You do known Satan was given permission by Elohim? And remind me, the children that Satan killed with Elohim's permission, were they raised from the dead?
I clearly haven't communicated my point very well. I hold formal instruction in the rules of English in disdain, not effective communication. I'm well aware of how you would check what effective communication is, there are even a small number of studies (done by people in Communication Sciences rather than the English faculty) which are very helpful in this regard. They follow exactly the experimental paradigm you suggest.
"This is the experiment that will back up the idea that people in general can evaluate the quality of somebody's writing -- generally an uncontroversial statement. Having established that, guidelines (much more common than "rules") for effective writing can be established by people who specialize in the field on the weight of their own experience."
No, this experiment wont back this up. It will back up whatever rule or guideline was being tested (say 'use a small number of words on a presentation slide') and only if the metric of quality applies. There is no such thing as/*the*/ quality of somebody's writing in general so there is no way to judge it. You can judge my writing by how well I communicate my ideas because I have told you I am explicitly interested in and trying to convey ideas, but it is not a general property. Sometimes we value writing for its obtuseness. Art which conveys layers of meaning subtly for example. To judge my writing style in such a way that I care you need to know my intent (a fact which flies directly in the face of the ever popular New Criticism and other post modernist bullshit which permeates the English academy).
You judge writing style in couple of ways, you can relay your experience, which is fine but only matters if I care about communicating to you in particular, or you can relate my writing style to some generalisable epistemology. The only one of those we have is the scientific method. English does not use the scientific method, as far as I can tell it uses no effective epistemology what-so-ever. If anything those who study English (rather than communication) are more disinterested in effective communication than most scientists.
I never said I was disinterested in effective communication. I said English majors and people who adhere to rules about how writing should be done can fuck off. While the statistics and experimental methods of communication science might be a bit dodgy at times I have nothing but respect for that endeavour and have used the fruits of that particular scientific process to improve my own writing and presentation.
The rest of your post I largely agree with. You outline a collection of nuances and particulars which would impact a careful, scientific study of science communication. Something which people who complain about how I end this sentence would have trouble getting at. People who study English are doing a bad job because they think there is an objectively correct way to write. They are doing such a bad job I just praised Communication Science as a discipline in comparison.
So what metric are you using to claim they are writing poorly?
Arbitrary rules about how writing should be structured are just one more reason much of English is a waste of time. If they don't do the psychology experiment to show that some particular rule of the English language facilitates communication then I have no motivation to obey it.
I will try (and generally fail) to obey the rules because I don't know which ones make communication more effective, if all I have is the witchdoctor then to the witchdoctor I will go. That said sanctimonious English majors can fuck right off if they want to lecture me without actual science backing up their judgemental attitude.
The two examples I gave are of things for which there are definitely laws against, and HSBC were let of with a slap on the wrist. That is why I listen them. We have probable cause, they misfiled their reports to the SEC, the value they claimed their assets had they didn't. I happy to let the few banks which didn't require bailout money go, for the rest we have a reasonable suspicion they mislead the regulator and can search their records.
Lets ignore the fact that your words ring hollow because they bribed and bought the system to make their acts legal. There were things which should at least result in a court case.
Improper reporting of their assets. They claimed their collateralised debt obligations were worth more than they were on their balance sheets and there is clear evidence they knew they were worth less than they claimed. How about Merril Lynch selling CDOs to Lonestar, claiming it was for 22% of the face value when the terms of the deal made it clear they were only selling them for about 6% of the face value.
Or for a more recent example HSBC acting as banker for the worlds terrorists and getting a slap on the wrist.
These people are scum, and some of them did illegal things. We should be going through our banking system one banker at a time searching all their records and looking for anything they may have done which was complicit in causing the crash and going after each and every one of them personally, no point in going after the banks themselves if we are just going to bail them out.
Again, I didn't ask for evidence and a contradictory view point, I asked for proof.
Have you gone line by line through say 10% of the HFT algorithms used and formally demonstrated that there are no common hidden assumptions.
Since I don't value liquidity in the stock market and believe in democratisation of access (that is abolishing special privileged access to stock and commodities markets via financial barriers and requiring markets to trade with a single percentage price per trade, essentially abolishing brokers, HFT, the whole swathe of middle men) on moral grounds it doesn't really matter what evidence you present that HFT improves liquidity. You aren't going to convince me it is a good thing by that route. As such I invite you to stop trying to convince me HFT is a good thing. I believe anyone should simply be able to go and put an order on the stock market via the internet under the same terms. There should be no middle men. Or we could abolish limited liability and associated government interventions in the market, either is fine with me, although I think the first idea is a better idea if we want companies larger than a grapefruit.
I also don't care much about volatility, I would rather a volatile market in which the mean price reflected the long term value (which I know is discounting short term information) better than a stable price which is reflective of the true day to day value with rapid but stable short term correction but does not force people to think long term. I know this will discourage people investing in the stock market, I would offset this by changing the way we tax shares and reduce taxation on real long term investment. Basically if you can show that you have held a share for over six months, a year, multiple years I would make cap gain and dividend taxes on those shares much lower than they currently are.
It isn't that your case isn't plausible. Nor am I convinced either way on HFT effect on liquidity or the spread. From what I can tell with enough players in the market they do increase the information reflected in the price. That isn't what I'm calling you on.
I suggest instead of trying to convincing me that HFT is a good thing (which will never work) you focus on giving me proof that a large subset of HFT are not making the same assumptions. After all that is what I'm actually calling you on. Otherwise I am just going to assume you are one of the middle men acting as a parasite on the rest of us.
Evidence is insufficient, your have made statements that are so confident you need proof. Your position may be correct but the confidence with which you have stated it is simply too strong. You are running counter to the position of the regulators and economists and doing so while supremely confident.
You didn't demonstrate what I asked you to demonstrate. You just listed a bunch of ways HFT might be beneficial. Demonstrate that it cannot and will not amplify a crash like you claim.
"The key fact of the story is that the 'tech bubble' component of HFT is over"
I see you posting this kind of thing left right and center on this story and it makes me think you have some dog in this race because there is absolutely no way you can know this, even if you have access to the highly guarded information that goes into building HFT systems.
How can you possibly know that there wont be another such glitch?
Please present proof that matches the categorical and unambiguous nature of your claims. Demonstrate that there isn't some seemingly reasonable common but catastrophic assumption built into a large number of the HFT systems in existence. A study where researchers have been given access to the source code and surveyed say a couple of hundred such traders would be a nice start, but your claims are absolute so I would like to see proof.
All actions are equally trivial for a deity because they are supremely powerful. The only thing a deity cannot do is the logically impossible. Since typically a deity is also the creator that makes them responsible for every single event that occurs. That is what being a deity means, to be able to do anything short of create rocks they cant lift or destroy themselves.
"Once again, experience belies this."
You are not a deity, you are not supremely powerful. You can therefore be benevolent within the bounds of what you are able to do. No logical contradiction is implied if you don't do the absolute maximal amount of good.
Further you can be benevolent some of the time and not benevolent at other time, your benevolence can change through time. A deity is a timeless entity, a single instance of lacking in benevolence means the deity is not benevolent because a deities actions cannot be thought of as temporally localised.
You cannot take examples of what is possible and impossible for you and apply it to a deity, it just does not work. If you want to claim a benevolent deity exists you have to show it is reasonable such a concept is not self contradictory working from the definition itself, not from your experiences because you are a very different entity from that deity. You could punch someone in the mouth for no reason (or even for fun and profit), a benevolent deity cannot because it implies a logical contradiction.
It isn't that the deity has an obligation. It is that it is logically contradictory for a benevolent deity to act in an evil manner or fail to act in a good one. A benevolent deity isn't obliged to do good, it is logically contradictory for them to fail to.
"The deity, however, is bound to a singular course of action, predetermined by myself, my wife, and the other party."
Yes exactly. But they are not bound by moral obligation, they are bound by the requirement that their own nature be internally consistent. The only way around this is to argue that gods notion of benevolence is so alien to our own that rape, torture, death and genocide somehow working for the greater good can be considered benevolence.
Free will is a self contradictory concept whoever it is applied to but in this case that has precisely zero impact. A benevolent deity can only chose between the maximally good actions (or inactions) available to it, not because it lacks free will (however you define it), and not because it experiences a moral obligation, but for the same reason it cannot create square circles. You cant choose to be a married bachelor and a benevolent deity cant choose to fail to do good or to do evil.
Because all actions are equally trivial for a deity and they are the root cause of all actions there is no distinction between action and inaction. A benevolent deity has virtually no choice in their actions because they can only pick from the set of maximally good actions (because the only way to make benevolence make sense in this context is as I suggested before making benevolence a property of the deities nature, and any violation of this nature is a grave indiscretion). There is no difference between a deity failing to prevent genocide and a deity failing to blow the wind so the smallest number of people experience an eggy fart. As a result all that is necessary to show such a deity does not exist is to find a preventable instance of suffering, it helps to find an extreme case because it prevents the 'greater good' rebuff, but frankly the time I stubbed my toe with no purpose does the job. This is precisely the problem with deities, because they dabble in the infinite they end up with a whole bunch of properties which are extreme on one axis or another.
If you think I think YHWH is benevolent then you have inferred a lot from a very short statement. YHWH is by most accounts one of the worst entities in fiction responsible for genocide, torture and poor taste in sea food.
Depends, Dick could be an expert philosopher who has supporting arguments for why any creator deity is likely to be benevolent. Most natural theologians will provide you with such arguments to back up their particular deity. You are judging his argument without knowing it in detail. It could be the case that he is making an error by conflating deities with benevolent deities, or it could be that he has an argument for why any deity would by definition be good (if you want an example consider the Christian conception of ethics as being a reflection of gods nature, making god good by definition).
"Would a benevolent deity unfailingly override the poor decisions made by humans?" - Doesn't need to. Just has to fail to do it once when it would be desirable for them to do so and possible for them to do so. Dick judges that he has encountered one such incidence which is sufficient to rule out those deities. You might argue he has put his line in the sand as to what constitutes too much suffering and evil in a poor place, but I don't suggest making that argument to veterans faces unless you yourself have watched comrades slowly bleed to death while you pick bits of shrapnel out your legs.
Your request is obviously daft. Collections of atoms behaving as though they have free will is exactly what we would expect if the materialists are right. That is the point, a universe with conciousness and free will looks no bloody different to one without. That is precisely why they are spurious concepts. As far as us to "evenly distribute [our] time between barking, shrieking, silence, and speaking", asking someone without free will to exercise free will to prove their point is just absurd.
It's Britain. We're used to terrorism. I remember after the 7/7 bombings one of the more popular jokes in the immediate aftermath was 'so Al Qaeda made the underground late, Ken Livingstone has been doing that for years and he doesn't even need bombs.'. Honestly I'm amazed no one offered these guys a cup of tea.
No, and neither would you, because the US doesn't have a left wing crazy with any hope of winning. The left in the US has some real idiots (Hi everyone who graduated from Berkeley!) but you go ahead and try to tell me that there will ever be a member of the US senate who could be described as communist the way some of the senate could be described as corporatist or fascist. The US has a stupid left, and the stupid portions of the left in the US spend most of their time attacking each other so that they don't get in, it doesn't have a effective radical left like say Italy or France.
I don't understand your example. If it was an attempt to argue by analogy you would be better served to give a clear example where atheism was a motivating factor. Please be careful no to confuse anti-theism (which I'm happy to admit can motivate people to do things) with atheism (which I claim rarely can). Note that it isn't enough for someone to claim they are doing something for a reason, they have to actually be doing it for that reason. The Reign of Terror was done in the name of justice and reason, but no one is insane enough to suggest that justice or reason caused the Reign of Terror. I'm not deceiving myself. I'm just not confusing atheism with anti-theism. There is no gospel of atheism, and I hope that is just a poorly chosen rhetorical device. Many Christians tie Thomist notions to Christianity, but Thomism is not Christianity and if someone tried to suggest that Christianity implied Thomism I'd call bullshit on them just like I'm going to have to call bullshit on you here. Atheism is not anti-theism. Anti-theism has indeed played the same role as religion in some historical atrocities. Many of it's adherents have been organised and used violence. But you are confusing a tertiary concern (lack of belief in deities) for the primary one (dislike of organised religion). I say this as someone who is an anti-theist so it isn't like I'd dodging criticism of my beliefs here, I'm just pointing that you are going after the wrong ideal. But you seem to think atheism either is anti-theism, or implies it. It isn't and it doesn't. If it were perspectives like my own about religion would be far more popular with non-believers than they are.
No, no it hasn't. Many religious people are quick to point out that philosophically speaking atheist has very little to offer. Not being compelled to a belief in god is not a motivator. Believers are correct in this regard, weak atheism will not tell you much about the world and it does not really do anything for you. For a start purely descriptive statements cannot alone act as a motivators. As such it cant be the cause of very much. Communism, capitalism, imperialism are all complex beliefs with implications, screw up how you apply them and they can cause you to be a douche. Atheism isn't really as ism at all, we only label it as such because historically religious belief is so common we needed a word to describe not having one. This is not to say there weren't atheists who happened to assholes ("Hi Stalin!"). But they weren't assholes because they were atheists. Because they were communists, or socialists, or fascists, or conservative, or liberal, or any number of other justifications for actions, sure, but not because they were atheists. Because atheism offers virtually nothing by way of imperative. You want to warn me of the dangers of my politics because I'm a liberal, a social democrat, a believer in democracy, have at it dude. Plenty of very bad things have been done as a direct result of those ideals and I'm all for being careful applying them. But you are being disingenuous when you say religion was used as an excuse, just like I would be disingenuous if I claimed the reign of terror had nothing to do with radical liberalism. Religion can cause strife, any ideology can cause strife. It isn't just an excuse, it is part of a complex system of causes.
Positive atheism is not exclusive with being 'sensible' and can be perfectly reasonable and rational. Many, if not most conceptions of a divinity are inherently self-contradictory and one can provide good arguments for why they do not exist. As an example consider that the God implied by the Kalam Cosmological argument is impossible if any exist definition of 'cause' is used when describing the cause of the universe (a efficient without material cause is contrary to all experience, a required event before another required event makes no sense in a atemporal setting). It is perfectly reasonable to take some or a few of the more common but contradictory conceptions of a deity or deity and assert they do not exist by looking at how they are self contradictory. Non-existence of contradictory being is as close to an objective fact as scientific truth or anything else we label as 'fact'. And those are the deist gods, showing that the gods of specific religions do not exist is child's play.
Positive atheism is not the same thing as believing that all believers are insane. I can think you are wrong without thinking you are a nut job. Besides insanity is a moral judgement (it amounts to asserting how a mind 'should' work, whatever that means) and I've no interest in passing moral judgement, just describing what is.
Give me a sufficiently fleshed out commonly used definition of god and I will probably have an argument why such a being is impossible. Given that many theists are unwilling to define god I define it for them as "an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omniscient being who is the cause of the universe". On this, or any similar definition I can show this deity does not exist. It might be the problem of evil, or the problem of unbelief, or something like the one I gave above. If not then you and I are simply defining god differently and I'm happy to say I'm a weak atheist on your definition. I'm likely to also point out your definition is so vague as to have no implications what-so-ever of course, but that doesn't change the fact that with respect to it I am not a strong atheist.
Are there atheists like you describe? Sure, there are a couple of assholes. And yes they pretty much have a religion. But you are conflating this religion with strong atheism, and that simply isn't the case. My own existence acts as a refutation.
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You do known Satan was given permission by Elohim? And remind me, the children that Satan killed with Elohim's permission, were they raised from the dead?
I clearly haven't communicated my point very well. I hold formal instruction in the rules of English in disdain, not effective communication. I'm well aware of how you would check what effective communication is, there are even a small number of studies (done by people in Communication Sciences rather than the English faculty) which are very helpful in this regard. They follow exactly the experimental paradigm you suggest.
"This is the experiment that will back up the idea that people in general can evaluate the quality of somebody's writing -- generally an uncontroversial statement. Having established that, guidelines (much more common than "rules") for effective writing can be established by people who specialize in the field on the weight of their own experience."
No, this experiment wont back this up. It will back up whatever rule or guideline was being tested (say 'use a small number of words on a presentation slide') and only if the metric of quality applies. There is no such thing as /*the*/ quality of somebody's writing in general so there is no way to judge it. You can judge my writing by how well I communicate my ideas because I have told you I am explicitly interested in and trying to convey ideas, but it is not a general property. Sometimes we value writing for its obtuseness. Art which conveys layers of meaning subtly for example. To judge my writing style in such a way that I care you need to know my intent (a fact which flies directly in the face of the ever popular New Criticism and other post modernist bullshit which permeates the English academy).
You judge writing style in couple of ways, you can relay your experience, which is fine but only matters if I care about communicating to you in particular, or you can relate my writing style to some generalisable epistemology. The only one of those we have is the scientific method. English does not use the scientific method, as far as I can tell it uses no effective epistemology what-so-ever. If anything those who study English (rather than communication) are more disinterested in effective communication than most scientists.
I never said I was disinterested in effective communication. I said English majors and people who adhere to rules about how writing should be done can fuck off. While the statistics and experimental methods of communication science might be a bit dodgy at times I have nothing but respect for that endeavour and have used the fruits of that particular scientific process to improve my own writing and presentation.
The rest of your post I largely agree with. You outline a collection of nuances and particulars which would impact a careful, scientific study of science communication. Something which people who complain about how I end this sentence would have trouble getting at. People who study English are doing a bad job because they think there is an objectively correct way to write. They are doing such a bad job I just praised Communication Science as a discipline in comparison.
You clearly misunderstood. I don't consider myself bad at something for which there is no acceptable standard.
So what metric are you using to claim they are writing poorly?
Arbitrary rules about how writing should be structured are just one more reason much of English is a waste of time. If they don't do the psychology experiment to show that some particular rule of the English language facilitates communication then I have no motivation to obey it.
I will try (and generally fail) to obey the rules because I don't know which ones make communication more effective, if all I have is the witchdoctor then to the witchdoctor I will go. That said sanctimonious English majors can fuck right off if they want to lecture me without actual science backing up their judgemental attitude.
The two examples I gave are of things for which there are definitely laws against, and HSBC were let of with a slap on the wrist. That is why I listen them. We have probable cause, they misfiled their reports to the SEC, the value they claimed their assets had they didn't. I happy to let the few banks which didn't require bailout money go, for the rest we have a reasonable suspicion they mislead the regulator and can search their records.
Lets ignore the fact that your words ring hollow because they bribed and bought the system to make their acts legal. There were things which should at least result in a court case.
Improper reporting of their assets. They claimed their collateralised debt obligations were worth more than they were on their balance sheets and there is clear evidence they knew they were worth less than they claimed. How about Merril Lynch selling CDOs to Lonestar, claiming it was for 22% of the face value when the terms of the deal made it clear they were only selling them for about 6% of the face value.
Or for a more recent example HSBC acting as banker for the worlds terrorists and getting a slap on the wrist.
These people are scum, and some of them did illegal things. We should be going through our banking system one banker at a time searching all their records and looking for anything they may have done which was complicit in causing the crash and going after each and every one of them personally, no point in going after the banks themselves if we are just going to bail them out.
Again, I didn't ask for evidence and a contradictory view point, I asked for proof.
Have you gone line by line through say 10% of the HFT algorithms used and formally demonstrated that there are no common hidden assumptions.
Since I don't value liquidity in the stock market and believe in democratisation of access (that is abolishing special privileged access to stock and commodities markets via financial barriers and requiring markets to trade with a single percentage price per trade, essentially abolishing brokers, HFT, the whole swathe of middle men) on moral grounds it doesn't really matter what evidence you present that HFT improves liquidity. You aren't going to convince me it is a good thing by that route. As such I invite you to stop trying to convince me HFT is a good thing. I believe anyone should simply be able to go and put an order on the stock market via the internet under the same terms. There should be no middle men. Or we could abolish limited liability and associated government interventions in the market, either is fine with me, although I think the first idea is a better idea if we want companies larger than a grapefruit.
I also don't care much about volatility, I would rather a volatile market in which the mean price reflected the long term value (which I know is discounting short term information) better than a stable price which is reflective of the true day to day value with rapid but stable short term correction but does not force people to think long term. I know this will discourage people investing in the stock market, I would offset this by changing the way we tax shares and reduce taxation on real long term investment. Basically if you can show that you have held a share for over six months, a year, multiple years I would make cap gain and dividend taxes on those shares much lower than they currently are.
It isn't that your case isn't plausible. Nor am I convinced either way on HFT effect on liquidity or the spread. From what I can tell with enough players in the market they do increase the information reflected in the price. That isn't what I'm calling you on.
I suggest instead of trying to convincing me that HFT is a good thing (which will never work) you focus on giving me proof that a large subset of HFT are not making the same assumptions. After all that is what I'm actually calling you on. Otherwise I am just going to assume you are one of the middle men acting as a parasite on the rest of us.
The SEC report on the May 6th crash said the exact opposite to what you have just said.
www.sec.gov/news/studies/2010/marketevents-report.pdf
So now you are just being dishonest. What exactly is the dog that you have in this race? Who pays your wages?
Evidence is insufficient, your have made statements that are so confident you need proof. Your position may be correct but the confidence with which you have stated it is simply too strong. You are running counter to the position of the regulators and economists and doing so while supremely confident.
You didn't demonstrate what I asked you to demonstrate. You just listed a bunch of ways HFT might be beneficial. Demonstrate that it cannot and will not amplify a crash like you claim.
"The key fact of the story is that the 'tech bubble' component of HFT is over"
I see you posting this kind of thing left right and center on this story and it makes me think you have some dog in this race because there is absolutely no way you can know this, even if you have access to the highly guarded information that goes into building HFT systems.
How can you possibly know that there wont be another such glitch?
Please present proof that matches the categorical and unambiguous nature of your claims. Demonstrate that there isn't some seemingly reasonable common but catastrophic assumption built into a large number of the HFT systems in existence. A study where researchers have been given access to the source code and surveyed say a couple of hundred such traders would be a nice start, but your claims are absolute so I would like to see proof.
All actions are equally trivial for a deity because they are supremely powerful. The only thing a deity cannot do is the logically impossible. Since typically a deity is also the creator that makes them responsible for every single event that occurs. That is what being a deity means, to be able to do anything short of create rocks they cant lift or destroy themselves.
"Once again, experience belies this."
You are not a deity, you are not supremely powerful. You can therefore be benevolent within the bounds of what you are able to do. No logical contradiction is implied if you don't do the absolute maximal amount of good.
Further you can be benevolent some of the time and not benevolent at other time, your benevolence can change through time. A deity is a timeless entity, a single instance of lacking in benevolence means the deity is not benevolent because a deities actions cannot be thought of as temporally localised.
You cannot take examples of what is possible and impossible for you and apply it to a deity, it just does not work. If you want to claim a benevolent deity exists you have to show it is reasonable such a concept is not self contradictory working from the definition itself, not from your experiences because you are a very different entity from that deity. You could punch someone in the mouth for no reason (or even for fun and profit), a benevolent deity cannot because it implies a logical contradiction.
It isn't that the deity has an obligation. It is that it is logically contradictory for a benevolent deity to act in an evil manner or fail to act in a good one. A benevolent deity isn't obliged to do good, it is logically contradictory for them to fail to.
"The deity, however, is bound to a singular course of action, predetermined by myself, my wife, and the other party."
Yes exactly. But they are not bound by moral obligation, they are bound by the requirement that their own nature be internally consistent. The only way around this is to argue that gods notion of benevolence is so alien to our own that rape, torture, death and genocide somehow working for the greater good can be considered benevolence.
Free will is a self contradictory concept whoever it is applied to but in this case that has precisely zero impact. A benevolent deity can only chose between the maximally good actions (or inactions) available to it, not because it lacks free will (however you define it), and not because it experiences a moral obligation, but for the same reason it cannot create square circles. You cant choose to be a married bachelor and a benevolent deity cant choose to fail to do good or to do evil.
Because all actions are equally trivial for a deity and they are the root cause of all actions there is no distinction between action and inaction. A benevolent deity has virtually no choice in their actions because they can only pick from the set of maximally good actions (because the only way to make benevolence make sense in this context is as I suggested before making benevolence a property of the deities nature, and any violation of this nature is a grave indiscretion). There is no difference between a deity failing to prevent genocide and a deity failing to blow the wind so the smallest number of people experience an eggy fart. As a result all that is necessary to show such a deity does not exist is to find a preventable instance of suffering, it helps to find an extreme case because it prevents the 'greater good' rebuff, but frankly the time I stubbed my toe with no purpose does the job.
This is precisely the problem with deities, because they dabble in the infinite they end up with a whole bunch of properties which are extreme on one axis or another.
In which case I clearly need to woosh myself...
If you think I think YHWH is benevolent then you have inferred a lot from a very short statement. YHWH is by most accounts one of the worst entities in fiction responsible for genocide, torture and poor taste in sea food.
Depends, Dick could be an expert philosopher who has supporting arguments for why any creator deity is likely to be benevolent. Most natural theologians will provide you with such arguments to back up their particular deity. You are judging his argument without knowing it in detail. It could be the case that he is making an error by conflating deities with benevolent deities, or it could be that he has an argument for why any deity would by definition be good (if you want an example consider the Christian conception of ethics as being a reflection of gods nature, making god good by definition).
"Would a benevolent deity unfailingly override the poor decisions made by humans?" - Doesn't need to. Just has to fail to do it once when it would be desirable for them to do so and possible for them to do so. Dick judges that he has encountered one such incidence which is sufficient to rule out those deities. You might argue he has put his line in the sand as to what constitutes too much suffering and evil in a poor place, but I don't suggest making that argument to veterans faces unless you yourself have watched comrades slowly bleed to death while you pick bits of shrapnel out your legs.
Your request is obviously daft. Collections of atoms behaving as though they have free will is exactly what we would expect if the materialists are right. That is the point, a universe with conciousness and free will looks no bloody different to one without. That is precisely why they are spurious concepts. As far as us to "evenly distribute [our] time between barking, shrieking, silence, and speaking", asking someone without free will to exercise free will to prove their point is just absurd.
But not orthogonal to the question of if there are benevolent deities.
"It's a great user interface from the user's point of view, but a really terrible system to have."
I feel as though you are attacking our banking system somehow...
He said 70, not 7.
It's Britain. We're used to terrorism. I remember after the 7/7 bombings one of the more popular jokes in the immediate aftermath was 'so Al Qaeda made the underground late, Ken Livingstone has been doing that for years and he doesn't even need bombs.'. Honestly I'm amazed no one offered these guys a cup of tea.
No, and neither would you, because the US doesn't have a left wing crazy with any hope of winning. The left in the US has some real idiots (Hi everyone who graduated from Berkeley!) but you go ahead and try to tell me that there will ever be a member of the US senate who could be described as communist the way some of the senate could be described as corporatist or fascist. The US has a stupid left, and the stupid portions of the left in the US spend most of their time attacking each other so that they don't get in, it doesn't have a effective radical left like say Italy or France.
I don't understand your example. If it was an attempt to argue by analogy you would be better served to give a clear example where atheism was a motivating factor. Please be careful no to confuse anti-theism (which I'm happy to admit can motivate people to do things) with atheism (which I claim rarely can). Note that it isn't enough for someone to claim they are doing something for a reason, they have to actually be doing it for that reason. The Reign of Terror was done in the name of justice and reason, but no one is insane enough to suggest that justice or reason caused the Reign of Terror.
I'm not deceiving myself. I'm just not confusing atheism with anti-theism. There is no gospel of atheism, and I hope that is just a poorly chosen rhetorical device. Many Christians tie Thomist notions to Christianity, but Thomism is not Christianity and if someone tried to suggest that Christianity implied Thomism I'd call bullshit on them just like I'm going to have to call bullshit on you here. Atheism is not anti-theism.
Anti-theism has indeed played the same role as religion in some historical atrocities. Many of it's adherents have been organised and used violence. But you are confusing a tertiary concern (lack of belief in deities) for the primary one (dislike of organised religion). I say this as someone who is an anti-theist so it isn't like I'd dodging criticism of my beliefs here, I'm just pointing that you are going after the wrong ideal. But you seem to think atheism either is anti-theism, or implies it. It isn't and it doesn't. If it were perspectives like my own about religion would be far more popular with non-believers than they are.
No, no it hasn't. Many religious people are quick to point out that philosophically speaking atheist has very little to offer. Not being compelled to a belief in god is not a motivator. Believers are correct in this regard, weak atheism will not tell you much about the world and it does not really do anything for you. For a start purely descriptive statements cannot alone act as a motivators. As such it cant be the cause of very much.
Communism, capitalism, imperialism are all complex beliefs with implications, screw up how you apply them and they can cause you to be a douche. Atheism isn't really as ism at all, we only label it as such because historically religious belief is so common we needed a word to describe not having one.
This is not to say there weren't atheists who happened to assholes ("Hi Stalin!"). But they weren't assholes because they were atheists. Because they were communists, or socialists, or fascists, or conservative, or liberal, or any number of other justifications for actions, sure, but not because they were atheists. Because atheism offers virtually nothing by way of imperative.
You want to warn me of the dangers of my politics because I'm a liberal, a social democrat, a believer in democracy, have at it dude. Plenty of very bad things have been done as a direct result of those ideals and I'm all for being careful applying them. But you are being disingenuous when you say religion was used as an excuse, just like I would be disingenuous if I claimed the reign of terror had nothing to do with radical liberalism. Religion can cause strife, any ideology can cause strife. It isn't just an excuse, it is part of a complex system of causes.
Positive atheism is not exclusive with being 'sensible' and can be perfectly reasonable and rational. Many, if not most conceptions of a divinity are inherently self-contradictory and one can provide good arguments for why they do not exist. As an example consider that the God implied by the Kalam Cosmological argument is impossible if any exist definition of 'cause' is used when describing the cause of the universe (a efficient without material cause is contrary to all experience, a required event before another required event makes no sense in a atemporal setting). It is perfectly reasonable to take some or a few of the more common but contradictory conceptions of a deity or deity and assert they do not exist by looking at how they are self contradictory. Non-existence of contradictory being is as close to an objective fact as scientific truth or anything else we label as 'fact'. And those are the deist gods, showing that the gods of specific religions do not exist is child's play.
Positive atheism is not the same thing as believing that all believers are insane. I can think you are wrong without thinking you are a nut job. Besides insanity is a moral judgement (it amounts to asserting how a mind 'should' work, whatever that means) and I've no interest in passing moral judgement, just describing what is.
Give me a sufficiently fleshed out commonly used definition of god and I will probably have an argument why such a being is impossible. Given that many theists are unwilling to define god I define it for them as "an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omniscient being who is the cause of the universe". On this, or any similar definition I can show this deity does not exist. It might be the problem of evil, or the problem of unbelief, or something like the one I gave above. If not then you and I are simply defining god differently and I'm happy to say I'm a weak atheist on your definition. I'm likely to also point out your definition is so vague as to have no implications what-so-ever of course, but that doesn't change the fact that with respect to it I am not a strong atheist.
Are there atheists like you describe? Sure, there are a couple of assholes. And yes they pretty much have a religion. But you are conflating this religion with strong atheism, and that simply isn't the case. My own existence acts as a refutation.