We need to keep in mind that morals and ethics can be entirely independent from religions, otherwise all atheists and agnostics would be running around murdering and raping people with no remorse. Do you only do good because otherwise your god would punish you?
As I don't live in USA or the Americas, I don't care about whether atheists are liked or not over there. I feel more than justified in insulting religions due to all the hate and war and murder that has been carried out in the name of religion. If you want to believe in a personal divinity, then I am more than happy for you to do so, but I really object to hierarchical religions and I think the vast majority of the worlds' evils are caused by the lack of critical thinking and people just blindly following the instructions/orders of someone else.
Atheists might go around acting high and mighty and insulting people of faith, but you have no idea how many of humanities best and brightest were tortured and murdered in the name of religion.
I disagree. As an organisation, the USPS doesn't teach people to do this and there's no reason why they would. The ultimate fault lies with people delaying/destroying the parcels no matter what the reason.
A package can have whatever you want on the outside - it's not the USPS remit to decide what gets delivered and what doesn't.
I disagree. Bigotry is treating people with hatred, contempt and intolerance based on your own prejudices of their religion (or race or ethnic group etc.). Attacking the belief system itself is not bigotry. It might be insensitive, but I think a lot of religions are incredibly intolerant to other religions, so why shouldn't we be able to speak our mind?
There will always be people who can get offended, so rather than avoiding any possible offense, it makes far more sense to not sugar-coat your words unnecessarily (there's times and places for tact, though). The bible does read like a fairy tale. Who can seriously believe the whole 6 day creation story and god acting like a spoiled brat when his "pet" humans don't do as they're told?
Good and evil as concepts exist independently of religion. In fact it's only more "recent" religions that incorporate good and evil as concepts. I'm pretty sure that Romans had the concept of good (desirale) and evil (undesirable) even though their gods weren't cleanly split between the two concepts.
Good and evil are cultural universals, so rather than letting religions co-opt them for their own purpose, we need to avoid the idea that morals and ethics can only exist within a religious framework.
The use of logic is fundamentally different to the belief in god(s). Logic is simply a tool to help organise reasoning and to help understand things. I don't believe that logic is the only way to think about things - there's lots of different ways to reason. If someone uses intuition to come up with an idea, it doesn't bother me that they didn't use logic to get to the result (it only matters if the idea is good or not).
Okay, you've got me - they do exist in our usual dimensions.
However, they are pink as they mainly reflect pink light. They're invisible due to their warping of spacetime - similar to a black hole (pink hole?). I heard that the only direction that they can emit photons from is their rear which is why they have the reputation of pooping rainbows (obviously pink rainbows).
I think we have to investigate exactly what we mean by "pink" and "invisible"
I've only had a quick look at your first link. Those seem to be evidence of people's astonishing capacity to believe things and the lengths that they (possibly unconsciously) will go to to project meaning to events.
e.g. The weeping/bleeding statue probably started off with some discoloured rainwater coming off the statue. Some people noticed it and declared it to be blood and there was suddenly a lot more interest in it. It's far more likely that believers then added their own blood to the statue to increase the interest rather than the statue is some kind of miracle. The tested blood was a variety of blood types, so the idea probably occurred to several people.
It's very easy to find confirmation of pet theories/beliefs and those kind of things are self perpetuating. The interesting evidence is where you can perform an experiment and declare that one particular outcome would disprove the theory.
If you could state a theory such as "eating M&Ms cause invisible pink unicorns to materialise and become visible around you", then we could test that and see that it is false. Religion never provides us with anything that concrete.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is a limit to the precision that you can know certain pairs of properties of a particle. It requires experiments to determine whether it is likely to be true or not. You can't really prove whether a theory is true, you can only state that all the experiments have confirmed the theory and there is yet to be an experiment that disagrees with it.
It requires faith to believe that a theory is "true" as in a belief that the theory will never be proven wrong in the future. I can't think of any theory that has stood the test of time (Darwin's theory of evolution is very different to modern evolutionary theory - he didn't know about genes).
I suppose, it does require to faith to think that a particle can have a precise location and a precise momentum. Einstein hinted at his belief with his famous "God doesn't play with dice" quote. The question is whether it makes any sense to talk of a particle having a "position" or "momentum" without measuring one or the other. Are they properties of the particle or are they properties of the measurement of the particle?
I don't think it requires faith to have something that is unknowable to us. Faith is involved if you are prescribing an "unknowable" property to something e.g. invisible pink unicorns require faith.
"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Typically, I eliminate the "cannot be determined" category as being meaningless. I suppose it's like logical positivism - it makes no sense to talk about the existence of something that can't be proved either way.
It's a lot simpler to put together all the "cannot be determined" category and just say "until you can show some evidence, you're just talking twaddle". In practise, atheism and agnosticism are very closely entwined and are not mutually exclusive.
When I heard about some churches (in London, I think) having special "atheist" meetings, I came to a similar conclusion. They're doing it wrong. The only time atheism comes into my thoughts is when I encounter over-enthusiastic religious people.
I can see why athesists might feel the need to band together if they're being repressed by an overly religious society, but the UK is far from that.
Null hypothesis - it makes more sense to refute the existence of gods, the tooth fairy, invisible pink unicorns, Easter Bunny etc. until there's evidence provided to demonstrate their existence.
George Carlin puts it better than me:
Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man... living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money.
Firstly, atheism is a rejection of theism, but as theology is a study of god/religions, I can quite happily study theology (although I don't) and be an atheist. I used to enjoy reading about the Norse gods when I was a child but without believing that they exist - they're good stories anyway.
String theory holds an interesting position in physics as no-one's figured out an experiment to dis-prove it yet. To my mind, this means that it doesn't really fall into traditional physics, but is more a mathematical theorem.
It does follow the usual rules of science, though: guess a theory that matches all of our existing data/experiments and then try to find a situation that doesn't fit the theory. If an experiment doesn't match the predictions, then guess a new theory and repeat.
They were pink before they became invisible. If such a method was found to render them visible, they're ineffable nature would revert them back to their original pink colouring.
What do you think happens to their "pinkness" when they go invisible?
I don't see how logic is a matter of faith - it's mathematics and can be deduced from first principles. Also the scientific method can be shown to be very effective in a number of applications - it's not really a matter of faith.
If I was to state that Science can solve everything, then that would be more akin to a religion, but I don't believe that and Godel's theory would imply that not everything can be known.
I can't be certain about the existence or not of the FSM, but the null hypothesis would be to assume that it doesn't exist until there's evidence to suggest that it does.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, whereas to make a claim that the FSM doesn't exist is entirely reasonable and doesn't require proof (or faith).
So, is a "true" scientific mind like a "true" scotsman?
Generally, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. As there's no evidence for/against invisible pink unicorns, it's prefectly reasonable to assume/believe that they don't exist - it's the null hypothesis.
If that's not classed as scientific by you, then so be it, but your use of the word "fail" indicates that you're probably lower than average intelligence.
I've got no problem with someone's personal beliefs. The big problem with religions is when they go past personal beliefs and start to impact other people e.g. delaying/losing parcels because they're labelled "atheist".
As an atheist, I always try to be sensitive to other people's beliefs (except on Slashdot) and I don't go around criticising anyone's belief systems unless they're trying to convert me. I did once get into a discussion with a Hare Krishna about why he should convert to worshipping Cthulhu, but it was good natured and he was the one who asked me about my beliefs.
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We need to keep in mind that morals and ethics can be entirely independent from religions, otherwise all atheists and agnostics would be running around murdering and raping people with no remorse. Do you only do good because otherwise your god would punish you?
As I don't live in USA or the Americas, I don't care about whether atheists are liked or not over there. I feel more than justified in insulting religions due to all the hate and war and murder that has been carried out in the name of religion. If you want to believe in a personal divinity, then I am more than happy for you to do so, but I really object to hierarchical religions and I think the vast majority of the worlds' evils are caused by the lack of critical thinking and people just blindly following the instructions/orders of someone else.
Atheists might go around acting high and mighty and insulting people of faith, but you have no idea how many of humanities best and brightest were tortured and murdered in the name of religion.
I disagree. As an organisation, the USPS doesn't teach people to do this and there's no reason why they would. The ultimate fault lies with people delaying/destroying the parcels no matter what the reason.
A package can have whatever you want on the outside - it's not the USPS remit to decide what gets delivered and what doesn't.
I disagree. Bigotry is treating people with hatred, contempt and intolerance based on your own prejudices of their religion (or race or ethnic group etc.). Attacking the belief system itself is not bigotry. It might be insensitive, but I think a lot of religions are incredibly intolerant to other religions, so why shouldn't we be able to speak our mind?
There will always be people who can get offended, so rather than avoiding any possible offense, it makes far more sense to not sugar-coat your words unnecessarily (there's times and places for tact, though). The bible does read like a fairy tale. Who can seriously believe the whole 6 day creation story and god acting like a spoiled brat when his "pet" humans don't do as they're told?
Good and evil as concepts exist independently of religion. In fact it's only more "recent" religions that incorporate good and evil as concepts. I'm pretty sure that Romans had the concept of good (desirale) and evil (undesirable) even though their gods weren't cleanly split between the two concepts.
Good and evil are cultural universals, so rather than letting religions co-opt them for their own purpose, we need to avoid the idea that morals and ethics can only exist within a religious framework.
They've got tails have they? I knew they had wings, but tails!
Good point - shows how often I go to churches (weddings or otherwise).
The use of logic is fundamentally different to the belief in god(s). Logic is simply a tool to help organise reasoning and to help understand things. I don't believe that logic is the only way to think about things - there's lots of different ways to reason. If someone uses intuition to come up with an idea, it doesn't bother me that they didn't use logic to get to the result (it only matters if the idea is good or not).
Okay, you've got me - they do exist in our usual dimensions.
However, they are pink as they mainly reflect pink light. They're invisible due to their warping of spacetime - similar to a black hole (pink hole?). I heard that the only direction that they can emit photons from is their rear which is why they have the reputation of pooping rainbows (obviously pink rainbows).
I think we have to investigate exactly what we mean by "pink" and "invisible"
I've only had a quick look at your first link. Those seem to be evidence of people's astonishing capacity to believe things and the lengths that they (possibly unconsciously) will go to to project meaning to events.
e.g. The weeping/bleeding statue probably started off with some discoloured rainwater coming off the statue. Some people noticed it and declared it to be blood and there was suddenly a lot more interest in it. It's far more likely that believers then added their own blood to the statue to increase the interest rather than the statue is some kind of miracle. The tested blood was a variety of blood types, so the idea probably occurred to several people.
It's very easy to find confirmation of pet theories/beliefs and those kind of things are self perpetuating. The interesting evidence is where you can perform an experiment and declare that one particular outcome would disprove the theory.
If you could state a theory such as "eating M&Ms cause invisible pink unicorns to materialise and become visible around you", then we could test that and see that it is false. Religion never provides us with anything that concrete.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is a limit to the precision that you can know certain pairs of properties of a particle. It requires experiments to determine whether it is likely to be true or not. You can't really prove whether a theory is true, you can only state that all the experiments have confirmed the theory and there is yet to be an experiment that disagrees with it.
It requires faith to believe that a theory is "true" as in a belief that the theory will never be proven wrong in the future. I can't think of any theory that has stood the test of time (Darwin's theory of evolution is very different to modern evolutionary theory - he didn't know about genes).
I suppose, it does require to faith to think that a particle can have a precise location and a precise momentum. Einstein hinted at his belief with his famous "God doesn't play with dice" quote. The question is whether it makes any sense to talk of a particle having a "position" or "momentum" without measuring one or the other. Are they properties of the particle or are they properties of the measurement of the particle?
I don't think it requires faith to have something that is unknowable to us. Faith is involved if you are prescribing an "unknowable" property to something e.g. invisible pink unicorns require faith.
You're stretching the use of the word "faith" way past it's usefulness. Like you say, philosophy is bloody worthless.
At least mathematics doesn't have to concern itself with reality - it just needs to be self-consistent.
Maybe they're invisible because they hide in other dimensions? The fact that you can't see them doesn't mean that they can't see themselves.
You're forgetting about their ineffable nature.
"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Typically, I eliminate the "cannot be determined" category as being meaningless. I suppose it's like logical positivism - it makes no sense to talk about the existence of something that can't be proved either way.
It's a lot simpler to put together all the "cannot be determined" category and just say "until you can show some evidence, you're just talking twaddle". In practise, atheism and agnosticism are very closely entwined and are not mutually exclusive.
When I heard about some churches (in London, I think) having special "atheist" meetings, I came to a similar conclusion. They're doing it wrong. The only time atheism comes into my thoughts is when I encounter over-enthusiastic religious people.
I can see why athesists might feel the need to band together if they're being repressed by an overly religious society, but the UK is far from that.
George Carlin puts it better than me:
Firstly, atheism is a rejection of theism, but as theology is a study of god/religions, I can quite happily study theology (although I don't) and be an atheist. I used to enjoy reading about the Norse gods when I was a child but without believing that they exist - they're good stories anyway.
String theory holds an interesting position in physics as no-one's figured out an experiment to dis-prove it yet. To my mind, this means that it doesn't really fall into traditional physics, but is more a mathematical theorem.
It does follow the usual rules of science, though: guess a theory that matches all of our existing data/experiments and then try to find a situation that doesn't fit the theory. If an experiment doesn't match the predictions, then guess a new theory and repeat.
They were pink before they became invisible. If such a method was found to render them visible, they're ineffable nature would revert them back to their original pink colouring.
What do you think happens to their "pinkness" when they go invisible?
I don't see how logic is a matter of faith - it's mathematics and can be deduced from first principles. Also the scientific method can be shown to be very effective in a number of applications - it's not really a matter of faith.
If I was to state that Science can solve everything, then that would be more akin to a religion, but I don't believe that and Godel's theory would imply that not everything can be known.
I can't be certain about the existence or not of the FSM, but the null hypothesis would be to assume that it doesn't exist until there's evidence to suggest that it does.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, whereas to make a claim that the FSM doesn't exist is entirely reasonable and doesn't require proof (or faith).
So, is a "true" scientific mind like a "true" scotsman?
Generally, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. As there's no evidence for/against invisible pink unicorns, it's prefectly reasonable to assume/believe that they don't exist - it's the null hypothesis.
If that's not classed as scientific by you, then so be it, but your use of the word "fail" indicates that you're probably lower than average intelligence.
I've got no problem with someone's personal beliefs. The big problem with religions is when they go past personal beliefs and start to impact other people e.g. delaying/losing parcels because they're labelled "atheist".
As an atheist, I always try to be sensitive to other people's beliefs (except on Slashdot) and I don't go around criticising anyone's belief systems unless they're trying to convert me. I did once get into a discussion with a Hare Krishna about why he should convert to worshipping Cthulhu, but it was good natured and he was the one who asked me about my beliefs.
I believe in it.