The emotional involvement and belief structure make it religious, and the evidence disproving it makes it a myth.
Well, some people do take things a bit too seriously. On the other hand, if people kept telling me that atoms don't exist, and they wanted to teach my kids that, I might get emotional, and for good reason!
As for the other part, there is no evidence disproving evolution, or even signifigant evidence that suggests that it's wrong.
There are missing links. And as their classification would suggest, they're missing.
And when one is found, you now have two missing links! (We had A-Z and now have A-M and M-Z). We don't have to chart the path of every asteroid and dust particle in the solar system to be fairly sure of our theories about gravity.
Could she have meant both elected branches of government? Members of the judicial branch don't advertise their party allegiances, and supposedly aren't picked on that basis (as much). Plus having 60% of the judges won't dominate the system as much as 60% of the members of congress or 60% of the vote for president.
Today's myth is spontaneous generation and undirected evolution with no external intelligence guiding the process. There of course is no scientific proof of this.
Of course your can't prove that God or aliens didn't affect the development of life on earth. On the other hand, we know that naturalistic forces exist and, as far as we can tell, they are sufficient to explain what we see in the world around us. As long as that's true, science has to stick with the naturalistic explanation.
On the other hand, you could weave together the various theories about our origins (big bang, abiogenisis, evolution, cultural development) in a way that is meaningful to people. Once it isn't just dry facts, that would be a myth.
Translated: I can live however the hell I want to (as long as government is god).
There is no connection between the two ideas. A lot of people try to pervert science in order to support their own beliefs, but that doesn't make it true. Science is silent on issues of morality - it will tell you what will and what won't kill a person, but it won't tell you if you should or shouldn't kill them.
As for the government = god idea, I probably like it even less than you do, but I have no idea how you get from scientific theories to a deified government.
My attempt is anything but crude, as it is well informed and backed up by history and a scholarly understanding of the reality of the power of myths. They are as present and powerful today as they have ever been, you might agree.
Myths are quite powerful, even today. Myths about Israel's place in history intensify the conflicts in the Middle East. Other myths imply that an unborn child has a soul and that drastically alters the debate on induced abortion. And myths about the origin of the universe induce people to believe in Creationism, and that still has a profound effect in a few places.
Genesis my be special, but no matter how great its influence or even how true it is, it's still a religious story that explains the natural world and the human condition, so it's still a myth.
The parts about Jewish/Christian/Islamic religion being different that other religions and important in world history I'm not going to dispute. On the other hand, it has nothing to do with whether or not those religions contain mythology.
By the books, Genesis is non-mythological. It has no explanation for the existence of God.
If merely lacking the origin of god(s) makes a story a non-myth, then you can make any creation story a non-myth with white-out. Does that make sense?
...the broad consensus of Jewish scholars.
And that's the problem. If you ask any religious person "Are your religious stories like those of other religions?" they will usually scramble for some reason that their beiefs are special. And given that "myth" has picked up the connotation of "not true", there's even more reason to try to relabel own culture's stories as non-myths.
I don't mean to be rude, but from a non-believer's perspective, it looks like a crude attempt to make your beliefs seem better than other people's.
The non-mythological statement of Genesis 1:1 just hangs there to be accepted at face value or not, and it offers no myth to go with it.
Christian mythology
can also be taken to refer to the entire mythos surrounding the Christian religious system, including the various narratives of both the Old and New Testaments.
I sure most people want to treat other cultures' beliefs as myths and theirs as something more than that, but that doesn't change the fact that their creation myths are still myths. When you say "The hallmark of myth is the detailed origin of the gods." you're just arbitrarily drawing a line designed to exclude your own beliefs from the definition of a myth. If you're going to argue that Christian stories about supernatural events aren't myths, you might as well just argue that Christianity isn't a religion.
We could have another flu pandemic in which millions die. Is that an aquired "dis-value" or negative aquired value?
Yes, it's aquired, the flu is bad because it kills people. If the virus was inherently bad, that would mean that if it were alone in the universe, with nothing to infect, ever, it would still have to be bad. That sound weird to me.
Is it mere utility that their mother's blood is not carrying toxins absorbed from dirty air?
Yes. If the toxins didn't hurt children, we wouldn't care about them getting into kids. Toxins are only bad because they cause bad things to happen.
I just don't think the assertion can be made that good health is an aquired value.
Yes. Most people who believe in inherent value would say that health is one of the inherently valuable things in the world. Good health is just good, period, and no deeper reason needs to be given in order to support that.
The same follows for clean air.
No. Clean air aquires the quality of being good because it promotes good health (scenic views, etc). Clean air is only good because of those connections - inherently, meaning by itself, with no interaction with other things, it has no value.
I caught that, too. I'd love to know how he got from a moral to a legal argument.
I assert we can almost freely interchange, in this context, legal with moral.
In the context of his response, sure. Other people might take issue with the legal = moral thing.
Similarly, regard for the environment goes beyond the framework of utility because nature doesn't make distinctions for man made constructs. Eg, you can't legislate the tides and the wind blows across state lines.
I still don't follow that argument. Clean air might be valuable to the person in the next state, or to the human race a a whole, but that would still be valuing it based on utility. To make it inherently valuable, you would have to say that "It just is." or "Because it's natural" - almost any other "It's valuable because..." statment would mean that it has aquired value, not inherent value.
BTW, the whole "Behold your failure to understand" is terrifically asinine. But I won't hold you to it.
It is asinine, good thing I didn't come up with it. Otherwise I might think I was a real jerk.
It is the capitalism and the hunger for domination that is going to drive this world to the end.
I was going to take issue with the capitalism part, but then I read further...
It may seem unrelated, but multinational enterprises have each one its stake on the government.
Capitalism has nothing to do with governmental favors. That's one thing socialists an free marketers have in common, they want to sever the business ties that corrupt government. Captalists want to separate the two completely, socialists want to subordinate businesses to government, but their motives seem to be the same.
Adam: "I use them extensively, but I don't think robots have inherent value."
Beth: "You won't mind, then, that I design public areas to purposefully interfere with the efficient functioning of robots."
Adam: "Yes, I do. Functional robots are valuable to me, but I don't think that they have inherent moral value."
Beth: "So you wouldn't mind if I abused my own robots."
Adam: "Not a bit. Next time I'll make it clear that 'inherent value' is a statment about morality, not utility."
You can define the words, but you still don't know what this sentence means: [Believing] ecosystems have inherent value that the livliehood of humans must not interfere with is repugnant to me.
Being valuable to a person is very different than being inherently valuable.
Some people feel that damaging the ecosystem is bad, even if no person is negatively affected in any way. They feel that nature is inherently valuable. The poster you're responding to feels that this is repulsive, probably because it treats nonsentients as having moral worth.
I'm sorry if this post sounds rude, but your statments have no connection to the original post. If you said "I don't think robots have inherent value" and I said "But without robots cars would be more expensive", how would you respond? The two statments have nothing to do with each other.
And healthy food is cheap, too. How much does a bag of frozen mixed veggies cost where you live? Whole wheat bread?
unhealthy food is fashionable
What? Don't you know any vegetarians?
unhealthy food is heavily advertised (when did you last see an ad for carrots, rice etc)
Health food is very heavily advertised. Most fast food places asvertise their salads, cereal advertises its nutritional value and weight-loss guarantees, even antacids advertise added calcium. Heck, half the packaged food I buy has "Low Fat" or some other ad on the container. And of the love of all that's good in the world, what are Health Food Stores advertising themselves to be?
As for carrots and rice, not very often, but I don't see ads for buckets of lard, either. Commodities don't get advertised.
unhealthy food is available in every city,town, highstreet,corner shop, school,office
So is healthy food. The place I know of that has the least health food is one chain of convienence stores, and they still have lemonade and dried fruit. Most pop vending machines have bottled water as well as diet sodas in them.
If you blame outside forces every time people do bad things, then you have to blame the same forces when they do things that are good, and any kind of responsibility disappears.
Why am I better of that I can buy a bag of apples at a 2% discount?
Because you have more money left over for other things.
Why am I better of that I can buy this bag of apples 10% quicker then 5 years ago?
Because you have more time left over for other things.
Perhaps I would be better [i]f this bag of apples was grown in Ontario and shipped to me a few hundred mile[s], rather then the few thousand it probably was.
Why? How on earth would that make you better? (Better off?)
The ability to consume more does not make the world a better place.
The ability to do something gives you more choices, and that almost always makes you better off. Even if you think consuming is a bad thing, you still have the choice to not consume.
Maybe I misunderstood you post, but the point of using the pythagorean theorem was to determine the length of the diagonal so they only have to measure it once, rather than measure both a bunch of times.
You say it like [wealth redistribution]'s a bad thing.
It certainly can be.
Where does wealth come from?
From providing things that other people want.
You're so interested in people `earning` money/property that you're prepared to allow literally millions of people to die every year from problems which cause practically no deaths at all in developed countries just to maintain your belief in an immoral method of running countries?
I can't speak for the other poster, but here's my perspective. If there weren't any people earning money/property there wouldn't be anything to use to help poorer people, meaning that without richer people to give to charity or to tax there's nothing to help the poor with.
In any case, if we could help poor countries become economically free, they wouldn't need our support and we could start griping about them stealing our jobs rather than whining that the rich aren't helping enough.
What percentage of the US GDP is given away each year?
About the same as most other developed countries. European governments give a lot more than the US government, but private donations make up for that.
> The reality is that I share more cultural and economic bonds with my fellow citizens, therefore their well-being is more important to me.
A very weak argument. On that basis you personally wouldn't find anything immoral about the Nazi genocide of the Jews - unless they had legally binding contracts with you, at which point it would suddenly become immoral.
I have no idea where you got that interpretation. He never said anything about ignoring genocide or contracts, that's just stuff you're projecting onto him.
Every person cares more about some people than others, period. He was just expressing which people that he cared more about, which differs from the ones that you care about. And before you claim moral superiority, would you really ignore your dying grandmother in order to comfort a dying stranger who's slightly more lonely?
> You've stated some global problems with approximately zero feasible concrete solutions to any of them.
On the contrary, you've just come up with excuses for not making the effort to change anything.
He was just pointing out that he feels that your solutions aren't feasible, not making excuses.
Which is the whole point. Things that were expensive or even non-existant 50 years ago are now, for all practical purposes, free. Even poor people benefit from technological progress.
I can't, but I can read his post. He seems to believe that people who kill mice in the name of science are really doing it in order to satisfy sadistic desires. Unless he's seen a study or had a lot of experience in the field, I don't think he really knows what their modivations are.
I'd love a cite for that, but even if the neutrinos beat the photons, that doesn't mean that they beat the speed of light in a vacuum. Photons traveling through a medium are slowed, I would think that they would end up lagging behind after going though a large part of the sun.
And suffocation causes... what? What if the body is badly damaged?
Most importantly, couldn't this eventually lead to more comprehensive tests, so we could check for recent oxygen deprivation, exertion, stress, sleep or sun exposure (does vitamin D production change gene expression?)?
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Well, some people do take things a bit too seriously. On the other hand, if people kept telling me that atoms don't exist, and they wanted to teach my kids that, I might get emotional, and for good reason!
As for the other part, there is no evidence disproving evolution, or even signifigant evidence that suggests that it's wrong.
There are missing links. And as their classification would suggest, they're missing.
And when one is found, you now have two missing links! (We had A-Z and now have A-M and M-Z). We don't have to chart the path of every asteroid and dust particle in the solar system to be fairly sure of our theories about gravity.
Could she have meant both elected branches of government? Members of the judicial branch don't advertise their party allegiances, and supposedly aren't picked on that basis (as much). Plus having 60% of the judges won't dominate the system as much as 60% of the members of congress or 60% of the vote for president.
Of course your can't prove that God or aliens didn't affect the development of life on earth. On the other hand, we know that naturalistic forces exist and, as far as we can tell, they are sufficient to explain what we see in the world around us. As long as that's true, science has to stick with the naturalistic explanation.
On the other hand, you could weave together the various theories about our origins (big bang, abiogenisis, evolution, cultural development) in a way that is meaningful to people. Once it isn't just dry facts, that would be a myth.
Translated: I can live however the hell I want to (as long as government is god).
There is no connection between the two ideas. A lot of people try to pervert science in order to support their own beliefs, but that doesn't make it true. Science is silent on issues of morality - it will tell you what will and what won't kill a person, but it won't tell you if you should or shouldn't kill them.
As for the government = god idea, I probably like it even less than you do, but I have no idea how you get from scientific theories to a deified government.
My attempt is anything but crude, as it is well informed and backed up by history and a scholarly understanding of the reality of the power of myths. They are as present and powerful today as they have ever been, you might agree.
Myths are quite powerful, even today. Myths about Israel's place in history intensify the conflicts in the Middle East. Other myths imply that an unborn child has a soul and that drastically alters the debate on induced abortion. And myths about the origin of the universe induce people to believe in Creationism, and that still has a profound effect in a few places.
Genesis my be special, but no matter how great its influence or even how true it is, it's still a religious story that explains the natural world and the human condition, so it's still a myth.
By the books, Genesis is non-mythological. It has no explanation for the existence of God.
If merely lacking the origin of god(s) makes a story a non-myth, then you can make any creation story a non-myth with white-out. Does that make sense?
And that's the problem. If you ask any religious person "Are your religious stories like those of other religions?" they will usually scramble for some reason that their beiefs are special. And given that "myth" has picked up the connotation of "not true", there's even more reason to try to relabel own culture's stories as non-myths.
I don't mean to be rude, but from a non-believer's perspective, it looks like a crude attempt to make your beliefs seem better than other people's.
Why?
Yeah, but nobody listens to that old broad anymore.
I sure most people want to treat other cultures' beliefs as myths and theirs as something more than that, but that doesn't change the fact that their creation myths are still myths. When you say "The hallmark of myth is the detailed origin of the gods." you're just arbitrarily drawing a line designed to exclude your own beliefs from the definition of a myth. If you're going to argue that Christian stories about supernatural events aren't myths, you might as well just argue that Christianity isn't a religion.
You just explained politics and religion!
Yes, it's aquired, the flu is bad because it kills people. If the virus was inherently bad, that would mean that if it were alone in the universe, with nothing to infect, ever, it would still have to be bad. That sound weird to me.
Is it mere utility that their mother's blood is not carrying toxins absorbed from dirty air?
Yes. If the toxins didn't hurt children, we wouldn't care about them getting into kids. Toxins are only bad because they cause bad things to happen.
I just don't think the assertion can be made that good health is an aquired value.
Yes. Most people who believe in inherent value would say that health is one of the inherently valuable things in the world. Good health is just good, period, and no deeper reason needs to be given in order to support that.
The same follows for clean air.
No. Clean air aquires the quality of being good because it promotes good health (scenic views, etc). Clean air is only good because of those connections - inherently, meaning by itself, with no interaction with other things, it has no value.
As long as you realize that.
His response was that he was legally protected.
I caught that, too. I'd love to know how he got from a moral to a legal argument.
I assert we can almost freely interchange, in this context, legal with moral.
In the context of his response, sure. Other people might take issue with the legal = moral thing.
Similarly, regard for the environment goes beyond the framework of utility because nature doesn't make distinctions for man made constructs. Eg, you can't legislate the tides and the wind blows across state lines.
I still don't follow that argument. Clean air might be valuable to the person in the next state, or to the human race a a whole, but that would still be valuing it based on utility. To make it inherently valuable, you would have to say that "It just is." or "Because it's natural" - almost any other "It's valuable because ..." statment would mean that it has aquired value, not inherent value.
BTW, the whole "Behold your failure to understand" is terrifically asinine. But I won't hold you to it.
It is asinine, good thing I didn't come up with it. Otherwise I might think I was a real jerk.
I was going to take issue with the capitalism part, but then I read further...
It may seem unrelated, but multinational enterprises have each one its stake on the government.
Capitalism has nothing to do with governmental favors. That's one thing socialists an free marketers have in common, they want to sever the business ties that corrupt government. Captalists want to separate the two completely, socialists want to subordinate businesses to government, but their motives seem to be the same.
Adam: "I use them extensively, but I don't think robots have inherent value."
Beth: "You won't mind, then, that I design public areas to purposefully interfere with the efficient functioning of robots."
Adam: "Yes, I do. Functional robots are valuable to me, but I don't think that they have inherent moral value."
Beth: "So you wouldn't mind if I abused my own robots."
Adam: "Not a bit. Next time I'll make it clear that 'inherent value' is a statment about morality, not utility."
[Believing] ecosystems have inherent value that the livliehood of humans must not interfere with is repugnant to me.
Being valuable to a person is very different than being inherently valuable.
Some people feel that damaging the ecosystem is bad, even if no person is negatively affected in any way. They feel that nature is inherently valuable. The poster you're responding to feels that this is repulsive, probably because it treats nonsentients as having moral worth.
I'm sorry if this post sounds rude, but your statments have no connection to the original post. If you said "I don't think robots have inherent value" and I said "But without robots cars would be more expensive", how would you respond? The two statments have nothing to do with each other.
There is no connection between those two statments.
And healthy food is cheap, too. How much does a bag of frozen mixed veggies cost where you live? Whole wheat bread?
unhealthy food is fashionable
What? Don't you know any vegetarians?
unhealthy food is heavily advertised (when did you last see an ad for carrots, rice etc)
Health food is very heavily advertised. Most fast food places asvertise their salads, cereal advertises its nutritional value and weight-loss guarantees, even antacids advertise added calcium. Heck, half the packaged food I buy has "Low Fat" or some other ad on the container. And of the love of all that's good in the world, what are Health Food Stores advertising themselves to be?
As for carrots and rice, not very often, but I don't see ads for buckets of lard, either. Commodities don't get advertised.
unhealthy food is available in every city,town, highstreet,corner shop, school,office
So is healthy food. The place I know of that has the least health food is one chain of convienence stores, and they still have lemonade and dried fruit. Most pop vending machines have bottled water as well as diet sodas in them.
If you blame outside forces every time people do bad things, then you have to blame the same forces when they do things that are good, and any kind of responsibility disappears.
Because you have more money left over for other things.
Why am I better of that I can buy this bag of apples 10% quicker then 5 years ago?
Because you have more time left over for other things.
Perhaps I would be better [i]f this bag of apples was grown in Ontario and shipped to me a few hundred mile[s], rather then the few thousand it probably was.
Why? How on earth would that make you better? (Better off?)
The ability to consume more does not make the world a better place.
The ability to do something gives you more choices, and that almost always makes you better off. Even if you think consuming is a bad thing, you still have the choice to not consume.
Maybe I misunderstood you post, but the point of using the pythagorean theorem was to determine the length of the diagonal so they only have to measure it once, rather than measure both a bunch of times.
It certainly can be.
Where does wealth come from?
From providing things that other people want.
You're so interested in people `earning` money/property that you're prepared to allow literally millions of people to die every year from problems which cause practically no deaths at all in developed countries just to maintain your belief in an immoral method of running countries?
I can't speak for the other poster, but here's my perspective. If there weren't any people earning money/property there wouldn't be anything to use to help poorer people, meaning that without richer people to give to charity or to tax there's nothing to help the poor with.
In any case, if we could help poor countries become economically free, they wouldn't need our support and we could start griping about them stealing our jobs rather than whining that the rich aren't helping enough.
What percentage of the US GDP is given away each year?
About the same as most other developed countries. European governments give a lot more than the US government, but private donations make up for that.
> The reality is that I share more cultural and economic bonds with my fellow citizens, therefore their well-being is more important to me.
A very weak argument. On that basis you personally wouldn't find anything immoral about the Nazi genocide of the Jews - unless they had legally binding contracts with you, at which point it would suddenly become immoral.
I have no idea where you got that interpretation. He never said anything about ignoring genocide or contracts, that's just stuff you're projecting onto him.
Every person cares more about some people than others, period. He was just expressing which people that he cared more about, which differs from the ones that you care about. And before you claim moral superiority, would you really ignore your dying grandmother in order to comfort a dying stranger who's slightly more lonely?
> You've stated some global problems with approximately zero feasible concrete solutions to any of them.
On the contrary, you've just come up with excuses for not making the effort to change anything.
He was just pointing out that he feels that your solutions aren't feasible, not making excuses.
Which is the whole point. Things that were expensive or even non-existant 50 years ago are now, for all practical purposes, free. Even poor people benefit from technological progress.
I know when I need to maintain control and I know when it's more important to lock the wheels.
No, you don't. Your first statement disproves your second.
Why do you think this is junk? Sure, this is just a proof of concept study, but it could lead to some useful techniques.
My guess is that they do it as some sort of joke, perhaps aiming for an ignobel or something.
This sounds like pure speculation to me.
I don't have to be a mind reader to speculate about their motives.
I have no problem with you speculating, but you seemed quite sure of yourself, more so than the evidence would support.
We are entitled to, because we are people ourselves.
Sure, but it's rude to ascribe sadistic motives to someone without any support. Do you like it when someone does it to you?
I can't, but I can read his post. He seems to believe that people who kill mice in the name of science are really doing it in order to satisfy sadistic desires. Unless he's seen a study or had a lot of experience in the field, I don't think he really knows what their modivations are.
Could someone explain how this is "overrated" when it hasn't been rated at all?
I'd love a cite for that, but even if the neutrinos beat the photons, that doesn't mean that they beat the speed of light in a vacuum. Photons traveling through a medium are slowed, I would think that they would end up lagging behind after going though a large part of the sun.
And suffocation causes ... what? What if the body is badly damaged?
Most importantly, couldn't this eventually lead to more comprehensive tests, so we could check for recent oxygen deprivation, exertion, stress, sleep or sun exposure (does vitamin D production change gene expression?)?