Evolution IS an argument against gods, a specific form of gods. Namely the idea that there are gods that care about us and had us in mind when creating the universe. Evolution teaches us that human life, from the universe's perspective, is no more meaningful than a beetle's. That form of god is a capricious and uncaring god by any standard. The god of evolution is also the god of AIDS, cancer, birth defects and flesh eating bacteria. Not because of anything man did or because of some "fall" but because that's simply how the system works. The god of evolution could consider us nothing but freakish vehicles for his beloved diseases. Evolution is the biggest threat to religion for a damn good reason. The idea of nonoverlapping magisteria loses it's appeal when the religious circle keeps getting smaller and smaller. In other words, those believers in the god of the gaps really don't like it when we shrink their gaps.
Please tell me what Mackie has said that is less controversial to you than Dawkins? If your complaint is one of eloquence or breadth then it's a rather silly one. You haven't made any specific criticisms just general disdain so I have nothing more to add until you do so.
Lame attacks huh? How many bestselling books have you written? Theism mocks itself. You're just upset that materialists are tired of bending over backwards to keep from shattering your narrow world view. Anyone that thinks humans or life in general has a special place in the universe is mistaken and in for some depressing realizations. You can only keep running from it for so long. As you retreat your doctrines further into the spiritual realm (read: imaginary) they become even more irrelevant and disconnected from reality. I respect your right to believe anything you wish but don't think you can attempt to justify those beliefs without people like myself speaking up and saying: ahem, you are full of shit. The problem is, you don't like hearing that your beliefs are irrational. You want faith AND you want to justify it. That's where the problem lies. Faith by definition cannot be justified. I'll leave you to mull this over but pissing and moaning about people stepping on toes and hurting feelings changes nothing. Everyone is competent to have a view about religion. Trying to discredit Dawkins because he doesn't have formal training is nothing more than an appeal to authority and a fallacious ad hominem.
In a release candidate, everything is supposed to be locked down. There should not be any code changes only minor corrections such as typographical errors. If you are in RC1 and still adding or rewriting code then you've screwed the pooch.
As long as there is religion, there will be fundamentalists wanting a simpler and purer form of that religion. Where do Muslims find it? In the Qu'ran, which taken literally, gives us the results we've witnessed. If the core beliefs of Islam were to give puppies to non-believers, Islamic terrorism would never happen or happen as rarely proportional to Wiccan terrorism. Trying to pawn off religion as a victim or an innocent weapon with no intention is just ridiculous. Yes there will always be stupid and evil people doing stupid and evil things. That doesn't mean you should roll over and acquiesce to religion. There will always be murder but that doesn't mean we should sanction it.
To value merely being alive over the freedom to make choices is to make being alive worthless. I'd rather be dead than existing solely as a breeding machine for the state.
I didn't see a connection between that and modern science and/or cloning. Then you aren't well read on those topics. Forget it then.
we cannot force someone to care for another person. Likewise, we cannot force someone to not drive their vehicle through a crowd of people. You're off course Scotty, way off course.
When I said "cannot" I didn't mean physically, I meant ethically and when I said "care" I meant feed, clothe, shelter etc.
Ethically I can't force someone to care for another person, because that would be wrong.
Physically I can force them. A gun would do the job nicely.
The crowd full of people analogy doesn't even make sense in comparison.
You keep bringing up a deity in this discussion, assuming I am arguing from that point of view. I assume nothing, those final comments are not particularly directed at you, this is a public discussion and as such I am also addressing the audience as well.
It's alright for the mother of the 8 month old fetus to terminate the life of the fetus but somehow isn't alright for her to do the same to the newborn 1month premature baby. Wrong. It's right for the mother to remove the fetus from her womb, even if that causes death for the fetus, which it currently does but will not always be the case.
An already born baby on the other hand is already surviving on it's own and if left at a hospital it will most likely continue to survive because someone else will care for it.
So you wouldn't of had a problem with your wife deciding to abort the day before the birth because she changed her mind? After all, it's "her fetus" Typical appeal to emotion. Yet you ignore the fact that any bitch that evil and crazy, I wouldn't want to be shackled to the rest of my life. Better to find our your wife is a psycho hose beast before the life altering event not after.
Are you asking if there will be a sense of loss or regret, sure, of course but I'd still be thanking FSM that the crazy bitch didn't spread her crazy genes all over the place and ruin my life.
I love these ethical thought experiments, do some more!
The right to mother's host body is a natural right in the context of human rights. Then why is abortion legal? Your argument is circular. Human rights are defined by humans. That's me and I say abortion stays.
Damn, looks like we're back to square one with each of us defending our rights. I'm pretty sure I could kick some fetus ass too.
but what you are depositing in the shower is not capable of turning into a complete human being as it only has half the chromosomes needed to do so I said with modern science and cloning, not growing out of the grout in your shower. It's very much possible.
Maybe the 150 cell blastocyst doesn't have a brain Which is all they need for embryonic stem cell research, which was the original topic, which proves my point.
Abortion, which I also brought up, is a different matter, however, in that it can occur after the fetus has developed.
In such a case, yes it is killing a limited intelligence but like I said, the issue is "can we force someone to care for another person" even against their will?
If so, any dollar I spend not directly related to my survival is in fact being taken away from starving children or whatever. I'm just as guilty as a woman getting an abortion.
The only real difference is location. Wrong. Someday it will be possible to abort a fetus without killing it, perhaps it may completely replace normal child birth altogether. The difference is in technology. A hundred years ago these premature babies didn't stand a chance. Now they do. Nothing ethical has changed, we're still humans. Technology has changed and our ignorant, ancient religious books never planned on these things.
You can't force a woman to remain pregnant any more than you can force me to allow my paraplegic uncle to live in my house. You can say that's wrong, that's your right to disagree. That doesn't matter though since only humans decide what is right, not some skydaddy. If you think otherwise, prove it in a court of law and maybe God will show up to testify on your behalf.
Actually this is a distraction from the real argument.
What we should be asking isn't "when does life begin" but rather "can we force someone to be responsible for another's well being".
When people are brain dead we bury them in the ground or cremate them. We no longer treat them as we would any other person. Recognizing how we treat someone after they've stopped thinking, what's the practical difference in how we treat someone before they start thinking?
If the word "potential" is entering your mind, consider this. Thanks to modern science and cloning, every cell on your body is capable of turning into a complete human. Everytime you scratch an itch or jerk off in the shower you are committing a virtual holocaust.
Ignoring potential which is incomparable, from the perspective of the fetus, there is no practical difference between and abortion and contraception other than the discomfort to the mother.
Blastocysts have 150 cells, a fly's brain has over 100,000. There is no brain, there is nothing recognizable. If you think this spec of cells has a soul already then how do you explain when it splits and make twins? Is it 1 soul in 2 bodies, half a soul in each? Or is it obvious that this metaphysics of souls in a petri dish is kind of silly?
Anyone putting enough thought into it realizes there are no hard and fast rules on morality and the only thing that makes sense in today's world is to allow the person keeping the fetus alive to make the choice.
Exactly my point again.
Only when you can read something out of a book and then go and match it up with the physical world or what I like to call REALITY can you actually know it is true.
The Christian God is defined as not being subject to natural laws. Then he cannot interact with us.
What a pithy statement. Where's the evidence to back it up? Back what up? That the Bible is full of contradictions or that the scripture you referenced but failed to cite is contradicted?
I'll do that if you go ask all the historians of the world if they're scientist and if their field of study is another branch of science, or a separate discipline. Wow, that's the whole point! Woosh!
Only through science can we actually KNOW things. The rest is just hearsay.
Do we take history at face value because we read it in a book? NO! We dig up the ground and look for evidence and corroboration from other sources that these stories are true. Even then it's only a best GUESS. We assume it's true because we have nothing better. That's not truth.
Right, the most powerful being in the universe made us imperfect then demands us not to sin and of course when we fail the best solution is to kill himself as a blood sacrifice so he can make himself happy?
Wow man, that's just fucking stupid. Trying to change it from the literal interpretation, which is how most people in history took the creation story, to an allegorical one only increases the stupidity. God symbolically killed himself for a symbolic original sin? Oh, ok then, I symbolically give a shit in that case.
You can get all offended and act like you're so much more civilized than us because you have a shit-eating-grin on while spouting fantasy but I really don't care. I'm equally offended by dogma so we're even on that.
Speaking of arrogance. Which one of us is the one that thinks he knows more than science can show us and asserts it without any contact with this supposed other realm of existence?
You are infinitely more arrogant and presumptuous than we could ever be.
I can pretty confidently say that Christians don't think the Christian God is testable by science. Who can speak with authority about how Christians define their God better than Christians themselves? This isn't a question of a bandwagon, it's a question of who defines a belief: those who believe it, or those who don't. Wrong. You don't get to just say if God is testable or not. I'm sure you wish you could just change things like that on a whim but no not happening. God is defined as testable only because Christians make certain claims about his actions.
If ever God contacted humans, there would be a way to detect and prove that it happened. If not, it doesn't matter because God is silent and hasn't given us any rules to follow.
It's one the fundamental attributes of the Christian God, as revealed in the Bible. If you want to talk about some other deity, than by all means do so, but so long as we are talking about the Christian God, this is one of his attributes, regardless of whether you believe in him or not. As in many other places, the Bible contradicts itself there.
History happened, mythology didn't, therefore there will be historical evidence to verify the events. Then you don't believe Jesus Christ died on the cross and then rose bodily to Heaven. There is NO evidence for that.
I agree (largely). My point was simply that science is not the be all and end all when it comes to knowing things. Please go and gain some knowledge about the physical world in any other way besides science then report your results.
If you claim to exist in any world beyond the physical then please prove that first.
If you can't do either then you must admit you're wrong.
God and science are unrelated. If that is true then God has no contact with the physical world and he is irrelevant.
If you believe that somehow the thoughts in our head caused by our neurons and synapses reach God then he must be in contact with nature somehow. If God sends his magical wishes into our world to be written down in a book then it must also be so. If you claim that God affects our world then he must be part of nature or extend somehow into the physical world and science is the only possible successful method at discovering it. If you reject science you reject the only possibility of ever truly finding a god.
You can say that your idea of a god isn't related to science but the Christian God most certainly is and it's absurdly false.
Stop confusing your redefined vague new age bullshit god with the vengeful, jealous and petulant God of the desert.
Yes these people are heartless fiends by... what exactly? Making money off of something that anyone with half a brain could get for free? What sense does that make? You didn't want to charge money for it but you're mad because someone else did? Are you really implying that thinking up Chuck Norris facts is a profession and that "stealing" it somehow harms you?
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At first, I read that as Goatse Universe... *shudders*
Evolution IS an argument against gods, a specific form of gods. Namely the idea that there are gods that care about us and had us in mind when creating the universe. Evolution teaches us that human life, from the universe's perspective, is no more meaningful than a beetle's. That form of god is a capricious and uncaring god by any standard. The god of evolution is also the god of AIDS, cancer, birth defects and flesh eating bacteria. Not because of anything man did or because of some "fall" but because that's simply how the system works. The god of evolution could consider us nothing but freakish vehicles for his beloved diseases. Evolution is the biggest threat to religion for a damn good reason. The idea of nonoverlapping magisteria loses it's appeal when the religious circle keeps getting smaller and smaller. In other words, those believers in the god of the gaps really don't like it when we shrink their gaps.
Do we have free will? No. Do we make choices? Yes. Do our choices affect ourselves and others? Yes.
Be glad you don't have free will. People that act randomly, without a cause, we call crazy.
Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'
It turns out that wallowing in ignorance is actually harmful to society. Who would have guessed, huh? Oh well. C'est la vie!
And for the record I AM a registered patent agent.
That makes sense. You forgot to close your italics tag just like you forgot to REJECT ALL THOSE RIDICULOUS PATENTS!!!
Please tell me what Mackie has said that is less controversial to you than Dawkins? If your complaint is one of eloquence or breadth then it's a rather silly one. You haven't made any specific criticisms just general disdain so I have nothing more to add until you do so.
Lame attacks huh? How many bestselling books have you written? Theism mocks itself. You're just upset that materialists are tired of bending over backwards to keep from shattering your narrow world view. Anyone that thinks humans or life in general has a special place in the universe is mistaken and in for some depressing realizations. You can only keep running from it for so long. As you retreat your doctrines further into the spiritual realm (read: imaginary) they become even more irrelevant and disconnected from reality. I respect your right to believe anything you wish but don't think you can attempt to justify those beliefs without people like myself speaking up and saying: ahem, you are full of shit. The problem is, you don't like hearing that your beliefs are irrational. You want faith AND you want to justify it. That's where the problem lies. Faith by definition cannot be justified. I'll leave you to mull this over but pissing and moaning about people stepping on toes and hurting feelings changes nothing. Everyone is competent to have a view about religion. Trying to discredit Dawkins because he doesn't have formal training is nothing more than an appeal to authority and a fallacious ad hominem.
In a release candidate, everything is supposed to be locked down. There should not be any code changes only minor corrections such as typographical errors. If you are in RC1 and still adding or rewriting code then you've screwed the pooch.
It's still real to me, damnit!
As long as there is religion, there will be fundamentalists wanting a simpler and purer form of that religion. Where do Muslims find it? In the Qu'ran, which taken literally, gives us the results we've witnessed. If the core beliefs of Islam were to give puppies to non-believers, Islamic terrorism would never happen or happen as rarely proportional to Wiccan terrorism. Trying to pawn off religion as a victim or an innocent weapon with no intention is just ridiculous. Yes there will always be stupid and evil people doing stupid and evil things. That doesn't mean you should roll over and acquiesce to religion. There will always be murder but that doesn't mean we should sanction it.
So the Torah predates the Egyptian deity Saosis's tree of life?
Who says that's a bad thing?
I'd rather you kill yourself than someone else.
To value merely being alive over the freedom to make choices is to make being alive worthless. I'd rather be dead than existing solely as a breeding machine for the state.
When I said "cannot" I didn't mean physically, I meant ethically and when I said "care" I meant feed, clothe, shelter etc.
Ethically I can't force someone to care for another person, because that would be wrong.
Physically I can force them. A gun would do the job nicely.
The crowd full of people analogy doesn't even make sense in comparison. You keep bringing up a deity in this discussion, assuming I am arguing from that point of view. I assume nothing, those final comments are not particularly directed at you, this is a public discussion and as such I am also addressing the audience as well. It's alright for the mother of the 8 month old fetus to terminate the life of the fetus but somehow isn't alright for her to do the same to the newborn 1month premature baby. Wrong. It's right for the mother to remove the fetus from her womb, even if that causes death for the fetus, which it currently does but will not always be the case.
An already born baby on the other hand is already surviving on it's own and if left at a hospital it will most likely continue to survive because someone else will care for it.
It's not even in the same realm of ethics.
Abortion, which I also brought up, is a different matter, however, in that it can occur after the fetus has developed.
In such a case, yes it is killing a limited intelligence but like I said, the issue is "can we force someone to care for another person" even against their will?
If so, any dollar I spend not directly related to my survival is in fact being taken away from starving children or whatever. I'm just as guilty as a woman getting an abortion. The only real difference is location. Wrong. Someday it will be possible to abort a fetus without killing it, perhaps it may completely replace normal child birth altogether. The difference is in technology. A hundred years ago these premature babies didn't stand a chance. Now they do. Nothing ethical has changed, we're still humans. Technology has changed and our ignorant, ancient religious books never planned on these things.
You can't force a woman to remain pregnant any more than you can force me to allow my paraplegic uncle to live in my house. You can say that's wrong, that's your right to disagree. That doesn't matter though since only humans decide what is right, not some skydaddy. If you think otherwise, prove it in a court of law and maybe God will show up to testify on your behalf.
Actually this is a distraction from the real argument.
What we should be asking isn't "when does life begin" but rather "can we force someone to be responsible for another's well being".
When people are brain dead we bury them in the ground or cremate them. We no longer treat them as we would any other person. Recognizing how we treat someone after they've stopped thinking, what's the practical difference in how we treat someone before they start thinking?
If the word "potential" is entering your mind, consider this. Thanks to modern science and cloning, every cell on your body is capable of turning into a complete human. Everytime you scratch an itch or jerk off in the shower you are committing a virtual holocaust.
Ignoring potential which is incomparable, from the perspective of the fetus, there is no practical difference between and abortion and contraception other than the discomfort to the mother.
Blastocysts have 150 cells, a fly's brain has over 100,000. There is no brain, there is nothing recognizable. If you think this spec of cells has a soul already then how do you explain when it splits and make twins? Is it 1 soul in 2 bodies, half a soul in each? Or is it obvious that this metaphysics of souls in a petri dish is kind of silly?
Anyone putting enough thought into it realizes there are no hard and fast rules on morality and the only thing that makes sense in today's world is to allow the person keeping the fetus alive to make the choice.
Exactly my point again. Only when you can read something out of a book and then go and match it up with the physical world or what I like to call REALITY can you actually know it is true.
Only through science can we actually KNOW things. The rest is just hearsay.
Do we take history at face value because we read it in a book? NO! We dig up the ground and look for evidence and corroboration from other sources that these stories are true. Even then it's only a best GUESS. We assume it's true because we have nothing better. That's not truth.
Right, the most powerful being in the universe made us imperfect then demands us not to sin and of course when we fail the best solution is to kill himself as a blood sacrifice so he can make himself happy?
Wow man, that's just fucking stupid. Trying to change it from the literal interpretation, which is how most people in history took the creation story, to an allegorical one only increases the stupidity. God symbolically killed himself for a symbolic original sin? Oh, ok then, I symbolically give a shit in that case.
You can get all offended and act like you're so much more civilized than us because you have a shit-eating-grin on while spouting fantasy but I really don't care. I'm equally offended by dogma so we're even on that.
Speaking of arrogance. Which one of us is the one that thinks he knows more than science can show us and asserts it without any contact with this supposed other realm of existence?
You are infinitely more arrogant and presumptuous than we could ever be.
If you believe that somehow the thoughts in our head caused by our neurons and synapses reach God then he must be in contact with nature somehow. If God sends his magical wishes into our world to be written down in a book then it must also be so. If you claim that God affects our world then he must be part of nature or extend somehow into the physical world and science is the only possible successful method at discovering it. If you reject science you reject the only possibility of ever truly finding a god.
You can say that your idea of a god isn't related to science but the Christian God most certainly is and it's absurdly false.
Stop confusing your redefined vague new age bullshit god with the vengeful, jealous and petulant God of the desert.
Yes these people are heartless fiends by... what exactly? Making money off of something that anyone with half a brain could get for free? What sense does that make? You didn't want to charge money for it but you're mad because someone else did? Are you really implying that thinking up Chuck Norris facts is a profession and that "stealing" it somehow harms you?
Yet you probably still say it like "February third, two thousand and seven"... hypocrite.