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.
Next up on slashdot: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Next up on slashdot: (Score:4, Funny)
I especially love the fake testimonials at the bottom of the page. Dr. Wilstonshire Oglethorpe XVIII, who has a degree in Super-Advanced Mega Astronomy says: "OMG You were totally right. Bad on us"
Re:Next up on slashdot: (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe you need a proper education in darksucker theory [siliconhell.com].
Also, the existence of magic smoke [wikipedia.org].
And don't forget applied phlebotinum [tvtropes.org].
Correction... (Score:5, Funny)
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: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)
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: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: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: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:I am not surprised. (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that for all the good religious institutions have collectively done for science, they have done at least as much bad. It would be reasonable to argue that without religion's involvement, mankind would be more intellectually and scientifically advanced today. And I'm not counting the work of individual scientists who happened to be religious as contributions from religion, as they could have done the same work if they were atheists (and maybe could have done more work if religious institutions weren't causing them trouble - Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin immediately come to mind).
And what about religion's general negative effects on science? "Oh no need to investigate that, god did it!" "Why do you question this, is your faith weak?" "Man shouldn't play god!" are all lines we still hear today, and in the western world theists are a lot less fundamentalist than they were in the past.
For at least the last 200 years religion has only been yanking the brakes on the science train, so for today it would be safe to say that with religious authority out of the picture, intellectual advancement would flourish.
Another poster further down argues that it's just idiots who happen to be religious that stifle science. I agree that many stupid people would be anti-scientific with or without religion, but religion's ability to organize and support people with such viewpoints (and even encourage these views in some cases) can't be ignored. In a world without religion, if all the anti-scientific idiots formed The Organization for the Abolition of Scientific Thought (TOAST), they'd be no more powerful than any other similarly-sized think tank of idiots. But in the real world if the pope says investigation into the origin of the universe is an attack on their religion and their deity's authority, this is much more powerful.
Re:I am not surprised. (Score:5, Interesting)
Erm, if there was no religion, there would be no need to hide some selected intellectual works in monasteries.
If there was no religion the Library of Alexandria would still be standing.
The poor understanding of history is on your side. We know a lot about what kind of works were lost during the dark ages from the references to the documents that don't exist anymore. We know that there were works in which scholars argued that stars are like the sun, but very far away. We know that there were other Homeric books around. We know of the lost works of Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, Aristophanes and many more. You can read the handful of their works that survived - and they are works of genius - and wonder how much brilliance was lost.
The dark ages we are talking about are not to be praised by how works were preserved, but condemned for how many books were lost and destroyed. Go read your Name of the Rose again because that is the true picture of the ages.
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: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)
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: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:I am not surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)
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, Informative)
No, no it isn't. The nondeterminism in quantum mechanics is understood and circumscribed, and we absolutely can be exactly sure.
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:4, Informative)
Sorry, that is not right.
You have described the Specific Theory of Relativity accurately. However, the General Theory of Relativity expands the equivalency to any point in any reference frame, hence the "General".
ME! (Score:5, Funny)
My mom says I'm the center of the universe.... or is that just the basement?
Re:ME! (Score:5, Funny)
Is there a difference?
Re:ME! (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I have a bit more belief in the theory of parallel basements than of parallel universes.
Re:ME! (Score:5, Funny)
It's not so much that you're the center, as much as that you've expanded to fill all the available space, so it doesn't make sense to talk about your position in the basement. You are the basement.
In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Funny)
...even they know the earth goes round the sun.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That's because the Communists purged all the morons^Wreligious nuts.
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: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:In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd have to agree. Atheism doesn't have to be a religion, but when some people start a new thread on 4-Chan asking for quote wallpapers, ten times in a row, and whichever anonymous poster begins each thread always starts it off with a pro-atheist/anti religious quote, and not a quote about anything else, and they say that the only meaningful quotes about anything are about how bad religion is, that's the actions of religious fanatics. If your point of view has numerous religious fanatics who claim to speak for everyone else, it becomes a religion. If you don't distance yourself from the nutters because they claim to be part of your group, then it becomes your religion.
That said, I'm a Zen Gnostic Episcopalian myself. I want to distance myself right now from the WBC, the people who don't want a mosque within 2,000 miles of ground zero, and really, anyone who thinks God wants you to hate for Him. I can logically prove Jesus is superhuman*, and have a separate proof for Apollo's existence**. The rest, I'm not sure about.
*OK, here goes: Jesus' teachings were perverted to support the crusades, the inquisition, and the witch trials. The earliest of these happened about 1,000 years after Jesus was executed. Darwin's teachings were perverted to support the Eugenics movements and Naziism. The earliest of these took only about 40 years after Darwin's publication of his first book to become life destroying monstrosities. It's 39 years from Einstein's first relevant publication to the A-Bomb, and about 43 to the cold war. Ergo, Jesus was roughly 25 times better than some of the very smartest humans we know at avoiding his work being perverted into something loathsome by stupider humans. That's superhuman, although in a somewhat limited sense.
(OK, if you accept that orthodox Christians destroyed the library at Alexandria and killed its head, we can reduce the ratio to roughly 300 years to 40, so Jesus would only be about 8x an incredibly smart human, not 25. Alternately, is it fair to blame anybody for how other people, years after their death, interpret their sayings or writings?).
** The Delphic Oracle guided Greek civilization for at least 500 years. The job was filled by a series of 12 to 15 year old girls, who got blind frackin' stoned day in and day out breathing the fumes they found in a cave. We're talking stoned Emo chicks of the sort who write bad poetry, and obviously, ones who thought nobody understood them, as they kept a host of translators around just to interpret their cryptic utterances. (In fact, this is where cryptic utterances originated). They also played with snakes by some accounts. Everyone believed these immature, spaced-out bints when they claimed to speak for Apollo, and followed their advice. Instead of this promoting one ultimate level massive clusterfrack, it led to an era generally considered surprisingly peaceful and enlightened, and the foundations of what became modern democratic government, formal logic and science. Ergo, Apollo at least was real at that time, because that's an obvious incredible major miracle on a par with everyone on all sides agreeing with the US plan for peace in the Middle East. (Thanks to Alan Moore for this one) .
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Interesting)
Atheism isn't a religion, in the same sense theism isn't a religion.
Correct.
But just as it's obviously impossible to find a theist who does not in fact have a religion, I think it's not possible to find anyone who is "only" an atheist.
Once again - correct. How do you get from that, to calling atheism a religion?
That communists aren't "only" atheists are obvious to all - except communists themselves, a rather important exception.
I'd say it's obvious to communists, also.
There were several problems with soviet-style "atheism":
1. You cannot legislate belief. You can persecute people, the way most religions have done to eachother for thousands of years, and you can get those whom you're persecuting to say that they now believe what you believe, but you can't actually make someone believe something by threatening or harming them.
2. Atheism without religion is meaningless. Every child is born an atheist, but there's a massive difference between the atheism of a newborn, and the atheism of, say, Richard Dawkins. Atheism based on ignorance is no better than religion.
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:In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Informative)
Buddhism (which is neutral on the topic of gods)
Buddhism has Devas [wikipedia.org]. They are not creators of the universe or omnipotent or immortal, but are considered "supernatural gods" [wikipedia.org].
and Scientology
Some countries do not accept Scientology is a religion. [wikipedia.org].
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Informative)
Buddhism as a whole isn't particularly neutral on the subject of gods. Theravada Buddhism is all about ethical actions and meditation. Theravada doesn't really support anything supernatural, but they also insist on there being one and only one Buddha and his always being a little above even the most enlightened modern practitioner. By them, no one else gets to be a Buddha, just off the wheel of Karma by meditation. So while they claim not to have any gods involved, some of us feel they are making the historical Buddha into one. Mahayana Buddhists mostly believe in gods and lots of other things, but the goal isn't becoming a mere god, it's enlightening yourself and then all sentient beings. You can theoretically become a god in some Mahayana traditions, but you shouldn't want to, as that god may still be as far as you are right now from the real goal of enlightenment. Some Mahayanists also believe in demi-gods (who are in cool afterlives but often too busy being jealous of the full gods to seek enlightenment), and hungry ghosts, who by some accounts are descending to splinter into animal spirits and start the climb back. Then there's Vajrayana, which I can't describe much more succinctly than to say it holds the goal is enlightenment, but you will have to become Dr. Strange first. If Mahayana is supernaturalist with gods and 'other planes', Vajrayana is taking the gods and dimensions and psychic powers stuff to an ongoing TV series, with half a dozen successful spin-offs and lots of special guests and plot cross overs, and you have to learn the names of all the particles of the week to progress.
Zen, by the way, is mostly based on Mahayana teachings.
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Informative)
Oy. Not this again. Look. Theism consists of dogma, rules for behavior, and often enough, a strong and well solidified political agenda, for instance, as with Islam or the Christians that are constantly attempting to fiddle with the sayings on money, messing with the pledge of allegiance, praying in congress before making laws, seeing to it the rest of us can't buy beer on Sunday, etc. They do these things because they think this is the way to "bring" their religion, and its dogma and rules, to the rest of us. Speaking generally, theism is a belief in a god or gods, and it carries, in a very official and intentional manner, a great deal of imposed behavior and canned rules with it.
Atheism is the lack of such a belief. It embodies no dogma; no rules; no political agenda, no morals, no ethics. Atheism contains no guides in any particular direction as to science, politics, etc. No atheist will burn a scientist because atheism presents an alternate worldview, because atheism doesn't present worldviews at all. If an atheist has a particular worldview about a scientific issue, it is a 100% guarantee that the worldview did not arise from the atheism (although it is possible that the atheism came from the worldview.)
Your line "thanks to its staunch atheism" is completely wrong and misleading. The soviets were a highly corrupt -- meaning, far from core principle -- communist society and the things they did, they did in the name of active dogma, rules and outlooks that came from communism, socialism, and so forth. Not as any kind of consequence of atheism. Think about it: "I don't believe in god, therefore you can't go to a scientific conference"??? "I don't believe in god, therefore we'll build a ground-based laser"??? I mean, really... WTF?
The thing you theists need to get through your heads is that atheism is not the opposite of theism; it does not present or espouse mirror outlooks to theism. The 'a' up front doesn't mean "the devil's minions", it means "without." It is a lack of belief in religion's core idea, the existence of a god or gods. That's all it is. There is no atheistic mirror to religion's constant, dogmatic, intentional interference with society and law. And there is not one single thing in it that tells us what we should do WRT politics or science. When you see an atheist taking action in some area, you can be sure they are basing those actions upon something other than atheism.
In "believe anything written down" land (Score:4, Informative)
A compendium of bible quotes loosly supporting this:
http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/geocentric.shtml [hypertextbook.com]
Re:In "believe anything written down" land (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:In "believe anything written down" land (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:5, Funny)
...Which is one of the flaws in democracy rather than true self-government and is why democracies need to transition to self-government with a tiny government to protect people from force and fraud.
You're right! Galileo is attempting to subject us all to the gravitational force, and as an American I am against that. My feet stay on the ground because I am bound to this country by patriotism, not because some namby-pamby Eurotrash fraud is trying to force me to. Don't tread on me!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How would a tiny government protect its citizens if they did whatever they wanted?
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 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: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: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:Doesn't really matter... (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 pretty much did away with literacy tests for voters. Sigh.
Maybe because the literacy tests had nothing to do with knowledge and everything about (white) cultural familiarity? The examiners even got to select who took the test and who didn't. What could possibly go wrong?
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:Doesn't really matter... (Score:5, Interesting)
So you would deny yourself the vote as you think it is in another man's best interest to implement this new law you think is in his best interest?
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:Doesn't really matter... (Score:5, Interesting)
--- A. C. Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
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:4, Informative)
Let us remember that Doyle was a dupe of Spiritualism and believed in the physical existence of fairies. His stories and characters are probably not a good example.
Re:Doesn't really matter... (Score:4, Funny)
So in that version does the Little Mermaid not have crabs?
18% (Score:5, Funny)
there is still a significant minority of Western people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe: 18% of Americans
In other news, 17% of Americans were found to exhibit a sense of humor when called by pollsters while most of the rest just get upset.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Really? Because I'm rather familiar with the bible and no where does it say the earth is the center of the universe. Just created first.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Doesn't the Bible say so? (Score:5, Insightful)
No you don't, because the earth is a non-inertial frame.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not looked at General Relativity much, I see...
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:Doesn't the Bible say so? (Score:5, Informative)
Except that we can measure the acceleration of the earth (rotation around the sun is obviously not a strait line, and easily measurable). So... yeah, you don't actually get the same results when you do the math for a point decoupled to the solar system and earth. No one outside of physics learns relativity, despite it being 100 year old science. Some may learn "pigeon" relativity, but that's not really helpful.
Re:Doesn't the Bible say so? (Score:4, Interesting)
Try looking at General Relativity a bit more closely. Results are the same either way.
You are mistaken. Translation is relative, but rotation is not. Rotation us absolute and measurable.
There is for example the Sagnac effect used in some inertial navigation systems. A laser is placed in a ring with light circling in both directions. The laser will lock on a reinforcing frequency where the light takes an integer number of wavelengths around the ring. After making a loop around the ring there is constructive interference as the standing wave overlaps itself. The light going around in both directions will have the same frequency and wavelength. Now lets give the ring some rotation. The light going around in opposite directions need to cover different distances around the ring to return to the laser which that has advanced during the that time. The wavelength of the light in one direction must increase and the wavelength of the light in the other direction must decrease in order to maintain the integer-number-of-wavelengths constructive interference.
If the ring is not rotating then the light going in the two directions locks at the identical frequency. If the ring is rotating then there will be a difference between the two frequencies, and that difference is exactly proportional to the rate of rotation.
This is not merely theoretical, it is the actual foundation of existing navigation systems.
Rotating reference frames are currently a bit of a mess in General Relativity. There isn't a single well defined way to define simultaneous time across a rotating disk, leaving no single well defined measure of length either. If you Google relativity rotating frames the top result is a $360 book on the multitude of often contradictory models attempting to define rotating reference frames in General Relativity. [amazon.com]
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Relativity Says It can be. (Score:4, Insightful)
In the rest frame of the Earth the entire universe revolves around it.
Re:Relativity Says It can be. (Score:5, Insightful)
Website Design for Crazy People (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Website Design for Crazy People (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Website Design for Crazy People (Score:5, Funny)
Surely you jest - this site shows the beauty that is out there [dokimos.org] ;)
GOD HATES EPILEPTICS!
Re:Website Design for Crazy People (Score:5, Informative)
This may not be Mosaic, but I'm sure they were taken aback when GeoCities folded and they had to move.
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:Evidence (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, but they do cluster, and vote, and then take over boards of education.
Actually, it just takes one of the nutters in your kid's district to bring education to a stand-still. Our local school official policy, luckily, is that you can contest a book, but the teacher can go on using it until the process has completed. And they've got librarians in at every step of the way. Don't mess with librarians.
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:Evidence (Score:4, Informative)
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 mean
I suspect you don't truly know what it means. I suspect you think it means that the bread physically transforms, whereas it turns out the original Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation does not claim that. It 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. The confusion comes from a change in common language idioms -- a modern reader would see "essence" and assume atoms (ie, that the doctrine claims the physics of the bread changes), whereas a religious spiritual writer would regard matter as mere aspect and things of eternal significance (the spiritual nature) as being "essence".
I'm not Catholic, but I did have to stop making fun of that doctrine when I found out it was my misunderstanding of the Catholic doctrine that was the issue, not their doctrine misunderstanding physics after all.
Re:Evidence (Score:4, Funny)
A compromise (Score:3, Funny)
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: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: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.
Re:It's really a moot question (Score:5, Informative)
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.
They're KINDA right (Score:5, Funny)
Web site tense is wrong (Score:5, Informative)
The summary should read:
Catholic] Church's historical position on the immobility of the Earth was not only scientifically supportable, but it was the most stable model of the universe
The Roman Catholic Church long ago accepted our current scientific understanding of the organization of celestial bodies.
Oh, and evolution through natural selection as well.
And one of its greatest thinkers [wikipedia.org] believed that reason and faith were both equally valid ways to truth and not in conflict at all.
These nuts are in no way affiliated with official Roman Catholic Church positions. So let's just halt the Church bashing before we begin, ok?
What does the 17% mean? (Score:5, Informative)
What does the claim that 17% of the population believe in a geocentric earth mean? Even assuming that there's no one in that population that is simply saying that for kicks, it seems probable that a large part are simply answering that way because they don't know anything either way and are just guessing. At some level that's not as bad as having people who actively believe in geocentrism. But at another level, that means that one should expect that around 34% are really ignorant and have of them just got lucky when asked. That's not good. However, I suspect that some of these answers really are just people messing with the polsters or not bothering to thing.
But one thing to note is that many of the geocentrists are religious. Not only is geocentrism common among Christians but there's a substantial fraction of ultra-Orthodox (charedi) Jews who are affirmatively geocentrist. This is especially common among the chabad chassidim who are often geocentrists because their guru, the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, made pro-geocentrist comments and because they want to preserve the word of Maimonides as inerrant (of course some of these are the same sort of people who refuse kidney transplants because the Talmud says that one kidney is the seat of your good instincts and the other is the seat of your bad instincts. So we're not talking about highly enlightened individuals). There are however, some very disturbing studies by Alexander Nussbaum showing that even among modern Orthodox Jews, anti-science views are disturbingly common. See for example http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v12n03_orthodox_judaism_and_evolution.html [skeptic.com] .
However, one thing to note is that although the conference in question in the top post is Catholic, affirmative geocentrism is not nearly as uncommon among evangelical Protestants as one would hope. Indeed, it is common enough that Answers in Genesis, one of the world's largest young earth creatonist ministries, feels a need to have essays that talk about why Christians don't need to be geocentrists. http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v15/i2/geocentrism.asp [answersingenesis.org] . Incidentally, There's some evidence that anti-Copernican sentiment actually started in Protestants and only spread to Catholics a few years later. Thomas Kuhn discusses this in his excellent book "The Copernican Revolution" although my understanding is that more modern historians disagree with him on this point and many don't think that there is a strong case for anti-Copernicanism as an originally Protestant ideology.
Finally, note that there are still some flat-earthers out there although they are very rare. They aren't as uncommon in the Islamic world. See for example this segment on Iraqi TV http://haha.nu/interesting/iraqi-tv-debate-is-the-earth-flat/ [haha.nu] . In the West there is still some flat-Earthism but it is often more conspiratorial than religious in nature. See http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/ [theflatearthsociety.org] although some of the people there are trolls, some are quite sincere.
Re:Scientific evidence.... (Score:5, Funny)
I thought Galileo Darwin had conclusively proved that the Earth evolves around the sun?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Let's see... 18% of Americans believe that the Earth is the center of the universe? For real?
No shit.
I now understand a little more about the stalwarts that support Obama no matter what.
Works just as well this way, too. :p
Re:Haha you got me (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Look, these guys know what they're talking about. They have a book published by Catholic Apologetics International Publishing, a non-profit corporation. Since it's a non-profit you know they're not out to make a quick buck.
And the authors both have a Ph.D. The primary author, Robert A. Sungenis, Ph.D. holds advanced degrees in Theology and Religious Studies. He has authored ten books including a five volume compendium on the bible. How can you argue with that? If this man says the Earth is the center
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
the good news is that the dinosaurs are fine, and not extinct; they now inhabit the shell of the topmost Turtle.
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:Spurious survey results? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Spurious survey results? (Score:5, Funny)
No, he's a "Keynesian muslim."
Re:BS (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you ever gone door to door in a rural environment and met people? Seriously, you select your friends, your friends select you, your family members were raised by the same people, there's a lot of bias going on.