Mr Skeptic

The founding fathers would say, "We left rules in place so you could change this document in case such were ever needed. So get your asses together and do this the proper way, else don't do it at all. If you don't have the majorities required to change the constitution, neither should you be circumventing it." The other thing they would do would be to get rid of political parties.

I forgot to add, I can also reason within the realm of Star Trek or such. That, and my absolute horror when I realized that the principle of non-contradiction is not necessarily true. (That is, the possibility that contradictions might exist.)

I agree with that sentiment. However, I am just as capable of rational thought when I start off with different premises (eg, "the bible is the word of god" vs "[the scientific method]"). Only difference is what I am studying, and for what purpose. I can argue theology, or I can argue physics. If I want to speculate about unobservable things (eg religion or math), then I need premises about unobservable things. If I want to speculate on observable things, then I need premises related to that (ie, the scientific method). In all this, I do not kid myself that the premises I start with are somehow better than other premises. Premises are always assumed and never proven (though you can show that some premises follow from other premises). All true statements are necessarily of the form if [premises], then [conclusions], even though the premises may be ommitted if they are implicitly assumed. I suppose that is more or less what you meant by "subjective and qualitative, not objective and quantitative" Well, I don't think people who absolutely and irrationally believe in complete tolerance are dangerous to me. That's the only exception I could find to the "suspension of rational thought is dangerous". Anyhow, you're welcome. ---- PS: You wouldn't beleive how betrayed I felt when I found out that Euclidian geometry wasn't true. It had seemed so obvious!

Oh. What do you ground your premises in? How are your premises better? People who suspend rational thought are dangerous, (almost completely) regardless of what they believe. Exactly.

As your example shows, the problem you have is not with religion, but with people curtailing your liberties due to their beliefs. Basically, you have a problem with the intolerance of people who think differently from you. Is that correct?

Agentchange, one of the principles this country was built on is that the government should be split into separate branches to divide their power. Another principle is that the government should fear the people, not the other way around. This does have a price, as does everything, but the benefits -- stability and following the will of the people -- far outweigh the inefficiencies of splitting up the government and limiting their power. Shifting the balance of power toward one branch is just asking for trouble. Enough trouble has already come due to the two party system that limits our power of selection.

Why do you beat your wife? Why is the moon made of green cheese? Why is the earth flat? Why are electrons more massive than protons? It would seem that a "Why?" question makes a statement (an assumption) and then asks for justification for it. If the assumption is wrong, then the question is wrong. So I would say that if the question is correct, then "Why?" questions would have incredible value in science, but if the question is incorrect, the question will be worthless to religion, philosophy, science, and anything else based on logic.

Idiots are like fissile atoms. On their own they are toxic, what they produce is even more toxic, and if you put enough of them close together, things can go BOOM!

just use [ code ] [ /code ] tags, which will preserve the spaces and make all characters the same size.

Yes, but is it possible? I would have thought that increasing the voltage sufficiently would allow all the metals to get electroplated and affect the ratios, and the concentrations of electrolytes to have an effect on the ratios.

Because you are old?

If we're going to consider stuff at the level of altering the laws/constants of physics, maybe we could also consider other things like move to a different universe or create a universe of our own.

Science deals with why questions. The observations are the hows and models are the whys. Q: Why do planets move around in the sky? A: They move in ellipses around the sun. Q: Why? A: Because of gravity Q: Why? A: [insert Grand Unified Theory here] Each time "Why?" gets asked, the answer grows exponentially harder!

Oh, dear. I think you need to narrow down your question a little. Life started a couple billion years ago and never quite ended. An egg is alive, a sperm is alive, and a fetus is alive. The exact difference between a live cell and a dead cell is hard to tell. The difference between a live multicellular creature and a dead multicellular creature is even harder to tell, since part of the creature can be alive and part dead, and part is normally dead (eg skin, hair). A person starts when they were previously not a living person then became a living person. A person dies when they are no longer a living person. (That means that either they are no longer living, or no longer a person.) Anyhow, we need to know what you are asking to be able to answer it.

That seems interesting. Wouldn't it be hard to control the ratio of substances though? How could that be done? Would changing the voltages and the electrolyte concentration be sufficient to get alloys of any ratio of several substances? If so, it could be useful for making objects with varying alloy type.

Emacs is pretty good. Depending on how much time you intend to spend learning to use it, it can be an incredibly powerful editor. BTW, what are you switching from?

Obviously he has never seen insects.

Depends. If you believe that gods don't exist, then you are a strong atheist. If you don't believe gods exist, but aren't sure, you are a weak atheist. If you believe that it is impossible to tell whether or not gods exist, then you are a strong agnostic. If you are unsure whether gods exist or not, but believe that it might be possible to find out, then you are a weak agnostic. There are finer distinctions as well. That's right. Atheists are defined by not believing in gods.

Very good. It is not often that you would find a teacher willing to devote so much class time to teaching critical thinking skills. And not afraid to piss off both the religious and atheists. I hope he doesn't get in trouble for that. BTW, isn't the correct scientific opinion supposed to be agnosticism (mild/weak agnosticism), rather than atheism? That is, "We don't know whether or not there is a god, but we are willing to look at evidence," rather than "There is no god."

It follows directly from the concept of materialism.

Dictionaries and laws are notoriously bad at definitions.

I agree, it is nice to see environmentalists that do not hate humanity for a change.

I'm not saying that Christians have to be perfect (though they should strive to be). I was saying that there is no reason to think that the guy is a Christian, since he has not given any evidence thereof. Unless you want to take the word of a liar and thief that he is deeply religious, that is. If you believe he is a Christian, you might as well believe that he intends to give you money and entrust the care of his son to you as well. There is nothing inherently wrong with slavery (any more than, say, prison). At one time, slavery (for a limited time) was a punishment for people who owed a bunch of money and couldn't or wouldn't pay it back. Nowadays, we just forgive their debt. The Old Testament had some rules for slavery, regarding the rights slaves retained and other things such as a death sentence for anyone caught kidnapping people to sell them as slaves.

I believe that the current understanding is that the earth will be blown by the solar wind just enough to be out of the way when the sun goes red giant (the earth will get toasted but not fall into the sun). If we're still around by then, we may have moved the earth ourselves, eg by using the slingshot effect to slowly accelerate the earth using asteroids.

For some people atheism is their religion. Just like, for some people, not collecting stamps yet spending much of their time mocking stamp collectors, is a hobby.