(July 3, 2015 at 7:30 am)Little Rik Wrote: The difference is that i may be hilarious because i believe in God without the need to go through an NDE while i believe that you will believe only after your body die or go through an NDE.You're hilarious because you lack self-awareness and because you're a steaming bath of cognitive biases at work. I'm hilarious because I point those out. So really, you're the source of most of the hilarity. I guess you had to be good at something.
Little Rik Wrote:Actually rather than be thin air i would call it thin bread.Again, I'm wondering why you're trying to question the march of scientific and technological progress by claiming that things aren't going well around the world. If you only focus on a distorted picture of the world, that might seem to be the case, but reality isn't on your side. One simple example:
Little Rik Wrote:And what about the N0 1 killer malaria still out of control?Malaria isn't even in the top five in poor countries. By far the leading killer is heart disease, which is a disease that primarily strikes as we get older. Even in those places where the quality of life is relatively low, we're living longer and healthier lives with more leisure time. The worst places in the world to live are places where science and technology are being blocked by religion and spiritual leaders who consider things like vaccines to be the work of evil spirits. Thanks to such nutty ideas, diseases like polio and mumps, which were all but eradicated, are making a comeback (sadly even in the USA, where non-religious nuts are the ones battling against science and technology).
In other words, we make progress anywhere that we allow science and technology to flourish. We regress anywhere that we block those and replace them with spiritual and religious influence. So if you want to be negative about it, you've got to point the finger of blame at people like yourself.
Little Rik Wrote:You never finish to amaze me Ton.If science and technology only got us one step forward and then one step backwards, humanity would be extinct today instead of the dominant species. You have no idea what you are talking about, Rik. You speak of not making progress while you enjoy a healthy diet, medical care, electricity and internet access on a computer with a processor core that is the size of your fingernail yet performs billions of operations every second. The society you describe wouldn't even know how to use fire or stone tools. Technology is more like 100 steps forward for each step backwards. That backwards step is often helped along by "spiritual" people and ideas.
Didn't i explained you the policy of one step forward and one step backwards?
Where do you think you can get to?
This stuff only amazes you because you've so thoroughly insulated yourself from reality.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould