How many times does this need to be said? When it comes to ethics, morality, community, and spirituality, science is no replacement for religion at all.
Either this year or last year I actually submitted a resume and application for an Apple internship... never heard back. I'd still put one in, except that I already have work for the summer: an REU and a Summer of Code project.
Funny thing, I'm graduating next year and *like* doing kernel work... My actual track at school is Programming Languages & Compilers, but I've known how to do low-level stuff since high school. Would you happen to have a contract email address you can send me?
Re:You knew nothing of the sort
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And you failed to detect a lie over 6 years that took me one summer's weekend of sitting through my brother's DVD box sets. Why?
Re:Do you want more religion with your scifi?
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As a religious person, I'd like to say: bugger off, Lost didn't have anything properly religious in it.
Religion means nailing your spirituality down to actual, concrete meanings. Lost never did that. Wooga, wooga, there's some kinda afterlife! Great, now who made the whole thing: Krishna, Mazda, Elohim, Jesus Christ, Allah, the Great Spirit, Odin, Zeus, or WhatTheFuck? No answers are given.
Religion and religious feelings can certainly have a legitimate place in science fiction. Dune handles it all rather well, as a matter of fact, always leaving it to the reader to decide if there really is a God/Shai-Hulud or if humans are just making it up, and what it means to be a religious human in a religious universe either way.
Lost, on the other hand... Donnie Darko made more sense than Lost.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
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It reminded me of a few anime series I watched in this respect where the shows digress into absolving themselves of anything earthly or logical in some sort of ethereal climax of visual and auditory sequence or cues.
Yeah, "Lost" is pretty much the "Neon Genesis Evangelion" of American prime-time.
I am not sure where you are getting your definition of a "living document" but a quick google search for a definition [google.com] says a living document is one that is edited and revised.
Except in America, where "living document" means that we read the right to abort fetuses into the right to privacy into the Fourth Amendment and the right to homosexual marriage into the Equal Protection Clause, rather than having any kind of sane, convincing public conversation over the moral acceptability of these things and the degree to which law should legislate morality.
I agree, on the condition that the nation as a whole doesn't have to help ameliorate the consequences of Kansas's and Texas's self-imposed ignorance, such as unemployment, infrastructure failures, and out-migration of educated and productive citizens.
If the consequences will become our problem, we've got a right to impose some standards in the name of prevention.
OK, can I just say for the Slashdot record that Zionism is not right-wing, and there is no "right-wing bias" about giving a Zionist-slanted (but factually correct) reading of the history of the modern State of Israel and its surrounding region.
Once again, I acknowledge that the issue of the Middle East is hugely complex, leading to a very real capability to make factually correct statements that appear to slant this way, that or the other, but I don't like seeing it turned into a wrecking ball of left-right Western politics. When this happens, many of us Zionists wind up thrown into political wings that we ordinarily don't align with, or even ordinarily detest (that's the American right, for me), but suddenly feel completely unwelcome on the wing to which we thought we belong. Of all the issues in American left-right politics, the Middle East is actually the one where the talk of "polarization" is true. The Left, even the Jewish Left, has almost entirely taken up the Arab side and historiography, and in response the Right has integrated Jabotinskyist Right-Wing Zionism into its "clash of civilizations" neo-conservative project. Honestly, if Texas introduces some factual, informative lessons on the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict, with a Zionist slant, that departisanize Zionism and Arab nationalism by making them into matters of national self-determination, as they are in fact, rather than matters of whether one votes Democratic or Republican, then they'll have accomplished one little bit of good in a storm of ignorance and anti-intellectualism.
I have read lots of history and while I think the church-and-state arguments the Texas board makes are a little week, I can tell you that if you pickup the typical High School Civics book today there IS a progressive bias.
That depends where you pick up the book. In Texas, I'd bet the civics books are already quite conservative. In Massachusetts, they are most likely quite progressive. America works by local variation.
That's not at all an argument in favor of the "living document" mode of legal interpretation. It's an argument in favor of amending and updating the laws with the times, which is certainly what we should be doing. The idea of a "living [legal] document" that can mean a different thing now than it did 200 years ago without amendment is absurd, since it does, in fact, mean that we can interpret the laws however we please. As everyone knows, however, when every interpretation is true, none is true. Good progressives should step away from legal nihilism and simply advocate rewriting laws when we need to.
I never said you have problems. This is a Christian country that tolerates us non-Christians (I'm Jewish too, as a matter of fact) quite well, but it's a Christian country nonetheless.
If you think that the United States is not a Christian nation, try living as a non-Christian here. It's not a Christian state, but it's sure as hell a Christian nation.
If you're talking about the UC system or the UMass system, you're right about the idiotic, wannabe-radical academic politics, but there are two facts you need to face: it's really only combined to a few influential college systems, and most majors a person can take in college will still result in more learning of the subject matter than learning of the professors' ideology.
But, to answer your question, secular humanism is the idea that evidence and not magical thinking is the way to improve our lives.
No, it's not. That's not the definition of secular humanism. Secular humanism is an ethical system, not a way of knowing how "to improve our lives". It can include a belief in the use of science to better mankind, but it actually includes loads and loads of other things. This is why it's called humanism instead of secular scientism.
You do realize that strengthens his point? These people volunteer to fight for their country, and you think that when they come home sick or broken, we shouldn't pay to heal them?
With a two party system the compromise and the coalition forming is done before the election, then the people vote on which coalition of interests they want in power.
Right, so if I want to vote for universal health care, my vote will also go toward homosexual marriage and pandering to Muslim extremists. If I don't want to pander to Muslim extremists but instead want to protect my country from them, it turns out that I have absolutely nobody to vote for, since the side that doesn't want to pander to them has decided it's a good idea to go randomly invading their countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Once again, you're equating science with rationalism and rationalism with the rejection of religion. This is fundamentally incorrect.
So to you, the definition of science is keeping religion out of the public sphere and stem-cell research. Wonderful. The future of science is bright!
How many times does this need to be said? When it comes to ethics, morality, community, and spirituality, science is no replacement for religion at all.
Why do you want to have sex with the volleyball team full of Great Old Ones, though?
Either this year or last year I actually submitted a resume and application for an Apple internship... never heard back. I'd still put one in, except that I already have work for the summer: an REU and a Summer of Code project.
If I hadn't posted here already, I'd mod you up for the subtlest Firefly reference I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Funny thing, I'm graduating next year and *like* doing kernel work... My actual track at school is Programming Languages & Compilers, but I've known how to do low-level stuff since high school. Would you happen to have a contract email address you can send me?
And you failed to detect a lie over 6 years that took me one summer's weekend of sitting through my brother's DVD box sets. Why?
As a religious person, I'd like to say: bugger off, Lost didn't have anything properly religious in it.
Religion means nailing your spirituality down to actual, concrete meanings. Lost never did that. Wooga, wooga, there's some kinda afterlife! Great, now who made the whole thing: Krishna, Mazda, Elohim, Jesus Christ, Allah, the Great Spirit, Odin, Zeus, or WhatTheFuck? No answers are given.
Religion and religious feelings can certainly have a legitimate place in science fiction. Dune handles it all rather well, as a matter of fact, always leaving it to the reader to decide if there really is a God/Shai-Hulud or if humans are just making it up, and what it means to be a religious human in a religious universe either way.
Lost, on the other hand... Donnie Darko made more sense than Lost.
It reminded me of a few anime series I watched in this respect where the shows digress into absolving themselves of anything earthly or logical in some sort of ethereal climax of visual and auditory sequence or cues.
Yeah, "Lost" is pretty much the "Neon Genesis Evangelion" of American prime-time.
I am not sure where you are getting your definition of a "living document" but a quick google search for a definition [google.com] says a living document is one that is edited and revised.
Except in America, where "living document" means that we read the right to abort fetuses into the right to privacy into the Fourth Amendment and the right to homosexual marriage into the Equal Protection Clause, rather than having any kind of sane, convincing public conversation over the moral acceptability of these things and the degree to which law should legislate morality.
I agree, on the condition that the nation as a whole doesn't have to help ameliorate the consequences of Kansas's and Texas's self-imposed ignorance, such as unemployment, infrastructure failures, and out-migration of educated and productive citizens.
If the consequences will become our problem, we've got a right to impose some standards in the name of prevention.
OK, can I just say for the Slashdot record that Zionism is not right-wing, and there is no "right-wing bias" about giving a Zionist-slanted (but factually correct) reading of the history of the modern State of Israel and its surrounding region.
Once again, I acknowledge that the issue of the Middle East is hugely complex, leading to a very real capability to make factually correct statements that appear to slant this way, that or the other, but I don't like seeing it turned into a wrecking ball of left-right Western politics. When this happens, many of us Zionists wind up thrown into political wings that we ordinarily don't align with, or even ordinarily detest (that's the American right, for me), but suddenly feel completely unwelcome on the wing to which we thought we belong. Of all the issues in American left-right politics, the Middle East is actually the one where the talk of "polarization" is true. The Left, even the Jewish Left, has almost entirely taken up the Arab side and historiography, and in response the Right has integrated Jabotinskyist Right-Wing Zionism into its "clash of civilizations" neo-conservative project. Honestly, if Texas introduces some factual, informative lessons on the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict, with a Zionist slant, that departisanize Zionism and Arab nationalism by making them into matters of national self-determination, as they are in fact, rather than matters of whether one votes Democratic or Republican, then they'll have accomplished one little bit of good in a storm of ignorance and anti-intellectualism.
So yeah.
I have read lots of history and while I think the church-and-state arguments the Texas board makes are a little week, I can tell you that if you pickup the typical High School Civics book today there IS a progressive bias.
That depends where you pick up the book. In Texas, I'd bet the civics books are already quite conservative. In Massachusetts, they are most likely quite progressive. America works by local variation.
That's not at all an argument in favor of the "living document" mode of legal interpretation. It's an argument in favor of amending and updating the laws with the times, which is certainly what we should be doing. The idea of a "living [legal] document" that can mean a different thing now than it did 200 years ago without amendment is absurd, since it does, in fact, mean that we can interpret the laws however we please. As everyone knows, however, when every interpretation is true, none is true. Good progressives should step away from legal nihilism and simply advocate rewriting laws when we need to.
I never said you have problems. This is a Christian country that tolerates us non-Christians (I'm Jewish too, as a matter of fact) quite well, but it's a Christian country nonetheless.
If you think that the United States is not a Christian nation, try living as a non-Christian here. It's not a Christian state, but it's sure as hell a Christian nation.
I question the notion that 25% of the country having a bachelors degree is too many college graduates...
If you're talking about the UC system or the UMass system, you're right about the idiotic, wannabe-radical academic politics, but there are two facts you need to face: it's really only combined to a few influential college systems, and most majors a person can take in college will still result in more learning of the subject matter than learning of the professors' ideology.
But, to answer your question, secular humanism is the idea that evidence and not magical thinking is the way to improve our lives.
No, it's not. That's not the definition of secular humanism. Secular humanism is an ethical system, not a way of knowing how "to improve our lives". It can include a belief in the use of science to better mankind, but it actually includes loads and loads of other things. This is why it's called humanism instead of secular scientism.
Dear God, it's comments like these that make me wish Slashdot had a "BESTOF" button.
Am I actually the only person who thinks that the name "Diaspora" sucks because it means "large-scale exile from one's homeland"?
You do realize that strengthens his point? These people volunteer to fight for their country, and you think that when they come home sick or broken, we shouldn't pay to heal them?
With a two party system the compromise and the coalition forming is done before the election, then the people vote on which coalition of interests they want in power.
Right, so if I want to vote for universal health care, my vote will also go toward homosexual marriage and pandering to Muslim extremists. If I don't want to pander to Muslim extremists but instead want to protect my country from them, it turns out that I have absolutely nobody to vote for, since the side that doesn't want to pander to them has decided it's a good idea to go randomly invading their countries.
Right, except that's Japan, land of staying at work extra to make it look like you've put in extra hours, whether you have that much work or not.
Cooperate at work, get your work done, and then leave. It's not your life.