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There's a joke dating from the early part of the Mike Harris era that goes something like this: “Harris is starving the education system so that people will be dumb enough to vote for him again.” I chuckled a bit when I first heard the joke but, ultimately, I thought that it was just another throwaway putdown.

In retrospect, I'm wondering if the comic (whose name escapes) might have been on to something.

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Originally posted by Sanityatlast:
They aren't ignorant victims of an education system anymore than progressives are.

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Most of the people erroneously labelled as stupid right wingers are merely hardworking people too overwhelmed by their ongoing life struggles to find the time for debating idealistic solutions to problems that do not affect them directly.

This sneering condescension of a large part of Canadian society goes a long ways in explaining why leftists are not taken seriously-why they are always( to their amazement)on the outside looking in.

From international affairs to community living,alternative energy to benefits reform,leftists have excellent ideas but prefer to confront anyone who does not understand or agree as a stupid right winger rather than persuading them to be supportive.

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Originally posted by No Yards:

How many progressives believe that the world is 6000 years old and that man walked with dinosaurs?

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How many 'progressives' believe Jesus was a god and rose from the dead? Millions. How does one mythology show less ignorance than another. Many natives believe in a spirit world...spirits in the rocks, trees and so on. This is 'less progressive' than believing Jesus brought Lazarus back to life?

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Originally posted by nister:
Jester, you don't know our motives, or end game. I for one neither need nor want right-wingers in my life; it's they who inflict their beastly company on us. I stipulate that I don't know how to keep them at bay, given that they can always get my attention with sufficient violence and fear-mongering. That's the only reason I post here.

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You're right,I don't.

I spose if you find babble a refuge from beastly right wingers,this thread makes some sense.I never thought of it that way.

Although I am most likely considered a beastly right winger by some here,I have spent most of my life strugging against them as have most of the other little people denigrated here as stupid right wingers.

I'm a fighter,not a seeker of refuge.In the struggle of life,I usually get the crap kicked out of me and I have chosen to respond with irreverent good humour.

You are right,there are beastly right wingers out there. They prey on unbeastly right wingers,leftists and each other with equal abandon.Your mistake is in assuming everyone who is not in complete agreement with leftist ideals is automatically a beastly right winger.

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Originally posted by Sanityatlast: Most right wingers are hard working people from mechanics to forestry workers to farmers to truck drivers. They aren't ignorant victims of an education system anymore than progressives are. They have a value system based on what they experience in life and what they believe works in society. They aren't any more mean spirited than anyone else.

If progressives believe there is a better way for society to function then that takes convincing. In fact the convincing has been quite successful from public education to health infrastructures to senior pensions,social assistance programmes and so on...

(In response to No Yards, who wrote: How many progressives believe that the world is 6000 years old and that man walked with dinosaurs?) How many 'progressives' believe Jesus was a god and rose from the dead...? Many natives believe in a spirit world ... spirits in the rocks, trees and so on. This is 'less progressive' than believing Jesus brought Lazarus back to life?

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I'm with Sanity on both responses. If you visit FD, you'll find many posters there lumping all left-wingers together and ridiculing, scorning, and tossing them off as having nothing worthwhile to contribute, no position or value that might have validity. Are we any better if we do the same to right-wingers?

Before Bush's re-election, I made a small effort to push America's position on landmines to the fore..hey, you never know. I was naive enough to think there might be a weapon system they wouldn't like. Boy, did they set me straight.

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Originally posted by Papal Bull: I'd like to sees you, a so-called progressive, stop from lumping all progressives together.

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Originally posted by nister:
Naci Sey, FDer's call us limp-wristed traitors. They make specific threats. I know whereof I speak because I used to post there.

Before Bush's re-election, I made a small effort to push America's position on landmines to the fore..hey, you never know. I was naive enough to think there might be a weapon system they wouldn't like. Boy, did they set me straight.

FDer's love landmines, or are too craven to speak up. 10,000 tragedies a year is a small price to pay, they say. Freedom has a price, they say. Only foreigners die, they say.

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Originally posted by nister: Naci Sey, FDer's call us limp-wristed traitors. They make specific threats.

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Certain FDers (and some right-wingers) do that, yes. The ones who don't speak out against such actions are a big part of the problem, because then it's assumed that everyone thinks as the posters do.

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No yards: Atheists are equally "dogmatic" in their belief that the question of God can be answered.

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Actually, no. This atheist, at least, holds that there is no god. If rational argument proves otherwise, then I'll believe. On the other side, it's an impossibility to prove a negation, that something does not exist.

ETA: Sorry! No more of the other site.

[ 19 April 2006: Message edited by: Naci_Sey ]

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Actually, no. This atheist, at least, holds that there is no god. If rational argument proves otherwise, then I'll believe. On the other side, it's an impossibility to prove a negation, that something does not exist.

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Actually, again, no.

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Originally posted by writer:
The last thing we need right now is another board war.

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Originally posted by Papal Bull:

Actually, again, no.

There are two forms of atheism. There is strong atheism and weak atheism. Strong atheists actively seek out to disprove that God or any other diety does not exist.

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In my response to No Yards' assertion that atheists are dogmatic, I wrote "this atheist, at least, holds that there is no god. If rational argument proves otherwise, then I'll believe." I was proving an exception, not talking about all atheists.

Strong atheism is untenable, if it relies on reason and not belief. As I said before, a negation, such as 'there is no god', cannot be proven; the argument must go on into infinity.

[ 19 April 2006: Message edited by: Naci_Sey ]

The definition of Atheism is just plain dogmatic either way; weak or strong ... the Strong Atheist has a dogmatic belief that God does not exist ... the weak Atheist is someone who is just sceptical that God exists, but supposedly if someone brought forward proof, then they could be persuaded to change their minds ... so in other words, the strong Atheist takes something that is impossible to prove or disprove and insists that it has been disproved; and the weak Atheist takes the same impossible to prove or disprove situation and defaults to believing it has been disproved, but is open to listening to someone who claims it is provable.

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... the weak Atheist is someone who is just sceptical that God exists, but supposedly if someone brought forward proof, then they could be persuaded to change their minds ..

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Now to me No Yards, you're describing an agnostic.

I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who opined that at it's highest form, technology would be indistinguishable from magic.

So show me a supreme being which is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, who moreover created the universe, and I'll show you nothing more than an alien life form which has advanced to an absolute state.

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Originally posted by Sanityatlast:
The onus isn't on the atheist to disprove the existence of God, Santa Claus, Leprechauns or the Easter Bunny. The onus is on the believer to provide irrefutable proof of God (or Leprechauns, etc.).

I don't see evidence of any mythical beings. I'm an atheist.

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So, yeah.

You can wrap them up in strong language pretending that your unprovable beliefs are some kind of truth, or you can admit that they are simply beliefs and accept all that goes with believing in things that can't be proved.

There's nothing inherently wrong with beliefs, unless of course you forget that they are beliefs and start considering them truths that others should accept as such.

[ 19 April 2006: Message edited by: No Yards ]

quote:

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Originally posted by Sanityatlast:
The onus isn't on the atheist to disprove the existence of God, Santa Claus, Leprechauns or the Easter Bunny. The onus is on the believer to provide irrefutable proof of God (or Leprechauns, etc.).

I don't see evidence of any mythical beings. I'm an atheist.

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On to the topic:

Come on agnostics, git off the fence!

If you allow for the possiblity of the existence of a supreme being, then no claim can be too outrageous to discount. Dragons? Sure, can't say they ain't out there somewhere. Bigfoot? What the hell, why not. Loch Ness Monster? Give 'er. Virgin birth followed by Zombi-like return from the dead? Okeydokey. UFO abductions and anal probing? Who am I to call it looney?

What happens to peoples' bullshite detectors when religion is involved? Why are they given the kind of benefit of the doubt which Raelians and Mormons can only dream of getting?

[ 19 April 2006: Message edited by: Jingles ]

quote:

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Originally posted by Jingles:
I haven't posted in a while...

Come on agnostics, git off the fence!

If you allow for the possiblity of the existence of a supreme being, then no claim can be too outrageous to discount. Dragons? Sure, can't say they ain't out there somewhere. Bigfoot? What the hell, why not. Loch Ness Monster? Give 'er. Virgin birth followed by Zombi-like return from the dead? Okeydokey. UFO abductions and anal probing? Who am I to call it looney?

What happens to peoples' bullshite detectors when religion is involved? Why are they given the kind of benefit of the doubt which Raelians and Mormons can only dream of getting?

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I haven't posted in a while. Did I miss anything?

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Now, even if the universe is perfectly self aware and intelligent, that still would not answer the question as to whether it was indeed God, but those who might choose to understand the universe as God could be forgiven in that case for doing so ...where if it were found the bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster actually did exist, it would still be pretty foolish to consider them God.

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God may be an old beaded guy in a dress (in which case a comparison to bigfoot is appropriate,) or God might just be a manifestation of the universe having some form of self awareness ..

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This one appeals to me more than others...

...but hey, when here I function in your idiom. Bigfoot or a cosmic self awareness is cool too.

Since I did the free will thing this is kind of up to you, but do you know what I really am?

I'm the best you see when you look in the mirror. If that's not so good for you, then sit down and think a bit. You have tools and resources. Some of them are right here on babble.
They're called "eachother".

http://www.forceministries.com/

Disappointingly they have toned it down a bit, the old site had someone with a huge assault rifle in a ready fire stance looking much like Rambo complete with explosions etc.

[ 20 April 2006: Message edited by: eau ]

You can't ridicule an unprovable belief by pointing to the "truth" of another unprovable belief ... all the inferring away from God from the non existence of bigfoot, or to God with the existence of watch makers, doesn't prove anything.

It's not the belief system I have a problem with, it's the refusal to accept that their belief system is based on belief and not fact ... they may underpin their beliefs with some reference to tangentially related facts, but the relationship between those facts and their belief are rather forced and not a priori nor even a posteriori knowledge ... the arrogance of some atheists to say the non existence of God is proven leads me to surmise that they are no more credible than someone who claims creationism is a proven fact.

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Originally posted by No Yards:
How many progressives believe that the world is 6000 years old and that man walked with dinosaurs?

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Man never walked with with the dinosaurs. Man ran from the dinosaurs. There's a BIG difference.

My understanding (from early contemporaneous written records of human contact with dinosaurs) is that dinosaurs ran at about the same pace as a black bear when it's shot in the arse with salt shot (around 35 mph). So, when humans encountered dinosaurs (again, from early written records), humans learned not to run (which excited the dinosaurs) but, rather, to "play dead"...and that usually fooled the dinosaurs.

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
Atheism is not a belief. By definition it is an absence of belief.

How can an absence of belief be dogmatic?

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Originally posted by GOD:

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quote:

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
Atheism is not a belief. By definition it is an absence of belief.

How can an absence of belief be dogmatic?

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No, Atheism makes a definite statement about the existence of God, it is a doctrine proclaiming the non existence of God.

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Originally posted by jester:
This sneering condescension of a large part of Canadian society goes a long ways in explaining why leftists are not taken seriously-why they are always( to their amazement)on the outside looking in.

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Progressive thinking has been the root of much good, jester. For example, the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s was established, not by conservatives who fought it every step of the way, but by "progressives". There are countless examples of "progressive" ideas that were, at the time, rejected by status quo conservatives. That is no doubt the case with many "progressive" ideas being debated today.

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
I have met and talked and corresponded with hundreds of atheists, and I have never met one who claims to be able to prove that God does not exist.

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Originally posted by Sven:
I suppose in the sense that an athiest believes that God does not exist. It is, perhaps, that belief that is held dogmatically?

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
Is that being dogmatic?

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
What does "dogmatically" mean? If all beliefs are dogmas then the word loses its meaning.

I believe that God does not exist, because the evidence for its existence is insufficient, and I refuse to accept its existence on the basis of faith alone. If anyone can come up with convincing proof I will become a believer in God. Same goes for Bigfoot, Cadborosaurus, leprechauns, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Jolly Green Giant, Zeus, and Vishnu. Is that being dogmatic?

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Refusing to accept, and believing that they don't exist, are two different things. If you're going to try and fight to keep the meaning of "dogma" relevant, then please let's give the same respect to the meaning of atheist and agnostic shall we?

Refusing to accept is "agnostic", believing in the nonexistence is "atheistic". "Strong" and "weak" when referring to Atheism means about the same as being a "strong" or "weak" theist ... it speaks more about the person than it does the "belief".

The second concept is leaving the door open for the existence of established mythological beings like Jesus, Alah, wood spirits and so on to exist.

In my earlier days I would have considerd myself an agnostic of the first type (above). To others, however, I would have called myelf and atheist because folks often think by 'agnostic' one means unsure about the existence of Jesus, Alah, etc. The door is 'open'. When, in fact, from the age of 10, I dismissed Jesus as a god with no more of a reality than Caspar the Ghost.

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Today I'm a solid atheist. I see no evidence of any existence outside of the physical properties of matter and energy.

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Originally posted by No Yards:
Refusing to accept, and believing that they don't exist, are two different things.

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It's not I who am violating the laws of logic, but rather people who claim to be "agnostics", who agree they have no basis for believing in God, but who refuse to draw the obvious conclusion (or, if you don't like the word "conclusion", how about "operating assumption") that there is no God.

quote:

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
If I refuse to accept the existence of something, how is that not equivalent to believing (at least provisionally, and without purporting to be able to prove a negative) that it does not exist?

It's not I who am violating the laws of logic, but rather people who claim to be "agnostics", who agree they have no basis for believing in God, but who refuse to draw the obvious conclusion (or, if you don't like the word "conclusion", how about "operating assumption") that there is no God.

I think the distinction between agnosticism and atheism is a false one, invented to save some people from having to actually confront the fact of their own disbelief in God.

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In science, when you shine a light through two relatively closely placed slots, the light pattern that fall on a screen on the other side of those slots shows an interference pattern (ie. some brighter and darker areas where the two separate sources of light coming through the slots cross over each other and defending upon where and how they meet, some areas show a strengthening effect, and some areas shown a cancelling effect. So if both slots are open and you shine your light through these slots, they show this effect, if you close off one of these slots, then the light shows an expected dispersal pattern, brighter in the middle, darkening as you move outwards.

Now, when you take the same two slots and shoot single photons (single discrete "packets" of light "particles") through one of those those slots, a strange thing happens ... since there is only one particle being passed though one slot at one time, one would assume it whether the other slot covered or not would have no effect on the single photons gong through the other un opened slot ... but strangely enough it does make a difference ... if the slot is opened, then the single photons are more likely to hit in the areas where a wave would have predicted a strengthening effect, and less likely to hit in areas where a wave would have shown a cancellation effect ... when the second slot is closed, the photons strike in a pattern showing reflecting the probability shown by a wave of light going though a single slot.

http://www.tcd.ie/Physics/Schools/what/atoms/quantum/duality.html

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Originally posted by Sanityatlast:
Most of us grew up in a European-white-Christian culture and 'believing' is as much in our blood as Hockey Night in Canada. We all 'want' to believe that whatever team scores a goal has meaning to it but when we step back we can laugh that it's still a bunch of grown men chasing a chunk of rubber around the ice. Easier to get caught up in the emotion of the game as it's easier to 'cling to' some thread of supernatural power 'out there'.

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I'm a product of the 50s and I've never believed in the existence of God (or the Tooth Fairy, the Easter bunny, or Santa Claus). However, it wasn't for lack of my mother trying to instill that belief in me or society's pressure to have everyone conform to the majority view.

I felt the societal pressure so strongly that I didn't 'come out' as an atheist until the early 1990s. I was studying philosophy as an undergraduate at the time. What an amazing experience! Finally, there was a place where it was permitted, even encouraged, to question 'common sense', 'first principles', and the like.

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Originally posted by Sven:

Progressive thinking has been the root of much good, jester....

And, I think the condescending "sneering" is often from both sides of the political spectrum.

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I'm not disputing the contributions progressives make to society,Sven. I also do not dispute that the sneering is mutual.My point is that by polarising leftist issues into us and them,the left alienates potential supporters who could be convinced by reason but not coerced by ideological preaching.Many so-called right wingers are merely cautious people who resist change due to fear of the unknown rather than ideologically driven rightists.

Nister has enlightened me with the view that to some leftists,a refuge is required from the bullying of the right.A place where there is mutual support.

Perhaps,I am misconstruing this inward projection of mutual support into an outward projection of condescension.

[ 20 April 2006: Message edited by: jester ]

quote:

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Originally posted by No Yards:
... If I then say that there is not enough proof either way to say that photons are somehow intelligent, or that the experiment is just some kind of big nonexistent hoax ... so scientists are somehow "coping out" by not dismissing the whole thing for lack of sensible evidence?

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It is no more logical to conclude from an experiment in quantum mechanics that photons possess intelligence than it is to conclude from the examination of the human eye that it is the product of intelligent design.

But denying that photons have intelligence is not the same as denying the existence of the strange and observable behaviour that they sometimes exhibit. The fact that a certain observed behaviour cannot be fully explained in terms comprehensible to the layman, or that it may be the subject of conflicting scientific explanations, does not justify anyone saying that the observations or the behaviour themselves are non-existent.

If the scientific question is "do photons possess intelligence?" then the analog of the atheist would be the scientist who says "There is insufficient evidence to establish such an extraordinary proposition, and until there is further evidence, I must continue on the provisional assumption that the proposition is false. To assume the contrary proposition would amount to substituting faith for evidence; and to carry on as if there is some doubt about the matter would put much of hitherto accepted knowledge about other scientific matters into such doubt that further scientific progress would be unjustifiably hindered."

What would the "agnostic" scientist say? "I can't decide whether photons are intelligent or not, so I will carry on doing science while believing that photons are neither inanimate nor sentient beings"?

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
Would you care to join the argument, or are you happy just to make comments from the sidelines?

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I'm having difficulty understanding your irritation with my posts. Should I just concede defeat to No Yards, even when he poses a direct question challenging my position? Am I being unfair in my debating tactics?

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
Am I bullying someone?

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[ 20 April 2006: Message edited by: jester ]

"An agnostic is someone who when they die, God says 'I just don't know what I'm going to do with you.'"

"Hey, don't make fun of my deeply held conviction that when I die I will be surprised!"

But getting back to the original topic..

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The voting patterns of high school students (in Stedent Vote, etc.)tend to resemble that of their left-leaning public school teachers rather than the public at large

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I don't think that is true at all. As I recall, high school students tend to vote like their parents.

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Originally posted by Boom Boom:
I had conservative parents, very conservative brothers, mostly very conservative teachers, and I was very left wing and radical when much younger than I am today. I still consider myself on the progressive left on most matters, although I'm 56 now and slowing down a bit.

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My parents were very orthodox Catholcs. 4 out of 5 their children are atheists. My German brother-in-laws father was a Naxi in WW2...my brother-in-law is a lefty liberal. Etc., etc.

The labels at the personal level less and less meaningful. Farmers in Alberta and Sask. vote right wing...those in rural Quebec BQ...I doubt they are really all that different from each other. They probably both support the death penalty, support public health care, want criminals locked up longer, don't like the Feds, etc.

Student Vote

Actual Results

Students voted 34% NDP, 28% Liberal and 23% Green. That results in 45, 24 and 7 MLAs respectively.

The registered voters actually voted 46% Liberal, 42% NDP and 9% Green. That resulted in 46 Liberals and 33 NDP MLAs.

In short, students are only 2/3 as likely to vote Liberal and over twice as likely to vote Green. Looking at it another way, if the Student Vote carried the day, the Liberals would have basically half as many seats in the provincial legislature, a result the BCTF would be rather happy about I would suspect.

The -rhetorical- question.

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Originally posted by No Yards:

How many progressives believe that the world is 6000 years old and that man walked with dinosaurs?

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The reply

quote:

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Originally Posted by Sanityatlast

How many 'progressives' believe Jesus was a god and rose from the dead?...

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Apparently science and spirituality are the same thing to right-wingers.

[ 06 May 2006: Message edited by: sidra ]

It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic.

I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.”

In that case, the theist is making a claim about the make up of the world

If someone says "I don't believe that God exists," they are (typically) making the claim that the world is constituted in a certain way and in that world, a being which they refer to as God does not exist.

In this case, the atheist is making a claim about the make up of the world.

It really doesn't matter that one is affirming an existence and the other is denying an existence. They are both making claims about the nature of the world. (On the typical/accepted meaning of atheist, anyway.)

The agnostic looks at the situation and says "I have no reason one way or another to adopt either position. I have no empirical verification either way, and the logical arguments drawn up in support of either position are insufficient. Therefore, I'm going to withhold judgment until such time as I have empirical evidence or a logical argument to lead me to one conclusion over the other."

The difference between an atheist and an agnostic, then, is that the atheist says "God does not exist," and the agnostic says "I have no basis for an opinion either way."

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The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.-- Albert Einstein

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I would think it more difficult to develop a serious sense of wonder while having to pack a rifle and wonder if your legs will still be attached to your body in months to come in exchange for the basic human right to an education.

ETA: 20 thousand is the number of Canadian kids they've press ganged into the military in recent years. Those kids either don't want to flip burgers for a living, or they don't desire to take on a quarter century worth of student loan debt sentence.

[ 17 May 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by SvenThere are countless examples of "progressive" ideas that were, at the time, rejected by status quo conservatives. That is no doubt the case with many "progressive" ideas being debated today.

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Wow, I'm agreeing with Sven, what has the world come to?

Seriously, in my vast lefty travels in the world, I have come to believe that many inequities and oppressions that happen can be slowly reframed over time to be unacceptable to the mainstream. Through the work of various left-wingers and others.

Take the issue of drunk driving. Not even a generation ago, it was okay to leave a party and drive home while drunk. It was never thought to be the smartest thing to do, but it didn't carry the immense social stigma it does today. And of course, today, people still do it, so it hasn't been eradicated. But it's not "okay" anymore. That's huge. And that's the work of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

It was argued, very far upthread, that right-wingers aren't concerned with issues that don't affect their lives directly. I would argue that this is true for most of us, not just right wingers. Yet how many of us, statistically, have been affected by a drunk driving tragedy? Rather small statistic, yes? But I still think it's wrong to do it and I would discourage anyone in my immediate circle from doing so. By any means necessary.

So, if it can be done for drunk driving, within a generation, it can be done for violence against women, racism, cutting social services to the poor, ongoing oppression of FN people, I could go on. Many lefties take a "it's good for the economy for everyone to be working/productive" approach. "And they will be more productive if they aren't suffering from (fill in name-of-oppression-here)" This isn't taking down capitalism, which is the one of a number of flaws in that tactic. But it can work for some people, and that's my take on social change, small steps. And never going back.

Society benefits as a whole from a broader-based education system, but this leads to individuals often realizing they have obligations that extend beyond just immediate family.

In any case, the same trick that has worked on health care works on education.

1. Break the system.
2. Blame the people who try to make it work for the broken system in the first place, even though it wasn't their fault.
3. Lather, rinse, repeat.

So high school teachers get dumped on for trying to teach kids when the government's frozen per student funding and didn't account for inflation.

Let's use me as an example of how this sort of situation harms the education system, long-term.

I wanted to teach in high school. However, after the BC Liberals got in and made teaching a huge political football, I decided to shitcan that idea and go on for my doctorate, since that way even if I can't get a teaching position I can get a research fellowship.

Now, I am but one individual but you can bet that on a large enough scale, this kind of calculation and weighing of options means the best teachers will NOT be teaching high school, but will teach at university.

Conclusion: Teacher quality in high school will degrade slowly over time, and more people will either teach college/university or simply won't teach at all. As a result, students who would otherwise get taught by excellent teachers in high school and retain their interest through to university, won't.

Essentially they work toward the corporate agenda using the formula of the three D's: 1. defund it 2. defame it 3. deregulate and privatize it Someone mentioned this in another thread, and it's exactly what they've been doing imo.

The global corporatocracy understands that economies based on oil and oil byproducts is a dead end. So the magic word is to liberalize anything and everything that can be made a market of, like publicly funded education. And the neoLiberalizing politicians have de-legitimized themselves and their second-hand Chicago School ideology by doing what they've been doing since FTA abd NAFTA, trade agreements signed by two phony majority governments in Ottawa in 1989 and 1994.

Except in those democratic countries which have resisted the dictates of the new corporate-friendly trade rules, very few laws governing international food safety standards, health care and education enacted after public participation and with public interests in mind have stood up to WTO rules favouring transnational agendas.

And they have been putting our public services on the table behind closed door WTO trade talks in ever more remote locations around the world to avoid public scrutiny, and to avoud all those wonderful and amazing anti-globalization protesters. We don't have democracy but we do have the power to stand up to them. And we should do by all means.

[ 06 September 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

I'm can no longer call myself an agnostic; I'm an atheist and have been far longer than I realized.

Here's why: the god whose existence I previously maintained was undecideable was constantly being re-defined to as to increase its likelyhood of existence.

Decades ago it was the liberal, middle-class all-powerful-but-polite god of anglo-Canadian Anglicanism.

This morphed into the unitary consciousness that authored the Big Bang, spoke to humanity throught the various religions and spiritual traditions, inspired/incarnated Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Black Elk, the trees, subatomic particles, galaxies and each human being with a spark of the divine.

God's responsibilities lessened and She became Love and the laws of Nature.

Then just the laws of mass-energy...

Wait a minute! That lexical slot was already occupied.
It occurred to me that if I'm trying to make the case that we can't know for sure whether or not laws of physics exist, I'm not so much joining the ranks of agnostics so much as breaking with reality.

So, if God is not defined then I will concede that you can't prove the non-existence of something you can't say anything about. You also can't disprove the existence of an impotent God who influences nothing in the universe. In other words, you can't disprove the existence of a god whose effect on the Universe is indistguishable from that of a non-existent god, and if that's what you get your kicks worshipping, well, have fun.
However, if you believe in a god that influences the universe in a way only an omnipotent being who answers prayer in a way that produces different outcomes than predicted by chance, supersedes the laws of physics even occasionally, or whose Universe shows any differences from one having been prodcued without supernatural intervention, then we have the basis for a disproof.

It's a safe bet the the god of Matthew 18:

" Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven. 20 “For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst.”

does not exist, for example.

For ways in which the idea of a God who is active in the Universe contradicts logic and our current understanding of physics, I highly recommend
God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist by physicist Victor Stenger.
Unlike the polemics by the always-entertaining Dawkins, the long-winded Dennett, self-absorbed Hitchens and sophomoric Harris, Stenger's book is humane, logical and dispassionate. Head and shoulders above the others in my opinion, and he puts to rest several miscguided notions on the rationalist side such as:
Science cannot investigate the supernatural (it has, and the latter has been found wanting).

Astrology is not a science (it is and has failed dismally as such).

To address the true subject of this thread: we should yank all funding for religious schools and put it into the public system.

Right-wingers and left-wingers both want us to be educated enough to agree with them.
Our corporate overlords want us to be betas and gammas: smart enough to work productively for them, but not smart enough to question the system.

[ 25 September 2007: Message edited by: Sisyphus ]

My ex's parents were what I'd call grass roots tories. Small business people that couldn't figure out that the kind of business that the tories favour wasn't small business. They tend to be ideologically driven, too. And chruchy joes. In fact, my then father in law told me once, while leaving a Catholic church where one of my nephews and one of his Grand Children was being baptized that he'd "never set foot in a place of idol whorship again. And I don't think he has.

But, back during the Gulf War, when I was pretty much all alone in opposition to it, I started in on them about it, assuming they'd be in lock step with the right wing. "We don't support the war." my then mother in law said, "We're not monsters, you know."

Your Tommy Paine was speechless, as people who know me would tell you was a moment to record.

So, "right wingers" are many and varied. The vast majority are not monsters.

The few who are tend to be people like John Tory.

John Tory is going around now, trying to divide, to appeal to the worst in people. But it isn't to make life easier for the small business people, or the factory worker who pulled himself up by the bootstraps and expects everyone else to give it a go.

It's to keep the tax dollars flowing from us lefties and the right wingers to the friends in the exclusive Family Compact.

Which, by no coincidence, is what Dalton McGinty is all about, too.

quote:

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Originally posted by No Yards:

How many progressives believe that the world is 6000 years old and that man walked with dinosaurs?

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