There's nothing remotely Flamebait or Troll in that message. TrollMods spew cosmoturf to suppress discussion of growing Russian backsliding towards tyranny. Slashdot's mod system really is disgusting sometimes when it's abused by political operatives.
When did the US economy ever grow at 10-15%? And if we can produce our own oil at $40:bbl, why aren't we, instead of paying OPEC $75? Forces that counteract that balance?
Everything you're talking is pure theory, which in economics is known as "folly" (by businessmen, not economists). Except that wild claim of 10-15% US growth. China'a economy grows at 10-15%, so why are they buying our debt? There are other good reasons, but yours is not one of them.
Goddamn I love freaky misfit mathematical geniuses. They're even better than their nerdier cousins, the chess geniuses. The ones from Central/Eastern Europe and South Asia always seem to be the most fun.
I'm no bigot. I hate only those "Christians" who tell me or others what to think or do because of the "Christian's" faith.
As for missing your points, you're the one missing the points of testing. Maybe you accept the Big Bang on faith, but that's only because you can't understand the science. Your limited intellect doesn't reduce science to the primitive weakness of religion.
"Freedom and knowledge" my ass - "Christian theism" is based on training children before they're old enough to question adult authority. Just like the rest of the world's religions. You've apparently fooled yourself easily enough. Find your own values somewhere they don't try to insult my intelligence.
No, faith does offer that knowledge. It just can't be known how accurate or precise - whether it's right, or how wrong. Faith can offer contradictory knowledge of the same "answers", which might not even be exclusive.
But proof can offer no knowledge of those answers. It's up to you whether faith's less reliable answers to more important questions is better than nothing, but it is more than nothing.
You're just caught up in a solipsistic experience of the universe. You can't understand how any knowledge can be had without being reassured by some supernatural father figure.
Just hear my truth, infinitesimal godchild... you are getting sleepy... sleepy... sleepy... put your money in the hat... god is truth... sleepy... money in the hat...
Endless parade of people responding to this thread whose inability to understand science, and how theories like the Big Bang are not only not "blind belief", but testable in in the real present. Tests that yield results we use to do other things with the rest of the real world.
Religion gives us the number of angels that would dance on the head of a pin, and bloody jihad/crusades.
Give me the atheistic agenda, freedom and knowledge and stick your fake "respect for learning" up your blind, stupid ass.
Any economist with any input to any actual economy knows a sustained large negative balance of trade bankrupts the account holder. And anyone trading T-bills knows its not "people with money in China", but the Chinese government, which buys our debt - though there's no real difference between their mafia government and their rich people. When China threatens to stop propping up our dollar's value by buying our debt, unless we concede to some policy of theirs, we'll see just how good it is for our most major global rival to hold so much of our debt.
So you're making "tons of money on this stuff". I've been making financial infosystems for here in NYC and Toronto for over a decade. I watched people who knew nothing of economics make tons of money off stocks and stuff, until they crashed the global economy. And that was just the last time around. I watched others do the same thing the time before that with junk bonds and S&Ls. In between I was there when Long Term Capital needed an $11B bailout, after making tons of money off their stuff. Enron. The list goes on. There's always money in selling out the market, until it crashes down and we're left holding the bag.
Down to the matter at hand, let's have your idea of metrics of how America's kicking everyone's butt. Then we'll see just how those numbers actually stack up away from some Wall Street steakhouse.
What a bunch of crap. "Practice what you preach" doesn't even remotely resemble "learn to read". I'd say I was waiting for an example of the evidence you'd accept, but I never believed that you'd mention it. All you've got, like any apologist for conquerors, is some nebulous mumbojumbo.
I am sticking to my moral superiority above people who force conversion to their cult with a sword. And to my intellectual superiority over Anonymous Cowards who can't post anything but circuitous platitudes unrelated to any defensible position.
Probabilities, testable simulations, beliefs from evidentiary deduction, revisions after testing... those have nothing to do with faith. They are the process of science.
Your inability to distinguish between unproven, yet proveable, beliefs and unproveable faith is not the fault of science.
Your inability to accept knowledge unless it has the impossible certainty of faith is all your fault.
You can't reason gods away, but you can dispel simulated reason that is used to "prove" they exist. When you get rid of the frauds, all that's left is the incompleteness of science in explaining existence, the demonstrable incompleteness of experience. What remains is metaphysical, but in no way resembles any "god" worshipped in any church. Along the way, so many certain claims of various religions are shown false and worthless (or worse) that the rest of their pronouncements on god are not to be trusted, either.
The part that makes religion fascinating is people's insistence on believing even what they know to be false. It tells us a lot about people. And it's the oldest, most lucrative business on Earth.
I can agree with most of that. Except that "not believe in a creator because it is PC" is exactly the opposite of what we're discussing in this thread about a majority of Americans believing in Creation rather than evolution. Creation is Politically Correct. Evolution, the increasingly precise model of natural selection that we're developing, is scientifically correct.
If you're looking for a "Creator" to make sense of all that, you should consider the "Creator" that is your mental function creating your experience of reality from your senses and ideas. It worked to wean Kant off the puerile medieval idea of a supernatural diety, and offers the same powers to a testable psychological phenomenon.
I dismissed and ridiculed someone throwing a "maybe god just started before the part we used to say god started, before science gave a better explanation". The kind of desperate guessing I expect from stupid people.
"believe life started in some sort of 'scientific' way'"? What the hell is wrong with your brain? Science isn't the way things happen, it's the way we know what happens. How can you go through modern life without getting even that basic idea?
I dismiss and ridicule people who insist on believing pure superstition and ignore knowledge backed by facts and evidence, even when less than certain.
I dismiss and ridicule people who think knowledge is just arbitrary agreement or disagreement.
I dismiss and ridicule Anonymous Cowards who reduce my fair criticisms to straw man gibberish.
I dismiss and ridicule you, Anonymous Coward, because you need me to tell you why I dismiss and ridicule your ridiculous way of life.
Killing anyone who doesn't accept you as the prophet of the only god doesn't leave much in the way of evidence, Anonymous Coward.
What kind of proof, Anonymous Coward, would you accept? Or aren't you just an Anonymous trolling Coward who has nothing worth hearing about "confidence", except maybe "confidence games"?
It's no troll - Urey-Miller tested a hypothesis. That makes it science. Even your wife should be able to explain that to you.
You can be a scientist and believe in god, you can be a scientist and be wrong about anything, even in your own discipline. But when you don't understand that faith explains only things that can't be tested, you're not a scientist - you're playing a science game, even if you're good at it. Good at pretending that you accept logic, when you just like to flip it about to impress your less educated fellow believers.
I don't pretend that there's evidence for the Creationism superstition, nor do I throw it out - I test it, if I can, or skeptically examine others' tests. Where is this Creation evidence you claim exists? Haeckel's embryo fraud was well over a century ago, and exposed by science. The people perpetuating it were treating his scientific props the way they were used to treating church props. The way that you treat logic like a prop.
Pitting faith against science weakens faith, even before science proves it wrong - even when science sometimes proves it right. You just realize that so much of what churches once claimed monopoly in explaining can now be explained by science, which draws their power elsewhere.
Faith has its place. It offers knowledge of phenomena we cannot test. Much of which is more important than practically all we cannot test. But which is much less reliable than fact, because we cannot test it. But faith must also yield to fact when fact is available. And we get fact by hypothesis and tests. You Creationists would throw that all away to believe in your favorite brand of infallible bible. You're free to do so, but don't expect to be taken seriously by people who reserve faith for where it is both important and necessary.
Well, you're ignorant of the many endeavors in which Americans are getting our butts beat. As reflected in balance of trade, for example. Or in per capita academic, technical, and sports achievement.
And you're also ignorant of how productive are the actually smart Americans that we can drag along the fools in the country.
America is about 300 million people. There's only so long we can coast on the disadvantages of our competitors they're finally shedding after seeing our past achievements, on the unspoiled continent their emigrants stole from the people who conserved it while they wasted theirs, on the hard work and realism of our ancestors.
Your kind of complacency is the root of what's killing the American mind.
You think that because science has found subatomic phenomena more different from mesoscopic phenomena the more we know about them, that science is wrong? Which justifies your just splitting the difference between science and religion on matters of fact like origins of species?
Sounds like your explanation is just long enough to run out the clock of anyone who'd wait for you to explain it. It's a cop out because you don't understand the science, and the religion is easier to "just believe".
Switch to the FSM model. It goes down even easier.
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There's nothing remotely Flamebait or Troll in that message. TrollMods spew cosmoturf to suppress discussion of growing Russian backsliding towards tyranny. Slashdot's mod system really is disgusting sometimes when it's abused by political operatives.
When did the US economy ever grow at 10-15%? And if we can produce our own oil at $40:bbl, why aren't we, instead of paying OPEC $75? Forces that counteract that balance?
Everything you're talking is pure theory, which in economics is known as "folly" (by businessmen, not economists). Except that wild claim of 10-15% US growth. China'a economy grows at 10-15%, so why are they buying our debt? There are other good reasons, but yours is not one of them.
I always thought it's their natural advantage in having an "alphabet" much closer to the Greek symbols we have to struggle to even recognize at first.
Goddamn I love freaky misfit mathematical geniuses. They're even better than their nerdier cousins, the chess geniuses. The ones from Central/Eastern Europe and South Asia always seem to be the most fun.
I'm no bigot. I hate only those "Christians" who tell me or others what to think or do because of the "Christian's" faith.
As for missing your points, you're the one missing the points of testing. Maybe you accept the Big Bang on faith, but that's only because you can't understand the science. Your limited intellect doesn't reduce science to the primitive weakness of religion.
"Freedom and knowledge" my ass - "Christian theism" is based on training children before they're old enough to question adult authority. Just like the rest of the world's religions. You've apparently fooled yourself easily enough. Find your own values somewhere they don't try to insult my intelligence.
Flow Fazer
Excel
Mosaic
Star Raiders
Shut Down
No, faith does offer that knowledge. It just can't be known how accurate or precise - whether it's right, or how wrong. Faith can offer contradictory knowledge of the same "answers", which might not even be exclusive.
But proof can offer no knowledge of those answers. It's up to you whether faith's less reliable answers to more important questions is better than nothing, but it is more than nothing.
You're just caught up in a solipsistic experience of the universe. You can't understand how any knowledge can be had without being reassured by some supernatural father figure.
Just hear my truth, infinitesimal godchild... you are getting sleepy... sleepy... sleepy... put your money in the hat... god is truth... sleepy... money in the hat...
Endless parade of people responding to this thread whose inability to understand science, and how theories like the Big Bang are not only not "blind belief", but testable in in the real present. Tests that yield results we use to do other things with the rest of the real world.
Religion gives us the number of angels that would dance on the head of a pin, and bloody jihad/crusades.
Give me the atheistic agenda, freedom and knowledge and stick your fake "respect for learning" up your blind, stupid ass.
Any economist with any input to any actual economy knows a sustained large negative balance of trade bankrupts the account holder. And anyone trading T-bills knows its not "people with money in China", but the Chinese government, which buys our debt - though there's no real difference between their mafia government and their rich people. When China threatens to stop propping up our dollar's value by buying our debt, unless we concede to some policy of theirs, we'll see just how good it is for our most major global rival to hold so much of our debt.
So you're making "tons of money on this stuff". I've been making financial infosystems for here in NYC and Toronto for over a decade. I watched people who knew nothing of economics make tons of money off stocks and stuff, until they crashed the global economy. And that was just the last time around. I watched others do the same thing the time before that with junk bonds and S&Ls. In between I was there when Long Term Capital needed an $11B bailout, after making tons of money off their stuff. Enron. The list goes on. There's always money in selling out the market, until it crashes down and we're left holding the bag.
Down to the matter at hand, let's have your idea of metrics of how America's kicking everyone's butt. Then we'll see just how those numbers actually stack up away from some Wall Street steakhouse.
What a bunch of crap. "Practice what you preach" doesn't even remotely resemble "learn to read". I'd say I was waiting for an example of the evidence you'd accept, but I never believed that you'd mention it. All you've got, like any apologist for conquerors, is some nebulous mumbojumbo.
I am sticking to my moral superiority above people who force conversion to their cult with a sword. And to my intellectual superiority over Anonymous Cowards who can't post anything but circuitous platitudes unrelated to any defensible position.
Selah.
Probabilities, testable simulations, beliefs from evidentiary deduction, revisions after testing... those have nothing to do with faith. They are the process of science.
Your inability to distinguish between unproven, yet proveable, beliefs and unproveable faith is not the fault of science.
Your inability to accept knowledge unless it has the impossible certainty of faith is all your fault.
Accounting scam witchhunts go too far when they trip over Bush's Abramoff bribery/corruption network.
Up until that point, they're fair game for the Republican^Wgovernment.
You can't reason gods away, but you can dispel simulated reason that is used to "prove" they exist. When you get rid of the frauds, all that's left is the incompleteness of science in explaining existence, the demonstrable incompleteness of experience. What remains is metaphysical, but in no way resembles any "god" worshipped in any church. Along the way, so many certain claims of various religions are shown false and worthless (or worse) that the rest of their pronouncements on god are not to be trusted, either.
The part that makes religion fascinating is people's insistence on believing even what they know to be false. It tells us a lot about people. And it's the oldest, most lucrative business on Earth.
I can agree with most of that. Except that "not believe in a creator because it is PC" is exactly the opposite of what we're discussing in this thread about a majority of Americans believing in Creation rather than evolution. Creation is Politically Correct. Evolution, the increasingly precise model of natural selection that we're developing, is scientifically correct.
If you're looking for a "Creator" to make sense of all that, you should consider the "Creator" that is your mental function creating your experience of reality from your senses and ideas. It worked to wean Kant off the puerile medieval idea of a supernatural diety, and offers the same powers to a testable psychological phenomenon.
I dismissed and ridiculed someone throwing a "maybe god just started before the part we used to say god started, before science gave a better explanation". The kind of desperate guessing I expect from stupid people.
"believe life started in some sort of 'scientific' way'"? What the hell is wrong with your brain? Science isn't the way things happen, it's the way we know what happens. How can you go through modern life without getting even that basic idea?
I dismiss and ridicule people who insist on believing pure superstition and ignore knowledge backed by facts and evidence, even when less than certain.
I dismiss and ridicule people who think knowledge is just arbitrary agreement or disagreement.
I dismiss and ridicule Anonymous Cowards who reduce my fair criticisms to straw man gibberish.
I dismiss and ridicule you, Anonymous Coward, because you need me to tell you why I dismiss and ridicule your ridiculous way of life.
Ah, but how many of the jocks have gone ChrisTaliban after alcoholism or just because that's where the money is today?
Killing anyone who doesn't accept you as the prophet of the only god doesn't leave much in the way of evidence, Anonymous Coward.
What kind of proof, Anonymous Coward, would you accept? Or aren't you just an Anonymous trolling Coward who has nothing worth hearing about "confidence", except maybe "confidence games"?
I just heard the voice of Odin in my head commanding me to help you pagans get your scary insults right.
"Superstitious".
DO NOT CHALLENGE MIGHTY ODIN!
Now excuse me, I have a date with the Tooth Fairy. Since you've never seen her, you don't know that she doesn't exist.
It's no troll - Urey-Miller tested a hypothesis. That makes it science. Even your wife should be able to explain that to you.
You can be a scientist and believe in god, you can be a scientist and be wrong about anything, even in your own discipline. But when you don't understand that faith explains only things that can't be tested, you're not a scientist - you're playing a science game, even if you're good at it. Good at pretending that you accept logic, when you just like to flip it about to impress your less educated fellow believers.
I don't pretend that there's evidence for the Creationism superstition, nor do I throw it out - I test it, if I can, or skeptically examine others' tests. Where is this Creation evidence you claim exists? Haeckel's embryo fraud was well over a century ago, and exposed by science. The people perpetuating it were treating his scientific props the way they were used to treating church props. The way that you treat logic like a prop.
Pitting faith against science weakens faith, even before science proves it wrong - even when science sometimes proves it right. You just realize that so much of what churches once claimed monopoly in explaining can now be explained by science, which draws their power elsewhere.
Faith has its place. It offers knowledge of phenomena we cannot test. Much of which is more important than practically all we cannot test. But which is much less reliable than fact, because we cannot test it. But faith must also yield to fact when fact is available. And we get fact by hypothesis and tests. You Creationists would throw that all away to believe in your favorite brand of infallible bible. You're free to do so, but don't expect to be taken seriously by people who reserve faith for where it is both important and necessary.
Well, you're ignorant of the many endeavors in which Americans are getting our butts beat. As reflected in balance of trade, for example. Or in per capita academic, technical, and sports achievement.
And you're also ignorant of how productive are the actually smart Americans that we can drag along the fools in the country.
America is about 300 million people. There's only so long we can coast on the disadvantages of our competitors they're finally shedding after seeing our past achievements, on the unspoiled continent their emigrants stole from the people who conserved it while they wasted theirs, on the hard work and realism of our ancestors.
Your kind of complacency is the root of what's killing the American mind.
I'd love to read Pascal flimflamming about selfhypnosis for the Church. Got a link to the text?
And I said "let there be gibberish", but you posted before I could get it out without laughing too much.
Maybe god created this post just to test your faith. But actually, I did it to make fun of you without any divine intervention. Am I the devil?
Maybe the Flash could outrun Superman, if they raced on Krypton...
You think that because science has found subatomic phenomena more different from mesoscopic phenomena the more we know about them, that science is wrong? Which justifies your just splitting the difference between science and religion on matters of fact like origins of species?
Sounds like your explanation is just long enough to run out the clock of anyone who'd wait for you to explain it. It's a cop out because you don't understand the science, and the religion is easier to "just believe".
Switch to the FSM model. It goes down even easier.