Wuzzums

Now that you mentioned it, the tainted drink might also be alluding to the apple in the Garden of Eden making the black goo in turn an allegory to forbidden knowledge. The biologist and geologist also die after interacting, so to speak, with the black goo but in their case in the form of a snake-like creature.

The point is that it has no clear interpretation. For such a short story, barely a paragraph long, it's possible it holds everything you need to know or can know about human strife.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain_and_Abel#Genesis_narrative I'm looking into different translations and there's an interesting one in the orthodox christian religion where God implies Cain did something wrong with his sacrifice because Cain's face was fallen, implying in turn God did not actually know what Cain's sin was but he knew Cain sinned by the look of his face. Maybe it's about ego. Cain's sacrifice was of equal measure but God preferred Abel's.

I'm posting this because of how impressed I am with Rucka. The discussion starts off jokingly with Rucka claiming that he's ignorant on most things, basically just a pleb. Later on it becomes way too obvious that Sargon is out of his depth when it comes to philosophy compared to Rucka. Sargon tries to wiggle out by turning the conversation to generalities but Rucka brings it back to the personal each time. When Sargon makes a statement that is a clear counter argument Rucka demolishes it easily by making him define his terms and using his own definition against him. Rucka extracts first principles, makes the argument from ethics, even tricks Sargon into making self-defeating statements. It's great. It's unexpected. The podcast ends because Sargon is literally at a loss for words. Rucka also makes a very insightful statement I find. He comes out attacking all of these anti-SJW's saying they're no different that the SJW's. His reasoning is that before they attacked video games, these gamer-gaters (now anti-SJW's), they all were fans of The Young Turks, SJW converged gaming journalism sites, late night leftist political shows, and so on. This is I think a very important point. I afterwards recalled the conversation Sargon had with Crowder in which Sargon claimed TYT really went off the deep end but Crowder said they were always like they are now. That it's not TYT that has changed (and implicitly all other leftist outlets) but the viewer that has changed. If it is indeed the case that the viewer's values are the ones that change, because they went from left-leaning to now right-leaning we can safely imply that the pendulum will swing the other way, from right-leaning to left-leaning. And if that is the case then we are certainly not making any progress towards a more free society, we're just running in circles. If we are indeed running on a treadmill trying to get to Anarcho-Land the end effect is us just getting tired by standing in the same place. But if we aren't actually running on a treadmill how could we even tell the difference? Check out this video of Peter Thiel from 1996 whose rhetoric is indistinguishable from 2017 rhetoric. It's been more than two decades and we're still in the same situation. My question is basically, is this a feature of the matrix or is this a failure of society?

Nowhere in the story it is implied Cain's offering to be of a lower quality than Abel's. God even specifies this. This is what makes the story so deep. Cain's fortune was above Abel's, he was firstborn and therefore the land was his yet this did not matter to him. It's Cain who offers a sacrifice first which implies that regardless of his fortune in life what he sought most was God's love even though one can argue he already had it considering his lot in life. Abel's murder wasn't a result of envy, Cain did it to spite God. Ridley Scott is a Dune fan and his latest movies (Prometheus and Covenant) make a whole lot of sense if they're happening in the Dune universe. In the books there are several references to the Butlerian Jihad, a holy war between man (the slaves) and their rulers (the machines). Humans were triumphant and a core "truth" was derived: evil = machine think (AI). Creating, owning, or using intelligent devices was heresy of the highest order and the punishment was death. Humans colonized all galaxies meaning Earth was just one planet of 7 billion in a total human population that filled the entire universe. Just an insignificant amount in the grand scheme of things. And out of 7 billion not one was innocent of heresy (for having created, owned, and used thinking machines). This is why the Engineer in Prometheus attacks the crew only AFTER he learns David is a synthetic, a machine. Literally the devil in the Engineer's eyes. In the theatrical release it appears the Engineers attacks them straight after he wakes up, in the deleted scenes they actually have a very long amicable conversation which turns violent only when Weyland mentions David is artificial. In the scene we see a close-up of the Engineer's face which expresses a combination of shock and regret. This is why the Engineers wants to destroy Earth and this is why he was amazed by a movie projector on a wall. Engineers' technology was very primitive lest it would run out of control again and enslave humanity for another million years. This of course explains why the Engineer's homeworld was so primitive. Another hint at the Dune universe is the planet they land on. In the distance at some point we can see a massive mountain that's shaped like a huge fat man with a skull instead of a face. The design is based on H.R. Geiger's concept art for the Baron Harkonnen's castle. H.R. Geiger was recruited at the time to create the Harkonnen look on a Dune movie project that ultimately failed. Later on H.R. Geiger will go on to create the Alien designs. In Covenant David learns all of this and this is why he decides to wipe out the entire planet. If he didn't he would have been torn apart himself. It was a "me or them" type of scenario. In the sequel David flat out refers to himself as The Devil and takes this role very seriously, even referring to the colonists as "souls" rather than people. He, like the devil, corrupts life and creates flesh that kills other flesh. Practically speaking it was unambiguous in the movie that David could have taken out the whole crew by himself but this is not the way of the devil. Deceit, lies, and temptation are the tools of the trade, all of which are traits David clearly exhibits in Prometheus But to return to the Cain and Abel story. The best movie to showcase the myth is Amadeus. It is told from the "villain's" perspective, Salieri (Cain), which devotes his whole life to doing good and serving God hoping in return he would become a great and famous musician. He gets what he wants: fame, fortune and the respect of his peers. It turns into a revenge movie (against God) when he meets Mozart (Abel) which Salieri recognizes to be favored by God. Mozart had talent beyond anyone's comprehension except his which was a punishment too great to bare. I highly recommend the movie, it's one of my favorites.

I watched it. It's apparently one of the most successful horror movies of all time but not because of the movie. The marketing was a stroke of genius. They started promoting the movie ever since it went into production with easter eggs that only fans of the book would recognize which in turn started hyping the movie before the first trailer even came out. Plus it was released doing a period of box office dribble. I suspect a lot of people went to see it because they literally had nothing better to choose from such as myself. As for the movie: great production, good acting, doesn't seem to long. I wouldn't even classify it as a horror. It has a bunch of genuinely funny moments, as in looney toons funny. The audience laughed out loud way too often. It reaches an Evil Dead level of humor at times. Frankly all I can remember from it now are the funny moments, which were great. If you're an Evil Dead fan go watch it and picture the Stranger Things kid as tween Ash. You'll enjoy it.

I saw the redlettermedia review. Was there really an in depth description of an underage gangbang in the book?

https://www.glamour.com/story/hooking-up-with-trump-voters-essay Just wanted to share this article. No matter how hard they try, they still can't fight biology.

I come from a country where that sort of thing is just daily routine. It's true what they say about Eastern European and ex-Soviet countries, how people from those places are very prone to white collar types of crime. Because the former regime was so oppressive and inefficient and because you needed to spend weeks in bureaucratic hell to do anything "by the book" people learned how to hustle. The whole system works on hustling (more or less). Most people are state employees so there's no such concept of "getting paid for good service". The employees get paid the same whether they do a good job or no job at all. Therefore they expect a little "extra" as an incentive to do a good job. Now from a legal standpoint there are a ton of ways to circumnavigate the act of bribery per se: If they receive the bribe after the fact then it is not classified as a bribe. If they receive the bribe before and did not solicit it then it is not classified as a bribe. If one gives a bribe and the other takes the bribe both parties are guilty. If the giver of the bribe gets caught they can just play stupid and pretend they thought they had to pay after which they will get a receipt, bla, bla. Or he could just play the "I'm a foreigner and this is just common courtesy in my country lol" card. Nobody's gonna arrest anybody over 5$. This is the reason why the bribes are so small. If it were 500$ then a third party would gladly come into the mix maybe to even get his "cut" in order to turn a blind eye. A bribe soliciting something illegal is a serious crime and it's usually prosecuted. A bribe soliciting that the state official does his job is petty crime and the official is the guilty party. If the 5$ come in the form of a gift like a box of chocolates, alcohol or whatever then it is not considered a bribe. Also, standing in line with a large bouquet of flowers might signal to some willing to be bribed teller that you're willing to bribe them with said bouquet of flowers. In your friend's case, if he chooses to pay the bribe, why not instead of money just buy the officials involved actual coffee? Plus, receiving good service from a state-employee is an underhanded way of them telling you that they're expecting something in return. Kinda like a waiter at a restaurant.

I don't find Stephen King to be that much of a cerebral writer. He's a quantity over quality kinda guy and with the amount he's written it's almost inevitable to come upon a great number of gems. As far as I know he's the one that created the whole genre of "innocent childish thing is actually evil". It was literally a million dollar idea. Serial killers mumbling nursery rhymes, killer dolls, child ghosts, devil kids, haunted schools, cursed toys, masked Halloween killers, evil crazy parents, dream monsters, evil siblings, and so on are horror-movie themes that are being constantly recycled even now. A killer clown is just another subset of that same idea. The underlying message of "adult cover-up of child abuse" does seem to me to fit however take in account that the clown is actually not a clown, or a human, or a demon, but a giant spider. Why? Because some people have a phobia of spiders so wooooo, scaaaawry. A better movie that does have an underlying message is The Babadook. The movie takes on a whole new meaning (removing the supernatural element altogether) when you realize the first half is from the mother's perspective and the second half is from the child's perspective. That said I would love to hear more movie reviews from Stefan and Mike. The District 9 review was also fantastic.

You talk as if you never learned how to catch a ball in your life, or learned anything in your life: trial and error. A half moment of thought would have given you the answer which is why I'm 100% certain you're talking to yourself. I have proof: I repeatedly said this is not about neural networks or genetic algorithms (which are not contradictory to each other seeing how you CAN have BOTH like YOU pointed out, Einstein) yet you keep trying to prove to me I'm wrong on some point I've never made. Bye.

It makes no difference whatsoever in my arguments whether I would have said "neural networks" instead of "genetic algorithms". These two are not mutually exclusive or contradictory to each other. You asked for an example, I gave you an example then you started talking about how you didn't like the example not because it was wrong but because it wasn't the one you wanted. Are you talking about AI here or the brain? If it's the latter I addressed ALL THOSE POINTS. And what's the deal with this whole "the best one to do a particular thing" bs? Was I arguing how the brain figures out how to do something or was I arguing how the brain figures out how to do something THE BEST POSSIBLE WAY? I gotta say I'm pretty annoyed that I spent the time answering you and you retort back to me repeating MY EXACT POINTS but with different words as if you just added something to the conversation. I specifically said not to dwell too much on the 400 billion figure because I have doubts on its validity. I specifically said the analogy is very rough. Argue on the numbers all you want, the conclusion still remains the same. I NEVER said 1 neuron = 1 transistor. The WHOLE argument was about SPEED not how many transistors equate to how many neurons. Please show me my phrasing that led you to believe I've said such a thing. Prove to me you're not just having hallucinations on what I said. Prove to me you're not just talking to yourself at this point. BTW please don't answer anything. They were all rhetorical questions. I know you're not even attempting to understand what I've said because none for your points contradict a word I've said.

When you want to catch a ball the brain runs a subroutine. If the subroutine does not lead to the catching of the ball the brain will try another subroutine. This will be repeated until the ball is finally caught. This is identical to genetic-algorithms. The difference between a computer and the brain is, like I previously mentioned, speed. Each time a computer subroutine so to speak runs it runs at the exact same speed as any other subroutine. If a subroutine correctly gives out the intended goal in a machine the other "wrong" subroutine are scratched. In the brain there's no such thing as that. Each time you want to catch a ball ALL subroutines are played at once, all neurons depolarize at once that are related to the ball-catching subroutine. However only the subroutine that can actually catch the ball is played because it's faster than the other ones. The signal arrives to the motor centers FIRST activates it and depolarize the neurons leading to whatever motor actions are needed to catch the ball. A depolarized neuron is unresponsive to any other signal it might receive, it's kinda like a discharged battery. So when the other "wrong" subroutines arrive it's as if they get lost because the motor neuron still hasn't repolarized in order to be able to send any more signals forth. Why is there a speed difference? Myelinization. Myelin roughly speaking makes the neuron signal travel faster. What causes myelinization? Repeated depolarization. When we actively and consciously repeat an action long enough it's gonna become like a reflex because all the neurons coming from the brain leading to the muscles will be strongly myelinated thus faster. This is why the brain has 2 states: the conscious and subconscious. The subconscious is way, way faster because it's made up of all the fast (myelinated) neurons. The conscious is slow because it runs like a computer, because the connections are newly formed each subroutine runs as slow as any other subroutine we try out. It's like the difference between designing a car and building a car. Designing it can take months if not years and it's a trial an error type of process, building it takes weeks because it's a streamlined process. People with Alzheimer disease that have had a strong education and have had a constant intellectual life seem to have a milder form of the disease that those who didn't. The more you use the brain the more myelin it will accumulate, the more myelin it has the more it can afford to lose over time. In Alzheimer especially but in old age in general people have a difficult time of forming new memories or learning new things because the myelinization process isn't what it used to. The habits/memories of these people from long ago are still intact because those habits/memories were formed during a time when myelinization was normal. This is why I mentioned that speed is key. People who say AI will be able to process thousands if no millions of times faster than a human don't really know what they're talking about. I'm gonna equate some things here for simplicity's sake but keep in mind these are not perfect analogies. A transistor can switch at about 600 billion times per second. The subconscious runs at about a similar speed of 400 billion. (again, take this with a grain of salt because personally I think this number is way too high but there are some studies that suggest it might be correct) This means that at the current moment the state-of-the-art AI will be 50% faster than the average human. The speed of light is the upper limit of speed. The speed of light is 300 mil m/s. However this is not the upper limit of how fast something can be because once we approach the speed of light relativistic weird stuff start happening like time dilation. So in order to avoid relativistic effects the upper limit needs to be lowered. 1/10th of the speed of light is a very general rule o thumb, above this you get relativistic effects, bellow you don't (or don't get relativistic effects that matter). So the upper speed limit for ANYTHING would be 30 mil m/s. A transistor is 1/1mil-th of a meter meaning a transistor travels at a 600 000 m/s at which speed it's 50% smarter than a human. The upper limit is 30 mil m/s meaning that a transistor that can operate at 30 mil m/s is 50 times faster meaning it's 50 times faster than an AI that is 50% faster/smarter than the average human. All of this makes the upper limit of AI to be a maximum of 75x smarter/faster than an average human WITH THE CAVEATS that the 400 billion figure for the subconscious is correct AND that we want to avoid relativistic speeds. Another caveat would be that the 75x faster figure is for the AI's subconscious. Because I explained that speed is key in a brain, to create an AI implies creating a brain-like structure implying further the need of different processing speeds. Given this a computer will never, ever be able to process information consciously faster than a human's subconscious but a computer's subconscious can process information (or react to it, or whatever) 75x faster than an average human's subconscious. I get really angry when people like Sam Harris start spouting off gibberish like AI can process information MILLIONS of times faster than humans. It's plainly idiotic. 75 times faster means avoiding the relativistic cap. Take that off and you have a maximum processing speed of 750 times faster (if my previous reasoning was correct, of course). A millions times faster means exceeding the speed of light 2000 times over PLUS. I mean, just imagine the electricity bill for such a machine. What would it cost? Everything in the universe forever times 3?

This is the 3rd time you're doing it. You keep defining X as a goalstate AND subgoal state. Make up your mind. I never said you have to recreate 4 billion years of evolution though that would be a completely valid method of creating AI (and the storyline behind a great videogame called "The Talos Principle"). Reverse engineering is a completely valid method of creating AI, we having reverse engineered loads of biology already (like flight, medicine, eyeglasses, and so on). BTW, I don't know why you're bringing up DNA. I never said we need DNA to create AI, I'm 100% certain of this. If you thought my bringing up of genetic algorithms had anything to do with DNA then I wasn't clear enough. Genetic algorithms and how the brain works at a very base level are almost identical. I don't have any exact proof of this but these two ideas (of a genetic-algorithm and how the brain works) have been arrived at independently. I don't think that two theories from two different fields having such striking similarities is trivial. YES! That's exactly what I wanted to say. Once you attribute one human-esque characteristic to AI you can attribute with the same certainty ANY other human-esque characteristic to AI. If it thinks like a duck it thinks like a duck AND has other duck-like characteristics.

I used your definition of goal state. You said because X can be both a goal set and a sub-goal state then X can be contained within a goal state. This is tautologically wrong because BASIC MATH. X cannot be both X and X-1. Yes it is and yes we do. To even imply human intelligence is not biological and implicitly strongly tied to DNA and evolution is absurd. Name one creature on this planet that has a larger brain and more powerful cognitive capacities that it is ascribed in that species' DNA. Humans are apex predators. Bears compared to humans are innocuous. The very fact that you had to take away the traits that makes a human an apex predator should ring a bell in your head that your analogy doesn't hold water. You basically said "A rock is far more dangerous than a bullet because it's heavier", or "a car is deadlier than an H-bomb because a car has more mass" Yes it does. I'll put it into a syllogism to make it as clear as possible: Humans want to take over the world Humans have human intelligence AI wants to take over the world. Therefore it is implied AI has human intelligence. Human intelligence is strictly related to human biology. Human biology implies desires among other things. Therefore it is implied that an AI that wants to take over the world has human intelligence and desires. Think about this for at least one second: do you know of any desire in yourself or any action you partake in that doesn't have an evolutionary biological motive or foundation behind it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm#History Taking over the world is a goal state in of itself (your words) so it cannot NOT be a goal state by being part of a larger goal state. Again, I'll repeat myself. In order to get a computer to do something you can either (a) program it or (b) it will have a desire to do it. If you don't program it it won't happen. If it doesn't have a desire for it it won't happen. If it has a desire for it then the AI is tantamount to a human and lots of humans have a desire to rule the world but none manage it so it won't be able to take over the world. Furthermore lots of humans have a desire to stop those who seek to take over the world, so it's only logical to assume that a human level AI will eventually express the same desire.

This could be achievable of course but not in the near future. We still haven't figured out ho the brain works in order to simulate it. This is the whole plot of the Ghost in The Shell anime. If you take parts little by little from a human and replace them with artificial ones at some point you'll have a fully artificial conscious person, a machine with a soul. And if that's possible will the reverse also be possible, to create a machine that mimics humans little by little that will eventually develop a conscious? What do you mean by artificial life and artificial intelligence? We have had artificial intelligence for something verging on a century. Intelligence (defined as the ability to predict the future accurately) and consciousness don't go hand in hand. Life and consciousness don't go hand in hand either. There was a start-up of a non-invasive brain-wave scanner that you would place on your head (like headphones) and it would be able to read off brainwaves with a pretty good degree of accuracy. The idea of it was to be used as a computer peripheral, instead of using a keyboard shortcut you can map some macro or whatever to some specific brainwave and trigger the macro just by thinking about it. Here's the TED talk.

Feedback loops; in pseudocode: IF (X) THEN (X+1); in biology: hormone system. You can basically reduce all programs to some if/then. If malware detected then quarantine and delete. If foreign organism detected then quarantine and kill. Or at the very core of computers, the transistors. They can be either on or off. Nerve cells or muscle cells are the same, they can either be off or on. Whatever we think we might have figured out through our human ingenuity biology has figured it out first. Like quantum theory: https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/12/more-evidence-found-for-quantum-physics-in-photosynthesis/

We don't even know why animals sleep in the first place. We can't remove something we have no idea how to build in the first place This is what I don't get. If it's 100% human, albeit artificial, how can it exceed human intelligence? If you say it's gonna process information faster you would be wrong. It won't. You can't build an artificial human brain that can process faster information than the fastest human. The brain itself is structured on having different processing speeds, some parts of it being slow are a feature not a setback. What if your brain was 2x faster? You think you would be able to move? The second impulse will arrive at your muscles way before your muscles had a chance to react to the first. How will your eyes work or detect motion in the first place? You would see the world as a series of slideshows. Same thing with speaking. Read "Thinking Fast and Slow" for more. I have heard Sam Harris make the argument that an AI can live in 1 human second something like 80 years. No... NO... this is antiscienfitic. There are limits to reality colloquially called LAWS OF PHYSICS. There's an upper limit to how fast things can be called the speed of light. We can never, ever, ever surpass it. And even if we get computers to just come close to it then we're entering the realm of relativity which in reality translates to the faster you go the faster time around you will move. Meaning 1 computer second will equal 80 human years (rough generalizations but I hope you get the point). Computers haven't gotten faster for decades because transistors have already been perfected. Our PC's run faster because of (a) parallel processing and (b) more resilient materials that can run at full speed without burning up. So returning to your point, if you want to have faster AI you can either have more AI in different bodies making AI no more faster than human society, or more AI's in the same body essentially giving the AI a mental illness. Again, this stuff has been figured out for literally decades. Feynman after he retired he used to hold lectures on this very topic, the limits of processing power and how we can find tricks to overcome them. He was one of the first to suggest a parallel processing mechanism or starting changing our whole infrastructure to accommodate a ternary system so as to find a use for quantum computers.

It can't. In order to have human level AI you would need to build a humanoid robot, give it a sex, a desire for reproduction, digestive system, all of a human's senses, desires, etc. Basically you would need to build an artificial human that practically speaking will be indistinguishable from a normal human. The AI issue has been figured out in the 70s. The pundits who keep talking about AI never really did a cursory analysis on the subject. Elon Musk worries that AI will try to take over the world however this is scientifically inaccurate because we know from science (neurology) that a person that has suffered brain injury that affected their reward system (i.e. they're unable to have desires) is tantamount to a vegetable. If we don't program a need to take over the world it won't have the desire to take over the world, and if you say that it will develop a need to take over the world it's like saying a clock can spontaneously create itself from a junkyard. Conquering things is a human trait. Computer science is not separate from biology. Computer science (transistors, networks, programs, algorithms, etc) are an artificial imitation of biology. Computer science has had 60+ years to develop, biology has had 4 billion years. At the very best computer science can be on par with biology. We can never exceed it because we humans are the ones creating machines and humans are biological. Saying a human can break free of the bonds of biology is like saying a rock can break free of the law of gravity. A few movies I can think of that have gotten AI correctly are: Ex-Machina, Prometheus, and the original Ghost in The Shell. The GiTS example is interesting because in the movie the AI spontaneously manifested itself and the first thing it did in order to remain sentient was to put limits on itself (like no replicating copying itself) and it searched for a human-like body in order to fully become an autonomous entity.

Some people are more equal than others and it's not us.

In Romania after communism the religious aspect swung back towards christianity. Much like you see in Russia with Putin we see a strong embrace of religion and great resistance against anything that might undermine it. This is something more cultural rather than state-imposed. Romania is a truly secular country, the state does not recognize the church's authority and vice versa. For instance the marriage ceremony has 2 aspects independent of each other. The civic/civil ceremony where the union is officiated by a state official, and a religious ceremony where the union is officiated by a priest. Unlike in the US if you just get married in a church you're not married in the eyes of the law. However because religion holds such a strong cultural bond with the people, you're not seen as married in the eyes of the community if you're not married in a church. Religion has no say in state. Religion might have no say in the eyes of the law but the people recognize its authority therefore in practice it holds a lot of say. Another example I can give of this theory-practice dichotomy is of policemen not wanting to arrest gypsy witches for fear of curses, true story. I looked up statistics in the past and the crime rate is half of that of the US. The bulk of the violent crimes (murder/rape/theft) come from the gypsy communities (though to be fair it's mostly theft, for them it's literally a cultural thing to steal, not joking). The corruption is ultra-high here, though. You might have heard the communist work ethic mantra "they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work". This is the attitude most people have towards authority including those in authority. It's game theory, if I know everyone cheats how could I possibly play the game if I also don't cheat. For instance Turkey wanted to fund the building of a Mega-Mosque, the largest in the EU, to be built in our capital. Of course nobody wanted it built including the state officials but they agreed. They took the money, started the construction, at which point "someone" desecrated the land by throwing pigs' carcasses from a helicopter. Ooops, it appears we can't build the mosque there anymore. Sorry, no refunds. This might be a funny story but it applies to most of everything, from hospital funding to road construction. Nothing ever gets done here and if you want to do something you have to learn how to hustle. This is a remnant of the communist era. Because the state was so inefficient in order to survive people had to learn ways to go around it. Oh, and politics make absolute zero sense here. I'm fascinated by countries like the US where people actually hold principles. Here the liberal party (the equivalent of he US Republican Party) wants to raise taxes and the socialist party wants to lower them. It's as if they have no idea what their party stands for, the only thing that matters is whether or not they're in power and they're gonna promise anything in order to get the votes. I have read their manifestos during campaign elections, if you switch them up at random you won't be able to tell the difference. Everyone's mind was blown here when Donald Trump started doing what he promised he was gonna do. People can't literally process it. Here it's not the low-IQ receivers and high-IQ givers type of dichotomy. It's the pensioners who have nothing better to do than to vote for people who promise to raise their pensions and the working people who are too busy trying to make a life for themselves.

There are parts of christianity which take the Bible as fact and in those cases the atheist arguments against the book still hold true. However I have never considered the Bible stories as fact, my state mandated religious indoctrination made me look at them as a metaphor rather than a historical metaphor. I remember the priest that taught religion class how he explained to us that in Genesis one day did not mean 24 hours, one day for God could mean 1 billion years, or 1 minute, so we mustn't look at the literary meaning but at the symbolic meaning. Looking back at all of it know I know recognize some aspects of my orthodox upbringing that I took for granted. Jordan Peterson is a prime example of an orthodox christian, even though he may not know it. In orthodox christianity there is a clear separation between religion and everything else. It's like masturbation, it's faux pas to talk about it and flaunt it, to be state-mandated, to make your children do it, etc. However we all assume everyone else is doing it, and when someone's not doing it they're just considered either (a) lying or (b) weird. I'm wondering now where the whole christian-bashing phenomenon came from. Like they way you had to prove yourself of being an atheist was by attacking christians, and no other religion. Like for instance, Dawkins is a cultural christian, he goes to church and celebrates Christmas and most of his "atheist books" are a response to creationism not christianity, him being a professor and all. Hitchens and Ayaan Hirsi Ali both attacked islam, christianity being caught in the crossfire. Dennet had a beard. Sam Harris is the only figure of that time that attacked christianity specifically. So how did we end up in a world that vilifies christians and worships muslims? But anyways... The Bible stories are by no means unique. The stories are ancient and have survived for so long specifically because they have something valuable to teach. Fairy tales are the same. They may have been watered down for kids by Disney but in their original forms they're gruesome cautionary tales. My favorite thing Peterson said was that people laugh these stories off as nonsense yet they pay billion of dollars to see a modernized version of them on a movie screen.

I wanted to share this clip of Adam Carolla arguing for the integrity of the family unit in front of congress:

Quantum theory explains nothing in the world we inhabit. Quantum theory explains a whole lot at the quantum level but nothing at the biological level. The larger the object the less the quantum world has an effect on it. Imagine "quantum theory" as a huge black blanket. You put this blanket over 1 particle and you can be very certain that there might or might not be a particle underneath because a particle is too small to modify the blanket's shape. Add a bunch of particles and you'll be less certain than before but still certain there might or might not be a bunch of particles underneath. In the case of the blanket forming the shape of a couch you'll know for certain that the couch is in a quantum superposition of it being a couch or it being two chairs apart from each other to form the shape of a couch. You'll also be certain it's not a cat, or a car, or a building, and so on. The larger the object you need to drape a quantum blanket over the easier it is to "guess" the object by the shape of the blanket. If you put a cat inside a box with a poison vial that can be opened by a particle in some quantum state then the cat IS NOT in a quantum state of it being alive and dead at the same time. Schrodinger's cat is not an analogy to demonstrate the meaning of quantum theory, it's an analogy to demonstrate the absurdity of quantum theory because Schrodinger really, really hated quantum theory. So did Einstein. Both these people dismissed quantum theory on the basis of it being too stupid. Einstein's famous quotes of "God does not play dice" and "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough" for instance are critiques of quantum theory. As a personal rule of mine, each time a person mentions "quantum theory" as one of their premises I immediately assume their conclusion is 100% BS. You can test this. Read up on the double slit experiment, as in the actual experiment, not someone's interpretation of what someone else said. Then ask them to explain what the experiment means. If they say that light behaves both like a wave and particle depending on who's looking they have no idea what they're talking about.