Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Dawkin's is a piss poor social scientist (Score 1, Insightful) 862

delusion: something that is falsely or delusively believed or propagated

Many parts of religious believe is not proven wrong, but unfalsifiability. Wikipedia (and Wordnet) define delusion as

A delusion is a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary.

There is no superior evidence to the contrary, just a lack of evidence.

Calling religious believers delusional is accurate, not bigotry.

No, it is just crap. There are delusional believers sure, but many believers are not delusional.

Comment Google is already censoring the auto-complete (Score 5, Interesting) 164

Google is already censoring the auto-complete, just for other reasons:

It will not suggest "adobe photoshop torrent" or "adobe photoshop crack", even though that these searches and similar searches are extremly popular. And it will not autocomplete "Rocco" to "Rocco Siffredi". So google is censoring auto-complete against piracy and against pornography, why exactly shouldn't it do the same thing to protect people against libel?

Comment Why seperate competions by gender anyway? (Score 0, Troll) 559

No matter how much I would train, I and 99.9% of the population wouldn't stand a chance at Olympia for genetic reasons. No matter if your genetics give you less than perfect endurance, reaction times or muscular strength, you will not get a medal at Olympia. People with genetics better suited for the discipline will get the medals. Nobody is going to hold a separate contest for people with less than optimal muscular strength or stuff like that. Even through white runners did not stand a chance against black runners, there is not going to be a olympia medal for the fastest non-black runner. Why should we make a difference for women? If they don't stand a chance against men, why should they get a medal?

Comment Re:Doesn't work. (Score 1) 439

You are forgetting something really important here:

In a free market with a lot of competion companies will only make small to no profits. For that reason the most efficient way of making profit is stop competion. The goverment also needs to take care that there is a working free market with a lot of competion.

Comment Re:adults living together (Score 1) 804

Not exactly. Marriage is one male and N females though, and N == 1 is a fairly common number.

Not really. A marriage is always a union between one male and one female. A polygamist doesn't marry multiple females at once, he has multiple marriages active at the same time. That is why there is no ceremony for 1 male and N females but instead N ceremonies with 1 male and 1 female. That is also the reason why it is often possible to get a divorced from just one female and divorce doesn't end the union with all the other females the polygamist has also married.

'marriage' as the union of a male and one or more females in a family unit for purposes of reproduction and inheritence

Yes. Marriage as a symbol of love is a rather new idea. Stuff like "arranged marriages" make a lot of sense with your definition of marriage but little sense if you require that marriage had something to do with love.

Comment Re:False Dichotomy (Score 1) 1226

But there are over 2 billion Christians, 100 Million people in the US is just 5% worldwide. Worldwide there are likely more christians believing Evolution is true than Atheists.

And if you look at the questions often used for "god inspired evolution" vs. "evolution" you will often see that they are phrased in a way where almost no theist could really reject them and choose the "evolution".
Even if someone is a deist who believes God created the universe and did not interact with it at all after that, then evolution must be considered as something that has only happend because God had choosen rules and starting conditions that allow evolution to work. So even a deist or pantheist can not really choose an answer like "Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process"

Comment Re:Why homosexualism but not incest? (Score 1) 426

Exactly a single gene is beneficial, two of them are not. But you can not have people with one of the them, without also having people with two sickle-cell genes.

Anyway, gay people have kids all the time. Just because you don't care to copulate with the opposite sex, doesn't mean the drive to procreate isn't there.

Sure, but they sure get a smaller number of kids than heterosexuals without modern contraception. And remember that not too long ago people were often having 8 children or so but the population still stayed almost stable. So for survival people need to have a lot of kids because only a small subset of them was actually living long enough to get own children.

Comment Re:Why homosexualism but not incest? (Score 1) 426

No, but for resistant to malaria one copy of the gene is enough, which will not cause full SCD. However single gene carriers mating with other single gene carries results in a 25% chance of double SCD gene offspring, 50% with a single gene and malaria resistance and 25% chance of offspring without a single SCD gene. So SCD gene will be beneficial to a group if malaria is large enough threat for survival, so that limited resistance for 75% offsets the dead's caused by full SCD for 25% of the children.

Comment Re:Why homosexualism but not incest? (Score 1) 426

Don't forget that during most of human history human survival was not as easy as it is now. In the past people often had a huge number of children, but still the population often did not increase because so many children died before they reached adulthood and own children. So it is not unlikely that even a birthrate that is just 20% lower would have been a real survival risk.

Comment Re:Why homosexualism but not incest? (Score 4, Insightful) 426

No. That is a too simple view of evolution and genetics. Something being common does not necessary show that something is beneficial for survival. Look at e.g.: Sickle-cell disease(SCD). Very common in Sub-Saharan Africa, but not helpful for survival. SCD happens in individuals with two copies of the gene, while one copy of the gene makes individuals more resistant to malaria. Genes can often have multiple effects, some beneficial, some not.
So it is possible that homosexuality is beneficial for survival but it could also be just a side effect of something that is actually beneficial.

There are lots of species of which a significant number are homosexual.

This is also problematic reasoning. There are also significant numbers of species(ants,...) where most individuals are infertile. But that sure does not mean that mass infertility would be beneficial for humans, too. Whether something is beneficial or not most often also depends on other traits and the environment of species.

Comment Re:Religion (Score 1) 343

Yes, but the reason they believed religion needed to be eradicated was not so much because they were atheists as that it was competition for the loyalties of the people they ruled over.

This can be said for "religious" wars. Do you know any war where the rulers reason for participation was really religion and not power gain? However claiming religious reasons has often helped getting support by the people. But this also worked for Stalin and Mao, see e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Militant_Atheists

Also I think the power gain theory is not strictly true. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 Stalin shut down the League of millitant godless, anti-religious periodicals and reopened churches to gain more support by the people. So for power gain the extremely antireligious activities were actually counterproductive and Stalin apparently knew this and continued until he felt he needed the support of religious people to not lose the war against Nazi-Germany.

For Hitler power gain as motivation behind his antichurch activities sounds more like likely. He used antireligious persecution against religious entities which he could not control, changed the protestant church to the "German Christians" and tried to appear as regular Christian in public while his private opinions were different.

Comment Re:Religion (Score 1) 343

I agree, the details of Hitlers views are hard to pin down. But I think that lumping him into a list of "atheist mass murderers" is extremely misleading.

"atheist mass murders" is misleading yes, on other hand "anticlerical mass murders" would be fine.

Aside from a few anecdotal accounts of skepticism, we have little reason to believe Hitler was not religious and many reasons (including his own statements) to believe that he was.

The question if he was religious is hard to answer because there are many very different definitions of "religious". Some people consider communism a political religion while others count only traditional religions. I think however most definitions will agree that Hitler was religious in a certain sense, calling him a roman catholic however is only formally true but very misleading imho.

These arguments are also beside the point, as there is a key difference between the three men listed above, and the religious zealots they are being compared to. The men above, whether atheist or not, did not do what they did because of atheism. They did not justify their actions by appealing to atheist teachings. Their religious beliefs can not be directly linked to their unspeakable actions. On the other hand, the abhorrent actions of the religious justified by, or taken "in defense of" their faith can.

Actually I think for Stalin and Mao this is not strictly true. They both killed a great number of priests and monks because they believed religion needs to be eradicated.

Slashdot Top Deals

A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson

Working...