If anything, this makes it easier to snooker people.
Before: You had a football you want to pawn off as an "authentic Superbowl XXXXVIICLM ball". How did you convince your buyer that it was the real deal? Dunno.
Now: You have a football you want to pawn off. How do you convince your buyer? Shine a bit of green light on it, and watch it glow back at you. Cha-ching!
Didn't anyone anywhere look at this plan and think, "so the idea is to take a football, and make it unduplicatable by smearing on some stringy goop (DNA) whose sole purpose is to be easily duplicated?"
You claim that China has the right to legislate as it sees fit. Where does this inalienable right come from?
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses. Not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. Not from the end of a gun. Whatever China does within its own borders is fine by me, so long as China is governed at the behest of the governed.
There is positively no reason to give the will of a tiny clique of despots any moral standing. That goes double for you, Cheney.
1) These tech companies have no choice but to do business with China.
2) There is no such thing as civil disobedience. A law is a law is a law, and if it says to throw live puppies in the mulcher then by God, that's what you do.
3) Corporations have no responsibilities beyond their own bottom lines. Not to human decency, not to the environment, not to the quality of life of their customers or workers. The governments of the countries in which they do business are the corporations' only conscience.
While I am in favor of drug decriminalization, you're trivializing the issue when you compare America's laws against marijuana to China's laws against speaking out against its laws against marijuana. Follow?
If a company comes here to do business, they have to abide by our rules against marijuana. If we go to China to do business, we have to abide by their rules against criticism of the Party. If we go to Morvikonia to do business, we have to agree to help them round up and execute women who have been unfaithful to their husbands. These three situations are all exactly the same, right? Of course not.
If you're going to make this sort of analogy, at least compare apples to apples. Maybe you could talk about how other countries might stop doing business with the U.S. for, say, our detainment and torture of war prisoners, or our spying on our own citizens without any sort of due process or oversight.
But then people start thinking, "Hey, that sort of makes sense," and your whole argument gets blown out of the water.
Not really. A really crappy book or game could theoretically be turned into an awesome movie. I once bought an RPG that promised one of the deepest, most compelling plots available. Couldn't master the controls, and the graphics sucked. So maybe if someone took the plot and turned it into a book or a movie, it might have been cool.
I see where you're coming from. But I also see that the rule you're describing is your own, not Blizzard's. Lots of the guilds are about out-of-game associations, and Blizzard isn't doing squat about them. I don't see that changing in the future, no matter how much the purists claim about how their personal asthetics have been violated. So bringing up role-playing purity may be an intriguing exercise, but it's only obscuring the real issue: Is it right to "protect" a group of players from their immature, juvenile peers by hampering their ability to freely associate with each other?
I really think that what Blizzard is doing is wrong. Squashing a GLBT-friendly guild while allowing, say, a Mormon-friendly guild (shout-out to the Warriors of Cumorah and The Gadianton Robbers), then there is a real double standard in play.
Grr. You people just don't get it. See, the government of China had money! And Google wanted that money. They only agreed to censor their site because Google wanted that money. They wouldn't have violated their standards, but they were forced into it by the money!
Tell me you wouldn't suck up to a totalitarian regime if there were a few million cash on the table. Of course you would.
You're just not getting it. ID will never be a "plausible conclusion." Anyone has the right to believe, deep down in their hearts, that God is the ultimate architect of the Universe and our place in it. That will always be the case. Always. Because there is no possible piece of evidence that would ever be able to disprove the idea.
That's why ID isn't "an alternative" to evolution: because ID is not a scientific theory.
I expect those examples to go away, because evolution has passed test after rigorous scientific test. I expect those examples to go away, because I find ludicrous the idea that God would either use the wasteful process of evolution, or that He would intentionally fake all the evidence that leads us to conclude the truth of evolution. I expect those examples to go away, because people like you have been fighting a rearguard action against scientific naturalism for the last five hundred years, and your track record is laughable.
But even if these examples are legitimate, and even if no naturalistic explanation ever holds water, ID will never be a valid scientific conclusion, nor will it become the best available theory. That's not "naturalistic bigotry," just the simple recognition that you cannot conduct meaningful investigations of the world and also assume the existence of a supreme being.
Your post shows that you--like most ID proponents--have trouble distinguishing between "falsifying Evolution" and "proving Creationism." Your opponent was saying, "here are some things that could decisively prove that Evolution is impossible." But they're all supported by evidence that some ID'ers accept, and so you get all confused.
Creationists like yourself* think of Evolution and Creationism as being in exclusive competition like two boxers in a ring. If one falls, the one left standing must be the winner. But science doesn't work that way. There is never a permanent winner, and there is always the possibility of new evidence coming out that will rock an old theory to its core. So even if Evolution died suddenly, science would still continue to look for naturalistic explanations for the world we see around us.
As for the constant harping on "irreducable complexity": The very idea is little more than the fallacy of "argument from incredulity" writ large. Forty years ago, the sine qua non of "irreducable complexity" was the eye. How could such a complex structure evolve gradually? What good is an eye without all its constituent parts? They would all have to emerge simultaneously.
Since then, there has been mounting evidence that the eye is NOT irreducably complex. Creationists-turned-ID'ers still trot out the eye as an example when speaking to the uninformed. But when going up against hostile, skeptical audiences, smart ones drop it in favor of... let's see, the flagellum... and... er... the blood clotting cascade... and... um... the flagellum...
I expect these other examples will meet the same ignoble fate.
Dembski is so wrong here. So, so, very wrong. It's clear he doesn't even know the meaning of the word "falsifiable".
If evolutionists could show that every one of these "irreducibly complex structures" was indeed reducable, and could be developed by gradual, Darwinian processes, that would not falsify Intelligent Design. It would show that its proponents had been spouting pseudoscientific gibberish for the last decade, but it does nothing to close off the possibility that God created everything.
In his other quote, about the falsifiability of Evolution, he makes another blunder that shows he really doesn't know what he's talking about. Just because a theory doesn't currently account for a set of observations doesn't mean you scrap the theory. It means you start looking for patterns in the non-conforming observations, and see if modifications to the theory explain the data better. Sometimes the necessary changes are profound, and cut very much to the center of the theory. But it always, always, always leads to a theory that has more explanatory power than the theory it is succeeding.
Intelligent Design is unfalsifiable, because it relies on the concept of some Creator, who has the power to shape the world in precisely any way It sees fit. Therefore, any set of observations is consistent with the Intelligent Design "Theory", which is precisely why it's unscientific, and precisely why it has zero explanatory power. If we kept throwing up our hands and shouting, "I give up, God did it!" we'd still be beating each other over the head with flint axes.
You're comparing Google refusing to filter search results for a communist dictatorship to a full-scale embargo of China? Claiming that refusing to provide filtered search services is the same as starving an entire country is more than a little over-the-top.
I haven't seen anyone saying "Google shouldn't do business in China, because they're evil Communists." But they really shouldn't be doing anyone's dirty work for them. Political censorship is the dirtiest work there is, it's antithetical to Google's mission of being a provider of accurate information, and the fact that there was even a discussion of doing this shows that Google has sold off a big chunk of its soul. It should have been a slam-dunk, no brainer.
The article explicitly states that the Supreme Court didn't declare the monitoring of a telephone conversation to be a "search" until the 1960s. Prior to such a ruling, it would be questionable whether such an intrusion would constitute a violation of the fourth amendment.
Five years ago, Iraq wasn't on the brink of civil war. It wouldn't be today, had Bush taken a bit more care in planning the invasion. But no, he figured that once Hussein was toppled, it would all be small children scattering rose petals before our liberation force.
If you're so worried about not getting "the good news", you should read the Iraqi papers. Apparently, our government is paying to plant all sorts of good news in them. The fact is, the media is there to report what is actually happening, not to drum up support for the war. If the media has failed in anything, it was in their slack-jawed acceptance of the intelligence that led us into war in the first place.
In March 2003, the 3rd Circuit Court again struck down the law as unconstitutional, this time arguing that it would hinder protected speech among adults. The administration appealed.
On 30 June 2004, in Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, the Supreme Court upheld the block on enforcement, ruling that the law was likely to be unconstitutional.
By 2003 and 2004, Bush was in office, so it was his administration pushing it at that point.
Both administrations wanted this law. Porn is one of those issues where both sides use it when they have a need to appear "tough on evil". It really speaks to the "values crowd", far more than things like universal health care, minimum wage laws, environmental protection, and--I don't know--not blowing up countries that don't threaten you. Nah, those ideas don't have moral implications.
That's the sort of naive, pre-September 11 talk that got three thousand American citizens killed. While you sniveling liberals are sitting up in your ivory towers, making all your pointless, academic distinctions, George Bush is plowing straight ahead, protecting our lives and our freedoms from pornographers and terrorists. This is why the reality-based community will never win; too much thinking, not enough doing.
Bug fixing happens all the time in software development. Nothing about this story indicates that Microsoft is ahead of the game.
Rather, what it indicates is that Microsoft is recycling a bunch of XP code. That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially given the need for backwards compatability. But it means that whenever they find a new XPloit, they'll have to release a Vista patch at the same time. Otherwise, hackers could reverse-engineer the XP patch, and try the same exploit on Vista.
That will be more true once Vista actually launches. Right now, I guess they can just console themselves by saying that hardly anyone is using Vista, and certainly not on production systems. But it would be a good idea for them to get their XP and Vista patching schedules synched.
Re:Article is front-page news, summary is not
on
CNN On The $500 PS3
·
· Score: 1
Pricing the PS3 below the price of the Xbox 360 (or at the same price as the $299 Core version) may very well sound the death knell for MS.
Nah, they'd just fall back on their cash cows: MSN and optical mice.
If it really was a case of someone pushing the wrong button, then there is a good chance that the blame should fall on the person who designed the button, rather than the person who hit the button. Read this for more details.
Whenever I set up a new Windows box for family type people, I add several categories of applications (Multimedia, Word Processing, Internet, etc.), to help "keep things organized". I come back a few months later, and of course they've installed a ton of new crapware, and of course none of it has been put in the proper categories.
My theory is that there is one reason and one reason alone for the way vendors organize their apps on Windows. They want the user to see the company name as frequently as possible.
Smith didn't just write/translate/dig up/ymmv a "companion book". He also went into the Bible proper and made lots of changes (which he called corrections). The results of this effort are called "The Joseph Smith Translation" within the LDS Church. Some of his changes seem rather self-serving. For example, in Genesis 50, the Joseph who was the son of Jacob gives a rather short death speech. But Joseph Smith turned it into a much more elaborate speech wherein Joseph Smith's own career is prophesied.
The LDS party line is that the Bible was corrupted over the centuries, and that the Joseph Smith Translation (though incomplete and not official) is inspired by God and uniquely true to the original Bible. Yet there isn't any manuscript evidence for any of Smith's changes. Funny that.
In Linux - everyone seems to think that the technology is more important that the freedom in making the business case for using it.
Huh? What exactly is stopping people from making the business case in whatever way they like?
In monitary policy - everyone seems to think that other measures of inflation and growth are more important, than the freedom from controll that the gold standard offers.
Yeah, because it's great when the Emirate of Kissoffistan finds a new mine and suddenly can lay claim to twenty percent of everything else in the world. Why would the distribution of a soft, pretty, not terribly useful metal determine how all the rest of the world's resources get allocated?
In public education - everyone talks about what kind of education the kids need, and noone talks about the financial freedom lost in paying for it, or the very influence that such has on the kids.
Waah! They're taking my money and using it to help the poor! Mine! Waaah!
In social security and medicade/ medical care - everyones worried about how will we take care of the needy and elderly and noone talks about the people that need to be financially coerced to make these systems work.
See above.
In copyrights and patents - everyone talks about the poor starving inventor or creator, and noone talks about all the people that need to be coerced to make these systems of incentive work.
Ummm, people do talk about that stuff. Some people can't shut up about it. This must be your first time on Slashdot.
In the genocide of the poor - noone would even dare mention that the best solution would be to arm them and seciure their right to bear arms first.
Because what the folks in New Orleans needed to defend themselves against Katrina was small-arms fire. I'm not aware of any sort of literal genocide against the poor. If there was, what good would it do to give them "the right to bear arms?" If the rich are all genociding against the poor, guess who will be able to afford the best weapons? This solution seems utterly irrelevant to whatever problem you might conceivably be talking about.
Yes, I know it is an insanely radical shocking "lunatic" proposal and people would shudder at the thought that people might actually be "allowed" freedom and empowerment. Perhaps you should just mod me to minus infinity now to save society from the terror that such an outlandish notion would inflict.
Yeah, because society will never be able to survive your crackpot libertarianism. We should just hunt you down and send you to Gimto, I guess.
The distinction you're trying to make is actually the distinction between "strong" and "weak" atheism (to use the terminology atheists use in such discussions). A "weak atheist" says, "I do not believe there is a God." A "strong atheist" says, "I believe there is no God."
Agnosticism is a thing apart, and again there are strong and weak variants. A weak agnostic can say, "I believe that there may or may not be a God." But a strong agnostic makes an additional claim: "There is insufficient evidence for anyone to justifiably be either a theist or an atheist."
Communism (as promoted by Marx and misimplemented by the Russian and Chinese dictatorships) may repudiate the concept of a divine creator, but it's chock full of beliefs that are logically indefensible. Marx believed that there was a mystical inevitability to his worldview, and that whatever he did to promote Marxism would only speed history towards its final destination (Communism, the withering away of the State, etc.), rather than actually changing its course. Marxism also claims to have as its basis some of the weirdist pseudophysics you'll find this side of Scientology.
I don't blame "religion" for all the deaths attributed to it by many of its critics, either. Religion is just one of the many "big ideas" that people use to convince others to devalue other people. But the point is, Communism and religion both make bold claims about the world and about their claims on your heart and mind, then demand that these bold claims be believed without proof.
So from where I stand, as a person who likes to call himself a "freethinker", those murderous Communist regimes have much more in common with religious doctrines than with the philosophies that guide my actions.
Slashdot Mirror
If anything, this makes it easier to snooker people.
Before: You had a football you want to pawn off as an "authentic Superbowl XXXXVIICLM ball". How did you convince your buyer that it was the real deal? Dunno.
Now: You have a football you want to pawn off. How do you convince your buyer? Shine a bit of green light on it, and watch it glow back at you. Cha-ching!
Didn't anyone anywhere look at this plan and think, "so the idea is to take a football, and make it unduplicatable by smearing on some stringy goop (DNA) whose sole purpose is to be easily duplicated?"
Complete, utter moronicallishness.
Fully disagree.
You claim that China has the right to legislate as it sees fit. Where does this inalienable right come from?
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses. Not from some
farcical aquatic ceremony. Not from the end of a gun. Whatever China does within its own borders is fine by me, so long as China is governed at the behest of the governed.
There is positively no reason to give the will of a tiny clique of despots any moral standing. That goes double for you, Cheney.
Here's what I get from your post:
1) These tech companies have no choice but to do business with China.
2) There is no such thing as civil disobedience. A law is a law is a law, and if it says to throw live puppies in the mulcher then by God, that's what you do.
3) Corporations have no responsibilities beyond their own bottom lines. Not to human decency, not to the environment, not to the quality of life of their customers or workers. The governments of the countries in which they do business are the corporations' only conscience.
I don't like this world you want to live in.
While I am in favor of drug decriminalization, you're trivializing the issue when you compare America's laws against marijuana to China's laws against speaking out against its laws against marijuana. Follow?
If a company comes here to do business, they have to abide by our rules against marijuana. If we go to China to do business, we have to abide by their rules against criticism of the Party. If we go to Morvikonia to do business, we have to agree to help them round up and execute women who have been unfaithful to their husbands. These three situations are all exactly the same, right? Of course not.
If you're going to make this sort of analogy, at least compare apples to apples. Maybe you could talk about how other countries might stop doing business with the U.S. for, say, our detainment and torture of war prisoners, or our spying on our own citizens without any sort of due process or oversight.
But then people start thinking, "Hey, that sort of makes sense," and your whole argument gets blown out of the water.
Not really. A really crappy book or game could theoretically be turned into an awesome movie. I once bought an RPG that promised one of the deepest, most compelling plots available. Couldn't master the controls, and the graphics sucked. So maybe if someone took the plot and turned it into a book or a movie, it might have been cool.
I see where you're coming from. But I also see that the rule you're describing is your own, not Blizzard's. Lots of the guilds are about out-of-game associations, and Blizzard isn't doing squat about them. I don't see that changing in the future, no matter how much the purists claim about how their personal asthetics have been violated. So bringing up role-playing purity may be an intriguing exercise, but it's only obscuring the real issue: Is it right to "protect" a group of players from their immature, juvenile peers by hampering their ability to freely associate with each other?
I really think that what Blizzard is doing is wrong. Squashing a GLBT-friendly guild while allowing, say, a Mormon-friendly guild (shout-out to the Warriors of Cumorah and The Gadianton Robbers), then there is a real double standard in play.
Grr. You people just don't get it. See, the government of China had money! And Google wanted that money. They only agreed to censor their site because Google wanted that money. They wouldn't have violated their standards, but they were forced into it by the money!
Tell me you wouldn't suck up to a totalitarian regime if there were a few million cash on the table. Of course you would.
You're just not getting it. ID will never be a "plausible conclusion." Anyone has the right to believe, deep down in their hearts, that God is the ultimate architect of the Universe and our place in it. That will always be the case. Always. Because there is no possible piece of evidence that would ever be able to disprove the idea.
That's why ID isn't "an alternative" to evolution: because ID is not a scientific theory.
I expect those examples to go away, because evolution has passed test after rigorous scientific test. I expect those examples to go away, because I find ludicrous the idea that God would either use the wasteful process of evolution, or that He would intentionally fake all the evidence that leads us to conclude the truth of evolution. I expect those examples to go away, because people like you have been fighting a rearguard action against scientific naturalism for the last five hundred years, and your track record is laughable.
But even if these examples are legitimate, and even if no naturalistic explanation ever holds water, ID will never be a valid scientific conclusion, nor will it become the best available theory. That's not "naturalistic bigotry," just the simple recognition that you cannot conduct meaningful investigations of the world and also assume the existence of a supreme being.
Your post shows that you--like most ID proponents--have trouble distinguishing between "falsifying Evolution" and "proving Creationism." Your opponent was saying, "here are some things that could decisively prove that Evolution is impossible." But they're all supported by evidence that some ID'ers accept, and so you get all confused.
... er... the blood clotting cascade... and... um... the flagellum...
Creationists like yourself* think of Evolution and Creationism as being in exclusive competition like two boxers in a ring. If one falls, the one left standing must be the winner. But science doesn't work that way. There is never a permanent winner, and there is always the possibility of new evidence coming out that will rock an old theory to its core. So even if Evolution died suddenly, science would still continue to look for naturalistic explanations for the world we see around us.
As for the constant harping on "irreducable complexity": The very idea is little more than the fallacy of "argument from incredulity" writ large. Forty years ago, the sine qua non of "irreducable complexity" was the eye. How could such a complex structure evolve gradually? What good is an eye without all its constituent parts? They would all have to emerge simultaneously.
Since then, there has been mounting evidence that the eye is NOT irreducably complex. Creationists-turned-ID'ers still trot out the eye as an example when speaking to the uninformed. But when going up against hostile, skeptical audiences, smart ones drop it in favor of... let's see, the flagellum... and
I expect these other examples will meet the same ignoble fate.
* Are so.
Dembski is so wrong here. So, so, very wrong. It's clear he doesn't even know the meaning of the word "falsifiable".
If evolutionists could show that every one of these "irreducibly complex structures" was indeed reducable, and could be developed by gradual, Darwinian processes, that would not falsify Intelligent Design. It would show that its proponents had been spouting pseudoscientific gibberish for the last decade, but it does nothing to close off the possibility that God created everything.
In his other quote, about the falsifiability of Evolution, he makes another blunder that shows he really doesn't know what he's talking about. Just because a theory doesn't currently account for a set of observations doesn't mean you scrap the theory. It means you start looking for patterns in the non-conforming observations, and see if modifications to the theory explain the data better. Sometimes the necessary changes are profound, and cut very much to the center of the theory. But it always, always, always leads to a theory that has more explanatory power than the theory it is succeeding.
Intelligent Design is unfalsifiable, because it relies on the concept of some Creator, who has the power to shape the world in precisely any way It sees fit. Therefore, any set of observations is consistent with the Intelligent Design "Theory", which is precisely why it's unscientific, and precisely why it has zero explanatory power. If we kept throwing up our hands and shouting, "I give up, God did it!" we'd still be beating each other over the head with flint axes.
You're comparing Google refusing to filter search results for a communist dictatorship to a full-scale embargo of China? Claiming that refusing to provide filtered search services is the same as starving an entire country is more than a little over-the-top.
I haven't seen anyone saying "Google shouldn't do business in China, because they're evil Communists." But they really shouldn't be doing anyone's dirty work for them. Political censorship is the dirtiest work there is, it's antithetical to Google's mission of being a provider of accurate information, and the fact that there was even a discussion of doing this shows that Google has sold off a big chunk of its soul. It should have been a slam-dunk, no brainer.
And don't forget: It's a really glittery sword!
The article explicitly states that the Supreme Court didn't declare the monitoring of a telephone conversation to be a "search" until the 1960s. Prior to such a ruling, it would be questionable whether such an intrusion would constitute a violation of the fourth amendment.
Five years ago, Iraq wasn't on the brink of civil war. It wouldn't be today, had Bush taken a bit more care in planning the invasion. But no, he figured that once Hussein was toppled, it would all be small children scattering rose petals before our liberation force.
If you're so worried about not getting "the good news", you should read the Iraqi papers. Apparently, our government is paying to plant all sorts of good news in them. The fact is, the media is there to report what is actually happening, not to drum up support for the war. If the media has failed in anything, it was in their slack-jawed acceptance of the intelligence that led us into war in the first place.
Both administrations wanted this law. Porn is one of those issues where both sides use it when they have a need to appear "tough on evil". It really speaks to the "values crowd", far more than things like universal health care, minimum wage laws, environmental protection, and--I don't know--not blowing up countries that don't threaten you. Nah, those ideas don't have moral implications.
That's the sort of naive, pre-September 11 talk that got three thousand American citizens killed. While you sniveling liberals are sitting up in your ivory towers, making all your pointless, academic distinctions, George Bush is plowing straight ahead, protecting our lives and our freedoms from pornographers and terrorists. This is why the reality-based community will never win; too much thinking, not enough doing.
Bug fixing happens all the time in software development. Nothing about this story indicates that Microsoft is ahead of the game.
Rather, what it indicates is that Microsoft is recycling a bunch of XP code. That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially given the need for backwards compatability. But it means that whenever they find a new XPloit, they'll have to release a Vista patch at the same time. Otherwise, hackers could reverse-engineer the XP patch, and try the same exploit on Vista.
That will be more true once Vista actually launches. Right now, I guess they can just console themselves by saying that hardly anyone is using Vista, and certainly not on production systems. But it would be a good idea for them to get their XP and Vista patching schedules synched.
If it really was a case of someone pushing the wrong button, then there is a good chance that the blame should fall on the person who designed the button, rather than the person who hit the button. Read this for more details.
Whenever I set up a new Windows box for family type people, I add several categories of applications (Multimedia, Word Processing, Internet, etc.), to help "keep things organized". I come back a few months later, and of course they've installed a ton of new crapware, and of course none of it has been put in the proper categories.
My theory is that there is one reason and one reason alone for the way vendors organize their apps on Windows. They want the user to see the company name as frequently as possible.
Smith didn't just write/translate/dig up/ymmv a "companion book". He also went into the Bible proper and made lots of changes (which he called corrections). The results of this effort are called "The Joseph Smith Translation" within the LDS Church. Some of his changes seem rather self-serving. For example, in Genesis 50, the Joseph who was the son of Jacob gives a rather short death speech. But Joseph Smith turned it into a much more elaborate speech wherein Joseph Smith's own career is prophesied.
The LDS party line is that the Bible was corrupted over the centuries, and that the Joseph Smith Translation (though incomplete and not official) is inspired by God and uniquely true to the original Bible. Yet there isn't any manuscript evidence for any of Smith's changes. Funny that.
As someone who once ran over a low-flying goose, I question the certainty of your claims.
Small birds are highly maneuverable. Large birds are somewhat less so.
Yeah, because it's great when the Emirate of Kissoffistan finds a new mine and suddenly can lay claim to twenty percent of everything else in the world. Why would the distribution of a soft, pretty, not terribly useful metal determine how all the rest of the world's resources get allocated?
Waah! They're taking my money and using it to help the poor! Mine! Waaah!
See above.
Ummm, people do talk about that stuff. Some people can't shut up about it. This must be your first time on Slashdot.
Because what the folks in New Orleans needed to defend themselves against Katrina was small-arms fire. I'm not aware of any sort of literal genocide against the poor. If there was, what good would it do to give them "the right to bear arms?" If the rich are all genociding against the poor, guess who will be able to afford the best weapons? This solution seems utterly irrelevant to whatever problem you might conceivably be talking about.
Yeah, because society will never be able to survive your crackpot libertarianism. We should just hunt you down and send you to Gimto, I guess.
The distinction you're trying to make is actually the distinction between "strong" and "weak" atheism (to use the terminology atheists use in such discussions). A "weak atheist" says, "I do not believe there is a God." A "strong atheist" says, "I believe there is no God."
Agnosticism is a thing apart, and again there are strong and weak variants. A weak agnostic can say, "I believe that there may or may not be a God." But a strong agnostic makes an additional claim: "There is insufficient evidence for anyone to justifiably be either a theist or an atheist."
Communism (as promoted by Marx and misimplemented by the Russian and Chinese dictatorships) may repudiate the concept of a divine creator, but it's chock full of beliefs that are logically indefensible. Marx believed that there was a mystical inevitability to his worldview, and that whatever he did to promote Marxism would only speed history towards its final destination (Communism, the withering away of the State, etc.), rather than actually changing its course. Marxism also claims to have as its basis some of the weirdist pseudophysics you'll find this side of Scientology.
I don't blame "religion" for all the deaths attributed to it by many of its critics, either. Religion is just one of the many "big ideas" that people use to convince others to devalue other people. But the point is, Communism and religion both make bold claims about the world and about their claims on your heart and mind, then demand that these bold claims be believed without proof.
So from where I stand, as a person who likes to call himself a "freethinker", those murderous Communist regimes have much more in common with religious doctrines than with the philosophies that guide my actions.