That is demonstrably untrue: the mainstream Christian god is a single god in three persons (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), while the Jewish and Muslim god is not triune in nature.
Ha, no, he was the owner of the Texas Rangers (baseball team, not law enforcement organization). The Houston Texans were started in 2002, at which time Bush was more interested in agitating for war against Iraq than he was making draft picks in the NFL.
Does someone doesn't like the fact that some Windows users not being Joe Sixpacks does not use their work because of other concerns? What if those non Joe Sixpacks love Safari?
Were you dictating this to Vista's speech recognition? "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all"?
I'm not calling her a fascist to lump her with the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Her grandfather did not perpetrate the Holocaust, either, and any role he had in the Holocaust was due to factors other than his own fascist ideology. I'm calling her a fascist because she is, literally and avowedly, a fascist politician, and there is more than adequate documentation for that claim.
You're right. Being a granddaughter of a Fascist doesn't make her a fascist. Starting a neo-fascist political party because the leader of her former party denounced fascism makes her a fascist.
As time went on, we realized that it was actually weaponry that we were developing (DOD had other intentions based on how they were changing our protocols). As a young man, I thought that it was abhorrent and left the project. Now, as I watch China's military building up, I know that the work that I was doing actually could make a difference. The reason is that Chinese leaders are gearing up for a war. The problem is that they have MANY times the troops levels that we have. The major thing that holds them in check is that they KNOW we have a very high tech advantage. But with their continuing theft of our military secrets and W. having tied us up in Iraq, combined with our monster growing deficits, it is only a matter of time before they are equal to us (from the chinese leaders POV).
The difference you made could have been simply designing more technology to fall into China's hands, too. Look, we know China might get a little anxious about putting down its immediate neighbors, but they won't be going to war with us. In fact, war between the United States and China is nearly impossible, since neither side can afford it. Wars between superpowers across oceans are expensive and protracted by nature, which means a robust economy is required. If China starts a war, they will lose trade with America and with nearly all of Europe as well (due to NATO treaty obligations), leaving them incapable of continuing to fight. We will be hurt too, and a worldwide depression would likely ensue, but China would be crippled.
If the US starts the war or even suffers an attack from China, China could immediately release all its American currency, flooding the world market and causing hyperinflation, which would economically cripple the United States if not the entire world. Again, in the long run, no one will be able to afford continuing the war. On the other hand, were China to do so, they would cripple their own currency as well: even in a shooting war, releasing all their American currency would only be a last-ditch effort to let their own massive army wipe out an American landing, or something similar.
Even setting that aside, China's military means nothing without naval power that rivals our own. The US Navy (with NATO support undoubtedly, particularly from the Royal Navy) could undoubtedly blockade China completely.
Your analogies are entertaining, but moot. You miss the point: science and religion are both methods for attempting to understand truth (i.e. that which is consistent) in the universe.
First off, the purpose of religion is not entirely to understand truth: as you can tell from the examples I gave, it importantly, even primarily, serves the purpose of giving emotional comfort when no rational means of doing so is possible. Secondly, the purpose of science isn't to understand truth, it's to predict our future observations, which are two entirely different things.
As for your assessment of my understanding of spiritualism, claims without supporting arguments prove only one thing: that the person making the claim is a fool.
If I'm a fool, you're the first fool: you failed to give me any reason to reject all prior usage of the term "spiritualism" I've observed from English speakers in favor of your definition. Indeed, my convenient Mac OS X dictionary describes spiritualism as either "a system of belief or religious practice based on supposed communication with the spirits of the dead, esp. through mediums" or, in philosophy, "the doctrine that the spirit exists as distinct from matter, or that spirit is the only reality". What you're talking about is more similar to, but still not quite, mysticism--at least mysticism involves meditating upon mysteries, albeit with the hope of non-empirically and non-rationally gaining some knowledge about them.
Many people, for example, accept global warming while at the same time relying on economic estimates that say guarding against global warming would be more expensive than dealing with it.
Can you refer us to one of those estimates? The ones I've seen have invariably said the opposite, and I am interested in seeing the other side of the argument.
Just as people who lack training in science have difficulty understanding the scientific perspective, those who lack training in religious philosophy have difficulty understanding the religious perspective.
Try reading the parent post a little more closely: "philosophy of religion" is NOT the same thing as "religious philosophy". There are non-religious philosophers of religion. Dawkins attempts to be one of them, but falls short because he's effectively participating in a field he knows nothing about. (Then again, most of your "evangelical" Christians don't know much either--theological sophistication has really taken a beating in the US lately.)
Religion and science are NOT reconcilable. Religion is about accepting assertions as true without any logical or evidential basis, and acting/organizing/living accordingly. Science is about accepting no assertions without a solid logical and evidential basis. They are very nearly the antithesis of one another.
Brakes and motors are not reconcilable. Brakes are about physically stopping a wheel from spinning; motors are about causing a wheel to spin. They are very nearly the antithesis of one another. The fact remains that a well-designed car contains both components.
Breathing and playing piano are not reconcilable. Breathing is about your brain and body maintaining a rhythm without your conscious control, playing piano is about your brain and body maintaining a rhythm under your conscious control.
Kittens and rocks are not reconcilable. Kittens are all about eating kitten chow and running around and playing, rocks just sit there without undergoing any growth, change, or yarn-attacking at all.
Look, we all know it's a bad idea to use religion to decide how old the earth is. It's like using a brake to roll a wheel, using your breath to play the piano, or throwing kittens through windows. On the other hand, I wouldn't use science to comfort a grieving widow or help someone feel better about his mortality, just as I wouldn't use a piano to control my oxygen intake or expect a rock to go chasing after a laser pointer, and while an electric motor can stop a spinning wheel if you use regenerative braking, that only goes to show I'm bad at making analogies.
It is possible you are confusing religion with what is commonly termed "spiritualism." Spiritualism is largely the celebration of mystery, and is therefore essentially the enjoyment of agnosticism.
There's a difference between a positive and comfortable environment and a company that acts like a Soviet collective farm or a 19th century "company town" owner. Benefits are nice, but having enough cash to choose my own benefits in the free market is better. And it's not really my company's business when I have kids or where I go on vacation: that's a totally separate part of my life. (If you're talking about the environment you work in, those aren't really a "benefit" for you. If you code, it's nice if you get dual monitors, an office with a closing door, a comfy chair, and so forth, but your code is also a lot better if you can concentrate without interruptions, use dual monitors, and don't have backaches.
Doesn't the Tesla run on something like 100 laptop batteries. That means that for each one, 100 fewer laptops can be produced.
It's impossible to manufacture more batteries?
One factory produces seemless containment units for nuclear reactors. They produce 8 a year. That means that only 8 reactors based on that technology can be opened each year.
Yes but if we also build two seamless containment unit factories per year, we can build 24 reactors the next year, 40 reactors the year after that, and 56 reactors the year after that. Sorry, this is one game of Starcraft that you're gonna lose playing that way.
The "insightful" mods might be an attempt to game the system. You don't get positive karma for "funny" upmods, but if you're downmodded as "overrated" you still lose karma. Modding you up "insightful" is a means to rectify that.
Why rove over it, if you can get all the information you need by safer, cheaper, less environmentally damaging, more scientific ways?
It's a lot safer, cheaper, and less environmentally damaging to stop worrying about whether there was ever life on Mars, or what kind of rocks the Moon is made out of. And maybe these aren't the most important questions for a humble island nation to worry about. There's not really a good argument I can give, other than, "Hey, let's go land on the planet Mars!" sounds like a pretty cool project, especially compared to, "Hey, let's try to invent a better safety razor!". Not much we do really matters anyway.
Ed Koch is making a suggestion: there's no evidence that any of that's been implemented, or indeed, that Arabs were driven out of Israel by any sort of "ethnic cleansing".
...Both sides rejected the partion plan...
The 1947 UN partition plan was accepted by the vast majority of Jewish organizations and rejected by the Arab side. Look, now you're just lying, which is (sadly) a favorite tactic of anti-Semites, along with making shit up and throwing around code words like "Zionist".
By definition, an insurgency cannot "win" a war, since the definition of winning is forcing a surrender.... The most they can realistically do is force a retreat by causing sufficient losses to turn the tide of public opinion against the war.
And if that war was against Americans, instead of against Iraqis or Vietnamese, the tide of public opinion would be turned that much faster.
Nothing mysterious here, just natural selection/evolution. There's no reason to assume that religion is necessary for a society to develop an ethical code.
No, but the question of whether an individual should abide by an ethical code is answered a lot easier with religion. Game theory shows us that if everyone else is ethical except me, I can benefit.
Pre-agriculture societies generally tend to have values more similar to what we'd call today "democratic values" like equality and freedom and all that good stuff. Plus, they generally won't do things like let someone die for lack of medical care if somebody lacks funds the way we will today.
Indeed: they'll let everyone die for lack of medical care because they haven't invented it yet in any real way. Which goes to show that even an immoral civilization is better to live in than a moral hunter-gatherer tribe.
To take another tack, hunter-gatherer tribes weren't especially tolerant of freeloaders, either, whether they can't or just won't carry their own weight. Yet one of the central beliefs we have in modern civilization is that freeloaders should still be cared for, especially if they're freeloaders due to some sort of mental or physical disability. (And this completely ignores the fact that someone like Stephen Hawking can contribute uncountably more to a civilization than he could to a pre-agricultural society.)
Your argument seems to be, "poorly armed and equipped insurgents cannot possibly defeat the US military." I'm sure the people of Iraq and Vietnam would disagree with that assessment.
Slashdot Mirror
Nuts to them. If you can only insult 1/6 of the world population at once you're not even trying.
That is demonstrably untrue: the mainstream Christian god is a single god in three persons (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), while the Jewish and Muslim god is not triune in nature.
Ha, no, he was the owner of the Texas Rangers (baseball team, not law enforcement organization). The Houston Texans were started in 2002, at which time Bush was more interested in agitating for war against Iraq than he was making draft picks in the NFL.
Were you dictating this to Vista's speech recognition? "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all"?
Because you just paid $19 billion to ensure that no one else uses it, either.
I'm not calling her a fascist to lump her with the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Her grandfather did not perpetrate the Holocaust, either, and any role he had in the Holocaust was due to factors other than his own fascist ideology. I'm calling her a fascist because she is, literally and avowedly, a fascist politician, and there is more than adequate documentation for that claim.
You're right. Being a granddaughter of a Fascist doesn't make her a fascist. Starting a neo-fascist political party because the leader of her former party denounced fascism makes her a fascist.
Indeed: Italy still elects avowed fascists to high government office far more often than the United States.
Sounds like a wiring problem to me. I've never even seen a CFL expire.
The difference you made could have been simply designing more technology to fall into China's hands, too. Look, we know China might get a little anxious about putting down its immediate neighbors, but they won't be going to war with us. In fact, war between the United States and China is nearly impossible, since neither side can afford it. Wars between superpowers across oceans are expensive and protracted by nature, which means a robust economy is required. If China starts a war, they will lose trade with America and with nearly all of Europe as well (due to NATO treaty obligations), leaving them incapable of continuing to fight. We will be hurt too, and a worldwide depression would likely ensue, but China would be crippled.
If the US starts the war or even suffers an attack from China, China could immediately release all its American currency, flooding the world market and causing hyperinflation, which would economically cripple the United States if not the entire world. Again, in the long run, no one will be able to afford continuing the war. On the other hand, were China to do so, they would cripple their own currency as well: even in a shooting war, releasing all their American currency would only be a last-ditch effort to let their own massive army wipe out an American landing, or something similar.
Even setting that aside, China's military means nothing without naval power that rivals our own. The US Navy (with NATO support undoubtedly, particularly from the Royal Navy) could undoubtedly blockade China completely.
First off, the purpose of religion is not entirely to understand truth: as you can tell from the examples I gave, it importantly, even primarily, serves the purpose of giving emotional comfort when no rational means of doing so is possible. Secondly, the purpose of science isn't to understand truth, it's to predict our future observations, which are two entirely different things.
As for your assessment of my understanding of spiritualism, claims without supporting arguments prove only one thing: that the person making the claim is a fool.If I'm a fool, you're the first fool: you failed to give me any reason to reject all prior usage of the term "spiritualism" I've observed from English speakers in favor of your definition. Indeed, my convenient Mac OS X dictionary describes spiritualism as either "a system of belief or religious practice based on supposed communication with the spirits of the dead, esp. through mediums" or, in philosophy, "the doctrine that the spirit exists as distinct from matter, or that spirit is the only reality". What you're talking about is more similar to, but still not quite, mysticism--at least mysticism involves meditating upon mysteries, albeit with the hope of non-empirically and non-rationally gaining some knowledge about them.
Can you refer us to one of those estimates? The ones I've seen have invariably said the opposite, and I am interested in seeing the other side of the argument.
Try reading the parent post a little more closely: "philosophy of religion" is NOT the same thing as "religious philosophy". There are non-religious philosophers of religion. Dawkins attempts to be one of them, but falls short because he's effectively participating in a field he knows nothing about. (Then again, most of your "evangelical" Christians don't know much either--theological sophistication has really taken a beating in the US lately.)
Brakes and motors are not reconcilable. Brakes are about physically stopping a wheel from spinning; motors are about causing a wheel to spin. They are very nearly the antithesis of one another. The fact remains that a well-designed car contains both components.
Breathing and playing piano are not reconcilable. Breathing is about your brain and body maintaining a rhythm without your conscious control, playing piano is about your brain and body maintaining a rhythm under your conscious control.
Kittens and rocks are not reconcilable. Kittens are all about eating kitten chow and running around and playing, rocks just sit there without undergoing any growth, change, or yarn-attacking at all.
Look, we all know it's a bad idea to use religion to decide how old the earth is. It's like using a brake to roll a wheel, using your breath to play the piano, or throwing kittens through windows. On the other hand, I wouldn't use science to comfort a grieving widow or help someone feel better about his mortality, just as I wouldn't use a piano to control my oxygen intake or expect a rock to go chasing after a laser pointer, and while an electric motor can stop a spinning wheel if you use regenerative braking, that only goes to show I'm bad at making analogies.
It is possible you are confusing religion with what is commonly termed "spiritualism." Spiritualism is largely the celebration of mystery, and is therefore essentially the enjoyment of agnosticism.You have no idea what spiritualism is.
There's a difference between a positive and comfortable environment and a company that acts like a Soviet collective farm or a 19th century "company town" owner. Benefits are nice, but having enough cash to choose my own benefits in the free market is better. And it's not really my company's business when I have kids or where I go on vacation: that's a totally separate part of my life. (If you're talking about the environment you work in, those aren't really a "benefit" for you. If you code, it's nice if you get dual monitors, an office with a closing door, a comfy chair, and so forth, but your code is also a lot better if you can concentrate without interruptions, use dual monitors, and don't have backaches.
It's impossible to manufacture more batteries?
One factory produces seemless containment units for nuclear reactors. They produce 8 a year. That means that only 8 reactors based on that technology can be opened each year.Yes but if we also build two seamless containment unit factories per year, we can build 24 reactors the next year, 40 reactors the year after that, and 56 reactors the year after that. Sorry, this is one game of Starcraft that you're gonna lose playing that way.
The "insightful" mods might be an attempt to game the system. You don't get positive karma for "funny" upmods, but if you're downmodded as "overrated" you still lose karma. Modding you up "insightful" is a means to rectify that.
Which is strange: trying it on an old-fashioned Mac calculator DA used to yield "infinity". The Spotlight calculator just whines, "divByZero".
Try to say something so absurd on the internet that everyone realizes at once you aren't serious. (Hint: This is impossible.)
It's a lot safer, cheaper, and less environmentally damaging to stop worrying about whether there was ever life on Mars, or what kind of rocks the Moon is made out of. And maybe these aren't the most important questions for a humble island nation to worry about. There's not really a good argument I can give, other than, "Hey, let's go land on the planet Mars!" sounds like a pretty cool project, especially compared to, "Hey, let's try to invent a better safety razor!". Not much we do really matters anyway.
Ed Koch is making a suggestion: there's no evidence that any of that's been implemented, or indeed, that Arabs were driven out of Israel by any sort of "ethnic cleansing".
...Both sides rejected the partion plan...The 1947 UN partition plan was accepted by the vast majority of Jewish organizations and rejected by the Arab side. Look, now you're just lying, which is (sadly) a favorite tactic of anti-Semites, along with making shit up and throwing around code words like "Zionist".
And if that war was against Americans, instead of against Iraqis or Vietnamese, the tide of public opinion would be turned that much faster.
Talk about an unfalsifiable hypothesis.
No, but the question of whether an individual should abide by an ethical code is answered a lot easier with religion. Game theory shows us that if everyone else is ethical except me, I can benefit.
Pre-agriculture societies generally tend to have values more similar to what we'd call today "democratic values" like equality and freedom and all that good stuff. Plus, they generally won't do things like let someone die for lack of medical care if somebody lacks funds the way we will today.Indeed: they'll let everyone die for lack of medical care because they haven't invented it yet in any real way. Which goes to show that even an immoral civilization is better to live in than a moral hunter-gatherer tribe.
To take another tack, hunter-gatherer tribes weren't especially tolerant of freeloaders, either, whether they can't or just won't carry their own weight. Yet one of the central beliefs we have in modern civilization is that freeloaders should still be cared for, especially if they're freeloaders due to some sort of mental or physical disability. (And this completely ignores the fact that someone like Stephen Hawking can contribute uncountably more to a civilization than he could to a pre-agricultural society.)
Your argument seems to be, "poorly armed and equipped insurgents cannot possibly defeat the US military." I'm sure the people of Iraq and Vietnam would disagree with that assessment.