For those wondering, this is from “Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness”, by the inestimable Zach Weinersmith.
I think you meant estimable (worthy of great respect), not inestimable (too great to calculate), although I guess they both work.
Inestimable also means “of great value”
Inflammable means flammable? What a country!
Yeah, but he’s also not the xkcd guy.
Antitheism is colonial white people shit and it sucks
What do you mean?
You know that joke atheists tell Christians where they say “We both agree that most gods don’t exist, I just believe in one less than you. You and I aren’t so different.”? Well, that joke is more accurate than the atheists realise. The monotheism of the pre-roman Christians and Jews is very different to the monotheism of today.
Ancient Christians and Jews believed in the gods of every culture, but they only worshipped one. That’s how every culture treated foreign gods, back then. The Romans transformed the world forever when they used religion as a tool of cultural genocide through syncretism. As Roman polytheism was replaced by Roman Christianity, it became the custom to deny the gods of foreign religions. This was a new thing, back then.
Anyone who studies history knows that Europeans have been copying Rome ever since Rome fell. The colonisers of the new worlds copied Roman techniques of cultural genocide, by denying not just the power or worthiness of indigenous gods, but their very existence.
White modern atheism exists in the wasteland left in the wake of Christianity. The difference between a Christian coloniser and a white antitheist is one god. That’s insignificant. The antitheists are simply carrying on the traditions of Christianity, rather than attempting to actually move beyond a roman Christian worldview and learn from the way human thought worked before Christian genocide.
How does Islam fit into your frankly absurd worldview?
My absurd worldview? I guess you think the Encyclopedia Brittanica is absurd too
https://www.britannica.com/summary/monotheism
The monotheism that characterizes Judaism began in ancient Israel with the adoption of Yahweh as the single object of worship and the rejection of the gods of other tribes and nations without, initially, denying their existence.
Oh, and Stanford
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/monotheism/
Most mainstream Old Testament scholars believe that the religion of the early Israelites was neither monotheistic nor polytheistic but “monolatrous.” While the existence of other gods was not denied, Israel was to worship no god but Yahweh.
Maybe just read some encylopedias if you want to know more about the history of monotheism
No they don’t claim antitheism is colonial white people stuff.
First your own cited sources contradict you: you said that ancient Christians believed also in other gods but ancient Judaism was before that. Also in those sources you find that this happend in ancient Israel.
I don’t think the people there would be described as white.
I think the physicists have been having doubts about slow stuff recently too.
This is the truth. I am a few months away from getting my PhD in particle physics and the core questions being raised in all levels of the field at the edges of our decent big-picture understanding are so exciting.
So, question. Does stuff?
Sometimes stuff does. Othertimes, it is more open for debate. As a rule, I like to imagine that stuff might, but only if it will make stuff more confusing.
Well that checks out. Thanks!
So what’s your view on MOND?
It is interesting, but it feels like there are too many compromises made at the expense of observational data.
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The first issue is the reliance on a ~2eV neutrino to compensate. While sterile neutrinos could theoretically be that massive, we have yet to find conclusive evidence of steriles and don’t know the absolute masses or the mass ordering of the neutrinos mass eigenstates we have observed. (I am in neutrinos, so this is the point I am most familiar with.) While the discovery of steriles could occur, my buddy works on a search for eV scale sterile neutrinos and all of his findings have shown that there is no preference for any sterile signal at or around 1-100eV. Normal neutrinos also can’t work: While we don’t know the masses of each neutrino mass eigenstate individually, we know the sum of the neutrino masses, ~0.06-0.1eV, eliminating normal neutrinos from contention as well. This is a core failing, as it relies on the presence of an equally unproven particle as DM, but isn’t as good a fit as DM in many ways, leading into point 2…
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It has a hard time fitting to galactic cluster data. The Bullet cluster is one of the best observational proofs of DM, and MOND doean’t offer a good explanation for what we see. It also doesn’t account for gravitational lensing, which is a problem given we can see that quite clearly. Since it is only effective at huge scales and can’t be easily checked in a lab, it needs to at least consistently describe observations before I can consider it over DM, which does an excellent job of describing observation. This leads into my final point…
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There isn’t really any way to experimentally verify/refute it. I am an experimentalist, and while not every theory needs to have a labrotory confirmation, it seems like there is no way to falsify MOND. DM experiments have long proposed models that allow for some DM particle interaction mechanism, however infrequent, with barionic matter that would confirm/deny those models. While far from exhaustive, it at least allows for the ruling out of certain models if the expected flux isn’t there. MOND seems opaque to even this sort of experimental checking.
There are other issue too, but I am not well versed in GR, which is where many other tensions exist. Overall, it seems like an interesting math problem, but I can’t take it seriously until it gives us something to test or describes what we see much more accurately.
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Isn’t MOND largely discounted by the results we’ve gotten from JWST so far?
I wish this kind of disclaimer would have been in my physics book in school. Big reason why I didn’t pursue an academic career in physics is because all the quantum stuff sounded like a religion, trying to convince itself that superpositions are real and you can’t measure things, because you just can’t.
Many years later I know that there’s explanations for these things and that some of the illogical things I’ve been told were not nearly as certain or just flatout wrong. Because yeah, we’re still pushing the boundaries of our understanding outwards…
Time go forward, no go back.
What hard to understand? /s
Right, but how quickly? And does that rate change in different places? If so, what causes it to change?
So we got gravity linked to quantum mechanics, and all figured out, at least?
It’s waves or something
