well in a way, the notion of jesus did - when emperor constantine I prayed to the christian god before battle pretty much on a whim, then proceeded to win the battle, he decided to make christianity the official religion of the roman empire. Before that point it was an obscure illegal cult.
so ironically, thanks to the power of the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy in the wrong hands, "jesus" did invade europe, and that is the ONLY reason anyone knows about him 2000 years later.
there is a difference between agnosticism and unawareness. we are all born unaware of the concept of any gods, therefore we lack any belief in them. If you parse "atheism" as rejection of a concept, and agnosticism as as reservation of judgement in the face of a lack of evidence either way, then new born infants are neither atheist or agnostic, simply unaware there is a position to hold. of course, some people parse "atheism" as meaning a lack of belief in any gods, in which case newborns do fall into this category.
he's not saying the evidence for jesus is false because it is in favour of some religion or other, he's saying it is useless because it is completely unverifiable and completely inadequate to support the claim. on the other hand, the evidence caesar invaded gaul is verifiable, manifold and varied, and so supports the claim well. As redundant as this is, but for the sake of clarity, he also pointed out that the well supported caesar claim was also inherently more likely even without the evidence.
the reason why you saw that disclaimer on Newtonian physics is because it's been supplanted by a more accurate theory, relativity. There is no reason to put that disclaimer on evolutionary theory, because it hasn't been supplanted by a different theory, it has simply been improved and refined over time.
also, the term evolution can refer to either the "theory of evolution" (the details of mechanisms of the process)or the "fact of evolution", the fact being the scientific consensus that all life currently on the earth descended from a common ancestor. that's the fact being referred to in your true/false question. The evidence behind this is both vast and varied, and is freely verifiable by anyone who has the expertise to examine it, thus making common descent a scientific fact.
"I use OpenDNS which will not resolve a phishing site."
it won't resolve phishing sites that are registered in its blacklist. You are still vulnerable to those that aren't.
i use opendns, but i back that up with safer client software like firefox+adblock plus+noscript, pidgin and thunderbird. you can't rely on a single point of failure for security. the more layers you have, the less likely they are to all fail simultaneously. the final layer of course being your own wits, which despite my acute awareness of phishing and how it works, have failed me once on a fake ebay email.
the ID "proponents" are trying to make people think there is a controversy amongst the scientific community, ie, a lack of scientific consensus about the validity of evolutionary theory. Scientific controversy is not the same thing as a generic controversy, but using loose terminology to cloud the issue is a mainstay of creationist propaganda efforts.
None of this is a flame, just genuine curiosity...
I've always been curious about the notion of praying to the holy spirit for guidance in interpreting the bible. Countless different people with countless different interpretations of the bible claim they are guided by the holy spirit in their interpretation, but if many of them interpret it differently to one another, they can't all be guided by the holy spirit.
So what is happening to the people who pray to the holy spirit for help interpreting their bible, and come away convinced they have been inspired that the earth was created 6000 years ago?
Perhaps it was satan tricking them, or perhaps their faith wasnt strong enough. Fair enough, but if that's the case, how do you know your faith is strong enough, or that satan isn't lying to you?
It seems to me that praying to the holy spirit for guidance gives you as much to work with as just going with your gut instinct, which, speaking as a skeptic of religions in general, is what it seems is happening from my standpoint.
i think the conflict arises when science contradicts the particular holy texts of a religion, rather than the notion of a god. But that is only really a problem for biblical literalists or their equivalents, which from what you've said, i assume you aren't one of.
You're generalising - as if one of the prime imperatives of atheism is to mock and scorn theists. This is simply not the case. Some people who disbelieve particular religions feel compelled for one reason or another to mock and scorn those religions, but that is down to the individual and their personal motivations.
Of all the atheists i know (most of my friends) only one of them is scornful of religious people.
As for agnosticism, i agree as far as deism goes- since we don't know what happened before the big bang, we cant say one way or the other if an intelligent agency created the universe. However that's as far as the agnosticism can stretch. We certainly can't be agnostic about the veracity of the bible or any of the religious texts for any religion. The bible is flat out false. Any serious biblical scholar will tell you, it is demonstrably a collection of mutually contradictory bronze age myths, that has no bearing on the reality of the history of the universe or anything in it. There is no agnosticism to be had there. The same goes for all other texts that purport to explain the existence of man. This is not intended as scorn or mockery on my part, merely a statement of fact that I have to make in order to explain my position as an atheist.
This is just another possible piece in the jigsaw puzzle.
It's a bit churlish to say this doesn't explain anything. It just doesn't explain everything. This early on in the game there are still lots of threads to pick up in the story. When you watch a murder mystery, do you start complaining after a couple of scenes because they haven't found the murderer yet? Or perhaps you're too used to columbo...
give them a chance to figure it out, it's not like the emergence of life is some kind of trivial problem to understand.
that block of uninteresting, unfunny gibberish that must have taken you some time to compose is what you do with your spare time. why? is your life so empty? i don't understand "trolling organisations". It's not like its even funny - it rarely even makes sense. weird.....
FUCKING HELL. You go to the trouble of RTFAing before reading the comments, and it's too late to know that there is a MASSIVE SPOILER halfway though the article. I was sure i'd seen the entire 3rd season so it must be a 4th season spoiler.
yeah but the point is it NEEDS all that extra ram to run smoothly. its all very well saying "oh it only uses your extra ram to speed things up" but the point is if you don't have the extra for it to use for caching, it is pathetically slow.
hey! i still use VHS:) there's no point throwing away perfectly good tapes! My trusty £15 sony walkman cassette player that i bought in 1998 served me well into 2002 till i splurged £250 on a NetMD instead of £500 on a 1st/2nd gen ipod. In retrospect the netmd was a DRM restricted waste of money, but you live and learn. I miss taping albums off of LPs... get off my lawn..!
if you download the ubuntu installer CD it's a live CD so you can boot from it and see if your hardware works before you install it. I installed ubuntu 3 years ago so im not sure but i think making it dual boot with windows is a doddle now, the installer does all the work for you. As for there being lots of distros, just forget about the others - the big three, SUSE, Red Hat and Ubuntu are very very similar, with ubuntu having by far the best community support and ease of use.
also stuff like playing DVDs, MP3s, running 3D acceleration on Nvidia/ATI cards and youtube(flash) while not installed by default on ubuntu for copyright/patent/dmca reasons, the first time you attempt to do any of those things it just pops up a prompt asking you if you're allowed to do those things, you click "yes", then it just installs the necessary components and off you go.
when i installed ubuntu in 2005 (it was less slick back then, but still relatively good) i left win2k installed so that i could play games, but to be frank i havent booted into windows since...
as with the word "theory", the word "fact" has a different meaning in scientific terminology. If something has been independently empirically verified enough times it is considered a scientific "fact", and is assumed by science that it will still be the case should any further observations be made regarding it. This includes the existence of gravity, and the common descent of all life on earth (the fact of evolution).
The blanket term of "evolution" covers two things (which is where a lot of the confusion comes from) both the fact of common descent, and also the theory of how the common descent occurred. So evolution is both fact and theory, depending on which aspect of it you are referring to.
The colloquial definition of fact you give pretty much makes it impossible for anything to be a fact. Also your definition of the universe as "an infinite sequence of purely random energies" is rather ambiguous.
Slashdot Mirror
they dont melt anymore
so ironically, thanks to the power of the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy in the wrong hands, "jesus" did invade europe, and that is the ONLY reason anyone knows about him 2000 years later.
barred by whom? am i barred from making simpsons references just becasue i don't think it's real?
there is a difference between agnosticism and unawareness. we are all born unaware of the concept of any gods, therefore we lack any belief in them. If you parse "atheism" as rejection of a concept, and agnosticism as as reservation of judgement in the face of a lack of evidence either way, then new born infants are neither atheist or agnostic, simply unaware there is a position to hold. of course, some people parse "atheism" as meaning a lack of belief in any gods, in which case newborns do fall into this category.
he's not saying the evidence for jesus is false because it is in favour of some religion or other, he's saying it is useless because it is completely unverifiable and completely inadequate to support the claim. on the other hand, the evidence caesar invaded gaul is verifiable, manifold and varied, and so supports the claim well. As redundant as this is, but for the sake of clarity, he also pointed out that the well supported caesar claim was also inherently more likely even without the evidence.
also, the term evolution can refer to either the "theory of evolution" (the details of mechanisms of the process)or the "fact of evolution", the fact being the scientific consensus that all life currently on the earth descended from a common ancestor. that's the fact being referred to in your true/false question. The evidence behind this is both vast and varied, and is freely verifiable by anyone who has the expertise to examine it, thus making common descent a scientific fact.
it won't resolve phishing sites that are registered in its blacklist. You are still vulnerable to those that aren't.
i use opendns, but i back that up with safer client software like firefox+adblock plus+noscript, pidgin and thunderbird. you can't rely on a single point of failure for security. the more layers you have, the less likely they are to all fail simultaneously. the final layer of course being your own wits, which despite my acute awareness of phishing and how it works, have failed me once on a fake ebay email.
the ID "proponents" are trying to make people think there is a controversy amongst the scientific community, ie, a lack of scientific consensus about the validity of evolutionary theory. Scientific controversy is not the same thing as a generic controversy, but using loose terminology to cloud the issue is a mainstay of creationist propaganda efforts.
I've always been curious about the notion of praying to the holy spirit for guidance in interpreting the bible. Countless different people with countless different interpretations of the bible claim they are guided by the holy spirit in their interpretation, but if many of them interpret it differently to one another, they can't all be guided by the holy spirit.
So what is happening to the people who pray to the holy spirit for help interpreting their bible, and come away convinced they have been inspired that the earth was created 6000 years ago?
Perhaps it was satan tricking them, or perhaps their faith wasnt strong enough. Fair enough, but if that's the case, how do you know your faith is strong enough, or that satan isn't lying to you?
It seems to me that praying to the holy spirit for guidance gives you as much to work with as just going with your gut instinct, which, speaking as a skeptic of religions in general, is what it seems is happening from my standpoint.
i think the conflict arises when science contradicts the particular holy texts of a religion, rather than the notion of a god. But that is only really a problem for biblical literalists or their equivalents, which from what you've said, i assume you aren't one of.
that's no so much a disclaimer as a claimer.
Of all the atheists i know (most of my friends) only one of them is scornful of religious people.
As for agnosticism, i agree as far as deism goes- since we don't know what happened before the big bang, we cant say one way or the other if an intelligent agency created the universe. However that's as far as the agnosticism can stretch. We certainly can't be agnostic about the veracity of the bible or any of the religious texts for any religion. The bible is flat out false. Any serious biblical scholar will tell you, it is demonstrably a collection of mutually contradictory bronze age myths, that has no bearing on the reality of the history of the universe or anything in it. There is no agnosticism to be had there. The same goes for all other texts that purport to explain the existence of man. This is not intended as scorn or mockery on my part, merely a statement of fact that I have to make in order to explain my position as an atheist.
It's a bit churlish to say this doesn't explain anything. It just doesn't explain everything. This early on in the game there are still lots of threads to pick up in the story. When you watch a murder mystery, do you start complaining after a couple of scenes because they haven't found the murderer yet? Or perhaps you're too used to columbo...
give them a chance to figure it out, it's not like the emergence of life is some kind of trivial problem to understand.
that block of uninteresting, unfunny gibberish that must have taken you some time to compose is what you do with your spare time. why? is your life so empty? i don't understand "trolling organisations". It's not like its even funny - it rarely even makes sense. weird.....
hmm i think i better check what i watched....cheers
What? AArrrrghh another spoiler.... That wasnt the spoiler i read in TFA....
oh bugger now i've just posted a spoiler! someone mod me down for gods sake!
i could have sworn i'd watched all of season 3 and i dont remember colonel tigh being a cylon
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
PUT A SPOILER WARNING IN THE FUCKING ARTICLE SUMMARY PLEASE! Everyone needs to tag this SPOILER in the meantime.
all the computer nerds i went to school with called it a beeb.
yeah but the point is it NEEDS all that extra ram to run smoothly. its all very well saying "oh it only uses your extra ram to speed things up" but the point is if you don't have the extra for it to use for caching, it is pathetically slow.
hey! i still use VHS :) there's no point throwing away perfectly good tapes! My trusty £15 sony walkman cassette player that i bought in 1998 served me well into 2002 till i splurged £250 on a NetMD instead of £500 on a 1st/2nd gen ipod. In retrospect the netmd was a DRM restricted waste of money, but you live and learn. I miss taping albums off of LPs... get off my lawn..!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-decay
By all accounts, even creationist "think tanks" like Answers in Genesis say it doesn't work as an explanation.
also stuff like playing DVDs, MP3s, running 3D acceleration on Nvidia/ATI cards and youtube(flash) while not installed by default on ubuntu for copyright/patent/dmca reasons, the first time you attempt to do any of those things it just pops up a prompt asking you if you're allowed to do those things, you click "yes", then it just installs the necessary components and off you go.
when i installed ubuntu in 2005 (it was less slick back then, but still relatively good) i left win2k installed so that i could play games, but to be frank i havent booted into windows since...
The blanket term of "evolution" covers two things (which is where a lot of the confusion comes from) both the fact of common descent, and also the theory of how the common descent occurred. So evolution is both fact and theory, depending on which aspect of it you are referring to.
The colloquial definition of fact you give pretty much makes it impossible for anything to be a fact. Also your definition of the universe as "an infinite sequence of purely random energies" is rather ambiguous.