Jonanananas

Maybe you could leave him the time to reply instead of going against your nickname. There's no need to get condescending.

Something that has popped up in discussions at times, but never has been thoroughly discussed here (in recent times) is determinism. Do you believe humans have a free will or are they completely determined? What consequences does your view have? Personally, I believe humans (and everything else really) are completely determined. I've come to this conclusion through the following steps: 1.Everything that happens to us either happens because of our actions, the actions of others, and chance (Usually a mix of all three) 2.Chance obviously cannot be affected, so the only thing to be affected would be our actions. 3.Whenever I make a decision, I will decide based on my personality. Example: I have the free choice to go to work one day or just to stay home. I will reach a decision and it will be dependant on who I am (so e.g. if I've been raised to have a good work ethic, I would go). I cannot make a decision that would go against my personality. Of course, you might say now that I could willingly go against it, e.g. staying home despite having a good work ethic to prove I can decide - but this would prove nothing, it merely shows that e.g. I don't like the concept of being determined and stay home to try to have a proof against it. So really I will always act based on my personality 4. My personality again depends on others, on how I've been raised, what's happened to me in my childhood, etc. This again is something I can't control - As such, there's no free will. Of course, the human mind is incredibly complex, so the roots of my personality will never be able to be deciphered. But the basic concept works the same, regardless of that. What do you think?

Vezon, I'm wondering: If you take the bible as literal, what do you make of (seeming) contradictions within the bible? Such as the two versions of Genesis?

Dangit, I can't seem to find a working stream :(

I've won the first one in a tip.it competition, so I was basically forced to read it :P I've found it to be okay literature, something you can read without disliking it but nothing that I will remember as particularly enjoyable to read. I've found it quite predictable at times and the characters were rather dull.

[hide]Yeah, the wolfbats wouldn't have cheated so blatantly if they didn't know the ref was bribed. I think Amon knew though - I'm sure he counted on the wolfbats to win, as he doesn't want to take away Korra's bending. And I don't think there's any regulation for the ref. As long as you can't prove that he's been bribed, his decision counts. It's actually not that uncommon and works similar in rl sports too. I don't think the cheating was *that* obvious. Obvious yes, but not so extreme that he couldn't claim he didn't notice. You have to keep in mind the show clearly wants us to know the wolfbats are cheating, but from a spectators perspective, those fights are pretty quick, and as such you can somewhat reasonably explain how you missed that. Korra also seems to have improved a bit. A few episodes earlier, those equalists would probably have been able to beat her.[/hide]

I don't know how I am supposed to clarify. It's simply all people accepting some kind of christian belief. Not sure what you mean by "beyond scripture" either. As for why we are discussing this: Your original question was skewed. I pointed that out and used myself as an example to explain why. When you are rephrasing the original question, we can discuss that.

Well, as Christian entails the entirety of christianity and I was raised as a christian (as in accepting christian beliefs, not just by the name), then yes, you must be misunderstanding me. Maybe the issue is that I'm not christian anymore, I'm atheist. But I was raised as a christian. As for the question, let's say "raised with religious doctrine" ?

It's just sooo perfectly accurate :D One of my favourite XKCD comics^^

You know, that's an entirely different thing from being rased as a christian. Or rather, it's a part of a variety of options. For me it worked like this: As a baby, I was baptized. I was taken to church when my parents went there. I was taught christian morals but on the basis of explaing why certain things are bad, not because I'll go to hell otherwise. I was told god was watching over me, and as a child, it was comforting. When I grew older, I started to question it. I asked my mum if God really existed, as I couldn't really believe it anymore. She said she believed in it and would be happy to tell me about it, but that everyone has to answer that question for themselves anymore. When I told them I didn't want to go to church anymore I didn't have to, and it wasn't an issue. Does that help you? Else, you can just change the question to "being forced to accept religious doctrine" - but you know, then the answer would be pretty obvious.

And you know that douchebags with religion are douchebags because of religion? Yeah, right. As said, the human mind is far too complex to judge that. And please don't bring another of these examples where parents don't give their children medicine or any of that. Yeah sure, without religion they might have given it medicine. They also might not have because they believe that the state puts mind-control chemicals in there or whatever. As for the second point: Yes of course. But you can't say "religion" and only look at part of the picture. Just because doctrines exist doesn't mean that they make up the entirety of the religion which is what you are basically basing your argumentation upon (probably not on purpose, but still)

This is kind of a strawman because the two options are by far not mutually exclusive. I've been raised as Christian yet was allowed to think freely and to change my religion once I was old enough to think about it and expressed that wish. You're confusing your logical fallacies. Straw-man arguments would be fallacious argumentation because it misrepresents the position. False dichotomies would be fallacious argumentation because it falsely limits the options by omitting plausible alternatives. I'd say you were raised as a freethinker with a greater emphasis on Christianity, if not being exposed to cherry picked Christian ideals. I'd say it would be better to raise children as true freethinkers by exploring every avenue of belief, and drawing conclusions from there. I'm not a native speaker, that's why I'm not familiar with the exact names for logical fallacies, that's also why I said "kind of a strawman" I've been raised as christian. Period. Christian and freethinker are not in any way mutually exclusive. It's just that you seem to have a completely different view of "christian" as the differences in that group can be rather large. This is why your initialy question doesn't work well. You should clarify it.

You are applying different yardsticks here. You argue that secular organizations can be charitable just as well yet ignore that douchebags can be douchebags just as well without religion. I should also mention that you should distinguish between religion and religious doctrine. The latter will most likely be negative. The former is far too complex to be judged easily.

Uh...no? First of all, the only thing you could possibly be talking about are actions openly caused by religious belief. The human mind is far to complex to be able to judge which actions are really caused by religion. And even if you're only looking at these obvious examples...you have some idiots promoting intolerance and violence....and you have some people helping out in third-world countries, helping children, being charitable, whatever. Personally I don't think religion makes a difference at all, at least on the big perspective. The reason being, it comes from the minds of humans. Reasons based on religion are ultimately reasons based on human nature. Whether it takes the detour through religion doesn't matter. But that's just my personal opinion, nothing I am sure of. I'm just saying atheists aren't necessarily more rigorous about their beliefs. I chose the example of my existence because strictly speaking, nothing proves I do. It's a reasonable assumption to say I do exist, but it's still an assumption, and you could be dreaming or in some sort of matrix. Is this an interesting question? Not really. It's not like we can exit this matrix: the truth of the answer doesn't matter. Same goes for the existence of a God; it may or may not be true, but that doesn't really matter--what does matter is whether believing he does is useful. Ah yes. In that case, I agree with you

As far as voices go, I find Justing Bieber quite annoying. In technical terms I don't think he's bad but I don't have the knowledge to be able to judge how good he is.

This is kind of a strawman because the two options are by far not mutually exclusive. I've been raised as Christian yet was allowed to think freely and to change my religion once I was old enough to think about it and expressed that wish.

Religion has its advantages and disadvantages. Which side prevails is up to personal opinion and not an issue we can really discuss well.

I've always found c) to be a weird point. Given that until now, only humans are capable of communicating in the way we do here, it's very reasonable to assume that you do indeed exist. Even in the unlikely case that you are AI, the situation won't really change. About religion giving a meaning to life, providing morals etc. : If you assume god doesn't exist, you can conclude that all religion comes from the mind of a human and as such isn't needed for any of that. Now, for some people religion makes it easier to deal with these kind of things, but at the same time you have to acknowledge that others do not need it in any way. I presume Assume is one of those and just hasn't been able to understand why someone would need it (No offense intended)

Going to agree here. I've never been a fan of Likes/Thumbs up/etc for reasons already mentioned, but it doesn't hurt to give it a try..(though I sincerely hope it won't last long) I'll third that :-| From what we've decided so far, while the like button will be enabled for posts, you will not be able to go to your profile to see your total "reputation", the post will merely have the likes attached to it when users view the topic. So ultimately there would be no benefit to making posts just for likes other than that single post would have a lot of likes, it won't increment some competitive number in your profile. :) Well, it's the same way for youtube, yet there are still enough fishing for likes. I'm comfortable to try it out however, as long as the staff is willing to turn it off again if it doesn't work out. There's really no harm in trying.

[hide]I'm not really familiar with Asian culture - does the number 4 have a certain association(Such as the 8 meaning luck in china) or what? Also, quite the interesting episode. Rather predictable but definitely fun to watch. I thought it was especially interesting to see those flashbacks again. I wonder where they come from. Could it be that this is Aang, trying to "communicate" with Korra to try to help her? It's already been hinted at that the incident 42 years ago was in some ways similar to this one. Also, Amon seems comfortable with getting out in the open, compared to how he told Korra why he wouldn't kidnap her in episode 4. He has made it an event for the whole public and proven that he can take over an arena with police at every corner. Surely that would be enough for the city to ask for some outside help?[/hide]

Glad they're doing this. I wouldn't want to imagine what would happen if they had released the entire rework without player testing...

Plus they already had a real bonfire with the sköll event... I'd also wish that the xp bonus for groups were a tad higher. I like the mechanic and think it's a good idea, both with firemaking and with the citadel, but in both cases (citadel especially but I think here too) I think the bonus is too small to encourage most people to search for others to skill with (Excluding the first days here of course, I guess everyone's fming right now)

It's just the last CCF reward, you can use it to let smoking chickens appear. Nothing shows up as member's object anymore, or at least it's not supposed to. Is this just the reward for multiple players at your fire, or do you even get more without that? Generally I like this update, but I'd wish that more click-intensive methods or especially methods were you need good timing(in this case pyrelording) would reward you sufficiently for it. Now it seems pyrelording is only really worth it if you value speed above everything else...and if you use a barb horn the difference is almost negligible...

Either an oversight or (by now unfortunately the more likely option) incentive for you to get membership...

Yeah, I don't think that will get him voters...though I am personally in favor of it as well.