There's no empirical evidence to back up this claim. Even those religions which were used as a form of control were usually not created for that reason. Sure, it could be argued that Confucianism fits your model, and probably a few others, but I sincerely doubt Jesus of Nazareth went around preaching about peace and love so Constantine could use his ideas as a form of control ~300 years later.

Religion is not a thing that was invented in one part of the world and spread from there. Many religions throughout the world developed completely independent from each other at different times. Personally, I think most of them were inspired by something good. But many ideas can be warped and perverted and turned into something terrible -- I doubt Marx would approve of Stalin's version of Communism just as I doubt Jesus would approve of American Evangelicals' version of Christianity.

Maybe, although you're consciously unaware of it, your body craves the carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids that cheap pizza provides. And then other times, despite the fact that it's dinner time, you had a late lunch and you don't currently need any energy input, especially considering that you haven't used much energy sitting around browsing Slashdot.

There may be randomness in decision making sometimes, but basing a decision off of 'this is what I feel like' isn't random, you're just not making a conscious effort to employ logic (even though you probably do without realizing it).

Such as drinking crap like Tab or Mountain Dew. It may give you kidney stones, do a poor job of hydrating, lack vital nutrients, and only contain monomers which provide nothing more than short term energy, but it tastes sooo good.

I think you're both right, both saying the same thing, the OP just did so in a more cynical fashion. The important thing that the headline muddles is that there are no actual transitivity violations being observed, only seeming transitivity violations, so headline proposes something false ("why transivity [sic] violations can be rational').

Journalism wouldn't be interesting if the journalists understood the important minutiae of the scientific journals they refashion into pop articles.

Here's some suggestions:

1) Instruction. Make teaching a more prestigious career. Pay more, but also require higher credentials. Most people who would make the best teachers pursue other careers because they can get paid more doing something else.

2) Curriculum. Start teaching deductive logic in elementary school. It would vastly improve students' ability to understand mathematics, argumentative writing, hard sciences, politics, and just about anything else. Philosophy should be introduced by high school. Foreign language should also be introduced in elementary school. Most people have a very tenuous grasp of grammar before studying a foreign language.

3) Health. Longer school days, less homework. In the lower grades, combine recess with physical education, and force exercise upon kids. Their physical education grade ought to be based on progress -- a goal is set by the instructor and the student must progress towards it, such as loss of body fat, increase in strength, etc. No more packed lunches -- all students are provided two healthy meals during the school day. Furthermore, rather than just a school nurse, hire pediatric doctors. A child's health shouldn't be dependent on their parent's ability to obtain quality insurance or buy quality food.

Schools function the same way they did a hundred years ago and that's why they fail. Everyone always points to parents as the problem and they're right. Shitty parents are more often than not the problem that holds children back. We need to abandon the archaic idea that a person owns their child. A child affects society and this system of entrusting parents to do the bulk of raising their children (all while working 40+ hours a week) is absurd. I hate to quote Hilary but she was right, it takes a village.

When I was in high school there was only one local charter school and it sure didn't resemble any institution such as those depicted in Waiting for Superman. Students who had no shot of graduating went there. All the coursework was on a computer (which was kind of a big deal then, I graduated over ten years ago), students only had to be there three hours a day, and there was no certified teacher present. The 'teacher' was more like a supervisor - a guy who only had a high school diploma, was only in his early twenties, and everyone knew him by his first name. The idea was that the computers were the teacher, so they didn't need a certified teacher to run the whole gig.

Despite the fact that the coursework was mind numbingly easy, everyone cheated, and the supervisor didn't care. In fact, they'd take pot breaks with the supervisor. You could just keep taking the modules until you got them right, anyway. Then, once all the coursework was completed, the students received a full high school diploma from THE LOCAL HIGH SCHOOL. Totally indistinguishable from the one I got. Yet none of these students were competent enough to take the most basic college courses.

The charter school existed for a couple reasons. First, the No Child Left Behind Act had just been passed and the school system was scrambling for a solution to increase the graduation rate. Second, it was a private institution which received a government grant to function (by paying the supervisor minimum wage instead of paying a certified teacher a teacher's wage, by only staying open 3-4 hours a day, they were able to pocket most of that money). Finally, it was a way to get 'problem students' out of the system -- a sort of purgatory before they either took blue collar jobs or ended up in prison.

I had a couple of friends that went that route. I'm not friends with any of them anymore. One currently lives in government subsidized housing, is unemployed, and has a couple kids. One's a heroin addict and career criminal. One lives with his mother, he just got out of prison.

I'm rather skeptical of charter schools.

I think the flaw in your logic is the belief that democracy is an ideal that ought to be strived for. Also, I question your assertion that the Senate wasn't intended as a check on urban areas. It gave the rural southern states representation they wouldn't have had if population was the only metric, especially considering that blacks only counted as 3/5th of a person. Without the senate the south would have been similar to the thirteen colonies compared to England (which, as the urban centers in the north grew exponentially, eventually happened and caused a civil war).

Personally, I don't think it's right for people in cities a thousand+ miles away from my rural home to dictate the laws around here because there's more of them. Democracy only works on a very small scale. When it's expanded from sea to shining sea it becomes a tyranny throughout most the land, whether it's a tyranny for of most the people or not.

That's a prime example of a Catch-22. The NSA is doing illegal things, but it's illegal to expose the NSA's illegal activities. Conclusion: even is the NSA does something illegal they have every right to do so because they have the power to do illegal things whereas whistleblowers don't. Might makes right.

If that's going to be official government policy, it'd be much better to install a dictator so the whole system runs more efficiently. The Chinese system is preferable to what we have now. It's much more honest, they throw less people in prison, and their economy grows and their standard of living increases every year. That's not to say that I think we should model ourselves after the Chinese -- it's just that our system has deteriorated to the point that their's is better. The United States has become an embarrassment of all the ideals it's supposed to stand for.

Damn straight. Teaching math, programming, or argumentative writing (among other subjects) without logic is like teaching a language without grammar.

The future of Linux: on all devices. You should check out my toaster.

I believe what he was trying to say is that corporate America is unlikely to wean itself off of the Microsoft monopoly anytime soon, but Microsoft's stranglehold of the consumer market is vulnerable if gaming is taken away. Apple has dug deep into one important niche -- the non-gaming, high-end users -- and Steam on Linux has the potential to knock off the gaming niche. This is important because those two niches are where the high dollars are spent.

So while you're right, that the consumer market has the potential change quickly, I think he's correct in pointing out that corporate America will largely remain latched on to Microsoft for the foreseeable future. Two centuries is a bit of a hyperbole, but corporations are much slower to change up the technologies they depend on than individuals. An individual has to set up a new computer. A corporation has to set up thousands of new computers, write software, train people, etc. In the long term, I see specialized Linux systems becoming the standard in most corporations, but it's also probably the stranglehold Microsoft will keep within its grasp longer than any other.

Interestingly enough, humans can only eat a small percentage of plants that are out there, most of which we've modified by selectively breeding them to create large seeds, fruit, or vegetation. Most grocery store vegetables share wild mustard as an ancestor. A few species of cereals (wheat, barley, corn) make up most of human's other plant-derived food. On the flip side, humans can eat practically any animal, even most insects.

So, objectively speaking, it's more natural for people to eat other animals. Until the advent of plant domestication about 10,000 years ago, most people wouldn't have been able to survive on a vegetarian diet and even if they could they'd spend most of their time collecting wild seeds as most plants we think of as food don't exist in nature. People have been omnivores as long as they've been around because 'beggars can't be choosers.' Our ancestors ate what was available that was compatible with their digestive systems.

If they had chose to respect 'animal rights' then civilization wouldn't exist. It was the use of animal-drawn plows that allowed for large-scale agriculture and thus civilization to come about. Animal domestication, or as the animal-rights people would say, 'animal enslavement,' was a necessary part of human progress. Not to mention the fact that without animal domestication cows, chickens, and dogs (to name a few) wouldn't exist as none of those animals ever existed in nature -- they're man-made species.

I kind of got off point but it remained on topic so I'll leave it. Point was, humans can eat many more animals than we can plants, so I'd modify your "homo sapiens eat everything" to "homo sapiens eat every animal, and a few plants we modified to be compatible with our digestive systems." If our digestive system could break down cellulose starvation would be a non-issue (as it is, starvation is just an economic issue, but that's another discussion altogether).

There's no '-1 disagree' option in moderation.

Maybe some particular religion insists on those things, but there's nothing about religion in general that demands unconditional, unquestioning, evidence-free belief. The Dali Lama, one of the most influential religious leaders in the world, has explicitly stated that one should not be so devout as to have unconditional, unquestioning, evidence-free belief. In fact, he's stated that throughout his life he's often doubted his faith and challenged himself to question its basic tenants.

Evidence-free belief also isn't as egregious as you make it sound. Not everything is a science experiment. Moral questions aren't the type that can be answered with empiricism.

The fact that you think that supernaturalism and religion are synonymous demonstrates that you don't understand religion very well. Atheism just means not a theist -- 'a' is a prefix that means 'not.' If you don't believe in God but you believe in ghosts, you're an atheist. Sure, some religions incorporate supernaturalism -- fundamentalist Christians and some variants of Hinduism, for example -- but many do not and supernaturalism isn't a necessary component of religion. Zen Buddhism, Taoism, non-fundamentalist Christianity, and non-Orthodox Judaism are a couple examples.

A common trend you'll see among the religious -- that the stupid also believe in the supernatural -- you'll see among atheists as well. An atheist who believes that aliens built the pyramids is just as crazy as the Christian who believes that Jesus of Nazareth performed miracles. The crazies will be crazies, religion or no religion.

Being skeptical of weird stuff doesn't mean one can't be religious so that's not a valid definition of atheism. Atheism is a strict belief that any form of theism is incorrect. That may not be a very complicated (or rational) belief system, but it's still a belief system.