First of all, none of those three quotes mentions anything supernatural (i.e. outside of nature, or appealing to something beyond understanding by the scientific method). No no deities, no spirits, no other planes of existence beyond the ken of mortal men. Faith does not equate to supernatural belief.
Secondly, if you re-read the three examples you give you will see that they do not in fact hinge upon "faith that, in general, people are good":
A desire to see fulfillment and growth does not require people to be good, just as my desire to see the my favorite team to win the world cup does not require that team to be good (although it would be nice).
A committment to understanding does not require people to be good, just as my committment to understanding why SCO are doing what they're doing doesn't require SCO to be good.
A conviction that "with reason, an open marketplace of ideas, good will, and tolerance, progress can be made", does not require people to be good, or to have an empathic connection, or anythng of the sort. It merely states a belief that if people are good then things will be better - which seems almost tautological.
Nowhere, is there any expressed belief "that humans have some kind of empathic connection that will steer them toward good behaviour if left alone." Nowhere is there an example of supernatural beliefs. The underlying message of secular humanism is that we can't rely on any outside influence (deity, spirit, universal guiding force, mysterious empathic connection, or whatever) to solve our problems. Secular humanism says: If we want the world to be a better place (quote #1) we need to do it ourselves, first by understanding the problems (quote #2), and then by using the tools available (reason, free flow of information, tolerance for other viewpoints - quote #3) to construct solutions to those problems.
Your comments make no sense because they seem to be predicated on the premise that:
no god == no supernatural
Look, this argument was about whether or not secular humanism constitutes a religion. Religions involve supernatural beliefs (which may or may not include one or more gods). Secular humanism does not include supernatural beliefs. Ergo secular humanism is not a religion. End of story.
buddhism is full of supernatural beliefs
Perhaps you should take another look at the buddhist cosmology I linked to. They don't believe in a god. They believe in a whole slew of them. Plus a bunch of other supernatural stuff.
4 : a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith
Which is all very well, but it means that pretty much anything that anyone feels strongly about becomes a "religion". Now, while I may joke about rugby being New Zealand's "national religion", it's fairly clear that there is a large difference between rugby-mania and devotion to a set of beliefs about the supernatural. But your (and Webster's) definition makes it seem like there's little difference between a "real" religion and a bunch of rugby fanatics. Which, as I said before, is a handy rhetorical device (particularly when you're trying to argue that any attempt to keep religion out of schools amounts to secular humanism and thus the state promotion of religion). But it really does very little to aid in communication.
You have to realize that many followers of religions don't actually believe in any of the "supernatural" portion of their faith, and continue to act on its rules and ethics out of some other personal source of goodwill. How is that so different from Secular Humanism?
It's different because the rules and ethics are rooted in a worldview based on the supernatural (that is after all the fundamental defining difference between religion and secular humanism). It's different because they are "followers of a religion", which means they have some kind of implicit beliefs about the existence of the supernatural. Otherwise they would be secular humanists of one brand or another.
So what does define "religion" then, if not a belief in the supernatural?
...Buddhism is most certainly a religion, and yet it doesn't talk of any gods at all...
Oh really?. A brief examination of Buddhist cosmology would tend to negate that assertion.
Religion is a style of thought involving a high degree of faith, and it doesn't have to be faith in a god to count.
That is not the commonly accepted definition of the word "religion". Most dictionaries will specifically mention religion's supernatural component.
If you choose to dilute the definition of religion that much then it becomes effectively a useless word. Do you have some other word for differentiating those who believe in god from those who don't? (theist vs atheist perhaps?)
Why do you choose to dilute the definition of religion such that encompasses secular humanism (which by virtue of the word "secular" in its name is, in the conventional interpretation, specifically not religious in nature). What do you gain by doing so?
While the specific quote I used was from a secular humanist organization, the point was that the most commonly accepted definition of "religion" includes the idea that it involves deities and the supernatural (as a perusal of pretty much any dictionary will confirm), and that secular humanism is not concerned with those concepts.
I will be interested to see what alternative definition of religion you can offer that encompasses secular humanism without being so overly broad that it is useless for communication. Pray tell what are the defining characteristics of religion, if not belief in deities and/or the supernatural?
Oh, and please don't try to pull out that hoary old argument about secular humanists' (or atheists') lack of belief in the supernatural constituting a belief about the supernatural, and thus a religion. That's like saying that a lack of belief in UFOs makes one a UFO conspiracy theorist: great rhetoric, but it makes the label "UFO conspiracy theorist" completely pointless since it no longer allows us to differentiate between those who believe in UFOs and those who don't.
Just out of interest, what is required in terms of belief in order for something to be categorized as a religion, rather than simply a belief about the world?
"Critics often try to classify secular humanism as a religion. Yet secular humanism lacks essential characteristics of a religion, including belief in a deity and an accompanying transcendent order. Secular humanists contend that issues concerning ethics, appropriate social and legal conduct, and the methodologies of science are philosophical and are not part of the domain of religion, which deals with the supernatural, mystical and transcendent."
Then perhaps the elected officials should not be tampering with the market at all. That way netither their wits nor their distance from the public will have any effect whatsoever.
Your logic is flawed. Clarke says "religion is the most malevolent mind virus". That statement says nothing about secular humanism. The only conclusion about secular humanism that be drawn from that statement is that Clarke believes that secular humanism is not as malevolent as religion (since religion is the most malevolent).
Unrestrained capitalism is just as bad as communism. Both ideologies push for centralized, top down control of resources.
Uh, no. Capitalism, aka the free market, is fundamentally a distributed system. Control rests in the hands of each individual buyer and seller in the market. That's the whole point of it.
With US style capitalism, corporations are given powers above those of ordinary people, and profit is not only a good motive to do something, it is by law the ONLY motive to do something.
"US style capitalism" is an oxymoron. The US does not have a free market (although it is freer than some). The fact that corporations are given any powers at all is an indicator that the market is no longer free.
...no government existed and everything was owned and run by corporations..
You honestly believe that the big corporations would be the size they are (or even exist at all) without the having the government distort the "free market" in their favor? Corporate power is derived from government power.
...paying politicians/rulers/kings/whatever to mandate their products...
But see, that's the problem - as soon as you allow that kind of thing to happen, you no longer have a free market. It starts to sound a lot less like capitalism, and a lot more like central planning. So you can't really blame the social and economic ills that result on capitalism.
I bring this up because the first step in solving a problem is correctly understanding what the problem is. Capitalism and the free market unquetionably have a lot of benefits. The problem is not capitalism per se, it's the destruction of free markets by "special interests". The question is, is it possible to construct a free market system that is impervious to special interests. If not, then perhaps we should be looking for another economic system. But I have yet to hear of any system that can match the efficiency and scalability of the free market's distributed agent architecture.
Perhaps Verisign should sit down and read the "World of Ends". Especially the parts about The Internet is stupid, Adding value to the Internet lowers its value, and All the Internet's value grows on its edges.
The biggest expenses tend to be housing, medical, and auto. For the heavily in debt, you can add in credit cards. Housing and medical are skyrocketing while auto is rising more modestly.
So get a job in the building or real estate industries, the auto industry, or the medical industry. There's clearly a demand out there, otherwise prices wouldn't be rising.
Actually, the parent post is closer to being correct. The Van Allen belts have their lower edge up around 1200-1400 km. The station is orbiting at a much lower altitude than that (mean altitude somewhere around 380 km). That low altitude is mostly driven by the capability of the shuttle, which can't go a whole lot higher than that (especially at the inclination that the station is at). It'd be nice to put the station higher, since that would cut down atmospheric drag a lot, and thereby seriously reduce the amount of stationkeeping (aka "reboosting") they would need to do.
[sigh] Yet another "space troll". The lack of originality in this type of post is, well, a little depressing to tell you the truth. Back in January of 2002 Guppy06 posted the following comment on Slashdot:
"I swear, Slashdot could post the most mundane story about space exploration, and it still draws the same old complaints about this and that, the usual space trolls. I'm just going to respond to them all here for future linkage..."
Here's that list of responses, if you want to see what the answer to your troll...er...I mean question is.
Right. Or Dr. Pepper, or Sprite, or Evian, or Gatorade, or...
Or to simply not buy any of them because none of them are what you want. At which point you will have created a new market for an as yet unproduced beverage. The question then becomes: do enough other people feel the same way that it becomes economically viable for a business to produce this new wonder-drink? If not, your only other choice is to make it yourself.
What free market either?
Every major industry in the US (and other countries don't get me wrong) is heaviliy subsidized, whether it be through, tax breaks, tarrifs on competing products or outright money giving such as what occurs in the US agricultural industry.
No argument there. That doesn't mean that it's right to do it that way. The post I was replying to was complaining about "the market", and all its deleterious effects. You have just made the point that "the market" isn't, in fact, a market at all. It has a bunch of regulation put into it that blocks or distorts the useful economic feedback signals contained in prices. No wonder "the market" doesn't work right...
This idea that we some how live in a free market society is trotted out every time people have legitimate complaints about how society is evolving. It isn't true and never has been true.
That's nice. But I was replying to a post talking about market theory in the abstract, not a concrete realization. My response was framed in terms of the properties of a market, not of any given country - and I never "trotted out" the idea that we live in a free market. I happen to believe that we don't live in a free market (see above). So you can hardly blame society's current ills on a free market, can you? By doing so you are falling for the rhetoric of those who do "trot out the idea that we live in a free market" as a way to defend their privilege. If there are legitimate problems with market theory, please say so. If your is issue is instead "legitimate complaints about how society is evolving" then, by your own arguments, the free market can not be to blame since it is not actually being used (but the theory may help us understand what is wrong).
I disagree. In one case you have a rover with one IMU that works for half of the EDL sequence, and a second that works for the other half. In the other case you have two rovers with IMUs that only work for half of EDL, and both make a big black mark on the surface of Mars.
What you say is true of software. However, hardware is a different ballgame. For example, if the design flaw involved specifying hardware items that turn out to have inadequate lifetime then per-rover redundancy may mitigate the problem, but system-level redundancy won't (e.g. redundant inertial measurement units might allow the guidance system to operate after one IMU has failed, by switching to the previously unused backup - one IMU per rover wouldn't solve the problem).
Hey, you get nitpicky, and people are likely to pick a few nits in return.
Oh, and BTW, LotR is typically sold as a three-volume set. And it's spelled Denethor, not Denthenor.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, none of those three quotes mentions anything supernatural (i.e. outside of nature, or appealing to something beyond understanding by the scientific method). No no deities, no spirits, no other planes of existence beyond the ken of mortal men. Faith does not equate to supernatural belief.
Secondly, if you re-read the three examples you give you will see that they do not in fact hinge upon "faith that, in general, people are good":
- A desire to see fulfillment and growth does not require people to be good, just as my desire to see the my favorite team to win the world cup does not require that team to be good (although it would be nice).
- A committment to understanding does not require people to be good, just as my committment to understanding why SCO are doing what they're doing doesn't require SCO to be good.
- A conviction that "with reason, an open marketplace of ideas, good will, and tolerance, progress can be made", does not require people to be good, or to have an empathic connection, or anythng of the sort. It merely states a belief that if people are good then things will be better - which seems almost tautological.
Nowhere, is there any expressed belief "that humans have some kind of empathic connection that will steer them toward good behaviour if left alone." Nowhere is there an example of supernatural beliefs. The underlying message of secular humanism is that we can't rely on any outside influence (deity, spirit, universal guiding force, mysterious empathic connection, or whatever) to solve our problems. Secular humanism says: If we want the world to be a better place (quote #1) we need to do it ourselves, first by understanding the problems (quote #2), and then by using the tools available (reason, free flow of information, tolerance for other viewpoints - quote #3) to construct solutions to those problems.Could you substantiate that? Perhaps by giving an example of the supernatural beliefs that secular humanists apparently hold?
no god == no supernatural
Look, this argument was about whether or not secular humanism constitutes a religion. Religions involve supernatural beliefs (which may or may not include one or more gods). Secular humanism does not include supernatural beliefs. Ergo secular humanism is not a religion. End of story.
buddhism is full of supernatural beliefs
Perhaps you should take another look at the buddhist cosmology I linked to. They don't believe in a god. They believe in a whole slew of them. Plus a bunch of other supernatural stuff.
Which is all very well, but it means that pretty much anything that anyone feels strongly about becomes a "religion". Now, while I may joke about rugby being New Zealand's "national religion", it's fairly clear that there is a large difference between rugby-mania and devotion to a set of beliefs about the supernatural. But your (and Webster's) definition makes it seem like there's little difference between a "real" religion and a bunch of rugby fanatics. Which, as I said before, is a handy rhetorical device (particularly when you're trying to argue that any attempt to keep religion out of schools amounts to secular humanism and thus the state promotion of religion). But it really does very little to aid in communication.
You have to realize that many followers of religions don't actually believe in any of the "supernatural" portion of their faith, and continue to act on its rules and ethics out of some other personal source of goodwill. How is that so different from Secular Humanism?
It's different because the rules and ethics are rooted in a worldview based on the supernatural (that is after all the fundamental defining difference between religion and secular humanism). It's different because they are "followers of a religion", which means they have some kind of implicit beliefs about the existence of the supernatural. Otherwise they would be secular humanists of one brand or another.
So what does define "religion" then, if not a belief in the supernatural?
Oh really?. A brief examination of Buddhist cosmology would tend to negate that assertion.
Religion is a style of thought involving a high degree of faith, and it doesn't have to be faith in a god to count.
While the specific quote I used was from a secular humanist organization, the point was that the most commonly accepted definition of "religion" includes the idea that it involves deities and the supernatural (as a perusal of pretty much any dictionary will confirm), and that secular humanism is not concerned with those concepts.
I will be interested to see what alternative definition of religion you can offer that encompasses secular humanism without being so overly broad that it is useless for communication. Pray tell what are the defining characteristics of religion, if not belief in deities and/or the supernatural?
Oh, and please don't try to pull out that hoary old argument about secular humanists' (or atheists') lack of belief in the supernatural constituting a belief about the supernatural, and thus a religion. That's like saying that a lack of belief in UFOs makes one a UFO conspiracy theorist: great rhetoric, but it makes the label "UFO conspiracy theorist" completely pointless since it no longer allows us to differentiate between those who believe in UFOs and those who don't.
Or about 90% of New Zealand when it comes to Rugby...
To quote from the Council for Secular Humanism:
"Critics often try to classify secular humanism as a religion. Yet secular humanism lacks essential characteristics of a religion, including belief in a deity and an accompanying transcendent order. Secular humanists contend that issues concerning ethics, appropriate social and legal conduct, and the methodologies of science are philosophical and are not part of the domain of religion, which deals with the supernatural, mystical and transcendent."
Then perhaps the elected officials should not be tampering with the market at all. That way netither their wits nor their distance from the public will have any effect whatsoever.
Your logic is flawed. Clarke says "religion is the most malevolent mind virus". That statement says nothing about secular humanism. The only conclusion about secular humanism that be drawn from that statement is that Clarke believes that secular humanism is not as malevolent as religion (since religion is the most malevolent).
Uh, no. Capitalism, aka the free market, is fundamentally a distributed system. Control rests in the hands of each individual buyer and seller in the market. That's the whole point of it.
With US style capitalism, corporations are given powers above those of ordinary people, and profit is not only a good motive to do something, it is by law the ONLY motive to do something.
"US style capitalism" is an oxymoron. The US does not have a free market (although it is freer than some). The fact that corporations are given any powers at all is an indicator that the market is no longer free.
You honestly believe that the big corporations would be the size they are (or even exist at all) without the having the government distort the "free market" in their favor? Corporate power is derived from government power.
But see, that's the problem - as soon as you allow that kind of thing to happen, you no longer have a free market. It starts to sound a lot less like capitalism, and a lot more like central planning. So you can't really blame the social and economic ills that result on capitalism.
I bring this up because the first step in solving a problem is correctly understanding what the problem is. Capitalism and the free market unquetionably have a lot of benefits. The problem is not capitalism per se, it's the destruction of free markets by "special interests". The question is, is it possible to construct a free market system that is impervious to special interests. If not, then perhaps we should be looking for another economic system. But I have yet to hear of any system that can match the efficiency and scalability of the free market's distributed agent architecture.
Perhaps Verisign should sit down and read the "World of Ends". Especially the parts about The Internet is stupid, Adding value to the Internet lowers its value, and All the Internet's value grows on its edges.
So get a job in the building or real estate industries, the auto industry, or the medical industry. There's clearly a demand out there, otherwise prices wouldn't be rising.
That very much depends on your definition of "dangerous". And on the quantity of shielding that you are willing to put in place.
Actually, the parent post is closer to being correct. The Van Allen belts have their lower edge up around 1200-1400 km. The station is orbiting at a much lower altitude than that (mean altitude somewhere around 380 km). That low altitude is mostly driven by the capability of the shuttle, which can't go a whole lot higher than that (especially at the inclination that the station is at). It'd be nice to put the station higher, since that would cut down atmospheric drag a lot, and thereby seriously reduce the amount of stationkeeping (aka "reboosting") they would need to do.
"I swear, Slashdot could post the most mundane story about space exploration, and it still draws the same old complaints about this and that, the usual space trolls. I'm just going to respond to them all here for future linkage..."
Here's that list of responses, if you want to see what the answer to your troll...er...I mean question is.
Thanks for the clarification. Always nice to see a little courtesy in amongst the flamewars that infest the 'net :-)
Right. Or Dr. Pepper, or Sprite, or Evian, or Gatorade, or...
Or to simply not buy any of them because none of them are what you want. At which point you will have created a new market for an as yet unproduced beverage. The question then becomes: do enough other people feel the same way that it becomes economically viable for a business to produce this new wonder-drink? If not, your only other choice is to make it yourself.
What free market either?
Every major industry in the US (and other countries don't get me wrong) is heaviliy subsidized, whether it be through, tax breaks, tarrifs on competing products or outright money giving such as what occurs in the US agricultural industry.
No argument there. That doesn't mean that it's right to do it that way. The post I was replying to was complaining about "the market", and all its deleterious effects. You have just made the point that "the market" isn't, in fact, a market at all. It has a bunch of regulation put into it that blocks or distorts the useful economic feedback signals contained in prices. No wonder "the market" doesn't work right...
This idea that we some how live in a free market society is trotted out every time people have legitimate complaints about how society is evolving. It isn't true and never has been true.
That's nice. But I was replying to a post talking about market theory in the abstract, not a concrete realization. My response was framed in terms of the properties of a market, not of any given country - and I never "trotted out" the idea that we live in a free market. I happen to believe that we don't live in a free market (see above). So you can hardly blame society's current ills on a free market, can you? By doing so you are falling for the rhetoric of those who do "trot out the idea that we live in a free market" as a way to defend their privilege. If there are legitimate problems with market theory, please say so. If your is issue is instead "legitimate complaints about how society is evolving" then, by your own arguments, the free market can not be to blame since it is not actually being used (but the theory may help us understand what is wrong).
Given that markets are composed of individuals making free choices I fail to see how they thwart consumer choice or democratic freedom.
I disagree. In one case you have a rover with one IMU that works for half of the EDL sequence, and a second that works for the other half. In the other case you have two rovers with IMUs that only work for half of EDL, and both make a big black mark on the surface of Mars.
What you say is true of software. However, hardware is a different ballgame. For example, if the design flaw involved specifying hardware items that turn out to have inadequate lifetime then per-rover redundancy may mitigate the problem, but system-level redundancy won't (e.g. redundant inertial measurement units might allow the guidance system to operate after one IMU has failed, by switching to the previously unused backup - one IMU per rover wouldn't solve the problem).
Hey, you get nitpicky, and people are likely to pick a few nits in return. Oh, and BTW, LotR is typically sold as a three-volume set. And it's spelled Denethor, not Denthenor. ;-)