I didn't see the point in spending days studying a program when the developer could just explain it to/walk through the code with me in a couple of hours.
While I agree with the general sentiment of your post, I don't find the above that strange. You're asking your co-worker to spend hours of his/her time on an activity where the reward (time saved) is completely on your end.
While I'm willing to hypothesize about a conscious and invisible entity being involved in our existence, can you guys (theists) PLEASE come up with better stuff than the utter nonsense of some dead cult leader's blood turning into wine and vice versa? Sure, I can see why people would buy that some centuries ago, but shouldn't it be obviously bogus in this day and age?
One day my boss plugged the cable in slightly off, and this fried the graphics card - he had to manually de-solder and replace around 70 chips as a result.
I had to read this several times before I realized that it does start to make sense if placed in a timeframe of 25 years ago. Doing this kind of manual work on today's graphics cards wouldn't just be pointless economically, but close to impossible (very tiny pads, etc).
I've watched the Outer Limits in the past, but got a bit bored with them rehashing the same "being dependent on technology is bad" message in different stories.
Okay, I read your arguments carefully and I extracted this from them:
1. Homosexuality is in the same category as lying, cheating and stealing and should be discouraged. 2. Homosexuals shouldn't act on their homosexuality and thus only engage in heterosexual interactions or none at all. 3. You tolerate homosexuals, but you would wish they'd change into heterosexuals.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but if you agree to the above three points then I have merely exposed your homophobia.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say with your last paragraph as the grammar doesn't make sense. Can you rephrase it?
Not really -- when a society labels certain people as bad or harmful, it is hardly surprising that weaker minds find a lot of moral support for their violent actions. You are openly claiming that homosexuality is a choice that can be reversed. It's not that big a leap for the impatient to want to encourage the right choice with force.
You said "sin is sin according to the bible" and that there is no difference between the sin of being (acting out?) one's homosexuality or cursing in frustration. If the characteristic of extremism is using a black-or-white view of the truth, then your stance is already contaminated by extremism.
I'm not going to debate with you whether homosexuality is a choice or genetics -- this seems more a field for researchers with relevant credentials and not for either of us.
Thanks for your reply and explaining your points. I'm a bit late with mine.. it's been a busy week, sorry.
I have no real issue with differing views, but what upsets me is hate-mongering; not just because its content is primitive, false and dehumanizing but also because it is delivered in the name of the highest level of integrity and wisdom.
The real problem, however, is with the moderates...
You say you don't hate homosexuals. Okay, I respect that, BUT: you still cannot fully accept them *and* you cannot fully condemn hate-mongerers. That, in my view, is the problem with the relatively much larger group of moderates: they still give implicit support to extremists.
I find it surprising that people can put a lot of inconvenient biblical passages into context, yet appear to make little effort to do the same with anti-gay passages. If some honest effort is made and historical data as well as modern scientific knowledge is taken into account, it should quickly be possible to find a clear religious basis for dismissing the "gay = sin" myth.
I'm as hetero as they come, but I really feel that an injustice is being committed against these people. Perhaps the real "test" from the divine can be found in how we deal with that.
Actually, the one major issue with churches, both modern and old, is that they have this silly thing with making the utterly bold claim that what they preach is valid not just because it would make sense philosophically or ethically, but because it's linked directly with the same force or entity that's responsible for our very existence.
You, as a Christian, by definition are claiming that what you preach *has* to be followed and that excessive punishment results from not following the crux of what you preach. So, yes, there is a LOT more weight on you to practise what you preach if you want that which you preach to be taken seriously.
If they truly believe that gays are evil incarnate, then it's pretty obvious that their divine information link isn't working that well.
Now I don't know if you too hate gays, but you have to admit... all the hating isn't giving Christianity a very good name.
Btw, you might try turning that other cheek instead of swearing...
Nonsense. Embryos don't have thoughts, they don't care. It's also a rather cheap tactic to turn it into a "rich vs. poor" argument. Are you working for a political campaign or something?;-)
1. VAT in The Netherlands has been 19% instead of 17.5% for years.
2. The 52% bracket starts at EUR 52.229, where did you get your 33k figure from? (btw, the exchange rate is a lot lower than 1.50!). If we do some calculations, we find out that the effective (box 1) income tax for a EUR 100k income is about 45.3%.
My guess is that you haven't gotten proper tax advice. It's not impossible to lower the effective rate to about 35-40% max if you know how to navigate the rules and business forms.
A much better idea would have been to create a subsidiary and do it through them. The association with a company that works on a "mass" basis somewhat works against the desire to "express one's individuality".
Actually, if I did want to express my individuality (which I don't, because I don't have low self-esteem), I would prefer to make my own site. That's a lot more individualistic than being part of a large mass of people on a big site.
What's left to look at are those who are in a position of power and influence, and either aren't religious or believe that God is on their side...
Well, good thing we can safely ignore the 9/11 hijackers then, because they were definitely spiritual.
You seem to hold a rather naive view of right vs. wrong. Sure, killing millions of people is a bad thing, but do the wackos who commit these atrocities agree? Probably not. Rather, they most likely believe their actions are necessary for the greater good and that their gods are on their side.
You're using a strawman fallacy... trying to troll perhaps?
It always strikes me as peculiar when people refer to "atheism" as though it were a unified philosophy. Dividing people into "theists" and "atheists" in itself is silly, since it is obvious that opinions vary greatly in the "theists" camp, even within the same sub-groups. What kind of uniformity or cohesiveness do you expect when you group people by entities they do not believe in?
What I find more disturbing in general is that in spite of all the scientific progress humanity has made, the view that humans are practically irrelevant in the scope of the universe is challenged infinitely more than the view that we should all follow a martyred faith healer.
Every religion on the planet claims a logical link to observable reality- usually in the lives and acomplishments of their followers. They pick and choose the success stories- airplanes fly, SOMETIMES they crash. Computers work, but SOMETIMES they lock up. Nothing is perfect. Catholic marriages are supposed to be divorce-free; but 49% end up in annulment.
And sometimes we can't- because the machines don't work in all situations, do they?
Okay, so now we very roughly have two sets of claims, one which "fails" sometimes and one that fails very often. Religious claims aren't the best bet as both of us demonstrated.
Well, as I've pointed out at the beginning: such discussions end up being a debate about epistemology.
Logic is about consistency between claims. Now a body of claims can be entirely consistent with eachother and still - as a body - be false, but ultimately scientific claims have a logical link to observable reality -- we can observe that computers work, airplanes fly, etc.
Regardless of one's worldview, we must all accept that computers work. Without machines that use hardcore logic, you and I would not be able to communicate about logic and epistemology.
The bodies of religious claims on the other hand not only conflict with one another, but also each have only dubious logical links to measurable reality. The official stories about pivotal events are not only sketchy, but also conflict with one another.
The only real "leap of faith" in this particular area is following the chain of logic into an area that is no longer measurable. However, it's still the best tool for the job and better than using an arbitrary story of thousands of years ago made up in a time when people thought the earth was flat.
Surely it should be obvious that the scientific method and religious dogma operate in opposite ways? There is a big difference between the view "our holy book says it started so and so" and observing from the measurable domain how evolutionary mechanisms work and then extrapolate back to "day 1".
The only result of the "everything is religion" argument is that the concept of "false" is removed from the discussion, which in turn results in a lecture on the rules of logic.
Well, you have to agree that it's rather impossible to have an intelligent conversation about Creation because in the end it comes down to educating the Creationist in the rules of logic and pointing out that the Designer figure is eerily close to the deity of the Christian religion.
Sooner or later, the Creationist will start using the "G word" and the discussion ends up in the domain of religion... which is another QED about Creationism being religious despite its thin veil of scientific terminology.
While I agree with a big part of your post, I don't think the "let's just get along" idea is going to work. As long as creationism/ID is going to be pushed as a credible scientific theory, there is going to be a problem and as long as superstitious beliefs are not going to be viewed as reality, there is going to be a problem...
The confusion may result in some sort of success in the public view, but in order to get it accepted as a scientific theory (and thus valid school teaching), the lack of a clear definition works against it. This also seems to have been a big contributing factor to the resounding defeat in court.
I've noticed in discussions even with people on slashdot, that everyone seems to have their own ID interpretation (just like people seem to have with religious texts). One person said that ID doesn't rule out evolution, the other said that biblical scripture rules out evolution 100% (huh, how did he connect ID to scripture?), etc.
As I understand, "teaching ID" comes down to a direct attack on evolution in biology class. It's not a theory that stands on its own.
Maybe not, but misspelling IDiot does;-) Sorry.. could not resist the pun, nothing personal.
You might like to know that the "inventor" of ID (i.e. the one who coined the term) and other leading proponents categorically rule out evolution, so official ID and evolution are not compatible. Someone who believes in a deity and evolution, follows what is apparently called theistic evolution. This is a class of belief that ID chiefs claim to have more issue with than outright evolution.
a life after that on earth
Well, you can't really complain that you're not taken seriously as a death-denialist. Given that the psychology of wishful thinking is easily understood, death-denialism seems as silly to me as Easter Bunny worshipping probably seems to you.
Note that when I say "silly", I certainly do not mean "idiot". There is a big difference between the two.
If the ability to have sexual intercourse equates your ability to shoot people, then you probably fall in the category that should have neither ability;-)
As for me, there's no rule that requires discussion of every deity ever concocted in order to raise the issue of the inability of evolution to explain or disprove the supernatural.
Okay, I'm beginning to believe you're just trolling here. I'm willing to give a more in-depth answer to your points, but before I do so, I'd like you to confirm if you're familiar with these concepts:
1. Proponents of evolution theory subscribe to a range of beliefs and branches of philosophy and also count religious people.
2. Evolution theory is not antithetical to the existence of all supernatural entities and phenomena.
4. When discussing natural vs. supernatural, it shows bias to constantly focus on one supernatural entity and base conclusions on that one instance. For a balanced discussion, we both have to accept the hypothetical possibility of any supernatural entity.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't see the point in spending days studying a program when the developer could just explain it to/walk through the code with me in a couple of hours.
While I agree with the general sentiment of your post, I don't find the above that strange. You're asking your co-worker to spend hours of his/her time on an activity where the reward (time saved) is completely on your end.
While I'm willing to hypothesize about a conscious and invisible entity being involved in our existence, can you guys (theists) PLEASE come up with better stuff than the utter nonsense of some dead cult leader's blood turning into wine and vice versa? Sure, I can see why people would buy that some centuries ago, but shouldn't it be obviously bogus in this day and age?
One day my boss plugged the cable in slightly off, and this fried the graphics card - he had to manually de-solder and replace around 70 chips as a result.
I had to read this several times before I realized that it does start to make sense if placed in a timeframe of 25 years ago. Doing this kind of manual work on today's graphics cards wouldn't just be pointless economically, but close to impossible (very tiny pads, etc).
I've watched the Outer Limits in the past, but got a bit bored with them rehashing the same "being dependent on technology is bad" message in different stories.
Okay, I read your arguments carefully and I extracted this from them:
1. Homosexuality is in the same category as lying, cheating and stealing and should be discouraged.
2. Homosexuals shouldn't act on their homosexuality and thus only engage in heterosexual interactions or none at all.
3. You tolerate homosexuals, but you would wish they'd change into heterosexuals.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but if you agree to the above three points then I have merely exposed your homophobia.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say with your last paragraph as the grammar doesn't make sense. Can you rephrase it?
Not really -- when a society labels certain people as bad or harmful, it is hardly surprising that weaker minds find a lot of moral support for their violent actions. You are openly claiming that homosexuality is a choice that can be reversed. It's not that big a leap for the impatient to want to encourage the right choice with force.
You said "sin is sin according to the bible" and that there is no difference between the sin of being (acting out?) one's homosexuality or cursing in frustration. If the characteristic of extremism is using a black-or-white view of the truth, then your stance is already contaminated by extremism.
I'm not going to debate with you whether homosexuality is a choice or genetics -- this seems more a field for researchers with relevant credentials and not for either of us.
Thanks for your reply and explaining your points. I'm a bit late with mine.. it's been a busy week, sorry.
I have no real issue with differing views, but what upsets me is hate-mongering; not just because its content is primitive, false and dehumanizing but also because it is delivered in the name of the highest level of integrity and wisdom.
The real problem, however, is with the moderates...
You say you don't hate homosexuals. Okay, I respect that, BUT: you still cannot fully accept them *and* you cannot fully condemn hate-mongerers. That, in my view, is the problem with the relatively much larger group of moderates: they still give implicit support to extremists.
I find it surprising that people can put a lot of inconvenient biblical passages into context, yet appear to make little effort to do the same with anti-gay passages. If some honest effort is made and historical data as well as modern scientific knowledge is taken into account, it should quickly be possible to find a clear religious basis for dismissing the "gay = sin" myth.
I'm as hetero as they come, but I really feel that an injustice is being committed against these people. Perhaps the real "test" from the divine can be found in how we deal with that.
Actually, the one major issue with churches, both modern and old, is that they have this silly thing with making the utterly bold claim that what they preach is valid not just because it would make sense philosophically or ethically, but because it's linked directly with the same force or entity that's responsible for our very existence.
You, as a Christian, by definition are claiming that what you preach *has* to be followed and that excessive punishment results from not following the crux of what you preach. So, yes, there is a LOT more weight on you to practise what you preach if you want that which you preach to be taken seriously.
If they truly believe that gays are evil incarnate, then it's pretty obvious that their divine information link isn't working that well.
Now I don't know if you too hate gays, but you have to admit... all the hating isn't giving Christianity a very good name.
Btw, you might try turning that other cheek instead of swearing...
Nonsense. Embryos don't have thoughts, they don't care. It's also a rather cheap tactic to turn it into a "rich vs. poor" argument. Are you working for a political campaign or something? ;-)
You're making some rather blatant errors:
1. VAT in The Netherlands has been 19% instead of 17.5% for years.
2. The 52% bracket starts at EUR 52.229, where did you get your 33k figure from? (btw, the exchange rate is a lot lower than 1.50!). If we do some calculations, we find out that the effective (box 1) income tax for a EUR 100k income is about 45.3%.
My guess is that you haven't gotten proper tax advice. It's not impossible to lower the effective rate to about 35-40% max if you know how to navigate the rules and business forms.
Perhaps slightly off-topic, but which registrars would you guys recommend who have a proven track record of siding with the registrant?
A much better idea would have been to create a subsidiary and do it through them. The association with a company that works on a "mass" basis somewhat works against the desire to "express one's individuality".
Actually, if I did want to express my individuality (which I don't, because I don't have low self-esteem), I would prefer to make my own site. That's a lot more individualistic than being part of a large mass of people on a big site.
Hhm, after rereading your post it appears I've misinterpreted it and jumped to a wrong conclusion. It happens. Sorry.
What's left to look at are those who are in a position of power and influence, and either aren't religious or believe that God is on their side...
Well, good thing we can safely ignore the 9/11 hijackers then, because they were definitely spiritual.
You seem to hold a rather naive view of right vs. wrong. Sure, killing millions of people is a bad thing, but do the wackos who commit these atrocities agree? Probably not. Rather, they most likely believe their actions are necessary for the greater good and that their gods are on their side.
You're using a strawman fallacy... trying to troll perhaps?
It always strikes me as peculiar when people refer to "atheism" as though it were a unified philosophy. Dividing people into "theists" and "atheists" in itself is silly, since it is obvious that opinions vary greatly in the "theists" camp, even within the same sub-groups. What kind of uniformity or cohesiveness do you expect when you group people by entities they do not believe in?
What I find more disturbing in general is that in spite of all the scientific progress humanity has made, the view that humans are practically irrelevant in the scope of the universe is challenged infinitely more than the view that we should all follow a martyred faith healer.
Tapping you on your shoulder is not a violent act either, but if it's done a million times per second, it's going to hurt.
Every religion on the planet claims a logical link to observable reality- usually in the lives and acomplishments of their followers. They pick and choose the success stories- airplanes fly, SOMETIMES they crash. Computers work, but SOMETIMES they lock up. Nothing is perfect. Catholic marriages are supposed to be divorce-free; but 49% end up in annulment.
And sometimes we can't- because the machines don't work in all situations, do they?
Okay, so now we very roughly have two sets of claims, one which "fails" sometimes and one that fails very often. Religious claims aren't the best bet as both of us demonstrated.
Well, as I've pointed out at the beginning: such discussions end up being a debate about epistemology.
Logic is about consistency between claims. Now a body of claims can be entirely consistent with eachother and still - as a body - be false, but ultimately scientific claims have a logical link to observable reality -- we can observe that computers work, airplanes fly, etc.
Regardless of one's worldview, we must all accept that computers work. Without machines that use hardcore logic, you and I would not be able to communicate about logic and epistemology.
The bodies of religious claims on the other hand not only conflict with one another, but also each have only dubious logical links to measurable reality. The official stories about pivotal events are not only sketchy, but also conflict with one another.
The only real "leap of faith" in this particular area is following the chain of logic into an area that is no longer measurable. However, it's still the best tool for the job and better than using an arbitrary story of thousands of years ago made up in a time when people thought the earth was flat.
Surely it should be obvious that the scientific method and religious dogma operate in opposite ways? There is a big difference between the view "our holy book says it started so and so" and observing from the measurable domain how evolutionary mechanisms work and then extrapolate back to "day 1".
The only result of the "everything is religion" argument is that the concept of "false" is removed from the discussion, which in turn results in a lecture on the rules of logic.
Well, you have to agree that it's rather impossible to have an intelligent conversation about Creation because in the end it comes down to educating the Creationist in the rules of logic and pointing out that the Designer figure is eerily close to the deity of the Christian religion.
Sooner or later, the Creationist will start using the "G word" and the discussion ends up in the domain of religion... which is another QED about Creationism being religious despite its thin veil of scientific terminology.
While I agree with a big part of your post, I don't think the "let's just get along" idea is going to work. As long as creationism/ID is going to be pushed as a credible scientific theory, there is going to be a problem and as long as superstitious beliefs are not going to be viewed as reality, there is going to be a problem...
The confusion may result in some sort of success in the public view, but in order to get it accepted as a scientific theory (and thus valid school teaching), the lack of a clear definition works against it. This also seems to have been a big contributing factor to the resounding defeat in court.
I've noticed in discussions even with people on slashdot, that everyone seems to have their own ID interpretation (just like people seem to have with religious texts). One person said that ID doesn't rule out evolution, the other said that biblical scripture rules out evolution 100% (huh, how did he connect ID to scripture?), etc.
As I understand, "teaching ID" comes down to a direct attack on evolution in biology class. It's not a theory that stands on its own.
I am an IDist, ... does this make me an idiot?
;-)
Maybe not, but misspelling IDiot does
Sorry.. could not resist the pun, nothing personal.
You might like to know that the "inventor" of ID (i.e. the one who coined the term) and other leading proponents categorically rule out evolution, so official ID and evolution are not compatible. Someone who believes in a deity and evolution, follows what is apparently called theistic evolution. This is a class of belief that ID chiefs claim to have more issue with than outright evolution.
a life after that on earth
Well, you can't really complain that you're not taken seriously as a death-denialist. Given that the psychology of wishful thinking is easily understood, death-denialism seems as silly to me as Easter Bunny worshipping probably seems to you.
Note that when I say "silly", I certainly do not mean "idiot". There is a big difference between the two.
If the ability to have sexual intercourse equates your ability to shoot people, then you probably fall in the category that should have neither ability ;-)
As for me, there's no rule that requires discussion of every deity ever concocted in order to raise the issue of the inability of evolution to explain or disprove the supernatural.
Okay, I'm beginning to believe you're just trolling here. I'm willing to give a more in-depth answer to your points, but before I do so, I'd like you to confirm if you're familiar with these concepts:
1. Proponents of evolution theory subscribe to a range of beliefs and branches of philosophy and also count religious people.
2. Evolution theory is not antithetical to the existence of all supernatural entities and phenomena.
4. When discussing natural vs. supernatural, it shows bias to constantly focus on one supernatural entity and base conclusions on that one instance. For a balanced discussion, we both have to accept the hypothetical possibility of any supernatural entity.
5. Falsifiability, the important property of scientific theory. For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method