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Galileo Was Wrong: The Hubris of Anti-Science
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I doubt genetic modification on that level is going to be around for centuries though, and in any case power collects in the older and wealthier people who presumably would not be keen to give it straight to their grandchildren just because they look pretty and are really good at football. Not to mention it is one thing to correct a few minor errors, but another thing entirely to really improve someone. It would also take decades to work out if what you had done was actually useful (and you might never really know).
A perfect, super-smart group would do a better job of attaining their goals, but there's no reason to assume that their goal would be to run things better. You know, seeing as I'm a communist.
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Remove a particular defect from an entire generation, and that defect will be permanently gone, save for extremely rare mutations.
What's sad is that we'll prolly see "programmable births" before we'd ever see an electric car you "plugged in" when you got home.
I see those around in Japan already, but not exactly commonplace yet. But there's a whole different set of circumstances here than other countries. (For like 80%+ of the people here, you never drive more than 1 hour in a day; and almost any distance more than 30min away you take a train.)
How about the bans of cloning and the reluctance for Western governments to fund stem-cell research? Moral inflexibility due to religion or is it irresponsible to play with life by any metric?
There are loads of Gee-Whizz things driving around London. They look a bit silly.
Well, cloning as it is today has massive side effects. Its still not been perfected to the point where I would want them to start on human cloning. A human clone today would suffer a painfull life and a early death. I think it took around a hundred tries to get Dolly the Sheep. 100 pregnancies to get a single clone. Now transfer that to human pregnancies.
Also on religion the popes imminent arrival in London is causing quite a stir of controversy with some calling for his arrest and trial over his involvement in the vatican cover-up of peadophile priests.
Religious institutions have always claimed a moral monopoly but how long do you think they'll be able to maintain such a high level of credibility?
How is this relevant to the macro subject of research?
pointing out that its not just moral inflexibility that prevents human cloning research. Anybody trying it would be endangering the health of many people. The cloning ban only applies to human cloning.
I know there's a ban on reproductive cloning (what you're talking about) in the UK, but IIRC, the US ban is on cloning involving human tissues which is a bit broad for my tastes.
However, I still say we should have been doing induced pluripotency research all the time anyway, ban on cloning or not, because it's what you're going to want to do anyway, once you figured out how to teach a stem cell to become a liver cell in vitro.
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This is revisionist bullshit. It's God 2.0. Two-hundred or even one-hundred years ago, you'd might have been lynched or stoned for this sort of thought crime. You're just rationalizing religious beliefs in a world where there's no longer any room for them. You're making excuses for retaining belief in a supernatural, supreme being when those beliefs are no longer necessary. Apologizing for the rest of the faithful. This sort of argument only further discredits religion by saying "Oh, well, yeah, there's over a thousand years of history that contradicts everything I just said, but those people were just ignorant. They didn't really understand. They weren't ENLIGHTENED, like us modern folk!"
You cannot cherry pick what you like and dislike about your book, it's history, and the people who practice it. It doesn't exist within a bubble. Historical, the Bible was accepted as the whole truth. It was a record of history, a map to the universe's cosmology, and a guide to proper living all rolled into one. To deny God and the Christ was to risk death. If you were a nonbeliever (I hate that term, because it acknowledges a theo-centric worldveiw, but its appropriate to the conversation), you kept your fucking mouth shut if you valued your neck. There are still countries were stoning is, according to Abrahamic religous texts used to justify it as law, an acceptible method of punishment for the wicked and unfaithful. To deny this is to be willfully ignorant.
You're within your right to believe whatever you like (as long as you're not forcing your faith on to others). But you have to acknowledge that, within historical context, you're veiws are anamolous and only allowed because you live in tolerant society. You have accepted that the Bible is meant as parable, not as historical truth. This is not true for the rest of the world, though. You can interpert your faith however you like, but what you cannot do is project your beliefs on its history and its practitioners. Make whatever excuses you need to if you must justify to yourself your beliefs. You must accept, however, that just because it's what you think doesn't make it what the rest of the world believes.
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It's literally impossible for a Christian to follow the teachings of the Bible without ignoring the teachings of other parts of the Bible. There isn't a single book of the New Testament whose doctrine isn't explicitly contradicted in some fashion by at least one other book of the NT. The Bible wasn't a single text written by a single author, or even by multiple authors of a single theologically uniform sect. It's hypocritical, if not ignorant, to accuse Christians of cherrypicking when the Bible itself requires Christians to do so in order to develop an internally cohesive and coherent theology.
If you're going to attack Christianity as a whole on a Biblical basis, using the entire Bible as a rhetorical bludgeon, and treating it as a single homogenous text in the process, is only useful when the people you're trying to reach either aren't Christians, or are Christians whose personal faith doesn't actually reference the Bible at all. It's even less useful to attack modern Christians and Christianity on the basis of the actions of historical Christians or of modern Christians from completely different cultures; doing so compounds the issue of doctrinarian differences with the issue of cultural differences. Nobody with any sense of intellectual honesty is going to compare conquistadores to Episcopalians (for example) solely on the grounds that they're all Christians.
I think the point generally becomes that if you can pick and choose which parts of your "holy" book you're going to follow, then your beliefs have no more claim to validity then anyone elses, be they a different sect, a different religion or non-religious.
There's no real functional difference between rejecting parts of the Bible and rejecting the entire thing. One could very easily describe an atheist as one who believes (some) of the word of the Bible, but rejects the notion of a deity - since really, that's just outmodded.
You can't have it both ways without doublethink.
(I believe they often would describe themselves as Jews).
This is only true if you believe your scriptures to be infallible. What Duffel was getting at above is that this isn't always the case. It may be for Islam, and a lot of varieties of protestantism, but it's pretty stupid to lump all religious beliefs together in this regard.
Not all religious texts are assumed to have been divinely written by their adherants.
In those instances, though, what's the use of keeping them as holy texts?
It would seem that if a particular sect had a good reason for doubting the validity of, say, Deuteronomy, they would come up with a Bible that left out that book. Not, as it seems, downplay its importance or divine inspiration.
And that's exactly what the Protestants did.
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Just because something Biblical isn't taken as literal, or in this case is Old Testament and contains guidelines that are no longer followed, doesn't mean there isn't value in it. I wouldn't throw Deuteronomy out of the Bible any more than I would throw Herodotus out of a History classroom.
And apparently there are some criteria for not including certain works in the Bible, depending on your sect, because there are apocrypha.
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