Bill

[Bill]

PopeBeanie wrote:

I may be wrong in thinking that they’re feeling shoulds and shouldn’ts when they’re follow their species’ specific behavior patterns, but I’d need to see proof that I was wrong before changing my default assumption.

But the original comment was about the (arguably) natural feelings of shoulds and shouldn’ts with respect to “enhancing their social connections to each other via sexual pleasure” (perhaps I trimmed too much, my apologies). There are certainly species that have no such feelings while still exhibiting what would generally be categorized as “moral behavior”. There are countless animal species that have no aversion toward sexual behavior with multiple members of their species (although I will concede that there are also examples of species where pair-bonding seems to be the norm). Given the numerous examples of both sides of what are otherwise considered “moral creatures”, it seems reasonable to consider the observation by individual species to be a learned behavior.

 

The same holds with respect to the feelings surrounding homosexuality (or even bisexuality). While, obviously, heterosexual mating is necessary for procreation, it is not strictly required for a member to experience sexual pleasure thus leading to an enhanced social connection. I would contend that any corresponding feelings of shoulds and shouldn’ts are not necessarily innate. Indeed, the fluidity of the sexual preference may span the entire spectrum of desires were outside influences not allowed to interfere.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by Bill.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by Bill.

[Bill]

PopeBeanie wrote:

as crude as that will sound to many people still naturally feeling their strong shoulds and shouldn’ts.

I’m not so sure that the feelings of shoulds and shouldn’ts is necessarily a naturally occurring one – at least not when it comes to sexual pleasure. It seems there are probably very few moral imperatives (such as proscriptions against murder and some other forms of harm) and even those most likely came about as a learned behavior (i.e. I am only dissuaded from killing you insofar as I don’t want to be the victim of retaliation). Even rape and female objectification were not seen as a “natural taboo” even a few hundred years ago.

If you look at other members of the animal kingdom, there are behaviors in which they freely engage that humans consider offensive only because of taboos that have been put in place primarily due to religion (e.g. polyamory, homosexuality, etc.). Absent those arguments, it’s possible humans wouldn’t have those hangups either.

[Bill]

Agile doesn’t mean that there are no requirements. In fact feature requirements are very important. It simply means that you don’t have to specify the behavior of the entire system in order to deliver value to the customer. Check out the Agile Manifesto. Three of the four values are “working software”, “customer collaboration” and “responding to change”. If you have fully planned out everything that you’re going to do, then, when change comes up, you have to throw away part of your plan – so why spend time coming up with a plan if it’s likely that you’re going to have to revise it anyway?

In an effort to bring things around to the purpose of this forum, it occurs to me that the religious notion of God isn’t Agile either. According to believers, God has a plan. God’s customers (mankind) sometimes ask Him to make changes to His plan in the form of prayers. Most of those requests He refuses. He only grants the ones that already fit into his plan.

God (such as it is) is the ultimate waterfall project manager.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by Bill.

[Bill]

_Robert_ wrote:

I will not lift a finger until I have a plan. As a result I am efficient getting tasks completed.

You may be efficient in the time the task takes from beginning to end but are you including the planning time in your total?

In contrast, as long as I have a general idea of what I need to do, I tend to just dive in on tasks adjusting as needed when something doesn’t work as I expect it to. In today’s software engineering world, this is known as “Agile” – just get something out in front of users because they won’t know what they like or dislike about an application until they have a chance to use it.

My wife takes the same approach as you do, not starting on anything until she has completely evaluated all possible approaches and outcomes. She hates doing anything wrong. I call this “analysis paralysis”. She’ll often ask me how to perform some action on the computer in some application that I have never used. I just start looking for things that look or sound like they’ll do what I need and clicking on them. More often than not, the action at least <i>leads</i> to what she wanted to do although (potentially) with many side trips along the way. She hates that because it means that she did something wrong. I take the viewpoint that anything done wrong is just knowledge for the next time that you want to actually do the thing that happened.

[Bill]

How about, since you had turned away from the god known as Yahweh, the one true God (maybe it was the Flying Spaghetti Monster, maybe it was Russell’s Teapot) was testing your faith and gave you a premonition to make sure you wouldn’t turn back toward the false one.

By the way, you failed.

Seriously though, it’s called a “coincidence”. Just move on.

[Bill]

“America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight.”

– Andrew Shepherd (“The American President”)

[Bill]

It is a theory in the same way that the behavior of gravity is a theory. It can’t really be “proven” since we can’t see what is happening. However we can see the results of the effect and produce testable hypotheses that can then be experimentally confirmed or refuted. Once a sufficient body of tested and confirmed behaviors has been amassed, the theory becomes accepted as “fact”.

The important point in this is that the testable hypotheses be refutable.The Xtian argument that the universe/world/etc. was created in seven days produces no testable hypotheses whatsoever (aside from “it says so in the Bible” – a weak argument indeed as there are many assertions in the Bible that ARE testably refutable).

The response to “show us an extinct creature from the past that branched off into two totally different distinct modern species” is “the absence of such an example is not evidence that the theory is invalid.” As it turns out, there are examples of individual species evolving to produce new lifeforms that are sufficiently different as to qualify as distinct species – specifically, they are not capable of interbreeding. The fact that the original species (which is capable of interbreeding with either of the new species) hasn’t died out is largely irrelevant to the discussion. At some point, the original species may indeed become extinct. The fact that it has yet doesn’t invalidate the observations supporting the divergence.

Whenever I have these kinds of discussions with Xtians, I have begun using the term “evidence” instead of “proof”. For example, instead of saying “Intelligent Design is false”, I say “There is no evidence supporting Intelligent Design”. If they ask for “proof” that evolution is true, I respond “I don’t have ‘proof’ but I can point you to a huge body of evidence.”

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