> militant godbothering atheist

What? That makes no sense. It's like saying militant beef-eating vegetarian.

> Just imagine it: Some child asks Mr Jones in science class in some primary school full of 8 year olds whether God made the world. Jones gives a diplomatic answer. Little Johnny goes home and tells his parents. The next thing Jones hears is that he is now on a disciplinary charge for "teaching Creationism".

Yes. That is exactly what should happen.

If some child asks Mr Jones in science class in a primary school full of 8 year olds whether God made the world, Jones should say, "The verifiable, testable evidence suggests that this is not the case. See here and here and here. Some people believe that a supernatural being, such as God, Vishnu, or Ra did create the world -- they are entitled to their beliefs, but those beliefs do not stand up to scientific rigor."

This is the only reasonable position for a science teacher, in class, to take.

Imagine, for a moment, if some other part of the school curriculum was able to be influence by the religious beliefs of the teachers. Let me give a few examples:

History student: "Mr Jones, is it true that horses were introduced to North America in the 16th century?"
Mormon Mr Jones: "Horses were always in North America, as documented by Nephi in 590 B.C."

English student: "Mr Jones, is it I before E, except after C, or is that rule not taught anymore?"
Muslim Mr Jones: "Actually, Arabic words have holy power and a special relationship with Allah. It is the most holy language and you should write in that instead."

Maths student: "Mr Jones, if the train leaves at 5:30pm, heads west, and goes for months, won't it just circle the world?"
Hindu Mr Jones: "No, of course not. The Earth is flat, as told by NARASINGA PURANA. If you go too far west, you will fall off."

You think it's fine to let other religions do as you want Christianity to do? Let a teacher's religious viewpoints influence what they teach? That's insane.

> This is the intention. This is the design purpose of the law; to permit malicious local atheists to harass church schools.

No. It's not. The purpose is to stop lying for Jesus, where Christians -- slowly but surely confronted with the evidence that their worldview is a fiction -- resort to either deluding themselves ("I choose not to accept the evidence"), or worse, resort to indoctrination of children in order to validate their life-long beliefs.

> And why do people even want to teach Creationism? Because of all the atheists who did trolling tours of the bible belt sneering, "Science proves your religion is a lie! Har har!"

People want to teach Creationism because fundamental, Biblical literalists realized that if they didn't convince people that the Bible is real when they were children and highly susceptible to manipulation, they wouldn't accept it as adults because the tale is, frankly, ludicrous.

The cornerstones of Creationism are:

- Science and evidence are lies/conspiracies/not to be trusted.
- Faith -- believing in something in spite of evidence -- is a virtue and superior to believing in things because of evidence.
- Never change your point of view for any reason, no matter how overwhelming the evidence to the contrary.
- Because we don't know everything, this is justification to prove anything wrong. Except God.

> No society is well served by making ideologically-based denunciations possible.

Science isn't an ideology. It's a search for facts. It makes no moral judgements, no pronouncements, and has no dogma. It is simply facts.

> No society is well-served by trying to prevent members of the world's largest religion - which created our society - from running schools and teaching in them.

Here's a perfect example of why teaching Creationism in schools is wrong.

My initial reply to this question was: "The world's largest religion? You mean Islam, right?"

And then I thought -- no. I don't know that for sure. I should check that. So I googled it. Yep, Christianity is the world's largest religion. So what did I do then?

I changed my position in light of the evidence presented to me.

The truth is not a popularity contest. Even if the facts make you feel uncomfortable -- I, like many others, don't like being wrong -- the facts stand. They are what they are. I may not like Christianity being the dominant religion on this planet. I might love it. I might hate it. I might despise it with all my being and try, with everything I have, to undermine and destroy it at every turn.

None of that changes the fact of the matter, which is that Christianity is the dominant religion on this planet.

The evidence strongly suggets that the Earth was not created 6,000-10,000 years ago by a God. This is fact. It, too, many make people feel uncomfortable -- but the fact stands. The Earth is billions of years old. You might not like this. You might hate it.

It doesn't matter. It is fact.

Creationists don't care about facts. They don't want to know the truth. They just want to create more Christians, either through lying for Jesus or deluding themselves that they'll "eventually" be proven right, even if that has to happen after they die.

> The real story in UK schools is that Moslems are trying to hijack the schools in order to indoctrinate suicide bombers. So the government rushes into action and passes a law ... against the Christians. It's appalling.

I think it's hilarious how badly Christians are reacting to the idea that Muslims are infiltrating schools and influencing kids, indoctrinating them into a religion. They hate it because IT IS EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT TO DO, just for a different religion.

So they're really just jealous that Muslims are doing it better.

> become so intensely fanatical with their faith-based beliefs, which they force upon everyone, that you actually can't reason with them.

Funny words for someone who, no matter how many times they're told that the Earth is receiving energy from the Sun, continues to say it's a closed system in a vain effort to twist an engineering simplification into a validation of a religious viewpoint.

I posted a very long, clear, polite point about your whole 2nd Law of Thermodynamics claim no more than two jumps away, and you didn't even respond to it, but instead continued to post crap like this.

I wonder how many others have similarly tried to point out the flaws in your argument for you to just continue to use them verbatim elsewhere.

> I'd suggest that evidence of creation is found in the fact that anything exists at all

There is a solid working theory for some of why "anything exists", pretty good educated guesses for most of it, and the rest we don't really know but can speculate. Just because we don't know doesn't mean God Did It. Of all the things that are possible explanations for why we are here, "Jesus and God" are way, way down on the unlikely side of things, in-so-far as there's no evidence to suggest that they are the cause, and a lot of evidence to suggest they are not.

> We individually collect what evidence we can come across and in the end, we still choose what we want to believe, whether that choice is based on faith or on something that might conventionally be considered more tangible.

Technically correct, in the same way that we can choose to believe that there are infinitely many prime numbers without having to count them all because we review the evidence and accept it, or we can believe that there are twelve because twelve is the best way to divide pizza (now divisible by 1, 2, 3 AND 4).

> But if you think that faith isn't worth actually basing any beliefs off of, then one is advocating, for instance, that it would be unwise for any married person to believe in the fidelity of their spouse, for example, without almost constant supervision and routine physical exams.

This is a common mistake (or deliberate effort) by apologetics to conflate different meanings of the word "Faith".

Definition #1: Belief without, or in spite of, evidence.
Definition #2: Belief because of evidence.

I trust that my spouse won't have sex with other dudes because she's earned that trust by displaying a pattern of behaviour that indicates that, even if she could "get away with it", she chooses to only have sexytimes with me. I didn't make that assertion for no reason; it was formed from induction and inference based on my interactions with her. In that sense, I have faith in her.

I don't trust that there's an invisible zombie-jew watching my every move and imploring me not to masturbate, because there's no evidence of that. Nothing. Zip. No more than there is for Santa Claus, or Zeus, or Ra, or anyone.

There's a profound difference there.

There are limits to free speech. You cannot claim free speech protection when lying to defraud someone, or speaking the truth to deliberately incite a riot, or lie to cause a panic. This isn't a complete list.

Ergo, if you are a teacher, you are bound to teach the curriculum you were hired to teach. You can't teach something else and claim it was "free speech" and that you shouldn't be fired for exercising your rights.

What evidence is there to disprove Zeus?

Millions of people throughout history have believed, totally and completely, in the existence of Zeus as a real, literal God who interfered with the Earth in a direct way. Not as many believe in the Aramaic God, of course, but the truth is not a popularity contest.

Any argument you can use against the existence of Zeus can also be used to argue against the existence of God, except the following:

"I feel a great, personal, tangible connection with God and I know in my heart he is real."

So did the 9/11 hijackers. They felt that Islam and their interpretation of God and his commandments was so real and so true that they killed themselves and thousands of other people. They felt what you feel, equally, or even stronger.

And it's not just Islam. People also felt the same way about Zeus. Or Shiva. Or Ra. People killed for these beliefs. Died for these beliefs, singing the praises of whatever God they believed in on their lips. They believed as you believed.

So that's not evidence of God. It's probably more evidence that, for a significant part of the population, they feel these powerful "feelings" that some interpret as divine inspiration. And these invariably follow cultural norms; people raised in Islamic countries hear the voice of Allah, people raised in western countries hear God, Indians hear Shiva.

So what's more likely? Some kind of tangled, complicated, cryptic "God moves in mysterious ways" incomprehensible wheels-within-wheels justification for why an all-powerful creator God would reveal himself as a totally different entity in different lands, or the idea that a strange quirk in human biology causes us to see connections that aren't really there.

"The Christian/Muslim/Mormon Bible has scientific foreknowledge that proves it to be real!"

No.

http://wiki.ironchariots.org/i...

"God exists outside of space and time and is completely untestable and unfalsifiable."

If anything exists outside of what we can perceive with our senses and outside of its ability to interact with the universe in any way at all that we can measure with even the best instruments, then, for all practical purposes, it doesn't exist. Christians like to use analogies like: "Well you can't see air, but you'll die if you hold your breath!". This is correct, but we can measure air. It spins our turbines. It cools our bodies. We can perceive it, even if we can't see it.

Neutrinos are extremely hard to detect. They have almost no influence on our existence at all, and only through the most sensitive and carefully planned experiments can we hope to observe them with instruments. Yet if there exists, say, another type of particle which completely defies even our most theoretically sensitive detection methods, then we can neither prove it exists, nor prove it doesn't exist. That doesn't mean we should kneel down and worship it. When dealing with things we cannot observe in any way, such as guesses, hunches, daydreams and Gods, the latter scenario -- non-existence -- is much, much, much more likely than the alternative.

So yeah.

If you're asking the question: "Where is the peer-reviewed evidence that supports the non-existence of a God?", then I'm afraid you've wasted your education and allowing your biases to frame your point of reference. If I told you that a billion light years away an alien race were making space-waffles, you wouldn't demand peer-reviewed evidence that supports the non-existence of the Wafflicons. You'd just dismiss it as ludicrous because that's what it is. You only don't apply the same logic to magical zombie-Jews because you were raised in a Christian country and, I presume, by Christian parents/friends/family who encouraged your beliefs.

So I'd like to ask: Where is the peer-reviewed evidence that supports the non-existence of Santa Claus?

For the same reasons you completely and utterly dismiss my question as rude, offensive, stupid, malformed, and flat out dumb, I also reject your own question.

It's a bad day when the United States's Education Program is in such good company as Afghanistan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Brunei, and Somalia.

A post which is signed, but posted as Anonymous Coward, is worth nothing.

This response isn't to the GP, it's to anyone who might read the above and nod along.

There are no "arbitrary system boundaries between the earth and the sun". In truth, between neutrinos and other such space weirdness, there are no truly, perfectly closed systems. But we use the term in every day engineering, physics and chemistry discussions because it is useful. We accept that there are no perfectly spherical frictionless cows, but seemingly ludicrous simplifications like that are made every day.

We use them because they are useful. Not because they are the literal representation of what we are trying to model, but because they allow scientists, physicists, and engineers to make predictions. For example: I predict a perfectly spherical ball on a perfectly flat plane will roll in the direction of that plane's tilt, even if that tilt is infinitesimally small, or remain motionless if that plane is perfectly perpendicular to the sole source of gravametric pull.

Of course, we do not have a perfect sphere, nor a perfectly flat plane, nor a region of space completely devoid of any and all gravity except one source. This doesn't mean that rough spheres on roughly flat planes on Earth will not roll if we tilt that plane a bit.

The model is not perfect -- with a small enough tilt, and enough imperfections in the ball, it might well roll a different way for a time or not move at all -- but this allows us to make predictions.

So. The Earth, although commonly assumed to be a closed system (makes sense, right?) is really not. It's bombarded by radiation of all times, meteor impacts, it passes through the tails of comets and stellar gasses and neutrinos and all manner of things. If you drive out to the countryside the Earth at night might seem quiet and alone, but in reality the Earth is drafty. We eject atmospheric material, matter, energy, and all manner of things into the universe and it regularly bombards us with stuff in return.

The Earth is not a closed system. Evolution completely obeys the laws of physics; insects used to be huge, back when the planet had much more oxygen and could support such life. As the planet's atmosphere changed, creatures grew smaller as -- you guessed it -- the big ones died out, and the little ones survived to pass on their genes. The littler, the more chance of surviving, so insects shrank and shrank until being being smaller presented problems and the size stabilized.

There was no way evolution could conquer this lack of oxygen. Instead, the creatures merely adapted to survive in their new environment. This part's the most important: they didn't change the laws of physics to survive, they changed themselves instead.

That is the most important piece of the puzzle. The laws of physics aren't something that are a problem for evolution; in fact, they're critical to its success.

Side note: Biologists, as a whole, aren't interested in creating new species. That's not their job. Neither is the creation of a device that heals itself, reproduces, or feeds itself in death. Biologists, in general, study things and attempt to know. There are practical implementations of this knowledge, but the quest to create life from nothing is not, in a broad sense, one of them.

Sure. And that's fine. You can have religious questions in philosophy class, alongside Greek myths, African tribal legends, etc. If a student chooses to believe Zeus had sex with a swan and had a daughter that's okay, as long as it's not presented to the students by the faculty as plausible.

It's only when the school is presenting any religiously influenced doctrine as true when the scientific consensus disagrees that we have problems.

Britain Rules Teaching Children Known Falsehoods In Science Class For Religious Reasons Now Deemed Inappropriate

Good. Honestly, though, this isn't a huge deal for Britain. Almost every developed country has this policy either formally or de-facto.

If this came out of the US, though, holy balls it would be big. The US seems to be the only country where a sizable body of Christians are allowed to lie for Jesus to impressionable children, or worse, genuinely believe creationist excrement and are still permitted to use their authority to teach it to others.

Fiction. Although I primarily write science fiction, I've also dabbled in fantasy, horror, paranormal, and all manner of genres over the years. Sure, my sci-fi series has a sentient robot as an antagonist and my IT knowledge has been invaluable, but even in the paranormal and horror genres I can usually wiggle something in. "Approximate knowledge of many things" is by far the most useful skill for a writer to have, but it also helps to have a specailisation too.

This thing with Elliot Rodgers has been on my mind for days now, eating away at me. He's that "nice guy" who went and shot four men and two women, because the women wouldn't have sex with him, and the men took what he believed to be rightly his. I've read a lot of discussion about him and his actions, lots of related peripheral discussion, and read and read and read.

I'm reading because it's personal to me. More personal than I thought possible. It's personal because it's delving into geek culture. It's personal because of the deep conflicts I feel about what happened.

It's personal because every other factor is, in my mind, a distraction. This isn't really about gun control, for example. The problem wasn't his guns. It’s about him.

It's personal because, just like the Columbine shooting, it's morally reprehensible. Utterly inexcusable. This is the product of a deranged man, a narcissist and deluded person, taking his anger out on a world he thought owed him everything simply for him being who he was. He was the ultimate "nice guy", a concept which is something of a berserk button for me; entitled, selfish, in love with himself, bitter, jaded, hateful. Indefensible. Repugnant. Evil.

It's personal because, on some level, I sympathise with him.

Feels dirty to even type that. In case I haven't already been perfectly clear, I really, really hate the so-called "nice guys". I make them villains in my stories. I council anyone I see displaying "nice guy"-ism against the folly of their ways. I speak out about it as often as I can. My philosophy is this:

If you believe that you are owed romantic or sexual favours because you do things for them, you are not a nice guy. If you misrepresent your intentions towards women, in the belief that this makes you "deserve" their affection, you are not a nice guy. If you think that treating a woman well means she owes you something, treating basic human interaction as an exchange of goods and services, you're not a nice guy.

You're *supposed* to be nice. To everyone. You don't get credit for that. You're *supposed* to be good to people. You're *supposed* to do kindnesses for people without expectation of reward. You're supposed to have the courage to do the right thing without holding your hand out for payment. You're supposed to treat women and men of all ages and backgrounds with the same level of respect, friendship, kindness, loyalty, strength, compassion, dignity, autonomy, charity, gratitude and love. If you can't do that, you're not a nice guy and you never will be.

So why do I sympathise with someone I despise?

We've all felt helpless at some time. Especially so when it comes to romance. Male, female, straight, gay, or something in between. We've all felt attracted to someone who didn't return our affections. It hurts. I don't know anyone who'll say that being rejected doesn't cut them. Frankly, I'd be worried about someone who *didn't* care. It's painful, and in that pain, we can think stupid things. Pry open the diary of any 15 year old kid and you will find some messed up stuff in there. Peel back their skin, cut open their skull, read their minds and you'll find much darker and hurtful things. Being rejected is painful. It's frustrating. It hurts. It can be hurtful to look at those who have what you want.

But you know what?

Tough.

Yep, tough.

Australians have a saying: "Tough bikkies". Hard luck. You're not owed anything because you're in pain. You're going to have to find some way of dealing with it -- introspection, self-improvement, even physical relocation. This is YOUR problem. Not anyone elses. Nobody owes you resolution. I can sympathise, empathise, and relate -- but it's your problem to deal with. Go hiking in Tibet. Join a gym. Eat a bucket of icecream and watch Pacific Rim. Go do whatever it is that you do to cope with things.

You don't get to take it out on the world. You don't get to do things like grope women at conventions because you can't control yourself, and then blame them for “provoking it”. You don't get to fall all over women with similar interests, coming on like a raging bull, then get offended when they run away. You don't get to make women feel unsafe around you, because you're "that guy" who everyone doesn't really like but puts up with because it's the right thing to do. You don't get to bottle up your anger, releasing it in explosions of self-righteous distemper. You don’t get to do much worse things.

You don't get to spread your pain. Inflict your inability to cope on others.

Let me be clear about something. There are injustices against straight, white men. Some of those are more profound than most understand, and there are much weaker support networks for men looking for relief from those injustices. Fewer options for them to turn to. The advocacy groups for men are usually just responses to the radicalised factions of other advocacy groups, and every bit as radicalised themselves. This limits their usefulness. I can understand the frustration of men who look at radical feminism or radical LGBT groups and face down hateful, extremist views that paint men dark colours with a broad brush. "Not all men do that," you might say. And you're right. They don't. It’s wrong for anyone to accuse you, directly or implicitly, of heinous acts just because of your sex, or the colour of your skin, or any other factor beyond your control.

I've met people who do this. Those who demonise men. Caucasians. Hetrosexuals. These are people, in the flesh, not ghosts over the Internet. Not constructs woven out of fantasy but whole cloth. Real people with real faces and real identities who proudly proclaim so-called "reverse discrimination" is justified. Or those who believe it is acceptable to openly discriminate against hetrosexuals to repay past injustices to LGBT-folk. And those that hope -- sincerely and genuinely hope -- that one day it will be "open season" against men.

In the light of what's just happened, that last one should be particularly chilling.

Many advocacy groups, communities, and religious organisations have extremist elements. Those organisations do not do enough to denounce their radical parts, and hide behind the paper-thin curtain of "No True Scotsman". This is a cowardly way of dealing with extremism and if you're affected by that extremism, the apathy of the moderates can cause anger. I get that. Truly. I don't like it either.

But the moment you start down the path of thinking that, for whatever reason, the world owes you for injustices against you, that you can take out your anger for the wrongs of others, that you can hate a group for the actions of a few... you are wrong. Plainly, simply, elegantly wrong.

The problem isn't them. Or “the system”. Or radical feminists. Or MRAs. Or women, or men, or Democrats or Republicans or Liberals or Labour or anyone.

It's you.

And it always will be.

10/10, would buy.

Automated cars are already better than people. The trains in Canada have been automated for decades and they're fine. The Google fleet drove across the US several times, something most human drivers would probably screw up at some point.

The only thing I dislike is the fact that I love my car and I can't think of a way to convert it economically. Otherwise I would, without hesitation. Including removing the steering wheel and pedals.

I don't want to drive it. I want auto-driving cars and I want them now.

A few years ago, my ex had a miscarriage at three months. By that point I was already accepting that there was going to be a kid and planning accordingly (adding another room to the house, telling friends and co-workers, etc). We dated for five years and the stress that caused ended an already fragile relationship.

Since then, I've noticed a distinct change in my personality. It's subtle and hard to quantify in absolute terms, but it's definitely there and I'm not the only one who noticed. I'm a lot less interested in women than I was before. I'm a lot more interested in stability, especially financial, and I'm finding myself doting on my cat a lot more (she's the bestest). While I'm still in many ways "an overgrown college kid" I've noticed that I'm also assuming a lot more responsibilities with my life, especially cleaning, cooking, and being a lot more timely and responsible* in my behaviour.

It's hard to assign causation to something like this -- I'm nearly 30 now. Did I just get older and is that adequate enough to explain it? Was it because I was exposed to a lot of new things, such as The Atheist Experience which I started watching just after the breakup? Or maybe it was just a change in the social and political climate locally, here in Australia? Or possibly the change in friend circles (I moved across the country afterward) that did it? I lost a lot of weight, maybe that's it too? Or the change in career (IT to full time writer)?

It's hard to pin down, but something changed and although a lot of factors I can think of were environmental I'd find it quite plausible that there is a distinct bio-chemical trigger at play here too. Probably 75% environmental, 25% chemical?

The whole thing is very interesting at any rate.

*I bought a Pikachu onesie a week ago so maybe not too responsible.

The reimagined Battlestar Galactica copped a lot of (somewhat) deserved flak for its filler episodes, but my favourite episode of the entire series is also one of the more blatant filler episodes ("Scar").

In particular, I loved the scene where it is revealed that Cylon raider-ships also reincarnate, just as their fleshy biological counterparts do. Sharon even spells it out for the characters.

Starbuck: Raiders reincarnate?
Sharon: Makes sense, doesn't it? It takes months for you to train a nugget into an effective Viper pilot. And then they get killed and then you lose your experience, their knowledge, their skill sets. It's gone forever. So, if you could bring them back and put them in a brand new body, wouldn't you do it? 'Cause death then becomes a learning experience.

This is why, I believe, the future will eventually belong to automated drivers. The initial ones are already very good, but there will be holes. There will be headlines like "automated car drives headlong into school, killing 10 of the world's cutest orphans". Human drivers have similar issues and events like that are almost everyday occurrences all around the world. The problem is, as Sharon pointed out, when those drivers die their experience is lost. With an automated system, the skill set improves. Someone discovers that, for example, hey, if a drunk passenger opens the door to a self-driving car at low speed and falls out the system doesn't realise they're gone and blindly drives away.

So the system improves. The car's internal systems track passengers, and if one exits the car, the vehicle will double back and pick them up. Or contact emergency services if the speed is high enough, and form a roadblock so that this person isn't hit again. Or simply lock the doors to begin with. Or any number of more sane actions. The point is: the accident becomes a learning experience. With a human driver, we spend months training people to become drivers. Then one day they make a stupid mistake -- one other drivers have learnt to avoid, but not this driver -- and become a red smear. Their skill set, their experience and training, is lost.

With automated systems, every mistake is an opportunity to grow. I personally believe that automated driving systems are already better than humans, but this massive evolutionary benefit (directly learning from the mistakes of others drivers as though they were that other) ensures that they will continue to improve, whereas human lifespans are finite and so ours will not.