Bay 12 Games Forum

Man, the larger spider species must send you screaming for the hills. There's several insect (and a few arachnid, I think) species that get bigger than that

Huh... must be desensitized, or something. Things that look like cicadas are inherently harmless to me.

Though I'm pretty sure they occasionally do some horrific things to local ecologies, or something... iirc. Cicada swarms are supposed to be a bit of a threat for certain... plant species? I think? Under certain conditions. Still, as direct harm goes, they're not a threat.

Okay, gave a mundo PVP run on SR... yes, it's not exactly high ELO, but...

I went 14/1/3 before they surrendered... only death happened when I got too greedy and tower-dived past their inhib to murder soraka again. Our team had 29 kills. Top laned with jayce against soraka and nunu. It... it was... it was brutal. Low level play definitely had a lot to do with it, though... other guys were terrible as far as cleaver dodging went (and I'm not exactly pro at aiming them, either ), and did silly things like vayne trying to sit in melee and AD me to death (Poor thing melted.). They just... didn't know how to respond to Mundo. Mind you, I'm not really sure how to respond to Mundo right now (Except dodge those damn cleavers! And maybe that % damage item... razor something?), but...


Also, that was my first attempt at PvP in LoL

I wouldn't call deism rational either, at least not anymore.  Belief in a non-interventionist impersonal god is about as rational as belief in Sagan's invisible dragon.  It made sense in the enlightenment period, back before stuff like evolution and advanced cosmology had made atheism a tenable position for the thinking man, but now that we don't need an intelligence to invoke them I don't see why we should.

Yeah, not cluttering up the metaphysics unnecessarily is my primary reason for not accepting a lot of theist arguments, myself. There's people that disagree that a maximally uncluttered metaphysics is a virtue, though, and from what I've seen where a person falls on that subject is more a matter of taste than justification.

M'not particularly interested in actually providing the arguments that are going around nowadays... I honestly don't remember any of the particulars, nor can I recall (/or am willing to expend the effort finding) enough to hunt them down again. Those were just examples thrown out to show that, y'know, it's not all just FAITH FAITH FAITH NO REASON or whathaveyou (which is overstating Zig's original statement, I do believe, but it gets the point across.). Yes, a lot of the older stuff's been kicked into the ground pretty hard and etc, and so forth, and so on. That doesn't mean we get to posit the assumption that, simply because an argument is faith (and/or religion) based, it's irrational. S'not paying th'better theologians their fair due, and the issue isn't quite that simple.

(As a side note, I too have not found much in the way of specific logical theologians. I search for them every once and a while, but the closest I have ever come to finding them is the Anthropic Principle, which basically consists of assigning physical laws probabilities in order to make a gap into which a god can fit.)

Yeah, s'like I've been saying, I'm aware that they exist but don't remember exactly who they are... frankly, I'd have to make either a long distance phone call (am poor ) or a six hour road trip (in about a month and a half, when they come off vacation ) to talk to a couple of my old professors to get some good suggestions. Theology isn't really my field, I've just brushed up against it enough to have a degree of respect for it, even if I by-and-large disagree with the conclusions it tends to come to (and basically don't remember a bloody thing about the actual arguments). It's never good to underestimate the enemy, so to speak

As for the faith thing, just remember to clarify religious faith with that, heh. Everything's ultimately faith (i.e. unjustifiable -- in the stronger sense -- belief) based at the bottom, etc. Faith isn't just a worthwhile thing, it's a necessary thing. Strong skepticism can't actually be beat without it, unfortunately, and thorough skepticism itself is basically a useless dead-end.

Isn't this the part where you give an example?

*lackadaisically gestures at the Enlightenment* God of the Gaps, Deism, etc.

The medieval period in general's just kinda' rife with it, too, due largely to that whole "only major source of literacy" thing... some of the major Arabic powers in and around that time period are incredibly notable for producing rational theists, as well. These people were entirely aware of the logical problems with a theistic axiom base and didn't just ignore or downplay the issues involved.

In more modern times, I'd... have to go find my old school notes, which is more effort than I'm going to put forward But yes, there's continuing effort in the modern era to marry reason and religion, and in ways considerably more genuine than is often appreciated -- by either the non-religious or the religious.

But, you can look toward guys like Spinoza, theists (albeit of a sort that many lay worshipers nowadays likely wouldn't recognize as such) who didn't just throw out rationality. That sort of tradition has most definitely extended into the modern age and is engaging in good faith (heh) with non-theist ideology. I just can't remember any of the more notable names, bleh.

Primary point I was trying to make, though, is that saying that true faith is necessarily irrational just isn't something that's accurate. Theology is considerably more diverse than that, and it's just not really an assumption that's fair to make, especially if you're trying to discuss the issue meaningfully.

Some can go down as hardware incompatibility; I've got a few games in my library that just plain don't run on my machine.

This and offline are my big ones. There's... four? Five? Games in my steam library (which is something just shy of half of them, iirc) that are simply non-functional on any computer I have access to. Another couple are insufficiently functional, i.e. they run, but barely or do horrible things to th'computer's CPU, so I don't exactly play much. Everything else, I've sunk in at least a few dozen hours, though in a couple cases before I got the game on steam or most of that time offline.

I will "invest" if I've got some loose funds and there's particularly good sales going on, though -- buying a game I'm not able to play or aware I won't be playing much for a long while doesn't bother me when it's digital. I'll get around to it sooner or later, whenever I've got better hardware access. It's not going anywhere, and if it does, I'm a lot less troubled by re-aquiring something I've actually purchased.

EDIT: I've also been hearing people say that they're no longer buying Blizzard games since the Warcraft 2 expansion and, well, everyone still buys the next Blizzard game. I'm curious as to whether this is an actual "I'm done" or a "I'm done until the Starcraft 2 expansion price drops".

... be careful with the word "everyone." Chances are pretty high it's going to be inaccurate. In this case, absolutely certain, because I exist, and haven't purchased (or even bothered to play through other methods!) a blizzard game since WC3. Don't have consistent enough Internet access to play D3, refuse to play SC2 unless there's major changes to how it handles custom maps. Probably one of maybe three people on this forum that's never played WoW. Some of us actually did mean it when we said, "Nope. Sorry, done."

Now... almost everyone -- that's probably fair

Still. Don't misuse everyone. That's a logical category that is incredibly difficult to actually fill.

tl:dr: Bad Ribbus! Don't misuse logic on the carpet!