If you seriously can't tell the difference, I'm not sure the most lucid argument in the world would change your mind, but limiting my argument to the God of the Abrahamic traditions here it goes anyway.
1. If people ever did believe in dragons and fairies they believed in them as physical entities. Anything physical is governed by natural law. God does not exist in the physical world as described by science, so there is your biggest distinction.
2. God is omniscient, eternal, and omnipotent. I can't convince you that this is the case if you require physical evidence (see 1). It is these qualities that makes him fit to worship. Dragons and fairies are none of these things, and wouldn't be even if they existed outside of the physical world.
3. God is personal.
4. Religion and/or spirituality play a significant role in the affairs of every culture. It provides answers to questions that science cannot by definition answer (e.g. Why am I here? What happens after I die?) Dragons and fairies don't. Attempting to eliminate something fundamental to the human condition is laughably futile.
5. If you are going to take the next step and suggest that dragons and fairies are a form of nature worship, then yes they can be a deity or personification of nature god. If that is your case then nature gods can't be explained away. However, if you take that position then your belief that they are silly moves from condescending to insulting to the millions of practicing nature worshipers around the world.
6. If you want to make the case that dragons and fairies are analogous to angels and demons, then I have no counter. However, belief in angels and demons is either a form of nature worship, or they are they are servants of God or the devil respectively. In the case of nature worship see 5. In the case of servants see 2.
Intolerance, a trait with no upside that you seem to have more than your fair share of, is a more direct cause of much more violence than religion, and also the root cause of many so-called religious conflicts. Maybe we should try to stamp that out, especially because it is something that actually can be countered with education, and watch all your problems with religion go away.
First of all, I think what is being done in Kansas is an afront to Science. But in the other 49 states religion has never been taught in school, in contrast to stories about being eaten by dragons and sailing off the face of the world. You can teach something like religion and not present it as fact. You sound as if you want to censor it out of existance.
Claiming that religion is like dragons and fiaries is a strawman, and you ought to know that.
There can be no doubt that religion is a source of much hate and trouble in the world, so why shouldn't people try prevent others falling into its trap?
This is utter niavety. Religion isn't the reason people hate each other, its an excuse. Wars aren't fought over religion, wars are fought and then religion is tacked on top.
If you remove religion people won't stop hating each other, they'll just find other excuses
Yeah because people with similar catchy phrases are always the same...
Even if all their slogans were an identical, "One world, One leader, One Religion," even if they all were religions. Your only valid point would be sometimes religions are bad.
Do you believe everything your parents told you when you were little. Have you mastered doublethink to the extreme that Santa Clause still exists?
Are you seriously supporting removing the right of parents to raise their children? Or only if they teach their kids something the government hasn't approved
Do you really think that eliminating religion is a good thing?
You talk of freedom and use words from 1986, all in a proposal to strip of rights that even Orwell claimed Eastasia had been unable to accomplish.
I said earlier that I think that the reason many people claim to be non-denominational is so that they can add weight to their arguments (by not being contradicted by years of dogma or challenged by superiors.)
I think you are repeating my case, just in gentler language. You said
Each church within the denominations has to teach specific things that are agreed to by the leaders of the denomination. Non-denominational churches are simply those churches that choose not to associate themselves with a specific group.
In doing so they can ignore anything from any other group, because they are not subject to any rules. The Catholic church is certainly not perfect, but faiths with long traditions tend to go to great pains to make sure their arguments are internally logically consistent. I don't think the same can be said of ND congregations.
I'm not a blind papist, I don't agree with everything the church teaches, but I believe that having an institution is useful for preserving and developing the faith. One of the teachings of the Catholic church that I fully endorse is that scripture and tradition are equally important. Certainly it can be argued that tradition isn't on par with scripture, and I don't want to get into that debate. I do however want to point out that it is my belief, and because of that I think scripture can be supplemented.
For example, without tradition telling us that St. Paul argued that it is not necessary to be Jewish to be Christian, how do you explain the lapse of Jewish dietary laws. As far as I know that debate isn't captured in the new testament, it only resides in histories of the church. If you reject tradition as a source of revelation how do you justify eating pork? Drinking milk and eating steak? Wearing clothing of two cloths? I'm not asking rhetorical questions, I've always wanted to know how these things are justified in faiths that don't value tradition. It seems to me that they are certainly subjectively dismissing part of the Bible.
IDist may be good for pointing out errors, mistakes, and misrepresentations that happen, like it or not, in every branch of education (Remember the Alamo!) but they do not contribute anything to science.
I'm not excusing the misrepresentations of the authors, but pointing out something that has been disproven several times in peer review journals is more an exercise in literature searching capabilities than doing science.
Basically when arguing evolution vs. ID in the media (the only place it is really debated) evolutioists are as bad as IDist, in that they both regurgitate the same tired old rhetoric, regardless of how true it is. (Haeckle's embreos v. Behe's mousetrap) However, in the laboratory, where science is actually advanced, it doens't matter if someone faked illustrations to develop a concept, so long as the concept is sound. Since IDist spend all their time in the media, and scientists are only reluctantly drawn there, I'll go ahead and continue to believe that the people actually doing the work, are more reputable than media whoring IDists.
The eye was the famous case, although they've relinquished that because it was phemonenally easy to prove that there was a spectrum of qualities of light detection from earthworms to eagles
Really the IDists have relinquished an argument? Someone should really let the men in the trenches know because in my experience IDists just spout the same tired old arguments regardless of merit.
My personal take on ID supporters is that in their arrogance they believe that they should be able to understand everything that is not supernatural. As a result if they don't get it it must be God's work.
So they build up this God of the Gaps that is responsible for everything man cannot expain. Then once we get close to understanding something they get all upset, because we are removing some of God's power.
My blanket dismissal for all IDers is that they are limiting the power of their god to that which they don't understand. My God is more powerful than that and not subject to my arrogent limitations - If He wants to violate non-contradiction He can. I don't know what that means, but just because I can't imagine a world where something can both be and not be simultaneously dosen't mean that God can't do it.
In my opinion the reason that evangelicals often label themselves as non-denominational is so that they can speak with all the authority of their non-existing church.
While I'm glad that the Vatican is reaffirming its position that evolution is not heretical, this isn't new. JPII wrote a cautious endorsement of evolution years ago.
Addditionally the fundies aren't going to care what Rome says anyway, and they couldn't care less if they're going against the longest tradition of Christianity - they might even see it as a badge of honor.
The best thing that could happen from announcements like these is that people stop assuming that being a Christian automatically means you are a young earth creationist. And maybe if were lucky some uninformed Kansasians (what the hell do you call someone from Kansas anyway?) realize that you can see the Bible as True, without it being a historic fact. I mean you would think that if they can wrap their brain around fully man and fully divine they could handle True but not fact...
It's not a good model because it doesn't segment the market. If people in one market have no desire to move to another you can raise the price across the board by pointing at cheaper, but undesirable options. You may like the model you proposed, but a good buisness model it is not.
Theres a legitimate watch-it-once market, and a legitimate I-want-the-box market. The question is whether the I'm-cool-with-a-digital-copy market is something that is acutally worth getting into.
If everyone in the digital-copy market is a subset of one of the other two markets the answer is a resounding no. However, if there are new people who don't rent movies because watching it once isn't enough, and also don't buy the movie for whatever reason then it may be a market worth persuing. If the movie company takes a larger hit from people defecting from the I-want-the-box catagory than they gain by tapping the new digital-copy market it's not worth persuing no matter how cool it is.
You might only want to watch something once, but the very nature of digital information is that they can't take it back once they've given you (although that hasn't stopped them from trying.) Movie makers actually have a good buisness model for the the watch-something-once market i.e. Blockbuster.
This is aimed at the I-don't-want-a-disc market, which the media companies have been wholly unable to figure out.
I'm with you on the IP system being economic slight of hand, but I think that turning indirect monopoly rent into direct taxation is a terrible idea. Leting the government decide who the "innovation tax" goes to works fine for DARPA, because ultimately the defense department is the consumer of those technologies. I really don't want to see a similar model applied to consumer products, or we'd see a lot of items that Uncle Sam thinks is best for us.
In essence the problem is that you need people who develop things that people actually want to be rewarded for spending the money to bring them to the public, but once they've recouped their R&D budget, plus a bit of profit the tech should go generic.
A perfect example of IP gone arwy is the pharma buisness. Sure they spend billions on R&D, and sure they should be entitiled to recoup that money, but because of the governmental and insurance controlled field of medicine they can expect to be able to charge a price that is entirely to high. As a result of the expected price they get to dump more money into marketing than R&D, which stings a bit in the first world, but results in drugs that are entirely cost prohibitive in the developing world. - If pharma companies restricted their marketing campaigns to educating doctors every non-generic pill in the world could be conservitavely 30% cheaper.
Of course the pharma companies would tell you they could charge less per pill if they had longer patent protections, but they wouldn't. The real solution in pharma is to stop letting the HMOs dictate everything, and let the free market work, forcing pharma companies to slash marketing budgets, focus on development, and make more good products - although you might need some protection against price gouging if one company comes up with something wholly unique. Besides with a seven year head start there is no reason they shouldn't still be able to make the pills cheaper than anyone else once it goes generic... unless of course they were more concerned with superbowl ads than streamlining manufacturing during the time that thier product was under patent protection.
I don't have the the answer, but I don't think it is to bloat the federal government. Besides the patent system is international, if you change it to a research subsidy system, with no exclusive right to manufacture in the US there would be no patent protection overseas, and overseas consumers wouldn't pay the innovation tax either.
An innovation tax is no less economic slight of hand than patent protections.
Sure they probably will go back to competeing, but they have still artificially raised the bar for start-ups to compete, which is bad no mater which economic school of thought you subscribe to.
If I'm not mistaken IQ isn't a measure of education, nor can "the average IQ go up" as the review states.
It is my understanding that IQ is a represenitive comparison of your cognitive skills with the average.
Strictly speeking cognitive ability is independent of education, but practically since we have to test for it you can learn how to answer the questions.
On the other hand I belive the average IQ is defined as 100. If the average person becomes smarter his IQ is still 100.
One of my Mech Eng profs liked to tell us that robustness is marketing-speak, it has no real meaning to engineers.
For example you don't talk about robustness of a strut, you talk about strength and fatigue. You don't talk about robustness of an robot, you talk about manuverability and degrees of freedom. You don't talk about robustness of a Mars Rover, you talk about sensors, speed, solar panel life, etc.
Now before you poo-poo this, name one parameter that is best described by robustness, rather than an actual engineering term with real units.
(of course we filled the final presentation for that professors course with all forms of the word, including robustitude)
So would a consensus of nations be better than a consensus of US citizens? Why?
If the majority of nations didn't want.xxx would it be ok to block it then?
Do you really want China and Iran to have a say over what is on the internet?
The US don't censor the internet. You can't host child porn in the US, but that isn't because ICANN is a puppet for the feds, it's because the US has the right to enforce its laws within its borders. If you can find someone in any country to host content for you you can get it on the internet. Thats not to say that you won't get arrested for looking at it in the US, but that doesn't mean the internet is locked down.
If we open up tons of TLDs do you really want to have to remember wheather its mcdonalds.com, mcdonalds.co, mcdonalds.biz, mcdonalds.inc, etc.
All this would do is make search engines even more so the de facto internet regulating bodies, which would essentially rip power from ICANN, and send it down the street to google.
Slashdot Mirror
Stop buying crappy cars!
Currently taking bets 3:1 that parent dies by hitting moose in kia spectra.
If you seriously can't tell the difference, I'm not sure the most lucid argument in the world would change your mind, but limiting my argument to the God of the Abrahamic traditions here it goes anyway.
1. If people ever did believe in dragons and fairies they believed in them as physical entities. Anything physical is governed by natural law. God does not exist in the physical world as described by science, so there is your biggest distinction.
2. God is omniscient, eternal, and omnipotent. I can't convince you that this is the case if you require physical evidence (see 1). It is these qualities that makes him fit to worship. Dragons and fairies are none of these things, and wouldn't be even if they existed outside of the physical world.
3. God is personal.
4. Religion and/or spirituality play a significant role in the affairs of every culture. It provides answers to questions that science cannot by definition answer (e.g. Why am I here? What happens after I die?) Dragons and fairies don't. Attempting to eliminate something fundamental to the human condition is laughably futile.
5. If you are going to take the next step and suggest that dragons and fairies are a form of nature worship, then yes they can be a deity or personification of nature god. If that is your case then nature gods can't be explained away. However, if you take that position then your belief that they are silly moves from condescending to insulting to the millions of practicing nature worshipers around the world.
6. If you want to make the case that dragons and fairies are analogous to angels and demons, then I have no counter. However, belief in angels and demons is either a form of nature worship, or they are they are servants of God or the devil respectively. In the case of nature worship see 5. In the case of servants see 2.
Intolerance, a trait with no upside that you seem to have more than your fair share of, is a more direct cause of much more violence than religion, and also the root cause of many so-called religious conflicts. Maybe we should try to stamp that out, especially because it is something that actually can be countered with education, and watch all your problems with religion go away.
Claiming that religion is like dragons and fiaries is a strawman, and you ought to know that.
This is utter niavety. Religion isn't the reason people hate each other, its an excuse. Wars aren't fought over religion, wars are fought and then religion is tacked on top.
If you remove religion people won't stop hating each other, they'll just find other excuses
No one mandated that belief in or teaching of dragons is illegal. Ditto to geocentrism.
How can you honestly speak of freedom, and than sugest eliminating peoples ability to think for themselves?
Yeah because people with similar catchy phrases are always the same...
Even if all their slogans were an identical, "One world, One leader, One Religion," even if they all were religions. Your only valid point would be sometimes religions are bad.
Interesting? Hardly
Are you out of your mind?
Do you believe everything your parents told you when you were little. Have you mastered doublethink to the extreme that Santa Clause still exists?
Are you seriously supporting removing the right of parents to raise their children? Or only if they teach their kids something the government hasn't approved
Do you really think that eliminating religion is a good thing?
You talk of freedom and use words from 1986, all in a proposal to strip of rights that even Orwell claimed Eastasia had been unable to accomplish.
I think you are repeating my case, just in gentler language. You saidIn doing so they can ignore anything from any other group, because they are not subject to any rules. The Catholic church is certainly not perfect, but faiths with long traditions tend to go to great pains to make sure their arguments are internally logically consistent. I don't think the same can be said of ND congregations.
I'm not a blind papist, I don't agree with everything the church teaches, but I believe that having an institution is useful for preserving and developing the faith. One of the teachings of the Catholic church that I fully endorse is that scripture and tradition are equally important. Certainly it can be argued that tradition isn't on par with scripture, and I don't want to get into that debate. I do however want to point out that it is my belief, and because of that I think scripture can be supplemented.
For example, without tradition telling us that St. Paul argued that it is not necessary to be Jewish to be Christian, how do you explain the lapse of Jewish dietary laws. As far as I know that debate isn't captured in the new testament, it only resides in histories of the church. If you reject tradition as a source of revelation how do you justify eating pork? Drinking milk and eating steak? Wearing clothing of two cloths? I'm not asking rhetorical questions, I've always wanted to know how these things are justified in faiths that don't value tradition. It seems to me that they are certainly subjectively dismissing part of the Bible.
IDist may be good for pointing out errors, mistakes, and misrepresentations that happen, like it or not, in every branch of education (Remember the Alamo!) but they do not contribute anything to science.
I'm not excusing the misrepresentations of the authors, but pointing out something that has been disproven several times in peer review journals is more an exercise in literature searching capabilities than doing science.
Basically when arguing evolution vs. ID in the media (the only place it is really debated) evolutioists are as bad as IDist, in that they both regurgitate the same tired old rhetoric, regardless of how true it is. (Haeckle's embreos v. Behe's mousetrap) However, in the laboratory, where science is actually advanced, it doens't matter if someone faked illustrations to develop a concept, so long as the concept is sound. Since IDist spend all their time in the media, and scientists are only reluctantly drawn there, I'll go ahead and continue to believe that the people actually doing the work, are more reputable than media whoring IDists.
Really the IDists have relinquished an argument? Someone should really let the men in the trenches know because in my experience IDists just spout the same tired old arguments regardless of merit.
True as in the moral of the story is True, not as in it is true that snakes talk.
My personal take on ID supporters is that in their arrogance they believe that they should be able to understand everything that is not supernatural. As a result if they don't get it it must be God's work.
So they build up this God of the Gaps that is responsible for everything man cannot expain. Then once we get close to understanding something they get all upset, because we are removing some of God's power.
My blanket dismissal for all IDers is that they are limiting the power of their god to that which they don't understand. My God is more powerful than that and not subject to my arrogent limitations - If He wants to violate non-contradiction He can. I don't know what that means, but just because I can't imagine a world where something can both be and not be simultaneously dosen't mean that God can't do it.
NO ONE expects the Spanish Inquisition!
In my opinion the reason that evangelicals often label themselves as non-denominational is so that they can speak with all the authority of their non-existing church.
While I'm glad that the Vatican is reaffirming its position that evolution is not heretical, this isn't new. JPII wrote a cautious endorsement of evolution years ago.
Addditionally the fundies aren't going to care what Rome says anyway, and they couldn't care less if they're going against the longest tradition of Christianity - they might even see it as a badge of honor.
The best thing that could happen from announcements like these is that people stop assuming that being a Christian automatically means you are a young earth creationist. And maybe if were lucky some uninformed Kansasians (what the hell do you call someone from Kansas anyway?) realize that you can see the Bible as True, without it being a historic fact. I mean you would think that if they can wrap their brain around fully man and fully divine they could handle True but not fact...
It's not a good model because it doesn't segment the market. If people in one market have no desire to move to another you can raise the price across the board by pointing at cheaper, but undesirable options. You may like the model you proposed, but a good buisness model it is not.
2 words market segmentation
Theres a legitimate watch-it-once market, and a legitimate I-want-the-box market. The question is whether the I'm-cool-with-a-digital-copy market is something that is acutally worth getting into.
If everyone in the digital-copy market is a subset of one of the other two markets the answer is a resounding no. However, if there are new people who don't rent movies because watching it once isn't enough, and also don't buy the movie for whatever reason then it may be a market worth persuing. If the movie company takes a larger hit from people defecting from the I-want-the-box catagory than they gain by tapping the new digital-copy market it's not worth persuing no matter how cool it is.
You might only want to watch something once, but the very nature of digital information is that they can't take it back once they've given you (although that hasn't stopped them from trying.) Movie makers actually have a good buisness model for the the watch-something-once market i.e. Blockbuster.
This is aimed at the I-don't-want-a-disc market, which the media companies have been wholly unable to figure out.
I'm with you on the IP system being economic slight of hand, but I think that turning indirect monopoly rent into direct taxation is a terrible idea. Leting the government decide who the "innovation tax" goes to works fine for DARPA, because ultimately the defense department is the consumer of those technologies. I really don't want to see a similar model applied to consumer products, or we'd see a lot of items that Uncle Sam thinks is best for us.
In essence the problem is that you need people who develop things that people actually want to be rewarded for spending the money to bring them to the public, but once they've recouped their R&D budget, plus a bit of profit the tech should go generic.
A perfect example of IP gone arwy is the pharma buisness. Sure they spend billions on R&D, and sure they should be entitiled to recoup that money, but because of the governmental and insurance controlled field of medicine they can expect to be able to charge a price that is entirely to high. As a result of the expected price they get to dump more money into marketing than R&D, which stings a bit in the first world, but results in drugs that are entirely cost prohibitive in the developing world. - If pharma companies restricted their marketing campaigns to educating doctors every non-generic pill in the world could be conservitavely 30% cheaper.
Of course the pharma companies would tell you they could charge less per pill if they had longer patent protections, but they wouldn't. The real solution in pharma is to stop letting the HMOs dictate everything, and let the free market work, forcing pharma companies to slash marketing budgets, focus on development, and make more good products - although you might need some protection against price gouging if one company comes up with something wholly unique. Besides with a seven year head start there is no reason they shouldn't still be able to make the pills cheaper than anyone else once it goes generic... unless of course they were more concerned with superbowl ads than streamlining manufacturing during the time that thier product was under patent protection.
I don't have the the answer, but I don't think it is to bloat the federal government. Besides the patent system is international, if you change it to a research subsidy system, with no exclusive right to manufacture in the US there would be no patent protection overseas, and overseas consumers wouldn't pay the innovation tax either.
An innovation tax is no less economic slight of hand than patent protections.
Sure they probably will go back to competeing, but they have still artificially raised the bar for start-ups to compete, which is bad no mater which economic school of thought you subscribe to.
If I'm not mistaken IQ isn't a measure of education, nor can "the average IQ go up" as the review states.
It is my understanding that IQ is a represenitive comparison of your cognitive skills with the average.
Strictly speeking cognitive ability is independent of education, but practically since we have to test for it you can learn how to answer the questions.
On the other hand I belive the average IQ is defined as 100. If the average person becomes smarter his IQ is still 100.
Martian dust caking on the solar panels.
One of my Mech Eng profs liked to tell us that robustness is marketing-speak, it has no real meaning to engineers.
For example you don't talk about robustness of a strut, you talk about strength and fatigue. You don't talk about robustness of an robot, you talk about manuverability and degrees of freedom. You don't talk about robustness of a Mars Rover, you talk about sensors, speed, solar panel life, etc.
Now before you poo-poo this, name one parameter that is best described by robustness, rather than an actual engineering term with real units.
(of course we filled the final presentation for that professors course with all forms of the word, including robustitude)
So would a consensus of nations be better than a consensus of US citizens? Why?
.xxx would it be ok to block it then?
If the majority of nations didn't want
Do you really want China and Iran to have a say over what is on the internet?
The US don't censor the internet. You can't host child porn in the US, but that isn't because ICANN is a puppet for the feds, it's because the US has the right to enforce its laws within its borders. If you can find someone in any country to host content for you you can get it on the internet. Thats not to say that you won't get arrested for looking at it in the US, but that doesn't mean the internet is locked down.
yeah, so its a good thing we don't regulate any trade...
What if I want newyorktimes.com, and am unable to (easily) find in in a search engine? Should I be required to remember the IP address?
If we open up tons of TLDs do you really want to have to remember wheather its mcdonalds.com, mcdonalds.co, mcdonalds.biz, mcdonalds.inc, etc.
All this would do is make search engines even more so the de facto internet regulating bodies, which would essentially rip power from ICANN, and send it down the street to google.