If there isn't a literal "Christ's definition" of Christianity in the Bible, it's only your own interpretation, and, theology not being an exact science, you have little chance to prove that the other interpretations are wrong. Redefining Christianity to exclude anything bad is just a common and silly way to evade criticism.
It's very simple: they're vandals who've found a particular fig leaf to plausibly clothe their destructive compulsions.
Somehow I can just imagine that you're one of those bitter twits who don't want to understand the notability criteria, and attack the editors trying to enforce them.
But hey, don't let history and objectivity get in the way of flinging insults at believers of various faiths.
Of course, you realize that you're conflating the ridiculing of beliefs with "flinging insults" at the believers by making the implicit assumption that everyone will be offended. It's the same as when people talk about Muslims as some monolith mass, for example, like with the Jyllands-Posten cartoons incident or the Satanic Verses. Your reading of MORB's post is also very uncharitable, and the analogy of "saying all Germans are Jew hating murderers without understanding what really went on and who was really responsible" is completely unrelated to it. You are inventing things that the poster hasn't said and would probably not defend. Your blanket statement about some specific parts of the Bible, that would support intolerance, being unauthentic, also makes me doubt that you're a particularly sophisticated believer. In the end, it's just true that the vast majority of Christendom is against homosexuality (which, if you accept that sexual orientation is part of one's nature, makes them against gays too) and sexual promiscuity, and is rarely enthusiastic about other religions taking over, is especially against atheism, and Jesus is indeed usually being portrayed as a half-naked man on a torture device, so I think it can be safely said that MORB's caricature is defensible and your personal attacks are not warranted (not that attacking the poster and not the post would be acceptable even if the post was worse).
Though it is amusing that insulting someone's beliefs is prima facie bad. If your beliefs are stupid, they should be discouraged.
This notion of some beliefs being exempt from ridicule seems to come from a misunderstanding of the idea that the believers shouldn't be ridiculed for their deeply held beliefs, although even that might be therapeutic in some cases. In religions like Christianity, doubt is always something bad, and faith is good, so they will never like being made fun of, because being saved is Serious Business, and committing certain thought crimes can earn you an eternal punishment from your deity or make you miss out on going to a Really Good Place after the death of your body.
I think we would have very little Christians left for the pollsters to count if we adopted your redefinition of Christianity. It would also mean that there haven't been too many Christians historically either. It would also raise the question of what should we call the fake "Christians" who don't act like you say they should. I'm not sure you really want to go there.
Can beliefs be hurt or offended? If not, what do you mean by "insulting someone else's beliefs"? If you mean "ridicule", then you should say so, but I guess your intent was to equate making fun of a religions doctrine to insulting someone. I think grandparent's caricature was bang-on, and I regret that there are people who need to attack others in bad faith for daring to treat their beliefs with impiety. I wonder if the reaction would still be the same if the one's being poked fun at would be the New Agers, Scientologists, Mormons or any other of the religions usually perceived as stupider than Christianity.
That something is very abstract or has alternate meanings does not mean that it's meaningless. Your attacks on marketing speak and O'Reilly are also irrelevant, and a term does not necessarily need to have definite boundaries. The words "day" or "child", for example, have a definition, but there are times when it's both day and both night, and when a human is both a child and a grownup, because they gradually turn from one into the other without a definite breaking point. Similarly, a site can be traditional, but have some elements of Web 2.0 like using XHR, user generated content, a wiki, communities, blogs and so on. A site can also be clearly Web 1.0 (w3c.org) or clearly Web 2.0 (YouTube).
In living languages, terms are created without any prescription, and a word having alternate meanings does not mean that it's meaningless. That it has no "regulatory body" or whatever also does not mean that it's not defined. Your main argument seems to be that it has something to do with marketing, and therefore it's bad, which is just appeal to emotion.
I honestly don't understand what is there to gain for the rest of us from upping the creationist pseudoscience ante. Hovind at least is transparently ridiculous to anyone with a decent education, unlike ID, which can mislead more people because of the way it is constructed and marketed. It's never been targeted at scientists anyway, but at schoolchildren and the general public, and this is why it should be mocked with contempt for posing to be a science. I know I definitely prefer the childish yaba-daba science than what people like Behe and Dembski are trying to sell, just because it has less potential to gain wider appeal with its stupidity and devalue real science than ID.
Except, the difference is in how they are being used, so not in the sum of the parts, but in the whole. Web 2.0 does mean something, but It just depends on who are you talking to. For example, if I'm talking to a marketing person who's familiar with it in the buzzword sense, it might not, but if I'm talking to a fellow developer, I think he would understand me fine if I'd refer to Web 2.0.
Behe's... what? "legitimate scientific efforts"? are you really thinking about the same person as I, because the Behe I know has contributed 0 scientific publications supporting his "theory" to any respectable journals, and is definitely not known for trying to advance any science, just for his attacks on evolution in books ostensibly intended to mislead laypeople. you can just look up his responses to criticisms about his works from people like Ken Miller if you have any doubts about it.
"largely settled matters"... in 1404, a flat Earth was a "largely settled matter"
No educated people in the middle ages believed that the Earth was flat, and it was common knowledge that it's round among the Greeks too. Aristotle, for example, had 3 proofs for this, one of which was that the ships' hulls disappear over the horizon before the masts and vice versa.
I have a Firefox extension that makes the layout better like in Google Video, and as a side effect it has no ads, because it uses an older version of the player.
I just don't think it's true that you can't have ethics that's based on logic and sound judgment (which is what I mean by "reason"). I understand your argument to be that for a system of ethics to work, it needs to be based upon some absolute or metaphysical truths, and reason is ruled out because "empiricism can't be epistemologically fundamental." I suppose this is because all knowledge is mediated, not immediate, and what we think we know about reality is based on induction. I wish I had a good slam-dunk response to this, but I don't. I just intuitively feel that such relativism is self-contradictory, because you can't simultaneously claim that truth is unknowable and that what you claim is true. So, If I am right about it, then your main premise is wrong, and rational ethics is possible after all. After that, you can proceed to understand the basic, shared human constitutive principles (for example, through evolutionary psychology and neuroscience), and base your ethical system upon that.
You also say that mysticism is "a strong alternative" for basing ethics on, probably because it claims to offer a shortcut to direct knowledge. I don't think it's right, for several reasons. One is that the "truths" you get that way are not really demonstrable or verifiable, and very likely not truths at all. Take any revealed religion, believers can't even agree about the nature of their magic-man within the religion itself, much less between different religions. They just trust or hope that the real Creator of the Universe chose to inspire their particular sect or religion out of all the thousands of religions ever seen on the face of Earth. This, of course, can be much better explained by human cognitive biases and anthropology than the Universe being haunted. Another reason is that moral precepts based on delusions are more likely to be divisive than useful and uniting. Even the one religion that's strongest in numbers today is very far from being in the majority (only 1/3rd of all humans are Christians), and the second largest religion has a very problematic theology and history. They are also split into conflicting sects, where the 'moderates' or the people who subscribe to a sufficiently watered-down liberal theology to be fully compatible with others are still in the minority.
About your dancing around whether you said that God exists or not, I think it's just weak. If anyone's faith is so fragile that he can be offended by others questioning its veracity, it's obviously their own damn problem.
Britannica is not a collection of popular culture or slang terms.
Neither is Wikipedia. They are both encyclopedias, but Wikipedia can cover a much broader range of topics than a print encyclopedia, including current events, newly famous people, various internet phenomena and so on.
Based on what I've read in the Bible, I'd believe God implemented religion, specifically Judaism/Christianity.
First, why exclude the newest Abrahamic religion, Islam? Second, granted I'm not a real expert on Bible, but it does seem to speak out against churches, and it also doesn't seem to prescribe any religious hierarchy. The verses about churches are:
God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; ~ Acts 17:24
Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; ~ Acts 7:48
These are the most straightforward ones, but there are some more that implicitly say the same.
Mankind has thoroughly mucked up God's handiwork.
So, does that mean an omnipotent, omniscient being failed? That's an interesting conclusion for a believer. But let's recap his approach:
1. wait about 10 billion years to create Earth in the outskirts of an unexceptional galaxy that is one of billions, orbiting one of its about 200 billion stars; 2. wait about 1 billion years to get to abiogenesis; 3. wait about 4 billion years more to get to a particular primate species with large brains; 4. let them live short (20 years on average), pain-filled lives for hundreds of thousands of years until they stumble upon agriculture and writing and establish a civilization; 5. wait a couple of thousand years more and pick some desert tribes in the Middle East as the chosen people, give some very imprecise or false information, order some genocides; 6. create a great mess on Earth by sending your son (which is also yourself) to die (mimicking many earlier myths about godmen), supposedly to start over and re-brand yourself as more caring, less jealous diety (also, blame everything on your creation); 7. prove to the primitive people you're the authentic creator of the universe by doing some magic tricks like killing pigs, curing women from menstruations, raising the dead and exorcising "daemons"; 8. forget to leave any contemporary evidence and die, forgetting your earlier promises of what you would do (end wars, unite mankind); 9. wait for years and reveal the last part of the story to a man who hasn't ever met you so he writes it down; 10. about 40 years after your death (whatever "death" means to an immortal being) make a guy possibly named Mark write down your feats conjuring food and vandalizing trees, with pretending to have been your disciple, even though he'd have to be exceptionally old then for an era in which the average lifespan was short (making rational people later conclude that this is just made up, or based on an oral tradition, or both; not very credible in any case); 13. have more texts written, some of them more than a hundred years after your supposed death; 12. watch your chosen tribes call you a false messiah because you didn't fulfill the prophecies you gave earlier; 13. see how stupid Gnostics misunderstand everything, pagans call your new followers Atheists, and how Mithrianism almost prevails over your new religion; 14. have Constantine I help out; 15. forget to send the memo about monotheism to very large portions of humanity for more than a thousand years; 16. the council of Nicaea officially recognizes that your son is the same as you, even though you forgot to write it down in the texts; it also discards some writings that you didn't inspire well enough; 17. see your religion spread through the tribes of barbarians wrecking Western Roman Empire; 18. by the way, your religion is already split into the Eastern Orthodox cult and the Roman Catholic cult; 19. some Arab plagiarizes most of your earlier texts and pretends that an angel told him to; do nothing about it, dividing the humanity even further; 19. have your followers destroy Constantinople, ending the last of Roman Empire; 20. establish a complete hegemony of your religion over the illiterate masses, mostly benefiting just the clergy and the monarc
Seems like a nice argument for the God of Gaps. Compared to this, the creationist literalism actually looks more coherent, because their idea of a deity doesn't shrink as science progresses.
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What about the European Convention of Human Rigts? I believe Britain has signed and ratified it and its protocols.
So, basically, you're telling other people not to tell other people what to do?
Pardon my political incorrectness, but I'd think that the Judaists would qualify more for this.
If there isn't a literal "Christ's definition" of Christianity in the Bible, it's only your own interpretation, and, theology not being an exact science, you have little chance to prove that the other interpretations are wrong. Redefining Christianity to exclude anything bad is just a common and silly way to evade criticism.
Somehow I can just imagine that you're one of those bitter twits who don't want to understand the notability criteria, and attack the editors trying to enforce them.
This notion of some beliefs being exempt from ridicule seems to come from a misunderstanding of the idea that the believers shouldn't be ridiculed for their deeply held beliefs, although even that might be therapeutic in some cases. In religions like Christianity, doubt is always something bad, and faith is good, so they will never like being made fun of, because being saved is Serious Business, and committing certain thought crimes can earn you an eternal punishment from your deity or make you miss out on going to a Really Good Place after the death of your body.
I think we would have very little Christians left for the pollsters to count if we adopted your redefinition of Christianity. It would also mean that there haven't been too many Christians historically either. It would also raise the question of what should we call the fake "Christians" who don't act like you say they should. I'm not sure you really want to go there.
Can beliefs be hurt or offended? If not, what do you mean by "insulting someone else's beliefs"? If you mean "ridicule", then you should say so, but I guess your intent was to equate making fun of a religions doctrine to insulting someone. I think grandparent's caricature was bang-on, and I regret that there are people who need to attack others in bad faith for daring to treat their beliefs with impiety. I wonder if the reaction would still be the same if the one's being poked fun at would be the New Agers, Scientologists, Mormons or any other of the religions usually perceived as stupider than Christianity.
That something is very abstract or has alternate meanings does not mean that it's meaningless. Your attacks on marketing speak and O'Reilly are also irrelevant, and a term does not necessarily need to have definite boundaries. The words "day" or "child", for example, have a definition, but there are times when it's both day and both night, and when a human is both a child and a grownup, because they gradually turn from one into the other without a definite breaking point. Similarly, a site can be traditional, but have some elements of Web 2.0 like using XHR, user generated content, a wiki, communities, blogs and so on. A site can also be clearly Web 1.0 (w3c.org) or clearly Web 2.0 (YouTube).
In living languages, terms are created without any prescription, and a word having alternate meanings does not mean that it's meaningless. That it has no "regulatory body" or whatever also does not mean that it's not defined. Your main argument seems to be that it has something to do with marketing, and therefore it's bad, which is just appeal to emotion.
I honestly don't understand what is there to gain for the rest of us from upping the creationist pseudoscience ante. Hovind at least is transparently ridiculous to anyone with a decent education, unlike ID, which can mislead more people because of the way it is constructed and marketed. It's never been targeted at scientists anyway, but at schoolchildren and the general public, and this is why it should be mocked with contempt for posing to be a science. I know I definitely prefer the childish yaba-daba science than what people like Behe and Dembski are trying to sell, just because it has less potential to gain wider appeal with its stupidity and devalue real science than ID.
Except, the difference is in how they are being used, so not in the sum of the parts, but in the whole. Web 2.0 does mean something, but It just depends on who are you talking to. For example, if I'm talking to a marketing person who's familiar with it in the buzzword sense, it might not, but if I'm talking to a fellow developer, I think he would understand me fine if I'd refer to Web 2.0.
Behe's... what? "legitimate scientific efforts"? are you really thinking about the same person as I, because the Behe I know has contributed 0 scientific publications supporting his "theory" to any respectable journals, and is definitely not known for trying to advance any science, just for his attacks on evolution in books ostensibly intended to mislead laypeople. you can just look up his responses to criticisms about his works from people like Ken Miller if you have any doubts about it.
No educated people in the middle ages believed that the Earth was flat, and it was common knowledge that it's round among the Greeks too. Aristotle, for example, had 3 proofs for this, one of which was that the ships' hulls disappear over the horizon before the masts and vice versa.
I have a Firefox extension that makes the layout better like in Google Video, and as a side effect it has no ads, because it uses an older version of the player.
I just don't think it's true that you can't have ethics that's based on logic and sound judgment (which is what I mean by "reason"). I understand your argument to be that for a system of ethics to work, it needs to be based upon some absolute or metaphysical truths, and reason is ruled out because "empiricism can't be epistemologically fundamental." I suppose this is because all knowledge is mediated, not immediate, and what we think we know about reality is based on induction. I wish I had a good slam-dunk response to this, but I don't. I just intuitively feel that such relativism is self-contradictory, because you can't simultaneously claim that truth is unknowable and that what you claim is true. So, If I am right about it, then your main premise is wrong, and rational ethics is possible after all. After that, you can proceed to understand the basic, shared human constitutive principles (for example, through evolutionary psychology and neuroscience), and base your ethical system upon that.
You also say that mysticism is "a strong alternative" for basing ethics on, probably because it claims to offer a shortcut to direct knowledge. I don't think it's right, for several reasons. One is that the "truths" you get that way are not really demonstrable or verifiable, and very likely not truths at all. Take any revealed religion, believers can't even agree about the nature of their magic-man within the religion itself, much less between different religions. They just trust or hope that the real Creator of the Universe chose to inspire their particular sect or religion out of all the thousands of religions ever seen on the face of Earth. This, of course, can be much better explained by human cognitive biases and anthropology than the Universe being haunted. Another reason is that moral precepts based on delusions are more likely to be divisive than useful and uniting. Even the one religion that's strongest in numbers today is very far from being in the majority (only 1/3rd of all humans are Christians), and the second largest religion has a very problematic theology and history. They are also split into conflicting sects, where the 'moderates' or the people who subscribe to a sufficiently watered-down liberal theology to be fully compatible with others are still in the minority.
About your dancing around whether you said that God exists or not, I think it's just weak. If anyone's faith is so fragile that he can be offended by others questioning its veracity, it's obviously their own damn problem.
Neither is Wikipedia. They are both encyclopedias, but Wikipedia can cover a much broader range of topics than a print encyclopedia, including current events, newly famous people, various internet phenomena and so on.
OK, suppose having a reason based ethics really is impossible, what would be the alternatives? Whims? Mysticism?
No, it raises the question. "Begging the question" means using circular reasoning.
If it was a game, the latency would be around 600000. That's some bad lag.
Based on what I've read in the Bible, I'd believe God implemented religion, specifically Judaism/Christianity.
First, why exclude the newest Abrahamic religion, Islam? Second, granted I'm not a real expert on Bible, but it does seem to speak out against churches, and it also doesn't seem to prescribe any religious hierarchy. The verses about churches are:
God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; ~ Acts 17:24
Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; ~ Acts 7:48
These are the most straightforward ones, but there are some more that implicitly say the same.
Mankind has thoroughly mucked up God's handiwork.
So, does that mean an omnipotent, omniscient being failed? That's an interesting conclusion for a believer. But let's recap his approach:
1. wait about 10 billion years to create Earth in the outskirts of an unexceptional galaxy that is one of billions, orbiting one of its about 200 billion stars;
2. wait about 1 billion years to get to abiogenesis;
3. wait about 4 billion years more to get to a particular primate species with large brains;
4. let them live short (20 years on average), pain-filled lives for hundreds of thousands of years until they stumble upon agriculture and writing and establish a civilization;
5. wait a couple of thousand years more and pick some desert tribes in the Middle East as the chosen people, give some very imprecise or false information, order some genocides;
6. create a great mess on Earth by sending your son (which is also yourself) to die (mimicking many earlier myths about godmen), supposedly to start over and re-brand yourself as more caring, less jealous diety (also, blame everything on your creation);
7. prove to the primitive people you're the authentic creator of the universe by doing some magic tricks like killing pigs, curing women from menstruations, raising the dead and exorcising "daemons";
8. forget to leave any contemporary evidence and die, forgetting your earlier promises of what you would do (end wars, unite mankind);
9. wait for years and reveal the last part of the story to a man who hasn't ever met you so he writes it down;
10. about 40 years after your death (whatever "death" means to an immortal being) make a guy possibly named Mark write down your feats conjuring food and vandalizing trees, with pretending to have been your disciple, even though he'd have to be exceptionally old then for an era in which the average lifespan was short (making rational people later conclude that this is just made up, or based on an oral tradition, or both; not very credible in any case);
13. have more texts written, some of them more than a hundred years after your supposed death;
12. watch your chosen tribes call you a false messiah because you didn't fulfill the prophecies you gave earlier;
13. see how stupid Gnostics misunderstand everything, pagans call your new followers Atheists, and how Mithrianism almost prevails over your new religion;
14. have Constantine I help out;
15. forget to send the memo about monotheism to very large portions of humanity for more than a thousand years;
16. the council of Nicaea officially recognizes that your son is the same as you, even though you forgot to write it down in the texts; it also discards some writings that you didn't inspire well enough;
17. see your religion spread through the tribes of barbarians wrecking Western Roman Empire;
18. by the way, your religion is already split into the Eastern Orthodox cult and the Roman Catholic cult;
19. some Arab plagiarizes most of your earlier texts and pretends that an angel told him to; do nothing about it, dividing the humanity even further;
19. have your followers destroy Constantinople, ending the last of Roman Empire;
20. establish a complete hegemony of your religion over the illiterate masses, mostly benefiting just the clergy and the monarc
And this.
I think it's safe to say that they are truly a minority group, and this is their chance to have a moment in the sun.
The latest Gallup poll showed that creationism is accepted by a sweeping 41% of the US population.
Well, that and in this country we value freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech refers to state censorship, not laughing at stupid opinions or protesting against indoctrinating children into them.
Seems like a nice argument for the God of Gaps. Compared to this, the creationist literalism actually looks more coherent, because their idea of a deity doesn't shrink as science progresses.