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Yeah, you are getting pretty tiring. FOX Network airs or has aired, Living Color, The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad and a about three decades worth of very liberal television. FOX News is one of the most conservative and disingenuous news services on the planet.

They share a parent company that wants one and only one thing, MONEY. The scumbag chairman you refer to is only as idealistic as his greed allows him to be. He’s more than happy to let FOX Network be as liberal as it wants to be so long as it keeps making him MONEY. The decades of evidence that FOX Network and FOX News show completely different programming and that one does not unduly influence the other clearly indicates two things:

1) Rupert Murdoch cares about cash more than any political ideal.

2) You clearly aren’t paying attention.

6 days ago on Neil deGrasse Tyson's remake of Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' headed to Fox in 2014

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I think you’ve got it half right. In your answer are a couple of assumptions that you might not even recognize:

1) There is something “beyond” the universe.

2) There is a purpose (to anything).

Neither of those two points are guaranteed to be true. I think most religions start with those two assumptions, and then try to fill in the blanks with answers to questions that are “fundamentally impossible to answer with deductive logic.” But what if the questions themselves are nonsensical? What if the assumptions those questions are based on are wrong?

The difference between the atheist and the religious (in this case, not all) is that the atheist doesn’t begin their line of reasoning with the same base assumptions you do. Once we accept that, the question we should be asking now is, “Where do our base assumptions, either set of them, come from?”

I’m not a religious person. I was raised Catholic, but that really didn’t stick. I identify as a naturalist (as in I don’t believe there are any supernatural forces. Everything is the result of natural forces which can be explained and understood even if we haven’t yet found the explanation). I find it very difficult to accept the possibility of a deity (any deity) in the truest sense of the word, and I especially find it hard to swallow the idea of an Abrahamic God—omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent—in the face of the evidence of history. But the reason is that I don’t really accept the same base assumptions as the people who do believe. I’m not more logical than they are, I just started from a different set of premises. If you accept a different set of base premises, logic can lead you in a completely different direction.

But if you never analyze where your base assumptions came from, what value is there in the logic built on top of them? Faith is ultimately, about belief, not logic. Even if you use logic to come to conclusions based on your faith, the underlying premise of all faith is that assumption that your life serves a purpose (other than whatever purpose you choose to give it) and that there is something beyond this plane of existence (of which we have no evidence).

Perhaps that’s why the only religion I’ve ever really been able to take seriously was Chan/Zen Buddhism. When the whole purpose of your religion is to analyze and ultimately reject your assumptions to get a clearer view of reality and make peace with the way things really are rather than the way you want them to be, it’s a little harder to just chalk it up to a whole lot of wishful thinking and fairy tale escapism. It’s also why the title of this article should be considered very misleading. Just because both Zen and Christianity have something called “monks” doesn’t mean that Christian monks have anything in common with Zen thinking. Christian monks meditate on the questions they think they already have the answers to. Zen monks meditate on questions that are designed to shatter their assumptions and their sense of self. One reinforces a dogma, the other attempts to erase all dogma. Sloppy editing in the article too. “…the second largest Christian group in the world after the Catholicism.”

11 days ago on Everything, Zen: can you be a monk and a tycoon too?

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What is up with these companies all designing the diagonal cube? It’s a terrible design. I don’t want my consumer electronics to be a fucking sculpture in my living room. I want them to disappear and be as unobtrusive as possible. If I could hide them all inside the wall I would. The last thing I want is something that takes up twice as much space as it actually needs and can’t have anything stacked on top of it.

These particular industrial designers should be shot out of a cannon.

11 days ago on Bluestacks' new Gamepop Android console takes on Ouya with 'Netflix for games' approach 1 reply 1 recommend

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Being an artist is a terrible way to make living even without this ruling. If your incentive to create is purely based on compensation or recognition, you are in the wrong career.

19 days ago on A legal victory for 'appropriation art' expands when artists can remix each others' work

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http://harebrained-schemes.com/shadowrun/ Shadowrun Returns. 3D character models, 2D artist-rendered isometric environments.

21 days ago on Exotic fighting game locales become animated GIFs in this tour of the 16-bit world

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Nothing is more helpful on the campaign trail than a constituency’s deep ignorance of their own country’s laws.

24 days ago on See 'Man of Steel' a day early by visiting Walmart

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I wonder why he chose to record four minutes of him counting as the test. Was it so gaps or flaws would be obvious (missing numbers)? And they got progressively more specific and arbitrary as it went on.

24 days ago on Telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell's voice recovered from 'unplayable' record

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Don’t try to explain how things work to him. He probably also thinks that if you get bumped up into a higher tax bracket you lose money.

26 days ago on See 'Man of Steel' a day early by visiting Walmart 1 reply 1 recommend

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I really want to see this “impressively disguised” phishing email. I really really want to see it.

26 days ago on AP Twitter account hacked, makes false claim of explosions at White House (update) 1 recommend

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You’re not lying, you’re just wrong. Stainless literally does not rust unless you find a way to remove the layer of chromium oxide that seals the surface and prevents rusting. Which is what you must have done either with prolonged contact with a non-stainless metal (and water, and oxygen) or with some kind of saline solution. In other words, you fucked up your bottle somehow by putting something other than just water in there.

#ignorance right back at you

27 days ago on What's in your bag, Carl Franzen?