Biblically, the government is given a separate role than individuals. This isn't too hard to understand, 'cause we do the same thing now, anyway. I'm not allowed to hunt down a criminal and put him into a cell in my garage for as long as I think he deserves, but the government can and does do that. When questioned about paying taxes, Jesus himself directed the questioner to "render under Caesar," when (if you'll forgive me for arguing with a little circularity) the Romans did not have in many senses a particularly "Christian" or (if you prefer) "Christ-like" government.
"Thou Shalt Kill" is NOT self-explanatory. Precious little is. The commandment was given in the historical context of a people who had left Egypt and were on their circuitous way to fight a series of wars against the Cannanites. As a non-Christian, I'm sure you don't believe in the infallibility of the Bible, but I think that you should at least find it interesting that the Israelites evidentally did not interpret "Thou shalt not kill" to mean, "Thou shalt not fight wars."
What this commandment (and the sayings of Jesus about pacifism) are most sensibly interpreted to condemn is vengence, and not correctly apportioned justice, or a proper defense by the government of its people.
"Been There, Done That," or BTDT, is a disorder that many people who have left a religion suffer from. It's primary symptom is the exaggeration by the victim both in his own mind and to other people of the extent of his knowledge and understanding of his former religion. It is one of many disorders caused by mistaking the desire to be comfortable for the desire to have the truth.
Sufferers of BTDT frequently imagine that value judgements about religious ideas are as important as whether religious ideas are objectively true. Thusly, they may justify leaving the "faith" by saying things like:
"I just can't imagine how God could be that way.."
"That's so judgemental!"
Also, they likely will make sweeping generalizations about the psychology and epistemology of religious belief, or about religious ideas and themes in general.
Attempts to dialogue with BTDT sufferers about statements such as these are not usually successful. The BTDT sufferer has become for himself his own infallible authority, so that statements and ideas which run contrary to his own, no matter how carefully explained or reasoned, are, by default, wrong. BTDT sufferers may attempt clumsy rebuttals, but the ultimate result is usually the same: The challenger is dismissed by the sufferer without any meaningful dialogue as "judgmental," a "fundamentalist," "intolerant," or something similar. That these epithets ultimately express nothing more than an opinion and fail to address the real issues is irrelevant. Even in cases which are caught early, the inability or lack of desire to engage in relevant discussion is rarely correctly perceived (as betraying a lack of genuine understanding) and is unconsciously glossed over by the sufferer.
Though in isolated cases, people have recovered from BTDT, usually the belief that in religious matters one's feelings ultimately supersede reality and the laws of logic is too enticing, and the condition only worsens.
Because of course "religion" (whichever one you are referring to) teaches both that graphic violence is great and that graphic sex is bad. That's the logical connection you were going for, right?
I'm an engineer at a chemical plant, and we request our maint. dept. to do work using a work order system called JD Edwards. (The company that makes it was recently absorbed by PeopleSoft.) I don't know how much the type of maintenance done around a chemical plant has in common with requests for IT work, but there you go.
This comment is akinned to those that people make who are convinced that Science (tm) has somehow disproven the existence of God, simply because we now have a better understanding of the physical mechanisms for certain phenomena that used to be explained by divine activity (a popular example is Zeus casting down lightning bolts). Whether or not individual lightning "bolts" (or hurricanes) have some divine purpose is not a question that we can answer by understanding atmospheric science.
In a rough parallel, it might be asked, "Why did Phigrin type what he typed?" And in response someone will say, "Because the electrical/chemical impulses transmitted via his nervous system caused the muscles in his fingers to move in such and such a fashion." It's a valid answer, but says nothing about Phigrin's intents or motives.
This notion that humans are above even evolution is just another conceit, right up there with Earth being the center of the universe and man being created in the image of God. You wish.;-)
The view that the Earth is the center of the universe stemmed not from a "high" view of mankind, but from a low one. It was believed that the corrupt things must be lower the celestial bodies, which were admired. (This is also the source of the idea that Hell is in the center of the Earth).
While it may be said that Christians have a high view of man because they believe that we were made in God's image, Christians are usually criticized for claiming that man is bad enough to need saving. (If it's not one thing, it's another.)
So, though it may amuse you to think of your views as being less conceited than the two you've mentioned, it is a dishonest pleasure.
Maybe this is redundant, but I don't think I've seen anyone mention it yet. Is it likely that wars are going to stop because of a lack of research? I doubt it. If "war technology" never improved from this day forward, we'd still be blowing one another up. While I can appreciate how declining funding from the DoD might be meaningful as a protest, what you might be saying in effect is, "I'd rather see carpet bombing than precision guided bombs." Or perhaps, "I'd prefer it if our soldiers weren't protected from chemical agents used by our enemies." Even if it is assumed that research done with DoD funds will only have a military application, it by no means follows that its only function is to kill more people. It might have the opposite effect.
Which is even more of a leap than the original story, considering that (A) "religious feelings" are not confined to churches, and (B) many (most?) churches don't have pipe organs.. and quite a few don't use instruments of any kind.
Right.
A brief list of a few famous and influential scientists who were Christians:
Copernicus
Kepler
Galileo
Newton
Boyle
Faraday
Mendel
Kelvin
Maxwell
Heard of any of them?
I don't think anyone believes that scientists have no ethics. I think that the people you are talking about (the "moronic protestors") just have different ideas about what is ethical than the scientists carrying on whatever research they are protesting. Maybe in some cases their fear is irrational, but it isn't too tough to see what might be fueling it, in some cases. Scientists and engineers have given us a lot of nice stuff, but they've also given us the threat of NBCs, more pollution than we know what to do with, and lots of other nasty things. The opposite assumption, that scientists are extremely ethical and thoughtful people who have humanity's best interest at heart is probably more dangerous.
In fact, people are more educated (if you are counting degrees) today than ever before. If you are talking about quality of education, I might agree.
Re:how long before the first twit...
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I admit that it is. I did not choose my words carefully. It would have been more accurate to claim that his "run in" had a lot less to do with geocentrism than most people have been led to believe. As others in that thread went on to say, the primary moviation of the Church in "condemning" Galileo did not have to do with his scientific views, per se. The conflict was a great deal more complicated than a simple black and white portrayal of it as "Science vs Religion" would suggest.
Re:how long before the first twit...
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Nope. That must have been someone else. Here is what I said, in the post that I imagine you are referring to:
"Galileo did have a run in with the church.... "
So now it's straw men and lying. Or is just failure to read carefully?
Re:how long before the first twit...
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Hard to say. But it's interesting that you wrote a post making fun of them before they got the chance. It seems as though there is some kind of conspiracy (or at least an inexplicable concentration of ignorance) when attempts are made to discredit certain viewpoints (straw men?) before they are even expressed.
When I worked for A Really Big Oil Company Which Shall Remain Unnamed I was presented with a statistic that said that more bald eagles died in (I think) 2001 b/c of collisions with wind generators than were killed by the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Right, you waited until the 9th hour to start (for whatever reason) and then you purposefully drove 1000 km/hr in the direction of your destination to make it there on time. That's not random. Your need to make it to your destination in 10 hours governed your rate and direction in the last hour. Let's suppose that your mode of transporation is limited in speed. Then the amount of time you could have waited is also constrained by that maximum speed and the distance you have to travel to make it to your destination, and so it isn't purely random, either.
If your start time, rate, and direction were truly random, there is very little chance that you would ever arrive at your destination in 10 hours precisely.
I realize that. My real question is, how can a bunch of truly random events collectively yield something predictable? Don't we take emergent patterns as a sign that something isn't random? There must be some bias at work in at least a few of these events. It might be practical to say that "This is effectively random, because we don't understand the physical laws governing it." But it doesn't make sense to me that we would say, "If you get enough of these things, we can see a pattern.. but individually they are actually random."
If it were truly random, we would be unable to know the half-life of radioactive elements. If I add up a whole bunch of strings of what seem to be random numbers and every string adds up to exactly 1075, I think that I might be forced to conclude that there is something not truly random about the numbers.
I remember reading once an article about the problem of randomness. IIRC, every time someone comes up with a new method of generating random numbers, some statistician comes up with a new test method to prove that the numbers it generates aren't truly random. The author pointed out (like the parent) that there is no such thing as a truly random number. I see several posts about how quantum mechanics is random. I have to admit to having only a superficial knowledge of these matters (from a physical chemistry course), but I have to say that if quantum effects are truly random, then all the physicists in the world ought to pack up and go home. The experiment that one does could never be repeated by another, or if it was, it would be purely because of "chance." How am I misunderstanding things?
Off topic though it may be:
'From 1613, however, Galileo unambiguously asserted that the earth literally moves around the sun and popularized his views in snappy Italian rather than the arcane Latin of the universities. This put his work at the top of the seventeenth-century bestsellers list, but it did not endear him to his academic colleagues. Galileo was first and foremost opposing Aristotle, not the Bible, and for the majority of early-seventeenth-century astonomers, this put him on the fringes of "science"; his was not a cutting-edge theory but and ancient Pythagorean view that had been discredited by Aristotle.
On the other hand, Galileo's relations with the Church were cordial. The orthodox story tells us that his telescopic discoveries "gave unbounded alarm to the Church. By the low and ignorant ecclesiastics they were denounced as deceptions or frauds." But this is not so. Far from being constantly harried by obscurantist priests, he was feted by cardinals, received by Pope Paul V and befriended by the future Pope Urban VII who, in 1620, wrote an ode in his honor. The historican George de Santillana observed in 1958 that "it has been known for a long time that a major part of the Church intellectuals were on the side of Galileo, while the clearest opposition to him came from secular circles."'
6 Modern Myths About Christianity and Western Civilization, Phillip J. Sampson, pg 37.
Actually, it was Copernicus that first championed that idea, and he was not condemned by the church for it. In fact, the majority of the people who didn't like the idea, the people who Galileo continued to contend with, were academics who held that the earth had to be the center of the universe because of their adherence to Aristotelean philosophy. Galileo did have a run in with the church, but it had nothing to do with geocentrism, and it was a far cry less serious than has been popularly portrayed. The story about Galileo, representing Science, vs Big Bad Irrational Religion, protrayed by the Catholic Chruch, is a myth. I leave you to speculate as to why it is such a popular one.
Re:Could this be used to create 'real' holograms?
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Yes, and if pigs somehow had wings, they could fly.:)
Texas freed itself from Mexico on its own, thankyouverymuch. Texas is the only state that did that, and it's also the only one that was its own country prior to becoming a state. Texans asked for statehood shortly after their war for independence. US refused. ~10 years later, the US was back on its doorstep begging to make it part of the Union. One concessions made to Texas as a condition of its statehood: It retains the right to leave the Union (the only state that has that right).
Give it back to Mexico. Please. Remember the Alamo.
Slashdot Mirror
Biblically, the government is given a separate role than individuals. This isn't too hard to understand, 'cause we do the same thing now, anyway. I'm not allowed to hunt down a criminal and put him into a cell in my garage for as long as I think he deserves, but the government can and does do that. When questioned about paying taxes, Jesus himself directed the questioner to "render under Caesar," when (if you'll forgive me for arguing with a little circularity) the Romans did not have in many senses a particularly "Christian" or (if you prefer) "Christ-like" government.
"Thou Shalt Kill" is NOT self-explanatory. Precious little is. The commandment was given in the historical context of a people who had left Egypt and were on their circuitous way to fight a series of wars against the Cannanites. As a non-Christian, I'm sure you don't believe in the infallibility of the Bible, but I think that you should at least find it interesting that the Israelites evidentally did not interpret "Thou shalt not kill" to mean, "Thou shalt not fight wars."
What this commandment (and the sayings of Jesus about pacifism) are most sensibly interpreted to condemn is vengence, and not correctly apportioned justice, or a proper defense by the government of its people.
P.S. I am in no way defending Bush
Oh, I see, you are. When you said "permanently," I wasn't certain.. but "permanently from now on" makes it all crystal clear.
"Been There, Done That," or BTDT, is a disorder that many people who have left a religion suffer from. It's primary symptom is the exaggeration by the victim both in his own mind and to other people of the extent of his knowledge and understanding of his former religion. It is one of many disorders caused by mistaking the desire to be comfortable for the desire to have the truth.
Sufferers of BTDT frequently imagine that value judgements about religious ideas are as important as whether religious ideas are objectively true. Thusly, they may justify leaving the "faith" by saying things like:
"I just can't imagine how God could be that way.."
"That's so judgemental!"
Also, they likely will make sweeping generalizations about the psychology and epistemology of religious belief, or about religious ideas and themes in general.
Attempts to dialogue with BTDT sufferers about statements such as these are not usually successful. The BTDT sufferer has become for himself his own infallible authority, so that statements and ideas which run contrary to his own, no matter how carefully explained or reasoned, are, by default, wrong. BTDT sufferers may attempt clumsy rebuttals, but the ultimate result is usually the same: The challenger is dismissed by the sufferer without any meaningful dialogue as "judgmental," a "fundamentalist," "intolerant," or something similar. That these epithets ultimately express nothing more than an opinion and fail to address the real issues is irrelevant. Even in cases which are caught early, the inability or lack of desire to engage in relevant discussion is rarely correctly perceived (as betraying a lack of genuine understanding) and is unconsciously glossed over by the sufferer.
Though in isolated cases, people have recovered from BTDT, usually the belief that in religious matters one's feelings ultimately supersede reality and the laws of logic is too enticing, and the condition only worsens.
Because of course "religion" (whichever one you are referring to) teaches both that graphic violence is great and that graphic sex is bad. That's the logical connection you were going for, right?
I'm an engineer at a chemical plant, and we request our maint. dept. to do work using a work order system called JD Edwards. (The company that makes it was recently absorbed by PeopleSoft.) I don't know how much the type of maintenance done around a chemical plant has in common with requests for IT work, but there you go.
This comment is akinned to those that people make who are convinced that Science (tm) has somehow disproven the existence of God, simply because we now have a better understanding of the physical mechanisms for certain phenomena that used to be explained by divine activity (a popular example is Zeus casting down lightning bolts). Whether or not individual lightning "bolts" (or hurricanes) have some divine purpose is not a question that we can answer by understanding atmospheric science. In a rough parallel, it might be asked, "Why did Phigrin type what he typed?" And in response someone will say, "Because the electrical/chemical impulses transmitted via his nervous system caused the muscles in his fingers to move in such and such a fashion." It's a valid answer, but says nothing about Phigrin's intents or motives.
This notion that humans are above even evolution is just another conceit, right up there with Earth being the center of the universe and man being created in the image of God. You wish. ;-)
The view that the Earth is the center of the universe stemmed not from a "high" view of mankind, but from a low one. It was believed that the corrupt things must be lower the celestial bodies, which were admired. (This is also the source of the idea that Hell is in the center of the Earth).
While it may be said that Christians have a high view of man because they believe that we were made in God's image, Christians are usually criticized for claiming that man is bad enough to need saving. (If it's not one thing, it's another.)
So, though it may amuse you to think of your views as being less conceited than the two you've mentioned, it is a dishonest pleasure.
Maybe this is redundant, but I don't think I've seen anyone mention it yet. Is it likely that wars are going to stop because of a lack of research? I doubt it. If "war technology" never improved from this day forward, we'd still be blowing one another up. While I can appreciate how declining funding from the DoD might be meaningful as a protest, what you might be saying in effect is, "I'd rather see carpet bombing than precision guided bombs." Or perhaps, "I'd prefer it if our soldiers weren't protected from chemical agents used by our enemies." Even if it is assumed that research done with DoD funds will only have a military application, it by no means follows that its only function is to kill more people. It might have the opposite effect.
Which is even more of a leap than the original story, considering that (A) "religious feelings" are not confined to churches, and (B) many (most?) churches don't have pipe organs.. and quite a few don't use instruments of any kind.
Right. A brief list of a few famous and influential scientists who were Christians: Copernicus Kepler Galileo Newton Boyle Faraday Mendel Kelvin Maxwell Heard of any of them?
I don't think anyone believes that scientists have no ethics. I think that the people you are talking about (the "moronic protestors") just have different ideas about what is ethical than the scientists carrying on whatever research they are protesting. Maybe in some cases their fear is irrational, but it isn't too tough to see what might be fueling it, in some cases. Scientists and engineers have given us a lot of nice stuff, but they've also given us the threat of NBCs, more pollution than we know what to do with, and lots of other nasty things. The opposite assumption, that scientists are extremely ethical and thoughtful people who have humanity's best interest at heart is probably more dangerous.
In fact, people are more educated (if you are counting degrees) today than ever before. If you are talking about quality of education, I might agree.
I admit that it is. I did not choose my words carefully. It would have been more accurate to claim that his "run in" had a lot less to do with geocentrism than most people have been led to believe. As others in that thread went on to say, the primary moviation of the Church in "condemning" Galileo did not have to do with his scientific views, per se. The conflict was a great deal more complicated than a simple black and white portrayal of it as "Science vs Religion" would suggest.
Nope. That must have been someone else. Here is what I said, in the post that I imagine you are referring to: "Galileo did have a run in with the church.... " So now it's straw men and lying. Or is just failure to read carefully?
Hard to say. But it's interesting that you wrote a post making fun of them before they got the chance. It seems as though there is some kind of conspiracy (or at least an inexplicable concentration of ignorance) when attempts are made to discredit certain viewpoints (straw men?) before they are even expressed.
When I worked for A Really Big Oil Company Which Shall Remain Unnamed I was presented with a statistic that said that more bald eagles died in (I think) 2001 b/c of collisions with wind generators than were killed by the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
From http://www.webster.com Main Entry: nuclear Pronunciation: 'nu-klE-&r, 'nyu-, /-ky&-l&r
Right, you waited until the 9th hour to start (for whatever reason) and then you purposefully drove 1000 km/hr in the direction of your destination to make it there on time. That's not random. Your need to make it to your destination in 10 hours governed your rate and direction in the last hour. Let's suppose that your mode of transporation is limited in speed. Then the amount of time you could have waited is also constrained by that maximum speed and the distance you have to travel to make it to your destination, and so it isn't purely random, either. If your start time, rate, and direction were truly random, there is very little chance that you would ever arrive at your destination in 10 hours precisely.
I realize that. My real question is, how can a bunch of truly random events collectively yield something predictable? Don't we take emergent patterns as a sign that something isn't random? There must be some bias at work in at least a few of these events. It might be practical to say that "This is effectively random, because we don't understand the physical laws governing it." But it doesn't make sense to me that we would say, "If you get enough of these things, we can see a pattern.. but individually they are actually random."
If it were truly random, we would be unable to know the half-life of radioactive elements. If I add up a whole bunch of strings of what seem to be random numbers and every string adds up to exactly 1075, I think that I might be forced to conclude that there is something not truly random about the numbers.
I remember reading once an article about the problem of randomness. IIRC, every time someone comes up with a new method of generating random numbers, some statistician comes up with a new test method to prove that the numbers it generates aren't truly random. The author pointed out (like the parent) that there is no such thing as a truly random number. I see several posts about how quantum mechanics is random. I have to admit to having only a superficial knowledge of these matters (from a physical chemistry course), but I have to say that if quantum effects are truly random, then all the physicists in the world ought to pack up and go home. The experiment that one does could never be repeated by another, or if it was, it would be purely because of "chance." How am I misunderstanding things?
Off topic though it may be: 'From 1613, however, Galileo unambiguously asserted that the earth literally moves around the sun and popularized his views in snappy Italian rather than the arcane Latin of the universities. This put his work at the top of the seventeenth-century bestsellers list, but it did not endear him to his academic colleagues. Galileo was first and foremost opposing Aristotle, not the Bible, and for the majority of early-seventeenth-century astonomers, this put him on the fringes of "science"; his was not a cutting-edge theory but and ancient Pythagorean view that had been discredited by Aristotle. On the other hand, Galileo's relations with the Church were cordial. The orthodox story tells us that his telescopic discoveries "gave unbounded alarm to the Church. By the low and ignorant ecclesiastics they were denounced as deceptions or frauds." But this is not so. Far from being constantly harried by obscurantist priests, he was feted by cardinals, received by Pope Paul V and befriended by the future Pope Urban VII who, in 1620, wrote an ode in his honor. The historican George de Santillana observed in 1958 that "it has been known for a long time that a major part of the Church intellectuals were on the side of Galileo, while the clearest opposition to him came from secular circles."' 6 Modern Myths About Christianity and Western Civilization, Phillip J. Sampson, pg 37.
Actually, it was Copernicus that first championed that idea, and he was not condemned by the church for it. In fact, the majority of the people who didn't like the idea, the people who Galileo continued to contend with, were academics who held that the earth had to be the center of the universe because of their adherence to Aristotelean philosophy. Galileo did have a run in with the church, but it had nothing to do with geocentrism, and it was a far cry less serious than has been popularly portrayed. The story about Galileo, representing Science, vs Big Bad Irrational Religion, protrayed by the Catholic Chruch, is a myth. I leave you to speculate as to why it is such a popular one.
Yes, and if pigs somehow had wings, they could fly. :)
Texas freed itself from Mexico on its own, thankyouverymuch. Texas is the only state that did that, and it's also the only one that was its own country prior to becoming a state. Texans asked for statehood shortly after their war for independence. US refused. ~10 years later, the US was back on its doorstep begging to make it part of the Union. One concessions made to Texas as a condition of its statehood: It retains the right to leave the Union (the only state that has that right). Give it back to Mexico. Please. Remember the Alamo.