HelixDab

Right, I'm not arguing that belief is inherently bad, per se. I think that the external structure of a religion can provide a lot of direct, tangible benefits that can't be readily had in other ways.

On the other hand, a sincere belief in supernatural effects is not something that can be supported by the existing evidence.

Is there a reason that you'd prefer to not have exposed metal? Unless you have PTFE (Teflon) coated cookware, that's not an issue. I mean, I've got stainless steel pots that have gotten dinged up over the years, but I can buff that out with 400 grit sandpaper, and when I manage to burn something to cast iron and have to scrub it, I can freshen up the surface with any drying oil. And if you do have PTFE coated pots, I'd be more worried about the PTFE than about the utensils. Pots and pans that are PTFE coated are more or less disposable, and I would recommend against them in most cases. PTFE frying pans can be a real risk, because when heated, PTFE can release toxic gasses.

Huh. I got 1312 confused with 1349, and was wondering why left libertarians would care when the black plague arrived in Norway, or why they'd all be super into a black metal band.

But yeah. 1312.

System Shock.

As a regular person in the world? Sure, no problem. It's not all that different from reality now, only the climate has effectively collapsed (..we're getting there, give it time), and it's functionally run by corporations (see previous). If I have to live on the station with SHODAN? Yeah, no, definitely not.

Before that was Skyrim, and I feel like I'd be pretty okay there; most people seem to go about their daily lives without dying horrible deaths. Prior to that, Death Stranding, and, again, most people just live quietly in their little bunkers, fuck around on social media, and complain about deliveries of GruHub and Amazon taking too long.

1. Frequently hauling items that won't fit inside an enclosed vehicle
2. Frequently used over rough terrain where high ground clearance and 4WD is necessary.

I have regular need for a truck to carry lumber to and from home improvement box stores and lumber yards (it's remarkably inconvenient to carry a 10' 2x4 in anything that doesn't have an open bed, and you can't fit a 4x8 sheet of plywood inside anything smaller than a panel van). But even with that, it's far, far cheaper for me to rent a truck for a few hours when I need one than it is to make payments on one, pay for insurance, gas, tires (!!!), repairs, etc. It would be nice to have one on the forest service roads around here--I broke 2 motor mounts on a Civic on a forest service road--but that's uncommon enough that it's not worth the purchase.

As far as the US goes, that's incorrect. The issue is a 1A issue, not a 5A issue.

tl;dr - you are required to provide keys, combinations, fingerprints, etc. when there's a warrant. You might not be required to provide passwords.

Let's say cops have a search warrant for your house, and you have a safe in your house that they think the evidence of the crime they're investigating is hidden in. But it's locked. You are obligated to unlock that safe for them, whether it's a physical key, a combination, or a fingerprint. If you refuse, you can be compelled, and can be held in contempt of court and held in jail until you comply. (Or course, in the case of a physical safe, refusing the provide the key would mean that they'd hire a security expert to destroy the safe in order to retrieve the contents. But that's not possible with encrypted data.)

The problem is that a password is both a key and speech. I can be compelled to provide a key, but I can't be compelled to engage in certain speech. So far, courts have been divided on what a password is, and I don't believe that the question has been addressed by SCOTUS yet. (Although, knowing SCOTUS, I wouldn't expect them to be tech-savvy enough to make a good ruling.) In some cases, people that have been under court orders to provide passwords have been held in jail on contempt charges until they've divulged the password, even when they say that they've forgotten the password in question.

Keep in mind that the people that this is often applied to are not usually people you'd want to be friends with; most of that cases I've seen in the news involve people that are accused of having child pornography, either uploading or downloading it, or terrorism. But obvs. revoking rights to deal with exceptionally scummy people also means that those rights get revoked for everyone else...

I'm going to push back on this a bit.

No, you can't disprove the existence of deity, because you can't technically disprove anything. On the other hand, there's no evidence that points to a divine that couldn't be more easily explained by some other mechanism. This gets into Occam's Razor territory; the lack of deity is more likely than the existence of deity, simply because it's an answer that requires the least unsupported, new evidence to arrive at.

OTOH, I think that people have evolved in such a way that beliefs like this are easy to fall into, and are comforting in a deeply instinctual way, even if they aren't factually correct. We are biological organisms, and our biological nature makes it impossible for us to perceive the universe as it 'really' is, but only through the lens of our own existence. We're biologically programmed, through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, to see things and patterns that aren't there, since missing patterns that are there is more likely to get us killed. Thus, religion.

If he was convicted of domestic violence, then he cannot legally own a firearm, unless the conviction has been vacated or he's been pardoned. That's federal law. Therefore, he either wasn't convicted of domestic violence, the courts failed to follow through with their legal obligations and report the conviction to NICS, or he acquired the firearm illegally.

I guarantee that it will first be available to the wealthy, and they will shut the door to prevent anyone else from accessing it. The result will be a very few people will continue to amass wealth and power.

This is not a liberating idea.

The problem is that it's not "proven"; the only side presenting any evidence is the person seeking the protective order. If you make it an adversarial process so that the subject of the protective order can try to refute claims by the person seeking the order, then sure.

But right now it's strictly one-sided. Most places do require some form of evidence, but that evidence doesn't have to meet normal evidentiary standards, and the evidence isn't being questioned in an adversarial way.

Personally, I'm not comfortable removing rights when the person losing rights can't contest it.

For Leviticus 20:13 to not be hate-speech, you have to start by proving, first, that any god at all exists, and second, that the Hebrew bible is the word of that god. The approach advocated in Leviticus assumes that morality is predicated on the will of a god; if a god wills a thing, then that thing must be moral, because that god creates morality. So unless you can demonstrate that a god exists, and that the translation that we have of Leviticus is the will of that god, then it should not be assumed to be moral. Perhaps you could prove the morality of it in some other way, but you haven't made that attempt yet.

The Hebrew bible also explicitly condones slavery and rape, which implies that god says those things are moral. Would you then agree that slavery in the American south prior to 1860 was a moral practice? Would it be a moral practice if it started again? The bible advocates for genocide; is genocide moral?

BTW there's disagreement about the meaning of that verse, from rabbinical scholars no less. Seems to me that evangelicals might want to do a little more studying to understand context before they make assumptions about the foundations of their religion.

Mmmmm, it's more like no one can reasonably demonstrate the truth of any god, rather than any specific god being demonstrably false. It's an important distinction. You can't disprove a thing, but you can prove that alternate explanations are far more probable, or that the thing doesn't fit the evidence.