quote:edited by Beren: Content removed to avoid offending people. Warning, if you are religious and you click on that link, you might be offended.
OSC is a pretty tolerant guy, as he has been exceedingly gracious in answering questions about his faith, and has rarely moderated our religious discussions.
However, I'm posting this here just in case he or his family members find such ads offensive and would like to block them from Ornery.
[ December 02, 2005, 07:59 AM: Message edited by: Beren One Hand ]
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posted
Of course he'd find the ad offensive. Simple as that. Whether or not he actually comes into "Books, Films, Food and Culture" anymore is another thing. I doubt he'll see this.
And I'm not going to speak for him on whether he would mind the ad being on Ornery, and I doubt anyone else who may answer this will be qualified to do so. Of course, I could be wrong, but I wouldn't hold your breath if I were you.
[ December 02, 2005, 07:30 AM: Message edited by: cheiros do ender ]
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It seems to me the most logical place to register such an observation (is it a complaint?) is on Ornery. Even if Mr. Card doesn't see the post, it will surely be seen by someone there who both can get in touch with Mr. Card, and who has a vested interest in the site itself.
posted
Or you could write Papa, or just click on the report icon on one of the posts and explain the problem. GoogleAds allows you to block ads you don't want, they should be able to knock that one out.
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On second thought, a personal email to a moderator on either forum would likely get back to Mr. Card as I can't imagine they wouldn't have a way to contact him. That would also serve to get his notice without further disseminating the offensive material. [edit: or what Chris said]
And I only say "offensive material" because it becomes so in being posted here. The person who runs the site has every right to his opinion. He has every right to advertise his site and seek wider dissemination of his opinion. You, however, are the person who brought the opinion into the Card's living room and waved it around.
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Please, not the living-room again! I thought the intention was really nice, and that's far enough for me. Now the method...
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I haven't been following Hatrack that closely lately, but the last time I posted a similar observation about a copyright infringement issue, OSC did respond in the thread.
Moreover, I also thought Geoff and Christine might also have opinions on this subject as well (I don't know if they hang out at Ornery). I know they are busy folks so maybe they've stopped lurking on Hatrack.
To answer Karl's question, this is not really a complaint. I just thought this is something the Cards may be interested in knowing.
It is not big enough deal to email them directly, so I also posted this thread to get a sense of whether the people here who know the Cards better than I do can shed some light on whether I should even bother them about this.
Of course, the real reason I posted here instead of Ornery is that I like you guys better.
Edited to add: Anna, I hope this is not interpreted as disrupting the living room again. I don't want to turn this into a "why you anti-religious people keep bashing religion" thread. Maybe I should delete the example so it doesn't turn into that type of thread. Thanks for the reminder. Posts: 4116 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
I'll do as Chris said and report your own post. That way you'll be sure it goes to the good person.
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I guess my point is that there are large numbers of people here who would likely be offended by the piece. Why spread the offense among those who can't do anything about it? What's the point?
If the "living-room" metaphor is inadequate, how about finding a Playboy magazine that blew into Mr. Card's front yard and taking into an OSC Fan club meeting and waving it around hoping OSC might be there?
[edit: Removed potentially unwarranted criticism. Sorry if it was seen before I deleted it.]
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KarlEd did have a very valid point though, BerenOneHand. You are the one who posted it here. The last quoted paragraph is more than enough to demonstrate the tone of the ad. Please delete the rest of the quotation. Cuz leaving it as is makes it look as if you are trolling.
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I do understand your point, KarlEd. It's just that I'm fed up with the living-room metaphor, it has been discussed a million times and I don't think it's adequate. Anyway, I'm sorry if I sounded angry. And I'll report the post myself, that way I'm sure it won't stay here for too long.
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Beren, I don't think you've done anything to deserve this thread becoming aimed at you as a "why you anti-religious people keep bashing religion" thread.. And as such, I don't see that happening. You need not worry about that.
I'm just surprised that site was created by the founder of HowStuffWorks.com: http://whydoesgodhateamputees.com/god-author.htm (non-offensive link). I don't see why he's not confident enough to put it on, or at least link it on his HSW's site. Seem's an appropriate enough place to put it, no?
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Update: I've reported my own post as suggested. I've never used that function before. It figures that the first person who crosses the line would be . . . myself.
Karl, no apologies necessary. I apologize if the example in the post offended people. It was not my intent to do so.
To clarify, I didn't post that example as an endorsement of that website. The stuff in there is so over the top that it is probably on the same rhetorical level as Chick publications. I only posted the example to highlight portions that I think should bother the Cards.
But you guys are right. A link will do just fine. Why force people to read that stuff?
aspectre, you missed my edit by a few minutes. But you are correct, though.
Ender, that is a surprising revelation. "How Stuff Works" is a wonderful and catchy domain name. This other name of his is just sad and offensive.
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quote:Originally posted by Anna: I do understand your point, KarlEd. It's just that I'm fed up with the living-room metaphor, it has been discussed a million times and I don't think it's adequate. Anyway, I'm sorry if I sounded angry. And I'll report the post myself, that way I'm sure it won't stay here for too long.
I didn't think you sounded angry. In fact, I dislike the "living-room" metaphor, myself, and agree that it is inadequate. The only reason I used it here is that the thread was about OSC's reaction, and we've been told before that he views this place as his living room, so I thought the metaphor worked in context. (Though the second metaphor works for my point, too.)
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However I do not think the site controls what adds show up on the gogle thing at the bottom. They did that, I think, as a way to raise funds to help pay for both sites. I would suspect that Google would have rules about sites controlling what their banner puts up.
The sites on those adds are not random. I think Google mines the forum and finds topics being discussed. I might be wrong though.
quote: Can I filter the ads that are displayed on my site?
Yes. To create and manage a filter list of websites whose ads you'd like to restrict from showing on your site or AdSense for search results pages, simply log in to your account at https://www.google.com/adsense and click the Competitive Ad Filter link below the AdSense for content or AdSense for search tab. You can create separate filter lists for your content pages and for your AdSense for search results pages. Ads for the websites that you add to your competitive ad filter list typically will not run on your pages, but remember that filtering sites may decrease the number of ads that can appear on your pages as well as decrease your potential earnings.
For more details on using your competitive ad filter, please read the Filtering Ads section of this FAQ.
We also combine an editorial team and filtering technology to maximize the quality of the Google ads on Google and publisher sites:
*
Review: Across the Google network, ads are reviewed using a combination of human and automated processes before they are shown on publishers' sites. The review process takes into account a variety of factors, including the quality of the ad and whether the ad is suitable for all audiences. *
Sensitive content filters: At times, certain ads may not be appropriate to run on all pages. For example, Google automatically filters out ads that would be inappropriate on a news page about a catastrophic event.
Please note that Google does not commit that all ads for the websites that you add to your competitive ad filter list or ads containing objectionable content will be prevented from display on your site.
posted
Getting back to the original subject, personally I would like to know how a religious person answers the questions put on that site. I don't think it is particularly offensive; it seems to me that our friend is bending over backwards to be reasonable and gentle. On the other hand, being offended is a fairly common defensive mechanism for questions you don't want to answer.
So tell me again, how is the Gabriel bit in Mohammed's revelation any different from comrade Smith's angel?
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At very very very best, the site provides ammunition to those who use "Christians are persecuted" to manipulate the gullible. At worst, it is an attack on natural philosophy through spreading the disinformation that Science is in opposition to Religion.
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The problem with that website is that calling religious people "delusional" and saying "God hates so and so" is not the best way to have a rational discussion about religion. Posts: 4116 | Registered: Apr 2002
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Well, I did think the guy was trying to be gentle, and he does make a few interesting points, but much of it is laughable at best. I find it particularly amusing that he thinks himself clever for discovering that people that don't believe the Joseph Smith story *surprise* don't believe the Joseph Smith story, and the people that don't believe the Mohammed story likewise consist of people that just so happen to not believe the Mohammed story, etc. And while the Santa example is indeed simple, as the author claims, it is a very poor analogy. I didn't find this material to be offensive, just uninteresting.
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While the webmaster doesn't believe in Santa or Jesus, he does urge his users to buy his T-shirts "just in time for Christmas."
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quote:Originally posted by Beren One Hand: While the webmaster doesn't believe in Santa or Jesus, he does urge his users to buy his T-shirts "just in time for Christmas."
Because "Christmas", aside from having some minor religious overtones, is a marketing juggernaut that one would have to be a fool to overlook or underestimate. Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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I read some of the "godhatesamputees" site and I don't find it offensive. The guy is obviously sincere and trying to fix what he feels like is a terrible problem with humanity and our country, the problem of 90% of the people believing in God, whom he feels to be imaginary. He's trying to save us from our delusions, which I find sort of sweet. He's just clueless, that's all, not offensive. At least not to me. Like Joseph Smith, I don't blame people at all for not believing what I believe. If I hadn't experienced the things I've experienced, I wouldn't believe it either.
So anyway, I just wanted to stand up for those ads. At least the part that I read wasn't offensive at all to me, it was just trying to persuade me and save me from myself. Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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As a rule of thumb, I don't think it's a good idea to either be offended on behalf of somebody else or try to decide whether others ought to be offended or not.
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quote: I find it particularly amusing that he thinks himself clever for discovering that people that don't believe the Joseph Smith story *surprise* don't believe the Joseph Smith story, and the people that don't believe the Mohammed story likewise consist of people that just so happen to not believe the Mohammed story, etc.
That's actually part of his point, you realize. Which is that the majority of the people on the planet don't believe any particular religious "superstition," no matter how normal and common that belief might seem to someone living within a specific culture.
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I'm going to flip the challenge around. I will post several sentences from his website that I have selected:
quote:The Bible is the sacred text of the Christian faith. The Bible is the book that contains the Ten Commandments, the revelation that Jesus is our resurrected savior and the story of our creation. This is God's holy word to his children. God is perfect. Therefore the Bible is perfect. Jesus is God, God does answer prayers, God did create Adam and humans have both souls and eternal life.
It's a ridiculous challenge and one to easily manipulated for any sane proponent of an idea to accept.
His Santa example is just as ridiculous. Consider the proposition, "Person X did Y" (assuming Y is a singular event such as "carried this gift through the air in a sleigh and placed it under this tree sometime between 12:00 and 6:00 AM"). You talk to person A who admits to actually doing Y. You talk to person B who admits to doing Y1, a similar event also claimed to have been performed by X. You repeat this 1,000 times. At this point, you are in possession of some strong evidence that person X did not do Y.
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I don't think Mr Card would find the discussion about this site offensive, even if the site itself were.
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quote:That's actually part of his point, you realize. Which is that the majority of the people on the planet don't believe any particular religious "superstition," no matter how normal and common that belief might seem to someone living within a specific culture
I do realize that was his point, I just didn't find it particularly enlightening or useful to the discussion. I thought that essential idea was more or less obvious to most people already, the idea that there are many different beliefs that everyone else tend to disagree with. And I don't see how the fact that many different people and cultures that have differing interpretations of essentially the same idea is supposed to mean that they are all delusional. But then again, perhaps that's just my spiritual side of my brain drowning out the rational side Posts: 1256 | Registered: May 2005
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Actually, I think the point is a little stronger than "most people believe different things". It is rather that "most people's religious beliefs sound quite silly to an outsider." It is not so much an issue of what people believe, as why they believe things that are instantly recognisable as nonsense to anyone outside the belief system.
Dag, I do not think you have 'flipped around' the challenge, because you have not got as much material there as he allows his opponents. I doubt you can manage to take thirty minutes' worth of out-of-context quotes from that site, and have them all sound like a fundie. But even if you could, I do not think the two cases are equivalent. The site, after all, is intended as a contribution to a debate; it can reasonably contain summaries of its opponents' arguments. The Bible, on the other hand, is not part of an ongoing debate; it is intended, among other things, as a history of your god's relationship with humans. Quotes from it, showing Yahweh as an evil being, are therefore not irrelevant - it can be assumed they were not put there by opponents of your god in order to discredit it.
As for Santa, I think you are kind of missing the point, here. Yes, we can easily see that Santa does not exist. And we can also, easily, see that your god does not exist. It's not that the Santa story is not ridiculous; it is rather that the Jesus story is also ridiculous.
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quote:Dag, I do not think you have 'flipped around' the challenge, because you have not got as much material there as he allows his opponents. I doubt you can manage to take thirty minutes' worth of out-of-context quotes from that site, and have them all sound like a fundie.
He said 30 verses. I could certainly find the equivalent.
quote:But even if you could, I do not think the two cases are equivalent. The site, after all, is intended as a contribution to a debate; it can reasonably contain summaries of its opponents' arguments. The Bible, on the other hand, is not part of an ongoing debate; it is intended, among other things, as a history of your god's relationship with humans. Quotes from it, showing Yahweh as an evil being, are therefore not irrelevant - it can be assumed they were not put there by opponents of your god in order to discredit it.
The point is that it is easy to take things out of context when selecting 30 verses from 60-some odd books.
quote:Yes, we can easily see that Santa does not exist. And we can also, easily, see that your god does not exist. It's not that the Santa story is not ridiculous; it is rather that the Jesus story is also ridiculous.
We can easily see that Santa doesn't exist [i]because nobody is claiming he exists[i].
He is saying something like, "The only reason you don't disbelieve the Christian story but do disbelieve the Santa story is that you have experience in rationalizing the Christian story."
But it's just not true. The reason I disbelieve the Santa story is that I have directly contradictory evidence that I have personally witnessed that he did not leave particular gifts. Further, there isn't anyone who's actually claiming
All this Santa/IPU analogy misses the point: Nobody's really saying Santa exists, except children who have been told about Santa by someone who doesn't believe Santa exists. Nobody believes the IPU exists.
Making up or pointing to untrue supernatural stories is not evidence of any weight that other supernatural stories don't exist.
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Santa, though, is only the trainer-wheel version of the argument; it is intended to show that humans recognise a certain kind of story as false even without actual evidence. It is true that we have evidence against Santa; but if you should encounter the story for the first time as an adult, would you believe it? Never mind investigating; you would dismiss it as false because it is preposterous.
Continuing on to the more advanced version : I assume that as a Catholic you do not believe in Joseph Smith's visions and golden plates, right? But here you can hardly claim there is direct evidence against the story. Again, you recognise this as a fairy tale, entirely in the absence of actual investigation. And here there certainly are people who claim this as literal, exact truth, our esteemed host being one of them.
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quote:I assume that as a Catholic you do not believe in Joseph Smith's visions and golden plates, right? But here you can hardly claim there is direct evidence against the story. Again, you recognise this as a fairy tale, entirely in the absence of actual investigation.
I don't claim to recognize Smith's account as a fairy tale. This is a common mistake, one this site makes often.
Smith may have seen what he claimed to see. He may have imagined it. I make no claims about whether he saw or heard what he says he saw or heard, just about the truth of the the conclusions he drew from what he heard and saw. I hold beliefs which contradict the beliefs of those who believe Smith fully. By the nature of those beliefs, I believe Smith's conclusions about God are wrong. Just as Smith and his followers believe that my beliefs about apostolic succession are wrong.
In short, I don't recognize it as a fairy tale.
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quote: In short, I don't recognize it as a fairy tale.
I think you're splitting that hair a little fine, Dag. What would it take to make something a "fairy tale," as opposed to one man's possibly mistaken "vision?"
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Dag, I'll accept that you haven't made any claims about whether Joseph Smith actually saw or heard what he claimed, but is it safe to assume that you don't believe he did? Or are you saying that you do believe that he saw and heard what he said he did, but also believe that he misinterpreted his experience?
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IIRC, many Christians believe the delusions and visions claimed by competing faiths were actually sent by demons or evil spirits.
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I won't insist on the words 'fairy tale'; the point is, you apparently do not consider it reasonable to draw the conclusions that Mormons draw, from the claims of Joseph Smith. Likewise you do not consider it reasonable to draw Moslem conclusions from the claims of Mohammed, or Hindu conclusions from the Vedas, or Norse-pantheon conclusions from the Ynglingasaga. Am I right so far?
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Well, yes, I know lots of different things that "many christians" believe. I'm actually wondering what Dag, whose ideas I respect, believes. Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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quote:It is not so much an issue of what people believe, as why they believe things that are instantly recognisable as nonsense to anyone outside the belief system.
But why is it supposedly instantly recognizable as nonsense? Some people feel it is nonsense because of what they have learned about the physical world, namely, that "supernatural" things can't happen. But they didn't start out that way. They had to learn to disbelieve certain things.
It's one thing to suggest that evidence disproves the belief in Jesus. It is quite another to suggest that even the notion of his divinity is impossible to even discuss rationally. The only reason why certain beliefs may seem like utter nonsense to some people is because it conflicts with a person's current beliefs about what is and isn't possible. Just because a person hasn't learned to accept that certain things are impossible to some people's notions of the physical universe, that in itself does not make him delusional.
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OK, that's actually a good point. Let me rephrase : Why do people believe things that of their own religion, which they dismiss as incompatible with their experience when believers in other religions put them forth as evidence? As the saying goes, you're almost as much an atheist as I am; I believe in one god less. Why do you not apply the same rules of evidence to your own god that you apply to everyone else's?
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