Sadly this is not true. Extremely intelligent people can be and are religious. Assuming otherwise is hubris and ignorance on your own part. The 9/11 hijackers were by and large well educated and successful.

I agree that religion can be a vector of incredibly bad ideas. Unfortunately intelligence does not inoculate people against bad ideas. It's worse than that, intelligent people are better at constructing complex justifications to support their bad ideas. The sooner that secular people (myself included) admit this and stop talking down to the religious, the better.

The Bible is very vague on whether you should still hate gays, have slaves, stone people, etc... Pretending that

obviously means the old law can be ignored is moderate apologetics. All the Abrahamic religions have plenty of fire and brimstone, and killing in the name of God. Ignoring that is just as much an act of cherry-picking as is ignoring the more love and tolerance passages. The fact that it takes a "bible/koran scholar" to make a plausible argument other than "just ignore the old stuff" is problematic at best. Hell, the Bible ends with Revelations, which is seriously lacking in "turn the other cheek" and "love thy neighbor."

I could be totally wrong, but I'm pretty confident in this. The Bible is easy to use to justify misogyny, hating gays, having slaves, etc... My understanding is that the Koran is more so. Maybe the people doing that are "reading it wrong," but the fact that these "holy books" are so easily misinterpreted makes it hard to say that Christian/Muslim fundamentalists are not following the religion. They are doing what the books say to do.

Dear God, next time you inspire a holy book please leave out "allegories" that seem to promote killing, enslaving, stoning, beheading and burning people at the stake for victimless crimes. Someone might think you meant it. Actually, please stop being a lazy bastard that outsources all killing, enslaving, stoning, beheading and burning people at the stake do do it yourself.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” - Joseph Goebbels

Yes, I know that this is what both sides think. Now as far as the discussions of conspiracies by rich environmentalists go, please go to wikipedia and look up the wealthiest 100 companies. Then go and look at all the money being pumped into politics and explain to me how 90% of all the money and (and therefore power) is opposed to AGW and yet the conspiracy is supposedly about all the money being made by scientists and the potential green industries. Seriously, if you're going to claim a fucking financially motivated conspiracy, please explain the fact that all the real money in this game is in the anti-AGW camp. Conservative governments are passing laws opposing research and passing gag-rules on scientists. And the most likely conspiracy is a cabal of middle-class scientists sworn to unite the world under a UN world government? Un-fucking-believable.

Actually Canada has gone mad too. Canadian weather forecasters forbidden discussing climate change. Basically Canada has enacted a bunch of laws preventing government funded scientists from speaking to the public without consent, especially on environmental issues. They never get consent. They've also defunded a bunch of environmental research.

LAS on the shuttle was impractical for a number of reasons. One of the lessons of the Challenger incident was that LAS was more important of a requirement than they thought when making design trade offs when developing the shuttle. So part of post-Challenger requirements for new designs is to include LAS.

You really should learn about a topic before posting. The Dragon 2 is being developed as part of NASA's commercial crew program. Launch Abort is a NASA requirement. NASA will be using Dragon to transport astronauts to and from the ISS.

The Challenger incident reminded us that rockets are still dangerous. Especially newer rockets, and everything US crew flies on will either be a new-ish rocket (F9), or a rocket with new engines (Atlas V flying Blue Origin's engine as a replacement to Russian engines.) Also, SpaceX has done something rather clever. The abort propellent and engines will eventually be used for propulsive landings instead of coming down under canopy. So their abort system isn't a total waste.

To clarify on this, one of the reasons Armadillo Aerospace was put into hibernation was because it took risks it could not afford. And one crash and a hard landing later they had to close down. I feel bad for Armadillo and Carmack and I wish Slashdot allowed editing of posts since my real target was the AC that assumes to know that Opportunity was over engineered, rather than just being well built and frankly a bit lucky.

Should they have spent time and energy making it last less long? You have no idea why it's lasted as long as it has. You have no idea if it was over-engineered, or just built well with the most appropriate components and technologies available. Millions of dollars were spent just to get the rover to Mars. If it failed do to being under-engineered, THAT would be a complete waste. Seriously, explain to me what parts should be engineered to fail in exactly 90 days? How much time should be spent creating solar panels that fail sooner? Should they make intentionally bad welds?

John Carmack's a smart guy, way smarter than I am. Of course his rocket company failed. He was building small sounding rockets and he failed. There's nothing wrong with failing, that's part of life. On the other hand SpaceX is succeeding. They are delivering satellites to LEO, GTO and even one BEO. They are delivering cargo to the ISS. They are testing the abort system on a crew capsule that will be used to transport astronauts. I think SpaceX knows how to build real rockets better than John Carmack does...

On that note, SpaceX is totally willing to loose rockets in experiments. What they aren't willing to do is knowingly risk loosing a rocket prior to completing the mission. It's important to know when to take risks. If you spent $200 million to get a rover to Mars (made up, but realistic number), it's not a waste to spend a few bucks to make sure it will work when it gets there. And if you're building a rocket to put people and $500 million satellites into orbit, it's important not to kill the passengers or destroy the satellites.

That is awesome! :) Clearly she's a job creator! She created -30,000 jobs at HP, just think what she could do for America!

The GOP's primary tactic for reducing the size of government is completely in line with Ms. Fiorina's techniques used to reduce HP's size. Starve it of income and cut funding for developing future sources of income. This is exactly the GOP strategy. All the while they give the "base" what they want to keep getting re-elected. They keep sending out the social security checks, because not doing so is political suicide. They cut taxes, borrow money from social security and run up the deficit. It's intentional. When the whole system collapses under the weight of financial mismanagement, you "have to" cut programs and you get to blame it on the fiscal irresponsibility of the Democrats.

Like I said, Carly is the perfect GOP candidate.

P.S. Yes, the Democrats suck too. But not in ways compatible with Ms. Fiorina's skill set.

No, but the Internet is still populated by angry trolls that blame others for their miserable lives.

Excellent point. Many people that are not religious have trouble understanding that someone can be religious and intelligent (I suffered this blind spot for a long time.) Actually, I think the blind spot goes further, I think that intelligent person of religion X frequently fails to understand that a follower of religion Y can also be intelligent. But the truth is that the more intelligent someone is, the better they are at rationalizing their own beliefs. Regardless of how rational the beliefs actually are.

Well, played. Now excuse me while I clean the coffee off my screen...