I guess from now on I'll have to perform the 8 level DoD 5220.69M brain wipe instead of the plain old erase procedure:( Can I get some more info on that? You see, I've had this Sheryl Crow song stuck in my head for a week now...
Where did I say that reading zero books is better than reading one book? I said that studying only one book leads to dogmatism. Who says that Christians studying the Bible or Muslims studying the Qu'ran only read one book on the subject? There are entire bookstores that cater to trying to understand how to apply those books to your life, on their histories, and on the viewpoints of famous scholars of them. Furthermore, we live in a society where we get a lot of exposure to different schools of though in our primary and secondary education.
But really, I was replying to what I thought you were saying about the portion of my previous post that you quoted. (i.e. That you were rejecting the idea that a guy who posts on Slashdot about his experiences as a mosque-attending Muslim would know more about the Qu'ran than an ignorant blowhard who did nothing but regurgitate all the bad things he's heard about the book as a way of "refuting" that it had anything nice to teach.) If that's not what you were saying, then my bad. I apologize for going on the attack.
I quite agree - I have no objection to faith, only to dogma. Okay, common ground has been found. Let's shake and be friends. I got enough blowhards to argue with here without getting hostile with a reasonable, open-minded person. <g>
Well, wait. Which is it going to be? Are we going to assume that every adherent of a religion cleaves so closely to their holy book in word and deed that they're a qualified expert on it simply from studying it so much, or that religions are social practices in a context well beyond, for most people, the strictures of their bibles? Composition + false dichotomy. Mmm... Taste the logical fallacies!
Again, you reveal your soft-spot for black-and-white reductionism. Either you're a qualified expert or you know nothing more than someone who's never read it. Either you're an expert in your religion or you're shaped by the society around you. You present a distorted set of arguments.
The truth, of course, is more complex than that. A person who has read the Bible for years probably knows more about it than someone who has never read it and is only familiar with a few verses hear and there quoted by others. Is their knowledge of the subject matter perfect? Probably not. Is the former more qualified to describe what it actually says than the latter. Definitely.
Religion's defenders want to have it both ways, it seems. When we're talking about what's in the book, an adherent of a religion is assumed to be such a devotee of their bible that their opinion can't be questioned. But, paradoxically, we can't be allowed to assume that these individuals actually cleave all that closely to what is written there, so what's actually written there is irrelevant to the religious experience. Ah, the parade continues! Two straw men, back-to-back!
First. No one is saying that a person's expertise cannot be questioned simply because one is devoted to a subject. (Well, maybe you are; I'm not.) Christians and Muslims regularly question each other's understanding of the Bible, and many are eager to discuss their knowledge with a non-believer who doesn't have an axe to grind (in much the same spirit of political discussions between people of opposite positions who aren't partisan jerks).
Second, there's your assertion that if two people read the Bible and come to different conclusions, then one (or both) of them are obviously not cleaving to what it says. Culture shapes what we take from the book. 200 years ago, Americans would have looked at Genesis 9:20-27 (the story of the curse of Ham) as justification for slavery of Africans. Today, we look at the same story and see no mention of skin color, nor any mention of his son Canaan as founding a whole people and scratch our heads over that idea. That's not even counting the parts of the Bible that suggest two different courses of action and the decision of the believer in which one is binding (e.g. an eye for an eye vs. turning the other cheek). The Bible is not a blueprint or a computer program; it requires interpretation.
We live in a nation where the vast majority of Christians think the Bible says "God helps those who help themselves". That is a sad truth, one of the many ways in which common, modern American Protestant beliefs don't really follow the Bible. (Doesn't mean that they don't have a religion that calls itself Christianity, though.) Few Christians have read the I'll bet that most people I regularly talk theology with probably have a better grasp of the material than your average "this book is filled with useless delusions and lies" atheist does for the same reason that I don't count myself as an Ayn Rand scholar, having only read Anthem and summaries of Atlas Shrugged and finding them wretched.;)
The Bible is the book that's produced the most atheists. Heh. An odd argument -- that atheists are produced primarily as matter of rebellion against Christianity. Does that mean that you believe that faith is the natural state of man before being exposed to Christianity?
Oh, that's nonsense. I'm not talking about secularism, I'm talking about not believing in things on the basis of no good evidence. Whatever Stalin's Russia was - and it's hard to argue that a belief system that says "God is the state; the state is God" is atheist in any way - they certainly weren't a rationalist culture that rejected faith-based thinking. The Lysenko episodes prove this.
And my point is that rejecting the existence of the supernatural does not inherently lead to rational behavior. Nor does accepting the existence of the supernatural inherently lead to irrational behavior (especially in the domain of the observable).
I love this attitude of yours - fundamentalist religion is just fine for the rubes, for the common person, but you're too smart to fall for it. If it's not good for you, why should we believe it's any good for anybody else? What possible use can come from wrong ideas, when the right ones are right here in front of us?
Your "right ideas" are a matter of faith. You haven't proven the vast majority of what you believe in -- you've just accepted it from others you trust. It's impossible to have done otherwise. What makes your ideas inherently correct without need for proof?
But [the stance that one should discard physical evidence for words in a book is] the attitude you're defending and promoting.
Reading comprehension skills aren't your strong suit, are they? Directly quote me saying something to that effect, and link it.
Science shows us that, after death, our bodies are consumed by other organisms and the material of our bodies becomes part of other living things, as the bodies of other living things became part of us during our lives. Religion simply discards that truth and substitutes a fictional narrative of "eternal souls" and "life in heaven" and "meeting our deceased loved ones in the afterlife" because it feels better to believe those things, and organizations that can provide a space for that belief secure temporal power and influence over adherents.
Strangely, no religion I've seen denies that your body rots. If you think you have proof of the absence of a soul, I'd love to see it. Otherwise, you're just espousing a belief taken on faith.
Sure. Some people are creative enough to make up their own falsehoods to substitute for knowledge. I literally don't understand that perspective. You know it's all made up, because you're the one making it up, and yet you believe it anyway. The power of human imagination to generate ideas that bear no relationship to reality doesn't seem to faze you at all. Truly astounding arrogance.
I know that you're incapable of understanding it. It's okay. Some people just have their limits, you know? The problem you have is the inherent assumptions that (a) it's a falsehood just because you can't prove it and (b) it's entirely the result of fanciful daydreaming instead of applications of logic to personal observation. Personal revelations about faith are about grappling with things that don't make sense and trying out answers until one is found that does. You've done this at some point in your life when you came to the conclusion that there is no God, and you believe this in absence of proof. Really, how are you any different?
Read your own post. You asserted that they didn't even exist. Remember? I quoted you.
Because it's a lot easier for you to defend religion if you pretend like fundamentalists aren't real, and that fundamentalist religious belief doesn't constitute a far greater portion of religionists than your own goofy moderatism.
You quoted something that said nothing of the sort. Reading comprehension skills really aren't your strong suit, are they?
I said: "You wish paint all people of faith as dogmatic fundamentalists . .., but that ignorant stereotype of yours is di
So there is absolutely zero danger of such artifical DNA escaping the lab and getting into the environment cause goodness knows what damage? There's no indication that the new sequences code for any amino acid. Thus there should be no environmental impact unless the new nucleotides are somehow poisonous. Essentially, this is complete junk DNA which is mostly useful for its properties of being easily identifiable as non-biological in origin.
Yes, studying the same book every week will lead to dogmatism, which is a form of willful ignorance. So, when debating Nietzsche, you should always trust the opinion of the person who's never read his books over the scholar of Nietzsche, because the latter is going to be a dogmatic fanboy of it? Because that's what you're saying here -- that the guy who's never read the Qu'ran and who has an axe to grind against it has superior wisdom over a man who has actually studied it. You are actually advocating that Ignorance is Strength.
If you can't see how to pull out relevant lessons for life from a complex body of work, then it's pretty obvious that you have a very poor, humanities-free education that has left you intellectually handicapped. Interpretation is a vital part of reading any non-technical text, and it is very much possible to come away from reading the Bible or the Qu'ran is more questions than answers.
Dogma is what happens when you decide on an answer and believe in its inerrant truth. Faith does not require this. Faith can still leave room for seeking, and all intellectually honest people do so.
Then again, intellectual curiosity winning out over stubbornness isn't necessarily that common of an engineer's trait, so maybe this article had some merit, after all.
Maybe you missed the part in the Quran where it says it was dictated to the Prophet Mohammed by the Archangel Gabriel, and as such is the absolute, final and inerrant word of God. That leaves no wiggle-room for "some good stuff, some bad stuff". You aren't reading the Quran the way a Muslim reads it, and certainly not the way a suicide bomber reads it. You are the one who is grossly misinterpreting it. Look. I understand that you seem utterly incapable of going beyond the theory of religion -- i.e. how it's written in the book -- and how it's actually practiced. Religion is a cultural institution on the macroscale and a set of personal beliefs on the microscale. As such, it changes with the passing of time and with each new believer's step along the journey.
The Qu'ran is a set of goalposts, and the Qu'ran itself is not the final word on Allah's will. The teachings of Islam are also refined over the centuries by Islamic scholars. Take slavery for instance. While the Wahhabis (a Muslim fundamentalist sect) disagree, almost every other sect of Islam has decreed that slavery is incompatible with the Islamic concept of social justice and of racial equality (as advocated in the prophet's last sermon). That's a change over time.
Heck, if there was only one way to live your life according to the Qu'ran, we wouldn't even have Islamic sects. But we do -- which is another sign that religion is not some dry, cookie-cutter, mindless robot factory. Islam contains everything from the fundamentalist hardliners to the contemplative mystics to the barely faithful. All of these people consider themselves Muslims. All of them respect the Qu'ran. All of them are religious to some extent or another, but they don't need *your* sanction to be "doing it right."
But, hey, again as an outsider to a concept, you seem to have the arrogance to lecture people on what religious faith is and how there's only One Way To Do It. Nothing breeds confidence like ignorance, hey?
The real question is when did the slashdot audience turn to such un-comical jackasses who feel the need to take everything so seriously? I get it, you're well off, you like science, you like to stay on slashdot because in your opinion it represents the more "successful" members of society. But then, maybe you're just an arrogant prick, and maybe we're just having fun. I think the real problem here, as Mannie taught Mike, is the difference between "Funny," "Not Funny," and "Funny Once." Like much geek humor, it seems that all the humor in the use of the tag on this article come from mindless repetition, and the joke has officially been beaten into the ground.
However, dangers and recklessness involved in this project are next to nil. There's no irony and clever cynicism here. There's just the mindless misapplication of an overdone meme in a manner that makes Slashdot look like a bunch of technology fearing idiots. So yeah. While I don't think it's worth getting so worked up about, it is a stupidly applied tag and a failed attempt at humor.
But that's not what his argument postulates at all. Did you read? The "realness" of reality is irrelevant; regardless of the reality of Reality, the Reality that we perceive is the "only context in which anything is meaningful."
God, I hate philosophy. The problem with so many of you people is that you talk yourself out of knowledge, and into ignorance.
*Sigh* I pointed out that it leads to absurdities if you don't make certain assumptions, but nonetheless they are still there. Why is this point so difficult to understand? Reason is never "turtles all the way down." You have to start somewhere.
But that's nonsense. The problem with religion is that it gets people to believe things that are demonstratively false - "abstinence-only education prevents pregnancy and STD's" - on the basis of no good evidence. Faith-based thinking is the pernicious enemy of being right about things.
Secularist movements have had their warts too -- eugenics, Stalin's gulags, the Cultural Revolution, etc. Removing God from the equation does really nothing to fix the fundamental human flaws of hierarchical behavior, confirmation bias, the elevation of the values of the in-group over those of the out-group, etc. People who pretend that ending religion will solve humanity's problems aren't really good students of humanity, in my opinion. We'd just find something to replace it like nationalism, party affiliation, etc.
And let's face it, one of the key things I've been trying to get across is that ALL knowledge that you do not demonstrate as true with your own testing is ultimately faith-based, subject to being tainted by confirmation bias and misplaced trust in authority figures with their own agendas. You have to seek the truth for yourself -- all the time.
The simple truth is that the universe, or providence, or whatever, isn't going to take care of us. Survival - of individuals, of societies - demands that we have accurate information about how things in the world work. The power that comes from that knowledge simply can't be denied, and has absolutely no peer in any religion, which is why conflicts of religion vs. science invariably - universally - are resolved in science's favor. Eventually even the religious adherents cannot deny the power of accurate knowledge about the real world.
Have I really disagreed with anything you said in this paragraph (except maybe the "no peer" bit)? I have never believed that faith requires one to shut one's eyes to the truth of the world. Faith that relies on willful blindness is wrong. The idea, however, that religions cannot fulfill any useful purpose in society is wrong.
But they try. Oh, they try. And they're aided by hordes of religious moderates like yourself who stand up by the score to run interference for them.
Your problem is that you think we're part of the same group -- like a right wing talk show host decrying everyone who isn't as conservative as them as nothing but a bunch of "librulls." I have as little to do with smug, close-minded, fundamentalist Christians as I have to do with smug, close-minded, atheist zealots. Frankly, to me you all look the same. Same attitude, same outlook on people who disagree with you. The only real difference is the whole "going to Hell" vs. "being delusional" thing.
No, he's objectively correct. It takes a weird kind of double-think to assert "separate magesteria" between science and religion and then accept without question religious claims that are clearly scientific in nature. There's something wrong with your mind if you can spend all day hunting for real-world claims to put to rigorous scrutiny - which is the work of scientists - and then, when 5:00 rolls around, simply turn that off and go back to accepting dubious claims with no scrutiny whatsoever. We should be very wary when we discover individuals who can exhibit that kind of duplicity.
By your lights, critical thinking is in principle impossible given the existence of 'unprovable postulates'.
No, sorry. That's your bias right there. Critical thinking is possible given the existence of unprovable postulates. All logic has to start from somewhere. Critical thinking in the absence of unprovable postulates and assumptions simply doesn't exist.
To the extent that they cannot 'really' be proven or known, which is to say the extent to which reality itself may be an illusion - a Matrix-style simulation, a dream, etc - is irrelevant because reality itself is the only context within which anything is meaningful.
A good argument, but one that postulates that reality itself is real -- which can't be proven or disproven. You have to start from *somewhere*. Objective reality cannot be proven to exist, but we must assume that it does because the results of assuming otherwise lead to absurdity. Nevertheless, the house of reason cannot be built with no foundation.
Science attempts to find the truths that *can* theoretically be proven within certain fundamental assumptions (such as the casting aside of existential questions). Religion tries to answer the questions that really can't be proven. There is intellectual curiosity in both. (How did we get here?) There is reason that can be applied to the assumptions of both. (Can God be good, all knowing, and all powerful if evil exists?) There is, to a degree, faith in the words of others involved in both. (You can only claim true knowledge of the things you have yourself tested and reasoned out; everything else is based on faith in human sources.)
The problem with all faiths is dogma -- the willing blindness to the possibility that you can be wrong and that the world has not revealed all or enough of its truths to you. You have it in anti-evolution Christian fundamentalists. You have it in religious / nationalist / ethnic conflicts in Israel & Palestine, Kosovo, Sudan, and more.
You, personally, seem to have in your blanket assertion that accepting a belief in something beyond what the senses can prove requires schizophrenia and irrationality. In your diatribes, you evince the exact same judgmental condemnation and treatment of others different from you as worthless and evil as a Fred Phelps follower running around with a "God Hates Fags" sign. All because you have taken upon yourself the dogma that nothing beyond what the eyes can see can possibly exist -- that those who seek and question are dangerous and deluded. You have your answers. Why should anyone else see differently, and why should society tolerate them?
Yes, I do. The problem with dogma is that it is blinding. The nonsensical rant from the Devout Believer I was responding to was a perfect testament to the power of dogma, and the need to dispel the blindness it causes with clear and critical thinking.
Please. You have about as much understanding of the Qu'ran that a Fox news pundit does -- one largely based on soundbites and damaging, out-of-context quotes. Have you actually *read* the Qu'ran in any sort of detail? I'm no Muslim scholar, but I actually *have* read many parts of it, and it can be quite beautiful and humane in places.
Like most central religious texts, the Qu'ran has a lot of good and bad in it. On the one hand, it exhorts peace, kind treatment of your neighbors, devotion to your family, charity to the poor, and life freed from the frantic search for the next empty pleasure. On the other hand, it recognizes a system of slavery, it exhorts the occasional conversion by the sword, and it relegates women to unequal footing with men. Yeah, I'll admit it -- kind of like the Old Testament that way.
What one takes from their faith is intensely personal. Not everybody who follows the teachings of the Bible, the Qu'ran, the Torah, the Sutras, etc. feels that everything in it must be 100% literally true or that values must never change over time. I don't think there's hardly a
I'm sure he knew when he posted that people would flock to give examples of people taking themselves too seriously and getting stuffy about it. Welcome to the party! Hats and noisemakers are in the rear.
And on a more serious note, he didn't say that *all* atheists were like this. Just that some of the most strident people he's seen online are atheists. Set S is mostly swallowed by Set A, not Set A is all within Set S. I'm sure you can find a few in this thread that are tossing about language that (but for the values expressed) seems almost identical to fire and brimstone language condemning the wicked and slothful.
Frankly, finding people of faith in on Slashdot that advocate the destruction of everything that other people believe in and the castigation of the fools who persist in getting with the program is far harder than finding atheists who do the same for religious people here. (And when you do find it, it's generally trolling instead of passionately held beliefs.)
Either that, or you think anyone not speaking a Romanized language is a heathen.
*sigh* It's just a sign of respect. Of course, it only matters in whatever languages can express it naturally. You don't see me attaching -sama to God just because I know Japanese, do you?
I swear, some people just shut off all critical thinking skills and turn into fountains of logical fallacies and hate when presented with someone else's religion, and the irreligious are by no means immune to this disease of the mind either.
Many of the engineers I've known in college were absolutely convinced of tehir superiority and absolute rightness in all things. Certainly not all, but a fair chunk. Same with Fundamentalism. To a certain extent its still trying to change the world instead of yourself. Sometimes you get the opposite reaction to wanting to change the world for the better. Sometimes you get the idea that the world is filled with stupid people who just need to get out of your way.
Hence the widespread cult of Ayn Rand on the campuses of a lot of engineering schools.
Anyone who honestly believes there is no contradiction between science (the application of critical thinking, the challenging of assumptions, and the use of an ever-expanding body of evidence to understand the universe) and religion (the demonization of critical thinking, the elevation of dogma and preservation of ignorance, and the use of iron-age superstition and irrationality to 'understand' the universe) is either ignorant, stupid, fucntionally schizophrenic (as I said in my first post) or all of the above.
Anyone who thinks that critical thinking happens in the absence of unprovable postulates has never done any critical thinking. Everything from "I exist" to "Time flows" to "Cause and effect exists" to "The information my senses provide me is accurate and true" is just as much an unprovable (and impossible to disprove) assumption as "The universe has a first cause" or "We persist after death" or "All of this has meaning."
Furthermore, you have an extremely one-sided view of the history of religion. A dogmatically one-sided view. You ignore the influence of religion on Renaissance to Industrial Age science -- how it led people to ask, "How did God wrought the universe." You ignore the influence of even Islam on preserving the maths and sciences of the ancient Greeks after the fall of Rome. Instead, religion is nothing more than superstition, irrationality, and the elevation of positions born from ignorance in your eyes. Ignore Newton. Ignore Mendel. Ignore Ibn al-Haytham. It's all just suicide bombers and Inquisitions, isn't it?
But that's okay. You're a "critical thinker." You're wisdom is inherently superior to the ignorant skeptics of your positions. Why, you're so righteous and wise in your beliefs that you presume to lecture a Muslim on the Qu'ran, a book with which is almost certainly more familiar than you. But don't let logic get in the way of the bitter, bile-filed diatribe that is born from your enlightened "critical thinking." After all, the guy who studies the book every week at his mosque is obviously the one arguing from a position of dogmatic ignorance here.
I'll give you the magic, McGuffin AI, but there were a number of other things that jumped out at me as technical errors that the plot hinged on when I watched it again over the holiday break.
* Every computer in the movie has speech synthesis software on it. * The Joshua login has no password. * Springing open a security door with dial-tone playback. * Breaking encryption codes one digit at a time.
There are a few non-technical problems too, like some questions of security procedures and some time/distance questions with traveling from Cheyenne Mt. to Western OR and back. WarGames had a lot of plot holes and technical liberties, but it was a good fun ride.
According to recent studies, acupuncture is useful as a method of back pain relief, but it is completely irrelevant where you stick the needles. The concept of meridians and the flow of chi are compete mumbo jumbo. Sham acupuncture is as effective as real acupuncture within a reasonable margin or error (47.6% relief for real, 44.2% for sham, and 27.4% for conventional therapy).
A landowner gets to keep a meteorite that falls on his property under the doctrine of first possession, but a satellite would be different. Finder's doctrine would apply. Basically, if no one came to claim the satellite, the landowner would own it so far as everyone else's rights are concerned, but a finder's right of ownership is not good against the original owner who has every legal right to come and claim it. You can bet that the US government is pretty likely to come looking for it. (This analysis ignores whether or not there are laws preventing civilians from claiming military hardware in the first place.)
Note that you also don't actually have a legal right to claim ownership of frisbees and baseballs that fall onto your property. You would lose if someone sued you for conversion of chattels. However, people just generally aren't litigious enough to waste the money on an attorney to replace a $5 kids toy and are generally happy for an object lesson to their kids in being careful with your stuff.
But if your neighbor's stupid kids broke out their dad's prized baseball signed by Babe Ruth and managed to knock into your yard, you can be damned sure that you aren't going to be able to keep it.
Doing whatever you want just for your own needs without thinking of others is pretty much the exact definition of selfish behavior. No, that's the exact definition of freedom. Hi. I'm your new neighbor. I was worried that you might have some problems with the 17,000W stereo system I was putting in, but I'm glad to hear you're committed to freedom. Well, if you need me, I'll be out back working at my home hog-rendering plant.
You don't think that maybe lots of them will continue to hate us anyway simply because we have religious and personal freedom?
Not enough to cross the ocean to kill us. It takes serious emotional investment to dedicate your life (and to be willing to sacrifice it) to the goal of destroying the lives of a large, powerful enemy, and they've got plenty of people to hate at home. It isn't personal enough at that point like it is currently with the support of Israel and our actions in Iraq.
Have you really drank the Kool-Aid deeply enough to think that something as impersonal as living differently from them on the opposite side of the world is enough to provoke an attack (as opposed to all the stuff that's been done in their backyard for decades)?
The best argument you can make is that it's too late after Iraq to think that withdrawing will do any good. We've committed ourselves personally to this blood feud for decades to come instead of just indirectly like we previously did by propping up Israel with money and UN vetoes.
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Things just haven't been the same with the Palantirs since the Eternal Halimath of 1493.
except, it's a civil-case, not a criminal case.
Ah, well then, in that case, welcome to civil discovery and mandatory disclosures where the 5th Amendment is in many ways largely made a mockery of.
You see, I've had this Sheryl Crow song stuck in my head for a week now...
But really, I was replying to what I thought you were saying about the portion of my previous post that you quoted. (i.e. That you were rejecting the idea that a guy who posts on Slashdot about his experiences as a mosque-attending Muslim would know more about the Qu'ran than an ignorant blowhard who did nothing but regurgitate all the bad things he's heard about the book as a way of "refuting" that it had anything nice to teach.) If that's not what you were saying, then my bad. I apologize for going on the attack. I quite agree - I have no objection to faith, only to dogma. Okay, common ground has been found. Let's shake and be friends. I got enough blowhards to argue with here without getting hostile with a reasonable, open-minded person. <g>
Again, you reveal your soft-spot for black-and-white reductionism. Either you're a qualified expert or you know nothing more than someone who's never read it. Either you're an expert in your religion or you're shaped by the society around you. You present a distorted set of arguments.
The truth, of course, is more complex than that. A person who has read the Bible for years probably knows more about it than someone who has never read it and is only familiar with a few verses hear and there quoted by others. Is their knowledge of the subject matter perfect? Probably not. Is the former more qualified to describe what it actually says than the latter. Definitely. Religion's defenders want to have it both ways, it seems. When we're talking about what's in the book, an adherent of a religion is assumed to be such a devotee of their bible that their opinion can't be questioned. But, paradoxically, we can't be allowed to assume that these individuals actually cleave all that closely to what is written there, so what's actually written there is irrelevant to the religious experience. Ah, the parade continues! Two straw men, back-to-back!
First. No one is saying that a person's expertise cannot be questioned simply because one is devoted to a subject. (Well, maybe you are; I'm not.) Christians and Muslims regularly question each other's understanding of the Bible, and many are eager to discuss their knowledge with a non-believer who doesn't have an axe to grind (in much the same spirit of political discussions between people of opposite positions who aren't partisan jerks).
Second, there's your assertion that if two people read the Bible and come to different conclusions, then one (or both) of them are obviously not cleaving to what it says. Culture shapes what we take from the book. 200 years ago, Americans would have looked at Genesis 9:20-27 (the story of the curse of Ham) as justification for slavery of Africans. Today, we look at the same story and see no mention of skin color, nor any mention of his son Canaan as founding a whole people and scratch our heads over that idea. That's not even counting the parts of the Bible that suggest two different courses of action and the decision of the believer in which one is binding (e.g. an eye for an eye vs. turning the other cheek). The Bible is not a blueprint or a computer program; it requires interpretation. We live in a nation where the vast majority of Christians think the Bible says "God helps those who help themselves". That is a sad truth, one of the many ways in which common, modern American Protestant beliefs don't really follow the Bible. (Doesn't mean that they don't have a religion that calls itself Christianity, though.) Few Christians have read the I'll bet that most people I regularly talk theology with probably have a better grasp of the material than your average "this book is filled with useless delusions and lies" atheist does for the same reason that I don't count myself as an Ayn Rand scholar, having only read Anthem and summaries of Atlas Shrugged and finding them wretched.
Does that mean that you believe that faith is the natural state of man before being exposed to Christianity?
Oh, that's nonsense. I'm not talking about secularism, I'm talking about not believing in things on the basis of no good evidence. Whatever Stalin's Russia was - and it's hard to argue that a belief system that says "God is the state; the state is God" is atheist in any way - they certainly weren't a rationalist culture that rejected faith-based thinking. The Lysenko episodes prove this.
And my point is that rejecting the existence of the supernatural does not inherently lead to rational behavior. Nor does accepting the existence of the supernatural inherently lead to irrational behavior (especially in the domain of the observable).
I love this attitude of yours - fundamentalist religion is just fine for the rubes, for the common person, but you're too smart to fall for it. If it's not good for you, why should we believe it's any good for anybody else? What possible use can come from wrong ideas, when the right ones are right here in front of us?
Your "right ideas" are a matter of faith. You haven't proven the vast majority of what you believe in -- you've just accepted it from others you trust. It's impossible to have done otherwise. What makes your ideas inherently correct without need for proof?
But [the stance that one should discard physical evidence for words in a book is] the attitude you're defending and promoting.
Reading comprehension skills aren't your strong suit, are they? Directly quote me saying something to that effect, and link it.
Science shows us that, after death, our bodies are consumed by other organisms and the material of our bodies becomes part of other living things, as the bodies of other living things became part of us during our lives. Religion simply discards that truth and substitutes a fictional narrative of "eternal souls" and "life in heaven" and "meeting our deceased loved ones in the afterlife" because it feels better to believe those things, and organizations that can provide a space for that belief secure temporal power and influence over adherents.
Strangely, no religion I've seen denies that your body rots. If you think you have proof of the absence of a soul, I'd love to see it. Otherwise, you're just espousing a belief taken on faith.
Sure. Some people are creative enough to make up their own falsehoods to substitute for knowledge. I literally don't understand that perspective. You know it's all made up, because you're the one making it up, and yet you believe it anyway. The power of human imagination to generate ideas that bear no relationship to reality doesn't seem to faze you at all. Truly astounding arrogance.
I know that you're incapable of understanding it. It's okay. Some people just have their limits, you know? The problem you have is the inherent assumptions that (a) it's a falsehood just because you can't prove it and (b) it's entirely the result of fanciful daydreaming instead of applications of logic to personal observation. Personal revelations about faith are about grappling with things that don't make sense and trying out answers until one is found that does. You've done this at some point in your life when you came to the conclusion that there is no God, and you believe this in absence of proof. Really, how are you any different?
Read your own post. You asserted that they didn't even exist. Remember? I quoted you.
Because it's a lot easier for you to defend religion if you pretend like fundamentalists aren't real, and that fundamentalist religious belief doesn't constitute a far greater portion of religionists than your own goofy moderatism.
You quoted something that said nothing of the sort. Reading comprehension skills really aren't your strong suit, are they?
., but that ignorant stereotype of yours is di
I said:
"You wish paint all people of faith as dogmatic fundamentalists . .
If you can't see how to pull out relevant lessons for life from a complex body of work, then it's pretty obvious that you have a very poor, humanities-free education that has left you intellectually handicapped. Interpretation is a vital part of reading any non-technical text, and it is very much possible to come away from reading the Bible or the Qu'ran is more questions than answers.
Dogma is what happens when you decide on an answer and believe in its inerrant truth. Faith does not require this. Faith can still leave room for seeking, and all intellectually honest people do so.
Then again, intellectual curiosity winning out over stubbornness isn't necessarily that common of an engineer's trait, so maybe this article had some merit, after all.
The Qu'ran is a set of goalposts, and the Qu'ran itself is not the final word on Allah's will. The teachings of Islam are also refined over the centuries by Islamic scholars. Take slavery for instance. While the Wahhabis (a Muslim fundamentalist sect) disagree, almost every other sect of Islam has decreed that slavery is incompatible with the Islamic concept of social justice and of racial equality (as advocated in the prophet's last sermon). That's a change over time.
Heck, if there was only one way to live your life according to the Qu'ran, we wouldn't even have Islamic sects. But we do -- which is another sign that religion is not some dry, cookie-cutter, mindless robot factory. Islam contains everything from the fundamentalist hardliners to the contemplative mystics to the barely faithful. All of these people consider themselves Muslims. All of them respect the Qu'ran. All of them are religious to some extent or another, but they don't need *your* sanction to be "doing it right."
But, hey, again as an outsider to a concept, you seem to have the arrogance to lecture people on what religious faith is and how there's only One Way To Do It. Nothing breeds confidence like ignorance, hey?
Plus, let's face it -- there are articles where the tag is wonderfully appropriate as ironic snark, but this one isn't it. I mean, it's great for articles like this one about mass production of micro fission reactors or this one about the proposed future of military robots. Sometimes, it's funny when the very proposition of something going wrong is itself funny like with an article on a robot controlled by a monkey's brain.
However, dangers and recklessness involved in this project are next to nil. There's no irony and clever cynicism here. There's just the mindless misapplication of an overdone meme in a manner that makes Slashdot look like a bunch of technology fearing idiots. So yeah. While I don't think it's worth getting so worked up about, it is a stupidly applied tag and a failed attempt at humor.
But that's not what his argument postulates at all. Did you read? The "realness" of reality is irrelevant; regardless of the reality of Reality, the Reality that we perceive is the "only context in which anything is meaningful."
God, I hate philosophy. The problem with so many of you people is that you talk yourself out of knowledge, and into ignorance.
*Sigh* I pointed out that it leads to absurdities if you don't make certain assumptions, but nonetheless they are still there. Why is this point so difficult to understand? Reason is never "turtles all the way down." You have to start somewhere.
But that's nonsense. The problem with religion is that it gets people to believe things that are demonstratively false - "abstinence-only education prevents pregnancy and STD's" - on the basis of no good evidence. Faith-based thinking is the pernicious enemy of being right about things.
Secularist movements have had their warts too -- eugenics, Stalin's gulags, the Cultural Revolution, etc. Removing God from the equation does really nothing to fix the fundamental human flaws of hierarchical behavior, confirmation bias, the elevation of the values of the in-group over those of the out-group, etc. People who pretend that ending religion will solve humanity's problems aren't really good students of humanity, in my opinion. We'd just find something to replace it like nationalism, party affiliation, etc.
And let's face it, one of the key things I've been trying to get across is that ALL knowledge that you do not demonstrate as true with your own testing is ultimately faith-based, subject to being tainted by confirmation bias and misplaced trust in authority figures with their own agendas. You have to seek the truth for yourself -- all the time.
The simple truth is that the universe, or providence, or whatever, isn't going to take care of us. Survival - of individuals, of societies - demands that we have accurate information about how things in the world work. The power that comes from that knowledge simply can't be denied, and has absolutely no peer in any religion, which is why conflicts of religion vs. science invariably - universally - are resolved in science's favor. Eventually even the religious adherents cannot deny the power of accurate knowledge about the real world.
Have I really disagreed with anything you said in this paragraph (except maybe the "no peer" bit)? I have never believed that faith requires one to shut one's eyes to the truth of the world. Faith that relies on willful blindness is wrong. The idea, however, that religions cannot fulfill any useful purpose in society is wrong.
But they try. Oh, they try. And they're aided by hordes of religious moderates like yourself who stand up by the score to run interference for them.
Your problem is that you think we're part of the same group -- like a right wing talk show host decrying everyone who isn't as conservative as them as nothing but a bunch of "librulls." I have as little to do with smug, close-minded, fundamentalist Christians as I have to do with smug, close-minded, atheist zealots. Frankly, to me you all look the same. Same attitude, same outlook on people who disagree with you. The only real difference is the whole "going to Hell" vs. "being delusional" thing.
No, he's objectively correct. It takes a weird kind of double-think to assert "separate magesteria" between science and religion and then accept without question religious claims that are clearly scientific in nature. There's something wrong with your mind if you can spend all day hunting for real-world claims to put to rigorous scrutiny - which is the work of scientists - and then, when 5:00 rolls around, simply turn that off and go back to accepting dubious claims with no scrutiny whatsoever. We should be very wary when we discover individuals who can exhibit that kind of duplicity.
Straw man. I've never said that when
By your lights, critical thinking is in principle impossible given the existence of 'unprovable postulates'.
No, sorry. That's your bias right there. Critical thinking is possible given the existence of unprovable postulates. All logic has to start from somewhere. Critical thinking in the absence of unprovable postulates and assumptions simply doesn't exist.
To the extent that they cannot 'really' be proven or known, which is to say the extent to which reality itself may be an illusion - a Matrix-style simulation, a dream, etc - is irrelevant because reality itself is the only context within which anything is meaningful.
A good argument, but one that postulates that reality itself is real -- which can't be proven or disproven. You have to start from *somewhere*. Objective reality cannot be proven to exist, but we must assume that it does because the results of assuming otherwise lead to absurdity. Nevertheless, the house of reason cannot be built with no foundation.
Science attempts to find the truths that *can* theoretically be proven within certain fundamental assumptions (such as the casting aside of existential questions). Religion tries to answer the questions that really can't be proven. There is intellectual curiosity in both. (How did we get here?) There is reason that can be applied to the assumptions of both. (Can God be good, all knowing, and all powerful if evil exists?) There is, to a degree, faith in the words of others involved in both. (You can only claim true knowledge of the things you have yourself tested and reasoned out; everything else is based on faith in human sources.)
The problem with all faiths is dogma -- the willing blindness to the possibility that you can be wrong and that the world has not revealed all or enough of its truths to you. You have it in anti-evolution Christian fundamentalists. You have it in religious / nationalist / ethnic conflicts in Israel & Palestine, Kosovo, Sudan, and more.
You, personally, seem to have in your blanket assertion that accepting a belief in something beyond what the senses can prove requires schizophrenia and irrationality. In your diatribes, you evince the exact same judgmental condemnation and treatment of others different from you as worthless and evil as a Fred Phelps follower running around with a "God Hates Fags" sign. All because you have taken upon yourself the dogma that nothing beyond what the eyes can see can possibly exist -- that those who seek and question are dangerous and deluded. You have your answers. Why should anyone else see differently, and why should society tolerate them?
Yes, I do. The problem with dogma is that it is blinding. The nonsensical rant from the Devout Believer I was responding to was a perfect testament to the power of dogma, and the need to dispel the blindness it causes with clear and critical thinking.
Please. You have about as much understanding of the Qu'ran that a Fox news pundit does -- one largely based on soundbites and damaging, out-of-context quotes. Have you actually *read* the Qu'ran in any sort of detail? I'm no Muslim scholar, but I actually *have* read many parts of it, and it can be quite beautiful and humane in places.
Like most central religious texts, the Qu'ran has a lot of good and bad in it. On the one hand, it exhorts peace, kind treatment of your neighbors, devotion to your family, charity to the poor, and life freed from the frantic search for the next empty pleasure. On the other hand, it recognizes a system of slavery, it exhorts the occasional conversion by the sword, and it relegates women to unequal footing with men. Yeah, I'll admit it -- kind of like the Old Testament that way.
What one takes from their faith is intensely personal. Not everybody who follows the teachings of the Bible, the Qu'ran, the Torah, the Sutras, etc. feels that everything in it must be 100% literally true or that values must never change over time. I don't think there's hardly a
I'm sure he knew when he posted that people would flock to give examples of people taking themselves too seriously and getting stuffy about it. Welcome to the party! Hats and noisemakers are in the rear.
And on a more serious note, he didn't say that *all* atheists were like this. Just that some of the most strident people he's seen online are atheists. Set S is mostly swallowed by Set A, not Set A is all within Set S. I'm sure you can find a few in this thread that are tossing about language that (but for the values expressed) seems almost identical to fire and brimstone language condemning the wicked and slothful.
Frankly, finding people of faith in on Slashdot that advocate the destruction of everything that other people believe in and the castigation of the fools who persist in getting with the program is far harder than finding atheists who do the same for religious people here. (And when you do find it, it's generally trolling instead of passionately held beliefs.)
Either that, or you think anyone not speaking a Romanized language is a heathen.
*sigh* It's just a sign of respect. Of course, it only matters in whatever languages can express it naturally. You don't see me attaching -sama to God just because I know Japanese, do you?
I swear, some people just shut off all critical thinking skills and turn into fountains of logical fallacies and hate when presented with someone else's religion, and the irreligious are by no means immune to this disease of the mind either.
Hence the widespread cult of Ayn Rand on the campuses of a lot of engineering schools.
Anyone who honestly believes there is no contradiction between science (the application of critical thinking, the challenging of assumptions, and the use of an ever-expanding body of evidence to understand the universe) and religion (the demonization of critical thinking, the elevation of dogma and preservation of ignorance, and the use of iron-age superstition and irrationality to 'understand' the universe) is either ignorant, stupid, fucntionally schizophrenic (as I said in my first post) or all of the above.
Anyone who thinks that critical thinking happens in the absence of unprovable postulates has never done any critical thinking. Everything from "I exist" to "Time flows" to "Cause and effect exists" to "The information my senses provide me is accurate and true" is just as much an unprovable (and impossible to disprove) assumption as "The universe has a first cause" or "We persist after death" or "All of this has meaning."
Furthermore, you have an extremely one-sided view of the history of religion. A dogmatically one-sided view. You ignore the influence of religion on Renaissance to Industrial Age science -- how it led people to ask, "How did God wrought the universe." You ignore the influence of even Islam on preserving the maths and sciences of the ancient Greeks after the fall of Rome. Instead, religion is nothing more than superstition, irrationality, and the elevation of positions born from ignorance in your eyes. Ignore Newton. Ignore Mendel. Ignore Ibn al-Haytham. It's all just suicide bombers and Inquisitions, isn't it?
But that's okay. You're a "critical thinker." You're wisdom is inherently superior to the ignorant skeptics of your positions. Why, you're so righteous and wise in your beliefs that you presume to lecture a Muslim on the Qu'ran, a book with which is almost certainly more familiar than you. But don't let logic get in the way of the bitter, bile-filed diatribe that is born from your enlightened "critical thinking." After all, the guy who studies the book every week at his mosque is obviously the one arguing from a position of dogmatic ignorance here.
I'll give you the magic, McGuffin AI, but there were a number of other things that jumped out at me as technical errors that the plot hinged on when I watched it again over the holiday break.
* Every computer in the movie has speech synthesis software on it.
* The Joshua login has no password.
* Springing open a security door with dial-tone playback.
* Breaking encryption codes one digit at a time.
There are a few non-technical problems too, like some questions of security procedures and some time/distance questions with traveling from Cheyenne Mt. to Western OR and back. WarGames had a lot of plot holes and technical liberties, but it was a good fun ride.
Maybe you're fuzzy on the concept of "liked," or "wanting those two hours of my life back."
Those generally aren't concepts that go together.
According to recent studies, acupuncture is useful as a method of back pain relief, but it is completely irrelevant where you stick the needles. The concept of meridians and the flow of chi are compete mumbo jumbo. Sham acupuncture is as effective as real acupuncture within a reasonable margin or error (47.6% relief for real, 44.2% for sham, and 27.4% for conventional therapy).
A landowner gets to keep a meteorite that falls on his property under the doctrine of first possession, but a satellite would be different. Finder's doctrine would apply. Basically, if no one came to claim the satellite, the landowner would own it so far as everyone else's rights are concerned, but a finder's right of ownership is not good against the original owner who has every legal right to come and claim it. You can bet that the US government is pretty likely to come looking for it. (This analysis ignores whether or not there are laws preventing civilians from claiming military hardware in the first place.)
Note that you also don't actually have a legal right to claim ownership of frisbees and baseballs that fall onto your property. You would lose if someone sued you for conversion of chattels. However, people just generally aren't litigious enough to waste the money on an attorney to replace a $5 kids toy and are generally happy for an object lesson to their kids in being careful with your stuff.
But if your neighbor's stupid kids broke out their dad's prized baseball signed by Babe Ruth and managed to knock into your yard, you can be damned sure that you aren't going to be able to keep it.
Yes, but does Tor not work that way? Hmmm...?
Right. Forgot about that. Thanks.
Toodles.
That's always bugged me. So, was the anti-gravity flight modification *also* gas powered?
You don't think that maybe lots of them will continue to hate us anyway simply because we have religious and personal freedom?
Not enough to cross the ocean to kill us. It takes serious emotional investment to dedicate your life (and to be willing to sacrifice it) to the goal of destroying the lives of a large, powerful enemy, and they've got plenty of people to hate at home. It isn't personal enough at that point like it is currently with the support of Israel and our actions in Iraq.
Have you really drank the Kool-Aid deeply enough to think that something as impersonal as living differently from them on the opposite side of the world is enough to provoke an attack (as opposed to all the stuff that's been done in their backyard for decades)?
The best argument you can make is that it's too late after Iraq to think that withdrawing will do any good. We've committed ourselves personally to this blood feud for decades to come instead of just indirectly like we previously did by propping up Israel with money and UN vetoes.