But religions are a threat to rational thought all by themselves
You may be right, but religions certainly don't have a monopoly on that particular threat. I think it is a basic survival skill. Since humans are social animals it occasionally behooves us to not question authority. In prehistory, and still today in many parts of the world having too rational a mind can get you killed. Now, that's certainly not something we should try to exploit when building future civilizations, but it is a fundamental and unalterable portion of human nature.
I get your point here, but I'm not agreeing 100%
My point is that even the staunchest atheist yelling about how reason trumps all else can still get swept up in ultra-nationalistic fervor - against all reason. We are simply not programmed to examine every choice with a critical mind, and even if a few individuals are able to rise to that standard the vast majority of humanity never will.
Even if all religion is eliminated, people will still be swayed by irrational rhetoric that seeks to group and separate people. The goal of a secularist shouldn't be to eliminate religion, it should be to eliminate the us vs. them attitude that all large scale violence is contingent upon. Here's why your views make me uneasy, they promote that mentality. In my opinion your views, carried to their logical conclusion wouldn't do anything to quell violence in the long term, they would simply substitute groups of atheists chanting anti-religious slogans for Islamists chanting anti-western slogans.
No, no, no. Not MY ideas. MY ideas are to educate people to the point that religion is an historical curiosity, ridiculous in its obsolete phrases that say things that are WRONG. Even S. Freud, who only ever thought with, through, by, about, his penis, predicted that religion will ome day eventually collapse under its own inconsistence and how obvious it is that it's wrong. How can you believe in Flat Earth when you've got a device in your hand that talks to satellites? Some day, we will know so much, and use so many things that directly contradict everything that religion says, it will collapse. We are a species inteligent enough for that. Oh, yes, the goose and the farmer, and geese never learned... (that the farmer means food until he means axe), but WE can.
About Us Vs Them : it's what we are, yes. Suppressing that means transforming humans into solitary feral animals. Go read this, it will explain better than I can.
On the subject of heckling, I'm afraid you've misunderstood me, at least in part. The reason that any movement is successful is that, at least in its founding stages, it gathers in private where the members participation reinforces the speakers message. If a heckler disrupts a private gathering he will be asked (or forced) to leave. During these private gatherings the virulent speeches and the congregation's tacit acceptance has phenomenal recruiting power. It goes back to what I said earlier about how humans, as social animals, have a great ability to turn off all reason. A successful group will not endanger itself by staging poorly planned public events where hecklers can disrupt the message. These groups gain members not by massive public demonstrations, but rather by individual private recruiting. Even if a group does hold public gathering, hecklers will tend to increase the us vs. them mentality, and thus the groups solidarity, and may even win the group more recruits.
As an aside, heckling may be successful against poorly planned or executed gatherings like the KKK's of late, but it could never be successful against a better organized group. Heckling isn't what caused the KKK's membership to plummet from it's heyday, it was changing social views. That is precisely why secularists shouldn't seek to create their own group to do battle with the religious groups.
So we love cute kids, even kids who aren't our own, because we want to have sex with them? What about our parents? Grandparents?
You're playing the idiot. It's not the same feeling at all. We love cute kids because it's a survival trait of our species, caring for them so that they can replicate when our time is past. We love our parents... Not all of us do, to play stupid like you do. (I love my parents, but I know enough people who really, deeply hate them.)
Except when it's not close-up, or does not involve actual sex acts. What's softcore pornography? Is a simple striptease pornography? Or, except when it's somehow considered art, or of historical importance. Is the Kama Sutra pornography? What about those little Taoist books? It gets worse when we start talking about literature. At what point is a sex scene considered pornographic or obscene? Even movies can make this difficult -- if no body parts are shown, but the camera is kept close to their faces, or to one of their backs, is this pornography? I happen to think obscenity is something we humans invented, but that does not make it less real -- it absolutely does have a measurable effect on the world.
No close-up insertions = not pr0n, definition over. (Close-up means "you're clearly seeing stick A in slot B for a while") Softcore porn is porn that does not dare to be hardcore, it's an oxymoron. Striptease is not porn at all, unless followed by clear views of sex.
When it's considered art? Why, they're exclusive of each other? Marc Docel does "unusual" things with his use of lighting, and directs porn movies that have stories and background -not that much, as sex scenes still take 75% of running time- however, it is porn. Historical facts? I won't complain if I get to see Messaline getting shagged in a movie, if that one ever gets made, but it's not as if it's necessary to show the actress's cunt getting fucked a hundred times just to prove a point. Is Caligula porn? Some parts are bolted-on sex scenes, but they're part of the story... The Kama Sutra? There is only one chapter that's about sex technique. *I* have read it cover to cover; it's a book about how to live your life in the time between Studies and Spirituality, in the way that a given society was expecting at a time (and numerous parts are valid for anyone and anywhere). It has evolved over the centuries. It's an historical documentary, in that sense. Of course they talk about the lingam going in-and-out of the yoni! But... I can't remember one sex *scene* in the whole book. It's "when you kiss, do this and that with your tongue", not "I see her lips parting to meet mine, her breath quickens, then with my hands on her ass I" --you get the point. As for the Taoist books, I recall those old japanese artbooks with paintings of people clearly having sex. So that is porn, and art. They're so not exclusive. (Btw, I find those paintings esthetically ugly. I can see the harmony and understand the art, but it's not pleasing to my taste.) About literature, it depends, again. There can be porn parts in a non-porn book... Okay, I have it : when the focus of the book is directly related to sex, it's pr0n. (This calls for further argumentation, but let's leave the rule-of-thumb at that.) To finish with your last point about movies, if all you see in the movie is faces and backs of people having or faking sex, I don't call it porn, but highly boring:-)
Obscenity? What's that? Obscenity is not in sex. Maybe in the acessories, but "a dick in a cunt" is not obscene. It may be ugly (picture a few really obese people over 80 having sex all together... now go watch close-up, and try not to barf). But then, I'm really curious here : what effect does obscenity have on the world?
Last thing about obscenity : I'm talking of sex here, not perversions such as bestiality and paedophilia. And even then, I don't see the problem with having sex with animals. I wouldn't do that, but I wouldn't
Love, yes, it's what we call fixating our basic sexual urge ion one person in particular. It is a survival trait. Of course it exists.
Pornography, dead easy to define : depictions of sex acts in close-up. Did anyone ever have a problem defining that? Oh, yes, I know where that question comes from. And "many definitions" - bullshit. Pr0n is "people fucking". But then, I don't see the problem with pr0n in the first place, since people offended by depictions of sex acts are the sick ones; puritanism is a clinical symptom of neurosis.
it's a "Mystery That Man Can Not Comprehend", and those have no influence whatsoever on the Universe we exist in, the one that we're explaining using Science.
You're assuming that things which cannot be explained using Science, or cannot be comprehended by Man, have no influence on the Universe we exist in.
Actually, there are a few things which cannot yet be comprehended by Man -- for instance, how to predict where an electron will be and how fast it is moving. Yet these things do influence the Universe we exist in -- obviously, that electron is somewhere, right?
If something can't be measured, it does not exist. Yes, we can measure electrons. We know they exist. Our science predicts they exist, and measured results are consistent with electrons existing. Thus, they exist. The measurements say so. Else, the theory would be inconsistent. Right?
So, the electron exists. Somewhere between there and there, between this and that speed. The precise place and speed of that one electron are unimportant for the Universe, though. And it matters not much for us, until we try to measure it...
What importance does that have? My point was and is : 1/ "It's A Mystery That Man Can Not Comprehend" is an fallacious argument that religious people use when they're out of ideas for explaining away their inconsistencies and 2/ We measure things by the influence they have on our world, when we can't measure them directly. If they have no influence whatsoever, they don't exist, otherwise they'd skew the results of our experiences and we'd have to account for them in our theories.
Now get that through your head. I suppose I'll have to explain again that "If it can't be measured by its effects, it does not exist".
I had understood you. I was typing that (and am typing this) on a fairly normal x86, where I've installed Leopard in under 30 minutes. The only thing that didn't work out of the box was the Ethernet card, and there's a -relatively easy to find- driver.
My point is, you actually can install OSX on a normal PC and expect it to work. How's that for a desktop Unix that already has all the Necessary Apps (i.e. MS Office including Outlook, even if it's called Entourage, and the full Adobe Suite.)
I'm amazed that Steve Jobs doesn't sell OSX boxed for grey PCs -clearly printed on the box that it's not guaranteed to work. He'd cut off Microsoft's air supply in a year, dwarfing Linux's adoption rate by a ridiculous margin in the process. Maybe he can't wrap his head around Apple having to either write an Office suite themselves, or maybe calling Corel back from the dead...
"You cannot disprove God, because there is no consistent definition of God. Therefore, God does not exist."
Will you redefine "existence" now? You can't call all those definitions of God by the same name. Something that can't even be defined can't be existing -or else, it's a "Mystery That Man Can Not Comprehend", and those have no influence whatsoever on the Universe we exist in, the one that we're explaining using Science.
Won't work. Robots evolving in natural environments will have the survival advantage on domestic robots. (Wtf? Well, if social robots evolve social behavors, some will leave their groups eventually.) They will evolve altruistic behaviors too. They will just calculate how advantageous each alternative is, within the boundaries of what they can calculate before they act. That sounds much the same as what we do IMO, just that we take other data into account, like how we feel. To robots it would just be a variable; it's enough to declare it, initialize it randomly within a range, and test to find what range of "try not to harm others" factor works to prevent violence.
Personally I don't think religion is dangerous. Far from it. However, some religious people are undoubtedly dangerous. Plenty of non-religious people are equally dangerous.
I think condemnation of religion is prosecuting a perceived cause, and wholly failing to get to the actual root problem. In my opinion, the root cause of violence is always socio-economic. Sometimes religion is a convenient pretext to move the masses in your direction. Sometimes race or tribal groups proves more advantageous. Look at Kenya, Sudan, and Rwanda.
You're absolutely right. But religions are a threat to rational thought all by themselves, and some actually insist on poverty. Or the religious leaders blind the people so much that they become dirt-poor without even comprehending what happened.
I also think that heckling (what you seem to propose) is a dangerous way of discrediting others. It's disrespectful and intolerant, and therefore prone to backfire. Virulent speeches might have good recruiting power, but public condemnation of others is only effective when it is reinforced daily by friends, not some when applied sporadically by some anonymous nut job in a crowd. The only way anyone's mind really gets changed is through civil discourse.
I'm not qualified for civil public discourse. What I can do is attract attention on points I think important. (There are almost 140 replies to my first comment on this story, I think that's successsful by/. standards.) My point here was that it's not important if the religious speakers are not convinced - if they talk in public about their religion or religiousness, let's laugh them out of view. It will teach all watchers that, there exists the opinion, that religion is all bullshit, and, that some people hold it, and speak it up. It's not to convince the speaker, he's lost already. But as you judiciously point out, that tactic has good recruiting power. Is recruiting several active atheists worth to ridicule a religious person? Your answer to this question determines your answer to the existence of religious memes. You think doing nothing, or at least not ridiculing the religious, is better than doing so. I understand your point of view. And I think you can understand mine, that it's too important an issue to let the comfort of the proselytizing delusional infect more people. I'd rather have them active atheists then, so they're better equipped to live long and prosper, and, optionally, spread atheist memes. If there really is a "religion zone" in the brain (gross oversimplification, yeah, blah), then it's better filled by atheism. That's the idea. And I really think that laughing religion out of sight is a very, very gentle way to do away with it. After all they did to the "witches"? Do you know how many little girls are still excised every year in the name of tradition or religion or "the spirit wills it so"? (I've used a Think Of The Children? Oh My Gawd.)
Yes, there is danger in religious literalism, but the answer isn't banning religion, it's recognizing the social and historical framework in which religious works were written. Look, I can quote Shakespeare and Dostoevsky to fuel anti-Zionist sentiment just as easily as the Koran. If someone chooses to believe that their book is inspired by god, who am I to disagree? It's when people claim that their (translated) book is the absolute, unalterable, and uninterpreted word of god that I get a little uneasy. Literature, any literature, contains nuance and if taken in a vacuum it will lead to conclusions not intended by the author.
Muhammad condemned the infidels, and on its face that may seem damning. However, taken in context, he was actually condemning a very specific group of tribal Arab polytheists who had waged war specifically against him. The Old Testament is full of fire and brimstone. The Hebrews were a conquering band, and their religious writings reflect that reality. The danger
Imagine the world, where anyone, talking about God, is treated just as if talking about their imaginary, bright, blue, fuzzy friend, that's invisible, to those who don't believe.
1. Take a culture of bacteria in a Petri dish 2. Put an antibiotic in the middle 3. Watch them die and wither off the center of the dish 4. See them evolve to become resistant to the poison
Voilà, evolution proven.
Care to gimme another argument to destroy? Hungry troll here.
Look, suppose we found a way to stop the spread of AIDS by sex, but you could still get it by the blood. Would you dismiss it as useless? No? So, let's go dismantle all organized religions and see what it does to the violence level in the world. I'd happily bet my life that, by then, it will be lower than it would be with religions.
If religious extremists are threating violence you have cause for action. If you act against religious people because you don't like what they believe you are a hypocrite.
Agreed. I'm not the one who wants to jail priests...
It should also be noted that you simply cannot move against religion without simultaneously moving against freedom of speech and assembly. It seems to me that your idea of a secular society is pragmatically similar to Islamic sharia, in the same way that fascist Germany was pragmatically similar to communist Russia.
... but I started this whole discussion with my troll, so I'll have to throw in here.
My approach is that you should let the goddamn fools believe whatever it is they want to believe. Don't force anything, just dare to speak up and ridicule every public religious speech. It doesn't matter that the speakers won't change their ideas, what counts is that other people become aware that the opinion that it's all bullshit exists, too. And that some people are at least prepared to speak it up. What I want to achieve is that people begin publicly expressing discontent at the mention of religion. "Enough bullshit, down with religion". Good motto, that. -"How can you laugh at my beliefs, whine whine whine" -"Because they're ridiculous! Go kill someone and defend yourself by saying your Spook In The Sky told you to and you'll see the real worth your beliefs have in our scientific, technological society. Thus, STFU and believe all you want In The Privacy Of Your Own Home And Church." But PLEASE let them believe, in peace. As long as it's not in public.
Another way is to simply censor religious speech for being just as dangerous as racist speech. But I think it's not worth the human, social, monetary, etc. costs. (How many people will have read the second sentence here?)
Laughing them out of public appearance will force them to spend their own resources to publish their ideas, and there are only so many idiots who spend money on their religion... It might be a lot, but atheists could well do the same... That's one of very few projects I would happily volunteer on.
As for the threat level of religious/hate speech, there are examples enough... The passage from the Book of Kings I've posted somewhere near here, for one, and that those who claim to have read the Koran and say "Allah the Merciful" with a straight face must have skipped the parts about the Infidels being more impure than beasts.
I challenge you to go read any Holy Book along with a key to mental diseases and not notice that the prophets were all just crazy people that were taken seriously, before our species found out what mental illnesses are. (I've got a personal anecdote about a guy that went crazy from heavy drug use and went back from the asylum talking just like Muhammad writes.)
The craziness of prophets explains several features of religions, too. Like the fact that their peaceful and merciful God is always an obvious sociopathic mass murderer. From this, also follows that people with completely opposite views (the respectful Muslim vs. Osama's gang) can find justification in their speech and writings... they're just not consistent, simply because they were written by madmen.
Look, go read up VALIS by Philip K. Dick sometime. The guy is schizophrenic, obviously so - and I've known schizophrenia enough to recognize it. Then read any book by Roger Zelazny, preferably one that he's written (parts of) while on LSD or recalling what it was like. Then open a Bible or Koran at any one page, it says something that it refutes somewhere else, and you'll see that the author was crazy. I'm not talking about the language, but the content. Why else do you think religions have always been so charitable and good, and at the same time sociopathic mass-murdering institutions where mental illnesses thrive?
Remember, all religions are fairytales about your imaginary friend that really hates you unless you worship him.
Not precisely, but thanks:-) A point I've been trying to make is more exactly that, now that Science has explained the origin of wars, we can simply apply the conditions (forever rising income per capita) to the whole world to prevent wars. Forever.
If that means suppressing all (at least, most) State(s) (not specifically US) (in the senses of "governments" and "frontiers"), then... then "global, direct, fully-transparent open democracy" might be a solution.
When did religion ever turn peaceful? when it is responsible for a huge amount of charity and sacrifice the well-being of the rest of the world.
No. Correlation not causation. What makes people generous and charitable is, when they have enough resources, then, their basic urge to cooperate with other human beings overrides their aversion to loss and so they share their resources. (Those are evolved species-specific behaviours. Without them we wouldn't be the species that influences their environment the most, we'd be solitary primates in a world ruled by scaled things.)
Science is a double-edged sword as well. Was it peaceful when it was used to create atomic and nuclear weapons? Was it peaceful when it created the worst weapons(chemical, biological, and others) known in the history of mankind?
Yes. The research on the atomic bomb has brought us nuclear power, ending our dependence on those fanatics who have all the oil.
Oh, wait...
Chemical weapons, noone uses them anymore. (Or where?) Biological weapons are a by-product of the advances in medicine. You'd want to live in a world with no chemical industry? That means no computers too, you know. And with a 50% chance to live long enough to eat solid food?
This is called a reductio ad absurdum. It's not a logical fallacy in the mechanism; the logical fallacy here is "God". I begin the reasoning with the false premise of "God created the Universe" so as to DISPROVE it.
I seriously have questions with the usefulness of, say, the "countless" devices that were built in "the labs." Ever read up on bioinformatics? It's the study of information flow in complex (biological) systems. We get absolutely NOTHING without the synthetic steps of the discovery cycle. Zero. Zilch. Nada. "Analysts" are useful, but they are not the cum of Christ as you make them out to be.
Synthetic steps, yes, it's a tool for analysis. If all you can measure is tiny current flows, then of course you have to model the bigger picture they make by synthesis. Analysis in the sense of "analyzing the whole system", is synthesis of the interacting agents that make it up, right? In that sense, they're not opposed.
My last roommate was like this. I loaned him a book on the emergent properties of ant colony behavior to try to get him to understand that you can't model a colony as an aggregate of 1000 ants, you have to modify it as a colony. It's the same issue as when you try to model the behavior of, say, a platoon of soldiers, modeling the behavior of one infantryman is sometimes useful, but when you want to grok "What a platoon does," it's not the final step, any more than modeling "half an infantryman" makes sense (outside of certain gory first-person shooters, anyway) when you want to describe one soldier's behavior.
I'm agreeing here, analysis of idividuals is not analysis of the whole. An analysis of a complex system made up of lots of agents defines all the common behaviors of subsets of agents, but you don't have to go the the individual for that. Depends how you define synthesis vs. analysis. What I said was "at least engineers do useful things, whereas literary analysts do not". That was YOUR example of a synthetist, wasn't it?
I think if you study a little bit of history then you will discover that most of our most robust theories come from the synthetic steps. Darwin's theory, for example, is the result of synthesis, not only analysis.
You win on that one. But, is science not a tool to analyze how Everything works?
So everyone's stake is in "solving" phenomena and acting as if they suddenly have plucked some kind of new jewel of meaning that nobody ever saw before. You spend 8 years in the academy just to conclude that Shylock was a transsexual or to make some snippet of code run a little faster, and then you and your friends sit there back-patting and agreeing about how deluded the religious people are for being into something that is "meaningless."
Yes. Literary analysts are about as necessary as religion, but engineers are the people who designed and built the countless devices that have evolved in the labs, under the pressures of the market, to end up right in front of you, in the computer you're using. What have literary analysts ever done that was useful in the slightest? Not as persons, as literary analysts. There is no reason to analyze what anyone has written! Why do that? Read the book, understand, or not, but analysis... of literature... now THAT's useless wanking. At least, compared to religion, literary analysis is harmless.
This tack is, to me, completely boring and a sign of intellectual sloth. It's just that our culture for some reason glorifies "analysts" more than...synthetists? People who help us assemble the big picture instead of parsing our beliefs into their components,
Yes. Analysts have built the technological civilization. Synthetists have done... what?
as if the whole is understandable from the parts, as if this somehow helps us come to grips with life.
You can't understand the whole as a whole. You just learn parts. When enough parts are interacting that you can't even think of what hasn't been explained, you see the whole from your perspective. And you can solve the problems in your life by "a sequence of actions that reduce the difference between the initial situation and the goal", the actions and their order defined by what? Analysis.
Some day, a Chinese or Indian company will buy storage in monstrous quantities, convert all media available so far to digital, set up an all-you-can-watch non-DRMed service, and ask $5/month for it. It will be able to authenticate over a browser or a device. It will stream in the highest possible quality for everyone. Lack of bandwidth is a technical problem with the technical solution of "More Fiber" or "Mesh Network For Everyone", so that won't be an issue by the time someone with the money and balls to deliver ALL MEDIA UNRESTRICTED TO EVERYONE does Just That. It's impossible to set up as long as copyright exists, thus copyright will disappear. Because WE ALL WANT ALL MEDIA ALL FREE. At LEAST all media whose right holders either are dead or have been repaid their investment several times over.
Well, didn't remember the backstory to that one either. So the lesson here would be? "If you can't replicate, incest is OK".
It's in line with survival of the fittest under given conditions. Nothing immoral here, then.... It's funny, really. It's a fuckin' example of situational ethics, you know, the idea of you replacing "immovable moral principles" by "gain/loss calculations".
Okay, bad examples. How about this one:
Book of Numbers, from The holy Bible, King James version Chapter 31 7: They warred against Mid'ian, as the LORD commanded Moses, and slew every male. 8: They slew the kings of Mid'ian with the rest of their slain, Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur, and Reba, the five kings of Mid'ian; and they also slew Balaam the son of Be'or with the sword. 9: And the people of Israel took captive the women of Mid'ian and their little ones; and they took as booty all their cattle, their flocks, and all their goods. 10: All their cities in the places where they dwelt, and all their encampments, they burned with fire, 11: and took all the spoil and all the booty, both of man and of beast. 12: Then they brought the captives and the booty and the spoil to Moses, and to Elea'zar the priest, and to the congregation of the people of Israel, at the camp on the plains of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho. 13: Moses, and Elea'zar the priest, and all the leaders of the congregation, went forth to meet them outside the camp. 14: And Moses was angry with the officers of the army, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, who had come from service in the war. 15: Moses said to them, "Have you let all the women live? 16: Behold, these caused the people of Israel, by the counsel of Balaam, to act treacherously against the LORD in the matter of Pe'or, and so the plague came among the congregation of the LORD. 17: Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. 18: But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
Thank you in advance for the backstory, the "matter of Pe'or"... What was that to justify a mass murder of women and children? And "because of $UNHOLY we were punished with the plague"... Come tell me again that religion and science are not mutually exclusive.
Let's pool our money and found that land on some island-for-sale.
I like your points, though. Religion a social hack... I don't think it's that important. I see worship and social constructs are orthogonal, not entangled.
Laws? Who needs laws? "Do unto other as you want them to do unto you" I don't need one more word. It's not even "game theory", it's self-evidently beneficial. ANYone not agreeing with that principle is simply _not a social animal_, let alone an human.
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I get your point here, but I'm not agreeing 100%
No, no, no. Not MY ideas. MY ideas are to educate people to the point that religion is an historical curiosity, ridiculous in its obsolete phrases that say things that are WRONG. Even S. Freud, who only ever thought with, through, by, about, his penis, predicted that religion will ome day eventually collapse under its own inconsistence and how obvious it is that it's wrong. How can you believe in Flat Earth when you've got a device in your hand that talks to satellites? Some day, we will know so much, and use so many things that directly contradict everything that religion says, it will collapse. We are a species inteligent enough for that.
Oh, yes, the goose and the farmer, and geese never learned... (that the farmer means food until he means axe), but WE can.
About Us Vs Them : it's what we are, yes. Suppressing that means transforming humans into solitary feral animals. Go read this, it will explain better than I can.
You're playing the idiot. It's not the same feeling at all. We love cute kids because it's a survival trait of our species, caring for them so that they can replicate when our time is past. We love our parents... Not all of us do, to play stupid like you do. (I love my parents, but I know enough people who really, deeply hate them.)
No close-up insertions = not pr0n, definition over. (Close-up means "you're clearly seeing stick A in slot B for a while") Softcore porn is porn that does not dare to be hardcore, it's an oxymoron. Striptease is not porn at all, unless followed by clear views of sex.
:-)
When it's considered art? Why, they're exclusive of each other? Marc Docel does "unusual" things with his use of lighting, and directs porn movies that have stories and background -not that much, as sex scenes still take 75% of running time- however, it is porn.
Historical facts? I won't complain if I get to see Messaline getting shagged in a movie, if that one ever gets made, but it's not as if it's necessary to show the actress's cunt getting fucked a hundred times just to prove a point. Is Caligula porn? Some parts are bolted-on sex scenes, but they're part of the story...
The Kama Sutra? There is only one chapter that's about sex technique. *I* have read it cover to cover; it's a book about how to live your life in the time between Studies and Spirituality, in the way that a given society was expecting at a time (and numerous parts are valid for anyone and anywhere). It has evolved over the centuries. It's an historical documentary, in that sense. Of course they talk about the lingam going in-and-out of the yoni! But... I can't remember one sex *scene* in the whole book. It's "when you kiss, do this and that with your tongue", not "I see her lips parting to meet mine, her breath quickens, then with my hands on her ass I" --you get the point.
As for the Taoist books, I recall those old japanese artbooks with paintings of people clearly having sex. So that is porn, and art. They're so not exclusive. (Btw, I find those paintings esthetically ugly. I can see the harmony and understand the art, but it's not pleasing to my taste.)
About literature, it depends, again. There can be porn parts in a non-porn book... Okay, I have it : when the focus of the book is directly related to sex, it's pr0n. (This calls for further argumentation, but let's leave the rule-of-thumb at that.) To finish with your last point about movies, if all you see in the movie is faces and backs of people having or faking sex, I don't call it porn, but highly boring
Obscenity? What's that? Obscenity is not in sex. Maybe in the acessories, but "a dick in a cunt" is not obscene. It may be ugly (picture a few really obese people over 80 having sex all together... now go watch close-up, and try not to barf). But then, I'm really curious here : what effect does obscenity have on the world?
Last thing about obscenity : I'm talking of sex here, not perversions such as bestiality and paedophilia. And even then, I don't see the problem with having sex with animals. I wouldn't do that, but I wouldn't
Pornography, dead easy to define : depictions of sex acts in close-up. Did anyone ever have a problem defining that? Oh, yes, I know where that question comes from. And "many definitions" - bullshit. Pr0n is "people fucking". But then, I don't see the problem with pr0n in the first place, since people offended by depictions of sex acts are the sick ones; puritanism is a clinical symptom of neurosis.
If something can't be measured, it does not exist. Yes, we can measure electrons. We know they exist. Our science predicts they exist, and measured results are consistent with electrons existing. Thus, they exist. The measurements say so. Else, the theory would be inconsistent. Right?
So, the electron exists. Somewhere between there and there, between this and that speed. The precise place and speed of that one electron are unimportant for the Universe, though. And it matters not much for us, until we try to measure it...
What importance does that have? My point was and is : 1/ "It's A Mystery That Man Can Not Comprehend" is an fallacious argument that religious people use when they're out of ideas for explaining away their inconsistencies and 2/ We measure things by the influence they have on our world, when we can't measure them directly. If they have no influence whatsoever, they don't exist, otherwise they'd skew the results of our experiences and we'd have to account for them in our theories.
Now get that through your head. I suppose I'll have to explain again that "If it can't be measured by its effects, it does not exist".
I had understood you. I was typing that (and am typing this) on a fairly normal x86, where I've installed Leopard in under 30 minutes. The only thing that didn't work out of the box was the Ethernet card, and there's a -relatively easy to find- driver.
My point is, you actually can install OSX on a normal PC and expect it to work. How's that for a desktop Unix that already has all the Necessary Apps (i.e. MS Office including Outlook, even if it's called Entourage, and the full Adobe Suite.)
I'm amazed that Steve Jobs doesn't sell OSX boxed for grey PCs -clearly printed on the box that it's not guaranteed to work. He'd cut off Microsoft's air supply in a year, dwarfing Linux's adoption rate by a ridiculous margin in the process. Maybe he can't wrap his head around Apple having to either write an Office suite themselves, or maybe calling Corel back from the dead...
Wtf? OFX runs *better* than Linux, on all 64 bits x86s.
I predict that those altruistic behaviors will be a survival advantage when groups of bots will be competing for the same resources...
"You cannot disprove God, because there is no consistent definition of God. Therefore, God does not exist."
Will you redefine "existence" now? You can't call all those definitions of God by the same name. Something that can't even be defined can't be existing -or else, it's a "Mystery That Man Can Not Comprehend", and those have no influence whatsoever on the Universe we exist in, the one that we're explaining using Science.
And, please. Smartasshat.
Won't work. Robots evolving in natural environments will have the survival advantage on domestic robots. (Wtf? Well, if social robots evolve social behavors, some will leave their groups eventually.)
They will evolve altruistic behaviors too. They will just calculate how advantageous each alternative is, within the boundaries of what they can calculate before they act. That sounds much the same as what we do IMO, just that we take other data into account, like how we feel. To robots it would just be a variable; it's enough to declare it, initialize it randomly within a range, and test to find what range of "try not to harm others" factor works to prevent violence.
You're absolutely right. But religions are a threat to rational thought all by themselves, and some actually insist on poverty. Or the religious leaders blind the people so much that they become dirt-poor without even comprehending what happened.
I'm not qualified for civil public discourse. What I can do is attract attention on points I think important. (There are almost 140 replies to my first comment on this story, I think that's successsful by /. standards.) My point here was that it's not important if the religious speakers are not convinced - if they talk in public about their religion or religiousness, let's laugh them out of view. It will teach all watchers that, there exists the opinion, that religion is all bullshit, and, that some people hold it, and speak it up. It's not to convince the speaker, he's lost already. But as you judiciously point out, that tactic has good recruiting power. Is recruiting several active atheists worth to ridicule a religious person? Your answer to this question determines your answer to the existence of religious memes. You think doing nothing, or at least not ridiculing the religious, is better than doing so. I understand your point of view. And I think you can understand mine, that it's too important an issue to let the comfort of the proselytizing delusional infect more people. I'd rather have them active atheists then, so they're better equipped to live long and prosper, and, optionally, spread atheist memes.
If there really is a "religion zone" in the brain (gross oversimplification, yeah, blah), then it's better filled by atheism. That's the idea. And I really think that laughing religion out of sight is a very, very gentle way to do away with it. After all they did to the "witches"? Do you know how many little girls are still excised every year in the name of tradition or religion or "the spirit wills it so"? (I've used a Think Of The Children? Oh My Gawd.)
Imagine the world, where anyone, talking about God, is treated just as if talking about their imaginary, bright, blue, fuzzy friend, that's invisible, to those who don't believe.
Happy sunny future.
Wow, I'm as good as a theologian now! And I only invoke logic here, not "it's a Mystery that Man can Not Comprehend".
Go me.
Okay, One more time...
1. Take a culture of bacteria in a Petri dish
2. Put an antibiotic in the middle
3. Watch them die and wither off the center of the dish
4. See them evolve to become resistant to the poison
Voilà, evolution proven.
Care to gimme another argument to destroy? Hungry troll here.
Look, suppose we found a way to stop the spread of AIDS by sex, but you could still get it by the blood. Would you dismiss it as useless? No? So, let's go dismantle all organized religions and see what it does to the violence level in the world. I'd happily bet my life that, by then, it will be lower than it would be with religions.
Agreed. I'm not the one who wants to jail priests...
My approach is that you should let the goddamn fools believe whatever it is they want to believe. Don't force anything, just dare to speak up and ridicule every public religious speech. It doesn't matter that the speakers won't change their ideas, what counts is that other people become aware that the opinion that it's all bullshit exists, too. And that some people are at least prepared to speak it up.
What I want to achieve is that people begin publicly expressing discontent at the mention of religion. "Enough bullshit, down with religion". Good motto, that. -"How can you laugh at my beliefs, whine whine whine" -"Because they're ridiculous! Go kill someone and defend yourself by saying your Spook In The Sky told you to and you'll see the real worth your beliefs have in our scientific, technological society. Thus, STFU and believe all you want In The Privacy Of Your Own Home And Church."
But PLEASE let them believe, in peace. As long as it's not in public.
Another way is to simply censor religious speech for being just as dangerous as racist speech. But I think it's not worth the human, social, monetary, etc. costs. (How many people will have read the second sentence here?)
Laughing them out of public appearance will force them to spend their own resources to publish their ideas, and there are only so many idiots who spend money on their religion... It might be a lot, but atheists could well do the same... That's one of very few projects I would happily volunteer on.
As for the threat level of religious/hate speech, there are examples enough
I challenge you to go read any Holy Book along with a key to mental diseases and not notice that the prophets were all just crazy people that were taken seriously, before our species found out what mental illnesses are. (I've got a personal anecdote about a guy that went crazy from heavy drug use and went back from the asylum talking just like Muhammad writes.)
The craziness of prophets explains several features of religions, too. Like the fact that their peaceful and merciful God is always an obvious sociopathic mass murderer. From this, also follows that people with completely opposite views (the respectful Muslim vs. Osama's gang) can find justification in their speech and writings... they're just not consistent, simply because they were written by madmen.
Look, go read up VALIS by Philip K. Dick sometime. The guy is schizophrenic, obviously so - and I've known schizophrenia enough to recognize it. Then read any book by Roger Zelazny, preferably one that he's written (parts of) while on LSD or recalling what it was like. Then open a Bible or Koran at any one page, it says something that it refutes somewhere else, and you'll see that the author was crazy. I'm not talking about the language, but the content. Why else do you think religions have always been so charitable and good, and at the same time sociopathic mass-murdering institutions where mental illnesses thrive?
Remember, all religions are fairytales about your imaginary friend that really hates you unless you worship him.
Not precisely, but thanks :-) A point I've been trying to make is more exactly that, now that Science has explained the origin of wars, we can simply apply the conditions (forever rising income per capita) to the whole world to prevent wars. Forever.
... then "global, direct, fully-transparent open democracy" might be a solution.
If that means suppressing all (at least, most) State(s) (not specifically US) (in the senses of "governments" and "frontiers"), then
Primitive primates hear the tone.
Intelligent life-forms listen to the content.
But that might be just my Asperger's acting up.
No. Correlation not causation. What makes people generous and charitable is, when they have enough resources, then, their basic urge to cooperate with other human beings overrides their aversion to loss and so they share their resources. (Those are evolved species-specific behaviours. Without them we wouldn't be the species that influences their environment the most, we'd be solitary primates in a world ruled by scaled things.)
Yes. The research on the atomic bomb has brought us nuclear power, ending our dependence on those fanatics who have all the oil.
Oh, wait...
Chemical weapons, noone uses them anymore. (Or where?) Biological weapons are a by-product of the advances in medicine. You'd want to live in a world with no chemical industry? That means no computers too, you know. And with a 50% chance to live long enough to eat solid food?
This is called a reductio ad absurdum. It's not a logical fallacy in the mechanism; the logical fallacy here is "God". I begin the reasoning with the false premise of "God created the Universe" so as to DISPROVE it.
Synthetic steps, yes, it's a tool for analysis. If all you can measure is tiny current flows, then of course you have to model the bigger picture they make by synthesis. Analysis in the sense of "analyzing the whole system", is synthesis of the interacting agents that make it up, right? In that sense, they're not opposed.
I'm agreeing here, analysis of idividuals is not analysis of the whole. An analysis of a complex system made up of lots of agents defines all the common behaviors of subsets of agents, but you don't have to go the the individual for that.
Depends how you define synthesis vs. analysis. What I said was "at least engineers do useful things, whereas literary analysts do not". That was YOUR example of a synthetist, wasn't it?
You win on that one. But, is science not a tool to analyze how Everything works?
Okay. God is outside the Universe, having created it. The definition of Universe is "all that exists". Therefore, God does not exist.
Yes. Literary analysts are about as necessary as religion, but engineers are the people who designed and built the countless devices that have evolved in the labs, under the pressures of the market, to end up right in front of you, in the computer you're using. What have literary analysts ever done that was useful in the slightest? Not as persons, as literary analysts. There is no reason to analyze what anyone has written! Why do that? Read the book, understand, or not, but analysis... of literature... now THAT's useless wanking. At least, compared to religion, literary analysis is harmless.
Yes. Analysts have built the technological civilization. Synthetists have done
You can't understand the whole as a whole. You just learn parts. When enough parts are interacting that you can't even think of what hasn't been explained, you see the whole from your perspective. And you can solve the problems in your life by "a sequence of actions that reduce the difference between the initial situation and the goal", the actions and their order defined by what? Analysis.
Some day, a Chinese or Indian company will buy storage in monstrous quantities, convert all media available so far to digital, set up an all-you-can-watch non-DRMed service, and ask $5/month for it. It will be able to authenticate over a browser or a device. It will stream in the highest possible quality for everyone. Lack of bandwidth is a technical problem with the technical solution of "More Fiber" or "Mesh Network For Everyone", so that won't be an issue by the time someone with the money and balls to deliver ALL MEDIA UNRESTRICTED TO EVERYONE does Just That. It's impossible to set up as long as copyright exists, thus copyright will disappear. Because WE ALL WANT ALL MEDIA ALL FREE. At LEAST all media whose right holders either are dead or have been repaid their investment several times over.
God does not exist. There is no evidence whatsoever to the contrary.
Done.
It's in line with survival of the fittest under given conditions. Nothing immoral here, then.
Okay, bad examples. How about this one
Thank you in advance for the backstory, the "matter of Pe'or"... What was that to justify a mass murder of women and children? And "because of $UNHOLY we were punished with the plague"... Come tell me again that religion and science are not mutually exclusive.
Let's pool our money and found that land on some island-for-sale.
I like your points, though. Religion a social hack... I don't think it's that important. I see worship and social constructs are orthogonal, not entangled.
Laws? Who needs laws? "Do unto other as you want them to do unto you" I don't need one more word. It's not even "game theory", it's self-evidently beneficial. ANYone not agreeing with that principle is simply _not a social animal_, let alone an human.