Hey, thannks for the leads. I just watched some of Midnight in Paris, and realised I'd never read the classics. Would you suggest I start with your Connecticut one?
In reply to this comment by jonny:
[edit] woops, meant to reply on the talk post.

Twain is a great choice - definitely read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. It's LOL funny. Some of my favorites among the American classics are Poe, Emerson, Washington Irving, Walt Whitman, Joseph Heller, Vonnegut (is he counted as classic yet?). Edgar Allen Poe is a must. I first read The Pit and the Pendulum in my 30s and it scared the shit out of me. He clearly had access to the best drugs available in the world at the time. Other top Poe choices - The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Tell-Tale Heart.
In reply to this comment by kymbos:
I'm reading Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, which is a pretty good page turner.

I'm interested in reading some classic American literature if anyone would recommend some for a guy who has never really read any of the classics (like Mark Twain, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald).

I'm green.

Twain is a great choice - definitely read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. It's LOL funny. Some of my favorites among the American classics are Poe, Emerson, Washington Irving, Walt Whitman, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal (are those last two counted as classic yet?). Edgar Allen Poe is a must. I first read The Pit and the Pendulum in my 30s and it scared the shit out of me. He clearly had access to the best drugs available in the world at the time. Other top Poe choices - The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Tell-Tale Heart.
In reply to this comment by kymbos:
I'm reading Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, which is a pretty good page turner.

I'm interested in reading some classic American literature if anyone would recommend some for a guy who has never really read any of the classics (like Mark Twain, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald).

I'm green.

[edit] woops, meant to reply on the talk post.

Twain is a great choice - definitely read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. It's LOL funny. Some of my favorites among the American classics are Poe, Emerson, Washington Irving, Walt Whitman, Joseph Heller, Vonnegut (is he counted as classic yet?). Edgar Allen Poe is a must. I first read The Pit and the Pendulum in my 30s and it scared the shit out of me. He clearly had access to the best drugs available in the world at the time. Other top Poe choices - The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Tell-Tale Heart.
In reply to this comment by kymbos:
I'm reading Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, which is a pretty good page turner.

I'm interested in reading some classic American literature if anyone would recommend some for a guy who has never really read any of the classics (like Mark Twain, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald).

I'm green.

Would this be a case of Poe's law?

There is a law for that. @dag knows what it is called.... Poe's Law? Is that it?

Thanks for the promote. You have SUCH good taste -- on bad taste.

In reply to this comment by hpqp:
Top YT comment: Y U NO PARODY?

Sometimes *religion and its wacky ideas are so bad parody becomes redundant.

*promote

The mud wrestling gives it away. Parody, Poe, gotta be.

OnKneesforJesus is an awesome Poe.

I don't think it is funny, sarcasm box or not.

As someone who avoided being involved with the Sift for YEARS because of "jokes" like this, now that I am involved, I speak up.

Bone thought you were funny. I did not. Not for me to censor.

But I don't censor myself either -- I speak up when I think something stinks. You don't have to agree with me. But I have the right to say it.

In reply to this comment by westy:
>> ^bareboards2:

To new or casual visitors to the Sift --
This is not typical of the Sift. I don't know if this comment was meant to be a "joke" or not. There is a mechanism for marking a comment as "sarcasm" -- it wasn't utilized for this comment. So I don't know if this sifter Westy is "joking" or not.
The Sift has guidelines against egregiously offensive speech; it can lead to being banned from the site.
The Sift also is fiercely proud of Americans' everyone's right to free speech. (Thanks, Boise-lib)
It puts folks like me in a quandary. I hate this comment, whether it is a "joke" or not. I believe in free speech.
I am posting my comment so that if you are new or a casual visitor, you will know that at least one person on the sift is appalled by this comment and doesn't know what to do. @<a rel="nofollow" href="http://dag.videosift.com" title="member since February 16th, 2006" class="profilelink"><strong style="color:#008800">dag.
What is weird is that this seems out of character for Westy. He's crusty and opinionated, not foul mouthed and ugly. It's almost as if someone has hacked into his account.

>> ^westy:
TYPICAL THING FOR A FAGGOT TO DO BRAIN WASH THERE CHILDREN WITH THE FAGOT AGENDA IF THEY LET JUSES INTO THERE HARTS THEY WOULD BE FREE OF THE EVIL GAY SPIRIT THAT POSSESS THEM.
PS..THE EARTH IS 6000 YEARS OLD



>> ^dag:

From years of interacting with Westy - I can tell you that this is definitely sarcastic parody - though he does live at the fringe of Poe's Law and without using the sarcasm box - it's hard to tell. It's also a troll. Sigh.>> ^bareboards2:
To new or casual visitors to the Sift --
This is not typical of the Sift. I don't know if this comment was meant to be a "joke" or not. There is a mechanism for marking a comment as "sarcasm" -- it wasn't utilized for this comment. So I don't know if this sifter Westy is "joking" or not.
The Sift has guidelines against egregiously offensive speech; it can lead to being banned from the site.
The Sift also is fiercely proud of Americans' right to free speech.
It puts folks like me in a quandary. I hate this comment, whether it is a "joke" or not. I believe in free speech.
I am posting my comment so that if you are new or a casual visitor, you will know that at least one person on the sift is appalled by this comment and doesn't know what to do. @<a rel="nofollow" href="http://dag.videosift.com" title="member since February 16th, 2006" class="profilelink"><strong style="color:#008800">dag.
What is weird is that this seems out of character for Westy. He's crusty and opinionated, not foul mouthed and ugly. It's almost as if someone has hacked into his account.

>> ^westy:
TYPICAL THING FOR A FAGGOT TO DO BRAIN WASH THERE CHILDREN WITH THE FAGOT AGENDA IF THEY LET JUSES INTO THERE HARTS THEY WOULD BE FREE OF THE EVIL GAY SPIRIT THAT POSSESS THEM.
PS..THE EARTH IS 6000 YEARS OLD




Not a troll , just think how bland the world would be if every comment or remark has a disclaimer and full exsplination next to it.

If sum one claims the world is 6k years old then they are ether being sarcastic or past the point of reasonable communication.

From RationalWiki

Poe's Law states:
“ Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing. ”

Poe's Law is an axiom suggesting that it's difficult to distinguish between parodies of religious fundamentalism and its genuine proponents, since they both seem equally insane. For example, some conservatives consider noted homophobe Fred Phelps to be so over-the-top that they argue he's a "deep cover liberal" trying to discredit more mainstream homophobes.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

From years of interacting with Westy - I can tell you that this is definitely sarcastic parody - though he does live at the fringe of Poe's Law and without using the sarcasm box - it's hard to tell. It's also a troll. Sigh.>> ^bareboards2:

To new or casual visitors to the Sift --
This is not typical of the Sift. I don't know if this comment was meant to be a "joke" or not. There is a mechanism for marking a comment as "sarcasm" -- it wasn't utilized for this comment. So I don't know if this sifter Westy is "joking" or not.
The Sift has guidelines against egregiously offensive speech; it can lead to being banned from the site.
The Sift also is fiercely proud of Americans' right to free speech.
It puts folks like me in a quandary. I hate this comment, whether it is a "joke" or not. I believe in free speech.
I am posting my comment so that if you are new or a casual visitor, you will know that at least one person on the sift is appalled by this comment and doesn't know what to do. @dag.
What is weird is that this seems out of character for Westy. He's crusty and opinionated, not foul mouthed and ugly. It's almost as if someone has hacked into his account.

>> ^westy:
TYPICAL THING FOR A FAGGOT TO DO BRAIN WASH THERE CHILDREN WITH THE FAGOT AGENDA IF THEY LET JUSES INTO THERE HARTS THEY WOULD BE FREE OF THE EVIL GAY SPIRIT THAT POSSESS THEM.
PS..THE EARTH IS 6000 YEARS OLD

Wow. Someone send his ass back to basic frosh science class. Damn near everything he touched on was explained to me by my 9th grade science teacher.

And yeah, his theology is lacking too, which doesn't surprise me.

It could be a Poe, which wouldn't surprise me. But I dunno.

For someone who claims to have been a man of science, you are so far off on your understanding of science and even your ability to do basic research that you're looking a lot more like a troll on the Poe scale.

1. You're still using your subjective experience to prove Premise Two.
2. In the other threads you quoted one Wikipedia page at me without even reading the other one (Check the second paragraph of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical to see the difference). You ignore the fact that empiricism as a philosophy is an unscientific world view on its face due to its unverifiable claims of where information can and cannot come from.
3. You quoted people who haven't even graduated university at me???
4. You equate spectators at a football game who are there to support their team with scientists collecting data (Scientists at that match would have been making a record of each foul), and on and on with analogies that all demonstrate a sad lack of understanding of how science works, or, in one case, modelling it somewhat accurately, but presenting it as if bias was something scientists didn't openly acknowledge, and didn't have processes to mitigate impact. If religion ever acknowledged its bias, it would cease to exist instantly, because its bias is the entire religion. At the very least, this makes science more mature and credible in the objective world.
5. You go on with your, "There is plenty of evidence which suggests that God created the universe" spiel which is always countered with "Religion just catalogues things we cannot explain nor ever prove and ascribe them to a deity, knowing (hoping, hoping, please!!!) it will never be possible to disprove them, and all the while ignoring former claims for God that have been shown not to be God, but a newly understood and measurable force.
6. You are still conflating your "God" (I'm going to start calling him "Yahweh" to prevent this in the future) with any old god. The Big Bang Theory, which you alternately endorse and claim is bunk, could point to a creator, but by no means a god with any of the properties of Yahweh, except the singular property of the ability to create the universe as we know it.
7. You quote scientists' opinions on religious issues like I think they're infallible prophets or something. Science doesn't work that way. Only religion does.
8. There's nothing we are "interpreting differently". You are interpreting everything as "Yahweh did it", and I'm not interpreting anything: There observably is CMBR, and it points to a Big Bang billions of years ago. That is all. You leap from this "suggestion" to "therefore it was Yahweh a few thousand years ago".
9. I would never scoff at infallibility in anything that can be tested. I scoff only at claims of infallibility where by definition there is no possibility of failure only because there lacks any measure of success, just like every piece of dogma in the Bible, except for the ones that have been proven false, like the shape of the Earth, the orbit of the planets, and so on. Every scientific hypothesis has a measure of success or failure, and when one is disproven, that hypothesis is discarded, except to keep a record of how it was proven false.
10. I like your story of the scientist who climbs to find a bunch of theologians who have been sitting on a mountain of ignorance for centuries. Apt image. And I don't get the intent anyway. It suggests both that science could one day arrive at total knowledge (doubtful), and that religion has ever produced a shred of useful knowledge (it hasn't).

In short, I'm through talking about anything logical with you, or attempting to prove anything. You really, really do not understand the essential (or useless) elements of a logical discussion of proof. If you knew them, I would enjoy this debate. If you acknowledged this weakness and were keen to learn them, I would enjoy showing you how they work -- you seem keen. But neither seems the case. [edit -- This may be due to the fact that you're connected to both the objective world and the God world, and you're having trouble only using input from the one stream and not the other, like using input you received from your right eye, but not your left, as our memories are not stored that way. Either way, it is a weakness.]

The third thread about our (mostly your) beliefs seems like it might still be fun, and I may get there, but these first two two comments of yours really took the wind out of my sails.

Poe suggests that this might be real, I'm too tickled by the possibility that this is all one crazy performance piece, to accept that.

I could be depressed by how lame this is, or I can be overjoyed by how hard she is pwning the fundies.

I fully acknowledge that I may very well be wrong, but since the truth, in this case is both un-verifiable, and completely irrelevant to anything else, I prefer to accept that this is all a brilliantly executed satire.

From now on, a political Poe will be known as a Cain.