No, I'm not a one issue voter. In fact, I voted for Kerry in 2004, if you must know. But, like many Christians, I wouldn't even consider voting for Bush except for the issue of abortion.
Thinking that abortion should be illegal is not the same thing as "theocracy," and you'd have to be a flaming, ignorant jackass to think it was. Ultimately, the abortion debate comes down to whether one thinks of an unborn fetus as person or property. The Christian church has a tradition of thinking of fetuses as person, but we are by no means alone in that. In fact, many faith traditions, and even secular ethics, have found the same thing.
No, the reason that all three branches are controlled by Republicans is that the Democrats decided 20-30 years ago to be the party of Abortion-on-demand. While I am a pacifist and am quite uncomfortable with Bush's foreign and economic policies, every 4 years I have to make a choice between a guaranteed continuation of the absurd notion of abortion as a "right" and Republicans.
The bottom line is that the Christian church has forbade abortion and infanticide (traditionally regarding them as equivalent) since at least the 1st century (see the Didache), and large numbers of Christians are going to have a hard time voting for a candidate who favors continued legalized infanticide. Don't like it? Then get the democratic party to stop the lock-step support for Roe v. Wade and send abortion back to the states, where it belongs.
As a minister formally of the Southern Baptist convention, I can tell you that there are a lot of Christians standing up to fundamentalism. The problem is that they don't tend to get the press. Instead, the press latches on to controversy (e.g. Pat Robertson's all-too-regular hoof-in-mouth disease) and, due to their largely secular bias, have created a caricature of American religion in the form of the religious right.
1. Large National Sales Tax on new goods--approx. 33%.
2. "Prefund" of 33% of the poverty line to every household in America (based on household size.) This means that people with very low incomes actually get more money than they pay. Progressive enough for ya?
3. Jobs program for the hundreds of thousands of leeches^H^H^H^H^H^Hbookkeepers, accountants, and IRS agents who will no longer take 30-40% of total tax revenue, off the top.
4....
5. Profit!
Of course, it will never pass, but it is a LOVELY idea.
I can believe that for some people it is beyond their psychological abilities to reduce their eating. But lock them in a room and limit them to 1000 calories a day, and they'll lose the weight. They'll also probably shoot you when they get out.
Maybe what some of these folks need is a stay in a psychiatric facility where their food intake can be controlled by someone other than themselves, and receive counseling. Somehow I think the idea of chronic overeating as a psychiatric disorder will not go over well, though.
Actually, I doubt it's beyond anybody's physiological ability, but I think it may well be beyond some of our economic abilities. Let me state, up front, that I am enormously overweight, at over 400 lbs. I can lose weight if I very carefully limit my food intake. But doing so requires an enormous amount of emotional, spiritual, and mental energy.
The problem is that I don't have the time to put out the energy (of all kinds) that weight loss requires. I work two jobs (one for God, and one for currency) and at the end of the day I'm/tired/, and I simply don't have the energy to ask myself how many calories my dinner has. I just want to eat something and collapse on the account.
The real bottom line of this article, along with related research into Syndrome X, etc. is that me and people like me are placed at an enormous disadvantage because, due to genetics or a virus or whatever, we are handicapped when it comes to weight loss. It's not that we are physiologically impossible to reduce eating, but that everything in our culture works against it and it just becomes too much damned hassle.
Our society makes allowances for people with other sorts of handicaps -- e.g. wheelchair ramps. Should we also make allowances for people with lousy metabolisms? For example... why shouldn't restaraunt chains be required to provide calorie counts on a meal, printed on the menu? All the fast food places already do this, but you have to ask for it, and it's much harder to get this information "on the fly" for non fast-food restaraunts. This information would would be especially helpful if it included the Glycemic Index.
You've spent a great deal of time and effort to get Eclipse setup, and are apparently using it with at least some success. However, you are debating whether to switch to something with less features because you're not sure if you need all of Eclipses features. Therefore, you are proposing to go to a very different, but very feature rich programming environment that will cost money?
Huh? If it's working, why switch?
I bet you were one of those "vi" types back in the day, weren't you? No editor can ever have too many features: Emacs all the way!
Now, if the ID advocates had their way, we would have just said, "Hey, God makes bees fly. Since I already know the real reason, there's no real reason to keep studying it." In fact, some of them will probably even go so far as to dismiss the findings as false because it conflicts with their notion that God must be responsible. If we listened to them, we wouldn't have possible future scientific and engineering discoveries, discoveries that could possibly lead to even more important work on truly world-changing devices.
Nonsense. This is a caricature of ID perpetuated by those who know nothing about it, haven't bothered to read the central works, etc. An ID advocate would (and no doubt will say), "Cool! We discovered the novel, innovative way that the Designer chose to make Bees fly!" The more religiously minded intelligent design sorts would say, "Ain't God grand?"
The bogus, idiotic, pseudo-scientific types opposing ID would say, "ooh! Here's an interesting finding that I can somehow stretch to attack ID," on the basis of a few off-hand remarks made by a few non-central ID advocates.
The claim that we don't know how bees fly is by no means central to ID. This is just propaganda.
Actually, many (most?) modern supercomputers run linux in a clustered environment. Cray's were a different story, of course, but the old Cray architecture is pretty much obsolete at this point.
Supercomputers aren't about "Ease of use." They're about speed per dollar. When WCC can beat Linux on price/performance, then people will stand up and take notice. Not before.
The significance attributed to searches is for a jury to decide, as a question of fact.
Bear in mind too that in murder trials a whole lot hinges on prior intent (i.e. the difference between execution and a few years in prison!) In the article cited, the plaintiff was found to have searched for a variety of information in support of the killing: information on how to kill, information on currents in the body of water where he ditched the body, etc. If I were on a jury, this sort of information would go a long way towards establishing prior intent--that is, this guy didn't just lose it and kill his wife in a fight, but planned it ahead of time.
It also goes to support the basics of the criminal act. I wouldn't vote to convict someone based on their internet searches alone, but when you discover that they sought information in advance on the method of execution used, the method of disposing the body used, and there is other circumstantial evidence to link them to the crime, it sure goes a long way towards eliminating reasonable doubt.
I am personally an athiest, and think that even though things are extraordinary, there was a lot of time for it to happen. I do think if there is any higher power that has any (even minor) interest in us obviously ID is a reality through at least minor guiding of mutations. To me the idea of a belief in God requires the belief that, at the very least, evolution is guided by ID. But that doesn't mean it should be in a science class. From what I am seeing ID could be its own class.
Here's the thing. The only point at which ID necessarily differs from the traditional scientific account is in its supposition of something more than random mutation involved in evolution. (Granted, neo-Darwinism makes it a bit less than random mutation, but I have yet to see the high school science text that gets into that.)
Now, let's stipulate for the moment that the earth is 4-5 billion years old (as ID and the mainstream scientific hypothesis both do), that some sort of evolution happened (as most forms of ID and MSH do): at that point, the only question under debate is the underlying telos of evolution. Is evolution random, or is it going towards some sort of end? And, even if it is random, can we say that "God is in the dice?" (which is more or less what I believe.)
You might well say that, even if there is a teleology to evolution, that is not a scientific question, and I would tend to agree. Science is the study of means, not ends. Yet surely if the supposition of a purposive element in evolution is a religious (or perhaps philosophical) question, then the insistence that there is no purpose is no more scientific?
Put another way, isn't the scientific establishment, by insisting on teaching to every high school student in America that evolution occurs without any underlying pattern imposing a religious viewpoint of its own? Namely, isn't it imposing deism at best, and perhaps a functional atheism? And isn't this overstepping the evidence by a good bit? (Elementary logic: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.)
Once you stop trying to interpret ID through the lense of creationism, it seems like what's going on here is a very significant and determined effort by an agenda-driven scientific establishment to surpress any interpretation that leaves room for divine involvement. From what I've seen, none of the bills on the table demand "equal time for God." Instead, they require that science teachers do much what you describe in your post: acknowledge that evolution is a theory, and that some have argued that there is a designer. It takes five minutes, and I really can't see how it does any harm unless someone is trying to use tax dollars to teach atheism. In fact, to me this seems nothing more than common courtesy to a minority in the population for whom it is very important.
Nothing makes an intelligent person more critical of religion than actually learning about a religion.
I disagree, with an appeal to counter-example. I am generally considered to be an intelligent person. I was a National Merit Finalist, got a 790 on my verbal GRE (700 on Math, but that was because I hadn't had a Math course in years when I took it). I regularly read two daily newspapers (WSJ and the Washington Post). I've managed to become reasonably well-off by investing and high salaries earned by my ability to manage complex computer-related "stuff". I'm also eligible for Mensa, although I can't see a point in joining. By any measure I'm aware of, I'm no slouch.
I also know a great deal about religion. In fact, pardon me for saying this, but I would wager that I know a lot more about Christianity than you ever learned. I have a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy with a concentration in religious studies (local state college), a Master of Divinity (at a denominational seminary), and am currently a Ph.D. candidate in New Testament Studies at a major state (i.e. secular) university. And I'm an ordained minister and work as a bivocational pastor of a small church. Bluntly, I almost certainly know more about Christian theology (including Catholic theology) than the nuns who taught you.
Yet, I'm quite religious.
Thus, your syllogism fails. Intelligent people don't become critical of religion as they learn about it, because I'm intelligent and well-informed, yet not critical of religion.
I went to catholic schools for a couple of years, and I can certainly agree that endless indoctrination on trivia doesn't lead to a vibrant faith. (Who really CARES how many sacraments there are, anyway!?) That's what tends to happen at parochial schools of all stripes, because American education at hte primary and secondary levels is more concerned with indoctrination than education.
What makes people critical of religion is when a pale shadow of it is shoved down their throat, and they aren't given a chance to figure out what they believe for themselves, and they think that's all there is. It happens in parochial schools, it happens in Sunday School, it happens in too many homes and from too many pulpits, and I agree that it stinks.
But don't think that this sort of thing represents all there is to know of Christianity. It doesn't.
I tend to agree, but that's Slashdot. I've had "excellent" Karma for so long that it hardly matters (before they stopped showing raw numbers, my positive Karma was 300+)
But how does ID help explain or predict anything? It is very vague, and can even include evolution (from my understanding).
Well... you've got to ask, "ID according to whom?" There are substantial differences between ID as presented by (for example) Behe and Dembski. Behe is, to my ear, the most scientifically sophisticated, but I'm no scientist. (I am a theologian, both Academically and in the religious sense. Theologically, I would agree with the OP that to interpret Genesis literally is silly. However, ID doesn't need to intepret Genesis literally, and that is one of the main points at which it is not the same thing as "creationism." Christian tradition has interpreted Genesis 1-12 figuratively since at least Origen, Augustine (4th century, one of the great theologians of all time even though I often disagree with him) specifically condemned a literalist reading of Gen 1-12, and you could make a strong argument that Paul's interpretations are figuratively motivated. )
In any case, ID in most forms is perfectly compatible with Evolution, differing from the mainstream in holding that Natural Selection is not a sufficient explanation for evolution. Frankly, I can't see what difference it makes, nor can I see why the scientific community is so stirred up about it. Stipulating that Evolution is the foundation of modern biology (although I can't see how) I can't see it makes a bit of difference whether that evolution is somehow guided by some sort of designer.
Intelligent Design is an absurd argument that rests on assigning the complexity of origins of one thing (say, for instance, very complicated molecules) to the infinately more complex and unlikely appearance of something that could have created these things (say, God).
Like many others who attack ID, you are illegitimately broadening the scope and beating up on a straw man. The only question in scope here is the question of species formation. Creation of the universe, etc., while many ID proponents certainly have strong opinions on it, is not part of the core theory, any more than it's part of the core theory of darwinism.
Consider this: can you not agree with evolution and support steady-state, Big Bang, or just "God made it"? The question of species formation is completely distinct from the cosmological question.
Until you can describe, in precise, technical, repeatable detail, HOW such force guided evolution, ID is at its base no different than creationism.
Here you arrive, unintended I'm sure, at the reason why Evolution is more an ideology than a scientific theory, just as Intelligent Design is. Namely, none of this is repeatable. You can't setup an experiment to show what did happen. Even if one could show conclusively that a designer could exist, it would still not prove that one/did/ exist, or that one actually took part int he design of the universe. And, I'm sad to say, none of it seems to be willing to consider falsifying evidence. This is the precise reason why Popper (more or less father of modern Philosophy of Science) rejected the notion that history could be scientific.
Let's make this clear once and for all that ID is nothing but another flavor or creationism. How many atheists are proponents of intelligent design?
And this is a lovely example of a circumstantial ad hominem. You are rejecting the argument, unexamined, because of the people who make it. And it stinks.
For the umpteenth time, ID is not an account of creation. Intelligent design is an account of how the species we observe on earth came about. It could well be that somewhere else little green men came about (either by direct divine creation or by evolution or what have you) and then came to earth and manipulated the design here by science and/or technology unknown.
You're drinking the establishment kool-aid by assuming that intelligent design is equivalent to creationism. It's not. It has different methods, different assumptions, and different explanations.
For the umpteenth time, Intelligent Design and creationism are not the same thing.
There are certainly many creationists who hold to intelligent design. However, there are creationists who regard the whole ID movement as missing the point.
Intelligent design argues (or attempts to argue) from scientific evidence, that evolution is not a sufficient explanation for different species without some sort of guiding force. Creationism argues that evolution is not compatible with Genesis.
These are very different things. There are people in the Intelligent Design community (e.g. Michael Behe) who are not fundamentalists and who would feel no need to defend Genesis as a literal account of the origins of the earth. It would be possible (although I have to admit I can't name a case) for someone of any religious persuasion to hold to Intelligent Design. The Intelligent Designer doesn't have to be the Christian God, nor does it even need to be a God at all. It could be little green men.
The assumption that intelligent design and creationism are the same thing is little more than a smeer campaign that allows people to completely bypass the arguments (which, whether they are faulty or not are not religious arguments) that ID proponents make in support of their position. The way the scientific community has attacked ID is sickening: it is almost always founded in ad hominem (circumstnatial and otherwise) attacks rather than actual criticism of their arguments.
For what it's worth, I am an ordained minister, but I am not a creationist. If anything, I regard the whole debate as irrelevant--no matter what your account of human origins, God's status as creator is secure in my book. But let's do try to understand the terms we throw around.
My first "real" job was at Christopher Newport University in 1991 (okay, 14 years--but prior to that I worked at a local computer store for several years and did fiddle with networks a little bit.) There I managed an integrated, campus-wide IP and IPX network. This was back when Gopher was state of the art.
Samsung, Infineon and Hynix have all admitted to fixing prices, they're now lawsuits from Rambus
They ARE? Wow, what a transformation! I knew confession was good for the soul, but... wow.
I strongly qualified my response in several ways. And, for what it's worth, I've been diagnosing networks for 15 years, so I feel qualified to have a strong opinion. When I see a network exhibiting the kind of erratic behavior described by the questioner, first thing I check is for a bad NIC, because 90% of the time that's the problem.
It certainly could be any of the things you mention. With the vagueness of the original post, it could even be a layer 7 problem (i.e. a crappy Windows server.) But with the piss-poor information provided, my money is still on an NIC.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm not a one issue voter. In fact, I voted for Kerry in 2004, if you must know. But, like many Christians, I wouldn't even consider voting for Bush except for the issue of abortion. Thinking that abortion should be illegal is not the same thing as "theocracy," and you'd have to be a flaming, ignorant jackass to think it was. Ultimately, the abortion debate comes down to whether one thinks of an unborn fetus as person or property. The Christian church has a tradition of thinking of fetuses as person, but we are by no means alone in that. In fact, many faith traditions, and even secular ethics, have found the same thing.
The bottom line is that the Christian church has forbade abortion and infanticide (traditionally regarding them as equivalent) since at least the 1st century (see the Didache), and large numbers of Christians are going to have a hard time voting for a candidate who favors continued legalized infanticide. Don't like it? Then get the democratic party to stop the lock-step support for Roe v. Wade and send abortion back to the states, where it belongs.
Most ID advocates DON'T believe that the earth is 6-10,000 years old. Once again, ID and creationism are not the same thing.
As a minister formally of the Southern Baptist convention, I can tell you that there are a lot of Christians standing up to fundamentalism. The problem is that they don't tend to get the press. Instead, the press latches on to controversy (e.g. Pat Robertson's all-too-regular hoof-in-mouth disease) and, due to their largely secular bias, have created a caricature of American religion in the form of the religious right.
2. "Prefund" of 33% of the poverty line to every household in America (based on household size.) This means that people with very low incomes actually get more money than they pay. Progressive enough for ya?
3. Jobs program for the hundreds of thousands of leeches^H^H^H^H^H^Hbookkeepers, accountants, and IRS agents who will no longer take 30-40% of total tax revenue, off the top.
4. ...
5. Profit!
Of course, it will never pass, but it is a LOVELY idea.
The problem is that I don't have the time to put out the energy (of all kinds) that weight loss requires. I work two jobs (one for God, and one for currency) and at the end of the day I'm /tired/, and I simply don't have the energy to ask myself how many calories my dinner has. I just want to eat something and collapse on the account.
The real bottom line of this article, along with related research into Syndrome X, etc. is that me and people like me are placed at an enormous disadvantage because, due to genetics or a virus or whatever, we are handicapped when it comes to weight loss. It's not that we are physiologically impossible to reduce eating, but that everything in our culture works against it and it just becomes too much damned hassle.
Our society makes allowances for people with other sorts of handicaps -- e.g. wheelchair ramps. Should we also make allowances for people with lousy metabolisms? For example ... why shouldn't restaraunt chains be required to provide calorie counts on a meal, printed on the menu? All the fast food places already do this, but you have to ask for it, and it's much harder to get this information "on the fly" for non fast-food restaraunts. This information would would be especially helpful if it included the Glycemic Index.
Huh? If it's working, why switch?
I bet you were one of those "vi" types back in the day, weren't you? No editor can ever have too many features: Emacs all the way!
The bogus, idiotic, pseudo-scientific types opposing ID would say, "ooh! Here's an interesting finding that I can somehow stretch to attack ID," on the basis of a few off-hand remarks made by a few non-central ID advocates.
The claim that we don't know how bees fly is by no means central to ID. This is just propaganda.
News like that makes me want a coke (rum optional.)
Actually, many (most?) modern supercomputers run linux in a clustered environment. Cray's were a different story, of course, but the old Cray architecture is pretty much obsolete at this point.
Supercomputers aren't about "Ease of use." They're about speed per dollar. When WCC can beat Linux on price/performance, then people will stand up and take notice. Not before.
Bear in mind too that in murder trials a whole lot hinges on prior intent (i.e. the difference between execution and a few years in prison!) In the article cited, the plaintiff was found to have searched for a variety of information in support of the killing: information on how to kill, information on currents in the body of water where he ditched the body, etc. If I were on a jury, this sort of information would go a long way towards establishing prior intent--that is, this guy didn't just lose it and kill his wife in a fight, but planned it ahead of time.
It also goes to support the basics of the criminal act. I wouldn't vote to convict someone based on their internet searches alone, but when you discover that they sought information in advance on the method of execution used, the method of disposing the body used, and there is other circumstantial evidence to link them to the crime, it sure goes a long way towards eliminating reasonable doubt.
Now, let's stipulate for the moment that the earth is 4-5 billion years old (as ID and the mainstream scientific hypothesis both do), that some sort of evolution happened (as most forms of ID and MSH do): at that point, the only question under debate is the underlying telos of evolution. Is evolution random, or is it going towards some sort of end? And, even if it is random, can we say that "God is in the dice?" (which is more or less what I believe.)
You might well say that, even if there is a teleology to evolution, that is not a scientific question, and I would tend to agree. Science is the study of means, not ends. Yet surely if the supposition of a purposive element in evolution is a religious (or perhaps philosophical) question, then the insistence that there is no purpose is no more scientific?
Put another way, isn't the scientific establishment, by insisting on teaching to every high school student in America that evolution occurs without any underlying pattern imposing a religious viewpoint of its own? Namely, isn't it imposing deism at best, and perhaps a functional atheism? And isn't this overstepping the evidence by a good bit? (Elementary logic: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.)
Once you stop trying to interpret ID through the lense of creationism, it seems like what's going on here is a very significant and determined effort by an agenda-driven scientific establishment to surpress any interpretation that leaves room for divine involvement. From what I've seen, none of the bills on the table demand "equal time for God." Instead, they require that science teachers do much what you describe in your post: acknowledge that evolution is a theory, and that some have argued that there is a designer. It takes five minutes, and I really can't see how it does any harm unless someone is trying to use tax dollars to teach atheism. In fact, to me this seems nothing more than common courtesy to a minority in the population for whom it is very important.
I also know a great deal about religion. In fact, pardon me for saying this, but I would wager that I know a lot more about Christianity than you ever learned. I have a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy with a concentration in religious studies (local state college), a Master of Divinity (at a denominational seminary), and am currently a Ph.D. candidate in New Testament Studies at a major state (i.e. secular) university. And I'm an ordained minister and work as a bivocational pastor of a small church. Bluntly, I almost certainly know more about Christian theology (including Catholic theology) than the nuns who taught you.
Yet, I'm quite religious.
Thus, your syllogism fails. Intelligent people don't become critical of religion as they learn about it, because I'm intelligent and well-informed, yet not critical of religion.
I went to catholic schools for a couple of years, and I can certainly agree that endless indoctrination on trivia doesn't lead to a vibrant faith. (Who really CARES how many sacraments there are, anyway!?) That's what tends to happen at parochial schools of all stripes, because American education at hte primary and secondary levels is more concerned with indoctrination than education.
What makes people critical of religion is when a pale shadow of it is shoved down their throat, and they aren't given a chance to figure out what they believe for themselves, and they think that's all there is. It happens in parochial schools, it happens in Sunday School, it happens in too many homes and from too many pulpits, and I agree that it stinks.
But don't think that this sort of thing represents all there is to know of Christianity. It doesn't.
In any case, ID in most forms is perfectly compatible with Evolution, differing from the mainstream in holding that Natural Selection is not a sufficient explanation for evolution. Frankly, I can't see what difference it makes, nor can I see why the scientific community is so stirred up about it. Stipulating that Evolution is the foundation of modern biology (although I can't see how) I can't see it makes a bit of difference whether that evolution is somehow guided by some sort of designer.
Consider this: can you not agree with evolution and support steady-state, Big Bang, or just "God made it"? The question of species formation is completely distinct from the cosmological question.
For the umpteenth time, ID is not an account of creation. Intelligent design is an account of how the species we observe on earth came about. It could well be that somewhere else little green men came about (either by direct divine creation or by evolution or what have you) and then came to earth and manipulated the design here by science and/or technology unknown.
You're drinking the establishment kool-aid by assuming that intelligent design is equivalent to creationism. It's not. It has different methods, different assumptions, and different explanations.
This is just one of example out of many of how Intelligent Design and creationism are not the same thing.
There are certainly many creationists who hold to intelligent design. However, there are creationists who regard the whole ID movement as missing the point.
Intelligent design argues (or attempts to argue) from scientific evidence, that evolution is not a sufficient explanation for different species without some sort of guiding force. Creationism argues that evolution is not compatible with Genesis.
These are very different things. There are people in the Intelligent Design community (e.g. Michael Behe) who are not fundamentalists and who would feel no need to defend Genesis as a literal account of the origins of the earth. It would be possible (although I have to admit I can't name a case) for someone of any religious persuasion to hold to Intelligent Design. The Intelligent Designer doesn't have to be the Christian God, nor does it even need to be a God at all. It could be little green men.
The assumption that intelligent design and creationism are the same thing is little more than a smeer campaign that allows people to completely bypass the arguments (which, whether they are faulty or not are not religious arguments) that ID proponents make in support of their position. The way the scientific community has attacked ID is sickening: it is almost always founded in ad hominem (circumstnatial and otherwise) attacks rather than actual criticism of their arguments.
For what it's worth, I am an ordained minister, but I am not a creationist. If anything, I regard the whole debate as irrelevant--no matter what your account of human origins, God's status as creator is secure in my book. But let's do try to understand the terms we throw around.
Go back to your hole, troll.
Samsung, Infineon and Hynix have all admitted to fixing prices, they're now lawsuits from Rambus They ARE? Wow, what a transformation! I knew confession was good for the soul, but ... wow.
It certainly could be any of the things you mention. With the vagueness of the original post, it could even be a layer 7 problem (i.e. a crappy Windows server.) But with the piss-poor information provided, my money is still on an NIC.