keithprosser

So you'd like an America that doesn't build walls to keep people out nor blocks immigration on the basis of religion?  i agree America was greater in its idealistic past - but is it those days that Trump wants to return to?

In the past America was segregaged by race, made extensive use of slavery and tore itself apart in civil war.  What is a 'great' country'?    I don't think any country has ever been 'great'.   Many countries have been and are worse than the US - but does being better than Chad or Chile make a country 'great'?

The joke is that many of the world-cup winning French team were ethnic Africans, as were many players in other teams.

Cuomo's remarks have to be taken in the context of 'Make America Great Again'.  If Trump is right and America is no longer great it raises the issue of when America was great - or if it ever was.

What and when was this 'great America' Trump wants to return to? 

It's very noticeable that one side says she was raped and the other side says she claims to have been raped.   Another odd feature is that she laid the blame on Arnoud van Doorn, who switched from being an islamophobe to being a Muslim.

Note he is not 'just a Muslim' "At the moment he is President of the European Da'wah Foundation, and Ambassador of Celebrity Relations for the Canadian Da'wah Association in Europe." (wikipedia).

People don't commit suicide unless they are troubled, but the right are trying to paint Ms Dille as a martyr -  I get the impression things are not at all simple or straightforward as that.

She said the rape occurred in March 2017.... I doubt there would be much point doing a test.

I think you have misread your sources.   Solicitation is the offence of 'hiring a hitman' and punishable even if no murder happens.  If the hitman carries out the murder then both the hitman and client are guilty of murder.

Both p1 and p3 wanted p2 dead, p1 for personal reasons and p3 for the fee,  so they both have motive.   Also both take deliberate, conscious steps to bring about the death of p2.  I see both as equally culpable and as just as culpable as if they had acted alone.

Have you ever watched 'Strangers on a Train'?   Wiki summarises the plot thus:

"The story concerns two strangers who meet on a train, a young tennis player and a charming psychopath. The psychopath suggests that because they each want to "get rid" of someone, they should "exchange" murders, and that way neither will be caught. The psychopath commits the first murder, then tries to force the tennis player to complete the bargain."

i'd be happy to say that because the Mona Lisa exists a painter of the Mona Lisa must have existed at some point in time, because Mona Lisa's do not appear spontaneously.

But i think - or hope - that is just the starting point for something more interesting, not the end-point!

p1 killed p3 using p2 as a weapon.  I'm struggling to see any difference in the level or sort of crime committed by p1 an p3.

I think we humans naturally think in terms of opposing pairs - north/south poles, positive/negative, action/reaction and many others, but there is no rule that there must always be exactly 2 opposite sides.

One example is that white light is made of 3 colours(red, green and blue) not 2, and that is metaphorically carried over into nuclear physics. Stable particles such as protons need '3 sorts of charge' to gain stability.   That is an atom is stable and neutral by balancing the familiar pair of postive and negative electric charge, but inside a nucleon you need red, green and blue charge - it isn't a case of 'opposites attract' - it is a 'menage a trois' that is stable.

but you can go to pompeii and see statues that have no sculptor.

I'm a TOS afficionado -I'd choose 'Mirror Mirror' - not only because of alt-Uhura's costume, but it's the tie-breaker!

Are humans smart enough to be able to construct a living cell (let alone human being!) from scratch?

A livinng thing is a system that is self-sustaining, self-reparing, self-replicating and self-aware.  It can defend itself against disease and injury and actively seek out what is beneficial to it.

If you are intelligent enough to design something that can do that I take my hat off to you!

Living things have all the signs and attributes of a designed object - but they aren't designed; that is the whole point.

We had a flood because the river god is mad. There has been a drought because the sun god is unhappy. Etc. Etc.

I am sure you are right.  And -of course-it suggests a course of action; ie to appease said god.  Hence societies develop rituals, often involving sacrifices as 'bribes' to the gods.

And of course eventually floods do go down and droughts end so it can appear the rituals actually work.  If they don't work then it is easily explained by saying the sacrifice was not done right, or not big enough.  

one suspects that from the beginning religion was a mixture of cynical exploitation of the masses by an elite and genuine belief.

An alternative view is that race is overly-significant in American society in general and voting patterns reflect that. if one's race was not an issue in people's day-to-day life it would not affect the way they vote.

I don't see a problem with that... the issue is to find out what works and what doesn't.   One thing that keeps cropping up is 'unintended consequences'.   Perhaps arming teachers would result in several accidental deaths or teachers using shootingand pistol-whipping intead of giving lines or detention for unruly students....

The public tend to like politicians who promise quick fixes.  A politician that says 'I'm going to to fix school shooting by arming teachers' as more ready appeal than a politician who say 'I don't know how to fix school shootings - we need to do a study'.

What is the objective anyway?  Is it is deter attacks from happening i the first place or minimise deaths when they do?  Or is it simply so shift attacks away from schools and onto other places? 

School shootings are a problem in the US (as they are not anywhere else).  I am suspicious of quick-fixes and I don't think important policies should be decided on rhetoric.

Instead of arguing what to do, do all of them in a controlled, sensible and rational way and then we will know.  It is almost 20 years on from Columbine (April 1999) and we're still arguing.  Madness.

I feel more dunce-like than guru-like... and I'm sure Ethang agrees!

I was going to use my purple rectangle - but I'll stick with this now.

Far too flattering, but a little gimping will put it right.... wait!

There more than 2000 schools! 

Also the 'do nothing' approach has been tested for the last 20 odd years and we know it ends up with a school shooting every week on average.

Or send your kids to school in the UK - no school shootings at all for more than 20 years...

I disagree with you about the underlying psychology.  i'd say it reflects a desire to identify with (and be identified with)an 'elite' rather than with 'the crowd'.

That is to say that we humans don't want to be isolated individuals nor do we want to be totally absorbed into a 'universal hive mind' - our ideal is membership of a sub-group so we can feel we are 'special' without being 'strange'.

If a scientist was in charge we'd select 1000 schools at random to arm the teachers and another 1000 schools to hire guards.   At the end of, say, 2 years we'd have some facts to go on.

In some contexts what consitutes a Christian is which box is ticked on a survey form.  

I would say it's not a 'fad' as such but it is part of the same phenomenon as, say, Rolex watches as Armani clothes.   People can - and frequently do - pay 20 to 100 times as much for a low-spec Rolex than a high-spec no-name.

Some of the price premium can be put down to confidence in the quality of the item, but not - IMO - all of it.

You really see this effect in the world of art.   If you find a painting in the attic how much it is worth has nothing to do with the subject or the quality of the brushwork and everything to do with who painted it.

Not everyone who opposes animal experimentation is a violent fanatic -  almost everybody opposes animal experimentation in the sense that they feel it is a 'necessary evil', with both words emphasised.

Opposition to animal tests has almost certainly led to there being much less animal suffering in labs than would otherwise be the case, which must be a good thing.

Of course it can veer into fanaticism, but that applies to anything - including being fanatically anti-anti animal experimentation as the OP demonstrates!

 

Cor!   You can spot the fine line between saying something is 'a fad' and saying something is 'all hype'!   I bet not everyone can.

Almost nothing.  

Well, when i was travelling around Africa a while back I lugged a phone, hiking GPS, mp3/4 player, camera and laptop around with their assorted chargers.   Nowadays I just put my smartphone in my pocket.

I wouldn't buy a i-phone and haven't upgraded for a couple of years, but smartphones aren't all hype.

By 'football' you mean American football or soccer?

I'm not a doctor or a sportsman, but I think it must be than in contact sports like football, soccer and rugby one's brain is going to get shaken around inside its skull a fair bit.  I expect sports will be around for a while yet.

Maybe because all you need is a $20 soccer ball.  With gridiron you sell each player a $1000 outfit.

Coke and Pepsi are different things too - they just aren't very different!

I suppose i am wondering if moderation can be 'democratized'; i.e decisions about bans etc get taken out the hands of an individual and put in the hands of the wider membership.

I can see practical problems with sock-puppetry and collusion with a simple voting system, but the developers might like to think 'outside the box' as well as 'inside the box' of conventional moderation by one or two elite members.

I'd like a way to link to a post.

What about banning polite pedophilia advocates?

Quite possibly DA members do want to allow pedophiles, flat earthers, racists and fascists to peddle their wares providing they do it politely and without swearing - if so what matters is not the moderator's toolset but who the moderator is.

I would add a facility to flag a member as 'on probation' - some sort of 'yellow card' so they can still post but they have been publicly warned and knuckle-rapped.

There are two sides to this.  From a developers POV it's just about the tools to be provided, but there is also the tricky question of what policy DA should have.   Do we ban a foul-mouted moderate or a polite holocaust denier?  Both? neither?

e.g above it says:   Added: 08.12.18 02:16PM

To me that's the 8th of December!

It's a very, very minor issue.

Every post is marked as 'added 08-12-18'.

Can we Brits have a UK date format?

Were it ends...

I hope not just karate classes - there should be other reason for kids to meet up then to performs acts of violence on each other!   Playing in an orchestra or doing some theatre... much more co-operative.

If Oz is anything like the UK, most people are indifferent to religion - it simply doesn't play a role in their thinking or their lives.  But because people never actually think about 'does god exist' or the power of prayer much in their day-to-day lives they retain a vague notion (learned as a kid) that religion is a 'good thing' - at least in its moderate form!

I wonder for how many people being asked in a religion survey its the first time they have given the matter any actual explicit thought.   Someone who believed in Jesus and angels when they were 5 year old but have spent the next 30 years of their lives thinking about football, their family, work and what is on TV (but never thinking about 'god') might well be a 'nominal Christian' and check the Christian box on the form, but they are 'functionally atheists', never going to church or really believing in eaven and hell.

In the western world, Christianity had hijacked 'niceness'.   To most westerners 'being religious' means no more than 'being a nice person with good manners'.  At least it was like that - the last few decades have seen the rise of hard-core religionism.  It has made people think a more about whether they should tick the 'Christian' box rather tan doing it automatically as not of any significance.

The religion forum of DDO appears to have revived.

Suppose we do have a hole; is it neccessary that it is 'God shaped'?

I'd say that hole is something like a desire to see meaning, patterm and purpose in the world and our lives. 

I think that a big problem is that there is no convenient analogy for Darwinian evolution.   That is to say nothing other than life self-reproduces and undergoes natural selection, so there is nothing one can point to and say 'it's like that'.

I can close my eyes and imagine self-reproducing entities competing with each other to survive evolving into ever more complex and efficient forms, but no form of mere words conveys the image - certainly not to anyone determined to reject it.

There is so much high-quality material about evolution available on the 'net that anyone with a genuine interest in it wouldn't post questions about it on religion forums  - certainly not if their reaction to any reponse is to dismiss Darwinism as a 'baseless just-so story' as janesix did.

Eth wrote:

To put things as neatly as I can, I would say that humans invented gods to control nature and then invented religion to control the gods.

Did you intend to @me?  It was Ethang who said the Piraha story was debunked.

There was a young witch known as Poly

Who was noted for being un-jolly.

She come down quite hard

On any bigot or tard

and hit atheists left and right with her brolly.

I'd say Cas is reaching deeper...perhaps it's you who are not - you are the one advocating going by mere appearances in regard to design.

You asked 'Why not?'

I guess you mean why 'it aint necessarily so' that something that looks designed is actually designed.  If you don't know why not there's not much point trying to explain that sometimes things are not quite how they seem.

So...design is not the same thing as an appearance of design? then what does a design appear like? 

it's not skep that claims to be able to determine design or non-design from appearances.

Living things do indeed appear to have been designed... but it ain't necessarily so!

Are you saying the truth - unembellished with gods and magic - cannot be beieved in and cannot inspire?

The same way everything else evolved

The same way everything else evolved