Letters to the Editor
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neurotobot
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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Phase change
Mike Sulzer wrote:
Yes, it is very small, but there is no sudden threshold or phase change. And classical physics implies that any scale size is still "classical".
The point I was trying to make is that the magnitude is at such a small level that the "superposition of states" does not apply to this domain. So, while there isn't a "clear cutoff" it is still pretty evident that - minus the applicability of the superposition principle (which, of course, leads to mutualluy interfering observables etc.) there is clearly no quantum domain here.
So, in the limit of n -> oo, as in a fast moving billiard, I can surely ignore QM, by which I mean QM's paramount principle - the superposition of states. There is no measurable superposition, period.
Let's also realize that as the principal quantum no. n -> oo, QM reverts to the limit of Newtonian Mechanics.
Newtonian mechanics in other words, is a sub-domain of quantum mechanics when nb-> oo.
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droogoy
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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Thermodynamics & Probability
Beltline Betty wrote (in reply to a comment by 'jfsee11'):
The coffee cup analogy is just silly. Unless you are speaking to another defensive believer or an inexperienced teenager I doubt anyone will take your arguments seriously
Indeed, they are quite laughable and had me in near hysterics, ROTFL! The writer forgets the probability of his broken cup coming back together, and also - more importantly - that this would violate the entropy law.
As we know this law defines the direction of time in our cosmos. You cannot take expended exhaust from a car and convert it back into gasoline, nor can Star Trek transporters disassemble humans and reassemble them someplace else, nor can you get the toothpaste- once it is all squeezed out - back into the tube. Nor can you have a cup reassembling itself after the original molecular bonds have been broken.
But this sort of desperation argument is often pushed by godists.
Order (Ior higher order) itself can only be produced by increasing entropy. This is because producing order involves a change in the accessible states of a system, which can only be produced by expending energy.
In general,
S = k ln W
where k is the Boltzmann constant and W are the accessible states of a system. The greater W, the greater k.