1. That's a typical method of irrigation in the US only in the loosest sense of the word 'typical'. What you've managed to find is a picture of an antique. My dad has a 20-year-old center pivot sprinkler that has low pressure dropped nozzles to reduce evaporation and soil compaction as much as possible, and it was old technology even back then. Center pivot means just what it sounds like. One end is fixed, and the other end goes around in a giant circle.
The nozzles on these machines vary in size from the center (i.e. near the pivot) to the end. Think about it: The drops near the pivot go around the circle much more slowly than those on the end, and so if the nozzles were all the same size, a lot more water would be put out near the center. Also, the water pressure is higher there since it hasn't undergone friction losses through the length of the sprinkler. During the first summer that my dad owned that machine, I remember walking down it several times with a dot matrix print out in one hand and a bucket of nozzles in the other, replacing them one at a time to try to evenly distribute the supply of water as much as possible.
A half-mile-long sprinkler was (again, 20 years ago) an $80K investment over the former, low-tech system of row irrigation, and he was and is not an especially wealthy farmer. Why would he go to so much expense and trouble? In part because one of his largest expenses is pumping costs, and center pivot irrigation makes much more efficient use of water, overall.
2. I am not personally familiar with Qanats, but they appear to be a water collection and storage method, not a method of irrigation. It was surprising difficult to find quantitative information about irrigation in the middle east, but after several minutes of googling, I did find this brief, UN-produced report on irrigation in Saudi Arabia. It claims, in part:
All agriculture is irrigated and in 1992 the water managed area was estimated at about 1.6 million ha, all equipped for full/partial control irrigation. Surface irrigation [i.e. row watering, like my dad used to do] is practiced on the old agricultural lands, cultivated since before 1975, which represent about 34% of the irrigated area (Figure 3). Sprinkler irrigation is practiced on about 64% of the irrigated areas. The central pivot sprinkler system covers practically all the lands cropped with cereals.
I wouldn't be so quick to assume that horses are "a lot" cheaper, especially long term. They continue to self-fuel (and require frequent maintenance) even when not in use.
What makes you so confident? They have in the past. The Soviet Union was officially an atheist state and severely persecuted religious people. The same remains true of China. Lest you believe this is all behind us, Richard Dawkins has said (more than once, I believe) that religious instruction is a form of child abuse. One implication of his view is that the state should remove children of religious parents from their homes and lock the parents up, because that's how we treat child abuse. Take a look at this comment, too. (When I first read it, it was marked +5 Insightful.) People say that kind of stuff online all the time. Can you imagine what would happen if that point of view became really popular in "real life"? Hint: What do we do with the mentally ill?
But I have to ask why the OP decided to belittle the Senator's formal educational credentials?
Oh, it's simple. The senator has an R after her name, and yet she is calling for a scientific examination of one of the TSA's policies. The submitter hates the TSA, but he also knows that Republicans hate science and that he hates them. The prospect of a Republican supporting the use of science to accomplish something good creates an obvious tension in the submitter's way of looking at the world. He chose to resolve it by impugning the Senator's credentials in a completely irrelevant way.
The speed that it wants to? You realize that science doesn't do itself, right? Ego has always been one of the chief reasons that human beings, who are to a man petty and selfish, do science. The Royal Society invented many practices like peer review that we now consider to be necessary components of the scientific process. One of the reasons that it established Philosophical Transactions, which was the very first modern scientific journal, was to resolve disputes about who did what first. If you were to somehow remove ego from the equation, I think we'd have very few working scientists. There just aren't that many people sufficiently motivated by pure altruism to do it for very long without recognition.
I don't know anything about neutrinos, and I don't know if what PvtVoid said is right, but I think he pretty clearly addressed your concern already. The old result was based on wide, narrowly spaced pulses of protons, and so it required "a lot of knowledge about the shape of the proton bunches, and a lot of statistical fitting." The new tests are based on narrow, widely separated pulses of protons, so that much of the uncertainty associated with each individual result (i.e. the reason that lots of experiments were needed to achieve statistical significance) has been removed.
Licensure in the US is handled by the individual states, and the rules and enforcement can be murky and inconsistent. I have a degree in the one of the traditional areas of engineering, but I am not licensed. I was told in college that in my state, my employer is allowed to refer to me internally as an engineer, but I can't represent myself that way to others (e.g. on my business cards) as an engineer unless I'm a for-real P.E. I'm honestly not sure where the line is, though. It could be a matter of fact that my job title is "Engineer II". If I put that on my resume, am I breaking the law, or is it fine so long as it's sufficiently clear that I'm not claiming to be licensed? Here's an old article from 2003 specifically about this issue in Texas. I'm not sure how it turned out, but it looks like a mess.
I wouldn't consider myself a catalysis expert, but I do computational materials research to predict how atoms are arranged in the surfaces of alloys in order to understand how that affects their catalytic properties, so I do know a thing or three about it. The answer to your question is mostly no. There are good explanations of how catalysts work in many particular cases, but there is certainly no known straightforward way to design a catalyst to do arbitrarily specified chemistry.
Think about this paper. I haven't read it yet, but from the abstract, it looks like it's about a group of researchers finding a single parameter that controls the activity of a particular, narrow class of materials for a particular reaction, and then exploiting that to create an optimal catalyst within this class of materials for that reaction. And for doing that, they were published in Science, which suggests that it's fairly clever, important, and original work. That should give you an idea about what the state of the art is in catalyst design.
John Goodenough, by the way, is about 90 years old, still sharp as a tack, and a world expert in metal oxides (what the catalysts in this study were made out of). Back in the 70s, he "invented" (that's probably not the best word) the cathode material that's still being used in most commercial Li-ion batteries. I just say that to make the point that this research was probably not something that many people have the depth of understanding to do.
I read the IRS guy's manifesto on the day that it happened, and I looked it up again just now to be sure. The only time he mentions religion is to pillory the Catholic church and then "organized religion" more generally. That doesn't prove he wasn't a Christian of any stripe, but in the absence of any evidence that he was (which I'm having trouble finding), it does make it seem less likely.
Loughner (the "guy who shot Congresswoman Giffords") was almost certainly not a Christian. A little googling reveals that as near anyone could tell (he was pretty crazy, after all), he was some kind of nihilist or atheist, although he may have remained a member (on paper) of his mother's synagogue.
James von Brunn, ("the guy who shot up the Holocaust museum in DC"), seemingly wasn't a Christian either. A screed he wrote entitled Christianity and the Holocaust states,
Toward that end -- no different than Hollywood script-writers today -- Saul [That's the apostle Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, for the biblically illiterate] created a bogus a la Spielberg docu-drama stuffed with lies, miracles, guilt trips, betrayal, virgin birth, eternal damnation, salvation -- a scenario appealing to the superstitious, vulnerable, ignorant yearning sheep -- he named his hoax "Christianity."
Based on what little I've read, he seems to be much more of a disciple of a form of perverted Nietzscheanism than a Christian.
I hadn't heard of the plot to blow up the Bad, Bath, and Beyond. I can only find this news item from about two weeks ago that describes a 61 year old man going into a store with a fire cracker and threatening to blow the place up. Even though you clearly don't deserve it, I'll spot you this one and agree that he was a Christian. I have the luxury of being generous because I'm pretty sure it doesn't contribute much to your implied argument for some kind of media bias or conspiracy to protect Christianity.
Maybe you should come back to explain. Most people seem to mistakenly think that you really meant either that "religion is not morally good" or that "religion is not the only foundation for morality", instead of, "Religion is not merely about morality," which is what I'm betting.
I take the confusion as a an indication of how deep and pervasive a certain myth of the Enlightenment has become. I'm talking about the false and unhelpful thesis or approach to religions that says that all of them are essentially about morality, and that all of them are essentially the same. The parts where they disagree (that is, most of the stuff about the nature of reality) are unimportant cruft. (Of course, the same goes for the parts of their moral teachings that we find troubling.) It's sort of a Grand Unified Theory of rationality and faith that seems nice and tidy because it keeps everything in its place, but utterly fails when examined closely.
I'm not claiming that anybody is wrong, but that this "consensus", as of my current knowledge, is not really substantiated by comprehensible, verifiable arguments, but mostly through rethorical tricks.
What makes you so confident that you would be able to understand and rightly evaluate the arguments? I'm not knocking your intelligence. I'm saying that since you are (probably) a layperson, you know comparatively little not only about the "raw data" of history, but about the methods of historical research. You don't think like a historian. It takes more than 5 years of full time work to get a PhD in most areas. Most of what's happening during that time is not anything as concrete as memorization. It's practice at being a competent independent researcher under the guidance of people who already are. It's learning (for example) why certain kinds of arguments which might appear to be very convincing to an uneducated person actually don't make any sense if examined closely, and conversely, why certain kinds of arguments that would seem hopelessly intricate and esoteric are no more complicated than they need to be.
So, in response to your claim that "Even Ehrman doesnt just straightly answer the asked question why he does believe Jesus existed, but knocks The infidel guy out by questioning his standards of proof and in the end dodges the answer completely," I'm proposing (again) that there's probably not that much that he could have done differently that would have been responsible. What good would it have done for Ehrman to directly argue with this guy if the only arguments he could have presented would have been highly distilled caricatures of the real thing? The reaction would have been (indeed appears to be to some extent, in your case), "Is that the best this Ehrman guy has to offer? These historians must really have no convincing evidence at all!" Instead, what Ehrman appeared to be doing is a little hasty brush-clearing to try to knock some sense into this guy. What I hear in this "debate" is that the Internet Infidel Guy is not just mistaken, but clueless about where to even start.
The whole case you present is still facts-free and still amounts to nothing more than "Intelligent people have put N hours into investigating this, and I believe them blindly without ever trying to check how they came to their conclusion, therefore Jesus existed."
Not quite. I stated part of my point of view in a reply to someone else. I'll just quote it here.
Nothing prevents you from coming to your "own" conclusions about Jesus' existence. But, from my perspective, since I acknowledge that I am not trained to fairly evalulate (or even to know all of) the evidence myself, it ultimately boils down to who I'm going to believe, either working scholars who subscribe to the consensus view, or (what appears to be) mostly screwballs on the internet who don't.
I would add to that the fact that said internet screwballs are for the most part not that much different from me in terms of their training and susceptibility to bad historical reasoning. We are liable to fall into the same kinds of traps. So even if I find the case they make convincing (on some level), I have an additional reason to be highly skeptical of it. That is, chances are, if we all find an argument convincing that the experts don't, it's probably because we're missing something, making a common beginner's mistake, or have fallen prey to our biases in some way.
That strikes at the heart of what we'd like to believe about ourselves, especially as "nerds", but I think it's right. We really want to think that we are not one of the sheep who blindly believes what it's told. Instead, we like to think, we believe things based on "the evidence." But the only way to do that, to really evaluate the evidence and arguments and personally come to the best conclusion we can based on what's currently known, is to become experts ourselves. If
I'm a PhD student, and I never heard that 40% stat before. It's eye-opening. I don't have mod points so I thought I'd just reply to thank you for posting it.
So you are making an inductive argument based on a sample size of 1?:)
After a few minutes of googling, I found this. The salient bit is that 91% of Protestant pastors use the internet for church business. Note that the article is six years old. There isn't a lot of room above 91% for that fraction to have increased since then, but it seems likely that it has.
I have no doubt that it is technically true that "some" Protestants think the internet is a tool of pure Satanic evil. But I think it is probably a number too small to call a "significant portion", and also so small that it seems a little tendentious to base a comparison between Catholic and Protestant attitudes on it, even with qualifiers like "some" and "many."
Huh. According to wikipedia, there are around 40,000 Exclusive Brethren, 250,000 Amish, and 800 million total Protestants worldwide. "Nowhere near a majority" is kind of an understatement, considering that 300,000 is only about 0.04% of 800 million. I understand that you were just giving examples, but I think the extremity that you had to resort to (Surprise! Amish people don't like the internet!) in order to back up digsbo's claim suggests something about how significant it really is.
The explanation is in the submission, and it isn't hard to understand. I think what you really mean is that you aren't going to let Naughton/Eco's unwillingness to grind your favorite axe for you get in the way of you doing it yourself. (And in a tendentious and convoluted way, I might add.)
I don't think I understand. If you acknowledge that the definition of faith that you supplied is not the definition that Christians actually use, why do you think that the conclusion you drew from it is important?
Moreover, "fideism" implies an absolute, exclusive reliance upon faith, as in, "No need to get up out of bed, I have faith that my feeding and waste-evacuation will be taken care of magically."
None of the sources I just checked (Wikipedia, Catholic Encyclopedia, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and various ordinary dictionaries) say that. Where did you find it?
Anyway, it's not that important. I think the fact remains that almost no Christian thinkers have defined faith as "belief without evidence." (I'm willing to be proven wrong, of course!)
By definition, faith is belief in something without evidence.
Religious apologist here. (I do apologize...)
The definition of faith you are talking about has a name. It's called fideism. In the history of Christian thought, there have been approximately zero fideists. So, while your definition has the advantages of being very simple and of answering your question in a particular case, it suffers from being mostly irrelevant.
Their stories aren't exactly what the article is talking about, imo. It sounds like they all did studies critical of existing positive results. They didn't just write a paper out of the blue that said, "We thought it would be interesting and important to show X. We tried, A, B, and C, but none of those things did what we expected. We still haven't shown X." The exception might be if A, B, and C are somehow exhaustive and so their failure to show X actually disproves X.
I think part of the reason papers like that are rare is, as you suggested, ego. Science is very competitive, and reputation is almost everything. No one wants to give away what they've been working on and how they've been working on it until they can publish something that will make a splash. The risk is too high that some other guy will say, "Oh, yes.. I know just how to show X!" Then he and his students will scoop you and take the lion's share of the credit.
I think that's probably the nature of competition. There's a careful balance between secrecy and openness. You can't compete if you give everything away, but you can't "win" if you don't trumpet your accomplishments. Maybe we can find ways to reward greater openness, but I think that some degree of secrecy is unavoidable.
Barring the sudden availability of much better internet access, this is bad news for my parents. They live about 15 miles from the nearest town, which is itself nothing to really speak of. Wireless is available, but they are on the very edge of the service area, so it is unreliable. They've been using a satellite-based service for a year or two, but the latency is terrible. A ping to google takes around 1.5 s (yes, seconds). I haven't tried to call anyone on skype from their house, but I imagine it would be unusable. Their cell phone service is somewhat spotty, as well.
Slashdot Mirror
The nozzles on these machines vary in size from the center (i.e. near the pivot) to the end. Think about it: The drops near the pivot go around the circle much more slowly than those on the end, and so if the nozzles were all the same size, a lot more water would be put out near the center. Also, the water pressure is higher there since it hasn't undergone friction losses through the length of the sprinkler. During the first summer that my dad owned that machine, I remember walking down it several times with a dot matrix print out in one hand and a bucket of nozzles in the other, replacing them one at a time to try to evenly distribute the supply of water as much as possible.
A half-mile-long sprinkler was (again, 20 years ago) an $80K investment over the former, low-tech system of row irrigation, and he was and is not an especially wealthy farmer. Why would he go to so much expense and trouble? In part because one of his largest expenses is pumping costs, and center pivot irrigation makes much more efficient use of water, overall.
2. I am not personally familiar with Qanats, but they appear to be a water collection and storage method, not a method of irrigation. It was surprising difficult to find quantitative information about irrigation in the middle east, but after several minutes of googling, I did find this brief, UN-produced report on irrigation in Saudi Arabia. It claims, in part:
All agriculture is irrigated and in 1992 the water managed area was estimated at about 1.6 million ha, all equipped for full/partial control irrigation. Surface irrigation [i.e. row watering, like my dad used to do] is practiced on the old agricultural lands, cultivated since before 1975, which represent about 34% of the irrigated area (Figure 3). Sprinkler irrigation is practiced on about 64% of the irrigated areas. The central pivot sprinkler system covers practically all the lands cropped with cereals.
Oh.
I wouldn't be so quick to assume that horses are "a lot" cheaper, especially long term. They continue to self-fuel (and require frequent maintenance) even when not in use.
What makes you so confident? They have in the past. The Soviet Union was officially an atheist state and severely persecuted religious people. The same remains true of China. Lest you believe this is all behind us, Richard Dawkins has said (more than once, I believe) that religious instruction is a form of child abuse. One implication of his view is that the state should remove children of religious parents from their homes and lock the parents up, because that's how we treat child abuse. Take a look at this comment, too. (When I first read it, it was marked +5 Insightful.) People say that kind of stuff online all the time. Can you imagine what would happen if that point of view became really popular in "real life"? Hint: What do we do with the mentally ill?
But I have to ask why the OP decided to belittle the Senator's formal educational credentials?
Oh, it's simple. The senator has an R after her name, and yet she is calling for a scientific examination of one of the TSA's policies. The submitter hates the TSA, but he also knows that Republicans hate science and that he hates them. The prospect of a Republican supporting the use of science to accomplish something good creates an obvious tension in the submitter's way of looking at the world. He chose to resolve it by impugning the Senator's credentials in a completely irrelevant way.
Maybe be aware of it so that they won't be taken by surprise when their own leaders attempt something similar, perhaps at the behest of the US State Department, which has a history of meddling in the laws of other nations regarding precisely this issue?
The speed that it wants to? You realize that science doesn't do itself, right? Ego has always been one of the chief reasons that human beings, who are to a man petty and selfish, do science. The Royal Society invented many practices like peer review that we now consider to be necessary components of the scientific process. One of the reasons that it established Philosophical Transactions, which was the very first modern scientific journal, was to resolve disputes about who did what first. If you were to somehow remove ego from the equation, I think we'd have very few working scientists. There just aren't that many people sufficiently motivated by pure altruism to do it for very long without recognition.
I don't know anything about neutrinos, and I don't know if what PvtVoid said is right, but I think he pretty clearly addressed your concern already. The old result was based on wide, narrowly spaced pulses of protons, and so it required "a lot of knowledge about the shape of the proton bunches, and a lot of statistical fitting." The new tests are based on narrow, widely separated pulses of protons, so that much of the uncertainty associated with each individual result (i.e. the reason that lots of experiments were needed to achieve statistical significance) has been removed.
Licensure in the US is handled by the individual states, and the rules and enforcement can be murky and inconsistent. I have a degree in the one of the traditional areas of engineering, but I am not licensed. I was told in college that in my state, my employer is allowed to refer to me internally as an engineer, but I can't represent myself that way to others (e.g. on my business cards) as an engineer unless I'm a for-real P.E. I'm honestly not sure where the line is, though. It could be a matter of fact that my job title is "Engineer II". If I put that on my resume, am I breaking the law, or is it fine so long as it's sufficiently clear that I'm not claiming to be licensed? Here's an old article from 2003 specifically about this issue in Texas. I'm not sure how it turned out, but it looks like a mess.
I wouldn't consider myself a catalysis expert, but I do computational materials research to predict how atoms are arranged in the surfaces of alloys in order to understand how that affects their catalytic properties, so I do know a thing or three about it. The answer to your question is mostly no. There are good explanations of how catalysts work in many particular cases, but there is certainly no known straightforward way to design a catalyst to do arbitrarily specified chemistry.
Think about this paper. I haven't read it yet, but from the abstract, it looks like it's about a group of researchers finding a single parameter that controls the activity of a particular, narrow class of materials for a particular reaction, and then exploiting that to create an optimal catalyst within this class of materials for that reaction. And for doing that, they were published in Science, which suggests that it's fairly clever, important, and original work. That should give you an idea about what the state of the art is in catalyst design.
John Goodenough, by the way, is about 90 years old, still sharp as a tack, and a world expert in metal oxides (what the catalysts in this study were made out of). Back in the 70s, he "invented" (that's probably not the best word) the cathode material that's still being used in most commercial Li-ion batteries. I just say that to make the point that this research was probably not something that many people have the depth of understanding to do.
Loughner (the "guy who shot Congresswoman Giffords") was almost certainly not a Christian. A little googling reveals that as near anyone could tell (he was pretty crazy, after all), he was some kind of nihilist or atheist, although he may have remained a member (on paper) of his mother's synagogue.
James von Brunn, ("the guy who shot up the Holocaust museum in DC"), seemingly wasn't a Christian either. A screed he wrote entitled Christianity and the Holocaust states,
Toward that end -- no different than Hollywood script-writers today -- Saul [That's the apostle Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, for the biblically illiterate] created a bogus a la Spielberg docu-drama stuffed with lies, miracles, guilt trips, betrayal, virgin birth, eternal damnation, salvation -- a scenario appealing to the superstitious, vulnerable, ignorant yearning sheep -- he named his hoax "Christianity."
Based on what little I've read, he seems to be much more of a disciple of a form of perverted Nietzscheanism than a Christian.
I hadn't heard of the plot to blow up the Bad, Bath, and Beyond. I can only find this news item from about two weeks ago that describes a 61 year old man going into a store with a fire cracker and threatening to blow the place up. Even though you clearly don't deserve it, I'll spot you this one and agree that he was a Christian. I have the luxury of being generous because I'm pretty sure it doesn't contribute much to your implied argument for some kind of media bias or conspiracy to protect Christianity.
Maybe you should come back to explain. Most people seem to mistakenly think that you really meant either that "religion is not morally good" or that "religion is not the only foundation for morality", instead of, "Religion is not merely about morality," which is what I'm betting.
I take the confusion as a an indication of how deep and pervasive a certain myth of the Enlightenment has become. I'm talking about the false and unhelpful thesis or approach to religions that says that all of them are essentially about morality, and that all of them are essentially the same. The parts where they disagree (that is, most of the stuff about the nature of reality) are unimportant cruft. (Of course, the same goes for the parts of their moral teachings that we find troubling.) It's sort of a Grand Unified Theory of rationality and faith that seems nice and tidy because it keeps everything in its place, but utterly fails when examined closely.
I'm not claiming that anybody is wrong, but that this "consensus", as of my current knowledge, is not really substantiated by comprehensible, verifiable arguments, but mostly through rethorical tricks.
What makes you so confident that you would be able to understand and rightly evaluate the arguments? I'm not knocking your intelligence. I'm saying that since you are (probably) a layperson, you know comparatively little not only about the "raw data" of history, but about the methods of historical research. You don't think like a historian. It takes more than 5 years of full time work to get a PhD in most areas. Most of what's happening during that time is not anything as concrete as memorization. It's practice at being a competent independent researcher under the guidance of people who already are. It's learning (for example) why certain kinds of arguments which might appear to be very convincing to an uneducated person actually don't make any sense if examined closely, and conversely, why certain kinds of arguments that would seem hopelessly intricate and esoteric are no more complicated than they need to be.
So, in response to your claim that "Even Ehrman doesnt just straightly answer the asked question why he does believe Jesus existed, but knocks The infidel guy out by questioning his standards of proof and in the end dodges the answer completely," I'm proposing (again) that there's probably not that much that he could have done differently that would have been responsible. What good would it have done for Ehrman to directly argue with this guy if the only arguments he could have presented would have been highly distilled caricatures of the real thing? The reaction would have been (indeed appears to be to some extent, in your case), "Is that the best this Ehrman guy has to offer? These historians must really have no convincing evidence at all!" Instead, what Ehrman appeared to be doing is a little hasty brush-clearing to try to knock some sense into this guy. What I hear in this "debate" is that the Internet Infidel Guy is not just mistaken, but clueless about where to even start.
The whole case you present is still facts-free and still amounts to nothing more than "Intelligent people have put N hours into investigating this, and I believe them blindly without ever trying to check how they came to their conclusion, therefore Jesus existed."
Not quite. I stated part of my point of view in a reply to someone else. I'll just quote it here.
Nothing prevents you from coming to your "own" conclusions about Jesus' existence. But, from my perspective, since I acknowledge that I am not trained to fairly evalulate (or even to know all of) the evidence myself, it ultimately boils down to who I'm going to believe, either working scholars who subscribe to the consensus view, or (what appears to be) mostly screwballs on the internet who don't.
I would add to that the fact that said internet screwballs are for the most part not that much different from me in terms of their training and susceptibility to bad historical reasoning. We are liable to fall into the same kinds of traps. So even if I find the case they make convincing (on some level), I have an additional reason to be highly skeptical of it. That is, chances are, if we all find an argument convincing that the experts don't, it's probably because we're missing something, making a common beginner's mistake, or have fallen prey to our biases in some way.
That strikes at the heart of what we'd like to believe about ourselves, especially as "nerds", but I think it's right. We really want to think that we are not one of the sheep who blindly believes what it's told. Instead, we like to think, we believe things based on "the evidence." But the only way to do that, to really evaluate the evidence and arguments and personally come to the best conclusion we can based on what's currently known, is to become experts ourselves. If
I'm a PhD student, and I never heard that 40% stat before. It's eye-opening. I don't have mod points so I thought I'd just reply to thank you for posting it.
So you are making an inductive argument based on a sample size of 1? :)
After a few minutes of googling, I found this. The salient bit is that 91% of Protestant pastors use the internet for church business. Note that the article is six years old. There isn't a lot of room above 91% for that fraction to have increased since then, but it seems likely that it has.
I have no doubt that it is technically true that "some" Protestants think the internet is a tool of pure Satanic evil. But I think it is probably a number too small to call a "significant portion", and also so small that it seems a little tendentious to base a comparison between Catholic and Protestant attitudes on it, even with qualifiers like "some" and "many."
Huh. According to wikipedia, there are around 40,000 Exclusive Brethren, 250,000 Amish, and 800 million total Protestants worldwide. "Nowhere near a majority" is kind of an understatement, considering that 300,000 is only about 0.04% of 800 million. I understand that you were just giving examples, but I think the extremity that you had to resort to (Surprise! Amish people don't like the internet!) in order to back up digsbo's claim suggests something about how significant it really is.
as are many of the conservative Protestant churches in the USA today.
Such as? This is news to me as a conservative Protestant.
For chemical engineering: Perry's Chemical Engineers' Handbook.
I really don't get the religion comparison
The explanation is in the submission, and it isn't hard to understand. I think what you really mean is that you aren't going to let Naughton/Eco's unwillingness to grind your favorite axe for you get in the way of you doing it yourself. (And in a tendentious and convoluted way, I might add.)
I don't think I understand. If you acknowledge that the definition of faith that you supplied is not the definition that Christians actually use, why do you think that the conclusion you drew from it is important?
Moreover, "fideism" implies an absolute, exclusive reliance upon faith, as in, "No need to get up out of bed, I have faith that my feeding and waste-evacuation will be taken care of magically."
None of the sources I just checked (Wikipedia, Catholic Encyclopedia, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and various ordinary dictionaries) say that. Where did you find it? Anyway, it's not that important. I think the fact remains that almost no Christian thinkers have defined faith as "belief without evidence." (I'm willing to be proven wrong, of course!)
By definition, faith is belief in something without evidence.
Religious apologist here. (I do apologize...)
The definition of faith you are talking about has a name. It's called fideism. In the history of Christian thought, there have been approximately zero fideists. So, while your definition has the advantages of being very simple and of answering your question in a particular case, it suffers from being mostly irrelevant.
Their stories aren't exactly what the article is talking about, imo. It sounds like they all did studies critical of existing positive results. They didn't just write a paper out of the blue that said, "We thought it would be interesting and important to show X. We tried, A, B, and C, but none of those things did what we expected. We still haven't shown X." The exception might be if A, B, and C are somehow exhaustive and so their failure to show X actually disproves X.
I think part of the reason papers like that are rare is, as you suggested, ego. Science is very competitive, and reputation is almost everything. No one wants to give away what they've been working on and how they've been working on it until they can publish something that will make a splash. The risk is too high that some other guy will say, "Oh, yes.. I know just how to show X!" Then he and his students will scoop you and take the lion's share of the credit.
I think that's probably the nature of competition. There's a careful balance between secrecy and openness. You can't compete if you give everything away, but you can't "win" if you don't trumpet your accomplishments. Maybe we can find ways to reward greater openness, but I think that some degree of secrecy is unavoidable.
Well, I have to admit that his point is a little hard for me to grasp, since it forces a false dichotomy between religion and ethics.
It also ignores purely secular arguments that have been made against abortion.
the choice should be with the person who is pregnant...ethics has nothing to do with it.
Ah. I guess you must be using the word 'should' in a non-ethical way.
Barring the sudden availability of much better internet access, this is bad news for my parents. They live about 15 miles from the nearest town, which is itself nothing to really speak of. Wireless is available, but they are on the very edge of the service area, so it is unreliable. They've been using a satellite-based service for a year or two, but the latency is terrible. A ping to google takes around 1.5 s (yes, seconds). I haven't tried to call anyone on skype from their house, but I imagine it would be unusable. Their cell phone service is somewhat spotty, as well.