Well the difference between a historic deist and an atheist is pretty thin.
Not at all. As we're discussing here, deists in that time believed in a deity and that rights were granted by it. Atheists, on the other hand, reject the existence of a creator and objective ethics. Deists believed in dualism, while atheists do not favour dualism.
"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it." - John Adams.
Perpetuating this quotation in isolation is dishonest. See, for example here:
John Adams did, in fact, write the above words. But if you see those words in context, the meaning changes entirely. Here's the rest of the quotation:
Twenty times, in the course of my late reading, have I been on the point of breaking out, 'this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!!' But in this exclamation, I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in public company--I mean hell.
In any event, I assume that was the poster above was getting at by "religious", was that these men were theists and their understanding of rights was that they are endowed by a Creator. That's pretty par for the course in the Enlightenment era.
To the best of my knowledge, in all other countries the situation is closer to that in Japan than in the US: the bulk of academic research is performed by public institutions using public funds.
There's still plenty of private funding even in countries with strong welfare states and comparatively little patronage. I work in Finland in a branch of linguistics that was fortunately founded by some wealthy men a century ago, and the endowments they left behind are still vital funding today. The heiress of a major multinational corporation studied at our department, and since she has such nice memories, we've recently been given millions in grants. We wouldn't get much done with the public funds available to us.
I agree with just how important science fiction is in the long run. It's a shame that it's scoffed at as just being about bug eyed monsters and little green men..It's also such a shame so much science fiction spewed out by Hollywood is just the same tired old plots over and over again. Science fiction says so much and can be as compelling and moving as other forms of fiction.
You think it's only Hollywood that has made dreck out of the potentials of science fiction? Even science-fiction authors who begin their careers writing imaginative works, sometimes even seeking a prose style that can compete with the canon of great literature, eventually give up and decide to start churn out one lame sequel after another. Just look at what has happened to Orson Scott Card and Larry Niven over the last 15 years, and Arthur C. Clarke before he died. They decided to publish hastily written airport paperbacks with little attention to detail, just another space opera plot in a universe they created decades ago. And they might even relegate the task of actually writing to a co-author and just put their name on the cover to score sales.
One often meets the claim that science-fiction is a genre full of myriad possibilities, but if even once-legendary science-fiction authors are abandoning that, it doesn't make the field look any better.
While home video was certainly a net gain in availability of obscure films nationwide/worldwide, at a local level it destroyed many local cinemas who ran classic art films. It used to be that you could go to a screening of, say, an Ingmar Bergman film from several years prior, meet other cinephiles in your neighbourhood, and walk out of the cinema having passionate discussions with your peers about what you just saw.
Sure, nowadays you can torrent the film or get it from Netflix, and then go on IMDB or Flixster to post a review or get into a masturbatory flame war with anonymous people who can't spell, but that in-real-life community aspect is gone except in a very few places.
This is always my biggest indictment of religion. It stopped human progress for 1000 years.
Blaming the fall of the Roman Empire and certain post-Roman developments on Christianity was a hobbyhorse of Gibbon. Historians after him have revised their views, and most would make a case that the seeds of the fall of the Western Empire were sown already by economic and political crises in the third century, when Christianity was still a minor underground sect.
Furthermore, the relationship between Christianity and state was strongest in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, which didn't fall in the mid-first millennium and in fact lasted for another thousand years, carrying on the tradition of classical learning and high literacy.
I'd really encourage you to read a recently published history of the fall of the Roman Empire and the early medieval era. The general public tends to have a stereotype of this portion of history that was overturned long ago.
We can also thank it for the inquisition and the dark ages.
Historians no longer use the term Dark Ages and haven't for decades. Late antiquity and the early medieval era was more complicated than that.
Blaming the fall of the Roman Empire and certain post-Roman developments on Christianity was a hobbyhorse of Gibbon. Historians after him have revised their views, and most would make a case that the seeds of the fall of the Western Empire were sown already by economic and political crises in the third century, when Christianity was still a minor underground sect. Furthermore, the relationship between Christianity and state was strongest in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, which didn't fall in the mid-first millennium and for another thousand years carried on the tradition of classical learning and high literacy.
Assuming you can even find the stolen books and texts online (with Baghdad being a major center of learning and knowledge while Europe was in the Dark Ages, you can be pretty sure that they might have had a few irreplaceable texts)
Historians no longer use the term "Dark Ages" and haven't for decades. Late antiquity and the early medieval era were more complicated than that. Furthermore, you seem to be overlooking that half of Europe was the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire, where there the tradition of popular literacy and classical learning lasted through the whole era.
While Baghdad no doubt continued to have a few important texts, the majority of the work achieved when Baghdad was a centre of learning was already destroyed during the Mongol Siege of Baghdad in 1258.
That's what the world was like before copyright: there were artists and there was art, and it was whatever a rich guy said it was.
This is an ignorant assertion. Even in eras when artists depended on patronage, they produced an enormous amount of art that ignored the wishes of, or even outright lampooned, their patrons. Just look at seemingly half of the Roman canon.
Basically none of the proposed funding models work without either (1) Hollywood paying everybody the 10 months out of the year people aren't working on their crowdsourced project or (2) abandoning the concept of the professional artist.
Producing films and television programmes with state funding (perhaps drawn in part from license fees) works with neither of those effects in quite a few countries.
However, proving that specific gods don't exist is a whole lot easier when they make outrageous claims that do not conform to the world that we witness today. For instance, if their holy book ascribes cities that have no archaeological evidence to suggest that they ever existed, or did not exist at the time described.
See Swinburne's Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. ) for a case that scientific or historical errors in the Bible (or Qur'an, Vedas, Mahayana canon, etc.) do not necessarily undermine religious claims.
The best way, "Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for." -Socrates.
That is a spurious quotation. Please don't perpetuate stuff like that. Anyone who has read Plato and has seen the ambiguous view of writing in the Socratic dialogues can tell right off that an attribution to Socrates is bogus.
p>The aim of the philosophy of mathematics is to provide an account of the nature and methodology of mathematics...
So mathematics cannot be even be done without reference to philosophy of mathematics, and the simplest equation, "2+2=4" makes a boatload of assumptions gained from philosophy.
There are plenty of things that human beings consider to be true that are not due to application of the scientific method. Where's the control group, for example, in "I think, therefore I am"?
Furthermore, human beings do not usually draw their ethical beliefs from application of the scientific method. Some of the New Atheists have been very reluctant to subscribe to Mackey's claim that there are no absolute ethics, stating that even in the absence of religion there must be right and wrong. But that assertion cannot be subjected to the scientific method, and even attempts to make ethics more like science, namely Utilitarianism, have broken up in myriad schools of thought.
The point that the xkcd author misses is that mathematics is regulated by philosophy (specifically the branch philosophy of mathematics, though drawing of course on the whole field). Mathematics is not some field of inquiry that exists on its own, pure and unchallengeable.
Not only is your first paragraph erroneous, as another poster pointed out, but you go on to make more mistakes:
For instance, homosexuality was perfectly acceptable in ancient Greece and Rome.
This isn't so at all. Pederasty was acceptable, but possibly only among the upper classes. Sexual abuse of slaves was also acceptable. But only the "active" man could get away with this behaviour, and that's only if he did it on the side while also maintaining a marriage to a woman. The "passive" partner in the sex act was absolutely despised by society. For long documentation of what Romans thought about homosexual men, see the Satyricon of Petronius.
Re:Probably was the best course of action
on
EU ACTA Chief Resigns
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Guess what, cockroaches? The democracy genie is outta the bottle, and it has been for 15 years. These desperate, piddly attempts of yours to stuff it back in the bottle won't work for long.
It's funny for me to read this not two minutes after I finished Roger Hutchinson's book High Sixites, a sweeping view of 1960s youth culture. The final pages are an interview with the artist Jeff Nuttall held in 1991, at the end of the Thatcher era. Nuttall poignantly recalls that he thought at the time that his generation had triumphed, that conservative forces should just step out of the way since they had already plainly lost. And then came two decades (and more) that did away with all that they had accomplished, and with their hope itself.
For our own generation, the genie may well go back in the bottle...
There's the four option, namely that intelligent races quickly evolve onto some higher plane and they don't stick around their home planet or even the visible universe. Vernor Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime has some interesting speculations about the possibility of a technological singularity and how it might explain the apparent lack of other intelligent civilizations.
2. It really is impossible to go FTL, meaning we're stuck in our system, and had probably stop treating it more like a sewer than not.
You wouldn't need to go faster than light to expand through the universe. Von Neumann probes for instance could bring signs of civilization throughout the galaxy even if they were moving relatively slowly.
Ha! I'm going to sell it without attribution. What are you going to do about it, Pirate Party?!
The Pirate Party opposes the present understanding of copyright, but it does not oppose the moral right of the author to be credited. It can be argued that copyright is a recent innovation (the early US legislation noted that it is a government fiat to spur creation, not a natural right) and alien to most people, but claims that authors have the right to be credited stretch far back into antiquity.
Basically, copyright violation and plagiarism are two different issues.
Dear libertarians and rationalists who think manned space missions are a waste of money because robots can do the job cheaper...
I think it's important to distinguish between at least two sets of people on this News for Nerds site who oppose manned missions and favour robotic probes instead. On one hand, perhaps there are people who aren't inclined to dream, see no romantic vision in man expanding into the cosmos, and may make a good argument that mankind can have a bold future without ever living the planet.
On the other hand, there's people who have read Ray Kurzweil's conjectures/ravings in The Singularity is Near and other books. This crowd doesn't lack dreams of humanity spreading through the galaxy. Rather, they might simply say that we should wait a few decades or a century until human beings will have supposedly overcome biological limitations that hamper spaceflight: radiation exposure, need for certain sustenance, limited lifespans that would force unrealistic generational starship designs, etc . That is, such people may figure that human beings will eventually be robotic probes, and once the two are the same, then we can really begin with longterm space exploration that is more than just a stunt.
The sharing scene for the music I listen to mainly transitioned from P2P networks or Bittorrent sites to indexes of Megaupload/Rapidshare/whatever uploads. The advantages cited were the inability to track IPs and more dependability since one didn't have to wait around for seeders. These recent developments might be enough to send people back to Bittorrent, especially as legal challenges have not sufficed to bring down The Pirate Bay, let alone some of the (IMHO more useful) lesser known torrent communities.
If things go back to Bittorrent, remember that the community depends to a degree on you, so please seed.
It also believes that Buddha only created the religion and he was a normal, living guy.
Even the Theravada canon holds that a Buddha cannot be killed by fire, poison or drowning. That view of Buddha is less fanciful than other schools, but even there Buddha is hardly a "a normal, living guy".
Where did I excuse anything? Nowhere did I make any apology for Israel's occupation. Rather, my point was that the Israel settlers are rather different demographically than most people outside Israel seem to think. On my first trip to Israel, I too expected to meet lots of religious people, and it came as a shock that people had other motivations than belief in Jewish mythology for their political goals.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. As we're discussing here, deists in that time believed in a deity and that rights were granted by it. Atheists, on the other hand, reject the existence of a creator and objective ethics. Deists believed in dualism, while atheists do not favour dualism.
A poster before me has cited one, and here is another one.
Perpetuating this quotation in isolation is dishonest. See, for example here:
In any event, I assume that was the poster above was getting at by "religious", was that these men were theists and their understanding of rights was that they are endowed by a Creator. That's pretty par for the course in the Enlightenment era.
There's still plenty of private funding even in countries with strong welfare states and comparatively little patronage. I work in Finland in a branch of linguistics that was fortunately founded by some wealthy men a century ago, and the endowments they left behind are still vital funding today. The heiress of a major multinational corporation studied at our department, and since she has such nice memories, we've recently been given millions in grants. We wouldn't get much done with the public funds available to us.
You think it's only Hollywood that has made dreck out of the potentials of science fiction? Even science-fiction authors who begin their careers writing imaginative works, sometimes even seeking a prose style that can compete with the canon of great literature, eventually give up and decide to start churn out one lame sequel after another. Just look at what has happened to Orson Scott Card and Larry Niven over the last 15 years, and Arthur C. Clarke before he died. They decided to publish hastily written airport paperbacks with little attention to detail, just another space opera plot in a universe they created decades ago. And they might even relegate the task of actually writing to a co-author and just put their name on the cover to score sales.
One often meets the claim that science-fiction is a genre full of myriad possibilities, but if even once-legendary science-fiction authors are abandoning that, it doesn't make the field look any better.
While home video was certainly a net gain in availability of obscure films nationwide/worldwide, at a local level it destroyed many local cinemas who ran classic art films. It used to be that you could go to a screening of, say, an Ingmar Bergman film from several years prior, meet other cinephiles in your neighbourhood, and walk out of the cinema having passionate discussions with your peers about what you just saw.
Sure, nowadays you can torrent the film or get it from Netflix, and then go on IMDB or Flixster to post a review or get into a masturbatory flame war with anonymous people who can't spell, but that in-real-life community aspect is gone except in a very few places.
Blaming the fall of the Roman Empire and certain post-Roman developments on Christianity was a hobbyhorse of Gibbon. Historians after him have revised their views, and most would make a case that the seeds of the fall of the Western Empire were sown already by economic and political crises in the third century, when Christianity was still a minor underground sect.
Furthermore, the relationship between Christianity and state was strongest in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, which didn't fall in the mid-first millennium and in fact lasted for another thousand years, carrying on the tradition of classical learning and high literacy.
I'd really encourage you to read a recently published history of the fall of the Roman Empire and the early medieval era. The general public tends to have a stereotype of this portion of history that was overturned long ago.
Historians no longer use the term Dark Ages and haven't for decades. Late antiquity and the early medieval era was more complicated than that.
Blaming the fall of the Roman Empire and certain post-Roman developments on Christianity was a hobbyhorse of Gibbon. Historians after him have revised their views, and most would make a case that the seeds of the fall of the Western Empire were sown already by economic and political crises in the third century, when Christianity was still a minor underground sect. Furthermore, the relationship between Christianity and state was strongest in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, which didn't fall in the mid-first millennium and for another thousand years carried on the tradition of classical learning and high literacy.
You sure enjoy moving the goalposts, don't you?
While I've never seen this done for daily newspapers, in some pirated communities I participate in, this is done with weekly magazines.
Historians no longer use the term "Dark Ages" and haven't for decades. Late antiquity and the early medieval era were more complicated than that. Furthermore, you seem to be overlooking that half of Europe was the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire, where there the tradition of popular literacy and classical learning lasted through the whole era.
While Baghdad no doubt continued to have a few important texts, the majority of the work achieved when Baghdad was a centre of learning was already destroyed during the Mongol Siege of Baghdad in 1258.
That's what the world was like before copyright: there were artists and there was art, and it was whatever a rich guy said it was.
This is an ignorant assertion. Even in eras when artists depended on patronage, they produced an enormous amount of art that ignored the wishes of, or even outright lampooned, their patrons. Just look at seemingly half of the Roman canon.
Producing films and television programmes with state funding (perhaps drawn in part from license fees) works with neither of those effects in quite a few countries.
See Swinburne's Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. ) for a case that scientific or historical errors in the Bible (or Qur'an, Vedas, Mahayana canon, etc.) do not necessarily undermine religious claims.
That is a spurious quotation. Please don't perpetuate stuff like that. Anyone who has read Plato and has seen the ambiguous view of writing in the Socratic dialogues can tell right off that an attribution to Socrates is bogus.
That's only one part of it. From Wikipedia:
So mathematics cannot be even be done without reference to philosophy of mathematics, and the simplest equation, "2+2=4" makes a boatload of assumptions gained from philosophy.
There are plenty of things that human beings consider to be true that are not due to application of the scientific method. Where's the control group, for example, in "I think, therefore I am"?
Furthermore, human beings do not usually draw their ethical beliefs from application of the scientific method. Some of the New Atheists have been very reluctant to subscribe to Mackey's claim that there are no absolute ethics, stating that even in the absence of religion there must be right and wrong. But that assertion cannot be subjected to the scientific method, and even attempts to make ethics more like science, namely Utilitarianism, have broken up in myriad schools of thought.
The point that the xkcd author misses is that mathematics is regulated by philosophy (specifically the branch philosophy of mathematics, though drawing of course on the whole field). Mathematics is not some field of inquiry that exists on its own, pure and unchallengeable.
This isn't so at all. Pederasty was acceptable, but possibly only among the upper classes. Sexual abuse of slaves was also acceptable. But only the "active" man could get away with this behaviour, and that's only if he did it on the side while also maintaining a marriage to a woman. The "passive" partner in the sex act was absolutely despised by society. For long documentation of what Romans thought about homosexual men, see the Satyricon of Petronius.
It's funny for me to read this not two minutes after I finished Roger Hutchinson's book High Sixites, a sweeping view of 1960s youth culture. The final pages are an interview with the artist Jeff Nuttall held in 1991, at the end of the Thatcher era. Nuttall poignantly recalls that he thought at the time that his generation had triumphed, that conservative forces should just step out of the way since they had already plainly lost. And then came two decades (and more) that did away with all that they had accomplished, and with their hope itself.
For our own generation, the genie may well go back in the bottle...
There's the four option, namely that intelligent races quickly evolve onto some higher plane and they don't stick around their home planet or even the visible universe. Vernor Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime has some interesting speculations about the possibility of a technological singularity and how it might explain the apparent lack of other intelligent civilizations.
You wouldn't need to go faster than light to expand through the universe. Von Neumann probes for instance could bring signs of civilization throughout the galaxy even if they were moving relatively slowly.
The Pirate Party opposes the present understanding of copyright, but it does not oppose the moral right of the author to be credited. It can be argued that copyright is a recent innovation (the early US legislation noted that it is a government fiat to spur creation, not a natural right) and alien to most people, but claims that authors have the right to be credited stretch far back into antiquity.
Basically, copyright violation and plagiarism are two different issues.
I think it's important to distinguish between at least two sets of people on this News for Nerds site who oppose manned missions and favour robotic probes instead. On one hand, perhaps there are people who aren't inclined to dream, see no romantic vision in man expanding into the cosmos, and may make a good argument that mankind can have a bold future without ever living the planet.
On the other hand, there's people who have read Ray Kurzweil's conjectures/ravings in The Singularity is Near and other books. This crowd doesn't lack dreams of humanity spreading through the galaxy. Rather, they might simply say that we should wait a few decades or a century until human beings will have supposedly overcome biological limitations that hamper spaceflight: radiation exposure, need for certain sustenance, limited lifespans that would force unrealistic generational starship designs, etc . That is, such people may figure that human beings will eventually be robotic probes, and once the two are the same, then we can really begin with longterm space exploration that is more than just a stunt.
The sharing scene for the music I listen to mainly transitioned from P2P networks or Bittorrent sites to indexes of Megaupload/Rapidshare/whatever uploads. The advantages cited were the inability to track IPs and more dependability since one didn't have to wait around for seeders. These recent developments might be enough to send people back to Bittorrent, especially as legal challenges have not sufficed to bring down The Pirate Bay, let alone some of the (IMHO more useful) lesser known torrent communities.
If things go back to Bittorrent, remember that the community depends to a degree on you, so please seed.
Even the Theravada canon holds that a Buddha cannot be killed by fire, poison or drowning. That view of Buddha is less fanciful than other schools, but even there Buddha is hardly a "a normal, living guy".
Where did I excuse anything? Nowhere did I make any apology for Israel's occupation. Rather, my point was that the Israel settlers are rather different demographically than most people outside Israel seem to think. On my first trip to Israel, I too expected to meet lots of religious people, and it came as a shock that people had other motivations than belief in Jewish mythology for their political goals.