How is this argument different from the following:

I take a shuffled deck of cards. I draw them one after another and place them face up. At the end I have arrived at a sequence that is incredibly unlikely.

Therefore, according to the logic in this video, we must have multiverses in which I deal billions of card combinations, or else there must be someone behind the scenes sorting the deck?

Extrapolating like this from a single data point (be it a card ordering, or a set of universal laws) is idiotic.

My problem with the cosmological argument is that it takes something we know nothing about, specifically how things may have worked before the universe came into exists, and massively leverages them. We know about as much about what happened before (if the concept of time or before could mean anything without space and mass) as we do about what happens after death.

Anyone making absolutely claims from such shaky ground should have their motivations analyzed, because it seems suspect to me.

He's got a year, almost, to figure out how to incorporate a garden hose into the costume, so he can deal with the little dirt bag next halloween.

@enoch

Cheers.

I think we agree completely with Sam Harris in that Islam is in desperate need of a reformation. I won't bring Reza Aslan into this as I haven't read him, and it seems to be tangential at best.

But, acknowledge what you just said when you said that Islam is in need of reformation. You are saying what Sam is saying: That Islam contains some horrible ideas, and people are acting on those ideas, and we need to find a way to marginalize those ideas within the canon of Islam.

We could end the disagreement right there, except for where we stand in history at this point. If Christianity had undergone its reformation in a post nuclear arsenals world, who knows where we would be. It is because of this that it behooves everyone to encourage this reformation of Islam, and potentially to limit their access to apocalyptic weaponry until such a reformation has taken place. That's a different discussion though.

I think Sam's position is that one of the potential motivations behind suicide bombing is martyrdom and jihad. Real belief in those particular dogma alone is sufficient to justify suicide attacks. There are definitely plenty of terrorist actions that take place for completely non-religious reasons, and I bet that the bulk of them combine the two. But that doesn't refute Sam's point.

As for your last bit about literal interpretations, I don't agree there either, at least not entirely. How could you possibly explain the inquisition without resorting to what one would now consider to be fundamentalist readings of the texts? The same fundamentals you're saying weren't in vogue until 100 years ago is the very propaganda used to recruit soldiers to the caliphate's armies centuries ago. In any case it seems unrelated to the discussion when scriptural literalism came about, the fact is that it exists, making it more important that some books contain really bad ideas.

""Since 2 of those 3 [religions] have already internally dealt with the most horrendous of their ideas"

Now that is fucking funny, and the crux of Sam Harris's ignorance"

To think that they haven't, it would seem to me, is to be either forgetful, or ignorant of their pasts and just how horribly they behaved.

To pretend that you've made a point by sneering dismissively is just juvenile. Explain your stance.

The wholesale, unabashed genocides in the old testament seem to me to be more horrible than anything that jews are doing, for religious reasons in the present day. And that is taking Israel into account.

The picketing of soldier's funerals seems altogether less bad than the spanish inquisition.

It's not to say that Judaism and Christianity don't still have some work to do. Of course they do. But they've already climbed quite a distance.

Sam makes a great point about the failure of journalism, and I love that he calls out Cenk on the issue at the start. Call it whining if you like, but he's so spot on with his criticism that it alone makes the viewing worthwhile in my opinion.

All Sam is really asking for (not the profiling part) is to acknowledge that it matters what people believe. I'm amazed that this is somehow hard for people to swallow. I think most people would agree with him, fundamentally on this point.

Having accepted the above point (that people are motivated, at least in part, by their beliefs), one of the next things to do is to identify some of humanity's worst ideas, and try to undermine them. It so happens that the horrible ideas Sam is tackling, in general, are in the holy books of the 3 big monotheisms. Since 2 of those 3 have already internally dealt with the most horrendous of their ideas, it leaves the latecomer, Islam, to fall under the microscope. It doesn't help that islam, at it's foundation, attempted to bake in a proof against future refinement and growth.

This seems almost as uncontroversial as a logical chain of thoughts could be, yet somehow people manage to misunderstand them.

Horrible analysis by Cenk.

Why doesn't it count when the US invades someone? Because we're talking about religious problems. I hate the US policy of invasion and nation building and whatnot. But that doesn't mean I think it's being done for religious reasons to conquer lands for christendom. Christianity gave up that mentality some centuries ago. If you want to denigrate American interventionism go at it, but don't pretend that it is anywhere near as religiously motivated.

The Islam is the motherlode of bad of ideas statement was clearly leading into an explanation that Harris was unable to provide because of interruptions. I expect he would have pointed out particularly odious articles of belief held to varying degrees across the muslim world as evidence to back up his claim. In any case it was obviously hyperbolic, and never meant to stand on it's own.

So much of Cenk's argument is straw man. Maher did not say that all 1.5B muslims believe the batshit extremist stuff. He refuted the claim that 1.0B (later upped to 1.5B) muslims want nothing to do with the more grotesque portions of Islamic beliefs. They then went on to mention the 20% number, which seems to directly refute Cenk's position without further conversation needed. But Cenk refuses to acknowledge the number, despite his own graph roughly supporting it.

Serious failing in objectivity and logic on the part of Cenk. A bit disappointing, really.

He's explained several times why he tends to focus on Muslim fundamentalist failings when arguing about good and bad with westerners. That's because if he were to bring up an example of a perhaps damaging dogma from Catholicism, there would be an argument if it were really bad, and that isn't the argument he wants to have. Instead, he talks about something absurd like the death penalty for apostasy, which we can usually accept as 'bad' and move on to the meat of his discussion.

If you consider him a racist, you're likely part of the left's overly active auto-immune disorder regarding racism, or you really haven't listened to or understood him. Criticising a world view is not exactly the same as racism. Especially if that world view is shared by several different races!

I feel like the problem isn't necessarily religion, but rather dogma. It just so happens that religion is full of dogma. The fact that Islam contains an attempt to immunize itself against reform serves to make it more dogmatic, as reformists can be shown, in black and white, to not be observing the religion as it was intended.

Dogma creates incredibly extreme behaviour. Once people believe they hold an absolute truth, almost anything becomes justifiable. It isn't limited to religion, as evidenced by the 20th century's forays into communism, but it is clearly present in religion, and particularly in Islam.

Comparing Canadian Muslims with Saudi Muslims is a false comparison, as I expect everyone can see. There really is a difference between living in a country as an extreme minority, versus living in a country as a member of the extreme majority. Nevermind living in a theocracy based on the religion. It's a completely different environment, and if people didn't behave differently, they wouldn't be tolerated very long.

Comparing by industry and level of education is not sufficient to really see what is going on, unfortunately. Two people could work in the same industry, in completely different jobs. Two people could have bachelor's degrees, in completely different fields. As it happens these are two of the major contributors to the gap. I've seen it both in my life, and in this study, from just a few years ago. It concludes that the gap is between 5 and 7% for equivalent employees. That means people with similar credentials performing similar jobs. Here is the study http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf

Here are the reasons for the discrepancies, as they see them, in no particular order:
- More men than women tend to get educations in fields that pay more (ie. engineering vs teaching).
- More women work at part time jobs, which tend to have lower wages.
- More women tend to take parental leave.
- Women tend to place more value in the non-monetary dimension of a job than men (benefits, location, etc).

Sure, people shouldn't be punished for their gender. On the surface everyone would obviously agree with that statement I believe. If you dig a bit deeper though it's not so clear. Imagine it from the side of the employer. You have two candidates for a job, one that is statistically more likely to leave work for one or more extended periods. Each time that happens, it will cost you X$ to fill the void left. Divide that cost over the average term of employment, and you have a pretty strong case for a wage gap. Now, imagine that the decision was made for the company to ignore this cost, and simply swallow it. Assuming that they don't just increase their payroll budget to float it, we'll see wages for other people, completely unrelated to the issue cut so as to make room for it. Is that injustice more to your taste? It's worth mentioning that it would provide a clear quantifiable justification for hiring men over women.

#1 - she shouldn't have to put up with it
#2 - something about your argument is itching my brain, and replying is the best way for me to explore it

I think there is a meaningful difference between her and the examples you expanded on. Some fella with low hanging pants isn't trying to look low class. Somebody with tats isn't trying to look like a future fashion victim. A girl that dresses up sexy is usually trying to look sexy. There are a few that pretty much can't help it.

Imagine someone with has a bunch of tats of a band that you like. You can approach him about that, directly, out of the blue, and probably not get a negative response. You could even just holler from across the road, and it's just dandy.

Something makes it unacceptable to acknowledge that the girl did a great job of looking sexy.

Been a while since I've studied this stuff, but the way I'd do it is as follows:

Chance for a flush (I'll shorten this to %Flush) is:

%FlushHeart + %FlushDiamond + %FlushSpade + %FlushClub

%FlushSuit = %Atleast4OfSuit

Here we are gonna calculate the odds of drawing 4 out of 4 cards of the correct suit, and simply ignore the 5th card. If that card is always of the same suit, awesome, if it isn't, well that doesn't matter anyways, since there is one of each suit already in play. Since there are 5 positions that the don't care card could be in, we have to multiply the result by 5.

%Atleast4OfSuit = 5 * (#OfSuitInDeck / #OfCardsInDeck)*(#OfSuitInDeck-1 / #OfCardsInDeck-1)*(#OfSuitInDeck-2 / #OfCardsInDeck-2)*(#OfSuitInDeck-3 / #OfCardsInDeck-3)

Run that for each of the four suits in the deck, add the results, and you should have your answer. The above can of course be written more concisely using other notations, but a lot of people aren't familiar with those.

If we ignored the other players to make the calculation more concise, we would have:
4 * 5 * 12/48 * 11/47 * 10/46 * 9/45 = 237600/4669920 = 5.09% chance
If you want the exact odds for this paticular hand, it should be easy to adjust to fit.

Obviously, they shift drastically at the flop and every card afterwards.

You make a point to be sure. And it is clearly being ignored. Regardless of how it came to the point, the USA for sure would go absolutely insane, and declare war on the attackers, as well as one or two of their so called friends.

We already saw this in 9/11. We saw a conflict that required far too long to come to an inconclusion. We also saw it used, politically, as motivation to launch an additional war against someone else. I might add, that I suspect many people would consider both efforts to have been unsuccessful.

The situation in Palestine seems far more similar to the situation with the Native Americans some time ago. Land theft and ethnic cleansing by virtue of superior technology and a racial superiority complex and an unwillingness on the natives' part to just roll over. I would have hoped that we had learned something since then.

I would

No, instead the perpetuate a state sponsored version of history that says the palestinians willingly left their homes when Israel was founded, ignoring the terror campaign instituted that made them want to leave their homes, ignoring the hundreds of thousands that were literally forced out at gun point. Instead they force their children to participate in a generations long campaign of ethnic cleansing. Instead they relocate their families to settlements, thereby implicating them in war crimes. No, they don't use suicide bombers, they just use bombers. That way they can go back over and over again.

I'm not saying the Palestinians make good neighbours. I am saying that Israel makes for a horrible neighbour.