There's no faith required to not believe that there is a God. In fact, the absence of faith is atheism.
You're absolutely wrong. Atheism is the active denial of the existence of God. Agnosticism is quite different. Please educate yourself before posting further.
Atheism means I don't believe in one more god than you don't believe in.
If there were only 1000 gods on the menu, you'd be 99.9% atheist. (You do actively deny the existence of Zeus, don't you?)
And I suspect that our species has come up with far, far more than 1000 gods.
So examine the evidence for the reliability of the bible, and decide for your self.
I have, and I did.
Once you understand the text, you might proceed by asking yourself how you would go about creating a set of folks with real free will, and how you would redeem the ones that foul up.
What about the vast majority of mankind that your loving God is going to send off to eternal torture because they didn't join the right club?
As for your question, I'm curious why a control freak like the biblical God would want to create pets with free will to begin with.
Also, why a purportedly omniscient+omnipotent Being would fuck up so many times that a Savior is even needed. According to Genesis, Adam and Eve didn't know right from wrong, and didn't know what death was, so of course this omni-omni Being threatens them with death if they do wrong, then walked off and neglected them until they screwed up.
Even more, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all believe in the same god (or at least they claim to).
Sorry, this is wrong. Christians believe in a trinity. Many practising christians try to claim this is still "One God", but the slightest academic perusal of the material shows "the father", "the son", and "the holy ghost" as separate entities. Heck, Jesus prays to god at various points and is responded to. That there shows that they are either separate beings or that god is bipolar.
Allah is a singular. Haven't studied judaism much, so can't comment there.
Perhaps the strangest thing about Christianity is the have+eat cake insistence one having three diving beings and yet claim to be a monotheistic religion, resulting in the need for the Tao-like nonsense of the Trinity.
The biggest schism in the history of Christianity was over the debate as to whether the three were of "the same substance" vs. "like substance". IIRC, the phrasing is a single differing vowel in a Greek word 10-15 letters long.
Canada's Tom Harpur, a (former?) Anglican priest and a very educated man, has written extensively of what he calls the Pagan Christ, showing how many pre-existing myths, some of Egyptian origin, were woven into the stories about Jesus, the immaculate conception, etc.
In my view, if you take the gospel story and subtract away all the miracles, wisdom sayings, and mythical archetypes, you're left with nothing but a collection of proper names.
Some of his most renowned sayings are on record from the mouths of wise and/or holy men from yet earlier times. Rabbi Hillel, who lived about a generation before the time Jesus supposedly lived, gave us a version of the Golden Rule. (And I don't think he was by any means the first.)
Even the theology is vague in the gospels; for all practical purposes St. Paul invented Christianity.
Gingrich for one may be a cynical bastard, but Santorum is one of the various flavors of fools you refer to. So are Bachmann and Palin, among others in the spotlight and/or in a position of power, which is what happens when they cater to these fools, some of them rise among the ranks to a national stage.
I'm not confident of my ability to distinguish the nutters from the cynics.
The Republican party has been appealing to the nutters (and bigots, etc) for so long that it's certainly plausible that some have risen through the ranks and now help run the asylum, but OTOH the unending stream of news stories about "values" candidates who transgress the values they claim to support, in the most egregious way possible, makes it impossible for me to imagine any bounds on how artificial and cynical these people can be.
The only distinction between the two groups is whether they actually believe the puke they're trying to feed us, and since I can't read minds I don't know who actually believes it.
Democrats talk a lot about science when it comes to climate change (to justify government control of the economy), embryonic stem cells (to give abortion an upside), or evolution (out of a dislike of creationism).
Wrong on all three accounts.
But where are they when it comes to science for the sake of human knowledge instead of some blatant political agenda? Obama gutted the space program. Democrats killed the Superconducting Super Collider. Nobody on the left has a bold scientific vision like Newt Gingrich's moon base proposal.
I don't have any idea how Obama feels about the space program, but regardless of how he might feel about it, it's getting squeezed because 1980-2008 wrecked our economy, and everyone is demanding deficit reductions.
The SSC's support in Congress fell as the list of candidate sites got shorter. Everyone liked it when they thought it might bring a shitload of money to their jurisdiction, but when it was narrowed down to Texas, there weren't enough Texans in Congress to keep it alive.
Gringrich's moon base has little to do with science and a lot to do with handing tax money over to the aerospace industry. We could do a phenomenal amount of planetary science and cosmology for what a moon base would cost.
I'm a big fan of the idea of human space travel, but a moon base isn't something that's going to make the Space Age happen right now.
It's gotten to be simply hilarious. Your boy Obama has failed miserably, so it's time to roll out the attack machine...again.
Funny view. In the reality that the rest of us inhabit, the main arms of the attack machine is the other Republican hopeful's super-PACs.
As apathetic as people are about Obama, I'm guessing that he'll win by a substantial margin. Not due to any merit on his part, but because the Republicans are slinging so much shit at each other that the winner won't be able to wash the stench out before election day.
As to republicans believing in no laffer curve because they think lowering taxes increases revenue... not really. Republicans rarely think they're going to make a lot of tax money by lowering taxes. They generally think they're shrinking government and giving the economy a chance to grow.
Which makes you wonder why they've adopted the Laffer Curve as their magical incantation, since it's all about tax revenues as a function of tax rates.
Anyway, your objection is really what I was going for here. You're proving my point. See how strongly you feel about this issue? Is it an entirely rational issue for you?
Some of feel strongly about maintaining the distinction between facts and bullshit.
Democrats on economics for example... little things like the Laffer curve that they swear doesn't exist
The empirical data does not actually support the Laffer curve. (See the Wikipedia article for some examples.)
Perhaps it would if it took all the relevant variables into account. And meanwhile it does offer a sensible intuition about tax policy: too low and revenues will go down for obvious reasons, and too high will strangle the economy and cause revenues to go down for that indirect reason.
So what you want, if the goal is to optimize revenues, is to identify the "sweet spot" between those extremes that maximizes payoff.
However, people who bring up the Laffer curve never want to identify that sweet spot, or even offer it as a way of optimizing revenues; they just invoke it as an "reason" to lower taxes, which even the fantasy curve does not support.
You remind me of a girl I knew who thought that GWB was going to declare martial law to prevent his leaving office and had nightmares that she was going to be taken aside in an airport, tortured, and sexually assaulted because she wrote a blog post.
Whereas in reality she was merely taken aside and groped, with nothing to do with her blog.
If a creationist says that the Oort Cloud is unscientific, people mock them. But the reality is, it doesn't follow a single tenet of the scientific method. It exists purely because without it, the presence of comets in the solar system would prove that the solar system is too young. So a theoretical "comet-holding" cloud is invented out of thin air because long ages require it, not because of any sort of observation or because the facts led anyone there.
You're just peddling the creationist myth that scientists make stuff up so they'll have an excuse to reject the Bible and sleep in on Sunday mornings.
I recently heard a discussion where they were attempting to figure out the level of bias on the Left and Right and they needed an issue where Democrats are largely in conflict with the science. The best candidates for the left are anti-nuclear power (which is actually a left-wing in the 1960s, I doubt it has much traction now) and some of the organic food, anti-genetically modified food, and anti-vaccine movements.
And for the most part those are matters of *policy*, not reality denial (except the anti-vaccine sentiment).
You don't have to deny physics to think nuclear power is something we haven't been careful enough about, and you don't have to deny biology to think that GM crops are something we will someday wish we had been more careful about.
(You do have to deny science if you think vaccinations cause autism.)
I think McCain really lost because of the economy and Palin.
And Bush, and two wars, and the TSA, etc.
2008 was a perfect storm for the Republicans. I can't believe McCain was foolish enough to run.
After the election a lot of liberals/progressives crowed that Obama had a mandate, but I disagree. (Beyond the fact that anyone who gets elected has some kind of token "mandate".) Obama won as a rejection of everything Bush stood for, just as Bush won (or "won") as a rejection of Clinton's zipper policy.
I don't think capitalism even correlates to left and right. I'm a liberal and I don't object to capitalism, though I do object to its excesses.
The Republicans certainly advocate unrestricted capitalism, but the Republicans aren't really a right-wing party. They're the USA's plutocracy party, and all the pretence at conservatism is just to get enough poor people to help them get elected.
If you don't believe this, take a moment to review what the Republicans did when they had the presidency and both houses of Congress in 2001-2006.
During the 2006 election cycle, the leaders of the various socially and religiously conservative movements were complaining aloud that they were bringing a lot of votes to the table and not getting much of anything in return.
Any Republican candidate who has a legitimate chance at winning the presidency is sitting this election out so as not to go against an incumbent Democrat.
Who would those be? We've got a lot of familiar faces in the ring this time.
Conventional wisdom is that the Republicans always nominate the guy who cam in second the last time.
Lol, yes it's too much to ask. Charged with what, specifically? You're being ridiculous.
The USA has recognized waterboarding as torture since the Spanish-American war, and has successfully prosecuted foreigners who did it to our troops, our troops who did it to foreigners, and even a group of law enforcement officers in Texas.
When it's instigated or approved by the President and Vice President, it doesn't stop being a war crime.
Also, if we hold ourselves to the same standards we held the Nazis to at Nuremburg, our invasion of Iraq was another war crime.
You can daydream about American Exceptionalism all you want, but if we act like the worst we can hardly claim to be exceptional.
Of course, this whole discussion *is* about reality denial.
I voted for Obama but feel that I got burned for it. Is it too much to ask that he at least allow an investigation of whether Bush & Cheney should be charged? That bit of "looking out for one's own," "Presidential perks" - fucking the Constitution and the rest of us in the bargain - in addition to the wiretaps, the "guilty 'cuz I say so" hit on a "terrorist" American, and the failure to immediately dismantle the TSA is taking us way too far down the wrong path.
Obama pretty much told us he wasn't going to fix all that stuff, before he got elected.
I think I'm going to violate my own principles and not vote for anyone (for President) this time. So far as I'm concerned, Obama is giving shelter to war criminals, and if I vote for him I'll be culpable as well. I had naively hoped that he would at least do a little bit to restore honor to our country and his office.
I'm seriously leaning toward Paul. Not one of those publicity and power-seeking whores, er candidates, is close to perfect, but Paul's looking like the "least worst" of the bunch. $skyDaddy help us...
Paul is as much a crackpot as the rest of them, just in different directions.
Anyone know a nice pro-science, individual rights, fiscally responsible, small government oriented party out there? It would also be nice if they could also ignore gay marriage, contraception, abortion both pro or con, and also just about every other distracting hot button issue out there. It would be nice if they simply had a government that worried about balancing a budget for a change.
There are some who speculate that is the case, that the good candidates don't want to run against an incumbent, so it's just the dross who can't wait till 2016.
It always astonishes me that someone who can't possibly win would run. I suppose their ego and arrogance makes them deny that reality too.
I don't know who deserves what, but y'all Americans have responsibility to not let idiots take over your government. You being the only world superpower brings responsibility and the possibility for a lot of damage.
Yeah, I really worry about what's going to happen when the USA goes Fascist, which seems to be the track we're on.
Who's going to come beat the shit out of us when we've got the world's largest newcular arsenal?
What would have happened if those guys (pace Godwin) had had a huge arsenal of ICBMs, cruise missiles, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Atheism is a belief system in the same way that non collecting stamps is a hobby.
Or not having a car is a brand of car, or not playing a musical instrument makes you just another kind of musician.
Alas, theists have to make shit up about what others think, in order to shore up their own positions.
There's no faith required to not believe that there is a God. In fact, the absence of faith is atheism.
You're absolutely wrong. Atheism is the active denial of the existence of God. Agnosticism is quite different. Please educate yourself before posting further.
Atheism means I don't believe in one more god than you don't believe in.
If there were only 1000 gods on the menu, you'd be 99.9% atheist. (You do actively deny the existence of Zeus, don't you?)
And I suspect that our species has come up with far, far more than 1000 gods.
So examine the evidence for the reliability of the bible, and decide for your self.
I have, and I did.
Once you understand the text, you might proceed by asking yourself how you would go about creating a set of folks with real free will, and how you would redeem the ones that foul up.
What about the vast majority of mankind that your loving God is going to send off to eternal torture because they didn't join the right club?
As for your question, I'm curious why a control freak like the biblical God would want to create pets with free will to begin with.
Also, why a purportedly omniscient+omnipotent Being would fuck up so many times that a Savior is even needed. According to Genesis, Adam and Eve didn't know right from wrong, and didn't know what death was, so of course this omni-omni Being threatens them with death if they do wrong, then walked off and neglected them until they screwed up.
We throw parents in jail for stuff like that.
Even more, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all believe in the same god (or at least they claim to).
Sorry, this is wrong. Christians believe in a trinity. Many practising christians try to claim this is still "One God", but the slightest academic perusal of the material shows "the father", "the son", and "the holy ghost" as separate entities. Heck, Jesus prays to god at various points and is responded to. That there shows that they are either separate beings or that god is bipolar.
Allah is a singular. Haven't studied judaism much, so can't comment there.
Perhaps the strangest thing about Christianity is the have+eat cake insistence one having three diving beings and yet claim to be a monotheistic religion, resulting in the need for the Tao-like nonsense of the Trinity.
The biggest schism in the history of Christianity was over the debate as to whether the three were of "the same substance" vs. "like substance". IIRC, the phrasing is a single differing vowel in a Greek word 10-15 letters long.
Canada's Tom Harpur, a (former?) Anglican priest and a very educated man, has written extensively of what he calls the Pagan Christ, showing how many pre-existing myths, some of Egyptian origin, were woven into the stories about Jesus, the immaculate conception, etc.
In my view, if you take the gospel story and subtract away all the miracles, wisdom sayings, and mythical archetypes, you're left with nothing but a collection of proper names.
Some of his most renowned sayings are on record from the mouths of wise and/or holy men from yet earlier times. Rabbi Hillel, who lived about a generation before the time Jesus supposedly lived, gave us a version of the Golden Rule. (And I don't think he was by any means the first.)
Even the theology is vague in the gospels; for all practical purposes St. Paul invented Christianity.
Gingrich for one may be a cynical bastard, but Santorum is one of the various flavors of fools you refer to. So are Bachmann and Palin, among others in the spotlight and/or in a position of power, which is what happens when they cater to these fools, some of them rise among the ranks to a national stage.
I'm not confident of my ability to distinguish the nutters from the cynics.
The Republican party has been appealing to the nutters (and bigots, etc) for so long that it's certainly plausible that some have risen through the ranks and now help run the asylum, but OTOH the unending stream of news stories about "values" candidates who transgress the values they claim to support, in the most egregious way possible, makes it impossible for me to imagine any bounds on how artificial and cynical these people can be.
The only distinction between the two groups is whether they actually believe the puke they're trying to feed us, and since I can't read minds I don't know who actually believes it.
Frothy. Need I say more?
"Santorum" --> "santorum" --> "frothy mix" --> "frosty piss" --> "first post"
This whole article is just a cleaver "first post" troll.
Religion is humans best attempt at understanding/explaining the world we sense but cannot directly scientifically observe around us.
Actually, religions discourage such attempts. Their only goal propagating their own belief system.
Anyone who thinks up a new understanding/explanation for spiritual matters is immediately branded as a heretic, and always has been.
Democrats talk a lot about science when it comes to climate change (to justify government control of the economy), embryonic stem cells (to give abortion an upside), or evolution (out of a dislike of creationism).
Wrong on all three accounts.
But where are they when it comes to science for the sake of human knowledge instead of some blatant political agenda? Obama gutted the space program. Democrats killed the Superconducting Super Collider. Nobody on the left has a bold scientific vision like Newt Gingrich's moon base proposal.
I don't have any idea how Obama feels about the space program, but regardless of how he might feel about it, it's getting squeezed because 1980-2008 wrecked our economy, and everyone is demanding deficit reductions.
The SSC's support in Congress fell as the list of candidate sites got shorter. Everyone liked it when they thought it might bring a shitload of money to their jurisdiction, but when it was narrowed down to Texas, there weren't enough Texans in Congress to keep it alive.
Gringrich's moon base has little to do with science and a lot to do with handing tax money over to the aerospace industry. We could do a phenomenal amount of planetary science and cosmology for what a moon base would cost.
I'm a big fan of the idea of human space travel, but a moon base isn't something that's going to make the Space Age happen right now.
It's gotten to be simply hilarious. Your boy Obama has failed miserably, so it's time to roll out the attack machine...again.
Funny view. In the reality that the rest of us inhabit, the main arms of the attack machine is the other Republican hopeful's super-PACs.
As apathetic as people are about Obama, I'm guessing that he'll win by a substantial margin. Not due to any merit on his part, but because the Republicans are slinging so much shit at each other that the winner won't be able to wash the stench out before election day.
So you think you can eat 75 percent of the GDP of an economy and not have a negative impact on growth?
He didn't say that. He said that by some estimates the Laffer Curve says that.
You should be disputing the Laffer Curve rather than ranting at the messenger.
As to republicans believing in no laffer curve because they think lowering taxes increases revenue... not really. Republicans rarely think they're going to make a lot of tax money by lowering taxes. They generally think they're shrinking government and giving the economy a chance to grow.
Which makes you wonder why they've adopted the Laffer Curve as their magical incantation, since it's all about tax revenues as a function of tax rates.
Anyway, your objection is really what I was going for here. You're proving my point. See how strongly you feel about this issue? Is it an entirely rational issue for you?
Some of feel strongly about maintaining the distinction between facts and bullshit.
Democrats on economics for example... little things like the Laffer curve that they swear doesn't exist
The empirical data does not actually support the Laffer curve. (See the Wikipedia article for some examples.)
Perhaps it would if it took all the relevant variables into account. And meanwhile it does offer a sensible intuition about tax policy: too low and revenues will go down for obvious reasons, and too high will strangle the economy and cause revenues to go down for that indirect reason.
So what you want, if the goal is to optimize revenues, is to identify the "sweet spot" between those extremes that maximizes payoff.
However, people who bring up the Laffer curve never want to identify that sweet spot, or even offer it as a way of optimizing revenues; they just invoke it as an "reason" to lower taxes, which even the fantasy curve does not support.
You remind me of a girl I knew who thought that GWB was going to declare martial law to prevent his leaving office and had nightmares that she was going to be taken aside in an airport, tortured, and sexually assaulted because she wrote a blog post.
Whereas in reality she was merely taken aside and groped, with nothing to do with her blog.
If a creationist says that the Oort Cloud is unscientific, people mock them. But the reality is, it doesn't follow a single tenet of the scientific method. It exists purely because without it, the presence of comets in the solar system would prove that the solar system is too young. So a theoretical "comet-holding" cloud is invented out of thin air because long ages require it, not because of any sort of observation or because the facts led anyone there.
You're just peddling the creationist myth that scientists make stuff up so they'll have an excuse to reject the Bible and sleep in on Sunday mornings.
I recently heard a discussion where they were attempting to figure out the level of bias on the Left and Right and they needed an issue where Democrats are largely in conflict with the science. The best candidates for the left are anti-nuclear power (which is actually a left-wing in the 1960s, I doubt it has much traction now) and some of the organic food, anti-genetically modified food, and anti-vaccine movements.
And for the most part those are matters of *policy*, not reality denial (except the anti-vaccine sentiment).
You don't have to deny physics to think nuclear power is something we haven't been careful enough about, and you don't have to deny biology to think that GM crops are something we will someday wish we had been more careful about.
(You do have to deny science if you think vaccinations cause autism.)
I think McCain really lost because of the economy and Palin.
And Bush, and two wars, and the TSA, etc.
2008 was a perfect storm for the Republicans. I can't believe McCain was foolish enough to run.
After the election a lot of liberals/progressives crowed that Obama had a mandate, but I disagree. (Beyond the fact that anyone who gets elected has some kind of token "mandate".) Obama won as a rejection of everything Bush stood for, just as Bush won (or "won") as a rejection of Clinton's zipper policy.
They agree we're leftward (less capitalist) than
I don't think capitalism even correlates to left and right. I'm a liberal and I don't object to capitalism, though I do object to its excesses.
The Republicans certainly advocate unrestricted capitalism, but the Republicans aren't really a right-wing party. They're the USA's plutocracy party, and all the pretence at conservatism is just to get enough poor people to help them get elected.
If you don't believe this, take a moment to review what the Republicans did when they had the presidency and both houses of Congress in 2001-2006.
During the 2006 election cycle, the leaders of the various socially and religiously conservative movements were complaining aloud that they were bringing a lot of votes to the table and not getting much of anything in return.
Are they sitting this one out or something?
Yes... they are sitting this one out.
Any Republican candidate who has a legitimate chance at winning the presidency is sitting this election out so as not to go against an incumbent Democrat.
Who would those be? We've got a lot of familiar faces in the ring this time.
Conventional wisdom is that the Republicans always nominate the guy who cam in second the last time.
Lol, yes it's too much to ask. Charged with what, specifically? You're being ridiculous.
The USA has recognized waterboarding as torture since the Spanish-American war, and has successfully prosecuted foreigners who did it to our troops, our troops who did it to foreigners, and even a group of law enforcement officers in Texas.
When it's instigated or approved by the President and Vice President, it doesn't stop being a war crime.
Also, if we hold ourselves to the same standards we held the Nazis to at Nuremburg, our invasion of Iraq was another war crime.
You can daydream about American Exceptionalism all you want, but if we act like the worst we can hardly claim to be exceptional.
Of course, this whole discussion *is* about reality denial.
I voted for Obama but feel that I got burned for it. Is it too much to ask that he at least allow an investigation of whether Bush & Cheney should be charged? That bit of "looking out for one's own," "Presidential perks" - fucking the Constitution and the rest of us in the bargain - in addition to the wiretaps, the "guilty 'cuz I say so" hit on a "terrorist" American, and the failure to immediately dismantle the TSA is taking us way too far down the wrong path.
Obama pretty much told us he wasn't going to fix all that stuff, before he got elected.
I think I'm going to violate my own principles and not vote for anyone (for President) this time. So far as I'm concerned, Obama is giving shelter to war criminals, and if I vote for him I'll be culpable as well. I had naively hoped that he would at least do a little bit to restore honor to our country and his office.
I'm seriously leaning toward Paul. Not one of those publicity and power-seeking whores, er candidates, is close to perfect, but Paul's looking like the "least worst" of the bunch. $skyDaddy help us...
Paul is as much a crackpot as the rest of them, just in different directions.
Anyone know a nice pro-science, individual rights, fiscally responsible, small government oriented party out there? It would also be nice if they could also ignore gay marriage, contraception, abortion both pro or con, and also just about every other distracting hot button issue out there. It would be nice if they simply had a government that worried about balancing a budget for a change.
See: Clinton, Bill 1992-2000
He died when he was eight?
There are some who speculate that is the case, that the good candidates don't want to run against an incumbent, so it's just the dross who can't wait till 2016.
It always astonishes me that someone who can't possibly win would run. I suppose their ego and arrogance makes them deny that reality too.
Just for the sake of argument, what if...?
We get more of 2001-2008, with more sanctimonious topping this time.
I don't know who deserves what, but y'all Americans have responsibility to not let idiots take over your government. You being the only world superpower brings responsibility and the possibility for a lot of damage.
Yeah, I really worry about what's going to happen when the USA goes Fascist, which seems to be the track we're on.
Who's going to come beat the shit out of us when we've got the world's largest newcular arsenal?
What would have happened if those guys (pace Godwin) had had a huge arsenal of ICBMs, cruise missiles, etc.