Atheist "church" in London.

[Cyberman]

I'm sorry, I should have known better than the criticize the teachings of the Atheist Church. Carry on.

Oh, do pay attention, 007!

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How many of you just read that in Desmond "Q" Llwellyns's voice? I'm betting all of you!

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[Angrboda]

I'm sorry, I should have known better than the criticize the teachings of the Atheist Church. Carry on.

Oh, do pay attention, 007!

---

How many of you just read that in Desmond "Q" Llwellyns's voice? I'm betting all of you!

---

When I woke up one morning and everybody on IRC was talking about how Q had died, I was initially rather sad, as I really liked John de Lancie.

[Cyberman]

This was a letter in popular adult comic Viz some years back:

"All that fuss about the Millennium Bug and the only thing that crashes is Q out of the Bond films."

[Confused Ape]

I'm sorry, I should have known better than the criticize the teachings of the Atheist Church. Carry on.

What does the Antikythera Mechanism have to do with being religious or an atheist? Can you find any article which disproves what Tony Freeth and his research team say? The only thing I ask is that it's by someone who has the qualifications to disprove the findings.

I found this article by Tony Freeth and Alexander Jones. ISAW Papers 4 (February, 2012)The Cosmos in the Antikythera Mechanism

We compare the positions of Mars, as reconstructed by NASA with the Mechanism’s predictions over the middle seven retrogrades of Mars in the 1st Century BC—a period of about 13 years.86 Serious error spikes can be seen, amounting to nearly 38°—more than a zodiac sign—at the retrogrades. The deferent and epicycle theories, on which the mechanisms depended, might be regarded as an adequate first-order approximation but were completely inadequate for accurate prediction at the retrogrades, particularly for Mars. More accuracy would have to wait for more sophisticated theories such as those employed by Ptolemy in the second century AD. Added to these inherent theoretical errors were significant mechanical inaccuracies because of the way that the rotations were transmitted through the gear trains.87

In short, the Antikythera Mechanism was a machine designed to predict celestial phenomena according to the sophisticated astronomical theories current in its day, the the sole witness to a lost history of brilliant engineering, a conception of pure genius, one of the great wonders of the ancient world—but it didn’t really work very well!

Maybe that's why it's the only one found so far. If it didn't work very well it's unlikely that devices like this would have been mass produced.

[iameatingjam]

I don't know if anyone has mentioned this yet but I wonder if this church gets tax breaks the way a regular church does. And if it doesn't, that would be totally unfair. Well it would be more fair if neither were tax exempt.

[Aegrus]

This strikes me not as a bad idea, but a clumsy one. Making it appear so similar to an actual church is going to make the "atheism is not a religion" argument much harder to defend. Sure, this seems like a parody of a church, to me, but good luck telling someone religious that.

[Aractus]

What does the Antikythera Mechanism have to do with being religious or an atheist? Can you find any article which disproves what Tony Freeth and his research team say? The only thing I ask is that it's by someone who has the qualifications to disprove the findings.

However complicated it appears, it is just a device that tracks the celestial motions of astronomical objects (including the earth), as they rotate the earth. By anyone's definition that's a calendar. It doesn't require any computations by the device, the device simply moves the hands on the dials that have been pre-set by the engineer to move when and where he wants them by cutting the gear wheels. It's a remarkable early piece of engineering, but it's not higher than the technology that we know existed at the time - it's just a more refined and very well engineered example of it. The ancient Greeks and Egyptians didn't have the ambition to try and build an actual computer. They also didn't have the technology to be able to build a working computer.

Maybe that's why it's the only one found so far. If it didn't work very well it's unlikely that devices like this would have been mass produced.

It worked fine for tracking the planets according to current Alexandrian/Greek theory at the time. It did what its designer wanted. But it's next to useless once you introduce someone like Newton who figured out that the ancient greeks had no clue as to how the celestial solar bodies actually moved.

[NoraBrimstone]

Am I the only one who likes this thing? It looks like a joke-church to me, making a point. Like someone rich saw an old Chuch for sale/hire and thought it would be funny to have an "Atheist Church." Stinks of satire to me.

I live in North-West London, so I might go check it out, if I can find it.

[Confused Ape]

However complicated it appears, it is just a device that tracks the celestial motions of astronomical objects (including the earth), as they rotate the earth. By anyone's definition that's a calendar. It doesn't require any computations by the device, the device simply moves the hands on the dials that have been pre-set by the engineer to move when and where he wants them by cutting the gear wheels.

It's obviously not what Tony Freeth and the editors of the science journal, Nature think about the device. Nature doesn't publish woo. Seeing as you haven't found an article by people qualified to disprove the findings it looks like you're just expressing a personal opinion.

PS: You're entitled to have a personal opinion, of course, but you can't complain if everyone else chooses to go by the official findings.

[Aractus]

You're not hearing me Ape. The astrology theory at the time regarding planetary motions was Ptolemaic epicycles. That's easy to reproduce using gears since it simplifies very nicely. They're not claiming that the device didn't reproduce the epicycles. They're pointing out the flaw in the astrology of the time that thus resulted in any device like this actually being flawed in its representation of celestial motion for bodies in our solar system.