The horror of war, brought to you by Mountain Dew.

*promote a better use for mountain dew than hydration!

this song is the era of commodore 64 and mountain dew, well, when i heard it

fucking disgusting, in every sense of the word!

Also, I'm assuming that's Mountain Dew?!?!

Well, let's talk about rationality for a minute, since you seem to be a logical person. I just don't think there is any basis in a secular worldview for rationality. For instance, if you believe in evolution then you believe that life came from non-life, which means that your rationality came from irrational forces. How can you trust it? If you have inherited your reasoning capability from rocks and primates, how is it trustworthy?

Another question is, how do you have any free will in a secular worldview? If the way things are at this moment is due to the arrangement of atoms at the beginning of the Universe, then there is no such thing as free will. Those atoms have you locked in from birth to death and no one has any meaningful awareness. There is no way to get outside this box that materialism puts you in. How do you respond to this quote:

If there is no God, then all that exists is time and chance acting on matter. If this is true then the difference between your thoughts and mine correspond to the difference between shaking up a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bottle of Dr. Pepper. You simply fizz atheistically and I fizz theistically. This means that you do not hold to atheism because it is true , but rather because of a series of chemical reactions… … Morality, tragedy, and sorrow are equally evanescent. They are all empty sensations created by the chemical reactions of the brain, in turn created by too much pizza the night before. If there is no God, then all abstractions are chemical epiphenomena, like swamp gas over fetid water. This means that we have no reason for assigning truth and falsity to the chemical fizz we call reasoning or right and wrong to the irrational reaction we call morality. If no God, mankind is a set of bi-pedal carbon units of mostly water. And nothing else.

Douglas Wilson

Since you mentioned that you work with math, where do you find the laws of logic in nature? How do you presuppose something which is unchanging and immaterial in a Universe which is material and always changing? I can account for these things in a theistic worldview, so how do you account for them?

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
>> ^shinyblurry:
I can relate to tyson, as I felt the same feelings when i was a kid..started reading cosmos at age 4, went to planetariums, got a telescope, devoured any and all information i could get my hands on about astronomy. I can relate to his sheer sense of wonderment about it. What I find interesting though is how he talks about having a personal relationship with the Universe, that it talks to him, that it was "calling" him, and how the Universe (as starstuff) is within him. That is unmistakably worship.

Indeed, this video talks much about the irrational kinds of religious orders secular people still hold to, like love or living forever. People, even those who claim to be rational, still deal with our monkey nature more oft then they would like to admit to themselves <IMG class=smiley src="http://cdn.videosift.com/cdm/emoticon/teeth.gif">

That's what happens when I drink Mountain Dew now.. Ralph

>> ^Ajkiwi:

Quite good website takes you through a tour of the machine: http://www.skatepinball.co.nz/#/ExploreTheMachine


http://videosift.com/video/Introducing-Mountain-Dew-Skate-Pinball-Park for construction of it.

>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

"I don't like Pepsi.. but Coke is even worse. Sooo, I'll just let Pepsi rot out all my teeth until I find a different sugary soda drink, Mountain Dew perhaps. "
(It's at this point, I would walk up and point out the jug of water sitting on the counter.)
'You know, this is free. You can get it yourself, and it doesn't rot your teeth.'
i.e. something like voluntaryism.

So what are you suggesting I do exactly? Stop paying attention to politics? Stop voting? Vote for some other candidate? Declare myself a sovereign citizen and refuse to pay taxes or obey laws, and pretend like that's going to change anything?

Also keep in mind, I'm not at all interested in trying to implement some radical right-wing philosophy no matter which label you put on it.

"I don't like Pepsi.. but Coke is even worse. Sooo, I'll just let Pepsi rot out all my teeth until I find a different sugary soda drink, Mountain Dew perhaps. "

(It's at this point, I would walk up and point out the jug of water sitting on the counter.)

'You know, this is free. You can get it yourself, and it doesn't rot your teeth.'

i.e. something like voluntaryism.

>> ^NetRunner:
but that doesn't translate into me deciding that the world would be better with a Republican in the White House.

Gotta have my mountain dew... haha!

Yeah but $23.69 Canadian for a case of Mountain Dew is only like $3.15 in US dollars right. Oh, wait that was before Bush.

pretty cool, but it sounds like his nervousness is going to explode in a glorious oral outpouring of cheetos and mountain dew.

I WAS KIDDING! Did you not read the next line? However, I think being specialtive of data that comes from the distant past is prudent. If one did not question the geocentric model like Copernicus and Galileo, but rather agreed with the Aristotelian consensus would we be better off? Most of the tools we have for looking at the distant past are murky at best, so while useful always have to be taken in stride, which is what I have been saying all along.

Radio age dating, and stellar cartagrophy have all shown themselves to be off by large margins at times. For instance, the believed age of the universe has increased 5 billion years in my life time...a very large number when trying to make other measurements like cosmic inflation and other dependent things. Small and large variances would undo very fundamental understood physical properties of the universe. If the age of the universe changes by any amount, any new theory trying to explain cosmological inflation has to be reworked from scratch...or at the very least re-propagated.

I never said throw it out, I said approach it with cautious skepticism, the same would go for radio carbon dating. It is good for estimations and approximations, but the fact is the data sets could be wildly inerrant. For general things like tectonic tenancies and the slow moment of things overtime, this isn't as big of a deal. But for making very detailed climatic predictions about the overall direction and the results of said direction of the weather is putting to much credence in the information at hand.

If the science is bogus, it doesn't necessarily have to be disproven in a timely manor either. It was nearly two thousands years from Aristotle to Galileo, and that was with something that could bee seen, this can never been seen. Your mistaken my faith in God for my ability to use reason as well. I started an atheist and have a firm back round in science and scientific thinking. The modern movement of science by consolidation more resembles church that true empirical thought. I find that true science is dead, and what is alive now is conjecture by consensus. The empirical model is dead. Science now has more faith than most would care to comment on. Belief in aliens because of the large amount of space and large amount of planets is evidence of faith before empiricism. If you want faith, church is ok, but science is chop full of non-agnostic positions.

My desire is to not be ignorant. I find the current fear mongering as a play on ignorance. I find people defending the radical data as definitive as naive. But I also see pollution as a problem that should be corrected if not just for the sake of doing it or the planet; but for breath of fresh air in the morning, a commodity that is hard to price.

Try not to be jaded by people you assume I am like and look at my argument more fully next time. I don't think you read exactly what I said but you read more what you wanted to read from someone named like I am named. I also was very crass and kinda rude to start off my comments in that thread, so maybe I had it coming

Anyway, it is a problem that is bigger than any one of us, so us calling each other names or mocking each others believe systems is not going to get us anywhere. I will endeavor to not get sarcastic when on a mountain dew high if you will read my objections for what they really are, based in rational skepticism. When confronted with skepticism, my position is to remain as agnostic about projections about what I am skeptical about until that thing is resolved; it is the only logical position.

In reply to this comment by asynchronice:
"O shit, they had climatologists in the 300,000BC"

LOL...you've got to be fucking kidding me. Let's throw out carbon dating too. It's unverifiable! You weren't there ! And how do they know what stars are made of ? They can't verify it !

I don't get the defensiveness here. No debate corporations will use this data for profit. They will use ANYTHING for profit. And governments will always want to tax more of their citizenry. It has no import/relevance on the scientific facts being given. And if the science is bogus, then it will be disproven. PERIOD. That's just how it works. Just because you're spoiled and think the scientific community has to give you a day, a time, and detailed description of what will happen, isn't a reason to dismiss it. If you want that, go back to church.

It weirds me out that people go to great lengths to show how it is all a conspiracy to instill fear and get money; just look at the facts, and make up your own goddamn mind. And if you choose to be willfully ignorant, then do people a favor and stay out of the debate. Some of us actually want to understand what's going on.

>> ^Lolthien:
FYI, neither of those girls have ever, ever in real life, ever bought mountain dew 'gamer fuel' or played world of warcraft for more than the three minutes it took to log in and realize what kind of game it was.
As you were.


Wow MaN, You realy know how to steriotype! Based on that commercial, you have no idea what they do in their spare time - Holly Crap!

I played D&D with a 50/50 Male/Female group and those girls were hot! Just cause you don't know girls that are both Hot and Cool... sheesh!