1. Evolution: What is 'Natural'?

Comment #178690 by mblarson323 on May 11, 2008 at 11:43 pm

To Paula and epeeist et. al

While I applaud your efforts to school the "artful dodger" (artless though he is), your efforts are doomed to failure for the same reason that I point out time and again. Religion teaches - and in fact exalts - illogical, irrational thinking. The more religious one is, the less capacity for rational discourse one has. Each attempt you make to reason with "artful" will result only in yet another irrational "dodge" and will serve only to frustrate you. Rather than trying to convert the convinced, we should focus our efforts on the younger minds that have not yet been polluted with the sickness of religion. We may not live to see the fruits of our efforts, but we will be planting the seeds that will bear that fruit.

2. Research Volunteers Needed

Comment #175313 by mblarson323 on May 5, 2008 at 7:55 am

When you're asking about personal feelings, such as anxiety, depression, positive affectivity, etc., then it is a good idea not to include a middle option, because most people will lean one way or the other.

Have to disagree with this one. I answered many of these questions "I don't know." Many of these questions asked how I rated myself in a human trait as compared with the rest of my peers. Knowing that my perception of myself is necessarily subjective, I had to answer "I don't know." Likewise, with questions about how other people perceived me, I can only know what I divine from their outward behavior. They may be reacting genuinely; they may be "sucking up." I can't always know which is the case?

BTW, MPhil, I don't know if the questions were all randomly chosen from a larger pool, but I noted several repeat questions.

3. Soldier Sues Army, Saying His Atheism Led to Threats

Comment #170689 by mblarson323 on April 27, 2008 at 10:16 pm

Here's an idea. Why don't we let the evangelicals *have* the armed forces. Stack the deck with 'em! Send them over to some god-forsaken (pun intended) war in a foreign country with "Rumsfeld's army" - you know, the one you go to war with - no truck armor, no body armor, substandard weapons? Let natural selection do its job and thin the ranks. It'd filter some of the scum out of the bottom of the gene pool.

4. Lynchings in Congo as penis theft panic hits capital

Comment #167189 by mblarson323 on April 23, 2008 at 5:45 pm

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear....

How much you wanna bet that the vast majority of claims were for "shrinkage" and not total disappearance?

"Really, ma'am! I was hung like a horse before that witch doctor touched my peepee! Damn the luck!"

5. Science 2.0 -- Is Open Access Science the Future?

Comment #167180 by mblarson323 on April 23, 2008 at 5:38 pm

Sounds nice in theory but, I wouldn't expect anyone to be posting anything important, like a breakthrough discovery until they data is been sent for publishing and the patents are filed.

Yes, but wouldn't it be nice if there were a way to automatically "time/date stamp" these kind of entries in Web 2.0 so they were attributable to the poster and an "audit trail" of such postings could be reliably established? If there were no "fear of being ripped off", scientists would feel less trepidation about early publication of research, connections and application could be discovered earlier and everyone who contributed would share in a piece of the credit for future developments derived from their contribution.

6. Is religion a threat to rationality and science?

Comment #166424 by mblarson323 on April 23, 2008 at 8:37 am

It's like I been sayin' all along. The more religious you are the more you lose the ability to think rationally.

7. Richard Dawkins' secular army must be stopped. God is behind some of our greatest art

Comment #160314 by mblarson323 on April 13, 2008 at 11:42 pm

Who is this boob and why does the Guardian allow such pedantic drivel to soil its pages?

"this lack of commitment, must surely be faw faw, faw faw faw"

"be that religious or political, are surely faw faw faw faw faw faw"

This moron seems to think that if he makes liberal use of the words "surely" and "certainly" thoughout his witless discourse it will lend an air of "british credibility" to an otherwise vacuous argument. "Pathetic" is too kind a word! I should sue the author for the time I lost reading this crap.

And "Dawkin's Army?" What comprises any army these days? Have I been missing something? Has Richard been leading an angry mob of militants that has completely escaped my attention? Somebody please tell me where they muster, so I can join them!

Shit, I'm gonna go get a shingle that says "Journalist" and hang it outside my door. Apparently, that's all it takes to get published these days.

8. Biologists Take Evolution Beyond Darwin Way Beyond

Comment #156268 by mblarson323 on April 7, 2008 at 8:05 am

Seems to me that concepts like "emergence" and "punctuated equilibrium" are not so much a challenge to evolutionary explanations, but evidence of the proponents inability to think on a geological timescale instead of a human one. Daniel Dennett makes this point eloquently in "Darwin's Dangerous Idea."

9. Who wants to kill the elderly?

Comment #153928 by mblarson323 on April 2, 2008 at 8:17 am

I almost hesitate to weigh in on this one, because the solution is easy enough. Someone already started with it but didn't point out the obvious to Janus:

Noun: Condemnation
1. An expression of strong disapproval; pronouncing as wrong or morally culpable.
2. The condition of being strongly disapproved of

"I don't think I should be expected to acknowledge a public truth that I actually think is a public myth"

The operative words in the definition are "disapproval" and "morally culpable" Nothing in that statement indicates "strong disapproval." I think the word you're looking for Janus, is:

Noun: rejection
1. The act of rejecting something
2. The speech act of rejecting

Even refutation doesn't fit, because it requires the element of proof.

Here, I brought you a stool. That horse looks awfully high!

10. Who wants to kill the elderly?

Comment #153917 by mblarson323 on April 2, 2008 at 7:59 am

I just sent an email to the office of the Bishop of Durham at:

Bishops.Office@durham.anglican.org

to let him know that I viewed his response to David Aaronovitch's question as yet another example of Christian waffling and challenged him to "display the courage and moral rectitude to respond to David Aaronovitch's question honestly and directly."

Wouldn't he be surprised to get similar emails from non-theists around the world?

BTW, I reject the label "atheist" because it does seem silly, after all, to bother with a "word for someone who doesn't believe in something that doesn't exist" doesn't it?

11. Seven new deadly sins: are you guilty?

Comment #141776 by mblarson323 on March 11, 2008 at 7:34 am

and paedophilia, which had even infected the clergy itself and so had exposed the "human and institutional fragility of the Church".

Note how the Pope portrays the sins as independent entities that thrust themselves upon the poor, unsuspecting clergy. Just another way to divorce he and his fellow "pretenders to ethics" from taking *personal* responsiblity for their monstrous behavior.

The mass media had "blown up" the issue "to discredit the Church", but the Church itself was taking steps to deal with it.

Once again, an renunciation of their personal responsibility for their actions. These "men of the cloth" are *not* paragons of ethics. They are depraved monsters!

12. When blasphemy bit the dust

Comment #140580 by mblarson323 on March 7, 2008 at 11:34 pm

Hooray! Thank...uh...never mind.

Maybe the UK will now carry on the proud political innovation of "secular government" that the USA founded back in 1776 but has now, sadly, begun to reject in favor of outdated and misguided mythological dogma.

13. Pakistan blocks YouTube over blasphemous video

Comment #133212 by mblarson323 on February 25, 2008 at 9:42 pm

"Authorities in Brazil, China, Iran, Morocco, Myanmar, Syria and Thailand have blocked access to YouTube in the last few years, according to Reporters Without Borders, a press advocacy organization. "

So let's flood the internet with subversive and blasphemous content of all types! All these dictatorial countries and oppressive religions will be forced to block so much internet content that it will become virtually useless to them. They'll be cut off from the rest of the world. They're economies will crumble, their social fabric will begin to unravel, their despotic regimes will fall into chaos and the populace will eventually run the tyrants out of town in tar and feathers. We'll be rid of them forever! Voila!

14. Fleabytes

Comment #130467 by mblarson323 on February 20, 2008 at 3:31 pm

I'd like to point out another obvious response to the "What about the fine-tuning of the universe?" question. As usual, this christian-conceived question overlooks an obvious "natural" answer because it is predicated on the presumed answer.
But who says the universe was fine-tuned to us? Why is it so inconceivable that it occured the other way around? Isn't it just possible that humans (and, for that matter, all life on earth) developed and evolved in response to the conditions of the universe around us? I'll grant that if you change one variable a tiny bit *this kind* of life might not be possible. But that says *nothing* about the countless different kinds of life that might develop and evolve and thrive under the *new* conditions; life forms that we cannot, even in our wildest dreams, imagine because they are so far outside our experiential frame of reference. To assume that the life forms we can "imagine" are the only ones conceivable reeks of anthropic arrogance (and self-imposed ignorance).

I'll conclude this post with my favorite (and, as far as I know, original) maxim:

"Tradition is institutionalized ignorance."

15. 'Irrational Atheist' trounces God-deniers

Comment #117908 by mblarson323 on January 30, 2008 at 12:31 am

"Using reason, science and historical documentation – not theology – Day argues the atheists into an inescapable corner"

Upon first stumbling upon this description of Vox's book in WorldNetDaily, my initial reaction was positive. "Perhaps" I thought to myself, "I will finally be treated to a well-reasoned argument in support of theism. One that is build upon objective, verifiable premises that collectively lead to a rational conclusion in support of their belief system." After all, anyone who claims to be a rationalist, regardless of their position on the subject of religion, would very much welcome such argument in contrast to of the vitriol-laden diatribes that are so often served up by these pietistic pretenders to reason. Once again, I was sadly disappointed. After reading the article in that introduces the book, it was apparent that all Vox has to offer is more of the same old arguments dressed up in somewhat more florid prose.

I won't bother to comment on any of the arguments themselves, because they have all been thoroughly and repeated discredited in too many other reputable sources to count. The purpose of this comment is to point out that, for two very clear reasons, we should abandon all hope of ever being treated to such an argument by a true believer. The first, and most obvious reason, is that no such argument exists. If it hasn't been posited in the last 2000 years, there's little reason to expect it to emerge, fully conceived, any time in the near future. But the second reason derives from the very nature of the messenger. In order to be a true believer, one must both embrace a belief system that which has no basis in logic and at the same time, engage in a persistent and diligent effort to prop up the inconsistencies and contradictions inherent in those beliefs with equally inconsistent and contradictory evidence. The simple truth is that, in the course of "learning" to be religious, one gradually loses all capacity for logical discourse – or for that matter, even logical thinking!

Of course theists will always claim, as does the description of the article by Vox, to use "reason" and "science" to support their arguments. But a cursory study of these specious polemics quickly and consistently exposes them as little more than "sows dressed in fine silks."

I'd like to say "Nice try" Vox, but it wasn't even that