201. Would the World Be Safer Without Religion?

Comment #43388 by Steven Mading on May 21, 2007 at 8:40 am

Nina, there is no such thing as sincere faith. Faith is, by definition, believing something while admitting to one's self that there isn't a reasonable reason to do so. That is inherently dishonest. The phrase "sincere faith" is an oxymoron. Sincerity would be to drop a belief if you know it's not a reasonable one, rather than spread the notion that there is some other type of thinking that does not require coherent thought and yet is still legitimate. Faith is not some seperate type of rationale for belief. It's just a re-naming of rationales that fail to disguise the fact that they fail.

202. God grief

Comment #41982 by Steven Mading on May 17, 2007 at 12:02 pm

The notion of a satan figure that is always lurking in the shadows trying to dissuade the faithful with arguments that trick you into thinking they are reasonable when they allegedly aren't - this is what makes it impossible to argue down a fundamentalist with facts and logic. The idea of the whispering seductive satan behind the disbelievers' arguments means that if your arguments start to seem convincing to the believer, the believer thinks, "Uh Oh - these argument are sounding convincing, that must mean Satan is behind this! I must do the morally right thing and refuse to be swayed by these arguments!"

It's a pre-programmed defense mechanism the meme uses to survive, and its extremely effective.

203. Television evangelist Falwell dies at 73

Comment #41704 by Steven Mading on May 16, 2007 at 4:01 pm

Dower said:
So, save your energy, kids. I won't be responding to any follow-ups.

I'm not replying for your sake. I'm defending my and other people's reputation against false slanderous accusations. When you falsely equated a sense of gladness Falwell is gone with hatemongering, you engaged in slander. And that is inexcusable. If I tolerated dishonesty, I'd go to church.

204. Television evangelist Falwell dies at 73

Comment #41699 by Steven Mading on May 16, 2007 at 3:49 pm

It is sad to see anybody wasting their lives following some sky-god, and rejoicing over their deaths is hateful

There is a huge difference between feeling sympathy for one who has been duped versus feeling sympathy for the one who responsible for doing the duping. Fallwel isn't some innocent gullable starry-eyed person who fell for an enticing lie. He's one of the dishonest people who deliberately propigated a lie to further his aims. He's not innocent in this. He's not the victim, he's the perpitrator.

And it's not hate that makes me glad he's gone - it's compassion for all the people who's lives he's ruined by spreading lies about them. Now he can't do that anymore. The problems resulting from the legacy of his speeches and political actions will linger on for a while, but at least he's no longer able to add any more problems to the pile.

I have no respect whatsoever for people like Falwell who don't care if their lies slander others in the process of serving their own ends. By default everyone deserves respect at first, but people who act like Falwell did give up that right.

205. Television evangelist Falwell dies at 73

Comment #41694 by Steven Mading on May 16, 2007 at 3:39 pm

OK, get with it. Prove my claims false. And by the way, the name is Dower.

The proof already there is in the history of this comment page. It takes immense dishonesty to claim as you have doen that what you read here matches what Falwell said.

206. Television evangelist Falwell dies at 73

Comment #41630 by Steven Mading on May 16, 2007 at 12:20 pm

I'm glad Dover is incorrect in his many false claims that what was said in this forum is equivilent to what Falwell said. I'm glad he's incorrect about that because I'd agree with him if he was correct. But luckily over here in the real world, his claims that the comments here are the same tactics as Falwell used are not based in honesty but in strawman fiction.

207. Television evangelist Falwell dies at 73

Comment #41627 by Steven Mading on May 16, 2007 at 12:14 pm

When someone is causing extreme damage to humanity, it actually is a good thing for him to be gone. Dover and the people who agree with him are missing the whole point. Being glad that Falwell is gone is not a matter of hating Falwell. It's a matter of loving humanity and enjoying the fact that the man will not continue to foment human suffering as he did while he was alive.

Being glad that Falwell is dead is no more "hateful" than being glad if the news surfaced that Bin Laden was dead.

208. Disney daughter calls Muslim Mickey evil

Comment #39395 by Steven Mading on May 10, 2007 at 1:41 pm

On the Disney question - one thing they did was to singlehandedly change the rules about public domain material so that things don't end up falling into public domain after a reasonable time anymore. They didn't want Mickey Mouse to become public domain, so they keep (sucessfully) lobbying congress to increase the duration of copyrights to their current absurd levels.

They're also at the forefront of the whole "there is no reason anyone would have to circumvent restrictive software other than piracy" falsification. (For some of us, we have to circumvent it because our platform isn't supported.)

209. Christopher Hitchens and Al Sharpton: A Debate God Is Not Great

Comment #38925 by Steven Mading on May 9, 2007 at 1:54 pm

"he kept Hitchens on the ropes with his repetitive demand that Hitchens address religion *itself*,
without reference to history or scripture."

That doesn't make sense. That's like asking someone to comment on geometry without reference to lines, angles, circles, or shapes.

210. Richard Dawkins in the Time 100

Comment #37118 by Steven Mading on May 3, 2007 at 12:22 pm

It is not a gesture of good will to say that Dawkins is merely arguing his premises in The God Delusion, as Behe did here. To say that is to ignore the existence of any of Dawkins reasoned arguments in the book.

It's a repeat of the classic put-the-burden-of-proof-on-the-wrong-party tactic theists use frequently. They invented the idea that an entity called God needs to exist, so the burden of proof is entirely theirs. It is not a "premise" to start from the default hypothesis that a proposed entity shouldn't be believed to exist until there's a reason to believe it.

211. Now Muslims Get Their Own Laws In Britian

Comment #36816 by Steven Mading on May 2, 2007 at 12:14 pm

The article is very unclear about the key issue that matters as to whether this is an outrage or not: Do all parties enter into it willingly? If so, then it legally has the same status as hiring an arbitrator and signing a contract agreeing to abide by the arbitrator's decision. And as much as I would consider anyone willingly submitting to Sharia law to be a complete fool for doing so, it shouldn't be illegal to be stupid in cases where your stupidity only hurts yourself and not others.

Of course, when dealing with religion, the distinction between "willing" and "unwilling" can be very hard to define.

So I guess what I'm saying is this: This article expresses an outrage over something while simultaneously being too vague on a key piece of information that would help me determine whether or not the outrage is justified. That makes me suspicious of the article.

212. 4 Sermon for Matins: 'Dawkins and The God Delusion'

Comment #36518 by Steven Mading on May 1, 2007 at 11:59 am

I really get angered at the dishonest line of rhetoric that smoothes over how appallingly bad religion is at accuracy by trying to pretend that religion never made any claims of explanation, or never was about trying to understand the universe (the non-overlapping magisteria claim). It's historical revisionism at its finest to pretend that the current gaps that their god-of-the-gaps resides in are the same gaps as they always were, and that never in history have those gaps been shrunken or taken over by science.

Currently most modern Christians no longer try to claim that the bible gives a real account of history. They no longer believe that a god made mankind at the same time as the plants and animals. They no longer believe that the "begat list" is a meaningful record of the number of generations that have passed. Most no longer believe that 100% of all people who haven't followed the christian religion are destined to hell. These are wonderful examples of people being open-minded enough to CHANGE their religious beliefs when they clearly didn't stand up to reality. But what really angers me is that so many of them will simply not admit that this does represent a change to their religion (that would call into question the notion that their relgion is the infallable word of god, after all.)

Instead they engage in historical revisionism by pretending that the newest interpretations were the "right way" all along - the way the texts were originally intended to be read - and anyone who says otherwise is clearly not "well informed" enough.

213. Against All Gods, by A C Grayling

Comment #36163 by Steven Mading on April 30, 2007 at 11:04 am

36. Comment #36155 by Vinelectric on April 30, 2007 at 10:27 am
Belief in a personal God could be on the way out but untill atheists can persuade us that 'Why' is 'How' (as suggested by Peter Atkins) then people will always ask Why the hell are we here!! Why did the big bang occur and why does evoultion work at all.

Ask yourself what the actual difference is between the word "how" and the word "why". I think the difference is this: "How" asks what the process was that made something happen, while "Why" asks what the motivation for it was. But here's the thing - If you're asking for what the motivation behind the creation of the universe was, and ending up later on with the answer "God did it", then you're committing the logical fallacy of assuming your conclusion before you begin. In other words, for the question "why" to even be relevant in the first place, one must assume a creator. Otherwise there's no sentience and therefore no motivation to even be asking about and the correct answer to the qeustion "why" would then be "mu".

As soon as you make the assumption that "why is the universe here" is even a valid question in the first place, you've already assumed a creator before you even get started.

214. Against All Gods, by A C Grayling

Comment #36159 by Steven Mading on April 30, 2007 at 10:48 am

In response to:
34. Comment #36128 by briancoughlanworldcitizen on April 30, 2007 at 8:50 am

I agree about Sagan. And the other useful thing about COSMOS is that it stands as an excellent counterexample to the mean-spirited, nasty, villifying claim that belief in God is a requirement for a sense of wonderment and awe about life and existence. The claim that atheism is somehow less pleasant, less emotionally satsifying, or less humble than belief in god is debunked quite fully by looking at COSMOS.

And Pale Blue Dot is far more wonderment-invoking than anything written by bronze-age sheepherders.

215. Bill Maher - APATHEIST

Comment #35504 by Steven Mading on April 27, 2007 at 11:46 am

Comment #83 by William said:

He got fired from P.I. for shooting his mouth off in a silly and boorish manner. Imprudence requires no bravery.

If that was the reason for being fired he would have gotten fired long before he did. He'd always been like that all along. What changed is that he said it was incorrect to call the 9/11 suicide hijackers cowards, that there are plenty of reasons to revile them, but the label of coward doesn't make sense at all. After all, if you're willing to die to carry out your plan, that's not really cowardice. Being wrong and evil is still compatable with bravery. Bravery doesn't mean you're right - just that you're not afraid.

Of course, people got all insane about this comment and painted the strawman fallacy that it amounts to praising the hijackers.

And that's why he got fired. For once he actually became honest and less of a blow-hard, and for that he got fired.

216. Bill Maher - APATHEIST

Comment #35501 by Steven Mading on April 27, 2007 at 11:37 am

34: Livliest Crib - This one sickens me too. People who want to claim Christianity is the source of goodness in historical people engage in the fallacy of counting the hits and ignoring the misses - They fail to realize that until very recently, it was assumed that ALL moral positions were the provedence of religion, and so any talk on any moral issue was done via religion - by people on BOTH sides of the debate. Abolitionists said theirs was the properly Christian position, and so did the slave-owners. Back then that was how you had to frame your position. Very few people recognized that you can entirely divorce the notion of morals from the notion of religion. This is the main reason atheists were (and still are) so reviled - people assume that no religion equals no morals.

Abolitionists did not cite Christianity because Christianity favors aboloshing slavery more so than it favors perpetuating it (The bible is fairly neutral about it - it mentions slavery as if it's natural state of affairs and neither condemns nor praises it). They cited Christianity merely because people at the time (abolitionists and pro-slavery advocates alike) assumed all moral issues must necessarily be religious ones and must be argued on religious grounds.

217. We aim to misbehave

Comment #35089 by Steven Mading on April 26, 2007 at 7:11 am

ktillyer, There is a common practice in the US of having old laws on the books that become suppressed by higher laws and higher court rulings, but nobody ever bothers to remove them, because that takes effort and has no real immediate effect (since the law is being suppressed by a higher law anyway, getting rid of it doesn't change anything.) The laws against atheists voting in some places are that type of law. The federal government has rules that make such laws unconstitutional and unenforcable, but instead of getting rid of them the local governments just stop enforcing them, knowing that if they tried to enforce them, a court case would develop that would be expensive and eventually get them overturned anyway, so there's no point in bothering to enforce them.

I don't like this practice. It leaves behind landmines in the legal system to be discovered later on that can stealthily be reactivated later when court opinion changes.

But, that's the way it's done, even though it's a bad idea. I'd much rather see the case where when a law is declared unconstitutional by a court, that this immediately revokes it entirely, such that if the constitution (or court interpretation thereof) changes later to allow it again, a new version of it would have to be re-written and re-instated from scratch if people wanted things to go back to the way they were, rather than just re-activating the old hidden landmine law.

218. Atheists split on how to not believe

Comment #35004 by Steven Mading on April 25, 2007 at 11:02 pm

Steven Mading, with all due respect, it is not anti-atheist propaganda to accept some various definition of religion.

Even in this case, where the definition includes the implication that religion is inherently the source of goodness? I don't agree.

219. Fighting Words: A wartime lexicon

Comment #35001 by Steven Mading on April 25, 2007 at 10:38 pm

I agree about the complaint over the word "brights". While I've felt the incorrect strawmanning that comes from people's misconception over atheism (and their inability to tell that it's not just a case of common-usage-is-right-because-thats-how-language-work, , because their definition includes predjudices), and so I can understand the desire to coin a new term, I think the term "Brights" was a horrendous choice to pick for that new word. If you want to say that unbelievers are brighter than believers, I might even agree, but do it AFTER the definitions are picked - don't do it INSIDE of the definitions - because making your argument inside the definitions of your terms is called propaganda, and I can't support that.

220. Study: Religion is Good for Kids

Comment #35000 by Steven Mading on April 25, 2007 at 10:33 pm

Notice the very important change between the article title and the article content? It's rather deceptive:

The Title says religion is better for kids.

The Article says religion makes kids more well-behaved - in other words, it makes things easier for the parents.

That's an entirely different claim.

For an extreme example of the difference between those two claims, consider the practice (now thankfully abandoned) of lobotomizing mental patients. It's not better for them, but man did it ever make them more well-behaved.

221. The God disunion: there is a place for faith in science, insists Winston

Comment #34998 by Steven Mading on April 25, 2007 at 10:23 pm

Why, time and time again, do religious believers falsely claim when a person says statements that effectively mean "Science is less fallable than religion" that they're really saying "Science is always correct and has all the right information."

That's bullshit and they know it. Good scientists admit their beliefs can be proven wrong, and in fact the entire apparaturs of scientific culture is all about just that very thing. Good theologians, on the other hand, accept things on faith. That's the difference, and it's why science ends up converging toward more and more reliable claims (but it's a work in progress so NO, no scientists don't think they have all the answers. It's just that as fallable as science can be, religion is EVEN MORE so.

222. One Hell of a Religious Read

Comment #34572 by Steven Mading on April 24, 2007 at 2:40 pm

In reply to: 12. Comment #34357 by theorrhea

What you're missing is that is that the reasons the neocons gave for the war were lies. Yes, there might be reasons to support the war. But if so, they weren't the reasons that were being given. The ones that were given are now *objectively* known to have been lies. And that's not just a difference of opinion - that's objective fact. They claimed they had evidence of WMD's. It is now known that they invented this evidence from thin air. That's lying. Plain and simple. That was a lie. And for Hutchins to come down against lying about religion he needs to be fair about it and also come down against the lying that started the war. Now, if he wants to put forth OTHER reasons he thinks the war is still a good idea despite the lying that started it, fine. But if he wants to defend what was said to get it started, then he's a hypocrite.

My take on this is that there were possible ways to have done it that would have been good. But they all would have required totally different strategies from day one than the ones they did take. For one thing they would require a leader in charge of the effort that actually knew there were such things as Sunni and Shia.

223. Atheists split on how to not believe

Comment #34197 by Steven Mading on April 23, 2007 at 1:41 pm

The title does not match what the story says at all.
The title says atheists disagree on how not to believe.
The article, on the other hand, describes a situation where atheists disagree on how to respond toward those who believe.

Thats a very different thing. Disagreeing over how to think versus disagreeing over how best to speak to others about what you think.

224. Atheists split on how to not believe

Comment #34194 by Steven Mading on April 23, 2007 at 1:31 pm

"Humanism is not about erasing religion," he said. "It's an embracing philosophy."

In general, humanism rejects supernaturalism, while stressing principles such as dignity of the individual, equality and social justice. If there's no God to help humanity, it holds, people better do the work.

Gaaaaah!!! Why do people assume that's what religion is? Especially an atheistic humanist? That is NOT what religion is. What makes religion differ from irreligion is, at its core, the notion of what reliable sources of truth are. If you think faith alone can make a reliable source of truth, you're religious. If not, then you're not. Whether or not you think people can be helped or bettered in life, and whether you want to particpate in the process of doing so is secondary to this. This false notion that religion is a mandatory prerequisite for compassion or for morals is at the heart of why we atheists get such a bum rap. Why perpetuate it like this? Why?

Gaaaahhhhhhh!

This is so frustrating. He's an atheist, he should know better than to feed anti-atheist propaganda like that.

225. Space tourist makes safe return

Comment #34188 by Steven Mading on April 23, 2007 at 1:22 pm

Darn. I used to respect this guy (Even though he worked for Microsoft, Microsoft Word is what he did there, and the evil decision to use Word as a tool to enhance Windows dominance was not his doing.) Anyway, like I said, I used to respect this guy.

But now that I found out he's the one responsible for Hungarian Notation? Man, how can I respect that? The notion that variables should be named to match their type so that you can't change their type without also changing lots of lines of code - evil, evil! We should have left that behind with Fortran.

226. NEXT MONDAY: Bill O'Reilly interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #33803 by Steven Mading on April 21, 2007 at 11:29 pm

This is a big mistake for Dawkins because of the the dishonest microphone-cut-off trick that O'Reilly uses. O'Reilly has in the past used this trick of making sure his own microphone works better than the other guy's, either cutting the other guy's off entirely or at least not making them pick-up at the same volume, and then, with this setup in place, he asks questions that make the other person look bad if they can't be answered, and fast-fires them and shouts over the other guy. It's a trick that doesn't fool smart people, but we're not talking about smart people, we're talking about O'Reilly's audience. In the eyes of the audience this dishonest trick somehow proves that the guest is "stumped". It doesn't matter that Dawkins is smarter, or that he can articulately fire back answers to any idiocy O'Reilly throws at him - because the microphone trick will be used to make it look like he has no answers.

This is a huge mistake. Don't pander to O'Reilly's ego and don't fall for his trick, please.

227. Einstein & Faith

Comment #31623 by Steven Mading on April 13, 2007 at 2:10 pm

Once upon a time the word Atheist was dripping with much more negative stereotype than it is today. People used to think it included being a nihilist or being utterly uncaring about philiosophy or ethics. Atheists have fought hard to strip those stereotypes off the definition so that in modern times it's not quite the same thing. Before that, there just was not a good word to describe someone like an einstein (or a Carl Sagan, for that matter, had he lived at the same time.) that recognizes the importance of curiosity and wonder about the universe, but doesn't portray it as having been caused by a sentient personality. Today such people can be considered atheists - back then they wouldn't have been - thus Einstein's convoluted twisted attempts to explain his position.

Now, as an aside, here's another word who's connotations have changed: Gay. As everyone knows, it once referred to someone being in a light, genial mood, willing to be exhuberant and flamboyantly happy. Then the whole "flamboyantly happy" part of the word got latched on to, associated with the flamboyant stereotype of homosexuals, and now that part of the meaning has stuck and the other part has faded and now it just means homosexual.

I've read Winston Churchill's history of WW2 and in those books he often calls people gay. He even called FDR gay, and said he admired FDR for refusal to let his disablity keep him from acting gay.

Where am I going with this? Easy: To say that Einstein would have a problem with modern atheists such as Sagan and Dawkins because of what he said would be just as incorrect as saying that Churchill thought FDR was homosexual, and for the same reasons.

228. Einstein & Faith

Comment #31616 by Steven Mading on April 13, 2007 at 1:55 pm

#33, "Spinoza" - the is/ought distinction is blurred not by atheists, but by theists. In fact it's the core behind what faith IS - Thinking that wanting something to be true is sufficient reason to believe it to be true is the core behind the argument that faith is a good thing. Telling people to believe on faith is telling them to blur their is/ought distinction.

229. Einstein & Faith

Comment #31614 by Steven Mading on April 13, 2007 at 1:49 pm

Einstein, as presented here, seems to have bought into the false boogeyman definition of atheists that non-atheists foist upon us. His objection to atheism seems to be not based on whether or not god exists, but based on the premise that atheists cannot have wonderment and awe at the complexity of the universe, which is of course, complete bullshit. It's as if he thought that anyone who does not label this wonderment with the word "god" is not recognizing this wonderment at all. All you need is to read a bit of Dawkins or Carl Sagan to see this wonderment does not require that it be labelled "god". (Sagans' "Pale Blue Dot" is far more moving and awe-inspiring than any mere religous text. A disdain for the supernatural does not automatically mean an inability to see the wonderful.) But, alas, those two writers didn't exist in Einstein's day. Labelling the wonder at the universe as "god" creates all manner of misconceptions. On the one hand Einstein had all sorts of unfair trouble with the religious trying to claim him as one of their own, but on the other hand, he sort of brought it on himself by insisting on confusingly using the words "god" and "religion" in ways entirely unlike the rest of the world uses them. He could have expressed his ideas in better words than that, and then it wouldn't have led to the problems he had being pestered about it.

230. Is God poison?

Comment #30981 by Steven Mading on April 10, 2007 at 1:55 pm

About comment #66 by Helian:
Helian, you say you are an atheist. Okay, then let me give you an example of something you've probably had to deal with in your lifetime, as most atheists have had to: Think about that old chestnut, one of the most dishonest disguisting arguments that some theists use against atheists, that is to say, that atheists disbelieve in god because atheists hate god. Consider how incorrect and offensive that dishonest line of arguing is. Now, then ask yourself where does that come from? What makes someone make such an obviously flawed claim? What does it is their tendency (whether deliberate or subconscious) to blur the line between belief and desire - to act as if belief in a fact amounts to desire for it to be true, and disbelief in a fact amounts to desire for it to be false. This melting of these two independant concepts leads to very acidic, nasty ad-hominem slander of atheists. We are perceived as disbelieving god exists purely because we WANT god not to exist, because we don't like him.

To put it more bluntly - I believe the holocaust happened. That doesn't mean I like it.

Now, where am I going with all this? I'm trying to point out just how much of an arse you are being when you equate Richard's beliefs about what happened in recent American history with him being Anti-American. By doing that, you engaged in exactly the same dishonest fallacy as every fundamentalist who ever said being an atheist is evidence of hating god. If you want to debate claims about what happened, or you want to prove someone wrong about it, you can do that without lying about their intent, as you have done here.

231. Even non-believers must recognise the moral necessity of Christianity

Comment #30687 by Steven Mading on April 9, 2007 at 10:50 am

This one aspect of the article really annoyed me: He describes the practice of Christians having doubt about what they think and engaging in some introspection about it, and he describes the practice of atheists doing the same, and then compares the two and makes the claim that Christians do their introspection more so than atheists do theirs. There's two problems with that - first of all there's the fact that it's false to claim that atheists are less introspective on their topic, and the second, and much larger problem is that he's operating on the incorrect premise that a christian thinking about his religion and an atheist thinking about his a-religion are two independant activities. They aren't They are thinking about SAME things, but coming to different conclusions about it.

Introspective Christians and introspective atheists are not thinking about two entirely different topics. They're thinking about the exact same topic and coming to different conclusions about it.

What he seems to forget is that a very large number of those atheists BECAME that way because they were introspective Christians who ALREADY did the self-examination thing on the topic of god, and that's WHY they are no longer Christians.

He acts as if, after that happens, these newly-minted atheists now need to start over and go through the exact same process a second time, even though no new evidence showed up overnight about the topic, the only thing that changed is their conclusion.

232. Crucifixion 'makes God into a psychopath'

Comment #30402 by Steven Mading on April 8, 2007 at 2:17 am

I've always had this same complaint about Christianity and when I try to ask actual Christians about it they present arguments that are utterly baffling in thier nonsensicalness. y complaint is this: How is it that one's transgressions can be absolved by punishing Jesus, who's the wrong guy? In terrestrial matters, If I've committed a robbery, and you confess to the crime even though it wasn't you that did it, the reason that you successfully saved me from having to go to prison and put yourself in my place to take the prison time for me is because you tricked people into thinking you were responsible instead of me.

In other words, this trick only only works because unlike the alleged character "God", the jury lacks omniscience. If they did figure out that your confession was false, and they did figure out that I was really the one responsible, then there's no way any modern court system would let you serve the prison time for me, even if you claim that you love me deeply and willingly would serve prison time in my stead. In such a scenario it doesn't matter that you are willing to do that - you're still the wrong guy and if the jury knows this, so you can't save me from punishment that way.

When the jury is god, you can't fool him into thinking you did the crime. He knows it was me.

This feature doesn't make any damned sense, and I couldn't figure it out for the longest time - even if one accepts all the other premises of Christianity this one still doesn't make any sense. It seems to come totally out of nowhere.

And now I think it's starting to make a little bit of sense to me where it came from. The notion that another person cannot serve prison time for you is actually a new, modern idea. It used to be the case that in ancient justice systems one could trade-up punishments a lot more than today. One could say, "oh, I'm supposed to live as a slave for a year as my punisment? Well, considering the going rate these days for slave labor, how about if I just pay you that amount instead as a fine? Wouldn't that be an equivilent punishment?" So, what I'm getting at is that our modern notion that punishments only count if they are applied to the actual culprit was not always the way people looked at it. People used to look at it as a debt - and like any other kind of debt, trades can be made and other equivilent payments can be substituted. The punishment was actually a virtually tradable item just like a number on paper in a bank account is.

So, with a mentality such as the people who wrote the bible had at the time, ALL punishments could be substituted and traded, sort of like a negative form of currency. Given that mindset, the notion of Jesus paying someone else's punishment for them makes more sense. It's just in modern times that we've come to realize how utterly horrible a system of tradable punishment actually is. To a person living in bronze age mesopotamia, it would have made more sense.

233. Militant atheists: too clever for their own good

Comment #30086 by Steven Mading on April 7, 2007 at 12:06 am

To be more explicit about what I said in the above comment:

The pre-poll's numbers were: 826 for + 681 against + 364 dont-know = 1871 participants.
The post-poll's categories were: 1205 for + 778 against + 103 dont-know = 2086 participants.

There were 215 more participants in the second poll.

234. Militant atheists: too clever for their own good

Comment #30083 by Steven Mading on April 7, 2007 at 12:03 am

Why did so many more people participate in the second poll after the debate than participated in the first poll preceeding the debate? Did a bunch of people show up late and miss the first one? Or does that show a sort of meta-effect of the debate - that in addition to changing some people's minds about religion it also changed some people's minds about whether or not it was important to participate in the poll?

235. The God Debate

Comment #29764 by Steven Mading on April 4, 2007 at 3:29 pm

The incorrectly-named truthseeker said, in comment 107:

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." - Albert Einstein.

Further examination of what Einstein used the word "religion" for clearly shows that he was using it in such a way that it just isn't even close to the same concept at all as religions such as Christianity. He had a habit of using words like "god" and "religion" in ways that have nothing to do with the common definitions of those words.

Also, in comment 106, he said:

Otherwise, why don't you just "live and let live"?

It never ceases to amaze me the level of doublethink that goes on in the mind of the believer like "truthseeker" here, who spreads falsehoods about atheists, and if they defend themselves and protest about it, that is evidence that his accusations were right (in his mind), leaving atheists in a catch-22 situation. (It's exactly like the dishonesty of accusing someone of being an alchoholic, and then saying "if you deny that you have a problem, that's just what I'd expect an alchoholic to do, so it proves you have a problem...")

236. Atheist says he's victim of religious hate crime

Comment #29719 by Steven Mading on April 4, 2007 at 12:31 pm

I dislike the application of "hate crime" laws because they make already-illegal activity more illegal based on the (assumed) mindset of the person doing it, and that's essentially instituting the Orwellian notion of thoughtcrime - that what you think can be a crime.

I'd rather see the abolition of hate-crime laws, but if they are on the books and they do exist, at least have the honesty to enforce them evenhandedly, and not according to a double-standard. So, yes, if hitting someone for being religious is a hate-crime, then hitting someone for speaking agaisnt religion is also a hate-crime.

237. Richard Dawkins: Author of the Year!

Comment #28481 by Steven Mading on March 29, 2007 at 11:00 am

Not that I want to disparage Peter Kay in any form because I think he is an amazing comedian.He has a great joke about how he prayed to god to get him a new bike when he was young and was told that was wrong, so he went and stole someone else's and prayed for forgiveness still makes me giggle!

I heard precisely the same joke from Emo Phillips. (in fact it was so identical it didn't even substitute some other type of stolen item - it also used a bike.) I think someone's been taking someone else's material (not sure who had it first).

On the topic, yeah - Congrats to Dawkins - but I think the book award is better than a knighthood. Knighthood has been so watered down now - I doubt that musicians, writers, and actors are going to be defending Britain any time soon.

238. Neil Peart cites The God Delusion in new album's liner notes

Comment #27996 by Steven Mading on March 27, 2007 at 2:28 pm

I have to think that when he talked about adopting puppies that were "rescue dogs" he meant "rescued dogs" - otherwise it just doesn't make sense. You don't use puppies as rescue dogs - they need more training.

But yeah, Rush good.
I want the new album. Now. There was a time when I was worried they were going to do nothing from now on but more recompilations of existing songs, retrospectives, concert videos, and so on.

I like their ability to make the music REALLY FIT the mood for the words (impressive given that the words are written by the drummer, who does not write the music.) Their songs celebrating life and joy SOUND fast and energetic and upbeat, while their songs of sadness just SOUND sad.

239. The Case for Teaching The Bible

Comment #27816 by Steven Mading on March 26, 2007 at 11:19 pm

I have taken Civ I, which is a basic humanities/history ( I have no idea if they call it that every where else) class at KU. Almost always people come down rather hard on the bible, and rightfully so. Yes the believers in the class got pissy, but oh well, though we had a wonderful professor so maybe this would not be every ones experience. Also the Time article refers to high schools, but i would like to think class discussions could be critical of the bible.

What I fear comes in two varieties:
1 - There is a strong trend of the believers to falsely characterize the act of articulating very strong dissent with their opinion as being identical to the act of infringing upon their rights to have those opinions. Such a characterization is complete bollocks of course, but in the realm of school boards, majority opinion can trump facts - so what I fear happening is that a student who expresses the opinion that the bible is total bullshit (even if not using swear-words to do so) would be falsely equated with expressing bigoted hate speech. Remember this is high school, not college. A key difference between the two is compulsory versus elective attendance, which carries with it massive legal ramifications.
2 - Imagine how many times a believer has characterized a strong critic of religion as being a critic merely because he's misinformed about what the religious texts actually say, and too lazy to do the research. (Consider the many rebuttals to Richard Dawkins along those lines). These people seem to be using a criteria that assumes it is impossible to be familiar with their claim without being in agreement with it. It's clear that RD (and others) is very aware of the claims about religion being metaphorical, or about which parts are not generally taken literally anymore, but his critics do not see that. They see him refusing to give those claims false respect that they don't deserve, and then assume this means he is not familiar with them. Now, where am I going with this? Well, imagine now if one of those people who make that type of false counterargument to the skeptics is the person teaching the bible class. Think about it. To someone of that mindset, taking a passage as if it was intended literally but is false, as an atheist typically would, would show that the student is factually incorrect. They would claim that the correct understanding is a metaphorical one, which salvages the notion that the passage could be true in some sort of way. They would take the atheist's literal debunking of the statement as being evidence of the atheist not having paid attention. Thus it could actually detrimentally affect the student's grade, even if the instructor doesn't consciously realize they are being biased.

240. The Case for Teaching The Bible

Comment #27757 by Steven Mading on March 26, 2007 at 3:10 pm

The fear I'd have with such a class, if I imagine my younger self having been enrolled in it is the utter incompatability between being honest and being polite to believers. It's one thing to make people literate about ancient myths nobody in the class will be a believer in - like teaching about the ancient greek pantheon for example - for the sake of basic cultural literacy. But when it comes to the bible, I just can't imagine a class where honest inquiry, like "hey, wait, this part contradicts that part" would be tolarated by the believers. And so it's not possible to teach the bible as a work of literature without getting too close to that fuzzy line between the desired goal of tolerance of a religion and the despicable goal of mandatory respectfulness and uncritical speech toward a religion.

241. Gimme That Old Time Religion (Bashing)

Comment #27727 by Steven Mading on March 26, 2007 at 11:04 am

J.J says:

"You and Harris are not just trying to argue that religion is irrational--which is relatively easy--but that the nasty and violent among the religious are the better representatives of their faiths, which is a much tougher thing to prove, and with Christianity at least, probably impossible."

All adherents of Christianity must necessarily ignore some parts of what their religion says, given that their religion says self-contradictory things.

So the important question becomes, WHICH parts are being ignored.

The more moderate, friendly christians are ignoring the ones that are central, core to the religion itself. - For example, the notion that belief in Yahweh via Jesus Christ is the only means of salvation - the ONLY one. That's not some minor little point - that's the foundation of the entire religion. And any person who follows that notion and fully believes it must necessarily be disrespectful and intolerant of other religions, or of the idea of not having religion at all, because when they spread those ideas and deconvert Christians, they are causing those ex-Christians to go to hell. Think about that - the most important primary core belief of what Christianity is makes it so that if you really believe it fully, then people who try to fill your head with contrary ideas are actually engaging in behavior that will condemn you and your family to hell of you let them win you over.

242. New clues to why we see red

Comment #27723 by Steven Mading on March 26, 2007 at 10:43 am

DavyB said: "Purple is not really a spectral color. It is true that some people see a faint band of violet at the far blue end of the rainbow. I don't think anyone knows for sure why that is."

I always thought it was a harmonic affect tickling the red receptor.
The blue end of human vision is about 400nm wavelengths.
The red end is about 700nm

Half of 700 is 350.

So what might be happening is that as the wavelengths get down close to 350, we approach the first-order harmonic (the doubling of frequency) of the frequency the the red receptor is looking for, and so the red receptor registers a false positive because it's starting to get close to "2x red".

And that's why bluer than blue looks violet - the 2x frequency harmonic is generating a signal on the red receptor.

And that's why we can simulate violet by giving our eyes a signal of red and blue on a computer monitor. Even though that's an entirely different input spectrum than the one in nature that produces a violet sensation, it stimulates the receptors in the same way, generating an optical illusion of violet.

243. GM mosquito 'could fight malaria'

Comment #27720 by Steven Mading on March 26, 2007 at 10:30 am

I'm concerned with the role that mosquitoes play in the food chain. Making them die out entirely by sterlization may be a bad idea. The idea of making them no longer be carriers or malaria seems more prudent.

244. Nigeria teacher dies 'over Koran'

Comment #27719 by Steven Mading on March 26, 2007 at 10:25 am

While it is true that a common term for virgin and the word for white raisin are the same (much like the English word "cherry"), many other passages (other than the one that gives the number 72) do give explicit descriptions of the virgins one will be rewarded with in heaven that are not abmiguous and do use other terms for virgin than the "white raisin" term. So in theory the argument about "white raisins" not being virgins can only be used to discount the part where it gives a count of 72 of them. So maybe you could use that argument to say the number of virgins one will find in heaven is not really 72 because that passage was talking about raisins. But you can't use it to claim that one is not promised virgins in heaven. It's only the place where a count of 72 is given where this linguistic ambiguity exists. In the other places where the Islamic texts state that one is rewarded with virgins in heaven, there is no such ambiguity.

245. If only gay sex caused global warming

Comment #27186 by Steven Mading on March 23, 2007 at 12:52 pm

I think the biggest worry is still overpopulation. Trying to fix global warming by altering how much pollution is generated per person is just a stall tactic that attacks the symptom, not the cause. As long as the population continues growing exponentially, pollution will outgrow our ability to mitigate it. (Because our mitigations are generally linear in nature (i.e. "This new form of electrical plant only pollutes 30% as much per killowatt-hour as the one it replaces, yea.", but the population growth is exponential.)

If we could flatten human population growth rates to a generally linear graph, then a lot of other problems become possible to solve - global warming being just one of them. If we fail to do this, then a lot of those problems will always remanin impossible to solve, global warming being one of them.

And it is possible to flatten growth. Much of Europe has done it. The key obsticle to doing it is religious attitudes about sex, procreation, and birth control.

246. The Salem Hypothesis

Comment #27184 by Steven Mading on March 23, 2007 at 12:39 pm

An engineer learns science and builds things with it.
A scientist learns science and build more science with it.

Both start out by learning what science has already discovered. It's what they do with it that makes them different. Both are important. Both are useful. But don't trick yourself into thinking they are identical.

247. The Fourth Flea!

Comment #26756 by Steven Mading on March 21, 2007 at 2:02 pm

From post 44, by kkant"
"2) RELIGIOUS INDOCTRINIZATION OF CHILDREN IS ABUSE:
...
If I've misrepresented Dawkins' views and/or the book here, someone please correct me."

Well, I don't know if Dawkins thinks indoctrination of children is abuse, but I do know that this isn't what he was talking about in TGD. (It might be something he mentioned elsewhere though - he's written an awful lot of things I haven't read.)

In TGD, the point he was making was that the premature labelling them as members of the religion was abuse - not the teaching to them of the religion, but the claim that they are already members of it the moment they are born into a family with parents who believe it. If you haven't thought about it yet yourself, and haven't agreed to what it says yet yourself, then you are NOT a member of the religion yet. Religion is NOT hereditary. The belief does not transmit from the parents to the child unconditionally like genes do. It's something you pick up later in life via deliberate conscious thought.

Imagine a mother talking to her very small child for the first time about the religion she follows. The instant she says - "This is what we believe" she's lying. The child (part of that 'we') does not yet believe it.

By talking to the child as if his belief in the religion was already there to begin with, just by being part of the culture, as if it's not something he needs to voluntarily enter into before it becomes his, the child's ability to think for himself about the issue is stunted.

This is why I think atheists experience such dripping ire and hatred by the religious - people's belief in god predates their higher cognative abilities because it happened as a very core part of what their parents told them, at that young age when you accept everything you're told, and use that as the axioms you build other beliefs on for the rest of your life. The belief in god happens so early in life due to this labelling that in the mind of the thusly labelled person belief in god becomes an axiom to build arguments on, rather than a concusion of arguments derived from lower axioms.

248. The Fourth Flea!

Comment #26752 by Steven Mading on March 21, 2007 at 1:48 pm

Cheshire cat said:
"The barrier for entry to the serious debate is not belief but knowledge."

It would be wonderful if that was true. But the problem is that by defining it so that one must agree with the claims of theologians to enter into the debate, you do make it so that only believers are allowed in.

I'm well aware that modern theologians claim the religion was never intended to be believed literally. But if you insist that I am required to agree with that claim before I can speak on the subject, you are indeed asking for more than just knowlege of what claims they have made. You are insisting on agreement with the claims they have made.

249. The Fourth Flea!

Comment #26751 by Steven Mading on March 21, 2007 at 1:42 pm

cheshire cat, your post #40 is very wrong, in several ways. Let me iterate them:
You seem to be saying that the fact that there is a long tradition in Christianity of interpreting Genesis as not really true means Dawkins is making a strawman argument. Here's the problems with that:
1 - St Augustine did not invent Christianity. A lot of Christin history predates him - so a quote by him does not prove your claim that genesis was always not meant to be taken literally by Christians.
2 - Dawkins was talking about a lot more than just Genesis. Some of the claims the bible makes are impossible to metaphor-away without losing the core of what the religion actually is, and yet they are indeed claims about objective reality too. For example - Did Jesus Christ the man actually exist or was he a legend? If he existed, are the four gospels in the Bible that are alleged to have been written by some eyewitnesses of him a reliable tale of the events in his life, or not? That's an objective question for historians, not a subjective question for theologians. Did Jesus Christ actually come back from the dead or not? Again, a necessary defining characteristic of being a Christian, and an objective historical claim, not a subjective "opinion". Is there in fact an afterlife? Again, an objective claim about the reality of the universe, not a subjective one. Did the universe have a deliberate designer that made it? Again, an objective claim about the reality of the universwe, not a subjective one.

The idea that Genesis is the ONLY place where Christianity makes objective claims that should be dealt with scientifically and not religiously, and therefore the one quote by St Agustine proves that this religion is entirely meant to be subjective in all its claims, is complete bollocks.

250. The Fourth Flea!

Comment #26747 by Steven Mading on March 21, 2007 at 1:22 pm

From comment #24:
When people attack him for not knowing any theology they have a point.

Not really. First off, he does know some theology - he just doesn't agree with it, or consider it worthwhile to pursue it any further than a cursory look because it's already wrong before you go any further with it than that. Secondly, a person who does not find religion to be convincing does not become a theologian. By saying that being a theologian is a prerequisite for talking about religion, Dawkins' critics end up creating a barrier for entry to the topic where the only people allowed to talk about religion are believers. It's a nice closed circle tautology to shut out all atheists - you can't discuss religion unless you are a theologian, and no theologians will claim the topic of their study is a sham.