No I believe the idea of God exists, and as it exists, at least, as people explain God to me and as far as I understand God as a concept using the Christian Bible, I reject any attribute of benevolence, I don't see it. So my comment is a little paradoxical. Maybe I didn't explain it well, basically its like, why would I believe in such a seemingly childish god? I am not against believing in things that lack current scientific validation, but the christian god is certainly not one of those things.

I really hate that God always was and just tells us that is his explanation...just like I hate almost everything to do with Christianity. Atheism may have its concessions, but its still backed more by science than any religion. And anyone that doesn't gloss over the Christian God and make tons of excuses for Him would admit what a inconsistent wreck of a being it is. I was a Christian too, and I know how this is done. But then one day I get fed up with trying to bend reality for an alleged being that doesn't interact or communicate or appear to exist in any way.

Dawkins was raised as a Christian.

As someone also raised as a Christian, there's no way I would go back, even if God personally asked me back...

So far this thread is about the rational side of rejecting religion, but this is a more qualitative, personal approach. So personally, there's no alleged qualities of the Christian God that I find benevolent. He's a genocidal, manipulative, needy, self-ish being reminiscent of a psychotic girlfriend and I would suffer any fate to avoid it/him/her. Thankfully this makes sense, these are human traits and God is a human product, albeit a very dark, destructive one.

It also solves death, provides an easy solution to meaning etc. If you look at historical religions as far back as history goes, all religions arise for exactly the same reasons. A reductionist explanation would be that all religion arises in response to an unknown i.e. we don't know if it'll rain, let's pray to the rain gods. We don't know what makes lighting, it must be a god, lets name him Thor. We don't know what happens when we die, lets pray to Ra and rap our bodies in linens hoping they re-animate after death. You could go on and on. Anything that lies outside or has lied outside of humanities direct control has been/or will be a god.

I think Dawkin's lack of openness is somewhat intentional. It's like pushing back on years and years of unyielding, narrow minded religious culture. This is what the atheist side of being a bigot looks like. Honestly, I am also more open minded than the whole Dawkins parade lets on, but it feels amazing to have someone pushing back on the religious community with equal levels of unyielding stubbornness. They brought it on themselves, its a very reactionary movement especially if you look at communities like reddit.com/r/atheism. It's more than just being rational with your beliefs, there's a need to go a step beyond if you've been the victim of religious oppression like most have. I think in the end it will level out once we get several generation beyond the Millennials.

I encountered this problem more in cheaper theaters when I lived in a more impoverished area in a smaller sized town. It was mostly teenagers that had nothing better to do than sit in the back of a sparsely populated theater and troll its occupants by talking and laughing obnoxiously. It had nothing to do with the technology. I won't comment that these teenagers are normally of a specific minority or on the details of they the said area was impoverished for the sake of political correctness or that this so called "problem" is really a by-product of something much larger and really shouldn't be treated as a separate issue. But in summary, I live on a white side of town with expensive theaters with nice bars (the kind that serve drinks) and dine in areas and this problem doesn't exist. If someone's on their phone, I certainly don't notice and no one would pay the prices my theater charges to sit and chat in the middle of the movies.

Sounds like you're in the service and chugging the koolaide...remember Snowden was pretty devout as well. Please report back to /. first when your decide to go rogue.

That's already in the news media, along with other lies.

Religion does whatever it wants. People wanted to advance humanity and still maintain whatever beliefs they had, so they did. That's all there is to it.

If you want to understand where dinosaurs come from (or went), just make some crap up. You already have the end in mind, God has to be right. So find some random verse that mentions some random creature like a Leviathan and BOOM, dinosaurs and God. Solved.

If religious minded people ever started with the premise, "maybe I'm wrong about god", how different would everything look from a religious perspective?
Think of all the ridiculous theories like Young Earth that would instantly vanish.

Religion always starts with an unfounded premise and builds on that premise (God exists). Science starts from nothing and works its way to a logical, empirical truth. They're only reconcilable in the way some religious people just take from Science whatever they please and discard the rest, creating these ugly Frankenstein-like theories that mesh science and religion in a desperate, pathetic attempt to reconcile God and the observable reality.

I'm not sure I understand this statement, there are plenty of religious scientists that try to validate their faith based on scientific principles, they're just a joke.

To me that's the real problem, religious minded people who start with a premise they want to be true and then pasting together evidence until they feel comfortable.
This makes entirely no sense from a scientific perspective. How can use scientific principles to help validate something that you have no concrete evidence to even hint at its existence. The only evidence they have is the inability to disprove, once and for all, the existence of a supreme being.

You have to hand it to the religious though, if wanting something to be true could will it in to existence, they could create a god.

Seems pointless to pay off Google when that info could easily be yanked in to Federal jurisdiction.

If I could know that my info was 100% private I would pay the price, but that just doesn't seem realistic at all.

As long as the info exists period, someone will use it if the need arises IMHO.

In college, I bought Office 2007 for $10 through our subsidy program. I could have easily gotten by with Open Office, but at that price, why?
At work, I have Office 2010 on all my devices. I rarely use any specific MS Office feature, but my corporation provides it, so why not use it?

So lets say 10 years from now when all my MS Office DVDs are antiquated, I start my own business.
I'm no longer in school or part of a corporation and I need the variety of rich formatting features MS Office provides since I am doing everything on my own.

I would have to pay $150 for the software I previously always had access to, but never needed until now.

All that to say, if the majority of people get MS from work or school at next to no cost, and the rest pirate.
Why can't Microsoft lower individual purchasing costs when they're obviously making most of their money from massive enterprise purchases of MS Office.

Do they just like seeing my face when my parents tell me they once again purchases a full priced
copy of MS Office so they can type up store lists in Word and create the occasion budget in Excel?

I mean that's all it is right? It's a gimmick, no one in their right mind goes out and buys MS Office Full Retail unless they're incredibly ignorant or senile.

I literally feel like MS leaves the price super high just for the people dumb enough to pay it.

I think the point is that "networking" doesn't make one a prodigy or a flame (if we're keeping with the analogy).

I mean great, so happy he ducked the system, but there's not shortage of talented people being destroyed by the education system that would have the exact same story if they were brave enough to simply step out of the lemming line...

It isn't exactly the same scenario as someone who's freakishly brilliant getting a lot of fame and then one day melting down in a suicide. It's more like a Mark Zuckerberg scenario, a little bit of talent, a lot of "right place at the right time"...I mean networking.

I would settle for completely paperless processes involving external actors such as clients or customers.

Its my observation that a lot of the organizations that require me to print something hold massive monopoly such as a loan company or service company. On a recent student loan consolidation app I had to wait 2 weeks for a paper application to be mailed to me only to find out later that the paper app was then scanned in to a computer...the entire process lasted 6-8 weeks thanks to snail mail and the result was an electronic application.

My skill in importing signatures in to PDFs that I handily draw in MS Paint is pretty good too...such a crying shame.