Why is it scary to you that so many geeks might actually believe religion? An awful lot of brilliant math and science has been performed by people who firmly believed religion...does that terrify you, too?
No, it just saddens me - I wonder how much better they could have done without it.
Or do you just assume that, if someone believes in religion, they're supporters of ID and incapable of rational thought?
Supporters of ID, no. As for rational thought, not incapable, but by definition they think irrationally more often than is good.
I don't understand the anti-religous crusade so many people seem to take on as their own little holy war. Why the hell can't you leave me alone? You believe what you want, and I'll believe what I want. I won't teach your kids to believe what I do, and you can just stay away from mine.
Because you're wasting your life, and you're not seeing the glory of the universe that's out there. And you're doing it for such a stupid reason. When you're walking down the street and see someone banging their head against a building, you want to stop them.
If you want to talk about testable hypotheses, we can do that. You produce evidence contrary to my understanding of the universe, and I'll change my understanding. I'd hope you could do the same thing.
Of course. And if you're doing that that's halfway there. But if you start believing random things without evidence, your worldview's not going to make a lot of sense.
But if you want to get into a contest of faiths, don't even bother. And don't think that atheism isn't a faith: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You can prove to me that we as a species evolved, ultimately, from a tiny pile of organic slime clinging to a rock in some antediluvian sea. Check. You can't prove to me that no god exists, any more than I can prove to you one does.
Just like the fairies at the bottom of my garden. I haven't seen them because they turn invisible whenever humans are looking at them, of course. Occam's razor and assuming the absence of anything that doesn't have a reason to exist is the only way to get a reasonable view of things.
Your railing against religion (and everyone else's) as a whole (as opposed to railing against statements made based on religion that are demonstrably false, which is, of course, appropriate) is no better than any other zealot demanding that his religion is right and everyone else's is wrong.
We at least have some grounds for this - "religion is dumb because this religious person said this dumb thing" is fallacious but better than "my religion is better than yours" with no reason at all.
Replacing one religion with another doesn't help a bit. Quantum Mechanics is not predictible, and thus fails at the test of being a science by your own rules.
Of course it's predictable. It comes from our observations, the double slit experiment being the most famous example.
A lack of intent is as much a theological concept as having intent; logically the two are completely equivalent.
If you're talking about the universe itself having an "intent" then ok. It doesn't matter whether or not the universe has an intent. But to suggest the driving force is the intent of an intelligent being is introducing something extra and unnecessary.
Why would he know how to be a parent any more than the rest of us? That's a pretty big assumption you're making as to the definition of the word God.
Capital-g God as traditionally defined is omniscent, and would thus know everything there is to know about parenting.
No, we THINK we see a lack of a pattern. Not being infinite, we cannot tell if what we see is actually a lack of a pattern, or a small part of a larger pattern.
We've applied every test we know to all the data we can collect and there's no pattern. The only place such a pattern could be is outside the universe itself, and such a pattern would by definition have no observable effects in our universe. So we ignore it per occam's razor. As far as this universe is concerned, things are random.
Neither can you actually observe randomness, since a random spot is indistinguishable from a larger pattern.
But a spot that looks random rules out a large number of possible patterns. With every observation we make the probability that there's a pattern becomes less. Of course we can never be certain, but that's usually the way in science.
But that's the problem isn't it: it does attempt to prove the lack of existance of one.
No it doesn't. It merely explains the process without reference to God. Regardless of whether God exists or not, evolution is how speciation works.
Too bad random mutation is in and of itself a higher entity, or else by occam's razor that would be true.
Randomness is a much simpler idea than God. You need some idea of randomness, or a pattern if you exist, to understand the universe, because it occurs everywhere. Now, you can say this randomness is real randomness or a pattern coming from the mind of God. But in the latter case, we look for the simplest possible God which could do this - and that's a God which does nothing but generate something that looks like a bunch of random numbers. Which by my standards is not intelligent - I have seen a PCI card that can do it.
Yep- which is why you need an intelligent designer setting up the rules:-)
You seem to have the additional connotation that whatever is not science or outside the purview of science is simply not an acceptable method to understand this universe - sounds rather unscientific by to me to exclude something by definitional fiat.
I exclude whatever is not science based on its results. I have not seen one single useful prediction made by someone based on an unscientific approach to understanding the universe, wheras science shows its predictive power daily.
Seriously though, there's more automotive performance enhancement parts out there than there are firefox plugins. Does that make it hard to drive a car?
No, but it makes it easier to buy a Ferrari than buy a Honda and make it go faster, even if you get a better car in the end the second way. So I'll stick with Opera.
Oh come on, you're on slashdot. You can't have/standards/.
Re:Semi-Off-Topic Python vs. Perl discussion
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Guido Goes Google
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· Score: 1
You can write Perl code that's as readable as any other language, you just have to a) want to and b) have time for it.
As readable as C perhaps. You still have the punctuation-filled syntax which makes it completely incomprehensible for a non-perl programmer. And with python you don't need to want to, you'll write readable code unless you're deliberately trying not to.
It's easy to write quick and dirty one-off hacks in perl, so people use it for jobs that aren't supposed to be maintainable in the first place. Unreadable perl is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that respect.
Up to a point. I write the same kind of one-off scripts in python. I won't ever need to maintain them, but if I did, they're perfectly readable when I look at them a year on.
If you know a language well enough, it's always readable.
But perl's "there is more than one way to do it" philosophy, and the huge number of special cases, means "well enough" requires you to learn a lot more perl than any other language. I know roughly the same amount of perl as tcl or lisp, but either of the others I can read someone else's code and see roughly what they're doing. Some perl is like that, but that's the perfectly-commented bits where it's clear there's been a lot of effort put into readability. Any perl script where the author hasn't been specifically trying to make it readable, I don't have a hope, which isn't the case with any other non-joke language I've come across.
Ordinary PCI graphics cards are nice for doing multihead on less high end systems. You only need one really good card for the screen you play games on (which can go in your AGP slot), then a bunch of cheap PCI ones to get that lovely monitor space.
But the real difference is that speeding is often an issue of life and death, both for the driver and for everyone else on the road. Piracy isn't even remotely analogous. Even if the industry could prove that piracy is hurting them so much, the "hurt" here is loss of profit. I apologize for not sympathizing with your pain, my rich corporate friend.
I think his analogy is dead on. The kind of DRM the customer would be happy with is that which tells you whether your copy is "genuine", but no-one else. With luck that could stop commercial piracy as much as is possible, but not harm normal customers; at the very least it would let buyers be more informed.
Opera uses Qt and is non-open-source, so I'm pretty sure they pay to license it. Then again, I think the same's true of motif. Anyway, the mac version certainly looks like Qt, and it would be a waste not to enable Qt on mac/win if you want it (just like if you really want to use motif on unix, you can.
That's not a decimal point, it's just a separator. The next version could be 3.0, and there will already have been a 2.4 that came after 2.3 and before 2.5.
You have to document the function arguments. Static typing doesn't change that, it just hides some of the most immediate problems from not doing so. (An int still needs documentation saying what values it can have). I feel dynamic typing is such a timesaver and improves flexibility so much that its benefits outweigh the costs. But whatever works for you.
Re:Semi-Off-Topic Python vs. Perl discussion
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Guido Goes Google
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· Score: 1
I've never been able to really understand Python, though, because of its bizarre syntax. (insert Perl syntax joke here)
Just write properly indented C and then delete all your braces. That's all it is. If your indentation is right the braces are redundant, so why bother with them.
It's always seemed easier to just do what I need to do in Perl, since I know it so well.
That'll be the case with any new language.
If I'm reasonably proficient in Perl, what would I gain by using Python instead? I'm not trying to troll here, I'm just wondering what I'm missing.
It's nicer to write, IMO. Far fewer "gotchas" than any other language. And it's far nicer to read, making it much easier to maintain. You can look at a python script and see immediately what it does.
If Google uses it internally it must have an advantage over other languages, but I've never not been able to do something in Perl if I really wanted to.
If you really want to you can do anything in any language. But python makes it easier.
We seem more or less agreed. But if you feel people should come to religion through their own observations, then surely that means it is better for parents to leave their children to do that for themselves?
But surely there is a clear difference between "this is the truth because blah blah blah" and "this is the truth", even if you don't understand the "blah blah blah"?
That's the second comment of mine in this sub-thread that's been taken completely out of context. Please don't do that.
I was quoting the relevant part to respond to, it makes more sense than the whole thing. I didn't mean to misrepresent you.
Religious people don't see the difference between those. They just don't. Someone who fully believes in god and whatnot really believes that it's a fundamental truth. Just like you might think that it's a fundamental truth that people should be free to choose as they do. You and I may disagree, but guess what? It's all subjective.
It's in the UN charter as a right. That's not subjective.
It's all subjective. I'm going to teach my kids not to steal. But guess what? It's not a "truth" that one should not steal.
No. It's a truth that stealing is illegal, it's a truth that stealing usually costs those you steal from far more than you gain from it, and it's a truth that people are as far as we can tell more or less the same. Faced with this most people conclude that stealing is wrong.
Whether it's "right" or "wrong" to teach that sort of thing is subjective, just like it's subjective whether it's "right" or "wrong" to teach religion to one's kids.
Freedom of religion is a right, it's not something subjective.
Again, please don't take my comments out of context. I'm an atheist. I will not teach my kids to worship some being in the sky.
I'm not trying to. How does it affect the discussion?
But people who do believe that there is one really truly believe that it's a fundamental truth that there is one.
I can't believe that anyone would think that the existence or not of a God was a truth on the same level as the sky being blue.
And you're not helping the situation by refusing to try to see things from their perspective.
I'm not refusing to, I really don't understand such a perspective.
No. If religions were truly searching for truth they would question the existence of their gods. What distinguishes science from superstition is the desire to find out the truth whatever it may be.
So we all have our own "beliefs" that we have come to for various reasons. I say "beliefs" as no science or religion can be proved 100% true. In the end, every one of us makes a decision based on our observations. Scientific observation is certaintly a good one, as it is reproducable. But that should not and does not negate personal observations and experiences that may lead to more religious beliefs.
But religious believers don't on the whole base their beliefs on observation, just on what they are told by authorities.
So to end my little speech, it seems to be poor parenting to not pass on experiences and observations to your children. This should include reproducable science as well as personal experiences and ideas.
Pass on the experiences, sure. But let them draw their own conclusions.
There are as many scientists that will disagree with the evidence that supports evolution as those that agree with it, therfore, it will always be theory.
Where? I don't see any serious scientists opposing evolution, I really don't.
I'm going to teach my kids that worshipping this god is "right". Just like I'm going to teach them that respecting others' right to hold opinions that I don't agree with is "right".
And you don't see that you shouldn't be teaching them that those are the same things?
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ID doesn't solve that issue at all - how did the designer arise?
No, it just saddens me - I wonder how much better they could have done without it.
Or do you just assume that, if someone believes in religion, they're supporters of ID and incapable of rational thought?
Supporters of ID, no. As for rational thought, not incapable, but by definition they think irrationally more often than is good.
I don't understand the anti-religous crusade so many people seem to take on as their own little holy war. Why the hell can't you leave me alone? You believe what you want, and I'll believe what I want. I won't teach your kids to believe what I do, and you can just stay away from mine.
Because you're wasting your life, and you're not seeing the glory of the universe that's out there. And you're doing it for such a stupid reason. When you're walking down the street and see someone banging their head against a building, you want to stop them.
If you want to talk about testable hypotheses, we can do that. You produce evidence contrary to my understanding of the universe, and I'll change my understanding. I'd hope you could do the same thing.
Of course. And if you're doing that that's halfway there. But if you start believing random things without evidence, your worldview's not going to make a lot of sense.
But if you want to get into a contest of faiths, don't even bother. And don't think that atheism isn't a faith: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You can prove to me that we as a species evolved, ultimately, from a tiny pile of organic slime clinging to a rock in some antediluvian sea. Check. You can't prove to me that no god exists, any more than I can prove to you one does.
Just like the fairies at the bottom of my garden. I haven't seen them because they turn invisible whenever humans are looking at them, of course. Occam's razor and assuming the absence of anything that doesn't have a reason to exist is the only way to get a reasonable view of things.
Your railing against religion (and everyone else's) as a whole (as opposed to railing against statements made based on religion that are demonstrably false, which is, of course, appropriate) is no better than any other zealot demanding that his religion is right and everyone else's is wrong.
We at least have some grounds for this - "religion is dumb because this religious person said this dumb thing" is fallacious but better than "my religion is better than yours" with no reason at all.
Of course it's predictable. It comes from our observations, the double slit experiment being the most famous example.
A lack of intent is as much a theological concept as having intent; logically the two are completely equivalent.
If you're talking about the universe itself having an "intent" then ok. It doesn't matter whether or not the universe has an intent. But to suggest the driving force is the intent of an intelligent being is introducing something extra and unnecessary.
Why would he know how to be a parent any more than the rest of us? That's a pretty big assumption you're making as to the definition of the word God.
Capital-g God as traditionally defined is omniscent, and would thus know everything there is to know about parenting.
No, we THINK we see a lack of a pattern. Not being infinite, we cannot tell if what we see is actually a lack of a pattern, or a small part of a larger pattern.
We've applied every test we know to all the data we can collect and there's no pattern. The only place such a pattern could be is outside the universe itself, and such a pattern would by definition have no observable effects in our universe. So we ignore it per occam's razor. As far as this universe is concerned, things are random.
Neither can you actually observe randomness, since a random spot is indistinguishable from a larger pattern.
But a spot that looks random rules out a large number of possible patterns. With every observation we make the probability that there's a pattern becomes less. Of course we can never be certain, but that's usually the way in science.
But that's the problem isn't it: it does attempt to prove the lack of existance of one.
No it doesn't. It merely explains the process without reference to God. Regardless of whether God exists or not, evolution is how speciation works.
Too bad random mutation is in and of itself a higher entity, or else by occam's razor that would be true.
Randomness is a much simpler idea than God. You need some idea of randomness, or a pattern if you exist, to understand the universe, because it occurs everywhere. Now, you can say this randomness is real randomness or a pattern coming from the mind of God. But in the latter case, we look for the simplest possible God which could do this - and that's a God which does nothing but generate something that looks like a bunch of random numbers. Which by my standards is not intelligent - I have seen a PCI card that can do it.
Yep- which is why you need an intelligent designer setting up the rules :-)
That's another debate.
I exclude whatever is not science based on its results. I have not seen one single useful prediction made by someone based on an unscientific approach to understanding the universe, wheras science shows its predictive power daily.
I'm sure there is. Replace the chassis, then the engine,...
No, but it makes it easier to buy a Ferrari than buy a Honda and make it go faster, even if you get a better car in the end the second way. So I'll stick with Opera.
Oh come on, you're on slashdot. You can't have /standards/.
As readable as C perhaps. You still have the punctuation-filled syntax which makes it completely incomprehensible for a non-perl programmer. And with python you don't need to want to, you'll write readable code unless you're deliberately trying not to.
It's easy to write quick and dirty one-off hacks in perl, so people use it for jobs that aren't supposed to be maintainable in the first place. Unreadable perl is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that respect.
Up to a point. I write the same kind of one-off scripts in python. I won't ever need to maintain them, but if I did, they're perfectly readable when I look at them a year on.
If you know a language well enough, it's always readable.
But perl's "there is more than one way to do it" philosophy, and the huge number of special cases, means "well enough" requires you to learn a lot more perl than any other language. I know roughly the same amount of perl as tcl or lisp, but either of the others I can read someone else's code and see roughly what they're doing. Some perl is like that, but that's the perfectly-commented bits where it's clear there's been a lot of effort put into readability. Any perl script where the author hasn't been specifically trying to make it readable, I don't have a hope, which isn't the case with any other non-joke language I've come across.
Ordinary PCI graphics cards are nice for doing multihead on less high end systems. You only need one really good card for the screen you play games on (which can go in your AGP slot), then a bunch of cheap PCI ones to get that lovely monitor space.
Just wait until next week when they dupe the story. They'll get a link in then
I think his analogy is dead on. The kind of DRM the customer would be happy with is that which tells you whether your copy is "genuine", but no-one else. With luck that could stop commercial piracy as much as is possible, but not harm normal customers; at the very least it would let buyers be more informed.
Opera uses Qt and is non-open-source, so I'm pretty sure they pay to license it. Then again, I think the same's true of motif. Anyway, the mac version certainly looks like Qt, and it would be a waste not to enable Qt on mac/win if you want it (just like if you really want to use motif on unix, you can.
That's not a decimal point, it's just a separator. The next version could be 3.0, and there will already have been a 2.4 that came after 2.3 and before 2.5.
You have to document the function arguments. Static typing doesn't change that, it just hides some of the most immediate problems from not doing so. (An int still needs documentation saying what values it can have). I feel dynamic typing is such a timesaver and improves flexibility so much that its benefits outweigh the costs. But whatever works for you.
Just write properly indented C and then delete all your braces. That's all it is. If your indentation is right the braces are redundant, so why bother with them.
It's always seemed easier to just do what I need to do in Perl, since I know it so well.
That'll be the case with any new language.
If I'm reasonably proficient in Perl, what would I gain by using Python instead? I'm not trying to troll here, I'm just wondering what I'm missing.
It's nicer to write, IMO. Far fewer "gotchas" than any other language. And it's far nicer to read, making it much easier to maintain. You can look at a python script and see immediately what it does.
If Google uses it internally it must have an advantage over other languages, but I've never not been able to do something in Perl if I really wanted to.
If you really want to you can do anything in any language. But python makes it easier.
How about PyQt, and use qt designer xml? Would that do what you're aiming for?
We seem more or less agreed. But if you feel people should come to religion through their own observations, then surely that means it is better for parents to leave their children to do that for themselves?
But surely there is a clear difference between "this is the truth because blah blah blah" and "this is the truth", even if you don't understand the "blah blah blah"?
I was quoting the relevant part to respond to, it makes more sense than the whole thing. I didn't mean to misrepresent you.
Religious people don't see the difference between those. They just don't. Someone who fully believes in god and whatnot really believes that it's a fundamental truth. Just like you might think that it's a fundamental truth that people should be free to choose as they do. You and I may disagree, but guess what? It's all subjective.
It's in the UN charter as a right. That's not subjective.
It's all subjective. I'm going to teach my kids not to steal. But guess what? It's not a "truth" that one should not steal.
No. It's a truth that stealing is illegal, it's a truth that stealing usually costs those you steal from far more than you gain from it, and it's a truth that people are as far as we can tell more or less the same. Faced with this most people conclude that stealing is wrong.
Whether it's "right" or "wrong" to teach that sort of thing is subjective, just like it's subjective whether it's "right" or "wrong" to teach religion to one's kids.
Freedom of religion is a right, it's not something subjective.
Again, please don't take my comments out of context. I'm an atheist. I will not teach my kids to worship some being in the sky.
I'm not trying to. How does it affect the discussion?
But people who do believe that there is one really truly believe that it's a fundamental truth that there is one.
I can't believe that anyone would think that the existence or not of a God was a truth on the same level as the sky being blue.
And you're not helping the situation by refusing to try to see things from their perspective.
I'm not refusing to, I really don't understand such a perspective.
Not as to what to believe. That's something they can decide for themselves.
Nothing will stop a child from changing his or her mind when they get older,
Then why do such a huge proportion of people have the same religion as their parents?
but they need indoctrination of some sort in order to reach a basic level of interaction with society.
You can interact with society perfectly well without religious or any other kind of beliefs.
The fact that this indoctrination happens through a framework of religion does not make it harmful.
It harmed me. Just because it isn't harmful in every case doesn't mean it isn't harmful.
No. If religions were truly searching for truth they would question the existence of their gods. What distinguishes science from superstition is the desire to find out the truth whatever it may be.
So we all have our own "beliefs" that we have come to for various reasons. I say "beliefs" as no science or religion can be proved 100% true. In the end, every one of us makes a decision based on our observations. Scientific observation is certaintly a good one, as it is reproducable. But that should not and does not negate personal observations and experiences that may lead to more religious beliefs.
But religious believers don't on the whole base their beliefs on observation, just on what they are told by authorities.
So to end my little speech, it seems to be poor parenting to not pass on experiences and observations to your children. This should include reproducable science as well as personal experiences and ideas.
Pass on the experiences, sure. But let them draw their own conclusions.
Where? I don't see any serious scientists opposing evolution, I really don't.
The game shoots first!
It's not that I don't have hope. I was on the wrong end of a religious upbringing, I don't want anyone else to go through that.
And you don't see that you shouldn't be teaching them that those are the same things?