Then we are coming from different directions, and you have to take the whole thread into context. The person I replied to quoted his parent as saying: "Insane is a perfectly fine way of describing someone who thinks they have the sole capacity and right to choose for the rest of the nation."
That's what my reply was in context to, and so I assumed your reply to me was in that context.
That said, we still have the right to vote, yet people are grumbling about violent overthrow and assassination, threatening those in power because they don't like this or that legislation. Furthermore, when you make remarks comparing the murder of politicians with flushing a piece of tissue paper, it does make you a murderous tyrant. Politicians are people too, not all of them are bad, and the process itself is a necessarily ugly one. We all compromise ourselves in one way or another.
It always has been. I don't mean that in a negative sense, as long as both parties are arguing honestly.
But the Lord's name has yet to fail me, and certainly not as spectacularly as the rain has.
And yet it already failed me. Not just this one time either, but back when I had a belief in Christianity. I never, not once, felt something like a connection through prayer. Now, I didn't utter some magical incantation out loud, and I didn't practice said incantation daily, but are you suggesting that God would ignore my prayers when not using the highly specific form you suggest?
All I'm asking is that you try it. Once a day, drop your concepts and call. That's all.
It's just indoctrination. Humans are all too susceptible for it (for all kinds of beliefs), and I'm not going to subject myself to it.
Which would make this test perfect for a lot of people who would see and read this.
If you're going to appeal to science, then you need to be more skeptical in the design of your test. It's not proving the truth behind the biblical Jesus Christ. At best it shows that some people show an emotional response to a loaded term. If an atheist raised in a Christian nation had such an emotional response, you couldn't discount their upbringing.
Your feelings can be misleading, and are not some arbiter of truth. Do you know what brings me peace? The sound of rain. Does this prove the existence of a god of rain? I also find the song "Bridge Over Troubled Water" soothing. Should I worship Simon & Garfunkel? When I was in school and first heard audio recordings of Hitler's speeches, I was enthralled and felt a desire to follow his lead, and this even knowing how evil he was.
Again, I think you should test it(you may have, you left that unsaid as well).
I did it, once, just for the sake of it. No, it had no effect on me. Do you want me now to repeat that once a day? That's indoctrination. Do you think anybody that shows a positive response should then believe in biblical truth? That's uncritical thinking.
The people in 1776 weren't assassinating politicians on a whim. In fact, you'll note "No taxation without representation" was the slogan leading up to the American Revolution. We have the right to vote. The whole point of democracy is to peacefully decide issues and avoid bloodshed. Murdering somebody because the decision doesn't go your way makes you a tyrant.
In that case, we should be able to achieve the same result by calling out any other name of similar status in our mind. Correct so far?
No, you're missing one important aspect: Preconceived notions. For an individual raised in an environment where Jesus is heralded as a savior, calling out his name can raise these feelings by association. Perform the same experiment with somebody in a Muslim country, and they will probably find the reverse of your results. In the case of mantra, the same thing happens, but no Jesus is invoked.
say out loud, "Oh Lord Jesus". Obviously, if you're right, if He doesn't exist, nothing will happen. But if I'm right, you will suddenly feel at peace.
And I believe that science and religion can coexist peacefully as long as each one is minding their own business - science is there to explain the material world, and religion should stick to spiritual stuff.
There is no distinction if you believe "spiritual stuff" is based on matter following the laws of physics. In other words, it can be studied in a scientific manner.
I was raised in a non-religious household. [..] So it's quite common for people to believe in Christianity through being convinced of its claims, not only because of an accident of upbringing.
I bet you were raised in a nation with a large Christian following, though. Just how many people will become Christian growing up in a Muslim country? How many Christians were there in every other culture before Christianity arose? Every culture, when separated from others, came up with their own religions. Does it sound like God really wanted one true message to be heard, and that it is Christianity? Or perhaps people were just making shit up.
I'd rather take a chance than take no chance at all.
You're lucky I found you! You see, I was informed by God himself that if you only believe out of fear, then you cease to exist. He doesn't want cowardly sycophants populating His plane.
Try any country where only the most ruthless and murderous people stay in power. Why should they care if they purge people like you? You're just a piece of tissue paper to them, too.
Like Barack Obama, and many Senators, Representatives,
You mean the people voted into power?
and Supreme Court Justices.
or appointed via the people voted in? You still have the right to vote. Angry fuck-nuts murdering politicians based on their pet issues leads to a hell-hole, fast.
Equivocation. Anytime somebody does something bad, just say whatever they believe in is a religion. The problem isn't that somebody like Mao or Stalin were "religious", it was that they were fascist assholes.
I missed the law where you were only allowed to vote for Republican or Democrat. Surely if you can get enough people to overthrow the government, you can ask them to vote for a candidate on your issues?
Same goes for pretty much everything humans do. We've already terraformed the planet. I can't say I'm happy about it, but here we are. If our carbon dioxide emissions aren't a problem, then you'll be spending huge amounts of resources to fix it.
It's always a question of tradeoffs. We need the science to be the best it can be. Considering the stakes involved, there's been a lot of bad science, from poor data, poor review, and outright political shenanigans.
"Beyond reasonable doubt" is necessary for court of law because of significant losses that convicting innocent people causes; but it is not the level that is needed for engineering efforts and society-level planning of environmental issues.
When you're talking about changing the basis for the global economy, it is needed.
This is really just a profit grab. I can't really blame them since they don't have to compete with anyone for their existing install base, but it does irk me.
Not totally true. I switched from a 360 and bought a PS3. I have an original 360 model which is collecting dust now. What tipped me over was that if I wanted a bigger hard drive and HDMI, I would have had to pay Microsoft's exorbitant markup. The 360 was also a noisy beast. The PS3 was well designed from day one, with free multiplayer, blu-ray, commodity hard drives, and Bluetooth. When the Slim came out for $300, I switched.
If you have any evidence to the contrary please present it, otherwise its just the two of us shooting the shit with no proof either way.
Well you're right, I don't have hard numbers or even soft numbers. However, I have seen community sites group up around donation models. Worst comes to worst, the site could either charge money or shut down and be replaced by a smaller alternative.
But I don't think any of this is going to happen, because advertising is too strong a force to be shut down. The only question I have is just how obnoxious is it going to get. Minority Report levels don't seem too far down the road.
you aren't hurting the advertisers by doing this... you are only hurting the site owners who need the advertising money to support the technology infrastructure and creative energy that needs to flow into the site.
What is "this"? Do you mean use AdBlock? Because earlier you said you wish there was some way people could opt-out. I do opt-out with AdBlock, NoScript, and I don't load 3rd party images. However, the casual web users haven't caught on yet, can't, or don't care. This is actually good for me, because I'm sure the advertisers would make the ads much harder to block otherwise.
As for hurting site owners, the Internet and Web was around long before advertising. A site like Slashdot could easily exist on community donations. Many people put up content in their spare time and make no or very little money at all from advertising.
The advertisers drove me to these ad-blocking solutions with their obnoxiousness.
Does AdBlock actually prevent the ads from loading initially or does it just load and hide them??
It doesn't load them.
I wish there was some easy way to set it up so that people who will never make a conversion anyway could just opt-out of the whole process so we wouldn't have to bother you and you could have a better experience.
The "do not track" option was mentioned in the summary. You can replace that with "do not advertise". The problem is advertisers assume some people who say they don't want ads would still occasionally have clicked on an ad otherwise. My guess is they are right. Some advertisers even block content if ads are disabled. If they annoy 80 people to make 1 sale they just don't give a shit, and tools like AdBlock scare them.
Or even 'sudo apt install'. Yes, it's the same problem. Linux doesn't do much better (there are some bonus points for having a repository of open source software).
Slashdot Mirror
but I haven't said one word about [..]
Then we are coming from different directions, and you have to take the whole thread into context. The person I replied to quoted his parent as saying: "Insane is a perfectly fine way of describing someone who thinks they have the sole capacity and right to choose for the rest of the nation."
That's what my reply was in context to, and so I assumed your reply to me was in that context.
That said, we still have the right to vote, yet people are grumbling about violent overthrow and assassination, threatening those in power because they don't like this or that legislation. Furthermore, when you make remarks comparing the murder of politicians with flushing a piece of tissue paper, it does make you a murderous tyrant. Politicians are people too, not all of them are bad, and the process itself is a necessarily ugly one. We all compromise ourselves in one way or another.
this is turning into an argument.
It always has been. I don't mean that in a negative sense, as long as both parties are arguing honestly.
But the Lord's name has yet to fail me, and certainly not as spectacularly as the rain has.
And yet it already failed me. Not just this one time either, but back when I had a belief in Christianity. I never, not once, felt something like a connection through prayer. Now, I didn't utter some magical incantation out loud, and I didn't practice said incantation daily, but are you suggesting that God would ignore my prayers when not using the highly specific form you suggest?
All I'm asking is that you try it. Once a day, drop your concepts and call. That's all.
It's just indoctrination. Humans are all too susceptible for it (for all kinds of beliefs), and I'm not going to subject myself to it.
Which would make this test perfect for a lot of people who would see and read this.
If you're going to appeal to science, then you need to be more skeptical in the design of your test. It's not proving the truth behind the biblical Jesus Christ. At best it shows that some people show an emotional response to a loaded term. If an atheist raised in a Christian nation had such an emotional response, you couldn't discount their upbringing.
Your feelings can be misleading, and are not some arbiter of truth. Do you know what brings me peace? The sound of rain. Does this prove the existence of a god of rain? I also find the song "Bridge Over Troubled Water" soothing. Should I worship Simon & Garfunkel? When I was in school and first heard audio recordings of Hitler's speeches, I was enthralled and felt a desire to follow his lead, and this even knowing how evil he was.
Again, I think you should test it(you may have, you left that unsaid as well).
I did it, once, just for the sake of it. No, it had no effect on me. Do you want me now to repeat that once a day? That's indoctrination. Do you think anybody that shows a positive response should then believe in biblical truth? That's uncritical thinking.
The people in 1776 weren't assassinating politicians on a whim. In fact, you'll note "No taxation without representation" was the slogan leading up to the American Revolution. We have the right to vote. The whole point of democracy is to peacefully decide issues and avoid bloodshed. Murdering somebody because the decision doesn't go your way makes you a tyrant.
In that case, we should be able to achieve the same result by calling out any other name of similar status in our mind. Correct so far?
No, you're missing one important aspect: Preconceived notions. For an individual raised in an environment where Jesus is heralded as a savior, calling out his name can raise these feelings by association. Perform the same experiment with somebody in a Muslim country, and they will probably find the reverse of your results. In the case of mantra, the same thing happens, but no Jesus is invoked.
say out loud, "Oh Lord Jesus". Obviously, if you're right, if He doesn't exist, nothing will happen. But if I'm right, you will suddenly feel at peace.
Alternative explanations:
No Jesus needed.
No, that makes you a murderous tyrant. You're worse than the politicians.
I'm sorry you aren't taking up the chance I have given you. Now you have no chance at all.
And I believe that science and religion can coexist peacefully as long as each one is minding their own business - science is there to explain the material world, and religion should stick to spiritual stuff.
There is no distinction if you believe "spiritual stuff" is based on matter following the laws of physics. In other words, it can be studied in a scientific manner.
I was raised in a non-religious household. [..] So it's quite common for people to believe in Christianity through being convinced of its claims, not only because of an accident of upbringing.
I bet you were raised in a nation with a large Christian following, though. Just how many people will become Christian growing up in a Muslim country? How many Christians were there in every other culture before Christianity arose? Every culture, when separated from others, came up with their own religions. Does it sound like God really wanted one true message to be heard, and that it is Christianity? Or perhaps people were just making shit up.
I'd rather take a chance than take no chance at all.
You're lucky I found you! You see, I was informed by God himself that if you only believe out of fear, then you cease to exist. He doesn't want cowardly sycophants populating His plane.
Try any country where only the most ruthless and murderous people stay in power. Why should they care if they purge people like you? You're just a piece of tissue paper to them, too.
Like Barack Obama, and many Senators, Representatives,
You mean the people voted into power?
and Supreme Court Justices.
or appointed via the people voted in? You still have the right to vote. Angry fuck-nuts murdering politicians based on their pet issues leads to a hell-hole, fast.
They made Communism their religion.
Equivocation. Anytime somebody does something bad, just say whatever they believe in is a religion. The problem isn't that somebody like Mao or Stalin were "religious", it was that they were fascist assholes.
I missed the law where you were only allowed to vote for Republican or Democrat. Surely if you can get enough people to overthrow the government, you can ask them to vote for a candidate on your issues?
Same goes for pretty much everything humans do. We've already terraformed the planet. I can't say I'm happy about it, but here we are. If our carbon dioxide emissions aren't a problem, then you'll be spending huge amounts of resources to fix it.
It's always a question of tradeoffs. We need the science to be the best it can be. Considering the stakes involved, there's been a lot of bad science, from poor data, poor review, and outright political shenanigans.
"Beyond reasonable doubt" is necessary for court of law because of significant losses that convicting innocent people causes; but it is not the level that is needed for engineering efforts and society-level planning of environmental issues.
When you're talking about changing the basis for the global economy, it is needed.
This is really just a profit grab. I can't really blame them since they don't have to compete with anyone for their existing install base, but it does irk me.
Not totally true. I switched from a 360 and bought a PS3. I have an original 360 model which is collecting dust now. What tipped me over was that if I wanted a bigger hard drive and HDMI, I would have had to pay Microsoft's exorbitant markup. The 360 was also a noisy beast. The PS3 was well designed from day one, with free multiplayer, blu-ray, commodity hard drives, and Bluetooth. When the Slim came out for $300, I switched.
If you have any evidence to the contrary please present it, otherwise its just the two of us shooting the shit with no proof either way.
Well you're right, I don't have hard numbers or even soft numbers. However, I have seen community sites group up around donation models. Worst comes to worst, the site could either charge money or shut down and be replaced by a smaller alternative.
But I don't think any of this is going to happen, because advertising is too strong a force to be shut down. The only question I have is just how obnoxious is it going to get. Minority Report levels don't seem too far down the road.
you aren't hurting the advertisers by doing this... you are only hurting the site owners who need the advertising money to support the technology infrastructure and creative energy that needs to flow into the site.
What is "this"? Do you mean use AdBlock? Because earlier you said you wish there was some way people could opt-out. I do opt-out with AdBlock, NoScript, and I don't load 3rd party images. However, the casual web users haven't caught on yet, can't, or don't care. This is actually good for me, because I'm sure the advertisers would make the ads much harder to block otherwise.
As for hurting site owners, the Internet and Web was around long before advertising. A site like Slashdot could easily exist on community donations. Many people put up content in their spare time and make no or very little money at all from advertising.
The advertisers drove me to these ad-blocking solutions with their obnoxiousness.
Does AdBlock actually prevent the ads from loading initially or does it just load and hide them??
It doesn't load them.
I wish there was some easy way to set it up so that people who will never make a conversion anyway could just opt-out of the whole process so we wouldn't have to bother you and you could have a better experience.
The "do not track" option was mentioned in the summary. You can replace that with "do not advertise". The problem is advertisers assume some people who say they don't want ads would still occasionally have clicked on an ad otherwise. My guess is they are right. Some advertisers even block content if ads are disabled. If they annoy 80 people to make 1 sale they just don't give a shit, and tools like AdBlock scare them.
Or even 'sudo apt install'. Yes, it's the same problem. Linux doesn't do much better (there are some bonus points for having a repository of open source software).
You can make it easy. If you're willing to undergo an hour of torture without cracking then you can keep your secret key (if you have it).
Reading comprehension fail.
Mostly writing comprehension fail. The first sentence was poorly written and prone to misunderstanding.
It might not even be legal since the letter of the law clearly specifies an enumeration of every individual.
If they wanted to follow the law, they wouldn't ask all those other questions that had nothing to do with enumerating, including questions about race.
Besides, the specific data from this Census gets opened in 2080 and will be a treasure trove for historians and genealogists.
Or it may be opened before then and used for other reasons.