So how do you use greek in your everyday life, or your professional life?
It has tremendeously widened my horizon in ways that sometimes took a decade for me to realize. For example, the greek grammar reveals a lot more about human thought processes than the more simplified, "smoothed out" german or english grammar does. Some of the differentiations that it allows enable you to start thinking on the same level of differentiation in your other languages. You do know that languages structure concepts of thought, yes?
Being able to read a few of the classics that much of our modern thought is based on still in their original also has merits that are hard to express. It's like having sex or having someone tell you about their sex - sometimes, one layer of indirection takes a lot away. Now if you are only interested in, say, learning what the basic moves are, then someone else telling you works just fine. So if you are only interested in Pythagoras because you need to do some calculations on a triangle, then your average math textbook will do just fine. But if you care about the full complexity of his thoughts, then the original is absolutely something that you want. Even a good commented translation will assume you have a basic grasp of some of the language concepts - see above - because there is much meaning in them.
Continued learning of Greek by non-Greek people is probably more a matter of "That's how its been done for years, so that's how we're going to continue to do it."
Nobody learns ancient greek in order to speek with any ancient greeks. And modern greek is so different that while one helps the other, you'd have to relearn quite a bit. Greek is taught because it's the language that many of the texts that define our culture and philosophies are written in that language.
Maybe, but if what they report is true, then - surprise - it is true.
Whatever their agenda is, if they point out stuff that needs changing, then it needs changing. In fact, I would judge the maturity of a country on their response - if it is self-defense or counter-attack, it is childish. If it checks the facts and takes steps to improve those that are rightly pointed out, then it is mature.
So, what are you, USA? A kid with dangerous weapons or an adult?
No, they do have a point. Even if they are even worse, even if you don't like them. The serial-killer child-rapist cleptomanic is still right when he points out the guy who ran the red light. It may be any number of things, but it doesn't change the simple fact that the truth remains the truth no matter who reports it.
And sometimes, it needs an unpopular perceived enemy to speak out what all your friends don't dare to say out loud and clear.
Wind isn't always blowing or in the right place, sun isn't always shining or in the right place, water isn't always available for dams or in the right place and kills huge aquatic populations, not all of the population lives where tidal generators are a possibility...
You are thinking isolated, not combined. The reality is that places that aren't sunny are often windy, and cloudy days are often windy, and if there is no sun here today, it is somewhere else.
If you think about alternative energy sources, you always have to think in several of them, never just one. Given that we already have existing power lines as the next nuclear or other power plant is also on average a hundred or a few hundred miles away, you aren't really limited to local generation that much.
In addition, storing the energy generated during especially sunny or windy or whatever times and then using it later when it's needed is a very promising current development.
Finally, statistics show that total energy generation by alternative sources is much more stable than the fearmongers and lobbyists want us to believe. You know, just in case you're interested in actual facts.
For the record: I'm not even against nuclear power. In fact, my personal vision is a mix of alternative energy and nuclear power, so we can rid ourselves of all the dirty coal and gas plants.
And what's wrong with that? My friends and I lend each other books, movies, etc. all the time. If I buy a game, why can't I lend it to a friend when I'm done playing it?
If you want to become a billionaire really quickly, come up with a DRM scheme for books and movies and the content industry will pay you anything for it. The only reason you can lend books and movies is that they don't have DRM, not because the publishers are fine with it.
I know I've downloaded No-CD fixed.exe files for games that I actually bought. If that doesn't tell the game publishers something, I don't know what will.
I've been saying this for years: If you want to lose the "war on piracy", the absolutely best way of doing that is making the legal, bought copy less convenient than the pirate copy.
If one option you have is to go to a brick-and-mortar store, or order a CD/DVD online and wait for 1-2 days, paying some $50, then paying some more for DLC that really should've been in the main release, then spend 10 minutes entering a 243-character ID number badly printed on the inside of the case, half covered by some advertisement sticker, then have to enter your private details that they have no business of knowing, registering some online account, and having to have an active Internet connection every time you want to play, so the rootkit they installed can check you're legit, after crashing your PC a couple times and requiring you to uninstall a few perfectly legal and useful tools because it has decided they're evil...
Or, you go to some random torrent site, download three seperate releases because you know at least one is fake, but the other two are fine, have all the DRM crap removed, and you're up and running within a few hours and without all the hassle...
Seriously, which option would a rational being choose? Ignore the legal and moral, because if you feel compelled to "do the right thing", that's not a rational decision.
Yes, I am exaggerating, but not really all that much. Fact is that for way too many games these days, the torrent is simply more convenient, less hassle, less invasive(!).
And, as I keep telling to game publishers, you can't change the pirates' side of the equation. You can change yours.
If it does you can mount a portion of your colony on a train running over an inclined circular track or on a pivoting boom arm, and you can amplify the felt force of gravity.
Which requires quite a bit of energy to run, not to mention other problems.
If low gravity turns out to be a major problem, and it very likely will, space stations (which can spin easily) might be our best option until genetic engineering has advanced sufficiently.
Nobody said such space stations can't be stationary over a planet, with space elevators doing the lifting, so our first Mars colony could actually be a space station in orbit, with mostly automated factories etc. on the surface to produce whatever the station needs. Which solves the problem with stations that it is horribly expensive and complex to make one really self-sufficient. Splitting the colony into a surface and an orbit part solves most of the problems of either approach.
Because at some point the sun will turn into a red giant and swallow the earth whole.
Just as interstellar distances are unimaginable to most of us and our human-environment-size-and-time-scaled brains, so is time. We are about halfway through the lifetime of our sun, which means we still have a comfortable one to two billion years before any noticeable change.
We could wipe out all life - down to the bacteria and one-celled, I mean absolutely freaking everything - on the planet and there would be enough time for another sentient species to evolve. They'd have a lot less time, we don't. I really don't think we should worry now. Two billion years is plenty of time to come up with interstellar travel, even without trying.
We will be completely and irreversibility erased from the universe.
A lot of people find that thought rather uncomfortable.
If you worry about the sun going out, why not worry about whether or not K > 0? If there's going to be a "Big Crunch", then we'll be wiped out whether or not we go to the stars.
I honestly think there's something else to the whole space exploration meme. It is a symbol of freedom, because it is so huge that for alle we care it's unlimited in size and time. On a planet where we are just about to map the last few remaining white spots, that means a lot.
I want to a public school that taught latin starting 5th year (i.e. when I was 11) and greek starting 10th year (pupils aged 16-17).
Ok, this is good old Europe, we're not being bred to become burger flippers. Maybe that's a point. And yes, it's not your average school, but it's neither an expensive place (free, in fact, just a regular public school) nor very special.
Education can be had if you want it (for your kids). But you do have to look around and make a good choice. It's not everywhere. And - and that's probably the main point - you have to have some yourself in order to understand how to make that choice.
If they take a pocket knife you forgot to remove, or a flask of water because it's 110ml instead of the allowed 100ml or whatever other insanity they have at the airports these days - that's an inconvenience, but nothing major.
If they take your notebook, that can easily be a 2000-3000 US$ loss.
Oh, you think you're going to get it back? Certainly you should. It just might take weeks or months, and by then you're out of the country again, and it might, just might be all kinds of hassles. And then there's plenty of stories of stuff seized that was never returned, usually on some pretext.
You know, in short-term scheduling, you need the day only. So you can write "on the 12." - but then when you need to be more specific, you simply expand that to "on the 12.5." - you add more detail as required, and you always add in the same way (at the end).
It's logically consistent. Then again, maybe I just think so because I'm European.
How can you believe anything about Columbus, have you seen his long-form birth certificate?
So what you are saying is that only one specific piece of evidence counts as any evidence at all? I'm sorry, I can not argue with you on that level. I'd have to drink away at least half my brain before I can even wrap my head around that kind of thinking.
Sadly, all the evidence in the world is nothing to those who would prefer the explanations "substantiated" by faith.
As with all things religion, it is enlightening to read what they say or write inverted. "substantiated" is a great example, because substantiating is exactly what does not happen in faith. It's a pattern - they do the opposite of what they claim they do. You know, like saving your soul by killing you.
Science is a process. It has a research branch and an application branch. Technology is a result of scientific research. Unless I somehow missed the memo and we have planes whose engines are based on prayer or something.
When we speak of science, I agree we usually picture the researchers. But the engineers are as much scientists as the packaging is part of the manufacturing plant. Maybe some people don't consider it the interesting part, but it very much is a part.
Faith is not passed on genetically, that's true (though I've heard rumours that there may be a genetic susceptibility to superstition).
But, faith can be pushed on someone. While we all know someone who managed to leave the cult, the number of children growing up in a christian household who then continue their life as a christian is much, much higher than the number stepping out of it. And the effectiveness is intolerable. Look at what it takes to get a believer to stop the insanity. Evidence doesn't matter, massive amounts of doubt don't cut it, losing their loved ones to religiously caused tragedies like suicide bombings only strengthens their own faiths instead of making them ask what the heck is wrong with people who kill real human beings for imaginary friends.
If you put two people through the same process, you cannot say with certainty they will come out with the same faith.
Not with certainty, but with a very high probability. The number of hindus coming out of a muslim upbringing is quite tiny.
Theology is really a specialized kind of Philosophy.
The part in my that loves philosophy cringes at that thought. But I have to agree that theology is a lot closer to philosophy than to any science, including those of the mind.
For example, the entire theory of Just and Unjust wars (whether you agree with it or not) owes quite a bit to theological work of Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Again, whether you agree with it or not, wars are real-world things, and our (USA) reasoning about when we engage in them owes quite a bit to this particular work of Catholic Theology.
That is a good point, yes.
I do agree that for centuries, any thinking about the world had to be conducted with the context of theology, or you'd be branded a heretic. Much of early science was officially "an inquiry into the wonders god has given us" or some such cover. I would even go so far as to say that many of those who wrote that actually believed it.
So yes, in many texts it is quite hard to see where the theology stops and the philosophy begins. Much like ancient greek texts freely move between physics, math and philosophy.
I still can't agree that the two are the same or one part of the other. However, you do have a very good point, and I have to agree that at the least they are sometimes hard to seperate.
Not everyone can be an airplane engineer, true. But anyone can fly in an airplane and verify for himself that airplanes exist and they really fly, so apparently - even if you don't understand the details - there is something to what these science people say about whatever it is that makes them fly. You can't verify the theoretical underpinnings, but you can verify the results. You don't know why the predicted result ("it will fly") comes to pass, but you can see with your own eyes that it does.
Now if a catholic priest could repeatedly turn his wine into a substance that tests out as blood - I'll not even be picky about the details, for all I care Jesus can have a different blood type every week - then I might be inclined to listen to some of his ramblings. And while I may be curious about the process, as soon as some research has removed trickery from the list of explanations, I'll be quite inclined to give quite a bit more credit to this "transsubstantiation" thing. But right now, and that's the difference, every minute of every day, we have planes flying around this planet. I've yet to hear of a single confirmed transsubstiation.
And that's why flying in a plane requires a ticket, but no faith in physics, while going to mass requires faith or all you do is take a sip of cheap wine.
The big difference is that when someone says they see a miracle, all they can offer is "Because I said so."
True, but I really agree with the GP that the main difference is that when a young kid sees a miracle, and you have to look into these big eyes full of awe and it says "do that again! do that again!" - with a scientific miracle you smile and say "sure, my dear". No such luck with a religious miracle.
I've always thought it rather obvious that Science is a Faith. If a word cannot be used to define itself, than how can Science ever be used to prove itself?
I do believe the Wright brothers did not derive their airplane designs from the science of physics.
And neither did they get the blueprints handed down on divinely inspired sacred scrolls.
Of course they derived the designs from physics. That doesn't mean that they designed the planes on a blackboard. Experimentation is very much a part of science, as is incremental improvements. Mythbusters, despite the obvious entertainment value and shortcuts they take since it's a TV show, is pretty much scientific - you formulate a hypothesis, you test it using a series of experiments in controlled conditions, you go back to the drawing board to see if the results verify or contradict your initial assumptions, you improve your concept, repeat until you're happy with the results.
And that's pretty much what the Wright brothers did.
You desperately need a better understanding of the word "science". It's not just people in white coats working in labs. In fact, throughout most of history, science was very practical, and only with the extreme specialization and depths we have reached during the past few decades has it become so largely theoretical.
Science is fundamentally different from faith in that science is reproducible. Faith is not.
I know you don't mean it like that, but the fundamental problem today is precisely that faith is reproducable. It reproduces by human reproduction (there is a strong correlation between religious faith and number of children) and religious brainwashing (religion is intentionally and deliberately being taught to children too young to have developed critical thinking).
This is either stupid or a troll - yet another attempt to build a false equivalency between proven methods of finding out the truth, and unproven magical thinking.
It is neither. Don't you guys get it? This is part of an organised attempt to discredit science as a principle. Its purpose is to give religion another century or so before humanity can rid itself of that curse, because too many powerful and/or wealthy people profit from religion to let it go so easily.
But since magical and religious thinking suffers dramatically from the doubt that science has cast on it - and even the most simpleminded people are beginning to take up the very simple problem of "but there are no results", it is impossible to restore faith in religion.
But what you can do is cast doubt on science, so people don't have an easy answer to go to. The more people doubt science, the closer they will stay to the church. It's a totally irrational process - the same people who speak out loudest against science usually fly in planes to their speaking locations where they use microphones, amplifiers, electric lighting and so forth. Not to mention that apparently the Internet is so hot with the religious community, I'm getting more spam for "free church websites" than for penis enlargements. But there really is no disparity there. The target of the doubt is the heart, not the mind. So they don't even realize that using the same technology that the try to discredit is kind of strange.
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So how do you use greek in your everyday life, or your professional life?
It has tremendeously widened my horizon in ways that sometimes took a decade for me to realize. For example, the greek grammar reveals a lot more about human thought processes than the more simplified, "smoothed out" german or english grammar does. Some of the differentiations that it allows enable you to start thinking on the same level of differentiation in your other languages. You do know that languages structure concepts of thought, yes?
Being able to read a few of the classics that much of our modern thought is based on still in their original also has merits that are hard to express. It's like having sex or having someone tell you about their sex - sometimes, one layer of indirection takes a lot away. Now if you are only interested in, say, learning what the basic moves are, then someone else telling you works just fine. So if you are only interested in Pythagoras because you need to do some calculations on a triangle, then your average math textbook will do just fine. But if you care about the full complexity of his thoughts, then the original is absolutely something that you want. Even a good commented translation will assume you have a basic grasp of some of the language concepts - see above - because there is much meaning in them.
Continued learning of Greek by non-Greek people is probably more a matter of "That's how its been done for years, so that's how we're going to continue to do it."
Nobody learns ancient greek in order to speek with any ancient greeks. And modern greek is so different that while one helps the other, you'd have to relearn quite a bit. Greek is taught because it's the language that many of the texts that define our culture and philosophies are written in that language.
Maybe, but if what they report is true, then - surprise - it is true.
Whatever their agenda is, if they point out stuff that needs changing, then it needs changing. In fact, I would judge the maturity of a country on their response - if it is self-defense or counter-attack, it is childish. If it checks the facts and takes steps to improve those that are rightly pointed out, then it is mature.
So, what are you, USA? A kid with dangerous weapons or an adult?
And the Chinese might have a point.
No, they do have a point. Even if they are even worse, even if you don't like them. The serial-killer child-rapist cleptomanic is still right when he points out the guy who ran the red light. It may be any number of things, but it doesn't change the simple fact that the truth remains the truth no matter who reports it.
And sometimes, it needs an unpopular perceived enemy to speak out what all your friends don't dare to say out loud and clear.
Wind isn't always blowing or in the right place, sun isn't always shining or in the right place, water isn't always available for dams or in the right place and kills huge aquatic populations, not all of the population lives where tidal generators are a possibility...
You are thinking isolated, not combined. The reality is that places that aren't sunny are often windy, and cloudy days are often windy, and if there is no sun here today, it is somewhere else.
If you think about alternative energy sources, you always have to think in several of them, never just one. Given that we already have existing power lines as the next nuclear or other power plant is also on average a hundred or a few hundred miles away, you aren't really limited to local generation that much.
In addition, storing the energy generated during especially sunny or windy or whatever times and then using it later when it's needed is a very promising current development.
Finally, statistics show that total energy generation by alternative sources is much more stable than the fearmongers and lobbyists want us to believe. You know, just in case you're interested in actual facts.
For the record: I'm not even against nuclear power. In fact, my personal vision is a mix of alternative energy and nuclear power, so we can rid ourselves of all the dirty coal and gas plants.
And what's wrong with that? My friends and I lend each other books, movies, etc. all the time. If I buy a game, why can't I lend it to a friend when I'm done playing it?
If you want to become a billionaire really quickly, come up with a DRM scheme for books and movies and the content industry will pay you anything for it. The only reason you can lend books and movies is that they don't have DRM, not because the publishers are fine with it.
I know I've downloaded No-CD fixed .exe files for games that I actually bought. If that doesn't tell the game publishers something, I don't know what will.
I've been saying this for years: If you want to lose the "war on piracy", the absolutely best way of doing that is making the legal, bought copy less convenient than the pirate copy.
If one option you have is to go to a brick-and-mortar store, or order a CD/DVD online and wait for 1-2 days, paying some $50, then paying some more for DLC that really should've been in the main release, then spend 10 minutes entering a 243-character ID number badly printed on the inside of the case, half covered by some advertisement sticker, then have to enter your private details that they have no business of knowing, registering some online account, and having to have an active Internet connection every time you want to play, so the rootkit they installed can check you're legit, after crashing your PC a couple times and requiring you to uninstall a few perfectly legal and useful tools because it has decided they're evil...
Or, you go to some random torrent site, download three seperate releases because you know at least one is fake, but the other two are fine, have all the DRM crap removed, and you're up and running within a few hours and without all the hassle...
Seriously, which option would a rational being choose? Ignore the legal and moral, because if you feel compelled to "do the right thing", that's not a rational decision.
Yes, I am exaggerating, but not really all that much. Fact is that for way too many games these days, the torrent is simply more convenient, less hassle, less invasive(!).
And, as I keep telling to game publishers, you can't change the pirates' side of the equation. You can change yours.
If it does you can mount a portion of your colony on a train running over an inclined circular track or on a pivoting boom arm, and you can amplify the felt force of gravity.
Which requires quite a bit of energy to run, not to mention other problems.
If low gravity turns out to be a major problem, and it very likely will, space stations (which can spin easily) might be our best option until genetic engineering has advanced sufficiently.
Nobody said such space stations can't be stationary over a planet, with space elevators doing the lifting, so our first Mars colony could actually be a space station in orbit, with mostly automated factories etc. on the surface to produce whatever the station needs. Which solves the problem with stations that it is horribly expensive and complex to make one really self-sufficient. Splitting the colony into a surface and an orbit part solves most of the problems of either approach.
Because at some point the sun will turn into a red giant and swallow the earth whole.
Just as interstellar distances are unimaginable to most of us and our human-environment-size-and-time-scaled brains, so is time. We are about halfway through the lifetime of our sun, which means we still have a comfortable one to two billion years before any noticeable change.
We could wipe out all life - down to the bacteria and one-celled, I mean absolutely freaking everything - on the planet and there would be enough time for another sentient species to evolve. They'd have a lot less time, we don't. I really don't think we should worry now. Two billion years is plenty of time to come up with interstellar travel, even without trying.
We will be completely and irreversibility erased from the universe.
A lot of people find that thought rather uncomfortable.
If you worry about the sun going out, why not worry about whether or not K > 0? If there's going to be a "Big Crunch", then we'll be wiped out whether or not we go to the stars.
I honestly think there's something else to the whole space exploration meme. It is a symbol of freedom, because it is so huge that for alle we care it's unlimited in size and time. On a planet where we are just about to map the last few remaining white spots, that means a lot.
Now consider the laws of chemistry. You canâ(TM)t change them by legislation.
I'm sure that doesn't stop our current-day politicians. These guys have been living in lala-land for a decade or more, sure they can.
*wave* - over here.
I want to a public school that taught latin starting 5th year (i.e. when I was 11) and greek starting 10th year (pupils aged 16-17).
Ok, this is good old Europe, we're not being bred to become burger flippers. Maybe that's a point. And yes, it's not your average school, but it's neither an expensive place (free, in fact, just a regular public school) nor very special.
Education can be had if you want it (for your kids). But you do have to look around and make a good choice. It's not everywhere. And - and that's probably the main point - you have to have some yourself in order to understand how to make that choice.
I've been staying out of it for 10 years, despite my profession drawing me there and several invitations to conferences and the like.
I don't feel like I missed out on anything important. The US isn't as important anymore as it may have been 20-30 years ago.
In other words: Stay the fuck out of the USA.
If they take a pocket knife you forgot to remove, or a flask of water because it's 110ml instead of the allowed 100ml or whatever other insanity they have at the airports these days - that's an inconvenience, but nothing major.
If they take your notebook, that can easily be a 2000-3000 US$ loss.
Oh, you think you're going to get it back? Certainly you should. It just might take weeks or months, and by then you're out of the country again, and it might, just might be all kinds of hassles. And then there's plenty of stories of stuff seized that was never returned, usually on some pretext.
It is also a lot more useful for expansion.
You know, in short-term scheduling, you need the day only. So you can write "on the 12." - but then when you need to be more specific, you simply expand that to "on the 12.5." - you add more detail as required, and you always add in the same way (at the end).
It's logically consistent. Then again, maybe I just think so because I'm European.
How can you believe anything about Columbus, have you seen his long-form birth certificate?
So what you are saying is that only one specific piece of evidence counts as any evidence at all? I'm sorry, I can not argue with you on that level. I'd have to drink away at least half my brain before I can even wrap my head around that kind of thinking.
Sadly, all the evidence in the world is nothing to those who would prefer the explanations "substantiated" by faith.
As with all things religion, it is enlightening to read what they say or write inverted. "substantiated" is a great example, because substantiating is exactly what does not happen in faith. It's a pattern - they do the opposite of what they claim they do. You know, like saving your soul by killing you.
Science is a process. It has a research branch and an application branch. Technology is a result of scientific research. Unless I somehow missed the memo and we have planes whose engines are based on prayer or something.
When we speak of science, I agree we usually picture the researchers. But the engineers are as much scientists as the packaging is part of the manufacturing plant. Maybe some people don't consider it the interesting part, but it very much is a part.
Faith is not passed on genetically, that's true (though I've heard rumours that there may be a genetic susceptibility to superstition).
But, faith can be pushed on someone. While we all know someone who managed to leave the cult, the number of children growing up in a christian household who then continue their life as a christian is much, much higher than the number stepping out of it.
And the effectiveness is intolerable. Look at what it takes to get a believer to stop the insanity. Evidence doesn't matter, massive amounts of doubt don't cut it, losing their loved ones to religiously caused tragedies like suicide bombings only strengthens their own faiths instead of making them ask what the heck is wrong with people who kill real human beings for imaginary friends.
If you put two people through the same process, you cannot say with certainty they will come out with the same faith.
Not with certainty, but with a very high probability. The number of hindus coming out of a muslim upbringing is quite tiny.
Do you really want to know that you are a cannibal if you attend church?
Well that is what they're claiming. No wiggle room there.
Theology is really a specialized kind of Philosophy.
The part in my that loves philosophy cringes at that thought. But I have to agree that theology is a lot closer to philosophy than to any science, including those of the mind.
For example, the entire theory of Just and Unjust wars (whether you agree with it or not) owes quite a bit to theological work of Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Again, whether you agree with it or not, wars are real-world things, and our (USA) reasoning about when we engage in them owes quite a bit to this particular work of Catholic Theology.
That is a good point, yes.
I do agree that for centuries, any thinking about the world had to be conducted with the context of theology, or you'd be branded a heretic. Much of early science was officially "an inquiry into the wonders god has given us" or some such cover. I would even go so far as to say that many of those who wrote that actually believed it.
So yes, in many texts it is quite hard to see where the theology stops and the philosophy begins. Much like ancient greek texts freely move between physics, math and philosophy.
I still can't agree that the two are the same or one part of the other. However, you do have a very good point, and I have to agree that at the least they are sometimes hard to seperate.
No, you are missing the point.
Not everyone can be an airplane engineer, true. But anyone can fly in an airplane and verify for himself that airplanes exist and they really fly, so apparently - even if you don't understand the details - there is something to what these science people say about whatever it is that makes them fly. You can't verify the theoretical underpinnings, but you can verify the results. You don't know why the predicted result ("it will fly") comes to pass, but you can see with your own eyes that it does.
Now if a catholic priest could repeatedly turn his wine into a substance that tests out as blood - I'll not even be picky about the details, for all I care Jesus can have a different blood type every week - then I might be inclined to listen to some of his ramblings. And while I may be curious about the process, as soon as some research has removed trickery from the list of explanations, I'll be quite inclined to give quite a bit more credit to this "transsubstantiation" thing. But right now, and that's the difference, every minute of every day, we have planes flying around this planet. I've yet to hear of a single confirmed transsubstiation.
And that's why flying in a plane requires a ticket, but no faith in physics, while going to mass requires faith or all you do is take a sip of cheap wine.
The big difference is that when someone says they see a miracle, all they can offer is "Because I said so."
True, but I really agree with the GP that the main difference is that when a young kid sees a miracle, and you have to look into these big eyes full of awe and it says "do that again! do that again!" - with a scientific miracle you smile and say "sure, my dear". No such luck with a religious miracle.
So, won't anyone think of the children? ;-D
I've always thought it rather obvious that Science is a Faith. If a word cannot be used to define itself, than how can Science ever be used to prove itself?
There's this thing called meta-physics and while the "meta" part is allegedly accidental, it is very fitting.
I do believe the Wright brothers did not derive their airplane designs from the science of physics.
And neither did they get the blueprints handed down on divinely inspired sacred scrolls.
Of course they derived the designs from physics. That doesn't mean that they designed the planes on a blackboard. Experimentation is very much a part of science, as is incremental improvements. Mythbusters, despite the obvious entertainment value and shortcuts they take since it's a TV show, is pretty much scientific - you formulate a hypothesis, you test it using a series of experiments in controlled conditions, you go back to the drawing board to see if the results verify or contradict your initial assumptions, you improve your concept, repeat until you're happy with the results.
And that's pretty much what the Wright brothers did.
You desperately need a better understanding of the word "science". It's not just people in white coats working in labs. In fact, throughout most of history, science was very practical, and only with the extreme specialization and depths we have reached during the past few decades has it become so largely theoretical.
Science is fundamentally different from faith in that science is reproducible. Faith is not.
I know you don't mean it like that, but the fundamental problem today is precisely that faith is reproducable. It reproduces by human reproduction (there is a strong correlation between religious faith and number of children) and religious brainwashing (religion is intentionally and deliberately being taught to children too young to have developed critical thinking).
This is either stupid or a troll - yet another attempt to build a false equivalency between proven methods of finding out the truth, and unproven magical thinking.
It is neither. Don't you guys get it? This is part of an organised attempt to discredit science as a principle. Its purpose is to give religion another century or so before humanity can rid itself of that curse, because too many powerful and/or wealthy people profit from religion to let it go so easily.
But since magical and religious thinking suffers dramatically from the doubt that science has cast on it - and even the most simpleminded people are beginning to take up the very simple problem of "but there are no results", it is impossible to restore faith in religion.
But what you can do is cast doubt on science, so people don't have an easy answer to go to. The more people doubt science, the closer they will stay to the church. It's a totally irrational process - the same people who speak out loudest against science usually fly in planes to their speaking locations where they use microphones, amplifiers, electric lighting and so forth. Not to mention that apparently the Internet is so hot with the religious community, I'm getting more spam for "free church websites" than for penis enlargements.
But there really is no disparity there. The target of the doubt is the heart, not the mind. So they don't even realize that using the same technology that the try to discredit is kind of strange.