Low-level anxiety, procrastination, jittery energy useless for humdrum work, bad overall energy levels if you consume alot of strong coffee, painful wakeup in the morning, adrenalised brain geared to snap decisions rather than measured reasoning.
Or
Bounce out of bed at 100% energy, fluid easy reasoning, easier learning, relaxed, enjoy slow movies, good overall energy, fine with humdrum activities, far less procrastination. Less impatient with people.
The caffeine-energy thing is pretty bogus. The problem for me is that I find it fun.
Just realise that giving up caffine means tapering for many people as the migrained a heavy coffee drinker can get form cold-turkey can be the worst, worse than anything I;ve ever had before. Also, even decaf and cocoa have too much caffeine, and with the reduction in tolerance as you come down in dose, so you become more sensitive. You really have to give it up completely, which is a shame. But the upside is massive.
"I lucked into the most fortuitous, warm, constructive kind of family context imaginable. My father was a top scholar, a Phi Beta Kappa. My mother was a voice coach and accompanist of singers in the concert and opera fields. We didn't have the term "liberated woman", but my mother certainly was ... They were brought up, both, in the state of Indiana, which is now called the Bible Belt. They were wholesome, they neither smoked nor drank, and they never used the Lord's name in vain. I never heard a four-letter word. It didn't exist in my wholesome family setting."
The Middle-East was actually pretty Ok until the secular West decided to interfere and upset the balance of powers.
As for harm more generally, historically religious wars are at 7% of the total.
But it's also arguable that religion has suppressed more wars than caused. For instance, most of the religions are strong on self-control, against anger and intemperate behaviour. Christianity has "Love your enemies and pray for them", "Do good to those who do ill to you" "Never stop forgiving...." "Do not judge and you will not be judged" "Mercy will be show to the merciful" etc etc etc. It was famous for a list of such principles and behaviour, but somehow seems to have been forgotten and instead has become the religion of hate?!?!
Religious principles and morality laws, and especially Christian ones as above which are quotes, also enhance community stability and harmony. They're a recipe for happy families, peaceful communities....
Depends what version of Christianity you're thinking of.
After all, the inventor of the Big Bang theory was a Catholic priest (top physicist first), and the father of modern genetics was a Catholic monk (biologist also). It's also
That covers 50% of Christianity. And since none of Christianity has ever had a dogma that the Bible has to be literally interpreted, really it's just the Christians who don't know they don't have to be creationist who are pseudo-scientfic.
Despite stating the facts, it's inevitable that this post will be downvoted by the agressively anti-religious.
"The power of this disquieting portrait of divinity—a persona unseeing, all-knowing, eternal, pitiless."
I agree. Completely the opposite of the 'suffering god' of pure self-giving love, dying by torture at the hands of the evil in order to save them from a fate worse than death. Someone was having a joke on Christians.
What's interesting is that the "Sacre Coeur" image on the basilica ceiling at the "Sacre Coeur" in Paris is similar: expressionless, pitiless. Yet the whole point was the heart of a god that burns with love and compassion. Who painted that? Who approved of it?
MySql is the PHP of databases. Easy to get in to, but soon becomes a mire of pitfalls, exceptions, ambiguities etc.
PHP introduced me to the mindblow of having to use a lookup table to work out what the equality operators do under any particular combo of types and values. It was quite a rude shock even coming from C++.
Any properly designed language requires almost zero mental burden for equality. (Granted a longtime PHP guy will have it all memorised in time.)
MySql is in the same bracket. I was accustomed to commercial databases but my short stint with PHP also involved MySql, pre-MariaDB. Unless I'm on the point of starvation I'll not waste my efforts like that again.
Postgres, meanwhile, is a properly designed RDBMS and you can just get on with the job at hand.
Rather than having to constantly read the docs and go down the rabbit hole of MySql issues apparent from the endless comments about unexpected quirks and side-effects that used to be at the bottom of each doc page (which is likely the only reason that MySql was even usable and survived). Is it even yet ACID compliant?
I expect MySql will not be as bad for data analysis as it was for general development, but the reason it exists, in the face of Postgres, is because there are just so many devs and websites based on it. Similarly with PHP.
Why is there no Christian god? Where does the 'absolute not' come from?
I ask that for two reasons: scientist Christians clergyman invented the Big Bang theory AND are at the root of evolutionary theory.
That is a most bizarre coincidence. There just aren't that many scientist clergyman, even historically.
Secondly, because Christianity fully answers the outstanding question: why do the innocent suffer.
While almost all the other monotheisms define their supreme beings the same way, which is already evidence of a god, they don't fully address that question.
"I think that's the nuanced position of Dawkins"
First I've heard of Dawkins' 'nuanced' position. "the God Delusion" is not a subtle title. It also means he's a true believer and irrational.
How was what I wrote a 'flamewar'? And especially in the context of the anti-religious views that elsewhere were not flagged nor called flamewars. What's your agenda, Dang?
Politics, religion, philosophy, these are worthwhile things to discuss.
Yet I spelled out that much of Christianity (at least; if not other religions) have no issue with the fundamental scientific claims that are said to disprove religious claims.
That the Big Bang, 14 billion years, and evolution are all the product of famous scientist Christians was just the icing on the cake.
The fact is that science does not in any way disprove the existence of a god.
The example isn't the same as religious claims. Firstly because all religious people claim that the 'invisible' friend will talk back if you make the effort to make contact (with few exceptions, but some are: the arrogant, the idly curious, those who wouldn't change their lives even if they knew).
And unlike fairies at the bottom of the garden, a supreme being has by definition the power to prove its own existence to the individual. Nothing else does. Think about it, you can't even prove your own sanity to yourself, or that anything around you exists. Even science can't deal with that one.
So sure, I can't prove a god's existence to you but I could witness to my own contact with one. Depending on your evaluation of me as a person of integrity and sensibleness, you may be encouraged to make contact. But to dismiss a person as not sensible because of such a claim is clearly fallacy. First you would need to prove it can't be true.
"Nope. A-theist simply means someone who lacks theism."
Actually it was coined by theists without a strict reference to the greek and was defined as "To Deny the gods/God".
Lately, the OED modified the definition to "To Deny or disbelieve in the gods/God", which is actually quite a radical change and has thoroughly muddied the waters of discourse.
But really, think about it: if atheists are going to call religious persons deluded, or even think it, as they consistently do then they are true believers.
Also let's break it down (especially to counter the confused nonsense that is the wikipedia article on the definition of atheist):
Either you:
1)believe there is a god
2)beleive there isn't a god
3)have no belief either way.
Now, we need a word for the 2nd. What is it to be if it isn't 'atheist', as you are claiming. And why should it not be 'atheist' when that was its original meaning? And that's what most non-atheists think it means. And by that definition it only has one meaning, which is seriously helpful in debate.
We should also ask, why are atheists telling us they merely lack belief when they walk and talk like they genuinely believe there is no god, even to callign religious instruciton child abuse (Dawkins). And why are they insisting on redefining 'atheist'?
Is it perhaps because the more educated atheists know their position and belief isn't provable, and so such a belief would be rightly called out as irrational? After all, beleiving in the unproven is not reaosnable. Belief means certainty, and you can't be certian without proof.
A great deal of speculation in that article. Sounds more like psycotherapy ideas than real psychology/neuroscience.
Meanwhile, let's look at the (paraphrased) claims:
"Science is not compatible with religion."
Yet the Big Bang theory was invented by a physicist who went on to become a Catholic priest, George Lemaitre. And the father of modern genetics is not Darwin but a catholic monk, Gregor Mendel. hmmm. Both had google doodles recently.
"Evolution and creationism are not reconcileable."
But Christianity has never had a formal dogma that the Bible is literally true as a historical document (but neither any reason prior to modern science to think otherwise, but that misses the point). 3/4 of Christianity is fine with evolution and the Big Bang, and 14 billion years, and for Catholics even the existence of aliens. It's arguable that the rest are just reacting to Atheist claims, clutching to a dogma that doesn't exist because they are simple and uneducated Christians who don't know better.
"There is no evidence of a god."
But this claim has to discount those who claim to personally know a god as deluded. That's clearly a fallacy. Sure, spiritual 'contact' doesn't give 3rd party verification (the 3rd party being an agnostic who hasn't had such contact), and will not satisfy the determinedly materialistic who will only accept physical evidence, but what evidence of a spiritual God can we expect in the material universe?
More importantly, wouldn't a god be able to give proof of itself? And wouldn't that proof, if it were a personal god as claimed, be person to person communing? The author evidently did not actually personally know the god she eventually rejected and by a Christian standard never had faith.
Faith "Belief without evidence". Thanks for that presumptious redefinition, Bertrand Russell, but that is not a Christian or religious definition and has no etymological roots. Sure makes them look silly, though. The real definition of faith is more to do with direct personal knowledge of a god.
Or let's take Dawkins favourite argument "Who made God?". But this was answered by Thomas Aquinas centuries ago. A thing whose nature/essence is existence, to exist, self-evidently exists. Since it must also self-evidently exist of itself, and is therefore self-referencing, the real question is not "Is there a god" but "Is this self-referencing fundamental thing also self-aware?". Either Dawkins is ignorant or he's lying by ommission (which he already does with evolution).
But here's the kicker: an atheist beleives that there is no god - which is why they quite outrageously call religious persons deluded as no agnostic would - yet there is no proof of the non-existence of a supreme being.
So while atheists are always irrational whether or not there is a god, religious persons are only irrational if there isn't a god.
The irony is wonderful. Faith as "Belief without evidence" applies to atheists more than religious persons.
What's your best atheist argument? I can pretty much defeat any atheist argument.
Veganism unavoidably implies a moral superiority where vegetarianism doesn't.
That's pretty irritating.
It also just doesn't mesh with most people's understanding of simple animals as simple and food-driven, not in any way equal to the long existential agonies and traumas of humans.
Their implied moral high-ground, in the face of rampant predator killings in the natural world, adds up to too much Disney and too little sense.
...and lions eat their own young let alone warthogs.
This is only an issue because Donald Trump is misrepresented as being racist and anti-immigration when he has only talked of illegal immigration and the problem of Islamic migrants (ie, the Islamic version of democracy which is not compatible with any Western Liberal democracy).
The gender gap is an IQ spread difference. Search "iq sexes" and look at the graphs. The average is the same (in most studies), but there are far more extremely dumb males and far more extremely intelligent males than females. By at least 10 to 1. This is also born out in the sciences, chess and other such forms of IQ type intelligence.
Females gain in social skills, with brain scans showing that the female brain is geared towards the social. We all know that there are far more awkward boys than awkward girls.
Here's a left-leaning newspaper reporting on that:
Don't forget to downvote me for telling you the truth.
After you've refused to believe that, search for "iq countries" and take in to mind two facts: that twin studies have proven that this is not environment or food, and that the US army would not accept candidates of an IQ of less than 83 however desperate they were. And now you also know why there is a diversity gap.
Take the red pill, and invest your money in businesses that don't dabble in fanciful equality dogmas.
Before anyone goes vegan, check-out the numerous ex-vegan videos on youtube. Even with supplementation veganism isn't sustainable for most people past 3 years, 10 if you're lucky, very few get to 15. Just keep in mind that without vitamin B12 supplements-->certain death.
This is not a human diet, and humans are not herbivores. Herbivores have complex stomachs or eat their own poop (eg, gorrillas and rabbits).
After the health flush of the first few months, veganism is a downward spiral to pasty skin, mood-swings, depression, dark circles, fatigue, skinny-but-fat, Joint paint, constant hunger/lack-of-satisfaction, excessive volume of eating. Vegans eat like you wouldn't believe. And a great deal of wildlife dies due to agricultural farming.
And despite what people say, anthropologically we are not omnivores but carnivores. Radio-isotope analysis has us eating a diet close to a wolf by preference over the last million years. Unlike a pig, a genuine omnivore, we do not have a proper cecum.
But sure, a few humans are better adapted to a plant-based diet than others, and our distant genetics was herbivore which means these genes can re-express, but for most people veganism becomes a nightmare and explains why the level has historically been at 0.3%.
The wonderfully mad thing about UK politics is that the socialists are very much against the EU and for leaving, but their nominally socialist party, the Labour Party, is Remainer while their leader is a capitulating Brexiter, and grassroots conservatives are Brexiters while the Conservative Party is significantly Remainer with a (now ex) Remainer primeminister and remainer Chancellor of the Exchequor.
What makes a lot more sense it that while the ideological Economist Magazine and academic economists are Remainer (of the same 125 who jointly wrote to Thatcher telling her how wrong she was in 1982; that didn't turn out so well, haha!), Money Week (which is only interested in making money) and the capitalist pundits at the Daily Telegraph are essentially Brexiters.
Or
Bounce out of bed at 100% energy, fluid easy reasoning, easier learning, relaxed, enjoy slow movies, good overall energy, fine with humdrum activities, far less procrastination. Less impatient with people.
The caffeine-energy thing is pretty bogus. The problem for me is that I find it fun.
Just realise that giving up caffine means tapering for many people as the migrained a heavy coffee drinker can get form cold-turkey can be the worst, worse than anything I;ve ever had before. Also, even decaf and cocoa have too much caffeine, and with the reduction in tolerance as you come down in dose, so you become more sensitive. You really have to give it up completely, which is a shame. But the upside is massive.