I Know That God Does Not Exist

I'm guessing that with Dredge being from Australia, he is referring to the Racial Discrimination Act over there (and a number of other laws which prescribe racially hateful speech).Hate speech laws in Australia - Wikipedia

We have similar legislation in this country - a lot of other countries do too. See this page here: Hate speech - WikipediaI disagree that it's fascist. I certainly don't live in a fascist country and as you'll see, there's a decent amount of international consensus on the issue between a number of liberal democracies.We take, I think, a different view to many in the US, in that we don't see rights as 100% absolute in every case - sometimes rights conflict with each other, and when that happens, we believe a pragmatic view has to be taken (by society, and through a democratic process) to limit one of the rights in conflict. In this instance, the right to free speech was seen to be creating more harm against certain groups on the receiving end of prejudice, than would be caused to people by limiting somewhat their right to free speech. So we enacted laws to that effect.I realise that seems totally contrary to your understanding of rights, but it works for us.I feel very free indeed in the UK. That feeling isn't diminished by knowing that I'll get into trouble if I behave in such a way that we have collectively agreed would hurt a bunch of people too much.Freedom within our society includes the freedom to be a twat, but not where you are being such a twat that we have collectively decided that you would harm others by behaving that way. Fair enough for me.

We're probably veering off topic with this one, but I wanted to clarify a couple of things.First off, speaking for myself and my experience of British society, I agree that it pays to be very careful in relation to freedom of speech - and indeed we are. In UK law, the requirements for hate speech laws to be breached are significant. It's not about causing offence - you have to both (a) use threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour towards a protected class - eg a racial group; and also (b) you intend to stir up racial hatred or cause harassment, alarm or distress to someone (to paraphrase, genuinely put them in fear). This is where we've chosen to draw the line. It's further than in the States, but the laws are pretty much only used to keep in check the far right neo Nazi organisations we have. We allow those organisations to exist, meet, talk and publish material - but if they breach the hate speech laws, we can punish that.We have had these laws for quite a while now, and I haven't noticed any slippery slope. The line has stayed where we decided to draw it. We haven't abandoned freedom of speech, but have determined that it has a small number of limits, when we feel that the harm it could cause to protected groups is greater than the harm caused by drawing those limits.It's not a question of abandoning freedom of speech - quite the contrary. It's that we (and a lot of other countries) have drawn a narrow line where we think freedom of speech can cause more harm than it does to limit it slightly.My view is that life is rarely (possibly never) about absolutes. That's far too simplistic for me. It's more about balancing rights to make sure that in the 1 time in a 1000 we, as a society, feel that they cause more harm than good, we take a pragmatic view.Your mileage may differ.Edited by vimesey, : No reason given.

I don't know - Boris has been spouting a lot this month too.

That is a description of a really simplistic and unsophisticated perception of time by some human beings.To understand time as it is (ie one of the dimensions of space time, which came into existence at the singularity), you need to be able to do the mathematics involved in relativistic physics - or at the very least, be able to appreciate the implications of that mathematics.

OK, if I’m going to be able to reply in a way which helps here, I need to know if you are aware that space and time are not separate, but are part of a single concept, being spacetime.For example, are you aware that if you left Earth in a spaceship which (purely in spatial terms) could travel at speeds of a decent fraction of the speed of light, you could return to Earth younger than your kids ?

There’s tons of evidence, but here’s a really compelling and straightforward one to understand:Hafele—Keating experiment - Wikipedia Also, you misunderstand when I said you could come back from a space flight and be younger than your kids - you wouldn’t reverse your ageing process by doing that and get younger yourself - you would just age much more slowly than your kids back on Earth (relatively speaking, of course), who would catch you up and then get older than you.Edited by vimesey, : No reason given.

Did you not read the article ? They took gravitational time dilation into account and still evidenced time dilation through relativistic spatial motion to within the predicted 10% range of accuracy. That range has been narrowed in subsequent more accurate experiments.As for your misunderstanding of you coming back to earth younger than your kids, I quote your earlier post: Therein lay your misunderstanding.

Then it is clear that you have no understanding of relativity and spacetime. Which is fine - it’s not a concept for which our day to day existence gives us any instinctive understanding - it’s counter-intuitive. But it’s the way the universe is. We have the theories and the evidence to back it up.Your instinctive approach seems to be to resist any science which is counter to your own personal world view, because to accept one iota of that contrary science would be to threaten the foundations of your absolute belief in every letter of one particular translation of some words written down thousands of years ago by some Bronze Age tribesmen. Open your mind a little - you can maintain your faith and start to wonder at the true complexity and amazing beauty of the universe - I know many scientists who are men and women of faith. To know your God, do you truly, truly need to cling to what you see as the truth of a few ancient stories, and ignore the deeper and so much more amazing majesty of the genuine universe ?