What we have here is people using science to support their religious claims. This "museum" is chock full of "evidence" that their fundamentalist cosmology is correct. They put on the trappings of science to give authority to their religious ideals of biblical infallibility, inerrancy, and literalism.
These claims of infallibility are at the heart of what makes religious systems tick; without it religion becomes more of a safe social club with little memetic virulence. These claims of absolute knowledge are the very currency of religion, and this is why science and rationalism threaten all current metaphysical, spiritual, and moral institutions.
Since the churches don't have power in modern civil governments anymore, they can't force retractions using torture, imprisonment, and death. This is simply a different tactic, and it won't work.
Also, it seems to me that slashdot is more agnostic than atheistic, in that we think these wild claims people make about God are pretty fuckin' silly! Or pretty fuckin' scary. Although I'm sure many of us have read and agreed with Dawkins and Harris, we cannot completely rule out the idea even though we find it extremely unlikely.
This is fine, as long as they give all citizens access to the data. Also, all government workers would also need to be listed in this database. I could stomach living in a glass house, AS LONG AS IT'S TWO WAY, NOT ONE WAY. Make the government drink it's own coolade, and they desire for this sort of thing will be quickly chilled.
If there was a correlation between CD sales dropping and computer ownership rising, it could also be attributed to, oh, I don't know, SPENDING MORE TIME ON THE COMPUTER? Like gaming, porn, email, research, etc. etc. etc.
As "they" say, "40% of all statistics are wrong.". Or was it 30%...who's counting.
This is a sign of not getting the big picture. Lucky for us; I hope nobody tells them what is actually going on.
OK, unless you're of the "trademarks are evil" school, it seems like there's nothing wrong with this. In "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", Raymond talks about how he and O'Reilly tried to trademark the term "Open Source", and have it defined by the OSD. His reasoning was that there would be legal recourse against people using the term open source when not actually opening their source code. And after seeing shenanigans of this sort (Sun, anyone?), this makes perfect sense.
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What we have here is people using science to support their religious claims. This "museum" is chock full of "evidence" that their fundamentalist cosmology is correct. They put on the trappings of science to give authority to their religious ideals of biblical infallibility, inerrancy, and literalism.
These claims of infallibility are at the heart of what makes religious systems tick; without it religion becomes more of a safe social club with little memetic virulence. These claims of absolute knowledge are the very currency of religion, and this is why science and rationalism threaten all current metaphysical, spiritual, and moral institutions.
Since the churches don't have power in modern civil governments anymore, they can't force retractions using torture, imprisonment, and death. This is simply a different tactic, and it won't work.
Also, it seems to me that slashdot is more agnostic than atheistic, in that we think these wild claims people make about God are pretty fuckin' silly! Or pretty fuckin' scary. Although I'm sure many of us have read and agreed with Dawkins and Harris, we cannot completely rule out the idea even though we find it extremely unlikely.
This is fine, as long as they give all citizens access to the data. Also, all government workers would also need to be listed in this database. I could stomach living in a glass house, AS LONG AS IT'S TWO WAY, NOT ONE WAY. Make the government drink it's own coolade, and they desire for this sort of thing will be quickly chilled.
If there was a correlation between CD sales dropping and computer ownership rising, it could also be attributed to, oh, I don't know, SPENDING MORE TIME ON THE COMPUTER? Like gaming, porn, email, research, etc. etc. etc. As "they" say, "40% of all statistics are wrong.". Or was it 30%...who's counting. This is a sign of not getting the big picture. Lucky for us; I hope nobody tells them what is actually going on.
OK, unless you're of the "trademarks are evil" school, it seems like there's nothing wrong with this. In "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", Raymond talks about how he and O'Reilly tried to trademark the term "Open Source", and have it defined by the OSD. His reasoning was that there would be legal recourse against people using the term open source when not actually opening their source code. And after seeing shenanigans of this sort (Sun, anyone?), this makes perfect sense.