What, pray tell, does a "fair" media even look or sound like? Deliberately giving every side of every story equal time, regardless of whether or not people are interested?
this appraoch does not impress anyone or sway anyone from their beliefs
Hate to break it to you, but it did for me, and for anyone else who was a theist and is not anymore. You are denying reality.
offering something better always works. taking away leads to a resistance fight
Offering something better most certainly does NOT always work. "Better" is highly subjective. And anyway, if atheism presents something closer to the truth than theism does, is that not something better? As for resistance fight, why is that my problem? The anti-slavery movement led to a resistance fight also. So? Does that mean they were wrong? That their ideas were not worth fighting for?
the problem with atheists is they only attack. they offer nothing superior.
Again, if what an atheist is offering is the TRUTH, is that not superior to falsity and fantasy? How is clarity not superior to haze?
that is why atheism is doomed to eternally fail in the face of religion
Is that why, by most measures, secularism is on the rise?
you never sway a single person by attacking their beliefs.
You can say this over and over and over if you want, but that does not make it true. The reverse, in fact, IS true. It IS entirely possible to change people's beliefs by deconstructing them (again, I am one of those people). And it is the most desirable method, for me. I do not wish to win anyone over to my particular worldview. I merely wish them to NOT choose the ones which make baseless assertions about reality.
You are full of non-sequiturs. I cannot grok your words. They look like English sentences, but upon examination are completely incoherent. You might as well tell me that communism is a dark-white polka dotted wallpaper monument.
You're being awfully presumptuous. What do you know about how I approach my religious conversations, besides this one we're having right now? And anyway, you started the conversation about atheism, and you were completely wrong about numerous things. So I pointed them out. I denied the validity of your views, because I perceived them to be incorrect. I just wanted to puncture the big shiney red balloon of fractal wrongness which you had just inflated.
Also, I do not wish to "impress someone else with [my] beliefs". I merely wish to inform you that you're wrong, and why you're wrong. And I wish that anybody else reading does not get suckered into believing your particular character assassination of atheism.
And a follow-up - atheism is NOT a belief system, it is merely a categorization of them. There are billions of belief systems; some are atheistic, and some theistic. That is to say, some have gods and some do not. People who adhere to any belief system, even if it is highly individualized, are either theists or atheists. If you believe in gods, you're a theist. If you don't, you're an atheist. There can certainly be shades of gray here, but the basic idea is to help classify all the various belief systems according to some common characteristics.
Moreover, that there are social movements and organizations present in today's society which are against theism, or against one particular manifestation thereof, does not make it a belief system. If anything, these people should be classified as "anti-theist"; beyond being merely without theism, they are actively opposed to it. Yet still, anti-theism is not a belief system anymore than anti-war, or anti-fur, or anti-slavery. It is merely several diverse people coalescing around a common cause.
Why does something superior need to be offered? You are either correct or incorrect in your belief; if it can be demonstrated to be incorrect, that does not necessarily require an alternative. All atheism stands for is a lack in belief in some invisible supernatural personality; i.e. a deity. It's not a lack of purpose or happiness or humanity or optimism or anything else. Atheism's just an opinion on one particular issue - it's not a worldview. You are profoundly mistaken if you think otherwise.
You seem to be conflating atheism with nihilism. Nihilism is a particular atheistic worldview, but basic logic should tell you that that doesn't mean all atheists are nihilists. One can be an atheist and still adhere to any number of belief systems (e.g. Buddhism, secular humanism, Humanistic Judaism, Confucianism, Taoism), few of which endorse any sort of meaninglessness.
What are you blathering about? Equivocation, at least one straw-man, shifting goalposts...
I've never before heard someone define god as "us, in the future". If that's what anybody's talking about when they're going on about the trinity, or transubstantiation, or first-movers, or young-earth creationism, or the Shahada, or the virgin birth, then they're doing a shitty job getting that aspect of their point across.
Look, I'm an atheist too, but it's radically disingenuous to say or imply that all religions are a means of social control. It may very well be the case that some or many or most of them are, but even if you had said that (and hopefully backed it up with some sort of evidence), it would be non-sequitur in the context of ChromeAeonium's comments. He/she was discussing his/her own personal church community as a counter-example to your assertion that all religions are out for money. Come back to you, and you're talking about suicide bombers (shifting the goalposts), the Catholic Church (may be true, but one example does not an argument make), Socrates (appeal to authority), back to Abrahamic religions (still doesn't address the counterexample), and then some diatribe about puritanism - which, again, is entirely unrelated to your claims about money-driven religious institutions.
It's people like you, bsDaemon, who help to justify theists' frequent claims that atheism is just another religion. You've done nothing but lump emotional criticisms upon religion when there's plenty of logical, rational criticisms that go over much better, and which are fundamentally more convincing. Not to mention that the money or power-driven aspects of some religions are not universal to all religions - they're very common, but the root cause of it is superstition, which you barely touched on! Superstition is the true enemy here, not religion. Without superstition, you are still left with socialization, community, altruism, social welfare, philosophy, etc. - which are all neutral at worst.
Actually if you watch the film Stein does not necessarily believe in ID.
Actually, he does believe in ID. Why else would the movie promote ID as the only alternative to evolution?
Why do we teach kids the difference between laws, and theory and then act like evolution is a law?
The difference between law and theory is pretty much semantics. Both refer to hypotheses which have been backed up by evidence. Anything called a "law" tends to be simple enough to be stated succinctly. The words do not indicate anything about the strength of the claims put forth.
it does not explain how you get from paramecium to human
Well, first of all, no one thinks humans evolved from paramecia. Both are extant species (i.e. leaf nodes on the evolutionary tree). What is claimed by evolution is that, if you could trace back far enough, paramecia and humans have some sort of common ancestor which has long been extinct. Secondly, evolution DOES offer an explanation as to how that common ancestor eventually led to human beings - via a long, long, long series of chance mutations shaped by natural selection over billions of years. Certainly evolution can't illustrate every single point along the path, but there exists mountains of evidence - fossil, evolutionary development, genetic, etc. - in support of evolutionary theory. ID, on the other hand, claims that God did it, and offers no viable evidence to back up that claim.
In what way does the presents of evolution rule out an intelligent designer; might that designer have included an evolutionary mechanism?
Evolution itself does not rule out an intelligent designer, but it certainly diminishes the role of one. The current theory of evolution is largely conceived of as an undirected series of events which doesn't require any intelligence driving it. If anything, the role of the designer must be confined to a so-called "first-mover" - an intelligence that set up the dominoes and then simply tipped the first one. This designer might have set up evolution as the dominos' mechanism, but that's not at all what Intelligent Design tries to claim.
All Stein is doing is asking scientists to act like it. They should acknowledge the weak spots in any theory and look to finding the explanations.
He is doing no such thing. He is not simply pointing out weak spots - any credible scientist will acknowledge truckloads of unknowns in the theory of evolution, but these largely consist of elements and mechanisms yet unexplored, or inconclusive evidence, etc. No, what Stein and his cronies are suggesting is to toss out the strong points in the theory! Simply because their doubts seem reasonable does not mean that they are! Every claim put forth by the intelligent design cabal has been dismissed by the evidence, and yet they continue to persist. The irony is that no design proponent appears to be open to the weak spots in THEIR theories.
Did you even look to see if anything I had said was documented or available via a search engine before you questioned my comments in public?
I certainly did not. Claims require evidence, which the claimant (you) must provide. People claim all sorts of shit every microsecond on the Internet. What makes you so special that I should give you that kind of time?
Further, how dare you label me as ignorant of my industry, or anything else? No, I do not follow the legal ins and outs of Microsoft's every move, as you appear to, but that's hardly the breadth of the history of software. I'm far more concerned with the history of languages, object-oriented design, various programming paradigms, artificial intelligence, information security, various visionaries from Babbage to Turing to Knuth to Stallman, the Jargon File, the Game of Life, etc. Then there's the thousands of other interests I have - simple things like the philosphy of science, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, the study of evolution, linguistics, and world religions. So I'll admit with utter anguish that the courtroom dramas of Redmond are pretty goddamn low on my list. Consequently, if that makes me "pathetic" in your eyes, you'll forgive me if I think that says more about your myopia and pretension than my intellect.
Are attempting to discuss things rationally, or just rant, and insult anybody who doesn't take your arguments at face value? Maybe there's a very good reason nobody listens to what you're saying: you come off like an asshole who doesn't care that his message is garbled by its embittered delivery.
I sure as hell am not going to take you or your views seriously when you think I'm "mouthing off" or clueless just because I don't agree with you. Because that makes you a troll.
It is sad because it locks out a larger portion of the market.
If you're talking about the OS market, you're correct that MS never wrote (or like will write) a Linux or Mac port of.NET, but they never stopped the Mono dudes from doing their thing. Also: who cares? What obligation are they under to provide this product, or any other, to every known platform, no matter the costs or difficulties associated with that kind of scope?
Also, they're not locking anybody out; if you need cross-platform functionality, use something cross-platform. As soon as they show up at your doorstep and remove all traces of Java, Python, Ruby, Boo, Mono, gcc, g++, Pascal, PowerBuilder, Haskell, AspectJ, FORTRAN, bash, COBOL, Lisp, Delphi, ML, Erlang, PHP, Perl, GW-BASIC, Tcl, Lua, Ada, and any other non-MS language or framework from your life, they're not locking anybody into or out of anything. To imply so is disingenuous.
It is sad because it locks in developers and customers to one platform.
Again, it's not locking anybody into or out of anything, because that implies a lack of choice. You're free to choose any tool you want to program new apps. There is no proverbial gun to your head.
It is sad because it was designed to do both these and so many are ignorant of this.
You know what it was designed to do? Make Microsoft money! Horrors! Which is the same reason Sun made Java, and it's the same reason they're going (or have gone) open-source with it: because their potential profit of that decision outweighs any other disadvantages. Obviously Microsoft doesn't perceive it that way, for better or worse. Whether these decisions make sense from a profit standpoint is up to future historians to figure out. But it doesn't make sense to treat MS as something like an oppressor when you're perfectly free to avoid them, and free to encourage others to do so as well.
I'm on Paxil (also an SSRI) currently, and for me it's likewise great at preventing the "sinking feeling" you're describing. However, I was under the assumption that the physiological reaction (sweaty palms, sinking feeling, heart palpitations, dry mouth, etc.) were all related to anxiety, not depression. My understanding is that an anxiety "disorder" means that you have some sort of a "short-circuit" in your fight-or-flight response, causing it to trigger from benign, non-life-threatening stimuli, such as social interactions, bad memories, or phobias.
Anyway, I think the major problem with public perception of antidepressants is that they're expected to be some miracle drug, eliminating the illness with the same efficacy that penicillin eliminates infection. But they're just not that good, and they probably never will be. So if all this study is saying is that antidepressants alone do not cure depression, then that's not really news at all.
Overcoming depression, in my experience, is a process of debugging your brain: detecting poorly functioning thought processes(*), brainstorming ways to fix those bugs, fixing them, and then adapting a certain sort of vigilance in order to catch and eliminate those same sorts of bugs in the future. Antidepressants are just a tool, nothing more, and they still require a knowledgable human being to use them effectively.
Antidepressants do not a happy person make, in the same way that any drug does not a healthy person make. I can't take painkillers to repair a torn ACL - somebody's got to get in there and sew things up. And due to the super-personal and incorporeal nature of the problem, nobody can very effectively "sew things up" besides the patient. I am fond of saying that the Paxil offered me nothing more than clarity. It has lifted some of the fog, so that I can more clearly see what is going on, and get to work on fixing what's broken.
What the fuck has this got to do with evolution? Evolution reveals to us that humans and monkeys and alligators and gadflies and mushrooms are all related, and that they speciated as a result of accidental mutations selected by reproduction and millions of years. This paper reveals to us that... people can construct canoes by trial and error. Just like they build and refine any other tool ever produced.
It's got NOTHING to do with Linux being free and EVERYTHING to do with inertia. Linux is used by jillions of companies every day for all kinds of shit BESIDES desktop apps, so it's not like there's widespread distrust of Linux, and certainly not due to its price tag. The reason it hasn't reached that tipping point is circular: nobody is using Linux on the desktop because nobody is using Linux on the desktop.
Windows is well-known and it's Good Enough for the masses, so they have no reason to go through the unknowns of switching. That the "something else" is Linux has nothing to do with it.
I don't think there's any replacement for talking to the real-live developers who wrote it. Failing that, any design documentation they left behind. Failing that, just get a task to do, and try to get it to work. Nothing like learning by doing.
You don't "study science scientifically". Science is a method of study, so that's like saying we "study studying studiously". And "spirituality" (whatever that may be) should be subject to the same modes of inquiry as the rest of our observations of the universe.
The beam widens over large distances. It could have easily been several feet across on the chopper, depending on altitude and location. Not to mention that the windshield and other shiny things in the cockpit would reflect and refract the light, increasing the odds that some amount of light hits the retina, if only briefly. And, of course, even a quick flash across the retina is enough to do temporary damage (at least), thus endangering the pilot and co-pilot.
If you RTFA, you'll notice there's no mention of a power-hungry officer, or that this couple was acting in some form of civil disobedience. They were fucking around with a laser, endangering someone's life.
Slashdot Mirror
The term I believe you're looking for is "false dichotomy".
What, pray tell, does a "fair" media even look or sound like? Deliberately giving every side of every story equal time, regardless of whether or not people are interested?
Hate to break it to you, but it did for me, and for anyone else who was a theist and is not anymore. You are denying reality.
Offering something better most certainly does NOT always work. "Better" is highly subjective. And anyway, if atheism presents something closer to the truth than theism does, is that not something better? As for resistance fight, why is that my problem? The anti-slavery movement led to a resistance fight also. So? Does that mean they were wrong? That their ideas were not worth fighting for?
Again, if what an atheist is offering is the TRUTH, is that not superior to falsity and fantasy? How is clarity not superior to haze?
Is that why, by most measures, secularism is on the rise?
You can say this over and over and over if you want, but that does not make it true. The reverse, in fact, IS true. It IS entirely possible to change people's beliefs by deconstructing them (again, I am one of those people). And it is the most desirable method, for me. I do not wish to win anyone over to my particular worldview. I merely wish them to NOT choose the ones which make baseless assertions about reality.
You are full of non-sequiturs. I cannot grok your words. They look like English sentences, but upon examination are completely incoherent. You might as well tell me that communism is a dark-white polka dotted wallpaper monument.
You're being awfully presumptuous. What do you know about how I approach my religious conversations, besides this one we're having right now? And anyway, you started the conversation about atheism, and you were completely wrong about numerous things. So I pointed them out. I denied the validity of your views, because I perceived them to be incorrect. I just wanted to puncture the big shiney red balloon of fractal wrongness which you had just inflated.
Also, I do not wish to "impress someone else with [my] beliefs". I merely wish to inform you that you're wrong, and why you're wrong. And I wish that anybody else reading does not get suckered into believing your particular character assassination of atheism.
And a follow-up - atheism is NOT a belief system, it is merely a categorization of them. There are billions of belief systems; some are atheistic, and some theistic. That is to say, some have gods and some do not. People who adhere to any belief system, even if it is highly individualized, are either theists or atheists. If you believe in gods, you're a theist. If you don't, you're an atheist. There can certainly be shades of gray here, but the basic idea is to help classify all the various belief systems according to some common characteristics.
Moreover, that there are social movements and organizations present in today's society which are against theism, or against one particular manifestation thereof, does not make it a belief system. If anything, these people should be classified as "anti-theist"; beyond being merely without theism, they are actively opposed to it. Yet still, anti-theism is not a belief system anymore than anti-war, or anti-fur, or anti-slavery. It is merely several diverse people coalescing around a common cause.
Why does something superior need to be offered? You are either correct or incorrect in your belief; if it can be demonstrated to be incorrect, that does not necessarily require an alternative. All atheism stands for is a lack in belief in some invisible supernatural personality; i.e. a deity. It's not a lack of purpose or happiness or humanity or optimism or anything else. Atheism's just an opinion on one particular issue - it's not a worldview. You are profoundly mistaken if you think otherwise.
You seem to be conflating atheism with nihilism. Nihilism is a particular atheistic worldview, but basic logic should tell you that that doesn't mean all atheists are nihilists. One can be an atheist and still adhere to any number of belief systems (e.g. Buddhism, secular humanism, Humanistic Judaism, Confucianism, Taoism), few of which endorse any sort of meaninglessness.
What are you blathering about? Equivocation, at least one straw-man, shifting goalposts...
I've never before heard someone define god as "us, in the future". If that's what anybody's talking about when they're going on about the trinity, or transubstantiation, or first-movers, or young-earth creationism, or the Shahada, or the virgin birth, then they're doing a shitty job getting that aspect of their point across.
Look, I'm an atheist too, but it's radically disingenuous to say or imply that all religions are a means of social control. It may very well be the case that some or many or most of them are, but even if you had said that (and hopefully backed it up with some sort of evidence), it would be non-sequitur in the context of ChromeAeonium's comments. He/she was discussing his/her own personal church community as a counter-example to your assertion that all religions are out for money. Come back to you, and you're talking about suicide bombers (shifting the goalposts), the Catholic Church (may be true, but one example does not an argument make), Socrates (appeal to authority), back to Abrahamic religions (still doesn't address the counterexample), and then some diatribe about puritanism - which, again, is entirely unrelated to your claims about money-driven religious institutions.
It's people like you, bsDaemon, who help to justify theists' frequent claims that atheism is just another religion. You've done nothing but lump emotional criticisms upon religion when there's plenty of logical, rational criticisms that go over much better, and which are fundamentally more convincing. Not to mention that the money or power-driven aspects of some religions are not universal to all religions - they're very common, but the root cause of it is superstition, which you barely touched on! Superstition is the true enemy here, not religion. Without superstition, you are still left with socialization, community, altruism, social welfare, philosophy, etc. - which are all neutral at worst.
Is this true though? Is it impossible to sell GPL software under a contract which required each copy of the software to be paid for?
Why didn't you call a month ago?
I certainly did not. Claims require evidence, which the claimant (you) must provide. People claim all sorts of shit every microsecond on the Internet. What makes you so special that I should give you that kind of time?
Further, how dare you label me as ignorant of my industry, or anything else? No, I do not follow the legal ins and outs of Microsoft's every move, as you appear to, but that's hardly the breadth of the history of software. I'm far more concerned with the history of languages, object-oriented design, various programming paradigms, artificial intelligence, information security, various visionaries from Babbage to Turing to Knuth to Stallman, the Jargon File, the Game of Life, etc. Then there's the thousands of other interests I have - simple things like the philosphy of science, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, the study of evolution, linguistics, and world religions. So I'll admit with utter anguish that the courtroom dramas of Redmond are pretty goddamn low on my list. Consequently, if that makes me "pathetic" in your eyes, you'll forgive me if I think that says more about your myopia and pretension than my intellect.
Oh, and I accept your half-assed apology.
Are attempting to discuss things rationally, or just rant, and insult anybody who doesn't take your arguments at face value? Maybe there's a very good reason nobody listens to what you're saying: you come off like an asshole who doesn't care that his message is garbled by its embittered delivery.
I sure as hell am not going to take you or your views seriously when you think I'm "mouthing off" or clueless just because I don't agree with you. Because that makes you a troll.
If you're talking about the OS market, you're correct that MS never wrote (or like will write) a Linux or Mac port of .NET, but they never stopped the Mono dudes from doing their thing. Also: who cares? What obligation are they under to provide this product, or any other, to every known platform, no matter the costs or difficulties associated with that kind of scope?
Also, they're not locking anybody out; if you need cross-platform functionality, use something cross-platform. As soon as they show up at your doorstep and remove all traces of Java, Python, Ruby, Boo, Mono, gcc, g++, Pascal, PowerBuilder, Haskell, AspectJ, FORTRAN, bash, COBOL, Lisp, Delphi, ML, Erlang, PHP, Perl, GW-BASIC, Tcl, Lua, Ada, and any other non-MS language or framework from your life, they're not locking anybody into or out of anything. To imply so is disingenuous.
Again, it's not locking anybody into or out of anything, because that implies a lack of choice. You're free to choose any tool you want to program new apps. There is no proverbial gun to your head.
You know what it was designed to do? Make Microsoft money! Horrors! Which is the same reason Sun made Java, and it's the same reason they're going (or have gone) open-source with it: because their potential profit of that decision outweighs any other disadvantages. Obviously Microsoft doesn't perceive it that way, for better or worse. Whether these decisions make sense from a profit standpoint is up to future historians to figure out. But it doesn't make sense to treat MS as something like an oppressor when you're perfectly free to avoid them, and free to encourage others to do so as well.
There's no E's in your sig. What do I win?
I'm on Paxil (also an SSRI) currently, and for me it's likewise great at preventing the "sinking feeling" you're describing. However, I was under the assumption that the physiological reaction (sweaty palms, sinking feeling, heart palpitations, dry mouth, etc.) were all related to anxiety, not depression. My understanding is that an anxiety "disorder" means that you have some sort of a "short-circuit" in your fight-or-flight response, causing it to trigger from benign, non-life-threatening stimuli, such as social interactions, bad memories, or phobias.
Anyway, I think the major problem with public perception of antidepressants is that they're expected to be some miracle drug, eliminating the illness with the same efficacy that penicillin eliminates infection. But they're just not that good, and they probably never will be. So if all this study is saying is that antidepressants alone do not cure depression, then that's not really news at all.
Overcoming depression, in my experience, is a process of debugging your brain: detecting poorly functioning thought processes(*), brainstorming ways to fix those bugs, fixing them, and then adapting a certain sort of vigilance in order to catch and eliminate those same sorts of bugs in the future. Antidepressants are just a tool, nothing more, and they still require a knowledgable human being to use them effectively.
Antidepressants do not a happy person make, in the same way that any drug does not a healthy person make. I can't take painkillers to repair a torn ACL - somebody's got to get in there and sew things up. And due to the super-personal and incorporeal nature of the problem, nobody can very effectively "sew things up" besides the patient. I am fond of saying that the Paxil offered me nothing more than clarity. It has lifted some of the fog, so that I can more clearly see what is going on, and get to work on fixing what's broken.
What the fuck has this got to do with evolution? Evolution reveals to us that humans and monkeys and alligators and gadflies and mushrooms are all related, and that they speciated as a result of accidental mutations selected by reproduction and millions of years. This paper reveals to us that... people can construct canoes by trial and error. Just like they build and refine any other tool ever produced.
It's got NOTHING to do with Linux being free and EVERYTHING to do with inertia. Linux is used by jillions of companies every day for all kinds of shit BESIDES desktop apps, so it's not like there's widespread distrust of Linux, and certainly not due to its price tag. The reason it hasn't reached that tipping point is circular: nobody is using Linux on the desktop because nobody is using Linux on the desktop.
Windows is well-known and it's Good Enough for the masses, so they have no reason to go through the unknowns of switching. That the "something else" is Linux has nothing to do with it.
I don't think that's true - he wants Roe vs. Wade overturned. I don't see him letting the issue slide like you're suggesting.
I don't think there's any replacement for talking to the real-live developers who wrote it. Failing that, any design documentation they left behind. Failing that, just get a task to do, and try to get it to work. Nothing like learning by doing.
You don't "study science scientifically". Science is a method of study, so that's like saying we "study studying studiously". And "spirituality" (whatever that may be) should be subject to the same modes of inquiry as the rest of our observations of the universe.
The beam widens over large distances. It could have easily been several feet across on the chopper, depending on altitude and location. Not to mention that the windshield and other shiny things in the cockpit would reflect and refract the light, increasing the odds that some amount of light hits the retina, if only briefly. And, of course, even a quick flash across the retina is enough to do temporary damage (at least), thus endangering the pilot and co-pilot.
If you RTFA, you'll notice there's no mention of a power-hungry officer, or that this couple was acting in some form of civil disobedience. They were fucking around with a laser, endangering someone's life.