The Grimm brothers didn’t collect fairy tales for amusement or children. They were philologists and they collected them to show the use of language and the way that words alter with time.
(There is a memorial statue of them in Hanau, but they are famous in Germany also because they took a stand for democracy and civil liberties in the 19th century.)
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You’ve just described picking up DC and plopping it in the middle of Vegas.
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You’re right – I misspoke. It does mock the park, because it mocks everything.
It’s a wide-ranging shotgun catching the shooters in the blast as well.
the billboard is not brilliant or succinct. It is crude and short, poorly aimed, and magisterially impressed with its own being.
The cognitive dissonance is such that even you are trying to deny the obvious fact that this has been put up by a bunch of assholes with poor social skills who wish to be congratulated by how brilliant and “free-thinking” they are.
UPDATED: added the missing “skills” after “poor social”
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I read the conversation. It’s clear you came here to comment for reasons other than to discuss the topic at hand. Toward the end of discussing the OP, I offer the following:
An individual’s particular religion plays no part in whether or not said person might be upset with corporate welfare which directly results in a higher tax bill for anyone living or working within the tax abatement zone. The fact that this particular gift of welfare from the state is twinged with one, specific flavor of one, specific religion adds salt to wounded wallets. Why would a Catholic, Jew, Muslim, etc., living within the abatement zone be less upset by it than an atheist?
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Back when I was Muslim, I hated the Creationist strain that ran through America, and I would have been livid that my tax dollars were paying for a single ounce of it- based on scientific accuracy alone. The church-state issue came in a close second. There are plenty of religious folk who aren’t crazy about creationism, and who shouldn’t be forced to support it with tax dollars. I would have been royally pissed if it was coming out of my paycheck because I worked in the county. Sadly, this tactic goes beyond creationism, where anyone with a few lobbying bucks or connections can make legislators do whatever they want.
The cognitive dissonance goes beyond that. This very thread is evidence that ridicule actually requires a lot more effort justifying it than it’s probably worth. The circular logic that you can convince people if they’d stop being so stubborn and agree is impatient at best, and very deeply counterproductive at worst.
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They’re both insulting, and it’s my humble opinion that there’s too much insult in today’s discourse. Far better would be a billboard protesting the tax subsidy and religious hiring situation. That, I could get behind, and with some $$, too.
Skeptic, do you know who my avatar is?
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Quite funny that in a thread about Creationism someone is trying to bring back philosophical concepts that, basically, died when Heisenberg propounded the Uncertainty Principle. There are of course philosophers who still try to argue that the world is deterministic, we just cannot observe the determinism (the world is in sharp focus but we look at it through an out of focus lens.) But that just shows that they do not actually understand physics, especially quantum tunnelling and radioactive decay. Schroedinger’s thought experiment isn’t about dead or alive cats, it is about the whole idea that the universe doesn’t run on rails.
Determinism and predestination are just as much intellectual bunkum as Creationism, it’s just that there are no discrepancies that are obvious to lay people.
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Clearly, it’s a conspiracy!
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You live in Seattle?
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When faced with such a choice - there might be reasons you are not conscious of. Or, it might be a random choice. Which is not deterministic, but entirely compatible with materialism. What makes no sense for me is the idea that there might be a third explanation - neither deciding because of reasons, nor deciding randomly. When I don’t have a reason for deciding either way, there’s nothing left but rolling dice; I can’t ask a separate “me” to make a decision, because there is only one “me”, and this me is going to pick randomly. If there was a separate “me” to ask, well, then I’d have a reason for doing what “I” tell me…
Well, I usually just try to give people the benefit of the doubt and use that philosophy to reign in my anger when I notice that there is no chance that my anger will have positive results.
But “victims”? Who is a victim of what? For X to be a victim of Y, X and Y have to be different, separate entities. An evil man is not a victim of his brain processes, he is his brain processes. And if he is punished, then the resulting suffering exists in his brain processes. It’s not like an innocent “person” has to take the blame for what “his brain” did.
I’m not talking “as if” humans should be held accountable. I believe they should be held accountable. I also believe they are just machines. It’s a matter of abstraction: you can interpret the world in terms of atoms and molecules, or you can interpret the world in terms of people and their actions. The higher up you go in abstraction, the more subjective things become. The higher levels of abstraction simply don’t exist on the lower levels. And arbitrarily mixing different levels of abstraction can lead you to strange conclusions.
Do you happen to play Go? That game has very simple rules. Yet most of the game happens at a more abstract level. I might look at a bunch of stones on the board and say “these stones extend influence towards the center” or I will say “these stones look weak”. There is nothing in the rules about “influence” or “weakness”, yet Go players will use this term when thinking about the game, when talking about the game, and when deciding their next move. Often, I can make a reasonable guess about how to use the influence that some stones exert without being able to calculate in advance how that will work based on the actual rules.
I do the same thing in the real world: I believe there is nothing in the rules about “accountability” or even “people”, but at a higher, more subjective and more human level of abstraction, I am a person who interacts with other people who will hold me accountable for my actions.
True for determinism. For predestination, I’d say that if there was a God, I don’t see why he couldn’t be omniscient enough to know in advance how all quantum-mechanical randomness and uncertainty will turn out. And all the philosophy about determinism will become very relevant again when we develop general artificial intelligence or simulate human minds on deterministic computer hardware.
But I don’t think the difference between determinism and quantum mechanics is actually very relevant for @dug’s argument, because all that quantum mechanics adds to the game is true randomness. I think it makes no difference whether someone is being held accountable for the results of deterministic natural laws, or for the results of a quantum mechanical random event, or for the result of a computer-simulated random number generator that is deterministic but looks and feels random.
What, first you tell me that God is real, and now you’re saying that AUSTRALIA is a real place? I just don’t understand you theists. 
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You can’t mock the myth of Oedipus by saying it’s a story of murder and incest. Because it is, and no one denies it.
You can’t mock Star Wars by saying that the destruction of Alderaan was mass murder. You can’t mock Star Wars by pointing out that it didn’t really happen.
I feel the most aggressive part of the billboards is the fact that they do put up a billboard in front of somebody else’s amusement park. I could be happy in a world where atheists don’t put up anti-creationist billboards in front of creationist parks and creationists don’t put up anti-science billboards in front of museums of natural history.
But I don’t want a world where it’s considered unacceptable to point out that the deliberate drowning of all but a handful of humans is genocide. The concept that killing all but a handful of humans is a real and good thing deserves mocking. The destruction of Alderaan, on the other hand, is regarded neither as real nor as good, so if you point out that it’s a story of genocide, no one will feel mocked.
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There are a lot of different nuances in what compatibilism means depending on who’s making the argument, all they all have in common is the position that one can hold that humans have free will/moral responsibility for moral choices while also holding to metaphysical naturalism. I was bringing it up to note that there have been and continue to be serious philosophers trained in the discipline who work to build a logical and rational case that humans have free will/moral responsibility for moral choices while also holding to metaphysical naturalism. The accounts for why individuals have moral responsibility for moral choices vary, often the fact that the clockwork model of a deterministic universe is an anachronism comes into play, sometimes there are arguments that take Hume’s criticism of the necessity of causes as a basis, there are a lot of current thinkers who discuss mind as an emergent phenomena that can’t meaningfully be accounted for by deterministic reductionism, etc. So it’s not really the case that compatibilism means that if you believe the world follows natural law that the end result is a determinism that negates human agency, merely explaining it away with “feeling free.”
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Really? Calling the park “Genocide & Incest Park” mocks everything? Everything ?
If that is your idea of “everything” then I’d say you seem to find butthurt everywhere, and there is nothing the Tri-State Free thinkers could post that you wouldn’t find offensive.
Miss the point much? Nobody has created an Oedipus park holding up Oedipus as the example of a good thing. It’s a literal Tragedy - something learn from and not emulate. Creationists don’t consider the mass murder of every creature on earth a tragedy but rather a good thing, so good they consider it a cute children’s story, suitable for painting on the walls of nurseries. Or for an “amusement” park to bring children to. Certainly a mere critical billboard is less offensive than an amusement park celebrating genocide as a good thing.
And yes, if someone were to make an Alderaan Park and claim that Alderaan wa a real place and its destruction was the apotheosis of good then it would be worthy of mockery to point out the ridiculousness of such claims. And it would also be ridiculous for people to defend the believers of Alderaan as being poor delicate flowers who must not be mocked.
No, but you’re obviously missing mine :-). We seem to be in full agreement, except of course for the question of who missed whose point.
I was just pointing out how calling the park “genocide & incest park” does not mock everything, because… well precisely all the things you have just reiterated. Oedipus, Star Wars, etc. are not mocked because they never claimed that their respective murders, genocides and incests were real and good. The Genocide & Incest Park is mocked, but it deserves mocking precisely because it claims that genocide is a good thing.
In general, I’d say it’s pretty hard to seriously mock things that don’t need mocking by just making a simple true statement.
Oh, I’m sure I miss all sorts of points… Sigh…
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Well I’m sure you know that there is quite a bit of debate about whether quantum principles apply to neurons. I’d quite like it to be true (for my own reasons). But mostly, I’m not sure how quantum principles help the situation. It doesn’t make a person any more “free” or “responsible” to say that their actions are dictated by miracles of indeterminacy than it does to say they are caused by macro forces.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a massive flood and…no, there would have to be a God for that to happen.
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Yes I could see the different flavours in the article. I must confess I do not yet understand them.
I am sure that the emergent phenomena stuff is right, but I’m not sure that it gets us away from determinism or can offer a genuine agency. Chaos theory is still deterministic even though it’s complex and non-linear.
Second Law of Thermodynamics; entropy increases for a closed system. To postulate a god who knew in advance the ultimate state of the universe and all the intermediate states is to take out Ockham’s razor, use to to try to cut through concrete, jump up and down on it and finally put it in a bath of hydrochloric acid. While we cannot prove that a god is not tracking and recording the world lines of every single particle in the universe with minute precision over the billions of years of the existence of the universe, it is possible to suggest that comparing the alternatives - that the universe runs on randomness and that entropy simply increases, or that the universe is subject to a level of book-keeping that even McKinsey doesn’t aspire to - one stands out as very much more scientifically probable than the other.
To put it another way, predestination is just determinism + teleology.
If determinism is bunk, then free will is at least possible. I can decide to go down one path or another depending on whether an atom of plutonium decays in a given time interval; no matter how I arrive at the decision to do that, the result is that which action I perform is unpredictable in advance.
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Yes, I can’t disprove what you say about unconscious reasons. And if the "third"option is correct then it will be, by definition, non-reductionistic – so it could not be proved by reason in a similar way that a random event can’t be proven. There might always be a cause we don’t know about (see Einstein!). What I’m trying to suggest however is that this elusive third option is the way we all think instinctively. We react to people as if they were (at least partly) causa sui rather than merely effects of other forces.
But what about randomness, does that help? Well I’m not sure. A truly random event seems indistinguishable from a supernatural event – something happens for no scientific or material cause whatsoever. It’s an irreducible event – just like a decision under cartesian dualism! By itself that doesn’t make a person free – just buffeted by a different kind of force. But what if the metaphysical events we call “random” are actually signs of another kind of metaphysical event?..
Is the conscious person his brain or the effect of his brain? I can’t quite put my finger on what’s wrong with this but we know that there is such a thing as diminished responsibility. We wouldn’t think it was right to treat a mentally disabled criminal in the same way we treat an evil genius. Yet if the actions of both are simply generated by their brains then this seems unfair.
I’m afraid I don’t play Go, but I think I get the gist of the analogy. This is a strong point, I think. My (vague) question is, whether what you say about this higher level of interpersonal interaction is justified. Not everybody would agree it was. For instance, there was an angry reaction on this website when it was revealed that Anders Breivik was living quite a luxurious life in his Norwegian prison. The feeling seemed to be that he deserved to suffer. But the Norwegian system is predicated on the idea that crime is pathology.
Both totally real, man 
