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That's the point of regulations. Or rather, why large businesses oftentimes support gov't regulation - to squeeze small businesses out so that the large corporations, who can hire people to take care of tedious things like HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, monthly W-2 Payroll Withholdings, etc. I went crosseyed trying to handle all the payroll and taxes for a small corporation, and even with professionals doing it for us (costing $500/year for payroll, $1000/year for taxes), it's *still* a massive hassle. Guess who's responsible when Paychex sends out 1099s -- but instead of sending 1099s, majorly messes up and issues checks for the amount that should be on the 1099? Hint: not Paychex.

Due to friction / barriers to entry, it's very difficult to profitably run a small S Corp on less than six digits a year.

While you always hear some left-wing people complaining about large corporations, the highly regulated environments found in socialist countries are very favorable to the large companies at the expense of the small. If you contrast the number of top-100 corporations in 1950 in France and the US vs. the ones still around decades later, the majority of the US firms had vanished, but the majority in France were still around.

Socialism loves big corporations.

(In regards to the ratemycop story.)
The police internal review system is totally incestuous. Policemen will never give each other a fair review unless there's a tremendous amount of outside pressure applied to the department.

One of my dad's friends was a guy named Sam Knott. On my 9th birthday, his 20 year old daughter was pulled over by an unstable CHP officer named Craig Peyer. He killed her by a bridge overpass.

The real sticking point for Sam was that the CHP has received a large number of complaints about the guy's aggressive and threatening personality. Not only did they not even bother to investigate any of them, they didn't even have a system for tracking them. They all went into a filing cabinet and ignored. Sam investigated the black hole of police accountability, and really didn't like what he found, and crusaded tirelessly for the next 20 years to reform the system. He showed up at city hall meetings, befriended politicians, antagonized police chiefs that were desperate to preserve their above-the-law status, and got the bridge where she was killed renamed after her (it's a couple miles from my house). He got the laws changed, too.

He died from a heart attack in 2000 while cleaning up the bridge where his daughter was killed.

There's countless other examples of police being never held accountable - you can watch videos on Youtube of some black guys trying to file complaint reports, and being dismissed or turned away. Hell, my dad was held at gunpoint by a Texas Ranger because he didn't think he should have to fill out his SSN on the speeding ticket he got (for doing 70 on the highway). When we called to complain, they said, yeah, he's been having some psychological issues. Kind of an understatement - the guy turned purple with rage when my dad just questioned if he could be asked for his SSN, and they guy drew his gun and threatened to throw him in jail for the night.

But Texas still let him go on patrol -- he was just having "some issues".

So yeah, sites like ratemycop which provide even a totally unofficial level of police accountability should desperately be encouraged. In fact, something like this should be mandated to be part of every department's internal affairs office.

It's sad that the epic story of Sam Knott's crusade for reform doesn't get a wikipedia article, and there's just a brief stub for Craig Peyer (who once claimed, "There are two people you don't piss off in this world: God and a Highway Patrolman-and not necessarily in that order."), even Sam was tremendously influential and the stories got a lot of press. I guess having one's daughter murdered by an evil cop and having the father campaign for and win systematic change isn't as notable as a pokemon character.

http://www.sandiegomagazine.com/media/San-Diego-Magazine/February-2004/The-Killer-Cop/index.php?cp=1&si=0#artanc

Here's some classical rational arguments for God by Aquinas, Anselm, Descartes, Pascal, Lewis, and James, using my own paraphrasing of them to make them short. I think Pascal's and James' are probably the ones that will interest atheists the most, as the others, while interesting, are rational arguments *for* the existence of God, but these pragmatic arguments say that it is rational *to believe* in God. An important difference. (Most people confuse Pascal's wager as an argument in the first case, not the second, as it was intended -- he wrote it for Christians, not trying to convince atheists.)

1) Aquinas:
Everything in science has a cause. What caused the big bang? If you say nothing, that is a less scientific statement than saying something. Therefore, rationally, something caused the universe. Since that something must stand outside of time, the only thing which fits our concept of a powerful entity sitting outside of time is God. Though you could posit something else that fits those shoes, like an omnipotent 8th grader in a higher dimension creating our universe as a science fair project, whatever it is will resemble God to some degree.
Note: The universe cannot be infinitely old. If the universe started an infinite amount of time ago, we could not get to the present one second at a time.

2) Anselm:
Unlike with unicorns and fairies, we know that God has to exist simply from the definition of him as the most perfect being, as existence is one of the required attributes for perfection. Certainly a god that exists is more perfect than a god that doesn't exist.

3) Descartes (heavily adapted):
God or evolution made us (or maybe space aliens). Therefore, we were made either with a purpose, or survived by being be more fit than other species, with useful traits retained and harmful ones pruned. All humans have a yearning for God, hence atheists' greater belief in the supernatural than theists, as they attempt to fill their need another way. But this need makes no sense in any creation method (unless we were made by aliens, I guess, who wanted religious slaves to tend their stargates...) unless there was a God. A creature who has blinded or deceptive senses is useless evolutionary, and wouldn't be done by a kind and loving God. Therefore, since in both cases we are given facilities which we should be able to trust, the yearning for God should be seen as actual evidence that God does exist.

4) Pascal:
We don't know if God exists or not. However, we *do* know what the consequences of belief and nonbelief are. When dealing with uncertainty, the rule is to ignore the non-quantifiable probabilities and focus on the consequences in order to make a rational decision. In this case, it is a very simple decision, as with even a small (but non-zero!) chance of God's existence, the rational decision is to believe.

Note: this means that if you think there's a 0% chance that God exists, you shouldn't believe in him. In any event, trying to believe in something that you think is completely false is stupid, and probably impossible to boot.

However, it does mean that if someone thinks that there is a chance that God exists, that you shouldn't criticize them for being irrational, as well.

5) Lewis:
The historical record, unlike with Mormonism and some other records, shows that there probably was a guy named Jesus who ran around on earth and did stuff in front of a bunch of people. There's several possibilities: 1) Jesus was a man, but a great moral teacher (Christian "modernism"), 2) Jesus thought he was the son of God -- but was just kind of crazy, 3) Jesus was a sort of crazy evil cult leader guy, like David Koresh, or 4) He was the son of God. Lewis eliminates the first three possibilities due to various things like his disciples almost universally dying for him (sorry, I'm running out of time here, I have to take off for Jiu-Jitsu), and so concludes that Jesus must have been the son of God.

6) James (the Will to Believe, one of the greatest works of philosophy: http://falcon.jmu.edu/~omearawm/ph101willtobelieve.html)
We don't know if God is real or not. However, we must choose -- we cannot put it off. As long as the option is a live option (in other words, it's an option a specific person could actually believe in, as opposed to "the world was created by My Little Ponies") which is rational and not self-contradictory, then let him believe it without shame. The person who tediously insists on 100% proof of anything will be sorely disappointed in life (and probably a bore, to boot), since even science doesn't give us things that are 100% true. A tedious skeptic is just as bad, if not worse, than a fatuous believer.

Imagine a person put a gun to your head (i.e., it's a forced decision), and says that you have to decide, right now, if P=NP or not, and how you pick will govern the rest of your life somehow. It's a momentous, forced, live decision (as either P=NP or P!=NP could be true), but you *must* pick, without firm proof either way. James' point is that in such situation we can freely choose either, without shame, or without being called irrational.

So there you have it -- four rational arguments for the existence of God, and two that the belief in God is rational.

>>God, I hate philosophy. The problem with so many of you people is that you talk yourself out of knowledge, and into ignorance.

Philosophy and logic are interesting in that you can study what *must* be true, regardless of, well, anything. Even in a whacky world with 23 dimensions and no light, a circle is still a circle.

>>The "realness" of reality is irrelevant; regardless of the reality of Reality, the Reality that we perceive is the "only context in which anything is meaningful."

Except our *understanding* of reality is critically important. The basic questions about life (you know, stuff like What is the Meaning of Life) have different answers for different people, and essentially shape the entire direction of a person's life. A person who says that the Meaning is to spread the Word of God will live a very different life than the person who says that it is to enjoy life as much as we can, and then get out while the getting is good. Philosophy can help differentiate these stances, and reveal problems and contradictions in them.

>>The problem with religion is that it gets people to believe things that are demonstratively false - "abstinence-only education prevents pregnancy and STD's" - on the basis of no good evidence.

Atheism gets people to believe things that are patently false, like Hutchens saying that religion is irrational and bad (for some definition of bad in a world that doesn't involve a moral law, naturally), or Dawkins claiming that religion doesn't change how people act, or, hey, your statements implying that religious people must be blind to the real world in order to believe in God. Which is not at all the case. There is no contradiction between saying, I am a Scientist and a Man of God.

Gould's NOM model is primitive... while I think there is quite a very large lesson people should learn that religion teaches religious matters and science teaches scientific matters, there is a non-negligible area that overlaps between the two. Buddhism claims that the world is without end, and has lessons which rely on this key point (be nice to everyone you meet, because since the world is infinitely old, everyone has probably been your mother and your child at some point). Christianity claims that the world was created. If science can conclusively rule one way or another, that would make a tremendous difference for religion. Christians don't claim primacy of religion over scientific matters -- if the Bible says Pi is 3, well, that's because it was rounded off to one digit, not because it was 3. When a Christian scientist learns more about God's creation, that is an act of worship, not an attack on religion.

Islam has a different approach to science, though. The great Islamic scholar Averroes pointed out in the 1100s that there is only one truth -- there cannot be a contradiction between religious truth and scientific truth (such as it is). In later years, though, Sufi mysticism has sort of permeated Islamic culture, and so claim that every electron only moves because the Will of God commands it to be so, and thus it is pointless to study things scientifically, since it is impossible (and incredibly hubristic) to predict the Will of God. Even more recently, there has been a resurgence in scientific thought in Islamic worlds, but in my opinion, that was one of the major reasons Islamic scientific progress stalled after the 1100s or so.

On the other hand, religion can and should inform scientific decisions when it comes to making certain decisions. This probably horrifies you to no end, but science in the absence of all morality and ethics leads to much worse tragedies and horrors than religion ever created.

>>Which is a pretty good indication that those books have little that is useful to a rational society.

Whether or not you believe in God, which it's pretty (adamantly) clear that you don't, it should be rather obvious that religion is the only thing that lets mankind transcend the real world as we know it, and achieve those Herculean heights of greatness that would never happen if we were all just concerned with the real world. Where is the Mother Theresa of the atheists?

As far as the law goes, Jesus said that he wasn't there to change the law, but fulfill it. While he never broke the law himself (the pharisees criticizing him for breaking the law were actually in error), his point was this: "The law was given to man for man's benefit. Man was not given to the law. God wants a merciful heart, not blind obedience to the law." Does that make sense to you? It does to me.

The question after Jesus was whether non-Jews would have to follow the law, as the covenant was with the Jewish people. Peter and the others held it did (i.e., you'd have to be circumcised to become a Christian). But Paul's viewpoint won, which is that the law doesn't apply to Gentiles, but the greater moral law does.

>>And of course, there's zero evidence to support any of these religious claims anyway.

Is there? Certainly people act differently when highly religious, and that is measurable. If a religion's claim is that it makes you happy (or not care about being happy, like with Buddhism), you can test and measure that.

>>As an engineer, if I doubt something, I can set up an experiment and determine if it works or not.

You can test electrons. It's rather different trying to test God. More importantly, most statements of this sort are dishonest -- even if an experiment of some sort showed that God might have intervened, the doubter would doubt it anyway. You know, like with a religious friend of mine with a terminal brain tumor that vanished between two visits. There's an infinite number of explanations to this, but a doubtful person will always select the one that doesn't involve religion, making the test fundamentally dishonest.