exchemist

OK thanks. To me, EVA means extravehicular activity, so I was a bit stumped. Mind you, to me, STD means subscriber trunk dialling................

Yes, nice point.

But Christians are not Jews. Christianity is defined by the New Testament, put together between 50 and 100AD or thereabouts.

Traditionally, in say the 1960s and 1970s, feminism meant support for the concept of treating women equally with men in society, without preconceptions as to what roles may be appropriate for women to fulfil. As a male student at university in the early 70s, I used to describe myself as a feminist. I am not sure what further nuances the term may have acquired today, but I still regard myself as a feminist. Having worked in the Arabian Gulf, I feel sure that feminists in those societies aspire to exactly the same ideal. They are just further from achieving it. I do not really see that having entered the "digital age" changes anything. (P.S. This is now I think the 4th thread you have started about the sexes.)

Where's the chemistry? You don't provide any details of the composition of these objects. What's an EVA sponge?

Well I suppose the Roman Empire at the time of Christ could be said to be an Iron Age civilisation, but I think the term is generally restricted to pre-history, i.e. before there were written records.

Well obviously I am talking about the teaching of Christ as the figure represented in the gospels. One can do that without getting sidetracked into the quite separate question of evidence for and against Jesus as a historical person. This thread is about a question of Christian teaching. Let's not hijack the discussion.

I did not say St. Paul was an ascetic. Read more carefully. I said he was an advocate of asceticism. I think that is pretty hard to dispute when you read his epistles. It's not just marriage.

In my view, St. Paul has a lot to answer for, when it comes to the historically twisted attitude of much of Christianity towards sexual relations. It is significant, I think, that Christ himself had practically nothing to say on the subject. But in the Old Testament you get a very different picture from that painted by St. Paul. , for example the rather beautiful story about Adam's rib in Genesis 2:23-14 :- "This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh! She is to be called Woman, because she was taken from Man. This is why a man leaves his father and mother and becomes attached to his wife and they become one flesh." What a poetic and non-judgemental way to describe the primal urge for sex. To be fair to St. Paul, he was clearly an advocate of asceticism, which is by no means unique to Christianity. The practice of abstinence and the control of carnal appetites by the intellect, in order to achieve a higher state of spirituality, is practised in many religions. Even St. Paul acknowledges it is not for everyone. (By the way, some of your threads seem to betray a rather unhealthy attitude towards sexuality, for instance, besides this one, the one in which you are preoccupied with incels and the one about the roles of the sexes in society. I confess I am starting to find this a bit creepy.)

Oh indeed. I suspect the point here is that religion offers a way to appeal to the better nature of these youths, guiding them towards prosocial attitudes and behaviour, in a way they probably find fairly natural and acceptable, culturally. Some people think religious teaching is all about forbidding things and retribution, but of course it isn't at all like that really.

OK but then I'm not sure what you are now arguing. If you accept there are "universal principles" that Mankind tends to observe regardless of religion then they would also tend to be observed by those, such as Buddhists or atheists, who do not believe in a God or gods. To your second point, a drug cartel is not really a "social group". However there is indeed evidence that religion has a role to play in reducing crime. This 2014 study for instance, showed a significant beneficial effect of religion on youth crime: https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/41333/chapter/352355230?login=false I quote the 1st para of the Conclusion: This chapter provides evidence that religious influences are consequential in crime reduction. The vast majority of studies reviewed document the importance of religious influences in protecting youth from harmful outcomes as well as promoting beneficial and prosocial outcomes. The beneficial relationship between religion and crime reduction is not simply a function of religion’s constraining function or what it discourages (e.g., opposing drug use or delinquent behavior) but also a matter of what it encourages (e.g., promoting prosocial behaviors).

I think it is important to read these Genesis stories as allegorical. If you try to take them literally you end up looking a prize idiot, seeing as they are contradictory in so many ways. The main Christian (and, I believe, Jewish) denominations have always seen them as allegorical, with a message behind them, rather than literal fact. It seems to me the story of the Fall is basically a way to explain why there is hardship in life, in spite of the apparently contradictory belief in a loving God who takes care of His creation. The ancient Greeks, for instance, had no such concept of a loving God. So for them the vicissitudes of life could be attributed to the gods fooling with humanity arbitrarily, for their own amusement. But Christianity and Judaism have this idea of a benign, personal God, which is a bit hard to reconcile with all the unpleasant aspects of life. Coming to the specifics, there is no suggestion in the bible, so far as I am aware, that childbirth would be a source of sorrow. It would be painful, sure, but the arrival of a child is assumed, generally in the bible, to be a source of delight and celebration.

I think it's a misconception to think that natural selection will necessarily eliminate all inherited traits that do not promote reproductive success. Furthermore I'm not sure it is at all clear that that sexual orientation is inherited in the first place. With that in mind one should be able to see why homosexual behaviour might continue to be found in nature, natural selection notwithstanding. Even if homosexuality is to some degree inherited, considering that Man is a social creature, success for the group would be expected to be driven by factors that help the group to pass on its genes successfully to subsequent generations, rather than simply operating at the level of the individual. There are roles in human society for individuals that contribute to that, apart from procreating themselves. For instance one explanation for the longevity of human life, way past procreation age, is that the wisdom and skills of experience have value to the group, as does the help of grandparents with childcare. So individuals that don't actually procreate themselves may nonetheless serve an evolutionary purpose at group level.

This doesn't bear a moment's serious examination. While it is true that morality in western societies is strongly coloured by the pervasive heritage of Christianity, similar moral principles are found in numerous societies elsewhere that have a radically different idea of God or gods, or no idea of a god at all. (One obvious example of the last would be Buddhist societies.) Respect for life and for property seems to be a natural trait among human beings - and one can immediately see why it would be, for a social animal, simply to avoid conflict. Religions with a god or gods may present these natural principles as instructions from a God who judges humanity's compliance. This certainly provide societies with nice, explicit and easy to grasp reasons for morality, but it is idle to pretend that without belief in a god these moral principles would not be present.

The requirement for (reproducible) observational evidence is only axiomatic for applying the scientific method, the purpose of which is the study of nature. The scientific method is shown to "work", in the sense that we can understand and predict far more about nature than we could before the Renaissance. So I can't see there is anything circular about employing it. Secondly, you are wrong to characterise faith in science as faith in what you call "individuals". The whole nature of science is that it is a collective enterprise that does not rely on individuals. That's why observations need to be reproducible, i.e. capable of being agreed upon by different people, in different places and using different methods. The hypotheses and theories put forward by any one individual to account for observations are also subject to criticism by other people. Active areas of research are full of disputes and argument. You are obviously right that we all take on trust a great deal of what one can call "settled science", by reading books, attending lectures and so forth. The same is true in all other disciplines of study. If nobody did that we would all be constantly reinventing the wheel. But that obviously does not mean, in the case of science, that we have abandoned the requirement for reproducible evidence. We simply trust the observations reported and validated by others and well-tested theories associated with them.

Yes it’s a psychological pathology, if not an actual mental illness. What is it that makes you an authority on it?

It's absurd to call incels a "demographic", when they are just a handful of misfits. Why are you fixing on incels in this thread? Is it really incels that you want to talk about, for some reason? I note, from this article, that incels are prone to suicidal thoughts: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/articles-heterodoxy/202208/inside-the-minds-the-incels. I also note that you speak of it being "merciful" to execute them. But we don't generally help mentally ill people with suicidal thoughts by bumping them off, do we? This is strange talk from one of the Calvinist "Elect".

I expect the mods will move it for you if they think that’s best.

Not sure this belongs in the maths section but I have read there is a view that the entropy increase in irreversible processes determines the direction of time, the issue being, if I have it right, that the equations of mechanics are symmetrical with respect to time, so the only thing distinguishing the past from the present or future is lower entropy.

In theory it does not experience time (time dilation -> ∞ as v -> c). Absent any sense of time, it seems to me that "experience" has no meaning.

The Americans here will just love "dryass"😁.

A couple of points. One is this would not have to be a totalitarian state, just an authoritarian one. Totalitarianism means the control, typically by manipulation, surveillance and coercion, of all facets of society. An extant example is N Korea. What you describe could be any kind of "strongman" rule, like that of Franco or Mussolini - or perhaps even Trump, as the authors of Project 2025 seem to hope. The more important point, though is that what you outline ignores a blindingly obvious fact: that the behaviour of human beings is partly driven by circumstances and can change when those circumstances change. A "murderer" does not automatically go on murdering if released from prison. It all depends on what led to the first murder. An "incel" , who of course is not even a criminal, is someone with an unhealthy psychological condition at a particular stage in their life. That can change. I feel sure a lot of incels simply grow out of it - it all seems very feeble and adolescent. But under your proposal they would all be dead. Your proposal to treat groups of human beings as subhuman, on the basis of applying fixed labels to them, is not only morally repugnant (and deeply unChristian, as I feel sure you must be aware) but also ignorant of actual human behaviour.

Absolutely not. By far the best thing is to expressly avoid talking up nuclear threats. If you make nuclear threats, Putin will feel he has to respond in kind, in order not to show weakness. Before before you know it, he will have backed himself into a rhetorical corner from which he cannot escape without either losing face or actually using these weapons. Russia already knows Nato will retaliate with nukes if Russia uses them to attack NATO states. There is no need to reiterate this in the form of a public threat, which would effectively force him to make public threats as well.

What makes you say we have not been getting closer? This latest piece of work shows the contrary, surely? And your remark about not being able to create life is a complete non-sequitur. -1

Haha I was just thinking about that film. But I haven’t looked into how these connections function in the brain. It’s a long way from my stamping ground.