Hm. The covenant of Noah is about two paragraphs before this part (King James Version) which is used for various justifications of slavery and discrimination against all sorts of people because they are said to bear the Curse of Ham. If folks wanted to use the Bible to justify anything ISIS says is justified by God's words in the Koran, they could easily do so.
18 And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.
19 These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.
20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:
21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.
22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.
23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.
24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
26 And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
PS - I liked it better when we had ads for mail-order-brides on the front page. At least that was something that performs a useful service. The GOP can't claim that.
...with the GOP, you have an even better chance of getting screwed.
As I've said before, the democrats promise to improve things and - either through incompetence or evil - end up screwing me instead. The GOP campaigns on promising to screw me.
For now, I'll take the fantasy. I like to think that I could keep a job here in this country.
Roboticist Srikanth Saripalli makes this interesting point: "If the government has to decide what to fund and what not to fund, they are going to get their ideas and decisions mostly from science fiction rather than what's being published in technical papers."
Because at NIH indeed you are placed on a grant review board because of your techical knowledge of the matter. On top of that, the applications are all supported by citations in technical (and peer-reviewed) papers.
As best I understand funding at DOE and NSF works much the same way; your odds of getting funded are astronomically better if you have good primary literature to support the experiment you propose. Now, if your funding plans revolve around convincing your favorite congress-critter to write in a line (or a full bill) to get you some money, that might work too but it generally isn't the most reliable way to establish a career path.
The bigger failure, from my vantage point, is that people who call themselves "atheists" today often have faith in there not being a god.
A circular argument.
No, for the argument that I presented later in the same post. The problem I have is the modern hijacking of the term atheist.
All the word smitihng doesn't convince me that there can be faith in "nothing" if a person is inclined to be an atheist.
If one declares there to be no god, they are making a statement of faith. It is of the same magnitude - though opposite orientation - as one made by someone declaring there to be a god.
Similarly, the classic definition of agnostic was a "doubter", one who questioned the existence of a deity. Then some of the "atheists" took on a faith of their own and pushed the classical atheists out in search of a new term to describe their standing.
Having faith that things I've never heard of that don't exist just seems like dividing by zero.
Perhaps I wasn't clear on this matter. My point is that people who specifically state a belief in there not being a particular (generally Abrahamic) god are calling themselves atheists when they are showing faith in that very statement. Similarly by the way that the terms "atheist" and "agnostic" have been redefined in modern times, one could reasonably describe any random person to likely be agnostic towards a deity that they have never heard of (unless they specifically subscribe to the existence of a different one in a way that prevents them from accepting any other).
Do athiests go on missions from their atheist church to convert people - to nothing?
You've nearly hit the nail on the head, there - though I suspect perhaps not in the way you had intended. A lot of people who embrace the term "atheist" today do go and try to convert people. This in reality means that they are not atheists in the classic definition of the word as they are expressing a faith and a drive for that faith.
The bigger failure, from my vantage point, is that people who call themselves "atheists" today often have faith in there not being a god. At that point they are not truly atheists as the term means "without faith". They have instead hijacked the term to now mean "anyone who believes there to not be a god"; indeed it takes just as much faith to believe there to not be a god as it does to believe there to be one.
This is why while I am classically an atheist, I use the term agnostic to describe myself in the modern world.
Happiness is twin floppies.
