Whoohoo!
Another victim of Less Wrong. =D

All in all, it's often very interesting and even practical stuff, but doesn't have a great impact on my happiness, so I didn't spend too much stuff on it.

I'm curious if any of my fellow UFers are familiar with Eliezer Yudkowsky.

If not, I'd highly recommend him to all of you. I ran across his writing when I was trying to understand Bayes' Theorem:

http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

He has written a hell of a lot of material, many of his essays/articles you can find here:

http://lesswrong.com

Anyway. Read and enjoy.

Don't be afraid, Francesco. It only hurts for a second, until the spambot parasite attaches to your spine. After that it's really easy. Come on, shed your human body...

FO, while I agree completely that it's vanishingly unlikely that we're alone in the universe, the probability isn't zero. Ultimately it's a question that can only be answered experimentally - in other words, going out into space and actually looking. I think it'd be shocking and really rather depressing if we were alone, and it'd put a kind of scary responsibility on us to get the whole civilization thing right, since there'd be no one to pick up the pieces if we messed it up.

Hahah, LOL, you're right.
Well, I guess I needed to get all fired up and evo-righteous. ^_^

FO, this post is 2 years old :D It was necro'ed by a spambot

First, unlike God, evolution has been witnessed in the lab and the experiment reproduced:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14094-bacteria-make-major-evolutionary-shift-in-the-lab.html
It is a fact.
If you are curious, search and you will find several recorded instances of speciation.

Second, evolution is the ONLY SCIENTIFIC theory that accounts for the variety of the living.
Until you can prove the existence of a superior intelligent being, Creationism is NOT science.

Third, quantum THEORY powers your computer, and seems to work pretty well.
Uh, what about germ THEORY?
Thermodynamic THEORY?
Fuck creationists are dumb.
At least search around before you make your arguments.
I really think they do not research even the basics because they are afraid to find out they may be wrong.

To the OP:
1. This question has been answered already.
The answer is No.
The universe is so insanely huge that by sheer numbers, we cannot be alone.
Every month or so we discover new Earth-like planets.

The interesting question is: Can we contact each other?

2. Depends on your beliefs.
At the same time, I imagine that the question "Do aliens go to heaven?" could be difficult to answer for many.

But then, if I were, that's just the sort of thing I'd say, isn't it?

The cup in the laundry whenever I had associated a temporal Island, it's exciting!

I'm not a spambot. But then, if I were, that's just the sort of thing I'd say, isn't it?

is there anything left here that aren't spambot?

Wonderful. And just think of the implications...we'll have our sewers invaded by Jellyfish-rats!

Weird science at its best.

Bioengineers at Harvard have taken cells from a rat's heart and used them to build an artificial jellyfish. There's even a video of it swimming (which it does in response to an external electric field).

http://www.nature.com/news/artificial-jellyfish-built-from-rat-cells-1.11046

@Francesco - I think you can make an account and make corrections like wiki. If I found a place I would like to go, I would also find a link to their website and use it for most of the information, again, like wiki.

& yeah, too bad about the snakes.

Pity that dead snakes are so flammable.

I love weird/obscure historical places.

I have been using that for a while.
Pity I could not visit the Snake Museum before it burned.

Awesome page, but the part about Rome contained way too much errors :D

Way cool.

I just found this website while I was looking for an image of a really long tapeworm:
http://atlasobscura.com/

It is billed as "a Compendium of The World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica". For example, there is a parasite museum in Japan. If you like weird stuff, nerdy stuff, weird nature, literary, deviant, historical stuff, need an interesting day trip for your kids, etc., it looks like a cool site to check out. It's searchable by location - where you live, or where you are headed on vacation, you can find something stranger than the old humdrum usual, or just learn about these weird places and not have to go to there.

This place in my local search piqued my interest. The gravesite of the Boston Strangler is closer, Nantucket is kind of a haul, but it is an observatory and aquarium PLUS more. "Small island science organization offers public the chance to participate in research." Bonus points for the whole thing being the legacy of a woman astronomer and aide to sailors:
http://atlasobscura.com/place/maria-mitchell-association

I encourage you to find some neat field trips in your area.

...an easy way to restate "one should do X" is as the (subtly different) statement "it is good to do X." Those don't mean the same thing...

Situationally, I think those two statements are exactly isomorphic. At the very least, I can't think of a circumstance where the most good option is not the same as the option one should undertake. From a (non-existent) universal perspective, the terms do differ. As thought experiments with sadists and train tracks generally illustrate, there might not be a "good" option available, but there generally is a "least bad" option; if given the forced option between killing one innocent person and killing ten, killing one person is the least bad option but cannot be conceived of as a good act from the objective perspective. So, from the subjective location of the person who has to make the choice, the ethical and moral choices are identical, though a hypothetical objective being might take issue with the idea that the choice has a moral component.

Since morality and ethics, I would argue, are functional only from the point of view of the actor and the acted upon, the "objective" perspective can generally be discarded, leaving us with the general and fairly reasonable dictum that if something should be done, it is good to do it.

Sorry, I didn't realize that people had responded at me.

Theory_of_I, I may have misinterpreted what you actually meant.

This: "Seeing, of itself, contains no moral instruction" is a fair point, and if you were only really talking about moral instruction, then I misinterpreted you. The act of seeing isn't necessarily a moral act. I would maintain that the decision that "seeing is good," though, very much is one. I suspect that part of the trouble is that I mentally swapped/confused the definitions of the words "moral" and "ethical."

What I mean to say, more specifically, is that an ethical claim is just a claim that 'one should do (or ought to do) X. Saying "I should obtain knowledge about my environment" for example, even though there is nothing particularly *moral* (in the sense of a moral code, moral teachings, or absolute moral law) inherent in the statement, is certainly an ethical statement, even if it comes merely from pragmatism. This can be fairly confusing because an easy way to restate "one should do X" is as the (subtly different) statement "it is good to do X." Those don't mean the same thing, but I fell for one of the classic blunders.

Now, a moral code might expressly forbid certain kinds of knowledge, and while that certainly wouldn't be a moral code that I would take kindly to, it might nevertheless be one. But the statement "One should open their eyes in a dark room," for all its pragmatism, is not entirely without moral impact. For example, one can very easily make the jump from "you should do X" to the clearly moral "if you don't do X you are doing something bad."

I'm not saying that you meant to say that "people who don't open their eyes are at fault." Although that's a perfectly fair thing to say, it is different in an important way. I just want to make sure we're on the same page about that.

Jabster, I think you might have been reading things into what I actually wrote.

Then again, maybe you guys think that what I'm saying is bogus. It might be. I am not a philosophy expert, and really I'm not even much of a hobbyist anymore. It is my understanding that statements about what "should be done" are very, very often either ethical or moral statements. But someone with more philosophy expertise than I could convince me that I'm factually wrong about that definition.

I worship at the altar of good booze, video games, and hot redheads.

How do I volunteer for the Altar Guild?

I worship at the altar of good booze, video games, and hot redheads.

A great example is the Universal Unitarians. Their 'religion' is so watered down that most deeply religious people consider them de facto atheists, and atheists look at them and wonder 'why bother?'.

As a child, I attended a Unitarian Universalist congregation.

Yup.

How's this for religion and ethics?: I'm in the proper lane to go straight and someone bullied into my lane - with a specialty license plate, "Choose Life". Who wants to live in a world with bastards like that? No pun intended.

'...reject other reasonable thought.' By that, do you mean other than skepticism/atheism? Exactly what is reasonable about thinking crackers magically turn into the flesh of a dead apocalyptic Jew? Or that a man found golden plates with ancient Egyptian writing buried in upstate New York? Or that a divine prophet of Allah was morally perfect, even when consecrating his marriage to a 9 year old?

Sure, I'm cherry picking the horrible stuff from religion, but when you take out the horrible, the obscene, the racist, and the ludicrous, there is little difference between the religious and us. A great example is the Universal Unitarians. Their 'religion' is so watered down that most deeply religious people consider them de facto atheists, and atheists look at them and wonder 'why bother?'.

Kids need more critical thinking, period. Applying it to a course on religion and ethics.. seems specifically crediting religion with some truth that needs to be examined what is true and what might not be true. In the US, I THINK most parents like to keep things like that at home and teachers have to be very careful not to "push" or indoctrinate children into questioning their parents' methods, which might include religion. It's quite another thing to, roundabout, instill lessons on them how to question things and have them independently apply that to their own lives. I think, counter to that, is why religious creationists particularly have a problem with schools teaching science without also introducing what, to them, is also possibly true and should not be contradicted by school. In general, schools do a sort of poor job helping children grow up with values, being that kids spend so much time there, and might not be taught correctly at home (like an abusive home, for example), parents have an awful time with schools misdirecting their children by pointing them all in the same direction.

I just came back from having a conversation with my therapist about how I got through school if I might have had/still have a learning disability. Certain subjects were straightforward enough that they came easy (like math and spelling), while other subjects were not so attractive to me (like science, history, or English) but I did well enough because they were not strenuous in the aspects that made them difficult for me. I can memorize a diagram of a human body and the functions - I can memorize dates and people - I can regurgitate a discussion about a book for an essay test. The facade of all those subjects comes easy to me, and that's how deep it all was. School should be, but doesn't seem to make time for, rougher and more developmental in those areas, and for at least one reason being, parents don't really want their children learning much outside the home that upsets what they're learning inside of it, e.g. sex ed seems to have been really difficult to include in high school curricula. Other parents, such as my own, are apathetic to what's being taught, going only by my grades (which were B and higher, made the honor rolls, high honor rolls, and National Honor Society) that I was doing well. I might have been more motivated for science, history, and English if it was more intense, or gotten poorer grades if I'm really incompetent at that sort of thinking. I don't think schools really are allowed to take on a participatory role in the engagement of children's learning, life skills and such, as assumed to be the parental domain, and just give kids a place to go during the day and occupy them with busywork on an assortment of, I'd argue, trivial subjects taught superficially.

I did go on to college, and feel like that was a major waste of time. Not only did they perpetuate the "skate" method there, but I didn't really have an adequate baseline for my abilities and interests. A subject like math would have gotten more intense and demanding, where a social science as I ended up in, was really easy to bullshit through and still graduate. I'm sure I've mentioned the 10-12 page statistics paper I was assigned and got a B on it, turning it in several days late, only 8 pages, and no charts/illustrations. I don't even remember what it was about or how I got 8 pages out of it.

So yeah, religion and ethics might be good for an elective, I know in my school Social Studies had 12th grade 2 half-year electives, which I believe now has been replaced by mandatory "Civics," I don't know what that is about, I took "Law" and "Psychology," other choices including "Death" and "Economics."

So your goal is to teach us to be more objective?

No offense intended, but we've have enough people come here with the intention of teaching us the "right way to do it" that I've sort of had all I can handle of that. If that's not your intention, cool.

@ty

"I wonder, 36, was your goal is here? Is it to discuss these issues? Or to educate us on what you think atheists should be doing differently?"

My goal is reasonable thought. That is what this site claims to have 'reasonable thought on religion science and skepticism'. Now I was taught that reason involved objectivity. Objectivity means trying to strip away personal subjectivity, including subjective experiences of religion. If the majority of people are here only out of rejection of one subjective past it should not close their minds and lead them to reject other reasonable thought. Otherwise they may find themselves still in a subjective position (although possibly in a slightly more open dogma).

I am not trying to educate atheists. I am just saying what I think are my reasonable thoughts (which is the point of a discussion forum is it not). If what I say contributes to someones thinking or alters views then so be it, if not, well squat... I fully acknowledge that most thoughts I have are incomplete. Hopefully, through this forum people will help me complete them.

All I want to do is contribute reasonable thoughts that will challenge thinking and raise objectivity as well as help my own learning. We should know this world is not black and white, religion or no religion, God or no God, nor, through the best attempts of science, can this world ever be completely compartmentalised into clearly labelled boxes which are fully understood. This world is infinitely more detailed and unknowabke than that.

I have enjoyed the discussions here, and through them I have revised my thoughts and formulated new ones (even if some came from my misreading of some comments (sorry @custador)). However, I would like to go look at some other discussions on this site so I won't post here again. After all this post was just meant to be a 'hello people, nice to meet you thing'. So hello, nice to meet you and see you around! :-)

This seems like a good place to derail the discussion even further: I heard on the radio this morning that a lot of vocational qualifications are to lose their accreditation. This worried me slightly, until the radio gave an example. There is a vocational equivalent to a GCSE called, and I shit you not, "Nail Technology". Nails as in fingernails. I'm not talking about a foundation course in chiropody, I'm talking about a course that teaches you how to give a manicure and paint nails - And the education authorities gave that the same academic weighting as a GCSE in Physics. Apparently a lot of kids were shocked when employers and colleges didn't take them seriously and suggested they come back with some actual qualifications. Heysooooos....

"I doubt teaching critical appraisal of religion will lead to global atheism in 3 generations my friend."

... but great strides can be made towards it. Just look at how much the UK has changed.