Jews, as in, the Hebrew People as a whole, are not a sect of Christianity.
There were, however, a significant sect of early Christianity who still considered themselves early jews. Heck, there's even (NT) biblical evidence of them!
If not for the outrageous heresies of the Gnostics, I doubt that the early Church would have formed into anything stronger than the current Protestant central authority--or, at least, the contemporary Jewish authorities. (Oh, them and the Roman Empire...)
Hint to Microsoft: if you don't want to GPL your software, don't derive it from GPL'd software. It's as simple as that -- at least for people who aren't being obtuse willfully.
Let's say that the FSF has an annurism, and releases a VB workalike, with common controls and librarys and whatnot, and releases the whole sheebang with the GPL.
Anyone using these common controls or libraries has to now use the GPL.
Now, lets move to something else. Lets say that the government takes Nvidia to court for monopolizing the temporal card market with the amazing 4D standard library, SLIDE, which everyone uses for 4D images. Now, let's say that the FSF weighs in on this case, and gets SLIDE GPL'd. All of a sudden, anyone wanting to use SLIDE has no choice but to use the GPL, or an effectively identical license.
The GPL's "viral" nature propagates through the only way "code flesh" is ever exchanged--through re-use of components. The FSF has set up a "free or nothing" proposition with the GPL--which understandibly makes MS rather unfriendly towards them.
Here's a thought for you: The Open Gaming License is based on the GPL, but it has one important difference: you need to keep the actual derivations open and licensed, but not the rest of the game that wasn't derived from the OGL'd game at all.
The premise of the Dark Materials triology sounds a LOT like the root of the Gnostic Heresey (where new age "gnosticism" comes from, actually.)
In the early days of Christianity, there were three major sects--the Christians, the Jews, and the Gnostics. The Jews were, well, jewish folk who lived as jews but thought that Jesus was the Messiah (sorta like "Jews for Jesus.") The Christians were the to-the-lions folks we all know and love, and the Gnostics--well, the gnostics are why the strong central church formed, and why the Inquisition was so harsh.
The Gnostic Heresy, as I understand it:
There was a God, and Jesus Christ was his living son--but God_the_Creator is not God-the-burning-bush-that-spoke-to-moses. Sometime after creation, a spirit called the Demiurge usurped control over creation, lied to the jews, and pretty much acted the way Christians might imagine "Satan" acting.
The Demiurge created flesh, and so flesh is flawed, and all of humanity is doomed to damnation, save for the accidental banishment from heaven of the goddess/archangel Sophia, who apparantly had no small part in Jesus Christ showing up and mascarading as a person for so many years.
The Gnosic Heresy, btw, was propagated by a series of "revelations" about the faith, sort of like the popular image of how a witch's coven is organized. It was stamped out rather freverently in the early days of Christianity, and hasn't been a going concern as a religion for a great many years.
Calling atheism a religion is like calling not-collecting-stamps a hobby. Or, more appropriately, like calling not-believing-in-superstition a superstition.
In the context of "not stepping on the rights of other religions", it's all but criminal to not consider atheism a religion.
Atheists should be able to build "atheist halls", where they gather to watch TV or somesuch, and get the same tax benefits that a church gets.
To some people, anything you believe constitutes religion, and to others, only clear, spelled out systems of belief involving the supernatural constitute a religion.
I don't know anyone I'd call "religious" who has a clear spelled out system of belief--it's either "clear" or it's "spelled out.";)
Similarly, some people equate atheism with denial of all gods, others with just a lack of a belief in any of them. There is a distinct difference between saying something DOESN'T exist, and lacking belief either way.
Atheism : Faith that there are no gods (or equivalent supernatural beings). Agnostic : no religion, on account of no faith.
Blindly accepting science as "truth" is definitely religion - and completely opposite what science is, since it's a continual process of discovery and learning. But don't let the fact that some people do this suggest that all of science is that bad. And because some people who don't believe in god worship science doesn't mean that all people who are atheist are that way.
I'm a fan of (most of) science. However, it irks me to a great deal when the scientists and science-fans prostletyze their religion under the guise of teaching or talking about science.
However, "weak" atheism is disbelief in the existance of god, meaning that you do not belive in the existance of god, for one or another reason. This is not the same as denying the existance of god.
If you don't have an answer to "what is out there", you're agnostic, not atheist. If your answer is "nothing is out there", then you're atheist.
What do you mean by saying that atheism should not be given greater "scientific or political respect" than any other "religion"?
In a secular society with seperation of church and state, religious matters should not be political.
The USA is not, never has been, and very likely never will be a secular society. We're a religous society with seperation of church and state to protect religious dissent.
The bodies of the state (and science) should be agnostic in their behavior--and all public schools are bodies of the state. Politics and atheist prejudice shouldn't cause the schools to say, in action or word or inaction, "your religion is wrong". (Evolution should be taught, but if it gets the evolution of man, it should be contemporary of a "religions of the world" course that touches on atheism.)
If I start a religion which claims that objects do not fall to the ground when I drop them, and scientists claim the opposite, does this mean that science is giving more respect to atheism than to my religion?
No. Science can in fact prove that objects do indeed fall when dropped. (And no world religion argues that there are really "drop faeries" that pretend gravity.) However, if science were to claim, oh, that there is no afterlife at all (which it can't), it'd be stepping on religon's toes. Less so for the origion of man, moreso for the existance of God.
Science pays respect to observable facts, and observable facts only. If these contradict some religion, it is the problem of the religion, not a scientific one.
Unfortunately, science doesn't always stick with observable facts. There's an awful lot of conjecture that is taken as science, and not the near-science-fiction that it is.
And as for quantum physics: if you limit objects to 'non-quantum levels of mass', then you are by definition outside of the realm where quantum effects have a significant inpact, so the question is really redundant. (the "force"-part I don't even understand..)
Sorry, thinking of Special Relativity--which as I understand it has more to do with the shape of the universe than the mechanics or principles within it.
A better question is why you would want to save classical mechanics? Quantum mechanics is based on 6 postulates, all laws of QM follow from these, and all laws of ordinary mechanics can be deduced from QM. Classical mechanics OTOH, was much more of an ad hoc hodgepodge of laws until QM explained why they take the form that they do.
I did a short search for QM's postulates, and all I found was a bunch of mathematical jargon that no one outside of college could hope to really understand without earning a scholarship for simple genius.
Compare that with classic mechanics, which are both largely simple enough to be taught in High School and easily derivable from everyday life--not arcane observations and academic debates. Having a rebuttal to the juvenile claim that QM proves classical mechanics "wrong" is a good thing.
As for QM itself--still strikes me as a bunch of overthinking on the researcher's part, that explains very little and is practically useful for even less.
(For those of you who don't know, humans and apes evolved from the same historical lineage.)
Oddly enough, we could call that common ancestor (gasp!) "an ape."
Actually....
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Uncle Tungsten
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Sex is the foundation of knowledge. If not for the desire to mate, we humans wouldn't have a drive to improve ourselves and the lives of our offspring.
Just watch. Take mating out of the picture, and see how few years it takes for advancement to grind to a halt for lack of grinding.
How is this an "atheism aspect" of evolution? The Theory of Evolution says nothing about how life originated, just how it has changed over time.
The theory of evolution, as taught in the US, doesn't care to seperate "life evolves" from "life evolved." It's foolish to think that life doesn't adapt over time... but it's a religious statement to say "Adam definitly didn't live, because we all evolved from apes and nothing else."
Personally, I'm of the opinion that homo sapiens did evolve--and then, just about the time of the neolithic revolution, God made one example from dust, whose offspring have wandered throughout the world, mating the animals that just happen to be completely indentical to themselves.
Bullshit - no matter how you try to dress it, calling atheism a religion is completely untrue.
Religion isn't "what do you think the things out there are like?", it's "what do you think is out there?." Atheism is a religion, and should be given no more political or scientific respect than any other.
It's a sad statement of the level of science education in this country that most people don't realize that this is ALWAYS the case with science. There's no such thing as a "fundamental truth" - just working theories that have various levels of accuracy.
Blame the funding model. For scientists to get money, they have to justify their existance--and that means saying "we know" when all they should be saying is "we think."
For example, classical mechanics was pretty accurate, but not for all possible conditions, thus quantum mechanics came along for more details. Surely other things we take for granted will be changed slightly also - such as gravity.
Actually, aren't classical mechanics still accurate, if you limit "objects" to non-quantum levels of mass, and include quantum randomness as a "force"?
The thought occured to me over vacation, and I don't have a physics teacher to ask.
Jesus himself said to Thomas that believing without seeing is a good thing.
This wasn't intended as a flame, I'm just honestly pointing out what I see the relationship between science and religion to be.
A significant portion of the population never reads scientific journals, never does an experiment, and can't even tell you what the scientific method is. Yet these people take whatever scientists say as gospel truth.
It's hard to maintain agnosticism, which is the only "religion" that science can claim to belong to. As a result, there's a significant portion of the population that listens to scientists and not priests, and so fall into a "scientific religion."
Science isn't a religion, but there is a religion based (badly) on science. Anyone who tries telling you that science has disproven God is a member.
# Couldn't they have been reformed once or twice in the expanding and collapsing process?
Yes, although since they're no evidence of that or a mechanism that wouldn't create a "new universe", they can ignore it.
If evolutionists could step back for a second and see the ridiculousness posed by articles like these, they might see that it comes off as not much better than science fiction or some 1960's Popular Mechanics dream concept of the future.
The problem with evolution isn't that it contradicts creationism (pick your conciliation: God created the animals through evolution, God has a fast-forward button, God left the fossils so we'd understand how His creation will work, etc.). The problem is that it's taught as more true than religion, and the atheism aspect of evolution ("man evolved from apes") isn't seperated from the observable theory ("life evolves to the survival of the fittest.")
The problem is that, although we're all entitled to our beliefs, our culture increasingly holds that science is just another belief.
There's a difference between "scientific knowledge" and the religon atheists call "science." Once we get to the creation of the universe (not just Earth) or start dealing with the origins of life, etc., science is in religious grounds--and that means that it throws up a religion, even if the researchers themselves are careful to keep their research properly agnostic.
But scientists are comfortable with not knowing. They thrive on it. They don't assume that just because they had an idea it must be right. They attack it as vigorously as they can because they don't want to lie to themselves. As Richard Feynman said, "Not knowing is much more interesting than believing an answer which might be wrong."
Sadly, scientists and the common man differ greatly on this. Science as a whole might be a whole bunch better if they started issuing press releases with all of the proper disclaimers ("this science is only 6 months old, it may be overturned in a week") and media people (jounralists) spent a bit more time hammering home that point.
I could see a future where microsoft is afraid to do the "bad things" they like to do for fear of lawsuits.... but then I think about their huge pile of money, and the idea seems laughable.
Their huge pile of money will only get them so far. If they start losing it by the billions, their stockholders (including Mr. Gates) will sit up and reign in the company.
$40 billion+ in the bank shouldn't be enough to avoid justice--but it should be enough to elminate a chance of appeal, or tiered payments, etc.
And what ever happened to the EU antitrust type trial?
I'm under no imaginable obligation to contact the seller and let him know he's an idiot.
No legal obligation, but there are plently of moral and ethical ones. In a like vein, if you were to contact the seller and your appraisal was accurate, he'd be under the same kind of non-legal obligation to give you first crack at the antique--or just a "finder's fee."
As someone else pointed out, there are laws against getting into extremely one-sided deals--Usury, bad faith, court policy, etc. No law against making a bad deal, but there are laws against one-sided "mafia" deals.
Humankinds downfall wont be global warming or nuclear war. We will be killed off by the only thing that is higher on the food chain than us, virii. We still can't cure virii, not even the common flu has a cure, and given it's yearly mutation (evolution) there is virtually no hope of curing viruses. We can postpone but not stop them i.e. AIDS. Biowarfare is happening today, but not from Iraq, mother nature has found our supierior.
Er, Viri aren't on the food chain. They're a parasitical life form that simply won't survive if they kill off all of the hosts. (And AIDS is a particularly bad example. The "simple" act of killing, neuturing, or ostracizing every HIV+ individual & blood sample would eliminate the virus in a way that, oh, killing TB infections wouldn't.)
Plus, don't forget that humans aren't the only ones to suffer from virii. EVERY animal has its parasites; we just happen to know more about ours, AND we've got enough tech to beat back even the nastiest of them.
It's only 2 miles to work for me (one-way), and maybe 5 miles to the largest shopping center in the area; I live inside of the city limits, and there's a grocery store, police station, movie theater, drugstore, college, gas station, two banks, three restaurants, post office, and a hair salon within four blocks.
I live in what can be justly termed "metropolitan area", or better yet, "urban." A vehicle with the segway's range and efficincy would make sense for me; if the rail system was better in the USA, it might even make sense for those living in conditions like I do to skip the car and just use the short-range vehicle.
Segways aren't for everyone, but there is a potential place for them--and that place is in cities. (50 lbs of cargo room isn't anything to shake a stick at, either--walking even two blocks with 50 lbs, or trying to ride a bike with 50 lbs, is hardly anything worth trying.)
Before you ask: no, I don't live in the boondocks. I live in a metropolitan area (Tampa, FL, US).
Sorry, if anyplace worth going is 3 1/2 miles away, you're probably in the boondocks. And if anyplace more interesting than a gas station and a grocery store is further away than 15 miles, it's a high probability.
Sure, you could probably plead "suburbia" instead of "sticks", but that's certainly not a "metropolitan area."
If you redefine days to some personal definition then it all works out.
Genesis was written in Hebrew. The word used, and commonly translated as "day", can be translated as a fair variety of time periods, including "age" or "eon."
So, a bit of nonbiased investigation, and the bible isn't as clearly primitive as some atheists would like to believe.
And if you consider that God likely has a "fast foward" button for the boring billions of years, the "seven day" line might really be acurate, after all. Or, it could just be a myth propagated by the ancient jews to solidify their culture, which would still not be proof of God's nonexistance.
The Business Software Alliance is the absolute worst thing to ever happen to the United states of america... and they need to be watched very very carefully.
You weren't alive during the Red Scare, were you? Or the Trail of Tears? And you're probably white (like me), and so don't have to worry about innner-city gang violence or the KKK...
The BSA is absolutely, positivley tame compared to the USA's real problems, most of which have been happilly dealt with or contained. The BSA might be the worst thing to happen in the world of slashdotters--but that's not what you said.
Unless this head cold is making me bonkers, Apple stopped offering an "upgrade discount" on retail bundles of its software. It's just one price, if you're upgrading last year's PowerMac or getting software for your piecemeal assembled HackMac.
This is another law like the seat belt law. They slide it in under the voter's nose by saying: "It's only 15 bucks and we won't enforce it unless you get stopped for something else" Well, guess what? Here in CA that lasted about 3 years. Now it's 35 bucks and they CAN pull you over just for not wearing a set belt! This is how Govt. works. Crack the door open an inch for them and the next thing you know there IS no door!
The seat belt laws, like most other tickatble traffic codes, are there becuase they really really do save lives. And if you die on the roadway, not only does the gov't lose your tax revenue, but they also have to have their employees suffer the emotional trauma of scraping you off the pavement.
If you really want to kill yourself, or just never pay taxes again, please use something clean, like a massive overdose of rat poison.
Nazism was an idea (set of related ideas actually) that was and always will be evil.
What was Nazism, exactly--and why is it evil? ("because I say so" or "because the Germans used it to kill a lot of people" aren't acceptable answers.)
Wrong again. Harming others is evil. Even if it doesn't aid anybody.
Use a broader definition of "harm" than simple "physical injury." Here's a few samples:
* A man who throws himself in front of a train to push another out of the train's way has just committed a good act.
* A man who pushes someone else into the train's way to save themselves has committed an evil act.
* Giving your lunch to someone who's hungry and hasn't eaten in four days is a good act.
* Stealing someone else's lunch because you don't want to pay for your own is an evil act.
And no, valiant Germans who died for their country in WWII were not good. Glorious service in the name of evil makes one evil. Since your sig brands you as an RPG gamer I'll put in terms you might better understand. A brave and valiant SS stormtrooper would be Lawful Evil. Hitler began as Lawful Evil and ended up Chaotic Evil (Insane). A generic german soldier was Neutral Evil. Get it?
Bullocks. My sig also brands me as a Christian, and religion has more to say about Good and Evil than a glorified wargame.
A brave German infantryman who sacraficed himself so his comrades could escape, or who took on extra guard duty to aid weaker soldiers, is probably a Good Person--as long as they didn't take part in the Very Very Bad things that the Germans did.
"Lawful" and "Chaotic" are, despite RPGing's wargaming baggage, hardly on par with Good or Evil. They're barely even real concepts.
Harming yourself to help others may or may not make you good. It might also make you stupid. Helping yourself while helping others is the greatest good though. Henry Ford helped far more people while making himself filthy rich than 10,000 do-gooders working in soup kitchens on their day off.
There's a differnece between DOING good and BEING good. I am qualified to judge actions as Good or Evil, and it is accetpable for me to react to someone based on their actions--but I do not have the knowledge to judge anyone, even Hilter or the 9-11 hijackers or the heroes who die every day, as "good" or "evil." And neither do you.
To give of yourself for the benefit of others is most certainly the essence of "Goodness." If you think you have a better objective definition, by all means try and spit it out. (Subjective Defintions and Simple Definitons, such as "my enemies are evil" or "harming people is evil", are fairly useless.)
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite, there were Jews and Gentiles
Jews, as in, the Hebrew People as a whole, are not a sect of Christianity.
There were, however, a significant sect of early Christianity who still considered themselves early jews. Heck, there's even (NT) biblical evidence of them!
If not for the outrageous heresies of the Gnostics, I doubt that the early Church would have formed into anything stronger than the current Protestant central authority--or, at least, the contemporary Jewish authorities. (Oh, them and the Roman Empire...)
Hint to Microsoft: if you don't want to GPL your software, don't derive it from GPL'd software. It's as simple as that -- at least for people who aren't being obtuse willfully.
Let's say that the FSF has an annurism, and releases a VB workalike, with common controls and librarys and whatnot, and releases the whole sheebang with the GPL.
Anyone using these common controls or libraries has to now use the GPL.
Now, lets move to something else. Lets say that the government takes Nvidia to court for monopolizing the temporal card market with the amazing 4D standard library, SLIDE, which everyone uses for 4D images. Now, let's say that the FSF weighs in on this case, and gets SLIDE GPL'd. All of a sudden, anyone wanting to use SLIDE has no choice but to use the GPL, or an effectively identical license.
The GPL's "viral" nature propagates through the only way "code flesh" is ever exchanged--through re-use of components. The FSF has set up a "free or nothing" proposition with the GPL--which understandibly makes MS rather unfriendly towards them.
Here's a thought for you: The Open Gaming License is based on the GPL, but it has one important difference: you need to keep the actual derivations open and licensed, but not the rest of the game that wasn't derived from the OGL'd game at all.
The premise of the Dark Materials triology sounds a LOT like the root of the Gnostic Heresey (where new age "gnosticism" comes from, actually.)
In the early days of Christianity, there were three major sects--the Christians, the Jews, and the Gnostics. The Jews were, well, jewish folk who lived as jews but thought that Jesus was the Messiah (sorta like "Jews for Jesus.") The Christians were the to-the-lions folks we all know and love, and the Gnostics--well, the gnostics are why the strong central church formed, and why the Inquisition was so harsh.
The Gnostic Heresy, as I understand it:
There was a God, and Jesus Christ was his living son--but God_the_Creator is not God-the-burning-bush-that-spoke-to-moses. Sometime after creation, a spirit called the Demiurge usurped control over creation, lied to the jews, and pretty much acted the way Christians might imagine "Satan" acting.
The Demiurge created flesh, and so flesh is flawed, and all of humanity is doomed to damnation, save for the accidental banishment from heaven of the goddess/archangel Sophia, who apparantly had no small part in Jesus Christ showing up and mascarading as a person for so many years.
The Gnosic Heresy, btw, was propagated by a series of "revelations" about the faith, sort of like the popular image of how a witch's coven is organized. It was stamped out rather freverently in the early days of Christianity, and hasn't been a going concern as a religion for a great many years.
Calling atheism a religion is like calling not-collecting-stamps a hobby. Or, more appropriately, like calling not-believing-in-superstition a superstition.
In the context of "not stepping on the rights of other religions", it's all but criminal to not consider atheism a religion.
Atheists should be able to build "atheist halls", where they gather to watch TV or somesuch, and get the same tax benefits that a church gets.
To some people, anything you believe constitutes religion, and to others, only clear, spelled out systems of belief involving the supernatural constitute a religion.
;)
I don't know anyone I'd call "religious" who has a clear spelled out system of belief--it's either "clear" or it's "spelled out."
Similarly, some people equate atheism with denial of all gods, others with just a lack of a belief in any of them. There is a distinct difference between saying something DOESN'T exist, and lacking belief either way.
Atheism : Faith that there are no gods (or equivalent supernatural beings). Agnostic : no religion, on account of no faith.
Blindly accepting science as "truth" is definitely religion - and completely opposite what science is, since it's a continual process of discovery and learning. But don't let the fact that some people do this suggest that all of science is that bad. And because some people who don't believe in god worship science doesn't mean that all people who are atheist are that way.
I'm a fan of (most of) science. However, it irks me to a great deal when the scientists and science-fans prostletyze their religion under the guise of teaching or talking about science.
However, "weak" atheism is disbelief in the existance of god, meaning that you do not belive in the existance of god, for one or another reason. This is not the same as denying the existance of god.
If you don't have an answer to "what is out there", you're agnostic, not atheist. If your answer is "nothing is out there", then you're atheist.
What do you mean by saying that atheism should not be given greater "scientific or political respect" than any other "religion"?
In a secular society with seperation of church and state, religious matters should not be political.
The USA is not, never has been, and very likely never will be a secular society. We're a religous society with seperation of church and state to protect religious dissent.
The bodies of the state (and science) should be agnostic in their behavior--and all public schools are bodies of the state. Politics and atheist prejudice shouldn't cause the schools to say, in action or word or inaction, "your religion is wrong". (Evolution should be taught, but if it gets the evolution of man, it should be contemporary of a "religions of the world" course that touches on atheism.)
If I start a religion which claims that objects do not fall to the ground when I drop them, and scientists claim the opposite, does this mean that science is giving more respect to atheism than to my religion?
No. Science can in fact prove that objects do indeed fall when dropped. (And no world religion argues that there are really "drop faeries" that pretend gravity.) However, if science were to claim, oh, that there is no afterlife at all (which it can't), it'd be stepping on religon's toes. Less so for the origion of man, moreso for the existance of God.
Science pays respect to observable facts, and observable facts only. If these contradict some religion, it is the problem of the religion, not a scientific one.
Unfortunately, science doesn't always stick with observable facts. There's an awful lot of conjecture that is taken as science, and not the near-science-fiction that it is.
And as for quantum physics: if you limit objects to 'non-quantum levels of mass',
then you are by definition outside of the realm where quantum effects have a significant inpact, so the question is really redundant. (the "force"-part I don't even understand..)
Sorry, thinking of Special Relativity--which as I understand it has more to do with the shape of the universe than the mechanics or principles within it.
A better question is why you would want to save classical mechanics?
Quantum mechanics is based on 6 postulates, all laws of QM follow from these, and all laws of ordinary mechanics can be deduced from QM.
Classical mechanics OTOH, was much more of an ad hoc hodgepodge of laws until QM explained why they take the form that they do.
I did a short search for QM's postulates, and all I found was a bunch of mathematical jargon that no one outside of college could hope to really understand without earning a scholarship for simple genius.
Compare that with classic mechanics, which are both largely simple enough to be taught in High School and easily derivable from everyday life--not arcane observations and academic debates. Having a rebuttal to the juvenile claim that QM proves classical mechanics "wrong" is a good thing.
As for QM itself--still strikes me as a bunch of overthinking on the researcher's part, that explains very little and is practically useful for even less.
if you are in a room with a hot nekkid chick, and you notice the computer, your not a geek, you're dead.
Or "satisfied and oddly awake."
(For those of you who don't know, humans and apes evolved from the same historical lineage.)
Oddly enough, we could call that common ancestor (gasp!) "an ape."
Sex is the foundation of knowledge. If not for the desire to mate, we humans wouldn't have a drive to improve ourselves and the lives of our offspring.
Just watch. Take mating out of the picture, and see how few years it takes for advancement to grind to a halt for lack of grinding.
I have a problem with people who think you can believe in evolution and Christanity.
Where did Cain, Abel, and Seth's wives come from?
How is this an "atheism aspect" of evolution? The Theory of Evolution says nothing about how life originated, just how it has changed over time.
The theory of evolution, as taught in the US, doesn't care to seperate "life evolves" from "life evolved." It's foolish to think that life doesn't adapt over time... but it's a religious statement to say "Adam definitly didn't live, because we all evolved from apes and nothing else."
Personally, I'm of the opinion that homo sapiens did evolve--and then, just about the time of the neolithic revolution, God made one example from dust, whose offspring have wandered throughout the world, mating the animals that just happen to be completely indentical to themselves.
Bullshit - no matter how you try to dress it, calling atheism a religion is completely untrue.
Religion isn't "what do you think the things out there are like?", it's "what do you think is out there?." Atheism is a religion, and should be given no more political or scientific respect than any other.
It's a sad statement of the level of science education in this country that most people don't realize that this is ALWAYS the case with science. There's no such thing as a "fundamental truth" - just working theories that have various levels of accuracy.
Blame the funding model. For scientists to get money, they have to justify their existance--and that means saying "we know" when all they should be saying is "we think."
For example, classical mechanics was pretty accurate, but not for all possible conditions, thus quantum mechanics came along for more details. Surely other things we take for granted will be changed slightly also - such as gravity.
Actually, aren't classical mechanics still accurate, if you limit "objects" to non-quantum levels of mass, and include quantum randomness as a "force"?
The thought occured to me over vacation, and I don't have a physics teacher to ask.
Jesus himself said to Thomas that believing without seeing is a good thing.
This wasn't intended as a flame, I'm just honestly pointing out what I see the relationship between science and religion to be.
A significant portion of the population never reads scientific journals, never does an experiment, and can't even tell you what the scientific method is. Yet these people take whatever scientists say as gospel truth.
It's hard to maintain agnosticism, which is the only "religion" that science can claim to belong to. As a result, there's a significant portion of the population that listens to scientists and not priests, and so fall into a "scientific religion."
Science isn't a religion, but there is a religion based (badly) on science. Anyone who tries telling you that science has disproven God is a member.
# Couldn't they have been reformed once or twice in the expanding and collapsing process?
Yes, although since they're no evidence of that or a mechanism that wouldn't create a "new universe", they can ignore it.
If evolutionists could step back for a second and see the ridiculousness posed by articles like these, they might see that it comes off as not much better than science fiction or some 1960's Popular Mechanics dream concept of the future.
The problem with evolution isn't that it contradicts creationism (pick your conciliation: God created the animals through evolution, God has a fast-forward button, God left the fossils so we'd understand how His creation will work, etc.). The problem is that it's taught as more true than religion, and the atheism aspect of evolution ("man evolved from apes") isn't seperated from the observable theory ("life evolves to the survival of the fittest.")
The problem is that, although we're all entitled to our beliefs, our culture increasingly holds that science is just another belief.
There's a difference between "scientific knowledge" and the religon atheists call "science." Once we get to the creation of the universe (not just Earth) or start dealing with the origins of life, etc., science is in religious grounds--and that means that it throws up a religion, even if the researchers themselves are careful to keep their research properly agnostic.
But scientists are comfortable with not knowing. They thrive on it. They don't assume that just because they had an idea it must be right. They attack it as vigorously as they can because they don't want to lie to themselves. As Richard Feynman said, "Not knowing is much more interesting than believing an answer which might be wrong."
Sadly, scientists and the common man differ greatly on this. Science as a whole might be a whole bunch better if they started issuing press releases with all of the proper disclaimers ("this science is only 6 months old, it may be overturned in a week") and media people (jounralists) spent a bit more time hammering home that point.
Then again, I'm biased.
I could see a future where microsoft is afraid to do the "bad things" they like to do for fear of lawsuits .... but then I think about their huge pile of money, and the idea seems laughable.
Their huge pile of money will only get them so far. If they start losing it by the billions, their stockholders (including Mr. Gates) will sit up and reign in the company.
$40 billion+ in the bank shouldn't be enough to avoid justice--but it should be enough to elminate a chance of appeal, or tiered payments, etc.
And what ever happened to the EU antitrust type trial?
AFAIK, it's still going on.
I'm under no imaginable obligation to contact the seller and let him know he's an idiot.
No legal obligation, but there are plently of moral and ethical ones. In a like vein, if you were to contact the seller and your appraisal was accurate, he'd be under the same kind of non-legal obligation to give you first crack at the antique--or just a "finder's fee."
As someone else pointed out, there are laws against getting into extremely one-sided deals--Usury, bad faith, court policy, etc. No law against making a bad deal, but there are laws against one-sided "mafia" deals.
Humankinds downfall wont be global warming or nuclear war. We will be killed off by the only thing that is higher on the food chain than us, virii. We still can't cure virii, not even the common flu has a cure, and given it's yearly mutation (evolution) there is virtually no hope of curing viruses. We can postpone but not stop them i.e. AIDS. Biowarfare is happening today, but not from Iraq, mother nature has found our supierior.
Er, Viri aren't on the food chain. They're a parasitical life form that simply won't survive if they kill off all of the hosts. (And AIDS is a particularly bad example. The "simple" act of killing, neuturing, or ostracizing every HIV+ individual & blood sample would eliminate the virus in a way that, oh, killing TB infections wouldn't.)
Plus, don't forget that humans aren't the only ones to suffer from virii. EVERY animal has its parasites; we just happen to know more about ours, AND we've got enough tech to beat back even the nastiest of them.
It's only 2 miles to work for me (one-way), and maybe 5 miles to the largest shopping center in the area; I live inside of the city limits, and there's a grocery store, police station, movie theater, drugstore, college, gas station, two banks, three restaurants, post office, and a hair salon within four blocks.
I live in what can be justly termed "metropolitan area", or better yet, "urban." A vehicle with the segway's range and efficincy would make sense for me; if the rail system was better in the USA, it might even make sense for those living in conditions like I do to skip the car and just use the short-range vehicle.
Segways aren't for everyone, but there is a potential place for them--and that place is in cities. (50 lbs of cargo room isn't anything to shake a stick at, either--walking even two blocks with 50 lbs, or trying to ride a bike with 50 lbs, is hardly anything worth trying.)
Before you ask: no, I don't live in the boondocks. I live in a metropolitan area (Tampa, FL, US).
Sorry, if anyplace worth going is 3 1/2 miles away, you're probably in the boondocks. And if anyplace more interesting than a gas station and a grocery store is further away than 15 miles, it's a high probability.
Sure, you could probably plead "suburbia" instead of "sticks", but that's certainly not a "metropolitan area."
If you redefine days to some personal definition then it all works out.
Genesis was written in Hebrew. The word used, and commonly translated as "day", can be translated as a fair variety of time periods, including "age" or "eon."
So, a bit of nonbiased investigation, and the bible isn't as clearly primitive as some atheists would like to believe.
And if you consider that God likely has a "fast foward" button for the boring billions of years, the "seven day" line might really be acurate, after all. Or, it could just be a myth propagated by the ancient jews to solidify their culture, which would still not be proof of God's nonexistance.
The Business Software Alliance is the absolute worst thing to ever happen to the United states of america... and they need to be watched very very carefully.
You weren't alive during the Red Scare, were you? Or the Trail of Tears? And you're probably white (like me), and so don't have to worry about innner-city gang violence or the KKK...
The BSA is absolutely, positivley tame compared to the USA's real problems, most of which have been happilly dealt with or contained. The BSA might be the worst thing to happen in the world of slashdotters--but that's not what you said.
Unless this head cold is making me bonkers, Apple stopped offering an "upgrade discount" on retail bundles of its software. It's just one price, if you're upgrading last year's PowerMac or getting software for your piecemeal assembled HackMac.
This is another law like the seat belt law. They slide it in under the voter's nose by saying: "It's only 15 bucks and we won't enforce it unless you get stopped for something else" Well, guess what? Here in CA that lasted about 3 years. Now it's 35 bucks and they CAN pull you over just for not wearing a set belt! This is how Govt. works. Crack the door open an inch for them and the next thing you know there IS no door!
The seat belt laws, like most other tickatble traffic codes, are there becuase they really really do save lives. And if you die on the roadway, not only does the gov't lose your tax revenue, but they also have to have their employees suffer the emotional trauma of scraping you off the pavement.
If you really want to kill yourself, or just never pay taxes again, please use something clean, like a massive overdose of rat poison.
Nazism was an idea (set of related ideas actually) that was and always will be evil.
What was Nazism, exactly--and why is it evil? ("because I say so" or "because the Germans used it to kill a lot of people" aren't acceptable answers.)
Wrong again. Harming others is evil. Even if it doesn't aid anybody.
Use a broader definition of "harm" than simple "physical injury." Here's a few samples:
* A man who throws himself in front of a train to push another out of the train's way has just committed a good act.
* A man who pushes someone else into the train's way to save themselves has committed an evil act.
* Giving your lunch to someone who's hungry and hasn't eaten in four days is a good act.
* Stealing someone else's lunch because you don't want to pay for your own is an evil act.
And no, valiant Germans who died for their country in WWII were not good. Glorious service in the name of evil makes one evil. Since your sig brands you as an RPG gamer I'll put in terms you might better understand. A brave and valiant SS stormtrooper would be Lawful Evil. Hitler began as Lawful Evil and ended up Chaotic Evil (Insane). A generic german soldier was Neutral Evil. Get it?
Bullocks. My sig also brands me as a Christian, and religion has more to say about Good and Evil than a glorified wargame.
A brave German infantryman who sacraficed himself so his comrades could escape, or who took on extra guard duty to aid weaker soldiers, is probably a Good Person--as long as they didn't take part in the Very Very Bad things that the Germans did.
"Lawful" and "Chaotic" are, despite RPGing's wargaming baggage, hardly on par with Good or Evil. They're barely even real concepts.
Harming yourself to help others may or may not make you good. It might also make you stupid. Helping yourself while helping others is the greatest good though. Henry Ford helped far more people while making himself filthy rich than 10,000 do-gooders working in soup kitchens on their day off.
There's a differnece between DOING good and BEING good. I am qualified to judge actions as Good or Evil, and it is accetpable for me to react to someone based on their actions--but I do not have the knowledge to judge anyone, even Hilter or the 9-11 hijackers or the heroes who die every day, as "good" or "evil." And neither do you.
To give of yourself for the benefit of others is most certainly the essence of "Goodness." If you think you have a better objective definition, by all means try and spit it out. (Subjective Defintions and Simple Definitons, such as "my enemies are evil" or "harming people is evil", are fairly useless.)