Surely one can argue that most suicidal or self destructive people do not have free will, but are, in the vast majority of cases, subject to a mental issue and therefore not in their normal mind. If they cannot give 'informed consent' to their own actions, how can they have free will?
Abaddon
JoinedPosts by Abaddon
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Should suicidal or self destructive people have free will?
by The Dragon inbeen going through my head lately....if you try to prevent them from doing what they want...they see you as the enemy...but are you?.
if you take away their freedom to do so.....are they no longer free?
will they hate you...or thank you when they come to their senses?.
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174
Gun control logic
by Gregor inthe v tech shooter bought his guns legally.
gun control laws don't stop this kind of determined killer anywhere in the world.
the defenseless victims couldn't carry a gun legally on campus if they had one.
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Abaddon
The US are basically obsessed with guns and illusory freedoms that actually mean many people live their lives in fear. Some freedom.
As the gun lobby fund politicians nine times as much as the gun control lobby, this will not change, regardless of the rights or the wrongs.
No one will stop criminals getting guns. But crazies are not criminals, they are crazies. The Virgina killer would have probably been ripped off, even killed by a criminal gun supplier, or been too afraid to contact one.
As for arguments concerning the Constitution, it's all dumb.
- First, you CAN change it, otherwise black people and women could not vote. It is NOT tablets of stone from god, okay?
- Second, to most students of English, the clause on gun ownership is linked to a millita at a time when they did not anticipate a standing army, so is as relevent as buggy whips today.
- Third, it is talking about single-shot muzzle loaders, not semi-automatics or assault weapons; I think if those men who signed the Constitution were alive today they would not write the law that way in the face of 30,000 dead a year and spree killers.
- Four, the bleating noise that American's need guns to pwotec themselves fwom the govewnment is pathetic (although given your government is understandable); Eastern Europe freed itself from Communism without mass gun ownership - are Americans cowards that need guns to stand up to despots? Burger-eating surrender monkeys unless they have guns? I don't think so but this is the logical conclusion of some arguments in favour of the status quo.
- Five, when Americans HAVE had the chance to use guns to protect themsleves from the government, where's the NRA? Where's the gun owners? Hiding whilst students get shot at Ohio U, that's where.
- Six, the police were apparently delayed in stopping the carnage by citizens going in with guns; more students died because of amateur gun freaks showing-off than would have otherwise.
I love the 'facts' presented, which;
- combine suicide with homicide to make gun ownership appear less risky to people other than the owner than it is
- classify a part of a country that has had civil unrest for decades as a country in its own right (Northern Ireland) to further distort the statistics and make gun ownership seem less risky to people other than the owner
- amusingly distort things further by ignoring most deaths in the USA are caused by HANDGUNS but counting all guns everywhere as equal
I congratulate the complier of the table and/or those who have cluelessly spread such statistical tripe for such a manifest disregard of facts and such determination to compare apples to elephants.
Sadly, you're (the US) &ucked. There is no way short of a door-to-door army search to reduce gun ownership to levels seen in most civilised countries, and if you did that the gun-nuts would die with a self-rightous cry of "I told you so".
There is one truth; as a society, America is disproportionately violent. There are countries with similarly slack gun laws and comparable GDP/capita and far fewer gun deaths, but they have far far lower levels of social inequality than the USA, and thus far less disadvantaged people who might turn to violence to redress things. As social inequality is getting worse (the US is moving away from European norms and towards, say, Brazil, as far as social inequality goes), the violence is unlikely to get better. If you create a social model where dog eats dog, this is what happens.
It is this inequality, and desensitisitaion to gun violence after decades of it that ensures the 32 students are far from the last who die like this, and those who die at the hands of the disenfranchised underclass will continue to die, and the deaths will change nothing due to politicians being in the pockets of the NRA.
heathen
The koreans in general have a bad attitude about the US
Racist.
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Why does being right = being arrogant?
by AlmostAtheist inwhat is it about a person's believing they are "right" that leads them to being arrogant?
you've surely noticed that the more sure a person is that he's right, the more likely he is to treat those that disagree with him with disrespect.
it's hard to see how a person can disagree with something that you know is right.
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Abaddon
Almost atheist
You feel like saying, "Dude, get educated, THEN come talk to me!"
Feel like? I DO say that!! And boy does it go down like a pork saucege at a Bahmitspha (sp?). I have tried everything from direct ("you are wrong, try reading up on the subject") to nicey-nicey ("that's an interesting opinion and I thought something along those lines too but then I found out that xyz"), and it makes little difference; people don't like being told they are wrong no matter what sauce you serve with it.
But in his own way, the other guy has probably done some research too.
He may be feeling exactly like you, wondering -- bewildered, even -- how you can possibly sit there with a straight face and claim you don't "get it".
I like to think this but this belief is frequently shattered when I find the 'research' is mainstream journalism or lobby groups with the resultent superficial, sensationalised, or biased results. And when you point this out, do people pause and check stuff? Not nearly often enough. Normally they make any 'arrogance' on the part of the well-informed insignificant in comparion to their own; complacent ignorance is a postition as liable to arrogance as 'intellectualism'.
I also think that the confidence of someone who has gone around the block on an issue where factual polarity is possible can be mistaken for arrogance by people who haven't done the ground work.
jgnat
That arrogance thing also might be related to testosterone. I notice in a fight, though I am feisty, I am no match to a bulldog male brain on the offence. He just won't stop chewing on that old bone.
Don't bring balls into this. I know women, hell, I am marrying a woman who can go toe-to-toe with 'bulldog male brains'.
cog dis
Some people have a deathly fear of being "wrong".
Yup. Contarywise, I LIKE being wrong. If I hadn't been stupendously wrong at one point in my life and embraced it and done something about it I would still be a Dubbie - and that i true for many here. Being wrong means I can learn something. I do however have high standards of proof and someone has to really prove they are right; but when they do, fine. I don't invest my ego in ignoring facts.
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Albert Einstein said:
by Sasha inif the bees ever disappear, man will die in 4 years.
the bee's are disappearing..
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Abaddon
jaguarbass
The creatures that run this planet want the global population reduced to 500 million.
Really? Okay, if you say so...
Some other hypothesis are, its infra red light from the sun that is disorientating them and disabling them from finding their way back to the hive.
Yeah, I mean, it must have been a big surprise to them, this big yellow ball in the sky when there wasn't one before. No wonder the poor lovies are confused.
Also it could be the cellphone waves disorientating them.
Yup, we all know cellphones were invented last year... or was it in 1896 when the first reports of something like CCD was reported?
The rays that arent givning humans brain cancer. I know 2 people that have brain cancer 1s dead and the others dying.
I am sorry for their trouble, but;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6209960.stm
I'm all for being open minded jaguar, but it kinda loses something if you let the top of your head fall off... don't you actually check stuff before believing it?
If you do some research into this it seems that reports of CCD (where the bees disappear) are being conflated with reports of colonies dying in their hives from 'old fashioned' bee diseases that have been around years. The average journalist knows an immeasurably small amount more than nothing about bees. And it makes for a good story. CCD remains to be satisfactorily explained, but I don't think we need to hoard food yet.
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Answering an evolutionist argument.
by hooberus inthe world is full of complex biological systems (for one example see below):.
here is a brief overview of the biochemistry of vision.
when light first strikes the retina, a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal.
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Abaddon
hooberus
I am not 'dropping the qualifying charaters', I am saying the qualifying characters are essentially Creationists and IDots (or is it IDites?) saying "but in this case our postulated designer doesn't need a designer because we say so".
Did you not see I was already catering for your predictable protestation in the way that I phrased my initial comment to you?
It is still a form of special pleading; without any evidence what-so-ever such people make the implict claim that intelligent non-biological entities either generate sponataneously in some undescribed fashion, or are external to space and time.
Both are just based on the say-so of you and your chums... and given the lack of ability to show me how greviously wrong dendrochronology is (as you have claimed), , the tendancy to quote from websites I have shown you on multiple previous occasions to be repositories and examples of bad science who pay their chief executives disporportionate salries for the csharitable sector, and as you decietfully or ignorantly mention IDot doctrines like 'irreducable complexity' that have been refuted with no mention of their refutation, the say-so of you and your chums is worth nothing to me.
Go and prove something, eh? I will not indulge you in your arrogant insistence that you are right (without a gramme of evidence to prove it) and the seas of evidence produce by modren science are wrong.
hillary_step
Thank you, that really made me laugh
TopHat
You need to know about a subject you argue against. You've yet to demonstrate any 'accurate knowedge' of the subject. Keep the pretty pictures up if they make you feel happy, but neither they or the text you accompany them with do anything other than show you need to learn more about evolution before you can discuss it without making silly mistakes.
If I were to try to give an example of how little I would need to know about theology to argue about theology as embaressingly as you do about evolution, I'd need to make claims like 'God is a Pizza'.
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Where do you like to sit on a plane and why?
by Crumpet ini'm trying to decide where i want to sit on the plane to dallas - i can choose online 24 hours beforehand but am not sure where is best for comfort, quiet, service, view.
is there anyway of predicting where any babies might be so i can be as far away as possible from them?.
https://www.britishairways.com/travel/managebooking/public/en_gb?eid=104504&source=mmb_tab_ob.
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The Question Of ReligionThe Question of Atheism
by The wanderer in<!-- .style1 { font-size: 14px; font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif; } .style2 { font-size: 18px; font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif; color: #006699; } .style4 {font-size: 16px; font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif; color: #006699; } --> the question of religionthe question of atheism recently, i posted some thoughts and questions about atheism and after having .
read some of the individual thoughts on that thread it is understandable why some.
individuals on both sides feel the way they do.
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Abaddon
The wanderer
From my perspective,
Very true, and the entire issue (see below)
religion and atheism have a common denominator. One
believes in a Universal Creator or God and the other does not.How can this be a common denominator? It is like saying 'Fred and Jane were identical as Fred likes jam and Jane didn't'.
They are differentiated by their beliefs in god.
I have decided that neither one nor the other fully answers the questions to life’s meaning
Of course atheism doesn't answer the questions to life's meaning! It isn't meant to. This doesn't mean in a godless Universe life can have no meaning, but what meaning we give it is a result of us not some intrinsicmeaning for our existence.
I suggest you seek to stop presupposing things; whilst you carry on making such assumptions you truely are;
“locked” into a belief system that does not allow for other views and perspectives on different subject matters.
All the best
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Answering an evolutionist argument.
by hooberus inthe world is full of complex biological systems (for one example see below):.
here is a brief overview of the biochemistry of vision.
when light first strikes the retina, a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal.
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Abaddon
greendawn
if some of these mutations happen to be advantageous (1)
I can't imagine this being anything other than a random process driven by chance. (2)
This is where you are going wrong. You understand well enough upto the sentence I haven marked (1), but your mistake is thinking that the selection process in (1) is correctly described as you do in (2).
Whilst the VARIATION may well be random the SELECTION is not random. It is the entire point of the theory of natural selection... the selection is non random
For example, say you assign six chacteristics like this;
1: Brown Hair
2: Black Hair
3: Blonde Hair
4: Red Hair
5: Curly Hair
6: Straight Hair... and then roll a six-sided die to assign one to a test organism.
The selection of which characteristic (or mutation) the test organism has is random.
However, if the organisms with characteristic 4 produce more offspring in the environment they dwell in than characteristics 1-3 and 5 & 6, eventually all the organisms in that environment will have red hair. This is not random. It really is SO not random...!
I know you've seen this explained a dozen times before in such threads. I hope the explanations you get on this thread are clearer and prevent you making this mistake again.
With such a profound misunderstanding of evolution it is not surprising you've found it hard to see it as a credible theory.
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Answering an evolutionist argument.
by hooberus inthe world is full of complex biological systems (for one example see below):.
here is a brief overview of the biochemistry of vision.
when light first strikes the retina, a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal.
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Abaddon
It is unbelivable that Creationists can think their argument against evolution ("design requires a designer") is NOT a fallacy simply because they say "but in this case our postulated designer doesn't need a designer because we say so". It shows the self-obsesion and auto-idolatry that lies at the heart of every literalistic belief system where it is only the conceit of the literalist that they can understand scripture correctly that provides any basis for their belief structure.
Once again they wharp facts to suit theories rather than adapting theories to suit facts, and blashpheme against god by insisting god cannot cause what we see around us to come about as a result of evolution, even when all the evidence points to evolution occuring. They limit the power of the Almighty god because of their lack of faith.
Seriously, with believers like that god doesn't need atheists.
And hooberus, you knowBehe's irreducable complexity arguments have been falsified; why do you seek to deceive people by presenting it as credible science? Is dishonesty like that part of your Christian fruitage? I don't expect someone as evasive as yourself to answer me; I have been waiting several years for you to show how dendrochronolgy does not falsify literalist claims of a global flood. You make out your silence on the subject to be my fault, which is just more deciet as we all know if you had a credible argument against dendrochronology you would use it...
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Final Thought About Atheism
by The wanderer in<!-- .style1 { font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; } .style2 { font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; color: #336699; } .style4 {font-size: 15px; color: #336699; font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif;} --> final thought about atheismafter having reviewed the last thread about atheism, i have decided there.
exists a common theme among the postings.
the themes surrounding the .
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Abaddon
The wanderer
Didn't you realise the Penn U thing wasn't academic?
Or do you think Student Union/Guild/Associations are academic?
Wow. I never knew that when I edited the University of Exeter's Student's Newspaper I could have been quoted as an authority on journalism!
Now, stop being silly and provide some proof of the paranormal, oh dear, you can't.
golf2
Someone THINKING they are in the grip of spirits/elves/Carebears, and someone actually being controlled by non-cororeal entities are two different things. The former beliefs are held by millions of people with mutually contradictory belief structures and explanations. The latter is something that has never been proved,
...unless screwing one's face up and going 'wooo!' (or varients thereof) is proof to you.