Brazil is worse. Last time the number of laws we have was in the 1.5 million range. Good luck we, the Brazilian people, have this custom of just ignoring it all. But more law-abiding countries surely have a huge problem on the horizon.
I'm sorry for UK fans of Negima!: Magister Negi Magi. It's one of the funniest manga teen comedies I've ever read, but due to the protagonist being a 10-year old who is surrounded by partially naked teen girls, it might end up being targeted by such a dumb law. How absurd!
The simple answer is: yes. If you define that 0/0 = 0, then all the operations where 0/0 appears that would result in something different (for example, the classic "sen(x)/x", that approaches 1 when x approaches 0) would end up in a mess, because you would have to acknowledge that that answer is indeed equal to 0, and thus develop the consequences of what that causes when reversing the whole operation. In the example, you would have to do this: "Okay, sen(x)/x is equal to 0 when x is 0, so, what does this say about sen(x)?".
Not that this isn't feasible, but the "new mathematics" that you would produce by doing this wouldn't be much related to the real world. It would be one case among others of an alternative mathematics based on an alternative set of axioms.
In other words: while in the standard mathematics the indetermination of the 0/0 is a consequence of its axioms, something that you discover by operating from them, in your alternative mathematics 0/0 = 0 would be one of the fundamental axioms, and based on it you would then discover other things. Some of which would probably be in direct contradiction with things that are obvious truths in standard mathematics, with a very actual possibility that you would end up with indeterminations in things that, in standard mathematics, are very determinate.
That's so true! Back in the time I actively used Linux, the very first thing I did in a new system was to list the exact hardware I had and the exact features I needed and compile a new kernel with support for that, and only that. I did this not because of lack of memory or the like, but because a standard generic kernel takes an excessive amount of time to boot. A minimal kernel was, and I guess still is, one of the few tricks, if not the single most important one, you have to speed up booting. If that's not a problem in the kernel design, I surely don't know what it is.
It's important to note, however, that our ads are created and managed under the exact same guidelines, principles, practices and algorithms as the ads of any other advertiser.
So, if a Google employee makes the mistake of clicking on a Google ad from the same shared IP that was used to put the ad on the air, will Google ban itself from the AdSense service?
You just answered your questions: because different methods give different results. There are ways to show that 0/0 results in 0, or in 1, or in 2, or in +infinite, or in both +infinite and -infinite at the same time, and so on and so forth.
If you limit your numerical domain in a very specific way, it's possible to make only one of those possibilities valid. So, in that domain 0/0 has a specific value. But once you go back to "standard" numbers (integer, real or complex), the ambiguity returns, and no single answer is the answer.
This is incorrect. The site was paying the Russian government, in complete accordance with the Russian law. If the Russian government wasn't forwarding the money to the copyright holders, this is something you should blame on that government, not on the service that was following the law strictly.
I didn't read the article, but there's something there.
Too broad free speech is sometimes a bad thing, because you can use it to preach against free speech, and sometimes be successful in doing so. Just look the Nazi Germany: Hitler was elected, and he was elected because he was preaching against democracy!
On the other hand, we cannot determine arbitrary rules on what speech is allowed and what speech isn't allowed. That would be dictatorial, and maybe even totalitarian.
So, what could be done? I think I have a generic solution that isn't arbitrary, wouldn't damage any kind of legitimate free speech, and might actually work. It goes like this: whatever you say about free speech must be applied to your own right to free speech as if you were committing whatever it is that would prevent it for someone else. In other words, it's a recursive principle. So, whenever you wanted to preach against free speech, doesn't matter for whatever reason, that would render you unable to do so, because you're the first victim to your own restrictions.
The same could go for democracy: you wanna create a political party to fight against democracy? No problem! Your party simply won't be allowed to participate in any election. And if it's against free speech too, it won't be allowed to preach publicly its proposals. The day your party accepts free speech, it'll be allowed to preach its positions. And the day it accepts democracy, it'll be allowed to enter elections. This is simply enough, and perfectly just.
I guess it goes like this: because violence is something between you and society, while sex is something between you and family. In other words, as a man you're expected to be violent at times, otherwise you won't survive, but as a man you're also expected to be a monogamous family father. So, watching violence is mere training, while watching pornography is getting progressively corrupted.
Your point is? I agree, much of what I understand from science is a set of beliefs, unless I actually perform the experiments myself. However, I have the option to do so, and can measure/observe the results.
True. But the results you obtain being equal to what others say they obtained isn't a proof of anything other than that you obtained the same results. That's it. You can't affirm this to be a "law" at all, except by jumping to conclusions. This jump has a name: belief. You believe repeated similar results to be a "law of nature". You have no proof. You actually have no proof any "law of nature" exist. The only proof you have is: when you did this, that happened. And that's all.
So, please explain to me: HOW can you logically dismiss other persons personal experience of "that" following "this"? Answer: you can't. The only thing you can say is: "To me this hasn't yet happened." That's also all. Go one step further and you're also in the realm of belief preaching.
I *know* certain things from direct personal experience, yes. I *know* things from science that I can directly test for and measure. Other things in science are called "theories". I am however free to prove/disprove the theory myself, and should I come up with irrefutable evidence that the theory does not work, then it is discarded or adjusted as required.
This is in direct contrast to religion which, when faced with evidence that it is a crock, comes up with shit like "god put those bones in the ground to fool us!", or such.
Why is it that militant atheists always take the worst idiots in religious circles as the parameter of reference when it comes to talking about religion?
You know what? From now onwards, I'll do the same. Whenever I'll talk about science, I'll take nazi eugenists as the example by which I'll judge all scientists. It's only fair, don't you think so?;)
Now, talking more seriously: has you attempted to follow a mystical path of a traditional religion from beginning to end, for only then judging of the validity of religious claims? Those are very specific and detailed instructions, far from any kind of vagueness: do exactly this, that'll follow. When that happened, do so. When this one happened, follow it by doing so and so. And so on and so forth. These instructions are repeatable by anyone interested. They can be peer reviewed. You can compare your results to those of other "researchers", present and past. You can even compare results between different religions. But do any militant atheist try to follow these detailed instructions? Do any of them try to repeat the "experiment" to see what he obtains? Well, yes, some of them do. And guess what? They cease to be militant atheists in short time.
So this is very comfortable for the remaining militant atheists themselves: simply tell the ones that become religious are full of BS, pretending nothing happened, and happily watching the last debunkings by James Randi and reading the last anti-religious/anti-ID books of Richard Dawkins, as if such things had any relevance whatsoever in this regards.
However, as I said, literal interpretation of religious texts is retarded and defeats the intended purpose in my opinion. Whether or not "god put the bones there" or some aspects of the bible (for example) are bullshit is besides the point. It's the morals contained within that are the point - many of the "facts" are merely window dressing to make an interesting story. Remember the little stories with morals you were taught when you were about 6-8 years old? Same idea...
Expand a little your anti-literalist efforts (up and above mere morality) and you'll approach the orthodox understanding of the meaning of the sacred books. Literalists, be them Christians, Muslims, Hinduists or whatever, are all hereticals inside these traditions. The fact the USA is filled with literalists says nothing against religion, but much against America.
You're both wrong and right. You're right in that the teacher shouldn't teach these things. You're wrong on the reason. The correct reason is simply because s/he isn't being paid to teach religion. The same applies to a biology teacher that starts attacking religious beliefs in classroom: he isn't being paid to teach anti-religion, he is being paid to teach biology. No more, no less.
By the way, you also don't "know" whether anything other than your direct, personal experience, is true or not. Anything other than that is a belief. Your father told you you're his son? You don't "know" it to be true, you believe it. Wanna be sure and purchase a DNA test? You don't "know" it to be true, the researcher might be lying to you. Actually, all researchers might be lying to you. Don't think so? You not thinking so is a belief. How about learning how to do a DNA test by yourself then? Well, which proof you have the equipment offer accurate results? Actually, which proof you have that an image passing through a lens (such as a microscope) is accurately showing you things you can't check by yourself? You don't have it: you simply believe it.
In short: your belief on Dawkins tell me nothing. But feel free to try again.;)
In USA there're basically two kinds of schools: the basic ones, be them public or private ones, up to and including higher education, that teach skills you need to work; and the liberal education ones, amounting to 120 schools, all of them private, very selective, also up to and including higher education level, that teach skills not found anywhere else. The people taught in the liberal education ones receive the training you wish was widespread, and are usually members of the political and economic elites.
This isn't exactly a conspiracy thing because common people are allowed in these places. The problem is that one doesn't learn a profession or profession-related skills there. So much that people who go to one also usually enter a University afterwards to learn something more practical as a complement. But it nevertheless becomes an elite thing.
One example of such an institution is the Thomas Aquinas College, in Santa Paula, California. Give a close, detailed look at their curriculum. It's like nothing you'll ever see in a standard public or private school or college, much less in a standard university. It begins in Homer and goes aaaaaaall the way to Einstein, by reading the authors themselves, many of which in their original language, never "text books".
I would love to study there in future. I hope I can.:)
How do you recommend it should be done then? Tell kids to believe in something because I say so? If that's the case, how do I prevent children from being told a lie?
You didn't notice the irony. I wasn't talking agains it, but for it. The current educational system doesn't teach logic before submitting children to specific subjects. It drops the children directly into the subjects themselves, and hope they'll "grasp" how it's done by magic. The medieval educational method is far better.
I'm not familiar with the disputatio. Can you point out how what I wrote relates to it, and why, as you seem to suggest, it's a bad thing?
I'm not suggesting it's a bad thing. Quite the contrary. This is how a disputatio works: first thing, you define a subject that will be analyzed; then you go search all that has been said about the given subject, listing and numbering each and every answer already given; in the end of the list, you write your own answer to the problem; and then you go through the whole list again, answering to all the answers in it one by one, explaining in detail why and how they're wrong, and why and how yours is better.
The Summa Theologica is entirely written in this way. For each of the hundreds of subjects it analyzes, Thomas Aquinas collects everything that has beens said on the subject, offers his own answer, and then confronts this answers to the collection. There's literally thousands of citations there, and to each one Aquinas offers a detailed reply. And that's not specific to Aquinas. All thinkers of the time did the same thing. Occam's PhD thesis (the same Occam from the razor), made when he was in his 20s, has 12 volumes. And it's just the first of his works.
By the way, you know Occam was a Franciscan monk, don't you?;)
Science has accepted the fact that our view on the universe is a limited one, and doesn't state something as "fact" or "fiction." Thus you are correct about the "phenomenon" observation, and scientists do indeed follow Instrumentalism today.
It's end goal, however, is to draw out reality for what it actually is. It's openness to question itself is a quality seen in no religion I'm aware of (perhaps Buddhism is an exception).
That's because you never studied any religion in depth. Only the discussions among the Christians of the first 4 or 5 centuries fill a library. Not to mention Jewish rabbinical debates, or Islamic ones, able to fill 10 or more. Your concept of what religions are is caricatural at best. Since you mention born-again Christians as your point of reference, I guess that explains from where such a misunderstanding arises. They're far from the best example. Actually, they're far from even the worst. They're no example at all.
It seems to be winning ideology for the time being, when you look at what it has accomplished in the recent 100 years (computers, rocket ships to the moon, medicine, etc...). Religious ideologies have been praying for centuries, but it has been scientifically shown that the power of prayer to be bogus. Their credence is much less.
Your suppose technology and science come from the scientistic world view. It does not. It has been shown, more than once, by lots of philosophers, that the scientific method has no dependence whatsoever to scientistic beliefs. They're completely unlinked. You can replace scientism with anything (Christian philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, no philosophy, whatever), and the scientific method still works. Furthermore, there's no philosophy that can be derived from the scientific method. No political philosophy, no religious philosophy, no world view, nothing. The scientific method is a philosophical subject of study, never a source for any philosophy.
A true scientist is acceptant of perfectly reasonable counter-arguments. Those arguments will have to offer proof, and be held accou
Cool! The guy believes in Jesus, let's fire him, then torture him. After all, we're obviously right, he's obviously wrong, and the II century Roman Empire is the best example we have on how to deal with these wrongdoing individuals. No more duckspeak crimethink in the land of the doubleplusfree!
A school's job is not meant to brainwash people into believing something, whether that be Science or Jesus. It's job is to teach them how to gather evidence from all points of view, and then come to logical conclusions about that evidence using critical analysis, sound reasoning, valid thought processes, and logic.
Oh! I see. Much like the way schooling was in the Middle Ages: first you teach language, rhetorics and logic, then specific subjects. Nice!
Individuals who promote a certain viewpoint, whether that be religious, political, scientific, or whatever, must be able to back their viewpoints with such reasoning and evidence. Otherwise their thoughts are little more than opinions and/or delusions, whether theirs or someone else's, that lack justification, accountability, and credibility.
Agreed. You provided a very concise explanation of the medieval technique of the disputatio, extensively used to write the philosophical treatises of the time, such as the Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Too bad philosophers abandoned the method when we entered the Modern Age, don't you think?
The idea is that by providing people with valid, unbiased thought-processes through proper schooling, they will be able to draw their own conclusions, and a perception of reality for what it actually is will emerge. This would eliminate the ability for people to be easily manipulated, and/or brainwashed into believing non-truths, fairy tales, and superstition.
Exactly. Too bad modern science has got rid of the concept of "reality", preferring to adopt the concept, invented by Kant, of "phenomenons". That's why in the Middle Ages everyone was a Realist, while nowadays Instrumentalism is the norm.
Any such schooling is a direct threat to organizations based upon such fantasies, like religions. It becomes next to impossible to make someone believe in something without being able to offer them a whole-hearted explanation, taking all relevant factors into account.
Because of this, fantasy-based organizations become threatened with this type of schooling. The chessboard needs an ample supply of pawns, if you will, and if those pawns disappear, so does the religion. It's not surprising then to see members of a religious cult, such as Jesus Teacher Lady here, lash out against a student in her class.
Or self-righteous scientistic believers lash out agains perfectly reasonable counter-arguments they don't like and prefer to see muted.
There will be more lashing out in the years to come, especially seeing as science is starting to exponentially increase its speed of discovering new things about the world around us, many of which completely contradict the bible.
Post XV-century, modernist, heretical, protestant interpretations of the Bible, you mean.
I predict that within the next 30 years, scientists will be able to create life from non-life in a lab. It'll mark a definitive moment in human history, shattering religions to shreds. You can expect protest far greater than Jesus Teacher Lady, and quite possibly far more dangerous.
Because science will prove that Intelligent Design (human intelligent design, in the case) actually works? And because it will provide a path for the mass production of stem cells without killing babies? Nah, I don't think so.
Oh, by the way: please, go learn a little History before talking nonsense. And a little about philosophy, which is always useful.
There's a problem in your view: the fact that oil is purchased in US dollars. As long as this is the case, all countries will need to keep purchasing US dollars to be able to purchase oil, what means USA won't have serious economic problems due to no matter what reason.
Actually, there's a theory that the actual reason for the Iraq war was the fact that Saddam Hussein was threatening to allow countries to purchase oil with other currencies, not only the US dollar. This would mean a gross devaluation of the US currency, and a big recession for the US people. So, this war would actually be a warning to any oil-producing country to not do any dumb thing on the way oil is sold...
With or without net neutrality, for the foreseeable future the USA won't become poorer. And not becoming poorer, you Americans will be able to still pay the bill, no matter how distorted it is.
Without copyright, I could take a computer program whose source code is available, introduce some improvements and then distribute only the binaries while I make a business of supporting my improved version of the program.
Not exactly so. Without copyright yes, you would be able to withhold the original source code for your modifications, but not the disassembled source code, nor the decompiled one. The open-source community would have some work to recreate your code, but it would be feasible and, were your changes good enough to prompt this, made, don't have doubts on that.
The current Brazilian government, just reelected, has done lots of moves in the past 4 years to limit free speech. Some of these moves, mainly those that would affect big media, have been striken down due to the strong reaction by the media, while the less obvious ones have been approved. If this one gets approved, this won't be something outside of the established pattern.
The Brazilian people isn't usually interested in these matters. Some of them because they simply don't understand it, but most because they're very poor and are looking more for the government-granted food vouchers than anything else. Alas, that's one of the main reasons why this government was reelected: fear that a new president would remove or change some of these benefits. Even the fact that it was (and keeps being) the most corrupt of Brazilian history, seems to be of no consequence to the voters.
Now, one must not think that the other candidate would do much better. His party, the Brazilian Social-Democratic Party (PSDB), is the same from which come the representative who's trying to approve this law. The main difference between them and the governing Labor Party (PT) is that they're a little less radical in their left-wing ideology, and a little more democratic, than the PT. But that's it. In comparison to US parties, PSDB would be the liberal democrats, and PT the extreme-left of the democrats coupled to CPUSA.
Unfortunately, both PSDB and PT are the only strong national parties we have. All the others have only regional or even local importance, and all are becoming weaker and weaker as the time goes by. As a result, nowadays our elections are nothing more than a decision between the bad and the ugly. There's simply no one around here standing for freedom.
The subscription is very inexpensive. The only difference to, let's say, iTunes, other than the lower price, is that they sell you a basic pack of 'x' downloads the first time in a month, with the option of purchasing packs of additional 'y' downloads if you wish more music, instead of individual downloads, but that's it. And, believe me, you'll usually want more. On top of that, you can redownload the musics you purchased whenever you want, provided your subscription is active. And if you unsubscribe, your music keeps being yours. Just don't expect finding big labels there. They're out.
And no, you don't need to subscribe the service to browse the catalog and listen to samples. Just click the href="http://www.emusic.com/browse/all.html">BROWS E button on the top bar. Actually, I suggest you click all thelinkson thetop bar. It's worth it. The reviews, and the dozens selections, are a must.
In short: it's a very, very good service. I'm currently unsubscribed because I've little time for searching music nowadays, but I plan resubscribing in future.
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Why for a $40k robot, but not for those $1.5k to $5k Japanese robots? Not exactly affordable, but surely more so than a $40k one.
Brazil is worse. Last time the number of laws we have was in the 1.5 million range. Good luck we, the Brazilian people, have this custom of just ignoring it all. But more law-abiding countries surely have a huge problem on the horizon.
I'm sorry for UK fans of Negima!: Magister Negi Magi. It's one of the funniest manga teen comedies I've ever read, but due to the protagonist being a 10-year old who is surrounded by partially naked teen girls, it might end up being targeted by such a dumb law. How absurd!
The simple answer is: yes. If you define that 0/0 = 0, then all the operations where 0/0 appears that would result in something different (for example, the classic "sen(x)/x", that approaches 1 when x approaches 0) would end up in a mess, because you would have to acknowledge that that answer is indeed equal to 0, and thus develop the consequences of what that causes when reversing the whole operation. In the example, you would have to do this: "Okay, sen(x)/x is equal to 0 when x is 0, so, what does this say about sen(x)?".
Not that this isn't feasible, but the "new mathematics" that you would produce by doing this wouldn't be much related to the real world. It would be one case among others of an alternative mathematics based on an alternative set of axioms.
In other words: while in the standard mathematics the indetermination of the 0/0 is a consequence of its axioms, something that you discover by operating from them, in your alternative mathematics 0/0 = 0 would be one of the fundamental axioms, and based on it you would then discover other things. Some of which would probably be in direct contradiction with things that are obvious truths in standard mathematics, with a very actual possibility that you would end up with indeterminations in things that, in standard mathematics, are very determinate.
Nope. But it's a possibility in the ID framework. There're UFO IDologues out there.
That's so true! Back in the time I actively used Linux, the very first thing I did in a new system was to list the exact hardware I had and the exact features I needed and compile a new kernel with support for that, and only that. I did this not because of lack of memory or the like, but because a standard generic kernel takes an excessive amount of time to boot. A minimal kernel was, and I guess still is, one of the few tricks, if not the single most important one, you have to speed up booting. If that's not a problem in the kernel design, I surely don't know what it is.
You just answered your questions: because different methods give different results. There are ways to show that 0/0 results in 0, or in 1, or in 2, or in +infinite, or in both +infinite and -infinite at the same time, and so on and so forth.
If you limit your numerical domain in a very specific way, it's possible to make only one of those possibilities valid. So, in that domain 0/0 has a specific value. But once you go back to "standard" numbers (integer, real or complex), the ambiguity returns, and no single answer is the answer.
I didn't know "Intelligent Design" had the word "Supernatural" attached to it's name. Actually, it doesn't.
This is incorrect. The site was paying the Russian government, in complete accordance with the Russian law. If the Russian government wasn't forwarding the money to the copyright holders, this is something you should blame on that government, not on the service that was following the law strictly.
Lol! Yes, I guess so. :D
I didn't read the article, but there's something there.
Too broad free speech is sometimes a bad thing, because you can use it to preach against free speech, and sometimes be successful in doing so. Just look the Nazi Germany: Hitler was elected, and he was elected because he was preaching against democracy!
On the other hand, we cannot determine arbitrary rules on what speech is allowed and what speech isn't allowed. That would be dictatorial, and maybe even totalitarian.
So, what could be done? I think I have a generic solution that isn't arbitrary, wouldn't damage any kind of legitimate free speech, and might actually work. It goes like this: whatever you say about free speech must be applied to your own right to free speech as if you were committing whatever it is that would prevent it for someone else. In other words, it's a recursive principle. So, whenever you wanted to preach against free speech, doesn't matter for whatever reason, that would render you unable to do so, because you're the first victim to your own restrictions.
The same could go for democracy: you wanna create a political party to fight against democracy? No problem! Your party simply won't be allowed to participate in any election. And if it's against free speech too, it won't be allowed to preach publicly its proposals. The day your party accepts free speech, it'll be allowed to preach its positions. And the day it accepts democracy, it'll be allowed to enter elections. This is simply enough, and perfectly just.
What do you think?
I guess it goes like this: because violence is something between you and society, while sex is something between you and family. In other words, as a man you're expected to be violent at times, otherwise you won't survive, but as a man you're also expected to be a monogamous family father. So, watching violence is mere training, while watching pornography is getting progressively corrupted.
So, please explain to me: HOW can you logically dismiss other persons personal experience of "that" following "this"? Answer: you can't. The only thing you can say is: "To me this hasn't yet happened." That's also all. Go one step further and you're also in the realm of belief preaching.
Why is it that militant atheists always take the worst idiots in religious circles as the parameter of reference when it comes to talking about religion?
You know what? From now onwards, I'll do the same. Whenever I'll talk about science, I'll take nazi eugenists as the example by which I'll judge all scientists. It's only fair, don't you think so?
Now, talking more seriously: has you attempted to follow a mystical path of a traditional religion from beginning to end, for only then judging of the validity of religious claims? Those are very specific and detailed instructions, far from any kind of vagueness: do exactly this, that'll follow. When that happened, do so. When this one happened, follow it by doing so and so. And so on and so forth. These instructions are repeatable by anyone interested. They can be peer reviewed. You can compare your results to those of other "researchers", present and past. You can even compare results between different religions. But do any militant atheist try to follow these detailed instructions? Do any of them try to repeat the "experiment" to see what he obtains? Well, yes, some of them do. And guess what? They cease to be militant atheists in short time.
So this is very comfortable for the remaining militant atheists themselves: simply tell the ones that become religious are full of BS, pretending nothing happened, and happily watching the last debunkings by James Randi and reading the last anti-religious/anti-ID books of Richard Dawkins, as if such things had any relevance whatsoever in this regards.
Expand a little your anti-literalist efforts (up and above mere morality) and you'll approach the orthodox understanding of the meaning of the sacred books. Literalists, be them Christians, Muslims, Hinduists or whatever, are all hereticals inside these traditions. The fact the USA is filled with literalists says nothing against religion, but much against America.
You're both wrong and right. You're right in that the teacher shouldn't teach these things. You're wrong on the reason. The correct reason is simply because s/he isn't being paid to teach religion. The same applies to a biology teacher that starts attacking religious beliefs in classroom: he isn't being paid to teach anti-religion, he is being paid to teach biology. No more, no less.
;)
By the way, you also don't "know" whether anything other than your direct, personal experience, is true or not. Anything other than that is a belief. Your father told you you're his son? You don't "know" it to be true, you believe it. Wanna be sure and purchase a DNA test? You don't "know" it to be true, the researcher might be lying to you. Actually, all researchers might be lying to you. Don't think so? You not thinking so is a belief. How about learning how to do a DNA test by yourself then? Well, which proof you have the equipment offer accurate results? Actually, which proof you have that an image passing through a lens (such as a microscope) is accurately showing you things you can't check by yourself? You don't have it: you simply believe it.
In short: your belief on Dawkins tell me nothing. But feel free to try again.
In USA there're basically two kinds of schools: the basic ones, be them public or private ones, up to and including higher education, that teach skills you need to work; and the liberal education ones, amounting to 120 schools, all of them private, very selective, also up to and including higher education level, that teach skills not found anywhere else. The people taught in the liberal education ones receive the training you wish was widespread, and are usually members of the political and economic elites.
:)
This isn't exactly a conspiracy thing because common people are allowed in these places. The problem is that one doesn't learn a profession or profession-related skills there. So much that people who go to one also usually enter a University afterwards to learn something more practical as a complement. But it nevertheless becomes an elite thing.
One example of such an institution is the Thomas Aquinas College, in Santa Paula, California. Give a close, detailed look at their curriculum. It's like nothing you'll ever see in a standard public or private school or college, much less in a standard university. It begins in Homer and goes aaaaaaall the way to Einstein, by reading the authors themselves, many of which in their original language, never "text books".
I would love to study there in future. I hope I can.
You didn't notice the irony. I wasn't talking agains it, but for it. The current educational system doesn't teach logic before submitting children to specific subjects. It drops the children directly into the subjects themselves, and hope they'll "grasp" how it's done by magic. The medieval educational method is far better.
I'm not suggesting it's a bad thing. Quite the contrary. This is how a disputatio works: first thing, you define a subject that will be analyzed; then you go search all that has been said about the given subject, listing and numbering each and every answer already given; in the end of the list, you write your own answer to the problem; and then you go through the whole list again, answering to all the answers in it one by one, explaining in detail why and how they're wrong, and why and how yours is better.
;)
The Summa Theologica is entirely written in this way. For each of the hundreds of subjects it analyzes, Thomas Aquinas collects everything that has beens said on the subject, offers his own answer, and then confronts this answers to the collection. There's literally thousands of citations there, and to each one Aquinas offers a detailed reply. And that's not specific to Aquinas. All thinkers of the time did the same thing. Occam's PhD thesis (the same Occam from the razor), made when he was in his 20s, has 12 volumes. And it's just the first of his works.
By the way, you know Occam was a Franciscan monk, don't you?
That's because you never studied any religion in depth. Only the discussions among the Christians of the first 4 or 5 centuries fill a library. Not to mention Jewish rabbinical debates, or Islamic ones, able to fill 10 or more. Your concept of what religions are is caricatural at best. Since you mention born-again Christians as your point of reference, I guess that explains from where such a misunderstanding arises. They're far from the best example. Actually, they're far from even the worst. They're no example at all.
Your suppose technology and science come from the scientistic world view. It does not. It has been shown, more than once, by lots of philosophers, that the scientific method has no dependence whatsoever to scientistic beliefs. They're completely unlinked. You can replace scientism with anything (Christian philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, no philosophy, whatever), and the scientific method still works. Furthermore, there's no philosophy that can be derived from the scientific method. No political philosophy, no religious philosophy, no world view, nothing. The scientific method is a philosophical subject of study, never a source for any philosophy.
Cool! The guy believes in Jesus, let's fire him, then torture him. After all, we're obviously right, he's obviously wrong, and the II century Roman Empire is the best example we have on how to deal with these wrongdoing individuals. No more duckspeak crimethink in the land of the doubleplusfree!
Agreed. You provided a very concise explanation of the medieval technique of the disputatio, extensively used to write the philosophical treatises of the time, such as the Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Too bad philosophers abandoned the method when we entered the Modern Age, don't you think?
Exactly. Too bad modern science has got rid of the concept of "reality", preferring to adopt the concept, invented by Kant, of "phenomenons". That's why in the Middle Ages everyone was a Realist, while nowadays Instrumentalism is the norm.
No, no! You mean: "like the scientistic ideology".
Or self-righteous scientistic believers lash out agains perfectly reasonable counter-arguments they don't like and prefer to see muted.
Post XV-century, modernist, heretical, protestant interpretations of the Bible, you mean.
Because science will prove that Intelligent Design (human intelligent design, in the case) actually works? And because it will provide a path for the mass production of stem cells without killing babies? Nah, I don't think so.
Oh, by the way: please, go learn a little History before talking nonsense. And a little about philosophy, which is always useful.
There's a problem in your view: the fact that oil is purchased in US dollars. As long as this is the case, all countries will need to keep purchasing US dollars to be able to purchase oil, what means USA won't have serious economic problems due to no matter what reason.
Actually, there's a theory that the actual reason for the Iraq war was the fact that Saddam Hussein was threatening to allow countries to purchase oil with other currencies, not only the US dollar. This would mean a gross devaluation of the US currency, and a big recession for the US people. So, this war would actually be a warning to any oil-producing country to not do any dumb thing on the way oil is sold...
With or without net neutrality, for the foreseeable future the USA won't become poorer. And not becoming poorer, you Americans will be able to still pay the bill, no matter how distorted it is.
Because we all know that maturity and adulthood are all about sex, drugs and $MUSIC_GENRE.
The current Brazilian government, just reelected, has done lots of moves in the past 4 years to limit free speech. Some of these moves, mainly those that would affect big media, have been striken down due to the strong reaction by the media, while the less obvious ones have been approved. If this one gets approved, this won't be something outside of the established pattern.
The Brazilian people isn't usually interested in these matters. Some of them because they simply don't understand it, but most because they're very poor and are looking more for the government-granted food vouchers than anything else. Alas, that's one of the main reasons why this government was reelected: fear that a new president would remove or change some of these benefits. Even the fact that it was (and keeps being) the most corrupt of Brazilian history, seems to be of no consequence to the voters.
Now, one must not think that the other candidate would do much better. His party, the Brazilian Social-Democratic Party (PSDB), is the same from which come the representative who's trying to approve this law. The main difference between them and the governing Labor Party (PT) is that they're a little less radical in their left-wing ideology, and a little more democratic, than the PT. But that's it. In comparison to US parties, PSDB would be the liberal democrats, and PT the extreme-left of the democrats coupled to CPUSA.
Unfortunately, both PSDB and PT are the only strong national parties we have. All the others have only regional or even local importance, and all are becoming weaker and weaker as the time goes by. As a result, nowadays our elections are nothing more than a decision between the bad and the ugly. There's simply no one around here standing for freedom.
I might be wrong on this, but isn't a pet owner responsible for everything his pet does? Or a father for everything his child does?
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