101. Global Warming (includes commentary about creationism)

Comment #107037 by the_ultimate_samurai on January 4, 2008 at 1:22 am

if this were a culture of bacteria in a petri dish sucreeting a substance (say amonia) and there was a notable rise in the levels of amonia in the dish matching the rise of population of bacteria it would be pretty obvious that the bacteria were the cause of the rise, the amonia is a by-product, the culture increased, the amonia increased. you could predict this, you could even take this data and then predict that the amonia levels will continue to grow proportional to the bacteria culture. test it, confirm or refute it, etc.
so why then, with humans occupying so much of the land in the world, and with humans giving off large quantities of greenhouse gasses in proportion to their growth and the growth of technology, is it that people dont believe humans can make a global change in the environment. one person...sure. one person couldnt affect the entire globe, but there are people over just about every surface of the earth, the volume of humans is perticularly large, so given this large mass, this large surface area i should say, putting out this amount of greenhouse gas, it follows, least to a lay-person, that there is a causal relationship between the amount of greenhouse gas and the amount of people/burning fuel.

one problem of course when dealing with these issues (aside from political entanglement, which always makes things much worse) is the large number of variables. way too many, including the afore mentioned sun spots (which could actually speed up the process, could even be the main contributer, cant say) then you have CO2 conversion, growth rates of photosynthetic algae (remember, the ocean is the bigest source of CO2 conversion, not the rain forest. and an increase in CO2 may also cause an increase in the amount of algae, which in turn would cause a reduction in the CO2 levels...see how that works out, though a raise in algae could cause other implications)

i dont find the idea humans are behind it implausible, but i dont find it definative either, i guess i dont have an opinion on it. i AM kinda opposed to the opposition of it, if for no other reason than because the fundamentalist christians are so opposed to it.

but of course, im not a climatologist, its not my area of expertise, i would rather see science than politics, so "this guy didnt get funding, foul!" doesnt interest me. scientific understanding is stolen at knife point, it isnt given. if it wasn't granted for political reasons that is a travesty, but it is possible it wasnt granted because it wasnt on strong enough ground.
i would like to hear a consensus on this, at the moment i am sticking to the accepted artificial greenhouse effect, least til a better more accepted theory is given, were it my area of interest, i would probably involve myself more strictly with the debate...

102. The Colbert Report: The Intolerant

Comment #107030 by the_ultimate_samurai on January 4, 2008 at 12:37 am

the video doesnt play for me, i think it has DRM, which linux doesnt support....is there a google video version?

103. Don't eat at the Outback Steakhouse on Route 3...

Comment #107004 by the_ultimate_samurai on January 3, 2008 at 8:45 pm

the video is gone....i never got to see it...is there an alternate version?

however the colbert one was there, that one realy made me laugh
"Exactly! The Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis were both notorious for allowing people to express unpopular views in an open and free forum."
i love how he puts him down so much while making it seem like he is praising him, i saw an interview between him and o'reily where he put down on him so much and o'reily just couldnt figure it out. he was just eating up the "compliments" was quite funny.

104. Bill Maher Making New Documentary Movie, 'Religulous'

Comment #106996 by the_ultimate_samurai on January 3, 2008 at 8:22 pm

This is _exactly_ what many decent, honourable Christians get angry about alot with respect to alot of loudmouth athiests: That these latter are more than willing to mouth off about Christianity but turn green rather than confront the horror of Islam. And they're right to call us to the task about this.

i imagine it's the difference between getting hate mail and get bomb mail...
i think people are more likely to insult christianity over islam BECAUSE they arent as bad, they can walk down the street without worrying about a christian walking up to them and EXPLODING. now this doesnt mean they are SAFE walking down the street, bible is pretty clear about suicide..if you want to be a martyr you have to be KILLED, but the bible is also very much in favour of killing blasphemers, though you may get away with just being beaten by an angry mob...but you at least see it coming, you can run or fight, bomb...not so much. angry christians are also less likely to use a gun...very much an act of passion, not pre-meditated. so they use what's on them, which hopefully doesnt include a gun. but thats in the extreme, the majority of christians are fine with sending very very very disturbing hate mail. all their venier of peace and love and understanding realy kinda melts away when the isssue of their faith comes in. then there are things ranging from "i hope you burn in hell" on the light side to "i shall personally see to it that you are dismembered, your family stoned, and your courpsed dragged into the street" on the more extreme side, but none the less they are just mail, e-mail, or phone calls. islam has all that and bombs. and insulting islam can lead not just to the person being attacked but any company that promotes it. and there are fundamentalist islamic sects here in the states.

and christians are the only one of the retarded trinity of the abrahmic faiths that you can insult without a major backlash, jews are protected because of the anti-semetics and rcists that make any form of critique of judeaism taboo, the muslim as mentioned have the companies at gun point, and the christians are just annoying. they dont have the post-WWII protection of the jewish nor the fear of the islamic.
but there are many other religions, why the 3 abramic religions? i have a theory...because the other religions arent as retarded. i noticed dawkins and the others all mention the western religions...but where is taoism? where is budhism, where is confusiousism, where is shinto? i suspect these ones are avoided because they are less extreme, they are introspective -that is they incourage one to look within themselves for the answers to their problems, they promote self reflection through meditation and mantras- they dont have dieties as we know them (they have gods, but they acknowlege that their gods arent real, that they are meant to be alagorical, you cant even get some christians to admit thats the purpose of the bible, they admit thats the purpose of their gods), and though they have prayer, its just meant as a meditative practice.
shinto actually has a unique view of gods, to shinto a god is just a thing of beauty and esspecialy reverance. not a being of supream power, just a thing, mount fuji for instance is a god, a perticularly large rock or large tree can be a god, a living person who you very greatly admire can be a god. and for them the term god doesnt hold the meaning that it holds for westerners.
many of the eastern religions hold very large emphesis on the here and now, and little of the world after. for instance taoism (though it does have this wierd idea that one of piety can atain immortality...which always seemed wierd) doesnt have another world, nor a re-incarnation, the emphesis on taoism is the now, and that the greatest virtue of a faithful person is the maintanance of his own body and the prolonging of his life. so a healthy body, is a virtue...something western religion i think fails to mention. many eastern religions focus on the body, the expression "a healthy body is a healthy soul" and so they place much emphesis on work, walking rather than driving, manual labor as a virture, not a chore. and proper health care, shinto notably could very well be the source of the term "cleanliness is next to godliness" (though i dont believe that the term has any connection) because their faith puts so much emphesis on cleaning oneself, the act of bathing is virtuous.
if i had to see a religion taking large hold (though i would prefer none, but if i had to chose) it would probably be an eastern religion, or a healthy fusion of all of them (since some have their more primitive bits, but taoism, though it has some wierd bits, also places emphesis that one should seek their own meaning through meditation and deep thought. im not sure about budhism though. )
though eastern societies have shown a rather large ammount of violence, it hasnt realy been religious (though some is there, but they tended to be the state sponsered religion being changed and the old religions being erradicated, notably more on the political side) for instance japan has had centuries of violence, warring daimyou (feudal land lords) fighting over territory, mostly clan warfare, the religion didnt realy factor in since everyone had around the same religion (shinto or budhist) though some conflicts occured with the introduction of christianity by the portugese, though i admit this was not the christians fault, the japanese viewed christianity as a western influence and were VERY xenophobic, as such violence against christianity happened in japan on a WIDE scale.

but it is odd how all religion kinda get lumped in with the western religions, that the eastern religions tend to be overlooked. (though many times its hard to tell if they are religion, or philosophy, in fact i had one person argue with me that taoism is a philosophy not a religion...perhaps due to the lack of any diety or afterlife)

but anyhow, i would like to hear dawkins views of the eastern religions and maybe a contrast with western religions.

105. Critical Analysis of Case for a Creator

Comment #106967 by the_ultimate_samurai on January 3, 2008 at 6:57 pm

the video has been removed...is there another source?

106. New Rules: A Religious Test

Comment #106957 by the_ultimate_samurai on January 3, 2008 at 6:38 pm

personally, i am a fan of bill maher. i cant say if his tone towards religion has realy increased, it seems the same tone he has in all of his stand up comedy acts. in fact many of them are echoed in his show.

bill maher is a comedian, as such he tends to be more animated than others like dawkins or denette, even more than hitchens. you can see he exaggerates both points and his movements and facial expressions for the best delivery, thats basic comedy, no one laughs at monotone. generaly i think he does well at defending himself when placed in a debate situation, i have seen many interviews he has had and he does well. in fact even bill e'reily had to make a special mention of this when he was talking about people making jokes insulting bush, in his usual arrogant way he was going on about how if placed in a debate with him he would tear them apart or something, he was listing the people and when he came to bill he said "well bill usually defends himself"

in one of his stand up comedy acts "victory starts at home" he remarked "if you want to regulate something which has the potential to cause wide scale death and destruction, regulate RELIGION!" which broke into a large bit on the dangers of religion.
actually i was rather wondering if dawkins had ever been on bill maher's show. i suspect that would make for a rather interesting show.

on the issue of religious section on medical forms, as someone said it is so they dont give transfusions to a jovie or an autopsy to a jew, or any other medical treatment which may violate their religion.

though i also suspect this data may be improperly used. for insurance companies, correlation is all they need to justify increased rates, so they can show a correlation between being married and living longer, they give a bonus for marriage, and if they found a similar correlation between having a religion and living longer? or any increased chance for any illness for that matter. thats all they would need, and with that they could justify and increased rate for atheists. (though i imagine its harder to prove you are christian than it is to prove you are married...after all...marriage has a certificate and entry in a national database, lets hope no such system is ever enacted for religion)

as for swearing in, i always figured id just grit my teeth and do what everyone else does, i dont want to look more guilty, or place a prejudice in the minds of the people against me.

(i think my last post didnt go through, if it did...sorry for double posting...i looked realy hard for it...)

107. Fox News Discussion on 'The Golden Compass'

Comment #106333 by the_ultimate_samurai on January 2, 2008 at 5:07 pm

if you need to know the catholic views on reason, the fact that descartes and kant were both on the catholic ban list should say something. the idea iof reason to them must seem such a poisonous thing, you cant actually say "we are opposed to reason, we wish to see free thought and free speech removed" no one would swallow that, but call it blasphemous, call it herretical (and heresy itself is such a dead give away, ideas which are contrary to their ideas are grounds for DEATH)

this interview realy shows the partisan nature of the fox news people. they claim (least that ass o'reily does) that they are being fair and impartial, showing both sides. i recall one interview o'reily did with dawkins where he barely gave him a couple words to talk, i wait for them to just replace the other person with a cardboard cutout and have the moderator talk for them, since they already pretty much do. the other side of the argument is no longer important, it isnt a debate its a lecture. they call these people on so they can lecture them about how they dislike their view, and they are moderator so they get to decide if the other guy talks. that video with hitchens that someone linked, imo is quite nice. i love hitchens lack of a venier of respect for the other side. and he realy does keep telling the guy "you called me on here, now let me talk" precicely because they DONT let the other guy talk, and the other person they call in support of their view is given much time, this person is just there so they can make it look like its a debate. i like how hitchens didnt play into this and basically made it between the moderator and him, the other guy got no chance to speak.

if i was in the place of that girl in the article there, i think i would have interrupted with "would you two like to get room? why even call me here if you arent going to give me a chance."
im reminded of an episode of x-files, moulder is on trial (think it was the final episode)...a military trial. at the end, he is asked to give a closing argument, he says "a bullet in the head would have been preferable to this charade." and in many ways i feel he had as much of a chance to win his debate as that girl had to win this one. it was a charade, a farce in the guise of journelism, showing of the excellent standard of fox news.

108. Discover plagiarism at the Discovery Institute

Comment #105895 by the_ultimate_samurai on January 2, 2008 at 4:52 am

yes the original was quite astonishing, it realy is a beautiful thing the inside of a cell, something of a world alien to us, inside our own bodies. the world according to a bacteria. world of nuclear bond, chemical reactions, fluid motion. where friction or gravity dont keep you on a surface, covalent bonds do. what a different world that is from ours, but what a different world ours would be from a much grander being (speaking natural here, not super natural) imagine a being where galaxies are like cities. and the world is the universe, imagine a being on that scale, or a being not bound to this universe, i would quite imagine to such a being, our world would be like the world of those cells. it is much as dawkins mentions about "middle world" how strange worlds of the very small and the very large and the very fast appear to us.

and what the DI did to that lovely film is horrible. i hope they get what's coming to them

109. Highway to hysteria

Comment #105883 by the_ultimate_samurai on January 2, 2008 at 4:18 am

"See them get on fire for God..."
saw that, imediately thought "hey, theres an idea"

110. Why debate dogma?

Comment #105881 by the_ultimate_samurai on January 2, 2008 at 4:03 am

sorry to skip all the people in the many pages from something from page 1 (too many replies to go through) and sorry if this has been brought up already. that said:

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"Let me preface this by saying that I am of the same mind as you all and would love a world free of religion.

That said, the works of Prof. Dawkins, Sam Harris, Hitchens, Dennett and the rest have done an incredible job of effectively bringing many atheists our of the proverbial closet (myself included) and providing a basis on which to build around, but at this point, "giving the verbal finger" to religion is only going to further mobilize the faithful.

Sam Harris's speech at the AAI conference encouraged us to take on each issue as it comes. If people try to teach religion in science class, put it down. If the US government inhibits stem cell research on the basis of religion, prove that he is violating the Constitution, but what needs to be realized is that simply saying "you're all full of crap," (which i agree with) and "therefore you're not worth having a discussion with," is going to get us nowhere. "

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i want to address this and much reasoning on this vein, that you should take it on a case by case basis. on the surface that sounds like a good idea, but realy all you are doing is dealing with the symptoms, and ignoring the disease, the faith virus; oblivione scientophobus.
people have been mostly ignoring the disease which is why it has been evolving new symptoms every time, like a hydra whos head you just cut off. we can go cutting of head again and again til the cows come home. the problem isnt the heads, its the hydra, and we need to keep them from growing back, we need to slay the hydra, because eventualy there will be too many heads to cut off, they will have developed too big of an argument, and we will be overcome. and we may be near there now. justice system is geting quite loaded against us, when they control the justice sytem, the ground on which we fight may be pulled from underneith us. with faith becomes law, we can no longer fight it on law. and so while we go cutting off heads in the school systems, cutting off forks like ID or creationism, the other heads are tearing into our only ally, the justice system.

and i agree with this guy, make waves, as dawkins said "rock the boat" i think you SHOULD challenge them and i think you SHOULD be vocal, be rude, be strong, but dont sit back and say "i'll get the next one" or worse insult others when they DO rock the boat. if them rocking the boat makes it harder for you to justify your atheism, maybe you should consider a religion, because you are clearly just along for the ride. if someone is an out spoken atheist and is insulting christians, and you are called to defend him by a theist, just ask them to defend pat roberts. thats all you have to do.
and for some it is an intelectual one, we are so used to playing by our wits, making tactical moves, planning out strategy, and when someone else acts and it isnt how you would have done it, you feel the need to chastize them. well you arent a leader, you havent any say on if the people follow your strategeum. either you accept everyones right to free speech or you dont. and you should accept that this person has his views reguardless. if he stirs them up then good, he is right we DONT have a good name, it is much akin to a person covered in mud yelling at someone running because it splashed mud on them. and while it is true we are trying to get the mud OFF and dont appriciate more being ADDED, at the same rate you cant realy fault him for making you more muddy.
now im going to speak entirely in metaphore and similie, much like an inspirational speaker, i want to get across the idea in ways even a christian could understand. we atheists need to stop spinning our wheels in reverse and pulling and tugging at religion, just charge straight at them, and cut at the obi.
ok thats probably all for metaphore and similie...i do tend to over use them and i appologize. but analogies are quite fun.
so there is a place for tactical debate, and there is a place for riddicule, and evangelizing, and activism (though should probably not do illegal things like graffiti...unless you live in a country with graffitti zones...then you probably SHOULD. equaly such violance would never be a good idea, just from a human stand point. probably true for breaking things too...unless they are yours to break of course) because on the whole we will be taken by the average. so each high level makes a step foreward that a low level can make. because the moderate contrasts with the extreme, and thus the moderate can become more extreme as the extreme becomes more extreme. but the closer the moderates are to the extremes the less progress they can make.
so the vocal people, the strong people, they realy beat the path for us tacticals to follow. and for that i give them credit where credit is due.

hmm my last post didnt go through...

111. Jumbo shrimp, creationist astronomy

Comment #105861 by the_ultimate_samurai on January 2, 2008 at 1:46 am

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"My favourite bit;
"Growing a large distant gas giant like Saturn or Jupiter poses an insurmountable problem for evolutionists"
oh, and that bit about multiple impacts should 'cancel out' spinning!!

what complete fukwits. "
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i guess he never though about what would happen to a body set in rotation by one hit and then hit again in the same dirrection, i believe there is a childs game called "cross fire" where the very purpose is to fire small bb's at a thing in the middle to make it spin...or maybe that has nothing to do with how that game was played and i invented that in my head due to a veague notion of a similar game or concept...i cant be certain...

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Science for home-schoolers
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hey, i may have hated my christian home-school books, but in all fairness they werent THAT bad (though i will admit their sections on evolution were...retarded at best...such as their claim that the diversity of nature is just an example of all the animals released from noahs ark...or the lovely bit where they claim scientists date the rock layer by the fossils it contains, and dates the fossils by the rock layer it is in...)
they do resort to appeal to emotion because emotion is all religion runs on, emotion and ritual. if you control a persons emotions, you control that person, emotion preceeds rationality. but even less on the mischievous manner, its realy because they view emotion as GOOD, a key sign of religion. rationality, acceptance, evidence, those arent as important as emotion, by them emotion is the means in which they connect to god, their emotions are from their soul and their soul their link to the divine. this is how they think. so of course to them emotion is the most important aspect. and it is for that reason they tend to specialize in appeal to emotion, esspecialy in picking out emotionaly weighted words. also they tend to prefer connotation to denotation, or confuse one usage of a word with another, its not by any measure of unintelegence, its more of desperation, they will cling to anything they can get their hand one to possibly justify themselves, thats all they want, like anyone suffering self delusion the justification is the most important thing, its almost like a bad sore, they dont want people to touch it, they want you to get as far away as you can, and nothing rubs this sore quite like science, and when you touch their sore they can react with violence, this is often seen in life in the violence caused by religion, but in other self delusions too. psychietrists are quite familiar with this phenomenon, someone professes that such and such is true, its real, they build their image of the world, their delusional state, and when a psychietrist tries to get through reality their brain wont accept it, and they will keep saying "no, no, no thats not true, that didnt realy happen" they will try to justify themselves, explain it away, make it fit their view, and if they cant they may very well turn violent. and i think that is what we often see in religions, they have to keep reminding themselves, they have to re-inforce this delusion in their mind that this is the truth, that these people are liars, that god is testing their faith, that its a conspiricy, that its not true, they seek evidence not to put forth an idea to make a change but to put forth an idea to justify their belief, the more people who believe too the better the re-inforcement, this is also a phenomenon which has been examined in which one person justifies another through mutual delusion, and by that the delusion grows in one which grows the other, neither dare dismiss the other because they are key to convincing themselves, so no levels of absurdity are too far. christians have enough people they dont need for instance the mormans, or other faiths to re-inforce their convictions. but the undermining of this re-inforcement is something for them to fear, they cant allow for ideas like evolution to come in and burst their bubble as it were.

also on the topic of the codec, some of the QT dont work for me, i dont know why...maybe version. i run debian linux. this one does play though. but i do support an open format

also, i dont know how to quote...

112. Evolutionary Design

Comment #105083 by the_ultimate_samurai on December 30, 2007 at 2:16 pm

i had kinda thought that myself, the use of a human in the evolutionary process seemed as though it would serve more to retard it than to help it. and really is just artificial selection, a process used for centuries.
i am quite interested in evolutionary algorithms though. what exactly do you use RBH? or do you know of any available commercial evolutionary algorithms?

113. Why Science Will Triumph Only When Theory Becomes Law

Comment #104993 by the_ultimate_samurai on December 30, 2007 at 9:49 am

i too have considered something similar, though not to call the theory of evolution the law of evolution that would be absurd, but to create a law of evolution. since laws tend to be rather general observations (such as that the sum of all energy present in the product of a reaction is equivalent to the amount of energy in the reactants. law of conservation of energy, subset law being the law of conservation of matter)
so why not make a simple law which states that evolution happens. evolution has been directly observed, and even predicted, its reasonable then to make a simple law such as "all creatures change into other creatures by small steps each of which being beneficial to the survival of the creature or the ability of the creature to procreate" this is something observed, it doesn't explain anything (really laws don't, they are like facts...data...just less specific.) but having the "law of evolution" when you talk about this process specifically you can cite the "law of evolution" like you would the law of gravity when describing that objects are attracted to one another, though if you want to describe how creatures evolve, just like if you wanted to describe how objects are attracted to one another, you would use the theory of evolution (or theory of gravity for the latter) and by that matter you can cut out some of the semantic confusion that seems to occur.