There have been plenty of investigation: physical experiments, attempts at communication, etc.
Citation needed. I have never heard of any experiment that a Christian would expect a useful result from. The only experiment you can make with God is a personal one - it will not give you
publishable results.
properties postulated for God by churches have shown not to be plausible/quote. Like what? It needs to be a core belief, not theological theorising - otherwise you might as well reject physics because many scientific theories have been falsified.
Here is where the Dawkins analogy breaks down. Suppose several astronauts, on separate missions all claimed to have seen the tea set? Would disbelief be so obvious then. Look at how many people have some sort of "religious experience".
Has anyone ever asked you at the point of a sword? Atheists also persecute believers (Pol Mot, Mao, Stalin etc.). Is that not equally bad?
I do not believe in a supernatural world because it helps me, but because I have experienced it - not in a big way, only a few, usually very good, people are privileged to do that, but enough to convince me. Many hundreds of millions of others have had similar experiences?
God has a measurable effect on the universe in the same way that a CPU has a measurable effect on a simulation, or Shakespeare has a measurable effect on The Tempest.
The idea of testing the effectiveness of prayers would only work if God (an infinite intelligence) is willing to cooperate.
Creation myths are parables, so what you test against reality depends on how you interpret them. I would claim that key elements of the Christian one are have been confirmed by science (original sin in particular).
The religious answer is that if you seek sincerely God may, depending on your needs, grant you a personal proof. There is no reason to think that God even wants everyone to be religious.
If you actually took the time to find out WHY people believe God exists, you would answer your own questions.
I think your brand of atheism is irrational. If hundreds of millions of sane people claimed that they had met people from starships, I would at least think their claims at least plausible. You dismiss it out of hand, because you have already decided its wrong.
For atheism to be even plausible you need to explain how so many people are simultaneously apparently delusional/hallucinating/whatever your explanation is, and apparently otherwise sane and normal.
The dark ages were caused by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire which was invaded by barbarians. What has that got to do with religion? The Eastern Roman Empire, with almost identical religious beliefs, did not suffer a dark age.
Muslim scholars were responsible for huge advances in maths and science, which is why we still use words like "algebra" and "algorithm".
People were not religious because they understood less. Almost everyone was religious in the 19th century. Can you find any scientific advance science then that has a significance for religious belief? Even where science does impinge on religion, it usually merely raises old questions that were already debated centuries or millennia : e.g. evolution and St Augustine's views on creation in potentia.
The decline in religion is a sociological phenomenon, not an intellectual one. People are now prosperous and do not want to follow religions that tell them that money is evil.
The roots of modern science lie in the theistic religions belief in a God who was a law maker, and hence the creator of a universe that follows laws.
Atheists are rather like a lot of Windows advocates - they have never actually seriously looked at another OS. Similarly, atheists are no idea why people believe any religion to be true, but start from the assumption that they are purely arbitrary. Has it occurred to you that these billions of people might have a reason for believing? Have you even considered what amount to hundreds of millions of eye witness accounts?
Buddhism and Scientology both require belief in the supernatural and revealed truth.
The Soviet Union (and China, and the Khmer Rouge) were explicitly atheist.
You are simply redefining inconvenient as religious, because you want to avoid admitting that all the worst mass murderers were atheists or indifferent to religion.
That is actually the closest I have seen to a sensible response to this. Slashdot needs a way of marking stories "flamebait".
Follow the links throught to Robert Sungenis's site. He is a complete nut case. He is a creationist, probably anti-semitic,conspiracy theorist. The "news alert" links on the front page of one of his sites include one to a site that claims that the Vatican has been infiltrated by "satanic cults".
I was a bit surprised by the last paragraph, about not scattering ashes. Several Catholics in my family have had their ashes scattered, but, then again, that is in a country where scattering ashes is traditional, whereas these guidelines are for Australia.
First you say that Linux is too hard for developers, then you say that it works well for developers but not for end users.
Apart from sound (and that is not too hard a problem, given everyone uses Pulseaudio these days, and it can play ALSA and OSS stuff if the distro configures it correctly, and ALSA can also emulate OSS), I have never heard either developers or end users complain.
Most of the most ambitious (and richest) people I know are over-weight, because they got rich by putting in long hours at the office, thereby reducing the time they have for exercise.
On the other hand, nice hard manual labour makes people fit.
Instead what I see is a lot of corporations wanting to reassert control over Cuba so they can rape its resources and access a source of cheap labor.
That is usual definition of "a democracy friendly to the US and its interests"
Republicans have had years to seriously screw it up and twist the US into something it wasn't intended to be by its founders.
US foreign policy has been much the same for a long time, under both Republican and Democrat governments.
I don't think Communism works very well, but it might just be that it has served the interests of Cuba well enough.
Communism works quite well in the third world because the economies are simpler (so central planning works better) and they often lack a lot of what is needed for capitalism to work (well-judged regulation to slap down monopolies, honest enough government to prevent interventions that distort markets, etc.)
God does not want people to breach state mandated monopolies? What next - God supported Stalin?
Artists made a living for millennia before copyright law.
Many professional programmers choose to make limited use of copyright protection (open source licences) or even waive them altogether (stuff like SQLite that is public domain).
That is the way it should be, but it is not the way it is anymore.
There has been warrantless tapping in the US, and a reduction in oversight generally, while EU law now REQUIRES that ISPs and phone companies record EVERYONE's activities/
I thought Linux was supposed to be able to run on *anything* right?
Linux is supposed to be able to run on a fairly wide range of supported hardware, not everything.
I do not buy hardware unless I think confident that it will work with Linux (no exhaustive research, just quick checking) and almost everything has been fully functional out of the box, and I have exactly one serious problem (laptop sound needed a config file edited to work, and it took a lot of Googling to find the fix - when I reinstalled to swtich distro six months later it worked out of the box.).
You could say the same thing about "Protestants and Catholics", "Muslims and Christians" or even "Theists and Atheists". For exactly the same reasons.
That is a really bad example. My family are all Catholic (so am I technically, but I think denominations do not matter), my wife is protestant, as are many of my friends. Some of my closest friends are atheists, and since I moved to a town that has a large Muslim population (about a quarter of the total) I have been making Muslim friends.
We all manage to get along with a minimum of glares and nasty comments, and those are rarely about religion.
If you cannot get on with people with different opinions about religion, or anything else, there is something wrong with you.
The average consumer certainly cannot tell the difference, and someone knowledgeable enough to care will know the difference between Aussie port and Portuguese.
What this is, is an anti-consumer, anti-freemarket measure designed to stifle competition. If it is not marked "sherry" or "champagne" consumers cannot know that it tastes the same, so they will not buy it.
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There have been plenty of investigation: physical experiments, attempts at communication, etc.
Citation needed. I have never heard of any experiment that a Christian would expect a useful result from. The only experiment you can make with God is a personal one - it will not give you
publishable results.
properties postulated for God by churches have shown not to be plausible/quote.
Like what? It needs to be a core belief, not theological theorising - otherwise you might as well reject physics because many scientific theories have been falsified.
Here is where the Dawkins analogy breaks down. Suppose several astronauts, on separate missions all claimed to have seen the tea set? Would disbelief be so obvious then. Look at how many people have some sort of "religious experience".
Has anyone ever asked you at the point of a sword? Atheists also persecute believers (Pol Mot, Mao, Stalin etc.). Is that not equally bad?
I do not believe in a supernatural world because it helps me, but because I have experienced it - not in a big way, only a few, usually very good, people are privileged to do that, but enough to convince me. Many hundreds of millions of others have had similar experiences?
God has a measurable effect on the universe in the same way that a CPU has a measurable effect on a simulation, or Shakespeare has a measurable effect on The Tempest.
The idea of testing the effectiveness of prayers would only work if God (an infinite intelligence) is willing to cooperate.
Creation myths are parables, so what you test against reality depends on how you interpret them. I would claim that key elements of the Christian one are have been confirmed by science (original sin in particular).
The religious answer is that if you seek sincerely God may, depending on your needs, grant you a personal proof. There is no reason to think that God even wants everyone to be religious.
If you actually took the time to find out WHY people believe God exists, you would answer your own questions.
I think your brand of atheism is irrational. If hundreds of millions of sane people claimed that they had met people from starships, I would at least think their claims at least plausible. You dismiss it out of hand, because you have already decided its wrong.
For atheism to be even plausible you need to explain how so many people are simultaneously apparently delusional/hallucinating/whatever your explanation is, and apparently otherwise sane and normal.
The dark ages were caused by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire which was invaded by barbarians. What has that got to do with religion? The Eastern Roman Empire, with almost identical religious beliefs, did not suffer a dark age.
Muslim scholars were responsible for huge advances in maths and science, which is why we still use words like "algebra" and "algorithm".
People were not religious because they understood less. Almost everyone was religious in the 19th century. Can you find any scientific advance science then that has a significance for religious belief? Even where science does impinge on religion, it usually merely raises old questions that were already debated centuries or millennia : e.g. evolution and St Augustine's views on creation in potentia.
The decline in religion is a sociological phenomenon, not an intellectual one. People are now prosperous and do not want to follow religions that tell them that money is evil.
The roots of modern science lie in the theistic religions belief in a God who was a law maker, and hence the creator of a universe that follows laws.
Atheists are rather like a lot of Windows advocates - they have never actually seriously looked at another OS. Similarly, atheists are no idea why people believe any religion to be true, but start from the assumption that they are purely arbitrary. Has it occurred to you that these billions of people might have a reason for believing? Have you even considered what amount to hundreds of millions of eye witness accounts?
Buddhism and Scientology both require belief in the supernatural and revealed truth.
The Soviet Union (and China, and the Khmer Rouge) were explicitly atheist.
You are simply redefining inconvenient as religious, because you want to avoid admitting that all the worst mass murderers were atheists or indifferent to religion.
That is actually the closest I have seen to a sensible response to this. Slashdot needs a way of marking stories "flamebait".
Follow the links throught to Robert Sungenis's site. He is a complete nut case. He is a creationist, probably anti-semitic,conspiracy theorist. The "news alert" links on the front page of one of his sites include one to a site that claims that the Vatican has been infiltrated by "satanic cults".
Why is this even worth discussing?
The question is, is it appropriate to a Christian mass?
If not, as the guidelines say, have it before or after.
The guidelines are actually well thought out:
http://www.cam.org.au/guidelines/the-archdiocese-of-melbourne-guidelines-for-catholic-funerals.html
I was a bit surprised by the last paragraph, about not scattering ashes. Several Catholics in my family have had their ashes scattered, but, then again, that is in a country where scattering ashes is traditional, whereas these guidelines are for Australia.
MS has no special interest in pushing Intel.
Sticking to x86 means binary compatibility: all Windows apps run on all Windows PCs. Losing that would mean blunting MS's key competitive advantage.
I'm talking something that makes you say "Wow, that is faster than my i5, and for less money."
Its fast enough and my laptop battery lasts longer would be good enough for a lot of people.
All "data enabled" phones in the EU are going to be chargeable through a micro-USB based standard socket.
First you say that Linux is too hard for developers, then you say that it works well for developers but not for end users.
Apart from sound (and that is not too hard a problem, given everyone uses Pulseaudio these days, and it can play ALSA and OSS stuff if the distro configures it correctly, and ALSA can also emulate OSS), I have never heard either developers or end users complain.
The "phobe" suffix is used to indicate hatred as well as fear: in words the word "xenophobe", for example.
They seem to be very fond of OK Cupid stories. Ads for lonely geeks?
Most pages work OK.
Depends what sort of sites you visit.
Most of the most ambitious (and richest) people I know are over-weight, because they got rich by putting in long hours at the office, thereby reducing the time they have for exercise.
On the other hand, nice hard manual labour makes people fit.
Its been going for 15 years: I think the chances are that it is sustainable.
Thats WHY they are pushing for it. Its a way to present the courts and the people with a fait accompli.
The UK uses the EU the same way.
Instead what I see is a lot of corporations wanting to reassert control over Cuba so they can rape its resources and access a source of cheap labor.
That is usual definition of "a democracy friendly to the US and its interests"
Republicans have had years to seriously screw it up and twist the US into something it wasn't intended to be by its founders.
US foreign policy has been much the same for a long time, under both Republican and Democrat governments.
I don't think Communism works very well, but it might just be that it has served the interests of Cuba well enough.
Communism works quite well in the third world because the economies are simpler (so central planning works better) and they often lack a lot of what is needed for capitalism to work (well-judged regulation to slap down monopolies, honest enough government to prevent interventions that distort markets, etc.)
As the GP pointed out, Israeli intelligence actually murdered people in Dubai. Given that, they do have a reason to be a bit wary of the risks posed.
OF course it is a nasty feudal dictatorship, with a modern gloss to hide its underlying backwardness, but it still has genuine enimies.
God does not want people to breach state mandated monopolies? What next - God supported Stalin?
Artists made a living for millennia before copyright law.
Many professional programmers choose to make limited use of copyright protection (open source licences) or even waive them altogether (stuff like SQLite that is public domain).
That is the way it should be, but it is not the way it is anymore.
There has been warrantless tapping in the US, and a reduction in oversight generally, while EU law now REQUIRES that ISPs and phone companies record EVERYONE's activities/
I thought Linux was supposed to be able to run on *anything* right?
Linux is supposed to be able to run on a fairly wide range of supported hardware, not everything.
I do not buy hardware unless I think confident that it will work with Linux (no exhaustive research, just quick checking) and almost everything has been fully functional out of the box, and I have exactly one serious problem (laptop sound needed a config file edited to work, and it took a lot of Googling to find the fix - when I reinstalled to swtich distro six months later it worked out of the box.).
You could say the same thing about "Protestants and Catholics", "Muslims and Christians" or even "Theists and Atheists". For exactly the same reasons.
That is a really bad example. My family are all Catholic (so am I technically, but I think denominations do not matter), my wife is protestant, as are many of my friends. Some of my closest friends are atheists, and since I moved to a town that has a large Muslim population (about a quarter of the total) I have been making Muslim friends.
We all manage to get along with a minimum of glares and nasty comments, and those are rarely about religion.
If you cannot get on with people with different opinions about religion, or anything else, there is something wrong with you.
The average consumer certainly cannot tell the difference, and someone knowledgeable enough to care will know the difference between Aussie port and Portuguese.
What this is, is an anti-consumer, anti-freemarket measure designed to stifle competition. If it is not marked "sherry" or "champagne" consumers cannot know that it tastes the same, so they will not buy it.