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14 points

I think Haley from Order of the Stick has her argument down pat here.

Supporting Evidence: Order of the Stick #121 (www.giantitp.com)
4 points

C'mon guys, this is self-evident: blue is cool, while orange is hot. Basic color theory.

Supporting Evidence: Wikipedia on color theory (en.wikipedia.org)
3 points

Yes, but then, I'm a programmer. It's kind of required, given that I'm dealing not with custom-built GUI wizardry designed for maximum usability, but with languages for general-purpose unrestricted computation and tools for low-level manipulation designed for the technically-inclined. In fact, in things outside of my area of expertise, I often don't read the manual, finding I pick things up faster by trying than by reading. It's a bit funny: you'd think someone with expertise in a particular area would RTFM less there, but precisely because they tend to be dealing with more complex problems, it is just for such people that reading the manual is often most important.

1 point

"Natural" or "normal" do not equate to "healthy" and "right". Whatever the source of such fascination, even if it is some quirk of human nature that would in other circumstances be useful, it is at present far from edifying or helpful - quite the contrary. It diverts what could otherwise be useful time to mindless diversion ("mindless", not "diversion", being the operative word), it encourages a materialistic and envious culture, and of course it hardly leads to much happiness for those whose lives are so inordinately scrutinized.

10 points

A two party system is inevitable? Go tell that to the Netherlands.

4 points

1. Most atheists I know don't think all theists are stupid. Anecdotes get us nowhere.

5. Atheists do not "believe in nothing". Atheists merely lack belief or do not believe in a deity. That is the only unifying factor among atheists; apart from that, anything goes. Atheism is not even the same as lacking religion (eg. Buddhists can be atheists). And no, every other religion does not believe in basically the same thing. The ten commandments require monotheism and Sabbath observance, prohibit idolatry and blasphemy. These are features not found in many other religions. As for "God" being a vague term, while in general it may be, in the context of the ten commandments it most certainly is not ambiguous.

Those are the only points I object to.

2 points

In any sufficiently complex logical system, there are statements that are true but unprovable, yes. But this is not "unprovable by computers", this is "unprovable within the system, period". Godel's incompleteness theorem says nothing about humans and human consciousness being special. Yes, we can show that these theorems are true, "proving" them in a fashion - but only in a metasystem, not within the rules of eg. Peano arithmetic itself. Likewise, so could a computer prove a statement about Peano arithmetic, from a system outside it.

1 point

Indeed, extreme views and fanaticism do not always go hand-in-hand with violence. Consider the ascetism and nonviolence of Jainism, or the anti-technological stance of the Amish.

2 points

Although I agree with most of what you are saying in theory, I do not understand your apparent belief that antitheism has become the rule rather than the exception in the US and its government. The vast majority of America is religious now, as it has always been. Atheism is gaining ground, but most of the atheists I know (including myself) want nothing more than not to be discriminated against on the basis of their lack of faith (and for the most part, we are not discriminated against). What is it that makes you say that "religion cannot creep into any aspect of public life"? Can you provide any articles or even anecdotes justifying your fear? Until you do, I will continue to think you are overreacting.

7 points

AIDS is not spread by homosexuality. It is spread by promiscuity. (In particular, you mentioned Africa, where the spread of AIDS is far more attributable to unprotected sex than to homosexuality.) The homosexual subculture does tend toward promiscuity, but this is not a necessary aspect of homosexuality itself. In much the same way as Christianity was associated with patriarchy and, eg., militarism during the Crusades, it's a historical artifact, not a causative association. Sex, when engaged in "properly", can still spread disease, no matter the biological genders of those involved.

As for why homosexuality was moved off the list of mental disorders, its true this was for political/social reasons. However, political-social reasons are the only reasons it was on the list in the first place. The idea of "voting away" an affliction is ludicrous because it should not be necessary except in a ludicrous situation!

What is "natural" and what is not is a red herring. Nature is not a guide to morality. Self-sacrifice and martyrdom are not "natural", and neither is monogamy (some species mate singly and for life; humans don't tend to unless strongly pressured by social norms).

And no, a "right" to homosexuality is never mentioned in the constitution, nor is a more broad right to privacy or freedom of sexuality mentioned; because it is impossible to mention all the things which should be legal in one document. If we're going to argue based on the founding father's intents - which are hardly, again, a guide to morality - the Constitution was written using the guiding philosophy of the "social contract", under which government was formed merely to protect persons from other persons. Homosexuality is victimless, thus not falling under the purview of this minimalistic view of government.

If you don't argue based on sinfulness, then why did you bring it up at all? You argued earlier that homosexuality is unnatural. I believe this is false, but I didn't bring that up, because I believe that arguing from "nature" is wrongheaded in the first place; so why do you bring up homosexuality's sinfulness if you believe this is not a good way to argue? You're just trying to be convincing while preventing people from attacking you on this point, getting the best of both worlds. This is not only fallacious, it's deceitful.

3 points

So something being illegal makes it wrong? Funny, I thought it was supposed to be the other way around.

I have cousins who are aged 12-15. A few years ago, we were on holiday in Crete, and they decided to play naked in a private pool at our rented residence. Their father took a picture of this. Does that make him a pedophile? Sure, it wasn't "posing", but hell, even if he had asked them to stop splashing around for a while so he could get a decent picture, would it be a sign of pedophilia? Or just of a parent wanting to keep a clear reminder of happy memories?

Slitting someone's throat and them posing naked are hardly comparable. Obviously exploitation of a person is wrong, no-one is arguing against that - but what you are doing is jumping to the conclusion that the portrayal of underage nudity must be for purposes of exploitation, and this is simply not so. Obviously it can be, but so can many other non-illegalized things. The solution is not to also ban them, but to make exploitation illegal, and leave it to the courts to determine what was really going on - that is why they exist.

2 points

Exploitation is wrong no matter who the subject is - given this, why do we feel the need to say in addition to it that "14 year olds posing nude is wrong"? It is not underage nudity that is wrong, it is exploitation, and the matters should be handled separately. If a person abuses a position of authority - be it that they are older or that they are richer or that they are that person's boss - to force someone to do something they do not understand or which is explicitly against their will, then that is wrong.

But we do not need to assume that just because the person is a minor, they cannot understand what is being done. I know persons who were mature at the age of thirteen, and I know persons older than myself whom I would not trust with their own lives. There are reasons why we have judges and juries who take the time to think about whether anyone has been wronged; because it requires human judgment to determine this. Mechanical special-cased laws, such as those prescribing definite age limits, can never accurately describe what is moral.

To say that taking a photograph or painting or other depiction of a naked minor is wrong in all cases is tantamount to saying that nudity itself is wrong - a view I simply do not understand.

0 points

I agree with your argument. In addition, I'd like to point out that while the wording of the Second Amendment does support the idea that its intent was to form a pool for state militias, it does not support the limiting of the right to bear arms to said militia. The first part of the sentence regarding the militia is a nominative absolute, a construction introduced from Latin which was far more familiar to our founders than it is to modern-day readers. Its wording, if updated to modern-day language, might run something like: "Because a militia is necessary to secure a free state, people have the right to keep and bear arms". "People" is not qualified or restricted here; the first part of the sentence merely designates the reason why the second part should be so.

2 points

You're misinterpreting the graph. Just because the graph passes the zero point somewhere around the 1970s doesn't mean that's when "global warming" started. The graph is merely of average temperatures, and if you look on the left side, it's labeled "wrt 1961-90"; that is "with respect to 1961-1990". So they put the zero point at the average temperature from 1961-1990, not at wherever the average temperature "should be" or would be without global warming. If you look at the graph, in fact, you see that average temperature has been increasing (with occasional ups and downs) since around 1910.

5 points

Well, it would be nice if you clarified what you meant by "very very recent", but yes, and this is kind of the point. If global warming weren't recent, then it wouldn't be attributable to artificial emission of greenhouse gases.

4 points

Although I agree that Yeshua of Nazareth was a real historical figure, your argument is fatally flawed.

What other institution? Islam is but 500 years younger than Christianity, while Buddhism is 400 years older. The earliest Hindu Vedas date to at least 1,100 BC. Judaism goes back maybe 4,000 years. And that's just religions. Other institutions lasting that long? City-scale government has been around for 5,000 years. Agriculture is about 11,000 years old. But then, those are practical applications, so I guess it's unfair to compare them to religion.

But all this is ignoring the fundamental problem here: lots of people believing in something doesn't make it true. Lots of people used to believe the world was flat; and moreover, many people still don't realize that this theory was debunked in the 4th century BC by the Greeks, rather than by Columbus, who in fact merely believed the world was a smaller sphere than was believed at the time (he was dead wrong and would have died if a hitherto-unknown continent hadn't happened to be in his way).

6 points

I have but one request: Cite some sources.

Coleman claims to have dug through thousands of pages of research papers; you expect me to take him at his word? He says Earth has cooled for ten straight years. The University of East Anglia says otherwise - are they falsifying data, all part of the conspiracy as well? I don't buy it, not yet. He hasn't cited a single source or linked to a single website, just blown about a bunch of hot air. He's a convincing writer, I'll give you that; but good writing and good arguments aren't the same thing.

Supporting Evidence: Global average temperatures 1850-2007 (hadobs.metoffice.com)
6 points

As long as "creationism" merely means the view that "god created the Universe", yes, there certainly are staunch creationists who understand evolution; I'm friends with one such person. Whether the majority of them do, I don't know; nor do I know how common such understanding is among creationists who also deny evolution (my friend believes in Theistic evolution; see link).

Supporting Evidence: Theistic evolution on Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
9 points

While I don't know whether they have been documented instances of macroevolution in the laboratory, there certainly have been observed instances of speciation, which goes a long way towards discrediting the creationist argument that "well, we've never actually seen macroevolution happen". See the attached link.

Supporting Evidence: Observed instances of speciation (www.talkorigins.org)
1 point

Religion itself is a "shifting sand". It was thought that God created the world in 7 days - nowadays this view is passé, held only by fanatics; most claim that "7 days" means "7 periods of indeterminate time", or that the entire thing was just a metaphor. But the content of the Bible hasn't changed; just our interpretation of it - that is, just the religion itself.

The fact is, there is nothing wrong with admitting lack of knowledge about something, and science does this in many areas. Indeed, science is nothing but an attempt to fill those gaps in knowledge, which one cannot do without acknowledging their existence. Religiously denying them by saying "god did it" is called "god of the gaps", and is a tricky proposition what with science going around steadily filling them.

So despite your derogatory analogy of scientific endeavour (such as the theory of evolution) to "building a house on shifting sand", science is actually going about things the right way by acknowledging its limitations, while religion takes one of two paths: escaping into having only "personal meaning" and taking its holy books to have only "metaphorical" meaning, or remaining in denial and believing in "god of the gaps".

4 points

Most of the arguments against strong AI revolve, as yours does, around the idea that there is something "special" about self-awareness or consciousness. But if the human brain or indeed the Universe itself is simulable (see below), then the only possible reason that "consciousness" could be special is if naturalism is wrong - if there is something supernatural and extra-causal about the human mind. There is no evidence to suggest this, and I see no reason to believe it is true. Discussion of this proposition could however take up a debate all to itself.

Then the question merely becomes: is the Universe, or at least the human brain, "simulable" - meaning, does the Church-Turing thesis apply to it? Can the physical laws of the universe, or the neural functioning of the brain, be phrased as an "algorithm"? Our current knowledge of the laws of physics says it probably can, although the Copenhagen interpretation of QM would suggest we need a true source of randomness for this simulation; thankfully this is not only possible but nearly within our grasp given the developments being made in quantum computation.

2 points

While I am a believer in Strong AI (roughly, the proposition that computers can become self-aware), I don't believe that we'll have a functional strong AI within 50 years. You mention chess as an example of computers outperforming humans; but consider the game of Go. Computers are utterly incapable of playing Go at anything approaching a professional level. This is partially because Go-programs mostly model the game as they would other games of the same type (chess, checkers, othello), but Go is so complex that this model doesn't scale well to it: the number of possible games of Go exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe); the number of possible moves on each turn is very large; and a good utility function for evaluating a board position is nonobvious.

But developing a different approach, one capable of playing Go competently, would probably amount to solving many problems in the realm of AI which are are, to say the least, nontrivial (pattern recognition and "intuition", for example, are extremely important parts of the game of Go; but we have essentially no formal notion of what these are or how to implement them). I reckon they are probably best solved, not by brute force nor by a priori logic, but by examining how the human brain actually works itself: developing strong AI is more than just a technological problem, it requires understanding of the human mind. But while technology is indeed advancing rapidly, perhaps exponentially, our knowledge of the workings of the human brain is advancing rather slower. I would say that it is highly unlikely that we will have strong AI within the next 50 years, or even the next century.

However, all this is ultimately just speculation. Only time will tell whether computers will ever rival the human mind.

3 points

Any analogy can be stretched until it is broken. The point of the Game of Life example was to show that complexity can develop from simplicity (any emergent phenomenon would have done as well, really; I just have a fondness for math). The fact that the rules and parameters (such as the starting state) are human-devised are irrelevant to that point. It would be relevant if I were saying that the world itself were like the game of life, but I didn't. Thanks for the strawman, though.

1 point

I have no formal debate experience; mostly just talking with friends and participating in various other online communities. On the other hand, my father is a professor of philosophy and often enough I've been present when he's meeting with friends and they're talking about philosophy, and I'm usually able to both understand and participate in the argument, despite likewise having no formal grounding in philosophy. Perhaps I'm too confident of my own abilities or too sure of my own views, but I never felt out of place or under-qualified.


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