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In the spirit of the holidays we here at DWR are going to go easy (for one week at least) on the religiously deluded, thus today’s disservice is a gift, only for religious emergencies mind you. :)
Browsing the time sink known as Reddit today I came across a very cool comic showing someone building a chat-bot to debate a theist. I googled the title of the comic and found the original as well a very awesome comic called Bag of Toast. I highly recommend checking it out.
The comic in question:
This made me think that I would love a chat bot to debate the theists, global warming deniers, anti-vaccine advocates, scumbags MRAs, or anyone I disagree with but constantly have to have 101 level discussions with. It would be wonderful. But then the Reddit community came through and proved there is such a thing already!
Christopher Mims at MIT Technology Review writes:
Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.
The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t responsible for it.
Sadly this chat bot has since been suspended, but given how easy it is to create twitter accounts I’m sure it is out there somewhere, debating science deniers so that we don’t have to. Finding out this bot existed has made today a good day.
G-sharp minor is a minor scale based on G♯, consisting of the pitches G♯, A♯, B, C♯, D♯, E, and F♯.
Few symphonies are written in G♯ minor; among them are Nikolai Myaskovsky’s 17th Symphony, Christopher Schlegel’s 5th Symphony, and an abandoned work of juvenilia by Marc Blitzstein.
Despite the key rarely being used in orchestral music other than to modulate, it is not entirely uncommon in keyboard music, as in the sonatas of Scriabin. For orchestration of piano music, some theorists recommend transposing the music to G minor or A minor. If G-sharp minor must absolutely be used, one should take care that B-flat wind instruments be notated in B-flat minor, rather than A-sharp minor.
A big thanks to the CBC and Paolo Pietropaolo for hosting the Signature Series.
Simply too good not to reblog. JZ brings the smack down from on high on our religiously deluded friends. Read it all, propagate the post widely, and let loose the rational atheist argumentative dogs of war!
Let there be no doubt whatsoever, to the Yahwehist – the practicing Jew, the Christian and the Muslim – whose entirereligiousfaith rides E X C L U S I V E L Y on the historical validity of the Pentateuch this quote from Israel’s oldest daily Newspaper, Hareetz, is murderously troublesome in two torturously uncomfortable ways. Firstly, it announces without fanfare what’s been known within archaeological and scholarly circles for well over two generations: the entire Jewish foundation narrative is a myth, and characters such as Moses are nothing but inventive fiction knitted together to service the geopolitical needs and territorial longings of Judah after the fall of Mamlekhet Yisra’el (Kingdom of Israel) in 722 BCE. Secondly, and phenomenally more importantly, the author concedes in the last line that the field of biblical archaeology has not only flat-lined, but is now beyond hope of resuscitation.
Now it might…
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I know, I know. Belief in magic is not really the best way to run anything, but rather than focusing on the silly nature of believing in the Grand Oooga-Booga, lets look at how those in power keep their ‘base’ ignorant and happy to continue to lap up all mendacity that spews forth from the Party of No. Alter.net author CJ Werleman has a nifty article about biblical illiteracy in America, so lets go over the highlights.
“More than 95 percent of U.S. households own at least one copy of the Bible. So how much do Americans know of the book that one-third of the country believes to be literally true? Apparently, very little, according to data from the Barna Research group. Surveys show that 60 percent can’t name more than five of the Ten Commandments; 12 percent of adults think Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife; and nearly 50 percent of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple. A Gallup poll shows 50 percent of Americans can’t name the first book of the Bible, while roughly 82 percent believe “God helps those who help themselves” is a biblical verse.”
So really, the obedient masses can be fed just about any line of bullshite and they won’t bat an eye.
“The truth, whether Republicans like it or not, is not only that Jesus a meek and mild liberal Jew who spoke softly in parables and metaphors, but conservatives were the ones who had him killed. American conservatives, however, have morphed Jesus into a muscular masculine warrior, in much the same way the Nazis did, as a means of combating what they see as the modernization of society.
Author Thom Hartmann writes, “A significant impetus behind the assault on women and modernity was the feeling that women had encroached upon traditional male spheres like the workplace and colleges. Furthermore, women’s leadership in the churches had harmed Christianity by creating an effeminate clergy and a weak sense of self. All of this was associated with liberalism, feminism, women, and modernity.”
Funny how much of a threat Conservatives see women to the established order. I take it as a sign we are moving in the right direction.
“For instance, when Republicans were justifying their cuts to the food stamp program, they quoted 2 Thessalonians: “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” One poll showed that more than 90 percent of Christians believe this New Testament quote is attributed to Jesus. It’s not. This was taken from a letter written by Paul to his church in Thessalonica. Paul wrote to this specific congregation to remind them that if they didn’t help build the church in Thessalonica, they wouldn’t be paid. The letter also happens to be a fraud. Surprise! Biblical scholars agree it’s a forgery written by someone pretending to be Paul.”
Being fact averse seems to be the default setting for much of the Republican party and concomitantly most their followers. The stupid leading the blind is not a winning recipe for running a nation.
“The best argument against a historical Jesus is the fact that none of his disciples left us with a single record or document regarding Jesus or his teachings. So, who were the gospel writers? The short answer is we don’t know. What we do know is that not only had none of them met Jesus, but also they never met the people who had allegedly met Jesus. All we have is a bunch of campfire stories from people who were born generations after Jesus’ supposed crucifixion. In other words, numerous unidentified authors, each with his own theological and ideological motives for writing what they wrote. Thus we have not a single independently verifiable eyewitness account of Jesus—but this doesn’t stop Republicans from speaking on his behalf.”
Not that making stuff up is new for politicians.
“The price this country has paid for biblical illiteracy is measured by how far we’ve moved toward Ayn Rand’s utopia. In the past three decades, we’ve slashed taxes on corporations and the wealthy, destroyed labor unions, deregulated financial markets, eroded public safety nets, and committed to one globalist corporate free-trade agreement after another. Rand would be smiling down from the heaven she didn’t believe in.”
Fantastic. Well we should be applaud the republicans for packaging up self-immolation so nicely – all decked out with rainbows and jesus stickers. It would be cute if it wasn’t underpinning the destruction of a nation.
“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”
— Assata Shakur
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