If you can satisfactorily explain where the intelligent designer comes from then I might buy the Occam's Razor argument.
Just to make sure that both sides of the argument start off on the same page...
Underpinning every theory are axioms. The key axiom of materialism is that matter exists (either always, temporarily, or in a recurring fashion) in a form which allows it to randomly recombine over the course of a few billion years to produce space and hydrogen, which coalesces to produce stars and planets. These in turn must possess the properties which allow them, over the course of a billion or so years, to produce protozoa, petunias, puppies and philosophers. These properties must exist from the start, in either actual or latent form. Are we agreed on that?
The key axiom of Intelligent Design is that either this assemblage which became matter and finally life arrived with a designer, or a designer built it from scratch, which in turn implies that the designer either always existed or was supplied from an external source. Still OK?
At first it might appear that the matter plus designer postulate fails Ockham's Razor because it looks like the materialist axiom plus a designer. This simplistic surface view of the comparison ignores the ability to displace uncannily precise universal requirements (mathematically, the term is "impossibly precise") for material properties into the designer, allowing a much broader range of properties for any starting material.
The designer-makes-matter postulate simply displaces all of the required specificity into the designer, and any specificity in the universe at large simply derives from said designer. Mathematically, this would make the requirements much more manageable, but it is intellectually disturbing because it smacks too much of a magic wand, like the carefully-unexplained antigravity or warpdrives trotted out by sci-fi authors to make their stories workable.
However, at the end of this dissection, an embarrassing observation remains: by themselves, none of these postulates is on an overview scale any better than another. They all require axiomatic starting conditions which we cannot directly measure, only infer, and they all end up with a complex and very specific end condition. This is the precise fate which awaits the "panspermia" theories.
The devil, as they say, is in the details. <digression>Wherever someone says this, I think of Maxwell's Demon. Cute concept, and a great pity that it cannot work.</digression>
Adopting one PoV to the exclusion of the others can handicap your science quite a bit. I'm sure your aware of the classic examples of this, like J Harlan Bretz, but fewer people are aware of what can happen if you decouple your theology from your earth-history at a different point. No, I'm not seriously proposing Senapathy's theory as workable, but it does have the mathematical advantage over either uniformitarianism or punk-eek, and seriously exploring the ramifications of it or scenarios tangential to it might be scientifically fruitful.
The point I'm orbiting with that little example is: considering the available menu of alternatives to be completely explored is as much blind dogma as the countless volumes of papal Canon Law. If you can accept that, then you're well on your way to understanding why it is so counter-productive to dismiss ID principally because it is heresy according to your own canon. Or to put it more bluntly, because it worries you.
If you are to dismiss it at all, it should be dismissed on far less emotive grounds, and you should take care that the baby stays when the bathwater goes. In particular, when you can satisfactorily explain the existence of universal conditions so singularly appropriate to life as we know it (no, the anthropic principle cuts no ice here, it's a statistical abomination), you'll be in a position to demand satisfac
I believe that the entire point of Intelligent Design is to dress creationism in a white lab coat
No, it's to saw the question "Was everything designed - by God?" in half, so that each half can be dealt with separately and sensibly.
Once you saw off the God section and park it to one side, you are free to discuss more kinds of design possibilities than would otherwise be acceptable, and also to ask the "everything is an accident" team to bisect their own question, "Did everything happen at random - because there is no God?"
Once you saw off the materialism section of that question and park it to one side, you are free to explore possibilities which might otherwise raise "you're a creationist!" witch-hunts and scorn such as the one exemplified so clearly in the parent and great-grandparent posts.
The fear of being branded a religious nutter has had a widespread chilling effect on a lot of novel primary science. A very few stubbornly principled people have decided that, ridicule or no, they have to follow their conscience, but they are rare birds indeed, archaeopteryx-like in their singularity.
For the vast majority, even the unwritten requirement to include flights of fancy about what evolution may have achieved or brainless organisms may have "decided" to do in otherwise sober scientific reporting - to demonstrate one's religious commitment to materialism, rather than to seriously illuminate any technical point - undermines the authority of the data and uses up space and effort which would be better dedicated to actual research.
On top of that, who knows how much research has been self-censored or mis-reported for fear of charges of heresy and the consequent burning of a career at the academic stake?
Here, it seems that you're demonstrating a will to be one of the Ignatius Loyolas of the holy cult of Materialism. Is there such a thing as The Materialist Oath?
Consider this, the number of possible proteins 200 amino acids long is 20 raised to the 200th power or about 10 raised to the 260th power. Now, the number of particles in the known universe is about 10 to the 80th power. Suppose, on a microsecond time scale the universe were doing nothing other than producing proteins length 200. It turns out that it would take vastly many repeats of the history of the universe to create all possible proteins length 200. This means that, for entities of complexity above atoms, such as modestly complex organic molecules, proteins, let alone species, automobiles and operas, the universe is on a unique trajectory (ignoring quantum mechanics for the moment). That is, the universe at modest levels of complexity and above is vastly non-
ergodic.
The short story: the levels of complexity we see in life around us are well beyond impossible. Stuart wants to invoke a mystery principle to explain this, but doesn't want it to be God.
When I go into a store and buy something, noone takes a gun to my head and forces me to buy it, and noone takes a gun to theirs and forces them to sell it. We are engaging in a free activity.
No, you're not.
You're engaged in an activity which is governed by an enormous number of laws and regulations.
These say the shop can't refuse to serve you simply because you're better able to produce melanin than the next guy or wear a kippah, but it may be required to refuse service for some or all items if you've not yet been out of the womb for 570 megaseconds or have obviously already imbibed an elephant sufficiency of the product in question.
More laws say you're not allowed to sell "whipped cream" when it's really sweetened whipped raw pork fat plus additives, or include botulin with the burgers.
Laws that prevent the shop from opening on a Sunday or running continuous footage of cum-dripping anal assaults on twelve-year-olds through the waiting-room television in order to attract custom.
The stuff you buy was manufactured and/or imported, then transported and wholesaled under the aegis of another tonne of laws. It's not free, it's not anything like it. Ditto for the circumstances of employment you posit.
As it happens, I also disagree with much of RMS's economics as well as some of his personal philosophy (but do agree with a lot of what he says). OTOH, what you're spouting here is dangerous starry-eyed nonsense, and you don't appear to recognise it for the blind idealism that it is.
Here I come to save the da... *thud* I gotta get me a shorter cape.
"No capes! [...] Do you remember Thunderhead? Tall, storm powers? Nice man, good with kids. [...] November 15th of '58! All was well, another day saved... when his cape snagged on a missile! [...] Stratogirl! April 23rd, '57! Cape caught in a jet turbine! [...] Metaman - express elevator! Dynaguy - snagged on takeoff! Splashdown - sucked into a vortex! NO CAPES!" -- Edna, from The Incredibles. All accompanied by appropriate video.
And make sure while they use Linux you explain to them how lots of big co[r]porations such as Sun and MS paid $$$ to develop the technology that you now enjoy in cloned form for free.
Oh, very good. We're talking about the same MS that directly cloned Apple's interface right down to fixed-sized elevators, and DEC's operating system right down to the spelling mistakes? The same MS who bought in or stole almost all of their major applications because the home-grown ones didn't fly? Who ripped off SpyGlass Systems, Blue Mountain Greeting Cards and a looong list of other software houses?
And is this the same Sun Microsystems whose Unix is one of the more difficult (in relative terms) to port Linux code to due to the differences between them?
Here, put on this conical hat and go stand in the corner.
It would be handy to have an option to rename such as you from "Anonymous Coward" to "Brainless Coward".
I cut my teeth on an Wang 2200B at high school. Three small-suitcase-sized boxes, a console the size of a SOROC or similar character terminal, a very slow cassette tape storage unit, BASIC and no graphics.
The next year I entered the business world with exposure hpBASIC on one of their fabulous colour terminals to CP/M-80 on an S-100 box, then the Apple ][ europlus, Hitachi Peach and Sirius 1/Victor 9000. The Hitachi has "real" colour on a 640x480 screen, the Apple had faux colour at lower res and lots of interesting software, and the Sirius had "Ooooo...!" resolution in black and white (no merely monochrome, but one bit per pixel).
Everything else (except a Cromemco Z3) was character-based, including the DECsystem-10's glass-teletypes and LA-36 DECwriters at Curtin University (then WAIT, the Western Australian Institute of Technology). Nevertheless, us all wannabee hackers loved it and spent ages (plus much printer paper) using hijacked demo accounts to write and improve Star Trek games and the like; I clearly remember being disgusted at having to type a number to get a short range scan, and replacing that with a mnemonic system using some obscure function like STRING$() (different to today's STRING$, which merely replicates a string) to convert that into an index.
Then there was Murphy, the Alpha Micro AM-100 at the Uni of WA's Computer Club. ACC Murphy, because he was so registered with the Hungry Jack's Kids' Club (ACC for A Computer Called). Murphy was a reworked PDP-11 and essentially an open system, since the club had source for everything (legally or not, I have no idea), and since the glass teletypes were the most primitive terminals they had (in the form of the EME-2 kit), I now had actual cursor positioning to play with. It was a revolution.
We could do trivial things, and grow them. For example, the "MAKE" program, used to create an empty file like Unix's "touch" (so you could then edit it) would print "Not war?" if you typed "MAKE LOVE", so I built an expanded version. SiMat was fond of starting transient/testing programs with the sequence "MAKE IT", "EDIT IT" and was quite startled when one day typing "MAKE IT" got the response "Make it what?". MAKE had a whole list of responses now.
Murphy also gave direct access (on one screen only) to a memory-based 64x16 character S-100 display board (DG-640) which could be convinced to turn each character into a 4x2 array of blocks, for a massive 128x64 pixel black and white (again, not even monochrome) graphics display. So Kevin, Indulis, Frank, Graham and Greame and so on wrote things like a 3D lunar lander for "the VideoRAM" while others contented themselves with marching bell-character Space Invaders off into the system monitor and killing the machine. We completely wrote significant portion of the system like the console driver, and devised a program called MONSAV, a precursor to modern power management which would scrape a copy of system memory off into a system-monitor image, allowing the machine to be rebooted and working in about two seconds instead of about a minute.
The 64kB memory limit also occasioned some ingenuity, such as bank-switched versions of the VideoRAM kits
By the time Linux arrived, the kind of hackery which is possible here was already second nature. (-:
I used that commercially to vandalise the postage-stamp-sized (well, maybe 4x3") display on an Osborne 1 to display 160x75 graphics using a 3x2 block-graphics character set and also turned this into a shoot-the-spaceships game (and found a genuine use for the CPIR instruction, how many of y'all nappy-wearers can say that?:-) in Z80 macro-assembler.
In those days, crashing a computer consisted of putting the hard disk heads through the hub of several tens of kilos (yes, bytes and grams:-) of rapidly spinning disks or running a HCF* instruction with the interrupts off, none of this namby-pamby blue-screen stuff for us!
Ah, the fond memories of The Schad0w's double-decker t
I'd rather you didn't address me by first name. Use my nick as is the custom for blogs.
Si, Bwana NathanH! As you wish. Beautiful clear blue skies over here today. What's the weather like on the other end of the lucky country?
it really annoys me when Yanks get this holier-than-thou attitude
Hmmm. I wonder how annoyed they are by your own HTTA? (-: Or my own overwhelming self-righteousness, for that matter; welcome to the wonderful world of human nature:-)
I think any charity that proclaims its ideology is doing so for political reasons and I find that distasteful.
How about the ones who are doing so to help people avoid making mistakes?
A friend of mine who works for ADRA was relaying first-hand reports to me from there. 100% of what you donate to them goes to the front lines, no matter what your religion, or the religion(s) of the disaster victims.
I don't know of any Atheistic organisation which can come close to that. Christian donors just seem to be more generous. Moderate Islam ain't so bad, either, but tends to fatalism.
Madalyn and her grand-daughter (nice girl, used to chat with her on FIDO and our last conversation went unfinished because of that) were murdered by their manager over a matter of a few tens of thousands of $. If that's the leaders, even the "television evilangelists" aren't so bad. I guess it helps to have a future focus.
As an Atheist, you're either responsible for just yourself, or for everybody depending upon your viewpoint. I'm very glad to hear that you're shooting for "everybody" because in practice very few do.
The only logical ground I can see for being an Atheist, as I once was, was if evolution actually worked. But it doesn't and it can't. Reknowned ex-Atheist Antony Flew hasn't quite gone so far as top profess anything resembling Christianity, but to his credit he is following observations to their logical conclusion.
OK, I guess we can let the flamewar rage, now. It's been months since I was modded anything but up anyway. (-:
Pork-barrelling (to win an election in SA, in that case) is never pretty.
They've got an Oberon stuck up in the dry at Fremantle, if you want to see a sub that used to work. In fact, the Yanks borrowed them a few times when their own subs weren't up to snuff.
...and be defensive to the detriment of the strength of your arguments, but I have to agree with you on that last point.
Billy Boy's pet drug company has also acted (based on patent claims) to completely block proposed donations of low-cost generic anti-AIDS drugs to Africa from Brasil.
Paul Allen doesn't overtly fight as dirty as Bill does, and in fact in many ways he's the Compleat Modern Gentleman, yet his donations still reflect his ideology. I wouldn't be able to make much sense of the situation if they didn't.
And now for something completely different.
It may be coincidence, but I only know of two organisations which routinely ship 100% of public donations to the front lines, and they're both Christian. I had a chat with a local who collects donations for Retinosis Pigmentosa research, and because he collects a lot he personally got to keep 45% of whatever he collects.
I imagine that by promising to pass 100% through, Amazon has considerably upped their own donation referrals. Perhaps they should consider making that feature a permanent fixture?
And perhaps a few secular organisations could try asking separately for donations from secular humanists (or whoever, really) to support the organisation itself, so that they too can guarantee to pass 100% of what is donated on through. It might help to remove one more excuse for stinginess from the equation.
Do you have enough of your own background/contacts to comment creatively?
Slashdot Mirror
Just to make sure that both sides of the argument start off on the same page...
Underpinning every theory are axioms. The key axiom of materialism is that matter exists (either always, temporarily, or in a recurring fashion) in a form which allows it to randomly recombine over the course of a few billion years to produce space and hydrogen, which coalesces to produce stars and planets. These in turn must possess the properties which allow them, over the course of a billion or so years, to produce protozoa, petunias, puppies and philosophers. These properties must exist from the start, in either actual or latent form. Are we agreed on that?
The key axiom of Intelligent Design is that either this assemblage which became matter and finally life arrived with a designer, or a designer built it from scratch, which in turn implies that the designer either always existed or was supplied from an external source. Still OK?
At first it might appear that the matter plus designer postulate fails Ockham's Razor because it looks like the materialist axiom plus a designer. This simplistic surface view of the comparison ignores the ability to displace uncannily precise universal requirements (mathematically, the term is "impossibly precise") for material properties into the designer, allowing a much broader range of properties for any starting material.
The designer-makes-matter postulate simply displaces all of the required specificity into the designer, and any specificity in the universe at large simply derives from said designer. Mathematically, this would make the requirements much more manageable, but it is intellectually disturbing because it smacks too much of a magic wand, like the carefully-unexplained antigravity or warpdrives trotted out by sci-fi authors to make their stories workable.
However, at the end of this dissection, an embarrassing observation remains: by themselves, none of these postulates is on an overview scale any better than another. They all require axiomatic starting conditions which we cannot directly measure, only infer, and they all end up with a complex and very specific end condition. This is the precise fate which awaits the "panspermia" theories.
The devil, as they say, is in the details. <digression>Wherever someone says this, I think of Maxwell's Demon. Cute concept, and a great pity that it cannot work.</digression>
Adopting one PoV to the exclusion of the others can handicap your science quite a bit. I'm sure your aware of the classic examples of this, like J Harlan Bretz, but fewer people are aware of what can happen if you decouple your theology from your earth-history at a different point. No, I'm not seriously proposing Senapathy's theory as workable, but it does have the mathematical advantage over either uniformitarianism or punk-eek, and seriously exploring the ramifications of it or scenarios tangential to it might be scientifically fruitful.
The point I'm orbiting with that little example is: considering the available menu of alternatives to be completely explored is as much blind dogma as the countless volumes of papal Canon Law. If you can accept that, then you're well on your way to understanding why it is so counter-productive to dismiss ID principally because it is heresy according to your own canon. Or to put it more bluntly, because it worries you.
If you are to dismiss it at all, it should be dismissed on far less emotive grounds, and you should take care that the baby stays when the bathwater goes. In particular, when you can satisfactorily explain the existence of universal conditions so singularly appropriate to life as we know it (no, the anthropic principle cuts no ice here, it's a statistical abomination), you'll be in a position to demand satisfac
After all, Atheists like Mao and Stalin have been directly responsible for far more deaths than even the Inquisition in its heyday.
Or would you care to re-think your argument? (-:
Once you saw off the God section and park it to one side, you are free to discuss more kinds of design possibilities than would otherwise be acceptable, and also to ask the "everything is an accident" team to bisect their own question, "Did everything happen at random - because there is no God?"
Once you saw off the materialism section of that question and park it to one side, you are free to explore possibilities which might otherwise raise "you're a creationist!" witch-hunts and scorn such as the one exemplified so clearly in the parent and great-grandparent posts.
The fear of being branded a religious nutter has had a widespread chilling effect on a lot of novel primary science. A very few stubbornly principled people have decided that, ridicule or no, they have to follow their conscience, but they are rare birds indeed, archaeopteryx-like in their singularity.
For the vast majority, even the unwritten requirement to include flights of fancy about what evolution may have achieved or brainless organisms may have "decided" to do in otherwise sober scientific reporting - to demonstrate one's religious commitment to materialism, rather than to seriously illuminate any technical point - undermines the authority of the data and uses up space and effort which would be better dedicated to actual research.
On top of that, who knows how much research has been self-censored or mis-reported for fear of charges of heresy and the consequent burning of a career at the academic stake?
Here, it seems that you're demonstrating a will to be one of the Ignatius Loyolas of the holy cult of Materialism. Is there such a thing as The Materialist Oath?
..."It Just Evolved".
There are many, many physical situations in which Intelligent Design is easily the top Ockham's Razor candidate.
But thanks for yet another example of argument from ridicule. <sarcasm>We really, really needed another one of those</sarcasm>
The short story: the levels of complexity we see in life around us are well beyond impossible. Stuart wants to invoke a mystery principle to explain this, but doesn't want it to be God.
...but DEC paid him to write it for DEC. Note the settlement MS later paid DEC and then Compaq over it.
Can't speak for AIX, but IRIX has always been easier than anything Sun for me.
I have a photo kicking around somewhere of an iMac box full of pizza.
...for Dominos, with one of the vouchers that they shower on our mailbox like confetti. That works out to USD$4.56 apiece.
Their pizzas are very middle-of-the-road. Nice pizzas, slightly larger, from non-chain pizzerias typically run to about AUD$12-16 apiece.
You're engaged in an activity which is governed by an enormous number of laws and regulations.
These say the shop can't refuse to serve you simply because you're better able to produce melanin than the next guy or wear a kippah, but it may be required to refuse service for some or all items if you've not yet been out of the womb for 570 megaseconds or have obviously already imbibed an elephant sufficiency of the product in question.
More laws say you're not allowed to sell "whipped cream" when it's really sweetened whipped raw pork fat plus additives, or include botulin with the burgers.
Laws that prevent the shop from opening on a Sunday or running continuous footage of cum-dripping anal assaults on twelve-year-olds through the waiting-room television in order to attract custom.
The stuff you buy was manufactured and/or imported, then transported and wholesaled under the aegis of another tonne of laws. It's not free, it's not anything like it. Ditto for the circumstances of employment you posit.
As it happens, I also disagree with much of RMS's economics as well as some of his personal philosophy (but do agree with a lot of what he says). OTOH, what you're spouting here is dangerous starry-eyed nonsense, and you don't appear to recognise it for the blind idealism that it is.
This mod system really needs an overhaul.
...Sun's Schwartz feels about the award, given that he recently complained about Linus' management style?
It's much easier to type that crap right (like, who's to tell?) than to speak it right.
Agree. Apple did at least have the wit to change some of the core concepts. Generally for the worse, but you get that. (-:
...'coz it had more colours and sounds than MBASIC.
And is this the same Sun Microsystems whose Unix is one of the more difficult (in relative terms) to port Linux code to due to the differences between them?
Here, put on this conical hat and go stand in the corner.
It would be handy to have an option to rename such as you from "Anonymous Coward" to "Brainless Coward".
I cut my teeth on an Wang 2200B at high school. Three small-suitcase-sized boxes, a console the size of a SOROC or similar character terminal, a very slow cassette tape storage unit, BASIC and no graphics.
:-) in Z80 macro-assembler.
:-) of rapidly spinning disks or running a HCF* instruction with the interrupts off, none of this namby-pamby blue-screen stuff for us!
The next year I entered the business world with exposure hpBASIC on one of their fabulous colour terminals to CP/M-80 on an S-100 box, then the Apple ][ europlus, Hitachi Peach and Sirius 1/Victor 9000. The Hitachi has "real" colour on a 640x480 screen, the Apple had faux colour at lower res and lots of interesting software, and the Sirius had "Ooooo...!" resolution in black and white (no merely monochrome, but one bit per pixel).
Everything else (except a Cromemco Z3) was character-based, including the DECsystem-10's glass-teletypes and LA-36 DECwriters at Curtin University (then WAIT, the Western Australian Institute of Technology). Nevertheless, us all wannabee hackers loved it and spent ages (plus much printer paper) using hijacked demo accounts to write and improve Star Trek games and the like; I clearly remember being disgusted at having to type a number to get a short range scan, and replacing that with a mnemonic system using some obscure function like STRING$() (different to today's STRING$, which merely replicates a string) to convert that into an index.
Then there was Murphy, the Alpha Micro AM-100 at the Uni of WA's Computer Club. ACC Murphy, because he was so registered with the Hungry Jack's Kids' Club (ACC for A Computer Called). Murphy was a reworked PDP-11 and essentially an open system, since the club had source for everything (legally or not, I have no idea), and since the glass teletypes were the most primitive terminals they had (in the form of the EME-2 kit), I now had actual cursor positioning to play with. It was a revolution.
We could do trivial things, and grow them. For example, the "MAKE" program, used to create an empty file like Unix's "touch" (so you could then edit it) would print "Not war?" if you typed "MAKE LOVE", so I built an expanded version. SiMat was fond of starting transient/testing programs with the sequence "MAKE IT", "EDIT IT" and was quite startled when one day typing "MAKE IT" got the response "Make it what?". MAKE had a whole list of responses now.
Murphy also gave direct access (on one screen only) to a memory-based 64x16 character S-100 display board (DG-640) which could be convinced to turn each character into a 4x2 array of blocks, for a massive 128x64 pixel black and white (again, not even monochrome) graphics display. So Kevin, Indulis, Frank, Graham and Greame and so on wrote things like a 3D lunar lander for "the VideoRAM" while others contented themselves with marching bell-character Space Invaders off into the system monitor and killing the machine. We completely wrote significant portion of the system like the console driver, and devised a program called MONSAV, a precursor to modern power management which would scrape a copy of system memory off into a system-monitor image, allowing the machine to be rebooted and working in about two seconds instead of about a minute.
The 64kB memory limit also occasioned some ingenuity, such as bank-switched versions of the VideoRAM kits
By the time Linux arrived, the kind of hackery which is possible here was already second nature. (-:
I used that commercially to vandalise the postage-stamp-sized (well, maybe 4x3") display on an Osborne 1 to display 160x75 graphics using a 3x2 block-graphics character set and also turned this into a shoot-the-spaceships game (and found a genuine use for the CPIR instruction, how many of y'all nappy-wearers can say that?
In those days, crashing a computer consisted of putting the hard disk heads through the hub of several tens of kilos (yes, bytes and grams
Ah, the fond memories of The Schad0w's double-decker t
Hmmm. I wonder how annoyed they are by your own HTTA? (-: Or my own overwhelming self-righteousness, for that matter; welcome to the wonderful world of human nature
How about the ones who are doing so to help people avoid making mistakes?
...then why did you reply? You obviously care that somebody knows that you supposedly do not care what I think... or something like that. (-:
A friend of mine who works for ADRA was relaying first-hand reports to me from there. 100% of what you donate to them goes to the front lines, no matter what your religion, or the religion(s) of the disaster victims.
I don't know of any Atheistic organisation which can come close to that. Christian donors just seem to be more generous. Moderate Islam ain't so bad, either, but tends to fatalism.
Madalyn and her grand-daughter (nice girl, used to chat with her on FIDO and our last conversation went unfinished because of that) were murdered by their manager over a matter of a few tens of thousands of $. If that's the leaders, even the "television evilangelists" aren't so bad. I guess it helps to have a future focus.
As an Atheist, you're either responsible for just yourself, or for everybody depending upon your viewpoint. I'm very glad to hear that you're shooting for "everybody" because in practice very few do.
The only logical ground I can see for being an Atheist, as I once was, was if evolution actually worked. But it doesn't and it can't. Reknowned ex-Atheist Antony Flew hasn't quite gone so far as top profess anything resembling Christianity, but to his credit he is following observations to their logical conclusion.
OK, I guess we can let the flamewar rage, now. It's been months since I was modded anything but up anyway. (-:
Will anyone be surprised at the outcome?
Pork-barrelling (to win an election in SA, in that case) is never pretty.
They've got an Oberon stuck up in the dry at Fremantle, if you want to see a sub that used to work. In fact, the Yanks borrowed them a few times when their own subs weren't up to snuff.
...and be defensive to the detriment of the strength of your arguments, but I have to agree with you on that last point.
Billy Boy's pet drug company has also acted (based on patent claims) to completely block proposed donations of low-cost generic anti-AIDS drugs to Africa from Brasil.
Paul Allen doesn't overtly fight as dirty as Bill does, and in fact in many ways he's the Compleat Modern Gentleman, yet his donations still reflect his ideology. I wouldn't be able to make much sense of the situation if they didn't.
And now for something completely different.
It may be coincidence, but I only know of two organisations which routinely ship 100% of public donations to the front lines, and they're both Christian. I had a chat with a local who collects donations for Retinosis Pigmentosa research, and because he collects a lot he personally got to keep 45% of whatever he collects.
I imagine that by promising to pass 100% through, Amazon has considerably upped their own donation referrals. Perhaps they should consider making that feature a permanent fixture?
And perhaps a few secular organisations could try asking separately for donations from secular humanists (or whoever, really) to support the organisation itself, so that they too can guarantee to pass 100% of what is donated on through. It might help to remove one more excuse for stinginess from the equation.
Do you have enough of your own background/contacts to comment creatively?
...film at eleven.
So, what's he going to do next? Build ShortHorn into every telephone?