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06-17-2011, 05:34 AM
I had almost forgotten how much I appreciate that Japanese culture isn't so full of die hard atheists and and die hard religious enthusiasts ....
Thank you Japan for just not caring about it either way. You save me countless headaches dealing with extremists on either side of the fence. 
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06-17-2011, 05:51 AM
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No, sir, you're pretty close, there may be diminishing hope for the likes of me. I can, in fact, appreciate the possibility that the world is merely thousands of years old, instead of billions. I can, in fact, appreciate the possibility that dinosaurs co-existed with humans. I may be an absolute idiot. But I would rather be an idiot, capable of appreciating new ideas, while also having the capacity and humility to acknowledge the wonders we have already established as true than a closed-minded bigot. Science and Christianity aren't enemies; they do not necessarily negate one-another... The interpretations of people do. If you can agree with this concept, then, ultimately, you would realize that you're just as bad as any radical, religious "nutter". Proclaimed intelligence shouldn't excuse treating people badly. I'll keep my fairytales, thank you.
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06-17-2011, 05:59 AM
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No doubt, moderation is best. I can't even stand religious people's arguments sometimes.
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06-17-2011, 06:03 AM
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In Japan it's very common to be good friends with someone who may disagree very fundamentally with you on any "strong" topic. In western culture, politics/religion/etc often times come between friendships and even family... that's just getting it all wrong.
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06-17-2011, 06:15 AM
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Many of my friends are Atheists, with conflicting political views. We poke fun at each-other, from time-to-time, in good fun. And that's how it should be, in my opinion.
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06-17-2011, 07:50 AM
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Science can't co-exist with religion if you want to believe that dinosaurs and humans once lived at the same time (even as remotely possible). There is no evidence whatsoever of this. In fact all the evidence supports that the last of the dinosaurs died out around 65 million years ago and the human species just wasn't around at that time. You also can't accept as even a remote possibility that the earth is only 6,000 years old because all of the scientific evidence shows that it is much, much older. There is such overwhelming evidence that the earth is billions of years old that it truly is ridiculous to consider otherwise. It is the sort of evidence that anyone of any religion or cultural backcground could do experiments to verify and all come up with the same results if the same good scientific methodology is followed. The sort of thinking you are talking about is credulous thinking. Where anything is possible regardless of any evidence to support it. So you believe in one of the myriad of gods that have been worshipped over the millenia and basically there is virtually nothing you could consider impossible once you start down that road. There is just as much proof in the existence of vampires, fairies, werewolves, ogres, etc, etc. You believe in something for which there is no proof whatsoever and are unconvinced by things for which there are mountains of proof by some of the most intelligent people the human race has ever produced. If this isn't idiotic I don't know what is. When you have schools teaching kids creationism over evolution or that dinosaurs co-existed with humans once upon a time then we have a huge problem. If you teach that the earth is only 6,000 years old instead of billions then religion negates science. We may as well accept that all human advancement over the years has been for nothing if we cannot accept that our understanding of the world has moved on quite a bit since some old blokes sat around a few thousand years ago and assembled a book of stories called the bible. The biggest hypocrasy of fundamentalist religious nutters is that most of them happily live in the modern world using the creations of science and technology whilst denying the basic precepts of the science that helped create such things. Surely there is something mentally wrong with people who support such delusions?
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06-17-2011, 08:05 AM
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06-17-2011, 09:19 AM
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One of the major contrasts in western and Japanese cultures is how often arguments revolving around religion/science/god/belief/faith/etc occur. Japanese people have pretty nutty beliefs too by western standards, and among the people here there is a huge range of belief, but it hardly ever enters conversation, and even if it does, it hardly ever gets emotional, and it's virtually non-existent to hear of a person making such factors a basis for friendship or not.
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06-17-2011, 09:23 AM
I might believe in global warming if it were actually happening. If one cares to check the average temperature of the last 20 years, one will find that the world has not gotten any warmer since 1998. In fact, the average temperature has decreased slightly since then.
In a BBC interview a year or so ago following the "Climategate" scandal, The head of the UN's Climate Research Unit, Dr Phil Jones, was forced to admit that there has been any not statistical global warming since 1995. Temperatures have been increasing in cities, but this has more to do with urban heat island effect than Co2 in the atmosphere. Temperatures in the countryside have been decreasing. In a damning part of the emails leaked during the "Climategate" scandal, CRU scientists expressed their concern when tree ring data collected in Siberia showed cooling temperatures, and these same scientists tried to figure out a way to "hide the decline" in their official reports. Their method has been to continually reduce the numbers of thermometers, taking readings from thermometers in city and suburban areas, and not from thermometers in the countryside. In 1960, more than 6000 thermometers were used for this purpose, whereas nowadays fewer than 2000 thermometers are now used. This point should be moot, as America's GISS satellites have been able to measure atmospheric temperatures since the late 70's, but you won't find satellite temperature readings used in the IPCC reports, probably because their readings can't be "massaged" by IPCC scientists to show anything but what they are. All previous UN IPCC reports included computer models which were used to predict increases in global temperatures. To date, not a single one of these computer models has proved accurate. Regarding the official IPCC reports, all of them have been plagued with errors. The 1996 report originally stated that scientists were unable to verify any man-made influence on climate change. However, this was changed to say that there was a "discernible human influence". But this change was made without consulting the peer-review group of scientists. It apperared that the authors of the report were made to change it's contents so as to agree with the political agenda of the policy makers who sponsored the report. Universities and research centers around the world receive billions of dollars in government and industry grants, and global warming has become a multi-trillion dollar industry itself. If there were no global warming (and Dr Jones admits right now there isn't, though he believes it will start "eventually"), what would these organizations do?
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06-17-2011, 11:28 AM
Sangetsu I reckon I could probably guess the psuedo-science websites you're getting that BS from (it's practically word for word I've seen on some sites). It's the same BS that all denialists circulate over and over again throughout the internet. And for people with no background in science (I guess you have little to none) it's impossible to guage what is right and what is wrong.
In actual fact warming has continued unabated through the naughties with global average temperatures surpassing the average of the 90's significantly. 2010 was the equal warmest year on record globally (equalling that of 2005). 9 of the top 10 warmest years on record were recorded in the 2000's. State of the Climate | Global Analysis | Annual 2010 You state that not one single climate model has proven accurate. In fact the opposite is true. The latest models have been supprisingly accurate in their forecasts with actual temperatures following the models well. It really depends on what you mean by inaccurate. Will they exactly predict the temperature in years to come? Of course not, hell we can barely forecast weather a few days out with a great deal of accuracy. What they have been pretty good at is showing likely trends. To test accuracy of models they do a thing called hindcasting. This is where they run the model say from 1900 and see how it does against the actual temperature record. If it does pretty well then it is reasonable to have some confidence that it will be somewhat accurate if continued on into the future. The IPCC has used a fair number of models and got a range of expected temperature and sea level rises out to around 2100. So far the actual observed temperatures and sea level rises have been right at the upper end of the forecasts of the models. So if anything the IPCC has probably underestimated and understated the likely effects. Yes there has been many 100's of millions of dollars put into the science around global warming and guess what? It has had results! We now understand climate and weather far better than we ever did and the fact the mankind is affecting the climate (warming it) through increasing the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere is not even debatable anymore. There's virtually no government in the world now that doesn't agree with the scientific concensus on this (especially now that the old mate of the oil industry Bush is out of the picture). You talk about the money involved in research on climate change as though it's a large amount. It is but a small drop in a vast ocean when compared to the money involved in the fossil fuel industries like oil and coal and the downstream industries these support. That's the gravy train that has the most to lose and has been muddying the scientific waters for years with pseudo-science and misinformation (just like the tobacco industry did).
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