Phi for All

Why would the default state be one of irrational belief in supernatural explanations? Why do people who remain skeptical and refuse to put strong belief in things they can't possibly know about get called "pseudo intellects" who "condemn" the believers? It seems to me that the neutral atheists are being persecuted by the zealots.

There's no evidence for creationism. There's a thread where a creationist asked for everyone to present evidence and no one could. I'll look for it.. I think the best, quickest presentations you can give to creationists is to tell them about one of the first vertebrate animals, like Haikuichthys. Most creationists are hung up on the "monkey descendant" bit of evolution, so it kind of blows them away when you go all the way back to the common ancestor for everything with a backbone and it's a fish.. Then show them this video: Dawkins showing how vertebrate design, far from "perfect", is nevertheless a product of millions of years of awesome evolution.

There is an audible tone that goes off in your head. It signals the brain to redirect all rational thought through the heart filters. You end up making the stupidest decisions while wearing an equally stupid grin. It's grand.

Ultimately, our rule must stand on the principle that you attack the idea and not the person. It's simple and I think it distinguishes us from most other discussion sites, where flaming seems to be conflated with freedom of speech. This is a special word for us, since crackpot ideas are usually about some kind of science. Perhaps we need a different term for ideas that are not merely non-mainstream, but that actively ignore rational arguments and lack supportive rigor. md65536 suggested "crank ideas" to highlight the distinction.

You're right, there needs to be a distinction. Exploring a crackpot idea shouldn't be such a negative thing, but being so obsessive about it that you stop listening to peer input is completely different. This is a tough question for me. Is it a personal attack to call someone an AGW denialist if that's the stance they take? Is it a personal attack to call someone a creationist if they believe in a literal bible that places the age of the Earth around 6000 years? And if someone claims that tens of thousands of scientists representing hundreds of millions of hours of observation, research and experimentation have got it all wrong and THEY have figured out the real answer all by themselves and won't listen to any refutations, is it a personal attack to call them a crackpot?

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What can we do, that God cannot do alone? We're apparently capable of believing strongly in things we can't possibly know about. God can't do that alone, he needs our voluntary irrationality.

I'm not shifting any goal posts. You asked if one could be moral without compassion, or compassionate without morals. I'm setting up a situation to show how one could do so. You admitted earlier that morals are made up by the society. If you can't follow the morals of the Peruvian society we both grew up in, how can we view you as a compassionate Peruvian? You sound like someone who is making a moral judgement that lacks all compassion.

There's no addiction, no withdrawal. You wanted to experiment with heroin for the first time, I was worried you'd hurt yourself so I stole it when you weren't looking. Am I compassionate, or am I a thief? Separate question, let's say our culture is Peruvian and it's our ritual mushrooms instead of heroin, but my concerns remain the same about you. Did anything change morally? Compassionately?

I stole your heroin because i'm afraid you'll overdose. Am I compassionate or immoral?

This is one of my tests for corporate involvement. When government is doing something that doesn't make sense, or actually works against what we know is right, look for special interests trying to legislate more profit. It wasn't the government that removed the solar heat from the White House after it had been installed, it was Big Oil making sure a message was sent about protecting their infrastructure.

You could spend an inordinate amount of resources trying to correct this technically, or you could fix it in the script with one of the actors adding the line, "It was warmer earlier" or "It's gotten colder all of a sudden". Unless your film has a reason this has to be summer, this should work.

Don't look where the troll points.

It depends. Are you going to make us wait until you graduate before you tell us what your proof (truth) is? How much science have you studied so far?

It's hard to believe we're the only ones complaining to IPB about it. This shouldn't be that difficult for them to fix, but it's getting worse instead of better. I base my argument that they should fix it soon on sheer incredulity.

The steed I sit astride is named "Evidence", and the view from up here is magnificent. Science is the only human system that attempts to raise itself above faith, to provide support instead of guesses and hunches. It may have started by taking more on faith, but every day we progress god(s) are forced out of the gaps in our knowledge. Faith isn't a foundation, it's a Styrofoam house built on dirt compared to science. While my horse can't completely erase all skepticism, she does give me reason to trust explanations I receive while up here. Evidence also elevates my claims over foundation-less faith-based answers. Explanations mean something when they have evidence to back them up. Wishing that dreams will come when our mortal coils have been shuffled-off is just hope, and can't be trusted. I wish it was like that when we die, experiencing anything we can dream of for eternity. I hope, but I don't trust that explanation, and I certainly would never consider believing it unquestioningly with faith.

Because it asks you to unquestioningly believe in something you can't possibly know about. Relying on faith is like selling everything you own to place a bet on a horse race. You're absolutely sure of the bet NOT because you've scouted the track and know every horse and jockey and have taken weather and crowds into consideration. You place the bet based on a "hunch", a gut feeling, or because someone else told you the horse was a winner. How is that rational?

Perhaps (s)he will continue to participate with the original account (s)he joined with.

danston has been banned as a sockpuppet account for nyouremyperfect10, which is still an active account. We'll treat this as a memory lapse.

For personal verification of anything I claim to believe in, I define "belief" in three different ways; trust, hope and faith. Trust is the type of belief you can have when there is empirical evidence to support it. I trust in evolution because I can see it working, test it myself, read all the evidence that supports it. Hope is wishful thinking. I hope my consciousness lives on after my body dies, but I have nothing to support that belief, and I don't do anything to center my life on that hope; it's just a wish I harbor. Faith asks me to believe strongly, without question, in things for which there is no supporting evidence. In fact, it goes out of its way to enforce the idea that strong belief in the supernatural has some kind of magic power, that giving yourself over to this faith will somehow "set you free". I think faith sets you free of rationality. Faith demands you stop looking for answers outside of god(s), stop wondering why your sacred documents are so contradictory, stop wondering why there are so many better reality-based explanations, stop being weak and asking questions. I think the point of religions is to give simple comfort to people who are afraid of being on their own. It started because imagination saved lives and passed itself along to succeeding generations. Imagination saw tigers in shadows and imagination lets us project ahead to see what will benefit us. Imagination is good mostly, but it also shows us how lies help us and how people will revere us if we know things they don't. Imagination is at the heart of religion, imo, and it's the dark heart that has made things up for so long it now believes every word it has fabricated. You can't verify God, but you can be honest with yourself and realize faith is not a wise form of belief. Faith is no more stable than hope, but at least hope doesn't ask you to change your whole life. Trust is the only way to verify what you believe in, imo.

I wanted to quote this whole post again from iNow. If I'd had the time to go into more detail, I couldn't have said it any better than this. Some things are better funded publicly. Medicine is one. Prisons are another. If you don't want more prisons and more prisoners, don't apply a growth model to the situation. The US is a bit different, but the pharmas are part of the problem here too. Like too many others, they have the money to buy political clout, then get regulations relaxed or work some sweet deals like Bush's Medicare reform in 2003. We can regulate the pharmas better. Few for-profit companies would spend the initial research money that ends up being so critical to any discovery, so public funding through universities and government makes sense even though it's heavily criticized. We can extract a fairer price for that research by requiring them to test for medicines for less-profitable diseases. Far too many industries have forgotten how much financial help our citizens provide through publicly funded programs. They don't do much to give back, they hide their profits from taxation and they send jobs to foreign countries while enjoying US protections. In fact, if we could plug the leaks in our state and federal budgets that spew tax dollars out to big business and get little in return, we might not need to reduce anything else.

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Couple that with swansont's teleporting cushions and you'll have colleagues with their heads stuck in the ceiling too.

The yellow glue is mostly for wood. It dries harder so it takes sanding better. It's yellow so it looks more like common light woods. It's generally a bit thicker, so it's stickier, tackier right away to help hold heavy wood pieces in place better. I think yellow glue also holds up better to heat and moisture. I have no idea about their scents getting trapped anywhere.

Unfortunately, medicine in general is handled poorly in a capitalist approach using modern business models. The ideal of business is growth. The ideal of medicine is to reduce sickness, suffering and disease. The two aren't really compatible unless we can figure a way to pay doctors for spreading health instead of reducing illness. That could be a big stumbling block to this plan. I wonder too about how much governments looks at us the way a restaurant manager looks at patrons on a busy Saturday night. "It's great that you're here, you help keep things running with your consumerism and we love you, but could you please hurry up and leave so we can stop wasting resources on you and make way for the next customer?" I still say it would be smarter to focus extra funding on education. It would make medicine and medical knowledge more available and thus more efficiently applied worldwide, as well as all the other great things history tells us happens in an informed, mature and well-educated society.