>> ^shinyblurry:

That would be a Satanist
>> ^dag:
What would you call someone who believes in God, but hates her? Would they be an antitheist?



Deiphobe is more accurate, though if you are a yahwehphobe you may choose to ally yourself with his nemesis by worshiping him, it is entirely conceivable to be opposed to them both.

[EDIT] Downvote for trolling title [/EDIT]

>> ^BansheeX:

I see little difference between this and dollars. Who is behind its issuance? Who will be behind it 100 years from now? What ensures that a company or a government doesn't take it over and issue bitcoins for themselves without labor while everyone else has to labor?<


The system actually does not allow this. The "mint" as well as the "bank" are a massively peer to peer system. The coins are scarce, because the system only generates coins at a fixed rate. Because the system auto adjusts, each coin is cryptographically more difficult to generate then the one before. these coins are awarded to miners based on real cryptographic, unfakable, work that they do to generate the coins. The history of each coin is tracked collectively by the p2p system, and any coin that has broken its rules is considered invalid.

The only significant hacks on the system require having more processing power than the entire existing BitCoin network, and only allows you to either:

1) reverse your own transactions, thereby double spending, and committing easily traceable fraud.
2) deviate from the systems rules, making all your coins invalid, getting barred from interacting with peers using the official client, and end up with a fork of the network, which generates and processes coins that nobody on the official network will accept. (Note: official in this context refers to adhering to the standard, not the approval of any central body)

>> ^shinyblurry:

Satan has definitely had his hand in the affairs of the church.
The only reason we know about Satan is because of the bible. If he did author the bible then he is an idiot because even I would know to not mention myself.


And on what basis do you assume that since Satan wrote the bible he didn't call himself God?

>> ^shinyblurry:

I would ask by what standard are you judging God? By the standards of your personal morality? Well, I hate to tell you this but our righteousness is like filthy rags compared to the righteousness of God.


And you, of course, have this on authority from God himself, unless Satan wrote the bible, in which case you have been taken in by the deceiver, a possibility which you have no way to refute, except by your own prideful claims of revelation.

>> ^shinyblurry:


You might realize that God is an idea deserving of serious philisophical consideration, a subject debated by some of the greatest minds this world has ever known. Is it the question in those circles. It would be laughable if you were to come to a real debate and say "well you don't have any evidence". And you do? Let's get real here..


Okay lets start this Poe/Turing test:

To give God serious philosophical consideration, the word itself must have meaning, so please, while not tipping your hand, explain how we could identify this thing if we were to come upon it. If you want to claim that we can't come upon it, then please explain your definition of the term exists in such a way that you can make the claim "God does exist".

>> ^shinyblurry:
I really don't know what you're complaining about..sorry that you were forced to watch my video and read all the comments. You do know you don't have to do that, right?


I'm complaining about you being an ass, I already said that a couple of times.

I'm not complaining about you posting a video, and I clearly have not argued that you are "forcing" me or anybody else to have a discussion about it. The point I am making, and that you keep providing more evidence for, is that in comments on and the discussion around this video, you have managed to consistently be a condescending ass.

Your redundant "you don't have to watch it" false apology is a prime example, I have not said you should not have posted it, I have only said that it is nonsense. That I should save myself the displeasure of your video is not what you really mean, you mean that you don't want to hear it. Since you have been lurking here for years you probably picked up on the fact that quality control involves critique, it's just that you are so used to special treatment for your theological views that you didn't consider what you were getting into.

If you want to have a theological discussion, bring it, but do your homework, don't bother with the old tropes like "atheism takes faith" or "only anti-theists are atheists", and certainly don't lead with nonsense that even you must know will be disregarded as the propaganda it is by anybody who does not already agree with you.

>> ^shinyblurry:

@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/dgandhi" title="member since March 22nd, 2007" class="profilelink">dgandhi
Sorry to intrude on your house..but I thought this is a community.


Yes a community which you seem to want to capitalize on to gain piety point, a community which you condescend to by saying things like "endless void of unbelief that is currently blanketing the community" as if we can just import nonsense into our world view to solve this supposed lack. You are of course welcome here, IF you learn to stop being an ass to those of us who are already here, something which should be easy if you can manage to see us as more than souls to be harvested.

>> ^shinyblurry:

You can call my beliefs nonsense all day long, but that isn't exactly compelling.


We don't have to "compel" ourselves to not believe that for which there is no evidence. If you have no interest in considering your claimed beliefs well enough to defend them, that's really not my problem, but it is similarly not compelling.

>> ^shinyblurry:

And sorry that it's pompous to submit videos, which is the whole point of this site.....yet most of the comments here are just attacking comments I made rather than anything insightful about the video itself.


Okay, how about leaving the cross at home, and deal with the fact that you are not being martyred, you are being criticized. Since the video does not actually contain anything insightful you really should not be surprised that people are talking about the comments, especially the ones where you implicitly ask us all to pretend that we don't disagree with you, and to ignore your condescending posturing so that you can continue to be a jerk with impunity.

>> ^shinyblurry:


I have better things to do than waste my time arguing on the internet for fun, and it's not fun to argue. I would rather we could find something to agree on. The only reason I am here on the sift is to provide an alternate viewpoint to the vast and endless void of unbelief that is currently blanketing the community here. Yes, there are people who don't agree with your views out there. Amazing isn't it?


Are you actually so deluded as to believe that we don't all deal with "people of faith" on a daily basis? The sort of nonsense that is this video, and the forced obliviousness that causes otherwise intelligent people to label it evidence, is the norm in the US, common in the civilized world, and often legally mandated in the rest of the world.

How about realizing that people choose, with full awareness of your "arguments" to consider your position either naive or stupid, and that we have a point.

You are the one who walked into our house, so don't get all butt hurt that your pompous rudeness is met with a resounding fuck off.

>> ^SDGundamX:


Thanks for posting that link. It was an interesting read. Unfortunately, it didn't really persuade me that much. I'm not sure if you clicked the links I supplied or not, but the sources I cited didn't just do a simple survey--they did a full-on academic year-long research projects that followed up with in-depth interviews of the participants and structured data analysis.


I find that counterargument interesting. The only thing the study I linked shows is that self reporting for religiosity in the united states is extremely unreliable, and specifically very biased towards religion. Your response is to say that you want to only use studies that use larger datasets of self reported(bad) data, I really don't see how that makes you feel better about the reliability of the results.

>> ^SDGundamX:


EDIT: I'm really most interested in any evidence that 10% is a conservative number for the number of atheists in the U.S., because it seems from the studies I find that at this point 7% is probably about right and maybe even a little bit of an overestimate. Just to be clear, these studies are talking about people who are full-on self-described atheists, not people who are kind of on the fence. It doesn't make sense to try to count the people who are on the fence because it gets too confusing... do you include as an atheist a guy who goes to church every week but doesn't follow any of his religion's tenets? Do you include people who think "something" is out there but are turned off by the idea of--and don't participate in--organized religion?


This is a goal post move, atheist ≠ anti-theist, and religious ≠ non-anti-theist. To be religious requires a positive belief in the existence, and goodness of a deity. You can't "kind of" believe something, belief is binary, and largely unaffected by desire. The fact that Americans seem to want to be religious, or church goers, or whatever, has no bearing on their actual beliefs, or apparently on their actions, except that it seems to drive them to lie. And when we measure behaviors that we can measure against self-reporting, we find that self reporting is HUGELY biased in the favor of religion.

Now nobody can KNOW if you believe in something, and so I am left to conclude that your claims about what you believe are probably as accurate as your claims about where you were on Sunday. If even a conservative 1/4 of the claimed "believer" population does not actually believe, then the real number of non-theists is somewhere around 25%. I'm not claiming that it is that high, but I would not be unreasonable if I were to make that extrapolation from the data we have, I would be happy to consider any data (not self reported) that you might have that suggests that that extrapolation is untenable.

Now I just need to plant the cylon virus and....

From the images she interspersed with the video, I'm inclined to think that her answer is "Yes, the Israeli military is currently destroying property and killing people with the material and political support of the US government", but she does not want that in her FBI file, and she does not want to commit the crime of lying to federal agents either. >> ^Sagemind:
If the police showed up at my door asking if I knew of anyone planning to destroy property or hurt people - I'd say, "no". There is no reason to say anything else.

http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/csrpl/RIN%20Vol.1No.1/RIN%20Vol.1No.2/Church_lies_polling.htm

>> ^SDGundamX:
Show me some evidence of that and I'll believe you. Otherwise, I'll stick to the numbers that actually exist.

>> ^SDGundamX:

Just because a scientist on a survey says they don't know for sure if a god really exists doesn't mean said scientist doesn't practice a religion

And just because somebody on a survey says that they identify with a religion does not mean that they practice or believe it. This video is mostly fluff, because the evidence for causation is much better for affluence -> atheism than the other way around, but the 10% number is conservative based on what we know about how much people over report religiosity.

For a lot of commodity stuff, finding the answer to "what's in the damned box" can be neigh impossible, I use unboxing vids to find out when the manufacturer and amazon have not bothered to provide a good list. Not exciting, but sometimes useful. >> ^deathcow:

I think it's cool for crazy expensive stuff, or really difficult stuff (some 2000 pound CNC lathe for example.. how th' hell to do it) but for commodity crap, yawn

Poe's law for woo.