itistoday

There is also the interesting practice of Tonglen that I was recently introduced to. It is a meditation technique (endorsed and practiced by the Dalai Lama), that teaches you how to train your mind to effectively and healthily handle the issue of suffering:

http://www.naljorprisondharmaservice.org/pdf/Tonglen.htm

My assertion, as I explained, is that you have a poor understanding of the various meanings of the word "God". If that is so, then you might be missing something important. It's fine not to believe in a "pink elephant", but doing a quick Google search will show you that there are in fact things that exist and go by that name.

If you're still in disagreement and would like to take this conversation to a satisfactory conclusion, feel free to contact me via email. You'll find it via the link in my profile. I think I am done refreshing the page for this thread for today though.

No, atheism is the outright rejection of the idea of God. It is a religious belief in itself that requires a faith in the non-existence of any sort of God.

Yes, you are right to point that out; after looking up the definition on wikipedia I saw the nuance regarding "supernatural" and expounded upon that above.

And you also forgot one definition. Namely that of religion:

How so? I generally tend to agree with that definition of religion. Notice how physics overlaps that (cosmology and TOEs specifically).

Please explain what god or gods i believe by not believing in god?

Please explain what atheists believe in?

I already addressed this above. If you have a specific question let me know.

You accuse me of spouting nonsense, yet you actually make two contradictory claims:

1) "It's not a non-belief in god."

2) "It's simply that I don't believe in this thing" (thing referring to "god")

Statement #2 is clearly an admission that you hold a non-belief in god.

I think part of the problem here is that you do have a belief in God. You believe "God" to refer to some specific thing, and it is that thing that you choose not to believe in. Whatever that is, I don't know, but if you assume that the word "God" has a clear and singular definition, well, then you don't know very much about religion, do you? :-)

But that doesn't seem to be the case, it just sounds like you might be a little confused, as in your last sentence, you demonstrate an understanding that there are in fact multiple definitions for the word "god".

So, what is atheism then, really? Wikipedia gives the following definition:

  Atheism, in a broad sense, is the rejection of belief in the existence of 
  deities.[1] In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there 
  are no deities.[2] Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that
  any deities exist.[3] 

  A deity[1] is a postulated preternatural or supernatural immortal being, who may 
  be thought of as holy, divine, or sacred, held in high regard, and respected by
  believers, often religiously referred to as a god.

And that is were the crux is. For the mystics do not believe that God is supernatural or "preternatural". This is not the notion of God as understood in Hinduism or Buddhism, for example. In those religions, God is natural. God is nature.

So, if you identify as an atheist, and by that you mean you disbelieve in a God that is outside of nature, then I think that is just fine (and fairly unremarkable), but if you disbelieve also in the second type of God, the one who is one with nature, then that is another thing entirely. You may in fact believe in God, but you just might not have known about the various meanings of that word.

It certainly can be.

Militancy: the view that it's OK to tell people that they are wrong.

This would be OK if the people to whom they were saying this to were actually wrong. The truth is quite often they don't have any evidence for this. For example, if a mystic were to go to the average physicist and tell them that they were God and they had created the Universe, they would laugh in the mystic's face, yet that doesn't mean the mystic is incorrect, it just means the physicist did not understand the mystic, nor were they inclined to attempt to do so. This sort of militarism is a block to knowledge and understanding.

Reductionism: the expectation that what things do is explained by what the things they're made of are doing (what else would you expect - some sort of soul that imparts unexpected properties?)

Reductionism assumes that fundamentally everything is made up of individual parts, a "lego-theory of the world" if you will, yet this is not what the known physics itself says is happening. Take the case of quantum entanglement, you have two "things" that yet act as one. Physicists are still baffled by this. Legos do not behave this way.

Further, it must be acknowledged that even if everything is made up of "individual parts", these parts interact with one another, and hence they are not truly individual and separate, their behavior and any meaning that can be attributed to them requires the simultaneous acceptance of all other parts of the system, the understanding of mutual-interdependence (a mystical concept). Without the rest of the parts, the individual components are without meaning themselves. Meaning only arises out of the relationship between the various components, and that does not fit with the reductionist viewpoint.

Atheism: the view that gods need explaining as much as anything else.

No, atheism is the outright rejection of the idea of God. It is a religious belief in itself that requires a faith in the non-existence of any sort of God. It does not ask for an explanation of God, for if it did it would have to accept the possibility of a God.

Calories do matter, but it is not nearly as simple as you're trying to make it out to be.

Genes play a huge role. For most people, playing the game of watching what you eat and counting calories makes sense, but for others, it's not so clear cut. For example, my dad (a molecular biologist) is studying the effects that certain genes have on the weight of mice. The details escape me (and aren't relevant here), but the takeaway is that your genetic makeup will predispose you to weighing a certain amount, and some mice/people will be fat even if they eat very well, and others will be skinny even if they eat very poorly.

Hence, for some people (but not everyone), managing their weight requires more than just counting calories.

I can eat a stick of butter and I won't gain a pound (unless the butter weighs a pound..). My body simply won't store the extra energy, it uses what it needs and the rest goes out the end. It is a tad frustrating because I am a bit underweight as well.

  I'm not afraid of zucchinis, but I just don't know how to cook them.

I tried the single player and don't see what the fuss is about, perhaps I'm missing something?

I'm leaning more toward the "not the brightest bulb in the valley" theory.

http://www.sophos.com/images/blogs/gc/2010/09/onmouseover-po...

(hint: see URL or titlebar)

http://www.citycarshare.org/

Personality Which profile is most like you?

- Vision/strategy: see 1-2 years ahead, predict trends, write vision document, and inspire a team

- Implementation/execution: build a product, follow a great plan, detail-oriented, manage daily operations

I'd be nice if those were checkboxes, it's perfectly reasonable for a person to embody all of those personality traits. In general it would be nice if there was more flexibility in the profile.

  Well, CBP has no power over me. I am a law-abiding
  citizen, and, as such, I am the master, and the federal
  cops are my servants. They would do well to remember that.

  When it comes to rights, you don’t know in advance what
  battle will be important. But you do know, based on 
  history and human nature, that a right undefended will 
  shrivel and die. If you don’t fight for the small right, 
  you won’t be in a position to assert the large right.

  1) You lose credibility (whether its unfounded or not is irrelevant)
  2) People refuse to spend much time looking at your code

Conversely, I've learned that prickly people who get red-faced upon encountering an unfamiliar style are often worth avoiding.

You're conflating two very different concepts of complexity here.

One is the complexity of a static state of information, and the other is the complexity arising from dynamical systems.

As roadnottaken pointed out, fractals are perfect examples of systems that are described by very "simple" formulas, yet contain infinite complexity. It could therefore be said that the simple equation of the Mandelbrot set represents infinite complexity.

However, if you take a particular iteration of the formula, then you can get a finite concept of its complexity, i.e. how many bits it takes to represent the image you're seeing.

So, to say that the "the brain cannot be more complex than the data that specifies it" is true in one sense, but completely useless in another.

To put this into terms of the Mandelbrot, you can gather up all the bits that represents some particular iteration of the Mandelbrot, but that doesn't tell you anything about how it works, or even how to generate the next frame. You need the equation for that.

That's just one place where Ray fails. The second is the lingering question of whether computers in their current state are even capable of "simulating" a brain. It's still not an answered question of what the role of the non-determinism found in Quantum Mechanics plays in the brain and the interactions of various chemicals. It was recently shown that DNA relies on QM entanglement to "hold it together". If it turns out that non-determinism and QM effects play a crucial role in biology (which they almost certainly do), then the very rigid and deterministic system that is the CPU may simply be incapable of simulating a human brain.

By lack of humor, I meant an inability to take one's self less seriously.