...The ONLY way to attack this problem is to go after the advertisers....
Most likely not, until nobody buys any of the merchandise they try to sell. We get plenty of paper junk mail which is much more expensive than the electronic variety everybody is complaining about. In either case, electronic or paper it must be worth the advertisers while to do this, otherwise it would stop. Obviously, there must be people who think their penis can be enlarged or that they can get rich quickly and without effort.
....You get nothing from the employer except a job, but that job may be your last one for a few years....
This is where society would need to step in and either outlaw such agreements entirely, as California has done. A compromise might be to make it expensive for companies to ask employees to sign such agreements. This might be better than actually flat outlawing them. Any company that wishes to make such an agreement with an employee, could be forced by law to pay the salary +50% for the duration of such an agreement.
....it's the one it is presented to who has the freedom to tell the company to go fuck themselves....
That might work if there were only one or two companies in a given field that made these noncompete agreements as a condition of employment. As soon as most them or all of them make this as part of their standard employment practice, such a stance on part of the employee is no longer practical. When that happens, society must step in and outlaw such agreements completely or make it unpalatable for employers to include them in their employment agreements. Requiring employers who make such agreements to pay a full salary +50% for the duration of such an agreement might strongly discourage employers to routinely require such agreements.
...Non-compete is bullshit and should be illegal/unenforceable....
Maybe he instead of disallowing these agreements entirely, an employer who wanted to make such an agreement would have to pay the employee at least 50% more then normal salary for the duration of the agreement. That would give a disincentive to employers to routinely make such agreements as a condition of employment. For the employee, there would be no financial hardship because they could not immediately find a suitable job. They could take a nice vacation and/or if bored, try something new in another line of work. It seems to me that such a law would be a good compromise.
...Given the high pay and pleasant working conditions around here, they obviously want to keep us here....
Apparently IBM did want to keep the guy and offered him full pay for the duration of the noncompete agreement. In effect, they were offering him a paid vacation, so it would have been no financial hardship to keep his promise.
Keeping promises is apparently not nearly as important to people anymore, as it used to be in bygone days. Solemn promises made on wedding days are broken more often than kept nowadays.
....Why don't we make IBM enforce their own contracts, instead of having the taxpayer enforce them...
How do you expect IBM to do that? Should they send "enforcers" with guns, sort of like the mafia does?
Don't you think that people should be held to their promise, regardless of what the promise is? If a society thinks that a person being forced to make certain promises in order to get a job should be illegal, such as California has done, then that would be a way to address the problem. Apparently the state of New York has not yet seen fit to disallow such promises.
If a person moves to a different state can the state they left behind still enforce their laws on that person? Can the state of New York force the state of California to enforce actions that are illegal in the state of California? Does the federal government through the court system have that right and obligation?
....Then you start talking about zero point energy in nothing more than a hand-waving fashion that is even less compelling than dark matter.....
The difference between conjectured dark matter in the distant reaches of space and the zero point energy, instead the zero point energy has been experimentally measured right here on Earth. It manifests itself in various ways, one of them is called the Casimir effect. This zero point energy, pervades all of space and affects all atomic processes.
(...when we know the interaction is the electroweak interaction...)
This is only one facet of the electric interaction to which all leptons respond to.
(...On large scales, gravity is much stronger than the electromagnetic interaction...)
That is flat out wrong unless the matter subject to gravity is strictly neutral, such as it is, fortunately, right around here where we live. The fact is that most matter in the universe is not nicely electrically neutral, but consists of positive and negative pieces of atoms moving in various paths, as dictated by Galactic, intergalactic or local electric fields. A naked electron or proton existing somewhere between here and the sun is 39 orders of magnitude more sensitive to "feeling" and moving in response to an electric field existing in space than a gravitational field, such as from the Earth are from the sun.
We have abundant evidence of immense magnetic fields associated with galaxies, stars, and planets. The intense magnetic fields observed to exist on the Sun are generated by a correspondingly great electric currents. There is only one way to generate a magnetic field, which is by moving electrical charges (currents). There is also only one way to generate x-rays or gamma rays and that is by means of electricity or electrical atomic activity.
....Quite a bit of the energy release in a nuclear explosion is released as energetic neutrons and neutrinos....
That is true, but even then in the end these are absorbed and end up as electromagnetic energy. Neutrinos may travel quite far before this happens to them, but at some point they to will interact with with an atom somewhere and produce electromagnetic energy.
(...Black holes is a consequence of relativity...)
Not at all, in fact relativity prohibits the existence of black holes. Even a theoretical black holes cannot be observed by definition since no light or anything else can escape them, according to the theory. According to relativity, a black hole would have to have infinite mass.
(...Take a look at the weak lensing results on the Bullet cluster for example....)
Quite often in science we make an observation and then try to interpret that observation. After a while, the interpretation is equated with the observation itself.
The lensing, in other words the bending of light has been INTERPRETED to be due to a massive object's gravity. We do observe that light is slightly deflected when it passes by the sun or other massive object. That is all we observe and then we speculate about its cause. In 1929 Edwin Hubble observed that starlight shifted in its spectrum toward the red. This has been known ever since as the "red shift". That is all we observe, starlight shifted to the red. This has been INTERPRETED to be caused by motion as in the familiar Doppler effect. There is evidence that the red shift is caused by the steadily increasing zero point energy of space itself.
There is now increasing evidence that the 39 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity electric interaction is responsible for many of the otherwise inexplicable observations coming from modern telescopes and space probes. I do not understand why the incorporation of the electric interaction into the large-scale operation of the universe should be so controversial and greatly opposed by many cosmologists.
Indeed correct, but are not all photons a manifestation of the electric interaction? In reactions involving the strong nuclear force all energy produced eventually converted to and released as electromagnetic energy. When an atomic or hydrogen bomb explodes, all sorts of exotic fragments of atoms are flying around. However, in the end all that energy created by the conversion of mass into energy is converted into and dissipated in the form of electromagnetic radiation. Nowhere has the force of gravity been observed to be involved in any of this.
Why do cosmologists have to resort to convoluted theories involving gravity and come up with undiscovered and exotic constructs such as dark matter and black holes. The well-known principles of modern electrodynamics can interpret the strange observations coming from space probes and modern telescopes. The relatively weak force of gravity is only secondarily involved.
....We simply must agree to disagree, and move on....
I suppose that you are right about that for now. After you draw your last breath and I draw mine, we will learn who was right and who was wrong. I personally believe that I have made a safer bet than you.
...Saying that electromagnetic radiation is produced by "electrical" effects is something of a tautology, as electromagnetic radiation is, as you might guess, an electromagnetic effect....
Exactly, but then why is dark matter and energy postulated to exist, yet it has so far at least never been found to exist in anything other than mathematical speculations? If this postulated of dark matter produces any electromagnetic radiation, would that not of necessity mean that electrodynamic processes were involved?
Everything I have ever read as to why astronomers and astrophysicists tell us the universe must consist of mostly dark matter and energy, is to explain the motions of galaxies as governed by the force of gravity alone. If an addition to the force of gravity, the electric forces also taken into account in the operation of the large-scale universe, dark matter and energy become unnecessary. Incidentally, the same can be said for the fictional construct of black holes. They are also a purely mathematical construct without observational or experimental evidence. All of the puzzling observations coming in from probes sent out into space and advanced telescopes can be explained in a more logical manner, if BOTH the force of gravity and the electrical force are taken into account in the large-scale operation of the universe. One or the other alone leads scientists to scratch their heads trying to puzzle out the "weird" data coming from scientific instruments.
It is observed, that most matter in the universe is not nicely electrically neutral as we have here on earth, but exists primarily in the form of electrically charged particles in violent motion. Ignoring the electrical force which is 39 orders of magnitude greater than gravity, cannot possibly give us a complete picture of events nearby or in the distant reaches of the universe.
...but since a true supreme being would have to be so much more than human, it is impossible for a human to "know the mind of God"....
You are most definitely right about that. We cannot know the mind of God. However, is that not true also of the human mind? How can you know the mind of your significant other or wife or any other human being unless that other person chooses to reveal it to you. Once another person chooses to reveal what is in their mind to you, you have to decide whether to believe them are not.
Even if you do not accept the Bible as God's revelation of some of His mind to mankind, you certainly should be able to consider that it is a very unusual book. Actually it is a collection of 66 books penned by 40 different writers over a time span of at least 1500 years. Much of it depicts human history written down before it ever took place. For thousands of years, all human writing had to be laboriously copied by hand. When the art of printing was finally invented by Johannes Gutenberg, guess which human writing was first printed? Guess which human writing is distributed more widely than any other and translated into more languages and dialects than any other? Guess which book its enemies have endeavored to destroy more than any other? There are many religious writings, but none of them come even remotely close to the content and distribution of this remarkable book.
(...Why would such a being even be aware of these tiny little creatures in a remote part of a galaxy in a universe that is filled with billions of galaxies...)
You are right, indeed why should God care about us human ants crawling around on this third rock from the Sun? However, to me that is the very reason why I believe his revelation in the Bible. There we are informed that this awesome transcendent God, existing outside of the limits of time and space, telling us that he cared enough to confine himself to a human body, becoming mortal. He came here in the person of Jesus Christ, to invite anyone who wishes, to share in his eternal existence with him in his presence forever. You can, as I have accept the invitation by faith or reject it. There is no way that either you or I or any human being can figure this out logically. It can only be believed or not.
...through the annihilation of positrons and electrons....
You not say that electrons or positrons are not charged and are not moving when they annihilate? What I am saying is that gamma rays are produced by electrical effects rather than gravitational interactions involving mass. Maybe I am wrong, but I was under the impression that one of the big reasons of postulating dark matter is to account for the motion of galaxies. The reason that dark matter and dark energy have not been found is really very simple: they are the figment of mathematical imaginations, not based on physical reality as determined by observations and experiments.
There is a confusion in science today that mixes up mathematics and observed physical reality. Mathematics is a good means of describing physical reality, nothing more.
....where they should be able to detect gamma rays caused by dark matter...
This assumes that dark matter generates gamma rays, a form of electromagnetic radiation. Has anybody ever scientifically demonstrated that it is possible to generate such electromagnetic radiation by means OTHER than moving electrical charges? If they do detect such gamma radiation, how will they ascertain that this radiation is NOT caused by an electrical phenomena rather than some unknown action of undiscovered dark matter?
Anytime the underlying assumptions of a computer input or algorithm are faulty, even the 3 1/2 million hours of computation on a supercomputer will not lead to the discovery of the scientific truth. The principle of garbage in garbage out still applies. The bottom line is simple: the dark matter emperor is as naked as a newborn.
....You are right, if a/the supreme being exists and confronts me, I would dismiss it/him/her out of hand and assume any supernatural special effects were due to clever technology or someone slipping me some acid....
A person with an attitude such as yours, should not call himself an agnostic, but an atheist, and ignorant atheist at that. Jesus makes it quite clear that belief is an act of the will. You make it clear that you do not believe in God because you have decided in your sovereign will not to and there could be no evidence whatsoever that could change your mind.
Even though you have firmly decided in your mind to disbelieve in God, especially the God of the Bible, you might still be open to a thought experiment.
Assume for a moment, that there is a God, a heaven and hell. Assume that this God has all the attributes of a perfect human being, one that has never done anything that you or most people would consider "evil". In addition, assume that this God has the ability, because he is the creator of all, to impose his will on his creation, which includes you and I. In fact, assume that YOU were this god and wamt to decide on what basis a human being could become a member of your intimate family. In short, you have to come up with a basis upon which to decide whether a person should go to heaven or hell. Since you are good, your overriding desire would be to give every individual human being alive today or that has ever lived on this planet an equal chance.
What characteristics, behaviors or abilities of any individual human being would you apply in order to decide whether to send a person to hell or accept them into your house forever. Would you apply intelligence? Athletic ability? Would an eligible person have to be highly "moral" by whatever definition you gave to that term? Would there even be a deciding factor, or would you simply accept everyone into your house to live with you forever?
....and acts as if it follows a rational set of laws that humans are slowly discovering....
Has the thought ever occurred to you that if there is a set of rational laws in the universe, there might be a rational lawgiver? We know that human laws don't just happen, but are made by (mostly) rational human beings. We just elected or reelected a bunch of them. Why then should the natural laws which you call rational not also be because of rational processes of thought by a transcendent rational being, God. If there is such a rational transcendent being, who created everything including us, not want to communicate with another rational being he created?
If another human being came to you, claiming to be God, what evidence would you ask for to substantiate such a claim so you would believe that this person was indeed God in human form?
A big problem with the scientific method is that it is only applicable to the present. To determine the truth of history, we have to rely on witnesses, human or archaeological. The most definitive witnesses of history are written records that have come down to us. There is no way to prove by the scientific method that Aristotle Jesus Christ or George Washington were ever alive on planet Earth. The scientific method cannot be used to determine the truth of a matter recorded by a witness from the past. If you are on the jury of a court proceeding, nothing is ever proved to you, but you have to believe the evidence presented, including the testimony of witnesses. You may question the credibility of the witnesses of written history, but it should be uniformly applied principles to guide you, not emotion. The Bible certainly passes all tests of credibility and truth that is normally applied to all historic writings.
In the end, believing is a matter of choice, of wanting to or not. Someone who does not want to believe, will not believe, no matter how many tests he might make. Would the ability to instantly quiet a fierce storm be sufficient evidence? How about being able to walk on water? Would someone who can feed 5000 men plus women and children by multiplying bread and fish be an adequate test? How about the biggest one of all, raising the dead and shortly thereafter getting cruelly murdered and then rising from the dead himself? Jesus Christ did all these and more. He claimed to be God come to earth as a human, living in a mortal body as you and I do. If someone came to you and made a claim to deity, what evidence would it take for you to accept the claim as truth?
....The fear of dying is so terrible that it guides most part of human philosophy and religion.....
Would that not depend on what else God might have revealed about death? Even on the human plane, none of us can know another person, unless that person reveals him or herself to us. We just had an election where someone named Obama was elected for President. The general population only knows a very limited amount about this man. Only his relatives and intimate friends with whom he personally attracts would know what he has revealed to them about himself.
If this is true of human, how much more is this true or that God who's entirely other than we are? The only way we could know more, as if God chooses to reveal more of himself. There exists a written communication in the form of 66 books penned by 40 writers over a period of about 2500 years, which claims to have been authored by the transcendent Creator God of the universe.
Even if you do not accept the Bible as truth, or as God's message to mankind, you certainly should be able to consider that it is a very unusual book. Yet it has a very unified central authorship and message concerning the dealings of God with mankind. Much of it depicts human history written down before it ever took place. Some of this history, written in advance, is taking place right before our very eyes in our time.
For thousands of years, all human writing had to be laboriously copied by hand. When the art of printing was finally invented in 1439 by Johannes Gutenberg, guess which human writing was first printed? Guess which human writing is distributed more widely than any other and translated into more languages and dialects, by far, than any other? Guess which book its enemies have endeavored to destroy more than any other? There are many religious writings, but none of them come even remotely close to the content and distribution of this remarkable book.
In the King James Version of the Old Testament, the phrase "saith the LORD" occurs 802 times, according to my computer search program. Did God really say those things or are these 802 lies? In Genesis alone, the phrase "God said" occurs 28 times.
I believe that that the God that exists is a communicating God who has given us truth, not exhaustive truth, but enough truth to know and understand what He wants us to know and then orient our lives by. One of these truths is that death is not the end of existence, but only a change of location. The is why anyone who truly believes what God has communicated and done through Jesus no longer fears death. All religious founders EXCEPT Jesus are very much dead and don't even lay claim to having conquered death on our behalf, let alone actually done it.
Depending on your definition of proof, you are right we cannot really prove anything. Even in a court of law nothing is ever proved, such as guilt or innocence. The judge and jury weigh the evidence presented by each side, including the testimony and credibility of witnesses and then decide which evidence to believe. In the same way there is certain evidence for and against belief in God. When it really comes down to it, we do nothing on the sure knowledge, but only on belief in what we think is true.
....to always check the assumptions, be a skeptic and never accept any bit of information on faith...
The problem is that rock-bottom assumptions cannot be objectively checked. We assume that the laws and constants of physics have not changed over time, but there is no way we can check this. We assume that our senses are telling us a reliable picture of reality, but there is no way we can really know. In short, there is no way to prove anything. All we can do is weigh the evidence and then either believe or disbelieve what we think the evidence is telling us. For some people there is sufficient evidence to allow them to believe in God and for others that same evidence is insufficient and so they refuse to believe.
You can't really prove anything in the absolute sense, but only consider whether the evidence you have is sufficient to BELIEVE that evidence. In a sense, everything in life is based on belief, not sure knowledge or proof. When you go to bed at night you don't know for sure that you will wake up in the morning, but you hope and believe that you will. Furthermore, most of what you believe is not something you experience first-hand, but things that you were told by others. Anybody who tells you anything is in effect a witness, just as witness in a court of law. One of the major criteria for whether a witness is believed, is the integrity and credibility of that person. Even in things that you experience or think you're experiencing, you are relying on your senses. There is plenty of evidence that our senses are not always reliable.
Humans have the tendency to attribute anything they cannot explain or understand to what we have labeled "supernatural". I believe that it is impossible for us to tell what we have labeled "supernatural" from sufficiently advanced technology. We spend large amounts of money on things like the SETI project, to try to discover whether we are alone or not in this great big universe. If a visitor from the other side of our galaxy, from the edge of the universe, or even from another universe were to come here, what would it take to convince us that this was really true? If such a visitor demonstrated the ability to instantly control the weather, to walk on water, to multiply bread & fish, make wine out of plain water and demonstrate power over even death itself, would we believe him? If such a visitor demonstrated complete independence from the constraints of time and space, claiming to be God, what would our reaction be? I believe that the transcendent Creator God visited us here on this little third rock from the Sun almost 2000 years ago and is known by the name of Jesus of Nazareth.
....but voting for someone because they are a charismatic leader generally hasn't ended well...
The Germans did not elect Hitler because he was a charismatic leader, but he campaigned on a platform of change. One of his campaign promises was " when I get done with Germany, it will not be recognizable". Indeed, he made good on that promise, though not in the way that anybody thought at the time. Only 12 years later the world had changed forever and Germany was not recognizable, being a smoking heap of ruins.
I hope that the change Obama succeeds in making will not disappoint those that voted for him, in the same way that many are sorely disappointed in Bush even though they voted for him initially.
...the plastic itself becomes dangerous when cut...
well yes, but then LIFE itself is dangerous. You will never get out of it alive! Honestly, if you don't face greater danger every day than cutting yourself on a piece of plastic, or even on a piece of paper, you are living a very sheltered life. I DARE you to get out of your mothers basement and RUN across the street. The odds are pretty good you will make it, IF you look both ways first! This packaging thing is a non-issue for most people.
... I think that it only makes sense that federal elections are handled by the federal government....
In a sense, there are no federal elections in the United States. For president we have the electoral system and each state elects and sends two senators and some representatives in Washington. Because of the electoral system, a president can be elected even though not voted for by the majority of the population in the United States as a whole. The founders of the United States were quite distrustful of a powerful central government. Many states internally mirror this system of government. The system makes it more difficult for the highly populated cities of the country or of the state to steamroller the rural areas.
Slashdot Mirror
...The ONLY way to attack this problem is to go after the advertisers....
Most likely not, until nobody buys any of the merchandise they try to sell. We get plenty of paper junk mail which is much more expensive than the electronic variety everybody is complaining about. In either case, electronic or paper it must be worth the advertisers while to do this, otherwise it would stop. Obviously, there must be people who think their penis can be enlarged or that they can get rich quickly and without effort.
....You get nothing from the employer except a job, but that job may be your last one for a few years....
This is where society would need to step in and either outlaw such agreements entirely, as California has done. A compromise might be to make it expensive for companies to ask employees to sign such agreements. This might be better than actually flat outlawing them. Any company that wishes to make such an agreement with an employee, could be forced by law to pay the salary +50% for the duration of such an agreement.
....it's the one it is presented to who has the freedom to tell the company to go fuck themselves....
That might work if there were only one or two companies in a given field that made these noncompete agreements as a condition of employment. As soon as most them or all of them make this as part of their standard employment practice, such a stance on part of the employee is no longer practical. When that happens, society must step in and outlaw such agreements completely or make it unpalatable for employers to include them in their employment agreements. Requiring employers who make such agreements to pay a full salary +50% for the duration of such an agreement might strongly discourage employers to routinely require such agreements.
...Non-compete is bullshit and should be illegal/unenforceable....
Maybe he instead of disallowing these agreements entirely, an employer who wanted to make such an agreement would have to pay the employee at least 50% more then normal salary for the duration of the agreement. That would give a disincentive to employers to routinely make such agreements as a condition of employment. For the employee, there would be no financial hardship because they could not immediately find a suitable job. They could take a nice vacation and/or if bored, try something new in another line of work. It seems to me that such a law would be a good compromise.
...Given the high pay and pleasant working conditions around here, they obviously want to keep us here....
Apparently IBM did want to keep the guy and offered him full pay for the duration of the noncompete agreement. In effect, they were offering him a paid vacation, so it would have been no financial hardship to keep his promise.
Keeping promises is apparently not nearly as important to people anymore, as it used to be in bygone days. Solemn promises made on wedding days are broken more often than kept nowadays.
....Why don't we make IBM enforce their own contracts, instead of having the taxpayer enforce them...
How do you expect IBM to do that? Should they send "enforcers" with guns, sort of like the mafia does?
Don't you think that people should be held to their promise, regardless of what the promise is? If a society thinks that a person being forced to make certain promises in order to get a job should be illegal, such as California has done, then that would be a way to address the problem. Apparently the state of New York has not yet seen fit to disallow such promises.
If a person moves to a different state can the state they left behind still enforce their laws on that person? Can the state of New York force the state of California to enforce actions that are illegal in the state of California? Does the federal government through the court system have that right and obligation?
....Then you start talking about zero point energy in nothing more than a hand-waving fashion that is even less compelling than dark matter.....
The difference between conjectured dark matter in the distant reaches of space and the zero point energy, instead the zero point energy has been experimentally measured right here on Earth. It manifests itself in various ways, one of them is called the Casimir effect. This zero point energy, pervades all of space and affects all atomic processes.
(...when we know the interaction is the electroweak interaction...)
This is only one facet of the electric interaction to which all leptons respond to.
(...On large scales, gravity is much stronger than the electromagnetic interaction...)
That is flat out wrong unless the matter subject to gravity is strictly neutral, such as it is, fortunately, right around here where we live. The fact is that most matter in the universe is not nicely electrically neutral, but consists of positive and negative pieces of atoms moving in various paths, as dictated by Galactic, intergalactic or local electric fields. A naked electron or proton existing somewhere between here and the sun is 39 orders of magnitude more sensitive to "feeling" and moving in response to an electric field existing in space than a gravitational field, such as from the Earth are from the sun.
We have abundant evidence of immense magnetic fields associated with galaxies, stars, and planets. The intense magnetic fields observed to exist on the Sun are generated by a correspondingly great electric currents. There is only one way to generate a magnetic field, which is by moving electrical charges (currents). There is also only one way to generate x-rays or gamma rays and that is by means of electricity or electrical atomic activity.
....Quite a bit of the energy release in a nuclear explosion is released as energetic neutrons and neutrinos....
That is true, but even then in the end these are absorbed and end up as electromagnetic energy. Neutrinos may travel quite far before this happens to them, but at some point they to will interact with with an atom somewhere and produce electromagnetic energy.
(...Black holes is a consequence of relativity...)
Not at all, in fact relativity prohibits the existence of black holes. Even a theoretical black holes cannot be observed by definition since no light or anything else can escape them, according to the theory. According to relativity, a black hole would have to have infinite mass.
(...Take a look at the weak lensing results on the Bullet cluster for example....)
Quite often in science we make an observation and then try to interpret that observation. After a while, the interpretation is equated with the observation itself.
The lensing, in other words the bending of light has been INTERPRETED to be due to a massive object's gravity. We do observe that light is slightly deflected when it passes by the sun or other massive object. That is all we observe and then we speculate about its cause. In 1929 Edwin Hubble observed that starlight shifted in its spectrum toward the red. This has been known ever since as the "red shift". That is all we observe, starlight shifted to the red. This has been INTERPRETED to be caused by motion as in the familiar Doppler effect. There is evidence that the red shift is caused by the steadily increasing zero point energy of space itself.
There is now increasing evidence that the 39 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity electric interaction is responsible for many of the otherwise inexplicable observations coming from modern telescopes and space probes. I do not understand why the incorporation of the electric interaction into the large-scale operation of the universe should be so controversial and greatly opposed by many cosmologists.
...Gamma is just energetic photons...
Indeed correct, but are not all photons a manifestation of the electric interaction? In reactions involving the strong nuclear force all energy produced eventually converted to and released as electromagnetic energy. When an atomic or hydrogen bomb explodes, all sorts of exotic fragments of atoms are flying around. However, in the end all that energy created by the conversion of mass into energy is converted into and dissipated in the form of electromagnetic radiation. Nowhere has the force of gravity been observed to be involved in any of this.
Why do cosmologists have to resort to convoluted theories involving gravity and come up with undiscovered and exotic constructs such as dark matter and black holes. The well-known principles of modern electrodynamics can interpret the strange observations coming from space probes and modern telescopes. The relatively weak force of gravity is only secondarily involved.
....We simply must agree to disagree, and move on....
I suppose that you are right about that for now. After you draw your last breath and I draw mine, we will learn who was right and who was wrong. I personally believe that I have made a safer bet than you.
...Saying that electromagnetic radiation is produced by "electrical" effects is something of a tautology, as electromagnetic radiation is, as you might guess, an electromagnetic effect....
Exactly, but then why is dark matter and energy postulated to exist, yet it has so far at least never been found to exist in anything other than mathematical speculations? If this postulated of dark matter produces any electromagnetic radiation, would that not of necessity mean that electrodynamic processes were involved?
Everything I have ever read as to why astronomers and astrophysicists tell us the universe must consist of mostly dark matter and energy, is to explain the motions of galaxies as governed by the force of gravity alone. If an addition to the force of gravity, the electric forces also taken into account in the operation of the large-scale universe, dark matter and energy become unnecessary. Incidentally, the same can be said for the fictional construct of black holes. They are also a purely mathematical construct without observational or experimental evidence. All of the puzzling observations coming in from probes sent out into space and advanced telescopes can be explained in a more logical manner, if BOTH the force of gravity and the electrical force are taken into account in the large-scale operation of the universe. One or the other alone leads scientists to scratch their heads trying to puzzle out the "weird" data coming from scientific instruments.
It is observed, that most matter in the universe is not nicely electrically neutral as we have here on earth, but exists primarily in the form of electrically charged particles in violent motion. Ignoring the electrical force which is 39 orders of magnitude greater than gravity, cannot possibly give us a complete picture of events nearby or in the distant reaches of the universe.
...but since a true supreme being would have to be so much more than human, it is impossible for a human to "know the mind of God"....
You are most definitely right about that. We cannot know the mind of God. However, is that not true also of the human mind? How can you know the mind of your significant other or wife or any other human being unless that other person chooses to reveal it to you. Once another person chooses to reveal what is in their mind to you, you have to decide whether to believe them are not.
Even if you do not accept the Bible as God's revelation of some of His mind to mankind, you certainly should be able to consider that it is a very unusual book. Actually it is a collection of 66 books penned by 40 different writers over a time span of at least 1500 years. Much of it depicts human history written down before it ever took place. For thousands of years, all human writing had to be laboriously copied by hand. When the art of printing was finally invented by Johannes Gutenberg, guess which human writing was first printed? Guess which human writing is distributed more widely than any other and translated into more languages and dialects than any other? Guess which book its enemies have endeavored to destroy more than any other? There are many religious writings, but none of them come even remotely close to the content and distribution of this remarkable book.
(...Why would such a being even be aware of these tiny little creatures in a remote part of a galaxy in a universe that is filled with billions of galaxies...)
You are right, indeed why should God care about us human ants crawling around on this third rock from the Sun? However, to me that is the very reason why I believe his revelation in the Bible. There we are informed that this awesome transcendent God, existing outside of the limits of time and space, telling us that he cared enough to confine himself to a human body, becoming mortal. He came here in the person of Jesus Christ, to invite anyone who wishes, to share in his eternal existence with him in his presence forever. You can, as I have accept the invitation by faith or reject it. There is no way that either you or I or any human being can figure this out logically. It can only be believed or not.
...through the annihilation of positrons and electrons....
You not say that electrons or positrons are not charged and are not moving when they annihilate? What I am saying is that gamma rays are produced by electrical effects rather than gravitational interactions involving mass. Maybe I am wrong, but I was under the impression that one of the big reasons of postulating dark matter is to account for the motion of galaxies. The reason that dark matter and dark energy have not been found is really very simple: they are the figment of mathematical imaginations, not based on physical reality as determined by observations and experiments.
There is a confusion in science today that mixes up mathematics and observed physical reality. Mathematics is a good means of describing physical reality, nothing more.
....where they should be able to detect gamma rays caused by dark matter...
This assumes that dark matter generates gamma rays, a form of electromagnetic radiation. Has anybody ever scientifically demonstrated that it is possible to generate such electromagnetic radiation by means OTHER than moving electrical charges? If they do detect such gamma radiation, how will they ascertain that this radiation is NOT caused by an electrical phenomena rather than some unknown action of undiscovered dark matter?
Anytime the underlying assumptions of a computer input or algorithm are faulty, even the 3 1/2 million hours of computation on a supercomputer will not lead to the discovery of the scientific truth. The principle of garbage in garbage out still applies. The bottom line is simple: the dark matter emperor is as naked as a newborn.
....You are right, if a/the supreme being exists and confronts me, I would dismiss it/him/her out of hand and assume any supernatural special effects were due to clever technology or someone slipping me some acid....
A person with an attitude such as yours, should not call himself an agnostic, but an atheist, and ignorant atheist at that. Jesus makes it quite clear that belief is an act of the will. You make it clear that you do not believe in God because you have decided in your sovereign will not to and there could be no evidence whatsoever that could change your mind.
Even though you have firmly decided in your mind to disbelieve in God, especially the God of the Bible, you might still be open to a thought experiment.
Assume for a moment, that there is a God, a heaven and hell. Assume that this God has all the attributes of a perfect human being, one that has never done anything that you or most people would consider "evil". In addition, assume that this God has the ability, because he is the creator of all, to impose his will on his creation, which includes you and I. In fact, assume that YOU were this god and wamt to decide on what basis a human being could become a member of your intimate family. In short, you have to come up with a basis upon which to decide whether a person should go to heaven or hell. Since you are good, your overriding desire would be to give every individual human being alive today or that has ever lived on this planet an equal chance.
What characteristics, behaviors or abilities of any individual human being would you apply in order to decide whether to send a person to hell or accept them into your house forever. Would you apply intelligence? Athletic ability? Would an eligible person have to be highly "moral" by whatever definition you gave to that term? Would there even be a deciding factor, or would you simply accept everyone into your house to live with you forever?
....and acts as if it follows a rational set of laws that humans are slowly discovering....
Has the thought ever occurred to you that if there is a set of rational laws in the universe, there might be a rational lawgiver? We know that human laws don't just happen, but are made by (mostly) rational human beings. We just elected or reelected a bunch of them. Why then should the natural laws which you call rational not also be because of rational processes of thought by a transcendent rational being, God. If there is such a rational transcendent being, who created everything including us, not want to communicate with another rational being he created?
If another human being came to you, claiming to be God, what evidence would you ask for to substantiate such a claim so you would believe that this person was indeed God in human form?
A big problem with the scientific method is that it is only applicable to the present. To determine the truth of history, we have to rely on witnesses, human or archaeological. The most definitive witnesses of history are written records that have come down to us. There is no way to prove by the scientific method that Aristotle Jesus Christ or George Washington were ever alive on planet Earth. The scientific method cannot be used to determine the truth of a matter recorded by a witness from the past. If you are on the jury of a court proceeding, nothing is ever proved to you, but you have to believe the evidence presented, including the testimony of witnesses. You may question the credibility of the witnesses of written history, but it should be uniformly applied principles to guide you, not emotion. The Bible certainly passes all tests of credibility and truth that is normally applied to all historic writings.
....A few other tests...
In the end, believing is a matter of choice, of wanting to or not. Someone who does not want to believe, will not believe, no matter how many tests he might make. Would the ability to instantly quiet a fierce storm be sufficient evidence? How about being able to walk on water? Would someone who can feed 5000 men plus women and children by multiplying bread and fish be an adequate test? How about the biggest one of all, raising the dead and shortly thereafter getting cruelly murdered and then rising from the dead himself? Jesus Christ did all these and more. He claimed to be God come to earth as a human, living in a mortal body as you and I do. If someone came to you and made a claim to deity, what evidence would it take for you to accept the claim as truth?
....The fear of dying is so terrible that it guides most part of human philosophy and religion.....
Would that not depend on what else God might have revealed about death? Even on the human plane, none of us can know another person, unless that person reveals him or herself to us. We just had an election where someone named Obama was elected for President. The general population only knows a very limited amount about this man. Only his relatives and intimate friends with whom he personally attracts would know what he has revealed to them about himself.
If this is true of human, how much more is this true or that God who's entirely other than we are? The only way we could know more, as if God chooses to reveal more of himself. There exists a written communication in the form of 66 books penned by 40 writers over a period of about 2500 years, which claims to have been authored by the transcendent Creator God of the universe.
Even if you do not accept the Bible as truth, or as God's message to mankind, you certainly should be able to consider that it is a very unusual book. Yet it has a very unified central authorship and message concerning the dealings of God with mankind. Much of it depicts human history written down before it ever took place. Some of this history, written in advance, is taking place right before our very eyes in our time.
For thousands of years, all human writing had to be laboriously copied by hand. When the art of printing was finally invented in 1439 by Johannes Gutenberg, guess which human writing was first printed? Guess which human writing is distributed more widely than any other and translated into more languages and dialects, by far, than any other? Guess which book its enemies have endeavored to destroy more than any other? There are many religious writings, but none of them come even remotely close to the content and distribution of this remarkable book.
In the King James Version of the Old Testament, the phrase "saith the LORD" occurs 802 times, according to my computer search program. Did God really say those things or are these 802 lies? In Genesis alone, the phrase "God said" occurs 28 times.
I believe that that the God that exists is a communicating God who has given us truth, not exhaustive truth, but enough truth to know and understand what He wants us to know and then orient our lives by. One of these truths is that death is not the end of existence, but only a change of location. The is why anyone who truly believes what God has communicated and done through Jesus no longer fears death. All religious founders EXCEPT Jesus are very much dead and don't even lay claim to having conquered death on our behalf, let alone actually done it.
....Thus we are unable to prove....
Depending on your definition of proof, you are right we cannot really prove anything. Even in a court of law nothing is ever proved, such as guilt or innocence. The judge and jury weigh the evidence presented by each side, including the testimony and credibility of witnesses and then decide which evidence to believe. In the same way there is certain evidence for and against belief in God. When it really comes down to it, we do nothing on the sure knowledge, but only on belief in what we think is true.
....to always check the assumptions, be a skeptic and never accept any bit of information on faith...
The problem is that rock-bottom assumptions cannot be objectively checked. We assume that the laws and constants of physics have not changed over time, but there is no way we can check this. We assume that our senses are telling us a reliable picture of reality, but there is no way we can really know. In short, there is no way to prove anything. All we can do is weigh the evidence and then either believe or disbelieve what we think the evidence is telling us. For some people there is sufficient evidence to allow them to believe in God and for others that same evidence is insufficient and so they refuse to believe.
....But you can disprove specific religions.....
You can't really prove anything in the absolute sense, but only consider whether the evidence you have is sufficient to BELIEVE that evidence. In a sense, everything in life is based on belief, not sure knowledge or proof. When you go to bed at night you don't know for sure that you will wake up in the morning, but you hope and believe that you will. Furthermore, most of what you believe is not something you experience first-hand, but things that you were told by others. Anybody who tells you anything is in effect a witness, just as witness in a court of law. One of the major criteria for whether a witness is believed, is the integrity and credibility of that person. Even in things that you experience or think you're experiencing, you are relying on your senses. There is plenty of evidence that our senses are not always reliable.
Humans have the tendency to attribute anything they cannot explain or understand to what we have labeled "supernatural". I believe that it is impossible for us to tell what we have labeled "supernatural" from sufficiently advanced technology. We spend large amounts of money on things like the SETI project, to try to discover whether we are alone or not in this great big universe. If a visitor from the other side of our galaxy, from the edge of the universe, or even from another universe were to come here, what would it take to convince us that this was really true? If such a visitor demonstrated the ability to instantly control the weather, to walk on water, to multiply bread & fish, make wine out of plain water and demonstrate power over even death itself, would we believe him? If such a visitor demonstrated complete independence from the constraints of time and space, claiming to be God, what would our reaction be? I believe that the transcendent Creator God visited us here on this little third rock from the Sun almost 2000 years ago and is known by the name of Jesus of Nazareth.
....but voting for someone because they are a charismatic leader generally hasn't ended well ...
The Germans did not elect Hitler because he was a charismatic leader, but he campaigned on a platform of change. One of his campaign promises was " when I get done with Germany, it will not be recognizable". Indeed, he made good on that promise, though not in the way that anybody thought at the time. Only 12 years later the world had changed forever and Germany was not recognizable, being a smoking heap of ruins.
I hope that the change Obama succeeds in making will not disappoint those that voted for him, in the same way that many are sorely disappointed in Bush even though they voted for him initially.
...the plastic itself becomes dangerous when cut...
well yes, but then LIFE itself is dangerous. You will never get out of it alive! Honestly, if you don't face greater danger every day than cutting yourself on a piece of plastic, or even on a piece of paper, you are living a very sheltered life. I DARE you to get out of your mothers basement and RUN across the street. The odds are pretty good you will make it, IF you look both ways first! This packaging thing is a non-issue for most people.
...Because it practically requires bladed weapons to open....
And that is so terrible? A sharp pair of scissors is quite good for this and reasonably safe for anyone that doesn't have two left hands.
... I think that it only makes sense that federal elections are handled by the federal government....
In a sense, there are no federal elections in the United States. For president we have the electoral system and each state elects and sends two senators and some representatives in Washington. Because of the electoral system, a president can be elected even though not voted for by the majority of the population in the United States as a whole. The founders of the United States were quite distrustful of a powerful central government. Many states internally mirror this system of government. The system makes it more difficult for the highly populated cities of the country or of the state to steamroller the rural areas.