Well personally if I'm going to be knocking out important services like VPN or email I sent out an email a couple of days in advance.
For critical things like that, it seems a bit weird to just leave it to a random announcements page that people have to remember to check, and that mostly will never have anything important on it. Our company is pretty small, only about 40 people using computers in total, but we have 3 offices and several road users, so email is the one thing that you can guarantee everyone is going to check at least once a day, and IMO it's the best method for notifying people of important events.
An announcement or policy board with fixed company events would make sense, but for maintenance operations which often can only be scheduled a couple of days in advance (I myself was ready to make a change but had to wait for our ISP to be ready, and after waiting a month for them to be ready I wanted to get the changes done as soon as possible, so scheduled it for 2 days after they were all sorted out), you can't guarantee to reach people.
I think you're a bit confused. This is not a 'free energy' scam, the power is coming from the wind. Movement in a magnetic field generates power. This is how a lot of electrical generators work. Some apparently work without magnets, I'm not an engineer so I've not studied this stuff in depth. I don't know if this system gradually makes the magnet lose its magnetism, but somebody above said the magnets wouldn't run out, and he probably knows what he's talking about (not definite but I'm sure someone will chime in with an explanation).
I'm not sure how you intend on creating a magnetic field without magnets or another electrical generator generating the field.
Likewise if you want to generate movement with an electric motor, AFAIK it is necessary to induce a magnetic field by passing electricity through a wire.
Good luck setting up some kind of infrastructure in a shanty town! I've not seen any in real life, but the pictures/movies (think the start of Incredible Hulk) I've seen show that they are crazy and totally unstructured!
Besides that, you have already pointed out plenty of problems that would arise even if it were architecturally possible to create a power grid in a shanty town. A large wind turbine would be expensive to maintain, not to mention who is actually responsible for the maintenance.
People are thinking on completely the wrong scale when they complain about this. If these guys could afford to pay for power infrastructure installation and subsequent power bills (which they wouldn't have to pay if they got their own micro-generator system), wouldn't they be living in an area that has power to begin with? Building a collection of smaller generators as and when they can afford it seems like a pretty good option. Then they can even take it with them if they have to move or their town is hit by a natural disaster. I know I'd love to be self sufficient in power terms (via solar panels/wind turbines/whatever), but seeing as I don't even have my own house yet, that's getting a bit far ahead of myself.
On the other hand, if we can make wind power cheap (cheap turbines, which might not be quite as efficient, but still work, and towers constructed out of locally-available materials), a huge impact will be made.
You could simply put several of these mechanisms on a pole? It's not that hard to figure out:p Efficient storage is really the 'killer app' because then you don't need the wind to be blowing every time you want to switch on the lights. We have plenty of tech for collecting energy these days, it's the storage that is now the main issue. With decent batteries/supercaps you could be collecting energy all day with these babies and you'd only need to be drawing power for a few hours in the evening.
Nobody apart from you said anything about saving the third world. Whether he can do that or not has nothing to do with this being a pretty good idea. He does sound like he has plans for scaling it up as well, though he has a pretty good niche market to start on with the efficient micropower thing.
You can ignore this if you want, but I expect all those into engineering and technology are a bit more impressed, and imagining what could be done with larger scale systems. Our company is in the process of manufacturing our first megawatt tidal turbine. Guess what? We can make it smaller if we want to only generate kilowatts. I don't know if we have any plans for making even larger ones though, 25m tall is difficult enough to construct. This guy's design is simple, efficient and would probably work quite well underwater too..
Actually, I commented to my mum on the drive home from communion how peaceful everything seemed, it was dark and you could see the starts etc. I knew it was kind of a weird thing to say even as I was saying it. Of course it could just have been because we were at communion.
I had wondered since then if that was the same night, but I was talking to my uncle a couple of weeks ago and he said that it was on the day of communion that dad died (we only did communion 4 times a year at our church). So there you go:p I don't discount spiritual things, I think that's just as stupid as assuming that there definitely are spiritual things without first having decent evidence.
I'm quite aware that it could just have been a coincidence, and did psychology for a couple of years at university (and I'd read a little before I attended university) so I'm quite aware of the way that memories can be affected - you don't have to be so patronising;) I knew when my mum gathered us all together one sunday night that she was going to say our grandad was dead too, of course he was very ill though so it was pretty obvious to me even though I was only about 8 or something. But my dad died suddenly and without any kind of warning. The only other person in my family that died was my granny, can't really remember much about that time, but 2/3 isn't that bad. Again I'm not saying it's conclusive evidence, just saying it's the only pro-'spiritual' type evidence I've got so far, outside of the realm of music and the arts I guess.
Well in some perhaps, but Christianity for one says "do not put your lord god to the test", and I expect others have such catch-all clauses just so that they can't be 'disproven' as such..
Thanks for the compliment, I'm trying to be aware but I just have little idea how to go about it. I was considering doing yoga style meditation, but I'm pretty sure that's just a way to get yourself high by loading up your blood with oxygen.. it makes you feel good (yeah I did have a good go at it one day:) ), but does it actually reveal any special truths? I should probably start a habit of doing it anyway as it's good for stress relief, and if there are any spiritual elements in life then blanking off physical and mental activity could be a good way to reach them.
I agree in general, the bible says God makes the sun shine on the believer and non-believer, that type of thing, so there is no way of actually testing whether God is there. The whole bible is like that, you can indeed pray for good things (and the bible does not condemn riches or other things which are nice to have, it just condemns being obsessed by them), but you will only get the ones that God wants you to have etc. So praying to me over the last few years seemed kind of pointless, which probably helped me to stop brainwashing myself and eventually free myself from my nonsensical beliefs.
I have known a few ministers though, and in in my denomination at least they were very genuine people. My grandad was one, I've had friends that have gone to study as ministers or are likely to one day, and a lot of my friends at University were minister's children. So don't assume that the majority of them are lying conmen, a lot actually believe in what they are doing. I have heard that some ministers in the Church of England profess to not even be Christians though, and I can't see any more pointless existence than preaching for something that you don't believe in.. pretty crazy.
In that case, the time stuff isn't what bothers me, it's the existence part. Something must have always existed in eternity or whatever you want to call it. That is an astounding and wonderful mystery, but it still freaks me out. It perhaps does hint at some higher truth but is there a way to tell? If I will just disappear when I die then I guess it won't be a problem to me anymore though.
I just assumed you were a Christian because Cristians often try to explain away the existence of God by saying that he exists outside of time and we'll never be able to understand that (which means they can shut down their brain and ignore anything beyond the meaning for their own existence). Perhaps there is some truth to this, that some intelligence was involved in causing our universe to come into existence, perhaps not.
How exactly is the big bang 'ridiculous'?? The universe is gradually falling to entropy and eventually all energy will just end up as heat. It is my understanding that the universe will eventually stop expanding and collapse in upon itself due to gravity pulling it back in. If the universe contracted again into a black hole type singularity, then it happening to explode because of all the energy contained in it isn't that ridiculous.. I'm not a physicist and haven't read about the big bang for years though. But I don't think it's ridiculous. It just isn't the answer to why everything exists.
An omnipotent God just existing fully formed is pretty ridiculous (not saying it's impossible, but it is crazy).
A god-like being or race gradually evolving, still pretty ridiculous, but less-so than a god just being.
Anything existing at all, fully formed or gradually evolving - the most ridiculous, yet here we are.
There was a/. article about a certain group of bacteria or similar organism that evolved to be able to metabolise a new chemical from its surroundings (one of the defining attributes of this species was that it could not metabolise the chemical). There were some a few groups as control groups and only one of the groups evolved this ability. The scientist also had been taking samples of the cultures every few generations, and when he 'replayed' the evolution back beyond a certain point the organisms didn't develop the ability. So he came to the conclusion that a combination of two or more random mutations had caused the bacteria to develop the ability to metabolise this chemical. Seemed fairly conclusive evidence..
The thing is that God of the bible isn't 'alone', he is the father, son and spirit living in perfect communion. Doesn't sound like he needs to share to me. And if he did need to share and create us, and loves all of humanity as Jesus claimed, why punish the non-believers eternally? Why not punish them for a finite amount of time then destroy their souls? Seems much kinder to me. I was a devout believer and know all the little arguments for free will and that crap, but it is all just a pile of paradoxical nonsense. It isn't paradoxical because it's 'deep', it's paradoxical because it's bollocks. That's just my opinion of course, after 24 years of sitting listening to sermons in a fairly fundamentalist church, and 10 of those years I was a "born again" Christian.
I don't know, personally I consider it quite a great event. Christians may not consider it 'great', but that is because it is negating their beliefs rather than affirming them. Those that aren't Christians seem to consider it a good thing, as a couple of comments here have shown. Of course people are going to be happy when others come to believe the same thing as they do.
I may not be perfectly happy, but I'm certainly happier than before, when I was trying to wrestle with the pointlessness of Christian existence (Nietzche rightly points out that Christianity is nihilistic). The world makes much more sense now, despite me not feeling like I have all the answers any more.
I am undecided. I don't see any particular reason why an all powerful god or gods should just have always existed, rather than just.. stuff existing and eventually some stuff randomly coming to achieve sentience. Of course if you believe that you could believe that gods had evolved too. I wouldn't have trouble believing either way to be honest, but there isn't much evidence for an all-powerful god that I have seen. When my dad died I felt at peace that evening before I even knew he died, so that's the only evidence I have personally for the existence of some kind of spiritual link. Recently I've wondered if it could perhaps be due to some kind of quantum entanglement or something..
My brain isn't just a radio receiver, it is the radio station. And it's already broken.
That was nothing to do with the fact that they were german, it was what they were doing. A bias towards helping out your fellow man when he is in trouble is acceptable..!
I admit that you can't really live without bias, and there is the paradox that if you want to be tolerant of all opinions and people, you have to be tolerant of the intolerant too. But only having two main political parties, especially ones that appear to consider themselves diametrically opposed to one another, seems pretty silly. The truth is that they aren't amazingly different, but people act like they are, insisting that the opposing party is full of morons. Of course, there is the chance that both parties are entirely correct!
Sure, but if he created such a notion as time then isn't it likely that he would exist in a place which can move from one state to another? Which is basically just what time is. If a god did in fact create something in which time exists, it suggests that time exists for him too, otherwise there could not have even been a time when the universe was not created. Eternity itself requires the concept of time to exist. I think it's just impossible to understand the idea of something simply being. It's even more impossible to understand that anything could be in such a fashion as to allow conscience. It freaks me out just trying to grasp how anything could be. It all seems like some strange cosmic joke, the incongruity of it all:)
I don't have direct experience of many religions apart from Christianity, but I know that I don't believe in that any more. I don't want to discount the existence of intelligence or existence outside of our own universe, or even input from outside of the universe, because we don't have any evidence either way. I didn't say that anything in the final paragraph is true or what I believe, I was just pointing out how people can believe different things, and I feel that the circular reasoning section was necessary to point out to people how there is no point saying that the universe couldn't have just produced us because it's too unlikely. The fact is that if the real truth is that we are just the result of random events, we wouldn't be here to ask if those events hadn't taken place. I didn't say that we are just here by chance, but it is a possibility. The fact that anything is here is a crazy, crazy thing. It's not particularly more crazy to say that a God could exist, but as for the Christian God, I don't think he (as outlined in the bible) fits in well with what we can perceive and calculate to be true.
I don't get your last paragraph. Someone's understanding of god may be real to them, but that definitely does not make it real. People have been brainwashed to believe all sorts of things, and the mind is capable of great inner strength in difficult situations. Believing in a higher power is a good shortcut to that inner strength, and is one part of the 12 step program that addicts take to recover. It doesn't matter what higher power you believe in as long as you pretend it's there..
Indeed, the bible doesn't say a lot of things that different denominations take to be true. If God can't change then he can't really make decisions etc. But it's still all bollocks:p I can believe that there is a god, but I can't believe in the christian god just because of a few simple things - like how is it fair that only a select group of people were told about him, and even these days there are people who know nothing of Jesus. Are these people saved? And if they are, what is the fscking point in going out and reaching them to witness to them?
Well, I experienced doubts because of reasoning, but I always found excuses and arguments against things. A lot of people just don't know enough about religions to be able to reason properly against a religious person without making some basic errors in their understanding of the person's beliefs, which is enough to make you just think that person is an idiot. Back in those days I relied more on just my feelings and experiences though, telling myself that even though on the surface sometimes things didn't seem to add up, the element I was missing was faith. You're kind of right that you can reason with people, but only if they have the right attitude in the first place - if they are just out to defend their religion or to disprove one, rather than having an open mind, then you can't do anything. Give a Christian a logical proof that their God doesn't exist, and they just won't accept it, because they have convinced themself that he does exist. They believe that God just lets evil happen to allow free will, but that he is still a good god. They believe that he punishes people eternally in hell for finite sins, yet he is still a good god, etc. Against that kind of belief, you can't reason effectively.
Everyone is different of course, and I'm not infallible, so perhaps it's possible to reason even a steadfast Christian out of their beliefs, but if that were true then I doubt anyone would still be one. It sounds like you are the type of person who has a logical and open mind, but not everyone is like that. I have been talking with some of my Christian friends about why I stopped believing, and one of them came out with completely moronic things like "the bible can't be manmade - it's too complicated!". I was stunned. She also said that if God didn't exist, then love wouldn't exist. I tried to point out that that was only true if you believe the bible, but she didn't seem to get that at all.
I was very strong in my beliefs, and someone even told me after we left high school that he admired how much I stood up for them even though he didn't agree with them. I thought up pascal's wager before I knew it was called pascal's wager, only my version included more religions than just christianity. It was quite difficult to come to terms with the fact that I and the past few generations of my family (my grandad was a minister and most of my relatives are Christians) could have been wrong that whole time;) In the last few years my ideas of Christians being essentially incapable of certain 'sins' or attitudes was shattered, making it much easier for me to see that in fact God was not present in these people's lives. These people really were proper believing 'Christians' though. That enabled me to doubt the bible, which lead to me looking at it in a whole different way and picking out several flaws in the logic of it which previously I just wouldn't have accepted (things like a good god creating hell like I mentioned above - IMO a good god would simply destroy the souls of sinners rather than punishing them forever, which is pretty sadistic)
It does forbid sex outside of marriage. Or at least my denomination of the church did. I'm not sure if I ever found a verse that explicitly forbade it (and I'd read the old testament through twice, and the new testament far more times), though it could come under 'fornication', 'adultery' and the like. My dad once explained it as the first person you had sex with was the person you were married to, as the word marriage simply means joining.
Those with the conservative mindsets are more likely to over-simplify and force every question into a very rudimentary, black-and-white dichotomy
You mean like classifying everyone into 2 main political groups?;)
I've always thought the whole 2 party thing was ridiculous. Then again apparently according to British politics, both the main american parties are right-wing, just that the liberals are slightly less so! We in the UK are just as bad though, there are really only 2 political parties in with a chance of winning. I think it's pretty insane to have a heavily biased leadership in your country..
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Well personally if I'm going to be knocking out important services like VPN or email I sent out an email a couple of days in advance.
For critical things like that, it seems a bit weird to just leave it to a random announcements page that people have to remember to check, and that mostly will never have anything important on it. Our company is pretty small, only about 40 people using computers in total, but we have 3 offices and several road users, so email is the one thing that you can guarantee everyone is going to check at least once a day, and IMO it's the best method for notifying people of important events.
An announcement or policy board with fixed company events would make sense, but for maintenance operations which often can only be scheduled a couple of days in advance (I myself was ready to make a change but had to wait for our ISP to be ready, and after waiting a month for them to be ready I wanted to get the changes done as soon as possible, so scheduled it for 2 days after they were all sorted out), you can't guarantee to reach people.
I think you're a bit confused. This is not a 'free energy' scam, the power is coming from the wind. Movement in a magnetic field generates power. This is how a lot of electrical generators work. Some apparently work without magnets, I'm not an engineer so I've not studied this stuff in depth. I don't know if this system gradually makes the magnet lose its magnetism, but somebody above said the magnets wouldn't run out, and he probably knows what he's talking about (not definite but I'm sure someone will chime in with an explanation).
I'm not sure how you intend on creating a magnetic field without magnets or another electrical generator generating the field.
Likewise if you want to generate movement with an electric motor, AFAIK it is necessary to induce a magnetic field by passing electricity through a wire.
Good luck setting up some kind of infrastructure in a shanty town! I've not seen any in real life, but the pictures/movies (think the start of Incredible Hulk) I've seen show that they are crazy and totally unstructured!
Besides that, you have already pointed out plenty of problems that would arise even if it were architecturally possible to create a power grid in a shanty town. A large wind turbine would be expensive to maintain, not to mention who is actually responsible for the maintenance.
People are thinking on completely the wrong scale when they complain about this. If these guys could afford to pay for power infrastructure installation and subsequent power bills (which they wouldn't have to pay if they got their own micro-generator system), wouldn't they be living in an area that has power to begin with? Building a collection of smaller generators as and when they can afford it seems like a pretty good option. Then they can even take it with them if they have to move or their town is hit by a natural disaster. I know I'd love to be self sufficient in power terms (via solar panels/wind turbines/whatever), but seeing as I don't even have my own house yet, that's getting a bit far ahead of myself.
Except after the initial outlay for the winbelt, you never need to crank again. Any man would pay $125 for indefinite free cranking.
On the other hand, if we can make wind power cheap (cheap turbines, which might not be quite as efficient, but still work, and towers constructed out of locally-available materials), a huge impact will be made.
You could simply put several of these mechanisms on a pole? It's not that hard to figure out :p Efficient storage is really the 'killer app' because then you don't need the wind to be blowing every time you want to switch on the lights. We have plenty of tech for collecting energy these days, it's the storage that is now the main issue. With decent batteries/supercaps you could be collecting energy all day with these babies and you'd only need to be drawing power for a few hours in the evening.
Nobody apart from you said anything about saving the third world. Whether he can do that or not has nothing to do with this being a pretty good idea. He does sound like he has plans for scaling it up as well, though he has a pretty good niche market to start on with the efficient micropower thing.
You can ignore this if you want, but I expect all those into engineering and technology are a bit more impressed, and imagining what could be done with larger scale systems. Our company is in the process of manufacturing our first megawatt tidal turbine. Guess what? We can make it smaller if we want to only generate kilowatts. I don't know if we have any plans for making even larger ones though, 25m tall is difficult enough to construct. This guy's design is simple, efficient and would probably work quite well underwater too..
Actually, I commented to my mum on the drive home from communion how peaceful everything seemed, it was dark and you could see the starts etc. I knew it was kind of a weird thing to say even as I was saying it. Of course it could just have been because we were at communion.
I had wondered since then if that was the same night, but I was talking to my uncle a couple of weeks ago and he said that it was on the day of communion that dad died (we only did communion 4 times a year at our church). So there you go :p I don't discount spiritual things, I think that's just as stupid as assuming that there definitely are spiritual things without first having decent evidence.
I'm quite aware that it could just have been a coincidence, and did psychology for a couple of years at university (and I'd read a little before I attended university) so I'm quite aware of the way that memories can be affected - you don't have to be so patronising ;) I knew when my mum gathered us all together one sunday night that she was going to say our grandad was dead too, of course he was very ill though so it was pretty obvious to me even though I was only about 8 or something. But my dad died suddenly and without any kind of warning. The only other person in my family that died was my granny, can't really remember much about that time, but 2/3 isn't that bad. Again I'm not saying it's conclusive evidence, just saying it's the only pro-'spiritual' type evidence I've got so far, outside of the realm of music and the arts I guess.
You must be new here.
There we go, fixed that for you.
In Soviet Russia, Jedi knights queen!
I, for one, welcome our Jedi ove.. meh, forget it.
6 films? I thought it was 3? Wait.. something is coming to me.. argh no! The horror! Make it stop, make it stop!! FAAAATHEEEEEEEEEEEERRR!!!
What 6 films would those be?
A one day course? I think a day-trip to Belfast is in order so that I can put 'Jedi Knight' after my name instead of BSc.
Well in some perhaps, but Christianity for one says "do not put your lord god to the test", and I expect others have such catch-all clauses just so that they can't be 'disproven' as such..
Thanks for the compliment, I'm trying to be aware but I just have little idea how to go about it. I was considering doing yoga style meditation, but I'm pretty sure that's just a way to get yourself high by loading up your blood with oxygen.. it makes you feel good (yeah I did have a good go at it one day :) ), but does it actually reveal any special truths? I should probably start a habit of doing it anyway as it's good for stress relief, and if there are any spiritual elements in life then blanking off physical and mental activity could be a good way to reach them.
I agree in general, the bible says God makes the sun shine on the believer and non-believer, that type of thing, so there is no way of actually testing whether God is there. The whole bible is like that, you can indeed pray for good things (and the bible does not condemn riches or other things which are nice to have, it just condemns being obsessed by them), but you will only get the ones that God wants you to have etc. So praying to me over the last few years seemed kind of pointless, which probably helped me to stop brainwashing myself and eventually free myself from my nonsensical beliefs.
I have known a few ministers though, and in in my denomination at least they were very genuine people. My grandad was one, I've had friends that have gone to study as ministers or are likely to one day, and a lot of my friends at University were minister's children. So don't assume that the majority of them are lying conmen, a lot actually believe in what they are doing. I have heard that some ministers in the Church of England profess to not even be Christians though, and I can't see any more pointless existence than preaching for something that you don't believe in.. pretty crazy.
In that case, the time stuff isn't what bothers me, it's the existence part. Something must have always existed in eternity or whatever you want to call it. That is an astounding and wonderful mystery, but it still freaks me out. It perhaps does hint at some higher truth but is there a way to tell? If I will just disappear when I die then I guess it won't be a problem to me anymore though.
I just assumed you were a Christian because Cristians often try to explain away the existence of God by saying that he exists outside of time and we'll never be able to understand that (which means they can shut down their brain and ignore anything beyond the meaning for their own existence). Perhaps there is some truth to this, that some intelligence was involved in causing our universe to come into existence, perhaps not.
How exactly is the big bang 'ridiculous'?? The universe is gradually falling to entropy and eventually all energy will just end up as heat. It is my understanding that the universe will eventually stop expanding and collapse in upon itself due to gravity pulling it back in. If the universe contracted again into a black hole type singularity, then it happening to explode because of all the energy contained in it isn't that ridiculous.. I'm not a physicist and haven't read about the big bang for years though. But I don't think it's ridiculous. It just isn't the answer to why everything exists.
An omnipotent God just existing fully formed is pretty ridiculous (not saying it's impossible, but it is crazy).
A god-like being or race gradually evolving, still pretty ridiculous, but less-so than a god just being.
Anything existing at all, fully formed or gradually evolving - the most ridiculous, yet here we are.
There was a /. article about a certain group of bacteria or similar organism that evolved to be able to metabolise a new chemical from its surroundings (one of the defining attributes of this species was that it could not metabolise the chemical). There were some a few groups as control groups and only one of the groups evolved this ability. The scientist also had been taking samples of the cultures every few generations, and when he 'replayed' the evolution back beyond a certain point the organisms didn't develop the ability. So he came to the conclusion that a combination of two or more random mutations had caused the bacteria to develop the ability to metabolise this chemical. Seemed fairly conclusive evidence..
Ah, found it :) http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/10/1845250
The thing is that God of the bible isn't 'alone', he is the father, son and spirit living in perfect communion. Doesn't sound like he needs to share to me. And if he did need to share and create us, and loves all of humanity as Jesus claimed, why punish the non-believers eternally? Why not punish them for a finite amount of time then destroy their souls? Seems much kinder to me. I was a devout believer and know all the little arguments for free will and that crap, but it is all just a pile of paradoxical nonsense. It isn't paradoxical because it's 'deep', it's paradoxical because it's bollocks. That's just my opinion of course, after 24 years of sitting listening to sermons in a fairly fundamentalist church, and 10 of those years I was a "born again" Christian.
I don't know, personally I consider it quite a great event. Christians may not consider it 'great', but that is because it is negating their beliefs rather than affirming them. Those that aren't Christians seem to consider it a good thing, as a couple of comments here have shown. Of course people are going to be happy when others come to believe the same thing as they do.
I may not be perfectly happy, but I'm certainly happier than before, when I was trying to wrestle with the pointlessness of Christian existence (Nietzche rightly points out that Christianity is nihilistic). The world makes much more sense now, despite me not feeling like I have all the answers any more.
I am undecided. I don't see any particular reason why an all powerful god or gods should just have always existed, rather than just.. stuff existing and eventually some stuff randomly coming to achieve sentience. Of course if you believe that you could believe that gods had evolved too. I wouldn't have trouble believing either way to be honest, but there isn't much evidence for an all-powerful god that I have seen. When my dad died I felt at peace that evening before I even knew he died, so that's the only evidence I have personally for the existence of some kind of spiritual link. Recently I've wondered if it could perhaps be due to some kind of quantum entanglement or something..
My brain isn't just a radio receiver, it is the radio station. And it's already broken.
That was nothing to do with the fact that they were german, it was what they were doing. A bias towards helping out your fellow man when he is in trouble is acceptable..!
I admit that you can't really live without bias, and there is the paradox that if you want to be tolerant of all opinions and people, you have to be tolerant of the intolerant too. But only having two main political parties, especially ones that appear to consider themselves diametrically opposed to one another, seems pretty silly. The truth is that they aren't amazingly different, but people act like they are, insisting that the opposing party is full of morons. Of course, there is the chance that both parties are entirely correct!
Sure, but if he created such a notion as time then isn't it likely that he would exist in a place which can move from one state to another? Which is basically just what time is. If a god did in fact create something in which time exists, it suggests that time exists for him too, otherwise there could not have even been a time when the universe was not created. Eternity itself requires the concept of time to exist. I think it's just impossible to understand the idea of something simply being. It's even more impossible to understand that anything could be in such a fashion as to allow conscience. It freaks me out just trying to grasp how anything could be. It all seems like some strange cosmic joke, the incongruity of it all :)
I don't have direct experience of many religions apart from Christianity, but I know that I don't believe in that any more. I don't want to discount the existence of intelligence or existence outside of our own universe, or even input from outside of the universe, because we don't have any evidence either way. I didn't say that anything in the final paragraph is true or what I believe, I was just pointing out how people can believe different things, and I feel that the circular reasoning section was necessary to point out to people how there is no point saying that the universe couldn't have just produced us because it's too unlikely. The fact is that if the real truth is that we are just the result of random events, we wouldn't be here to ask if those events hadn't taken place. I didn't say that we are just here by chance, but it is a possibility. The fact that anything is here is a crazy, crazy thing. It's not particularly more crazy to say that a God could exist, but as for the Christian God, I don't think he (as outlined in the bible) fits in well with what we can perceive and calculate to be true.
I don't get your last paragraph. Someone's understanding of god may be real to them, but that definitely does not make it real. People have been brainwashed to believe all sorts of things, and the mind is capable of great inner strength in difficult situations. Believing in a higher power is a good shortcut to that inner strength, and is one part of the 12 step program that addicts take to recover. It doesn't matter what higher power you believe in as long as you pretend it's there..
Indeed, the bible doesn't say a lot of things that different denominations take to be true. If God can't change then he can't really make decisions etc. But it's still all bollocks :p I can believe that there is a god, but I can't believe in the christian god just because of a few simple things - like how is it fair that only a select group of people were told about him, and even these days there are people who know nothing of Jesus. Are these people saved? And if they are, what is the fscking point in going out and reaching them to witness to them?
Well, I experienced doubts because of reasoning, but I always found excuses and arguments against things. A lot of people just don't know enough about religions to be able to reason properly against a religious person without making some basic errors in their understanding of the person's beliefs, which is enough to make you just think that person is an idiot. Back in those days I relied more on just my feelings and experiences though, telling myself that even though on the surface sometimes things didn't seem to add up, the element I was missing was faith. You're kind of right that you can reason with people, but only if they have the right attitude in the first place - if they are just out to defend their religion or to disprove one, rather than having an open mind, then you can't do anything. Give a Christian a logical proof that their God doesn't exist, and they just won't accept it, because they have convinced themself that he does exist. They believe that God just lets evil happen to allow free will, but that he is still a good god. They believe that he punishes people eternally in hell for finite sins, yet he is still a good god, etc. Against that kind of belief, you can't reason effectively.
Everyone is different of course, and I'm not infallible, so perhaps it's possible to reason even a steadfast Christian out of their beliefs, but if that were true then I doubt anyone would still be one. It sounds like you are the type of person who has a logical and open mind, but not everyone is like that. I have been talking with some of my Christian friends about why I stopped believing, and one of them came out with completely moronic things like "the bible can't be manmade - it's too complicated!". I was stunned. She also said that if God didn't exist, then love wouldn't exist. I tried to point out that that was only true if you believe the bible, but she didn't seem to get that at all.
I was very strong in my beliefs, and someone even told me after we left high school that he admired how much I stood up for them even though he didn't agree with them. I thought up pascal's wager before I knew it was called pascal's wager, only my version included more religions than just christianity. It was quite difficult to come to terms with the fact that I and the past few generations of my family (my grandad was a minister and most of my relatives are Christians) could have been wrong that whole time ;) In the last few years my ideas of Christians being essentially incapable of certain 'sins' or attitudes was shattered, making it much easier for me to see that in fact God was not present in these people's lives. These people really were proper believing 'Christians' though. That enabled me to doubt the bible, which lead to me looking at it in a whole different way and picking out several flaws in the logic of it which previously I just wouldn't have accepted (things like a good god creating hell like I mentioned above - IMO a good god would simply destroy the souls of sinners rather than punishing them forever, which is pretty sadistic)
It does forbid sex outside of marriage. Or at least my denomination of the church did. I'm not sure if I ever found a verse that explicitly forbade it (and I'd read the old testament through twice, and the new testament far more times), though it could come under 'fornication', 'adultery' and the like. My dad once explained it as the first person you had sex with was the person you were married to, as the word marriage simply means joining.
Those with the conservative mindsets are more likely to over-simplify and force every question into a very rudimentary, black-and-white dichotomy
You mean like classifying everyone into 2 main political groups? ;)
I've always thought the whole 2 party thing was ridiculous. Then again apparently according to British politics, both the main american parties are right-wing, just that the liberals are slightly less so! We in the UK are just as bad though, there are really only 2 political parties in with a chance of winning. I think it's pretty insane to have a heavily biased leadership in your country..