This post will be fair, factual, but it also may contain things that people may find mean or distasteful.
You think those two statements may be linked?
That's a fairly shallow outlook on life; if you have to work, life won't be worth living? (I know that is, to some extent, a trivialisation, but the fact of the matter remains)
Female circumcision no longer goes on in the western world, and it is unbelieveably oversimplistic to believe that only Jewish people get circumcised. I know of people in this country (England) who are circumcised, who aren't jewish. Another counter-example is the United States; doctors regularly perform circumcision, yet the majority of doctors aren't jewish, and neither are the majority of the patients.
There's also some discussion over the cause of the Jewish tradition of circumcision; it has proven health benefits, and Judaism may have implemented it for those reasons. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely to have this conjecture proved or refuted.
That's a fatally flawed argument. Just because it's something that many people fail at, or ignore, doesn't mean it's any more irrational than other emotional interactions. The high divorce rate can show two things: that some people are inherently unsuited to monogamy, or that some partnerships haven't had the underlying mental or physical sacrifices required for a relationship of that kind. There are enormous numbers of successful monogamous partnerships, and your decrying of this situation as 'irrational' is unjustified at best.
A rather overreactive backlash, there. Why do people in monogamous relationships deserve their partner cheating on them? Are you saying that we should not trust anyone (for this is obviously a question of trust) and, if any person proves to be unreliable, following on from or despite previous evidence, it is the truster's fault for giving them responsability in the first place? That is no way to run a society.
Furthermore, 'In my opinion' is terrible justification for an argument. I can say that I believe that open relationships are bad because everyone in them goes around hitting llamas with sticks. That doesn't make it true, and, if there is anecdotal evidence for this, the sample size is so small as to make the statement invalid in any case.
There is ignorance and stupidity everywhere, that much is certain. However, it seems strange to base a system of morality upon this premise, and, indeed, make good and evil mutually exclusive with the aforementioned traits.
It is fairly clear that there is no absolute morality; however, going by the basis of most moral codes (the rights of the individual) it is fairly easy to say that, for the majority of major moral codes, the actions of x group or individual disobey those codes.
You're describing a system of Lamarckist evolution, which has been proven not to take place. Furthermore, your argument appears immensely shallow; on the grand scheme of things, especially from the point of view of the species as a whole, noone cares about the sex life of the individual.
You're also proposing a system referred to as 'Sins of the Father'; why should an individual deserve to suffer for actions which they had no say in? Whilst it is clearly the case that men are not created equal, it should be a duty of society to reduce the impact of the differences as much as it can, by means such as a national health service, or social security.
A meaningless statement; either everything is the product of evolution or nothing is.
And today people kill for other things; I'd argue that Christianity itself didn't per se have anything to do with, say, the Spanish Inquisition; the Old and New Testament lie down very clear rules on killing (Vengence is mine, sayeth the lord. Mine, not yours.) and yet they are continually disobeyed; the religious wars were, by and large, political, rather than religious; the Crusades was political, the wars in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries were political.
Furthermore, it seems likely that the peoples delving into human sacrifice (as it were) were merely practicing their own, small, brand of science; they had no way of measuring things such as air pressure, or following cloud formations by satellite; it seemed logical to them that, in the same way that they control their microenvironment, some larger power controls the metaenvironment. If human sacrifice has worked in the past, who is to say that it won't work again?
There's the obvious logical flaw of post hoc ergo propter hoc, of course, but we're on the outside looking in, with much more knowledge.
People still believe a lot of things. It requires less thought to believe in a god, than to comprehend the more advanced scientific theories, and the evidence and philosophy that gave rise to them. Better education would surely be the answer, were the populations of most democratic states not religious themselves. To deny religion is to lose the almighty vote.
Really? The argument I've heard more often (in non-localised discussions) is that god was the impetus behind evolution, not that it is to be denied. To deny evolution is to deny the empiric method, to deny science itself.
Again, you're being contradictory; the application of religion to the discoveries of science are as an attempt to offer an explanation, so if you decry this you must also decry other investigative attempts; this is utterly contradicted by your initial statements on tradition, and your ones in this section on the subject of an ill-educated society.
This is amazingly contradictory; on the one hand you discard god because you cannot directly experience god, but then you support assertions with the same problems. Noone has experienced life from off this planet, Buddhism has as much evidence for it as the religions you have chosen to decry, and string theory...
Can you see an atom? Can you see Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, or its results? Can you see the disagreement between the standard model of quantum physics and general relativity?
Of course you can't; you can attempt to derive explanations to phenomena you have observed experimentally, but this kind of experimental empiricism remains bound by its apparatus; the only reason we know atoms to exist is that we postulated for the solution to a problem, in much the same way as many people find religion.
Partially this is due to the target group wanting a 'quick fix'; social factors cause this to be endemic on both sides of the doctor/patient divide, unfortunately.
I'd go even further than that; most psychoanalytical knowledge (especially that based of Freud) is just plain wrong. Of course, the reason that they can charge so much is generally a social one; never underestimate the hypocondria of society (particularly, american society) and, as before, the desire for a quick fix. The american dream isn't all it's cracked up to be.
That's mainly a question of efficiency. The amount of time and effort required to do the latter course of action, although better, is judged to be not worth it. This of course varies from doctor to doctor; it has to be remembered that doctors aren't superhuman, they have varying levels of motivation and interest, just like the rest of us. Sad, but true.
I both agree and disagree. Morally, a person should have the right to take their own life. However, it's fairly obvious that a person with some sort of psychiatric disorder is not acting rationally; I know a fellow who has bi-polar disorder, and, whilst he can feel suicidal fairly regularly, he always regrets it afterwards.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
Geneticists, on the whole, don't think eugenics is a bad idea. It's the general populace being biased with its association with national socialism.
Of course, eugenics has gone on for centuries; less so in people, but definitely in livestock and crops.
However, this I disagree with. Morally, there is no difference between a buffoon and a genius, and, whilst one is intellectually preferable, there is no essential difference between them.
Some said that, of course, I won't deny that, but, like most predictiors, they were wrong. They only got publicity because of the outlandish nature of their claims; noone wants to hear from the silent majority. This is true in all things; the dot com bubble, going to jupiter by 2001... We have advanced in leaps and bounds, but in unexpected directions.
Absolute tosh. Every single aspect of computer games has improved in the last decade. Graphics have improved. Game play has become more intricate, more based in reality. Immersivity and story telling have both gained some excellent champions. How can you call Half Life 2 juevenile crap? Planescape: Torment? Rise of Nations?
Of course, these are all PC games, but PC games have ALWAYS tended to be more intricate, more 'adult'. This was true a decade ago as it is now; Civilization was released in 1991 for the PC; what console game of the time had its complexity, its depth?
That's not to say console games are entirely lacking in these features; for example, I hear good things about Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem on the Nintendo Gamecube.
Every generation of video game players has had people longing for the golden days of yesteryear, but that's an extremely rose-tinted view. Every system had multitudes of forgotten failures. I can probably name 100 truly excellent NES games; what I don't remember are the thousands of terrible or mediocre ones that were released alongside them.
FMV 'games' are one of the least immersive things I can think of; where's the realism of such a limited amount of interactivity? If you want a 'realistic virtual world', try something like Half Life 2, or, if you desire something less linear, an RPG such as Morrowind or Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. Have you heard of these games? Have you played them?
Yeah, The Matrix made me feel depressed too.
Sweet Jesus. I haven't spent that much money in my life.
Because it's in development. Assuming the technology isn't limited in a multitude of ways (like all the things they are using at the moment are), as soon as the technology becomes available, it will be used.
YOU might. Not many others would, so we're lacking economic impetus.
They can, but in small numbers; remember the technology is still EXCEPTIONALLY young, and that's ignoring other problems; computer games, even the successful ones, are by and large fractured affairs; 'action' can happen all over the place, and there isn't a single focus for the game, like there is in football, say.
As for the rest of that example: where's the economic impetus? It's outrageously expensive for little guaranteed return.
YOU would. Again, the economics are all out of wack.
Ignoring the impossibility of a computer program being per se a 'sexual partner' (something you have mentioned twice now without any real reason), this is either extremely unlikely or already happening. If you mean the limited response style thangs that tend to come out of Japan, then you're set.
If you mean True AI, then no chance. No chance at all.
A fair enough pipe dream, but utterly implausable at current levels of technology. It would require, simultaneously, a much greater level of processing power, engineering and understanding of the workings of the brain that we current have. MUCH greater.
I'm not sure where this came from, or if it would work; that's not really something we can examine at the current time.
I think this is an oversimplification, because, ignoring everything else, there are some problems we simply cannot solve.
That's contradictory with your last statement; if we're all connected, then why is 'misery' the only thing that's isolated to the individual?
Most medical doctors DO realise that biological or chemical treatment is inferior to a more holistic medicine, but we come back again to the problem of economics; there simply aren't enough doctors to provide this.
Of course, that's ignoring that, for many things, there is a pill or a serum which can cure the ill; it is true for diseases and infections, and, believe it or not, it can be true for depression and the like; frequently, true sufferers from depression do not have their deepest problems sparked off by some catastrophic event, but something so otherwise insignificant that it seems an impossible cause for such a great reaction in a person. As the problem is neural chemistry, it's something we can treat with our tiny agents of change.
Again, with the contradictory statements. Nigh on all ethical systems are based around making life better for human beings (in whatever fashion).
Nice words, but meaningless. 'Speed up the process of evolution'? This shows either a basic misunderstanding of how evolution operates or a desire for style over substance in writing.
Evolution is not a change to a more advanced creature, but a tendency to change to one which can exist more efficiently in its situation. This could mean an increase in brain power, or a decrease. It depends on the change in circumstances.
What ideology is this?
Assuming no problems with the freedom of other individuals, no way of living is per se worse or better than another, just as the way one uses one's brain is cannot per se be wrong. Emotions are also what drive us to greater things; to remove them is to remove the impetus for improvement.
