A hypothetical situation:

     Suppose someone had created a device that allowed him to control the actions of someone else. Suppose further that he used device to make someone else rob a bank. Finally, suppose the person who used that controller was the judge in the criminal case and sentenced his victim to life in a dungeon. Would that person be perfectly good? Is the person controlled against his will actually responsible for anything?

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A prediction

     I am making a prediction for what will in 2009 when Daniel's "prophecy" about the supernatural destruction of San Francisco fails to come to pass. I will put my prediction in the comments section to avoid claims of editing after the fact.

Well, Daniel is decreeing that I am not impartial because I don't simply take his side on everything.

     I suppose it's not really a surprise. He doesn't want a fair judge. He wants someone to give him a pass on everything. Failing that, he wants to say that anyone who says that something he did is wrong is just a "servant of Satan" looking for an excuse to accuse him. Well, the fact is that when he is right, I say so. When he is wrong, I say that as well. In the particular post he is wrong to say that Charles of England went to him. He went to Charles (by his own account) and taunted him about his dead wife. Now, he might have tried to argue that he was justified in going to Charles. That would be open to discussion. After all the man who threw the shoes at George Bush no doubt considered himself justified in going to Bush to do so. But he would be wrong to say that Bush went to him.

No such thing as an ex-christian?

     Some people claim that there is no such thing as an ex-christian. That, of course, is baloney. A christian is someone who believes (or pretends to believe, depending on your point of view) that a person named Jesus was really the son of a god and came to "die for our sins." As it is possible to stop believing that, it is possible to be an ex-christian.

It seems that several christians are embracing the dishonesty that is Sye.

     I am talking about lines like "How do you account for logic according to your worldview?" In an honest debate, one does not call for an accounting of things not in dispute. One also does not call for an accounting of things that are properly basic. It is not possible to form a worldview without some sort of logic. Logic is properly basic to any worldview.

If the larger scientific community had accepted an unfalsifiable pseudoscience as a valid science, could it ever be corrected?

     I would like to point out that a falsifiable pseudoscience would eventually be corrected because someone would publish an experiment which falsified it. I am of the mind that large-scale evolution is such an unfalsifiable pseudoscience. But here I am interested in the larger question. I only bring up that particular belief because I am sure that, if I did not, someone would use it in an ad hominem attack.
     To the direct point, I think that such an error could remain uncorrected indefinitely. There is no perfect test to distinguish between science and pseudoscience. In fact, the determination is made by existing scientists. Going against the grain (unless you can prove it) will get you ignored, dismissed as a crackpot, shunned, or something similar. But one cannot prove that no possible observation will falsify an idea. Believers in an idea will insist that the idea is potentially falsifiable. Look at the followers of any pseudoscience. They will state that they have conducted tests and that differing results would have "falsified the theory." And they are sincere. They really believe it. But the significance of data are only determined after the fact. Negative data are dismissed as unimportant or explained away. Positive data are heralded as important confirmation. The followers of a pseudoscience genuinely cannot see that they have set it up to be unfalsifiable. So, if a pseudoscience was ever accepted, how could it be detected? Once it was in, how could it be rooted out?