Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 1883 Editor's Choice: 20
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neurotobot
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I find myself alarmed at the implications of the line of reasoning of some atheists, whose speech borders on invective, and whose logic leads dangerously close to state-sponsored religious intolerance.
As usual, the religious have it backwards. With few exceptions, religious intolerance is perpetrated by the religious, and not by the non-religious.
"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."
--Ann Coulter, This is War column, Sept. 13, 2001
"The Jews of Temple Beth Sholom are sinful, greedy, Hell-bound, money-grubbing sodomites; and they have dedicated their synagogue to be a gay and lesbian propaganda mill and recruiting depot, soliciting young people to sodomy."
--Rev. Fred Phelps - Sept 7 1998, Westboro Baptist Church press release, re: protesting Jewish groups
"Nobody has the right to worship on this planet any other God than Jehovah. And therefore the state does not have the responsibility to defend anybody's pseudo-right to worship an idol."
--Rev. Joseph Morecraft,Chalcedon Presbyterian Church, Marietta, Georgia, quoted in "the Public Eye," June 1994
"A civil war is brewing in which we must deal with the Jews. It is a time of reckoning for their pact with the devil."
--Robert G. Millar (1925-2001) http://www.adl.org/learn/Ext_US/Elohim.asp
"The Christian community has a golden opportunity to train an army of dedicated teachers who can invade the public school classrooms and use them to influence the nation for Christ."
--D. James Kennedy, "Education: Public Problems and Private Solutions," Coral Ridge Ministries, 1993
"The 'wall of separation between church and state' is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned."
-- William Rehnquist, Dissenting Opinion in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985
"I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good.... Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a Biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism."
-- Randall Terry, quoted in The News-Sentinel, Fort Wayne, Indiana, August 16,
"Unique among the nations, America recognized the source of our character as being godly and eternal, not being civic and temporal. And because we have understood that our source is eternal, America has been different. We have no king but Jesus."
-- John Ashcroft, Commencement address given on May 8, 1999, upon receiving an honorary degree at ultra-right-wing and ultra-fundamentalist Bob Jones University, also known for its anti-African-American segregationist policies
"We are going to remove the mythical separation of church and state."
--Bishop Carlton Pearson
"We are to make Bible-obeying disciples of anybody that gets in our way."
--Jay Grimstead, February 1987
But the truth is that liberals -- including agnostics and atheists -- have long been far more tolerant of religious believers in office than the other way around. They helped elect a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, and today they support a Mormon named Harry Reid who is the Senate majority leader -- which makes him the highest-ranking Mormon officeholder in American history. Nobody in the Democratic Party has displayed the slightest prejudice about Reid's religion.
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droogoy
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Newtonian mechanics in other words, is a sub-domain of quantum mechanics when nb-> oo.
That's quite a tangent you guys have gone off on.
I think it started when I pointed out that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle guarantees that no scientific conclusion can be precisely correct because it depends on physical measurement, whereas mathematics has no such restriction and can achieve a degree of certainty.
Hence the concept of 'proof', that is, absolute certainty, cannot be applied to science, but can properly be applied only to mathematics. Instead, science relies on conclusions derived from facts and reason, and there is no such thing as 'proof'.
I submit to you that the canard that 'science cannot prove the non-existence of gods' is a red herring and a logical fallacy, for the simple reason that the concept of 'proof' does not apply to science. Therefore the demand to 'prove' that gods do not exist is a dishonest one, but it is one that is characteristic of the religious.
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droogoy
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Order (Ior higher order) itself can only be produced by increasing entropy.
You could be more precise.
The entropy of a local system, like the coffee cup, can be reduced, but at the expense of the increase in entropy to the universe outside that local system. Net entropy necessarily increases in this process, even though the entropy of the local system is decreased.
The coffee cup can be reassembled by introducing a mechanism which reduces its entropy, meaning that somebody has to come by and glue it back together.
The Second Law pretty much guarantees that the coffee cup can't come back together in the absence of such a mechanism, and that introducing that mechanism is going to cost somebody something in time and glue, and that overall entropy must increase.