Waterloo
Trafalger
Dunkirk
And now, Arundel
Great post, very informative and sheds a light into a world I know nothing about.

Like leaving the house? 8)

European civilisation isn’t dying, it’s just changing, societies are dynamic, conservatism fails to understand this basic truth of humanity.

The people are dying, by which I mean the populations which have lived in European countries for the past 2000 years plus.

Of course, you can import people from a different continent, but as they have their own culture, that culture will eventually supersede your culture.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote an excellent book which contrasted static societies vs dynamic societies. Bergson pointed out that societies can only become dynamic if they have an underlining continuity in the first place (i.e. they are static). To assert that dynamism (meaning here multiculturalism) is inherent in “human nature” is frankly ridiculous.

European civilisation is dying because the people are deciding not to reproduce. This forum is indicative of that trend for the most part, as there are plenty of middle-aged childless posters on here.
A civilisation cannot outlive a falling birth rate.
The immigrants aren’t to blame for Europe’s woes, they are are just exploiting the fact that nature abhors a vacuum.
It’s a shame it is happening during our lifetimes, but I say good luck to them, if Europeans won’t continue their civilisation, then they don’t deserve it in the first place.

For some women power is the ultimate attraction.
Vile couple.

OTOH I imagine critics at the time said Shakespeare was mass entertainment and shouldn’t be compared to ye greates Mystery Plays

True enough, Thomas Bodley initially didn’t want any play texts in his oxford library, and Shakespeare was obsessed with earning money and attaining the status of gentleman, rather than being known as a mere playwright.

But in terms of artistic achievement, I think comparing the output of a popular musician with the output of one of the greatest writers is always OTT.

The BBC is going OTT on Bowie as a cultural catalyst. Bowie’s best music is great, the changing personas never really added much to his act, other than being a great way of generating media interest.
And at the end of the day it is popular/mass culture, here today, gone tomorrow, but the BBC seems to want to elevate what is essentially mass entertainment to the level of art, alongside Shakespeare and Dante.

Bowie hasn’t produced pop music in 30+ years.

I agree. But he was the last of the greats, so it’s more a symbolic moment.

Please, please, please don’t let this mean we are going to have a Bowie tribute concert, on the BBC, with Adele, Sam Smith, and Ed Sherran covering the songs and telling us how formative he was to their music.
Quality pop music died with Bowie, all we have left now is garbage (although Elton can still hit the high notes in Vegas).

There are some simple project management tools available online.
I use a simple spreadsheet on Google docs to track everything though.

Let’s Dance was the song I will always remember from growing up in the 80s, it was everywhere, especially when I was on holiday somewhere abroad.
I also like the song “Everyone says hi”.
RIP

What plonker created that list as a criteria of logic? Or am I missing the point?
I might send it on to a friend who lectures in logic for a laugh.

Just treat it like a visit from the Gestapo.

That was a worse pain than the initial ACL rupture or the dislocated patella, they had just felt like a bad growing pain.

How did you dislocate it out of interest?

+1 for Worldclassaccident having the best name of this forum.

Demographics are important, of course, you don’t want your country to resemble an old persons home.
It’s clear the fall in fertility rates in the West is permanent.
But with the rise of technology and automation, do we need a continued influx of young labour?
We could be approaching a world in which technology does pretty much everything.

Great photo. The Chilterns are no different, except you don’t have a lake in the distance but Hemel Hempsted.

I see Merkel is saying that Germany need to do more to change its laws to allow asylum seeking sex offenders to be deported (currently it would be virtually impossible to deport any Syrian and no one who is sentenced to less than 3 years). Wouldn’t it have been smarter to have figured this out before ?

This is how it starts! They will all be in concentration camps before the end of the year!

She is trying to cover herself, when she caused the problem in the first place (well it’s not all her fault, as Germany didn’t decide to invade Iraq and destabalise the whole region).

It’s chicken and egg – what comes first, the religion or the culture?
I think the religion creates the culture for the most part, but there are many other factors which also have an influence.

It isn’t just the attitude to Western women among some of the refugees which is an issue.
Near where I live a group of Libyans went on a sexual rampage, raping a man as well as a woman in Cambridge. I thought at the time the events were under-reported in the press and many people who live locally haven’t even heard about them.

The research merely confirms what even a mild hangover tells you – alcohol isn’t good for your body.
I doubt moderate drinking has any physical benefits.
But there is a lot to be said for the social and mental benefits of going down the pub and meeting friends.
It is a public health issue. We are living longer but taking worse care of our bodies. It is incredibly expensive to treat an elderly human being for diseases and conditions they have incurred from a bad lifestyle (note: this is not the same thing as just natural aging).
My experience is a lot of retired people are drinking heavily as they have nothing to do. Most heavy drinkers I know lack one thing: hope.
I drink too much, and it is all very well me saying, it’s my choice, but is it then fair for me to expect the NHS to rescue me from all the health conditions my drinking has incurred?

Investigate journalists – good bunch.
I’m less keen on the rest.
Unplugging oneself from the day-to-day news is probably a healthy move.

It was not long ago she was peerless but the tensions over the asylum seekers was quite intense even before NYE. In a poll late last year less than 50% of Germans wanted her to stand again for Chancellor.

I was drinking in a hotel lobby in Lisbon when Merkle made the decision to let the migrants in. A bunch of Germans came in and I raised the subject (in a diplomatic way naturally as there were more of them). They said overall Germans liked her and saw her as a safe pair of hands. There is also the fact that Germans value continuity very highly.

There was also public support for keeping the borders open, as some kind of national absolution for the holocaust, which tortures some of the older Germans still.

Eastern Europe, by contrast, isn’t having any of this. I think the Eastern European leaders are going to club together and effectively sabotage Europe’s freedom of movement policy. The EU which Merkel tried to create will collapse and so will her career.

Here’s a thought: Perhaps the Singletrackworld web designers could add a symbol like a bomb to a thread when it degenerates into a theist vs atheist debate.

SlackAlice, please read my posts above, I argued that our current system of (secular) morality came from a historical development which started with theism, especially Christianity.

Anyhow, good night all 8)

not sure ask badnewz if they ever get anything wrong.

I get plenty wrong. I use this forum to test ideas/concepts in the battle of debate. I suppose the anonymity makes me more forthright than I would be in face-to-face conversations.

Anyhow, I’m always careful to keep it civil and know when to pull an “Exit Badnewz pursued by a bear”. I understand how people get irritated by the endless God vs atheism debates, and in fairness we’ve kept a bit of a lid on it recently overall!

And I’d point out yet again (for the umpteenth time) that I was not saying atheists are immoral. I was saying that atheism doesn’t have the capacity on its own to produce a system of ethics / a code of morality, because it doesn’t have the room for a lawgiver/truth/sense of transcendence.

But it is interesting, given how much abuse there is sent from this forum to the way of theists, at how given to overreaction many of you are. After all, plenty of you are happy to call religious believers bonkers.

Anyhow my time on this thread is up, so it truly is, exit Badnewz pursued by an (outraged-how-dare-you-call-me-immoral) bear.

That’s an example of ethical truth. I’m less interested in someone stealing cookies than I am in the idea of a complete explanation for the existence of the universe, I suppose.
Anyhow, it’s teatime, so exit Badnewz, pursued by a bear.

everything is mocked on here – start a vegan thread if you want some proof of that I just dont bother to whinge when i am in the minority and sure;y you should forgive us and turn the other cheek.

That is not the root of my objection (infact, I enjoy being in the minority, maybe too much at times:)

My objection was that I asked Malvern Rider a legitimate question, and rather than answer it, he started a thread which had loaded language (“Truth is the word of God. Amirite?”) in order I suspect to rally the Dawkinistas and avoid answering the question.

I’d be happy with a simple, “I don’t know and don’t care”!

so apparently atheists dont have morals and if we did its because christians gave us them

My point is atheism has no room for truth, and without a transcendent truth, there is no reason for an ethical system in the first place. The history of morality started with religion.

But I’ve also pointed out natural law, which suggests people have a sense of conscience in the first place. So no, individual atheists are not necessarily immoral, in the same way that Christians are not all moral. But morality reaches its zenith among religious saints and it reaches the bottom under atheistic states like Stalinist Russia and the Nazis.

But I asked you the question, and you still haven’t answered.
Instead you’ve set up a thread trying to shore up your position as an atheist with the mockery of religion typical of this site.
I ask you again – what is truth?
Or let me put it more mildly, do you believe there is such a thing as truth?

Alternatively, atheists are capable of working our stuff for themselves, and don’t need an old book to tell them what to do.

Ok rancos, tell me as an atheist, what is truth?

The fundamental bill of human rights is not a religious document so presumably it has not moral basis to offer anyone any guidance on these sorts of issues

Do I have to keep going over old ground? Verily, verily, I say to you, human rights were created by Christianity in the first place.

can you explain those innate characteristics in relation to what god says to do to homosexuals?

This depends on what your attitude to scripture is. Some christians consider it to be the word of God. I think that is a mistake. Jesus is the word of God, truly understood. And he said nothing about homosexuals.
So there is the possibility that the passages which are commonly read from the NT to argue against homosexuality are wrong and the intolerance is down to the fact that Christians place too much emphasis on the truth being fully understood by fallen human beings (an argument actually made by the writer of the contentious passages, Paul).

@ransos, I don’t think slavery will ever end, unfortunately, not in this world anyhow.
@malvern It’s an interesting one – can there be a morally ethical athiest? The answer is normally yes, of course, most theists would also concede this. But I’m not so sure. Athiesm has no moral law, it is the absent of truth.
I’d argue your sense of empathy, sympathy, respect etc were probably in you to begin with through your conscience (implanted by God), and it has benefited from your being raised in a culture where those things were passed along as values.
Socrates is the example many athiests use to argue against this, but aside from him being a remarkable individual, he had also lived in a culture which was beginning to puzzle out an ethical system based on a type of theism (that is Platonism).

When Rome converted to Christianity under Constantine the Great in about 325AD, the brutal slavery and Imperial politics continued apace.

There are certainly major issues with the Donation of Constantine. Some people (mainly Protestants) argue it was a mistake as it polluted the faith with Roman power politics. Others (mainly Catholics – no surprise) argue that it enabled the long term renewal of Europe along progressively less brutal lines.

I’m not sure either way, but the point stands that Christianity emphasises man’s fallen nature, so it stands to reason it will become polluted on contact with politics.

Thank God for burning of heretics, the crusades and systematic sexual abuse! Oh.

Please pay attention. Christianity places emphasis on man’s fallen nature – it does not say Christians will be above sin; but Christianity contains within it an ethical system which means it can be reformed over time by Saintly people. The pagan world did not have such an internal ethical system and hence was unable to reform itself.

So before Christianity can’t to pagan Europe nobody knew right from wrong??!?!?

I would argue that the natural law meant they had some understanding of a moral law.

Do you have a shred of proof for this assumption?

Yes, considering much of the Pagan world was based upon a brutal system of slavery and imperial politics. Child sacrifice was practiced and I think that only became an ethical issue after Christianity, which placed revolutionary emphasis on the value of the individual human being.

I agree. I’d also ask the question: where do we get our sense of right and wrong from?
I think we get it from the moral commandments as relayed from Judaism (with some revision) to what was Pagan Europe via Christianity.
Many athiests use the moral ethical system of Christianity to criticise the religion itself, e.g. how Christians have used religious and political persecution, but surely we wouldn’t think persecution was such a bad thing were it not for the ethical system as laid out in the Sermon on the Mount.
And at root Christianity does say that people are sinners, so it can hardly be surprising that as soon as a religion gets mixed up with human beings, things start to go wrong.
(“Bonkers Badnewz warning”)
But then there is a separate history, the history of sainthood – people like William Wilberforce, who understood more clearly the Christian message and undertook to abolish the slave trade.
In conclusion, like it or not, we are the products of post-Enlightenment Christianity.

Americans don’t seem to like each other very much these days. They fundamentally disagree on so many issues it is hard to see where the common ground is.
Whether the culture war will turn into something bigger is difficult to say. It will definitely affect the presidential polls, although I expect Clinton to win, I think Trump (my namesake) will do far better than many expect.

For my A-Level Geography I did my coursework on social housing in Hackney. It was something of a prophetic work, saying it was ripe for Islington overspill and gentrification (this was back in the 90s). I did get to see some tower blocks blown up but tbh a trip to New York would have been better!

Sounds like it, although I’ve generally avoided advocating karma after Glenn Hoddle lost the England job.

A mate of mine once said he had more respect for extremists than the rest of the religious populous. At least the extremists take it all and do something with it as opposed to the rest who pick and choose what they want to believe. If you’re going to believe it, do it properly.

Your mate sounds awesome. Where did he get his PhD from? Oxford or Cambridge?