So to create "utopia" we just have to make everyone "fair" ?
Americans have over 20 times the average income in the world. Since you are a "fair" individual... surely you will donate the difference, 90% of your pay, to me, right ?
Doing otherwise "is not fair".
It's not fair that you have freedom of speech. Only 300 million people have freedom of speech, that means 5.7 billion do not. So it's not fair that you get to post this dissenting opinion of yours. Surely you'll remove it, right ?
Doing otherwise "is not fair".
It's not fair that you have freedom of beliefs. You are born in a christian nation. Were you born in a muslim nation, you'd have been killed for dissenting from that religion. So we'll see you next sunday in church right ?
That you get to choose not to go "is not fair".
It's not fair that you have a job. Still more than 50% of people worldwide do not have a job. So you'll quit, right ?
Doing otherwise "is not fair".
And let's not kid ourselves : the above described "fair" situations is exactly what your utopia has to offer. No thanks. In fact I will kill you for attempting to create said utopia anywhere near me.
Distopia is a better word. Perhaps God has a utopia. Certainly, no human does.
The problem is the violent reactions to any criticism of islam. The west has "responded" by appeasing them. There is of course the problem that the quran itself is an extremely racist book, so equal treatment of religions and outlawing hate speech de-facto means outlawing islam (unless you consider "all non-muslims are lower than animals, you should never trust them, and only killing a bunch of them when you get the chance will help" just another "nice" statement. Then again, by Obama's standards that probably IS a nice statement).
Since a certain prophet did indeed kill his critics (and obviously this was upon command of a certain imaginary friend of his), a certain religion consider's killing it's critics holy, and they have offices in mecca (a city where you can get beheaded for not being a muslim). Google "asma bint marwan". They even left her kids for dead.
However there is no non-discriminatory way to prevent criticism of islam without making criticizing anything that calls itself a religion illegal.
The govt are weasels, so they'll just appease scientology too. Wonder when the vatican will get the hint.
Yes there are exceptions (that's only because plants have dropped the co2 content of the athmosphere so very much). One or two. Doesn't change a thing for food crops though, or for trees, or...
You are being dishonest, sir. But why not go all the way in the conspiracy theory ? Perhaps I AM Bush (hey if you're a megalomaniac too, certainly this must indulge you). Let's have some more conspiracies. Bush was obviously not more "anti-science" (budget cutter) than Clinton was. Not that I care.
Scientists demands for funds are unreasonable. Nobody, not even themselves deny it. Therefore a lot of them aren't going to get granted. Doing all the research we want is a physical impossibility, and doing even 10% of it is an economical impossibility. Besides, I'm quite happy with the rate of scientific advancement under Bush. Certainly the war has done what wars always do : push the envelope. I'm not too impressed with the principles behind their new universal translator, but the fact that they made it work is a huge advancement. Also there are lots of new radar systems, and wireless advances.
What does "science" say ? Where exactly do you see the unity that this sentence screams ?
According to the current state of the art in our understanding of the workings of photosynthesis (it's the process that removed most of the co2 from the athmosphere in the first place, you should know about it) : more co2 = better working.
The most important limitation in the plants' rate of photosynthesis is the LOW carbon content of the athmosphere (low, relative to what it was when plants evolved the ability to photosynthesize, back then we weren't talking about parts per million, but about tens of percents)
Making the athmosphere revert to, oh say 12% co2 (which is a few million times the current level) would be a good thing for plants.
If you want to know what happens if you really increase the amount of oxygen in the athmosphere : what is the connection between Valentin Bondarenko and Gus Grissom ?
Furthermore, and not sarcastically, is increasing the number of people Earth can support really all that good? If we doubled Earth's capacity to support human life, then that would push back our reaching that by by maybe 30 years, and then we'd have the same catastrophe we're headed toward now but affecting twice as many people. And what if it scales faster than linearly?
So who do we kill first ?
It may seem like a cruel question but obviously an attitude like yours makes it a necessary one to answer. And answer it soon.
I assume you're a volunteer to get killed ? How about your family ? You're taking up resources that could have been used by dolphins ! or pigs ! or bisons !
I completely agree with you. At least when you pull the carbon from the air and put it back you are maintaining an equilibrium instead of bringing carbon stored in the ground an releasing it into the air.
Except you don't. You pull it from the oceans. Both from upper & lower layers.
But the oceans contain MUCH more carbon than the oil fields, and that *will* be brought up, because algae NEED co2 (like every single plant does), and for plants more co2=better (plant growth climbs until they have about 60% co2 in the athmosphere, realistically you can get maybe 1% to them). So algae farms are going to want to pump up co2 from the lower layers of the ocean (much, much easier and faster than getting it from the athmosphere).
So I do believe the poster was right. Nobody tell the green nuts, okay ?
However, in reality, adding co2 to the athmosphere makes it a LOT easier to increase crop yields world wide. And it doesn't "heat up the earth" (unfortunately, because that too would increase the number of people that the earth can support, and we all know that number needs to go up fast, unless you want WWIII in a few years).
Are you saying politicians could actually be useful?
Yes, they're easier to convert into jet fuel than algae. The devil has perfected that specific process already : I hear a steady supply of politicians (and lawyers obviously) is what keeps hell warm.
They're all white (I'm not kidding). I guess Obama won't much like them. (meaning hawking radiation is white, much more "white" btw than any "white" light you've ever seen)
It's just such a faint white that you'd swear it's black.
Obviously it is. All these singularities in the theories are basically "out-of-theory" points.
In other words : to them the laws of physics don't apply. If you then realise how big this "the laws of physics don't apply" region is in even our own galaxy, you start seeing problems.
Same with "the big bang". What nobody ever says is that it is necessary to drop the laws of physics at the point of the big bang. I wonder why they tend to forget that little tidbit (oh wait, no I don't:-p)
Cute, but flawed : we both know that the dead don't return at will. We don't need an experiment to verify that.
I don't say there is no God. Depending on what you mean by God there certainly is. Certain the "God the father" concept of Christianity identifies a very real entity that can be trivially shown to exist.
The same argument applies for the holy ghost. It can be trivially shown to be existing.
Now the son is a bit more of a problem. But certainly there's a historical record of him. However, it's not enough for some people.
But then we're only human : for a lot of people, it's never enough.
The idea that you only fall through the hole because God perceives the hole is no different to the ancient idea that things fall because they are pushed by angels.
It seems to me that beliefs like that weren't necessarily held by "ancient people". What a sentence like "Mars conquered Athens" meant was that, for one reason or another, a lot of people in Athens at once decided it necessary to go and invade Troy. And they knew this, nobody thought that an actual god was involved. They didn't understand it (but most people don't understand why saudi muslims flew a plane into the towers either).
Angels are pushing rocks means that "nature" is making said rocks fall. These days we'd mention vibrations, perhaps sound and echo, but we're still not a millimeter closer to preventing it from happening. We'd probably say that "nature is making those rocks fall", which is the same thing, with merely another word for "God".
Therefore one might still say "angels are pushing rocks onto the road", and it'd still be equally correct and mean the same thing : if you take that specific road, you're liable to find a rock in the middle of the road every 25 km's or so.
Just like other "extreme" beliefs aren't as wrong as you might think. They're wrong, obviously, but they're a lot more subtle than you'd think. Islam for example, states that muslims are better, because them being muslims makes them capable of killing everyone else, and stealing from the others for themselves to have a good life, to have success (there's an entire chapter about this in the quran). Now obviously that's wrong, in practice the act of stealing will make the economy collapse, making sure that in at best a few months there won't be anything left to steal.
But socialists believe a similar thing. Violently taking (which is stealing at it's worst) the "means of production" (this is marginally more intelligent than what the muslims do, but equally destined to fail) and putting it in hands of "the people" (which is a very static, very dogmatic thing in socialism, it certainly does not reflect the will of the actual people (otherwise they'd be pluralistic).
So you shouldn't be so dismissive of both ancient and contemporary religions. Their core messages have been filtered by a sort of natural selection. They aren't stupid. Sure, some are destined for the dustbin of history, but all have survived several thousand years, and helped their people survive those years too. They're not stupid, and they're not nearly as wrong as you make them out to be. Besides there's another big problem today : non-dogmatic atheism (as opposed to limited agnosticism), is equally stupid and incorrect.
I make no assumptions. These things exist, period. If you make claims of God, it's up to you to prove it.
This is a question Christianity answers with "faith". It doesn't actually try to answer it, and in fact Christianity has a clever way of making both existence or non-existence of God impossible to be reasoned about in a scientific way.
(where for example, since the quran is the "literal word of god", and contains stupid mathematical mistakes, for example in it's inheritance laws, it's easy to prove wrong. Other religions, like Buddhism and other "mind over matter" religions are fundamentally at odds with the basic assumption of experimental verifiability : if Buddhism is true, then science cannot count on an experiment being predictable. Science can't prove it's incorrectness, but it is itself mutually exclusive with Buddhism)
Christianity is not alone in pushing the "miracle" approach. Hinduism uses a similar mechanism and isn't easily falsifiable. That doesn't mean either of them is true, but given that natural selection hasn't filtered them out should give at least some support to their message (meaning that a man/woman who believes in Christianity/Hinduism/islam is more likely to be successfull, in the long term. Certainly christianity, islam and hinduism have all 3 contended with atheists in their history, and all 3 have won. Either violently, enforced from above like islam, or peacefully like hinduism and christianity, even in cases where atheists violently enforced atheism from above Christianity managed to win out).
Observing doesn't mean seeing. It means sensing. If his foot had continued on without experiencing the typical effects of "hole", then it wouldn't have existed in human consciousness, and therefore could only exist on the presence of faith.
You've got a huge mistake and a very big truth in the same sentence. Are you a politician ?
If the hole hadn't generated the "typical" hole experience, we would simply call it something else. You are confusing reality and words.
It would still BE. It's be a step, a bump or a sandpile, it'd be identified by a different word. But our observation doesn't move a single grain of sand (and don't you dare start your reply with "but quantum mechanics...")
Furthermore you have an very non-trivial, but huge truth in the same sentence. Realism REQUIRES FAITH. Science is necessarily dogmatic, in the christian sense of the word (as opposed to the islamic sense of that same word, since islam "submission" is based first and foremost on physical submission and military-sense occupation, not on trust in a one good God, a positive world, like Christianity and Judaism). You have to have faith in completely unprovable assumptions if you want to practice exact science. You have to have faith, not in Jesus Christ per se, but you'd have to follow a positivist worldview.
And atheism, in the sense of non-dogmatism, REQUIRES a rejection of reality (and even basic logic, but that is a very non-trivial truth), just like most other cults require a rejection of truth, as does every nihilist or "mind over matter" ideologies, and a few religions like buddhism and islam. They cannot coexist with free enquiry.
If the universe were not self aware, there would be no such thing as a hole. The example you give depends on some God like being creating a concept called a room, creating a hole, and putting us in that room. The simple fact is, if nothing ever perceives the hole then there simply is no such thing as a hole.
This argument is one of the better ones. But I do believe Edwin Aldrin stumbled on the moon, on a hole he clearly had missed and nobody else had ever seen.
Furthermore, you have enough sudden disasters, like a meteor strike in a house, onto a woman who was cooking. Nobody saw it coming, certainly not the woman... so it couldn't have hurt her, right ?
*ahem* you're thinking I will TELL you about the hole. Because without that you'd never know. I thought that was clear from the description.
Can you fall through a hole you don't know about ? As anyone who's ever fallen down a single stair knows... yes you can.
Therefore your "philosophy" is worthless and proven wrong. You could at least try to make it sound believeable. Then again you could just keep lying and lie harder and use violence everytime anyone questions you, after all that's the way a certain "prophet" did it.
I propose a simple experiment. You say the universe exists only inside one's awareness.
In other words, you believe in magic. But we can easily experimentally verify this state of affairs.
I put you inside a dark room, completely and utterly dark, so that most of your perception is disabled. What you don't know is that there is a hole in the floor of the room : but no worries, nobody is aware of the hole, and it isn't aware of itself : so you won't fall through it.
Obviously if you do fall through : your "philosophy" is worthless and untrue : it failed a prediction.
Your philosophy is different in nothing from any ancient belief that you would call utterly stupid. They believed something that could be trivially disproven and "the world is only what you think about it".
Obviously it's not. The world exists independantly of you.
And it doesn't. Validity of 90% of the claims of astrology should be "verified" (ahem) by biologists.
Are people born under a white moon more likely to be X or Y ? That's not something astronomy confronts itself with. At best it answers the question when a white moon occurs. Astrology uses astronomy as a tool, to make their calendars and doesn't dispute the validity of it. The science they dispute the validity of is (mostly) biology and economics.
You will find most idiotic groupings disputing biology and economics, and little else. Socialism, islam, other cults... all are fighting mostly biology and economics. The only potential problem in astronomy, and only in some crackpot movements, is the cosmological creation story (and while obviously genesis isn't the final answer, the big bang theory isn't either, therefore atheists should perhaps be a bit more careful about using it. In fact I do find the premise of genesis that the universe is eternal much more plausible than the outside-of-the-theory moment of the big bang itself in the big bang theory).
The problem with that is that every scientist has already decided on a camp. A real scientist (in the exact, positive sciences) has accepted 2 assumptions as the absolute truth :
1) miracles may or may not occur. However since neither presence nor absence of miracles has any shred of hope to ever be proved, we ASSUME in all scientific theories that they don't. Per definition a miracle is a non-repeateable event, and theories only discuss repeateable (and therefore hopefully one day predictable) events.
Science only studies "what happens when God's asleep" for lack of a better expression (I don't mean to imply that God ever sleeps for example).
2) Because of 1) Science will never either verify or cuonterproof a christian-style religion that's based on historical reports of miracles. It can't be done. Think about this : the evidence that Jesus walked over water is exactly as strong as the evidence Julius Caesar conquered Gaul. How then, to judge the relative truth of both events : simple. Don't. Just report them both, without prejudice and, like all historical events, preceded by : X believes Y. (note that in the case of Caesar's contest of Gaul, it's in the end also a case of believing).
Oh it's all a large conspiracy. And by whom ? Let's see the jews, weapons merchants... no... capitalists, corporations AHA.
Obviously the corporations remain nameless and there are no people involved, at all. Once I point out the people you will start decrying their evil intentions and your purity. Great. We'll get nowhere.
How about instead of blaming "corporations"* (why not "the devil" ? I like the devil. I think we should mention him more often) we start looking at the reality.
China has resources we need if we are to have the standard if living "we" want. (and by we I mean first and foremost you and myself)
So here's the cost of "isolating" china : about 60% of your paycheck. If you also want to isolate the (much) worse middle eastern islamic dictatorships, we're talking 85-90% of your paycheck.
So let's hear your argument. You don't need to blame "corporations", they can do nothing about price. There's a limited supply of goods, and nothing can extend that supply except free enterprise. Currently said free enterprise has allowed U.S. citizens to increase their paychecks about twentyfold of what they would otherwise be.
So, let me ask you : why should I drop half my paycheck (isolating 1 government), or 19/20th of it (isolating all govts that deny human rights for islamic or other reasons).
Would you yourself be prepared to do so ?
The result of walling of China on the U.S. (or western) end would be massive inflation until your paycheck is worth about 60% of what it is now.
Oh and please explain to a lot of people who live at less than 200% sustinence level (not so much in the US, but more than enough elsewhere), why they should die for your "right to be free" ? Are you even prepared to die for it yourself ? Are you, say, a reservist ?
Actions, such as isolating China, have consequences. Clearly the best course of action, judged by the likely results, is *not* isolating china. Judging an action by it's likely consequences is a thorougly christian concept, which is also the only correct way to do it, you may or may not like this, but the real world doesn't care.
China wouldn't collapse if left to it's own devices. More likely it would do what it did in the past under such circumstances : attack.
* let's take the example of oil companies. Shell, Exxonmobil,... the works. Together they made profits of about $80 billion on about 75 million bbl/day in 2007. This means that a 100% tax on those companies, precluding any investment and creating utter chaos in even the near term, could only "lower" the oil price by...... 2.9 dollars/barrel or 2% (you know the price hike of the last, what, 24 hours ?), which would buy us 2 days of extra oil supply ? I doubt even that. These companies are not to blame for oil problems.
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So to create "utopia" we just have to make everyone "fair" ?
... surely you will donate the difference, 90% of your pay, to me, right ?
Americans have over 20 times the average income in the world. Since you are a "fair" individual
Doing otherwise "is not fair".
It's not fair that you have freedom of speech. Only 300 million people have freedom of speech, that means 5.7 billion do not. So it's not fair that you get to post this dissenting opinion of yours. Surely you'll remove it, right ?
Doing otherwise "is not fair".
It's not fair that you have freedom of beliefs. You are born in a christian nation. Were you born in a muslim nation, you'd have been killed for dissenting from that religion. So we'll see you next sunday in church right ?
That you get to choose not to go "is not fair".
It's not fair that you have a job. Still more than 50% of people worldwide do not have a job. So you'll quit, right ?
Doing otherwise "is not fair".
And let's not kid ourselves : the above described "fair" situations is exactly what your utopia has to offer. No thanks. In fact I will kill you for attempting to create said utopia anywhere near me.
Distopia is a better word. Perhaps God has a utopia. Certainly, no human does.
The problem is the violent reactions to any criticism of islam. The west has "responded" by appeasing them. There is of course the problem that the quran itself is an extremely racist book, so equal treatment of religions and outlawing hate speech de-facto means outlawing islam (unless you consider "all non-muslims are lower than animals, you should never trust them, and only killing a bunch of them when you get the chance will help" just another "nice" statement. Then again, by Obama's standards that probably IS a nice statement).
Since a certain prophet did indeed kill his critics (and obviously this was upon command of a certain imaginary friend of his), a certain religion consider's killing it's critics holy, and they have offices in mecca (a city where you can get beheaded for not being a muslim). Google "asma bint marwan". They even left her kids for dead.
However there is no non-discriminatory way to prevent criticism of islam without making criticizing anything that calls itself a religion illegal.
The govt are weasels, so they'll just appease scientology too. Wonder when the vatican will get the hint.
Exactly. This is going to cost stupid people who don't bother keeping a working dns system a lot of money - or they might get shamed.
Exactly what you'd want if you want people to be more aware of internet and dns problems.
Update those root zonefiles, people !
I'm normally not a fan of wikipedia, but since this is so very basic stuff, I'm going to make an exception :
...
Carbon_dioxide_levels_and_photorespiration
Yes there are exceptions (that's only because plants have dropped the co2 content of the athmosphere so very much). One or two. Doesn't change a thing for food crops though, or for trees, or
You are being dishonest, sir. But why not go all the way in the conspiracy theory ? Perhaps I AM Bush (hey if you're a megalomaniac too, certainly this must indulge you). Let's have some more conspiracies. Bush was obviously not more "anti-science" (budget cutter) than Clinton was. Not that I care.
Scientists demands for funds are unreasonable. Nobody, not even themselves deny it. Therefore a lot of them aren't going to get granted. Doing all the research we want is a physical impossibility, and doing even 10% of it is an economical impossibility. Besides, I'm quite happy with the rate of scientific advancement under Bush. Certainly the war has done what wars always do : push the envelope. I'm not too impressed with the principles behind their new universal translator, but the fact that they made it work is a huge advancement. Also there are lots of new radar systems, and wireless advances.
Have you read what science says?
What does "science" say ? Where exactly do you see the unity that this sentence screams ?
According to the current state of the art in our understanding of the workings of photosynthesis (it's the process that removed most of the co2 from the athmosphere in the first place, you should know about it) : more co2 = better working.
The most important limitation in the plants' rate of photosynthesis is the LOW carbon content of the athmosphere (low, relative to what it was when plants evolved the ability to photosynthesize, back then we weren't talking about parts per million, but about tens of percents)
Making the athmosphere revert to, oh say 12% co2 (which is a few million times the current level) would be a good thing for plants.
If you want to know what happens if you really increase the amount of oxygen in the athmosphere : what is the connection between Valentin Bondarenko and Gus Grissom ?
Furthermore, and not sarcastically, is increasing the number of people Earth can support really all that good? If we doubled Earth's capacity to support human life, then that would push back our reaching that by by maybe 30 years, and then we'd have the same catastrophe we're headed toward now but affecting twice as many people. And what if it scales faster than linearly?
... so not cool man.
So who do we kill first ?
It may seem like a cruel question but obviously an attitude like yours makes it a necessary one to answer. And answer it soon.
I assume you're a volunteer to get killed ? How about your family ? You're taking up resources that could have been used by dolphins ! or pigs ! or bisons !
That's like
I completely agree with you. At least when you pull the carbon from the air and put it back you are maintaining an equilibrium instead of bringing carbon stored in the ground an releasing it into the air.
Except you don't. You pull it from the oceans. Both from upper & lower layers.
But the oceans contain MUCH more carbon than the oil fields, and that *will* be brought up, because algae NEED co2 (like every single plant does), and for plants more co2=better (plant growth climbs until they have about 60% co2 in the athmosphere, realistically you can get maybe 1% to them). So algae farms are going to want to pump up co2 from the lower layers of the ocean (much, much easier and faster than getting it from the athmosphere).
So I do believe the poster was right. Nobody tell the green nuts, okay ?
However, in reality, adding co2 to the athmosphere makes it a LOT easier to increase crop yields world wide. And it doesn't "heat up the earth" (unfortunately, because that too would increase the number of people that the earth can support, and we all know that number needs to go up fast, unless you want WWIII in a few years).
Mostly from the upper layers of the ocean. You know that "huge store of CO2".
The truth is that CO2 in the athmosphere isn't a problem at all.
Are you saying politicians could actually be useful?
Yes, they're easier to convert into jet fuel than algae. The devil has perfected that specific process already : I hear a steady supply of politicians (and lawyers obviously) is what keeps hell warm.
They're hoping Iran will do it for them. I don't think they even want to get off first.
"Hey, it's a really big bang man"
They're all white (I'm not kidding). I guess Obama won't much like them. (meaning hawking radiation is white, much more "white" btw than any "white" light you've ever seen)
It's just such a faint white that you'd swear it's black.
Obviously it is. All these singularities in the theories are basically "out-of-theory" points.
:-p)
In other words : to them the laws of physics don't apply. If you then realise how big this "the laws of physics don't apply" region is in even our own galaxy, you start seeing problems.
Same with "the big bang". What nobody ever says is that it is necessary to drop the laws of physics at the point of the big bang. I wonder why they tend to forget that little tidbit (oh wait, no I don't
Cute, but flawed : we both know that the dead don't return at will. We don't need an experiment to verify that.
I don't say there is no God. Depending on what you mean by God there certainly is. Certain the "God the father" concept of Christianity identifies a very real entity that can be trivially shown to exist.
The same argument applies for the holy ghost. It can be trivially shown to be existing.
Now the son is a bit more of a problem. But certainly there's a historical record of him. However, it's not enough for some people.
But then we're only human : for a lot of people, it's never enough.
How would that possibly happen ? The hole doesn't exist before your awareness of it. So how could you possibly encounter it ?
The idea that you only fall through the hole because God perceives the hole is no different to the ancient idea that things fall because they are pushed by angels.
It seems to me that beliefs like that weren't necessarily held by "ancient people". What a sentence like "Mars conquered Athens" meant was that, for one reason or another, a lot of people in Athens at once decided it necessary to go and invade Troy. And they knew this, nobody thought that an actual god was involved. They didn't understand it (but most people don't understand why saudi muslims flew a plane into the towers either).
Angels are pushing rocks means that "nature" is making said rocks fall. These days we'd mention vibrations, perhaps sound and echo, but we're still not a millimeter closer to preventing it from happening. We'd probably say that "nature is making those rocks fall", which is the same thing, with merely another word for "God".
Therefore one might still say "angels are pushing rocks onto the road", and it'd still be equally correct and mean the same thing : if you take that specific road, you're liable to find a rock in the middle of the road every 25 km's or so.
Just like other "extreme" beliefs aren't as wrong as you might think. They're wrong, obviously, but they're a lot more subtle than you'd think. Islam for example, states that muslims are better, because them being muslims makes them capable of killing everyone else, and stealing from the others for themselves to have a good life, to have success (there's an entire chapter about this in the quran). Now obviously that's wrong, in practice the act of stealing will make the economy collapse, making sure that in at best a few months there won't be anything left to steal.
But socialists believe a similar thing. Violently taking (which is stealing at it's worst) the "means of production" (this is marginally more intelligent than what the muslims do, but equally destined to fail) and putting it in hands of "the people" (which is a very static, very dogmatic thing in socialism, it certainly does not reflect the will of the actual people (otherwise they'd be pluralistic).
So you shouldn't be so dismissive of both ancient and contemporary religions. Their core messages have been filtered by a sort of natural selection. They aren't stupid. Sure, some are destined for the dustbin of history, but all have survived several thousand years, and helped their people survive those years too. They're not stupid, and they're not nearly as wrong as you make them out to be. Besides there's another big problem today : non-dogmatic atheism (as opposed to limited agnosticism), is equally stupid and incorrect.
I make no assumptions. These things exist, period. If you make claims of God, it's up to you to prove it.
This is a question Christianity answers with "faith". It doesn't actually try to answer it, and in fact Christianity has a clever way of making both existence or non-existence of God impossible to be reasoned about in a scientific way.
(where for example, since the quran is the "literal word of god", and contains stupid mathematical mistakes, for example in it's inheritance laws, it's easy to prove wrong. Other religions, like Buddhism and other "mind over matter" religions are fundamentally at odds with the basic assumption of experimental verifiability : if Buddhism is true, then science cannot count on an experiment being predictable. Science can't prove it's incorrectness, but it is itself mutually exclusive with Buddhism)
Christianity is not alone in pushing the "miracle" approach. Hinduism uses a similar mechanism and isn't easily falsifiable. That doesn't mean either of them is true, but given that natural selection hasn't filtered them out should give at least some support to their message (meaning that a man/woman who believes in Christianity/Hinduism/islam is more likely to be successfull, in the long term. Certainly christianity, islam and hinduism have all 3 contended with atheists in their history, and all 3 have won. Either violently, enforced from above like islam, or peacefully like hinduism and christianity, even in cases where atheists violently enforced atheism from above Christianity managed to win out).
Observing doesn't mean seeing. It means sensing. If his foot had continued on without experiencing the typical effects of "hole", then it wouldn't have existed in human consciousness, and therefore could only exist on the presence of faith.
...")
You've got a huge mistake and a very big truth in the same sentence. Are you a politician ?
If the hole hadn't generated the "typical" hole experience, we would simply call it something else. You are confusing reality and words.
It would still BE. It's be a step, a bump or a sandpile, it'd be identified by a different word. But our observation doesn't move a single grain of sand (and don't you dare start your reply with "but quantum mechanics
Furthermore you have an very non-trivial, but huge truth in the same sentence. Realism REQUIRES FAITH. Science is necessarily dogmatic, in the christian sense of the word (as opposed to the islamic sense of that same word, since islam "submission" is based first and foremost on physical submission and military-sense occupation, not on trust in a one good God, a positive world, like Christianity and Judaism). You have to have faith in completely unprovable assumptions if you want to practice exact science. You have to have faith, not in Jesus Christ per se, but you'd have to follow a positivist worldview.
And atheism, in the sense of non-dogmatism, REQUIRES a rejection of reality (and even basic logic, but that is a very non-trivial truth), just like most other cults require a rejection of truth, as does every nihilist or "mind over matter" ideologies, and a few religions like buddhism and islam. They cannot coexist with free enquiry.
Actually if you count the axis alliance of WWII, they did ...
If the universe were not self aware, there would be no such thing as a hole. The example you give depends on some God like being creating a concept called a room, creating a hole, and putting us in that room. The simple fact is, if nothing ever perceives the hole then there simply is no such thing as a hole.
... so it couldn't have hurt her, right ?
This argument is one of the better ones. But I do believe Edwin Aldrin stumbled on the moon, on a hole he clearly had missed and nobody else had ever seen.
Furthermore, you have enough sudden disasters, like a meteor strike in a house, onto a woman who was cooking. Nobody saw it coming, certainly not the woman
*ahem* you're thinking I will TELL you about the hole. Because without that you'd never know. I thought that was clear from the description.
... yes you can.
Can you fall through a hole you don't know about ? As anyone who's ever fallen down a single stair knows
Therefore your "philosophy" is worthless and proven wrong. You could at least try to make it sound believeable. Then again you could just keep lying and lie harder and use violence everytime anyone questions you, after all that's the way a certain "prophet" did it.
I propose a simple experiment. You say the universe exists only inside one's awareness.
In other words, you believe in magic. But we can easily experimentally verify this state of affairs.
I put you inside a dark room, completely and utterly dark, so that most of your perception is disabled. What you don't know is that there is a hole in the floor of the room : but no worries, nobody is aware of the hole, and it isn't aware of itself : so you won't fall through it.
Obviously if you do fall through : your "philosophy" is worthless and untrue : it failed a prediction.
Your philosophy is different in nothing from any ancient belief that you would call utterly stupid. They believed something that could be trivially disproven and "the world is only what you think about it".
Obviously it's not. The world exists independantly of you.
And it doesn't. Validity of 90% of the claims of astrology should be "verified" (ahem) by biologists.
... all are fighting mostly biology and economics. The only potential problem in astronomy, and only in some crackpot movements, is the cosmological creation story (and while obviously genesis isn't the final answer, the big bang theory isn't either, therefore atheists should perhaps be a bit more careful about using it. In fact I do find the premise of genesis that the universe is eternal much more plausible than the outside-of-the-theory moment of the big bang itself in the big bang theory).
Are people born under a white moon more likely to be X or Y ? That's not something astronomy confronts itself with. At best it answers the question when a white moon occurs. Astrology uses astronomy as a tool, to make their calendars and doesn't dispute the validity of it. The science they dispute the validity of is (mostly) biology and economics.
You will find most idiotic groupings disputing biology and economics, and little else. Socialism, islam, other cults
The problem with that is that every scientist has already decided on a camp. A real scientist (in the exact, positive sciences) has accepted 2 assumptions as the absolute truth :
1) miracles may or may not occur. However since neither presence nor absence of miracles has any shred of hope to ever be proved, we ASSUME in all scientific theories that they don't. Per definition a miracle is a non-repeateable event, and theories only discuss repeateable (and therefore hopefully one day predictable) events.
Science only studies "what happens when God's asleep" for lack of a better expression (I don't mean to imply that God ever sleeps for example).
2) Because of 1) Science will never either verify or cuonterproof a christian-style religion that's based on historical reports of miracles. It can't be done. Think about this : the evidence that Jesus walked over water is exactly as strong as the evidence Julius Caesar conquered Gaul. How then, to judge the relative truth of both events : simple. Don't. Just report them both, without prejudice and, like all historical events, preceded by : X believes Y. (note that in the case of Caesar's contest of Gaul, it's in the end also a case of believing).
If you think it's bad in the US, then don't look at EU countries. It can be much worse.
... not get done.
Minimum wage in EU is about 15$/hour I believe. Anything that is worth less than that does
Because -as hard as it may be to believe this for you- some people actually have an attachment to their birth country.
Why ? Because big corporate jobs are lonely, strange and unfulfilling. A wife and family in your birth country is what most prefer.
And some people have morals and see that as a chance to give back.
Or they get older and take a teaching position in their home country.
Lots of reasons.
*sigh* when exactly does the US hide that they're using military might against someone ?
Oh it's all a large conspiracy. And by whom ? Let's see the jews, weapons merchants ... no ... capitalists, corporations AHA.
... the works. Together they made profits of about $80 billion on about 75 million bbl/day in 2007. This means that a 100% tax on those companies, precluding any investment and creating utter chaos in even the near term, could only "lower" the oil price by ... ... 2.9 dollars/barrel or 2% (you know the price hike of the last, what, 24 hours ?), which would buy us 2 days of extra oil supply ? I doubt even that. These companies are not to blame for oil problems.
Obviously the corporations remain nameless and there are no people involved, at all. Once I point out the people you will start decrying their evil intentions and your purity. Great. We'll get nowhere.
How about instead of blaming "corporations"* (why not "the devil" ? I like the devil. I think we should mention him more often) we start looking at the reality.
China has resources we need if we are to have the standard if living "we" want. (and by we I mean first and foremost you and myself)
So here's the cost of "isolating" china : about 60% of your paycheck. If you also want to isolate the (much) worse middle eastern islamic dictatorships, we're talking 85-90% of your paycheck.
So let's hear your argument. You don't need to blame "corporations", they can do nothing about price. There's a limited supply of goods, and nothing can extend that supply except free enterprise. Currently said free enterprise has allowed U.S. citizens to increase their paychecks about twentyfold of what they would otherwise be.
So, let me ask you : why should I drop half my paycheck (isolating 1 government), or 19/20th of it (isolating all govts that deny human rights for islamic or other reasons).
Would you yourself be prepared to do so ?
The result of walling of China on the U.S. (or western) end would be massive inflation until your paycheck is worth about 60% of what it is now.
Oh and please explain to a lot of people who live at less than 200% sustinence level (not so much in the US, but more than enough elsewhere), why they should die for your "right to be free" ? Are you even prepared to die for it yourself ? Are you, say, a reservist ?
Actions, such as isolating China, have consequences. Clearly the best course of action, judged by the likely results, is *not* isolating china. Judging an action by it's likely consequences is a thorougly christian concept, which is also the only correct way to do it, you may or may not like this, but the real world doesn't care.
China wouldn't collapse if left to it's own devices. More likely it would do what it did in the past under such circumstances : attack.
* let's take the example of oil companies. Shell, Exxonmobil,