Heck there was definitively a need for a saviour who told the people, just be nice to each other and things work out and god is not the almighty punishing nutjob you think to believe but a good and loving father.
Um. The fuck?
You've got it completely backwards. This "saviour" is the one who invented the concept of Hell - infinite punishment for finite transgressions. The Jews certainly never had that idea. The Greek and Hindu Gods weren't "almighty punishing nutjobs". Christianity was the first major religion to claim that those who don't believe in it would be tortured forever. Jesus was a nutjob who started a cult based on the idea that the world was about to end, that only a small number of people would get taken to "heaven", and that the only way to get there was to follow him. "Good and loving father" my hairy ass.
Firefighters are heroes: they save peoples' lives. Obviously they should get the best healthcare available. Police are just enforcers for the government's oppressive laws, which really just makes them jack-booted thugs.
Thanks:) If I had tried to parody you, people would accuse me of some kind of horrible strawman. It's always best when I can just point and say "SEE???".
Nobody can be trusted with the reigns of power. However, someone will hold them nonetheless, so we better make it someone who we can watch, restrain and control. This is the idea behind the division of power between various sectors of government, or "checks and balances" as you call it.
I agree with you for the most part, but our disagreements are the important bits. The main problem is that the bigger a bureaucracy becomes, the less effective "checks and balances" become. You see the same issue in large businesses - incredible amounts of money get wasted, millions of man-hours get spent on useless make-work projects, and entire departments get created for the sole purpose of making someone look important. The difference is that businesses have to compete. When they start wasting time and money they leave the market open for a more agile and efficient competitor to take their customers. You don't see that with governments (well, you do, but the results tend to be far more damaging than a company going bankrupt).
I've spent most of my life working for big corporations and the government. In the corporate world, I saw idiocy like $60,000 being spent on a Microsoft Access application which took almost a minute to run a single query. I could have made something better in-house given just 3-4 work-days, but the company outsourced it because of the usual nepotism. Meanwhile, in the government, I get to watch millions of dollars being wasted on poorly thought-out contracts with big-business, and tens of thousands being wasted every time some new career-minded big-wig gets promoted and decides he wants to reorganize everything his predecessor did (usually with the result that everything goes to shit for the next 2 years, is acceptable for a year, runs fine for a fourth year, and then goes to shit again when a new guy takes over).
Oh, and it's spelled "reins". Guess you copied my mistake:)
Libertarians want to dismantle central government, which will inevitably lead to feudalism
This is simply a lie. I've never met a libertarian who wants to "dismantle central government". I suppose that this might be a valid argument if you consider Anarchists to be a type of Libertarian, but even then it would be inaccurate since Anarchists would be a small subset.
Look, I understand why you people don't want Big Government; simply understand that those are the very same reason why I don't want Big Capital to rule instead, and I've never heard a convincing argument for why that wouldn't happen.
Because even most Libertarians will generally acknowledge that one of the legitimate functions of a government is to enforce anti-monopoly laws. Ergo no corporation could ever "rule". Nor would any of the Libertarians I've talked to be in favor of letting business take care of things like policing, the military, the legal system, etc. I'm not sure what it is you're scared of, exactly.
Personally, I think punishments for police and other government officials should be much, much, much harsher than for regular people. If you can't even trust your own government, then your society is failing, so strong protections should be put into place to protect the people from government abuses.
Yeah! Just like firefighters shouldn't get any health care whatsoever. I mean honestly, if you can't trust a firefighter not to get burned, then your society is already failing, and strong protections should be put in place to protect people from their abuse and/or incompetence.
If people are generally bad, then you need a strong government to restrict their evil
And where, exactly, do you propose we find these Robot Overlords who can be trusted with the reigns of power?
Wassat? You want "bad" people to vote for other "bad" people which will somehow make a "good" government that protects us from "bad" people? Oh boy....
Yes, and the ignorant atheist doesn't read them at all and so criticizes about that which he knows nothing.
You don't need to read a book in order to criticize viewpoints which someone else espouses. If you tell me that Xenu infests people with Thetans thereby causing them to get sick and die, and that I should give lots of money to your church which will let me live forever, I don't need to read Dianetics in order to call you an idiot and tell you to go bother someone else. Some claims are simply too absurd to be taken seriously and no book is ever going to make them any more plausible.
Of course, the fact that Atheists have been shown to generally be more knowledgeable about religion than any other group (Jews came in second) kinda makes your argument irrelevant, anyway.
Two of my least favorites groups of people: religious and atheist proselytizers (in no order, it's a tie).
Yeah, I'm getting sick and tired of atheists showing up at my door every week, insisting that I'm going to be tortured forever if I don't believe what they believe.
Honestly, if you're willing to insist that the two groups are equivalent, you're a fucking moron. There's really nothing else to say.
Not necessarily comparable, but lets work with it anyway. The answer is no, unless the extreme-4ists are murdering people who disagree with their PoV because they disagree.
Well, close, but no. The point is that there is nothing in the belief that 2+2=4 which could possibly advocate any kind of action. It's a simple statement of fact - one which you can either accept or reject. If you then go on to murder someone, you can claim that it's because they didn't believe that 2+2=4, but there's simply no causal chain there which you can point to. You will have committed murder because you are a sociopath who enjoys killing people who disagree with him - not because an equation told you to do it.
That's the reason why religions can directly lead to fanaticism and extremism while atheism cannot. Religions have doctrines. They talk about morality and the desires of gods. They tell people what to do and how to think. Atheism does none of that. Atheism is simply a label which people adopt to explain their position on one single question. There's no gospels, no dogma, no teachings of any kind. Any conclusions drawn by a particular atheists must inherently be based on other beliefs which are part of other belief systems, and not based on atheism itself.
Half find 2, half find -2 and a small majority see both as possibilities. The extreme positives and the extreme negatives are to me, functionally identical because I can see both possibilities. If that offends you, I am sorry, but that is what it looks like from outside your viewpoint. I don't claim to be completely objective(if that is even possible), but I try by all means to be as objective as possible. I am not saying both views are correct, mind, as the original x used while it could have been either 2 or -2 may only have been one of these. If that makes sense?
Heh. Yeah, it makes sense, but I think you're assuming too much. I can see both possibilities. I think all atheists can see both possibilities. We simply discount one because it's unsupported by any serious evidence, and seems extremely unlikely given what we know about the universe and about the human tendency to "explain" things by making up stories. Why would you assume that we "can't see" the other possibility?
With regards to discarding the non-biblical references because they were written after the fact, I feel this is as far as I can see a minority view.
I'm not sure if it's a minority view or not, but it's the only rational view. Hearsay is rejected even in a court of law, let alone when it comes to scientific research. It can be useful in historical research, but it has to be considered in the context of all the other information we have about that time period, and any decent historian will realize that what they're dealing with is, at best, evidence of what some people were saying at the time, rather than evidence of what actually happened.
If I told you that I know a bunch of people who say that the Evil Lord Xenu populated the Earth by bringing people here in DC-8 shaped spaceships and then blowing them up with nuclear weapons beside a volcano, would that convince you that these things really happened? Granted, even if I told you that I personally witnessed these things, you'd still probably call me a lunatic, but at least you couldn't dismiss my claim as the re-telling of a story.
I reckon if I were to ask you if Jesus existed, you would probably have to answer "probably"? We are not stating that the biblical account is accurate, merely that there was a man named Jesus who had a following and was executed by the Romans.
Yeah, I would say a Jewish Arab cult leader who taught that the world was coming to an end probably existed at the time, and that the stories about Jesus are loosely based on him. I'd even go so far as to say that he was probably executed by the Romans, though there's certainly
You're telling me you have never met an extremist atheist who thinks it is their own personal goal to eradicate everything but atheism, and lacks tolerance for anything but atheism, taking every idea of atheism to the extreme? Making statements like "There are certainly no gods?" Sheltered life much?
Well, first off, I think your switch from "fundamentalist" to "extremist" is rather dishonest, since the two words have different meanings. However, even if I ignore the switch, it's irrelevant; there is no such thing as a fundamentalist or extremist atheist. You cannot be a fundamentalist or an extremist in your answer to a single question. As I said, the very idea is ludicrous. I'm not sure how to explain this to you any better. Maybe an analogy:
I ask 50 people "is 2+2 equal to 4". 48 of them say "yes" and 2 say "no". Which ones are the "extremists"? If 5 of the people who said "yes" later go out and commit mass-murder, would that mean they're "extremist 4-ists"?
Does that help, or am I just confusing you more?
If you had your facts straight, you may have a point. There is a lot of non-biblical evidence of the existence of Jesus. He is mentioned by a lot of historians of that time.
You're right I misspoke; what I was referring to is contemporary non-biblical evidence, since anything written significantly after the fact is mere hearsay. "My uncles wifes fathers second cousins college roommate told me..." kind of stuff. The problem with Josephus is that he wrote his account 50-60 years after Jesus was supposedly crucified, and claimed no direct knowledge of the guy. I don't consider that to be convincing in the slightest, nor should anyone else who isn't just looking to confirm their personal beliefs. As a comparison, the evidence for the existence of Socrates is far more abundant than for the existence of Jesus, yet you'll find no shortage of academics willing to argue that Socrates may not have existed, and you could spend years wading through the arguments about what he actually said and did vs. what Plato made up about him.
Also, while wikipedia quotes Louis H. Feldman as saying that "few have doubted the genuineness of Josephus' reference", this is simply not true. While few claim that it is an outright fabrication most believe that it was at the very least embellished by the church. Very few scholars believe that that particular passage came to us through the ages completely unaltered. However, that's a minor point; the critique I provided in the previous paragraph makes the question of the authenticity of that passage completely moot.
The problem with these sorts of discussions, is we are covering ground that has already been covered. Non of your arguments or mine are anything new.
Of course. I don't expect to make any miraculous discoveries through these discussions; I seek only to provide you (and any bystanders) with information of which you are not aware, and to be similarly enlightened if you happen to know things which I do not. When we want to discover completely new things we turn to science, not discussion.
With regard to souls(since I am a student of all religions) I prefer not to comment(and the precise concept can differ a lot even within a religion), except that it relates to the interesting concept of free will, which in turn implies responsibility which in turn is the basis of most legal systems..
Free will is not dependent on a soul. Moreover, even if free will does not exist as an absolute concept (ie. if you believe in a completely deterministic universe), it wouldn't have any impact on our legal codes. We wouldn't stop punishing and/or rehabilitating murderers simply because they were "predestined" to commit murder.
Also, it's worth mentioning that the concept of "absolute" free will directly contradicts the possibility of an "all-knowing" god.
The difference is subtle.. From someone who believes in a god, that is "known." From someone who believes in naturalism, that is "known" too. When you get down to it, there are assumptions everywhere.
No. There is a difference between belief and knowledge. I believe that my car is currently parked in the driveway because that's where I left it. I don't know that it's parked in the driveway because I can't see it right now, and there is the possibility that someone stole it, or that god miracled it out of existence. The difference between knowledge and belief is one of the most important concept in theological discussions - you don't get to lump the two together.
But what about fundie atheists. Can you honestly say you've never met one?
The very idea is ludicrous. Atheism is no a belief system - it is an answer to a single question. To talk about "fundie atheists" is the equivalent of talking about "fundie round-earthers", or "fundie thermodynamicists". It's nonsensical.
For example, few mainstream secular historians deny the existence of Jesus. That makes the new testament portion of the bible on the level of a written statement by a witness.
That's funny. I guess the fact that few mainstream secular historians deny the existence of William Wallace means that the movie "Braveheart" is on the level of real-time footage of his exploits.
I think you'll find that the main reason many "mainstream secular historians" accept the existence of Jesus is actually because the bible has so many inconsistencies about his life. If he hadn't existed, the whole story could have been made up and made internally consistent - instead it reads as if it was written about a real person who was known to exist, with many of the details added afterwards in order to fulfill particular Jewish prophecies. There's certainly no non-biblical evidence of his existence, nor do historians generally see the bible as reliable evidence of his life.
To take it to the extreme, imagine an intepretation along the lines of: "Hey, that 'God' character? Yeh, that's just there as a representation of the universe... all that stuff talking about what he 'wants' and 'says' and 'does' is really just to help you understand why you need to be a good person".
We don't need to imagine it; it's already the way we view the vast majority of gods which have ever been proposed. When a christian reads Greek myths, that's the way he thinks about Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Athena, and all the rest of them. If they'd stop and realize that the evidence for the existence of the Greek gods is every bit as "good" as the evidence for the existence of the Abrahamic god, there would probably be a lot fewer Christians around.
I doubt he managed to load his gun with police standard ammunition. It's a converted starter pistol.
It depends on the caliber. To be fair, I didn't even consider that, however, after a quick check, it turns out that starter pistols come in quite a large range. Police pistols are usually either 9mm or.40 caliber; starter pistols are available in both of these calibers, so there's no reason he couldn't load it "police standard ammunition".
On the other hand, given the evidence available so far, I'd have to say it's more likely that the bullet really was fired from a police sidearm. Just pointing out that there is another possibility.
And maybe I have an over-romanticised idea of what competent policing should be like, gleaned by watching too many films, or reading too many books, but honestly, if there's more than one of you, you are heavily armed, wearing protective gear, and you're facing down a drug dealer with a gun, I honestly believe you should be able to apprehend that man without shooting him dead.
Most of the time you can. That doesn't change the fact that once in a while there's going to be a situation where you can't. It's selection bias - you might have 99 arrests where the guy is apprehended fine, and 1 where you can't, but which one do you think will make the headlines?
If firearms officers are allowed to unload on anyone when they "believe" there is a thread to life, that basically equates on them unloading on anyone.
It has to be a reasonable belief. There's a big difference between "I shot him because I thought he might have a gun" and "I shot him because he was pointing a gun at my head". The former is completely unjustified, the latter is not. In between, there's all kinds of questionable situation where the officer is in the position of having to weigh the risk to his own life versus his responsibility to use minimal force. Sometimes they make the right decision, sometimes they don't - obviously they need to be held responsible when they screw up, but I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt where possible, and be more lenient if it was a case of bad judgement vs. malicious intent.
In addition to that self serving reasoning, I also think the interests of justice and the public are better served by trying that man, in court, and sending him to prison.
On that we agree completely, but having dead police officers isn't in the interest of justice and the public, either. It's a fine line sometimes.
Your weasel words fail to reassure anybody. There is evidence: methane contaminated wells.
Hah. Yeah, like the presence of oranges in my kitchen is evidence that Big Produce has been dumping stuff in my house.
Please. Don't be stupid.
The fool is an ironic character because he does not realize he is the fool. Now that you have been made aware, you become the asshole.
Thanks, Dr. Science! Maybe for an encore you can explain to me how the presence of CO2 on mars proves that industrials are poisoning it's atmosphere, or how the presence of oil in the ground proves that Big Oil has been having massive spills.
Fuck off. If you're not going to make a serious argument, why bother responding?
I assume b/c these people don't trust the police to actually report the truth if that truth reflects negatively on the officers involved.
So then why bother discussing specifics? Just say "I hate cops" and leave it at that. If you're just going to assume they're always doing the wrong thing, then the details of any particular incident are completely irrelevant. May as well just assume that they've killed 20,000 innocent people this year, and covered it up.
I support gas drilling if it can be done responsibly and safely. The problem is that right now, there is no evidence that it is possible to do it responsibly and safely.
Pure FUD. Right now, there is no evidence that it isn't being done responsibly and safely, in the vast majority of cases.
The problem is that their attitude is, "Nothing wrong ever happened. The contamination is not our fault... Some bacteria crawled into your well that had been clean for decades at around the same time we started drilling. No, there isn't any connection. Drilling is safe!"
Yes, and most of the time, they're absolutely right. Have you been paying attention to the world around you? There are people running around screaming about the dangers of power-lines. Others railing against cell-phone "radiation". Or Wi-Fi. Even nimrods complaining about nuclear power plants, and, more recently, "shock-waves" made by wind-turbines. No matter what technology you decide to use, you're guaranteed to have at least a couple halfwits protesting against it, claiming you're killing babies and causing brain-damage in puppies. Given the prevalence of such people, how much are you willing to bet that the complaints being made about "fracking" are legit?
People confuse correlation with causation all the time, and having the perceived ability to sue for millions of dollars tends to discourage them from educating themselves on the subject. The only proper response to these ignorant luddites is "shut the fuck up, and get out of my way".
I've started with facts and then moved straight on to stating my opinion. I do not know that they reacted in a hysterical fashion. I don't know what happened. However, I *infer* that they reacted in a hysterical fashion from the known facts that the victim did not fire his weapon, and an officer shot another officer.
Thank you. It's rare to see someone actually correcting themselves in an attempt to be rational. You've just restored my faith in humanity!
That said, your inferences are a little premature. AFAIK no officer was shot - the bullet lodged in his radio. This suggests it may well have been a ricochet - it happens. Or it may have been the suspect after all - there's no reason why he couldn't have gotten his hands on "ammunition of the type usually issued to police". Jumping to conclusions at this point is foolish. Why not wait for the police report?
Also, while it's possible that they may have been able to apprehend him without killing him, why would you expect them to take that kind of risk? If someone points a weapon at me and I believe he intends to use it, I am going to shoot him. I'm not going to argue, negotiate, or practice my ninja-skills; I'm going to shoot him in the head, and then shoot his body if it's still twitching. Anyone who faults me for that is a fool. If you personally have no survival instinct, that's your problem - I like being alive! Yes, police, fire fighters, soldiers, etc. are expected to place their lives in danger in order to do their jobs, but "be suicidal" is not part of the job description. There's a difference between calculated risks and just being stupid.
FTFY. No such animal as the middle class right now. There's working class that don't, and those that do, and then the rich. Nothing in the middle.
Is this the new talking-point of the idiots? I only ask because I hadn't heard it before, and two of you spouting it in the same thread is unlikely to be a coincidence. It must be fresh out of the propaganda-mill.
Which I took to mean: If you have a gang of 5-10 youths trying to kick your door in, or break in through your window and you ding a couple with your cricket bat, you're more likely to get off than you would under normal circumstances.
Is the UK really so messed up that this wouldn't be considered completely justified under normal circumstances? What would the cops expect you to do? Open the door and invite them in for tea and crumpets?
I'm not sure how "reasonable use of force" could ever change for the average citizen. It changes for soldiers in a war zone, sure, because we tend to have the ability to kill people from far away, so in an environment full of hostiles "reasonable" might mean "shoot anything that moves", while under normal circumstances it's "shoot anything that shoots at you". I'm just having a hard time seeing how it could change for civilians in a country where nobody is supposed to have weapons in the first place.
Re:It'll never make it through FDA trials
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Cancer Cured By HIV
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They make MILLIONS AND MILLIONS treating a SINGLE cancer patient over the course of several years.
Your thought pattern failed right here. Even the most expensive drugs in existence might go for $120,000 a year. For your "several years", that would be $360,000 to $720,000 tops. In what universe does less than a million equal "MILLIONS AND MILLIONS"?
Again, that's the most expensive drugs on the market, taken every day for 3-6 years (ridiculous). In reality, the costs are much lower. For example, total treatment costs for the average Lung Cancer patient in the first year run around $40,000, only a small fraction of which is the cost of drugs. Even if we assume that 25% of that is the cost of drugs (it's not) we're left with $10k per year, at which speed your EEEEVIL Big Pharma would have to keep treating the patient for 100 years before they sold $1 million worth of medicine (that's total product sold; if they had a really high profit margin they might see $300k profit).
You know why you're getting all confused? Because you see things in the newspaper like "Anti-Cancer drug Zevalin costs $24,000 A DOSE!!!" and you think "oh, wow, those bastards are just rolling in the dough!". You don't stop long enough to do a bit of research, and figure out that Zevalin is a SINGLE TREATMENT DRUG. It's only be given once. And, by the way, how exactly does that stack up against your claim that "they don't want to endanger their revenue stream", huh? Those evil bastards are so stupid, they can't even figure out how to be evil properly! Maybe you should go teach them.
In other words, you're full of shit. So it doesn't surprise me that you finish your rant off by talking about "greed". Ignoramuses are always going on and on about greed, primarily because they can't do math (liberal arts majors) and they don't understand economics. But I hope you've been able to learn something here today, and I hope you'll do a bit more research and stop spreading numbers that you've pulled out of your ass.
It is a myth. Rifles are "zeroed" so that a bullet fired from the rifle will hit a target that's centered in the scope at a specified distance from the shooter. For example, the U.S. Army routinely zeroes their M-4s and M-16s for 300 meters, which means the bullet drop distance due to gravity is accounted for, and a target at 300m that the shooter is aiming in the center of his sights will be struck.
Yeah, that was my conclusion, too, though I haven't yet gotten around to finding a confirmation, or testing it myself. Our army generally zeroes for 200 meters, but it's the same principle. It's just that, ever since I first went through basic training, I've heard it taught as the spin of the bullet causing a rise out to about 100m. I even taught it that way myself when I was an instructor. It's only recently that I actually thought about the physics of it, and realized it doesn't make any sense.
Thanks for the confirmation! I still plan to do some more research on it, but I appreciate the input.
I guess, it's un-powered flight, which probably makes it a glider in the same way a bullet is a glider if it had wings.
If it's unpowered and generates lift through forward movement, it's a glider. Bullets don't do that - you shoot them out, they fall. If you fire one horizontally from a height of 10 meters, it will hit the ground roughly 1 second later. If it were gliding, it would hit the ground 2, 3, 50, or however many (but greater than 1) seconds later.
Before anyone chimes in, yeah, I know plenty of people claim that the rifling of modern firearms causes the bullet to curve upwards, and that this could kinda-sorta be considered "gliding" but:
1. I've recently come to the conclusion that this is probably a myth, and 2. Even if it's not a myth, it's kinda pedantic to consider that "gliding".
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Heck there was definitively a need for a saviour who told the people, just be nice to each other and things work out and god is not the almighty punishing nutjob you think to believe but a good and loving father.
Um. The fuck?
You've got it completely backwards. This "saviour" is the one who invented the concept of Hell - infinite punishment for finite transgressions. The Jews certainly never had that idea. The Greek and Hindu Gods weren't "almighty punishing nutjobs". Christianity was the first major religion to claim that those who don't believe in it would be tortured forever. Jesus was a nutjob who started a cult based on the idea that the world was about to end, that only a small number of people would get taken to "heaven", and that the only way to get there was to follow him. "Good and loving father" my hairy ass.
Firefighters are heroes: they save peoples' lives. Obviously they should get the best healthcare available. Police are just enforcers for the government's oppressive laws, which really just makes them jack-booted thugs.
Thanks :) If I had tried to parody you, people would accuse me of some kind of horrible strawman. It's always best when I can just point and say "SEE???".
Nobody can be trusted with the reigns of power. However, someone will hold them nonetheless, so we better make it someone who we can watch, restrain and control. This is the idea behind the division of power between various sectors of government, or "checks and balances" as you call it.
I agree with you for the most part, but our disagreements are the important bits. The main problem is that the bigger a bureaucracy becomes, the less effective "checks and balances" become. You see the same issue in large businesses - incredible amounts of money get wasted, millions of man-hours get spent on useless make-work projects, and entire departments get created for the sole purpose of making someone look important. The difference is that businesses have to compete. When they start wasting time and money they leave the market open for a more agile and efficient competitor to take their customers. You don't see that with governments (well, you do, but the results tend to be far more damaging than a company going bankrupt).
I've spent most of my life working for big corporations and the government. In the corporate world, I saw idiocy like $60,000 being spent on a Microsoft Access application which took almost a minute to run a single query. I could have made something better in-house given just 3-4 work-days, but the company outsourced it because of the usual nepotism. Meanwhile, in the government, I get to watch millions of dollars being wasted on poorly thought-out contracts with big-business, and tens of thousands being wasted every time some new career-minded big-wig gets promoted and decides he wants to reorganize everything his predecessor did (usually with the result that everything goes to shit for the next 2 years, is acceptable for a year, runs fine for a fourth year, and then goes to shit again when a new guy takes over).
Oh, and it's spelled "reins". Guess you copied my mistake :)
Libertarians want to dismantle central government, which will inevitably lead to feudalism
This is simply a lie. I've never met a libertarian who wants to "dismantle central government". I suppose that this might be a valid argument if you consider Anarchists to be a type of Libertarian, but even then it would be inaccurate since Anarchists would be a small subset.
Look, I understand why you people don't want Big Government; simply understand that those are the very same reason why I don't want Big Capital to rule instead, and I've never heard a convincing argument for why that wouldn't happen.
Because even most Libertarians will generally acknowledge that one of the legitimate functions of a government is to enforce anti-monopoly laws. Ergo no corporation could ever "rule". Nor would any of the Libertarians I've talked to be in favor of letting business take care of things like policing, the military, the legal system, etc. I'm not sure what it is you're scared of, exactly.
Personally, I think punishments for police and other government officials should be much, much, much harsher than for regular people. If you can't even trust your own government, then your society is failing, so strong protections should be put into place to protect the people from government abuses.
Yeah! Just like firefighters shouldn't get any health care whatsoever. I mean honestly, if you can't trust a firefighter not to get burned, then your society is already failing, and strong protections should be put in place to protect people from their abuse and/or incompetence.
If people are generally bad, then you need a strong government to restrict their evil
And where, exactly, do you propose we find these Robot Overlords who can be trusted with the reigns of power?
Wassat? You want "bad" people to vote for other "bad" people which will somehow make a "good" government that protects us from "bad" people? Oh boy ....
Yes, and the ignorant atheist doesn't read them at all and so criticizes about that which he knows nothing.
You don't need to read a book in order to criticize viewpoints which someone else espouses. If you tell me that Xenu infests people with Thetans thereby causing them to get sick and die, and that I should give lots of money to your church which will let me live forever, I don't need to read Dianetics in order to call you an idiot and tell you to go bother someone else. Some claims are simply too absurd to be taken seriously and no book is ever going to make them any more plausible.
Of course, the fact that Atheists have been shown to generally be more knowledgeable about religion than any other group (Jews came in second) kinda makes your argument irrelevant, anyway.
Two of my least favorites groups of people: religious and atheist proselytizers (in no order, it's a tie).
Yeah, I'm getting sick and tired of atheists showing up at my door every week, insisting that I'm going to be tortured forever if I don't believe what they believe.
Honestly, if you're willing to insist that the two groups are equivalent, you're a fucking moron. There's really nothing else to say.
Why aren't we rioting in the streets?
Because most people don't buy in to your nonsense?
Not necessarily comparable, but lets work with it anyway. The answer is no, unless the extreme-4ists are murdering people who disagree with their PoV because they disagree.
Well, close, but no. The point is that there is nothing in the belief that 2+2=4 which could possibly advocate any kind of action. It's a simple statement of fact - one which you can either accept or reject. If you then go on to murder someone, you can claim that it's because they didn't believe that 2+2=4, but there's simply no causal chain there which you can point to. You will have committed murder because you are a sociopath who enjoys killing people who disagree with him - not because an equation told you to do it.
That's the reason why religions can directly lead to fanaticism and extremism while atheism cannot. Religions have doctrines. They talk about morality and the desires of gods. They tell people what to do and how to think. Atheism does none of that. Atheism is simply a label which people adopt to explain their position on one single question. There's no gospels, no dogma, no teachings of any kind. Any conclusions drawn by a particular atheists must inherently be based on other beliefs which are part of other belief systems, and not based on atheism itself.
Half find 2, half find -2 and a small majority see both as possibilities. The extreme positives and the extreme negatives are to me, functionally identical because I can see both possibilities. If that offends you, I am sorry, but that is what it looks like from outside your viewpoint. I don't claim to be completely objective(if that is even possible), but I try by all means to be as objective as possible. I am not saying both views are correct, mind, as the original x used while it could have been either 2 or -2 may only have been one of these. If that makes sense?
Heh. Yeah, it makes sense, but I think you're assuming too much. I can see both possibilities. I think all atheists can see both possibilities. We simply discount one because it's unsupported by any serious evidence, and seems extremely unlikely given what we know about the universe and about the human tendency to "explain" things by making up stories. Why would you assume that we "can't see" the other possibility?
With regards to discarding the non-biblical references because they were written after the fact, I feel this is as far as I can see a minority view.
I'm not sure if it's a minority view or not, but it's the only rational view. Hearsay is rejected even in a court of law, let alone when it comes to scientific research. It can be useful in historical research, but it has to be considered in the context of all the other information we have about that time period, and any decent historian will realize that what they're dealing with is, at best, evidence of what some people were saying at the time, rather than evidence of what actually happened.
If I told you that I know a bunch of people who say that the Evil Lord Xenu populated the Earth by bringing people here in DC-8 shaped spaceships and then blowing them up with nuclear weapons beside a volcano, would that convince you that these things really happened? Granted, even if I told you that I personally witnessed these things, you'd still probably call me a lunatic, but at least you couldn't dismiss my claim as the re-telling of a story.
I reckon if I were to ask you if Jesus existed, you would probably have to answer "probably"? We are not stating that the biblical account is accurate, merely that there was a man named Jesus who had a following and was executed by the Romans.
Yeah, I would say a Jewish Arab cult leader who taught that the world was coming to an end probably existed at the time, and that the stories about Jesus are loosely based on him. I'd even go so far as to say that he was probably executed by the Romans, though there's certainly
You're telling me you have never met an extremist atheist who thinks it is their own personal goal to eradicate everything but atheism, and lacks tolerance for anything but atheism, taking every idea of atheism to the extreme? Making statements like "There are certainly no gods?" Sheltered life much?
Well, first off, I think your switch from "fundamentalist" to "extremist" is rather dishonest, since the two words have different meanings. However, even if I ignore the switch, it's irrelevant; there is no such thing as a fundamentalist or extremist atheist. You cannot be a fundamentalist or an extremist in your answer to a single question. As I said, the very idea is ludicrous. I'm not sure how to explain this to you any better. Maybe an analogy:
I ask 50 people "is 2+2 equal to 4". 48 of them say "yes" and 2 say "no". Which ones are the "extremists"? If 5 of the people who said "yes" later go out and commit mass-murder, would that mean they're "extremist 4-ists"?
Does that help, or am I just confusing you more?
If you had your facts straight, you may have a point. There is a lot of non-biblical evidence of the existence of Jesus. He is mentioned by a lot of historians of that time.
You're right I misspoke; what I was referring to is contemporary non-biblical evidence, since anything written significantly after the fact is mere hearsay. "My uncles wifes fathers second cousins college roommate told me ..." kind of stuff. The problem with Josephus is that he wrote his account 50-60 years after Jesus was supposedly crucified, and claimed no direct knowledge of the guy. I don't consider that to be convincing in the slightest, nor should anyone else who isn't just looking to confirm their personal beliefs. As a comparison, the evidence for the existence of Socrates is far more abundant than for the existence of Jesus, yet you'll find no shortage of academics willing to argue that Socrates may not have existed, and you could spend years wading through the arguments about what he actually said and did vs. what Plato made up about him.
Also, while wikipedia quotes Louis H. Feldman as saying that "few have doubted the genuineness of Josephus' reference", this is simply not true. While few claim that it is an outright fabrication most believe that it was at the very least embellished by the church. Very few scholars believe that that particular passage came to us through the ages completely unaltered. However, that's a minor point; the critique I provided in the previous paragraph makes the question of the authenticity of that passage completely moot.
The problem with these sorts of discussions, is we are covering ground that has already been covered. Non of your arguments or mine are anything new.
Of course. I don't expect to make any miraculous discoveries through these discussions; I seek only to provide you (and any bystanders) with information of which you are not aware, and to be similarly enlightened if you happen to know things which I do not. When we want to discover completely new things we turn to science, not discussion.
With regard to souls(since I am a student of all religions) I prefer not to comment(and the precise concept can differ a lot even within a religion), except that it relates to the interesting concept of free will, which in turn implies responsibility which in turn is the basis of most legal systems..
Free will is not dependent on a soul. Moreover, even if free will does not exist as an absolute concept (ie. if you believe in a completely deterministic universe), it wouldn't have any impact on our legal codes. We wouldn't stop punishing and/or rehabilitating murderers simply because they were "predestined" to commit murder.
Also, it's worth mentioning that the concept of "absolute" free will directly contradicts the possibility of an "all-knowing" god.
The difference is subtle.. From someone who believes in a god, that is "known." From someone who believes in naturalism, that is "known" too. When you get down to it, there are assumptions everywhere.
No. There is a difference between belief and knowledge. I believe that my car is currently parked in the driveway because that's where I left it. I don't know that it's parked in the driveway because I can't see it right now, and there is the possibility that someone stole it, or that god miracled it out of existence. The difference between knowledge and belief is one of the most important concept in theological discussions - you don't get to lump the two together.
But what about fundie atheists. Can you honestly say you've never met one?
The very idea is ludicrous. Atheism is no a belief system - it is an answer to a single question. To talk about "fundie atheists" is the equivalent of talking about "fundie round-earthers", or "fundie thermodynamicists". It's nonsensical.
For example, few mainstream secular historians deny the existence of Jesus. That makes the new testament portion of the bible on the level of a written statement by a witness.
That's funny. I guess the fact that few mainstream secular historians deny the existence of William Wallace means that the movie "Braveheart" is on the level of real-time footage of his exploits.
I think you'll find that the main reason many "mainstream secular historians" accept the existence of Jesus is actually because the bible has so many inconsistencies about his life. If he hadn't existed, the whole story could have been made up and made internally consistent - instead it reads as if it was written about a real person who was known to exist, with many of the details added afterwards in order to fulfill particular Jewish prophecies. There's certainly no non-biblical evidence of his existence, nor do historians generally see the bible as reliable evidence of his life.
To take it to the extreme, imagine an intepretation along the lines of: "Hey, that 'God' character? Yeh, that's just there as a representation of the universe... all that stuff talking about what he 'wants' and 'says' and 'does' is really just to help you understand why you need to be a good person".
We don't need to imagine it; it's already the way we view the vast majority of gods which have ever been proposed. When a christian reads Greek myths, that's the way he thinks about Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Athena, and all the rest of them. If they'd stop and realize that the evidence for the existence of the Greek gods is every bit as "good" as the evidence for the existence of the Abrahamic god, there would probably be a lot fewer Christians around.
I doubt he managed to load his gun with police standard ammunition. It's a converted starter pistol.
It depends on the caliber. To be fair, I didn't even consider that, however, after a quick check, it turns out that starter pistols come in quite a large range. Police pistols are usually either 9mm or .40 caliber; starter pistols are available in both of these calibers, so there's no reason he couldn't load it "police standard ammunition".
On the other hand, given the evidence available so far, I'd have to say it's more likely that the bullet really was fired from a police sidearm. Just pointing out that there is another possibility.
And maybe I have an over-romanticised idea of what competent policing should be like, gleaned by watching too many films, or reading too many books, but honestly, if there's more than one of you, you are heavily armed, wearing protective gear, and you're facing down a drug dealer with a gun, I honestly believe you should be able to apprehend that man without shooting him dead.
Most of the time you can. That doesn't change the fact that once in a while there's going to be a situation where you can't. It's selection bias - you might have 99 arrests where the guy is apprehended fine, and 1 where you can't, but which one do you think will make the headlines?
If firearms officers are allowed to unload on anyone when they "believe" there is a thread to life, that basically equates on them unloading on anyone.
It has to be a reasonable belief. There's a big difference between "I shot him because I thought he might have a gun" and "I shot him because he was pointing a gun at my head". The former is completely unjustified, the latter is not. In between, there's all kinds of questionable situation where the officer is in the position of having to weigh the risk to his own life versus his responsibility to use minimal force. Sometimes they make the right decision, sometimes they don't - obviously they need to be held responsible when they screw up, but I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt where possible, and be more lenient if it was a case of bad judgement vs. malicious intent.
In addition to that self serving reasoning, I also think the interests of justice and the public are better served by trying that man, in court, and sending him to prison.
On that we agree completely, but having dead police officers isn't in the interest of justice and the public, either. It's a fine line sometimes.
Ugh. Mentioning fringe on a thread about a real science show .... that's just poor taste.
Your weasel words fail to reassure anybody. There is evidence: methane contaminated wells.
Hah. Yeah, like the presence of oranges in my kitchen is evidence that Big Produce has been dumping stuff in my house.
Please. Don't be stupid.
The fool is an ironic character because he does not realize he is the fool. Now that you have been made aware, you become the asshole.
Thanks, Dr. Science! Maybe for an encore you can explain to me how the presence of CO2 on mars proves that industrials are poisoning it's atmosphere, or how the presence of oil in the ground proves that Big Oil has been having massive spills.
Fuck off. If you're not going to make a serious argument, why bother responding?
I assume b/c these people don't trust the police to actually report the truth if that truth reflects negatively on the officers involved.
So then why bother discussing specifics? Just say "I hate cops" and leave it at that. If you're just going to assume they're always doing the wrong thing, then the details of any particular incident are completely irrelevant. May as well just assume that they've killed 20,000 innocent people this year, and covered it up.
I support gas drilling if it can be done responsibly and safely. The problem is that right now, there is no evidence that it is possible to do it responsibly and safely.
Pure FUD. Right now, there is no evidence that it isn't being done responsibly and safely, in the vast majority of cases.
The problem is that their attitude is, "Nothing wrong ever happened. The contamination is not our fault... Some bacteria crawled into your well that had been clean for decades at around the same time we started drilling. No, there isn't any connection. Drilling is safe!"
Yes, and most of the time, they're absolutely right. Have you been paying attention to the world around you? There are people running around screaming about the dangers of power-lines. Others railing against cell-phone "radiation". Or Wi-Fi. Even nimrods complaining about nuclear power plants, and, more recently, "shock-waves" made by wind-turbines. No matter what technology you decide to use, you're guaranteed to have at least a couple halfwits protesting against it, claiming you're killing babies and causing brain-damage in puppies. Given the prevalence of such people, how much are you willing to bet that the complaints being made about "fracking" are legit?
People confuse correlation with causation all the time, and having the perceived ability to sue for millions of dollars tends to discourage them from educating themselves on the subject. The only proper response to these ignorant luddites is "shut the fuck up, and get out of my way".
In China, "safe driving" equates to "don't hit anything and don't get hit by anything."
I'm pretty sure that's what "safe diving" means everywhere in the world.
Argh.
I've started with facts and then moved straight on to stating my opinion. I do not know that they reacted in a hysterical fashion. I don't know what happened. However, I *infer* that they reacted in a hysterical fashion from the known facts that the victim did not fire his weapon, and an officer shot another officer.
Thank you. It's rare to see someone actually correcting themselves in an attempt to be rational. You've just restored my faith in humanity!
That said, your inferences are a little premature. AFAIK no officer was shot - the bullet lodged in his radio. This suggests it may well have been a ricochet - it happens. Or it may have been the suspect after all - there's no reason why he couldn't have gotten his hands on "ammunition of the type usually issued to police". Jumping to conclusions at this point is foolish. Why not wait for the police report?
Also, while it's possible that they may have been able to apprehend him without killing him, why would you expect them to take that kind of risk? If someone points a weapon at me and I believe he intends to use it, I am going to shoot him. I'm not going to argue, negotiate, or practice my ninja-skills; I'm going to shoot him in the head, and then shoot his body if it's still twitching. Anyone who faults me for that is a fool. If you personally have no survival instinct, that's your problem - I like being alive! Yes, police, fire fighters, soldiers, etc. are expected to place their lives in danger in order to do their jobs, but "be suicidal" is not part of the job description. There's a difference between calculated risks and just being stupid.
what do you think an army is for? its a collection of well paid thugs who specialise in arson, robbery and murder.
Yep. In other news, physicists are all a bunch of crazy geniuses specializing in eeevil plots and doomsday weapons.
FTFY. No such animal as the middle class right now. There's working class that don't, and those that do, and then the rich. Nothing in the middle.
Is this the new talking-point of the idiots? I only ask because I hadn't heard it before, and two of you spouting it in the same thread is unlikely to be a coincidence. It must be fresh out of the propaganda-mill.
It's not just the families - all the cop-haters start spewing their vitriol because no "pigs" got killed. Trolls like him don't deserve a response.
Which I took to mean: If you have a gang of 5-10 youths trying to kick your door in, or break in through your window and you ding a couple with your cricket bat, you're more likely to get off than you would under normal circumstances.
Is the UK really so messed up that this wouldn't be considered completely justified under normal circumstances? What would the cops expect you to do? Open the door and invite them in for tea and crumpets?
I'm not sure how "reasonable use of force" could ever change for the average citizen. It changes for soldiers in a war zone, sure, because we tend to have the ability to kill people from far away, so in an environment full of hostiles "reasonable" might mean "shoot anything that moves", while under normal circumstances it's "shoot anything that shoots at you". I'm just having a hard time seeing how it could change for civilians in a country where nobody is supposed to have weapons in the first place.
They make MILLIONS AND MILLIONS treating a SINGLE cancer patient over the course of several years.
Your thought pattern failed right here. Even the most expensive drugs in existence might go for $120,000 a year. For your "several years", that would be $360,000 to $720,000 tops. In what universe does less than a million equal "MILLIONS AND MILLIONS"?
Again, that's the most expensive drugs on the market, taken every day for 3-6 years (ridiculous). In reality, the costs are much lower. For example, total treatment costs for the average Lung Cancer patient in the first year run around $40,000, only a small fraction of which is the cost of drugs. Even if we assume that 25% of that is the cost of drugs (it's not) we're left with $10k per year, at which speed your EEEEVIL Big Pharma would have to keep treating the patient for 100 years before they sold $1 million worth of medicine (that's total product sold; if they had a really high profit margin they might see $300k profit).
You know why you're getting all confused? Because you see things in the newspaper like "Anti-Cancer drug Zevalin costs $24,000 A DOSE!!!" and you think "oh, wow, those bastards are just rolling in the dough!". You don't stop long enough to do a bit of research, and figure out that Zevalin is a SINGLE TREATMENT DRUG. It's only be given once. And, by the way, how exactly does that stack up against your claim that "they don't want to endanger their revenue stream", huh? Those evil bastards are so stupid, they can't even figure out how to be evil properly! Maybe you should go teach them.
In other words, you're full of shit. So it doesn't surprise me that you finish your rant off by talking about "greed". Ignoramuses are always going on and on about greed, primarily because they can't do math (liberal arts majors) and they don't understand economics. But I hope you've been able to learn something here today, and I hope you'll do a bit more research and stop spreading numbers that you've pulled out of your ass.
You take care now.
It is a myth. Rifles are "zeroed" so that a bullet fired from the rifle will hit a target that's centered in the scope at a specified distance from the shooter. For example, the U.S. Army routinely zeroes their M-4s and M-16s for 300 meters, which means the bullet drop distance due to gravity is accounted for, and a target at 300m that the shooter is aiming in the center of his sights will be struck.
Yeah, that was my conclusion, too, though I haven't yet gotten around to finding a confirmation, or testing it myself. Our army generally zeroes for 200 meters, but it's the same principle. It's just that, ever since I first went through basic training, I've heard it taught as the spin of the bullet causing a rise out to about 100m. I even taught it that way myself when I was an instructor. It's only recently that I actually thought about the physics of it, and realized it doesn't make any sense.
Thanks for the confirmation! I still plan to do some more research on it, but I appreciate the input.
I guess, it's un-powered flight, which probably makes it a glider in the same way a bullet is a glider if it had wings.
If it's unpowered and generates lift through forward movement, it's a glider. Bullets don't do that - you shoot them out, they fall. If you fire one horizontally from a height of 10 meters, it will hit the ground roughly 1 second later. If it were gliding, it would hit the ground 2, 3, 50, or however many (but greater than 1) seconds later.
Before anyone chimes in, yeah, I know plenty of people claim that the rifling of modern firearms causes the bullet to curve upwards, and that this could kinda-sorta be considered "gliding" but:
1. I've recently come to the conclusion that this is probably a myth, and
2. Even if it's not a myth, it's kinda pedantic to consider that "gliding".