If we only treated those we already know properly, then we'd never get new friends. That we DO in fact develop new friendships shows that we're not rotten to the core by nature.
Or you could use GNU/Linux, for example, without paying any licensing fees whatsoever, on this cheap, commodity hardware you Mac heads seem to hate for no good reason.
Dude, I'm a linux guy through and through, from way back with slackware 3x on floppies... but I also realize that, for some people, the mac can be justified. I wouldn't mind having one myself, even though I certainly don't need hand-holding.
What can I say... it's a bit like life in general... f'ed up:-)
I'll look at the MiniWin box when it comes out, but I have to admit, I am leaning towards recommending a Mac Mini for my daughter, specifically because of the Window security issues. I want our lunches together to be spent talking about other things than the latest virus/trojan/whatever.
No, true atheists don't kill themselves. We can enjoy life. There is no need for us to worry about offending "some dude in the sky."
If we do good, it is because we want to, not because we have to. If we help people laugh, it is because we want to see them happy, not because of some commandment from on high.
So, who is the better person, the one who does good because his or her religious beliefs constrain them to do so, or the one who does good because it is their nature? The one who doesn't steal because it is sinful, who struggles with this daily in prayer, etc, or the one who doesn't steal because it isn't their nature to be greedy or steal?
I don't need an afterlife, or a "purpose" asigned to me by someone on high, to give my life meaning. It has meaning to me, and that's enough.
I get my pleasures out of helping my daughters, my sisters, enjoying the company of my friends, being creative at my work, walking my dogs, etc.
This is sufficient. Guess that makes me an incurable optimist.
Since this is posted here, I'll respond here... though I would (to keep it on topic) frame my answers along the lines of "would be possible to convince aliens that Jesus or God are real."
That's the danger of approaching the bible with your own set of presuppositions and reading it to look for text that supports your own arguments.
Whenever you read any text be it a story or non-fiction, you should clear your mind and let it tell it's story.
It would be illogical to ask anyone to forget every fact they've ever learned, to suspend disbielief, when making a decision about whether something is true or not. Certainly, you're not going to get aliens to discard the science, tech, and logic that enabled them to get here...
Unfortunately, you are prejudiced against christianity. Therefore when you read the bible, your mind is already tainted.
This is a prejudgment on your part as to how I originally approached it. It is also irrelevent to the case at hand - which is, produce evidence that would convince either me, or aliens, that heaven, Jesus, or God exist.
The defective manufacturer or product:
Since we are talking about the story of Adam and Eve here, we should subcribe to the whole story and not take bits and pieces. Therefore, let us suppose:
-God created A&E and they knew that. -God is all-knowing -God said of all his creation, "it is good." -Therefore, there was nothing defective about the product, and so the manufacturer cannot be blamed.
Again, you make statements, but fail to back them up with any proof.
You have not offered any proof, in the above, for any of the following assumptions:
No proof that God exists;
No proof that Adam and Eve existed
No proof that God created them
No proof that God is all-knowing
No proof that God created anything, never mind all of creation
No proof that God ever claimed "it is good"
All you have done is make assertions, without proof. Neither I nor an alien would be likely to accept those statements at face value. Proof. Not just a claim, but actual, concrete, verifiable proof.
Disobedience kicked in because man was created with "free will".
Why free will? Would you rather have a wife who serves you because she is willing, or a wife who serves you because of your cattle prod in hand?
Well, you still haven't offered any proof that man was created, never mind that he was created with free will or not (and how do you reconcile free will with predestination, but that's just another topic). Also, I would not want a wife to serve me, period. I'm not a slave-master. I wouldn't have a problem with cooperating, but if I have to connect all the dots for her, I'd rather find someone with more intelligence. I think aliens, unless they've come here to enslave us, would agree with me.
God warned Adam and Eve not to eat that particular fruit. Contrary to what you may think, Adam and Eve were not babbling idiots. They knew that disobeying God is bad, and Eve, during her temptation by the serpent, knew that God told them not to eat the fruit, else they will die.
Again, even if we accept the Bible as authoritative (which you have not offered any proof that we should), it states quite clearly that they had no knowledge of good and evil. No moral being would hold people accountable for something they were incapable of grasping. Would you prefer that our hypothetical aliens hold us to a siomilar standard to the one God supposedly held Adam and Eve to? In that case, we may have already assigned our rights away, because we may have offended their gods without knowing.
If you would do a detailed study of Genesis, the "knowledge of good and evil" is not so much "knowing whats right and whats wrong", rather
Jesus claimed to be the son of god. This is just a claim. It proves nothing. It does not prove that god exists, or that jesus is god's son. Similarly, I can claim to be alien spawn. That doesn't prove that aliens exist.
The claim that jesus rose from the dead after 3 days is also not substantiated, and if it were, again, it does not prove his claim to be the son of god. One doesn't flow from the other.
Now we come to something that should be provable. jESUS claimed to have ascended into heaven. Okay, provide proof for either the existence of heaven, or for jesus' continued existence.
Unfortunately, there is no proof for the existence of either heaven or jesus continued existence. Sure, there are people who *choose* to believe, but that is their choice, and it is done without proof (which is why it's called faith, I guess:-) Me, I want proof. Absent proof, its just another story that ranks up there with alien abductions.
Speaking of which, I know someone whose wife claimed to have been abducted by aliens, and her body probed, etc, the whole ball of wax. Doesn't make it true, and there was no evidence for either the aliens or the abduction (on a side note - I told him that, since she insisted this happened, he should stop paying child support for his "alien spawn").
Again, you don't have a purpose other than tht which YOU choose. If you decide tomorrow that your purpose is to do performance art and string toilet paper over people's homes, well, then that's your purpose according to you; it has no scientific validity.
As for proving God doesn't exist, I've already debunked the "Ggod of the Bible" and Jesus often enough, but I'll take a few minutes to start down that path again, seeing as its Tuesday...
The Bible claims man is a fallen creature who needs to be redeemed. This "fall" is supposed to have been because Man disobeyed God.
However, if you check out the first 3 chapters of Genesis, you see that the situation is far from clear that Man was in the wrong. Man did not have knowledge of good and evil before eating from the tree - "Behold, man is become as one of us, to know good and evil". So, before disobeying, Man was not able to understand the concept of wrong.
Sure, disobedience is "wrong". But if the person who is being disobedient has been deprived of the capacity to understand the concept of disobedience, they are blameless. Especially if the one condemning them for being disobedient is also the same one who withheld the very knowledge they needed in order not to be disobedient.
So, if we take the Bible's view, Man is a faulty product, and the Manufacturer (God) is solely to blame.
Our human system of justice is superior to that of God in the Bible, as we don't allow such entrapments.
So, since the God of the Bible is supposed to be just and perfect, and blaming people for your own mistakes is neither just nor perfect, the God of the Bible does not exist.
It also means that Man is either not a fallen creature, or that Jesus, who, if he is God the Son, is equally imperfect as God the Father and equally blameful, is not sufficient to redeem man.
After all, an imperfect sacrifice does not cut it.
But of course, since the God of the Bible \, according to the Bible's own description, is not perfect, we don't have to worry about it.
Similarly, we don't have to worry about our "purpose" in life - it's all what we want to make of it, nothing more, nothing less.
On a side note - this is only one of many flaws in the Bible, but what can you expect; it was written by people to control other people, and more misery has been beset on people because of it than all the world wars combined.
think of it - they don't have to die out to cease to exist. They just have to continue to evolve.
A quick analogy - Music still exists, but try playing those old 8-tracks. Soon it will be the same with video tapes.
And then, for us humans, theres a further problem - we don't just have a built-in "death clock" as individuals - it appears that we also have one as a species. The male y chromosome is shrinking, and will eventually disappear.
New research on the Y chromosome shows that my jittery male friends are not paranoid; they are in an evolutionary shame spiral.
As Nicholas Wade wrote in The Times: "Although most men are unaware of the peril, the Y chromosome has been shedding genes furiously over the course of evolutionary time, and it is now a fraction of the size of its partner, the X chromosome. . . . The decay of the Y stems from the fact that it is forbidden to enjoy the principal advantage of sex, which is, of course, for each member of a pair of chromosomes to swap matching pieces of DNA with its partner."
and
The flip side of this process is the disposal of unwanted or unneeded genes on the Y chromosome. Genes that are not needed by the male may gradually accumulate problematic mutations. In the female, a mutated gene on one X chromosome can be compensated for by a "healthy" gene on the other X chromosome. In the male, however, there is no such shuffling between X and Y, so the unneeded genes on the Y tend to become useless and are eventually sloughed off. The result is a shrinking Y chromosome that has fewer and fewer genes in common with the X.
This explains why most of the X-Y gene pairs identified by Page are in the younger regions of the X chromosome--most of the Y versions in the older regions have already been lost. In the younger regions, the process of loss will continue. "In humans," said Page, "the ramifications of the hijacking are still being played out."
"still being played out" is putting it politely. If humans manage to avoid being killed off, eventually the males all disappear. Nice to know we're soon (in evolutionary terms) going to be redundant.
No matter what we do, what we think of as "humans" is temporary, albeit with a possible span of a few million years to go. We just don't know at what point the Y chromosome becomes ineffective, and the human male (XY) ceases to exist.
So, to bring it back to the current discussion, certainly intelligences like ours (me Tarzan - you Jane, etc) have a very finite lifespan. The odds of two such species developing within communications distance in the same timeframe is pretty low.
Now, back to the original question - is there intelligent life out there? I'd like to think so, but I also think that it may not be possible to answer that question definitively.
You STILL haven't provided a single, solitary, piece of evidence to back up your claim. That's why you earned the sobriquet of "bigmouth". Like too many people who want to be "defenders of the faith", they really don't think logically.
Unless you can PROVE that a person has a purpose in life over and above what we as humans choose to adduce to it, then you have NO basis for either your claims OR your religious beliefs.
Gotta say I'm quite happy with the nvidia drivers on this linux box (suse 9.3).
Honestly, if Apple wants to make extra bucks, continue setting trends, and REALLY hurt the competition, they have to come out with an x86 port of Tiger.
Poeple would start buying it, dual-booting, then, when the time comes to pay for the next round of Windows upgrades, most people will go "why bother". They'll have their WinPart for games, and their TigerPart for everything else.
If they're too far away, they will have died out or completely changed by the time we return any signal they've sent. Just look at what humans were like 250,000 years ago. We would not be able to communicate with them. Ditto for the aliens - they wouldn't recognize a response if they have changed too much over time.
So we're limited to the local area, for any sort of contact. Unless, of course, we get ftl drives and instantaneous communications. The latter MIGHT be possible, thanks to "strange effects at a distance".
Of course, time travel would fix all that. Just go to the future when all this shits been invented and bring it back...
Gotta say, it's kind of disturbing reading your posts - I see your sig, and I feel like I'm replying to myself...:-)
I agree that intelligence may be extremely rare - it certainly is down here. Now if we could just get rid of the damn 20-second and 2-minute rules...:-)
It's up to the person who claims something exists to prove it. It's not necessary (and frequently impossible) to prove a negative.
So, until the poster can show ANY evidence that the earth, the universe, or whatever, has an actual purpose (as opposed to just existing), I'm grounded in logic, they're not.
They smoke to self-medicate - rather than get help.
I think you fail to see the wisdom in doing step # 3 - why bother continuing a habit that will kill you when you can deal with the underlying cause?
For example, we know that 1 out of 5 people suffer from some form of mental illness at any particular time, and that 1 out of 20 are pretty much chronically mentally ill.
Now lets look at another stat - 1 out of 4 women, and 1 out of 10 men, have been the victims of sexual abuse. How much do you want to bet that the majority of them smoke, continuing to "punish" themselves for something that isn't even their fault?
You are shameless, aren't you? If Slashdot had a '-1, Kneejerk Fanboy', I'd mod your ass into oblivion. Then again, half the posts here would be at -1, since that's all the mouth-breathing, basement-dwelling human refuse around here can seem to post about.
One problem with that - I don't use a mac. I use linux. I'm just pointing out that the Mini Mac has one hell of an advantage over *anything* from the Bitch from Redmond - to the point where I'd recommend it to people who aren't able to make the leap to linux. This doesn't make me a knee-jerk fanboy - just a realis[tt].
No, that's NOT what I did. I pointed out a serious logical mistake (anthropomorphization - the attribution of human characteristics to non-human objects) of the poster I was replying to.
Experiments with mirrors demonstrate that a lot of animals have a concept of self/other.
Experiments with monkeys have demonstrated that they understand symbols as being representative of other things. They are also capable of taking something that works with one set of circumstances and extending it to work in other circumstances.
We haven't spent enough time investigating the other species to shut them out in terms of their mental capabilities.
No, that's just a purpose you assign to it. You can't provide ANY proof whatsoever that life has a purpose independent of what we as humans assign to it.
The world finds a purpose everyday
WTF - now you're proposing somethig akin to the Gaia hypothesis - even the "world" has a purpose.
Oh God, it's going to learn languages from examples? I hope they don't try this over the net, otherwise we'll have computers writing LOL, IC, and other nonsense.
... and they'll be replying to half the "articles" posted on slashdot: "I AM A SCRIPT YHBT YFI HAND"
This is great and all, but I won't be impressed until it translates the gibberish that comes from the Iranian gas station attendant everytime I stop for gas
Windows was originally for people who wanted mac-like functionality on cheaper hardware. Now that the Mini Mac is actually cheaper (unless you pirate Windows) than a baseline PC, we're going to see a LOT of Mini Macs sold in the fall back-to-school season, and even more for Xmas.
If Apple ever releases OSX/ia32 and/or OSX/ia64, a LOT of people will buy it and start dual-booting their windows boxes, instead of buying the non-existent Longhorn.
Slashdot Mirror
If we only treated those we already know properly, then we'd never get new friends. That we DO in fact develop new friendships shows that we're not rotten to the core by nature.
I'll look at the MiniWin box when it comes out, but I have to admit, I am leaning towards recommending a Mac Mini for my daughter, specifically because of the Window security issues. I want our lunches together to be spent talking about other things than the latest virus/trojan/whatever.
For that, I'm willing to pay a small premium.
If we do good, it is because we want to, not because we have to. If we help people laugh, it is because we want to see them happy, not because of some commandment from on high.
So, who is the better person, the one who does good because his or her religious beliefs constrain them to do so, or the one who does good because it is their nature? The one who doesn't steal because it is sinful, who struggles with this daily in prayer, etc, or the one who doesn't steal because it isn't their nature to be greedy or steal?
I don't need an afterlife, or a "purpose" asigned to me by someone on high, to give my life meaning. It has meaning to me, and that's enough.
I get my pleasures out of helping my daughters, my sisters, enjoying the company of my friends, being creative at my work, walking my dogs, etc.
This is sufficient. Guess that makes me an incurable optimist.
It would be illogical to ask anyone to forget every fact they've ever learned, to suspend disbielief, when making a decision about whether something is true or not. Certainly, you're not going to get aliens to discard the science, tech, and logic that enabled them to get here ...
This is a prejudgment on your part as to how I originally approached it. It is also irrelevent to the case at hand - which is, produce evidence that would convince either me, or aliens, that heaven, Jesus, or God exist.
Again, you make statements, but fail to back them up with any proof.
You have not offered any proof, in the above, for any of the following assumptions:
All you have done is make assertions, without proof. Neither I nor an alien would be likely to accept those statements at face value. Proof. Not just a claim, but actual, concrete, verifiable proof.
Well, you still haven't offered any proof that man was created, never mind that he was created with free will or not (and how do you reconcile free will with predestination, but that's just another topic). Also, I would not want a wife to serve me, period. I'm not a slave-master. I wouldn't have a problem with cooperating, but if I have to connect all the dots for her, I'd rather find someone with more intelligence. I think aliens, unless they've come here to enslave us, would agree with me.
Again, even if we accept the Bible as authoritative (which you have not offered any proof that we should), it states quite clearly that they had no knowledge of good and evil. No moral being would hold people accountable for something they were incapable of grasping. Would you prefer that our hypothetical aliens hold us to a siomilar standard to the one God supposedly held Adam and Eve to? In that case, we may have already assigned our rights away, because we may have offended their gods without knowing.
The claim that jesus rose from the dead after 3 days is also not substantiated, and if it were, again, it does not prove his claim to be the son of god. One doesn't flow from the other.
Now we come to something that should be provable. jESUS claimed to have ascended into heaven. Okay, provide proof for either the existence of heaven, or for jesus' continued existence.
Unfortunately, there is no proof for the existence of either heaven or jesus continued existence. Sure, there are people who *choose* to believe, but that is their choice, and it is done without proof (which is why it's called faith, I guess :-) Me, I want proof. Absent proof, its just another story that ranks up there with alien abductions.
Speaking of which, I know someone whose wife claimed to have been abducted by aliens, and her body probed, etc, the whole ball of wax. Doesn't make it true, and there was no evidence for either the aliens or the abduction (on a side note - I told him that, since she insisted this happened, he should stop paying child support for his "alien spawn").
Again, you don't have a purpose other than tht which YOU choose. If you decide tomorrow that your purpose is to do performance art and string toilet paper over people's homes, well, then that's your purpose according to you; it has no scientific validity.
As for proving God doesn't exist, I've already debunked the "Ggod of the Bible" and Jesus often enough, but I'll take a few minutes to start down that path again, seeing as its Tuesday ...
The Bible claims man is a fallen creature who needs to be redeemed. This "fall" is supposed to have been because Man disobeyed God.
However, if you check out the first 3 chapters of Genesis, you see that the situation is far from clear that Man was in the wrong. Man did not have knowledge of good and evil before eating from the tree - "Behold, man is become as one of us, to know good and evil". So, before disobeying, Man was not able to understand the concept of wrong.
Sure, disobedience is "wrong". But if the person who is being disobedient has been deprived of the capacity to understand the concept of disobedience, they are blameless. Especially if the one condemning them for being disobedient is also the same one who withheld the very knowledge they needed in order not to be disobedient.
So, if we take the Bible's view, Man is a faulty product, and the Manufacturer (God) is solely to blame.
Our human system of justice is superior to that of God in the Bible, as we don't allow such entrapments.
So, since the God of the Bible is supposed to be just and perfect, and blaming people for your own mistakes is neither just nor perfect, the God of the Bible does not exist.
It also means that Man is either not a fallen creature, or that Jesus, who, if he is God the Son, is equally imperfect as God the Father and equally blameful, is not sufficient to redeem man. After all, an imperfect sacrifice does not cut it.
But of course, since the God of the Bible \, according to the Bible's own description, is not perfect, we don't have to worry about it.
Similarly, we don't have to worry about our "purpose" in life - it's all what we want to make of it, nothing more, nothing less.
On a side note - this is only one of many flaws in the Bible, but what can you expect; it was written by people to control other people, and more misery has been beset on people because of it than all the world wars combined.
A quick analogy - Music still exists, but try playing those old 8-tracks. Soon it will be the same with video tapes.
And then, for us humans, theres a further problem - we don't just have a built-in "death clock" as individuals - it appears that we also have one as a species. The male y chromosome is shrinking, and will eventually disappear.
and"still being played out" is putting it politely. If humans manage to avoid being killed off, eventually the males all disappear. Nice to know we're soon (in evolutionary terms) going to be redundant.No matter what we do, what we think of as "humans" is temporary, albeit with a possible span of a few million years to go. We just don't know at what point the Y chromosome becomes ineffective, and the human male (XY) ceases to exist.
So, to bring it back to the current discussion, certainly intelligences like ours (me Tarzan - you Jane, etc) have a very finite lifespan. The odds of two such species developing within communications distance in the same timeframe is pretty low.
Now, back to the original question - is there intelligent life out there? I'd like to think so, but I also think that it may not be possible to answer that question definitively.
Unless you can PROVE that a person has a purpose in life over and above what we as humans choose to adduce to it, then you have NO basis for either your claims OR your religious beliefs.
Honestly, if Apple wants to make extra bucks, continue setting trends, and REALLY hurt the competition, they have to come out with an x86 port of Tiger.
Poeple would start buying it, dual-booting, then, when the time comes to pay for the next round of Windows upgrades, most people will go "why bother". They'll have their WinPart for games, and their TigerPart for everything else.
So we're limited to the local area, for any sort of contact. Unless, of course, we get ftl drives and instantaneous communications. The latter MIGHT be possible, thanks to "strange effects at a distance".
Of course, time travel would fix all that. Just go to the future when all this shits been invented and bring it back ...
I agree that intelligence may be extremely rare - it certainly is down here. Now if we could just get rid of the damn 20-second and 2-minute rules ... :-)
Guess that proves YOU'RE not a script. Now try to prove I'm not one :-)
And this doesn't excuse Windows Update from trying to install drivers that are known to be bad.
So, until the poster can show ANY evidence that the earth, the universe, or whatever, has an actual purpose (as opposed to just existing), I'm grounded in logic, they're not.
- Suicide is killing yourself
- A lot of smokers are mentally ill
- They smoke to self-medicate - rather than get help.
I think you fail to see the wisdom in doing step # 3 - why bother continuing a habit that will kill you when you can deal with the underlying cause?For example, we know that 1 out of 5 people suffer from some form of mental illness at any particular time, and that 1 out of 20 are pretty much chronically mentally ill.
Now lets look at another stat - 1 out of 4 women, and 1 out of 10 men, have been the victims of sexual abuse. How much do you want to bet that the majority of them smoke, continuing to "punish" themselves for something that isn't even their fault?
Besides, we don't know what price point these "Winnies" will sell at - they probably won't be cheap.
No, that's NOT what I did. I pointed out a serious logical mistake (anthropomorphization - the attribution of human characteristics to non-human objects) of the poster I was replying to.
Experiments with monkeys have demonstrated that they understand symbols as being representative of other things. They are also capable of taking something that works with one set of circumstances and extending it to work in other circumstances.
We haven't spent enough time investigating the other species to shut them out in terms of their mental capabilities.
So. lets see some proof, bigmouth.
If Apple ever releases OSX/ia32 and/or OSX/ia64, a LOT of people will buy it and start dual-booting their windows boxes, instead of buying the non-existent Longhorn.