Religious believers need not exercise "faith" that science works, because there is evidence that science works.
For extremely-vague values of "works", which can be legitimized no further than that, and not even to the degree that you hope people will allow you to non-sequitur "leaving the impression of" rather than justifying. Tell me, why did Luminiferous Ether not "work"? By what means, ever, do you know that a current model of science is fully correct? "Kicking the can down the road" to "oh, it will correct itself" in no way demonstrates it is or ever will be -true-, -ever-, or even can be. That is an article of faith.
Which brings us to the next point...
The mindset of faith is to encourage belief regardless of evidence.
No, only in your directly-false statement of what "faith" is (you're just parroting Dawkins and Hitchens in that, understood, though). It is a confidence based on -limited- information. Christians are -directly required- to be able to give a justification for their belief (1 Peter 3:15). If you haven't met any that can, that would be their issue--that is, assuming you've even asked any, rather than just going with a personal history you've made-up to fit your argument.
You are conflating and excluding epistemological domains here to an absurd level. We haven't even touched upon axiomatic statements and their superior claim to being "truth" over scientific processes (as you describe them, not so much "science" as Logical Positivism, which ran aground a few decades ago), or the limits of knowledge of science. Or their habitual overstatement into domains such as politics, invalidly, though I've yet to find a person with your premises who isn't just as happy with "sciency-sounding" as "science" in their automatic assent... but these are wider topics well beyond your apparent capacity at the moment. Another day, then.
For now, just be aware that some of us are fully aware you are pounding square pegs into round holes to support a dubious conclusion you've decided a priori.
Call it a "loophole" if you wish, but one can have a viable rationale for why Old Testament rules are no longer followed. Often, this takes the form of holding those rules are superseded by the "New Covenant" between God and man applying since the life of Christ. There is massive internal scriptural support for this notion.
Within that context, we have a "meta-ethical heuristic" given to us directly by Christ: "Love God and your neighbor as yourself", and directly stated as the principle on which all supposed interpretations of the Law "hang" (and are thereby justified as interpretations, or not). When in doubt regarding the letter of the OT Law, apply that, toward determining whether one's approach maximizes those objectives for the context at hand..
Note that this does -not- mean (though every atheist to a man will claim it does) that the OT Law is now "wrong". It was always contextual to begin with, and contextual rules need application according to context, just like our secular system that has a means to handle cases such as horse-drawn-carriage parking laws. Were there contention about a modern-day law regarding parking, a lawyer could indeed invoke the horse-drawn-carriage law as -precedent-, based on its -intent- as reapplied to the modern context. This does not, in fact, in any way say the horse-drawn-carriage law is -wrong-.
In fact, wide swaths of the OT Law -cannot- be literally word-for-word performed from the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD right up to the present day. You have several optional conclusions in regard to this:
1. God's nature is such that he would demand word-for-word compliance with a Law he has made impossible to perform in that manner.
2. God does not expect word-for-word compliance, and thus would naturally provide us a mechanism to resolve apparent conflicts--as he has, per above.
3. There is no God.
You may choose option #3. However, be aware alternatives to that stance exist, and they do not require "loopholes".
That would be a legal establishment of a religion, which is in fact what my quote prohibits.
Nobody is forcing you to pray to a god. That has nothing to do with addressing the distinction my post addresses in response to the grandparent. His question was regarding the -indirect presence or influence- of religion in the government, which is not a making of a law mandating a religion, and has no legitimate objection per the quote nor a rational interpretation of "Separation of Church and State".
You are not legally mandated to pray. A Senator choosing to pray is not the same thing, is not an issue, and isn't going to be fuzzy-worded into equivalence.
Eh? I don't think most of the "religious" are so concerned about you using the words "morals" and "ethics" and saying they are "in direct conflict", but rather than you have no rationale for yours at all. Thus, it's probably a case of subjective nonsense being misrepresented as even being in the same philosophical class as a systematic ethical structure. It just muddies the waters to include it in the discussion when, for any given ethical question, yours and -the exact opposite- have equal subjective validity, per -your- criteria.
"Where the morals or ethics came from is irrelevent."
I was a bit concerned I was making assumptions on this, but handily, you've provided this as definitive on the matter. This is the same as saying you have no referenceable basis whatsoever for "moral" or "ethics", and there is literally no substance to them at all beyond the desire for claiming credit for using the mere words, while having nothing behind the words that you are proposing one need adhere to. And without that as an actuality of the system, the ethical system is wholly dysfunctional on any scale. Seriously, do you think if you ever got to the point of specifying and systematizing your own set ethical norms, -regardless- of what they are, you'd get any response from other atheists other than... "Eh, nah. Don't feel like it."
Easy. Just refer to what "Separation of Church and State" actually means:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."
The rendering of it as "removal of religion from the State" is simply a made-up misrepresentation as unbacked in content and justification (by -any- reference to anything that exists as an objective underpinning) as the rest of the secular arbitrariness that someone will soon post to "correct" this view, as stated by Some Lawyer Wearing A Black Robe At The Time.
In getting the notion propagated that humans need to be interchangable biped commodities--er, "resources".
I'm an engineer, my sister is a nurse. I don't consider either job imbued with a superiority such that the statistical gender count needs to be "fixed" in either case. If men and women are psychologically different and often have a different mix of motivating interests (as, when we review reality, we see is... reality), why should we expect or desire that all types of jobs net out at a 50-50 gender split?
You cannot hypothesize that scientific discovery is driven by faith, when there have been a plurality of faiths, including none at all, involved in making discoveries major and minor over the years.
"I think Thy thoughts after Thee, O God!" -- Johannes Kepler
I'm not really interested in chasing your particular equivocation of "faith", as based on your rationale here, I have the sense that would be quite a semantic chase.
That there have been a plurality of faiths has nothing to do with whether a particular scientific discovery is facilitated or informed by faith. Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto--insofar as the individual's motivation or overall metaphysical axioms (one of which being the quite-unprovable notion science is quite thoroughly dependent on, that of identity, that things consistently are what they are and continue to behave as they are) structure or guide an individual's process of discovery in any sense, the science is to that degree "driven" by that.
One may, indeed, propose that -all hypotheses-, and by extension, -all scientific progress-, is driven by faith, in that -by definition- a hypothesis is unproven, indeed, untested at the point of proposal. I'm not sure what notion of "faith" you are using, and I suspect we'd quite disagree on it, but if it means "provisional acceptance based on limited information", as actual theists would use it, rather that it being used as no theists actually do to semantically fit a pre-built argument (cf. Dawkins) it is essential to all scientific progress.
Perhaps you can indeed project into their brains a more-accurate recounting of their thoughts than they know themselves, and then inform us of it, but I quite doubt it. I suggest starting with your better-known-by-you-then-they-themselves rendering of the cognitive processes of Planck, Heisenberg, and Maxwell, as listed.
The followers of Arius, who thought themselves Christians and believed that only they had Christianity right, believed that while Jesus was a superhuman entity, he was not identical with the Creator.
Just to clarify here, it is not mainline Trinitarian doctrine that they are "identical", either. Going back to Athanasius, proper rendering of the concept of the Trinity requires "Neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance". Considering them as "identical" would violate the first criteria.
Since misrepresenting the history and concept of this seems to be an shared avenue of attack of, oddly, both atheists and Mormons, I think it worth noting--even though I take from your post the implications of the word choice were probably inadvertent. "Three entities, one essence" seems a good way to verbalize what has always been the Trinitarian doctrine into modern parlance.
Likely primarily his Catholicism. The prevailing "scientific" model of the time, the Steady State theory, would have been much less "harmonious" with the "creation event" notion presented by Christianity. This would naturally motivate him to investigate to reconcile his belief with the scientific facts.
And so, we now have the correct science, harmonious with the religious framework, as accepted, and the erroneous model forwarded previously by "scientific consensus" refuted. Seems like a straightforward progression to me, and probably more work than its worth in this case for you to try the standard attempt to twist the two into opposition.
How about a label for the supposed graph points before Prokaryotes?
Otherwise one might conclude that they are simply assuming these "precursors" in the absence of even enough evidence such that they have a name--because that's what "must" have been the case per the assumed paradigm.
Out of curiosity, since we can clearly demonstrate human and animal cells (stem cells) that "know how" (that is, contain the necessary "reconfiguration" information) to individuate to generate all types of biological structures, what is the mainline argument against cells that intrinsically contain all the DNA "data" necessary to similarly individuate directly to varying species?
Surely the mainline Darwinian argument here is stronger than, "cells as of now, absolutely and provably so", and "cells as of back in distant history, no possible way"?
On the other hand, I have in mind a number of pursuits that I personally expect will "return many times over what was spent on it", that is, return to someone, perhaps even coincidentally you.
Ready to invest? Wait, not "invest" per se, as my actual investors/political-friends will get any payback. Let's call your contribution an "enforced donation". I await your check.
Or, to put it another way, there's a ton of research left to be done for which the entire medical industry has looked at the tangibility of the definition of the objective, and the likelihood of its pursuit being useful, and (with their own money on the line), all passed.
... more money to achieve our neuroscience goals faster
Apparently they've already achieved augmenting the mind to psychic powers, because there's no other way he knows what my (as, yes, a member of the set of "our") neuroscience goals are.
Since, however, I am not a consulting neuroscientist nor a corporation poised to monetize discoveries in this field, my goals, at least in the "money" terms, probably vary.
The notion in brief being that for any given situation, however probable death may be, there is some branch in which death does not occur, which consciousness would be compelled to "switch to". Though the physics depth would probably be well beyond me, I'd love to see a detailed analysis incorporating all three of these scenarios.
The other likely reason being that it means tens of thousands of skilled developer hours for free, with the general public perception being that it's "yours" in terms of who did the work and invested in the engineering effort and business risk.
The developers' created value is thereby caused to be "left on the table" (per the terms of business) to be scooped up en-masse by Google shareholders.
I would, in fact, be astonished if this wasn't the unadmitted -primary- rationale, for both Apple and Google, to obfuscating "their OS'" origins.
There is no "divine command to hate gay people", in Romans or anywhere else in the bible. There is in fact not any criticism in even the mildest terms for being gay, per se, -at all-.
You are conflating homosexual sex with having homosexual orientation. Remarkably, having sex is actually non-compulsory, and one can choose not to. Similarly, there is no criticism of heterosexuality per se in the bible, but definite censure of certain choices of what one does with that sexuality. Treating orientation/desires and actions as synonymous by equivocating language is simply intellectually dishonest.
If you want to argue a point, why not go ahead make it actually possible for the argument to resolve the question, by making your representation of what's being discussed actually correspond to what is being discussed?
Romans says, arguably as the mildest censure anywhere in the bible, that the penalty of gay promiscuity is the direct causal personal effects of the acts themselves, "in one's own body". No reference to adding additional "hate", or anything else for that matter, as a penalty, at all.
Harming/killing other people is a generally agreed upon thing that is wrong to be doing.
True enough, but my contention is that it's agreed upon specifically because people internalize that view as provided to them by religious views that has assimilated within the culture. If you needed to trace it back within the context of religion, and you ask "Why is it wrong to harm/kill other people?" eventually you get down to the answer "because God says so". That's the metaphysical underpinning. Theism says there's an omnipotent, all-knowing God that says "don't do that", and that's as close to an objective validation of the ethical principle as you are ever going to get.
By contrast, it's entirely unclear what the answer is from a Naturalist/atheist/Darwinian worldview. A plausible viewpoint would be that killing/harming others isn't "wrong" at all, and in fact should be done if it increases the survival prospects of one's own DNA. So, again, without resorting to such tactics as saying it's wrong "just because", or expressing indignation at what I'm saying, when it apparently accurately represents -your- worldview, and -not- mine, how would you respond to that and what is your justification for asserting it (or any given thing) is "wrong"?
As for your objections regarding what has occurred in the Catholic Church and with regards to the status of women, I'm not in disagreement with you. The distinction is, though, that theism would have a framework for arguing these points, and one could (and indeed, I would say, can and should) argue against these actions with the common religious authoritative references themselves. Apart from doing that, though, it isn't clear that for any given action, one can effectively present from an atheistic view that "action X" is better or worse than "the exact opposite of action X", for any ethical question at all.
I think courtrooms would be a lot more interesting if we could call on various gods to turn up and confirm/deny points of law.
Well, we could do that, but neither I, your legal system, nor you think that there's more than one plausible God.
Here in the UK, our justice system is not based on a particular religious system - the judges aren't schooled in religion.
Your justice system is entirely based on a particular religious system. Trace the history of the relationship of the legal system to the Anglican church back to its source, Christianity. That you assimilate it by default and then deny its origins after you've done so doesn't change anything.
Okay, then, name a -single- law, and validate it is correct that violating it is "wrong", as opposed to violating it being "right", without reference to a religious justification, or an empty claim that it is "self-evident" and defaulting on providing any verification at all. If you can't do that--and you can't--it's fair to conclude nobody else did either, and the the rationale that exists is directly provided historically by religion, and when you examine it now, that's the only underpinning justification you'll find.
Only they can have any actual ethics. To have meaningful ethics, you need a way to validate -particular- stances per your metaphysics (in the philosophical sense of the term, that is, what you assert is "the way reality is").
You can't. You have unverifiable subjective ethical opinions that do not even propose, in terms of a consensus, to have any basis for an objective weight provided by connecting them to something "real".
Though "stability" isn't the core issue, as one can have "stability" in a society that is massively unethical (see North Korea), but to answer your question as to my view, well, no, you can't. We had our test-case of precisely the ideal circumstance to test your conjecture of no-faith societies, a large-scale society defined as an atheist society, being led by atheists specifically to advance, and guided by, atheistic principles, and stated as such. Your test case was called the Soviet Union, and in a couple of decades killed more people (including its own citizens, theists and atheists alike), than religion has in all history. And, yes, it wasn't ultimately stable. It collapsed politically and economically in the 1980's.
All of the multi-trillions of observations relevant to the prediction of Genesis as to the maximum future lifespan of humans, observable and verifiable up to the present day, validate the prediction, to the accuracy in significant digits given by the prediction.
Leaving aside the fact that from the theological side, one could interpret the verse differently, how do you, from your perspective, justify claiming "no observations supporting" the claim exist, when in fact -every single one of trillions of observations- support Genesis' prediction of 120 years, despite -massive- advancements in medicine and technology over the intervening thousands of years?
Good and evil as concepts exist independently of religion
And after 2500 years of analysis and debate by secular philosophy, there is still not the slightest consensus on core moral axioms that would enable a secular ethical system to be even marginally effective if actualized in practice.
Slashdot Mirror
Religious believers need not exercise "faith" that science works, because there is evidence that science works.
For extremely-vague values of "works", which can be legitimized no further than that, and not even to the degree that you hope people will allow you to non-sequitur "leaving the impression of" rather than justifying. Tell me, why did Luminiferous Ether not "work"? By what means, ever, do you know that a current model of science is fully correct? "Kicking the can down the road" to "oh, it will correct itself" in no way demonstrates it is or ever will be -true-, -ever-, or even can be. That is an article of faith.
Which brings us to the next point...
The mindset of faith is to encourage belief regardless of evidence.
No, only in your directly-false statement of what "faith" is (you're just parroting Dawkins and Hitchens in that, understood, though). It is a confidence based on -limited- information. Christians are -directly required- to be able to give a justification for their belief (1 Peter 3:15). If you haven't met any that can, that would be their issue--that is, assuming you've even asked any, rather than just going with a personal history you've made-up to fit your argument.
You are conflating and excluding epistemological domains here to an absurd level. We haven't even touched upon axiomatic statements and their superior claim to being "truth" over scientific processes (as you describe them, not so much "science" as Logical Positivism, which ran aground a few decades ago), or the limits of knowledge of science. Or their habitual overstatement into domains such as politics, invalidly, though I've yet to find a person with your premises who isn't just as happy with "sciency-sounding" as "science" in their automatic assent... but these are wider topics well beyond your apparent capacity at the moment. Another day, then.
For now, just be aware that some of us are fully aware you are pounding square pegs into round holes to support a dubious conclusion you've decided a priori.
Call it a "loophole" if you wish, but one can have a viable rationale for why Old Testament rules are no longer followed. Often, this takes the form of holding those rules are superseded by the "New Covenant" between God and man applying since the life of Christ. There is massive internal scriptural support for this notion.
Within that context, we have a "meta-ethical heuristic" given to us directly by Christ: "Love God and your neighbor as yourself", and directly stated as the principle on which all supposed interpretations of the Law "hang" (and are thereby justified as interpretations, or not). When in doubt regarding the letter of the OT Law, apply that, toward determining whether one's approach maximizes those objectives for the context at hand..
Note that this does -not- mean (though every atheist to a man will claim it does) that the OT Law is now "wrong". It was always contextual to begin with, and contextual rules need application according to context, just like our secular system that has a means to handle cases such as horse-drawn-carriage parking laws. Were there contention about a modern-day law regarding parking, a lawyer could indeed invoke the horse-drawn-carriage law as -precedent-, based on its -intent- as reapplied to the modern context. This does not, in fact, in any way say the horse-drawn-carriage law is -wrong-.
In fact, wide swaths of the OT Law -cannot- be literally word-for-word performed from the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD right up to the present day. You have several optional conclusions in regard to this:
1. God's nature is such that he would demand word-for-word compliance with a Law he has made impossible to perform in that manner.
2. God does not expect word-for-word compliance, and thus would naturally provide us a mechanism to resolve apparent conflicts--as he has, per above.
3. There is no God.
You may choose option #3. However, be aware alternatives to that stance exist, and they do not require "loopholes".
All my tubes and wires
And careful notes
And antiquated notions
Here's to Luminiferous Aether.
You DO realize that Thomas Jefferson built a chapel in the White House, right?
;)
Was that an instance of Congress making a -law-, prohibiting a free exercise of a religion?
This is a Yes/No question.
That would be a legal establishment of a religion, which is in fact what my quote prohibits.
Nobody is forcing you to pray to a god. That has nothing to do with addressing the distinction my post addresses in response to the grandparent. His question was regarding the -indirect presence or influence- of religion in the government, which is not a making of a law mandating a religion, and has no legitimate objection per the quote nor a rational interpretation of "Separation of Church and State".
You are not legally mandated to pray. A Senator choosing to pray is not the same thing, is not an issue, and isn't going to be fuzzy-worded into equivalence.
Eh? I don't think most of the "religious" are so concerned about you using the words "morals" and "ethics" and saying they are "in direct conflict", but rather than you have no rationale for yours at all. Thus, it's probably a case of subjective nonsense being misrepresented as even being in the same philosophical class as a systematic ethical structure. It just muddies the waters to include it in the discussion when, for any given ethical question, yours and -the exact opposite- have equal subjective validity, per -your- criteria.
"Where the morals or ethics came from is irrelevent."
I was a bit concerned I was making assumptions on this, but handily, you've provided this as definitive on the matter. This is the same as saying you have no referenceable basis whatsoever for "moral" or "ethics", and there is literally no substance to them at all beyond the desire for claiming credit for using the mere words, while having nothing behind the words that you are proposing one need adhere to. And without that as an actuality of the system, the ethical system is wholly dysfunctional on any scale. Seriously, do you think if you ever got to the point of specifying and systematizing your own set ethical norms, -regardless- of what they are, you'd get any response from other atheists other than... "Eh, nah. Don't feel like it."
Boring workday, and karma to burn.
Easy. Just refer to what "Separation of Church and State" actually means:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."
The rendering of it as "removal of religion from the State" is simply a made-up misrepresentation as unbacked in content and justification (by -any- reference to anything that exists as an objective underpinning) as the rest of the secular arbitrariness that someone will soon post to "correct" this view, as stated by Some Lawyer Wearing A Black Robe At The Time.
In getting the notion propagated that humans need to be interchangable biped commodities--er, "resources".
I'm an engineer, my sister is a nurse. I don't consider either job imbued with a superiority such that the statistical gender count needs to be "fixed" in either case. If men and women are psychologically different and often have a different mix of motivating interests (as, when we review reality, we see is... reality), why should we expect or desire that all types of jobs net out at a 50-50 gender split?
You cannot hypothesize that scientific discovery is driven by faith, when there have been a plurality of faiths, including none at all, involved in making discoveries major and minor over the years.
"I think Thy thoughts after Thee, O God!" -- Johannes Kepler
I'm not really interested in chasing your particular equivocation of "faith", as based on your rationale here, I have the sense that would be quite a semantic chase.
That there have been a plurality of faiths has nothing to do with whether a particular scientific discovery is facilitated or informed by faith. Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto--insofar as the individual's motivation or overall metaphysical axioms (one of which being the quite-unprovable notion science is quite thoroughly dependent on, that of identity, that things consistently are what they are and continue to behave as they are) structure or guide an individual's process of discovery in any sense, the science is to that degree "driven" by that.
One may, indeed, propose that -all hypotheses-, and by extension, -all scientific progress-, is driven by faith, in that -by definition- a hypothesis is unproven, indeed, untested at the point of proposal. I'm not sure what notion of "faith" you are using, and I suspect we'd quite disagree on it, but if it means "provisional acceptance based on limited information", as actual theists would use it, rather that it being used as no theists actually do to semantically fit a pre-built argument (cf. Dawkins) it is essential to all scientific progress.
You will find many other referenced first-hand positions on how faith had facilitated the science of scientists, by the scientists themselves, here.
Perhaps you can indeed project into their brains a more-accurate recounting of their thoughts than they know themselves, and then inform us of it, but I quite doubt it. I suggest starting with your better-known-by-you-then-they-themselves rendering of the cognitive processes of Planck, Heisenberg, and Maxwell, as listed.
The followers of Arius, who thought themselves Christians and believed that only they had Christianity right, believed that while Jesus was a superhuman entity, he was not identical with the Creator.
Just to clarify here, it is not mainline Trinitarian doctrine that they are "identical", either. Going back to Athanasius, proper rendering of the concept of the Trinity requires "Neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance". Considering them as "identical" would violate the first criteria.
Since misrepresenting the history and concept of this seems to be an shared avenue of attack of, oddly, both atheists and Mormons, I think it worth noting--even though I take from your post the implications of the word choice were probably inadvertent. "Three entities, one essence" seems a good way to verbalize what has always been the Trinitarian doctrine into modern parlance.
Likely primarily his Catholicism. The prevailing "scientific" model of the time, the Steady State theory, would have been much less "harmonious" with the "creation event" notion presented by Christianity. This would naturally motivate him to investigate to reconcile his belief with the scientific facts.
And so, we now have the correct science, harmonious with the religious framework, as accepted, and the erroneous model forwarded previously by "scientific consensus" refuted. Seems like a straightforward progression to me, and probably more work than its worth in this case for you to try the standard attempt to twist the two into opposition.
You're welcome.
How about a label for the supposed graph points before Prokaryotes?
Otherwise one might conclude that they are simply assuming these "precursors" in the absence of even enough evidence such that they have a name--because that's what "must" have been the case per the assumed paradigm.
Out of curiosity, since we can clearly demonstrate human and animal cells (stem cells) that "know how" (that is, contain the necessary "reconfiguration" information) to individuate to generate all types of biological structures, what is the mainline argument against cells that intrinsically contain all the DNA "data" necessary to similarly individuate directly to varying species?
Surely the mainline Darwinian argument here is stronger than, "cells as of now, absolutely and provably so", and "cells as of back in distant history, no possible way"?
Protip: They were.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2000/04/35479
On the other hand, I have in mind a number of pursuits that I personally expect will "return many times over what was spent on it", that is, return to someone, perhaps even coincidentally you.
Ready to invest? Wait, not "invest" per se, as my actual investors/political-friends will get any payback. Let's call your contribution an "enforced donation". I await your check.
Or, to put it another way, there's a ton of research left to be done for which the entire medical industry has looked at the tangibility of the definition of the objective, and the likelihood of its pursuit being useful, and (with their own money on the line), all passed.
... more money to achieve our neuroscience goals faster
Apparently they've already achieved augmenting the mind to psychic powers, because there's no other way he knows what my (as, yes, a member of the set of "our") neuroscience goals are.
Since, however, I am not a consulting neuroscientist nor a corporation poised to monetize discoveries in this field, my goals, at least in the "money" terms, probably vary.
Or, assuming the Everett Interpretation, the answer to how they would die might be "none of the above"...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_immortality
The notion in brief being that for any given situation, however probable death may be, there is some branch in which death does not occur, which consciousness would be compelled to "switch to". Though the physics depth would probably be well beyond me, I'd love to see a detailed analysis incorporating all three of these scenarios.
The other likely reason being that it means tens of thousands of skilled developer hours for free, with the general public perception being that it's "yours" in terms of who did the work and invested in the engineering effort and business risk.
The developers' created value is thereby caused to be "left on the table" (per the terms of business) to be scooped up en-masse by Google shareholders.
I would, in fact, be astonished if this wasn't the unadmitted -primary- rationale, for both Apple and Google, to obfuscating "their OS'" origins.
There is no "divine command to hate gay people", in Romans or anywhere else in the bible. There is in fact not any criticism in even the mildest terms for being gay, per se, -at all-.
You are conflating homosexual sex with having homosexual orientation. Remarkably, having sex is actually non-compulsory, and one can choose not to. Similarly, there is no criticism of heterosexuality per se in the bible, but definite censure of certain choices of what one does with that sexuality. Treating orientation/desires and actions as synonymous by equivocating language is simply intellectually dishonest.
If you want to argue a point, why not go ahead make it actually possible for the argument to resolve the question, by making your representation of what's being discussed actually correspond to what is being discussed?
Romans says, arguably as the mildest censure anywhere in the bible, that the penalty of gay promiscuity is the direct causal personal effects of the acts themselves, "in one's own body". No reference to adding additional "hate", or anything else for that matter, as a penalty, at all.
Harming/killing other people is a generally agreed upon thing that is wrong to be doing.
True enough, but my contention is that it's agreed upon specifically because people internalize that view as provided to them by religious views that has assimilated within the culture. If you needed to trace it back within the context of religion, and you ask "Why is it wrong to harm/kill other people?" eventually you get down to the answer "because God says so". That's the metaphysical underpinning. Theism says there's an omnipotent, all-knowing God that says "don't do that", and that's as close to an objective validation of the ethical principle as you are ever going to get.
By contrast, it's entirely unclear what the answer is from a Naturalist/atheist/Darwinian worldview. A plausible viewpoint would be that killing/harming others isn't "wrong" at all, and in fact should be done if it increases the survival prospects of one's own DNA. So, again, without resorting to such tactics as saying it's wrong "just because", or expressing indignation at what I'm saying, when it apparently accurately represents -your- worldview, and -not- mine, how would you respond to that and what is your justification for asserting it (or any given thing) is "wrong"? As for your objections regarding what has occurred in the Catholic Church and with regards to the status of women, I'm not in disagreement with you. The distinction is, though, that theism would have a framework for arguing these points, and one could (and indeed, I would say, can and should) argue against these actions with the common religious authoritative references themselves. Apart from doing that, though, it isn't clear that for any given action, one can effectively present from an atheistic view that "action X" is better or worse than "the exact opposite of action X", for any ethical question at all.
I think courtrooms would be a lot more interesting if we could call on various gods to turn up and confirm/deny points of law.
Well, we could do that, but neither I, your legal system, nor you think that there's more than one plausible God.
Here in the UK, our justice system is not based on a particular religious system - the judges aren't schooled in religion.
Your justice system is entirely based on a particular religious system. Trace the history of the relationship of the legal system to the Anglican church back to its source, Christianity. That you assimilate it by default and then deny its origins after you've done so doesn't change anything.
Okay, then, name a -single- law, and validate it is correct that violating it is "wrong", as opposed to violating it being "right", without reference to a religious justification, or an empty claim that it is "self-evident" and defaulting on providing any verification at all. If you can't do that--and you can't--it's fair to conclude nobody else did either, and the the rationale that exists is directly provided historically by religion, and when you examine it now, that's the only underpinning justification you'll find.
Only they can have any actual ethics. To have meaningful ethics, you need a way to validate -particular- stances per your metaphysics (in the philosophical sense of the term, that is, what you assert is "the way reality is").
You can't. You have unverifiable subjective ethical opinions that do not even propose, in terms of a consensus, to have any basis for an objective weight provided by connecting them to something "real".
Though "stability" isn't the core issue, as one can have "stability" in a society that is massively unethical (see North Korea), but to answer your question as to my view, well, no, you can't. We had our test-case of precisely the ideal circumstance to test your conjecture of no-faith societies, a large-scale society defined as an atheist society, being led by atheists specifically to advance, and guided by, atheistic principles, and stated as such. Your test case was called the Soviet Union, and in a couple of decades killed more people (including its own citizens, theists and atheists alike), than religion has in all history. And, yes, it wasn't ultimately stable. It collapsed politically and economically in the 1980's.
All of the multi-trillions of observations relevant to the prediction of Genesis as to the maximum future lifespan of humans, observable and verifiable up to the present day, validate the prediction, to the accuracy in significant digits given by the prediction.
Leaving aside the fact that from the theological side, one could interpret the verse differently, how do you, from your perspective, justify claiming "no observations supporting" the claim exist, when in fact -every single one of trillions of observations- support Genesis' prediction of 120 years, despite -massive- advancements in medicine and technology over the intervening thousands of years?
Good and evil as concepts exist independently of religion
And after 2500 years of analysis and debate by secular philosophy, there is still not the slightest consensus on core moral axioms that would enable a secular ethical system to be even marginally effective if actualized in practice.