Bible-beater pilots

On Fri, 21 Nov 2003, Wdtabor wrote:


Anyone ever run into this before? What did you do?
--

Well, when the Mormons or Jehovah Witnesses come to my door, I find it works
well to ask them to come back at a time when my wife and my Mistress can both
be present to hear them.

That's nasty. I like it.

Next time either mob arrives at my door, I'm going to ask for the address
of their nearest meeting place, and the time of the next weekend service.
I'm sure they'll smell a convert...

Then I'll tell them that I'll arrive about 30 minutes after the service
starts with an armful of National Geographic & New Scientist, hammer on
the door until someone answers, and harangue them about evolution and the
scientific method.

Hey, if they can bang on my door, what goes around comes around...

Brian.

On Fri, 21 Nov 2003, Larry Fransson wrote:

On 2003-11-21 13:03:41 -0800, (Jim Buckridge) said:

I still don't understand how people who consider themselves true
followers of Christ rationalize spending money on frivolous flight.
Just getting the PPL costs over $5K. That money would have gone a
long long way to feeding hungry people, or paying the way for
missionaries to spread the word....

I know one guy who was getting flight training just so that he could go and fly for one of the missionary flight organizations - MAF, I think. I also work with a guy who took a year off from flying professionally to go fly for a missionary organization in Central America.


You know, this is about the only reason I can think of to get religion.
Those missionary pilots do some seriously interesting flying, into places
nobody else goes. The amount of social/medical aid they deliver *might*
even outweigh the damage they do by bringing actual missionaries in.

Are there any secular groups that do this sort of humanitarian flying in
the developing world?

Brian.

On Fri, 21 Nov 2003, Andrew Gideon wrote:

Robert Perkins wrote:

On Fri, 21 Nov 2003 06:54:32 GMT, "Lenny Toulson"
wrote:

Tell me again how many people have died in wars based on nothing but
religion?

People have died in wars based on nothing but human avarice, with
religion as the dressing to break down a person's natural inclination
not to kill for the first time.

If what you're saying is true, then religion is obviously a harmful tool in
the hands of the greedy. Let's disarm them.

That's more or less what Richard Dawkins said just after Sept 11/01:

http://www.ffrf.org/tm.php?tm=dawkins.html

Brilliant guy. Thanks to whoever posted the FfRF URL earlier in this
thread!

Brian.

in article Wwfvb.262377$Fm2.278122@attbi_s04, Jay Honeck at
wrote on 11/20/03 7:21 PM:

He
allowed that their kind was exceedingly rare at the casino -- an observation
that made us laugh out loud.

They were probably meeting William Bennett.

in article Wwfvb.262377$Fm2.278122@attbi_s04, Jay Honeck at
wrote on 11/20/03 7:21 PM:

We
realized (with a shudder) that these men were only one or two steps removed
from the Islamo-Fascists we are currently fighting in the Middle East, the
only difference being their hair style and their dogma.

What, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson gloating after 9-11 that we " got what
we had coming " didn't tip you off?

"Montblack" wrote in message
...
|
|
| Hey Homie .....or should I say Mormie g
|
| When you say *For the Homeland* ...you mean Minnesota too - not just the
| Great Salt Lake basin, right?

Well, since I am not from the Great Basin area I don't regard Salt Lake as
any kind of 'home.' However, after the 2002 Winter Olympics and its flight
restrictions I figure we got as many homeland types there as there are in
DC.

|
| BTW. Why don't we ever get the Marie Osmond kind of Mormons coming to
| the door? You know - cute!!
|

I will see what I can do. Or would you prefer Buffy?

On Fri, 21 Nov 2003 22:05:52 -0800, Brian Burger
wrote:

If what you're saying is true, then religion is obviously a harmful tool in
the hands of the greedy. Let's disarm them.

That's more or less what Richard Dawkins said just after Sept 11/01:

http://www.ffrf.org/tm.php?tm=dawkins.html

It's nonsense, that is, fallacy in the form of the Genuine but
Insignificant Cause. If it were true, then people espousing atheist
belief systems would consistently behave much better than they've
proven to have behaved.

In harping on "religion", he misses that point, and so I don't care
what his letters and credentials are, he's demagoguing.

Rob

--
[You] don't make your kids P.C.-proof by keeping them
ignorant, you do it by helping them learn how to
educate themselves.

-- Orson Scott Card

On Sat, 22 Nov 2003 01:46:10 GMT, "Richard Hertz"
wrote:

You're kidding right?

Well, first of all, you're mixing terms. "Hypothesis" is a term used
in scientific method, to propose something that is observed, but isn't
proven consistent. It doesn't exist in mathematics; proposals of
mathematic properties are called "theorems". But I set that aside;
this is casual conversation, after all.

Bear with me here, everyone. I'm going to make a pretty good point or
two, in my opinion.

Mathematical fundaments are composed of "Postulates", such as "A point
is defined as a location in space", "A line is defined as the
one-dimensional measure of distance between two points", and, "The
shortest distance between two points is a line".

Those are "postulates", specifically of Euclidean geometry. "Theorems"
arise from logical conclusions of the interactions of the postulates.
The ideas that triangles have certain properties, such as the sum of
their angles equalling pi radians, are "theorems".

Casually, these are sometimes called "laws", as in the "Law of
Cosines". Non-Euclidean geometries, necessary for doing things like
traversing the surface of a sphere (and none of us have *ever* done
that, oh, no!), does *not* have, as a postulate, that the shortest
distance between two points is a straight line; there are *no*
straight lines in spherical geometries.

For natural philosophers, people like physicists and mathemeticians,
the discovery (or rediscovery) of alternate but valid geometric
rulesets has resulted in several very useful discoveries, one of which
being Einstein's body of thought on relativity, flawed as we now know
it to be (but haven't come up with an all-encompassing replacement).

One other result of the re-examination of Euclidean thinking has been
the formulation of Theorems which deny the principal assumption of
great works like the _Principia Mathematica_, Goedel's Theorem
probably the most popular among them.

The upshot of Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem is mathematical proof
that "any self-consistent axiomatic system powerful enough to describe
integer arithmetic will allow for propositions about integers that can
neither be proven nor disproven from the axioms." [from the Wikipedia
article on Goedel]

Euclidean geometry is more powerful than integer arithmetic.

That is, logical systems powerful enough to be useful will contain
unprovable axioms. So the question, "Which [axiom or theorem] in
mathematics can't be proven or shown false that is the basis for all
other math?" is simply an utterly unanswerable question, given a
powerful enough system. Goedel proved it years ago. What *can* be said
is that "some axioms are unprovable, which doesn't mean they're false
or true."

Mathematics itself is today in a state alongside physics and most
natural science, of great uncertainty about the "Great Unknowables",
therefore, while depending on mathematical fundamentals will be
remarkably and consistently useful (can't compute a weight and balance
and then observe performance, or watch your climb rate go down as
altitude goes up, without noticing that), you just never know if your
system will stand up to new stuff.

Kind of like religion, that way, which works for most people. Until it
doesn't. Except for mine, of course. :-)

Rob

--
[You] don't make your kids P.C.-proof by keeping them
ignorant, you do it by helping them learn how to
educate themselves.

-- Orson Scott Card

On Sat, 22 Nov 2003 01:24:57 GMT, "mike regish"
wrote:

I never got taught that in grammar. "He" is only capitalized if it's the
first word of a sentence or in a title.

I attribute that more to the paucity of grammar teaching in schools
these days, than to what is actually correct. I was taught to
capitalize the pronouns for God in 1982, in the ninth grade, in public
school.

For example:

http://www.montanalife.com/writing/Capitalization.html

"Note: Capitalize God only when it refers to the Christian God; also
capitalize all nouns and personal pronouns when they refer to God."

....is consistent with what I was taught.

Rob


mike regish

"Robert Perkins" wrote in message
.. .
On Sat, 22 Nov 2003 00:18:27 GMT, "mike regish"
wrote:

I can understand why you feel you need to capitalize the "G" on god, but
why
do you have to capitalize the "H" in "he?"

Because the grammatical rules of Standard American English call for
it, Mike.

Rob

--
[You] don't make your kids P.C.-proof by keeping them
ignorant, you do it by helping them learn how to
educate themselves.

-- Orson Scott Card



--
[You] don't make your kids P.C.-proof by keeping them
ignorant, you do it by helping them learn how to
educate themselves.

-- Orson Scott Card

On Fri, 21 Nov 2003 20:15:29 -0800, "C J Campbell"
wrote:

I personally would prefer Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" or anything by
James Randi. Or even Hawking's book "An Illustrated History of Time."

After all, us religious fanatics like to carry our scriptures around in our
PDA.

Hear hear! The day I moved to Pocket PC my load at church meetings
dropped from bag full o books to pocket full o PDA. Now I help carry
my kids.

I'm still looking for good freeware W&B and E6B calculators for Pocket
PC 2002. Anyone know of any?

Rob

--
[You] don't make your kids P.C.-proof by keeping them
ignorant, you do it by helping them learn how to
educate themselves.

-- Orson Scott Card