Well, you were lucky. The people at my workplace didn't go to monasteries to learn their religion, they learned most of what they know about their God from televangelists' sound bites and a few vague stories about hell from their parents. (And I believe most of them vote.)
No one has a reasonable or complete world view. I'm betting that right now there is a bit of information about the Universe out there that will completely change everything we think the Universe is when we discover it.
Plenty of people have reasonable and/or complete worldviews, and any fact about the universe which comes to light will, though previously unknown, be consistent with our current understanding. If it's not, then we've made some seriously anomalous observations, all of which have been consistent with one another - and I just don't think that's likely.
I'm not denying that ignorance is bliss - but that only works for an individual. If all of mankind were blissfully ignorant we'd lack many happiness-inducing inventions like heat and the Grateful Dead.
By the way, why can't you enjoy movies? I know how they're made, and I still enjoy them. Are you watching good movies, or movies like Titanic and 300?
I tried to explain that, but one didn't listen and the other didn't understand. I also tried to make clear that the common ancestor would have been classified as an ape, but would be different from modern apes, but that was lost too.
That might make a good bumper sticker, but it's not a realistic or reasonable way of looking at the curve.
Why not? Intelligence is normally distributed, isn't it? The mean and median should be close enough as makes no difference.
Individual acts of stupidity and ignorance don't hurt, but collectively they do. You're right that I shouldn't care that a single person believes in magic or religion, but I do care if everyone does. Think globally, act locally.
And I don't change people. I explain myself; they choose to change if they wish.
I don't think refuse is too strong a word at all. Most people aren't presented with an actual choice to think or not, but when they are they usually do actively refuse. Example: At work just a few days ago I got drawn into a political/religious discussion with a few people of probably average intelligence, and when two of them said they "didn't believe" in evolution simply because they didn't think we evolved from apes, we had quite a discussion about it. I tried several ways to break it down and figure out which part of the theory they didn't believe, or why they didn't believe it, or whether they distrusted the scientific method in general, and every time both of them very carefully avoided thinking about my points or explaining their position - every time they came to a point where a stock answer they'd read somewhere or heard in a sermon failed they brought it back to "well, I just don't think we came from apes, it's my belief."
I went to Catholic school for 13 years, and several times per day we were reminded of the mysteries of the Trinity and whatnot that we couldn't understand, so we weren't to try. We learned about all the "heretics" who managed to formulate the Church's teachings into something coherent and were sentenced to an eternity in hell. I still hear those things at church every week. This is the religion of a sixth of the world's population.
50% of the population has above-average intelligence. There aren't many people who are genuinely incapable of understanding the world, but there are many who don't bother to try.
The problem is that most people DON'T try to figure out this world with their brain. They look around themselves and find the world is a confusing place, so they don't think about it - they refuse to think analytically about anything, they just develop through trial-and-error a set of reactions to various situations that gets them through almost anything. Then they cruise through life, without a reasoned or complete worldview, just waiting for the weekends so they can get drunk and think even less.
You think the very classic songs most cover bands play are mass-produced crap? Songs like A Hard Day's Night, Master of Puppets, Stairway to Heaven, Uncle John's Band, My Generation, Twist and Shout, Paranoid, Jumpin' Jack Flash, and Zeus only knows how many others are what's being protected here... care to explain how those are crap?
I can't tell if you're joking or not (too early), but... those are assholes, not sociopaths. No sociopath could tolerate the company of others long enough to rise to the top of the federal government.
No, it's character assassination. Nifong mishandled the case for votes, right? That's because his conclusions were what everyone wanted and expected. Why'd it take a year for people to wonder why there was no testimony from the lacrosse players, hmm? It wasn't just Nifong - when the case broke EVERYONE supported the false victims. Nifong was a dick, but he's a scapegoat so people don't have to face up to the ridiculousness of their affected pro-black racism, which they refer to as "racial sensitivity" or similar.
I must say I enjoyed the conversation too. I don't meet too many God believers who aren't ignorant, technophobic, and/or delusional. Glad to know there are some out there.
Post-enlightment science will make you believe in things like virtual particles coming out from nowhere, anomalous singularities in the space-time so as to fit non-observed events to mathematical formulaes that explain most scenarios and many other things which sound just about as miraculous as any of God's makings.
But there are very solid mathematical (and observational) reasons to believe those things happen. Einstein trusted his eyes and insisted God does not play dice with the universe, and look how right he was - quantum theory is under about as much doubt as the structure of DNA now. Not so with the existence of God.
But you gotta agree with me: such an weak and small group of sheppards such the Hebrews seem to have been tremendously successful ever since they associated with Abrahm's God, to the point of influencing the course of History in Europe, Americas and Middle-East. There got to be something more to that than just the will of some minorities...
The problem is, they really weren't all that successful until Constantine. In the two millennia after Abraham started preaching, his followers were enslaved by the Egyptians, spent 40 years lost in a desert, turned to the worship of other gods several times, were attacked and exiled by the Babylonians, and then were conquered by the Romans. The passing of Christianity into the mainstream was a matter of chance, really - people were already bored of their pagan gods who didn't send down lightning bolts and storms like they used to, and Christianity passed around with some fun stories of a guy raising the dead, and probably helped in a few places with well-timed lightning strikes and such. Many had the lack of foresight to fight against the Christians, which helped it spread (who doesn't want to be a rebel?), and eventually it worked its way around to the emperor. Right after that came the Middle Ages when people believed anything with no proof, so the spread during that period doesn't say much.
Actually, I find it refreshing anyway since I'm not a plain religious zealot: I certainly have doubts about an all-omniscient and almighty forever entity as, like most slashdotters, I'm a rational thinker nerd with a fondness for science and logic.
Amazing! I went to Catholic school for 13 years, so I... well, I am, to put it lightly, not accustomed to rational people, not when it comes to religion.
But then I look at the Universe at large and how weird and unbearable it is and I think to myself: "Hey! Believing in God makes just about as much sense as anything out of quantum theory and at least it puts a human face to Creation rather than just fuzzy chaos"... so, there.:)
But quantum theory does make sense - its conclusions are surprising and counterintuitive, yes, but there's solid mathematics backing it up, and observations of all the counterintuitive phenomena. If you'd like to argue that mathematics doesn't reflect the world accurately then you'll find yourself in an uphill battle.
haha, why do you think you're going to Hell? Do you take other people's lifes? If no, you're just a regular sinner like most, prone to expiatin. Believing or not in God, He believes in you.;)
I'm going to hell (or being reborn as a cockroach) because I violate the first commandment, or I don't pray 5 times a day to Allah, or I don't meditate, or I curse, or I listen to rock music, or a thousand other things, depending on whom you ask. There are very few religions that allow you access to their heaven if you're not a dues-paying member of the club - exra ecclesiam nulla salus, and all that. I don't worry too much about it.
Yes, Cre acts as a catalyst to procure a specific reaction (recombination) for a specific DNA sequence. That is indeed an attribute of the chemical composition of the enzyme. Cre recombinase is a specific enzyme that operates on a specific sequence, referred to as loxP.
Yes, similar techniques could be used to cure many or most viral diseases, eventually. That's the goal this sort of research works toward, and it's why this particular milestone is important - we now know we can remove viral DNA that's already integrated into a cell. The challenge is designing enzymes like Tre recombinase to recognize characteristic base pair sequences for a particular virus. That's an insanely difficult task - the scientists in this article had to do it through an evolutionary process, which is nice but indirect (and inelegant, and if biochemistry doesn't have elegance then we've failed as a species).
Changing the DNA body-wide is the next challenge - going from in vitro in in vivo. That's the fun part.
More like timeism than racism. You'll forgive me if I trust modern, post-enlightenment science more than early-historical-era shepherds to tell me about how the world works - better track record, you see. And I don't care who God talked to - if the sole reason to think said talk happened is politically-useful writings, made after the fact and passed down for thousands of years by people with an interest in those writings being believed, which tell of events of a sort that certainly don't happen around me (and make no mistake, all religions are based on essentially that sort of system, with beliefs passed down from father to son to grandson, etc., from the earliest Neanderthal religion to the present day), then I have no reason at all to allow them to affect my life except as interesting historical documents.
But I'm sure this discussion is pointless, as you'll have heard all of this before and haven't let it change you then either. So, I'll see you in the afterlife - I in hell, and you in heaven. I give you my full permission to say "I told you so" as often as you like.
Quantum FIELD theories have been developed from the late '20s to the present time (QCD, for example, is still being worked on).
Liquid-fueled rockets were developed by Goddard in the 1920s - which, you'll notice, is new physics (well, physical engineering anyway) since 1905.
And Einstein's lasers and the ones in the 50s weren't operating on femtosecond scales. Femtochemistry is definitely new science since 1950.
Proof would be giving the question too much credit. Next time you find yourself at Mass, step back and take an objective look at what you're doing. You, and the people around you, are worshiping the chief deity of a desert-wandering Semitic people (a weak one at that), whose belief system was formulated probably about 4000-5000 years ago, which was passed on to you by chance when a Roman emperor and maybe a few noblemen were feeling particularly gullible one day. You take your faith from a collection of Afro-Asiatic texts written by farmers, sheep herders, slaves, and missionaries between 1950 and ~3500 years ago, and consider this to be the revealed holy word of your Semitic god. Do you see the problem?
What's wrong with Andy Warhol's work? I'm not generally a fan of art snobs, or the art they like, but I think works like, e.g., Campbell's Soup Cans, were good at making the point he wanted. He wasn't trying to make an aesthetically pleasing painting of a goddess or a garden scene or something else classically seen as art, he was holding the mirror up - whereas the ancients and medievals defined their lives in terms of Venus and Jupiter, modern people's lives revolve around what kind of canned soup they're having today.
You want to complain about modern art, go after found art or abstract impressionism or something like that. Some modern art (like Pop Art and surrealism) actually works.
No new physics since 1905? Little new science since 1950? What the hell is quantum electrodymanics then? Liquid-fueled rockets? Biopolymers research gone nowhere, has it? Biochemistry, for that matter? Quantum chemistry, quantum field theories, etc.? Femtolasers?
Demanding a change of government wouldn't do anything. They're sure as hell not going away on their own, and they've got plenty of young men who've volunteeered complete control of their actions to the government who'll kill us dead if we try to do something about it ourselves.
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Well, you were lucky. The people at my workplace didn't go to monasteries to learn their religion, they learned most of what they know about their God from televangelists' sound bites and a few vague stories about hell from their parents. (And I believe most of them vote.)
LOGICAL error?? I'm pretty sure psychology isn't logic...
I'm not denying that ignorance is bliss - but that only works for an individual. If all of mankind were blissfully ignorant we'd lack many happiness-inducing inventions like heat and the Grateful Dead.
By the way, why can't you enjoy movies? I know how they're made, and I still enjoy them. Are you watching good movies, or movies like Titanic and 300?
Why not? Intelligence is normally distributed, isn't it? The mean and median should be close enough as makes no difference.
Individual acts of stupidity and ignorance don't hurt, but collectively they do. You're right that I shouldn't care that a single person believes in magic or religion, but I do care if everyone does. Think globally, act locally.
And I don't change people. I explain myself; they choose to change if they wish.
I don't think refuse is too strong a word at all. Most people aren't presented with an actual choice to think or not, but when they are they usually do actively refuse. Example: At work just a few days ago I got drawn into a political/religious discussion with a few people of probably average intelligence, and when two of them said they "didn't believe" in evolution simply because they didn't think we evolved from apes, we had quite a discussion about it. I tried several ways to break it down and figure out which part of the theory they didn't believe, or why they didn't believe it, or whether they distrusted the scientific method in general, and every time both of them very carefully avoided thinking about my points or explaining their position - every time they came to a point where a stock answer they'd read somewhere or heard in a sermon failed they brought it back to "well, I just don't think we came from apes, it's my belief."
I went to Catholic school for 13 years, and several times per day we were reminded of the mysteries of the Trinity and whatnot that we couldn't understand, so we weren't to try. We learned about all the "heretics" who managed to formulate the Church's teachings into something coherent and were sentenced to an eternity in hell. I still hear those things at church every week. This is the religion of a sixth of the world's population.
50% of the population has above-average intelligence. There aren't many people who are genuinely incapable of understanding the world, but there are many who don't bother to try.
The problem is that most people DON'T try to figure out this world with their brain. They look around themselves and find the world is a confusing place, so they don't think about it - they refuse to think analytically about anything, they just develop through trial-and-error a set of reactions to various situations that gets them through almost anything. Then they cruise through life, without a reasoned or complete worldview, just waiting for the weekends so they can get drunk and think even less.
You think the very classic songs most cover bands play are mass-produced crap? Songs like A Hard Day's Night, Master of Puppets, Stairway to Heaven, Uncle John's Band, My Generation, Twist and Shout, Paranoid, Jumpin' Jack Flash, and Zeus only knows how many others are what's being protected here... care to explain how those are crap?
I can't tell if you're joking or not (too early), but... those are assholes, not sociopaths. No sociopath could tolerate the company of others long enough to rise to the top of the federal government.
I'm pretty sure the sociopaths have very little interest in our government, or indeed in any of our society.
Sorry, I've already pledged to the Palm Beach Golf and Tennis Resort.
No, it's character assassination. Nifong mishandled the case for votes, right? That's because his conclusions were what everyone wanted and expected. Why'd it take a year for people to wonder why there was no testimony from the lacrosse players, hmm? It wasn't just Nifong - when the case broke EVERYONE supported the false victims. Nifong was a dick, but he's a scapegoat so people don't have to face up to the ridiculousness of their affected pro-black racism, which they refer to as "racial sensitivity" or similar.
I must say I enjoyed the conversation too. I don't meet too many God believers who aren't ignorant, technophobic, and/or delusional. Glad to know there are some out there.
Yes, Cre acts as a catalyst to procure a specific reaction (recombination) for a specific DNA sequence. That is indeed an attribute of the chemical composition of the enzyme. Cre recombinase is a specific enzyme that operates on a specific sequence, referred to as loxP.
Yes, similar techniques could be used to cure many or most viral diseases, eventually. That's the goal this sort of research works toward, and it's why this particular milestone is important - we now know we can remove viral DNA that's already integrated into a cell. The challenge is designing enzymes like Tre recombinase to recognize characteristic base pair sequences for a particular virus. That's an insanely difficult task - the scientists in this article had to do it through an evolutionary process, which is nice but indirect (and inelegant, and if biochemistry doesn't have elegance then we've failed as a species).
Changing the DNA body-wide is the next challenge - going from in vitro in in vivo. That's the fun part.
More like timeism than racism. You'll forgive me if I trust modern, post-enlightenment science more than early-historical-era shepherds to tell me about how the world works - better track record, you see. And I don't care who God talked to - if the sole reason to think said talk happened is politically-useful writings, made after the fact and passed down for thousands of years by people with an interest in those writings being believed, which tell of events of a sort that certainly don't happen around me (and make no mistake, all religions are based on essentially that sort of system, with beliefs passed down from father to son to grandson, etc., from the earliest Neanderthal religion to the present day), then I have no reason at all to allow them to affect my life except as interesting historical documents.
But I'm sure this discussion is pointless, as you'll have heard all of this before and haven't let it change you then either. So, I'll see you in the afterlife - I in hell, and you in heaven. I give you my full permission to say "I told you so" as often as you like.
Nice try.
Quantum FIELD theories have been developed from the late '20s to the present time (QCD, for example, is still being worked on).
Liquid-fueled rockets were developed by Goddard in the 1920s - which, you'll notice, is new physics (well, physical engineering anyway) since 1905.
And Einstein's lasers and the ones in the 50s weren't operating on femtosecond scales. Femtochemistry is definitely new science since 1950.
Proof would be giving the question too much credit. Next time you find yourself at Mass, step back and take an objective look at what you're doing. You, and the people around you, are worshiping the chief deity of a desert-wandering Semitic people (a weak one at that), whose belief system was formulated probably about 4000-5000 years ago, which was passed on to you by chance when a Roman emperor and maybe a few noblemen were feeling particularly gullible one day. You take your faith from a collection of Afro-Asiatic texts written by farmers, sheep herders, slaves, and missionaries between 1950 and ~3500 years ago, and consider this to be the revealed holy word of your Semitic god. Do you see the problem?
What's wrong with Andy Warhol's work? I'm not generally a fan of art snobs, or the art they like, but I think works like, e.g., Campbell's Soup Cans, were good at making the point he wanted. He wasn't trying to make an aesthetically pleasing painting of a goddess or a garden scene or something else classically seen as art, he was holding the mirror up - whereas the ancients and medievals defined their lives in terms of Venus and Jupiter, modern people's lives revolve around what kind of canned soup they're having today.
You want to complain about modern art, go after found art or abstract impressionism or something like that. Some modern art (like Pop Art and surrealism) actually works.
No new physics since 1905? Little new science since 1950? What the hell is quantum electrodymanics then? Liquid-fueled rockets? Biopolymers research gone nowhere, has it? Biochemistry, for that matter? Quantum chemistry, quantum field theories, etc.? Femtolasers?
The list goes on and on. You're ignorant.
But anarchists don't want anarchy - they merely want to bring down the current government. Perhaps it's not the best term, but it's the one we use.
"The Great Cyberwar of 2002": http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.02/cyberwar.h tml
Always a good read.
Demanding a change of government wouldn't do anything. They're sure as hell not going away on their own, and they've got plenty of young men who've volunteeered complete control of their actions to the government who'll kill us dead if we try to do something about it ourselves.