Phi for All

Could it be that it was a star that the camera captured but your eyes, pupils contracted from looking at the sunset, couldn't discern?

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Well, thanks. I had real problems in the beginning with the distinction between broken people believing in concepts and people believing in broken concepts. Now I can see that the ones who are broken are the ones who see faith as a strength. Faith will make you change the way you live your life, it will cause you to make decisions that will affect the outcome of real world events, based on a certainty that has no basis in reality. That kind of thinking is broken, imo. If I want to play the lottery and I have complete faith that I'll win, it might cause me to run out and start spending money I don't have yet, or make promises I can;t keep if I lose. Or I can buy a ticket and hope that I'll win, but I won't do anything crazy I might regret later. That hope might make me a more positive person for a while, might even affect the way I treat others in a beneficial way. Or I can trust that the odds will make it highly unlikely that I'll win, and save my money for something else, like buying a cup of coffee for a friend, something I'm 99% sure will be a great thing. It's a distinction I'm making, based on what those people I know who claim to have faith have told me. To them, faith is a certainty, assurance where nothing assuring can be seen, surrendering to an inevitable power, acceptance that what your religion says is the Truth, perseverance in the face of all criticism, endurance despite all adversity. They are absolutely certain, and they call this faith. I guess I would say what the agnostic theist has is hope. I can have hope that my consciousness will live on after my body dies, even with no evidence to support the hope, and it's not really going to affect the way I live. I'm still going to treat life as a learning experience, one I hope will survive after my body dies. The agnostic theist can hope that there is a higher power, perhaps one that doesn't require a direct and specific worship ritual, one that doesn't intervene in daily life or that will condemn him for his lack of complete acceptance.

This is a huge part of the problem, this blind acceptance that we're a "warring nation", and that's just OK. It baffles me that confessed conservatives such as yourself see nothing wrong with us being the aggressor in so many of our conflicts. The conservative stance used to be strong defense, stop being the world's police, war needs to be agreed upon by the States. Since the beginning of the neo-conservative movement, the exact opposite has occurred. How did you guys let "neo" come to mean "anti"? As far as "it was going to happen sooner or later", what else do you predict as inevitable on the military front? Where do you draw the line between US and THEM? The best reference I have, the one that clinched it for me, was from General Petraeus, commander of the multi-national force in Iraq. There's also the FBI, the Army's Judge Advocate General, and the Senate Armed Services Committee. I have other source material from the CIA and FBI, all attesting to the fact that enhanced interrogation techniques have NOT prevented any attacks on the US. As some of the cited sources testify, they can actually hamper intelligence gathering efforts instead of aid them. It should be obvious to any thinking human being that, since torture is an ineffective technique, it's use is purely for savagery and retribution. That, coupled with the fact that these techniques threaten to violate the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture of which the US is a signatory, should firmly place its use as unethical. I have to say that I'm personally disgusted that there are those who consider ethics to be a "fad". You're missing the fact that the space race was won on brains. Did your history teacher tell you that some soldiers threw those rockets past the stratosphere? The fact that our past has had more examples of success through military might doesn't mean that this is the way to continue into the future. I think Soviet Russia was a much greater threat to the US than Nazi Germany was, and we won the Cold War on brains and economics. Do you truly think the world is better off with war than without it? I don't see how your statement invalidates mine. There are hundreds of known examples of the US sponsoring foreign wars to prop up regimes that gained us temporary economic and political gain. Many of those, like Hussein, Qaddafi and the Shah of Iran, later turned out to be some of our costliest mistakes. Who are we fostering now that may turn into our next Iraq? And do you really think that corporations who make increasing profits from war want them to end? I think they are very much connected in many people's minds. I think they're connected in YOUR mind. You think it's against our nature to be non-violent, AND you think unnecessary violence poses an ethical dilemma. See? Connected. There are absolutely times when military intervention and the violence and destruction that entails are necessary. I don't think Iraq was one of them. In hindsight, I think our whole response after 9/11 was a big mistake. I think we should have accepted the support and sympathy the rest of the world was willing to give us, we should have used that support to put diplomatic pressure on the countries where the (then) handful of terrorists (there were less than a thousand of them back then!) had training bases, and we could have squeezed al Qaeda out of existence in a way that would have downplayed their existence. Then we would have been in a much better position to deal with Hussein in Iraq. Instead, we did everything possible to turn the situation into a circus that now has most of the Islamic world and even some of our formerly staunch allies shaking their heads, wondering why we spend so much of our blood and money to recruit for the terrorists. We're like their marketing department.

! Moderator Note Thomas Kelly guessed, if you have a relevant link to a specific webpage that supports a claim you have, you are allowed to post it. When you joined and began using links to the same site for each of your posts, you looked like you were spamming to promote that site. If we were over-zealous, it's because of the sheer amount of spammers a site like this attracts. It's not our intention to cut off your source of evidence.

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I wouldn't say all agreed to accept the definition, just that it was the one offered in response for clarification. I think the OP was purposely left ambiguous in this regard to elicit a wider variety of perspectives. I have to say this thread has helped me make certain distinctions with regard to how reason is used. Faith in a concept has no rational basis due to a complete lack of evidence. Faith is literally pretending to know something for certain I can't possibly know for certain. Hope, however, is based on at least some evidential support. I can hope that a concept will prove true based on what I've learned about it. Trust is what I consider to be accepting the explanation with the most evidence to support it. I can trust a concept validated by the scientific method because it represents a great deal of testable, predictable, observed reality. Faith, hope and trust are all part of a belief system for me, and I now have these distinctions to help determine the strengths of the foundations of my beliefs.

Earlier in the thread, "broken" was defined as a mental defect in the ability to reason rationally.

Besides assuming that non-violence is against our very nature, the other aspect of this statement that bothers me is that the rational act of looking for smarter, more effective, more sophisticated methods for dealing with our problems is even considered an ethical "dilemma". Where along the line did being smart get such a bad reputation?

I see it more like the waiting period for buying firearms.

This is one part that bothers me a great deal, that I feel is a great moral injustice. Our own sense of ethics is being used to manipulate us into actions that our ethics would normally reject.

First, the war in Iraq, which became the War on Terror. I think it was all designed to provide economic and political opportunity for a few in power, and I feel we were duped into it by playing on the natural vengeance we felt after 9/11. There are too many reasons to list why this War is unjustified, too many reasons why so many resources fail to defeat such a backward, limited, disorganized foe. We are presented with a carefully crafted ethical challenge that ignores what is smart in favor of what our leaders tell us is right. I can't shake the feeling that everything that's being done to "win" is akin to putting out the fire with gasoline. Second, torture has been proven many times to be unreliable. Why use something so ineffective that comes with such a high ethical price tag? Why choose "an eye for an eye" when "as ye judge, so shall ye be judged" is just as applicable? Why should both sides be barbaric when one side wants to be the moral victor? Third, just because in the past it's been our nature to be violent, does that mean it's always going to be that way? As we progress as a societal species, is it not incumbent upon us to recognize when and where violence isn't a strength? Aren't our greatest advancements achieved when cooperation enables us to use our brains instead of our brawn? I think we are being manipulated by some of those in power who have used practically unlimited resources to figure out the dynamics of our interactions as a society. When so much of the world is willing to be non-violent, how does the US find so many people to wage war on?

Manatees eschew reading in favor of making small children giggle, apparently. Vulgar just means "generally used", to some.

I think if something like this was made available, a waiting period of five years should be mandatory (barring some kind of condition that might kill you before that). Have you ever looked back at some of the things you were doing five years ago and thought, "Wow, that was really stupid"? I think if you had five years to reflect on your impending assisted suicide, you'd either find a reason to live or you'd know for sure it was the consummation you've been devoutly wishing for.

My Scooby goggles didn't mess up my hair so much. On the plus side, this headgear has a built-in decoder, so your pin means squat to me.

That pin won't protect my eyes from zombie brain blowback! Twin sawed-offs and those goggles were my whole plan, man!

Nice try. I'll NEVER forget what you did to my Scooby-Doo biohazard goggles.

You need to calm down and understand that lashing out like this will only get you suspended or banned. Posting any question you like may not break any rules, but the way you're treating responses is trolling, which IS against the rules.

Sometimes humans are incapable of seeing that they are fast becoming what they hate and fear the most.

I think you and zapatos have similar probabilities of being equally obviously wrong.

We're also developing global policy governance for space debris. Anything we can mess up, we can fix. Name another animal that can do that.

Using evolution for that kind of time period might not be realistic. Any environment that's too different would require technology to overcome just to be there, so there's no pressure for selective adaptation. If you want a physiological change, your colonists have to actually deal physiologically with the environment. The differences would have to be small, and that means small selective pressures that would require a couple more orders of magnitude of time. You mentioned less ultraviolet light to contend with, and darn it, that was the only thing I could think of that might make for a superior advantage for the colonists after only a thousand years. They might be able to adapt to higher UV radiation on the colony, thus making them capable of surviving longer/working in normally inaccessible places/being generally more productive back on Earth. I could see some kind of mutation being genetically engineered that would manipulate the UV radiation/vitamin D/calcium relationship to give you some interesting opportunities for physiological change.

I also dislike this type of premise. They seem to argue that we'd be better off walking ten miles to work instead of driving, juggling our stuff while pushing open heavy doors instead of using the automatic sensors, and only listening to music when we're near people with instruments who know how to play them well. I agree with Polednice. Technology is a tool that can be wielded by the industrious and the lazy alike. Tools are not good or evil.

If the environment is only slightly different from Earth, there's not much much selective pressure for evolutionary change over such a short time. Are you assuming that these colonists have genetic engineering but Earth doesn't, or have the colonists developed more skills in that area than Earth? You also need to take into account that any environmental adaptations from the new colony might leave them at a disadvantage when they come back to Earth.