"This was exclusively in a context of a discussion on biological evolution. The end of that sentence, "for biological evolution to exist" was implied."
Can you restate the sentence then, because when I append that, I get an even less comprehensible assertion:
"If God used a mechanism such as evolution for divergent species to exist, then God is not necessary for biological evolution to exist."
"Adding an appeal to a divine power merely pushes back the questions by 1 level of abstraction."
Agreed, but it's hard to argue that level of abstraction doesn't exist whether you posit the existence of a creator or not. While ID may not be a sound theory, people who can reconcile their belief in God with the existence of evolution (and are, by definiton, not proponents of ID but of evolution) are not basing their belief on necessarily untenable positions. They are simply stating they have reasons, based on philosophy or personal experience, to believe that a divine will exists, and that it's existence is not incompatible with that of evolution.
"If and Intelligent Designer was necessary for anything as complex biological evolution to occur, what Intelligence designed the Intelligent Designer? Repeat ad infinitum."
A credible attack on ID, yes, but I didn't express a belief in ID, nor did the poster to whom you replied. As stated above, if they believe in evolution and a creator, then they do not believe per se in the vulgar version of ID you are now assailing.
"If you postulate the existence of the Intelligent Designer, as a God (or whatever), then there is no reason to then reduce the problem and postulate the existence of biological evolution."
Who are you to tell the designer how to do his work?;-)
"The process of evolution is dynamic enough to give rise to intelligence without the need for design from intelligence."
Based on what? Your denial of "the next level" of abstraction? Perhaps you can justify the claim that intelligence is an ephemeral by-product of evolution.
"There are sufficient (and better) mechanisms for the origin of ethics and morality then postulating that they were granted, inspired, or created by a God."
Bring 'em on...
"Meaning in life (what I assume you mean by purposefulness in the universe, since that is the only thing I was able to get out of those words) is created by the person searching for meaning in their life."
Meaning in life is a fair way to individualize the notion of "purposefulness in the universe". That you can't comprehend a reference to purpose beyond individual purpose is perhaps a clue to your struggle with the notion of there being a broader one. (Yes, I'm taunting you now)
"And every conceptualization of soul that I have heard of either reduces to a subset of the mind, or was so in-substantially abstracted as to be unnecessary for any understanding about the nature of people."
Funny, every conceptualization of the mind that I have heard reduces to a subset of the soul...
"If God used an mechanism such as Evolution to create divergent species, then God is not necessary."
I hear this argument all the time and I have yet to hear it make logical sense.
P1. God used evolution to create divergent species. C. God is not necessary.
Not only is the middle undistributed, it doesn't even exist?!
In any rational person's mind, there is much more to the question of the existence of God (e.g. the origin of ethics and morality, purposefulness in the universe, the nature of the soul) than supplying a mechanism for transforming biological mass from one form to the next.
"We don't want a world in which companies decide for themselves whether they are in the right and then decide for themselves how to enforce the rights they themselves have determined they have."
Yet we're apparently quite comfortable around here with individuals who do exactly the same thing.
I agree with your statements about corporate lobbying and recent expansions of copyright laws, to the point that I have been an activist against them, but let's be intellectually honest here. Do you hear a great cry for torrents of Steamboat Willie? Rome is a current show and would have been protected under even the most limited copyright acts of the past.
Or is your point that they've pushed the system to the point of declaring war on consumers (oh, how I despise that word, but the shoe fits) and now "all's fair" for individuals to lay waste to the entertainment cartels by any means necessary?
I got the same thing on a post that got upmodded almost as many times as it got downmodded. I had the misfortune of posting something controversial near the top of the list and got something like 10 mods down and 9 mods up, so the net downmod on the post was about 10%, but because the total *number* of downmods was above a threshold, I got put in the penalty box. I couldn't get the penalty lifted by communicating with/.'s staff folks either.
Before that day, I always thought the people bitching about the moderation system were just whining, but now I'm convinced there are aspects of it that are completely capricious.
I think, in the base of both Gates and Bush, that they aren't deliberately lying but that their world views are so myopic and locked in that they actually believe what they say. Gates doesn't see the world beyond the Microsoft platform, except as something to fear and destroy, and he therefore believes the claim that software (by which he means MS or MS-hosted software) wasn't designed to be connected. Bush, well... You can do the substitutions in the claim about Gates...
"Gates: Software in general, whether it was from Microsoft or somebody else, was not set up for an environment where all the computers were connected together. So it's not like there was some software that had this security capability and our software did not. As we use the Internet to connect everyone up, then the need to essentially have suspicion and only listen to certain other systems, and if flaws come up to have those updated very quickly, that became a new requirement."
What can one say to something so far off the mark?
"Anyway, I think the suggestion that Genesis in any way supports a political system is mistaken, just like the belief that freedom and democracy are somehow closely related."
Oh, I'd definitely agree with that. I just sort of brainstormed the theme. It's probably revisionist to fit the democratic/populist ideas of many modern Jews to an ancient system that, IIRC, was ruled by kings and priests...
While we're at it, Christians didn't write Genesis either.
Here's an interesting question for you: were there Jews (who did write Genesis) in Greece and Rome? Can anyone speak as to whether and how they could have influenced those democratic ideas?
World history ain't my thing. I'm asking a question here, not espousing a theory...
The other person who replied to you gets it. My point is that there is no value in posting this material on Slashdot and that it will serve no purpose but to agitate the true believers on each side of this issue to start in on each other again.
I'm afraid you're wrong in this case. I used the term "consultant" the way we used it back then in the context of our business, but what we really were was the hired on engineering division. I have to remember that when the term is used these days it means Dogberts.
At any rate, we were giving them the engineering mantras plus the business advice to get the thing up and out even without all the bells and whistles. Nonetheless, they insisted on waiting until everything was "perfect". By then, all their VC $ was gone and so were they...
The post about bad management was spot on. These were a bunch of well-connected kids with no contacts in the industry they wanted to play with, and apparently noone around to tell them that they needed businesspeople to get their business done, not their slacker college buds.
I know there are always exceptions to the rule and everyone thinks they're going to be it, but folks with any business savvy look at the rule first, then the exception.
I spent about a year working for a consulting company that was developing the presence for one of these "stealth start-ups". They were certainly not counterevidence to the thesis.
They spent millions, much of it on our programming fees, as we went through endless iterations of design-as-you-build. We tried repeated to reign them in, get them on a rigorous development process, and convince them to get a basic system live and build from there. They insisted on dotting every i and crossing every t, and rolling out from day one with ridiculous bleeding edge multimedia features that had nothing to do with their business model, before ever revealing the site. All the while we billed them T-and-M. They went broke and dark within a month of their actual debut on the Web.
It was stupid, frustrating work for a stupid, frustrating client, but the paycheck sure was nice...
Librarians as a profession (http://ala.org/) are privacy conscious. That doesn't necessarily mean that the policies of an individual public library, funded and run by the local political system, will be.
First of all, let me commend you for the comment about writing to newspapers and otherwise campaigning to get the issue in front of more people. That is an excellent bit of advice that many people would be well advised to heed.
Now, the bad news. I know for a fact that you are just plain wrong on the question of whether congressional mail gets read, and I can provide a stack of replies from my rep to prove it. Some (the ones related to hot politicial topics like the war or social security where the topic is producing copious mail to the office) are canned "Dear Constituent" letters, but many are specific point by point responses to my letters. Letters which were, incidentally, sent using the Web form that you and your fellow decriers spew on about the uselessness of.
Maybe I'm blessed with an especially engaged and diligent rep (and staff, of course, I don't delude myself to believe every word comes personally from the congressman's pen) but if what you claim is true, then a lot of people need to get to work replacing their reps with individuals who will be responsive to the constituency's communications and concerns.
By discouraging political communication you are serving a disinformation campaign that leads to political disengagement and apathy. That you were moderated +5 insightful shows your campaign is working, which is too damn bad.
You are correct. Whether or not it was redundant, it was a point worth making. My first thought upon reading the post was "Oh, boy. This person is admitting to a hack of a government Web site, involving the transportation system no less, on a public forum." She/he is just begging to get busted...
As for the weather, it's mighty fine. I live in South Florida!:-)
Why is that modded redundant? The guy has a point, and I can't see it made elsewhere, so how can it be redundant?
I believe the moderator's assumption is that people reading the thread are familiar with Slashdot memes and mythology, and is pointing out that this post could have been autogenerated down to the "pound him in the pass" prison cliche. A post doesn't have to be in the same thread to be redundant, as witnessed by thousands of "in Soviet Russia" posts...
On the other hand, both of us justly deserve to be moderated off-topic for having this exchange.:-)
With so many divisions and levels of middle management
I was under the impression that MS was one of the flattest organizational structures in the business world. Not that I doubt your key point, that one hand doesn't always know what the other is doing, but levels of management are fewer than average from what I've heard.
I'd agree with you that in the case of these stickers, the fundies are on the attack and deserve to be handed their asses.
I'm referring to a more general tendency of self-righteous atheists feeling it is their moral (?!) obligation to berate religous people.
Your "crutch" assertion, for example. Somehow, anyone who has any religous inclination is a supersitous peasant and you are the enlightened philosopher king who must set them straight.
Bullshit, I say. I'd much rather spend my days in the company of pleasant people than arrogant jackasses, regardless of the role of religion in their life.
hermeneutics: The theory and methodology of interpretation, especially of scriptural text.
Note that it doesn't mention the Bible, unless you are assuming that it is the only scriptural text, which puts you on dangerous grounds from a critical thinking perspective.
As for literal or non-literal. When all the (non-testimonial) *evidence* in the universe points to its being old, doesn't the context demand that the 6 days or Creation be considered non-literal?
Also, your photosynthesis argument is both a straw man and a red herring. I have never heard any advocated of evolution claim that plants were around for 1 billion years between their emergence and the emergence of animal life. In general, evolutionary theory is going to be consistent with accepted *scientific* theory about the age of the universe and the solar system. It must in order to be credible. The interval from the Jurassic to the common era is commonly accepted at only 65 million years, for example, and the prior eras in the history of life on Earth stretch for hundreds of millions of years, easily within the boundaries of the accepted "old" age of the solar system.
Rejecting evolution because it contradicts the old old testament is about as deep as people who reject God because religious people aren't perfect, and religions aren't perfect.
Thank you. I have been trying for years to come up with that statement, and you finally put it in words.
Slashdot Mirror
"This was exclusively in a context of a discussion on biological evolution. The end of that sentence, "for biological evolution to exist" was implied."
;-)
Can you restate the sentence then, because when I append that, I get an even less comprehensible assertion:
"If God used a mechanism such as evolution for divergent species to exist, then God is not necessary for biological evolution to exist."
"Adding an appeal to a divine power merely pushes back the questions by 1 level of abstraction."
Agreed, but it's hard to argue that level of abstraction doesn't exist whether you posit the existence of a creator or not. While ID may not be a sound theory, people who can reconcile their belief in God with the existence of evolution (and are, by definiton, not proponents of ID but of evolution) are not basing their belief on necessarily untenable positions. They are simply stating they have reasons, based on philosophy or personal experience, to believe that a divine will exists, and that it's existence is not incompatible with that of evolution.
"If and Intelligent Designer was necessary for anything as complex biological evolution to occur, what Intelligence designed the Intelligent Designer? Repeat ad infinitum."
A credible attack on ID, yes, but I didn't express a belief in ID, nor did the poster to whom you replied. As stated above, if they believe in evolution and a creator, then they do not believe per se in the vulgar version of ID you are now assailing.
"If you postulate the existence of the Intelligent Designer, as a God (or whatever), then there is no reason to then reduce the problem and postulate the existence of biological evolution."
Who are you to tell the designer how to do his work?
"The process of evolution is dynamic enough to give rise to intelligence without the need for design from intelligence."
Based on what? Your denial of "the next level" of abstraction? Perhaps you can justify the claim that intelligence is an ephemeral by-product of evolution.
"There are sufficient (and better) mechanisms for the origin of ethics and morality then postulating that they were granted, inspired, or created by a God."
Bring 'em on...
"Meaning in life (what I assume you mean by purposefulness in the universe, since that is the only thing I was able to get out of those words) is created by the person searching for meaning in their life."
Meaning in life is a fair way to individualize the notion of "purposefulness in the universe". That you can't comprehend a reference to purpose beyond individual purpose is perhaps a clue to your struggle with the notion of there being a broader one. (Yes, I'm taunting you now)
"And every conceptualization of soul that I have heard of either reduces to a subset of the mind, or was so in-substantially abstracted as to be unnecessary for any understanding about the nature of people."
Funny, every conceptualization of the mind that I have heard reduces to a subset of the soul...
"If God used an mechanism such as Evolution to create divergent species, then God is not necessary."
I hear this argument all the time and I have yet to hear it make logical sense.
P1. God used evolution to create divergent species.
C. God is not necessary.
Not only is the middle undistributed, it doesn't even exist?!
In any rational person's mind, there is much more to the question of the existence of God (e.g. the origin of ethics and morality, purposefulness in the universe, the nature of the soul) than supplying a mechanism for transforming biological mass from one form to the next.
"We don't want a world in which companies decide for themselves whether they are in the right and then decide for themselves how to enforce the rights they themselves have determined they have."
Yet we're apparently quite comfortable around here with individuals who do exactly the same thing.
I agree with your statements about corporate lobbying and recent expansions of copyright laws, to the point that I have been an activist against them, but let's be intellectually honest here. Do you hear a great cry for torrents of Steamboat Willie? Rome is a current show and would have been protected under even the most limited copyright acts of the past.
Or is your point that they've pushed the system to the point of declaring war on consumers (oh, how I despise that word, but the shoe fits) and now "all's fair" for individuals to lay waste to the entertainment cartels by any means necessary?
I got the same thing on a post that got upmodded almost as many times as it got downmodded. I had the misfortune of posting something controversial near the top of the list and got something like 10 mods down and 9 mods up, so the net downmod on the post was about 10%, but because the total *number* of downmods was above a threshold, I got put in the penalty box. I couldn't get the penalty lifted by communicating with /.'s staff folks either.
Before that day, I always thought the people bitching about the moderation system were just whining, but now I'm convinced there are aspects of it that are completely capricious.
I think you meant to say not "shall be" but "have been".
I think, in the base of both Gates and Bush, that they aren't deliberately lying but that their world views are so myopic and locked in that they actually believe what they say. Gates doesn't see the world beyond the Microsoft platform, except as something to fear and destroy, and he therefore believes the claim that software (by which he means MS or MS-hosted software) wasn't designed to be connected. Bush, well... You can do the substitutions in the claim about Gates...
What can one say to something so far off the mark?
""Better than Pol Pot" is not a sufficent criterion to rank as acceptable on my scale of gouvernments."
Nice! I am seriously considering quoting you for my sig...
"Anyway, I think the suggestion that Genesis in any way supports a political system is mistaken, just like the belief that freedom and democracy are somehow closely related."
Oh, I'd definitely agree with that. I just sort of brainstormed the theme. It's probably revisionist to fit the democratic/populist ideas of many modern Jews to an ancient system that, IIRC, was ruled by kings and priests...
While we're at it, Christians didn't write Genesis either.
Here's an interesting question for you: were there Jews (who did write Genesis) in Greece and Rome? Can anyone speak as to whether and how they could have influenced those democratic ideas?
World history ain't my thing. I'm asking a question here, not espousing a theory...
Yeah, but that material actually is news for nerds. There's usually some substantive element.
That GWB thinks "the jury's out" on evolution is a tired old saw. That both sides of the debate distort each others positions is also.
BTW, I just registered your username. That is hysterical...
The other person who replied to you gets it. My point is that there is no value in posting this material on Slashdot and that it will serve no purpose but to agitate the true believers on each side of this issue to start in on each other again.
Really, this is nothing but provocation. There is no news value here...
I'm afraid you're wrong in this case. I used the term "consultant" the way we used it back then in the context of our business, but what we really were was the hired on engineering division. I have to remember that when the term is used these days it means Dogberts.
At any rate, we were giving them the engineering mantras plus the business advice to get the thing up and out even without all the bells and whistles. Nonetheless, they insisted on waiting until everything was "perfect". By then, all their VC $ was gone and so were they...
The post about bad management was spot on. These were a bunch of well-connected kids with no contacts in the industry they wanted to play with, and apparently noone around to tell them that they needed businesspeople to get their business done, not their slacker college buds.
I know there are always exceptions to the rule and everyone thinks they're going to be it, but folks with any business savvy look at the rule first, then the exception.
I spent about a year working for a consulting company that was developing the presence for one of these "stealth start-ups". They were certainly not counterevidence to the thesis.
They spent millions, much of it on our programming fees, as we went through endless iterations of design-as-you-build. We tried repeated to reign them in, get them on a rigorous development process, and convince them to get a basic system live and build from there. They insisted on dotting every i and crossing every t, and rolling out from day one with ridiculous bleeding edge multimedia features that had nothing to do with their business model, before ever revealing the site. All the while we billed them T-and-M. They went broke and dark within a month of their actual debut on the Web.
It was stupid, frustrating work for a stupid, frustrating client, but the paycheck sure was nice...
Librarians as a profession (http://ala.org/) are privacy conscious. That doesn't necessarily mean that the policies of an individual public library, funded and run by the local political system, will be.
First of all, let me commend you for the comment about writing to newspapers and otherwise campaigning to get the issue in front of more people. That is an excellent bit of advice that many people would be well advised to heed.
Now, the bad news. I know for a fact that you are just plain wrong on the question of whether congressional mail gets read, and I can provide a stack of replies from my rep to prove it. Some (the ones related to hot politicial topics like the war or social security where the topic is producing copious mail to the office) are canned "Dear Constituent" letters, but many are specific point by point responses to my letters. Letters which were, incidentally, sent using the Web form that you and your fellow decriers spew on about the uselessness of.
Maybe I'm blessed with an especially engaged and diligent rep (and staff, of course, I don't delude myself to believe every word comes personally from the congressman's pen) but if what you claim is true, then a lot of people need to get to work replacing their reps with individuals who will be responsive to the constituency's communications and concerns.
By discouraging political communication you are serving a disinformation campaign that leads to political disengagement and apathy. That you were moderated +5 insightful shows your campaign is working, which is too damn bad.
You are correct. Whether or not it was redundant, it was a point worth making. My first thought upon reading the post was "Oh, boy. This person is admitting to a hack of a government Web site, involving the transportation system no less, on a public forum." She/he is just begging to get busted...
:-)
As for the weather, it's mighty fine. I live in South Florida!
I believe the moderator's assumption is that people reading the thread are familiar with Slashdot memes and mythology, and is pointing out that this post could have been autogenerated down to the "pound him in the pass" prison cliche. A post doesn't have to be in the same thread to be redundant, as witnessed by thousands of "in Soviet Russia" posts...
On the other hand, both of us justly deserve to be moderated off-topic for having this exchange.
I was under the impression that MS was one of the flattest organizational structures in the business world. Not that I doubt your key point, that one hand doesn't always know what the other is doing, but levels of management are fewer than average from what I've heard.
Gilgamesh is Babylonian. My point was that the OT stories are not European, not that they were original.
:-)
It was my understanding that the stories of Utnapishtim and Noah shared a common ancestor, appropriate enough for a discussion of evolution!
Then, quite simply, the statement wasn't referring to you, and it stands.
I'd agree with you that in the case of these stickers, the fundies are on the attack and deserve to be handed their asses.
I'm referring to a more general tendency of self-righteous atheists feeling it is their moral (?!) obligation to berate religous people.
Your "crutch" assertion, for example. Somehow, anyone who has any religous inclination is a supersitous peasant and you are the enlightened philosopher king who must set them straight.
Bullshit, I say. I'd much rather spend my days in the company of pleasant people than arrogant jackasses, regardless of the role of religion in their life.
Note that it doesn't mention the Bible, unless you are assuming that it is the only scriptural text, which puts you on dangerous grounds from a critical thinking perspective.
As for literal or non-literal. When all the (non-testimonial) *evidence* in the universe points to its being old, doesn't the context demand that the 6 days or Creation be considered non-literal?
Also, your photosynthesis argument is both a straw man and a red herring. I have never heard any advocated of evolution claim that plants were around for 1 billion years between their emergence and the emergence of animal life. In general, evolutionary theory is going to be consistent with accepted *scientific* theory about the age of the universe and the solar system. It must in order to be credible. The interval from the Jurassic to the common era is commonly accepted at only 65 million years, for example, and the prior eras in the history of life on Earth stretch for hundreds of millions of years, easily within the boundaries of the accepted "old" age of the solar system.
Thank you. I have been trying for years to come up with that statement, and you finally put it in words.