In some places the government builds the liquor stores.

Oops, should be:

In other words, religious people feel threatened by science, so they will adopt the fantasy that science is, or should be, more like just another religion, thereby putting science and their religion on an equal footing.

In other words, religious people feel threatened by religion, so they will adopt the fantasy that science is, or should be, more like just another religion, thereby putting science and their religion on an equal footing.

By changing the law, even only cosmetically, we now need *new* proof of the law being broken.

Without the proof, there's no actual uncertainty that the law is being broken, but a lack of evidence is one more obstacle to action.

Atheists have moral systems because all humans have moral systems. Atheism is not that moral system - atheism is the absence of belief in the supernatural.

The idea.

to eliminate patent examiner fraud. The method, of course, is patented.

No, atheism actually is the disbelief in god or gods.

I can't figure out which one Alva Noë has less understanding of - atheism, science, or Star Trek.

Apparently Noë's conclusion is that science does not make a very good religion. Since science is not a religion at all, that is unsurprising.

Atheism is not a religion. People who are atheists do not believe the same thing, they are people who lack a certain kind of belief. And they are certainly not people who have adopted science as their religion.

Atheism is a belief that there are no supernatural deities. Some atheists are fine with religious metaphors, they simply accept them as metaphors with no supernatural reality behind them. Atheism is not a rejection of values. In fact, atheists embrace the challenge of living lives that they must make meaningful on their own without having a religion tell them what that meaning is supposed to be ahead of time.

Spock is a fictional character.

Evolution "isn't going to let people get away with being sloths" and simultaneously be successful at propagating their genes.

A lot of the slothful are fine with that.

So, interstellar Twitter is *not* a sign of an advanced civilization.

(Though that would have been my guess all along.)

It's certainly a worthy area of computational linguistic research. But the reason for that is that it's a very hard problem. Automated language processing, with very smart people and very motivated spy agencies working very hard at it, has taken 60 years to get to a point not quite at the level of high school language speakers.

The privacy concerns are irrelevant. The deaf will demand this, and as long as there are weak-willed politicians and judges more interested in making political statements than dispensing justice, the whims of a special interest group will always trump the rights of the majority.

It's called being a democracy. You appear to be unfamiliar with the concept.

Most people in the US are blinded by their national mythology, in which a people threw off a foreign tyranny and created democracy and rule of law from scratch in a single day.

In reality, the American provinces were already democracies living with more freedom and less taxation than practically anywhere else in the world, and the British really didn't want to fight beyond the point of making a show of defending the loyalists. The only meaningful change was the shift from a mercantilist to a capitalist economy and currency reform.

When terrorists hate Americans "because of their freedoms", it's not about Americans having freedoms, it's because Americans believe freedoms are theirs and no-one else's. If someone thinks your freedoms don't count for anything, you become annoyed at them.

But with Americans falling over themselves to give up their freedoms, maybe that issue will resolve itself.