Mr Skeptic

OK, I think the best method would be to have 3 threads per debate topic, and probably no formal moderation. One thread for each side, where they can decide among other things who to represent their side, and also to pass the podium to someone else if they wish. After that, the two selected debaters start debating in the debate thread. Observers can participate indirectly (which will help make things interesting for them) by commenting in one of the two commentary threads, and also the debaters should read these threads to pick out the good arguments in them. The reason I suggest no formal moderation is because that would likely scare away people, and I'd like to think we can pick good people for the debate. Perhaps also complaints about debate tactics and such can go on the commentary threads, so as not to clog the debate thread. Yes, complaints should definitely be made on the commentary threads first. Having no formal moderation I think would increase overall quality, not of the specific debate threads but rather by encouraging the debate threads. --- As to the original debate threads, I note one of them got 8,700 views, and they all have over 1,500 views. I suspect a lot of these are due to new visitors continuously drawn in by teh googles. Any idea how many views the threads had when the debates ended?

But can you confirm one of the very few premises that science has? For example, can you confirm that the world is objective? Or consistent? Or do you take this on faith? If I publish a paper describing an experimental setup and the results, and it is interesting so a few people repeat it but get different, boring results, then will they not claim that I made a mistake? This is because they assume the world is consistent and objective. If I claim my experiment was correct and evidence that the world is inconsistent, or subjective, they will laugh at me. --- As to the respect issue, one of the big pluses for having our own religion forum is that we can be different than other religion forums, in adhering to higher standards for discussion, and also a different perspective.

I see, but your line is not as clear as one might like if you look closely, and your definition arbitrary. For example, fertilization is not instantaneous. Which microsecond makes the difference between a largely worthless egg and a person? What of cloned people, who don't quite have fertilization (although something similar does occur)? What of chimeras, who have two fertilization events? Are you saying that a scientist can create a human life in the lab with a simple ultrasound machine? What if fertilization occurs with a sperm that does not have 23 chromosomes? This is by no means a clear line, and if that is your basis for the definition then it fails. This is my quote; did you mean to reply to it? If you read what I said, I said the species was the gene pool, so you are claiming I said the opposite of what I said. But that's entirely arbitrary as well; they are all potential people.

My suggestion is the creation of a "one on one" debate section. It doesn't have to actually lock other people out from it; they could just be ignored. The purpose is to increase the fairness and quality of debates, when one side is vastly under-represented. Having partaken in a few threads where I'm the minority, things get confusing very quickly with lots of people making all kinds of arguments, some of which are repeats, bringing up already resolved issues, and occasionally all demanding their specific posts get answered. There's also plenty of flawed arguments and misunderstandings. The minority then has to either spend an awful lot of time reading everything or will just have to answer everything quicker, which can result in lower quality. It can also be discouraging. There can be lots of repetition and bad feelings, one side from being stressed and the other from being "ignored". Also there's the risk of the minority being able to get away with ignoring all the strong bits of the argument and answering to the weak or irrelevant parts, of which there will be plenty. Think of back in the day when duels of honor were done. Sometimes people chose a champion to fight for them. What there never was was a giant mob beating up one guy, not for a duel at least. One-on-one just seems more honorable. Now there are two separate forms of debate: one is a debate to convince a wider audience, while the other is a debate to convince each other. I'm thinking more the second kind, as otherwise a whole lot of arbitration would have to happen, but I don't really think the PM system would be good enough for extensive debate. Also, the people debating could cede the position to a different person. Alternately, there could be two threads, one for anyone to comment in (or two, one for each side), and then the "real" one where the two chief debaters could make their case, making use of interesting and non-redundant points raised in the commentary thread. And the commentary threads would allow the majority side to point flaws in suggested things on their own side, which for the most part would otherwise fall to the minority. If nothing else, this would condense some of our absurdly long threads to only the interesting bits.

No more than killing becomes ambiguous depending on how much money the person had. So then they may become people at a later date, but they are not people now. I'm glad we agree. The point is that you can't even call an egg at least one life, even without abortions or miscarriages. It's not one potential person, it could become zero to many people at a later date. Indeed, but we can revive the species. Also note that the component of species is the gene pool, not individuals, and the gene pool is still there. If you lose the gene pool you lose the species. That's why we do preserve sperm and egg samples of certain vulnerable species, to preserve the species even if the individuals die out. If we desperately needed to increase the population, then abortions would be terrible in that respect as well. Likewise, when we eventually go to colonize space we will likely take large sperm and egg banks, and anyone damaging these is going to get in serious serious trouble (note that this is without fertilization). Not for murder, but for some sort of felony. The difference, of course, is that now we would rather decrease than increase population, so potential persons might be a negative rather than a positive.

Extremes are objective, but dependent on the allowed range. Given the range of 100-1000, 100 and 1000 are the extremes. Given a range of 0-200, now 100 is the exact middle and 0 and 100 are the extremes. This is entirely objective -- no one is going to give different values for said extremes. I wouldn't agree that society defines the middle ground though. Societies themselves can be extremists on certain ideologies; our society is extremely in favor of democracy for example.

Well, if you mean to do this at large distances and outdoors, wind will become a problem. Otherwise, I think the simplest setup would be a negatively charged ring, being used to electrically suspend a negatively charged ball of styrofoam. For this sort of thing you'd need very high voltages to get enough charge, the sort of voltages you get from static electricity. There's other ways, of course. Magnetism works, but unless you use superconductors they have a problem because magnets have two poles, and also that makes it much weaker over a distance. A famous one is using a regular vacuum cleaner set to blow, which can and will stably hold up a ping pong ball. Of course the vacuum cleaner does have a motor, but the ping pong ball does not.

Yes, I had this happen to me twice. The first was something that could easily have been a trick my mind played on myself, but the second seemed absurdly unlikely to be such, as I remembered my dream just before someone said something rather unusual that I had dreamed of. And then, roughly a decade has passed and no such dreams ever happened again. So now I'm pretty sure it had to be coincidence, despite how unlikely that would seem.

Embezzlement is indeed totally ambiguous if you cannot tell how many dollars were stolen, or if any were stolen at all. The unit of embezzlement is dollars, not people affected -- there's a big difference between stealing 1 dollar from 1000 people or 1,000,000 from 10 people. Incidentally, if we're considering abortion to be murder, it does become relevant how many people were murdered. You don't see people going to jail for "killing 1/4 to 4 people, but we don't know who nor how many". And then there's the case of chimeras, where two or more fertilized eggs develop into a single individual. This, like identical twins, can occur naturally or artificially. It is, however, your own semantic nonsense. I just replaced "bugs" with "fetuses" while leaving your reasoning intact.

No, it's one zombie at a time at the start. Could the average person kill 1 or more zombies before being zombified? Even with a zombie mob? If so, then there is no zombie mob -- they get wiped out faster than they get created.

On the other hand, being in atmosphere means you can use fans rather than rockets.

So then you don't know in advance which egg is how many people? When I things that fit my definition of people, I can tell you how many there are. Oh, and you're leaving out chimeras, which start life as two fertilized eggs and end up as one person. By my definition anyways. Fetuses are zero people because fetuses are fetuses, but later they will probably become people?

I think you mean, Maxwell's Equations, which describe electromagnetic waves and say exactly how fast they go.

As for possible benefits of pregnancy, see this: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527453.900-elixir-of-youth-lurks-in-blood-of-conjoined-mice.html This is in a sense like an artificial pregnancy, although there is more thorough blood mixing. http://anson.ucdavis.edu/~mueller/FrCanpdf.pdf (pdf) A correlation between having children and mother's lifespan.

I think the claim is that religious fundamentalism is a form of religious extremism (while not making a value judgment as to whether this is good or bad).

Quite. Have you figured out how many people in a fertilized egg yet? Or is it just some perhaps non-zero number of people? I'm by no means equating the two. I'm using an analogy. I note that you also consider bugs to be zero people, regardless of how they may die or not.

When I say that the number of persons that a bug is is zero, it likewise has nothing to do with abortion or miscarriage. But, are you in fact saying in the above that the fertilized egg is not yet a person? Otherwise abortion and miscarriage have no bearing on its personhood.

My logic is that since you don't know how many persons a fertilized egg is, you can't argue that a fertilized egg is a person. Also, nowhere did I mention miscarriages. The question that you can't seem to answer is: how many people is one fertilized egg? I'm saying the most sensible answer is zero. You seem to be saying that it's somewhere above zero but you don't know how much. Miscarriages have nothing to do with any of this (unless you are talking potential for persons). Chimeras and twins, however, do.

Oh, were there natural processes that produce fluorocarbons? I thought those would be a giveaway of our technology.

bascule asked about prescribed drugs, not just drugs in general. From your link, "You can certainly talk to your doctor about it. Given the tremendous potential savings, doctors are increasingly prescribing generic drugs. According to a study by the AARP, generic prescriptions now account for over 65 percent of all prescriptions in the United States, up from only 27 percent in 1987. Your doctor will likely be glad to prescribe a generic drug if you request one and a generic is available." Note that we still are going to spend more money on the brand name drugs overall, since they are much more expensive. Also note that they tell you to ask your doctor for a generic prescription (some doctors give the brand name ones if they can).

I'm considering the military socialist, because: 1) They are being paid for by we, the people, and we are required to do so by the government 2.a) They are under the control of we, the people (via an elected, civilian Commander in Chief) 2.b) Furthermore, funding for military operations and official declaration of war are done by a group of civilians again on behalf of we, the people. They're "our" military. They're not "Bush's military" or "Obama's military" or "Haliburton's military". They're "our" military. But they are being paid for by we, the people. And, presumably, they are doing this research on behalf of us. Still, I think enough of their stuff is classified that it might be reasonable not to call them a socialist program (we the people don't "own" them). Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged That's "high quality violence", if you don't mind! We have the biggest and bestest military in the world! [/nationalistic]

Hm, if you're doing it the Bayesian way, I guess you start like so: 1) As child brought up by religious parents, assign a probability to god's existence as roughly equal to the proportion of things your parents told you that seem true. Similar for converted people and your conversations with others 2) Use of a broken likelihood function can now strengthen the belief further. Observe: -Joe reached his destination safely. Thank God for keeping him safe. -Joe had an accident on the way. Thank God he was not badly injured. -Joe was badly injured. Thank God he didn't die. -Joe died. Thank God, he's now in heaven. I think it is more likely that a broken likelihood function is affecting things, as otherwise religion would just fade away.

I guess I better not take up a job as a thug!!!

In many cases that would appear to make sense on some level. However, one must ask what makes it human? And in particular, how many lives is it? 0? 1/2? 1? 2? 3? 4? If you can't tell the difference between 4 humans and 1/2 of a human, then you have a problem. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged It does seem to extend the mother's lifespan, at least nowadays when she isn't going to be dying in childbirth. A similar but more artificial experiment hooked up a young mouse with an old mouse ( as in continuous mutual blood transfusions), and the old mouse's cells started acting a little younger.

(If the above has copyright issues, a link to the website is here: http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/store/add.php?iid=44382)