If both party's motives are pure, they should have no problem with one.
Well, if someone asks for a pre-nup he or she is already considering divorce to be a event with a rather high likelyhood. Is it really smart to marry someone who considers divorce a likely event?
how about 870M being BETTER in almost EVERY single parameter than 970M?
The 970M is based on Maxwell instead of the Kepler architecture of 870M. It is going to be a lot faster than the 870M despite having a lower number of shaders and a lower clock speed.
There are several reasons for this. In Maxwell memory access is more effective: There is a improved framebuffer compression that increases effective bandwidth by around 25%. L2 cache is now 2 MB instead of 768 KB in 870M. The next and likely more important change are more efficient gpu cores. 970M has 10 SMM cores with 128 Shaders each while 870M has 7 SMX cores with 192 Shaders each. Despite 50% less shaders per core each SMM is ~90% as fast as a SMX. NVidia did many microarchitectural enhancements such as improved instruction scheduling and shorter pipelines.
GTX970 is a about as fast as GTX780 Ti despite having 40% less shaders, 50% less memory bandwidth and only 26% higher clock.
It can falsely flag you as overweight, but if it marks you obese you have a serious problems.
It depends. Overweight seems to be very healthy and results in a quite significant reduction of mortality. Obesity class I (BMI 30-35) seems to still provide a slightly lower mortality than normal weight. "BMI and mortality: results from a national longitudinal study of Canadian adults." So do you also consider normal weight to be a serious problem?
I've seen plenty of people on/. decrying the fact that H-1B workers are horribly underpaid. Having met quite a lot of them, I've yet to discover one that's actually paid any less than their American (or green-card-holding) counterparts.
Even when employers pay normal wages to H-1B workers, it can still drive down wages by creating more supply. Forcing employers of H-1B works to pay substantially higher wages than normal would indeed by very useful. This would drive up wages, because if employers have to decide between a H-1B with 50% above normal wage or paying an employee from a different company 30% more to make him switch, most would choose to not hire any H-1B.
At the moment we are just seeing what is happening when a formally almost monopolistic marketplace is opened up: The former monopolist loses market share and the competition gains market share. But this does not mean the former monopolist is going to disappear, it will just shrink a lot. And while Christianity has decreasing market share in the US and Western Europe, in other place with a former monopoly of state mandated Atheism, Christianity and other religions are gaining market share. E.g.: In China and Russia.
I don't see why you should deny someone a legal right based on some accident of biology, whether chromosome or pigment
So mentally ill persons should have access to guns, because it is just some accident of biology that caused their mental illness?
Oh, that argument. So really, even heterosexual couples should have to prove their fertility before marriage. No marriage for post-menopausal women. Would you also annul heterosexual marriages if they fail to produce children within some allocated timeframe?
Would be fine with me. But you are missing an important concept here. It is perfectly normal that laws are made for the average case. It can usually be accepted that a few persons get an unfair advantage or disadvantage from a law that they do not really deserve, what matters is if most people addressed by the law will be treated fairly. If you say marriage is only for couple who will procreate then you are treating most people fair if you ban gay marriage. You will provide an unfair advantage to unfertile or unwilling heterosexual couples and an unfair disadvantage to homosexual couples who will procreate using donor sperm or a surrogate mother. But you will still treat most people fair as long as most heterosexual couples actually procreate and most homosexual couples do not.
. Under the U.S. Constitution, states must grant equal protection of law to all citizens.
Yes.
That implies making civil marriage available to same-sex couples.
No. The first question is: Is it a discrimination of a citizen or of a couple? Even with gay marriage banned, all citizen still keep the same right to marry a opposite sex spouse.
But the more important thing is: equal protection does not apply when there is rational reason for the discrimination, e.g.: banning some mentally ill people from gun ownership has a rational reason and thus can not be considered a violation of the equal protection of law of mentally ill citizens.
This is a non-discriminatory practice, despite the fact that a lot of gun violence is committed by mentally healthy citizens and a lot of mentally ill citizens would not commit gun violence, even if they would be allowed to own a gun.
Most opponents of gay marriage argue that differences in procreation are the rational reason why same-sex relationships can be treated differently than opposite-sex relationships. And it is certainly true that the likelyhood of procreation differs a lot between these two groups.
When a person can't do something because of the shape of their genitals or the pretense or absence of a Y chromosome, ipso facto that's not equal treatment.
Or just biology. I'm pretty sure I can never get pregnant. I think it might be related to the shape of my genitals. I should sue the state.
You can, but others can voice their objection, like OKCupid does here. Freedom of speech is for all, and does not mean freedom from criticism.
And other can voice their objection on the objection. And in this case there are several good reasons to object to OKCupid's objection even if you completely disagree with Eich:
1. Pragmatism: Living together in a democracy requires people to work together even if they have strong disagreements in their religious or political beliefs. For this reason objections should primarily be aimed directly at the belief itself and not at the persons holding them. This enables working together even with disagreements.
2. Fairness: Even if you disagree with someone you should still not misrepresent his stance. OKCupid claims gay relationships would illegal if Mr. Eich got his way on gay marriage. But Gay relationships would still be legal, even when gay marriage are banned. So you can not claim Eich wants gay relationships to be illegal, just because he supported California's Prop 8.
3. Proportionality: Brendan Eich donated $1000 for Prop 8. A rather small sum of money for a high profile engineer such as Eich. This clearly not the most important topic for Eich. He is not a major spokesperson against gay marriage, he is best known for his Javascript work and not for his opposition to gay marriage. The response should have a reasonable proportion to the thing that is being criticized. Brendan Eich's $1000 are now 100x more visible than the $1,000,000 by Alan Ashton.
You don't seem to understand the meaning of implication. If A implies B, then B must be true in all cases where A is true.
So if a lack of intelligence would imply believe in God then everyone who lacks intelligence would also have believe in God. So even a single person lacking intelligence without believing in a god shows that the implication does not exist.
You seem to understand "implication" as "contributory cause". They are not the same thing. A contributory cause makes something more likely. While a sufficient cause or a implication must ALWAYS have a specific effect.
1) Smoking causes lung cancer, but not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer. If smoking would imply lung cancer every smoker would also be suffering from lung cancer. It is clear that religion does not imply a low IQ, because some really smart religious people do exist. 2) Lack of intelligence also does not imply believe in God, because there are stupid atheists as well. 3) There are many possible causes for both religion and low intelligence.
- If religion is one of the rare sources of hope in insecure situations, how would that make religions look bad? This would be like saying: Antibiotics are bad, they are consumed mostly by unhealthy people.
There can also be causality chains. E.g.: - Higher Intelligence causes people to question the believes for neighbors. - This makes it more likely to get a different set of believes than the neighbors. - If the majority of the neighbors believes in god, mostly high IQ people will not share this believe.
If you look at Lynn and Nyborg's data you will notice that not that nations with the overall highest level of atheist have the highest average IQ, but instead the nations with around 10-20% atheists have the highest IQ.
More than half of Americans believe in some form of creationism (young earth creationism, intelligent design, or "evolution guided by God").
"Evolution guided by God" = Theistic Evolution is not creationism. That is just new atheist crap. The most common version of Theistic evolution does not make any testable predictions different from the scientific theory of evolution. It just adds a untestable metaphysical believe to it or as Francis Collins phrases it: "evolution is real, but that it was set in motion by God". Just because you disagree with this metaphysical claim it does not turn theistic evolution into creationism.
If China and Russia would sell off their dollars it would make USD much cheaper. This would make imported goods more expensive but at the same time it would also provide a huge boost to the economy because everyone would try to use these cheap USD to buy goods from the USD. But if everyone is trying to buy goods from the US using cheap USDs, prices and thus the value of the USD would increase because of supply and demand. Supply of US-manufactured goods does not magically increase just because Russia and China throw throw loads of USDs into the market.
Then you are arguing that same sex couples should never be allowed to have children,
No. But as with opposite sex couples requiring a sperm donation, there should be process for proper transfer of the responsibilty for the child. It is fine to transfer the responsibility from the biological father to a social mother. But it should not be possible to just remove the responsibility of the father without providing a second person that steps in.
because it will always require someone of the opposite sex to assist with creating the child
I would not be completely sure about this. It might be possible at some point two eggs can be fused together giving birth to a girl with two biological mothers and no biological father.
and if that other party will always be a legal parent of that child then same sex couples can never really have children legally. That is wrong.
This does not really follow. If you do not allow to transfer the legal parenthood from its biological parents to social parents then same sex couples can not be legal parents of their social childern. But it would just the same for any opposite sex couple that requires a sperm donation, they could also not have kids. I do not see any reason why states must allow transfer of biological parenthood to social parents. It more seems to be something that is nice to have but I do not know of any fundamental human right that would be violated if you do not allow this.
Someone can exercise their right to take money from someone else? (...) We already have too many children
If someone decides to have a baby he or she should also be responsible for supporting it. Especially if you believe that we have too many childern already, you should be in favor of this. If you donate your sperm to woman to have a child you should better be sure that she can support the child by herself, if not you should not have provided it in the first place.
I don't think you can blame the parents for "fucking over" the donor: it's the Kansas Department for Children and Families that has brought the case, and the recipients of the funds may not have a say in the matter.
And the Kansas Department for Children and Families is completely right about this: Two persons cannot make any contract or agreement that takes away the rights of a third person. It is the right of the child to get support from his biological parents. The mother cannot decide that the child should not exercise this right. Even as a legal guardian of the child she can only make decisions for the child that are in the interest of the child. But not getting support from the child's farther is in the interest of the mother but not in the interest of the child.
10 Mb/s upstream is not that unusual these days. And many botnets are way bigger than 10000 bots. Even if each bot has just 2 Mb/s upstream, you only need 50000 Bots. And botnets are not limited to infecting computers on home user connections. Infecting 100 servers on 1 Gbit/s connections is also enough.
A BSD-licensed C++ reference implementation of both HEVC/H.265 encoding and decoding is available. This implementation is focused on research and features and not on speed. Especially the encoder is very slow, a few frames per minute is completely normal, even on good machines. But many people have optimized the reference implementation by adding SIMD and parallelizing the decoder and have reached 4K real time decoding and >100fps for 1080p decoding, even on low end machines. A C-based reimplementation is not really needed to get good speed, nor it is needed to have a open source implementation and they are not even saying anything about the speed of their decoder.
Uh, the article you are linking says Finland has a small number of private schools. And they are completely funded by the state. Finland is not forcing anyone into public school, instead their public schools are so good, that almost nobody wants to go to a private school, even when private schools are free.
As already said, for an example see Zen Buddhism, also see the theory of political religions. Some definitions of religion require a god, many definitions of religions do not require God or anything supernatural, e.g.:
Clifford Geertz: "Religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, persuasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in [people] by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic."
Soviet Communism is clearly a religion under such a definition. It had all: a system of symbols, powerful motivations, a big theory about the general order of existence and last but not least it also did (4). The predictions done by the communist ideology were treated as completely proven facts.
There are many definitions of religion that do not involve supernatural beliefs, e.g.:
Clifford Geertz: "Religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, persuasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in [people] by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic."
Schmidt, et al.: "Religions, then, are systems of meaning embodied in a pattern of life, a community of faith, and a worldview that articulate a view of the sacred and of what ultimately matters."
J. Miltion Yinger: "Religion is a system of beliefs and practices by means of which a group of people struggle with the ultimate problem of human life."
Durkheim: "A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."
Communism, as a philosophy, and what has actually been implemented in the real world, are very different things.
That is often claimed, but I'm not sure if that is really true. I do not think it is just a matter of bad luck that all real world attempts to implement communism ended in a horrible mess. Stuff like "Dictatorship of the proletariat" or "Class warfare" is right from Marx.
Communism does not ban the worship of God, god(s) or goddess(es), and the only place of proof is the communist manifesto, and I would have to cite the entire book to show it's not in there.
Communism as a philosophy contains far more than just the communist manifesto. All the other works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Trotsky,.... You do not need to agree with them, but these works are still part of the philosophy of communism. There is not a single true version of Communism, but many different versions with different teachings and some of them are religions. What you are trying to do here, is the Communist version of the "True Christian" defense tactic. A Christian is still a Christian even if he does evil things, that are completely against your interpretation of what are a true Christian should do. And a Communist is still a Communist even if he, in your opinion, completely misunderstood Marx. Notice that I explicitly mention Marxism-Leninism and also Maoism in my last post. Sure, there is also a version of Communism that is just a economic system and nothing else. But Marxism-Leninism, Maoism and Stalinism are also versions of Communism and they are not just an economic system.
Atheist & Theism = religious systems
Atheism and Theism are not religious systems, but properties that can be part of religions and also non-religious world views.
Yes. But I have also seen many physics textbooks, but I'm quite sure that most Physicists do not imagine electrons as middle sized dots or colorful bubbles. Humans are able of abstract thought. Just like you can not illustrate electrons exactly how they really look like, you can not illustrate god. The ban of images of god that exists in many religions is clear sign that people always have been aware of this. Banning images of god is way to deal with this problem, symbolic images like the ones in the sixtine chapel are a different way of dealing it.
Slashdot Mirror
If both party's motives are pure, they should have no problem with one.
Well, if someone asks for a pre-nup he or she is already considering divorce to be a event with a rather high likelyhood. Is it really smart to marry someone who considers divorce a likely event?
how about 870M being BETTER in almost EVERY single parameter than 970M?
The 970M is based on Maxwell instead of the Kepler architecture of 870M. It is going to be a lot faster than the 870M despite having a lower number of shaders and a lower clock speed.
There are several reasons for this. In Maxwell memory access is more effective: There is a improved framebuffer compression that increases effective bandwidth by around 25%. L2 cache is now 2 MB instead of 768 KB in 870M. The next and likely more important change are more efficient gpu cores. 970M has 10 SMM cores with 128 Shaders each while 870M has 7 SMX cores with 192 Shaders each. Despite 50% less shaders per core each SMM is ~90% as fast as a SMX. NVidia did many microarchitectural enhancements such as improved instruction scheduling and shorter pipelines.
GTX970 is a about as fast as GTX780 Ti despite having 40% less shaders, 50% less memory bandwidth and only 26% higher clock.
It can falsely flag you as overweight, but if it marks you obese you have a serious problems.
It depends. Overweight seems to be very healthy and results in a quite significant reduction of mortality. Obesity class I (BMI 30-35) seems to still provide a slightly lower mortality than normal weight. "BMI and mortality: results from a national longitudinal study of Canadian adults." So do you also consider normal weight to be a serious problem?
I've seen plenty of people on /. decrying the fact that H-1B workers are horribly underpaid. Having met quite a lot of them, I've yet to discover one that's actually paid any less than their American (or green-card-holding) counterparts.
Even when employers pay normal wages to H-1B workers, it can still drive down wages by creating more supply. Forcing employers of H-1B works to pay substantially higher wages than normal would indeed by very useful. This would drive up wages, because if employers have to decide between a H-1B with 50% above normal wage or paying an employee from a different company 30% more to make him switch, most would choose to not hire any H-1B.
At the moment we are just seeing what is happening when a formally almost monopolistic marketplace is opened up: The former monopolist loses market share and the competition gains market share. But this does not mean the former monopolist is going to disappear, it will just shrink a lot. And while Christianity has decreasing market share in the US and Western Europe, in other place with a former monopoly of state mandated Atheism, Christianity and other religions are gaining market share. E.g.: In China and Russia.
I don't see why you should deny someone a legal right based on some accident of biology, whether chromosome or pigment
So mentally ill persons should have access to guns, because it is just some accident of biology that caused their mental illness?
Oh, that argument. So really, even heterosexual couples should have to prove their fertility before marriage. No marriage for post-menopausal women. Would you also annul heterosexual marriages if they fail to produce children within some allocated timeframe?
Would be fine with me. But you are missing an important concept here. It is perfectly normal that laws are made for the average case. It can usually be accepted that a few persons get an unfair advantage or disadvantage from a law that they do not really deserve, what matters is if most people addressed by the law will be treated fairly.
If you say marriage is only for couple who will procreate then you are treating most people fair if you ban gay marriage. You will provide an unfair advantage to unfertile or unwilling heterosexual couples and an unfair disadvantage to homosexual couples who will procreate using donor sperm or a surrogate mother. But you will still treat most people fair as long as most heterosexual couples actually procreate and most homosexual couples do not.
. Under the U.S. Constitution, states must grant equal protection of law to all citizens.
Yes.
That implies making civil marriage available to same-sex couples.
No. The first question is: Is it a discrimination of a citizen or of a couple? Even with gay marriage banned, all citizen still keep the same right to marry a opposite sex spouse.
But the more important thing is: equal protection does not apply when there is rational reason for the discrimination, e.g.: banning some mentally ill people from gun ownership has a rational reason and thus can not be considered a violation of the equal protection of law of mentally ill citizens.
This is a non-discriminatory practice, despite the fact that a lot of gun violence is committed by mentally healthy citizens and a lot of mentally ill citizens would not commit gun violence, even if they would be allowed to own a gun.
Most opponents of gay marriage argue that differences in procreation are the rational reason why same-sex relationships can be treated differently than opposite-sex relationships. And it is certainly true that the likelyhood of procreation differs a lot between these two groups.
When a person can't do something because of the shape of their genitals or the pretense or absence of a Y chromosome, ipso facto that's not equal treatment.
Or just biology. I'm pretty sure I can never get pregnant. I think it might be related to the shape of my genitals. I should sue the state.
You can, but others can voice their objection, like OKCupid does here. Freedom of speech is for all, and does not mean freedom from criticism.
And other can voice their objection on the objection. And in this case there are several good reasons to object to OKCupid's objection even if you completely disagree with Eich:
1. Pragmatism: Living together in a democracy requires people to work together even if they have strong disagreements in their religious or political beliefs. For this reason objections should primarily be aimed directly at the belief itself and not at the persons holding them. This enables working together even with disagreements.
2. Fairness: Even if you disagree with someone you should still not misrepresent his stance. OKCupid claims gay relationships would illegal if Mr. Eich got his way on gay marriage. But Gay relationships would still be legal, even when gay marriage are banned. So you can not claim Eich wants gay relationships to be illegal, just because he supported California's Prop 8.
3. Proportionality: Brendan Eich donated $1000 for Prop 8. A rather small sum of money for a high profile engineer such as Eich. This clearly not the most important topic for Eich. He is not a major spokesperson against gay marriage, he is best known for his Javascript work and not for his opposition to gay marriage. The response should have a reasonable proportion to the thing that is being criticized. Brendan Eich's $1000 are now 100x more visible than the $1,000,000 by Alan Ashton.
You don't seem to understand the meaning of implication. If A implies B, then B must be true in all cases where A is true.
So if a lack of intelligence would imply believe in God then everyone who lacks intelligence would also have believe in God. So even a single person lacking intelligence without believing in a god shows that the implication does not exist.
You seem to understand "implication" as "contributory cause". They are not the same thing. A contributory cause makes something more likely. While a sufficient cause or a implication must ALWAYS have a specific effect.
Causility != Implication
1) Smoking causes lung cancer, but not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer. If smoking would imply lung cancer every smoker would also be suffering from lung cancer. It is clear that religion does not imply a low IQ, because some really smart religious people do exist.
2) Lack of intelligence also does not imply believe in God, because there are stupid atheists as well.
3) There are many possible causes for both religion and low intelligence.
- If religion is one of the rare sources of hope in insecure situations, how would that make religions look bad? This would be like saying: Antibiotics are bad, they are consumed mostly by unhealthy people.
There can also be causality chains. E.g.:
- Higher Intelligence causes people to question the believes for neighbors.
- This makes it more likely to get a different set of believes than the neighbors.
- If the majority of the neighbors believes in god, mostly high IQ people will not share this believe.
If you look at Lynn and Nyborg's data you will notice that not that nations with the overall highest level of atheist have the highest average IQ, but instead the nations with around 10-20% atheists have the highest IQ.
Why would you find this fascinating? There have been numerous studies showing a negative correlation between religiosity and intelligence.
Correlation != Causality. Also note that Lynn and Nyborg published the same kind of results for gender vs. I.Q. and race vs. I.Q.
The northern europe doesn't even believe god exists.
Not really. Look at these statistics from the eurobarometer poll:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#Europe
Europe seems to be split between Theism, Pantheism and Atheism.
More than half of Americans believe in some form of creationism (young earth creationism, intelligent design, or "evolution guided by God").
"Evolution guided by God" = Theistic Evolution is not creationism. That is just new atheist crap. The most common version of Theistic evolution does not make any testable predictions different from the scientific theory of evolution. It just adds a untestable metaphysical believe to it or as Francis Collins phrases it: "evolution is real, but that it was set in motion by God". Just because you disagree with this metaphysical claim it does not turn theistic evolution into creationism.
If China and Russia would sell off their dollars it would make USD much cheaper. This would make imported goods more expensive but at the same time it would also provide a huge boost to the economy because everyone would try to use these cheap USD to buy goods from the USD. But if everyone is trying to buy goods from the US using cheap USDs, prices and thus the value of the USD would increase because of supply and demand. Supply of US-manufactured goods does not magically increase just because Russia and China throw throw loads of USDs into the market.
Then you are arguing that same sex couples should never be allowed to have children,
No. But as with opposite sex couples requiring a sperm donation, there should be process for proper transfer of the responsibilty for the child. It is fine to transfer the responsibility from the biological father to a social mother. But it should not be possible to just remove the responsibility of the father without providing a second person that steps in.
because it will always require someone of the opposite sex to assist with creating the child
I would not be completely sure about this. It might be possible at some point two eggs can be fused together giving birth to a girl with two biological mothers and no biological father.
and if that other party will always be a legal parent of that child then same sex couples can never really have children legally. That is wrong.
This does not really follow. If you do not allow to transfer the legal parenthood from its biological parents to social parents then same sex couples can not be legal parents of their social childern. But it would just the same for any opposite sex couple that requires a sperm donation, they could also not have kids. I do not see any reason why states must allow transfer of biological parenthood to social parents. It more seems to be something that is nice to have but I do not know of any fundamental human right that would be violated if you do not allow this.
Someone can exercise their right to take money from someone else? (...) We already have too many children
If someone decides to have a baby he or she should also be responsible for supporting it. Especially if you believe that we have too many childern already, you should be in favor of this. If you donate your sperm to woman to have a child you should better be sure that she can support the child by herself, if not you should not have provided it in the first place.
I don't think you can blame the parents for "fucking over" the donor: it's the Kansas Department for Children and Families that has brought the case, and the recipients of the funds may not have a say in the matter.
And the Kansas Department for Children and Families is completely right about this: Two persons cannot make any contract or agreement that takes away the rights of a third person. It is the right of the child to get support from his biological parents. The mother cannot decide that the child should not exercise this right. Even as a legal guardian of the child she can only make decisions for the child that are in the interest of the child. But not getting support from the child's farther is in the interest of the mother but not in the interest of the child.
10 Mb/s upstream is not that unusual these days. And many botnets are way bigger than 10000 bots. Even if each bot has just 2 Mb/s upstream, you only need 50000 Bots. And botnets are not limited to infecting computers on home user connections. Infecting 100 servers on 1 Gbit/s connections is also enough.
Somehow the link was removed: http://hevc.hhi.fraunhofer.de/
A BSD-licensed C++ reference implementation of both HEVC/H.265 encoding and decoding is available. This implementation is focused on research and features and not on speed. Especially the encoder is very slow, a few frames per minute is completely normal, even on good machines.
But many people have optimized the reference implementation by adding SIMD and parallelizing the decoder and have reached 4K real time decoding and >100fps for 1080p decoding, even on low end machines.
A C-based reimplementation is not really needed to get good speed, nor it is needed to have a open source implementation and they are not even saying anything about the speed of their decoder.
Uh, the article you are linking says Finland has a small number of private schools. And they are completely funded by the state. Finland is not forcing anyone into public school, instead their public schools are so good, that almost nobody wants to go to a private school, even when private schools are free.
As already said, for an example see Zen Buddhism, also see the theory of political religions. Some definitions of religion require a god, many definitions of religions do not require God or anything supernatural, e.g.:
Clifford Geertz: "Religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, persuasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in [people] by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic."
Soviet Communism is clearly a religion under such a definition. It had all: a system of symbols, powerful motivations, a big theory about the general order of existence and last but not least it also did (4). The predictions done by the communist ideology were treated as completely proven facts.
There are many definitions of religion that do not involve supernatural beliefs, e.g.:
Clifford Geertz: "Religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, persuasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in [people] by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic."
Schmidt, et al.: "Religions, then, are systems of meaning embodied in a pattern of life, a community of faith, and a worldview that articulate a view of the sacred and of what ultimately matters."
J. Miltion Yinger: "Religion is a system of beliefs and practices by means of which a group of people struggle with the ultimate problem of human life."
Durkheim: "A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."
Communism, as a philosophy, and what has actually been implemented in the real world, are very different things.
That is often claimed, but I'm not sure if that is really true. I do not think it is just a matter of bad luck that all real world attempts to implement communism ended in a horrible mess. Stuff like "Dictatorship of the proletariat" or "Class warfare" is right from Marx.
Communism does not ban the worship of God, god(s) or goddess(es), and the only place of proof is the communist manifesto, and I would have to cite the entire book to show it's not in there.
Communism as a philosophy contains far more than just the communist manifesto. All the other works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Trotsky, ....
You do not need to agree with them, but these works are still part of the philosophy of communism. There is not a single true version of Communism, but many different versions with different teachings and some of them are religions. What you are trying to do here, is the Communist version of the "True Christian" defense tactic. A Christian is still a Christian even if he does evil things, that are completely against your interpretation of what are a true Christian should do. And a Communist is still a Communist even if he, in your opinion, completely misunderstood Marx. Notice that I explicitly mention Marxism-Leninism and also Maoism in my last post. Sure, there is also a version of Communism that is just a economic system and nothing else. But Marxism-Leninism, Maoism and Stalinism are also versions of Communism and they are not just an economic system.
Atheist & Theism = religious systems
Atheism and Theism are not religious systems, but properties that can be part of religions and also non-religious world views.
Ever seen the roof of the sixtine chapel?
Yes. But I have also seen many physics textbooks, but I'm quite sure that most Physicists do not imagine electrons as middle sized dots or colorful bubbles. Humans are able of abstract thought. Just like you can not illustrate electrons exactly how they really look like, you can not illustrate god. The ban of images of god that exists in many religions is clear sign that people always have been aware of this. Banning images of god is way to deal with this problem, symbolic images like the ones in the sixtine chapel are a different way of dealing it.