I know it's been a week since you posted this, but what the hey...
Incidentally, despite god's claim that eating from the tree would kill them that day the reality turned out to be quite different.
Ironically, if you support the idea that each "day" in Genesis lasts for millions of years, God could well have been right;) (Yes, I'm joking, sort of.)
You begin to approach an understanding of why the christian mythology does not make sense and why most people don't believe it.
To be fair, most people believe in some kind of supernatural mythology, and Christianity is up there as far as how many adherents each religion has. On the other hand, the number of people who believe something has zero bearing on how accurate it is, and I'm still an atheist either way. I suppose this paragraph falls under "suggestion about how to properly criticize religion":)
And *that* my friends is exactly why pen-and-paper games (especially with a good DM) rules over computer games.
Pen and paper games *always* rule over computer games? That's not even a remotely justifiable thing to say. I've experienced PNP sessions that were boring, unfulfilling, or frustrating, and I've played CRPGs that were incredibly fun, a great story, etc. (And of course I've had PNP sessions that were awesome, and played CRPGs that sucked.) PNP and computer RPGs both have their good and bad points; how can you claim that one somehow "rules" over the other, when they're completely different kinds of experiences?
Yeah, Skynet is the self-aware computer system that launches Judgment Day and kills 3 billion people in the Terminator movies. It used advanced artificial intelligence hardware that was able to rewire itself on the fly and thus learn, unlike modern computers. Hence the jokes.
I played in an AD&D campaign a couple of years ago with some friends. We came upon some kind of enormous artifact buried in a forest, and it had a gaping hole leading down into fathomless depths.
So while standing around examining the thing, we get attacked by a bunch of ghostly creatures of some kind. One of the guys had some acrobatic skill, so he told the GM that, in order to avoid an attack, he was going to "tumble, but not into the hole."
Yep, that's right: he rolled a 1. I think the GM was nice and didn't make him plummet to his death, but we did get to spend the rest of the campaign mocking him.
So technically, if you manage to hold that prison guard still while you slowly push the shiv through his armor, it'll work just fine (for you, not the guard). Interesting -- so throwing yourself on the knife might actually be a useful defense!
Presumably if you were holding down the guard, you'd go for a more vulnerable spot like his neck or head, rather than trying to work the knife through the vest.
"Contrary to what most people say, the most dangerous animal in the world is not the lion or the tiger or even the elephant. It's a shark riding on an elephant's back, just trampling and eating everything they see." - Jack Handey
If we strapped a laser to the shark's back, I think we'd have quite the unstoppable killing machine. And then mounted the elephant-shark-laser combo on a 747. Yeah!
was or was not Saddam Hussein a murdering bastard of a dictator who should have been taken out?
The problem is, asking the question this way is misleading. Almost everyone agrees that Saddam was an evil, murderous, tyrannical bastard of a dictator. Almost no one will cry when Saddam dies.
But just because someone (or everyone) believes that Saddam deserves to die, does not mean they believe that the U.S. should have invaded Iraq in March 2003. The Bush administration justified invading Iraq under false pretenses: that Iraq had WMDs and was planning to use them against the U.S. Whether they had WMDs in the months before the invasion started, we don't really know; there are all kinds of arguments like, "Well, we know they HAD WMDs in 1998 or so, and there's no reason to think they would have destroyed them," but so far all the evidence is circumstantial. And as has been revealed in bits and parts over the past year, there was essentially no evidence that -- even if Iraq had WMDs -- they were going to use them against us.
Okay, well what about freeing the Iraqi people? Sure, that's an admirable goal, to bring democracy to what was formerly a cruel dictatorship. Assuming you actually pull it off and don't fuck up the country even more... but that remains to be seen. The problem is, Bush & Co. didn't actually say that this was the reason they were doing it in the first place. Back before the invasion, it was all about the WMDs. WMDs, WMDs, WMDs. Then after months had passed with no WMDs, they started shifting to the liberation argument. Which is a good motive, but just because they did something good doesn't excuse the fact that they lied to us to do it!
Our response ought to be, "Fine, so you freed Iraq from the chains of tyranny. Good job. However you also lied to us about your motives. You're fired." Compare it to a man who instead of turning a child molester into the police, kills the child molester himself (before the child molester's trial). "Great job, ridding the world of that presumably evil bastard. However, you committed a murder, so you're still going to jail."
In addition to the liberation argument being an ad hoc justification, it misses other important facts:
1) There are numerous other tyrannical dictators in the world, e.g. all across Africa, whom we have not made noise one about getting rid of. If liberation and bringing freedom and democracy are so important, why doesn't the administration have plans for all the other dictators?
2) We've established a precedent of toppling evil dictators, so everyone expects us to topple all the other dictators.
3) The U.S. has established a precedent that it can unilaterally decide that a government needs to be toppled. This is just going to make other countries nervous, which is not good for our foreign relations.
The situation is not as simple as "Saddam was evil and needs to die, therefore the invasion was justified."
The DeLorean time machine is a licensed, registered vehicle in the state of California. While the vanity license plate used in the film says "OUTATIME", the DeLorean's actual license plate reads 3CZV657
I wonder about this. The California license plate sequence wasn't anywhere near 3CZV657 back in 1985. We still had the 2 series in 1990, so either the plate listed is wrong, or the DeLorean wasn't registered until much later (1993 or so), or was reregistered and got new plates. (Nitpick mode off!)
"I believe in God and..."
"I believe in Nothing/Nature and..." (yes, defining Atheism as a belief in Naturalism/Materialism)
The athiest still has to prove his/her statement true.
They would, if they made that statement. Generally, atheists don't. Or at least, that's not what our philosophy boils down to.
Atheism and theism both start from the same axiom: "The universe exists." Nobody really argues about that, so nobody needs to prove it. (Aside from solipsists, who we can safely ignore.) If it does need to be proved, then the theists need to prove it just as much as atheists do, since they're both making the same proposition. But effectively, they cancel out, since nobody demands proof.
From there, the theists add, "God created the universe." But atheists add nothing, despite your apparent desire to define them as being firm naturalists. They merely demand evidence for the proposition "God created the universe." But there is no parallel proposition on the atheist side that requires evidence.
Now of course this is simplifying things a bit; certainly there are some atheists who insist that there cannot be a God, or definitively state that God could exist but does not, and that there is no "higher" power than the natural laws of physics. Of course, there is no evidence for these propositions either, and it is foolish to make them. But many (most?) atheists, and virtually all of those that I know personally, take the null stance -- the universe appears to exist, and that's all we can really say about its origins. You have for some reason set up a straw man in your post, implying that all atheists say something that most do not.
And, as you pointed out, even if atheists had to prove a claim, that would not lessen a theist's responsibility to prove their claim in the existence of a God.
If you think you can do any better, then please, by all means do so, until then I suggest you not comment on how poor you think the quality of their work is.
Bullshit. By this criterion, I shouldn't be allowed to tell people what I think of food if I can't cook, what I think of a movie if I don't know how to make one, what I thought of a novel if I couldn't write one, or what I think of a painting if I can't draw.
You quite definitely don't need to know how to cook to know that something tastes terrible. And you don't need to know how to do machinima to watch one and say it sucks. (Or that it's good!)
You also missed the flipside of your argument -- if you can't comment on it until you've done one, then you shouldn't say it's good, either, because what do you know?
The problems with calling (telephone) as a whitelist solution are that 1) people may be reluctant to give their phone number out online, to strangers, and 2) the person who wants to get on your whitelist might be in another state or country, and calling you would be prohibitively expensive.
I keep thinking about solutions along the line of, anywhere my email address is posted publicly, there's a little instruction text that says something like, "I filter all my email. If you wish to email me, put 'mattw whitelist bravo 7' as the subject line, otherwise your email will be rejected." Then I filter out any messages that have that as the subject, and (if they're not spam) add that person's email to my whitelist (so that in the future, they can use whatever subject line they want).
Yeah, it's a lot more unwieldy that just putting the email address, but it may be the only reliable way. Of course, if one random friend wants to give another random friend my email address so that he can contact me out of the blue, he has to remember to use the proper subject line, otherwise I'll never see the request and have no idea someone tried to contact me who wasn't already on my whitelist. Basically it's a password which lets them access my email address. The password is only needed once, so if I need to change it (because a spammer gets ahold of it), I don't need to tell anyone who's already on my whitelist.
It's not a perfect solution, but I'm sure we could build it into a usable system.
The parent poster is definitely a troll. However, he is either:
1) really a Christian, in which case he's a hypocrite, a coward, not especially bright, and certainly not a strong believer in the teachings of Jesus; or
2) merely a troll.
In either event, he's making Christianity look bad, something of which I always approve.
Re:This is BRILLIANT! +5 Flame
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SimChurch
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My apologies to start, but this is really long, mostly because I like picking things apart point-by-point. Don't take any of it personally.:)
Logic is poor problem solving technique for real world situations.
Logic is exactly what we use (and should use) for solving problems in the real world; it's just that our premises are far more numerous, and our inductive steps far more elaborate and involved than a simple logical exercise like "Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore Socrates is mortal." Are you telling me that you operate under some principle other than logic when trying to make decisions? Either you decide using some logical system, or you decide randomly (which is itself encompassed by a logical system, in which the premise is that all conclusions shall be generated randomly).
While you can debate vigorously the nature of gravity, at the end of the day if you drop a pencil it will hit the floor. Logic doesn't tell you that, experience tells you that.
Would experience tell that to someone who had grown up in zero gravity? Imagine a person who is born and raised on a space station orbiting Earth. They never leave the station. Gravity is unknown to them on a personal level; the space station is far short of the mass necessary for objects within it to be noticeably subject to its gravity. They never experience gravity the same way someone standing still on Earth's surface does.
Certainly, if they were educated, they'd be aware that gravity existed, that all matter has gravitational attraction to all other matter, and that gravity is a force that increases with the product of the masses involved and decreases with the square of the distance.
So if you asked this educated person what would happen if two objects were placed near each other -- say, a pencil placed 5 meters away from Earth -- they could and would quite rightly and reasonably use logic to determine that the pencil and Earth would be mutually attracted to each other, that from the point of view of an observer on Earth's surface, the pencil would fall... even if they had never seen it happen before.
The logical proof for one plus one is several hundred pages.
No, it only takes 5 simple rules for the basis of arithmetic. Proving that 1+1=2 is as simple as defining the operation of addition, then demonstrating that since the 1st successor of 1 is 2, if we take the 1st successor of 1 (a translation of 1+1 into Peano's rules), we get 2. QED.
Experience gives you the answer instantly.
Experience certainly is useful when performing simple arithmetical operations in your head. Does experience instantly tell you what 87598136410 + 562142346819 is? Not likely; you'll use logic (arithmetic) to find the answer. How about 293 + 4476? At what point does experience take over from logic? Even when it does, so what?
Even in matters of arithmetic, logic is superceeded by tradition and rules to work around the lack of precision. (Logically currency would be a real value, in practice you have 2 decimal places to work with.)
I'm beginning to think that you're not all that clear on what logic really is. I hope I'm wrong, so please correct me if so. When you say, "Logically currency would be..." you mean logically according to who? Who says that it would be more logical to handle all currency as real numbers rather than limiting it to some arbitrary precision? Clearly, since humans are far less capable of dealing with real numbers than simple integers when it comes to currency, and since efficiency is a primary goal of currency systems, it would be incredibly illogical to use a real number system for currency.
(Of course, if you were dealing with computers, it might be logical, and in fact a lot of
Indeed, it's pretty amazing how much information they can fit on those trading cards. For those of you with ultra-high resolution printers, here's the code to Super Mario 3:
One possibility is that the number of people happy with dial-up service will increase, because those who are unhappy with it will switch to broadband. All the people for whom dial-up is perfectly acceptable, and have no real desire or need to upgrade, will remain on dialup. Eventually it'd get to nearly 100% who are happy with dial-up, because everyone else has already left for broadband.
Of course, those who are happy with dial-up may become unhappy with it for a variety of reasons: customer service sucks and they think broadband will be better, they find out how much faster broadband is and find a use for it, whatever. Or even those who remain "happy" with dial-up may choose to upgrade to broadband because it's even better, from their POV.
Even if someone WAS raised from the dead, you apparently have already decided that it couldn't possibly be God.
Hm. So how exactly would you tell that someone had been raised from the dead because of God? How would you determine that God was the definite cause, and not some natural, physical mechanism? Or maybe that he wasn't dead in the first place? I'm really interested in finding out, since two thousand years of theologians so far haven't come up with a method to distinguish between God causing something, and that thing happening on its own.
No, the burden of proof does not lie both ways. The atheist starts out going about his day. Then the theist approaches and says, "God exists." The atheist then says, "Prove it."
You seem to think that the atheist, at this point, is as responsible for disproving the assertion "God exists" as the theist is responsible for proving it. This is false. The atheist has proposed nothing, and in all logical systems heretofore devised, the one making the assertion is the one responsible for proving it. The one asking for evidence of the assertion is not responsible to provide counter-evidence.
If I were to claim that you have an invisible rabbit following you around, nobody would expect you to disprove it. It would be up to me to prove it. The same goes with gods.
Re:Will the priests be able to...
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SimChurch
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You shouldn't split an inifinitive, it's just bad grammar.
Says you. That particular grammatical rule was borrowed from Latin and hasn't even been in favor with a majority of grammarians for years. Is there (has there ever been) any reason not to split an infinitive besides "you shouldn't?" (No.) Considering that splitting an infinitive is often the best way to render a particular idea, there's no reason to blindly avoid doing it.:)
Re:This is BRILLIANT! +5 Flame
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SimChurch
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That said, It is better to worship something, however imperfect, than to live life believing there is nothing out there. Idolitry may be nutty, but living by pure materialism is downright pathological.
Say what? How do you support that statement? You consider it "pathological" to act only on reliable information, but not pathological to invent mythological extraplanar superbeings?
Yes, the site is an interesting expression of his creativity.
It ALSO has (rather unpleasant) pictures of a fat man in a unitard.
Someone's response to this page doesn't have to just be "Ewww, fat guy in unitard" or "Cool, what a neat idea!" It can, in fact, be both.
Re:Wait... so you're telling me...
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A New Ice Age?
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More accurately, the books the movie is based on were written by Bell and Strieber. They didn't write the screenplay (or at least they're not credited with it; Roland Emmerich and Jeffrey Nachmanoff are).
This article indicates that Eben Moglen, at least, disagrees with you. Seems like if anyone would know, he would. To quote him:
Because the GPL does not require any promises in return from licensees, it does not need contract enforcement in order to work.
Certainly he could be wrong, but I wasn't even aware that there were any lawyers who made the serious claim that the GPL is a contract in addition to being a license. From what I can find, licenses are not necessarily a form of contract, not in the technical legal sense.
The definitions of license and contract are quite distinct. When it comes to copyright, a license is "4) n. a private grant of the right to use some intellectual property such as a patent or musical composition." The license itself is merely a grant: I grant you this right, nothing is required in return. Where a contract might come into play is that you and I might sign a contract saying, "You will give me one million dollars, and I will grant you a license to use my copyrighted work." In order to fulfill the terms of the contract, I have to grant you a license. But if I felt like simply granting you the license without us having a contract, I could do that too, and it wouldn't involve contracts or contract law in any way.
The definition of "patent infringement" says that "the manufacture and/or use of an invention or improvement for which someone else owns a patent issued by the government, without obtaining permission of the owner of the patent by contract, license or waiver," which implies that contracts and licenses are separate entities.
No other entries in that dictionary mention "license" and "contract" together in any way that implies that licenses are a subset of contracts.
Can you point to something specific that shows that copyright licenses are automatically a form of contract and can/must be treated according to contract law? I haven't been able to find anything.
You're talking about patent law, not copyright law. The GPL is a copyright license. Does the patent law definition of what a license is apply to copyright licenses? A patent license may be a contract, but a copyright license (as far as I know) is not necessarily so.
I should have been more clear and said "a copyright license is not a contract" rather than the more general "a license is not a contract," but since the topic is the GPL (a copyright license), it is definitely implied.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Skynet is the self-aware computer system that launches Judgment Day and kills 3 billion people in the Terminator movies. It used advanced artificial intelligence hardware that was able to rewire itself on the fly and thus learn, unlike modern computers. Hence the jokes.
I played in an AD&D campaign a couple of years ago with some friends. We came upon some kind of enormous artifact buried in a forest, and it had a gaping hole leading down into fathomless depths.
So while standing around examining the thing, we get attacked by a bunch of ghostly creatures of some kind. One of the guys had some acrobatic skill, so he told the GM that, in order to avoid an attack, he was going to "tumble, but not into the hole."
Yep, that's right: he rolled a 1. I think the GM was nice and didn't make him plummet to his death, but we did get to spend the rest of the campaign mocking him.
"Contrary to what most people say, the most dangerous animal in the world is not the lion or the tiger or even the elephant. It's a shark riding on an elephant's back, just trampling and eating everything they see." - Jack Handey
If we strapped a laser to the shark's back, I think we'd have quite the unstoppable killing machine. And then mounted the elephant-shark-laser combo on a 747. Yeah!
But just because someone (or everyone) believes that Saddam deserves to die, does not mean they believe that the U.S. should have invaded Iraq in March 2003. The Bush administration justified invading Iraq under false pretenses: that Iraq had WMDs and was planning to use them against the U.S. Whether they had WMDs in the months before the invasion started, we don't really know; there are all kinds of arguments like, "Well, we know they HAD WMDs in 1998 or so, and there's no reason to think they would have destroyed them," but so far all the evidence is circumstantial. And as has been revealed in bits and parts over the past year, there was essentially no evidence that -- even if Iraq had WMDs -- they were going to use them against us.
Okay, well what about freeing the Iraqi people? Sure, that's an admirable goal, to bring democracy to what was formerly a cruel dictatorship. Assuming you actually pull it off and don't fuck up the country even more... but that remains to be seen. The problem is, Bush & Co. didn't actually say that this was the reason they were doing it in the first place. Back before the invasion, it was all about the WMDs. WMDs, WMDs, WMDs. Then after months had passed with no WMDs, they started shifting to the liberation argument. Which is a good motive, but just because they did something good doesn't excuse the fact that they lied to us to do it!
Our response ought to be, "Fine, so you freed Iraq from the chains of tyranny. Good job. However you also lied to us about your motives. You're fired." Compare it to a man who instead of turning a child molester into the police, kills the child molester himself (before the child molester's trial). "Great job, ridding the world of that presumably evil bastard. However, you committed a murder, so you're still going to jail."
In addition to the liberation argument being an ad hoc justification, it misses other important facts:
1) There are numerous other tyrannical dictators in the world, e.g. all across Africa, whom we have not made noise one about getting rid of. If liberation and bringing freedom and democracy are so important, why doesn't the administration have plans for all the other dictators?
2) We've established a precedent of toppling evil dictators, so everyone expects us to topple all the other dictators.
3) The U.S. has established a precedent that it can unilaterally decide that a government needs to be toppled. This is just going to make other countries nervous, which is not good for our foreign relations.
The situation is not as simple as "Saddam was evil and needs to die, therefore the invasion was justified."
Atheism and theism both start from the same axiom: "The universe exists." Nobody really argues about that, so nobody needs to prove it. (Aside from solipsists, who we can safely ignore.) If it does need to be proved, then the theists need to prove it just as much as atheists do, since they're both making the same proposition. But effectively, they cancel out, since nobody demands proof.
From there, the theists add, "God created the universe." But atheists add nothing, despite your apparent desire to define them as being firm naturalists. They merely demand evidence for the proposition "God created the universe." But there is no parallel proposition on the atheist side that requires evidence.
Now of course this is simplifying things a bit; certainly there are some atheists who insist that there cannot be a God, or definitively state that God could exist but does not, and that there is no "higher" power than the natural laws of physics. Of course, there is no evidence for these propositions either, and it is foolish to make them. But many (most?) atheists, and virtually all of those that I know personally, take the null stance -- the universe appears to exist, and that's all we can really say about its origins. You have for some reason set up a straw man in your post, implying that all atheists say something that most do not.
And, as you pointed out, even if atheists had to prove a claim, that would not lessen a theist's responsibility to prove their claim in the existence of a God.
You quite definitely don't need to know how to cook to know that something tastes terrible. And you don't need to know how to do machinima to watch one and say it sucks. (Or that it's good!)
You also missed the flipside of your argument -- if you can't comment on it until you've done one, then you shouldn't say it's good, either, because what do you know?
The problems with calling (telephone) as a whitelist solution are that 1) people may be reluctant to give their phone number out online, to strangers, and 2) the person who wants to get on your whitelist might be in another state or country, and calling you would be prohibitively expensive.
I keep thinking about solutions along the line of, anywhere my email address is posted publicly, there's a little instruction text that says something like, "I filter all my email. If you wish to email me, put 'mattw whitelist bravo 7' as the subject line, otherwise your email will be rejected." Then I filter out any messages that have that as the subject, and (if they're not spam) add that person's email to my whitelist (so that in the future, they can use whatever subject line they want).
Yeah, it's a lot more unwieldy that just putting the email address, but it may be the only reliable way. Of course, if one random friend wants to give another random friend my email address so that he can contact me out of the blue, he has to remember to use the proper subject line, otherwise I'll never see the request and have no idea someone tried to contact me who wasn't already on my whitelist. Basically it's a password which lets them access my email address. The password is only needed once, so if I need to change it (because a spammer gets ahold of it), I don't need to tell anyone who's already on my whitelist.
It's not a perfect solution, but I'm sure we could build it into a usable system.
OT: About your sig... wasn't the line "It comes in PINTS?!" in "Fellowship of the Ring", not "Return of the King"?
The parent poster is definitely a troll. However, he is either:
1) really a Christian, in which case he's a hypocrite, a coward, not especially bright, and certainly not a strong believer in the teachings of Jesus; or
2) merely a troll.
In either event, he's making Christianity look bad, something of which I always approve.
Logic is exactly what we use (and should use) for solving problems in the real world; it's just that our premises are far more numerous, and our inductive steps far more elaborate and involved than a simple logical exercise like "Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore Socrates is mortal." Are you telling me that you operate under some principle other than logic when trying to make decisions? Either you decide using some logical system, or you decide randomly (which is itself encompassed by a logical system, in which the premise is that all conclusions shall be generated randomly).
Would experience tell that to someone who had grown up in zero gravity? Imagine a person who is born and raised on a space station orbiting Earth. They never leave the station. Gravity is unknown to them on a personal level; the space station is far short of the mass necessary for objects within it to be noticeably subject to its gravity. They never experience gravity the same way someone standing still on Earth's surface does.
Certainly, if they were educated, they'd be aware that gravity existed, that all matter has gravitational attraction to all other matter, and that gravity is a force that increases with the product of the masses involved and decreases with the square of the distance.
So if you asked this educated person what would happen if two objects were placed near each other -- say, a pencil placed 5 meters away from Earth -- they could and would quite rightly and reasonably use logic to determine that the pencil and Earth would be mutually attracted to each other, that from the point of view of an observer on Earth's surface, the pencil would fall... even if they had never seen it happen before.
No, it only takes 5 simple rules for the basis of arithmetic. Proving that 1+1=2 is as simple as defining the operation of addition, then demonstrating that since the 1st successor of 1 is 2, if we take the 1st successor of 1 (a translation of 1+1 into Peano's rules), we get 2. QED.
Experience certainly is useful when performing simple arithmetical operations in your head. Does experience instantly tell you what 87598136410 + 562142346819 is? Not likely; you'll use logic (arithmetic) to find the answer. How about 293 + 4476? At what point does experience take over from logic? Even when it does, so what?
I'm beginning to think that you're not all that clear on what logic really is. I hope I'm wrong, so please correct me if so. When you say, "Logically currency would be..." you mean logically according to who? Who says that it would be more logical to handle all currency as real numbers rather than limiting it to some arbitrary precision? Clearly, since humans are far less capable of dealing with real numbers than simple integers when it comes to currency, and since efficiency is a primary goal of currency systems, it would be incredibly illogical to use a real number system for currency.
(Of course, if you were dealing with computers, it might be logical, and in fact a lot of
One possibility is that the number of people happy with dial-up service will increase, because those who are unhappy with it will switch to broadband. All the people for whom dial-up is perfectly acceptable, and have no real desire or need to upgrade, will remain on dialup. Eventually it'd get to nearly 100% who are happy with dial-up, because everyone else has already left for broadband.
Of course, those who are happy with dial-up may become unhappy with it for a variety of reasons: customer service sucks and they think broadband will be better, they find out how much faster broadband is and find a use for it, whatever. Or even those who remain "happy" with dial-up may choose to upgrade to broadband because it's even better, from their POV.
No, the burden of proof does not lie both ways. The atheist starts out going about his day. Then the theist approaches and says, "God exists." The atheist then says, "Prove it."
You seem to think that the atheist, at this point, is as responsible for disproving the assertion "God exists" as the theist is responsible for proving it. This is false. The atheist has proposed nothing, and in all logical systems heretofore devised, the one making the assertion is the one responsible for proving it. The one asking for evidence of the assertion is not responsible to provide counter-evidence.
If I were to claim that you have an invisible rabbit following you around, nobody would expect you to disprove it. It would be up to me to prove it. The same goes with gods.
Here's one explanation.
Yes, the site is an interesting expression of his creativity.
It ALSO has (rather unpleasant) pictures of a fat man in a unitard.
Someone's response to this page doesn't have to just be "Ewww, fat guy in unitard" or "Cool, what a neat idea!" It can, in fact, be both.
More accurately, the books the movie is based on were written by Bell and Strieber. They didn't write the screenplay (or at least they're not credited with it; Roland Emmerich and Jeffrey Nachmanoff are).
This article indicates that Eben Moglen, at least, disagrees with you. Seems like if anyone would know, he would. To quote him:
Certainly he could be wrong, but I wasn't even aware that there were any lawyers who made the serious claim that the GPL is a contract in addition to being a license. From what I can find, licenses are not necessarily a form of contract, not in the technical legal sense.
law.com's dictionary definition of "license" does not mention the word "contract". Neither does its definition of "contract" mention the word "license."
The definitions of license and contract are quite distinct. When it comes to copyright, a license is "4) n. a private grant of the right to use some intellectual property such as a patent or musical composition." The license itself is merely a grant: I grant you this right, nothing is required in return. Where a contract might come into play is that you and I might sign a contract saying, "You will give me one million dollars, and I will grant you a license to use my copyrighted work." In order to fulfill the terms of the contract, I have to grant you a license. But if I felt like simply granting you the license without us having a contract, I could do that too, and it wouldn't involve contracts or contract law in any way.
The definition of "patent infringement" says that "the manufacture and/or use of an invention or improvement for which someone else owns a patent issued by the government, without obtaining permission of the owner of the patent by contract, license or waiver," which implies that contracts and licenses are separate entities.
No other entries in that dictionary mention "license" and "contract" together in any way that implies that licenses are a subset of contracts.
Can you point to something specific that shows that copyright licenses are automatically a form of contract and can/must be treated according to contract law? I haven't been able to find anything.
You're talking about patent law, not copyright law. The GPL is a copyright license. Does the patent law definition of what a license is apply to copyright licenses? A patent license may be a contract, but a copyright license (as far as I know) is not necessarily so.
I should have been more clear and said "a copyright license is not a contract" rather than the more general "a license is not a contract," but since the topic is the GPL (a copyright license), it is definitely implied.