I don't see really good ways to minimize secondhand-smoke exposure in public - separate rooms/airflows wouldn't help all the workers who might wish to breathe clean air (some have to work those rooms), and I don't know of air filtration systems that would be effective enough. Air quality could be measured - portable air meters should be available, and enforcement could be increased - but if there isn't a practical means to ensure air quality (and assuming a reasoned standard is used) then it's useless. Allowing outdoor (or indoor) self-serve venues would be reasonable, particularly if designated as a smoking area, although they would need to be separate from the outside areas of others. Reasonable plans, though, would "look at the issues in detail" and at least here (in the votes over the ordinance) I didn't see that - it was more like "You're evil, and I want you gone."
As for Scotts, I worry about the expansion of workplace authority - I worry that my employer will try to govern my entire life, not just what they pay me for. In my field (chemistry), there aren't many jobs where I live, and the job market for chemists in the US appears to be in a long-term funk. People may have few options if their employers try to exert control over their lives, and there is no power in the Constitution to prevent them from doing so. I'm wasn't trying to confuse Scotts's policies with law, just arguing that they are using narrow causes to justify broad actions, and worrying about where the expansion of employers' authority might end.
Money would be the scarce resource in this case - there is plenty of health care, but it costs. If health care is scarce on a societal basis, then ban smoking for all, but state/federal govts don't want to forgo the money it makes them, and they remember the last two times they tried banning something that a large fraction of the population used, and how well it worked/is working.
If they were interested in the scarcity of health care, they would fire people who are overweight or who eat badly, but that would require an even more substantial intrusion into their workers' lives, and probably leave them short of workers.
Prohibition was advocated on the basis of the damage alcoholics do to their families and those around them, though such damage could have been limited by other means. When a highly restrictive method is chosen for a problem of limited scale, one can safely assume that the initial problem is a pretense for a method decided on for other reasons.
If secondhand smoking risks (to workers, as has been claimed here in OH) are the cause for smoking bans, why not mandate internal air quality rules, or separate rooms for smokers and nonsmokers (though the latter wouldn't help all workers)? Banning smoking in public places is a rather restrictive way to achieve these ends...unless their real goal is something else. There is even an employer here (Scotts, my least-favorite lawn care company) who has a no-smoking-anywhere (not at work, but anywhere) policy for its employees, with smoking being a firable offense. Again, if reducing health care costs to nonsmokers is the point, why not charge smokers extra? Well....
No, Prohibition is probably about right for this. They've already helped to assure smoking as an expression of "freedom" for many, likely to make smoking harder to actually eradicate. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes quite nicely.
I might be ignorant but it seems the whole point is to ban internet gambling because its proceeds can't easily be taxed by the USG - some of it is probably a moral issue (and since the Republicans may be doing less well with lots of people, their conservative Christian core is more important to them now that before), but a lot of it would seem to be an issue of money that the USG can't tax (Democrats might oppose this as well, for different public reasons). With internet sales, the (widely ignored) "use tax" for states can be applied, but I don't know of anything similar with gambling (or other less traceable income).
I think Dicks is probably here for awhile though - at least for the US, US citizens are under the laws of the countries they visit rather than those of their home countries (though didn't Germany try to go after citizens engaging in sex tourism abroad (Thailand)?), and I would think that other countries might behave similarly. It doesn't look good for the US, but I don't think it's necessarily illegal.
I'm sure organized criminals appreciate the business opportunities provided them by the USG, and I'm pretty sure that they will take full advantage of them.
Without the intentional shuttering of plants, isn't part of the increase in gas prices in the US related to this? The lack of petroleum refining capacity relative to demand, while created partly because of siting/environmental/government issues, is mainly driven by the large cost of refineries (> $10e9) and by the increased profits accrued by not building any more and allowing market prices to increase (increasing profit margin) rather than building new capacity and selling more gas (increasing profit through volume).
The chair of HP's board didn't start the company - she was hired, as were Fiorina, and other female executives.
It's possible that the executives are chosen for their behavior - the people who hire the executives may want ones willing to trample their customers, employees, and stockholders for their own interests and profit, or act in the best interests of a few, or something else. The character of men or women in general would not matter - companies get people that most represent their positions, and the people hired are expected to change to fit the corporate ethic rather than expecting the company change to theirs (or, more accurately, those who don't have to change to fit in).
If executives are chosen by those who act in their own best interests rather than those of the company, it seems predictable that you'd get the same behavior from those they hire - the sex of the person doesn't matter.
In another arena, does it matter who the Presidential candidates are if a small set of people were allowed sole discretion to choose the candidates? At that point, the decision power isn't in the election of a President, but in the mechanism by which the small group chooses the candidates. The behavior of Presidential candidates would not necessarily be representative of those who wished to run for office, but only of those chosen to do so.
Correcting the problem means admitting that there is one to begin with, and perhaps that one might even be partially responsible for it. These are difficult acts for anyone, let alone someone who seems to think of themselves as infallible. Much easier to dump the complainers and leakers, and continue behaving as before, being careful to make sure that your options can be cashed out quietly, that any contractual benefits are felony-proofed (if such is possible), and that your stockholders and customers can be lulled back to sleep.
Is this how business always was, and we're just more aware (or cynical) about it, or have the people that run corporations gotten more self-serving recently?
Did I miss something, or were you asleep for the VMI decision - the one where Scalia and Thomas decided that even though VMI didn't meet any of the standard criteria to be allowed to remain single-sex and receive state funding, it had other criteria (length of existence, for example) that, made from whole cloth, justified it. Only sporadic decisions from Scalia would lead me to think he resembles a strict constructionist (the marjuana search by heat detector case, for example). Alito's past indicates that he might be more in the ballpark of President's Bush main legal adviser Addington, adhering to policy precedent in which "if the President does it, it is not illegal" (and which would be as far from anything related to the Constitution as it is possible to be).
Maybe it's my rampant liberalism, but if these guys are the only thing between me and a government above the law, I don't feel very secure.
1) The services profit the cellular service companies, while the extra features profit the cell phone makers, so I figured that both of them make money from the transactions. In many, if not most, cellular service plans, the phone and the plan are coupled. (I have had Verizon in the US - others may vary), so people don't shop for phones and then for plans - they shop for both simultaneously. Based on what is advertised by cellular service providers in the US (which is what they want to sell, presumably because they have a greater economic incentive to do so), there is significant emphasis on providing phones with lots of features (most of which generate money for the providers) and less on simplicity of use (although maybe that's just because simplicity of use is assumed
2) The solar cell data makes sense, but I don't know enough about either solar cells or battery types to know.
3) I thought that all cell phones in the US were equipped with some sort of location device for 911 calls - if it's not GPS, it could be used similarly, to provide the service requested in the post before mine; locations of towers, as someone else suggested, could be used as well. Maybe there aren't enough people that want this, though.
Maybe they think they can make phones without buttons more cheaply than phones with buttons? The technology wouldn't be useful to users, but the manufacturers/cell phone companies could make more money on their phones?
I don't care about the phones (other than that they work) - I would prefer electronic replacements for my magazines/journals where they would actually be physically readable, and I'm hoping that anything that makes the components for them cheaper or easier to make will accelerate their generation, but that's selfish and OT.
I think they sell the jazzy camera/music phones with lots of features because they are getting money on all of them. Want pictures? - they have them, and they will charge you to send them anywhere. Music and ringtones - same thing. The phones cost more at the front end (though more than they cost to make? I don't know) but they include the possibility of making more money with the services.
The features you want, while useful, don't allow the cell phone company to make money except when they sell the phone. The lost phone GPS might be a chargeable service, but they might be able to do that now, without other security features. The other features don't let them make money, and I don't know that there are enough providers (because of coverage issues - it seems like only a few big companies have enough coverage to be useful, and others are only useful within a narrow range) to generate a market push to compel the cell phone companies to ask manufacturers to include them. In addition, the price of the phone (the only place they can recoup the cost) might be increased enough to make them uneconomic.
...and if people don't debunk them, they take root like kudzu or dandelions - people assume that if they haven't been disproven, they must be correct. There is always the "misunderstood me" phenomenon as well, although the misunderstandings are often willful - people want something for nothing, and hope that someone will give it to them (the theory behind 419 scams and Kevin Trudeau, for example). In those cases, while getting the word out keeps money in the hands of lazy, misinformed, and delusional people, it keeps it out of the hands of active liars and thieves, and makes the careers of such scammers shorter and less profitable. One hopes that if such pseudoscience and the people behind it are vigorously stomped, people might cease to scam in this manner (though that's pretty unlikely).
Even if (by some miracle) it isn't overturned, the President will just issue an executive order contravening it, or simply ignore it as he does with other laws or facts he finds distasteful. If a President can ignore the law without penalty (without fear or impeachment or being made impotent), it doesn't really matter what the judicial branch does.
If you are a company affected by this, you don't have any choices - the governemnt will tell you what to do, and you will get sued later for it. Of course you have lots of lawyers and you might win, or neuter the outcome sufficiently as to make it not a problem. If you attempt to disobey the government (and the government has no check), you probably won't have a business.
Science is limited by the observability of phenomena - people are capanble of seeing God, but no one's been capable of measuring things that relate directly to God, only to other measurable phenomena that may have other explanations - hence the existence of God is falsifiable from science, and not a testable hypothesis.
Of course, though, science and measurable phenomena aren't everything - one of the reasons why a "God of the gaps" is pointless. People don't start out knowing what the want in life, or what good and evil are, or what they should do with their lives, and science (and engineering) have nothing to say about these - they can tell people good ways to achieve their goals, but not what those goals should be. Science and related fields do not deal with all that is, only all that can be measured. People turn to God (or other beliefs) because there are other parts of the world and themselves that they need to understand.
Science has good reason to be Godless - but that does not require or imply that the rest of life should be.
Infinium doesn't have a console that it's been "building" for four years (and of which it had previously claimed to have a working model), it sues people who discuss its shady background, and now it's changed its business model to something that can be criticized by a frosh in high school without looking stupid (no games? no copy protection? what?).
My condolences to anyone related to the people running this company, particularly those of you who actually lent them money. To those who actually gave them money expecting a return on investment...oops.
Derek Lowe used this anecdote on his blog and it seems apropos.
Einstein is quoted as saying to Niels Bohr, "God does not play dice with the universe." to which Bohr responded, "Albert, stop telling God what to do."
Christianity and science are only incompatible if one holds the Bible to be absolutely inerrant and literal - but since only God is perfect, that doesn't make any sense. At minimum, it deifies the people who wrote and contributed to the Bible or their output, which is also inconsistent. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." Those who hold the Bible to be absolute make a god from their minds and intend to force all to worship it.
True, but Leviticus is one of the main arguments used against gay people in Christianity (the other being in Romans) - the people who use it as such (who have significant overlap with those who argue against evolution) are assuming that it is not just applicable to the Israelites of 3K years ago, but to modern Christians as well. If parts of it (rather than all of it) is useful, then one has to figure out which parts are useful, and why.
One of the African Episcopal priests (bishop?) interviewed for the New Yorker's article on the Episcopal Church's rift (about three months before - don't have a copy or a link) summarizes the conservative position by saying that the plain text of the Bible is true for all people and all times - their claim to rightness comes from their "lack" of interpretation. Once you factor in things such as historical context (in which parts of the Bible, such as Jesus' parables, swim) social context, and consistency, then their interpretations have to be judged on their own merit, rather than taken as dogma, which kills much of their appeal and power.
if the Bible is to be interpreted literally (according to a "plain" reading), why are there two Adam-and-Eve creation stories? Why don't Christians (in general) follow Leviticus? Why aren't women silenced in church (in accordance with a contentious letter of Paul's)?
The problem with "literal" interpretation is that everything in the Bible is interpreted, whether in translation or usage. The people who argue against evolution (and many of the advocates of conservatism in Christian churches) are arguing for a particular interpretation, by arguing that their version of the Bible is not an interpretation of the Bible, but the plain text, and hence faith derived from it is the only valid Christian faith (the "confessing church" movement, named after a more accurate movement in Nazi Germany, is an example). Fighting against evolution is an attempt to install their faith in society, to make it valid and real, as if they could force their version of God into existence.
As a separate issue, atheism doesn't really help get rid of dogmatic behavior - people believe and act in these ways either because they need to (in which case they will find something to believe in, and which enables them to behave accordingly) or because the object of their faith is real (in which case denying it would be untrue to what is) and they believe that their faith requires those actions. It's possible that the actions might be disconnected from the faith (if they are inconsistent with it), but atheism isn't the correct response to incorrect actions (because it would require ignorance of a truth). If there is a need to be dogmatic, atheism (or nonreligious beliefs) can serve just as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see really good ways to minimize secondhand-smoke exposure in public - separate rooms/airflows wouldn't help all the workers who might wish to breathe clean air (some have to work those rooms), and I don't know of air filtration systems that would be effective enough. Air quality could be measured - portable air meters should be available, and enforcement could be increased - but if there isn't a practical means to ensure air quality (and assuming a reasoned standard is used) then it's useless. Allowing outdoor (or indoor) self-serve venues would be reasonable, particularly if designated as a smoking area, although they would need to be separate from the outside areas of others. Reasonable plans, though, would "look at the issues in detail" and at least here (in the votes over the ordinance) I didn't see that - it was more like "You're evil, and I want you gone."
As for Scotts, I worry about the expansion of workplace authority - I worry that my employer will try to govern my entire life, not just what they pay me for. In my field (chemistry), there aren't many jobs where I live, and the job market for chemists in the US appears to be in a long-term funk. People may have few options if their employers try to exert control over their lives, and there is no power in the Constitution to prevent them from doing so. I'm wasn't trying to confuse Scotts's policies with law, just arguing that they are using narrow causes to justify broad actions, and worrying about where the expansion of employers' authority might end.
Money would be the scarce resource in this case - there is plenty of health care, but it costs. If health care is scarce on a societal basis, then ban smoking for all, but state/federal govts don't want to forgo the money it makes them, and they remember the last two times they tried banning something that a large fraction of the population used, and how well it worked/is working.
If they were interested in the scarcity of health care, they would fire people who are overweight or who eat badly, but that would require an even more substantial intrusion into their workers' lives, and probably leave them short of workers.
Prohibition was advocated on the basis of the damage alcoholics do to their families and those around them, though such damage could have been limited by other means. When a highly restrictive method is chosen for a problem of limited scale, one can safely assume that the initial problem is a pretense for a method decided on for other reasons.
If secondhand smoking risks (to workers, as has been claimed here in OH) are the cause for smoking bans, why not mandate internal air quality rules, or separate rooms for smokers and nonsmokers (though the latter wouldn't help all workers)? Banning smoking in public places is a rather restrictive way to achieve these ends...unless their real goal is something else. There is even an employer here (Scotts, my least-favorite lawn care company) who has a no-smoking-anywhere (not at work, but anywhere) policy for its employees, with smoking being a firable offense. Again, if reducing health care costs to nonsmokers is the point, why not charge smokers extra? Well....
No, Prohibition is probably about right for this. They've already helped to assure smoking as an expression of "freedom" for many, likely to make smoking harder to actually eradicate. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes quite nicely.
I might be ignorant but it seems the whole point is to ban internet gambling because its proceeds can't easily be taxed by the USG - some of it is probably a moral issue (and since the Republicans may be doing less well with lots of people, their conservative Christian core is more important to them now that before), but a lot of it would seem to be an issue of money that the USG can't tax (Democrats might oppose this as well, for different public reasons). With internet sales, the (widely ignored) "use tax" for states can be applied, but I don't know of anything similar with gambling (or other less traceable income).
I think Dicks is probably here for awhile though - at least for the US, US citizens are under the laws of the countries they visit rather than those of their home countries (though didn't Germany try to go after citizens engaging in sex tourism abroad (Thailand)?), and I would think that other countries might behave similarly. It doesn't look good for the US, but I don't think it's necessarily illegal.
I'm sure organized criminals appreciate the business opportunities provided them by the USG, and I'm pretty sure that they will take full advantage of them.
Without the intentional shuttering of plants, isn't part of the increase in gas prices in the US related to this? The lack of petroleum refining capacity relative to demand, while created partly because of siting/environmental/government issues, is mainly driven by the large cost of refineries (> $10e9) and by the increased profits accrued by not building any more and allowing market prices to increase (increasing profit margin) rather than building new capacity and selling more gas (increasing profit through volume).
The chair of HP's board didn't start the company - she was hired, as were Fiorina, and other female executives.
It's possible that the executives are chosen for their behavior - the people who hire the executives may want ones willing to trample their customers, employees, and stockholders for their own interests and profit, or act in the best interests of a few, or something else. The character of men or women in general would not matter - companies get people that most represent their positions, and the people hired are expected to change to fit the corporate ethic rather than expecting the company change to theirs (or, more accurately, those who don't have to change to fit in).
If executives are chosen by those who act in their own best interests rather than those of the company, it seems predictable that you'd get the same behavior from those they hire - the sex of the person doesn't matter.
In another arena, does it matter who the Presidential candidates are if a small set of people were allowed sole discretion to choose the candidates? At that point, the decision power isn't in the election of a President, but in the mechanism by which the small group chooses the candidates. The behavior of Presidential candidates would not necessarily be representative of those who wished to run for office, but only of those chosen to do so.
Correcting the problem means admitting that there is one to begin with, and perhaps that one might even be partially responsible for it. These are difficult acts for anyone, let alone someone who seems to think of themselves as infallible. Much easier to dump the complainers and leakers, and continue behaving as before, being careful to make sure that your options can be cashed out quietly, that any contractual benefits are felony-proofed (if such is possible), and that your stockholders and customers can be lulled back to sleep.
Is this how business always was, and we're just more aware (or cynical) about it, or have the people that run corporations gotten more self-serving recently?
Did I miss something, or were you asleep for the VMI decision - the one where Scalia and Thomas decided that even though VMI didn't meet any of the standard criteria to be allowed to remain single-sex and receive state funding, it had other criteria (length of existence, for example) that, made from whole cloth, justified it. Only sporadic decisions from Scalia would lead me to think he resembles a strict constructionist (the marjuana search by heat detector case, for example). Alito's past indicates that he might be more in the ballpark of President's Bush main legal adviser Addington, adhering to policy precedent in which "if the President does it, it is not illegal" (and which would be as far from anything related to the Constitution as it is possible to be).
Maybe it's my rampant liberalism, but if these guys are the only thing between me and a government above the law, I don't feel very secure.
1) The services profit the cellular service companies, while the extra features profit the cell phone makers, so I figured that both of them make money from the transactions. In many, if not most, cellular service plans, the phone and the plan are coupled. (I have had Verizon in the US - others may vary), so people don't shop for phones and then for plans - they shop for both simultaneously. Based on what is advertised by cellular service providers in the US (which is what they want to sell, presumably because they have a greater economic incentive to do so), there is significant emphasis on providing phones with lots of features (most of which generate money for the providers) and less on simplicity of use (although maybe that's just because simplicity of use is assumed
2) The solar cell data makes sense, but I don't know enough about either solar cells or battery types to know.
3) I thought that all cell phones in the US were equipped with some sort of location device for 911 calls - if it's not GPS, it could be used similarly, to provide the service requested in the post before mine; locations of towers, as someone else suggested, could be used as well. Maybe there aren't enough people that want this, though.
Maybe they think they can make phones without buttons more cheaply than phones with buttons? The technology wouldn't be useful to users, but the manufacturers/cell phone companies could make more money on their phones?
I don't care about the phones (other than that they work) - I would prefer electronic replacements for my magazines/journals where they would actually be physically readable, and I'm hoping that anything that makes the components for them cheaper or easier to make will accelerate their generation, but that's selfish and OT.
I think they sell the jazzy camera/music phones with lots of features because they are getting money on all of them. Want pictures? - they have them, and they will charge you to send them anywhere. Music and ringtones - same thing. The phones cost more at the front end (though more than they cost to make? I don't know) but they include the possibility of making more money with the services.
The features you want, while useful, don't allow the cell phone company to make money except when they sell the phone. The lost phone GPS might be a chargeable service, but they might be able to do that now, without other security features. The other features don't let them make money, and I don't know that there are enough providers (because of coverage issues - it seems like only a few big companies have enough coverage to be useful, and others are only useful within a narrow range) to generate a market push to compel the cell phone companies to ask manufacturers to include them. In addition, the price of the phone (the only place they can recoup the cost) might be increased enough to make them uneconomic.
...and if people don't debunk them, they take root like kudzu or dandelions - people assume that if they haven't been disproven, they must be correct. There is always the "misunderstood me" phenomenon as well, although the misunderstandings are often willful - people want something for nothing, and hope that someone will give it to them (the theory behind 419 scams and Kevin Trudeau, for example). In those cases, while getting the word out keeps money in the hands of lazy, misinformed, and delusional people, it keeps it out of the hands of active liars and thieves, and makes the careers of such scammers shorter and less profitable. One hopes that if such pseudoscience and the people behind it are vigorously stomped, people might cease to scam in this manner (though that's pretty unlikely).
Even if (by some miracle) it isn't overturned, the President will just issue an executive order contravening it, or simply ignore it as he does with other laws or facts he finds distasteful. If a President can ignore the law without penalty (without fear or impeachment or being made impotent), it doesn't really matter what the judicial branch does.
If you are a company affected by this, you don't have any choices - the governemnt will tell you what to do, and you will get sued later for it. Of course you have lots of lawyers and you might win, or neuter the outcome sufficiently as to make it not a problem. If you attempt to disobey the government (and the government has no check), you probably won't have a business.
Science is limited by the observability of phenomena - people are capanble of seeing God, but no one's been capable of measuring things that relate directly to God, only to other measurable phenomena that may have other explanations - hence the existence of God is falsifiable from science, and not a testable hypothesis.
Of course, though, science and measurable phenomena aren't everything - one of the reasons why a "God of the gaps" is pointless. People don't start out knowing what the want in life, or what good and evil are, or what they should do with their lives, and science (and engineering) have nothing to say about these - they can tell people good ways to achieve their goals, but not what those goals should be. Science and related fields do not deal with all that is, only all that can be measured. People turn to God (or other beliefs) because there are other parts of the world and themselves that they need to understand.
Science has good reason to be Godless - but that does not require or imply that the rest of life should be.
Gavin de Becker said it best: Bad security fools everyone but the bad guys.
Infinium doesn't have a console that it's been "building" for four years (and of which it had previously claimed to have a working model), it sues people who discuss its shady background, and now it's changed its business model to something that can be criticized by a frosh in high school without looking stupid (no games? no copy protection? what?).
My condolences to anyone related to the people running this company, particularly those of you who actually lent them money. To those who actually gave them money expecting a return on investment...oops.
Derek Lowe used this anecdote on his blog and it seems apropos.
Einstein is quoted as saying to Niels Bohr, "God does not play dice with the universe." to which Bohr responded, "Albert, stop telling God what to do."
Christianity and science are only incompatible if one holds the Bible to be absolutely inerrant and literal - but since only God is perfect, that doesn't make any sense. At minimum, it deifies the people who wrote and contributed to the Bible or their output, which is also inconsistent. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." Those who hold the Bible to be absolute make a god from their minds and intend to force all to worship it.
No thanks, I think I'll pass.
True, but Leviticus is one of the main arguments used against gay people in Christianity (the other being in Romans) - the people who use it as such (who have significant overlap with those who argue against evolution) are assuming that it is not just applicable to the Israelites of 3K years ago, but to modern Christians as well. If parts of it (rather than all of it) is useful, then one has to figure out which parts are useful, and why.
One of the African Episcopal priests (bishop?) interviewed for the New Yorker's article on the Episcopal Church's rift (about three months before - don't have a copy or a link) summarizes the conservative position by saying that the plain text of the Bible is true for all people and all times - their claim to rightness comes from their "lack" of interpretation. Once you factor in things such as historical context (in which parts of the Bible, such as Jesus' parables, swim) social context, and consistency, then their interpretations have to be judged on their own merit, rather than taken as dogma, which kills much of their appeal and power.
if the Bible is to be interpreted literally (according to a "plain" reading), why are there two Adam-and-Eve creation stories? Why don't Christians (in general) follow Leviticus? Why aren't women silenced in church (in accordance with a contentious letter of Paul's)?
The problem with "literal" interpretation is that everything in the Bible is interpreted, whether in translation or usage. The people who argue against evolution (and many of the advocates of conservatism in Christian churches) are arguing for a particular interpretation, by arguing that their version of the Bible is not an interpretation of the Bible, but the plain text, and hence faith derived from it is the only valid Christian faith (the "confessing church" movement, named after a more accurate movement in Nazi Germany, is an example). Fighting against evolution is an attempt to install their faith in society, to make it valid and real, as if they could force their version of God into existence.
As a separate issue, atheism doesn't really help get rid of dogmatic behavior - people believe and act in these ways either because they need to (in which case they will find something to believe in, and which enables them to behave accordingly) or because the object of their faith is real (in which case denying it would be untrue to what is) and they believe that their faith requires those actions. It's possible that the actions might be disconnected from the faith (if they are inconsistent with it), but atheism isn't the correct response to incorrect actions (because it would require ignorance of a truth). If there is a need to be dogmatic, atheism (or nonreligious beliefs) can serve just as well.