Ted Cruz picks a fight with Wikipedia, accusing platform of left-wing bias
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Probably because no one uses conservapedia because it is deeply unreliable. As opposed to Wikipedia, which is about equivalent to any other well run encyclopedia.
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That is why it is called an unreliable source. You can't trust unreliable sources, but they can still potentially be useful in certain cases. For instance, Fox News can give you a pretty good idea of what the far right agenda is (primarily fear, xenophobia, and hate).
This is just the academic term for it, and it means you can't trust that anything in the source is correct. It is still a primary source on what is going on in the world. It is just not one to rely on for factual accuracy.
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Given the fact that one of your provinces is trying to opt out of your charter of human rights in order to fuck queer people over, you might also want to look at your own politics at home. Sadly this sort of bigotry is everywhere. Its even worse in the UK where its taken over both Labor and the Torries.
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You mean when your world view requires you to view these things literally, yes. Most Christians do not think that Genesis is a literal document. Plenty of people have no problems holding both the science and religion as true. Plenty of people have no problem with people who don't believe in the same things as they do.
This is just Ted Cruz being an asshole.
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No. Science and religion are two different methods that attempt to understand the world. However, they are in general not asking the same questions about the world. There are plenty of extremely smart and important scientists who believed in both science and religion. Some of them were even in the clergy.
The two are not fundamentally incompatible, given the number of religious scientists in the world are very high. Nor does being religious require rejecting science.
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Oil and water can be turned into an emulsification, so maybe not the best analogy?
As an engineer, I would point to reality showing us that both religion and science are compatible in practice. Reality and how things work in practice is a pretty good counter. Being a scientist and being religious are not incompatible. This is not something new or novel.
There are also a lot of areas of knowledge that science just doesn't apply to. There is a natural level of compartmentalization here. An example is that Christian doctrine exactly make a claim about god that can be scientifically proven.
The reality that religious fundamentalists want you to make this a black and white choice of religion or science. The world is never so simple, when you get humans involved in it. We're complicated as a species.
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What in the fuck makes someone more religious? That is not a thing you can actually directly measure. So what are they measuring? Where did they measure it? Is it a correlation rather than causation? Does it matter what the religion or sect of a religion a person is in? Do the questions cover people who are religious but not involved in organized religion? Do people who aren't fundamentalists just tend to respond that they're less religious than extreme fundamentalists on surveys?
Not to mention, how did they prove that this is a casual relationship? Is it just a matter of people tend to become less religious as they become more educated? Why is that?
I can think of a ton of questions about your claims here, which can easily undermine your point.
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It would generally speaking not be necessary to directly cite Fox News on its handling of the the 1/6 insurrectionists. You can just as easily cite more reliable sources which have accurate summaries and quotes from Fox News itself.
The purpose of Wikipedia is not there for promoting progress towards compromise and cooperation. Wikipedia's purpose is to be factual. The problem with unreliable sources is you need to determine if their information is accurate, and at that point you may as well directly use the other reliable sources that corroborate what the unreliable source indicates.
There is no echo-chamber when we talk about the scientific facts on things like the big bang, evolution, global warming, or transgender people being who they claim they are, there just isn't room for anything but the scientific facts. The articles may cover the history of scientific thought on these things. It might cover that there are still political controversies, but they're not going to treat any of these things as being something other than factually true.
Wikipedia only reports on what the facts are and are summaries of available primary and secondary sources. It is not their job to be full on proving something. If you want to go more in depth, Wikipedia's reference sections are where you should start digging.
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Then why is Labor pursuing the anti-LGBT policies like banning gender affirming care for minors? Why haven't the fixed the horrific ruling from the supreme court that removed a ton of protections for transgender people?
There is a reason why pride events were banning political parties from marching in pride parades. There is no point in letting Labor march when they don't stand with queer people. No point in letting any of them do so until they do something about it.
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Your constitution has a clause that will let them do this if they choose to.
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Then what did? Because I can't think of what else you mean by a fluffy candidate.
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Any reason to think that Alberta will not continue to be shitty in 5 years?
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I believe there are a specific set of readings to choose from for a wedding mass. They do not follow the ordinary mass cycle of readings throughout the three-year cycle. So it absolutely is not random.
I assume the couple gets some input on which readings the priest will do, but I've not been through the sacrament personally.
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You very much sound significantly right of even Democrats, based on your statements here.
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Being the one who brought them up, I also specified the UK when referring to them. So it should have been quite clearly not about Canadian parties. Unless Canada has become a colonial holding of the UK again while I was looking.
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No, but there are still in existence protections legally speaking if the charter were not optional. It at least still matters up there.
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This is absolutely not true, though, at least for the Catholics. You're not looking for the word "true" or "inerrant" to describe things. Most all denominations are going to say the bible is true and inerrant, including the Catholic Church itself. The word you're looking for is "literal." Just because you don't believe a text is figurative or metaphorical doesn't mean that you think it is false.
That is something that is primarily the domain of the fundamentalist evangelicals. This is why you have Catholic schools that teach evolution and the big bang, and evangelical ones that have those fun books where humans and dinosaurs lived together. It is also why evangelicals tend to eschew higher education, whereas Catholics do not.
The fundamentalists are certainly leading the spearhead of wanting the country to be a theocracy. But there are people from most all other denominations that are drawn to this thinking in disturbingly large numbers. I doubt most of them would be happy when it isn't their form of Christianity that is in charge.
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You're assuming that Genesis is intended to be taken literally, which traditionally speaking isn't how it has been understood by Christians. The non-literal interpretation is still used by most denominations today.
On top of that, linguistically while the word is commonly translated as "day" into English, it also means a "period of time". With the value of pi, you're likely assuming the bible is identifying pi, instead of identifying an easy-to-use approximation of pi for people who didn't have a calculator or modern math.
What the OP pretty clearly meant is that, as defined, the Abrahamic God is not falsifiable by the scientific method. This is primarily because God is not defined in such a way that they can be tested with a falsifiable hypothesis. This is just like science can't prove a negative, and is fundamental to applying the scientific method.
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I'm not sure why you're so angry about this. I don't particularly care about what you believe and I'm not talking about what I believe.
What I'm talking about is what is knowable through the scientific method. The Abrahamic God is defined by the original sources, but it also isn't a definition that works with the scientific method. It is not possible to come up with a falsifiable hypothesis.
There are limits to what science can tell us, because you have to ask questions and come up with theories that can be tested with the method. There are just a lot of things that science can't investigate. The scientific method can't tell you it is unethical to run an orphanage in order to have test subjects for drug testing. It is wrong, but Science can't really say if it is wrong. Instead, you need the field of ethics, which has its own paradigms.
None of this is partially controversial. The scientific method is arguably our most powerful paradigm for understanding our world, but it has its limits. Understanding those limits is important, and what I was going on about in that section.
I did make some notes and corrections on what you said, because they're wrong. It is not revisionist to recognize the word commonly translated as "day" at the beginning of Genesis doesn't actually mean "day." Day is only one of several potentially correct ways of translating the word from ancient Hebrew.
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There are some power players that petty clearly do have a personal interest in the spiritual aspects. I have no reason to think that Biden hasn't been honest about being Catholic. But he also isn't constantly trying to leverage his own religion.
Where I think you have to worry is when people wrap themselves in their religion or flag. Someone like Trump or Falwell.
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Since when are science and religion the only two domains of knowledge to exist? You are presenting a false dichotomy here, which twists the OP's argument. There are other paradigms to acquire knowledge and wisdom besides science and religion.
Ethics and morality aren't derived from science. Science is rather agnostic about the idea. Science can tell you what is, but it can't tell you if it is right or wrong. Just because something is natural and the way the world is, doesn't mean it is right.
As the OP mentioned, there are other paradigms such as philosophy that work in the domain of ethics and morality. So pretty explicitly refuting the words you're putting in their mouth.
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I'd like to point out the bible's inerrancy is something the Catholic Church professes. That isn't something special, and its something that most denominations believe in.
By definition, if you do not accept the authority of the apostolic succession through the popes and the bishops, then you're not Catholic. The people who are claiming the Pope isn't actually Catholic probably aren't really Catholic anymore. There are not a lot of things you have to do to be Catholic, but that is one of them.
To be honest, what you're seeing is likely more so the cult of Trump replacing these people's religion. I've seen this happening as well, but they seem to only really view their world through what Trump wants. Its also not just the Catholic Church that is running into this, but also other more mainstream denominations are having similar problems with their more conservative members and its causing churches to fracture.
It also is showing up in secular arenas, but it looks different there when not dressed up in traditional religion. Instead, it is wrapped in the flag.
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Yes, I would not disagree with that specifically in Genesis 1, but sometimes in a literary work we do use words in ways that they have multiple meanings that apply. The bible is not a simple document to read, and by necessity you do have to reconcile Genesis 1 and 2. This brings in the ambiguity of the word back into focus.
Yes, the words have meaning, but that isn't as simple as looking in a dictionary.
In the end, even if I just accepted that the universe was created in 6 - 24 hour days and nothing else was meant by it, that doesn't change the fact that this story is not taken to be literally, and that this is intended to be meant to be interpreted in certain ways. Both Christianity and Judaism have long traditions on interpreting these passages.
The idea that it has always until recently been understood as literal is a modern myth.
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Scientific ethics are not science. Scientific ethics apply to the practices of scientists working in the field. You cannot apply the scientific method to ethics. There is no experiment you can do to disprove scientific ethics. Ethics are more of the domain of philosophy.
Scientific ethics come from philosophy and society's values. These ethics were developed in direct response to horrible things people have done as scientists, some of which resulted in perfectly valid scientific results.
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Or it could represent a period where they were living a more nomadic or itinerant life without a permanent settlement due to being displaced from their prior home. Or being forced to use land and resources on less desirable arid areas in a region.
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The trolley problem probably is a bad choice of examples.No, and neither can philosophy. And neither can mathematics. Because the trolley problem does not have a generic solution. All three can find any number of specific solutions that might fit some specific circumstances.
It's like the shipwrecked sailor problem. In the end, someone gets eaten. The only issue is whether it's voluntary, an accident of fate (the short-straw solutino) or by dint of being the smallest and weakest in the lifeboat.
Science can't solve the problem of determining how to ethically do human experiments on children. Using the scientific method, it is trivially easy to design a perfectly valid experiment that violates our ethical guidelines on human experimentation. The constraints on human experimentation come from outside the scientific method.
Philosophy and ethics are where we look to come up with the guidelines for human experimentation. This is not a field with an objective truth, the way we have with particle physics. There is often no objective right answer to these questions.
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Except that courts don't find people innocent. They find people not guilty, which is an extremely different standard.
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Would you be able to differentiate the Jewish people of the time from the other nomadic or iterant peoples of the time? We know that people have been living lives like that in the region since before written history.
On top of that, archaeological record tends to be biased towards permanent settlements, especially those that there were written records about. Historically, there was a strong bias towards not treating nomadic and iterant peoples as significant or important.
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Differences in material culture show up in archeology, but material culture is not necessarily enough to differentiate different groups that are living relatively closely together. There is no reason to think that there would be a clear difference here.
It is very likely given the sophisticated trading routes and physical proximity that they were still within a fairly similar material culture.
This is in part why genetics show different patterns of migration than material culture alone tell us. We know there are migrations that don't have a significant impact on material culture from this.
Who says that there were millions of people? That is your assumption. Like other historical texts, that the head counts involved could be wildly exaggerated or were never intended to be taken literally.
You can assume that if the events are real, what really occurred is almost certainly much more complicated than what we get out of the Old Testament.
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I'm not doing a lot, just thinking critically. I'm going to argue against silly claims. Even if you don't care about this, discussions about what the archeological record can show us and its limits are interesting by themselves.
There are a couple big reasons to think that the exodus story is rooted in actual history.
- From other cultures, we know that oral histories often do preserve real historical events that occurred.
- Other parts of these texts that were not part of the oral traditions do include real historical events.
It is pretty clear you're not going to find it fully historically accurate, but it is also not a historical record. It is a religious one and should not necessarily be taken literally. Also, given that it is rooted in an oral history that was written down, we have to assume that it evolved in some way. You may want to consider it as similar to The Iliad in some ways.
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I'm not sure what pyramids have to do with this. I think you are mixing up something else with the biblical story.
Many of the more narrative records from Egypt are political propaganda from the government. This is of course true from a lot of the primary documents that survive from before the early modern period. You always have to consider who is speaking and what they may not be speaking because of that. Assuming that all major historical events are in these records is probably not a good assumption.
However, it is pretty obvious if the story is anchored in real historical events, it couldn't have been as impactful on the Egyptian state as the story implies. That almost certainly would have shown up somewhere in the records.
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There almost certainly wouldn't have been millions of people involved with this sort of migration.
Do you know if at that point and time there would have been differences in what animals were being eaten between the two groups? We know it is true later on, but was it true at this time? You can't always assume, for instance that pork was always disallowed in this group.
Different groups do not necessarily have different material culture that will show up in the archeology. Material culture can also migrate without mass population migrations. We are also finding that when people more to an area that sometimes they adopt the local material culture.
Only a few Christians who believe that. On top of that, those aren't the groups that have had the resources to fund archeological expeditions to the Levant. Most of those would have received funding and money from more mainstream denominations. The entire field of archeology in this region at one point was centered around biblical sites.
I'm sure that the more fundamentalist side has spent a ton of money on it, but they've likely spent it on far less academic aspects. Instead, you often get stunts and propaganda related things like the ark museum. They're not funding someone to go out and search for the next Dead Sea scrolls.
I was talking about the more factual information that was slowly dropped from stories. Almost certainly at one point there would have been more facts and details in the story, especially during the first few generations. In the case of exodus, there aren't a lot of details about what they were doing for years while they "wandered" in the desert. Things you might want to know.
The extra details that accreted likely are related to the religious purpose of the story.
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