And as the costs of non-renewable resources and pollution keep increasing
Why would the cost increase? Can you back this up? (Are you just talking about the cost of fertilizer?)
All industrial areas gets cheaper over time. Also, since modern farming has been done for decades now, if there was some effect destroying the soil we should know about it, yes?
'so, if there is life on Mars, how should we deal with it?'
The point was that any decisions to be made regarding terraforming will be made decades after research on Mars.
Today's discussion will probably be as relevant for Mars as Jules Verne's books will be for Moon colonies... [ 1/2:-) ]
OK, OK. There are scenarios where the possibility of terraforming will come quite soon after the research on Mars because of a breakthrough in some area (say, space travel gets dirt cheap, Drexler-like nanotechnology or maybe even the building of bacteria that are tough enough to work in Mars' environment of UV radiation and terrible temperatures).
But, sadly, it feels like detailed planning for what restaurants to visit if you win millions on a lottery ticket.
No, it is decades-premature-story about a decision that can't be taken without information that will be learned these coming decades.
Seriously, no one will start changing Mars without decades of research first. That is just too stupid -- it's a straw man.
And, if they do terraform Mars sometime in the future, the decision will be based on information we will have learned between now and then.
It would be better to discuss how to lower the price of getting hardware into orbit. Before that happens, anything else are just pipe dreams and a very few tons of exploratory robots.
I remember a conference for the scandinavian internet (Helsinki '92, I think), where the WWW people made a presentation.
I, and likely the rest of the audience, thought:
"Bad English, damn -- wish I could understand better. Sounds really good. Pity that Gopher already has covered this niche... WWW won't win."
The WWW did take off later (-: as you kids in the audience probably are aware of:-) when there was a viewer that could show images!
I was happy that it took off (good functionality) but disgusted that ephemeral garbage like showing images was the reason.
I do think that the Gopher manifesto do have some points...
What I remember as the Gopher killer was that the team started off on a strange tangent with a 3D interface(?!).
If they instead had concentrated on extending the protocol and functionality (making RPC:s out of it?), then history could certainly have taken another path.
the original Globalview, which predates Apple's GUI system.
Can you give a reference to this?
If this was not from Xerox, boy, Apple must have been pissed since they paid a lot of stock to get the information from Xerox...:-)
If this was Xerox, read the article. It follows what I've read in other sources that say that the Star was later than the Lisa project. It was mostly done after Apple got their famous tour.
(Lisa was released January '83, right?)
Please note, in today's patent environment, the Mac interface (both look and API) would have been patented airtight -- by both Xerox and Apple. I think we can agree on both that and that the world became a better place that the cat got out of the bag.
Neither I nor anyone else have argued Apple invented the mouse -- Xerox didn't do that either.
You quoted icons -- but didn't mention that they weren't used at all in the same way. There was no desktop at all, no copy/paste, they had to give numerical X,Y-arguments to move a window(!), etc, etc.
The GUI was a very, very different thing after Apple -- Microsoft didn't steal anything directly from Xerox but from Apple -- who did buy a license from Xerox. (And that without even mentioning APIs, etc.)
I wrote "Apple more or less
invented most of what you think of as the GUI". The Anon argued:
Your claim that Apple "invented" the GUI and it is their "property" is ludicrous.
Talk about intellectually dishonest straw arguments!
I think that the reason the free software world took off so fast, was that it's impossible to compete with a monopoly.
A monopoly product is made to create "lock in" and make writing a compatible O/S so slow that a new version is out before it's finished. The monopoly product uses really complex (and noncompatible) protocols, undocumented APIs that the main applications uses and subtle bugs.
So people that wanted a good product -- without the "lock in" ugly garbage -- had to make one.
And the only thing Microsoft couldn't remove the oxygen supply of was open software. (If Apple were to open a damn hotel chain, then Microsoft probably would, too! Just to keep Apple from getting too much money to invest...)
Say what you want about IBM (there are lots of things to say), but they had some business morals. Not even magazines getting lots of ads say that about Microsoft...
Apple intended for quite awhile to own the GUI market and be it's only vendor. They sued various entities and ran some of them out of the market. Because that's just how Apple does things.
Apple more or less
invented most of what you think of as the GUI. It was their property. The world might be a better place if ownership of lots of property was moved around, but without general respect for ownership rights, the world doesn't work.
Microsoft plowed that ground for us. In fact the legal precedent that Microsoft set by fighting that fight for us is what allows people to 'clone' Windows GUI concepts and incorporate them into Linux/Free Software projects.
In short (from the reference above):
Microsoft got a license from Apple to port their applications to other platforms and managed to get a judge to allow them to copy the GUI. So this was original work from Apple that Microsoft managed to steal.
Well, low business morals are something that you could admire Microsoft for... (You're a big fan of the mob, too?)
It is really strange that this is not written in articles. It probably have something to do with the large Microsoft ad budget -- and helped along historically that companies with large ad budgets was dependent on the Msoft monopoly for their survival...
Let's face it, the shuttle is not. It is the most expensive (in terms of dollar per killogram) launcher.
Which is really "fun".:-(
NASA claimed that the Shuttle would become the cheapest transport known to man. (It was not only incompetence -- they knowingly lied about expected flight rates to get the $/pound down to the hundreds.)
The shuttle got so expensive that NASA had to throw their weight around to stop competition. (This is possible to argue -- maybe e.g. taking over and failing the Delta Clipper project was just incompetence.)
If NASA are going to do more development, make certain there is a good reason to believe the result won't be a new Shuttle!
The world is poorer without a good US space program.
The whole point is that with Christianity you have only belief to rely on. In other religions they give you phony evidence in purportedly proving their claim
I realized who your heroes are!
You ignore all arguments based on reason and facts -- and argue that you only accept faith.
Remember Galileo?
The officials from the church refused to look through his telescope to see if the moons of Jupiter really went round the planet.
Those guys must be your heroes! They used exactly the same arguments as you do!
My last comment (unless you can present something similar to a counterargument).
Even if you argument hadn't been an invalid ad hoc thesis (see other comment), your position on this shocks me.
What you're claiming, really, is that no matter if your opinion is shown to be impossible and self contradictory, you will not change your position. Those are arguments based on reason.
I try not to be judging and condemning about people as long as they don't hurt others, since they might have had much harder lifes than I have had.
But that people really needs their beliefs so much that they sell out their intellectual integrity so badly, makes me ashamed to be human. This is my honest opinion and why I bother to argue with believers.
(No, it's not an argument that your religion is true that you feel this emotional need. Same problem here -- the same emotional need is ingrained in people of other cults.)
Let me express hope that yielding to an "ad hoc hypothesis" (look it up) as you did here, is the top of your intellectual achievements...
Should be:
Let me express hope that yielding to an "ad hoc hypothesis" (look it up) as you did here, is not the top of your intellectual achievements...
The whole point is that with Christianity you have only belief to rely on.
As I already wrote:
Read Bertrand Russel's history of western philosophy. Chapter on Roussau. This position of reason not being relevant is a later revision, after realizing that religion could be criticized. Invented as late as Roussau.
Let me express hope that yielding to an "ad hoc hypothesis" (look it up) as you did here, is the top of your intellectual achievements...
(Note that Xianity isn't making lots of converts since the "easy" nature religions et al. Without indoctrinating children while young and letting them grow up in a non-contradicting environment, they don't become religious. I live in a post-protestant society.)
Besides, this bears on my personal moral. Not being able/allowed to reason -- and just accepting truths without questioning. That goes against all dignity.
The scary part of the US fundamental revival is the tendency for religious people there to stay out of hard science. Seems a bit like the social changes in Rome, which changed the social class they recruited soldiers from...
You seriously don't get that all those differences are small internal dogma differences -- that are irrelevant for my argument?
My argument is based on the similarity of the psychology of believers -- be it marxism, xianity, islam, etc. The only difference that the argument need is that not more than one (maximum a few) of a large number can be true. I.e., the religions are contradictory.
The interesting thing for the argument is not what religious people believe but that they believe.
Sigh. If you want, I can try to write it again for a fourth(?) time?
I already replied in detail [...] detailed points illustrating how Christianity is different from other religions.
You have answered "faith".
My point is that the psychology of faith is the same in all religions, as far as I'm aware.
In other words:
If there is a god who is a member of any religions (I know of), there shouldn't be a lot of other religions with exactly the same psychology of faith. Because that goes against the religion. (See my two formulations of writing this argument for details.)
You have NOT answered my argument. (Except with descriptions of dogma internal to your religion, which is not a relevant answer.)
My thesis, if I have one, is that:
Lack of intellectual integrity is the common denominator of all idealists.
Note on 3: All religions I know of don't admit the possibility that god(s) itself inspires lies in his divine inspiration to people of some religions. (If there is just one.)
Note on 2: Followers of all religions typically refuses to answer this exact short argument. Just like you. They typically use an excuse like "You haven't answered my argument I presented afterwards", or something. (Just as an example of the similarity of psychology.)
You fail to address my argument which I presented first -- and claim I ignore yours? Typical integrity of idealists... I repeat the argument below -- if you just didn't understand because of my bad communication skills, please answer.
My argument was, in short:
1. People have faith in hundreds, if not thousands, of contradictory religions -- only a few of them can be true.
2. There is no way to sort religion on psychology of their believers, since people of all religions literally die for their faith. Etc.
3. All religions I know of claim that they are inspired by a supernatural being -- and all other religions are just lies. (and/or inspired by a devil of some kind).
4. Point 2 and 3 are contradictory since, according to all religions I know, lies (or a devil) can't inspire the true religious feelings.
Not on 3: All religions I know of don't admit the possibility that god lies in his divine inspiration to some people.
Note on 1: Followers of all religions typically claim to have answered an argument and bows out of a discussion when they can't answer this argument...
I present a logical argument about a contradiction (math proof method, assume X and if it is self contradictory --- then non-X must be true).
You answer with dogma internal to your faith. (-: Even claims the bible to be
perfect!?:-) I asked for an answer, not a politican's answer-another-question. If there should be a god, why would he be Xian? (When discussing Bertrand Russel and faith/reason in protestantism -- read his chapter on Roussau in his big book on philosophy... you're wrong.)
(-: My fault -- I assumed that on slashdot even a believer would be able to reason.:-)
If the fault was that you couldn't understand my bad presentation of the argument, I'm willing to rewrite it. (But then you would have asked.)
If you missed the point: The religious people are making a very extreme statement (a powerful supernatural being exists, he is a member of my cult). To not be laughed at -- considering the number of cults with contradicting statements -- you need very good support. Internal dogma isn't.
Yes, I've read up on religious arguments. They stink and never answer simple arguments like this. (I never read C S Lewis after finding
this. Well, except for his self biography on when he became religious. Laughed my ass off.)
That is agnosticism.
An irrelevant word definition. See 101-103
here. This was your main problem with atheism? (-: You are 99.99% as much atheist as me, it's just that you are atheist for a god less...:-)
Yes, yes -- I know about Xian dogma -- trinity ("3 for the price of 1"), etc. Internal dogma point for one of multiple Jewish heresies are neither interesting or a serious argument that it happens to be the only true religion.
Will just comment on this:
You say all religions call for violence and death
I friggin' well didn't! (For moral arguments I content myself with comparing a god who would torture people for ever with Hitler and note that arguably Hitler is less evil.)
Who am I fooling, there is no way you'll answer my argument seriously -- you'll just spout bible references.
The problem with atheism is that it isn't falsifiable. [...] Atheism hinges on the notion that we can fully know the universe through our senses.
No, no.
Atheism's base is to not believe things to be true -- when there are no reason to believe them true.
You claim, without any proof outside your brain, that there exists a Xian god. The existence of a Xian ghod has as much support as an invisible pink unicorn standing behind you right now. It is one of an infinite number of possible theories about the universe without more support than voices inside someone's head -- like "Son of Sam" had.
You think there is more support for your (brand of) Xianity than Son of Sam's dog?
Consider all the different contradicting religions/cults in the world.
Let us assume there is a god.
Why would that god follow your specific cult? Why not "Son of Sam"'s or any of thousands of other theories about how a god would be?
There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of different cults on the planet with contradicting messages. Just a very small minority of them can be true.
All followers of the cults claim divine inspiration through self suggestion (prayer, mediation) -- and hear different messages from their god!
That you are certain of your Xian god, despite the Hindus, the Bhuddists, the what you have, is hysterically funny!
Assume that all the other religions are inspired by some devil or demon? The problem here is that there are no differences in psychology between religions. (People die for their faith, etc, disregarding which religion they have.) So that devil has to be able to inspire religious feelings as strong as the god. That goes against all religions I know of.
The god could be a total liar and inspire different messages in different believers for fun. Also goes against all religions I know of (-: except if it's Loke having fun? Cool if that guy got his own cult, a 1000 years afterwards!:-)
(My guess, of course, is that religion probably is a tendency built in (as appreciation of music), that gets expressed in different ways.)
The existence of a god following one of the present religions is self contradicting.
Q E D
I have presented the argument above to numerous cultists and never gotten any answer except insults... You guys really don't want to think about it, do you?
Oh, lucky me... I was half believing I misunderstood a joke!
You are you aware of that what is an affront to your invisible pink unicorn has changed dramatically every few decades? Try "Why I'm not a christian" by Bertrand Russel. Read the chapter about why Thomas Paine became loathed. Then read his anger at the anglican church of his time (30's, I think) -- and realize that the dogma today has changed as much from then to now -- as from Paine's time to the 30's!
Arguably the origin of the modern democracy were USA, Britain and France. Pity that large parts are still a few hundred years behind.
As I wrote, your own coastal areas have left the middle ages, too... better not forget them, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would the cost increase? Can you back this up? (Are you just talking about the cost of fertilizer?)
All industrial areas gets cheaper over time. Also, since modern farming has been done for decades now, if there was some effect destroying the soil we should know about it, yes?
(The article did recommended crop rotation.)
The point was that any decisions to be made regarding terraforming will be made decades after research on Mars.
Today's discussion will probably be as relevant for Mars as Jules Verne's books will be for Moon colonies... [ 1/2 :-) ]
OK, OK. There are scenarios where the possibility of terraforming will come quite soon after the research on Mars because of a breakthrough in some area (say, space travel gets dirt cheap, Drexler-like nanotechnology or maybe even the building of bacteria that are tough enough to work in Mars' environment of UV radiation and terrible temperatures).
But, sadly, it feels like detailed planning for what restaurants to visit if you win millions on a lottery ticket.
Only wish I had written it as well. They deserve a 5 more than I did.
No, it is decades-premature-story about a decision that can't be taken without information that will be learned these coming decades.
Seriously, no one will start changing Mars without decades of research first. That is just too stupid -- it's a straw man.
And, if they do terraform Mars sometime in the future, the decision will be based on information we will have learned between now and then.
It would be better to discuss how to lower the price of getting hardware into orbit. Before that happens, anything else are just pipe dreams and a very few tons of exploratory robots.
I remember a conference for the scandinavian internet (Helsinki '92, I think), where the WWW people made a presentation.
I, and likely the rest of the audience, thought:
"Bad English, damn -- wish I could understand better. Sounds really good. Pity that Gopher already has covered this niche... WWW won't win."
The WWW did take off later (-: as you kids in the audience probably are aware of :-) when there was a viewer that could show images!
I was happy that it took off (good functionality) but disgusted that ephemeral garbage like showing images was the reason.
I do think that the Gopher manifesto do have some points...
What I remember as the Gopher killer was that the team started off on a strange tangent with a 3D interface(?!).
If they instead had concentrated on extending the protocol and functionality (making RPC:s out of it?), then history could certainly have taken another path.
Today, with same kind of material, Xerox and Apple would have covered their work in patents like mountain snow. And it would have been upheld.
So, easily arguably, a new environment -- both GUI and the APIs that were copied -- would have been kept proprietary.
SCO is a scam that seems to be financed by Microsoft. Different.
Can you give a reference to this?
If this was not from Xerox, boy, Apple must have been pissed since they paid a lot of stock to get the information from Xerox... :-)
If this was Xerox, read the article. It follows what I've read in other sources that say that the Star was later than the Lisa project. It was mostly done after Apple got their famous tour.
(Lisa was released January '83, right?)
Please note, in today's patent environment, the Mac interface (both look and API) would have been patented airtight -- by both Xerox and Apple. I think we can agree on both that and that the world became a better place that the cat got out of the bag.
Neither I nor anyone else have argued Apple invented the mouse -- Xerox didn't do that either.
You quoted icons -- but didn't mention that they weren't used at all in the same way. There was no desktop at all, no copy/paste, they had to give numerical X,Y-arguments to move a window(!), etc, etc.
The GUI was a very, very different thing after Apple -- Microsoft didn't steal anything directly from Xerox but from Apple -- who did buy a license from Xerox. (And that without even mentioning APIs, etc.)
I wrote "Apple more or less invented most of what you think of as the GUI". The Anon argued:
Talk about intellectually dishonest straw arguments!
You give Anonymous Cowards a bad name! :-)
I'm not certain.
I think that the reason the free software world took off so fast, was that it's impossible to compete with a monopoly.
A monopoly product is made to create "lock in" and make writing a compatible O/S so slow that a new version is out before it's finished. The monopoly product uses really complex (and noncompatible) protocols, undocumented APIs that the main applications uses and subtle bugs.
So people that wanted a good product -- without the "lock in" ugly garbage -- had to make one.
And the only thing Microsoft couldn't remove the oxygen supply of was open software. (If Apple were to open a damn hotel chain, then Microsoft probably would, too! Just to keep Apple from getting too much money to invest...)
Because keeping the protocols ugly and convoluted makes them harder to copy. It is standard monopolist tactics.
(Same reason they don't follow their own published document formats for office programs.)
You really hadn't figured this out? :-)
Microsoft keeps on bundling and instead buys politicians.
Say what you want about IBM (there are lots of things to say), but they had some business morals. Not even magazines getting lots of ads say that about Microsoft...
Apple more or less invented most of what you think of as the GUI. It was their property. The world might be a better place if ownership of lots of property was moved around, but without general respect for ownership rights, the world doesn't work.
In short (from the reference above):
Microsoft got a license from Apple to port their applications to other platforms and managed to get a judge to allow them to copy the GUI. So this was original work from Apple that Microsoft managed to steal.
Well, low business morals are something that you could admire Microsoft for... (You're a big fan of the mob, too?)
It is really strange that this is not written in articles. It probably have something to do with the large Microsoft ad budget -- and helped along historically that companies with large ad budgets was dependent on the Msoft monopoly for their survival...
Is it as readable as paper?
Are you going to do some lightweight electronic book with a hard drive (using some radio net to my computer so I can buy new books).
Then I want to buy all my books electronically at low cost -- since I both already own them and you don't need to print them.
Then I'll throw away all my bookshelves and get more living area! I will never have to get out of my sofa to fetch another book!
Which is really "fun". :-(
NASA claimed that the Shuttle would become the cheapest transport known to man. (It was not only incompetence -- they knowingly lied about expected flight rates to get the $/pound down to the hundreds.)
The shuttle got so expensive that NASA had to throw their weight around to stop competition. (This is possible to argue -- maybe e.g. taking over and failing the Delta Clipper project was just incompetence.)
If NASA are going to do more development, make certain there is a good reason to believe the result won't be a new Shuttle!
The world is poorer without a good US space program.
I realized who your heroes are!
You ignore all arguments based on reason and facts -- and argue that you only accept faith.
Remember Galileo?
The officials from the church refused to look through his telescope to see if the moons of Jupiter really went round the planet.
Those guys must be your heroes! They used exactly the same arguments as you do!
Even if you argument hadn't been an invalid ad hoc thesis (see other comment), your position on this shocks me.
What you're claiming, really, is that no matter if your opinion is shown to be impossible and self contradictory, you will not change your position. Those are arguments based on reason.
I try not to be judging and condemning about people as long as they don't hurt others, since they might have had much harder lifes than I have had.
But that people really needs their beliefs so much that they sell out their intellectual integrity so badly, makes me ashamed to be human. This is my honest opinion and why I bother to argue with believers.
(No, it's not an argument that your religion is true that you feel this emotional need. Same problem here -- the same emotional need is ingrained in people of other cults.)
Should be:
Let me express hope that yielding to an "ad hoc hypothesis" (look it up) as you did here, is not the top of your intellectual achievements...
As I already wrote:
Read Bertrand Russel's history of western philosophy. Chapter on Roussau. This position of reason not being relevant is a later revision, after realizing that religion could be criticized. Invented as late as Roussau.
Let me express hope that yielding to an "ad hoc hypothesis" (look it up) as you did here, is the top of your intellectual achievements...
(Note that Xianity isn't making lots of converts since the "easy" nature religions et al. Without indoctrinating children while young and letting them grow up in a non-contradicting environment, they don't become religious. I live in a post-protestant society.)
Besides, this bears on my personal moral. Not being able/allowed to reason -- and just accepting truths without questioning. That goes against all dignity.
The scary part of the US fundamental revival is the tendency for religious people there to stay out of hard science. Seems a bit like the social changes in Rome, which changed the social class they recruited soldiers from...
My argument is based on the similarity of the psychology of believers -- be it marxism, xianity, islam, etc. The only difference that the argument need is that not more than one (maximum a few) of a large number can be true. I.e., the religions are contradictory.
The interesting thing for the argument is not what religious people believe but that they believe.
Sigh. If you want, I can try to write it again for a fourth(?) time?
My point is that the psychology of faith is the same in all religions, as far as I'm aware.
In other words:
If there is a god who is a member of any religions (I know of), there shouldn't be a lot of other religions with exactly the same psychology of faith. Because that goes against the religion. (See my two formulations of writing this argument for details.)
You have NOT answered my argument. (Except with descriptions of dogma internal to your religion, which is not a relevant answer.)
My thesis, if I have one, is that:
Lack of intellectual integrity is the common denominator of all idealists.
Note on 2: Followers of all religions typically refuses to answer this exact short argument. Just like you. They typically use an excuse like "You haven't answered my argument I presented afterwards", or something. (Just as an example of the similarity of psychology.)
My argument was, in short:
1. People have faith in hundreds, if not thousands, of contradictory religions -- only a few of them can be true.
2. There is no way to sort religion on psychology of their believers, since people of all religions literally die for their faith. Etc.
3. All religions I know of claim that they are inspired by a supernatural being -- and all other religions are just lies. (and/or inspired by a devil of some kind).
4. Point 2 and 3 are contradictory since, according to all religions I know, lies (or a devil) can't inspire the true religious feelings.
Not on 3: All religions I know of don't admit the possibility that god lies in his divine inspiration to some people.
Note on 1: Followers of all religions typically claim to have answered an argument and bows out of a discussion when they can't answer this argument...
You answer with dogma internal to your faith. (-: Even claims the bible to be perfect!? :-) I asked for an answer, not a politican's answer-another-question. If there should be a god, why would he be Xian? (When discussing Bertrand Russel and faith/reason in protestantism -- read his chapter on Roussau in his big book on philosophy... you're wrong.)
(-: My fault -- I assumed that on slashdot even a believer would be able to reason. :-)
If the fault was that you couldn't understand my bad presentation of the argument, I'm willing to rewrite it. (But then you would have asked.)
If you missed the point: The religious people are making a very extreme statement (a powerful supernatural being exists, he is a member of my cult). To not be laughed at -- considering the number of cults with contradicting statements -- you need very good support. Internal dogma isn't.
Yes, I've read up on religious arguments. They stink and never answer simple arguments like this. (I never read C S Lewis after finding this. Well, except for his self biography on when he became religious. Laughed my ass off.)
An irrelevant word definition. See 101-103 here. This was your main problem with atheism? (-: You are 99.99% as much atheist as me, it's just that you are atheist for a god less... :-)
Yes, yes -- I know about Xian dogma -- trinity ("3 for the price of 1"), etc. Internal dogma point for one of multiple Jewish heresies are neither interesting or a serious argument that it happens to be the only true religion.
Will just comment on this:
I friggin' well didn't! (For moral arguments I content myself with comparing a god who would torture people for ever with Hitler and note that arguably Hitler is less evil.)Who am I fooling, there is no way you'll answer my argument seriously -- you'll just spout bible references.
No, no.
Atheism's base is to not believe things to be true -- when there are no reason to believe them true.
You claim, without any proof outside your brain, that there exists a Xian god. The existence of a Xian ghod has as much support as an invisible pink unicorn standing behind you right now. It is one of an infinite number of possible theories about the universe without more support than voices inside someone's head -- like "Son of Sam" had.
You think there is more support for your (brand of) Xianity than Son of Sam's dog?
Consider all the different contradicting religions/cults in the world.
Let us assume there is a god.
Why would that god follow your specific cult? Why not "Son of Sam"'s or any of thousands of other theories about how a god would be?
There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of different cults on the planet with contradicting messages. Just a very small minority of them can be true.
All followers of the cults claim divine inspiration through self suggestion (prayer, mediation) -- and hear different messages from their god!
That you are certain of your Xian god, despite the Hindus, the Bhuddists, the what you have, is hysterically funny!
Assume that all the other religions are inspired by some devil or demon? The problem here is that there are no differences in psychology between religions. (People die for their faith, etc, disregarding which religion they have.) So that devil has to be able to inspire religious feelings as strong as the god. That goes against all religions I know of.
The god could be a total liar and inspire different messages in different believers for fun. Also goes against all religions I know of (-: except if it's Loke having fun? Cool if that guy got his own cult, a 1000 years afterwards! :-)
(My guess, of course, is that religion probably is a tendency built in (as appreciation of music), that gets expressed in different ways.)
The existence of a god following one of the present religions is self contradicting.
Q E D
I have presented the argument above to numerous cultists and never gotten any answer except insults... You guys really don't want to think about it, do you?
You are you aware of that what is an affront to your invisible pink unicorn has changed dramatically every few decades? Try "Why I'm not a christian" by Bertrand Russel. Read the chapter about why Thomas Paine became loathed. Then read his anger at the anglican church of his time (30's, I think) -- and realize that the dogma today has changed as much from then to now -- as from Paine's time to the 30's!
Arguably the origin of the modern democracy were USA, Britain and France. Pity that large parts are still a few hundred years behind.
As I wrote, your own coastal areas have left the middle ages, too... better not forget them, either.
Besides, this has nothing to do with anything.