Of course a Muslim might argue that you cannot understand the Koran unless you read it in the original Arabic. Apparently the Arabic language is untranslatable into any other language and therefore cannot be learned by anyone who doesn't grow up with it as their mother tongue. So I guess noone who doesn't grow up with Arabic language can ever understand the Koran.
I've actually had quite well educated and otherwise intelligent Muslims lay down the 'you cannot understand the Koran except in Arabic' line on me. Its a logical fallacy.
It's the holy month of Ramadan where Muslims fast for a whole month and then have a big feast at the end of it.
Because it's a month long 'holiday' doesn't really do it justice. Life still goes on, just at strange hours and in strange ways. I've had islamic scholars tell me that part of the point is to experience hunger, so when some Muslims switch to being nocturnal they're missing the point. But that happens a lot of places, the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law so to speak.
Technically Indonesia is not an islamic state, they recognize a couple of religions (some of Islam, some of Christianity, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism), but as is practically the case, with just shy of 90% of the population being (or at least claiming to be) Muslim you can't really get around Islamic tradition.
Its far from a holiday and more a festival of self abuse. I worked under an executive who was a Muslim. During Ramadan he fasted himself almost into a coma every day. By 5 pm he was unable to think straight and could barely stand. He fucked up a number of critical contracts due to this. He made it very very hard on everyone else in the company.
Guess what he had for breakfast? A couple of fried eggs. It was completely retarded.
That was the most amusing mis-spelling I saw on the fake phones in local market place. There were more stupid ones ('Samung' for example). I asked the vendors to take the back off and the battery out and let me photograph them. Comparing with pics of actual Samsung phones they were very obvious fakes. Also I have lots of friends who appear to have iphones. Except they don't have wireless and are not even 'smartphones'.
I almost bought a beautiful camera in Yongsan for an unbelievable price until I double checked the real spelling of Hasselblad. Korea is home to the finest counterfeit luxury goods in the world. No surprise here. Move along.
If one is unsure that a given meat may be haram, the word of a non-Muslim is not sufficient to determine this.
When travelling in a non-Muslim country, or a country where Muslim-operated food businesses are the norm, it is generally best to eat only scaled fish and vegetarian dishes, as these are generally halal automatically. Do be careful to verify as best as you can that the fish have scales. Generally modern fishing operations will only keep live catch, so that is less of a concern.
So you don't have to say a prayer and kill the fish with a single cut to its throat??
Where they "accidentally" released a virus to kill all the rabbits. Just saying that they hav a mixed history with such things.
It's a giant slab of land that's largely unpopulated, and every now and then some stupid mother fucker introduces an invasive species... Like rabbits. Keep it in context. That's no different than what they're doing in the United States to control mosquito populations.
Maybe rabbits will evolve into something that eats cane toads?
With what money? The reason they are called "the developing world" is that they are poor and do no possess large markets.
And that would also mean the end to their sweet sweet corporate welfare.
Let Exxon piss off America and consequently their supporters in Congress and just see how fast they crash and burn.
Sure the 'developing world' doesn't have a lot of money and the corporates aren't going to get much money out of them. But for the corporates the main thing is that THEY get what little money the developing world has.
So basically, you are saying that you have something to hide?
I invite anyone who claims otherwise to install a permanently on webcam in their bedroom so we can get some nice videos of their pet sheep.
Reality TV gave me this idea; you offer people a great deal. Give them a fantastic TV with access to all the satellite AND cable that they ever want. The catch is that they must have cameras installed in their home and everyone who is part of this program gets access to everyone elses camera feeds. The hook line is: "You will be your own reality TV show!!! YOU WILL BE ON TV!!!!!!111111"
It is truly shocking that some people resist the idea of the police state! If for your own good! Think of the children! The only people with anything to hide are terrorists and criminals!
Face it, folks. The bottom line is, our governments and the corporations that control them, want a police state. They are afraid of freedom, and they will go to any lengths to limit freedom. Badmouthing the president is cause for the Secret Service to put a bullseye on you, and your communications channels. Exposing fraud in the corporate world is reason to haul your ass through the court system, and to take everything you own, along with everything that you might ever hope to own. And, cheating an author out of a dollar of royalties? Phht - ten years in prison sounds about right - to the police state, anyway.
Right. So basically, you are saying that you have something to hide?
Capital "G" G-d in philosophy at least does not refer to the judeo-christian god of the bible. It refers to the concept of a being that is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. There are no specific details assigned like they are in theology. This is generally to be charitable, since the entire idea of G-d starts to make no fucking sense once you start describing it in any but the most abstract terms. Even the "omni"s are completely nonsensical when assigned to the same being at once.
I really don't see why this needs to be capitalised.
If you don't send em, someone else will and the future will be colonised by them not you.
We have enough children being born every day.
No, we don't, not in the Western world. The world is being overrun by the progeny of poor and undeveloped countries which are, in effect, invading countries which are, at the moment, richer and better off.
People of those developed nations need to pull their fingers out and make more babies.
I guess enlightenment is the carrot, suffering is the stick. But you're already suffering, so...
That said, the Dalai Lama is one of the least religious spiritual leaders I can think of. He just tweeted last week about how he's increasingly convinced it's time to ditch religion. He wasn't giving up on happiness and "spirituality"... whatever that is.
As some have said of atheists, and I'm sure I'm butchering this, "their greatest fear is finding out there's life after death". If you "just don't get heaven", nobody would be worried. If being wrong means the Xtian version of Hell... well, then it starts to feel like a gamble.
Buddhism is hardly a religion. He probably meant ditching Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism etc etc.
(I've encountered the Dalai Lama twice. He even gets angry).
As far as I know there are no concrete concepts of either hell or heaven in Judaism.
Nor did Jesus teach about any sort of eternal conscious torment. Part of the problem is that some churches have conflated two concepts, Sheol and Gehenna, into "hell". Sheol (also called Hades) is the grave, an unconscious state of being ("the dead are aware of nothing", Eccl 9:5) in which the dead sleep awaiting resurrection. Gehenna (from the Hebrew for Hinnom Valley) is literally the name of a valley where garbage was destroyed through burning, and it symbolically refers to destruction of the incorrigible with no hope of resurrection, not eternal conscious torment.
The Hebrew Scriptures have a concept of a kingdom of God that will destroy the kingdoms of man (1 Chr 29:10-12; Daniel 2:44, 4:3).
So where did this concept of an almost theme-park like torture camp 'hell' come from?
i don't understand people who have an idea how the world should be, yet they decide it's not worth bringing a child into the world as it is. if people like us don't breed, then the world will never be as we would like it.
The reluctance of people in the 'educated' world to have kids is wierd. I myself never thought I wanted to have kids. It wasn't until I was much older that I realised what a terrible mistake I'd made. This was after reading Nietzsche and realising something about myself, about kids and what they are.
The human race is on a journey. We travel from the bestial to the superhuman. Each child is a step on that journey. If we continue to have children, to nurture them, to raise them to be better than us, stronger, smarter, more bold than us, we contribute to that journey. One must feel... almost threatened by ones children; that one day they may beat us, defeat us, exceed us, show us for the lazy ignorant sluggards that we are (compared to them). If we carry on like this then one day our descendants will be to us as we are to the animals.
Children are explorers and colonists that we send into the future. If you don't send em, someone else will and the future will be colonised by them not you. Also, I think what wonders these explorers will uncover in that 'undiscovered country'.
If you don't have kids then perhaps you don't think the future is worth colonising and that theres nothing worthwhile discovering there... That the superhuman that waits in the destiny of our species perhaps should not come to exist?
where there is no infrastructure, there is religion.
when a ruling power cannot effectively educate it's people, there are religious people doing it for them (for free!).
Its not 'for free', they have to sell their souls.
in this way you could take religion as being a kind of base level of education that will reach everywhere.
the goal of an enlightened society is to educate people even halfway as effectively, or they'll be dominated by supernatural thought.
religion will keep a people alive, but rarely can they achieve greatness without demystifying the world.
I've recently been working in a developing country, in what I thought was a university. Turns out this 'university' is a front for christian missionaries and despite handing out degrees the quality of education is laughable. About 85% of the teaching staff have NO KNOWLEDGE of the subjects they are pretending to teach. But they feel good about what they do because they are spreading the word of god. Its pretty detestable stuff. And its stifling genuine education, which is EXACTLY what they want.
Just because something is imaginary or metaphorical doesn't mean it's name is not a proper noun. There are valid cases where the words "heaven" and "hell" should not have a capital H.
Well, to me 'god' is a generic term. Just because some people believe that there is a singular entity and in their use of the word 'god' they choose to grace it with a capital letter why should I?
I do not believe that the god of the christians/jews/muslims is a unique entity, I believe that it is just one local spirit patron.
I will capitalise the names that they give this spirit patron eg Allah, Yahweh, Yod Heh Vav Heh, Adonai, whatever, but I won't capitalise the word 'god'. To do so would be to acknowledge their (false belief) in the uniqueness and primacy of their particular little local spirit patron.
Sure...the same lipids that are found in the phospholipid bilayer in our own cells. The hydrophilic end is methane-phobic, and the hydrophobic end is methane-philic. This would cause them to organize in the reverse direction so that the hydrocarbon tail is solvent-exposed. There seems to be some work on the subject, perhaps starting with Rand et al, Biochemistry, vol. 29, pp. 76--87 (1990), though it's really not my field so I'm not familiar with all the literature.
I wonder if they would function like this at the temperatures where methane is liquid?
Politicians will not change their behavior until they fear for their jobs. As long as voters are loyal to political parties, platforms, etc things will not change. Politicians need to feel that there is no base they can rely upon.
But politicians already do fear for their jobs and they do change their behavior accordingly.
The problem is that the people who have the most influence over the politicians job-keeping potential are not the voters. The people with the real influence are those that make the campaign contributions and the people who manipulate the media image of the politicians.
The media isn't run by the government; the government is run by the MEDIA. How is this not obvious? Democracy has already been subverted, what you have today is not democracy, if anything its 'mediacracy'.
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Of course a Muslim might argue that you cannot understand the Koran unless you read it in the original Arabic. Apparently the Arabic language is untranslatable into any other language and therefore cannot be learned by anyone who doesn't grow up with it as their mother tongue. So I guess noone who doesn't grow up with Arabic language can ever understand the Koran.
I've actually had quite well educated and otherwise intelligent Muslims lay down the 'you cannot understand the Koran except in Arabic' line on me. Its a logical fallacy.
It's the holy month of Ramadan where Muslims fast for a whole month and then have a big feast at the end of it.
Because it's a month long 'holiday' doesn't really do it justice. Life still goes on, just at strange hours and in strange ways. I've had islamic scholars tell me that part of the point is to experience hunger, so when some Muslims switch to being nocturnal they're missing the point. But that happens a lot of places, the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law so to speak.
Technically Indonesia is not an islamic state, they recognize a couple of religions (some of Islam, some of Christianity, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism), but as is practically the case, with just shy of 90% of the population being (or at least claiming to be) Muslim you can't really get around Islamic tradition.
Its far from a holiday and more a festival of self abuse. I worked under an executive who was a Muslim. During Ramadan he fasted himself almost into a coma every day. By 5 pm he was unable to think straight and could barely stand. He fucked up a number of critical contracts due to this. He made it very very hard on everyone else in the company.
Guess what he had for breakfast? A couple of fried eggs. It was completely retarded.
My favorites were the 'Sansmug Galaxy S2' phones.
Wow.
That was the most amusing mis-spelling I saw on the fake phones in local market place. There were more stupid ones ('Samung' for example). I asked the vendors to take the back off and the battery out and let me photograph them. Comparing with pics of actual Samsung phones they were very obvious fakes. Also I have lots of friends who appear to have iphones. Except they don't have wireless and are not even 'smartphones'.
or 2) we pick a continent and exterminate all the humans on it; say, Africa or South America
As I recall the population of Africa is absolutely tiny, a very small percentage of the total human population.
I almost bought a beautiful camera in Yongsan for an unbelievable price until I double checked the real spelling of Hasselblad. Korea is home to the finest counterfeit luxury goods in the world. No surprise here. Move along.
My favorites were the 'Sansmug Galaxy S2' phones.
its a good job the USA doesn't have the death penalty for those crimes!!!
oh... wait
If one is unsure that a given meat may be haram, the word of a non-Muslim is not sufficient to determine this.
When travelling in a non-Muslim country, or a country where Muslim-operated food businesses are the norm, it is generally best to eat only scaled fish and vegetarian dishes, as these are generally halal automatically. Do be careful to verify as best as you can that the fish have scales. Generally modern fishing operations will only keep live catch, so that is less of a concern.
So you don't have to say a prayer and kill the fish with a single cut to its throat??
Where they "accidentally" released a virus to kill all the rabbits. Just saying that they hav a mixed history with such things.
It's a giant slab of land that's largely unpopulated, and every now and then some stupid mother fucker introduces an invasive species... Like rabbits. Keep it in context. That's no different than what they're doing in the United States to control mosquito populations.
Maybe rabbits will evolve into something that eats cane toads?
I think you just didn't bother reading the menu very well or asking the server any questions about the dishes.
You have a lot to learn about Muslim dietary restrictions.
Pork is the least of them. Was that turkey killed in the proper fashion?
"Thats cause its full of 12 year olds swapping porn and not much else"
They should swap a few apostrophes and periods.
DO NOT start asking 4channers to 'swap periods'. It could get very icky very fast.
"sell to the developing world "
With what money? The reason they are called "the developing world" is that they are poor and do no possess large markets.
And that would also mean the end to their sweet sweet corporate welfare.
Let Exxon piss off America and consequently their supporters in Congress and just see how fast they crash and burn.
Sure the 'developing world' doesn't have a lot of money and the corporates aren't going to get much money out of them. But for the corporates the main thing is that THEY get what little money the developing world has.
So basically, you are saying that you have something to hide?
I invite anyone who claims otherwise to install a permanently on webcam in their bedroom so we can get some nice videos of their pet sheep.
Reality TV gave me this idea; you offer people a great deal. Give them a fantastic TV with access to all the satellite AND cable that they ever want. The catch is that they must have cameras installed in their home and everyone who is part of this program gets access to everyone elses camera feeds. The hook line is: "You will be your own reality TV show!!! YOU WILL BE ON TV!!!!!!111111"
I think this would catch on.
It is truly shocking that some people resist the idea of the police state! If for your own good! Think of the children! The only people with anything to hide are terrorists and criminals!
Face it, folks. The bottom line is, our governments and the corporations that control them, want a police state. They are afraid of freedom, and they will go to any lengths to limit freedom. Badmouthing the president is cause for the Secret Service to put a bullseye on you, and your communications channels. Exposing fraud in the corporate world is reason to haul your ass through the court system, and to take everything you own, along with everything that you might ever hope to own. And, cheating an author out of a dollar of royalties? Phht - ten years in prison sounds about right - to the police state, anyway.
Right. So basically, you are saying that you have something to hide?
Capital "G" G-d in philosophy at least does not refer to the judeo-christian god of the bible. It refers to the concept of a being that is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. There are no specific details assigned like they are in theology. This is generally to be charitable, since the entire idea of G-d starts to make no fucking sense once you start describing it in any but the most abstract terms. Even the "omni"s are completely nonsensical when assigned to the same being at once.
I really don't see why this needs to be capitalised.
"Buddhism is hardly a religion. "
True, its a superstition like every other religion
No, its not 'another religion' at all.
Sure, superstition, but hardly a religion.
If you don't send em, someone else will and the future will be colonised by them not you.
We have enough children being born every day.
No, we don't, not in the Western world. The world is being overrun by the progeny of poor and undeveloped countries which are, in effect, invading countries which are, at the moment, richer and better off.
People of those developed nations need to pull their fingers out and make more babies.
I guess enlightenment is the carrot, suffering is the stick. But you're already suffering, so...
That said, the Dalai Lama is one of the least religious spiritual leaders I can think of. He just tweeted last week about how he's increasingly convinced it's time to ditch religion. He wasn't giving up on happiness and "spirituality"... whatever that is.
As some have said of atheists, and I'm sure I'm butchering this, "their greatest fear is finding out there's life after death". If you "just don't get heaven", nobody would be worried. If being wrong means the Xtian version of Hell... well, then it starts to feel like a gamble.
Buddhism is hardly a religion. He probably meant ditching Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism etc etc.
(I've encountered the Dalai Lama twice. He even gets angry).
As far as I know there are no concrete concepts of either hell or heaven in Judaism.
Nor did Jesus teach about any sort of eternal conscious torment. Part of the problem is that some churches have conflated two concepts, Sheol and Gehenna, into "hell". Sheol (also called Hades) is the grave, an unconscious state of being ("the dead are aware of nothing", Eccl 9:5) in which the dead sleep awaiting resurrection. Gehenna (from the Hebrew for Hinnom Valley) is literally the name of a valley where garbage was destroyed through burning, and it symbolically refers to destruction of the incorrigible with no hope of resurrection, not eternal conscious torment.
The Hebrew Scriptures have a concept of a kingdom of God that will destroy the kingdoms of man (1 Chr 29:10-12; Daniel 2:44, 4:3).
So where did this concept of an almost theme-park like torture camp 'hell' come from?
so out-breed them! :)
i don't understand people who have an idea how the world should be, yet they decide it's not worth bringing a child into the world as it is. if people like us don't breed, then the world will never be as we would like it.
The reluctance of people in the 'educated' world to have kids is wierd. I myself never thought I wanted to have kids. It wasn't until I was much older that I realised what a terrible mistake I'd made. This was after reading Nietzsche and realising something about myself, about kids and what they are.
The human race is on a journey. We travel from the bestial to the superhuman. Each child is a step on that journey. If we continue to have children, to nurture them, to raise them to be better than us, stronger, smarter, more bold than us, we contribute to that journey. One must feel... almost threatened by ones children; that one day they may beat us, defeat us, exceed us, show us for the lazy ignorant sluggards that we are (compared to them). If we carry on like this then one day our descendants will be to us as we are to the animals.
Children are explorers and colonists that we send into the future. If you don't send em, someone else will and the future will be colonised by them not you. Also, I think what wonders these explorers will uncover in that 'undiscovered country'.
If you don't have kids then perhaps you don't think the future is worth colonising and that theres nothing worthwhile discovering there... That the superhuman that waits in the destiny of our species perhaps should not come to exist?
where there is no infrastructure, there is religion.
when a ruling power cannot effectively educate it's people, there are religious people doing it for them (for free!).
Its not 'for free', they have to sell their souls.
in this way you could take religion as being a kind of base level of education that will reach everywhere.
the goal of an enlightened society is to educate people even halfway as effectively, or they'll be dominated by supernatural thought.
religion will keep a people alive, but rarely can they achieve greatness without demystifying the world.
I've recently been working in a developing country, in what I thought was a university. Turns out this 'university' is a front for christian missionaries and despite handing out degrees the quality of education is laughable. About 85% of the teaching staff have NO KNOWLEDGE of the subjects they are pretending to teach. But they feel good about what they do because they are spreading the word of god. Its pretty detestable stuff. And its stifling genuine education, which is EXACTLY what they want.
Just because something is imaginary or metaphorical doesn't mean it's name is not a proper noun. There are valid cases where the words "heaven" and "hell" should not have a capital H.
Well, to me 'god' is a generic term. Just because some people believe that there is a singular entity and in their use of the word 'god' they choose to grace it with a capital letter why should I?
I do not believe that the god of the christians/jews/muslims is a unique entity, I believe that it is just one local spirit patron.
I will capitalise the names that they give this spirit patron eg Allah, Yahweh, Yod Heh Vav Heh, Adonai, whatever, but I won't capitalise the word 'god'. To do so would be to acknowledge their (false belief) in the uniqueness and primacy of their particular little local spirit patron.
Sure...the same lipids that are found in the phospholipid bilayer in our own cells. The hydrophilic end is methane-phobic, and the hydrophobic end is methane-philic. This would cause them to organize in the reverse direction so that the hydrocarbon tail is solvent-exposed. There seems to be some work on the subject, perhaps starting with Rand et al, Biochemistry, vol. 29, pp. 76--87 (1990), though it's really not my field so I'm not familiar with all the literature.
I wonder if they would function like this at the temperatures where methane is liquid?
One of the things that contributes to 'life as we know it' is the lipid bi-layer which forms cell membranes.
The lipid bi-layer is formed by molecules one end of which is hydrophobic and the other end of which is hydrophilic.
One has to wonder if similar analogous molecules exist for methane instead of water? Ie methane-phobic on one end and methane-philic on the other.
The vote is a form of currency.
Just as advertising shapes and manipulates patterns of spending money so it shapes and manipulates patterns of spending votes.
Politicians will not change their behavior until they fear for their jobs. As long as voters are loyal to political parties, platforms, etc things will not change. Politicians need to feel that there is no base they can rely upon.
But politicians already do fear for their jobs and they do change their behavior accordingly.
The problem is that the people who have the most influence over the politicians job-keeping potential are not the voters. The people with the real influence are those that make the campaign contributions and the people who manipulate the media image of the politicians.
The media isn't run by the government; the government is run by the MEDIA. How is this not obvious? Democracy has already been subverted, what you have today is not democracy, if anything its 'mediacracy'.