John Cuthber

" Slavery, in and of itself, was not originally such a bad thing, " Yes it was. "I worked for a company for 24 and they no longer required my services and laid me off, killed me, said I was done...." Dead yet? No, OK that's better than slavery then. Gees, "Consider two villages that were at war; when one village is defeated, it may no longer have the ability to provide for its people. So what do the winners do" I considered that. I came to the conclusion that the war should not have been declared. In addition to the reduced death toll, it means I don't have to pretend that slavery is a good thing. Do you really thing there's a God up there who wants dead people + slaves? "If initially its "alright" to treat non-tribe members in a sub-tribe manner,..." it isn't "then racism is not without reason, and therefore no more immoral than slavery." That's consistent with the idea that racism is obviously wrong. BTW the site rules proscribe racism, so think carefully about how you reply to that.

OK, I own you, I'm tired of feeding you. I kill you. happy? Or do you think slavery means something else? I'm a wage-slave, but that's just a rhetorical term. It's wrong, even within it's own frame of reference.

The hole is just like a slit. Once the light has gone through it, it spreads out, by diffraction. That's my point. The pipe would need to be infinitely wide not to touch the sides of the beam. That's he point of a Gaussian beam profile.

I don't see any sensible doubt about the wrongness of slavery. Even by the standards of most religions, it's wrong. Have a look at what I wrote in post 25.

Sorry to dissapoint you, but it does. The end of the pipe behaves like a hole in a barrier so there's diffraction and, as soon as the light leaves the pipe, it starts to spread out. So, it doesn't have a well defined "direction" to change.

So you're just assuming that religion wasn't a part of society at some stage and then positing that people still had morals because they didn't die? Obviously, not If I was just assuming it was to do with our survival I wouldn't have mentioned the other reasons. Are you somehow unable to count to three or something? Pears, Are you saying that religion got it right when telling you where to get your slaves from?

Three things, if we didn't cooperate we would die out. we didn't die so we must have cooperated Our innate morals Our evolutionary ancestors' morals.

"Countries with the highest consumption of dairy also have the highest rates of osteoporosis." The confounding variable there is longevity. "That's because animal protein, including that from dairy products, may leach more calcium from the bones " Or it may not There is still no evidence for a mechanism, just an assertion by someone trying to sell her book. In any event, if you are concerned about calcium loss- eat cheeseburgers.

This is interesting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Victor_Zammit

"Will evolution play a role in colonization of extraterrestrial planets?" For a start, what could possibly stop evolution playing a part? Also, there was a program I saw the other day which said that one of the most plausible ways we can get round the problem of radiation damage to people in space travel is to find genetic markers for people who are naturally more resistant so we can send them. Your genes may already have decided whether or not your relatives are going to be among the first space travellers. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03vpc74/Horizon_20132014_Man_on_Mars_Mission_to_the_Red_Planet/

Is this a bit like saying the best takeaway food place known to me is n the city where I live? The oldest known star is interesting. the fact that it's nearby may simply reflect the fact that it's harder for us to judge the ages of more distant ones.

"The OP suggests that morality can be had, without religion. My thought is that morality both causes religion in the first place, and defines it, in the second place. " ​OK, how come religion keeps getting morality utterly wrong (in the ways I have already pointed out)? And, to clarify "Earlier it was noted that religion causes or allows slavery and wars. This may well be the case, but the only solution is to have everybody following the same book" For a start, if doesn't just allow them, it encourages them. People are innately disinclined to kill others, but will do so if the "other" is dehumanised or if they are told that "It is God's will and you will be punished if you do not". Without religion (and a matching deity) you can't tell them that. And the solution is not that they all follow the same book, (just for a start, many of those books oppress women, so, for half the population it's no solution at all). It's that we need the right book. Perhaps nobody has written that book, or perhaps it's just one line long "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you". " We would have to kill the immoral bastard." No, it's borderline insane to say you need to kill someone for what he says.

The light isnt destroyed, it just gets moved. The fringes have light and dark bands but the light bands are brighter than you would expect without the interference effects.

"Why can it not go in Cosmology and Astronomy" Because it has nothing to do with cosmology or astronomy. "many Astronomers and Cosmologists like this sort of things" They probably like sex too, but ... "Several thousand did in the Royal Albert Hall." Really? They got several thousand cosmologists + astronomers together?

Given some Dr Who Fans' behaviour, should it be in religion?

John Cuthber, on 11 Feb 2014 - 06:42 AM, said: And somehow, you seem to end up with a "Good book" that says "You must hate and kill the following groups of people..." and " You may take these people as slaves..." and so on. It seems morality was doing OK until religion came along. It's hard to take this seriously since both the Egyptians and Sumerians (earliest recorded history) had deities. And those deities "believed in" slavery and killing the "other guys" Tar's comment was made concerning the origin of religion " Write the stuff down, and you have a good book. Get a bunch of people holding the same good book sacred, and you have a religion." All you have done is said that my comments refer to an older religion than, for example, Christianity or Judaism. So what? Tar, re "One baby is going to wind up with the good thing in their hand and the other baby is going to cry at the injustice." True, but once they are a little older, they learn to "trade" (in a very general sense). It's when they get cheated in their trading that you really start getting moral conflict. If I get killed by a lion, that's not a moral issue- lions don't know any "better". If I get killed by a person, that's possibly a moral issue, depending on the circumstances. Does our innate sense of "right and wrong" cover that distinction? Re. "If you can have morality without religion, would you also argue you can have justice without judges and a law to go by?" Yes. " Everybody still knew the difference between right and wrong, but wound up waiting in line for toilet paper. " Non sequiteur. Everybody knew that a small number of people were stealing the wealth and lying and cheating to do it. That dishonesty led to things like shortages. The people at the top knew it too. So? "And the Soviet Union grew into somewhat of an evil empire during the cold war." There are other secular governments who succeeded so it's not sensible to blame the failings of the Soviet Union on the lack of religion. I don't think it's a strong argument, but some would say the USSR simply replaced other religions with "Communism" and replaced the clergy with "the Party".

"The thing is what I'm thinking is if a solution has an equal concentration of an acid and base it must be neutral." Oddly, no. "Why is it that in formula, PH is only determined by H+ concentration, Can't we find PH using OH- concentration." You generally can. pH + pOH = 14 "The definition of base says it must produce OH ions in solution, bicarbonate is not producing OH ions in solution why is it considered a base?" It does, but nobody wrote down that reaction HCO3- +H2O <--> OH- + H2CO3 But bicarbonate is a weak base, so that reaction doesn't work very well. It doesn't produce much OH- I think you need to understand the idea of equilibrium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_equilibrium Not all reactions go completely to products (in fact, strictly speaking, no reaction does- though some get extremely close)

The right of the weapons industry to make profits shall not be infringed.

If the surface was truly black, you wouldn't. The reason you can see it is that the "black" surface you use reflects a small percentage of the light. Because a laser is very bright you can still see the small fraction of it that bounces off the "black" surface. However, and this is the important point made earlier. If you use a blackened photographic plate, very few photons will be reflected. If you use two razor blades and a piece of copper wire, quite a lot of the photons will be reflected. But the diffraction pattern is pretty much the same in both cases. So the amount of reflection can not be important.

"You can see there is nothing in between electrode from chalk stick and water:" And, it's the water that conducts the electricity. Thanks for proving my point. ""most" doesn't mean "all"." At least I said "most" while you said that "any" stationers' chalk is the carbonate. "Chalk you can buy in any stationery shop for penny." Again, thanks for illustrating my point. "The all sources in mine native language mention CaCO3 as material for blackboard chalk sticks. And only source mentioning CaSO4 are in English language." So the ones that are in the same language as the OP's question have a good chance of referring to... "Any insulator can become electric conductor. It's just a matter of voltage." indeed, but once you are talking about dielectric breakdown you are no longer talking about electrolysis . So, once again, thanks for illustrating my point. I can't see how the video will help.

And somehow, you seem to end up with a "Good book" that says "You must hate and kill the following groups of people..." and " You may take these people as slaves..." and so on. It seems morality was doing OK until religion came along.

This thread started years ago. There are probably languages now that didn't exist when the question was first asked. I also suspect that, by now, the OP has got the hang of at least one language (and I'd not be at all shocked to find they have learned (at least bits of) several). ecoli, Am I right?

Thankyou. Being influenced by known results of experiments is called doing science. As I said, one of the classic ways of illustrating this is with a blackened photographic plate. The notable thing about about blackened plates is that they are black. So light doesn't bounce off them if it misses the slits.

A deep question. The answer is that it behaves as if it does. You still get a diffraction pattern

This http://www.123rf.com/photo_1364035_a-giraffe-feeding-on-the-grass-in-wildlife-park-in-england.html suggests that they are able to eat grass. Isn't this "And why do we not have another variant of this animal in the wild? (unless you consider animals like the alpaca etc.)?" a bit like saying "Why don't we have another variant on the shark (unless you consider dogfish and killer whales etc)"?