No, I don't think they have. Very few countries have arrested people for committing a "crime" when the place where the "crime" was committed, the action in question was not a crime. The main exception to this is child molestation, which is one of the few areas where a government will prosecute people for crimes committed when abroad.
I live in the US, I can do things over here, play poker in a Casino for example, that would be a crime in, for example, Norway. If I go to Norway the Norwegian government would never even consider prosecuting me for something like this. This is a basic tenant of law, if it is not a crime where the action was committed, then so be it, it is legal and you can not be prosecuted. With the exception noted above.
The bills and the work that this centers around is supported by both parties. That the Dems support this is not strange, the Democratic Party is about the government protecting and supporting the poor stupid population against them selves and others. As such the Dems are for limitations on individual freedoms, high taxes (to fund their government programs) etc.
The traditional platform for the Republican Party is the opposite. The individual is responsible for his own actions, has the ability to think for him self. The Republican party is therefore for small government, small taxes, no government control.
Sadly, the last few decades the Republican Party has turned into a totally different party. They are now for a huge central government (the Democrats have never spent this much public money on crap, even when you take the Iraq bill out of the budget). This enormous central government funds insane crap like in-door rain forests in Ohio. For now the money has generally been borrowed, but at some stage we have to pay that back. If we don't see a significant economic growth, that means higher taxes at some stage.
In addition to now being (far more so than the Dems) the big-government party, the Republicans also have become the party of government limitations on individual freedoms. I don't have the right to travel where I want. Did you know that there is now a law, pushed through from Florida of course, that says that if the government suspects me of planning to sail my private boat to Cuba, they can impound the boat? Of course the government, lead by these repugnicans, also don't want me to gamble online. On and on.
Since the republican party started taking directions from born-again, male-prostitute buying, crack-snorting religious nut cases, this country has been in a nose dive. More religion in Washington means more repugnicans, and that means more shit for the rest of us.
Any thinking individual who values individual freedoms, personal responsibility, no government meddling and all the other things the republican party used to stand for should voice their opinion. Say it out loud: "I don't like these people who turned The Republican Party into a Stalin-inspired left-wing nut cases with a Jesus twist. I will not vote for them.
Anyone who likes these freedoms and still votes republican needs a brain transplant. I've heard that the San Diego zoo are doing some experiments with chimpanzees. Maybe they have a brain or two extra. It would be a huge upgrade for anyone who voted republican the past 6 years.
Oh, and btw, though I would never vote Democrat, there is nothing wrong with those who do. The democratic party has a consistent platform in most ways. They favor government "oversight" over the individual. Fine, if that is what you thing society should be, more power to you, and vote for the Democratic Party. This is a free country and we like differences of opinion. If you are republican in nature and vote for the RHINOs currently in charge, you are what Carlos Mencia would call "dee-dee-dee".
The point is that the AMC have a body of science that says XYZ about the climate, they do not want someone giving the impression that they endorse a diametrically opposed view that they have investigated ad-nauseam.
Not to burst any bubbles here, but even though there is a strong agreement among scientists that human activities are impacting our climate, there is no consensus on to what level or agreement on what the consequences are. If a member of an organization expresses skeptisism towards some of the views held by that organization, and the organization therefore wants to kick them out, that just proves that the organization is run by dogma not by science. Dogma and science, as opposed to science and ignorance, are diametrical oppoosites. Your "investigat(ion) ad-nauseam" has so far yeilded a few very important theories, and also a better understanding of how we currently impact the climate. Any thoughts on how this will impact our world are pure speculation however, we really don't know.
Climate predictions are like a medical diagnosis for the progression of a "cancer" known as the population explosion.
And here you just show the entire world how astonishingly ignorant you are. Don't want to ruin your world view, but the "population explosion" myth has been abandoned by scientists a long time ago. I understand it is a comfortable thing to think about for dooms-dayers, but it is a myth. Not happening. The worlds population will flatten around 10bn (a fully manageable number) and then go down a little bit.
Please take part in the debate and express your views, but please try to update your facts to some time post 1985.
If the aliens have an organization like NASA, and some Alien-Aliens drop by and donate Faster than Light technology and two space elevators to our Aliens, they still wouldn't be able to colonize their own solar system in 10 billion years.
We end up with carbon based life forms existing only where liquid water is available and consequently no life on mars - as experiment after experiment has found.
I think this is stretching the meaning of "shown" further than you logically can. I am not saying there is life on Mars, but there appears to be the possibility of at least liquid water periodically, so ruling it out is jumping to conclusions not supported by any raw data. Obviously proving a negative isn't particularly easy, so...
NASA pushes life on Mars as a possibility because it's a justification for their continued existence and their proposed (pointless) manned trips there.
For the longest time NASA was pushing the ISS as a justification for NASA's existence. So be it. We do need a space program as such, and we need to fund it. The public needs to support it for the government to fund it, so pushing one or two generally interesting things into the media is not a bad idea. Going to Mars as such is also not a terrible idea, there are a lot of problems to overcome in order to make such a trip, and for further space explorations, overcoming those problems is crucial. For that reason I consider a trip to Mars a good idea.
There is one main problem with sending people to Mars, and that is cost. This can easily be reduced to a fraction of standard calculations by changing the trip from a return trip to a one-way trip. We could send a phenomenal amount of stuff to Mars for the price of a 5 person return ticket, including five people (or a few more), so that is the most sensible thing to do. Finding five qualified volunteers would be easy.
Interestingly, giving them a one-way ticket would probably significantly increase the general populations support for a general space program, since they would stay there for a long time. The general population would feel a duty to assist them in their exploration, not let them die. In that way, our space program would probably be securely funded for the foreseeable future. Over time it would be reasonable to assume that we send more people up as well.
Because the "theory" (it is not a theory, it is barely a conjecture) "God does exist" is not testable nor is it falsifiable. Therefore it has no meaning in a reasonable debate. There may be philosophical reasons for wanting to ponder the language that forms the question, but the question has exactly the same meaning as "ggrraagh vaarrpp sshhrrmmaa".
Discussion about the possibility that this is all the dream of a butterfly actually gives us a refreshing sense of perspective.
In a philosophical way it might, but it doesn't bring any new information to the debate. It may enrich debate and our understanding of language and thought, but nothing more. When I say it is meaningless I mean that the pondering as such is nonsensical. In fact, the debate around whether a debate on "God exists" has any meaning is far more enlightening than the debate on God. In other words, the debate on the debate has meaning while the debate it self is meaningless.
Suppose I threw my keyboard in a ginormous box of junk... What if it's a whole junkyard? What if it's the whole universe?
Ah, but this is a testable question. Even if you included the whole universe. It may be impractical, but it really is testable. In theory. The God conjecture on the other hand is not.
we could, theoretically, get at least as much proof of the existence of God as we have for the existence of a keyboard
No, we couldn't. Not even close. I could find the keyboard. And that is enough evidence. God is not "findable".
There are actually solutions to this problem that Christians may or may not agree with. For one possibility, read the Foundation series (by Asimov) -- it could be possible that God knows everything that can be known, and therefore, God knows the trend of the future better than any human could
I love the Foundation Series, just finished it for the umpteenth time (had to travel for three weeks so I brought some paperbacks with me. Bringing it in to the discussion about the existence of a divine entity is silly though. The God entity doesn't have the features of psychohistory, he has absolute knowledge. That is the feature that separates him from man. Without absolute knowledge God is not Omnipotent and Omniscient, he is just a fucking smart dude.
we're free to blaspheme, but God is free to strike us down if we do
Problem is, the omnipotent and omniscient God was the one that made us blaspheme in the first place, and then he wants to punish us for it. That makes him, as I said earlier, the most evil mental creation ever deviced by man.
God can make corrections, from a relatively small scale (the angel on your shoulder, maybe) to a planet-wide scale (the flood).
I looked at my shoulder, there was no angel. I have studied archeology, there never was a flood. Why would anyone believe there was? The very idea is absurd, and anyone who believes there was a world-wide flood should really get some professional help. It is a mental decease, not a religion.
If P=NP, then God can exist, no matter what.
The God(s) described in any of the major religions can not. They carry too many self-contradictory features. The Muslim God less so than the Christian God, since Muslims don't put as much stock in free will as does Christians, but there are other features with that infantile religion that has it's own problems. The problem with accepting that their God "may" exist from a standpoint of scientific research, is that we accept their mental problems as "normal". They are not. The problem with this decease is that it can be crippling, or in many cases, fatal, and not only for the poor bastards who are infected.
To an atheist the question of the existence of divine entities is nonsensical in the same way that the question of the existence of blue swans with yellow spots on the planet Gurrargh on the other side of our galaxy is.
To me, those aren't fundamentally different than questions of whether I actually exist, whether this keyboard is real, and which OS is best.
Which shows you really don't understand the basics of this discussion. The quesiton of blue swans is nonsensical because it is not really falsifiable. The question of God is nonsensical because it is not falsifiable. The question of the existence of your keyboard is, given the context the basic assumption that what we actually observe is in fact there. If your premise is that nothing is testable because this could all be the dream of a red butterfly then all discussion as such is meaningless.
But it's important to keep in mind when we're trying to talk about so-called "absolute truth".
There is no absolute truth, truth is always relative to a given set of axioms. Human kind typically has held as true the axiom that we do in fact exist, and that what we observe is more or less real. Once you remove that axiom any dialog about what is and what is not becomes entirely meaningless. If we agree that the above axiom is a good place to start, then God becomes entirely meaningless.
It's certainly possible that any number of variations of that could exist.
Most Christians agree on the following attributes for their God:
God has given man free will to do as man wishes, including believing in God or not.
God is omnipotent and omniscient, and he can, if he so wishes, find out anything about my future. He can take a peek if you wish. He might not want to, but he has the ability. He can also communicate, one way or another with man.
Problem is, those attributes are mutually exclusive, and God is therefore a logical impossibility. I leave it up to the reader to find the problem.
No there isn't, and when you say there is, you are just showing to the entire world that you are lying in your two statements quoted above. You haven't even understood the basic idea of a proof. Please stop lying and get some education.
You should be careful with using words you don't understand. This one is only a little one, proof, five letters, but you have no idea what it means. There is no proof that there is a god. None whatsoever. Your existence is nothing of the sort. That you were created is something you believe. The fact that you believe it doesn't mean that the fact that you can observe your self living is proof. The funny thing, there isn't even a theory that there is a god. Before you can have proof you need a theory, and you god guys haven't even got a theory yet. Oh, and by the way, science doesn't do much in the ways of proving stuff. The favorite tool of science is to falsify.
Before continuing you need to check the meaning of the following terms: Conjecture, theory, falsification, axiom. You can then sit down and try to come up with a theory for god. A theory that says that there is a god or something. I will promise you one little thing, you will not be able to come up with such a theory. People have been trying for more than 1000 years, and there still is no theory.
Just for the record, I don't think that God is evil. I don't think that he is. On the other hand, if he was what he is as described in what you so accurately point out is a collection of random texts put together more for political purposes than anything else, then he'd be pure evil.
Technically, atheism is the belief that there is no god. I would think agnostics are more in line with science. Not sure until we get some real data on the matter.
Wrong. An a-theist is someone who lacks the belief. You describe an anti-theist over. Anti-theism is as unscientific as theism. The scientific reality is that the question of the existence of God is absurd. Absurd questions are in and of the self unscientific. Both claiming that there is a god and claiming that there is no god is unscientific. The scientific attitude is to respond with: Stop asking stupid questions.
Try looking up Atheism in a good dictionary. The form of the word gives it away, it's the opposite of believing a god exists, it's believing no god exists.
The a- prefix is used when talking about the absence of. When talking about the opposite of, you normally use anti-. Someone who has the belief that there is no god would be an anti-theist, someone who lacks the belief of a god would be an a-theist. A person, for example, who has never given the matter any thought and therefore has no opinion on the matter, would be an a-theist. Gnosis is, as you say, "knowledge". An a-gnostic is a person with no knowledge. Given the subject matter, an a-gnostic could therefore be an a-theist who claims that we can not obtain knowledge in this matter or he could be a wishy-washy dumbass who dosen't know shit. An atheist is on solid scientific ground. An agnostic may or may not be. A theist and an anti-theist are not.
Strange comment, but... No, atheism is not the rejection of a theistic belief, it is the absence of a theistic belief. The statement "I believe there is no God" is anti-theism. "anti" opposed. "a" absence of. I have said before and I will say it again, to make public debate easier to follow, one should use a-theism and anti-theism (which is not yet a word) where appropriate.
I am an atheist. Does that mean I think it is possible that there is a god? No, I do not. I find the question to be absurd, and as with all other dumb questions, not possible to answer rationally. To have a conviction that says there is no god is as illogical as to hold a conviction that says there is a god. A scientist will have neither.
To paraphrase someone better at this than I am: The religious people are not right, they aren't even wrong.
That's true. Science does work. That shows it's more powerful at understanding the world than the previous belief system of mysticism and spirituality. In the future, we'll likely find another belief system that is even more powerful than science as we currently understand it.
I was, for a little while, agreeing with you. Now I understand you are just uninformed. No, we will probably not find another system of understanding that replaces science in the future. Science encompasses any and all rational methods of observing the world, and therefore any change to our understanding of the world as such will, with expanded horizons, be a scientific development, not a new methodology.
On the other hand you are right, there is a degree of a belief system in science. The belief-jump we have to make is that what we observe, incomplete or complete, is reality and not something else. This isn't a huge leap of faith given that the reality we are observing is the one we are living in. Whether it is objectively real or not is therefore immaterial, it is what is, and we have to relate to it.
This is probably best examplified with the Lao-Tzu story. The dude wakes up one morning after having dreamt that he was a butterfly. As a butterfly he had no concept of the fact that he was Lao-Tzu dreaming about being a butterfly. He was just flying from flower to flower enjoying him self. So, the dude asked, am I Lao-Tzu who just woke up from a dream about being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am Lao-Tzu.
The answer to the riddle above is meningless, and the pursuit of the answer is ridiculous. We are Lao-Tzu in this reality, and this reality is all we have. Taking other realities into consideration is meningless nonsense.
You (or others like you) need to provide proof that God doesn't exist in order to have a reasonable platform from which to convince others that He doesn't exist.
A negative can not be proven. I can not prove that God doesn't exist. I can not prove that Santa Claus doesn't exist. I can not prove that there are no blue swans with yellow spots. There is an infinite number of things that I can never prove doesn't exist. The spaghetti monster. Green Teapots in orbit around Mars that go invisible if anyone look at them. You name it, I can not prove it. That is science. When you understand that you will have learned a lot. Sadly you probably never will.
As a scientist I do not demand the right to have a platform from which I can convince others that God doesn't exist any more than I want a platform for preaching that there are no little blue Goblins in my cars tires at night. There are an infinite number of things I do not demand a platform for denying the existence of. As a scientist I only want our children to grow up learning scietific method rather than yet another 2000 year old superstition though. That is all I want.
"God exists" is the biggest claim someone can make. Regardless of how much evidence is available to support this, many scientists would never believe it.
This is where you show the entire world that you do not understand anything about science. One could say that you are dumb, but uneducated is probably more correct. You see, the sentence over contains something that essentially is self-contracitory. Self-contracitory beliefs is an integral part of religion, so I am not surprised that you express that above. So. To the point.
You state that if lots of evidence for the existence of God was presented, some scientists would never believe it. Well, that is pure at utter rubbish. You see, if evidence, one one piece of evidence (or proof as is more popular in scientifi circles) for the existence of God did exist, anyone not believing in that proof would not be a scientist. By definition.
A scientis is a person who lives his life according to scientific method. If there is proof of something, he accepts it. If there is proof of God, the scientists accepts that proof. If someone rejects the proof, they are not scientists. That is, of course, only of there is proof. There is no such thing at this stage.
You are absolutely correct. Science can not. Neither can science disprove Santa Claus, but that doesn't mean that anyone aged 12 or older should believe he exists.
Evolution remains unproven
This is pure and utter rubbish, and proof positive that you are one of those loonies you claim not to be. Evolution is proven fact. Not only that, we know the mechanisms by which it works. You can your self, if you chose to get a minimum of education, start experiments where you can observe evolution. Disbelief in evolution is as dumb today as is the disbelief in a spherical (or mostly so) earth.
As such, the "low IQ" bias doesn't hold
You are again showing us, by example, what education can do. If you get some, you will stop posting nonsense like this. The fact that there are intelligent christians doesn't detract from the fact that as IQ and education increases so does belief in divine entities. More educated, smarter people, are generally less religious. This doesn't mean that there are no smart religious people, just that there are more dumb religious people than there are dumb atheists.
Its funny that a society (meaning the/. society, not in general) would hammer down so hard on the word of God in a classroom
It is not particularly funny, neiher is it particularly strange. The/. society has a higher education average than the population in general. We are therefore more likely to be atheists. As atheists we are probably getting sick and tired of having people demand that our schools shall teach superstitious nonsense to our children rather than scientific method.
(on evolution:) If evidence were conclusive either way, then it'd no longer be a theory.
OK, I then assume that you accept evolution. Evolution is proven fact. Has been observed many, many times in the real world, and can be re-produced in a controlled environment. The mechanisms governing evolution is also much better known today than only a few years back. Why do jo reject something that is an observable fact?
If you don't follow God, well, where do you think you'll end up?
In the belly of some maggots. Who cares? What I am really relieved about though is that I am not going to be spending an eternity with the God described in your bible. I have never read of, or heard of anyone more evil and cruel than the biblical God. I can not see him having a single good feature. From the first to the last story of the bible, God comes through as pure evil inside and out. I am very happy not to have to spend eternity with him.
According to what I have understood from the Christian litterature you can get forgiveness for any sin except one, and that is the mocking of The Holy Spirit. I have therefore, to be on the safe side, thoroughly and utterly mocked The Holy Spirit. I will do it again, now, to be safe. See below. I can not be forgiven, and will therefore be spared an eternity in the presence of pure evil. I am still looking for similar safeguards when it comes to the other lunatic religions out there.
Safety Mockery (just in case they missed the other times I did it):
The Holy Spirit is a joke. Wouldn't be able to think his way out of a paper bag. The Holy Spirit is ugly and should be locked up for it's own good. The Holy Spirit has such a small penis that he would be unable to de-flower a virgin. The Holy Spirit has bigger ears than Dumbo. Can you fly with those ears Holy?
who have never taken the time to truly understand the source of most of Christian belief - the Bible
I have. I have read it. I have studied it. I have even studied other writings from the same are and the same time. I have studied writings that significantly pre-dates the main christian book, The New Testament (NT). One of the first thing one finds when reading NT with this knowledge, is how much litterary "theft" there is in NT. A significant number of the stories written about Jesus, his birth being one of many, are copies of far older stories, familiar to the people that christianity was originally "sold" to. It is easy to understand why it is so. Selling the Jesus idea with old and familiar stories is easy. People only had to change the name of the hero. That people believe these are actual stories about Jesus on the other hand, given that many of these stories were written down several hundred years before he was born, just shows how little christians in fact knows about their bible.
he Bible never contradicts itself once the context is understood.
This is patently false, and rubbish to boot. The bible is riddled with contradictory statements. If you take The Old Testament (OT) into consideration, there is hardly a book in the bible that doesn't have some text that doesn't contradict some other part of the bible. There are passages where two books describe the same events, but quite differently. How can both be true at the same time? Start by explaining Genesis. There are, as you probably are aware of, two stories about how God created the world. These stories vary quite significantly, and can not both be true at the same time.
t seems unlikely that a big ball of fire... would just appear in space and start a universe.
You are absolutely right. That seems highly unlikely. Do you know anyone who believes that this happened? I don't. The problem is that you have no idea what The Big Bang was, and your ignorance makes you jump to bad conclusions.
The Bible is a huge and complex book.
The Bible is a rather small book written by the intellectual midgets of their time in their region. It is sad that given all the good litterature and philosophy that came out of the eastern Mediterranean in the years 500BC and up to a few years AD, that mundane ramblings of a small group of uneducated, superstitious sheep-herders is what people cling to today. Thankfully we live in a society generally governed, not by the principles of these people but by the intellectual works of the significantly sharper Greeks and others who lived in the same region at the same time.
That the Romans did use crucifixion in Palestine as a form of capital punishment is historical fact. That a Jewish carpenter-turned-rabbi called Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, during the Passover celebrations, sometime between 20BC and 50AD, is not
You are correct, this is not documented. In fact, the story as given in the bible is, given the information we have, most likely a complete fabrication. There are a number of facts that says so:
This is more or less what the bible says:
Jesus was arrested by the jewish leadership and brought before a jewish court during passover
He was handed over to the romans for execution
He was crucified by the romans together with two minor criminals.
There are a number of problems with this story:
The jewish religious leadership would never gather and convict a man over passover. Doing this during passover would be completely illegal. They would have to wait, and would have waited, until passover was past.
The romans generally left law-and-order matters to the locals. If Jesus was arrested and convicted by the jewish authorities, he would have been executed by the Jewish authorities, in other words, stoned to death. Crucifiction was used on people who committed crimes, and only serious ones, against the Roman Empire. According to the bible, Jesus did no such thing.
Jesus is crucified together with two minor-is criminals, Romans wouldn't have done that, that kind of law was delegated to the locals, the jews in this case.
The New Testament was never written to be an accurate representation of what actually happened. The writers never intended this at all. The New Testament was written to "sell" a story. They created stories to show points, not to explain what actually happened. The stories were to have morals. Many of the stories about Jesus are more or less verbatime copies of older Greek and Egyptian stories. As historical records, the books of The New Testament are completely fictional.
Sure, cultural norm is easter bunnies and hiding eggs, candy, etc, however if you're going to teach facts, how exactly do you tell a child what Easter is without telling them about the crucifixion?
How about: For thousands of years, farming has been an important part of huma lives. This has meant that we have celebrated various things over the course of the seasons. Springtime we used to celebrate the planting of seeds etc, that tradition morphed into what is now Easter i Christianity and Passover in Jewis traditions. We also celebrated the phases of the moon and the sun, since these were so significant features in our lives. For thousands of years we (in the north) have celebrated that mid-winter means longer days and a move towards light, summer and life again. This was always a very big celebration, particularly in Europe. The Christians high-jacked this celebration and made it their most important celebration.
When you think about it Son, there was hardly anything new in Christianity at all when it was created. Most of what the teacher says that the New Testament says are old Egyptian and Greek myths re-branded as stories about this "Jesus" character. The old Greeks and Egyptians should sue the Christians for plagiarism.
It doesn't make you naive, it makes you an atheist. In most debate today atheist is assumed to be someone who believes there is no God, in other words, an individual who holds a belief which currently is impossible to investigate the truth of. This is not the case. An atheist is someone who just lacks a belief in a divinity. A child raised by parents who never talk about divinities will grow up never having had a thought about the matter. That child is an atheist.
To an atheist the question of the existence of divine entities is nonsensical in the same way that the question of the existence of blue swans with yellow spots on the planet Gurrargh on the other side of our galaxy is. Someone who has never given the matter any thought is an atheist. Someone who has given the matter a lot of thought and come to the conclusion that there can not possibly be any god would probably have to be labelled anti-theist.
Now, the God described in the Bible, the God very many Christians believe in, the God that created this, that and the other and gave us free will and watches over us and all of that, we know that that God doesn't exist. He is a logival impossibility since he and his creation has attributes that are mutually exclusive.
God is a central question in philosophy,... Underpants gnomes and FSM are just artificial creations that mock thousands of years of human insight, intuition, art, and culture.
How exactly is God different from the underpants gnomes and the flying spaghetti monster? The only difference is that PersonA has a belief system that includes "God" and PersonB has a belief system that includes the spaghetti monster. By saying that there is an inherent difference between the two you are mocking PersonB, which is not nice. For any sane and rational person, "God" and "The Spaghetti Monster" and "The Underpants Gnome" are equally relevant. Now, you may set the relevance of either to 0 if you wish, but then you have to accept that they all have their relevance set to this level.
Yeah, and when they talk about the fact that the earth is round and circles around the sun, that is also atheists preaching. Or to put it differently: Are you retarded?
If he was a practicing Zen buddhist, he shouldn't be, since that would mean he doesn't believe in much of anything. Depending. Zen is typically more of a philosophy than a religion. A Zen buddihst may or may not believe that he will be reincarnated after he is dead. He may in fact believe or not believe that he is going to die some time in the future, depending on his feelings that day, or not.
Imagine the following exchange of words between a Zen master and a student:
Student: Hey, what happens when I die?
Master: How should I know?
Student: But you are a master! You must know!
Master: Well, duh, I'm not dead yet!
At it's core Zen doesn't teach you anything that is "supernatural". Reincarnation is what happens to you here and now. Every moment that you experience something your old "self" (oversimplification, who knows if there is a "self") dies and is re-born as a new "self" due to the experience you just had. If that continues after you are dead is just another dumb, and extremely irrelevant, question. What matters is where, how and what you are now.
The grandparent feels that Zen meditation helps him deal with what he calls his Buddha nature. Good for him. Another person may find that surfing the beaches of Southern California does the same.
I am not sure what you think is nonsense about what he believes, or why you think you know what he believes, but then again, does it matter?
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for pointing out in the header of your comment, what your comment consisted of.
No, I don't think they have. Very few countries have arrested people for committing a "crime" when the place where the "crime" was committed, the action in question was not a crime. The main exception to this is child molestation, which is one of the few areas where a government will prosecute people for crimes committed when abroad.
I live in the US, I can do things over here, play poker in a Casino for example, that would be a crime in, for example, Norway. If I go to Norway the Norwegian government would never even consider prosecuting me for something like this. This is a basic tenant of law, if it is not a crime where the action was committed, then so be it, it is legal and you can not be prosecuted. With the exception noted above.
The bills and the work that this centers around is supported by both parties. That the Dems support this is not strange, the Democratic Party is about the government protecting and supporting the poor stupid population against them selves and others. As such the Dems are for limitations on individual freedoms, high taxes (to fund their government programs) etc.
The traditional platform for the Republican Party is the opposite. The individual is responsible for his own actions, has the ability to think for him self. The Republican party is therefore for small government, small taxes, no government control.
Sadly, the last few decades the Republican Party has turned into a totally different party. They are now for a huge central government (the Democrats have never spent this much public money on crap, even when you take the Iraq bill out of the budget). This enormous central government funds insane crap like in-door rain forests in Ohio. For now the money has generally been borrowed, but at some stage we have to pay that back. If we don't see a significant economic growth, that means higher taxes at some stage.
In addition to now being (far more so than the Dems) the big-government party, the Republicans also have become the party of government limitations on individual freedoms. I don't have the right to travel where I want. Did you know that there is now a law, pushed through from Florida of course, that says that if the government suspects me of planning to sail my private boat to Cuba, they can impound the boat? Of course the government, lead by these repugnicans, also don't want me to gamble online. On and on.
Since the republican party started taking directions from born-again, male-prostitute buying, crack-snorting religious nut cases, this country has been in a nose dive. More religion in Washington means more repugnicans, and that means more shit for the rest of us.
Any thinking individual who values individual freedoms, personal responsibility, no government meddling and all the other things the republican party used to stand for should voice their opinion. Say it out loud: "I don't like these people who turned The Republican Party into a Stalin-inspired left-wing nut cases with a Jesus twist. I will not vote for them.
Anyone who likes these freedoms and still votes republican needs a brain transplant. I've heard that the San Diego zoo are doing some experiments with chimpanzees. Maybe they have a brain or two extra. It would be a huge upgrade for anyone who voted republican the past 6 years.
Oh, and btw, though I would never vote Democrat, there is nothing wrong with those who do. The democratic party has a consistent platform in most ways. They favor government "oversight" over the individual. Fine, if that is what you thing society should be, more power to you, and vote for the Democratic Party. This is a free country and we like differences of opinion. If you are republican in nature and vote for the RHINOs currently in charge, you are what Carlos Mencia would call "dee-dee-dee".
Not to burst any bubbles here, but even though there is a strong agreement among scientists that human activities are impacting our climate, there is no consensus on to what level or agreement on what the consequences are. If a member of an organization expresses skeptisism towards some of the views held by that organization, and the organization therefore wants to kick them out, that just proves that the organization is run by dogma not by science. Dogma and science, as opposed to science and ignorance, are diametrical oppoosites. Your "investigat(ion) ad-nauseam" has so far yeilded a few very important theories, and also a better understanding of how we currently impact the climate. Any thoughts on how this will impact our world are pure speculation however, we really don't know.
And here you just show the entire world how astonishingly ignorant you are. Don't want to ruin your world view, but the "population explosion" myth has been abandoned by scientists a long time ago. I understand it is a comfortable thing to think about for dooms-dayers, but it is a myth. Not happening. The worlds population will flatten around 10bn (a fully manageable number) and then go down a little bit.
Please take part in the debate and express your views, but please try to update your facts to some time post 1985.
If the aliens have an organization like NASA, and some Alien-Aliens drop by and donate Faster than Light technology and two space elevators to our Aliens, they still wouldn't be able to colonize their own solar system in 10 billion years.
I think this is stretching the meaning of "shown" further than you logically can. I am not saying there is life on Mars, but there appears to be the possibility of at least liquid water periodically, so ruling it out is jumping to conclusions not supported by any raw data. Obviously proving a negative isn't particularly easy, so...
For the longest time NASA was pushing the ISS as a justification for NASA's existence. So be it. We do need a space program as such, and we need to fund it. The public needs to support it for the government to fund it, so pushing one or two generally interesting things into the media is not a bad idea. Going to Mars as such is also not a terrible idea, there are a lot of problems to overcome in order to make such a trip, and for further space explorations, overcoming those problems is crucial. For that reason I consider a trip to Mars a good idea.
There is one main problem with sending people to Mars, and that is cost. This can easily be reduced to a fraction of standard calculations by changing the trip from a return trip to a one-way trip. We could send a phenomenal amount of stuff to Mars for the price of a 5 person return ticket, including five people (or a few more), so that is the most sensible thing to do. Finding five qualified volunteers would be easy.
Interestingly, giving them a one-way ticket would probably significantly increase the general populations support for a general space program, since they would stay there for a long time. The general population would feel a duty to assist them in their exploration, not let them die. In that way, our space program would probably be securely funded for the foreseeable future. Over time it would be reasonable to assume that we send more people up as well.
Because the "theory" (it is not a theory, it is barely a conjecture) "God does exist" is not testable nor is it falsifiable. Therefore it has no meaning in a reasonable debate. There may be philosophical reasons for wanting to ponder the language that forms the question, but the question has exactly the same meaning as "ggrraagh vaarrpp sshhrrmmaa".
In a philosophical way it might, but it doesn't bring any new information to the debate. It may enrich debate and our understanding of language and thought, but nothing more. When I say it is meaningless I mean that the pondering as such is nonsensical. In fact, the debate around whether a debate on "God exists" has any meaning is far more enlightening than the debate on God. In other words, the debate on the debate has meaning while the debate it self is meaningless.
Ah, but this is a testable question. Even if you included the whole universe. It may be impractical, but it really is testable. In theory. The God conjecture on the other hand is not.
No, we couldn't. Not even close. I could find the keyboard. And that is enough evidence. God is not "findable".
I love the Foundation Series, just finished it for the umpteenth time (had to travel for three weeks so I brought some paperbacks with me. Bringing it in to the discussion about the existence of a divine entity is silly though. The God entity doesn't have the features of psychohistory, he has absolute knowledge. That is the feature that separates him from man. Without absolute knowledge God is not Omnipotent and Omniscient, he is just a fucking smart dude.
Problem is, the omnipotent and omniscient God was the one that made us blaspheme in the first place, and then he wants to punish us for it. That makes him, as I said earlier, the most evil mental creation ever deviced by man.
I looked at my shoulder, there was no angel. I have studied archeology, there never was a flood. Why would anyone believe there was? The very idea is absurd, and anyone who believes there was a world-wide flood should really get some professional help. It is a mental decease, not a religion.
The God(s) described in any of the major religions can not. They carry too many self-contradictory features. The Muslim God less so than the Christian God, since Muslims don't put as much stock in free will as does Christians, but there are other features with that infantile religion that has it's own problems. The problem with accepting that their God "may" exist from a standpoint of scientific research, is that we accept their mental problems as "normal". They are not. The problem with this decease is that it can be crippling, or in many cases, fatal, and not only for the poor bastards who are infected.
It is therefore paramount th
Which shows you really don't understand the basics of this discussion. The quesiton of blue swans is nonsensical because it is not really falsifiable. The question of God is nonsensical because it is not falsifiable. The question of the existence of your keyboard is, given the context the basic assumption that what we actually observe is in fact there. If your premise is that nothing is testable because this could all be the dream of a red butterfly then all discussion as such is meaningless.
There is no absolute truth, truth is always relative to a given set of axioms. Human kind typically has held as true the axiom that we do in fact exist, and that what we observe is more or less real. Once you remove that axiom any dialog about what is and what is not becomes entirely meaningless. If we agree that the above axiom is a good place to start, then God becomes entirely meaningless.
Most Christians agree on the following attributes for their God:
- God has given man free will to do as man wishes, including believing in God or not.
- God is omnipotent and omniscient, and he can, if he so wishes, find out anything about my future. He can take a peek if you wish. He might not want to, but he has the ability. He can also communicate, one way or another with man.
Problem is, those attributes are mutually exclusive, and God is therefore a logical impossibility. I leave it up to the reader to find the problem.No you haven't
No you don't
No there isn't, and when you say there is, you are just showing to the entire world that you are lying in your two statements quoted above. You haven't even understood the basic idea of a proof. Please stop lying and get some education.
You should be careful with using words you don't understand. This one is only a little one, proof, five letters, but you have no idea what it means. There is no proof that there is a god. None whatsoever. Your existence is nothing of the sort. That you were created is something you believe. The fact that you believe it doesn't mean that the fact that you can observe your self living is proof. The funny thing, there isn't even a theory that there is a god. Before you can have proof you need a theory, and you god guys haven't even got a theory yet. Oh, and by the way, science doesn't do much in the ways of proving stuff. The favorite tool of science is to falsify.
Before continuing you need to check the meaning of the following terms: Conjecture, theory, falsification, axiom. You can then sit down and try to come up with a theory for god. A theory that says that there is a god or something. I will promise you one little thing, you will not be able to come up with such a theory. People have been trying for more than 1000 years, and there still is no theory.
Just for the record, I don't think that God is evil. I don't think that he is. On the other hand, if he was what he is as described in what you so accurately point out is a collection of random texts put together more for political purposes than anything else, then he'd be pure evil.
Wrong. An a-theist is someone who lacks the belief. You describe an anti-theist over. Anti-theism is as unscientific as theism. The scientific reality is that the question of the existence of God is absurd. Absurd questions are in and of the self unscientific. Both claiming that there is a god and claiming that there is no god is unscientific. The scientific attitude is to respond with: Stop asking stupid questions.
The a- prefix is used when talking about the absence of. When talking about the opposite of, you normally use anti-. Someone who has the belief that there is no god would be an anti-theist, someone who lacks the belief of a god would be an a-theist. A person, for example, who has never given the matter any thought and therefore has no opinion on the matter, would be an a-theist. Gnosis is, as you say, "knowledge". An a-gnostic is a person with no knowledge. Given the subject matter, an a-gnostic could therefore be an a-theist who claims that we can not obtain knowledge in this matter or he could be a wishy-washy dumbass who dosen't know shit. An atheist is on solid scientific ground. An agnostic may or may not be. A theist and an anti-theist are not.
Theists are not right. They aren't even wrong.
Strange comment, but... No, atheism is not the rejection of a theistic belief, it is the absence of a theistic belief. The statement "I believe there is no God" is anti-theism. "anti" opposed. "a" absence of. I have said before and I will say it again, to make public debate easier to follow, one should use a-theism and anti-theism (which is not yet a word) where appropriate.
I am an atheist. Does that mean I think it is possible that there is a god? No, I do not. I find the question to be absurd, and as with all other dumb questions, not possible to answer rationally. To have a conviction that says there is no god is as illogical as to hold a conviction that says there is a god. A scientist will have neither.
To paraphrase someone better at this than I am: The religious people are not right, they aren't even wrong.
I was, for a little while, agreeing with you. Now I understand you are just uninformed. No, we will probably not find another system of understanding that replaces science in the future. Science encompasses any and all rational methods of observing the world, and therefore any change to our understanding of the world as such will, with expanded horizons, be a scientific development, not a new methodology.
On the other hand you are right, there is a degree of a belief system in science. The belief-jump we have to make is that what we observe, incomplete or complete, is reality and not something else. This isn't a huge leap of faith given that the reality we are observing is the one we are living in. Whether it is objectively real or not is therefore immaterial, it is what is, and we have to relate to it.
This is probably best examplified with the Lao-Tzu story. The dude wakes up one morning after having dreamt that he was a butterfly. As a butterfly he had no concept of the fact that he was Lao-Tzu dreaming about being a butterfly. He was just flying from flower to flower enjoying him self. So, the dude asked, am I Lao-Tzu who just woke up from a dream about being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am Lao-Tzu.
The answer to the riddle above is meningless, and the pursuit of the answer is ridiculous. We are Lao-Tzu in this reality, and this reality is all we have. Taking other realities into consideration is meningless nonsense.
A negative can not be proven. I can not prove that God doesn't exist. I can not prove that Santa Claus doesn't exist. I can not prove that there are no blue swans with yellow spots. There is an infinite number of things that I can never prove doesn't exist. The spaghetti monster. Green Teapots in orbit around Mars that go invisible if anyone look at them. You name it, I can not prove it. That is science. When you understand that you will have learned a lot. Sadly you probably never will.
As a scientist I do not demand the right to have a platform from which I can convince others that God doesn't exist any more than I want a platform for preaching that there are no little blue Goblins in my cars tires at night. There are an infinite number of things I do not demand a platform for denying the existence of. As a scientist I only want our children to grow up learning scietific method rather than yet another 2000 year old superstition though. That is all I want.
This is where you show the entire world that you do not understand anything about science. One could say that you are dumb, but uneducated is probably more correct. You see, the sentence over contains something that essentially is self-contracitory. Self-contracitory beliefs is an integral part of religion, so I am not surprised that you express that above. So. To the point.
You state that if lots of evidence for the existence of God was presented, some scientists would never believe it. Well, that is pure at utter rubbish. You see, if evidence, one one piece of evidence (or proof as is more popular in scientifi circles) for the existence of God did exist, anyone not believing in that proof would not be a scientist. By definition.
A scientis is a person who lives his life according to scientific method. If there is proof of something, he accepts it. If there is proof of God, the scientists accepts that proof. If someone rejects the proof, they are not scientists. That is, of course, only of there is proof. There is no such thing at this stage.
You are absolutely correct. Science can not. Neither can science disprove Santa Claus, but that doesn't mean that anyone aged 12 or older should believe he exists.
This is pure and utter rubbish, and proof positive that you are one of those loonies you claim not to be. Evolution is proven fact. Not only that, we know the mechanisms by which it works. You can your self, if you chose to get a minimum of education, start experiments where you can observe evolution. Disbelief in evolution is as dumb today as is the disbelief in a spherical (or mostly so) earth.
You are again showing us, by example, what education can do. If you get some, you will stop posting nonsense like this. The fact that there are intelligent christians doesn't detract from the fact that as IQ and education increases so does belief in divine entities. More educated, smarter people, are generally less religious. This doesn't mean that there are no smart religious people, just that there are more dumb religious people than there are dumb atheists.
It is not particularly funny, neiher is it particularly strange. The /. society has a higher education average than the population in general. We are therefore more likely to be atheists. As atheists we are probably getting sick and tired of having people demand that our schools shall teach superstitious nonsense to our children rather than scientific method.
OK, I then assume that you accept evolution. Evolution is proven fact. Has been observed many, many times in the real world, and can be re-produced in a controlled environment. The mechanisms governing evolution is also much better known today than only a few years back. Why do jo reject something that is an observable fact?
In the belly of some maggots. Who cares? What I am really relieved about though is that I am not going to be spending an eternity with the God described in your bible. I have never read of, or heard of anyone more evil and cruel than the biblical God. I can not see him having a single good feature. From the first to the last story of the bible, God comes through as pure evil inside and out. I am very happy not to have to spend eternity with him.
According to what I have understood from the Christian litterature you can get forgiveness for any sin except one, and that is the mocking of The Holy Spirit. I have therefore, to be on the safe side, thoroughly and utterly mocked The Holy Spirit. I will do it again, now, to be safe. See below. I can not be forgiven, and will therefore be spared an eternity in the presence of pure evil. I am still looking for similar safeguards when it comes to the other lunatic religions out there.
Safety Mockery (just in case they missed the other times I did it):
The Holy Spirit is a joke. Wouldn't be able to think his way out of a paper bag. The Holy Spirit is ugly and should be locked up for it's own good. The Holy Spirit has such a small penis that he would be unable to de-flower a virgin. The Holy Spirit has bigger ears than Dumbo. Can you fly with those ears Holy?
I have. I have read it. I have studied it. I have even studied other writings from the same are and the same time. I have studied writings that significantly pre-dates the main christian book, The New Testament (NT). One of the first thing one finds when reading NT with this knowledge, is how much litterary "theft" there is in NT. A significant number of the stories written about Jesus, his birth being one of many, are copies of far older stories, familiar to the people that christianity was originally "sold" to. It is easy to understand why it is so. Selling the Jesus idea with old and familiar stories is easy. People only had to change the name of the hero. That people believe these are actual stories about Jesus on the other hand, given that many of these stories were written down several hundred years before he was born, just shows how little christians in fact knows about their bible.
This is patently false, and rubbish to boot. The bible is riddled with contradictory statements. If you take The Old Testament (OT) into consideration, there is hardly a book in the bible that doesn't have some text that doesn't contradict some other part of the bible. There are passages where two books describe the same events, but quite differently. How can both be true at the same time? Start by explaining Genesis. There are, as you probably are aware of, two stories about how God created the world. These stories vary quite significantly, and can not both be true at the same time.
You are absolutely right. That seems highly unlikely. Do you know anyone who believes that this happened? I don't. The problem is that you have no idea what The Big Bang was, and your ignorance makes you jump to bad conclusions.
The Bible is a rather small book written by the intellectual midgets of their time in their region. It is sad that given all the good litterature and philosophy that came out of the eastern Mediterranean in the years 500BC and up to a few years AD, that mundane ramblings of a small group of uneducated, superstitious sheep-herders is what people cling to today. Thankfully we live in a society generally governed, not by the principles of these people but by the intellectual works of the significantly sharper Greeks and others who lived in the same region at the same time.
You are correct, this is not documented. In fact, the story as given in the bible is, given the information we have, most likely a complete fabrication. There are a number of facts that says so:
This is more or less what the bible says:
There are a number of problems with this story:
The New Testament was never written to be an accurate representation of what actually happened. The writers never intended this at all. The New Testament was written to "sell" a story. They created stories to show points, not to explain what actually happened. The stories were to have morals. Many of the stories about Jesus are more or less verbatime copies of older Greek and Egyptian stories. As historical records, the books of The New Testament are completely fictional.
How about: For thousands of years, farming has been an important part of huma lives. This has meant that we have celebrated various things over the course of the seasons. Springtime we used to celebrate the planting of seeds etc, that tradition morphed into what is now Easter i Christianity and Passover in Jewis traditions. We also celebrated the phases of the moon and the sun, since these were so significant features in our lives. For thousands of years we (in the north) have celebrated that mid-winter means longer days and a move towards light, summer and life again. This was always a very big celebration, particularly in Europe. The Christians high-jacked this celebration and made it their most important celebration.
When you think about it Son, there was hardly anything new in Christianity at all when it was created. Most of what the teacher says that the New Testament says are old Egyptian and Greek myths re-branded as stories about this "Jesus" character. The old Greeks and Egyptians should sue the Christians for plagiarism.
It doesn't make you naive, it makes you an atheist. In most debate today atheist is assumed to be someone who believes there is no God, in other words, an individual who holds a belief which currently is impossible to investigate the truth of. This is not the case. An atheist is someone who just lacks a belief in a divinity. A child raised by parents who never talk about divinities will grow up never having had a thought about the matter. That child is an atheist.
To an atheist the question of the existence of divine entities is nonsensical in the same way that the question of the existence of blue swans with yellow spots on the planet Gurrargh on the other side of our galaxy is. Someone who has never given the matter any thought is an atheist. Someone who has given the matter a lot of thought and come to the conclusion that there can not possibly be any god would probably have to be labelled anti-theist.
Now, the God described in the Bible, the God very many Christians believe in, the God that created this, that and the other and gave us free will and watches over us and all of that, we know that that God doesn't exist. He is a logival impossibility since he and his creation has attributes that are mutually exclusive.
How exactly is God different from the underpants gnomes and the flying spaghetti monster? The only difference is that PersonA has a belief system that includes "God" and PersonB has a belief system that includes the spaghetti monster. By saying that there is an inherent difference between the two you are mocking PersonB, which is not nice. For any sane and rational person, "God" and "The Spaghetti Monster" and "The Underpants Gnome" are equally relevant. Now, you may set the relevance of either to 0 if you wish, but then you have to accept that they all have their relevance set to this level.
Yeah, and when they talk about the fact that the earth is round and circles around the sun, that is also atheists preaching. Or to put it differently: Are you retarded?
If he was a practicing Zen buddhist, he shouldn't be, since that would mean he doesn't believe in much of anything. Depending. Zen is typically more of a philosophy than a religion. A Zen buddihst may or may not believe that he will be reincarnated after he is dead. He may in fact believe or not believe that he is going to die some time in the future, depending on his feelings that day, or not. Imagine the following exchange of words between a Zen master and a student: Student: Hey, what happens when I die? Master: How should I know? Student: But you are a master! You must know! Master: Well, duh, I'm not dead yet! At it's core Zen doesn't teach you anything that is "supernatural". Reincarnation is what happens to you here and now. Every moment that you experience something your old "self" (oversimplification, who knows if there is a "self") dies and is re-born as a new "self" due to the experience you just had. If that continues after you are dead is just another dumb, and extremely irrelevant, question. What matters is where, how and what you are now. The grandparent feels that Zen meditation helps him deal with what he calls his Buddha nature. Good for him. Another person may find that surfing the beaches of Southern California does the same. I am not sure what you think is nonsense about what he believes, or why you think you know what he believes, but then again, does it matter?