While I have every right to believe in a tooth fairy, I cannot let that belief cloud my judgement on deciding what needs to be taught in a dental faculty.
Agreed. But I don't think that analogy is relevant in this case. I was arguing for my particular view about the most sensible approach to use when weighing claims about things like Christianity.
I think you're making a point from a different conversation, in which belief in Christianity is assumed to be equivalent to belief in a Tooth Fairy, and you're talking about the foolishness of living as though the Tooth Fairy / Christianity were actually true.
In fact, since it goes against absolutely every single piece of evidence available, the only position compatible with the information I have is that that claim is in fact false.
If you're serious about wanting to hear some of the best arguments for the alleged resurrection being an actual historical event, you might want to read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis or The Case for Easter by Lee Strobel. The first is considered a classic. The second book I haven't read, but I've read some of Strobel's other books, and I've found them to be pretty good.
Of course, if you're so certain that Christianity is false that you don't consider it worth investing the time in reading a book that tries to make the case for Christianity, then I guess there's not much I could do right now to convince you.
Of course, as an agnostic, it's not that much skin of my back;)
Sure. Now, after thousands of years, no one has been able to come up with any falsifiable statement which might possibly entail the existence of those imaginary friends, nor with any falsifiable statement which would contradict the non-existence of such imaginary friends.
At the core of Christianity's claims is that Jesus of Nazareth died, and yet was alive three days later. That's at least a claim about empirical, objective, physical reality. The problem is that it's now a historical claim.
Any suggestions for how to sort out whether or not a historical claim is true?
You seem angry ("You can't understand because you are stupid.") I'm not sure why. I actually thought this was a really interesting conversation.
Regarding the genealogy timeline thing. I can see why you'd see that. The explanation I've heard though is that it's customary for those genealogies to omit certain generations. That is, "X is the father of Y" is meant to be interpreted as "X is an ancestor of Y". It's hard to know whether or not scholars come up with that claim just to deal with that particular problem, or if even non-Christian / non-Jewish scholars would agree that that literary form of genealogy really can skip generations.
This actually raises a broader issue I've encountered when trying to determine if the Bible is true. Whenever I've come to an apparent contradiction, there's always been some scholarly explanation that explains away the contradiction. And since I'm not a full-time scholar of ancient literary forms, it's hard to know whom to trust about this stuff. Maybe it's really true that casual readers are likely to completely misinterpret texts like the Bible.
The thing about the sun stopping the the sky: I dunno. Maybe the Bible's wrong, maybe we're interpreting it more literally than that book's original author meant, or maybe there's some third explanation. I'm pretty beat, so I'm going to leave researching that one into you if you're interested. A good place to look is something like this.
This is a great example of both a false analogy and genetic fallacy. There is no credible evidence that Jesus as described in the bible existed, while there there is volumes of evidence that George Washington existed. Therefore the analogy is false. The genetic fallacy comes in when you assert that a fictional character is real.
Why do you believe that there's no credible evidence that the Jesus of the bible existed?
In other words Argument from half-truth. You want to change the definition of what makes "good evidence" to allow false premises to support your arguments.
I wasn't equivocating. I never agreed with you on the definition of "good evidence" in the first place. Your charge of sophism isn't accurate.
False Dilemma: It is not that belief itself isn't scientifically verifiable, but that what you believe has no scientifically verifiable evidence. It is in no way self-contradictory to require that there be scientific evidence of the thing one believes in as one is not demanding evidence of belief but rather evidence of the thing believed in.
I think you misunderstood my point. But it was probably a point I shouldn't have made anyway, because it's trying to argue against a view that I don't think you hold. I suggest we suspend this branch of the discussion.
BTW, thanks for keeping up the conversation. This is fun for me.
Believing what someone in authority told you when you didn't know any better isn't "evidence".
I don't think anyone here is suggesting that adults should believe Christianity's claims merely because someone in authority told them that they were true. I certainly wasn't.
Such "evidence" of the tooth fairy, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny is also "not entirely absent". But even most Christians stop believing in at least one of them.
Agreed. I think that's why these kinds of discussions are rarely or never fully satisfying. Just about every belief we can hold is impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. That's why we're kind of forced to settle for a lesser standard of certainty when dealing with this kind of issue. It's frustrating, but it seems to just be the way this issue is.
In other words, you can't provide any proof for a creator at all. You also thin
And you can't give any proof for evolution, either. Recall that at best, the scientific method can disprove hypotheses, not prove them. That's why I think the discussion should be about best evidence, not proof. I don't see how we'll get proof for either position.
And in terms of "evidence", like I said, we should probably try to account for the historical evidence for and against Christianity, because the veracity of Christianity is connected to whether or not old-earth creationism is a reasonable belief.
A supposition is not evidence, therefore this is not evidence. There may have been an historic person name Jesus, born to a Joseph and Mary, but there is no evidence of anyone "living again".
I disagree. I say there is evidence. Like I said earlier, we can quickly get to the point where we disagree about what make credible evidence. Welcome to a common impasse on this topic of debate.
I'm not trying to put words in your mouth with the following. But: if you hold that only scientifically verifiable beliefs are the beliefs worth accepting as true, then you're dogmatically holding a self-contradictory position. At the very least, that belief itself isn't scientifically verifiable, which is where the self-contradiction arises. So that standard would be problematic if you were to hold that.
As an example of other classes of propositions that you might want to consider as possible evidence, consider historical evidence. I think if we categorically refuse to admit it, then we come to some problematic results. For instance, we'd be unable to admit that George Washington was probably the first U.S. president.
I guess what I'm doing is challenging you to carefully think about how you decide to admit something as evidence (even provisionally) worth considering, vs. ruling it out before carefully considering it. One example of the kind of evidence that I'm talking about is the apparent fact that Christianity spread very rapidly throughout the Roman empire very shortly after Jesus is reported to have died. Or the historical records that 11 of the 12 apostles (the guys that spent a lot of time with Jesus) were executed for not recanting their belief that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. Because people generally aren't willing to die to uphold claims they belief are false, that strikes me as a piece of evidence that needs consideration.
Anyway, I'm not trying to enumerate the evidence that I think supports Christianity (and thus some form of Creationism). I'm just trying to give examples of historical evidence that's worth considering but which may not fit your current mold about what makes good evidence. If you want to see specific arguments for the historical reliability of the Bible, one of the other posts I did in this thread lists some decent books.
f people could breath water, that would be pretty strong evidence that people can't drown.That makes as much sense as what you said.
Sorry, I just can't understand what you're saying here. It seems like a complete non sequitur.
There is nothing to suggest a creator except some old books that are demonstrably false
Okay, prove it. I think that if you remain intellectually honest, you'll find it's a much, much harder task then you think.
Everything you and your creationist friends say falls into one of the following fallacies:
Dragging out a list of fallacies and pasting it into a response doesn't make your case at all. You've failed to justify any one of those bullet items.
There is no brand of Creationism that is scientific.
I don't think we were arguing about what's knowable via science, but rather about what beliefs can be reasonably held. Recall that we were originally discussing whether or not Sarah Palin is given to irrationality and delusion.
The reason I'm pointing that out is that you may be falling into the trap of claiming that the only things we can reasonably believe are those things which are scientifically verifiable. I've heard some arguments in the past that convinced me that such as view is self-defeating, which is why I thought I'd mention it.
It's faith, which is the most unreliable way to know anything, and is completely different from science, which is determined by only proof.
That should give you pause regarding, at a practical level, you should accept all published scientific work as "proof" of anything. I'm not trying to argue for some radical form of skepticism - I'm just pointing out that most "scientific conclusions" we think we know are actually told to us by other people, and often are never verified. So the version of the scientific method that we have access to in our regular daily lives is actually pretty different from the idealized version of the method that seems like such a reasonable razor for beliefs.
Proof destroys faith, but Creationists prefer faith, to the point of denying any fact that they possibly can, usually by ignoring it.
All Creationists are anti-evidential, anti-scientific people who are intellectually dishonest even to themselves? I suppose many of them are, but certainly not all. I'd be more tempted to agree with you if you limited that claim to young-earth creationists + other dogmatic people. But in my own experiences I've met Creationists (mostly old-earth creationists) who have none of the qualities you ascribe to the overall group.
Then what is it? Some links/citations to the scientific evidence of a creator would be nice.
Sure, I'll see what I can dig up. But bear in mind that I'm agnostic, so I haven't found any evidence on either side completely compelling.
Rather than trying to dig up some slam-dunk scientific argument (which I personally have never found), I'll give you a few links to books from guys who have tried to make compelling cases for the compatibility of Christianity and modern science (and/or other reasons to believe that Christianity is true). I think you'll find the kinds of arguments you're looking for in these books. I'd try to answer your request more narrowly, but I'm actually at work and should get back to it. Some links are below.
Provide any evidence that points to a creator that is not also explained better and with more evidence by evolution.
The crux of the problem is the word "better". I think you'll find that evaluating this stuff unavoidably goes into the realm of informal logic, and all kinds of subjective issues come into play. I.e., different people can judge different explanations for the same evidence to be "better". And there's really no where to go from there in terms of resolving your different conclusions.
Every single creationist I have met or interacted with started with the conclusion "There is a creator." and worked backwards from there ignoring evidence to the contrary, ignoring evidence that their creation myth is wrong, ignoring anything and everything that did not fit their conclusion. Many have gone so far as to lie about the facts and redefine words such as "science" and "theory" to bolster their claims.
Maybe some of them are idiots. Maybe some of them get irrational when backed into a corner during a debate, and/or try getting philosophical during the debate without having previously developed their critical thinking skills. Maybe you've run into a particularly dense cross-section of them.
All I'm saying is that sometimes a proposition can be true, even when lots of people give bad arguments for that proposition. Personally, I've read some pretty good (but not slam-dunk) arguments for the version of Christianity that's compatible with old-earth Creationism. Which is why I believe that they're not all idiots or wackos, despite the sampling you've come across.
You can say that the statement "is only true of a subset of those who call themselves Creationists", but you would be wrong. One can not be pro-science and believe that there is a creator for whom there is no evidence and that the only record of whom is proven false by science. Either one accepts the conclusions of science or one believes in stories that directly contradict the evidence and conclusions of science.
I think you're assuming that the only things we can reasonably believe are those things that can be proven by the scientific method. I think that's an unrealistic standard. (To be more technical, I think that adopting such a standard would likely prevent us from holding a number of true beliefs, especially regarding historical facts.)
There are two pieces of evidence that are pretty hard to apply the scientific method to, because we can't readily perform repeated experiments with controlled conditions. For example, historical events.
Take for example the alleged existence and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Whether or not he died, and whether or not he was walking around after having died, were (at the time) observable events. The problem is that they're probably not repeatable events, so they're really hard to probe with the scientific method. And unfortunately, our grasp on science just isn't good enough to use science to determine whether or not something like that happened 2000 years ago. We're forced to use other disciplines like historical research to make informed guesses about that. And conclusions about historical events definitely involve some subjective judgment. But if Jesus really did live, die, and live again, that's a pretty strong piece of evidence for the veracity of Christianity, and maybe in turn for some version of Creationism.
One can not be pro-science and believe that there is a creator for whom there is no evidence and that the only record of whom is proven false by science.
Not quite sure what you mean by "proven false". Are you talking about evolution vs. Creationism? If so, then even if most popular version of evolutionism is actually an accurate account of history, then all that does is disprove the Young-earth Creationist standpoint. It's entirely compatible with Old-earth Creationi
Apparently, it can't be closer than 130 light-years but it can be as far as 11 billion light-years away. It's not in any known galaxy either. And they have ruled out a supernova too. It's something that they have never encountered before. In other words: they don't have a single clue about where or what the heck this thing is.
Fortunately, with Bush in office, we can count on a simple, direct solution that's unencumbered by a lot of scientifical mumbo-jumbo. We'll send someone out to check. Sitting on earth, just looking at it with telescopes is the Democratic way.
Any form of creationism is unscientific specifically because there is no evidence for a creator.
I disagree. I think the evidence can be murky, but isn't entirely absent. Also, you'll probably disagree with them on what constitutes valid evidence. If you're like most people, you'll find yourself hard pressed to justify your personal take on what should constitute valid evidence.
Creationists start with a conclusion and then cherry-pick facts to try to support their conclusion.
I don't think that such argumentation style is a necessary consequence of being a Creationist. So presumably you're not referring to every single Creationist with that statement. Why are you making such generalizations?
As creationist wish to suppress the true science and impose their beliefs as being science based, they are by definition anti-science.
Again, I'd say this is only true of a subset of those who call themselves Creationists. By grouping all Creationists into that single category, you're going to argue against straw men. That would be a waste of your time.
In the end, it all comes to you asking yourself whether you want to be under the power of someone who believes in imaginary friends, independently of how old s/he thinks the earth is.
The question, then, is whether or not the friends are imaginary. Or more precisely, whether or not the people who believe in those "imaginary" friends might have good reasons to believe that those friends exist.
And I can say with great confidence that trying to reason about that issue on Slashdot is not productive.
Of course they'll talk a good science game (after farming that questionnaire out to one of the lobbyist lawfirms that make up their campaign)...
I think you're painting with too broad of a brush. There are a lot of different forms of Creationism, and they're not all as anti-scientific as you're probably thinking. You're probably against strict creationism, which flat-out rejects evolution. But I think many other Creationists also think strict-creationism is nuts, given the evidence in favor of evolution.
I think a lot of Creationists are old earth creationists. They basically hold a world view that seeks to make sense of both the fossil record and other beliefs they carry.
Also, is it possible that some of your anger is a carry-over from Bush's administration's anti-scientific policies? I haven't met a thinking Christian who's down with what Bush has done to science policy in the U.S. But I suspect Bush's policies have nothing to do with Creationist views, and a lot more to do with his utter failure of leadership, morals, ethics, intelligence, and integrity. But that's just my 2 cents as an agnostic.
Yup. Hidden on the side I couldn't easily see. I was hoping for the more techically interesting solution to the problem, but at least I've got the MAC address now. Thanks.
Yes, there are other ways to cool without a compressor, but they are in a lot of cases nowhere as energy efficient as the tried and true way of compression/evaporation.
It's ok - we only need one case of a technology that's as efficient as compression-based refrigeration (so long as it does as well or better in other important criteria.)
The Bush and Blaire administrations fraudulently misused and misrepresented intelligence in order to trick the U.S. Congress as well as the U.N. Security Council into their authorizations.
That could be legal only under definitions of "legal" that are entirely divorced from "just" and "good".
If it's wrong to post videos that are propaganda for an organization that commits criminal acts of war, then shouldn't they ban videos of Army successes in Iraq?
After all, the U.S. invaded Iraq without just cause, making it an illegal war.
I don't think so. With regular ripped DVDs, I suspect you're at risk of having your laptop seized at the U.S. border. With the files produced by this tool, since it's supposedly fully licensed, you may be ok.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say Stallman's first OS:
doofus@hotdog:~$ time emacs -nw
real 0m2.075s
user 0m0.372s
sys 0m0.076s
doofus@hotdog:~$
Agreed. But I don't think that analogy is relevant in this case. I was arguing for my particular view about the most sensible approach to use when weighing claims about things like Christianity.
I think you're making a point from a different conversation, in which belief in Christianity is assumed to be equivalent to belief in a Tooth Fairy, and you're talking about the foolishness of living as though the Tooth Fairy / Christianity were actually true.
If you're serious about wanting to hear some of the best arguments for the alleged resurrection being an actual historical event, you might want to read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis or The Case for Easter by Lee Strobel. The first is considered a classic. The second book I haven't read, but I've read some of Strobel's other books, and I've found them to be pretty good.
Of course, if you're so certain that Christianity is false that you don't consider it worth investing the time in reading a book that tries to make the case for Christianity, then I guess there's not much I could do right now to convince you.
Of course, as an agnostic, it's not that much skin of my back ;)
At the core of Christianity's claims is that Jesus of Nazareth died, and yet was alive three days later. That's at least a claim about empirical, objective, physical reality. The problem is that it's now a historical claim.
Any suggestions for how to sort out whether or not a historical claim is true?
You seem angry ("You can't understand because you are stupid.") I'm not sure why. I actually thought this was a really interesting conversation.
Regarding the genealogy timeline thing. I can see why you'd see that. The explanation I've heard though is that it's customary for those genealogies to omit certain generations. That is, "X is the father of Y" is meant to be interpreted as "X is an ancestor of Y". It's hard to know whether or not scholars come up with that claim just to deal with that particular problem, or if even non-Christian / non-Jewish scholars would agree that that literary form of genealogy really can skip generations.
This actually raises a broader issue I've encountered when trying to determine if the Bible is true. Whenever I've come to an apparent contradiction, there's always been some scholarly explanation that explains away the contradiction. And since I'm not a full-time scholar of ancient literary forms, it's hard to know whom to trust about this stuff. Maybe it's really true that casual readers are likely to completely misinterpret texts like the Bible.
The thing about the sun stopping the the sky: I dunno. Maybe the Bible's wrong, maybe we're interpreting it more literally than that book's original author meant, or maybe there's some third explanation. I'm pretty beat, so I'm going to leave researching that one into you if you're interested. A good place to look is something like this.
Why do you believe that there's no credible evidence that the Jesus of the bible existed?
I wasn't equivocating. I never agreed with you on the definition of "good evidence" in the first place. Your charge of sophism isn't accurate.
I think you misunderstood my point. But it was probably a point I shouldn't have made anyway, because it's trying to argue against a view that I don't think you hold. I suggest we suspend this branch of the discussion.
BTW, thanks for keeping up the conversation. This is fun for me.
I don't think anyone here is suggesting that adults should believe Christianity's claims merely because someone in authority told them that they were true. I certainly wasn't.
Agreed. I think that's why these kinds of discussions are rarely or never fully satisfying. Just about every belief we can hold is impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. That's why we're kind of forced to settle for a lesser standard of certainty when dealing with this kind of issue. It's frustrating, but it seems to just be the way this issue is.
And you can't give any proof for evolution, either. Recall that at best, the scientific method can disprove hypotheses, not prove them. That's why I think the discussion should be about best evidence, not proof. I don't see how we'll get proof for either position.
And in terms of "evidence", like I said, we should probably try to account for the historical evidence for and against Christianity, because the veracity of Christianity is connected to whether or not old-earth creationism is a reasonable belief.
I disagree. I say there is evidence. Like I said earlier, we can quickly get to the point where we disagree about what make credible evidence. Welcome to a common impasse on this topic of debate.
I'm not trying to put words in your mouth with the following. But: if you hold that only scientifically verifiable beliefs are the beliefs worth accepting as true, then you're dogmatically holding a self-contradictory position. At the very least, that belief itself isn't scientifically verifiable, which is where the self-contradiction arises. So that standard would be problematic if you were to hold that.
As an example of other classes of propositions that you might want to consider as possible evidence, consider historical evidence. I think if we categorically refuse to admit it, then we come to some problematic results. For instance, we'd be unable to admit that George Washington was probably the first U.S. president.
I guess what I'm doing is challenging you to carefully think about how you decide to admit something as evidence (even provisionally) worth considering, vs. ruling it out before carefully considering it. One example of the kind of evidence that I'm talking about is the apparent fact that Christianity spread very rapidly throughout the Roman empire very shortly after Jesus is reported to have died. Or the historical records that 11 of the 12 apostles (the guys that spent a lot of time with Jesus) were executed for not recanting their belief that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. Because people generally aren't willing to die to uphold claims they belief are false, that strikes me as a piece of evidence that needs consideration.
Anyway, I'm not trying to enumerate the evidence that I think supports Christianity (and thus some form of Creationism). I'm just trying to give examples of historical evidence that's worth considering but which may not fit your current mold about what makes good evidence. If you want to see specific arguments for the historical reliability of the Bible, one of the other posts I did in this thread lists some decent books.
Sorry, I just can't understand what you're saying here. It seems like a complete non sequitur.
Okay, prove it. I think that if you remain intellectually honest, you'll find it's a much, much harder task then you think.
Dragging out a list of fallacies and pasting it into a response doesn't make your case at all. You've failed to justify any one of those bullet items.
I don't think we were arguing about what's knowable via science, but rather about what beliefs can be reasonably held. Recall that we were originally discussing whether or not Sarah Palin is given to irrationality and delusion.
The reason I'm pointing that out is that you may be falling into the trap of claiming that the only things we can reasonably believe are those things which are scientifically verifiable. I've heard some arguments in the past that convinced me that such as view is self-defeating, which is why I thought I'd mention it.
Is it possible that you're over-romanticizing the scientific method? It has plenty of potential for fallibility as well. People can make up data, reason incorrectly, base their results on other people's incorrect work, etc.
That should give you pause regarding, at a practical level, you should accept all published scientific work as "proof" of anything. I'm not trying to argue for some radical form of skepticism - I'm just pointing out that most "scientific conclusions" we think we know are actually told to us by other people, and often are never verified. So the version of the scientific method that we have access to in our regular daily lives is actually pretty different from the idealized version of the method that seems like such a reasonable razor for beliefs.
All Creationists are anti-evidential, anti-scientific people who are intellectually dishonest even to themselves? I suppose many of them are, but certainly not all. I'd be more tempted to agree with you if you limited that claim to young-earth creationists + other dogmatic people. But in my own experiences I've met Creationists (mostly old-earth creationists) who have none of the qualities you ascribe to the overall group.
Sure, I'll see what I can dig up. But bear in mind that I'm agnostic, so I haven't found any evidence on either side completely compelling.
Rather than trying to dig up some slam-dunk scientific argument (which I personally have never found), I'll give you a few links to books from guys who have tried to make compelling cases for the compatibility of Christianity and modern science (and/or other reasons to believe that Christianity is true). I think you'll find the kinds of arguments you're looking for in these books. I'd try to answer your request more narrowly, but I'm actually at work and should get back to it. Some links are below.
The crux of the problem is the word "better". I think you'll find that evaluating this stuff unavoidably goes into the realm of informal logic, and all kinds of subjective issues come into play. I.e., different people can judge different explanations for the same evidence to be "better". And there's really no where to go from there in terms of resolving your different conclusions.
Maybe some of them are idiots. Maybe some of them get irrational when backed into a corner during a debate, and/or try getting philosophical during the debate without having previously developed their critical thinking skills. Maybe you've run into a particularly dense cross-section of them.
All I'm saying is that sometimes a proposition can be true, even when lots of people give bad arguments for that proposition. Personally, I've read some pretty good (but not slam-dunk) arguments for the version of Christianity that's compatible with old-earth Creationism. Which is why I believe that they're not all idiots or wackos, despite the sampling you've come across.
I think you're assuming that the only things we can reasonably believe are those things that can be proven by the scientific method. I think that's an unrealistic standard. (To be more technical, I think that adopting such a standard would likely prevent us from holding a number of true beliefs, especially regarding historical facts.)
There are two pieces of evidence that are pretty hard to apply the scientific method to, because we can't readily perform repeated experiments with controlled conditions. For example, historical events.
Take for example the alleged existence and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Whether or not he died, and whether or not he was walking around after having died, were (at the time) observable events. The problem is that they're probably not repeatable events, so they're really hard to probe with the scientific method. And unfortunately, our grasp on science just isn't good enough to use science to determine whether or not something like that happened 2000 years ago. We're forced to use other disciplines like historical research to make informed guesses about that. And conclusions about historical events definitely involve some subjective judgment. But if Jesus really did live, die, and live again, that's a pretty strong piece of evidence for the veracity of Christianity, and maybe in turn for some version of Creationism.
Not quite sure what you mean by "proven false". Are you talking about evolution vs. Creationism? If so, then even if most popular version of evolutionism is actually an accurate account of history, then all that does is disprove the Young-earth Creationist standpoint. It's entirely compatible with Old-earth Creationi
Fortunately, with Bush in office, we can count on a simple, direct solution that's unencumbered by a lot of scientifical mumbo-jumbo. We'll send someone out to check. Sitting on earth, just looking at it with telescopes is the Democratic way.
I disagree. I think the evidence can be murky, but isn't entirely absent. Also, you'll probably disagree with them on what constitutes valid evidence. If you're like most people, you'll find yourself hard pressed to justify your personal take on what should constitute valid evidence.
I don't think that such argumentation style is a necessary consequence of being a Creationist. So presumably you're not referring to every single Creationist with that statement. Why are you making such generalizations?
Again, I'd say this is only true of a subset of those who call themselves Creationists. By grouping all Creationists into that single category, you're going to argue against straw men. That would be a waste of your time.
In the end, it all comes to you asking yourself whether you want to be under the power of someone who believes in imaginary friends, independently of how old s/he thinks the earth is.
The question, then, is whether or not the friends are imaginary. Or more precisely, whether or not the people who believe in those "imaginary" friends might have good reasons to believe that those friends exist.
And I can say with great confidence that trying to reason about that issue on Slashdot is not productive.
Palin is a Creationist. McCain is a fossil.
Of course they'll talk a good science game (after farming that questionnaire out to one of the lobbyist lawfirms that make up their campaign)...
I think you're painting with too broad of a brush. There are a lot of different forms of Creationism, and they're not all as anti-scientific as you're probably thinking. You're probably against strict creationism, which flat-out rejects evolution. But I think many other Creationists also think strict-creationism is nuts, given the evidence in favor of evolution.
I think a lot of Creationists are old earth creationists. They basically hold a world view that seeks to make sense of both the fossil record and other beliefs they carry.
Also, is it possible that some of your anger is a carry-over from Bush's administration's anti-scientific policies? I haven't met a thinking Christian who's down with what Bush has done to science policy in the U.S. But I suspect Bush's policies have nothing to do with Creationist views, and a lot more to do with his utter failure of leadership, morals, ethics, intelligence, and integrity. But that's just my 2 cents as an agnostic.
This device is guaranteed to only give what you judge to be true positives... if you only use it on people you've already decided are guilty.
In the U.S. I would say yes, because we have the 5th Amendment to the Constitution. In Indian law, I have no idea.
At first blush this sounds like a high-tech form of seeing if the witch can float.
A label on the bottom ?
Yup. Hidden on the side I couldn't easily see. I was hoping for the more techically interesting solution to the problem, but at least I've got the MAC address now. Thanks.
It's ok - we only need one case of a technology that's as efficient as compression-based refrigeration (so long as it does as well or better in other important criteria.)
I tried that, but found the interface pretty confusing. So instead I tried kwavecontrol, which has a more intuitive gui.
From what I can tell, the linux driver for my laptop's Intel 4965 wifi card doesn't report the AP's MAC address.
Maybe I'd have more luck with the Window's driver, but my laptop only has Ubuntu on it. :(
I have a Verizon FiOS Wifi / ethernet router. I poked around the settings for the router but I couldn't find its WiFi MAC address listed anywhere.
Anyone know how I can found that address? (On my client I'm running Ubuntu 8.04)
The Bush and Blaire administrations fraudulently misused and misrepresented intelligence in order to trick the U.S. Congress as well as the U.N. Security Council into their authorizations.
That could be legal only under definitions of "legal" that are entirely divorced from "just" and "good".
If it's wrong to post videos that are propaganda for an organization that commits criminal acts of war, then shouldn't they ban videos of Army successes in Iraq?
After all, the U.S. invaded Iraq without just cause, making it an illegal war.
At least he used a complete, grammatically correct sentence. ;-)
Oh, my kingdom for a verb...
Oh, my kingdom for the ability to go back and edit stupid typos on /. :)
Slashdot became ever so slightly less egalitarian that day, when 'UID cred' became something touted right up on the header of each comment.
So here's a long belated: Thanks, Bruce.
Like we about the opinion of a seven-digiter...
I don't think so. With regular ripped DVDs, I suspect you're at risk of having your laptop seized at the U.S. border. With the files produced by this tool, since it's supposedly fully licensed, you may be ok.