Thanks for voting, Elfer! Your experience has been automatically deposited!

With that vote, you now have 13,600 experience points. You need 0 more to get to Level 36. The next Grounds Gold day begins in 12 hours, 53 minutes, and 33 seconds.

At 11/7/09 07:58 PM, Proteas wrote: I know the intention is to satirize religion as a whole, but the idea that they would actually copy the organizational pattern of the Church in spreading atheism intrigues me. Could it lead to atheism becoming a large organization, with doctrines and dogma?

Actually, I think the intention is to allow atheists to become ordained ministers, in order to provide the service to people who are so ANGRYFAIS about being atheists that they demand their wedding be conducted by someone who will not mention god at all.

If atheism does become a large organization with doctrines and dogma, it won't really be atheism any more. In any case, this "church" is not really a step towards that, since they don't really do anything.

At 11/7/09 01:08 PM, RiuTenshin wrote: So it seems you are correct.
Next question.
If water is so much more useful than diamonds or gold, why is it cheaper?

Because there's enough of it that you barely have to shoot any African kids at all to get it.

At 11/7/09 01:03 AM, RiuTenshin wrote: Elfer, I have the most important question ever.
Yes or No?

No. You do not.

At 11/7/09 01:17 AM, MultiCanimefan wrote: Elfer, I was recently at a carnival giving out cotton candy, when suddenly it got out of control and engulfed half the park in pink, sweet goodness. What the hell do I do?

Don't worry about it, I'm sure there's already a team of rough-and-ready cartoon kid detectives working on it for you. Order yourself a pizza.

At 11/7/09 03:00 AM, Tateos wrote: Elfer, is it possible to give help to a large pile of tangled retards? If so, how?

Yes. You could try untangling them somehow. Perhaps by dumping a large quantity of some sort of industrial lubricant on the pile, it would simply lose cohesion and slide apart.

You could also throw food at them to stave off death in the pile.

At 11/7/09 06:56 AM, Proteas wrote: The FCA is located atop the lush rolling hills of Levittown, Pennsylvania.

Wherever the website is based from, they deem that building to be a Church. So.... *blows a raspberry*

They don't necessarily deem the building itself a church, that's just where the organization is located. A reverse 411 on the phone number given shows nothing other than the fact that the provider is a company based in Philly, and that it's a landline. Based on that, I'd venture a guess that the base of operations of the first church of atheism is nothing more than a second phone line.

When I say there's "no actual church building" what I mean is that there's no dedicated building, and people are almost certainly neither invited nor even allowed to show up there for some sort of preaching.

And hey, even if there really was a church where atheists gathered to hear about stuff, I would still think it was pretty stupid, so the point is moot.

What better way to help spread atheism than to get together as a group with a codified body of beliefs, and work together toward a common goal... like a Church denomination.

This is the exact opposite of what atheism is supposed to be. A codified body of beliefs is exactly the sort of problem that shouldn't be promoted. People are fallible, and asking them to just trust you on a philosophical matter is a shitty plan.

After all, isn't the common goal of Atheism to see the Church taken out of society and atheism elevated to the same worldwide status that religion holds now? Hardly seems to me like your motives are altruistic if that's the case.

I think if atheism had some sort of "common goal," (which is a bit weird given the nature of atheism), it would be more along the lines of getting people to think for themselves, or maybe getting rid of the more damaging influnces that organized religion has on society.

"Elevating atheism to the same status that religion holds now" would be a pretty terrible idea.

At 11/6/09 10:50 PM, Valjylmyr wrote: When you crash, everything is going to come back. It's temporary.

"Crash"?

And sorry, which medication is it now that's permanent for general illnesses that you don't develop immunity to?

At 11/6/09 09:46 PM, Proteas wrote: You do realize that there is such a thing as Church of Atheism, right?

You also realize that there's no actual church building, and the only thing that organization does is ordain people as ministers, right? There's no obligation, real or implied, for any atheists anywhere to have anything to do with this organization.

At 11/6/09 08:38 PM, poxpower wrote: But I hate people who just demand endless little favors. When the energy you spend demanding something is equal to or greater than the energy expanded to accomplish that thing, you're a douche.

Don't worry pox, you'll learn to coexist with women one day.

just kiddin'

Sneaking around and trying to give someone some kind of mouth infection makes you a bad person, yeah. It's a complete spineless dick move and also flagrantly unsanitary.

How big is he?

If you're trying to gain weight and you aren't then the solution is to EAT MORE FOOD.

Also, have you considered just wrestling in a lower weight class?

At 11/6/09 03:46 PM, poxpower wrote: Here's one thing you may not know about rich people: they want more money and power anyway.
As far as Buddha goes, I'm pretty he was fictional too so who cares what his religion says about him? It's not true.

There's pretty good historical evidence for Buddha, since he was actually known as a prince before he was known for his spiritual teachings. He also didn't claim to have superpowers or a phone line directly to god. His teachings all basically came down to "try to be a good person."

Buddhism is an oddity among world religions in that for the most part, you don't really need to believe in anything. There's certainly no concept of heresy the way it exists in say, Catholicism.

Listen guys, my IQ is upwards of 600 according to a test I took online, and I think we'd all just better calm down here.

elpher@googlewave.com

Add to NG wave?

At 11/5/09 11:13 PM, Proteas wrote:

At 11/5/09 11:10 PM, gumOnShoe wrote: I hate it when people use religion as a synonym for Christianity. :/

I hate it when people don't have the balls to come out and say which religion they have beef with, attacking the whole group instead of the one offending branch.

Oh, there's a heap of them, but with variations on the theme. It should be noted that the idea of eternal punishment in religion existed way back in ancient egypt, long before Christianity was invented by Roman executioners.

Catholicism = you'll burn in hell
Judaism = you won't get into heaven, and this is KILLING your mother
Islam = we'll put you in a bag and hit you with rocks until you'll die

etc. etc. etc.

The point I was making is that no matter what method they use to convince people, it's never evidence-based. There's a few exceptions, like Zen Buddhism, but those are few and far between, and start blurring the lines between religion and philosophy.

At 11/5/09 06:41 PM, Warningshot wrote: Elfer,

I'm failing english

Halp

Do your assignments on time and do them well? If you know anyone who's good at English, ask them to edit your shit, and actually pay attention to what they change and try to apply it next time.

Also, trying to use good sentence structure all the time, even in casual online conversations, is good practice.

At 11/5/09 06:49 PM, SgtDK wrote: Elfer I can't suck my dick. Help me learn how to do this task.

Here is an internet on the subject. Also the googs led me to a yoga posture hilariously suited to the task.

Yesssssssssss.

Just beat Rad Racer without using the continue code.

That's going to be the last time I ever set out to do that, because that game is not even REMOTELY beatable.

At 11/5/09 07:23 PM, Proteas wrote: Whereas atheism doesn't encourage you to act in a specific way, right?

Not really, no. Atheism is an outcome of a way of thinking, not a causal factor.

Also, the distinction between religion and science is pretty obvious.

Religion says "If you don't believe us on our word alone, you're going to burn for all eternity, so you'd better just believe what we say or else."

Science says "If you don't believe us on our word alone, here's exactly how we did it, go take a shot at it for yourself."

At 11/5/09 05:34 PM, Kittykylie wrote: Hi!

Just thought id ask your advice on why im in so much pain but not in labour? Should i keep ringing the hospital telling them im in pain or just put up with it?

Cheers!

ps: my local hospital is quite shit and always send me home saying "Oh we dont know!" :S

I am in no way a medical professional, so I'm not even going to offer an opinion as to the cause of your pain.

However, you might want to try ringing a different hospital, or a doctor's office, or some sort of maternity-specific service in your area.

Honestly though, this doesn't necessarily indicate that your hospital is shit. It just means they don't know what the cause of the pain is but don't see symptoms that require continuing observation.

At 11/5/09 03:23 PM, SessileNomad wrote: Can God, assuming he were real, make a rock sooo big that even he couldnt lift it?

Yes.

But then he'd lift it anyway and all the peeps would be like :o

World peace. Obvious, but important. Certainly more important than things I would want for myself.

At 11/5/09 12:19 PM, MwnciHead wrote: How does prayer cost money anyway? I mean, dont people pray now, without it costing money?

No see, what they're talking about doing is hiring people to pray for sick patients. To be honest, if this goes through, I'd like to start up my own prayer healing business in the states, so I could be paid by insurance companies for having no qualifications and doing nothing.

I also have no understanding of this, but maybe that's because I could just step outside if I wanted to see an impressive number of trees?

Pretty much every war ever has been caused by greed.

At 11/5/09 10:50 AM, Ericho wrote: I didn't read the whole article, but I recall some guy named GllVideo (he has the most commented video on YouTube) who said there wasn't any statistical information supporting prayer. I would like to say that this article would probably be more reliable than he would be and I'm glad we're getting some positive outputs on prayer.

Did you read any part of the article? It doesn't say anything about the effectiveness of prayer, just that certain members of the senate are trying to get prayer paid for with taxpayer money.

At 11/5/09 06:58 AM, gumOnShoe wrote: Clearly if someone told you that you were brainwashed over gravity, you'd have many logical arguments as to why gravity is legitimate if you took the time to research it. But a man naive in the scientific study of gravity has been brainwashed, and it was a good thing he was.

But that's the thing. With science, you actually can go verify everything for yourself, and there's a very active community of people constantly trying to prove things wrong. You can make very good arguments for why the scientific community can be trusted to make sound scientific conclusions in the vast majority of cases.

For example, I can tell you right now that you have a great trust in the competence of engineers and the soundness of engineering design processes. Were you "brainwashed" into this? No, the reason that you trust in it is because you've been shown time and time again that your trust is well-placed. The building you work in doesn't collapse, the rims on the vehicle you're in don't crumple, and your phone doesn't send a shock down your arm when you pick up the receiver. This has been true every single time. And if it wasn't, you can bet your ass there's a team working on it to make sure it will be the next time.

Trusting a source of information when you have good reason to do so is very, very different from being brainwashed. If someone tells you something over and over starting when you're a kid, but can't tell you how they know it's true or why they believe it or how you can go check for yourself, that's being brainwashed.

At 11/5/09 01:46 AM, AlkaSeltzer wrote: Dear Elfer,

What is the highest court in the Dutch legal system?

The Hoge Raad der Nederlanden. It also acts as the highest court of appeal for the Dutch Antilles and Aruba.

At 11/5/09 02:48 AM, TGreenie wrote: Elfer, what are some things that can help me manage my academics and athletics? The plan I'm currently doing actually lets me complete practice and school work but robs me of my sleep. I wrestle, and not doing wrestling is not an option.

What's your schedule like right now? Gimme an example.

Yeah well, they both look like pretty stupid kids. Especially given the quote from the article:

Relatives had reportedly warned the Ternitz couple about the danger of leaving the car's engine running in a closed garage.

Not only were they dumb enough to leave the car running in the garage, they were dumb enough to leave it running after explicitly being warned not to do so because it would kill them.

Yeah, I remember those, definitely a piece remover. It probably came with a big package of pieces.

At 11/4/09 02:10 PM, ArmouredGRIFFON wrote:

At 11/4/09 01:15 PM, Elfer wrote: Stuff; Does the energy have to "come from" somewhere?

Energy cannot be created science tells us (only to the limitations of my knowledge of corse), but can only be transferred from one mode of existance to the next, so yes from our knowledge we can only assume that such energy must have come from somewhere in the first place.

I'm not saying it's being created or destroyed, I'm saying what if there was a temporal bound on its existence (outside of which, presumably, the idea of "time" would be meaningless to us)?

!Past <---------------------------------------
------------ x ----------------------------------------
-----------------> Future!
Present
! = Infinite

I am aware that there could well be an infinite past, and an infinite future.

What if there isn't, though? I proposed a fairly specific interpretation of the universe, i.e. as a single four-dimensional "block." For example, you're perfectly comfortable with a brick only taking up so much room on the three spatial axes, why aren't you comfortable with the universe only taking up so much space on the temporal axis? Outside of where the brick is, it just isn't, why not think of it as outside of when the universe is, it just isn't?

I agree that it is even more absurd to say that the universe could at one point have been absent of all matter, energy, and forces; and I don't ask where it all came from, I only ask where the energy comes from to suddenly generate the force to create it all, and what laws, how and why define the cofounds of that energy. Even so the idea that time is infinite still does not explain proportionally what defines that elements can react in the first place.

This isn't an argument for God though. Consider my earlier analogy in this thread:

You find a machine powered by some sort of stored energy. Where did it come from? You conclude that obviously, it must have been made by a bigger, more complicated machine containing more energy. Where did that machine come from? Doesn't matter.

You're making the same sort of absurd argument, but with the universe and God instead of the machine and the super-machine.

Infact to say that there was a creator and that all life was somehow 'created', would to suggest that our universe is in singularity and is parallel to another universe,

What?