EVERYBODY APART FROM GOJIRA (AND MAYBE TURKEY) SHOULD PROBABLY JUST READ THE RECAP AT THE BOTTOM.

Definitions:

1) X is any arbitrary event. (I was born in Germany.)

2) ¬X denotes "not X". (I was not born in Germany.)

3) E represents the existence of positive evidence that indicate X is correct. (My birth certificate is from Germany.)

4) ¬E denotes "not E", or the total absence of positive evidence.

5) P(X) denotes the probability of X.

6) P(X/E) denotes the conditional probability of X given E; this is the joint probability of X and E divided by the probability of E.

P(X/E) =  P(X^E) / P(E)

Assumption (1):
- If an event like X were to really have happened, then it very likely left some evidence of itself. In other words, the probability of E, given X, is greater than the probability of NOT E, given X.

P(E/X) > P(¬E/X)

1 - P(¬E/X) > P(¬E/X)

P(¬E/X) < 1/2

This isn't an unfair assumption, as most things of significance leave some sort of evidence.

Now we invoke Bayes' Theorem: P(¬E/X) = P(X/¬E)P(¬E) / P(X).

->  1/2 > P(X/¬E)P(¬E) / P(X)

P(X/¬E) < (1/2) P(X)/P(¬E)

Thinking about P(X) in the equation immediately prior, is X a likely or unlikely event?

Assumption 2:
- The event X is extraordinary. P(X) << 1. The probability of event X is very small.

Let X be an intersection of two statistically independent events, A and B. X = A^B. (I was born in Germany, and I love shitting on my neighbour's lawn.) However, the joint probability of A and B is always equal to or less than the probability of A or B. P(AB) = P(A)P(B). The more events which define X, the lower the probability.

Returning to the emboldened equation, consider the term P(¬E). What can we say about the likelihood of evidence for X?

Assumption 3:
- We have searched for evidence of X, but failed to find any. P(¬E) [approx.]= 1. The probability of no actual evidence for X is very high, and the more we search for E but fail, the closer this value approaches 1.

Bringing forward the emboldened equation again:

P(X/¬E) < (1/2) P(X)/P(¬E)

The more specific and extraordinary X, the closer P(X) is to 0. And the more we search for evidence, but fail, the closer ¬E is to 1. The ratio here [P(X)/P(¬E)] then, must be very small. As long as this ratio is less than one, the entire right-hand side of the inequality is less than one-half.

P(X/¬E) < 1/2. This inequality must hold. This implies: P(¬X/¬E) > 1/2.

We finally arrive at:

P(¬X/¬E) > P(X/¬E). In other words, given an absence of any evidence for X, the more likely event is that X did not, in fact, occur.

This is a demonstration of the epistemic principle known as the inference to the best explanation. Many things cannot be known with absolute certainty, but we can show which explanations are most preferable.

Recap:
1) An event like X should leave evidence.
2) All things being equal, X is unlikely.
3) We have searched for evidence of X, but failed.

From these premises, it mathematically follows that ¬X is a more likely event than X.

Let X be the following claim:

The Virgin Mary, upon being impregnated by Yahweh, gave birth to a half-blooded demigod named Jesus of Nazareth. During his life, Jesus performed many miracles that included healing the sick, raising the dead and turning water into wine. Jesus also took the aggregate sins of humanity upon himself, and gave his own life for us. Upon his execution by Roman authorities, Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to Heaven. All of these events were compiled into the record, with inerrancy, known as the New Testament.

And anybody who fails to believe this will spend an eternity in endless suffering.

If any of this is to be the case, we should find evidence beyond mere say-so.

P(E/X) > P(¬E/X).

X is a huge intersection of independent events, all competing with the various denominations and interpretations of Christian doctrine which is, in turn, competing with those belonging to other religions. Significant positive evidence for Christianity is yet to have been found, also.

P(X) [appox.]= 0.

P(¬E) [approx.]= 1.

P(¬X/¬E) [approx.]= 1. Quad erat demonstrandum.

P1: God is omnipotent.

P2: Omnipotence is the power to do all things logically possible.

P3: Something is logically possible is any coherent action which can be expressed without contradiction.
3a: Any action which has ever been done before is logically possible.

P4: It is logically possible to create a finite mass of rock that cannot be lifted by its own maker (from P3).

P5: Therefore, an omnipotent being can create a finite mass of rock which cannot be lifted by its own maker (from P2 & P4).

P6: Therefore, an omnipotent being can create a finite mass of rock which cannot be lifted by an omnipotent being.

P7: For any finite mass of rock, it is logically possible to generate a force that will lift it against a uniform gravitational field (2nd Law of Motion).

P8: Therefore, an omnipotent being can lift any finite mass of rock (from P2 and P7).

P9: Premise 6 and Premise 8 are contradictions.

P10: Therefore, it is logically impossible to be omnipotent.

C: Therefore, God is logically impossible.

By Serkan Engin, a Turkish poet and atheist.

I am an atheist author and poet, who had lived as a Sunni Muslim for 23 years from birth, and I am still living in a Muslim country, Turkey. Also, my parents and all of my relatives are still Muslim. So, my critics about Islam can be easily consider this an inside view.

I know that the title of this essay seems assertive, but I will explain the rightness of this title step-by-step in this essay.

First of all, you have to learn about Islam that if you are an “outsider”, a non-Muslim, for example, a Christian, an atheist, a Buddhist, a Jew or whatever else, all Muslims have the “right” of killing and raping you, grabbing all your properties, your country, land, money and anything else. They take this “right” from the book of their belief, the Quran. In other words, they take this “right” from their belief’s core, the theology of Islam.

Here are some examples of this in verses from Quran.

This verse of Quran is about “all non-Muslims”, all “heretics”! — Christians, Buddhists, atheists, Jews, etc. — describing them “who wage war against Allah and His Messenger (Muhammad)”

Surat Al-Ma’idah (5.33)

http://quran.com/5/33

“Indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land. That is for them a disgrace in this world; and for them in the Hereafter is a great punishment.”

And this verse of the Quran is about the order to kill the humans who left Islam, the apostates:

Surat An-Nisa’ (4.89)

http://quran.com/4/89

“They wish you would disbelieve as they disbelieved so you would be alike. So do not take from among them allies until they emigrate for the cause of Allah. But if they turn away, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them and take not from among them any ally or helper.”

Look at the current situation in Syria. How can Islamist terrorists slaughter Alawite people or rape Christian women so easily? Because they take this “right” from their belief and they believe that they will go to the heaven because of these vandalistic actions against “outsiders”, who are out of Islam, who don’t believe the same religious tenets — in other words, those who are the “heretics” according to their belief. Some Muslims say, “But they are not the real Muslims.” That is a big lie; that is the exact form of real Islam, because these vandalistic actions are in accord with the orders of Quran.

You have heard many times that “Islam is a tolerant religion”. That is the biggest lie that you can hear all over the World, and this lie is used as a mask to hide the terrible face of Islam. There is NO difference between Islam and Islamism. This is the main error that the modern world make about Islam. There are not different forms as Islam and Islamism, they are the same thing, and they have the same content. This separation is just only an illusion, and it is used by Muslims to hide the brutal, hateful, oppressive,murderous, genocidal face of Islam.

Islamic theology is based on the verses of the Quran and Hadith. Hadiths are the words and actions of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and all Muslims must follow these words and actions in addition to the orders of Quran. For example, you have to defecate as Muhammad did, and you have to clean yourself as he did, or you can rape and enslave a “heretic” woman in a war as a sex slave as Muhammad did, or you can torture your enemy in a war to learn the place of his hidden money, as Muhammad did.

You “must” cut the hand of a thief as Muhammad did, not give him any prison sentence as do the modern laws.

You must stone a woman to death as Muhammad did, because she had sex outside of the rules of Islam (but you must only whip her partner a hundred times). If you are a Muslim, you can never set them free while considering that their sexual actions are about their own personal relations and freedom, in accord with modern laws. You must definitely apply the punishments of Muhammad such as stoning the woman to the death and whipping her partner a hundred times if you want to be a good Muslim.

You must kill the man who left the belief of Islam, as Muhammad did. You can’t say “This is his own choice and he has the freedom of thought and belief”, because it is an order of the Quran that you “must” kill the persons who were Muslim before and then left the Islamic religion.

You must kill all homosexuals according to the orders of Islam. No Muslims can say according to Islam that their sexual orientation is their own natural right, in accord with the human rights norms of our age.

You have the “right” to marry a little girl at 9 years old, as Muhammad did. In other words, you can rape a little child legally in Islam and make her a sex slave, and also a domestic slave till the end of her life.

You can lie alongside of your dead wife for 6 hours, as Muhammad did. In other words, you can rape the dead body of your wife for 6 hours after her death.

Here is Islam…Here is the “tolerant religion”…Here is the right way to the heaven…Here are the orders of Allah…Here are the actions of Muhammad…

You can easily see how civilized the Muslim countries of the world are because of Islam, such as Afghanistan, Nigeria, Turkey, Iran, Sudan and the others. You can see how much they have contributed to the history of philosophy, the history of art, and the history of science of the whole world. You can see how respectful they are to human rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, the freedom of expression and thought, the freedom of the press, the freedom of belief, etc.

The first genocide wave of 20th century, the Armenian Genocide, the Assyrian Genocide and the Pontic Greek Genocide, was perpetrated by Turkish and Kurdish people of the Ottoman Empire and the new Turkish Republic, getting motivation from the “rights” that they had because of Islam: the “rights” of killing and raping the non-Muslims, enslaving their women and little girls as sex slaves and also domestic slaves, and grabbing their money, houses and lands. However, “The Committee of Union and Progress” (CUP) (Turkish: İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti) was based on Turkish nationalism; they used Turkish and Kurdish people easily for these genocides because of the Islamic religion’s content about non-Muslims. All the Turkish and Kurdish Muslims believed that they would go to the heaven if they killed more non-Muslims, as do today’s Islamist terrorists.

The owners of the second genocide wave of 20th century were Nazis, as you know. They took the genocides of the Turks as a sample. It is know that Adolf Hitler said to his military commanders, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?,” while they were talking about the reaction of the world about the genocides that they were planning to perpetrate.

Nazism was considered a legal and respectable ideology at the beginning of the 1930s, and then the world saw how dangerous Nazism was. Millions of people died because of Nazism, and today it is illegal to support Nazism in any civilized country. You can never make propaganda about Nazism legally. Today, Nazism is not considered as a genuine thought alternative, and it is not included in the freedom of thought and expression.

As I have detailed above, Islam is against the human rights norms of our age, and it has more dangerous content than Nazism. Islam is not a belief alternative, it is just a crime against humanity, and any crime shouldn’t have freedom in our modern world. So, Islam must be declared illegal all over the world, as is Nazism, because of its vandal content and commands that are against human rights. All actions about Islam must be forbidden and the propagandists of Islam must be judged because of instigating to the crimes of murder, rape, grab and crimes against humanity. Otherwise, the world will meet with a big tragedy when the Islamists will get more power, as the world suffered because of Nazism.

I can't bring myself to say Islam is worse than, or even as bad as, Nazism and I can't say I agree with the final paragraph there, but it's certainly both important and interesting to consider just what he is saying.

So, he's a divisive character of course. Let's, for a minute, just assume that all off the shit said about him is true. . . So what?

He's a religious sociopath who wound up with a rifle--this shit just happens sometimes. He was a good sniper, but not a good person. Of course he was a blight on the U.S. military, particularly for snipers, but expecting a 100pc rate of moral supremacy is unrealistic, not to mention dangerous. Our snipers are far better than theirs. We've known since 2006 that insurgent snipers in Iraq specifically targetted engineers, medics and chaplains.

I'm not here to make a huge argument about how Chris Kyle ought to be exonerated, or how the conduct of the Coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has been exemplary, but let's not forget just who we're fighting.

Here are some of the things wrong with the Green Party in my country. The policies noted exist on their policy website.

1. The Green Party would destroy Britain's pharmaceutical industry by completely banning animal testing (AR414), and the alternatives they put forward (AR415) are either useless or use humans.

2. AR428 states they would ban xenotransplantation, which is essential to both academic and practical biomedical process and would probably cause the death of countless people.

3. They have no sense of balance between ecological preservation and human activity. CC100 isn't at all clear which trumps which and under what circumstances.

4. They have stated in CMS206 that they would not impose censorship in any way, shape or form and yet policies on the same page contradict this (namely CMS611, 660 and 662) would put mass media directly under State control and regulation.

5. EC658, whereby companies would be transformed into co-operatives if the consumers or workers agree, would probably kill investment.

6. The call for full-reserve banking in EC663 is completely unnecessary and would seriously hamper economic progress.

7. Expanding corporation and capital gains tax will cause higher deadweight loss than expanding, say, property or consumption taxes.

8. EC901 states competitiveness is a "zero-sum game", which completely ignores the theory of comparative advantage and the phenomenon of consumer surplus.

9. ED190, in all its multicultural glory, states that religious dietary requirements will be respected. Yet given the general trend towards not eating meat the Party wants to establish, and the admittedly cruel nature of Kosher and Halal slaughter, how can the Party possibly advocate this with any integrity?

10. FA713 just displays complete ignorance of most literature on GM foods, and FA711C is based on discredited 'science'.

11. PD205 claims nuclear weapons are disproportionate to any threat, which would necessarily include other nuclear weapons. . .

And this is, of course, coming from a former anarcho-communist. It genuinely seems to me that there's an inverse relationship between how much one understands capitalism, and how much one protests it. Obviously, it suffers from incumbency; it is the 'system' in which we('re supposed to) live, so it's easier to see its flaws and advocate something else.

But all the market is is a way of organising and facilitating exchange between people who want to do business. Very few of the problems with 'capitalism', when reduced to their fundamentals, are actually problems with capitalism and pretty much all of the ones I can think of have simple solutions, at least when compared with throwing the entire system out. I mean, let's be honest, it's the progress and development of capitalism from around the 1750s that facilitates our very protest of it.

Literally the only problem with capitalism that I can think of, which could bring the whole system down, is that it will bring about its own downfall via technological development.

You should have to select, from a drop-down menu, which rule is being broken and then have the option of putting some more information.

I know I don't use the text-box usefully when making reports.

Breitbart

Police armed with pistols in heavily gun-controlled European countries are realizing a hard lesson fast–jihadists with no respect for the law are side-stepping gun control and stockpiling weapons that will give them the upper hand in confrontations with officers.

Europol chief of staff Brian Donald says there were two “large seizures” of firearms–particularly “assault weapons”–over the last two weeks and more seizures are expected as investigations and tracking continues.

According to TIME magazine, this is indicative of the reality European police face. Regardless of the gun control laws passed/implemented, jihadists are able to arm themselves just as those who attacked the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo’s headquarters on January 7 were armed.

Cherif and Said Kouachi “were armed with Kalashnikov rifles and could easily outgun the police officers who tried to apprehend them with pistols,” not to mention the police officers who weren’t armed. The third attacker, Amedy Coulibaly, “had an even greater collection of military grade weapons.”

The terrorists also had grenade launchers and Scorpion machine guns. AFP reports that Coulibaly had purchased most of the weapons from an unnamed arms trafficker in Belgium.

On January 7 Bloomberg.com reported the that Charlie Hebdo attack exposed the black markets for firearms that now exist in Europe–particularly France–and undercut gun control.

In other words, gun control appears to have created a false sense of security for the European people and their police forces as well. The reality is that guns remain available in black markets, albeit especially for those who have criminal or terrorist intent.

TIME reports that gun traffickers are thriving to such a degree that a training assignment for some new European officers has been to go out an buy a Kalashnikov from a black market dealer, just to see how easy it is. To date, doing so has only taken a couple of hours.

This is what Donald Trump warned about when he reacted to the Charlie Hebdo attack by saying, “When guns are outlawed, only the outlaws will have guns.”

Washington Times

The head of BBC Arabic said the Paris attackers who killed 12 people at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo should not be called terrorists.

Tarik Kafala said that “terrorist” is “too loaded” of a word to describe the actions of Said and Cherif Kouachi. The two died in a shootout with French authorities on Jan. 9.

“We try to avoid describing anyone as a terrorist or an act as being terrorist. What we try to do is to say that ‘two men killed 12 people in an attack on the office of a satirical magazine.’ That’s enough, we know what that means and what it is,” the senior BBC executive told The Independent Jan. 25. “Terrorism is such a loaded word. The U.N. has been struggling for more than a decade to define the word, and they can’t. It is very difficult to.”

Disgusting.

FUCKING SCIENCE MAN

A team of scientists has figured out a way for a standard silicon chip to tackle quantum entanglement — a phenomenon in which multiple particles are connected to each other and act in uniform, regardless of how far apart they are. The scientists’ findings were detailed on Monday in a research paper published in Optica, a monthly journal by The Optical Society (OSA).

So far, harnessing the power of quantum entanglement onto silicon chips has proven to be a difficult task because of the large size of the devices used to emit entangled photons; photons are essentially the particles that make up light. Creating silicon chips — which are inexpensive and prevalent compared to specialized entanglement equipment — that can handle quantum entanglement is a big deal in that it can allow for more powerful computer chips and better encryption technology.


The researchers of Università degli Studi di Pavia in Italy have come up with a way to solve this problem by creating a microscopic device that can supposedly fit onto a silicon chip and produce entangled photons.

The researchers paired a silicon wafer with what’s known as a ring resonator — a closed loop that photons enter on one side via a laser beam. They emerge entangled on the other side, where they are captured.

According to the research paper, the team of scientists was able to “demonstrate that silicon ring resonators in a silicon-on-insulator platform are an efficient source of time-energy entangled photon pairs.”

From the research paper:

Quote

We can confidently expect that silicon mircoring resonators will become the dominant paradigm of correlated photon sources for quantum photonics, both for applications involving the transmission of quantum correlations over long distances, such as quantum cryptography, and for applications involving quantum information processing “on-a-chip.”

Quantum entanglement can be very useful to the field of security and can help with encrypting messages. GridCOM Technologies, for example, explained to Gigaom in 2013 that it uses quantum entangled photons to generate encryption keys.

Any time someone tries to measure an entangled photon to learn what it may have encrypted, the GridCOM system is automatically pinged because of the way the photons are connected; each entangled particle affects the other and when one particle exists in a state where it is spinning up, its correlated particle will take on a state where it is spinning down.

Good old Thomas Sowell.

I have to make a presentation for philosophy about secular authority; I chose science and politics, and would like to know if my parts about science make sense/are digestible. Also, for the sake of discussion value, do you have any specific philosophy of science and what role do you think science can play in society?

Nature of Science

Science has a long history with different schools of philosophy, from the Rationalism of Descartes to the Empiricism of Hume. The problem of demarcation—or what counts as science and what doesn’t—has plagued the processes and nature of science since its conception, and has been tackled from the Ancient Greeks to the Logical Positivists.

The modern basis of science finds itself in the work of Karl Popper, who developed the meta-theoretical school of Postpositivism, that sought to correct many of the problems with Logical Positivism. They broke down the subject-object divide; asserted that all knowledge is necessarily conjectural and warranted as opposed to authoritative and definite; and advanced Falsificationism.

This led to the epistemological school of Critical Rationalism; which embodied the ideas of Postpositivism into a scientific method. Critical Rationalism rejected the Strong Rationalism of the French Enlightenment, the Verificationism of the Logical Positivists and all forms of inductive Empiricism. Critical Rationalism argued science was a ‘natural selection’ of hypotheses.

Popper’s main achievement was solving the Problem of Induction, which he claimed was actually a myth. Inductive reasoning can’t lead to justified knowledge, as justification ‘begs for an authoritarian answer’. The whole underlying assertion of Popper and his work was that knowledge is perspectivist and conjectural; ideas which has been espoused by Friedrich Nietzsche, R.M. Hare and Sam Harris.

Authorities within Science:

Lawrence Krauss best summarised the attitude of science to authority when he said: ‘There are no authorities in science’. There may be people considered experts in certain fields of research, but their word is not authoritative, and only serves as valid if backed up by significant empirical evidence.

For instance, Newton is considered the original expert on physics and gravity. Nobody, however—or at least no scientist—would take Newton’s works as absolute. In fact, Newton’s work has been largely displaced by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, which offers a geometric explanation of spacetime.

Despite this, however, Einstein also isn’t considered authoritative. Recent revelations in theoretical physics—namely quantum mechanics—has highlighted the problems of General Relativity and made scientists realise the need for a unified theory which reconciles a quantum description of matter with a geometric explanation of spacetime.

The existence of singularities, and a need for the ability to understand the interiors of black holes as well as the early universe also indicate a need to develop a full quantum theory of gravity, which can be combined with a description of the geometry of spacetime in the language of quantum physics.

There are also fledging hypotheses which are Popper falsifiable, such as Lee Smolin’s cosmological natural selection, which could become part of our body of knowledge.

Science as an Authority:

Science, as a whole process, can be considered an authoritative methodology for informing how we ought to view the world. Relying on the assumptions of ontological realism—more specifically metaphysical naturalism—science has proved its worth by working; it is the single best method of determining the value of the empirical content of certain propositions.

The problem many religious—and even secular people—have with viewing science as an authority is that they view science as a monolithic body of knowledge, as opposed to a gestalt of processes under constant revision. Science is a collection of probabilistic assertions subject to revision or rejection at any time.

In more specific questions of how we ought to act, in moral terms, science also claims to be able to inform. This rejects the historic fact-value distinction made by Hume, which asserts science can only say what is real, not how we ought to act. Founded on the philosophical basis of ethical naturalism—which makes a number of propositions to reach this point—people like Michael Shermer and Sam Harris have made the case for a science of morality.

Richard Feynman used the idea of cargo cult science to criticise certain areas and people who give the appearance of being outwardly scientific, while lacking the content of proper scientific study.

Politics section:

The headteacher gave it, predictably, and at the end essentially made it clear why he was doing it. The government has been making a lot of noise recently of the need to stop the potential for radicalisation in schools and prisons. The whole assembly wasn't as serious as I'd have liked, but it brings up an important point about British--and by extension Western--values.

When he was being serious, he mentioned things like the rule of law, liberty, tolerance and the moral values that underlie our society. Disappointingly, quite a few people I know didn't like the assembly and found it irrelevant; I do wish more people appreciate the philosophical foundations of our society, handed down during the Enlightenment by people such as David Hume, Adam Smith and later individuals like Bertrand Russell.

I also wish, even more strongly, that people could appreciate the clear superiority of Western culture--even assuming all of its flaws--and I say that unabashedly and without hesitation. I won't capitulate to barbarism, and not just militants, but those who would foist their socio-religious codes of behaviour on our society.

He played this song at the end:


And in the spirit of Voltaire he pointed out that it's not the content of his propositions which necessarily matter, but the fact that he has a right to say them.

I'm actually fairly confident in asserting that he's one of the most direct politicians I've ever seen talk. Shame he won't win the primaries.

You, personally, whether you've seen me discuss this issue and my views surrounding it or not.