Unfortunately, atheism doesn't make the world rational.
No, it doesn't. But it's a prerequisite for a rational world.
This is quite understandable: human processing capacity is limited by the brain size...
Maybe in an absolute sense, but the efficiency of that processing can scale wildly. We have the same brain size as did our ancestors from thousands of years ago (roughly), but consider just how much better we have become at all sorts of processing. As just one example, we have turned the analysis of uncertainty into a very precise science and can now combine a huge number of measurements that, by themselves, have little value into statements like "It is 99.7% certain that X is better than Y." (I refer, of course, to the modern science of statistics. As just one example of how far we go these days in quantifying uncertainty, see http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.2211.)
Whereas in medieval times artisans trying to build a cathedral had to go by rules of thumb and intuition (which they were quite good at, but the things still fell down regularly), we now have come up with precise ways of measuring the strength of materials and our buildings only very rarely fall down now due to design failures.
It's like bubble-sort vs. quicksort: even running on the same CPU there is a lot of room for improvement in algorithms, and that's what the development of human culture buys you. And we're not done yet.
The religious impulse in humans is answered less and less these days in many parts of the world. It's mostly answered because of tradition and upbringing, not anything innate.
Christianity bumped off a huge number of people too, indirectly -- how many people died of plague in the Dark Ages because the Church's response was "Pray harder!"
How many Muslim girls have had their clitorises chopped off and then forced to live lives as servants?
How many Aztecs and Incas died because of the Spaniards' holy drive to conquer and Christianize the heathens?
How many Africans have died of AIDS that would have lived if the Pope hadn't stood in the way of sex education and barrier contraception?
And in the void left by the eradication of religion, what do you think would fill in? Utopian enlightenment and a dreamy new world of scientific achievement and the finest arts?
Not immediately, no. Opiate withdrawal, to borrow Marx's metaphor, is painful. And it's not as though getting a druggie off of his dope immediately makes him a paragon of virtue and achievement... but it's a step in the right direction, and that's all that counts.
Christianity, to be sure, has been behind a lot of achievements: the music of Bach and Palestrina, for an example. But that's only because the church was the great *temporal* power of the time -- giving Christianity credit for things done with the Church's money is a little disingenuous. Would Bach have written beautiful music if the Church weren't involved? Of course -- actually, he did. (See the Well-Tempered Clavier, among others.)
If people need fantasies to learn to control themselves, then what sort of control is that? Besides, that's a false statement -- there's hardly a wave of terrible things going on in the environment of the declining religious belief in northern Europe. God has left the building, nothing terrible has entered in his stead, and the world goes on.
The most atheistic nations today have the highest suicide rates (these are those enlightened nations always mentioned here as being so wonderful..we all know which ones those are). They may have a lot of material wealth, but have little regard for anything else, mass alcoholism and drug addiction is the norm in those nations, and has been steadily rising year after year over the last several decades now.
Citation needed -- if you're not even going to name the countries, you don't have much credibility. Also, have you estimated the size of the systematic error due to reporting differences? If you're going to wave your hands and invoke statistics you'd better have some numbers to back them up.
The largest mass murders in the 20th century were done by the officially atheistic and socialist/communist/collectivist nations (USSR, China, Nazi era Germany, and today North Korea, by far the most oppressive regime on the planet).
Did I say that atheists were always perfect? Besides, Hitler's regime wasn't adverse to religion; he alternatively used Christianity and Germanic neopaganism for his own ends.
Your examples would be more meaningful if three of the four weren't Communist, which just happens to combine state atheism with state repression.
And these Communist regimes replace loyalty to a false religious ideology with unblinking loyalty to the Party, which is just as bad in exactly the same way.
In your list of repressive regimes, you forgot Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the various Southeast Asian military dictatorships, fyi.
Your metrics, the ones you insist make you "superior", leave a lot to be desired when you leave out and dismiss as so trivial to not mention, the mass murder of close to 200 million people, and the mass unhappiness that comes from pure empty materialistic life.
"Materialism" means two things. There's the philosophical idea that the material world is all that there is, and that's not "empty". (I study that material world as a particle physicist, and it's very complex and beautiful.)
Then there's the common use to mean "obsession with material things"... and that has nothing to do with atheism; actually, most of the atheists I know are less concerned with possessions than the average religious person.
Atheism in and by itself is not any sort of "cure" for mass assholeness.
No, it's not. It's prevention, in the long term: in a rational world, assholes are more quickly called out and shouted down.
This is the same God in whose name we slaughtered Muslims and burned witches in the Middle Ages, in whose name we persecute gays today, and in whose name we restrict the teaching of biology and human sexuality?
Some Christians may well live the life of altruism and kindness attributed to Jesus. (In my experience in the USA, the ones that do are precisely those denominations that are least obsessed with the mythology: the Episcopalians, for instance.) But you can forgive your neighbor and feed the poor based on purely secular ethics, too; if you want to compare charity between religious organizations and secular ones, I believe that MSF or Amnesty International is a little bit more purely altruistic than your average bunch of missionaries.
There are levels of the assumption of privacy. On a public street I expect that anything I do might be photographed, but I don't expect that any party is keeping an extensive enough set of recordings of me to plot all my movements and my daily activities.
Even though photography in public in general is legal and violates no rights, it's unclear whether a systematic campaign to photograph such a huge swath of someone's activities that you can extract overall patterns of behavior does. If a private person did this they might be prosecuted (rightfully so) for stalking.
The irony is that Christians, which Miriam represented in the game, have inflicted a terrible, awful false god upon the West for the last two millennia.
All gods are false, and the sooner we do away with them as anything other than myths the better.
If by "monitoring" they mean "reading publically-available websites", then I have no civil-liberties problem with this. It might not be a good use of law enforcement resources (they'd benefit me, the taxpayer, more by finding the people who steal cars and break into houses), but there's nothing wrong with the DHS using publically-available information to do their job.
This, of course, is contingent upon them only using that information in an ethical way. If they want to subpoena my ISP and send the police to hassle me because I said "Fuck the police", then that's a problem. But that isn't directly related to the DHS' monitoring of the web.
Monitoring of private communication (email, IM, which websites I read) is a whole different ball game. Ethical arguments aside it is simply not practical -- the real "bad guys" can hide so deep behind cryptography and steganography that the only people turned up by this monitoring will be people who are a little too ardent (for their tastes) in saying "Fuck the police".
I'm visiting Italy, and they really do make it hard to get an internet connection that they can't investigate. I had to give my passport information to the hotel before they'd give me a damn wifi account (and they have accounts, on an authentication server that's always grossly overloaded, where in the US there'd just be a public AP). But of course anybody really up to no good would do their dirty work over Tor or through an anonymising proxy, while these sorts of "security" measures instead just make it hard for a bunch of scientists to check their experiments.
We can have all the discussions we want about whether there is a fundamental right to private anonymous communication, but the technological reality is that anyone who wants it enough will have it regardless. Monitoring etc. is just going to make/b/ load slowly because everyone has to load it over Tor.
I don't see why they can't let the kids without their own Macs leave the school-provided loaner macs plugged in at school, and ssh into them from home...
The same would be true for Ubuntu, if you limited it to a single hardware platform that it was tested on. The way that your Mac is so reliable is because Apple tested the hell out of the software on *that specific hardware*, not because there's anything inherently better about OSX.
So the school could just as well find some generic Dell/HP/Acer/IBM laptop that Ubuntu was known to have no issues on, and distribute that.
Most biology textbooks contain what the authors noted was the overwhelming consensus of biologists.
Nobody puts anything controversial (*actually* controversial -- things that are overwhelmingly accepted scientific consensus but that still piss off the Baptists do not qualify), without clearly labelling it as such, in a mainstream elementary biology book.
There is a difference between driving fast and driving recklessly. Sometimes they go hand-in-hand, but not always -- and a bright-line speed limit is not the way to make the decision.
I don't see how this would result in anything but meaningless spamming of that "button".
It's like giving/b/ a direct line to the cops. They'll figure out that you can use this to partyvan a partyvan driver, and will keep doing it for the lulz.
Slashdot Mirror
Gas and nuclear may have similar costs, but they're hardly alike when it comes to environmental concerns.
Gas still produces CO2, and extraction is messy.
Nuclear produces no emissions, and it takes so little uranium to make a plant that the issues associated with mining are small.
That the poster made a typo and you knew what the hell he meant?
Good luck. I can encrypt something in polynomial time (quadratic, isn't it?) that it takes you exponential time to encrypt.
Unfortunately, atheism doesn't make the world rational.
No, it doesn't. But it's a prerequisite for a rational world.
This is quite understandable: human processing capacity is limited by the brain size...
Maybe in an absolute sense, but the efficiency of that processing can scale wildly. We have the same brain size as did our ancestors from thousands of years ago (roughly), but consider just how much better we have become at all sorts of processing. As just one example, we have turned the analysis of uncertainty into a very precise science and can now combine a huge number of measurements that, by themselves, have little value into statements like "It is 99.7% certain that X is better than Y." (I refer, of course, to the modern science of statistics. As just one example of how far we go these days in quantifying uncertainty, see http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.2211.)
Whereas in medieval times artisans trying to build a cathedral had to go by rules of thumb and intuition (which they were quite good at, but the things still fell down regularly), we now have come up with precise ways of measuring the strength of materials and our buildings only very rarely fall down now due to design failures.
It's like bubble-sort vs. quicksort: even running on the same CPU there is a lot of room for improvement in algorithms, and that's what the development of human culture buys you. And we're not done yet.
The religious impulse in humans is answered less and less these days in many parts of the world. It's mostly answered because of tradition and upbringing, not anything innate.
Christianity bumped off a huge number of people too, indirectly -- how many people died of plague in the Dark Ages because the Church's response was "Pray harder!"
How many Muslim girls have had their clitorises chopped off and then forced to live lives as servants?
How many Aztecs and Incas died because of the Spaniards' holy drive to conquer and Christianize the heathens?
How many Africans have died of AIDS that would have lived if the Pope hadn't stood in the way of sex education and barrier contraception?
In short:
Religion's response to the plagues was the flagellants.
Reason's response to the plague was "Hey, this moldy bread kills bacteria..."
And in the void left by the eradication of religion, what do you think would fill in? Utopian enlightenment and a dreamy new world of scientific achievement and the finest arts?
Not immediately, no. Opiate withdrawal, to borrow Marx's metaphor, is painful. And it's not as though getting a druggie off of his dope immediately makes him a paragon of virtue and achievement... but it's a step in the right direction, and that's all that counts.
Christianity, to be sure, has been behind a lot of achievements: the music of Bach and Palestrina, for an example. But that's only because the church was the great *temporal* power of the time -- giving Christianity credit for things done with the Church's money is a little disingenuous. Would Bach have written beautiful music if the Church weren't involved? Of course -- actually, he did. (See the Well-Tempered Clavier, among others.)
If people need fantasies to learn to control themselves, then what sort of control is that? Besides, that's a false statement -- there's hardly a wave of terrible things going on in the environment of the declining religious belief in northern Europe. God has left the building, nothing terrible has entered in his stead, and the world goes on.
The most atheistic nations today have the highest suicide rates (these are those enlightened nations always mentioned here as being so wonderful..we all know which ones those are). They may have a lot of material wealth, but have little regard for anything else, mass alcoholism and drug addiction is the norm in those nations, and has been steadily rising year after year over the last several decades now.
Citation needed -- if you're not even going to name the countries, you don't have much credibility. Also, have you estimated the size of the systematic error due to reporting differences? If you're going to wave your hands and invoke statistics you'd better have some numbers to back them up.
The largest mass murders in the 20th century were done by the officially atheistic and socialist/communist/collectivist nations (USSR, China, Nazi era Germany, and today North Korea, by far the most oppressive regime on the planet).
Did I say that atheists were always perfect? Besides, Hitler's regime wasn't adverse to religion; he alternatively used Christianity and Germanic neopaganism for his own ends.
Your examples would be more meaningful if three of the four weren't Communist, which just happens to combine state atheism with state repression.
And these Communist regimes replace loyalty to a false religious ideology with unblinking loyalty to the Party, which is just as bad in exactly the same way.
In your list of repressive regimes, you forgot Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the various Southeast Asian military dictatorships, fyi.
Your metrics, the ones you insist make you "superior", leave a lot to be desired when you leave out and dismiss as so trivial to not mention, the mass murder of close to 200 million people, and the mass unhappiness that comes from pure empty materialistic life.
"Materialism" means two things. There's the philosophical idea that the material world is all that there is, and that's not "empty". (I study that material world as a particle physicist, and it's very complex and beautiful.)
Then there's the common use to mean "obsession with material things"... and that has nothing to do with atheism; actually, most of the atheists I know are less concerned with possessions than the average religious person.
Atheism in and by itself is not any sort of "cure" for mass assholeness.
No, it's not. It's prevention, in the long term: in a rational world, assholes are more quickly called out and shouted down.
Mankind made religion; differentiating between what we made and what we made of what we made isn't terribly relevant.
This is the same God in whose name we slaughtered Muslims and burned witches in the Middle Ages, in whose name we persecute gays today, and in whose name we restrict the teaching of biology and human sexuality?
Some Christians may well live the life of altruism and kindness attributed to Jesus. (In my experience in the USA, the ones that do are precisely those denominations that are least obsessed with the mythology: the Episcopalians, for instance.) But you can forgive your neighbor and feed the poor based on purely secular ethics, too; if you want to compare charity between religious organizations and secular ones, I believe that MSF or Amnesty International is a little bit more purely altruistic than your average bunch of missionaries.
The fact that law enforcement treats the arena in which they work as a battlefield means that they have already failed.
Law enforcement should not be a war.
There are levels of the assumption of privacy. On a public street I expect that anything I do might be photographed, but I don't expect that any party is keeping an extensive enough set of recordings of me to plot all my movements and my daily activities.
Even though photography in public in general is legal and violates no rights, it's unclear whether a systematic campaign to photograph such a huge swath of someone's activities that you can extract overall patterns of behavior does. If a private person did this they might be prosecuted (rightfully so) for stalking.
The irony is that Christians, which Miriam represented in the game, have inflicted a terrible, awful false god upon the West for the last two millennia.
All gods are false, and the sooner we do away with them as anything other than myths the better.
If by "monitoring" they mean "reading publically-available websites", then I have no civil-liberties problem with this. It might not be a good use of law enforcement resources (they'd benefit me, the taxpayer, more by finding the people who steal cars and break into houses), but there's nothing wrong with the DHS using publically-available information to do their job.
This, of course, is contingent upon them only using that information in an ethical way. If they want to subpoena my ISP and send the police to hassle me because I said "Fuck the police", then that's a problem. But that isn't directly related to the DHS' monitoring of the web.
Monitoring of private communication (email, IM, which websites I read) is a whole different ball game. Ethical arguments aside it is simply not practical -- the real "bad guys" can hide so deep behind cryptography and steganography that the only people turned up by this monitoring will be people who are a little too ardent (for their tastes) in saying "Fuck the police".
I'm visiting Italy, and they really do make it hard to get an internet connection that they can't investigate. I had to give my passport information to the hotel before they'd give me a damn wifi account (and they have accounts, on an authentication server that's always grossly overloaded, where in the US there'd just be a public AP). But of course anybody really up to no good would do their dirty work over Tor or through an anonymising proxy, while these sorts of "security" measures instead just make it hard for a bunch of scientists to check their experiments.
We can have all the discussions we want about whether there is a fundamental right to private anonymous communication, but the technological reality is that anyone who wants it enough will have it regardless. Monitoring etc. is just going to make /b/ load slowly because everyone has to load it over Tor.
The 4channers will all just fire up Tor, or 4chan will move to freenet.
If you're some uber-photographer and don't want that, Picasa lets you turn it off.
The main thing Picasa lacks is proper curves and noise-reduction tools.
If the lowest-cost bidder isn't providing a high-quality product, then perhaps they didn't really meet the specs in the first place?
This wreaks of something illegal.
No, it wreaks of someone getting a kickback under the table.
Which, uhh... is illegal.
... and also common as dirt.
I don't see why they can't let the kids without their own Macs leave the school-provided loaner macs plugged in at school, and ssh into them from home...
The same would be true for Ubuntu, if you limited it to a single hardware platform that it was tested on. The way that your Mac is so reliable is because Apple tested the hell out of the software on *that specific hardware*, not because there's anything inherently better about OSX.
So the school could just as well find some generic Dell/HP/Acer/IBM laptop that Ubuntu was known to have no issues on, and distribute that.
Couldn't they just borrow them during the day, and leave them at school at night turned on and ssh into them?
Most biology textbooks contain what the authors noted was the overwhelming consensus of biologists.
Nobody puts anything controversial (*actually* controversial -- things that are overwhelmingly accepted scientific consensus but that still piss off the Baptists do not qualify), without clearly labelling it as such, in a mainstream elementary biology book.
When you're a jaguar, pretty much anything is prey. Any smell that you don't recognize is still probably something you can eat.
There is a difference between driving fast and driving recklessly. Sometimes they go hand-in-hand, but not always -- and a bright-line speed limit is not the way to make the decision.
I don't see how this would result in anything but meaningless spamming of that "button".
It's like giving /b/ a direct line to the cops. They'll figure out that you can use this to partyvan a partyvan driver, and will keep doing it for the lulz.