You wrote:

Which implies that non-religious people do not lack those abilities. But it looks like you got over it, as you contradict that here:

I can't argue with that.

If Slashdot is any indication, most atheists lack that ability as well.

Even your post indicates that you, despite implications to the contrary, have very poor reasoning skills! It's pretty clear that the parent pointing out some very obvious facts that made you uncomfortable, and possibly a little angry. (Look at your first line, how ridiculous does it look to you now?)

Let's be honest here. You just want to feel superior to a majority class. Not only does it make you feel important, it provides you a wonderful excuse for why you're not more famous/successful/whatever: It's those darn religious people keeping superior beings like yourself down! We rationalists should rule over the ignorant masses! Things won't turn out like they did during French Revolution at all! (Those guys weren't true rationalists.)

Being an atheist obviously necessitates no additional qualities, though you irrationally refuse to accept that simple fact. You don't have a special brain, neither are you more rational or more intelligent simply because you're an atheist. Get over it and face reality.

Histories greatest scientists have been predominantly theists, you know. I'll bet you have an impressively twisted explanation to force that fact in to your comforting delusion.

Then why make the argument at all? After all, it completely undermines your point!

Why not simply explain that science is necessarily built on a set of assumptions? If you needed to, for your example, you could explain the limits of induction.

This whole thing makes it look like you personally need to justify your acceptance of the principle of the uniformity of nature (though science requires no such justification) even if that means accepting what you presumably know is faulty reasoning. (Why else would you repeat it?)

Assuming that you're perfectly sane, is it that you're just trying to avoid drawing negative attention from the scientifically illiterate "defenders of science"?

Atheism gives you no such thing! Though that's what many atheists happen to believe, the simple belief that no gods exist implies nothing about life after death.

Piling on dogmas like that is a sure-fire way to turn atheism in to a religion in its own right.

It looks like you're justifying the uniformity of nature inductively, even though induction depends on the uniformity of nature.

You've clearly read Hume, so you know this already -- and should know better!

Yes, computationalism is long dead. Now, can we stop using the term AI? Keeping the term around serves only to further confuse the general public and decision-makers both public and private. I'd go as far as to say that the continued misuse of the term is precisely what has kept the cranks and con artists in business!

How long has that joke been going over your head?

Oh, you're one of those people. Why am I not surprised?

That's why I keep the bedside clock plugged in to a UPS.

You should probably look up the term "logical fallacy".

It was a joke, in case you didn't notice. You felt the need to tell me how long you've been doing web development; which I immediately quoted. It's not an uncommon gag. It's particularly funny as you made an obviously absurd statement, to which one would assume that you were new and simply didn't know any better.

See how absurd that statement is? It's not even a tiny bit true! Rather than tell you what I presume you already knew, I made a lighthearted joke. Should I not have done that? Should I have just assumed you were a moron and explained in detail why your statement was foolish?

I should reply to them as a group? I don't even know what your expectations would be!

What's your objection anyway? You don't think that jQuery Mobile is too slow for real-world use? You really like jQuery and think that its performance problems aren't a big deal? Or is it that you just like jQuery and think everyone should ignore all the problems?

Savign a few seconds worth of typing isn't exactly a good reason to use a library! If the physically typing code is a bottle-neck in your development process, I'd love to know where you hire!

They know when an app is slow and clunky. That's why you don't use jQuery Mobile. Of course, it looks like you hate users, so I'm not surprised that you're not concerned about their experience. I'll let you work out the ethics.

You'd be the first. Well, or you just haven't noticed.

I do have objective data to support that assertion. Very simple tasks take significantly longer in jQuery vs. vanilla JS. You can find any number of performance tests online, or even test for yourself with a profiler. You do use a profiler, don't you? If not, start using one!

Surely, you're new to web development.

You were probably just doing it wrong. I dug up an old ajax project of mine from 2006 not long ago and, well, it wasn't pretty. jQuery doesn't offer any real simplicity, once you know what you're doing -- I'd even argue that (vs xhr2) the jQuery equivalent is harder to read.

Really, I haven't found a single case in recent years where jQuery has made development easier. In the few places you can make a legitimate case, you usually can't justify the extra weight and performance penalty.

You do realize all of that applies when you use jQuery as well, right?

Maybe you don't...

In the context you're trying to support the use of jQuery, it very obviously offers you no benefits what-so-ever. But you know that, right?

Well, I can't blame you for trying to make such a non-argument. It's VERY difficult to defend the use of jQuery. See, what this all boils down to is that you're comfortable with jQuery, not so comfortable with JavaScript, and already know that jQuery has long outlived any utility that it may have had in the past. You don't want to see your favorite "tool" die, so you feel the need to protect it from reality.

jQuery has promised, but never safely delivered cross-browser support. With 2.0, it gave up on that goal entirely. Besides, once you drop support for IE6, there's very little you need to do to maintain cross-browser compatibility. So little, in fact, that using jQuery actually *increases* the amount of work you need to do as you get to deal with cross-browser problems in jQuery and cross-jQuery problems with your plugins!

For some reason, you mentioned writing reusable functions as a benefit of using jQuery. Using jQuery guarantees that your code will not be reusable. Sure, you can refuse to upgrade and artificially extend the life of your code, but you'll inevitably end up maintaining multiple jQuery versions, eventually loading multiple versions of jQuery on the same page! (If you use a lot of plugins, things will go to hell even faster...)

Think I'm joking? It's such a common problem that jQuery includes features to help you cope with it's instability (see: noConflict). There are a host of tools (like jQuery Quarantine) to help you manage the hell that you created because you swallowed a load of nonsense about a crummy library back in 2006. Er, sorry, read that as "thought you could save some time by using a popular library."

That's just absurd. jQuery primarily consists of functions that are common across browsers, wrapped in an incredibly inefficient library. It's primary (and only useful) feature was its selector engine, but that hasn't been an advantage for a very long time now. Once you learn more about JavaScript and the DOM, you'll realize how little jQuery actually offers you.

This is all off-topic. My original point was that jQuery Mobile is best avoided as it's too slow. (No surprise, no one is willing to defend THAT mess!) This turned in to "defend jQuery against the unbelievers!" thread, which I'm rapidly losing interest in.

Looks like it takes the same amount of code to me. Also, the pure JS version is significantly faster as you can see from any one of several tests online.

Let's not forget about maintenance. The unreadable mess that jQuery forces you to write (to try to compensate for its absurdly poor performance) coupled with the ever-shifting API dramatically increases maintenance costs.

Your users care. They care a lot. The host of slow laggy UI's and the associated user complaints are a strong testament to this. The "computers are getting super fast" line has always been the cry of lazy and incompetent developers. Don't fall in to that trap!

That's why you should AVOID jQuery! You get a massive performance boost simply by avoiding it! You waste tons of time and effort already trying to get acceptable performance out of jQuery -- which ultimately leaves you with slower, less readable, and less reliable code in the end.

In short: Cutting out jQuery will ultimately save you development time, improve the overall quality of your code, and significantly improve performance. Why would you even bother with jQuery in the first place?

Dear God, yes. Why is that so damn difficult?