1. Atheist says he's victim of religious hate crime

Comment #29343 by christmeal on April 2, 2007 at 3:41 pm

It's not about double-standards.

"...it doesn't look like it falls within what our policies and procedures define as a hate crime," said the detective.

It's about the policies lagging behind reality. Policies can only be implimented after the fact of a problem. I say, damn the procedures, they're a bunch of retarded bureaucratic rubbish. It takes a very minimal understanding of human nature to know what hate looks like on the surface, but the detective is being cautious. He probably doesn't understand that the policies are supposed to reflect the human condition although that can take years to happen.

2. Why there are almost no genuine atheists

Comment #24609 by christmeal on March 7, 2007 at 2:40 pm

"After all, the human race has existed for an eye-blink of cosmological time and will certainly cease to exist in another eye-blink or two."

Not necessarily. We could propogate like vermin and infest the universe if we wanted to. We have the power. Give us time.

3. CNN Sylvia Browne Fraud

Comment #21953 by christmeal on February 12, 2007 at 1:24 am

I know why they diverted their search efforts. Police are not supposed to refuse a lead in any form, because any testimony, no matter where it comes from, should be given equal treatment. If it turned out the woman really did know something, however improbable, the police would get blamed for not taking the lead.

4. Panel discussion on atheism where no atheists are included

Comment #21946 by christmeal on February 12, 2007 at 12:55 am

When you get that list, Stewart, you can smear it on the face of the media with a nice editorial in the New York Times, and then somebody will draw a nice political cartoon of Christians worshipping a cross shaped like a sword.

5. The questions science cannot answer

Comment #21942 by christmeal on February 12, 2007 at 12:47 am

"What is life all about?"

Having sex, looking cool, and feeling good.

Alister, I think, is looking at it from the wrong direction. The question itself is vague. What does he mean by "what"? What does he mean by "about"? What does he mean by "all"? Rather than speculate on the apparent definitions, I can offer a translation: What is the meaning of life?

Survival. Everything we do is for our own survival. Survival is not meaningless, because survival requires you to feel good and purposeful--to help others to survive.

Science can answer any question.

6. Panel discussion on atheism where no atheists are included

Comment #21759 by christmeal on February 11, 2007 at 1:59 am

Sharpen your sticks. Clamp on your helmets. They will throw stones. When they run after us, we will run too. When they stomp on us, bleed on their shoes. The crisis will be upon us. Close your eyes. Faith in evolution. There is no death. We're all one. When we bleed, it's their blood too.

7. Does Richard Dawkins exist?

Comment #21753 by christmeal on February 11, 2007 at 1:25 am

Bollocks.

Dawkins has evidence to back up his existence.

I think what the actual confusion is, if would you please think about this, just to confirm, is the problem of proof. What does 99% mean?

In one video, a Liberty University student tells Dawkins, "I can't prove you exist." This is wrong and backwards.

In science, when you try to prove something, you run a series of tests, and the better tests you have, the closer your number gets to looking like 99.999%. That finite little number at the end is assumed to be an uncertainty, a possible God hiding deep within the infinity of the unknown. This is wrong, because percentage doesn't always mean probability. I would think these percentages are more akin to a picture.

You have a fuzzy picture, with 50% resolution. You can barely see what it is. You gather more information, and the picture becomes more clear. At 70% resolution, you see some of the details, and you can pretty much tell what it is by now, and what you can't see, Gestalt does it for you. When you get up to 90% resolution, the picture is clear. You don't need any more information.

The mistake many people make is in thinking that once you get to 99.999%, you still don't have enough information to see the picture. They ignore the 99.999% in the pursuit of the 0.0001%. Finding it isn't going to change the picture at all. If you increase the resolution by 0.0001%, God won't suddenly jump out of the shadows and say Peek-a-Boo.

Like I said, percentage does not imply probability. We know Dawkins exists, even though his videos are a little fuzzy. The outlines of the picture are clear enough and consistent enough with human patterns of behavior to rule out all doubt otherwise. If his videos were of higher resolution, we wouldn't find that he didn't exist. All we would see is that he has more wrinkles than we thought he did.