…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
Finally, something we can agree on.
On a whiny self-righteous meltdown scale I give it a 7.
You’d better pray there isn’t.
If Revelation is true, there’s no place for your sort in the new earth/heaven.
Glen Davidson
wow, so you know what color a bible is! congratulations!
Outside the city.
Glen, will you ever put together an argument consisting of premises and conclusion? Ever? Are you the absolute best that Elizabeth [this isn’t an atheist site] has to offer up? Glen the Lamb. I get it now.
Will you ever be clever, instead of a dull drone who can’t keep up with discussions in real time?
I don’t cater to your mendacity.
Glen Davidson
Am I “late”? I wanted to use “scare quotes”. Am I doing it “right”, “?”.
Liar.
How far along are you? breathe.
Mung,
I was “trying” to add some “levity”.
Is levity a mechanism?
Rich:
“OldMung” isn’t in the “mood” for it. He’s having another “bad thread day”.
William,
In an attempt to cover up yet another mistake, you are advancing the ludicrous idea that a being with its own mind and its own purposes doesn’t count as “someone else”.
In your own words:
Yet in 2013 you confirmed adamantly that you regard god as a being with its own mind and its own purposes:
Who created humans, in your view? It wasn’t you, and it wasn’t me — it was someone else, a purposeful being with its own mind.
You’re understandably embarrassed, William — this is typical ‘blurt and backpedal’ behavior — but it’s a losing proposition to try to cover up your mistake.
So I do cater to your mendacity?
Whatever, the point is what a mendacious, disingenuous a-hole you are, really just trying to play people.
It’s despicable.
Glen Davidson
William J. Murray,
A ridiculous comparison. New Hampshire has no major cities. Japan has dozens. Cities are where most homicides occur. Maryland has a poor homicide rate. The main reason is Baltimore.
Further, an egregious correlation/causation fallacy. Areas with restrictive gun laws may have felt obliged to introduce them because their citizens have proven themselves unworthy of the responsibility. NH finds itself not in need of tighter restriction, so does not have it. It is a ridicuous stretch to argue that homicide rates there are low because anyone can have a gun – that the guns themselves are what keep homicides down.
William J. Murray,
I think I can answer that one: it’s run by liberals, yes?
fifthmonarchyman,
What utter rot. There is no entailment deriving from not-believing-in-God that relates to what other people believe.
I don’t offer people, Mung. I offer a forum where people can discuss things with each other. Those people include atheists and theists.
Can we cool it a bit in here? If not, I might close this thread temporarily, for a cooling off period.
Let’s try and rediscover the art of communication, which involves listening as well as speaking! 🙂
Though, if the site stats are reliable, readership is on the up from around 500 unique visitors a day to over 600.
@ WJM
You appear not to have noticed my correction to a factual error of yours. The two French law enforcement groups (Police Nationale and Gendarmerie) are routinely armed when on duty.
Chuckle. You compare a lightly populated state against an industrial powerhouse of a country with multiple cities.
Ok, well, what explains Japan’s low crime rate then if not laws allowing gun ownership? Does that not tell you there is a way that low crime rates can be achieved without the constant parade of children shot by other children, to pick one consequence of “a legally armed population”?
Yeah, why on earth would anyone conflate “murder” and “homicide”.
An additional benefit of a legally armed population is that it’s much easier to kill yourself.
http://www.livescience.com/51446-guns-do-not-deter-crime.html
No doubt you will dispute this but the fact is their methods are sound
They go on
So while I’m sure you’ll use the magic word “conflate” and dispute any and all of these claims, the fact is the world looks at you and wonders how you can be so blind.
More guns, more crime. It’s simple and supported by the evidence
Here is the study: http://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(15)00072-0/abstract
Please feel free to write them a letter telling them why they go it so very wrong.
Except nobody ever claimed it did. What it undeniably reduces are overall murder and violent crime rates. The before and after statistics of the same areas are undeniable, and the regional comparisons are undeniable, which is why anti-gun propaganda must concentrate on firearm related crimes only and must dishonestly bait and switch two entirely different legal terms (murder and homicide) in order to present firearm ownership and RTC in an unfavorable light.
But, I’ve already pointed this out and yet you still offer more of the same misleading info, as if murder and homicide are the same thing, and as if anyone has claimed anything about firearm-related crime. If firearm-related crime goes up, but both murder and violent crime rates go down, who gives a crap that firearm related crime has gone up? WTF difference does that make to anyone except anti-gun nuts who use that isolated statistic out of context to make it appear as if overall violent crime rates have gone up?
btw, the figures I looked at were for “intentional homicide” i.e. murder.
William J. Murray,
Shot people? It’s amazing the amount of cherry-picking and twisting of words and figures people will go to to defend the right to bear arms. I certainly feel safer not having a gun, secure in the knowledge that hardly anyone else in this country has one either. You need guns because any asshole can get one. In that situation, gun ownership may potentially make the gun-toter safer. In that mad, completely indefensible situation.
Seems you can’t fix stupid.
The water they are in is boiling, and they move to a cooler part of the saucepan and say “see, things are different in different areas”.
http://www.dailykos.com/news/GunFail
…
..
Yes, the benefits of ubiquitous firearm ownership are clear.
It’s interesting that you admit that more guns equals more gun crime, but spin that into a positive thing anyway. The rest of the world is laughing at you.
William,
It’s also telling you refused to touch the “myth of a good guy with a gun” as it dismantles your argument re: France and arming the population to prevent atrocities like what we just witnessed. You also refuse to address the point that you are willing to sacrifice 10,000 people a year to prevent something which being armed does not usually prevent.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/oregon-shooting-gun-laws-213222
So, sure, when everyone you know has a gun it might be an idea to get a gun. But as soon as you attempt to use it in such a situation you become the target for law enforcement.
It’s interesting that to you facts become propaganda.
It’s all about persuading gullible rubes in pews.
I find it sufficient to distinguish between people who are decent human beings, and people who aren’t.
People who are decent human beings do hot call others heretics or apostates.
Correct that was my point after all. Atheism is consistent with either religious persecution or not persecution.
On the other hand Christianity is not consistent with religious persecution.
Peace
In this argument as in all arguments you need to look at the evidence and not the person. In this case the evidence he presented comes from the Christian Scripture.
peace
No, they just persecute atheists or muslims.
The only way to fix that sort of thing with out violence is by pointing out that their behavior is inconsistent with the teachings of Christ. The only place that that sort of dialog can happen is in the public square.
Yet you would prohibit religious discussion in pubic because you think it rude.
Do you see the problem?
peace
I find that such pubic religious discussions only ever end one way! With a night in the cells!
Of course there are people who claim to be Christian but don’t act like it
The question was whether a “fanatic” is acting in accordance of the tenets of his belief or contrary to those tenets.
When a Kim Jong-un or a Stalin persecutes others for the sake of conscience he is acting in a manner that is perfectly constant with his atheism.
On the other hand when a professing Christian does so he is not.
peace
You obviously did not read the argument I posted. Williams appealed to scripture. His argument came squarely from the radical Christian Anabaptist/Puritan tradition.
There is no hint of the enlightenment in his words.
peace
William,
I encourage you to read the paper I linked to earlier, (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2443681), the abstract of which you proceeded to quote-mine (All those caveats that you bolded were used by the authors, Aneja et al., regarding their conclusion that RTC laws lead to large increases (+33%) in gun aggravated assaults).
The fact of the matter is that Lott and Mustard’s “More Guns, Less Crime” analysis contains a string of embarrassing mistakes (Who the fuck uses 36 collinear demographic variables?). Fix these errors and it turns out (Aneja et al. Table 8a, line 1) that RTC laws lead to an increase in Rape and Larceny, and a probable increase in aggravated assault, robbery, auto theft and burglary. There’s a slight increase in murder too, but that effect is too small to have any confidence that it’s real.
Lott managed to get his bogus numbers by carefully choosing his time frame to coincide with the end of the crack epidemic.
As you have admitted previously, you are not qualified to “arbit” such research, so you are just “cheer-leading”.
Shake those pom-poms.
Williams’ essay explicitly covered that. He makes the point that persecution of Muslims or atheists is against the teaching of Christ and is therefore anti-christian
Apparently you did not read it.
peace
For the fourth time (so I’m guessing you know) I wasn’t talking about Christiams–and certainly not your picture of true loving nicey nice Christians. The discussion was about theists and atheists. You asked me whether both are capable of intolerance. I said sure and then you pretended i’d said something about something else. I’d rather you didn’t do that.
Yet it happens and it happens by people who call themselves Christian.
Hey, fifth, what are the chances of an atheist being elected in the USA?
It might make you feel better to think that people who discriminate against atheists are not real Christians, but they think they are.
Why do you suppose most of the time people who complain about illegal prayer in USA schools retain their anonymity? Perhaps it’s because they are aware of what’ll happen to them by many many previous examples of what happens to such people.
So while it’s easy and convenient for you to shrug and say, well, those people are not real Christians, in fact the opposite is true. You are outnumbered by those people and hence it’s you that is not the true Christian.
Mung,
That is the definition of atheism. It is the only shared characteristic of all atheists. Your desire to ascribe more to it than that is your issue.
Re the gun issue, I don’t think anything is gained by acting as if itwoouldn’t matter at all if gun ownership reduce all other forms of violence and murder, even if it increased gun violence because any latter increase is swamped by the former reduction. Hell, if gun ownership magically eliminated cancer in some society, that would be relevant.
Guns are not an intrinsic evil; but they seem to be an extrinsic one. If william can demonstrate that that’s false it would be important. So, I want to hear what support he has for his claim.
A lot of the confusion is in the way we categorize the world. Apparently you divide it into two groups Atheists and everyone else.
Pointing out that the recent terrorist attacks were committed by theists makes little sense. These acts were committed by Jihadist Muslims.
Lumping Jihadist Muslims into the same category as the Amish and Salvation Army is counterproductive.
You need to know who your enemy is and it’s not Aunt Martha’s prayer group.
peace
You as a tolerant western liberal atheist are outnumbered by the Chinese Communists and hence it’s you who are not the true Atheist.
Use your head man.
The fact is when a Christian persecutes he is acting against the teachings of Christ. When a Atheist persecutes he is being perfectly consistent with the tenets of atheism.
You may disagree with the atheist who acts in such a manner but your shared belief in no god offers you no foundation to tell him he is wrong.
peace
Atheism doesn’t have tenets.
If the atheist expressed views that are popular in the USA and did it in a non condescending way I would expect the odds are pretty good.
I don’t think that combination is very likely
peace
exactly, geeze
peace
Using words is more likely to be taken as “lumping,” when others purposely mischaracterize what they say. There are atheists, Christians, pumpkins, dingbats, non-pumpkins, Muslims, your idea of perfect Christians, etc., etc.
I used the words that expressed precisely what I meant, the words I wanted to use. Then, you pretended I used words you might have liked me to use. As I said, I’d rather you didn’t do that. I didn’t lump; you conflated.