Have you ever thought about the reason why USA is the country with more killings compared to ALL the other countries in the world? Easy answer...guns are so common and so easy to retrieve!
Wrong, and wrong. I live in Brazil, and while we have roughly half the population of USA, we have twice the number of deaths by firearms, actually nearing the numbers you see on news about Iraq, and that without an actual war going on. And do you know what's the most interesting thing about this? It's that, here, gun ownership is outlawed exactly in the way you think it should be on USA:
Guns should be owned only by police and military forces and in very special cases by people who really need em, that have a very well certified ability to use em, with certified mental stability tests and that are risking their life everyday (to justify the owning of a gun).
So, why do you think we have that much deaths by firearms here? If you don't mind, I'll answer: it's because that old adage, that when guns are outlawed only the outlaws have guns, is literally true. This is exactly what happens here. Every year Brazilian criminals become more and more violent. And why? Because they know that no matter who they target, that person will be an unarmed, easy prey. That any house they enter will be an unarmed, easy to rob house. That any person they kidnap, or any woman they rape, will be an unarmed, hopeless victim.
As for myself, I walk around armed with the deadliest small army knife I managed to find. Thanks God knives still aren't forbidden, and thus I have some small prospect of getting away alive if (when) attacked by a criminal intent on killing me no matter what. But, alas, our Congress is already looking into ways to forbid knife-carrying too. Once that law is approved I guess I'll have to start walking around with a telescopic baton. Or, once those are forbidden, a wood stick...
So, do you want to know what USA will become one guns are outlawed? Come see for yourself. And take care with your luggage.
Even with your angry 6 year old who somehow managed to unlock his dad's (otherwise perfectly safe) gun cabinet and stick a clip into a pistol.
Children play with whatever is new and strange. The safest thing a gun-carrying father of a 6 year old can do is thus to make it absolutely sure said gun isn't something new and strange. From the very moment his child is able to not go around swallowing small objects, he should sit down with him and start presenting him the gun. Unmount it, clean it, teach the child to do both things, teach him to shot cans, show him what happens to a chicken when it's shot (a good opportunity to teach the children what is that "death" thing she had heard about, plus why she shouldn't play with her food), and so on and so forth. This way, even if it happens that the child comes into contact with a weapon unsupervised, she will know how to behave and, most important, to never, ever, point it to another person or animal, no matter what.
Preventing a child from doing harm by blocking his access to something dangerous surely works. But it's just addressing the symptoms, not the actual problem. What is it? Simply put, the lack of "responsibility development" in the child. Some 150 years ago a 13 years old managed to be more mature than the typical 20 years old of today. The reason for that is that modern day parents have the strongly misplaced desire of shielding their children from maturity, i.e., of shielding them from the "nasty things" in the world, rather than allowing and providing for their growth at their actual potential.
Stop holding them back, start pushing them towards what they can achieve, and these accidents simply won't happen. Or, rather, if they do, they'll be actual accidents, and not the necessary outcome of keeping children clueless just for the sake of it.
No matter how horrible a business model they use, it still can't be worse than Vista.
Sure it can. Just imagine the possibilities:
a) What? You want to use ALL of your installed 8 GB or RAM, not only 2 GB? Sure! The "improved memory accessibility module" subscription goes for just $1.50/GB/month!
b) So, you say you want to use all 4 of your cores instead of just 2? Plus have access to the 2nd processor in your 3D graphics board? Why, no problem! We're selling a PERMANENT, I say PERMANENT license to the "multi-core compatibility mode" for just $35! Offers end by July 13th, 2011.
c) Ah, you need to have 5 USB devices connected simultaneously, and need them all to work in fast USB 3.0 mode instead of USB 2.0? We had a promotion for that last month, but unfortunately now we're back to the standard price, sorry. It'll be $0.50/USB device/month for every device above the 4th, plus $14.99 for the permanent 3.0 functionality, or $0.90/month for the subscription version. The module name is "FastUSB expansion/speed-up bundle package", and you can find the different option in the Connectivity tab at the Module Shop window.
2) cable lock for laptop and external monitor(they really are quite good)
Only for protecting the laptop from someone wishing to steal the whole of it. Months ago I read about a case in which a class in some professional training left their laptops cable-locked, went for lunch, came back after one hour, and their HDDs, RAMs, batteries (and anything else detachable) were all gone.
Extensive theft protection means planning towards screwdrivers too.
You would have the fastest windows operating system, if you could get all the drivers to work.
Win98 surely flies on today's hardware, but a difficult to manage problem is the memory available for 2D graphical elements (GDI): a fixed 64 kB stack. This is an alien concept for NT-based OSes, which don't have this limitation, but for all DOS-based Windows OSes it was (is) a very limiting factor, and even more so when you consider that nowadays you must run an anti-virus, a malware scanner, a software firewall and plenty of other things on the background, all of them "attached" to one or more windows, each of which with plenty of buttons and other elements. Once the GDI fills, it doesn't really matter whether you still have plenty of physical memory available: graphical elements start behaving erratically and Windows at some point just crashes.
Now, if you manage to shield a Win98 box from the external world so that it doesn't need these 3rd party tools running, then sure, you'll have a "GDI load" similar to what such a machine saw on 1998, and it'll be usable. But that requires discipline and tons of good sense on the part of the user. Anything else, and it's either too risky or quite literally impossible.
Java is not inherently slow, especially not for complex applications.
As long as a Java software converted to byte code is nothing more than interpreted code, and the VM an interpreter, it's slower than compiled code. Pretending it isn't makes no sense. At best you can say that, since the code is idle most of the time, it doesn't make much practical difference from the user's perspective.
Even so, though, if you have a choice between a small interpreted language on one hand, and a gigantic interpreted language on the other, it makes little sense to prefer the gigantic if all the features you need are available in the small. And that's precisely the case with OOo's wizards. What they do can be done with, say, python. So why use Java? There's no reason other than it's a Sun project, and since Sun also owns Java, it wants OOo to be a showcase example for Java.
If OOo itself was a Java application then I surely wouldn't complain. In fact, I loved playing around with that ancient Corel Office for Java before it got canceled years ago. But as things stand, I don't see any reason at all for Java to play any role in OOo's inner workings.
Sure, it sounds like a big deal to maintain a gui, but the time spent doing that may be shorter than debugging WM issues. Mozilla maintains their own gui for the same reason.
Except Mozilla obeys and follows the WM's anti-aliasing, kerning etc. commands.
Well, now that's just not going to happen considering it's Sun's project.
Sad, but true. Although I heard some time ago about some guys doing a Java-less fork. Unfortunately I don't remember the name.
While my Wife and I have no issues with tables, maybe it's just not intuitive for you. It happens all the time. Maybe shelling out the dough for an MSOffice license is what you should do rather than complain about something you got for free?
First, let's stop with this nonsense of thinking one cannot complain or request improvements to a piece of free software. Good free software projects accept and welcome suggestions and criticisms all the time. Why do you think Firefox (since we talked about Mozilla) has a "Report site as incompatible..." option under it's Help menu? Simple: because positive, concrete criticism is good, not bad. Had they followed this "go use the proprietary version" philosophy and that menu option would be a link to Microsoft's IE download page. Also, let's not forget that OOo isn't solely a free software package. It's also the core of Sun StarOffice package, from which they earn well deserved profits.
That said, no, it has nothing to do with it not being "intuitive to me". OOo's tables, or at least the user interface around them, simply have less features than MS Office ones. For people who just need a "n x m" table now and then that's surely not a problem, but the moment you're required to make a very complex table layouts to accommodate within millimeter of precision fields that will be printed on non-blank, pre-printed paper form, you have a really hard time doing so in OOo. The funny thing, though, is that you can import a document with a complex table from MS Office to OOo, and it works well. That's why I think the problem is in OOo's user interface, not on its internal table support.
I use OOo in Ubuntu, and I really, REALLY hope this new version to stop handling menu and dialog font spacing and anti-aliasing (or the lack thereof, as I prefer) by itself, and instead let Gnome or KDE handle this, as all other applications do. It's just ugly to have the fonts in everything looking perfectly in a certain way, except for OOo.
My 2nd hope is for OOo 3 to stop using Java for the wizards. Or for anything really. There's no point in having Java handle things behind the scenes on an otherwise compiled application. It just make things slow to load and slow to run.
And my 3rd hope is for OOo 3 to finally make tables creation and editing in Write as easy, free form and trouble free as it is in MS Word. Click a button, start "drawing" your table any way you like, without giving any consideration whatsoever to the number of rows and columns, dividing cells anywhere you want, merging cells in any way, moving cell boundaries left and right and up and down without any invisible wall preventing you (not even the table's boundaries): that's how it should be, and how it actually is in MS Word.
Do these 3 things and I'll never look back to MS Office.
The only other "classic" works that I've read that I have not finished Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The repetition seriously got on my nerves. LOTR reminded me of them, but not so much due to repetition as endless descriptive text.
I also didn't finish LOTR, mostly for the same reason, but regarding Homer's works, there's a trick you can use to make the reading much more enjoyable.
It basically comes down to recognizing and taking to hearth that, contrary to current days, works like the Odyssey, the Iliad, and pretty much everything written before 400 BC, weren't meant to exist in written form. Writing down anything on papyrus or parchment was very, very expensive. So, authors designed they works in a way that caused them to be easy to remembered after a few concentrated listening sessions. This is the source of the repetitions: few things are more mnemonic than a sequence of repetitive sounds in poetic form.
So, for you to really enjoy such a work (among which you can include the Old Testament and the Koran, even though this last one is recent), the best way is to first acquire a good rhythmic poetic translation then read it aloud.
It might feel odd at first, but in short time you get used to it, begin to like those repetitions, and start seeing the text shine. It's really worth the effort.
The Silmarillion was far and away my favourite Tolkien work
Same here. I love how it barely glances over centuries and millennia of history highlighting only the really relevant events. On the other hand, contrary to the majority of Tolkien fans, I never managed to finish Lord of the Rings. I feel it's filled with an excess of irrelevant details.
In fact, I think the final pages of the Silmarillion shows perfectly well what I mean. There, the 1200 pages of LOTR become a whooping... three pages. The Hobbit, if I remember correctly, went for a single paragraph, if that much. And that's because they were worked in more details than was typical for the remaining tales in the book. Had they received the same treatment, and I guess LOTR would have been given a single page.
The Silmarillion is really for those who like synthesis. Where it written in the hyper-detailed LOTR style and the thing would become a 140,000 pages monstrosity spread over 350 volumes. It would most probably be a fun read for many, but not really my thing.:-)
God is not only "above" nature he is also apart from it, as far as I can gather.
In a certain sense, God is apart nature. In fact, that's what the word "saint" means: separated.
However, this isn't to mean that nature exists apart from God. To be more precise, it means that God is "all", while nature is "nothing". Meaning, a time-spatially infinite Universe would still be finite in the sense that it is a single entity, and a such, no more than a dot immersed in God's absolute, ultimate, actual infinity. So, analogically you could say He's "apart" from it, as there's infinitely "more" of "him" "outside" the Universe than there is "inside" it. But that doesn't imply in any way that the whole Universe isn't still a "piece" of him. Or, for that matter, each, every and all subatomic particle. Including yours.
Putting the same thing in a more Philosophical way, it's the same as saying that transcendence includes immanence. Their relationship is that of whole and part, not that of two independent wholes.
However, a natural law is, naturally, (pun intended) natural, as well as being "above" nature.
Which is a subset of the case delineated above.
In the traditional concept of the ontological hierarchy of beings, reality is organized in interconnected "steps", each one determined by the next one above it, all of them working together to constitute the whole we perceive. So you have particles that are organized by the level above them (atomic), which in turn are organized by the level above it (molecules), which in turn... in turn... in turn... up to nature, which is organized by natural laws, which are organized by mathematical laws, which... which... which... up to and until God, which is the ultimate organizer of all there is.
You can of course call the whole ontological scale as being "natural", but then you'll lack the term for that specific level of reality to which it is usually applied.
You have a strange, and rather insulting, definition of 'atheism' which implies that atheism is just another religion.
It's worse actually. As I see it, an atheism is just a subset of a religion, and you have at least as many atheism as religions, probably more, depending on which aspects of the religion are dropped by a given atheism, and which ones are retained.
Thus, for example, if you take Christianism, and cut our these aspects, you end up with Enlightenment's atheism. Cut those others, and you'll end up with Ayn Rand's Objectivism. Those others, and you get Positivism and it's childrens, such as biologistic (evolution-based) atheisms. Marxism, on the other hand, comes from cutting out pieces of Judaism. And so on and so forth.
As for your other arguments, I've replied to similar ones in this subthread, so I suggest you read it in whole.
Still, as I don't know of this beforehand I fail to see you provide the evidence that you claim is there (readily even). You don't even say what these universal, or half-universal conclusions are.
That's because I've already written about it in this subthread. Read around.:-)
I'm not sure how you define pre- or outside Modernity, but if it includes religions such as hinduism and christianity (not really new) they don't even give a conclusive answer about the number of gods.
Of course they are. All ancient "polytheisms", such as Hinduism or Shintoism, are in reality monotheists. They teach that all their many "gods" are in fact aspects and/or representations of the single, one Absolute.
A full blown polytheism, with tons of actually independent gods in the best Marvel Comics' Thor-like super-hero style, is something that, when it appears, it simply doesn't survive. Whenever something like this appeared in History among a proper polytheism, it was taken by the highest level practitioners of that tradition, such as a Plato on Ancient Greece, as a degeneration, then denounced, fought against, and eventually either reformed back into a proper "polymonotheistic" tradition, or wholly replaced by some living tradition, such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism etc.
The distinctions we make between monotheisms and polytheisms come from old monotheist practitioners who use towards them the same simplistic analysis that atheists use towards monotheisms in general: interpret them in the more literalistic way, beat the straw man, and declare victory. When the target religion has degenerated, sure, it works. Otherwise, it doesn't.
The Christian God, especially the Old Testament version, shows a lot of human attributes. (...) I hate to be snarky here but the God as described in the Bible is practically begging to described in terms of human analogies.
That's correct. But then, on other texts He's described in completely different terms. The usual understanding is simply that God manifest Himself in the way the subject will manage to grasp Him. The broader your intellectual apprehension, i.e., your ability to perceive reality in less and less contingent ways, the more universal and less particularized God appears to you. This is seen in absolutely ALL ancient religions, without exception.
Thus, when an atheist rejects the over-personalization of God, he's actually on the correct track. The problem is just that he misses the teachings that would allow him to switch from the purely negative "(this) God makes no sense!" apprehension to the "next step" of a, so to speak, positive negation, as, different from traditional societies, it's culturally unavailable and, even when available, frowned upon by almost everyone who doesn't understand it.
Personally I think the typical atheist would do well in Buddhism, particularly the Theravada school, as it departs from the whole "human-like god" representation from the get go, while the other religious traditions place this on the table only later in the game.
We have a being who we are clearly told has thoughts and feelings and can take independent actions for His own reasons yet somehow he isn't sentient because it opens the door to uncomfortable arguments.
The trick here is to understand that the infinite is, by definition, unlimited. If you place some limitation on it, such as "not having intelligence", it isn't the infinite anymore, it's just some huge thing that happens to lack this or that. On the other hand, pretending it to have just "human-like intelligence" is also a limitation, as our intelligence is most definitely finite.
Thus, the correct reasoning goes like this: since the infinite cannot lack intelligence, or will, or whatever a human being has, as lacking this would make it less than us, thus finite, it must have something analogous to our attributes, but on its own level, and these we can by analogy call "infinite intelligence", "infinite will" etc. They're not the same as ours, and contrary to ours these aren't distinguishable from each other, as a pluralized or divided infinite is a logical impossibility.
Incidentally, I wouldn't terribly if you dragged those old "straw man" chestnuts out. I must have missed out on those watching old flamewars on alt.atheism.
Ah, but I don't care about the "exoteric" (simplistic, literalistic) arguments these guys employ. They're stuck on "level one" and surely cannot offer anything that a good atheist isn't able to destroy without even thinking about it. The "esoteric" concepts of high level religious thinking, on the other hand, starts from where atheism stops. They're way funnier to use.;)
Perhaps we might call it "meta-natural" but not supernatural.
"Meta-" and "super-" are synonyms. Both designate something that is "above", i.e., that conditions that which is "below" it. Human language, for example, is used to construct meta-logical languages, which in turn is used to construct formal logical languages.
Are you saying that nature doesn't exist or are you just calling everything God?
Well, if we understand "nature" as a kind of order full of laws etc., there's no proof at all it exists. We might as well change the name from "laws" to "habits" and it would work. On the other hand, if by "nature" you understand what we perceive immediately with our senses, no order or reality implied, then I think everyone can agree with that nature existing, even hard core classical skeptics.
By the way: I'm a fan of the concept of nature having habits. Now it has this habit of enforcing entropy. Tomorrow "it" could change "its" mind and give us some infinite source of energy. Who knows?;-)
If we're going to debate fictional, unenforceable laws, I'd prefer to debate the ones Asimov proposed.
Well, here in Brazil it isn't a fictional law. Anonymity is forbidden by our Constitution, no less. On the other hand, yes, it remains completely unenforceable. No one gives a damn and everyone, everywhere, creates anonymous logins all the time.:-)
It doesn't make much sense to call these other things "God" when "God" has rather specific cultural connotations, and we already have pretty good words for describing these other things.
True. But then, what an atheist ends up denying is a specific cultural construct. This says nothing about any eventual supernaturalness, after all, "laws" governing "nature" are by definition "above" it.
Aristotle's "god", as you define it, is observable, so we can build a view of it that is consistent and accurate enough to be useful in daily life and under emergency circumstances. The Christian god is not. To you, that's "nothing much different"?
Yes, because the best you can logically say is: "The Christian god isn't observable by me."
In other words, if you can observe the Aristotelian God, but not the Christian God, that says nothing about the Christian God, but it might say something about you, although I don't know exactly what.;-)
. . . even non-personal conceptions of god emphasize that they are supernatural, which by definition excludes nature and natural law.
Not exactly, no. If a "natural thing" is a "part of nature", then nature itself is both natural (any whole is a part of the whole) as well as supernatural, since as a totality it's more than the sum of its parts, which comprise the whole of "naturality". Furthermore, if by "law of nature" we mean something that determines nature, the determinant isn't subject to that which is determined, meaning these laws are "located" in some kind of "super-" (above-) "natural" realm.
Now we would like you to provide a word for not believing in sentient supernatural beings.
This is a problem mystics have dealt with and solved over 1800 years ago. If you read the small apophatic book of Dionysius the Areopagite, you'll see he says something like this: sentience of finites is an attribute of finites, since it derives of finity itself; thus, since God is by definition infinite, he cannot be sentient; and if we say He is, that's because we cannot imagine God if not by making analogies based on ourselves.
So, whenever an atheist criticizes the, say, Christian God for being sentient, they're committing a straw man.
I'd say 100% similar. Literally. Academic works on this aren't difficult to come by, just search around for comparative religion or philosophy of religion, such as the one I linked in my original post: 1100 pages of evidence from hundreds of sources, almost without commentary so as to not taint the reader, 140 pages consisting of the bibliography of original works by orthodox masters of each religion the author consulted. And beyond the "raw data" it provides, there are also a lot of complementary works on the subject. Search for these authors and any other related: Rene Guenon, Fritjof Schuon, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Mircea Eliade, Huston Smith.
And most importantly, why are the commonalities better explained by a common "spiritual truth" than by the fact that the practitioners who come up with this stuff are all humans with a religious bent, sharing a common nature?
I have dealt with this in two other messages in this subthread, so I'll skip it now. Please read them.:)
It's not unreasonable to put the burden of proof on the believer when every testable supernatural prediction of religions has turned out false. For example, numerous cultures have global flood myths and astrology, but when you look closely, you find that the details are different and the science doesn't work out. Many people have out-of-body experiences, but when you look closely, you find that they can't really see anything they wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
True. But I'm not talking about this. I'm talking about everyone of them concluding something like: nature is hierarchically ordained; complexity is subsumed by simplicity (this means that nature is counter-reductionist); efficient causality isn't sufficient to explain order, you need formal and final causality; reality is objective, and the mind is passive in perceiving it (contrary to Kant) etc.
Events such as out-of-body experiences are considered purely "psychic" phenomena by traditional religions, and dismissed as irrelevant. Irrelevant in the sense that, whether they exist or not, it's just not important at all. And in this, again, you'll see sages as different as Saint Thomas Aquinas or Nagarjuna (a Buddhist saint) speaking the same thing: "Leaving your body? Forget it. There are more important things. Just don't do it and, if you're doing, stop."
You can't point to shared belief as evidence without taking into account basic features of human thought such as selection bias.
True again. But I also talked about this in another message, so, skipping again.
It takes ten years of college to do original research in physics, but even middle school students can learn Newton's Laws. Are your universal principles written down anywhere in a simple form that everyone can agree on?
Yep. But the simple form is really simple: religious symbols. They don't need you to even know how to read to understand them, and they still convey the intended meaning.
As for Newton's Laws, they're in no way easy. We take them easily because our culture is structured around them, so you see from infancy "space ships" going to planets that circle around stars etc. The moment a child takes formal contact with them he already knows enough to grasp the formalization somewhat easily. But try to teach them to someone who had no contact at all with the Newtonian worldview and you'll see it's far from straightforward.
What are the limits of these principles?
It's the other way around. As happens with logic, or math, they aren't secondary things delimited by some higher principle, they are the higher principle that that delimits secondary ones.
What do they cover and what do they not cover?
In a very direct way, they explain how reality is structured. Physical laws are a subset o
There's a big difference between useless and wrong. The problem with the commonality of results between different religious philosophy is that many of the stated assumptions of these different belief structures are not compatible. While the Buddhist & Trappist monks may reach the same conclusion on what is required of us, they can't both be correct.
That's incorrect. There are details in practice, and symbols, which differ, but the philosophical meaning behind those is the same. This has already been exhaustively studied. It might not be common knowledge among non-students of comparative religion and/or of Philosophy of Religion, but among those who study the subject closely it's a well known fact.
So, yes, if you take the type of person who is likely to be attracted to a life of contemplation & meditation, and allow them to do so, they're often going to reach the same result.
That's the point. Simply going for contemplation and meditation doesn't provide the same results. You must follow specific methodologies, with a well established sequence of steps. The amazing fact is precisely that these methodologies being very different allow for the same set of results to be obtained, while (as I mention in a previous message in this subthread) other, non-orthodox methodologies lead to wildly differing and mutually contradictory sets of results. Much like, say, building airplanes without following actual Physical laws, but anyway you liked, would.
But which is the simpler theory - they are all being affected by various external supernatural agencies, or the structure of the human mind tends to the same result from different starting conditions?
One might answer this with another question, both questions sounding very Kantian: what is the simpler theory: that a ball actually exist as a finite entity in an infinite space, for a finite duration in an otherwise infinitely extending time, or that the structure of the human mind tends to the same result (of perceiving a space-time delimited ball) from different starting conditions? Kant would answer with "the mind" for both. For him, both a ball, and God, and the notion of freedom, etc., are totally unprovable, the question about the "reality" of any of them being the same. For him, only perceptions exist, and our mind is the active element in the perception of each, every and any of them.
I don't mind those who are Kantians, but I myself am an ontological realist. If certain methods, be them "opening your eyes" or "touching with your hands" to perceive a ball, or "meditating according to this methodology" or "according to that methodology" to perceive God, regularly, repeatably, reproducibly work, the object perceived is real.
Please would you provide a list of such experiences, together with details of the circumstances surrounding those experiences, so that they can be double blind tested.
Given the limitation, it can be done, yes. And there's lot of readily found evidence on that one too. If you take ALL, and I mean ALL, religions pre- or outside Modernity, ALL their practitioner show the same conclusions. Same goes for their practitioners who follow their exact same instructions nowadays. On the other hand, if you take the results achieved by anyone who followed of follows the new, Modernity-influenced religions, such as the many branches of occultism, theosophy, spiritualism etc., they all reach different results, which differ not only from those unanimously achieved by ancient ones, but also from each other. Thus, you have two fields of results: one which is heterogeneous but reach homogeneous and repeatable results, another one which is also heterogeneous, but only reach heterogeneous, chaotic and erratic results.
This is as "blind" as you can get. Try these different methods with different groups and see the results, or use the results already existing. There's no mystery there. Other than, perhaps, the mysterious reason atheists don't care for the fact they have no way to explain why one heterogeneous group reaches homogeneous results while the other heterogeneous group doesn't.
You seem to have missed a course in logic. Atheism is simply not believing in a god.
Not exactly. Atheism is not believing in a given definition of what "a god" means. No atheist that studied, for example, Aristotle's God, would be able to "deny" it, because it would mean throwing causality away and with it Physics itself. But then, Aristotle's God isn't the same as the Christian God. So, as long as denying goes, atheists deny some gods, but not others. These other gods they just don't call by this name, preferring to call them "nature", "laws" and the like. In any case, nothing much different from a Christian, who also denies other gods while keeping his own intact. So much, in fact, that the old Roman pagans called Christians "atheists". After all, they denied, and still deny, the Roman gods.
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As for myself, I walk around armed with the deadliest small army knife I managed to find. Thanks God knives still aren't forbidden, and thus I have some small prospect of getting away alive if (when) attacked by a criminal intent on killing me no matter what. But, alas, our Congress is already looking into ways to forbid knife-carrying too. Once that law is approved I guess I'll have to start walking around with a telescopic baton. Or, once those are forbidden, a wood stick...
So, do you want to know what USA will become one guns are outlawed? Come see for yourself. And take care with your luggage.
Preventing a child from doing harm by blocking his access to something dangerous surely works. But it's just addressing the symptoms, not the actual problem. What is it? Simply put, the lack of "responsibility development" in the child. Some 150 years ago a 13 years old managed to be more mature than the typical 20 years old of today. The reason for that is that modern day parents have the strongly misplaced desire of shielding their children from maturity, i.e., of shielding them from the "nasty things" in the world, rather than allowing and providing for their growth at their actual potential.
Stop holding them back, start pushing them towards what they can achieve, and these accidents simply won't happen. Or, rather, if they do, they'll be actual accidents, and not the necessary outcome of keeping children clueless just for the sake of it.
a) What? You want to use ALL of your installed 8 GB or RAM, not only 2 GB? Sure! The "improved memory accessibility module" subscription goes for just $1.50/GB/month!
b) So, you say you want to use all 4 of your cores instead of just 2? Plus have access to the 2nd processor in your 3D graphics board? Why, no problem! We're selling a PERMANENT, I say PERMANENT license to the "multi-core compatibility mode" for just $35! Offers end by July 13th, 2011.
c) Ah, you need to have 5 USB devices connected simultaneously, and need them all to work in fast USB 3.0 mode instead of USB 2.0? We had a promotion for that last month, but unfortunately now we're back to the standard price, sorry. It'll be $0.50/USB device/month for every device above the 4th, plus $14.99 for the permanent 3.0 functionality, or $0.90/month for the subscription version. The module name is "FastUSB expansion/speed-up bundle package", and you can find the different option in the Connectivity tab at the Module Shop window.
And so on and an so forth.
Not a pretty picture.
Extensive theft protection means planning towards screwdrivers too.
Now, if you manage to shield a Win98 box from the external world so that it doesn't need these 3rd party tools running, then sure, you'll have a "GDI load" similar to what such a machine saw on 1998, and it'll be usable. But that requires discipline and tons of good sense on the part of the user. Anything else, and it's either too risky or quite literally impossible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_performance#Comparison_to_other_languages
Even so, though, if you have a choice between a small interpreted language on one hand, and a gigantic interpreted language on the other, it makes little sense to prefer the gigantic if all the features you need are available in the small. And that's precisely the case with OOo's wizards. What they do can be done with, say, python. So why use Java? There's no reason other than it's a Sun project, and since Sun also owns Java, it wants OOo to be a showcase example for Java.
If OOo itself was a Java application then I surely wouldn't complain. In fact, I loved playing around with that ancient Corel Office for Java before it got canceled years ago. But as things stand, I don't see any reason at all for Java to play any role in OOo's inner workings.
That said, no, it has nothing to do with it not being "intuitive to me". OOo's tables, or at least the user interface around them, simply have less features than MS Office ones. For people who just need a "n x m" table now and then that's surely not a problem, but the moment you're required to make a very complex table layouts to accommodate within millimeter of precision fields that will be printed on non-blank, pre-printed paper form, you have a really hard time doing so in OOo. The funny thing, though, is that you can import a document with a complex table from MS Office to OOo, and it works well. That's why I think the problem is in OOo's user interface, not on its internal table support.
I use OOo in Ubuntu, and I really, REALLY hope this new version to stop handling menu and dialog font spacing and anti-aliasing (or the lack thereof, as I prefer) by itself, and instead let Gnome or KDE handle this, as all other applications do. It's just ugly to have the fonts in everything looking perfectly in a certain way, except for OOo.
My 2nd hope is for OOo 3 to stop using Java for the wizards. Or for anything really. There's no point in having Java handle things behind the scenes on an otherwise compiled application. It just make things slow to load and slow to run.
And my 3rd hope is for OOo 3 to finally make tables creation and editing in Write as easy, free form and trouble free as it is in MS Word. Click a button, start "drawing" your table any way you like, without giving any consideration whatsoever to the number of rows and columns, dividing cells anywhere you want, merging cells in any way, moving cell boundaries left and right and up and down without any invisible wall preventing you (not even the table's boundaries): that's how it should be, and how it actually is in MS Word.
Do these 3 things and I'll never look back to MS Office.
It basically comes down to recognizing and taking to hearth that, contrary to current days, works like the Odyssey, the Iliad, and pretty much everything written before 400 BC, weren't meant to exist in written form. Writing down anything on papyrus or parchment was very, very expensive. So, authors designed they works in a way that caused them to be easy to remembered after a few concentrated listening sessions. This is the source of the repetitions: few things are more mnemonic than a sequence of repetitive sounds in poetic form.
So, for you to really enjoy such a work (among which you can include the Old Testament and the Koran, even though this last one is recent), the best way is to first acquire a good rhythmic poetic translation then read it aloud.
It might feel odd at first, but in short time you get used to it, begin to like those repetitions, and start seeing the text shine. It's really worth the effort.
In fact, I think the final pages of the Silmarillion shows perfectly well what I mean. There, the 1200 pages of LOTR become a whooping... three pages. The Hobbit, if I remember correctly, went for a single paragraph, if that much. And that's because they were worked in more details than was typical for the remaining tales in the book. Had they received the same treatment, and I guess LOTR would have been given a single page.
The Silmarillion is really for those who like synthesis. Where it written in the hyper-detailed LOTR style and the thing would become a 140,000 pages monstrosity spread over 350 volumes. It would most probably be a fun read for many, but not really my thing.
However, this isn't to mean that nature exists apart from God. To be more precise, it means that God is "all", while nature is "nothing". Meaning, a time-spatially infinite Universe would still be finite in the sense that it is a single entity, and a such, no more than a dot immersed in God's absolute, ultimate, actual infinity. So, analogically you could say He's "apart" from it, as there's infinitely "more" of "him" "outside" the Universe than there is "inside" it. But that doesn't imply in any way that the whole Universe isn't still a "piece" of him. Or, for that matter, each, every and all subatomic particle. Including yours.
Putting the same thing in a more Philosophical way, it's the same as saying that transcendence includes immanence. Their relationship is that of whole and part, not that of two independent wholes.Which is a subset of the case delineated above.
In the traditional concept of the ontological hierarchy of beings, reality is organized in interconnected "steps", each one determined by the next one above it, all of them working together to constitute the whole we perceive. So you have particles that are organized by the level above them (atomic), which in turn are organized by the level above it (molecules), which in turn... in turn... in turn... up to nature, which is organized by natural laws, which are organized by mathematical laws, which... which... which... up to and until God, which is the ultimate organizer of all there is.
You can of course call the whole ontological scale as being "natural", but then you'll lack the term for that specific level of reality to which it is usually applied.
Thus, for example, if you take Christianism, and cut our these aspects, you end up with Enlightenment's atheism. Cut those others, and you'll end up with Ayn Rand's Objectivism. Those others, and you get Positivism and it's childrens, such as biologistic (evolution-based) atheisms. Marxism, on the other hand, comes from cutting out pieces of Judaism. And so on and so forth.
As for your other arguments, I've replied to similar ones in this subthread, so I suggest you read it in whole.
A full blown polytheism, with tons of actually independent gods in the best Marvel Comics' Thor-like super-hero style, is something that, when it appears, it simply doesn't survive. Whenever something like this appeared in History among a proper polytheism, it was taken by the highest level practitioners of that tradition, such as a Plato on Ancient Greece, as a degeneration, then denounced, fought against, and eventually either reformed back into a proper "polymonotheistic" tradition, or wholly replaced by some living tradition, such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism etc.
The distinctions we make between monotheisms and polytheisms come from old monotheist practitioners who use towards them the same simplistic analysis that atheists use towards monotheisms in general: interpret them in the more literalistic way, beat the straw man, and declare victory. When the target religion has degenerated, sure, it works. Otherwise, it doesn't.
Thus, when an atheist rejects the over-personalization of God, he's actually on the correct track. The problem is just that he misses the teachings that would allow him to switch from the purely negative "(this) God makes no sense!" apprehension to the "next step" of a, so to speak, positive negation, as, different from traditional societies, it's culturally unavailable and, even when available, frowned upon by almost everyone who doesn't understand it.
Personally I think the typical atheist would do well in Buddhism, particularly the Theravada school, as it departs from the whole "human-like god" representation from the get go, while the other religious traditions place this on the table only later in the game.The trick here is to understand that the infinite is, by definition, unlimited. If you place some limitation on it, such as "not having intelligence", it isn't the infinite anymore, it's just some huge thing that happens to lack this or that. On the other hand, pretending it to have just "human-like intelligence" is also a limitation, as our intelligence is most definitely finite.
Thus, the correct reasoning goes like this: since the infinite cannot lack intelligence, or will, or whatever a human being has, as lacking this would make it less than us, thus finite, it must have something analogous to our attributes, but on its own level, and these we can by analogy call "infinite intelligence", "infinite will" etc. They're not the same as ours, and contrary to ours these aren't distinguishable from each other, as a pluralized or divided infinite is a logical impossibility.Ah, but I don't care about the "exoteric" (simplistic, literalistic) arguments these guys employ. They're stuck on "level one" and surely cannot offer anything that a good atheist isn't able to destroy without even thinking about it. The "esoteric" concepts of high level religious thinking, on the other hand, starts from where atheism stops. They're way funnier to use.
By the way: I'm a fan of the concept of nature having habits. Now it has this habit of enforcing entropy. Tomorrow "it" could change "its" mind and give us some infinite source of energy. Who knows?
In other words, if you can observe the Aristotelian God, but not the Christian God, that says nothing about the Christian God, but it might say something about you, although I don't know exactly what.
So, whenever an atheist criticizes the, say, Christian God for being sentient, they're committing a straw man.
I'd say 100% similar. Literally. Academic works on this aren't difficult to come by, just search around for comparative religion or philosophy of religion, such as the one I linked in my original post: 1100 pages of evidence from hundreds of sources, almost without commentary so as to not taint the reader, 140 pages consisting of the bibliography of original works by orthodox masters of each religion the author consulted. And beyond the "raw data" it provides, there are also a lot of complementary works on the subject. Search for these authors and any other related: Rene Guenon, Fritjof Schuon, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Mircea Eliade, Huston Smith.
I have dealt with this in two other messages in this subthread, so I'll skip it now. Please read them. :)
True. But I'm not talking about this. I'm talking about everyone of them concluding something like: nature is hierarchically ordained; complexity is subsumed by simplicity (this means that nature is counter-reductionist); efficient causality isn't sufficient to explain order, you need formal and final causality; reality is objective, and the mind is passive in perceiving it (contrary to Kant) etc.
Events such as out-of-body experiences are considered purely "psychic" phenomena by traditional religions, and dismissed as irrelevant. Irrelevant in the sense that, whether they exist or not, it's just not important at all. And in this, again, you'll see sages as different as Saint Thomas Aquinas or Nagarjuna (a Buddhist saint) speaking the same thing: "Leaving your body? Forget it. There are more important things. Just don't do it and, if you're doing, stop."
True again. But I also talked about this in another message, so, skipping again.
Yep. But the simple form is really simple: religious symbols. They don't need you to even know how to read to understand them, and they still convey the intended meaning.
As for Newton's Laws, they're in no way easy. We take them easily because our culture is structured around them, so you see from infancy "space ships" going to planets that circle around stars etc. The moment a child takes formal contact with them he already knows enough to grasp the formalization somewhat easily. But try to teach them to someone who had no contact at all with the Newtonian worldview and you'll see it's far from straightforward.
It's the other way around. As happens with logic, or math, they aren't secondary things delimited by some higher principle, they are the higher principle that that delimits secondary ones.
In a very direct way, they explain how reality is structured. Physical laws are a subset o
I don't mind those who are Kantians, but I myself am an ontological realist. If certain methods, be them "opening your eyes" or "touching with your hands" to perceive a ball, or "meditating according to this methodology" or "according to that methodology" to perceive God, regularly, repeatably, reproducibly work, the object perceived is real.
This is as "blind" as you can get. Try these different methods with different groups and see the results, or use the results already existing. There's no mystery there. Other than, perhaps, the mysterious reason atheists don't care for the fact they have no way to explain why one heterogeneous group reaches homogeneous results while the other heterogeneous group doesn't.