On Prop. 8, keep in mind that the anti-8 campaign was, shall we say, ill-conceived. The pro-8 campaign was heavily emotional: "protect marriage". (I've also seen "protect freedom of religion" and "protect mother nature".) The anti-8 group for some reason decided to fight emotion with philosophy: "it's not fair". I'm opposed to Prop. 8 (and voted against it), and *I* found the anti-8 ads unconvincing. With a *good* campaign, an overturn should be quite doable.
John Scalzi has the right idea here: attack the "it threatens marriage" claims directly. "We've been married for fifty years, and if gays can marry, well, we expect to stay married for fifty more."; "So, John and Marsha, if gays can marry, will you give up on getting married yourself?"/"No; we're more interested than ever!"; "How is *your* marriage threatened by two guys getting married, too?"; "How can gay marriage *threaten* marriage when it means even *more* marriages will be made?"; etc.
Featuring maps, and introducing project management!
In a company long long ago and far far away, the manager of the project I worked on was fond of describing the progress of the project as if it were an military operation. However, he didn't talk of combat, assaults, and so forth. Rather, the conceit was that work on the project corresponded to taking control of a mythical foreign territory. Each subproject was considered to be a "country" in the territory; the more progress was made, the more land was occupied. He went so far as to create a "map" of the project on blueprint paper, with suitable "country" boundaries drawn in for each subproject (and arranged so that "travel" across the map encountered the "countries" in the same order that the projects had to be completed). As progress was made, or obstacles encountered, he'd update the hatching indicating "occupied land" on the map to reflect the progress, and run off a new printing.
I still have one of those maps.
Continuing the hiking:
On the last day of the trip I took to Japan with some friends last year, I decided to walk the back way from the train station to our lodging. The walk wasn't particularly long (a leisurely hour or so, I suspect), nor particularly meandering. It was, however, enough to reveal to me the marvel of a store dedicated entirely to artists' brushes, with racks filled with every size and style an artist might need, Even better, nearby I found not one, but two pigment shops, their walls filled with jars of every color you might want to use. Had they been open, I might have braved the language barrier just for the satisfaction of shopping in such places.
Me: Any statement about whether [Really Big Powerful Guys Up There] exist or not is, at its core, a statement of religion.
Avram: Y'know, I used to sort-of agree with this, but I've come to see that it's not true. And I don't just mean that atheism isn't a religion. I mean that the mere belief in a god isn't a religion either.
That's why it's a statement of religion, not an essay, I didn't say that it was statement that one was religious, but only that it was a statement that fell into the area of religion, in the same way that "f=ma" is a statement of science.
Avram: Religion is a set of beliefs and practices. Taking one single statement about whether there is or isn't a Guy In The Sky When You Die With A Big Pizza Pie (That's Agape!) is like pointing to a single ballot and saying it's a working democracy.
You seem to be arguing with something I didn't say.
Teresa: What, are we back to that hoary old chestnut about how religion was an exceptionally stupid attempt to explain natural phenomena before the invention of science?
Assuming that was in response to my post, I didn't make that claim. All I said was that, contrary to Daniel's apparent belief, comfort was not the only function of religion, and presented the easy-to-understand controlling-the-uncontrollable as an example. Given his post, subtlety and nuance didn't seem likely to make the point. (Sometimes, sledgehammers are the tool of choice.)
I don't regard religion as an exceptionally stupid attempt at anything. If I had to describe it as an "exceptionally ____ attempt", I'd fill in the blank with "inventive". I wouldn't think the leap from material being to immaterial ones was either trivial or obvious. To call those beliefs "stupid" would be to hold those people to utterly inappropriate standards, We know things--lots of things--they not only didn't know, but couldn't know. Given what they did know, those beliefs were a perfectly reasonable attempt to explain natural phenomena.
Daniel wrote (in #30)
Christianity, Judaism, Wicca, New Age Spiritualism and what they're all called today are all about as useful as the caveman's belief that lightning is some Really Big Powerful Guy Up There being pissed off with him, or the belief that stars are just little holes in the firmament. Surely they had their uses in less enlightened times; surely they put some minds at ease about things that couldn't then be understood. But right now all they are is dead weight slowing down any progress toward a happier life.
This one paragraph has so many problems it's hard to know where to start. Most of them seem to stem from using subjective terms as if they had fixed, objective, absolute meaning. So, picking points at random:
* "Useful": Usefulness is determined by the particular task you're trying to accomplish. A sledge hammer is quite useful for driving stakes into the ground; it's entirely useless for inserting pins into fabric. So is a sledge hammer useful or useless? It depends on what you're trying to do. Similarly, to determine whether religion is "useful", you have to say what you're trying to use it for. As you haven't said that, you seem to be claiming it's of no use at all, for any task imaginable, which would seem to be a very hard claim to support. Even the most cynical atheist would have to concede that the Republicans have found religion very useful, in encouraging large fractions of the population to endorse their agenda. It may be a sleazy, hypocriical use for religion, but it is a use.
* "Enlightened": whether we are living in more or less enlightened times than we used to depends on what you deem to constitute "enlightenment". There are a considerable number of people who claim that the 21st Century is less enlightened than times past, and point to the prevalence of greed and intolerance as support.
* And the capper: "Happier". If there's anything people cannot agree on, it's what makes them happy. "Happiness" is about as subjective a term as you could find. There are people who are made happy by having lots of stuff. There are people who are made happy by having no stuff at all. There are people who are made happy by being able to stay in the same place for their whole lives. There are people who are made happy by spending each day in a different place. For any given activity, you can find people to whom it brings bliss, and you can find people who flee it as the vilest drudgerly. There are people who are made happy by having unlimited choices available. There are people who are made happy by not having to make choices. Without a "pole of happiness" to make progress toward, how can you meaningfully speak of "progress toward a happier life"?
Other problems:
* Disbelief in Really Big Powerful Guys Up There (RBPGUTs) is as much a religious position as any form of belief is. Any statement about whether RBPGUTs exist or not is, at its core, a statement of religion. Science has nothing to say on the subject. Science bases its claims on evidence, and while there is no evidence that RBPGUTs exist, neither is there evidence that they don't. (Remember that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.)
* You seem to have a remarkably simple-minded idea of what constitutes "religion". Your example of "caveman religion" is straight out of children's cartoons. The evidence available suggests that the early Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens had rather more complex religion beliefs than merely "some Really Big Powerful Guy Up There being pissed off with him". Moreover, RBPGUTs are not posited merely to bring comfort, but to bring control. They exist (for some values of "exist") as an attempt to control the otherwise-uncontrollable forces of nature. To keep the typhoons from destroying the crops, you need an entity more powerful than the typhoon. Mere mortals can't do that, so you enlist the help of any non-mortals you can get.
Perhaps if you rephrased your argument in a way that didn't reek so much of "I know better than you do what's best for you", we might be able to get somewhere.
For what it's worth, the Unicode standard (which, in loose terms, attempts to assign a number to every character in existence) just calls the section mark a "section sign". Considering that it calls "/" a "solidus", and the paragraph mark a "pilcrow", it seems likely that the Unicode people couldn't find a proper name for it, either.
Can we all stop using GOP?
I'd argue that Republican is actually worse, as being outright deceptive. The party as a whole doesn't appear to believe in republican government: "a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch" and "in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law"*.
Teresa's plot to take over the world continues. Found on the comp.lang.c Usenet newsgroup:
George Orwell writes:
> I found this here http://fndsmthng.blgspt.cm
>
> bbye
(URL disemvoweled for your protection.)
Don't bother. ... This may or may not be spam, but it's definitely off-topic.
--
Keith Thompson
Clearly, the practice has spread beyond comment moderation.
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