Except that historically, he's always denied responsibility for attacks that were clearly accredited to NK. It's kind of like Putin's behavior in the Ukraine, only even a bit more bizarre.

The cast of "Duck Dynasty" did North Korea's hacking for them? I didn't know this...

Eh forget it. With the complete failure of Slashdot metamoderation and the increasing blatant intellectual dishonesty of the mods here, Slashdot has become worthless for useful discussion.

Merry Christmas, all.

Do I explain "citing primary sources" or "post hoc ergo propter hoc" first?

You toss a powerful magnet at a brain and you can shut off emotions, shut off senses, distort them and induce them... what makes you think the brain dying is any less traumatic than changing the flow of electricity in one portion?

I made no claim it is less traumatic. What is relevant is the high specificity of the results of the trauma, as quantified by the study. If the perceptions were random, say in the case of LSD, hitting someone in the head repeatedly with a rock, or random magnetic stimulation, I would agree the evidence would be very weak. They are not random. They correlate strongly with exactly what the religion predicts.

You are incompetent in literally every field you address. Why are you posting to Slashdot?

1. Your definition of "psychosis" is wrong. Check the DSM, or any actual professional in the field, that is, what science says.

2. There is nothing "obvious" about the notion there is not a God, feel free to share the special insight you have superseding thousands of years of theology, philosophy, and science demonstrating clearly it is not "obvious".

3. Even if it were "obvious", the notion it is therefore "psychosis" is nonsense. Once can name innumerable instances of something being claimed to be "obvious" for which disregarding it is not "psychosis"--say, choosing to drink and drive despite the consequences. Say, buying overpriced products. Say, being Republican or Democrat, viewed from the other side.

In short, you are being irrational. In short, something is indeed wrong here with mental functioning. The person exhibiting this would be you.

This is highly effective in several countries around the world, but it does have one key criteria. The availability of firearms to the criminal and/or general public has to be low initially for this to be an effective policy.

And I believe nearly all countries where regular police / peace officers do not carry a firearm, they do have special units that can be activated in the rare event of (suspected) firearm / deadly weapon usage or widespread violence or mob/mass rioting.

In my youth I was told by a police officer during a tour of police facilities that they were trained to only draw their weapon to fire it or to clean it. To the best of my knowledge, based on my own very limited experience, the majority of officers I have seen still operate under that basic premise. A firearm is a means of lethal force to be used only as a last resort. It is not perfect, but I do believe it has lead to far more lives being saved on both sides than the alternative of officers drawing their weapons sooner as a method of deterrent or preparation.

I support the law enforcement officers goal of making it home alive always, but I also value their efforts in not escalating scenarios, and respecting the lives of others.

But if you truly feel there is a god, then obviously your sense of reality is wrong and this is what psychosis is about.

Back your absolutely nonsensical arbitrary claim here.

It would be called "science" by people like you, who fail to understand that nothing in science is "proven", it is a collection of models that are always provisional and permanently open to revision based on future data.

Still, say, one's preferences in art... do you object that those aren't "proven" and therefore aren't "science"--and what do you conclude from that?

This would be why you make sure you always argue with theists who reject evolution, I'll bet.

Which, for the record, is a minority of them. Unless you mean people who mean by "evolution" the irrational non-sequitur of "evolution is true, therefore there is no God" or other "often, therefore always" notions of evolutionary change.

Happy holidays, do enjoy your pet false dichotomy this festive season.

Thats the start of the problem. People control the software. Like with guns, is people that is the one that kills, abuse, take advantage or use it for their own ends, giving them more tools to control our life is letting not only the saint, pure and morally perfect and responsible ones to do so, but all of them, at all levels. People is not perfect, either the one that decides what the software should do, the ones that actually does that, or the ones that in the end have the capabilities to control them, and in that way, you. You know how police can behave already, give them and people in higher more control, and that won't stop them to misbehave, just give them new ways to do it, with more broad impact and the possibility of doing it without consequences nor leaving a trace.

And if not bad enough the people with their own interests, biases and corruption in the "right" side of the controlling that software, it is not perfect, and you have vulnerabilities, design faults, leaks and plain idiocy at the hour of deciding who can control that software that could let not authorized people to do that control too. And they can do pretty bad misuses too.

And you are in the center of it, not knowing, not having a warning, not having any possibility of control, In some moment shit will happen because of this and you will be dead, without savings or property, working as a slave or maybe worse consequences. And maybe, not even realizing that all of that already happened.

Such an imaginary construct does indeed fit the definition of psychosis by DSM

No, it doesn't. You are simply making that claim up. At worst, the religion could be incorrect. It could not be a "psychosis". Silly anti-science rhetorical amplification doesn't really add anything to your argument here.

As for your "enabling" claim, to what to you attribute the historical bloodbath existing previous to the presence of any religion, which undeniably according to your model, is the one-and-only reason you exist in the evolved form you do? What do you blame for these moral objections then? And while you're add it, on what basis are you implying such an objection, from -your- model?

Incidentally, maybe you can help me with a discussion with an acquaintance of mine. He has a philosophy he calls "fooism", and though it is suitably undefined and lacking in any actual demographic to compare with, and thus he can point out way more negative things done in the name of theism, he can also point out way more negative things done by atheism than fooism. Seems that when you have no admitted responsible adherents to your philosophy, other ones can be blamed for way more things, relatively. As an atheist, do you have some defense for how many more abhorrent things were done in the name of atheism than fooism? He's waiting.

Again, whether it constitutes "proof" is irrelevant. However, one does have reason to consider as evidence the decidedly non-random nature of the "hallucinations" supposedly caused by brain failure (try to short out your computer and see if you suddenly get presented with a new 3D MMO, for example), which correlate very highly with the religious model's predictions.

Formally, though I understand your statement is a Bare Assertion Fallacy troll, it is factually and scientifically incorrect to claim it is a "psychosis". Formally, per the actual field you clearly have no knowledge of, a position that the majority of a culture subscribes to cannot be a "psychosis", per the DSM. Your use (and Dawkins', who you parrot) is simply scientifically and factually false.

I could go on, but rather I'll leave you with a challenge. Predict the upper-bound of the lifespan of a man for the -next- 2500 years. Let's see how you rate compare to the goat herders.

If religious people had any proof, it would no longer be religion.

Sure it would. Why would the definition of "religion" change? I mean, the real one, not the Dawkins made-up one.

But, "proof" (clever of you to goalpost-shift this up front to a criteria virtually nothing, including science, can meet, by the way) would be tantamount to worldwide forced conversion. You'd either have to accept it, or go to an asylum for denying basic proven facts. Might you see a reason a God would not want that, particularly in this era of global communication?

That said, to use reasonable epistemological criteria, here's peer-reviewed evidence. As with most domains, -evidence-, not -proof-, is the intellectually-honest expectation.