Yea, you're right. Just like there's no good reason for having sex with contraceptives. Ha! Only dumb idiots cannot realize what they're doing is in vain. Too bad it seems we're all idiots.
It just occurred to me that air pressure depends on two things, altitude AND weather:). Usually during storms the air pressure would drop significantly even on the sea level, and similar could be expected on the mountain. Maybe that time altitude + storm meant lower air pressure than her previous higher altitudes in good weather?
I climb and study meteorology. You've given me a very nice question to think about:). What you say about edemas is probably very true, but maybe this is an additional reason to take storms extremely seriously?
The idea is true, one detail is not. Earth's mantle is mostly solid, so of our small model earth, nearly half of the diameter is solid matter. It's viscous and capable of flow though.
How do we know this? That's because S-waves (waves vibrating in a direction perpendicular to the propagation of sound) can only happen in solids. Think of the vibration of a tuning fork, for example. S-waves travel very well in the mantle. S-waves, however, don't enter the liquid outer core at all (which is why we know it's liquid;).
So, once again, our everyday "wisdom" about what a stone is, is at fault. During very long times, stones deform. Sagging is becoming apparent even in some old marble benches on the surface of the earth. And stones deform much more readily in the huge pressures of the mantle.
On the other hand, in the 18th century transportation "sucked royally", so the spreading of diseases was far, far, far less rapid than it is today.
My guess is, if you add transportation without adding vaccination, child mortality goes up even with clean water and waste treatment. Measles alone would kill something like 10% of children (without proper healthcare), and none of the developments you mention would help against it.
Historically it might often have been the case that kids escaped infection by luck. Not anymore.
I second that wholeheartedly. And I'm a real geek. I love the Xandros ui - heck, XP's start menu wouldn't fit on the 901's screen anyway;). The gui works, and the terminal works too. No complaints.
In the last millennia, we've seen huge changes in the environment. Not surprisingly, evolution is currently very fast.
For some reason people often forget evolution is not only about survival, it's about procreation. And that's about many many details. One strong driving factor in evolution is who we choose to breed with - today, we have more options than ever in all possible ways. Why are many people so beautiful today? Because of evolution from choosing companions. We choose whom we breed with, and not nearly everyone ever has (or ever has had) kids, no matter if they die young or not.
More and more, people choose to not have kids. If you trust their capability of not having kids (and the technological means are unforeseen), that's going to drive evolution and rather strongly. I personally think people from happy families are more likely to want families of their own, which keeps evolution going the right way too.
Seriously though, the "normal" atmospheric concentration of methane is about 0.000001745%. 100x that brings us up to 0.001745%, which isn't very close to 5 - 15%.
I do agree that everything should be done to slow down the climate change - it's bad enough even without "explosions and conflagrations".
For example, if I cough outside facing north, it's NOT going to cause a pressure system to sweep the northern continent. By the same token, if I stand on the coast of southern Africa and sneeze west, it is NOT going to cause a hurricane.
Suppose you cough outside and accidentally blow out a candle. A young waitress comes to light it again, and a driver of an oil truck gets distracted by the sight and the truck moves a foot to the left, causing a collision with another truck. The oil spills and burns because of the candles, causing a forest burn that spreads over a very large area because it happened to be a dry period. That caused large clouds of smoke that obscured the sun, cooling down the ground, and altering the weather patterns on a large-ish scale (even worldwide, if it was a very large forest fire;).
The example is entirely artificial, but similar chains of cause and effect also exist in nature, just maybe not as probable or potent.
Suppose the butterfly flaps its wings. So the wings are vertical instead of horizontal - more sunlight goes into the pond that warms up more, and so more water was evaporated. The cloud above receives more water vapor, and thus rain starts two seconds earlier than otherwise. Because the cloud was moving, that also means the rain is in a slightly different place than it would have been, so more water fell on the lake on the mountain, raising the water level and causing the natural dam to collapse, resulting in a flash flood. That knocked down forest, dug a river valley deeper by many meters, and covered a large field with mud. That would alter surface albedo and wind patterns in the area, and thus local weather, which is a component in the global weather.
There are other processes that don't require interaction with solid matter but which are equally valid. Of course neither example above is very likely - most of the time small changes fail to push the events over the limits. Even then, that is possible.
Most of the time you coughing northwards will only add some very little momentum northward. So the weather system moving east-west will maybe be 1 millimeter more north than it would be, after traveling 1000 km west. Everything depends on everything, so the evolution of weather is changed, and everything else will also be in a different place than otherwise. Very small changes in directions or velocities will become apparent over long distances and time frames.
By the way, the weather predictions are usually very good in predicting what's going to happen. The inaccuracies lie in when and where things will happen;). If rain is predicted, maybe it'll be 100 km off and three hours later. That's because directions and velocities used in the prediction were slightly off. And they can be slightly off for very small reasons.
And I find the keyboards in widescreen laptops superior to that of 4:3 models. If you need lots of display space, get a 17" laptop. They're feasible because they're widescreen - a 17" 4:3 display would be a joke.
Like I said, no one knows the future. If you could use data mining to predict the future, these scientists would be retired as millionaires who had played the stock market correctly....
Oh yeah, nobody knows if the sun is going to set today. And certainly nobody knows where some asteroid might be next! Foo. We do know, and we know because we do clever scientific prediction. We can do orbit simulations, and they are not mere extrapolation. We can do quite nice physical modeling too, that's also not extrapolation. If you disagree, please explain how CGI in modern movies is done with extrapolation!
The evidence that accurate modeling can be done is right there for everybody to see, in most movies..
But hence, with large modeling, comes large innaccuracies. My main point is that these models are based on a correlation of temperature increase with increased CO2 and yet this doesn't seem to be the case....which makes the models in themselves suspect.
No, that's not true. These models are based on a correlation of CO2 and absorption of certain wavelengths. What the models show is that if more CO2 means more absorption, then that means warmer atmosphere. Also, that CO2 absorbs some wavelengths can be and has been measured in a lab, we know that for sure.
Further, what IPCC has done is running lots and lots of different models with both slightly different initial conditions and mechanics. The changes they're somewhat certain of are changes that most or all of their models forecast in the same way. When models disagree, they're not claiming to know what's going to happen.
Will you get a fucking clue and stop your uninformed fear-mongering? ID cards contain your identity, nothing more.
Identity:
2 a: the distinguishing character or personality of an individual : individuality b: the relation established by psychological identification
So excuse me a wordplay, but I do not find one dictionary definition for identity, such that it could be contained by a card.
Is birthdate actually being used as part of identification somewhere? I'm sorry to hear that, and I agree that it's a really poor choice. However, it's useful to have a card that's hard to fake, and that maps your picture, fingerprint, birthdate and social security number to each other - with that anyone can match your face with their database with significant accuracy. No system's infallible, but that's pretty good already.
So, you're saying my identity should be all contained in a card?
I'm going to let someone mark me as a troll while you think about that.
Exactly. From now on, having a personality trait not listed on the card will be completely forbidden. Do not try to change your personality either, that'll be considered forgery.
HA! Think about that for a while, troll!
Are you actually afraid that somebody will beat you, steal your card, and afterwards know what you look like and when you were born?
It's my understanding that they want to tie bank accounts, driver's license, social insurance / security (I'm Canadian), passport etc. to one single card. If you lose this card you are completely fsck'd.
I have all my different cards in my wallet, which is a single point of failure. I'm more likely to lose my wallet than only one card from it. I'm completely fscked if I lose my wallet.
Except, I am not. I can always go to a hospital, bank, police station or embassy while abroad, tell them my social security number (easy to remember), and they know exactly who I am. No, they're not stupid enough to trust me, but knowing my number, they can very easily get my picture and other identification data and check. I think it's great.
Have you ever thought how amazingly little thought and practice driving requires? It becomes very very natural after just a couple dozen hours at it. And how extremely good we are at not hitting anything when we drive, much like we're not very likely to bump into something while walking..
So your saying it is perfectly acceptable to throw the baby out with the bath water? I mean this is basically making the case that one or two bad people justify persecuting everyone right?
Stop personifying things! =)
Of course religious tradition has its benefits. I think most such benefits do not depend on belief, and can live and prosper without it. These of course are valuable and in no way bad - I'm personally not against religious tradition, only belief.
And when option A has a benefit AND a disadvantage, while option B has a similar benefit with a smaller disadvantage, option A must be thrown out with or without bathwater.
But tell me, you have sparked my interest, what is so bad about religious faith that you seem to be so disgruntled over. Why must you act like the religious and impose your beliefs over theirs? For what reason do you justify your actions over their similar actions?
I don't think GP was saying anything about his beliefs. He was talking about a claim that faith is dangerous, something which is based on evidence. He even said why. Of course not all faith is equally dangerous, and modern christianity is already quite peaceful. No dogmatic system can be perfect though, and religious thought can not control which religion people end up adopting.
Physicist and Nobel prizewinner Stephen Weinberg describes religion as an insult to human dignity. 'Without it,' he says, 'you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.'
In my view, it is fundamentally irresponsible behavior to let anyone else tell you what things are right and what things are wrong. Religion is a method of doing just that, globally and systematically. You will most probably agree with me that this indeed is dangerous.
I've nothing against religious people trying to convince me their religion is right, as long as they respect the discussion with logical arguments. I always find out religious arguments are very bad, and scientific ones superior. Nor religious nor scientific ideas should be respected just because they are ideas.
If a being is all knowing, exists outside of time, and has absolute control over all matter, how -- you being limited in knowledge, and physically limited by time and space -- do you propose that you would be able to find any evidence of such a being's meddling? Logically, they could instantaneously cover up any such changes to the fabric of reality.
By the virtue of looking. We have good knowledge about the physical laws of nature, and can make predictions with them. If reality significantly differs from prediction, that's evidence for meddling. At least if that difference is inconsistent - a consistent deviation from predictions would probably be explained by another law of nature we didn't know before.
A god is free to convert water into wine, and I am free to remember that wine used to be water and thus know that a miraculous thing happened. That's pretty much the point - if a miracle happened, people could tell that it's a miracle. Such miracles don't happen.
Yeah, a god could cover up any changes he makes, but that would necessarily include meddling with the brains of all living beings and all stored information, texts, audio and video. Because if only the scientists oddly forgot things when researching for something, other people would notice.
If a god would regularly meddle with world affairs and in doing so would fix everybody's memories and all other stored data, I'd very much choose to not worship such a sod!
Anyway, I don't specifically believe in god, but I don't specifically disbelieve in god, either, and there's a lot more to religion for most people than simply "god said there was no dinosaurs". It gives them comfort in times of grief, it gives them hope for the future, it gives them faith that other people can be good people.
You're making a fair and important point here and I mostly agree. Not all religious views though, and not only religious views, have that property. Atheists I know don't seem to be any worse off than religious people I know. That's partly explained by the fact that hardship makes people more vulnerable to religion, so it's difficult to calculate the net benefit..
In any case, religion is dangerous. It necessarily involves the belief that one is right and righteous and others are less so. I find religious politicians are often the bad ones.
If you're actually interested in things that give comfort and hope, I heartily recommend "Ancient Wisdom, Modern World" by Dalai Lama. In it he deliberately avoids religion and uses common human experience in building a wonderful basis for a good life =).
My WOW character is constrained by the laws inside WOW. If those laws are broken for him, it's a bug or an exploit, and I will complain loudly;). I am not constrained by WOW laws when I am outside WOW, but I am, in WOW.
If something or somebody meddles with the world of WOW and its internal laws are broken, I will notice. That is my whole point - if a god meddles with this world, his deed cannot go unnoticed if it's significant.
Whether or not the definition of atheism says lack of belief in god or not, many atheists do in fact treat their belief system with as much fervor as religious people.
There you go again. Atheism is not a belief system. I am very serious about logic and scientific honesty and am very serious about evangelizing atheism and making religions go away. That means while I cannot absolutely prove my position, I can defend it fairly well. That said, I get fervor only when someone doesn't understand what I'm saying or accept that we can use logic in reasoning even about religion.
Personally, I think it's just as false to believe that it's impossible for a god-like intelligence to exist as there is to believe that one definitely exists without proof.
You're right of course. However, some people are claiming that a god-like intelligence had something to do with creation, and might even be meddling with the world's affairs now! Such a god MUST leave behind evidence. If he does something that has a significant effect, that effect must be measurable. Because science is simply careful looking at the evidence and science does not see such an effect, it's outrageous to claim such effects still exist.
What if god created us and then disappeared? ID, you know. Well, if I designed humans, I'd make brains understand symmetry. It would be very easy to apply what I've learned about moving my right hand to my left one. A really simple mirroring. In reality, my left hand is almost useless compared to the right one. Clearly I wasn't designed by intelligence.
If there is a god who didn't create the world and doesn't have any other effect either.. Well, gee, what a god, you know. He might exist, but so what? That's not a useful hypothesis.
Absolutely - death is by no means the only factor in driving evolution, but it is an important one in preventing the propagation of serious diseases to the following generations.
Is it? I wouldn't mate with somebody who had a serious disease. Now, this certainly depends on the definition of serious.. And the world you're living in. Poor eyesight is not serious.
How terrible is your eyesight, and how exactly? As humans have always been living in communities, not everyone need to have a "good" eyesight. And shortsighted "bad vision" can actually be beneficial, because shortsighted people see clearly closer. In my own monkey pack, I'd like to have a few shortsighted lice-pickers accompanying the normal-sighted bulk that can feed them!
Sight going bad with old age can also be beneficial in evolution. Old people dying off and making space for the young ones and their "radical" ideas of development.
There actually was news rather recently that evolution has accelerated in the last 5000 years. That's because our surroundings have changed so fast during that time. My reading of that report was that our genetic makeup is changing faster, not that we are necessarily becoming "better" (which is what I would consider to be evolution).
Surely we're better when we can digest milk at old age! =). While I see no reason to believe mutation rate would have gone up (well, until recently), I think it's really evolution and we're really better in the modern world than people 5000 years ago would have been. Of course the difference isn't probably very big..
I'm not a geneticist, but logically I would have to conclude that evolution (to the improvement of the gene pool) has probably slowed due to the advancement of medicine. We are now saving the lives of people who have serious diseases and allowing them to breed, so a lot of the natural selection forces have been removed.
I'm also not a geneticist, but I think this is largely false. Death as it is is only one of the factors driving evolution, choice of partners is another. And that factor has grown vastly in importance now that we have a huge variety of possibilities around us. It's actually an interesting thought - to think of all the properties that today will lead to people having kids. And not only that, but having kids who will have kids who will have kids. So it's not a good strategy in the long run to fail in raising your kids to be pleasant, beautiful and intelligent..
There actually was news rather recently that evolution has accelerated in the last 5000 years. That's because our surroundings have changed so fast during that time.
What's wrong about telling Little Susy that in my best knowledge, the bible is an amusing compilation of age-old hallucination? She's completely free to make up her own mind, but not letting her know what I think, what the teacher thinks or what the scientific community thinks would be a clear violation of free speech. Freedom of religion does not, cannot and should not mean freedom to close your eyes from reality!
Religion falls into the same category as all other misinformation. Bible says the Earth is flat? Well, I'm sorry, but the bible is clearly wrong on that. Bible says God created everything in one week? Well, science says that's most probably bullshit.
Yes, sure, people could use a better understanding of science. But I think the problem is not in science but rather in religion. It's the religious types who insist that any knowledge can be absolutely certain, while scientists are mostly uncertain about everything. There's no way at all we could have perfect information about anything. So we grow tired of adding "in my opinion" to every single sentence and assume that, and in popular science try to be convincing because we think that's what the audience wants or needs. But it's a fair point - a real popular science piece on the qualities of truth and ways to know it would be needed.
What do you mean "no guaranteed freedom of religion"? A whole lot of other countries have that, mind you. Here, though, it seems that religious people have learned to restrict their religious claims to things that are not ridiculous from the science perspective.
...business travellers definitely do not like being treated as criminals.
Now this is the thinking you need to get rid of. Just because police takes fingerprints from criminals doesn't mean by taking fingerprints you are labeled criminal. It's normal to leave fingerprints. It's cool.
If business travelers were intimidated for hours with tough questions, that would be treating them like criminals. Or, on the other hand, quite normal for people outside the US who travel there. Nevermind. Well, throwing people into jail for a couple of days, now that's treating like a criminal.
Yeah, some methods you list actually do have a negative impact on something. Gathering fingerprints at the airport will slow travellers down, probably for a minute or two. So? You are saying that those minutes are absolutely too valuable to be wasted in this way?
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Yea, you're right. Just like there's no good reason for having sex with contraceptives. Ha! Only dumb idiots cannot realize what they're doing is in vain. Too bad it seems we're all idiots.
It just occurred to me that air pressure depends on two things, altitude AND weather :). Usually during storms the air pressure would drop significantly even on the sea level, and similar could be expected on the mountain. Maybe that time altitude + storm meant lower air pressure than her previous higher altitudes in good weather?
I climb and study meteorology. You've given me a very nice question to think about :). What you say about edemas is probably very true, but maybe this is an additional reason to take storms extremely seriously?
The idea is true, one detail is not. Earth's mantle is mostly solid, so of our small model earth, nearly half of the diameter is solid matter. It's viscous and capable of flow though.
How do we know this? That's because S-waves (waves vibrating in a direction perpendicular to the propagation of sound) can only happen in solids. Think of the vibration of a tuning fork, for example. S-waves travel very well in the mantle. S-waves, however, don't enter the liquid outer core at all (which is why we know it's liquid ;).
So, once again, our everyday "wisdom" about what a stone is, is at fault. During very long times, stones deform. Sagging is becoming apparent even in some old marble benches on the surface of the earth. And stones deform much more readily in the huge pressures of the mantle.
On the other hand, in the 18th century transportation "sucked royally", so the spreading of diseases was far, far, far less rapid than it is today.
My guess is, if you add transportation without adding vaccination, child mortality goes up even with clean water and waste treatment. Measles alone would kill something like 10% of children (without proper healthcare), and none of the developments you mention would help against it.
Historically it might often have been the case that kids escaped infection by luck. Not anymore.
I second that wholeheartedly. And I'm a real geek. I love the Xandros ui - heck, XP's start menu wouldn't fit on the 901's screen anyway ;). The gui works, and the terminal works too. No complaints.
In the last millennia, we've seen huge changes in the environment. Not surprisingly, evolution is currently very fast.
For some reason people often forget evolution is not only about survival, it's about procreation. And that's about many many details. One strong driving factor in evolution is who we choose to breed with - today, we have more options than ever in all possible ways. Why are many people so beautiful today? Because of evolution from choosing companions. We choose whom we breed with, and not nearly everyone ever has (or ever has had) kids, no matter if they die young or not.
More and more, people choose to not have kids. If you trust their capability of not having kids (and the technological means are unforeseen), that's going to drive evolution and rather strongly. I personally think people from happy families are more likely to want families of their own, which keeps evolution going the right way too.
Seriously though, the "normal" atmospheric concentration of methane is about 0.000001745%. 100x that brings us up to 0.001745%, which isn't very close to 5 - 15%. I do agree that everything should be done to slow down the climate change - it's bad enough even without "explosions and conflagrations".
For example, if I cough outside facing north, it's NOT going to cause a pressure system to sweep the northern continent. By the same token, if I stand on the coast of southern Africa and sneeze west, it is NOT going to cause a hurricane.
Suppose you cough outside and accidentally blow out a candle. A young waitress comes to light it again, and a driver of an oil truck gets distracted by the sight and the truck moves a foot to the left, causing a collision with another truck. The oil spills and burns because of the candles, causing a forest burn that spreads over a very large area because it happened to be a dry period. That caused large clouds of smoke that obscured the sun, cooling down the ground, and altering the weather patterns on a large-ish scale (even worldwide, if it was a very large forest fire ;).
The example is entirely artificial, but similar chains of cause and effect also exist in nature, just maybe not as probable or potent.
Suppose the butterfly flaps its wings. So the wings are vertical instead of horizontal - more sunlight goes into the pond that warms up more, and so more water was evaporated. The cloud above receives more water vapor, and thus rain starts two seconds earlier than otherwise. Because the cloud was moving, that also means the rain is in a slightly different place than it would have been, so more water fell on the lake on the mountain, raising the water level and causing the natural dam to collapse, resulting in a flash flood. That knocked down forest, dug a river valley deeper by many meters, and covered a large field with mud. That would alter surface albedo and wind patterns in the area, and thus local weather, which is a component in the global weather.
There are other processes that don't require interaction with solid matter but which are equally valid. Of course neither example above is very likely - most of the time small changes fail to push the events over the limits. Even then, that is possible.
Most of the time you coughing northwards will only add some very little momentum northward. So the weather system moving east-west will maybe be 1 millimeter more north than it would be, after traveling 1000 km west. Everything depends on everything, so the evolution of weather is changed, and everything else will also be in a different place than otherwise. Very small changes in directions or velocities will become apparent over long distances and time frames.
By the way, the weather predictions are usually very good in predicting what's going to happen. The inaccuracies lie in when and where things will happen ;). If rain is predicted, maybe it'll be 100 km off and three hours later. That's because directions and velocities used in the prediction were slightly off. And they can be slightly off for very small reasons.
..only they're mostly covered with dust from dust storms.
Remember the patch of ice in a crater? It's supposedly up to 200 meters thick. On Earth, that would be a glacier. What else could it be?
And I find the keyboards in widescreen laptops superior to that of 4:3 models. If you need lots of display space, get a 17" laptop. They're feasible because they're widescreen - a 17" 4:3 display would be a joke.
Oh yeah, nobody knows if the sun is going to set today. And certainly nobody knows where some asteroid might be next! Foo. We do know, and we know because we do clever scientific prediction. We can do orbit simulations, and they are not mere extrapolation. We can do quite nice physical modeling too, that's also not extrapolation. If you disagree, please explain how CGI in modern movies is done with extrapolation!
The evidence that accurate modeling can be done is right there for everybody to see, in most movies..
But hence, with large modeling, comes large innaccuracies. My main point is that these models are based on a correlation of temperature increase with increased CO2 and yet this doesn't seem to be the case....which makes the models in themselves suspect.No, that's not true. These models are based on a correlation of CO2 and absorption of certain wavelengths. What the models show is that if more CO2 means more absorption, then that means warmer atmosphere. Also, that CO2 absorbs some wavelengths can be and has been measured in a lab, we know that for sure.
Further, what IPCC has done is running lots and lots of different models with both slightly different initial conditions and mechanics. The changes they're somewhat certain of are changes that most or all of their models forecast in the same way. When models disagree, they're not claiming to know what's going to happen.
Identity:
2 a: the distinguishing character or personality of an individual : individuality b: the relation established by psychological identification
So excuse me a wordplay, but I do not find one dictionary definition for identity, such that it could be contained by a card.
Is birthdate actually being used as part of identification somewhere? I'm sorry to hear that, and I agree that it's a really poor choice. However, it's useful to have a card that's hard to fake, and that maps your picture, fingerprint, birthdate and social security number to each other - with that anyone can match your face with their database with significant accuracy. No system's infallible, but that's pretty good already.
So, you're saying my identity should be all contained in a card?
I'm going to let someone mark me as a troll while you think about that.
Exactly. From now on, having a personality trait not listed on the card will be completely forbidden. Do not try to change your personality either, that'll be considered forgery.
HA! Think about that for a while, troll!
Are you actually afraid that somebody will beat you, steal your card, and afterwards know what you look like and when you were born?
I have all my different cards in my wallet, which is a single point of failure. I'm more likely to lose my wallet than only one card from it. I'm completely fscked if I lose my wallet.
Except, I am not. I can always go to a hospital, bank, police station or embassy while abroad, tell them my social security number (easy to remember), and they know exactly who I am. No, they're not stupid enough to trust me, but knowing my number, they can very easily get my picture and other identification data and check. I think it's great.
Have you ever thought how amazingly little thought and practice driving requires? It becomes very very natural after just a couple dozen hours at it. And how extremely good we are at not hitting anything when we drive, much like we're not very likely to bump into something while walking..
Stop personifying things! =)
Of course religious tradition has its benefits. I think most such benefits do not depend on belief, and can live and prosper without it. These of course are valuable and in no way bad - I'm personally not against religious tradition, only belief.
And when option A has a benefit AND a disadvantage, while option B has a similar benefit with a smaller disadvantage, option A must be thrown out with or without bathwater.
But tell me, you have sparked my interest, what is so bad about religious faith that you seem to be so disgruntled over. Why must you act like the religious and impose your beliefs over theirs? For what reason do you justify your actions over their similar actions?I don't think GP was saying anything about his beliefs. He was talking about a claim that faith is dangerous, something which is based on evidence. He even said why. Of course not all faith is equally dangerous, and modern christianity is already quite peaceful. No dogmatic system can be perfect though, and religious thought can not control which religion people end up adopting.
Physicist and Nobel prizewinner Stephen Weinberg describes religion as an insult to human dignity. 'Without it,' he says, 'you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.'
In my view, it is fundamentally irresponsible behavior to let anyone else tell you what things are right and what things are wrong. Religion is a method of doing just that, globally and systematically. You will most probably agree with me that this indeed is dangerous.
I've nothing against religious people trying to convince me their religion is right, as long as they respect the discussion with logical arguments. I always find out religious arguments are very bad, and scientific ones superior. Nor religious nor scientific ideas should be respected just because they are ideas.
By the virtue of looking. We have good knowledge about the physical laws of nature, and can make predictions with them. If reality significantly differs from prediction, that's evidence for meddling. At least if that difference is inconsistent - a consistent deviation from predictions would probably be explained by another law of nature we didn't know before.
A god is free to convert water into wine, and I am free to remember that wine used to be water and thus know that a miraculous thing happened. That's pretty much the point - if a miracle happened, people could tell that it's a miracle. Such miracles don't happen.
Yeah, a god could cover up any changes he makes, but that would necessarily include meddling with the brains of all living beings and all stored information, texts, audio and video. Because if only the scientists oddly forgot things when researching for something, other people would notice.
If a god would regularly meddle with world affairs and in doing so would fix everybody's memories and all other stored data, I'd very much choose to not worship such a sod!
Anyway, I don't specifically believe in god, but I don't specifically disbelieve in god, either, and there's a lot more to religion for most people than simply "god said there was no dinosaurs". It gives them comfort in times of grief, it gives them hope for the future, it gives them faith that other people can be good people.You're making a fair and important point here and I mostly agree. Not all religious views though, and not only religious views, have that property. Atheists I know don't seem to be any worse off than religious people I know. That's partly explained by the fact that hardship makes people more vulnerable to religion, so it's difficult to calculate the net benefit..
In any case, religion is dangerous. It necessarily involves the belief that one is right and righteous and others are less so. I find religious politicians are often the bad ones.
If you're actually interested in things that give comfort and hope, I heartily recommend "Ancient Wisdom, Modern World" by Dalai Lama. In it he deliberately avoids religion and uses common human experience in building a wonderful basis for a good life =).
My WOW character is constrained by the laws inside WOW. If those laws are broken for him, it's a bug or an exploit, and I will complain loudly ;). I am not constrained by WOW laws when I am outside WOW, but I am, in WOW.
If something or somebody meddles with the world of WOW and its internal laws are broken, I will notice. That is my whole point - if a god meddles with this world, his deed cannot go unnoticed if it's significant.
There you go again. Atheism is not a belief system. I am very serious about logic and scientific honesty and am very serious about evangelizing atheism and making religions go away. That means while I cannot absolutely prove my position, I can defend it fairly well. That said, I get fervor only when someone doesn't understand what I'm saying or accept that we can use logic in reasoning even about religion.
Personally, I think it's just as false to believe that it's impossible for a god-like intelligence to exist as there is to believe that one definitely exists without proof.You're right of course. However, some people are claiming that a god-like intelligence had something to do with creation, and might even be meddling with the world's affairs now! Such a god MUST leave behind evidence. If he does something that has a significant effect, that effect must be measurable. Because science is simply careful looking at the evidence and science does not see such an effect, it's outrageous to claim such effects still exist.
What if god created us and then disappeared? ID, you know. Well, if I designed humans, I'd make brains understand symmetry. It would be very easy to apply what I've learned about moving my right hand to my left one. A really simple mirroring. In reality, my left hand is almost useless compared to the right one. Clearly I wasn't designed by intelligence.
If there is a god who didn't create the world and doesn't have any other effect either.. Well, gee, what a god, you know. He might exist, but so what? That's not a useful hypothesis.
Is it? I wouldn't mate with somebody who had a serious disease. Now, this certainly depends on the definition of serious.. And the world you're living in. Poor eyesight is not serious.
How terrible is your eyesight, and how exactly? As humans have always been living in communities, not everyone need to have a "good" eyesight. And shortsighted "bad vision" can actually be beneficial, because shortsighted people see clearly closer. In my own monkey pack, I'd like to have a few shortsighted lice-pickers accompanying the normal-sighted bulk that can feed them!
Sight going bad with old age can also be beneficial in evolution. Old people dying off and making space for the young ones and their "radical" ideas of development.
There actually was news rather recently that evolution has accelerated in the last 5000 years. That's because our surroundings have changed so fast during that time. My reading of that report was that our genetic makeup is changing faster, not that we are necessarily becoming "better" (which is what I would consider to be evolution).Surely we're better when we can digest milk at old age! =). While I see no reason to believe mutation rate would have gone up (well, until recently), I think it's really evolution and we're really better in the modern world than people 5000 years ago would have been. Of course the difference isn't probably very big..
I'm also not a geneticist, but I think this is largely false. Death as it is is only one of the factors driving evolution, choice of partners is another. And that factor has grown vastly in importance now that we have a huge variety of possibilities around us. It's actually an interesting thought - to think of all the properties that today will lead to people having kids. And not only that, but having kids who will have kids who will have kids. So it's not a good strategy in the long run to fail in raising your kids to be pleasant, beautiful and intelligent..
There actually was news rather recently that evolution has accelerated in the last 5000 years. That's because our surroundings have changed so fast during that time.
What's wrong about telling Little Susy that in my best knowledge, the bible is an amusing compilation of age-old hallucination? She's completely free to make up her own mind, but not letting her know what I think, what the teacher thinks or what the scientific community thinks would be a clear violation of free speech. Freedom of religion does not, cannot and should not mean freedom to close your eyes from reality!
Religion falls into the same category as all other misinformation. Bible says the Earth is flat? Well, I'm sorry, but the bible is clearly wrong on that. Bible says God created everything in one week? Well, science says that's most probably bullshit.
Yes, sure, people could use a better understanding of science. But I think the problem is not in science but rather in religion. It's the religious types who insist that any knowledge can be absolutely certain, while scientists are mostly uncertain about everything. There's no way at all we could have perfect information about anything. So we grow tired of adding "in my opinion" to every single sentence and assume that, and in popular science try to be convincing because we think that's what the audience wants or needs. But it's a fair point - a real popular science piece on the qualities of truth and ways to know it would be needed.
What do you mean "no guaranteed freedom of religion"? A whole lot of other countries have that, mind you. Here, though, it seems that religious people have learned to restrict their religious claims to things that are not ridiculous from the science perspective.
...business travellers definitely do not like being treated as criminals.Now this is the thinking you need to get rid of. Just because police takes fingerprints from criminals doesn't mean by taking fingerprints you are labeled criminal. It's normal to leave fingerprints. It's cool.
If business travelers were intimidated for hours with tough questions, that would be treating them like criminals. Or, on the other hand, quite normal for people outside the US who travel there. Nevermind. Well, throwing people into jail for a couple of days, now that's treating like a criminal.
Yeah, some methods you list actually do have a negative impact on something. Gathering fingerprints at the airport will slow travellers down, probably for a minute or two. So? You are saying that those minutes are absolutely too valuable to be wasted in this way?
That's probably a typo, it should say intergelatic. That's something between ice creams.