If the power to tax were only used for collecting money and not social engineering, then all of this would not be an issue. It is our bought and paid for politicians that abuse the power to tax to favor or disfavor certain groups. Tax laws should all be rewritten so that they don't favor or discriminate against any particular person or action, but only raise the amount of money needed.
"Do you honestly want your government to know every minute detail of your life?"
Actually I would not mind that one bit if I could also know along with you and everybody else know what the government and all of the bought and paid for politicians and their bureaucrat underlings are doing every moment of their lives.
The thing is that the spies who naturally consider themselves to be the good guys, don't want to be spied on themselves, but want to have complete freedom the spy of everybody else. In a world with an even playing field where EVERYBODY, without the slightest exception, would have all their actions and thoughts tracked 27/7 and made public would not necessarily be bad. Mr. Snowden took some steps to even the playing field.
It is because some people want to be more private than others, that causes problems. It is like that with other things, such as taxes or guns for instance. I won't tax you I won't tax me, we will just tax the man behind the tree. Tyrants or potential tyrants have always, without a single exception, always have endeavored to disarm those who might oppose their tyranny.
Those who worry are usually those who have something to hide or something criminal in the works.. Bottom line, you can't care about this, unless you do wrong or plan on doing wrong. That's kinda how I see it.
That is a wonderful vision you have, that would only work in a world where there is no evil. You may not have anything evil or criminal to hide, but that most often is not true of whoever is seeking your information.
How does the saying go... "They hide the information you're looking for in books."
Anybody can put anything down on paper. The question really is, do you trust the person, the author of the book? That is much more important than the actual content. The Bible is a collection of 66 books written down by 40 writers over a period of about 1500 years, all of whom claim to have received what they have written from a single author, namely God. God tells you that you may disbelieve him, but he also tells you what the consequences of that unbelief will be.
There is no absolute proof which one of our beliefs is correct, but in 100 years or less we both will have that information. At that time however it will be too late for you to change your mind.
When you tell somebody that you don't believe him/her, that is just another way of calling such a person a liar. Most people, especially if they're truthful, object to such a label. Why should the God of truth, who cannot lie, not be upset when you called him a liar and want to have nothing to do with you, unless you are willing to change your mind about that accusation by believing.
"Fortunately, popular opinion does not decide what the truth is."
You are definitely correct about that one. Long ago, a Roman governor named Pilate asked a Jewish prisoner this question: "What is truth?" Earlier, this now a prisoner about to be condemned to a painful death, named Jesus said this,...I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life;...(John 14:6)
A man who makes such an utterance about himself is either 1) unbelievably arrogant, 2) crazy, self deceived or monstrously evil, 3) speaking an incredible truth.
Millions of people and I have chosen to believe that Jesus Christ is who he claimed to be and was proclaimed by others to be, namely God come to earth in human form. He is the ultimate personification of all truth. The witness of what He said and did, as written down in the Bible, has endured throughout the centuries since then. When someone floating down a river is warned that there is a 300 foot waterfall up ahead and he/she chooses to ignore such a warning, whose fault is it when such a person is finally swept away? It is your prerogative to now make the choice to ignore and disbelieve numerous warnings in the Bible that there is something called hell for all eternity, but when you are going over the waterfall of physical death, it is too late to avoid your eternal doom.
Evidence from human history and today's human activity abundantly shows that you are in the minority. Also, you may change your mind when you are actually faced with death. Many people who believe like you very much think about it when death actually is imminent.
You forgot to take note of that little phrase "most religions". There are some religions, including atheism that as an article of faith proclaim that death is the end of existence of people. Even science contradicts that idea. Nothing ever goes out of existence, but only changes form. What makes you think that your spirit, soul, consciousness or whatever you want to call your immaterial self, ceases to exist just because your flesh and blood body no longer operates properly? Is the house that people live in and the people themselves not distinct?
The two chief human activities are preventing death and causing death. Most human energy and effort is expended in trying to avert death and immediately after that comes the effort to produce death. Those two activities affect every human being on this planet while they are still alive. I would therefore say that those are among the deepest needs of humans. We have vast governmental laws and regulations that try to keep people "safe and healthy" and conversely we expend billions each year to systematically kill people. Whether you like it or not, DEATH governs all of life.
It turns out that all the equations governing atomic activity, including radioactivity, have "constants" in them, specifically Planck's constant that have changed dramatically since the birth of the universe. There is evidence from ancient starlight, namely the red shift, but this is true. The man named William Tift also determined that this light was quantized. That means that the usual interpretation of the red shift's cause as motion is bogus. This change in some of these constants is caused by the nature of space itself, as the universe expanded outward. Maybe after you do some Google research into this, you may change your mind and also become "arrogant" by learning the truth.
Even if it could be proven, which it can't, that the warming is human caused, so what? For most life forms, like I said before, warm is better than freezing cold. Let's make the earth a little warmer, so the frozen wastes in the Arctic become habitable for humans and other living things. I say bring it on!
The thing is that for most humans, the "why" questions are more important than the "how" questions. Most people when they get a gift, say of a technological device, are not interested nearly as much how the thing works and when it was made, rather than why it was given and who the giver is. The Bible tells us this about the gift of life and what happens after death. Most complex devices come with an instruction book from the manufacturer so that those who obtain the gadget, can get the most out of it. The manufacturer of life, also has given an instruction book to go with it, called the Bible. No matter who the manufacturer is, many people ignore the instruction book included with the product.
Sometimes it gives you nothing, but what's the problem with that? Would you rather be filling in the answers with whatever nonsense that you can dream up? Why is it so bad to simply admit that something is unknown?
People fear the unknown, especially what lies behind the curtain of death. Those who believe what Jesus Christ said, need not fear death or what lies beyond, because Jesus told us what we need to know about it. You don't have to believe what he said, but then that's your problem.
What makes you so sure and other scientists as well, that gravity is the only force that acts in certain places of the universe. Most of the universe as a matter of fact is not nicely electrically neutral, like in our backyard, the solar system, but consists of electrically charged plasma. These plasmas are subject to a force that is 36 orders of magnitude greater than gravity, namely the electric force. It is not only possible, but fairly certain that the motion of objects in the center of the galaxy is subject to an overwhelmingly greater electrical force, wherein gravity is essentially for all practical purposes nonexistent. If the cosmologists would include the electrical force in their computer models, no fictional constructs such as black holes, dark energy and other made-up stuff would be needed. One problem is that any models that are based on the electric force would be at least twice as complicated as present-day simplistic attempts to model the motion of the galaxies, because the electric force can also repel as well as attract. If gravity needs to be taken into account as well, it gets even more complicated.
I agree. I am a Christian myself --- it's not just "early" scientists who find no conflict between their religious beliefs and a "scientifically predictable" universe. Note, however, that current scientific understanding does place more stringent constraints on what variety of scriptural hermeneutics extract accurate "facts of the Bible" --- for example, ultra-simplistic 19th-century "literal 6-days creation" readings are utterly out of the question.
All dating of what occurred ages ago is based on the fundamental assumption, namely that the clocks used have never in all that time ticked differently than they do today. From quantized red shift data as observed by Mr. Tifft, it can be shown that some fundamental constants of the universe have not been constant throughout time. One of these is Planck's constant which is involved in atomic processes, including radioactive decay and the emission of light from excited atoms. Clocks based on gravity, such as orbits of heavenly bodies in the solar system do not contain any terms in their equations that have time-dependent "constants" in them. Mankind has always measured time by these clocks rather than atomic clocks, which are rather recent invention. From this red shift data it is possible to map the approximately 3×10^8 nonlinearity decay curve of the atomic clock to the equivalent gravity time. This dramatic change in the relevant atomic constants is caused by the change in the properties of space itself, as the universe expanded from the very beginning of time.
Scientists today tell us that dinosaurs became extinct about 60 million years ago. That number, when correlated with gravity time, comes out to about the time in history when Job lived. He gives a very good description of creatures we now call dinosaurs, but were usually called dragons or other names in ancient times. There are other extinction events that scientists tell us happened millions of years ago, that can be correlated to the time of Noah and the flood. There is no difference in the chronology of the scientists and the chronology given in the Bible, except that the clock that scientists use ran much much faster when the universe was young.
The problem is that science does not address the deepest needs of human beings, especially when our mortality is demonstrated by someone at death, which is something that all of us will face. There is something about human beings that always refused to believe that death is the end of their existence. The pyramids and other monuments are stark evidence of that. Most religions have some kind of teaching that tries to give comfort to those who are left behind when someone dies. All founders of all religions, with one glaring exception, are dead. Not even the claim of their return from death is made. Jesus Christ is the only one who came back from death and is physically alive today in another dimension beyond our own. Just because of this, I would give more credence to what Jesus has to say about death and the world beyond, than any scientist or other religious leader.
So where do these precise relationships between cause and effect come from? Why do the laws of nature work consistently over time? Why are they not random, varying from day to day or year to year? Why are people no matter where they live on earth incurably religious? What answers can science give us, what if anything, happens after we die?
Science is also the study of God's splendor and majesty. Science is the effort of men thinking God's thoughts after him. Thousands of years ago, David Psalmist writes how the heavens declare the glory of God. From creation, David goes on to the power and wisdom of the word of God, as written down by many different people over large periods of time. At one time, science was the pursuit of truth, but nowadays it has become corrupted into the pursuit of fame and fortune.
To be accurately able to say how long ago something place, you have to have a clock that is reliable over the period of time you want to measure. All dating of long-ago ages is based on the assumption (belief) that the clocks we we use today have ticked at today's observable rates for that entire time. There is no way to check out whether this assumption is true.
Slashdot Mirror
If the power to tax were only used for collecting money and not social engineering, then all of this would not be an issue. It is our bought and paid for politicians that abuse the power to tax to favor or disfavor certain groups. Tax laws should all be rewritten so that they don't favor or discriminate against any particular person or action, but only raise the amount of money needed.
This would NOT be true if everybody was encrypting all their communications.
"Do you honestly want your government to know every minute detail of your life?"
Actually I would not mind that one bit if I could also know along with you and everybody else know what the government and all of the bought and paid for politicians and their bureaucrat underlings are doing every moment of their lives.
The thing is that the spies who naturally consider themselves to be the good guys, don't want to be spied on themselves, but want to have complete freedom the spy of everybody else. In a world with an even playing field where EVERYBODY, without the slightest exception, would have all their actions and thoughts tracked 27/7 and made public would not necessarily be bad. Mr. Snowden took some steps to even the playing field.
It is because some people want to be more private than others, that causes problems. It is like that with other things, such as taxes or guns for instance. I won't tax you I won't tax me, we will just tax the man behind the tree. Tyrants or potential tyrants have always, without a single exception, always have endeavored to disarm those who might oppose their tyranny.
Those who worry are usually those who have something to hide or something criminal in the works.. Bottom line, you can't care about this, unless you do wrong or plan on doing wrong. That's kinda how I see it.
That is a wonderful vision you have, that would only work in a world where there is no evil. You may not have anything evil or criminal to hide, but that most often is not true of whoever is seeking your information.
You'd be surprised, this may work, provided you use Limburger or some other very aromatic kind of cheese.
How does the saying go... "They hide the information you're looking for in books."
Anybody can put anything down on paper. The question really is, do you trust the person, the author of the book? That is much more important than the actual content. The Bible is a collection of 66 books written down by 40 writers over a period of about 1500 years, all of whom claim to have received what they have written from a single author, namely God. God tells you that you may disbelieve him, but he also tells you what the consequences of that unbelief will be.
There is no absolute proof which one of our beliefs is correct, but in 100 years or less we both will have that information. At that time however it will be too late for you to change your mind.
When you tell somebody that you don't believe him/her, that is just another way of calling such a person a liar. Most people, especially if they're truthful, object to such a label. Why should the God of truth, who cannot lie, not be upset when you called him a liar and want to have nothing to do with you, unless you are willing to change your mind about that accusation by believing.
"Fortunately, popular opinion does not decide what the truth is."
You are definitely correct about that one. Long ago, a Roman governor named Pilate asked a Jewish prisoner this question: "What is truth?" Earlier, this now a prisoner about to be condemned to a painful death, named Jesus said this, ...I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; ...(John 14:6)
A man who makes such an utterance about himself is either 1) unbelievably arrogant, 2) crazy, self deceived or monstrously evil, 3) speaking an incredible truth.
Millions of people and I have chosen to believe that Jesus Christ is who he claimed to be and was proclaimed by others to be, namely God come to earth in human form. He is the ultimate personification of all truth. The witness of what He said and did, as written down in the Bible, has endured throughout the centuries since then. When someone floating down a river is warned that there is a 300 foot waterfall up ahead and he/she chooses to ignore such a warning, whose fault is it when such a person is finally swept away? It is your prerogative to now make the choice to ignore and disbelieve numerous warnings in the Bible that there is something called hell for all eternity, but when you are going over the waterfall of physical death, it is too late to avoid your eternal doom.
Evidence from human history and today's human activity abundantly shows that you are in the minority. Also, you may change your mind when you are actually faced with death. Many people who believe like you very much think about it when death actually is imminent.
You forgot to take note of that little phrase "most religions". There are some religions, including atheism that as an article of faith proclaim that death is the end of existence of people. Even science contradicts that idea. Nothing ever goes out of existence, but only changes form. What makes you think that your spirit, soul, consciousness or whatever you want to call your immaterial self, ceases to exist just because your flesh and blood body no longer operates properly? Is the house that people live in and the people themselves not distinct?
The two chief human activities are preventing death and causing death. Most human energy and effort is expended in trying to avert death and immediately after that comes the effort to produce death. Those two activities affect every human being on this planet while they are still alive. I would therefore say that those are among the deepest needs of humans. We have vast governmental laws and regulations that try to keep people "safe and healthy" and conversely we expend billions each year to systematically kill people. Whether you like it or not, DEATH governs all of life.
It turns out that all the equations governing atomic activity, including radioactivity, have "constants" in them, specifically Planck's constant that have changed dramatically since the birth of the universe. There is evidence from ancient starlight, namely the red shift, but this is true. The man named William Tift also determined that this light was quantized. That means that the usual interpretation of the red shift's cause as motion is bogus. This change in some of these constants is caused by the nature of space itself, as the universe expanded outward. Maybe after you do some Google research into this, you may change your mind and also become "arrogant" by learning the truth.
Even if it could be proven, which it can't, that the warming is human caused, so what? For most life forms, like I said before, warm is better than freezing cold. Let's make the earth a little warmer, so the frozen wastes in the Arctic become habitable for humans and other living things. I say bring it on!
I had big science funded by governments and corporations in mind, where any new ideas outside of the mainstream are systematically stifled.
The thing is that for most humans, the "why" questions are more important than the "how" questions. Most people when they get a gift, say of a technological device, are not interested nearly as much how the thing works and when it was made, rather than why it was given and who the giver is. The Bible tells us this about the gift of life and what happens after death. Most complex devices come with an instruction book from the manufacturer so that those who obtain the gadget, can get the most out of it. The manufacturer of life, also has given an instruction book to go with it, called the Bible. No matter who the manufacturer is, many people ignore the instruction book included with the product.
What answers can science give us
Sometimes it gives you nothing, but what's the problem with that? Would you rather be filling in the answers with whatever nonsense that you can dream up? Why is it so bad to simply admit that something is unknown?
People fear the unknown, especially what lies behind the curtain of death. Those who believe what Jesus Christ said, need not fear death or what lies beyond, because Jesus told us what we need to know about it. You don't have to believe what he said, but then that's your problem.
What makes you so sure and other scientists as well, that gravity is the only force that acts in certain places of the universe. Most of the universe as a matter of fact is not nicely electrically neutral, like in our backyard, the solar system, but consists of electrically charged plasma. These plasmas are subject to a force that is 36 orders of magnitude greater than gravity, namely the electric force. It is not only possible, but fairly certain that the motion of objects in the center of the galaxy is subject to an overwhelmingly greater electrical force, wherein gravity is essentially for all practical purposes nonexistent. If the cosmologists would include the electrical force in their computer models, no fictional constructs such as black holes, dark energy and other made-up stuff would be needed. One problem is that any models that are based on the electric force would be at least twice as complicated as present-day simplistic attempts to model the motion of the galaxies, because the electric force can also repel as well as attract. If gravity needs to be taken into account as well, it gets even more complicated.
I agree. I am a Christian myself --- it's not just "early" scientists who find no conflict between their religious beliefs and a "scientifically predictable" universe. Note, however, that current scientific understanding does place more stringent constraints on what variety of scriptural hermeneutics extract accurate "facts of the Bible" --- for example, ultra-simplistic 19th-century "literal 6-days creation" readings are utterly out of the question.
All dating of what occurred ages ago is based on the fundamental assumption, namely that the clocks used have never in all that time ticked differently than they do today. From quantized red shift data as observed by Mr. Tifft, it can be shown that some fundamental constants of the universe have not been constant throughout time. One of these is Planck's constant which is involved in atomic processes, including radioactive decay and the emission of light from excited atoms. Clocks based on gravity, such as orbits of heavenly bodies in the solar system do not contain any terms in their equations that have time-dependent "constants" in them. Mankind has always measured time by these clocks rather than atomic clocks, which are rather recent invention. From this red shift data it is possible to map the approximately 3×10^8 nonlinearity decay curve of the atomic clock to the equivalent gravity time. This dramatic change in the relevant atomic constants is caused by the change in the properties of space itself, as the universe expanded from the very beginning of time.
Scientists today tell us that dinosaurs became extinct about 60 million years ago. That number, when correlated with gravity time, comes out to about the time in history when Job lived. He gives a very good description of creatures we now call dinosaurs, but were usually called dragons or other names in ancient times. There are other extinction events that scientists tell us happened millions of years ago, that can be correlated to the time of Noah and the flood. There is no difference in the chronology of the scientists and the chronology given in the Bible, except that the clock that scientists use ran much much faster when the universe was young.
The problem is that science does not address the deepest needs of human beings, especially when our mortality is demonstrated by someone at death, which is something that all of us will face. There is something about human beings that always refused to believe that death is the end of their existence. The pyramids and other monuments are stark evidence of that. Most religions have some kind of teaching that tries to give comfort to those who are left behind when someone dies. All founders of all religions, with one glaring exception, are dead. Not even the claim of their return from death is made. Jesus Christ is the only one who came back from death and is physically alive today in another dimension beyond our own. Just because of this, I would give more credence to what Jesus has to say about death and the world beyond, than any scientist or other religious leader.
So where do these precise relationships between cause and effect come from? Why do the laws of nature work consistently over time? Why are they not random, varying from day to day or year to year? Why are people no matter where they live on earth incurably religious? What answers can science give us, what if anything, happens after we die?
Science is also the study of God's splendor and majesty. Science is the effort of men thinking God's thoughts after him. Thousands of years ago, David Psalmist writes how the heavens declare the glory of God. From creation, David goes on to the power and wisdom of the word of God, as written down by many different people over large periods of time. At one time, science was the pursuit of truth, but nowadays it has become corrupted into the pursuit of fame and fortune.
There is little proof that the dinosaurs died 65 (66?) million years ago
No proof, but piles of evidence.
Let us know if you find a more reliable path to reality than evidence.
Would you please cite some of that evidence?
To be accurately able to say how long ago something place, you have to have a clock that is reliable over the period of time you want to measure. All dating of long-ago ages is based on the assumption (belief) that the clocks we we use today have ticked at today's observable rates for that entire time. There is no way to check out whether this assumption is true.
How can you trust someone if you think they are lying? I think trust and belief are two sides of the same coin.