Friends,
I have a crisp $1.00 bill I would like to auction off to the highest bidder. The catch is that the second runner up must also pay his or her bid, but receives nothing.
Let's start the bidding at $0.01
Happy bidding!
rem
Posts by rem
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Dollar Auction
by rem infriends, .
i have a crisp $1.00 bill i would like to auction off to the highest bidder.
the catch is that the second runner up must also pay his or her bid, but receives nothing.
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rem
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84
Chilling experience
by TallTexan ino.k....most people that know me know me to be a rational and logical person not prone to hype or the sensational.
nor am i infatuated with the supernatural as many jw's/ex-jw's are/were.
with that said, let me relate what happened to me at work last night.. on saturday night, we had four bad burns come in.
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rem
TT,
Very true, with skepticism there is the real possibility of refusing to believe in something that is true because there is not enough evidence to back it. That does not, however, make it probable.
As Carl Sagan used to say, sure they laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. There are more wrong ideas than right ones. My opinion is that the lack of positive evidence for the paranormal, even after the last century of in-depth expirimental science, is a good indicator that there is really nothing there. Really, the paranormal position is non-falsifiable (a red flag in itself) which means it is impossible to disprove it - all we can hope for is positive evidence, which is conspicuously lacking.
In the case of micro-organisms, Pasteur did not just make germ theory up. He noticed things (anecdotes) and then tested the anecdotes (scientific method). That people did not agree with him at the time was more a question of trust in the scientific method over old traditions. I don't see this as skepticism in the modern sense. The fact that Pasteur was actually able to prove his claims and *measurably* improve survival rates in hospitals bears this out.
Today belief in the paranormal is really still the traditional view. The scientific view is actually quite novel and more often than not people prefer their traditional views - not for rational reasons, but because of emotional ones. In my view it's as if nothing has changed since the late 19th century.
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84
Chilling experience
by TallTexan ino.k....most people that know me know me to be a rational and logical person not prone to hype or the sensational.
nor am i infatuated with the supernatural as many jw's/ex-jw's are/were.
with that said, let me relate what happened to me at work last night.. on saturday night, we had four bad burns come in.
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rem
TT,
>>If one is skeptical of something, then has an experience (or finds information, etc) that proves otherwise, or at least makes them think about things differently, what's odd about that?
Because you are using the word skeptical in the colloquial sense - not as a real skeptic would, ergo, you never really were a skeptic.
Being skeptical does not mean not believing in something until you experience it. The plural of anecdote is not data - even when it happens to you. Being skeptical means not believing in something without evidence. A real skeptic knows the limitations of his own perception and that even his own experience is not really "evidence". That's what the scientific method is for.
But it was an interesting story. I've had some strange things like that happen to me - they are chilling and even scary at the time. The intensity of the feeling, though, does not add validity to the supernatural theory. In my opinion, after reading much on cognitive and perceptory illusions, it does the opposite.
rem -
84
Chilling experience
by TallTexan ino.k....most people that know me know me to be a rational and logical person not prone to hype or the sensational.
nor am i infatuated with the supernatural as many jw's/ex-jw's are/were.
with that said, let me relate what happened to me at work last night.. on saturday night, we had four bad burns come in.
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rem
Well, at least now we know she isn't in hell. :)
Oh, yeah, and I agree with Six. Auditory and visual hallucinations are not an indicator of a person losing his mind. It's natural - the mind plays tricks on us all of the time. Some tricks are just more elaborate than others. It's happened to me too.
One thing I find funny is people who *claim* to be skeptical, but then as soon as something happens to themselves they become the most credulous people you could ever meet. Maybe that's a selective skeptic?
Sad story about the family.
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I thought I'd share a bit of the book I'm reading...
by Surreptitious in"i'll be honest about it.
it is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics.
doubt is useful for a while.
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rem
I don't think the author is trying to directly equate doubt with immobility, though the wording does imply that he/she sees both doubt and immobility as negative attributes. The author is just trying to describe, in his/her opinion, the absurdity of choosing doubt as a philosophy of life as it is incompatible with his/her worldview, just as immobility is incompatible with transportation.
I don't agree with the author's premise, though. No sane person uses doubt in they Phyrronic sense as a philosophy of life. How could they, really, since it is a self-refuting philosophy? In reality agnostics and atheists doubt the existence of god. This is not a "philosophy of life" and, therefore, is not incompatible with living a happy, normal life.
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123
Michael Moore--Bill O'Reilly finally, on Foxnews tonight
by sf intonight 8 pm / 1 am et
challenge accepted michael moore finally enters the no spin zone!
tune in for the fireworks.. .
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rem
>>sorry, REM, I believe that 18, 19 and 20 year olds are children. It doesn't matter if they are 25, they are still the children of their parents.
Sorry, but their parents aren't "sacrificing" them. These adults are making their own decisions in life, just like some chose to take risky jobs as firefighters.
>>Regardless of the age of the "professionals", they were put into that war because of a lie. There were no WMD in Iraq and Sadam was not a threat to the American way of life.
The argument can be made that Bush overemphasized WMD. Many people like myself, though, never believed that existing WMD's were the only reason for the war. Sadam effectively broke the cease-fire agreement with the United States by continually firing upon US aircraft in the no-fly zone, failing to provide required documentation, and failing to allow the weapons inspectors to do their job for the past 12 years.
Unfortunately, I believe Bush's error was to link Iraq with the war on terror. To me they are completely separate things. I would have agreed with the war even without 9/11. The global powers need to mean what they say. When they say there will be serious consequences there must be serious consequences.
>>What has beating your mate got to do with this topic? Your argument is merely an attempt to mislead from the real issues.
Perhaps you misunderstood. It had to do with Moore's logical fallacy - his appeal to emotion. Of course, I'm not saying that O'Reilly's tactics are usually any better.
rem -
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Michael Moore--Bill O'Reilly finally, on Foxnews tonight
by sf intonight 8 pm / 1 am et
challenge accepted michael moore finally enters the no spin zone!
tune in for the fireworks.. .
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rem
>>"So, tell me, Mr. O'Reilly, would you sacrifice your child to free Fallujah?"
Actually, I think it's a stupid question - an appeal to emotion fallacy. No sane person would want to sacrifice their child to free fallujah, and no san person would want to sacrifice their child to save people from a burning building in the United States.
The question is as bogus as "have you stopped beating your wife?"
These are not children going to Iraq. They are professionals who made their own decision to take on a risky profession, just as firefighters or police do. Going into foreign countries and fighting has been a well known aspect of US foriegn policy for quite some time. Especially after the Gulf War, the possibility of re-entering Iraq should not have been a surprise to anyone.
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evolution VS. creation
by doogie inhey guys,.
what do you think: evolution or creation?
for those of you who believe in evolution, what are some good resources on the subject?
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rem
"The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins is a great book to start with.
rem, monkey's uncle -
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Do you believe in God?
by XBEHERE inafter reading the wt for last week's lesson on god's creative works i couldnt help but think that there really is a god, there has to be.
i dont want to start a creation vs. evolution debate but you have to agree that its an extremely remote chance that the whole universe, the planets, stars, the sun, the earth, the animals, humans came about by accident.
i mean, what the chances really.
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rem
Chappy,
It seems when you say "everything", what you really mean to say is "everything *except* god". Special pleading?
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Is there proof of Evolution out there? help needed
by trumangirl ini've faded, but i still would like to have faith in a creator/god.
but i am really not sure if my belief in god is the result of being brought up a jw and being stuck with a particular world-view.
the best thing i can do is challenge myself by reading some material that explains proof of the evolution, but i have not seen anything that does this yet, i've only seen explanations of the theory, not the proof.
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rem
Trumangirl,
Intelligence is not needed to play Yahtzee. Only an algorithm is needed, which is basically what Natural Selection is - a filtering algorithm. An algorithm may not win as often as an intelligent player, but that's not the point - the point is that the results are much less probable than chance alone. Note too that there are many problems with biological organisms - Natural Selection is a decent algorithm, but an intelligent designer could probably do much better.
You are thinking of irreducibly complex features. So far no irreducibly complex features have been demonstrated. Features that some have claimed to be irreducibly complex, such as the bacteria flagellum, have been shown to be reducible.
The reason is that there is no "plan" to build a feature with a purpose. There is no plan for an eye, for instance. Different parts of the eye may have had completely different purposes before they took the form we see today.
I'm simplifying this horribly, but there is a lot of good information on the web about irreducible complexity and critical reviews of Michael Behe's book, Darwin's Black Box, which promotes this mistaken view.
rem