What is a proof?

[justin]

Once you go into the realm of the supernatural you have left the realm of reality.

And be a umbrella for terrorist organizations, women and child oppression, etc. Seems like a peaceful and intelligent stance......not. MS stick with faith, knowledge is the enemy of your religion.

Persia kept knowledge alive during the "Dark ages" then iSlam was inflicted on the Persian sates and now we have nothing but this iSlamic terrorism overshadowing anything that even remotely smacks of knowledge.

It is very sad when you look into the history of say Iran or Iraq .... as compared to now a days?

I know. Persia was on top of the game before islam. I think islam has to be the worst destructive religion. People find it way to easy to turn their heads instead of speaking out against this tyranny.

When religion run the government. Bad shit will be sure to follow. Like grown men getting away with beating a child for wanting to go to school and read! Like wtf?

[KichigaiNeko]

When ideologies take precedent in government then the country is in free fall to disaster.

Persia..oh how I despair for that area and it's people...such a waste!!

Had a bit of a brain fart the other day...
"The Farther, The Son and the Holy Ghost" =
Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Still "meditating" on those thoughts but felt it profitable to share. And NOW we have the Trinity that was predominant in the Pagan religions...

Funny don't you think?

[justin]

Haha i do i have slipped up and said "the Farter, the son and the holy spirit" before and didn't realize why everyone was laughing when i said it haha.

You think things will change anytime soon over there?

[KichigaiNeko]

Haha i do i have slipped up and said "the Farter, the son and the holy spirit" before and didn't realize why everyone was laughing when i said it haha.

You think things will change anytime soon over there?

I have my doubts. From SOME FB pages that are against the current regime, things are encouraging.

Ultimately I not NOT tolerate intolerance and am hoping that this Leif motif will catch on

[justin]

Haha i do i have slipped up and said "the Farter, the son and the holy spirit" before and didn't realize why everyone was laughing when i said it haha.

You think things will change anytime soon over there?

I have my doubts. From SOME FB pages that are against the current regime, things are encouraging.

Ultimately I not NOT tolerate intolerance and am hoping that this Leif motif will catch on

Same here. I try to share things from like atheist republic and stuff dealing with the intolerance with religious run governments. People seem to even go as far get pissed about this though because i'm being "rude" and not respecting others "opinions". Women suffer probably the most from this ruling yet calling it out for the intolerance and i'm the mean ol atheist. Hopefully there will be some change. I want my generation to break trends, not submit to them.

[EGross]

It gets scarier, and I have had this exact same conversation with other Muslims.

If I lived in Saudi Arabia, and hung out with Osama bin Ladan, and we saw someone standing on a soap box, shouting that Allah requires that the first born son of all Muslim families be put to death to quell his anger, and that Mohammed had done so with his son. The punishment of such blasphemy would be imprisonment, flogging, amputation, hanging, or beheading, depending on the law. He would have been treated like some disgusting thing to be discarded.

Now, when Bin Laden gets up on the same soap box and makes his own declaration of death, he is in no danger of the same punishments, because it is not blasphemy, because all that he has said can be interpreted as valid. The very fact that no Fatwa for his crime of blasphemy was ever made against him is a proof by omission that his words are not so outside of the mainstream, and can find support in a faith of slaves.

Because when you are a slave, and the leadership gives you a command, you do it as a true believer. And so that is why you had several true believers obey Bin Laden, while they paused to pray to Allah, and look forward to their eternal reward for doing God's work. And until a decree for the death of such a person comes from a Mufti from within the faith, then is it not that Islam defines what Osama really is, but the other way around.

Slaves are dangerous.

Muslims are not slaves to other Muslims, only to God

You know that is not entirely correct. Religion, by definition, has heirarchies. And while you may consider yourself a slave only to God, you also are obedient to his eathly judges who direct you. While Jewish Orthodoxy (where I live) has it's p'sak, you guys have your fatwas. It's the same structure and concept, and you obey those from your community.

However, one unique difference with the Muslim version is that a fatwa can declare someone to be murdered/executed, such as someone who makes a tacky movie about Mohammed, or distributing it, or writing "Satanic Verses". And people who would never have considered killing such a person are now moved to do so. And while there may be a few people that might go "that's pretty weird", you have enough with the slave mentality who will blindly follow, with no questions asked.

Part of the problem is the illiteracy rate in the Islamic countries in general. It is a slave mentality just ripe for the picking. Mohammend knew a golden opportunity when he saw it.

So when I say you are a slave to God, I include that you are also a slave to the religious structure that defines your life (and your god)for you.

[jstrodel]

There are many different ways to support knowledge and many different systems which operate in different ways. It is very difficult or impossible to separate universal rules that define what is a valid way to know something and what it not which are valid in all circumstances.

The human experience is diverse an encompasses many models of epistemology and science. Some are more valid than others (e.g. physics is more valid than astrology). There is a lot of gray area and a lot of areas that are difficult to sort out. This is why science changes so quickly and old explanations are replaced with newer ones as well as newer ways of knowing.

[Cyberman]

Actually, it's more accurate to say that science evolves as new information and new tools for obtaining information come along. Most of the time old explanations are refined and sharpened by new discoveries; though it's not unheard of, it's actually quite rare for old explanations to be discarded and replaced wholesale. Even then, it might be the case that the old explanations are still relevant. For instance, Newton's laws are still useful and indeed far simpler in many practical contexts, even though Einstein's relatiivity theories are many magnitudes more accurate and yiled truer results.

[jstrodel]

Can you really say that Newton's laws are wrong then? What if there was a certain amount of pride in always wanting to have the most complex measure. How can you say that Newton's laws evolved into Einstein's if Newton's laws are more applicable? Isn't that just a matter of semantics more than some hard and fast formula?

Epistemology/science is an art, I do not think there is any absolute way to command adherence to any theory. A woman carrying a basket in Africa is not going to care about many things that preoccupy western people. But knowledge is central to the human experience. There are many ways to think about the world that yield different results. It is arrogant to assume that your methods are the best ones unless you know that they are.

[Cyberman]

Newton's laws are not wrong, merely incomplete and also inaccurate when dealing with situations involving extremes of gravity and speeds close to that of light. This was actually demonstrated during observations of the transit of Venus (iirc - I forget the year across the face of the Sun); predictions using Newton's model were approximate, while those based on Einstein's work were spot on. In fact, the whole of modern communications and GPS technology only work because of Einstein's formulae. That's the eating that proves the pudding: when it can be shown to match up to reality, and lead to further developments that work.