Apart from all the birthday cards, letters to your bank and so on with your name on it, you mean? And this doesn't just extend to governments oppressing citizenry en masse. A whistleblower in the public or private sector could get caught out by this - print your document, send it to the press (or boss or regulator or potentially corrupt police or whatever), have it seized or otherwise examined by someone you've criticized and lose your job. Anyone could correlate the dots on your secret documents to those on your non-secret ones.

Yes, there would, albeit a different issue, at least when it comes to access in people's rooms. Whether legal or not, landlords should not be filtering their tenants Internet access like that, and it doesn't matter if the landlord is a private landlord, a government entity, a University or a charity. It's not an acceptable commercial practice. And it's most especially unacceptable if the landlord ensures they are a monopoly supplier of fixed-line access to that person (no idea if they are, but I can imagine the reaction had I asked my college for a phone line and ADSL/cable).

We have to wait and see what they actually do with this.

Here might be some examples of non-evil uses, or at least uses which are in the same class as blocking the word 'democracy' or 'tibet' in China:

• - Removing material which breaches only US copyright laws in only the US.
• - Removing private information subject to a UK injunction only from the UK site.
• - Blocking holocaust denying material from the German site only.
• - Blocking material which can't be distributed in a particular country due to an ongoing court case.
• - Blocking material containing the names of rape victims or children involved in court cases in countries which ban publishing them.

No company can be totally free in which governments or jurisdictions it chooses to alienate. Maybe you can accept copyright infringement in Russia and be Russia-based, or you can accept criticism of Vladimir Putin and be US-based, but you can't do both. And similar countries often cooperate (or are exposed to coercion, such as US export of its copyright laws).

If we're talking about programming as a school (ie, pre-University) subject then it surely wouldn't extend to actually being able to develop useful software. No-one is ever going to be able to get a job as a software developer based on having studied it at high-school.

There are some ways in which it might be useful, though.

• Not all programming is writing giant software systems, and knowing some basics could be very useful for people who might one day have a reason to write a macro in a piece of software, write an SQL query or do something simple with HTML or JavaScript. This also extends to being a starting point for those who specialize in other areas (sciences, say) but one day have to write simple limited-use software to help them with their job.
• Being good at writing simple software is a good signal (and perhaps good training) for careful and rigorous logical thought, just as studying philosophy might. In the UK it's been promoted as a 'new latin', presumably for similar reasons.
• Software and computers are very important features of modern human society. Having a better understanding of what they are and aren't, can and can't do, and just how difficult and complex software is may help people interact with software and software developers.
• Getting some exposure to it will means children who might otherwise never have considered it for future study will have a better idea of whether or not they should.

I also disagree that it'll become quickly outdated. Variables, comparisons, loops, functions, arguments and so on are not going to go out of date anytime soon - certainly not in the way that the current nonsense 'how to use Word' lessons will.

The biggest threat, I think, is that they'd be watered down to pathetic uselessness that provides no insight at all. I suspect some children would be sufficiently useless at the necessary thorough logical thought (possibly the same ones I remember who couldn't cope with basic maths) that any attempt to design a course that didn't leave them far behind would make the whole thing worthless. So there needs to be some way to deal with them, like putting them in another stream, which IIRC isn't normally done for non-core subjects. Come to think of it, maths lessons were slow enough for anyone with any aptitude for it that it could make sense to speed them up for those who are good at them and use some of the extra time for software.

It's not a good concept at all. It's not just about being 'fair' to a loosely defined collection of many people named 'the recording industry', the incentives placed on people is also important. Copyright is about creating incentives to product copyright material which will be benificial to society as a whole. That means rewarding people who play a part in producing things that are widely valued, whether as creators, financers who take on risk, or whatever, and not rewarding those who do not. Distributed blank media tax revenues via some sort of formula may not do a good job of correlating payments with the value of the work people are doing. It's a bung to dominant encumbants and no incentive to new entrants, for example.

A lot of C or C++ applications also use a lot of memory (maybe less, I'm not sure, but still a lot) - but there's a better chance that a lot of it can be paged out and left there because they don't have a garbage collector regularly scanning it.

All taxes modify behaviour, intended or not. At the moment most taxes are raised in ways which result in modifications to behaviour which are bad. For example, taxes on labour, and taxes that cause corporations to prefer debt financing over equity financing when there's no underlying business reason to do so. You have to pay your taxes somehow.....much better to have them levied on things where there's an obvious economic advantage (like fuel and anything else with negative externalities) than where the opposite is true. There's a limited supply of those things, but what supply there is isn't being fully used.

I haven't made a 'they're correct' argument for science. Scientific theories are developed using a particular process, a process which is a credible way of creating and assessing the models it produces, one which can make known the difference between real behaviour and the model and one which can plausibly bring those models closer and closer to 'correctness'. Tests of the most important and basic parts have been carried out by a diverse set of individuals who are credibly able to do so as far as a human can, and the results disseminated through diverse channels via direct and carefully recorded contact with those who have produced, refined and tested those theories. The theories and tests are well described and specific, and are to a very substantial degree consistent with each other (with inconsistencies at the edges of our knowledge). Outside the basic parts there may not be replication and there may be greater scope for manipulation or mistakes. But the process still provides a good reason to take the results as likely to be an improvement of our collective modelling of the world. Finally, individuals sometimes make knowlingly or wrecklesses false claims (eg, false data), but the process means that it's unlikely that a huge body of false knowledge will be established through deception because each piece of later modelling is separately performed and tested.

Religious models of the world - it's creation, it's functioning and so on - are based on divine revelation of one kind or another. The proposed mechanism is that god causes an individual human to make the claims that he requires, and that god's claims are both accurate and made usefully accurately by his proxies. This process is not credible, and is vulnerable to becoming circular ('what I say is the word of god, you know it's the word of god because I say so, and you know I'm not lying or deceived because everything I say is the word of god'). The claims are not very specific and not always very well specified. They're often not testable or tested at all, never mind credibly or with a credible mechanism for the outcomes to be accurately disseminated. They're not disseminated from the original claimant to us now in a way likely to have good accuracy and there's no means for modern humans to verify them. Finally, humans are known to sometimes spontaneously produce new clearly false religious beliefs and for others to follow them. eg, cargo cults or Jonestown. The claimed process of divine revelation and human dissemination has no defence against this.

I also make a distinction between scientific models and statements about the world and statements about other things. The Bible, for example, makes many assertions of historical fact and of morality. I would not attempt to use a scientific process to assess a statement of morality, not least because of the 'what's a rational goal?' question. I know for myself what is and isn't moral, just as I know what is and isn't beautiful (and I can gather information about what others think). Morality isn't a question of facts about the world and can't be tested for accuracy, except in the context of being an accurate description of part of a single human mind.

Utility can't drive someone's life, poor or otherwise. For utility to exist stuff has to be useful for something. That something can only be determined by a non-rational process - an emotional process.

I do not accept that belief in the bible is useful as such, although it's quite possible that human capacity for religion has conferred a survival advantage for those genes (for example, religions may have been a good way to encourage altruism to the point of dying in battle within a tribe but without compromising the tribe's ability to wage war by fostering the same feelings towards outsiders). I accept that belief in the bible and other religions has caused considerable difference to the current state of the world compared to one dominated by atheism, I do not accept that it's known for sure whether society would be 'better' with different religions or no religion. I suspect so, but humans appear to be very susceptible to developing religious beliefs and an atheist society would probably have to imply different genes and brains to remain that way. What I don't accept is that I should encourage myself and others to have apparently false beliefs because it's in some way useful to me or builds what I consider a 'better' society, especially considering that many of those beliefs could be very damaging.

And it is trivial to produce a counterexample (in fact it's easy to point out that finding 100 million counterexamples would not be a huge problem. If you look towards history, it is plain to see that there have been huge time periods where these "human" morals barely existed -if at all.

You have evidence that in huge time periods humans did not experience shame when caught stealing? Did not experience disgust at people who sleep with their siblings? Did not experience anger when they see those around them being robbed or murdered? Or, more generally, did not experience emotions of morality when confronted with actions which did not conform to their contemporary morality?

I do not claim that all humans share the same morality. I claim (tentatively, as I'm not a scientific research with research to back it up, so its more of an opinion than a claim) that all non-psychopathic humans have a moral capacity. A capacity which generates emotions of morality when they detect certain situations. And I claim that the situations in which this is triggered are substantially cultural, but with some commonality across humans at a single evolutionary time (eg, most humans have concepts of property and theft, and of unjustified killing, and of incest).

Rationality can help you to achieve goals set by your 'lower' emotions, as you call them. Rationality is useless without emotion because without emotion you have no idea what to do with it.

I'm not saying that human emotion (as a whole) guides me towards good. I'm saying that we have an internal capacity to detect moral goods and bads, and that experiencing an emotion is the consequence of contravention. I'm not saying the converse. I'm not saying that all emotion indicates an aspect of your internal morality. Nor am I saying that the behaviour that results from your emotions is definitively good. I'm saying that, to you, theft is immoral because it makes you feel guilty and makes you angry when you see it. If you feel tempted by someone's chocolate cake, steal it and then feel guilty the fact that your greed made you do it doesn't make it moral according to your moral code. Quite the opposite - your guilt indicates that your mind assesses it as immoral.

How?

The morality which exists is the one which exists. Whether you think biology currently explains its existence adequately or not it still exists. (And I notice you mention individual and group level selection, not gene-level).

I don't claim that wishing to be kind to strangers and feeling guilty when I'm not is rational. Nor do I claim it to be irrational. It's a goal, a goal motivated by my morality. Slamming doors in the face of strangers would be an irrational way to behave given the goal, but a rational way to behave given the opposite goal. My biology, genetics, evolutionary history and so on is (combined with my social environment) the cause of me having this goal, and that's a non-rational process, too. It just is.

It's not a coincidence that Christian moral claims and my morality have common elements (but only some, and it depends on where and when you sample yourChristianity....I have no problem with graven images, say). Christianity's founders based their moral claims partly on the moral codes prevalent at the time, and Christianity's claimed morals have evolved along with prevailing morals (eg, attitudes to homosexuality). Also, Christian moral claims have influenced my environment and so influenced my morals. This does not make a hypothesized Christian god the source of a hypothesized one true morality.

Yet again you're treating atheism as if it were wider than it is. My morals are not a part or consequence of my atheism. Holding an opinion that there are no gods does not resemble the entirety of the bible at all, let alone closely. It makes no moral claims, no historical claims and no factual claims beyond the non-existence of god. The bible does, in huge measure.

I'm not too sure about your venture. Islam does claim that islam is the road to victory, but isn't that part of a claim that 'good morals' lead to victory? Do muslims not believe, just like other believers in the old testament, that if god says do it then it is by definition moral? Bear in mind that just because the moral rules are not your moral rules, and indeed strongly conflict, doesn't mean that it isn't a system of morality. 'everything is acceptable "to make islam victorious over other religions"' is a good example of a moral rule, just not one which either of us would accept. As another hypothetical example imagine that an intelligent harem-forming species with a moral sense existed. Such a species may have rules such as 'non-dominant males may not have sex with females without beating the dominant male in a fair fight in spring-time', or 'females may not refuse to have sex with the dominant male', and may get angry when they see transgressions and feel guilt or shame when they commit transgressions. This is a moral code. It's not your or my moral code, but it's a moral code.

Religion's false claim to morality is not just 'this moral code is the right one'. It's that the whole PROCESS of morality is other than it is and that religious authorities are the masters of it. This process has a huge lag, with old moral codes (written in to religion) popping up and doing huge damage - to homosexuals, for example. Religions often go so far as to claim that adhering to their religion and accepting its beliefs is itself a requirement of the moral code. This, I think, is by far the largest source of conflict and anger between atheists and the religious.

It's a system of morality which was presumably claimed to be right by the founders of those religions. I don't believe religious morality to be true morality, just a claim of morality. I do however believe it was influenced by it. I'm not saying that I think morality is the 'justification' behind these religions. I'm saying that religions attempt to take over the process of the construction of moral codes by claiming that they are the only true source of them.

No, a claim of that sort made by 'Buddhism' isn't 'human morality'. Human morality is inside their heads, not their books (but is influenced by their books).

Firstly, morals claimed by different religions will differ because the claims were made at different times by different people with different motivations within different cultures. Secondly, actual morals differ between people because they have different brains and are subject to a different environment. Your own moral code is influenced by those around you, and by your culture, including your priests and your bibles. You see others close to you or trusted by you expressing shock, disgust and anger at sex outside marriage and you become more likely to pick that up as part of your own moral code. You see others you trust telling you that the bible and faith is the source of all goodness and maybe start to develop a moral rule which says that not believing in it is a morally bad act. Your capacity for morality is human. The specifics are cultural.

You wanted to know why atheists take literal interpretations of the bible. That is my answer. I have not, myself, taken any literal interpretations of the bible in this discussion. Nor do I demand that Christians act as if following a literal interpretation. It's not really relevant to our discussion.

No. I charge myself with following my moral standards. I object to Christianity claiming that they are not in fact my moral standards, but instead theirs.

Morality is not a rational process. Not rational. Not irrational. Morality plays a part in setting goals, rationality helps achieve them. For example, I like chocolate (because I'm built that way as an organism), and so getting chocolate becomes a goal. I want to be moral (because I'm built that way, too), and that's a second goal. I can then use my rationality to develop a process to achieve them: earn money, go to shop, etc. Incorporating your morality in to your goals is not inconsistent with an opinion that there are no gods.

Not a shot in the dark, but not necessarily complete or as thoroughly established as I'd like. It's not really a shot in the dark to say that people experience, for example, shame when they commit what they consider moral transgressions. It's also not much of a stretch to claim that people categorize actions morally in to obligatory, permissible or impermissible.....but, of course, a lot harder to demonstrate that this is a complete description (and I'd accept it probably isn't). As for the emotional basis of it, which I imagine is the contentious bit, I offer a series of moral dilemmas which apparently demonstrate that people create post-hoc rationalizations which they later have to retract. You probably know of these already. If a train is going down a track and will kill five people is it moral to pull a lever to direct it down a track where it will kill only one? Why? (Typical answer: one dead person is better than five). If a train is going down a track where it will kill five people is it permissible to push a fat person on to the track to stop it? People typically feel that it isn't, but then they must alter or extend the rationalization of the first answer afterwards. Sometimes people give the same answer, in which case you can ask: a healthy person walks in to a hospital; is it moral to harvest his organs to save five? It's very rare for people to say yes here. People may change their justifications for their first answer when presented with the later questions (or the second time someone asks them). They never change their opinion on whether or not it is moral. People are not generally all that aware of what moral rules they use and can easily be caught out in logical problems with their logical justifications - but it's the justifications they change, not the moral decision. You've probably experienced these situations yourself, you've probably experienced a feeling that something is morally wrong and then had to come up with a rationalization you can give to others. I know I have. That's why I argue that morality is probably a subconscious emotion process and not a rational one.

No. Maths is not science, it's extended logic alone.

We treat axioms as true because it's useful to do so, yes. Often they're useful because they help us to produce surprisingly accurate models of the world that produce useful predictions. Often there are attempts to undermine them or find out what happens when some of them don't hold, just in case that produces something useful, or just out of curiosity.

I haven't read too much so far about mathematical philosophy, but Bertrand Russell at least appears to propose alternatives to Peano's axioms. Maths does produce results useful to achieving goals and which have a very high degree of consistency both internally and with what we observe. It's also quite possible that the ability to do the basics of maths - counting, adding, etc. - on which we've based all of the serious stuff are capabilities which humans have evolved to have as a survival advantage.....and so it'd be no surprise that it's almost universally believed among non-philosophers.

My argument that the creation of models of the world on the basis of evidence and testing is a process not compatible with 'believe this because an authority says so', but that humans frequently use one of the two at a time depending on which seems most appropriate to them? I don't see how the models not being perfect models causes problems for this argument. I don't claim perfect models, merely that science is the only reasonable method for advancing and assessing humanity's collective stock of them. And these models DO produce highly consistent, repeatable and accurate predictions under a very wide set of circumstances and DO perform a very great deal better than the pure logic that preceded it, and better yet than the intuitive guesses, dogma and superstitions which preceded that.

This is more likely to lead to the fundamental difference between theists and atheists: 'Given an account which is physically implausible what is the most credible explanation? That the account is inaccurate, that there's an undiscovered physical mechanism or that the physical mechanism is as we understand it but a supernatural being with a distinct identity and personality used an unspecified or unspecifiable mechanism to cause an alternative outcome'. An atheist would not consider this last explanation to be very credible.

No. Atheism is the holding of an opinion that, with a very high degree of probability, the correct answer to 'Is there a God?' is 'no'. (I don't set the bar at 100% certainty for someone to go from agnostic to atheist, nor would I not categorize a person 99% sure of Christianity as agnostic). It is no more than that. It implies nothing about a person's opinions on other subjects, or his system of morality or culture. 'Being Christian' implies a very wide set of beliefs on a very wide set of topics, from correct behaviour to factual and historical accounts. This set is very fuzzy, widely disputed, changeable and very rarely actually fully known to claimed Christians in any case. But it's certainly wide. Atheism is not wide. Being atheist implies one specific thing that I described above. It is not incompatible with believing that homosexuality is immoral, or that it is not. It is not incompatible with believing in the murder of all albinos, or with not believing that. All non-psychopathic atheists have a moral capacity, but the decisions it produces are independent of this person being atheist. (Personally I think it may be true for the religious, too - that the moral capacity of a (perhaps secret, to keep the environment constant) atheist in religious society [x] may produce the same decisions as that of a conformant member of society [x], but that the religious conformant may sometimes override the outcome at a conscious level).

My belief that humans have a moral capacity consisting of a set of emotions triggered by certain situations isn't a result of my atheism. (I also wouldn't be surprised if some animals have a simpler equivalent, but I'm not sure that there's sufficient evidence to be too sure yet). I found 'Moral Minds', quite convincing, although I appreciate that Marc Hauser has faced some accusations since then. It'd even be possible to reconcile this belief with belief in a religion which claims that god is the source of all morality. I'm not so sure it's even difficult - just postulate that god deliberately created this capacity, or the circumstances under which it evolved.

What's wrong with considering other people's suffering to be an ugly-looking chain of electrical impulses AND feeling a moral obligation to provide assistance? Humans have another 'chain of electrical impulses' (well, I assume it's more complicated, but let's stick with that) which triggers certain feelings in those circumstances which in turn influence behaviour.

We're back to the question of 'rational goals' again. I'm not at all sure that it makes sense to say that a goal - alleviating other's suffering, or ensuring your own survival for example - is 'rational'. Rationality is something you can use to achieve your goals. I don't think it can set them. Goals come from emotions. Why does there need to be something in it for me? There often is, of course, but why is this necessary to consistently be both atheist and express morally motivated behaviour?

It's very human. And Y-ians would probably say its very Y-ian.....innate human morality initialized with contemporary social parameters has been written in to the founding documents of many religions. As I said, I think that religions may have taken it on themselves to explain human morality just as they explained earthquakes and disease (though I doubt this is the only motivation, there may have been political ones as well, for example). Those document go on to be part of the social parameters fed in to the next generations moral capacity and so provide a lagging influence over it, which sometimes has to be lessened with 'careful' argument when it later conflicts with a new moral culture. (eg, consider homosexuality).

Firstly, what has this got to do with atheism? You appear to be arguing that healthcare now will cause suffering to later generations. If true, then both atheists and non-atheists have to make a moral judgement about which is best and the problem doesn't go away when the atheism goes away. Secondly, you appear to be claiming that because biologists have proposed a credible and well backed up mechanism for certain natural phenomena an atheist should believe that this mechanism is a moral good. This just doesn't follow. Believing that an explanation is good does not imply feeling that the outcome is moral, or that having a human try to influence the process is not moral. Finally, healthcare changes the environment in which the genes operate and therefore changes their ability to replicate in that environment. Healthcare does not disable natural selection of genes.

Hypocrisy occurs when a person claims that something is not morally correct whilst simultaneously doing it. Only beliefs about what is and is not moral can be a cause of hypocrisy. Atheism does not imply a belief that any particular actions are immoral - non-psychopathic atheists have those beliefs, but they are not part of atheism. Therefore atheism can't be a cause of hypocrisy.

You keep on trying to widen the definition of 'atheism' to include a set of moral beliefs. Atheism is not a system of moral beliefs. It's a single particular opinion on one question of fact.

2:228 as in this, which appears to cover a period of separation in divorce procedures? It's not obvious to me that this says that men are superior, certainly not by direct statement.

In what possible way does being 'good' at believing that there almost certainly are no gods make those points? The two things are not related. In what way would being a theist imply not recognizing that on-average physical or psychological differences between men and women exist? In what way would recognizing differences imply that atheists (alone) would place different moral (or other) value or rights on one gender?

My political and moral beliefs on this are mostly in line with current western norms. I don't accept that Christianity has any right to 'claim' this side as its own. Christians have held a wide variety of beliefs on this, and still do. Atheists probably do, too. In any case atheism is one specific thing. It's not even strictly incompatible to be atheist but accept the moral code in the bible (assuming you can extract a consistent one). There's nothing inconsistent about being atheist and believing that graven images are morally wrong. It's just not typical. Human's innate moral capacity as parameterized by the current social environment only very rarely considers graven images immoral. As a result, Christians, Muslims, Jews and atheists overwhelmingly do not avoid them.

So here we have one big point of conflict between the religious (theist and otherwise, I suspect) and non-religious. The religious in many important religions have tried to claim human morality for themselves. They've taken something innately human and said 'this is from us, only we authoritatively know how it should be, only our god/book/founder is its source and anyone outside our group is necessarily disabled as a human and can never have the same level of morality as us - beware the atheist!'. It's no wonder that atheists frequently become upset with the religious.

Atheists frequently challenge Christians with literal interpretations of the new testament because Christians have a problem, as I've already described: There's no adequate mechanism for separating biblical statements in to literal and non-literal. At an extreme a Christian could be ultimately pushed in to accepting the whole bible as non-literal, including descriptions of god, and become an atheist Christian. Probably easier to throw away the bible, though, and that's where it may lead many people.

Aiming to be moral is a non-rational process. Not rational. Not irrational. It's a goal: behave in a way which is moral. I'm not at all sure that I (or most others) have a good quality definition of 'morality', but I usually think of it as a capacity which humans have (and other species could have, at least in principle) which responds to situations in an emotional way which, in effect, categorizes actions in to obligatory, permissible or impermissible. Humans are often not aware at a conscious level of what the rules are for generating these categorizations: it's easy to give people a series of moral questions, asking for a justification after each one, only for them to have to keep on revising their justification because they realize after making their moral judgement that their justification was not compatible with it. ie, moral reasoning is a post-hoc rationalization of an immediate subconscious emotional response. Moral Minds is well worth reading.

As any politician will tell you, the goal in a debate is not to convince the person with whom you're debating. It's to convince the audience. It's not worth even hoping that your online debating partner is ever going to agree with you, and certainly not that he'll say so, but that doesn't mean you're not achieving your goal.