This this is science. We have skeptics who questioned the initial results. The result authors went back and reexamined the evidence, test setup, etc. Somewhere in this process, they found the truth.
Yes, this appears to be exemplary. They published their suprising observations, that got feedback, answered questions, carefully repeated their work, got the same results...
Too bad, really, that this turned out to be an "oh, sh*t" moment rather than a "gee, that's funny" moment.
The cable transmitted the signal 60ns faster than the time used in their compensation. I wouldn't call that defective.
Either the cable is shorter than they thought, or it's propagation factor is higher than specified, or they simply used the wrong number in their original calculations.
Or electrons travel faster in the cable than the known laws of physics allow.
This "explanation" just moves the problem from neutrinos to electrons.
Perhaps your interpretation is right, but I can't spot the reference to tree rings in the first quoted message. Who is making the conclusion that that is the reference, and what is the basis for that conclusion?
I ask, because that interpretation is in direct conflict with a statement about the matter by someone who should know, which I've run across in the past few days.
Also because (AIUI) the investigation didn't find any wrongdoing, and (AIUI) the vast majority of climate scientists still accept the hockey stick.
Please try to respond without appeal to conspiracy theories. In the real world, a year doesn't go by without some not-really-a-scientist getting his career destroyed after such an investigation finds that he did in fact fake his results. If your interpretation depends on "a vast green-wing conspiracy" I won't find it very compelling.
none any more supported by evidence than the next. The only honest thing to do is to apply the same standard of evidence to all of them, with the result that you accept them all or reject them all.
False dichotomy, and some really ungrounded statements.
If you have two religions: one which says that nothing exists and that reality is an illusion, and another which says things exist and were created long ago and that man has a capability for good but a sad inclination towards evil; would you say "neither is more supported by evidence than the next"? I suppose if you want to go all post-modern-the-truth-is-all-relative, you could take that stance, but otherwise it seems sadly indefensible.
Very strangely (from my point of view), you aren't talking about *evidence* at all. You're just appealing to your culturally-moderated intuitions about what kind of religion makes more sense.
When I raise the issue of evidence, I'm talking about "Could Mohammed move a mountain, or was that just PR?"" [*]
How do you know? All you've got is one tradition that says one thing and another tradition that says something different.
Some people cite miracles as evidence that their tradition is right, but everyone just accepts the miracles of their own tradition and rejects the miracles of competing religions out of hand.
So how can you establish the truth or falsehood of one religion vs. another, if you're a skeptic or a newly arrived alien, and you want something more reliable than personal intuitions or cultural traditions? What is the best evidence anyone can offer for their religion, and can the followers of one religion offer evidence that will trump what anyone else can offer, when judged by a neutral party?
So far as I can tell, there isn't any such evidence. Every religion has its traditions, its wisdom, its miracles, its mystics who testify to their personal encounter with The Divine, etc. Maybe I'm in the market for a religion: on what basis can I choose one over another with full confidence that I'm getting the right one - unlike the majority of the people in the world, who are 100% convinced that they got the right one, even though they picked something else?
If one religion is true and the rest aren't, why haven't its followers convinced everyone else on the basis of evidence? (And before you attribute that to some bias or other defect in the followers of other religions, pause to consider that they are going to say the same thing about you.)
Evidence! Why should anyone accept one religion and reject all the others?
[*] A line from Jesus Christ Superstar, if you didn't get the reference.
You said: "Bullshit. Our species has had thousands of religions, none any more supported by evidence than the next. The only honest thing to do is to apply the same standard of evidence to all of them, with the result that you accept them all or reject them all."
I have to disagree with this a little. I think, in the early days, religion was science. Your tribe moves to a new place, the weather is different, the micro-organisms are different, the yeast that makes your bread rise is different. The smart guys, the shamans, figured out how the new place worked. They led the tribe in doing what works in this new place. Planting, harvesting, etc... "Gods" in that sense, are just the set of rules that work here, where we are now. It was imminently practical and supported by evidence. If you did things right (the way the local "god" wanted you to) you survived. Best evidence ever. Our predecessors were no more intelligent or stupid than we are and were probably a LOT more practical.
Over time religions developed into the things they are today, but in the early days I think they existed because they worked.
I can't agree with this, if you're using "science" in the ordinary sense of the word. The essential property of science is anchoring beliefs on observations. A "primitive religious leader" could make up anything without constraint. If you do what he says the gods want, and your crop fails anyway, he just says that Gublu is mad because you gave Mublu a better sacrifice, or that you've been wanking with the wrong hand, or some such nonsense.
I don't think science is limited to people in labcoats who check off the steps of some formalized scientific method as they work. When your computer won't boot and you hypothesize that it's unplugged, then go check whether that hypothesis is tenable, you're doing exactly what scientists do. And there's no reason our earliest thinking ancestors could not have done the same thing - I suspect they did. But you can't do hypothesis testing on the arbitrary will of imaginary creatures. What the shaman infers about what Gublu and Mublu want hasn't got anything to do with science.
Christianity claims that Allah is a false idol from the Mecca idol market which just became prominent over the others and was molded into something like Abraham's God after Mohamed met with some Christians, but that Christians actually worship the same deity as the Jews.
Some Christians claim that. My friend, who's a recently retired priest in Church of Sweden, says he gets annoyed when Christians claim the Muslim God is not the same as the Christian God.
Clearly they both evolved from the same proto-cultural concept.
As to whether they're the same... an atheist's mind kind of boggles at the problem of deciding whether two imaginary friends are the same thing. It's like asking whether the Invisible Pink Unicorn and the Flying Spaghetti Monster are the same thing; a meaningless or near-meaningless question, for us.
Roman historians mention Christ so he seems to be historical rather than fictional.
Can't look it up right now, but I thought the only near-contemporary mention was Josephus, in a passage generally reckoned to be a pious interpolation by some later religious copyist.
(Considered so, IIRC, because what Josephus purportedly wrote about him is something that only a Christian would write.)
Given that the church I grew up in now supports gay marriage, socialist redistribution (as opposed to charitable giving), and is currently brushing up against approving of bestiality, pedophilia, polygamy and pretty much every other moral failing that the Christian church has spent the last 2000 years condemning, I can understand where Santorum's comment about the Protestant churches is coming from.
Please note, I am not endorsing either the new or old church's position, as I left all organized churches nearly 25 years ago, but I am forced to listen to my mother's complaints about where the church has gone over the last two decades and thus know the current state of the church. (UCC)
Is that one considered "mainstream protestant"? (Not a rhetorical question.)
The rest of the post is about whether there is consensus about AGW. Aside from the fact that/all/ respected scientific professional bodies in the world agree
I read recently that there is a *single* professional body that rejects it: a society for petroleum geologists or such. (Just a coincidence, I'm sure.)
They just gave Michael Crichton some kind of honor for his JP and anti-AGW books. I suppose people will take whatever support for their views they can find... Reminds me of creationists citing movies and novels to support their peculiar views about reality.
Even today I heard someone claim that smoking pot does not have worse health effects than tobacco smoke (think about it : no filters on the sigarettes -> you're actually inhaling burning leaves directly into your lungs which will never again come out.
Nobody smokes a pack of joints per day. Pot is less healthy on a per-dose basis, but probably healthier overall for a typical user.
According to folklore, the Reagan Administration hand-picked a panel to out the bad stuff on pot, and the panel came back with a report that the biggest health hazard of smoking pot is that it leads to smoking tobacco.
While we're on the topic, a study just came out showing that driving under the influence of pot doubles your chances of having an accident. I'm still inclined toward the view that legalizing it would be the best public policy, and would solve way more problems than it causes, but we can't pretend that it's harmless. I don't want to be the person that gets killed because some pot smoker has his double-probability accident on me.
Oh yeah, these are the guys that told you cigarettes were healthy, and that there was no reliable evidence that they harmed people.
Not really, they worked with Phillip Morris to spread material on the effects of secondhand smoke, which was questionable at the time they did so (they had long since stopped doing this before actual studies confirmed the effects)
I don't know about "these guys", but the tobacco industry knew darn well that smoking kills people, kept their studies secret, and marketed their poison like candy - long before the issue of second-hand smoke ever arose.
I'm no climate denier, but what he did was unethical. He should be fired, and possibly prosecuted if any crimes were committed.
It really seems strange to me that he would out himself, since that seems to be the likely outcome.
Pangs of guilt, wanted to confess? Martyr complex? Thinks outing the Institute is more important than his own well being? Knows he's dying in a few weeks? Talked to a lawyer and figures nothing will stick?
Who knows.
I think there's room for debate on the topic of whether it's right to violate first-order ethics in support of higher-order ethics, but this hardly seems like the occasion for that sort of thing even if you think it's OK. It's not like we didn't already know that there's big money and back-room arrangements behind climate denial (like every other PR effort). Why would he feel a need to stick his neck out just to prove that one organization is involved in it?
I guess you are correct after all. It is not a conspiracy, it is a paranoid delusion. Thanks for the heads up.
I don't think it's even a paranoid delusion. It's just a cynical argument to justify continuing to wreck the planet in order to sustain profits.
Remember the tobacco industry and lung cancer? Remember pharmaceuticals that kept selling their products even after their own studies showed that they are ineffective and/or harmful?
These people literally don't care if you have to die in order to sustain their profit margin.
Apparently they don't even care about the well-being of their own grandchildren; showing a profit on the next quarterly report is far more important.
Except as their own email show those scientific facts are anything but. Instead they are statistically massaged to look the way they want them when the base is actually showing things very different.
Except they didn't.
The most notorious meme that came out of "Climategate", the claim that there was a "trick" to "hide the decline", was manufactured by taking words out of two different parts of a message and putting them together to make people think the e-mail said something that it didn't.
The cowardly pundit will say Democrats do it and Republicans do it. This is true but banal. We could also say the Hitler and Lincoln were imperfect human beings.
There is a whole new level of crazy that has gripped Republican politics, and it is really too bad. I would love to have seen John Huntsman do well in the primaries, or even see the Republicans field some accomplished credentials. (e.g.: Colin Powell would be more accomplished then the entire republican field put together.)
I used to wish Powell would run for pres, but after carrying water for Cheney and the neocons at the UN, I wouldn't bother crossing the street to shake his hand.
Now we have the party of anti-science. We have Karl Rove eschewing the "reality-based community" which looks for solutions through judicious analysis. We have reactionary politics and faith-based righteous indignation. Somewhat ironically, Jesus preached love, not fear. And the christian right are driven by fear of all sorts of things -- mainly irrational.
Mainly sex.
The republicans really need to remake themselves, but the Tea Party has been a step in the wrong direction. More fear and reactionary politics. It really is too bad.
If I had a conservative bone in my body, I'd start a genuinely conservative party. There's surely a big opening for someone to do that right now.
OK, same might be said about a genuinely liberal party...
I was perplexed for the longest time how the republican party worked since all of their policies seem to be in favor of the rich. where did they get their votes? It finally clicked for me: they get their money from the rich (by favoring that segment in policies, taxes etc.) and the votes from the religious zealots (by appealing to the creationism, every-sperm-is-sacred etc. crowds).
Yeah, it astonishes me that it took me several decades to figure out what the game was. I always wondered why unions support the Democrats - the average ironworker or longshoreman is hardly a liberal.
But liberal and conservative don't have diddly to do with our two-party system. It's all about money.
It finally clicked for me when the Republicans had control of the country in 2001-2006, and worked real hard to help the rich get richer, but only occasionally threw the social conservatives a bone.
For the short term the Republican strategy was a good electoral strategy, but now the turkeys are coming home to roost. The rich don't like seeing their party actually becoming what they've spent the last 50 years pretending it was just to garnish votes. I think we're building up to an ugly divorce between the "R-is-for-rich" Republicans and the "R-is-for-right-wing" Republicans, which have no common interest other than greed for power so they can run the country their way(s).
BTW, in addition to the bedding-down with religious zealots that you mentioned (starting in 1980), they had Nixon's "southern strategy", which was to play up to anti-Black bigotry in order to lure in the former Southern Democrats (making the Old South now the reddest part of the country), and they're now pushing what historians will call a "southwestern strategy", to lure in anti-Latino bigots.
The problem (other than the turkeys coming home to roost) is that these strategies keep alienating large and fast-growing minorities.
With sanctimonious Santorum its not just Mormons, but Protestants as well, for example when he says "And the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is a shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it."
I suspect he was primarily talking about the fact that mainstream Protestants don't condemn birth control, which he seems to think is central to the definition of Christianity.
I think most of the religious right are protestants (or at least consider themselves to be), so he won't be doing himself any favors if he keeps ragging on them.
Even today, we have people who believe a particular Football player is winning because God is answering his prayers. And in matters of faith, who is to say they are wrong? Their God is apparently more interested in football than world peace or saving babies, because a lot of people pray for that, with no results.
If God would just turn off the damn television on game day, the world would be a lot better place.
Atheism is not a belief, so how can it possibly operate on the "same level" as believing in god? Atheism is literally the lack of belief in god(s). All babies are born atheists, for example. It's not until their minds are later poisoned that they believe in gods and cease being atheists.
It is a common correlation, however, for atheists to assert that in the absence of any evidence what-so-ever that it is extremely unlikely that any of the gods proposed by theists thus far exist as described if they exist at all.
Slashdot Mirror
i would rather share a drink with him than the guy telling me i am gonna die alone on this planet just like everyone else....
From what I've read, you're supposed to go with the topic that's most likely to get you laid.
[Listen to us slashdorks speculating about what a party would be like.]
This this is science. We have skeptics who questioned the initial results. The result authors went back and reexamined the evidence, test setup, etc. Somewhere in this process, they found the truth.
Yes, this appears to be exemplary. They published their suprising observations, that got feedback, answered questions, carefully repeated their work, got the same results...
Too bad, really, that this turned out to be an "oh, sh*t" moment rather than a "gee, that's funny" moment.
The cable transmitted the signal 60ns faster than the time used in their compensation. I wouldn't call that defective.
Either the cable is shorter than they thought, or it's propagation factor is higher than specified, or they simply used the wrong number in their original calculations.
Or electrons travel faster in the cable than the known laws of physics allow.
This "explanation" just moves the problem from neutrinos to electrons.
Perhaps your interpretation is right, but I can't spot the reference to tree rings in the first quoted message. Who is making the conclusion that that is the reference, and what is the basis for that conclusion?
I ask, because that interpretation is in direct conflict with a statement about the matter by someone who should know, which I've run across in the past few days.
Also because (AIUI) the investigation didn't find any wrongdoing, and (AIUI) the vast majority of climate scientists still accept the hockey stick.
Please try to respond without appeal to conspiracy theories. In the real world, a year doesn't go by without some not-really-a-scientist getting his career destroyed after such an investigation finds that he did in fact fake his results. If your interpretation depends on "a vast green-wing conspiracy" I won't find it very compelling.
none any more supported by evidence than the next. The only honest thing to do is to apply the same standard of evidence to all of them, with the result that you accept them all or reject them all.
False dichotomy, and some really ungrounded statements.
If you have two religions: one which says that nothing exists and that reality is an illusion, and another which says things exist and were created long ago and that man has a capability for good but a sad inclination towards evil; would you say "neither is more supported by evidence than the next"? I suppose if you want to go all post-modern-the-truth-is-all-relative, you could take that stance, but otherwise it seems sadly indefensible.
Very strangely (from my point of view), you aren't talking about *evidence* at all. You're just appealing to your culturally-moderated intuitions about what kind of religion makes more sense.
When I raise the issue of evidence, I'm talking about "Could Mohammed move a mountain, or was that just PR?"" [*]
How do you know? All you've got is one tradition that says one thing and another tradition that says something different.
Some people cite miracles as evidence that their tradition is right, but everyone just accepts the miracles of their own tradition and rejects the miracles of competing religions out of hand.
So how can you establish the truth or falsehood of one religion vs. another, if you're a skeptic or a newly arrived alien, and you want something more reliable than personal intuitions or cultural traditions? What is the best evidence anyone can offer for their religion, and can the followers of one religion offer evidence that will trump what anyone else can offer, when judged by a neutral party?
So far as I can tell, there isn't any such evidence. Every religion has its traditions, its wisdom, its miracles, its mystics who testify to their personal encounter with The Divine, etc. Maybe I'm in the market for a religion: on what basis can I choose one over another with full confidence that I'm getting the right one - unlike the majority of the people in the world, who are 100% convinced that they got the right one, even though they picked something else?
If one religion is true and the rest aren't, why haven't its followers convinced everyone else on the basis of evidence? (And before you attribute that to some bias or other defect in the followers of other religions, pause to consider that they are going to say the same thing about you.)
Evidence! Why should anyone accept one religion and reject all the others?
[*] A line from Jesus Christ Superstar, if you didn't get the reference.
You said: "Bullshit. Our species has had thousands of religions, none any more supported by evidence than the next. The only honest thing to do is to apply the same standard of evidence to all of them, with the result that you accept them all or reject them all."
I have to disagree with this a little. I think, in the early days, religion was science. Your tribe moves to a new place, the weather is different, the micro-organisms are different, the yeast that makes your bread rise is different. The smart guys, the shamans, figured out how the new place worked. They led the tribe in doing what works in this new place. Planting, harvesting, etc... "Gods" in that sense, are just the set of rules that work here, where we are now. It was imminently practical and supported by evidence. If you did things right (the way the local "god" wanted you to) you survived. Best evidence ever. Our predecessors were no more intelligent or stupid than we are and were probably a LOT more practical.
Over time religions developed into the things they are today, but in the early days I think they existed because they worked.
I can't agree with this, if you're using "science" in the ordinary sense of the word. The essential property of science is anchoring beliefs on observations. A "primitive religious leader" could make up anything without constraint. If you do what he says the gods want, and your crop fails anyway, he just says that Gublu is mad because you gave Mublu a better sacrifice, or that you've been wanking with the wrong hand, or some such nonsense.
I don't think science is limited to people in labcoats who check off the steps of some formalized scientific method as they work. When your computer won't boot and you hypothesize that it's unplugged, then go check whether that hypothesis is tenable, you're doing exactly what scientists do. And there's no reason our earliest thinking ancestors could not have done the same thing - I suspect they did. But you can't do hypothesis testing on the arbitrary will of imaginary creatures. What the shaman infers about what Gublu and Mublu want hasn't got anything to do with science.
Christianity claims that Allah is a false idol from the Mecca idol market which just became prominent over the others and was molded into something like Abraham's God after Mohamed met with some Christians, but that Christians actually worship the same deity as the Jews.
Some Christians claim that. My friend, who's a recently retired priest in Church of Sweden, says he gets annoyed when Christians claim the Muslim God is not the same as the Christian God.
Clearly they both evolved from the same proto-cultural concept.
As to whether they're the same... an atheist's mind kind of boggles at the problem of deciding whether two imaginary friends are the same thing. It's like asking whether the Invisible Pink Unicorn and the Flying Spaghetti Monster are the same thing; a meaningless or near-meaningless question, for us.
Roman historians mention Christ so he seems to be historical rather than fictional.
Can't look it up right now, but I thought the only near-contemporary mention was Josephus, in a passage generally reckoned to be a pious interpolation by some later religious copyist.
(Considered so, IIRC, because what Josephus purportedly wrote about him is something that only a Christian would write.)
The implication of your penultimate paragraph is that you know how to do this better than God. I think not.
I've got more sense than the god portrayed in the Old Testament.
Given that the church I grew up in now supports gay marriage, socialist redistribution (as opposed to charitable giving), and is currently brushing up against approving of bestiality, pedophilia, polygamy and pretty much every other moral failing that the Christian church has spent the last 2000 years condemning, I can understand where Santorum's comment about the Protestant churches is coming from.
Please note, I am not endorsing either the new or old church's position, as I left all organized churches nearly 25 years ago, but I am forced to listen to my mother's complaints about where the church has gone over the last two decades and thus know the current state of the church. (UCC)
Is that one considered "mainstream protestant"? (Not a rhetorical question.)
Where is the outrage
No one on the reality-engaged side of the fence operates by manufacturing it.
Outrage is what the Heartland Institute manufactures when the shoe is on the other foot.
The rest of the post is about whether there is consensus about AGW. Aside from the fact that /all/ respected scientific professional bodies in the world agree
I read recently that there is a *single* professional body that rejects it: a society for petroleum geologists or such. (Just a coincidence, I'm sure.)
They just gave Michael Crichton some kind of honor for his JP and anti-AGW books. I suppose people will take whatever support for their views they can find... Reminds me of creationists citing movies and novels to support their peculiar views about reality.
Even today I heard someone claim that smoking pot does not have worse health effects than tobacco smoke (think about it : no filters on the sigarettes -> you're actually inhaling burning leaves directly into your lungs which will never again come out.
Nobody smokes a pack of joints per day. Pot is less healthy on a per-dose basis, but probably healthier overall for a typical user.
According to folklore, the Reagan Administration hand-picked a panel to out the bad stuff on pot, and the panel came back with a report that the biggest health hazard of smoking pot is that it leads to smoking tobacco.
While we're on the topic, a study just came out showing that driving under the influence of pot doubles your chances of having an accident. I'm still inclined
toward the view that legalizing it would be the best public policy, and would solve way more problems than it causes, but we can't pretend that it's harmless. I don't want to be the person that gets killed because some pot smoker has his double-probability accident on me.
Oh yeah, these are the guys that told you cigarettes were healthy, and that there was no reliable evidence that they harmed people.
Not really, they worked with Phillip Morris to spread material on the effects of secondhand smoke, which was questionable at the time they did so (they had long since stopped doing this before actual studies confirmed the effects)
I don't know about "these guys", but the tobacco industry knew darn well that smoking kills people, kept their studies secret, and marketed their poison like candy - long before the issue of second-hand smoke ever arose.
He should be fired, and possibly prosecuted if any crimes were committed.
Yeah. Put him in jail with this Assange guy! What do I say. Burn'em!!!
Or put him in solitary confinement with waz-zis-name.
But then, it wouldn't be solitary confinement anymore, would it.
I'm no climate denier, but what he did was unethical. He should be fired, and possibly prosecuted if any crimes were committed.
It really seems strange to me that he would out himself, since that seems to be the likely outcome.
Pangs of guilt, wanted to confess? Martyr complex? Thinks outing the Institute is more important than his own well being? Knows he's dying in a few weeks? Talked to a lawyer and figures nothing will stick?
Who knows.
I think there's room for debate on the topic of whether it's right to violate first-order ethics in support of higher-order ethics, but this hardly seems like the occasion for that sort of thing even if you think it's OK. It's not like we didn't already know that there's big money and back-room arrangements behind climate denial (like every other PR effort). Why would he feel a need to stick his neck out just to prove that one organization is involved in it?
I guess you are correct after all. It is not a conspiracy, it is a paranoid delusion. Thanks for the heads up.
I don't think it's even a paranoid delusion. It's just a cynical argument to justify continuing to wreck the planet in order to sustain profits.
Remember the tobacco industry and lung cancer? Remember pharmaceuticals that kept selling their products even after their own studies showed that they are ineffective and/or harmful?
These people literally don't care if you have to die in order to sustain their profit margin.
Apparently they don't even care about the well-being of their own grandchildren; showing a profit on the next quarterly report is far more important.
Except as their own email show those scientific facts are anything but. Instead they are statistically massaged to look the way they want them when the base is actually showing things very different.
Except they didn't.
The most notorious meme that came out of "Climategate", the claim that there was a "trick" to "hide the decline", was manufactured by taking words out of two different parts of a message and putting them together to make people think the e-mail said something that it didn't.
Lecturer at the University I went to meant you don't have Tenure.
At most universities, "lecturer" means you're not even on the tenure track. It means they just hired you to teach classes.
(At most universities with graduate programs, tenured and tenure-track faculty split their time between teaching and research.)
Facts don't matter in American politics.
The cowardly pundit will say Democrats do it and Republicans do it. This is true but banal. We could also say the Hitler and Lincoln were imperfect human beings.
There is a whole new level of crazy that has gripped Republican politics, and it is really too bad. I would love to have seen John Huntsman do well in the primaries, or even see the Republicans field some accomplished credentials. (e.g.: Colin Powell would be more accomplished then the entire republican field put together.)
I used to wish Powell would run for pres, but after carrying water for Cheney and the neocons at the UN, I wouldn't bother crossing the street to shake his hand.
Now we have the party of anti-science. We have Karl Rove eschewing the "reality-based community" which looks for solutions through judicious analysis. We have reactionary politics and faith-based righteous indignation. Somewhat ironically, Jesus preached love, not fear. And the christian right are driven by fear of all sorts of things -- mainly irrational.
Mainly sex.
The republicans really need to remake themselves, but the Tea Party has been a step in the wrong direction. More fear and reactionary politics. It really is too bad.
If I had a conservative bone in my body, I'd start a genuinely conservative party. There's surely a big opening for someone to do that right now.
OK, same might be said about a genuinely liberal party...
I was perplexed for the longest time how the republican party worked since all of their policies seem to be in favor of the rich. where did they get their votes? It finally clicked for me: they get their money from the rich (by favoring that segment in policies, taxes etc.) and the votes from the religious zealots (by appealing to the creationism, every-sperm-is-sacred etc. crowds).
Yeah, it astonishes me that it took me several decades to figure out what the game was. I always wondered why unions support the Democrats - the average ironworker or longshoreman is hardly a liberal.
But liberal and conservative don't have diddly to do with our two-party system. It's all about money.
It finally clicked for me when the Republicans had control of the country in 2001-2006, and worked real hard to help the rich get richer, but only occasionally threw the social conservatives a bone.
For the short term the Republican strategy was a good electoral strategy, but now the turkeys are coming home to roost. The rich don't like seeing their party actually becoming what they've spent the last 50 years pretending it was just to garnish votes. I think we're building up to an ugly divorce between the "R-is-for-rich" Republicans and the "R-is-for-right-wing" Republicans, which have no common interest other than greed for power so they can run the country their way(s).
BTW, in addition to the bedding-down with religious zealots that you mentioned (starting in 1980), they had Nixon's "southern strategy", which was to play up to anti-Black bigotry in order to lure in the former Southern Democrats (making the Old South now the reddest part of the country), and they're now pushing what historians will call a "southwestern strategy", to lure in anti-Latino bigots.
The problem (other than the turkeys coming home to roost) is that these strategies keep alienating large and fast-growing minorities.
With sanctimonious Santorum its not just Mormons, but Protestants as well, for example when he says "And the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is a shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it."
I suspect he was primarily talking about the fact that mainstream Protestants don't condemn birth control, which he seems to think is central to the definition of Christianity.
I think most of the religious right are protestants (or at least consider themselves to be), so he won't be doing himself any favors if he keeps ragging on them.
A person who loves truth will accept that truth from wherever it comes, be it science, philosophy, experience or scripture.
Which "scripture?"
And perhaps more importantly, how do you detect which parts of scripture are "truth" and which are merely superstitious bullshit?
Even today, we have people who believe a particular Football player is winning because God is answering his prayers. And in matters of faith, who is to say they are wrong? Their God is apparently more interested in football than world peace or saving babies, because a lot of people pray for that, with no results.
If God would just turn off the damn television on game day, the world would be a lot better place.
Atheism is not a belief, so how can it possibly operate on the "same level" as believing in god? Atheism is literally the lack of belief in god(s). All babies are born atheists, for example. It's not until their minds are later poisoned that they believe in gods and cease being atheists.
It is a common correlation, however, for atheists to assert that in the absence of any evidence what-so-ever that it is extremely unlikely that any of the gods proposed by theists thus far exist as described if they exist at all.
Cf. Russell's Teapot.