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Post by Julian on Jan 8, 2011 6:19:45 GMT -5
Granted, but you spend most of the time arguing with yourselves to the point you start hunting each other down in your sleep.
I wish people weren't such intellectually vacuous, vapid, self-opinionated, ignorant assbites.
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Post by Julian on Jan 8, 2011 6:16:52 GMT -5
Yes it was valid in the fact he prefaced it with the qualifier, "I think"... Therefore he was not proporting opinion as fact, but if he's dismissing the fact that most of we we are what we are, and more importantly a large part of we react the way we react, is due to our evolutionary history, then he's throwing out the golden child with the bath water.
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Post by Julian on Jan 8, 2011 6:09:15 GMT -5
How does that help us understand anything better? I doesn't. Then again who said that was the point. The point of faith does not have to be one of understanding the world around you. Faith can just be a means to find internal peace and comfort. Yes science allows us to find the rules by which the universe works. It does not, nor can not answer why those are the rules. Why does the universe work the way it does. That is a different question on how does the universe work. What does adding God change, for some people a lot. Many people lean on their faith. I don't think he was going to scientific answers to questions. What would you expect the leader of a faith do. Announce to all their faith is wrong? How does the Pope saying that God created the universe through the Bid Bang keep people from trying to find out how God did it? Summarising your replies. 1/. Crutch. 2/. Misconception on your part. A complete scientific theory does explain why as well as how. Newton quantified gravity (how and how much). Einstein's special theory of relativity went a great deal further to explain why. The "science doesn't answer why" canard is generally forwarded by idiots and/or philosophers who like to pretend that science cannot address questions that start with why? Why does rain fall? Why does the sun rise? Science answers these questions - once upon a time religious fuckwits siad God was the answer, then mercifully we worked out a whole pile of stuff about the hydrological cycle, and gravity, and elliptical orbits and sanity and reality prevailed. People who like to think science can't answer why, aren't remotely interested in finding out why, and often it's because they just want to pretend there's room for their idiocy. 3/. CRUTCH! 4/. No shit, but a red herring. He's trying to pretend the church has factual relevance based in reality. It does not. 5/. Oh, the argument from intellectual dishonesty. I'm wrong, but I have a selfish vested interest in remaining wrong, so I will try to remain as wrong as I possibly can. Oh dude! How could you even go there?
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Post by Julian on Jan 7, 2011 17:55:52 GMT -5
Fred, has hatred perpetuated, fuelled and escalated the crisis or not, whether greivances are legitimate or proportionate or not?
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Post by Julian on Jan 7, 2011 17:47:48 GMT -5
In the words of a friend of mine who used to date Paul Ince..."4 inches? You may as well not bother". Don't you have to be a certifiable geocentrist or an outright spastic to believe this? My money's on outright spastic because, tilt aside, signs of the zodiac aside, summer and winter solstices aside, land of the midnight sun aside, etc you'd also have synchronised seasons in the Northern and Southern hemispheres which you don't. Also, variation in orbit eccentricity comes to about 1.5%. Variation in seasonal sunlight comes to far, far, far more and is highly dependant upon latitude. (And fucking sine curves) [Edit: And the Zodiac should not be list above, only how much of it is visible in an arc in the night sky, had a bit of a brain fart last night. (a bit like the 8x for the meteorite)]
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Post by Julian on Jan 7, 2011 17:23:24 GMT -5
Oooops and my bad, it'd be about 8 times bigger...
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Post by Julian on Jan 7, 2011 17:19:55 GMT -5
I favour the asteroid solution, myself. Nothing says "your god thinks you're all a bunch of twats" like a trillion tons of rock and ice landing on your holy city. Complete overkill!!! That's about the size of the meteorite that made the Gulf of Mexico and killed off the dinosaurs.
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Post by Julian on Jan 7, 2011 16:50:36 GMT -5
Education and integration and trying to undo the last 60 years of bullshit, hate, injustice, division and damage...
That or they should have another biblical contest between their prophets, and whomever's God calls down fire from the heavens first gets to enslave the other people for 1,000 years. (And no cheating.) In the event of a draw, and no fire before sunset, both sides have to drink the kool-aid - or - the Jews get their plan B site, which was in the Congo from memory, the Palestinians can be moved into the new mines in Afghanistan and the entire two state area can be fenced off and peppered with landmines. Evangelicals are still encouraged to go on pilgrimages - would God hurt the faithful? If so, nice plan big guy!
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Post by Julian on Jan 7, 2011 11:47:34 GMT -5
For sure, they should not be trying to overlay EP to the point of firmly dictating cultural behaviours - that part's bullshit, but in terms of basic brain architecture, neurotransmitters, (to a certain extent the number of receptors and sensitivety to them) and the major communication pathways between the different parts of the brain in the subconscious, which is largely where the emotions discussed in this thread come in to play, it's pretty sound, albeit largely in its infancy.
Evolutionary psych is very good at explaining the basic operating system if you like, but should not be used to look at the specific applications that are loaded, apart from in terms of their basic appeal, ease of application, affinity, addictiveness and compatability. The cortex is just too malleable and too prone to feedback to suggest automatic circuitry. There is no such as being born knowing a language for instance - which no one should be stupid enough to ever suggest.
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Post by Julian on Jan 7, 2011 5:33:30 GMT -5
Granted, the board is really fast, but your ISP has shit the bed. I wish for the ability to give anyone I want explosive diarrhea without ever getting caught. Granted, you're now the typhoid Mary of cholera... Unfortunately you also give fatal explosive diarrhea to people you quite like too, as well as to people you'd quite like to. I wish verbal bullshit smelt like the real stuff, so there was an olfactory marker for those lacking the metacognition or desire to distinguish it intellectually.
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Post by Julian on Jan 7, 2011 4:21:41 GMT -5
Granted, but you sacrifice control in one of the other three remaining dimensions in the space-time continuum because of it. The first time you try going into the past you materialise 50ft in the air an cripple yourself upon landing. When you have healed a little 6 months after living on a diet of dung and nettles, you materialise in bedrock causing a particularly nasty localised explosion / minor earthquake.
I wish these boards didn't have so many laggy hiccups.
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Post by Julian on Jan 7, 2011 3:37:49 GMT -5
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Post by Julian on Jan 7, 2011 3:31:26 GMT -5
I refer ye to the possibly apocryphal tale of how, presented with 1,168 pages (in print; the MS almost certainly ran over 1,500) of Atlas Shrugged, her editor suggested cuts and got the reply, "would you edit the Bible?". Bible and apocryphal in the same sentence... No, you'd need a committee of lying hounds to edit the bible, and if you dissented on the wrong points, you'd get executed for heresy after it was compiled. Frankly the bible could've done with a decent editor! Got rid of all the mistranslations, scientific impossibilities, multiple personalities and disjointed styles, contradictions, errors in the continuum... Constructed a better narrative... Not trailed off into hate-filled self-serving polemic of hypocrisy after the death of a largely irrelevant (absurdly embellished) protagonist, then finally collapsing into madness at the end... Ego much? Don't edit Atlas Shrugged in case Ayn Rand is displeased and causes the Earth to open up and swallow you whole.
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Post by Julian on Jan 7, 2011 3:30:45 GMT -5
I wasn't primarily talking about the occupied territories, I was talking about Palestinians remaining in Israel. Israeli arabs might've been a better term in that respect, although, they also are turfing people out to encroach further upon Palestinian territories, not to mention bombing the shit out of as much infrastructure as they can get away with in the desperately overcrowded Palestinian cities, including thousands or water tanks with munitions specifically designed to puncture them, then call the practice 'knocking' to warn this house may or may not get razed in the next five minutes. The overwhelming majority never do, they just have their water tanks made non-functioning, and then have all building materials able to repair them banned, although I suppose I did just mention that...
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Post by Julian on Jan 7, 2011 3:19:55 GMT -5
Read this article yesterday. It's from 2006, and it predates the financial crisis amongst other things, and it's seriously long, but it puts up some extremely cogent arguments why conservatives can't govern for shit! It also puts the tax cuts down to myopia as opposed to a two step process to cut spending. .... [/i] [/quote] Good article. But it fails on one spot I think. Enough Americans WERE willing to give Republicans another chance, despite that party having changed not at all. Which might display a failing of Liberalism. We keep assuming people are always rational creatures. [/quote] Yeah... That's the Enlightenment model, and unfortunately it's just not true. Anyone who spends more than a few days on this board finds that out the hard way. Can't say I'm a fan of Lakoff's work, but he does a good job of explaining why fundies and Republican devotees are such utter fuckwits, and fact impervious.
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