pope wins my vote
Vote on the Bad Faith awards : Pharyngula
Teh man wears a dress and jewelry, heads the richest organization in the world yet is against gay rights and preaches poverty.
All life is precious till it’s born, demons are real and god speaks thru the pope.
Finally i spent two years in a Catholic seminary.
More than enough to put him over the top in my book.by tsig0
Slightly Rattled
While walking up the driveway a couple of days ago, I encountered one of the more interesting local inhabitants.
Fortunately, I was able to keep the dogs away, and, after securing them in the fenced yard, returned armed with a long stick and a cat crate.
I placed the crate on end, with the door upright and open, annoyed the thing sufficiently that it coiled, upon which I scooped it, (carefully, with the stick!), into the crate and secured the door.
After taking a few photos, I drove a couple of miles up an old mining road, and released it.
Hope it finds the new location suitable. Apparently translocating rattlers is only marginally successful.
Western Rattlesnake (Crotalus atrox)
Woah!
forums.debian.net disabled
- To: debian-project@lists.debian.org
- Subject: forums.debian.net disabled
- From: Peter Palfrader <weasel@debian.org>
- Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2009 23:18:56 +0200
- Message-id: <20090419211855.GB11196@intrepid.palfrader.org>
- Mail-followup-to: Peter Palfrader <weasel@debian.org>, debian-project@lists.debian.org
forums.debian.net is a debian.net service run by a set of DDs for the community. It’s not an official Debian service run or maintained by the project or DSA (then it would be forums.debian.org).Nevertheless it was hosted on debian.org hardware since sometime last year because the original system it was on was an under-the-desk kind of “server” that was falling apart and the forum admins wanted to continue to provide this service.
DSA gave them access to tartini.debian.org, which was unused at the time. Since then, this system has been dedicated to running forums.debian.net; it was decided to not use tartini for any other services due to security concerns.
This afternoon DSA received reports that forums.debian.net might have been compromised: registered users had been email spammed from the forums software.
forums.debian.net has therefore been disabled.
It is not known when or if or how forums.debian.net will return.
We currently have no reason to believe that tartini itself was compromised.
For DSA,
Peter
From the site here
Damn!
Name that pooter!
I’ll be taking delivery of a new computer soon, (hopefully), and will need to give it a name, so I can link it to my local network
Currently, I have three Debian Gnu/Linux boxes on the network:
debbie, my 5-year old desktop machine
tigger, my ancient server
zilla, my extremely heavy 17″ ‘mobile’, laughably called a ‘laptop’
I like two-syllable names….
One small chip for a chimp; one giant interface for borg-kind
Can the neural computer interface be far behind?
Electronic chip connects with brain to control movement
The Neurochip creates a brain-computer interface that records every movement sent from the motor cortex to the rest of the animal’s body.
impersonal transcendence
I should think meaning must be agreed to, even if that meaning depends ultimately on a discussion of what is not, in order to at least form a coherent, if not mutually acceptable proposition.
In other words, can one really prove or disprove a position regarding the nature of what actually constitutes meaningfullness?
It seems to me that the quality of having meaning is a requirement of a proposition. If this is so, anything that does not have meaning also is not, in fact, a position, or at least is one rendered incapable of positive, objective statement.
Sometimes we engage in laughably futile attempts to talk about ‘things’ that are incapable of being conceptualized. They are futile simply because these ‘things’ do not exist as ‘things’ at all, laughable, because we really should know better.
To illustrate further:
If you speak to me in a language foreign to me, I simply do not understand. But I correctly guess your utterances have meaning.
Even the random babble of a child inarguably has meaning.
A chair has meaning, as does the word, ‘chair’ we use to label the ‘thing’ we call a chair. A rose by any other name, and so on.
It is the verbal or non-verbal neural process of labelling, abstracting, symbolizing, which ascribes meaning to things, which otherwise have none.
At the most basic level, all which appears to exist in the universe of our experience has at least the base characteristic of meaning, defined as whatever it is which characterizes, or sets that ‘thing’ apart — as far as our cause/effect, subject/object conceptualizing brain is concerned.
This is what is meant by ‘limits’ bestowing meaning. Without limits, a thing has no objective, conceptual meaning, because it cannot be defined as a thing.
There is, naturally, that which exists without limit. We call ‘it’ the universe, or transcendence, as if we were somehow separate from ‘it’, and can therefore be experienced subjectively as object. No matter how we try, we cannot positively define transcendence, quite simply because it is limitless.
All experience is objective. That is, mind is composed of experience-ing. Transcendence, which is limitless, and all inclusive, must remain incapable of being ‘experienced’ objectively, because thought is contained within ‘it’.
Transcendence unquestionably exists, and may even be alluded to as, for example, ‘all that is’, or ‘universe’, but its inclusive, limitless nature precludes a coherent definition.
This is one of the reasons why it is quite meaningless to personalize transcendence.
Lesser gods there may be, but there cannot be an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent ’supreme being’
Bubbles in the stream…
We exist not as separate entities.
Although we appear to do so, we are not persons moving through time/space. Rather we are expressions of the multiplicity of process that is the universe, and define ourselves as distinct solely due to the abstracting neural functioning which characterizes our particular mode of energy/matter.
This is the basis for unbelief in a universe composed of ‘things’.
Despite the apparent perception of a multiplicity of objects, I must inevitably recognize all objects depend ultimately on ultimate subject. Therefore ‘I’ cannot be object. Since subject cannot exist in the absence of object, nor object in the absence of subject, it follows neither exists apart from the convenient illusion invented by the neural process of perception/thought.
I do not, therefore, believe in my ’self’ as a being, and I certainly don’t believe in a God-being.
Reason has little to do with it
Reason is Cast Aside
Lady Science Has Fled
Faith and Superstition
Fill The Believer’s Head
Teaching Pigs to Sing (Skeptical Inquirer July/August 2006)
It was the beginning of an odyssey that introduced me to a strange race of people who believed in angels but not in germs. I can only compare it to visiting a carnival freak show of intellectual, rather than physical, anomalies. I observed how the average nonskeptic member of the public reacts to these anomalies. It almost destroyed my faith in human reason.
Oh, the morality…
Yeah, Elio. Try reading the bloody history of your ‘moral’ religion sometime. Include your oh-so- ‘holy’ bible in your studies.
Edit: Oh, and lest we forget.
Hey, Elio, how about you preach your morality to those abused by your holy men, and the thousands infected with aids due to your moral teachings about condom use. You don’t even need to crack open a history book for that stuff.
Ethical stem cells still horrify Vatican
But the head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, Bishop Elio Sgreccia, told Reuters in an interview that the new method by Advanced Cell Technology Inc failed to overcome the church’s many moral concerns.
