Binaries are an accidental byproduct of the current technology
This statement is delightfully farsighted. Humans won't be able to read binaries until
their brains have built-in computers and digital interfaces (think GITS level technology
and beyond).
Every RPG enthusiast I know has played Planescape: Torment. Yet none of them purchased it.
"Piracy hurts sales" can only be justified or refuted by statistics. You offer us an anecdote.
For the record, I did pay for PT, even though it is not exactly my way. Let's be fair: PT had writing and art to die for, but
it was also one of the buggiest games of the year. For a game that moves around a handful of 2d sprites it was unbearably slow and
crashed all the time. Could that be one of the reasons that it didn't sell very well?
Stallman has contributed greatly over the years to free software. You can't change that. I appreciate his contributions.
Thank you for recognizing this.
But Stallman is a zealot who hurts the image of free software, making it difficult to sell the concept of free software to suits. He goes after Linus, Mozilla and Google, never realizing who his friends are in the FOSS world. He demands 100% compliance with his growing list of restrictions, or you aren't free.
I disagree with the first sentence, while the rest is certainly true. Stallman only has cookies (the GNU toolchain, the GPL), he does not have a beating stick. He is not forcing anyone to do anything. He is not forcing anyone to even listen to him. You can write software and license it under whatever the hell you want, Stallman respects your choice as long as it is lawful. You should know who makes free software look unappealing through rhetoric and monopolistic practices: Microsoft, Apple and friends. Apple does it even as they leech on the work of the BSD team. Stallman is not it.
Freedom is not a list of restrictions.
You have to listen to the arguments before you rebut them. Free software owes its freedom solely to copying restrictions enforced via copyright law. The sense in which Stallman uses the word "free" has been the same for more than 20 years.
In reality, he wants to remove rights,
No, the copyright law does that. It removes all rights and GPL gives most of them back to the user. Few licenses out there are less restrictive than GPL.
How is this really different from DRM? DRM restricts users to protect the developer/artist from having their property stolen.
I don't think you understand the purpose of DRM. Put simply, it is similar to that of a gigantic black dildo with sharp metal spikes. Very different from GPL, which is more like a cute pink bunny that burps gold and shits rainbows.
In conclusion, Stallman is right again and we are all very lucky to have him around.
As far as I understand, Stallman maintains that all commodity software should be free
for ethical reasons, and he is fine with getting there via incremental changes to the copyright
law.
To be fair, I get myself in trouble all the time by saying "all" instead of "almost all". Well, almost all the time.
In practical terms, you face the same challenge on Mars as you do on Moon: no ecosystem. That alone makes colonization practically impossible. Two guys and a chick camping on Mars for a few months is no "colonization", even if they manage to reproduce. A sustainable eco-dome that uses local resources to provide most if not all life support is the very minimum of what I would call "colonization". Anything less than that on Mars is just a money sink. I'll be first to agree that we must do that asap, but the technology just isn't there yet. The challenge is the same in the sense that it is at the moment insurmountable. But if you must try, you have to start with Moon, because it is so much closer and hence less costly (and we have no disagreement on that).
While we are on the subject, I really want deep space colonization most of all. A nice space station is where it's at. If we can create a life support system out of light and a few nearby asteroids, we will be nearly indestructible, with space to expand for a looooooooong time. Unfortunately, robots (who, unlike us, are fine in vacuum, feeding on nothing but sunlight) will be way ahead of us in the near future, and we should just let them. Because robots are our friends.
So what exactly is the point of sending a human to Mars? I happen to believe that humans must
colonize the solar system just to survive, but why start with Mars? The Moon is much closer and offers
all the same challenges.
Yes yes, I am glad someone brought this up. This thing could be huge if it catches on,
it could be the email, IM, and wiki replacement all folded in one. But they will have to address
issues which come with the territory. I would not abandon email or vanilla XMPP for something
that prevents me from establishing contacts with strangers, and that means dealing with the good
old spam. My second concern is the privacy, which basically comes down to implementing
end-to-end encryption, i.e. messages should be unreadable without private keys (that would
make storing data on Google's servers fine by me). And finally, I would never abandon email
for something that prevents me from exporting. They just have to make it so that all my waves
can be exported and maintained as a single indexed database which I myself can archive and back up.
Ideally, with only a few clicks I should be able to create a local wave server which is in sync
with my wave "inbox", which I can browse using a vanilla wave client while offline.
The only good thing about the Seeker, imho, is the wizard played by Bruce Spence.
OK, and the fact that every female is wearing a corset. If the two leads were replaced by inflatable dolls and the script
by pressure cooking instructions, the overall quality would not suffer significantly.
Wow, the second link in particular is very informative, thank you. While you are right about the difference between monetary base and supply, I would like to point out that money was indeed created. We just cannot feel it yet because banks are exercising restraint:
That idleness, as I read the situation, was something the Fed initially actually wanted, and deliberately cultivated by choosing to pay an interest rate on excess reserves that is equal to what banks could expect to obtain by lending them overnight. As long as banks do just sit on these excess reserves, the Fed has found close to a trillion dollars it can use for the various targeted programs.
But what would happen if those electronic credits start to be redeemed for actual cash? Then we would have a concern, and the Fed would need to call the reserves back in by selling assets or failing to renew loans. But that presents a potential problem...
There are concerns that reversing the process may be very difficult for political reasons. The ending is very telling:
Which brings me back to the original question. Does the explosive growth of the monetary base in Figure 1 imply uncontrollable inflationary pressures? My answer: not yet, but stay tuned.
I do not predict hyper-inflation, like some people already do, nor do I advise anyone to panic, but I am close to doing it for myself:) This whole thing seems to be holding on the fact that the newly created money will not be liquidated.
Also, having a fixed amount is not an issue. It is enough if the production is stable and low in relation to the total supply. What are the chances that
gold production will double next year? Very low. That the gold supply will double? Astronomically low. US dollar supply? We've seen what happened in 2009:)
Not calling you out or anything, but what would be a good place to learn about it?
I am currently considering moving some of my assets into my mattress and I need
pointers for what to buy. Even though gold, as you say, may be more abundant than
before, it is still a lot rarer than the fiat dollar.
I am for free software and all that, but I am for one OK with commercial titles
being tethered to the mothership. The usual ethical argument l la RMS does not apply,
since games are not commodity software. I think that games benefit the society,
but a fun million dollar game is every bit as effective as a fun 1000 dollar game.
And I like some of the big-budget stuff. I want these guys to stay in business.
I like Diablo, for one. Blizz said recently that with the new battle.net they are going
to try to become an arena for competitive gaming. Kudos. Tying the game to
the central server is their only option, and what an option that is, they would be
stupid not to use it. They will get paid. They will have a position on cheaters. They
will give us something homegrown titles do not have: a large, competitive (as in sport)
minded community. Or at least they intend to and should be able to do just that with
some luck. Think SC in Korea, but now it is SC2 and D3, bigger, and in US. I can't stop salivating.
This is how you play in the big leagues, dude. You buckle and obey
the ground rules. Where is the downside? Don't like this attitude? Suck it up and
download Free Arena. Professional game developers do not owe you squat. They
would not be able to pull it off if they could not get paid. It is not like there is a lack
of free as in freedom games that kick ass. There are more of those than ever!
In that light, I am very happy that there is even an option of single-player.
Why is it still tethered to the mothership? A better question is: why should they
untie it? Why should they care and put in more code when they have nothing to gain
from it? It's the big leagues. Their playground, their rules. This is the freaking appeal.
I am an old gamer and I like where this is going.
Every religion is based on faith, which is a belief which must be accepted without evidence.
Are we supposed to accept this on faith? You, as well as the original poster, are guilty of the very thing you faulting religions for: firing away oversimplified statements that can be shown false by reading only a few paragraphs describing various religions.
Now, was that so complicated? Or do you have any good arguments or examples to the contrary?
I thought you'd never ask.
According to the scriptures, during his lifetime the Buddha remained silent when asked several metaphysical questions. These regarded issues such as whether the universe is eternal or non-eternal (or whether it is finite or infinite), the unity or separation of the body and the self, the complete inexistence [sic] of a person after nirvana and death, and others. One explanation for this silence is that such questions distract from activity that is practical to realizing enlightenment and bring about the danger of substituting the experience of liberation by conceptual understanding of the doctrine or by religious faith. [Wiki]
And more:
TheravÄda promotes the concept of Vibhajjavada (Pali), literally "Teaching of Analysis". This doctrine says that insight must come from the aspirant's experience, critical investigation, and reasoning instead of by blind faith. [Wiki]
And no, it does stop stop at Buddhism. Classical Taoism, for example, ignores "faith" completely! It is a non-issue for them.
... Shinto and Buddhism typically do not require professing faith to be a believer or a pratitioner... [Wiki]
Hinduism does not have a "unified system of belief encoded in declaration of faith or a creed" [Wiki]
I just reread your post and it made more sense. I am really sorry for sounding all pissed off and flaming like no tomorrow.
May be I have a more satisfactory answer for you. I understand that "the system of beliefs wherein propositions are taken to be true on faith" may be the meaning employed by the original poster who got me started. The question is: is it at all useful to talk about religions in such a way? Does it advance the religion versus science debate? I do not think so. World religions are hopelessly complicated and it helps no one when we reduce them to mere sets of statements which are taken to be "true". Sure, some religions are more guilty of this intellectual laziness, and mainstream protestantism in USA may seem the most guilty of them all, but even the latter is just so much bigger than that.
Did you ever read Apocalypse? It is short and entertaining. Sometimes I think that religions are like the beasts described therein. Religions are gigantic animals with bodies composed of people, buildings, machines; their spirits are dispersed across millions of human minds and (nowadays) computers. They probably have their own selfish desires, they definitely have a lot of inertia once they start moving. No one person ever has control or even a good understanding of how exactly they work or behave. To be fair, some of them do seem to be hostile to science, but explaining how, and why, and what we can do about it is no simple matter.
And this is what gets me so upset: idiots who oversimplify. They are not helping, they are just pissing off more and more religious people. I am a science guy. I do want us to a parley with religions, mainly because I want our society to understand the sheer awesomeness of science as well as its limitations, and to use science to its advantage. And every time stupid people say things about religion that are stupid and untrue, we all loose.
You keep conflating "religion" and "Judeo-Christian religion". Give me another religion which places so much emphasis on "blind faith in certain propositions". Your words, not mine. Judeo-Christian pistis is a theological anomaly. OED (I hope) orders meanings according to usage frequency. If that is indeed the case, it is not surprising that a country so long dominated by a single church (Of England) prefers a heavily biased meaning of the word. Why do you insist on using this meaning in a careful debate about relationship between religion and science?
You tried to make it about semantics, and you failed. You do not seem to realize that definition is different from meaning. Wikipedia gives a definition of religion, OED gives meanings. Anyone who needs to look up the meaning of this word is not qualified for this debate at all.
Now, please address my point if you want to keep arguing. I will make it easier for you and pretend that we are only talking about Christianity. You say then, Christianity "is all about blind faith in certain propositions". I don't know where to start, this is just wrong on so many levels. I dare you to find a major denomination with such a creed or a major theologian who said something this stupid.
I despise most if not all organized religions. I think that modern orthodox Christianity is full of superstition and that its theology is rotten. But I also know (from reading Christian writers and participating in religious communities, sometimes for months or years at a time) that modern Christianity is much more than just "blind faith". For one, they do not call their faith "blind", and for you doing so is already very inconsiderate if you are trying to enable a discussion. Regardless, a modern US Christian's worship revolves around reading scriptures, prayer (both personal and communal), Sunday service with a sermon and the Communion, monetary donations, and participation in humanitarian projects in the local community, just to name a few things that occupy their time. Don't let this next thought to blow you away: you, sir, can meaningfully participate in the life of a Christian community near you without believing any of their fairy tales. You just need to start shaking hands and do their Christian things that they do, like listening to stories about moral choices people made, confessing your faults, raising funds for this cause or other. Saying that Christianity is "is all about blind faith in certain propositions" is just false. Saying the same about religion is not only false, but also betrays a strong Judeo-Christian bias, which is rather ironic for you to have, as you seem to be opposed to their beliefs.
I cannot elaborate on why the GGP is wrong precisely because he didn't offer any kind of cogent argument. I will not pretend I understood what GGP was trying to say, and you should not be so hasty to read meaning into that gibberish just because it hits on certain keywords.
What he is essentially saying is that religion is all about blind faith in certain propositions (God exists, he created the universe, he created humans in his image etc etc) even in the face of complete absence of evidence, actually even in the face of very strong evidence contradicting those propositions (such as the evidence for evolution).
[Emphasis is mine.]
This view is so simplistic that it is incorrect. If you wish, go read the 1st paragraph here for an amalgamated definition of religion. If I was forced to pick just one facet of religion to answer for the rest of them, I would not go with faith, if only because it is not a major theme outside of Jewish god's domain. If anything, I would pick the existence of sacred writings or oral traditions as the defining feature of religion, and I would go with ritual as a close second. Neither of which has anything at all to do with the science of today.
And talk about how to get the dialog stop before it starts. Look, if you have a problem with one or other superstition being propagated by the Christian Church, say it. Name a particular church and a particular superstition, and expose them for being morons that they are. If you have a problem with Christian faith and surrounding theology, say it. I myself find the orthodox concept of faith in the modern Christianity insulting to even a 10 year old's intelligence. It is full of holes and glaring contradictions just waiting to be exposed by a total neophyte. None of these points are hard to argue, we just need to use our words and argue them, not write idiotic equations like Religion = "I Believe". These are inflammatory and get us nowhere.
Religion and Science are 100% incompatible. Religion = "I Believe", Science = "I can show/demonstrate/repeat".
This is exactly the kind of a dumb-ass comment that prevents a dialog from happening. I suggest that you start by re-reading all Dawkins just to make sure that he never says anything even remotely resembling your... I can only describe it as a cognitive equivalent of a premature ejaculation.
I second this. I think that Dawkins is really witty and funny; in fact, I am reading A Devil's Chaplain right now and loving it. But he is not the first person I think of when it comes to popularizing scientific discoveries (although he left a mark with The Selfish Gene), he is more of an anti-religious zealot with a boner for Darwin. He is an apologist for Science, which is somewhat ironic if you think of Apologetics as a traditionally Christian genre.
Slashdot Mirror
Binaries are an accidental byproduct of the current technology
This statement is delightfully farsighted. Humans won't be able to read binaries until their brains have built-in computers and digital interfaces (think GITS level technology and beyond).
Every RPG enthusiast I know has played Planescape: Torment. Yet none of them purchased it.
"Piracy hurts sales" can only be justified or refuted by statistics. You offer us an anecdote.
For the record, I did pay for PT, even though it is not exactly my way. Let's be fair: PT had writing and art to die for, but it was also one of the buggiest games of the year. For a game that moves around a handful of 2d sprites it was unbearably slow and crashed all the time. Could that be one of the reasons that it didn't sell very well?
Stallman has contributed greatly over the years to free software. You can't change that. I appreciate his contributions.
Thank you for recognizing this.
But Stallman is a zealot who hurts the image of free software, making it difficult to sell the concept of free software to suits. He goes after Linus, Mozilla and Google, never realizing who his friends are in the FOSS world. He demands 100% compliance with his growing list of restrictions, or you aren't free.
I disagree with the first sentence, while the rest is certainly true. Stallman only has cookies (the GNU toolchain, the GPL), he does not have a beating stick. He is not forcing anyone to do anything. He is not forcing anyone to even listen to him. You can write software and license it under whatever the hell you want, Stallman respects your choice as long as it is lawful. You should know who makes free software look unappealing through rhetoric and monopolistic practices: Microsoft, Apple and friends. Apple does it even as they leech on the work of the BSD team. Stallman is not it.
Freedom is not a list of restrictions.
You have to listen to the arguments before you rebut them. Free software owes its freedom solely to copying restrictions enforced via copyright law. The sense in which Stallman uses the word "free" has been the same for more than 20 years.
In reality, he wants to remove rights,
No, the copyright law does that. It removes all rights and GPL gives most of them back to the user. Few licenses out there are less restrictive than GPL.
How is this really different from DRM? DRM restricts users to protect the developer/artist from having their property stolen.
I don't think you understand the purpose of DRM. Put simply, it is similar to that of a gigantic black dildo with sharp metal spikes. Very different from GPL, which is more like a cute pink bunny that burps gold and shits rainbows.
In conclusion, Stallman is right again and we are all very lucky to have him around.
As far as I understand, Stallman maintains that all commodity software should be free for ethical reasons, and he is fine with getting there via incremental changes to the copyright law.
To be fair, I get myself in trouble all the time by saying "all" instead of "almost all". Well, almost all the time.
In practical terms, you face the same challenge on Mars as you do on Moon: no ecosystem. That alone makes colonization practically impossible. Two guys and a chick camping on Mars for a few months is no "colonization", even if they manage to reproduce. A sustainable eco-dome that uses local resources to provide most if not all life support is the very minimum of what I would call "colonization". Anything less than that on Mars is just a money sink. I'll be first to agree that we must do that asap, but the technology just isn't there yet. The challenge is the same in the sense that it is at the moment insurmountable. But if you must try, you have to start with Moon, because it is so much closer and hence less costly (and we have no disagreement on that).
While we are on the subject, I really want deep space colonization most of all. A nice space station is where it's at. If we can create a life support system out of light and a few nearby asteroids, we will be nearly indestructible, with space to expand for a looooooooong time. Unfortunately, robots (who, unlike us, are fine in vacuum, feeding on nothing but sunlight) will be way ahead of us in the near future, and we should just let them. Because robots are our friends.
So what exactly is the point of sending a human to Mars? I happen to believe that humans must colonize the solar system just to survive, but why start with Mars? The Moon is much closer and offers all the same challenges.
Yes yes, I am glad someone brought this up. This thing could be huge if it catches on, it could be the email, IM, and wiki replacement all folded in one. But they will have to address issues which come with the territory. I would not abandon email or vanilla XMPP for something that prevents me from establishing contacts with strangers, and that means dealing with the good old spam. My second concern is the privacy, which basically comes down to implementing end-to-end encryption, i.e. messages should be unreadable without private keys (that would make storing data on Google's servers fine by me). And finally, I would never abandon email for something that prevents me from exporting. They just have to make it so that all my waves can be exported and maintained as a single indexed database which I myself can archive and back up. Ideally, with only a few clicks I should be able to create a local wave server which is in sync with my wave "inbox", which I can browse using a vanilla wave client while offline.
...if you program it to feel pain, or if you program it to learn to feel pain.
The only good thing about the Seeker, imho, is the wizard played by Bruce Spence. OK, and the fact that every female is wearing a corset. If the two leads were replaced by inflatable dolls and the script by pressure cooking instructions, the overall quality would not suffer significantly.
Wow, the second link in particular is very informative, thank you. While you are right about the difference between monetary base and supply, I would like to point out that money was indeed created. We just cannot feel it yet because banks are exercising restraint:
That idleness, as I read the situation, was something the Fed initially actually wanted, and deliberately cultivated by choosing to pay an interest rate on excess reserves that is equal to what banks could expect to obtain by lending them overnight. As long as banks do just sit on these excess reserves, the Fed has found close to a trillion dollars it can use for the various targeted programs.
But what would happen if those electronic credits start to be redeemed for actual cash? Then we would have a concern, and the Fed would need to call the reserves back in by selling assets or failing to renew loans. But that presents a potential problem ...
There are concerns that reversing the process may be very difficult for political reasons. The ending is very telling:
Which brings me back to the original question. Does the explosive growth of the monetary base in Figure 1 imply uncontrollable inflationary pressures? My answer: not yet, but stay tuned.
I do not predict hyper-inflation, like some people already do, nor do I advise anyone to panic, but I am close to doing it for myself :) This whole thing seems to be holding on the fact that the newly created money will not be liquidated.
May be you can explain this chart to me?
Gold is computers' potato.
Also, having a fixed amount is not an issue. It is enough if the production is stable and low in relation to the total supply. What are the chances that gold production will double next year? Very low. That the gold supply will double? Astronomically low. US dollar supply? We've seen what happened in 2009 :)
Not calling you out or anything, but what would be a good place to learn about it? I am currently considering moving some of my assets into my mattress and I need pointers for what to buy. Even though gold, as you say, may be more abundant than before, it is still a lot rarer than the fiat dollar.
I hardly know of any games outside of the PC world.
You are right about one thing at least. I should have made more effort what I mean before I started flaming :)
I am for free software and all that, but I am for one OK with commercial titles being tethered to the mothership. The usual ethical argument l la RMS does not apply, since games are not commodity software. I think that games benefit the society, but a fun million dollar game is every bit as effective as a fun 1000 dollar game.
And I like some of the big-budget stuff. I want these guys to stay in business. I like Diablo, for one. Blizz said recently that with the new battle.net they are going to try to become an arena for competitive gaming. Kudos. Tying the game to the central server is their only option, and what an option that is, they would be stupid not to use it. They will get paid. They will have a position on cheaters. They will give us something homegrown titles do not have: a large, competitive (as in sport) minded community. Or at least they intend to and should be able to do just that with some luck. Think SC in Korea, but now it is SC2 and D3, bigger, and in US. I can't stop salivating. This is how you play in the big leagues, dude. You buckle and obey the ground rules. Where is the downside? Don't like this attitude? Suck it up and download Free Arena. Professional game developers do not owe you squat. They would not be able to pull it off if they could not get paid. It is not like there is a lack of free as in freedom games that kick ass. There are more of those than ever!
In that light, I am very happy that there is even an option of single-player. Why is it still tethered to the mothership? A better question is: why should they untie it? Why should they care and put in more code when they have nothing to gain from it? It's the big leagues. Their playground, their rules. This is the freaking appeal. I am an old gamer and I like where this is going.
Every religion is based on faith, which is a belief which must be accepted without evidence.
Are we supposed to accept this on faith? You, as well as the original poster, are guilty of the very thing you faulting religions for: firing away oversimplified statements that can be shown false by reading only a few paragraphs describing various religions.
Now, was that so complicated? Or do you have any good arguments or examples to the contrary?
I thought you'd never ask.
According to the scriptures, during his lifetime the Buddha remained silent when asked several metaphysical questions. These regarded issues such as whether the universe is eternal or non-eternal (or whether it is finite or infinite), the unity or separation of the body and the self, the complete inexistence [sic] of a person after nirvana and death, and others. One explanation for this silence is that such questions distract from activity that is practical to realizing enlightenment and bring about the danger of substituting the experience of liberation by conceptual understanding of the doctrine or by religious faith. [Wiki]
And more:
TheravÄda promotes the concept of Vibhajjavada (Pali), literally "Teaching of Analysis". This doctrine says that insight must come from the aspirant's experience, critical investigation, and reasoning instead of by blind faith. [Wiki]
And no, it does stop stop at Buddhism. Classical Taoism, for example, ignores "faith" completely! It is a non-issue for them.
... Shinto and Buddhism typically do not require professing faith to be a believer or a pratitioner ... [Wiki]
Hinduism does not have a "unified system of belief encoded in declaration of faith or a creed" [Wiki]
Get your head of sand and learn about religions.
I just reread your post and it made more sense. I am really sorry for sounding all pissed off and flaming like no tomorrow.
May be I have a more satisfactory answer for you. I understand that "the system of beliefs wherein propositions are taken to be true on faith" may be the meaning employed by the original poster who got me started. The question is: is it at all useful to talk about religions in such a way? Does it advance the religion versus science debate? I do not think so. World religions are hopelessly complicated and it helps no one when we reduce them to mere sets of statements which are taken to be "true". Sure, some religions are more guilty of this intellectual laziness, and mainstream protestantism in USA may seem the most guilty of them all, but even the latter is just so much bigger than that.
Did you ever read Apocalypse? It is short and entertaining. Sometimes I think that religions are like the beasts described therein. Religions are gigantic animals with bodies composed of people, buildings, machines; their spirits are dispersed across millions of human minds and (nowadays) computers. They probably have their own selfish desires, they definitely have a lot of inertia once they start moving. No one person ever has control or even a good understanding of how exactly they work or behave. To be fair, some of them do seem to be hostile to science, but explaining how, and why, and what we can do about it is no simple matter.
And this is what gets me so upset: idiots who oversimplify. They are not helping, they are just pissing off more and more religious people. I am a science guy. I do want us to a parley with religions, mainly because I want our society to understand the sheer awesomeness of science as well as its limitations, and to use science to its advantage. And every time stupid people say things about religion that are stupid and untrue, we all loose.
You did not address my point at all.
You keep conflating "religion" and "Judeo-Christian religion". Give me another religion which places so much emphasis on "blind faith in certain propositions". Your words, not mine. Judeo-Christian pistis is a theological anomaly. OED (I hope) orders meanings according to usage frequency. If that is indeed the case, it is not surprising that a country so long dominated by a single church (Of England) prefers a heavily biased meaning of the word. Why do you insist on using this meaning in a careful debate about relationship between religion and science?
You tried to make it about semantics, and you failed. You do not seem to realize that definition is different from meaning. Wikipedia gives a definition of religion, OED gives meanings. Anyone who needs to look up the meaning of this word is not qualified for this debate at all.
Now, please address my point if you want to keep arguing. I will make it easier for you and pretend that we are only talking about Christianity. You say then, Christianity "is all about blind faith in certain propositions". I don't know where to start, this is just wrong on so many levels. I dare you to find a major denomination with such a creed or a major theologian who said something this stupid.
I despise most if not all organized religions. I think that modern orthodox Christianity is full of superstition and that its theology is rotten. But I also know (from reading Christian writers and participating in religious communities, sometimes for months or years at a time) that modern Christianity is much more than just "blind faith". For one, they do not call their faith "blind", and for you doing so is already very inconsiderate if you are trying to enable a discussion. Regardless, a modern US Christian's worship revolves around reading scriptures, prayer (both personal and communal), Sunday service with a sermon and the Communion, monetary donations, and participation in humanitarian projects in the local community, just to name a few things that occupy their time. Don't let this next thought to blow you away: you, sir, can meaningfully participate in the life of a Christian community near you without believing any of their fairy tales. You just need to start shaking hands and do their Christian things that they do, like listening to stories about moral choices people made, confessing your faults, raising funds for this cause or other. Saying that Christianity is "is all about blind faith in certain propositions" is just false. Saying the same about religion is not only false, but also betrays a strong Judeo-Christian bias, which is rather ironic for you to have, as you seem to be opposed to their beliefs.
I cannot elaborate on why the GGP is wrong precisely because he didn't offer any kind of cogent argument. I will not pretend I understood what GGP was trying to say, and you should not be so hasty to read meaning into that gibberish just because it hits on certain keywords.
What he is essentially saying is that religion is all about blind faith in certain propositions (God exists, he created the universe, he created humans in his image etc etc) even in the face of complete absence of evidence, actually even in the face of very strong evidence contradicting those propositions (such as the evidence for evolution).
[Emphasis is mine.]
This view is so simplistic that it is incorrect. If you wish, go read the 1st paragraph here for an amalgamated definition of religion. If I was forced to pick just one facet of religion to answer for the rest of them, I would not go with faith, if only because it is not a major theme outside of Jewish god's domain. If anything, I would pick the existence of sacred writings or oral traditions as the defining feature of religion, and I would go with ritual as a close second. Neither of which has anything at all to do with the science of today.
And talk about how to get the dialog stop before it starts. Look, if you have a problem with one or other superstition being propagated by the Christian Church, say it. Name a particular church and a particular superstition, and expose them for being morons that they are. If you have a problem with Christian faith and surrounding theology, say it. I myself find the orthodox concept of faith in the modern Christianity insulting to even a 10 year old's intelligence. It is full of holes and glaring contradictions just waiting to be exposed by a total neophyte. None of these points are hard to argue, we just need to use our words and argue them, not write idiotic equations like Religion = "I Believe". These are inflammatory and get us nowhere.
:) I hope you are not going to try and punch Neil, a former captain of a wrestling team.
Religion and Science are 100% incompatible. Religion = "I Believe", Science = "I can show/demonstrate/repeat".
This is exactly the kind of a dumb-ass comment that prevents a dialog from happening. I suggest that you start by re-reading all Dawkins just to make sure that he never says anything even remotely resembling your... I can only describe it as a cognitive equivalent of a premature ejaculation.
I second this. I think that Dawkins is really witty and funny; in fact, I am reading A Devil's Chaplain right now and loving it. But he is not the first person I think of when it comes to popularizing scientific discoveries (although he left a mark with The Selfish Gene), he is more of an anti-religious zealot with a boner for Darwin. He is an apologist for Science, which is somewhat ironic if you think of Apologetics as a traditionally Christian genre.
I am currently going through a Neil deGrasse Tyson phase.