Lets just see how well those post-apocalyptic bands of cannibals can find their way between supply caches without someone who knows how to perform an A* search!!
I think the lack of party discipline is the worst feature of the American system. In the Canadian system Michelle Bachmann, Ted Cruize, and Jim Inhofe would just be random backbenchers no one listens to. But in the US because there's no discipline each of them has a voice on the national stage.
MPs with lots of independence means political power goes local, instead of debating things on the national stage with everyone it's debated by hyper-partisans because those are the only people obsessive enough to get involved in politics at the local level. Moreover you get drawn into a lot of dumb symbolic stuff because there's not enough time to debunk all the dumb symbolism.
In the Canadian system nuanced debate happens inside the party, when they think they have the best argument they take it public and now the public has just a handful of positions to evaluate. I think a lack of discipline (and that includes an elected senate) is a horrible idea because it makes our political debate into the cacophony the Americans are dealing with.
Ideally the Constitutional Monarch should have just slightly more power. Currently in Canada the Governor General does whatever the PM tells him to do, right or wrong. This has resulted in Harper proroguing Parliament when the shit was about to hit the fan a couple of times including once when he's government was going to lose a vote of confidence the next day, then he went on about how it wasn't democratic if the opposition parties ganged up on him and formed a coalition government like the UK and Australia currently have. A government consists of which ever part[y][ies] can pass a budget and if none can then Parliament is dissolved and there are elections. The voters get pissed off if this happens too often.
That prorogue situation was a bit of a mess, the Conservatives had just won the election (as a minority) and introduced a controversial election funding bill they hadn't discussed during the campaign. But the voters understand that the minority party forms government, giving the voters a coalition government they didn't expect isn't really Democratic. I think the proper thing would have been to say withdraw the the bill or we'll defeat it and force another election and let the voters decide whose fault it is.
I think the governor general made the right call, the coalition didn't even last till the conclusion of the prorogue.
I've thought of that before, you might end up with rule by bureaucrats but otherwise I think it works pretty well, other than the fact that no legislative body would ever implement it.
Given modern constraints I think constitutional monarchies are the way to go, not because the monarch is useful, but because the monarch takes the "executive" role and all the power ends up in parliament where voters can pay attention.
The problem with the US is power is too distributed. 538 congress critters each with their own agenda, there's too much information to make an informed decision and it's too easy for lobbyists to overpower individual politicians.
I think Canada has about as good a system as you can reasonably get because the parties are so strong. They can stand up to lobbyists or pundits when they think it's in their own best interest (which usually corresponds to what that think is good for the country too). And the opposition can coordinate their attacks a lot more effectively. There's a Tea Party element in the Conservatives but Harper keeps it under wraps. They still introduce some bad legislation like this, but bad bills have been defeated in the past.
But here's the thing. If I pull you over and you have one of our public servant honor tags, you're still getting a ticket for whatever I pulled you over for. In fact, I am less likely to let you go, because of the appearance of impropriety created by these tags. I get a lot more "by the book" when someone starts flashing special tags and membership cards at me.
Is that just you or your department in general? For you at least I buy your explanation, but my question is, considering all the appearance trouble with the tags, if they aren't for nefarious purposes then what are they for?
It's the cops extorting money. It's not just speeding. This creates the appearance that, if you do not buy the membership, you'll be stopped and shown absolutely no mercy, and may even have charges trumped up against you - or otherwise be punished.
This is tantamount to soliciting bribes.
Soliciting bribes maybe, they're not accepting the money personally.
And unless cops go around advising motorists to buy the membership I don't see how it can be extortion, and I don't think the idea that if you don't have a membership "you'll be stopped and shown absolutely no mercy, and may even have charges trumped up against you - or otherwise be punished" is particularly compelling. I'd assume without a card they'd carry out their duties as usual (as good or bad as they usually are).
The cops are obviously doing something very wrong and people should be facing whatever discipline or legal repercussions it takes to make it stop, but I'm not sure what the exact charges are.
Honestly I was being slightly lazy, taking the only per capita figure in the article.
I'll say I'm a bit suspicious how the figures vanish for the last several years until 2003 when Singapore's Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong told the BBC in September 2003 that he believed there were "in the region of about 70 to 80" hangings in 2003. Two days later he retracted his statement, saying the number was in fact ten.
Though I admit it would be very hard for them to hide executions (and there doesn't appear any evidence they did other than that misquote)
Singapore has 13.8 executions per 100,000, which is more than the 12.5 murders per 100,000 in Africa (though I don't know the execution rate in Africa).
Sure the executed Singaporeans have (generally) broken the law, but how many murder victims are killed because they're involved with crime? And if you can blame someone for getting caught up with a gang that pressures them to commit crime then why can't you blame someone for remaining with a violent spouse who might harm them?
Because some states released their numbers. If you actually RTFA you would have noticed that 21 states +DC which released enrollment numbers averaged about about a 30-50% increase in the last month. Doing the math, the other 29 states which did not release numbers would have had to average a 90% increase in order to hit 7.1 million.
So, there might something be wrong with IBD's math, there might be innocuous reasons which states released numbers, or there might be something fishy with the 7.1 million supposed signups which might conflict with your ideology.
Which begs the question of what's the difference between the 21 states releasing numbers and the 29 that didn't. Well 14 of the 21 states were running state exchanges. With all the hype about the federal exchange you'd expect the state exchanges to get a smaller deadline bump (they either had people sign up early or more people miss the deadline).
As for the 7 remaining states. For the most part they're probably Republican (that's why they didn't set up state exchanges), so they might have released their numbers specifically because they were underwhelming and they were trying to show their state didn't want ObamaCare anyways.
Are you self-aware enough to admit that you are doing the exact same thing? You have decided that a book you have not read is false, and so you accept without question evidence of that falsehood. Any evidence that supports the Mormon narrative you dismiss, without examining it, as the work of apologists. Yet, if as you say, atheists, other Christians, Muslims, etc., become convinced of the Book of Mormon, would they not then become apologists, and in your view lose all credibility? What source could convince you, then?
A false equivalency, the bible contains many historical claims you can believe without being a christian. Many atheists believe there is a historical Jesus who was crucified, or that some of the historical events did happen. They don't believe Jesus is the son of God.
To believe Joseph Smith found some ancient gold plates and a medieval sword at a site in the US I wouldn't have to believe they were the work of a prophet, or he saw an angel. I could simply believe he was a religious fanatic who stumbled across an archaeological site. The Book of Abraham could exist,, be a proper translation, and simply be some ancient belief.
There are lots of ancient religious sects no one believes, a pre-viking European migration involving another religious sect doesn't mean we would believe that religion either. So atheists could believe those claims from the Book of Mormon without believing in the religion itself, none do which suggests that the evidence is quite poor.
have a couple of missionaries come by your house with a Book of Mormon, read it, and try the experiment contained in its very own pages. (What have you got to lose?) If you then learn that the book is its own best evidence, then it follows that Joseph Smith was the prophet he claims to be, because good fruit does not come from a poisoned tree. Everything else is just window dressing.
But if there is evidence besides the Book of Mormon then the Book of Mormon shouldn't be necessary.
Its slightly harder to believe that someone could record the complete narration of such a film without getting some idea of what it was about - or at least getting suspicious. Nor does it pass the plausibility test that the makers would go to the time, expense or legal risk* of large-scale manipulation when there are plenty of real life Troy McLures out there would will read out whatever the hell they were handed if they needed money or lizards.
You seem to think she watch watching the film and narrating at the same time. But I suspect it's pretty common to say "here's a bunch of things we want to record you saying and here's the context", she might not have seen any clips nor even expected to watch the final product. She probably thought she knew what it was about, they probably gave her the context and backstory for every line, but if it was a lie and she trusted them it would be pretty trivial for them to get her to say incriminating stuff.
They could probably even get her to say something nice about geocentrism if they framed it right, ie "Ok, we're talking about the origins of astronomy when they first got the idea of planetary bodies, so we want you to read 'The geocentric model of the universe answered many questions that had baffled philosophers for ages'"
That sounds like it could be a credible statement, but can obviously be used in a very different context.
As for the "Troy McLures", they certainly exist, but they don't have credibility. The subset of actors who do narrations and have decent geek cred isn't huge. And it doesn't take a genius to realize that appearing in one of those things would cost them far more than the measly amount of money they'd make.
Like lots of former Trek actors Mulgrew still does a lot of genre work, you think she's jeopardize her career so for a tiny paycheck from a geocentrist documentary? Her claim that she was deceived is far more credible than the idea she was willing to destroy her reputation for this documentary.
That's a little harsh. Lawrence Krauss was also tricked into appearing in the documentary, are you going to claim he's stupid as well?
It's not like she was writing scripts and part of the editing process. They gave her a list of lines, probably a few provocative trailer bits like "everything we think we know about the universe is wrong" which might be not ridiculous if you're talking about dark energy or something (they got the physicists to say similar things) and add a bunch of innocuous introductions and such. You don't even need to cut and paste her words together, just change the context they're delivered in and she sounds like she's endorsing crackpot loony stuff.
Maybe she could have asked around to figure out more about the people involved, but what reason would she have for thinking that the whole thing was a giant conspiracy?
Well I'd strongly disagree with you about the quality of the evidence, the genetics were a good example. They came up with piles of excuses for why the evidence of these huge kingdoms was missing, and not one piece of evidence outside of Joseph Smith's testimony that they did exist. Unless you were predisposed to believe Joseph Smith there's no reason to believe the story is true.
Similarly with the Book of Abraham, the source you provided is a Mormon apologist. If the evidence stands on its own it should also be endorsed by atheists, mainstream Christians, Muslims, etc. I don't find your claim that your faith isn't a causal motive in your belief in the evidence to be credible. If the evidence could stand on its own there would be many people who believed the evidence without the faith, or the faith without the evidence. As it is there are many people that believe the faith without believing the evidence, but almost none who believe the evidence but not the faith. That tells me that faith is necessary to believe in the evidence, and the evidence does not stand on its own.
It's called arcadia. It's this myth that's been around since ancient Rome that life would be so much simple if wealthy urbanites could simply retire to the country for vacations to recharge. The truly delusional quit their jobs and buy farms thinking their lives will then be stress free.
I think the bigger factor is social. We spent most of our evolution in small communities with a lot of group activities, I don't think it's unreasonable to consider the possibility that those uncontacted tribe members are actually happier than we are. Hell, I'd rather be chatting with friends than posting on/. but our world isn't really designed for that.
I obviously can't say anything about your personal experience with a god, but my point is that outside of that experience the other evidence doesn't stand up, the evidence supporting Mormon story is nowhere near strong enough to convince a non-believer. You don't believe the Books of Mormon and Abraham are factual because they stand on their own, you believe because they're endorsed by your faith which you believe for other reasons.
To circle back to the point of the article I think some people think the evidence around the stories is solid, and that's a big part of the reason they believe. The Internet exposes them to strong counterarguments, when they realize the stories don't stand on their own that damages their faith as a whole.
Only fragments of the original papyri have survived. The only part of the papyri that are reproduced directly in the Book of Abraham are two drawings, only one of which survives in part, and the most interesting and controversial parts are not among the scraps that have survived. Egyptologists have argued that the drawings are "wrong,*" but that's actually kind of the point. The author used a variation on the Egyptian funerary drawing to illustrate a story. As for the text itself, that may have come from a separate papyrus that did not survive, or Joseph may have received it as a direct revelation as he did many other passages of scripture. To me, how Joseph got from the papyri to the extant text is not so interesting as the text itself, which I have found to be extremely valuable.
So the explanation for the translating being completely wrong is the author wasn't actually writing Egyptian?
About how you would deal with it if I laid out to you my theory for how I have disproved the existence of trees. You'd look at it and think, "That's interesting, but I know there are trees, because I've seen them. So I suspect there is something missing in your argument."
Except for some reason we can't actually see the trees (I'm not sure what you mean by seeing them).
So instead we ask what would we expect if there were trees? Well there would be leaves on the ground. Why aren't there leaves? The wind must have blown them away.
Ok, there would be wooden furniture and houses. But then we look and all the houses are brick and the furniture metal and plastic. So you say they must not like to build with wood.
Ok, then there would be fruit in the markets, but there isn't any. You say they must not like fruit.
The problem is that every time there's a test that could endorse the Mormon narrative you end up finding an excuse to explain away the difference.
Joseph Smith claimed there was a sword with the golden plates. Assume we had some fancy sonar that could identify the type any material underground, and, starting at Cumorah Hill, we scanned the earth 100m deep for a 20 km radius.
Would you expect them to find any swords or other metalwork from the 4th century?
Others are biting on the other topics so I'll just mention the genetics bit.
What about the claim that Native Americans are a lost tribe of Israelites, something proven false.
That's too big of an issue to get into here, but suffice it to say that your statement of the claim is an oversimplification (the original and current editions of the Book of Mormon state that the peoples of the Book are descended of Joseph of Egypt, and among the ancestors of Native Americans), and the 'evidence' that has been posited against is does not stand up to scrutiny.
Weren't the people described be Semitic? In that case there would be signs of Semitic DNA in the Native American population, if the genes have spread through the genepool then genetic drift won't eliminate all traces. And the things they describe aren't population bottlenecks, for a bottleneck you really have to reduce the population to a small portion of their overall numbers. If a Semitic population had been there for several centuries the DNA would have spread throughout North America. To wipe out that DNA you'd have to drive the Native American to the brink of actual extinction.
Apropos, the answers to all of your questions and the cure to your misconceptions are readily found on the internet. Whether the internet makes some people into atheists, I do not know, but one this is for sure: knowledge, even readily available knowledge, does not by itself make one more informed. One has to know how to seek it out, filter the truth from the noise, and then judiciously apply it.
It's not about knowledge it's about evaluating evidence and arguments. Mormonism isn't just claiming a couple Semites showed up in North America, it is claiming four major kingdoms surviving for almost 1000 years. The problem isn't that there aren't ways you can explain away the evidence, it's that every time there's a way to test the claims of Mormonism you end up having to explain something away.
Why couldn't the plates be investigated by an impartial authority, or the original text transcribed? Well the angel didn't want that.
Why does the little we've seen of the scrolls from book of Abraham have nothing to do with the described text of the book of Abraham? Well it was written by a Jew who wasn't writing proper Egyptian.
Why is there no evidence, genetic or archaeological, of these four huge middle eastern kingdoms that lasted a millenia or more? Apparently Moroni wasn't talking about the Native Americans after all.
Imagine that tomorrow someone discovered the book of Abraham scrolls hadn't been destroyed in fire, and were found intact in some forgotten collection, or some expedition on Cumorah found a bag containing some golden plates and the bag was carbon dated to the 1830s.
They items in question were then scanned and put online. My prediction is that the plates would turn out to be gibberish and the book of Abraham would have nothing to do with Joseph Smith's translation. What do you think the result would be?
Let me give you the view of a non Mormon: Mormonism is bonkers!
That's a compelling counter-argument.
It's a little pithy but he did follow with some actual arguments.
How do you rationalize Smith's behaviour with the gold plates that nobody but him ever saw, and when the transcriber "lost" the translations (to see if Smith actually did have a source document from which he could reproduce the same translation) Smith then provided a different translation. How he translated some Egyptian scrolls into the Book of Abraham, but the scrolls in question have nothing in common with what Joseph Smith translated. What about the claim that Native Americans are a lost tribe of Israelites, something proven false.
I'm just curious, I'm sure you're aware of these counterarguments, how do you deal with them?
The US is supposedly selling Democracy, free speech, and freedom of the press.
Government propaganda, particularly covert government propaganda, has no place in Democracy. By using these methods to influence foreign populations not only is the US is undercutting its own message, they're doing through the agency (USAID) that is supposed to be spreading that message.
This is why sunlight is essential, because without it governments fall victim to group think and short sighted objectives and lose the ability to plan for the long term by standing on principal.
I don't think that's the issue precisely, but I think the idea of debunking actual pseudoscience is really dicey.
When you teach evolution you're teaching something the parents think is wrong. They fight it but you can do it.
But if you debunk creationism you're teaching that the parents are wrong. They're going to fight that a lot harder.
Similarly with "Roughly one in three American adults believes in telepathy, ghosts, and extrasensory perception,"
So if you use those as examples of pseudoscience you're saying that 1/3 of parents are wrong.
Even if you could manage it politically I don't like it from an ethical perspective.
It's better to concentrate on teaching good critical thinking skills. The Texas GOP notwithstanding the idea of making kids better critical thinkers is something everyone can get behind, I doubt you can find a single creationist, astrologer, or antivaxxer who doesn't attribute their belief to superior critical thinking skills. Everyone can agree with making the kids better critical thinkers because everyone thinks that they're right and smarter kids will agree with them.
If you want to attack the pseudoscience directly you might be able to get away with inventing some ridiculous fictional pseudoscience and debunk that just so they understand the existence of cargo cult science. But even you'd probably get in trouble as it would be pretty obvious you were "shilling for big science" or something similar.
now here is the mystery. Let's say it was a fire. The captain and crew are incapacitated from carbon monoxide. The fire would take down the whole aircraft. It would burn through the wires for the computer auto pilot and crash the plane well before 7 hours. Or the structure would fail as it would burn through the luggage and explode the fuel compartment.
I'm not convinced this was the case, the fire could run out of oxygen, run out of things to burn (depending where it started), or they could have put it out before succumbing.
Also the path is changed again in the final arc. Why? Wouldn't it logically be on the same new path and be half way between Australia and Africa if the crew did die? That is west of perth alright but WAAY farther west. What in the mathematically geometry that says it is in the search area? Distance wise why wouldn't it be on the other side of the arc southwest instead of southeast?
Also if the plane is flying lower you have more friction if it still was at 12,000 feet. So wouldn't it logically be farther north as it would run out of fuel quicker too?
If it turned later on couldn't that be the result of the autopilot? I'm envisioning a scenario where the pilot tried to program in a return course but was very confused due to oxygen deprivation and wrote in some bizarre flight instructions instead. Soon after the fire everyone was dead and the fire was out but the plane continued flying with weird instructions entered.
a) we'd have known it was on fire before it disappeared
Assuming the first thing the pilots did wasn't turn off the communications system to try and prevent the fire from spreading.
b) the planes occupants would have put it out
So you're implying that detectors failing is implausible, and any detected fire is trivial to put out. If that were the case then airplane fires wouldn't be a problem.
That being said I would be curious to know why more experts aren't talking about a fire.
Sorry, but any reasonable person knows they are all dead. It's not worth $53M to find out what we already know - that the pilot and/or co-pilot went on a suicide mission to kill everyone on board.
We don't know that.
And I'm not sure it's accurate to say it's not worth $53M for closure, a good portion of the planet would like to know what happened. There's also the question of what went wrong, plane crashes are rare, which means they're invaluable from a data perspective. Say discovering the cause of this crash allows us to avert on average 1/4 of a future crash, 50 people is about $1,000,000/person, that's well below the standard $2,000,000/person you see thrown around.
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Lets just see how well those post-apocalyptic bands of cannibals can find their way between supply caches without someone who knows how to perform an A* search!!
I don't see a problem.
As long as the people aren't fed on wild fish it should be sustainable.
I think the lack of party discipline is the worst feature of the American system. In the Canadian system Michelle Bachmann, Ted Cruize, and Jim Inhofe would just be random backbenchers no one listens to. But in the US because there's no discipline each of them has a voice on the national stage.
MPs with lots of independence means political power goes local, instead of debating things on the national stage with everyone it's debated by hyper-partisans because those are the only people obsessive enough to get involved in politics at the local level. Moreover you get drawn into a lot of dumb symbolic stuff because there's not enough time to debunk all the dumb symbolism.
In the Canadian system nuanced debate happens inside the party, when they think they have the best argument they take it public and now the public has just a handful of positions to evaluate. I think a lack of discipline (and that includes an elected senate) is a horrible idea because it makes our political debate into the cacophony the Americans are dealing with.
Ideally the Constitutional Monarch should have just slightly more power. Currently in Canada the Governor General does whatever the PM tells him to do, right or wrong. This has resulted in Harper proroguing Parliament when the shit was about to hit the fan a couple of times including once when he's government was going to lose a vote of confidence the next day, then he went on about how it wasn't democratic if the opposition parties ganged up on him and formed a coalition government like the UK and Australia currently have. A government consists of which ever part[y][ies] can pass a budget and if none can then Parliament is dissolved and there are elections. The voters get pissed off if this happens too often.
That prorogue situation was a bit of a mess, the Conservatives had just won the election (as a minority) and introduced a controversial election funding bill they hadn't discussed during the campaign. But the voters understand that the minority party forms government, giving the voters a coalition government they didn't expect isn't really Democratic. I think the proper thing would have been to say withdraw the the bill or we'll defeat it and force another election and let the voters decide whose fault it is.
I think the governor general made the right call, the coalition didn't even last till the conclusion of the prorogue.
I've thought of that before, you might end up with rule by bureaucrats but otherwise I think it works pretty well, other than the fact that no legislative body would ever implement it.
Given modern constraints I think constitutional monarchies are the way to go, not because the monarch is useful, but because the monarch takes the "executive" role and all the power ends up in parliament where voters can pay attention.
The problem with the US is power is too distributed. 538 congress critters each with their own agenda, there's too much information to make an informed decision and it's too easy for lobbyists to overpower individual politicians.
I think Canada has about as good a system as you can reasonably get because the parties are so strong. They can stand up to lobbyists or pundits when they think it's in their own best interest (which usually corresponds to what that think is good for the country too). And the opposition can coordinate their attacks a lot more effectively. There's a Tea Party element in the Conservatives but Harper keeps it under wraps. They still introduce some bad legislation like this, but bad bills have been defeated in the past.
But here's the thing. If I pull you over and you have one of our public servant honor tags, you're still getting a ticket for whatever I pulled you over for. In fact, I am less likely to let you go, because of the appearance of impropriety created by these tags. I get a lot more "by the book" when someone starts flashing special tags and membership cards at me.
Is that just you or your department in general? For you at least I buy your explanation, but my question is, considering all the appearance trouble with the tags, if they aren't for nefarious purposes then what are they for?
It's the cops extorting money. It's not just speeding. This creates the appearance that, if you do not buy the membership, you'll be stopped and shown absolutely no mercy, and may even have charges trumped up against you - or otherwise be punished.
This is tantamount to soliciting bribes.
Soliciting bribes maybe, they're not accepting the money personally.
And unless cops go around advising motorists to buy the membership I don't see how it can be extortion, and I don't think the idea that if you don't have a membership "you'll be stopped and shown absolutely no mercy, and may even have charges trumped up against you - or otherwise be punished" is particularly compelling. I'd assume without a card they'd carry out their duties as usual (as good or bad as they usually are).
The cops are obviously doing something very wrong and people should be facing whatever discipline or legal repercussions it takes to make it stop, but I'm not sure what the exact charges are.
Honestly I was being slightly lazy, taking the only per capita figure in the article.
I'll say I'm a bit suspicious how the figures vanish for the last several years until 2003 when Singapore's Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong told the BBC in September 2003 that he believed there were "in the region of about 70 to 80" hangings in 2003. Two days later he retracted his statement, saying the number was in fact ten.
Though I admit it would be very hard for them to hide executions (and there doesn't appear any evidence they did other than that misquote)
Best to be an expert cross-dresser who can choose the safest gender for the occasion.
Singapore has 13.8 executions per 100,000, which is more than the 12.5 murders per 100,000 in Africa (though I don't know the execution rate in Africa).
Sure the executed Singaporeans have (generally) broken the law, but how many murder victims are killed because they're involved with crime? And if you can blame someone for getting caught up with a gang that pressures them to commit crime then why can't you blame someone for remaining with a violent spouse who might harm them?
I'm not sure I'd feel much safer there after all.
Because some states released their numbers. If you actually RTFA you would have noticed that 21 states +DC which released enrollment numbers averaged about about a 30-50% increase in the last month. Doing the math, the other 29 states which did not release numbers would have had to average a 90% increase in order to hit 7.1 million.
So, there might something be wrong with IBD's math, there might be innocuous reasons which states released numbers, or there might be something fishy with the 7.1 million supposed signups which might conflict with your ideology.
Which begs the question of what's the difference between the 21 states releasing numbers and the 29 that didn't. Well 14 of the 21 states were running state exchanges. With all the hype about the federal exchange you'd expect the state exchanges to get a smaller deadline bump (they either had people sign up early or more people miss the deadline).
As for the 7 remaining states. For the most part they're probably Republican (that's why they didn't set up state exchanges), so they might have released their numbers specifically because they were underwhelming and they were trying to show their state didn't want ObamaCare anyways.
Are you self-aware enough to admit that you are doing the exact same thing? You have decided that a book you have not read is false, and so you accept without question evidence of that falsehood. Any evidence that supports the Mormon narrative you dismiss, without examining it, as the work of apologists. Yet, if as you say, atheists, other Christians, Muslims, etc., become convinced of the Book of Mormon, would they not then become apologists, and in your view lose all credibility? What source could convince you, then?
A false equivalency, the bible contains many historical claims you can believe without being a christian. Many atheists believe there is a historical Jesus who was crucified, or that some of the historical events did happen. They don't believe Jesus is the son of God.
To believe Joseph Smith found some ancient gold plates and a medieval sword at a site in the US I wouldn't have to believe they were the work of a prophet, or he saw an angel. I could simply believe he was a religious fanatic who stumbled across an archaeological site. The Book of Abraham could exist,, be a proper translation, and simply be some ancient belief.
There are lots of ancient religious sects no one believes, a pre-viking European migration involving another religious sect doesn't mean we would believe that religion either. So atheists could believe those claims from the Book of Mormon without believing in the religion itself, none do which suggests that the evidence is quite poor.
have a couple of missionaries come by your house with a Book of Mormon, read it, and try the experiment contained in its very own pages. (What have you got to lose?) If you then learn that the book is its own best evidence, then it follows that Joseph Smith was the prophet he claims to be, because good fruit does not come from a poisoned tree. Everything else is just window dressing.
But if there is evidence besides the Book of Mormon then the Book of Mormon shouldn't be necessary.
Its slightly harder to believe that someone could record the complete narration of such a film without getting some idea of what it was about - or at least getting suspicious. Nor does it pass the plausibility test that the makers would go to the time, expense or legal risk* of large-scale manipulation when there are plenty of real life Troy McLures out there would will read out whatever the hell they were handed if they needed money or lizards.
You seem to think she watch watching the film and narrating at the same time. But I suspect it's pretty common to say "here's a bunch of things we want to record you saying and here's the context", she might not have seen any clips nor even expected to watch the final product. She probably thought she knew what it was about, they probably gave her the context and backstory for every line, but if it was a lie and she trusted them it would be pretty trivial for them to get her to say incriminating stuff.
They could probably even get her to say something nice about geocentrism if they framed it right, ie "Ok, we're talking about the origins of astronomy when they first got the idea of planetary bodies, so we want you to read 'The geocentric model of the universe answered many questions that had baffled philosophers for ages'"
That sounds like it could be a credible statement, but can obviously be used in a very different context.
As for the "Troy McLures", they certainly exist, but they don't have credibility. The subset of actors who do narrations and have decent geek cred isn't huge. And it doesn't take a genius to realize that appearing in one of those things would cost them far more than the measly amount of money they'd make.
Like lots of former Trek actors Mulgrew still does a lot of genre work, you think she's jeopardize her career so for a tiny paycheck from a geocentrist documentary? Her claim that she was deceived is far more credible than the idea she was willing to destroy her reputation for this documentary.
That's a little harsh. Lawrence Krauss was also tricked into appearing in the documentary, are you going to claim he's stupid as well?
It's not like she was writing scripts and part of the editing process. They gave her a list of lines, probably a few provocative trailer bits like "everything we think we know about the universe is wrong" which might be not ridiculous if you're talking about dark energy or something (they got the physicists to say similar things) and add a bunch of innocuous introductions and such. You don't even need to cut and paste her words together, just change the context they're delivered in and she sounds like she's endorsing crackpot loony stuff.
Maybe she could have asked around to figure out more about the people involved, but what reason would she have for thinking that the whole thing was a giant conspiracy?
Well I'd strongly disagree with you about the quality of the evidence, the genetics were a good example. They came up with piles of excuses for why the evidence of these huge kingdoms was missing, and not one piece of evidence outside of Joseph Smith's testimony that they did exist. Unless you were predisposed to believe Joseph Smith there's no reason to believe the story is true.
Similarly with the Book of Abraham, the source you provided is a Mormon apologist. If the evidence stands on its own it should also be endorsed by atheists, mainstream Christians, Muslims, etc. I don't find your claim that your faith isn't a causal motive in your belief in the evidence to be credible. If the evidence could stand on its own there would be many people who believed the evidence without the faith, or the faith without the evidence. As it is there are many people that believe the faith without believing the evidence, but almost none who believe the evidence but not the faith. That tells me that faith is necessary to believe in the evidence, and the evidence does not stand on its own.
It's called arcadia. It's this myth that's been around since ancient Rome that life would be so much simple if wealthy urbanites could simply retire to the country for vacations to recharge. The truly delusional quit their jobs and buy farms thinking their lives will then be stress free.
I think the bigger factor is social. We spent most of our evolution in small communities with a lot of group activities, I don't think it's unreasonable to consider the possibility that those uncontacted tribe members are actually happier than we are. Hell, I'd rather be chatting with friends than posting on /. but our world isn't really designed for that.
I obviously can't say anything about your personal experience with a god, but my point is that outside of that experience the other evidence doesn't stand up, the evidence supporting Mormon story is nowhere near strong enough to convince a non-believer. You don't believe the Books of Mormon and Abraham are factual because they stand on their own, you believe because they're endorsed by your faith which you believe for other reasons.
To circle back to the point of the article I think some people think the evidence around the stories is solid, and that's a big part of the reason they believe. The Internet exposes them to strong counterarguments, when they realize the stories don't stand on their own that damages their faith as a whole.
Only fragments of the original papyri have survived. The only part of the papyri that are reproduced directly in the Book of Abraham are two drawings, only one of which survives in part, and the most interesting and controversial parts are not among the scraps that have survived. Egyptologists have argued that the drawings are "wrong,*" but that's actually kind of the point. The author used a variation on the Egyptian funerary drawing to illustrate a story. As for the text itself, that may have come from a separate papyrus that did not survive, or Joseph may have received it as a direct revelation as he did many other passages of scripture. To me, how Joseph got from the papyri to the extant text is not so interesting as the text itself, which I have found to be extremely valuable.
So the explanation for the translating being completely wrong is the author wasn't actually writing Egyptian?
About how you would deal with it if I laid out to you my theory for how I have disproved the existence of trees. You'd look at it and think, "That's interesting, but I know there are trees, because I've seen them. So I suspect there is something missing in your argument."
Except for some reason we can't actually see the trees (I'm not sure what you mean by seeing them).
So instead we ask what would we expect if there were trees? Well there would be leaves on the ground. Why aren't there leaves? The wind must have blown them away.
Ok, there would be wooden furniture and houses. But then we look and all the houses are brick and the furniture metal and plastic. So you say they must not like to build with wood.
Ok, then there would be fruit in the markets, but there isn't any. You say they must not like fruit.
The problem is that every time there's a test that could endorse the Mormon narrative you end up finding an excuse to explain away the difference.
Joseph Smith claimed there was a sword with the golden plates. Assume we had some fancy sonar that could identify the type any material underground, and, starting at Cumorah Hill, we scanned the earth 100m deep for a 20 km radius.
Would you expect them to find any swords or other metalwork from the 4th century?
Others are biting on the other topics so I'll just mention the genetics bit.
What about the claim that Native Americans are a lost tribe of Israelites, something proven false.
That's too big of an issue to get into here, but suffice it to say that your statement of the claim is an oversimplification (the original and current editions of the Book of Mormon state that the peoples of the Book are descended of Joseph of Egypt, and among the ancestors of Native Americans), and the 'evidence' that has been posited against is does not stand up to scrutiny.
Weren't the people described be Semitic? In that case there would be signs of Semitic DNA in the Native American population, if the genes have spread through the genepool then genetic drift won't eliminate all traces. And the things they describe aren't population bottlenecks, for a bottleneck you really have to reduce the population to a small portion of their overall numbers. If a Semitic population had been there for several centuries the DNA would have spread throughout North America. To wipe out that DNA you'd have to drive the Native American to the brink of actual extinction.
Apropos, the answers to all of your questions and the cure to your misconceptions are readily found on the internet. Whether the internet makes some people into atheists, I do not know, but one this is for sure: knowledge, even readily available knowledge, does not by itself make one more informed. One has to know how to seek it out, filter the truth from the noise, and then judiciously apply it.
It's not about knowledge it's about evaluating evidence and arguments. Mormonism isn't just claiming a couple Semites showed up in North America, it is claiming four major kingdoms surviving for almost 1000 years. The problem isn't that there aren't ways you can explain away the evidence, it's that every time there's a way to test the claims of Mormonism you end up having to explain something away.
Why couldn't the plates be investigated by an impartial authority, or the original text transcribed? Well the angel didn't want that.
Why does the little we've seen of the scrolls from book of Abraham have nothing to do with the described text of the book of Abraham? Well it was written by a Jew who wasn't writing proper Egyptian.
Why is there no evidence, genetic or archaeological, of these four huge middle eastern kingdoms that lasted a millenia or more? Apparently Moroni wasn't talking about the Native Americans after all.
Imagine that tomorrow someone discovered the book of Abraham scrolls hadn't been destroyed in fire, and were found intact in some forgotten collection, or some expedition on Cumorah found a bag containing some golden plates and the bag was carbon dated to the 1830s.
They items in question were then scanned and put online. My prediction is that the plates would turn out to be gibberish and the book of Abraham would have nothing to do with Joseph Smith's translation. What do you think the result would be?
Let me give you the view of a non Mormon: Mormonism is bonkers!
That's a compelling counter-argument.
It's a little pithy but he did follow with some actual arguments.
How do you rationalize Smith's behaviour with the gold plates that nobody but him ever saw, and when the transcriber "lost" the translations (to see if Smith actually did have a source document from which he could reproduce the same translation) Smith then provided a different translation. How he translated some Egyptian scrolls into the Book of Abraham, but the scrolls in question have nothing in common with what Joseph Smith translated. What about the claim that Native Americans are a lost tribe of Israelites, something proven false.
I'm just curious, I'm sure you're aware of these counterarguments, how do you deal with them?
The US is supposedly selling Democracy, free speech, and freedom of the press.
Government propaganda, particularly covert government propaganda, has no place in Democracy. By using these methods to influence foreign populations not only is the US is undercutting its own message, they're doing through the agency (USAID) that is supposed to be spreading that message.
This is why sunlight is essential, because without it governments fall victim to group think and short sighted objectives and lose the ability to plan for the long term by standing on principal.
I don't think that's the issue precisely, but I think the idea of debunking actual pseudoscience is really dicey.
When you teach evolution you're teaching something the parents think is wrong. They fight it but you can do it.
But if you debunk creationism you're teaching that the parents are wrong. They're going to fight that a lot harder.
Similarly with "Roughly one in three American adults believes in telepathy, ghosts, and extrasensory perception,"
So if you use those as examples of pseudoscience you're saying that 1/3 of parents are wrong.
Even if you could manage it politically I don't like it from an ethical perspective.
It's better to concentrate on teaching good critical thinking skills. The Texas GOP notwithstanding the idea of making kids better critical thinkers is something everyone can get behind, I doubt you can find a single creationist, astrologer, or antivaxxer who doesn't attribute their belief to superior critical thinking skills. Everyone can agree with making the kids better critical thinkers because everyone thinks that they're right and smarter kids will agree with them.
If you want to attack the pseudoscience directly you might be able to get away with inventing some ridiculous fictional pseudoscience and debunk that just so they understand the existence of cargo cult science. But even you'd probably get in trouble as it would be pretty obvious you were "shilling for big science" or something similar.
now here is the mystery. Let's say it was a fire. The captain and crew are incapacitated from carbon monoxide. The fire would take down the whole aircraft. It would burn through the wires for the computer auto pilot and crash the plane well before 7 hours. Or the structure would fail as it would burn through the luggage and explode the fuel compartment.
I'm not convinced this was the case, the fire could run out of oxygen, run out of things to burn (depending where it started), or they could have put it out before succumbing.
Also the path is changed again in the final arc. Why? Wouldn't it logically be on the same new path and be half way between Australia and Africa if the crew did die? That is west of perth alright but WAAY farther west. What in the mathematically geometry that says it is in the search area? Distance wise why wouldn't it be on the other side of the arc southwest instead of southeast?
Also if the plane is flying lower you have more friction if it still was at 12,000 feet. So wouldn't it logically be farther north as it would run out of fuel quicker too?
If it turned later on couldn't that be the result of the autopilot? I'm envisioning a scenario where the pilot tried to program in a return course but was very confused due to oxygen deprivation and wrote in some bizarre flight instructions instead. Soon after the fire everyone was dead and the fire was out but the plane continued flying with weird instructions entered.
Why would the fire have to evade the detectors?
Because otherwise
a) we'd have known it was on fire before it disappeared
Assuming the first thing the pilots did wasn't turn off the communications system to try and prevent the fire from spreading.
b) the planes occupants would have put it out
So you're implying that detectors failing is implausible, and any detected fire is trivial to put out. If that were the case then airplane fires wouldn't be a problem.
That being said I would be curious to know why more experts aren't talking about a fire.
Sorry, but any reasonable person knows they are all dead. It's not worth $53M to find out what we already know - that the pilot and/or co-pilot went on a suicide mission to kill everyone on board.
We don't know that.
And I'm not sure it's accurate to say it's not worth $53M for closure, a good portion of the planet would like to know what happened. There's also the question of what went wrong, plane crashes are rare, which means they're invaluable from a data perspective. Say discovering the cause of this crash allows us to avert on average 1/4 of a future crash, 50 people is about $1,000,000/person, that's well below the standard $2,000,000/person you see thrown around.