^^^ That is such a tired and empty sentiment.

Most modern atheists were raised in an environment which conditioned them to believe in some ooky-spooky paranormal 'spiritual' dualism, those that were brought up with parents who chose to maintain an intellectual honesty to their child-raising are a fortunate few.

Most modern atheists are former conditioned theists who persistently sought to challenge the fallacious argument and dishonesty employed by theism because theist belief is incapable of rationally explaining the world around them and is generally in constant conflict with its own claimed values and contradictions. This often achieved through a long process of investigation, evaluation and eventual rejection. Not because they couldn't 'find' god, but because the argument being used to suggest such were clearly dishonest or delusional.

We are more than able to chart the psychosocial development of the establishment of belief systems and their related symbolism and ritual, so in that you, as a theist, can happily dismiss Thor and Zeuss and Ra or the thousands and thousands of gods claimed by theism throughout human history and even currently, why would you choose, then, to ignore the fact that your theism is rooted in *exactly* the same fallacious thought process that the belief systems you so readily dismiss, are, or were?

I am particularly appalled that research in the US showed atheists to be less trusted than rapists.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-atheists-we-distrust/

Yes, 'tis indeed a stunning notion to comprehend the extent of theist conditioning in demonising the absence of theist belief in a person to the degree that a convicted rapist would be considered more trustworthy.

No. Theism is about staking a claim on a wildly speculative proposition, atheism is simply the act of not accepting that proposition as worthy of consideration because it is entirely absent reason or evidence.

I don't have to go around describing myself as 'Aunicornist' if I do not believe in unicorns. It is not considered a 'stake' being claimed if I reject your unfounded assertions towards an invisible pink teapot orbiting Mars, or any number of arbitrarily dreamed up concepts our imagination is capable of.

I am not surprised by the degree of intellectual dishonesty theists end up posting in their frothing nonsense defending their subjective beliefs, or attacking our lack of same, after all, they have been conditioned to live in a near-constant, and stressful, state of denial and dishonesty, within their own minds to the extent they believe the gilded cage their thoughts live in is a wondrous place to be, absent belief that it is even possible to find any happiness outside of the abusive relationship they maintain with an all-powerful imaginary patriarch who lives in their heads. 'He' loves them and through all the pain and suffering, they know that 'He' only lets it happen because he loves them so very very much.

Back in biblical times there were plenty of 'Messiahs', 'Prophets' and such, declaring themselves to either be god, of god, or possessing of some unique insight into god, along with vast numbers of ill-educated people who readily latched on to anyone who could claim to explain the meaning of life to them. 'Jesus' wasn't special, he was just another guy with a messianic complex, albeit his tended to be more about loving each other, much the way that, say, someone like David Ike is today, as being the resolution to all our problems.

Trouble is, Jesus wasn't expected to die, at the very least his delusional followers thought he'd be coming back to finish the job of defeating the Roman oppressors. Oppressors not because they were Christian, by the way, oppressors because they were not Roman. Christianity does tend to paint itself as the ever-suffering victim, claiming they were persecuted by the Romans but there is no evidence to suggest the Romans were picking on them any more than they picked on anyone else who wasn't a Roman.

Still, never let facts get in the way of a good story, especially one that can persuade people to buy in to your scheme promising 'ultimate reward' . . . after death.

PoS coins are particularly prone to creating high numbers of transactions and the ability to regularly consolidate them automatically would be extremely useful.

I think it is most definitely worth thinking about seeing if such a function could be incorporated into the wallet. It would certainly be a feature worthy of a bounty.

You do know that simply repeating the same erroneous assertion isn't going to eventually make it correct, right?

Courtesy of the late and most definitely great Carl Sagan:

A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"
Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you.  Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself.  There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say.  I lead you to my garage.  You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely.  "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick."  And so on.  I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?  If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists?  Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.  Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.  What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.  The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head.  You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me.  The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind.  But then, why am I taking it so seriously?  Maybe I need help.  At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility.  Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded.  So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage.  You merely put it on hold.  Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you.  Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative -- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."

Imagine that things had gone otherwise.  The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch.  Your infrared detector reads off-scale.  The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you.  No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons -- to say nothing about invisible ones -- you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me.  Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages -- but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive.  All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence.  None of us is a lunatic.  We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on.  I'd rather it not be true, I tell you.  But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported.  But they're never made when a skeptic is looking.  An alternative explanation presents itself.  On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked.  Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath.  But again, other possibilities exist.  We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons.  Such "evidence" -- no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it -- is far from compelling.  Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

Except that Atheism is not a religion, hence the name.

It is the absence of theism. Theists are the ones proposing the existence of something for which they have no evidence, that's called playing pretend *real* hard.

You need to make sure the byte size is lower than 75k I believe.

I think you can select a few hundred transactions to send to a consolidation address before you reach that size though.

You sound angry, yet your reply is absent reason or objective evidence, merely obfuscation of the original claim by trying to redefine it by another name and talking about links which clearly are not able to withstand critical analysis otherwise they would be global news.

Clearly your claim towards the 'personality' existing after death references dualism, whatever you want to label the same thing that is also known as the human 'soul'

There's no reason to believe you existed before this life and there is no reason to believe you will exist after it, either. If you existed before this life, but have no memory of it, then the 'you' that has grown from birth and identified yourself with all that you have experienced, would not be the 'you' that is often claimed preceded this life, rendering assertion towards sentience prior to this existence absurd as you might as well be talking about someone else who existed prior to this life.

No there isn't. Nobody comes back from death, because they would not have been dead, they would have been another state, best described as 'dying'. Claims towards there being 'proof' of consciousness existing while 'brain dead' ignore the fact that electrical and neurochemical signals are still active to some degree, even if close to complete brain death. Dream-like experiences are reported, but that would be expected considering we have similar social cues that tend to paint the descriptions to match common expectations.

All claims regarding supposed 'real' experiences 'after death' are either simply subjective anecdote or outright lie. Often it is a combination of the two, which tends to manifest as a combination of vague recall of imagery and sensation interwoven with wishful thinking and descriptive narrative.

The notion of the human 'spirit' is something that exists solely in our imagination. Just because billions of people are conditioned from childhood to believe in dualism, again purely on the basis of repeated baseless assertion, does not make it a fact.

You can't prove anything by way of general consensus.

BTW, someone turned up in IRC earlier as a result of them seeing the number of votes we are getting over at Crypto-Trade so, whoever is putting in the legwork on that, good job, it is having an effect.

Oh? Ok, well that would be better than I feared anyway.

Thanks for the information.

I wonder whether batch2 will begin shipping a month after the first units ship from batch1 or a month after the last unit from batch1 ships.

It should be the latter, but given that KNC want to kick us all to the kerb and get back to what they do best, namely, mining with the hardware they manufacture, I'm guessing it will be the former.

Sure, as long as you're fighting an enemy and not an ideology.

Saying Atheism is a religion is like labelling 'off' a tv channel.

“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” - Stephen Roberts

Atheism is the practice of intellectual honesty - a state of mind toxic to theism.

How would the staking be handled for a Trezor wallet?

Yes, because that is exactly what I was saying.

The assertion that you can't defeat violence with more violence must, of course, mean I am proposing we keep funding the violence.

/sarcasm

Careful Spoods, it seems the general consensus is that any suggestion other than violence when faced with a violent dysfunctional people is to be dismissed with, you guessed it, hopes of more violence.

Not one hint of recognition at the sickening absurdity of it. Not one.

Sure, that approach has certainly worked well so far. I'm certain if only you had more bullets, or more bombs, or more broken bodies of your enemy laying around, it would bring rapid victory. Or victory, anyway.

Cos they're, like, totally not thinking the same thing.

You don't get to tell people their intellectually dishonest delusions are wrong while your intellectually dishonest delusions are right.

Theism requires a persistent state of intellectual dishonesty and the more we attempt to tell people that their delusional conditioning isn't acceptable but other people's delusional conditioning is, the more they will ignore all you try and do to stop their madness.

How do you otherwise propose we defeat a people who think dying is a good way to impress their god?

The sooner we as a species recognise the insanity and dishonesty of theism, all theism, the sooner we'll be able to replace indoctrination with education.

The question posed in the topic title is, "How do we defeat ISIS without U.S. Ground Troops?".

Do you want to know the *real* simple answer to that?
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You're not going to like it.
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It requires no bullets, bombs or broken bodies.
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Still want to know?
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Ready?
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The answer to the question, "How do we defeat ISIS without U.S. Ground Troops?" is,
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With intellectual honesty.