music

I hadn't seen it before, but it's easy to understand: http://regentsprep.org/Regents/math/algtrig/ATE4/natureofroots.htm

On the contrary, there has been a lot of study of terrorists. A good example relevant in this instance is Pape's study, which found that most "religious" suicide terrorism was clearly motivated at least as much by politics, and almost never involved mental illness. http://www.amazon.com/Dying-Win-Strategic-Suicide-Terrorism/dp/0812973380/ref=tmm_pap_title_0

The actions you give as examples are morally reprehensible to me, but I don't equate that to mentally ill (nor vice versa). The people doing them may be mentally ill, but they might also be sane people who use religious language to justify actions motivated by other concerns. Most terrorists, to the best of my knowledge, do not claim to have had personal communication with a god. They're usually just relatively ordinary people angry enough to be violent. In a world of media sensationalism, terrorism might even be a thoroughly rational strategy. However, if there were a terrorist who constantly heard God's voice telling him to kill people, that would sound like a mental illness. But that is not the kind of people that comprise the Taliban or Al Qaeda or the IRA. The leader of the Lord's Resistance Army evidently does have regular possession experiences and also support horrible violent acts, but it really looks to me that he's not a bit crazy, just a thug on a grand scale, with a talent for manipulating religion and religious experience. If you're asking a philosophical question about epistemology, in a significant way you're right. Maybe not in every way, depending on your epistemology, but anyway that's philosophy and I was talking about psychology. Psychologically the difference is obvious. As "Iggy" said, ordinary religious experience can be effectively shut off most of the time, so that people can drive their cars to work and so on. You used the word "functional" and that's With perhaps all psychological problems, there is a spectrum rather than a binary dichotomy, and we could probably find all kinds of cases where it's hard to tell whether someone's just very religious or if they've started to be a little mentally ill. That's the same with anything, from fear of germs to wanting to be thin to whatever else: there is a spectrum of intensity, but generally it's easy to tell whether someone is just insecure about his weight or has an eating disorder.

studiot, your proof is beautiful! I don't know that "product of roots" rule so I can't follow that point, but the proof strikes me as both simple and clever.

Thank you guys.

Being from a fundamentalist and very pious family, I've known lots of people who believe they've heard God's voice. That's fairly common, as is belief in miraculous healing. I've also witnessed spiritual possession and ecstatic religious trance. But it's not mentally ill. Working with homeless people in the 1990s, I've seen mentally ill: a guy who had to be physically restrained for his own safety because he believed he was demonically possessed. A guy who believed the Pope (and by extension the entire Catholic Church) was trying to kill him. A guy who insisted he needed to attach paper cups to his ears with duct tape in order to prevent some malevolent extraterrestrial or spiritual thing from getting inside his head. There's probably a spectrum of behaviors, but it's usually really easy to tell the difference between ordinary religious experience and mental illness. People who get messages from God in church telling them to be patient with their kids, go home afterwards, watch some pro wrestling, go to work the next day... that's normal. People who cut and burn themselves to get the demons out - nope.

Mooney doesn't say any of those things. That's not even a caricature of his claims.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Republican-Brain-Science-Science--/dp/1118094514/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1339059556&sr=1-1 Anyone read this? (Full disclosure: I do not know know Chris Mooney, but that is kind of a coincidence at this point; we know many of the same people.) It looks fascinating to me - but I suspect it doesn't explore very well why liberals deny science, when they do (i.e. European liberals and GM foods; the previous generation of American liberals and nuclear power). The problem may be that just at this particular moment we don't have enough anti-science liberals for the scientists to study. Anyway, seems to be an important topic in human self-understanding, and with study and thought this kind of thing might show us a way out of the nearly violent partisan hatred that is consuming America. (The other day in Hardee's I heard a man, a retired judge and police officer, claim that if re-elected Obama would be putting conservatives in concentration camps; a few moments later my own brother "joked" - knowing but not caring that I am a liberal, and evidently knowing next to nothing about history - that Hitler "ought to have" put liberals in the gas chambers.)

I wonder if anyone besides me has noticed what appears to be a fairly strong correlation between loving science/math and loving art music ("classical" music, jazz, and so on)? And also, what is your favorite music?

Looks very interesting, though. Thank you!

It could be seen more charitably. I don't know iNow, so I don't have any idea whether you're interpreting his motives accurately. But a lot of people would rather live in a hell without illusion than live in hell imagining (or pretending) to live in a heaven. That's taking the opposition to extremes, so the point applies more forcefully when we're just talking about something like whether we can imagine that a god is watching us. And so, it's possible to understand at least some atheist proselytizers as being motivated by a desire to seek truth together rather than by a desire to ruin theists' lives.

Anyone know good books about chemistry in the 18th & 19th centuries? I'd like to learn more about that so I can integrate it into my history classes.

Thank you! If that is a proof, I haven't understood it yet, but I'll look at it for awhile.

I wonder... if we were to analyze or think carefully about the way we're using the word "meaning" in this thread, would we discover that it implies a subject? Like, perhaps when we ask whether something (life, the universe, and so on) is meaningful, we're implicitly wondering if it is meaningful to someone. If so, then the theist says it is meaningful to God, and therefore it is all meaningful even if it isn't meaningful to me personally (God's values = objectivity). So from a theistic perspective, an atheistic universe would be meaningless. But from a thoroughly atheistic perspective, without any theistic reference or expectation (thus without any expectation of objective meaning), I can rest content that something is meaningful to me. In fact, that's really all I feel I need. The fact that in aeons past and in aeons to come there will probably be no conscious agents to enjoy or endure the cosmos - what does that matter to me? For whatever reason, I value X, and X is meaningful to me. That's what I have, and what I need. I feel no nostalgia for an authoritarian deity who can tell me "what really matters" in total disregard for my values. And I fervently distrust anyone who proposes to speak on behalf of such a deity, telling me what matters in total disregard for my values, as an explicit threat to my democratic values and liberty.

Hello, I was told about this place by a vampire pig - perhaps not the only person who can say that - who knows me as "science" (yup, I got there first). Though science was my first love and I intended to be a priest when I grew up, I wound up a history and literature teacher in Korea, a job that I love because I can be a bad (that is, within my value system, good) influence on young'uns while constantly learning more about the world. One thing that I'm proud of is the diversity of material that I cover in my history classes - not just standard political and social history, but lots of culture (especially music), math, science, and technology as well. Hopefully the knowledgeable people here will be able to help me do a better job with the history of chemistry, on which I'm very weak, and maybe also the history of geology, of which I know so little that I've never even tried to work it into my classes. At this point in my life, my main interest is probably music, particularly jazz and classical, though I'm looking to learn more about South Asian music in the future. My main goal is to retire and travel, and to achieve that I need to spend less of my money on CDs and books. If you recommend something really good to me, I will love you, because I have an addiction, but you should regard yourself as an enabler.

One that I really love and encourage people with scientific interests to check out is Owen Flanagan's The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them.

Many years ago, in college, a textbook ordered me to prove that from any point on the directrix, the two tangents that can be drawn to the parabola intersect at a right angle. (Maybe I've got that wrong, but that's how I remember the problem.) I worked on that for months and was never able to solve it, even after the professor told me how to do it. Drove me nuts. So I've never forgotten it. But I've also never found a proof of it. I'd appreciate seeing it proven if anyone cares. But of course I have no right to take anyone's time, so... no obligation or anything. Just something I've been curious about for a long time.