Pope Francis describes ‘ideological Christians’ as a ‘serious illness’

That's how propagandists like to infiltrate people's minds. They use the words of their enemies, but distort the meanings to discredit their opponents. Despicable.

Thrasher said:

That's how propagandists like to infiltrate people's minds. They use the words of their enemies, but distort the meanings to discredit their opponents. Despicable.

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That is what they have done with many other scientific terms - worst is theory, which in real scientific terms has a specific meaning, but in the hands of a specific sect of religious zealots has come to have as much value as the ramblings of some drunk postulating in a pub ...

Damian said:

So basically i gave you a reference saying what I was saying. You come up with a counter claim and you cant back it up and somehow i am in the wrong?

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I just also want to point out that i never talked about all of Al Qaeda. Just the suiciders.

txa1265 said:

That is what they have done with many other scientific terms - worst is theory, which in real scientific terms has a specific meaning, but in the hands of a specific sect of religious zealots has come to have as much value as the ramblings of some drunk postulating in a pub …

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Well if the Big Bang Theory is a scientific theory, i dont see why not.

Damian said:

Well if the Big Bang Theory is a scientific theory, i dont see why not.

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You don't see why not because you do not understand everything behind the Big Bang Theory...

Neither do I to be honest, but I don't care much about the origin of the universe personally.

I do know however that those scientists who research things related to the Big Bang Theory will have the tendency to be more right than most other people who do not know anything about it (ie. you and me). Especially since many of those things lead and have led to important discoveries.

And your tendency to say that they're wrong because you do not understand it is worse than them actually being wrong for the simple reason that if they were to find out they were wrong that they would change their minds and go forward with the new way which would be more right.

Your way is to say they are wrong, because I do not understand it and because magic we exist.

Pladio said:

You don't see why not because you do not understand everything behind the Big Bang Theory…

Neither do I to be honest, but I don't care much about the origin of the universe personally.

I do know however that those scientists who research things related to the Big Bang Theory will have the tendency to be more right than most other people who do not know anything about it (ie. you and me). Especially since many of those things lead and have led to important discoveries.

And your tendency to say that they're wrong because you do not understand it is worse than them actually being wrong for the simple reason that if they were to find out they were wrong that they would change their minds and go forward with the new way which would be more right.

Your way is to say they are wrong, because I do not understand it and because magic we exist.

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The problem is that there is so much evidence against the big bang theory it is not even funny any more. There is like 4 evidences(1 that i cannot understand how it is evidence) for the big bang and more than 30 evidences against it not from creationists sources, secular sources.

It annoys me that the cosmic radiation map i think it is called the CMD is considered to be uniform but when i look at it, it is anything but uniform. The worst part about it is that if a secular scientist tries to come up with an alternate theory they are met with antagonism. Its bad science gone amuck,

Damian said:

Well if the Big Bang Theory is a scientific theory, i dont see why not.

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No - it is EVERYTHING. Like Climate Change, as another example. Which is so well supported it is only refutable by those with a political (or religious) agenda.

Look at it this way ... I haven't looked at the research on Big Bang Theory, but assuming what you say is correct, then it has 4 more source supporting it than creationism

txa1265 said:

No - it is EVERYTHING. Like Climate Change, as another example. Which is so well supported it is only refutable by those with a political (or religious) agenda.

Look at it this way … I haven't looked at the research on Big Bang Theory, but assuming what you say is correct, then it has 4 more source supporting it than creationism

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And more than 30 against it. More than creationism.

Ha ha! Anyone who has seen an explosion knows they are never uniform.

A quick wiki shows it's "near"-uniform. It does not say uniform. And you can't look at the skymap like this :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ilc_9yr_moll4096.png

You have to look at the frequency distribution, which is what they're talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cmbr.svg

A uniform distribution would mean a rectangular distribution, and while this isn't a rectangular one you can easily notice ~3/4 of the frequencies are arranged around the first peak, creating a "near"-rectangle, aka "near" uniformity.

While I don't understand how this affects the big bang, I know this is quite an "accurate" description of a frequency distribution.

When filtering noise out of a system, having exact rectangular filters would be perfect, but (almost) impossible to achieve. In reality we use this type of filters.

Low pass filter example :
http://msp.ucsd.edu/techniques/v0.05/book-html/img886.png

Damian said:

I just also want to point out that i never talked about all of Al Qaeda. Just the suiciders.

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Various organizations, such as the Taliban are suspected of sometimes giving suicide bombers, particularly children, drugs, prior to sending them out on suicide missions, causing a short term high. And probably that does happen. But attacks such as 9/11 are not like that: The bombers for 9/11 were selected several years before the attack, there was no shortage of candidates (thousands of young men want nothing better than to martyr themselves), and the volunteers had to learn to fly airliners (but not to land!) as well as other training and planning…The only drug used to motivate them was religion.

Thrasher said:

Ha ha! Anyone who has seen an explosion knows they are never uniform.

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They predicted that the radiation caused by the big bang is uniform.

Pladio said:

A quick wiki shows it's "near"-uniform. It does not say uniform. And you can't look at the skymap like this :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ilc_9yr_moll4096.png

You have to look at the frequency distribution, which is what they're talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cmbr.svg

A uniform distribution would mean a rectangular distribution, and while this isn't a rectangular one you can easily notice ~3/4 of the frequencies are arranged around the first peak, creating a "near"-rectangle, aka "near" uniformity.

While I don't understand how this affects the big bang, I know this is quite an "accurate" description of a frequency distribution.

When filtering noise out of a system, having exact rectangular filters would be perfect, but (almost) impossible to achieve. In reality we use this type of filters.

Low pass filter example :
http://msp.ucsd.edu/techniques/v0.05/book-html/img886.png

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I am intrigued. I thought that the uniform distribution would mean that there wouldnt be large amount of black areas. Please explain further.

Roq said:

Various organizations, such as the Taliban are suspected of sometimes giving suicide bombers, particularly children, drugs, prior to sending them out on suicide missions, causing a short term high. And probably that does happen. But attacks such as 9/11 are not like that: The bombers for 9/11 were selected several years before the attack, there was no shortage of candidates (thousands of young men want nothing better than to martyr themselves), and the volunteers had to learn to fly airliners (but not to land!) as well as other training and planning…The only drug used to motivate them was religion.

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Have you got any reference to this? AFAIK they used drugs to turn their minds to mush before indoctrination.

Damian said:

I am intrigued. I thought that the uniform distribution would mean that there wouldnt be large amount of black areas. Please explain further.

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And this is exactly what I meant when I said you do not understand it well enough to be able to say whether it is wrong or not. Neither do I, again.

However, I do "trust" scientists more than I do people who use a 2000-year old book to justify things when so many things are wrong in that book (unless you say the magic is true or they're all expressions/allegorical/parables).

About frequency distributions:

This is all about stochastic (random) systems.
In simple terms, and in theory, a two-sided coin has a rectangular/uniform distribution.

It has a 50/50 chance of falling either on heads or tails.

The same is true for a 6-sided die.

It has a 16.666...% chance of falling on 1/2/3/4/5/6.

If the die had two sides with a 1 on it, it would not be a uniform distribution anymore.

You do have to realise that even in the case of the two-sided coin, you could throw the coin ten times in the air and the coin could land 8 times on heads and twice on tails. The whole point is that you're talking about random systems. So while the "real-life" distribution would not be uniform, the theoretical one would be. And if you threw the coin in the air 1000, or 10000000 times, the statistical anomaly would tend to 0.

This is very basically how it works. However this can get way more complicated when dealing with more complex systems and I am guessing the cosmological radiation would be way more complex.

Some simple information regarding different types of distributions here :
http://www.psychstat.missouristate.edu/introbook/sbk10m.htm
and here:
http://www4.uwsp.edu/geo/faculty/ozsvath/lectures/Data Distributions.htm

There are university-level courses about this stochastic systems however, and unless you are really interested in probability theory you will not get through it so easily.

This is difficult stuff to master. I had 2 6-month courses on stochastic systems and how they work related to Electronic systems and I can tell you that if you do not understand them, you certainly can not say the scientists are wrong.

Just for your information: the "Normal" distribution is the most well-known frequency distribution amongst regular people and is often called the bell-shape curve. You can usually show many things using that distribution as it applies to many circumstances in life.

A simple example is usually the IQ grade per pupil in a class. It usually results in a bell-shaped curve, meaning most kids will be around let's say 110IQ, some people will end up at 120, one or two at 130-140, and the same on the other side, some people will bee 100, and a few at 80-90.
http://www4.uwsp.edu/psych/stat/4/normal.gif

If you are really, really interested in how these work, you'll need to let me know how much knowledge you have of probability theory at this moment in time and I can find some sources for you. I suggest you think twice or thrice before you decide to make the plunge, as with every scientific theory; probability theory is quite complex.

Thanks for that. Very interesting.

Damian said:

Thanks for that. Very interesting.

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No problem, but don't expect this for all of the the stuff you don't understand about the biig bang as you hit on exactly one topic I do know something about

I probably know very little about the rest ...

Pladio said:

However, I do "trust" scientists more than I do people who use a 2000-year old book to justify things when so many things are wrong in that book (unless you say the magic is true or they're all expressions/allegorical/parables)

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You do understand that this actually proves the idiocy of both sides of this argument, right? You have chosen to trust one side over the other based on your personal perception of the world. Then, you make the logical leap that somehow your choice based on your personal perception is somehow more valid than someone else's choice based on their personal perception.

Based on your personal choice of evidence, which is somehow magically promoted to preferred status whilst the other side's personal choice of evidence is summarily dismissed because it doesn't fit within your personal perception. For claiming to be so damned smart, I don't see how y'all can't see the fallacious hubris just pouring out of that dogpile.

Damian said:

They predicted that the radiation caused by the big bang is uniform.

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That is obviously incorrect. You fail to grasp the basic tenets of science and are trying to explain The Big Bang Theory to us. Ludicrous.

Thrasher said:

That is obviously incorrect. You fail to grasp the basic tenets of science and are trying to explain The Big Bang Theory to us. Ludicrous.

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The CMB is well explained as radiation left over from an early stage in the development of the universe, and its discovery is considered a landmark test of the Big Bang model of the universe. When the universe was young, before the formation of stars and planets, it was denser, much hotter, and filled with a uniform glow from a white-hot fog of hydrogen plasma. As the universe expanded, both the plasma and the radiation filling it grew cooler. When the universe cooled enough, protons and electrons combined to form neutral atoms.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background

txa1265 said:

That is what they have done with many other scientific terms - worst is theory, which in real scientific terms has a specific meaning, but in the hands of a specific sect of religious zealots has come to have as much value as the ramblings of some drunk postulating in a pub …

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It is just like RPG. It was meant to characterize whose main purpose is roleplaying.
Now, it means to characterize games that are about everything but roleplaying.