Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? We're trying for a more thoughtful sort of discussion here.
If you'd read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post in the intended spirit of the site, we'd be grateful. I noticed a thread from a few days ago where this account got involved in a religious flamewar. That's just what we don't want on HN.
You might also find these links helpful for getting the spirit of this site:
When I go to a store in "public" like Walmart, and buy a bottle of whiskey, an onion, and a deodorant, in front of hundreds of strangers, sharing willfully my payment details with Walmart and Visa, when I get home I still do not expect all my Facebook friends to know what I bought, to have pictures of me buying the items and to have a copy of my receipt. And some of them even have Walmart as a friend. Some even Visa!
Yet all is public information and happened in a location with no expectation of privacy.
The difference is that you have a degree of control over what people see. There is a degree of privacy and can back out at almost any point and can mask what you are doing quite easily.
It’s not socially acceptable to go and rummage through someone else trolley and confirm what’s in there.
But it is socially acceptable that after installing an app or signing up for a service it gets to scrub all the data from the phone; contacts, photos, messages, relationships, locations, businesses, apps installed, calls, usage, all of it, then correlate it, classify it, generate profiles, predict behaviors and sell that information?
Not at all. I’m saying that normal interactions have a degree of privacy to them, even when out ‘in public’. I do think that there are expectations of privacy in most interactions, yet somehow social media and advertising have completely broken this standard.
You are being downvoted because people have problems separating the two since they've been so tightly coupled for millennia at least in western civilization.
But you are right, nothing in "atheism" prohibits someone believe there is an afterlife, or ghosts, or reincarnation, etc. Atheism just means you don't believe in gods; with a little imagination an afterlife can still exist without any overlords.
Atheism is a positive belief system. It actively asserts special gnosis of God’s nonexistence which effectively makes it a particularly bare-boned form of Protestantism.
Agnosticism on the other hand isn’t a religion, it’s just intellectual humility or maybe just laziness.
> Atheism is a positive belief system. It actively asserts special gnosis of God’s nonexistence which effectively makes it a particularly bare-boned form of Protestantism.
Asserting the nonexistence of something is not asserting special knowledge of something's nonexistence. Atheism isn't a Platonic Beard[1].
On a more practical level: if Protestants and atheists don't find their views mutually intelligible, there probably isn't any really meaningful sense in which one is a "bare-boned form" of the other.
Atheists are people who assert "I do not believe in God" and not, "I believe there is no God." It can not be otherwise, because the opposite makes no logical sense. Which God would the correct one to "believe against"? There are infinite Gods that one must equally disbelieve. Not believing in Zeus, Jupiter, Odin, Ra, Yahveh, and the flying spaghetti monster does not require any evidence at all, it's merely the default position which any rational person must take.
Atheists merely believe in one God less than believers.
I appreciate the sophistry, but it just doesn't accurately describe the empirical reality. Western atheists are observably interested in the nonexistence of the biblical God. As you correctly note, none of them define themselves by, say, disbelief in Trimurti. I doubt they even think about it.
Furthermore, every atheist I encounter actually asserts something like "I do not believe in God, because there is no God." After all "I do not believe in God, because there is a God" is irrational and, given the consequences of disbelief if God is as described in western tradition, exceedingly foolish. Atheism is only a rational belief if God is known to not exist. Otherwise it's no different than not believing in climate change or dinosaurs.
And in any event a transcendent creator God (first cause, etc) isn't anything at all like the easter bunny, comic book superheroes, or bad fictional characters.
Atheists are well aware of the distinction, I can assure you. A statement like "I do not believe in God because there is no God" proves absolutely nothing. I could tell you "I do not believe in pink unicorns because there are no pink unicorns" and you would not take it as a statement of faith, just as the obvious truth. Such a truth is also obvious about the Judeo-Muslim-Christian God to atheists: there is no evidence of God, and in particular, there is no evidence whatsoever of Yahweh.
As a side note, the strange idea that Yahweh is the only "possible" God is taken as granted by religious people, but it makes really little sense to those who came to disbelief through a philosophical journey. A lot of atheists will tell you that the specificity problem is one of the most convincing reasons not to believe in God.
> As a side note, the strange idea that Yahweh is the only "possible" God is taken as granted by religious people,
It's really not, especially by most people who follow non-Yahwistic religions. But even those who personally believe in Yahweh who pose arguments for the existence of a god often do so for a god of a far less defined nature; belief in the existence of a god (however that term is defined) and belief that the god that exists has, in addition to those traits which are reviewed as inherently defining being a god, also has the other traits classically identified with some particular image of Yahweh are often coinciding but distinguishable beliefs.
You ought to put some more effort into understanding the millennia of thought that has gone into the topic before making sophomoric errors.
You've unintentionally acknowledged my original point with your obsession on the nonexistence of the biblical God. Why aren't you going on about your lack of belief in Susano-o?
What you fail to understand is that there are those who have come to a belief in a transcendental creator God in a philosophical journey, because it's a logical necessity. Granted, the particulars of the incarnation are a matter of testimony. Setting that aside though, the logical argument for the necessity of a creator God is no different than the logical argument that we live in a "simulation."
> who have come to a belief in a transcendental creator God in a philosophical journey, because it's a logical necessity
Care to unpack that for me? Are you arguing for a "God", or a Prime Mover? I think they are very distinct - people attribute certain anthropomorphized qualities to a "God". I don't find an argument that there must being a prime mover particularly compelling, and if there were such a thing, I would very much doubt that it would represent any sort of deity as we define it - if anything I'd expect it to be energy and chaos. I'd just like to know which side of this argument you're going with.
See "He Is There And He Is Not Silent" by Francis Schaeffer.
However, be aware that this book is more a sketch or outline of an argument, not detailed at every step. You're going to have to do a lot of thinking about various points to decide whether you agree with his argument.
You're also going to have to pay careful attention to his definitions of words, specifically his distinction between rationality and rationalism.
Taking a weak sketch of an argument and then filling in what you want to see seems to me to be a realization of one's own desires, and not a convincing argument in and of itself. I've no interest in reading a Christian Apologists attempt to find a way to rationalize out a creator - if I'm going to be convinced of such a thing, I expect there to be convincing, obvious, evidence, and not to end up at the end of a metaphysical cul-de-sac and to have to "God" my way out of it.
I never said it was weak. It's not. I said that you're going to have to think through whether the "but what about"s that you come up with really counter his point, because he's not going to address every "what about" that exists.
> What you fail to understand is that there are those who have come to a belief in a transcendental creator God in a philosophical journey, because it's a logical necessity.
And what you fail to understand is that there are those who have come to a disbelief in a transcendental creator in a philosophical journey, because it's a logical impossibility.
> You ought to put some more effort into understanding the millennia of thought that has gone into the topic before making sophomoric errors.
> We know that the existence of God can be found logically, because Gödel wrote a formal proof.
This, of course, is why if you look online there are no refutations of said proof.
I would suggest you're being incredibly pedantic - formal logic being a place far removed from the logic to which they were referring. It seems roughly analogous to me that just because mathematically infinity exists doesn't mean it must exist as physical property.
You're right - that's not a terribly well thought out argument. They should have said:
"I don't believe in any deities existence as such a claim would require extraordinary evidence. Not only have we been provided no extraordinary evidence, we have been provided no evidence at all, save possibly the very existence of creation itself, but we can safely reject the argument that a creator deity exists because creation exists due to the innate problem with first causes arguments - if you assume that everything must have a first cause, that first cause can't have had one, thus there isn't an innate requirement for a first cause, making first causes an argument against themselves. There being no evidence provided, therefore I can safely rejected the supposition that such a being would exist."
Yes, that does make more sense. Of course I would counter that the universe and our existing in it came to be out of random mindless chaos is also an extraordinary claim.
I’d state it as there must be a singular uncaused cause on account of the tree of causality has to have a root. We call that uncaused root of causality God. The refutation requires that we accept that some events have causes and some don’t and oh well no idea to really know which is which. Since the entire scientific and engineering endeavor relies on events having causes, I find that conclusion philosophically unsatisfactory.
If we don't assume a beginning or end, then we end up with infinite time, with infinite variations, and with that it's a pretty much certainty that this would exist as it does, for this iteration.
Science and Engineering rely on cause and event largely in mathematical abstractions - if we draw the line out far enough "why is that real ball moving through space" the answer stretches all the way back to the big bang, and we lack the ability to see what came before. From what I understand of current science - the theory is that it was due to a big crunch, which was due to a big bang - infinite loops in an infinite cycle.
Again though, you're saying that the singular uncaused occurred just because - in a system that otherwise must have a cause and effect that MUST have had a cause and effect, unless you decide to draw a special case for it, where I can see no reason why you would. It's basically a special pleading to jam god into a hole of knowledge, just like we used to do with demons and witches before we understood the real nature of diseases.
Godel's proof is just a formal logic version of Augustine proof, which has been disproven.
Here's the "proof": God is perfect, all perfect things must exist, therefore God exists
Which is easily refuted by observing that the statement merely shows that either a perfect God exists or it does not. The fact that one can posit a perfect God does not make it real. Even a kid can understand that.
No it's not. It's a formalization of St. Anselm's ontological argument. It's clear to me that you have no real interest in the subject, but on the off chance I'm wrong you can easily find both the medieval ontological argument and the modern formal one online.
In any event I think Gödel's proof is worth understanding simply as a nice example of modal logic and the power of formalisms. Anselm's informal attempt at a proof is famously unreadable.
> We know that the existence of God can be found logically, because Gödel wrote a formal proof.
And that is when the whole world converted overnight never to question dogma again, right? Wait, that didn't happen. Because is not posible to prove any god, let alone the overlord dictator that is, by your own "logic", making me type this words disregarding him/her.
If there are no gods, then I'm right. If there are gods and they are your kind of illogical creators that somehow do not need an explanation themselves, completely powerful and complex beyond imagination, yet simple enough to classify as "first movers", and caring enough to "die" for us but not before having a plan in-place to resurrect themselves, then leaving for some reason, he/she/it/they WANT ME to be an atheist, so I'm still right. Or are you going against your gods?
Anyway I'm done answering you. At least I hope you learned what an Atheist is and don't keep going around claiming that we are as bad as the rest because we also have "faith" in atheism! Sadly, I'm not holding my breath.
If you assert “gnosis” then you are not talking about belief you are talking about knowledge. Gnostics claim to know there is a god, Agnostics claim they do not know if there are gods.
But I’m an Atheist. Why? Because I do not BELIEVE there are gods. I have not made any claims. I have not asserted anything. I simply find all the arguments in favor of gods lacking.
Atheism IS NOT a positive belief system, but simply the rejection of one.
> If your favorite car company releases a nice premium product are they also "pissing on you"?
If Toyota re-releases the Corolla as a 60K car, then yes.
Apple is not "diversifying" their product. They are straight pushing it upmarket leaving current Mac Pro customers, the ones paying until today $3000 for a trash can Apple swore was the future, out in the cold.
Who believes what Apple says? Most things Apple says are completely bullshit.
From the Mac Pro trash can product page(norwegian): "Enough performance to realize all your biggest ideas"
"You will never want more speed"
And let's not forget why Apple is sticking to 3.5" screens. It is the perfect size, and that's why Apple won't make phones bigger. It's definetly not because Apple is lagging behind. Oh, wait...
Never belive Apple's marketing. It's misleading and often false.
I'm not saying you should believe Apple. What I'm saying is that it is completely fair to criticize them based on what they say and do.
Apple promised a Mac Pro replacement for pro customers but delivered a new Mac Pro only for the high end of those customers. That is why they are being criticized.
The old Mac Pro wasn't exactly pro, no matter how much Apple says it is.
The new Mac Pro is an actual pro product, at least the higher specced ones. So they did make a replacement.
Is Apple terrible at naming? Yes. Do they throw Pro into the product name for no reason? Yes. Is it better this way? Who knows. They still have the MacBook "pro".
Default skepticism doesn't mean verify everything every time. It means that when confronted with a new claim, a claim you've not decided yet its validity, you should abstain from taking a position until you have enough evidence to accept or refute the claim.
In the case of your example, I gather you've bought rice before, you've probably bought at that store before, you've used money before and you've eaten food before. By the looks of it, you've probably cooked before with that same kind of rice. Hence you are not evaluating the rice and all its production line from scratch every time you buy the rice. You already evaluated that claim and you've found that the store and their products are acceptable to you and that is why you probably bought the rice.
In that case you abandoned long ago the default position because you already had the required evidence to take an action. Which is the only purpose of the default position.
The problem is that now you've evaluated that news agency or political leaning and you've stopped evaluating it, and 15 years later the message has changed but you haven't noticed.
Skepticism by definition requires no amount of work. What you are describing is the action of taking a position, or wanting to take a position be it for or against.
> Not easy for a data journalist to standup and get a new set of data when there's a time constraint.
Doing that is actively trying not to be a skeptic. A skeptic would wait for the party making the claim to present the set of data validating the position.
Now, I do not now if the default position in the media should be skepticism, but your misrepresentation of it makes me wonder if you are confusing what being a skeptic means and maybe that is why you find it so troublesome?
That's the whole issue. There should be a mac between the mac mini and mac pro as right now they are only addressing the extremes. And it should not be one with a screen attached to it and no expansion.
Mac mini has no expansion and is very thermally constrained. If you are a web developer and never do anything else it might be fine, but there are many kinds of developers, and some need custom hardware, custom PCI cards, multiple network adapters, normal consumer grade GPUs not on an external bus. In short, not the most extreme processing power but customization options. To be able to change hardware without throwing away the whole machine.
Anyway, I love how Apple has convinced everybody that a ~$3000-$4000 machine cannot be pro and is not worthy of their engineering prowess because only modest, unsuccessful developers would spend such a small amount in a computer.
After this I’m not answering any more of your questions because you are clearly not reading my responses. But to others that might stumble upon this thread:
- I already have a monitor, 3 in fact. I do not need to pay for another, specially one that is glued to the cpu.
- The gpu is not the only hardware I listed.
- I do not want to cover my desk with external boxes and adapters, each requiring their own psu, that can only be used within 2ft, forcing them to be right next to the computer negating any “benefits” of taking them out of the machine in the first place for a desktop that never moves.
- I do not want to pay for the overhead an external box will bring, in money, noise, or in mess to my desk.
An iMac is a fine machine. It is not the machine for everyone.
Exactly. Many of us loved the old Mac Pro. Great that the iMac and Mac mini works for many, some of us just don't like them. Apple is in their right to build computers they want, we are in our right to not buy them and complain they no longer build the machine we care about.
Edit: Due to censorship I request you to remove this account since you've not constructed a way to do it ourselves.
http://remove.org/removal-requested