"As of right now, neither creation nor evolution is provable. Period. I personally believe that neither will ever be provable."
This is incorrect. Evolution has been proven over and over again. The National Geographic has an excellent synopsis of Evolution by Natrual Selection in this month's issue. You should really read it. It lays out in plain language the evidence for evolution and how the theory gets confirmed over and over again by various branches of science (not just biology).
You do not take an unproven (or unprovable) hypothosis and then go looking for evidence to prove it (and ignoring evidence that does not prove it). This is not the scientific method. By this standard, Creationism is not science.
You examine the evidence, and develop a hypothosis that explains your observations. You use your hypothosis to make predictions. You let others test and examine your hypothosis. When you have a great deal of evidence, both observed and experimental, your hypothosis can then become a "theory" - a theory in scientific terms is just about equivilent to "fact" in laymans terms.
Gravity is a theory, Elctricity is a theory, Relativity is a theory. That I am sitting here typing this on the Internet proves all three.
You let the evidence take you to a conclusion, not the other way round.
Does that mean there's not God? No, not nescesarily, but it does show that the God that is portrayed in the Bible (and most other theistic religious books) does not exist. Darwin himself was studying to be an Anglican minister when he took his famous voyage on the Beagle. He followed the evidence and that evidence helped him build the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection (in secret, over 15 years of gathering and examining the evidence). After that, he quietly renounced his faith. Although he was no longer a Christian, he was an agnostic, leaning toward theism - he believed that an impersonal God existed, but that once it created the universe it simply "moved on" leaving the mechanism of evolution to run.
And that is what really scares Creationists and why they cling to their beliefs so rabidly, despite the overwhelming LACK of evidence for their hypothosis - they are afraid to become Darwin. They WANT there to be a personal God of the Bible, that can interceed in our world. The idea that God doesn't exist or is impersonal takes away the psychological crutch that theistic religionsgive to those that need it. They WANT there to be a God so badly they will use any amount of sophistry and even violence to keep their world from being shattered. The possibility that God does not exist as they believe he should (or even exist at all) is too terrifying to even consider for them.
Think of the pat answer's of Creationists and Fundementalists less as arguments to people that support evloution than as mantra's sung to themselves to keep them convinced of that which the want to believe.
...and Buddha, and Mohammed, and Confusius and Wiccans, and Druids and Native Shamans and most other religious leaders. It's the dream of quite a few atheists as well.
Let's not try to corner the market on caring, morality and dreams here. Yes, the Christ character in the Bible did stand for this occasionally, but he wasn't the first, wasn't the last and not the only one.
The dream can come true when we realize it's the dream of ALL humankind and not the particular domain of one nation or one religion, to the exclusion of all others.
You should read my name....I'm Canadian and we have very strict gun control laws, especially for handguns. I live this on a daily basis. Our crime rate is miniscule comapred to yours. Our Murder rate is orders of magnitude lower than yours. Our entire country records less murders in one year than any one of your major cities, and only about 1/3 of them are committed with any kind of firearm.
For example, the capital of Alberta, Edmonton, with a population of about 900 000, had its first murder of 2004 yesterday. Can comparable US cities make that same claim?
Stop other Americans from killing you by becoming an American armed to the teeth and ready to kill.
Brilliant.
So by that same logic, in order to prevent America from nuking them, its OK, nay encouraged, for North Korea and/or Iran to get nuclear weapons and learn how to use them.
When I read things like this, it reminds me that not all citizens of the United States think like the stereotype or like GWB. It is you that gives me hope that the the US can actually turn it around and make the world a better place.
You seem very peaceful and enlightened. Keep it up and spread the word.
So make it a cooperative with a 'backup' or parallel fail-over service running in Joe's basment\attic\garage over on the next block, so you have redundancy.
Now imagine this over-lapping throughout your subdivision or neighbourhood. Kind of a new take on the idea of the mesh netowrk, no?
I personally think its brilliant. Decentralized, self-healing network of services....
Re:Dual booting is from hell
on
GNOME 2.8 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Funny I was able to install Suse 9.1 Pro on my Anthon 3000+XP box without a problem. YaST even shrank my XP partition to 50 Gigs for me so I didn't have to get Partition Magic or anything....
Well, if CNN says it it must be true. I personally believe a "US Official" who states that a 4 KM wide mushroom cloud and blast are a result of a "forest fire".
I'd wait for confirmation form BBC, CBC and a few other sources before I buy the 4km mushroom cloud blast forest fire story.
I say F9/11 in the Metreon in downtown San Francisco in June. I saw cheers and tears and anger in the crowd. That might sound like propoganda to you, but what I saw on the screen was everything I had seen before.
Not from some astro-turfing, strawman-fighting internet neocon apologist, but from one of Canada's most trusted sources of news and public affairs documentaries - The Fifth Estate.
Try looking here for a series of stories that ran in October of 2003. Almost all of the more contraversial facts that Michael Moore presents are corroborated there, months before F 9/11 was even heard of.
I was not surprised by what I saw in the movie as I had seen and heard it all before - we seem to get a less filtered view of your government's actions up here - on the nightly news.
Moore's only crime was to make a purposely provocative documentary in a style that would make it enjoyable to watch and easy to remember. In that sense, he is guilty as charged. But make no mistake, it presents facts and it IS a documentary. Many of those same facts can be corroborated here if you think Canadian sources are somehow suspect.
F 9/11 has been out for 3 months now. Now, if it were full of lies and inaccuracies as some people say it is, don't you think somebody allegedy slandered in the film would have sued Moore by now? If not, why? Perhaps because truth is a defence in slander and libel and those involved know that they would loose in court and Moore would be vindicated. I'm sure GWB doesn't want that right now.
Michael Moore to the US populace: "The Emperor Has No Clothes!"
Just because you don't want to believe him, doesn't mean he's not right.
Not every one. I believe earlier this spring a Jupiter sized planet was found orbiting in a Jupiter or Saturn distanced orbit around it's Sun. They are out there.
Do you remember that web pages in 1996 look like shit?
Do remember that web development these days cannot rely on simple static text?
Do you realize that with HTML/XHTML editing tools around these days, it doesn't matter?
Right tool for the job, my friend. A text editor is for writing static text. HTML/XHTML tools are used for making web pages and interfaces.
Just because there's "doc types and CSS" out there doesn't mean you have to use them - go ahead and write crappy looking pages in notepad, just becasue you can. But if you are going to do proper, standard, stylish web development that is a good experience for the user, you may need to know some of this stuff.
So let me get this straight, Evoluition has to be proven.
Well then so does Creationism.
Where is the proof for creationism? There is lots of evidence for evolution. Where is the evidence of creationism? In the Bible? A BOOK written by humans is the evidence of something natural?
Please. If you think creationism is the best theory that fits the evidence (and don't get a theory and look for supporting evidence, that's backwards), present the evidence. If you can prove it, you will win a Nobel prize and convert a lot of Atheists to you cause. Evolution has been contiuously refined and proven to best explain the observations in the world around us for over 160 years.
And people flamed me in the 'Game with God' threads the other day because I accused Christians of being anti-intellectual. Sheesh, what more proof do I need than this guys posts?
You are entitled to your opinion and believe what you want, but that doesn't make them facts without evidence. And the Bible is only proof that human imagination flowed freely a few thousand years ago.
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
Not angry, annoyed.
Annoyed that this guy thinks religion==Christianity.
Annoyed that, once again, this guy is trying to paint Christianity as the victim of some sort of percecution - this time its gamers who are patently anti-Christian and that's why he can't get a "Christian" video game.
I was trying to point out that video games don't treat ANY religion very well. For the record, those games only treat Buddhism/Taoism very superficially. But who cares? I don't. I don't play games because they have religion in them, I play because they are fun. I don't care that they have "far more Christian than Buddhist influence". That's irrelevant to me.
But I still get annoyed when a member of the most powerful religion in the world, the one that is itself more intolerant of other religions, historically, than any other, whines that once again the poor Christians are the victims of intolerance becasue they can't get good treatment in a video game. Please!
That's like Microsoft saying they can't get a fair shake in the software industry or the RIAA saying they are losing money at the movies.
(And for the record, I consider Buddhism more of a philosophy or practice than a religion and follow it as such. There are lots of other Buddhist that do the same...)
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
Yes mercy is a virtue in Buddhism. And I try to follow it on a daily basis. But so is telling the truth. So is pursuing that which is right.
I am not trying to spread hatred of Christians. I am a former one AND and married to one. What I am trying fight is the Christian belief that they have cornered the market on truth. And many of them act as such. If you ar not with them or like them, you are against them. There are more sources of truth out there than Christianity.
As for your historical evidence of all those things and events that happened during the dark ages, I certainly am not disagreeing that they happened. I postulate, of course, that all those things are the exceptions not the rule. Like Galileo, they happened despite living under Christian Theocratic Rule as opposed to a very tolerant pagan Rome. Remember, the lack of new thought and science is why it was called the Dark Ages, not because the sun wasn't as bright.
BTW, More on the fate of Hypatia can be found here, about halfway down the page and about the library (which they have found a very small part of because it was purposely hidden to protect it from destruction by the Christians!).
You realize that there was no number "0" in the west until probably the middle of the 12 or 13th century because "0" meant the abscence of anything and since God was everywhere, there could be nothing, therefore the number "0" was heresy? How much math can you really do without a zero? Yet you claim discovery flourished under these conditions?
I'm sorry to pick on Christianity but that is the topic of the thread and the one I know the most about. Does Islam and Hinduism and the other have there warts? Sure they do. Pointing out the issues and problems with Christianity does not automatically mean I agree with the other or think they are ok. Christianity is the current topic. Start a thread about the evils of the caste system in India, or the sudden rise in violent Islamic fundementalism, and I'll happily bash the Hindus and Mulsims too.
If you wish to say this is "hate" or "bigoted", you are entitled to your opinion. I prefer to think of those things I am saying as acting like the conscience for Christianity (and other religions too). If you say you are a religion of peace and love, I'll remind you of the myriad instances this was not true. If you say that rational thinking and discovery flourished between 300 AD and 1450sih, I'll point out that it didn't. If you put certain people up as heros or Saints, I'll point out how thery were evil and vicious and deserve contempt rather than praise.
I'll simply try to make you live up to your word. I'll try to educate you on the history of your religion. But I won't shut up.
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Followers because if they weren't they would be dead.
Hey, how about the invention of the printing press, gunpowder, the number zero, relativity, etc that were invented by non-believers.
Remember, when the Christains took over in 346 AD, they closed the Universities in Greece, burned the Great Library at Alexandria (and viciously murder the priestess Hypatia) and actively banned an persecuted all thinking that did not agree with Church dogma for over 1000 years (and they are still trying it). That's why it was called the Dark Ages . Meanwhile civilisations in America, China and Muslim countries were literally flowering with art and science.
Galileo succeed despite living in a Christian theocray, not becasue of it (and who cares about Augustine - just another apologist for a corrupt institution). I wonder how many brilliant minds and discoveries we will never hear about because the Church and its various inquisitions put the people to the torch?
"The best games that handle religion are the ones with invented lands, invented people, and an invented religion."
Oh, you mean like the New Testament? (or the rest of the Bible for that matter)..
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1, Troll
Of course the gaming community is downright disdainful of Christianity. Most gammers are relativlee intellegent and can see through the hokum. Christianity itself is historically anti-imagination and anti-intellectual. How exactly could you put that into a video game? Video games are meant as an escape from the real world, a fantasy. Why would you try to put into a game that which many are trying to escape from?
I promise to stop being disdainful of Christianity when they stop being disdainful of my beliefs.
Oh and BTW, in case you were wondering, video games don't handle Buddhism, Judiaism, Islam, Shintoism, Hinuism or any other religion very well. That you assumed "religion" is synonomous with Christianity shows complete hubris.
Look what we get for our "50%" (which I don't pay and I make about $80 k) ->
Public medical care, portable across the entire country. My sister in Arkansas pays $400 US per month for her insurance for a family of 4 and she can't pick her own doctor. Our Health Care Levy is no where near that.
Very good infrastructure. Especially in major cities like Toronto or Montreal, most infrastructure (roads, sewers, power etc) are quite good. Have you tried to drive in Detroit lately? More potholes than road on the expressways and streets - and this is the place where they make the cars.
Good social services. You may not need them but they are there if you do. Lots of people are able to survive without living on the streets. Been to New York or San Francisco lately (especially San Fran)? Remember what ole John Locke said: "No man should have so much land that another man starves" - land being the measure of wealth at the time.
Low crime rate. Likely a direct result of the above social service. I've never been scared to walk the streets of Toronto at night. Even with out recent spate of gun-related violence, every single incident makes the news! That means it's so unusual as to be newsworthy. Our crime rates, for similar sized and diverse populations (Toronto and Manhattan) are orders of magnitude below that of the US.
I'm not trying to put down the US. They are really great people. But lets be fair here. Is $400 per month for your HMO a tax? Technically no, but it still comes out of your pocket. I beleive there was a study done a few years ago that showed for the services recieved, Canadians and Americans pay out basically the same amount in taxes (sales tax, liqour tax, income tax) and fees (HMO insurance etc) up until about $60K US. After that, we contiue to tax on a graduated scale, while in the US they pay almost no other taxes. So the only real difference is we tax the rich more.
I guess you get what you pay for, eh?
BTW, for all this talk about too much taxes and stuff, I'd like you to know that due to my RRSPs and various tax credits (or kids) I have not had to pay taxes at the end of the year for about 10 years....
Frankly I'm happy with what I get. I get pretty good value for my money, Sponsorship scandals not withstanding. I think it could be better, but being like the US is not better.
Slashdot Mirror
"As of right now, neither creation nor evolution is provable. Period. I personally believe that neither will ever be provable."
This is incorrect. Evolution has been proven over and over again. The National Geographic has an excellent synopsis of Evolution by Natrual Selection in this month's issue. You should really read it. It lays out in plain language the evidence for evolution and how the theory gets confirmed over and over again by various branches of science (not just biology).
You do not take an unproven (or unprovable) hypothosis and then go looking for evidence to prove it (and ignoring evidence that does not prove it). This is not the scientific method. By this standard, Creationism is not science.
You examine the evidence, and develop a hypothosis that explains your observations. You use your hypothosis to make predictions. You let others test and examine your hypothosis. When you have a great deal of evidence, both observed and experimental, your hypothosis can then become a "theory" - a theory in scientific terms is just about equivilent to "fact" in laymans terms.
Gravity is a theory, Elctricity is a theory, Relativity is a theory. That I am sitting here typing this on the Internet proves all three.
You let the evidence take you to a conclusion, not the other way round.
Does that mean there's not God? No, not nescesarily, but it does show that the God that is portrayed in the Bible (and most other theistic religious books) does not exist. Darwin himself was studying to be an Anglican minister when he took his famous voyage on the Beagle. He followed the evidence and that evidence helped him build the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection (in secret, over 15 years of gathering and examining the evidence). After that, he quietly renounced his faith. Although he was no longer a Christian, he was an agnostic, leaning toward theism - he believed that an impersonal God existed, but that once it created the universe it simply "moved on" leaving the mechanism of evolution to run.
And that is what really scares Creationists and why they cling to their beliefs so rabidly, despite the overwhelming LACK of evidence for their hypothosis - they are afraid to become Darwin. They WANT there to be a personal God of the Bible, that can interceed in our world. The idea that God doesn't exist or is impersonal takes away the psychological crutch that theistic religionsgive to those that need it. They WANT there to be a God so badly they will use any amount of sophistry and even violence to keep their world from being shattered. The possibility that God does not exist as they believe he should (or even exist at all) is too terrifying to even consider for them.
Think of the pat answer's of Creationists and Fundementalists less as arguments to people that support evloution than as mantra's sung to themselves to keep them convinced of that which the want to believe.
"Bumbles Bounce!"
:-)
Yukon Cornelius
Yes, brilliant.
:)
I gather you have read Sun Tzu then?
Perhaps there should be SF project on doing this...I'd join.
...and Buddha, and Mohammed, and Confusius and Wiccans, and Druids and Native Shamans and most other religious leaders. It's the dream of quite a few atheists as well.
Let's not try to corner the market on caring, morality and dreams here. Yes, the Christ character in the Bible did stand for this occasionally, but he wasn't the first, wasn't the last and not the only one.
The dream can come true when we realize it's the dream of ALL humankind and not the particular domain of one nation or one religion, to the exclusion of all others.
Peace.
Even better, simply offer to have a business meeting with them in a corn field...
You should read my name....I'm Canadian and we have very strict gun control laws, especially for handguns. I live this on a daily basis. Our crime rate is miniscule comapred to yours. Our Murder rate is orders of magnitude lower than yours. Our entire country records less murders in one year than any one of your major cities, and only about 1/3 of them are committed with any kind of firearm.
For example, the capital of Alberta, Edmonton, with a population of about 900 000, had its first murder of 2004 yesterday. Can comparable US cities make that same claim?
I too can present "correlations"
Stop other Americans from killing you by becoming an American armed to the teeth and ready to kill.
:|
Brilliant.
So by that same logic, in order to prevent America from nuking them, its OK, nay encouraged, for North Korea and/or Iran to get nuclear weapons and learn how to use them.
I feel safer already...
Incredibly insightful post.
When I read things like this, it reminds me that not all citizens of the United States think like the stereotype or like GWB. It is you that gives me hope that the the US can actually turn it around and make the world a better place.
You seem very peaceful and enlightened. Keep it up and spread the word.
Thanks,
So make it a cooperative with a 'backup' or parallel fail-over service running in Joe's basment\attic\garage over on the next block, so you have redundancy.
Now imagine this over-lapping throughout your subdivision or neighbourhood. Kind of a new take on the idea of the mesh netowrk, no?
I personally think its brilliant. Decentralized, self-healing network of services....
Well, me too. And I also do a lot of Java and I quite like it. 'To each their own' I suppose and 'right tool for the job' and all that.
;)
I use a lot of server side Java and I do stuff with Jini that I could never have done with C or C++ (easily).
But hey, if you don't want to use java that's fine with me. More income for me.
I guess your still using VB, eh sparky?
Funny I was able to install Suse 9.1 Pro on my Anthon 3000+XP box without a problem. YaST even shrank my XP partition to 50 Gigs for me so I didn't have to get Partition Magic or anything....
I had it up and running in about 1/2 hour.
Perhaps its your distro?
Well, if CNN says it it must be true. I personally believe a "US Official" who states that a 4 KM wide mushroom cloud and blast are a result of a "forest fire".
I'd wait for confirmation form BBC, CBC and a few other sources before I buy the 4km mushroom cloud blast forest fire story.
I say F9/11 in the Metreon in downtown San Francisco in June. I saw cheers and tears and anger in the crowd. That might sound like propoganda to you, but what I saw on the screen was everything I had seen before.
Not from some astro-turfing, strawman-fighting internet neocon apologist, but from one of Canada's most trusted sources of news and public affairs documentaries - The Fifth Estate.
Try looking here for a series of stories that ran in October of 2003. Almost all of the more contraversial facts that Michael Moore presents are corroborated there, months before F 9/11 was even heard of.
I was not surprised by what I saw in the movie as I had seen and heard it all before - we seem to get a less filtered view of your government's actions up here - on the nightly news.
Moore's only crime was to make a purposely provocative documentary in a style that would make it enjoyable to watch and easy to remember. In that sense, he is guilty as charged. But make no mistake, it presents facts and it IS a documentary. Many of those same facts can be corroborated here if you think Canadian sources are somehow suspect.
F 9/11 has been out for 3 months now. Now, if it were full of lies and inaccuracies as some people say it is, don't you think somebody allegedy slandered in the film would have sued Moore by now? If not, why? Perhaps because truth is a defence in slander and libel and those involved know that they would loose in court and Moore would be vindicated. I'm sure GWB doesn't want that right now.
Michael Moore to the US populace: "The Emperor Has No Clothes!"
Just because you don't want to believe him, doesn't mean he's not right.
Johnny Soko!!
(God, I gotta get out of the house more....)
HD70642 in Puppis 90 light years away...
I see a pattern forming...
Oh, I also forgot Vega as a candidate. NASA and the JPL thinks so.
:)
Seems your hypothosis is crumbling...
Not every one. I believe earlier this spring a Jupiter sized planet was found orbiting in a Jupiter or Saturn distanced orbit around it's Sun. They are out there.
I think it was Epsilon Eridani but don't quote me...
Besides, what if they find one tomorrow?
Do you remember that web pages in 1996 look like shit?
Do remember that web development these days cannot rely on simple static text?
Do you realize that with HTML/XHTML editing tools around these days, it doesn't matter?
Right tool for the job, my friend. A text editor is for writing static text. HTML/XHTML tools are used for making web pages and interfaces.
Just because there's "doc types and CSS" out there doesn't mean you have to use them - go ahead and write crappy looking pages in notepad, just becasue you can. But if you are going to do proper, standard, stylish web development that is a good experience for the user, you may need to know some of this stuff.
Clearly you aren't a web developer.
So let me get this straight, Evoluition has to be proven.
Well then so does Creationism.
Where is the proof for creationism? There is lots of evidence for evolution. Where is the evidence of creationism? In the Bible? A BOOK written by humans is the evidence of something natural?
Please. If you think creationism is the best theory that fits the evidence (and don't get a theory and look for supporting evidence, that's backwards), present the evidence. If you can prove it, you will win a Nobel prize and convert a lot of Atheists to you cause. Evolution has been contiuously refined and proven to best explain the observations in the world around us for over 160 years.
And people flamed me in the 'Game with God' threads the other day because I accused Christians of being anti-intellectual. Sheesh, what more proof do I need than this guys posts?
You are entitled to your opinion and believe what you want, but that doesn't make them facts without evidence. And the Bible is only proof that human imagination flowed freely a few thousand years ago.
Not angry, annoyed.
Annoyed that this guy thinks religion==Christianity.
Annoyed that, once again, this guy is trying to paint Christianity as the victim of some sort of percecution - this time its gamers who are patently anti-Christian and that's why he can't get a "Christian" video game.
I was trying to point out that video games don't treat ANY religion very well. For the record, those games only treat Buddhism/Taoism very superficially. But who cares? I don't. I don't play games because they have religion in them, I play because they are fun. I don't care that they have "far more Christian than Buddhist influence". That's irrelevant to me.
But I still get annoyed when a member of the most powerful religion in the world, the one that is itself more intolerant of other religions, historically, than any other, whines that once again the poor Christians are the victims of intolerance becasue they can't get good treatment in a video game. Please!
That's like Microsoft saying they can't get a fair shake in the software industry or the RIAA saying they are losing money at the movies.
(And for the record, I consider Buddhism more of a philosophy or practice than a religion and follow it as such. There are lots of other Buddhist that do the same...)
Yes mercy is a virtue in Buddhism. And I try to follow it on a daily basis. But so is telling the truth. So is pursuing that which is right.
I am not trying to spread hatred of Christians. I am a former one AND and married to one. What I am trying fight is the Christian belief that they have cornered the market on truth. And many of them act as such. If you ar not with them or like them, you are against them. There are more sources of truth out there than Christianity.
As for your historical evidence of all those things and events that happened during the dark ages, I certainly am not disagreeing that they happened. I postulate, of course, that all those things are the exceptions not the rule. Like Galileo, they happened despite living under Christian Theocratic Rule as opposed to a very tolerant pagan Rome. Remember, the lack of new thought and science is why it was called the Dark Ages, not because the sun wasn't as bright.
BTW, More on the fate of Hypatia can be found here, about halfway down the page and about the library (which they have found a very small part of because it was purposely hidden to protect it from destruction by the Christians!).
You realize that there was no number "0" in the west until probably the middle of the 12 or 13th century because "0" meant the abscence of anything and since God was everywhere, there could be nothing, therefore the number "0" was heresy? How much math can you really do without a zero? Yet you claim discovery flourished under these conditions?
I'm sorry to pick on Christianity but that is the topic of the thread and the one I know the most about. Does Islam and Hinduism and the other have there warts? Sure they do. Pointing out the issues and problems with Christianity does not automatically mean I agree with the other or think they are ok. Christianity is the current topic. Start a thread about the evils of the caste system in India, or the sudden rise in violent Islamic fundementalism, and I'll happily bash the Hindus and Mulsims too.
If you wish to say this is "hate" or "bigoted", you are entitled to your opinion. I prefer to think of those things I am saying as acting like the conscience for Christianity (and other religions too). If you say you are a religion of peace and love, I'll remind you of the myriad instances this was not true. If you say that rational thinking and discovery flourished between 300 AD and 1450sih, I'll point out that it didn't. If you put certain people up as heros or Saints, I'll point out how thery were evil and vicious and deserve contempt rather than praise.
I'll simply try to make you live up to your word. I'll try to educate you on the history of your religion. But I won't shut up.
Followers because if they weren't they would be dead.
Hey, how about the invention of the printing press, gunpowder, the number zero, relativity, etc that were invented by non-believers.
Remember, when the Christains took over in 346 AD, they closed the Universities in Greece, burned the Great Library at Alexandria (and viciously murder the priestess Hypatia) and actively banned an persecuted all thinking that did not agree with Church dogma for over 1000 years (and they are still trying it). That's why it was called the Dark Ages . Meanwhile civilisations in America, China and Muslim countries were literally flowering with art and science.
Galileo succeed despite living in a Christian theocray, not becasue of it (and who cares about Augustine - just another apologist for a corrupt institution). I wonder how many brilliant minds and discoveries we will never hear about because the Church and its various inquisitions put the people to the torch?
"The best games that handle religion are the ones with invented lands, invented people, and an invented religion."
Oh, you mean like the New Testament? (or the rest of the Bible for that matter)..
Of course the gaming community is downright disdainful of Christianity. Most gammers are relativlee intellegent and can see through the hokum. Christianity itself is historically anti-imagination and anti-intellectual. How exactly could you put that into a video game? Video games are meant as an escape from the real world, a fantasy. Why would you try to put into a game that which many are trying to escape from?
I promise to stop being disdainful of Christianity when they stop being disdainful of my beliefs.
Oh and BTW, in case you were wondering, video games don't handle Buddhism, Judiaism, Islam, Shintoism, Hinuism or any other religion very well. That you assumed "religion" is synonomous with Christianity shows complete hubris.
Isn't that a sin?
And this is different from the US how?
Look what we get for our "50%" (which I don't pay and I make about $80 k) ->
Public medical care, portable across the entire country. My sister in Arkansas pays $400 US per month for her insurance for a family of 4 and she can't pick her own doctor. Our Health Care Levy is no where near that.
Very good infrastructure. Especially in major cities like Toronto or Montreal, most infrastructure (roads, sewers, power etc) are quite good. Have you tried to drive in Detroit lately? More potholes than road on the expressways and streets - and this is the place where they make the cars.
Good social services. You may not need them but they are there if you do. Lots of people are able to survive without living on the streets. Been to New York or San Francisco lately (especially San Fran)? Remember what ole John Locke said: "No man should have so much land that another man starves" - land being the measure of wealth at the time.
Low crime rate. Likely a direct result of the above social service. I've never been scared to walk the streets of Toronto at night. Even with out recent spate of gun-related violence, every single incident makes the news! That means it's so unusual as to be newsworthy. Our crime rates, for similar sized and diverse populations (Toronto and Manhattan) are orders of magnitude below that of the US.
I'm not trying to put down the US. They are really great people. But lets be fair here. Is $400 per month for your HMO a tax? Technically no, but it still comes out of your pocket. I beleive there was a study done a few years ago that showed for the services recieved, Canadians and Americans pay out basically the same amount in taxes (sales tax, liqour tax, income tax) and fees (HMO insurance etc) up until about $60K US. After that, we contiue to tax on a graduated scale, while in the US they pay almost no other taxes. So the only real difference is we tax the rich more.
I guess you get what you pay for, eh?
BTW, for all this talk about too much taxes and stuff, I'd like you to know that due to my RRSPs and various tax credits (or kids) I have not had to pay taxes at the end of the year for about 10 years....
Frankly I'm happy with what I get. I get pretty good value for my money, Sponsorship scandals not withstanding. I think it could be better, but being like the US is not better.