I am simply claiming that more Christians have murdered people *for their religious beliefs* than Atheists have murdered people *for their religious beliefs*.
And *I* am claiming that this is a hair-splitting, irrelevant statement. I agree that they didn't kill everyone they killed purely for the sake of their opinion about the existence of God. But that's a philosophical nicety and small comfort to the people who died. The practical fact remains that had Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao not been atheists, a lot of people they either murdered or who died because of their neglectful governance probably would have lived much longer lives. Their atheism can't be neatly decoupled from what they did. It wasn't a coincidence.
FWIW, I think that what the OP implies is an oversimplification.
I think you're in such a hurry to split hairs that you're missing something important. As you yourself pointed out, "Communism specifically calls for atheism." Christians weren't in charge of the communist governments that killed millions in the 20th century. Supposing that Stalin never killed anyone out of atheistic fervor (which is disputable), his atheism was still a necessary condition for what happened. It wasn't incidental.
Even so, you are right to point out that atheism by itself never murdered anyone. But the same is true of Christianity. The problem isn't with Christianity or with atheism as such. It's with blindly following any ideology to the exclusion of respecting human rights.
Bottom line, I'd prefer an atheist over a Christian when it comes down to who will let me believe and practice what I want.
I'm not so sure. There are plenty of religious crazies in the world, but then you have atheists like Dawkins who believe that religious instruction is a form of child abuse. If he was made supreme dictator tomorrow, how long do you think it would be before the governement started removing kids from homes or even putting religious people into camps?
I disagree with you, but in spite of what such charming and insightful resources as the Skeptics Annotated Bible might lead us to believe, it's a complicated subject, and I don't have time to go on and on about it. In a nutshell, identifying contradictions isn't as simple as it might seem. Whether statements are contradictory is subject to all kinds of considerations, such as genre, intent, subtleties of the grammar, etc. Many Christian apologists have misrepresented the situation by making it sound like a belief in infallibility/inerrancy is based purely on the observable consistency of the bible. As I said above, you might be surprised by how much many Christians do question the bible. There's stuff in the bible that really does seem contradictory (or morally objectionable) to me. The issue isn't (and shouldn't be), can I find a single contradiction? It's conceivable that something that really seems like a contradiction isn't. So, a more general and reasonable question is, on the balance of all the evidence (including the list of apparent contradictions), is the bible inerrant?
Any answer you give would contain, implicitly or explicitly, one of the other bits of morality.
That's a pretty good objection, I think. I was reading a debate a year or so ago and I think either Antony Flew or Kai Nielson pointed out the same thing. I was really not satisfied with the response that the theist participant gave. In my opinion, the question, "Why should I follow it?", is nonsense when you are talking about an ultimate standard like God. Why shouldn't I shoplift? well, because it's stealing, and you shouldn't steal. Why shouldn't I steal? And so on until either we can't answer "why" any more and conclude that it's all arbitrary, or we acknowledge that we live in a moral universe and we've reached the bottom. It would be analogous to asking why the law of non-contradiction is true. That's a hard or impossible question for us to get our arms around because the law of non-contradiction is our standard for deciding whether other statements are true. You can't argue against it without first assuming that it's valid. The question, "Why should I conform to the ultimate standard of morality?" is similar.
"Textual is Arbitrary Crap. How many people quote the Bible where it supports their beliefs, but ignore it where it contradicts them?"
Relatively few, I'd say. Most people simply ignore it altogether. Of course, you'll drag out the same old arguments about wearing clothes made of mixed fibers, and when some Christian explains it all to you yet again, you'll ignore him and continue saying that it's selective and self-serving. However, even if you're right and most people do selectively quote the bible, you're still wrong generally. Our conformance to the bible would be "arbitrary", but the bible itself wouldn't necessarily be.
"How many people who deeply believe in the Bible have ever questioned it?"
I think you'd be surprised. I've heard before that in reality one of the main functions of apologetics is not to convince really skeptical people (that rarely happens), but to shore up sagging confidence among believers. I'd say that I "deeply believe" in the bible, but I question it pretty often.
You'd think all the ancient art depicting the god Atlas carrying a globe would have given the Pope a fucking clue!
Huh? Which pope and incident are you referring to? If you are thinking of Galileo, that wasn't about the shape of the earth, it was loosely about heliocentrism. I say "loosely" because if you do a little research, you'll discover that the popularly accepted version of the story has been highly exaggerated and simplifed to force it into the "religion vs science" mold.
Perhaps this means that by the year 3500 the church will have accepted evolution.
It's probably a little harder than you think. If the space shuttle were MS Notepad, your idea would probably work without a hitch. We'd start it up, wait for the new year to roll over, and then test to see if we could still type and a save and open documents. Test done.
The space shuttle is monumentally complicated. It's controlled by multiple computers. Test cases aren't just typing some stuff in and clicking on a few menus. The computers are hooked up to instruments and relays and motor controllers, and all of that would probably have to be convincingly "faked" for the test to be rigorous.
That's a good point. I think what I really intended to point out is that Salter is a professor of mechanical engineering. I got a little overzealous.:)
I only have one quibble with your criticism. I don't think we have to see a working implementation before we can call Salter an engineer. It may be the case that his device isn't practical under any real circumstances. When I worked in industry (I'm a grad student now), if we decided not to go forward with a project, we didn't say that the engineering work that had been done up to that point suddenly wasn't engineering. Projects got killed (successful results, in a negative sense. We avoided doing something stupid) because of engineering analysis.
So, it may be that he's done plenty of "engineering". The article doesn't say one way or the other.
Stephen Salter is an engineer, not a "scientist." The distinction can be blurry, but I think this is pretty clearly an example of engineering rather than science.
The only reason I point that out is that I'm an engineer, and I'd like credit to go where it's due.:)
Which means that every statement made in an educational context shall have to be backed up scientifically.
You'll never be able to teach students that their education should only include material that can be backed up scientifically. That educational philosophy fails its own test because it can't be scientifically verified.
Saying that education should only include scientifically verifiable ideas is itself a form of bias. You're also excluding broad swaths of math, history, literature, etc.
I agree that pedigree isn't everything, but your examples aren't relevant. First, it isn't obvious that this person lacks a first-rate formal education because she didn't have the oppurtunity. Second, there's a world of difference between earning an undergraduate degree at a no-name school and earning a PhD at a no-name school. You have to start someplace. But the number of really gifted people who don't manage to make it into a prestigious graduate program is small.
"Real education"? Education is never free from bias. There will always be disagreement about what "real education" should include. It can't be defined in terms of results, either, because there's also no universal agreement about what humanity would be like if it were to grow.
Well, to be fair, heavy rains have interfered with the operation of my parent's dish. The real problem, however, is not rain. It's ice. They have constant problems with the dish icing over on wet winter days.
Part of the difficulty of discussing this is that the criteria are a little subjective. A kid raised by wolves would have a great deal of independence from his biological parents. Most people would say too much. Too much for what? Well, too much to function well in society, to be "self-actualized", or whatever. Independence is not the real goal, I don't think. We value independence as a means. But what if the parents don't think "society" is all its cracked up to be, or that Junior's potential is closely attached to his having a close relationship with his immediate family? In that case, they definitely aren't hating him by homeschooling. In fact, they would be neglecting him otherwise.
Along these lines, some of the homeschooled kids I've met would normally be considered socially awkward. (Then again, I am the product of 17 years of public education, and I'm still socially awkward.) Many others are simply different. Their values are different. They are more polite. They have more respect for authority figures. They don't dress fashionably. I knew a couple of guys, for example, who were entirely homeschooled. They would probably never be accepted by the typical cool kids. However, they were extremely intelligent, friendly, hardworking, etc. That is, they possessed a lot of traditional virtues. There's nothing actually wrong with that, but they would still be labeled as weirdos, and thought of as evidence that homeschooling screws people up.
Anyway, homeschooling a kid doesn't necessarily deprive them of the things you mention. Many homeschoolers belong to homeschooling organizations, so the kids can do "extra-curricular" kinds of things and have friends.
Source, please. Most of the Christians I know or have read support research on stem cells from other sources, like umbilical cord blood. See for instance this article, which has nothing but good things to say about it: http://www.worldmag.com/articles/10284
yet even to this day religion has been the largest source of death and despair this planet has ever seen
So Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin wiped out people by the millions because they were such religious fanatics? I agree that people motivated by religion have done a lot of damage, but let's not exaggerate.
Right. Before you treat us to any more of your insights on the history of religion and science, you might want to brush up on the history and reputation of the Christian Science Monitor.
The only new dimension of it is the speed and ease with which it is passed from one person to the next.
Depends on what you mean. I think I agree that the difference between email and letter-writing is purely a function of speed and ease, but I don't think the difference is "simple." The care someone puts into writing an email is affected by the fact that the recipient can instantaneously reply and ask for clarification. The same operation with a letter might take days or weeks. An email is not just a faster letter. The content will typically be different.
No, the parent is correct. The Wikipedia article he linked to explains it pretty well. It even uses the corn starch mixture he was talking about as an example.
Obviously it depends on what's being engineered, but double would be considered overkill in most chemical plants. (I am a chemical engineer.) An order of magnitude would be used in only the most extreme cases. Think nuclear weapons or Yucca Mountain.
You mean this facility? I did an internship there. When Google Maps came out, it was one of the first things I checked out. I was really surprised that google had such good pictures of it, then I saw that aerial photo.
but who in their right mind sees it necessary to put critical systems online?
One of main things a control system in a chemical plant is used for (besides controlling) is data collection. In many or perhaps most cases, the corporate LAN is hooked somehow to the LAN with the DCS (distributed contol system) to give pointy-haired bosses sitting around the world access to this data. Also, the corporate LAN is hooked to the outside world to provide employees with internet access.
Normally this is all put together according to standards laid out by a company's IT department. These people hopefully know at least a little bit about what they are doing. In case they don't, the last leg of the control system, the industrial hardware that actually decides when to open and close valves and that sort of thing, is proprietary, weird, and expensive. (This is much smaller comfort than it use to be. A trade magazine ran a story recently about a demonstration. A security researcher started cold, with no knowledge of a certain DCS, and in three weeks he was able to work his way through what was reported to be a typical corporate security setup to manipulate control system outputs undetected.) More importantly, in a properly designed control system, the DCS won't be able to really wreck things. Hardwired interlocks, engineered safeties (like pressure relief valves, flares, blowdown drums), and dedicated, isolated safety controllers will take over.
OK, so which of these are observations then and have you ( or ID theorists in general ) observed anything which is actually irreduciably complex ?
Please see Michael Behe's book, Darwin's Black Box.
The basis of ID is not that you have observed anything which is irreduciably complex or observed anything in nature which leads to the idea of an intelligent designer but the idea that God or a deity of somekind must have been responsible and if you look hard enough you will find proof that this is the case.
When I said that ID "logically" comes from X, Y, and Z, I meant that ID supporters argue that design is a valid inference to make from those pieces of evidence. You seem to be confusing (your assumptions about) the motives of ID proponents with their actual claims.
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I am simply claiming that more Christians have murdered people *for their religious beliefs* than Atheists have murdered people *for their religious beliefs*.
And *I* am claiming that this is a hair-splitting, irrelevant statement. I agree that they didn't kill everyone they killed purely for the sake of their opinion about the existence of God. But that's a philosophical nicety and small comfort to the people who died. The practical fact remains that had Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao not been atheists, a lot of people they either murdered or who died because of their neglectful governance probably would have lived much longer lives. Their atheism can't be neatly decoupled from what they did. It wasn't a coincidence.
FWIW, I think that what the OP implies is an oversimplification.
I think you're in such a hurry to split hairs that you're missing something important. As you yourself pointed out, "Communism specifically calls for atheism." Christians weren't in charge of the communist governments that killed millions in the 20th century. Supposing that Stalin never killed anyone out of atheistic fervor (which is disputable), his atheism was still a necessary condition for what happened. It wasn't incidental.
Even so, you are right to point out that atheism by itself never murdered anyone. But the same is true of Christianity. The problem isn't with Christianity or with atheism as such. It's with blindly following any ideology to the exclusion of respecting human rights.
Bottom line, I'd prefer an atheist over a Christian when it comes down to who will let me believe and practice what I want.
I'm not so sure. There are plenty of religious crazies in the world, but then you have atheists like Dawkins who believe that religious instruction is a form of child abuse. If he was made supreme dictator tomorrow, how long do you think it would be before the governement started removing kids from homes or even putting religious people into camps?
Since the bible is self-contradictory
I disagree with you, but in spite of what such charming and insightful resources as the Skeptics Annotated Bible might lead us to believe, it's a complicated subject, and I don't have time to go on and on about it. In a nutshell, identifying contradictions isn't as simple as it might seem. Whether statements are contradictory is subject to all kinds of considerations, such as genre, intent, subtleties of the grammar, etc. Many Christian apologists have misrepresented the situation by making it sound like a belief in infallibility/inerrancy is based purely on the observable consistency of the bible. As I said above, you might be surprised by how much many Christians do question the bible. There's stuff in the bible that really does seem contradictory (or morally objectionable) to me. The issue isn't (and shouldn't be), can I find a single contradiction? It's conceivable that something that really seems like a contradiction isn't. So, a more general and reasonable question is, on the balance of all the evidence (including the list of apparent contradictions), is the bible inerrant?
Any answer you give would contain, implicitly or explicitly, one of the other bits of morality.
That's a pretty good objection, I think. I was reading a debate a year or so ago and I think either Antony Flew or Kai Nielson pointed out the same thing. I was really not satisfied with the response that the theist participant gave. In my opinion, the question, "Why should I follow it?", is nonsense when you are talking about an ultimate standard like God. Why shouldn't I shoplift? well, because it's stealing, and you shouldn't steal. Why shouldn't I steal? And so on until either we can't answer "why" any more and conclude that it's all arbitrary, or we acknowledge that we live in a moral universe and we've reached the bottom. It would be analogous to asking why the law of non-contradiction is true. That's a hard or impossible question for us to get our arms around because the law of non-contradiction is our standard for deciding whether other statements are true. You can't argue against it without first assuming that it's valid. The question, "Why should I conform to the ultimate standard of morality?" is similar.
"Textual is Arbitrary Crap. How many people quote the Bible where it supports their beliefs, but ignore it where it contradicts them?"
Relatively few, I'd say. Most people simply ignore it altogether. Of course, you'll drag out the same old arguments about wearing clothes made of mixed fibers, and when some Christian explains it all to you yet again, you'll ignore him and continue saying that it's selective and self-serving. However, even if you're right and most people do selectively quote the bible, you're still wrong generally. Our conformance to the bible would be "arbitrary", but the bible itself wouldn't necessarily be.
"How many people who deeply believe in the Bible have ever questioned it?"
I think you'd be surprised. I've heard before that in reality one of the main functions of apologetics is not to convince really skeptical people (that rarely happens), but to shore up sagging confidence among believers. I'd say that I "deeply believe" in the bible, but I question it pretty often.
You'd think all the ancient art depicting the god Atlas carrying a globe would have given the Pope a fucking clue!
Huh? Which pope and incident are you referring to? If you are thinking of Galileo, that wasn't about the shape of the earth, it was loosely about heliocentrism. I say "loosely" because if you do a little research, you'll discover that the popularly accepted version of the story has been highly exaggerated and simplifed to force it into the "religion vs science" mold.
Perhaps this means that by the year 3500 the church will have accepted evolution.
Maybe you should read this.
It's probably a little harder than you think. If the space shuttle were MS Notepad, your idea would probably work without a hitch. We'd start it up, wait for the new year to roll over, and then test to see if we could still type and a save and open documents. Test done.
The space shuttle is monumentally complicated. It's controlled by multiple computers. Test cases aren't just typing some stuff in and clicking on a few menus. The computers are hooked up to instruments and relays and motor controllers, and all of that would probably have to be convincingly "faked" for the test to be rigorous.
That's a good point. I think what I really intended to point out is that Salter is a professor of mechanical engineering. I got a little overzealous. :)
I only have one quibble with your criticism. I don't think we have to see a working implementation before we can call Salter an engineer. It may be the case that his device isn't practical under any real circumstances. When I worked in industry (I'm a grad student now), if we decided not to go forward with a project, we didn't say that the engineering work that had been done up to that point suddenly wasn't engineering. Projects got killed (successful results, in a negative sense. We avoided doing something stupid) because of engineering analysis.
So, it may be that he's done plenty of "engineering". The article doesn't say one way or the other.
Stephen Salter is an engineer, not a "scientist." The distinction can be blurry, but I think this is pretty clearly an example of engineering rather than science.
:)
The only reason I point that out is that I'm an engineer, and I'd like credit to go where it's due.
That's pretty cool. But it still doesn't make the examples I was responding to relevant.
Which means that every statement made in an educational context shall have to be backed up scientifically.
You'll never be able to teach students that their education should only include material that can be backed up scientifically. That educational philosophy fails its own test because it can't be scientifically verified.
Saying that education should only include scientifically verifiable ideas is itself a form of bias. You're also excluding broad swaths of math, history, literature, etc.
I agree that pedigree isn't everything, but your examples aren't relevant. First, it isn't obvious that this person lacks a first-rate formal education because she didn't have the oppurtunity. Second, there's a world of difference between earning an undergraduate degree at a no-name school and earning a PhD at a no-name school. You have to start someplace. But the number of really gifted people who don't manage to make it into a prestigious graduate program is small.
"Real education"? Education is never free from bias. There will always be disagreement about what "real education" should include. It can't be defined in terms of results, either, because there's also no universal agreement about what humanity would be like if it were to grow.
Well, to be fair, heavy rains have interfered with the operation of my parent's dish. The real problem, however, is not rain. It's ice. They have constant problems with the dish icing over on wet winter days.
Part of the difficulty of discussing this is that the criteria are a little subjective. A kid raised by wolves would have a great deal of independence from his biological parents. Most people would say too much. Too much for what? Well, too much to function well in society, to be "self-actualized", or whatever. Independence is not the real goal, I don't think. We value independence as a means. But what if the parents don't think "society" is all its cracked up to be, or that Junior's potential is closely attached to his having a close relationship with his immediate family? In that case, they definitely aren't hating him by homeschooling. In fact, they would be neglecting him otherwise.
Along these lines, some of the homeschooled kids I've met would normally be considered socially awkward. (Then again, I am the product of 17 years of public education, and I'm still socially awkward.) Many others are simply different. Their values are different. They are more polite. They have more respect for authority figures. They don't dress fashionably. I knew a couple of guys, for example, who were entirely homeschooled. They would probably never be accepted by the typical cool kids. However, they were extremely intelligent, friendly, hardworking, etc. That is, they possessed a lot of traditional virtues. There's nothing actually wrong with that, but they would still be labeled as weirdos, and thought of as evidence that homeschooling screws people up.
Anyway, homeschooling a kid doesn't necessarily deprive them of the things you mention. Many homeschoolers belong to homeschooling organizations, so the kids can do "extra-curricular" kinds of things and have friends.
Source, please. Most of the Christians I know or have read support research on stem cells from other sources, like umbilical cord blood. See for instance this article, which has nothing but good things to say about it: http://www.worldmag.com/articles/10284
yet even to this day religion has been the largest source of death and despair this planet has ever seen
So Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin wiped out people by the millions because they were such religious fanatics? I agree that people motivated by religion have done a lot of damage, but let's not exaggerate.
You think your sig is a problem, you should try mine. :)
Right. Before you treat us to any more of your insights on the history of religion and science, you might want to brush up on the history and reputation of the Christian Science Monitor.
The only new dimension of it is the speed and ease with which it is passed from one person to the next.
Depends on what you mean. I think I agree that the difference between email and letter-writing is purely a function of speed and ease, but I don't think the difference is "simple." The care someone puts into writing an email is affected by the fact that the recipient can instantaneously reply and ask for clarification. The same operation with a letter might take days or weeks. An email is not just a faster letter. The content will typically be different.
No, the parent is correct. The Wikipedia article he linked to explains it pretty well. It even uses the corn starch mixture he was talking about as an example.
Obviously it depends on what's being engineered, but double would be considered overkill in most chemical plants. (I am a chemical engineer.) An order of magnitude would be used in only the most extreme cases. Think nuclear weapons or Yucca Mountain.
You mean this facility? I did an internship there. When Google Maps came out, it was one of the first things I checked out. I was really surprised that google had such good pictures of it, then I saw that aerial photo.
one doesn't normally associate lions with Christ, for instance
:)
Unless of course one knows that he is called the Lion of Judah.
but who in their right mind sees it necessary to put critical systems online?
One of main things a control system in a chemical plant is used for (besides controlling) is data collection. In many or perhaps most cases, the corporate LAN is hooked somehow to the LAN with the DCS (distributed contol system) to give pointy-haired bosses sitting around the world access to this data. Also, the corporate LAN is hooked to the outside world to provide employees with internet access.
Normally this is all put together according to standards laid out by a company's IT department. These people hopefully know at least a little bit about what they are doing. In case they don't, the last leg of the control system, the industrial hardware that actually decides when to open and close valves and that sort of thing, is proprietary, weird, and expensive. (This is much smaller comfort than it use to be. A trade magazine ran a story recently about a demonstration. A security researcher started cold, with no knowledge of a certain DCS, and in three weeks he was able to work his way through what was reported to be a typical corporate security setup to manipulate control system outputs undetected.) More importantly, in a properly designed control system, the DCS won't be able to really wreck things. Hardwired interlocks, engineered safeties (like pressure relief valves, flares, blowdown drums), and dedicated, isolated safety controllers will take over.
OK, so which of these are observations then and have you ( or ID theorists in general ) observed anything which is actually irreduciably complex ?
Please see Michael Behe's book, Darwin's Black Box.
The basis of ID is not that you have observed anything which is irreduciably complex or observed anything in nature which leads to the idea of an intelligent designer but the idea that God or a deity of somekind must have been responsible and if you look hard enough you will find proof that this is the case.
When I said that ID "logically" comes from X, Y, and Z, I meant that ID supporters argue that design is a valid inference to make from those pieces of evidence. You seem to be confusing (your assumptions about) the motives of ID proponents with their actual claims.