I got a Dell XPS laptop myself. A bit pricey, and a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be (not exactly a notebook, more a portable desktop machine) but I'm impressed by what it can do. It runs Oblivion at the highest settings with no framerate problems--not even many desktop machines can do that. And with the built in wireless, I can put it on a lap trap and play online games while watching TV.
But a desktop machine? If you want a gaming machine, you build it yourself. As long as I don't get a bad component (which can take up to a week to isolate) I can usually get a new high end machine built, installed, and running games in a night, and you get to hand pick every part, and build it with future expansions in mind.
Yeah, you're probably right. It isn't the ID campaigns per se that worry me, but the numbers that keep popping up from the surveys: something like 30% believe in evolution, and over 60% believe in some form of creationism, the rest saying they don't know. I figure that maybe 20 or 30% at most are serious creationists. The rest are ditto-heads agreeing with whatever has the most airplay. It's the ditto-heads who have to wake up.
ID is part of a strategy called The Wedge, which was leaked in a memo from the Discovery Institute. The Wedge strategy is to undermine the naturalistic approach to understanding the world in favour of a supernaturalistic interpretation. There is a major problem with this: a supernaturalistic world view precludes the practice of science. The chain of cause and effect is broken because at any point one can claim that God intervened and rendered your data meaningless. This is precisely the strategy of pseudo-scientists, frauds, and psychic con-men when they fail any scientific challenge to their claims--they assert that hidden causes of a psychic or supernatural nature intervened to render the tests meaningless.
The battle between ID and Evolution is a defence of science. If creationists intentionally put God in harm's way to advance their cause, then God will bear the brunt of the scientific argument. This happens only because creationists deliberately define God in such a way as to conflict with well established scientific facts--as an Interventionist Creator. They do this with a specific political agenda in mind. The outcome of this for moderate religionists will be one of two defeats. Either their religion will come to be held in ridicule and contempt, or the creationists will win the argument and America will fall into decline and ruin as it loses its scientific and technological competence. The second defeat would be much worse than the first, because then, an external power, probably an atheistic one, will get to sing the tune their descendants dance to.
In the late 60's conservative think tanks came up with the Silent Majority, the moderate bulge which did not take part in the radicalism of the 60's. This in turn became the Moral Majority. A large proportion of the population still sits silently and allows ignorant demagogues to speak for them, even though they do not actually share the view of that extreme fringe. They simply have not taken the time or effort to understand what they really believe, or the consequences of those beliefs. Unfortunately, the vast majority of so-called believers no more understand their faith than they do science.
So, to all those self-proclaimed moderates out there, quit wasting your time arguing with atheists and wake up to what's being said in your name. It's your ass that's going to end up in a sling. Christianity is being hijacked for political purposes, corrupting both politics and religion. There's a great line in Hannah and her Sisters: "If Jesus could hear what was being said in his name, he would never stop throwing up!"
We really don't care what you believe, as long as you don't try to peddle bullshit to children too young and naive to know better. There is such a thing as the truth, and truth happens to be on the side of the evolutionists, with as much certainty as human beings are capable of (and yes, the Bible too is the work of human beings--it has our greasy finger prints all over it.) At one time Christianity meant an allegiance to the truth, which is why so many Christians became scientists--they preferred to get their knowledge first-hand from nature, rather than passed from hand to hand to hand ad nauseum through scripture. If Christianity has not sunk to the depths of invertebrate relativism, prove it!
Ah, I see where you're coming from. This is usually called antitheism or militant atheism. It's actually pretty rare. As I said, most atheists come to their beliefs by Occam's Razor, not by claiming to have disproven the existence of God. Even most people regarded as militant atheists are actually just strong opponents of religion, not of belief in God per se, as hierarchical religion is usually the cause of the more virulent and dangerous types of theism.
Quoting a definition from Miriam-Webster? That's pathetic. Your argument is a play on semantics; pure sophistry. I'm disppointed. I was going to let your last post go, but since you're so insistent on it...
Science and rationalism are about making and defending assertions about reality. You do not propose a theory about the world by announcing it without evidence and then challenging everyone to disprove it. Unless you have strong body of evidence, and the theory can add something to our understanding of the world, it is not considered. Never mind disproven, it doesn't even get into the journals, and is never considered as a serious proposition.
There are literally billions of stories which have been told by human beings which could be considered as theories of reality, not just religious, but fairy tales, science fiction, fantasy, as well as alternate scienctific theories. All of these are false by default until supported by a strong weight of evidence. It is not the business of science to seek out and address every single story ever told (whether there is any evidence for it or not) and disprove it. If that were the job of science, we would still be waiting for the theory of gravity.
I say again: the onus of proof is on the person advancing the theory. This is a principle both of rhetoric and of science. And again, all attempts to prove the existence or efficacy of God have failed. I don't have to disprove the existence of God, any more than I have to disprove the existence of the fairies in Arcadia, or the spirits in the Dreaming, or Zeus, Odin, etc. As a naturalist, I don't believe in any supernatural creatures. My disbelief in God is just part of that. Atheists don't set out to disbelieve in God, they just realize one day that they don't. God is just another casualty of Occam's Razor.
Atheism isn't religion, but the absence of religion, the reverse of theism. It becomes a philosophical position only because it is so often challenged, and because, like you, most believers don't really understand the naturalist position and take the absence of God to be the central feature. Those who are neither theists or atheists have that luxury because they are not constantly challenged to choose sides. Atheism seems like a major positive position simply because it is relatively rare in America, and you consider believing the norm. This is a cognitive error; the predominant color or feature is taken as background, while the exception is taken as foreground. But atheism isn't a religion--in fact, it's really not even about God at all. There is no God-shaped hole in my universe; in fact, I don't know where I would put him if I were to try to add him. He got pushed out by because the places he used to be got filled in.
You should probably read up on the scientific method, and get better acquainted with the rules of logic. It's not up to me to teach you, it's up to you to learn. As it is, you're sounding more and more like the conspiracy theory guy.
For now let me just point out that judging by this: Calling atheists fanatical dogmatists is not as good an argument as you think. you either have not read or have not understood what I've written.
You haven't called them that specifically, and I know that you are trying to argue for balance and rationality, but what you did say was that
Prayer, like most spiritual things, is difficult to quantify or directly observe and so the proper scientific default position on prayer should be utter neutrality: neither for nor against.
In fact, the onus of proof would be on those who claim prayer works, particularly because it appears to be based on non-empirical claims, and so the proper default scientific position on prayer should be negative until proven. The reason it tends to be a strong negative is that so many religious claims have fallen through that the entire domain has a very poor reputation. Religious proofs predate modern science itself, and go all the way back to the early church. Their poor reputation is not a recent acquisition.
What you are doing with this argument is sneaking the line of reasonableness closer to the religious side, to give the religious argument the edge and make the counter-argument look less reasonable. I know because I used to do it; I used to think that atheism was itself a positive assertion. If the correct scientific position really were neutral, then a assuming a position of skepticism before proof would be dogmatic. But that's not how it works.
So you didn't say that atheists were fanatical dogmatists, but that is where your argument leads, though you may not intends this (there are people on the extreme who are using this same argument for that specific purpose--a variation on it is a mainstay of the ID agenda.) And I'm really not trying to convert you here--the more rationalists we have amongst religious believers, the better, because a lot just won't listen to anyone but a fellow believer any more. But I am trying to show you where the tone of anger comes from in a lot of these posts.
Calling atheists fanatical dogmatists is not as good an argument as you think. When making an claim as to the existence or causality of something, the burden of proof is on the claimant. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If I were to claim that unicorns or fairies existed, the burden of proof would be on me, and that proof had better be fairly convincing.
No attempt to demonstrate the existence of God, inductive or deductive, has ever held up, despite the attempts of hundreds of thousands of scholars and researchers over thousands of years. This failure is not because the establishment would not accept the proof; don't forget that until the end of the 19th century scholars were overwhelmingly favourable to religion, with only a few exceptions. And what we find, when these pro-religious scholars attempted to find evidence for their beliefs, are bold claims that at last, they would have the proof--followed by embarrassed silence. When meticulous records were discovered detailing the events of Judea in the time of Christ, or Egypt in the time of Moses, no trace of either of these figures discovered. This does not mean that they did not exist, but it does mean that the grandiose miracles and events depicted in the Bible didn't happen. If they had, the record keepers of the day would have noticed.
Naturalistic atheists aren't fanatical, they're just fed up. I know a guy who is a dedicated conspiracy theorist. I have taken the time to show him the evidence that contradicts all of this, pointed him to sites and books, explained the science, shown him historical records. I've actually done a lot of work to present the facts. He has only read a few cover blurbs, some web sites, and cannot even be bothered to formulate coherent rational arguments. He hasn't even read the books he hands to me as "proof". When I go back to him and tell him that the book doesn't say at all what he claims, he admits he hasn't read it and then claims it was written by an illuminati shill.
I got fed up. I got tired of the bullshit, of the sloppy thinking, of the unfounded claims, and I got fed up with doing all the work of researching and spoon feeding knowledge to someone who couldn't even be bothered to look for it himself. I am sick of the laziness, the willful ignorance, the deliberate stupidity. But what I am sick of most is the utter contempt for the truth that this person shows.
This is how religious believers appear to naturalistic atheists. I understand what your saying because I used to make all the same arguments--I was a believer too. But the arguments fell apart, and I could not honestly continue to believe in or encourage people to believe in something which had no evidence to support it and a great deal of evidence to suggest that it was a cognitive error. And I do not in any way consider by loss of religious belief unfortunate. That you cannot disprove the existence of God, or the effectiveness of prayer, isn't saying much. You also cannot disprove the existence of the invisible, insubstantial, oderless and silent dragon I may claim to have in my basement.
I don't actually care whether you believe in God or not. What I cannot stand is the utter contempt for the truth shared by fundamentalist Christians, conspiracy nuts, new age flakes, professional psychics, and all the rest. I'm tired of them sitting around with their heads up their asses, demanding that we spoon feed them proof of reality in tiny, sugarcoated bites so that their delicate minds can cope with it. Go and believe what you want. We are the least of your problems. You have a militant religious faction in America who wishes to create a theocracy, a state religion, and who currently have the ear of the president and many of the people in the ruling party. As the people who landed on Plymouth rock knew, a state religion is almost never your religion. If you want to make a difference, don't bother arguing with atheists. Go and argue with your fellow believers, because they do care what you believe, and some of them want the power to force you to believe exactly as they do.
All that exists is in the mind of God. To be in the mind of God is to exist. God is omniscient, therefore everything that's in a human mind is in the mind of God. Therefore Narnia, Barsoom, and Middle-Earth exist, and George Lucas committed genocide when he blew up Alderaan.
You know, I always thought God was a kick-ass premise for a really far out work of science fiction. Someone should write a book with that premise... oh, wait...
I feel all warm and fuzzy. I just want to hug you all.
"I love you, you love me, we're a happy family..."
You do know that they used the Barney theme song as part of the torture regime at Abu Ghraib, right? I think the new color scheme is also a violation of the Geneva Convention.
Personally, I'm an atheist, but I know lots of people who are in or have been in 12 step programs. Their reviews and results are mixed. The main purpose seems to be one of social support and reenforcement.
In the later stages of addiction, your brain is so heavily hardwired for whatever drug your taking that you are almost on auto-pilot. The reward system becomes altered so that, for an alcoholic, even the sound of a drink pouring into a glass can start the stimulus-reward cycle. This is a physical change in brain structure. There is also an enormous weight of cognitive dissonance, because the person has indulged in so much rationalization to deny their addiction. So willpower and responsibility just may not be enough to do the trick.
Under these circumstance a radical behavioural and cognitive change is required. The abreaction response common to religious conversions fits the bill for this perfectly. The conversion experience provides the premise of extraordinary circumstances, and offers the possibility of the miraculous change which the patient might not otherwise consider. In effect, the invocation of the supernatural gives the addict 'permission' to undergo radical change. There are other ways to break addictions, but in our society, with its heavy investment in (free!) religious services, this is the cheapest and most accessible method, especially if you don't have the resources to go to a rehab center.
The problem, of course, is that conversions don't always work, and a religious fanatic can be as big an asshole as any drunk. There are plenty of people in AA to tell you to quit being an asshole, but it doesn't always work. Look at G. W. Bush...
There are even more subtle and less known ways that they pick your pocket.
One of Wal-Mart's main strategies (well documented, by the way) is to create a monopoly in a small town by opening two big stores, with concessions from the local government for ramps, zoning, etc. Both stores have a lease which stipulates that they may not be rented to another retail business for decades. Both run at extremely low prices, even lower than usual for Wal-Mart. Finally, all competition collapses, leaving only Wal-Mart for many goods.
Then they close one of the two stores, forcing everyone to go across town to the other.
Around the closed store, the commercial district looks like a bomb hit it, and in the middle is this huge, empty cavern, subsidized by local businesses and governments. But the economic impact has been so devastating that the commercial district cannot recover, and the local government is strapped because it's just sunk millions into a traffic system to feed an empty parking lot, and now it has no tax base in the area.
Here's another one. Premium brands sell at Wal-Mart at a loss by supplementing their income with goods sold at higher prices by independents. But to try to stop the losses, they send their manufacturing offshore, and cut the quality of their items. So even if you don't shop at Wal-Mart, when you go to buy these items at an independent, you end up paying $80 for what is now really only worth $30. You have subsidized Wal-Mart, even though you have never set foot in one.
And another: Wal-Mart employees make so little money that many of them, particularly those with families, are collecting welfare. Your taxes are subsidizing Wal-Mart. Did you vote for that?
Any sufficiently large and powerful organization in a country becomes the defacto government of that country if the actual government is sufficiently weak, disorganized, or complicit with the organization. The difference, in a democracy, is that the actual government you can vote out. But how can you vote out a business when they can take your money whether you shop there or not?
There's genetic replication, and there's memetic replication. Since time immemorial, the cultural and political elite have had smaller families (the Catholic Church is the most extreme example of this--a celibate priestly caste exerting near total cultural hegemony for over a thousand years.) Aristocrats, scientists, artists, and clerics have all tended to have fewer children, and recruited from amongst those who do bear children to replenish their numbers. Slippage does occur, but the pressure of loss of prestige and influence will drive even the most reactionary forces to moderate their positions; tolerance and a willingness to consider new ideas confer too much of a competitive advantage to be ignored. The cultural imperialism of the West in the third world doesn't exist because we are forcing our ideas upon them, but because they desparately want what it produces.
The current conservative reactionary bulge will dissipate as their children engage in the complexity of public life and discourse, in the same way that conservative judges tend to drift to the left in the daily practise of considering complex issues. Like it or not, the real action is in science, technology, art, and intellectual expression. And while the bulk of conservatives may be content to merely consume the products culture produces, the most ambitious amongst them will want to participate. The admission price for participation is a serious consideration of other ideas--culture does not reproduce asexually. The alternative is decline, irrelevance, and even domination by those willing to make the effort. It has ever been thus, and I see nothing that would prevent this from continuing.
The only question is whether the new cultural elite will emerge from the ranks of the reactionaries through recruitment and subversion, or whether America will come to dance to someone else's tune. But simple biological reproduction is pointless if cultural fitness (including the capacity to practice scientfic research) is compromised. If six of your seven children die because they cannot feed themselves, you're still going to die out.
They've managed to reproduce the additional heat output and some effects that suggest that a nuclear reaction might be happening, but they're not coming out and claiming that it's actual fusion. They just say that they can't really explain the results. Data you can't explain is a very useful result. It was precisely such unexplained phenomena that led to the Theory of Relativity.
I think getting this to work in a year is extremely unlikely, but if it ever does work, they'll have the IP on it. That IP might take a while to be worth something, but if it ever does pan out, it will be worth a lot. And there are other scientists who have claimed to reproduce the effect, though their reports are far more conservative--they don't want to get slagged the way Fleischmann was. According to them, the original experiment failed to document certain conditions that were necessary to produce fusion. Fleischmann just got lucky, but wasn't aware of all the requirements that played a factor in his success.
This is an extremely high risk venture with a low possibility of an incredibly high yield. There are also more widely applicable political, economic, and evironmental gains to be made. Some people might be willing to throw money at it just on the outside chance of these general gains to society, never mind the personal gains. Heat energy is the first step to more generalized energy production. As a friend of mine put it when the original results where announced, if we can get cheap, portable fusion power, we're off the planet.
She's not a luddite, provided she makes copies of her class notes and tells people just to sit back and listen. I hated profs who spent the entire class speed copying their notes to the blackboard or overhead--and then based the exam entirely on that. You spent the whole class scribbling like mad, and not a single word of it went into your consciousness. You shouldn't need the laptop, and you shouldn't be writing pages of notes either. But if you expect your class to spend the whole time scribbling, then you might as well let them have their laptops. They're not going to learn anything during class anyway.
And while laptops may not have that 60hz visual buzz of television CRT's that will actually anaesthetize brains, it does tend to distract by producing visual clutter. And it's one more thing for the student to hide behind when a question comes up.
The real breakthrough will come when we have an AI capable of parsing and analyzing political and advertising material for validity. Then we will end up with something like this for most of them:
[Premise] (false) [Premise] (false) [Fallacious argument] (bad premises) [Fallacious argument] (ad hominem) [Fallacious argument] (ad hominem) [Fallacious argument] (sweeping generalization) [Fallacious argument] (circular argument) [Fallacious argument] (strawman) [Fallacious argument] (ad populum) [Fallacious argument] (appeal to authority) [Fallacious argument] (anecdotal evidence)
Actually, Wikipedia has the same level of accuracy of any of the major encyclopedias (Britannica, etc.) And Wikipedia entries are peer reviewed, since it's pretty hard to conceal a bad entry on a public forum. Scientific journals typically have a very small review group, who simply may not have time to properly review them or confirm their validity. The result have been some very embarrassing and truly horrendous articles; in fact, as many of two thirds of all papers related to drug research have later turned out to be false. And there are fairly simple mechanisms for preventing wackos from posting trash on your wiki.
Amen. I bought a couple of CD's on the weekend, and was astounded by the price, and the audacity of the recording industry for demanding such a price. I would have bought more, but I had a price limit on how much I was willing to spend. And, frankly, I felt insulted, like I was being ripped off. Those will be the last CD's a buy for quite a while. I'll buy online, one song at a time, because the CD's cost too much if you want only one or two songs.
Theism has no relation to aesthetics, and most religions don't have much to say on the topic of beauty, generally considering aesthetic opinion to be rather subjective and not very important. Indeed, some religious traditions have an extremely antagonistic view towards beauty, considering it a distraction and temptation. Religious buildings tend to be beautiful for the same reason that palaces and banks do: they have the money to afford the artisans, and people are attracted to beautiful things.
There are no religious theories of beauty. There are a wide variety of philosophical and even scientific theories, but almost none of them depend upon the existence of God.
I don't know where you're getting this stuff, but I can tell you that my appreciation of beauty actually increased when I stopped believing in God.
I understand what it is to be a believer. I once made all the arguments you do. And I eventually had to be honest and admit that they were wrong. I don't really care whether you believe in God or not, but don't try to claim that you can't be human without believing in God. You've never seen the world as a non-believer, so don't tell me what it's like to be me.
True, but the real point of the argument is that evolution gives us a pretty good idea of what is thermodynamically possible. A grey goo simply cannot exert enough energy to break all the bonds of all the materials it encounters indefinitely, any more than we can digest glass, plastics, and even organic fibre. And we have an incredibly complex digestive system.
This whole grey goo scare is just bad science fiction. A machine that goes on replicating forever, eating everything in its path? If that were possible, don't you think that evolution would have come up with it already?
The machine would have to get enough energy, and enough raw materials, in more or less the right proportions, to do this. A general purpose eating machine would be so energetically expensive that it would stall before it could replicate. Life adapts itself to specific environments and foods because it's cheaper, and that makes the difference between life and death. Specific purpose life forms are efficient, and thrive in their ecological niche very well, but are no good outside of it. The closest thing to a general purpose life form, that can eat everything in its path, is us.
The principles of simplicity, elegance, and order are aesthetic, not religious. The appreciation of beauty is not in any way dependent on belief in God. In fact, the primary rationale for atheism is Occam's Razor. God has never been proven to be required to explain anything, and therefore the assumption that he exists is unnecessarily complex and inelegant.
The belief that the world is illusory or unimportant is actually a common religious belief, probably the one that sceintific atheists despise the most. If you follow the arguments of religious conservatives these days, they are based on epistemological relativism. Fundamentalists have co-opted postmodernism to exploit its slippery evasions of logic and evidence. This is why Evolution is "just a theory" to them--there is no truth, only opinion. There is no reality. The inconsistency of such arguments, coming from the mouths of absolutists, is mind-boggling, but then, they don't hold reason in very high regard.
And the primary argument of supernaturalists (theists) is that God can change or suspend the laws of physics at will. So the laws of physics apply... except when they don't. Given this assumption, science becomes impossible. This is what the current war between science and religion is about--political religion is intent on eradicating the naturalistic world view, and science in the process.
Everything you said in your post was completely wrong.
It might be argued that the offence wasn't simple hate speech, but a call for violent attacks. I'm not sure that this wouldn't violate American laws as well, particularly the new anti-terrorist laws.
Personally, I'm not particularly fond of the idea of prosecuting anyone for voicing an opinion. Most of the time, as with David Irving, it just gives them a bigger soapbox to stand on. But consider how most terrorist organizations work. They convince young disenfranchised men that they are victimized by the target group, suggest a violent course of action, fill in some of the technical details, and then just leave them to carry it out. The ring leaders walk away, hiding behind the claim of freedom of speech, leaving their recruits to do the dirty work. Most of the recruits will screw it up or just sit stewing, but a few will actually go ahead and pull it off. This is the deliberate intent. This is precisely how Charlie Manson got the Family to do the LaBianca murders (he went along later for the Tate murders.) But the intent is still mass murder. The difference is that the ring leader commits murder by proxy. Unlike Manson, most never touch the knives or guns or bombs, and can deny direct involvement with the crime. His bullets are the young men he turns to his cause and releases into society. And yet, he does this with the specific intent of committing murder.
This method is the basis for the movie American History X, where a neo-nazi ring leader whips young skinheads into a frenzy and then hangs back while they wreak havoc. An instigator who calls for violence through remote media is hoping to find just one Timothy McVeigh. The agitators of Political Islam have got this down to a science. Once they get the potential terrorist primed, they pass him off to people with more direct involvement, usually by by suggesting that he go to the Middle East for training. Suicide bombs are easy to make--the hard part is convincing someone to strap one on and use it. Almost anyone or anything can be destroyed if the attacker is willing to sacrifice his own life to do it. The most important component of the bomb is the bomber himself--and that component is built with ideas.
The kind of people who run these sites are trying to build this type of bomb. Their propoganda is the murder weapon. It's not a very accurate one, but it does have the advantage that you can avoid prison. There is a difference between voicing your opinion, and instigating violence. If a mob boss tells his underlings that someone should be killed, is he just voicing his opinion?
Lucas has been bellyaching about this since The Phantom Menace came out. His problems are obvious--he misused a great cast, wrote wooden characters, and spent a fortune on special effects that couldn't disguise the fact that he'd put out a bloated B movie. Too bad--Carrie Fisher is one of the best script doctors in Hollywood. It's not like he doesn't know her.
What the Hollywood unions will achieve is that movies will be made elsewhere. This is why so many movies are now being shot in Canada, but financed by Hollywood studios, who have the distribution access. The Canadian crews cut their teeth on TV shows like the X-Files in the 80's and 90's, and some of the technical expertise up here is way ahead of the Hollywood crews. You see things that you'd never see in Hollywood productions, like a lot of scenes with two people walking down a crowded street in long shot with perfect sound capture of their conversation (and no, the scene is not dubbed.) This trend is so pronounced that politicians in California have been sounding protectionist alarms against Canadian productions.
The Lord of the Rings was shot in New Zealand by Kiwi crews, and a lot of movies are going back to Europe for locations, even natural locations meant to mimic American outdoor shots. Since the money is coming from the States, distribution is not a problem.
We may, however, see a levelling out and even reduction in special effects costs as more digital effects become procedural rather than custom built and hand crafted. The big budget films of today and paying for the R & D that will allow for the low budget blockbusters of tomorrow. If you can procedurally generate a crowd, a city scene, and the special effects, you might be able to generate almost anything you want just be controlling the parameters. The first step, which is already being created, are human figures which are animated based upon muscle forces and constraints applied to a realistic skeleton, complete with muscle bulging, integrated rag-doll, and cloth effects. Suddenly, you don't need your location, the crew, the extras, the stuntmen, or the special effects team. You just do a low res proof and throw it at a server farm for the weekend.
The funny thing is that the whole book of Revelations is far more likely to be about events in the first century, with either Jerusalem or Rome being the Whore of Babylon and the Beast being the Emperor or the Roman Army. The Mark of the Beast probably refers to the tatoos that were given to slaves to mark them as such, usually in an easily visible place like the face or the hand. Early Christians also wore tattoos as a sign of their faith. Facial tattoos were sometimes worn by Roman Soldiers, although the Romans regarded tattoos as barbaric.
In fact, the Book of Revelations was a controversial addition to the early Bible, and several Bishops argued against including it in the canon due to the difficulty of interpreting it, and hence, its potential for abuse--particularly the type of abuse so typical of fundamentalists, who keep claiming that the end times are upon us. Other portions of the Bible specifically warn against doing this, because only God knows the time when the world will end. To this day the Eastern Orthodox Church does not consider it part of the Canon.
If you're a non-believer, like I am, all of this is moot--the whole thing is either about the world John lived in, or he got dosed with some grain ergot while in prison. If you are a Christian, however, steer clear of belief that these are the end times. It's a definite no-no in the religion. And if you believe in the Rapture, rest assured that the people who compiled the Bible would have denounced you as a heretic, and you probably would have ended up being used for sword practice by a Roman Legionnaire. This is a spin from the lunatic fringe on a single line of a book that almost ended up in the fireplace of history. It is also a morally corrosive doctrine because it undercuts personal responsibility, encouraging people to believe that God is going to solve all of their problems for them, kill all their enemies, and build them a whole new world.
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I got a Dell XPS laptop myself. A bit pricey, and a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be (not exactly a notebook, more a portable desktop machine) but I'm impressed by what it can do. It runs Oblivion at the highest settings with no framerate problems--not even many desktop machines can do that. And with the built in wireless, I can put it on a lap trap and play online games while watching TV.
But a desktop machine? If you want a gaming machine, you build it yourself. As long as I don't get a bad component (which can take up to a week to isolate) I can usually get a new high end machine built, installed, and running games in a night, and you get to hand pick every part, and build it with future expansions in mind.
Yeah, you're probably right. It isn't the ID campaigns per se that worry me, but the numbers that keep popping up from the surveys: something like 30% believe in evolution, and over 60% believe in some form of creationism, the rest saying they don't know. I figure that maybe 20 or 30% at most are serious creationists. The rest are ditto-heads agreeing with whatever has the most airplay. It's the ditto-heads who have to wake up.
ID is part of a strategy called The Wedge, which was leaked in a memo from the Discovery Institute. The Wedge strategy is to undermine the naturalistic approach to understanding the world in favour of a supernaturalistic interpretation. There is a major problem with this: a supernaturalistic world view precludes the practice of science. The chain of cause and effect is broken because at any point one can claim that God intervened and rendered your data meaningless. This is precisely the strategy of pseudo-scientists, frauds, and psychic con-men when they fail any scientific challenge to their claims--they assert that hidden causes of a psychic or supernatural nature intervened to render the tests meaningless.
The battle between ID and Evolution is a defence of science. If creationists intentionally put God in harm's way to advance their cause, then God will bear the brunt of the scientific argument. This happens only because creationists deliberately define God in such a way as to conflict with well established scientific facts--as an Interventionist Creator. They do this with a specific political agenda in mind. The outcome of this for moderate religionists will be one of two defeats. Either their religion will come to be held in ridicule and contempt, or the creationists will win the argument and America will fall into decline and ruin as it loses its scientific and technological competence. The second defeat would be much worse than the first, because then, an external power, probably an atheistic one, will get to sing the tune their descendants dance to.
In the late 60's conservative think tanks came up with the Silent Majority, the moderate bulge which did not take part in the radicalism of the 60's. This in turn became the Moral Majority. A large proportion of the population still sits silently and allows ignorant demagogues to speak for them, even though they do not actually share the view of that extreme fringe. They simply have not taken the time or effort to understand what they really believe, or the consequences of those beliefs. Unfortunately, the vast majority of so-called believers no more understand their faith than they do science.
So, to all those self-proclaimed moderates out there, quit wasting your time arguing with atheists and wake up to what's being said in your name. It's your ass that's going to end up in a sling. Christianity is being hijacked for political purposes, corrupting both politics and religion. There's a great line in Hannah and her Sisters: "If Jesus could hear what was being said in his name, he would never stop throwing up!"
We really don't care what you believe, as long as you don't try to peddle bullshit to children too young and naive to know better. There is such a thing as the truth, and truth happens to be on the side of the evolutionists, with as much certainty as human beings are capable of (and yes, the Bible too is the work of human beings--it has our greasy finger prints all over it.) At one time Christianity meant an allegiance to the truth, which is why so many Christians became scientists--they preferred to get their knowledge first-hand from nature, rather than passed from hand to hand to hand ad nauseum through scripture. If Christianity has not sunk to the depths of invertebrate relativism, prove it!
We're waiting...
Ah, I see where you're coming from. This is usually called antitheism or militant atheism. It's actually pretty rare. As I said, most atheists come to their beliefs by Occam's Razor, not by claiming to have disproven the existence of God. Even most people regarded as militant atheists are actually just strong opponents of religion, not of belief in God per se, as hierarchical religion is usually the cause of the more virulent and dangerous types of theism.
Quoting a definition from Miriam-Webster? That's pathetic. Your argument is a play on semantics; pure sophistry. I'm disppointed. I was going to let your last post go, but since you're so insistent on it...
Science and rationalism are about making and defending assertions about reality. You do not propose a theory about the world by announcing it without evidence and then challenging everyone to disprove it. Unless you have strong body of evidence, and the theory can add something to our understanding of the world, it is not considered. Never mind disproven, it doesn't even get into the journals, and is never considered as a serious proposition.
There are literally billions of stories which have been told by human beings which could be considered as theories of reality, not just religious, but fairy tales, science fiction, fantasy, as well as alternate scienctific theories. All of these are false by default until supported by a strong weight of evidence. It is not the business of science to seek out and address every single story ever told (whether there is any evidence for it or not) and disprove it. If that were the job of science, we would still be waiting for the theory of gravity.
I say again: the onus of proof is on the person advancing the theory. This is a principle both of rhetoric and of science. And again, all attempts to prove the existence or efficacy of God have failed. I don't have to disprove the existence of God, any more than I have to disprove the existence of the fairies in Arcadia, or the spirits in the Dreaming, or Zeus, Odin, etc. As a naturalist, I don't believe in any supernatural creatures. My disbelief in God is just part of that. Atheists don't set out to disbelieve in God, they just realize one day that they don't. God is just another casualty of Occam's Razor.
Atheism isn't religion, but the absence of religion, the reverse of theism. It becomes a philosophical position only because it is so often challenged, and because, like you, most believers don't really understand the naturalist position and take the absence of God to be the central feature. Those who are neither theists or atheists have that luxury because they are not constantly challenged to choose sides. Atheism seems like a major positive position simply because it is relatively rare in America, and you consider believing the norm. This is a cognitive error; the predominant color or feature is taken as background, while the exception is taken as foreground. But atheism isn't a religion--in fact, it's really not even about God at all. There is no God-shaped hole in my universe; in fact, I don't know where I would put him if I were to try to add him. He got pushed out by because the places he used to be got filled in.
You should probably read up on the scientific method, and get better acquainted with the rules of logic. It's not up to me to teach you, it's up to you to learn. As it is, you're sounding more and more like the conspiracy theory guy.
For now let me just point out that judging by this: Calling atheists fanatical dogmatists is not as good an argument as you think. you either have not read or have not understood what I've written.
You haven't called them that specifically, and I know that you are trying to argue for balance and rationality, but what you did say was that
Prayer, like most spiritual things, is difficult to quantify or directly observe and so the proper scientific default position on prayer should be utter neutrality: neither for nor against.
In fact, the onus of proof would be on those who claim prayer works, particularly because it appears to be based on non-empirical claims, and so the proper default scientific position on prayer should be negative until proven. The reason it tends to be a strong negative is that so many religious claims have fallen through that the entire domain has a very poor reputation. Religious proofs predate modern science itself, and go all the way back to the early church. Their poor reputation is not a recent acquisition.
What you are doing with this argument is sneaking the line of reasonableness closer to the religious side, to give the religious argument the edge and make the counter-argument look less reasonable. I know because I used to do it; I used to think that atheism was itself a positive assertion. If the correct scientific position really were neutral, then a assuming a position of skepticism before proof would be dogmatic. But that's not how it works.
So you didn't say that atheists were fanatical dogmatists, but that is where your argument leads, though you may not intends this (there are people on the extreme who are using this same argument for that specific purpose--a variation on it is a mainstay of the ID agenda.) And I'm really not trying to convert you here--the more rationalists we have amongst religious believers, the better, because a lot just won't listen to anyone but a fellow believer any more. But I am trying to show you where the tone of anger comes from in a lot of these posts.
Calling atheists fanatical dogmatists is not as good an argument as you think. When making an claim as to the existence or causality of something, the burden of proof is on the claimant. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If I were to claim that unicorns or fairies existed, the burden of proof would be on me, and that proof had better be fairly convincing.
No attempt to demonstrate the existence of God, inductive or deductive, has ever held up, despite the attempts of hundreds of thousands of scholars and researchers over thousands of years. This failure is not because the establishment would not accept the proof; don't forget that until the end of the 19th century scholars were overwhelmingly favourable to religion, with only a few exceptions. And what we find, when these pro-religious scholars attempted to find evidence for their beliefs, are bold claims that at last, they would have the proof--followed by embarrassed silence. When meticulous records were discovered detailing the events of Judea in the time of Christ, or Egypt in the time of Moses, no trace of either of these figures discovered. This does not mean that they did not exist, but it does mean that the grandiose miracles and events depicted in the Bible didn't happen. If they had, the record keepers of the day would have noticed.
Naturalistic atheists aren't fanatical, they're just fed up. I know a guy who is a dedicated conspiracy theorist. I have taken the time to show him the evidence that contradicts all of this, pointed him to sites and books, explained the science, shown him historical records. I've actually done a lot of work to present the facts. He has only read a few cover blurbs, some web sites, and cannot even be bothered to formulate coherent rational arguments. He hasn't even read the books he hands to me as "proof". When I go back to him and tell him that the book doesn't say at all what he claims, he admits he hasn't read it and then claims it was written by an illuminati shill.
I got fed up. I got tired of the bullshit, of the sloppy thinking, of the unfounded claims, and I got fed up with doing all the work of researching and spoon feeding knowledge to someone who couldn't even be bothered to look for it himself. I am sick of the laziness, the willful ignorance, the deliberate stupidity. But what I am sick of most is the utter contempt for the truth that this person shows.
This is how religious believers appear to naturalistic atheists. I understand what your saying because I used to make all the same arguments--I was a believer too. But the arguments fell apart, and I could not honestly continue to believe in or encourage people to believe in something which had no evidence to support it and a great deal of evidence to suggest that it was a cognitive error. And I do not in any way consider by loss of religious belief unfortunate. That you cannot disprove the existence of God, or the effectiveness of prayer, isn't saying much. You also cannot disprove the existence of the invisible, insubstantial, oderless and silent dragon I may claim to have in my basement.
I don't actually care whether you believe in God or not. What I cannot stand is the utter contempt for the truth shared by fundamentalist Christians, conspiracy nuts, new age flakes, professional psychics, and all the rest. I'm tired of them sitting around with their heads up their asses, demanding that we spoon feed them proof of reality in tiny, sugarcoated bites so that their delicate minds can cope with it. Go and believe what you want. We are the least of your problems. You have a militant religious faction in America who wishes to create a theocracy, a state religion, and who currently have the ear of the president and many of the people in the ruling party. As the people who landed on Plymouth rock knew, a state religion is almost never your religion. If you want to make a difference, don't bother arguing with atheists. Go and argue with your fellow believers, because they do care what you believe, and some of them want the power to force you to believe exactly as they do.
All that exists is in the mind of God. To be in the mind of God is to exist. God is omniscient, therefore everything that's in a human mind is in the mind of God. Therefore Narnia, Barsoom, and Middle-Earth exist, and George Lucas committed genocide when he blew up Alderaan.
You know, I always thought God was a kick-ass premise for a really far out work of science fiction. Someone should write a book with that premise... oh, wait...
I feel all warm and fuzzy. I just want to hug you all.
"I love you, you love me, we're a happy family..."
You do know that they used the Barney theme song as part of the torture regime at Abu Ghraib, right? I think the new color scheme is also a violation of the Geneva Convention.
Personally, I'm an atheist, but I know lots of people who are in or have been in 12 step programs. Their reviews and results are mixed. The main purpose seems to be one of social support and reenforcement.
In the later stages of addiction, your brain is so heavily hardwired for whatever drug your taking that you are almost on auto-pilot. The reward system becomes altered so that, for an alcoholic, even the sound of a drink pouring into a glass can start the stimulus-reward cycle. This is a physical change in brain structure. There is also an enormous weight of cognitive dissonance, because the person has indulged in so much rationalization to deny their addiction. So willpower and responsibility just may not be enough to do the trick.
Under these circumstance a radical behavioural and cognitive change is required. The abreaction response common to religious conversions fits the bill for this perfectly. The conversion experience provides the premise of extraordinary circumstances, and offers the possibility of the miraculous change which the patient might not otherwise consider. In effect, the invocation of the supernatural gives the addict 'permission' to undergo radical change. There are other ways to break addictions, but in our society, with its heavy investment in (free!) religious services, this is the cheapest and most accessible method, especially if you don't have the resources to go to a rehab center.
The problem, of course, is that conversions don't always work, and a religious fanatic can be as big an asshole as any drunk. There are plenty of people in AA to tell you to quit being an asshole, but it doesn't always work. Look at G. W. Bush...
There are even more subtle and less known ways that they pick your pocket.
One of Wal-Mart's main strategies (well documented, by the way) is to create a monopoly in a small town by opening two big stores, with concessions from the local government for ramps, zoning, etc. Both stores have a lease which stipulates that they may not be rented to another retail business for decades. Both run at extremely low prices, even lower than usual for Wal-Mart. Finally, all competition collapses, leaving only Wal-Mart for many goods.
Then they close one of the two stores, forcing everyone to go across town to the other.
Around the closed store, the commercial district looks like a bomb hit it, and in the middle is this huge, empty cavern, subsidized by local businesses and governments. But the economic impact has been so devastating that the commercial district cannot recover, and the local government is strapped because it's just sunk millions into a traffic system to feed an empty parking lot, and now it has no tax base in the area.
Here's another one. Premium brands sell at Wal-Mart at a loss by supplementing their income with goods sold at higher prices by independents. But to try to stop the losses, they send their manufacturing offshore, and cut the quality of their items. So even if you don't shop at Wal-Mart, when you go to buy these items at an independent, you end up paying $80 for what is now really only worth $30. You have subsidized Wal-Mart, even though you have never set foot in one.
And another: Wal-Mart employees make so little money that many of them, particularly those with families, are collecting welfare. Your taxes are subsidizing Wal-Mart. Did you vote for that?
Any sufficiently large and powerful organization in a country becomes the defacto government of that country if the actual government is sufficiently weak, disorganized, or complicit with the organization. The difference, in a democracy, is that the actual government you can vote out. But how can you vote out a business when they can take your money whether you shop there or not?
There's genetic replication, and there's memetic replication. Since time immemorial, the cultural and political elite have had smaller families (the Catholic Church is the most extreme example of this--a celibate priestly caste exerting near total cultural hegemony for over a thousand years.) Aristocrats, scientists, artists, and clerics have all tended to have fewer children, and recruited from amongst those who do bear children to replenish their numbers. Slippage does occur, but the pressure of loss of prestige and influence will drive even the most reactionary forces to moderate their positions; tolerance and a willingness to consider new ideas confer too much of a competitive advantage to be ignored. The cultural imperialism of the West in the third world doesn't exist because we are forcing our ideas upon them, but because they desparately want what it produces.
The current conservative reactionary bulge will dissipate as their children engage in the complexity of public life and discourse, in the same way that conservative judges tend to drift to the left in the daily practise of considering complex issues. Like it or not, the real action is in science, technology, art, and intellectual expression. And while the bulk of conservatives may be content to merely consume the products culture produces, the most ambitious amongst them will want to participate. The admission price for participation is a serious consideration of other ideas--culture does not reproduce asexually. The alternative is decline, irrelevance, and even domination by those willing to make the effort. It has ever been thus, and I see nothing that would prevent this from continuing.
The only question is whether the new cultural elite will emerge from the ranks of the reactionaries through recruitment and subversion, or whether America will come to dance to someone else's tune. But simple biological reproduction is pointless if cultural fitness (including the capacity to practice scientfic research) is compromised. If six of your seven children die because they cannot feed themselves, you're still going to die out.
They've managed to reproduce the additional heat output and some effects that suggest that a nuclear reaction might be happening, but they're not coming out and claiming that it's actual fusion. They just say that they can't really explain the results. Data you can't explain is a very useful result. It was precisely such unexplained phenomena that led to the Theory of Relativity.
I think getting this to work in a year is extremely unlikely, but if it ever does work, they'll have the IP on it. That IP might take a while to be worth something, but if it ever does pan out, it will be worth a lot. And there are other scientists who have claimed to reproduce the effect, though their reports are far more conservative--they don't want to get slagged the way Fleischmann was. According to them, the original experiment failed to document certain conditions that were necessary to produce fusion. Fleischmann just got lucky, but wasn't aware of all the requirements that played a factor in his success.
This is an extremely high risk venture with a low possibility of an incredibly high yield. There are also more widely applicable political, economic, and evironmental gains to be made. Some people might be willing to throw money at it just on the outside chance of these general gains to society, never mind the personal gains. Heat energy is the first step to more generalized energy production. As a friend of mine put it when the original results where announced, if we can get cheap, portable fusion power, we're off the planet.
She's not a luddite, provided she makes copies of her class notes and tells people just to sit back and listen. I hated profs who spent the entire class speed copying their notes to the blackboard or overhead--and then based the exam entirely on that. You spent the whole class scribbling like mad, and not a single word of it went into your consciousness. You shouldn't need the laptop, and you shouldn't be writing pages of notes either. But if you expect your class to spend the whole time scribbling, then you might as well let them have their laptops. They're not going to learn anything during class anyway.
And while laptops may not have that 60hz visual buzz of television CRT's that will actually anaesthetize brains, it does tend to distract by producing visual clutter. And it's one more thing for the student to hide behind when a question comes up.
The real breakthrough will come when we have an AI capable of parsing and analyzing political and advertising material for validity. Then we will end up with something like this for most of them:
[Premise] (false)
[Premise] (false)
[Fallacious argument] (bad premises)
[Fallacious argument] (ad hominem)
[Fallacious argument] (ad hominem)
[Fallacious argument] (sweeping generalization)
[Fallacious argument] (circular argument)
[Fallacious argument] (strawman)
[Fallacious argument] (ad populum)
[Fallacious argument] (appeal to authority)
[Fallacious argument] (anecdotal evidence)
Truth content: none
Actually, Wikipedia has the same level of accuracy of any of the major encyclopedias (Britannica, etc.) And Wikipedia entries are peer reviewed, since it's pretty hard to conceal a bad entry on a public forum. Scientific journals typically have a very small review group, who simply may not have time to properly review them or confirm their validity. The result have been some very embarrassing and truly horrendous articles; in fact, as many of two thirds of all papers related to drug research have later turned out to be false. And there are fairly simple mechanisms for preventing wackos from posting trash on your wiki.
Amen. I bought a couple of CD's on the weekend, and was astounded by the price, and the audacity of the recording industry for demanding such a price. I would have bought more, but I had a price limit on how much I was willing to spend. And, frankly, I felt insulted, like I was being ripped off. Those will be the last CD's a buy for quite a while. I'll buy online, one song at a time, because the CD's cost too much if you want only one or two songs.
Theism has no relation to aesthetics, and most religions don't have much to say on the topic of beauty, generally considering aesthetic opinion to be rather subjective and not very important. Indeed, some religious traditions have an extremely antagonistic view towards beauty, considering it a distraction and temptation. Religious buildings tend to be beautiful for the same reason that palaces and banks do: they have the money to afford the artisans, and people are attracted to beautiful things.
There are no religious theories of beauty. There are a wide variety of philosophical and even scientific theories, but almost none of them depend upon the existence of God.
I don't know where you're getting this stuff, but I can tell you that my appreciation of beauty actually increased when I stopped believing in God.
I understand what it is to be a believer. I once made all the arguments you do. And I eventually had to be honest and admit that they were wrong. I don't really care whether you believe in God or not, but don't try to claim that you can't be human without believing in God. You've never seen the world as a non-believer, so don't tell me what it's like to be me.
True, but the real point of the argument is that evolution gives us a pretty good idea of what is thermodynamically possible. A grey goo simply cannot exert enough energy to break all the bonds of all the materials it encounters indefinitely, any more than we can digest glass, plastics, and even organic fibre. And we have an incredibly complex digestive system.
This whole grey goo scare is just bad science fiction. A machine that goes on replicating forever, eating everything in its path? If that were possible, don't you think that evolution would have come up with it already?
The machine would have to get enough energy, and enough raw materials, in more or less the right proportions, to do this. A general purpose eating machine would be so energetically expensive that it would stall before it could replicate. Life adapts itself to specific environments and foods because it's cheaper, and that makes the difference between life and death. Specific purpose life forms are efficient, and thrive in their ecological niche very well, but are no good outside of it. The closest thing to a general purpose life form, that can eat everything in its path, is us.
Not exactly nanoscopic, are we?
The principles of simplicity, elegance, and order are aesthetic, not religious. The appreciation of beauty is not in any way dependent on belief in God. In fact, the primary rationale for atheism is Occam's Razor. God has never been proven to be required to explain anything, and therefore the assumption that he exists is unnecessarily complex and inelegant.
The belief that the world is illusory or unimportant is actually a common religious belief, probably the one that sceintific atheists despise the most. If you follow the arguments of religious conservatives these days, they are based on epistemological relativism. Fundamentalists have co-opted postmodernism to exploit its slippery evasions of logic and evidence. This is why Evolution is "just a theory" to them--there is no truth, only opinion. There is no reality. The inconsistency of such arguments, coming from the mouths of absolutists, is mind-boggling, but then, they don't hold reason in very high regard.
And the primary argument of supernaturalists (theists) is that God can change or suspend the laws of physics at will. So the laws of physics apply... except when they don't. Given this assumption, science becomes impossible. This is what the current war between science and religion is about--political religion is intent on eradicating the naturalistic world view, and science in the process.
Everything you said in your post was completely wrong.
It might be argued that the offence wasn't simple hate speech, but a call for violent attacks. I'm not sure that this wouldn't violate American laws as well, particularly the new anti-terrorist laws.
Personally, I'm not particularly fond of the idea of prosecuting anyone for voicing an opinion. Most of the time, as with David Irving, it just gives them a bigger soapbox to stand on. But consider how most terrorist organizations work. They convince young disenfranchised men that they are victimized by the target group, suggest a violent course of action, fill in some of the technical details, and then just leave them to carry it out. The ring leaders walk away, hiding behind the claim of freedom of speech, leaving their recruits to do the dirty work. Most of the recruits will screw it up or just sit stewing, but a few will actually go ahead and pull it off. This is the deliberate intent. This is precisely how Charlie Manson got the Family to do the LaBianca murders (he went along later for the Tate murders.) But the intent is still mass murder. The difference is that the ring leader commits murder by proxy. Unlike Manson, most never touch the knives or guns or bombs, and can deny direct involvement with the crime. His bullets are the young men he turns to his cause and releases into society. And yet, he does this with the specific intent of committing murder.
This method is the basis for the movie American History X, where a neo-nazi ring leader whips young skinheads into a frenzy and then hangs back while they wreak havoc. An instigator who calls for violence through remote media is hoping to find just one Timothy McVeigh. The agitators of Political Islam have got this down to a science. Once they get the potential terrorist primed, they pass him off to people with more direct involvement, usually by by suggesting that he go to the Middle East for training. Suicide bombs are easy to make--the hard part is convincing someone to strap one on and use it. Almost anyone or anything can be destroyed if the attacker is willing to sacrifice his own life to do it. The most important component of the bomb is the bomber himself--and that component is built with ideas.
The kind of people who run these sites are trying to build this type of bomb. Their propoganda is the murder weapon. It's not a very accurate one, but it does have the advantage that you can avoid prison. There is a difference between voicing your opinion, and instigating violence. If a mob boss tells his underlings that someone should be killed, is he just voicing his opinion?
Lucas has been bellyaching about this since The Phantom Menace came out. His problems are obvious--he misused a great cast, wrote wooden characters, and spent a fortune on special effects that couldn't disguise the fact that he'd put out a bloated B movie. Too bad--Carrie Fisher is one of the best script doctors in Hollywood. It's not like he doesn't know her.
What the Hollywood unions will achieve is that movies will be made elsewhere. This is why so many movies are now being shot in Canada, but financed by Hollywood studios, who have the distribution access. The Canadian crews cut their teeth on TV shows like the X-Files in the 80's and 90's, and some of the technical expertise up here is way ahead of the Hollywood crews. You see things that you'd never see in Hollywood productions, like a lot of scenes with two people walking down a crowded street in long shot with perfect sound capture of their conversation (and no, the scene is not dubbed.) This trend is so pronounced that politicians in California have been sounding protectionist alarms against Canadian productions.
The Lord of the Rings was shot in New Zealand by Kiwi crews, and a lot of movies are going back to Europe for locations, even natural locations meant to mimic American outdoor shots. Since the money is coming from the States, distribution is not a problem.
We may, however, see a levelling out and even reduction in special effects costs as more digital effects become procedural rather than custom built and hand crafted. The big budget films of today and paying for the R & D that will allow for the low budget blockbusters of tomorrow. If you can procedurally generate a crowd, a city scene, and the special effects, you might be able to generate almost anything you want just be controlling the parameters. The first step, which is already being created, are human figures which are animated based upon muscle forces and constraints applied to a realistic skeleton, complete with muscle bulging, integrated rag-doll, and cloth effects. Suddenly, you don't need your location, the crew, the extras, the stuntmen, or the special effects team. You just do a low res proof and throw it at a server farm for the weekend.
The funny thing is that the whole book of Revelations is far more likely to be about events in the first century, with either Jerusalem or Rome being the Whore of Babylon and the Beast being the Emperor or the Roman Army. The Mark of the Beast probably refers to the tatoos that were given to slaves to mark them as such, usually in an easily visible place like the face or the hand. Early Christians also wore tattoos as a sign of their faith. Facial tattoos were sometimes worn by Roman Soldiers, although the Romans regarded tattoos as barbaric.
In fact, the Book of Revelations was a controversial addition to the early Bible, and several Bishops argued against including it in the canon due to the difficulty of interpreting it, and hence, its potential for abuse--particularly the type of abuse so typical of fundamentalists, who keep claiming that the end times are upon us. Other portions of the Bible specifically warn against doing this, because only God knows the time when the world will end. To this day the Eastern Orthodox Church does not consider it part of the Canon.
If you're a non-believer, like I am, all of this is moot--the whole thing is either about the world John lived in, or he got dosed with some grain ergot while in prison. If you are a Christian, however, steer clear of belief that these are the end times. It's a definite no-no in the religion. And if you believe in the Rapture, rest assured that the people who compiled the Bible would have denounced you as a heretic, and you probably would have ended up being used for sword practice by a Roman Legionnaire. This is a spin from the lunatic fringe on a single line of a book that almost ended up in the fireplace of history. It is also a morally corrosive doctrine because it undercuts personal responsibility, encouraging people to believe that God is going to solve all of their problems for them, kill all their enemies, and build them a whole new world.