They should be allowed to, because this is a free country, they just shouldn't actually do it, because it's not good for the kids.
I know, and I felt kind of bad because she really seems to genuinely want a cat-dog hybrid, but I just couldn't help myself. ;)
I couldn't sleep, so I came down here to get an english muffin.
Point redistribution differs from wealth redistribution in two ways:
- We won't die of starvation if we don't get points.
- Points are given out via a consistent set of rules that reward all members equally for equal participation. Wealth is distributed unevenly, in most cases justifiable rewarding hard work, imagination, or risk, but also often pooling in the hands of a few people by virtue of their position. (I know that's overly simplistic, but I'm just trying to point out that money is often not distributed evenly).
Personally, I don't believe in redistributing wealth, but I do believe in structuring society to distribute wealth more evenly in the first place, such as through minimum wage and labor unions.
P.S. I also think we need to have support for bulleted lists in these edit boxes. I totally tried to do this above using html tags, but they were ignored. :(
This particular data comes just from the UK, but I see no reason why it would be different elsewhere. However, if someone has this data on a more global scale, it would be interesting to see.
Not yet, but my cat and dog have been working on it for years. I'm sure they're close to getting it. ;)
Dang, I was going to say exactly that. You beat me by 50 minutes. ;)
but compare Christian secular giving to Muslim and Jewish total giving
Do you have a reference to back this up? I didn't see this explained in the article I referenced, so I'm wondering if you're pulling that info from another reference.
I don't think their tracking donations directly, they're doing a poll and asking people how much they donate and what their religion is. Therefore, assuming people are honest, the poll is really recording how much people think they donate, not how much they really donate.
Sorry. I think I was trying to be indirect or something. Clearly it wasn't an effective strategy. I changed the title to be a little more clear.
You guys are missing the point entirely, but I guess I wasn't completely clear either. The real point I'm trying to make is that Muslims give more to charity than anyone else. I think that's an important point to keep in perspective when reading all the negative news about Muslims.
I know there's a lot of controversy over GMOs, and it sounds like there's a large potential for bad things to happen (unfortunately, I don't remember what the issues are), but I think there's a lot of potential for good as well, and I don't think we should throw the good out with the bad. We may need to carefully monitor and regulate GMOs, but I don't think they should be abandoned completely.
I remember something along those lines being considered, but the idea was rejected for some reason, I'm not sure why. Perhaps it would be worth reconsidering that idea with the wisdom of hindsight.
I agree, the issue between the Kurds and Turkey is a little more complicated than the other areas, but given that the other areas were being broken up, something would have to be done with the Kurds, and I think giving them to Turkey is better than giving them to Syria or Iran.
I also hadn't thought about Baghdad, and don't have an answer for that, but I also don't think one city should block a resolution that is good for the rest of the country. Even though Baghdad is diverse, I think the land around it is mostly Shiite (I'm not sure of that, it's been a while since I last saw maps that showed this stuff), so I think Baghdad would go to Iran.
As for the oil reserves, I think they should just follow the land.
There will obviously be a lot of arguing over borderline areas, and this is probably one of the reasons they didn't go this direction. However, I think the biggest reason we didn't divide up the country was that we're enemies with Syria and Iran, and we didn't want to give them anything.
All in all, though, I agree with you that we could have avoided all of this mess had Iraq never been formed in the first place. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it obviously hasn't worked out well.
Yes, but who's going to take out the trash and kill all the spiders?
They say (okay, I heard it once on TV) that the strongest marriages, on average, are those in which the wife looks better than the husband, and the husband makes more money than the wife. The theory is that the ideals of the sexes are different, so they can both 'win' in the comparisons that are important to them, and they can both see value in each other.
In a same sex couple, there's no obvious distinction like that, so I would think competition would be a bigger issue.
On the other hand, there is also a lot to be said for couples having a lot in common with each other. I've always said that if it weren't for the whole sex thing, men and women would never hang out together.
It certainly does not go without saying. Saddam was a brutal dictator who murdered anyone who, in his paranoid delusions, posed a threat to his regime. But, under his "reign of terror", women enjoyed far more equality than they do today, and the country was considered safe enough to do business with, bringing in foreign capital. Also, during his reign, he murdered far fewer people than have been killed since through sectarian violence, not even counting the people who died in the war.
Our military is the greatest engine of destruction the world has ever known (I mean that in a good way), and they are very good at targeting that destruction on military targets and minimizing civilian casualties, but as a force for nation building, it, and we, totally suck.
And after the war, which never should have happened, Iraq should have been split up, with the Sunni portion going to Syria, the Shiite portion going to Iran, and the Kurdish portion either given to Turkey, or setup as an independent nation.
If god created everything and put all human into motion with pre-planned actions throughout every life then that means that everything any human does is his intention.
The Bible says God created everything, but it doesn't say he put all humans into motion with preplanned actions. Sure, if you take a physicists point of view, and you believe that if you know everything about the universe at any one point in time, then with enough processing power you could predict all future events, then you could argue your point, that if God created the universe, then how he created it would predict all future events, but I think the two theories are mutually exclusive. Or at least, if you believe in a God, and that each man has a soul, then the laws of physics can be thought of to only apply when elements of the spirit world aren't affecting it. From a Christians point of view, God created the universe, and man, but he created man with a soul and the power of free will, and that gives man the power to change his course of action.
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to push either a Christian or an Atheistic point of view. I just think that when you combine two different paradigms, like science and the Bible, then you're making a lot of assumptions about which elements you pull from each paradigm, and your readers aren't necessarily going to make the same assumptions. If you're going to convince people that you're right, then you have explain and justify those assumptions.
Weve evolved BEYOND his morality.
Our morality today is certainly much different than it was when the books of the Old Testament were written. Whether it's better or not is a judgement call. The world today is much different than it was back then. Today we have birth control, which allows us to keep our population more or less below what our resources can provide for. Without that, your only choices are war and murder or mass starvation. I personally prefer today's world, because I'm not sure I would have been one of the successful ones in the world of the Old Testament, but people don't get to choose when and where they are born, so you can't blame the people of the Old Testament for acting the way they did back then, or for projecting those morals onto their God.
The Bible doesn't tell us, but I think he created the moon first, but it didn't work. It didn't have a strong enough gravitational pull hold it's oxygen in. His second attempt was Earth, and that one worked much better, but he was still kind of sentimental about his first attempt, so he hung it up there in the sky for everyone to look at.
Also, it was pretty.
All Genesis 8:3 says is that the rain stopped and the waters gradually receded. It doesn't say anything about erosion. Also, as the waters receded, it would have washed soil down, not up. The Bible says that the ark came to a rest on Mount Arafat, so the mountains would have remained. As the waters pulled away from the mountains and valleys, they would have followed the low courses of the land, basically where the earlier rivers would have been. If anything, they would have dug the courses of the rivers deeper.
The article you quote mentions a redistribution of surface soil, but not a changing of the contours of the earth, which is what would be required to significantly change the course of rivers. The courses of rivers change in minor ways even today, but that doesn't cause us to change their names, so a much bigger change than that would have been required to justify a name change.
I'm not claiming to prove that the existing rivers would have reappeared, only that it's plausible that they could have. Also, there's still the possibility that people could have reapplied the old names to new rivers. Basically, I'm just saying that you're a long way off from proving that the flood was local based on these few sentences from the Bible.
You must really want a response here if you posted the same argument twice. :)
Why couldn't the rivers just re-form as the waters subsided.
The flood would of caused major geological changes in the Earth.
This is your claim, but it's not obvious how much change and whether or not that would be sufficient to change the course of rivers. Mountains are likely to remain as they were before the flood, and that means their runoff would go in roughly the same valleys. Whether they would follow roughly the same course is hard to say, but I think that's close enough to give it the same name. Also, you mentioned that only two of the original four rivers remained, so that potentially points to a fairly significant geological change, just not enough of a change to destroy all of the rivers.
If the old names of the rivers were still remembered, then people would probably just resume calling them by the same names, and if they couldn't be remembered, then those who wrote the bible would just have had to use the new names to describe the rivers of Eden.
Unlikely
I'm not sure which of my options you're calling unlikely, probably both, but either way I'm just going to point out people name things in a fairly ad hoc manner. The turkey got it's name because American settlers thought it looked like another bird that had been imported to Europe through the country Turkey:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey(bird)#Historyand_naming
I also remember reading about certain birds and trees in the new world that were named after old world trees and birds just because they reminded the settlers of the old world versions. (Unfortunately, I don't remember which birds/trees these were.)
In short, if you were one of those post-flood survivors, lost and alone in a barren post-flood world, and you came across some as yet unnamed river, wouldn't you want to give it some nice familiar name that evoked fond memories of the rivers that Grandma used to talk about, a name that would be easily recognizable by others in your group? Of course you would. :)
I am actually totally in agreement with you as far as not wanting to government to make these kinds of decisions for me. However, if I knew someone who was blind and was concerned about protecting themselves, I would probably recommend pepper spray.
I realized it was a joke, but after I wrote the original question, I came up with a solution very similar to what you suggested. Basically, many people have come up with a splitting reality theory to solve problems like the time traveler's paradox, where an event happens that splits reality into two different paths.
What would happen if you started with two different paths that both took events to an identical state? If an event that creates two different outcomes can split reality, can two different events that result in the same outcome cause two realities to merge?
Of course, from an Atheists perspective, the most obvious solution is that the bible is fallible, and this is just one of many mistakes, so until we can get some Christians weighing in on this issue, everything else is just fanciful musings.
I'm actually disappointed that no Christians have responded. I can't believe that no one has noticed this discrepancy before and come up with a solution that satisfies Christianity, and there seems to be no end to the interest on this site for discussing these types of issues, so I'm not sure how to interpret their silence.
I stand corrected. The power and eloquence of your logic is overwhelming.
But how did the events of both dimensions get recorded in this one? Are you suggesting that the two dimensions somehow merged together?
The article wasn't complaining about blind people have guns at home, just carrying them out in public:
A majority of law enforcement officers across the state don’t have a problem with the visually impaired owning a gun to protect themselves within their own home, where they are familiar with the surroundings, according to Dunbar. Their concern is when someone who can’t see takes that weapon out into the community to try and protect themselves.
There is always room for improvement, but not always a viable mechanism for improvement. I think most people like the lack of rules on this sight. I remember people posting links to another debate website, and I looked at that briefly, but the quality and detail of the debates on that site was, frankly, intimidating to me. This is probably more a site for beginning/amateur debaters.
With this site, you can always try to educate people on better debate techniques in the body of a debate, and if you give good advice, then over time things might improve a little, but not much. At some point, with new users joining the site and old users becoming inactive (or graduating to that other site, or maybe to that "great debate site it the sky") things will eventually reach a steady state that will probably be lower than what you want.
That sounds like just the improvement in quality that I'd like to see. After that, maybe we can add female mud wrestling into our debates. :)
I'm sure it is a serious debate, but right now I'm having a hard time concentrating on anything meaningful to say. All I can think of is "Hubba Hubba!". :)
Why couldn't the rivers just re-form as the waters subsided. If the old names of the rivers were still remembered, then people would probably just resume calling them by the same names, and if they couldn't be remembered, then those who wrote the bible would just have had to use the new names to describe the rivers of Eden.
God realized that he didn't have to kill everyone, and that he could just use natural selection to weed out the unworthy, i.e. those of inferior genetic quality.
I'm not saying that none of our moral rules apply to god, I'm just saying that moral rules don't necessarily translate from one species, or type of being, to another, and that each one has to be looked at in a case by case basis. I'm also not trying to state categorically that the incest taboo doesn't apply to God, I'm just suggesting that that would be one way that God could be his own father without having sinned.
If you're reading anything else into what I've said, then you're applying your own interpretation to it, not mine.
I don't think I'm saying that. I'm saying that the moral rules for God will be different than those for man, because He is a fundamentally different type of being. I am further postulating that if our prohibition against incest is due to the whole defect inheritance issue, which is a fairly accepted theory going back to Darwin's era), and if God is considered to be perfect, then the prohibition against incest may not apply to him.
It's possible, given an assumption of different moral rules for God, that rape and other acts that would be considered sinful for man might not be considered sinful for God, but each act would have to be evaluated independently.
Also, even though we can theorize what may or may not be sinful for God to do, I wouldn't want to be presumptuous enough to accuse him of wrongdoing to his face. Right or wrong, I don't see that as going well for you. :)
Yes, but that's not really a problem. It only seems like a problem because you're projecting our value system onto God. Our prohibition against incest is due to defects in our genomes (explained below for those who don't know the details) but God has no defects, so it isn't a problem for Him.
Explanation: On average, we all have about 8 defects in our genome that would be fatal if those defects were homozygous. (We have two copies of every gene, one from our mother and one from our father. If both copies are the same, we are 'homozygous' for that gene, if they are different, we are 'heterozygous'.) If you mate with someone with whom you're closely related, then the chance of both of you having the same defects, and thus both of you passing those defects on to your offspring and leaving your offspring homozygous for that defect, is greatly increased. In response to that, natural selection has favored individuals who prefer to find their mates outside of their immediate family.
I can see two possible reasons why this is considered morally wrong. Either we've evolved an inherent feeling of ickiness towards the act of incest, or our ancestors noticed that incestuous relationships produced bad offspring, and interpreted that as punishment for a sinful act. This is similar to the theory for why Jews are prohibited from eating pork, but the attitude against incest is much stronger that that against eating pork, so I'm going with the ickiness theory.
Actually, I'm going to dispute my own statement here. I think our difference of opinion is based on semantics, not on any real disagreement. I think that when you think of an absolute value system, you're thinking of something that's universal to all humans, or maybe anything that can be considered to improve an organisms chances of survival, and I do agree that once you've identified any kind of goal as being desirable, then you can derive a set of values that contribute to achieving that goal.
However, when I think of an absolute value system, I'm thinking one degree more abstract than that, in that I think the idea of selecting any one goal is itself a value judgement and is no longer abstract. Without that 'seed' goal, such as increasing entropy, or complexity, or whatever, you can't extrapolate from that to create a value system.
You've obviously put a lot of thought into this, and I'm not going to claim to understand all that you've said, but I would like to respond to a couple of the points:
3,1) Evolution is caused by the universal tendency towards an increase in entropy.
Are you sure about this? I don't know much about thermodynamics, but I know a little bit about evolution. If you define entropy in terms of the randomness of the genome, then natural selection acts to reduce this entropy by eliminating combinations that don't result in a viable organism. Although there is certainly an increase in entropy on those rare occasions where a new species is formed, this is by far the exception rather than the rule.
Generally complicated life forms (like mammals as opposed to bacteria) are very effective at distributing energy and increasing entropy, but they are 'expensive' in the sense that they require a lot of lower level life forms to be sustainable. Since they are effective they are worth more, this corresponds with our inert tendency to place a higher value on birds than ants.
This is getting at the real heart of the issue. You say that more effective organisms are "worth more", but who is it that judges them more worthy? The laws of natural selection may select for more effective individuals, but that's because of the mechanism by which it works, not because such individuals are "worth more". Personally, I think we judge the worthiness of various species by how much nutrition they provide us when we eat them, but we evolved the tendency to evaluate other species in this way because it helps us to survive.
In fact, most, if not all, of our value judgements can be traced to things that allow us to survive better, but we only have those values because those of our ancestors that had those values survived in greater numbers than those that didn't, so the genes, and teachings, of those ancestors are better represented in today's population.
You could say, therefore, that this is the criteria that can use be used universally to distinguish right and wrong, but that's only true if we believe that survival is right, and that, again, is simply something we've evolved because those of our ancestors who believed this tended to out-survive those who didn't.
The universe doesn't give a rat's ass whether we survive or not. Only we care.
If I come to your home and kill your children.....are you telling me that it is not bad
The Bible teaches us that this is perfectly acceptable, because God did it to the Egyptians in order to set his people free. We also see many examples in the animal kingdom where an individual will kill someone else's children in order to free up resources for their own children.
Believing that there is no absolute right vs. wrong doesn't mean that you don't have a sense of what is right and wrong, only that you understand that your views of right and wrong are not universal. As humans, we have evolved a sense of right and wrong so that we can live together in large groups. The larger the group we live in, the more secure we are from outside invasions, and the better able our group will be to gather and defend the resources we need in order to survive.
There are some rules that are universal to all humans, but they extend only to humans, not to other species on our planet, not to potential aliens from another planet, and apparently not to God. We can only conjecture what these universal-to-humans rules might be, but I've heard it suggested that a sense of reciprocity is one of these values, that if I do you a favor, you should do one back for me if the opportunity arises. If you don't, then I'm going to hold it against you, and if you don't do this consistently, with others of your group, then the whole group will treat you poorly, and your chances of survival will go down.
The idea that we treat strangers with a certain amount of respect is something that we've learned, not evolved. It was one of Jesus's messages, and as we all know, it was only learned through a certain amount of sacrifice. However, it has enabled our societies to grow much larger than they were previously, and for those societies that practice it, it enables different societies to exist more peacefully together.
However, getting back to the core issue, these are values that we have developed as humans because they help us to survive. They are not absolute.
I really appreciate anyone who can argue their viewpoint in a logical manner, and it's even so satisfying when that someone has a viewpoint so different from your own. I'm not going to agree with a lot that you say, of course, but the clarity with which you represent your ideas makes it easy for me to see things from your viewpoint.
I'm an atheist, but I was raised Christian, so on an emotional level, the ideas and symbolism of Christianity mean a lot more to me than those of other religions, but I believe that from a philosophical standpoint, all religions have a lot to offer.
I'm going to partially disagree with you on your statement that Christianity takes most of the heat when arguing against religion in general. Certainly that's true of this website because almost everyone here is either an atheist or a christian, but world-wide I think Islam is getting a lot more heat these days. However, when you think about it, Islam and Christianity, more than any other religion, teaches their followers that theirs is the one true way, that anyone who follows a different path is going to hell, and that they should try to convert or force others to believe the same thing. I'm sure you're going to object to that statement regarding Christianity, but the missions that Christians have setup throughout history, which still exist today, and whose sole purpose is to convert the godless masses to believe in Christianity, is blatant evidence that they do this. As can easily be imagined, non-Christians are very offended by the way Christians openly claim that theirs is the only true religion and that everyone else's beliefs are false. It is because of this attitude that Christians and Muslims alike get so much heat.
Having said all of this, I think it is the institutions of Christianity, and not Christianity itself, that is to blame for this. Jesus taught to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", to "let he who is without sin cast the first stone", and he taught the parable of the Good Samaritan. The first teaches us to treat others with respect, the second not to judge others for their perceived failings, and the third that it is your actions, and not your beliefs, that make you a good person. Though it was the founder of Christianity that taught these values, I find that a lot more non-Christians than Christians follow them, yourself notwithstanding, of course.
I think he's like a Time Lord or something. Then he could go back in time and become his own father.
Jesus said it Himself, "I am THE WAY, THE TRUTH AND THE LIFE, NO ONE COMES TO THE FATHER BUT THROUGH ME." This is easy to understand...no way to misinterpret what Christ meant.
How is that easy to understand? Christians interpret that as meaning that you have to believe in God and that Jesus is the son of God, but that is certainly not the only way to interpret it. It could also mean believing in and following his message. I could easily be a Jew, but believe in the teachings of Jesus, since he was a Jewish prophet after all, and even though I don't believe Jesus is the son of God, I could still go to heaven. In fact, I could even be an atheist, but if I still lived my life according to Jesus's message, then theoretically I would go to heaven, even though I didn't believe that heaven existed.
There may be other passages in the bible that more clearly justify the Christian interpretation, but the above statement doesn't come close to that.
