I kid you not. TransPerth's trains are run by WestRail. The train I was on, a newish three-car one doubled-up on Platform 2, missed its departure time, then the driver cam on and announced that there was a fault with the train, so about half of the passengers scurried off to the milk-run train on Platform 6. Shortly after that, the train lost power - all of it, lights, aircon, doors, the lot - for about ten seconds, then came back up again, and about a minute later the driver came on to announce that we'd be departing as soon as the signal went green.
For context, 2 is the empty line ending above the bright sign in this picture and 6 is to the right of it (with a train departing it away from the camera for Clarkson). All of the trains in this shot are the older style, the new ones have 3 cars instead of 2, slightly more streamlined ends and are nearly twice as long.
I'm betting the suckers run XP Embedded. Anyone want to take my money? (-:
It does not attempt to make claims about life's origins, nor should it.
Without chemical evolution preceding it, you're building castles in the sky.
Besides, in my personal opinion anti-evolution is a political tool. It's a form of misdirection designed to keep people in line inside their religious community, and focus their attention in manageable ways so they wouldn't start asking themselves why the core principle of Jesus' teachings (helping those in need) is so ignored by today's political establishment
Ah! Now we're getting to the core of the discussion.
You'll be pleased to know that as a general rule the Christian organisations where the gap between haves and have-nots is largest are also the ones happiest about biological evolution. Or to put it another way, there is a positive correlation between the influence of evolution on a faith community and the degree to which they're inclined to let natural selection sort things like poverty out.
What this means in practical terms is that to find people who are more interesting an thwarting natural selection, avoid the evolutionists.
A key phrase to watch out for is "The ends justify the means". More evil is papered over with this phrase than any single other thing on the face of this planet.
Same thing with abortion. It's all politics.
"Pro choice" dogma is directly traceable back to Atheism, where by some dodgy atheology the baby is decreed to be sub-human or somehow less evolved so mummy can have him or her murdered with a clear conscience.
Here you will find idiots of murderous intent still promulgating gross stupidities like Earnst Haeckels' "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" charts of "similar embryos" in early stages of development.
You will also find murderous idiots on the other side blowing up the doctors who do the in utero murders. It's difficult to say whether it's just or not, but it's certainly inappropriate, generally not well thought out, and anti-social.
This is not founded on politics, it comes down to whether you regard a child in utero as somehow sub-human, and the same child half an hour later, having taken his or her first breath, as human - or not.
Atheist dogma requires that you do regard any child as a wiggling lump of meat or a kind of auxiliary appendix until birth, and calling it "just a fish" or some other complete bullshit along the same lines is simply an aide to the execution of this dogma.
Any politics devolves from this, and the reaction to this.
Evolution is a faith-based position, or to be pedantic it is a position necessary to a particular statement of faith, to wit, Materialism. Materialists needed a Creation narrative of their own, and they chose a very long one.
To have 44% of your population disbelieve a particular faith is not amazing.
there are not "many" if by "creationist" you mean disbeliever in evolution, natural selection, etc.
No, I don't. Natural Selection is fine by Creationists. Genetics is fine by Creationists. Random Mutation is fine by Creationists. Clear on that now?
Any combination of the above producing an average improvement in a species (or indeed adding any constructive information at all) is not fine by Creationists.
BTW, look up the mortality rates on Sickle Cell Anaemia before trotting that old saw out again, and bear in mind that no new information is being added here, the recipient of this "blessing" is in fact being permanently, heritably damaged, and the damage happens to lessen the impact of one contagion in one area.
evolution says nothing about the origin of life, just of species. That's "uneducated" in my book.
It certainly is! For a full-fledged professor, you're not doing so well.
Evolution does indeed speak to the origins of life - it would be utterly, utterly pointless if it did not do so. That branch of evolution is called "Chemical Evolution" and it necessarily overlaps the other big branch, "Biological Evolution".
If you define "Biological Evolution" as "change in a species over time" then on one hand I have no problem with that kind of evolution - God predicts the degradation of the world, and behold: extinctions and weakening species left and right.
On the other hand, the definition is so pathetically weak that it doesn't actually mean anything useful. So we turn to a "real" definition of evolution - or two.
Hello, Oxford Dictionary: "The gradual process by which the present diversity of plant and animal life arose from the earliest and most primitive organisms, which is believed to have been continuing for the past 3000 million years."
Hello, Evolutionist Zoologist Gerald A Kerkut (died last year, sad to see him go especially since he was very rational and sporting): "The theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form." The "single source" part could be argued, since multiple sources are getting popular again, but you get the idea.
This, I have a problem with, for lots and lots of reasons. Where shall we start? Bats? Squid? Pick a species?
Project Steve appears to be non-functional. Does it really have no links or is that still a placeholder?
BTW, thanks, penguinoid, for your calm, patient and kind assessment of DM's answer. (-:
Atheism is not a religion. It is a either a lack of belief that God exists or a positive belief that God does NOT exist.
Both of the statements in that latter sentence are religious statements, whether you want them to be or not. Since you yourself have just defined Atheism using two religious propositions, we can only conclude that Atheism - and in particular your Atheism - is a religion. Again, whether you want it to be or not. As I (sigh) have to continually emphasise, religion is not about monks and stained glass and other external frippery, it's about fundamental beliefs.
This is just as much a religion as beliefing that I don't have 3 arms is a religion. I dont seem to have 3 arms, so I believe I dont have 3 arms.
Not at all. You can show me your two arms, I or a medic I trust can examine you and verify the presence or absence of a third. You cannot show me a singularity exploding to form a universe, nor hydrogen condensing from that explosion, nor abiogenesis proceeding unaided or nor proto-monkeys turning into men. Or indeed anything of the sort.
In fact if evolution didn't work, we would not be able to breed specific breeds of dogs, cats, flowers, etc etc.
Would that be natural selection, or random mutation at work? Please, clue us in on this one, since artificially selected Mendellian genetics is all that's in evidence to us. Mendellian genetics does not produce new species, or new information of any kind it only split (and mixes, if you bend the definition of "species" a little) existing species. Think of a kaliedoscope. It doesn't put any more shiny things into the 'scope, it only shuffles the ones that are already there. And that's not evolution.
evolution works. That is almost indesputible.
To cut a long story short: no, it doesn't work. Genetics works, which is fine and cool and fantastic since God required each wee beastie to reproduce "after his kind". Evolution is a completely different matter. I really don't know where to start, there's so much missing here. Hmmm. How about with a careful definition of evolution? And see if you can avoid these fallacies, too. It will save a lot of time and anguish.
Not sure about you folks but my mind doesn't need any ties.
Ah! A druggie! That explains everything. (-:
Beliefs are too slow and difficult to change and are walled cleanly off from the realm of thinking.
I think you have beliefs and dogma confused. Beliefs are social axioms - they needn't be religious in nature - and without them you can't think meaningfully about the things happening around you. For example, I'm sure you believe that a brick, released over empty air, will drop.
I'm not sure where you read this 'dismal record' but as a french[man], I don't know about it
Read up on the French Revolution and its aftermath. Preferably not a mainstream history.
And as for separation from church and state in the US, given that your president swear on the bible, I'd say that it is pretty shallow.
I don't know about that. Clinton also swore on a Bible and it didn't seem to do him much good. I did like the French float of him, though. Every Australian PM (OBTW, I'm not American, although I was actually born only 7km from the top edge, in British Columbia, Canada) that I can remember has had a religious affiliation of some kind, although very few of them seemed to treat it as more than an "old boy network".
And saying that atheism is a religion is a way religious people have to slander atheist, but atheists have no priest, no prayer, no mythology about the beginning or the end of the universe, no mythology about the 'after-life', something common to nearly all the religion.
As I've said many times, none of the chrome is a required part of religion. However, atheism has definite policies on each point you've raised, though:
priests: Richard Dawkins and his ilk
prayer: I've personally heard a number of Atheists pray to a "Holy Shit!"
creation mythology: "In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded, eventually forming hydrogen, stars, planets, slime, monkeys and philosophers."
armageddon mythology: "In the end of time, we're all gunna freeze in the dark." Fimbulwinter, anyone?
afterlife: "There is definitely no afterlife. WYSIWYG."
Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods.
The doctrine that there is no God or gods.
Godlessness; immorality.
That last is kind of derived from the revolution mentioned above, and it's not pertinent to this part of our discussion anyway. The first two are definite statements of belief. Atheism is defined entirely by religious statements, therefore Atheism is a religion.
This applies whether you personally want to be considered as "religious" or not.
Perhaps you have religion confused with sacerdotalism, which is where all of the priests, ornamentation and other hocus pocus (itself a corruption of hoc est curpos meum, the Catholic forgiveness formula in Latin) comes from. If this is the case, then you can proudly state with a clear conscience that "I am not sacerdotal!"
An administrator overseeing the grants for said clowns' site wants them to rename it because it's misleading. (-:
Have a look at the reviewer's comment in the password-protected docs. That is, if you don't fear being done under the DMCA for typing in "7seven7". Still, I suppose it's better than "password". Or follow the direct link, which - not containing any JavScript - doesn't ask you for a password.
Creationism (or 'intelligent design', if you prefer) is unfalsifiable in part because it relies on an omnipotent creator who is used to explain every scientific question.
That's a false statement to start with, since simply invoking God to cover everything you don't understand is just as scientifically useless as invoking random numbers, blind luck, infinite time/space/atoms, intrinsic intelligence in the chemicals, aliens, parallel/convergent evolution and all of the myriad other mystery causes/CYA routinely seen in supposed explanation of evolutionary shortfalls. Creationist scientists generally do that less than evolutionists, particularly habitual hand-wavers like Dawkins.
TalkOrigins isn't fond of publishing effective rebuttals to their own material, especially not until they have a reasonable-sounding answer to publish alongside it. This is why the answers on their site all look so final, complete, authoritative and above all, comforting. However, several such rebuttals live on TrueOrigin, and occasionally CreationSafaris publishes one.
Also, GRISDA publishes evolution-oriented news essentially without comment, a constant stream of which goes unanswered by Talk.
Why can't creationists be honest and say, "Evolution is the best scientific theory of how life evolved, but I believe in creation because I believe in God, something science takes no stand on"?
Because it would be untrue. Science as a principle is impatial WRT questions of diety, supernatural causes are generally treated as error factors, much the same as any other engineering problem. Western science as a collective institution is on the other hand extremely hostile to anything smacking of God or even design and regularly takes an unscientific stand against the whole concept, everywhare from the lab to Congress.
Take for example these clowns, whose broken HTML seems to have been a little fixed since I told them about it. But not much. The password is 7seven7:
The Center for the Understanding of Origins is an interdisciplinary Center at Kansas State University. The center aims to foster bold and scholarly interdisciplinary research addressing issues of origins, especially the origin of the physical Universe, of the Earth, of Life, of intelligence, and of language.
The Center comprises permanent faculty from the departments of Biology, English, Entomology, History, Geology, Philosophy, and Physics. The Center's faculty are involved in developing general education courses and honors seminars for undergraduates, and a graduate certificate program in the study of origins. The Center sponsors both academic and public speakers, with the aim of transforming the discussion of important origins subjects such as evolution from one of hostile arguments between "experts" and "special interests" to informed debate among citizens.
Nice and neutral, hey? Despite this, they absolutely refuse to have me (or anyone else seriously supporting Creation) speak at one of their lectures, for free or otherwise, under any circumstances. And won't say why. The only item on their speaking agenda which mentions creationism is entitled Built on Sand: The Collapsing Creationist Tower and their news items are 100% oriented toward how bad it is that ID or Creation should get any kind of foot in an academic door.
...and only if they stay on and intact. They don't cover you for kissing, blowjobs and the like. And even in perfect conditions, they don't always work.
Better a condom than completely bare sex, but thinking of a condom as a magic bullet against AIDS is kind of suicidal. Monogamy is at least an order of magnitude more effective.
I can accept that biological molecules could not form completely randomly, since they didn't need to. Chemical reactions (whether biochemical or not) are not totally random. They rely on the interactions between atoms.
You're so right. And when you factor those specific interactions in, life becomes even less possible than random combinations might suggest.
I'm sure you've heard of Stanley Miller of Urey and Miller lightning-in-a-jar fame? Now go and follow the rest of his career. He's spent since 1953 (ie over fifty years of his life) trying to make more complex organic molecules in plausible (or even implausible) environments, and came up empty. Nor was he able to do anything about racemisation, which is of course natural, and fatal to any molecules-to-man programme.
Miller also went looking for evidence of the reducing atmosphere his original experiment required, and came up empty there too. You might also want to consider the earlier work of Walther Löb, Oskar Baudisch and Edward Bailey, and DE Hull's followup to Miller which ended with:
The conclusion from these arguments presents the most serious obstacle, if indeed it is fatal to the theory of spontaneous generation. First, thermodynamic calculations predict vanishingly small concentrations of even the simplest organic compounds. Secondly, the reactions that are invoked to synthesize such compounds are seen to be much more effective in decomposing them.
atheism is not a religion
Every dictionary I can find defines it as positive disbelief in the existence of any deity. That's a religious position.
No robes, chanting or stained glass are required when forming a religion, although there is actually a Church of Humanism. Yes, really! I don't know whether they have a big mirror across the front, or what the story is, but it exists.
scientific truth does not depend on popular opinion
The supposed straw man fearfully raised to answer Schutzenberger's logic was not shouted down because it had been thought about. It was shouted down because it was heresy. And in the meeting itself, it did its job.
Those who do not accept the basic tenets of evolution are usually not well educated
So says your prejudice, not your reasoning. Have you ever seen those figures cross-correlated with anything like IQ?
How do you explain away the many successful scientists who are both out-and-out Creationists and dare to say so despite the risk of being branded heretic and burned at the academic stake for it? We're not talking "soft sciences" here, either. I used to live within a stone's throw of an amply qualified nuclear physicist who was and is a Creationist. I've spoken with well-qualified local Geologists and Biologists and Mathematicians and others who are also Creationists. They're not as rare as you seem to presume.
Go and get the transcripts of those meetings and read them. All of those present are well qualified scientists and had a philosophical and academic commitment to evolution - this is not a scones-and-tea social chat after church - and still kept bouncing off the impossibility of what they supported. And since those meetings, the figures have gotten steadily worse as we learn more about how things work.
Dear old Charlie D was only able to entertain his ideas of evolution because he thought of cells as being little homogeneous blobs of jelly. Read his books. If he knew as much about cells as we do today, he would never have proposed evolution. Instead, he would be joining Antony Flew for services in the Church of the Unknowable Designer.
And also to Atheism, in a big way. If you are an Atheist, it logically follows either that you are responsible for everything (ie, helplessly overloaded with responsibility) because you are the highest authority around or nothing (irresponsibility) because nobody is the highest authority around. Guess which way people turn if left to themselves?
Social communism is an attempt to provide a system which is equitable built out of people who are inherently selfish. This is like making bricks out of sand. You have to glaze (torture) the sand to get it to hang together at all, you still lose lots, and you still have to settle for building low ceilings because your bricks are not very strong.
Taking Christianity as antitypical of Atheism (hypothetically, any form of Deism is "opposite" to Atheism), one immediately stumbles across the Golden Rule as the key to and core of everything. Any society built on the Golden Rule is going to work much better than one built on busybodies or selfishness. And they do.
It used to be that I puzzled over how people can take that and twist it into the strictly hierarchical and constantly clashing institutions which call themselves Christian, but no longer.
People who do that are simply expressing the latent Atheism exemplified in the fall. They know better than God how to organise things, with inevitable results. The Christianity winds up being more or less just a label.
"Pie in the sky when you die" doesn't work. That's only deferred gratification, and not noticeably more meritorious than immediate gratification. The only motivation which lasts and is effective is agape, a word which in Koine Greek has a slightly different meaning to modern Greek. And Atheism has no rationale for agape. In essence it makes us responsible for ourselves and one another in a non-invasive fashion.
The central planning to which you refer is a natural abdication of responsibility which would be healthy if it was a planned abdication to a perfect ruler. I guess you could call the prole's-eye-view of it the "ying" or surrendering side of Atheism.
Those picking up the responsibility are the "yang" or conquering side of Atheism, which would work just fine if they were altruistic but people generally don't even start that way, let alone remain it.
Sooner or later the leaders start regarding themselves as in some way more important than the led, power auto-centralises even more, and always there is the cumbersome feedback lag and massive data loss between the ploughman and the president to contend with.
Organisations like the Papacy are simply central planning for the large political and financial organisation it sits atop. The organisation directs power to and through itself, not to any supernatural deity.
Somehow I just can't picture an F40...
on
Hondas in Space
·
· Score: 1
...beating a WRX through a dirt or sand slalom. (-:
...an F40 does get to 100MPH in 8s (3x faster than a Delorean) vs 11s for a WRX Sti (the US version of the Sti is 1.5s slower than that again), but it's still the same speed as an F355 or a Lotus Esprit Turbo, faster than any Mazzer and a lot of other Ferraris, and only marginally slower than a Z8. The NSX is only a second slower.
Just looking down the table, whatever you Yanks do to cars when you import them seems to cost about 20% of their performance.
One thing the Subarus do a lot worse than Ferraris is stop, despite Enzo's statement about his cars being made only to go. An awful lot of them - in the hands of amateurs - wind up hugging trees despite the number of rally wins they notch up.
Who recently fixed one remote root vulnerability which was over a year old. Sorry, their security reporting system is so opaque I'm having trouble re-finding the link for you.
Microsoft persist in asserting that MSIE is part of the OS, so I see nothing wrong with counting its vulnerabilities as part of the OS's. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, after all. And their dotNYET implementation is even more tightly bound to the OS than their "I-do-colour-management-on-images-with-no-ICC*" browser.
For a more realistic comparison, pick one browser, one email client, one database, one MTA, one webserver, one nameserver, one office suite, one media player, one proxy for Linux and compare just those.
I usually use Konqueror, KMail, PostgreSQL, PostFix, Apache2, BIND, OpenOffice, MPlayer and Squid. In Linux land, the web-server and name-server in particular are not noted for their security, yet I can run both of them chrooted (BIND is set to do this by default), which is not possible with IIS or MS-Proxy.
Filter your terrible Linux stats through those, and you'll get something like a reasonable comparison of a fully loaded MS machine (server and workstation in one) versus a typical Linux machine (ditto).
The machine I'm facing saw four vulnerabilities in the time-slice touted by the GPP, two of them remote or remoteable, and that's unusually bad. Harking back to the distribution running on this machine I count 9 vulnerabilities in that package set (plus CUPS and X11, which are kinda-sorta built in to Windoze in a limited way) since last year, an average of one every four days. Most of those 9 are extremely difficult to exploit and several of them are "dupes" in that they're several packages recompiled to close a vulnerability in a common library, so three for four reports might really be one vulnerability. December was also very heavy with 14 fixes; November is more typical and saw 5, of which 3 were one (libXpm) vulnerability and one was a DoS rather than an intrusion.
Slashdot Mirror
Sooner or later, everyone driving one of these will be dead. Pity about the collateral damage.
"Here's this morning's casualty tally for the Hall of the Mountain King, Sir."
I kid you not. TransPerth's trains are run by WestRail. The train I was on, a newish three-car one doubled-up on Platform 2, missed its departure time, then the driver cam on and announced that there was a fault with the train, so about half of the passengers scurried off to the milk-run train on Platform 6. Shortly after that, the train lost power - all of it, lights, aircon, doors, the lot - for about ten seconds, then came back up again, and about a minute later the driver came on to announce that we'd be departing as soon as the signal went green.
For context, 2 is the empty line ending above the bright sign in this picture and 6 is to the right of it (with a train departing it away from the camera for Clarkson). All of the trains in this shot are the older style, the new ones have 3 cars instead of 2, slightly more streamlined ends and are nearly twice as long.
I'm betting the suckers run XP Embedded. Anyone want to take my money? (-:
Yes, yes, </sarcasm weight="heavy"> and all...
You'll be pleased to know that as a general rule the Christian organisations where the gap between haves and have-nots is largest are also the ones happiest about biological evolution. Or to put it another way, there is a positive correlation between the influence of evolution on a faith community and the degree to which they're inclined to let natural selection sort things like poverty out.
What this means in practical terms is that to find people who are more interesting an thwarting natural selection, avoid the evolutionists.
A key phrase to watch out for is "The ends justify the means". More evil is papered over with this phrase than any single other thing on the face of this planet."Pro choice" dogma is directly traceable back to Atheism, where by some dodgy atheology the baby is decreed to be sub-human or somehow less evolved so mummy can have him or her murdered with a clear conscience.
Here you will find idiots of murderous intent still promulgating gross stupidities like Earnst Haeckels' "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" charts of "similar embryos" in early stages of development.
You will also find murderous idiots on the other side blowing up the doctors who do the in utero murders. It's difficult to say whether it's just or not, but it's certainly inappropriate, generally not well thought out, and anti-social.
This is not founded on politics, it comes down to whether you regard a child in utero as somehow sub-human, and the same child half an hour later, having taken his or her first breath, as human - or not.
Atheist dogma requires that you do regard any child as a wiggling lump of meat or a kind of auxiliary appendix until birth, and calling it "just a fish" or some other complete bullshit along the same lines is simply an aide to the execution of this dogma.
Any politics devolves from this, and the reaction to this.
It might never land.
More fool you for suggesting a thought experiment built out of unobtainum. (-:
A real Möbius strip might land on edge.
Click here, here, here, or here. There's also this bloke who while not a PhD still has a string of interesting achievements to his name.
You could have more names if you cared, but you evidently don't. You got these by not posting as an AC.
Evolution is a faith-based position, or to be pedantic it is a position necessary to a particular statement of faith, to wit, Materialism. Materialists needed a Creation narrative of their own, and they chose a very long one.
To have 44% of your population disbelieve a particular faith is not amazing.
Any combination of the above producing an average improvement in a species (or indeed adding any constructive information at all) is not fine by Creationists.
BTW, look up the mortality rates on Sickle Cell Anaemia before trotting that old saw out again, and bear in mind that no new information is being added here, the recipient of this "blessing" is in fact being permanently, heritably damaged, and the damage happens to lessen the impact of one contagion in one area.It certainly is! For a full-fledged professor, you're not doing so well.
Evolution does indeed speak to the origins of life - it would be utterly, utterly pointless if it did not do so. That branch of evolution is called "Chemical Evolution" and it necessarily overlaps the other big branch, "Biological Evolution".
If you define "Biological Evolution" as "change in a species over time" then on one hand I have no problem with that kind of evolution - God predicts the degradation of the world, and behold: extinctions and weakening species left and right.
On the other hand, the definition is so pathetically weak that it doesn't actually mean anything useful. So we turn to a "real" definition of evolution - or two.
Hello, Oxford Dictionary: "The gradual process by which the present diversity of plant and animal life arose from the earliest and most primitive organisms, which is believed to have been continuing for the past 3000 million years."
Hello, Evolutionist Zoologist Gerald A Kerkut (died last year, sad to see him go especially since he was very rational and sporting): "The theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form." The "single source" part could be argued, since multiple sources are getting popular again, but you get the idea.
This, I have a problem with, for lots and lots of reasons. Where shall we start? Bats? Squid? Pick a species?
Project Steve appears to be non-functional. Does it really have no links or is that still a placeholder?
Not at all. You can show me your two arms, I or a medic I trust can examine you and verify the presence or absence of a third. You cannot show me a singularity exploding to form a universe, nor hydrogen condensing from that explosion, nor abiogenesis proceeding unaided or nor proto-monkeys turning into men. Or indeed anything of the sort.Would that be natural selection, or random mutation at work? Please, clue us in on this one, since artificially selected Mendellian genetics is all that's in evidence to us. Mendellian genetics does not produce new species, or new information of any kind it only split (and mixes, if you bend the definition of "species" a little) existing species. Think of a kaliedoscope. It doesn't put any more shiny things into the 'scope, it only shuffles the ones that are already there. And that's not evolution.To cut a long story short: no, it doesn't work. Genetics works, which is fine and cool and fantastic since God required each wee beastie to reproduce "after his kind". Evolution is a completely different matter. I really don't know where to start, there's so much missing here. Hmmm. How about with a careful definition of evolution? And see if you can avoid these fallacies, too. It will save a lot of time and anguish.
...went to Kuro5hin, dunno if he's still there. Glad to see it's still alive, though.
- priests: Richard Dawkins and his ilk
- prayer: I've personally heard a number of Atheists pray to a "Holy Shit!"
- creation mythology: "In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded, eventually forming hydrogen, stars, planets, slime, monkeys and philosophers."
- armageddon mythology: "In the end of time, we're all gunna freeze in the dark." Fimbulwinter, anyone?
- afterlife: "There is definitely no afterlife. WYSIWYG."
Atheism is defined in English dictionaries as (and the French word, athée, is essentially the same):- Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods.
- The doctrine that there is no God or gods.
- Godlessness; immorality.
That last is kind of derived from the revolution mentioned above, and it's not pertinent to this part of our discussion anyway. The first two are definite statements of belief. Atheism is defined entirely by religious statements, therefore Atheism is a religion.This applies whether you personally want to be considered as "religious" or not.
Perhaps you have religion confused with sacerdotalism, which is where all of the priests, ornamentation and other hocus pocus (itself a corruption of hoc est curpos meum, the Catholic forgiveness formula in Latin) comes from. If this is the case, then you can proudly state with a clear conscience that "I am not sacerdotal!"
An administrator overseeing the grants for said clowns' site wants them to rename it because it's misleading. (-:
Have a look at the reviewer's comment in the password-protected docs. That is, if you don't fear being done under the DMCA for typing in "7seven7". Still, I suppose it's better than "password". Or follow the direct link, which - not containing any JavScript - doesn't ask you for a password.
TalkOrigins isn't fond of publishing effective rebuttals to their own material, especially not until they have a reasonable-sounding answer to publish alongside it. This is why the answers on their site all look so final, complete, authoritative and above all, comforting. However, several such rebuttals live on TrueOrigin, and occasionally CreationSafaris publishes one.
Also, GRISDA publishes evolution-oriented news essentially without comment, a constant stream of which goes unanswered by Talk.Because it would be untrue. Science as a principle is impatial WRT questions of diety, supernatural causes are generally treated as error factors, much the same as any other engineering problem. Western science as a collective institution is on the other hand extremely hostile to anything smacking of God or even design and regularly takes an unscientific stand against the whole concept, everywhare from the lab to Congress.
Take for example these clowns, whose broken HTML seems to have been a little fixed since I told them about it. But not much. The password is 7seven7:Nice and neutral, hey? Despite this, they absolutely refuse to have me (or anyone else seriously supporting Creation) speak at one of their lectures, for free or otherwise, under any circumstances. And won't say why. The only item on their speaking agenda which mentions creationism is entitled Built on Sand: The Collapsing Creationist Tower and their news items are 100% oriented toward how bad it is that ID or Creation should get any kind of foot in an academic door.
...and only if they stay on and intact. They don't cover you for kissing, blowjobs and the like. And even in perfect conditions, they don't always work.
Better a condom than completely bare sex, but thinking of a condom as a magic bullet against AIDS is kind of suicidal. Monogamy is at least an order of magnitude more effective.
I'm sure you've heard of Stanley Miller of Urey and Miller lightning-in-a-jar fame? Now go and follow the rest of his career. He's spent since 1953 (ie over fifty years of his life) trying to make more complex organic molecules in plausible (or even implausible) environments, and came up empty. Nor was he able to do anything about racemisation, which is of course natural, and fatal to any molecules-to-man programme.
Miller also went looking for evidence of the reducing atmosphere his original experiment required, and came up empty there too. You might also want to consider the earlier work of Walther Löb, Oskar Baudisch and Edward Bailey, and DE Hull's followup to Miller which ended with: Every dictionary I can find defines it as positive disbelief in the existence of any deity. That's a religious position.
No robes, chanting or stained glass are required when forming a religion, although there is actually a Church of Humanism. Yes, really! I don't know whether they have a big mirror across the front, or what the story is, but it exists.No? Then what's a peer-reviewed journal for?
How do you explain away the many successful scientists who are both out-and-out Creationists and dare to say so despite the risk of being branded heretic and burned at the academic stake for it? We're not talking "soft sciences" here, either. I used to live within a stone's throw of an amply qualified nuclear physicist who was and is a Creationist. I've spoken with well-qualified local Geologists and Biologists and Mathematicians and others who are also Creationists. They're not as rare as you seem to presume.
Go and get the transcripts of those meetings and read them. All of those present are well qualified scientists and had a philosophical and academic commitment to evolution - this is not a scones-and-tea social chat after church - and still kept bouncing off the impossibility of what they supported. And since those meetings, the figures have gotten steadily worse as we learn more about how things work.
Dear old Charlie D was only able to entertain his ideas of evolution because he thought of cells as being little homogeneous blobs of jelly. Read his books. If he knew as much about cells as we do today, he would never have proposed evolution. Instead, he would be joining Antony Flew for services in the Church of the Unknowable Designer.
And also to Atheism, in a big way. If you are an Atheist, it logically follows either that you are responsible for everything (ie, helplessly overloaded with responsibility) because you are the highest authority around or nothing (irresponsibility) because nobody is the highest authority around. Guess which way people turn if left to themselves?
Social communism is an attempt to provide a system which is equitable built out of people who are inherently selfish. This is like making bricks out of sand. You have to glaze (torture) the sand to get it to hang together at all, you still lose lots, and you still have to settle for building low ceilings because your bricks are not very strong.
Taking Christianity as antitypical of Atheism (hypothetically, any form of Deism is "opposite" to Atheism), one immediately stumbles across the Golden Rule as the key to and core of everything. Any society built on the Golden Rule is going to work much better than one built on busybodies or selfishness. And they do.
It used to be that I puzzled over how people can take that and twist it into the strictly hierarchical and constantly clashing institutions which call themselves Christian, but no longer.
People who do that are simply expressing the latent Atheism exemplified in the fall. They know better than God how to organise things, with inevitable results. The Christianity winds up being more or less just a label.
"Pie in the sky when you die" doesn't work. That's only deferred gratification, and not noticeably more meritorious than immediate gratification. The only motivation which lasts and is effective is agape, a word which in Koine Greek has a slightly different meaning to modern Greek. And Atheism has no rationale for agape. In essence it makes us responsible for ourselves and one another in a non-invasive fashion.
The central planning to which you refer is a natural abdication of responsibility which would be healthy if it was a planned abdication to a perfect ruler. I guess you could call the prole's-eye-view of it the "ying" or surrendering side of Atheism.
Those picking up the responsibility are the "yang" or conquering side of Atheism, which would work just fine if they were altruistic but people generally don't even start that way, let alone remain it.
Sooner or later the leaders start regarding themselves as in some way more important than the led, power auto-centralises even more, and always there is the cumbersome feedback lag and massive data loss between the ploughman and the president to contend with.
Organisations like the Papacy are simply central planning for the large political and financial organisation it sits atop. The organisation directs power to and through itself, not to any supernatural deity.
...beating a WRX through a dirt or sand slalom. (-:
...an F40 does get to 100MPH in 8s (3x faster than a Delorean) vs 11s for a WRX Sti (the US version of the Sti is 1.5s slower than that again), but it's still the same speed as an F355 or a Lotus Esprit Turbo, faster than any Mazzer and a lot of other Ferraris, and only marginally slower than a Z8. The NSX is only a second slower.
Just looking down the table, whatever you Yanks do to cars when you import them seems to cost about 20% of their performance.
One thing the Subarus do a lot worse than Ferraris is stop, despite Enzo's statement about his cars being made only to go. An awful lot of them - in the hands of amateurs - wind up hugging trees despite the number of rally wins they notch up.
Who recently fixed one remote root vulnerability which was over a year old. Sorry, their security reporting system is so opaque I'm having trouble re-finding the link for you.
Microsoft persist in asserting that MSIE is part of the OS, so I see nothing wrong with counting its vulnerabilities as part of the OS's. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, after all. And their dotNYET implementation is even more tightly bound to the OS than their "I-do-colour-management-on-images-with-no-ICC*" browser.
For a more realistic comparison, pick one browser, one email client, one database, one MTA, one webserver, one nameserver, one office suite, one media player, one proxy for Linux and compare just those.
I usually use Konqueror, KMail, PostgreSQL, PostFix, Apache2, BIND, OpenOffice, MPlayer and Squid. In Linux land, the web-server and name-server in particular are not noted for their security, yet I can run both of them chrooted (BIND is set to do this by default), which is not possible with IIS or MS-Proxy.
Filter your terrible Linux stats through those, and you'll get something like a reasonable comparison of a fully loaded MS machine (server and workstation in one) versus a typical Linux machine (ditto).
The machine I'm facing saw four vulnerabilities in the time-slice touted by the GPP, two of them remote or remoteable, and that's unusually bad. Harking back to the distribution running on this machine I count 9 vulnerabilities in that package set (plus CUPS and X11, which are kinda-sorta built in to Windoze in a limited way) since last year, an average of one every four days. Most of those 9 are extremely difficult to exploit and several of them are "dupes" in that they're several packages recompiled to close a vulnerability in a common library, so three for four reports might really be one vulnerability. December was also very heavy with 14 fixes; November is more typical and saw 5, of which 3 were one (libXpm) vulnerability and one was a DoS rather than an intrusion.
Instead you could be rebooting until Easter. Such convenience. (-:
...is to have the Army build and launch Hubble II.
Bill it as a spysat (heck, you could even add some real spysat features to it that operated independently and up the mass from 11.5t to 12t).