We have stopped adapting a long time ago. âSomewhere around the time we invented fire, hunting, farming...âSince then we adapt everything AROUND US to ourselves.
I could also speculate that by our modern societies putting more worth on technical & scientific expertise, we could have a selection pressure that selects for smarter people, which would be evolution as well. Yes, we force our environment to adapt to us to a massive degree, but that still doesn't exclude us adapting to it. We can do both at the same time.
Google "recent human evolution"
I doubt evolution ever really can stop unless extremely advanced aliens catpure & domesticate us into a line of pure-breed pets...
Regarding the roaches, sharks, certain bugs, etc I would contest the part where you say:
but the evidence tells a different story.
...because in fact there is no evidence. Their outward appearances are largely a function of what their mechanical interactions with their environment require of them. Their immune system doesn't get fossilized, so who's to say that it hasn't evolved a great deal? (I've always personally assumed it must have)
The rest of your post has its merits, but it's wrong to say that we need genetic diversity just for the sake of having it.
I didn't actually intend to convey we need genetic diversity for the sake of having it (I could have been clearer I suppose). A better way to say it could be "We need genetic diversity as insurance.
Births, mutation, and death are all critical to a species survival. If people don't die & get replaced by offspring, the human-species will be endangering its ability to adapt.
A species which has become static and forgoes any new genetic variation is somehow not going to get wiped out by a pandemic at some point? Yeah right.
Even with good genetic variation, viruses have managed to kill significant portions of human populations. You're not going to exterminate these viruses, ever. Even if you did, nature would cook up more at some point.
And I've seen concerns over the idea of overpopulation poo-poo'd by people saying "we'll take-away/limit their ability to reproduce". What happens if for some reason the whole immortality thing stops working? Maybe an oversight, but maybe some anti-immortality jerks genetically engineer a retrovirus that makes everyone mortal again (contagious disease that kills over a period of about 70 years). Without the baby-making option, guess who gets to determine what traits make the species?
And all the talk here about how the body is just machine, and we can repair it to perfection seem to have forgotten that there are plenty of toxins out there, natural & anthropogenic, which don't leave the body once they get in. This is the entire basis behind biomagnification/bioaccumulation. How would "immortal" people avoid the accumulation of heavy-metals over long periods of time? How many years of trace-amounts of mercury do you think it takes to damage your brain?
It's also worth noting that the human societies have evolved in a sense as well, and would likely be much slower without replacing people with those able to offer fresh ideas & let go of the old without resistance. I can tell you that ethnic/national/political grudges would probably endure for much longer in the event that everyone can recall the reasons for their conflicts in a very personal way. If you think the middle east is a mess now, just wait until they're all immortal.
From my humble point of view, the desire for immortality comes off as an amazingly selfish quest which would certainly enhance the risks for the survival of the species. It can be argued that by the act of dying, humans behave as team players and increase the speed of progress (biological & intellectual).
All I'm saying is that I wish you would try to realize the situation "on the ground" so to speak in the US and that the rise in fuel costs is really hitting alot of people HARD. "On the ground" the situation is that people will continue to exploit the cheapest solutions for their needs, period. If the US got access to cheap oil again, we'd probably go back to our old habits. We had oil-shortages a few decades ago. Did the lesson stick? Given the number of SUV's on the road, obviously not.
A person can be smart, but people are proving themselves to be herd of stupid animals. If we have cheap oil again, the population will stop looking at efficient vehicles & choosing homes closer to where they work instead of acting as though suburban paradise was some sort of cultural entitlement.
All I'm saying is that, there are no options for survival as a nation unless we get sustainable energy in place. If oil/coal remain cheaper than all other forms of energy, then we'll continue to use the cheap stuff. A drunk with a hangover may ask for more booze, but should you give it to him?
The current economic pain we feel is a warning of what's to come when the oil-supply gets even shorter. You can try to use government-action to mitigate the suffering, but if you do, we'll become like an animal who's nerves can't sense pain. To survive, the animal is required to be smarter than a person who can sense pain to survive. Otherwise, you end up with a creature which allows a predator to gnaw on its torso without worrying too much about it.
sitting across from Steve eating his veggies and vegan gourmet cookies From what I've read, Steve Jobs isn't actually a vegan/vegetarian, as he is willing to eat fish (just not mammal or bird meat). I'm not trying to be overly nit-picky. It's actually a very easy thing to assume if you see a guy eat non-meat the vast majority of the time.
And the "problems" with the giant impact theory are too numerous to go into detail here. First, it is Giant Impact hypothesis, not theory. Yes, I know the wikipedia article uses the word "theory" in the body of the article a couple times, which is likely a mistake. (That or maybe they wanted to stress that it is currently the dominant lunar origin explanation, as noted elsewhere).
Secondly, I wasn't advocating it, in general, or even in the context of the original article. (I would think it doesn't fit into the chronology properly for the article anyway). I'm was merely pointing out that the whole "meteors usually not originating from Earth thing" is not a complete impossibility since the Giant Impact Hypothesis, despite difficulties, is still the prevailing hypothesis today.
And while, again I'm not advocating the hypothesis, the "difficulties" (quotes not intended to disparage) are themselves debatable as we can't verify that our expected evidence of such an event are correct given nobody's ever witnessed the formation of a planet, much less the collision between two. There are no smoking guns on any sides of the debate. Besides, none of the lunar origin explanations are free of difficulties & inconsistencies. Unless you know something I don't...?
And the person you responded to earlier (Tarlus) could have been making a completely different argument from the one you assumed. Maybe he meant to imply an large impact event ejected material from a primordial earth, and meteors in unstable orbits around Earth could have been contaminated with genetic material by the event. I just think his "correction" (quoted for sarcasm) actually can imply more than the one meaning you appeared to assume it had.
I question the logic behind the nucleobases only being formed in space. Why can't the nucleobases have incorporated that heavy form of carbon before or after its trip through space? What says they can only form together in the same place?
The person I was responding to was talking about executing unauthorized exe on on another person's computer (to uninstall Safari). That part of the attack is a Windows+IE issue that Microsoft has to fix.
Sure, Safari (on Windows) can carpetbomb & spam your desktop. That's potentially annoying (but ultimately doesn't harm your system).
There's a distinction between Safari "making available" the malicious executable versus it actually being executed, which like I was saying, the person I was responding to was talking about.
Stalin supporting evolution? Oh boy, were you misled. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that whoever told you of the views on evolution in the USSR under Stalin was a creationist, who wanted to villify evolution. Wether Stalin supported evolution isn't known unless you can get some quotes of him commenting on the topic. Without citing that, the most you should be able to argue against is what the Stalinist regime's official stance on evolution was.
And in fact, they did support the evolution of species. Lysenkoism was not an attempt to replace evolution, but rather it tried to serve as a mechanic for how evolution worked.
I suggest reading up on Lysenkoism and the effect it had on science in the Soviet Union: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism [wikipedia.org] I read the article. Lysenkoism doesn't involve any such evolution vs creationism, or Lysenkoism vs evolution. You've misrepresented the entire subject, and I hope people do read the article you linked so they can see why.
Quoting the article:
Lysenkoism, or Lysenko-Michurinism, may also denote the biological inheritance principles Lysenko subscribed to which derive from theories of the heritability of acquired characteristics, a body of biological inheritance theory which departs from Mendelism and that Lysenko himself named "Michurinism". Notice, it departs from "mendelism", not evolution as a whole.
When Darwin stumbled upon evolution, he was able to come up with all sorts of examples of things that must had evolved adaptations, but he didn't have a clue about the exact mechanisms involved other than there must be one.
Lysenkoism wasn't an alternative to evolution (as you said). It was merely trying to define the mechanism behind how evolution works. Of course it's not the evolution we know to be correct today, but it was still a branch of evolutionary theory (just a bad branch of evolutionary theory).
You've framed the context to be some sort of issue that attempts to be tangental to creationism, when in fact it was only a Mendelism (genetic heritability) vs Lysenkoism (inheritance of acquired characteristics). They were still both evolution.
Why are people so many people constantly desperate to try and distance the Soviet communists from being advocates of evolution? If it is for some sort of religion-vs-atheism impulse, leave it out of a science discussion, otherwise it's no better than creationists trying to get their stuff in our science classes.
I had queried: Either the environment kills it before it reproduces or it doesn't. Their goal is survival, not being efficient at it.
I believe that is not actually a query. I'm pretty sure it's not a question at all. Furthermore, it wasn't yours. I wrote that. I sense that this merely a copy/paste error. (It happens)
While I'd would normally attempt a response to the part where you say...
First, when talking about algae, "growth" is "reproduction". Second, when I said "opportunity to evolve optimizations" I'm speaking about the reproductive opportunities of algae. In pioneering species those opportunities are primarily at the unpopulated frontier rather than at the area populated by algae grazers (where toxins may have evolved in an evolutionary arms race).
... I'm reluctant to do so because what I suspect to be an innocent copy/paste error could still result in a poorly structured argument about who said what, and who meant what. If I respond to it, I would prefer to know wether it was indeed an error, and then which query of yours you were referring to because the quote-block in my first response to you actually had two questions in it. A response at this point could erroneously assume which of your questions you meant to paste in there.
Now you may be claiming that the "toxins" did not evolve in an arms race against algae grazers -- that they are merely pollution
Oh no. I never meant to imply any such thing. When I wrote that I intended the word "toxins" to be strictly in the context of toxins produced by the blooming algae/cyanobacteria population. I didn't mean to imply any sort of anthropogenic pollution being toxic in my previous post.
But what you wrote gave me an idea: Maybe (I don't know this actually be true) the agriculture which typically deposits NPK inorganic fertilizer could also be causing some sort of nutrient poisoning. We know that excessive nitrates in drinking water for humans causes blue baby syndrome, and the blood isn't able to carry the oxygen it needs. It affects adults, but not enough to hurt them. It seems to kill babies. If something similar were selecting against the larger organisms' offspring, it could also have an affect. I don't know how quickly nitrates are produced in the area where the nutrients are formed after the fertilizer runoff gets into the water, nor do I know wether the rate at which it's consumed by the bloom is fast enough to make it the limiting-nutrient. if it isn't the limiting-nutrient, maybe there can be enough hanging around to kill the juveniles of the larger species in the area. Hell, for all I know, maybe the zooplankton can utilize the algae-bloom for food, even when they produce toxins, but if their offspring can't survive the environment, they'd still get wiped out. For something that has a such a quick rate of growth, how do you distinguish between their vanishing being a result of being killed versus them simply dying off of old age without having viable offspring? I must stress, I have no proof that this actually contributes to eutrophication. It's just an idea.
but if that is the case it seems there is an awful lot of food begging to be eaten
I understand what you mean to say here, but I don't like that wording. Algae (whether it has toxins or not) isn't begging to be eaten by anything. Nothing alive begs to be eaten, unless of course you're a seed which relies upon being passed through a grazing animal's digestive tract that is. hehe
by the first algae grazer to become tolerant of the pollution.
It doesn't matter how much a consumer-species wants to eat something or how great the potential reward for them is unless they have the means to evolve the necessary traits faster than their prey can evolve a countermeasure (is would that be a counter-countermeasure?). Wether they can/can't with respect to Eutrophication is something I don't know. I just wanted to note
Yes I know the story: nutrients create algae blooms which then die and decay thereby robbing the ocean of oxygen. No, you don't know the story. That's only part of it. In addition to losing oxygen, the water becomes more turbid,and the proportions of species in the community is damaged. Some of these algal/cyanobacteria blooms are actually toxic to plants & animals.
Why don't the smaller, rapidly-reproducing zooplankton take up the gauntlet? Because they suffocate near the alleged food source. That of course assumes the food source firstly isn't toxic to them. Ever seen a dead mouse in a mouse-trap? Food surrounded by lethal conditions is hardly food.
Why don't the smaller, rapidly-reproducing zooplankton take up the gauntlet?
Virtually all of the articles I've read on hypoxic waters and dead zones fail to address this paradox. I've only read one paper that mentioned even an _hypothesis_ of how algae grazers fail to flourish -- referring to algae species that protect themselves with toxins. But this doesn't ring true: Why would the most pioneering of algae species be the most protective of themselves when there is so much opportunity to evolve optimizations for growth rather than defense against grazers? The evolution of life doesn't care about optimizations for growth. Evolution does not seek to form a more perfect creature. Either the environment kills it before it reproduces or it doesn't. Their goal is survival, not being efficient at it. An organism's life can be amazingly cruel and miserable, yet still perfectly succeed in this function. Optimizations and perfections aren't on the agenda unless the consequence of not adopting such things is extinction.
It's very simple, unthinking, and without any sort of goal orientation save for existing. If the algae can exist successfully without such optimizations, they will continue to do so. Kinda like how massive numbers of people will continue to buy large inefficient vehicles until gas gets expensive. They could have used optimized & efficient vehicles, but they don't unless they perceive it to be absolutely necessary to get by.
If ProprietaryFunction() is a GUI-related function, then who cares? You were gonna have to change the GUI code anyway. Even if you're porting between different open-source operating systems it can happen.
And if it's not GUI-related, but actually something that does substantial work? Just replace ProprietaryFunction() with an open-sourced alternative.
It's only useless if you're not willing to contribute to his open-source project. (And if that is the case, you would be the leech).
Chances are the original programmer knew that ProprietaryFunction() wasn't the ideal solution, but he lacked an open-source alternative. Maybe he's strapped for time. Or maybe he doesn't have the skill to code a replacement for ProprietaryFunction(). Maybe his primary concern wasn't OSS-ideology, but rather, getting the software to just simply work because "purely"-OSS that doesn't work yet is not going to help anyone (including himself) anymore than "mostly"-OSS that does work.
There isn't an open-source library that has a function that's able to do the same thing?
If your proprietary competitors have better libraries, for which you can't find some generally-equivalent function to replace ProprietaryFunction(), your libraries need work. No, it doesn't help you in the short term, but it does help you in the long term by forcing the realization upon you that that OSS library needs that particular feature enhancement. Open source OS'es like Linux are trying to be competitive. More power to 'em, go for it. But they're not going to be as-good alternatives if they aren't willing to have libraries with as-good functions for developers to utilize.
At least the guy (or team) that started the project on their proprietary OS gave you any sort of starting point. They could have kept the whole darn thing close-source.
Quoting the commenter...
To me open source on a non opensource OS (apple has a patchey history with opening bits of OS) has always seemed a little contridictory and defeating the purpose of running a free or opensource system. I'd like to point out that the commenter's alleged contridiction is only true depending on what you deem to be the purpose of running a free (as in rights) OSS system. If that purpose is to rely upon only ideologically-pure OSS solutions for your computing tasks, then yeah.
But if the purpose of running a your free or opensource system was because it was easier to get, or easier to get legally, or because you prefer the user-interface, or its stability, or because you believe it's more secure, or because it was free (as in beer), or because you believe your OS is just-plain-better, or because you like to be able to tinker with a kernal and system level things... then no. The purpose of running your free opensource system was not defeated. Some people have lofty ideology they wish to satisfy. Some people are trying to simply accomplish their task as efficiently as possible.
Rarely is the easy/efficient way also the ideologically superior way. The purpose of trying to use OSS is free (as in rights) for anyone to determine for themself and shouldn't not be assumed to be the same purpose for everyone.
I don't think most people would see that as a substantial portion of their content or their purpose. Isn't that irrelevant?
A judgment was made: If you link to copyrighted material, you can be taken to court. I didn't notice any conditions that exclude this based on "substantial portions of content".
And why wouldn't Google be suable, for general reasons & the fact that a cached-page of those indexing sites can be just as useful as the original sites?
Then you dump the nutrient-rich deep water locally and farm the resulting massive explosion of plants and critters. You're talking about deliberate manipulation of complex ecological systems. The idea of pulling this off without significant negative ramifications leaves me quite skeptical. (If you can cite some examples of this being done successfully, I'd be interested to see it). To anyone thinking you can simply dump nutrients into the ocean, and have more fish appear, I'd say they need to study a bit more about eutrophication. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutrophication More isn't better, and there is a point at which you will cause algae/cyanobacteria to kill off the stuff you plan to eat. As that stuff dies and decomposes, it causes even more harm by ruining the water's dissolved oxygen content, killing more of your fish. No offense intended, but any talk of just dumping nutrients into the ocean to bring edible fish sounds naive to me.
Also wondering about food, waste disposal and power. The ocean is full of tasty critters. And other people want them too. Fish populations have been in serious decline. How long do you think it would take for a political dispute to be formed over fishing rights of regions where fish are (relatively) abundant? I know if I've been making a living fishing an area for all my life, and some rich tax-dodgers planted a city over it, I'd be pissed as hell. The libertarian colony would be sustaining itself at the expense of people to whom they don't ever have to answer to.
And what happens if this libertarian colony plants itself atop of rich fishing grounds for the sole purpose of using it to sell to a nearby nation?
Another potential problem would be what happens when a land-nation's nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus runoff from agriculture causes eutrophication in the area they use for food. It hurts the colony.
What happens if eutrophication hurts a nation or colony, and they both try to blame eachother? In the time it takes them to sort stuff out, people are starving on the colony.
There are potential problems posed for both sides. Simply stating that there are lots of fish in the sea (IMHO) is a gross oversimplification of an extremely important aspect of manufacturing a nation (food supply). Not to mention manufacturing a nation in a place which is inherently hostile to humans.
Don't forget, relying exclusively upon seafood could be a health risk. The mercury content in fish isn't exactly a good thing these days, especially for women.
Will every citizen be a trained firefighter? Who will provide emergency medical services? The same sort of people who provide such services on ocean-going vessels or in houses in very rural areas. These are already solved problems - with solutions that vary depending on the size of the community and the degree of its location's isolation. I think you underestimate the differences between performing such emergency services on land versus open-ocean. It's significantly more difficult. There's a reason why have agencies like coast-guards (as opposed to just local police departments with some boats). In terms of emergency services mitigating disaster, a small explosion on land causing a fire is one thing. A small explosion causing a house to sink is is on a whole other level of difficulty.
Manufacturers just cut corners wherever possible, and the end result is weak, light cars, and more serious accidents and road deaths. Waydago! Here is a link to a crash-test comparison between a tiny (really tiny!) European car (minicooper) versus a Ford F150: http://bridger.us/2002/12/16/CrashTestingMINICooperVsFordF150/
Please explain to me why you believe small-european cars are inherently more dangerous?
I like burden of proof because it's often the quickest way to end the discussion. Yeah, that's pretty much the same reason court rooms like it. It saves people time & money. Unfortunately, it is still a logical fallacy, so winning an argument with it is a hollow victory for anyone really interested in determining truth (as opposed to just feeling right).
-- because theists do not (and cannot) have proof. This is only true in the context of groups of humans. On a purely individual level, one can actually have proof (i.e. God speaks to you in your head). I remember seeing a monk interviewed on TV (I wish I could remember the tv show, but I wanna say the person lived in egypt) who discussed how he used to be a vocal atheist "preaching" in streets his atheism, then God said something to him in his head (some question actually, can't remember). He had proof. Unfortunately it's not applicable for the rest of us.
It's like "I think therefore I am". I know I'm sentient. You know you're sentient. But we can never prove it to each other. Either of us could be always be an android with a damn good set of scripted responses.
Demanding that they show me proof is the quickest way to make them go away -- or to lead them into an actually logical argument This I can see may have some practical merit in day to day life: If they are smart enough to be worth taking the time to debate/discuss with, they'll call you out on the burden-of-proof fallacy.
, where I can beat the metaphorical snot out of them. I wouldn't assume that. I feel it's best to never assume anything. Assumptions are often the first mistake of arguments by theists & atheists.
If atheists can't prove it because it's a double-negative My apologies. Such an embarrassing typo. Hopefully everyone knows that when I wrote "double negative" I really meant to write "Proof of impossibility".
The burden is on the believer to provide proof. Not on the Atheist to provide some sort of mythical 'anti-proof'. This is actually wrong. Generally speaking, if A wants B to believe *something*, they should submit proof to B. Any persuasive claim (as opposed to just private beliefs) aught to require some validation. This applies not just to theists, but also atheists as well. If atheists can't prove it because it's a double-negative, then logically you can only be an agnostic or a theist, as anything else is not only unproven, but unprovable.
Despite it proving nothing, burden of proof makes us *feel* better. And it does save time & money in court cases when you have somebody needs to be blamed for a crime ("maybe"s and "I don't know", "I can't know" are agnostic answers, but we don't tolerate them in court rooms, it has to be a binary guilty/not-guilty).
They do not 'believe' there is no God, they have NO belief. This reminded me of a point I felt was worth mentioning: I can see how it could be argued that everyone believes what they want to believe. After all, you don't see many atheists who wish God existed, and you don't see many theists who wish God didn't exist. There's a strong correlation between what belief makes people happy and what they believe.
The problem is, the book of Leviticus doesn't make that statement, so based on that falseness alone, the rest of your point is moot. You can't invalidate anything based upon verifiable false information.
That would only be the case if I were relying upon that specific belief's factuality to prove the encapsulation & modularity of the books. But what you aren't acknowledging is that the point being made doesn't hinge on that flawed paraphrasing. I didn't need that specific quote. Any passage that contained rules that are significantly contrary to what modern societies have considered ethical could have been used in its place and it wouldn't make a bit of difference. There are plenty of things in the older books which modern people find very questionable: female subjugation, a tolerance for slavery, one ethnic tribe committing genocide against another, etc. Nowadays, lots of people fervently protest this stuff. Would you like me to use one of those as an example instead? Definitions of abomination are quite unnecessary in arguing the core point that selecting one's own desired books to live by has appeal to people & it isn't flawed in a logical sense.
An analogy: Bob: Macs never crash. Joe: You're wrong, mine got a blue screen of death (or something) just yesterday. Bob: Macs can't get a blue screen of death. That's impossible. Joe: Oh wait you're right. Bob: Yeah, see! Macs can't crash! I told you so! Joe: No, they can still crash, they get a kernal panic that displays a multilingual grey window. Bob: ***ignores Joe and repeats previous argument until the implied lie is accepted or Joe walks away, whining about how an erroneous supporting detail matters when it really doesn't, because in the end, Macs can still crash and Bob is still wrong, regardless of wether its they involve blue-screens-of-death or Leviticus-abominations.***
This analogy demonstrates a logical fallacy on Bob's part. A Mac *can* crash, regardless of wether or not it can get a blue-screen-of-death.
You do claim the statement by your statement that you believe the lie that the book says abomination (it doesn't), and use that to make a point.
Desperate to validate your straw-man huh? When I said this: **I can easily toss it aside** Notice the presence of the word "can". That sentence is a hypothetical example. If I believed as you accuse me of, I would have said: **"I easily toss it aside"** See the difference? As a rule I rarely discuss my actual personal beliefs. I have some, but in public discussion I present an agnostic point of view. It's basically how my theology prof. taught, and I figured it has merit.
If you don't believe it, then why use that as an example?
1) arbitrary 2) first thing that came to mind 3) didn't really matter anyway because I'm not actually declaring what I believe, nor do I declare what anyone else should believe. I declared something that many people don't like to believe because it seems discriminatory (even if the discrimination is only for some descendants of a particular man they don't care to know much about). Many people are uncomfortable with discrimination in any form. Like I said in my previous reply to you, I could have said "Leviticus thinks kittens poop rainbows". Anything that we nowadays consider disagreeable with what can be found in any of those old books could have been arbitrarily chosen to model the motive for accepting each of those books on an individual basis instead of as an indivisible package.
Or does wrong examples not matter, as long as your point is taken?
Wrong examples can matter if the entire arugment hinges upon that example, but in this case it didn't. Unlike many people, I know when to retract mistakes. The first "abomination" paraphrasing was such a mistake, but the point it was meant to represent is still logically sound (like in the analogy).
Of course it is interesting that you should view these people as "Abomination" when the scripture doesn't. Fact is, people who don't know the text, or the context of the passage shouldn't be spewing their biases.
This passage is about the PRIESTLY duties of Aaron's descendants. If you're going to misquote a passage and show your ignorance, and twist it to your viewpoint, you might want to make sure the person you are trying to convert knows less than you do. I'm calling Ignoratio elenchi on this one: You wanna talk about context? Fine. The context was that we were talking about how the Bible is a series of encapsulated books. I simply used an arbitrary example of distasteful prejudice. I could have said "Leviticus says kittens are evil!", and it wouldn't make a bit of difference. If you are interested in reinforcing context, police yourself. You're obviously trying to hyper-parse things that don't matter as though they did matter.
I even went so far as to follow up my hastily & arbitrarily written example of prejudice with the words "(or whatever)" because I knew that until I did a real citation it would probably be inaccurate. Those amended words acknowledged that. And I did that to keep the discussion on-topic, and avoid juvenile splinter-arguments like this. Sadly, you went out of your way to instigate a moot debate designed to make people to lose sight of the real topic.
Of course it is interesting that you should view these people as "Abomination" when the scripture doesn't. I'm gonna call Straw-Man here: I obviously don't believe that, yet you claim I do. If they were my beliefs as you claim, then why would I have been critical of a book that advocates such prejudices in the first place? How dishonest must a person be to try and misrepresent someone as an advocate of that which they actually detest? Go ahead and keep trying to tell people that I hate the physically-imperfect. It's laughable for multiple reasons. One of which being that I wear glasses.
I Didn't call you a nazi, I compared you to a propagandist, who happens to be a Nazi. I was specific to make note that it was endlessly repeating a lie, hoping it becomes a truth. Here's the actual quote [...] Still sounds like a Reductio ad Hitlerum (association-fallacy).
The problem is that supposedly the Bible was divinely inspired.
IMHO I think it would be more correct to say: "The problem is that supposedly the books of the bible were divinely inspired". The Bible is arguably just packaging for books/scripture that already existed for a while.
People take issue with throwing out parts of the Bible as faulty and accepting others. I personally can't blame them: either it is true, and the contents of every book is inspired by some supernatural force, or it was a man made work of fiction.
That logic is too binary for me. I would offer you other explainations: (#1) Misinterpretation: A book could be inspired by a supernatural force, and then the silly bald apes misinterpret it. In colonial-America the phrase "all men created equal" used to mean "white males", but nowadays it means "everyone". Interpretation is everything. I'm not aware of any rule that says God isn't allowed to share his metaphors with humans. Therefore it is conceivable for scripture to contain divine-fiction. Hell, a lot of jews never took Genesis literally.
(#2) Bad editors: Remember that it's a compilation of different books, written by various people that lived in different places, times, and used different languages, and even possibly some variation between their writers' cultures too.
Then some theological & political powers decided to get all the scriptures floating around at the time and decide which were going to be considered official/legit/canon. That's a *really* big deal because it means (arguably at least) humans (not just God) would be a filter. Can we be certain they filtered only the non-divine stuff, and didn't leave out any divine books? (the religion itself says humans aren't perfect). Couldn't they have included a few that they shouldn't have, but did anyway due to their cultural & religious biases? These are biases which could (just a hypothetical!) explain why a book like Leviticus with all its crazy rules would get lumped together with the other books when it maybe shouldn't have. People typically don't like big changes, and if you've been using a book to define cultural norms & taboos, chances any attempt to change it is gonna fracture the society even more. Causing more divisions is exactly the opposite of why the politicians got the theological authorities to decide which books would be canon.
Historical context is a huge deal. You can't only apply modern logic & interpretation.
(#3) God pulls a Santa: Ever heard a parent tell a kid "behave or santa will give you coal at christmas"? The parent tells the kid a blatant lie. There is no santa. But at their age they have an abundance of energy that isn't yet balanced by intelligence, and they have to keep the kid from hurting himself. Perhaps it's possible (although I don't advocate this one, it's still worth mentioning in the interest of considering all options) that deities can lie to the bald apes just to get them to behave a little better until they reach a level of maturity that enables them to handle the truth. I'm certain at the age of 6 I wouldn't have been able to accept the amazing weirdness of quantum mechanics (assuming if I were smart enough to understand it of course). But now I'm more mature & objective so I'm able to accept it. Tell people what they need to hear. By the time they discover the truth, they'll be mature enough to handle it.
I take the latter as my personal belief, and I have little respect for someone who picks and choses which parts of their supposed holy book are correct.
Why not? I'd argue it depends on **why** they pick-and-choose parts. If they do it because it's what they want to hear/think/believe, I can see your point. IF they do it because they're a scholar and they're basing it upon a thorough understanding of the historical context, that's fine IMO.
I'd love to see where Leviticus states this. Leviticus 21:17-23... No man of your descendants in succeeding generations, who has any defect, may approach to offer the bread of his God. For any man who has a defect shall not approach: a man blind or lame, who has a marred face or any limb too long, a man who has a broken foot or broken hand, or is a hunchback or a dwarf, or a man who has a defect in his eye, or eczema or scab, or is a eunuch. No man of the descendants of Aaron the priest, who has a defect, shall come near to offer the offerings made by fire to the Lord. He has a defect; he shall not come near to offer the bread of his God. He may eat the bread of his God, both the most holy and the holy; only he shall not go near the veil or approach the altar, because he has a defect, lest he profane My sanctuaries; for I the Lord sanctify them. (Leviticus 21:17-23) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_inconsistencies_in_the_Bible
If this counts for what people call "science" these days Who said this was science? Anyone should know this would be a theological subject. (That statement was implicitly putting words in my mouth which I consider to be deliberately misleading).
spewing shit that they heard from a person who heard it from thier cousin... then no wonder so many people believe Darwin is "survival of the fittest" (a phrase which Darwin never said). 1. Imply that I said or think something. 2. Attack it. 3. Profit!! I never cited my cousin or anyone else. Implying that I did is clearly misleading. I never mentioned (much less, misattributed) that survival-of-fittest-quote & I've always been aware of its origin. But hey, if you think you know what I think/believe better than I do, I suggest you get your telepathy fixed.
Endlessly repeating something until it is accepted as truth is worthy of Joseph Goebbels! Too bad it happens in Science too! You're comparing me to a Nazi. Congratulations on raising the level of this discourse to a higher & more mature level. Rather than call me a Nazi, you could have tried using counter-research to try to prove me wrong. But no, your name-calling accomplishes more than any counter-research ever could. Bravo, sir, bravo on a well researched and respectful discourse.
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We have stopped adapting a long time ago. âSomewhere around the time we invented fire, hunting, farming...âSince then we adapt everything AROUND US to ourselves.
Evidence of human evolution after having developed fire, hunting, farming evolution:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=african-adaptation-to-dig
And here's an BBC-news article that looks at evidence for the rate of evolution actually increasing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7132794.stm
I could also speculate that by our modern societies putting more worth on technical & scientific expertise, we could have a selection pressure that selects for smarter people, which would be evolution as well. Yes, we force our environment to adapt to us to a massive degree, but that still doesn't exclude us adapting to it. We can do both at the same time.
Google "recent human evolution"
I doubt evolution ever really can stop unless extremely advanced aliens catpure & domesticate us into a line of pure-breed pets...
Regarding the roaches, sharks, certain bugs, etc I would contest the part where you say:
but the evidence tells a different story.
The rest of your post has its merits, but it's wrong to say that we need genetic diversity just for the sake of having it.
I didn't actually intend to convey we need genetic diversity for the sake of having it (I could have been clearer I suppose). A better way to say it could be "We need genetic diversity as insurance.
Births, mutation, and death are all critical to a species survival. If people don't die & get replaced by offspring, the human-species will be endangering its ability to adapt.
A species which has become static and forgoes any new genetic variation is somehow not going to get wiped out by a pandemic at some point? Yeah right.
Even with good genetic variation, viruses have managed to kill significant portions of human populations. You're not going to exterminate these viruses, ever. Even if you did, nature would cook up more at some point.
And I've seen concerns over the idea of overpopulation poo-poo'd by people saying "we'll take-away/limit their ability to reproduce". What happens if for some reason the whole immortality thing stops working? Maybe an oversight, but maybe some anti-immortality jerks genetically engineer a retrovirus that makes everyone mortal again (contagious disease that kills over a period of about 70 years). Without the baby-making option, guess who gets to determine what traits make the species?
And all the talk here about how the body is just machine, and we can repair it to perfection seem to have forgotten that there are plenty of toxins out there, natural & anthropogenic, which don't leave the body once they get in. This is the entire basis behind biomagnification/bioaccumulation. How would "immortal" people avoid the accumulation of heavy-metals over long periods of time? How many years of trace-amounts of mercury do you think it takes to damage your brain?
It's also worth noting that the human societies have evolved in a sense as well, and would likely be much slower without replacing people with those able to offer fresh ideas & let go of the old without resistance. I can tell you that ethnic/national/political grudges would probably endure for much longer in the event that everyone can recall the reasons for their conflicts in a very personal way. If you think the middle east is a mess now, just wait until they're all immortal.
From my humble point of view, the desire for immortality comes off as an amazingly selfish quest which would certainly enhance the risks for the survival of the species. It can be argued that by the act of dying, humans behave as team players and increase the speed of progress (biological & intellectual).
A person can be smart, but people are proving themselves to be herd of stupid animals. If we have cheap oil again, the population will stop looking at efficient vehicles & choosing homes closer to where they work instead of acting as though suburban paradise was some sort of cultural entitlement.
All I'm saying is that, there are no options for survival as a nation unless we get sustainable energy in place. If oil/coal remain cheaper than all other forms of energy, then we'll continue to use the cheap stuff. A drunk with a hangover may ask for more booze, but should you give it to him?
The current economic pain we feel is a warning of what's to come when the oil-supply gets even shorter. You can try to use government-action to mitigate the suffering, but if you do, we'll become like an animal who's nerves can't sense pain. To survive, the animal is required to be smarter than a person who can sense pain to survive. Otherwise, you end up with a creature which allows a predator to gnaw on its torso without worrying too much about it.
Secondly, I wasn't advocating it, in general, or even in the context of the original article. (I would think it doesn't fit into the chronology properly for the article anyway). I'm was merely pointing out that the whole "meteors usually not originating from Earth thing" is not a complete impossibility since the Giant Impact Hypothesis, despite difficulties, is still the prevailing hypothesis today.
And while, again I'm not advocating the hypothesis, the "difficulties" (quotes not intended to disparage) are themselves debatable as we can't verify that our expected evidence of such an event are correct given nobody's ever witnessed the formation of a planet, much less the collision between two. There are no smoking guns on any sides of the debate. Besides, none of the lunar origin explanations are free of difficulties & inconsistencies. Unless you know something I don't...?
And the person you responded to earlier (Tarlus) could have been making a completely different argument from the one you assumed. Maybe he meant to imply an large impact event ejected material from a primordial earth, and meteors in unstable orbits around Earth could have been contaminated with genetic material by the event. I just think his "correction" (quoted for sarcasm) actually can imply more than the one meaning you appeared to assume it had.
I question the logic behind the nucleobases only being formed in space. Why can't the nucleobases have incorporated that heavy form of carbon before or after its trip through space? What says they can only form together in the same place?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis
This is an example of a scenario which could easily can result in some meteorites of Earth-made-origin coming back to eventually fall on Earth.
You're just not being imaginative enough.
The person I was responding to was talking about executing unauthorized exe on on another person's computer (to uninstall Safari). That part of the attack is a Windows+IE issue that Microsoft has to fix.
Sure, Safari (on Windows) can carpetbomb & spam your desktop. That's potentially annoying (but ultimately doesn't harm your system).
There's a distinction between Safari "making available" the malicious executable versus it actually being executed, which like I was saying, the person I was responding to was talking about.
It's something Microsoft has to fix. The article is your friend.
Maybe it's just me, but this looks like it's just Safari for Windows. I tried to click on the live example and it just downloaded an exe file.
And in fact, they did support the evolution of species. Lysenkoism was not an attempt to replace evolution, but rather it tried to serve as a mechanic for how evolution worked. I suggest reading up on Lysenkoism and the effect it had on science in the Soviet Union:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism [wikipedia.org] I read the article. Lysenkoism doesn't involve any such evolution vs creationism, or Lysenkoism vs evolution. You've misrepresented the entire subject, and I hope people do read the article you linked so they can see why.
Quoting the article: Lysenkoism, or Lysenko-Michurinism, may also denote the biological inheritance principles Lysenko subscribed to which derive from theories of the heritability of acquired characteristics, a body of biological inheritance theory which departs from Mendelism and that Lysenko himself named "Michurinism". Notice, it departs from "mendelism", not evolution as a whole.
When Darwin stumbled upon evolution, he was able to come up with all sorts of examples of things that must had evolved adaptations, but he didn't have a clue about the exact mechanisms involved other than there must be one.
Lysenkoism wasn't an alternative to evolution (as you said). It was merely trying to define the mechanism behind how evolution works. Of course it's not the evolution we know to be correct today, but it was still a branch of evolutionary theory (just a bad branch of evolutionary theory).
You've framed the context to be some sort of issue that attempts to be tangental to creationism, when in fact it was only a Mendelism (genetic heritability) vs Lysenkoism (inheritance of acquired characteristics). They were still both evolution.
Why are people so many people constantly desperate to try and distance the Soviet communists from being advocates of evolution? If it is for some sort of religion-vs-atheism impulse, leave it out of a science discussion, otherwise it's no better than creationists trying to get their stuff in our science classes.
I had queried: Either the environment kills it before it reproduces or it doesn't. Their goal is survival, not being efficient at it.
I believe that is not actually a query. I'm pretty sure it's not a question at all. Furthermore, it wasn't yours. I wrote that.
...
I sense that this merely a copy/paste error. (It happens)
While I'd would normally attempt a response to the part where you say
First, when talking about algae, "growth" is "reproduction". Second, when I said "opportunity to evolve optimizations" I'm speaking about the reproductive opportunities of algae. In pioneering species those opportunities are primarily at the unpopulated frontier rather than at the area populated by algae grazers (where toxins may have evolved in an evolutionary arms race).
Now you may be claiming that the "toxins" did not evolve in an arms race against algae grazers -- that they are merely pollution
Oh no. I never meant to imply any such thing. When I wrote that I intended the word "toxins" to be strictly in the context of toxins produced by the blooming algae/cyanobacteria population. I didn't mean to imply any sort of anthropogenic pollution being toxic in my previous post.
But what you wrote gave me an idea: Maybe (I don't know this actually be true) the agriculture which typically deposits NPK inorganic fertilizer could also be causing some sort of nutrient poisoning. We know that excessive nitrates in drinking water for humans causes blue baby syndrome, and the blood isn't able to carry the oxygen it needs. It affects adults, but not enough to hurt them. It seems to kill babies. If something similar were selecting against the larger organisms' offspring, it could also have an affect. I don't know how quickly nitrates are produced in the area where the nutrients are formed after the fertilizer runoff gets into the water, nor do I know wether the rate at which it's consumed by the bloom is fast enough to make it the limiting-nutrient. if it isn't the limiting-nutrient, maybe there can be enough hanging around to kill the juveniles of the larger species in the area. Hell, for all I know, maybe the zooplankton can utilize the algae-bloom for food, even when they produce toxins, but if their offspring can't survive the environment, they'd still get wiped out. For something that has a such a quick rate of growth, how do you distinguish between their vanishing being a result of being killed versus them simply dying off of old age without having viable offspring? I must stress, I have no proof that this actually contributes to eutrophication. It's just an idea.
but if that is the case it seems there is an awful lot of food begging to be eaten
I understand what you mean to say here, but I don't like that wording. Algae (whether it has toxins or not) isn't begging to be eaten by anything. Nothing alive begs to be eaten, unless of course you're a seed which relies upon being passed through a grazing animal's digestive tract that is. hehe
by the first algae grazer to become tolerant of the pollution.
It doesn't matter how much a consumer-species wants to eat something or how great the potential reward for them is unless they have the means to evolve the necessary traits faster than their prey can evolve a countermeasure (is would that be a counter-countermeasure?).
Wether they can/can't with respect to Eutrophication is something I don't know. I just wanted to note
In addition to losing oxygen, the water becomes more turbid,and the proportions of species in the community is damaged.
Some of these algal/cyanobacteria blooms are actually toxic to plants & animals. Why don't the smaller, rapidly-reproducing zooplankton take up the gauntlet? Because they suffocate near the alleged food source. That of course assumes the food source firstly isn't toxic to them.
Ever seen a dead mouse in a mouse-trap? Food surrounded by lethal conditions is hardly food. Why don't the smaller, rapidly-reproducing zooplankton take up the gauntlet?
Virtually all of the articles I've read on hypoxic waters and dead zones fail to address this paradox. I've only read one paper that
mentioned even an _hypothesis_ of how algae grazers fail to flourish -- referring to algae species that protect themselves with toxins.
But this doesn't ring true: Why would the most pioneering of algae species be the most protective of themselves when there is so much
opportunity to evolve optimizations for growth rather than defense against grazers? The evolution of life doesn't care about optimizations for growth. Evolution does not seek to form a more perfect creature. Either the environment kills it before it reproduces or it doesn't. Their goal is survival, not being efficient at it. An organism's life can be amazingly cruel and miserable, yet still perfectly succeed in this function. Optimizations and perfections aren't on the agenda unless the consequence of not adopting such things is extinction.
It's very simple, unthinking, and without any sort of goal orientation save for existing. If the algae can exist successfully without such optimizations, they will continue to do so. Kinda like how massive numbers of people will continue to buy large inefficient vehicles until gas gets expensive. They could have used optimized & efficient vehicles, but they don't unless they perceive it to be absolutely necessary to get by.
And if it's not GUI-related, but actually something that does substantial work?
Just replace ProprietaryFunction() with an open-sourced alternative.
It's only useless if you're not willing to contribute to his open-source project. (And if that is the case, you would be the leech).
Chances are the original programmer knew that ProprietaryFunction() wasn't the ideal solution, but he lacked an open-source alternative. Maybe he's strapped for time. Or maybe he doesn't have the skill to code a replacement for ProprietaryFunction(). Maybe his primary concern wasn't OSS-ideology, but rather, getting the software to just simply work because "purely"-OSS that doesn't work yet is not going to help anyone (including himself) anymore than "mostly"-OSS that does work.
There isn't an open-source library that has a function that's able to do the same thing?
If your proprietary competitors have better libraries, for which you can't find some generally-equivalent function to replace ProprietaryFunction(), your libraries need work. No, it doesn't help you in the short term, but it does help you in the long term by forcing the realization upon you that that OSS library needs that particular feature enhancement. Open source OS'es like Linux are trying to be competitive. More power to 'em, go for it. But they're not going to be as-good alternatives if they aren't willing to have libraries with as-good functions for developers to utilize.
At least the guy (or team) that started the project on their proprietary OS gave you any sort of starting point. They could have kept the whole darn thing close-source.
Quoting the commenter
But if the purpose of running a your free or opensource system was because it was easier to get, or easier to get legally, or because you prefer the user-interface, or its stability, or because you believe it's more secure, or because it was free (as in beer), or because you believe your OS is just-plain-better, or because you like to be able to tinker with a kernal and system level things
Rarely is the easy/efficient way also the ideologically superior way. The purpose of trying to use OSS is free (as in rights) for anyone to determine for themself and shouldn't not be assumed to be the same purpose for everyone.
A judgment was made: If you link to copyrighted material, you can be taken to court.
I didn't notice any conditions that exclude this based on "substantial portions of content".
And why wouldn't Google be suable, for general reasons & the fact that a cached-page of those indexing sites can be just as useful as the original sites?
More isn't better, and there is a point at which you will cause algae/cyanobacteria to kill off the stuff you plan to eat. As that stuff dies and decomposes, it causes even more harm by ruining the water's dissolved oxygen content, killing more of your fish.
No offense intended, but any talk of just dumping nutrients into the ocean to bring edible fish sounds naive to me. Also wondering about food, waste disposal and power. The ocean is full of tasty critters. And other people want them too. Fish populations have been in serious decline. How long do you think it would take for a political dispute to be formed over fishing rights of regions where fish are (relatively) abundant?
I know if I've been making a living fishing an area for all my life, and some rich tax-dodgers planted a city over it, I'd be pissed as hell. The libertarian colony would be sustaining itself at the expense of people to whom they don't ever have to answer to.
And what happens if this libertarian colony plants itself atop of rich fishing grounds for the sole purpose of using it to sell to a nearby nation?
Another potential problem would be what happens when a land-nation's nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus runoff from agriculture causes eutrophication in the area they use for food. It hurts the colony.
What happens if eutrophication hurts a nation or colony, and they both try to blame eachother? In the time it takes them to sort stuff out, people are starving on the colony.
There are potential problems posed for both sides. Simply stating that there are lots of fish in the sea (IMHO) is a gross oversimplification of an extremely important aspect of manufacturing a nation (food supply). Not to mention manufacturing a nation in a place which is inherently hostile to humans.
Don't forget, relying exclusively upon seafood could be a health risk. The mercury content in fish isn't exactly a good thing these days, especially for women. Will every citizen be a trained firefighter? Who will provide emergency medical services? The same sort of people who provide such services on ocean-going vessels or in houses in very rural areas. These are already solved problems - with solutions that vary depending on the size of the community and the degree of its location's isolation. I think you underestimate the differences between performing such emergency services on land versus open-ocean. It's significantly more difficult. There's a reason why have agencies like coast-guards (as opposed to just local police departments with some boats). In terms of emergency services mitigating disaster, a small explosion on land causing a fire is one thing. A small explosion causing a house to sink is is on a whole other level of difficulty.
http://bridger.us/2002/12/16/CrashTestingMINICooperVsFordF150/
Please explain to me why you believe small-european cars are inherently more dangerous?
I think you forgot to mention the one device which is arguably the worst offender: TV's.
Of course, if you plug your devices into a powerstrip, and turn off the switch on the powerstrip, they end up using nothing.
Unfortunately, people will never do this unless electricity were considerably more expensive.
He had proof. Unfortunately it's not applicable for the rest of us.
It's like "I think therefore I am". I know I'm sentient. You know you're sentient. But we can never prove it to each other. Either of us could be always be an android with a damn good set of scripted responses. Demanding that they show me proof is the quickest way to make them go away -- or to lead them into an actually logical argument This I can see may have some practical merit in day to day life: If they are smart enough to be worth taking the time to debate/discuss with, they'll call you out on the burden-of-proof fallacy. , where I can beat the metaphorical snot out of them. I wouldn't assume that. I feel it's best to never assume anything. Assumptions are often the first mistake of arguments by theists & atheists.
It's worth mentioning that "burden of proof" is actually a logical fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
Relying on burden of proof weakens your argument.
Despite it proving nothing, burden of proof makes us *feel* better. And it does save time & money in court cases when you have somebody needs to be blamed for a crime ("maybe"s and "I don't know", "I can't know" are agnostic answers, but we don't tolerate them in court rooms, it has to be a binary guilty/not-guilty). They do not 'believe' there is no God, they have NO belief. This reminded me of a point I felt was worth mentioning: I can see how it could be argued that everyone believes what they want to believe. After all, you don't see many atheists who wish God existed, and you don't see many theists who wish God didn't exist. There's a strong correlation between what belief makes people happy and what they believe.
The problem is, the book of Leviticus doesn't make that statement, so based on that falseness alone, the rest of your point is moot. You can't invalidate anything based upon verifiable false information.
That would only be the case if I were relying upon that specific belief's factuality to prove the encapsulation & modularity of the books. But what you aren't acknowledging is that the point being made doesn't hinge on that flawed paraphrasing. I didn't need that specific quote. Any passage that contained rules that are significantly contrary to what modern societies have considered ethical could have been used in its place and it wouldn't make a bit of difference.
There are plenty of things in the older books which modern people find very questionable: female subjugation, a tolerance for slavery, one ethnic tribe committing genocide against another, etc. Nowadays, lots of people fervently protest this stuff. Would you like me to use one of those as an example instead? Definitions of abomination are quite unnecessary in arguing the core point that selecting one's own desired books to live by has appeal to people & it isn't flawed in a logical sense.
An analogy:
Bob: Macs never crash.
Joe: You're wrong, mine got a blue screen of death (or something) just yesterday.
Bob: Macs can't get a blue screen of death. That's impossible.
Joe: Oh wait you're right.
Bob: Yeah, see! Macs can't crash! I told you so!
Joe: No, they can still crash, they get a kernal panic that displays a multilingual grey window.
Bob: ***ignores Joe and repeats previous argument until the implied lie is accepted or Joe walks away, whining about how an erroneous supporting detail matters when it really doesn't, because in the end, Macs can still crash and Bob is still wrong, regardless of wether its they involve blue-screens-of-death or Leviticus-abominations.***
This analogy demonstrates a logical fallacy on Bob's part. A Mac *can* crash, regardless of wether or not it can get a blue-screen-of-death.
You do claim the statement by your statement that you believe the lie that the book says abomination (it doesn't), and use that to make a point.
Desperate to validate your straw-man huh? When I said this:
**I can easily toss it aside**
Notice the presence of the word "can". That sentence is a hypothetical example. If I believed as you accuse me of, I would have said:
**"I easily toss it aside"**
See the difference? As a rule I rarely discuss my actual personal beliefs. I have some, but in public discussion I present an agnostic point of view. It's basically how my theology prof. taught, and I figured it has merit.
If you don't believe it, then why use that as an example?
1) arbitrary 2) first thing that came to mind 3) didn't really matter anyway because I'm not actually declaring what I believe, nor do I declare what anyone else should believe. I declared something that many people don't like to believe because it seems discriminatory (even if the discrimination is only for some descendants of a particular man they don't care to know much about). Many people are uncomfortable with discrimination in any form.
Like I said in my previous reply to you, I could have said "Leviticus thinks kittens poop rainbows". Anything that we nowadays consider disagreeable with what can be found in any of those old books could have been arbitrarily chosen to model the motive for accepting each of those books on an individual basis instead of as an indivisible package.
Or does wrong examples not matter, as long as your point is taken?
Wrong examples can matter if the entire arugment hinges upon that example, but in this case it didn't. Unlike many people, I know when to retract mistakes. The first "abomination" paraphrasing was such a mistake, but the point it was meant to represent is still logically sound (like in the analogy).
Sounds lik
Fact is, people who don't know the text, or the context of the passage shouldn't be spewing their biases.
This passage is about the PRIESTLY duties of Aaron's descendants. If you're going to misquote a passage and show your ignorance, and twist it to your viewpoint, you might want to make sure the person you are trying to convert knows less than you do. I'm calling Ignoratio elenchi on this one:
You wanna talk about context? Fine. The context was that we were talking about how the Bible is a series of encapsulated books. I simply used an arbitrary example of distasteful prejudice. I could have said "Leviticus says kittens are evil!", and it wouldn't make a bit of difference. If you are interested in reinforcing context, police yourself. You're obviously trying to hyper-parse things that don't matter as though they did matter.
I even went so far as to follow up my hastily & arbitrarily written example of prejudice with the words "(or whatever)" because I knew that until I did a real citation it would probably be inaccurate. Those amended words acknowledged that. And I did that to keep the discussion on-topic, and avoid juvenile splinter-arguments like this. Sadly, you went out of your way to instigate a moot debate designed to make people to lose sight of the real topic. Of course it is interesting that you should view these people as "Abomination" when the scripture doesn't. I'm gonna call Straw-Man here:
I obviously don't believe that, yet you claim I do. If they were my beliefs as you claim, then why would I have been critical of a book that advocates such prejudices in the first place? How dishonest must a person be to try and misrepresent someone as an advocate of that which they actually detest?
Go ahead and keep trying to tell people that I hate the physically-imperfect. It's laughable for multiple reasons. One of which being that I wear glasses. I Didn't call you a nazi, I compared you to a propagandist, who happens to be a Nazi. I was specific to make note that it was endlessly repeating a lie, hoping it becomes a truth. Here's the actual quote [...] Still sounds like a Reductio ad Hitlerum (association-fallacy).
The problem is that supposedly the Bible was divinely inspired.
IMHO I think it would be more correct to say: "The problem is that supposedly the books of the bible were divinely inspired".
The Bible is arguably just packaging for books/scripture that already existed for a while.
People take issue with throwing out parts of the Bible as faulty and accepting others. I personally can't blame them: either it is true, and the contents of every book is inspired by some supernatural force, or it was a man made work of fiction.
That logic is too binary for me. I would offer you other explainations:
(#1) Misinterpretation: A book could be inspired by a supernatural force, and then the silly bald apes misinterpret it. In colonial-America the phrase "all men created equal" used to mean "white males", but nowadays it means "everyone". Interpretation is everything.
I'm not aware of any rule that says God isn't allowed to share his metaphors with humans. Therefore it is conceivable for scripture to contain divine-fiction. Hell, a lot of jews never took Genesis literally.
(#2) Bad editors: Remember that it's a compilation of different books, written by various people that lived in different places, times, and used different languages, and even possibly some variation between their writers' cultures too.
Then some theological & political powers decided to get all the scriptures floating around at the time and decide which were going to be considered official/legit/canon.
That's a *really* big deal because it means (arguably at least) humans (not just God) would be a filter. Can we be certain they filtered only the non-divine stuff, and didn't leave out any divine books? (the religion itself says humans aren't perfect). Couldn't they have included a few that they shouldn't have, but did anyway due to their cultural & religious biases? These are biases which could (just a hypothetical!) explain why a book like Leviticus with all its crazy rules would get lumped together with the other books when it maybe shouldn't have. People typically don't like big changes, and if you've been using a book to define cultural norms & taboos, chances any attempt to change it is gonna fracture the society even more. Causing more divisions is exactly the opposite of why the politicians got the theological authorities to decide which books would be canon.
Historical context is a huge deal. You can't only apply modern logic & interpretation.
(#3) God pulls a Santa: Ever heard a parent tell a kid "behave or santa will give you coal at christmas"? The parent tells the kid a blatant lie. There is no santa. But at their age they have an abundance of energy that isn't yet balanced by intelligence, and they have to keep the kid from hurting himself.
Perhaps it's possible (although I don't advocate this one, it's still worth mentioning in the interest of considering all options) that deities can lie to the bald apes just to get them to behave a little better until they reach a level of maturity that enables them to handle the truth.
I'm certain at the age of 6 I wouldn't have been able to accept the amazing weirdness of quantum mechanics (assuming if I were smart enough to understand it of course). But now I'm more mature & objective so I'm able to accept it.
Tell people what they need to hear. By the time they discover the truth, they'll be mature enough to handle it.
I take the latter as my personal belief, and I have little respect for someone who picks and choses which parts of their supposed holy book are correct.
Why not? I'd argue it depends on **why** they pick-and-choose parts. If they do it because it's what they want to hear/think/believe, I can see your point. IF they do it because they're a scholar and they're basing it upon a thorough understanding of the historical context, that's fine IMO.
Of course, I also h
No man of your descendants in succeeding generations, who has any defect, may approach to offer the bread of his God. For any man who has a defect shall not approach: a man blind or lame, who has a marred face or any limb too long, a man who has a broken foot or broken hand, or is a hunchback or a dwarf, or a man who has a defect in his eye, or eczema or scab, or is a eunuch. No man of the descendants of Aaron the priest, who has a defect, shall come near to offer the offerings made by fire to the Lord. He has a defect; he shall not come near to offer the bread of his God. He may eat the bread of his God, both the most holy and the holy; only he shall not go near the veil or approach the altar, because he has a defect, lest he profane My sanctuaries; for I the Lord sanctify them. (Leviticus 21:17-23) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_inconsistencies_in_the_Bible If this counts for what people call "science" these days Who said this was science? Anyone should know this would be a theological subject. (That statement was implicitly putting words in my mouth which I consider to be deliberately misleading). spewing shit that they heard from a person who heard it from thier cousin
2. Attack it.
3. Profit!!
I never cited my cousin or anyone else. Implying that I did is clearly misleading. I never mentioned (much less, misattributed) that survival-of-fittest-quote & I've always been aware of its origin. But hey, if you think you know what I think/believe better than I do, I suggest you get your telepathy fixed. Endlessly repeating something until it is accepted as truth is worthy of Joseph Goebbels! Too bad it happens in Science too! You're comparing me to a Nazi. Congratulations on raising the level of this discourse to a higher & more mature level. Rather than call me a Nazi, you could have tried using counter-research to try to prove me wrong. But no, your name-calling accomplishes more than any counter-research ever could. Bravo, sir, bravo on a well researched and respectful discourse.