Pay a higher fee or suffer

Fast Lane means pay a higher fee or suffer:

Without net neutrality ISPs will have enormous incentives to keep regular customers hostage until they pay up higher fees to access the Internet; that is to say: pay a higher fee or suffer.

If a pay-to-play Internet becomes reality, most of us will be left behind while the money-cow moves to the more expensive plans and packages offered by ISPs. ISPs will start to favour them and neglect the rest of us who might not be able to afford the new fees. So, inadvertently it shifts the ISPs away from net neutrality into a discriminating Internet. read more...

How to digitally sign an e-mail – Updated

UPDATE 2018-05-17: web links are updates.

I made a post in 2009 explaining how to digitally sign an e-mail with FireGPG. Unfortunately, FireGPG is discontinued and no longer supports Gmail. So, we need to do it differently now.

Objective: To sign your out-going emails through an online email provider such as Gmail or Yahoo mail. read more...

Religion corrupts morality

by Eric Bright

UPDATE: 2020-03-11 typos, grammar, etc.

Pope holding on a golden staff while saluting an audience. The captions reads: Pray for the starving children while I hold this gold cross.
Pope holding a golden staff while saluting an audience. The caption reads:
“Pray for the starving children while I hold this gold cross.”
Note: This is written by an atheist for other atheists. You can rarely (if at all) convince a believer by an approach like this. Please don’t use this tone when conversing with your believer friends. It will not work.

Any believer I have ever seen so far, without a single exception, has had a moral standard that was at best equal to the lowest moral standards I keep seeing in non-believers, and at worse a degree of magnitude lower. read more...

Should we include the study of religions in the discipline of philosophy?

Epicurus’ Paradox
Epicurus’ Paradox

Someone said yes and this was her reason:

Mythology, astrology, humanity’s spiritual relationship to the stars , the soul, and God’s judgment on the soul, reincarnation, supernatural beings such as angels and demons, Plato wrote about all of those things.

An anonymous forum user. Edited for grammar and style.

Plato is particularly one of the worst examples one could have come up with to justify a position against my stance. If by that example she means that we have to study poetry, astrology, music, mathematics, mythology, reincarnation, demonology, the judgment day and the like because Plato has done so, then that’s not reasonable. read more...

The case against religions: Why the Law of Noncontradiction matters

By Eric Bright

Spock - a fictional character in the Star Trek.
Spock – a fictional character in the Star Trek.

Don’t have faith in logic

I am sure the reason you accept the validity of the Law of Noncontradiction (I would call it the law from now on) is not that you have faith in it. It does not even make sense to say that one has faith in the law.

Also, the law is not like physical laws or language laws, or social laws. Certainly, we all understand it. But, I have to emphasize this reality a bit further for my sake. read more...