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Dion

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Everything posted by Dion

  1. Dion
    Those were some of the most beautiful counter attacks I have seen in recent years.
  2. Dion
    @Barbara @Rmpr @Henrique Have you guys seen this?
  3. Dion
    I agree with you. But as absurd as that sounds to you and me, there are some who do not think homosexuality and catholicism/christianity are incompatible. It probably has its appeal to those, besides the more practical benefits like taxation, since they believe they should be together in the eyes of god or something to that effect.
  4. Dion
    It's super challenging and interesting at the same time. Which is far more than I can say about law. How about you? Partying like crazy over there with the euros and everything? My brother is in Lisbon right now, he's told me he's having a blast, amazing city.
  5. Dion
    The same is happening in Brazil.
  6. Dion
    Hey, what's up? I've been kinda busy. Long story short, I was pretty disappointed with law, so I studied a bit last year and got admitted to med school in an even better university than the one I studied law. And, well, it seems like it was true and med students really have a shit ton to study, so... but I still come here from time to time. You doing good?
  7. Dion
    I loved this:
  8. Dion
    No banning can ever completely negate anything. What it does is make it harder. If you really wanna kill another person you can always find a way. But guns make it easier. Isn't that the purpose of guns anyway – making killing easier? Homemade bombs take a lot more effort and knowledge to be used. You don't even need to ban guns for good, here in Brazil you can buy and keep one, as long as you meet certain requirements.
  9. Dion
    NRA must have some really exceptional people working for them if they can somehow shift the blame from how easy it is to buy a gun in the US and how a country with 5% of the worlds' population accounts for almost 1/3 of mass shootings. Maybe that's just me, but I wouldn't feel the tiniest little bit safer if everyone around me was armed. It would be the opposite really. And sadly there has been a rise in conservative agenda recently here in Brazil. I wouldn't be surprised if the US was funding this in the background again. We have enough gun killings already as it is, we don't need more.
  10. Dion
    I guess if the Bible is right about hell then I'll have lots of company there
  11. Dion
    Well, the matter that got expanded in the big bang, it had to exist before didn't it? There was a condensed mass of matter before the big bang. Matter existed before, the big bang theory does not say matter was created there, it says the expansion of our universe started there. The beginning you're talking about is the beginning of the expansion, not the beginning of everything. Just the beginning of the universe as we know it.
  12. Dion
    In addition to everything, I think it is a bit hypocritical that creationists are perfectly okay with saying that God, an entity which we have 0 evidence of having ever existed or even existing right now, just came to be out of nothing or has always existed but the universe, which we can currently experience and produce evidence about, can't be perpetual or have been originated out of nothing. If anything, our experience should point us to the direction that things have always existed. As far as I know we seem to be unable to create or destroy matter. I also don't think we have ever seem it be created or destroyed either.
  13. Dion
    Not everything evolved. I'll explain as clearly as I can. In summary, evolution started as soon as there was an organic form of life who could replicate itself and also suffer changes while or after doing so. From this point on evolution started its work. Anything before this was subject to a different phenomena other than evolution. You have point A and point B in time. Point A we have no life on the planet. Point B we have the first living organism. Did it evolve? No, it didn't cause it is the first one to ever exist. Evolution starts after the first living organism replicated, the first one can't be the result of replication and as such can't have evolved. It can have been created by a supernatural being or assembled randomly or anything else really. Something other than evolution happened between point A and B. That's why there are multiple theories for the origin of life even though evolution is almost a scientific truth, it's because these are different things, they explain different things. Are you following? Evolution explains the place where we are now and further back to the the replications and mutations of the first living being. It does not explain or even tries to explain how the first living being came to be. Do you get it now? The fact that we don't know how the first living being came to be does not invalidate evolution because that's not what evolution depicts. That's why evolution is compatible with creationism even. This is very tiresome, I seem to be repeating the same things over and over and you don't get it. Evolution requires replication and change. If something does not replicate and change it is not the subject of evolution. Evolution starts as soon as an organism was able to replicate and change.
  14. Dion
    Are you trolling me?
  15. Dion
    You realize what you have just said has nothing to do with evolution, right? Also, I never said there was nothing. I actually have said that I think it is more likely that things have always existed than a creator has always existed, which is what creationism preaches. At least I have evidence that things exist now, whereas I have no evidence that a creator has ever existed.
  16. Dion
    That's what YOU are not understanding. What you call the first information is the first organism. Evolution does not explain how the first organism was originated it explains how it changed and also tries to explain the mechanisms involved in that process. It's not faulty reasoning, it's you failing to understand what's the phenomena that evolution deals with. How do you jump from nothing to information is not what evolution explains or tries to explain. That would be what primordial soup tries to explain.
  17. Dion
    Evolution deals with how organisms change over time and differentiate themselves from one another. It has nothing to do with the origin of life or universe. It only deals with life after it appeared and it has nothing to do with how it was originated. It is even compatible with creationism somewhat if we assume god created the first organisms who then evolved through mutation and natural selection. The origin of everything and evolution are not tied up. To be honest, most of the complaints I see from ordinary people about evolution come from a poor understanding of it.
  18. Dion
    Evolution and the origin of the universe or life are completely separate things. They state the universe as we know it had a beginning. And such as everything else with science that may even be proved wrong in the future upon arrival of new evidence. Look at it this way. You get home and your wife is naked with another dude in the bedroom, they're panting, there's sperm... do you know for sure they had sex? No, you don't. Is it completely plausible to assume so? I think it is. That's about the degree of evidence we have that evolution is right. We don't have a live stream or video tape of the act but we're pretty damn close.
  19. Dion
    I don't know if I would call it faith. Calling it a guess would be more appropriate, I have absolutely no idea whether what I just said is the actual case or not, I just consider it as a possibility. I think faith requires a bit more confidence in one's beliefs. Faith as I understand is a strong belief in something that has little or no supportive evidence. In this sense, I wouldn't call it faith because I lack the confidence that this is the explanation. Additionally, my belief in evolution isn't either because there is strong evidence supporting it, at this point in time it's something almost certain. And even if it's wrong by any chance, I don't think anyone can say it did not make a hell lot of sense to reach such a conclusion given the information we have today. Heck, even popes have claimed it to be true.
  20. Dion
    Yes. I'm more of an agnostic atheist, as such I believe it is possible that there was a creator. Do I think it is likely? No. Especially not a god in the molds of any religion I've seen so far. None of those religions nor their gods look like what I think the creator would have been like or would have wanted to pass to us as a doctrine. The origin of everything is way harder to guess than the origin of life and there are many theories that look somewhat plausible given how little we know about it. As for myself, I like the superstring theories. Even if the universe and space-time as we know it may have had a beginning and the big bang theory is somewhat right, perhaps the conditions in the background that originated the big bang have always existed before time even began in the big bang. It is difficult for our brains to accept something that doesn't have a beginning because we are wired to believe things start and things end from most of our observations of the natural world. But if you look at it, the concept of God doesn't solve this either, if God created everything, then who created God? Where does he come from? This only leaves the conclusion that He must have always existed. If one can accept something to be perpetual like God, one can also suppose that, instead of the creator, maybe the "creation" has always existed and there was no need for a creator. Maybe the fundamental matter that constitutes everything has always existed and by chance things lined up in a way to cause the big bang and the origin of our universe as we know it. That sounds to me as good or better than a Creator-creation hypothesis.
  21. Dion
    I don't know. I think it makes sense. There are others similar to the primordial soup which also look decent. I don't like the panspermia theory, I think it only moves the question elsewhere to "so how did life began wherever it was before coming to earth?" Btw, I don't think I get what you meant by information.
  22. Dion
    The bolded part I think is a terrible concept. I get the impression it starts from the wrong place. First and foremost, life didn't have to exist, you know? Life is the exception, it looks miraculous because we ARE the exception. Look how many planets and how many places don't have any form of life, or at least none that we know of or similar to the ones we are familiar with. I don't know how to put this better but it seems everything fell in place in this particular place and time because it has. If it hadn't we wouldn't be here to observe it. Imagine if the earth's rotation had been different – well, we wouldn't exist then and as such we would never know, you see? We are only able to see the events lined up because that's the condition for our existence. And also there might be another couple of exceptions like us, because the universe is huge it is likely that it happened elsewhere in the cosmos where conditions are similar. And second, there might be other forms of life that we don't even know how to start looking for because they are not biochemical forms of life like ourselves or because they may exist in another scale of size or parameter.
  23. Dion
    I do not know how logical thinking evolved. But if I had to guess, I'd say it was similar to how other features have evolved. I mean, let's say you have a population of species X. One of these individuals from species X has a mutation that enables him to do better associations between cause and effect because of some differences in the way his brain functions. For instance, let's say he eats some berries and it causes him a major diarrhea or something. Now his brain makes a link between those two things, while the other individuals from species X cannot. From this point onwards this mutant individual already has an advantage over his peers since he'll avoid eating those berries. As evolution progressed this system became more and more complex as organisms got selected by their brain capacity, we humans just happen to be currently the apex in this regard. Now I wouldn't know the exact mechanism which provides us with this ability. Perhaps if I'm a neurologist one day I'd be able to tell you better. Concerning the origin of life that's anyone's guess, but there have been some interesting experiments. If I recall correctly, one of them was made by a scientist named Oparin. He tried to recreate our primitive atmosphere composition and continuous electrical discharges and, after a couple weeks or months running the experiment, he found that amino acids, organic matter which compounds proteins, had been spontaneously created at the bottom. Now imagine this experiment running in a HUGE scale, the whole planet, for millions or billions of years. It might have originated the first cells and then evolution started its magic, or it might not, nobody knows for sure.
  24. Dion
    The ideology is using logical thinking, if I assume I'm allowed to kill you, then I have to assume you are allowed to kill me. Living in society is sort of having a mutual agreement, I won't cause you harm and you won't cause me harm. Inflicting pain is not an ideology, is not a standard, is not an opinion, it's Biology. It's biologically unpleasant. It shouldn't be subjective. It should be derived from using rationality to achieve a positive well-being to the human species. Does it look like to you that was what Hitler was doing? Because happiness is pleasant. Again, Biology. Concern about others makes sense in an evolutionary sense if it was advantageous to survival and passing the genes along. Your understanding about evolution is flawed.
  25. Dion
    It is possible to reach a "morality" solely by using rationality. It's all about reaching a state of universalized well-being which will/would also benefit myself as an individual. It's about realizing humans can achieve a better quality of life as a whole by working together, cooperating. And it's actually better than morality because you don't have to deal with absolute statements like "killing is bad/wrong". Because killing can do good in certain situations if you look at the greater picture. It's true that to preserve the lives of everyone in a society, which is the primary reason for humans organizing themselves as a group – survival (or at least that was the starting reason), starting by protecting every single life is a good concept. But in an extreme example, there may occur a situation in which the protection of someone's life endangers the lives of the whole society, well, in this situation protecting that single life defeats the purpose of society itself. Ending that life is not bad in this sense. However, if you think about it in terms of morality than it's way harder to deal with it. The way every individual should operate is focusing to maximize their own well-being while avoiding causing harm to others, or hindering their chances to reach their own state of well-being, as best as possible, in fact, aiding others to reach it would be best whenever possible. That's my "morality", it has nothing to do with God.
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