You are the student who is asked, what is 2+2 and you answer that is probably a number.
For what it's worth, Russell and Whitehead took 378 pages to answer an even simpler question. As the Futurama bureaucrat said, "technically correct" is "the best kind of correct".
There either is a god or isn't.
Oh, that's simple. A god exists, and I can prove it. Which one? Why, the god of the ancient Roman cult of Sol Invictus, of course.
You see, they worshipped the Sun. By any reasonable definition of the word "god", the Sun was was their god. Now I can't personally "prove" that the Sun exists to the satisfaction of a determined pseudo-skeptic, but let's take it as read that by any reasonable scientific standard, the Sun exists. Therefore, we conclude, by any reasonable standard of evidence, the god of Sol Invictus exists.
When Parnas invented exceptions (though he didn't call them that), he framed it around the notion of "undesired events" (UEs for short). He developed the idea when writing for the operational flight program of the A-7E aircraft, where any piece of hardware could, in theory, fail at any moment, and the program must not crash if that happens. Stuart Faulk commented that "these are not problems that arise from programming errors but are unavoidable consequences of executing programs in any real-world environment".
I'm going to quote the design criteria that he used. Apologies for the now-sexist language; this was the 1970s.
The criteria are:
1. UE response routines are written by each programmer in terms of the abstract machine which he uses for his normal case code. UEs are reported in those terms. He is never forced to use information about the implementation of other modules in the system. 2. Programs can be written so that the code for UE detection, UE correction, and normal case, are lexically separate and can be modified independently. 3. The system can evolve from an initial version that does little recovery to one which uses sophisticated recovery techniques without a change in the structure of the system. 4. Even with unsophisticated recovery procedures, the task of locating the module containing a bug discovered at run-time does not require internal knowledge of many modules. 5. Costs incurred because of the recovery techniques are low as long as no UE occurs.
IME, it's #3 that not enough people appreciate. Writing your code for exception safety to begin with (and it's honestly not hard) allows you to increase the robustness of the system without touching intermediate code. That alone has saved my bacon more than once.
Re bad_alloc: do you run database servers in an OS that lacks virtual memory allocation? It's about the only case where run-of-the-mill allocations can fail.
On Linux, the only time I've ever received a bad_alloc exception was running out of virtual address space. This only ever happens on a 32-bit machine, where the amount of memory (physical and swap) is greater than the size of the address space.
As you correctly point out, on a 64-bit machine, the first you know of using too much memory is that the OOM killer kills your process. It's a right royal pain if your program is designed to recover. Our system also ran on Solaris, which has much better behaviour when memory is exhausted.
You see, practically minded people have figured long ago that having no memory left to allocate means you're already screwed [...]
Not at all! It depends on the system, but there's often plenty of stuff you can do in a server environment.
If there's a cache (there's always a cache), you can start by ejecting a bunch of entries. If you have a one-thread-per-client scenario (a very common scenario), you could find the client of least value, and kill that thread; unwinding will roll back any transactions in progress and recover any memory that connection was using.
Even if your ultimate plan is to shut down the system, you can still take steps to shut down cleanly.
Having said that, the problem usually isn't bad_alloc. Using smart pointers means that other exceptions don't cause memory leaks.
I don't give a shit about bad_alloc or "exception safety" because they simply provide no value in the systems I work with.
Right. Many systems, especially GUI-front-end-type systems (which is Qt's niche), can just crash. But many of the programs you use every day don't have that luxury. Even "medium-end" database servers can't do that; if MySQL crashing at this point means data corruption, it must go to some trouble to avoid crashing at this point.
I used to get paid to work on mission critical systems. "Mission critical" here means "if the software fails or is unavailable, our organisation is less viable". In that scenario, exceptions matter, and they matter a lot.
Expanding the application of a word from the individual level to a societal level is hardly equivalent of making up arbitrary woo.
The word "delusion" gives a veneer of scientific respectability to a statement which is not scientific. That is what woo-woo artists do.
While we're on the topic, Dawkins also claims that "the existence of god is a scientific question", and chooses to make his case not in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, but in the popular press. That is also what woo-woo artists do.
Yes, there is a huge difference in degree. However, as I've noted elsewhere, Dawkins is an actual scientist, and hence he should know better. I think it's right to hold him to a higher standard.
I gave an example of a cultural-norm belief with an objectively pathological nature. Do you dispute that extinction is pathological, and that any suicidal belief and practice which directly results in extinction is inherently pathological?
As I recall, it was 100% hypothetical and unrealistic. But I'll play along.
Yes, I do dispute the use of the word "pathological". That is, once again, a scientific word which denotes an indicator of a mental or physical illness. Using that particular word in that particular context is scientifically inaccurate. Such a belief may be harmful. Indeed, it may be very harmful. But it is not, in and of itself, pathological.
I can't help hut feel that the insane medical system of my country (the US) is subsidizing the cost of hearing aids in your country. You're welcome, I guess.
I doubt it's the cost of the product they're subsidising.
That religion can bring some good is a simple fact of history. Religion is one of the tools that humans used to organise a super-organism. We used it to transition from villages to cities, and then to even larger groups such as states. Without religion or something like it we could not have done this.
Yes, it's very possible that religion has had its day, as with other anachronistic pursuits such as paper books, passenger ships, hunting and growing your own food, and sewing your own clothes. Modernity has found far more efficient ways to achieve the same ends.
Do you really find different coding styles to be an "elaborate puzzle"? What do you do when you have to incorporate free or commercial source code into your product? Do you have to reformat it all?
That code lives in its own subdirectory, and we don't edit it unless we absolutely have to. If it turns out we absolutely have to, and it's free code, we follow the coding style of the project and contribute it back. Then it's no longer our problem.
I would imagine that they were written at the same time, because they needed the same functionality. If it's anything like the time I did it, the duplication was probably caught and fixed at check-in time.
That's a good reason alone, but really, banning meta-template shit like Boost and STL helps to extract greater efficiency across the board. Your ABIs can stay manageable, your binaries do not get more bloat than what you put there on purpose. Choose a good base library such as Qt, it will save you more time in the long run.
For the sake of all that is holy, no!
For the record, I have no problem with Qt. I like programming in Qt. But an awful lot of people don't realise until it's too late that you actually program "in" Qt, not "with" Qt.
You can program in C++, or you can program in Qt. You can't do both without a performance-inhibiting layer of insulation. You'll find this out the hard way the first time you need to integrate with a third-party library which assumes that you're doing it the standard way.
How many times have you seen this?
QSomething* something = new QSomething();
If you don't know why that line of code contains a bug, then you're a Qt programmer, not a C++ programmer. Though your tag line suggests that you do indeed know why it contains a bug, and you're still a Qt programmer.
That's fine. I encourage you to program much cool and useful stuff in Qt, and I will happily use it. But not everyone has your job, and I need to use C++.
No, No, and No again! What you are suggesting is nothing more than compartmentalising a team such that programmer A owns that bit of code, and programmer B owns that bit of code.
I didn't see the word "own" anywhere. Nobody has advocated a rule (explicit or tacit) which says "new programmers should not touch this".
Any development environment worth working at, assuming it makes sense (e.g. if it's safety-critical, or classified) lets anyone check in anything. But it's understood that you touch that particular piece of code at your own risk, because that is the key piece of technology that makes us money.
Anyone is encouraged to become the type of developer who can hack on that code. But it's unrealistic to expect that a new employee is automatically someone who can hack on that code. Hack on it if you like, but make sure you know how to back out changes first.
Incidentally, where I work, I'm that guy. I'm the one who "owns" a key piece of money-maker code. It's only about 1500 lines, but it's the "inner loop" of the whole product line. It's ultra-performance-critical, dense, bit-twiddly, and computer-science-rich. Everyone knows how it works and what it does on a theoretical level, but I'm the only one who ever got their hands dirty in that particular bit of code.
I don't actually want to "own" this particular code, but we have only three developers in total working on the product line, all of them senior. If we had some junior devs, I would absolutely spend the time getting them up to the point where they could handle it if they wanted it.
There is a big difference between programming with templates (e.g. using a container, or templated method), and meta-template programming (e.g. using TypeLists et-al, as a form of functional programing, but with a syntax that is far harder to understand & maintain than say, haskell).
And there's a continuum of possibilities between the two.
To be fair, I suspect this is moot for almost everyone. About 95% of what you want in the way of advanced template hackery is already in Boost, and the remaining 5% probably isn't that advanced.
But unless a religion specifically prohibits political involvement (and very few do), it is not only true to say that religion is political, but that religion is politics.
FWIW, I agree with you completely (though I disagree with you with some of the details about Constantine).
As I noted elsewhere, the "war on terror" is/was fought on the pretext of "freedom" and "democracy". Not only is religion politics, but politics is also religion. This makes anti-theism seem all the more like tilting and windmills to me.
Your answer is loaded with a rather significant assumption. It assumes that a cultural norm itself cannot be pathological.
The mere presence of a factually-false but culturally-normal belief is not, by itself, evidence of a physical or mental illness. That is not an assumption, it is an evidence-based conclusion, and it's not even a controversial one.
Setting aside that problem with your Columbus example, based on what I said earlier a person may both have a "delusion" in the broad sense while also being "sane" in a psychiatric context of functioning adequately within within his culture.
You're using "delusion" in the broad sense, which is fine. And just like a new ager uses "energy" or "vibration" in a broad sense, or Deepak Chopra uses "quantum" in a broad sense, you're allowed to. It's just not scientific, even though you used a scientific word.
Then I will ask (and answer) two very simple questions.
The simplistic answers to your very simplistic questions are:
1/ Almost certainly not. 2/ Almost certainly not.
The difficulty is the qualification that we're talking about government or "organized entity". However, I suppose it depends how you define "organized entity".
You could argue, for example, that the KKK was an "organized entity" which used Christianity as a motive, even though it was really about Confederate nationalism and racism. But then, so were the European anarchist groups of the early 20th century (you know, the ones who invented the car bomb) used atheism as a similar motive, even though their violent opposition to established churches they attacked were just a proxy for political motives.
Of course it is excluded for scientific reasons, and pretty simple ones at that: delusion is, by definition, pathological. False beliefs which are held because of incorrect or incomplete information are not pathological, and hence not delusional.
Are you arguing that people who believe that Christopher Columbus was trying to prove the Earth was round are mentally ill?
One could equally argue that "Roman Catholicism != Christianity".
Look, you're right. "Atheism", defined as "the lack of belief in gods", has arguably never caused violence. There's always been something extra, such as the statist ersatz-religion of Communism. But that raises the obvious point that "Christianity" defined as "adherence to the beliefs and practices taught by Jesus" has also arguably never caused violence. There's always been something extra there, too.
It's just as hard to point to instances of violence committed on the pretext of Christianity before it became the state religion of Rome, as it is to point to instances of violence committed on the pretext of atheism before it became the state religion of the Soviet Union. Before that happened, when it came to religious violence, Christianity was always on the receiving end.
I bring up Christianity because we can trace its origins to a specific time in history, and from its beginnings it was not tied to a specific ethnic group or political entity. Hence, Christianity is the first successful religion in history for which we can identify a period of time where church and state were (and had always been) completely separate, and usefully compare before with after.
I got death threats from Christians for being an atheist. Where are those "peaceful Christians" that you're talking about, and more to the point, where have they been hiding in the previous two millennia?
On behalf of the human race, sorry about the death threats. We primates should have evolved beyond that by now.
Having said that, it might help to step back and think about raw numbers. How many individual people did you receive death threats from, exactly? And what is that as a proportion of the billion or so Christians currently in existence?
And why stop at "Christians"? Assuming that you're an English speaker and the death threats were in (possibly bad) English, you could have said that you got death threats from "English speakers". Where are all the "peaceful English-speakers"?
For that matter, it's probably a reasonably safe bet that all of the death threats were from males, or from people in your own country, or from people who come from dysfunctional families. There are so many categories that these death threats fall into that it's hard to identify one as being any more important than the other, from the point of view of an unbiassed observer.
It doesn't take very many people sending someone death threats to make your life grief. I totally get this. It's like how many intelligent, outspoken women feel that the world is full of misogynists based on the number of threats they've received. I suspect that not very many people are actually misogynists; I'm sure that you're not, for example. However, intelligent, outspoken women are precisely the sort of people they target, and it doesn't take very many misogynists for that to preoccupy your thinking.
Those "peaceful Christians" exist. Just like "peaceful humans", they're the majority. The death threats you've received are from the tiniest of tiny majorities. Unfortunately, it only takes a handful to cause you a problem. And for that, I'd like to reiterate my apology on behalf of humans.
I wasn't going to comment on this, but you've reminded me of a pet peeve.
Some atheists call us delusional.
You know, Richard Dawkins calling religion "delusion" is kind of like a new ager talking about "energy" or "vibration", or Deepak Chopra throwing around the word "quantum".
"Delusion" is a fairly well-understood scientific word, used in the field of psychiatry. Its definition (in the DSM) specifically excludes any belief which is culturally normal, and specifically identifies religious beliefs as one class culturally normal beliefs.
Yes, he noted that he was using "delusion" in a non-technical sense. Deepak Chopra said the same thing about "quantum", in an interview with Dawkins no less. It's kind of like defining "evidence" to mean "that which I feel strongly", and then using that odd definition to conclude that evidence is unreliable.
Normally I wouldn't care about this nitpickery, but Dawkins is a scientist. The word "delusion" gives TGD air of scientific authority to a claim which isn't scientific. He's One of Us(tm), and hence I expected better.
People who are determined to kill will pick whatever convenient label is available so they can convince themselves that their cause is just. The better the label, the more noble the cause, the easier it is to convince yourself that you're doing the right thing.
No, people don't kill in the name of Atheism. That's because it makes for a terrible cause.
I have to point out that Richard Dawkins was very wrong about one thing, that religion is an arbitrary label behind which people divide themselves.
On the other hand, it's no more or less arbitrary as any other label which has been used over the years. "Race" or "ethnicity" are just as arbitrary and, indeed, they've often been historically synonymous.
In Northern Ireland, "Protestant" and "Catholic" started off as proxies for "English" and "Irish" respectively (and later, "republicans" and "loyalists" respectively). It's much the same as in the former Yugoslavia, where Croatian == Catholic, Serbian == Orthodox and Bosnian == Muslim.
Having said that, you've hit the nail on the head in a grand-sweeping-view-with-lots-of-caveats kind of way. I would argue that Constantine I of Rome was probably a "true believer", for example. Nonetheless, as a general statement, when religion is used as a tool of division by powerful interests, it is invariably a smokescreen for some person or group's power trip, and it's invariably the religion (rather than the powerful interest) which ends up with most of the negative consequences.
It's even visible in the current US election cycle. Just look at the US evangelical/fundamentalist church's endorsement of Mitt Romney, a Mormon. As much as they talk about religion, when push comes to shove, they're willing to compromise on religion. Because it's not really about religion, and everyone knows it. This can only end up badly for US evangelical/fundamentalist Christians. And whatever you think of US evangelical Christians, nobody deserves to be treated like that.
What's really interesting right now, though, is that as the influence of organised religion declines (being replaced with a combination of disorganised religion and non-religion), the "good causes" being perverted by powerful interests seem to be changing along with it.
The war in Iraq was launched on the pretext of "freedom" and "democracy". "Freedom" and "democracy" are excellent things. That makes those ideals ripe for, as you say, psychopathic leaders perverting them for conquest et al.
Slashdot Mirror
For what it's worth, Russell and Whitehead took 378 pages to answer an even simpler question. As the Futurama bureaucrat said, "technically correct" is "the best kind of correct".
Oh, that's simple. A god exists, and I can prove it. Which one? Why, the god of the ancient Roman cult of Sol Invictus, of course.
You see, they worshipped the Sun. By any reasonable definition of the word "god", the Sun was was their god. Now I can't personally "prove" that the Sun exists to the satisfaction of a determined pseudo-skeptic, but let's take it as read that by any reasonable scientific standard, the Sun exists. Therefore, we conclude, by any reasonable standard of evidence, the god of Sol Invictus exists.
First, a history lesson.
When Parnas invented exceptions (though he didn't call them that), he framed it around the notion of "undesired events" (UEs for short). He developed the idea when writing for the operational flight program of the A-7E aircraft, where any piece of hardware could, in theory, fail at any moment, and the program must not crash if that happens. Stuart Faulk commented that "these are not problems that arise from programming errors but are unavoidable consequences of executing programs in any real-world environment".
I'm going to quote the design criteria that he used. Apologies for the now-sexist language; this was the 1970s.
The criteria are:
1. UE response routines are written by each programmer in terms of the abstract machine which he uses for his normal case code. UEs are reported in those terms. He is never forced to use information about the implementation of other modules in the system.
2. Programs can be written so that the code for UE detection, UE correction, and normal case, are lexically separate and can be modified independently.
3. The system can evolve from an initial version that does little recovery to one which uses sophisticated recovery techniques without a change in the structure of the system.
4. Even with unsophisticated recovery procedures, the task of locating the module containing a bug discovered at run-time does not require internal knowledge of many modules.
5. Costs incurred because of the recovery techniques are low as long as no UE occurs.
IME, it's #3 that not enough people appreciate. Writing your code for exception safety to begin with (and it's honestly not hard) allows you to increase the robustness of the system without touching intermediate code. That alone has saved my bacon more than once.
On Linux, the only time I've ever received a bad_alloc exception was running out of virtual address space. This only ever happens on a 32-bit machine, where the amount of memory (physical and swap) is greater than the size of the address space.
As you correctly point out, on a 64-bit machine, the first you know of using too much memory is that the OOM killer kills your process. It's a right royal pain if your program is designed to recover. Our system also ran on Solaris, which has much better behaviour when memory is exhausted.
Not at all! It depends on the system, but there's often plenty of stuff you can do in a server environment.
If there's a cache (there's always a cache), you can start by ejecting a bunch of entries. If you have a one-thread-per-client scenario (a very common scenario), you could find the client of least value, and kill that thread; unwinding will roll back any transactions in progress and recover any memory that connection was using.
Even if your ultimate plan is to shut down the system, you can still take steps to shut down cleanly.
Having said that, the problem usually isn't bad_alloc. Using smart pointers means that other exceptions don't cause memory leaks.
I don't give a shit about bad_alloc or "exception safety" because they simply provide no value in the systems I work with.
Right. Many systems, especially GUI-front-end-type systems (which is Qt's niche), can just crash. But many of the programs you use every day don't have that luxury. Even "medium-end" database servers can't do that; if MySQL crashing at this point means data corruption, it must go to some trouble to avoid crashing at this point.
I used to get paid to work on mission critical systems. "Mission critical" here means "if the software fails or is unavailable, our organisation is less viable". In that scenario, exceptions matter, and they matter a lot.
Expanding the application of a word from the individual level to a societal level is hardly equivalent of making up arbitrary woo.
The word "delusion" gives a veneer of scientific respectability to a statement which is not scientific. That is what woo-woo artists do.
While we're on the topic, Dawkins also claims that "the existence of god is a scientific question", and chooses to make his case not in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, but in the popular press. That is also what woo-woo artists do.
Yes, there is a huge difference in degree. However, as I've noted elsewhere, Dawkins is an actual scientist, and hence he should know better. I think it's right to hold him to a higher standard.
I gave an example of a cultural-norm belief with an objectively pathological nature. Do you dispute that extinction is pathological, and that any suicidal belief and practice which directly results in extinction is inherently pathological?
As I recall, it was 100% hypothetical and unrealistic. But I'll play along.
Yes, I do dispute the use of the word "pathological". That is, once again, a scientific word which denotes an indicator of a mental or physical illness. Using that particular word in that particular context is scientifically inaccurate. Such a belief may be harmful. Indeed, it may be very harmful. But it is not, in and of itself, pathological.
Are you kidding? As we speak, hipsters are falling over each other to buy one before it's cool.
Nothing, since they're 100% guaranteed scratch-resistant.
I can't help hut feel that the insane medical system of my country (the US) is subsidizing the cost of hearing aids in your country. You're welcome, I guess.
I doubt it's the cost of the product they're subsidising.
This is the one where upon completion of recording all worthwhile knowledge, Wikipedia writes the final article describing Wikipedia itself.
FWIW, in Asimov's version, disaster was averted because the Universal AC got stuck in an edit war with itself.
That religion can bring some good is a simple fact of history. Religion is one of the tools that humans used to organise a super-organism. We used it to transition from villages to cities, and then to even larger groups such as states. Without religion or something like it we could not have done this.
Yes, it's very possible that religion has had its day, as with other anachronistic pursuits such as paper books, passenger ships, hunting and growing your own food, and sewing your own clothes. Modernity has found far more efficient ways to achieve the same ends.
Just like how the mitochondrion is a parasite.
Do you really find different coding styles to be an "elaborate puzzle"? What do you do when you have to incorporate free or commercial source code into your product? Do you have to reformat it all?
That code lives in its own subdirectory, and we don't edit it unless we absolutely have to. If it turns out we absolutely have to, and it's free code, we follow the coding style of the project and contribute it back. Then it's no longer our problem.
I would imagine that they were written at the same time, because they needed the same functionality. If it's anything like the time I did it, the duplication was probably caught and fixed at check-in time.
That's a good reason alone, but really, banning meta-template shit like Boost and STL helps to extract greater efficiency across the board. Your ABIs can stay manageable, your binaries do not get more bloat than what you put there on purpose. Choose a good base library such as Qt, it will save you more time in the long run.
For the sake of all that is holy, no!
For the record, I have no problem with Qt. I like programming in Qt. But an awful lot of people don't realise until it's too late that you actually program "in" Qt, not "with" Qt.
You can program in C++, or you can program in Qt. You can't do both without a performance-inhibiting layer of insulation. You'll find this out the hard way the first time you need to integrate with a third-party library which assumes that you're doing it the standard way.
How many times have you seen this?
QSomething* something = new QSomething();
If you don't know why that line of code contains a bug, then you're a Qt programmer, not a C++ programmer. Though your tag line suggests that you do indeed know why it contains a bug, and you're still a Qt programmer.
That's fine. I encourage you to program much cool and useful stuff in Qt, and I will happily use it. But not everyone has your job, and I need to use C++.
No, No, and No again! What you are suggesting is nothing more than compartmentalising a team such that programmer A owns that bit of code, and programmer B owns that bit of code.
I didn't see the word "own" anywhere. Nobody has advocated a rule (explicit or tacit) which says "new programmers should not touch this".
Any development environment worth working at, assuming it makes sense (e.g. if it's safety-critical, or classified) lets anyone check in anything. But it's understood that you touch that particular piece of code at your own risk, because that is the key piece of technology that makes us money.
Anyone is encouraged to become the type of developer who can hack on that code. But it's unrealistic to expect that a new employee is automatically someone who can hack on that code. Hack on it if you like, but make sure you know how to back out changes first.
Incidentally, where I work, I'm that guy. I'm the one who "owns" a key piece of money-maker code. It's only about 1500 lines, but it's the "inner loop" of the whole product line. It's ultra-performance-critical, dense, bit-twiddly, and computer-science-rich. Everyone knows how it works and what it does on a theoretical level, but I'm the only one who ever got their hands dirty in that particular bit of code.
I don't actually want to "own" this particular code, but we have only three developers in total working on the product line, all of them senior. If we had some junior devs, I would absolutely spend the time getting them up to the point where they could handle it if they wanted it.
There is a big difference between programming with templates (e.g. using a container, or templated method), and meta-template programming (e.g. using TypeLists et-al, as a form of functional programing, but with a syntax that is far harder to understand & maintain than say, haskell).
And there's a continuum of possibilities between the two.
To be fair, I suspect this is moot for almost everyone. About 95% of what you want in the way of advanced template hackery is already in Boost, and the remaining 5% probably isn't that advanced.
But unless a religion specifically prohibits political involvement (and very few do), it is not only true to say that religion is political, but that religion is politics.
FWIW, I agree with you completely (though I disagree with you with some of the details about Constantine).
As I noted elsewhere, the "war on terror" is/was fought on the pretext of "freedom" and "democracy". Not only is religion politics, but politics is also religion. This makes anti-theism seem all the more like tilting and windmills to me.
The mere presence of a factually-false but culturally-normal belief is not, by itself, evidence of a physical or mental illness. That is not an assumption, it is an evidence-based conclusion, and it's not even a controversial one.
You're using "delusion" in the broad sense, which is fine. And just like a new ager uses "energy" or "vibration" in a broad sense, or Deepak Chopra uses "quantum" in a broad sense, you're allowed to. It's just not scientific, even though you used a scientific word.
Then I will ask (and answer) two very simple questions.
The simplistic answers to your very simplistic questions are:
1/ Almost certainly not.
2/ Almost certainly not.
The difficulty is the qualification that we're talking about government or "organized entity". However, I suppose it depends how you define "organized entity".
You could argue, for example, that the KKK was an "organized entity" which used Christianity as a motive, even though it was really about Confederate nationalism and racism. But then, so were the European anarchist groups of the early 20th century (you know, the ones who invented the car bomb) used atheism as a similar motive, even though their violent opposition to established churches they attacked were just a proxy for political motives.
I've known at least two young earth creationists who were "cured" by doing a science degree.
Of course it is excluded for scientific reasons, and pretty simple ones at that: delusion is, by definition, pathological. False beliefs which are held because of incorrect or incomplete information are not pathological, and hence not delusional.
Are you arguing that people who believe that Christopher Columbus was trying to prove the Earth was round are mentally ill?
One could equally argue that "Roman Catholicism != Christianity".
Look, you're right. "Atheism", defined as "the lack of belief in gods", has arguably never caused violence. There's always been something extra, such as the statist ersatz-religion of Communism. But that raises the obvious point that "Christianity" defined as "adherence to the beliefs and practices taught by Jesus" has also arguably never caused violence. There's always been something extra there, too.
It's just as hard to point to instances of violence committed on the pretext of Christianity before it became the state religion of Rome, as it is to point to instances of violence committed on the pretext of atheism before it became the state religion of the Soviet Union. Before that happened, when it came to religious violence, Christianity was always on the receiving end.
I bring up Christianity because we can trace its origins to a specific time in history, and from its beginnings it was not tied to a specific ethnic group or political entity. Hence, Christianity is the first successful religion in history for which we can identify a period of time where church and state were (and had always been) completely separate, and usefully compare before with after.
I got death threats from Christians for being an atheist. Where are those "peaceful Christians" that you're talking about, and more to the point, where have they been hiding in the previous two millennia?
On behalf of the human race, sorry about the death threats. We primates should have evolved beyond that by now.
Having said that, it might help to step back and think about raw numbers. How many individual people did you receive death threats from, exactly? And what is that as a proportion of the billion or so Christians currently in existence?
And why stop at "Christians"? Assuming that you're an English speaker and the death threats were in (possibly bad) English, you could have said that you got death threats from "English speakers". Where are all the "peaceful English-speakers"?
For that matter, it's probably a reasonably safe bet that all of the death threats were from males, or from people in your own country, or from people who come from dysfunctional families. There are so many categories that these death threats fall into that it's hard to identify one as being any more important than the other, from the point of view of an unbiassed observer.
It doesn't take very many people sending someone death threats to make your life grief. I totally get this. It's like how many intelligent, outspoken women feel that the world is full of misogynists based on the number of threats they've received. I suspect that not very many people are actually misogynists; I'm sure that you're not, for example. However, intelligent, outspoken women are precisely the sort of people they target, and it doesn't take very many misogynists for that to preoccupy your thinking.
Those "peaceful Christians" exist. Just like "peaceful humans", they're the majority. The death threats you've received are from the tiniest of tiny majorities. Unfortunately, it only takes a handful to cause you a problem. And for that, I'd like to reiterate my apology on behalf of humans.
Oh, and males.
Hell, and English-speakers.
I wasn't going to comment on this, but you've reminded me of a pet peeve.
Some atheists call us delusional.
You know, Richard Dawkins calling religion "delusion" is kind of like a new ager talking about "energy" or "vibration", or Deepak Chopra throwing around the word "quantum".
"Delusion" is a fairly well-understood scientific word, used in the field of psychiatry. Its definition (in the DSM) specifically excludes any belief which is culturally normal, and specifically identifies religious beliefs as one class culturally normal beliefs.
Yes, he noted that he was using "delusion" in a non-technical sense. Deepak Chopra said the same thing about "quantum", in an interview with Dawkins no less. It's kind of like defining "evidence" to mean "that which I feel strongly", and then using that odd definition to conclude that evidence is unreliable.
Normally I wouldn't care about this nitpickery, but Dawkins is a scientist. The word "delusion" gives TGD air of scientific authority to a claim which isn't scientific. He's One of Us(tm), and hence I expected better.
People who are determined to kill will pick whatever convenient label is available so they can convince themselves that their cause is just. The better the label, the more noble the cause, the easier it is to convince yourself that you're doing the right thing.
No, people don't kill in the name of Atheism. That's because it makes for a terrible cause.
No, "funny". The mis-spelling "Clause" is the give-away that it's a Poe.
On the other hand, it's no more or less arbitrary as any other label which has been used over the years. "Race" or "ethnicity" are just as arbitrary and, indeed, they've often been historically synonymous.
In Northern Ireland, "Protestant" and "Catholic" started off as proxies for "English" and "Irish" respectively (and later, "republicans" and "loyalists" respectively). It's much the same as in the former Yugoslavia, where Croatian == Catholic, Serbian == Orthodox and Bosnian == Muslim.
Having said that, you've hit the nail on the head in a grand-sweeping-view-with-lots-of-caveats kind of way. I would argue that Constantine I of Rome was probably a "true believer", for example. Nonetheless, as a general statement, when religion is used as a tool of division by powerful interests, it is invariably a smokescreen for some person or group's power trip, and it's invariably the religion (rather than the powerful interest) which ends up with most of the negative consequences.
It's even visible in the current US election cycle. Just look at the US evangelical/fundamentalist church's endorsement of Mitt Romney, a Mormon. As much as they talk about religion, when push comes to shove, they're willing to compromise on religion. Because it's not really about religion, and everyone knows it. This can only end up badly for US evangelical/fundamentalist Christians. And whatever you think of US evangelical Christians, nobody deserves to be treated like that.
What's really interesting right now, though, is that as the influence of organised religion declines (being replaced with a combination of disorganised religion and non-religion), the "good causes" being perverted by powerful interests seem to be changing along with it.
The war in Iraq was launched on the pretext of "freedom" and "democracy". "Freedom" and "democracy" are excellent things. That makes those ideals ripe for, as you say, psychopathic leaders perverting them for conquest et al.
The purpose of a sporting competition is entertainment. That someone often wins and someone often loses is irrelevant compared to that.