(continued)… and it occurs to me that the conflation of hostility and anger could be at the root of the framing/atheist-anger controversy.  Anger is an emotion, hostility is behavior.  Maybe there are proponents talking past each other with related but dissimilar things in mind.

Niceness is overrated, and is where the social convention of never discussing religion or politics takes root.  Nice people are sort of crippled in their ability to deal with tough topics.  (My mother, a very nice person, is a good example)

To the extent that niceness is conflict-aversion, that’s the case.  (And I say that as someone who is conflict-averse far more than is healthy for me.)

On the other, other hand, hostility often makes anger ineffective and discussion impossible.  Not to flatter ***Dave, but he manages to be angry when it is fitting, and to handle tough topics, without hostility.  I admire.

I chalk it up to a liberal arts education. 

and it occurs to me that the conflation of hostility and anger could be at the root of the framing/atheist-anger controversy.  Anger is an emotion, hostility is behavior.  Maybe there are proponents talking past each other with related but dissimilar things in mind.

I think that’s a very important distinction, DOF.  Being angry is not wrong; how one deals with or acts out that anger is where I know I run into trouble more frequently than I like.

and it occurs to me that the conflation of hostility and anger could be at the root of the framing/atheist-anger controversy.

I vote for a complete lack of empathy on the side of the framers, unless they’re goading the atheists and shed crocodile’s tears.

If being angry about what the religious do is a problem, I must have missed the memo. Likewise, I fail to see why hostility towards religion and the religious is a bad thing. As long as you make sure to pick a deserving party if you feel the need to rip somebody a new one…

What I have observed time and time again on religious forums is that plenty of believers are honestly clueless about how their words and deeds are received by atheists and for everyone who doesn’t get it, there are plenty others who get it just fine, but either enjoy sticking it to the atheists or weep about how the believers are oppressed because they don’t always get their way.  What I’ve learned most of all is that religious and atheistic forums and blogs are the worst possible places to talk about religion or the lack thereof. Joints run by believers or atheists can be fine, though.

***Dave- don’t worry, I don’t wake up in the morning and think, “Hmmm, let’s piss off a God Botherer.” Think of it as more of hearing someone taling about the politician you hate the most- there is a time and place.  However, engage me in a discussion, and I will not hold back with my views, even if you are a complete stranger (unless I can’t, for professional reasons)

I don’t wake up in the morning and think, “Hmmm, let’s piss off a God Botherer.”

Paisan!  I don’t wake up in the morning and think, “Hmmm, let’s smite an unbeliever.”

Of course, I’m a big believer in the whole stones/glass houses thing.

However, engage me in a discussion, and I will not hold back with my views, even if you are a complete stranger

I will confess that such discussions come far easier to me on the Internet than in real life, being a truly conflict-averse kinda guy. 

That said, I realize there’s a tension between politeness and being truthful.  How folks handle that tension is not trivial.

Since people have been so bold as to say a few nice things about me, I’ll give mad props to Les for creating a community here where, despite the excesses in various edges of ideology, people can feel free to voice their opinions and engage in largely constructive dialog about beliefs and feelings important to them.

You live and learn.
[buy beer]for man with the cool time line photo strip on his blog[/buy beer]
Can I offer you some Homeopathic Communion wine? diluted 30 times to it’s really holy.

While typing that I had a thought.  Is an Athiest just a homeopathic believer?

While typing that I had a thought.  Is an Athiest just a homeopathic believer?

That is almost precisely the theory of many believers, who insist that only the presence of religion in the world enables an atheist to have any sense of right and wrong.

Is an Athiest just a homeopathic believer?

Of course not.

a) There has to be something to dilute in the first place.

b) It would mean that the more we dilute the mythical critter commonly known as god, the more powerful a cure it would be.

c) A cure for what, exactly?

c) A cure for what, exactly?

Obfuscatory Onomastics ????

(That being the confusing/obscuring of the meaning of names/words)

Obfuscatory Onomastics

Love it! I used to think there was a language barrier between theists and atheists, but it’s just obfuscatory onomastics on the side of the theists.

Obfuscatory Onomastics can be diagnosed by noticing that the patient performs much Pontification and Papist Mummery. This is usually accompanied by an increase in voice volume and/or pitch.

Just in case:
Pontification - getting up on your soapbox and making pronouncements

Papist Mummery - performing a ceremony with elaborate costumes and grandiose gesticulations

Scenter, you might enjoy the Disease Mongering generator…

elwedriddsche - thanks! hehe I went to the generator and generated:

Delusional Dysmorphic Aversion Disorder (DDAD)
DDAD is defined as involving unreal thoughts, visions or voices in conjunction with extreme unhappiness in the rejection of others.

Source: Page 238 of the DSM-IV-FE*

Kind of appropriate to some denizens of SEB no?

FWIW - I have created word generators in the past (for my RPG group) - mine were paper and dice, not computer code though. lots of calculations to generate a table, and then a few dice rolls gave youa few of millions of possible words.

***Dave writes…

Since people have been so bold as to say a few nice things about me, I’ll give mad props to Les for creating a community here where, despite the excesses in various edges of ideology, people can feel free to voice their opinions and engage in largely constructive dialog about beliefs and feelings important to them.

I’m just as amazed by what SEB has become as anyone else is. I have no idea how I managed to do it as I was just looking for a place to shoot my mouth off.

I liked this one, because of the acronym

Oppositional Disorganized Depersonalization Syndrome (ODDS)
ODDS is found in people with stubborn resistance to conform to social norms compromised by a striking inability to locate objects or information with a dissociative view of self.

So when we find ourselves at odds with someone, we know its just a syndrome

Is an Athiest just a homeopathic believer?

As elwed said.  We atheists like our truth undiluted, Thank you.

FWIW (Begging your pardon if you are already aware of this, as it diverges from topic, but there may be a lurking homeopath in the neighgborhood. Maybe we can coax him/her out to play)

Homeopaths believe that water has a memory of a substance that was once dissolved in it, and that even though the material is no longer present the water can be used to treat various diseases.

First off - If water had a ‘memory’ it would remember passing through a dinosaur’s kidneys as urine, inflating the guts of a toxic puffer fish, flowing past a black vent on the ocean floor where it picks up poisonous sulfides, percolating through an arsenic formation near a bitter spring, and watering a poison ivy plant, etc. So said memory implies that just because this time around the water is flowing through a beautiful meadow doesn’t mean squat - it cannot be pure, it remembers the filth of its previous incarnations.

Also, The stronger concentrations of actives added to water (i.e. the ones homeopaths think of as weak) actually might have enough material present to do some good, if the substance added to the water actually has a biological effect. once you pass D23 there ain’t nothing left but water.

Why D23? Well, Avogadro’s number is 6.02*10^23 which is how many molecules form a certain number of grams of a given material.

Lets use nicotine for example, which is in some homeopathic ‘quit smoking’ aids. It has a molecular weight of 162. That means 162 g (5.7 oz) of nicotine contain 6.02*10^23 molecules of nicotine, so now we start the dilution process:
D1 means take 1g of nicotine and dissolve it in 9 grams of ‘pure’ water (a 10% solution - D from latin deci- meaning one tenth)
D2 means take 1 g of D1 and dissolve it in 9 grams of ‘pure’ water (overall a 1% solution)
D3 means take 1g of D2.... etc

Once we pass D22 there aren’t enough molecules to go around, and we are basically adding ‘pure’ water to ‘pure’ water.

A D30 solution, for example, would contain approx. one molecule of nicotine in 10 million grams of water (30-23 = 7, so 10^7 extra water) so our chances of that nicotine molecule being in our 10g dilution are about the same as your chances of winning the ‘Powerball’ or ‘Big Game’ lotteries (in the USA - I don’t know enough about the overseas lotteries)

QED - homeopathy can’t work as currently mythologized, but why bother to overhaul it, conventional medicine uses viable doses of materials that have been screened for effectiveness (if not for all their side effects).

Sorry if I got a little verbose there, but as a chemist I have had to counter these claims again and again, so I get a little upset at the New-Age frouffy pseudo-science called homeopathy.

Oh man, that reminds me of some crap I saw in my local pharmacy recently when I was trying to find a good cold medicine (went with good old NyQuil in case anyone cares). In any event, there are these tablets (I assume they are cough lozenges from the packaging) called Cold-eeze.  They have Vitamins and stuff listed on the front, so you know they are supposed to be good for a cold (well, at least that’s what the TV told me).  However, at the top, on the right top of the main product logo, it says “Homeopathic”.  I checked the package and couldn’t find any further reference to homeopathic, so I assume it’s just there to get the credulous to buy it. Otherwise it would probably have to be capsules full of water I guess.

Scenter must be new in these here parts if my homeopathy joke upset him that much- you wait until I try and pay him in homeopathic money- it is $1,000,000- it’s just diluted down to 1 cent

DO Homeopaths believe in drowning?

Scenter- that’s why I always drink water with as close to the dilution D∞ of all homeopathic substances as possible.  Since higher dilution means extra potency, I figure I’m getting the strongest possible dosage of everything.  My good health proves that I’m right and that homeopathy works, when it doesn’t do anything.

Scenter must be new in these here parts if my homeopathy joke upset him that much- you wait until I try and pay him in homeopathic money- it is $1,000,000- it’s just diluted down to 1 cent

LH - hehe...no, I’m not ‘new’ ‘round here (I was a lurker for a while before I started posting), and I did get the point of your joke (my original reply was only the first line or so of my post) but then the homeopathy reflex trigger opened and had to be depressurized. Hence the little rant. I’m better now

As for homeopaths and drownings - consider this -the oxygen in the lungs of a drowning victim has been diluted to almost nothing by the act of drowning itself, therefore the water from the lungs of a human sponge should be the most potent source of oxygen according to the dilution mantra.  NOT!