I also don't own any Apple products, and have no plans to buy any in the future, either; I don't recommend anyone buy those, either.
Just a thought: I wonder how many of your friends have deliberately bought gadgets that you recommend against BECAUSE of your judgemental and sanctimonious attitude?? I know I would spend up to $100 on gadgets I don't need just to piss you off!
Of course malware is one of the reasons that Apple chose a walled-garden model, it's just that it's not the ONLY reason. Each of these [user experience improvements] | [infringements on your freedom]* make for a better experience for a large proportion of the market.
This is getting weird that I have to keep explaining it: The UNDERLYING mother of all reasons is that Apple want to make their platform more attractive to consumers who will therefore open up their wallets.
They did too. A proliferation of malware leads to unhappy and mistrustful users and a whole heap of bad publicity. That in turn can scare people away from Apple's platform. It's weird that you choose not to see this.
What the heck do political cartoons have to do with malware?
You are right, nothing at all!!! Because that's another thing that Apple perceive can scare people away from their platform. You see, there can be more than one reason.
a view that users are nothing more than exploitable sources of money that need to be controlled.
So which capitalist company that answers to shareholders _isn't_ that true for? The one you say is the one that you can be accused of being an apologist for.
Yup, I too find it creepy that certain religious organisations are untouchable and protected to the extent they are by law. I agree that there is a real danger to free speech.
But when you attack some of the more moderate religious elements especially those that take their time to visit slashdot, and in such an obnoxious way like the grandparent poster did, then it's actually counter productive.
Summary: Jesus lived a long time ago, lived an eventful, possibly tragic life and people keep the faith by adopting related mannerisms in their daily lives? Yes, insightful.
Here in the UK many indulge in this strange habit of dressing in exactly the same shirt, watch 22 men kick a ball about on a field and sing hymns - sorry, songs - taunting members of the opposite religion - sorry, team.
Others have also been known to follow the writings of a sociopathic virgin. There are even statues of him in London
I am NOT commenting on whether you are right or wrong in your obvious (and may I say not very original) attempt to portray religion as ludicrous. I AM commenting on the fact that you are singling out wider human traits.
You are part of a segment of the population that, by not thinking critically, you help perpetuate the myths and all their negative aspects, as well as the social structure that leads to huge inequalities between people.
I firmly side with bryan1945 and call master_p, and those that modded him insightful, on their arrogance. Think about it, he's never met the guy before and claims to know that bryan1945 and his church go about causing great harm in the world. If religion disappeared overnight the world would be no better off because this kind of hateful, wrong headed thinking will simply find a new home and new masters. Sadly it's part of the human condition and not religion - correlation does not imply causation.
Yes atheists of slashdot mod me down, but before you do think for a moment whether you want guys like this fighting your corner. That is exactly the kind of post that will alienate the very people you are trying to convince.
Or at the very least we should be talking about "Google/Motorola". This is important because we need to highlight who is responsible for which legal shit round here, and not let anybody get off scot free.
While I"m an android fan..I give respect to Nokia for doing this.
Interesting choice of language, reminds me very much of the sort of phrasing I see on sports forums. I'm more and more convinced that these megacorps are serving as surrogate sports teams for nerds.
If you have control over whether it's in those other bookstores, then, yes, you do have control over the price. You don't like their terms, don't publish it there. That's how you control it.
That would be control over whether or not the book is sold on the bookstore, not on the price it sells for. So no, you don't have control over the price.
People will be asking questions like this in their millions, may I suggest that as an industry you back away from the terms "nuclear" and "fusion"? It's horrible that politics and rebranding has to feature in science, but I feel it's essential if you want the support of senators that answer to their voters.
Some cheesy suggestions: Nu-Power, sunray, Green 'n' Clean. I really hate that last one, but that sort of thing!
Does anybody know if Gatekeeper which is touted for the next OSX release would have prevented this? And if so how does it stack up against pending changes in windows and Linux?
I still don't get why Steve Jobs is revered. To me he was just another guy who wanted to make a lot of money at the expense of loyal fans of products that were not even designed by him.
I suspect you must have heard every argument from all sides by now, so I'm not sure if yours is a genuine question. On the off chance that it is, from my perspective he is a genius engineer who helped bring products into the mainstream that I absolutely love.
Yes I know the slashdotterati won't like me referring to him as an engineer, but he had to bring together many different parts such as product devopment, marketing, content, licensing, prototyping, negotiating and all kinds of politics. That's a much better engineer than I will ever be, since at least my components (classes, design specs etc) don't conspire against me - much;)
I can't see how you can commit to that kind of life without being a control freak and possessing other sociopathic tendencies, but when he directed it at the "bad guys" it was pure joy. For example when he met up with michael eisner from Disney after the success of toy story and said to him: "we Pixar guys are the real thing, you Disney guys are shit". Awesome.
Also I think you are dead wrong when you think he was driven by money, at least any more than anyone else would be in his position. At any time he could have cashed in instead of nearly blowing his fortune with NEXT and Pixar, he took enormous risks there and nearly blew his fortune. Also why would a man on a death sentence commit the last of his energies to apple if it was just about the money? On your other points you may or may not be right but I firmly believe you are well wide of the mark when it comes to money as the primary motivating factor.
Apple truly was about freedom, openness, and the spirit of the personal computing revolution. Granted, that was Wozniak's influence
I see this often repeated by those who remember the old days of apple, but having read the Steve jobs bio I find it hard to believe that he would have let Wozniak dictate the design to him. Wozniak came across as an engineer who would come up with brilliant solutions to an idea you pointed him at, but who didnt have the force of personality to stand up to jobs.
You say this so matter of factly that i think you must have a very good reason to back it up, that hopefully goes beyond wishful thinking.
but all the basic facts of the horrendous working conditions are true
Sir, my humble counter arguments are no match for your razor sharp bold font. And your use of italics at the end was a linguistic master stroke, I am roundly defeated.
There is no such period as "pre-science" because the property that you ascribe to science is owned by humanity. Human beings have been observing and explaining since the dawn of time. Just because the Bob worshippers didn't go any further after observing the correlation between prayer and rain doesn't make their methods any different than ours, they just didn't push it any further. Perhaps they didn't have enough resources to allocate time to do this because they were too busy gathering crops, fighting wolves and cowering from the powerful advocates of the prayer/rain theory. The fact that we have been advancing technology wise, for many milleniea demonstrates that there has been a strand of observation/explanation/refinement all that time. Only it wasn't called science it was part of the whole that made up peoples lives and couldn't be separated from religion.
To me that sounds no different than today, where for example we would like to send probes out to mars in order to test theories but society hasn't released enough cash. And lets not forget there are many theories that have been pushed forward but not subjected to the rigour of experimental observation - relativity was an early one and experimentation continues to show a correlation between that model and the physical world. Newtons classical mechanics have been proved to no longer correlate with observations that we are now capable of. And who knows what will happen with string theory?
A much better attempt that would separate religion and science, and therefore serve as a basis for their definition, would be to conclude that religious folk are happier to sit on their theories for longer than scientific folk. But even then we are talking about an enormous sliding scale on which there are eminent scientists that have great trouble letting go of theories in the face of contradictory observation. And on the other hand there are followers of god who are more flexible about letting go of dearly held theories. So (in my very humble opinion) buddhism, paganism, christianity, islam, scientology, cosmology, science, Jedi are just cultural terms and it is possible to belong to any of these cultures and at the same time engage in a cycle of experimentation/observation/explanation to a varying degree. It is that latter strand that can run through all of us regardless of how much we dip into those cultures. Notice I threw in "Jedi", which for me proves to me that geeks themselves admit that it's not possible to define religion and in this case are using that fact for their own jocular purpose!
Why am I making a big deal of it? Well for one I love to debate:-) but also because there is a danger that when you put somebody in a box called religion or science then one might assume they know a great deal about them already and ascribe characteristics to them that are almost certainly not true. This can foster an adversarial atmosphere where hatred can thrive, because the label is an excuse not to find out anything more about the opinions that make up an individual personality.
I'm just trying to state what is obvious to so many and you became angry to the point of using profanity (not that I really give a fuck about that) but it showed a level of offense that can only be taken when one feels they are being attacked personally.
I am not black but I would be annoyed if I saw racist attacks on a black person. It's not logical (ironically) to conclude my religious slant based on the fact that I am opposing your point of view. Nor can you use how outraged you perceive me to be to make that conclusion.
What you have done is _define_ religion to be that collection of ideas that can't be justified and you can't use a definition as proof - that's the real path to hatred. I tried to help you by showing you that there are ideas outside of religion that also belong to that collection. Ideas from the world of mathematics and therefore science. In other words I'm not promoting religion, I'm "downgrading" your assumption that logic that drives science is on as solid a footing as you think. BTW there is no such term as "religious logic" that you use in your post, neither is there "scientific logic". There is just logic.
Take your assumption about the number 1. You might think for example that 1 + 1 = 2 right? Established rock solid fact? Well Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead tried to do this in their Pricipia Mathematics publication. And Russell questioned this act of addition, this strange juxtaposition of two neighbouring entities. Godel then showed that that publication could not be proven to not have contradictions!
Since the word "logic" underpins your arguments, you need to at least understand something of it. And if you can't do that at least recognise that there is much to learn. In fact I'm giving you more credit than you deserve because you didn't even use the word logic, you used the word "reason" which is a much more nebulous term that includes devices of persuasion outside of logic such as flattery, bullying and other forms of social pressure.
As I said I put my outrage to one side in the interest of rational debate. I know slashdot is rife with sarcasm so this may not have been clear.
I never once said that religion is both logical and true. I simply said that in any system there are statements that are true and statements that are false that nevertheless _cannot_ be proven with any series of logical steps. True for "mathematics", true therefore for "science" and true for "religion". So you can't single out "religion" as being somehow illogical. It may be, but it certainly wouldn't be exceptional.
Through your original quote from that esteemed philosopher Dr House you seek to portray religion as a synonym for "that collection of ideas that cannot be reasoned". As Goedel proved there many collections of ideas that cannot be reasoned in the most watertight branch of human thought possible - mathematical logic.
BTW don't fall for the trap that so many do here which is to assume that "if you're not with us you must be against us". You cannot tell my religious stance at all from my post so on this occasion you would be mistaken to further entrench your belief based on your perception of it.
'Religion' is pretty damn fuzzy, that's true, but I've yet to see one that's based solely on empiricism. If there's a scientific religion, then the edge of blurry
But isn't that exactly what religion attempts to do, come up with an explanation of the real world based on empirical observations? Whether it is the Elemental forces of paganism or the poly-gods of Greek mythology, man looked at the world around him and sought an explanation. Yes we think many of these explanations don't usefully model the world - there are no fire or water spirits - and so we see that those explanations have mostly fallen out of favor. That looks similar to a property that we usually attribute exclusively to "science" albeit at a much slower pace. Maybe in a thousand years time most of the planet will believe in just one or zero "gods".
Why the slow pace of change? Well I guess there are many dominant personalities, vested interests and much power at stake with movements such as christianity. And also where large numbers of people are involved it can be hard to change that momentum. But as we've seen changes do happen, but not because of some idea that is owned by "science", but because of rational human thought, bloodshed and personal sacrifice that is part of the human condition. Whatever ideas we have placed exclusively in the boxes labelled science and religion, runs as a thread through all of us. We knew this as recently as a century ago when learned people were much more all-rounders, but because of our obsession with division of labor, we have long since forgotten this.
And lest you think that "science" is exempt from irrational conflict here are some counter examples. Isaac Newton famously tried to eradicate the work of Robert Hooke, to the extent that there are no portraits left of him. Poincare wanted to abolish much of Cantors ideas on infinite numbers. And look at the opponents of string theory who deny that it is based on empirical discovery at all? No, empirical observation and discovery is open to wide interpretation and doesn't belong exclusively to some box called science.
"Religion bad, science good" or vice versa is quite literally, meaningless.
Physics is the study of how the universe works at a fundamental level. Geography is the study of how geological processes work. History is a description of humanity's past, what happened in the past, why it happened, and so forth. That wasn't very hard.
ok I walked right into that one, but that was hardly my point. Consider the Sistene chapel where art, history, an understanding of symmetry, biology, culture, religion, chemistry are all involved in its creation and even in our deconstruction of it through the modern eye. But do you really think that Michelangelo thought in terms of those meaningless labels?
Of course I understand that those labels usefully help us in teaching the next generation when there are too many ideas to fit in one persons head. But there is a danger that we start to believe that those labels offer a truth of their own and that we no longer need to examine an idea in its own right, just which "box" it goes in. Which then gives us carte Blanche to talk about "illogical religious maniacs" or "godless science geeks".
Which brings me back to my original point: there's no such thing as a universal definition of religion or science, not even close.
Religion, or a belief in a god, are not conclusions arrived to by logical thought, and your obvious outrage at the implications as such only strengthen my point. If you cannot logically arrive at a conclusion it is an illogical conclusion, pure and simple.
You are _still_ trying to attach this property uniquely to religion when it is a consequence of logic itself. The (logician) Kurt Goedel showed that there are statements that are true but unprovable in any logical system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Gödel#The_Incompleteness_Theorem (fuck you slashdot I can't be bothered to fix your umlaut shit)
I will put my "outrage" to one side and humbly hope that you take another look at your belief system.
"There are statements that can be made that cannot be reasoned with logical steps, that are nonetheless true or false." - Goedel. So fuck you with your implicit assertion that "illogical" is a synonym for "religious".
Slashdot Mirror
I also don't own any Apple products, and have no plans to buy any in the future, either; I don't recommend anyone buy those, either.
Just a thought: I wonder how many of your friends have deliberately bought gadgets that you recommend against BECAUSE of your judgemental and sanctimonious attitude?? I know I would spend up to $100 on gadgets I don't need just to piss you off!
This is getting weird that I have to keep explaining it: The UNDERLYING mother of all reasons is that Apple want to make their platform more attractive to consumers who will therefore open up their wallets.
* Delete as appropriate
Apple did not lock down iOS to keep out malware
They did too. A proliferation of malware leads to unhappy and mistrustful users and a whole heap of bad publicity. That in turn can scare people away from Apple's platform. It's weird that you choose not to see this.
What the heck do political cartoons have to do with malware?
You are right, nothing at all!!! Because that's another thing that Apple perceive can scare people away from their platform. You see, there can be more than one reason.
a view that users are nothing more than exploitable sources of money that need to be controlled.
So which capitalist company that answers to shareholders _isn't_ that true for? The one you say is the one that you can be accused of being an apologist for.
But when you attack some of the more moderate religious elements especially those that take their time to visit slashdot, and in such an obnoxious way like the grandparent poster did, then it's actually counter productive.
In the fighter jet world, it is generally broken down thusly:
Not seen one of those in the wild for some time, quick let me get my camera ;)
Here in the UK many indulge in this strange habit of dressing in exactly the same shirt, watch 22 men kick a ball about on a field and sing hymns - sorry, songs - taunting members of the opposite religion - sorry, team.
Others have also been known to follow the writings of a sociopathic virgin. There are even statues of him in London
I am NOT commenting on whether you are right or wrong in your obvious (and may I say not very original) attempt to portray religion as ludicrous. I AM commenting on the fact that you are singling out wider human traits.
You are part of a segment of the population that, by not thinking critically, you help perpetuate the myths and all their negative aspects, as well as the social structure that leads to huge inequalities between people.
I firmly side with bryan1945 and call master_p, and those that modded him insightful, on their arrogance. Think about it, he's never met the guy before and claims to know that bryan1945 and his church go about causing great harm in the world. If religion disappeared overnight the world would be no better off because this kind of hateful, wrong headed thinking will simply find a new home and new masters. Sadly it's part of the human condition and not religion - correlation does not imply causation.
Yes atheists of slashdot mod me down, but before you do think for a moment whether you want guys like this fighting your corner. That is exactly the kind of post that will alienate the very people you are trying to convince.
Or at the very least we should be talking about "Google/Motorola". This is important because we need to highlight who is responsible for which legal shit round here, and not let anybody get off scot free.
While I"m an android fan..I give respect to Nokia for doing this.
Interesting choice of language, reminds me very much of the sort of phrasing I see on sports forums. I'm more and more convinced that these megacorps are serving as surrogate sports teams for nerds.
For some reason it gave me great pleasure to imagine his voice when I read your post.
If you have control over whether it's in those other bookstores, then, yes, you do have control over the price. You don't like their terms, don't publish it there. That's how you control it.
That would be control over whether or not the book is sold on the bookstore, not on the price it sells for. So no, you don't have control over the price.
Oh sure, they're making the best stuff now, but they'll go down the same way in a decade or so.
Ten? Twenty? Thirty??? I give up, you've awarded yourself a lot of leeway in which to be right.
Some cheesy suggestions: Nu-Power, sunray, Green 'n' Clean. I really hate that last one, but that sort of thing!
Does anybody know if Gatekeeper which is touted for the next OSX release would have prevented this? And if so how does it stack up against pending changes in windows and Linux?
I still don't get why Steve Jobs is revered. To me he was just another guy who wanted to make a lot of money at the expense of loyal fans of products that were not even designed by him.
I suspect you must have heard every argument from all sides by now, so I'm not sure if yours is a genuine question. On the off chance that it is, from my perspective he is a genius engineer who helped bring products into the mainstream that I absolutely love.
Yes I know the slashdotterati won't like me referring to him as an engineer, but he had to bring together many different parts such as product devopment, marketing, content, licensing, prototyping, negotiating and all kinds of politics. That's a much better engineer than I will ever be, since at least my components (classes, design specs etc) don't conspire against me - much ;)
I can't see how you can commit to that kind of life without being a control freak and possessing other sociopathic tendencies, but when he directed it at the "bad guys" it was pure joy. For example when he met up with michael eisner from Disney after the success of toy story and said to him: "we Pixar guys are the real thing, you Disney guys are shit". Awesome.
Also I think you are dead wrong when you think he was driven by money, at least any more than anyone else would be in his position. At any time he could have cashed in instead of nearly blowing his fortune with NEXT and Pixar, he took enormous risks there and nearly blew his fortune. Also why would a man on a death sentence commit the last of his energies to apple if it was just about the money? On your other points you may or may not be right but I firmly believe you are well wide of the mark when it comes to money as the primary motivating factor.
Apple truly was about freedom, openness, and the spirit of the personal computing revolution. Granted, that was Wozniak's influence
I see this often repeated by those who remember the old days of apple, but having read the Steve jobs bio I find it hard to believe that he would have let Wozniak dictate the design to him. Wozniak came across as an engineer who would come up with brilliant solutions to an idea you pointed him at, but who didnt have the force of personality to stand up to jobs.
You say this so matter of factly that i think you must have a very good reason to back it up, that hopefully goes beyond wishful thinking.
but all the basic facts of the horrendous working conditions are true
Sir, my humble counter arguments are no match for your razor sharp bold font. And your use of italics at the end was a linguistic master stroke, I am roundly defeated.
...with a few space characters in it.
To me that sounds no different than today, where for example we would like to send probes out to mars in order to test theories but society hasn't released enough cash. And lets not forget there are many theories that have been pushed forward but not subjected to the rigour of experimental observation - relativity was an early one and experimentation continues to show a correlation between that model and the physical world. Newtons classical mechanics have been proved to no longer correlate with observations that we are now capable of. And who knows what will happen with string theory?
A much better attempt that would separate religion and science, and therefore serve as a basis for their definition, would be to conclude that religious folk are happier to sit on their theories for longer than scientific folk. But even then we are talking about an enormous sliding scale on which there are eminent scientists that have great trouble letting go of theories in the face of contradictory observation. And on the other hand there are followers of god who are more flexible about letting go of dearly held theories. So (in my very humble opinion) buddhism, paganism, christianity, islam, scientology, cosmology, science, Jedi are just cultural terms and it is possible to belong to any of these cultures and at the same time engage in a cycle of experimentation/observation/explanation to a varying degree. It is that latter strand that can run through all of us regardless of how much we dip into those cultures. Notice I threw in "Jedi", which for me proves to me that geeks themselves admit that it's not possible to define religion and in this case are using that fact for their own jocular purpose!
Why am I making a big deal of it? Well for one I love to debate :-) but also because there is a danger that when you put somebody in a box called religion or science then one might assume they know a great deal about them already and ascribe characteristics to them that are almost certainly not true. This can foster an adversarial atmosphere where hatred can thrive, because the label is an excuse not to find out anything more about the opinions that make up an individual personality.
I'm just trying to state what is obvious to so many and you became angry to the point of using profanity (not that I really give a fuck about that) but it showed a level of offense that can only be taken when one feels they are being attacked personally.
I am not black but I would be annoyed if I saw racist attacks on a black person. It's not logical (ironically) to conclude my religious slant based on the fact that I am opposing your point of view. Nor can you use how outraged you perceive me to be to make that conclusion.
What you have done is _define_ religion to be that collection of ideas that can't be justified and you can't use a definition as proof - that's the real path to hatred. I tried to help you by showing you that there are ideas outside of religion that also belong to that collection. Ideas from the world of mathematics and therefore science. In other words I'm not promoting religion, I'm "downgrading" your assumption that logic that drives science is on as solid a footing as you think. BTW there is no such term as "religious logic" that you use in your post, neither is there "scientific logic". There is just logic.
Take your assumption about the number 1. You might think for example that 1 + 1 = 2 right? Established rock solid fact? Well Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead tried to do this in their Pricipia Mathematics publication. And Russell questioned this act of addition, this strange juxtaposition of two neighbouring entities. Godel then showed that that publication could not be proven to not have contradictions!
Since the word "logic" underpins your arguments, you need to at least understand something of it. And if you can't do that at least recognise that there is much to learn. In fact I'm giving you more credit than you deserve because you didn't even use the word logic, you used the word "reason" which is a much more nebulous term that includes devices of persuasion outside of logic such as flattery, bullying and other forms of social pressure.
I never once said that religion is both logical and true. I simply said that in any system there are statements that are true and statements that are false that nevertheless _cannot_ be proven with any series of logical steps. True for "mathematics", true therefore for "science" and true for "religion". So you can't single out "religion" as being somehow illogical. It may be, but it certainly wouldn't be exceptional.
Through your original quote from that esteemed philosopher Dr House you seek to portray religion as a synonym for "that collection of ideas that cannot be reasoned". As Goedel proved there many collections of ideas that cannot be reasoned in the most watertight branch of human thought possible - mathematical logic.
BTW don't fall for the trap that so many do here which is to assume that "if you're not with us you must be against us". You cannot tell my religious stance at all from my post so on this occasion you would be mistaken to further entrench your belief based on your perception of it.
'Religion' is pretty damn fuzzy, that's true, but I've yet to see one that's based solely on empiricism. If there's a scientific religion, then the edge of blurry
But isn't that exactly what religion attempts to do, come up with an explanation of the real world based on empirical observations? Whether it is the Elemental forces of paganism or the poly-gods of Greek mythology, man looked at the world around him and sought an explanation. Yes we think many of these explanations don't usefully model the world - there are no fire or water spirits - and so we see that those explanations have mostly fallen out of favor. That looks similar to a property that we usually attribute exclusively to "science" albeit at a much slower pace. Maybe in a thousand years time most of the planet will believe in just one or zero "gods".
Why the slow pace of change? Well I guess there are many dominant personalities, vested interests and much power at stake with movements such as christianity. And also where large numbers of people are involved it can be hard to change that momentum. But as we've seen changes do happen, but not because of some idea that is owned by "science", but because of rational human thought, bloodshed and personal sacrifice that is part of the human condition. Whatever ideas we have placed exclusively in the boxes labelled science and religion, runs as a thread through all of us. We knew this as recently as a century ago when learned people were much more all-rounders, but because of our obsession with division of labor, we have long since forgotten this.
And lest you think that "science" is exempt from irrational conflict here are some counter examples. Isaac Newton famously tried to eradicate the work of Robert Hooke, to the extent that there are no portraits left of him. Poincare wanted to abolish much of Cantors ideas on infinite numbers. And look at the opponents of string theory who deny that it is based on empirical discovery at all? No, empirical observation and discovery is open to wide interpretation and doesn't belong exclusively to some box called science.
"Religion bad, science good" or vice versa is quite literally, meaningless.
Physics is the study of how the universe works at a fundamental level. Geography is the study of how geological processes work. History is a description of humanity's past, what happened in the past, why it happened, and so forth. That wasn't very hard.
ok I walked right into that one, but that was hardly my point. Consider the Sistene chapel where art, history, an understanding of symmetry, biology, culture, religion, chemistry are all involved in its creation and even in our deconstruction of it through the modern eye. But do you really think that Michelangelo thought in terms of those meaningless labels?
Of course I understand that those labels usefully help us in teaching the next generation when there are too many ideas to fit in one persons head. But there is a danger that we start to believe that those labels offer a truth of their own and that we no longer need to examine an idea in its own right, just which "box" it goes in. Which then gives us carte Blanche to talk about "illogical religious maniacs" or "godless science geeks".
Which brings me back to my original point: there's no such thing as a universal definition of religion or science, not even close.
Religion, or a belief in a god, are not conclusions arrived to by logical thought, and your obvious outrage at the implications as such only strengthen my point. If you cannot logically arrive at a conclusion it is an illogical conclusion, pure and simple.
You are _still_ trying to attach this property uniquely to religion when it is a consequence of logic itself. The (logician) Kurt Goedel showed that there are statements that are true but unprovable in any logical system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Gödel#The_Incompleteness_Theorem (fuck you slashdot I can't be bothered to fix your umlaut shit)
I will put my "outrage" to one side and humbly hope that you take another look at your belief system.
"There are statements that can be made that cannot be reasoned with logical steps, that are nonetheless true or false." - Goedel. So fuck you with your implicit assertion that "illogical" is a synonym for "religious".