Great Lake water levels are dictated by the local climate. Like how much rain the region gets, and cloud cover and other factors controlling evaporation. Even if we were in a state where we could predict general changes in the global climate, we can't predict the factors that lead to water level changes in the great lakes any more than a few weeks ahead. In general, a warmer global climate almost always means a wetter global climate. But still, you can't extrapolate that to any one locality and predict more rain there.
There's no reason to believe, even if we were right about CO2 emissions increasing the average global temperature by 6C, that we should reduce CO2 emissions at all. Even if you take, as a given, that temps are rising, and anthropogenic CO2 is causing it, there's not a shred of evidence that the particular distribution of increased average temperature will be detrimental to humanity.
I completely agree. I'd go further, and say that if it were demonstrated that we could raise average global temperature by 6C, we should take every step to ensure that this happens. Even the worst imagined consequences of such a change pale in comparison to the certain consequences of the return of glaciation in the next ice age, which is only estimated to be a few thousand years away. If it turns out to be within our control to keep the interglacial period going indefinitely, it's the best new humanity ever had.
Re:Article doesn't live up to expectations
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Bastardi's Wager
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· Score: 1
I started to lose confidence at this point. It's a standard argument from incredulity: I don't understand this, therefore it can't be true. He also confuses what's causing global warming: it's not only the energy input that controls how much warming occurs, but also how much energy is lost to space. And the problem that everyone's been talking about is that less energy is lost to space than before.
It's not an argument from incredulity. It's an argument based on well-established fact. Of the greenhouse gases that keep our atmosphere warm, there is only one that is not a trace gas, and that's water. The trace gases play minor roles. Moreover, CO2 has two narrow spectral absorption bands that play a significant role in the heat exchange process of the climate. Even at the present CO2 levels, these bands are already opaque. More CO2 can only enlarge the fringes of the bands, which represents an incredibly minor change in radiation absorption. Small CO2 concentration changes can hypothetically cause changes significant enough to measure in the larger climate, but only at lower concentrations where those absorption bands are not yet opaque.
Politics will not change the outcome. The idea that the housing market collapse, or bank collapse, or a freakin tunsian protest, is going to change the climate is absurd. Here's the last 50 years of CO2 levels. http://i37.tinypic.com/al6ips.jpg It's practically linear. The average CO2 concentration change is far more significant to any variation that would come from economic disturbances or any laws taxing CO2. So enough with the hedging. Place your bets.
The actual climate can be erratic, but the CO2 concentrations are as regular as clockwork and will continue to be.
There are rules for rhetoric. When it comes to global warming, the rules are "settled science", "overwhelming consensus", and "oil company shills". It doesn't have to be true or even make sense. They just have to say it.
* Coal mining has directly killed 100,000 people [wikipedia.org] over the last century in the United States alone, and is killing thousands every year around the world, right now. It causes many more cases of lung disease in workers, at least tens of thousands a year worldwide.
That is ridiculously misleading. You make it sound like we're still loosing thousands of miners every year to mine collapses, like it's 1910.
Have you need read the leaked emails? They control the climate journals. They tweak or reject critical papers. If they lose control of one journal, they try to discredit it.
Your link to political propaganda from the Center for American Progress Action Fund demonstrates nicely that the Bastardi's critics are politically driven rather than scientifically.
The science that says AGW is occurring is settled. That doesn't mean we have a precise model for how fast it will occur.
Nonsense. If you don't know how fast anthropogenic causes are forcing the climate (and you don't), then you don't know if it's faster, or even significant at all, in comparison to non-anthropogenic climate changes. In which case you have no AGW.
They probably could publish a table saying that if a decade from now the CO2 level is x and nothing else changes, the increase in temperature will be y
If that were possible, I'd be a believer. I have been looking for years for the origins of the climate forcing factors for CO2 that they plug into their models. Citations lead to citations of citations of citations. It's that little number that drives everything, but no one seems to want to talk about it or where it comes from, or what the scientific basis for belief in it is.
If someone wants to point me to a paper that establishes a basis in fact for the climate forcing factor of CO2, I'd be much obliged. Please for the love of God do not link me to a paper which just declares the number, with a citation to an IPCC report, which cites a paper which cites a paper which cites an older IPCC report.
Oh, but the climate activists posing as scientists DO make predictions on similar scales as this. Or haven't you read the IPCC reports? If the IPCC wants to admit that their models have no predictive power, then perhaps we'll be moving in the right direction.
It's just more political posturing to claim that anyone who questions your claims is funded by some Big Bad. It's bullshit. What are your predictions for temperature trends? Put up or shut up.
2) You can't currently sue more than one person at a time if they didn't collude
Not necessarily. This is a judgment in the West Virginia district. If Illinois doesn't reach the same conclusion, it will be a discrepancy that has to be decided by the Supreme Court.
Insurance premiums are cost-effective. There's a competitive market. There's nothing stupid about buying a correctly-priced insurance policy.
Lotteries are legally enforced state monopolies, instituted for the purpose of being able to sell massively overpriced tickets to morons. If lotteries were competitive, the tickets would cost half the price or less, and it would be a more justifiable thing to buy one.
42 million people per year being harangued for no reason at all."
If by "harangued," you mean detained for further screening, 42 million people per year are harangued so that other people are not able to blow up airliners -- not for no reason at all.
Airline terrorism is NOT a real threat, be it ever so dramatic on the few times when it does happen.
I think you miss the point. The "drama" produced is as much the threat -- and the payoff to the terrorists -- as the actual deaths incurred. The importance of preventing a terrorist from blowing up an airliner is far greater on many fronts -- including such things as the recruitment and fundraising abilities for that terrorist group, the inspiration for new terrorist groups, and morale and economy of the victimized society -- than, say, prevent an equivalent number of accidental deaths through enforcing speed limits.
If I buy $150 worth of groceries and throw in a $1 lottery ticket on top of it, the effective cost to me is zero. I'm never going to notice that dollar being gone.
No... the net effective cost to you is $1. The fact that you play a psychological game with yourself to make yourself "not notice" it, is really irrelevant to the actual cost to you.
Not having that dollar is going to make no difference to my life.
It's going to make a $1 difference in your life. If you do it every time you go shopping, it's going to make a significant cumulative difference in your life. If that dollar was really not going to make a difference to your life, maybe you should have dropped it in a donation box instead.
But in the (exceedingly unlikely, yes) event that I win a $100 million jackpot, the payoff is damn near infinite. Having that kind of money can't really be compared to, say, getting a raise, or seeing your stocks go up in the market. It's just on a whole different scale.
That's another psychological illusion. $100 million seems "damn near infinite" until you actually have it... after which you give half to the government, then generally buy a mansion you can't afford and end up in bankruptcy.
So in short: infinity - (0 * 10^-9) = infinity. Don't assume that everyone who buys a lottery ticket is ignorant. Actually, I suspect most people who buy lottery tickets are making this kind of calculation, even if they're not doing the numbers quite as explicitly.
Exactly, that's the equation. They are spending their money because of a psychological exploit which makes that appear to be the equation when it is not actually. That is exactly why people who play the lottery are ignorant.
Here's an example in the opposite direction, which I think will make things a little more clear. Suppose I were to set up a "reverse lottery," which works as follows. You have, let's say, a net worth of $100,000. If you sign up for my lottery, I pay you a dollar. Then you pick six numbers between 1 and 10, I draw six balls out of urns, and if the numbers match... I take everything you own. Your house, your car, your computer, the clothes off your back. You're turned out on the street.
In probabilistic terms, it would make perfect sense for you to play. 1 - (100000 * 10^-6) = 0.9, which means that the game has a positive expected payoff. In fact, it would make sense for you to play a lot, up to whatever limit is allowed, let's say once a day. But would you do it? I kind of doubt you would, because every day, you'd be looking at that one-in-a-million chance of having your life shattered. Most people would consider that a bad risk, no matter what the raw numbers say. And people who play the lottery consider it a pretty good risk for the same reason.
The problem with this scenario is that the payoff automatically increases too quickly, since you have to give up all your proceeds from selling tickets whenever someone wins. If you had to give up just the initial net worth of $100,000 if someone won, you'd be a fool not to do this. You'd have the most profitable casino in history, if you had customers stupid enough to pay. If someone happened to hit the number before you made $100,000 on tickets, you could easily get a loan to tide you over, with that kind of business model.
Why nobody was able to find any alien civilizations yet ? - That's because of there are black holes in place of them now
We have never detected a black hole with only the mass of a planet. Such things probably do not exist in the universe. We haven't found any alien civilizations yet because we don't know what to look for and even if we did, we don't have the technology required. I suspect our civilization is unique in its excessively technology-oriented behavior. I doubt many, if any, alien civilizations will ever be transmitting radio signals unless they get that technology from us.
99% of population are delegating their future and safety to the remaining 1%. They also hope that this 1% knows all possible consequences. Isn't that scary ?
How did you know when you wrote the above, that typing that exact sequence of letters into a computer wouldn't destroy the world? That sequence was probably never tried before. So how did you know. You didn't, but you took the risk anyway, on behalf of all of humanity. There is nothing in our understanding of physics that suggests any more danger to the world from the LHC than there is in that, or any other action. Just because someone comes up with a sci-fi doomsday scenario, whether it's the LHC, 2012, 2000, or the Terminator movies, doesn't make it an actual danger. Just because someone -- or even a LOT of people -- believe something is a danger, does not make it a danger. Those are fictions and fantasies. If there was an actual foundation of the possibility of a risk in physics, that would be a different matter. But there isn't. The only reason why some people assume there to be a risk there is because other people assume there to be a risk there, not from any rational basis.
If present science are so sure about all possible consequences of creating black holes using Large Hadron Collider or any collider that size, than why any expirements needed?
Actually, physicists have no idea if it will create micro black holes. In a poll of physicists I saw, I think there was a 40/60 split. If black holes are created it means there are more than 4 dimensions, as string theories predict. Either way, the result will have profound consequences for our knowledge. But there are no scenarios under which those black holes would be dangerous.
Especially if this nothing has one way information flow. Information can enter black hole but can't escape. It could lead to unpredicted consequences in either case: in a small scale or big scale.
That is a paradoxical view of black holes. Some may hold that view, but it certainly can't be stated definitively. Most physicists believe that information that enters a black hole gradually radiates out in Hawking radiation.
I was an atheistic highschooler in a religious school as well. If people ridiculed you for being an atheist, then they shouldn't have. Ridicule of any sort doesn't have a proper place in school. That's not something that falls under the 1st amendment though. There is no right to not be in the minority in one's beliefs or attitudes, and a practice of trying to pretend that differences in beliefs and attitudes don't exist is absurd. Silencing behaviors that are based on certain beliefs and attitudes just because they aren't unanimously shared is worse that absurd. It's detrimental to an open society. A school should be a place of open exchange and intellectual honesty, not hiding behind political correctness.
Having the coach say a prayer before a game when I was an atheist didn't harm me in any way. It just made me feel like I was the only one who wasn't an idiot. I never once felt like I needed to be shielded from the beliefs of others. I felt like my beliefs were well-founded and didn't need sheltering and could stand up to anyone else's.
As I grew up, those beliefs happened to change, but I think the point remains. The idea that thinking and talking about God should be limited to churches and homes is absurd. Thought and speech about God does not harm people. Schools are a place of education, and an education sterilized of the concepts of God and religion is no education.
To violate this law, the offending speech must be made with the intention of outraging you. Actually not just you, but a "significant number" of your religion. If your religion comprises only you, you're probably out of luck. (unless the number 1 counts as a "significant number".)
They don't want to be confronted by something they don't agree with which might make them think for themselves, so they outlaw it.
There's no outlawing of any expression of any particular view or belief in this law. For that, you would have to go to Germany where you can be put in jail for saying the holocaust didn't happen.
The founding fathers, who wrote the concept into the nation's documentation, were deists, not atheists.
This is a modern myth that really annoys me. The closest anyone can find to a deist among the founding fathers is Ben Franklin, who at times called himself a deist. But he also spoke in favor of Divine Providence, which is opposed to the central tenants of deism. Thomas Paine was a Christian, then an atheist while he was in France, and then at the end of his life a Christian again. Every other founding father was a Christian. None of the best of them bought into dogmas of any one denomination. Each had their own idea of Christianity. They were all free-thinkers. That's why they were the founding fathers.
I think you perhaps don't understand the concept of God. It is not "a guy who can do cool shit". It is the immutable and infinite source of all existence. What makes you think that God should be doing miracles? Obviously, if you were from any background other than a Judeo-Christian one, the thought wouldn't even occur to you. Either the miracles recorded in the Jewish and Christian scriptures actually happened, or else there's no reason to expect miracles from God in the first place. The reality is that apart from the continual influence of God, the universe would cease to exist, yet to you the fact that it exists, yet without things that look strange enough for you to call them "miracles" means that God doesn't exist? How is that reason? God should do weird things so that you don't have to use your own mind to figure out that he exists? I don't think so. Most people don't need what you call "miracles" to figure out that God exists. Meanwhile it sounds like any competent magician could start a cult and you would join it.
Would that include the right to have its tennents questioned? To have its absurdities drawn out for people?
Of course. I know of no Christian who wouldn't welcome this. As Thomas Jefferson said, it's only error that needs government protection to survive. Truth can defend itself.
A) I am unaware of ANY proscription against a christian brigning a Bible to school.
I know there's been at least one famous court case arising from this.
B) If Bible study clubs are to be allowed, then how about Torah and Talmud study clubs? Koran? How about study of the Upinishads? What about a buddhist meditation club?
Of course. That's the problem. Those things are -- and should be -- allowed. Then someone wants to start a Christian bible-study club and the officials start talking about "separation of church and state" and getting sued by the ACLU.
C) Praying out loud during the times when a student may direct his own attentions is not prohibited. Praying out loud at other times is just as much a disruption as anything else. Nobody is stopping students from voluntary prayer.
Teachers are stopped from voluntary audible prayer. Short prayers before football games by coaches have been the subjects of successful lawsuits to silence them. The practice of forcing a religious society to be sterilized of any appearance of religion in public is outrageous. Even the history books nowadays are whitewashed of the religious motivations and philosophies of historical figures. Let the coach say a freakin prayer. This isn't the USSR. Why is it okay to open every session of congress with a prayer, but if you try to open the school-year with a prayer, you get a lawsuit because it violates the 1st amendment?! An amendment that is nothing but a limitation on what CONGRESS may do? The prayer before congress is allowed because a prayer before congress doesn't implement a state religion. A prayer before a football game doesn't implement a state religion either.
Would you support an Altar in classrooms for those whose religious prayer traditions include blood letting?
If it was a school in a village where the large majority of the kids practiced that religion, then I certainly would. If it was done in a typical American school you'd probably get a lot of parents complaining that it was something that was highly objectionable from their religious views, and they wanted it stopped on the grounds that they find it objectionable. And that is completely legitimate and schools should desist from doing anything that significant numbers of parents find objectionable. What is not legitimate is to try to make the claim that the 1st Amendment prohibits bloodletting in classrooms, because it does not . Nor does the 1st Amendment prohibit teacher-lead prayers in classrooms. It doesn't even prohibit schools from adopting official religions. I would love to see public Christian schools, Jewish schools and Muslim schools in places where the local populations overwhelmingly those religions. Though I am Christian, I would rather send my kids to a Jewish or Muslim school than a secular school.
You are exaggerating the differences between the concepts of God. The concept of God is one of the infinite, eternal, immutable, singular, source of the finite, temporal, and mutable universe. God is Being itself and Coming-Into-Being itself. Everything else that exists, or seems to exist, does so though extension of the only Real Existence, which is God. God is Life itself. Nothing else lives, but only receives life from God. The more removed from God something is, the less it can be said to be alive. The spiritual is closer to God than the natural; the mind is closer to God than the body. God is Good itself and Truth itself. The further from God something is, the less it is good and the less it is true. The order that is implicit and immutable in God is the order which is inscribed into the spiritual world and the natural world arising from God, and which govern how they operate. Insight into the nature of God can therefore be obtained through the observation of the order of natural and spiritual worlds. For an individual to live a life of order, one must live a life that is good and true. Such a life comprises charity, generosity, reflection, sincerity, modesty, humility, contentment, moderation, and restraint of one's appetites and passions.
These are the teachings of the scholars and theologians of every monotheistic religion and philosophy, including but not limited to Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Pythagoreanism, and Platonism. Those remaining religions which are not consistent with the entire description are consistent with most of it. I believe that those who compare religions and see mostly difference (though this may be most people, religious or not) lack fundamental understanding of religion. As Ghandi said, all the major religions are fundamentally true.
Science is "natural philosophy". It is a subset of philosophy which is constrained to the natural world. This constraint is powerful, because natural evidence from the natural world can be objectively measured and requires no subjective agreements. In a sense it is the easiest branch of philosophy for this reason.
However the idea that the natural world is all of reality, and thus science is actually the study of everything (the doctrine of naturalism is one of these "extraordinary claims" that you mention, for which there is no extraordinary evidence.
Many religious claims (those to do with specific acts of Gods) don't even stand up to basic logical tests of internal self-consistency nor conformance with the known laws of physics
One could -- and many did -- say the same things about the initial claims of quantum mechanics.
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Great Lake water levels are dictated by the local climate. Like how much rain the region gets, and cloud cover and other factors controlling evaporation. Even if we were in a state where we could predict general changes in the global climate, we can't predict the factors that lead to water level changes in the great lakes any more than a few weeks ahead. In general, a warmer global climate almost always means a wetter global climate. But still, you can't extrapolate that to any one locality and predict more rain there.
It hasn't been continuously warming for the last 50 years either. The latest warming trend only began around 1980.
There's no reason to believe, even if we were right about CO2 emissions increasing the average global temperature by 6C, that we should reduce CO2 emissions at all. Even if you take, as a given, that temps are rising, and anthropogenic CO2 is causing it, there's not a shred of evidence that the particular distribution of increased average temperature will be detrimental to humanity.
I completely agree. I'd go further, and say that if it were demonstrated that we could raise average global temperature by 6C, we should take every step to ensure that this happens. Even the worst imagined consequences of such a change pale in comparison to the certain consequences of the return of glaciation in the next ice age, which is only estimated to be a few thousand years away. If it turns out to be within our control to keep the interglacial period going indefinitely, it's the best new humanity ever had.
I started to lose confidence at this point. It's a standard argument from incredulity: I don't understand this, therefore it can't be true. He also confuses what's causing global warming: it's not only the energy input that controls how much warming occurs, but also how much energy is lost to space. And the problem that everyone's been talking about is that less energy is lost to space than before.
It's not an argument from incredulity. It's an argument based on well-established fact. Of the greenhouse gases that keep our atmosphere warm, there is only one that is not a trace gas, and that's water. The trace gases play minor roles. Moreover, CO2 has two narrow spectral absorption bands that play a significant role in the heat exchange process of the climate. Even at the present CO2 levels, these bands are already opaque. More CO2 can only enlarge the fringes of the bands, which represents an incredibly minor change in radiation absorption. Small CO2 concentration changes can hypothetically cause changes significant enough to measure in the larger climate, but only at lower concentrations where those absorption bands are not yet opaque.
Politics will not change the outcome. The idea that the housing market collapse, or bank collapse, or a freakin tunsian protest, is going to change the climate is absurd. Here's the last 50 years of CO2 levels. http://i37.tinypic.com/al6ips.jpg It's practically linear. The average CO2 concentration change is far more significant to any variation that would come from economic disturbances or any laws taxing CO2. So enough with the hedging. Place your bets.
The actual climate can be erratic, but the CO2 concentrations are as regular as clockwork and will continue to be.
There are rules for rhetoric. When it comes to global warming, the rules are "settled science", "overwhelming consensus", and "oil company shills". It doesn't have to be true or even make sense. They just have to say it.
* Coal mining has directly killed 100,000 people [wikipedia.org] over the last century in the United States alone, and is killing thousands every year around the world, right now. It causes many more cases of lung disease in workers, at least tens of thousands a year worldwide.
That is ridiculously misleading. You make it sound like we're still loosing thousands of miners every year to mine collapses, like it's 1910.
How do they manage to do that?
Have you need read the leaked emails? They control the climate journals. They tweak or reject critical papers. If they lose control of one journal, they try to discredit it.
Your link to political propaganda from the Center for American Progress Action Fund demonstrates nicely that the Bastardi's critics are politically driven rather than scientifically.
The science that says AGW is occurring is settled. That doesn't mean we have a precise model for how fast it will occur.
Nonsense. If you don't know how fast anthropogenic causes are forcing the climate (and you don't), then you don't know if it's faster, or even significant at all, in comparison to non-anthropogenic climate changes. In which case you have no AGW.
They probably could publish a table saying that if a decade from now the CO2 level is x and nothing else changes, the increase in temperature will be y
If that were possible, I'd be a believer. I have been looking for years for the origins of the climate forcing factors for CO2 that they plug into their models. Citations lead to citations of citations of citations. It's that little number that drives everything, but no one seems to want to talk about it or where it comes from, or what the scientific basis for belief in it is.
If someone wants to point me to a paper that establishes a basis in fact for the climate forcing factor of CO2, I'd be much obliged. Please for the love of God do not link me to a paper which just declares the number, with a citation to an IPCC report, which cites a paper which cites a paper which cites an older IPCC report.
Oh, but the climate activists posing as scientists DO make predictions on similar scales as this. Or haven't you read the IPCC reports? If the IPCC wants to admit that their models have no predictive power, then perhaps we'll be moving in the right direction.
It's just more political posturing to claim that anyone who questions your claims is funded by some Big Bad. It's bullshit. What are your predictions for temperature trends? Put up or shut up.
2) You can't currently sue more than one person at a time if they didn't collude
Not necessarily. This is a judgment in the West Virginia district. If Illinois doesn't reach the same conclusion, it will be a discrepancy that has to be decided by the Supreme Court.
Insurance premiums are cost-effective. There's a competitive market. There's nothing stupid about buying a correctly-priced insurance policy.
Lotteries are legally enforced state monopolies, instituted for the purpose of being able to sell massively overpriced tickets to morons. If lotteries were competitive, the tickets would cost half the price or less, and it would be a more justifiable thing to buy one.
If by "harangued," you mean detained for further screening, 42 million people per year are harangued so that other people are not able to blow up airliners -- not for no reason at all.
I think you miss the point. The "drama" produced is as much the threat -- and the payoff to the terrorists -- as the actual deaths incurred. The importance of preventing a terrorist from blowing up an airliner is far greater on many fronts -- including such things as the recruitment and fundraising abilities for that terrorist group, the inspiration for new terrorist groups, and morale and economy of the victimized society -- than, say, prevent an equivalent number of accidental deaths through enforcing speed limits.
No... the net effective cost to you is $1. The fact that you play a psychological game with yourself to make yourself "not notice" it, is really irrelevant to the actual cost to you.
It's going to make a $1 difference in your life. If you do it every time you go shopping, it's going to make a significant cumulative difference in your life. If that dollar was really not going to make a difference to your life, maybe you should have dropped it in a donation box instead.
That's another psychological illusion. $100 million seems "damn near infinite" until you actually have it... after which you give half to the government, then generally buy a mansion you can't afford and end up in bankruptcy.
Exactly, that's the equation. They are spending their money because of a psychological exploit which makes that appear to be the equation when it is not actually. That is exactly why people who play the lottery are ignorant.
The problem with this scenario is that the payoff automatically increases too quickly, since you have to give up all your proceeds from selling tickets whenever someone wins. If you had to give up just the initial net worth of $100,000 if someone won, you'd be a fool not to do this. You'd have the most profitable casino in history, if you had customers stupid enough to pay. If someone happened to hit the number before you made $100,000 on tickets, you could easily get a loan to tide you over, with that kind of business model.
We have never detected a black hole with only the mass of a planet. Such things probably do not exist in the universe. We haven't found any alien civilizations yet because we don't know what to look for and even if we did, we don't have the technology required. I suspect our civilization is unique in its excessively technology-oriented behavior. I doubt many, if any, alien civilizations will ever be transmitting radio signals unless they get that technology from us.
How did you know when you wrote the above, that typing that exact sequence of letters into a computer wouldn't destroy the world? That sequence was probably never tried before. So how did you know. You didn't, but you took the risk anyway, on behalf of all of humanity. There is nothing in our understanding of physics that suggests any more danger to the world from the LHC than there is in that, or any other action. Just because someone comes up with a sci-fi doomsday scenario, whether it's the LHC, 2012, 2000, or the Terminator movies, doesn't make it an actual danger. Just because someone -- or even a LOT of people -- believe something is a danger, does not make it a danger. Those are fictions and fantasies. If there was an actual foundation of the possibility of a risk in physics, that would be a different matter. But there isn't. The only reason why some people assume there to be a risk there is because other people assume there to be a risk there, not from any rational basis.
Actually, physicists have no idea if it will create micro black holes. In a poll of physicists I saw, I think there was a 40/60 split. If black holes are created it means there are more than 4 dimensions, as string theories predict. Either way, the result will have profound consequences for our knowledge. But there are no scenarios under which those black holes would be dangerous.
That is a paradoxical view of black holes. Some may hold that view, but it certainly can't be stated definitively. Most physicists believe that information that enters a black hole gradually radiates out in Hawking radiation.
I was an atheistic highschooler in a religious school as well. If people ridiculed you for being an atheist, then they shouldn't have. Ridicule of any sort doesn't have a proper place in school. That's not something that falls under the 1st amendment though. There is no right to not be in the minority in one's beliefs or attitudes, and a practice of trying to pretend that differences in beliefs and attitudes don't exist is absurd. Silencing behaviors that are based on certain beliefs and attitudes just because they aren't unanimously shared is worse that absurd. It's detrimental to an open society. A school should be a place of open exchange and intellectual honesty, not hiding behind political correctness.
Having the coach say a prayer before a game when I was an atheist didn't harm me in any way. It just made me feel like I was the only one who wasn't an idiot. I never once felt like I needed to be shielded from the beliefs of others. I felt like my beliefs were well-founded and didn't need sheltering and could stand up to anyone else's.
As I grew up, those beliefs happened to change, but I think the point remains. The idea that thinking and talking about God should be limited to churches and homes is absurd. Thought and speech about God does not harm people. Schools are a place of education, and an education sterilized of the concepts of God and religion is no education.
To violate this law, the offending speech must be made with the intention of outraging you. Actually not just you, but a "significant number" of your religion. If your religion comprises only you, you're probably out of luck. (unless the number 1 counts as a "significant number".)
There's no outlawing of any expression of any particular view or belief in this law. For that, you would have to go to Germany where you can be put in jail for saying the holocaust didn't happen.
This is a modern myth that really annoys me. The closest anyone can find to a deist among the founding fathers is Ben Franklin, who at times called himself a deist. But he also spoke in favor of Divine Providence, which is opposed to the central tenants of deism. Thomas Paine was a Christian, then an atheist while he was in France, and then at the end of his life a Christian again. Every other founding father was a Christian. None of the best of them bought into dogmas of any one denomination. Each had their own idea of Christianity. They were all free-thinkers. That's why they were the founding fathers.
I think you perhaps don't understand the concept of God. It is not "a guy who can do cool shit". It is the immutable and infinite source of all existence. What makes you think that God should be doing miracles? Obviously, if you were from any background other than a Judeo-Christian one, the thought wouldn't even occur to you. Either the miracles recorded in the Jewish and Christian scriptures actually happened, or else there's no reason to expect miracles from God in the first place. The reality is that apart from the continual influence of God, the universe would cease to exist, yet to you the fact that it exists, yet without things that look strange enough for you to call them "miracles" means that God doesn't exist? How is that reason? God should do weird things so that you don't have to use your own mind to figure out that he exists? I don't think so. Most people don't need what you call "miracles" to figure out that God exists. Meanwhile it sounds like any competent magician could start a cult and you would join it.
Of course. I know of no Christian who wouldn't welcome this. As Thomas Jefferson said, it's only error that needs government protection to survive. Truth can defend itself.
I know there's been at least one famous court case arising from this.
Of course. That's the problem. Those things are -- and should be -- allowed. Then someone wants to start a Christian bible-study club and the officials start talking about "separation of church and state" and getting sued by the ACLU.
Teachers are stopped from voluntary audible prayer. Short prayers before football games by coaches have been the subjects of successful lawsuits to silence them. The practice of forcing a religious society to be sterilized of any appearance of religion in public is outrageous. Even the history books nowadays are whitewashed of the religious motivations and philosophies of historical figures. Let the coach say a freakin prayer. This isn't the USSR. Why is it okay to open every session of congress with a prayer, but if you try to open the school-year with a prayer, you get a lawsuit because it violates the 1st amendment?! An amendment that is nothing but a limitation on what CONGRESS may do? The prayer before congress is allowed because a prayer before congress doesn't implement a state religion. A prayer before a football game doesn't implement a state religion either.
If it was a school in a village where the large majority of the kids practiced that religion, then I certainly would. If it was done in a typical American school you'd probably get a lot of parents complaining that it was something that was highly objectionable from their religious views, and they wanted it stopped on the grounds that they find it objectionable. And that is completely legitimate and schools should desist from doing anything that significant numbers of parents find objectionable. What is not legitimate is to try to make the claim that the 1st Amendment prohibits bloodletting in classrooms, because it does not . Nor does the 1st Amendment prohibit teacher-lead prayers in classrooms. It doesn't even prohibit schools from adopting official religions. I would love to see public Christian schools, Jewish schools and Muslim schools in places where the local populations overwhelmingly those religions. Though I am Christian, I would rather send my kids to a Jewish or Muslim school than a secular school.
You are exaggerating the differences between the concepts of God. The concept of God is one of the infinite, eternal, immutable, singular, source of the finite, temporal, and mutable universe. God is Being itself and Coming-Into-Being itself. Everything else that exists, or seems to exist, does so though extension of the only Real Existence, which is God. God is Life itself. Nothing else lives, but only receives life from God. The more removed from God something is, the less it can be said to be alive. The spiritual is closer to God than the natural; the mind is closer to God than the body. God is Good itself and Truth itself. The further from God something is, the less it is good and the less it is true. The order that is implicit and immutable in God is the order which is inscribed into the spiritual world and the natural world arising from God, and which govern how they operate. Insight into the nature of God can therefore be obtained through the observation of the order of natural and spiritual worlds. For an individual to live a life of order, one must live a life that is good and true. Such a life comprises charity, generosity, reflection, sincerity, modesty, humility, contentment, moderation, and restraint of one's appetites and passions.
These are the teachings of the scholars and theologians of every monotheistic religion and philosophy, including but not limited to Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Pythagoreanism, and Platonism. Those remaining religions which are not consistent with the entire description are consistent with most of it. I believe that those who compare religions and see mostly difference (though this may be most people, religious or not) lack fundamental understanding of religion. As Ghandi said, all the major religions are fundamentally true.
Science is "natural philosophy". It is a subset of philosophy which is constrained to the natural world. This constraint is powerful, because natural evidence from the natural world can be objectively measured and requires no subjective agreements. In a sense it is the easiest branch of philosophy for this reason.
However the idea that the natural world is all of reality, and thus science is actually the study of everything (the doctrine of naturalism is one of these "extraordinary claims" that you mention, for which there is no extraordinary evidence.
One could -- and many did -- say the same things about the initial claims of quantum mechanics.