Dude, Martin Luther was really not Catholic.
However, I agree with your argument. It seems to me that if the school argued: these two girls are spreading views that go against the religious tenets of our institution, and produced some kinds of testimony that they'd been promoting the joys of lesbianism to the world, fair enough: they're disrupting the social climate that the Christian parents've chosen to raise their kids in. But saying they "exhibit a bond charactistic of a lesbian relationship" is no statement of crime. Private schools have the right to be more selective than state-funded ones, but expelling teenagers at a time when confused sexuality will be enough of a problem for them already? Shouldn't be within their rights.
I'd say yes - institutionalised discrimination, resentment against immigrants and hate crimes are all still major problems. Are racist jokes are indicative of strongly held racist beliefs? I'm not sure, but I don't think they're either a new problem or evidence that racism's unimportant nowadays.
Like... what, exactly? Wind turbines are easier to mass produce, but they also take up a larger area of land and are 'unreliable' in that they're dependant on the weather. Hydroelectricity is also arguably difficult to mass produce.
The main problem with nuclear reactors is not only the risk of a meltdown - "when [it] blows up - but the highly radioactive waste they produce. Much of this has a half-life longer than ten thousand years: it will need to be stored securely during this time or it will irradiate living things, causing cancer and other problems.
Nuclear power isn't the only option, but the reasons you put forward are inaccurate.
Portal, and, in fact, everything Valve's made. The Half-Life games and the Source engine they're built on raised standards for games everything, Team Fortress is funny and original, and all their games work well and are interesting and clever. But Portal neatly demonstrated that video games don't need violence to be awesome, so it gets my vote. (Not to mention, it has delicious cake!)
I don't it's at all true that "almost every marriage has had at least one half of the relationship have an affair" - I know a lot of happily married couples who haven't. While there are more and more people who are choosing not to get married because they don't agree with the idea of their relationships being religious contracts, that doesn't affect whether people who are married are monogamous - if anything, it means those who don't want to be tied down don't marry, which leaves those who do marry as the people who will value the sanctity of that marriage.
Your argument rests upon the idea that the FSM is created to be a straw man fallacy and therefore belief in Him is offensive. Why is that belief offensive, though? Why is it a matter of "ultimate reality and importance"?
The creator of the FSM website, Bobby Henderson, says this: "I don’t have a problem with religion. What I have a problem with is religion posing as science." In other words, it's pointing out the absurdity on imposing beliefs on other people as if they were truth. You talk about the offending the "sacred beliefs of others" and ridiculing people, but you're missing the point. FSMism is poking fun at fundamentalism, maybe. But it's not laughing at believers, Christian or otherwise. It's asking for religious freedom and tolerance, and for all believers to be able to believe what they want, without having Creationist dogma thrust upon them.
Why does that make them "a liar, a heretic, and someone insensitive to the sacred beliefs of others"? Using the FSM as an argument to rebut the teaching of Intelligent Design is no different from using any analogy; it's not "lying", it's demonstrating a point. And as to the charge of 'heresy', I can't see how you can call either someone of another faith or an atheist a heretic. That's religious totalitarianism and it's obnoxious.
Diplomatic relations: pretty important. How will you ever find a common ground with someone if you won't meet with them; how will you ever establish peace and make agreements and win them over if there isn't communication.
But I don't understand what you mean by anti-American. That the leader's country has been known to criticise America, or what? I'm not really sure what you're getting at with it. I also don't know what the conditions of a conditional meeting with these anti-American people would be.
However an interesting parallel to this is that Mugabe came to a UN talk about food shortages. Is it OK to meet with leaders who're ruling undemocratically and who've committed human rights violations? When their presence at a summit of that nature is hypocritical? I'd say there's no reason they shouldn't be allowed to come if they're still recognised as leader of their country; if their presence is hypocritical, that'll be noticed and commented on and will highlight the problems that exist with them. So I don't really see a problem with meeting with any foreign leader, unless there's a risk they'll assassinate you or something.
Yeah, I guess limiting people would be counterproductive.
I think, Borme, that the 'report' thing seems more like it should be reserved for spam or offensive stuff, not just "another boring clone debate". Voting on a debate to say "this is good" is would be a feature more people'd use and it'd help point to interesting debates, as well as just getting rid of bad ones.
It's obvious that religious beliefs will cause tension when we're talking about places like the Gaza strip or Northern Ireland, but, as you say, that's for a variety of reasons. The Israeli community would be reluctant to elect a Muslim because there are years of resentment, violence, and hostility between the two cultures. Those cultures have different religious identities, yes, but the conflict is originally about who owns that land, so I don't think you can really compare it with American politics.
You say: "The point is it shouldn't matter what a leader's religious beliefs are even if it does have implications on their leadership ability." I don't agree. I'd say, the leader should be elected for their leadership ability, and anything that affects that does matter. Anything that influences that would also matter: I wouldn't want to vote for a hard-line Catholic who would oppose abortion and teaching people to use contraception. I wouldn't deny their right to be Catholic, I would have no prejudice against their Catholicism, but I'd disagree with their policies and I'd want to know what those policies would be. If knowing their religion gives me that information about their political convictions, I want to know it. Because of that, I want them to be open about their religion.
Getting people to use more considered arguments is a good idea, but I don't think that kind of ranking would work particularly well.
First problem: that hierarchy doesn't apply to arguing FOR a motion. It's about rebutting and counter-arguing, so it'd need to be adapted before you could use it.
It also doesn't let you give points for style, and it considers supporting evidence, which few people use on this site. I know, it'd encourage it, but if you're debating for fun in an informal argument, it puts you off to feel the need to go hunt down evidence (it also encourages the use of wikipedia...).
The other problem I have with that idea is that the general reader/voter doesn't necessarily have the critical ability to decide whether the "central point has been explicitly refuted"; besides, a lot of the voters are partisan. It'd be more appropriate to have someone neutral with recognised authority judge participants in a debate and put them on a level in that hierarchy than to encourage all feedback to be in that form.
I think that ladder ranking is interesting and you could probably make use of it, but I think the Total Points/Total Arguments would be a more practical adjustment to make to the system.
The major problem I see with CD at the moment is that there's too many people posting one knee-jerk reaction to a debate title and not really engaging with the issues behind it or other people's arguments, and I'd like to see what ideas people having in solving this problem.
I think setting up debates that'll get judged 'professionally' and have start and finish times would be a good move. Maybe pick one motion every week or every day, post the title around in advance, and maybe even make it a closed debate that'll have a limited number of people. Judging the debate and evaluating the arguments in it should encourage a better quality of debate, I think. The practicalities of that kind of thing, I'm not so sure about. Still, I'll try and make it to the town hall. So long as I figure out what time 4pm EDT is in GMT... (8pm, counting daylight savings time, right?)
What ever do you mean, corporate leeches? I confess, I'm not quite capable of imagining steampunk aesthetics catching on in the high street, although it would be rather amusing if one were to notice chavs wearing goggles.
You goddamn reactionary; don't think you're coming running back to cyberpunk land after the steampunk fad catches on. Hmph.
(Also, your link brought me much joy and happiness. <3)
I think Google have shown exactly that you don't need to be extremely competitive to win in the world. They're massively popular just because of the good design of their stuff, and because of that they make a huge profit through hosting advertising alone, and don't need to spend any of it on adverts of their own. If Microsoft is diversifying, Google's doing the same: gmail and google maps are actually innovative, too, whereas moving out of the region of PCs makes Microsoft just look desperate. Open source is growing in power, what with Ubuntu being shipped on some laptops, and Firefox is getting to be more popular than Internet Explorer. I think Microsoft is going down.
Feminists try to change people's perception of women, not what people do. They don't say "you can't make porn, girls, even if you love your job", they're saying the objectification of women is a social problem that we need to address. Because, surprise, most women in the sex industry don't want to be there, and social attitudes to the sexualisation of women mean it's hard for these women to avoid being victimised. I don't necessarily think pornography is in itself degrading, but I think in its current state it allows women to be degraded, and I don't think feminists are obstructing anyone's free will in saying so.
I disagree; words can have offensive meanings behind them, and you don't have your development stunted to be hurt by them. "Shutdown speech and thought goes with it"? Well, not all speech has thoughts worth hearing behind it. It would be narrow-minded to not listen to someone because they said 'black' and not 'African-American', but a lot of the time people will be hurt by being called the n word or being a dyke or whatever. It's not taking things personally to be upset by that; that's verbal abuse and it's hurtful to almost everyone.
The definition of existence: that's the real question here. We exist physically as constructs made of molecules that will never be destroyed, and we also exist as beings that have effects on other people and on our world. The former will continue to exist, the latter, the person, will die and not speak or act in the same way ever again. Will this being live on in a spiritual sense? That's the harder question...
This debate could be two different ones - "should we be PC" and "should we have absolute freedom of speech". I'll talk about PC-ness, because there seems to be a general scorn for it.
"Being politically correct" is pretty unimportant for most of us; however, there are people who use 'freedom of speech' to justify racism and advocacy. We have the right to express ourselves, but there are situations in which doing so risks being inappropriate and offensive and in those circumstances, we have a social obligation to be careful about how we present ourselves and our views. If not using epithets that could be seen as derogatory when people who might see them that way are there is being PC, I'm all for it.
The reason political correctness exists is to avoid offence: politicians talk to the media and large groups of people and people look for reasons to condemn what they say; they're also representing their government and country rather than just themselves, so if they say something even slightly inflammatory they're endangering international relations. This is why they need the safety net of political correctness. They may sound silly to you talking about African-Americans instead of black people and same-sex partners instead of gay people or whatever, but given that people from the island of Lesbos took offence at the word lesbian, wouldn't you say better safe than sorry? The majority of people don't care, true, but enough do that I don't think it's frivolous for the media or the government to watch what they say.
Yes, the majority of other people don't need to avoid possible offence so meticulously, but most of us aren't asked to. Being "PC" rarely affects freedom of speech, and if it also stops people all getting offended at each other, that's only a good thing. If you had to stop swearing for a week while you stayed in a house with little kids, would that be a violation of your human right to freedom of speech? No, it would be you making an effort to be polite.
I definitely agree that a lot of the debate on this site ends up as a whole lot of separate people putting forward their own argument and ignoring everyone else's (or picking at technicalities of how the debate title is phrased). Equally, a lot of "proper" debates can get distracted by accusations that this or that is a fallacy or wouldn't work economically or whatever.
However, I think debate is one of the best ways to learn to communicate, to learn to question principles, and to learn to apply logic.
My point was that the rules debating societies use are intended to judge spoken debates and thus not necessarily applicable to an on-line format of debate, which you seem to think they are; you haven't provided any reason for that not to stand. My point is that there's not enough similarity between spoken and written debates for you to try and apply the rules of one to the other, so I think what I said was quite relevant.
I'm not sure why you think a school-level debating society doesn't count as one. Is it because you don't actually know enough about debate to want to discuss how it works, so you're just going to ignore me?
Still, I think I've given up hope that you're going to do anything other than misunderstand or ignore what I say and try and sound clever doing it.
Your argument isn't beyond my comprehension: it's just not especially relevant to the debate. Arguing that "we can never prove they are mutually exclusive, so the debate is pointless" is facile and annoying and doesn't add anything to this debate.
"Your assertion that 'no omnipotent or omniscient being is observable' is unprovable and thus, invalid. You do not prove something by it's absence and you cannot prove a negative." You miss the point completely.
I think if I can see and understand the reasoning behind something, and it's based on information that's beyond reasonable doubt, then I know it. You can make arguments about the nature of knowledge and proof based on things like existentialism, or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics, but neither of those have much relevance to real life, so I'd rather just say that I know that I can know.
No matter how well you prepare your debate, it doesn't change the fact it's spoken, and a lot of what you're judged on is responding to the other side's arguments. How well you've prepared may well affect how well you'll do, but it's not what you're marked on. My point stands.
And "Most debate is written before presentation"? Is that actually true in America? The competition I know of that you know the motion beforehand for is English Speaking Union. I prefer the Oxford rules, when you just have 20 minutes preparation time.
And as for ad hominem, I quote: "Obviously you have never actually BEEN in a debate society". That may not count as a personal attack, but it's as snide as hell.
Water is not an inorganic substance. Hydrogen, carbon and oxygen are the core of organic chemistry; guess where the hydrogen and the oxygen come from? In photosynthesis carbon dioxide and water get turned into sugars, in hydrolysis reactions water gets made from organic molecules. Not much water is made by organisms, some is, so it's arguably inorganic.
What's the 2% rule?
I don't think people currently vote just by opinions - you choose an argument, not a side, to vote for. I'll vote for someone who said something intelligent even if they were on the other side, and I'll vote down someone on my own side if they say something inaccurate or obnoxious. I won't vote for people if they say something unoriginal or badly phrased. I won't vote people down just because I personally disagree with their statements so long as their argument is good.
The point of encouraging people to vote in a debate even if they're not participating in it is that they will be swayed by the arguments of one side of the other. If you had a clear opinion on a subject, you'd want to make your views heard. If you didn't, you can look at the debates and see which you agree with. I think people who will just vote and not enter the debate will not find anything they care about on this site and they'll leave it. I don't think they'll hang around voting mindlessly, which seems to be your opinion, because if they're on these sites they're clearly interested.
And I want to know what kind of a Debating Society you were in that did other things than spoken debates, to be frank. I have been a member of a various debating societies; I've spoken in both English Speaking Union and Oxford Union debates in the school-level competition, and I have never heard of a non-spoken format. Please clarify. Please don't be a hypocrite about ad hominem.
Debating on the internet isn't comparable to debating in a competition.
In all truth, though, having a score for each contributor's argument quality and then one overall score for the side would be a great idea. I don't think we should have different categories to vote for on each argument, but having a chance to vote once for the for/against and then a separate chance to mark up each argument would work really well.
Paradoxical things are ones that are mutually exclusive, and you haven't made an argument that they are both possible but beyond our comprehension. Since no omnipotent or omniscient being is observable, we can't really talk about observing these traits co-existing in real life. It has to be hypothetical, so we have to engage with the ideas on a hypothetical level.
I don't understand your second paragraph. What does your 'point of certainty' mean? Nothing can ever be beyond doubt? I don't know how that ties in with theology.
And I like making ad hominem criticisms. I'm very sorry you don't appreciate my constructive criticism :<
I dunno if you missed the point, Cienna, because you didn't address it. The nearest thing to an actual argument that you're put forward is: "If something/someone is omniscient and omnipotent, there are a number of things they may choose to do, among which is NOT TO CHOOSE." That doesn't apply to the contradiction we're talking about. The paradox is essentially that it is possible for a theoretical omnipotent God to make anything, but there are things he can't make because they contradict with his omnipotence: "a rock too heavy for God to lift" is an item God can't make, because a rock of that weight would mean he wasn't omnipotent. Both him being able to make it and him not being able to make it negate his omnipotence. Whether or not he chooses to make this improbable rock doesn't matter, it's a still paradox.
Your attitude annoyed me, too. If you're going to use obnoxious rhetorical devices like starting all your sentences with 'perhaps' or 'if' and refer to Aristotle and sprinkle rhetorical questions about, can you also use proper grammar? "If omniscient then electing to be unknowing is possible" reads like it should have equals signs and variables and be a bit of code. It isn't clever. Your arguments wander in circles, your "that wasn't the question, was it?" applies to something that really wasn't the question and had no discernible POINT, so I'd like to know why you put it there.
You may be proud of using knowing some philosophical terminology, but it's actually what you say and not how you say it that matters most.
Are you saying he can't be both because of paradoxes like the "can god make a stone he can't move" one? You can find a paradox and use it to defend an argument infinitely, but then the debate doesn't ever move on to more interesting issues. There are other arguments like "why does he let us suffer when he's benevolent and omnipotent" to address, which are more interesting.
You can argue against the paradox by saying he created the Earth/Universe/whatever but isn't part of that system, so he's omniscient and omnipotent within it.
Re the desertification, it does, actually.
"Desertification is considered to be the result of management approaches adopted by land users... who increase the pressure on the land in unsustainable ways. This leads to decreased land productivity and a downward spiral of worsening degradation and poverty. Where conditions permit, dryland populations can avoid degradation by improving their agricultural practices and enhancing pastoral mobility in a sustainable way."
That's talking about intensive farming.
You're right that not all non-organic farming is intensive or bad for the environment, but all organic farming is certifiably not bad for it. Chemical methods aren't anywhere near clean and neat at this time: for most liquid chemical fertilisers, something like 90% ends up as run-off. That means even if you use a minimum of them you'll still get a lot of contamination of groundwater, a lot of algal blooms in your nice and previously oligotrophic lakes killing your fish.
Animal welfare isn't something I was taking into account (and I don't see why you think giving cows antibiotics is inhumane), but a lot of organic-certified places, in the little rural corner of Britain where I live at least, are also free-range. The animal rights issue is a completely separate issue.
I have, actually. They're universally less informative than any neutral investigations into their 'Church' or any of the sites that aim to expose them. I've heard countless reports of them responding to media statements either with suspicion or by ignoring the questions; here's just one. Their responses to Anonymous misrepresent the group, claim - patently untruthfully - that Anonymous has a sinister leader and destructive motives. They make that kind of claim about anyone who dares upset them. Find and give me a Scientologist-posted link that's upfront about Scientology, and your claim will be credible.
You don't seem to understand that there are a lot more considerations involved in organic food than its nutritional value (which is actually generally better or animal welfare. Organic crops are ones that chemical fertilisers and pesticides haven't been used on, and although humans eating the traces of these in crops are as you say unlikely to drop dead, the pesticides that intensive non-organic farming introduces into the ecosystems are dangerous to a lot of species, and the monoculture that industries promote in agriculture is destructive. It destroys variation within species, which is bad in the long run, and chemical fertilisers mess up the environment and cause things like eutrophication and desertification, which kill off the wild-life that isn't being farmed. So yes I do think organic food is worth spending extra on.
No - the word 'moral' comes from the Latin "mos, moris", which means something between 'customs' and 'social duties'. Although mythology influenced the Roman code of conduct, the weight of meaning behind that word has more to do with the society than their religious beliefs. An interesting definition from this philosophy reference site is this: "A principle of conduct or procedure established to set standards of conforming behavior in respects to actions to maintain stability in a complex social system.". Huh. This possibly rather cynical definition implies it's a rule imposed by society, and when we consider the historical role of the Christian church in controlling peoples' behaviour, I see where the statement is coming from. So-called 'Morality Plays' developed from other religious theatre in medieval times to illustrate Christian ideas of right or wrong, which links religion and moral concepts strongly, so while I'd say 'morality' is primarily a social construct, it is one that's been strongly influenced by religious authorities. Nevertheless, religion didn't create it.
To look at something with as complex a history as (for example) the bible - which has been translated and retranslated and updated and corrupted endlessly - in the depth it deserves would be a massive undertaking. By ancient writing what language to you mean, exactly? Hebrew? Ancient Greek? I learnt Latin at school, and I love classical literature, but it's a complex language and not one that everyone can appreciate, and not one that we should try and teach people for the sake of a "normal project for novels".
If by 'ancient writing' you mean 15th century English, I still don't see what makes studying the bible any more worthwhile than studying any other text of that time. Most European drama from then has Christian themes, anyway. And the Bible is not a novel: telling students to critically analyse any religious text will provoke members of that religion (Marxist readings of the New Testament, anyone? A feminist perspective on the Nativity story? Freud and Oedipal themes relating to people called Mary?). It'll seem disrespectful to Christians, and asking students to write essays on the Bible is practically inviting them to play that up and deliberately provoke Fundamentalists. I don't see how looking for 'literary devices' in the bible teaches us more about Christianity than you could learn in Religious Studies or more about English Literature than you learn by studying something less contentious. If you want to study religious doctrines, why don't you wait until college.
No, and I don't think it ever will. As someone who was on a debating team (albeit a student one), I think most of the more interesting debates are either about things most of us won't ever have the power to change ("This House would abolish the monarchy", for example...) or abstract things, like "This House believes euthanasia is wrong". You can maybe be convinced that, say, Fairtrade food isn't the best way to help the third world, but I don't think you're likely to be helped make decisions. Debating's an intellectual game, not a moral guide.
Do you have any evidence for the regulation about organic food? The Soil Association is the biggest UK organic certifier, and their list of industry standards seems fairly stringent. There's a massive PDF on their website (labelled "Farming and Growing Industry Standards" in the evidence link).
An random example from the 240 pages of detail:
"you must not:
•wash organic fruit and vegetables in water with more chlorine than allowed in drinking water (5ppm)
•use wax coatings directly onto fruit or vegetables."
Seems pretty stringent to me. And associating organic food with yuppies doesn't devalue it. Maybe some people consider 'green' a fashion statement, but that doesn't mean have to react against them instead of making your own decisions about whether the environment's worth it.
I buy organic fruit and vegetables, and buy locally. Fruit that hasn't been pumped with water so it'll stay shiny even after being flown round the world is more appealing to me, and I like being able to buy from markets and local shops. Supermarkets and monoculture make the world a soulless place.
And while manic environmentalism isn't my thing, monoculture really is a problem, and since no-one else has mentioned it I will. Intensive farming of the same crop, which has been more and more common since the Industrial Revolution, is nowadays quicker and cheaper than having to deal with multiple fields of different crops. But growing stuff that uniform is bad for biodiversity, not least because hedgerows get destroyed, and is also dangerous. If a disease or pest destroys the year's cotton, it's a lot worse it that's the only thing you're growing. Look at the Irish potato famine - a massive catastrophe. Monoculture destroys the genetic diversity that's needed to stop species being universally vulnerable, reducing their risks of survival, while at the same time making huge numbers of people dependant on that survival.
Not that I'm saying not buying organically is going to cause famine, but in the long run its a bad thing to have massive scale farming. You lose biodiversity AND genetic diversity within a species, and that's risky. There are also a lot of smaller-scale implications: planting the same thing year after year depletes the soil of the organic nutrients that sustain life, and that can cause desertification, and it'll reduce the quality of crops and crop yields. To combat this a lot of fertiliser is needed. But industrial fertilisers are inefficient, to the point that only about 10% of them are taken up by the crops, and the rest runs off and contaminates the surrounding. This causes bioaccumulation, which means animals and plants absorb things they're not meant to and then they build up in food chains and end up poisoning animals. It also causes eutrophication in lakes, which starves water of oxygen and kills fish (learn slightly more: http://openlearn.open.ac.
So basically, organic food supports small farmers, which I think is good, especially if they're local and you're not just picking up the bag labelled organic in the supermarket. And - unlike the mass production in monoculture - it's also not horrifically bad for the environment, either in a long term killing-the-planet way or in an immediate poisoning-the-wildlife way. So why not pay a little extra?
With the current system, I'd vote down people on my side of a debate if they said something inane or illogical, and if I could only vote once I wouldn't do that. Letting you vote for each argument encourages you not just to blindly take one side but to consider all the individual points raised, and I find that more rewarding than just coming down on one side or the other of an argument. It also means that the personal score thing counts for more.
I think a good way to score would be only letting you vote once for the side of a debate, but then also letting you vote arguments up or down and then maybe putting them in order based on the amounts of votes they have. That'd mean arguments that got approved of within the debate would be more prominent than others, which could be a good thing, and that the debate itself wouldn't affected by the fact someone who couldn't spell said something irrelevant that got voted down. It'd also get rid of the confusion with who's for and who's against.
If what you mean by self-prescribed law is personal discipline, I don't certainly don't think it's slavery. Slavery is the imposition of _someone else's_ will on you, whereas if you choose to ... be a strict vegetarian, say, that's a decision that you've taken for yourself. Unless your 'self-prescribed law' is something you won't be able to give up or turn back from, I think it is in a way personal liberty, because it means you're acting on your own choices rather than the state's or anyone else's.
The American government has maybe not got an 'obligation' to help, but I think it should, because the majority of Western governments have meddled politically in other countries, including sub-Saharan ones, and the fact that they feel entitled to do this, and that America, especially, has waged war there, means that they ought to also be involved with the humanitarian needs of these countries. By loaning money and creating large debts, they've already ended up harming the rate of development, so America ought to speed it up by assisting in other ways.
(Fight AIDS, not the War on Terror!)
If most of America's contributions to Africa are military in nature, doesn't that oblige them to help? Bombings tend to 'actively wreak havoc', whatever their target may be, on the poor and disenfranchised rather than the dictators themselves. 'Securing oil fields' sounds to me like 'exploiting other countries' natural resources', something I'd say you owe them a debt for. Why is that a reason you ought not increase health assistance, exactly?
The concept of paying reparations is often one that has to be enforced by the winners of a war, but that's no reason America shouldn't exercise its sense of justice and drop the debt or give more health aid of its own accord.
I don't think too much information promotes promiscuity - showing teenagers 'shock videos' that show the consequences (either giving birth or getting venereal diseases) is a good way of making them think carefully about whether to have sex. On the other hand, giving them no information except that they should wait til marriage is a very good way of making sex sound attractive. Forbidden pleasures tempt teenagers.
Apple builds on trends with great success, though. It popularised music players quicker than anyone else did, and nice shiny iPod with its scroll wheel is at least improving on an idea. That's advancing the industry in some ways, and Bill Gates and Microsoft have been accused of riding on the backs of others' ideas as well, so I don't really think your argument has reason.
Just because something's redesigned frequently doesn't mean the original was bad, and fact everyone's familiar with the iPod adverts just proves they advertise cleverly, not that they're a fad. As for redesigns, mp3 players are a newer and more competitive field than computer hardware, and besides, preferences and technology changes quickly - mp3 players are based on flash memory, and if you think how much the price of a USB memory stick has changed over seven years, you'll have to admit that anything based on that technology should have adapted a lot. That it has doesn't make it bad, it makes it competitive. Nor are iPod owners (and I don't own an iPod) obliged to buy a new one whenever one's available; if they do, they're idiot fanboys, but you could say the same of a lot of people. I said iPods are the market leaders and well-designed, not that Apple doesn't try and exhort money out of its customers. I'm sure it does, but that doesn't affect the quality of its products at all.
I also haven't ever owned a Mac, and I don't know what the Mac Mini is or the G4 is, but building your own PC is always going to be cheaper than buying a premade one. The tech support point is valid, but... well, Vista needs the extra support. Mac is Unix-based and mostly virus-free. Do the math.
You can do that if you're educated and thoughtful, and able to believe in your own intelligence. I'm not religious, and I'll defend my right to choose what my own moral convictions should be, but there are a lot of people for whom that is not true. A lot of people would rather put their trust in establishments based on thousands of years of philosophy than in their own thoughts, and that's their choice.
Mac's aren't exactly a fad - they're specialised towards graphical editing and media. That's not something most of the world needs or wants to do on their computers, but that doesn't mean they aren't useful and often superior to PCs for those who do want to do such things. And iPods are some of the best designed mp3-players out there, so I disagree with you calling them gadgets. If you're going to debate, do it intelligently.
It is different - it charges extortionately for membership, rather than asking for donations; it keeps its beliefs secret from many of its own members, and while threatening legal action against anyone who publicises them to the general public. Why's that - because they're obviously ridiculous if you're not hypnotised?
In the past, religions have controlled people, but they've almost always done it during a time when they were the dominant force in a country - people paying a tithe to the church, for example. Scientologists, on the other hand, are a minority, which makes them in many ways more vulnerable to the organisation they're a part of. Look at the case of Noah Lottick: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/
That it plays well with the voters is a big part of it, as far as this foreigner can see. There's always a lot of pressure on politicians to represent their target audience, and that's all too often xenophobic, over-Christian and extra-macho manliness in the Republican demographic. It's not so much an obsession as them feeling the need to be emphatically against it.
I don't know much about it, but I'd guess a lot of Apple's income comes from the fact they _aren't_ compatible with other OSes and you can't get plug-and-play stuff for Macs that Apple doesn't make, right? So that's a pretty strong incentive for them to keep a monopoly on the Mac-using market and not make compromises with who can make peripherals for their computers. The iPod and its million bastard children and the iPhone are making money for them, but I don't think that's a reason for people to buy a computer off Apple, and I don't think the mp3-playing market they've gained is giving them any reason to make their computers play nicely with Windows or Linux. So I don't really see where your argument's going.
PCs. They're ubiquitous, better designed, and cross-compatible in a way Macs aren't. I don't think Windows is better than Apple, but there are a wide range of other operating systems that are designed to work on PCs, like, for example, the open source OS Linux.
Religion has also taught people to aspire to be charitable, to love thy neighbour, and to give to the poor. While it can be a force for evil and it can be abused, so can governments, and so can science. Ideas like eugenics and trying to cure sexual deviance with electroshock therapy came from scientists, so enlightenment isn't limited to either science or religion.
"The sunlight's intensity falling on earth is a much bigger factor than the percentage the atmosphere absorbs."
But the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth is dictated by how much is absorbed by the atmosphere, so while badly expressed, the program got it right. The amount of heat radiated by the sun may vary naturally, but there's no real chance of permanent changes for hundreds of thousands of years, when it starts to run out of fissile material.
Although you say "Global industrialization did not take off until the post WWII boom,", this isn't about globalisation, this is about major industries creating CO2 emissions, and that started with the Industrial Revolution, starting in the late eighteenth century. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Doctors have found that circumcision is hygienic, which is a fairly compelling argument in favour of it. Being squeamish about sharp blades near that part of your anatomy is understandable, but the tissue in question is vestigial, and calling its removal mutilation is a gross exaggeration. Given that the Jewish find a religious significance in doing so, I'd say there's reason.
Scientology does involve a set of beliefs, but it's not what we typically think of as a religion. For one, it's been established by one man, L Ron Hubbard, whereas religions through the ages have taken doctrines and myths from their predecessors. Look at how the Judeo-Christian religions are rooted in the same events; look at how Roman and Greek mythologies are related. Scientology, on the other hand, is based on an entirely original creation myth, with none of the historical credibility that religions need. It proclaims as truth things that the rest of the world see as fiction, and that in itself is a good enough reason to call it a cult rather than a religion.
But the main argument against it is this: religions shouldn't be secret. Anyone and everyone has the right to buy a bible, anyone can go to mass. Scientology, on the other hand, is copyrighted by Hubbard, and the 'church' snatches their videos off the internet with threats. It's a secretive cult.
