Nevermind the bollocks, here's another religion topic


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Onyx said:

    Which guys? What science?

    The people who are part of the Church of the Warming Globe. They tell us how settled is the science.

    @Onyx said:

    Nothing in science is written in stone never to be changed. If it were that would defeat the whole point!

    I quite agree.


  • BINNED

    @boomzilla said:

    Wouldn't conversion kind of be renouncing your current faith?

    That supposes that an incantation can convert you. Which can only mean one of two things: the other religion you get converted to is actually true and that's why it has that power, or your current faith is not that strong. Both warrant further investigation.

    @boomzilla said:

    If you had faith, do you think you wouldn't want to do that?

    I would be as afraid to recite an incantation from Qur'an as much as I am "afraid" to ask Jesus to come into my heart right now. I am convinced enough that my current world view is correct to live my life according to it. If any of those things made me a Christian, or Muslim, or whatever, I'd be grateful for it because that means I was wrong and I have now been corrected.

    @boomzilla said:

    What if you had a significant other and said something about how someone else was your soulmate.

    I'm assuming you're referring to something akin to a breakup? Of course I wouldn't like it, but the alternative is my significant other living a lie. Or me living a lie. I'd rather have truth, no matter how painful.

    @boomzilla said:

    Even if you didn't believe it, might it not have some disastrous consequences for you?

    Can you give me an example? I cannot imagine how it would.

    @boomzilla said:

    I don't see why it's that hard to understand, unless you really don't have anything important in your life.

    It's hard to understand for me exactly because I have important people in my life. If I were a man of faith, believed that there is a god of some description, and believed that getting the character and commandments of that god wrong might have consequences for me, and, more importantly, for people I love, I would consider it my duty to explore every possibility, test every hypothesis and find out the actual truth, so I can ensure that the people I love don't end up in hell (or suffer whatever other punishment there is).

    So yes, I'd recite the thing, because if it worked and converted me to Islam that would give me some indication of Islam being the true religion. Doing otherwise would be irresponsible, and being afraid of it would actually mean my current state of faith is too weak to endure any kind of challenge. Reciting a verse and having nothing happen would strengthen my faith, since I got evidence that the other proposed one has no power over me.



  • @Tsaukpaetra said:

    Ever since the war, nothing has been funny...

    https://vimeo.com/135257996#t=26m0s



  • @DogsB said:

    It wasn't that good a book.

    To be fair, it was an execrable book.



  • @Onyx said:

    @FrostCat said:
    I read years ago some people believe reciting the shahada converts you. Perhaps some don't want to take the chance. The penalty for apostasy in Islam is death.

    So wait... if Christians are worried about this, does that mean they acknowledge that Islam is true? I mean, if the shahada thing has actual power to convert you...

    My brain hurts.

    Maybe they're worried about the extremist Muslims who do think that their kids are now all Muslim due to recitation of the shahada, and furthermore who want to put them and their children to death as soon as their kids come home and get a Bible lesson from their parents. The penalty for apostasy, remember.

    I mean, want to put them to death moreso than usual. For Muslim extremists, anyway... they seem to want to put everyone who doesn't agree with them to death, but still, some people might prefer to not give extra reasons for them to hate you personally and single you out.


  • BINNED

    @anotherusername said:

    extremist Muslims who do think that their kids are now all Muslim due to recitation of the shahada

    They do not. Otherwise, that could be useful you know. If you are captured by Islamic terrorists, right before getting beheaded recite few Arabic words and you wont be hurt.



  • They appear to believe whatever is most convenient for them, and I can't say with much confidence what that would be.


  • BINNED

    Fundamentalists do not
    @anotherusername said:

    believe whatever is most convenient for them,

    that would be opportunists.

    A few lessons about major religions would be useful, as long as it is not just about the rosy front doors.



  • Unless you are implying that Muslim extremists are always perfectly consistent and never opportunistic, I fail to see your point.


  • BINNED

    @dse said:

    rosy front doors.

    My back door is pink, does that count?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Onyx said:

    Which guys? What science? It would seem that the scientific method is settled, for now at least, because there is no better model yet proposed.

    If you're talking about the anthropogenic climate change model, I thought they were far too busy overfitting to get their graphs to model historic behaviour to bother overmuch with future behaviour, and continually cite the likes of A1FI and RCP 8.5 as canonical truthful doomsday scenarios which will happen without any substantive backup (hint - neither will, since they rely on things that are currently reducing, staying the same or even increasing.)


  • BINNED

    Fair enough I guess. Thought you quoted one sentence more than needed there.


  • :belt_onion:

    @Luhmann said:

    My back door is pink

    :giggity: ?



  • @PJH said:

    If you're talking about the anthropogenic climate change model, I thought they were far too busy overfitting to get their graphs to model historic behaviour to bother overmuch with future behaviour, and continually cite the likes of A1FI and RCP 8.5 as canonical truthful doomsday scenarios which will happen without any substantive backup (hint - neither will, since they rely on things that are currently reducing, staying the same or even increasing.)

    There's data for the past, so one can do analysis. There's no data for the future, so one can only model. Models require assumptions: if we assume X happens then we can expect Y result. (It's not like we have another planet where we can quick try out all the different assumptions.)

    I'm amused by the reaction to modelling in the denier crowd. Humanity models all kinds of things: weather, population, financials, strategy for wars, buildings, bridges, tunnels, and even computer programs. (In the latter case, that's what you'r doing when you benchmark, or project production loads, or growth of memory or disc storage.)

    Of course, modelling can be based on good assumptions or poor; and it may be difficult to know what assumptions to make. Assumptions can be abused deliberately, as when Wall street firms project the performance of your 401K. (When did you ever see one of those projections that said your 401K performance would suck?)

    It's legitimate to question climate models on some grounds. One might even say the models are abused, as an argument point. But to say modelling itself is bad? Foo.

    There's also some areas that are more easily challenged than others. The idea that CO2 doesn't cause warming is idiotic; global warming heat capture is based on a simple equation: this much CO2 captures that amount of heat. That CO2 is increasing...pretty much any idiot can test that. That human activity is the cause of the increase is easy to show; it's a simple matter of, "Can the ocean absorb the 32 billion tons of additional CO2 produced annually by humanity?" (No.) "Can it absorb what is produced by natural processes?" (Yes.)

    Where it gets gray is questions like:

    • What assumptions should we make about humanity's future production of CO2?
    • What assumptions should we make about the ocean's ability to absorb additional CO2 in the future?
    • What assumptions should we make about how increased temperature will affect natural CO2 production?
    • What assumptions should be made of the effect on global weather?

    Hence all the differing projections like A1FI and RCP 8.5, as different assumptions are fed into different models.



  • @CoyneTheDup said:

    Can the ocean

    stop curses?



  • @ben_lubar said:

    the one I don't know

    This one?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    When you havnt unlocked all the democrats

    😆



  • @dkf said:

    >When you havent unlocked all the democrats

    😆

    FTFY


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Grr, and I thought I'd been good and managed to get it right, leaving out the '. Deliberately misspelling is painful to me, though typo-ing happens frequently…


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @CoyneTheDup said:

    I'm amused by the reaction to modelling in the denier crowd. Humanity models all kinds of things: weather, population, financials, strategy for wars, buildings, bridges, tunnels, and even computer programs.

    None of the other things you mention require excessive funding from the taxpayers from all over the world nor require world-wide changes in behaviour, especially if it turns out the models over-exaggerate or are completely wrong, either in their predictions, or base assumptions.

    @CoyneTheDup said:

    The idea that CO2 doesn't cause warming is idiotic; global warming heat capture is based on a simple equation: this much CO2 captures that amount of heat. That CO2 is increasing...pretty much any idiot can test that. That human activity is the cause of the increase is easy to show; it's a simple matter of, "Can the ocean absorb the 32 billion tons of additional CO2 produced annually by humanity?" (No.) "Can it absorb what is produced by natural processes?" (Yes.)

    Others
    .. can an increase in the current 0.04% of a certain gas in the atmosphere cause catastrophic world events...
    ... are humans the major cause of such an increase ...
    ... should we be actively trying to get human-sourced CO2 down to zero at any monetary or societal cost ...

    Or perhaps we would be better off trying to address the causes of, and reducing, the 5% of gas in the atmosphere that contributes up to 70% of global warming instead...


  • BINNED

    @CoyneTheDup said:

    But to say modelling itself is bad?

    Who says this?

    Very good post otherwise. That was the most reasonable and level-headed AGW advocacy I've seen in a long time, a lot better than simply dismissing whoever doesn't agree as ASSholes.



  • @PJH said:

    Others
    .. can an increase in the current 0.04% of a certain gas in the atmosphere cause catastrophic world events...

    Oh, the mighty "the number is small so it doesn't matter!" argument.

    Here's an example where such a small change related to CO2 has quite a large effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Well considering there's a gas that's 125 more abundant in the atmosphere that contributes up to 8 times more to the warming, why isn't enough being done about that? Why don't we have the alarmists alarming over that?



  • @PJH said:

    Well considering there's a gas that's 125 more abundant in the atmosphere that contributes up to 8 times more to the warming, why isn't enough being done about that? Why don't we have the alarmists alarming over that?

    I'm pretty certain you have only a vague idea of how this all works and what we can actually influence. Again, just because the number is small in relative terms doesn't mean that the effect is negligible.

    There are quite a number of examples where small relative changes result in massive changes to the end state.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Rhywden said:

    I'm pretty certain you have only a vague idea of how this all works and what we can actually influence.

    Crudely summarised with a reference to the butterfly effect, yes.

    I'm railing against the excessive costs, past and future, to avoid alleged catastrophe at the pain of bankruptcy when the cost of dealing with any results of said alleged catastrophes would be far less.

    Spend trillions on subsidizing pie in the sky carbon capture, or millions on flood defense sort of thing.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @PJH said:

    I'm railing against the excessive costs, past and future, to avoid alleged catastrophe at the pain of bankruptcy when the cost of dealing with any results of said alleged catastrophes would be far less.

    Unfortunately, you might be very wrong on the distribution of costs there. Try talking to pension and insurance companies sometime about the costs of climate change; they really care, and have to as they have to handle investments that will mature over a period of multiple decades.

    It'd be great if all we had to do was build some flood defences. If you've got a magic wand to make that happen, please wave it!



  • @PJH said:

    Spend trillions on subsidizing pie in the sky carbon capture, or millions on flood defense sort of thing.

    Hamburg alone will spend 500 million € on flood defense. And I don't think the rest of our coast will be much cheaper.



  • @CoyneTheDup said:

    In reality, the only reason there's a dispute is because the text was OMG Muslim and not Christian.

    I would never ask a Muslim child to write down, "Jehova" or "Yeshua is Lord", in any language. I would never ask a Buddhist, atheist, Hinduist, and so on. Just because it's been done in the past, does not give schools the right to force Christian children to write down "Allah".

    Take that Mr. False Dilemma.

    @CoyneTheDup said:

    Schools are always and forever sneaking through Christian teachings, texts, assignments

    I need you to show examples.

    There's a lot of literary text that contains references to Christianity beliefs, but are classical texts. It would be no different than having a Muslim in a story and she talks about her beliefs, something I just saw in the scholastic offerings at the book fair this year.

    @CoyneTheDup said:

    thoughts

    "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is not a profession of faith.

    Big BIG difference between that and "Allah is God".


    There are, including impractical purposed, infinite things that can be written in a language. Why that specific phrase?

    Look at this difference.

    "Allah is God. There is no other God."

    "The Muslims believe Allah is God. They believe there is no other God."

    One is a profession of faith, the other is a culture studies lesson.

    Those that cannot tell the difference, should not teach.



  • @Onyx said:

    I am confuse.

    It's easy.

    If you put faith and hope in it, it is a religion.

    If you think science will cure everything that ails the world, including people's misunderstandings of each other, and bring about utopia. It's a religion.

    People are putting their faith in science. That's a religion.

    @Onyx said:

    Religion based on a science book or on a scientific concept?

    We already have one.

    It involves aliens inhabiting our souls and causing grief.

    @CoyneTheDup said:

    "global warming" is a religion.

    Again, if you put faith in it.

    If someone is saying that ISIS is radical because of global warming.... that is faith.

    They wrap all problems up in one solution.... that is faith.


  • BINNED

    @xaade said:

    If you think science will cure everything that ails the world, including people's misunderstandings of each other, and bring about utopia.

    Nope. Science deals with modeling of the physical world. Ethics and philosophy are outside of realm of science.

    @xaade said:

    People are putting their faith in science. That's a religion.

    Still nope. Any reasonable person will have confidence in science, nothing more.

    If we're going by any of the definitions above, that kind of faith is as contrary to science as it gets. In science nothing should be taken on faith. Everything has to be questioned, tested, modified, and discarded as needed. Otherwise it's not science.

    @xaade said:

    We already have one.

    It involves aliens inhabiting our souls and causing grief.

    Just because it misuses the word in its name it doesn't make it science. Seriously. Show me one valid theory Scientology produced. Actually, I'm gonna throw you a softball - show me a valid hypothesis Scientology proposed.

    @xaade said:

    Again, if you put faith in it.

    Climate science has data, hypotheses and theories backing it up. We can argue the validity of any of it. That's good. That's science. You try to prove stuff, I try to disprove it, until we're both satisfied that we have the best working model currently available. Otherwise, we discard it. There is no dogma, there are no commandments, there is only the never ending cycle of data collection => hypothesis => peer review => theory / step one.

    @xaade said:

    If someone is saying that ISIS is radical because of global warming.... that is faith.

    No, that's stupidity.

    @xaade said:

    They wrap all problems up in one solution.... that is faith.

    Failed to respond: E_TOO_VAGUE.



  • @PJH said:

    Spend trillions on subsidizing pie in the sky carbon capture, or millions on flood defense sort of thing.

    It's not like if we would all die if we don't solve this, huh?

    The soluction is actually pretty simple, we kill the god damn 99%



  • Note: Discourseless may have mixed up the links.

    @PJH said:

    None of the other things you mention require excessive funding from the taxpayers from all over the world nor require world-wide changes in behaviour, especially if it turns out the models over-exaggerate or are completely wrong, either in their predictions, or base assumptions.

    You know, I have never understood this reasoning: deniers claiming global warming proponent-scientists are getting rich, while they have to beg money from an NSF in a politically adverse environment. Even the best of them are making $120,000 a year or so. If climate scientists are in it for the money, they’re doing it wrong

    And the best part is that deniers are fueled by scientists literally receiving millions from Exxon and the Koch brothers, but oh, no, we trust those denier-scientists, because they would never have a money motive to lie. How Money Changes Climate Debate

    I think your "truster" is broken.

    @PJH said:

    Others.. can an increase in the current 0.04% of a certain gas in the atmosphere cause catastrophic world events...... are humans the major cause of such an increase ...... should we be actively trying to get human-sourced CO2 down to zero at any monetary or societal cost ...

    Carbon dioxide is currently dumped into the atmosphere at a rate 13 billion tons/year greater than the combined absorption of land and ocean. Ask yourself this: If this has been in balance for the last 150,000 years, then what changed that has caused the carbon dioxide output to increase by 13 billion tons per year? Was it nature? Or man, with his annual output of 29 billion tons per year, for the last century or so?

    How do human CO2 emissions compare to natural CO2 emissions?

    As for the catastrophic events, it isn't the CO2 that causes those.

    @antiquarian said:

    Who says this [modelling] is bad?

    @PJH, in a low-key way ("and continually cite the likes of A1FI and RCP 8.5 as canonical truthful doomsday scenarios which will happen without any substantive backup").

    But if you need a couple more examples, there's Dr. Roy Spencer, PHD ("Climate modeling EPIC FAIL – Spencer: ‘the day of reckoning has arrived’") and the George C. Marshall Institute ("Junk Science Week: Epic climate model failure"). I've heard others, mostly Republicans or the radio personalities crowd.


  • BINNED

    @CoyneTheDup said:

    But if you need a couple more examples, there's Dr. Roy Spencer, PHD ("Climate modeling EPIC FAIL – Spencer: ‘the day of reckoning has arrived’")

    I just skimmed over the article. I didn't see where it said that modelling was bad. What I thought they were saying was that the existing models don't work.



  • @xaade said:

    @CoyneTheDup said:
    Schools are always and forever sneaking through Christian teachings, texts, assignments

    I need you to show examples.

    Oh, come off it, now you're just being a :trollface:. I assume you watch the news and hear about the regularly occurring lawsuits over Christian teaching in schools? Okay, fine, here's one, from this year:

    ‘Jesus Pizza’: Lawsuit Claims That A Colo. Public High School Promotes A Local Church To Students



  • @antiquarian said:

    I just skimmed over the article. I didn't see where it said that modelling was bad. What I thought they were saying was that the existing models don't work.

    Ummm...now that I think about it in light of this, that may be right. Maybe no one ever said, properly, that "modelling was bad", but only that "all existing models were bad". Not sure. I concede those are not the same idea.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @fbmac said:

    It's not like if we would all die if we don't solve this, huh?

    Alarmists would disagree. We will all definitely die if we don't spend squillions on funding their pet projects.

    @fbmac said:

    The soluction is actually pretty simple, we kill the god damn 99%

    Malthus was wrong, but not totally. Enforcing it is, actively not having kids isn't.

    @CoyneTheDup said:

    Carbon dioxide is currently dumped into the atmosphere at a rate [...]

    ... less than it was last year. Alarmists claim that's not true (I refer to my previous links about the end of Life, The Universe and Everything.) And, apparently, because it's not true, we're all going to hell in a handbasket.

    Anyway, back to Wargames with this thread for me - .... 🚜: (Why a tractor?)


  • Java Dev

    @PJH said:

    Spend trillions on subsidizing pie in the sky carbon capture, or millions on flood defense sort of thing.

    The Dutch Water Control Boards have a combined budget of over €2.5 milliard per year. And IIRC the Delta Works weren't even financed from that budget. No clue on the Zuiderzee works, I seem to recall 60 million for the Afsluitdijk but construction on that started over 90 years ago so it's hard to compare numbers anyway. It may have been financed with the profit from the Zuiderzeepolders.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @PleegWat said:

    milliard

    Yeah, no.

    This is why I dislike the 'billion' being the difference between 1e6 and 1e9, depending on who you talk to.



  • So, this money you're talking about: Does it vanish into thin air?


  • BINNED

    @PleegWat said:

    milliard

    THANK YOU!

    To hell with your short system! To hell with it, I say!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Onyx said:

    @PleegWat said:
    milliard

    THANK YOU!

    Milliard?


  • Java Dev

    The long scale is the norm around here. The only reason people saying billion when they mean 1e9 confuses me less than people using Fahrenheit where any reasonable person uses Celsius is because the conversion is easier.



  • So you're saying that a gigabyte where you are is the same as a terabyte where I am?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @ben_lubar said:

    So you're saying that a gigabyte where you are is the same as a terabyte where I am?

    I think he's saying he can download a terabyte in less time than you can download a gigabyte.



    Filed under: Milwaukee PC



  • @PJH said:

    ... less than it was last year. Alarmists claim that's not true (I refer to my previous links about the end of Life, The Universe and Everything.) And, apparently, because it's not true, we're all going to hell in a handbasket.

    The thing is that we're 13 billion tons CO2/year over budget now. A 0.6% cut in the "deficit" is a start, but only just that. It's like holding a major national celebration because Congress cut our national budget deficit from $438.9 billion/year to $436.3 billion/year.


  • Considered Harmful

    @xaade said:

    I would never ask a Muslim child to write down, "Jehova" or "Yeshua is Lord", in any language. I would never ask a Buddhist, atheist, Hinduist, and so on. Just because it's been done in the past, does not give schools the right to force Christian children to write down "Allah".

    Have they stopped reciting this daily "one nation under God" thing lately?

    The "under God" part was explicitly inserted to 'set the United States apart from "godless communists."', and still according to a SF appellate court it is "ceremonial and patriotic and 'has nothing whatso[e]ver to do with the establishment of religion.'".
    If that's true of an English utterance, certainly drawing an Islamic phrase in a script the vast majority can't even read is purely calligraphic in nature and has nothing whatsoever to do with the establishment of religion?



  • To be fair, if you printed out an entire dictionary on a very long piece of paper, "one", "nation", and "USA" would all come after "god".


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @ben_lubar said:

    So you're saying that a gigabyte where you are is the same as a terabyte where I am?

    Depends - are you talking about hard-disk space or memory?


  • Java Dev

    @ben_lubar said:

    So you're saying that a gigabyte where you are is the same as a terabyte where I am?

    No, I'm saying a terabyte contains a billion bytes, even though you might be used to calling it a trillion bytes.



  • @PleegWat said:

    No, I'm saying a terabyte contains a billion bytes, even though you might be used to calling it a trillion bytes.

    You're enjoying the long-scale-short-scale confusion, aren't you? Well, it's wrong, I tell you, wrong. 😃


Log in to reply