Author Topic: Stupid religious analogies.  (Read 10647 times)

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Offline Undecided

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Re: Stupid religious analogies.
« Reply #30 on: March 02, 2013, 10:30:53 pm »
It's not a religious comparison, but I dislike "Government should be run like a business." It's an absurd, indefensible platitude that has no place in discussion between reasonable people.

[derail]
Isn't there some weird fundie thing about "Natural Law Theory" or some such crap?

Yeah.  They think that if there is a "law" then there has to be a lawmaker.  We had a discussion on that a while back here.

Personally I would like to know how natural laws came to be what they are. Things like why the speed of light is specifically the value it is. There are a bunch of universal constants, and I would love to know why they are what they are. I am probably asking too much though. "They just are" will probably be the best answer anyone can provide.

Essentially, that's about it.  When the word law is applied to scientific principles, it isn't actually a set of rules as to how something has to behave.  It is more an explanation of how things behave and why.  As for the speed of light, for example, we have found by careful measurements that the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.  We know this to be a constant in the natural universe.  But it isn't a rule that it has to be that speed, just that we have found it to be that speed.  Laws, as in the rule of law, which is a man-made construct, can be changed and broken.  The Laws of Physics, at least as far as our current level of knowledge and understanding, cannot. 
Actually, the speed of light has now been defined to be exactly 299 792 458 meters per second—the meter is now defined in terms of the second via the speed of light.

In the next few years, we're going to make similar changes to the kilogram, ampere, kelvin, and mole, so that all units will be defined in terms of the second:
  • The Planck constant will be fixed, which will define the kilogram in terms of the meter and second.
  • The Avogadro constant will be fixed, which will define the mole.
  • The Boltzmann constant will be fixed, which will define the kelvin in terms of the kilogram, meter, and second.
  • The electronic charge will be fixed, which will define the ampere in terms of the kilogram, meter, and second.

These definitions come about because, according to our best physical theories—theories that have been so well demonstrated that it is impossible to do modern physics without them—, several important measurable quantities are quantized, i.e., may only take on certain specific values. This means that there are preferred natural units:
  • According to special relativity, massless particles are constrained to travel at a unique speed. That means that the speed of light is the natural unit for speed.
  • According to quantum mechanics, orbital angular momentum can only arise as integer multiples of the smallest possible orbital angular momentum. Hence, the reduced Planck constant is the natural unit of angular momentum.
  • According to atomic theory, matter is composed of discrete units, meaning that there is an indivisible, smallest amount of chemical substance. Thus we have the inverse Avogadro constant, the natural unit of chemical amount.
  • According to statistical mechanics, at high temperatures the entropy can only take values equal to the Boltzmann constant times natural logarithms of positive integers. The Boltzmann constant is therefore the natural unit of entropy.
  • As described by the Quantum Electrodynamics sector of the Standard Model of particle physics, all free charges in the universe come in integer multiples of the electronic charge, which makes it a natural unit of charge.

The lesson to be learned from this is that it doesn't make sense to ask questions about the magnitude of dimensionful quantities, because their values are just a vestige of our primitive unit system; only dimensionless quantities matter. So, when you ask a question like "Why is the speed of light so very fast?", you are actually asking the question "Why are human beings so damn slow when compared to light?"

[/derail]
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Offline Feral Dog

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Re: Stupid religious analogies.
« Reply #31 on: March 02, 2013, 11:29:06 pm »

Wouldn't the only answer tho both of those analogies be less sex for everyone?

Clearly, the wonderful world of knit/crochet needs to throw in its two cents.
Some projects take one needle and one thread. Some take one thread and many needles. Some take one needle and many threads. Some take many threads and many needles. So long as the end result is good, does it really matter?
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EDIT: Aaaand my 10,000th post is about fascism, Plato, and gay sex. This is clearly a great accomplishment.

Offline rageaholic

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Re: Stupid religious analogies.
« Reply #32 on: March 04, 2013, 02:56:55 pm »
Just thought of another, the "stop a person from doing (insert dangerous thing here)" analogy.  That's where fundies compare trying to bully a person into comformance to trying to stop them from running off a cliff or something stupid like that.  If heard the same justification on those police proceedral shows... from the psycho of the week who had someone captive for several years.  It's quite telling. 

Offline Auggziliary

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Re: Stupid religious analogies.
« Reply #33 on: March 04, 2013, 06:22:12 pm »
What about the old sexist, abstinence-only bullshit line that goes something like, "A penis is like a key: If it can open a lot of locks, then it's a good key. Your vagina is like a lock: If you open for too many keys, then it'll break."

It's funny because I can twist it around and say, "A vagina is like a pencil sharpener: If it lets in all the pencils it wants to, it's a good sharpener. Your dick is like a pencil: If you sharpen it too much, it'll break and have to be thrown out."

I've heard two equally sexist arguments along these lines that coincidentally also only apply to girls.

In one analogy, a preacher/speaker plucks the petals off a rose one at a time and compares every sexual experience--depending on how hardcore fundie the speaker is, it can be anything from open-mouth kissing to groping to all sexual activities--to another petal being plucked off. And then you can't put the petals back on, no matter how much you try, so once you've done these things you're sullied forever and nobody--no MAN!!--will want a rose without petals. Totally not a convenient vagina analogy, either, amirite?

The other is comparing a girl to a piece of buttered toast that every guy she's with takes a lick of the butter off of. The more guys she's been with, the more people have licked off more butter and she becomes disgusting and in the end, nobody wants a piece of toast that dozens of other people have licked the butter from.

They only ever focus on women's virginity. Some sects pay attention to men's virginity, but for the most part it's just girls they're hung up on, probably because they have that handy-dandy, conveniently inaccurate hymen as an indicator of virginity which most girls break in childhood anyway.

To be fair, if you are ripping off your labias every time you have sex then you are doing it wrong.
Also, who the fuck licks butter off toast? Just put more butter on it dumbass.
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Offline Caitshidhe

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Re: Stupid religious analogies.
« Reply #34 on: March 04, 2013, 08:32:10 pm »
To be fair, if you are ripping off your labias every time you have sex then you are doing it wrong.

Isn't that a fetish of some kind? I'm almost positive I've heard of it before.
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Offline Auggziliary

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Re: Stupid religious analogies.
« Reply #35 on: March 04, 2013, 08:52:25 pm »
To be fair, if you are ripping off your labias every time you have sex then you are doing it wrong.

Isn't that a fetish of some kind? I'm almost positive I've heard of it before.

It's the internet so yeah. If it's messed up there's probably some hentai featuring it.
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Offline TheUnknown

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Re: Stupid religious analogies.
« Reply #36 on: March 04, 2013, 09:15:24 pm »
To be fair, if you are ripping off your labias every time you have sex then you are doing it wrong.

Isn't that a fetish of some kind? I'm almost positive I've heard of it before.

It's the internet so yeah. If it's messed up there's probably some hentai featuring it.

I'm pretty sure that's guro, though I think it includes the fetish mutilation/gore in general.

Offline Auggziliary

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Re: Stupid religious analogies.
« Reply #37 on: March 04, 2013, 09:23:24 pm »
To be fair, if you are ripping off your labias every time you have sex then you are doing it wrong.

Isn't that a fetish of some kind? I'm almost positive I've heard of it before.

It's the internet so yeah. If it's messed up there's probably some hentai featuring it.

I'm pretty sure that's guro, though I think it includes the fetish mutilation/gore in general.

True, but a labia ripping fetish is something more specific. I've actually seen a manga about a dude that cuts off his girlfriends clitorises and pins them on a bulletin board with a label. Idk if that counts.
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Offline Caitshidhe

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Re: Stupid religious analogies.
« Reply #38 on: March 04, 2013, 09:24:57 pm »
It probably fall under 'guro' or whatever the western equivalent is, but I'm still positive that labia-cutting/ripping is a specific thing. Boything mentioned it once. I have no idea how he knows and don't fancy asking.
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Offline Auggziliary

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Re: Stupid religious analogies.
« Reply #39 on: March 04, 2013, 09:27:06 pm »
It probably fall under 'guro' or whatever the western equivalent is, but I'm still positive that labia-cutting/ripping is a specific thing. Boything mentioned it once. I have no idea how he knows and don't fancy asking.

Maybe female circumcision fetish?
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Offline ironbite

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Re: Stupid religious analogies.
« Reply #40 on: March 05, 2013, 12:10:41 am »
Wow...this went somewhere creepy.

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Re: Stupid religious analogies.
« Reply #41 on: March 05, 2013, 12:16:57 am »
And we did it all by ourselves, Ironbite! Without you! You must be so proud. ^_^
'The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imaginations.' -- Bertrand Russel

Offline ironbite

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Re: Stupid religious analogies.
« Reply #42 on: March 05, 2013, 12:52:27 am »
I am!

Ironbite-I'd give you a gold star but I'm too busy RUNNING AWAY FROM YOU PEOPLE!

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Re: Stupid religious analogies.
« Reply #43 on: March 05, 2013, 01:05:11 am »
Please don't run Ironbite. We just want to *play* with you...


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Re: Stupid religious analogies.
« Reply #44 on: March 11, 2013, 08:00:31 pm »
I am!

Ironbite-I'd give you a gold star but I'm too busy RUNNING AWAY FROM YOU PEOPLE!

Unless you have labia to be ripped apart, you're safe.
BITCHES! YOU BITCHES! Killing me won't bring back your God damn honey!