The important thing to remember is that we’re the real bigots for calling bigots bigots.
So, is the obvious truth (evident to Christians but not to non-Christians) of the article that God is like Steve Jobs?
Jobs didn’t invent the iPhone all by himself, so the real truth must be that God had help in creating the universe. The Big Bang was actually the very first corporation. Thus, Adam and Eve were the first prototypes of humans, which means humans were upgraded throughout their existence, which is the same as Evolution!
I’d be just as likely to believe the Babylon Bee writers are secretly evolutionists as I would that Onion writers are secretly creationists.
I’m reminded of an excellent Cracked article on “conservative humor”: 5 Awful (But Revealing) Examples Of Conservative Comedy | Cracked.com
Just sayin’. It’s not funny because the premise is meant as an absurdist dig, but that dig doesn’t actually make a lick of sense to people who passed grade school biology lessons. It’s like a whole article premosed around debunking relativity using the “train on a train” thought experiment - funny only to those who buy this absolute garbage thought experiment.
It’s The Onion sans humor.
Somehow creationists find the idea of a slow natural process that takes millions of years more absurd than an invisible omnipotent sky creature that can do it all with a snap of his fingers.
Of course, Samuel Butler made the same joke 150 years ago, so the idea is not exactly fresh.
Now, now–you are missing brilliantly-written bits of satire such as this:
With all respect, I don’t consider an animal to be more complex than an iPhone. I’ve never really understood why most other people believe it to be the case.
Mod Note
Update: didn’t notice this was an old thread. Walking this back to a note, since we generally don’t give warnings on such old infractions. Definitely deserved moderation at the time though.
Warning Issued
Actually, those comments are nothing like saying Jews are slime. And insulting posters by saying they are defending immoral behavior by speaking out against anti-gay bigotry goes over the line.
You really struggle with expressing your opinion without hyperbole and insults.
Estimates vary pretty widely, but a median estimate for the processing performance of the human brain is 10^16 FLOPS. The fastest supercomputers are in the same ballpark; an iPhone about 5 orders of magnitude less.
Really? It takes me a few seconds to perform even a single floating point operation.
There are some things that I can process better than most computers, but those are tasks which are very poorly measured in FLOPS.
But also this, this, this this and this.
There’s plenty there that’s infuriating, but any random non-cherry-picked article is also quite likely to be amusing or neutral. Or only make sense if you’re regularly in church
Yeah, when someone makes an iPhone with trillions of copies of tens of thousands of types of molecular machines interacting inside of a watery bubble of fat, and trillions of those fat bubbles linked together into one system, then we can maybe conciser an iPhone being remotely as complex as an animal.
Only if doing conscious arithmetic is all you assume the brain does.
Sure, but there’s a lot of research out there that does discuss what the brain performance might equate to in FLOPS. Of course brain vs non-meat computer is not directly equivalent. But I don’t think it’s an unreasonable first step to estimate the relative complexity of brain vs iPhone in order of magnitude. No plausible alternative measure is going to suggest that an iPhone is remotely close to a mammalian brain in overall complexity, which was the issue raised.
I know one alternative proposed measure is TEPS, traversed edges per second.
I won’t claim to really understand it well, though.
Consciously, sure. Meanwhile, subconsciously, you’re running a highly advanced physics simulation that keeps your body balanced and tells you where your limbs are in relation to your environment. One reason for our big brains: throwing things long distance with accuracy is a hard thing to do! And we do it nearly instinctually.
Based on the “humor” in the OP, seems like you could get the “readers” of that “humor website” to sign up to a constitutional amendment declaring that life begins at the moment of manufacture, in order to prevent the immoral recycling of millions of iPhones every year.
Just considering our senses, we are constantly seeing and hearing and feeling everything around us and pattern-matching it against everything else in our memory in near real-time.
And that’s before taking into account actually thinking, and the unconscious maintenance that our brains do which would be the equivalent of FLOPS spent on system tasks.
And let me know when an iPhone spontaneously makes a copy of itself with equivalent capabilities.
Animals not only contain an internal blueprint allowing the reproduction of their own hardware, but also the development of their own behavioral software.
On the other hand, two bunnies can easily make a third bunny. Two bunnies can’t make an iPhone. In fact, there are probably no two humans who can make an iPhone. So, it depends on what we mean by “complex.”
The vast majority of humans can make another human; but virtually none would know how to make a simple thermostat to control their heating. Does that imply that a thermostat is more complex than a human being?
Virtually all bunnies can make more bunnies, generally very quickly and efficiently. Yet no bunny can make a smaller piece of rock from a large boulder. Does that mean a piece of rock is more complex than a bunny?