Well, I haven't heard you criticizing atheists for their faith.
I have, elsewhere on this thread for example (though I don't think it was in direct response to you). But I don't do it nearly so much since atheists aren't nearly so much of a problem. Anyone who says "I know for a fact that God doesn't exist and I'm here to tell you that He wants us all to do such and such" gets shut down pretty quickly.
I don't have a direct objection to people with imaginary friends, only to the ones that insist that we must act on the basis of what their imaginary friend says.
Nobody is demanding you to do much of anything because God said so. If the stated political reasons aren't compelling enough to garner your support, you are free to disagree, but don't claim the argument has gone to a whole new level just because someone believes, aside from the political reasons, that it is also the moral thing to do.
That last is a complete non sequitur. I have no objection to people choosing to do things on moral grounds, and there's nothing intrinsically moral about hearing voices or talking orders from somebody that no one else can see.
As for the first part, I don't know what planet you live on, but this one is full of people trying to dictate how others live based entirely one what their imaginary friends told them. A disturbing number are willing to kill (or even die) over it, and many times more are willing to throw rationality out the window on account of it. They dominate world politics and drive debate on countless issues. Even sports fans are reasonable and harmless by comparison.
Ahh, but so do the athiests take their beliefs "on faith"... absence of evidence does not amount to evidence of absence, yet they claim God does not exist.
Exactly. That's why I'm not an atheist.
The only ones who refuse to have "blind faith" are the agnostics, and even they must assume that the existence or non-existence of God is irrelevant to them - which may or may not be true.
It doesn't matter if its irrelevant to me or not. If the question is intrinsically unanswerable, discovering that it is also important does not suddenly make it answerable.
It's a pot and kettle situation: everyone believes something, and there's always the possibility that they're wrong. Therefore, they're taking on faith the assumption that, because evidence proving them wrong hasn't been found, they are correct.
If that was all it was, there wouldn't be a problem.
I don't have a direct objection to people with imaginary friends, only to the ones that insist that we must act on the basis of what their imaginary friend says.
If I found out my stock fund was being managed by someone who got their investment ideas from their cat, I'd take my money out. Talk to your cat, fine. Invest on the basis of what the cat say, no so much.
Likewise people who start wars because their imaginary friends told them to (such as Bush, Bin Laden, etc.) or want to change textbooks or deny their neighbors rights or any other such shenanigans.
And the assumption that all points of view except yours is irrational?
No, of course not. But any point of view that upfront declares itself to be inaccessible to reason, unreachable by any rational process, only obtainable through faith is, by definition, irrational. That's what I keep saying. It doesn't have anything to do with agreement or disagreement with my point of view.
but the fact that your logic and thought processes has proved to you that there is no God, does not imply the non existence or existence of God.
My thought processes have not proved any such thing. I am an agnostic, not an atheist. Atheists are just as irrational as theists, in that they take a proposition that is intrinsically unfalsifiable and claim to have falsified it.
And you will never convince anyone - except the weak minded - without first understanding their point of view, and respecting it.
Well, since my target here is the weak minded I'm not to worried.
As for respecting their point of view, that really is the key question here. The thing that makes religious people with imaginary friends so much more dangerous than your average street crazy with imaginary friends is that they expect to be taken seriously and we do it. If we reacted to tem the way we do to random street crazies (including not electing them to public office) they couldn't cause so much trouble. Conversely, if we treated the random street crazies with the same respect we give christians, jews, muslims, etc. they would be just as big of a problem.
The problem isn't with religions per se; we shouldn't let anyone who takes their cues from an imaginary friend hold a position of responsibility.
Ok, this explains it... you are under the delusion that all Americans are Christians. Well, they aren't.
Of course not.
But the US currency proudly proclaims a trust in God. Over three quarters of the US population (and over 95% of the elected officials) identify themselves as Christians. The percentages are higher in the military, especially of evangelicals.
Since we (for example) routinely call Pakistan "a Sunni nation" with less justification, and especially since the christian right has been so vocal in their support of the war, which the president said his god wanted him to start and called "a crusade," I think it's a fair label.
The US may not be a "Christian nation" by your definition (John McCain claims that it is one), but the situation in Iraq is a "Christian Occupation" by almost anybody's standards.
Meanwhile, there's one particular religion that you can just turn on the TV and see them killing people TODAY.
That would be the Christians, right? The ones that bomb schools and stuff 'cause there might be somebody bad inside? The ones that shoot up car loads of people because they didn't like the way they were driving?
When it comes to Iraq at least, the Christians are kicking butt.
They're not doing so good on the "love thy neighbor" score, but...
Why is it so hard to accept that the absolute worst thing a xian does to you TODAY is try to have a sticker placed on your science book. Oh the horror!
I gather from this that you are light beige to pinkish, Christian, and don't travel much.
I mean you no offense, but as an objective(or so I would like to believe) observer, your post comes across very emotional, and dare I say irrational. Perhaps take a breather and re-read it?
Did it. Looks fine to me.
In any case I doubt I will change your mind, but I am often told that one of the key points in a certain major religion is that any adherent or potential adherent must be allowed to question the whole thing - otherwise it is not true faith, but wacko fundamentalism.
Ok, so the ones who question it, realize that there really is no rational basis for believing the teachings (thus the need for faith) and opt out at that point aren't part of that religion anymore. That leaves the ones who either knowingly embraced an irrational belief system and those that weren't sharp enough to see the problem in the first place. Sounds about right to me.
Perhaps grouping all religions together in order to dismiss them is not so wise? Perhaps grouping all adherents of a religion together in order to dismiss them is equally unwise. I would suggest you start taking people as they are.
I am talking people as they are. What I'm not doing is taking them as they'd like me to take them.
There was a guy that used to live in a subway station I'd pass through. He talked to people that no one else could see. He heard voices. He thought it was very important that everyone listened to what the voices had told him. He wanted us to take his imaginary friend very seriously.
Religious people are basically of the same ilk (although some of them are doing it second or third hand -- they don't have an imaginary friend themselves, but they know somebody who does).
The problem isn't that religious people want to be taken as they are, it's that they want to be taken as more than they are, as emissaries from their really important imaginary friend. Who, like the subway guy's friend, wants to be taken very seriously.
I'm not dismissing them, I'm just not granting them the importance they think they are entitled to.
If it helps your brain think about it, consider the implications of a universe with different values for the fundamental constants. Its not a true universe, as in, we don't think it exists, but physics and chemistry would be completely different. Pointing out that we don't know the universe exists, doesn't have to stop us from logically determining how physics and chemistry would work in such a system. Religion is no different.
Ah, but it is. Religion asks (well, generally tells) people to act in this world on the basis of speculation about that other, hypothetical world.
Further, religions with few if any exceptions, insist that what they teach is literally true.
Further still, most religions involve some sort of imaginary friends who they claim tell us things about this hypothetical world. Not only do they insist that the things their imaginary friend tells them are true beyond question, but they insist that there imaginary friend is real (sometimes even insisting that he is in some sense more real than we are) and must be treated with enormous respect or he'll smite us.
And lastly, they often take matters into their own hands and do the smiting for him.
That's hardly the same as speculating about alternative systems of physics and chemistry.
He has stated that in his opinion no reasonable person can believe in any religion. Explaining how much how this belief is similiar to those held by religous extremists is probably futile as well.
I said rational, not reasonable, and it isn't an opinion, it's by definition.
Even most religion concede the point that you have to take them "on faith" because rational thinking won't get you there. Religions, for this reason, are irrational by definition.
And the key difference between my position and that of religious extremists is that they always make a special pleading for one specific religion (and as luck would have it, it's always theirs) whereas I'm applying the same criteria to everyone who takes their direction from their imaginary friends, with no exceptions for anybody.
I don't care if you're a priest or an imam or the guy that lives in the subway station, if you claim that we all have to listen to you 'cause you've learned The Truth from somebody that no one else can see, my response is the same.
1. The existence of millions of people who died from something other than eating rat poison does not mean that eating rat poison won't kill you. Likewise, listing bad things that weren't caused by religions doesn't change the fact that religions cause bad things.
No, but the existence of millions of people who ate rat poison and didn't die from it would imply that eating rat poison won't kill you.
Now, AFAIK, no such persons exist. However, there do exist millions of religious people who haven't done bad things.
But remember, we were talking about religions, not individuals. There don't exist millions of religions that have never cause anyone to do something bad. Remember, the claim sequence here has been:
Religions can cause people to do bad, things like try to kill random strangers
But there have been bad things that weren't caused by religions
That doesn't matter (the rat poison argument).
If you want to stretch that argument to cover the effect of religion on individuals the analog to faith would be something along the lines of "eating something you found in a box without checking what it was" and the argument would be something like so:
The existence of millions of people who died from something other than eating something you found in a box without checking what it was does not mean that eating rat poison won't kill you.
No, but the existence of millions of people who ate something they found in a box without checking what it was and didn't die from it would imply that eating rat poison won't kill you.
You can see the flaw in this I hope.
There may be millions of people who take orders from their imaginary friend and do whatever the he tells them to. And most of the time he tells them harmless things like "change your socks every day after lunch" or "eat fish on Fridays" or whatever, and no harm is done. But they are still crazy people, and potentially dangerous, since at any time the voice could start telling them to blow up gas stations that sell girly magazines or kill their own children or who knows what.
And, because they've decided to do whatever the little voice tells them, they will.
1. The existence of millions of people who died from something other than eating rat poison does not mean that eating rat poison won't kill you. Likewise, listing bad things that weren't caused by religions doesn't change the fact that religions cause bad things.
2. Patriotism is just another religion in this context, with the imaginary friend being "Uncle Sam" (he wants you, you know) or the King (not the flesh and blood King but the notional one that makes people chant "the King is dead, long live the King!") or whatever instead of some magic ghost.
I thought your whole point was that the belief in an "imaginary friend" caused the violence. I think there is enough evidence of cases where belief in an "imaginary friend" was not even involved, to call that conclusion into question.
That reasoning isn't sound. I claim X causes Y. You point out that there are cases of Y without X and "call my conclusion into question."
Let's try that reasoning pattern on a less emotional case and see how it works:
I claim poking your eyes out with a sharp stick causes blindness.
You point out that there are a lot of blind people who have never had their eyes poked out.
Can you "call my conclusion into question" on that basis?
In either situation, the problem comes in the rational (yes that is correct, there is rationality, logic, and thinking in most major religions) voices are ignored.
The rationality, logic, and thinking in any religion is strictly limited. Otherwise, somebody would think. "Hey, what if Santa Clause isn't real?" and that would be the end of it. The whole basis of religion is picking some set of goofy beliefs that no reasonable person would believe and saying "Ah, but what if you weren't allowed to question them, and had to take them on faith? Would you believe them then?" and then in the cognitive confusion that creates whacking it home with an argument by authority.
Well, the word "specific" must have confused me, especially in the context of a thread which once again degenerated into Islam-bashing and guilt by association fallacies. Sorry about the misunderstanding then.
What I meant was, if you think of any specific atrocity it's pretty easy to identify the specific religion(s) that participated in committing the atrocity. I claim this is because irrational belief systems (in general) facilitate irrational acts (in general). A general claim such as this should be true in any specific case (that's what being true in general means), which is why I pointed out that it was.
I'm not bashing Islam specifically, but rather pointing out the danger of all people who take their cues from their imaginary friends. I don't care if it was your dog or your god or the shoelace on your left shoe that told you to set fire to the mailman or the dentist office or your own hair, in my book you are crazy, and quibbling over which type of crazy is worse misses the point.
There's a reason it's so easy to associate specific religions with specific stupid bloodthirsty acts, and that's that they were causal in the perpetration of those acts..
So, pray tell, which religions do you have in mind, which _didn't_ facilitate a few choice atrocities? Again, only those which existed for any length of time, please, not late 20'th century new age cults or jokes like Pastafarianism.
I'm puzzled. Your tone implies that you think you are disagreeing with me and then you go on to make the same case I did (but with lots more detail). And then end up challenging me to offer a counter example to the converse of the position we seem to agree on.
To make this blindingly clear, even if someone could come up with an example of a religion such as you describe (I certainly can't) it wouldn't change my position. Just because some hypothetical irrational belief system hasn't yet led it's followers into committing stupid acts doesn't mean it won't start tomorow.
Basing your actions on what the little voice(s) no one else can hear is crazy. It's crazy and stupid if you can't hear the voices yourself, but have to trust somebody else who claims they can. Even if the little voices have only said things like "pick up litter" and "love they neighbor" you have no guarantee they won't start saying "kill people who don't like bacon" tomorrow.
All that really is needed is an ideal or thought that can be corrupted to appear to over-ride any reasonable objections, including those based on the organizations' own core principles.
While this may be true in principle, corrupting something like mathematics in that way would be a lot harder than corrupting something like scientology. If the axiom set you start with contains things like "Death to Infidels!!" and "Anything I tell you our imaginary friend told me, you must believe or face eternal damnation!" you're going to be a lot better off then if you have to build up from things like "two distinct lines share at most one point" and "there is no largest prime."
--MarkusQ
P.S. And yes, it has been done (by the Pythagoreans) but that was before peer review became common.
You can just as easily come up with a flawed ideology that is not based on a belief in the supernatural and use that for genocide.
Sure. I pointed that out, with the remark about football (aka soccer). Or hockey in Canada. Organized sports aren't that different from organized religion (though with the former you do run the risk of the star players or franchise owners speaking out against you).
Basically violence has nothing to do with religion. People will use ANY religion as an excuse to justify their view they they are right and everyone else is wrong.
I was right with you up till that.
Religion (and yeah, any other non-rational shared belief system, like football (aka "soccer")) is a key component of most episodes of large scale violence. It's hard to get people to do things that are liable to get them hurt or killed, or lead them to hurt or kill others. Their natural reaction will be to think "But wait, what if somebody gets hurt?"
This is where all having the same imaginary friend comes in. If you can get people worked up by some non-falsifiable hogwash you can whip up a mod that will believe and do anything. Getting people to do stupid things is much easier if you shut their brains down first.
The great thing about imaginary friends for this sort of thing is that they can't contradict you. If you use a living celebrity ("Come on, people, let's kill him for Oprah's sake!") there's always the risk your Chosen One will step up and say "WTF are you thinking?"
There's a reason it's so easy to associate specific religions with specific stupid bloodthirsty acts, and that's that they were causal in the perpetration of those acts..
Islam demands a specific political system and hence in order to approach that system Islamic leaders will rightly specify who best to vote for to achieve this end. Islam doesn't generally have a notion of personal relationship with God.
Christianity is a personal faith which makes no demands as to the political system under which it's adherents live.
Again, I'm sure it seems like a big difference to the people who believe in that sort of stuff, and probably to scientists who study them, but from an external perspective there's really no operational difference.
One guy has a personal relationship with his imaginary friend, while the other has a mediated relationship with his. From the point of view of a casual bystander they're both just guys with imaginary friends.
In one case you have the heads of the church telling you who to vote for because it's part of the religion, while his opposite number is telling you who to vote for 'cause it's god will. Again, from the outside it looks about the same.
And on and on. You're walking down the street and suddenly you get blown up because some nut-case decided the building you were passing was evil, it doesn't really matter to you if it was a islamic nut-case blowing up a girls school or a christian nut-case blowing up a doctor's office. And unless your family and friends are nut-cases of one flavor or another it isn't going to matter to them either.
I can see that it matters a lot to christians and muslims, or shia and suni, or protestants and catholics, and all, just as treckies get very worked up about which episode they used which type of doodad, but unless you buy into the whole belife system it rally doesn't make that much difference.
[...] the Bible without any altering..." so they'd surely accept that the word "church" could be used as I've used it.
It wasn't a trick question, I was interested in how you were using it, not how it may be used.
It wasn't a trick answer, so we're even. I was using it as it was being used in the reference I cited and elsewhere: to refer to a group of people who gather together worship their shared imaginary friend(s).
You need to distinguish between document semantics, which is what the SGML purists wanted for HTML, and real world semantics, which is what the Semantic Web people want.
They didn't distinguish all that well themselves, and with good reason: there isn't really a bright line distinction to be made. HTML has long supported a range of markup from the purely presentational (br) through what you are calling real-world semantics (meta-keywords, link, and such).
To a good first approximation, the closer a tag came to what the Semantic Web people want, the more likely it has been to be ignored, misused, or subverted by document creators. And there's good reason to suspect that that will continue to be the case until either human nature changes or the Semantic Web people can figure out a reason document creators will want to do the boring work of markup, beyond some vague altruistic "wouldn't it be nice if everyone did this?" pitch.
The Semantic Web is a failed attempt to extend the WWW via "semantic markup", which allows users/editors/etc to tag content (text, images, data) using a standard format that can be read, processed and exchanged by machines which can then give users more useful pointers to stuff that they care about.
You got that exactly backwards.
The WWW was an earlier doomed attempt at semantic markup, and up until the summer of '93 or so it looked like it might work. That's when the early rants about people using the tags to control layout instead of too convey meta information (e.g. using em to get italics in a bibliography, dt/dd to make roman numeral lists, etc.) started--or at least when I first became aware of them. In fact, pretty much the entire history of HTML has been a tension between the language's designers and purist, who want users to care about what markup means, even if it does nothing, and the vast majority of users who only care about what it does regardless of the "meaning" that may be ascribed to it. Once you can get your head around both perspectives some of the goofier things in the whole tawdry history (the Table Wars, XML, CSS) make a lot more sense.
Ok, a little more sense. But only if you already knew what people are like.
OK, when you start using words like "smokescreen" we're back into Big Conspiracy Territory. The problem of disposing of nuclear waste is not some hypothetical construct. It's a immediate real problem that the nuclear industry is grappling with even as we speak. The fact that there is a potential way to turn that dangerous waste into useful product doesn't change that.
It's a smokescreen in that the problem exists solely because all the practicable alternatives have been forestalled by regulatory shenanigans and the definition of success has been set so high that no industry could meet it. Suppose the fossil fuel industry had to capture, track and story all the radioactive waste they produce rather than just releasing it into the atmosphere, they'd be in the same mess the nuclear power industry is in.
Suppose you wanted to stop the production of copper by the same technique. All you'd have to do is require the industry to track and save every drop of sulphuric acid they produce (it is, after all, a very dangerous "waste product" of copper smelting). Don't let them use it, don't let them do anything to neutralize it, and by all means don't let them sell it to anyone.
Nuclear waste is only a "problem" as opposed to an "opportunity" because of the political and regulatory environment, and only in countries where it is defined to be a problem.
There is a key difference in Islam in the Imam's are the ultimate authority (or perhaps you could weasel it and say their interpretation of the Koran and Haddith is the ultimate?) whilst in a Christian church the ultimate authority is the word of God, especially as expressed in the Bible. Christianity is about personal faith, Islam is about a whole system for living.
While it may seem like a key difference to someone who believes, it really isn't a difference at all in an objective sense.
Two guys walk up to you. One says "This other fellow and I both have imaginary friends. But there's a key difference. He claims to be the ultimate authority on what his imaginary friend says, and if you don't like it, tough. Whilst take my imaginary friend as the ultimate authority, and don't try to push my interpretation of His Word."
See what I mean?
Thus Islam is a political system too, whilst Christianity is not.
Read much history?
On a side note I'm interested to know which "church" you are referring to that believes in multiple gods? Hindus for example use a temple. Church is a specifically Christian word as it's etymology is of greek words for a "congregation of the Lord".
Well, if Catholics counted the way most people do they'd have three (or four, if you count Mary).
I'll grant you that the word "church" in modern American usage generally refers to something that at least calls itself Christian, but they don't own the word. In fact their own bible uses the word to refer to what you're calling a temple. Note that, as the linked page points out, this is "God's Word - the Truth; the Bible without any altering..." so they'd surely accept that the word "church" could be used as I've used it.
You deserve points for having the moral courage to admit a mistake. But what a mistake! The waste issue has been a big part of the nuclear debate as long as there's been a debate.
Before you give me too many points, note that my concession is not as broad sweeping as you may be assuming.
The "99% of the fuel is still present" figure I cited is bogus, or at least wildly misleading.
However, there doesn't seem to be any question that 99% of the supporting U238 is still present, along with 30% of the original U235, and and additional 1% (new) plutonium, which could be very easily used for fuel in modern reactors.
Add in the fact that the remaining 1% is also material of commercial value, and I stand by my original claim that the so-called waste is actually a valuable resource.
Thus the "waste issue" is largely a smoke screen thrown up by people who are ideologically opposed to nuclear power, aided and abetted by those who are financially threatened by it.
You don't have to intimidate to get blocks of votes. The Imam at a large mosque can have a couple of thousand votes on request.
Ditto the guy who claims to speak for the appropriate god(s) at any large church.
But that has nothing to do with ballot privacy--the guy who hears voices just tells the sheep what to do and trust that they'll do it out of superstitious love/dread/sheepiness. Having them bring in proof really weakens the all-seeing powerful spirit in the sky shtick, so it isn't going to be worth the few extra votes it might bring in.
In this case, though, privacy of ballots is essential to an honest election, to prevent more traditional electoral fraud like vote-buying. Votes have to be entirely anonymous once you leave the booth so that your employer/union leader/other Big Bad of the month can't pressurise you into voting one way or another. The right to an honest election hinges on a vote being one individual's opinion, not that of someone else with an angle to work. All you do by making votes voter-verifiable is move the point of fraud from the system to the individual, which is probably easier to execute.
First off, privacy of the ballots isn't as essential to an honest election as fair tabulation. You can have an honest election without privacy, but you can't have one without fair tabulation. If the measures taken to ensure privacy prevent fair tabulation of the results, then it's too late to worry about the honesty of the election.
Second, there are many other things that impinge upon "a vote being one individual's opinion, not that of someone else with an angle to work;" if this is what concerns you than working for truth in campaign advertisements (including, say, strict penalties for knowingly making false statements in a campaign ad) would make more sense then fretting over ballot privacy.
Third, while privacy may be necessary to prevent the sort of effects you are worried about, it certainly isn't sufficient. There are already many other things that can be (and are) done, from purging voter rolls to scaring people away from the poles, that have the same effect. Ensuring privacy does not ensure that everyone gets to vote the way they wish.
Forth, while it may be easier to steal one or two ballots (without getting caught) by bullying voters, it's far harder to steal tens of thousands. If nothing else, it means that tens of thousands of people have to know what you're doing, if only so they can vote the way you want. Conversely, by tampering with the counting you could steal millions of votes without leaving a trace, and having only a handful of people in on the scam. If you're worried about fair outcomes, you should be far more worried about the election being stolen wholesale in the counting process than retail through voter intimidation.
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I have, elsewhere on this thread for example (though I don't think it was in direct response to you). But I don't do it nearly so much since atheists aren't nearly so much of a problem. Anyone who says "I know for a fact that God doesn't exist and I'm here to tell you that He wants us all to do such and such" gets shut down pretty quickly.
That last is a complete non sequitur. I have no objection to people choosing to do things on moral grounds, and there's nothing intrinsically moral about hearing voices or talking orders from somebody that no one else can see.
As for the first part, I don't know what planet you live on, but this one is full of people trying to dictate how others live based entirely one what their imaginary friends told them. A disturbing number are willing to kill (or even die) over it, and many times more are willing to throw rationality out the window on account of it. They dominate world politics and drive debate on countless issues. Even sports fans are reasonable and harmless by comparison.
--MarkusQ
Exactly. That's why I'm not an atheist.
It doesn't matter if its irrelevant to me or not. If the question is intrinsically unanswerable, discovering that it is also important does not suddenly make it answerable.
If that was all it was, there wouldn't be a problem.
I don't have a direct objection to people with imaginary friends, only to the ones that insist that we must act on the basis of what their imaginary friend says.
If I found out my stock fund was being managed by someone who got their investment ideas from their cat, I'd take my money out. Talk to your cat, fine. Invest on the basis of what the cat say, no so much.
Likewise people who start wars because their imaginary friends told them to (such as Bush, Bin Laden, etc.) or want to change textbooks or deny their neighbors rights or any other such shenanigans.
--MarkusQ
No, of course not. But any point of view that upfront declares itself to be inaccessible to reason, unreachable by any rational process, only obtainable through faith is, by definition, irrational. That's what I keep saying. It doesn't have anything to do with agreement or disagreement with my point of view.
My thought processes have not proved any such thing. I am an agnostic, not an atheist. Atheists are just as irrational as theists, in that they take a proposition that is intrinsically unfalsifiable and claim to have falsified it.
Well, since my target here is the weak minded I'm not to worried.
As for respecting their point of view, that really is the key question here. The thing that makes religious people with imaginary friends so much more dangerous than your average street crazy with imaginary friends is that they expect to be taken seriously and we do it. If we reacted to tem the way we do to random street crazies (including not electing them to public office) they couldn't cause so much trouble. Conversely, if we treated the random street crazies with the same respect we give christians, jews, muslims, etc. they would be just as big of a problem.
The problem isn't with religions per se; we shouldn't let anyone who takes their cues from an imaginary friend hold a position of responsibility.
--MarkusQ
Of course not.
But the US currency proudly proclaims a trust in God. Over three quarters of the US population (and over 95% of the elected officials) identify themselves as Christians. The percentages are higher in the military, especially of evangelicals.
Since we (for example) routinely call Pakistan "a Sunni nation" with less justification, and especially since the christian right has been so vocal in their support of the war, which the president said his god wanted him to start and called "a crusade," I think it's a fair label.
The US may not be a "Christian nation" by your definition (John McCain claims that it is one), but the situation in Iraq is a "Christian Occupation" by almost anybody's standards.
--MarkusQ
That would be the Christians, right? The ones that bomb schools and stuff 'cause there might be somebody bad inside? The ones that shoot up car loads of people because they didn't like the way they were driving?
When it comes to Iraq at least, the Christians are kicking butt.
They're not doing so good on the "love thy neighbor" score, but...
I gather from this that you are light beige to pinkish, Christian, and don't travel much.
--MarkusQ
Did it. Looks fine to me.
Ok, so the ones who question it, realize that there really is no rational basis for believing the teachings (thus the need for faith) and opt out at that point aren't part of that religion anymore. That leaves the ones who either knowingly embraced an irrational belief system and those that weren't sharp enough to see the problem in the first place. Sounds about right to me.
I am talking people as they are. What I'm not doing is taking them as they'd like me to take them.
There was a guy that used to live in a subway station I'd pass through. He talked to people that no one else could see. He heard voices. He thought it was very important that everyone listened to what the voices had told him. He wanted us to take his imaginary friend very seriously.
Religious people are basically of the same ilk (although some of them are doing it second or third hand -- they don't have an imaginary friend themselves, but they know somebody who does).
The problem isn't that religious people want to be taken as they are, it's that they want to be taken as more than they are, as emissaries from their really important imaginary friend. Who, like the subway guy's friend, wants to be taken very seriously.
I'm not dismissing them, I'm just not granting them the importance they think they are entitled to.
--MarkusQ
Ah, but it is. Religion asks (well, generally tells) people to act in this world on the basis of speculation about that other, hypothetical world.
Further, religions with few if any exceptions, insist that what they teach is literally true.
Further still, most religions involve some sort of imaginary friends who they claim tell us things about this hypothetical world. Not only do they insist that the things their imaginary friend tells them are true beyond question, but they insist that there imaginary friend is real (sometimes even insisting that he is in some sense more real than we are) and must be treated with enormous respect or he'll smite us.
And lastly, they often take matters into their own hands and do the smiting for him.
That's hardly the same as speculating about alternative systems of physics and chemistry.
--MarkusQ
I said rational, not reasonable, and it isn't an opinion, it's by definition.
Even most religion concede the point that you have to take them "on faith" because rational thinking won't get you there. Religions, for this reason, are irrational by definition.
And the key difference between my position and that of religious extremists is that they always make a special pleading for one specific religion (and as luck would have it, it's always theirs) whereas I'm applying the same criteria to everyone who takes their direction from their imaginary friends, with no exceptions for anybody.
I don't care if you're a priest or an imam or the guy that lives in the subway station, if you claim that we all have to listen to you 'cause you've learned The Truth from somebody that no one else can see, my response is the same.
--MarkusQ
But remember, we were talking about religions, not individuals. There don't exist millions of religions that have never cause anyone to do something bad. Remember, the claim sequence here has been:
If you want to stretch that argument to cover the effect of religion on individuals the analog to faith would be something along the lines of "eating something you found in a box without checking what it was" and the argument would be something like so:
You can see the flaw in this I hope.
There may be millions of people who take orders from their imaginary friend and do whatever the he tells them to. And most of the time he tells them harmless things like "change your socks every day after lunch" or "eat fish on Fridays" or whatever, and no harm is done. But they are still crazy people, and potentially dangerous, since at any time the voice could start telling them to blow up gas stations that sell girly magazines or kill their own children or who knows what.
And, because they've decided to do whatever the little voice tells them, they will.
That's what makes them dangerous.
--MarkusQ
1. The existence of millions of people who died from something other than eating rat poison does not mean that eating rat poison won't kill you. Likewise, listing bad things that weren't caused by religions doesn't change the fact that religions cause bad things.
2. Patriotism is just another religion in this context, with the imaginary friend being "Uncle Sam" (he wants you, you know) or the King (not the flesh and blood King but the notional one that makes people chant "the King is dead, long live the King!") or whatever instead of some magic ghost.
--MarkusQ
That reasoning isn't sound. I claim X causes Y. You point out that there are cases of Y without X and "call my conclusion into question." Let's try that reasoning pattern on a less emotional case and see how it works:
The rationality, logic, and thinking in any religion is strictly limited. Otherwise, somebody would think. "Hey, what if Santa Clause isn't real?" and that would be the end of it. The whole basis of religion is picking some set of goofy beliefs that no reasonable person would believe and saying "Ah, but what if you weren't allowed to question them, and had to take them on faith? Would you believe them then?" and then in the cognitive confusion that creates whacking it home with an argument by authority.
--MarkusQ
What I meant was, if you think of any specific atrocity it's pretty easy to identify the specific religion(s) that participated in committing the atrocity. I claim this is because irrational belief systems (in general) facilitate irrational acts (in general). A general claim such as this should be true in any specific case (that's what being true in general means), which is why I pointed out that it was.
I'm not bashing Islam specifically, but rather pointing out the danger of all people who take their cues from their imaginary friends. I don't care if it was your dog or your god or the shoelace on your left shoe that told you to set fire to the mailman or the dentist office or your own hair, in my book you are crazy, and quibbling over which type of crazy is worse misses the point.
--MarkusQ
I'm puzzled. Your tone implies that you think you are disagreeing with me and then you go on to make the same case I did (but with lots more detail). And then end up challenging me to offer a counter example to the converse of the position we seem to agree on.
To make this blindingly clear, even if someone could come up with an example of a religion such as you describe (I certainly can't) it wouldn't change my position. Just because some hypothetical irrational belief system hasn't yet led it's followers into committing stupid acts doesn't mean it won't start tomorow.
Basing your actions on what the little voice(s) no one else can hear is crazy. It's crazy and stupid if you can't hear the voices yourself, but have to trust somebody else who claims they can. Even if the little voices have only said things like "pick up litter" and "love they neighbor" you have no guarantee they won't start saying "kill people who don't like bacon" tomorrow.
--MarkusQ
While this may be true in principle, corrupting something like mathematics in that way would be a lot harder than corrupting something like scientology. If the axiom set you start with contains things like "Death to Infidels!!" and "Anything I tell you our imaginary friend told me, you must believe or face eternal damnation!" you're going to be a lot better off then if you have to build up from things like "two distinct lines share at most one point" and "there is no largest prime."
--MarkusQ
P.S. And yes, it has been done (by the Pythagoreans) but that was before peer review became common.
Sure. I pointed that out, with the remark about football (aka soccer). Or hockey in Canada. Organized sports aren't that different from organized religion (though with the former you do run the risk of the star players or franchise owners speaking out against you).
--MarkusQ
I was right with you up till that.
Religion (and yeah, any other non-rational shared belief system, like football (aka "soccer")) is a key component of most episodes of large scale violence. It's hard to get people to do things that are liable to get them hurt or killed, or lead them to hurt or kill others. Their natural reaction will be to think "But wait, what if somebody gets hurt?"
This is where all having the same imaginary friend comes in. If you can get people worked up by some non-falsifiable hogwash you can whip up a mod that will believe and do anything. Getting people to do stupid things is much easier if you shut their brains down first.
The great thing about imaginary friends for this sort of thing is that they can't contradict you. If you use a living celebrity ("Come on, people, let's kill him for Oprah's sake!") there's always the risk your Chosen One will step up and say "WTF are you thinking?"
There's a reason it's so easy to associate specific religions with specific stupid bloodthirsty acts, and that's that they were causal in the perpetration of those acts..
--MarkusQ
Again, I'm sure it seems like a big difference to the people who believe in that sort of stuff, and probably to scientists who study them, but from an external perspective there's really no operational difference.
One guy has a personal relationship with his imaginary friend, while the other has a mediated relationship with his. From the point of view of a casual bystander they're both just guys with imaginary friends.
In one case you have the heads of the church telling you who to vote for because it's part of the religion, while his opposite number is telling you who to vote for 'cause it's god will. Again, from the outside it looks about the same.
And on and on. You're walking down the street and suddenly you get blown up because some nut-case decided the building you were passing was evil, it doesn't really matter to you if it was a islamic nut-case blowing up a girls school or a christian nut-case blowing up a doctor's office. And unless your family and friends are nut-cases of one flavor or another it isn't going to matter to them either.
I can see that it matters a lot to christians and muslims, or shia and suni, or protestants and catholics, and all, just as treckies get very worked up about which episode they used which type of doodad, but unless you buy into the whole belife system it rally doesn't make that much difference.
It wasn't a trick answer, so we're even. I was using it as it was being used in the reference I cited and elsewhere: to refer to a group of people who gather together worship their shared imaginary friend(s).
--MarkusQ
They didn't distinguish all that well themselves, and with good reason: there isn't really a bright line distinction to be made. HTML has long supported a range of markup from the purely presentational (br) through what you are calling real-world semantics (meta-keywords, link, and such).
To a good first approximation, the closer a tag came to what the Semantic Web people want, the more likely it has been to be ignored, misused, or subverted by document creators. And there's good reason to suspect that that will continue to be the case until either human nature changes or the Semantic Web people can figure out a reason document creators will want to do the boring work of markup, beyond some vague altruistic "wouldn't it be nice if everyone did this?" pitch.
--MarkusQ
You got that exactly backwards.
The WWW was an earlier doomed attempt at semantic markup, and up until the summer of '93 or so it looked like it might work. That's when the early rants about people using the tags to control layout instead of too convey meta information (e.g. using em to get italics in a bibliography, dt/dd to make roman numeral lists, etc.) started--or at least when I first became aware of them. In fact, pretty much the entire history of HTML has been a tension between the language's designers and purist, who want users to care about what markup means, even if it does nothing, and the vast majority of users who only care about what it does regardless of the "meaning" that may be ascribed to it. Once you can get your head around both perspectives some of the goofier things in the whole tawdry history (the Table Wars, XML, CSS) make a lot more sense.
Ok, a little more sense. But only if you already knew what people are like.
--MarkusQ
It's a smokescreen in that the problem exists solely because all the practicable alternatives have been forestalled by regulatory shenanigans and the definition of success has been set so high that no industry could meet it. Suppose the fossil fuel industry had to capture, track and story all the radioactive waste they produce rather than just releasing it into the atmosphere, they'd be in the same mess the nuclear power industry is in.
Suppose you wanted to stop the production of copper by the same technique. All you'd have to do is require the industry to track and save every drop of sulphuric acid they produce (it is, after all, a very dangerous "waste product" of copper smelting). Don't let them use it, don't let them do anything to neutralize it, and by all means don't let them sell it to anyone.
Nuclear waste is only a "problem" as opposed to an "opportunity" because of the political and regulatory environment, and only in countries where it is defined to be a problem.
--MarkusQ
While it may seem like a key difference to someone who believes, it really isn't a difference at all in an objective sense.
Two guys walk up to you. One says "This other fellow and I both have imaginary friends. But there's a key difference. He claims to be the ultimate authority on what his imaginary friend says, and if you don't like it, tough. Whilst take my imaginary friend as the ultimate authority, and don't try to push my interpretation of His Word."
See what I mean?
Read much history?
Well, if Catholics counted the way most people do they'd have three (or four, if you count Mary).
That was sarcasm, in case you missed it.
I'll grant you that the word "church" in modern American usage generally refers to something that at least calls itself Christian, but they don't own the word. In fact their own bible uses the word to refer to what you're calling a temple. Note that, as the linked page points out, this is "God's Word - the Truth; the Bible without any altering..." so they'd surely accept that the word "church" could be used as I've used it.
--MarkusQ
Before you give me too many points, note that my concession is not as broad sweeping as you may be assuming.
The "99% of the fuel is still present" figure I cited is bogus, or at least wildly misleading.
However, there doesn't seem to be any question that 99% of the supporting U238 is still present, along with 30% of the original U235, and and additional 1% (new) plutonium, which could be very easily used for fuel in modern reactors.
Add in the fact that the remaining 1% is also material of commercial value, and I stand by my original claim that the so-called waste is actually a valuable resource.
Thus the "waste issue" is largely a smoke screen thrown up by people who are ideologically opposed to nuclear power, aided and abetted by those who are financially threatened by it.
--MarkusQ
Ditto the guy who claims to speak for the appropriate god(s) at any large church.
But that has nothing to do with ballot privacy--the guy who hears voices just tells the sheep what to do and trust that they'll do it out of superstitious love/dread/sheepiness. Having them bring in proof really weakens the all-seeing powerful spirit in the sky shtick, so it isn't going to be worth the few extra votes it might bring in.
--MarkusQ
First off, privacy of the ballots isn't as essential to an honest election as fair tabulation. You can have an honest election without privacy, but you can't have one without fair tabulation. If the measures taken to ensure privacy prevent fair tabulation of the results, then it's too late to worry about the honesty of the election.
Second, there are many other things that impinge upon "a vote being one individual's opinion, not that of someone else with an angle to work;" if this is what concerns you than working for truth in campaign advertisements (including, say, strict penalties for knowingly making false statements in a campaign ad) would make more sense then fretting over ballot privacy.
Third, while privacy may be necessary to prevent the sort of effects you are worried about, it certainly isn't sufficient. There are already many other things that can be (and are) done, from purging voter rolls to scaring people away from the poles, that have the same effect. Ensuring privacy does not ensure that everyone gets to vote the way they wish.
Forth, while it may be easier to steal one or two ballots (without getting caught) by bullying voters, it's far harder to steal tens of thousands. If nothing else, it means that tens of thousands of people have to know what you're doing, if only so they can vote the way you want. Conversely, by tampering with the counting you could steal millions of votes without leaving a trace, and having only a handful of people in on the scam. If you're worried about fair outcomes, you should be far more worried about the election being stolen wholesale in the counting process than retail through voter intimidation.
--MarkusQ
In some places, the right to own slaves was at one time too.
It's a matter of picking what's more important. Property rights or human rights? The right to privacy or the right to honest elections?
--MarkusQ