Fascinating... The city chose to give it back to him basically. What a terrible decision... When NY first woke up to the sudden appearance of a bronze...
So let me get this straight: A man vandalizes a public space, and the public subsequently decides they like the aesthetics of said vandalism, so they ...
I'd like to go out on a limb and try to defend the following definition of life: Self perpetuating intelligence. Any and all criticisms would be appre...
I think it depends on the nature of the hassling. Some of it is warranted, some of it not. When a staunch anti-theist like Christopher Hitchens critic...
The reason why I brought up the Orlando night club attack specifically was because it seems like an example of terrorism more purely motivated by reli...
Given the ample testimony that was floating around (including from the shooters wife) I'm less skeptical, but apparently his ex-wife has just pleaded ...
As far as I know no gay dating app accounts were ever discovered, but there is a boat load of eyewitness testimony suggesting he frequented the night ...
What would happen if we actually caught the truth? Would philosophers bat it around back and forth like a proud cat who captured and killed a mouse? W...
The distinction I make between "religious" and "political" is to separate religious rhetoric as an influence from environmental and circumstantial inf...
Reminds me of the plot of a spinoff T.V series called "Stargate: Universe"... An ancient alien race discovers anomalous or artificial structure in the...
The belief that the west is a satanic lacks impact without basing itself in an emotional appeal to a real world conflict. It's one thing to accept in ...
My suspicion is that aside from the commonality of a shared religion there must also be various psychological influences exterior to the religion itse...
It occurs to me that terrorism really is the prime mover of anti-isamic sentiment. I wrote the OP with all forms of religious violence in mind, not ju...
I wanted to write down my understanding of the CMB to see how well I understood it, and it occurred to me that not many people are very familiar with ...
When the world was a much bigger place, we were much less homogeneous. The distances that separated us insulated us from the conflicts that naturally ...
I'm somewhat fascinated by how religious reform, revisionism, and reinterpretation is informed by individual bits (sometimes single lines/verses) of t...
What's your end game Tom? Amend the constitution and ban a religion? Close the mosques? Run the muzzies out of town? Send them to camps? Who do we go ...
If you look at prof. Saad's youtube metrics and those of other youtube pundits who are windy on the subject, you can actually see charted growth. But ...
Hubble measured light from pulsing stars in distant galaxies, not the CMB. The pulsing stars are of the "Cepheid" class, which have the characteristic...
We measure these motions with classical astrophysics, not GR. We describe and predict what we measure with "spatial expansion", which GR endorses. The...
The conclusion of Hubble gets interpreted by GR, not the information he gathered. Hubble demonstrated that the universe is expanding, somehow, someway...
I guess in a way that's what I attempted to be in this thread. Open minded and dispassionate (unbiased?). To my far right I see a growing cloud of pas...
It might have been too much to cram in to the OP, but there is a noteworthy dynamic in the discussion of Islam that involves some proponents of the se...
The observational evidence for an expanding universe doesn't rely on GR though. Hubble measured and demonstrated the positive correlation between the ...
There are some gravitational forces everywhere. The gravitational field generated by a given mass extends infinitely, it just gets weaker the farther ...
Objects on cosmologically small scales (our local galactic group and smaller) exist within a gravitational field strong enough to counteract metric sp...
Big bang cosmology provides us with a model for past events which happens to be the best fit for all the observational data. It's taken basically 80 y...
What I'm saying is that thanks to observational evidence displaying consistency, it's not an uncritical presupposition. Why assume they were different...
There's no causation without consistency. Think about it. If things just happened randomly, "cause" would be an incoherent term. The consistency that ...
It's been about ten years since that particular Hirsi Ali quote. I am aware that she has become more moderate on the issue (heh), but I could not resi...
If you think about it, the laws of nature define causation. The pull of gravity causes movement. The strong and weak nuclear forces cause atomic and m...
Energy can cause expansion, such as in explosions. Wow. So general relativity, a theory with mountains of evidence to confirm it, is "nonsense" becaus...
I think I understand it. You're saying that since we cannot be sure causation happened in the past like it does in the present, we cannot be sure evid...
Basically you're suggesting that even though empirical science has given ample evidence to warrant accepting the big bang, they might be wrong because...
It's not nonsense at all. Explosions are the rapid expansion that results from a sudden release of heat and energy. But what are you really saying her...
Once accepted that Islam itself is broadly the problem, the political ramifications are somewhat chilling. in the words of Hirsi Ali : It's interestin...
Brute force. Causation is just one of those things that keeps showing to be true via experience and observation. It's fundamentally required to exist ...
It's not meaningless at all. We know the rapid expansion of heat and energy happened; an explosion. It's like we've found an area where there is clear...
Causation. Proven theories pertaining to astrophysics. Huh?!? Your personal presuppositions, whatever they may be, do not challenge the scientific tru...
The scientific method rejects the presupposition of truth. What counts as truth in science is generally an explanatory model with predictive power and...
It's the overwhelming preponderance of evidence. In order to dismantle the plethora of scientific observations, theories, and experimental confirmatio...
The pervasiveness of causality undermines "chance" in the universe. When we say "life arose by chance" we don't mean to say that things could have bee...
I fully expected bitching, but that's something that happens when discussing all controversial topics. It's the natural grime of labored discourse. I ...
"Space" isn't your run of the mill object. I'm not a physicist, but I reckon it has something to do with local gravitational fields counteracting the ...
Our perspective on the possibility of life is sort of like the possibility of precipitation except we know less about the conditions and physical proc...
Space itself is expanding. Here's the thing though: All the energy we can observe we are damn sure was very hot and very compressed in the moments aft...
Canadians have an unyielding existential need to please people, and it's hard work (sometimes we fail ). It's not like we're better than everyone else...
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