Sure, tell that to the companies that are buying up political critters to get laws passed that mainly protect their narrow business interests.
As I said, I think even they have lost control. It's just my opinion, feel free to disagree. I can point to the recent failure of many PACs to obtain the goals they were created to obtain, even though they were well funded and did all of the odious things that PACs are allowed to do. I can point to large corporations that were taken down by the government regardless of the level of contributions made. I can point to the government's riding rough shod over the constitution that the naive truly believe still form the basis of our government. The government has become an entity of and for itself at this point in time, and I think that's going to become clearer to all of us in the next few years.
The critical question is: What, if anything, will its citizens be willing to do about these matters?
Not bitter at all. Certainly I am sorry I can't do that any longer, but hardly bitter about it. I think it is your own bias towards fairness that made you read bitterness into what I was saying. By my own standards, I've been hugely successful, and truly have nothing I can complain about in the realm of business. I own a lingerie store, a literary agency, a software company, a martial arts school and an e-commerce consulting business. On top of that, I've built some websites that are currently riding Google's advertising model right into my wallet. I shouldn't be complaining, and in fact, I am not. The closing of my bookstore business was a strategic choice made before any damage was done to me because I was perfectly able to see that the light in the tunnel was indeed a train.
I don't remember saying that sales taxes (or lack of) is the only factor that makes or breaks a business, or even the main one for that matter. Just one of many.
I don't think I was trying to say that was your position; I was, at some length, saying that any perception of fairness in business matters is illusory and self-centered. Such an outlook is not only incorrect, it is dangerous.
Now imagine that they were able to sell everything for 7% even cheaper than they already were, widening the gap even more between their prices and yours. Would you have cared? Would it have mattered to you?
Amazon was able to sell to the end-user for less than my products cost me. Once they reached that level of pricing, no further difference between my and their prices could make any difference at all. Volume pricing is a consequence of efficiencies of scale enabled at the producer by the buyer. I could not so enable them; Amazon could. Perfectly fair. The niche my business grew into went away.
So, no — I would not have cared, and it would not have mattered to me one bit. They had already won and any further thrashing about on my part would have been entirely counter-productive. I spent that effort on other endeavors, and that was the right tack to take. Furthermore, I am a warm and fuzzy Amazon customer. They built a great business by my standards, and I am delighted to be one of their longest-term customers.
I think I see what you're trying to get at here; you want me to say that if a business has to charge tax in state A, but there is no comparable tax in state B, thereby drawing the buyer to state B and so using up the purchasing power of the buyer without involving the business in state A, that this is unfair.
However, I do not think that it is. States are in competition, businesses are in competition, consumers, in the last analysis, are in competition. If state A is foolish enough to enact a condition that drives its consumers to state B, then it deserves to fail or at least take some damage.
The optimum solution is not to have state B instantiate a comparably harmful-to-business environment, the smart thing to do is for state A to go, "Oh crap, we seem to have made a miss-step here" and fix the actual problem, which is obviously the sales tax itself.
Sales taxes by their very nature penalize consumption and so entice consumers to consume less at every level. Buying less, which is entirely optional from the consumer's standpoint, reduces taxes paid in and thereby the government's income; from the economic point of view, how stupid is that? Pretty stupid!
If the government needs X amount of funding to accomplish Y tasks, then the correct solution is to enact the simplest, most balanced, least expensive to administer solution that will get it those funds. Sales taxes cannot meet those standards. That's why they are bad. No other reason.
The day that the government is made to do the right thing is the day they create a flat tax on every individual, corporation, and organization in the country. No excep
If something is unfair to begin with, it's the current system. Incredibly unfair to brick and mortar stores.
You know, I used to have an online bookstore. Biggest specialty bookstore in the world of its type, the Martial Arts Bookstore. It used to be quite the moneymaking operation, and joy for me to run, because that's a strong area of interest for me. Then, along came Amazon, with buying power I couldn't hope to match (mainly from investors... they'd never had to make a profit at that time, while I had to make a profit.) Not only did they have buying power I couldn't match, they had publicity power, broader product lines in every other area to get people in there for other reasons... as you would expect, my bookstore business dried up, even though I carried many more martial arts titles and knew far more about them than Amazon did, enabling levels of customer service that Amazon never tried to match. As it turns out, customer service wasn't the point; low prices were the point, and I couldn't go any lower without going below my costs. So that business is gone now. But you don't hear me screaming about how "unfair" it all was. It was perfectly fair; it was business, and business is war. I got crushed by big guns, and there you have it. If the situation had been reversed, I'd have done the same to them, count on it.
You know why I don't scream? Because I don't consider the current state of affairs, whatever it might be, to be a mandate for some magical right for no changes to affect me; I have no inherent right to stagnation. I have no right to prevent larger players from coming onto the playing field.
When I hear someone bleating about how "unfair" it is that brick and mortar operations can't complete for whatever reason, I just laugh. Right now, I'm laughing at you. Times change. The nature of what constitutes a successful business changes along with everything else. Businesses that don't or can't adapt will suffer, but that's to be expected. If they want to do well, they need to adapt. If that means selling mail order / online, then its time to get after that. Past time, even. To put it another way, building a business model that is successful today does not in any way guarantee you some right to have that model continue to be successful. If something comes along that you didn't anticipate, then you need to adapt, or you may have to give up. There is no assurance or promise that someone (presumably, a politician) will step in and save your business model.
I still run online mail order / download businesses of other types. If I have to collect taxes for all states that have sales tax, then that's what I'll be doing. It's not all that huge a job, at least as long as it is at the state and not the county or hamlet level. I'll adapt and I'll handle it, or else I need to be doing something else.
The business world is not a playground. It's more like a battlefield, and you can expect a great deal of the "incoming" to arrive from the direction of the government. It's been out of hand for many years, and it cannot be fixed by inconsequential players like small businesses and citizens. If you're not a large corporation or a member of the blue-blood old boys club, you simply have to deal with whatever they do to you. Even if you are, you may find that the government has finally grown out of your control. It bears not even a vague resemblance to the government the founding father envisioned, for better or for worse.
It's not about "fair." The US isn't fair. You can't make it fair. I could write unendingly about imbalances that the system we live under is the primary causative agent for. Business and otherwise. Things you may have never thought about, as well as things that may bother you every day. Many of them cause significant human suffering. Bleating about fairness does no good.
So until, or unless, you're willing to pick up weapons and go after the root cause of all this unfairness, the US government, I'm just going to keep on laughing at you. Don't even bother suggesting a political solution. No such thing exists for our current situation.
...or a soldier that defends smarter, less physical rats, thereby promoting survival more generally than specifically. Ants and bees have plenty of non-mating participants, and I don't think you'd get very far saying this has been anti-survival for ants and bees.
People who say ID cripples their children's ability to succeed in the real world obviously don't pay attention to politics.
That's not it. It's just that they don't count becoming a bribe-taking, PAC-owned, glittering generality dispensing, constitution-eroding, rights-repressing, mommy-law-making, religious synchophant as "success."
...this excellent reponse brings up another point that I didn't cover in my initial post. When there is a bug in a server side application, the entire userbase will help you find it. For most bugs, this will result in you finding it sooner. Secondly, when you fix it, you only have to fix it once. Thirdly, you don't have to nearly as much debugging of the client system, which you may not be able to replicate, instead you are almost exclusively debugging the server system, which is right there in your lap 24/7, or at least accessible to you under those terms, hopefully. It is also nice that no client side "caching" of scripting or other pervasive and active issue (like a cached script) will befuddle your attempts to resolve the problem(s).
As for pop-ups... man, don't even get me started on popups.
the PROBLEM is not client-side scripting in general.
Actually, it is. The presumption that you can get exactly the same
execution environment running on any arbitrary set of operating systems, with any arbitrary set of user permissions (or not), with any arbitrary amount of ram, screen real estate, screen bit-depths, and so forth is not only blindly optimistic, it is outright foolish. In order to even remotely approximate that result, you're going to have to say "But we don't care about this, because it's too old, and we don't care about that, because the environment is impractical, and we don't care about this other because the userbase is too small" — in each case, screwing some otherwise perfectly legitimate banking customer out of some subset of services you offer everyone else, or requiring them to migrate or otherwise compensate for your poor design.
There are browsers that may not have Java (for instance, browsers in PDAs and phones and the PSP and so forth) or if they do, it's jammed into such a restricted environment that typically, no one ever thinks the design through for such a thing. My Palm TX, for instance, has a pretty cool browser on it, and with the display the TX has, it can do surprisingly well on HTML/FORMS pages, wrapping and punting as need be, but — it falls apart on anything that requires client side work, because it just isn't that capable. Now I grant you, it would be wonderful if everything was that capable, but the fact is, everything isn't and what we're talking about here is the idea that when it comes to critical information — banking, bills, taxes, legal materials, college applications.. the "must have" interactions of everyday life — then Java, ActiveX and all those digital-divide generating technologies should be passed over in favor of "it just works."
Now, you take issue with all this (obviously) and so feel that Java and ActiveX and whatever client-loading tech of the day might be on deck is a good thing, and I will give you that... the day you can show that whatever it is you have cobbled up will work in all the environments I mentioned, as well as in the web browser soon to be crammed into my custom beer mug, bought to celebrate the birth of God's only son, Santa, for Saturnalia/2007. And the one in the back of my RealDoll/2010(tm)'s head.
Until then, the nature of client-side applications is that of restricting the user base to some degree, and in the case of the types of uses I mentioned above, as far as I can see, any restriction at all is a fool's act. Unless you can point out some end-result in those areas that you can achieve with client-side processing that you can't get to with server-side processing. I'll grant that there may be something, but I've not heard of it thus far. It seems to me that you need input, output, and security, and that's the end of it. Anything else is superfluous at best, and disenfrancising at worst.
WF works with Safari, Firefox and Omniweb, but only Omniweb will remember the password — so there are some minor behavior differences. If you hav security issues at home, this may not be minor, either.:-)
Re: This highlights the actual problem, which is..
on
Microsoft Ends IE for Mac
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· Score: 4, Insightful
...Java, ActiveX and all other client-side processing designs for web sites.
No, really. If the server does all the work and uses nothing but standard CGI, then the web site will work for everyone. Everyone. If you really stick to basics, sites that deal with numbers can work for such crufty old things as text browsers without a glitch. If you must have images (say, for graphing your banking activities) then sticking to JPEG and GIF will again gather in by far the widest array of users.
Every time some developer chooses client-side processing of any kind, they are locking out users. Which is form over function, and as such, I think is a very poor decision.
It's one thing to be bleeding edge when you're showing off and nothing depends on it; it's entirely another to get the blood from your legitimate clients because you want to use new stuff.
Oh good grief, how long did you spend on that little rant?
No need to concern yourself, it was only about 15 minues, max. It doesn't take a lot of concentration to deal with belief in mythology, and it certainly doesn't affect my typing speed.:-)
again you forget the fact that the gospels are the primary account of the life of Christ. True there are arguments about the dates (Christian scholars tend to put them at around 50-90AD suggesting their primary authors wrote them before they died, while scholars opposed to Christianity tend to put them around 70-150AD suggesting a longer oral history before they were written down).
I didn't forget anything. The gospels themselves are works that can only be traced back to 300 AD. You're trying to use the book to prove the book, which won't work. There is no documentation older than 300 AD, only documents that are known to be either originals from 300ad, or copies of something earlier. How much earlier is completely unknown and unproven. This, combined with no contemporary accounts of Christ or his works, put the entire issue into the completely unsubstantiated category.
As for "grace through Christ" look here, you've gone and rejected grace through Zeus. What were you thinking? Oh, wait, you were thinking that's a bunch of myth. So we do have somehing in common.:-)
I have absolutely zero interest in believing in myths, but I am very interested in how belief in myths make gullible people behave.
Josephus and Tacitus... you (probably intentionally) missed the point. These folks have absolutely zero credibility. Here's why: Unlike a historian born in say, 1980, who writes about Jack Kennedy, for Tacitus and Josephus and the rest of the "we came along later crew" there are no prior historians, no prior witnesses in the record, no family trees, no carvings, no financial records, no prison records, no bills for crucifiction materials, crowns of thorns, nails, no nothing. It's as if this Christ person never even existed. The 1980 writer has huge credibility, he can be cross-checked about a zillion different ways. Josephus and Tacitus... no. No checking of any kind can be done.
It does no good whatsoever to claim that 20 years ago, a flying saucer landed and the reporter "heard it from someone else unspecified" that's just pointless in terms of credibility, regardless of if it happened or not. To convince others that it happened, you need reasonable quality evidence. Until or unless contemporary documentation is found for Christ's existance, there is no reason whatsoever to assume he was anything more than an imaginary character created by a cult -- simply a UFO by another name. Now, you believe in him, for whatever reason. Fine. The onus is on you to come up with the proof. Without it, you're just another myth-follower to me.
It's not just about them being later and not meeting the principle of their story; it's about that what little information there was at the time sprang out of nowhere with their reports, and that those reports can only talk sensibly about the cults, because the cults were contemporary for them. That's the problem.
As for my "repeating" the resurrection lessening the crucifiction, I responded directly to a second weak attempt to make more out of it than it was. To drive the point home that it is meaningless, I went over the territory again, albeit a little differently. The ressurection story is one of Christianity's weakests points from a number of directions. It's your job to deal with it, not mine. To me, it was never more than a very poorly told fiction in the first place.
"Knowledge " has no more to do with atheism and theism than does color.
It's about belief, or lack thereof. Period. If you persist in misunderstanding what it means, then you will be unable to communicate meaningfully with the people you talk to. You'll be just like someone looking at a red apple, and calling it salty. People will immediately be misled into talking about taste, when originally, you were talking about color. If you want to talk about beleif in a god or gods, then atheism and theism define the territory. If you want to talk about knowledge, then theism and atheism are irrelevant. They both contain people that know things, and that don't know things. When you assume that an atheist says they "know" something, but that atheist has never done any such thing, you have screwed up. If you want to be a screwup, I can't help you. If you can't get it right from what you've read in this thread, and not only from me, then you're probably never going to get it right -- you're a victim of your own dogma, and it's gone and run over your karma.:-)
I am saying that the word "atheism" encompasses both weak atheism and strong atheism, and as such is too broad.
But... that's ridiculous.
Look here. Theism encompasses theist A who believes only in a god or gods but disbelieves in UFOs, theist B who beleives in a god or gods but refuses to take a stand on UFOs, and theist C who believes in both a god or gods and in UFOs. Should we now say that only thiest C "is" a theist, because his outlook encompasses belief systems and no disbelief systems?
Clearly not, because being theist is about belief in a god or gods. And nothing else!
Being atheist only defines the state of being without belief in a god or gods. That's it. Nothing else. That means that the only definitive element in determining atheism is lack of belief in a god or gods. That's it.
The term atheist isn't "too broad" in fact, it is as narrow as theist is. It only depends on one issue: lack of belief.
No. Strong [naive] atheism layers belief (in something else) on top of atheism. Atheism is still the state of being without belief in a god or gods. Strong [naive] or weak [basic].
The words theism and atheism are opposite sides of the same coin, and they work perfectly well.
You said that the problem was the lack of appearance of a belief system. That's not a problem; I am an atheist, and I don't have a belief system of either stripe -- I don't even fractionally believe in a god or gods, nor do I indulge in the conceit that I know anything about any imaginary subject.
The reason, as I said, that atheism appears as the lack of a belief system is because atheists lack belief in a god or gods. Period. That's all you can say about them as an entire group. As soon as you presume they hold some other belief system, you're talking about something else already, and you're entirely out of the domain where theist / atheist is the question you're asking.
It is a safe bet that most atheists, like most theists, adhere to many belief systems. This does not make an atheist into a theist. That's what you're trying to do: Make the state of non-belief in a god or gods stand for a different belief entirely, one that you have absolutely no business assigning to all atheists.
The problem here is not the definition of theism or atheism; the problem is your lack of understanding what they mean. I'm just trying to help you out.:-)
The problem with that definition is that then atheism does not appear to be a belief system.
The reason that it doesn't appear to be a belief system is because it isn't a belief system.
The fact that it poses a problem to you is something that should make you re-examine you precepts; it is certainly no problem for me. I know exactly where I stand, and I can deal with anything you present on that very basis.
the term "atheist" encompasses both a belief system and what is not a belief system. I think this is too broad, and push for separate names.
The terms theist and atheist define if you have a belief system that provides for the existence of a god or gods, or not. They don't define if you have a belief system. The reason you're having a problem is because you're trying to make the word mean something entirely disjoint from what it actually means.
Normally I wouldn't "feed your troll", but I've got a few idle moments...
Yeah, me too...:-)
Similarly, if Christ had not risen it would have been very easy for the Romans to produce the body, but they didn't. The body would have been quite hard to steal, and post-resurrection Christ appeared to so many people that conspiracy is really out of the question.
Bzzzzt. Sorry. This isn't history. This is part of the bible's stories. You can't use it to justify the bible; that's circular.
Much of the Old Testament dates back a very long way and it's easy to confirm that hasn't been fiddled with since Christ's birth. Jesus convinced Jews in his time because he fulfilled their prophecies that had been written down long before, and because of the extent of his understanding of scripture. It's very easy to cross check between the OT prophecies and their NT fulfullment - most modern translations even have the references in the footnotes
Bzzzt. Book 1, written first, makes predictions. Book 2, written second (and quite some time later) claims they are fulfilled. History makes no mention of these fulfillments, only the books. Circular; uses the books to justify the books. Sorry.
And of course the gospels are none too flattering to their authors or to the notable apostles. One would think a cultist revising history would paint a rosy picture of the cultists themselves, rather than a picture of people who periodically fail Jesus, fall asleep when they are supposed to be keeping watch, and keep getting things wrong.
What? People don't write about mistakes or set up plot lines that need resolution or justify later plot twists if they're putting out fiction? If they do, it means its not fiction? Man, are you confused.:-) Bzzzt!
And then there's Paul remarkably agreeing with the other gospels and unpacking it in great depth despite having received his revelation separately and not having spent much time with the gospel writers, and having originally been one who persectuted Christians.
Bzzzt. The book reports that Paul (a character in the book) didn't spend much time with the gospel writers (other characters in the book.) Circular. Meaningless. Proof of nothing.
I didn't say you were. I indicated that's where your statements originated; in fact, I was pretty clear that I wasn't attributing these ideas to you, but to fundamentalists that came before you — the accusation of not having an original thought should cue you into this.
my journey to faith involved a very great deal of serious thought
This statement impeaches your ability to think. The positions you put forth in your various posts to me are in no way indicative of deep thought, or original thought. You're toeing a line that, if you metaphorically look to either side of you, you will find a very large percentage of the Christian population standing on, right next to you. The position you're taking is common, but it is neither well thought out nor significantly distant from the fundamentalist position. It is simply comfortable. The huge error, in my opinion, that society makes by engaging political correctness in such a way as to encourage this kind of superstitious drivel is what makes it comfortable. I, due no doubt to severe personality defects, feel no obligation to leave your comfort undisturbed. I think Christians, as adults, are reality-avoiding, superstitious, deluded and entirely unable to face outright rejection of their particular brand of superstition. I don't think you're very impressive as a group, though there are some notable exceptions (Mother Theresa, Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King.) I think that you outright deceive children, and worse, you blunt whatever tendency towards critical thinking they have by teaching them to swallow the ignominious bunkum the bible passes off as "truth." If you honestly believe you've engaged in serious thought, all I can tell you is that it's not showing in your posts. You sound just like the next Christian over, mouthing platitudes, spreading ridiculous fairy tales and conflicting stories around as if they were tinsel or confetti, when in reality the stuff you're producing is closer to offal. Yes, you've perfumed the hell out of it (not an accidental choice of words) but you know, it's still sewage.
I think your story about your friend's sacrifice and Jesus's sacrifice bring up topics that are far more important than debating the historical records, Tacitus, Josephus
Ok. Josephus was born AD 37. Jesus, assuming he was a real historical figure, had been dead for about 7 years before Josephus was born. Tacitus was born in 55 AD. Jesus had been dead for about 25 years when he was born. These people were not acting as witnesses, they were quoting hearsay. At best. From cultists. These are not dependable reporters, as they were not there to see any of it. Today, in a courtroom, after Josephus and Tacitus were sworn in and the provenance of their information made known to the court, you'd hear one word: Hearsay. And they would not be allowed to testify. And the truth of this matter, arguably, is far more critical than most things that go before a court these days. I suspect you'd at least agree with that.
As far as I have been able to determine, there are no, that is, zero, contemporaneous reports of Jesus. There are plenty of reports of Christians later on, with the almost entirely unanimous theme of "Man, how do we get rid of these annoying cultists?" Looking at the situation honestly, at it's root, we have less evidence to go by than we do for the UFO/comet cultists who committed suicide a few years back so they could ride off to Alpha Centauri, or wherever. At least we saw that cult start, and we can document the leader, and the comet. There is no comparable documentation for Jesus. Just the cult itself.
I'm also aware I need tread carefully here and not be insensitive to your understandable anger about your friend's death
Oh, no. You misread me entirely. I'm not angry about his death a
No. Agnostics say they don't know. Knowledge is a separate domain from belief. Theism and atheism are the two sides of the coin — with belief in god or gods, without belief in god or gods. There is no third side. If you choose to disbelieve in god or gods, that is, take a proactive stance that there is no such thing, you are still atheist, but have added to the base position, that's all.
See the rest of the thread to learn more about these issues. If you want to understand atheism, you have to drop the incorrect definition that the fundamentalists use. Atheism is definitely not completely specified by "belief that there is no God or Gods." Some atheists take that position, some don't.
The large assumptions I'm referring to is the belief that all of reality came about by mere chance.
This is not an assumption of mine. I don't know how all of reality came about. I really don't expect to learn, either, as all reality is incomprehensibly large. Mankind may learn someday, but that'll probably be long after I'm long gone. Doesn't bother me a bit. Again, would I like to know? Certainly. Do I feel unfulfilled in any way because I don't know? No.
This is the inherent flaw in atheist logic, in my opinion. If there is a God, he would not be bound by human cognitive models any more than humans would be bound by their own creations.
So... you are saying all human concepts of God are flawed, because we can't get there from here. I accept that. That's essentially what I've been saying all along. People have no data, and they're drawing these hugely specific conclusions (such as, "there is a god, he wants me to baptize my kids, I have to do 12 hail Marys, he turns folks into pillars of salt, gives out boils, drowns entire species (-2) and kills children") from creations of their own minds. Keep in mind that if there is no god, then the precise same conditions exist: the envisioning of god (as it is wholly imaginary) is bound by no human touchpoint in reality; no objective fact can be brought to bear that will disprove this thesis. Personally, I look around, and I say to myself: "If I were god, I'd have done a lot better job." The fact that I can see a way to do things better (on any level) makes the classic conception of god pretty laughable in my mind. Now, since the odds that a being powerful enough to do what god is reputed to have done in the Christian stories would screw up as badly as we see here on earth today are very poor, it appears to me that the far simpler explanation is that humans have screwed up in trying to describe or invent god in the first place. That actually fits all the facts I know to date.
Nope, not going to buy invisible body processes as "miracles", especially given the current state of the medical art — that is, doctors can't cure a cold, they can't tell you everything the liver does, they have no idea how the mind works, they don't even know why we get old for certain. The fact that a doctor doesn't understand an event could just as easily be an indicator that doctors are insufficient to the task as it could be anything else, and as there are, as I said, no documented miracles, there is no reason to assume that what you're talking about here is a miracle. Look at the news yesterday or so... there was an article that we just now MAY have discovered the mechanism that cancer uses to metastacize; that's great for us in terms of being able to use that knowledge (if it pans out), but it is important to realize one VERY important thing: Our body systems "knew" this all along, by virtue of being there and "witnessing" it happening in the context of chemical and genetic cues, physical attachments and so on. The fact that, for instance, the occassional immune system (or other body system) manages to defeat the mechanism for metastatic cancer is not anything I see so much as a miracle, as it is a tip that there is a solution lurking beneath our ability to discern it at the moment. Look at the other side of the coin, too. Some people, they lose their life partner, they die as if it was on cue. Maybe it is. We don't understand it, but this fits right in with we don't understand a whole trainload of other stuff about the body either.
One minor nit-pick to your sig: wouldn't 20+ and 70+ be just the same? Both mean "more than 20"...;-)
Slashdot's got a pretty tight limitation on the number of characters in a sig, and worse yet, HTML tags take away from the total which makes links and styles eat your sig space... so I was trying to find a way to say, without being specific, that the numbers in question are for PS, between 20 and 29, and for my product, between 70 and 79. This is true, and also gives me some wiggle room should Adobe blindside me and add one or two.:-)
On the one hand, we have theism. Belief in a god or gods. Next, we have atheism; without a belief in a god or gods. Neither position requires knowledge, as belief is completely disjoint from knowledge. People believe in bigfoot, elves, UFOs, astrology, scientology, phrenology, hinduism, and a host of other things, many of them extremely unlikely at best, without any confirming knowledge whatsoever.
It goes the other way, too. There are people out there who believe we've never been to the moon. There are people who do not believe in atoms. There are people who do not beleive in evolution.
This conclusively demonstrates that knowledge is not a pre-requisite for belief, and that also, belief can exist despite the availability of knowledge and objective facts to the community. That is why the agnostic position is one that is entirely separate from that of belief in god, or lack of belief in god. Belief is entirely disjoint from knowledge. It is also why the state of knowing if there is a god or god is not another side to the question of belief in a god or god. That question is only about belief, and that is not only its nature, but an inevitable consequence of the question itself.
To illustrate, I would ask you this question:
Do you, in any way or to any degree, believe in a god or gods?
If you answer yes, I shall deem you theist. If you answer no, I shall deem you athiest. In this way, I have codified how you answered the question in such a way as to identify your stance on this particular area of superstition. Note I didn't ask why you hold whichever position you hold, I just asked what the position was. The why question comes later, and that is where we get into knowledge, or lack of same.
The fact is, this question does not have three answers, and it never did. Those that want it to have three answers just don't understand what they're being asked (and I suspect that many times, they may not want to understand what they're being asked.)
I am an atheist. I hold not even the tiniest shred of belief in a god or gods. I think the question of knowledge is actually that of the social coward; Of course no one knows. That's the whole point. How can you have any knowledge about something that there is no evidence for?
Is it really neccessary for me, for instance, to make a separate declaration that I don't know if there are little pink unicorns dancing jigs on the dark side of the first planet in the Alpha Centauri system? Or, is it simply intellectually honest for me to say, "I don't believe that this is the case." I have no knowledge of this, but as with any proposition that comes to me entirely without any objective fact to back it up, and in stark contrast with what science tells me the probabilities are, I'm going to discount it as without any characteristic worthy of instilling belief until, or unless, the situation changes. This is a very reasonable and sane approach to take.
Agnosticism is not required. No matter how loudly the religious community shouts their stories, no matter how politically correct it is to say "it's ok to teach children stories that have zero objective facts to back them up as if they were cold, hard truths", a lack of belief is sufficient to carry the day. Do what you want, say what you want, lacking belief is a perfectly valid position that in no way requires or depends upon knowledge.
In fact, the important, no, the critical, question for everyone — no matter what you want to call them — is do you believe..., or to phrase it another way, do you have faith......in the god being presented by the religion at hand?
On a more practical level, see the dictionary definition given by bamberg. 1a, as was pointed out. You use the "American Heritage" dictionary and you expect a definition that wasn't biased towards the Christian worldview? How funny is that? The "American Heritage" is superstition. We've a long, long way to go before we can dig out of that hole.
And indeed it seems you haven't been convinced - even though someone rose from the dead.
Oh, for Pete's sake. Let's be perfectly clear here. If indeed anyone rose from the dead, it happened about 2000 years ago, didn't happen in front of me, wasn't recorded in any contemporaneous documents of the regime in power at the time, nor by any contemporary historian, and is only described as such by a book that was put together from codexes that date back to about 300 years after the fact. To top it off, we know of no such event, and our knowledge of the universe says it can't happen. This reasonably leads me to the position of doubt. I'm not doubting because I'm just a crank, I'm doubting because there is an extraordinary event here, and no proof any kind, much less extraordinary. If someone rises from the dead in front of me after three days of rigor mortis, putrifaction, and zero life signs of any kind, I will be duly impressed.
Perhaps having sent his son to die for you
If the story is true (which I do not believe to be the case), God sent his son to hang about on earth for thirty years, then gave him the best seat in heaven, after having him suffer a few days of moderate-level torture. For just one of many instances: Many Americans have sent their sons to die, where they ended up in the hellholes of Vietnam's POW camps, where those fellows endured being stabbed with dung-encrusted pungi sticks, maimed, beaten, caged, starved, diseased, mentally abused and worse, for years at a stretch. After which these fellows came home (well, those who survived) and were pretty well ignored by both the government and most of their fellow citizens, if they weren't actively reproached for having done what they were told to do. On a scale of one to ten, where let's call prisoner of war service a 7, I'd say Jesus's reported troubles rate about a two. If god wants to impress me with a sacrifice, then he can get down here and clean up some of the messes he's let go on without interference, such as birth defects, tsunmamis, regular failure of the female reproductive tract (with the side effect of killing the mother), Hitler, Cancer, Pol Pot, plagues, Stalin, the Spanish and Papal Inquisitions, the Crusades and so forth.
As a story, god's "sacrifice" of Jesus lands with a dull thud because (a) it was no sacrifice, it was a very short though admittedly annoying interval with a HUGE reward, and (b) human sacrifice dwarfs it on every level. By the numbers, and by intensity, and by the degree of what was hoped to be accomplished by many of the sacrifices made by humans. True story: I had a relative who was burned to death going into a burning home after a little girl's kitten. He tossed the kitten out of an upstairs window, but he didn't make it out himself. He was an atheist; I'd say his sacrifice dwarfs that of Christ's, even if, no especially if, the crucifiction story is true. My relative burned to death and according you and yours, he's going to suffer for all eternity. Christ, in the meantime, is where? At god's right hand.
Well, the sovereign God responds to that with a bit of a poser. He does do some things specially for people on an individual basis [answering prayer] but the catch is you already need to have faith to ask in faith.
I afraid you're ruffling my feathers here, because of all the Christian mythos, this is some of the most offensive tripe that hits the fan.
Your god is too something-or-other to help out, for instance, the most honorable, giving, self-sacrificing atheist who wishes for a child to be saved from cancer (or saves a little girl's kitten, as I related above); but he'll help you out for any random thing because you "have faith." I would not want anything to do with your god. Your god doesn't meet my standards for a decent hu
Have you ever investigated the claims of christianity for yourself?
Yes, I have. Other "isms" as well.
Miracles can and do happen all the time, and they are many thoroughly documented examples.
(emphasis mine)
Really? I am completely unaware of this, and I rather thought I was paying close attention. Point me to a few, please.
Atheism and evolutionism makes some prety large assumptions if you want to talk about proof
Basic atheism is the state of being without belief in a god or gods. It doesn't make any assumptions at all. As an atheist myself, I can tell you that were you to bring some objective, testable facts to the table, I'd be perfectly happy to examine them. You make extraordinary claims, in the sense that your claims require me to make assumptions for facts not in evidence. Your task is to solve that problem. In the interim, I see no reason to believe in anything for which I cannot derive any reasonable cognitive model.
Evolution is a theory that says that organisms change over time as a result of various pressures on the organism, from radiation to nutrition to weather to inter- and extra-species combat and more. This is well established theory, and I am unaware of anything that seriously challenges this viewpoint today. We can observe it; we can simulate it; we can even use it to create new solutions to problems. As a theory, it is in one of the strongest positions any theory ever attains.
That's how I see things. I would very much like to have you detail what the "large assumptions" are that you perceive that evolution and atheism make. Please, extend me the courtesy of laying out the details behind those assertions.
Example:
Religion: People exist because God wanted there to be people
Science: People exist because random genetic change enabled there to be people.
What is contradictory in my example?
Science puts forth the idea that random genetic change was part of the process because science has observed this process, and the theory, in a fairly basic and reasonably well accepted intellectual exercise, simply extends the idea that this has been going on since DNA has been the blueprint mechanism for building another biomachine similar to the previous biomachines. In short, there is decent evidence for this idea, and given that so far, it seems to be the idea with the best evidence in support, it is reasonable to use it as the current working model until, or unless, something better comes along. Add to this the observation that DNA is a combination of chemicals, and apply the idea that this combination might have come together as the result of some natural series of events, and we have a general overview of a theory of life, sans god or godlike influence.
Religion puts forth the idea that people are here because god wanted it that way. This is in the final analysis an attempt to answer the same basic question: How did life get started? If you want to start with the premise that god started us by triggering and/or designing DNA-based organisms, that just moves the domain of the question to: How did god get started?
If your answer is that god was always here, then why can't your answer be that we were always here? If your answer is that god's existance arose spontaneously, then why can't your answer be that we arose spontaneously? If your answer is that god was designed by someone else, then you've just moved the domain one step further and we go around again.
The bottom line is that we do not know how life got started here. Science, to its credit, is trying to find potential answers to that using the tools that belong to it: Examining evidence, deduction, theorizing, testing, falsification and around again. In the process, many interesting things have been uncovered (DNA, for instance) and many many more can reasonably be expected. That's the reason science is so popular; it is very productive of real-world benefits, not just metaphors for objective reality. That, in turn, gives at least some of us considerable confidence in science, and the scientific method in general.
Still, we do not know. We will not know even if life is created in the laboratory. We may have discovered something that is one of the possibilities, but we can't be certain, because we were not there when it happened. There is no "proof" forthcoming from science, only theory. And theories are mutable — that is their primary strength.
Turning to religion, the first question is, ok, if god kicked this off, where is the supporting evidence for this idea? We have the NT (AD 300 or so) and we have the OT, which is quite a bit BC compared to the NT, but still, very, very recent in terms of the planet's apparent geological age. We have nothing that backs up any of the bible's accounts, and in fact, we have quite a bit that contradicts the bible's accounts. Now, if you want to step away from the bible (a long way!) and just say that god did it 4 billion years ago using natural tools, then I simply ask, where is your evidence to back that assertion up? We look to the sky and we see solar systems in all stages of formation; theory accounts for much of this without a huge number of unknowns. We don't see god up there, but we do see physics.
So perhaps you'd like to go back to the formation of everything instead (which pretty much removes the idea of god from our day to day lives [or even eon to eon existance as a race] and I would question why you would even care at this point, but...) and then we are back to but who created god? And if your answer is "was always there", then we're back to that can be the answer for everything, and there is no need for a god to explain anything at all.
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As I said, I think even they have lost control. It's just my opinion, feel free to disagree. I can point to the recent failure of many PACs to obtain the goals they were created to obtain, even though they were well funded and did all of the odious things that PACs are allowed to do. I can point to large corporations that were taken down by the government regardless of the level of contributions made. I can point to the government's riding rough shod over the constitution that the naive truly believe still form the basis of our government. The government has become an entity of and for itself at this point in time, and I think that's going to become clearer to all of us in the next few years.
The critical question is: What, if anything, will its citizens be willing to do about these matters?
Not bitter at all. Certainly I am sorry I can't do that any longer, but hardly bitter about it. I think it is your own bias towards fairness that made you read bitterness into what I was saying. By my own standards, I've been hugely successful, and truly have nothing I can complain about in the realm of business. I own a lingerie store, a literary agency, a software company, a martial arts school and an e-commerce consulting business. On top of that, I've built some websites that are currently riding Google's advertising model right into my wallet. I shouldn't be complaining, and in fact, I am not. The closing of my bookstore business was a strategic choice made before any damage was done to me because I was perfectly able to see that the light in the tunnel was indeed a train.
I don't think I was trying to say that was your position; I was, at some length, saying that any perception of fairness in business matters is illusory and self-centered. Such an outlook is not only incorrect, it is dangerous.
Amazon was able to sell to the end-user for less than my products cost me. Once they reached that level of pricing, no further difference between my and their prices could make any difference at all. Volume pricing is a consequence of efficiencies of scale enabled at the producer by the buyer. I could not so enable them; Amazon could. Perfectly fair. The niche my business grew into went away.
So, no — I would not have cared, and it would not have mattered to me one bit. They had already won and any further thrashing about on my part would have been entirely counter-productive. I spent that effort on other endeavors, and that was the right tack to take. Furthermore, I am a warm and fuzzy Amazon customer. They built a great business by my standards, and I am delighted to be one of their longest-term customers.
I think I see what you're trying to get at here; you want me to say that if a business has to charge tax in state A, but there is no comparable tax in state B, thereby drawing the buyer to state B and so using up the purchasing power of the buyer without involving the business in state A, that this is unfair.
However, I do not think that it is. States are in competition, businesses are in competition, consumers, in the last analysis, are in competition. If state A is foolish enough to enact a condition that drives its consumers to state B, then it deserves to fail or at least take some damage.
The optimum solution is not to have state B instantiate a comparably harmful-to-business environment, the smart thing to do is for state A to go, "Oh crap, we seem to have made a miss-step here" and fix the actual problem, which is obviously the sales tax itself.
Sales taxes by their very nature penalize consumption and so entice consumers to consume less at every level. Buying less, which is entirely optional from the consumer's standpoint, reduces taxes paid in and thereby the government's income; from the economic point of view, how stupid is that? Pretty stupid!
If the government needs X amount of funding to accomplish Y tasks, then the correct solution is to enact the simplest, most balanced, least expensive to administer solution that will get it those funds. Sales taxes cannot meet those standards. That's why they are bad. No other reason.
The day that the government is made to do the right thing is the day they create a flat tax on every individual, corporation, and organization in the country. No excep
You know, I used to have an online bookstore. Biggest specialty bookstore in the world of its type, the Martial Arts Bookstore. It used to be quite the moneymaking operation, and joy for me to run, because that's a strong area of interest for me. Then, along came Amazon, with buying power I couldn't hope to match (mainly from investors... they'd never had to make a profit at that time, while I had to make a profit.) Not only did they have buying power I couldn't match, they had publicity power, broader product lines in every other area to get people in there for other reasons... as you would expect, my bookstore business dried up, even though I carried many more martial arts titles and knew far more about them than Amazon did, enabling levels of customer service that Amazon never tried to match. As it turns out, customer service wasn't the point; low prices were the point, and I couldn't go any lower without going below my costs. So that business is gone now. But you don't hear me screaming about how "unfair" it all was. It was perfectly fair; it was business, and business is war. I got crushed by big guns, and there you have it. If the situation had been reversed, I'd have done the same to them, count on it.
You know why I don't scream? Because I don't consider the current state of affairs, whatever it might be, to be a mandate for some magical right for no changes to affect me; I have no inherent right to stagnation. I have no right to prevent larger players from coming onto the playing field.
When I hear someone bleating about how "unfair" it is that brick and mortar operations can't complete for whatever reason, I just laugh. Right now, I'm laughing at you. Times change. The nature of what constitutes a successful business changes along with everything else. Businesses that don't or can't adapt will suffer, but that's to be expected. If they want to do well, they need to adapt. If that means selling mail order / online, then its time to get after that. Past time, even. To put it another way, building a business model that is successful today does not in any way guarantee you some right to have that model continue to be successful. If something comes along that you didn't anticipate, then you need to adapt, or you may have to give up. There is no assurance or promise that someone (presumably, a politician) will step in and save your business model.
I still run online mail order / download businesses of other types. If I have to collect taxes for all states that have sales tax, then that's what I'll be doing. It's not all that huge a job, at least as long as it is at the state and not the county or hamlet level. I'll adapt and I'll handle it, or else I need to be doing something else.
The business world is not a playground. It's more like a battlefield, and you can expect a great deal of the "incoming" to arrive from the direction of the government. It's been out of hand for many years, and it cannot be fixed by inconsequential players like small businesses and citizens. If you're not a large corporation or a member of the blue-blood old boys club, you simply have to deal with whatever they do to you. Even if you are, you may find that the government has finally grown out of your control. It bears not even a vague resemblance to the government the founding father envisioned, for better or for worse.
It's not about "fair." The US isn't fair. You can't make it fair. I could write unendingly about imbalances that the system we live under is the primary causative agent for. Business and otherwise. Things you may have never thought about, as well as things that may bother you every day. Many of them cause significant human suffering. Bleating about fairness does no good.
So until, or unless, you're willing to pick up weapons and go after the root cause of all this unfairness, the US government, I'm just going to keep on laughing at you. Don't even bother suggesting a political solution. No such thing exists for our current situation.
That's not it. It's just that they don't count becoming a bribe-taking, PAC-owned, glittering generality dispensing, constitution-eroding, rights-repressing, mommy-law-making, religious synchophant as "success."
As for pop-ups... man, don't even get me started on popups.
Actually, it is. The presumption that you can get exactly the same execution environment running on any arbitrary set of operating systems, with any arbitrary set of user permissions (or not), with any arbitrary amount of ram, screen real estate, screen bit-depths, and so forth is not only blindly optimistic, it is outright foolish. In order to even remotely approximate that result, you're going to have to say "But we don't care about this, because it's too old, and we don't care about that, because the environment is impractical, and we don't care about this other because the userbase is too small" — in each case, screwing some otherwise perfectly legitimate banking customer out of some subset of services you offer everyone else, or requiring them to migrate or otherwise compensate for your poor design.
There are browsers that may not have Java (for instance, browsers in PDAs and phones and the PSP and so forth) or if they do, it's jammed into such a restricted environment that typically, no one ever thinks the design through for such a thing. My Palm TX, for instance, has a pretty cool browser on it, and with the display the TX has, it can do surprisingly well on HTML/FORMS pages, wrapping and punting as need be, but — it falls apart on anything that requires client side work, because it just isn't that capable. Now I grant you, it would be wonderful if everything was that capable, but the fact is, everything isn't and what we're talking about here is the idea that when it comes to critical information — banking, bills, taxes, legal materials, college applications.. the "must have" interactions of everyday life — then Java, ActiveX and all those digital-divide generating technologies should be passed over in favor of "it just works."
Now, you take issue with all this (obviously) and so feel that Java and ActiveX and whatever client-loading tech of the day might be on deck is a good thing, and I will give you that... the day you can show that whatever it is you have cobbled up will work in all the environments I mentioned, as well as in the web browser soon to be crammed into my custom beer mug, bought to celebrate the birth of God's only son, Santa, for Saturnalia/2007. And the one in the back of my RealDoll/2010(tm)'s head.
Until then, the nature of client-side applications is that of restricting the user base to some degree, and in the case of the types of uses I mentioned above, as far as I can see, any restriction at all is a fool's act. Unless you can point out some end-result in those areas that you can achieve with client-side processing that you can't get to with server-side processing. I'll grant that there may be something, but I've not heard of it thus far. It seems to me that you need input, output, and security, and that's the end of it. Anything else is superfluous at best, and disenfrancising at worst.
As for the rest, I was specifically talking about critical applications, like banking. I have no objection to client side stuff for fooling around.
WF works with Safari, Firefox and Omniweb, but only Omniweb will remember the password — so there are some minor behavior differences. If you hav security issues at home, this may not be minor, either. :-)
No, really. If the server does all the work and uses nothing but standard CGI, then the web site will work for everyone. Everyone. If you really stick to basics, sites that deal with numbers can work for such crufty old things as text browsers without a glitch. If you must have images (say, for graphing your banking activities) then sticking to JPEG and GIF will again gather in by far the widest array of users.
Every time some developer chooses client-side processing of any kind, they are locking out users. Which is form over function, and as such, I think is a very poor decision.
It's one thing to be bleeding edge when you're showing off and nothing depends on it; it's entirely another to get the blood from your legitimate clients because you want to use new stuff.
So, what you're saying is, you have no adequate response. I understand. No problem. :-)
No need to concern yourself, it was only about 15 minues, max. It doesn't take a lot of concentration to deal with belief in mythology, and it certainly doesn't affect my typing speed. :-)
I didn't forget anything. The gospels themselves are works that can only be traced back to 300 AD. You're trying to use the book to prove the book, which won't work. There is no documentation older than 300 AD, only documents that are known to be either originals from 300ad, or copies of something earlier. How much earlier is completely unknown and unproven. This, combined with no contemporary accounts of Christ or his works, put the entire issue into the completely unsubstantiated category.As for "grace through Christ" look here, you've gone and rejected grace through Zeus. What were you thinking? Oh, wait, you were thinking that's a bunch of myth. So we do have somehing in common. :-)
I have absolutely zero interest in believing in myths, but I am very interested in how belief in myths make gullible people behave.
Josephus and Tacitus... you (probably intentionally) missed the point. These folks have absolutely zero credibility. Here's why: Unlike a historian born in say, 1980, who writes about Jack Kennedy, for Tacitus and Josephus and the rest of the "we came along later crew" there are no prior historians, no prior witnesses in the record, no family trees, no carvings, no financial records, no prison records, no bills for crucifiction materials, crowns of thorns, nails, no nothing. It's as if this Christ person never even existed. The 1980 writer has huge credibility, he can be cross-checked about a zillion different ways. Josephus and Tacitus... no. No checking of any kind can be done.
It does no good whatsoever to claim that 20 years ago, a flying saucer landed and the reporter "heard it from someone else unspecified" that's just pointless in terms of credibility, regardless of if it happened or not. To convince others that it happened, you need reasonable quality evidence. Until or unless contemporary documentation is found for Christ's existance, there is no reason whatsoever to assume he was anything more than an imaginary character created by a cult -- simply a UFO by another name. Now, you believe in him, for whatever reason. Fine. The onus is on you to come up with the proof. Without it, you're just another myth-follower to me.
It's not just about them being later and not meeting the principle of their story; it's about that what little information there was at the time sprang out of nowhere with their reports, and that those reports can only talk sensibly about the cults, because the cults were contemporary for them. That's the problem.
As for my "repeating" the resurrection lessening the crucifiction, I responded directly to a second weak attempt to make more out of it than it was. To drive the point home that it is meaningless, I went over the territory again, albeit a little differently. The ressurection story is one of Christianity's weakests points from a number of directions. It's your job to deal with it, not mine. To me, it was never more than a very poorly told fiction in the first place.
It's about belief, or lack thereof. Period. If you persist in misunderstanding what it means, then you will be unable to communicate meaningfully with the people you talk to. You'll be just like someone looking at a red apple, and calling it salty. People will immediately be misled into talking about taste, when originally, you were talking about color. If you want to talk about beleif in a god or gods, then atheism and theism define the territory. If you want to talk about knowledge, then theism and atheism are irrelevant. They both contain people that know things, and that don't know things. When you assume that an atheist says they "know" something, but that atheist has never done any such thing, you have screwed up. If you want to be a screwup, I can't help you. If you can't get it right from what you've read in this thread, and not only from me, then you're probably never going to get it right -- you're a victim of your own dogma, and it's gone and run over your karma. :-)
But... that's ridiculous.
Look here. Theism encompasses theist A who believes only in a god or gods but disbelieves in UFOs, theist B who beleives in a god or gods but refuses to take a stand on UFOs, and theist C who believes in both a god or gods and in UFOs. Should we now say that only thiest C "is" a theist, because his outlook encompasses belief systems and no disbelief systems?
Clearly not, because being theist is about belief in a god or gods. And nothing else!
Being atheist only defines the state of being without belief in a god or gods. That's it. Nothing else. That means that the only definitive element in determining atheism is lack of belief in a god or gods. That's it.
The term atheist isn't "too broad" in fact, it is as narrow as theist is. It only depends on one issue: lack of belief.
The words theism and atheism are opposite sides of the same coin, and they work perfectly well.
You said that the problem was the lack of appearance of a belief system. That's not a problem; I am an atheist, and I don't have a belief system of either stripe -- I don't even fractionally believe in a god or gods, nor do I indulge in the conceit that I know anything about any imaginary subject.
The reason, as I said, that atheism appears as the lack of a belief system is because atheists lack belief in a god or gods. Period. That's all you can say about them as an entire group. As soon as you presume they hold some other belief system, you're talking about something else already, and you're entirely out of the domain where theist / atheist is the question you're asking.
It is a safe bet that most atheists, like most theists, adhere to many belief systems. This does not make an atheist into a theist. That's what you're trying to do: Make the state of non-belief in a god or gods stand for a different belief entirely, one that you have absolutely no business assigning to all atheists.
The problem here is not the definition of theism or atheism; the problem is your lack of understanding what they mean. I'm just trying to help you out. :-)
The reason that it doesn't appear to be a belief system is because it isn't a belief system.
The fact that it poses a problem to you is something that should make you re-examine you precepts; it is certainly no problem for me. I know exactly where I stand, and I can deal with anything you present on that very basis.
The terms theist and atheist define if you have a belief system that provides for the existence of a god or gods, or not. They don't define if you have a belief system. The reason you're having a problem is because you're trying to make the word mean something entirely disjoint from what it actually means.
Yeah, me too... :-)
Bzzzzt. Sorry. This isn't history. This is part of the bible's stories. You can't use it to justify the bible; that's circular.
Bzzzt. Book 1, written first, makes predictions. Book 2, written second (and quite some time later) claims they are fulfilled. History makes no mention of these fulfillments, only the books. Circular; uses the books to justify the books. Sorry.
What? People don't write about mistakes or set up plot lines that need resolution or justify later plot twists if they're putting out fiction? If they do, it means its not fiction? Man, are you confused. :-) Bzzzt!
Bzzzt. The book reports that Paul (a character in the book) didn't spend much time with the gospel writers (other characters in the book.) Circular. Meaningless. Proof of nothing.
I didn't say you were. I indicated that's where your statements originated; in fact, I was pretty clear that I wasn't attributing these ideas to you, but to fundamentalists that came before you — the accusation of not having an original thought should cue you into this.
This statement impeaches your ability to think. The positions you put forth in your various posts to me are in no way indicative of deep thought, or original thought. You're toeing a line that, if you metaphorically look to either side of you, you will find a very large percentage of the Christian population standing on, right next to you. The position you're taking is common, but it is neither well thought out nor significantly distant from the fundamentalist position. It is simply comfortable. The huge error, in my opinion, that society makes by engaging political correctness in such a way as to encourage this kind of superstitious drivel is what makes it comfortable. I, due no doubt to severe personality defects, feel no obligation to leave your comfort undisturbed. I think Christians, as adults, are reality-avoiding, superstitious, deluded and entirely unable to face outright rejection of their particular brand of superstition. I don't think you're very impressive as a group, though there are some notable exceptions (Mother Theresa, Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King.) I think that you outright deceive children, and worse, you blunt whatever tendency towards critical thinking they have by teaching them to swallow the ignominious bunkum the bible passes off as "truth." If you honestly believe you've engaged in serious thought, all I can tell you is that it's not showing in your posts. You sound just like the next Christian over, mouthing platitudes, spreading ridiculous fairy tales and conflicting stories around as if they were tinsel or confetti, when in reality the stuff you're producing is closer to offal. Yes, you've perfumed the hell out of it (not an accidental choice of words) but you know, it's still sewage.
Ok. Josephus was born AD 37. Jesus, assuming he was a real historical figure, had been dead for about 7 years before Josephus was born. Tacitus was born in 55 AD. Jesus had been dead for about 25 years when he was born. These people were not acting as witnesses, they were quoting hearsay. At best. From cultists. These are not dependable reporters, as they were not there to see any of it. Today, in a courtroom, after Josephus and Tacitus were sworn in and the provenance of their information made known to the court, you'd hear one word: Hearsay. And they would not be allowed to testify. And the truth of this matter, arguably, is far more critical than most things that go before a court these days. I suspect you'd at least agree with that.
As far as I have been able to determine, there are no, that is, zero, contemporaneous reports of Jesus. There are plenty of reports of Christians later on, with the almost entirely unanimous theme of "Man, how do we get rid of these annoying cultists?" Looking at the situation honestly, at it's root, we have less evidence to go by than we do for the UFO/comet cultists who committed suicide a few years back so they could ride off to Alpha Centauri, or wherever. At least we saw that cult start, and we can document the leader, and the comet. There is no comparable documentation for Jesus. Just the cult itself.
Oh, no. You misread me entirely. I'm not angry about his death a
See the rest of the thread to learn more about these issues. If you want to understand atheism, you have to drop the incorrect definition that the fundamentalists use. Atheism is definitely not completely specified by "belief that there is no God or Gods." Some atheists take that position, some don't.
This is not an assumption of mine. I don't know how all of reality came about. I really don't expect to learn, either, as all reality is incomprehensibly large. Mankind may learn someday, but that'll probably be long after I'm long gone. Doesn't bother me a bit. Again, would I like to know? Certainly. Do I feel unfulfilled in any way because I don't know? No.
So... you are saying all human concepts of God are flawed, because we can't get there from here. I accept that. That's essentially what I've been saying all along. People have no data, and they're drawing these hugely specific conclusions (such as, "there is a god, he wants me to baptize my kids, I have to do 12 hail Marys, he turns folks into pillars of salt, gives out boils, drowns entire species (-2) and kills children") from creations of their own minds. Keep in mind that if there is no god, then the precise same conditions exist: the envisioning of god (as it is wholly imaginary) is bound by no human touchpoint in reality; no objective fact can be brought to bear that will disprove this thesis. Personally, I look around, and I say to myself: "If I were god, I'd have done a lot better job." The fact that I can see a way to do things better (on any level) makes the classic conception of god pretty laughable in my mind. Now, since the odds that a being powerful enough to do what god is reputed to have done in the Christian stories would screw up as badly as we see here on earth today are very poor, it appears to me that the far simpler explanation is that humans have screwed up in trying to describe or invent god in the first place. That actually fits all the facts I know to date.
Nope, not going to buy invisible body processes as "miracles", especially given the current state of the medical art — that is, doctors can't cure a cold, they can't tell you everything the liver does, they have no idea how the mind works, they don't even know why we get old for certain. The fact that a doctor doesn't understand an event could just as easily be an indicator that doctors are insufficient to the task as it could be anything else, and as there are, as I said, no documented miracles, there is no reason to assume that what you're talking about here is a miracle. Look at the news yesterday or so... there was an article that we just now MAY have discovered the mechanism that cancer uses to metastacize; that's great for us in terms of being able to use that knowledge (if it pans out), but it is important to realize one VERY important thing: Our body systems "knew" this all along, by virtue of being there and "witnessing" it happening in the context of chemical and genetic cues, physical attachments and so on. The fact that, for instance, the occassional immune system (or other body system) manages to defeat the mechanism for metastatic cancer is not anything I see so much as a miracle, as it is a tip that there is a solution lurking beneath our ability to discern it at the moment. Look at the other side of the coin, too. Some people, they lose their life partner, they die as if it was on cue. Maybe it is. We don't understand it, but this fits right in with we don't understand a whole trainload of other stuff about the body either.
So when I say miracle, I'm talking about things
Slashdot's got a pretty tight limitation on the number of characters in a sig, and worse yet, HTML tags take away from the total which makes links and styles eat your sig space... so I was trying to find a way to say, without being specific, that the numbers in question are for PS, between 20 and 29, and for my product, between 70 and 79. This is true, and also gives me some wiggle room should Adobe blindside me and add one or two. :-)
It goes the other way, too. There are people out there who believe we've never been to the moon. There are people who do not believe in atoms. There are people who do not beleive in evolution.
This conclusively demonstrates that knowledge is not a pre-requisite for belief, and that also, belief can exist despite the availability of knowledge and objective facts to the community. That is why the agnostic position is one that is entirely separate from that of belief in god, or lack of belief in god. Belief is entirely disjoint from knowledge. It is also why the state of knowing if there is a god or god is not another side to the question of belief in a god or god. That question is only about belief, and that is not only its nature, but an inevitable consequence of the question itself.
To illustrate, I would ask you this question:
Do you, in any way or to any degree, believe in a god or gods? If you answer yes, I shall deem you theist. If you answer no, I shall deem you athiest. In this way, I have codified how you answered the question in such a way as to identify your stance on this particular area of superstition. Note I didn't ask why you hold whichever position you hold, I just asked what the position was. The why question comes later, and that is where we get into knowledge, or lack of same.
The fact is, this question does not have three answers, and it never did. Those that want it to have three answers just don't understand what they're being asked (and I suspect that many times, they may not want to understand what they're being asked.)
I am an atheist. I hold not even the tiniest shred of belief in a god or gods. I think the question of knowledge is actually that of the social coward; Of course no one knows. That's the whole point. How can you have any knowledge about something that there is no evidence for?
Is it really neccessary for me, for instance, to make a separate declaration that I don't know if there are little pink unicorns dancing jigs on the dark side of the first planet in the Alpha Centauri system? Or, is it simply intellectually honest for me to say, "I don't believe that this is the case." I have no knowledge of this, but as with any proposition that comes to me entirely without any objective fact to back it up, and in stark contrast with what science tells me the probabilities are, I'm going to discount it as without any characteristic worthy of instilling belief until, or unless, the situation changes. This is a very reasonable and sane approach to take.
Agnosticism is not required. No matter how loudly the religious community shouts their stories, no matter how politically correct it is to say "it's ok to teach children stories that have zero objective facts to back them up as if they were cold, hard truths", a lack of belief is sufficient to carry the day. Do what you want, say what you want, lacking belief is a perfectly valid position that in no way requires or depends upon knowledge.
In fact, the important, no, the critical, question for everyone — no matter what you want to call them — is do you believe..., or to phrase it another way, do you have faith... ...in the god being presented by the religion at hand?
On a more practical level, see the dictionary definition given by bamberg. 1a, as was pointed out. You use the "American Heritage" dictionary and you expect a definition that wasn't biased towards the Christian worldview? How funny is that? The "American Heritage" is superstition. We've a long, long way to go before we can dig out of that hole.
Oh, for Pete's sake. Let's be perfectly clear here. If indeed anyone rose from the dead, it happened about 2000 years ago, didn't happen in front of me, wasn't recorded in any contemporaneous documents of the regime in power at the time, nor by any contemporary historian, and is only described as such by a book that was put together from codexes that date back to about 300 years after the fact. To top it off, we know of no such event, and our knowledge of the universe says it can't happen. This reasonably leads me to the position of doubt. I'm not doubting because I'm just a crank, I'm doubting because there is an extraordinary event here, and no proof any kind, much less extraordinary. If someone rises from the dead in front of me after three days of rigor mortis, putrifaction, and zero life signs of any kind, I will be duly impressed.
If the story is true (which I do not believe to be the case), God sent his son to hang about on earth for thirty years, then gave him the best seat in heaven, after having him suffer a few days of moderate-level torture. For just one of many instances: Many Americans have sent their sons to die, where they ended up in the hellholes of Vietnam's POW camps, where those fellows endured being stabbed with dung-encrusted pungi sticks, maimed, beaten, caged, starved, diseased, mentally abused and worse, for years at a stretch. After which these fellows came home (well, those who survived) and were pretty well ignored by both the government and most of their fellow citizens, if they weren't actively reproached for having done what they were told to do. On a scale of one to ten, where let's call prisoner of war service a 7, I'd say Jesus's reported troubles rate about a two. If god wants to impress me with a sacrifice, then he can get down here and clean up some of the messes he's let go on without interference, such as birth defects, tsunmamis, regular failure of the female reproductive tract (with the side effect of killing the mother), Hitler, Cancer, Pol Pot, plagues, Stalin, the Spanish and Papal Inquisitions, the Crusades and so forth.
As a story, god's "sacrifice" of Jesus lands with a dull thud because (a) it was no sacrifice, it was a very short though admittedly annoying interval with a HUGE reward, and (b) human sacrifice dwarfs it on every level. By the numbers, and by intensity, and by the degree of what was hoped to be accomplished by many of the sacrifices made by humans. True story: I had a relative who was burned to death going into a burning home after a little girl's kitten. He tossed the kitten out of an upstairs window, but he didn't make it out himself. He was an atheist; I'd say his sacrifice dwarfs that of Christ's, even if, no especially if, the crucifiction story is true. My relative burned to death and according you and yours, he's going to suffer for all eternity. Christ, in the meantime, is where? At god's right hand.
I afraid you're ruffling my feathers here, because of all the Christian mythos, this is some of the most offensive tripe that hits the fan.
Your god is too something-or-other to help out, for instance, the most honorable, giving, self-sacrificing atheist who wishes for a child to be saved from cancer (or saves a little girl's kitten, as I related above); but he'll help you out for any random thing because you "have faith." I would not want anything to do with your god. Your god doesn't meet my standards for a decent hu
Yes, I have. Other "isms" as well.
Really? I am completely unaware of this, and I rather thought I was paying close attention. Point me to a few, please.
Basic atheism is the state of being without belief in a god or gods. It doesn't make any assumptions at all. As an atheist myself, I can tell you that were you to bring some objective, testable facts to the table, I'd be perfectly happy to examine them. You make extraordinary claims, in the sense that your claims require me to make assumptions for facts not in evidence. Your task is to solve that problem. In the interim, I see no reason to believe in anything for which I cannot derive any reasonable cognitive model.Evolution is a theory that says that organisms change over time as a result of various pressures on the organism, from radiation to nutrition to weather to inter- and extra-species combat and more. This is well established theory, and I am unaware of anything that seriously challenges this viewpoint today. We can observe it; we can simulate it; we can even use it to create new solutions to problems. As a theory, it is in one of the strongest positions any theory ever attains.
That's how I see things. I would very much like to have you detail what the "large assumptions" are that you perceive that evolution and atheism make. Please, extend me the courtesy of laying out the details behind those assertions.
Science puts forth the idea that random genetic change was part of the process because science has observed this process, and the theory, in a fairly basic and reasonably well accepted intellectual exercise, simply extends the idea that this has been going on since DNA has been the blueprint mechanism for building another biomachine similar to the previous biomachines. In short, there is decent evidence for this idea, and given that so far, it seems to be the idea with the best evidence in support, it is reasonable to use it as the current working model until, or unless, something better comes along. Add to this the observation that DNA is a combination of chemicals, and apply the idea that this combination might have come together as the result of some natural series of events, and we have a general overview of a theory of life, sans god or godlike influence.
Religion puts forth the idea that people are here because god wanted it that way. This is in the final analysis an attempt to answer the same basic question: How did life get started? If you want to start with the premise that god started us by triggering and/or designing DNA-based organisms, that just moves the domain of the question to: How did god get started?
If your answer is that god was always here, then why can't your answer be that we were always here? If your answer is that god's existance arose spontaneously, then why can't your answer be that we arose spontaneously? If your answer is that god was designed by someone else, then you've just moved the domain one step further and we go around again.
The bottom line is that we do not know how life got started here. Science, to its credit, is trying to find potential answers to that using the tools that belong to it: Examining evidence, deduction, theorizing, testing, falsification and around again. In the process, many interesting things have been uncovered (DNA, for instance) and many many more can reasonably be expected. That's the reason science is so popular; it is very productive of real-world benefits, not just metaphors for objective reality. That, in turn, gives at least some of us considerable confidence in science, and the scientific method in general.
Still, we do not know. We will not know even if life is created in the laboratory. We may have discovered something that is one of the possibilities, but we can't be certain, because we were not there when it happened. There is no "proof" forthcoming from science, only theory. And theories are mutable — that is their primary strength.
Turning to religion, the first question is, ok, if god kicked this off, where is the supporting evidence for this idea? We have the NT (AD 300 or so) and we have the OT, which is quite a bit BC compared to the NT, but still, very, very recent in terms of the planet's apparent geological age. We have nothing that backs up any of the bible's accounts, and in fact, we have quite a bit that contradicts the bible's accounts. Now, if you want to step away from the bible (a long way!) and just say that god did it 4 billion years ago using natural tools, then I simply ask, where is your evidence to back that assertion up? We look to the sky and we see solar systems in all stages of formation; theory accounts for much of this without a huge number of unknowns. We don't see god up there, but we do see physics.
So perhaps you'd like to go back to the formation of everything instead (which pretty much removes the idea of god from our day to day lives [or even eon to eon existance as a race] and I would question why you would even care at this point, but...) and then we are back to but who created god? And if your answer is "was always there", then we're back to that can be the answer for everything, and there is no need for a god to explain anything at all.