The bible also describes pi as being 3.0 - does that make it a math book? It also gives instruction on how to beat slaves. Does that mean it's a medical text? It provides details on what the fine one must pay if they kick a pregnant woman and cause her to lose her fetus. Does that make it helpful to economics?
Your argument is analogous to suggesting people call themselves a vegetarian and still eat meat. Most religions are mutually-exclusive of each other. Why attach a label to yourself that for thousands of years has been used as the impetus to oppress others?
The reason science cannot disprove religion such as Christianity is because most believers only selfishly care about what God gives to their life, instead of whether the environment/universe is created by God.
You just employed a Begging the Question fallacy. Science can and does routinely disprove religion, from the origins of life in the Book of Genesis to the ancestry of Native Americans in the Book of Mormon. Almost every religion has some material claim that can be tested and thus far, there's been no non-circumstantial, material evidence to indicate any supernatural claims are true. The onus is on those who believe to prove their claims are legitimate. Not the other way around. We don't have to "disprove religion", you have to prove, for example, that prayer makes a difference, and numerous scientific studies have shown that claim to be false. So science can and does disprove numerous religious claims. Can science prove god doesn't exist? No, and it's not our responsibility to do so, and regardless of whether or not we prove you wrong, that still doesn't mean your beliefs or supernatural claims about the origin of the universe are correct. That's a burden you must back up instead of trying to shift it upon the skeptics.
the word 'faith' and correct me if I am wrong, but if something has no ontological status, you cannot argue for or against it.
Correct... until someone's faith-based beliefs intersect with the material world in the form of specific claims. Then their beliefs can be tested and proven or disproven, including:
Everyone believes in science; not everyone believes in religion.
So technically, "science" is everyone's "religion."
Science centers around making decisions based on observation, testable and repeatable practices. 99.9% of what you do every day is dependent upon these constructs. If this were not the case, then people would try to jump off buildings instead of taking an elevator down; they would assume any substance could cure any illness, etc.
Letter to Eric Gutkind (partial) Albert Einstein (1954) Translated from the German by Joan Stambaugh...
... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.
In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.
Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evalutations of human behaviour. What separates us are only intellectual 'props' and `rationalisation' in Freud's language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.
With friendly thanks and best wishes Yours, A. Einstein.
It says scientists at elite universities got that way by being diplomatic and avoiding unnecessary confrontation and controversy. It also says Slashdot readers are more intelligent. It's well established that the more intelligent one is, the more likely they are to subscribe to religion.
207 economics 225 political science 205 psychology
My guess is the vast majority of polled non-atheists are members of the above groups, most of which don't typically participate in standard scientific studies using the scientific method.
The '"insurmountable hostility" between science and religion is a caricature
Not really. Science is based on testable theories and evidence. Faith is belief despite there being evidence, or in many cases in spite of contrary evidence. Science has dispelled everything from evangelical christianity (proving Genesis to be false) to Mormanism (proving Joseph's Smith's revelations are phony through Egyptology and DNA evidence). There's ample evidence to indicate that religion evaporates in the light of science.
"I've recently gotten AT&T U-Verse, who, according to their privacy statement, will be monitoring my TV watching habits for advertisement purposes. I'm extremely annoyed by that, yet I love the service so much and I don't think I can cancel it. I just can't take this anymore."
The most effective way of stopping spam thus far is using IP blacklisting. It should be noted if the net moves to ipV6, that will be the end of blacklist effectiveness for some time.
I found this essay on Free Will which I tend to agree with. Any time someone deviates from what is considered a normal human desire, that becomes grounds for clinical diagnosis of mental issues, so ultimately the choices people make are extremely predictable and not very "free."
"lefties" don't employ strawmen arguments like the UN being a collection of Jihadist sympathizers and use terms like "extreme lefties" and hide behind the cowardice of anonymity. You're not fooling anyone.
t is only irrelevant because people ignore when Hamas attacks Israel and provokes an attack. Instead, people focus on how Israel is hurting the poor, terrorist loving Palestinians who elected a terrorist group to power and allow them to fire rockets into their bigger, better armed neighbor.
AIPAC talking point #8.
Irrelevent.
The whole chicken-or-the-egg argument is meaningless. It doesn't matter who shot first, Israel has progressively escalated the level of violence. And all of this is brought on by their refusal to follow the original treaties they agreed regarding the sovereignty of Palestinian territory.
Ultimately we should blame the British for starting this mess. They broke their promise with the Arabs and started the conflict, but then Israel invaded the area before an agreement was reached, so basically, Israel was the original aggressor.
It may be politically-correct to support Israel, but Israel is in the wrong here by International law and objective standards of morality. The only people pro-Israel are those that don't know the history and details of the conflict, or have personal interests they're protecting. People such as myself, who have no interest whatsoever in either side, can look at the issue objectively and realize there is a right side and a wrong side.
If the Israeli government seriously wanted to commit genocide it would have gotten it over with by now.
Oh puh-leeze. It's no conspiracy theory. The bottom line is what they are doing is systemmatically driving the Arabs off their own land and killing those that resist or won't move. That is basically genocide. This is exactly what was done to the American indians but of course, it's not called "genocide" by the invading army and their media. But it's the same thing. The winners of the conflict get to frame it however they want, but dead people are still dead.
Know this - Palestine covers an the area today known as Jordan and Israel. Israel composes roughly 10% of that area. Israel is surrounded by countries that have all tried to destroy Israel repeatedly.
AIPAC talking point #11
Irrelevent.
If you bulldoze your neighbor's homes and take over their land, as I said before, it's not unusual for these displaced, oppressed people to want to destroy you. That's human nature to fight an evil, oppressive force.
I still respect the guy for being a POW, no amount of partisanship can take that away from him.
McCain was a traitor and a coward more than he was a P.O.W. You should dive deeper into his personal story and then you find out:
* He was a crappy soldier who didn't follow orders
* He crashed 3 airplanes - anyone else would have been drummed out long before him
* His family's power and influence kept him in the military
* When he was shot down, he wasn't following the rules which led to his crash
* The injuries he suffered that many claim was the result of "torture" was not torture but injuries from the crash
* He lasted TWO DAYS.... TWO DAYS IN CAPTIVITY before he coughed up the fact that his father was the commander of the Pacific Naval Fleet
* He then became a traitor to America and recorded VC propaganda messages that were broadcast to his own troops in Vietnam
He claims torture doesn't work, but then he claims he was tortured and "broken", then he claimed torture does work and supported Bush's torture of Guantanamo detanees. In addition to being a liar, by his own admission he committed treason. He's a traitor and calling him a "hero" is an insult to virtually every other Vietnam vet who served more honorably and didn't sell out their country.
*before* the ceasefire ending Hamas fired almost 3000 rockets into Israel. I'd say they broke the ceasefire well before the IDF "provoked" them.
Many others report Israel broke the cease fire - the bottom line is that both sides have continued to fight. It's a red herring to suggest one side acted in an unprovoked manner - that's simply bogus.
Who shot first is irrelevant.
What is relevant is that Israel has been condemned by the United Nations more than 50 times for refusing to follow various agreed-upon conventions. Israel has been systematically driving the Palestinians off their own land and taking it over. That's a fact. That's not something you can accuse the arabs of doing. If you bulldoze someone's house. If you make them have to pass through armed checkpoints and hostile guards to get to work. If you break their cities into little pieces by building an illegal wall around their settlements, you shouldn't be surprise if some of these people react. The irony is that Israel is slowly committing genocide on the Palestinians and nobody's doing anything about it. The United States is funding the genocide to the tune of $6,000,000,000.00 a year now in an elaborate kickback scheme involving military defense contractors and the US's most powerful lobbying group: AIPAC. There's no motivation for Israel to make peace with its neighbors when war is profitable for them and for the American corporations that aid money gets funneled back to.
If you're stupid enough to give control of your computer to anyone, let alone the Israelis, you deserve whatever comes your way.
The fact of the matter is the United States should not be funding this middle eastern civil war. And the Israelis have been oppressing the Palestinians for decades and occupying their land. So there are lots of people on both sides who are being harassed and killed, but only one side has a lot of power and modern weapons, as well as sympathy and support from the mainstream media.
As an American, I think our country should not be giving $3-$6 Billion dollars of taxpayer money per year to Israel to fund their wars. Regardless of which side is right, we shouldn't be funding the conflict. America doesn't owe Israel anything. We fought to save them. It's about time they started trying to get along with their neighbors.
That's only going to happen via a two-step process:
1. Reinstate the Fairness Doctrine which was responsible for allowing the media to snowjob the public in the first place to pass provisions that needed to be repealed (#2)
2. Undo the media deregulation that was embedded in the Telco Act Of 1996, and provided for consolidation of networks.
Slashdot Mirror
I think ground zero in the security war always begins and ends with the spam industry, which seems to be at the forefront of exploitation.
You are confusing history with religion.
The bible also describes pi as being 3.0 - does that make it a math book? It also gives instruction on how to beat slaves. Does that mean it's a medical text? It provides details on what the fine one must pay if they kick a pregnant woman and cause her to lose her fetus. Does that make it helpful to economics?
God = Psychology
Religion = Economics
Your argument is analogous to suggesting people call themselves a vegetarian and still eat meat. Most religions are mutually-exclusive of each other. Why attach a label to yourself that for thousands of years has been used as the impetus to oppress others?
The reason science cannot disprove religion such as Christianity is because most believers only selfishly care about what God gives to their life, instead of whether the environment/universe is created by God.
You just employed a Begging the Question fallacy. Science can and does routinely disprove religion, from the origins of life in the Book of Genesis to the ancestry of Native Americans in the Book of Mormon. Almost every religion has some material claim that can be tested and thus far, there's been no non-circumstantial, material evidence to indicate any supernatural claims are true. The onus is on those who believe to prove their claims are legitimate. Not the other way around. We don't have to "disprove religion", you have to prove, for example, that prayer makes a difference, and numerous scientific studies have shown that claim to be false. So science can and does disprove numerous religious claims. Can science prove god doesn't exist? No, and it's not our responsibility to do so, and regardless of whether or not we prove you wrong, that still doesn't mean your beliefs or supernatural claims about the origin of the universe are correct. That's a burden you must back up instead of trying to shift it upon the skeptics.
the word 'faith' and correct me if I am wrong, but if something has no ontological status, you cannot argue for or against it.
Correct... until someone's faith-based beliefs intersect with the material world in the form of specific claims. Then their beliefs can be tested and proven or disproven, including:
* The power of prayer - Disproven by the Harvard Prayer Experiment.
* The creation myth of Genesis, disproven by numerous areas of science
* The origin of native Americans as dictated in the Book of Mormon, disproven by genetic science
* The claims of scientology, disproven by analysis of their e-meters other science fields
Religion has never been content with merely residing in a metaphysical realm, and that's when problems arise.
Everyone believes in science; not everyone believes in religion.
So technically, "science" is everyone's "religion."
Science centers around making decisions based on observation, testable and repeatable practices. 99.9% of what you do every day is dependent upon these constructs. If this were not the case, then people would try to jump off buildings instead of taking an elevator down; they would assume any substance could cure any illness, etc.
Letter to Eric Gutkind (partial) Albert Einstein (1954) Translated from the German by Joan Stambaugh...
In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.
Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evalutations of human behaviour. What separates us are only intellectual 'props' and `rationalisation' in Freud's language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.
With friendly thanks and best wishes
Yours, A. Einstein.
Ref: http://freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Image:Einstein_letter.jpg
One was made by God (Science)
[citation needed]
It says scientists at elite universities got that way by being diplomatic and avoiding unnecessary confrontation and controversy. It also says Slashdot readers are more intelligent. It's well established that the more intelligent one is, the more likely they are to subscribe to religion.
207 economics
225 political science
205 psychology
My guess is the vast majority of polled non-atheists are members of the above groups, most of which don't typically participate in standard scientific studies using the scientific method.
The '"insurmountable hostility" between science and religion is a caricature
Not really. Science is based on testable theories and evidence. Faith is belief despite there being evidence, or in many cases in spite of contrary evidence. Science has dispelled everything from evangelical christianity (proving Genesis to be false) to Mormanism (proving Joseph's Smith's revelations are phony through Egyptology and DNA evidence). There's ample evidence to indicate that religion evaporates in the light of science.
Apparently you can.
The most effective way of stopping spam thus far is using IP blacklisting. It should be noted if the net moves to ipV6, that will be the end of blacklist effectiveness for some time.
I'm pretty sure in one of those pictures they show electrical conduit and the caption says they're for cooling the equipment.
I found this essay on Free Will which I tend to agree with. Any time someone deviates from what is considered a normal human desire, that becomes grounds for clinical diagnosis of mental issues, so ultimately the choices people make are extremely predictable and not very "free."
"lefties" don't employ strawmen arguments like the UN being a collection of Jihadist sympathizers and use terms like "extreme lefties" and hide behind the cowardice of anonymity. You're not fooling anyone.
t is only irrelevant because people ignore when Hamas attacks Israel and provokes an attack. Instead, people focus on how Israel is hurting the poor, terrorist loving Palestinians who elected a terrorist group to power and allow them to fire rockets into their bigger, better armed neighbor.
AIPAC talking point #8.
Irrelevent.
The whole chicken-or-the-egg argument is meaningless. It doesn't matter who shot first, Israel has progressively escalated the level of violence. And all of this is brought on by their refusal to follow the original treaties they agreed regarding the sovereignty of Palestinian territory.
Ultimately we should blame the British for starting this mess. They broke their promise with the Arabs and started the conflict, but then Israel invaded the area before an agreement was reached, so basically, Israel was the original aggressor.
It may be politically-correct to support Israel, but Israel is in the wrong here by International law and objective standards of morality. The only people pro-Israel are those that don't know the history and details of the conflict, or have personal interests they're protecting. People such as myself, who have no interest whatsoever in either side, can look at the issue objectively and realize there is a right side and a wrong side.
If the Israeli government seriously wanted to commit genocide it would have gotten it over with by now.
Oh puh-leeze. It's no conspiracy theory. The bottom line is what they are doing is systemmatically driving the Arabs off their own land and killing those that resist or won't move. That is basically genocide. This is exactly what was done to the American indians but of course, it's not called "genocide" by the invading army and their media. But it's the same thing. The winners of the conflict get to frame it however they want, but dead people are still dead.
Know this - Palestine covers an the area today known as Jordan and Israel. Israel composes roughly 10% of that area. Israel is surrounded by countries that have all tried to destroy Israel repeatedly.
AIPAC talking point #11
Irrelevent.
If you bulldoze your neighbor's homes and take over their land, as I said before, it's not unusual for these displaced, oppressed people to want to destroy you. That's human nature to fight an evil, oppressive force.
I still respect the guy for being a POW, no amount of partisanship can take that away from him.
McCain was a traitor and a coward more than he was a P.O.W. You should dive deeper into his personal story and then you find out:
* He was a crappy soldier who didn't follow orders
* He crashed 3 airplanes - anyone else would have been drummed out long before him
* His family's power and influence kept him in the military
* When he was shot down, he wasn't following the rules which led to his crash
* The injuries he suffered that many claim was the result of "torture" was not torture but injuries from the crash
* He lasted TWO DAYS.... TWO DAYS IN CAPTIVITY before he coughed up the fact that his father was the commander of the Pacific Naval Fleet
* He then became a traitor to America and recorded VC propaganda messages that were broadcast to his own troops in Vietnam
He claims torture doesn't work, but then he claims he was tortured and "broken", then he claimed torture does work and supported Bush's torture of Guantanamo detanees. In addition to being a liar, by his own admission he committed treason. He's a traitor and calling him a "hero" is an insult to virtually every other Vietnam vet who served more honorably and didn't sell out their country.
If the difference between a legitimate military campaign and terrorism is a plan
No. The difference is a matter of perspective and who controls communication resources.
A suicide bomber is merely a poor country's F-16.
*before* the ceasefire ending Hamas fired almost 3000 rockets into Israel. I'd say they broke the ceasefire well before the IDF "provoked" them.
Many others report Israel broke the cease fire - the bottom line is that both sides have continued to fight. It's a red herring to suggest one side acted in an unprovoked manner - that's simply bogus.
Who shot first is irrelevant.
What is relevant is that Israel has been condemned by the United Nations more than 50 times for refusing to follow various agreed-upon conventions. Israel has been systematically driving the Palestinians off their own land and taking it over. That's a fact. That's not something you can accuse the arabs of doing. If you bulldoze someone's house. If you make them have to pass through armed checkpoints and hostile guards to get to work. If you break their cities into little pieces by building an illegal wall around their settlements, you shouldn't be surprise if some of these people react. The irony is that Israel is slowly committing genocide on the Palestinians and nobody's doing anything about it. The United States is funding the genocide to the tune of $6,000,000,000.00 a year now in an elaborate kickback scheme involving military defense contractors and the US's most powerful lobbying group: AIPAC. There's no motivation for Israel to make peace with its neighbors when war is profitable for them and for the American corporations that aid money gets funneled back to.
If you're stupid enough to give control of your computer to anyone, let alone the Israelis, you deserve whatever comes your way.
The fact of the matter is the United States should not be funding this middle eastern civil war. And the Israelis have been oppressing the Palestinians for decades and occupying their land. So there are lots of people on both sides who are being harassed and killed, but only one side has a lot of power and modern weapons, as well as sympathy and support from the mainstream media.
As an American, I think our country should not be giving $3-$6 Billion dollars of taxpayer money per year to Israel to fund their wars. Regardless of which side is right, we shouldn't be funding the conflict. America doesn't owe Israel anything. We fought to save them. It's about time they started trying to get along with their neighbors.
That's only going to happen via a two-step process:
1. Reinstate the Fairness Doctrine which was responsible for allowing the media to snowjob the public in the first place to pass provisions that needed to be repealed (#2)
2. Undo the media deregulation that was embedded in the Telco Act Of 1996, and provided for consolidation of networks.