You confuse "Would you like..." with "Is this a criminal offence".
And even if I felt the law would help me, the respose would be to take legal action through the (civil) courts. I wouldn't expect I could get someone arrested for it. Unlike the police, I can't go around and arrest you for doing that.
So if I can't get someone arrested for it, why is it a different rule here?
If no one else can get there, "owning" it irrelevant. I might as well claim that I "own" it.
If someone else can get there, it's not clear that you'll be able to stop them from landing there. Unless you break out a war. No court on Earth is going to grant a private company ownership of land in space (I believe there are international treaties preventing this).
Consider: why aren't private companies setting up offices in Antartica, so they can "own" it and charge rent?
I presume the 747 gave them revenue, even though it took time to recoup their costs. The problem with space is that getting revenue from it full stop is unclear.
And all sorts of companies spend money on side-projects that don't immediately bring in money (Google would be an obvious example), but I doubt the money spent on Asimo is anywhere near the amount required for manned trips to the Moon or elsewhere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIMO suggests each one costs under $1 million, with over 100 units in total. That's peanuts compared to what's required for manned space travel.
If you still don't understand after saying it twice, then you probably will never understand it.
You said: "there is not real speciation unless you much with the definitions to make it work. Point to one event that has been observer and does not do this"
This sentence does not parse. But let's try again:
As for speciation, we have never observed it without changing the definition of species specifically for the instance claimed. And when those changes are compared to a broad set of conditions, the sillyness of them are obvious.
So, I'll ask again: What is your definition of speciation? What "event" are you looking for, that you say has not been observed?
So when you have no evidence of something, then we should completely ignore it right? You have no evidence of it not being done by some magic teapot, you actually only have overwhelming evidence of evolution and can observe it on a micro scale within the same species, as well as having observed speciation. So why, if evidence is needed, are you blabbering on about ignoring magic teapots when you have no evidence of it's (sic) falsehood?
Fixed that for you. You believe in magic teapots, don't you? There might be one orbiting our planet right now, you can't disprove it, so I take it you will give serious consideration to such a possibility? I do hope you don't ignore it, along with an infinite number of other conceivable entities.
I'm not your shrink.
I should hope not. Not with your misunderstanding of science.
Regarding the claim that religion once served a use thousands of years ago, to propagate some good ideas, including scientific ones, there I don't disagree.
As I say - if religion was once about doing observing, theorizing and testing, it's a shame that that's no longer the case.
Religion and Science are both bodies of knowledge.
You are confusing methods with institutions. Religious organisations may sometimes give useful information - no one disagrees with this. But this is not comparable to science, as a method. The comparison was not about "religious organisations versus scientists", it was religion versus science as disciplines, as ideas, as methods.
So tell me, how does one use "Religion" as a body of knowledge? What method is this that you speak of that allows us to find new facts about the Universe? Read the Bible? That contains a mixture of truths, and complete falsehoods, without any way to tell the difference. Furthermore, reading a book is not how we find out new knowledge - that's simply how it may be explained to other people (it would be like saying we conduct science by "reading a science textbook"!)
Observing, theorizing and testing are all actions within that goal. However, you must be forgetting where the modern concept of science comes from. That's right, the religious universities in which science was developed over the years.
Universities are religious now? Do they believe in god?
Anyhow, whatever you say about the past, the issue I raised was: it's a shame that that's no longer the case.
The body of useful knowledge gained from Alchemy is still in use today.
There are things which alchemists discovered that are useful. This doesn't mean that alchemy itself ever had any chance of being true. This doesn't mean that "Alchemy and Science are both bodies of knowledge", as if there existed alchemy methods that weren't science, but still useful. The only useful things that alchemists did were things which were science.
Next you'll be telling me that Mathematics and Numerology are both bodies of knowledge, because Phythagoras believed in it...
and you've got the clout due to your good history to maintain your charity-monopoly, that's bad for everyone.
False - unlike Slashdot, "good history" does not give you any "clout".
This article only shows that people with more history are less likely to have their edits reverted, but as we ought to know here on Slashdot, correlation is not causation. There are all sorts of more obvious explanations - such as experienced users being less likely to be vandals (else there'd have long been banned), being more likely to understand the fundamental requirements (verifiable sources, etc), being more likely to have previously took part in talk page discussions before making the edit (someone with no previous edits obviously hasn't done).
The joke is that Wikipedia gets criticism from both sides - there's no end of ridicule it gets here on Slashdot when a false statement is found to have appeared on an article for, ooh, about 1 minute, or they complain that "anyone can put unsourced material on it".
Yet, when these people work hard to stop this from happening, you then whine about that too.
Arrogance? You're the one throwing ad hominem attacks against a mere handful of users, as if somehow that makes you better.
It's this kind of arrogant attitude that's kept me away from Wikipedia the last few years
Oh dear.
anything I add ends-up rejected because some stupid kid has a hard-on for his power position.
Give us an example?
You want to know why Wikipedia is not growing?
Does it need to grow? In terms of numbers of articles, one of the problems Wikipedia has is not that is doesn't have enough articles (it's already the largest encyclopedia in history, I believe!) What's needed now is to improve the existing articles. A Good or Featured article is better than countless new poor quality articles about some obscure thing, in my opinion.
As for edits to articles, it's unsurprising that as articles mature, changes are less likely. This is a good thing - it means stability. There's nothing more annoying when a well established article, that's been built up over perhaps years of discussion on the talk pages, gets completely changed by some random newbie. Not that newbie contributions are bad - on the contrary, I believe many worthwhile edits come from random people, and we all started out that way once. But if you're going to change something that has overwhelming consensus, you had better take the time to bring it up in the talk pages, and look over the arguments that people have already had a million times before.
See the Atheism article for an example. It's stable, but every so often someone will decide to completely rewrite the intro with no prior discussion - and then they come whining to Slashdot that they're being bullied by the cyber nerds, because they didn't agree with them.
Someone call the Waaambulance.
It's because the new pack of cyber nerds is defending it's territory.
Irony: Slashdot nerds whining about Wikipedia editors.
Receipt of money or other consideration in exchange for goods and services
Of course that's met, by the same transaction - they took my money, in exchange for goods and services.
Agreement byall parties
So we conclude that I agreed with their TOS, but they didn't with mine?
What I'd be curious to know is what happens if someone sells their burning man tickets or gifts them - since I don't think those obligations would apply to the recipient/new purchaser..
A classic example of this would be those gift cards that have replaced old gift vouchers (in the UK at least), that now come laden with terms and conditions, including dubious rubbish like "We'll take your money back if you don't use this card for X months". Obviously, it's commonplace that these are transferred to people who didn't buy the card originally, and never agreed to the terms. I would be curious to see this tested in court.
One time I used a gift voucher in WHSmiths that I'd kept for years. In the old days, they'd give you as much of the change as possible in terms of vouchers. These days, it's done automatically by the card. But they no longer had vouchers, so they said they'd have to give me that approx £1.50 change as a new gift card.
I said I didn't accept the terms and conditions.
After a few minutes of stalemate, they gave in and gave me the change in cash.
So it's okay for people who want stronger laws to lobby for it, but those who don't should have to persuade people to behave in a certain way?
And no one is being forced to do anything anyway - the question is how long copyright terms should be for, i.e., for how long due the courts prohibited copying. The only forcing is during the copyright term. I am amused that you managed to spin a lack of a law as "forcing" people to do something!
I think that the BBC funded programs should be free to copy, but that's a separate issue. Feel free to devote your time to that if you prefer, rather than telling someone else how they should be spending their time.
then he'd have a much stronger position to argue that it should be mandatory for everyone.
Nothing is manadatory, except the copyright laws that we already have. And I bet if this happened, people like you would just go "Well there's no need to change the law, if you can persuade them to release it anyway".
Lol.. So going back before I even chimed in to answer a specific question down the thread doesn't count now right?
You should have looked at the context, rather than assuming the illdefined question at that point meant something that it didn't. I've clarified what the thread was about now.
Obviously someone observed it, it was written in a book. Religions were doing the observation, theorizing and testing long before science was a concept.
I agree that people were doing observations and so on, long before the concept of the Scientific Method was formally established.
I believe that the method that we now refer to as the scientific method is the way to find out about the universe. The fact that the method existed before we called it that doesn't change the point. I don't care if you call it science, religion, or magic.
If religion was once about doing observing, theorizing and testing, it's a shame that that's no longer the case.
you cannot arbitrarily ignore contributions made from other areas
I'm not sure anyone's ignoring contributions. Obviously when looking at the history of science, we should look at all contributions. Some contributions came from people who happened to be religious, yes. Newton believed in alchemy, but I don't think that means we should give alchemy any special consideration today. If someone said "What useful knowledge have we got from alchemy?", I'm not sure it matters that Newton also happened to believe alchemy.
I'm glad it wasn't just me. I remember being very confused over some Usborne book of science for children, which suggested that it was simply a matter of mummy and daddy hugging each other whilst fully clothed, and loving each other very much. This was after they'd described the gamete cells in cartoon fashion (complete with faces, IIRC), but no mention was made as to how the transfer occurred. I was like, "How is that possible?"
Sad but true - I remember being taught (in a UK state primary school - where religious preaching is still a legal requirement) that rainbows were God's promise not to flood the world and kill everyone again (because obviously, that's the sort of thing that an all-loving being might do).
Now sure, we still do have actual science lessons later on, where religion keeps out of AFAICT, but the fact that even state schools have worship in assemblies and even Bible study lessons is an issue, and even more so that there is even a legal requirement to do so.
What it means is that you can't use your own experience as proof for other people.
I agree, yes exactly.
If you choose to believe an old hag visited you, you're free to do so, and your belief is no more factually incorrect than believing you weren't visited by an old hag, since neither belief is provable.
The issue isn't whether I'm right or free to believe - the question is: Am I visited by an old hag at night?
Surely this has a yes or no answer? Surely the answer is independent of the person? It doesn't make sense to say "It's true for me, but not other people", nor do I agree with "Believing that it's true is no more incorrect than believing it's false".
Also, I'm not saying that people should necessarily believe that unicorns, old hags, gods don't exist - I'm simply saying I don't believe in them, and I see no evidence or reason to do so (I'm a weak atheist).
I didn't know we were talking about dreams. When did we start talking about dreams? When I talk about answers to prayers, I'm not talking about dreams.
I'll rephrase it: at night, I have the "experience" of flying. Surely this means I'm really flying?
In what sense do you receive answers to prayers?
Referring to religious beliefs as "made up" is inherently a mocking statement, since you're implying that anyone who believes in God is either stupid or gullible.
So someone isn't allowed to state that religious beliefs are made up, even if that's what they believe? It doesn't imply that - I'm aware that people have these beliefs, despite being intelligent.
Sure it is - personal experience is indeed empirical evidence.
It's evidence that you had the experience, sure - but we can't say more than that. The experience itself tells us nothing about what caused that experience.
More accurately, I have specifically said that religious evidence cannot be binding on anyone other than the direct recipient of that evidence, because it is personal in nature.
Fair enough - I still don't believe what you believe to be true, however.
And that's exactly my point - those people will never be satisfied, because religion's evidence comes in the form of personal experience, not scientific experimental results. They're wanting religion to provide something that by nature it cannot provide.
Most likely because it doesn't exist beyond being something that you experience. Furthermore, the conjecture "It was caused by God talking to me" is no more likely to be true than "It was due to a magic beam from an orbital space teapot".
All I ask for is the same standard that would be required for me to believe anything else, whether it's "Aliens stole my bicycle", "We evolved from simpler lifeforms" or "This person committed this particular crime".
I thought the recent European elections were interesting, which used a form of proportional representation. It was a like - wow, elections are interesting to watch for a change.
Imagine if they'd have used FPTP like everything else. It would've been "And for this constituency, we elect Conservative, Conservative, Conservative, Conservative and Conservative."
Seeing as you are a fan of extremes, consider it being like repealing laws on murder.
I've nothing against extremes (being "moderate" doesn't make something better - see fallacy of argument to moderation). But I'm not a fan of bad analogies.
Perhaps you could compare it to a car?
I'm sure that the people with these views considered these issues, and aren't simply arguing for "maximum freedom for me at the expense of everyone else", as your murder straw man example suggests.
If you really believe the way copyright violators are punished is stupid, you should be campaigning for votes amongst copyright holders.
Eh? Parties should only care about copyright holders? Isn't that the problem at the moment, where the RIAA, Disney etc lobby for laws?
And if you could persuade Disney to release the first Mickey Mouse under a free licence, then there'd be no need for a political party in the first place.
Nowhere did he claim shock politics - their policies are what are stated.
The point is though that some people voting for them isn't going to abolish non-commercial copyright, nor reduce commercial copyrights to 5 years. Sadly, politics in the UK falls to the fallacy of the Argument to moderation. Views are only listened to as a "compromise", which rewards viewpoints that are more "extreme".
A classic example would be the recent extension of detention without charge, where the Labour party has proposed a more extreme term (90 days), but they still get the term extended because people see the middle ground "compromise" as the best solution. Maybe if we'd had some people calling for a change the other way ("Let's reduce it to 2 days, as with the USA"), then even if I didn't necessarily agree with their viewpoint, the resultant compromise might have been something I'd have preferred.
IOW, I don't care who you vote for - but if you want less strict copyrights, you should be glad that this party exists - even if you don't believe that the law shouldn't be relaxed as far as they say it should (as I don't either).
...then that's okay, my TOS on my site says that I own everything they produce. If they didn't want to accept it, they shouldn't have sold me a ticket. If they didn't read it, tough luck, that's no excuse.
"We" won't know anything - only you can know what you have experienced. Perhaps, were it a one-time thing, one could claim it as the product of an overactive imagination. But when it's repeatable and consistent, many times, over many years, what conclusion should I draw? (That's rhetorical, no need to answer.)
I've had the "old hag" experience many times, as have many people around the world, throughout history (I note that you didn't respond to my question on this experience). Does this mean that the old hag really exists? Of course not. All we know is that something causes the experience, and that something occurs multiple times, and affects many people. It tells us nothing about what that something is - whether it's an actual old hag, or a mental experience in our brains.
I also dream of flying. Often. Lots of people do. Does that mean I'm really flying?
It doesn't mean you're right to make fun of people who believe answers you think are stupid.
And I did this where?
Religious evidence is only binding on the person who receives it. For example, I believe I have received answers to my prayers, specifically I believe that I have been told by the Spirit that my church teaches the true gospel of Christ; I cannot use this to show that you've done something demonstrably wrong, I can only use this to know whether I have done something wrong (or right).
What you refer to isn't "evidence". You can call it "evidence" if you like, but that's just playing word games - it doesn't mean that what you talk about has any resemblance to the evidence being requested - and the evidence that most people expect before they believe in any other kind of thing.
So no - if someone else somehow had proof that I were guilty of murder, that proof by nature cannot be religious.
Allow me to rephrase: supposing members of the jury said that you were guilty, based on "religious evidence" that they had received. Would you accept that, because it was "valid" for them? How could you argue against that?
And indeed, I would entirely agree with what you say. Similarly: if someone else somehow had proof that God existed, that proof by nature cannot be religious. This is why when people talk about evidence for God, they're after evidence, and not your "religious evidence". Just as it is when people make claims about the old hag, unicorns, fairies, orbital teapots, and so on.
My god? You have no idea about me or any Gods I hold. Don't make stupid assumptions.
Do you believe in any god or gods then?
It was there and written down as part of the religion well before science had the concept.
"Religion" and "science" are not beings - they don't have knowledge themselves.
That's not the question and never was. The question was to present the useful predictions that religion has made.
Really? Let's go all the way back, shall we? The OP was: ID does not add anything useful to the discussion, because it postulates a "theory" that can neither be proven nor disproven, and doesn't make any kinds of useful predictions.
It was only the response that twisted this to the ill-defined "religious systems". Then you came in with irrelevant points about what people knew thousands of years ago, despite the fact that there is no evidence that this knowledge was obtained through any means other than observation, and later theorizing and testing.
So yes, let's go back to the OP - give me a prediction that the "theory" of Intelligent Design has made?
Concede? I never stated anything to the opposite.
Okay - do we agree that learning about the universe is done through the process of observation, hypothesising, testing (i.e., science), and not religion, magic, or anything else?
As I said, there is not real speciation unless you much with the definitions to make it work. Point to one event that has been observer and does not do this.
Could you say that again in English, please?
What I'm asking is: what is your definition of speciation? What "event" are you saying has not been observed?
I love that, overwhelming evidence. SO science is settled right? It can't ever be different or changes when new information is discovered? It's fact right, unbending facts and looking at it in any other way is blasphemy right?
Where did I say any of that? On the contrary, we should adjust our views when new evidence arrives. For example, when we have overwhelming evidence of evolution, it's perhaps time to let go of the idea that it was all done by some magic being.
Get over yourself and step into the real word.
I'm sorry, which world is that - the real one, or the one of magic and make believe?
Slashdot Mirror
Wait - you argue that PC gaming is dying due to piracy, with an Iphone anecdote?
Perhaps you could give us a car analogy instead.
There have been several Iphone models.
Most phones have experienced a growing userbase. All it needs is that the sales rate is higher than the phone-dying rate...
I find that reading Slashdot is a great way to keep up to date with developments in the mobile market, of about one to five years ago.
(The funniest one we had was that "Read a website ... On Your Iphone" a few months ago.)
You confuse "Would you like ..." with "Is this a criminal offence".
And even if I felt the law would help me, the respose would be to take legal action through the (civil) courts. I wouldn't expect I could get someone arrested for it. Unlike the police, I can't go around and arrest you for doing that.
So if I can't get someone arrested for it, why is it a different rule here?
Sub-orbital flights isn't anywhere near manned travel to the Moon.
If no one else can get there, "owning" it irrelevant. I might as well claim that I "own" it.
If someone else can get there, it's not clear that you'll be able to stop them from landing there. Unless you break out a war. No court on Earth is going to grant a private company ownership of land in space (I believe there are international treaties preventing this).
Consider: why aren't private companies setting up offices in Antartica, so they can "own" it and charge rent?
I presume the 747 gave them revenue, even though it took time to recoup their costs. The problem with space is that getting revenue from it full stop is unclear.
And all sorts of companies spend money on side-projects that don't immediately bring in money (Google would be an obvious example), but I doubt the money spent on Asimo is anywhere near the amount required for manned trips to the Moon or elsewhere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIMO suggests each one costs under $1 million, with over 100 units in total. That's peanuts compared to what's required for manned space travel.
If you still don't understand after saying it twice, then you probably will never understand it.
You said: "there is not real speciation unless you much with the definitions to make it work. Point to one event that has been observer and does not do this"
This sentence does not parse. But let's try again:
As for speciation, we have never observed it without changing the definition of species specifically for the instance claimed. And when those changes are compared to a broad set of conditions, the sillyness of them are obvious.
So, I'll ask again: What is your definition of speciation? What "event" are you looking for, that you say has not been observed?
So when you have no evidence of something, then we should completely ignore it right? You have no evidence of it not being done by some magic teapot, you actually only have overwhelming evidence of evolution and can observe it on a micro scale within the same species, as well as having observed speciation. So why, if evidence is needed, are you blabbering on about ignoring magic teapots when you have no evidence of it's (sic) falsehood?
Fixed that for you. You believe in magic teapots, don't you? There might be one orbiting our planet right now, you can't disprove it, so I take it you will give serious consideration to such a possibility? I do hope you don't ignore it, along with an infinite number of other conceivable entities.
I'm not your shrink.
I should hope not. Not with your misunderstanding of science.
Regarding the claim that religion once served a use thousands of years ago, to propagate some good ideas, including scientific ones, there I don't disagree.
As I say - if religion was once about doing observing, theorizing and testing, it's a shame that that's no longer the case.
Religion and Science are both bodies of knowledge.
You are confusing methods with institutions. Religious organisations may sometimes give useful information - no one disagrees with this. But this is not comparable to science, as a method. The comparison was not about "religious organisations versus scientists", it was religion versus science as disciplines, as ideas, as methods.
So tell me, how does one use "Religion" as a body of knowledge? What method is this that you speak of that allows us to find new facts about the Universe? Read the Bible? That contains a mixture of truths, and complete falsehoods, without any way to tell the difference. Furthermore, reading a book is not how we find out new knowledge - that's simply how it may be explained to other people (it would be like saying we conduct science by "reading a science textbook"!)
Observing, theorizing and testing are all actions within that goal. However, you must be forgetting where the modern concept of science comes from. That's right, the religious universities in which science was developed over the years.
Universities are religious now? Do they believe in god?
Anyhow, whatever you say about the past, the issue I raised was: it's a shame that that's no longer the case.
The body of useful knowledge gained from Alchemy is still in use today.
There are things which alchemists discovered that are useful. This doesn't mean that alchemy itself ever had any chance of being true. This doesn't mean that "Alchemy and Science are both bodies of knowledge", as if there existed alchemy methods that weren't science, but still useful. The only useful things that alchemists did were things which were science.
Next you'll be telling me that Mathematics and Numerology are both bodies of knowledge, because Phythagoras believed in it...
and you've got the clout due to your good history to maintain your charity-monopoly, that's bad for everyone.
False - unlike Slashdot, "good history" does not give you any "clout".
This article only shows that people with more history are less likely to have their edits reverted, but as we ought to know here on Slashdot, correlation is not causation. There are all sorts of more obvious explanations - such as experienced users being less likely to be vandals (else there'd have long been banned), being more likely to understand the fundamental requirements (verifiable sources, etc), being more likely to have previously took part in talk page discussions before making the edit (someone with no previous edits obviously hasn't done).
The joke is that Wikipedia gets criticism from both sides - there's no end of ridicule it gets here on Slashdot when a false statement is found to have appeared on an article for, ooh, about 1 minute, or they complain that "anyone can put unsourced material on it".
Yet, when these people work hard to stop this from happening, you then whine about that too.
Which is it?
Arrogance? You're the one throwing ad hominem attacks against a mere handful of users, as if somehow that makes you better.
It's this kind of arrogant attitude that's kept me away from Wikipedia the last few years
Oh dear.
anything I add ends-up rejected because some stupid kid has a hard-on for his power position.
Give us an example?
You want to know why Wikipedia is not growing?
Does it need to grow? In terms of numbers of articles, one of the problems Wikipedia has is not that is doesn't have enough articles (it's already the largest encyclopedia in history, I believe!) What's needed now is to improve the existing articles. A Good or Featured article is better than countless new poor quality articles about some obscure thing, in my opinion.
As for edits to articles, it's unsurprising that as articles mature, changes are less likely. This is a good thing - it means stability. There's nothing more annoying when a well established article, that's been built up over perhaps years of discussion on the talk pages, gets completely changed by some random newbie. Not that newbie contributions are bad - on the contrary, I believe many worthwhile edits come from random people, and we all started out that way once. But if you're going to change something that has overwhelming consensus, you had better take the time to bring it up in the talk pages, and look over the arguments that people have already had a million times before.
See the Atheism article for an example. It's stable, but every so often someone will decide to completely rewrite the intro with no prior discussion - and then they come whining to Slashdot that they're being bullied by the cyber nerds, because they didn't agree with them.
Someone call the Waaambulance.
It's because the new pack of cyber nerds is defending it's territory.
Irony: Slashdot nerds whining about Wikipedia editors.
Receipt of money or other consideration in exchange for goods and services
Of course that's met, by the same transaction - they took my money, in exchange for goods and services.
Agreement byall parties
So we conclude that I agreed with their TOS, but they didn't with mine?
What I'd be curious to know is what happens if someone sells their burning man tickets or gifts them - since I don't think those obligations would apply to the recipient/new purchaser..
A classic example of this would be those gift cards that have replaced old gift vouchers (in the UK at least), that now come laden with terms and conditions, including dubious rubbish like "We'll take your money back if you don't use this card for X months". Obviously, it's commonplace that these are transferred to people who didn't buy the card originally, and never agreed to the terms. I would be curious to see this tested in court.
One time I used a gift voucher in WHSmiths that I'd kept for years. In the old days, they'd give you as much of the change as possible in terms of vouchers. These days, it's done automatically by the card. But they no longer had vouchers, so they said they'd have to give me that approx £1.50 change as a new gift card.
I said I didn't accept the terms and conditions.
After a few minutes of stalemate, they gave in and gave me the change in cash.
Troll? No wonder I haven't got any mod points in years - these days it seems they're handed out to people who just mod down at random.
So it's okay for people who want stronger laws to lobby for it, but those who don't should have to persuade people to behave in a certain way?
And no one is being forced to do anything anyway - the question is how long copyright terms should be for, i.e., for how long due the courts prohibited copying. The only forcing is during the copyright term. I am amused that you managed to spin a lack of a law as "forcing" people to do something!
I think that the BBC funded programs should be free to copy, but that's a separate issue. Feel free to devote your time to that if you prefer, rather than telling someone else how they should be spending their time.
then he'd have a much stronger position to argue that it should be mandatory for everyone.
Nothing is manadatory, except the copyright laws that we already have. And I bet if this happened, people like you would just go "Well there's no need to change the law, if you can persuade them to release it anyway".
Lol.. So going back before I even chimed in to answer a specific question down the thread doesn't count now right?
You should have looked at the context, rather than assuming the illdefined question at that point meant something that it didn't. I've clarified what the thread was about now.
Obviously someone observed it, it was written in a book. Religions were doing the observation, theorizing and testing long before science was a concept.
I agree that people were doing observations and so on, long before the concept of the Scientific Method was formally established.
I believe that the method that we now refer to as the scientific method is the way to find out about the universe. The fact that the method existed before we called it that doesn't change the point. I don't care if you call it science, religion, or magic.
If religion was once about doing observing, theorizing and testing, it's a shame that that's no longer the case.
you cannot arbitrarily ignore contributions made from other areas
I'm not sure anyone's ignoring contributions. Obviously when looking at the history of science, we should look at all contributions. Some contributions came from people who happened to be religious, yes. Newton believed in alchemy, but I don't think that means we should give alchemy any special consideration today. If someone said "What useful knowledge have we got from alchemy?", I'm not sure it matters that Newton also happened to believe alchemy.
I'm glad it wasn't just me. I remember being very confused over some Usborne book of science for children, which suggested that it was simply a matter of mummy and daddy hugging each other whilst fully clothed, and loving each other very much. This was after they'd described the gamete cells in cartoon fashion (complete with faces, IIRC), but no mention was made as to how the transfer occurred. I was like, "How is that possible?"
Sad but true - I remember being taught (in a UK state primary school - where religious preaching is still a legal requirement) that rainbows were God's promise not to flood the world and kill everyone again (because obviously, that's the sort of thing that an all-loving being might do).
Now sure, we still do have actual science lessons later on, where religion keeps out of AFAICT, but the fact that even state schools have worship in assemblies and even Bible study lessons is an issue, and even more so that there is even a legal requirement to do so.
What it means is that you can't use your own experience as proof for other people.
I agree, yes exactly.
If you choose to believe an old hag visited you, you're free to do so, and your belief is no more factually incorrect than believing you weren't visited by an old hag, since neither belief is provable.
The issue isn't whether I'm right or free to believe - the question is: Am I visited by an old hag at night?
Surely this has a yes or no answer? Surely the answer is independent of the person? It doesn't make sense to say "It's true for me, but not other people", nor do I agree with "Believing that it's true is no more incorrect than believing it's false".
Also, I'm not saying that people should necessarily believe that unicorns, old hags, gods don't exist - I'm simply saying I don't believe in them, and I see no evidence or reason to do so (I'm a weak atheist).
I didn't know we were talking about dreams. When did we start talking about dreams? When I talk about answers to prayers, I'm not talking about dreams.
I'll rephrase it: at night, I have the "experience" of flying. Surely this means I'm really flying?
In what sense do you receive answers to prayers?
Referring to religious beliefs as "made up" is inherently a mocking statement, since you're implying that anyone who believes in God is either stupid or gullible.
So someone isn't allowed to state that religious beliefs are made up, even if that's what they believe? It doesn't imply that - I'm aware that people have these beliefs, despite being intelligent.
Sure it is - personal experience is indeed empirical evidence.
It's evidence that you had the experience, sure - but we can't say more than that. The experience itself tells us nothing about what caused that experience.
More accurately, I have specifically said that religious evidence cannot be binding on anyone other than the direct recipient of that evidence, because it is personal in nature.
Fair enough - I still don't believe what you believe to be true, however.
And that's exactly my point - those people will never be satisfied, because religion's evidence comes in the form of personal experience, not scientific experimental results. They're wanting religion to provide something that by nature it cannot provide.
Most likely because it doesn't exist beyond being something that you experience. Furthermore, the conjecture "It was caused by God talking to me" is no more likely to be true than "It was due to a magic beam from an orbital space teapot".
All I ask for is the same standard that would be required for me to believe anything else, whether it's "Aliens stole my bicycle", "We evolved from simpler lifeforms" or "This person committed this particular crime".
Sad but true.
I thought the recent European elections were interesting, which used a form of proportional representation. It was a like - wow, elections are interesting to watch for a change.
Imagine if they'd have used FPTP like everything else. It would've been "And for this constituency, we elect Conservative, Conservative, Conservative, Conservative and Conservative."
Seeing as you are a fan of extremes, consider it being like repealing laws on murder.
I've nothing against extremes (being "moderate" doesn't make something better - see fallacy of argument to moderation). But I'm not a fan of bad analogies.
Perhaps you could compare it to a car?
I'm sure that the people with these views considered these issues, and aren't simply arguing for "maximum freedom for me at the expense of everyone else", as your murder straw man example suggests.
If you really believe the way copyright violators are punished is stupid, you should be campaigning for votes amongst copyright holders.
Eh? Parties should only care about copyright holders? Isn't that the problem at the moment, where the RIAA, Disney etc lobby for laws?
And if you could persuade Disney to release the first Mickey Mouse under a free licence, then there'd be no need for a political party in the first place.
Nowhere did he claim shock politics - their policies are what are stated.
The point is though that some people voting for them isn't going to abolish non-commercial copyright, nor reduce commercial copyrights to 5 years. Sadly, politics in the UK falls to the fallacy of the Argument to moderation. Views are only listened to as a "compromise", which rewards viewpoints that are more "extreme".
A classic example would be the recent extension of detention without charge, where the Labour party has proposed a more extreme term (90 days), but they still get the term extended because people see the middle ground "compromise" as the best solution. Maybe if we'd had some people calling for a change the other way ("Let's reduce it to 2 days, as with the USA"), then even if I didn't necessarily agree with their viewpoint, the resultant compromise might have been something I'd have preferred.
IOW, I don't care who you vote for - but if you want less strict copyrights, you should be glad that this party exists - even if you don't believe that the law shouldn't be relaxed as far as they say it should (as I don't either).
...then that's okay, my TOS on my site says that I own everything they produce. If they didn't want to accept it, they shouldn't have sold me a ticket. If they didn't read it, tough luck, that's no excuse.
"We" won't know anything - only you can know what you have experienced. Perhaps, were it a one-time thing, one could claim it as the product of an overactive imagination. But when it's repeatable and consistent, many times, over many years, what conclusion should I draw? (That's rhetorical, no need to answer.)
I've had the "old hag" experience many times, as have many people around the world, throughout history (I note that you didn't respond to my question on this experience). Does this mean that the old hag really exists? Of course not. All we know is that something causes the experience, and that something occurs multiple times, and affects many people. It tells us nothing about what that something is - whether it's an actual old hag, or a mental experience in our brains.
I also dream of flying. Often. Lots of people do. Does that mean I'm really flying?
It doesn't mean you're right to make fun of people who believe answers you think are stupid.
And I did this where?
Religious evidence is only binding on the person who receives it. For example, I believe I have received answers to my prayers, specifically I believe that I have been told by the Spirit that my church teaches the true gospel of Christ; I cannot use this to show that you've done something demonstrably wrong, I can only use this to know whether I have done something wrong (or right).
What you refer to isn't "evidence". You can call it "evidence" if you like, but that's just playing word games - it doesn't mean that what you talk about has any resemblance to the evidence being requested - and the evidence that most people expect before they believe in any other kind of thing.
So no - if someone else somehow had proof that I were guilty of murder, that proof by nature cannot be religious.
Allow me to rephrase: supposing members of the jury said that you were guilty, based on "religious evidence" that they had received. Would you accept that, because it was "valid" for them? How could you argue against that?
And indeed, I would entirely agree with what you say. Similarly: if someone else somehow had proof that God existed, that proof by nature cannot be religious. This is why when people talk about evidence for God, they're after evidence, and not your "religious evidence". Just as it is when people make claims about the old hag, unicorns, fairies, orbital teapots, and so on.
My god? You have no idea about me or any Gods I hold. Don't make stupid assumptions.
Do you believe in any god or gods then?
It was there and written down as part of the religion well before science had the concept.
"Religion" and "science" are not beings - they don't have knowledge themselves.
That's not the question and never was. The question was to present the useful predictions that religion has made.
Really? Let's go all the way back, shall we? The OP was: ID does not add anything useful to the discussion, because it postulates a "theory" that can neither be proven nor disproven, and doesn't make any kinds of useful predictions.
It was only the response that twisted this to the ill-defined "religious systems". Then you came in with irrelevant points about what people knew thousands of years ago, despite the fact that there is no evidence that this knowledge was obtained through any means other than observation, and later theorizing and testing.
So yes, let's go back to the OP - give me a prediction that the "theory" of Intelligent Design has made?
Concede? I never stated anything to the opposite.
Okay - do we agree that learning about the universe is done through the process of observation, hypothesising, testing (i.e., science), and not religion, magic, or anything else?
As I said, there is not real speciation unless you much with the definitions to make it work. Point to one event that has been observer and does not do this.
Could you say that again in English, please?
What I'm asking is: what is your definition of speciation? What "event" are you saying has not been observed?
I love that, overwhelming evidence. SO science is settled right? It can't ever be different or changes when new information is discovered? It's fact right, unbending facts and looking at it in any other way is blasphemy right?
Where did I say any of that? On the contrary, we should adjust our views when new evidence arrives. For example, when we have overwhelming evidence of evolution, it's perhaps time to let go of the idea that it was all done by some magic being.
Get over yourself and step into the real word.
I'm sorry, which world is that - the real one, or the one of magic and make believe?