You need a law because parents can't (and shouldn't) provide parental guidance and oversight 24 hours a day. Without a law, a child could spend his pocket money on cigarettes and not tell his parents if he wanted to. With a law, a child can't just buy cigarettes on whim; they actually have to jump through some hoops, and run a serious risk of being caught.
Laws like these help not only certain bad parents, but also very good parents. It doesn't hurt to make the breaking of parents' trust physically difficult.
That's a pretty foggy description... So it isn't necessarily "the creator", as many would say? Is it omniscient? Omnipotent? None of the above?
It's not a description, it's an invitation for you to choose the description. It's whatever god you choose to, or choose not to, believe in.
Of course, there are some caveats. We can't be silly and start calling observed or measured things as gods. For example:
But wait, replacing "tea set" with god in the above quote, does your argument not still hold?
Well yes, but it's much weaker. The idea is that we have some evidence of the non-existence of the tea set, if not an exact proof. I mean, we do have fairly clear evidence that suggests that there are no terrestrially-based tea sets (since there's few with the means, and none with the motive). This tea set does allegedly exist within the observable universe, and given how long we have observed the observable universe, and how we've never seen a tea set occur within it, I certainly feel much more comfortable saying that the tea set does not exist than saying god does not exist.
Yes
Huh?
Oh, sorry. My bad. I actually meant no. I was in kinda a hurry at the time. No, the FSM is not an observably unlikely situation. I could have sworn at the time that I was answering the opposite question.:-/
Your argument for the non-existence of the celestial teapot should be equally applicable to the non-existence of god.
It isn't. If the OP had claimed that there was a tea set somewhere that wasn't earth, then it could be applied. There is no evidence that such a tea set does not exist. However, the OP was very specific. He said there was a tea set orbiting half way between the sun and the earth, i.e. in the observable universe. That's a far, far stronger statement to make, and a much easier one to refute.
I used to think along the same lines as you, but I came to realize that agnosticism is (imho) a very weak and coward position: "The existence of god is unknowable, so I don't care."
Surely, if you have any interest in how the universe works, you _must_ care to know. In the least, you have to live your life (possibly unconsciously) assuming gods either exist or don't.
I can't bring myself to believe one way or another, simply out of a desire to "know" the universe. I fail to see how such convictions are knowledge, if they are chosen arbitrarily. As I see it, choosing a side simply because you are afraid of not knowing is by far the more cowardly position. I am comfortable with the fact that I am largely ignorant of the reality around me, and that there is nothing I can realistically do to change that fact.
Additionally, most agnostics are de facto atheists: they live as if gods didn't exist, so why not be straight about the fact that you assume, through your decision-making processes and actions, that gods don't exist?
Well, this argument doesn't apply exclusively to christian gods. If I start taking possibilities into account in my daily life, then I'll have to take into account an anti-christian god as well, who will punish me for good deeds and confessing in church. To live with such possibilities in mind, is to live a life of contradiction.
The only reason I can see for someone to say he's "agnostic" is either for politeness (to avoid being "in your face" to theists) or because it's an "unattackable" position (i.e. he wants to take the "high ground" and have a way to troll both theists and atheists).
I am agnostic because I couldn't possibly be otherwise. I can't convince myself that I know one way or another, when I clearly do not. Agnosticism is a fact. Anything else is a matter of belief. (Although, I suppose that falls under "trolling theists and atheists".;-)
So, saying "agnostic" is orthogonal to the "atheist/deist/theist" situation. You can be an gnostic atheist -> you think that god doesn't exist and that it is provable/it can be inferred by some epistemological process You can be an agnostic atheist -> you think that the existence of god is unknowable, but it is preferable/obvious to assume it doesn't You can be an gnostic deist -> you think that a non-intervening god exists and that it is provable/it can be inferred by some epistemological process You can be an agnostic deist -> you think that the existence of non-intervening god is unknowable, but it is preferable/obvious to assume it exists You can be an gnostic theist -> you think that god exists and that it is provable/it can be inferred by some epistemological process You can be an agnostic theist -> you think that the existence of god is unknowable, but it is preferable/obvious to assume it exists
None of those particularly suit me. I live my life like an atheist, but it's not because I find it preferable or obvious to assume god doesn't exist. I think I lie on the athiest/deist/theist axis.
You raise a good point, but notice that I was explicitly saying "representative" sample, not "large" sample. For all we know, we lie on a very narrow end of a normal distribution!
If you are going to believe in god just because you argue that he can be everywhere and has the power to bypass my experiments, then I ask you to believe in my pink elephant-faries.
But that's just it: I don't believe in God. It's just that I don't believe we have any convincing evidence against God. That doesn't imply that I think he exists.
Care to provide a definition (or at least some traits) for god?
God, in the sense that I was using it, is really a placeholder word for anything that might exist outside our perception (preferably breaking logic as we know it).
You cannot simply say "he is outside our realm of perception, and is therefor off limits to proof/disproof" -- doesn't this seem a bit childish?
Wait. Did you just call a well-reasoned argument wrong because it's "childish"? Besides, it's not childish.
"I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing." -- Socrates
What if we replace the celestial teapot with the flying spaghetti monster -- does this still fall under the realm of "observably" unlikely situations?
Yes.
It is not valid to hold a belief, simply because no one has yet proven it false.
However at some point, saying 'I don't know' just becomes fetishism. It is useful to take a position when the opposing one is vanishingly unlikely.
So where's the proof that the existence of a god is vanishingly unlikely? I mean, with a tea set orbiting in space, the existence of such a tea set implies one of a small set of observably unlikely situations (note the word "observably"). The most likely explanation is that some country with an oversized space budget and sense of humour decided to plant the tea set there. Other less likely possibilities include the tea set formed on its own, or that a god placed the tea set there, but since we haven't observed any tea sets occurring in nature, or any divine tea sets handed down from any deities in odd places, we can conclude, with a reasonably strong degree of certainty that the tea set does not exist.
What about god? What observation tells us that he does not exist? Well, we haven't seen him, and nobody we know has seen him, but given his scope, he could be literally anywhere, in (or even outside) an extremely expansive universe. We haven't found any gods occurring naturally in the universe, but then again, the god that is claimed to exist by christians isn't exactly claimed to be common. We haven't found any intelligible message for humanity hidden in quantum mechanics or in the digits of Pi, but we supposedly have all the messages we are supposed to receive for now, so we weren't exactly anticipating them. We haven't found the hand of god measurably influencing the lives of faithful christians, but if anything could influence the course of events profoundly and cover his tracks, it would be god.
What evidence do we have against his existence? Well, about as much as we have for his existence. All we know is that, if he exists, he is thoroughly outside our sphere of perception. We can't determine a likelihood of events outside our sphere of perception, unless we make the assumption that what we perceive inside holds uniformly true outside, an assumption that presupposes that God doesn't exist anyway.
I suppose you could make an inductive argument: "We've seen what we've seen of the universe (or of any greater realities encompassing it, if they exist), and it holds true everywhere we've seen. Therefore, it holds true everywhere." The problem with that is that its strength relies on our perceiving a representative sample of reality, but we have little to back that assumption up.
Actually, this reminds me of a discussion I participated in a month or so ago. We were discussing how calculating Pi to 5 trillion digits could potentially be used as evidence as to whether or not Pi was a normal number. I argued that such a calculation actually tells us no more about normality than a calculation of the first 10 digits, because without some idea of a pattern that the infinite expansion follows, we have only a vanishingly small sample of the complete expansion of Pi, and we have no clue as to whether it is representative of the whole expansion or not. So, even though the number of digits we've calculated seems large by our standards, in the scheme of proving by brute force that Pi is normal, we've discovered almost nothing at all.
The same thing clearly applies here. We've observed a slice of reality, but we don't really know how large the whole of reality is, or what it looks like as a whole. Can we actually claim that we know reality just from the observable universe?
Rejecting superstition on the grounds that there is no scientific evidence is not blind faith, it is purely logical.
It depends what you mean by "reject". If you mean saying something along the lines of, "I don't see any irrefutable proof that superstition is or is not real", then it's logical. If you mean saying something along the lines of, "I know without a doubt that superstition is not real, despite seeing no proof that superstition is not real", then that is similarly illogical as to holding the superstition to be real without proof.
I think the word "reject" here is a little too ambiguous for such a delicate concept. I, as of yet, haven't come up with a suitable replacement though.
I personally don't mind trolls. They generally don't affect me greatly one way or another. They're more or less an opportunity to try out insults and general derogatory witticisms without feeling sorry for the recipient. After all, the character a troll creates is designed to be hated and reviled. I've trolled myself on occasion; I find a simple joy in watching others tear my posts to shreds.
I guess that's why they say, "Don't feed the trolls", but I don't see why we can't have a little bit of trolling here and there to spice up discussions. Hell, it's sometimes nice to have your viewpoint challenged in novel ways, even if the person on the other end doesn't believe in what they say. With all the genuinely stupid opinions out there, I'd even say the ruse is a little bit comforting.
So, if you want to keep it up, be my guest, but since I'm not biting in any meaningful way, I'm wondering what's keeping you coming back?
The RIAA and the Mafia are each best known for the outrageous projects that they spearhead that make them the most profit. Be it drug trafficking in Queens, or Justin Beiber on tour. These are the cash cows and the reason these organizations are in business, for better or for worse. So this is how they must be measured.
So, for you, the hatred for the RIAA does indeed trump any concerns for our culture. Like I said, I find that profoundly sad.
Trying to dilute their primary reason for being by bringing up numbers of small musicians or business owners who are productive, but pinned under their thumbs is completely disingenuous.
Moreso than some vague, largely unfounded accusations, based on a tenuous analogy? Sorry, but my bullshit detector was spinning out of control!
Look, your trolling didn't fetch an impassioned response the first time, what makes you think it'll happen this time? Trolling requires some measure of subtlety, otherwise the hook just looks like a hook. I especially love this one:
"Anything less than that is just petty politics."
And merely asserting that this is not the case is merely petty politics.
I must have hit a nerve AC, since your point could have been made in one line without the bile, and without the attention-seeking ad-hominem headline. Look, if it really is, to you, making hay while the sun shines, then I have no beef with you. I'm not saying you can't love art and hate the RIAA. That would be just stupid;-).
What I did notice about the OP was that his endorsement of this program began with putting the screws to the RIAA. The enrichment of culture didn't rate a mention.
Now, as I said, this may have been said in irony in this particular circumstance, but there is some truth behind it. For example, how many people here say RIAA music is crap? Is it because that person has heard a representative sample of the multitude of genres and styles played by RIAA-signed musicians? Anything less than that is just petty politics.
No matter how much you extol the virtues of a human instrumentalist, music is soundwaves, and soundwaves can be reproduced. I see no reason why a sufficiently complete algorithm and a quality sound system couldn't, in theory, manage to reproduce the effect of a human instrumentalist, to such an extent that the most discerning audiophiles could not tell the difference. Granted, we are not there yet, but to say "synthesizer technology [is] still a cold, digital reproduction of an instrument no matter how good the technology gets" is clearly unfounded.
I find that immensely sad that the motive to hurt the RIAA trumps the motive to simply enrich the culture. I know you were probably being ironic, but it hits a little too close to home. It just goes to show how little of a role art plays in the copyright wars.
Where in the US constitution, let alone the first amendment, does it prevent the US government from buying books?
I suppose any government power not explicitly granted by the constitution is unconstitutional, so I suppose the onus is on me to find where they are granted the power to buy books.;-)
What I never understood is why the patent office doesn't implement some kind of crowd sourcing?
I suspect the main reason is sluggish and conservative government bureaucracy, but also crowd sourcing could also reduce the fairness and neutrality in the system. For example, if/.ers had the power to block patents, do you think Sony or Microsoft would ever get a patent again?
I just want to say to the moderators, good job! This guy is clearly posting here just to get a reaction out of us, the very definition of "troll"! Thank you for making sure I don't have to react negatively to opinions.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Because there is observable evidence to the contrary...
That's funny. I'm sure they want to thank you for using bittorrent for legitimising their efforts to squeeze money from everyone.
You need a law because parents can't (and shouldn't) provide parental guidance and oversight 24 hours a day. Without a law, a child could spend his pocket money on cigarettes and not tell his parents if he wanted to. With a law, a child can't just buy cigarettes on whim; they actually have to jump through some hoops, and run a serious risk of being caught.
Laws like these help not only certain bad parents, but also very good parents. It doesn't hurt to make the breaking of parents' trust physically difficult.
OK, cya.
BTW, quickly before you go: what's the latin term for an argument deriving its conclusion from an out-of-context quote? My memory is failing me.
It's not a description, it's an invitation for you to choose the description. It's whatever god you choose to, or choose not to, believe in.
Of course, there are some caveats. We can't be silly and start calling observed or measured things as gods. For example:
Well yes, but it's much weaker. The idea is that we have some evidence of the non-existence of the tea set, if not an exact proof. I mean, we do have fairly clear evidence that suggests that there are no terrestrially-based tea sets (since there's few with the means, and none with the motive). This tea set does allegedly exist within the observable universe, and given how long we have observed the observable universe, and how we've never seen a tea set occur within it, I certainly feel much more comfortable saying that the tea set does not exist than saying god does not exist.
Oh, sorry. My bad. I actually meant no. I was in kinda a hurry at the time. No, the FSM is not an observably unlikely situation. I could have sworn at the time that I was answering the opposite question. :-/
It isn't. If the OP had claimed that there was a tea set somewhere that wasn't earth, then it could be applied. There is no evidence that such a tea set does not exist. However, the OP was very specific. He said there was a tea set orbiting half way between the sun and the earth, i.e. in the observable universe. That's a far, far stronger statement to make, and a much easier one to refute.
Well, to be fair, there are other ways of obtaining a plane without having to be rich first.
To be even fairer, most of those ways would earn you an indefinite stay in a prison without trial.
I can't bring myself to believe one way or another, simply out of a desire to "know" the universe. I fail to see how such convictions are knowledge, if they are chosen arbitrarily. As I see it, choosing a side simply because you are afraid of not knowing is by far the more cowardly position. I am comfortable with the fact that I am largely ignorant of the reality around me, and that there is nothing I can realistically do to change that fact.
Well, this argument doesn't apply exclusively to christian gods. If I start taking possibilities into account in my daily life, then I'll have to take into account an anti-christian god as well, who will punish me for good deeds and confessing in church. To live with such possibilities in mind, is to live a life of contradiction.
I am agnostic because I couldn't possibly be otherwise. I can't convince myself that I know one way or another, when I clearly do not. Agnosticism is a fact. Anything else is a matter of belief. (Although, I suppose that falls under "trolling theists and atheists". ;-)
None of those particularly suit me. I live my life like an atheist, but it's not because I find it preferable or obvious to assume god doesn't exist. I think I lie on the athiest/deist/theist axis.
You raise a good point, but notice that I was explicitly saying "representative" sample, not "large" sample. For all we know, we lie on a very narrow end of a normal distribution!
But that's just it: I don't believe in God. It's just that I don't believe we have any convincing evidence against God. That doesn't imply that I think he exists.
Hence, there is an infinite list of things I do not know.
God, in the sense that I was using it, is really a placeholder word for anything that might exist outside our perception (preferably breaking logic as we know it).
Wait. Did you just call a well-reasoned argument wrong because it's "childish"? Besides, it's not childish.
"I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing." -- Socrates
Yes.
Why?
Whatever I don't know. ;-)
So where's the proof that the existence of a god is vanishingly unlikely? I mean, with a tea set orbiting in space, the existence of such a tea set implies one of a small set of observably unlikely situations (note the word "observably"). The most likely explanation is that some country with an oversized space budget and sense of humour decided to plant the tea set there. Other less likely possibilities include the tea set formed on its own, or that a god placed the tea set there, but since we haven't observed any tea sets occurring in nature, or any divine tea sets handed down from any deities in odd places, we can conclude, with a reasonably strong degree of certainty that the tea set does not exist.
What about god? What observation tells us that he does not exist? Well, we haven't seen him, and nobody we know has seen him, but given his scope, he could be literally anywhere, in (or even outside) an extremely expansive universe. We haven't found any gods occurring naturally in the universe, but then again, the god that is claimed to exist by christians isn't exactly claimed to be common. We haven't found any intelligible message for humanity hidden in quantum mechanics or in the digits of Pi, but we supposedly have all the messages we are supposed to receive for now, so we weren't exactly anticipating them. We haven't found the hand of god measurably influencing the lives of faithful christians, but if anything could influence the course of events profoundly and cover his tracks, it would be god.
What evidence do we have against his existence? Well, about as much as we have for his existence. All we know is that, if he exists, he is thoroughly outside our sphere of perception. We can't determine a likelihood of events outside our sphere of perception, unless we make the assumption that what we perceive inside holds uniformly true outside, an assumption that presupposes that God doesn't exist anyway.
I suppose you could make an inductive argument: "We've seen what we've seen of the universe (or of any greater realities encompassing it, if they exist), and it holds true everywhere we've seen. Therefore, it holds true everywhere." The problem with that is that its strength relies on our perceiving a representative sample of reality, but we have little to back that assumption up.
Actually, this reminds me of a discussion I participated in a month or so ago. We were discussing how calculating Pi to 5 trillion digits could potentially be used as evidence as to whether or not Pi was a normal number. I argued that such a calculation actually tells us no more about normality than a calculation of the first 10 digits, because without some idea of a pattern that the infinite expansion follows, we have only a vanishingly small sample of the complete expansion of Pi, and we have no clue as to whether it is representative of the whole expansion or not. So, even though the number of digits we've calculated seems large by our standards, in the scheme of proving by brute force that Pi is normal, we've discovered almost nothing at all.
The same thing clearly applies here. We've observed a slice of reality, but we don't really know how large the whole of reality is, or what it looks like as a whole. Can we actually claim that we know reality just from the observable universe?
(FYI, I'm an agnostic.)
It depends what you mean by "reject". If you mean saying something along the lines of, "I don't see any irrefutable proof that superstition is or is not real", then it's logical. If you mean saying something along the lines of, "I know without a doubt that superstition is not real, despite seeing no proof that superstition is not real", then that is similarly illogical as to holding the superstition to be real without proof.
I think the word "reject" here is a little too ambiguous for such a delicate concept. I, as of yet, haven't come up with a suitable replacement though.
There's a way of proving you're innocent?
I'm not seeing any dichotomy here at all, let alone a false one. What are you getting at?
Whatever you say. ;-)
I personally don't mind trolls. They generally don't affect me greatly one way or another. They're more or less an opportunity to try out insults and general derogatory witticisms without feeling sorry for the recipient. After all, the character a troll creates is designed to be hated and reviled. I've trolled myself on occasion; I find a simple joy in watching others tear my posts to shreds.
I guess that's why they say, "Don't feed the trolls", but I don't see why we can't have a little bit of trolling here and there to spice up discussions. Hell, it's sometimes nice to have your viewpoint challenged in novel ways, even if the person on the other end doesn't believe in what they say. With all the genuinely stupid opinions out there, I'd even say the ruse is a little bit comforting.
So, if you want to keep it up, be my guest, but since I'm not biting in any meaningful way, I'm wondering what's keeping you coming back?
So, for you, the hatred for the RIAA does indeed trump any concerns for our culture. Like I said, I find that profoundly sad.
Moreso than some vague, largely unfounded accusations, based on a tenuous analogy? Sorry, but my bullshit detector was spinning out of control!
Look, your trolling didn't fetch an impassioned response the first time, what makes you think it'll happen this time? Trolling requires some measure of subtlety, otherwise the hook just looks like a hook. I especially love this one:
Overplayed your hand a bit there, huh?
I must have hit a nerve AC, since your point could have been made in one line without the bile, and without the attention-seeking ad-hominem headline. Look, if it really is, to you, making hay while the sun shines, then I have no beef with you. I'm not saying you can't love art and hate the RIAA. That would be just stupid ;-).
What I did notice about the OP was that his endorsement of this program began with putting the screws to the RIAA. The enrichment of culture didn't rate a mention.
Now, as I said, this may have been said in irony in this particular circumstance, but there is some truth behind it. For example, how many people here say RIAA music is crap? Is it because that person has heard a representative sample of the multitude of genres and styles played by RIAA-signed musicians? Anything less than that is just petty politics.
No matter how much you extol the virtues of a human instrumentalist, music is soundwaves, and soundwaves can be reproduced. I see no reason why a sufficiently complete algorithm and a quality sound system couldn't, in theory, manage to reproduce the effect of a human instrumentalist, to such an extent that the most discerning audiophiles could not tell the difference. Granted, we are not there yet, but to say "synthesizer technology [is] still a cold, digital reproduction of an instrument no matter how good the technology gets" is clearly unfounded.
I find that immensely sad that the motive to hurt the RIAA trumps the motive to simply enrich the culture. I know you were probably being ironic, but it hits a little too close to home. It just goes to show how little of a role art plays in the copyright wars.
Where in the US constitution, let alone the first amendment, does it prevent the US government from buying books?
I suppose any government power not explicitly granted by the constitution is unconstitutional, so I suppose the onus is on me to find where they are granted the power to buy books. ;-)
I suspect the main reason is sluggish and conservative government bureaucracy, but also crowd sourcing could also reduce the fairness and neutrality in the system. For example, if /.ers had the power to block patents, do you think Sony or Microsoft would ever get a patent again?
I just want to say to the moderators, good job! This guy is clearly posting here just to get a reaction out of us, the very definition of "troll"! Thank you for making sure I don't have to react negatively to opinions.