This is true in the short run. But in the long run, voting for a third party causes the major parties to move in that direction to win these voters back.
Very true, and voting third party can also have other benefits. You just have to do it smartly.
You only risk letting "the greater evil" win if you live in a swing state. If your state is solidly for one of the major parties, you can safely vote third party without risking the vote affecting the major parties. So for example, living in California, I can assume that Obama will win my state not matter how I vote, and so I can vote for whatever third party I feel like without worrying about "spoiling" anything (depending on which I would otherwise support, either victory is assured or it is impossible, either way there's no point wasting effort fighting about it).
So if you live in a swing state, yes, vote the lesser of the two evils who are most likely to win. If you don't, however, voting for your preferred third party will get you several other benefits, besides the one quoted above (major party platforms shift to try to recapture the third party vote):
- It increases the size of the third party supporter bloc (both for that party, and for the concept of third parties), which helps promote the third party (and the concept of third parties) even if they didn't win. Since they weren't going to win anyway, and your non-swing state was going the way it did anyway, this is pure win at no risk here.
But besides that obvious benefit:
- If people in your non-swing state start doing this who would otherwise vote for your state's shoe-in candidate (e.g. if California liberals start voting Green instead of Democrat), then that eventually makes your state a swing state, and suddenly your vote matters a whole lot more! This combined with parent poster's point about major parties courting the third party vote, but even better: since you're not a swing state, they care a lot about capturing your vote, giving your preferred third party's platform a major influence on them.
- That second point can however go the other way, e.g. if California conservatives start voting Libertarian, that just entrenches California more firmly as a Democrat state, with a large Democrat bloc vs smaller Republican and Libertarian blocs. However, since (for example) California is already a firmly Democrat state, you can feel free to take this all the way and eat up all the Republican votes you want, go right ahead and kill the Republican party in California, you won't be making any difference in who wins there so still no harm in letting the "greater evil" win since (for a conservative who ranks Libertarians > Republicans > Democrats) they would have anyway. So you can feel free to "spoil" the "lesser evil" all you want, and if you can manage it, go on to supplant them, e.g. turn the California election into Democrats vs Libertarians instead of Democrats vs Republicans.
Combining all these effects, voting third party in a non-swing state can have major influences. To use my own state for an example again, if we assume (perhaps questionably) that a large bloc of liberals generally prefer Greens > Democrats > Republicans, and a large bloc of conservatives generally prefer Libertarians > Republicans > Democrats, then if those people all follow this strategy instead of abstaining or voting for "the lesser evil", California could end up with a more notable Green party, Democrats eagerly adopting a lot of Green policies to try to keep the liberal vote, and at least a much larger Libertarian party if not one wholly supplanting the Republican party, and Republicans eagerly adopting a lot of Libertarian policies.
Suddenly you've got something almost resembling a healthy multi-party system, all without anyone ever risking "the greater evil" getting into office. And all this in what's now quite possibly a swing state, so very influential on national politics, and either way having an inevitable run-on effect o
Congress has no power to make laws regarding religious institutions. That means that it can't either ban or penalize any religion, nor give them any special support or breaks.
Churches' get only the exact same tax exemptions as any other 501(c) charitable organization does. And the same laws that apply to anybody anywhere still apply to those people when they are inside of a church, so I'm not sure what you're on about regarding underage drinking in churches.
(I'll admit I'm not sure how the famous "peyote isn't illegal for Native Americans" rule fits into this, but I suspect there is some complication involving the fact that strictly speaking federally recognized tribes are distinct sovereign nations in a special protectorate relationship with the United States.)
If you want to outlaw fiat currency, you must outlaw interest-bearing loans.... All of them...
Awesome, lets do it. Interest (and rent more generally) is how a free market (a good thing) devolves into capitalism (a bad thing). Get rid of it and we can have free markets with none (or at least a significantly reduced portion) of the traditionally associated problems of capitalism.
Quite the opposite: liberty is the freedom to do as we please, so long as we do not infringe on the equal liberty of others, which we ought (note spelling) not do. It is not limited by "act as the law says", which necessarily implies some set of arbitrary legal rules.
To quote Jefferson:
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
Anything is justifiable to stop terrorism, government censorship makes it difficult to stop terrorism, therefore government censorship must be stopped.
Anything is justifiable to stop terrorism, government surveillance is necessary to stop terrorism, therefore government censorship is justifiable.
Here's a thought exercise: You have a FTL ship that can reach Alpha Centuri in a second. You then make a U-turn and come back to Earth a second later. How much time has elapsed on Earth? How much time for the passenger of the ship?
Whose second did the trip take? An Earth second? A ship second?
When speaking of sublight but still relativistic speeds (e.g. 0.999c), one second of travel for the ship could be aeons on Earth. One second of Earth time would be an imperceptible instant of ship time.
Since you're using Alpha Centauri for an example, which is 4ly away, if we just say the ship travels at whatever speed necessary to get there in 1 second of ship time, and then comes back at the same speed (which could be less than light speed), you're looking at over 8 years of Earth time. If the ship travels for one second of Earth time... now you're in FTL territory and what the ship perceives depends on your method of supposedly being able to do that, but either way two seconds of Earth time have elapsed by the time it gets back.
Science is there to tell us the how of the world, religion is there to tell us the why.
Philosophy is there to tell us the why. Religion is just a small subset of philosophy.
Science is there to tell us the "how...", or equivalently the "why is...". That is a question of cause (or as the ancients would put it, "efficient cause").
The other question is not "why..." simpliciter, but "how come", or better put, "why ought...". That is a question of purpose (or as the ancients would put it, "final cause").
Ethics is there to answer that question. Ethics is just one branch of philosophy. Religion is one approach to philosophy (or a competitor to philosophy, depending on whether you construe philosophy as a subject matter or a methodology). Both religion and philosophy touch on the latter question of ethics, and the former question, the "why is".
Science is what we got once philosophy mostly settled on an answer to the question "how can we tell what is and what caused that to be?" and moved on to the "what is and what caused that to be?" directly. Religion still disagrees on the "how can we tell" version of that question and still puts forth its own answers to the more direct question. There is still minor quibbling among philosophers about how exactly to flesh out the "how can we tell" version, but in broad strokes we've collectively either settled on science more-or-less, or rejected it for religion.
The only reason why ethics is still seen as within the domain of philosophy (more so than science) is that philosophers haven't really settled on an answer to the question "how can we tell what ought to be and what serves that purpose?" There are religious and religion-like answers to that question and to the more direct question "what ought to be and what serves that purpose?", and more science-like answers to both of those questions as well. It hasn't yet settled down to a broad consensus plus some stubborn dissenters like the factual questions have, so this is the more active area of philosophy, but that doesn't make this the sole subject of philosophy.
Point being, the non-overlapping magesteria are not the scientific/factual and the philosophical/religious/normative:, they are the factual and the normative. Philosophy and religion both have things to say about both the factual and the normative; science is a philosophical position on the factual, generally opposed to religious positions on the factual; and there are philosophical positions on the normative opposed to religions positions on the normative, less refined but slowly approaching the normative equivalent of science.
Representative democracy does not necessarily add any protection of the minority over a direct democracy.
The term you're looking for is a limited democracy, in particular a constitutionally limited democracy, more particularly a constitutionally limited liberal democracy; where basic principles of individual liberty are held to be the supreme law of the land and not subject to a vote, though all the details of implementing them (and other public matters) may be.
No need to be humans. Be slaves and work 60+ hours a week, 49 weeks a year.
You think people these days get three whole weeks off work per year?
I just turned 30, have a bachelor's degree, have been working since before I graduated high school (while schooling too), and am now finally approaching a median income -- overall I'd place myself around the lower end of middle class. For my 30th birthday, I just I took my first week-long vacation in the past five years; and even that wasn't really a full week, it was Wednesday-Sunday. Before the economy tanked, I dared to try to take two week-long vacations per year, and wasn't always successful at that -- and when I managed it, it wasn't always a good idea financially, and I found myself wishing I hadn't.
I dare say that most people in this country would love to only work 49 weeks a year. Or love to be able to afford it, at least, as there's plenty of people who would love to have 49 whole weeks of paying work a year, and there are probably plenty of people who take time off anyway even when they really can't afford it.
WTF makes you think you know the mind and reasons of an omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, triune being who created a universe. I'd say He can make it any damn way He pleases, and there's no reason that can't include a lot of what you call "non-optimal" design, but may in fact accomplish his purposes perfectly.
I specifically did not comment on what would or wouldn't be an optimal anything. I merely pointed out that God, if he is guiding evolution, has apparently scrapped his work and started over again a whole lot of times, which indicates that he doesn't think it's optimal.
What makes you think "optimal" evolution would be a goal anyway?
The optimum is whatever best satisfied the goals. Whatever God's purpose is, if he was really all knowing and all powerful he would just get right to it, and wouldn't be futzing around for billions of years starting over again and again. I could see, maybe, building something in stages, gradually, progressively; but dead-ends and do-overs indicate that whoever if anyone is behind things either doesn't know what he's trying to do or hasn't figured out how to do it yet.
As far as i've ever read the Bible, and i've done a hell of a lot of that, the Hebrew/Christian/Muslim God seems to value freedom and trial and error and a big, wild, diverse creation and never once gives any hint that he cares about things on this Earth being optimal.
True, actually, the God depicted in the texts claiming his existence certainly doesn't seem like an all-knowing, all-powerful, or for that matter all-good being at all. Nevertheless he is claimed to be perfect in every way. Just more evidence that the whole story is bullshit. Why would an all-knowing God need to send some angels down to Sodom to see if it was really as wicked as he had heard? Wouldn't he just know? Why would an all-good God need Abraham to remind him to spare the lives of the innocent there? Wouldn't that have been part of his benevolent plan from the start?
Just another man creating God in your own likeness.
Not at all. I am an imperfect, fallible being. If I created a God in my own likeness he would be the same. Well-meaning, sure; knowledgeable, sure; capable, sure; but by no means perfect. It's the traditional theists who claim (despite the testimony of their own holy book) that their God is perfectly omni-everything.
Take a theology class at a local seminary if you want to know a bit about what God's revealed about Himself instead of what your very finite brain has invented about Him.
How about you take a philosophy class at a local university and learn a little critical thinking and how to operate safely within the limits of your very finite brain instead of leaping to conclusions beyond its grasp.
It totally depends on your perspective. One could consistently argue that the random process itself is a process chosen by an omniscient God for the promulgation of life and the exploration of the massive search space that is "the physical universe".
An omniscient God doesn't need to explore or search. He just sees it all in front of him already. He doesn't need to use some mechanism to find the best possibility for his purposes; he knows exactly what it is already. That was my point: trial and error indicates imperfection. And if evolution is maybe imperfectly guided, but partly still random, that then raises the question of how guided it is, and, well, there doesn't seem to be any suggestion in evidence that it's guided at all. All the "random" mutations don't seem to be heading toward any definite goal.
You're asserting that God would choose near term efficiency (direct conversion from single celled life to humans) over long term capability, but that's getting into the mind of God, just like young earth creationists do.
The concept of a God building some kind of model universe for the sake of it being an interesting universe goes against the concept of a personal God personally interested in us human people here on Earth, the kind who would employ or direct any mechanism toward any end like us humans existing. And you've got a deist God who just wound up his toy universe and watches it spin, then well, you've abandoned the suggestion that the apparently random mutations in evolution are God nudging things in the right way.
Some folks believe we should just let God be God and stop trying to impute behaviors to Him/Her.
If you're going to allow God to signify just a big unknown, then any claim made about God isn't claiming anything definite, and "God did it" doesn't really mean anything at all. You could say it about absolutely anything and everything with equal significance and equal evidence. God guided evolution. God is making me write this post. God made Hitler kill six million Jews. What does that mean? How would you tell the difference between any of those and their negations?
What God's standards of optimal are isn't really an issue for my point. If you walk into my studio and see a bunch of crumpled-up incomplete sketches in my trash can, you can conclude that apparently I've been having some trouble getting what I wanted to draw to come out right, without having any idea of what constitutes "come out right" in my mind. That I had to scrap it and start over again and again indicates that, in my own opinion of my work, I didn't do something right. If God is supposed to be all-knowing and all-powerful, he could sit down at the canvas and draw the perfect image -- whatever that may be -- in one go. The fact that there are balled up incomplete sketches piling out of the garbage indicates that whatever artist there may be, he is not so perfect; and if there were some explanation for how random sketches might get generated and discarded, we wouldn't need to postulate any artist at all. Trial-and-error indicates some lack of knowledge or power; whether it's a completely dumb automated process or some kind of imperfect agent at work may be an open question, but it indicates that there certainly isn't some flawless maestro pulling all the strings.
The concept of the supernatural is incoherent. If it interacts with the natural world, we can observe it through those interactions just like we observe any other part of the natural world, and it's as good as natural itself. If it doesn't interact with the natural world, then it doesn't interact with us, seeing as we live in the natural world, and we can never have any experience of it whatsoever and have no reason to stipulate its existence or for that matter care whether or not it exists since for all intents and purposes it may as well not.
In any case all we have to go on is our experience of the natural world, and a choice to either assume there is some sense to be made of that experience, or to assume there is no sense to be made of it. We can't really know either way, we can only assume, but to assume the latter is simply to give up on trying to make sense of it (even if we potentially could), so we rationally must always assume the former, and try to make sense of it as best we can. That means assuming that there are explanations, but never assuming what they are (for assuming a given explanation stops you from trying to make sense of things just as much as assuming there are no explanations does); just moving gradually forward with progressive tentative hypotheses. In other words, doing science.
Anything else is irrational, and someone disagreeing with that "premise" doesn't change that. It's possible to start from an incorrect premise, and it's possible to argue about premises. it just pushes the argument back further, from science to epistemology in this case, and I think I have a pretty sound argument here in favor of a scientific epistemology. I've only glossed over it very briefly here, but I'm happy to write you an essay about it if you have a problem with this short version.
If we're allowing that any intelligence behind the universe may be incomprehensible (and the universe it's behind thus likewise incomprehensible), then we're down to an unprovable assumption either way: either we assume the universe is comprehensible, or we assume it is not. Since we can only make an assumption either way, there can be no logical argument for or against either proposition.
But there can be a pragmatic one.
If the universe may or may not be comprehensible, but we can't know and can only assume either way (and must, by our actions, tacitly make one assumption or the other), then there are four possibilities: - We assume the universe is incomprehensible, and it is, so we never comprehend it and never could. - We assume the universe is incomprehensible, but it's not, so we never comprehend it even though we could have if we had tried. - We assume the universe is comprehensible, but it's not, so we never comprehend it no matter how hard we try. - We assume the universe is comprehensible, and it is, and eventually we manage to comprehend it.
The only chance we have of ever comprehending the universe is if we (at least tacitly) assume that it is comprehensible. So since we're making a baseless assumption either way, pragmatically we ought to make the assumption the operation under which at least gives us a chance, instead of just giving up from the outset. That is the real harm of "God did it" explanations: they give up on understanding and just suggest that we cannot understand. It's a quitter's answer.
Thus given that assumption that the universe is comprehensible, the workings of any God there might be behind it must be as well, at least insofar as they effect the universe and are thus evident to us at all. So to the extent that the evidence suggests there is no comprehensible design behind the universe, the evidence suggests that there is no design behind the universe at all. "There's a design, we just can't understand it" is merely giving up trying to understand.
Not that this undermines your overall point, but I get tired of hearing this. I'm tempted to blame Indiana Jones but I'm not certain that's the origin of this meme. Science very much does deal in truth. Capitalizing the "T" doesn't make it some mystical transcendent concept. A descriptive proposition is true to the extent that it accurately describes reality. Science is all about coming up with accurate descriptions of reality, and is therefore all about the search for truth.
How you should make the point I think you're trying to make is to say that science does not "state as truth" as the GPP wrote; it searches for truth. Since there is an infinite amount of truth to be found (in an infinite universe), it can never say that it has found all of the truth, but it can say with various degrees of certainty that "that's the truth over there". And most importantly, if it doesn't know where the truth on some question is to be found, it's happy to admit such, rather than make up some bullshit just so it can claim to have found the truth; but at the same time, it always assumes that there is some truth to be found, even if it hasn't found it yet.
"The answer is probably..." and "We don't know yet" are the twin mantas of science.
The evidence that mutations are "random" (at least in the sense of "not deliberate") is that there are so many dead ends in the evolutionary tree. Most species which have ever lived are now extinct with no descendants. So either God is grossly incompetent and makes a lot of mistakes (which, being mistakes and thus not deliberate, are just as "random" as science holds mutations to be), or he's not involved at all. Cause if he was involved and was as omniscient as he's supposed to be, primordial microbes would have evolved directly into the optimal spread of species with no "shit no that's not right, scratch that and try again" along the way. (And that's not even getting into whether the present spread of species extant in the world today is anything close to "optimal" by any definition. And never mind whether the "design" of any single species is "optimal" in any sense either).
The tree of life we see around us and in the fossil record looks like a huge (and ongoing) process of trial and error, with nature throwing random shit at the wall and seeing what sticks (most of it doesn't for long), NOT an intelligent, deliberate process of some omniscient designer rolling out new features in his target product line by stages.
(And for those who don't get the joke: No, the modern Democrats and Republicans didn't used to be one party, though there was a party called the Democratic-Republicans. When their opponents the Federalists collapsed, the Democratic-Republicans split into the Democrats and the Whigs. Then the Whigs collapsed and the new Republican party filled the void, and those are the parties we've had since around the Civil War, though they've both changed enough over that time that historians consider there to have been three distinct party systems composed of those two parties, each as unique as the aforementioned first [Democratic-Republican vs Federalist] and second [Democrat vs Whig] party systems).
From a pedantic aspie point of view you're correct
You know, I don't have Asperger's, but it's really offensive when you use it derogatorily like that. Not offensive to me for implying that I have it, but offensive for implying that there's something wrong with people who do.
tl;dr If it's unconditionally true or false, stating a condition is redundant and confusing.
But we're not talking about something being unconditionally true. We're talking about "only on the condition that he denounces them will he possibly be electable"; which doesn't say that he definitely will be electable on that condition, but that that condition is a prerequisite for his electability. That's an "only if". An "if" would say that "on the condition that he denounces them, he will definitely be electable"; which leaves open the possibility that he might be electable anyway, but that his denouncing them will guarantee that he's electable.
"If P, then Q" means that P is sufficient for Q: that if you have P, you'll definitely get Q (and you might get Q anyway even if you don't have P). "Only if P, then Q" means that P is necessary for Q: that unless you have P, you will never get Q (and you might not get Q anyway even if you do have P).
GGP was saying the latter: that a necessary condition for Paul's electability is his denouncing slavery and misogyny. You inferred from that that just denouncing slavery and misogyny would be enough to make him electable, which doesn't follow. He needs to denounce slavery and misogyny to be electable, but that isn't necessarily enough by itself to make him electable.
For another example: I can continue living only if I have ready access to oxygen, but that doesn't mean that so long as I have access to oxygen I cannot die. Oxygen is necessary, but not sufficient, for life.
If you're talking about what people should or shouldn't do, or any other kind of "should", you're talking about morality. Unless you're suggesting that the government isn't in the business of telling people "don't do that" (and backing that up with force, no less), then it sure seems like enforcing morality is the role of the government.
Conversely stated, if it isn't worth the government enforcing it, it's not really a moral issue. The problem is a lot of people have an inflated sense of morality based off the whims of some mythical sky fairy, whereas the law in a liberal democracy is based on (generally speaking) living and letting live -- it's not wrong unless it hurts someone else. So to those people, what the government is in the business of doing has a small intersection with what they consider "morality". But what they consider morality is wrong, and people who value liberty do themselves a disservice to accede to their mistaken conception of morality.
No, it implies that only if he denounces them that will he be electable.
They sound similar but it's literally the inverse logical connector: "If he does that he will be electable" = (He denounces them) --> (He will be electable) "Only if he does that will he be electable" = (He denounces them) -- (He will be electable)
On the contrary, you're suggesting that women making a complaint of rape shouldn't be believe by default. In other words, you're saying that these women are guilty of making a false report unless they prove themselves to be innocent. I'm going to suggest that you hadn't fully thought through the implications of your statement.
It sounds like you haven't fully thought through the statement of yours. If presuming the accused innocent until proven guilty means presuming the accusation false until it's proven true, then we (ostensibly) do that with all crimes, and it's an important founding principle of our legal system. Subverting that is precisely the danger that the GPP is wary of; to let accusation carry the presumption of guilt, at least for some certain crimes we're sufficiently worked up about. (And in that case, why not presume murder suspects guilty until proven innocent too?)
Kang: "Abortions for all!" Crowd: "Boo!" Kang: "Very well, no abortions for anyone!" Crowd: "Boo!" Kang: "Hmm.... abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!" Crowd: "Yaaaay!"
Point being the debate over abortion is not between two extremes (nobody is saying "abort all babies"), it's between an extreme and a middle ground.
That's not necessarily to say that the middle ground is always right, however; in a debate between "kill all puppies" and "don't kill any puppies", "only kill some puppies" hardly seems like the reasoned position to take just because it's a middle ground. Not that I'm saying that debate is analogous to the abortion debate, either.
You must not live in California. The cancer warnings don’t tend to show up on food...
You must not eat out much. All fast food restaurants in California and many other higher-class restaurants have a warning that their food contains... something, I don't even remember what (fat lot of good the signs do eh), which Is Known To The State of California To Cause Cancer, followed be a caveat that they don't add this chemical to their food, it's just something that's created when you fry things or roast coffee.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true in the short run. But in the long run, voting for a third party causes the major parties to move in that direction to win these voters back.
Very true, and voting third party can also have other benefits. You just have to do it smartly.
You only risk letting "the greater evil" win if you live in a swing state. If your state is solidly for one of the major parties, you can safely vote third party without risking the vote affecting the major parties. So for example, living in California, I can assume that Obama will win my state not matter how I vote, and so I can vote for whatever third party I feel like without worrying about "spoiling" anything (depending on which I would otherwise support, either victory is assured or it is impossible, either way there's no point wasting effort fighting about it).
So if you live in a swing state, yes, vote the lesser of the two evils who are most likely to win. If you don't, however, voting for your preferred third party will get you several other benefits, besides the one quoted above (major party platforms shift to try to recapture the third party vote):
- It increases the size of the third party supporter bloc (both for that party, and for the concept of third parties), which helps promote the third party (and the concept of third parties) even if they didn't win. Since they weren't going to win anyway, and your non-swing state was going the way it did anyway, this is pure win at no risk here.
But besides that obvious benefit:
- If people in your non-swing state start doing this who would otherwise vote for your state's shoe-in candidate (e.g. if California liberals start voting Green instead of Democrat), then that eventually makes your state a swing state, and suddenly your vote matters a whole lot more! This combined with parent poster's point about major parties courting the third party vote, but even better: since you're not a swing state, they care a lot about capturing your vote, giving your preferred third party's platform a major influence on them.
- That second point can however go the other way, e.g. if California conservatives start voting Libertarian, that just entrenches California more firmly as a Democrat state, with a large Democrat bloc vs smaller Republican and Libertarian blocs. However, since (for example) California is already a firmly Democrat state, you can feel free to take this all the way and eat up all the Republican votes you want, go right ahead and kill the Republican party in California, you won't be making any difference in who wins there so still no harm in letting the "greater evil" win since (for a conservative who ranks Libertarians > Republicans > Democrats) they would have anyway. So you can feel free to "spoil" the "lesser evil" all you want, and if you can manage it, go on to supplant them, e.g. turn the California election into Democrats vs Libertarians instead of Democrats vs Republicans.
Combining all these effects, voting third party in a non-swing state can have major influences. To use my own state for an example again, if we assume (perhaps questionably) that a large bloc of liberals generally prefer Greens > Democrats > Republicans, and a large bloc of conservatives generally prefer Libertarians > Republicans > Democrats, then if those people all follow this strategy instead of abstaining or voting for "the lesser evil", California could end up with a more notable Green party, Democrats eagerly adopting a lot of Green policies to try to keep the liberal vote, and at least a much larger Libertarian party if not one wholly supplanting the Republican party, and Republicans eagerly adopting a lot of Libertarian policies.
Suddenly you've got something almost resembling a healthy multi-party system, all without anyone ever risking "the greater evil" getting into office. And all this in what's now quite possibly a swing state, so very influential on national politics, and either way having an inevitable run-on effect o
You have it completely backwards.
Congress has no power to make laws regarding religious institutions. That means that it can't either ban or penalize any religion, nor give them any special support or breaks.
Churches' get only the exact same tax exemptions as any other 501(c) charitable organization does. And the same laws that apply to anybody anywhere still apply to those people when they are inside of a church, so I'm not sure what you're on about regarding underage drinking in churches.
(I'll admit I'm not sure how the famous "peyote isn't illegal for Native Americans" rule fits into this, but I suspect there is some complication involving the fact that strictly speaking federally recognized tribes are distinct sovereign nations in a special protectorate relationship with the United States.)
If you want to outlaw fiat currency, you must outlaw interest-bearing loans.... All of them...
Awesome, lets do it. Interest (and rent more generally) is how a free market (a good thing) devolves into capitalism (a bad thing). Get rid of it and we can have free markets with none (or at least a significantly reduced portion) of the traditionally associated problems of capitalism.
Quite the opposite: liberty is the freedom to do as we please, so long as we do not infringe on the equal liberty of others, which we ought (note spelling) not do. It is not limited by "act as the law says", which necessarily implies some set of arbitrary legal rules.
To quote Jefferson:
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
Anything is justifiable to stop terrorism, government censorship makes it difficult to stop terrorism, therefore government censorship must be stopped.
Anything is justifiable to stop terrorism, government surveillance is necessary to stop terrorism, therefore government censorship is justifiable.
I see what you did there.
Here's a thought exercise: You have a FTL ship that can reach Alpha Centuri in a second. You then make a U-turn and come back to Earth a second later. How much time has elapsed on Earth? How much time for the passenger of the ship?
Whose second did the trip take? An Earth second? A ship second?
When speaking of sublight but still relativistic speeds (e.g. 0.999c), one second of travel for the ship could be aeons on Earth. One second of Earth time would be an imperceptible instant of ship time.
Since you're using Alpha Centauri for an example, which is 4ly away, if we just say the ship travels at whatever speed necessary to get there in 1 second of ship time, and then comes back at the same speed (which could be less than light speed), you're looking at over 8 years of Earth time. If the ship travels for one second of Earth time... now you're in FTL territory and what the ship perceives depends on your method of supposedly being able to do that, but either way two seconds of Earth time have elapsed by the time it gets back.
Thank God It's You!
Science is there to tell us the how of the world, religion is there to tell us the why.
Philosophy is there to tell us the why. Religion is just a small subset of philosophy.
Science is there to tell us the "how...", or equivalently the "why is...". That is a question of cause (or as the ancients would put it, "efficient cause").
The other question is not "why..." simpliciter, but "how come", or better put, "why ought...". That is a question of purpose (or as the ancients would put it, "final cause").
Ethics is there to answer that question. Ethics is just one branch of philosophy. Religion is one approach to philosophy (or a competitor to philosophy, depending on whether you construe philosophy as a subject matter or a methodology). Both religion and philosophy touch on the latter question of ethics, and the former question, the "why is".
Science is what we got once philosophy mostly settled on an answer to the question "how can we tell what is and what caused that to be?" and moved on to the "what is and what caused that to be?" directly. Religion still disagrees on the "how can we tell" version of that question and still puts forth its own answers to the more direct question. There is still minor quibbling among philosophers about how exactly to flesh out the "how can we tell" version, but in broad strokes we've collectively either settled on science more-or-less, or rejected it for religion.
The only reason why ethics is still seen as within the domain of philosophy (more so than science) is that philosophers haven't really settled on an answer to the question "how can we tell what ought to be and what serves that purpose?" There are religious and religion-like answers to that question and to the more direct question "what ought to be and what serves that purpose?", and more science-like answers to both of those questions as well. It hasn't yet settled down to a broad consensus plus some stubborn dissenters like the factual questions have, so this is the more active area of philosophy, but that doesn't make this the sole subject of philosophy.
Point being, the non-overlapping magesteria are not the scientific/factual and the philosophical/religious/normative:, they are the factual and the normative. Philosophy and religion both have things to say about both the factual and the normative; science is a philosophical position on the factual, generally opposed to religious positions on the factual; and there are philosophical positions on the normative opposed to religions positions on the normative, less refined but slowly approaching the normative equivalent of science.
Representative democracy does not necessarily add any protection of the minority over a direct democracy.
The term you're looking for is a limited democracy, in particular a constitutionally limited democracy, more particularly a constitutionally limited liberal democracy; where basic principles of individual liberty are held to be the supreme law of the land and not subject to a vote, though all the details of implementing them (and other public matters) may be.
No need to be humans. Be slaves and work 60+ hours a week, 49 weeks a year.
You think people these days get three whole weeks off work per year?
I just turned 30, have a bachelor's degree, have been working since before I graduated high school (while schooling too), and am now finally approaching a median income -- overall I'd place myself around the lower end of middle class. For my 30th birthday, I just I took my first week-long vacation in the past five years; and even that wasn't really a full week, it was Wednesday-Sunday. Before the economy tanked, I dared to try to take two week-long vacations per year, and wasn't always successful at that -- and when I managed it, it wasn't always a good idea financially, and I found myself wishing I hadn't.
I dare say that most people in this country would love to only work 49 weeks a year. Or love to be able to afford it, at least, as there's plenty of people who would love to have 49 whole weeks of paying work a year, and there are probably plenty of people who take time off anyway even when they really can't afford it.
WTF makes you think you know the mind and reasons of an omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, triune being who created a universe. I'd say He can make it any damn way He pleases, and there's no reason that can't include a lot of what you call "non-optimal" design, but may in fact accomplish his purposes perfectly.
I specifically did not comment on what would or wouldn't be an optimal anything. I merely pointed out that God, if he is guiding evolution, has apparently scrapped his work and started over again a whole lot of times, which indicates that he doesn't think it's optimal.
What makes you think "optimal" evolution would be a goal anyway?
The optimum is whatever best satisfied the goals. Whatever God's purpose is, if he was really all knowing and all powerful he would just get right to it, and wouldn't be futzing around for billions of years starting over again and again. I could see, maybe, building something in stages, gradually, progressively; but dead-ends and do-overs indicate that whoever if anyone is behind things either doesn't know what he's trying to do or hasn't figured out how to do it yet.
As far as i've ever read the Bible, and i've done a hell of a lot of that, the Hebrew/Christian/Muslim God seems to value freedom and trial and error and a big, wild, diverse creation and never once gives any hint that he cares about things on this Earth being optimal.
True, actually, the God depicted in the texts claiming his existence certainly doesn't seem like an all-knowing, all-powerful, or for that matter all-good being at all. Nevertheless he is claimed to be perfect in every way. Just more evidence that the whole story is bullshit. Why would an all-knowing God need to send some angels down to Sodom to see if it was really as wicked as he had heard? Wouldn't he just know? Why would an all-good God need Abraham to remind him to spare the lives of the innocent there? Wouldn't that have been part of his benevolent plan from the start?
Just another man creating God in your own likeness.
Not at all. I am an imperfect, fallible being. If I created a God in my own likeness he would be the same. Well-meaning, sure; knowledgeable, sure; capable, sure; but by no means perfect. It's the traditional theists who claim (despite the testimony of their own holy book) that their God is perfectly omni-everything.
Take a theology class at a local seminary if you want to know a bit about what God's revealed about Himself instead of what your very finite brain has invented about Him.
How about you take a philosophy class at a local university and learn a little critical thinking and how to operate safely within the limits of your very finite brain instead of leaping to conclusions beyond its grasp.
It totally depends on your perspective. One could consistently argue that the random process itself is a process chosen by an omniscient God for the promulgation of life and the exploration of the massive search space that is "the physical universe".
An omniscient God doesn't need to explore or search. He just sees it all in front of him already. He doesn't need to use some mechanism to find the best possibility for his purposes; he knows exactly what it is already. That was my point: trial and error indicates imperfection. And if evolution is maybe imperfectly guided, but partly still random, that then raises the question of how guided it is, and, well, there doesn't seem to be any suggestion in evidence that it's guided at all. All the "random" mutations don't seem to be heading toward any definite goal.
You're asserting that God would choose near term efficiency (direct conversion from single celled life to humans) over long term capability, but that's getting into the mind of God, just like young earth creationists do.
The concept of a God building some kind of model universe for the sake of it being an interesting universe goes against the concept of a personal God personally interested in us human people here on Earth, the kind who would employ or direct any mechanism toward any end like us humans existing. And you've got a deist God who just wound up his toy universe and watches it spin, then well, you've abandoned the suggestion that the apparently random mutations in evolution are God nudging things in the right way.
Some folks believe we should just let God be God and stop trying to impute behaviors to Him/Her.
If you're going to allow God to signify just a big unknown, then any claim made about God isn't claiming anything definite, and "God did it" doesn't really mean anything at all. You could say it about absolutely anything and everything with equal significance and equal evidence. God guided evolution. God is making me write this post. God made Hitler kill six million Jews. What does that mean? How would you tell the difference between any of those and their negations?
What God's standards of optimal are isn't really an issue for my point. If you walk into my studio and see a bunch of crumpled-up incomplete sketches in my trash can, you can conclude that apparently I've been having some trouble getting what I wanted to draw to come out right, without having any idea of what constitutes "come out right" in my mind. That I had to scrap it and start over again and again indicates that, in my own opinion of my work, I didn't do something right. If God is supposed to be all-knowing and all-powerful, he could sit down at the canvas and draw the perfect image -- whatever that may be -- in one go. The fact that there are balled up incomplete sketches piling out of the garbage indicates that whatever artist there may be, he is not so perfect; and if there were some explanation for how random sketches might get generated and discarded, we wouldn't need to postulate any artist at all. Trial-and-error indicates some lack of knowledge or power; whether it's a completely dumb automated process or some kind of imperfect agent at work may be an open question, but it indicates that there certainly isn't some flawless maestro pulling all the strings.
The concept of the supernatural is incoherent. If it interacts with the natural world, we can observe it through those interactions just like we observe any other part of the natural world, and it's as good as natural itself. If it doesn't interact with the natural world, then it doesn't interact with us, seeing as we live in the natural world, and we can never have any experience of it whatsoever and have no reason to stipulate its existence or for that matter care whether or not it exists since for all intents and purposes it may as well not.
In any case all we have to go on is our experience of the natural world, and a choice to either assume there is some sense to be made of that experience, or to assume there is no sense to be made of it. We can't really know either way, we can only assume, but to assume the latter is simply to give up on trying to make sense of it (even if we potentially could), so we rationally must always assume the former, and try to make sense of it as best we can. That means assuming that there are explanations, but never assuming what they are (for assuming a given explanation stops you from trying to make sense of things just as much as assuming there are no explanations does); just moving gradually forward with progressive tentative hypotheses. In other words, doing science.
Anything else is irrational, and someone disagreeing with that "premise" doesn't change that. It's possible to start from an incorrect premise, and it's possible to argue about premises. it just pushes the argument back further, from science to epistemology in this case, and I think I have a pretty sound argument here in favor of a scientific epistemology. I've only glossed over it very briefly here, but I'm happy to write you an essay about it if you have a problem with this short version.
If we're allowing that any intelligence behind the universe may be incomprehensible (and the universe it's behind thus likewise incomprehensible), then we're down to an unprovable assumption either way: either we assume the universe is comprehensible, or we assume it is not. Since we can only make an assumption either way, there can be no logical argument for or against either proposition.
But there can be a pragmatic one.
If the universe may or may not be comprehensible, but we can't know and can only assume either way (and must, by our actions, tacitly make one assumption or the other), then there are four possibilities:
- We assume the universe is incomprehensible, and it is, so we never comprehend it and never could.
- We assume the universe is incomprehensible, but it's not, so we never comprehend it even though we could have if we had tried.
- We assume the universe is comprehensible, but it's not, so we never comprehend it no matter how hard we try.
- We assume the universe is comprehensible, and it is, and eventually we manage to comprehend it.
The only chance we have of ever comprehending the universe is if we (at least tacitly) assume that it is comprehensible. So since we're making a baseless assumption either way, pragmatically we ought to make the assumption the operation under which at least gives us a chance, instead of just giving up from the outset. That is the real harm of "God did it" explanations: they give up on understanding and just suggest that we cannot understand. It's a quitter's answer.
Thus given that assumption that the universe is comprehensible, the workings of any God there might be behind it must be as well, at least insofar as they effect the universe and are thus evident to us at all. So to the extent that the evidence suggests there is no comprehensible design behind the universe, the evidence suggests that there is no design behind the universe at all. "There's a design, we just can't understand it" is merely giving up trying to understand.
Not that this undermines your overall point, but I get tired of hearing this. I'm tempted to blame Indiana Jones but I'm not certain that's the origin of this meme. Science very much does deal in truth. Capitalizing the "T" doesn't make it some mystical transcendent concept. A descriptive proposition is true to the extent that it accurately describes reality. Science is all about coming up with accurate descriptions of reality, and is therefore all about the search for truth.
How you should make the point I think you're trying to make is to say that science does not "state as truth" as the GPP wrote; it searches for truth. Since there is an infinite amount of truth to be found (in an infinite universe), it can never say that it has found all of the truth, but it can say with various degrees of certainty that "that's the truth over there". And most importantly, if it doesn't know where the truth on some question is to be found, it's happy to admit such, rather than make up some bullshit just so it can claim to have found the truth; but at the same time, it always assumes that there is some truth to be found, even if it hasn't found it yet.
"The answer is probably..." and "We don't know yet" are the twin mantas of science.
The evidence that mutations are "random" (at least in the sense of "not deliberate") is that there are so many dead ends in the evolutionary tree. Most species which have ever lived are now extinct with no descendants. So either God is grossly incompetent and makes a lot of mistakes (which, being mistakes and thus not deliberate, are just as "random" as science holds mutations to be), or he's not involved at all. Cause if he was involved and was as omniscient as he's supposed to be, primordial microbes would have evolved directly into the optimal spread of species with no "shit no that's not right, scratch that and try again" along the way. (And that's not even getting into whether the present spread of species extant in the world today is anything close to "optimal" by any definition. And never mind whether the "design" of any single species is "optimal" in any sense either).
The tree of life we see around us and in the fossil record looks like a huge (and ongoing) process of trial and error, with nature throwing random shit at the wall and seeing what sticks (most of it doesn't for long), NOT an intelligent, deliberate process of some omniscient designer rolling out new features in his target product line by stages.
It's always been a single Democratic-Republican party.
Not so! Between 1792 and 1824 there were also the Federalists. ;-)
(And for those who don't get the joke: No, the modern Democrats and Republicans didn't used to be one party, though there was a party called the Democratic-Republicans. When their opponents the Federalists collapsed, the Democratic-Republicans split into the Democrats and the Whigs. Then the Whigs collapsed and the new Republican party filled the void, and those are the parties we've had since around the Civil War, though they've both changed enough over that time that historians consider there to have been three distinct party systems composed of those two parties, each as unique as the aforementioned first [Democratic-Republican vs Federalist] and second [Democrat vs Whig] party systems).
this is probably the 'magic app' that causes the tech to go mainstream
I'm amused that you strategically avoided the usual term we use for the use which makes a technology go mainstream: "killer app".
From a pedantic aspie point of view you're correct
You know, I don't have Asperger's, but it's really offensive when you use it derogatorily like that. Not offensive to me for implying that I have it, but offensive for implying that there's something wrong with people who do.
tl;dr If it's unconditionally true or false, stating a condition is redundant and confusing.
But we're not talking about something being unconditionally true. We're talking about "only on the condition that he denounces them will he possibly be electable"; which doesn't say that he definitely will be electable on that condition, but that that condition is a prerequisite for his electability. That's an "only if". An "if" would say that "on the condition that he denounces them, he will definitely be electable"; which leaves open the possibility that he might be electable anyway, but that his denouncing them will guarantee that he's electable.
"If P, then Q" means that P is sufficient for Q: that if you have P, you'll definitely get Q (and you might get Q anyway even if you don't have P).
"Only if P, then Q" means that P is necessary for Q: that unless you have P, you will never get Q (and you might not get Q anyway even if you do have P).
GGP was saying the latter: that a necessary condition for Paul's electability is his denouncing slavery and misogyny. You inferred from that that just denouncing slavery and misogyny would be enough to make him electable, which doesn't follow. He needs to denounce slavery and misogyny to be electable, but that isn't necessarily enough by itself to make him electable.
For another example: I can continue living only if I have ready access to oxygen, but that doesn't mean that so long as I have access to oxygen I cannot die. Oxygen is necessary, but not sufficient, for life.
Enforcing morality is not the role of government.
If you're talking about what people should or shouldn't do, or any other kind of "should", you're talking about morality. Unless you're suggesting that the government isn't in the business of telling people "don't do that" (and backing that up with force, no less), then it sure seems like enforcing morality is the role of the government.
Conversely stated, if it isn't worth the government enforcing it, it's not really a moral issue. The problem is a lot of people have an inflated sense of morality based off the whims of some mythical sky fairy, whereas the law in a liberal democracy is based on (generally speaking) living and letting live -- it's not wrong unless it hurts someone else. So to those people, what the government is in the business of doing has a small intersection with what they consider "morality". But what they consider morality is wrong, and people who value liberty do themselves a disservice to accede to their mistaken conception of morality.
No, it implies that only if he denounces them that will he be electable.
They sound similar but it's literally the inverse logical connector:
"If he does that he will be electable" = (He denounces them) --> (He will be electable)
"Only if he does that will he be electable" = (He denounces them) -- (He will be electable)
On the contrary, you're suggesting that women making a complaint of rape shouldn't be believe by default. In other words, you're saying that these women are guilty of making a false report unless they prove themselves to be innocent. I'm going to suggest that you hadn't fully thought through the implications of your statement.
It sounds like you haven't fully thought through the statement of yours. If presuming the accused innocent until proven guilty means presuming the accusation false until it's proven true, then we (ostensibly) do that with all crimes, and it's an important founding principle of our legal system. Subverting that is precisely the danger that the GPP is wary of; to let accusation carry the presumption of guilt, at least for some certain crimes we're sufficiently worked up about. (And in that case, why not presume murder suspects guilty until proven innocent too?)
Kang: "Abortions for all!"
Crowd: "Boo!"
Kang: "Very well, no abortions for anyone!"
Crowd: "Boo!"
Kang: "Hmm.... abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!"
Crowd: "Yaaaay!"
Point being the debate over abortion is not between two extremes (nobody is saying "abort all babies"), it's between an extreme and a middle ground.
That's not necessarily to say that the middle ground is always right, however; in a debate between "kill all puppies" and "don't kill any puppies", "only kill some puppies" hardly seems like the reasoned position to take just because it's a middle ground. Not that I'm saying that debate is analogous to the abortion debate, either.
You must not live in California. The cancer warnings don’t tend to show up on food...
You must not eat out much. All fast food restaurants in California and many other higher-class restaurants have a warning that their food contains... something, I don't even remember what (fat lot of good the signs do eh), which Is Known To The State of California To Cause Cancer, followed be a caveat that they don't add this chemical to their food, it's just something that's created when you fry things or roast coffee.