Quick, here’s a distraction!
It’s strange, but over the weekend we’ve had several threads top out over the magical 666 comment mark that I use as a signal to kill threads. There’s the ever-expanding endless thread, of course, but also the Sins of omission thread, which is now being closed, and the These guys are dangerous nuts thread, which bloomed into chaos thanks to the wild and wacky Graeme Bird, who now, temporarily, has his own thread (I anticipate an imminent flameout and permanent eviction).
Is it possible that one thread no longer has the capacity to contain the raging ebullience of Pharyngulistas? You’re worrying me, people!
Proof of god, of course, cause, you know, only minds deal with numbers.
Hey, it’s at least as good as Meyer’s “uh, only minds are known to create codes” so god created DNA, when DNA is one hell of a counterexample to an intelligently created code (DNA and its code and gene organization differ functionally from usual codes like C++ precisely in their evolvability).
But you know, god, because some people can’t think through any other “possibilities.”
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Come on, PZ–we’re social animals.
At least we’re quieter than the average party. I had to quit going to those because non-music noise hurts my head. And sometimes the music can, too.
My hypothesis is that having children triggers an aversion to noise.
Bacon.
And, Walton, *applause* for your brief last-thread summary. (Aspirating mint-water is not recommended.)
Oh, sweet cheeses I hope so… the entertainment value was squelched about 200 posts ago and now he’s simply masturbating… I think it’s time…
Dr. Myers: Please do not consider attempting anything foolhardy like a 3-way anastomosation. Thank you.
*chuckles in a condescending and world-weary manner while ruefully* shaking head slowly from side to side*
Me and Inigo Montoya think that this word does not mean what PZ, Josh, and Bill Dauphin (!) seem to think it means. Who can show us our error?
Huh. I had not. So that’s what Yong’s been teasing.
Aw. Puh-leeeeeeze?
A loss to whom? The Borg? Who gives a shit? Yong still pops up on my screen when I want him to. I certainly don’t consider the other Borg bloggers to be “on my team” in any way.
I had an interesting experience in the last 24 hours.
It’s nice to give a portion of your intellectual a reboot occasionally. Keeps the memory leaks from getting out of hand.
Goody, smaller threads actually load reasonably on my !#$$%^ work computer.
Awwww. Ok, I wondered why my last response wouldn’t post.
Just because I bothered to write it, I’m going to put it here, and then have done, because I suspect the good Thomist Daniel won’t follow:
Daniel Smith #794 wrote:
I think everyone — especially Paul — has pretty thoroughly addressed this, but I do want to point out that the fifth argument is generally considered the weakest, because it notoriously begs the question, assuming its own conclusion. Do natural bodies act for an end? We look, and we see they do act for an end. Whatever happens, is what was supposed to happen — or else it wouldn’t have happened.
And, because it was supposed to have happened, then it is the best result. How do we know it was the best result? Because it happened the way it was supposed to. And round and round, in a circle. The phrases “for an end” and “best result” smuggle teleology right into the description of the observations.
I’m really surprised you (or anyone) would think this the most persuasive of the five arguments. Maybe it’s the best because it achieves its end, which is being the best, so that the end achieved is what we see, which we do.
This is nothing more than the vacuous pop spirituality mantra of “everything happens for a reason,” clothed in ancient syntax.
I’ll also ask that you consider how to answer the question posed by Knockgoats and Feynmaniac: how would rocks have to behave, for you to conclude that they were NOT acting with intention? Or, if you’d rather, what would have to happen, for you to draw the conclusion that hey, it looks like everything doesn’t happen “for a reason?”
oops, forgot the referentially humorous tossed-off footnote:
*on account of it keeps cats away
[Anthology Editor of the Future: please append this to comment #5 above. Thank you.]
Aquaria, i guess having kids either sensitizes one to noise or else it has the opposite effect, or even leaves one’s sensitivity just the same as before. Hmmmm.
But I’m with you on avoiding parties because of the non-music noise. It’s as crazy as religion! But as you say, as a species, we’re social animals.
Gah!!! He did explicitly anastomosize the SoO thread to this one!
damn it
Pay sucks, but somebody has to do it.
Props for breaking Sven’s brain again.
@Sven:
OK Sven, I’m officially confused. Help me out? I know I used the word recently in a comment. . .but I can’t figure out what you mean.
In my particular case, having children triggers an aversion to simple, plain stupidity. Oh, and also, to nutheads that waste my time! So PZ, do permanently evict this idiot, pleaaaaaase!
Sorry, Sven. You don’t get to claim on the one hand that you’ve ceased arguing on the blog and aren’t to be taken seriously in general and then on the other expect people to put time into writing serious responses to your posts. Or at least to expect me to. I have no patience for it. On a related note, if you’re going to go out of your way to snipe at people’s field of study and justify it on the grounds that you’re an asshole, expect them to believe you.
Hi Josh; I was just recently taking to you over, uh, here on the krazy train.
Well, it’s the damndest thing, because it looks like the right word, and it functions fine as that word, but something bugged me about it, and then when I looked it up, all I was finding was weird technical meanings in law and finance, and I doubted.
But, OK, now I looked it up again and there it is meaning what it means.
My bad.
No ‘e’ on ‘for’ though; “forbearance”.
I’ll shut up now.
From dictionary.com:
forbearance, n. 1. The act of forbearing.
2. Tolerance and restraint in the face of provocation; patience. See Synonyms at patience.
3. The quality of being forbearing.
4. Law The act of a creditor who refrains from enforcing a debt when it falls due.
Oh, by the way, on the now-defunct “Sins of Omission” thread commenter R. David Dawson just pointed out a new article in some magazine called The New American. It specifically calls out PZ, complaining about the arrogant inadequacy of his “Courtier’s Reply” rebuttal to the very devastating theological arguments for the existence of God, posed by such luminaries as St. Thomas of Aquinas.
http://www.american.com/archive/2010/march/the-new-philistinism
The writer misses the point, of course: the fundamentalist preacher is dismissing a scientific theory without taking on the science. Dawkins and other so-called new atheists are not refuting philosophical arguments: they are making a scientific case against the existence of God.
And they are resisting the attempt to pull the argument back into the area of philosophy. God is not metaphysical principle we reason our way to in our heads; its a failed hypothesis.
Is having children is required? The fecking things being anywhere in the vicinity does it for me rather often… I’ve been known to stick my head in a speaker at concerts, so it’s not volume per se which irks me, but there’s something about the sounds children can make which can be bit irksome, and might be (in my case) more frequent than normal?
This should not be construed as I don’t like kids. Roasted, they’re fine… ;-)
Sven:
Whoops. . missed the krazy train post (it’s busy in here with all teh krazy threads). Oh, and yeah, sorry for taking what you wrote there seriously – sometimes my sarcasm meter gets broken:)
On forbearance – damn, I hate making spelling errors (but do appreciate being corrected on them)!
Sorry, Sven. Threads are complicated, we can’t just have everything linear and straightforward, you know.
I’m also considering closing the Graeme Bird thread and sending the refugees here. But they’ve held me off for a little while longer, at least.
At least I’m making the effort of roping them all together. What happens to the stats if the traffic starts busting out into multiple mega-threads all at once, as seems to have been happening the last few days?
:D I’m not social at all in meatspace; on the net, however…paaarty!
Now, where’s the bacon? We’ve been bacon deficient lately.
Oh, and moi? Misspell forbearance? Look again.
(Sometimes it is good to be the king, with puissant powers of post-editing.)
Oh please, great tentacles in the watery depths, I beg you, don’t let this thread become infested with game bird. Pleeaase.
To which I can only add:
Atonal music!!!!!
You are not discouraging me from unleashing chaos on the threads, you know.
By all means go ahead and cross the
streamsthreads then.*muah-hah-hah*
Oh my goodness that hurt (runs about the room desperately looking for a diatonic scale).
Nam/Gỏi Cuốn/summer roll
4 rice wafers (rice paper, tapioca sheet)
4-8 prawns and/or cooked pork or chicken meat
cooked vermicelli (thin rice noodles)
1 cucumber, sliced into fingers
4 leaves of lettuce
2 leaves of Chinese cabbage, halved lengthways
fresh herbs, to taste (e.g. coriander, basil, mint. I use Houttuynia since it’s growing like an invasive species in my back yard.)
a bowl of warm water
Dip a rice wafer into the warm water and remove immediately when it is wet. If you don’t you may end up tearing the wafer.
Lay the rice wafer on a plate
Arrange a portion of the ingredients near the edge of the rice wafer in a neat pile, with the fingers of cucumber roughly parallel to the edge of the wafer
Fold the edge of the wafer over the pile of ingredients, and roll it over once
Fold the sides of the wafer inwards, to close of the ends of the roll you just made
Roll the wafer up the rest of the way, to enclose the roll completely
you can eat it just then or wait.
You can eat it with a sauce. It can be purchased, or if you are willing you can mix fish sauce with roasted peanuts, sugar, and perhaps som garlic. That’s usaully the one I use, though I never mix it myself.
Also, sorry if you can’t find some of this stuff, since most of it is imported and specialized as Asian cuisine.
So you will agree to get your brain removed to support this?
Chuck Norris
writessermons in WorldNutDaily:(nothing new, but it’s a super-concentrate of stupidity and ignorance)
I believe in the resurrection of America
I wonder if good ol’ Chuck isn’t going to be candidate to the presidency of the Godly States of America.
Of Fibonacci sequence and golden ratio:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FibonacciNumber.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio
Ah!
Turns out I had the wrong coördinates in Heavens Above.
Today I saw a proper Iridium flare – much more impressive.
PZ:
I don’t suppose you could use your
pissantpuissant powers to correct my version of the same error, could you?I posted this near the end of the old thread, so if no one minds I’ll ask again in the bright sniny new one – any recommendations on blog hosts that are privacy-conscious? I’m about 90% of the way to convinced to delete my facebook, and was thinking of having my own space.
31 says:
I hope he’ll settle for the Godly Country of Texas.”
But I’m with you on avoiding parties because of the non-music noise. It’s as crazy as religion!
Another reason why I hate parties is because I have an APD which often makes it hard for me to distinguish the words that people are saying, especially in loud environments. I can hear the volume of their voice well enough in most cases, but I cannot distinguish the words themselves sometimes.
It’s very frustrating.
Chuck Norris doesn’t read the Constitution. He stares at it until he gets the answers he wants.
They were popular books for popular audiences arguing against a popular version of God. Why are those books being treated as sophisticated philosophical treatises (then being claimed they fail)? The books were never meant to be that in the first place. They weren’t arguing that.
For sophisticated attacks on the concept of God, there are philosophers out there willing to play the philosophical game for atheism. There’s always Graham Oppy and Michael Martin. Yet Dawkins is not one of them, he’s making a very different case.
It’s now been almost 4 years since the God Delusion came out. Can’t people recognise it for what it is as opposed to what it isn’t? The notions of God that I keep hearing about aren’t these sophisticated philosophical abstracts. Instead they are an interventionist deity, one that actually does things in the world and has a personal relationship with us. One that is meant to be the reason for order in the universe, and one that is meant to help us transcend reality after our physical bodies expire. It’s the deity of vitalism, the deity of dualism, the deity of souls and prayer healings, the deity of miracles.
If the “new atheists” are attacking a straw man, then why aren’t the theologians out there correcting the religious believers on their misconceptions of the God character? This is the double-standard that we see. The more likely one is to be a devout believer, the higher chance they are a creationist – yet to attack that creationist version of God is to argue a straw man apparently. Why are the theologians heaping scorn on the atheists for attacking such simplistic notions of God but not the believers who hold them?
Fixed.
You’re joking, right? This decade is all about monetizing personal information. No such thing as privacy conscious. At least, not that I’ve been able to find. I do have some web space with a webhost (Dreamhost) that I might turn into a blog, if I ever have anything interesting to say. I think that’s the closest one will get to “privacy-conscious”, unless one opens up a blogger/LJ/whatever account under an assumed name and only accesses it through TOR.
Not until I can get my ungodly ass out of it!
Yes, Chuck. Of course, for America’s founders, God and government were intricately linked… that’s why they didn’t put a single mention of God in the Constitution. And why the second President of the United States signed a treaty saying “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” And why they didn’t put “In God We Trust” on the currency (it was the McCarthyites in the 1950s who did that). They were so keen on linking God and government that they went to great lengths to make sure that God was kept out of government. Apparently, in Chuck Norris’ mental universe, this all makes sense.
Just don’t tell him Thomas Paine was a deist and was strongly opposed to orthodox Christianity. This might cause him to roundhouse-kick you in the face.
Walton: :::snicker::: You have a sense of humor under that serious facade!
As for Norris’s…well, I suppose, technically, they’re words, the guy has obviously taken one too many kicks to the head. He’s become the Oliver St. John-Mollusc of Right Wing Twits.
A friend of mine (an author) asked the following question on her FB page. I figured it would be a good question to ask Pharyngulites. Any input is welcome. Thanks.
“Very oddball question: Which philosopher, preferably Greek or Roman, would my character admire? My character is a survivalist, Libertarian living off the grid. Thank you to all my smart friends with better educations than I got. (And/or members of terrorist cells dedicated to the violent overthrow of the government.)”
Ben in Texas, I’m afraid I don’t understand just what the question is?
Yeah, I guess it’s kind of vague.
Is there a philosopher, preferably Greek or Roman, whose thinking or reasoning would “speak to” a libertarian type who is currently living off the grid as a survivalist?
Rephrasing:
Which philosopher (Roman or Greek preferred) would a survivalist, Libertarian whackjob admire? I’m writing a character and want him to sound deep by namedropping some 2000 year old dead dude.
It’s somewhat difficult a question, as to the best of my knowledge there weren’t too many people living outside society during Greek/Roman times. They didn’t have guns or video games, so they required other people to keep them from getting overly bored and committing suicide.
Upperclass Twit Of The Year
Oooh… I actually know one. Too bad I can’t ask him right now. I would guess the stoics. Zeno, Ceanthes…
Paul, pretty funny. I don’t know if she wants to make him sound deep, though. Heck, she might want to make him sound shallow.
Ol’ Greg, thanks. I know very little about philosophy, so those names mean zilch to me, but I’ll pass them along.
Kel, OM #39 wrote:
What I get from the more ‘sophisticated’ believers is a defense of doublethink: God is both a father-figure deity which involves itself in human affairs, AND it’s “a symbol of the mystery that lies between the poles of our clearest rational dichotomy.” How can it be both? Well, we just use the anthropomorphic version which sounds like an invisible person to represent the Mysterious Force which can’t be understood by finite minds. And that’s okay. The lesser version of God helps us understand the greater version of God, by putting it in terms we can understand.
This is really a classic dodge. It allows them to have the simplistic God they really believe in, and pretend to believe in a God that’s too vague to be criticized.
It seems to me that the infuriating thing that Dawkins does, is treat God like a hypothesis, and approach it from the standpoint of modern science. You’re not supposed to do that. God is not a hypothesis. Nor would we expect it to be consistent with modern science.
Why not? Because it’s NOT. It just isn’t. It shouldn’t. Ask anyone. Ask the theologians. Ask the guys who wrote the Bible. They all say the same thing: it’s not. GOD says He’s not. So no FAIR treating it like a hypothesis.
If you do, then you are failing to engage with God, as understood by the people who understand God. You’re making a straw man, and attacking that… The problem isn’t so much the atheist’s definition of God, as the lack of deference in the approach.
Just do what David Barton does. Pick any somebody you like, then make up some quotes to attribute to them.
Cleanthes, sorry… sticky “L” key.
Oh and that was addressed to Ben in Texas. You’d be surprised how many crazy people are well read in the classics actually. I know a self-educated manifesto-writing type who is batshit insane, but he has read more military philosophy and strategy than nearly anyone I know including people I met in school who studied military history. It’s almost a shame he uses it to bolster his very clearly mentally ill prophecy. Actually it’s just a shame he hasn’t gotten help for his problems.
Literacy… it’s only the beginning.
Yep, that sums it up for me. They want their magic sky daddy but not the perceived absurdity that comes with that belief. Unfortunately there are enough people who treat the very question as a purely academic exercise with no regard to how it manifests, so they have an intellectual foil to hold those who call it nonsense at bay.
But can God build a set of goal posts so mobile even He can’t score on them?
Hobbes’ state of nature comes to mind. But then he goes and argues for total loyalty to the monarch . . .
@54
Not surprising to me. The problem when I was trying to think of names (at most I’ve wet my toes, I haven’t gotten deeply into the classics) is that there is a definite bias towards the establishment in most of what I have read. Not much individualism. Stuff like Plato’s “magnificent myth/noble lie” isn’t really the stuff of survivalist libertarians, but those are the avenues of ancient thought I’m most familiar with.
Perhaps it could be used if the character is discussing how his ideal society would be, but that ignores the big issue of how the current system would be overthrown…
Well, I don’t know about your friend, but I think a lot people here would identify with Lucretius. His work De rerum natura, while not perfect, presents a more accurate view of the world than Aquinas, despite being written over a millennium before!
Sastra, #52 wrote:
They’re flat-out duotheists – but in a dishonesst way; the one they’ll admit to believing in depends entirely on who’s asking the question.
When up against atheists on the debate floor, radio, television or in print it’s the ‘nebulous, outside of science, shaping our lives and who exists in quantums and abstract concepts’ god; when in church with others of the faith it’s the ‘fill us with your love, hear our prayers and take us to be in Heaven with you’ god.
Basically, Christians want to have their special-pleading god-cake and eat it too.
Zeno’s republic didn’t survive itself but records of it suggest he called for all humans to become free from the state and free from money. Also interestingly enough called for complete breakdown of class distiction… sort of Utopian anarchy.
Cleanthes didn’t write much. I would think his lifestyle would be more of an inspiration to that type. He lived entirely by his own labor, or so it’s written.
Which philosopher (Roman or Greek preferred) would a survivalist, Libertarian whackjob admire? I’m writing a character and want him to sound deep by namedropping some 2000 year old dead dude. – Paul
For an ancient, I’d say either Diogenes, or Heraclitus. Of course in either case, he’d have to completely ignore most of their thought, and the cultural context, but that’s exactly what you’d expect! If you’d be content with the 19th century, go for Max Stirner: we had a particularly obnoxious looneytarian here called “Africangenesis” (now in the dungeon) who admired Stirner, often referred to as an anarchist, but more accurately as a nihilistic egoist.
On survivalist philosophers, again:
The best I can come up with is Aristotle. Warrior virtues and all that — could be seen a precursor to Nietzsche (who I guess would be obvious if you didn’t want someone ancient. Rand is even more obvious, if the character is an idiot . . . ) You could glance and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue if you wanted one picture of an Aristotelian sort of ethics. (I imagine there are better suggestions out there, but they don’t occur to me at the moment,)
Oh, and before anyone corrects me, I know the plural of quantum isn’t quantums. I was going for a kind of Pratchett vibe.
I appreciate all the input. I’ll send her a link to this thread. Thanks!
Thanks, Feynmaniac! I was trying to think of that name, but I couldn’t quite put my fingers on it. I kept getting confused by Lucretia
Sephiroth’s mother(someone from some video game) and Lucian of Samosata….Magic Sky Faerie has Magic Superglue. For it, it sticks. For others, it don’t.
That’s true Knockgoats, the character doesn’t have to have a truly good understanding of the philosophy and its context. I guess it all depends on the character and how intelligent, complex, admirable, annoying, repulsive, crazy, etc. the author wants it to be.
I tend to think of the off-the-grid types as either apocalypse waiting or extremely anti-state. A strong position against government will also actually be against the form of capitalism seen as operating within a government too. Most libertarians seem to want the government to let the business sector do it’s thing unhindered, but when you go so far as to live completely without the state to the best of your ability, you’re definitely privileging a different aspect of libertarianism.
I can’t imagine Ayn freaking Rand grinding down corn she grew on her property.
Carlie:
Good luck with that. You can’t actually delete it, the best you can do is strip every single bit of info, then hit “deactivate”. Your facebook is still kept, and can be accessed again any time you login.
Funny, as when the original challenge was given I got the impression the question was “Which philosopher would John Galt quote?”. I didn’t use that as my paraphrase because I didn’t want to be too flippant :-).
Sastra @#52: Exactly. That also displays the pointlessness of agnosticism to me. The only reason people declare that we can’t know if there is a god or not is because they’re using the sophisticated theist’s definition of the god. Of course God is unknowable and undetectable if you define him/her/it as such.
Knockgoats, funny you should mention Africangenesis, because (I’m reluctant to admit this) I sent him over here from another blog, what, maybe two years ago. I was hoping he’d learn something, or at least get smacked down repeatedly. I had to settle for the latter, but that was enjoyable.
Is the character based on Glenn Beck?
For the record, the previous subThread came in at 674 comments in 3.14 d. Neither datum is alarming in light of teh Thread’s recent history. That’s 215 comments/d, no record but not too shabby. Episode XL, for a recent example, had a lower rate (210 c/d).
Sili:
Yes, they’re great fun.
I used to join some local amateur astronomers to put on what we called a ‘sidewalk session’, where we’d set up our telescopes in a public location like a mall parking lot and show passersby whatever showcase objects we could manage in such a light-polluted locale (typically the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn).
I remember one time I checked beforehand, and there was a really bright Iridium flare scheduled for during the event. At the appropriate time, we stopped what we were doing and instructed everyone to look in the correct direction. There was lots of puzzled muttering of the form “what are we looking for?” but then the flare erupted. Oohs and aahs from everyone! It was as if we had conjured up celestial fireworks. I’m not a magician, but I think I now know what it feels like to be one.
βPer
I wouldn’t worry. I think that one of your threads has reacted to the pressure of the Pharyngula environment by evolving into a slow-motion chat room.
Wow, the video on this post is just beautiful.
—
From the previous incarnation:
Ol’Greg,
There’s always chess boxing.
Sastra #18
The courier’s reply is specifically (and intelligently) designed to answer the argument about atheists’ lack of specific theological knowledge. It doesn’t matter if angels dancing on the heads of pins are waltzing or doing the macarena if the existence of angels is being debated.
Caine – I’ve read two things about it. One is that if you don’t log in within two weeks, the account moves from deactivated to deleted; the other is that Facebook finally added a deletion feature after all the complaints, but it’s tricky to find. And then the nuclear option is to flagrantly violate their terms of service so that they remove your account for you. ;) Of course, none of that addresses the fact that they’ve admitted to having something like 7 copies of everything in servers across the globe that they don’t have to delete if they don’t want to, no matter if you tell them to or not.
Tis Himself, OM #78 wrote:
True, but the complaint being made on the link at #18 was that the arguments of Aquinas and other apologists were mischaracterized, and therefore Dawkins addressed the wrong arguments. If the writer is correct, then of course he has a point — for the small section of the book which dealt with refuting the theological arguments, as made by theologians. I’ve heard atheist philosophers agree that this section is a bit weak.
The problem, though, is that his analogy to someone thinking he’s knocked down the theory of evolution when he doesn’t even understand it doesn’t quite fit. The apologetic works are similar to what Dr. Harriet Hall calls “tooth fairy science.” They assume a phenomenon, and then add in the details and explanations which follow from this assumption, as if they’re establishing it. Dawkins wasn’t interested in disproving philosophy with more philosophy, all of it based on intuitions and common sense. He wanted to come in from the outside, with science — uncommon sense — and deal with it from that perspective.
I think we pharyngulites need a forum.
Carlie:
Not so, I’m afraid. I left my facebook untouched and didn’t log in for over a year. Still there, still active. (Maybe that’s changed, but I doubt it.) I finally stripped it and deactivated. There is no ‘delete’, what you get is ‘deactivate’. Yes, you used to have to jump through hoops to find it, and it’s easier to locate these days, but there is no delete at all. Even to deactivate, you have to go through two confirms and they demand a reason you’re attempting to leave. I’m seriously sorry I ever got talked into starting one in the first place. You couldn’t pay me to get near facebook these days.
Eeeeh, I use it as a somewhat remote address book, for when I need a quick handle on someone as I’m terrible at remembering phone numbers, so it’s handy for that. As to the rest of it? No way in hell.
Well, at least I can keep from adding anything more to it. :(
Heh.
Facebook, the Hotel California of the iGen.
#506 on that other thread.
Yep, that definitely has a bearing; the sun and earth don’t instantaneously communicate gravitationally; if Sol were to somehow suddenly vanish (which would involve violation of local conservation of mass, momentum, charge, etc.), Earth wouldn’t know it until 8 minutes later; the sun would continue to shine, and we’d continue to orbit the damned thing for that whole interval — we would have absolutely no way of knowing that Sol had done a runner until that 8 minutes was up.
from the Graeme Bird Memorial thread:
No, but then again Birdy is incorrect about the sun and earth instantaneously affecting gravity. It does not matter that the graviton the earth “intercepts” was generated 8 minutes ago, it still “points” back to the sun because the field is not changing. Only if the sun were to suddenly collapse or evaporate would a wave be generated that would have to take 8 minutes to propagate to us.
Can we please just forget about Bird for a while and have some oral sex?
Deal.
Great. My mother comes to visit me for a week and I find I’ve missed four sub-threads and a troll-gnawing session entirely.
Lynna, Mom was absolutely thrilled with the book and impressed that I knew the author well enough to have it autographed. She promised that she will email me any comments she might have about it. I will then forward them to you to use as you see fit.
Just pecked out a recipe for the Redhead.
Irish Potato Leek Soup
1 leek, chopped
1 onion, diced
3 potatoes, peeled and diced
1½ cups chopped cabbage
2 carrots, diced
¼ cup fresh parsley, chopped
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon caraway seed
½ teaspoon black pepper
1 bay leaf
½ cup sour cream
Meat version
4 cups chicken broth
1 lb. bacon, cooked and crumbled
1 lb. mushrooms (I used ⅔ lb. portabella)
⅓ lb. white button mushrooms, quartered
Veggie version
4 cups veggie broth
1 lb. more mushrooms of choice than meat version
Slow Cooker Directions
Combine chicken broth, potatoes, cabbage, leek, onion, carrots, and parsley in 5 qt. slow cooker. Add salt, caraway seeds, pepper and bay leaf. Cover, cook on low 8-10 hours, or on high for 4-5 hours. If doing vegetarian version, be sure to cook mushrooms with rest of vegetables. Remove and discard bay leaf. Combine some hot liquid from slow cooker with sour cream in a small bowl, then add this mixture to the soup. Stir in the crumbled bacon and serve.
6-8 servings.
Saucepan directions
I originally made this recipe in the crock-pot, but the texture of the vegetables and mushrooms seemed a little too soft, so I propose heating the broth and seasonings to a boil, adding the potatoes, onions, leeks and carrots. Boil 15-20 minutes. Add cabbage and mushrooms, cook for another 10-15 minutes. Add sour cream as before.
Which philosopher (Roman or Greek preferred) would a survivalist, Libertarian whackjob admire?
Marcus Aurelius, perhaps. Emperor of Rome and general, Stoic.
The Bird has been dungeoned? Nooo!
Time for this to remember him by….
Which philosopher (Roman or Greek preferred) would a survivalist, Libertarian whackjob admire?
Plato? He was against democracy because after the Pelopenesian war, old Socrates was condemned to death by the thirty tyrants I think. Plato blamed the Athenian democracy for the war and lionized the Spartan system, as evidenced by his Republic. By the way, next time a troll says evolution influenced the Nazis, get them to read about Sparta
Gyeong – summer roll recipe snagged.
Nerd – potato soup recipe snagged.
All cooks: Up to 30 recipes so far. Will start organizing them at Ichthyic’s place soon.
Teh ECO quoth:
*grumble*
The link to teh Thread was unnnecessary. If that thread was dead, as suggested by the plonking of its protagonist, let it stay dead and fucking rot! Why the gratuitous anastomosation?
poopyhead
*grumble*
Huh? Wait, what? Are we doing a Pharyngula cookbook or something? :D
If so, I should dig something out to contribute.
KJ
Bye bye Birdie!
Gee… and I was so looking forward to watching what passes for his brains smoke as he tried to explain how the site he linked to in anyway proved a connection between the Gamma Ray Burst and the alleged gravity waves that are somehow magically able to trigger an earthquake (but only in one part of the world) while simultaneously escaping detection by gravity wave detectors.
Not that we would have ever gotten a real attempt at an explanation. It just would have been fun to watch. Too bad Bird, if you actually tried to present real arguments (and evidence) rather than ignoring points and degenerating into racists/homophobic name-calling you might still be around.
Oh well…back to work again.
That rapidly-oxidizing-rectum loves the system — a system of laws that keep him from being shoved up the manure-production end of a cow; a system of laws which allows him to lie with impunity as long as it is ‘opinion’. And I’ll bet dollars to donuts that he is driven to work on public roads patrolled by socialist cops.
alexander: I hope the never-ending time-sucking energy-absorption device called Teh Thread!!(tm) doesn’t become a forum. First, I wouldn’t be able to access it from work while waiting for my half-computer to process a graphic function and second, it would cease to be a linear function and my poor liberal-arts historian brain would make the same sound created when a paradigm shifts without a clutch.
Yep, that’s the plan. I’m collecting all the recipes in one place, then will transfer them to Ichthyic’s page he set up for them. Some of the artistic Pharyngulites have offered to help illustrate the thing, when we all get our acts together:) The sooner the better, I’m sure, since we’re driving poor Sven de Milo nuts!
Josh:
If you and Ichthyic actually use one of my recipes (if you don’t, no problem — they’re pretty plain), please credit to my real nom de web — (((Billy))) The Athiest. Thanks.
Sven,
Duh.
What sort of Mad Scientist® would PZ be if he didn’t gratuitously experiment with necroanastomisation?
Billy:
Oh, I’ll use ’em. I’m not planning to get all “this stays, this goes.” What you posted looks yummy too. There’s everything from home cooking to more complicated stuff, so it’s a nice variety. The only recipes I’m not including are those that someone says came from another source (and that they didn’t alter them to make them their own).
You will have to remind me later about your name credit – I will forget. BTW. . .where do the multiple parentheses come from in your writing?
Josh;
Squee!
I squealed with delight there, in case you missed that. I shall try to decide what I want to contribute here in a day or so. I have a hard time making these sorts of decisions.
I’m glad I decided to read comments today, otherwise I would have missed it entirely. :P
KJ
Josh, OSG, do you already have my limoncello recipe? I remember posting it once, but it was a long time ago.
Sven DiMilo:
Nice.
Some Jane Ira Bloom. Not atonal. Not frantic. Good for late at night.
Like most self-described libertarians Beck either fails to realize or ignores how much he benefits from the “socialist” government. Craig T. Nelson said to Beck on his show: “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No. No.” Beck didn’t point out the ridiculousness of that statement.
It’s like a freakin’ Monty Python scene: “What has the government ever done for us? Besides providing roads, welfare, education, police, firemen,….” Honestly, when they say that they’re against government spending they really just mean they’re against government spending that doesn’t help them personally.
Of course gov’t ain’t perfect, but it’s better than what the libertarians advocate.
KillJoy:
Hmm. .nope, didn’t snag that. You can email it to me at spokesgay at gmail.
#105:
Whoops, sorry Katrina! I knew it was you, but I typed KillJoy’s name.
I guess this is why I’m sort of curious about the “character” from the above conversation. There’s something different about the sort of people who actually try to practice their ideology and live without government, or try to reduce the hypocrisy of it.
Now, please do not think this means I agree. But it suggests a different kind of personality at least, one that values actions that are logically consistent with one’s ideals.
I have met people who are willing to die this way, and you really can’t argue with that unless maybe they are bringing children into it. When some one who calls themselves a libertarian digs a well, lives in a shack with no electricity, eats what they grow or kill, and is willing to die without a doctor’s help they may be insane but they are not hypocritical.
@Josh, OSG: will do.
(Not Killjoy)
Well, this is interesting:
Tangent time!
So, how is the Pharyngula Bracket Challenge going?
I’ve had to just skim threads to keep up, so apologies if it’s been mentioned earlier.
Mr. Jessa is super excited that Michigan State (his alma mater) is still in. My alma mater is still in, too (Duke). Luckily I treat March Madness as a curiosity, or there would be much preening and strife in the Jessa household.
Thanks; nice late-night music indeed. As it happens I was listening to Bill Evans just this afternoon–the amazing duos with Tony Bennett. Hey! I wonder…
Ha!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA9G9GkQEEE
Forgive me for being behind on my astronomy reading (and my other-thread reading, for that matter), but have there actually been experiments that show that gravity travels at c, rather than instantaneously?
Greetings heathens. I’ve been too busy the last several weeks to read a lot, much less comment, but I finally had to give myself a break.
As for Philosophers for
DummiesLibertarians, I nominate Parmenides, for his belief that all change is illusory. What we call the past exists now because we can refer to it now — that seems to sum up conservatism pretty well. I’ve also noticed a lot of economic conservatives identify with Marcus Aurelius, but it’s awfully strange they would like a Roman emperor of all people.Some late-night music:
Coltrane & Ellington – In a Sentimental Mood
I love jazz and such, but now here’s some legit stuff:
Debussy – Nuages
Dvořák – Silent Woods
Add Armstrong and Parker and you’ve succinctly summarized jazz history from 1920-1969.
And I’ve always loved the term “legit”.
Sven DiMilo:
I’ll try to find such a recording, but (contrary to Parmenides) I do not think it exists outside of my imagination. It would probably be a psychedelic hard-bop version of Honeysuckle Rose.
My all-star jazz lineup would also include Dizzy, Miles, Clifford Brown, Ray Brown, Mingus, Monk, Roach, Herbie, and a few dozen more.
Hmm… with Evans and Ellington that makes four pianists. I didn’t even mention Peterson, Tatum, Corea, and let’s not forget Billy Strayhorn….
Ah, Dvořák. He has a wonderfully distinctive sound. I have always love his 9th since I learned to play it.
Again, great point.
Just to elaborate on this a little, a good analogy I feel is astrology. Now I’m sure I’m like everyone else here in that I’m a non-astrologer, and I would bet that like most people who are non-astrologers they wouldn’t know much about astrology beyond the superficial. Yet we all reject it without so much as even a consideration for the position of Mars, and I feel that’s justified.
Now someone who is into astrology might plead that we haven’t considered the nuances of celestial predestination. Have any of us bothered to take into account the possibility that the stars might be a cosmic mystery that unlocks the unfolding events on this planet? No, while we mock the astrology columns as a waste of time, the lucky number for today really might be 11 and if I just give it a chance there might be a new romantic interest around the corner…
But generally speaking, I’m betting that even the apologists who deride atheists for not taking seriously the claims of the theist do exactly the same as we do with astrology. It’s not because they don’t know what their rejecting, but because the line of inquiry has not shown itself as legitimate. There may have been times in history where people believed astrology to be a legitimate means of inquiry, and there may still be those who take it as one now.
So what of astrology? Personally I think the best refutations of the very concept come from astronomy, from physics, from psychology, and from magicians. Astrology has no foundational basis not because of how the treat the celestial position of Mars, but because it fails to establish that there’s a connection between Mars and events on earth.
The theist here is trying to sing out their field of inquiry as legitimate, and why wouldn’t they? The “new atheist” movement is around showing that the entire enterprise isn’t legitimate to begin with. So they have to cry outrage they aren’t being taken seriously, there’s little else they can actually do… other than show that their area is a legitimate enterprise of course.
Benjamin, #115:
The experiments so far have all been indirect, usually involving massive astronomical objects (due to the extreme weakness of G compared to other fundamental coupling constants). So far as I know, the binary pulsar decay rate has given the best constraint on the speed of gravity being exactly “c”, or at least within 1% of it.
Another indirect measurement has been done (http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0311063) of the bending of light near Jupiter, measured in 6 mo. intervals via a “very long baseline” measurement (when Earth is on opposite points in its orbit, and Jupiter transits the source’s image).
From more theoretical standpoints, the fact that gravity is an inverse-square force (like electromagnetism) means that it must travel at exactly ‘c’, though of course this is a somewhat indirect argument.
Kel wrote:
Which is why we have the fallacy of special pleading to (figuratively, if there are any pissant Intersection whiners lurking here in the hopes of gathering ‘evidence’ with which to please their rictus-afflicted master and mistress) beat them around the head with.
Because without it they have to admit that their preferred form of made-up shit is no more (or less) ridiculous than anyone else’s.
::giggle::
Thanks Wowbagger :-)
Carlie @ 84:
I decided to do some digging around, and came across this: https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account from http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account
I did it, and received this message after the two confirmations:
We’ll see if it actually works; I’ll check back in a couple of weeks. :)
Josh:
I always end up altering recipes to suit my taste, however, I don’t post recipes which are my own. There’s a reason for that, here’s an example of one of my very own:
See? They aren’t done to make sense to anyone else, just reminders to myself. And my paprika beef, (which I’ve been making since I was young, it was handed down from a great-gran) has never been made exactly the same way twice. :D
Alexander @ 81:
I don’t think so. All forums face the same set of problems, and no matter what the ideals are when a forum is set up, said problems arise. It would be very difficult to keep a forum alive and active in the same spirit of the thread. It gives us a place to talk about anything and blow off steam. The Thread is good, and all we really need. Just my .02 cents.
Or they can just create their own epistemology where their framework can justify God while rejecting astrology. Maybe they can justify ontologically the intrinsic qualities that God must have which follow that other such ideas like astrology contradict (say free will means the notion of cosmic predestination is absurd). In our framework, their ideas might seem bunk. But their framework accounts for more than our framework… Checkmate, atheists!
A recipe I posted here once:
_Green_Beans_with_Bacon_
Fry bacon in a skillet until crispy.
Remove bacon, crumble up.
Fry green beans in some of the bacon grease, cover skillet with lid for quicker cooking/steaming, until desired doneness.
Toss crumbled bacon back in with green beans.
Enjoy.
Serves one.
(I came up with this after trying to eat my mom’s version, which involved one lonely slice of bacon steamed in with the beans, resulting in the world’s worst slice of bacon lurking in boring beans.)
If anyone cares Bird Brain has a thread continuing the discussion that was going on here. Apparently, PZ is part of “the science maffia”.
Feynmaniac @ 112:
I would really like to believe that, but I don’t. In a poll, yeah, I can believe half said that; in a real life situation, subject to a vote, I don’t. Look at how people are reacting to having a black president. I think there are a lot of Americans who like to think they are open-minded, but when push comes to shove, they go traditional because actual change frightens them.
From the article you linked to:
That says a whole lot about American mentality, which happens to scare me just a little more each day.
Oh please god. Kill the stupid, for the love of Flying Spaghetti Monster!
/uncontrolled weeping
http://suddenlyatheist.wordpress.com/2009/08/22/what-if-satan-wrote-the-bible/#comment-1259
Gah. More anasmatosis.
Responding to Daniel Smith on “Sins of Omission”. Because SIWOTI.
#794:
Because you’re being unreasonable, of course.
The most fallacious and unreasonable, you mean.
Like calls to like, and unreason calls to the unreasonable.
This is a fallacious and therefore unreasonable argument that assumes its own conclusion.
Aquinas implicitly contradicts his own argument, if he seriously means that things “always”, or even “nearly always”, act to obtain the “best” result. If they always act the same way, then “best result” has no meaning as a comparative. He certainly gives no explanation of what “best result” means, or how to distinguish between results that are or are not “best”.
It is plain that he continues to implicitly contradicts his own argument here: If everything acts “designedly”, then nothing is “fortuitous”, and he therefore has no way to distinguish between something acting “fortuitously” and something acting “designedly”.
Did you know that if you start off with a contradiction, you can “logically” derive anything at all? So Aquinas contradicts himself in his premises, divides by zero, and triumphantly emerges with your mom’s phone number. Or rather, with the presupposition that he started out with.
Your failure to acknowledge your inability to reason or recognize logic is noted.
Leaving off a concluding fallacy does not make an argument founded on fallacy reasonable.
========
#801:
An illusion looks like reality, and therefore is reality?
Right. He fallaciously argues from a question-begging implicit contradiction to his presupposition.
KABOOM.
#807 on “Sins of Omission”:
Meh. We’ve argued with YECs for months. A presuppostionalist Catholic isn’t that different, and in some ways is a lot less painful.
The Laughing Man, from your link:
I found that amusing. I hadn’t heard that I’m outraged at star dust before. :D I wonder what it is I’m supposed to have against it…
I agree. The results can’t be interpreted naïvely. In the case of a black candidates, there’s actually a name given for the fact that black candidates receive less votes than opinion polls would indicate: the Bradley effect. I don’t know if there is a gay equivalent, but I’d imagine there might be a similar effect.
However, I do think it’s a sign of progress that half would tell a pollster they would support an openly gay president. Could you imagine that 20 years ago? Sure it’s probably in reality lower, and progress isn’t going as fast it should, but I think it’s moving the right direction (I must be in one of my rare optimistic moods :).
Secondly, I also linked it because I find it funny that it’s also more than the about 1/3 of people who support the Tea Party Movement. It’s time for America to ignore these teabaggers and support the rights of the other teabaggers.
Well, I do kinda dislike dusting, at least, I guess.
(Muttering under breath…) Fucking stardust. All over everything. Again. (Flicks duster around sullenly…) Man, if it weren’t for stellar nucleosynthesis, this ‘d all be so much easier…
(/Lousy stars. We had a pretty tidy universe, none of these heavier elements gunking everything up, and then they hadda come along…)
Feynmaniac:
No, not at all. That wouldn’t have been so much as a dream 20 years ago. I agree, it’s progress. It’s just not near as much progress as I’d like. What I see from day to day is how individual people are treated, and there is one fuck of a long way to go on that front.
AJ:
Well, when it comes to dust, I’d like to know what the fuck our so-called creator was thinking when it came to our skin. Stuff sheds like crazy. You’d think an all powerful entity could handle a little thing like that.
Feynmaniac:
True. I wish I could trust the numbers though. I sincerely wish we could ignore the birther/teabagger crowd, but it’s never wise to ignore a grass roots movement. I think they’re chronic malcontents, for the most part. Even so, they pose a distinct threat to basic reason on just about every level. If they can’t have someone they like, such as GWB in office, they happily work at a lower level, like what’s happened with Texas and educational standards.
And the lunatic religious views held by these folks is of the scariest kind; even while they attempt to scream persecution! every 5 seconds, they would happily actually persecute anyone who disagreed with them. They’re easy to laugh at, given their views, but there are a whole lot of disgruntled people in the U.S., and that, to me, prevents them from being a complete laughing matter.
Mabus is spamming my blog every day now with his nonsense. This is starting to get annoying, I’m having to delete comments every day now.
I was really hoping for some of the pharanguloid horde to mosey on over to this post and help with the incredible stupid that is Cameron.
Yay I now understand hypertext :3 What I don’t fathom yet is the algorithm of increasing stupidity- i.e. faith
A Voice of the Martyrs exec has shown up on the Poll of the Martyrs thread.
The Laughing Man, thanks, but no. I got the link the first time, and got a laugh out of “atheists are outraged at star dust” Cameron. He’s definitely stupid, but I don’t feel like going outside for chew toys, we’ve had enough of them here recently. ;D
Kel, yeah, he’s more than a pain in the ass. I had to shut down my guestbook on my photography gallery because of him. I count myself seriously lucky he didn’t follow me to my moblog.
I was reading Russell Blackford’s blog today and saw a Mabus dropping there – obviously, he’s got a long list of drop-sites.
In other news, Northern Lights author Philip Pullman has a new book coming out – The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ; one imagines that it’s going to draw more than a little attention.
The blurb: ‘By challenging the events of the gospels, Pullman puts forward his own compelling and plausible version of the life of Jesus, and in so doing, does what all great books do: makes the reader ask questions.‘
In some ways, though I’ve got to say I find presuppositionists really painful because even if you do a successful reductio ad absurdum, they don’t recognise it. Remember facilis and his 2+2=260.534 if God says so? Took that one right in his stride, regardless of the fact that it destroyed his position.
And Daniel Smith has successfully done similar here, his dualism / not dualism where mind is an emergent property of the brain when pressed but mind comes before matter when not – the only way he can save this now is to get an amount of his brain removed proportional to his disbelief in physicialism.
I’m not really sure what to do. If I add comment moderation to my blog, he wins. If I don’t, then I face the annoyance of either just leaving his rantings there or having to go through and purge my blog any time I get a chance to. And I really don’t want to throw comment moderation on the blog, I get few enough comments already.
Kel, I’d just delete as you can, he seems to be going through a list of some sort; chances are good he’ll lose interest eventually.
Kel, I’ve never used a blog, but surely the process of finding and deleting posts from a particular commenter could be automated.
It certainly can be. But part of the trouble is: Blogspot’s interface is pretty limited, if I recall correctly.
You could write a bot in Perl, tho’, that filtered on various criteria, killed stuff matching a pattern through the web interface, if it came to that. Wonder if anyone already has? Went looking around a bit, didn’t see one. But didn’t look that hard, honestly.
(/It’s a lot easier for me–hosted, use Nucleus, can do whatever I want, really, since messing with the PHP directly is well within my capabilities.)
Not on Blogger, the best I can do is shove moderation on there.
Owlmirror, I wonder if Daniel Smith will find and respond to your #132.
He’s a weak-sauce version of Matthew Segall, for mine.
Paul | March 29, 2010 5:20 PM:
Why has no-one suggested Azathoth?
With regards Facebook, a computer magazine I subsribe to had an article last month about how to commit Facebook suicide.
It can be found here.
Might be useful to some of you.
“Which philosopher (Roman or Greek preferred) would a survivalist, Libertarian whackjob admire?”
Mickey Mouse? Goofy? Foghorn Leghorn? Bob the guy I met at the bar who seemed to know ALL the Answers? Blind Io? Sappho? Biggus Dickus (famous Roman philospher http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FByERYetqI)?
Kel,
Just left you a comment.
btw, maybe shorter and less perfectly argumented posts would generate more comments. It’s hard to find something to add to your posts, they seem so well thought of already :-)
Here’s my fruit crisp topping recipe. It makes about 9 – 10 cups (depending on how much nuts you add): I keep it in a tightly closed bin in the freezer, and pull it out when I need it. You can make as much fruit crisp or as little as you want, and just put how much topping on it you need. I’ve made 1-apple crisps and 12 apple crisps. Works nicely with pears, too. Haven’t tried it with peaches or nectarines, but I imagine it would be good with them too.
-becca
topping:
2 cups brown sugar
2 cups flour
1-1/2 cups oatmeal (doesn’t have to be quick, can be any kind)
2 tsp (or more) cinnamon
1 cup cold butter, cut in chunks
1 to 1-1/2 cups pecans or walnuts (we prefer pecans)
zap the flour, cinnamon and butter in a food processor til smooth. Add sugar, zap til smooth. Put in bowl, set aside. Zap oatmeal and nuts only a little, to keep a nixe chunky texture (or zap til smooth if you prefer a smooth topping – we like ours chunky) – mix in with the rest of it.
put fruit in buttered dish. Put small tabs of butter on fruit if it’s a not terribly juicy fruit (apples need it, pears not so much). Sprinkle more cinnamon or spicing of your choice depending on what kind of fruit it is. Cover generously with topping. I tend to put a piece of waxed paper over it then and press down firmly, but you can skip that step if you like a looser crumble topping.
bake 45 minutes to an hour, til fruit is tender. Lovely with whipped cream.
Josh:
The keyboard — [shift-9] and [shift-0].
Seriously, though. When I write formally (papers, presentations, site bulletins, a government website) I don’t use parentheses unless absolutely necessary. When blogging (or commenting on a blog (such as this (duh))) I tend to type the way that I talk which is rather eliptical.
My first comments on a blog some years back were under ‘Billy’. Then (during a discussion of the efficacy of military operations within ‘hearts and minds’ operations) I was accused of being a liberal weenie who wouldn’t know the Army if it bit him (I do and it did) so I switched to Billy (A Liberal Disabled Veteran) which got cumbersome so it became Billy (ALDV). Meanwhile, as I commented on another blog (may have been the now-defunct No More Hornets (but it was a long time age and my (age-dehanced) memory is not what it was), in honour of my writing style, I was referred to as (((Billy))). So when I started my own blog, it was, of course, (((Billy))) The Atheist. And you thought that question would have a simple answer, didn’t you?
Kel and Negentropyeater: I have found with my blog that that is true. Some of my busiest ones for comments have been some throwaways (including this one which has (so far) garnered 115 comments, most of which are only related to the post through multiple tangential comments.
What the hell is it with these people and this whole “inanimate objects have wants and desires” schtick?
Rocks want to roll downhill? Planets want to orbit stars?
That kind of implies they have a choice in the matter, doesn’t it?
So why don’t you ever see a rebel rock rolling uphill, or a planet just getting sick of it all and stopping in its tracks?
Gravity is not optional. Therefore it’s not intentional.
And while we’re on the subject of repeating themes, why is “how do you account for the laws of logic” so damn popular lately? Do they even know what these laws are?
Do they really think the ‘law of identity’ needs a creator to make it so? Really?
iambilly,
I think if you leave a few hooks for concern trolls to hang to, that will generally drive up the comments. If your post is too water tight, they’ll find it more difficult to express their concerns. But if you leave too many concern hooks, that’s not good either as it becomes obvious. It’s all about finding the right dosage.
But I don’t have a blog, and you should always be careful with a recipie recommended by someone who only tastes and never cooks….
Argh. My preparation for exams is going very badly. I just wish I were a bit more intelligent and self-disciplined and had a better memory.
Anyone know of any jobs available for failed law students? Maybe I can pretend to be a wingnut and get a job writing for the WorldNutDaily, as this doesn’t seem to require any qualifications, expertise or knowledge whatsoever. :-)
Did someone say rebel rock?
Negentropyeater: The one I linked to was a throw away — I saw the graphic, added the frame and text, and tossed it up. The ones I actually put some thought into are the ones which (often) garner far less comments — though more readers. Hmmm.
Good morning endless thread!
I just spent an awesome weekend at PAX East (a convention for the nerds among us.) While flying back home from Boston, I came across the ‘Skymall’ catalog in the back pocket of the chair in front of me, and holy heck is there a crapload of woo in there.
I wish I had the catalog with me now, but it’s hilariously woo-ful. Anyone else see these things?
Here’s a recipe that has always served me well. I call it “One pan dinner”
Preheat oven to like, very hot.
Take a handful of tatertots and put them on a cookie sheet. If you didn’t eat lunch, maybe two handfuls. If it is after 2 in the morning, definitely two handfuls.
Stick that in the oven.
Open one beer, set it down and forget until after you have already opened a different beer that both beers even exist.
Go outside and smoke one cigarette. Contemplate the universe.
Go back in and put two hot dogs on the cookie sheet. Smile a little because you like how they hiss.
Open a second beer, and poke through whatever literature is on the counter (newspapers, mail, fliers).
Precisely when you are tired of waiting, take the cookie sheet out of the oven, and for god sake just use an oven mit or a towel or something…you’ve done that spatula thing before and always wither dropped the pan and/or burned the shit out of yourself.
Serve tots and dogs with whatever condiment you are actually jonesing for over the sink. I currently am eating dijon mustard with damned near everything.
Rediscover your first beer.
I learned that one from the erstwhile sous-chef of Wolfgang Puck while in my third year of culinary school.
It’s actually a lot easier than it ounds.
@Antiochus Epiphanes (165)
Can I skip the cigarette part? They tend to make me die.
Walton, sleep is required for memory making. Make sure you are getting enough sleep. Also, get a little exercise each day, even if it is just a 20-30 minute walk.
Apropos of nothing, I gather someone called Ricky Martin has just ‘come out’, too.
Apparently he’s a bit of a has-been, but given that he’s more mainstream famous and, I assume, part of Hollywood, his coming out does seem a bit ‘braver’ than Randi’s.
Though, of course, he’s receiving plenty of flack of waiting to long as well.
–o–
Speaking of Slog, I was very pleased to see how fast and thorough the woo was shot down by the commenters here.
Yep. Y’know… When you’ve burned through the books you brought to read, and you’re landing or in turbulence so the laptop is out, I’ve read the things…
And I do seem to recall some stuff for sale in there I’d generally characterize as woo-infested. Magnetic bracelets, anyone? Sheesh.
Kevin…Yeah. Cigarette is optional. I started skipping them a few years ago…this kind of messed with lots of my recipes at first, because the cigarette was serving as a timer (and coffin-nail, I guess)–don’t skip the contemplation of the universe part, though.
I didn’t know that Ricky Martin hadn’t already come out.
@AJ Milne (169)
Exactly. We had a remarkably long take-off, so I read through it. There were things about ‘accupoints’ and magnetic therapy and it just made me chuckle throughout.
It’s not a terrible catalog. Some of the things seemed useful but kitchy, and I remember sometime last year they had some replica movie props from Harry Potter and LotR, but those are gone now. I wouldn’t ever buy anything from it, so, yeah.
@Antiochus Epiphanes (170)
Ah, so contemplating the universe is not optional, got it.
Oh good, Caine, you saw that – I was going to ask if you had tried that one yet. I’m thinking of closing the account with all the flotsam and open a new blank one to still be able to keep tabs on people, but I’m afraid I’d just get sucked back in again.
Forget biology and religion for a bit.
Go here: http://webcast.cern.ch/lhcfirstphysics/
Kel OM
Yeah. I remember thinking occasionally: ‘Hrm… Actually, there’s an idea that might have some merit’, or just ‘there’s a toy that sounds maybe kinda fun’, but honestly, I’m only reading it to give something to hands, eyes, and brain to do to kill a bit of time…
And it’s funny, but it seems to me that maybe woo by association generally drives me away from almost any company. Not so much a conscious thing as a general sense these guys are a bit icky, so no thanks. Like some subconscious bit of your brain is thinking: ‘Well, they flog bullshit like this… So as if I can count on ’em to keep the lead out of their paint and install motors won’t melt down after like twenty minutes of service…’
(/And then, there’s also probably far less rational considerations, more driven by aesthetics. There, the subconscious is more thinking: ‘They also sell Elvis commemorative plates… If I order this, might I catch the tacky somehow? What if it is transmissible, after all…’)
Why on earth would you think that this makes Ricky Martin “a bit braver” for coming out?
The question is why hadn’t he done it before, why did he need to perpetuate this obvious lie for so many years? Is it because he, his agent and his producer thought they wouldn’t have made as much money?
Brave? Give me a break.
Caine @ 126,
*Agrees with clenched tentacle salute*
Lolly for the day :
Sam Harris on science and morality
AE, I used to have recipes very much like that one. I was too poor a cook to pull them off consistently, unfortunately. My problem was always substituting a ‘cigarette’ for the cigarette, contemplating the universe for far too long, getting distracted by a particularly interesting detail of said universe, often trying to express my feelings about this detail on the guitar, musing maybe this one would sound better on the 12-string, searching for the 12-string, simultaneously rediscovering and remembering the broken G” on the 12-string, changing out the broken string, tuning for about 20 minutes while alternately contemplating the universe and/or one or more of its many fascinating details and wondering what happened to my beer, sort-of recalling two different beers, finally wandering into the kitchen to find beer(s) and then noticing all the black smoke? and realizing that my food was charcoal again.
This is a mistake that is, importantly, almost impossible to make with frozen shit from Trader Joe’s in the microwave.
My kid collects the wands. They are really quite nicely designed and made. Once in awhile I’ll flick & swish one.
re: Ellington w/ other jazz greats
I just don’t see how anyone ever has the right to criticise anyone else for “not coming out soon enough.” Sexuality is a deeply personal matter, and it should be, IMO, entirely up to each person how open he or she wants to be about his or her sexual orientation. The public never has a “right” to know about a person’s sexuality, when that person wants to keep it private. It’s simply none of anyone else’s business.
more Duke-plus
Soooo staying out of this one this time around.
(btw I agree with you Walton…)
just Duke
Keep slogging through it Walton. When working on something particularly challenging it’s good to take little creative or physical breaks. For me, it helps keep my mind from going to sleep inside itself in the wake of too much information. Go draw a picture and do some interpretive dance :D
See if you can get yourself near manic and then read the same thing you were reading.
Then again this is from a person who hyperfocuses so meh….
that it hasn’t got itself back to the garden?
[ref: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBqodL2OJ1A first 0:48]
Okay, I’ve got a great (I hope) prank planned for April Fool’s Day and need some input from the godless crowd.
IM me (AIM: cr4kobra, Yahoo: voodookobra108, MSN: [email protected]) if you’re interested in judging it.
Meh… as far as Ricky Martin it seems no matter what you do, how, or when you do it, it’s just not going to be good enough for some people.
People always wanna complain.
Walton
As I have said before I have more than a few contacts in Britain for the type of work I do ( NGO, generalist community legal service etc. ).I’m now a criminal lawyer in the area of disability law (but still do a ridiculous amount of civil and family law)but if you’re keen to have a career in any such areas please email me and I’ll put you in touch with some like minded punters.
Having said that if you want some private practice experience too I can probably assist you. I worked as a commercial( primarily bankruptcy but also commercial litigation law) lawyer too and as my(now ex-Shrek) husband is a pom I have worked in England in that field also.
If you want to contact me please give me an email on laingshort at hotmail dot com.
@AJ Milne (176)
I think my decision stems from the latter. I don’t want to catch ‘the tacky.’
@Sven DeMilo (179)
That happens to me a lot. Although it usually ends up being more along the lines of ‘why is my microwave beeping?’ I once forgot laundry in the dryer for about a week before I had to do another load. It was towels and stuff, so no big deal, but still.
As per movie replicas, I have a reverse-blade katana (ala Samurai X / Rurouni Kenshin) and it’s fairly well put together. No wobbly bits or anything of that sort, although the stand had a bubble of paint that I had to file down.
BoS: Thanks for the offer. Will email you later today.
Walton,
Geebus, I was in Buenos Aires 2 years ago and he made no mystery of his sexuality to me and many others when he was there with his boyfriend. Why did he continue to lie to the media? Just tell me why? Because it’s a “deeply personal matter”? That’s the only reason you can think of why he perpetuated this lie?
And in any case, I reacted to him being “brave” for having come out. Just tell me where is the bravery? This is ridiculous.
Negentropyeater, I have some thoughts on it:
Maybe he didn’t want his sexual identity become his primary concern.
A lot of fame is setting up an image, and surprise surprise, that image is often false.
Hell, I had the squeaky clean American girl look thing going all through my teens. It was bullshit. Was I supposed to march into an agents office and tell them that I need to have an image that looks more like I feel inside? Hell, no one wants to look at that.
So yeah, it does take a special kind of courage to stand up to one’s own media image and say you’re going to be yourself.
Uhm, there goes the cherished concept of morality and soul and all that shit :
Magnets and morality
Waltom
Please do. Always keen to see young lawyers go the to the light side of the the force.!
I didn’t say he was “brave”. I’ve never heard of him, have no idea who he is and couldn’t care less, and don’t know why he chose not to come out.
I was making a more general point. It is never, IMO, fair to criticise someone for not being open about their sexuality. It’s just none of the media’s or the public’s business.
Obviously, it does matter whether people support or oppose LGBT rights; the statements that people, especially public figures, make about these issues make a difference to other people’s rights. But if someone supports LGBT rights and is an ally of the LGBT community politically, I don’t care whether that person is personally straight, gay or bi, nor whether he or she chooses to talk about it. It’s simply none of my business – nor any of yours, or the public’s generally.
Of course the flip side of that coin is that he’s trying to breath some life into his sagging career.
Walton, Ricky Martin makes terrible latin pop music from the 90’s I think. But I think he also went on to become sort of a social activist for women in India?
Or am I confusing him?
Of course, this plan relies on the assumption that I actually pass my finals. So I should really stop posting and get back to work…
@Ol’Greg (196)
Ricky Martin Foundatin
Plus on the main Ricky Martin Wiki page it talks alot about his humanitarian work. Here
Rorschach @193: I saw that study. Great stuff. And even the coverage was better-than-usual, with NPR noting on-air that it’s hard to argue for the existence of a soul when such a simple experiment can affect decisions judged to be “moral” or “immoral” — not to mention the nice side story about children’s brains having to go through a developmental stage before they can distinguish between harm being done intentionally and harm being done accidentally, and before they can assess the quantity of harm done as being inadequate for forming a judgement about intent.
Ol’Greg,
Because you really think that by perpetuating this lie it helped him to alleviate this? On the contrary, it made it his primary concern.
Read his comming out:
http://rickymartinmusic.com/portal/news/news.asp?item=114532
I know how it feels. I lied for ten years. One of the reasons why I came out is that continuing to lie about my sexual identity had become my primary concern. Coming wasn’t an act of bravery, but an act to restore my personal sanity.
Walton
I worked pro bono for quite a while for the GLBTQ organisation in my state which is what led in me into NGO work(which I got into as I have an L sister who led me to the fact there was little legal support for the community). It was almost ironic that as the leader of the legal aspects for this org I was continuously accused of being a “lesbo” by some of the right wing arsenuts I had to fight.
It proved to me that not only did they have no fucking clue about people, they also didn’t WANT to really having a fucking clue about people.
In a “real” situation they might have alluded to me as lawyer a bitch or somesuch but in my role as a LGBTQ lawyer their insult was “lesbo”.
Very very telling.
it’s gonna take a metric fuckton of humanitarian work to make up for ‘She Bangs’
@Sven DiMilo (202)
He’s doing pretty well so far, helping children is the greatest humanitarian aid I think one can do.
Walton,
Get out of your bubble. We don’t live in an ideal world where all types of sexuality are perfectly accepted and where your absolutist moral principles hold true. And we certainly won’t get there by assuming that we are there already.
I am shocked I tell…..SHOCKED! I haven’t been this surprised since Lance Bass came out of the closet.
Not at all. But I do think some times it’s hard to admit what problems are holding you back and do something about them.
A deluded but much loved Sven @ #202
.. you have obviously never heard the wonderment that is “Shake Your Bon Bon” . Otherwise such statements would never utter from your mouth.
Sam Harris talks about “Moral confusion in the name of science…” http://www.richarddawkins.net/articles/5343
video and text at the link
To enlighten my darling Sven ( and all those that have never engulfed the pleasure that is the RICKY)
If you all band toegther you could buy you eyeball/ear bleach in discount rates.
Cynical people might say it is a publicity stunt to promote his memoirs. I look at it as a consequence of parenthood and the desire to be honest with one’s children, similar to what happened with Clay Aiken. I’m glad for every person who comes out to the public, including Ricky Martin. Society has long treated gayness as a dirty little secret, so the more people who burst out of the closet, the better IMO.
See, I guess this is where we differ. I do think that acting to restore your personal sanity takes bravery some times, even though it is self-preservation.
Maybe this is because in my past I’ve found it far too easy to cling to behaviors that are ultimately self destructive out of fear.
Lynna @ 208,
didn’t I just post this @ 178? LOL
and all those that have never engulfed the
pleasurepain that is the RICKY)*fixed*
On a level with Britney and Enrique Eglesias, that one, just painful.(although, to let you in on one of my very few dirty secrets, I have been known to listen to BS’s “Lucky” at unhealthy volumes while dangerously intoxicated, but if asked I will deny it)
Evolution fail:
@213: The odds of a particular atom (1 in 10^80) being in a specific place (1 in (size of universe)/(size of an atom)) is incomprehensibly improbably. Therefore, atoms do not exist.
Ol’Greg
I’m not being confrontational at all here but trying to understand. I’m not sure what you meant with that statement in terms of a GLBT person cominfg out. Could you be kind enough to elaborate a little so I understand ( admittedly a little dim through 3 glasses of very nice chardonnay!)
*fixed*
And yes, in my 212, it ‘s meant to say ‘Iglesias”…
Ol’Greg
We’re probably going to cross post here but I think I’ve re read your post and now get it. Being a bit dim, sorry.
Oh, fer fuck’s sake. Yes, you did. Sorry. I’m just going to have to bow out of the endless thread for now. Too much work to do, so I can’t keep up — and this scattered attention, this dip-in-and-then-depart approach to the Thread is not working.
Lynna # 218
..if you think of it more of “take a dump and leave” you might find it way more satisfying.
.. whaa??? Who ever said here I was a lady ?
Bride of Shrek OM at #188 – “I’m now a criminal lawyer” – Nice to see a lawyer owning up to that upfront. Brava BoS!
(smiling and ducking)
For no reason whatsoever
re 159:
Well, not quite rolling uphill, but there are these rocks in the desert with obvious tracks behind them as if they were being dragged, but there are no marks in front of them so they appear to be “self-powered”.
Oh yeah, BoS. The “problem” I’m referring to would be the denial not the homosexuality. The pressure to keep up an appearance out of fear, etc. It doesn’t have to be coming from other people anymore to keep being present in one’s own mind.
Jeffrey D @ #220
Yeah, you better smile and duck sunshine. The reason Court is always held in the morning is so we can go swinging golf clubs in the afternoon at the bozos who make lawyer jokes.
.. of course for those of those that don’t play golf we just hire assassins to do the work ( also known as pro bono clients)
I’ll intentionally third Rorschach and Lynna’s posting of the link to Harris on science and morality:
http://www.project-reason.org/newsfeed/item/moral_confusion_in_the_name_of_science3/
It’s an important topic, and I think Harris is roughly right. IMHO it’s the most under-discussed topic in the “New Atheist” literature.
I hope PZ will post a top-level posting about it, though, because it’s a big loaded topic that would likely overload an Episode of the Endless Thread.
Hmmm, as an aside to the Ricky Martin thing, can I beg the indulgence of an opinion or two on something?
I’m a mature undergraduate student and an 18 year old friend of mine on the course recently came out to a group of us in the pub. We know that he comes from a devout Church of England family and he was talking to us about having come out to his friends in his home city but not yet to his parents- although he believes his Mum suspects. As it’s the Easter holidays and he’s going home for a week he has been thinking about coming out to his parents but has said that his Dad will probably go ape, his Mum will be incredibly upset and he has no idea how his siblings will react.
My initial thought when he said this was that maybe he should wait until he has finished his studies and moved out permanently before telling them. Primarily because if they react badly then he will have a home to go to at the end of the day with no fear of losing that home or it being an uncomfortable place for him to live and he will have time to deal with whatever reaction he gets. It would also mean that his parents have enough space and time to come to terms with it in their own way as they choose.
A bisexual friend of mine agreed with what I’d said at the time however he seems to care a lot less about what his parents think and he has said he doesn’t feel that they would be bothered anyway if he did speak to them about his sexuality.
I just wondered what the resident Pharyngulans think? It’s not a situation I’ve ever had to consider from a personal point of view and I’m not convinced I gave good advice :o(
Bos – Assassin is not a bad job – paid for college after pimping my sister feel through…or is that too much information? Oddly enough, lawyer seemed like a step down after those jobs.
As always, your obedient servant and with tongue firmly planted in cheek. ;)
Re Ricky Martin:
In general I agree with negentropy eater that coming out in 2010 isn’t nearly as much about bravery as it was in 2000 or especially 1990 or before.
In Ricky Martin’s case, it’s been an open secret for a long time that he’s gay. AFAIK few people who were paying attention believed him anymore when he lied about it. (In that position, it’s not terribly brave to decide to be an out and proud faggot rather than a known faggot who’s too craven to come out.) I could be wrong about that, and there might be a signficant contingent of his female fans for whom knowing he was gay might make it harder to idolize him in the same way, even if his heterosexuality was already suspect.
One factor I have to wonder about is that he’s from Puerto Rico and is an international star, largely in Spanish-speaking countries. My impression has been that Latin cultures have been more sexist and macho-ly homophobic, and it might be a much bigger deal coming out in some of those places, where he’d be more widely regarded as a pathetic excuse for a man if he’s a known faggot.
(But maybe that macho stereotype thing is a bit of an exaggerated stereotype, or there’s been more progress for gays in hispanic cultures than I know. I hope so.)
But it would lack the stream-of-multiple-consciousness charm of The Thread.
BarbieWanKenobi,
That’s a horrible situation. I don’t feel qualified to give advise because I’ve never had to go through that. I do however think it’s awful that someone has to choose between keeping silent or coming out and facing possible homelessness/financial hardship.
Uh, I think The Thread is the forum.
BoS @219: Thank you from the bottom of my… hmmm, may have to rethink my intro to this post… anyway, thank you for your advice re taking a dump and then leaving. Highly satisfying, as you noted.
Hormonal convert joins mormons, but at his wedding non-mormon relatives are excluded from the service An Arizona newspaper journalist works very hard to turn this into a feel-good story by the end, but it comes off a little forced. And in some of the comments, the truth will out.
Continued from the “Sins of Omission” thread:
There are no gaps. You don’t get it. The fact that we can predict matter’s behavior is confirmation of Aquinas’ fifth way. It is the fact that matter behaves as if driven along certain pathways (predictable pathways – as you rightly note), plus the fact that matter has no goals or intentions of its own, plus the fact that goals and intentions are only known to be the product of intellect, that shows that matter taking the forms that it does and doing the things that it does must be the product of intellect.
Anyway, I have no intention of pursuing this through another thread. I came here to test these ideas and, although I didn’t even try to answer every objection due to a lack of time, I did read and analyse every post to see if I could see the strengths, weaknesses and fallacies of your arguments. I was able (fairly easily actually) to formulate answers in my head that refuted the arguments presented here. I apologize that I was unable to share all of those answers with you.
I remain convinced of the validity of Aquinas’ five ways.
Thanks for a rockin’ good time!
Feynmaniac,
I don’t think homelessness as such would actually come into it but I do think he may end up in a situation where going home from Uni is incredibly uncomfortable for him. I think I’m probably a coward but were it me then I would not want to open up an inevitable can of worms until I had set myself up to be as shielded from it as possible. Then again, I’ve never had to deal with anything like that and I really have no idea how it feels to have to hide part of yourself away from your family.
On the plus side he’s got a lot of good friend that couldn’t give a monkey’s what he does in the bedroom so he won’t be short of people to support him if he needs it.
Actually, I thought Stardust was a pretty good movie.
Except when it is organized into a brain.
Bride of Shrek OM :
(URL deleted as a public service)
Not enough. I need some Drano in my synaptic gaps.
It’s good he doesn’t have to worry about homelessness. Unfortunately, some gay teens do. However, even being shunned or disapproved by one’s family is too harsh. It’s nice to know that he has some good friends.
_ _ _
That’s extremely weak.
It must be nice that your rationalizations come fairly easy.
What a surprise…..
…but unfortunately the margin of this book is too small to write it down.
How totally fucking lame, “I refuted all your arguments in my head”. Loser.
Daniel Smith:
I’m curious what you think it means for an argument to be valid. A lot of people think they do, but actually don’t.
It doesn’t mean that the other side hasn’t disproved the conclusion—as you seem sometimes to think when you resort to arguing that we can’t prove your question-begging assertions false.
If you actually still think that any of Aquinas’s Five Ways are actually valid arguments, much less all of them, well…
I pity you.
Please do go away. It’s too depressing to watch you be such a complete dufus.
Yet another moron who seems to think that debate is the best way to answer scientific questions.
And you verified this answers how?
It’s difficult to take excerpts from Sam Harris’s latest essay without doing a disservice to his argument, but having said that, here are two paragraphs that are interesting, even though they do not stand alone all that well — a good enticement perhaps to read more. (And, yes, this is the fourth presentation of the link on this thread. Once I’ve made the mistake of repetition, it’s good fun to compound the error.):
You mean, it’s a confirmation of Aquinas’ unreasonableness.
You mean, you (and Aquinas) concluding this means that you are both absolutely unreasonable.
By the way, when this came up before, you claimed “I never said “everything in the universe is the result of intentionality, purpose, goal-directedness, or willpower”, nor do I believe that.” (Comment #256 on “Sins of Omission”)
This is Aquinas’ (and your) contradiction made explicit. You want it both ways — everything “must be the product of intellect” (above), and not everything is the product of intellect.
Arguing from a contradiction is an unreasonable logical fallacy, just in case that hasn’t sunk in from the last zillion times I’ve pointed this out.
Meh. You’re not intelligent or honest enough to be worth arguing with anyway. Feel free to go away and be wrong somewhere else as much as you like.
I doubt this.
And you were too lazy to just type these wonderful refutations out? Or were you actually aware that your “refutations” were in themselves unreasonable and fallacious, and disingenuously refuse to expose them to criticism of their obvious unreasonable logical fallacy?
Aw. Our poor little hearts will break.
You remain more unreasonable than an atheist, in other words.
THESE ANSWERS
damn it
The lurkers support me in email?
Daniel Smith #232 wrote:
You’re missing the critical step: Because matter has no goals or intentions of its own, the logical explanation for the fact that matter seems to behave “as if” it is being driven to an end, is that this apparent teleology is an artifact of the human mind which is doing the interpreting. This is the simplest solution to the disconnnect. The goals and intentions are being read into a situation. What you are seeing at work is not the Mind of God — it’s the mind of man. Your own mind. Both you, and Aquinas, are anthropomorphizing nature, and have mistaken yourselves, for God.
I do hope you save (or bookmark) some of the posts you did not answer, so that you may study them later to consider how we might answer the answers you formed in your head. I’m pretty sure they would not have stumped us, and suspect you suspect the same thing.
Thanks for coming in. Feel free to come back some time. I don’t think you dealt adequately with my own objections. Or, maybe, you just didn’t get to them.
Paul W., did you read comment 101 below Sam Harris’s essay? If so, I’d like to hear your take on it.
BarbieWanKenobi,
well I’ve been in that same situation and lied to my parents for more than ten years from the moment I was conscious about my homosexuality. My dad was the main hurdle as he had never left me any doubts about his homophobia. I knew I didn’t risk homelessness or financial repercusions but I was fearful about the emotional repercussions. However I didn’t find it difficult to perpetuate the lie as I was very much focussed on my studies and didn’t really care that much about sex. My hand remained my only boyfriend and it was easy to conform to my father’s preferred image of the young heterosexual male motivated by his academic results. So I didn’t really feel the need to come out before I was far away from home. Nobody knew about my homosexuality, not even my closest friends.
But I think if your friend already feels the need to come out now, he shouldn’t wait any longer, however difficult that may be. It won’t be easy to perpetuate the lie to his parents for much longer if he needs to assume openly his sexuality now and his circle of friends all know about it.
From what you describe, it doesn’t look as if he can afford to wait. In that situation, perpetuating the lie is just going to make it harder for him and his family.
And we remain utterly and totally convinced, without presupposition like you, that the five ways have been throroughly refuted several times over by advances in science and philosophy.
I started Harris’ essay, and haven’t finished it yet, but from what I can tell he’s pretty much making the same case that Richard Carrier made in Sense and Goodness Without God. This is good, old-fashioned Enlightenment argument. Secular humanists have been whining about the flabby pop-pomo liberal moral relativism for years; it’s the same bogus “we all have our own truths” and “there are many different ways of knowing” that has been used to justify religion, and pseudoscience.
I do hope PZ gives the essay its own post. I can’t really fault Daniel for running from The Thread, either. It’s fine as a free-wheeling forum, but it’s not conducive to serious discussion.
I have to thank PeeZed ::genuflects:: for the latest anastomisation (or wevs). It has given The Thread ::genuflects:: a very pleasant infusion of Sastra.
Ah, so mr Martin is Latino. I suspected so, but was too lazy <boo goes here> to check.
And I never said he was ‘brave’ as such, just that he to a hitherto uneducated outsider like myself came across as ‘braver‘ than Randi, simply because his background and social circle would seem to make it more likely that he’d receive a backlash.
But, yes, still not as ‘brave’ as an A-list celeb or more importantly a politico.
Thanks for a
rockin’ goodfunky time!Call me up when you wanna grind!
Just because…
Why do you hate The Thread? Has The Thread not been good to you? Do you not owe The Thread everything?
Janine @252: Ah, yes. :-) Many thanks for a dose of our favorite Jehovah’s Witness. Thank you for a funky time—call me whenever you want to grind.
Hark! An octopus.
A secular, and quite successful charity, is helping the Lost Boys who leave (or are kicked out of) fundamentalist religious sects. Excerpt from the article:
I agree with Negentropyeater, Barbiewankanobe.
It all has to be dependent on how he feels and what he thinks he needs to do. Ultimately he’s the one who matters in that decision. He’s not going to be able to stay truly close to his parents if he has to keep his life secret. So it may be better for him just to tell them now so that they have more time to deal with it.
I think Daniel’s signoff is the most craven piece of intellectual cowardice we’ve ever seen on Pharyngula. Rather than actually fight his corner, or admit that he was wrong, he flees to the interior of his own head, where he is right and always wins. Frightened little man; pitiful.
In relation to the discussion earlier: I, for one, am a massive fan of the endless thread. Before the endless thread was instituted, everyone else complained that I used to derail discussions all the time to talk about whatever was on my mind at the time. Now I can blither away to my heart’s content, and leave other threads for their intended topics. :-)
I also think the fact that we can chat about a range of things on the endless thread, not being restricted to religion or politics, is part of what makes Pharyngula a community, rather than just a bunch of randomers who comment on a blog. Personally, I find it easier to interact socially, and am more comfortable being candid about myself and my issues, on the internet than in real life: and I know for a fact I’m not the only person here who feels that way. The endless thread is somewhere I can talk freely about what I want to talk about, without feeling like I’m hijacking an important discussion about something else.
I’m with Negentropyeater, Barbiewankanobe.
Another point – if his friends know about his sexuality, there is a real possibility that his parents will find out from a third party. I would hope that my son would do me the courtesy of telling me himself rather than learning from a stranger.
And where a little green alien tells him reason, logic and evidence are over-rated… oh, and calls him “dum-dum”…
@259: well, you would say that, the Thread may be getting you a job :)
As we enter the final few weeks before the General Election, perhaps a few songs?
Try this for relevance
Stephen Wells:
Eh. I think he would have stuck around if Sins of Omission were still open; I’d really rather not have him in The Thread.
I agree, though I’d take him over the birdbrain.
Cheers Negentropyeater, Ol’Greg and SteveV.
Been talking to him this evening and he’s going to talk to them about it over the holiday.
Thanks for balancing out my cowardlyness ;o)
KOPD:
*Nods* Game Bird’s delusions were seriously out there in comparison.
Less-Brains-Than-a-Stuff-Turkey has a new post up at its blog, Continuation Of The Now Blocked PZ MYERS Thread. I won’t quote from it (we’ll all had enough of its loopiness), but it’s still going on about how Special Relatively can’t possibly be true and only it knows the truth. The comments are an amazing mish-mash; again, it seems to be editing them heavily, so it’s virtually impossible to figure out what was said by the original commenter.
I think Graeme Bird was one of the most extreme examples of poster child for anti science delusional conservative loonytarian who believes all he says is the only truth. He had everything going for him, I had never met a real live birther/truther on Pharyngula before. Neither someone who refuses to call Obama by his name.
Geebus, what a loon.
btw, I can’t remember if anybody ever had been that quick to be dungeonified? It only took him 2 days and spreading his droppings on only 2 threads including getting his own memorial of the hyperloon thread. Is this a record?
Hey guys, I need some advice. A casual acquaintance of mine said recently that they weren’t “100%” of evolution. Now, they’re not religious or into any woo so far as I can tell, and they seem to get the basic idea, but when I asked ’em about it, they said:
AHHHHH. I’m not sure what to say, if anything. I mean, this person is not on the wrong track or going to become a creationist or anything, but…
So my question is, should I just figure “close enough” and let it go, or should I press it and try to make them a True Believer®?
If they were as confused and ignorant of science as the answers you gave before, then perhaps it’s best you saved us all the trouble.
Of course, the reductio ad absurdum you self-inflicted could be removed with the admission that mind is an emergent property of matter, or get your brain removed to demonstrate otherwise.
Of course you do, you wouldn’t even concede a simple point such as the principle of stability. So when the 5 ways were thoroughly taken apart and you showed how muddled your position was by the whole dualist / non-dualist hole you fell into, you could just ignore it and declare that the only rational belief to have is one involving God impregnating a virgin to give birth to himself only to die for the possibility of vicarious atonement. All your talk of infinities, all your talk of perfection – really when it comes down to it you believe that God in man-form wandered the middle east 2000 years ago, performed some miracles, then died so that you could have an eternal party if you just believed the right thing.
Kyorosuke, you might at least want to try to explain theory to your friend. A lot of people do not understand the word, and not a lot can be accomplished until that much is clear.
A little help is here and here.
@268
Hmm. I wonder if I go read the closed thread or this blog post of his if there be an explanation for how GPS works if special relativity is wrong. The engineers that built the GPS satellites slowed down their atomic clocks before launching to account for time dilation from both special and general relativity, otherwise they would have stopped being accurate at all after the first day.
(I’m pretty sure I got that link from a comment on this site several months ago. Whoever posted it, thank you. I really enjoyed reading it.)
http://notjustatheory.com/
I’ve posted it at least once here! It really is interesting stuff.
It’s first post was at (blog time) March 27, 2010 1:53 PM.
It’s last post was at March 29, 2010 7:43 PM, and Pee Zed announced it had been chucked into the dungeon at March 29, 2010 7:48 PM.
So, pedantically, it lasted c.2d5h.
I’m not interested enough to count how many times it commented, how many insults it made, how many loony ideas it espoused, or if it ever said anything a rational person might agree with. Someone industrious and immune to bullshite could probably make a career out of Less-Brains-Than-a-Stuffed-Turkey.
Bird made 172 comments in that period.
Kyorosuke, someone (possibly on this very thread) referenced the Discovering Religion videos on YouTube; I’m on episode 10 right now (except when catching up on The Thread, that is), and I’m finding them very useful for just such circumstances as you mention. They start here:
Paul:
Thank you! I wish I had read that before the conversation I had about a year ago with somebody who refused to accept relativity. It was argument from incredulity and I tried to explain the experiment involving atomic clocks on planes, but he refused to accept evidence from clocks or any other kind of device to measure time – because they are imprecise. It got really frustrating. Anyway, the fact that GPS works is very strong support for relativity and the article was a very fascinating read and it always springs to mind when relativity comes up.
Get him to read the book: Evolution: What the Fossils Say And Why It Matters, there’s plenty of fossilised evidence. And the impressive thing about the book is not what evidence is put in (and there is plenty) but all the fossils he had to leave out due to space.
Gravity – just a theory.
Your friend doesn’t realise the difference between scientific theory and the colloquial use of the word? Ask him if he believes in atomic theory.
Kyorosuke –
You may also want to point him to this TalkOrigins page in why Evolution is both theory and fact. I find it most helpful in dealing with people with the same mental block…
Ask him if he expects million year old fossils to be an easy catch? Does he think they grow on trees and one only needs to look and pick them like fruits?
Ask him if he thinks science can provide 100% certainty of anything? Only religions provide that illusion. And ask him what alternative he can think of. Without evolution, nothing else makes sense.
Wow… I noticed he seemed to be posting a lot. It seems like he didn’t sleep in two days. He must have spent the entire two-day period hunched over his computer, typing furious tirades against the “stupid” and “economically illiterate” denizens of Pharyngula.
Let’s say, at a conservative estimate, that an average blog comment is about 70 words long. That means Bird posted over 12,000 words during his two-week sojourn on this site – enough for several essays. I don’t know where he got the energy. :-
Doing oddjobs at the kid’s house today I noted that CNN appears to be going after Scientology in a big way this week. Big investigative series.
Also, tonight on Larry King, Catholic child abuse.
Seems like, yes, but not really. There were at least three distinct breaks, two short ones (meal-length?), and a possibly much longer one (sleep-length?). Possibly others as well, but three that I noticed at the time.
OTOH, as I commented in the previous endless thread’s subthread, I myself was laughing so hard at Less-Brains-… I was up for c.24h!
Here it is; biggest pain-in-the-ass update yet.
37765
I wonder what Truth Machine thought of the arguments presented in the Sins Of Omission thread.
Kyorosuke
Have your friend come here and make those claims…
Broboxley OT on the Christian Militia Thread is being very cute.
@188, he stated:
To which Celtic_Evolution @191 replied (I presume sarcastically):
Broboxley’s reply @196:
I chimed in @246 with:
To which Broboxley, quite mind-bendingly, said @251:
Am I talking with a very deapan Poe, or a very obtuse fool?
Well, I think David Mathews beat him in speed of banning, number of posts, posts/hour, and (amazingly) craziness:
That’s an average of about a post every 3 minutes for 12 hours straight. And few of them made sense. He talked about follwing a “post-primate religion”.
There are also others who I’m pretty sure got banned in a single day. Their crimes ranged from posting the same comment 15 times in a row, copy-and-pasting a whole chapter from a book, exploiting a tradegy to sneer at atheists, misogynistic, racist, homophobic comments, etc.
The Bird is in good company.
Go back to the recent thread on the Constitution and you’ll get your answer.
Aww thanks so much Wowbagger. you have earned your molly twicefold for supporting the larger athiest blogosphere. :)
I sure hope this isn’t considered to be spamming. We still crashing threads around here? There has to be some out there yet…
Oooh if i time it right and get lucky i can be the owner of the 40,000th comment :D
Hully cheese! Fossils are NOT needed to prove evolution. If nobody ever looked at the ground, evolution would still be an obvious fact. The fossil record SUPPORTS evolution, but it isn’t the only evidence for evolution.
Besides, fossil-finding is a rare, weird sequence of events. First, an animal has to die in such a way that the body is not rotted or eaten or scattered, but is naturally preserved. Then the preserved bits need to sink down to be replaced with soluble rock, which must harden, then the rock needs to come back up to the surface of the earth. Then the surrounding rock needs to erode away, exposing the fossil, without destroying the fossil. Then somebody needs to find it, recognize it, dig it out, ship it, classify it, catalogue it, publicize it and defend it.
It is a god’s wonder that there are any fossils at all. But there are a damned lot of them, and they all do support evolution. And, on occasion, someone finds a live animal that had only been seen as a fossil, and sees that fossil reconstruction is accurate–so much so that fossils, alone, pretty much prove evolution, already, yes.
But there are many instances of observed evolution, evidence of common ancestry, and frankly, the concept of evolution just makes sense out of everything, as evolution itself makes sense.
Fossils aren’t important, really. It’s just that the creationists have adopted the argument that fossils are not sufficient evidence, and a lot of non-scientists believe them. Sufficient fossils to support evolution are available, thanks, and more important, no fossils that disprove evolution have ever been found.
But fossils aren’t all the evidence for and of evolution. You, you sexual-reproducing-ape-monkey-primate-mammal, with your hair and your fingernails and your little canine teeth, are really all anybody needs.
deadpan
I’ve noticed Rev. BDC in the vicinity in both cases. Just sayin’, Rev.
226 more posts ’till the big 40k mark! It’s mine bitches! XD
nah, I don’t sockpuppet
OK. I get to brag: My oldest child just texted me that she go into Phi Beta Kappa. Go Her!!!
@Josh Official Spokesgay: I have a recipe I would like to email you but I forget what your email is. Can you email me at triskelethecat at g mail dot come?
No, but you do have a highly infectious typing disease.
Ahh, yes. This I do.
Hmmm – was checking out our favourite bird’s continuing hissy spit against PZ and left a comment or two.
Seems he edits comments to make them pro-Bird.
And when I say edit, I mean the edited comment bears no relation to the original comment, but turns out to be a parrot of bird’s deluded drivel.
What a contemptible loser. His dishonesty knows no bounds.
Suck Poppet…
I’d like to nominate you for best username EVAR!
David Mathews (see Dungeon/plonk) “graced this blog for a mere 12 hours, during which he left 255 sneering, whining, pretentious comments.”
I was there for the David Mathews meltdown, and I wonder a bit if I helped to trigger it by asking the wrong sort of analytical question(s).
I haven’t read the Bird threads, and I’m not sure that I’m going to. Too much crazy, too little time.
Ricky Martin announces he is proud to be performer of ‘Shake Your Bon-Bon’
It had long been assumed within the music industry that Martin hid behind a veil of secrecy surrounding his true feelings of revulsion towards the material he had foisted upon the world.
The rest is here:http://newsarse.com/2010/03/30/ricky-martin-announces-he-is-proud-to-be-performer-of-shake-your-bon-bon/
Another bit from the same site:
Vatican warns media to stop basing reports on things that definitely happened
A Vatican newspaper editorial said the media claims barely even referred to “faith”, choosing instead to base the attack on the Pope around things that had “definitely happened”.
I hear yeh. And BirdBrain was some world class crazy.
How are you supposed to pronounce “Graeme” anyway? Sorry for being dull.
Graeme Bird sounds like a cool band name. Maybe Golden Eggs from the Graeme Bird. Sounds indie.
I’m sorry for being so vapid.
*sighs*
I should go practice.
I do love the endless thread for it’s ability to take the inane things I say and make them sorta blend in.
Ltr folks :D:D:D
Ol’Greg,
Graeme is just another way of spelling Graham – but, since you’re from the US (IIRC), you don’t pronounce like we (or the UKers) do; for us it’s Gray-um, not Gra’am.
Bah. Missed seeing #291.
@ Kyorosuke —
If someone hasn’t already posted it, there’s also this:
http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Basically, the point is that science corrects itself with more evidence and/or logic.
Evolution, as we understand it, is the current scientific theory to explain life based on the evidence seen when examining living things at all levels — biochemical, genetic, cellular, anatomical, reproductive, familial, population, cross-population, and so on to higher taxonomic groups.
Fossils are very helpful in bolstering the theory and providing more evidence in support of it, but are not necessary to make it the best theory that we have.
Could you get your friend to explain what, exactly, is supposed to have happened instead of evolution? Or, I suppose, in addition to evolution?
Oh, and once again, here’s Jay Hosler’s breakdown of evolution. Which of these does your friend think is false? What, if anything, is missing?
================
1. As a result of mutation creating new alleles, and segregation and independent assortment shuffling alleles into new combinations, individuals within a population are variable for nearly all traits.
2. Individuals pass their alleles on to their offspring intact.
3. In most generations, more offspring are produced than can survive.
4. The individuals that survive and go on to reproduce, or who reproduce the most, are those with alleles and allele combinations that best adapt them to their environment.
================
Actually, looking at them more closely, it’s “missing” the finer details of reproduction of asexual organisms, and horizontal gene transfer, and similar tweaks based on more recent understanding of biology. But these are details that “falsify” the theory in the same way that the more accurate measurements of the Earth “falsify” the shape based on less accurate measurements: They add context and fine detail, but don’t make the entire theory entirely wrong.
I knew a person in Seattle with the last name of Graeme. She pronounced it Greem.
Attn: Baltimore Blaspheming Bastards
Just a reminder that the April get-together of the Baltimore Pharyngula Fans group will be Saturday, April 3. Complete information is on the group site.
Come hang out with smart, funny, and rational people.
Thanks for all the advice, guys. I’m trying to tread the line carefully here because I think they’re almost there, and I’m not particularly good at these sort of careful situations… but I’ll give it my best shot.
Owlmirror @ 310:
To be honest, I’m not sure… If I had to guess I’d say they haven’t really thought it through that much. Which I suppose is the problem. But I’ll see what I can do to get through to them.
The Pharyngulista cannot be halted. Simple as that.
This is Frank Zappa:
How about we just call him Graeme Cracker.
Because he is crackers.
And not in the (sometimes wonderful) Southern way (the wonderful Southern refers to buttermilk fried chicken, scrapple, bladder sausage, grits, hoppin’ john, and other delectible comestibles).
And I reiterate my earlier vote for the retention of th thread without forumizing it. The multithread formation creates serendipitous oddity as two, three or even four different conversations converge at an intersection called Pharyngula.
And now, I submit.
And in other news: A UK Parliamentary subcommittee has just cleared Phil Jones of any wrongdoing in the case of the hacked emails at the Climate Research Unit. This is not unexpected. Look for it on Page 8 or The Guardian, and look for George Monbiot to say something smug.
Two more inquiries are ongoing.
I agree. We have the endless thread for talking about whatever catches our fancy. We don’t knew no stinkin’ formum.
Here in Southern New England we’re in the midst of a rainstorm that’s lasted about 48 hours (supposed to finally finish tomorrow). We’ve had over 6½ inches (16.5 cm) of rain on top of already saturated soil.
I’ve got a couple of inches of water in my basement. I’ve had to turn off the electric hot water heater to keep it from short circuiting. Cold water shower tomorrow morning, what fun.
And this?
This is ALSO FZ:
disturbing visuals
cicely @ 305
It was a hilarious (and probably true to the spirit of the Vatican’s position), but in case anyone thinks the Vatican has been refreshingly honest about their true position, note the tagline UK spoof news and satire at the top of the story. The Vatican would not be so transparent about their desire to keep the lies coming!
Yep, definitely Onionesque. :D
@triskelethecat,
My email is spokesgay at gmail, if you don’t want to post the recipe in Teh Thread.
@#193, #199:
I read the Neurophilosophy take on this, “Magnetic manipulation of the sense of morality”, which has a link to the site of one of the primary authors. There are additional PDFs (not yet the one for this current publication) on similar topics available for download, there:
http://www.mit.edu/~lyoung/Site/Publications.html
Okay, I think I may have basically convinced my friend! If I ever get a chance I’ll direct her to Your Inner Fish et al. One thing that bugs me, though, is that she talks about how we haven’t “seen it happen”. Does anyone have a good, easy-to-understand-for-the-amateur summary of the Lenski e. coli experiment? Will the Wikipedia article suffice, ya think?
Gay Jesus Upsets Texans
Here, however, is the money quote:
OH NO! The House of Commons has been co-opted into the conspiracy to enable the environmentalist tools of the Reptoids to take control of the world and initiate Global Marxism!!
Catholic Church Sues over having to tell the truth.
semiprime filling capacity 97×2
I think it is important to recognize that evolution (change in allele frequencies over time or change in populations of organisms over time) is a fact. We see it happen, and not just in very rapidly reproducing organisms like E. coli, but in all lineages of the somewhat anastomosing but generally divergant tree of life. Evolutionary theory is a bundle of hypotheses that explain this fact.
Jay Hosler’s breakdown (#310) is a recapitulation of natural selection, and is only one of the mechanisms offered to explain the fact of evolution (although ostensibly the most interesting one).
I think the question most often considered when people ask “Evolution?” is this: is evolutionary theory sufficient to explain the diversity of life on the planet. To date, no observation has refuted the theory. Of course, even one falsifying observation would require a modification of that theory, or its replacement by another explanation as yet unarticulated.
I also want to express my admiration for those of you who are tireless in your address of the nutball contingent on these blogs (like Graeme, Daniel Smith, Professor Dendy, ad infinitum). I don’t know how you muster the patience. The enduring refutation of the mentally hemorrhagic and verbally incontinent is a Herculean task, but you lot ensure that our stables are tidy (damp as they may be). For me it is too much like grading. Nonetheless, I do enjoy the spectacle. Bravely on to my slumber.
AE
@ Sven DiMilo #287 the factors of 37765 are three semiprime pairs, 35x 1079, 91×415, and 581×65 (the complete factorization is 5,7,13 and 83
the semiprime 287 is divisible by 7 and 41
Oh dear i have been looking forward to the 38,000 comment mark. patience i must have. By the way 200 more till then
Owlmirror @ 324,
thanks for the link to Neurophilosophy, and to something a bit more sciencey about this, I had a boy look last night but couldn’t find anything in a hurry.
Sven,
With my lower back in a state of painful disarray the last 2 weeks I’ve been watching a fair bit of CNN, and around the clock they have been going on about the RCC child abuse, it was quite refreshing.
More confused christian aussie politicians/economists babbling nonsense:
There is a god, says RBA governor…
Funniest bit : God might not be omnipotent because he didn’t cause the global financial crisis.
You can’t make this shit up, you just can’t.
Be careful with that rhetorical device, you might engage Truth Machine’s logic circuit ;)
The machine seems busy these days, I like it though how I seem to have made him spell out the observed fallacy in syllogism form in his posts now, since if I don’t get it I will ask him anyway hahaha….
In case you want to watch someone clever speak :
AC Grayling interview with Greg Clarke before the GAC
Is that 9…ish whatever creature a dungeon escapee? Or someone from the crossroads? Something seems familiar, but considering all the incoherent people we’ve had the last few days, its hard to tell.
And if you like to follow how the Hitch is going after Ratzi, here is the newest :
The Pope is not above the law
My college is being nefariously incompetent. They were supposed to release $1850 in financial aid on January. When asked why they haven’t, the lady at the desk said, “We might be out of funds. Let me go check,” then five minutes later came back with, “We’re waiting on the federal government to approve you.”
Which would be believable except that this is my last semester, not my first one, and part of the financial aid money has already been released and the excess from that has found its way to my student bank account and therefore I’ve been approved.
Unless there’s another layer of bureaucracy that I’m not aware of (though it seems more likely that the lady accidentally let the truth slip then came back with a cover story), they’re unlawfully withholding funds.
http://www.kobrascorner.com/finaid-ss.png – (See blank spaces in second table.)
Are any other students experiencing similar frustrations with their financial aid or is my college just ran by crooks who hold onto your money for as long as possible then pay it to you when inflation has made it worth less than it should be?
I’m not the messiah, says food activist – but his many worshippers do not believe him
@Josh (Spokesgay): thanks for the email again. I wrote it down this time! I’ll post the recipe in the thread when I get home from work today, but thought the email would be good to have too, just in case.
OK, I confess in advance that this is sophomoric, but it’s not really OT (as if anything could be, here on the Thread), since it deals with numbers:
Has anybody else noticed that the Republican sex club thread has been stalled at 69 comments for a while now? Shouldn’t PZ lock the thread, to preserve the ability of arrested adolescents like me to have a snicker? Jus’ sayin’….
For Fuck’s Sake, Opera!
Pick a look and stick with it!
triskelethecat (@342):
What is this wrote it down of which you speak? I’ve heard legends of a clever scheme involving tiny rolling metal balls and liquid color, but I don’t know how far to trust these fanciful tales of olden times.
;^)
Just do what I did: Open your mail client, put in the estimable SpokesGay’s estimable e-mail, make the subject line say Just So You’ll Have My E-Mail (n/t), and hit Send. Then not only will he have your address, but his will be in your e-mail contacts list.
Kobra: My son recieved a government student loan (well, the government provided the money and the security but a bank gets the interest (aaargh!)). The school took out the tuition and applied the rest to his bookstore account. Last semester, he was held up in registration because he still owed tuition money. The college took out the wrong amount. Not much (a couple of hundred dollars) but, still! And he just got an email today — come to the finance office. Er, yesterday.
(((Boy)))’s college is just mildly incompetent (I wonder how well qualified a finance major is from that school?) but, Kobra, I think you are partially correct. I suspect that the withholding of money may be a violation of law, but I would (and I know I am an incredible optimist) tend to doubt any intentional criminality. More likely just two people in financial aid who don’t talk to each other.
Bill Dauphin: Beats me. I use a mechanical device which mounts a thin cylinder of compressed graphite in a mounting agent/binder. Rolling balls with liquid colour? Modernist!!!
You said it man! Nobody focks with the Jesuus!
Except other guys.
/Big Lebowski
I suppose I should have kept this for(A)666 but hell, why wait?
I have heard that liquid color was also applicable using cone-shaped bits of felt. Also goose-quills, if the stories are to be believed.
just now noticed SC @ #15; sorry, SC.
um, what?
a) in the absence of a designated Threadcop, I ‘get to” do whatever the hell I feel like doing, and so do you.
b) That was actually far from a request for you or anyone else to put time into writing a serious response. Just the opposite, actually; bit of irony sensu stricto. See “not taking me seriously.”
c) My sarcastic comment in this case was a backanded way of asking: What is the point of announcing that you are “refraining from commenting” about something? Either comment or refrain. You obviously have some comments in mind that you’re making it a point to tell us you are refraining from making. Are we all supposed to guess what your comments would have been? Why?
*shrug*
That seems fair enough.
As always, you are free to believe whatever you wish to.
(For the record, I was making contentless snipes at sociology, purely for my own amusement, before you were even around here–ask MAJeff.)
Lynna, OM:
I agree with the commenter that Harris’s essay is pretty polemical and slurs over the differences between different kinds of objections to his argument.
I still, perhaps naively, think that Harris is roughly right on the most important counts. I also think that commenter did a shitty job of clarifying anything. It would have been much better for the commenter to say what was right about various things Harris was saying, which I assume many philosophers would agree on, and where exactly the commenter (or most moral philosophers) would say Harris goes off into the weeds.
(In particular, it’d be nice if they’d slotted Harris’s views into standard philosophical terminology of ethics and metaethics, and named some prominent current philosophers with similar views, and their major detractors.)
I’ll list some important things that I think are roughly what Harris is getting at, but I don’t know where my interpretation of Harris shades off into what I think…
—
Aargh. Careful what you ask for.
I tried writing this twice, and both times it blew up into my usual treatises, and while I think Harris would mostly agree, it ends up being me blathering on in what I think is a similar vein.
Here’s the second try. It’s a bit redundant, but I hope the later versions of redundant are a little fuller an clearer. (And I don’t have time to tighten it up.)
—
1. Morality is a natural phenomenon. It’s not just a matter of opinion what counts as morality. It’s not just a matter of popular opinion or consensus, either. Scientifically speaking, some things are morality, and other things aren’t, because morality has a scientifically structure and function. (Actually, at least two important functions at different levels.)
2. Moral preferences are not just arbitrary aesthetic preferences. They play a unique role in human psychology.
3. Morality is a biologically-based phenomenon, evolved to serve certain biological functions. Some aspects of this biological functioning show up at the psychological level, in our heads, as motives. Others do not, in ways that turn out to be crucial (IMHO if not Harris’s).
Two important examples:
(i) our capacity for altruism (and for valuing altruism in others) may have resulted from actual group selection, or from more straightforwardly genetically selfish individual selection, but that doesn’t really matter—what matters is the innate psychological structures that we did in fact evolve, and how they do in fact motivate us, not “what evolution wants.” We can be altruistic for its own sake, even if we explain the evolutionary origin of that drive in terms of propagating our own genes. (Just as we can enjoy sex for itself, in psychological terms, irrespective of that drive’s origin in propagating our genes.)
(ii) the ability to limit our altruism also evolved—we evolved to tend limit our altruism to in-groups, where it is most likely to pay off in enhancing our own reproductive success—but those limitations are not necessarily psychologically or morally binding. It depends on how they actually work at the psychological level, in terms of the psychology we did in fact evolve. In an important sense, evolution (metaphorically) “wants” us to focus our altruism on likely kin and likely reciprocators, but the evolved mechanisms for focusing our altruism may not work, and we don’t care. (And in fact, they often do not. In evolutionary terms, we may “overgeneralize” our altruism in situations where it doesn’t benefit our genes, in much the same way we often “overgeneralize” our sexuality, and psychologically, that’s okay.)
4. Morality has a natural valence—it’s not just about cooperation, but pro-cooperation.
Biologically speaking, if your moral drive has the wrong valence or does not exist—if you want to hurt others rather than help them, or just don’t care, you are a malfunctioning moral unit. You are something like a psychopath or sociopath. That’s a real biological sense in which we can say you’re defective. There’s a certain scientific justification for saying you’re a bad example of the category “moral person.”
(There may be a larger biological sense in which you are not defective. For example, if the ability to be a psychopath or sociopath evolved as a “facultative behavior,” because it has a positive effect on reproductive success under certain circumstances, then you may be a high-functioning human animal in fitness terms—e.g., a rapist who spreads his genes effectively, and gets away with it—precisely because you’re a defective moral unit. That would not mean that there’s no scientifically real category of “moral person.” It would just mean that nature sometimes favors moral people, and sometimes favors amoral or immoral people.)
5. Much (but not all) of the diversity in moral opinion between and within moral systems is due to differences of opinion about truth claims, rather than basic values, and that obscures deeper commonalities.
Cross-culturally, we find certain deep universals that seem to be there for understandable evolved reasons, and differences that are not only comparatively superficial, but are rationalized in terms of the more basic commonalities.
For example, cross-culturally conservative religious types often justify the promotion and enforcement of conservative moral norms in three revealing ways:
i) they argue that not upholding some moral norm will lead to the destruction of people’s moral fiber, i.e., it will damage them in some (often ill-defined) way that will make them dysfunctional and personally unhappy
ii) they argue that lax enforcement of moral norms will be bad for society in the long run, leading to social chaos, and
iii) they argue that God (or Karma or whatever) will Get You, i.e., that people will suffer if the rules aren’t followed (whether in this life or an afterlife)
In all three cases, they’re casting concern for conservative moral norms not as an end in itself—as you’d expect if there was a fundamental disagreement—but as a means to an end of promoting personal happiness and/or social flourishing.
Moral talk is full of metaphors that suggest that Harris is right to think that morality is generally about a concern for happiness and/or flourishing. People may vary in how much they think that happiness per se is important vs. social flourishing being primary, but in general those things are assumed to go hand in hand. Dysfunctional people are assumed to be less happy on average, and to interfere with the social flourishing that promotes others’ well-being, and badly-run societies are assumed to be bad for individuals as well, on average.
Notice that liberal moral talk is full of similar concerns. In general we want to promote morality as good for individuals, so that they’re not misfits, as well as preventing their dysfunctions from being detrimental to everyone else.
The big moral arguments are not mostly about ends, but about means, and thus about the underlying truth claims:
Is there a God who designed you to function in a certain way, such that not getting with the program makes you a misfit in his universe, and thus likely to be unhappy in this world? Is there divine justice, such that if you screw up morally, you’ll suffer the wrath of the righteous in this world, or fail to benefit from the goodwill of the righteoous, or even burn in Hell or be reincarnated as a toad?
Are women mentally and/or emotionally ill-suited to positions of power and authority? Does giving them control over their lives and their bodies undermine the social order to everyone’s detriment? Is allowing women or gays to express and enjoy their sexuality a problem for other people?
Does society work best in concrete ways if the godly are in control? Does society work best for everyone, overall, if we view concern for the poor as a matter of something Christian charity—a personal virtue—rather than secular social justice?.
More generally, does ancient religious “wisdom” give us the guidance we need in figuring out how to organize modern society? Or are religious ideas about morality mostly a bunch of ratioinalizations that obscure the non-religious core and real rational implications of natural human morality?
6. If we use a scientific approach to morality—which IMHO entails ditching religion entirely, because science and religion do systematically conflict—we have a good chance at rationally coming to greater moral agreement.
That doesn’t mean we’ll converge to a single moral system that everyone agrees with in every detail, or that absolutely everyone will even agree on the basics, but we should be able to identify the shared core and natural range of human variation in basic moral drives.
For example, people may naturally differ on what they consider “the good” to be, even after they know all the relevant facts and all the relevant arguments. In particular, they may rank different kinds of happiness or flourishing differently.
That doesn’t mean that there are no generally agreeable standards, or that they won’t agree on anything, or that they’ll always disagree as much as they do now.
They may always disagree somewhat, even substantially, on prioritizing goods and what counts as best, but they’ll also generally agree on a lot of things that count as bad, and to be avoided.
For example, people may always disagree on how basically important “freedom” is, as opposed to happiness. (And what counts as meaningful freedom, or a good kind of happiness.) That doesn’t mean they can’t agree on a lot of important stuff, where freedom and happiness go together, and especially where non-freedom and unhappiness go together.
(IMHO, even on that particular point, there’s greater potential for rational argument than most people realize. If you probe libertarians who think that freedom is the highest moral value, it turns out that most of them really don’t. When pressed with probing questions and thought experiments, it becomes clear that they largely value freedom in instrumental terms, to promote happiness—on rational reflection their commitment to freedom per se is partly aesthetic but mostly an consequence of their belief that a certain kind of “free” society promotes a kind of flourishing that promotes happiness. A few libertarians would say that they’d rather society was organized on libertarian lines even if it systematically made people less happy, but even most other libertarians regard those people as dysfunctional weirdos.)
While we may never reach a very high level of moral agreement, based on rational working-out of shared very basic intuitions in light of actual facts, three basic points stand out so far:
i) Morality doesn’t disappear when you throw out the bogus truth claims of religion. It is not actually based on divine guidance, but on very widely shared, fundamental, biologically-based and robust moral intuitions. Religion doesn’t cause morality—it channels and often limits it with spurious rationalizations.
ii) The bogus truth claims of religion tend to obscure the real moral and factual issues, and put up roadblocks to the kind of rational inquiry we need, both into the basic nature of morality and into the workings out of particular moral issues in the real world. Successful religions evolve to defend the status quo from insightful fact-based analysis, by throwing up a smokescreen of pseudo-facts and especially by claiming the moral high ground. (E.g., that without religion, you won’t have a basis for morality, and society will fall apart and everyone will suffer.) To get rid of the pseudo-facts, and have sensible moral discourse, we need to puncture religion’s pretensions to holding the moral high ground.
iii) What’s left is a kind of natural morality, guided by basic moral intuitions and facts. In principle, the ability of natural morality to converge to a rational consensus should be limited only by unresolvable variation in very basic intuitions, not by disagreements on truth claims or rational consequences of those intuitions in light of truth claims. In practice, people will always disagree on some truth claims as well, but recognizing the difference would be a great boon to moral discourse—we’d know what was an unresolvable moral difference, and what was amenable to scientific study, at least in principle. (E.g., does libertarian political philosophy rely on mistaken psychological assumptions.)
7. Whether you want to call that natural morality objective morality or not, it’s clear that there’s such a thing as objective moral errors of at least three sorts:
i) if you think that it’s moral to inflict harm or suffering per se for no good reason, you just don’t get what morality is about. You might have an aesthetic or other preference for doing so, but it’s not a moral want, or it’s an immoral one. The basic valence of morality—being pro-happiness and/or pro-flourishing—is not a matter of personal opinion. It’s a matter of the natural function of morality.
(If you’re a natural sociopath who lacks normal basic normal moral intuitions, you may not care, and no facts and reasoning can make you care—Hume’s is/ought distinction is right in at least that sense—but if you’re rational, you should at least be able to see the difference, like a nonmoral alien anthropologist studying human morality as a natural phenomenon “from the outside.” There’s a scientific sense of what counts as morality, whether you are motivated by it or not.)
ii) If you have a knee-jerk moral response to something, and simply accept it—e.g., thinking sodomy is dusgusting and homosexuality is evidently morally wrong—you are making a moral mistake. Morality is just not that simple, and it’s part of the normal functioning of morality to analyze examples and try to tease out what are basic moral principles, and what are derived moral principles, and what are thoughtless errors that come from not thinking it through and mistaking one for the other.
Moral reasoning is mainly reasoning—a rational process—and being irrational leads to mistakes. Something may seem wrong, but by working through examples and refining your moral principles, you may realize that it’s not.
(This is the sort of thing Harris was getting at with his analogy to naive physics. We’re evolved to start out with a bag of basic intuitions about physical properties of things—roughly Aristotelian physics of impetus and so on—but we can learn that those intuitions aren’t quite right, and lead to contradictory conclusions. We have to amend them in light of real evidence and rational analysis. We end up salvaging some of the basic fundamental intuitions, but in a more refined, consistent, and realistic form. We may be forced to ditch certain intuitions, because they conflict with intutions that we think, on reflection, are just more important. To some extent at least, people tend to converge on which intuitions are primary and don’t go away on rational reflection in light of actual facts. Some moral intuitions survive any amount of reflection and analysis, while others come to seem evidently wrong in light of those, in what philosophers call “reflective eqilibrium”—i.e, a state in which further knowledge and reflection doesn’t change your assessments. It’s an empirical question how much people tend to converge on a “fixed point” in reflective equilibrium, and how much different people’s “fixed points” resemble each other. That’s the kind of thing Harris is saying we need more scientific study of, and I agree—the philosophical method should be continuous with the scientific method; the kind of armchair moral reasoning that philosophers do with compelling thought experiments should be cashed out with larger, controlled experiments in the cognitive psychology of morality.)
iii) Many differences of moral opinion are due to simple factual errors. For example, if somebody says that homosexuality is wrong because God doesn’t like it and it’s a personal affront to his moral authority that makes him mad and makes the baby Jesus cry, well, they’re just factually mistaken unless those things are in fact true.
We have scientific reason to doubt such truth claims, even the unfalsifiable ones—we know that in fact many unfalsifiable truth claims of religion are false, if only because they disagree with each other. (Think Mohammed as God’s own prophet vs. Jesus as God.) We may not be able to strictly disprove any particular unfalsifiable claim, but we know for a scientific fact that religion is falsehood-prone, not only in its many falsifiable claims (which are generally false) but in its unfalsfiable ones (which frequently conflict and can’t all be right). That gives us scientific grounds for dismissing unfalsifiable but scientifically implausible religious truth claims as probably wrong (or “not even wrong”), just as we would the unfalsifiable claims of any paranoid conspiracy theory.
8. There is reason for talking about objective morality, at least in the sense of denying claims that morality is simply subjective. Morality is certain kinds of things and not others, based on certain common evolved-in intuitions and not others, and is a mainly rational phenomenon. People can be factually mistaken about what even counts as a moral issue, or in the valence of a morally-loaded possibility (is suffering good or bad), or in particular reasoning steps (i.e., does something follow or not?)
That’s as close to objective morality as we need to defuse the criticism of morality as merely subjective.
This way of talking about morality does not imply that there is a resolution to every moral question, or a total ordering of all possible moral goods, such that we can agree on one concrete moral system and an algorithm for doing what’s right. That’s not plausible.
That doesn’t mean—as many apologists and accommodationists would have you think—that there aren’t scientific facts about what counts as morally wrong, and religion has more to say about it than science. Just the opposite, if you don’t want to say bullshit.
Many phenomena in science are messy, and many categories are blurry around the edges. For example, in biology, there’s not even a clear definition of life. You can view viruses or primordial (pre-genes) metabolic goo as “alive” or not, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m clearly alive and a rock clearly isn’t.
Similarly, there may be lots of ways to be moral, or arguably either moral or immoral in weird cases, but just as there are a whole lot more ways of being dead than of being alive, there are vastly more ways of being amoral or immoral than of being moral. That much, at least, is a scientific fact.
And that is often enough for practical purposes. So, for example, people may differ unresolvably, somewhat, in their basic moral intuitions (about exactly what counts as the good, their prioritization of utilitiarian vs. deontological moral intuitions, etc.) such that some are basically Kantian, some are fairly straight Utilitarians, others are Rule Utilitarians, etc…. but they will likely still agree usefully on many things, e.g., that it’s wrong and stupid to deny civil rights to gays, or to treat women as chattels, and that how we should organize our society should be informed by issues of what will work to promote the general welfare, and that judgments of what will work should be informed by actual facts of psychology, economics, political science, etc. and not Leviticus vs. the Sermon on the Mount or whatever.
More optimistically, I think that cognitive science does have some hope of resolving or dissolving certain enduring disagreements about morality in philosophy.
What I call “philosophical method” of moral argumentation rests on four assumptions being more or less true:
i) that some moral intuitions are more fundamental than others, and that you can get at those, and distinguish basic vs. derived moral intuitions, with thought experiments that clarify your values, and which ones depend on what other values or facts.
ii) that the more basic intuitions are stable in “reflective equilibrium,” i.e., that once you’ve learned all the relevant facts and heard all the relevant arguments enough times, you’ll work out the basic and derived issues in a way that won’t change after that—you’ll reach an understanding of the issues at multiple levels, and new examples will fit into that rather than undermine it and make you start over
iii) that the particular stable moral framework you converge on in that bootstrapping process is unique, and independent of things like the order in which you hear the facts and arguments. If you’re serious and thorough, you won’t get stuck in a rut of seeing things one way, when you could have gotten stuck in a rut of seeing them in a different way, just because you learned one framework first.
iv) that the unique stable moral frameworks that different people reliably converge to are reliably similar—people have basically the same underlying intuitions, and will resolve things the same way in light of conflicts, given the same relevant facts and all the right arguments.
Any of these assumptions might not be entirely true, and whether they are is a scientific question, not just a “philosophical” one.
To whatever extent they’re false, we may come to a scientific realization that there are certain moral disagreements that are just not going to go away. If they’re not too major, that’s not a huge deal—we can still have political compromise, and make things work in ways that may not be ideal from anybody’s point of view, but more or less work to the general benefit, for a variety of conceptions of “benefit.”
What doesn’t work is throwing in a bunch of extraneous religious falsehoods about moral both basic moral principles (e.g., Divine Command theory) and about specific issues (e.g., gay rights, women’s place, who are God’s favorites, etc.). That makes workable compromise much, much more difficult.
Well done, Paul W. I will save your treatise, and will also pass the text onto a few others who read Sam Harris’s essay and are interested in further discussions. Thanks again.
The one thing that surprised me about the comments on Sam Harris’s Reason Project was the number of people who basically said, “Fix your own culture before you mess with someone else’s.” As if one could not be concerned about moral and ethical flaws worldwide, including in one’s one culture. And, as if the kinds of flaws that lead to acid being thrown in women’s faces did not affect everyone, everywhere. Fucking provincialists.
A shorter gloss on some of the stuff in that long rant:
When people think morality and religion go together, and especially that morality depends on religion, moral argument ends up being mostly utterly dumb arguments from a nonexistent authority. (God or whatever spiritual thing informs transcendent spiritual insight.)
Worse, moral arguments end up being exercises in science denialism—denial of the crucially relevant facts of human psychology and societies, and denial of even the possibility of moral reasoning that’s not informed by spurious divine revelation or inspiration.
Morality is tremendously important—as important as anything can be—and it’s a real, natural phenomenon that science can and must study.
Kowtowing to religion with regard to morality is in a sense the biggest scientific mistake we could possibly make. It ensures that the vast majority of people will get the most important issues fundamentally wrong in scientific terms, and that they’ll systematically look in absolutely the wrong places for evidence relevant to the most important decisions they make.
That’s what compatibilism and accommodationism end up being about, and it sucks hugely.
As far as the practical importance of science education goes, what normal people really need to know is not that we evolved from fish. It’s that we can’t actually get moral guidance from God, or the people who claim to speak for him. No idea could be more important, or more wrong.
Just to go off on a wild tangent (thank you, Endless Thread, for allowing wild tangents), Craig Ferguson had an interesting take on the Republicans visiting a bondage-themed, lesbian strip club in California recently (and spending campaign funds to do so). Ferguson pointed out that Republicans were willing to spend their political war chest funds to enjoy lesbian strip clubs, where they could watch women to whom they had refused the right to marry simulate sex acts. So, for Republicans, lesbian sex is okay, but only if you’re not married. The episode is not up yet on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson website.
I agree with much of what Paul W. says, but I think he is far too optimistic about the extent of basic agreement we can expect, and I suspect intercultural differences are considerably greater than he suggests. To take the second point first, I would think that in most mass-societies from the past few millennia, the idea that morality is “about” cooperation and human flourishing would have seemed bizarre: rather, it would be considered “about” behaving in a way appropriate to your station, as decreed by God/the gods/karma. The idea that cooperation and human flourishing are good in themselves is a relatively rare one in historical terms. For clarity, I should say I don’t in the least take this to justify moral relativism about cultural differences: cooperation and human flourishing are things I value for themselves, and seek to advance across cultures. To take the first point, there are issues such as whether, and if so to what extent, the happiness and flourishing of non-human animals should be considered – facts are relevant here, but not determinative. Similarly with how we should weigh the happiness and flourishing of those who are now alive, with that of those we can expect to live in future. Also, technical and scientific advance are continually creating new moral dilemmas – for example, would it be right to change human biology to increase cooperativity?
Wow, PaulW (@352 & 354)! Great stuff! Tentacle Clusters for you, my good man!
Arghhh…..
Obama clears way for oil drilling off US coasts
The comments are also disturbing. Yahoo News indeed.
Yahoo related things are disturbing in general. Check out some of the question on Yahoo Answers.
Kobra:
More likely they are ‘farming’ it, and hundreds of similar amounts of money, for the interest.
/conspiracy theory
(Or…is it???)
I wish I had time to properly engage with the interesting discussion above about the nature of morality; unfortunately, I’m snowed under with studying EU law. :-(
(I now seem to use the endless thread almost exclusively as a place to complain about how overworked I am…)
A couple of thoughts, though. Firstly, I don’t think disagreements about morality are primarily reducible to disagreements about truth-claims. For a good example, compare Knockgoats and myself. He and I are both atheists and secular rationalists, and accept the primacy of empiricism as a means of determining the truth or falsehood of claims about reality. We both accept, essentially, the same scientific facts about how the world is. Yet we have very profound disagreements when it comes to moral and ethical philosophy. That’s because our disagreements are primarily normative, not empirical: we disagree not about how the world is, but about how it should be. We have substantially different conceptions of abstract moral concepts like “freedom” and “justice”, and what these mean for people in practice and for how society should be organised. Those disagreements are, ultimately, not reducible to questions of fact or evidence. They’re normative questions, and there’s no absolute “right” or “wrong” answer.
(Apologies, Knockgoats, for using you as an example like this; but it’s the clearest way to illustrate the point.)
The other difficulty I have is that some of our most fundamental normative values, on which all systems of human morality are premised, aren’t easily explicable. At the most basic level, all moral philosophies are premised, to some extent, on the idea that other people have legitimate interests that are important, and that we can’t always pursue our own interests and desires at the expense of others. (If this were not the case, we wouldn’t need a concept of morality at all; we could simply act according to our impulses or our prudential self-interest.) This is closely related to the general concept of “justice” or “fairness”; the idea that there is some sort of objectively right or fair method of resolving conflicts between different people’s wishes and interests, and that this method should constrain us from always pursuing our own interests and ignoring those of others. These concepts are fundamental to the whole endeavour of moral theory: yet I, for one, can’t explain them. We all agree that it’s wrong to kill or maim others in order to further our own self-interest, for example: but I couldn’t explain why it’s wrong. It just is. And perhaps, sometimes, our concept of morality has to boil down to instinct and empathy, rather than being entirely explicable on rational grounds: after all, we’ve developed these instincts through many generations of living together in communities. (I think this is the point that Ayn Rand missed in her moral philosophy: in condemning self-sacrifice, and elevating selfishness to the level of a virtue, she perhaps missed the fact that the basic moral principles she was rejecting are part of what allows people to live together in communities.)
Sorry this isn’t very coherent. Just a few random thoughts.
Paul W.: Excellent.
One of the more frustrating things I have run across when discussing morality with theists is that their definition of morality, their absolutist definition, is morality. Racism, bigotry, mysogyny, homophobia, and any other (to my mind) amoral and/or immoral positions are not seen as bugs within their belief system. They are seen as features.
Yes, Graeme Bird does that. Amazingly, Less-Brains-Than-a-Stuffed-Turkey didn’t edit my comment (which was a slightly-modified repeat of the posts I was making here, asking it to provide evidence for/against a very simple claim), but it did have a mini-starfart, claiming, for instance, its interest is only “education”. The mind boggles…
All: I wanted to leave this comment on one of the Birdthreads, but, as they are closed, I guess I’ll drop it here.
I have heard tell, over the years, of total and complete breakdowns manifested within blogs and/or the associated comment threading. I have never actually seen one (or participated in one (and have (to my knowledge) never instigated one) go down.
Impressive.
Reading the Bird droppings for a second time doesn’t help. They make even less sense.
This was amusing, though. In a Chevy-Chase-movie sort of way. Or Attack of the Killer Tomtatoes. Though AotKT makes more sense. Sober or drunk.
Does any of the recipistas have a use for two pints of spoilt milk?
Sili:
Depends. Cheese and Sour Cream are spoiled milk. As is cottage cheese (which (in my book) isn’t really cheese (so I’m not sure why they call it that (but I list it here, anyway))). If you refer to the ‘here, honey, smell this milk and tell me if it is still good’ type of spoiled milk, my suggestion would be wash it down the kitchen drain with plenty of water and rinse the jug out and put it in the recycle bin.
iambilly:
Yeah. Maybe somebody with more biology knowledge can correct me, but my impression is that you shouldn’t generally consume randmly spoiled food, because you don’t know which bugs happened to get into it and spoil it, and what toxins are their excrement.
Maybe milk is fairly reliably spoiled by some fairly safe bugs, but I’d get rid of it.
On the other hand, I have seen a number of recipes for various things where you just set it aside and let it ferment a bit, without any particular starter culture to get safe bugs.
(E.g. for Indian dosa batter or Ethiopian injera batter, or Korean kimchee.)
How hinky should I be about such things?
If you ever want to know what it’s really like to belong to a mormon community, the story of Peter and Mary Danzig will give you the full effect. At this website, the most effective piece is the podcast. Listen to the podcast in which:
This is what happens to you if you are heterosexual, but you stand up for gay rights. The church leaders contrive to turn such a stance into social, fiscal, and career suicide. This is how they keep the members in line. This episode also illustrates the hypocrisy and the ultimately uncaring, unloving attitude of the men in the General Authority.
Well, it was trying to find a way to save it.
It’s isn’t ‘stinky, chunky’ spoilt yet, just ‘grainy, unfresh’ spoilt. I was thinking that it might be cooked up or curdled or summat.
In less unsavoury news: My body can feed 46 hungry weasels.
Paul W.
The problem we have today is that we can’t take something of questionable consumability and give it to an old person to test. “Here, try this berry. Still alive? We can all eat it. Here, try this chunky bluish stuff growing on our cheese. Still alive? Voila! Roquefurt! Now all we need is a good wine.”
Sili:
You could pray over it, sprinkle it with holy water, dip a consecrated wafer in it, wave a bible over it, or
askpay a televangelist to pray for it.Or were you thinking of a different kind of saving?
Having experienced ‘grainy, unfresh’ spoiled milk, and the rather amazing episode of projectile vomiting (Post Fruity Pebbles (I was like, eight years old) spattered across a wall mimics Jackson Pollock in a most delightful way) I really cannot recommend eating it fresh.
I have used slightly older milk (smells a little off, but . . . ) in bread. I scalded the milk first to kill off whatever was consuming it (this also makes sure it won’t go to war with the yeast (now there’s an odd visual)) and made a nice marbled rye bread. But I think that Paul W. has it right: if you don’t know the beastie, be careful. Verrrrrry, verrrry careful.
Sili: Got you beat. I could feed 82 hungry weasels. When, however, did hungry weasels become the measuring stick?
And yes, before anyone mentions it, I know that I misspelled Roquefort. Sorry. My bad. Me culpa, mea maxima culpa. I apologize to the gods of fromage bleu.
Walton,
Maybe somewhat, but I am skeptical that the differences are as basic and major as you seem to think. I suspect that the differences largely stem from one or both of you not being in reflective equilibrium—either not knowing the relevant facts, or not having worked their implications through and adjusted your concepts accordingly.
Are you familiar with Rawls’s metaphor of the “veil of ignorance”? I think that gets at a more fundamental feature of morality that allows us to evaluate concepts of freedom and justice in a way that you’d probably recognize as more fundamental, and as largely based on truth claims. (It’s closely related to Kant’s concept of the Categorical Imperative and to a more basic principle underlying the Golden Rule.)
If you haven’t gone through thought experiments evaluating different concepts of freedom and justice in that kind of terms, I suspect you have not come to grips with your most basic moral intuitions, and are wrongly taking something somewhat higher-level as basic because you haven’t thought about it enough.
That’s an empirical matter, though, and we could go into it, but…
YOU SHOULD BE STUDYING INSTEAD!
Transvaluing all your values (or not) should wait until after your exams. :-)
Answers to normative questions often hinge in subtle ways on unanalyzed assumptions that amount to unrecognized truth claims, and there are often wrong answers to them. That’s the kind of thing the Veil of Ignorance is meant to tease out.
(BTW, for anybody who does know Rawls, I’m not actually a Rawlsian. I buy the basic V of E thing, but not the minimax principle. I don’t think most people would be minimaxers in reflective equilibrium; they’re clearly not that risk-averse in their actual lives.)
Sili @ 370:
In less unsavoury news: My body can feed 46 hungry weasels.
I think I did this before. Hmm, well it says I can feed 29.
64 weasels.
Fucketi fuck fuck. And Mooneybaum!
They’ve ever screwed with the search! IT WAS WORKING JUST DAMN FINE, THANK YOU VERY MUCH! WHY DO YOU THINK I WANT A CRAPPY FIREFOX RIPOFF?!!
ARRGLE RARRGLE BLAARGGLE!!
/starfart
Nah, this is new. I think you’re remembering how many tapeworms can make a comfortable residence in your innards.
–o–
Bread it is! I’ve done that before, but I wasn’t planning on baking till the weekend (It is risen!), since I wanted to make a sourdough again first. First attempt wasn’t bad, but I shoulda given it a touch of yeast (and less salt).
Ahoy, ‘Tis Himself!
Do I recall correctly that you’re located in CT? And that you like maritime music? Do you perhaps listen to Colin McEnroe’s show on WNPR? In case you missed it, here’s a podcast of his “ocean” show, which features segments on sea chanties (which is why I thought of you), the Connecticut River Museum, and scallop fishing, along with a comedy bit about the pirates who live in Unit 8T of a condo complex (and keep a kraken in the swimming pool).
Check it out.
</RandomDigression>
http://www.opera.com/browser/download/
Go nuts.
(Oh, wait…)
But where’s the fun in that?
PaulW:
Forgive me for cherrypicking (and somewhat naively/ignorantly, at that) a single idea out of your complex and nuanced analysis, but I’m curious: If, as I personally believe is true, the main fundamental distinction between the ideological right and left is that the former is more individualistic while the latter is more communitarian (i.e., cooperative), would this…
…imply that right-wing ideologies are objectively less moral than left-wing ideologies?
Um, what was that starfart about?
I just learned about missionary dating. I must say that a person who dates another person for the sole reason of converting the latter is a phenomenal douche (and it could backfire with the missionary becoming an apostate). But I do have question: If a person engages in missionary dating, are they obligated to assume the missionary position? lol
Hey now! Language!
Having just read the Graeme Bird thread, did anyone else get the “Stephen Colbert” vibe? I hope, for the sake of humanity on large, that Mr. Bird was intentionally playing the offensive, wild eyed, lunatic parody and (just like the white house press association) we all took him too seriously.
Some of you may say “oh, but he has a completely batshit blog, which spouts lunacy on a daily basis”. My response would be “but Stephen has his own daily tv show, spouting conservative lunacy on a daily basis”.
I attest that Graeme Bird is the greatest parody comedian to ever have lived!
Gyeong Hwa (@382):
Missionary dating does sound creepy. If it’s a matter of a believer honestly falling for a nonbeliever, and then trying to convert the beloved to resolve a crisis between faith and personal feelings, that’s one thing (creepy, but at least arguably honest); if it’s a matter of specifically targeting nonbelievers and using romance (which is to say, sex, or at least the promise thereof) as a means to unacknowledged persuasion, that’s just horrific… especially if there’s no intent of following through out the relationship after the conversion is accomplished.
I wonder if they have rules, like cops going undercover as drug dealers, about how far they’re permitted to go in counterfeiting a nonbeliever in love? Do they accept sexual behaviors that would otherwise be “sin” if they’re in the service of a missionary goal? Do they target gays? (That would be truly heinous, but I doubt many believers who personally hold homosexuality to be an abomination would be willing or able to successfully play the part, so I guess it’s unlikely.)
Every day I learn of new wonders previously undreamt of. As this revelation proves, not all “wonders” are particularly wonderful. <sigh>
Squirel52, to do what Stephen Colbert does requires intelligence, coherency and humour. Game Bird lacks all three qualities.
Right up there with Glen Beck!
(in other words, you can’t parody batshit insane)
I can’t find the link right now, but IRC Evan Hurst (or was it Wayne?) published an article on Truth Wins Out about how a Christian woman became close to a gay man in order to drag him away from his partner and marry him into an appropriate Christian relationship.
This I have less trouble with because it’s an attempt to work out a relation. (Though I may still look down about coercing others to believe.)
For a good example, compare Knockgoats and myself. […] We both accept, essentially, the same scientific facts about how the world is. – Walton
I don’t think that’s true. For example, we disagree (or did if you haven’t changed your mind) about the social effects of economic inequality, the degree to which an individual’s attainments and qualities are dependent on prior physical and social infrastructure, and the existence, at any time, of anything approaching the “free market” of glibertarian fantasy. I’m not saying these exhaust our differences, but they certainly contribute.
Now, I must go to bed, and you, Walton, should either do the same or work!
Missionary Dating? Pfff!
Some of us are old enough to remember Flirty Fishing, also known as, IIRC, “Love Bombing”. Some of the sadder people I knew got all their sex that way.
.
In an act of pointless masochism, I loaded all of Graeme Bird’s ravings into Wordle in order to make The Graeme Bird Memorial Wordle.
For what it is worth, enjoy.
I find it ironic how big evidence is birdbrains Wordle, and how little he knows about it.
Haha. But CO2 and bed wetter didn’t make it into the wordle.
I just got home and made dinner. Here is a quick recipe I used this evening (Honest — quick!)
Asparagus in Phylo
4 sheets of phylo
20 spears of asparagus
3 tablespoons melted butter
2 tablespoons cheap grated Romano or Parmesan cheese — the stuff in the plastic shaker cans.
Trim the asparagus to about the same length. Lay the spears at one corner of a sheet of phylo — the tips should be at the corner, the ends almost at the middle. Fold the bottom up so it is snug with the ends. Fold the tip of the phylo down to expose the tips of the spears. foll the rest of the sheet over the sides and wrap. Repeat three more times.
Lay on a non-stick baking sheet. Brush the melted butter on the phylo. Sprinkle with the cheap cheese and bake at 400 degrees F for about 13 minutes (the phylo should be light brown in the flat areas fading to darker brown at the edges.
Enjoy.
(We had that, chicken rolled in toasted onions, and some biscuits out of a tube (work nights tend to be less creative))
Phylo? That’s the scientist guy in UHF, right?
Big catcher-upper, part 1. Turns out I missed an entire troll from appearance to bannination while packing and sitting in the train… I’ve now read up to comment 151 of this subthread.
Completely forgot to mention that it’s good to have half an onion (with cloves in it) roasting and then boiling in the middle of the rice pan. But I’ve never done that, because I’d have needed to buy a single onion at a time, and I don’t like actually eating onions all that much (…though I’ve discovered that this depends on the preparation). Might not go well with all the spices, or might simply be unnecessary.
That happens a lot, giving us “series species” or “ring species” depending on the geography. And sometimes it looks like this…
--+--A `--+--B `--+--C `--+--D `--E…where A and E are interfertile, but all other combinations are not. This example is what I remember of a near-textbook example involving lake fish in Panama.
Yep, called a dialect continuum. German & Dutch form one with… probably at least three endpoints; and if northernmost German and Yorkshire English are mutually intelligible, the number of endpoints grows even more.
:-o
You don’t happen to live in or very close to Pittsburgh, do you?
Its printing errors are contagious, it seems :-)
Impressive!
:-) :-) :-)
NNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOO…
Into my quote folder.
FIFY :-)
No. I like the strict chronological order very much; it means I don’t have to go back again and again and again and look for new comments.
Win.
Hope :-)
(Well, till I read comment 130 anyway. But, as mentioned later, it’s still better than nothing, and better than I had thought.)
Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Toothy goodness for Jadehawk who has most likely already seen it. Remarkably, it’s toothy and cute at the same time.
David
Wikipedia –
I forgot to comment about this…
They’re not entirely “grass roots”. Much of it is “astroturf”. They’re receive a lot help by Fox News and Freedomworks, which is led by Dick Armey*. I could see why the Republicans would do this. Their reputation has become so bad in recent years that they need an entirely new front altogether. That’s not to say that they don’t have some sort amongst the population, as the poll indicated about 1/3 of Americans support the movement. They do however receive a disproportionate amount of coverage, especially when compared to the LGBT movement. The Daily Show did a good bit comparing the coverage of two almost equally sized protests by the two groups in Washing D.C held a few days apart.
_______
* Before they figured out the true meaning of “teabagging” the movement said they wanted to go teabagging all around the country. This led a MSNBC news anchor to comment: “if you are planning simultaneous teabagging all around the country, you’re going to need a Dick Armey.”
Bill Dauphin, OM #377
Avast ahoying. Belay your ahoys. Batten down all ahoys.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Thanks. I listened to it. Pretty good, but then McEnroe usually does a good show.
Bill, don’t you live in Middlestown or somewhere around there? I know we both have Joe Courtney as our congresscritter.
Oh, give me a break. You know what I meant – it’s not a reasonable expectation.
You said:
Sorry if I missed (and continue to miss) your rhetorical intent. Funny – I’ve never had a problem knowing when Rev. BDC and Emmet, who are generally funny, were being serious.
in the absence of a designated Threadcop,…
Yes, it should have been obvious that I don’t consider it a loss. I didn’t think anyone cared why particularly, and didn’t want to debate the matter. In my limited experience with it (and with Razib when he showed up here), I found it and him creepy and wingnutty and trying to disguise a political agenda as ‘neutral’ science. Happy?
For the record, that’s worse. If you were doing it to get a rise out of me or because you were angry with me that would be one thing. That you find it a general source of amusement is, well…
‘TisHimself
Idle late night (for me) nautical musing – I understand that you Americans pronounce buoy as boo-ee. Any idea why? You don’t also say boo-ee-ant, or boo-ee-ancy, do you?
Feynmaniac @ 399:
Oh, I agree with much of what you say. Still, I think it would be a mistake to take them as a complete joke. If stupidity, grudge-holding and fundieism weren’t so endemic in the U.S., I’d be more inclined to ignore the teabaggers altogether.
I do hope they simply implode, that would be good. Things just aren’t stable enough for me to be sure that will happen. It’s like Palin. She still has way too many supporters for comfort, and while she’s certainly not invested many brain cells in actual learning, she’s good at what she does, which is manipulating the stupid, the grudge-holding and the “god, bible, guns and country!” crowd. It’s discomfiting.
But not all Americans pronounce buoy as boo-ee. When I was a kid, my teacher used it as an example of a homophone, for boy.
Ok. Everyone calm down.
ok
breath
ok
are you ready?
NERDGASM COLLISION!!!
cicely wrote:
I have vague recollections of a Seinfeld episode where Elaine pronounced it ‘boy’ and was told by someone else it was ‘boo-ee’. Maybe it’s a regional thing.
Now that I’m conscious of it I’m not sure what I do, but I think I do it in between. Kind of a stretched version of boy.
KOPD:
Yeah. I say it with a barely pronounced ‘u’, not a long drawn out one.
@408
Yeah, that’s it.
@405
OMFSM! I especially enjoyed the Metallica songs on there. (Meta: how the hell does my spellcheck not have ‘Metallica’, or ‘spellcheck’?)
RBDC That was hideous. Let us never speak of it again.
Here’s some real music to clean your brain after listening to that.
Oh I know it was hideous.
I mean come on
IT’S DARK SIDE OF THE MOON MADE WITH NINTENDO SOUNDS!
‘Tis (@400):
Vernon, actually, hence my earlier comment about having the ZIP Code of the beast (06066). Just got home from videotaping a Town Council budget hearing for the Community Voice Channel.
Of whom I am most especially proud right now… not only because he voted for healthcare reform, but because he obviously worked so hard to truly master the legislation proposed, and to wrestle with aspects of the bill he questioned. He gets my nomination as the Hardest Workin’ Man in Congress™!
You and I should get together for a glass of grog sometime, no?
RBDC It’s gone 4am here and I’m still awake because a mouse has invaded my bedroom. Ten seconds after I turn off the light I can hear it scuttling around the room. I’ve spent three hours switching the light on and off and getting up to chase it around the room. Now I’m too tired to do that, or sleep.
But, since I played that video the mouse has gone! Thank you so much.
I do what I can for the humans.
Christian Philosopher Explores Causes of Atheism
Rev. BigDumbChimp! Amazing!!!!
I love you, sir!
That made my freaking night…
Perhaps, Spiegel, a small child’s relationship with a tall, booming father who takes care of the child and gives him attention when he cries is the very archetype of a religious man’s relationship with his imaginary god.
I hate OkCupid’s stupid categories. I don’t want to pick straight, bi, or gay. I want a “undetermined” option.
I know that’s an immature response but that is so much closer to the truth.
sorry for the random interjection.
Oh! I’m apologizing so much.
Caine #415,
Puke..Blech…Urghle
I actually read both pages of that drivel.
Thanks for the link, though. I’m gonna rewrite that article from a first-person perspective and email it to my dad as an April Fool’s Day joke*!
*My only worry is that my poor father will die laughing in front of the computer. Meh, there are worse ways to go.
Menyambal:
That was one of my first thoughts. It seems to me that someone looking for a father figure/presence would tend to be religious rather than atheist.
I did note that women didn’t figure into his theory, at least not what was in the article. I won’t be buying his book.
I get very tired of the whole rebellion scenario. Spiegel also says:
So as far as he’s concerned, it’s simply not possible to objectively assess evidence, unless that assessment comes down on the side of god. Naturally, he doesn’t provide any evidence for god.
Elroy, it was the most awful glurge wasn’t it? It will make a great April Fool’s prank though!
Oh weird… what a Freudian explanation of God that is!
And specifically of one image of God, as loving Father.
I get the “refusing to believe” thing a lot from people, even from people who call themselves agnostic!
It’s odd. Certainty can be so upsetting for people. I’d say that for me that I simply do not accept almost anyone’s God, and do not subscribe really to any religion. That’s fine. But when you say “atheist” people get upset.
Atheist = God hater. I think people really do see it as a rebellion against the idea of God.
Seems like that wouldn’t be “atheist” though, it would be something like misotheism or antitheism.
RevBDC, the nerdgasm has been a real pleasure. I recognize so many of the sounds but I can’t remember which games they come from (I swear I hear some Crystalis in there, though). : I’ll have to listen some more tomorrow.
That sounds like something straight out of Fight Club:
If you’re male and you’re Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?
What you end up doing, is you spend your life searching for a father and God. What you have to consider is the possibility that God doesn’t like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that could happen.
Getting God’s attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all. Maybe because God’s hate is better than His indifference.
Ol’Greg, a lot of people are certain that people are atheists because they are rebelling against god for whatever reasons* or they are angry at god.
*The list of reasons is usually eerily close to issues a person may have had with their parents/guardians around 14/15 years of age. Those who are convinced of this rarely think of atheists as any other age. That tends to come out here often, when chew toys show up and sooner or later make disparaging comments about all of us being teenage boys. Again, as I noted in #420, girls/women rarely figure into it, I guess females go against the archetype.
Caine,
Regarding the cat thing:
I put on my “scientist hat” and looked at the data provided by Sven and A.Noyd. I guess I was ignorant about how much damage cats can do to the native fauna.
I also put on my “good neighbor mittens” and considered the observations made by yourself and others.
I’m not happy about it, but I guess I have to concede that my long born, deeply held convictions may be wrong. I shall work it out from here.
/kittehs
I had never thought of it that way, but it makes some sense! Especially with things like the projection Spiegel uses to rationalize why *he* would be an atheist if he was one.
It’s a strange form of thinking though when a much better way to get a *reason* for people to reject the claim of the existence of gods would be to survey them some how.
Thanks, Elroy. One thing to keep in mind is that the kitteh or kittehs don’t need to completely deprived of outside pleasures. For ours, we used the standard dog kennel panels which can be bought individually and put together. The space can be enlarged at any time. We started with 12′ x 12′, its now twice that size. They get all the joy of dirt, grass, weeds, wood for scratching and a good portion of a tree for climbing. They can also dig holes to do their business outside as well. Ours even have a hammock in their outside space. They have it damn good and aren’t deprived in the least.
We set up the kennel so they can access it from a kitchen window. They can go in and out as they please, no worries. It takes a little bit of money, and a little bit of work, but everyone ends up happy.
Ah, the old ‘atheists are rebelling against god’ nonsense. Using that logic we can safely assume that Christians must be rebelling against Zeus.
Speigel has one thing right. In the second sentence of the article he contends;
He’s right. Skeptics do see a moral problem at the bottom of religion.
It’s fun to re-arrange the words in a fundie’s sentence!
Wowbagger, exactly. You know they never see it that way though. I’ve had the fun of taking a christian through that little exercise, and what it always come down to is “but those aren’t real!”. Or in the case of the especially fervent, “those are false gods.”
It is fun to watch them sputter when you keep asking why they reject this god and that god, what about these gods?
Elroy:
Having fun re-writing that for Dad? :D
Or any other given deity of the day. It really doesn’t matter if they are Greeks who are rejecting the Greek gods or Vikings rejecting the Norse gods, the argument makes a lot more sense as a commentary of human nature and the seeming importance of strong father figures.
But then again, if one can explain climate change denialists as being ideologically driven, it doesn’t mean that the arguments against climate change are wrong. If someone believes in evolution because they are pressured into it by their friends, it doesn’t mean the arguments supporting evolution are tied into the acceptance thereof.
There’s nothing wrong in looking for motivations, just as long as they aren’t used in place of arguments for or against the issue at hand.
Caine, Fleur du mal wrote:
I don’t know if you were around when it happened (last year sometime) but there was a (now-banned) inane Christian nitwit called Silver Fox who declared atheism invalid unless it could disprove the existence of God; I then challenged him to show his disproofs of all the other gods – or else admit that his Christianity was invalid.
His ‘argument’ (using the term loosely) was to assert that all gods were really his god in disguise and that there could, logically, only be one god.
Needless to say that didn’t get much traction. From then on I went out of my way to remind him at every opporunty (both here and on other blogs) that his Christianity was – by virtue of his own logic – invalid; he eventually got more than a little annoyed.
Good times.
I really wonder about this. For me personally, the question didn’t have anything to do with any moral issues. I’m still perplexed that people think there’s some sort of link between religion and morality.
Kel:
I don’t think Spiegel was looking for motivations at all. He not only used the tired “rebelling against god” argument, he decides what specific people’s fathers meant to them, as in his citing Dennet’s and Hitchens’ relationship to their fathers.
Also, as I quoted above (#420) Spiegel makes the statement that no atheist arrives at atheism via objective assessment of evidence.
not that rare a combination, you know… ;-)
Wowbagger:
Oh yes, I was around. I was truly impressed by those, such as yourself, who managed to keep on arguing with him. I seem to remember one hell of a lot of dodging on his part which was pure blather. I was very glad to see him go.
I remember that. I wrote a logical argument for a dual god (something about negative and positive forces, protons and electrons, up/down quarks, etc.), and he didn’t even acknowledge my brilliant argument for Manichaeism :-p
Lemuridae are not humans, Pan…. Hm. Is the Chimp that you are paniscus or troglodytes?
Misogyny noted.
Clearly, Spiegel must have had a dysfunctional family with an earthly mother who was defective because of death, abandonment, or abuse.
And a defective father who indoctrinated Spiegel to believe exactly as He believed.
It appears that the psychological fallout from a defective father must be combined with submissive indoctrination, resulting in a persistent immoral response of some sort, such as presuppositionalism. And when that submissive indoctrination is deep or protracted enough, religion results.
I wandered over to the site, and pondered starting a theological argument.
(heddle never takes my bait)
“Oh, look, another pretentious chucklehead calling himself a philosopher who tries spouting off on both Calvinistic theology and psychology, and getting them both wrong.”
“Atheists aren’t atheists because they had daddies who didn’t beat them enough. They’re atheists because faith is a gift of grace, and God grants this gift to people completely arbitrarily. Atheists are simply those who God hates (“…and Esau have I hated”) and denies the gift of faith to.”
“Don’t blame the men who raised them for something that God and God alone is responsible for. By doing so, you blaspheme by rejecting the absolute power of God.”
(and so on)
But….
Meh.
Owlmirror, I would love to see Spiegel’s reaction and response to your assessment. I imagine it would actually make him shut up for a bit.
Agreed, was making that statement in a vacuum as opposed to particularly responding to that article. Just saying that looking at motivations is fine, but to use motivations alone is making a huge error in logic. Spiegel seems to be doing the latter which I agree is terrible.
Or to put it another way, motivation alone isn’t enough to make a case against a particular idea.
Owlmirror:
Really? Huh. I didn’t even look at the comments. Now I’m glad I didn’t.
Ol’Greg | April 1, 2010 12:17 AM:
What the heck? What does “undetermined” have to do with (im)maturity?
Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday
Lynna, OM | March 31, 2010 12:21 PM:
… and if they get to watch.
Ol’Greg,
I know the feeling. (Not that I’ve ever used OkCupid or any other dating site.)
Don’t worry. I still hold the record for most number of apologies in a single thread. :-)
I wrote a response to Edward Feser’s critique of The Courtier’s Reply.
One of these days I’m hoping theists will engage the “new atheist” arguments for what they are instead of shouting ‘missed me’ and then going after their perceived strawman of what was said.
Kel, OM | April 1, 2010 4:00 AM:
Some of them have. Most of those are no longer theists.
Okay, I will clarify: professional theologians.
For example, the Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit has been dismissed on the grounds that only applies to physical things. God is non-physical so God can’t be harmed by it. Given how much complexity and order it takes for us to even formulate the question of God, how can one simply dismiss the argument without looking at the abstract significance of what’s being said? That is that in order for an entity to be able to produce order (a watchmaker making a watch), it itself needs a particular level of order. That the universe has gone from simple to complex explains that order, meanwhile those who posit God posit that the order just exists.
Very few actually even taking the argument for what it says, just giving a dodge that it doesn’t apply to God.
Walton, someone in Australia just got a passport that specified them as neither male nor female. I think the new official pronoun is ze (subject) or zim (object). What would you want as an alternative? “Eh”? “What ya got?” “WHATever”?
Well, as we know, quite a lot of professional theologians aren’t really theists in a proper sense of the term. Especially in liberal denominations, many end up believing in God only to a given value of “God”. Someone who studies theology at a high academic level – which will include substantial studies of history, philosophy, logic, and the Bible in its historical and cultural context – and engages with the really difficult questions of theism, is not going to be able to maintain a simple blind faith.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to someone who studies “Bible studies” at Podunk Evangelical Bible College with a focus on memorising the KJV and learning about young-earth creationism. Just like any other educational institution, theological colleges are not all created equal. Partly, I think the difference between liberal/mainline and fundie denominations stems partly from the quality of their education for ministry. In the Anglican/Episcopal Church, you can’t become a priest without an academic degree in theology, and most already hold a first degree in another subject (I’ve known some who had science or engineering backgrounds). Contrast this with, say, Ray Comfort, who has no degree in anything and no academic training in theology.
News from
the middle agesSaudi Arabia :Man accused of sorcery to be beheaded Friday
Something slightly less depressing :
Robin Williams on Letterman, talking about Australia, and not in a nice way….
Perhaps, though I think that a lot of them profess this intellectual abstract in public, but in the company of their flock they go the full on miraculous! But maybe I’m too cynical here…
Though point taken, I’ll further clarify: those professional theologians and theists who don’t lose God in a word salad.
I was going for the William Lane Craig’s and Alvin Plantinga’s of the word as opposed to the absolute bottom feeders that are fundamentalist preachers.
Off-topic (in a way) – Kel, on another site I’m dealing with a presupper (he’s claiming atheism can’t explain morality, only Christianity can); you’ve got more experience with this kind of rubbish than I have – any links to good explanations of the refutation?
I looked through your blog but couldn’t see any post title that addressed the issue.
monado:
No, it should be shklee or shklim or shkler. So says Yivo.
Not sure if I have any links for that explicitly, the best thing I suggest is to check out this article, and in particular The Euthyphro Dilemma. If you remember, that’s the first thing Peter Singer mentioned in his talk at the GAC – and for good reason too. It either means that any standards we do have are either arbitrary, or they are external to any notion of God.
Of course if they’re a presupper, I don’t expect them to be able to get it. But that’s pretty much the basic logic that refutes the position. Like facilis who would attest that the laws of logic are universal because God made them so. Which gives no grounds that 2+2=4 should be preferred to 2+2=5454.2378 because it makes the system arbitrary. And when it comes to morality, the last thing anyone wants is an arbitrary system – it defeats the entire purpose!
Quite a lot as what, a majority ? I don’t know that. [citation needed please]
I doubt studying theology at a higher level is that corrosive to faith.
From my uneducated pedestrian viewpoint morality has just over time been shown to be a function of time in history and social environment a given moral concept was conceived or stated.
Most people no longer think rape, genocide, snipping parts of genitalia off, cutting people up on altarsor stoning gays and daughters is cool, but the iron age goatherders thought it was the thing to do and wrote it down accordingly.
And there’s the little detail of the RCC’s track record of course….
Seriously, anyone arguing morality is god-given these days has a roo lose in the top paddock.
Kel,
Thanks, I’ll factor that in if I need it. Peter Singer was too early in the morning (and I too tired, hungover and undercaffeinated) for much of it to have sunk in…
As it is I’ve managed to get this guy to falter on the whole ‘God sets the absolute standard for morality’ nonsense by pointing out that a) God breaks the standard time and time again in the bible; and b) he allows others to break it when it’s for his benefit.
neg:
Actually, it is. Stupid of me, but I can’t cite at the moment. I’ll try to get back to this after I get some sleep. The more people study theology, the more they become aware that it doesn’t make sense. Most of those who do study it at high levels don’t have personal faith, at least not for long. Off the top of my head, Bart Ehrman comes to mind.
Some of those who lose faith through studying theology come to admit it; others have no personal faith but keep up the lie to congregations.
I’m looking forward to the talks on DVD for that very reason. Not so much the hungover bit (I remember Singer’s talk more clearly than most) but definitely the tiredness and the sheer volume of information to process means that I really need to hear most of what was said again.
How can you tell when someone is lying about what he really believes?
Also, what about those who have faith based on faith alone, ie the only reason they believe in God is because they want to believe and can’t kill that longing? The few theologians I know seem to fall in that category.
I don’t doubt that some professional theologians have lost their faith because of their studies, I’d like to see some evidence that supports the claim that this is true for a majority of them.
Hector Avalos is an atheist who studied theology and eventually lost his faith. He has Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School.
I remember hearing someone who wanted to go into theology (I think it was Ehrman, but I can’t seem to find the quote) was warned by his evangelical friends that doing so would lead to a lost of faith. It turned out they were right.
It’s always important to remember what the presupper is arguing. It’s not looking for a cogent theory of what morality is and how we behave, but how we ought to behave. To appeal to nature is to make the genetic fallacy, thus (the presupper argues) you need an external and transcendent source to dictate right and wrong.
The big mistake that the presupper makes is the false dichotomy between universal and subjective. They are arguing for an idealised, yet impossible standard, and any slight deviation from that falls into moral scepticism. Unless you can say that raping a child is wrong universally, it cannot be condemned. At least according to this line of apologetics.
It’s very bad logic, doesn’t make a lot of sense – but I guess that’s why they are stuck in the circularity that is the presupposition…
Really, if I was to judge the experience on the sole aspect of what I learned from seeing the presentations I’d have to say I didn’t get my money’s worth – I was just so exhausted the whole time and not really in the best state to take anything in.
Not that I regret going in any way whatsoever; I just wish it’d been on maybe a week or two later than it was and I’d had time to recover from Fringe/Festival and Soundwave to be at my most receptive.
On that note, has anyone found a recording of any kind of Dawkins’s remark about the “chop your head off” and “but dont for a moment think I respect you” bit from his talk at the GAC yet? My google foo is failing me…..
And I dream of an evening at the Hilton bar with Prof Grayling on of these comfy couches to talk it through so even I can understand it…:-)
Fringe Festival, is that what they call it now…;)
We can’t know, because it depends what you mean by “lost their faith”. I wasn’t talking primarily about those who expressly abandon their faith and leave the church after studying academic theology, though there are certainly some of those. Rather, I was referring more to people like John Spong: educated academic theologians and priests who are “Christian” in a very liberal sense, but are no longer really theists as the term is usually understood. While Spong is an extreme and obvious example, there are a lot of liberal Christian theologians, priests and ministers, having been educated in theology, who go down this road. They’re still attached to “Christian” ideas, the moral teachings of Jesus and the institution of the church, but tend to depart from orthodox theist ideas.
Rorschach wrote:
I don’t get it :(
There’s the Fringe Festival (Fringe for short) and the Festival of the Arts (Festival for short)- in an even-numbered year this they’re both on; the Festival is only every second year.
So, ‘Fringe/Festival’.
Wowbagger,
Uhm, joke fail I guess, I do realise you were worn out from the Fringe Festival…:-) Carry on then…
Walton,
What do you mean with “no longer really theists as the term is usually understood”?
As I have still not yet seen a consistent definition of the term “God” or “theism”, I don’t get what you mean?
Is Spong an atheist?
Good News
Till Eulenspiegel #440
Lemurian, not Lemuridae.
Re: The asshat who claims that god(s) hates atheists — does that give True Believers ™ the right to kill atheists? And is that a bug? Or a feature?
Apropos of absolutely nothing:
Today, my commuter car (an eleven-year-old Mitsubishi Galant with 2 1/2 hubcaps, rust on the hood, a dent in the door, a worn-out drivers seat, a new ($400 ()$)^&$&^#)(#(*#*#&*#!!!!) wheel hub and bearing just hit 136,666 miles as I came into the parking lot at work.
And I get to spend half the day breathing into miniature dummies (children and infant CPR (a prerequisite for a CPR Instructor course)).
And it is April 1.
Something tells me this is gonna be a weird day.
I dunno. Projection I guess. At my age… etc.
It is odd. I like OkCupid the best because it’s not so relationship based as others. I’m just kind of addicted to social media.
Good morning, Pharyngulites.
Good afternoon, Kevin
Saw Hemant’s talk in Syracuse last night – it was great. At some point I realized it was the first time I’ve ever been in a room with a bunch of people who were all specifically sitting around being all godless. It was pretty cool. Felt a bit odd, but cool nonetheless.
(oooo – im in ur lecture hall not respecting ur gods)
Ah, no–it was, apparently, me who missed what the hell you were talking about it the first place (the “puh-leeeeze?”, I thought, which was rhetorically intended as explained above). But what you quoted there is not a request for anybody else’s time-requiring, reasoned response, either. It’s just a blurt of opinion. Take it seriously or blow it off, it wasn’t an invitation to dialogue. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Sure. For the record, I know little to nothing of Razib Khan and don’t care in any way. One of the first times I looked at his blog, years ago, he deleted a couple of my comments (in a thread where he was bragging about his cat killing lizards) and I never went back. The only reason I knew you had something against him was that once when I linked–explicitly for the data shown–to what is apparently another blog of his (but to a post by somebody else), both you and Pygmy Loris made it clear that anything associated with Razib was suspect. I didn’t know why. *shrug*
And so about the bit you quoted, I honestly don’t get the concept of ScienceBlogs Team Spirit or whatever, in reference to which I blurted the opinion in the first place. Oops metablurt.
It’s, well, what?
I tried baiting Jeff a couple of times. It was amusing at the time.
I find amusement in a lot of stuff.
One thing that’s always amused me is dealing out a rash of shit to my friends.
It’s just fun. I’ll stop if it’s not seeming that way, and I’m sorry for being a pill.
(btw, I dish out nothing that I wouldn’t take, and likely have, and worse, in good humor myself. But humor is notoriously subjective. I’ll stop.)
Ha! Saw that coming…and Ventura 1984? I was right there, man. I think that was the summer I tried my hand at T-shirt vending to afford tix. Original silk-screened design, the American Beauty/Reality rose but with other words around the rim in that funkiest of fonts. It’s weird to think that some of those shirts might still be out there, in somebody’s ragpile or whatever. I don;t have one.
neg (@459):
I see Caine (@462) has already made a cogent response, but I would add that I suspect studying anything at a higher level is corrosive to faith, to the extent that said “higher-level studying” truly involves any sort of critical thinking or intellectual discipline.
Of course, this doesn’t account for the [citation] you wanted to substantiate Walton’s claim, but I think I see what he’s getting at: To the extent one truly takes onboard the habits of mind that academic study — all academic study, not just science — requires, it’s increasingly difficult to truly operate on faith, which explicitly rejects the rational, fact-based approach of the academy.
So people who have a powerful external need — cultural, familial, or emotional — to maintain belief in some concept of God find diffuse, intellectualized ways to hold on to an idea their education inherently pushes them away from. They may still believe in some sort of god, which means they remain, strictly speaking, theists, but the god they believe in is unlikely to be the sort of blustering tyrant who goes around smiting sinners for what they do with their genitals… you know, the heinous god promoted by the real enemies of reason we typically have in mind when we say “theists.”
Of course, Walton’s view may be colored by the fact that he lives in England, the home of tea-with-the-vicar, cake-or-death¹ Anglicanism. I’m afraid here in the U.S. there might be a higher percentage of well-trained academic theologians who have managed the amazing intellectual high-wire act of holding on to a truly Godly god.
¹ As usual, I’m posting this YouTube link blind, since YT is blocked from work. I hope it is what I think it is.
On the winged cats
Sven (@485):
Skypuss! FTW!
My question is, is it ethical to keep your winged cat exclusively indoors, or must you provide it some sort of aerie?
Oh, and another thing: Is it just me, or would Pantheropteryx not be the Best.Band.Name.Evarrrrr?
Well, I see a question mark and think “question,” unless I have pretty good reason to think otherwise. I find this reasonable.
He and his blog are suspect. Odd that even though he had deleted your comments you weren’t more critical in your presentation of their arguments.
You’re making assumptions about my position which are unwarranted. But you didn’t really ask, so I won’t clarify.
Aw. :)
Ha! How strange. “Pill” was exactly the word I had in mind. I thought it was a collocalism. (My father used it all the time. Today was his birthday, btw. No, I’m not in the best mood.)
Thanks. It really does upset me. I think we should be unsparing (but kind) in our criticism of the data collection, analyses, and conclusions of studies in any field, but that’s different.
I finally settled on beer and cig sales.
The mark-up was HUGE in the parking lots.
Bombers of Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout and Nutbrown Ale were huge sellers.
I funded a couple of long tours on beer and cigs.
:D
Skypuss!
Made my day.
Does anybody know if Skypuss! has been released on DVD?
I think Skypuss v. Megashark is coming out in June.
Feynmaniac (#399)
That is just so awesome.
The journal for David M.:
And speaking of DVDs, several have mentioned that the GAC talks are to be released on DVD. Will that be strictly for attendees (i.e., a “proceedings” publication), or might it be available for purchase by those of us who weren’t able to travel halfway around the world?
Also, in case SteveV’s Good News link (@474) was too cryptic to entice you to click, be of good cheer: It didn’t point to the Gospels, but rather to a BBC report of a favorable ruling in the Simon Singh libel case.
Finally, SC (@488):
I use pill, too (that makes Sven, you, me, and Alanis Morrissette!). In fact, I used it just last night, in a text-message question to my town councilman friend about whether the notably chippy questioning of one of his colleagues was typical.
I got it from my mom, who grew up in Maryland and has lived virtually all of her adult life in Texas and Florida, so I don’t think it’s a New England localism.
I thought *pill* was merely the short form of pillock. The long form is common in UK English, and I’ve heard the short form used sometimes.
Bill,
I don’t doubt that’s true. Several surveys have shown that religiosity is inversely correlated with education level.
However, there are great variations depending on the cultural background, the environment where one studies, and the field of study.
For instance this study by Gross and Simmons finds that the religious beliefs of university professors in the USA vary greatly from biologists being the least susceptible to believe in God (more than 60% are atheists or agnostics) to the other extreme in accounting (more than 60% have no doubt about the existence of God). It doesn’t say anything about theologians though.
It’s also clear from this study that a litteral interpretation of religious scripture is rare amongst academics, and I don’t doubt that’s also true with theologians.
Still, I don’t see any evidence that “most professional theologians aren’t theists”.
I tend to view theology as a fairly useless discipline, as Thomas Paine wrote in the Age of Reason, the study of nothing, and I doubt people who study this discipline are going to develop their critical thinking skills as much as with other more fact based fields of study.
The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion. Not anything can be studied as a science, without our being in possession of the principles upon which it is founded; and as this is the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing.
Sven,
I don’t recall ever saying Razib was suspect, but I do think he has a piss poor ability to interpret data on human variation. Nearly every time I went to his blog because there was a link at the top of the page I found unwarranted conclusions and generalizations from limited data. Also, he seems to simply accept proposed causal relations wrt IQ that fit his preconceived ideas about race.
I’ll only be around sporadically for the next few days. Lots of work to do and Pharyngula, like much of the internet, is a giant time sucker. :)
Religion explained :0)
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/04/01/scientists-discover-gene-and-part-of-brain-that-make-people-gullible/