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Is there a difference between these two definitions? "an atheist is someone who does not believe that God exists" and "An atheist is someone who believes that God does not exist" Ordinarily the statements are considered equivalent. But, by one definition a rock is an atheist. A rock doesn't believe anything, so it doesn't believe in God. A person who has never been told about God is in the same position as that rock. You can't believe in something that you don't know about. By that definition, they are an a atheist. But, by the other definition, a rock can't believe that God does not exist. The rock is not an atheist. A person who has never heard about God is, again, in the same position as that rock; they hold no opinion about the nonexistence of God and is therefore not an atheist. The OP's question talks about nature or nurture. Being told that God exists (or that some people think He exists) is part of nurture. By the first definition, if you do not receive that nurture you are an atheist. By the second definition, if you do not receive that nurture you are not an atheist. So the answer to the question depends very strongly on how you define atheism.

All electric charges possess an electric field around them. When they move their charge interacts with both their own electric field and the electric fields due to any other charges. Moving electric charges induce a magnetic field. We call this effect electromagnetism. This field changes according to the movement of the charges concerned. This distinguishes it from 'permanent magenetic' fields which do not change with movement (apart from moving bodily themselves with the magnet) But as Genady says the term is also used in a more general manner to cover all matter electrical and magnetic.

I have a memory of a sci-fi short story I read as teenager in the 1960s, in which, after a spacecraft crashes on an alien world, 4 members of the crew regain consciousness to find their bodies, apart from the brain and spinal cord, have been consumed by a sort of protoplasmic organism. The organism however supports and hosts the brain and spinal cord, as it is useful to its existence to have a directing mind. All four are in one blob and are able to communicate telepathically within the blob. The blob is shape-shifting and can take on forms instructed by the brains it hosts. So they can "make" arms, for example, by a process of mind control. The 4 crew members argue, fight and two eventually are killed, while the remaining two separate and try to reconstruct their human forms. I don't remember the author but I think the title was "Four In One". I've searched the internet for this without success. Does anybody recognise this story from my description and, if so, can you provide any more details about it? Update: I've found it: Damon Knight, 1953. There is even a pdf of the story: https://epdf.tips/four-in-one.html So now the question is different: does anyone else but me know this story? It's one that made quite an impression on me at the time, so that I still remember it, more than half a century later.

I wonder if this may be about virtual photons as "force carriers" in magnetism. They do that, don't they, in QED? (I never learnt this stuff).

No, not really. I think this idea comes from a misunderstanding of time dilation. While it is true that a clock moving relative to you would,as measured by you, tick slower and slower as it it approached the speed of light, the equation that predicts this is "undefined" for speeds greater than c (It gives a result that is the square root of a negative number. ) Now there are some setups that could be used to create causality issues in Relativity if FTL is allowed. Basically, this involves extended systems moving relative to each other, and rely on how these systems measures simultaneity differently. An example of such a system would be two long trains passing each other in opposite directions. One train sends an FTL signal from one car to another. That car transfers the signal a car of the other train as they pass each other. The second train sends an FTL answer back along it length, to be transferred back to the car that originated the message. Under the right conditions, allowing FTL transmission can result in the answer arriving at the origin before the initial signal was sent. This goes back to what swansont was referring to a few posts ago. The truth is that the Theory make no predictions as to what would happen if you exceeded c, as that is beyond it range of applicability.

Just been trying to remember something I'd read long ago about episodic memory that could be relevant to this discussion. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/uncategorized/myth-eyewitness-testimony-is-the-best-kind-of-evidence.html https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/mandela-effect-what-is-it-and-why-does-it-happen.html https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256375079_Collective_representation_elicit_widespread_individual_false_memories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_effect (My emphasis.) While I have the greatest respect for the Law, and I always abide by it and recommend everybody to do the same, we should always keep in mind that in the end it is a product of human convention, while science ellucidates facts and correlations between those facts. If science makes it objectively, reproducibly, and unambiguously clear that we have reasons to believe witness accounts are not totally reliable, the Law --and the law people-- would be well advised to take science's salient facts into account as, in the words of a famous scientist, "Nature cannot be fooled."

Yet you didn't post your source. Interesting how you have a convenient explanation for everything at the ready. Perhaps you should do more than just a "cursory search" when looking into matters such as this. I find it equally laughable how you find yourself unable to objectively consider this event as it is reported by the actual eye witnesses. I wonder why that is. And yes, I'm sure the town makes millions off of that UFO museum. Right back at you. Don't allow your confirmation bias and self-ordained skepticism to get in the way of objective observation. And it's not a youtube video, it's a feature length documentary; one that you won't watch, of course, because you already know you're correct.

Nay, it is thou who discombobulates me with thy maelstrom in a way.

This would be boring if it weren’t so annoying. Dim - You’re saying sometimes stories from religion have value, correct? If not, please set me straight. If so, please advise who claims otherwise. There are so many conflated concepts here. Atheism and lack of belief in god or gods. Opposition to organized religion, primary of the Abrahamic variety. Perhaps going back to the basics and defining our terms would suffice to move past the bickering ridiculousness.

Photons do not cause magnetic attraction. First, the classical EM field consists of very rapidly oscillating electric field, and an associated --also very rapidly oscilating-- magnetic field perpendicular to the E field, and both perpendicular to the direction of propagation of such EM field. Particles are predicted to oscillate in response by the theory, and so it is confirmed experimentally. That's how antennae work. It's oscillation, rather than overall attraction. Photons, OTOH, are quanta of such EM field. They can be absorbed, emitted, scatter... They never result in overall attraction either. They just change the state of electrically charged particles by making them change their energy and momentum. I hope that helps.

As Mudinho did live there, and that was his typical behavior, then for the young women to have seen a space creature there would have to have been two such beings — the known one, Mudinho, and the hypothetical one, an alien — but as they reported only one skinny humanoid crouching in the mud, and not two, we are left with no rational support for there having been any beings present other than Mudinho. Today, the three women do still give interviews about their experience. There is one very important detail that has changed since their original story: Today, they say they knew Mudinho well, and had even given him cigarettes in the past; so of course they would not have mistaken him for an alien. However, in their original reports from 1996, they said they didn't know him, and took him for a devil when they saw him. It's one more example of stories changing and growing to fit a changing and growing narrative that gains mass traction in pop culture. Everyone wants to be in on it, and everyone wants to be seen as credible and correct. I agree with @Moontanman that there is a body of cases that do appear to represent truly anomalous and unexplained aerial events, and these may at some point turn out to be some fascinating atmospheric phenomenon that expands our view of things. They should not be dismissed, and should be studied. But these Stanton Friedman generated narratives are mostly self-promoting flapdoodle and just piss poor science. As Dunning notes: Friedman's whole career, in fact, consisted of compiling bits and pieces of poor-quality evidence, mainly unverified eyewitness testimony usually taken years or decades after an event; and then composing an original alien visitation story that incorporates all those bits and is presented as the factual account of what happened. He's best known as the original author of the Roswell mythology, in which he worked with a retired mortician named Glenn Dennis. In 1989 — more than four decades after the 1947 Roswell crash was alleged to have happened — Friedman carefully wove together a string of snippets of Dennis' assorted memories of having worked in that town, and created the story we know today of a spaceship crash and small alien bodies being recovered. It was published in 1991, the first time that story even existed. Friedman couldn't have cared less that the things Dennis thought he remembered actually took place over a span of twelve years and had nothing to do with each other; his goal was to craft an original UFO narrative. That was Friedman's thing. That was what he did professionally... Would Mudinho have necessitated the Brazilian military arriving to Varginha en masse, blocking off roads and pointing rifles at people? I don't think so. Also, I think three teenage girls are able to discern the difference between a human and non-human creature in broad daylight at 3:00 pm.

He’s talking about resonant scattering - i.e. absorption with an allowed transition - which is not the same thing. He’s right that that explanation doesn’t work, for reasons he gives, but that’s not the QM explanation being offered. So one can make the case that he’s debunking a strawman. Absorption by a virtual state doesn’t permit transfer of energy or momentum to the atom; the only possibility is for the photon to continue on along the same path. (Which, again, is not the case he discusses)

If you heat the medium in which the bacterial are (e.g. yoghurt) sufficiently high, they will die. The intestine is physiologically outside of our bodies (our whole food intake and digestion tract is basically like a kind of hose that goes goes through our bodies. Interaction with the immune system only happens fairly close to the intestinal walls (with some exceptions).

Yes, I recall some famous sighting in either Brazil or Argentina which was mentioned in UFO literature back then. Similar elements. Thanks for the links - the 1896 account does sound Wellsian. The extremely low density of the ETs was a nice touch.

From something I read recently, the highest number of bone grafts happening these days is in dental work. When you lose a tooth, the bone that used to surround the root of the tooth tends to lose mass over time. If you later want to insert a dental implant in that empty socket, it can be necessary or better to rebuild that lost bone to provide a strong foundation for the implanted titanium screw. They either use your own bone, animal product, or something synthetic to produce new bone. I'm not fully up to date on the details, but here is a link, I'm sure you can find more about the subject once you've read it up : https://www.bupa.co.uk/dental/dental-care/treatments/dental-implants/supporting-treatments/bone-grafts

I don't see how. I'm not really up to par on this; it's 40 years or more since I worked with bones - and they were dead. My vague notion is that bone cells are too stupid to respond to hormones. I think you need to give them a pattern. Insert a graft of the right shape. You really ought to be discussing this with an expert.

''In quantum field theory, the Casimir effect is a physical force acting on the macroscopic boundaries of a confined space which arises from the quantum fluctuations of the field. It is named after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir, who predicted the effect for electromagnetic systems in 1948. ''

Title says "What is the Casimir effect used for ?". Possible answer: repulsive Casimir forces may have applications in nano-devices: (Bold by me. Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.07994.pdf) Paper on repulsive Casimir forces: https://arxiv.org/abs/1202.6415

If you skip the click bait videos and go to the actual publication (currently available in pre-print) you'll see exactly what lamda has been trained on: 1.56 trillion words. Just text, 90% of it English. Level 17 and level 32.

Wow, you are confused. At this website, it's not up to you to dictate people's comings and goings. Or how they should act on their feelings about another posters content. You are here to get feedback, and I see ZERO evidence of a good faith effort to understand our points of critique. Or even engage with questions of how terms are defined. Nonetheless I will post, or not post, as the spirit moves me, not because some arrogant newbie has decided to dictate terms of engagement.

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This is how your logic goes: It's a genuine paradox: Atheist/"arelionist", whatever, state's as a matter of fact, there is no such thing as Santa. (Edit let's not get into semantics here.) So therefore, in a world without Santa, the children's books and the idea's therein have to be written by man and accepted by their fellow man. So therefore, if a lot of people, even in the face of cultural difference, say "that's an idea worth following". No Santa needed. Therefore, Santa has become a weapon for atheism/<insert word>.

What are you even talking about? Do you expect me to retype anything that people just don't bother to actually read before responding to? It's not "evidence" it's "argumentation that I've made but people ignored" Stop accusing me of doing something that I didn't do. It's getting ANNOYING. Make the darn arguments if you've got one. Stop with the stupid accusatory shenanigans.

I've already told you in the reply that you've just replied to: Fuctional scope is vastly different between the two Compartmentalization in code but not DNA (when I repeated myself in the other thread, some idiot kept insisting that I'm "using my own writing as evidence" SMH)

Which "fact," and what "argument?" It takes a bit more than some half-baked quips to refute an argumentation, unless you're talking about some random internet forum. Arguing from assertion, that's what I'm seeing the most. On top of that, not even addressing the points I've made in the post and only the title (very typical of short attention spans to just look at the title and argue against that) I can see why I should only engage with professional academics- The venue filters out people who have no idea how to field an actual argument with their half-baked thoughts. I'm going to wait for your next random handwave.

Tell that to the strawman. I wouldn't have left a red 1, but the post didn't deserve a green 1. Because you're conflating santa and god in an attempt to ridicule my premise, not argue it. But just to be clear, most philosophical/cultural attacks on religion revolves around the existence of god (or santa if you prefer), rather than the credence of the philosophies written.