How can you remain neutral on such a topic? You either believe one way or the other.
You could not care, like I do. Ultimately, it doesn't matter to me whether we evolved billions of years ago or if God created us five minutes ago with our memories intact. Theories of human origins are interesting to speculate about, but they don't affect how I live my life. Honestly, the most interesting part of the "evolution vs creationism" debate is the debate itself, and what it teaches us about human nature. (It's taught me that everybody has mental blind spots and knee-jerk reactions, regardless of ideology.)
Science is about testable theories and Occam's razor, which can indeded be applied to the "Religious concept", when applied to these, you come to the conclusion that these beliefs are empty being not testable in any way.
"Not testable in any way" *means* "Science cannot apply to [it]". Science only covers the domain of things that are testable. If something is not testable, science can't say anything meaningful about it other than "it's not testable".
The only way to attack the IDers and creationists is to question their central axiom.
There's another way: assume their central axiom (God is real etc.) is true, and then show that it either does not lead to their conclusion, or that it makes their conclusion false or irrelevant. That's often the only effective way to convince somebody of something.
A third approach is to look at their assumptions about what the debate means. Many people get into ID and Creationism because they think that evolution somehow threatens their belief in God, and many people become anti-IDers and anti-Creationists because they think that evolution somehow threatens others' belief in God. Close examination reveals that those beliefs are false; the truth is that science, and theories of scientific evolution, can't prove the existence (or not) of the supernatural, and the existence of the supernatural is not inconsistent with science or theories of scientific evolution.
Except that society (or government) can't protect you from being killed, sold into slavery or raped.
Correct; there are no guarantees. What society does via government is reduce the frequency that I need to protect myself from being killed, enslaved or raped. Some people are actually able to go their entire lives without using the self-defense skills that they hopefully possess; others only have to defend themselves a handful of times. Contrast that with the alternative: short of inexpensive yet overwhelmingly effective defensive military technology (which a cornucopia machine might provide), life would be like a Mad Max movie, or worse, like an S.M. Stirling novel.
And again, usual punishment for breaking the law is jail and / or a fine. Not violence.
Jail and/or fine are threats of violence, because if you refuse to comply, they will force you.
To continue to support that is just stupid.
I can support the idea of taxation, government and social contract without supporting most of the things that my government actually does. A smaller government that ruined fewer lives would be preferable to the government I have now, but a government composed of whatever local street gang has the most guns would be worse than said smaller government.
Keep going down that road, and you end up at dictatorships and other governments.
Yes; too much of a good thing is often a bad thing.
How can you possibly say that taxes and enforcement of many of the laws is a benefit to society when you can't even really define who is in society?
I look at the extreme: without society to protect me from the strong, I would be victimized. Of course, many of the taxes and laws that we have are detrimental to society, but I depend on some laws (which are backed by threat of violence from the state) to prevent someone from forming a gang to kill me for my land, or sell me into slavery, or rape me, etc. That doesn't mean that I should not prepare for self-defense; what I mean is that I (and others) gain tremendous benefit from the government's threat of violence against those who would attack us.
Give me a cornucopia machine and things might be different.
A civilized state never threatens with violence their citizenry.
Never? What about rioting citizens, or drunken brawlers? What happens if someone resists arrest? What if the authorities think someone is a suicide bomber? What if someone attacks the police or military?
So what you're saying is armed thugs take what you've rightfully earned, and give it to someone else for purposes you probably don't agree with, and that violence keeps people doing what they are told, even when it may not be to their benefit.
That is a pretty accurate description of what happens, yes. I don't claim that it's moral, but it's generally to society's benefit.
What good is threat of violence if there is no real threat?
If there were no real threat, then threat of violence would not be very useful, but there is, so it is. If one could magically get everybody to forswear violence simultaneously, then it would be great, but too many people or groups would lie in order to get a monopoly on violence, with which they would then do as they pleased.
Being put in jail is not violent, so its not violence deterring anyone.
Try to resist and see how not violent it is. That's why I said "violence and threat of violence".
Sex is better because it is constructive and that benefits all of society.
Violence can also be constructive and beneficial to society. For example, the threat of violence from the state convinces many people (who would be otherwise disinclined) to pay their taxes and more or less obey the law. In addition, violence and the threat of violence is one way to avoid tragedy-of-the-commons scenarios. Finally, violence and the threat of violence can deter future violence from occurring.
It's not just that, it's balancing the rights of that collection of cells against the rights of the fully-formed person that is the mother.
Yes, exactly. More importantly, however, Ron Paul is probably the most privacy-friendly Presidential candidate. Like his position on abortion, his position on censorship would be "that's not up to the feds."
eh. He's pro life. That's mixing faith-based morals with law, which IMHO is about as bad as it gets.
There are pro-life atheists; the issue is not whether or not killing is bad, it's when you think a collection of cells deserves human rights, and how you think that affects society's (or your own) best interests. There are logically consistent positions on both sides.
To keep this post on topic: I think that some libertarian beliefs held by Ron Paul are pro-privacy, but some are not. I agree with those who say that a completely unregulated market will result in companies using dishonest tactics to deceive people and become monopolies. But, they do that already, and if Ron Paul were President he couldn't simply dissolve the FDA etc. as he'd like. There are checks and balances that would prevent his worst tendencies from being expressed, I think.
That phrase always bugged me. Logically the exception weakens the rule. With enough exceptions the rule becomes meaningless. So how exactly does the exception prove the rule? It's a very odd phrase.
It's an idiom, so the words don't actually have much to do with the meaning. Idioms bug me in general. I prefer more literal phrases.
Because even for someone with a low IQ, it's a major project to lie that baldly about how you see the world, or (much harder!) actually suspend reason long enough to actually convince yourself that's how it really is.
It keeps coming up because religious ideologues keep insisting that science is wrong because it contradicts their beliefs.
I was with you until you said "wrong". Too often I see religious ideologues insisting that science is the only rational basis for a worldview, because other worldviews contradict their beliefs. Religious zealots, regardless of flavor, tend to be distressingly similar when arguing their points of view.
I solved this problem by using two file servers -- old 400 MHz machines -- and keeping one powered off most of the time. Every so often I'll power both on and use rsync to copy new files to the old machine. When a system disk dies, I can restore onto a new disk using an image from the other machine. When a data disk dies, I only lose changes since the previous backup.
It's obviously not foolproof, but it meets my home needs, and it minimizes my annoyance when something breaks.
On my desktop, I use software for my RAID-1 array, specifically to avoid the problem you mention.
Lets see you claim 50 years of listening to aliens with just one BLEEP. Okay. Now for the other side. A minimum of 5000/6000 years with NADA, ZILCH, NOTHING.
That is not even comparing the size of the searches. So explain to me, if you believe god exists, where is the evidence.
Lots of people claim to have received communication from one or more gods. That's evidence.
We looked through the code on paper, literally line by line, and just couldn't for the life of us imagine what the problem was.
This may be the least effective method of debugging in existence.
Code inspections and walkthroughs are actually effective ways to find bugs. When you debug from a symptom you have to trace back and figure out where the bug is happening, but when you have multiple people manually working through what should happen you can detect problems directly.
makes it easier to accidentally break the code structure
I don't know what you mean here, either, unless you go around randomly adding whitespace for fun.
Your parent poster could be referring to the tab vs space issue. But that problem would disappear if those heretics would just do it like I do, the One True Way.
I think both you and the grandparent are assuming that your own personal experiences are typical. The reality is that the plural of anecdote is not data.
Income is greatly influenced by luck, ability and location (local cost of living). If an individual engineer hasn't cracked $50k with 6 years of experience, at least one of those things is low.
No, you're using a meaninglessly broad definition of the term "religous".
I think that's the crux of our disagreement. When examining moral or ethical opinions that are plucked out of thin air, I see no need to differentiate between those that are and are not backed by people who wear funny hats while performing weird rituals. The adjective "religious" does not have to mean "is associated with an organized religion". Any time somebody believes something because of faith (as opposed to, say, because of science), that belief can be accurately described as a religious belief. Now, some beliefs are so trivial that it doesn't really add anything to describe them as "religious" (such as my belief that my chair is not about to collapse), but the belief that mankind has a moral responsibility to not trash the earth is not trivial. In this specific case, using the word "religious" to describe that belief is useful, because it leads the reader to compare it to the beliefs typically associated with those who wear funny hats. That's why it's not meaninglessly broad.
It struck me that in a science-oriented discussion, someone's arbitrary (albeit popular) moral assertion went without note, so I noted it.
That is a MORAL view, not a RELIGIOUS view. Religious views can encompass moral positions, but moral views are not, in general, religious.
I can't think of any moral views that can't be accurately described as religious views. One of the definitions of "religious" is a synonym of "moral". Distinguishing between the two is like putting on a funny hat and performing some ritual in order to claim that one's views are special. My views are no more special than yours (aside from whether or not they're accurate).
I just saw a documentary on how the Israelis routinely cavity search ten year old girls just because they are Palestinians.
That's pretty terrible, but ten year old girls are a potential vector for terrorism, which is also pretty terrible. I'm not saying that the Israelis are right, but how do you protect against terrorists who use ten year old girls to smuggle weapons onto a plane? (Not saying they have, but if ten year old girls were never cavity searched, they would.)
Bad as it is, it seems like discrimination is an effective tactic against terrorism. Of course the real solution is "go back in time 50 years and be nice to the parents of today's terrorists," but that has implementation issues. Maybe the long-term effects of discrimination are worse than the long-term effects of terrorism, but I for one am at a loss for ideas about how to effectively prevent short-term terrorism, especially without the ability to control the strategic situation.
What the TSA is currently doing certainly doesn't help. The best strategy I can come up with is to drop the most onerous security and hope to make society better by more than terrorism makes it worse.
You're confusion religion with ethics. A position can be ethical without being religious.
No, you're confusing religious views with organized religion. Someone can hold religious views about anything; any arbitrary position (such as "X is wrong") is a religious view. This certainly overlaps with ethics, though it's not a superset of everything that has to do with ethics (descriptive ethics attempts to observe existing ethical views without necessarily endorsing them).
In this case, Dr. Hansen apparently believes that humanity doesn't have the right to damage the earth. This is clearly outside the realm of science; it's based on one's opinion about the place of mankind in the universe. Moreover, people often hold religious views about things that science does make meaningful statements about, so whether or not somebody believes something religiously is independent of whether or not there are other reasons to believe that thing.
It's possible that Dr. Hansen believes this for legal-historical reasons (for example, perhaps he read it on a web site that he trusted.) That doesn't prevent it from being a religious view though; lots of religious views are formed after being exposed to ideas that ultimately amount to hearsay.
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You could not care, like I do. Ultimately, it doesn't matter to me whether we evolved billions of years ago or if God created us five minutes ago with our memories intact. Theories of human origins are interesting to speculate about, but they don't affect how I live my life. Honestly, the most interesting part of the "evolution vs creationism" debate is the debate itself, and what it teaches us about human nature. (It's taught me that everybody has mental blind spots and knee-jerk reactions, regardless of ideology.)
"Not testable in any way" *means* "Science cannot apply to [it]". Science only covers the domain of things that are testable. If something is not testable, science can't say anything meaningful about it other than "it's not testable".
There's another way: assume their central axiom (God is real etc.) is true, and then show that it either does not lead to their conclusion, or that it makes their conclusion false or irrelevant. That's often the only effective way to convince somebody of something.
A third approach is to look at their assumptions about what the debate means. Many people get into ID and Creationism because they think that evolution somehow threatens their belief in God, and many people become anti-IDers and anti-Creationists because they think that evolution somehow threatens others' belief in God. Close examination reveals that those beliefs are false; the truth is that science, and theories of scientific evolution, can't prove the existence (or not) of the supernatural, and the existence of the supernatural is not inconsistent with science or theories of scientific evolution.
Correct; there are no guarantees. What society does via government is reduce the frequency that I need to protect myself from being killed, enslaved or raped. Some people are actually able to go their entire lives without using the self-defense skills that they hopefully possess; others only have to defend themselves a handful of times. Contrast that with the alternative: short of inexpensive yet overwhelmingly effective defensive military technology (which a cornucopia machine might provide), life would be like a Mad Max movie, or worse, like an S.M. Stirling novel.
Jail and/or fine are threats of violence, because if you refuse to comply, they will force you.
I can support the idea of taxation, government and social contract without supporting most of the things that my government actually does. A smaller government that ruined fewer lives would be preferable to the government I have now, but a government composed of whatever local street gang has the most guns would be worse than said smaller government.
Yes; too much of a good thing is often a bad thing.
I look at the extreme: without society to protect me from the strong, I would be victimized. Of course, many of the taxes and laws that we have are detrimental to society, but I depend on some laws (which are backed by threat of violence from the state) to prevent someone from forming a gang to kill me for my land, or sell me into slavery, or rape me, etc. That doesn't mean that I should not prepare for self-defense; what I mean is that I (and others) gain tremendous benefit from the government's threat of violence against those who would attack us.
Give me a cornucopia machine and things might be different.
Never? What about rioting citizens, or drunken brawlers? What happens if someone resists arrest? What if the authorities think someone is a suicide bomber? What if someone attacks the police or military?
That is a pretty accurate description of what happens, yes. I don't claim that it's moral, but it's generally to society's benefit.
If there were no real threat, then threat of violence would not be very useful, but there is, so it is. If one could magically get everybody to forswear violence simultaneously, then it would be great, but too many people or groups would lie in order to get a monopoly on violence, with which they would then do as they pleased.
Try to resist and see how not violent it is. That's why I said "violence and threat of violence".
Violence can also be constructive and beneficial to society. For example, the threat of violence from the state convinces many people (who would be otherwise disinclined) to pay their taxes and more or less obey the law. In addition, violence and the threat of violence is one way to avoid tragedy-of-the-commons scenarios. Finally, violence and the threat of violence can deter future violence from occurring.
Yes, exactly. More importantly, however, Ron Paul is probably the most privacy-friendly Presidential candidate. Like his position on abortion, his position on censorship would be "that's not up to the feds."
There are pro-life atheists; the issue is not whether or not killing is bad, it's when you think a collection of cells deserves human rights, and how you think that affects society's (or your own) best interests. There are logically consistent positions on both sides.
To keep this post on topic: I think that some libertarian beliefs held by Ron Paul are pro-privacy, but some are not. I agree with those who say that a completely unregulated market will result in companies using dishonest tactics to deceive people and become monopolies. But, they do that already, and if Ron Paul were President he couldn't simply dissolve the FDA etc. as he'd like. There are checks and balances that would prevent his worst tendencies from being expressed, I think.
It's an idiom, so the words don't actually have much to do with the meaning. Idioms bug me in general. I prefer more literal phrases.
Actually, it's pretty easy. Unfortunately.
I was with you until you said "wrong". Too often I see religious ideologues insisting that science is the only rational basis for a worldview, because other worldviews contradict their beliefs. Religious zealots, regardless of flavor, tend to be distressingly similar when arguing their points of view.
I solved this problem by using two file servers -- old 400 MHz machines -- and keeping one powered off most of the time. Every so often I'll power both on and use rsync to copy new files to the old machine. When a system disk dies, I can restore onto a new disk using an image from the other machine. When a data disk dies, I only lose changes since the previous backup.
It's obviously not foolproof, but it meets my home needs, and it minimizes my annoyance when something breaks.
On my desktop, I use software for my RAID-1 array, specifically to avoid the problem you mention.
Lots of people claim to have received communication from one or more gods. That's evidence.
Code inspections and walkthroughs are actually effective ways to find bugs. When you debug from a symptom you have to trace back and figure out where the bug is happening, but when you have multiple people manually working through what should happen you can detect problems directly.
"Vistard"
Why is that stupid and ironic? Lots of things become unacceptable when you make them involuntary.
Maybe in your field, but in Computer Science, most published research is flawed. There are a lot of journals and only a few are top notch.
Your parent poster could be referring to the tab vs space issue. But that problem would disappear if those heretics would just do it like I do, the One True Way.
Actually, in Solaris it's also the prefix of all of their official packages:
I think both you and the grandparent are assuming that your own personal experiences are typical. The reality is that the plural of anecdote is not data.
Income is greatly influenced by luck, ability and location (local cost of living). If an individual engineer hasn't cracked $50k with 6 years of experience, at least one of those things is low.
I think that's the crux of our disagreement. When examining moral or ethical opinions that are plucked out of thin air, I see no need to differentiate between those that are and are not backed by people who wear funny hats while performing weird rituals. The adjective "religious" does not have to mean "is associated with an organized religion". Any time somebody believes something because of faith (as opposed to, say, because of science), that belief can be accurately described as a religious belief. Now, some beliefs are so trivial that it doesn't really add anything to describe them as "religious" (such as my belief that my chair is not about to collapse), but the belief that mankind has a moral responsibility to not trash the earth is not trivial. In this specific case, using the word "religious" to describe that belief is useful, because it leads the reader to compare it to the beliefs typically associated with those who wear funny hats. That's why it's not meaninglessly broad.
It struck me that in a science-oriented discussion, someone's arbitrary (albeit popular) moral assertion went without note, so I noted it.
I can't think of any moral views that can't be accurately described as religious views. One of the definitions of "religious" is a synonym of "moral". Distinguishing between the two is like putting on a funny hat and performing some ritual in order to claim that one's views are special. My views are no more special than yours (aside from whether or not they're accurate).
That's pretty terrible, but ten year old girls are a potential vector for terrorism, which is also pretty terrible. I'm not saying that the Israelis are right, but how do you protect against terrorists who use ten year old girls to smuggle weapons onto a plane? (Not saying they have, but if ten year old girls were never cavity searched, they would.)
Bad as it is, it seems like discrimination is an effective tactic against terrorism. Of course the real solution is "go back in time 50 years and be nice to the parents of today's terrorists," but that has implementation issues. Maybe the long-term effects of discrimination are worse than the long-term effects of terrorism, but I for one am at a loss for ideas about how to effectively prevent short-term terrorism, especially without the ability to control the strategic situation.
What the TSA is currently doing certainly doesn't help. The best strategy I can come up with is to drop the most onerous security and hope to make society better by more than terrorism makes it worse.
No, you're confusing religious views with organized religion. Someone can hold religious views about anything; any arbitrary position (such as "X is wrong") is a religious view. This certainly overlaps with ethics, though it's not a superset of everything that has to do with ethics (descriptive ethics attempts to observe existing ethical views without necessarily endorsing them).
In this case, Dr. Hansen apparently believes that humanity doesn't have the right to damage the earth. This is clearly outside the realm of science; it's based on one's opinion about the place of mankind in the universe. Moreover, people often hold religious views about things that science does make meaningful statements about, so whether or not somebody believes something religiously is independent of whether or not there are other reasons to believe that thing.
It's possible that Dr. Hansen believes this for legal-historical reasons (for example, perhaps he read it on a web site that he trusted.) That doesn't prevent it from being a religious view though; lots of religious views are formed after being exposed to ideas that ultimately amount to hearsay.