Posted on 07/02/2002 5:16:45 PM PDT by Dog Gone
I don't see how.
When Nathaniel Branden started the Nathaniel Brandon Institute in the '60s meetings were sometimes attended by a few hundred people, often with Ayn Rand up on stage behind Branden. Ludwig von Mises once came with his wife, and she later related the experience. She told of serious, nervous looking people who smoked incessantly (I always imagine them as a prototypical pocket protector crowd with Brill Creamed hair and a band-aid holding their black-rimmed glasses together at the bridge of the nose). She said the only time any levity entered the room was when the word "God" was mentioned. Then everybody snickered in unison.
"Intellectual humility" is not a strong suit among atheists, having been replaced by a knowing snicker. These poor souls have come to the wholly unwarranted conviction that our meager advances in understanding the natural world somehow solve the unfathomable mystery of existence. It is a pitiable position, in my opinion, the there of no there there fame.
>I don't see how.
If we're trying for a scientific formulation, we have to expand this somewhat awkwardly:
"Repeated observations, under stringently controlled conditions, have failed to find credible evidence for the existence of Santa Claus. Therefore, the null hypothesis (i.e., that there is no Santa Claus) suggests itself as worthy of (contingent) adoption, and workers in this field will in general find it worth their precious time to seek other issues to investigate"
Obviously that would merely be empirical evidence that Virginia wasn't a good enough girl!I don't see how you can empirically verify that there is no Santa Claus.
Instead of going to the media, Virginia could have stayed up all night waiting for the jolly old elf to come down the chimney. Seems pretty empirical to me.
"Intellectual humility" is not a strong suit among atheists, having been replaced by a knowing snicker. These poor souls have come to the wholly unwarranted conviction that our meager advances in understanding the natural world somehow solve the unfathomable mystery of existence. It is a pitiable position, in my opinion, the there of no there there fame.
On the contrary, our advances in understanding have yet to provide evidence of a supernatural person out there, while explaining a whole heckuva lot of questions we had all had about the natural world.
Good first step..
Elie Weisel remembers some of the guards at Dachau going to church on Sunday mornings with their famlies.
They must have believed in something
BUMP
This reminds me of an old email that I dug up out of my Humor box:
There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan)religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the population reference bureau). At an average census rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming there is at least one good child in each.
Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000 th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get onto the next house.
Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second--3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.
The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set(two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousands tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer can pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them---Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).
600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each.
In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds,would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g's.
A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now. Merry Christmas
I hereby offer my profuse apologies. (I was aware only of the WWI version). A quick check of the net ... which I should have done first ... clearly shows the Germans also had "Gott mit uns" belt buckles during the Second World War.
So, yeah ... I also wonder if the concentration camp guards wore them.
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