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@Eliezer - nope, sorry, 3/8 now, seems like 10,000 words of cod fiction and OB has truly jumped the shark.

There's load of good ideas there but praps you shoulda' waited until LessWrong was working AllRight.

wellll.. it's kinda fun, Eleizer, I guess so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and keep reading .... but....but... is this format quite right for OB?

Would this series not be better in - ooh, I don't know - a new and more open sister site of some kind, perhaps with the key points written up at the end and posted on to OB, if they seem popular? Or am I wrong.

"Your opinions have been noted and completely disregarded"

Ouch!

I think perhaps my opinion wasn't clear:

  • I don't think atheism is a religion
  • I don't believe you think atheism is a religion But I think your post sure made it sound like one :-)

"Yes, she's a solid atheist in no danger whatsoever, thank you for asking"

Eliezer I have never heard you make atheism sound so much like a religion.

I'll put it down to too much turkey and pecan pie :-)

Jo - I think you will be surprised to find out that many of your co-religionists are, actually, in pretty much the same boat and don't 'really' believe 90% of the stuff they parrot (eg who really believes Exodus:12:29-30 nowadays?)

What people do have is a general feeling that there is a God(s) (seems to be almost hardwired in Human brains, and hard to overcome), and a liking for the companionship and structure that a religion brings.

Belief in Belief, as Dennett calls it in 'Breaking the Spell', which is good book to read..

"I hope the bailout fails decisively, so this calculation can be tested"

more pragmatically you can't teach creationism because you wouldn't know which which creationist story to teach? The christian one isn't the only creation story. How about the jain one? the buddhist story? the viking story? the Roman creation story?

One way to go about it would be to assemble the whole canon of stories, and then look about in the world around us to see if there is any evidence that helps support or falsify the different accounts. Maybe one could examine the stories and create some testable predictions from them and .... oh, hang about...

typo in the post, surely..

"Wade repeatedly selected insect subpopulations for low numbers of adults per subpopulation"

Didn't he in fact select sub-populations with low numbers of infants? Or am I misunderstanding completely.

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