Geocentrists Convene To Discuss How Galileo Was Wrong 1027
rollcall writes "'Galileo Was Wrong' is an inaugural conference to discuss the 'detailed and comprehensive treatment of the scientific evidence supporting Geocentrism, the academic belief that the Earth is immobile in the center of the universe.' The geocentrists argue that 'Scientific evidence available to us within the last 100 years that was not available during Galileo's confrontation shows that the [Catholic] Church's position on the immobility of the Earth is not only scientifically supportable, but it is the most stable model of the universe and the one which best answers all the evidence we see in the cosmos.' I, like many of you, am scratching my head wondering how people still think this way. Unfortunately, there is still a significant minority of Western people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe: 18% of Americans, 16% of Germans, and 19% of Britons."
I hope there is live blogging from the conference.
Doesn't really matter... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, there is still a significant minority of Western people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe: 18% of Americans, 16% of Germans, and 19% of Britons."
If your mechanic thinks that "The Little Mermaid" was a Shakespearean drama, that really doesn't affect his ability to fix your car. Same with this.
Doesn't the Bible say so? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now if you take the Bible as the literal truth, as so many do, this is to be expected.
Relativity Says It can be. (Score:4, Insightful)
In the rest frame of the Earth the entire universe revolves around it.
Website Design for Crazy People (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:5, Insightful)
Evidence (Score:4, Insightful)
90% of the world believes in God(s), and there's nothing but imaginary evidence for that, too.
But by all means mock the fringe dimwits who don't actually negatively impact society.
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Relativity Says It can be. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't the Bible say so? (Score:5, Insightful)
No you don't, because the earth is a non-inertial frame.
Re:Haha you got me (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Relativity Says It can be. (Score:1, Insightful)
No it doesn't. The Earth is rotating and this may be demonstrated by experiment, ergo it cannot be said to be at rest. You can argue that one inertial frame of reference is as good as any other, but the Earth is not an inertial frame.
Sure can treat Earth as a rest frame it just makes the math harder.
It's really a moot question (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no preferred point of reference, so you could just as well say that the Sun revolves around the Earth as vice versa. It's not like the Sun is a fixed immovable point around which everything revolves either, at least once you get beyond the solar system. Nor is there any other single fixed immovable point. You can pick any fixed immovable point you like and construct a model to match it. (The big problem with a geocentric model is retrograde motion--that is, the planets appear to go backwards from time to time.) The thing is that it's a lot simpler to look at it from the point of view that that the Earth goes around the Sun--both conceptually and mathematically, which is why astronomers do so when they are looking at the solar system. But it is possible to construct a description of the universe in which the opposite is true that is consistent, just damned inconvenient and not very useful.
So, in that limited since, Aristotle was as right as Galileo. Galileo just happens to be more useful.
Re:Doesn't the Bible say so? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not looked at General Relativity much, I see...
Re:Relativity Says It can be. (Score:1, Insightful)
But earth is not in a rest frame, since it is both spinning around the sun and spinning around its axis. The Coriolis effect is proof that we don't live in an inertial frame.
You can define a rest frame however you want. That doesn't mean that the lays of Physics are invariant in them.
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:5, Insightful)
...And assuming that they aren't working in astronomy, there really is no loss.
"No loss?" What a monstrously stupid statement.
This kind of ignorance may be "no loss" to society until it becomes widespread enough to perpetuate itself... which is exactly what happens when these people vote. Then, we'll end up having to "teach the controversy" of heliocentrism in the schools.
Have you ever seen Idiocracy?
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, truly religion is the root of all ignorance, and -- thanks to its staunch atheism -- Soviet Russia was a scientific paradise [wikipedia.org].
Oh, wait ...
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:3, Insightful)
How would a tiny government protect its citizens if they did whatever they wanted?
Re:Evidence (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's far fewer than 90% actually "believe" in deities, rather a good chunk of them profess belief in deities - that is, they say that they do to fit in.
When pressed on the details of their beliefs, I think that only a few people will actually say that yes, they truly believe in transubstantiation (after that
term is defined for them, after all I've talked with a lot of people who claim to be catholic who have no idea what that meant), or that jesus was of virgin birth, or any other number of ridiculous notions in any of the current day mythology texts.
Not surprisingly, people get quite defensive when you do actually ask them about this stuff - and often resort to the "well, a lot of it is just stories, but I do believe in the CORE stuff" response, leaving to question what is actually core to a mythology. Dan Dennett wrote a great book about this stuff, Breaking the Spell, worth the read!
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:1, Insightful)
With true self-government comes true freedoms of people to believe whatever delusion they wish without interfering with the rest of us.
Re:It's really a moot question (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's really a moot question (Score:4, Insightful)
Furthermore, the question isn't "are we at the center of solar system" The question here is "are we at the center of the Universe", and the scientific answer to that is an emphatic yes.
Case in point: red shifts of far-away supernovas (so-called "standard candle") show that every astronomical objects are moving away from us, as if we were in the center of the universe.
Perhaps I should clarify this point by saying, yes, we are moving relative to the rest frame of the Universe (i.e. the inertial frame where cosmic microwave background radiation is isotropic, not red-shifted one way blue-shifted another), but not very fast. And yes, every observer in the inertial frame of the Universe will see himself at the center of the Universe, but so what—we still see ourselves at the center of the Universe and that's what counts.
Re:In "believe anything written down" land (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow. I've heard of stretching things a bit, but most of these are completely ridiculous interpretations of similes, metaphors, and other language patters.
It's like if I wrote down "I have told you innumerable times that the Earth is round" and some idiot 3000 years later assumes I truly spent most of my waking days saying "the Earth is round."
Amazing.
Re:It's really a moot question (Score:3, Insightful)
Does the universe have a center of gravity?
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:3, Insightful)
The only way your dream government could ever come into being AND survive over the long term is if all the citizens living in it were genetically engineered to be incredibly anal, detail oriented and highly intellectual.
Thats not the current populace of earth.
Re:It's really a moot question (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, no. It was possible to construct an earth-centered model that matched the data available in the 1600s. Today we have radar-ranging that can tell you exactly where the planets are located and how they are moving within a few hundred kilometers or better. The planets move around the sun. There's also the whole thing that a sun-centered model is based on universal laws of physics, while earth-centered models were constructed just to describe the motion of heavenly bodies and had no universality.
More generally, there are preferred reference frames. They're called inertial frames.
Please mod this guy into oblivion.
18% Americans are geo-centrists? (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect that 18% are just incredibly daft, and can be led into answering a question such that they appear to support geocentrism.
"Do you think the Earth is the center of the universe?"
"Uh, yes?"
"Might the Sun not be center of the universe?"
"Uh, oh yeah, sure, yes."
Re:It's really a moot question (Score:4, Insightful)
So, in that limited since, Aristotle was as right as Galileo. Galileo just happens to be more useful.
Science is not about figuring out what's "right". That is, in fact, the domain of religion. Science is about creating a model that's useful.
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Atheism" is about the belief in god(s), which is not necessarily a required component of a religion. If Buddhism (which is neutral on the topic of gods) and Scientology (which believes in alien clams that build DC-10s inside volcanoes, or something) qualify as religions, I don't see why Soviet "Communism" doesn't.
Of course, by this interpretation, the Communists (or "Communists", since the USSR had few actual Communists) didn't purge "all the morons^religious nuts." They merely purged the heretics.
Re:Website Design for Crazy People (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In "believe anything written down" land (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In "believe anything written down" land (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or...maybe things won't be all nice and peachy like that.
Doing away with social security? Seriously? Investing and saving wisely does nothing for you when the financial system collapses.
Let me know when the private space industry has a space station that they're sending people to on a regular basis.
You basically did nothing to support your statement about education. I could just as easily say education would be less productive and more inefficient using private schools. (This "efficiency" factor you're talking about: is it efficient in a purely profit-driven sense, or efficient for the public good?)
Excessive taxation is the only thing keeping us from donating more to charities? Most people won't give a shit, and besides, there's no organized effort among *all* charities to take political action against a political problem. Let me know when the Labor Movement will be handed to us by charities...
Speaking of which, protecting citizens from force and prosecuting lawbreakers I can understand, but contract enforcement? Why would you possibly want government to enforce contracts between two private organizations? I thought they would have figured it out between themselves with their whole "self-governance" thing. Oh, maybe it's because you want contracts to be law? I've seen enough shitty EULAs in my life to be glad that isn't the case.
You're right, it isn't anarchy. It sounds more like a corporatist police state.
Re:Doesn't the Bible say so? (Score:1, Insightful)
To expand a little more though, Job referred to the Earth as "hanging upon nothing." (Job 26:7).
This is what I hate about people quoting scripture to support their arguments. You take one sentence that makes it seem like observations which "agree with astronomy" or modern science, or whatever. But you just ignore the ones that don't. In this case, you go right on ahead quoting Job 26:7, but there's a reason you did not continue on with 26:8, isn't there? Allow me to demonstrate:
7. He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.
8. He bindeth up the waters in his thick clouds; and the cloud is not rent under them.
Apparently water is bounded by clouds which miraculously don't burst under the weight. This is clearly saying the material that makes up clouds is separate from the water, and is in fact merely "holding" water. Does that agree with modern science?
For Isaiah 40:22, you didn't even bother quoting the entire thing. You argue that it means either circle or sphere, but if you actually quote the passage, the context is clearly that of a flat circle:
22. It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.
He spreads the heavens as a tent under which the inhabitants dwell in. Clearly they thought of the horizon as a physical thing where the heavens touched the ground, same as tent walls. Does that agree with astronomy?
You can tell me that I'm interpreting this incorrectly if you want, but even if I were to agree that your interpretations are as valid as mine, any text that can be interpreted in such diametrically opposed ways is completely worthless, because it doesn't tell you anything, it merely allows you to read into it whatever you wish it to say.
Re:Haha you got me (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:5, Insightful)
That seems a bit short-sighted.
One of the nice things about knowing things like that is that you can derive other things from them. For instance, from knowing the motions of the planets a sufficiently clever person would be able to figure out moon phases, eclipses, seasons, the position of the sun in the sky on a given day and the times of sunrise and sunset. I don't think it's very hard to imagine those being used in a Sherlock Holmes story.
A bit of knowledge can go a long way. If you have a good starting point you don't necessarily need to keep volumes of related things in your head. All you need to know is enough to know where to look for the rest.
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:3, Insightful)
Doing away with social security? Seriously? Investing and saving wisely does nothing for you when the financial system collapses.
With the reduction of government interference in the economy comes a return to sound money and sound investments. The elimination of inflation-building, unstable fiat currencies. The elimination of government support to banks in the form of the federal reserve means an end to silly, fraudulent practices like fractional reserve banking, thus making banks secure and stable.
Let me know when the private space industry has a space station that they're sending people to on a regular basis.
That hasn't happened yet because of the government. Due to restrictions put in place by the government, private corporations can't receive the research they paid for by taxes. Due to other restrictions they can't collaborate internationally on space research. Once those restrictions are eliminated, you will see private spaceflight take off. Its pointless to say that something can't happen when the conditions I said needed it to happen haven't been fulfilled yet.
You basically did nothing to support your statement about education. I could just as easily say education would be less productive and more inefficient using private schools. (This "efficiency" factor you're talking about: is it efficient in a purely profit-driven sense, or efficient for the public good?)
Profit is good for the public good. If someone who graduated from a private institution gets a job, that helps the public good because he is contributing something to society, which in turn helps the private institution because it gets them recognized and they got the money from that one person. On the other hand, a private institution detrimental to the public good by offering crap educational classes wouldn't be profitable because soon no one would enroll there.
Let me know when the Labor Movement will be handed to us by charities.
The labor movement is pointless if this comes to place because corporations will be forced to compete for the best working conditions because there is no status quo that is "good enough" and due to the lowered bar to form your own corporation, workers are free to form their own jobs if they don't like how they are treated.
Because of things like OSHA, businesses don't compete on working conditions beyond a certain threshold because workers have been trained to accept the standards of OSHA as "good enough" rather than striving to get better conditions. When businesses compete, the average person wins. When businesses have government enforcement to say that things are "good enough", the common person loses.
Speaking of which, protecting citizens from force and prosecuting lawbreakers I can understand, but contract enforcement? Why would you possibly want government to enforce contracts between two private organizations? I thought they would have figured it out between themselves with their whole "self-governance" thing. Oh, maybe it's because you want contracts to be law? I've seen enough shitty EULAs in my life to be glad that isn't the case.
Ok, so you want no contract enforcement? How the hell do you think that you get a paycheck? You have a contract, you work a certain number of hours and the business will pay you a certain amount of money. Do you really want the business to say, "Fuck you, we don't feel like paying you today for the hours you've worked"? Because that is what contract enforcement is all about, if the business says that they don't want to pay you, you sue them in court then the government forces them to pay you damages. Contracts are -everywhere- and you need them to be enforced by the government. As for EULAs, "IP" is not property, property has two characteristics, alienability and transferability, neither of which "IP" has. Our idea of property is only created out of the idea of sc
Re:Spurious survey results? (Score:4, Insightful)
But isn't 'yes' the correct answer anyway? Or at least the centre of the visible universe since you can only see as far as light could travel since the Big Bang and that distance is the same in all directions from whatever point you happen to be observing from...
What the crazies are pushing and deliberately confusing the truth with is that everything in the universe orbits the earth which is just wako...
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In "believe anything written down" land (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be insightful, except for the fact that there are a large number of people who "blatantly ignore context and treat obvious similes and metaphors as literal statements of fact" in other parts of the bible as well.
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:3, Insightful)
Least of all our representatives. You'd think there would at least be a literacy test for them, but no. Any idiot can be voted into office where they can then make brilliant statements like "We have to pass this bill to find out what's in it."
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd like a morality test for voters instead. Anyone who thinks that he knows what is in another man's best interest because that other man lacks some skill or talent, and therefore would deny him suffrage, hasn't understood what democracy is about and should be publicly shamed for his depravity and asked to stay home at election day.
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry dude, you should try to do some economics 101 at some point. Maybe start with Adam Smith and not Ayn Rand.
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this an accurate description of your opinion?
Atheism: not a religion.
Being an atheist who argues on forums who argues that it is immoral and/or illogical to believe in god and does this, that, and the other thing (fill it in as you will): religion.
Re:Doesn't the Bible say so? (Score:2, Insightful)
B) A tent is an object that frames an area. In like manner, a curtain is also an object that frames an area, especially in those days where they might literally frame rooms with ceiling to floor curtains. In the case of the passage, the earth is the object, and the heavens (or the atmosphere) frame it.
And I'm not going to be one of those Theologians that demands you agree with me. I'm simply presenting the information as I understand it, and you are free to do with it what you will.
Re:Evidence (Score:3, Insightful)
God's an AC. That explains a lot.
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:3, Insightful)
If we are going to get rid of our massive government we need to get rid of corporations and liability mitigation schemes.
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:5, Insightful)
"A corporation that screws their employees in a free society soon has no employees to work for them, so the company dies. A corporation that is unethical soon has no customers so it dies. Unlike governments, corporations must work to the will of the people or else die. "
Blatantly false. Corporations have common interests with their competitors. It is more profitable to collaborate with a small number of competitors than to have true competition and try to win out. One of the things they collaborate on is working conditions. You can't quit and go somewhere else because everywhere else does the same thing. Corporations have areas where they can compete now for employee attention, areas like invasive drug testing. Good luck quitting and causing the corporation to die because of drug testing.
What you are describing is not individual anarchy, you want individuals policed. But it is corporate and financial anarchy. It doesn't work to allow individuals to do what they want because the bad will they earn will not bring them in line. The same is true of corporate and financial anarchy.
Your system fails because right is not on the side of he with the most financial leverage. An employer always has the upper hand over an employee because the employee has only one job and employer has many employees. If an employee quits an employer simply replaces him because they structured things to handle the loss of employees but if the employee quits he may well starve.
The entire reason we form government in the first place is to more evenly distribute power. We have police because collectively the weak are stronger than the brute and with our police we equalize the brute to make everyone equally strong. The same is true of the financially strong, we must equalize their strength vs that of poor so the poor are not subject to wishes of the rich. Your idea of a weak government fails to protect the poor from the rich. Perhaps because you are rich yourself or hope to be or maybe you are poor and stupid and bought the rich mans line.
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not an american nor I ever set foot in it but even I know that you grossly failed to provide an accurate quote of that statement. I don't know if you did that intentionally in order to try to deceive anyone or if you just so happen to be just an ignorant fool that had enough memory to write that quote without checking it first. Either way, here is the correct quote:
from Pelosi Remarks at the 2010 Legislative Conference for National Association of Counties [speaker.gov]
If you just happened not to get that quote, the meaning behind what your Speaker said was that the american people would only be able to trully understand what that bill meant when all the "fog of the controversy", which is a reference to all the FUD and propaganda which was thrown at the bill, subsided. That statement does not, by no mean, means "you only get to see the rules after we implement it". It means "there was so much crap thrown at it that you will only be able to view it objectively after it passes, after the FUD attacks have ceassed".
Re:It's really a moot question (Score:3, Insightful)
More generally, there are preferred reference frames. They're called inertial frames.
Preferred by whom. That is a rhetorical question. Not every definition of "centre" or even "preferred centre" actually cares about astronomers. From a philosophical perspective, it is perfectly reasonable to describe yourself as the centre of the universe -- because you yourself can observe the universe directly from no other point (you can of course observe it indirectly from other points, but your direct observation -- your eyes and ears -- remain firmly attached to your own head). Accordingly, the self-centric universe is a model of the universe that you probably use cognitively every day in one way or another. And yes it can theoretically be modelled mathematically.
Re:Evidence (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree in spirit with the parent and grand parent of this post, but I think we can all agree it'll never happen - the state will (and maybe shouldn't?) interfere at that level of parenting. Instead, I think society should ensure that there is sufficient counter balance, in the way of increase education on all religions. This is something Dawkins advocates. No Bible in the school? That won't help -- instead, get kids to read the bible (old and new), the koran, and a host of other mythological texts. Have the child see that there are multitudes of these myths, and not only are they contradictory with each other, but are self-contradictory in and of themselves.
The only cure for this virus is more information.
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair enough, but then I don't see why atheism (as practiced in OT discussions on countless bulletin boards, if you prefer) shouldn't qualify as a "religion" as well.
Religion [google.com]: a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny
Atheism [google.com]: a lack of belief in the existence of God or gods
These are contradictory - you can't believe in gods and at the same time lack belief in gods. Hence atheism is not a religion.
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:4, Insightful)
"No, because then what happens is a new company needs to recruit people so they have better working conditions, etc"
There are no shortage of people willing to work with the same working conditions. There is no need for this competition so it won't happen.
"Trusts only work with government assistance."
Trusts? I was talking about collusion. It's illegal but happens both in spoken and unspoken fashion on a daily basis. The kind of competition you are talking about breaking these agreements is expensive and reduces profits. It is much more profitable to invest in the group of companies that collude with only token competition and have a rigged and controlled market than to invest in a new company that is constantly burning on tight margins in stiff competition.
"The "rich" don't magically have some sort of power because they have wealth."
Wealth is power. Wealth is leverage and has a momentum all its own. If you make furniture and a billionaire asks you to make a piece and hints there might be more commissions to come you give the job top priority, put your top craftsman on the piece and give him the lowest price you can sustain. If a poor man who saved for months comes in he pays full price and will get the piece when you get around to it.
Wealth also acts as a buffer. A wealthy man can afford to keep his investments until they are mature. A poor man must sell his goods at the first opportunity and hope for the best price because his family will starve if he holds the goods.
"If I didn't want my job, I'd say screw it and move on to another job or start my own company, both of which, barring the government fucking those up, would be very easy to do."
I wouldn't. I've owned my own company and it isn't an easy thing to do. There aren't really any governmental barriers the barriers are the far more wealthy companies that get prices because of their sheer size and thus can undercut your prices. Not to mention the brand power they bring to the table. As for the other job, the young and stupid quit their job and hop to another they do this until they realize that there really isn't a great deal of difference from one to the next.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of modern science is the result of hundreds of years of research by people who were religious to some extent.
Yes, because people had less of an understanding back in the day of how stuff actually works. Being religious was also compulsory in those days. Bach, one of my favorite composers, glorified god in his music while he was fooling around with maidens in wine cellars and beating up his musicians in street fights.
Anyway, back to your point. Religion is stifling "modern science" rather than advancing it forward. We all know what happened to Persia after Islam, and about Europe in the dark ages, etc. I think it's safe to say that the world as a whole would be much more advanced if magical thinking was abolished somewhere in its history.
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:3, Insightful)
Religion: a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny
Atheism: a lack of belief in the existence of God or gods
These are contradictory - you can't believe in gods and at the same time lack belief in gods. Hence atheism is not a religion.
While I would not argue that atheism is a religion, the point the GP(...P) made about certain religions not believing in a god or multiple gods results in your definition of Atheism not being exclusive of religion.
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't the Bible say so? (Score:5, Insightful)
The essence of General Relativity is that a non-inertial (accelerating) frame of reference is identical to an inertial frame of reference within a gravitational field--curved paths in Euclidean space become straight paths in gravity-warped space.
No. What gravitational field would explain the rotation of an object on the Equator? You can treat the paths of freely falling objects as geodesics in curved space time (within limits), but you cannot treat objects traveling along nongeodesics as freely falling.
If one treated a point on the Equator as an inertial reference frame, then many stars would be travelling at superluminal speeds with respect to that reference frame.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:4, Insightful)
That is simply not true.
Of course, religion did play a big part throughout history, and it even helped human kind advance a very long time ago. But saying that religion helped man get organized, leave by a certain set of rules, and develop the wheel millions of years ago is one thing, and saying that it still does that today is just plain stupid. Religion has been nothing but our biggest problem for at least 3000 years.
Remember, even in the golden days of Greece, religion was already trying to murder science.
And, really, why am I supposed to treat religion different from other mental diseases?
You wouldn't dare take seriously a scientists that was also an astrologist, or one that claimed aliens visited him daily ... then why do we accept those that believe in that creepy guy in the sky? It's certainly just as crazy as all those guys that keep their head wrapped in tinfoil to prevent the government from controlling their minds, and we love to lock those away at mental institutions. Instead, we grant tax exceptions to those that believe in the crazy guy in the sky. But beware, the rule of thumb is: if your guy in the sky is green and lives in a starship, you get locked away. If your guy in the sky has a badass beard and a jewish son, you get a tax exception. Just remember that, it might come in handy if you ever choose to become schizophrenic.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)
But saying that religion helped man get organized, leave by a certain set of rules, and develop the wheel millions of years ago is one thing, and saying that it still does that today is just plain stupid.
Actually, they're both equally stupid, which is why I didn't say either of those things. RTFP.
You wouldn't dare take seriously a scientists that was also an astrologist, or one that claimed aliens visited him daily
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton's_occult_studies [wikipedia.org]
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)
And, really, why am I supposed to treat religion different from other mental diseases?
Because it is not.
My mother is very religious. She attends mass every Sunday, she's a roman catholic so she believes in God, Jesus, Virgin Mary, the apostles and the saints. Yet she doesn't believe the Sun goes around the Earth, or that the Earth is the center of the Universe, or that we actually came from Adam and Eve. She's a smart, balanced, and certainly not mental diseased person. I think what you should consider a mental disease is fanaticism. Over anything. Specially religion. That's what really distortion reality for some.
Re:Relativity Says It can be. (Score:3, Insightful)
The earth's geodetic and frame-dragging effects are far too small to geometrize away the acceleration of an object on the earth's Equator.
"E si pur mouve" - true. More so in light of the above experiment - even if Galileo never said it ;)
I thought Bruno said it.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:4, Insightful)
How is believing in two inconsistent theories of the universe view not the sign of a mental illness?
If you believe that somehow your deity is not affected by the laws of formal logic, but simultaneously believe in science, which is based on the faith (for it is faith) that underlying all things is a universal set of rules which can be expressed using math, you are believing things which cannot simultaneously be. You are then forced to train yourself in doublethink -- and people do that: they terrify me. Basically forcing yourself to be schizophrenic is not a sane attitude. That is "being religious".
Now some are more honest, they just don't want to think about it, and will become angry when pointed out that their view of the Universe is absurd. This is infuriating, but not the sign of mental imbalance. These people may think of themselves as religious, but they will probably become either non-believers or religious depending on what people around them pretend to think.
Fanaticism, to me, is not a mental illness. It is just people who have picked the religious view of the Universe and stuck with it. They are logical and consistent. This is why religion is in essence dangerous: because if you are just religious, you are trained in doublethink, and if you are really consistent, your are a fanatic.
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:2, Insightful)
"Atheism" is about the belief in god(s), which is not necessarily a required component of a religion. If Buddhism (which is neutral on the topic of gods) and Scientology (which believes in alien clams that build DC-10s inside volcanoes, or something) qualify as religions, I don't see why Soviet "Communism" doesn't.
Of course, by this interpretation, the Communists (or "Communists", since the USSR had few actual Communists) didn't purge "all the morons^religious nuts." They merely purged the heretics.
WTF am I reading?
Insightful, Hardly....
Atheism is an absence of faith, not another type of religious belief. FULL STOP!
In Sam Harris's words:
"We do not have a need to invent words for people who are non-astrologers, or people who don't believe Elvis is still alive and living in the Mid-West."
I cannot comprehend how the US has a religious majority, as Western Europe does not,taking into account we have both availed ourselves of the scientific discoveries (You know, testable theories, not faith based ideas) of the last 500 years.
Re:Correction... (Score:4, Insightful)
I know when people ask me questions in a survey, there comes a point in time when I begin to get bored, and another point in time very near to that when I begin to answer questions either randomly or in an intentionally absurd manner just so I can get some revenge over having them waste my time. If the writers of the survey know something about how to incur that attitude hey could be intentionally skewing the results by placing the questions in the portion of the survey guaranteed to have the most people answering randomly. Then again, maybe I should just not take surveys...
Re:Website Design for Crazy People (Score:3, Insightful)
It is indicative of those people's ability and willingness to learn. They find one way, or are taught one way to do something, or to believe something, and it never changes.
Re:Next up on slashdot: (Score:3, Insightful)
Technically true as Man will never fly until we build large enough habitats on the moon and start genetically engineering people to have wings. Bat wings would probably be easier than bird wings.
Re:Relativity Says It can be. (Score:2, Insightful)
Incorrect. It's impossible to prove conclusively that the Earth is moving, only that the earth is moving relative to other things. The fact that the Coriolis force is explained better by fluid dynamics of the Earth "stirring" the atmosphere makes it extremely probable that the earth is moving. The theory that the atmosphere is rotating around the earth is more complicated and less consistent than the one where the earth is rotating within the atmosphere, so we choose the latter to be "right".
A Geocentric model also requires that the moons of Jupiter follow ridiculous spirograph tracks so that they can orbit Earth, instead of orbiting Jupiter which orbits the Sun along with Earth. This isn't wrong so much as it's much less elegant than universal gravitation, and it requires that each celestial body follow it's own unique set of physical laws which makes your knowledge of how Io orbits earth useless in predicting how Planet X orbits earth.
Geocentrism isn't wrong in the same way phlogiston (which ended up requiring some matter to have negative mass) is wrong. It's more complicated, less predictive, and less consistent with labratory-scale tests. But this doesn't make it lying, it's "wrong" in the sense of walking around with backpacks full of 5.25" floppies and claiming the Floppycentric theory of data transfer is superior to USB flash drives because they have decided "my God says so" is a more compelling argument for use than "this method is simpler, easier, and more useful". Where the lying comes in (and people don't even know they're lying) is the same place where the lying for Intelligent Design comes in: when people claim that their position has no religious component.
While I seriously doubt that the universe revolves around the Earth (and think that the people attending this conference are religious nutjobs), it's important not to instantly dismiss any Scientific claim just because it sounds like a longstanding crackpot idea. The Curies encountered significant resistance to their work because the idea of one element turning into another was dismissed as claims of Alchemy. Mendeleev actually had to visit the Curies and declare their work legit before their work became mainstream.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Next up on slashdot: (Score:5, Insightful)
That is actually the closest I have seen to a sensible response to this. Slashdot needs a way of marking stories "flamebait".
Follow the links throught to Robert Sungenis's site. He is a complete nut case. He is a creationist, probably anti-semitic,conspiracy theorist. The "news alert" links on the front page of one of his sites include one to a site that claims that the Vatican has been infiltrated by "satanic cults".
Why is this even worth discussing?
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean the dark ages where fear of heresy stifled secular innovation, or the dark ages where the core of hellenic, roman and islamic learning was preserver in monasteries while the kernels of the renaissance and the core of modern thinking and the scientific method was born between the rabbinical, islamic and christian scholars of the convivencia,?
By your tone, I'm not so sure 'we all know what happened to Europe in the dark ages' - one thing I know is that the foundations of *non-magical thinking* were preserved by the clerical population, not the secular one. Any reasoned study of the Inquisition (the catholic institution, not the spanish one under secular authorities) would be a good exposition of how the simplistic is the idea that removing religious authority out of the picture would suddenly make intellectual advancement flourish.
I say this not as a 'believer' but as someone who divorced himself from a religious tradition for very similar naive intellectual pride - only to rediscover later that much of the scientific and philosophical heritage that I so prized was due to the intellectual traditions that were preserved, cultivated and brought unto the world by brilliant scholars from religious traditions and dispositions.
You can disagree with them all you want (for what's it's worth, I do), but if you feel "it's safe to say the world as a whole would be more advanced" if they had not been there, I'd have to say you have a poor understanding of history.
Re:BS (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe I'm criticizing where I need not to, so if this wasn't your in-built bias leaking through, and I just read you the wrong way... my apologies.
That aside:
hey asshole! Nice biases there!
You can safely assume that most truly rural folks -- you know, the farmers who depend on accurate predictions governing the sun and weather -- know a heck of a lot more about what the sun and earth do relative to each other than their urbanite counterparts -- who's knowledge of the cosmos is typically limited to how fashionably their scarves revolve around their fashionably-stubbled necks.
You will find stupid people wherever you find failure. Not just in rural places, not just in urban places, not attached to any race or age or nationality or anything else.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)
Very good. Thank you.
More people should take a longer and more precise view of history, such as yours.People should realize that religion and science are two sides of the same nature, our inquisitive mind, which evolved along with millions of neocortical columns relatively quickly such that we became able to ask such questions as "What the fuck is that?" and "Why am I here?" The same impulse that drives science drives religion . That doesn't make science and religion equivalent as modes of explanation, but it does connect them.
Religion may seem like a silly vestige of prehistorical and ancient mythologizing. It may seem like a leftover piece of our brains that we should have learned to think around by now. But science is no less hardwired into our brains than religion. It's all about explaining experience. Some of us do it more with our left hemisphere than our right hemisphere, and situations where it's not lateralized so neatly blur the line between complete and incomplete explanations even more.
Re:Catholics and Vatican do real science ... (Score:3, Insightful)
The Catholic leadership is pretty good about astrophysics and evolution;
they're just lousy about anything relating to sex.
Re:Website Design for Crazy People (Score:3, Insightful)
I'M BLIND!
Seriously, that site amazes me on multiple levels. Did you see this at the bottom?
Best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Forget all the other browsers and down with the Web 2.0 net police.
It's as though they can't shut off their irrationally idiocentric attitude in any facet of life.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)
Religion is not stifling science. Idiots are. It just so happens that some (maybe even many) of them happen to also be religious.
Actually, no. I don't think even the idiots are because science is still advancing faster than they can attack it. I mean, more than 80% of people know better. Assertions to the contrary aside, I am not of the belief that we need to worry about the remaining ones.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that large majorities of people are wrong about universal facts all the freaking time. Sheer numbers don't make a valid source of experimental validity, unless their claims are based in evidence. Mass faith is still faith. Nothing against it, but atheism doesn't stop being rational just because most people aren't atheists.
You do remember that this article started with a discussion of geocentrism, right?
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think it's as inconsistant or 'scary' as you think.
I believe in God, and I also believe in his work (science). My experiences and my heart have lead me to my beliefs. When I reflect on what's important in my life, I don't really pay much attention to things I can measure or quantify with numbers - science has it's place, but science itself doesn't even attempt to make any guess as to how 'science' came to be in the first place.
That's not to say I don't enjoy looking at the numbers we do have - I think God would definitely like us exploring how the universe works; physics has always been a passion of mine. But I've felt God's presence many times, and feel I have a close relationship. You may call me schizophrenic for that - and I can understand that, if you are only considering what you can measure. To me, that sounds a little incomplete - considering the nature of human life.
People just don't like to look inward very much - drawing the conclusion that what we can measure is somehow enough evidence to make staments about things we cannot measure.
Maybe I have a chemical imbalance in my brain that is causing me to feel connected to God. Maybe everyone who believes in God has this same imbalance. Or maybe the imbalance is found in non-believers?
Disclaimer:I do believe 'religion' is the cause of untold amounts of suffering. Religion is not God - religion is a (mostly)corrupt human ordeal.
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, that's a problem that you have to personally deal with, which is called functional illiteracy.
Re:Evidence (Score:1, Insightful)
the original Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation [...] claims, if you read a translation of the original doctrine, that the bread retains the aspect (ie, physical properties) of bread, but is transformed in essence (ie, spiritual properties) as Christ.
So, basically you're saying, that while it is physically impossible for the bread to transform (in composition) into human flesh, it is actually possible for the bread to gain a soul? And you claim that the latter is a less wackier interpretation?
Nowadays, it is perfectly possible for substances to assume a different texture. A microwave oven can turn even the crispiest cake/dough into a mushy goo, while vegetarian product are marketed "with real chicken flavours (TM)". But please, don't let the vegan activists know that even wheat and vegetables might have a soul.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think your view on atheist is completely wrong. I would love for their to be a god. More importantly, I'd love for there to be a loving, kind, forgiving god who cares about it's subjects.
I am an atheist because I refuse to spend my time on something that can not be proven, has no quantifiable useful value to me, and is championed but a bunch of men who for the most part are no better then psychics who claim to speak to the dead. There is no compelling evidence that would require me to take this more seriously then I do santa claus or those christian leaders telling every generation that their generation is the 'end times'.
I also came to my conclusions at a young age. I was punished for them. I was raised catholic, but allowed to read. I read all about mythology because I loved the stories. Eventually it dawned on me that if all those gods were not real and thousands (probably millions) believed in them, then it stood to reason that my god was just another story and that one day people would read the bible like I read stories about Zeus. I brought this up to my parents and my priest and instead of answered with some kind of evidence, I was told that thinking like that would be the path to hell.
It's not that I don't want to accept the stories. I would love for there to be a wonderful afterlife with my family instead d of the unknown. The unknown is fucking terrifying! There have been nights (after a few drinks) when I've talked with people about death. Those nights sometimes lead to sleepless thought about the fear that when this life on earth is over that I am gone. That all that will be left is what I've done here and that is almost nothing. Even eternal punishment would be better then just being gone (Such is the desire for life).
Show me a shred of real evidence that supports god and I'll believe. You must however accept that proof does not mean I'll worship god. If it is the christian god I would rather burn in hell. That god is a hateful, spiteful, jealous god and nothing in the bible has shown me any reason to give him my respect. I'm fully willing to sit down with anyone who has new and useful evidence to the existence of god and how it can benefit me (and let's face it, the worship of gods is all about benefiting one's self). I am not however interesting in creating lies to make myself sleep better at night.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole reason science started when it did in all of human history is because of the was Christians looked at the world. Other faiths had active Gods where if you didn't do certain things the sun wouldn't rise or the spring wouldn't come. For the first time with Christians you had an idea of a hands off God. He created the universe and pretty much lets it run according to the set of rules he made. What this did was allow people to try to discover the rules that God set up to run the universe. This was the birth of science. The Church all during the dark ages said that when empirical scientific results conflict with the interpretation of the scripture that it is the interpretation that must be changed because reality is what it is.
Re:Doesn't the Bible say so? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not looked at General Relativity much, I see...
General relativity doesn't change the fact that we're in a rotating frame of reference, something which a simple experiment with a pendulum [wikipedia.org] will prove. Either that or you've got to postulate something even more outrageous like invisible unfeelable elves pushing the free-swinging pendulum around. I don't know about you, but a rotating planet makes more sense than invoking a host of magic users with nothing better to do than play around consistently with pendulums.
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)
If there was no religion the Library of Alexandria would still be standing.
That's first assuming the story of Julius Caesar accidentally burning it down is untrue. It is also an incredibly large assumption that it would continue to exist for 2000 years and that no one would attempt to conquer Alexandria.
But even more, it's quite possible that without religion, it would not have been built in the first place. That library was also a temple to an Egyptian god, though the contents of the library were not specifically religious texts. The Ptolomies (the library was built at the beginning of that dynasty) helped increase their power through the acceptance of the Egyptians' religion, and by at least appearing to respect and even observe it. Maybe if the Egyptians were not religious they would not have been conquered by Alexander. If religion did not exist, perhaps Alexander would not have created Alexandria. Heck, he might not have ever had any power to begin with. Maybe he would not even have been born.
For the record, I do agree with much of your post, but condemning someone for a poor understanding of history and then attempting to suggest that you can divine the consequences of removing an immense aspect of human history, especially one so influential as all religion, ever ... Well, that is not insightful in the least (as a few moderators seem to think) but it is incredibly ignorant and unbelievably arrogant.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:3, Insightful)
We all believe in a lot of things that can't be proven. The logical positivism / Popperish notion that only scientific knowledge is valuable is one of the greatest fallacies that everyone seems to believe on Slashdot. Entire swathes of human knowledge cannot be proven scientifically. Math, History, the Arts. If you look at what the early Christians were doing in their writings, they were using logic and evidence to convince people to convert - Gentiles, especially, had no reason to care about what this random Jewish guy was doing, yet they converted anyway. Why? Logic and evidence. What evidence? "Go talk to the people who've seen these things, and ask them." It seems very odd that the religion would be founded on a lie when they're encouraging people to find out for themselves what happened.
I don't think everything has to be prove, however if you want me to change my entire life on the word of some guy, you better damn well have some heavy proof! I have very little faith in anything. I do hours of research before I make simple purchases. I'm not going to waste countless amounts of time, money, and happiness on the off chance some nut job is right. I've seen no useful benefits from worship a god and have seen many hardships.
The reason the people of the bible told everyone to go look for themselves is because they knew they wouldn't bother. This is why urban legends take off. Just go ask my uncle's friends sister who knew a guy who had earwigs lay eggs in his brains. People are gullible, this is why we have faith healers, psychics and magicians. We want explanations for things, we want something to blame our lot in life on. It's much easier to blame god's will then to get off the couch and make something work for us. Further more the facts just don't add up. But this really isn't the place to write that giant list of reasons why any deductive reasoning would lead you to the conclusion there is no gods. Hell, just the fact that some all powerful, all knowing being would creation us, give us free will, then get pissed we exercise it doesn't hold water. He was all knowing, he knew what would happen. Hell I think a child would know what would happen.
Catholic, eh? Not surprising, honestly. =)
Or another way of looking at it is that humans have been having these sorts of experiences with the numinous for a long time, and have been trying to capture it in different ways. I'm not a theosophist, but it's interesting to think about nonetheless.
Yet in many religions making the wrong choice damns you. So until there is universal agreement in the one true religion how can I pick between odin, zeus, cuthulu, and jesus? If I don't pick jesus and he is the one true god, I'm damned to hell for thinking otherwise. WIthout any evidence to base my decision on, I have to go with personal experience. That being there is no such thing as gods. If they did exist and really wanted me to do something, I suspect they would tell me. If they don't feel the need, they must really not care.
Ok, since you mention the question of life after death. Why do you think it's so, that death is it - Nothingness? While it seems impossible for 'us' to ever arise from nothingness again, the only evidence that we have is that it IS possible. Before we were born, we did not exist. And yet - now we do. It seems better to say that it is more likely to happen again than to say that it is impossible.
I don't know what death is. Which is very fucking scary when you really think about it! I could be wrong (all intelligent men accept that they could be wrong) and thus burn for eternity for simply not worshiping a being that refuses to interact with me. I have no evidence that shows me people exist after they die. I do however have much empirical evidence that there is no afterlife. For example the houdini seance where houdini has yet to come back from the grave to prove there is an afterlife.
People see patterns anywhere there is not
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:3, Insightful)
The Church all during the dark ages said that when empirical scientific results conflict with the interpretation of the scripture that it is the interpretation that must be changed because reality is what it is.
Related, some good advice from St. Augustine of Hippo [wikipedia.org] (5th century CE) on why Christians shouldn't go around uneducated :
"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion."
I just which more of them took it to hart these days.