The belief that the world is billions of years old and that biological diversity has grown gradually through a process of mutation and natural selection is in no way incompatible with the belief that God created the world or that He has guided the process.
Yes, it is. Repeating this drivel over and over and over has become the latest fashion of putting your fingers in your ears and going "lalalala".
Evolution is the death sentence to any and all religious creation myths because it removes the necessity of creation. If life can evolve on its own, and we have no evidence of any outside influence (godlike, alien or anything else), then the most likely answer is that it has, and anyone claiming otherwise carries the burden of proof.
So unless you have any evidence for evolution being "guided" or whatever, you're just someone who can't let his pet myth go despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
God is quite capable of using DNA and RNA and quantum mechanics and other theories which we have yet to learn about to make people and the world.
The problem isn't what he's capable of. The problem you face is that he is unnecessary for anything and everything we observe in the real world. DNA and quantum mechanics and everything else work perfectly well without a guiding hand, and we do not have a single piece of scientific evidence pointing towards any unexplainable influences. Not one. Millions, billions of measurements, not one shred of finger of god.
Sure, maybe he's just playing hide&seek really well, but you know what? So do Eris Discordia and the FSM.
but personally, I don't see a conflict between Creationism and Evolution.
Then you haven't understood either.
For example, if you look at the creation account in Genesis, and take into account that the word that translates as "Day" can also mean "period of time", "Age", or "epoch", and not necessarily a defined period of time, then you can easily interpret it as mirroring what science tells us about how the Earth was formed and life evolved.
Except that it doesn't. You have to be use a very, very creative reading to come even close to things. For example, the sun, moon and stars are created on day 4, well after water, dry land and even vegetation. Any kind of microscopic life is missing entirely. Birds and fish are created on the same day, but land animals a day later. Very little of the genesis creation myth fits scientific facts. More importantly, there is no words whatsoever that anything ever changed, aka evolved. You have to try really hard to not read Genesis as things being created in their final form.
If you consider the level of understanding that would have been available in his time (Rabbinical tradition holds as being around 1300 BCE), the descriptions in Genesis are a rather good description of what modern-day science thinks on the subject today.
Oh dear. Scientific thinking didn't exist in 1300 BC. It's a creation myth (well predating Moses, btw) that someone came up with and that made a good narrative. It has nothing whatsoever to do with facts.
It's not necessary to pick one or the other. You can provide a balanced view of both sides to you children. I know my very-religious physicist parents did.
You can treat one as the scientific facts and the other as cultural tradition, sure. But you can not consider both as equally valid facts, because they collide in key points.
Care to enlighten us by naming, say, ten alternatives to having stuff on tables & shelves?
Strawman. Tables & shelves isn't the point, a specific design and layout is. If you want 10 alternatives on how to design a shop interior, go and visit your local shopping street, you'll find that most brand stores do have their own designs that, while they share some things (like shelves) with competitors, they are designed and arranged in specific ways that make them a) unique and b) recognisable.
I feel for everyone who has ever been screwed by PayPal, but I've done almost 10 years of business with them now and haven't had any serious trouble. On the plus side they provide me with a service that nobody else offers in a comparable form. And that's why I use them.
So if you want people to stop using PayPal, get VC money and start a PayPal competitor.
Of course it's a copy, that much is obvious. And there are other ways of designing a retail outlet.
That said, most of them are copies. Everyone looks at everyone else and checks on what works and what doesn't. Most supermarkets look so much the same that if I blindfolded you and dropped you inside of one, you'd have trouble telling which one it is. Same for most clothing stores, hardware shops, etc. etc.
Because while there are many ways to do it, there is always a rather small number (often just one) that the majority converge to. Mostly because it simply works (or everyone believes it does) and store layout is not the point at which they're willing to take a risk. Everyone once in a while, someone does and everyone else watches closely, and if it works, you'll find it copied elsewhere quickly.
So, tl;dr: Yes, it's a copy. No big deal, happens all the time in retail stores.
Nonsense. Lots of dictators rule over people where everyone and his dog has an AK47. Education is more dangerous than weapons, which is why it's the first thing that wannabe dictators cut back, see most western countries recently.
Nonsense. PayPal does not draw any money from any other account of mine, and the only direction money is transferred in is from PayPal to my bank account.
Yes, PayPal makes money off my transactions - it still happens to be the best alternative for me, as everyone else wants to make even more money.
Give me an alternative that works a) world-wide, b) takes credit cards and c) no setup-fees and I will move off PayPal.
Until then, my less-tinfoil-hat alternative is to never keep any substantial amounts of money in there. Whenever my account has accumulated a few hundred bucks, I transfer it to my bank account.
So far, works like charm. If they ever do freeze my account for whatever crazy reason of the day, I've lost an amount that sucks, but doesn't endanger me.
You missed the point. I might have a large table open in window A, but I only need the first two columns from it visible, while I only need the bottom three lines from window B. With a tiling WM, I would have to either give all apps the same screen space, leaving me with just a fraction of the screen for the window I'm actually working in, or manually adjust their sizes, which is even more effort than manually dragging them around.
Also, I work on a 27" screen. Almost no applications use all of that, and I like having some "remind me..." windows with open tasks in the background - if I close them, I'll forget them. This way, I always know there was something else to do.
why do I still have to manually move windows around, resize them
Because any complex workflow will use more than one application and the computer can't know which information from windows A and B I want to have visible while writing/coding/whatever in window C.
a non-consentual pregnancy and subsequent child support mandate can ruin a man's life, [...] Why is it then, that men in this circumstance are more frequently saddled with being the SOURCE of the rape, and denied protections as a victim of rape, while women are more frequently granted the protections of being the victims of rape, while men are saddled with the blame for such rape?
Because you are mixing up two different things here.
One is the event of a rape, and the other is the unwanted consequences of having had sex (consensual or not).
For the second, I completely agree that man need better protection than the law efforts, especially given that as a man you have no option of birth control that you can apply pro-actively. There's condoms and if you are too drunk or forced (it happens), you're fucked. A woman can take the pill and know she's good for the night, even if she gets totally wasted.
However, for the first I am with the feminists, even as a man. Yes, men do get raped, and not purely homosexually. However, the incident rate is much, much lower than for women. In addition, my discussions with women tell me that it's a different thing. As a woman, you get penetrated. Someone enters your body against your will. Read something about the psychology of "border violations" and you'll realize that can be a lot more traumatic than being in the other position, even involuntarily.
So seperate out these two different things, and it all becomes clearer.
Although something exists through the first several months of pregnancy, and it is certainly alive and it is certainly human (what other species is it, if not human?)
You assume that it is a species at all. During the first weeks of pregnancy, it is basically a tumor - it's a lump of cells growing somewhere in the body of the mother. It's as human as a wart is.
"And no human entity at any stage of its life-cycle should ever be killed for any reason"--and then drew a conclusion from that.
That solves nothing, because you still have to define at which point something turns into a "human entity". Is an egg a "human entity"? A sperm cell? Surely not, otherwise every time you masturbate, you are committing genocide. So is the combination of an egg and a sperm cell a human entity? Or does it become an entity after the first cell division?
Basically, you are trying to use a word to define something that does not allow for such a yes-or-no definition because it is a smooth scale.
It's a complicated issue largely resting on semantics.
Our language does not provide the necessary soft scale, and so our thinking doesn't, either. The process from fertilised egg to human being is gradual, there is no non-arbitrary point at which one starts to be an "individual". You can pick any point - birth or seperation of the umbilical cord are common points - at which there are two individuals instead of one. But the reality is that it's a gradual process.
As such, there's no point at which abortion becomes murder - basically, it starts at 1% murder and progresses towards 100% murder, but there is no point at which you can objectively say it either is or isn't.
All the fuss is about various groups of people defining their terms in different ways. For one group, even a 5% human is "human", while for another, a 90% egg is still an egg.
Our laws are just embodiments of our understanding, so likewise they are looking for some definite point and a clear definition where there is none.
That has been said before, but ignores that rape is less about sex and more about power. And given that the probability of getting a woman pregnant from a single sex act is in the single digits, rape is a horribly inefficient breeding strategy.
"Leistungsschutzrecht" has nothing to do with neighbours. The three words it is made off are Leistung which translates as "achievement, effort, performance", Schutz = "protection" and Recht = "right, law".
It plain and simple intends to protect the efforts of the newspapers. And it is highly controversial within Germany. Basically, our news and printing industry is what your movie and music industry are - strong lobby organisations buying special rights for themselves.
however, none of these things make someone inherently a bad person.
Neither does having a debilitating handicap. It's not about being a bad person, it's about causing unbearable amounts of suffering to both yourself and others.
Then there's the possibility that society must have assholes to function.
A hypothesis that needs supporting evidence before it becomes an argument.
All this does is raise the line of "good enough"
Yeah, the most difficult question I see in all this is where to draw the line and what objective measures to use.
No, they are not. Every single piece of evidence we have points towards it. Productivity goes down as fatigue goes up. Error rates go up as concentration drops over time. Two people each working 8 hours will be a lot more productive than one person working 16 hours. Burnout is real.
Heck, why is this even a question? What's next on "ask slashdot"? Something like "will the sun rise tomorrow?" ??
Long workdays are the result of greed or mismanagement, or both. If you think staying long all the time (in contrast to doing it every now and then when it's really necessary) benefits the company, you are kidding yourself.
I'm going to draw a lot of flack here, but I strongly believe that for many (not all) decision regarding future human beings, the parent are the last ones who should decide. Simple truth of the matter is that nobody is further away from objective evaluation than hormone-swamped people with built-in motherly and fatherly love.
Look at disabled children brought into the world with full knowledge of their genetic defects and severe consequences for their entire lives. There is no rational explanation for allowing that to happen, all the explanations are irrational: Either religion ("do not interfere with gods mysterious ways") or psycho-babble ("but it is our child and we'll love it no matter how it is"). There are some conditions where I consider it cruel to bringt that child into the world. It will be suffering its entire life. Abort it and make a new one if you are a loving parent.
Now TFA simply extends that to psychological, etc. defects. That's a bit SciFi and a bit nonsense because on most of those we do not yet know how much and what effect precisely the genetic component plays. But imagine it works, at least for some. What's the ethical consequences? I don't have a full answer, but I do have first-hand experience with someone mentally ill. Not genetically caused in this case, but for the thought-experiment assuming it would were. I must honestly say that I'm not sure. The amount of pain and suffering caused to both the ill one and everyone close was tremendous and long-term. I can not imagine any ethically defensible argument to abstain from prevent such things to happen, except that the actions required would be even worse. That certainly is true for murder, but then we're back at the irrational arguments where abortion and murder are equated, which rests on irrational definitions of life, personality and entity/beings.
And before you hit me with a reply, keep in mind that common sense is what tells us that the world is flat. Don't make "it feels wrong" an argument, because it isn't. Not in either direction - slavery or force marriages of very young girls didn't feel wrong for most of human history. Saying that your imaginary friend actually is imaginary, but not much of a friend, on the other hand, did.
Nowhere does it say that players want DLC. What they want is more of the game to play. That is not the same thing. For example, one of the reasons there's so little content in the game could be that it has been set aside for DLCs.
In my eyes, most DLC is still a greedy attempt at getting paid twice for the same game. I'm fine with non-essential fluff stuff like skins or vanity items. But horse armor, weapons or quests? That's fleecing your customers, period.
During sleep it's *always* non-consentual. A sleeping person *cannot consent*, period.
As much as I agree with most of your points, I must disagree here. There is such a thing as consent given in advance, and it's not purely semantical, the law does recognise these. In fact, most kinds of consent are given well in advance of being used.
Slashdot Mirror
The belief that the world is billions of years old and that biological diversity has grown gradually through a process of mutation and natural selection is in no way incompatible with the belief that God created the world or that He has guided the process.
Yes, it is. Repeating this drivel over and over and over has become the latest fashion of putting your fingers in your ears and going "lalalala".
Evolution is the death sentence to any and all religious creation myths because it removes the necessity of creation. If life can evolve on its own, and we have no evidence of any outside influence (godlike, alien or anything else), then the most likely answer is that it has, and anyone claiming otherwise carries the burden of proof.
So unless you have any evidence for evolution being "guided" or whatever, you're just someone who can't let his pet myth go despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
God is quite capable of using DNA and RNA and quantum mechanics and other theories which we have yet to learn about to make people and the world.
The problem isn't what he's capable of. The problem you face is that he is unnecessary for anything and everything we observe in the real world. DNA and quantum mechanics and everything else work perfectly well without a guiding hand, and we do not have a single piece of scientific evidence pointing towards any unexplainable influences. Not one. Millions, billions of measurements, not one shred of finger of god.
Sure, maybe he's just playing hide&seek really well, but you know what? So do Eris Discordia and the FSM.
but personally, I don't see a conflict between Creationism and Evolution.
Then you haven't understood either.
For example, if you look at the creation account in Genesis, and take into account that the word that translates as "Day" can also mean "period of time", "Age", or "epoch", and not necessarily a defined period of time, then you can easily interpret it as mirroring what science tells us about how the Earth was formed and life evolved.
Except that it doesn't. You have to be use a very, very creative reading to come even close to things. For example, the sun, moon and stars are created on day 4, well after water, dry land and even vegetation. Any kind of microscopic life is missing entirely. Birds and fish are created on the same day, but land animals a day later. Very little of the genesis creation myth fits scientific facts. More importantly, there is no words whatsoever that anything ever changed, aka evolved. You have to try really hard to not read Genesis as things being created in their final form.
If you consider the level of understanding that would have been available in his time (Rabbinical tradition holds as being around 1300 BCE), the descriptions in Genesis are a rather good description of what modern-day science thinks on the subject today.
Oh dear. Scientific thinking didn't exist in 1300 BC. It's a creation myth (well predating Moses, btw) that someone came up with and that made a good narrative. It has nothing whatsoever to do with facts.
It's not necessary to pick one or the other. You can provide a balanced view of both sides to you children. I know my very-religious physicist parents did.
You can treat one as the scientific facts and the other as cultural tradition, sure. But you can not consider both as equally valid facts, because they collide in key points.
Care to enlighten us by naming, say, ten alternatives to having stuff on tables & shelves?
Strawman. Tables & shelves isn't the point, a specific design and layout is. If you want 10 alternatives on how to design a shop interior, go and visit your local shopping street, you'll find that most brand stores do have their own designs that, while they share some things (like shelves) with competitors, they are designed and arranged in specific ways that make them a) unique and b) recognisable.
I feel for everyone who has ever been screwed by PayPal, but I've done almost 10 years of business with them now and haven't had any serious trouble. On the plus side they provide me with a service that nobody else offers in a comparable form. And that's why I use them.
So if you want people to stop using PayPal, get VC money and start a PayPal competitor.
If your bank account is associated w/ your paypal, they have full control over it whether you know it or not.
That might be true for the US. Over here in Germany, I would take them to court the second they take a single cent out of my bank account.
Of course it's a copy, that much is obvious. And there are other ways of designing a retail outlet.
That said, most of them are copies. Everyone looks at everyone else and checks on what works and what doesn't. Most supermarkets look so much the same that if I blindfolded you and dropped you inside of one, you'd have trouble telling which one it is. Same for most clothing stores, hardware shops, etc. etc.
Because while there are many ways to do it, there is always a rather small number (often just one) that the majority converge to. Mostly because it simply works (or everyone believes it does) and store layout is not the point at which they're willing to take a risk. Everyone once in a while, someone does and everyone else watches closely, and if it works, you'll find it copied elsewhere quickly.
So, tl;dr: Yes, it's a copy. No big deal, happens all the time in retail stores.
Nonsense. Lots of dictators rule over people where everyone and his dog has an AK47. Education is more dangerous than weapons, which is why it's the first thing that wannabe dictators cut back, see most western countries recently.
Nonsense. PayPal does not draw any money from any other account of mine, and the only direction money is transferred in is from PayPal to my bank account.
Yes, PayPal makes money off my transactions - it still happens to be the best alternative for me, as everyone else wants to make even more money.
Give me an alternative that works a) world-wide, b) takes credit cards and c) no setup-fees and I will move off PayPal.
Until then, my less-tinfoil-hat alternative is to never keep any substantial amounts of money in there. Whenever my account has accumulated a few hundred bucks, I transfer it to my bank account.
So far, works like charm. If they ever do freeze my account for whatever crazy reason of the day, I've lost an amount that sucks, but doesn't endanger me.
...if there's one thing the world needs more of, it's guns.
I didn't realize anyone would consider the Lord of War quote regarding the other 11 a call-to-action.
You missed the point. I might have a large table open in window A, but I only need the first two columns from it visible, while I only need the bottom three lines from window B. With a tiling WM, I would have to either give all apps the same screen space, leaving me with just a fraction of the screen for the window I'm actually working in, or manually adjust their sizes, which is even more effort than manually dragging them around.
Also, I work on a 27" screen. Almost no applications use all of that, and I like having some "remind me..." windows with open tasks in the background - if I close them, I'll forget them. This way, I always know there was something else to do.
why do I still have to manually move windows around, resize them
Because any complex workflow will use more than one application and the computer can't know which information from windows A and B I want to have visible while writing/coding/whatever in window C.
a non-consentual pregnancy and subsequent child support mandate can ruin a man's life, [...] Why is it then, that men in this circumstance are more frequently saddled with being the SOURCE of the rape, and denied protections as a victim of rape, while women are more frequently granted the protections of being the victims of rape, while men are saddled with the blame for such rape?
Because you are mixing up two different things here.
One is the event of a rape, and the other is the unwanted consequences of having had sex (consensual or not).
For the second, I completely agree that man need better protection than the law efforts, especially given that as a man you have no option of birth control that you can apply pro-actively. There's condoms and if you are too drunk or forced (it happens), you're fucked. A woman can take the pill and know she's good for the night, even if she gets totally wasted.
However, for the first I am with the feminists, even as a man. Yes, men do get raped, and not purely homosexually. However, the incident rate is much, much lower than for women. In addition, my discussions with women tell me that it's a different thing. As a woman, you get penetrated. Someone enters your body against your will. Read something about the psychology of "border violations" and you'll realize that can be a lot more traumatic than being in the other position, even involuntarily.
So seperate out these two different things, and it all becomes clearer.
Although something exists through the first several months of pregnancy, and it is certainly alive and it is certainly human (what other species is it, if not human?)
You assume that it is a species at all. During the first weeks of pregnancy, it is basically a tumor - it's a lump of cells growing somewhere in the body of the mother. It's as human as a wart is.
"And no human entity at any stage of its life-cycle should ever be killed for any reason"--and then drew a conclusion from that.
That solves nothing, because you still have to define at which point something turns into a "human entity". Is an egg a "human entity"? A sperm cell? Surely not, otherwise every time you masturbate, you are committing genocide. So is the combination of an egg and a sperm cell a human entity? Or does it become an entity after the first cell division?
Basically, you are trying to use a word to define something that does not allow for such a yes-or-no definition because it is a smooth scale.
It's a complicated issue largely resting on semantics.
Our language does not provide the necessary soft scale, and so our thinking doesn't, either. The process from fertilised egg to human being is gradual, there is no non-arbitrary point at which one starts to be an "individual". You can pick any point - birth or seperation of the umbilical cord are common points - at which there are two individuals instead of one. But the reality is that it's a gradual process.
As such, there's no point at which abortion becomes murder - basically, it starts at 1% murder and progresses towards 100% murder, but there is no point at which you can objectively say it either is or isn't.
All the fuss is about various groups of people defining their terms in different ways. For one group, even a 5% human is "human", while for another, a 90% egg is still an egg.
Our laws are just embodiments of our understanding, so likewise they are looking for some definite point and a clear definition where there is none.
That has been said before, but ignores that rape is less about sex and more about power. And given that the probability of getting a woman pregnant from a single sex act is in the single digits, rape is a horribly inefficient breeding strategy.
"Leistungsschutzrecht" has nothing to do with neighbours. The three words it is made off are Leistung which translates as "achievement, effort, performance", Schutz = "protection" and Recht = "right, law".
It plain and simple intends to protect the efforts of the newspapers. And it is highly controversial within Germany. Basically, our news and printing industry is what your movie and music industry are - strong lobby organisations buying special rights for themselves.
Hm, According to this article, the judgement you refer to was overturned and the precise argument I am making won out.
But that is what "asylum" is all about. Salman Rushdie was a convicted criminal in some muslim countries - should we have given him up to them?
however, none of these things make someone inherently a bad person.
Neither does having a debilitating handicap. It's not about being a bad person, it's about causing unbearable amounts of suffering to both yourself and others.
Then there's the possibility that society must have assholes to function.
A hypothesis that needs supporting evidence before it becomes an argument.
All this does is raise the line of "good enough"
Yeah, the most difficult question I see in all this is where to draw the line and what objective measures to use.
Are 12-16 Hour Workdays Productive?
No, they are not. Every single piece of evidence we have points towards it. Productivity goes down as fatigue goes up. Error rates go up as concentration drops over time. Two people each working 8 hours will be a lot more productive than one person working 16 hours. Burnout is real.
Heck, why is this even a question? What's next on "ask slashdot"? Something like "will the sun rise tomorrow?" ??
Long workdays are the result of greed or mismanagement, or both. If you think staying long all the time (in contrast to doing it every now and then when it's really necessary) benefits the company, you are kidding yourself.
I'm going to draw a lot of flack here, but I strongly believe that for many (not all) decision regarding future human beings, the parent are the last ones who should decide. Simple truth of the matter is that nobody is further away from objective evaluation than hormone-swamped people with built-in motherly and fatherly love.
Look at disabled children brought into the world with full knowledge of their genetic defects and severe consequences for their entire lives. There is no rational explanation for allowing that to happen, all the explanations are irrational: Either religion ("do not interfere with gods mysterious ways") or psycho-babble ("but it is our child and we'll love it no matter how it is").
There are some conditions where I consider it cruel to bringt that child into the world. It will be suffering its entire life. Abort it and make a new one if you are a loving parent.
Now TFA simply extends that to psychological, etc. defects. That's a bit SciFi and a bit nonsense because on most of those we do not yet know how much and what effect precisely the genetic component plays. But imagine it works, at least for some. What's the ethical consequences? I don't have a full answer, but I do have first-hand experience with someone mentally ill. Not genetically caused in this case, but for the thought-experiment assuming it would were. I must honestly say that I'm not sure. The amount of pain and suffering caused to both the ill one and everyone close was tremendous and long-term. I can not imagine any ethically defensible argument to abstain from prevent such things to happen, except that the actions required would be even worse. That certainly is true for murder, but then we're back at the irrational arguments where abortion and murder are equated, which rests on irrational definitions of life, personality and entity/beings.
And before you hit me with a reply, keep in mind that common sense is what tells us that the world is flat. Don't make "it feels wrong" an argument, because it isn't. Not in either direction - slavery or force marriages of very young girls didn't feel wrong for most of human history. Saying that your imaginary friend actually is imaginary, but not much of a friend, on the other hand, did.
Nowhere does it say that players want DLC. What they want is more of the game to play. That is not the same thing. For example, one of the reasons there's so little content in the game could be that it has been set aside for DLCs.
In my eyes, most DLC is still a greedy attempt at getting paid twice for the same game. I'm fine with non-essential fluff stuff like skins or vanity items. But horse armor, weapons or quests? That's fleecing your customers, period.
During sleep it's *always* non-consentual. A sleeping person *cannot consent*, period.
As much as I agree with most of your points, I must disagree here. There is such a thing as consent given in advance, and it's not purely semantical, the law does recognise these. In fact, most kinds of consent are given well in advance of being used.