They are the obvious rational conclusion you reach if you start with the belief that sex should be within a marriage and the belief that married people should welcome children into their lives as blessings from God.
No, these are not the rational conclusions you reach from such premises. You can be perfectly clear that sex should be within marriage and conducive to procreation, but that doesn't logically mean that you think those who err against your teachings (or are born to folks who err against your teachings) ought to suffer extra disease and unwanted pregnancies. You could still support the availability of condoms to all unmarried folks, as a "lesser-of-evils" alternative to out-of-wedlock unprotected sex, while still firmly stating that people ought to wait for marriage.
Survival of the fittest means that the animal with the biggest teeth or claws will survive over those with lesser equipment.
Nope --- otherwise every critter would be nothing but giant mounds of fangs and claws. In lots of environments, a bacterium, earthworm, or gerbil is quite well suited for survival, while saber-toothed kitties have all gone extinct. Your understanding of "reproductive fitness" is seriously flawed. However, that's not the worst mistake in your post.
Anyone who subscribes to the theory of evolution therefore cannot logically say that it is wrong to shoot as many "competitors for survival" as possible until someone with a bigger gun comes along.
No, they're logically allowed to say such a thing; they just won't base their claims (either way) on "evolution." "Evolution" neither says it is "right" nor "wrong" for the most fangly murderator to survive --- or even that it is right or wrong to survive at all. There's nothing "wrong" for a person who considers "evolution" an accurate theory to opt to be on the non-surviving side. Note that, despite your serious misunderstanding of reproductive fitness, a person who wants to be on the "reproductively successful" side would probably not strive to be the murderiest monster, since there are often huge survival advantages to friendly cooperation.
Yep, I agree that we're on the same page. I was just being a stickler for precision, since my posts on this thread started in response to the "evolution is a religion with morals" troll --- I think such muddled philosophies thrive on collecting enough imprecise statements to construct outright falsehoods.
Western religions aren't exactly subtle -- if you've reached adulthood and don't follow any, then you're probably not the kind of person who ever would.
I don't think demographics support this. While there is a small but growing fraction of the population who label themselves as "atheist" on religious surveys, there is a much larger chunk of "non-religious but spiritual" and "don't know or care." Folks who never went to church, or stopped going to church as soon as they left home, but never had a "burn-out" experience or otherwise developed hostility against religion. At least in the US, the majority of adults who "don't follow any religion" are not opposed to religion (on ethical or "rationalist" grounds); they just haven't stumbled across a church that seems worth their Sunday mornings. However, given a prescription to help their psychiatric condition, they'd likely give it a go.
I'll stand by my statement as being entirely correct. Though evolutionary theory and observation might indicate what drove the development of human perceptions of morality, "the theory of evolution" still doesn't have its own moral system --- it doesn't specify that "evolved" morality is or is not correct/incorrect/"good"/"bad."
atheists act against evolutionary forces
Bonus pedantry: similar to "evolution" providing no normative framework, there is also no definition for which direction is "for" or "against" evolutionary forces. Just as you might say one critter acted "with" the forces of evolution to survive/reproduce, you can just as well say another critter acted "with" the forces of evolution to die/not-reproduce. Atheists might act against survival, but that's not acting "against evolutionary forces."
Do you also have low opinions of any parents who feel some tinge of sadness when their kid departs to head off to college? Have you never had a friend move away for better opportunity elsewhere, and both rejoiced with them for their gains and sorrowed at your common loss? Had to put a family pet down, knowing its suffering is over, as is its life? Either you have lived an amazingly lucky and perfect life, or you're just a heartless git --- in either case, you lack a fundamental level of human empathy for those who (religious or not) have enough braincells for both joy and sorrow.
The guiding moral principle of evolution is "survival of the fittest"
Nope, the mechanism for evolution involves differential reproductive success ("survival of the fittest"), but there is absolutely no "moral principle." The Theory of Evolution doesn't say whether it's good or bad or whocares to survive and reproduce.
People have built all sorts of flaky philosophies off of evolution (e.g. "Social Darwinism") that ascribe moral values to certain outcomes, but these are no part of the scientific theory of evolution.
Is all your life binary pure good or pure bad, never a mix? Many religions consider death a bad thing, an unfortunate sign or result of brokenness in the world, which folks hope to one day transcend. There's no fundamental contradiction between being sad at one loss and death, even while rejoicing at another gain and life.
Many "God" claims imply an element of personal responsibility to judgement --- a "God" who not only exists in the Deist's sense as a setter-in-motion of cosmic mechanics, but proscribes a normative framework for human interactions. And nobody likes being held accountable to standards they did not set. One could certainly imagine a "universe simulator" who is also deciding which simulation fragments are beautiful and worth saving, and which to pipe to/dev/null, but this is generally not a characteristic ascribed to the (often presumed to be "scientific" and "morally neutral") simulation operator.
Any weapon will inflict injury. Guns make it especially easy to rapidly inflict death (point and click!), even for people who would not be mentally prepared to keep hacking away with a knife once the blood starts spurting, or would be restrained by others around.
70-85% of those murdered the US every year have a criminal record. Most major cities track close to 80% of there homicides resulting from gang violence.
And the availability of guns makes murder easier and more efficient, even in gang violence situations. It's a lot harder to kill someone with a baseball bat than a gun --- no quick drive-by pot-shots at kids wearing the wrong colors, you've got to stay around and pummel until the target's buddies show up with their own weapons.
Make the ability to protect yourself cheaper, easier and more available, and more people get protected.
"Protect yourself" with a gun means more people get killed. You simply shift from people losing their wallets to muggers, to engaging in gun fights with muggers. You also teach the muggers to shoot first and rob the body later.
Not sure why you want rapists and other criminals to have easier access to victims?
The overwhelming majority of rapists are "friends" and family members (who already have plenty of "access" to the victims), not some scary looking dude running out from a dark alley shouting "I'm gonna rape you!". And when your pushy creep boyfriend learns you keep a gun in your purse for self-defense, it just means he'll know an easy place to snag a gun before forcing himself on you.
There's a reason why MLK and his supporters had a lot of weapons around.
Yeah, that worked out real well for protecting MLK. And the civil rights activists who leaned more towards stockpiling weapons than peaceful protests generally ended up assassinated by the FBI, not winning civil rights victories.
The death penalty is typically an externality not factored into the cost of killing. Few murderers think ahead so much; or, if they do, feel certain they won't get caught (so severity of punishment, life imprisonment or death penalty, doesn't matter when mentally multiplied by a 0% estimate of getting caught). Whether they can get a gun or a bunch of booze for $20 *right now* does factor into the economic choices they make (and if the gun is $500, the booze probably wins). Now, when you increase the chances of getting caught (by increasing resources for investigation/enforcement), this has been shown to impact crime rates: increase the number of friends-of-friends that people hear about getting locked away for life, and folks' subconscious economic calculations start factoring in "I might get caught" with significantly higher weight.
Except I don't think murder is as price-inelastic as you think. Only a small fraction of gun murders in the US are in, e.g., carefully planned heists by criminal masterminds who will acquire guns regardless of cost for a pre-planned murder. Gun deaths overwhelmingly come from heat-of-the-moment domestic disputes, drug-addled petty criminals, super-depressed suicide victims, etc.: folks not utilizing near-unlimited resources and careful long-term planning skills. If a (cheap, ubiquitously available) gun is on hand at the minute of bad decision making, it gets used; otherwise not.
This is one of those instances where right-wingers suddenly stop believing in the market economics they dogmatically apply everywhere else. Supply and demand: make killing people cheaper, easier, and more available, and more people get killed. It's hilarious to watch gun murder apologists fly into fits of hand-waving about why lowering the cost of killing will magically decrease the amount of killing.
Ah yes, please excuse me for not fitting in all the details of my result above. I'm really more an experimentalist than a theorist, so I didn't feel up to calculating the conversion from first principles. But I did have a bit of spare beam time on the schedule. Finding appropriate nano-horses was a bit tricky. My first attempt started with a pony (just a small horse to first order), but its energy output didn't scale very linearly when I chopped it into pieces. I finally ended up using fetal sea-horses for the comparison, though the first couple batches didn't fare well during pumpdown, and left a bit of a mess on the scintillator calorimeters. Anyway, I don't want to bore you with all the sticky details, which I've got to get back to scrubbing off the inside of our vacuum chamber.
Anarchy is a social condition where (ideally) the only rule is there are no rules
That is an exceptionally poor summary of what anarchy is about. By this statement, it sounds like "there are no rules! I'm gonna beat you up and take your stuff! no rules!" would be an anarchist ideal. On the contrary, anarchy isn't about "no rules!" but about minimizing/eliminating structures of power/authority exerted over people --- whether the power of "big government," or the power of a muscular bully to beat you up. Depending on your stance among many different varieties of anarchy, this might require a fair amount of rules to assure that authority/power isn't accumulated and wielded against folks.
Where the heck did you see anyone implying or even discussing whether "the alternative to anarchy needs to be the most bloated and intrusive government (in economic terms) in human history"?
Actually, neutrinos do arrive slightly faster than light from supernovae. Space isn't completely empty --- tiny amounts of interstellar gas give it a refractive index slightly higher than "perfect" vacuum, which ever-so-slightly slows down light. Neutrinos interact far less than light with matter; so, a supernova neutrino going at very nearly the speed of light can outrun a photon through space. In Supernova 1987A, neutrino detectors saw neutrinos about three hours before light reached earth's telescopes.
That's more an argument that anarcho-capitalism has nothing to do with anarchy --- they're just morons who give a free pass to massive accumulation of power, just so long as it is done on oligarchical rather than democratic grounds. I've seen one of the loudmouthed "anarcho-capitalists" on this site openly espouse *feudalism* as the natural and ideal organization of humankind.
Putting some rough numbers on this: At lower energies, neutrino cross sections scale roughly proportional to energy with sigma/E ~ 10^-38 cm^2 / GeV. At high energy, the cross section at 10^15 eV is around 10^-33 cm^2. Thus, compared to an ~1MeV neutrino with a cross section on the order of 10^-41 cm^2, the PeV neutrino has ~10^8 greater cross section. You are about 10^-7 the thickness of the earth. Thus, you are roughly 10x more likely to be hit by a PeV neutrino passing through than the earth is to be hit by an MeV neutrino passing through (a rather good chance of being missed in either case).
We've got poor direct limits on muon neutrino mass from muon neutrino experiments; however, there are other sources of much stronger constraints on neutrino masses. See the "summed mass" limits a few pages down in your reference. From a Borexino neutrino experiment page at Princeton:
The current limits from cosmological considerations are less than about 0.5 eV (one millionth of the electron mass!) for the sum of the masses of all three neutrino types. The known values of the mass-squared differences imply that the heaviest neutrino type cannot be less massive than about 0.05 eV.
If the neutrino does interact inside your body, it's highly unlikely that much of the energy will stay there. The neutrino would transfer some chunk of its 10^15 eV of energy to another particle, such as a proton, in your body. A 10^15 eV proton will also shoot right through you --- smashing up nuclei and creating a big cascading shower of ionizing radiation (the signal this scientific experiment is looking for in the antarctic ice), most of which will escape your body. The "impact" will thus not be a "localized" nudge that you'd feel (like a raindrop), but distributed as radiation damage (not much above background levels, so pretty much harmless) to a large volume of flesh.
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They are the obvious rational conclusion you reach if you start with the belief that sex should be within a marriage and the belief that married people should welcome children into their lives as blessings from God.
No, these are not the rational conclusions you reach from such premises. You can be perfectly clear that sex should be within marriage and conducive to procreation, but that doesn't logically mean that you think those who err against your teachings (or are born to folks who err against your teachings) ought to suffer extra disease and unwanted pregnancies. You could still support the availability of condoms to all unmarried folks, as a "lesser-of-evils" alternative to out-of-wedlock unprotected sex, while still firmly stating that people ought to wait for marriage.
Survival of the fittest means that the animal with the biggest teeth or claws will survive over those with lesser equipment.
Nope --- otherwise every critter would be nothing but giant mounds of fangs and claws. In lots of environments, a bacterium, earthworm, or gerbil is quite well suited for survival, while saber-toothed kitties have all gone extinct. Your understanding of "reproductive fitness" is seriously flawed. However, that's not the worst mistake in your post.
Anyone who subscribes to the theory of evolution therefore cannot logically say that it is wrong to shoot as many "competitors for survival" as possible until someone with a bigger gun comes along.
No, they're logically allowed to say such a thing; they just won't base their claims (either way) on "evolution." "Evolution" neither says it is "right" nor "wrong" for the most fangly murderator to survive --- or even that it is right or wrong to survive at all. There's nothing "wrong" for a person who considers "evolution" an accurate theory to opt to be on the non-surviving side. Note that, despite your serious misunderstanding of reproductive fitness, a person who wants to be on the "reproductively successful" side would probably not strive to be the murderiest monster, since there are often huge survival advantages to friendly cooperation.
Yep, I agree that we're on the same page. I was just being a stickler for precision, since my posts on this thread started in response to the "evolution is a religion with morals" troll --- I think such muddled philosophies thrive on collecting enough imprecise statements to construct outright falsehoods.
Western religions aren't exactly subtle -- if you've reached adulthood and don't follow any, then you're probably not the kind of person who ever would.
I don't think demographics support this. While there is a small but growing fraction of the population who label themselves as "atheist" on religious surveys, there is a much larger chunk of "non-religious but spiritual" and "don't know or care." Folks who never went to church, or stopped going to church as soon as they left home, but never had a "burn-out" experience or otherwise developed hostility against religion. At least in the US, the majority of adults who "don't follow any religion" are not opposed to religion (on ethical or "rationalist" grounds); they just haven't stumbled across a church that seems worth their Sunday mornings. However, given a prescription to help their psychiatric condition, they'd likely give it a go.
You are mostly correct.
I'll stand by my statement as being entirely correct.
Though evolutionary theory and observation might indicate what drove the development of human perceptions of morality, "the theory of evolution" still doesn't have its own moral system --- it doesn't specify that "evolved" morality is or is not correct/incorrect/"good"/"bad."
atheists act against evolutionary forces
Bonus pedantry: similar to "evolution" providing no normative framework, there is also no definition for which direction is "for" or "against" evolutionary forces. Just as you might say one critter acted "with" the forces of evolution to survive/reproduce, you can just as well say another critter acted "with" the forces of evolution to die/not-reproduce. Atheists might act against survival, but that's not acting "against evolutionary forces."
Do you also have low opinions of any parents who feel some tinge of sadness when their kid departs to head off to college? Have you never had a friend move away for better opportunity elsewhere, and both rejoiced with them for their gains and sorrowed at your common loss? Had to put a family pet down, knowing its suffering is over, as is its life? Either you have lived an amazingly lucky and perfect life, or you're just a heartless git --- in either case, you lack a fundamental level of human empathy for those who (religious or not) have enough braincells for both joy and sorrow.
The guiding moral principle of evolution is "survival of the fittest"
Nope, the mechanism for evolution involves differential reproductive success ("survival of the fittest"), but there is absolutely no "moral principle." The Theory of Evolution doesn't say whether it's good or bad or whocares to survive and reproduce.
People have built all sorts of flaky philosophies off of evolution (e.g. "Social Darwinism") that ascribe moral values to certain outcomes, but these are no part of the scientific theory of evolution.
Is all your life binary pure good or pure bad, never a mix? Many religions consider death a bad thing, an unfortunate sign or result of brokenness in the world, which folks hope to one day transcend. There's no fundamental contradiction between being sad at one loss and death, even while rejoicing at another gain and life.
Many "God" claims imply an element of personal responsibility to judgement --- a "God" who not only exists in the Deist's sense as a setter-in-motion of cosmic mechanics, but proscribes a normative framework for human interactions. And nobody likes being held accountable to standards they did not set. One could certainly imagine a "universe simulator" who is also deciding which simulation fragments are beautiful and worth saving, and which to pipe to /dev/null, but this is generally not a characteristic ascribed to the (often presumed to be "scientific" and "morally neutral") simulation operator.
In crimes of passion almost any weapon will do.
Any weapon will inflict injury. Guns make it especially easy to rapidly inflict death (point and click!), even for people who would not be mentally prepared to keep hacking away with a knife once the blood starts spurting, or would be restrained by others around.
70-85% of those murdered the US every year have a criminal record. Most major cities track close to 80% of there homicides resulting from gang violence.
And the availability of guns makes murder easier and more efficient, even in gang violence situations. It's a lot harder to kill someone with a baseball bat than a gun --- no quick drive-by pot-shots at kids wearing the wrong colors, you've got to stay around and pummel until the target's buddies show up with their own weapons.
Make the ability to protect yourself cheaper, easier and more available, and more people get protected.
"Protect yourself" with a gun means more people get killed. You simply shift from people losing their wallets to muggers, to engaging in gun fights with muggers. You also teach the muggers to shoot first and rob the body later.
Not sure why you want rapists and other criminals to have easier access to victims?
The overwhelming majority of rapists are "friends" and family members (who already have plenty of "access" to the victims), not some scary looking dude running out from a dark alley shouting "I'm gonna rape you!". And when your pushy creep boyfriend learns you keep a gun in your purse for self-defense, it just means he'll know an easy place to snag a gun before forcing himself on you.
There's a reason why MLK and his supporters had a lot of weapons around.
Yeah, that worked out real well for protecting MLK. And the civil rights activists who leaned more towards stockpiling weapons than peaceful protests generally ended up assassinated by the FBI, not winning civil rights victories.
The death penalty is typically an externality not factored into the cost of killing. Few murderers think ahead so much; or, if they do, feel certain they won't get caught (so severity of punishment, life imprisonment or death penalty, doesn't matter when mentally multiplied by a 0% estimate of getting caught). Whether they can get a gun or a bunch of booze for $20 *right now* does factor into the economic choices they make (and if the gun is $500, the booze probably wins). Now, when you increase the chances of getting caught (by increasing resources for investigation/enforcement), this has been shown to impact crime rates: increase the number of friends-of-friends that people hear about getting locked away for life, and folks' subconscious economic calculations start factoring in "I might get caught" with significantly higher weight.
Except I don't think murder is as price-inelastic as you think. Only a small fraction of gun murders in the US are in, e.g., carefully planned heists by criminal masterminds who will acquire guns regardless of cost for a pre-planned murder. Gun deaths overwhelmingly come from heat-of-the-moment domestic disputes, drug-addled petty criminals, super-depressed suicide victims, etc.: folks not utilizing near-unlimited resources and careful long-term planning skills. If a (cheap, ubiquitously available) gun is on hand at the minute of bad decision making, it gets used; otherwise not.
This is one of those instances where right-wingers suddenly stop believing in the market economics they dogmatically apply everywhere else. Supply and demand: make killing people cheaper, easier, and more available, and more people get killed. It's hilarious to watch gun murder apologists fly into fits of hand-waving about why lowering the cost of killing will magically decrease the amount of killing.
Ah yes, please excuse me for not fitting in all the details of my result above. I'm really more an experimentalist than a theorist, so I didn't feel up to calculating the conversion from first principles. But I did have a bit of spare beam time on the schedule. Finding appropriate nano-horses was a bit tricky. My first attempt started with a pony (just a small horse to first order), but its energy output didn't scale very linearly when I chopped it into pieces. I finally ended up using fetal sea-horses for the comparison, though the first couple batches didn't fare well during pumpdown, and left a bit of a mess on the scintillator calorimeters. Anyway, I don't want to bore you with all the sticky details, which I've got to get back to scrubbing off the inside of our vacuum chamber.
Mexico is an experiment in neoliberal policy (let free markets rule! power to the oligarchs!), not anarchy.
Among the OECD countries, Mexico has the second highest degree of economic disparity between the extremely poor and extremely rich, after Chile
(from Wikipedia on the Mexican economy). Note, Chile is the other main right-wing product of US neoliberal intervention in South America.
Anarchy is a social condition where (ideally) the only rule is there are no rules
That is an exceptionally poor summary of what anarchy is about. By this statement, it sounds like "there are no rules! I'm gonna beat you up and take your stuff! no rules!" would be an anarchist ideal. On the contrary, anarchy isn't about "no rules!" but about minimizing/eliminating structures of power/authority exerted over people --- whether the power of "big government," or the power of a muscular bully to beat you up. Depending on your stance among many different varieties of anarchy, this might require a fair amount of rules to assure that authority/power isn't accumulated and wielded against folks.
Where the heck did you see anyone implying or even discussing whether "the alternative to anarchy needs to be the most bloated and intrusive government (in economic terms) in human history"?
10^15 eV is approximately 3.6 nano-horsepower-minutes. Happy now?
Actually, neutrinos do arrive slightly faster than light from supernovae. Space isn't completely empty --- tiny amounts of interstellar gas give it a refractive index slightly higher than "perfect" vacuum, which ever-so-slightly slows down light. Neutrinos interact far less than light with matter; so, a supernova neutrino going at very nearly the speed of light can outrun a photon through space. In Supernova 1987A, neutrino detectors saw neutrinos about three hours before light reached earth's telescopes.
Christian anarchy might be the closest you'll get --- "Jesus is Lord; none others need apply."
That's more an argument that anarcho-capitalism has nothing to do with anarchy --- they're just morons who give a free pass to massive accumulation of power, just so long as it is done on oligarchical rather than democratic grounds. I've seen one of the loudmouthed "anarcho-capitalists" on this site openly espouse *feudalism* as the natural and ideal organization of humankind.
Putting some rough numbers on this:
At lower energies, neutrino cross sections scale roughly proportional to energy with sigma/E ~ 10^-38 cm^2 / GeV. At high energy, the cross section at 10^15 eV is around 10^-33 cm^2. Thus, compared to an ~1MeV neutrino with a cross section on the order of 10^-41 cm^2, the PeV neutrino has ~10^8 greater cross section. You are about 10^-7 the thickness of the earth. Thus, you are roughly 10x more likely to be hit by a PeV neutrino passing through than the earth is to be hit by an MeV neutrino passing through (a rather good chance of being missed in either case).
We've got poor direct limits on muon neutrino mass from muon neutrino experiments; however, there are other sources of much stronger constraints on neutrino masses. See the "summed mass" limits a few pages down in your reference.
From a Borexino neutrino experiment page at Princeton:
The current limits from cosmological considerations are less than about 0.5 eV (one millionth of the electron mass!) for the sum of the masses of all three neutrino types. The known values of the mass-squared differences imply that the heaviest neutrino type cannot be less massive than about 0.05 eV.
If the neutrino does interact inside your body, it's highly unlikely that much of the energy will stay there. The neutrino would transfer some chunk of its 10^15 eV of energy to another particle, such as a proton, in your body. A 10^15 eV proton will also shoot right through you --- smashing up nuclei and creating a big cascading shower of ionizing radiation (the signal this scientific experiment is looking for in the antarctic ice), most of which will escape your body. The "impact" will thus not be a "localized" nudge that you'd feel (like a raindrop), but distributed as radiation damage (not much above background levels, so pretty much harmless) to a large volume of flesh.