-
Posts
23537 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
167
Everything posted by Phi for All
-
! Moderator Note jozef, highjacking someone else's thread with your own theory is NOT allowed here. If you have an objection with Relativity, you must start your own thread in Speculations, show your arguments and back them up with supportive evidence (and be prepared for quite a few counter-arguments). Please don't take any more threads off-topic. Thanks for your understanding.
-
Why does holding a pistol sideways like in the movies not really work?
Phi for All replied to Fanghur's topic in Engineering
With a sideways grip, aren't you also defeating the strength of your muscles against the recoil? The straight-up grip is much stronger and more designed with the way the hand and arm muscles work, it seems to me. Also, with a semi-automatic, aren't you running the risk of hot casings coming back at your face instead of off to your right and behind? -
Thomas Kelly guessed has been suspended for 1 week for ignoring requests for clarification, giving vague and misleading answers, and preaching.
-
I agree completely. I tend to be more conservative with regard to fiscal policies, more liberal with social issues. In fact, I think a more conservative approach to spending on social issues would probably be a more representative approach than either major party has currently. Oooh, I forgot about that one. I think it's a sorry attempt to corral the religious vote when Republicans try to legislate all this personal intrusion into our lives. It's hard to reconcile that stance with the platform Eisenhower and Reagan ran on. That's a very interesting perspective. If they'd grow a spine and stop vacillating on smart, effective use of funds I could almost agree with you. I still want a different voting system so more perspectives can be represented. I'm tired of two-sizes-fits-all.
-
What person are you talking about? And what did they ask? I find your lines of reasoning extremely uninteresting, and I haven't seen anyone who seems to disagree with me. Your arguments aren't really as provocative as you seem to think. Most of the members who only post in the Religion section have better a better and broader understanding of the topics they discuss. Please don't take this as a personal attack. I reference only your arguments, not you as a person.
-
The Concourse of Atoms Could Not Make the World.
Phi for All replied to Thomas Kelly guessed's topic in Religion
I find this style of argument to be intellectually dishonest. You ask questions and when valid, supported answers are given you ask other questions that require us to provide you with years of science education. This is a discussion forum, not an elementary school classroom. -
It seemed irrational (idiotic? I guess, considering such a large movement) for the Tea Party to form and immediately start griping about taxes at a time when middle class taxes had just been reduced. Why didn't they start the party under Bush? And they've done some other fairly idiotic things, like putting together lists of things the Obama administration is spending money on without understanding the expenditures in context. If it sounds pointless, it must be pointless, right? I felt the same way about neo-conservative Republicans. How can you be a small government Republican who doesn't want us to be the world's police and be a neo-conservative at the same time without seeming idiotic? Mitt gives me no hope either. "Planned Parenthood, we're going to get rid of that." Seems idiotic, but I guess it will make a lot of money for those privatized prisons his buddies want to build.
-
Isn't the distinction between deism and theism that a theistic deity stays involved to rule and a deistic one did the early work and is now off elsewhere, not pulling the strings? If so, I'd say your statement is wrong. There is much more evidence to support abiogenesis than there is to support your purple alien thesis, so my explanation is more trust-worthy than yours. Its "pretty scientific words" have a great deal of work and rational thought behind them.
-
Really? Higher beings distribute their DNA on asteroids and then leave it to chance that they'll form life elsewhere in the universe without their direct manipulation? Sounds more like deism than theism to me. As I said earlier, faith to me is complete and unwavering acceptance of a concept that has no supporting evidence, so I don't use faith at all. I trust the explanation that there was time and components enough for a fundamental biochemical reaction to start the "spark of life" here on Earth. Exogenesis is a less attractive explanation to me, mostly because DNA is unlikely to survive the ravages of space during the vast time required for it to be deposited. The question of our origin actually doesn't intrigue me as much as our development since then.
-
Isn't what you're describing more like deism than theism? I think, for the purposes of using rational thinking as the standard for this thread, all theistic approaches are still based on accepting knowledge that's not supported by any evidence, thus the single categorization. Do you have an example of a theistic concept that's not based on faith in unobservable deities?
-
A Cartoonist with a Questionable Sense of Humor
Phi for All replied to Bill Angel's topic in The Lounge
The biggest insult in equating Einstein with JP Morgan Chase is Einstein had scruples. -
No one said there's no possibility.
-
Wow, it's quite deep on the end off of which you have gone.
-
Hah! My wife thought having a bag full of Saiga shotguns was ridiculous. Now I can tell her about the napalm catapult on the roof!
-
Nobody knows you as a person. The reputation points are for what you post. Perhaps this misunderstanding is at the heart of your dissatisfaction. Members criticized your ideas and you thought they were criticizing you.
-
Hey, that's OUR ball! Just sayin'.
-
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?
-
Bush visits white house, job creation slows, unemployment up to 8.2%
Phi for All replied to waitforufo's topic in Politics
Send a Hallmark card. This is a discussion forum. -
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.