Drostie

So: for internationalization reasons, Yahoo! supports Unicode input into their questions and answers. I'm obviously *not* a Yahoo! staff member, but as a regular mathy user, I wanted to know whether typical English-speaking users had any trouble viewing unicode characters.

Could you tell me whether any of these ten expressions fail for you, on the right hand side of the "::" dividers? Also, what browser you are running, and what operating system? Thanks.

1. F ~~ v :: F ∝ v

2. a^i :: aⁱ

3. a^n :: aⁿ

4. a_{i+9} :: aᵢ₊₉

5. a_β :: aᵦ

6. x-bar p-hat :: x̄ p̂

7. Im, Re :: ℑ, ℜ

8. R, C, N, Z :: ℝ, ℂ, ℕ, ℤ

9. A ** B :: A ⊗ B

10. 2/5 :: ⅖

I'm a programming geek who has trouble sitting up straight, and when I do, especially sitting cross-legged, I get a muscular pain in my back -- some focused in my central lower back, some behind the lower half of my ribs.

I have a barbell and some dumbbells, and would like to target those muscles specifically. Any tips?

...?

Can you? And, erm, if you could, *would* you?

(Gals: I know that you are confused right now. You must trust me when I say that for guys, this question is totally unambiguous.)

Because I totally would. And I think you're hot.

No, but, like, seriously: how many of you all are just hoping that someone messages you saying "oh! You're so witty and your picture is so cute! Can we be internet dating?"

I've been posing very fundamental questions to my atheist kindred on Yahoo! Answers, because I seriously want to know how their mental processes work. I think I have learned something /very/ telling from the responses: the dominant sort of atheist on Yahoo! Answers considers God a character, as from a story. So, for example, my question about theology¹ was met with the following responses: First, the overwhelming majority of you confused theology with Bible study for some reason. But also, I was told that it would be like "demanding a debate about Zeus, or Odin", that "theology IS mythology", and that God is about "the business of their communities rather than the meaning of life or the universe." [As before, I was also told surprising things, this time about myself: apparently I'm "certainly" an agnostic. Also, as an atheist, I apparently think that theology is bullshit. Also, apparently I haven't read any theology, or else I have very simply seen why it is a joke.]

Now, if there's one thing stressed by every Catholic priest that I've ever talked to, every Muslim I've ever had a frank conversation with, it's that their God is not really that anthropomorphic sort of character, of any kind. God is a supernatural and transcendent entity. I mean, with the Muslims it is especially present: that everything is caused by Allah, who sustains every sort of natural process. A Christian might say "I see God in everything -- every sunset, the wind against my face, the song of birds, everything." This isn't the sort of thing you'd say of a mythological character of any kind. I mean, to take Hopkins as an example, "The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; it gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed," and, "for Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his, to the Father through the features of men’s faces."

I mean, you wouldn't say this sort of thing about your brother, your penpal, your potential secret admirer who you've not yet met, or Harry Potter. None of the traditional characters who engage your mental life has the sort of characteristics which would allow these sweeping transcendent statements to make any sort of sense. They only make sense if Christ and God, far from being the Mormon "humanoid who lives somewhere amongst the stars," transcends the entire mortal sphere of space, time, matter, and us. God, the theologians tell us, cannot be familiar to or even contained within human language, the way that characters so eloquently are.

It is somewhat as if a physicist like me was making sweeping statements to the effect of "Nature chooses the trajectory with the least action," and your response was, "Bah! I don't believe in nature! That's all just mythology." In the most literal sense, that response does make a salient point, but it misunderstands the way that the original statement was being used, because Nature is not some sort of character in some sort of fable, even though I have strictly speaking used her that way in this question.

With all that said as context, here is my question. Why are the gods you reject all (apparently) characters? What do you do with the many gods who many cultures insist cannot be characterized? Why is it that when I ask you guys about /theology/, you reply by talking about "the study of fairy stories," or "how many beans Jack traded his cow for," or "mythology," or "literature... treated as non-fiction"...? In short, why is your rejection of gods limited to bearded men in the sky, and can this limitation be justified with a rational argument?

(As before, those aren't rhetorical questions: I sincerely would love to see a bright take which would reason out such a conclusion. I like to be surprised.)

¹ My last question: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201007...

I know that this is a loaded question, but bear with me. In my last question¹, I asked why atheists used the specific term "illogical" in terms of belief. I, as an atheist, am dissatisfied with most of the responses. Several of them talked about "evidence" or "the burden of proof", in the context of /logic/, which of course is not an evidentiary field. And I tried to hint at that much in the three paragraphs in which I tried to expand on the question. So, I'm a little, I dunno, ashamed of the company I find myself in. Let us set this aside.

The question that I am asking here deals with the second most prevalent theme in those responses. I am told that "Faith is based on feelings," that theists believe "with zero evidence, but because it feels good," that theists take "a mere book... as authority of truths without questioning, without critique," that "all theists have is a musty old book", and so on.

As far as I can tell, all of these responses are expressing an absolute disbelief in anything which might be described as theology -- not saying "I know there's this theology, but it is stupid", but rather saying "theology doesn't exist -- there is no academic or intellectual study of the causal origins of the universe, or the causal structure of the aesthetic value you might place in a beautiful sunset, or what 'breathes fire into the equations' of physics, and so on."

Now, you might be dissatisfied with the /answers/ that a theist normally gives, but I am now asking a different question: Why do you believe that there is no room for an intellectual /question/ of God -- why do you believe that God is something which can only be about feeling good and submitting to an authority in a musty book? On what evidence are you discarding the traditional theological questions as, I don't know, nonsense or sentimentalism?

Just for disclosure: I don't mean any of the above as rhetorical. I am sincerely interested in these questions, because it sounds like some of you might be able to make /a logical case/ for this sort of thing, but I cannot imagine what such a case might look like -- what generic aspects of religious questions you would grasp upon to invalidate the enterprise as a whole, if you see what I mean. And if so many of we-who-are-logical believe this, then it is hard to believe that there is no logical case to be made for it. So I want to know this case.

¹ http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AsIFV...

I might accept "unreasonable" or, perhaps "irrational," but why do so many of you use the word "illogical" to describe someone's faith in a deity, god, or "higher power"? I mean, it seems clear to me that there is an internal logical structure to theistic claims, and that your disagreements are generally with /premisses/ and not with /the logic/ per se. I mean, if there's anything which Christians believe in (just to take them as an example) it is /logos/, which is identified with Christ in the Gospel of John.

Do atheists generally believe that there is a purely deductive argument with premisses which a believer would accept as unquestionable, which *proves* that there is no spiritual dimension to the universe -- thus making the term "illogical" a reasonable one?

Or is it more an informal sense of the term -- a sort of statement that "it is so clearly not worth it to sacrifice so much in pursuit of truth", in the sense that you might say "he will not make that chess move, it would be illogical" ...? Or is it that they all speak some other language as their native one, and in this other language the closest equivalent term has extra connotations? I really cannot puzzle out why you would use that particular word to criticize theists.

Within your religion, is oral sex allowed before marriage? Within marriage? Is oral sex allowed to be homosexual, or must it be strictly heterosexual? Is cunnilingus okay but fellatio not? Or perhaps they are okay as forms of foreplay -- i.e. as long as they are precursors to vaginal sex, and don't end themselves with orgasm. Or are there no taboos on oral at all in your religion?

What about the weirder side -- erotic foot-licking and analingus amongst them? I guess what I want to know is, if it's out-of-bounds, is it the /sex organs/ which are out of bounds, or is it the /whole sexual texture/ of the experience? which departs from a religious set of norms about the same?

(Please remember to include something saying which religion you consider yourself a part of, so that I know what context to frame your statements in.)

Not in the Lovecraft sense, but in the love-craft sense. Do you ♥ the madness, or do you fear it? Would you be one of the naked dancing cultists, or one of the independent detectives trying to figure out what's going on and stop it?

Okay, so I'm 25, right? Tall, strong, brilliant, endowed, and single, so I've got a lot going for me. But in my relationships I've pretty consistently dissatisfied my lovers on the religious side, whichever way they went.

I'd describe myself as "religious but not spiritual." I have ritual practices which I take very seriously for my moral well-being, I've read a bunch of theological writings from all sorts of different religions, and I've fond a lot of love in the cosmos. However, on the other hand, I don't believe in a supernatural dimension to life, or that there's "something there", or in ghosts, spirits, telepathy, psychics, fate, astrology, qi, et cetera. In other words, I am also pretty firmly an "atheist" by any stretch of the meaning.

Perhaps a better phrasing is this: I don't believe in God, because to my mind God is a question (really, a set of questions), but I think you can only believe in an answer to a question. When people say "I believe in God" I see that as saying "I know how the universe was created" or "I know how to explain the beauty in the universe," or so, and I just am too humble and prudent to claim that I have those sorts of answers -- that I know them with any confidence.

I guess given my past experiences, I want to ask, "why is this such a deal-breaker?" but since I've only been with a handful of women, I'm instead asking "Is this normally such a deal-breaker?". Would you still date me, knowing that this was going to be the way it is? That I would have religious practices but also a commitment to atheism? What makes this in particular such a point of tension with the women I've dated?

I think it's safe to say that most of us are unsatisfied with this forum. We do have a vehicle -- asking questions -- to have public discussion on the matter, but it seems like the ridiculously-high turnover ratio here keeps this from being at-all progressive.

If we were hypothetically able to change R&S, how could we make it better? Ban the people who aren't being productive, with a critical but open-minded eye? Create open discussion threads so that we could work towards a synthesis? Index topics better so that others could see what has already been said about the topics that are always being rehashed? How could we come together and agree on a protocol which makes this society of ours more worth our time?

Negative or apophatic theology is a way of thinking about the cause of the universe which goes something like this: "The First Cause isn't on the chart of 'exists' or 'does not exist,' because the human notion of existence is relative to the universe: but we're talking about something which *created* the universe. In other words, God can't be a kind of thing, because then the question 'why does anything exist?' is answered by 'because Something (with a Capital S) exists' -- clearly a non-answer. So God, as it were, isn't on the chart of existence vs. nonexistence; God exists *beyond existence*."

Is your goal, as an atheist, to argue that the universe doesn't have a causal explanation? Or that its causal explanation somehow lies inside of it? Or is there some insistence that the question doesn't even make sense? [And how so, when it seems like such a natural question to ask?

Or are you pretty capable of reconciling your own positions with negative theology? If so, what are the bounds at which theism ends and atheism begins?