I must agree that being sat on by gnomes, at midnight, does not make me a lawyer. I admit you have made a good point, and of which I had little awareness
However the first half of what you wrote is, ultimately, just procedure. If the court case can be handled within half an hour the fellow still gets tortured. And justly.
As for the 2nd half of what you wrote : the man who judges is logically united to the man who administers the judgement. And so if there is no shame to being a judge then there can be no shame to being the instrument of justice. If the administration of that justice is not well ordered to the wellbeing of that instrument then a solution is required, but the fact remains that the man is tortured justly.
What I wonder is whether Socrates would have submitted to torture.
I addressed that in my replies to the others. In anycase your objection is a purely practical one. I think what you really want to do is demonstrate that it is wrong to torture. My example, despite practical objections (which I countered in reply to the others), demonstrates that it isn't always wrong.
As I said to that other fellow: torture has its limitations. In any case that is only a practical objection. And even then with sufficient time the guilty person's answers may be tested. And only when the test is passed does the pain stop.
The main point though is that the guy deserves as much as he is willing to give, but torture under these conditions actually stops short of that. It's not even equivalent to an eye-for-an-eye.
Do you mean that as a positive statement about what is good about slashdot? I used the word 'simplistic'. Ie "Childish simplisticness", which are both derogatory words. But you use simplicity, which isn't. If you had said "childlike simplicity" I would have had to disagree.
I agree, torture definately has limits. If you read about the tortures of Romanian Christians (I'm half Romanian) many of them never gave in despite really very horrible and very long 'treatment'.
However there is always a chance it'll work, particularly where the subject is weak-willed, as I beleive may be the case with many of the suicide bombers. Contradiction? You can force a weak-willed person to kill themselves, or to assent to nonsense. It's not difficult. The act of will isn't in carrying out the act: it's in resisting the brain-washer, or peer-pressure, or whatever - or in this case the failure to resist. You could argue that the chap isn't fully assenting, but I don't think that's true since violent, nasty, angry, hatefilled people are typical of the weak-willed. The strong man is weak-willed if he uses his strength against those who are weaker than he, instead of protecting and helping them. It's a nice paradox.
In any case court cases are all very well, but they are only to put to trial the ones who refuse to admit what they have done. But the whole point of my example is that the guy has admitted it. Granted that isn't going to happen often and granted there are a few crazies out there who admit to anything (perhaps even with the threat of torture) but it isn't possible to order society around crazies, not if you want a functioning society, that is. Or one that doesn't get itself nuked.
Nevertheless even if a guy won't admit to planting the bomb: if he does admit to being part of an organisation committed to planting bombs then that may be enough to justify his torture.
Let's say a guy admits that he has planted an A-bomb in an american city and it's going to go off soon and he doesn't care that this will cause massive death and untold agonies for those left alive, in fact he wants that. Now tell me why he shouldn't be tortured?
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with torture, just as with capital punishment. The problem is mistakenly applying it to the innocent. But to just say that torture is bad always is childish simplisticness.
If the defenders of the poor could get their collective heads out of the beggar's bins perhaps they would recognise that that which benefits the rich might also benefit the poor in the longer term. It's always in the longer term for the rightest, always in the short term for the leftists. And for that the rightist is said to lack compassion.
I just compressed my camera's avi output to wmv with "Microsoft Movie Maker", it used both cores on my core 2 duo, and halved the time it usually takes. Since it can take several minutes for each movie I was quite pleased.
That's all nice and feminine, but patting someone on the head mechanically is liable to having your hand bitten off. What many of us want is to be valued and no amount of 'praise' substitutes for that.
Further no one, ultimately, wants to be though of as "working more efficiently", because that reduces us to the level of a machine.
It was supposed to be designed for robustness against nukes, but I can't see it surviving nukes these days. It's even beginning to have trouble agsint botnets.
Now it's being used for commercial purposes, but it isn't designed to give a fair service (I'm subsidising heavy users), nor does it have proper accountability so it's difficult to know who is screwing around (worms/botnets etc). Basically it doesn't reflect any reality/real-world/firmly-grounded/tried-and-teste d system that I'm familiar with. The result is rapidly moving towards chaos. Time to close those open ends.
I've just watched Mark Russinovich's video on malware/rootkit detection and removal, and keeping in mind his closing remarks and my own thoughts on the subject I am going to do what a friend of mine has done : open a 2nd bank account that is never accessed via the internet and shove the bulk of my money in to it with a 'standing-order' to keep my normal account healthy. You may think OpenBSD is the solution, but the fact is the cleverer blackhats keep their discoveries to themselves; so we really can't ever know how vulnerable we are.
Forget net neutrality: someone dismantle the internet. Come back Compuserve/Cix/MSN: all is forgiven.
This article isn't worthy of a tech audience. If I've understood correctly (and maybe I haven't) Vista brings something big to the party that should warm the cockles of every techies heart : non-IO-bound concurrency. Apparently, and correct my nearly-damned soul if I'm wrong, XP and all predecessors had poor IO concurency; rather like green threads.
Damned if I'm wrong, and may be I am anyway, but pair Vista with a dual core system and you should have a pretty slick system. If an app wants to go to 100% cpu, then with a dual core system you can probably feel magnanimous. But prior to vista if an app resulted in hard disk grind then even setting the errant process to idle-priority would't be enough (though it generally still helps, from experience). If vista does what I've been lead to understand it does then we are looking at a significant practical (as well as technical) step forward.
Vista probably needs condition variables and a security model that not only panders to 'least-privilege' but is also actually easy to use (window's APIs are so dreadfully awkward and poorly documented, you have to read Raymond Chen's blog to get some clues - at least he writes engagingly). I don't though. Bye.
I've demonstrated a mechanism that allows absolute proof (union with God) of a fact that never changes, which is far better than evidence. Your system entirely depends on evidence (thinkofthematrix and thinkofthemad), which is a poor second to proof (ie. following the acceptance that science never proves anything), and constantly changes (often reversing itself). You assert that your system is superior purely on the basis of "consensual evidence" being superior to "personal conviction" as that relates to coercive laws. I'm not a liberal and so such an argument doesn;t carry much weight; I don't even believe in free speech. You don't see evidence of God in nature but there is plenty, and this evidence has spawned unproven theories about multiple universes. I;ve also noticed that many of your arguments are based on the assumption of God's non-existence and so self-proving (Hawkings does this as well, and I bet some of the scientists you have listened to do this too).
As to children : let's say that a parent knows something as fact through union with God. So you argue that because he can't give scientific evidence (for what it's worth) he should not tell the child of this truth, or lead the child to church? This knowledge is more important than life itself to the religious, but he must not tell it? In anycase even if one accepts your position the religious person can still be said to be encouraging the child to experience union with God (through prayer etc), and so attain that proof that is so much better than evidence, scientific or otherwise. Perhaps you can accept that? You seem also to be saying that the religious is lying to the child. (Deliberately?) How can you assume that when you can not know that God doesn't exist, whereas the religious clearly have a mechanism to know, and so the presumption remains with you.
I would agree, if you had said it, that the universe cannot prove God's existence. Only God can prove his own existence. Even St Thomas Aquinas's 5 "proofs" where called by him "ways", that speak of God's existence, not proofs (even though loosely meant). In the end we still have to ask the fellow himself, somehow, or we won't get an answer. A test tube won't and can't do it.
Since you have not accepted so much of what I've written without actually addressing it I'm getting to the point where I think I'll have to give you the last word. I do promise to read whatever you write, however.
"And you did this by quoting some of the silliest rubbish I've ever seen.
If only those who have been terrified into accepting - that memorizing nonsense will protect them from torment in the afterlife - could step back and see just how silly they sound."
The probability of what? You have again missed my entire point. If the only time you're going to ask that question is when the horse wins, then the probability of the horse winning whenever you ask the question is indeed 1.
your orginal statement was :
What is that probability of life, given that we're asking? - obviously 1
Even your slippery re-wording of the problem doesn't get you out. Sorry, buddy, but at this point I can see that I must withdraw from further communication with you.
I acknowledge the time you put in to replying to me. I hope my reply to you reflects that.
"Of course. But the odds here are the same as for claims of an invisible pink unicorn that dances in your attic. Meaning, they are almost certain to be wrong."
Not really. Science has never been able to explain why anything exists at all. I very much doubt it ever will, particularly considering that mathemetics has such fundamental problems with self-refencing; it can't even describe itself. So that leaves either a universe without a cause or some kind of immaterial-reality/God, so the probability is looking a lot better than pink unicorns, eh? In any case its not true that there isn;t evidence in 2000 years. My uncle was a nuclear physicist working at some kind of high-powered polytechnic in France. He said that in his work "The finger-prints of God are everywhere". So it does rather depend on who you talk to, as usual. The materialist scientists will claim one thing, and the others another.
There was a statistic about 10 years ago in the newspapers - bless their worm-eaten souls - that 40% of physicists believed in God. No evidence in 2000 years? Hmmm, a decidedly tricky statement.
"Unfortunately, the "claim of the religious" is not evidence."
I didn't claim it was evidence. And I agree with you that a statement of truth doesn't necessarily involve evidence. Nevertheless if a religious person makes those statements and God witnesses to them then obviously the statements are proven (unless God can contradict himself, which is a likely self-contradiction). That is the basic, thoroughly rational, mechanism that 'transmits' the faith. Perhaps you can see, even if you don't believe it has ever happend, that it is rational. There's even an example in scripture of getting it wrong : St Paul tried to convert the Greeks by argument, instead of by the witness of the Spirit of God, and got laughed out of the house (its in 'Acts' somewhere).
"but my feeling that parents should have the right to bring up their children any way they prefer to is stronger than my feeling that it is immoral to expose a child to an idea that cannot be proven as if it was undeniable truth. "
But to the (sincere) christian it is undeniable truth by a mechanism that is perfect (union with God). I would also defend the atheists right to bring up their own kids as they see fit so long as they are sincere in striving for truth (as they see it) and giving it to their children (very much unlike communists). I accept many christians, as with many non-religious, are not sincere nor striving for Truth, even amoung the church-going.
At this point I must make a comment on what you have written. You seem to think that this is an argument about the lack of probability and evidence for the existence of God, and foil my arguments with statements to that effect, but without addressing my responses to what I previously wrote. So I am assuming now that you tacitly, at least, agree that my responses do demonstrate the rationaility of christianity (or at least 'Catholic' christianity).
However - and this is critical - when nature does so, so far at least, it has done so in such a way as to leave evidence supporting that situation all around in the form of natural laws, physical instances, and so forth. Religions - all of them - are notably lacking in this regard.
But religions concern themselves with that which above nature. In anycase your statement that there is no evidence is not really true. Not for Christians. There is evidence of the union of two making a third absolutely everywhere. It may be a more abstract evidence than you are accustomed to, but that's as it should be anyway. But christians also depend on better evidence than the empirical (which in anycase is fundamentally very weak - I refer you to Karl Popper again). For example : the beauty of nature, the mind-boggling beauty of ugly babies (to their parents, obviously). How can these
[somehow replied to myself when I intended to reply to you]
This is slashdot and most people here are in some way connected to mathemetics. So why try and pull a fast one in a place like this? If the guy made a mistake then he made a mistake.
...and I hate to say it, but yes I've studied stats. What do you expect from a guy who wanted to study Comp sci at uni, like half the other people here.?
In any case its blithering obvious that the previous post was talking nonsense. Just because it happened doesn't make it a probability of 1. Think of betting. The horse wins : was the probability 1 - NO!!!! You don;t have to have studied stats to know that.
"at the point of union (baptism) the existence of God is self-evident"
Even if you could achieve such a thing, how would you know that you had?
Well, I admit that does rather depend on the nature of God. If God has doubts about his own existence then it's not going to help. However if he is Truth itself, and therefore also Proof itself, and if he completely knows himself then it does seem reasonable to suggest that that won't be a problem. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that the balance would be in favour of God not having self-doubt. And since we become one with him we also will be certain (at least at that moment, though it seems not later when we are tested - in some way our participation is limited until heaven).
"Also, baptism is just another silly ritual, like believing that munching a cracker is "eating the flesh of Christ"."
Totally not. It's the center piece. Christinity is all about union. The Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the united persons of the one God. Ever heard of the philosophical axiom : all truth is one? (That axoim also underpins mathematics.) What does love want : union with the beloved. Humans have one single thing that distinguishes them from the divine and other pure intelligences (ie. the angels and the fallen angels) which is the body, and which through us unites spiritual beings to the material universe. Even our bodies participate in union (sex). In the eating of Christ's body we are bodily united to him and him to us, and so all is in all (since Christ is God). That bodily union is the absolute essence of the marital/conjugal act, just without the trimmings. And it is a promise and foretaste of the nature of the joy of the life to come. Granted not so many catholics actually allow that union to manifest it full power. But the potential is there if people would only take matters a bit more seriously.
If you understood any of that then just maybe you can see that it's not just a ritual. It's totaly logical, and further it is more important than the redemption (Christ's self-sacrifice to save us); it's what the redemption is for: the consummation of creation.
I;m not trying to convince you of the truth of any of this only to defend christians who are said to be stupid.
This is slashdot and most people here are in some way connected to mathemetics. So why try and pull a fast one in a place like this? If the guy made a mistake then he made a mistake.
...and I hate to say it, but yes I've studied stats. What do you expect from a guy who wanted to study Comp sci at uni, like half the other people here.?
In any case its blithering obvious that the previous post was talking nonsense.
"Gullible, confused, misguided, fearful, focused on the wrong issues - those are the right words."
But only if they are wrong. But science can't tell them that they are wrong. I referred to Karl Popper before because his position, as a philosopher of science, demonstrates that. He is the guy who switched everyone over to falsifiability. In other words : science doesn't give us facts or proof of anything. If you accept Popper, which by far the majority do, then science can not prove the existence or non-existence of anything, let alone God.
In the meantime the religious claim to have revelation from God himself. If you want proof then you can't really do better than relevation from God, eh? Even better, he unites to us individually, which means that proof is not an external 'vision' that could be dismissed as hullucination. The atheists keep telling us how stupid we are, but many, if not most, of us have direct experience of God (including me). It's why so many of us are faithful to our bibles even despite pressures to stop believing. If you look at the technical definition of faith then you really can't argue that a religious person is stupid :
"Faith : assent to Divinely revealed truth."
For the Catholic Church's position spelled out see here (direct official Catholic teaching - look at part II), more of an accent on 'trust' than the anglican quote above. I think you'll agree that this is quite different from the "Leap of Faith" idea that has become prevalent among uneducated christians. It's a pollution that seems to come from Pascal and Kierkegaard. We don't believe because we just decide to make that irrational 'leap', but because God has revealed it to us individually. In other words : logically a religious person is totally rational. (Of course discounting those who do not have authentic belief - of which I reckon there are very many).
"The point is, other people appear to have made it up."
For me, and probably many other believers, God has directly witnessed to the truth of the Bible. As a child I took it on trust from adults, but as an adult it was God who confirmed it (perhaps as a result of the effort of my prayers). Your objections are probably valid but not if God is revealing stuff to us individually and directly. Even the protestants go on about having a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ". Since Jesus is God then obviously that personal relationship is likely to involve divinely revealed truth and the act of 'assenting' to it.
"Well, if there weren't life we wouldn't be asking."
But that doesn't make it a probablity of 1. That's like saying because the coin flipped heads the probability of that was 1, which isn't the case at all. All that means is that whatever the probability, high or low, it nevertheless happened.
"The "probability of life" question really only makes sense when you're talking about the probability of life occurring elsewhere. You can't take everything that has ever happened that had less than a 50% chance of happening and say "wow, look how unlikely that is that all those things happened!"
But that's the point, you can. The probabilities multiply against each other. So if you get 20 50% possibilities of no life (like the narrow margin of the constant of gravity that actually allows anything more than hydrogen to exist) then the probability of life would be 1/2^20 which is 1 in a million, ie not much chance of order, let alone life. A few years ago it was estimated that there are 300 factors that need to be within certain parameters to allow for an ordered universe. But the margins were smaller than 1/2 in many cases (over the span of what was theoretically possible). And that's even before we approach the probabilities of life beginning within a universe ordered as our's is which is reckoned to be jolly unlikely. Hence the persuit of the infinite number of universes theories by hawkings et al. They really don't have any choice. But it's based on a presumption : the non-existence of God. If God does exist then those probabilities are irrelevant.
After that we can argue about evolution. But there's no point because as a catholic I've no problem with evolution. Most christians, unlike certain rather-too-vocal forms of protestantism, are not bound to a literal interpretation of the bible. Infact the 6 day creation story includes the fact that "God rested on the seventh day". Hebrew tradition is that the number 7 is used to indicate a 'large amount' (of whatever). So we can be reasonably confident that the 6+1 day creation story represents a long span of time. And was meant to suggest that. God was kind enough not to go in to scientific detail; I doubt Moses would have understood. A pity for us though.
"Nit-picking is of course completely valid in logic statements. If one of the premises is false, the conclusion is not necessarily true."
By use of the word 'nit-picking" I am rather obviously referring to statements that affect nothing. As I said, the original statement is fine, despite your nit-picking.
Furthermore, you're talking gibberish.
You do make the most extraordinarily arrogant statements. As it happens I am not. What can I say. I've already given the reason. It's a good one. If you can't see that it is reasonable then I can only assume we aren't going to have a constructive discussion. By your rather silly nit-picking statement above I very much think that that is the case and I since these things tend to go around in circles with your type of individual I withdraw from discussion with your delightful and personable self.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for that. But we/I still don't know what you meant in your original reply. How about giving an answer instead of being unpleasant.
However the first half of what you wrote is, ultimately, just procedure. If the court case can be handled within half an hour the fellow still gets tortured. And justly.
As for the 2nd half of what you wrote : the man who judges is logically united to the man who administers the judgement. And so if there is no shame to being a judge then there can be no shame to being the instrument of justice. If the administration of that justice is not well ordered to the wellbeing of that instrument then a solution is required, but the fact remains that the man is tortured justly.
What I wonder is whether Socrates would have submitted to torture.
I addressed that in my replies to the others. In anycase your objection is a purely practical one. I think what you really want to do is demonstrate that it is wrong to torture. My example, despite practical objections (which I countered in reply to the others), demonstrates that it isn't always wrong.
The main point though is that the guy deserves as much as he is willing to give, but torture under these conditions actually stops short of that. It's not even equivalent to an eye-for-an-eye.
Do you mean that as a positive statement about what is good about slashdot? I used the word 'simplistic'. Ie "Childish simplisticness", which are both derogatory words. But you use simplicity, which isn't. If you had said "childlike simplicity" I would have had to disagree.
However there is always a chance it'll work, particularly where the subject is weak-willed, as I beleive may be the case with many of the suicide bombers. Contradiction? You can force a weak-willed person to kill themselves, or to assent to nonsense. It's not difficult. The act of will isn't in carrying out the act: it's in resisting the brain-washer, or peer-pressure, or whatever - or in this case the failure to resist. You could argue that the chap isn't fully assenting, but I don't think that's true since violent, nasty, angry, hatefilled people are typical of the weak-willed. The strong man is weak-willed if he uses his strength against those who are weaker than he, instead of protecting and helping them. It's a nice paradox.
In any case court cases are all very well, but they are only to put to trial the ones who refuse to admit what they have done. But the whole point of my example is that the guy has admitted it. Granted that isn't going to happen often and granted there are a few crazies out there who admit to anything (perhaps even with the threat of torture) but it isn't possible to order society around crazies, not if you want a functioning society, that is. Or one that doesn't get itself nuked.
Nevertheless even if a guy won't admit to planting the bomb: if he does admit to being part of an organisation committed to planting bombs then that may be enough to justify his torture.
Let's say a guy admits that he has planted an A-bomb in an american city and it's going to go off soon and he doesn't care that this will cause massive death and untold agonies for those left alive, in fact he wants that. Now tell me why he shouldn't be tortured?
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with torture, just as with capital punishment. The problem is mistakenly applying it to the innocent. But to just say that torture is bad always is childish simplisticness.
pamela
If the defenders of the poor could get their collective heads out of the beggar's bins perhaps they would recognise that that which benefits the rich might also benefit the poor in the longer term. It's always in the longer term for the rightest, always in the short term for the leftists. And for that the rightist is said to lack compassion.
I just compressed my camera's avi output to wmv with "Microsoft Movie Maker", it used both cores on my core 2 duo, and halved the time it usually takes. Since it can take several minutes for each movie I was quite pleased.
Further no one, ultimately, wants to be though of as "working more efficiently", because that reduces us to the level of a machine.
Now it's being used for commercial purposes, but it isn't designed to give a fair service (I'm subsidising heavy users), nor does it have proper accountability so it's difficult to know who is screwing around (worms/botnets etc). Basically it doesn't reflect any reality/real-world/firmly-grounded/tried-and-teste d system that I'm familiar with. The result is rapidly moving towards chaos. Time to close those open ends.
I've just watched Mark Russinovich's video on malware/rootkit detection and removal, and keeping in mind his closing remarks and my own thoughts on the subject I am going to do what a friend of mine has done : open a 2nd bank account that is never accessed via the internet and shove the bulk of my money in to it with a 'standing-order' to keep my normal account healthy. You may think OpenBSD is the solution, but the fact is the cleverer blackhats keep their discoveries to themselves; so we really can't ever know how vulnerable we are.
Forget net neutrality: someone dismantle the internet. Come back Compuserve/Cix/MSN: all is forgiven.
Damned if I'm wrong, and may be I am anyway, but pair Vista with a dual core system and you should have a pretty slick system. If an app wants to go to 100% cpu, then with a dual core system you can probably feel magnanimous. But prior to vista if an app resulted in hard disk grind then even setting the errant process to idle-priority would't be enough (though it generally still helps, from experience). If vista does what I've been lead to understand it does then we are looking at a significant practical (as well as technical) step forward.
Vista probably needs condition variables and a security model that not only panders to 'least-privilege' but is also actually easy to use (window's APIs are so dreadfully awkward and poorly documented, you have to read Raymond Chen's blog to get some clues - at least he writes engagingly). I don't though. Bye.
As to children : let's say that a parent knows something as fact through union with God. So you argue that because he can't give scientific evidence (for what it's worth) he should not tell the child of this truth, or lead the child to church? This knowledge is more important than life itself to the religious, but he must not tell it? In anycase even if one accepts your position the religious person can still be said to be encouraging the child to experience union with God (through prayer etc), and so attain that proof that is so much better than evidence, scientific or otherwise. Perhaps you can accept that? You seem also to be saying that the religious is lying to the child. (Deliberately?) How can you assume that when you can not know that God doesn't exist, whereas the religious clearly have a mechanism to know, and so the presumption remains with you.
I would agree, if you had said it, that the universe cannot prove God's existence. Only God can prove his own existence. Even St Thomas Aquinas's 5 "proofs" where called by him "ways", that speak of God's existence, not proofs (even though loosely meant). In the end we still have to ask the fellow himself, somehow, or we won't get an answer. A test tube won't and can't do it.
Since you have not accepted so much of what I've written without actually addressing it I'm getting to the point where I think I'll have to give you the last word. I do promise to read whatever you write, however.
It rather sounds like you are blaming others for what was likely partly your fault.
Oh, well, nevermind then. bye
your orginal statement was :
What is that probability of life, given that we're asking? - obviously 1
Even your slippery re-wording of the problem doesn't get you out. Sorry, buddy, but at this point I can see that I must withdraw from further communication with you.
"Of course. But the odds here are the same as for claims of an invisible pink unicorn that dances in your attic. Meaning, they are almost certain to be wrong."
Not really. Science has never been able to explain why anything exists at all. I very much doubt it ever will, particularly considering that mathemetics has such fundamental problems with self-refencing; it can't even describe itself. So that leaves either a universe without a cause or some kind of immaterial-reality/God, so the probability is looking a lot better than pink unicorns, eh? In any case its not true that there isn;t evidence in 2000 years. My uncle was a nuclear physicist working at some kind of high-powered polytechnic in France. He said that in his work "The finger-prints of God are everywhere". So it does rather depend on who you talk to, as usual. The materialist scientists will claim one thing, and the others another.
There was a statistic about 10 years ago in the newspapers - bless their worm-eaten souls - that 40% of physicists believed in God. No evidence in 2000 years? Hmmm, a decidedly tricky statement.
"Unfortunately, the "claim of the religious" is not evidence."
I didn't claim it was evidence. And I agree with you that a statement of truth doesn't necessarily involve evidence. Nevertheless if a religious person makes those statements and God witnesses to them then obviously the statements are proven (unless God can contradict himself, which is a likely self-contradiction). That is the basic, thoroughly rational, mechanism that 'transmits' the faith. Perhaps you can see, even if you don't believe it has ever happend, that it is rational. There's even an example in scripture of getting it wrong : St Paul tried to convert the Greeks by argument, instead of by the witness of the Spirit of God, and got laughed out of the house (its in 'Acts' somewhere).
"but my feeling that parents should have the right to bring up their children any way they prefer to is stronger than my feeling that it is immoral to expose a child to an idea that cannot be proven as if it was undeniable truth. "
But to the (sincere) christian it is undeniable truth by a mechanism that is perfect (union with God). I would also defend the atheists right to bring up their own kids as they see fit so long as they are sincere in striving for truth (as they see it) and giving it to their children (very much unlike communists). I accept many christians, as with many non-religious, are not sincere nor striving for Truth, even amoung the church-going.
At this point I must make a comment on what you have written. You seem to think that this is an argument about the lack of probability and evidence for the existence of God, and foil my arguments with statements to that effect, but without addressing my responses to what I previously wrote. So I am assuming now that you tacitly, at least, agree that my responses do demonstrate the rationaility of christianity (or at least 'Catholic' christianity).
However - and this is critical - when nature does so, so far at least, it has done so in such a way as to leave evidence supporting that situation all around in the form of natural laws, physical instances, and so forth. Religions - all of them - are notably lacking in this regard.
But religions concern themselves with that which above nature. In anycase your statement that there is no evidence is not really true. Not for Christians. There is evidence of the union of two making a third absolutely everywhere. It may be a more abstract evidence than you are accustomed to, but that's as it should be anyway. But christians also depend on better evidence than the empirical (which in anycase is fundamentally very weak - I refer you to Karl Popper again). For example : the beauty of nature, the mind-boggling beauty of ugly babies (to their parents, obviously). How can these
This is slashdot and most people here are in some way connected to mathemetics. So why try and pull a fast one in a place like this? If the guy made a mistake then he made a mistake.
In any case its blithering obvious that the previous post was talking nonsense. Just because it happened doesn't make it a probability of 1. Think of betting. The horse wins : was the probability 1 - NO!!!! You don;t have to have studied stats to know that.
Well, I admit that does rather depend on the nature of God. If God has doubts about his own existence then it's not going to help. However if he is Truth itself, and therefore also Proof itself, and if he completely knows himself then it does seem reasonable to suggest that that won't be a problem. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that the balance would be in favour of God not having self-doubt. And since we become one with him we also will be certain (at least at that moment, though it seems not later when we are tested - in some way our participation is limited until heaven).
"Also, baptism is just another silly ritual, like believing that munching a cracker is "eating the flesh of Christ"."
Totally not. It's the center piece. Christinity is all about union. The Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the united persons of the one God. Ever heard of the philosophical axiom : all truth is one? (That axoim also underpins mathematics.) What does love want : union with the beloved. Humans have one single thing that distinguishes them from the divine and other pure intelligences (ie. the angels and the fallen angels) which is the body, and which through us unites spiritual beings to the material universe. Even our bodies participate in union (sex). In the eating of Christ's body we are bodily united to him and him to us, and so all is in all (since Christ is God). That bodily union is the absolute essence of the marital/conjugal act, just without the trimmings. And it is a promise and foretaste of the nature of the joy of the life to come. Granted not so many catholics actually allow that union to manifest it full power. But the potential is there if people would only take matters a bit more seriously.
If you understood any of that then just maybe you can see that it's not just a ritual. It's totaly logical, and further it is more important than the redemption (Christ's self-sacrifice to save us); it's what the redemption is for: the consummation of creation.
I;m not trying to convince you of the truth of any of this only to defend christians who are said to be stupid.
In any case its blithering obvious that the previous post was talking nonsense.
Hey, don`t be silly. You must know that we believe in a soul, so that possibility is entirely reasonable.
But only if they are wrong. But science can't tell them that they are wrong. I referred to Karl Popper before because his position, as a philosopher of science, demonstrates that. He is the guy who switched everyone over to falsifiability. In other words : science doesn't give us facts or proof of anything. If you accept Popper, which by far the majority do, then science can not prove the existence or non-existence of anything, let alone God.
In the meantime the religious claim to have revelation from God himself. If you want proof then you can't really do better than relevation from God, eh? Even better, he unites to us individually, which means that proof is not an external 'vision' that could be dismissed as hullucination. The atheists keep telling us how stupid we are, but many, if not most, of us have direct experience of God (including me). It's why so many of us are faithful to our bibles even despite pressures to stop believing. If you look at the technical definition of faith then you really can't argue that a religious person is stupid :
"Faith : assent to Divinely revealed truth."
For the Catholic Church's position spelled out see here (direct official Catholic teaching - look at part II), more of an accent on 'trust' than the anglican quote above. I think you'll agree that this is quite different from the "Leap of Faith" idea that has become prevalent among uneducated christians. It's a pollution that seems to come from Pascal and Kierkegaard. We don't believe because we just decide to make that irrational 'leap', but because God has revealed it to us individually. In other words : logically a religious person is totally rational. (Of course discounting those who do not have authentic belief - of which I reckon there are very many).
"The point is, other people appear to have made it up."
For me, and probably many other believers, God has directly witnessed to the truth of the Bible. As a child I took it on trust from adults, but as an adult it was God who confirmed it (perhaps as a result of the effort of my prayers). Your objections are probably valid but not if God is revealing stuff to us individually and directly. Even the protestants go on about having a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ". Since Jesus is God then obviously that personal relationship is likely to involve divinely revealed truth and the act of 'assenting' to it.
But that doesn't make it a probablity of 1. That's like saying because the coin flipped heads the probability of that was 1, which isn't the case at all. All that means is that whatever the probability, high or low, it nevertheless happened.
"The "probability of life" question really only makes sense when you're talking about the probability of life occurring elsewhere. You can't take everything that has ever happened that had less than a 50% chance of happening and say "wow, look how unlikely that is that all those things happened!"
But that's the point, you can. The probabilities multiply against each other. So if you get 20 50% possibilities of no life (like the narrow margin of the constant of gravity that actually allows anything more than hydrogen to exist) then the probability of life would be 1/2^20 which is 1 in a million, ie not much chance of order, let alone life. A few years ago it was estimated that there are 300 factors that need to be within certain parameters to allow for an ordered universe. But the margins were smaller than 1/2 in many cases (over the span of what was theoretically possible). And that's even before we approach the probabilities of life beginning within a universe ordered as our's is which is reckoned to be jolly unlikely. Hence the persuit of the infinite number of universes theories by hawkings et al. They really don't have any choice. But it's based on a presumption : the non-existence of God. If God does exist then those probabilities are irrelevant.
After that we can argue about evolution. But there's no point because as a catholic I've no problem with evolution. Most christians, unlike certain rather-too-vocal forms of protestantism, are not bound to a literal interpretation of the bible. Infact the 6 day creation story includes the fact that "God rested on the seventh day". Hebrew tradition is that the number 7 is used to indicate a 'large amount' (of whatever). So we can be reasonably confident that the 6+1 day creation story represents a long span of time. And was meant to suggest that. God was kind enough not to go in to scientific detail; I doubt Moses would have understood. A pity for us though.
By use of the word 'nit-picking" I am rather obviously referring to statements that affect nothing. As I said, the original statement is fine, despite your nit-picking.
Furthermore, you're talking gibberish.
You do make the most extraordinarily arrogant statements. As it happens I am not. What can I say. I've already given the reason. It's a good one. If you can't see that it is reasonable then I can only assume we aren't going to have a constructive discussion. By your rather silly nit-picking statement above I very much think that that is the case and I since these things tend to go around in circles with your type of individual I withdraw from discussion with your delightful and personable self.