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Bill O'Reilly chooses to double down on the stupid.

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johnson1010
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Bill O'Reilly chooses to double down on the stupid.

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But, like... what is hair, man? Where does that come from?

Your inability to understand is not equal to a compelling argument against.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/0 ... 17723.html
In the absence of God, I found Man.
-Guillermo Del Torro

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
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Re: Bill O'Reilly chooses to double down on the stupid.

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Hilarious, yet scary.

If you've ever heard of the Insane Clown Posse song about miracles, it reminds me of that. They revealed themselves as evangelical Christians.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs

SNL did a hilarious spoof of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq65hlbxdmk

(NSFW)
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Re: Bill O'Reilly chooses to double down on the stupid.

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I actually have Insane Clown Posse on my MP3 player.

They are christians in the broadest sense, but i wouldn't call them evangelicals. They have at least one song that is explicitly anti-evangelical, and others which could be interpreted that way. Like everyone else who says they are christian, they have their own interpretation of what that entails, and they do rely on superstition and magical thinking, but no more than a person from the other side of the spectrum, say a nascar dad. Its just that they have a platform to speak from, and so their ignorance on these subjects are more in the spotlight. Not to mention their act has proven to be a well tuned lightning rod for all kinds of allegations, not unlike marilyn manson in that sense.

They do deserve the ridicule they got for the complete mental laziness of "miracles".

I wouldn't recomend them for the science class, but they are good fo some laughs!

Very much not safe for work, and not to everybody's taste. Like south park, it's easy to gloss over when you hear them due to the provacative content.
In the absence of God, I found Man.
-Guillermo Del Torro

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
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Re: Bill O'Reilly chooses to double down on the stupid.

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johnson1010 wrote:I actually have Insane Clown Posse on my MP3 player.
I actually like them for their ridiculous, offensive lyrics. "F the world" is a good song.

"Miracles" could have been a perfectly fine appreciation of nature, except for the bit about scientists lying -- you can see the creationist influence there
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Re: Bill O'Reilly chooses to double down on the stupid.

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woot woot, good sir.
In the absence of God, I found Man.
-Guillermo Del Torro

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
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Re: Bill O'Reilly chooses to double down on the stupid.

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Here we have Richard Feynman answering Bill O’Reilly’s question of how there is never a miscommunication between the tides and the moon.



Here’s an interesting thing.


Ultimately, you have to explain things in terms of other things which you are familiar with. It’s all relative. For instance, how could you have anything to say about a universe which has nothing in it but a single particle with no distinguishing internal characteristics. You couldn’t tell if it was moving, rotating, vibrating, or if time was passing. Because there is nothing to compare it to.

It needs other things relative to itself to observe any differences.


We run into a this problem when discussing physics. It’s the old infinite why question game you get into with kids. You can explain why the moon is in the sky, but then you have to explain what the moon is, and then how it was formed, and then why that happens, and then what gravity is, and then how gravity works and eventually you get down to questions like why do magnets repel one another.


You end up saying there’s a force that repels and that’s all you can say. Because any analogy we would use to describe that repulsive force is actually something BUILT of the very repulsive forces you are trying to explain.


So you can’t say that magnets repel as though they have springs on the outside which bump into the other magnet, because if you then ask about springs, you end up talking about electric repulsion, which is of the same class you were trying to explain with the springs in the first place.

So when you explain the path of the moon and how gravity creates the tides ultimately you have to deal with forces which cannot be compared to other things honestly, because those other things are the way they are BECAUSE of the very forces we are trying to explain.


So why is there inertia that keeps things coasting indefinitely, unless acted on by other forces like gravity, which causes the inverse square law and the orbits and ultimately the tides?


That’s something that we can’t readily explain, for the reason I listed above, the limits of our imagination, and the failure of language to deal with things which are not in comparison to something else. So here we approach the unknown. And when we get there, it can be scary and confusing.


This is Bill O’Reilly’s problem, and the problem of many others. After all this hard work of understanding physics, the inverse square law, inertia, gravity, and planetary interactions, you ultimately end up having to say, at this point, we don’t know WHY it works. We know explicitly HOW it works. Not WHY.


So when you get to this point you are grappling with many complicated interactions and a mystery.

God takes the hard work out of this equation. We can’t really wrap our heads around the basic building blocks of repulsive forces. Holding that in your mind and then admitting the limit of knowledge is a hard trick to juggle. We are unfamiliar with forces like this. They are not available to us in their raw form through regular human-sized interactions, or time frames.


God is just as unknowable to the believer, but familiar. I don’t know why god does it, but God knows, and as long as he’s got a handle on it, then we’re good to go.


Why does Bill say it’s a greater leap of faith to believe in statistics and chance than to believe in god? They both ultimately come to an unanswerable question, for scientists on their side and for dyed in the wool believers on their side.


Science lets us answer conclusively how these things work, and the explanatory power of that method is what has led to the modern world. The power of this method is utterly undeniable. God, on the other hand, explains nothing at all about HOW things work, and instead asserts WHY things work, (god wants them that way) which does not really explain the why either, and has the added benefit of never having been demonstrated to be true in the least.


But it’s “a far greater leap of faith to believe in (science) than it is to believe in Buddha or Allah” because to him it isn’t about the explanatory power of the propositions.


It’s about what he’s able to hold in his little head. God is just a guy in the sky. He’s got mysterious motives and methods, but motives and methods are easy things to understand on principal.


Forces, statistics, variables, and spacetime are outside of our everyday way of thinking. They are unfamiliar. It can be uncomfortable to try to imagine the bizarre way things have demonstrated themselves to be.


It isn’t a greater leap of faith to understand statistics, and forces. God is a simple concept to keep strait in your head. They both lead to mysteries. But science is just not as simple a concept as “some dude did it with magic.”
In the absence of God, I found Man.
-Guillermo Del Torro

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
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Re: Bill O'Reilly chooses to double down on the stupid.

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This has crystalilzed a bit better for me now. Here it is.

For O'Reilly to believe that god is responsible for everything, there is only one item that he has to suspend disbelief for. "God did it." Because there is no in-depth analasys of how god might have done it, or why, or with what method, it become one thing to ignore.

vs. science you have to know about inertia, gravity, the solar system, the distances involved, the speed involved, angular momentum, etc... Each of these items is something you either have to have a comfortable working knowledge of, or at least ignore, in order to embrace the scientific view.

So each of these becomes a mental hurdle for Bill O'Reilly, as each one he doesn't understand becomes something he has to suspend disbelief over.

He's just counting up the things he doesn't understand and comparing the lists.

This is how you get "It is a far greater leap of faith than believing in Jesus, Budda or Allah, to think it all just happened that way."

Bill O'Reilly: Real man of Genius.
In the absence of God, I found Man.
-Guillermo Del Torro

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
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Re: Bill O'Reilly chooses to double down on the stupid.

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Feynman 'Fun to Imagine' 4: Magnets (and 'Why?' questions...)

I knew I heard this argument before... :P

Good post.
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Re: Bill O'Reilly chooses to double down on the stupid.

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:D applause :D
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