as I understand that Christians outside the USA tend to be pretty reasonable, but around here, 5% probably isn't too far off the mark for Christians who don't take the bible literally.
I'd like to say that you "around here, 5% [literalists]" needs to be clarified as certain areas within the US. I live in New York state, and that religious view is virtually nonexistent around here. There might be some fundie communities in remote rural areas upstate, but I haven't run into them.
It largely goes according to the Red-State Blue-State thing, and it extremely closely follows the urban-suburban vs rural divide. People in large well connected communities rarely get sucked into religious fundamentalism. They come face-to-face with the fact that there are people of other Faiths, and they face the fact that even within their own religion different people believe different things and different individual Churches of the same religion teach somewhat different things. They learn to deal differences in Faith - mostly by making religion a non-issue in routine social life.
People in small isolated communities - especially towns were everyone goes to the same single Church - tends to lead to monoculture and intense conformity pressure. If you aren't seen attending the singe town Church, if you don't toe the party line, you are a social outcast, you're unGodly and evil. It fosters the inerrancy mindset. They are following the unchallenged unquestionable One True religion of the One True God in their Church. God is inerrant -> the Bible is inerrant -> their religion is inerrant -> their faith is inerrant, which ultimately leads to the implicit attitude -> THEY are inerrant.
Across the US as a whole, people are split roughly 40% for evolution, 40% against evolution, and roughly 20% respond don't-care/no-clue. Many of the 40% "against" evolution are merely doubters, they heard the anti-evolution propaganda from the literalists and mistakenly bought it. The really nutty literalists are probably somewhere around 15% to 20% overall. The big problem is that they are nearly all Republican and they vote at a higher rate than average, making them nearly half the powerbase of one party, giving them almost total power over half of our politicians.
Oops. I just meant to make a small comment that you just happened to be in a particularly area part of the country, and I wandered off into analyze and rant mode. Heehee.
how can you know which of the alternatives are good and which are evil? The way I see it, this is a question atheists have no good answer for, period.
It's funny how virtually every atheist successfully does so with no difficulty, yet so many theists are apparently so morally or intellectually handicapped that constantly experess their own lack of understanding and their own lack of capability to accomplish it, and quite often expressing how that apparently *they* would be evil rapists/murderers/thieves/whatnot if they didn't have a pre-cooked morality system imposed on them.
How?
I'm not going to build an entire system for you here, but I will give you give you an incredibly simple and incredibly powerful foundation for doing so. A single point capable of constructing almost an entire system all by itself:
In a single word: Symmetry.
You don't get to assign yourself unique status under the system. A coherent universal system applies to you on the same terms it applies to everyone else. I do not want you to kill me, I consider it "evil" for you to kill me, therefore it is immediately obvious that I shouldn't go around killing people. I don't exactly want people stealing from me or breaking my leg either. It's closely similar to the Golden Rule.
Right there, a single-word principal, and I've already built a fairly comprehensive morality system. Symmetry.
I'd like to make an additional point. If I were to ask you to come up with some strictly objective standard for measuring morality, can you think of any approach to attempt it?
I have a proposed standard for measuring morality. I acknowledge that this is an extremely imperfect approximation for measuring morality, but I propose that crime is a completely objective standard and that it is a very reasonable approximation for measuring morality. People who are violent, who kill, rape, steal, commit fraud, or violate the standard assortment of other crimes, that is an imperfect but extremely solid indicator of violations of morality - measure of "evil".
The fact is that atheists are quite significantly UNDER-represented in the prison population. It seems to me that there are only two ways to explain those statistics. Either (1) atheists are *more* moral than theists, at least to the extent that crime accurately approximates morality levels, or (2) atheists are equally or more criminal/immoral as theists, but that atheists are incredible supra-geniuses in crime and aren't getting caught.
Personally I don't particularly buy into the second alternative there. Chuckle.
I have some possible thoughts towards explaining first alternative. For one thing, an atheist has to put much more and much deeper thought into building his morality system. A theist is simply handed a set of rules, they don't need to figure them out, they don't need to think them over, they don't need to analyze them, they don't much even need to understand them. The theist is just supposed to do what he's told. So the atheist much more deeply internalizes the system. The atheist is also equipped to evaluate novel situations on his own when he runs into them. If a theist runs into a novel situation and he has trouble fitting it into the morality framework he was given, then he's just plain stuck over what is right or wrong in that situation. I also think people have less respect for rules that are imposed upon them - people can be very creative in rationalizing their way around rules they dislike at the time. For an atheist, he isn't circumventing the rules of some distant external entity, he knows damn well that any excuses or circumvention are breaking the rules, when he breaks a rule he's violating himself, he's failing himself. He's not fearing that maybe God will look down on him for it, he knows and he feels that he's looking down on himself for it. He's not breaking some outside rule, he's violating his own integrity.
Several times I've seen theists essentially indicate that they would become some selfish evil monster
Religious people, at least in the US, have been ceding power to the secularists since the Salem Witch Trials.
The rest of your post is clearly anti-secularist, and I find it hysterical that somehow didn't notice that the above comment is incredibly pro-secularist. Unless of course you are of the view that returning to the Salem Witch Trials would be a GOOD thing.
suing to have christmas and easter displays removed from public grounds
Part of defending our Constitutional right of religious freedom.
The Constitution protects our individual freedoms against the force and powers of government. The government cannot oppress any disfavored religion. Nor can the government establish favoritism for any particular religion.
The First Amendment required that the FORCE and POWER of government remain neutral on religion. The force and powers of government cannot be used to infringe our individual religious freedoms, cannot be used to establish any religion as governmentally favored above any other.
The Government shouldn't be meddling in religious displays at all, and to the extent it is permissible at all it is only permissible if the government does not establish any religion above any other, like in Washington state had a display equally and non-nondiscriminatorily open to submissions representing any and all religions and religious viewpoints. You might remember some news stories about it - everything was peaceful and quiet until someone submitted an atheist sign for the display. And then of course there was a shitfit over it - a shitfit by Christians.
public for everyone but christians
The Constitution requires EQUAL treatment.
It only takes about 25 IQ points to see why Christianity is almost exclusively the religion involved in such cases - Christianity is the overwhelming majority religion. As such, in our Democratic system, it is generally the only religion in a position to attempt to hijack and abuse the force and powers of government to establish favoritism for itself. Christianity is the only religion in a position to commit constitutional violations, so obviously it is going to be the only religion involved in lawsuits for committing constitutional violations.
suing to remove moments of silence (cause someone might use the time to pray, ooohh)
The ACLU wins virtually every School Prayer case because they are defending the "reasonable middle ground" position, defending our Constitutional protection of freedom of religion against the force government.
The ACLU position is virtually identical to the Supreme Court position. The ACLU explicitly supports the right of students to pray in school. The ACLU position is that government officials cannot abuse their governmental powers to infringe upon students' protected freedom of religion. The government cannot favor nor oppress any religion, cannot promote nor suppress any particular religious beliefs or practice. Each and every case the ACLU has brought strictly targeted government officials attempting to use the force of government for the purpose of meddling in students' religion.
Students have the right to (non-disruptively) pray in school. The force of government cannot be used for the purpose of promoting student prayer, nor can force of government cannot be used for the purpose of suppressing student prayer.
Again again again, there is no problem no problem no problem with students praying in school. The problem is the use of government powers attempting to promote or suppress student prayer.
Being an atheist is not even scientific. A true scientist would be agnostic
Only if you apply a ludicrously extreme definition. Are you "agnostic" about the existence of unicorns? Are you "agnostic" about the existence of faeries? You can't prove unicorns and faeries don't exist. If you were being truly rational you have to admit you are "agnostic" about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
I never actually understood the fight between creationism and evolution. It's not like they have to be polar opposites.
The reason you find that confusing is a matter of definitions. The definition you are applying for "creationism" is "God created the universe". While that is a reasonable definition, it is not the commonly used definition. The common understanding of "creationism" is the position that God created Man and all the "kinds" of life in essentially their present form. So yes, by the common meaning of creationism, it is in direct conflict with evolution.
it's quite feasible that evolution was used in the creation of the world.
Only a small few percent of the population are atheists, and the majority of Christian accept evolution. Nearly all evolutionists are Christian.
So except for a couple of percent of people, that essentially defines the evolution position.
whether God is or is not real (and I believe that he is), is it really such a big deal that people want something to believe in, even if you don't particularly want or need that?
Most atheists don't much care about other people's personal religious beliefs.
However atheists, and many Christians, do have very serious objections when some overzealous fundamentalists attempt to hijack the force of government in an effort to impose some of their peculiar ideology on others. Atheists, and many Christians, seriously object when fundamentalists start damaging public school science education, attempting to discredit actual science and instead substitute their theology under a fraudulent mask of science. Harming our children's science education and hijacking the government public school system to forcibly impose their fundamentalist theology on our children.
Is there a middle ground to be had here? Can atheists and theists both be right?
Depends what part you are talking about. Both sides can be polite.
People on both sides sometimes become impolite - sometimes extremely impolite. It tends to be a vicious circle. You can't really assign the blame either side. There has been enough rude words from both sides to reasonably explain someone from either side becoming rather ill tempered in return.
As far as faith goes, the very essence of faith is that that it cannot be proven or disproven.
When it comes to science, there is definite right and wrong. And in fact the majority of atheists and the majority of Christians are in fact both right. Both right.
Atheists are in general perfectly content in going along with whatever mainstream science says. If virtually the entire scientific community says the earth is X year old, atheists don't much care what number X is. It has no special meaning for them. Knowing X is just an interesting factoid. If virtually all physicists say Relativity is how stuff works, atheists are perfectly happy to accept Relativity. If virtually all biologists say Evolution stuff works, atheists are perfectly happy to accept Evolution in exactly the same way and for the exact same reason they accept Chemistry.
The majority of Christians are also right about the science. Most Christians accept God creating the earth, and accept science as the study of how God's Creation works. Most Christians either never really thought much about it, or they look to something like Psalm 19: The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world....
If I may humbly submit my interpretation, I believe that is saying (at least in part) that God's own Testimony and God's Own Truth is written throughout the heavens and throughout the earth. That if Galileo says the earth moves around the sun, then the Faithful and Reasoning mind can look to the heavens through science and find God's testimony in His handiwork. The heavens an the earth utter speech and show knowledge. And if the heavens proclaim the earth moves, then that is God's Own Truth. If the Bible seems to say the earth does not move, that is either figurative/symbolic, or it is due to our limited and imperfect human understanding of the Bible, or due to the limited and imperfect human grasp of the human scribes attempting to record God's revelation into the Bible. If the heavens and the earth testify to a billions-years Old earth, then that is God's Testimony written in God's handiwork. If the Bible seems to say the earth is only a few thousand years old, that is either figurative/symbolic, or it is due to our limited and imperfect human understanding of the Bible, or due to the limited and imperfect human grasp of the human scribes attempting to record God's revelation into the Bible. If the Bible's description of creation seems to conflict with evolution, that is because the Genesis account was either figurative/symbolic, or it is due to our limited and imperfect human understanding of the Bible, or due to the limited and imperfect human grasp of the human scribes attempting to record God's revelation into the Bible. And seriously, what human main can truly comprehend even the smallest glimmer of the Act of Creation? What scribe thousands of years ago could have comprehended even a fragment of the modern scientific understanding of events? Scribes could only record the Bible through their small limited and imperfect understanding. Through the eyes and limited grasp of ancient goat herders and desert nomads, the Genesis account in the Bible is physically or symbolically to not unreasonably far off from the modern scientific description of events.
There are however a minority of Christians who have unfor
Sorry, with your mention of calculus I figured you'd have the math-geek radar to spot the problem based on my mention of 'compound interest' and 'not additive'. Percent-growth (like compound interest) is not additive, it's multiplicative. If you are getting 10% interest on a $1.00, after a day you gain 10 cents and have a $1.10. However the next day you gain 11 cents (10% of $1.10), you then have $1.21. Not $1.20. 10% growth is multiplication by 1.1, additional days combine by multiplication. 1.1 * 1.1 = 1.21.
0.5% growth is multiplication by 1.005, and 1.04% growth is multiplication by 1.0104. 1.005 * 1.005 * 1.005 * 1.0104 = 1.0256319063
I was just trying to be funny, nit-picking your post just so I could pile a second "New Math" gag on top of the first "New Math" gag. Now let us all observe a moment of silence, as we bury this joke. It is quite thoroughly dead now, chuckle.
(I know, somebody who thinks they're "l33t" will have some argument that they need to do some of the stuff Google prohibits. Just say no.)
Me! Me! Me! I am extremely l33t! Check this out:
You're doing genetic programming, evolving carefully constrained native code. It's essentially an extremely advanced form of self-modifying code, which is prohibited in this system. It is possible to still do it by interpreting the evolved code, but the speed penalty would be atrocious.
Grin.
P.S. For those who aren't familiar with it, genetic programming is a technique where you treat a string of code like DNA, and you let these programs compete and mate and mutate almost exactly like biological evolution. You have to carefully limit what code can be generated, so that you can safely jump into and out of of it without it touching anything anything outside the assigned work area, you have to have either no loops or carefully self-limiting loops to ensure the code returns, but it is possible and it does work. You can have a population of evolving programs, and they do successfully evolve to solve the task they are competing to solve. Most implementations of genetic programming work by safely interpreting evolved pseudo-code, but the daring and "l33t" way to do it is to evolve and directly execute native machine code:) See "Genetic Programming".
You walk into a bar and look at this daunting menu of 200 varieties of beer from across the globe, and they carry prune juice. You don't care about Australian Microbrews vs English Lagers, you're in a bar and you just want a goddamn glass of beer. So you chuck the 200-beer menu and tell the bartender "just give me a glass of whatever's most popular". The bartender thunks a glass down in front of you and you blindly grab it chug some down. You gag and choke and damn near vomit, and eventually manage to scream WHAT THE HELL IS THIS CRAP?! The bartender says "prune juice". "We offer 200 varieties of beer from across the globe, and prune juice. Yesterday we had 403 customers. We sold two glasses of each variety of beer, and three glasses of prune juice. Our most popular selection is prune juice."
The average normal public is split across the dozen-or-so channels for average normal news. People on the left and the center-left and in the center and the center-right are split across nearly a dozen channels for normal news. Radical rightwing Fox News captures essentially 100% of the far right segment of the population. It's the most popular news channel, but it makes the majority of the population want to vomit.
This means the total growth rate over the 4 days was 0.5 * 3 + 1.04 = 2.54...consults calculator...yah, that's right.
I don't understand your New Math either! *My* calculator gives me a bit over 2.563 for that. Put away the calculus book and review compound interest. Percent growth isn't additive:D
Thank god for your second post. I was going nuts here trying to understand your original reply to me, thinking I was missing some/. reference. God damn IdiotLoop post:D
i've got that Laibach album on now. Must be a cover of something, what is it?
The original is Zager and Evans - In the Year 2525. It topped the charts for a while in 1969, quite a few groups have have done cover versions.
Note that Laibach's version you're listening to is very very different from the original. The music is preformed very differently and Laibach entirely rewrote the plotline of the lyrics. The original starts with the year 2525 and advances 3535, 4545, 5555, 6565, 7510, 8510 and 9595. It runs forwards the fate of the human race as technology replaces our humanity. The final verses are the same except it's ten thousand years and a billion tears. While the plotline of the lyrics is completely different, the distinctive "mood" behind them is preserved pretty closely. If it's that distinctive mood you like about the song, you'll probably like the original too. The original does strongly sound it's 1969 date - which may or may not fit your taste.
The stick is just used to hold the carrot out of the donkey's reach, so that the donkey will walk towards it.
You're thinking of "carrot on a stick", a similar but different phrase. "Carrot and stick" definitely refers to combining rewards and punishments. See Carrot_and_stick.
Uhhhh..... I think you seriously warped the "carrot and stick" concept there.
Carrot and stick is when your trying to get a donkey to do what you want... you use a carrot as a reward to encourage it to do something, and you use a stick to punish it if it doesn't do it.
Amazon really isn't trying to get the Author's Guild to do anything here.
It's more like the donkey threatened to shoot you with an empty gun, so you graciously inserted some bullets into the donkey's gun and pointed it down at the donkey's foot.
MacOS and many versions of Linux have screen readers... [and]...Windows... So is this technology illegal?
No. The person making the threats was either clueless about the law, or they knew the threats were bogus and they were just trying to score some extra money out of Amazon with the threat of a frivolous but costly legal battle.
It's kinda annoying that Amazon said they are doing this, but the entire Kindle is craptastic DRM defective-by-design anyway. Hard to get too worked up that they're adding a cripple-me-even-more flag.
One more shitball in the shitbowl of shitsoup. Whatever. It's not like I was ever going to buy their shitsoup.
Although is sort of amusing the way Amazon threw it back in the Author's Guild's face. This way Amazon dodges the threatened bogus lawsuit, and the people making the threat are faced with the fact that their bitching was stupid in the first place. They are faced with the fact that NO, they really don't want to flag their books as un-text-to-speechable. They were just hoping to grab more money for themselves on the back of the text-to-speech feature.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you please provide history evidence for these statements?
He who wins the war gets to write the history books. ;)
They also get to make God in their own image.
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as I understand that Christians outside the USA tend to be pretty reasonable, but around here, 5% probably isn't too far off the mark for Christians who don't take the bible literally.
I'd like to say that you "around here, 5% [literalists]" needs to be clarified as certain areas within the US. I live in New York state, and that religious view is virtually nonexistent around here. There might be some fundie communities in remote rural areas upstate, but I haven't run into them.
It largely goes according to the Red-State Blue-State thing, and it extremely closely follows the urban-suburban vs rural divide. People in large well connected communities rarely get sucked into religious fundamentalism. They come face-to-face with the fact that there are people of other Faiths, and they face the fact that even within their own religion different people believe different things and different individual Churches of the same religion teach somewhat different things. They learn to deal differences in Faith - mostly by making religion a non-issue in routine social life.
People in small isolated communities - especially towns were everyone goes to the same single Church - tends to lead to monoculture and intense conformity pressure. If you aren't seen attending the singe town Church, if you don't toe the party line, you are a social outcast, you're unGodly and evil. It fosters the inerrancy mindset. They are following the unchallenged unquestionable One True religion of the One True God in their Church. God is inerrant -> the Bible is inerrant -> their religion is inerrant -> their faith is inerrant, which ultimately leads to the implicit attitude -> THEY are inerrant.
Across the US as a whole, people are split roughly 40% for evolution, 40% against evolution, and roughly 20% respond don't-care/no-clue. Many of the 40% "against" evolution are merely doubters, they heard the anti-evolution propaganda from the literalists and mistakenly bought it. The really nutty literalists are probably somewhere around 15% to 20% overall. The big problem is that they are nearly all Republican and they vote at a higher rate than average, making them nearly half the powerbase of one party, giving them almost total power over half of our politicians.
Oops. I just meant to make a small comment that you just happened to be in a particularly area part of the country, and I wandered off into analyze and rant mode. Heehee.
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how can you know which of the alternatives are good and which are evil? The way I see it, this is a question atheists have no good answer for, period.
It's funny how virtually every atheist successfully does so with no difficulty, yet so many theists are apparently so morally or intellectually handicapped that constantly experess their own lack of understanding and their own lack of capability to accomplish it, and quite often expressing how that apparently *they* would be evil rapists/murderers/thieves/whatnot if they didn't have a pre-cooked morality system imposed on them.
How?
I'm not going to build an entire system for you here, but I will give you give you an incredibly simple and incredibly powerful foundation for doing so. A single point capable of constructing almost an entire system all by itself:
In a single word: Symmetry.
You don't get to assign yourself unique status under the system. A coherent universal system applies to you on the same terms it applies to everyone else. I do not want you to kill me, I consider it "evil" for you to kill me, therefore it is immediately obvious that I shouldn't go around killing people. I don't exactly want people stealing from me or breaking my leg either. It's closely similar to the Golden Rule.
Right there, a single-word principal, and I've already built a fairly comprehensive morality system. Symmetry.
I'd like to make an additional point. If I were to ask you to come up with some strictly objective standard for measuring morality, can you think of any approach to attempt it?
I have a proposed standard for measuring morality. I acknowledge that this is an extremely imperfect approximation for measuring morality, but I propose that crime is a completely objective standard and that it is a very reasonable approximation for measuring morality. People who are violent, who kill, rape, steal, commit fraud, or violate the standard assortment of other crimes, that is an imperfect but extremely solid indicator of violations of morality - measure of "evil".
The fact is that atheists are quite significantly UNDER-represented in the prison population. It seems to me that there are only two ways to explain those statistics. Either (1) atheists are *more* moral than theists, at least to the extent that crime accurately approximates morality levels, or (2) atheists are equally or more criminal/immoral as theists, but that atheists are incredible supra-geniuses in crime and aren't getting caught.
Personally I don't particularly buy into the second alternative there. Chuckle.
I have some possible thoughts towards explaining first alternative. For one thing, an atheist has to put much more and much deeper thought into building his morality system. A theist is simply handed a set of rules, they don't need to figure them out, they don't need to think them over, they don't need to analyze them, they don't much even need to understand them. The theist is just supposed to do what he's told. So the atheist much more deeply internalizes the system. The atheist is also equipped to evaluate novel situations on his own when he runs into them. If a theist runs into a novel situation and he has trouble fitting it into the morality framework he was given, then he's just plain stuck over what is right or wrong in that situation. I also think people have less respect for rules that are imposed upon them - people can be very creative in rationalizing their way around rules they dislike at the time. For an atheist, he isn't circumventing the rules of some distant external entity, he knows damn well that any excuses or circumvention are breaking the rules, when he breaks a rule he's violating himself, he's failing himself. He's not fearing that maybe God will look down on him for it, he knows and he feels that he's looking down on himself for it. He's not breaking some outside rule, he's violating his own integrity.
Several times I've seen theists essentially indicate that they would become some selfish evil monster
Religious people, at least in the US, have been ceding power to the secularists since the Salem Witch Trials.
The rest of your post is clearly anti-secularist, and I find it hysterical that somehow didn't notice that the above comment is incredibly pro-secularist. Unless of course you are of the view that returning to the Salem Witch Trials would be a GOOD thing.
suing to have christmas and easter displays removed from public grounds
Part of defending our Constitutional right of religious freedom.
The Constitution protects our individual freedoms against the force and powers of government. The government cannot oppress any disfavored religion. Nor can the government establish favoritism for any particular religion.
The First Amendment required that the FORCE and POWER of government remain neutral on religion. The force and powers of government cannot be used to infringe our individual religious freedoms, cannot be used to establish any religion as governmentally favored above any other.
The Government shouldn't be meddling in religious displays at all, and to the extent it is permissible at all it is only permissible if the government does not establish any religion above any other, like in Washington state had a display equally and non-nondiscriminatorily open to submissions representing any and all religions and religious viewpoints. You might remember some news stories about it - everything was peaceful and quiet until someone submitted an atheist sign for the display. And then of course there was a shitfit over it - a shitfit by Christians.
public for everyone but christians
The Constitution requires EQUAL treatment.
It only takes about 25 IQ points to see why Christianity is almost exclusively the religion involved in such cases - Christianity is the overwhelming majority religion. As such, in our Democratic system, it is generally the only religion in a position to attempt to hijack and abuse the force and powers of government to establish favoritism for itself. Christianity is the only religion in a position to commit constitutional violations, so obviously it is going to be the only religion involved in lawsuits for committing constitutional violations.
suing to remove moments of silence (cause someone might use the time to pray, ooohh)
The ACLU wins virtually every School Prayer case because they are defending the "reasonable middle ground" position, defending our Constitutional protection of freedom of religion against the force government.
The ACLU position is virtually identical to the Supreme Court position. The ACLU explicitly supports the right of students to pray in school. The ACLU position is that government officials cannot abuse their governmental powers to infringe upon students' protected freedom of religion. The government cannot favor nor oppress any religion, cannot promote nor suppress any particular religious beliefs or practice. Each and every case the ACLU has brought strictly targeted government officials attempting to use the force of government for the purpose of meddling in students' religion.
Students have the right to (non-disruptively) pray in school.
The force of government cannot be used for the purpose of promoting student prayer,
nor can force of government cannot be used for the purpose of suppressing student prayer.
Again again again, there is no problem no problem no problem with students praying in school. The problem is the use of government powers attempting to promote or suppress student prayer.
Being an atheist is not even scientific. A true scientist would be agnostic
Only if you apply a ludicrously extreme definition.
Are you "agnostic" about the existence of unicorns?
Are you "agnostic" about the existence of faeries?
You can't prove unicorns and faeries don't exist. If you were being truly rational you have to admit you are "agnostic" about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
Most self-defined atheists in the US are
at least 1 in 2 Americans are drooling morons.
That's a ridiculous claim.
Not many people drool.
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I never actually understood the fight between creationism and evolution. It's not like they have to be polar opposites.
The reason you find that confusing is a matter of definitions. The definition you are applying for "creationism" is "God created the universe". While that is a reasonable definition, it is not the commonly used definition. The common understanding of "creationism" is the position that God created Man and all the "kinds" of life in essentially their present form. So yes, by the common meaning of creationism, it is in direct conflict with evolution.
it's quite feasible that evolution was used in the creation of the world.
Only a small few percent of the population are atheists, and the majority of Christian accept evolution. Nearly all evolutionists are Christian.
So except for a couple of percent of people, that essentially defines the evolution position.
whether God is or is not real (and I believe that he is), is it really such a big deal that people want something to believe in, even if you don't particularly want or need that?
Most atheists don't much care about other people's personal religious beliefs.
However atheists, and many Christians, do have very serious objections when some overzealous fundamentalists attempt to hijack the force of government in an effort to impose some of their peculiar ideology on others. Atheists, and many Christians, seriously object when fundamentalists start damaging public school science education, attempting to discredit actual science and instead substitute their theology under a fraudulent mask of science. Harming our children's science education and hijacking the government public school system to forcibly impose their fundamentalist theology on our children.
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Is there a middle ground to be had here? Can atheists and theists both be right?
Depends what part you are talking about. Both sides can be polite.
People on both sides sometimes become impolite - sometimes extremely impolite. It tends to be a vicious circle. You can't really assign the blame either side. There has been enough rude words from both sides to reasonably explain someone from either side becoming rather ill tempered in return.
As far as faith goes, the very essence of faith is that that it cannot be proven or disproven.
When it comes to science, there is definite right and wrong. And in fact the majority of atheists and the majority of Christians are in fact both right. Both right.
Atheists are in general perfectly content in going along with whatever mainstream science says. If virtually the entire scientific community says the earth is X year old, atheists don't much care what number X is. It has no special meaning for them. Knowing X is just an interesting factoid. If virtually all physicists say Relativity is how stuff works, atheists are perfectly happy to accept Relativity. If virtually all biologists say Evolution stuff works, atheists are perfectly happy to accept Evolution in exactly the same way and for the exact same reason they accept Chemistry.
The majority of Christians are also right about the science. Most Christians accept God creating the earth, and accept science as the study of how God's Creation works. Most Christians either never really thought much about it, or they look to something like Psalm 19:
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world....
If I may humbly submit my interpretation, I believe that is saying (at least in part) that God's own Testimony and God's Own Truth is written throughout the heavens and throughout the earth. That if Galileo says the earth moves around the sun, then the Faithful and Reasoning mind can look to the heavens through science and find God's testimony in His handiwork. The heavens an the earth utter speech and show knowledge. And if the heavens proclaim the earth moves, then that is God's Own Truth. If the Bible seems to say the earth does not move, that is either figurative/symbolic, or it is due to our limited and imperfect human understanding of the Bible, or due to the limited and imperfect human grasp of the human scribes attempting to record God's revelation into the Bible. If the heavens and the earth testify to a billions-years Old earth, then that is God's Testimony written in God's handiwork. If the Bible seems to say the earth is only a few thousand years old, that is either figurative/symbolic, or it is due to our limited and imperfect human understanding of the Bible, or due to the limited and imperfect human grasp of the human scribes attempting to record God's revelation into the Bible. If the Bible's description of creation seems to conflict with evolution, that is because the Genesis account was either figurative/symbolic, or it is due to our limited and imperfect human understanding of the Bible, or due to the limited and imperfect human grasp of the human scribes attempting to record God's revelation into the Bible. And seriously, what human main can truly comprehend even the smallest glimmer of the Act of Creation? What scribe thousands of years ago could have comprehended even a fragment of the modern scientific understanding of events? Scribes could only record the Bible through their small limited and imperfect understanding. Through the eyes and limited grasp of ancient goat herders and desert nomads, the Genesis account in the Bible is physically or symbolically to not unreasonably far off from the modern scientific description of events.
There are however a minority of Christians who have unfor
You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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Yeah, but they mispelled 'Severe'.
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The Education Property has been increased to 128 characters due to popular demand.
I hear they increased the chocolate ration too.
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It was a UFO, not a meteor!
This story about finding "meteorites" is just a government coverup!
Aliens walk among us.
The Rapture is near.
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you didn't bother to explain what numbers
Sorry, with your mention of calculus I figured you'd have the math-geek radar to spot the problem based on my mention of 'compound interest' and 'not additive'. Percent-growth (like compound interest) is not additive, it's multiplicative. If you are getting 10% interest on a $1.00, after a day you gain 10 cents and have a $1.10. However the next day you gain 11 cents (10% of $1.10), you then have $1.21. Not $1.20. 10% growth is multiplication by 1.1, additional days combine by multiplication. 1.1 * 1.1 = 1.21.
0.5% growth is multiplication by 1.005, and 1.04% growth is multiplication by 1.0104.
1.005 * 1.005 * 1.005 * 1.0104 = 1.0256319063
I was just trying to be funny, nit-picking your post just so I could pile a second "New Math" gag on top of the first "New Math" gag.
Now let us all observe a moment of silence, as we bury this joke. It is quite thoroughly dead now, chuckle.
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(I know, somebody who thinks they're "l33t" will have some argument that they need to do some of the stuff Google prohibits. Just say no.)
Me! Me! Me! I am extremely l33t! Check this out:
You're doing genetic programming, evolving carefully constrained native code. It's essentially an extremely advanced form of self-modifying code, which is prohibited in this system. It is possible to still do it by interpreting the evolved code, but the speed penalty would be atrocious.
Grin.
P.S. :) See "Genetic Programming".
For those who aren't familiar with it, genetic programming is a technique where you treat a string of code like DNA, and you let these programs compete and mate and mutate almost exactly like biological evolution. You have to carefully limit what code can be generated, so that you can safely jump into and out of of it without it touching anything anything outside the assigned work area, you have to have either no loops or carefully self-limiting loops to ensure the code returns, but it is possible and it does work. You can have a population of evolving programs, and they do successfully evolve to solve the task they are competing to solve. Most implementations of genetic programming work by safely interpreting evolved pseudo-code, but the daring and "l33t" way to do it is to evolve and directly execute native machine code
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My PC says the exact amount $8,191.997425203.
What? Why are you looking at me that way?
So what if my PC is a Pentium?
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No, he just has odd dance hobbies.
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Your sig is hysterical.
You walk into a bar and look at this daunting menu of 200 varieties of beer from across the globe, and they carry prune juice. You don't care about Australian Microbrews vs English Lagers, you're in a bar and you just want a goddamn glass of beer. So you chuck the 200-beer menu and tell the bartender "just give me a glass of whatever's most popular". The bartender thunks a glass down in front of you and you blindly grab it chug some down. You gag and choke and damn near vomit, and eventually manage to scream WHAT THE HELL IS THIS CRAP?! The bartender says "prune juice". "We offer 200 varieties of beer from across the globe, and prune juice. Yesterday we had 403 customers. We sold two glasses of each variety of beer, and three glasses of prune juice. Our most popular selection is prune juice."
The average normal public is split across the dozen-or-so channels for average normal news. People on the left and the center-left and in the center and the center-right are split across nearly a dozen channels for normal news. Radical rightwing Fox News captures essentially 100% of the far right segment of the population. It's the most popular news channel, but it makes the majority of the population want to vomit.
Fox News - the prune juice of news.
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This means the total growth rate over the 4 days was 0.5 * 3 + 1.04 = 2.54...consults calculator...yah, that's right.
I don't understand your New Math either! *My* calculator gives me a bit over 2.563 for that. :D
Put away the calculus book and review compound interest. Percent growth isn't additive
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Thank god for your second post. I was going nuts here trying to understand your original reply to me, thinking I was missing some /. reference. God damn IdiotLoop post :D
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i've got that Laibach album on now. Must be a cover of something, what is it?
The original is Zager and Evans - In the Year 2525. It topped the charts for a while in 1969, quite a few groups have have done cover versions.
Note that Laibach's version you're listening to is very very different from the original. The music is preformed very differently and Laibach entirely rewrote the plotline of the lyrics. The original starts with the year 2525 and advances 3535, 4545, 5555, 6565, 7510, 8510 and 9595. It runs forwards the fate of the human race as technology replaces our humanity. The final verses are the same except it's ten thousand years and a billion tears. While the plotline of the lyrics is completely different, the distinctive "mood" behind them is preserved pretty closely. If it's that distinctive mood you like about the song, you'll probably like the original too. The original does strongly sound it's 1969 date - which may or may not fit your taste.
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I'm a big sportsfan. I did a P2P search for Football, and all I got were these damn launch codes.
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about 0.5 per cent a day... topping one per cent by day four
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Ya goddamn perv.
Not about the camel... sexual freaks don't bother me... about being a hacker that can walk a mile. Turn in your geek card.
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The stick is just used to hold the carrot out of the donkey's reach, so that the donkey will walk towards it.
You're thinking of "carrot on a stick", a similar but different phrase. "Carrot and stick" definitely refers to combining rewards and punishments. See Carrot_and_stick.
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Uhhhh..... I think you seriously warped the "carrot and stick" concept there.
Carrot and stick is when your trying to get a donkey to do what you want... you use a carrot as a reward to encourage it to do something, and you use a stick to punish it if it doesn't do it.
Amazon really isn't trying to get the Author's Guild to do anything here.
It's more like the donkey threatened to shoot you with an empty gun, so you graciously inserted some bullets into the donkey's gun and pointed it down at the donkey's foot.
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MacOS and many versions of Linux have screen readers... [and] ...Windows...
So is this technology illegal?
No. The person making the threats was either clueless about the law, or they knew the threats were bogus and they were just trying to score some extra money out of Amazon with the threat of a frivolous but costly legal battle.
It's kinda annoying that Amazon said they are doing this, but the entire Kindle is craptastic DRM defective-by-design anyway. Hard to get too worked up that they're adding a cripple-me-even-more flag.
One more shitball in the shitbowl of shitsoup. Whatever. It's not like I was ever going to buy their shitsoup.
Although is sort of amusing the way Amazon threw it back in the Author's Guild's face. This way Amazon dodges the threatened bogus lawsuit, and the people making the threat are faced with the fact that their bitching was stupid in the first place. They are faced with the fact that NO, they really don't want to flag their books as un-text-to-speechable. They were just hoping to grab more money for themselves on the back of the text-to-speech feature.
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