I agree with you. It's a peculiar POV the one asserting that someone's property overrides the land it's located in.
Nonetheless I recall local newspapers (Italy) covering the visit of the Dalai Lama, with local sponsors retiring at the last minute because they were pressured in doing so by the chinese. Making me decide that there are no 2008 olympic games for what I am concerned.
> You don't know anything about what I use, you don't know what tasks I was talking about...
I know what you wrote and it's wrong. You were talking about operating systems, not apps. You said windows is the best tool for the job. The job for an OS is to interface apps with hardware. The availability of apps is another matter. If you had used mac or linux enough you'd simply wish you had your apps running over them instead of windows.
LMAO, Best tool for the job, windows? It's not the 1st of april yet. Try, like me, to use win, mac and linux at home and at work for some 5 years, then dare speak about which one is the best tool for the job.
Carriers working together would also mean two thirds of cellphone antennas becoming unnecessary. That would be welcome no matter the health risk, those things are ugly.
> Linux is too difficult for the average person, they will need outside help. But windows is so easy the average person can handle things themselves, no need for outside help.
Which one is easier to keep updated, both system and apps? Which one needs activation? Which one mounts volumes partitioned with other OSs? Which one comes with different crippled apps for each model so each time you change pc you have a different dvd maker or media player app? Which one has a different way for each model to backup the system? Which one lets you reinstall old packages, move an installation on a different media, switch to the newest release of the os with a single boot? Which one gives you more crashes? (app crashes) Is dealing with the register easier than editing config files?
Windows is easier than linux if you started with it, and most people started with windows.
Between space invaders and today's 3d there has been the time where blood could be drawn but mostly wasn't. Designers weren't using random color as soon as xevious, around '82. Drawing blood was technically possible and in topic in commando or green beret. And it would have impressed people, because we were impressed by VG graphics. We were impressed by marble madness fake 3d, or pole position fast sprites. Also, Video games were politically incorrect at least with leisure suit larry. It's not a matter of "we would have done it if we could".
Do VG mirror society or influence it? I guess it's kind of a feedback loop.
We might find an explanation for this anomaly, or it could not be an anomaly. Laws of nature might be changing from time to time, and even if we have looked into the past till the first seconds before the big bang and even if we were correct in our interpretation there is no guarantee that laws can't change starting here and now. Limit reached when guys study the system they're part of.
If I were representing big interests i wouldnt' bet much on MS. Nor on software. Hardware backdoors are better. Try and detect those in a multi layered nanometer scaled impossibly complex circuit.
Of course, naming a chipmaker INTEL doesn't help reassuring tinfoil hats:D
So one can patent one click to do other things, like a one click process to reply with a goatse guy jpeg at full res. Which is almost worse than having a patent on single click, which could more easily be challenged. Sigh.
Yes, I was following GP poster's long term perspective, so I didn't consider short term speculation, but then, why doesn't any other decision about mergers bring similar lawsuits? Or any other decision which affects the stock value? Are these things common? How many have been sued by this fund before?
> As an individual shareholder I probably would not sue, at least if I'm interested in long-term profit. I personally don't see how Yahoo can generate more wealth if they belong to a company which has managed to gain around 6% market share by investing billions. The logic behind it seems to be very flawed.
I would add that MS would be buying up a competitor, and it's all too common for companies to buy competitors to leave them to wither and then close them down after they sucked up all valuable assets and clients. As an individual shareholder I'd be primarily worried about that scenario, and I wonder why a fund forgets about it.
I would also add that suing your own company brings bad publicity to it- are they interested in their company well being or what?
Sorry but conspiracy theorists linking such a move to MS pulling strings have the most reasonable scenario here.
Oh by the way, dear real shareholders: the minute you sell to MS I'm canceling my subscription to yahoo. I do not trust MS to do something different with yahoo than what they did to hotmail. Besides, since I am a linux user and hobby dev for OSS software, you'd basically sell my data to the enemy. Double plus ungood.
LOL. Linux? Linux is headed by a very pragmatic guy. He used a closed source tool for kernel development. He is critical of GPLv3. You really meant to say free software? But what's religious about Stallman needing a printer driver and realizing he had to break free of the then-new tendency to close the source? If Stallman wore a tie the whole argument of the communist/religious movement would have never existed.
Besides, you just did a pro-closed source "zealot" comment just like some zealot pro open source comments that have cropped up. If you were being pragmatic, then this is the wrong topic. The matter is very simple and it has nothing to do with closed or open source, the question is:
Does company A make a good investment by helping external company B to write a compatibility layer for software belonging to company C when it has all the capital and the expertise to implement all the functionality of said software themselves by working with external group D, owning the result, and let the corporate image profit by helping out open source efforts?
Google decided it is a good investment, they either did a mistake or they consider some factors that we don't know about, which is very interesting.
> Scientology must die. It was already a sign that they are beyond control when they can intimidate the IRS let alone eBay.
If Scientology is allowed all this freedom, it means they are well under control. They are fulfilling a role. Determination of the role is left as an exercise to the reader.
> Windows changed that... but that made it more complex. Well, the Mac's toolbox changed that. Windows came later and judging by old widgets appearing sometimes into XP I have at work, didn't do abstractions very well.
Maybe al qaeda should sue scientology because it's associating "Anonymous" infidels to their movement after all the bombs and PR efforts to make Al qaeda a distinguished and prominent name.
Anyway, if people were more familiar with brainwashing techniques they'd likely be more alert when somebody tries experiments on them. And switch off TV too, hopefully:D
Ubuntu and recent debian ship with a thing called update-manager, which looks for updates and notifies their presence to the user which can install them (if he has proper privileges). You have no point here.
> This is called "preserving the phenomena"--arguing that a claim is true...
This is a written conversation: where did I argue the truth of which claim? If you reply to what you think those like me think, this conversation is gonna get really difficult. I repeat: do not require the scientifically examinable proof of the transcendent, it is naive.
About pink unicorns vs. gods, the sad difference is the amount of people died because of the latters. While most of the dead are killed with religion as a mere excuse, there are few which effectively bet their existence on some revelations. Which doesn't prove anything, of course: I just feel prompted to examine them in a different light than pink unicorns.
>Subjective convictions do not lend support to anything.
The subjective stuff comes after a practical example, so it doesn't need to support what already discussed.
> All religions make claims based upon 'revelation' that are mutually incompatible. At most one, if any, can be right.
Needless assumption. If your perception and experience is limited to 2D a cone can either be a circle/ellipse or a triangle, or a strange hybrid shape. Such shapes will have only faint and irregular links between them. At most one, if any, can be right? Nope. All of them are. Getting out of the metaphor does not require all revelations to be true and adds three layers of fuzziness, the gulf between the hypothetical revelation and the experience of it, the problem of communicating it, the possible distortions made by people who use religion for their own ends. Do you usually reject law because a criminal successfully used it to avoid going to prison?
>... you are the one claiming that the light bulb will burn out at a specified instant... Nope I said that the amount of different possibilities is irrelevant. It is relevant only when you want to choose. The problem of choosing is a theological problem, unless one wants to try some reductio ad absurdum.
> You are the one claiming that only your explanation is valid... Oh no, those are called religious nuts, or atheists:D I think whatever your idea is, you communicate it better by behavior than by words. But when others start using words they better be good at it or be flamed.
> Non sequitor. Dimension? What dimension? Spiritual practices are cognitive methods intended to instill habits of thought conducive to peace of mind and greater compassion. Only if you assume all interpretations differing from a purely psychological interpretation are wrong. I said what spiritual things COULD be. Not an assumption. The use of Occam's razor can end up in a potentially insufficient rationalization, or a helpful tool. Doesn't constitute proof.
> Incoherent. As much as I can make any sense of this... I meant: the fact that supernatural explanations cropped up whenever scientific ones were not available and then eventually replaced by the latter ones does not imply that all supernatural explanations can be replaced. It doesn't even imply that whenever a scientific explanation is plausible no supernatural interventions occur, which leads to the absurd of not being able to prove that a god is not ALWAYS doing supernatural interventions in the world. I repeat, I'm just discussing assumptions made by some atheists. Not trying to sell the vision of an always working god.
> You believe in your dogmas because you think they were inspired by God, and you believe in God because your dogmas tell you to. Which God, which dogmas? I was talking about dogmas in general. Besides, I included your same conclusion among the possibilities, I didn't select a thesis to do circular reasoning with it.
> I need something other than your opinion, and your assent to these dogmas, on which to base my judgements. Sure thing, just use my opinion to realize your atheism is technically indistinguishable from a religion due to the assumptions it relies on. Those assumptions seem perfectly logical and reasonable to you? Then it's the right religion for you, another shape for the same 3D cone, who knows. Just realize you wear your own pair of blinders, remember to move the head around sometimes.
> No, but the knowledge of an entity operating within that game regarding the outside world would be void--pure speculation. Fine for me. I wasn't the one characterizing the object of speculation after all.
> Without evidence for a belief... Do you realize whatever evidence that is completely immanent (a necessary condition to be scientifically explorable) is insufficient to tell a god from an immanent creature? Back to the game's metaphor, whatever thing the creator does to the game's universe to assert his "divinity" is indistinguishable from what a hypothetical creature that found a weakness in the game implementation so it's able to reprogram it. The term evidence is misleading, the correct one is revelation. It may seems specious but IMHO an atheist/agnostic which does not believe until he gets a revelation is acceptable, one that waits for evidence is not behaving logically.
>...only the belief itself remains to be explained, and the human predilection for intentional explanations, ego-centrism, social conventions, and a tradition of pre-scientific supernatural beliefs is all that is required here. Please be scientific. Even if all religions but one were documented as coming out of the explanations you listed, until the last one is dealt with too you can't say those are "all that is required". A plausible explanation of a phenomenon is not necessarily the cause of a phenomenon.
>Taking that into consideration, the probability of the theistic explanation drops back to negligible. So what?. A light bulb burns out in the instant T. Postulating time as continuous the probability of it happening numerically is zero. The event happens anyway. Events do not know about their probability. Of course that enables people to say: no way I am betting on that event happening at instant T since it's so improbable. It doesn't enable people to say: burning at any instant is improbable so no burning will occur.
> All of this does not mean that spiritual practices are worthless... Yep, also because the spiritual dimension could well be just a scientifically unexplored/unexplorable aspect of our universe, spiritual != divine. Atheists rejecting spirituality unless a scientific framework is built around it ought to realize that atheism is independent of the existence of such dimension.
>...but it does mean that the supernatural explanations that often accompany them are. A supernatural explanation being the traditional fallback one doesn't prevent a hypothetical divinity to act in/through the spiritual dimension. Theism is independent of the existence of such dimension even if most religions aren't.
> These are the foundations of religious dogmas, without which these dogmas cannot survive. Warning: circular reasoning. They are the foundation of religious dogmas only if God(s) never inspired any religion. Else the dogma is either the equivalent of an axiom, or a misconception. The problem of a god allowing such a misconception is interesting but faith specific.
> "...in which you cannot say anything about God".
In fact many religions are not about God, but about the message or the messenger coming from It or in contact with It through illumination or whatever. I dunno about the rest of the world, but the word "mystery" is even abused in roman catholic religion. I even came across one priest who said: "I don't believe in God, I can't say anything about it. I believe in Jesus as his son". On the other hand I think you are talking about a common situation about people trying to impose their belief as truth. For what concerns Christians, I don't recall Jesus ever forcing anyone to believe, so there is ample room to criticize the behavior from a religious point of view.
> "All too often, as it is in your post, the kind of argument you make is accompanied, within a few sentences, by a return to this magical thinking." Realizing most atheist (and theist) thinking makes an assumption that severely limits its usefulness doesn't seem "magical" to me. The object of the discussion being "magical" (more correctly, transcendent) doesn't make the thinking itself "magical".
> "I call this bait-and-switch deism, where the merest wisp of a deist possibility is taken as carte blanche for the existence of a being intimately involved in the physical world."
LOL I started by negating all religions, to focus on the problem I perceive. Then I said "*NOTHING* in this world can prove you wrong". And still I am fishing for souls, apparently. A needless assumption, criticizing naive atheism could generate better atheists... if some atheists were just a little less paranoid:P
> "If reason and evidence do not apply to such an entity"... Which happens by the very same definition of "transcendent", and GP poster seemed to agree, so no problem here.
> "...What is left is a meaningless question mark in the dark, something so completely orthogonal to any human hope, expectation, or understanding, so utterly alien, that it is colder than the void of space"
A needless assumption, an irrational characterization. E.g. if I run Conway's game of life, this reality is game of life's transcendent. The ineffable place where the creator stays. Supposing self aware creatures emerge from the game, they have no way to know about, say, the third dimension, or color. So Is our reality cold, dark, void of space, just because it's transcendent then?
You might argue it's not really transcendent because both the PC running the game and I are part of the same reality. True, in fact the gulf is between the PC and the game. In fact the game exists in the mind of the creator or his peers, it is an abstraction. If we take the creator out of the picture, all it remains is electrons traveling through circuits. The time of the simulation is completely independent of real time. Yet there are concepts that can be mapped outside that universe into ours, things the creature would be able to understand. "left, right, on, off". The complete inability of the creatures to escape their world for ours is completely independent of what concepts are defined in either of the two universes. The complete inability of the creatures to escape their world is independent of the creator being able to intervene in it.
But if you follow and believe in (almost) any religion, it means you believe things that are by definition unprovable, irrational, and supernatural. A person who is ready to believe such things might be more ready to believe other irrational things than someone who bases his thoughts on rational explanations.
Let's assume all religions are made up.
Then those people which made religions up thousands years ago were way more rational than you. At least, for religions that involve a transcendent being. Lets proceed to the rational demonstration:
Transcendent means out of our domain. Whatever is said about something out of our domain can't be discussed rationally because there is no whatsoever proof that rationality can be applied outside our domain.
Take "There is one God", discuss it rationally: Problem: "is" may be not defined in the transcendent domain. Problem: "one" may not be defined in the transcendent domain. Problem: Truth or falsehood may be not defined in the transcendent domain, or defined in a different way.
Of course discussing "There is no God" is equivalent. It a logic error. You should say: "Assuming that logic (as we conceive it) can be extended to the transcendent, there is no god". You sure can believe that no god exists, and *NOTHING* in this world can prove you wrong, no matter how miraculous it seems, if it reaches your senses it's part of this world. so the link to its transcendent origin is unprovable.
So these religious types instead want us to believe in the God that says "I am one". Quite another issue. It either proclaims that those concepts make sense even in the realm of God... or it's a rationalization which best approximates an ineffable concept in human terms. And belief respects the gulf between the transcendent and the immanent, it is simply accepting the message as "true for me".
Slashdot Mirror
BS. Reiser is innocent. If he really did something like killing his wife he'd put the event in his journal.
APPLAUSE
I agree with you. It's a peculiar POV the one asserting that someone's property overrides the land it's located in.
Nonetheless I recall local newspapers (Italy) covering the visit of the Dalai Lama, with local sponsors retiring at the last minute because they were pressured in doing so by the chinese. Making me decide that there are no 2008 olympic games for what I am concerned.
> I am, however, attempting to make Bill Gates's head explode...
Why not go the easy route and try to make something with a high internal pressure explode, instead of the head? E.g. his wallet.
You are discussing slashdot on slashdot: why not make a link to the comment you are talking about?
> You don't know anything about what I use, you don't know what tasks I was talking about...
I know what you wrote and it's wrong. You were talking about operating systems, not apps. You said windows is the best tool for the job. The job for an OS is to interface apps with hardware. The availability of apps is another matter. If you had used mac or linux enough you'd simply wish you had your apps running over them instead of windows.
LMAO, Best tool for the job, windows? It's not the 1st of april yet. Try, like me, to use win, mac and linux at home and at work for some 5 years, then dare speak about which one is the best tool for the job.
Carriers working together would also mean two thirds of cellphone antennas becoming unnecessary. That would be welcome no matter the health risk, those things are ugly.
> Linux is too difficult for the average person, they will need outside help. But windows is so easy the average person can handle things themselves, no need for outside help.
Which one is easier to keep updated, both system and apps?
Which one needs activation?
Which one mounts volumes partitioned with other OSs?
Which one comes with different crippled apps for each model so each time you change pc you have a different dvd maker or media player app?
Which one has a different way for each model to backup the system?
Which one lets you reinstall old packages, move an installation on a different media, switch to the newest release of the os with a single boot?
Which one gives you more crashes? (app crashes)
Is dealing with the register easier than editing config files?
Windows is easier than linux if you started with it, and most people started with windows.
I object to your objection :)
Between space invaders and today's 3d there has been the time where blood could be drawn but mostly wasn't. Designers weren't using random color as soon as xevious, around '82. Drawing blood was technically possible and in topic in commando or green beret. And it would have impressed people, because we were impressed by VG graphics. We were impressed by marble madness fake 3d, or pole position fast sprites. Also, Video games were politically incorrect at least with leisure suit larry. It's not a matter of "we would have done it if we could".
Do VG mirror society or influence it? I guess it's kind of a feedback loop.
We might find an explanation for this anomaly, or it could not be an anomaly. Laws of nature might be changing from time to time, and even if we have looked into the past till the first seconds before the big bang and even if we were correct in our interpretation there is no guarantee that laws can't change starting here and now. Limit reached when guys study the system they're part of.
If I were representing big interests i wouldnt' bet much on MS. Nor on software. Hardware backdoors are better. Try and detect those in a multi layered nanometer scaled impossibly complex circuit.
:D
Of course, naming a chipmaker INTEL doesn't help reassuring tinfoil hats
So one can patent one click to do other things, like a one click process to reply with a goatse guy jpeg at full res. Which is almost worse than having a patent on single click, which could more easily be challenged. Sigh.
Yes, I was following GP poster's long term perspective, so I didn't consider short term speculation, but then, why doesn't any other decision about mergers bring similar lawsuits? Or any other decision which affects the stock value? Are these things common? How many have been sued by this fund before?
> As an individual shareholder I probably would not sue, at least if I'm interested in long-term profit. I personally don't see how Yahoo can generate more wealth if they belong to a company which has managed to gain around 6% market share by investing billions. The logic behind it seems to be very flawed.
I would add that MS would be buying up a competitor, and it's all too common for companies to buy competitors to leave them to wither and then close them down after they sucked up all valuable assets and clients.
As an individual shareholder I'd be primarily worried about that scenario, and I wonder why a fund forgets about it.
I would also add that suing your own company brings bad publicity to it- are they interested in their company well being or what?
Sorry but conspiracy theorists linking such a move to MS pulling strings have the most reasonable scenario here.
Oh by the way, dear real shareholders: the minute you sell to MS I'm canceling my subscription to yahoo. I do not trust MS to do something different with yahoo than what they did to hotmail. Besides, since I am a linux user and hobby dev for OSS software, you'd basically sell my data to the enemy. Double plus ungood.
LOL. Linux? Linux is headed by a very pragmatic guy. He used a closed source tool for kernel development. He is critical of GPLv3. You really meant to say free software? But what's religious about Stallman needing a printer driver and realizing he had to break free of the then-new tendency to close the source? If Stallman wore a tie the whole argument of the communist/religious movement would have never existed.
Besides, you just did a pro-closed source "zealot" comment just like some zealot pro open source comments that have cropped up. If you were being pragmatic, then this is the wrong topic. The matter is very simple and it has nothing to do with closed or open source, the question is:
Does company A make a good investment by helping external company B to write a compatibility layer for software belonging to company C when it has all the capital and the expertise to implement all the functionality of said software themselves by working with external group D, owning the result, and let the corporate image profit by helping out open source efforts?
Google decided it is a good investment, they either did a mistake or they consider some factors that we don't know about, which is very interesting.
> Scientology must die. It was already a sign that they are beyond control when they can intimidate the IRS let alone eBay.
If Scientology is allowed all this freedom, it means they are well under control. They are fulfilling a role. Determination of the role is left as an exercise to the reader.
LOL, but I think one is more likely to hurt the softer mouth or even teeth than having those metallic braces break.
> Windows changed that... but that made it more complex.
Well, the Mac's toolbox changed that. Windows came later and judging by old widgets appearing sometimes into XP I have at work, didn't do abstractions very well.
Maybe al qaeda should sue scientology because it's associating "Anonymous" infidels to their movement after all the bombs and PR efforts to make Al qaeda a distinguished and prominent name.
:D
Anyway, if people were more familiar with brainwashing techniques they'd likely be more alert when somebody tries experiments on them. And switch off TV too, hopefully
> And **how* in the world can you be sure...
Ubuntu and recent debian ship with a thing called update-manager, which looks for updates and notifies their presence to the user which can install them (if he has proper privileges). You have no point here.
> This is called "preserving the phenomena"--arguing that a claim is true...
:D I think whatever your idea is, you communicate it better by behavior than by words. But when others start using words they better be good at it or be flamed.
This is a written conversation: where did I argue the truth of which claim? If you reply to what you think those like me think, this conversation is gonna get really difficult. I repeat: do not require the scientifically examinable proof of the transcendent, it is naive.
About pink unicorns vs. gods, the sad difference is the amount of people died because of the latters. While most of the dead are killed with religion as a mere excuse, there are few which effectively bet their existence on some revelations. Which doesn't prove anything, of course: I just feel prompted to examine them in a different light than pink unicorns.
>Subjective convictions do not lend support to anything.
The subjective stuff comes after a practical example, so it doesn't need to support what already discussed.
> All religions make claims based upon 'revelation' that are mutually incompatible. At most one, if any, can be right.
Needless assumption. If your perception and experience is limited to 2D a cone can either be a circle/ellipse or a triangle, or a strange hybrid shape. Such shapes will have only faint and irregular links between them. At most one, if any, can be right? Nope. All of them are.
Getting out of the metaphor does not require all revelations to be true and adds three layers of fuzziness, the gulf between the hypothetical revelation and the experience of it, the problem of communicating it, the possible distortions made by people who use religion for their own ends. Do you usually reject law because a criminal successfully used it to avoid going to prison?
>... you are the one claiming that the light bulb will burn out at a specified instant...
Nope I said that the amount of different possibilities is irrelevant. It is relevant only when you want to choose. The problem of choosing is a theological problem, unless one wants to try some reductio ad absurdum.
> You are the one claiming that only your explanation is valid...
Oh no, those are called religious nuts, or atheists
> Non sequitor. Dimension? What dimension? Spiritual practices are cognitive methods intended to instill habits of thought conducive to peace of mind and greater compassion.
Only if you assume all interpretations differing from a purely psychological interpretation are wrong. I said what spiritual things COULD be. Not an assumption. The use of Occam's razor can end up in a potentially insufficient rationalization, or a helpful tool. Doesn't constitute proof.
> Incoherent. As much as I can make any sense of this...
I meant: the fact that supernatural explanations cropped up whenever scientific ones were not available and then eventually replaced by the latter ones does not imply that all supernatural explanations can be replaced. It doesn't even imply that whenever a scientific explanation is plausible no supernatural interventions occur, which leads to the absurd of not being able to prove that a god is not ALWAYS doing supernatural interventions in the world. I repeat, I'm just discussing assumptions made by some atheists. Not trying to sell the vision of an always working god.
> You believe in your dogmas because you think they were inspired by God, and you believe in God because your dogmas tell you to.
Which God, which dogmas? I was talking about dogmas in general. Besides, I included your same conclusion among the possibilities, I didn't select a thesis to do circular reasoning with it.
> I need something other than your opinion, and your assent to these dogmas, on which to base my judgements.
Sure thing, just use my opinion to realize your atheism is technically indistinguishable from a religion due to the assumptions it relies on. Those assumptions seem perfectly logical and reasonable to you? Then it's the right religion for you, another shape for the same 3D cone, who knows. Just realize you wear your own pair of blinders, remember to move the head around sometimes.
> No, but the knowledge of an entity operating within that game regarding the outside world would be void--pure speculation.
...but it does mean that the supernatural explanations that often accompany them are.
Fine for me. I wasn't the one characterizing the object of speculation after all.
> Without evidence for a belief...
Do you realize whatever evidence that is completely immanent (a necessary condition to be scientifically explorable) is insufficient to tell a god from an immanent creature? Back to the game's metaphor, whatever thing the creator does to the game's universe to assert his "divinity" is indistinguishable from what a hypothetical creature that found a weakness in the game implementation so it's able to reprogram it.
The term evidence is misleading, the correct one is revelation. It may seems specious but IMHO an atheist/agnostic which does not believe until he gets a revelation is acceptable, one that waits for evidence is not behaving logically.
>...only the belief itself remains to be explained, and the human predilection for intentional explanations, ego-centrism, social conventions, and a tradition of pre-scientific supernatural beliefs is all that is required here.
Please be scientific. Even if all religions but one were documented as coming out of the explanations you listed, until the last one is dealt with too you can't say those are "all that is required". A plausible explanation of a phenomenon is not necessarily the cause of a phenomenon.
>Taking that into consideration, the probability of the theistic explanation drops back to negligible.
So what?. A light bulb burns out in the instant T. Postulating time as continuous the probability of it happening numerically is zero. The event happens anyway. Events do not know about their probability. Of course that enables people to say: no way I am betting on that event happening at instant T since it's so improbable. It doesn't enable people to say: burning at any instant is improbable so no burning will occur.
> All of this does not mean that spiritual practices are worthless...
Yep, also because the spiritual dimension could well be just a scientifically unexplored/unexplorable aspect of our universe, spiritual != divine.
Atheists rejecting spirituality unless a scientific framework is built around it ought to realize that atheism is independent of the existence of such dimension.
>
A supernatural explanation being the traditional fallback one doesn't prevent a hypothetical divinity to act in/through the spiritual dimension. Theism is independent of the existence of such dimension even if most religions aren't.
> These are the foundations of religious dogmas, without which these dogmas cannot survive.
Warning: circular reasoning. They are the foundation of religious dogmas only if God(s) never inspired any religion. Else the dogma is either the equivalent of an axiom, or a misconception. The problem of a god allowing such a misconception is interesting but faith specific.
> "...in which you cannot say anything about God".
:P
In fact many religions are not about God, but about the message or the messenger coming from It or in contact with It through illumination or whatever. I dunno about the rest of the world, but the word "mystery" is even abused in roman catholic religion. I even came across one priest who said: "I don't believe in God, I can't say anything about it. I believe in Jesus as his son".
On the other hand I think you are talking about a common situation about people trying to impose their belief as truth. For what concerns Christians, I don't recall Jesus ever forcing anyone to believe, so there is ample room to criticize the behavior from a religious point of view.
> "All too often, as it is in your post, the kind of argument you make is accompanied, within a few sentences, by a return to this magical thinking."
Realizing most atheist (and theist) thinking makes an assumption that severely limits its usefulness doesn't seem "magical" to me. The object of the discussion being "magical" (more correctly, transcendent) doesn't make the thinking itself "magical".
> "I call this bait-and-switch deism, where the merest wisp of a deist possibility is taken as carte blanche for the existence of a being intimately involved in the physical world."
LOL I started by negating all religions, to focus on the problem I perceive. Then I said "*NOTHING* in this world can prove you wrong". And still I am fishing for souls, apparently. A needless assumption, criticizing naive atheism could generate better atheists... if some atheists were just a little less paranoid
> "If reason and evidence do not apply to such an entity"...
Which happens by the very same definition of "transcendent", and GP poster seemed to agree, so no problem here.
> "...What is left is a meaningless question mark in the dark, something so completely orthogonal to any human hope, expectation, or understanding, so utterly alien, that it is colder than the void of space"
A needless assumption, an irrational characterization. E.g. if I run Conway's game of life, this reality is game of life's transcendent. The ineffable place where the creator stays. Supposing self aware creatures emerge from the game, they have no way to know about, say, the third dimension, or color. So Is our reality cold, dark, void of space, just because it's transcendent then?
You might argue it's not really transcendent because both the PC running the game and I are part of the same reality. True, in fact the gulf is between the PC and the game. In fact the game exists in the mind of the creator or his peers, it is an abstraction. If we take the creator out of the picture, all it remains is electrons traveling through circuits. The time of the simulation is completely independent of real time. Yet there are concepts that can be mapped outside that universe into ours, things the creature would be able to understand. "left, right, on, off". The complete inability of the creatures to escape their world for ours is completely independent of what concepts are defined in either of the two universes. The complete inability of the creatures to escape their world is independent of the creator being able to intervene in it.
Let's assume all religions are made up.
Then those people which made religions up thousands years ago were way more rational than you. At least, for religions that involve a transcendent being. Lets proceed to the rational demonstration:
Transcendent means out of our domain. Whatever is said about something out of our domain can't be discussed rationally because there is no whatsoever proof that rationality can be applied outside our domain.
Take "There is one God", discuss it rationally:
Problem: "is" may be not defined in the transcendent domain.
Problem: "one" may not be defined in the transcendent domain.
Problem: Truth or falsehood may be not defined in the transcendent domain, or defined in a different way.
Of course discussing "There is no God" is equivalent. It a logic error. You should say: "Assuming that logic (as we conceive it) can be extended to the transcendent, there is no god". You sure can believe that no god exists, and *NOTHING* in this world can prove you wrong, no matter how miraculous it seems, if it reaches your senses it's part of this world. so the link to its transcendent origin is unprovable.
So these religious types instead want us to believe in the God that says "I am one". Quite another issue. It either proclaims that those concepts make sense even in the realm of God... or it's a rationalization which best approximates an ineffable concept in human terms. And belief respects the gulf between the transcendent and the immanent, it is simply accepting the message as "true for me".
QED