Why would the burden of proof be with the guy who refuses to believe the religious crap?
Because when you study comparative religion in a serious, academic way, you quickly reach undeniable evidences of "something" that defy the typical atheist's oversimplifications.
For example, when you compare what different practitioners of different religions say on "the beyond" and related subjects, you find that, although the religions they practice are one very different from the other, after years of following to the letter the precise practices taught by that religion, the conclusions they all reach are the same, they are expressed in very similar terms, they draw the exact same picture of what reality "in itself" is like, etc. And by "different religions" and "different practitioners" I mean a modern day monk training in an Eastern Orthodox Christian monastery, a Native American using peyote, a Muslim Sufi of the 14th century, a Buddhist monk who lived in the 2nd century BC, etc.
So, yes, it's on the atheist hands to provide the extraordinary evidence allowing us to dismiss this enormous corpus of repeatable, reproducible experiences as useless.
And, most important: to do so properly, after studying and practicing the subject for as many years as it takes for a proper practitioner to reach these (again: repeatable and reproducible) results. Because this is in no way different than the requirements for one to become, say, a PhD in physics. For you to participate properly in a particle accelerator experiment, you need 8 years of basic education, plus 3 years of High School, plus 4 years of College, plus 2 years for a MD and 3 years for the PhD, i.e., 20 years (minimum) of dedicated study in total.
Religion requires the same effort and dedication for you to "get" it right. If you spent just 6 months in total thinking about religion to conclude it's worthless, then stopped worrying about it, don't expect your conclusion to have any weight whatsoever for those who spent 40 times more not only thinking, but "orthodoxically" practicing it, step-by-step, level-by-level, at each one confronting the results actually obtained to those others reached and adjusting his practice accordingly if they didn't match, until they did and he could advance to the next one and repeat the process. Simply put, there's no comparison.
The Church had a problem with people stating anything unproven as fact. If the idea was presented as an hypothesis, nothing would happen to the person presenting it, nor to his work.
Copernicus himself was a good example, as it seems that you didn't read the very link you suggested, see this topic and the one that follows it: his ideas were taught in Rome by a disciple of him, garnering a lot of interest and praise from Church officials, and his book itself was delivered to publication by a bishop friend of him.
As for the book, Copernicus might have been afraid, or not, of publishing it. I say "or not" because at the time people publishing books many years after they were completed wasn't uncommon. In any case, if he was afraid, it was without good cause, for the book went being published for decades without any problem at all. Why? Simply because of its preface, which I recommend you seek on Google then read. It'll teach you some things about what to be intellectually rigorous on scientific matters actually mean, not to mention it's also a very good introduction to Instrumentalism, a core component of Popper's falseabilism.
Yes! Absolutely! Put anyone in prison who comes up with a theory he can't immediately prove! Life sentences for anyone who displays any arrogance. Life sentences for anyone who comes up with a parody! What's more the church is founded on the unprovable - things that must be taken on faith despite a lack of evidence.
That never sent anyone to prison. But divulging an unproven theory as fact, or even as being "as good as" the established accepted theory and its facts, usually causes trouble to people exposing them.
Even nowadays, what do you think would happen to a public school science teacher who started teaching astrology to his students? Worse: start teaching it as fact, not even as an hypothesis? Sure, he wouldn't be imprisoned. But he would be fired without a 2nd thought. Is there that much of a difference? If you think there is, go read something by Feyerabend. It'll give you some much needed insight on the matter.
Ahhh the good old days! If only the church would return to them. If the people who had committed these attrocities had their way we'd still be in the dark ages.
Wait, wait. I never said those were "good days" to which we should go back. On the other hand, I don't hold our own time as being special in any way. As far as "ages" go, I'm pretty much an agnostic: one age is as good, and as worse, as any the other, not a single one is "special". If you think different, if you think a certain century is "better" than another, be it the current one or some other, in the past or in the future, then for me you're a Chronocentrist. And Chronocentrism is as much a form of discrimination as any other.
As for the "Dark Ages", such a thing doesn't exist. On this theme it seems you base your opinions on outdated 19th century prejudices.
I find your arguments offensive, misleading and full of factual inaccuracy.
Sorry, but I couldn't care less about how you feel. Life it too short for on to try
Testimony from lying, revisionist, ill-educated, pope-sucking, Catholic freaks aside
LOL, what a bad troll. Too bad then that all Galileo biographers are lying, revisionist, ill-educated, pope-sucking, Catholic freaks. I cannot but bow to your clearly evidenced superiority.:D
Galileo had a mathematical justification for his theory.
So what? Geocentrists did too. In fact, Ptolemaic epicycles are mathematically easier than Galilean epicycles. And the pendulum effect might be due to some other reason. Accepting Heliocentrism as fact just because of it would be the paradigmatic jump to conclusions.
The phases of the Moon, mountains on the Moon, sunspots, and the four "Galilean" moons of Jupiter, ALL OF WHICH were observed by Galileo, *DO* constitute hard evidence of the Heliocentric theory.
No, not really. Tycho Brahe was of the opinion that the Earth was fixed in the middle, the Sun and the Moon rotated around the Earth as its two satellites, and the other planets rotated around the Sun as its satellites. Thus, a Geocentrist might as well take Jupiter's moons as good evidence for Brahe's system, since satellites orbiting other satellites made it much more reasonable to consider the many planets as de facto orbiting around that bright satellite of ours. How do you disprove Tycho's theory with Galilean tools? Answer: you don't.
Besides, the standard Geocentric system of Ptolemy with its many epicycles, which Galileo adapted in an Heliocentric fashion, already had the planets doing crazily convoluted orbits around orbits around orbits around empty points in the sky which themselves orbited around the Earth. Satellites of satellites would at worst add one more epicycle to the system. Nothing special about it.
However, the Inquisition and its mates had far too much invested in Aristotle (and not being made to look ridiculous) and the rest is history.
This isn't accurate. The Church didn't officially accept Aristotle's system until the 19th century, when it declared Saint Thomas Aquinas' philosophy (which is basically Aristotle plus Christianism) as it's main one. At the time of Galileo and earlier, they preferred Plato, and you have A LOT of Church philosophers, both in the Middle and Modern Ages, trying as hard as they could to either refute Aristotle (Aquinas), or even both Aristotle and Plato. Also, at the time of Aquinas death (which rumors of the time suggested he might have been poisoned), Aristotle's teachings, including his physics, were not only badly looked at by the Church, but even full blown prohibited. It managed to live on just because, as usual, Universities never like to obey authority, and went ahead studying Aristotle anyway. Streisand effect and all, you know.
As for Galileo's inquisitor, Saint Bellarmine, if you read him you'll see he saying it didn't matter whether Geocentrism or Heliocentrism was the correct explanation, as both were compatible with the Church's teaching and as far as the faith is concerned it doesn't matter either way. The whole issue really was of a different nature, and Aristotle plays almost no role there.
If I'd been tortured and mistreated by an institution, I wouldn't want them to have a statue of me as a tourist attraction!
Galileo wasn't tortured.
He was a personal friend of the then Pope, and got prosecuted not because he divulged Heliocentrism itself. Other Heliocentrists at the time didn't have any problem with the Church, and in fact some of them were funded by the Church itself. He was prosecuted:
a) Because he insisted that all the details of his theory, such as that, despite Kepler, whose works he read but dismissed, planetary orbits are perfectly circular since circles are "perfect" and ellipses aren't, were absolute certainties, even though he couldn't prove any of them (the first actual proof of any version of Heliocentrism appeared only in the 19th century, 200+ years after Galileo's time);
b) Because he thought that everyone should accept his hypothesis just because, no matter the lack of proofs;
c) And because he did make the point clear by adding a character to his book, named "Simpleton", who "defended" Geocentrism by mocking actual speeches of his friend the Pope, what Galileo cluelessly hoped he would find funny, not offensive. Obviously, it didn't happen.
Considering that at the time people were tortured and burned for doing much less, being held in his own house was a very soft punishment. The Church really wasn't harsh on him. It's only by comparing what Galileo was subjected to with 20th century style freedom of speech that one finds it "evil". But comparing it to what was the standard practices in the 17th century puts things in a very different light.
You are - everyone who has an employer is - already being paid less than what they "make", less than they are worth to the company. If you earn X a month, the company rakes in X+n from your effort alone.
That's not entirely accurate. Sure, the "X" you earn is less than the "X+n" the company makes by your working there. However, this "X" is usually more than what you would earn working all by yourself.
So, if we call what you'd make by yourself "Y", and "m" the difference between "Y" and "X", so that "X = Y+m", we can safely conclude that the company's managerial ability, by directing your work and organizing it with others' work, offers the world the extremely important service of improving their employees productivity by "e*(m+n)", "e" being the number of employees. And that, for doing so, it only requires "e*n", returning "e*m" back to the employees, so that everyone profits. The employees, from their increased productivity. The company, from providing optimized productivity to the world, increasing the overall prosperity.
Now, of course, for those individuals whose "Y" is greater than "X", they working at a company rather than by themselves is just plain silly. In this case, yes, there's a loss. And, this is important, not only a personal loss, but also a social loss. After all, the "Y-X" difference is also the amount of prosperity not being generated and thus not entering the social whole.
Pirate Bay is an official distribution channel. (Yes, really.)
Hehe, I liked your "yes, really". But seriously, being friendly towards the topmost torrent trackers and using them as a marketing tool rather than looking at them as your enemy is a clever approach for anyone who knows anything at all about how the Internet works.
I am contrary to copyright on libertarian grounds, as it's a violation of property rights. But I've also incorporated in the form of a small movie studio owner to help a friend direct a low budget movie. So, barring any legal impediment, as said budget comes from a Brazilian government program that allows corporations to redirect part of their income taxes for cultural endeavors, I'll do the exact same thing.
Registering a tracker on Pirate Bay, then promoting it as an official distribution channel (and maybe making a deal with the site operators for them to promote it openly too), is a damn good way to get it to be known all over the place, all the while lowering bandwidth costs and, if some downloaders like it well enough to purchase official products, earning some reasonable profits.
Heck! I might even go so far as to distribute it under a share-alike commercial license. After all, what's there to lose in doing so? The fact I won't "control" someone making Tagalog subtitles and selling the subtitled DVDs in the Philippines? Give me a break! The more people coming into contact with my small studio and my friend's ability as a director, the better for us both, not the other way around!
Copyright has no future. Those who understand it and act on it now are also the best posed to come on top once said future arrives. Let's see if I manage to be there when it happens.
Never trust a "Christian" in a four thousand dollar suit.
Hehe, I appreciate the sentiment.:-) But take care in not taking this rhetorical argument of yours in too much of a literal sense. You won't find a condemnation of riches themselves in the Bible. Sure, you find allusions as to how difficult it is for a rich person to be saved. But the reason for this is well explained too. It's because rich persons are usually attached to their riches more than they're to God, thus placing God on a secondary place. Some rich persons, though, even if they wear "four thousand dollar suits", are interiorly detached from their riches to the point of placing God in the first place. Those, riches or no riches aside, get saved yes. After all, remember that the Gospel is about the relationship between individuals and God, not between "economic classes" (or any other kind of collective whole) and God.
When most people, particularly in the U.S., use the phrase "evangelical Christians", they really mean "fundamentalist evangelical Christians", because somewhere in the last ten or fifteen years the news media stopped using the word "fundamentalist".
That's a good thing, though, since the term "fundamentalism" literally means a system that attempts to return to the "fundamentals" of something, and this the Evangelical churches don't do. Why? Because their "fundamentalism" is actually to take the Bible literally, what neither the primitive Christians nor the Traditional churches have ever done. You'll find fundamentalists, in the proper meaning of the word (thus my lack of quote marks), among orthodox followers of Egiptian Copticism, Eastern Orthodoxism, Western Catholicism, and even the more authoritative branches of the first Historical Churches, but not among Evangelicals or more recent denominations, never among them. Now, if we were to call these "Literalist Christians" instead of Evangelicals, then I think we'd have a good term. But "fundamentalists"? No, that just doesn't suit them.
By definition German Protestants, Lutherans especially, are Evangelical Christians.
Well, it depends on how your classification system works. Literally, yes, after all they all follow (or profess following) the gospels. The system I'm used to, however, prefer to call Lutherans and other denominations that appeared roughly at the same time as either as "Protestant Churches" or, preferably, as "Historical Churches". Why "historical"? Three reasons, basically:
a) Because they're much older and the historical predecessors of the newer Christian denominations;
b) Because they were the first with definite historical starting points (Luther, Calvin etc.), what doesn't happen with, for example, the Catholic, Orthodox or Coptic churches, none of which you can point to and tell who was the idealizer/constructor of its specific doctrine;
c) Because they focus most on the history of Christianity and on hardcore theological analysis to determine most of their practices, and not on feelings, which is the main drive behind Evangelical Christianism.
In this classification, you'd have then the "Traditional", "Historical", "Evangelical", "Pentecostal" (due to the "speaking in tongues" nonsense) and "Other" (those with insertion of random doctrines derived out of nowhere, what means, among others, the Last Day Saints, 7th Day Adventists, Jehovah Witnesses etc.) churches.
So, although I agree that some terms there might be ambiguous, I think it's nevertheless an useful classification.
There is nothing whatever in the Christian Bible that says drinking is a sin.
Absolutely true. But evangelicals have their own ways to twist these texts. I have a few evangelical relatives who are 100% sure, contrary to all evidence, that anywhere the Bible speaks of "wine" it "actually" means "non-alcoholic grapes juice". So much that, believe it or not, this is precisely what they use on Sunday service. And when I try pointing out that "wine" in fact means "wine", if for no other reason than the historical fact that for most of History we drank alcoholic beverages to avoid the diseases typical of drinking non-treated water, they simply don't want to hear anything about it. It's sad really. And I say that from the perspective of someone who doesn't drink.
Most interesting, however, is how persons like these like accusing other Christians of not being "Christian enough" if they just don't agree with this nonsense. German Protestants just love beer (Oktoberfest anyone?). Can you imagine what the Dry Law was like for Lutheran immigrants, including German priests? I'm from German descent, and I know for sure that Hell would break loose if something like that was enacted here in Brazil.
The New Testament is all about the faithful not needing to follow overly strict rules to attain Salvation. Paul even explicitly forbids Christians from discriminating each other due to what they eat, drink, or refuse to eat or drink! Sure, some rules exist, such as not killing, not having sexual relations outside marriage etc. But even those are few and generic, not specific. Puritanism and their derivatives on the other hand, Evangelical Christianism included, are all about rules, rules and more rules. What's "Christian" about this? Hardly anything at all.
Capitalism is an economic system which focuses on the free market. Communism is an economic system which focuses on central government control. Socialism is an economic system which focuses on the welfare of the people.
If you prefer it that way, okay with me. After all, according to these categories, the USA has a mix of communism and socialism. My point stands intact.;)
When someone says they hate Capitalism, they aren't saying they hate the econ 101 definition, they are usually saying they hate a system which promotes antisocial activities which offend their sense of justice, often having some specific example in mind.
Then it's better to attack these specific things rather than do an improper generalization. What is the system that promotes antisocial activities? I'd say it's the patents system. So, attack it, not the other aspects of the equation that have no relation with and neither are guilty of whatever ills caused by the patent system.
(It isn't that I hate Apple or support patents, it is just that I hate capitalism. Can't you see the connection?)
No, you don't hate capitalism. You hate government interfering on free market, such as through its "patents" system, which wouldn't exist in a system of purely voluntary exchange of goods and services, i.e., in a capitalistic system. Once government dictates and enforces arbitrary rules of exchange, it's not capitalism anymore, it's something else.
Ho ho ho, in effect, books were in the hands of the elite, the monasteries also being part of the elite in that time
No, they weren't. What power did monasteries have? They owned donated lands, that's for sure. And they allowed anyone who had problems with other Feudal lords to settle there, no questions asked. But that's it. Anytime an actual member of an actual elite (a neighbor noble) strongly wanted to take a monastery's lands, he could take it without as much as saying it loudly. A powerless elite is no elite at all.
The value of the books was immense, as only up to a hundred copies were available and these books would not be given in the hands of some lower-class person (if that person could read at all).
Of course they would let people able to read to take books and read. Why do you think they wouldn't? As for the "lower-class" idea, most people on Universities were poor. How do you think they studied?
In practice, if you wanted to get a copy of a book, you would have to be able to afford a servant who could read and write, and send this servant all the way to the place the book was located, pay for traveling expenses, and/or a weaponed guard if you wanted to loan the book over to your place.
If you was rich, not willing to travel yourself, and wanted a copy, yes, that's what it would cost you. On the other hand, if you were poor, you could also do all this travel and not spend a cent. That's because in Middle Age people saw peregrines (anyone going from somewhere to a sacred place somewhere else) as a positive thing, and helped them. In fact, you had monasteries and other places located at one day of walking from each other that would offer food and a night stay for peregrines for free. If one wished, one could spend one's whole life going from a library to the other, reading and studying, all the while being feed and sheltered by others for no cost. You could even go to Jerusalem and back for $0, provided you didn't mind walking.
"The elite" refers to the church, not the nobles. If the Pope didn't like what you were doing, the threat of excommunication brought even kings back in line.
This is an oversimplification of what happened then.
If the Church (not only the Pope, but a lot of people; just the Pope disagreeing meant nothing if the others agreed) saw a problem in what you wrote, they would send someone knowledgeable on the subject to talk to you ("inquisitor" means "asker"), requesting you both to talk on the subject. This talk could proceed for as long as it was needed for one to convince the other, or for both to agree that an agreements was unreachable. Depending on what of these things happened, this was the procedure:
a) In case you were convinced by the inquisitor, nothing happened, of course. You both went back to your lives.
b) In case the inquisitor was convinced by you, what historically happened many times, he would take the subject back to the Vatican where it would enter the list of themes to be debated in the next council. Afterwards, once the council happened, one of two things could happen after some months of debate: the Church as a whole might conclude you were in fact correct, and change accordingly (what also happened historically many times), or it could conclude you and the inquisitor were wrong. What, however, didn't exclude the possibility of the theme being the subject of other councils, and the Church position change again, what also happened many times.
As for you yourself, the practical consequences while your position wasn't agreed upon by the Church were similar to the next case:
c) In case you both agreed that you couldn't reach an agreement on the subject, a document was presented to you wish you was expected to sign. This document basically said that you were aware that your arguments weren't strong enough to convince other sages as much knowledgeable on the subject as you; thus, that the Church's position on the matter could very well be the correct, that you're just unable to fully appreciate it; and thus, that since it's not a certainty, it isn't worth disclosing to less knowledgeable people as a proven fact, so to avoid social distress. You signed it, and while nothing happened to you, you could still bring the subject to discussion and investigation on Universities.
d) The last alternative was you refusing to sign the document, and then walking around preaching your ideas as if they were pure facts, trying to convince the simple people as a compensation for the fact you didn't manage to convince those at your own knowledge level, i.e., by becoming a cult leader and, as more and more non-scholars were convinced by you, a source of social unrest. This would set you as an heretical and put an excommunication decree over your head, with the consequences we know.
So, it's extremely naive, historically, to think the Church went directly to 'd'. It rarely happened, and most of the time the Church was a very reasonable entity for the time (for example, by threatening with excommunication those civil official who used more than one torture session on a suspect, as the custom was a lot of torture sessions; and by dismissing as unfounded and freeing the accused in 99 of each 100 witchcraft trials). They assumed that the unrestricted diffusion as fact of unproven and unsustainable hypotheses and theories would result in utter chaos, and history has shown they were correct in this regards as far as the immediately following centuries is concerned, as the many religious wars of the subsequent Modern Age have shown.
In fact, it took a lot of blood for societies to develop the profound concept of "Just don't care what your neighbor think, damn it!". Now we know this is possible, but at the time no one dreamed of such a possibility, and contrasting their stance of "perfect the proof, reach unanimity on it, and only then diffuse it" with the current understanding that "complete freedom of
you don't need presses if there's nobody who can read.
True. After all, there were huge Universities at the time, and on the biggest cities a lot of people had to know how to read and write just to be able to do their jobs. But notice that I was just disagreeing with his position that the knowledge was in the hands of a few that somehow locked it down, and that Gutenberg's invention had in some way liberated it. Nobles, particularly, weren't much interested in reading or writing until the Modern Age. They just contracted a scribe to do this for them. In fact, I'd say even that it was the printing press that caused they to become interested, not the other way around. It had, so to speak, become fashionable.
In the Middle Age proper, however, reading was an ability that only those who needed or wanted it developed. As most jobs didn't require this proficiency, almost everyone else didn't bother learning it, even if the opportunity was presented to them. With an interesting and very counterintuitive exception in that you had a lot of noble women who could do it. It seems their husbands expected them to teach well the kids, and being able to read makes this much easier when it comes to history, tales, songs, the Bible etc.:)
What makes you think "elite" meant "nobles" rather than "clergy" to begin with?
It might be, but then it would be wrong anyway. I only acknowledge as "elite" those who are able to kill others without being subject to punishment themselves. And this most surely doesn't include the Catholic clergy in the Middle Age. When we read about witches being burned, for example, it was always clergy asking the civil government to kill. The clergymen themselves couldn't do so. And the government could, and many times did, say "no". Besides, many times the civil government went and killed "annoying" priests too.
That's not to mean that the Catholic Church didn't want to have power. Middle Age history is full of episodes of conflicts around this. But the simple fact is, it never actually managed to. Unless you consider the Italian province surrounding the city of Rome. But there's the only place where the Catholic Church was a power, in the proper meaning of the word, for any actual period of time.
Furthermore, another indication in that direction is that medieval Universities, much like the actual ones, where in permanent conflict with everyone. This included ignoring Church decrees, what seems strange only until you notice that teachers, although usually priests, were however primarily Philosophers. And that's not to mention monks, in special Franciscans, who were an entirely different category of, so to speak, "troublemakers". Occam (the one from the razor), for instance, was a Franciscan monk AND a University professor, plus a very vocal opponent of the Vatican.
In short, you had many interested parties, all checking and balancing each other: Universities, Monasteries, the Church structure, and the many, many mutually conflicting civil governments. From all of those, only the civil government had actual power. Politically it must have been fun times.;)
In any case, I submit that the man's overall historical impact may rank with Gutenberg, and for the same reason: taking information out of the hands of the elite and offering a level playing field. Gutenberg did it for literacy, Stallman for programming.
This sentence, as far as Gutenberg is concerned, makes no sense whatsoever. Medieval nobles were illiterate, they didn't consider it worth their time to learn how to read. The thing is, if you were able to read, you would go after a literacy-requiring work, and this usually meant becoming a priest. Also, whenever you wanted to read something you just went for a library and read it there. Those where located inside monasteries, and no monk ever blocked anyone from going inside and reading whatever he so wished. Better yet: if you appeared with paper and ink wishing to copy something, they would be even more glad you were there. Compare this to the current thinking on copy "rights" and I'd say we wend down from the then status quo, not up.
Gutenberg caused copies to become much cheaper to produce though, that's for sure. But this has nothing to do with "taking information out of the hands of the elite". The information was always "out of their hands". To get to it you only had to do some foot work.
If users could only group together for political power like some are starting to do in Sweden, the course of democracy might be able to break copyright law.
This won't happen, in any country, unless and until government sanctions against file sharing become prevalent enough to affect the majority of Internet users living there. Unfortunately, as long as it only affects one person in a million, no one except those interested in the subject itself will care.
On the other hand, this British law, if enacted, might become the fire that will trigger that reaction. Just wait and see the growth in the amount of people pissed by false positives, or just pissed, for things to start to change.
I can assure you, the work we're doing to comply with the EU regulations is *not* minimal.
Well, it is possible that Microsoft is becoming a better company. After all, if IBM, of all corporations, could do so (and those old enough, or interested enough in the history of technology, know what I'm talking about), Microsoft most certainly can do so too. But most people will keep their skepticism up for as long as it takes for concrete demonstrations of good behavior to become the norm, rather than the exception.
Please note however that I don't think Microsoft will keep being "the evil neighbor" forever. Sooner or later it'll have to adapt to the advances of the free software movement and start working in synergy, rather than in conflict, with it. It's simply mathematically unavoidable: hundreds of thousands of free software developers will at some point aggregate more man-hours of development into at least one free software alternative to each Microsoft product, and sometimes to more than one, than Microsoft could surpass with its hundreds or thousands of developers. In many fields this hasn't happened yet, and there Microsoft softwares stand out. But at some point it will happen, and there's no way around it. So, once it happens, Microsoft will be forced to either change, or to be left behind. There'll be no third alternative.
This move, thus, seems to imply this change in posture might be happening, so to speak, before the natural deadline, rather than at it. But then, it's perfectly possible that Microsoft's management still hasn't grasped that this is the case and there's no routing around it. I'm not holding my breath. But I surely hope I'm wrong, and it turns out to be an actual change for the better. If I am, it'll surely be a win-win situation for everyone.
In any case, give it time and keep doing "The Right Thing(TM)", and the skepticism will fade accordingly and eventually disappear. Don't do it, and it'll happen some years down the line anyway. In either case, the future of software development is bright.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, when you compare what different practitioners of different religions say on "the beyond" and related subjects, you find that, although the religions they practice are one very different from the other, after years of following to the letter the precise practices taught by that religion, the conclusions they all reach are the same, they are expressed in very similar terms, they draw the exact same picture of what reality "in itself" is like, etc. And by "different religions" and "different practitioners" I mean a modern day monk training in an Eastern Orthodox Christian monastery, a Native American using peyote, a Muslim Sufi of the 14th century, a Buddhist monk who lived in the 2nd century BC, etc.
So, yes, it's on the atheist hands to provide the extraordinary evidence allowing us to dismiss this enormous corpus of repeatable, reproducible experiences as useless.
And, most important: to do so properly, after studying and practicing the subject for as many years as it takes for a proper practitioner to reach these (again: repeatable and reproducible) results. Because this is in no way different than the requirements for one to become, say, a PhD in physics. For you to participate properly in a particle accelerator experiment, you need 8 years of basic education, plus 3 years of High School, plus 4 years of College, plus 2 years for a MD and 3 years for the PhD, i.e., 20 years (minimum) of dedicated study in total.
Religion requires the same effort and dedication for you to "get" it right. If you spent just 6 months in total thinking about religion to conclude it's worthless, then stopped worrying about it, don't expect your conclusion to have any weight whatsoever for those who spent 40 times more not only thinking, but "orthodoxically" practicing it, step-by-step, level-by-level, at each one confronting the results actually obtained to those others reached and adjusting his practice accordingly if they didn't match, until they did and he could advance to the next one and repeat the process. Simply put, there's no comparison.
Lol!
The Church had a problem with people stating anything unproven as fact. If the idea was presented as an hypothesis, nothing would happen to the person presenting it, nor to his work.
Copernicus himself was a good example, as it seems that you didn't read the very link you suggested, see this topic and the one that follows it: his ideas were taught in Rome by a disciple of him, garnering a lot of interest and praise from Church officials, and his book itself was delivered to publication by a bishop friend of him.
As for the book, Copernicus might have been afraid, or not, of publishing it. I say "or not" because at the time people publishing books many years after they were completed wasn't uncommon. In any case, if he was afraid, it was without good cause, for the book went being published for decades without any problem at all. Why? Simply because of its preface, which I recommend you seek on Google then read. It'll teach you some things about what to be intellectually rigorous on scientific matters actually mean, not to mention it's also a very good introduction to Instrumentalism, a core component of Popper's falseabilism.
And about the list, here you'll find an extensive one.
That never sent anyone to prison. But divulging an unproven theory as fact, or even as being "as good as" the established accepted theory and its facts, usually causes trouble to people exposing them.
Even nowadays, what do you think would happen to a public school science teacher who started teaching astrology to his students? Worse: start teaching it as fact, not even as an hypothesis? Sure, he wouldn't be imprisoned. But he would be fired without a 2nd thought. Is there that much of a difference? If you think there is, go read something by Feyerabend. It'll give you some much needed insight on the matter.
Wait, wait. I never said those were "good days" to which we should go back. On the other hand, I don't hold our own time as being special in any way. As far as "ages" go, I'm pretty much an agnostic: one age is as good, and as worse, as any the other, not a single one is "special". If you think different, if you think a certain century is "better" than another, be it the current one or some other, in the past or in the future, then for me you're a Chronocentrist. And Chronocentrism is as much a form of discrimination as any other.
As for the "Dark Ages", such a thing doesn't exist. On this theme it seems you base your opinions on outdated 19th century prejudices.
Sorry, but I couldn't care less about how you feel. Life it too short for on to try
See this other message of mine in this thread.
Besides, the standard Geocentric system of Ptolemy with its many epicycles, which Galileo adapted in an Heliocentric fashion, already had the planets doing crazily convoluted orbits around orbits around orbits around empty points in the sky which themselves orbited around the Earth. Satellites of satellites would at worst add one more epicycle to the system. Nothing special about it.
As for Galileo's inquisitor, Saint Bellarmine, if you read him you'll see he saying it didn't matter whether Geocentrism or Heliocentrism was the correct explanation, as both were compatible with the Church's teaching and as far as the faith is concerned it doesn't matter either way. The whole issue really was of a different nature, and Aristotle plays almost no role there.
He was a personal friend of the then Pope, and got prosecuted not because he divulged Heliocentrism itself. Other Heliocentrists at the time didn't have any problem with the Church, and in fact some of them were funded by the Church itself. He was prosecuted:
a) Because he insisted that all the details of his theory, such as that, despite Kepler, whose works he read but dismissed, planetary orbits are perfectly circular since circles are "perfect" and ellipses aren't, were absolute certainties, even though he couldn't prove any of them (the first actual proof of any version of Heliocentrism appeared only in the 19th century, 200+ years after Galileo's time);
b) Because he thought that everyone should accept his hypothesis just because, no matter the lack of proofs;
c) And because he did make the point clear by adding a character to his book, named "Simpleton", who "defended" Geocentrism by mocking actual speeches of his friend the Pope, what Galileo cluelessly hoped he would find funny, not offensive. Obviously, it didn't happen.
Considering that at the time people were tortured and burned for doing much less, being held in his own house was a very soft punishment. The Church really wasn't harsh on him. It's only by comparing what Galileo was subjected to with 20th century style freedom of speech that one finds it "evil". But comparing it to what was the standard practices in the 17th century puts things in a very different light.
So, if we call what you'd make by yourself "Y", and "m" the difference between "Y" and "X", so that "X = Y+m", we can safely conclude that the company's managerial ability, by directing your work and organizing it with others' work, offers the world the extremely important service of improving their employees productivity by "e*(m+n)", "e" being the number of employees. And that, for doing so, it only requires "e*n", returning "e*m" back to the employees, so that everyone profits. The employees, from their increased productivity. The company, from providing optimized productivity to the world, increasing the overall prosperity.
Now, of course, for those individuals whose "Y" is greater than "X", they working at a company rather than by themselves is just plain silly. In this case, yes, there's a loss. And, this is important, not only a personal loss, but also a social loss. After all, the "Y-X" difference is also the amount of prosperity not being generated and thus not entering the social whole.
I am contrary to copyright on libertarian grounds, as it's a violation of property rights. But I've also incorporated in the form of a small movie studio owner to help a friend direct a low budget movie. So, barring any legal impediment, as said budget comes from a Brazilian government program that allows corporations to redirect part of their income taxes for cultural endeavors, I'll do the exact same thing.
Registering a tracker on Pirate Bay, then promoting it as an official distribution channel (and maybe making a deal with the site operators for them to promote it openly too), is a damn good way to get it to be known all over the place, all the while lowering bandwidth costs and, if some downloaders like it well enough to purchase official products, earning some reasonable profits.
Heck! I might even go so far as to distribute it under a share-alike commercial license. After all, what's there to lose in doing so? The fact I won't "control" someone making Tagalog subtitles and selling the subtitled DVDs in the Philippines? Give me a break! The more people coming into contact with my small studio and my friend's ability as a director, the better for us both, not the other way around!
Copyright has no future. Those who understand it and act on it now are also the best posed to come on top once said future arrives. Let's see if I manage to be there when it happens.
a) Because they're much older and the historical predecessors of the newer Christian denominations;
b) Because they were the first with definite historical starting points (Luther, Calvin etc.), what doesn't happen with, for example, the Catholic, Orthodox or Coptic churches, none of which you can point to and tell who was the idealizer/constructor of its specific doctrine;
c) Because they focus most on the history of Christianity and on hardcore theological analysis to determine most of their practices, and not on feelings, which is the main drive behind Evangelical Christianism.
In this classification, you'd have then the "Traditional", "Historical", "Evangelical", "Pentecostal" (due to the "speaking in tongues" nonsense) and "Other" (those with insertion of random doctrines derived out of nowhere, what means, among others, the Last Day Saints, 7th Day Adventists, Jehovah Witnesses etc.) churches.
So, although I agree that some terms there might be ambiguous, I think it's nevertheless an useful classification.
Most interesting, however, is how persons like these like accusing other Christians of not being "Christian enough" if they just don't agree with this nonsense. German Protestants just love beer (Oktoberfest anyone?). Can you imagine what the Dry Law was like for Lutheran immigrants, including German priests? I'm from German descent, and I know for sure that Hell would break loose if something like that was enacted here in Brazil.
The New Testament is all about the faithful not needing to follow overly strict rules to attain Salvation. Paul even explicitly forbids Christians from discriminating each other due to what they eat, drink, or refuse to eat or drink! Sure, some rules exist, such as not killing, not having sexual relations outside marriage etc. But even those are few and generic, not specific. Puritanism and their derivatives on the other hand, Evangelical Christianism included, are all about rules, rules and more rules. What's "Christian" about this? Hardly anything at all.
Try doing so today.
This is an oversimplification of what happened then.
If the Church (not only the Pope, but a lot of people; just the Pope disagreeing meant nothing if the others agreed) saw a problem in what you wrote, they would send someone knowledgeable on the subject to talk to you ("inquisitor" means "asker"), requesting you both to talk on the subject. This talk could proceed for as long as it was needed for one to convince the other, or for both to agree that an agreements was unreachable. Depending on what of these things happened, this was the procedure:
a) In case you were convinced by the inquisitor, nothing happened, of course. You both went back to your lives.
b) In case the inquisitor was convinced by you, what historically happened many times, he would take the subject back to the Vatican where it would enter the list of themes to be debated in the next council. Afterwards, once the council happened, one of two things could happen after some months of debate: the Church as a whole might conclude you were in fact correct, and change accordingly (what also happened historically many times), or it could conclude you and the inquisitor were wrong. What, however, didn't exclude the possibility of the theme being the subject of other councils, and the Church position change again, what also happened many times.
As for you yourself, the practical consequences while your position wasn't agreed upon by the Church were similar to the next case:
c) In case you both agreed that you couldn't reach an agreement on the subject, a document was presented to you wish you was expected to sign. This document basically said that you were aware that your arguments weren't strong enough to convince other sages as much knowledgeable on the subject as you; thus, that the Church's position on the matter could very well be the correct, that you're just unable to fully appreciate it; and thus, that since it's not a certainty, it isn't worth disclosing to less knowledgeable people as a proven fact, so to avoid social distress. You signed it, and while nothing happened to you, you could still bring the subject to discussion and investigation on Universities.
d) The last alternative was you refusing to sign the document, and then walking around preaching your ideas as if they were pure facts, trying to convince the simple people as a compensation for the fact you didn't manage to convince those at your own knowledge level, i.e., by becoming a cult leader and, as more and more non-scholars were convinced by you, a source of social unrest. This would set you as an heretical and put an excommunication decree over your head, with the consequences we know.
So, it's extremely naive, historically, to think the Church went directly to 'd'. It rarely happened, and most of the time the Church was a very reasonable entity for the time (for example, by threatening with excommunication those civil official who used more than one torture session on a suspect, as the custom was a lot of torture sessions; and by dismissing as unfounded and freeing the accused in 99 of each 100 witchcraft trials). They assumed that the unrestricted diffusion as fact of unproven and unsustainable hypotheses and theories would result in utter chaos, and history has shown they were correct in this regards as far as the immediately following centuries is concerned, as the many religious wars of the subsequent Modern Age have shown.
In fact, it took a lot of blood for societies to develop the profound concept of "Just don't care what your neighbor think, damn it!". Now we know this is possible, but at the time no one dreamed of such a possibility, and contrasting their stance of "perfect the proof, reach unanimity on it, and only then diffuse it" with the current understanding that "complete freedom of
In the Middle Age proper, however, reading was an ability that only those who needed or wanted it developed. As most jobs didn't require this proficiency, almost everyone else didn't bother learning it, even if the opportunity was presented to them. With an interesting and very counterintuitive exception in that you had a lot of noble women who could do it. It seems their husbands expected them to teach well the kids, and being able to read makes this much easier when it comes to history, tales, songs, the Bible etc.
That's not to mean that the Catholic Church didn't want to have power. Middle Age history is full of episodes of conflicts around this. But the simple fact is, it never actually managed to. Unless you consider the Italian province surrounding the city of Rome. But there's the only place where the Catholic Church was a power, in the proper meaning of the word, for any actual period of time.
Furthermore, another indication in that direction is that medieval Universities, much like the actual ones, where in permanent conflict with everyone. This included ignoring Church decrees, what seems strange only until you notice that teachers, although usually priests, were however primarily Philosophers. And that's not to mention monks, in special Franciscans, who were an entirely different category of, so to speak, "troublemakers". Occam (the one from the razor), for instance, was a Franciscan monk AND a University professor, plus a very vocal opponent of the Vatican.
In short, you had many interested parties, all checking and balancing each other: Universities, Monasteries, the Church structure, and the many, many mutually conflicting civil governments. From all of those, only the civil government had actual power. Politically it must have been fun times.
Gutenberg caused copies to become much cheaper to produce though, that's for sure. But this has nothing to do with "taking information out of the hands of the elite". The information was always "out of their hands". To get to it you only had to do some foot work.
On the other hand, this British law, if enacted, might become the fire that will trigger that reaction. Just wait and see the growth in the amount of people pissed by false positives, or just pissed, for things to start to change.
Please note however that I don't think Microsoft will keep being "the evil neighbor" forever. Sooner or later it'll have to adapt to the advances of the free software movement and start working in synergy, rather than in conflict, with it. It's simply mathematically unavoidable: hundreds of thousands of free software developers will at some point aggregate more man-hours of development into at least one free software alternative to each Microsoft product, and sometimes to more than one, than Microsoft could surpass with its hundreds or thousands of developers. In many fields this hasn't happened yet, and there Microsoft softwares stand out. But at some point it will happen, and there's no way around it. So, once it happens, Microsoft will be forced to either change, or to be left behind. There'll be no third alternative.
This move, thus, seems to imply this change in posture might be happening, so to speak, before the natural deadline, rather than at it. But then, it's perfectly possible that Microsoft's management still hasn't grasped that this is the case and there's no routing around it. I'm not holding my breath. But I surely hope I'm wrong, and it turns out to be an actual change for the better. If I am, it'll surely be a win-win situation for everyone.
In any case, give it time and keep doing "The Right Thing(TM)", and the skepticism will fade accordingly and eventually disappear. Don't do it, and it'll happen some years down the line anyway. In either case, the future of software development is bright.