But we as humans are actually fully capable of dealing with fuzzy things - the legal system does all the time. Does such-and-such constitute intent to murder? Sure, it can be fuzzy, but we have learned to discriminate nonetheless.
However you want to put it. Mother Theresa was a Christian, but if she'd been an atheist, I'd still have called what she'd done an act of grace.
Atheists talk about being nice to people, but do they put words into action as much as Christians? Where is the Mother Theresa of atheists?
One of the side effects of becoming a Christian is that you look at your own actions in retrospect and realize that while you thought you were just getting by, there were a lot of opportunities for you to have treated people better.
>>I'm just sort of goggling at this statement. The kid had full-time classes and a half-time job. No, he didn't have the time for working on side-projects.
7 days/week x 24 hours/day = 168 hours/week
16 units = 32 hours of schoolwork a week 20 hours of work for part-time 8 hours of sleep per day x 7 days = 56 hours of sleep 2 hour of driving and food per day x 7 days = 14 hours of driving and food. =46 hours left over.
That's the equivalent of a full time job in hours of free time left over.
Now if you're telling me he didn't *want* to spend his free time "working" on side-projects as you put it, that's one thing. (It's not work, in any event, it's play.) It's another to pretend that he had no free time.
>>Arbitrary, given that you have no measurement standard.
You didn't read the links above? They let you discriminate between cult and mainstream religion.
Fuzzy logic is indeed the answer - but it is rather silly to say that because hot and cold are on the same spectrum of temperature, that hot and cold are the same thing.
Perhaps you could try looking at the quoted part in the message I responded to? As an aside, I have yet to see an argument against religion on/. that has not been based on logical positivisism (which shows a poor level of debate from the anti-religionists, because those arguments were pretty comprehensively dealt with in the middle of the last century but there are more recent arguments against religion that are still subject to debate.)
Speak the truth, brother. I sometimes feel like I'm the only one that bothers to point out the obvious logical contradictions in the dominant logical positivist atheist groupthink on here.
It's like how the atheists view theists, ironically enough, except they're the ones adopting the obviously self-contradictory position. And due to their ideological blinders, they can't see it. I love it. =)
I don't mind people being atheists, at all. I just hate it when people adopt beliefs that are obviously false (and this goes for theists, too, don't get me wrong).
While it's not that hard to develop a system of beliefs that isn't built on obvious self-contradiction, for some reason logical positivism has become dominant on here. I could barely sit through some classes with Patricia Churchland at my college.
>>You're still ignoring the gray areas and focusing only on the extreme examples. So, as long as it doesn't force you to cut off all contact and move away from friends and family, it's not a cult?
Did you see how I rated the Campus Crusade for Christ as cult-light? I would put it in the middle of the spectrum between religion on one side and the People's Church on the other.
Fuzzy boundaries exist everywhere in real life outside of the hard sciences, and are always the answer to answers like these (even the Sorites Paradox which you referred to above, but doesn't apply here, as it is not a size matter).
>>I have a friend who doesn't have any personal projects to show for his 4 years in school. You know why? Because he was working to put himself through school.
Then he can use his full time work (assuming he did the smart thing and got a job in tech) as his resume instead. If he was just working part time, then he'd have the time needed to work on a project.
But again, you're making it sound as if a project is work, instead of play.
We will keep full servers going occasionally. Other people modified my code (I ran it open source from the beginning), so if you liked playing as a warlock, there's even more options for you now. =)
>>This is never, ever, a good introductory sentence.
Heh, I know. Social science is a lot more fuzzy than hard science. That said, who else is going to study cults? Your bioengineering professor?
Nobody?
At least if it was nobody, atheists would get away with making the incorrect claim there's no difference between cults and religion, eh?
No. As someone who has seen the effect cults can have on other people (my wife lost her best friend), there really is a strong difference. You know it when you see it. The social scientists that have studied it actually have a pretty good grasp on what it takes to be a cult, even if the result is a fuzzy truth value, instead of a binary one.
Heh, an atheist reference site is probably not the most impartial reference you could find.
The simple fact of the matter is, the French Revolutionaries hated the church, and went out of their way to desecrate churches and slaughter the clergy. Even your reference talks about the Russians wanting to create a "worker's paradise" and saw religion as an obstacle to that creation - and so they slaughtered the Christians because they were Christian. Atheism was an integral part of the Soviet Union, which regarded religion as the opiate of the masses - though in reality, they slaughtered the Christians because the doctrine of Freedom and Liberty that people draw from Christianity was a threat to the communist tyranny.
I'd assign credit for 9/11 to radical Islam. Just as I lay the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Christians - killed by atheists *because* they were Christian - at the doorstep of atheism. If that's too broad a paintbrush for you, call it radical atheism then.
My main point in posting those references, though, is to point out that it's incorrect to claim that atheists have been enlightened rulers whenever they've taken power. Atheist countries don't have a very good track record until very modern times. And France still is suppressing freedom of religion.
>>Thus I believe that ethical systems based on figuring out which individual behaviour leads to more desirable collective outcomes are better ethical systems than those prescribing the same individual behaviours for arbitrary reasons.
I've never seen a Utilitarian system that would work in practice, except by special casing out all the Utilitarianism.
>>I believe, as an atheist, that someone who requires a set of arbitrary rules to behave ethically -- or worse, the threat of eternal damnation -- is a scumbag at heart.
Flip it around. I believe that people that have a love for God (and a love for a living, loving God in particular) will naturally tend to love other humans more, and treat them better. Ethical systems by atheists suffer from spiritual aridness, not really doing much to inspire its adherents to go forth and make a positive difference in the world.
Atheists focus far to much on the Old Testament God-as-executioner, whereas the message of the Bible (well, the New Testament) is God-the-loving-father.
>>No, it doesn't make me sad. It makes me interested though, and as I said, there is no standard of measurement presented, so I don't know what you're referring to when you say they're measurably different. Even if there is some standard for measurement, then you still have the heap problem to overcome, namely at what point does a cult become a religion, or vice versa?
At the point at which it's negatively affecting a member's life is a easy threshold, similar to what mental health surveys use to test for illness. You have occasional mild manic and depressive phases, but it doesn't affect your life negatively? You're not sick.
Does your religion cause you to cut off all contact with outside friends and family (and force you to move to South America?) It's a cult.
Really? I guess if your parents are paying your way through school, you have plenty of time to play games and do mods.
Many people have to work full time jobs, sometimes 2 part-time jobs that equal more than a full-time job. While taking a full class load. If you call going to shool 8 hours a day, working 10+ hours a day, and trying to find time to do class work "lazy", then you're just plain insane.
It's good that you see things so black and white, and can't imagine how anyone else has different circumstances than you. You'll be a great manager.
My parents bought me some orange juice once when I was a junior - that was about the sum total of their contribution to my college funding. My grandparents left a few thousand dollars in bonds, though.
Part time jobs are probably a good idea, especially working in-field, for computer science people. If you're working 10+ hours a day, you're doing it wrong. Sorry. It may seem like a good idea, but you're going to have to sacrifice your studies to be able to put in that many hours at a job. You're not a student. Besides, if you're working full time in the field, then the above doesn't apply to you anyway.
College isn't school for 8 hours a day, five days a week, in any event.
The fact of the matter is, everyone has free time, and everyone chooses how to spend it differently. You're making it sound like I want people to work during their free time, which misses the point entirely.
Nice hypocrisy you've got there on your sleeve. Does it come out in the wash, or are you just loud angry all the time at how you imagine Christians are loud and angry all the time?
You're a loon.
>>It's like living in an insane asylum. Only without the access to good drugs.
>>That ICSA checklist uses lots of weasel words, making most differences between cults and religions only a matter of degree, and presents no objective way to measure those degrees. Most things in that checklist seem to be characteristic of most forms of Christianity and other major religions. Any good cultist could easily argue that they're a religion according to that list.
If you've ever come into contact with a cult, the difference is actually pretty obvious. I don't know any mainstream church that forces people to abandon their former friends when they join the church. By contrast, the Campus Crusade for Christ not only forces its members to drop former friends, they force them to drop all non-CCC friends - including Christian friends that might rescue the CCC member from the trap. The bi-weekly guilt sessions are also indicative, as are the pressure to donate lots of money to the CCC or be forced out (thus losing their entire social network, which is too painful for many people to consider). I don't know any mainstream church that forces people out if they don't donate. Mormons, maybe. But some people argue Mormonism is a cult, too.
A good analogy would be checklists in the DSM. They're guidelines for diagnosing mental disease. While not hard and fast, necessarily, they work adequately well in most cases to differentiate between sick and health, and in most cases the difference is obvious.
>>In what way does L. Ron Hubbard match that description, but Jesus of Nazareth not match it?
Elrond did it to build a multinational business. Jesus commanded his disciples to own no possessions, take no money, and rely on handouts from the people they spoke to.
This is true, but there are also plenty of reasons why a candidate wouldn't have a decent portfolio they could present to potential employers. The stuff I tend to do in my spare time tends to be rushed and experimental. I have a lot of unfinished projects, and the ones that do get finished tend to be the smaller things that I code on a whim without any intention of ever modifying it again, stuff done for programming challenges, etc.
This collection of half-finished tools is exactly what a smart employer will look for, and not expect them to be necessarily that polished.
Every great CS nerd I know had a programming folder full of random bits of code that they wrote themselves. That's why I'd ask to see something like that (if my company was hiring, that is).
Must be nice to have gone to a crappy enough school, on scholarship, where you had the free time necessary to do all of this because your classes didn't require all-night coding sessions for several days in a row and a part time job so you could feed yourself.
For the rest of us....all of this extracurricular program just isn't going to happen.
Watch less Glee, fucktard, and you'll have all the free time in the world needed to work on these things.
Though I had a full scholarship to a good school (I got a BS and MS from UC San Diego's CS department) I worked 15 hours a week, carried 16 units every quarter for four years, maintained a 3.5GPA, and still had time to work on projects (I wrote the CustomTF mod in this time period, for example, among many other things) while doing martial arts and intramural sports.
Don't watch TV, and you'll be amazed how much time you have on your hands. But hey, thanks for the troll.
>>Scientology has a lot of followers and doesn't worship a living person.
It's not about worshipping a living person, but about having a charismatic leader they built a cult of personality around. L Ron Hubbard matches that description exactly - they still maintain the cult of personality around him, even now.
>>Was Christianity a cult until it was adopted by the Roman Emperors a couple of hundred years after its creation?
No. Being a cult has nothing to do with being small or obscure, and doesn't go away when it becomes mainstream. It would only be a cult if it engaged in oppressive practices towards its members, whereas in reality it offered women (especially) greater freedom than what they got from Roman Society, which is why it was so attractive to them. The early church had lots of female church leaders, and women outnumbered men 2-to-1 or more, until it became mainstream.
>>I lost a very good friend to Campus Crusade of Crap. Most definitely, they are a nasty cult.
Yep, my wife, too. They lure in hapless people by offering them an instant social network, and then use the threat of losing all the New Friends to pressure people into paying them money, going on missions, ditching their former friends (even if they're friends) and attending bi-weekly guilt sessions.
I might have been wrong about them not having a charismatic leader, but I don't know that much about the Brights.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the real world is indeed complicated. =)
But we as humans are actually fully capable of dealing with fuzzy things - the legal system does all the time. Does such-and-such constitute intent to murder? Sure, it can be fuzzy, but we have learned to discriminate nonetheless.
However you want to put it. Mother Theresa was a Christian, but if she'd been an atheist, I'd still have called what she'd done an act of grace.
Atheists talk about being nice to people, but do they put words into action as much as Christians? Where is the Mother Theresa of atheists?
One of the side effects of becoming a Christian is that you look at your own actions in retrospect and realize that while you thought you were just getting by, there were a lot of opportunities for you to have treated people better.
>>I'm just sort of goggling at this statement. The kid had full-time classes and a half-time job. No, he didn't have the time for working on side-projects.
7 days/week x 24 hours/day = 168 hours/week
16 units = 32 hours of schoolwork a week
20 hours of work for part-time
8 hours of sleep per day x 7 days = 56 hours of sleep
2 hour of driving and food per day x 7 days = 14 hours of driving and food.
=46 hours left over.
That's the equivalent of a full time job in hours of free time left over.
Now if you're telling me he didn't *want* to spend his free time "working" on side-projects as you put it, that's one thing. (It's not work, in any event, it's play.) It's another to pretend that he had no free time.
>>Arbitrary, given that you have no measurement standard.
You didn't read the links above? They let you discriminate between cult and mainstream religion.
Fuzzy logic is indeed the answer - but it is rather silly to say that because hot and cold are on the same spectrum of temperature, that hot and cold are the same thing.
Speak the truth, brother. I sometimes feel like I'm the only one that bothers to point out the obvious logical contradictions in the dominant logical positivist atheist groupthink on here.
It's like how the atheists view theists, ironically enough, except they're the ones adopting the obviously self-contradictory position. And due to their ideological blinders, they can't see it. I love it. =)
I don't mind people being atheists, at all. I just hate it when people adopt beliefs that are obviously false (and this goes for theists, too, don't get me wrong).
While it's not that hard to develop a system of beliefs that isn't built on obvious self-contradiction, for some reason logical positivism has become dominant on here. I could barely sit through some classes with Patricia Churchland at my college.
>>You're still ignoring the gray areas and focusing only on the extreme examples. So, as long as it doesn't force you to cut off all contact and move away from friends and family, it's not a cult?
Did you see how I rated the Campus Crusade for Christ as cult-light? I would put it in the middle of the spectrum between religion on one side and the People's Church on the other.
Fuzzy boundaries exist everywhere in real life outside of the hard sciences, and are always the answer to answers like these (even the Sorites Paradox which you referred to above, but doesn't apply here, as it is not a size matter).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox#Truth_gaps.2C_gluts.2C_and_many-valued_logics
>>I have a friend who doesn't have any personal projects to show for his 4 years in school. You know why? Because he was working to put himself through school.
Then he can use his full time work (assuming he did the smart thing and got a job in tech) as his resume instead. If he was just working part time, then he'd have the time needed to work on a project.
But again, you're making it sound as if a project is work, instead of play.
It's still being played. =)
Join us on Facebook!
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_178060565542861&ap=1
We will keep full servers going occasionally. Other people modified my code (I ran it open source from the beginning), so if you liked playing as a warlock, there's even more options for you now. =)
>>This is never, ever, a good introductory sentence.
Heh, I know. Social science is a lot more fuzzy than hard science. That said, who else is going to study cults? Your bioengineering professor?
Nobody?
At least if it was nobody, atheists would get away with making the incorrect claim there's no difference between cults and religion, eh?
No. As someone who has seen the effect cults can have on other people (my wife lost her best friend), there really is a strong difference. You know it when you see it. The social scientists that have studied it actually have a pretty good grasp on what it takes to be a cult, even if the result is a fuzzy truth value, instead of a binary one.
Heh, an atheist reference site is probably not the most impartial reference you could find.
The simple fact of the matter is, the French Revolutionaries hated the church, and went out of their way to desecrate churches and slaughter the clergy. Even your reference talks about the Russians wanting to create a "worker's paradise" and saw religion as an obstacle to that creation - and so they slaughtered the Christians because they were Christian. Atheism was an integral part of the Soviet Union, which regarded religion as the opiate of the masses - though in reality, they slaughtered the Christians because the doctrine of Freedom and Liberty that people draw from Christianity was a threat to the communist tyranny.
I'd assign credit for 9/11 to radical Islam. Just as I lay the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Christians - killed by atheists *because* they were Christian - at the doorstep of atheism. If that's too broad a paintbrush for you, call it radical atheism then.
My main point in posting those references, though, is to point out that it's incorrect to claim that atheists have been enlightened rulers whenever they've taken power. Atheist countries don't have a very good track record until very modern times. And France still is suppressing freedom of religion.
>>Thus I believe that ethical systems based on figuring out which individual behaviour leads to more desirable collective outcomes are better ethical systems than those prescribing the same individual behaviours for arbitrary reasons.
I've never seen a Utilitarian system that would work in practice, except by special casing out all the Utilitarianism.
>>I believe, as an atheist, that someone who requires a set of arbitrary rules to behave ethically -- or worse, the threat of eternal damnation -- is a scumbag at heart.
Flip it around. I believe that people that have a love for God (and a love for a living, loving God in particular) will naturally tend to love other humans more, and treat them better. Ethical systems by atheists suffer from spiritual aridness, not really doing much to inspire its adherents to go forth and make a positive difference in the world.
Atheists focus far to much on the Old Testament God-as-executioner, whereas the message of the Bible (well, the New Testament) is God-the-loving-father.
>>No, it doesn't make me sad. It makes me interested though, and as I said, there is no standard of measurement presented, so I don't know what you're referring to when you say they're measurably different. Even if there is some standard for measurement, then you still have the heap problem to overcome, namely at what point does a cult become a religion, or vice versa?
At the point at which it's negatively affecting a member's life is a easy threshold, similar to what mental health surveys use to test for illness. You have occasional mild manic and depressive phases, but it doesn't affect your life negatively? You're not sick.
Does your religion cause you to cut off all contact with outside friends and family (and force you to move to South America?) It's a cult.
My parents bought me some orange juice once when I was a junior - that was about the sum total of their contribution to my college funding. My grandparents left a few thousand dollars in bonds, though.
Part time jobs are probably a good idea, especially working in-field, for computer science people. If you're working 10+ hours a day, you're doing it wrong. Sorry. It may seem like a good idea, but you're going to have to sacrifice your studies to be able to put in that many hours at a job. You're not a student. Besides, if you're working full time in the field, then the above doesn't apply to you anyway.
College isn't school for 8 hours a day, five days a week, in any event.
The fact of the matter is, everyone has free time, and everyone chooses how to spend it differently. You're making it sound like I want people to work during their free time, which misses the point entirely.
>>I remind them that King David had eight wives (and a dozen or so concubines).
>>Now, you can argue that the rules were different for him back then
Why would I argue that? Polygamy is perfectly acceptable by scripture, though in practice having multiple wives is probably not advisable.
"Everything is legal, but not everything is profitable." Getting eight times the nagging would be like a living nightmare.
Strawman is a misrepresentation of someone's position, to make it easy to attack.
The fact that a lot of people believe in a fallacy doesn't make it a strawman. People believe in fallacious things all the time.
*I'm* not heavily weighting the list. The three main characteristics of cults are well established by people that study the subject.
I imagine it must make you sad to find out that cults and religions are actually and measurably different, but the facts are what they are.
>>Furthermore there has never been a war waged in the name of Atheism.
No, of course not. Atheists have a great record of peace and tolerance when they take power, especially towards the religious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianisation_of_France_during_the_French_Revolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USSR_anti-religious_campaign_(1928%E2%80%931941)
http://www.freetibet.org/newsmedia/100807-china-purges-tibet-government-ethnic-tibetans-crackdown-dalai-lama-loyalists
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/2463385/China-plans-sweeping-purge-of-Tibetan-monasteries.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge#Crimes_against_humanity
>>You NEVER SHUT UP ABOUT IT.
Says the guy in bold / ALL CAPS.
Nice hypocrisy you've got there on your sleeve. Does it come out in the wash, or are you just loud angry all the time at how you imagine Christians are loud and angry all the time?
You're a loon.
>>It's like living in an insane asylum. Only without the access to good drugs.
Obviously, you'd know.
>>That ICSA checklist uses lots of weasel words, making most differences between cults and religions only a matter of degree, and presents no objective way to measure those degrees. Most things in that checklist seem to be characteristic of most forms of Christianity and other major religions. Any good cultist could easily argue that they're a religion according to that list.
If you've ever come into contact with a cult, the difference is actually pretty obvious. I don't know any mainstream church that forces people to abandon their former friends when they join the church. By contrast, the Campus Crusade for Christ not only forces its members to drop former friends, they force them to drop all non-CCC friends - including Christian friends that might rescue the CCC member from the trap. The bi-weekly guilt sessions are also indicative, as are the pressure to donate lots of money to the CCC or be forced out (thus losing their entire social network, which is too painful for many people to consider). I don't know any mainstream church that forces people out if they don't donate. Mormons, maybe. But some people argue Mormonism is a cult, too.
A good analogy would be checklists in the DSM. They're guidelines for diagnosing mental disease. While not hard and fast, necessarily, they work adequately well in most cases to differentiate between sick and health, and in most cases the difference is obvious.
>>In what way does L. Ron Hubbard match that description, but Jesus of Nazareth not match it?
Elrond did it to build a multinational business. Jesus commanded his disciples to own no possessions, take no money, and rely on handouts from the people they spoke to.
I think that sort of speaks for itself.
This collection of half-finished tools is exactly what a smart employer will look for, and not expect them to be necessarily that polished.
Every great CS nerd I know had a programming folder full of random bits of code that they wrote themselves. That's why I'd ask to see something like that (if my company was hiring, that is).
Watch less Glee, fucktard, and you'll have all the free time in the world needed to work on these things.
Though I had a full scholarship to a good school (I got a BS and MS from UC San Diego's CS department) I worked 15 hours a week, carried 16 units every quarter for four years, maintained a 3.5GPA, and still had time to work on projects (I wrote the CustomTF mod in this time period, for example, among many other things) while doing martial arts and intramural sports.
Don't watch TV, and you'll be amazed how much time you have on your hands. But hey, thanks for the troll.
My post was to a student ostensibly graduating this year. Experience people have resumes for these sorts of things.
The question posed was how people with no work experience could show they were competent before they were hired.
Helps to RTFA sometimes I guess.
>>Scientology has a lot of followers and doesn't worship a living person.
It's not about worshipping a living person, but about having a charismatic leader they built a cult of personality around. L Ron Hubbard matches that description exactly - they still maintain the cult of personality around him, even now.
>>Was Christianity a cult until it was adopted by the Roman Emperors a couple of hundred years after its creation?
No. Being a cult has nothing to do with being small or obscure, and doesn't go away when it becomes mainstream. It would only be a cult if it engaged in oppressive practices towards its members, whereas in reality it offered women (especially) greater freedom than what they got from Roman Society, which is why it was so attractive to them. The early church had lots of female church leaders, and women outnumbered men 2-to-1 or more, until it became mainstream.
>>I lost a very good friend to Campus Crusade of Crap. Most definitely, they are a nasty cult.
Yep, my wife, too. They lure in hapless people by offering them an instant social network, and then use the threat of losing all the New Friends to pressure people into paying them money, going on missions, ditching their former friends (even if they're friends) and attending bi-weekly guilt sessions.
I might have been wrong about them not having a charismatic leader, but I don't know that much about the Brights.