here it is in a nutshell:
1) Scientists like you present their theories as truth, when it's not.
2) People have grown distrustful of scientists because of this, and gain an unfortunate lack of faith in perfectly good scientific theories as the result.
3) The media presents all theories equally, so people don't understand when we should have confidence in a result (like the charge of an electron or the shape of DNA) and less confident results (like all those various epidemiology hand-waving studies).
>>Gaming and coding are two completely different things, only tangentially related by the thinnest of connections.
Not true. The connection is this: when you play a game long enough, you start discovering its flaws. If you have the right kind of personality, you get a burning desire to fix them.
For example, suppose that in chess, there was a way of always winning in 3 moves. You might make a quick fix rule to disallow that combination, but a creative person would start thinking of ways of rewriting the game so that it was still fun and balanced. People have been doing that kind of stuff for years, but with video games it's a lot harder. It's called "modding", and requires you to have a good set of coding skills for most of them. Look at the sheer number of addons written for WoW that modify its behavior.
That's the parent's entry into the whole thing, IF the kid has the right personality type. If he doesn't, then he's just never going to be a good programmer.
>>It is often considered a threat to Christianity because without a literal Adam and Eve there was no "fall" and therefor we didn't inherit a "sinful nature"
Nope, sorry. St. Augustine and Origen both considered Genesis to be allegorical, and they wrote long before the Darwin debate came up.
>>Logic fail: The Christians were Romans. Or do you suggest that the Roman government was running around setting their own record-keeping buildings on fire? The idea that Julius Caesar burned them down accidentally is one of the least-supported theories, and is considered well-debunked. In any case, Wikipedia gives four different explanations and none of them are amazingly well-supported. The issue is complicated by the fact that there were multiple libraries at Alexandria.
This is honestly one of the stupidest statements I've ever read on Slashdot. Are you honestly claiming the original manuscripts of the New Testament were destroyed in Julius Caesar's time? The man died in 44BC!
If not, please explain.
Also, logic fail: Christians were nominally Romans (depending which place and time), but not all Romans were Christians. You might want to go back to a basic logic class again.
>>It's not even a disproved theory. At its core, ID is simply "somehow something somewhere is wrong with evolution". Other than a rather vague claim that some structures are too complex to have evolved naturally, ID makes virtually no positive claims at all, and I don't even that vague claim can possibly be considered positive.
It is a theory. Or it can be, depending on how you formulate it. For example:
"Evolution is true, but something interfered with the natural process" is a positive claim that can be tested.
In fact, we'll need tests like that in the future if we're to tell if the West Nile 2100 virus was man-made or natural. We could easily apply such tests to any DNA historical archives we can put together.
>>False. There are no reputable historical sources for his existence.
Most every mainstream historians believe there was a historical Jesus. Atheist historians think he wasn't the son of God, but I think even idiots like Hitchens admit that he existed (IIRC).
There are extant writings from people who worked with the apostles, so it's very very hard to claim that Jesus never existed. (And the writings of the apostles themselves, but you're using special pleading to disallow them.)
>>I pray to global warming so that my mommy and daddy dont get a divorce.
According to Danny Glover, the Haiti earthquake was global warming's way of punishing us for our sins.
Which is very similar to what Pat Robertson said with their infernal pact and all that. So yeah, I guess it is a religion, at least for some idiots.
>>It wasn't the atheists that I was being critical of. I'm critical of Christians who think Christianity and their culture is better than Islam.
Are you honestly making the claim that all cultures are of equal ethical value?
Cultural relativism is a dark and windy path to walk down, my friend. Next thing you know you'll say it's wrong to stop islanders from Figi from kidnapping small boys from other islands and tying them to the tops of their masts, where they either die from exposure and vomiting, or survive and get brainwashed into joining their army. I mean, after all, stopping this is a form of cultural imperialism - by stopping their source of recruits, you're destroying their culture.
A similar analogy exists for Islam. Nobody cares that they don't eat pork, or wash their hands before dinner, or any purely cultural things like that. It's when their culture interfaces with our's, in a context of historical conquest, kidnapping and brainwashing (the Balkans experienced situations similar to the Figi example above for centuries) or modern day terrorism, that Christianity has responded to it. You can't simply call it cultural imperialism, because cultural interfaces work two ways.
Or are you just giving Islam special protection? Like everyone else does?
>>That never happened. Christianity never learned anything
>>They were thrown out of governments for good
Bullshit. What mythical atheist army removed the Christians from power? Think about that for second and realize how stupid that statement is. Given atheists were nearly non-existent at the time that the various protection laws for religion rolled around, which were a CHRISTIAN answer to a Christian problem, I find it fascinating that you would think that Christians got somehow thrown out of power.
>>Give Christianity back the power they had a in the dark ages and in a decade or two "peaceful" and "tolerant" Christians will be burning heathens on crosses in the name of their lord
Utter and total bullshit.
>>tldr; It is Islamic states (or generally religion+state) that are the problem, not Islam per se.
Islam is a large part of the problem. When a Christian runs around beheading people for not converting to Christianity, you can point out where they're wrong using the New Testament. When a Muslim does the same thing, the moderate has a hard time arguing it, because of the various passages advocating violence. Since they were written later in Muhammad's career, they take precedence over his peaceful passages (when he was still small and afraid of the Jewish communities in his area).
>>I sure find people who believe all atheists are Richard-Dawkins-wannabes annoying as hell
To be fair, all those Richard-Dawkins-wannabes here on Slashdot ARE annoying as hell.
The groupthink on /. is intolerable in its intolerance of religion.
I don't believe I've ever beheaded a person for not converting to Christianity, stoned someone to death for adultery, or tried to get local area bars shut down for serving alcohol on Sundays, but the moronic groupthink here hits all Christians on /. with that paintbrush, even though NONE of the above is actually a Christian activity to do.
>>So much so that most atheists just call themselves agnostic to avoid being confused with an anti-theist.
And as a Christian, I tend to keep my mouth shut because it's just not worth people assuming a thousand incorrect things about me by when I call myself a theist.
>>But religious moderation has always struck me as intellectually and (if your morals are religiously-grounded) morally dishonest
It depends what religion you mean. In Christianity, there's no concept of trying to convert by the sword - Jesus and his crew went out and talked people into converting. If you follow Jesus, you don't behead them if they don't believe in you. In Islam, well, there ARE passages that are quite hard for the moderate to deal with.
I really hate when atheists conflate Christianity with Islam. They're two different religions, and have two vastly different philosophies. Jesus was a brilliant man, peaceful, smart, and a healer. Mohammad was a lying warlord who married a very young girl. Christians getting back to their roots don't have to deal with all that convert-or-die stuff that modern day moderate Islam does.
>>The fundamentalists of a given religion are the true adherents of that religion.
No. Fundies follow the Bible much less closely than other mainstream religions. They're a modern invention created in response to rising scientism in our society. If you want to understand what Christians actually believe, you will have to take your atheist hat off for a second and realize the mouth breathing people you see on TV don't represent traditional Christian thought. Read instead the writings of the Catholic Church, especially the early fathers. They wrote long before the whole "Darwin vs. Religion" pseudo-debate happened, and considered Genesis to be metaphorical instead of literal. Read your St. Augustine or Origen or Polycarp or whatever. They obviously haven't been touched by modernism, and they disagree with fundies. The Catholic Church got nearly every theological point right except when it came to their invented doctrine of purgatory, saints, and sex. The church is forbidden from forcing church elders to be chaste. The RCC ignores this, and gets pedophiles as the result.
Fundies are the loudest, but they're not actually "Bible Christians" as they claim. Jesus turned water into wine. They consider alcohol to be the work of the devil. Etc., etc., etc.
>>but you still want to have monogamous sex with her. If that's what you want, then you don't really want a marriage, because marriage is this big complex institution that comes with all (or most) of those trappings you just said you don't want.
To be fair, most if not all of the modern day churches get the sex issue wrong. Oddly enough, this is the most common complaint about Christianity. Well, perhaps not that oddly.
>>Likewise, many religious moderates don't want all the medieval (hell, sometimes stone-age) trappings that come with their religious traditions
However, your core point is wrong. There are not "stone age trappings" in Christianity. But Christianity was amazingly modern for its time, and still is an ethical standard much higher than most people live by today. Honestly, there's only two fundamental rules in Christianity: 1) Love God above all else, 2) Love other people as much as yourself. All else is window dressing.
You could make an argument that Judaism is caught in "stone age trappings", except Maihamondes said something nearly identical to the above. And he was writing in the 1600s.
To put it another way, is it existing at all points along a line in spacetime at once?
>>They don't control Foxconn, and, last I checked, Apple didn't have a standing army or a special ops unit that could force Foxconn to do what Apple would like them to do.
Tell that to Gizmodo.
>>Even peasants in China living 100-200 years ago didn't need to live such pitiful lives.
And yet, oddly enough, the people choose to work in the factories rather than be dirt farmers back home.
There's a reason why do-gooders need bodyguards when they go to investigate "sweatshops" - the workers often try to kill them for costing them jobs.
>>I thought that phenomenon was caused by the curvature in space-time, so IMHO it wasn't "interaction" per-se.
Gravity is just curvature of time-space.
Maybe.
The really interesting thing about photons, to me, is that time doesn't pass for them (because they're massless). So if you were a photon, would you experience all points in spacetime simultaneously?
>>Having been poked in the eye with a stick once, I have to say, activating a game online induces far less blindness and ball-shriveling pain than being poked in the eye with a stick.
Was this the same weekend when Dragon Age: Origins came out, and my internet connection went down for a week?
Because I think I would have traded you.