Gilles Tran wrote:
> Here, have a carrot.

Me, I'm hoping this turns into a regular phrase here. :)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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Warp wrote:
>   Are you saying that making fun of other people is a viable and acceptable
> solution?
>   Well, that's exactly what I don't understand. 

Some of us have already explained to you why we consider mocking 
acceptable. You reject the explanation, then ask for an explanation.

I'm not sure how to make it more clear than I already explained it.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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Darren New wrote:
> It seems utterly irrational to me that you'd reject the whole thing 
> without any reason. 

To phrase better:
It seems utterly irrational to me that one would reject the whole thing 
without any reason.

I didn't mean to imply Warp did or did not reject it.

(Note that "God said so" is a reason. An irrational one, but a reason.)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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Darren New wrote:
> It explains pretty much everything, and it's used on a daily basis 
> world-wide to make drugs and other predictions.  People have used the 
> theory of evolution to figure out where to dig for new species, given 
> the genes of (IIRC) deer and whales, finding the Missing Link between 
> the two when mammals went back into the water.

The theory of evolution doesn't even try to explain pretty much 
everything, nor does it claim to do so.  It appears to be a fairly good 
descriptor of what is occurring, but it is not static; as such you can't 
really say that at any given point it explains an arbitrary phenomenon, 
as tomorrow a new piece of evidence might require the theory to be 
altered, making the previous version no longer what's being used to do 
the explaining.

> Sure, it might be wrong, but then maybe the world really *is* flat, too, 
> and maybe there's no gravity it's just the earth sucks.

Mathematically, it is entirely possible to represent the world as being 
flat.  It's even sometimes handy.  (Maps come to mind.)  Does it make 
other calculations that are far more elegant with the earth being an 
oblate spheroid impossible, or merely more difficult and complex? 
Besides, the earth does suck.  XD

> It really doesn't make sense to say "Gee, everything we've done for the 
> last 50 years has worked flawlessly, and everything we've predicted has 
> come true. But maybe we're doing things ALL WRONG and there's some 
> COMPLETELY DIFFERENT theory that would explain every experiment and 
> observation every biologist, geneticist, doctor, and nurse has made over 
> the last 50 years, *and* includes spontaneous generation of life?"

But it is incorrect to say that everything we've done for the past 50 
years has worked flawlessly.  Mistakes are constantly being made, and 
accepted, and tested to see why they happened.  Further, it is 
absolutely necessary to include spontaneous generation of life unless 
you want to argue that life has always existed up to and including 
immediately after the supposed big bang wherein particles that we call 
real came into existence...a bit spontaneously, come to think of it. 
All the data we have indicates that things haven't been the way they are 
right now forever, therefore it had to start at some point.  Science 
attempts to answer how; religion and philosophy attempt to answer why. 
They are not mutually exclusive notions.

-- 
Tim Cook
http://home.bellsouth.net/p/PWP-empyrean

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GFA dpu- s: a?-- C++(++++) U P? L E--- W++(+++)>$
N++ o? K- w(+) O? M-(--) V? PS+(+++) PE(--) Y(--)
PGP-(--) t* 5++>+++++ X+ R* tv+ b++(+++) DI
D++(---) G(++) e*>++ h+ !r--- !y--
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

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Tim Cook wrote:
>   Science
> attempts to answer how; religion and philosophy attempt to answer why. 
> They are not mutually exclusive notions.
> 

Just one minor point of clarification:  Philosophy --in what I would 
consider to be the proper sense-- can be considered a super-set of just 
about every cognitive discipline.  It may be one of the world's biggest 
umbrellas. After all, science was born out of philosophy.

That said, philosophy is not limited to what kinds of questions it can* 
attempt to answer - e.g. not just 'why' but also 'what'.

Charles

*depending on the intent of the author

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Darren New wrote:
> So evolution has nothing to say about religion, no. They're orthogonal.

Perhaps Andrew could build a JPEG algorithm out of them then. :)

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Bill Pragnell wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> So evolution has nothing to say about religion, no. They're orthogonal.
> Perhaps Andrew could build a JPEG algorithm out of them then. :)

(twitch)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:47422be6@news.povray.org...
> Ross <rli### [at] speakeasynet> wrote:
> > Warp hates the mocking and has yet to offer a viable option to it other
than
> > "Continue to try to convince by presenting the facts." Yet this has
failed,
> > and failed, and failed. Rather than continue the insanity loop, what
should
> > one do?
>
>   Are you saying that making fun of other people is a viable and
acceptable
> solution?
>   Well, that's exactly what I don't understand. In my opinion making fun
> of people is not civilized nor acceptable. I'm not exactly sure how should
> I think of people who disagree with this. It just doesn't make sense.
>
> -- 
>                                                           - Warp

No, not at all. You are reading too much into it. I was seriously asking, to
break the deadlock of "explain with facts, reject facts, explain with facts,
reject facts, etc..." what is a viable alternative?

Post a reply to this message

In article <474af5b3$1@news.povray.org>, rli### [at] speakeasynet says...
> "Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
> news:47422be6@news.povray.org...
> > Ross <rli### [at] speakeasynet> wrote:
> > > Warp hates the mocking and has yet to offer a viable option to it oth
er
> than
> > > "Continue to try to convince by presenting the facts." Yet this has
> failed,
> > > and failed, and failed. Rather than continue the insanity loop, what
> should
> > > one do?
> >
> >   Are you saying that making fun of other people is a viable and
> acceptable
> > solution?
> >   Well, that's exactly what I don't understand. In my opinion making fu
n
> > of people is not civilized nor acceptable. I'm not exactly sure how sho
uld
> > I think of people who disagree with this. It just doesn't make sense.
> >
> > -- 
> >                                                           - Warp
> 
> No, not at all. You are reading too much into it. I was seriously asking,
 to
> break the deadlock of "explain with facts, reject facts, explain with fac
ts,
> reject facts, etc..." what is a viable alternative?
> 
Besides.. I have to wonder, what possible response can you make to 
something like this:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/11/26/thorns.jpg

Unless its either a) laughing your ass off, or b) having an brain 
aneurysm? Keeping in mind that the "logic" part of the sign is *their* 
addition, not something that got added by someone else. I mean, at least 
they are being honest, but I somehow don't think that they *intended* to 
be *that* honest about their own logic. lol That is kind of the problem 
with the current movement. Confronted by a world in which reason is 
entirely a purview of the other side of the argument, all they can 
manage is to make themselves look even more absurd with every action. 
Some people at PZ's site have lamented that its not even worth it to 
make up idiotic BS to mock them, since its impossible to come up with 
anything more insane, irrational, fantasy based and delusional than they 
do themselves, or write anything sufficiently self contradictory to mock 
them, without being committed. All you have to do is look at 
conservapedia, recognize that probably 80% of everything on there is 
***known*** to be posted as a joke by non-conservatives as a joke, and 
that neither any of the people reading it, nor its owner can tell the 
difference, which is why the articles are **still** there.

When you can't tell the difference between satire and what your 
opposition actually believes, its about time to have a good laugh at it 
all, or you might be driven to a depth of despair sufficient to throw 
yourself in front of a church bus. I really can't comprehend how you can 
be considered sane and actually think most of the stuff on 
conservapedia, let alone any place else these people post their stuff. 
Mind you, one thing Warp completely doesn't get is that these people are 
not interested in debate, valid arguments or the search for truth. If 
you post *anything* on one of their sites, and I have tried at several, 
while others have tried at many more, you will find that they either a) 
hold all comments for review, then simply don't allow contrary points to 
be seen at all, b) delete anything that they do allow to be posted, if 
it contradicts their position, and/or c) ban the people that dare to 
confront them with actual facts. The owners and their ass kissers then 
all sit around whining about how, if science where true, someone would 
show up to debate with them about the subject, but that the fact that no 
one ever does means they are right.

Their public "debates" are the same. They are formatted so that only the 
most shallow version is allowed, they usually go to lengths to have them 
in places where they are 90% sure that 95% of the people attending will 
be on their side, and then they limit the amount of time for questions, 
and stock the front rows with people that will ask the right wrong 
questions, so that no real questions or comments can be addressed, and 
so that the questions that are asked are ones based on incorrect 
perceptions, so that it would take 20 times as long to explain *why* the 
question was a bad one as it would for the creationist to give a 
standard BS answer (which of course makes the scientist look like an 
idiot, since they can't answer it in 30 seconds).

On the net they stack things 100% in their favor and ban anyone with a 
different view. In the real world they stage 90% of everything and try 
damn hard to make sure its as close to 100% on their side as possible, 
then set the whole system up in a format where its impossible to explain 
how wrong the 30+ points they babble about are, within the time frame 
allowed. And, whenever someone suggests a format that isn't stacked 
almost entirely in their favor, they refuse to be involved in it, on the 
grounds that its somehow "unfair". They refuse to play by any rules but 
their own, and get damn irritated when anyone suggests to them that the 
rules don't work, are not truly fair, or that its too complicated to 
explain why they are wrong in the time frame they allow. And that is 
entirely the point. They *intentially* frame things in Dr. Phil format, 
where everything must be solved in the 40 minutes, not including the 
commercial breaks, given, even if its so damn shallow that *real* issues 
can't be address in it. Its the equivalent of arguing that fortune 
cookies are the single most important method of future predictions ever 
invented, and telling statisticians to shut up, because no one wants to 
hear their complicated explanations. Only, since they argue that science 
it just a different kind of religion, they would probably insert 
"astrologer" in the place of statistician.

-- 
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    call functional_code()
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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"Patrick Elliott" <sel### [at] rraznet> wrote in message
news:MPG.21b4e9db800f84a798a07f@news.povray.org...

"When you can't tell the difference between satire and what your opposition
actually believes, its about time to have a good laugh at it all"

If that's not a great .sig file I don't know what is.

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