For a good while now it seems their development strategy has been "upset geek users".
At the top of my head: Idea: The options dialog is not mac-like enough, let's put icons on top of the options! Response: That's not even mac-like, its not a good idea on wide displays, laptops or old smaller displays. Resolution: Implemented, throughly.
Idea: Change the address bar so that it also becomes a history search bar, and title based rather than URL based. Response: Not too bad but maybe it should be an option. Resolution: Implemented, not configurable, make your own extension.
Idea: Not everybody is installing the "Personas" extension, let's make them like it! Response: Ok you want to promote it but it's going to bloat the binary, why not include it like a default add-on like dictionaries? It's actually easier than embedding it! Resolution: Compiled into the core, load on mouse over always active, not configurable.
Idea: Firefox doesn't look enough like a rip-off, let's put the tabs on top! Response: That's such a pathetic way to ape Google! Come on that's so non-standard it going to break a gazillion work flows and is not compatible with . There are already extensions for it. Why? Tentative Resolution: Compiled into the core not configurable (probably)
Idea: People have too much extensions standardized on the status bar, let's pull the carpet of their feet! Response: Do we have any recourse? Resolution: Make your own extension, try to standardize on that, if you can.
Future Idea: People are not keen on jet-pack, let's remove add-ons (except for 3rd party not uninstallable add-ons like MS's.NET) Response: Are you enjoying this? Resolution: Not until you complain more!
Man, at no point did I say the church was a super brilliant thing that was totally awesome and you should join it.
Well? I know you didn't say that, you just misunderstood me.
I said that saying "(position), honesty, intelligence, pick two" is a bad idea. It's a bad idea if (position) is atheism, religion, Republican, Democrat, etc. *You* disagree with a position. Deciding that people could only disagree with you because they are stupid or dishonest is the hallmark of a dogmatic, not a rationalist.
No you didn't say that either, (although I have something to say in that matter). What you did wrote is a list of notable scientific people/discoveries and the involvement of religious institutions in them, from when I assume you mean to teach me that religion is friendly to intelligent and scientifically inclined minds.
About which I have already replied to you and other five guys which came up with the same point >_
Why is it that so many great men, whose writings and ideas about science, didn't leave any worthy commentary on religion?
I suspect it's for the same reason that there are few particle physicists who are also archaeologists. Any great field of study takes a lot of time to absorb, and there are not a lot of people who can master two fields deeply enough to comment historically on both.
So? I don't need to be a geologist to know and teach geological truths, if good foundations to superstition exist, anyone could be able to teach them even if they are not experts themselves. One would expect that the Ray Comforts and the Kent Hovinds would jump at the opportunity of using solid evidence or simply solid logic for their cause, and what they got? The crocoduck and a banana? Seriously please.
However, if one would satisfy you, I recommend Pascal, who wrote Pensées as well as Traité du triangle arithmétique.
Those sound like math treaties, I know Pascal was a religious nut, that's where ethically broken, statistically crippled and culturally myopic Pascal wager come from isn't it? If he did right something worthwhile please refer me to one of his books. But I'm only going to give him three strikes. I'm not particularly fond of bovine excrement.
You are free to respond that very few great scientists continued to contribute to science after they began contributing to theology
But I won't, that's not my turf
[...] than I have to your complaint that modern scientists are not religious.
If you had read my previous post*s*. Including the ones addressed to other slashdoters, you'd know that my main claim is not that there are no religious scientists.
My main claim is that religion is easier to accept the less educated and intelligent you are. That given two brothers raised together in the same conditions, the smarter one is the one more likely to deflect.
I was responding to the claim that religion "breed ignorance".
Please, please, I beg you to read everything I've written in this thread I have talked ad nauseam about that topic already.
...? What message were you reading?!? Seriously, dude, you've taken overinterpretation to a new level here.
Sorry I was going for style, what I mean is that (some disciplines of) modern science are at odds with the Church, regardless if the Church sponsored early science.
All I'm saying is that religion is not incompatible with science, and definitely doesn't discourage science, except when it sees a particular moral problem -- eg embryonic stem cell research.
Bullshit. Science is based on evidence and reason, religion demands submission to faith, religion prosecutes science whenever evidence contradicts dogma. Bull. Shit.
No, I'm suggesting that the term racism was invented by science and is very revealing of the pervasiveness of the belief in different "species" of human being.
I'm pretty sure the term racism was not invented by Darwin or biologists since. At most they would talk about "speciesism". The concept of different human races was born as soon as some person met someone from another continent.
In fact the term racism was cery probably invented by an early defender of human rights, much like the term sexism was invented by feminists, or the word capitalist was popularized by Marx
That's kinda like saying Monarchy is a very liberal form of government because most modern democracies were monarchies.
I know scientific inquiry, and pretty much all of education were originally under the control of the Church, as everything else was. Yes, at first the Church saw the pursue of science as a way to understand god's creation, but since the very begining it has also being very hostile to questioning of its own dogma.
So it was only partially friendly with rationality at first, but very friendly with ignorance all the way all the time.
I'm not saying being religious makes you stupid, I'm saying being religious puts you at odds with being intelligent, educated and intellectually honest, you have to at least give up one.
Notice also that all the men you list lived in acient times, way before archeology, paleontology, biology, etc reached a state where they were conflicting with Christianity/Islam.
Perhaps religion does not breed ignorance.
Religion thrives in ignorance I know this for sure. Many, many forms of ignorance.
Yeah yeah, one can know a lot about, say math without running into much trouble with some church, but try that with biology. Religion also thrives in other forms of ignorance that are less related to science, like ignorance about other cultures, and I don't mean just theoretical familiarity.
I'm talking about more subtle things like hearing a Buddhist mom pray for his son, or hearing a Muslim woman narrate a religious experience. The closer you get to people from other cultures the harder it becomes to dismiss their belief on the basis of your own faith, the harder it becomes to justify your faith, faith itself.
Perhaps great scientists' faith in the supernatural is not a curious exception to a universal faith-reason dichotomy.
You mean like Newton? Seriously, I don't know WTF is wrong with that. A lot of it can be attributed to ignorance since all the examples of great religious scientists tend to be ANCIENT!
Yes Newton was ignorant. Mind bogglingly so. He might have been smarter than I am but he knew much less about the universe than you and I.
Perhaps religious people are by nature neither stupid, nor ignorant, nor conformist, nor uneducated.
Perhaps but notice that for all the chat about how intelligent this or that scientist was. None has offered anything worthy in way of justification for their faith.
Why is it that if the church allegedly originated science it has never been vindicated by it? Why is it that so many great men, whose writings and ideas about science, didn't leave any worthy commentary on religion? Even Newton's commentaries on atheism are pitiful at best. So much genius reduced to childish deride...
Perhaps you have encountered people who were both religious and stupid/ignorant/conformist, and interpreted the correlations incorrectly.
No, it's quote a long history.
Perhaps you have an unexamined bias in your assumptions that distances you from reality.
Man, questioning my bias has been all I've been doing since I left my faith. Read the rest of the replies I've written below this, I've already written too much about the subject in this thread, I left some links too.
Peace. Signed, someone who thought similarly about atheists before reaching puberty.
It's hard to me to come to the conclusion I'm wrong when I'm not presented with good arguments why I'm wrong.
I suggest you to read the many, many replies I've got to my original post, they are interesting even the many that simple amount to "well yeah? you suck!". I also posted replies to most of them, I found the exercise refreshing tough it's growing old.
To honor you I did watch the video, since I can't ask you to read this much without giving you some of my attention. Sadly I'm underwhelmed by that video.
You seem to be making an appeal to emotion, that believing in contradictions is not a sign of a little mind but rather a sign of the wonder of humanity.
I call bullshit. Yes, doing stuff we know to be "impossible" (or just very hard) is exhilarating, thus we anticipate this gratification and purposely engage in wild crusades.
But that is just one instance of mental compartmentalization. In fact it doesn't even require mental compartmentalization because these crusades always have goals that are deemed virtually impossible, not *actually* impossible.
Real mental compartmentalization includes lots of silly stuff I'm not even going to list because you can find them online, like here.
So, really, there is a difference between finding gratification in challenging goals, which is what the video is about, and actually believing two opposing things simultaneously, which is what the video *claims* to be talking about, but fails.
Also what I've said is not bias or ignorance, is based on what I've learned from many sources, but got specially in depth from this book (which I referred to in another of my replies, see? I told you you should read that.).
Indeed, though Sam Harris is at haste trying to come up with a good alternative. He's not getting much traction, even among the choir, *specially* among the choir, because of the way he is selling it.
Alas if he just reworded his proposal! However his proposal is so terribly at odds with the humanist secular culture that more than a heavy lifting is needed, Harris needs a new writer, and when a writer needs a writer...
So before it was a "pro-social gene" and now religiosity is based on group solidarity, the ability to believe contradictory statements, and being simply stupid? I take it these are just your own narrow prejudices and conclusions, then?
"Before" and "now"? It seems you are taking different opinions from different people, ascribing them to me, and then blaming me for being inconsistent.
*i* have (since I read this book...) understood religiosity as a predisposition to group solidarity, the ability to believe contradictory statements and being simply a little stupid.
Nor am I saying that being stupid makes you religious, rather, being smarter and more critical makes you less religious. These two concepts are not the same.
But reallym read this book by a university professor, its called "The Authoritarians". And it is available for free at its web page:
For your comments on Buddhist logic, read the other replies I wrote to the other people who chimed in to say basically the same things that you, I've probably written too much about the subject for one day. Thank you.
It's hard to tell, I used to be very pessimistic about this, but then in an interview I watched, of Richard Dawkins of all people, gave me a light of hope.
"Intelligence pills"
And I thought, of course! Not just performance drugs, genetic engineering too will work as a big counterpart to this inverted fertility phenomena. So I'm not so worried about that anymore.
Of course some religions are better than others, based on both, benefit to humanity and veracity of its claims. But anytime you make a claim based on insufficient evidence you are coming from ignorance into more ignorance.
Example. Many eastern philosophies train adepts to commit some seriously outstanding deeds so they obviously are on to something, then fill the rest with ideas of ki and chacras that are pure imagination. If these traditions followed fully scientific, rather than almost scientific methods of analysis they would be far more advanced in their understanding of the same feats their followers commit, compared to where are they now.
what you think is stupidity on the part of practitioners is mostly the failure of the church as a responsible institution
I'm thorn here. Where should I start? Ok if you read me I did say that the ignorance aspect plays the greatest role in the prevalence of religiosity.
Yes, it is possible to know all the contradictions/absurdities of the Bible/Coral, and how everything we know from modern science and modern philosophy(*) concludes that there's most probably no God/afterlife AND STILL believe in one's religion; but not knowing it surely makes it much much easier.
I said philosophy, yes. Christians in particular, for that's my experience as you guessed, still flout, for instance, Pascal's wager, as if it hasn't been done to death.
Nor am I backtracking that religious people score lower in IQ tests because that a fact. Yes there are dumb and smart ones in either camp but the correlation exists, we can discuss about which one is the cause and which one is the consequence or if there is instead a third cause.
If you allow me, I venture the guess, based on most of the replies I'm receiving, that people think I'm implicating that low intelligence favors religiosity whereas I think it is religiosity which favors low intelligence, which is NOT the same thing.
First I'd have to say [[citation needed]], it might as well be that what you call small-minded is in fact correct and you are wrong, and never did I say that quote "[religion has] a monopoly on conformity, group-think, ignorance, and bigotry"
But seems to be a common trait, statistic show that religious communities have lower IQ, authoritarian feelings and bigoted tendencies, you can't fight the data, just attempt to make sense out of it.
Unfortunately the majority of science in history was carried out by religious institutions. Astronomy came out of astrology, the university system was founded by catholic monks, and it was Muslim scholars who introduced the world to Al-gebra.
How is that relevant? Science (and art) was mostly sponsored by churches and kings, how does that validate religion or monarchy for that matter? Or are you suggesting that because ancient monks practiced rudimentary science then religious consecration equals education of modern science? You seem to be suggesting that because Mendel made some breeding experiments in 1856, religious monks now know everything biology, astronomy and physics as of 2011 can teach us, surely that can't be the case.
Seriously are you just playing "you too"? Of course some atheists are stupid and badly educated, that doesn't do aways with the statistical evidence that highly religious people have hi mental compartmentalization capabilities, or that as a whole, religious people have lower levels of education and IQ. You seem to be arguing against the data.
And the example you show of mental compartmentalization in science is doubly wrong. First you seem to be suggesting there is some conflict between speciation and parallel evolution. As if they cannot be conceived a the same time, let alone be truth. But both phenomena ARE truth and of course can be conceived simultaneously by the same people.
After all even parallel evolution involves previous speciation, as the separation between Neaderthal man and Cro Magnon man is still an speciation event.
And seriously are you saying evolutionary science invented racism? I'm pretty sure it predates the bronze age.
I don't know this is a distinction that should be made. It might as well be that indeed that the "religiosity gene" is basically the "gullibility gene" by another name.
The debate over nature vs nurture is like the controversy of creationism vs evolution, meaning, debate is pretty much over.
A good while ago it was decided that experiments and observations, a.k.a. science, was a better tool than debate over this issue. It has since been throughly proven that we are NOT a "tabula rasa" when we are born, we have natural predispositions whence our nurturing takes over, it's pretty much a team effort to screw us over.
Yes, there are genetic predispositions to religiosity, mostly related to your capacity to hand wave contradicting beliefs as well as your level of individualism and traditionalism.
No, this alone doesn't make you a Reformed United Presbyterian, you have to learn that from somewhere else.
Simple, it's individuality and rationalism went wrong. Religion not only breeds conformity, it breeds ignorance, even an individualist person who deflects from the mainstream will run bumbling in the dark because they literally don't know any better.
That and, I'm sorry to be condescending, but besides group solidarity, religiosity is related to an ability to believe contradictory statements -mental compartmentalization- they call it, and I'm pretty sure being dumb enough to not even find the contradiction helps a lot. So a radically individualist person can still be religious, but I think the ignorance aspect plays the major part. I mean, I've personally known people who don't know a thing about evolution other than it's wrong and requires monkeys giving birth to humans, it really is that awful.
I wonder how far into science education are those Daoists and Indian Yogis and what their IQs are. I mean seriously it would be an interesting thing to know, I could of course be completely wrong.
Enemy of the State said it best for the government the only privacy that's left is the inside of your head. Maybe that's enough. I'm pretty damn sure it won't be enough once we have mind reading technology.
Some times the slippery slope argument is valid, this is one of those cases. The argument that users shouldn't be able to find bittorrent results "too easily" is actually weaker than the argument that users* just shouldn't be able to find bittorrent results so the jump seems imminent.
* Except law enforcement, politicians and members of the MAFIAA of course.
1. Funky navigation of Configuration. Configuration is disperse and seemingly redundant. 1.1. I can click "Options" in the top bar to edit article settings. 1.2. I can click "Account" to edit account settings. 1.2.1. From a usability point of view they are the same thing, just "settings". 1.2.2. I can also find "Account" in the user slashbox. 1.2. Slashbox options and other misc. options are available in the user slashbox via a gear icon. 1.3. My user page can be found in the top bar, the sections menu AND the header of the user slashbox. 1.3.1 All the sections in the user slashbox are in fact redundant. 1.3.2 I can't disable the user slashbox in article pages. 1.3.2.1 Oddly enough, I can disable it in the home page. 2. No matter what I do, I can't get rid of the "Disable advertising" invitation. I didn't accept it years ago, and now I feel forced to, I'm tempted to click it just to make it go away, but really, is it so hard to ad a "no thanks" option? 2.1. Even tough it doesn't consume much space itself it keeps a huge white gap at the right of the home page. 3. I can't disable the sections menu for the life of me. Even tough my settings say it IS disabled. 4. The "Use Slashboxes" option! It does nothing! 4.1. The selection of slashbox however does something, activate preset boxes if I disable them all.
PD: OMG I accepted the "Disable advertising" invitation just to see it go away, and it was replaced by an option to turn them on again. Why would this configuration option permanently be displayed in absolutely every page I visit?
"We have your community, if you don't pay us, something bad will happen to it."
So they don't want it, they could just hand it over. But there's demand, so they will charge for it. Is it just for the work of transferring the data, that would be understandable, but if they want to get a profit out it and threat to delete it if the price is not met, isn't this just like the time the farmers poured milk on the dirt* because it wasn't selling at the price they demanded?
That's just pure greed.
* Still looking the reference of this one, may be a myth, if it is just take it as an hypothetical example.
Maybe, but I'll blame the lameness of main stream superhero comics and the shadow of fail they cast over the entire genre. I was introduced to anime and manga by friends before it became commonplace so it was definitively hand picked stuff, EVA, GitS, the like... and I got to hang out with that crowd.
The *other* crowd on the other hand... Superman, Spiderman, Batman, X-men, Ironman... they never picked my interest and I sort of gave up on the whole genre early in my childhood, focusing rather on videogames, most of which came from Japan anyway. I mean, just look at the theme naming, "Somethingman". I couldn't believe someone took it seriously. So if ''The Code'' had something to do with that, it is still true that western comics *by market share* sucks. But of course this is IMH-andveryfuckedup-O and YM*W*V.
Slashdot Mirror
Because speaking up your mind against corporate and government collusion in corruption is idiocy and requires mockery.
If languages are fluid then by definition he can influence it to change it whatever direction he wants.
For a good while now it seems their development strategy has been "upset geek users".
At the top of my head:
Idea: The options dialog is not mac-like enough, let's put icons on top of the options!
Response: That's not even mac-like, its not a good idea on wide displays, laptops or old smaller displays.
Resolution: Implemented, throughly.
Idea: Change the address bar so that it also becomes a history search bar, and title based rather than URL based.
Response: Not too bad but maybe it should be an option.
Resolution: Implemented, not configurable, make your own extension.
Idea: Not everybody is installing the "Personas" extension, let's make them like it!
Response: Ok you want to promote it but it's going to bloat the binary, why not include it like a default add-on like dictionaries? It's actually easier than embedding it!
Resolution: Compiled into the core, load on mouse over always active, not configurable.
Idea: Firefox doesn't look enough like a rip-off, let's put the tabs on top!
Response: That's such a pathetic way to ape Google! Come on that's so non-standard it going to break a gazillion work flows and is not compatible with . There are already extensions for it. Why?
Tentative Resolution: Compiled into the core not configurable (probably)
Idea: People have too much extensions standardized on the status bar, let's pull the carpet of their feet!
Response: Do we have any recourse?
Resolution: Make your own extension, try to standardize on that, if you can.
Future Idea: People are not keen on jet-pack, let's remove add-ons (except for 3rd party not uninstallable add-ons like MS's .NET)
Response: Are you enjoying this?
Resolution: Not until you complain more!
Man, at no point did I say the church was a super brilliant thing that was totally awesome and you should join it.
Well? I know you didn't say that, you just misunderstood me.
I said that saying "(position), honesty, intelligence, pick two" is a bad idea. It's a bad idea if (position) is atheism, religion, Republican, Democrat, etc. *You* disagree with a position. Deciding that people could only disagree with you because they are stupid or dishonest is the hallmark of a dogmatic, not a rationalist.
No you didn't say that either, (although I have something to say in that matter). What you did wrote is a list of notable scientific people/discoveries and the involvement of religious institutions in them, from when I assume you mean to teach me that religion is friendly to intelligent and scientifically inclined minds.
About which I have already replied to you and other five guys which came up with the same point >_
Why is it that so many great men, whose writings and ideas about science, didn't leave any worthy commentary on religion?
I suspect it's for the same reason that there are few particle physicists who are also archaeologists. Any great field of study takes a lot of time to absorb, and there are not a lot of people who can master two fields deeply enough to comment historically on both.
So? I don't need to be a geologist to know and teach geological truths, if good foundations to superstition exist, anyone could be able to teach them even if they are not experts themselves. One would expect that the Ray Comforts and the Kent Hovinds would jump at the opportunity of using solid evidence or simply solid logic for their cause, and what they got? The crocoduck and a banana? Seriously please.
However, if one would satisfy you, I recommend Pascal, who wrote Pensées as well as Traité du triangle arithmétique.
Those sound like math treaties, I know Pascal was a religious nut, that's where ethically broken, statistically crippled and culturally myopic Pascal wager come from isn't it? If he did right something worthwhile please refer me to one of his books. But I'm only going to give him three strikes. I'm not particularly fond of bovine excrement.
You are free to respond that very few great scientists continued to contribute to science after they began contributing to theology
But I won't, that's not my turf
[...] than I have to your complaint that modern scientists are not religious.
If you had read my previous post*s*. Including the ones addressed to other slashdoters, you'd know that my main claim is not that there are no religious scientists.
My main claim is that religion is easier to accept the less educated and intelligent you are. That given two brothers raised together in the same conditions, the smarter one is the one more likely to deflect.
I was responding to the claim that religion "breed ignorance".
Please, please, I beg you to read everything I've written in this thread I have talked ad nauseam about that topic already.
...? What message were you reading?!? Seriously, dude, you've taken overinterpretation to a new level here.
Sorry I was going for style, what I mean is that (some disciplines of) modern science are at odds with the Church, regardless if the Church sponsored early science.
All I'm saying is that religion is not incompatible with science, and definitely doesn't discourage science, except when it sees a particular moral problem -- eg embryonic stem cell research.
Bullshit. Science is based on evidence and reason, religion demands submission to faith, religion prosecutes science whenever evidence contradicts dogma. Bull. Shit.
No, I'm suggesting that the term racism was invented by science and is very revealing of the pervasiveness of the belief in different "species" of human being.
I'm pretty sure the term racism was not invented by Darwin or biologists since. At most they would talk about "speciesism". The concept of different human races was born as soon as some person met someone from another continent.
In fact the term racism was cery probably invented by an early defender of human rights, much like the term sexism was invented by feminists, or the word capitalist was popularized by Marx
That's kinda like saying Monarchy is a very liberal form of government because most modern democracies were monarchies.
I know scientific inquiry, and pretty much all of education were originally under the control of the Church, as everything else was. Yes, at first the Church saw the pursue of science as a way to understand god's creation, but since the very begining it has also being very hostile to questioning of its own dogma.
So it was only partially friendly with rationality at first, but very friendly with ignorance all the way all the time.
I'm not saying being religious makes you stupid, I'm saying being religious puts you at odds with being intelligent, educated and intellectually honest, you have to at least give up one.
Notice also that all the men you list lived in acient times, way before archeology, paleontology, biology, etc reached a state where they were conflicting with Christianity/Islam.
Perhaps religion does not breed ignorance.
Religion thrives in ignorance I know this for sure. Many, many forms of ignorance.
Yeah yeah, one can know a lot about, say math without running into much trouble with some church, but try that with biology. Religion also thrives in other forms of ignorance that are less related to science, like ignorance about other cultures, and I don't mean just theoretical familiarity.
I'm talking about more subtle things like hearing a Buddhist mom pray for his son, or hearing a Muslim woman narrate a religious experience. The closer you get to people from other cultures the harder it becomes to dismiss their belief on the basis of your own faith, the harder it becomes to justify your faith, faith itself.
Perhaps great scientists' faith in the supernatural is not a curious exception to a universal faith-reason dichotomy.
You mean like Newton? Seriously, I don't know WTF is wrong with that. A lot of it can be attributed to ignorance since all the examples of great religious scientists tend to be ANCIENT!
Yes Newton was ignorant. Mind bogglingly so. He might have been smarter than I am but he knew much less about the universe than you and I.
Perhaps religious people are by nature neither stupid, nor ignorant, nor conformist, nor uneducated.
Perhaps but notice that for all the chat about how intelligent this or that scientist was. None has offered anything worthy in way of justification for their faith.
Why is it that if the church allegedly originated science it has never been vindicated by it? Why is it that so many great men, whose writings and ideas about science, didn't leave any worthy commentary on religion? Even Newton's commentaries on atheism are pitiful at best. So much genius reduced to childish deride...
Perhaps you have encountered people who were both religious and stupid/ignorant/conformist, and interpreted the correlations incorrectly.
No, it's quote a long history.
Perhaps you have an unexamined bias in your assumptions that distances you from reality.
Man, questioning my bias has been all I've been doing since I left my faith. Read the rest of the replies I've written below this, I've already written too much about the subject in this thread, I left some links too.
Peace. Signed, someone who thought similarly about atheists before reaching puberty.
But what about http://www.startpage.com/ ? the have a pretty good privacy policy, that's a sell point over Google's.
It's hard to me to come to the conclusion I'm wrong when I'm not presented with good arguments why I'm wrong.
I suggest you to read the many, many replies I've got to my original post, they are interesting even the many that simple amount to "well yeah? you suck!". I also posted replies to most of them, I found the exercise refreshing tough it's growing old.
To honor you I did watch the video, since I can't ask you to read this much without giving you some of my attention. Sadly I'm underwhelmed by that video.
You seem to be making an appeal to emotion, that believing in contradictions is not a sign of a little mind but rather a sign of the wonder of humanity.
I call bullshit. Yes, doing stuff we know to be "impossible" (or just very hard) is exhilarating, thus we anticipate this gratification and purposely engage in wild crusades.
But that is just one instance of mental compartmentalization. In fact it doesn't even require mental compartmentalization because these crusades always have goals that are deemed virtually impossible, not *actually* impossible.
Real mental compartmentalization includes lots of silly stuff I'm not even going to list because you can find them online, like here.
So, really, there is a difference between finding gratification in challenging goals, which is what the video is about, and actually believing two opposing things simultaneously, which is what the video *claims* to be talking about, but fails.
Also what I've said is not bias or ignorance, is based on what I've learned from many sources, but got specially in depth from this book (which I referred to in another of my replies, see? I told you you should read that.).
Here is the reference again, its a free download online http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
Indeed, though Sam Harris is at haste trying to come up with a good alternative. He's not getting much traction, even among the choir, *specially* among the choir, because of the way he is selling it.
Alas if he just reworded his proposal! However his proposal is so terribly at odds with the humanist secular culture that more than a heavy lifting is needed, Harris needs a new writer, and when a writer needs a writer...
So before it was a "pro-social gene" and now religiosity is based on group solidarity, the ability to believe contradictory statements, and being simply stupid? I take it these are just your own narrow prejudices and conclusions, then?
"Before" and "now"? It seems you are taking different opinions from different people, ascribing them to me, and then blaming me for being inconsistent.
*i* have (since I read this book...) understood religiosity as a predisposition to group solidarity, the ability to believe contradictory statements and being simply a little stupid.
Nor am I saying that being stupid makes you religious, rather, being smarter and more critical makes you less religious. These two concepts are not the same.
But reallym read this book by a university professor, its called "The Authoritarians". And it is available for free at its web page:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
For your comments on Buddhist logic, read the other replies I wrote to the other people who chimed in to say basically the same things that you, I've probably written too much about the subject for one day. Thank you.
It's hard to tell, I used to be very pessimistic about this, but then in an interview I watched, of Richard Dawkins of all people, gave me a light of hope.
"Intelligence pills"
And I thought, of course! Not just performance drugs, genetic engineering too will work as a big counterpart to this inverted fertility phenomena. So I'm not so worried about that anymore.
The evil singularity on the other hand...
Of course some religions are better than others, based on both, benefit to humanity and veracity of its claims. But anytime you make a claim based on insufficient evidence you are coming from ignorance into more ignorance.
Example. Many eastern philosophies train adepts to commit some seriously outstanding deeds so they obviously are on to something, then fill the rest with ideas of ki and chacras that are pure imagination. If these traditions followed fully scientific, rather than almost scientific methods of analysis they would be far more advanced in their understanding of the same feats their followers commit, compared to where are they now.
what you think is stupidity on the part of practitioners is mostly the failure of the church as a responsible institution
I'm thorn here. Where should I start? Ok if you read me I did say that the ignorance aspect plays the greatest role in the prevalence of religiosity.
Yes, it is possible to know all the contradictions/absurdities of the Bible/Coral, and how everything we know from modern science and modern philosophy(*) concludes that there's most probably no God/afterlife AND STILL believe in one's religion; but not knowing it surely makes it much much easier.
I said philosophy, yes. Christians in particular, for that's my experience as you guessed, still flout, for instance, Pascal's wager, as if it hasn't been done to death.
Nor am I backtracking that religious people score lower in IQ tests because that a fact. Yes there are dumb and smart ones in either camp but the correlation exists, we can discuss about which one is the cause and which one is the consequence or if there is instead a third cause.
If you allow me, I venture the guess, based on most of the replies I'm receiving, that people think I'm implicating that low intelligence favors religiosity whereas I think it is religiosity which favors low intelligence, which is NOT the same thing.
First I'd have to say [[citation needed]], it might as well be that what you call small-minded is in fact correct and you are wrong, and never did I say that quote "[religion has] a monopoly on conformity, group-think, ignorance, and bigotry"
But seems to be a common trait, statistic show that religious communities have lower IQ, authoritarian feelings and bigoted tendencies, you can't fight the data, just attempt to make sense out of it.
Unfortunately the majority of science in history was carried out by religious institutions. Astronomy came out of astrology, the university system was founded by catholic monks, and it was Muslim scholars who introduced the world to Al-gebra.
How is that relevant? Science (and art) was mostly sponsored by churches and kings, how does that validate religion or monarchy for that matter? Or are you suggesting that because ancient monks practiced rudimentary science then religious consecration equals education of modern science? You seem to be suggesting that because Mendel made some breeding experiments in 1856, religious monks now know everything biology, astronomy and physics as of 2011 can teach us, surely that can't be the case.
Seriously are you just playing "you too"? Of course some atheists are stupid and badly educated, that doesn't do aways with the statistical evidence that highly religious people have hi mental compartmentalization capabilities, or that as a whole, religious people have lower levels of education and IQ. You seem to be arguing against the data.
And the example you show of mental compartmentalization in science is doubly wrong. First you seem to be suggesting there is some conflict between speciation and parallel evolution. As if they cannot be conceived a the same time, let alone be truth. But both phenomena ARE truth and of course can be conceived simultaneously by the same people.
After all even parallel evolution involves previous speciation, as the separation between Neaderthal man and Cro Magnon man is still an speciation event.
And seriously are you saying evolutionary science invented racism? I'm pretty sure it predates the bronze age.
I don't know this is a distinction that should be made. It might as well be that indeed that the "religiosity gene" is basically the "gullibility gene" by another name.
The debate over nature vs nurture is like the controversy of creationism vs evolution, meaning, debate is pretty much over.
A good while ago it was decided that experiments and observations, a.k.a. science, was a better tool than debate over this issue. It has since been throughly proven that we are NOT a "tabula rasa" when we are born, we have natural predispositions whence our nurturing takes over, it's pretty much a team effort to screw us over.
Yes, there are genetic predispositions to religiosity, mostly related to your capacity to hand wave contradicting beliefs as well as your level of individualism and traditionalism.
No, this alone doesn't make you a Reformed United Presbyterian, you have to learn that from somewhere else.
Simple, it's individuality and rationalism went wrong. Religion not only breeds conformity, it breeds ignorance, even an individualist person who deflects from the mainstream will run bumbling in the dark because they literally don't know any better.
That and, I'm sorry to be condescending, but besides group solidarity, religiosity is related to an ability to believe contradictory statements -mental compartmentalization- they call it, and I'm pretty sure being dumb enough to not even find the contradiction helps a lot. So a radically individualist person can still be religious, but I think the ignorance aspect plays the major part. I mean, I've personally known people who don't know a thing about evolution other than it's wrong and requires monkeys giving birth to humans, it really is that awful.
I wonder how far into science education are those Daoists and Indian Yogis and what their IQs are. I mean seriously it would be an interesting thing to know, I could of course be completely wrong.
s/Eclipse/NetBeans/ ???
The FBI won't let logic and sense stop it!
Enemy of the State said it best for the government the only privacy that's left is the inside of your head. Maybe that's enough. I'm pretty damn sure it won't be enough once we have mind reading technology.
Some times the slippery slope argument is valid, this is one of those cases. The argument that users shouldn't be able to find bittorrent results "too easily" is actually weaker than the argument that users* just shouldn't be able to find bittorrent results so the jump seems imminent.
* Except law enforcement, politicians and members of the MAFIAA of course.
Ok here I go:
1. Funky navigation of Configuration. Configuration is disperse and seemingly redundant.
1.1. I can click "Options" in the top bar to edit article settings.
1.2. I can click "Account" to edit account settings.
1.2.1. From a usability point of view they are the same thing, just "settings".
1.2.2. I can also find "Account" in the user slashbox.
1.2. Slashbox options and other misc. options are available in the user slashbox via a gear icon.
1.3. My user page can be found in the top bar, the sections menu AND the header of the user slashbox.
1.3.1 All the sections in the user slashbox are in fact redundant.
1.3.2 I can't disable the user slashbox in article pages.
1.3.2.1 Oddly enough, I can disable it in the home page.
2. No matter what I do, I can't get rid of the "Disable advertising" invitation. I didn't accept it years ago, and now I feel forced to, I'm tempted to click it just to make it go away, but really, is it so hard to ad a "no thanks" option?
2.1. Even tough it doesn't consume much space itself it keeps a huge white gap at the right of the home page.
3. I can't disable the sections menu for the life of me. Even tough my settings say it IS disabled.
4. The "Use Slashboxes" option! It does nothing!
4.1. The selection of slashbox however does something, activate preset boxes if I disable them all.
PD: OMG I accepted the "Disable advertising" invitation just to see it go away, and it was replaced by an option to turn them on again. Why would this configuration option permanently be displayed in absolutely every page I visit?
It sounds like some sort of extortion sheme.
So they don't want it, they could just hand it over. But there's demand, so they will charge for it. Is it just for the work of transferring the data, that would be understandable, but if they want to get a profit out it and threat to delete it if the price is not met, isn't this just like the time the farmers poured milk on the dirt* because it wasn't selling at the price they demanded?
That's just pure greed.
* Still looking the reference of this one, may be a myth, if it is just take it as an hypothetical example.
Maybe, but I'll blame the lameness of main stream superhero comics and the shadow of fail they cast over the entire genre. I was introduced to anime and manga by friends before it became commonplace so it was definitively hand picked stuff, EVA, GitS, the like... and I got to hang out with that crowd.
The *other* crowd on the other hand... Superman, Spiderman, Batman, X-men, Ironman... they never picked my interest and I sort of gave up on the whole genre early in my childhood, focusing rather on videogames, most of which came from Japan anyway. I mean, just look at the theme naming, "Somethingman". I couldn't believe someone took it seriously. So if ''The Code'' had something to do with that, it is still true that western comics *by market share* sucks. But of course this is IMH-andveryfuckedup-O and YM*W*V.