May 21 2011

[Van T]

Well I was gonna say it wasn't worth it to even acknowledge mans0n but that was entertaining enough to justify it

Also yeah pretty dumb to spend your life waiting on something that has so far been shown to never happen ever. I mean I've been watching over the world for a good 18 years now and I haven't seen any apocalypses yet. I don't have any proof though someone might have to validate me here

[Mans0n]

Originally Posted by Reach

Two issues here:

1. I can just as easily flip this around on you.

What are you going to tell yourself when Jesus never returns, Christians are never saved, and you eventually die, now ceasing to exist and now and for the rest of eternity infinitely ignorant about the dumb shit you believed in when you were alive?

Or a more fun version: What are you going to tell yourself when millions of people (christians) get left on earth for believing in dumb shit? No vast amount of illogical reasoning will get you off earth and into the elite sky club of the atheists where we have disco parties with God and engage in science trivia! The bible is actually a test, put onto earth by God to keep gullible and illogical minds from ever entering his glorious kingdom!

See? Wasn't that fun? Don't complain about bashing when you post bigoted garbage like this.

2. The end of the world has been hypothesized thousands of times during human history. As history shows us, humans have been wrong every time.

Why on earth would it be any different this time, when it's clear that humans have absolutely no way of predicting the end of the world, and instead just love to engage in theory-apocalypsing to scare people.

See what you didn't get was I mean what I say regardless of what happens in may. I didn't hear about it until recently, Which is besides the point. It could happen in may it might not, I doubt it though because no one knows the day or time when the rapture will take place.
And if the rapture doesn't happen in my lifetime period, that just means it obviously wasn't the time yet. No where in the bible does it say the rapture is supposed to happen every generation.

And I don't think that makes me a bigot, I am completely tolerant of people of other faiths than my own, I have a shit load of friends who flat out don't believe in god as one example.

[igotrhythm]

Going off of a tangent I saw two pages ago to get some people's minds off the apocalypse: Y2K was REAL. It took hordes of computer programmers around the world working around the clock for months and consuming what I can only imagine were copious amounts of caffeine to patch most of its instances, but some were still missed. The story of the 104-year-old woman being asked to register for kindergarten is but one example.

Similar crises are on the horizon for the programming world, as well, as XKCD has shown us. The tubes are indeed getting clogged: We're running out of unique IP addresses, and World IPv6 Day on June 6th is a coordinated effort to launch a solution to this problem. Further down the road, the year 2038 will cause the rollover of 32-bit timestamps, which will be a problem on par with the aforementioned Y2K.

Instead of wasting our time worrying about world-ending scenarios based on mythology and religion, let's focus our energy on worrying about the ones based in science, as there's a big difference: The latter category can be reliably anticipated and averted.

[rushyrulz]

What rapture?

[kommisar]

I love you reach

[TD_Diarrhea]

Well, my prom is on the 19th, and I should be losing my virginity to my hot date, so I don't mind the world ending at all.

[customstuff]

Originally Posted by kommisar

I love you reach

Seconded.

[ddrxero64]

Another thread dominated by Reach. That was an awesome post, and not because I'm some sort of atheist, only because you reflected how egotistic some people are. I wonder who'll post here 11:59pm on May 21st.

Really not important, regarding the time discussion:

As for the second crystal thing someone said earlier. To be honest, sun dials were some of the first clocks. Philosophers had nothing better to do back in the day then to figure stuff out by hand, like they did with pi. I truly think they just kept finding things to use until they could come up with a way to organize it into a year. It probably took a long time, but look at America's metric system. Why do we use feet and not meters?

As for decimals being based on the number ten, it's not silly when you think about what point in our time it was created. They had nothing else to count on back in the day, why not their fingers?

A lot of people in ancient history spent years figuring stuff out, so when some realized a second, as defined by the post in this thread (go look at it), can be made into minutes and hours to make a day, they made up some bs to make the year. Over time someone realized we needed the leap year because the earth takes 365 1/4 days to make a full revolution. All trial and error really. I wouldn't be surprised if thousands of years from now we'll need to offset our clocks by a second.

[~kitty~]

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

isn't religion pretty irrelevant

I don't understand what you're trying to say. To the topic I was referring to, Religion is relevant. Are you trying to say it's not relevant to anything? What you posted, I don't see how it was relevant to most of what people said, except for the slight derailing of the thread, which makes it loosely relevant. Unless there's something else you were trying to say.

[Reincarnate]

Originally Posted by ~kitty~

I don't understand what you're trying to say. To the topic I was referring to, Religion is relevant. Are you trying to say it's not relevant to anything? What you posted, I don't see how it was relevant to most of what people said, except for the slight derailing of the thread, which makes it loosely relevant. Unless there's something else you were trying to say.

I'm saying religion is bullshit when it comes to making truth claims about our natural world. There's no reason to suspect the end of the world any time soon. Closest we've seen are certain gamma-ray bursters (which are angled away from the Earth) and the Apophis asteroid which is not likely to hit us.

[kommisar]

but climate change!!!!!

[Izzy]

Not like the earth gives a shit if we all die, actually I'm sure if the earth could think for itself it would be quite happy to see the end of humanity. So, the end of humanity will come much sooner than the end of the world.

[~kitty~]

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

I'm saying religion is bullshit when it comes to making truth claims about our natural world. There's no reason to suspect the end of the world any time soon. Closest we've seen are certain gamma-ray bursters (which are angled away from the Earth) and the Apophis asteroid which is not likely to hit us.

Oh, I was talking about relevancy to the topic itself, but the guy I'm talking about isn't using religion itself to make the truth claims, but science to make truth claims about religion. It was an aside, sort of, and I mentioned it to specifically one person.

[Reincarnate]

Originally Posted by ~kitty~

Oh, I was talking about relevancy to the topic itself, but the guy I'm talking about isn't using religion itself to make the truth claims, but science to make truth claims about religion. It was an aside, sort of, and I mentioned it to specifically one person.

You can use science to show things as true/false in religion all the time. Say, Noah's Flood. Demonstrably false.

[~kitty~]

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

You can use science to show things as true/false in religion all the time. Say, Noah's Flood. Demonstrably false.

You probably should talk to this guy I'm referring to yourself, because I can't speak on behalf of him. I was just saying.

[qqwref]

Originally Posted by Mans0n

To all those people that disagree and say this is bs, What are you going to tell yourself when millions of people (christians) suddenly disappear from the earth? Are you going to lie to yourself to make whatever you believe sound right?

Taking this post seriously - as someone who places enormous value on real evidence to decide what's true in the world, if I noticed millions of Christians disappear from the earth on a predicted date, I'd see that as good evidence that the Christian religion is true. I doubt I'd immediately start believing, but it would definitely make me a lot less skeptical of the religion's claims. Of course, I see no reason to expect that this miracle will happen, but if it does I wouldn't just ignore it because it doesn't conform to what I expect. In fact, it's one of the main tenets of scientific thought that a totally unexpected outcome means you have to change the way you think about the world.

At the moment there's no good evidence either for or against the religion, so I don't believe simply because the default position is to think something doesn't exist when you have no proof either way. It's the exact same reason I don't believe in Wotan, Santa Claus, Harry Potter, fairies, humanoid aliens, and so on. The fact that you would benefit if something were true is not a reason to think it really is.



EDIT: Oh yeah, for anyone who was wondering about the second: dividing the day into 24 pieces goes back to Ancient Egyptian times, although I don't know why they chose that number (probably because of how many factors it has). The Babylonians introduced the idea of dividing things into 60ths; so by the middle ages people had the concept of minute (from a similar Latin word meaning small), second ("second minute"), and even third and fourth if they wanted more precision. So by the early part of the last millennium people were already using a second to mean 1/(24*60*60) of the day.

As time went on, people eventually wanted more and more accurate clocks, and to do that they needed more precise measurements than how long the day is, especially since the exact length of the solar day isn't quite constant. These precise measurements were based on formulas or natural phenomena, but they were always numerically close to the existing amounts, so that all but the most precise clocks and astronomical charts could remain unchanged. The final result is a very specific and complex definition (the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom), but what's important is that it measures a physical constant which doesn't change, and that it is very close to the value of the second that has been used for many hundreds of years.

[ddrxero64]

Originally Posted by qqwref

<Time discussion>

Thanks for the info, I was speaking off the top of my head and I didn't have time to look into it. But now I know. I wonder if the Egyptians had sundials, and were able to use it to cut the circle in 24. They might as well have used 16 yes, but I faintly remember them being big on math, and if a circle could be cut into a usable number of pieces divisible by both 2 and 3 and able to relate to the day itself it would make sense. A couple of marks and observation of the sundial may have led to this.

Still waiting until May 21st, we can argue until then. After that, it'll be just another point for people who brag atheism, and a point against people who push religion into the world's face. I don't stand by either, but yea.

[rushyrulz]

Occam's Razor.

"the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one."

Random mysterious flood kills everyone on Earth
OR
Everything stays normal like it has for the past n,000 years.

You decide.

[DJRiDDeR]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTpPnL4BfIE

[LJRoX]

Nothing special happened on Y2K...
Just saying.