Number of Atheists on MAP

I'd be perfectly happy to admit that. What I'm not willing to agree to is that these people become terrorists purely because of their religion or that if there was no religion there would be no terrorist groups.

 

I don't think Islamic terrorists are terrorists purely because of their religion.
But their religion does make them the sort of terrorist that flies planes into buildings or drive car bombs rather than the sort of terrorist that plants bombs and sets them off from a distance.
There aren't IRA suicide bombers mostly because (I think) it's much harder to justify suicide bombing through christianity than islam.

 

Is that necessarily true? I'm no expert, by any means, but I thought that part of the IRA's motive was to pull Northern Ireland, where the protestant population outnumbered the catholics, into the republic, where they would be subsumed into a largely catholic governed political entity.

 

The conflict was less about reuniting the whole of Ireland as a Catholic country, more about getting rid of the (mainly Protestant) English. And Scots. Some people think the Troubles started in the 70's (Bloody Sunday etc) and some think it started in the early 20th century with the Easter Uprising. The truth is it started long before that; you can blame a lot of it on William of Orange, who thought he had something to prove and tried to colonise Northern Ireland with Protestants (religion again!) but he would never have been close to sharing the throne of England if Henry VIII hadn't been obsessed with having a son and seceding from the Catholic Church because the Pope wouldn't give him an annulment (religion on the surface, but definitely politics at the core).

http://www.easter1916.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_III_of_England

 

Religion is a major filter through which people view their world. It has a major impact on whatever political agenda they may be trying to achieve.

 

But the protestant population of Northern Ireland were Irish, weren't they? It's not like they were colonists or Brits building houses on Irish land. It was the majority population of Northern Ireland who wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom.

 

Depends how far you want to go back. the Protestant population of Northern Ireland is, by and large, composed of decendents of the Scots and English who were 'planted' by the English government in 1610, and decendents of the occupying forces of William of Orange. Ulster was Celtic Catholic until the early 1600's, but James I (Protestant, Scottish) wasn't that keen on Catholics (especially since they planned to blow him up) and saw Ulster as a threat (rebellion against English rule by Hugh O'Neill might have had something to do with that) so ordered it to be colonised on a grand scale.

http://www.wesleyjohnston.com/users/ireland/past/history/15981629.html

 

Not really. I think it's called that because of a book a physicist wrote about it that had God in the title.

Gravity couples to the stress energy tensor, not mass, and in fact, you have energy and momentum without mass, but it obeys the relationship E^2 - P^2 = 0 instead of E^2 - P^2 = m^2. The 00 component of the stress energy tensor is proportional to mass but the other elements of the tensor are important, too, which is why rotating and charged black holes have a different gravitational field than stationary ones. The Higgs mechanism is required to give mass to gauge particles like the W and Z boson (or photons for that matter, as in the case of superconductors) since those particles display a gauge symmetry and gauge invariance could not be maintained with a mass term in the Lagrangian otherwise.

Not really. There are variants of the standard model without the Higgs boson. As I said before, I'm not actually a particle physicist, so I don't know how those work in particular. Somehow, the Higgs mechanism is still present--I'm not sure how that works without the Higgs boson.

Yes, because there was mass present that couldn't be seen--keep in mind, that doesn't mean that there's anything special about it other than the fact that it's not visible. In fact, an early theory called MACHO (massive compact halo objects) basically just had a lot of heavy things floating around that weren't too well lit up.

However, it's very easy to show the distribution of mass in a galaxy from the rotation curves (not enough mass and the galaxy would fly apart, too little, it would shrink up), as well as from gravitational lensing and this is compatible with a gas of particles that don't interact under electromagnetism.

A study in 2006 of the bullet cluster also showed by using gravitational lensing that in the collision between galactic clusters, most of the mass did NOT track the location of the visible matter (most visisble matter is actually in the hot plasma between galaxies although it's only visible in x-ray frequencies), but rather the location where dark matter was expected to be (inside the galaxies), ruling out alternative theories, like MOND (modified Newtonian gravity).

Nope, this is totally wrong. Dark energy is almost completely unrelated to dark matter. In fact, it sort of does the opposite of what dark matter does. According to general relativity, gravity (i.e. curvature) couples to the stress energy tensor, so curvature becomes a function of energy. Measurements of the rate of expansion of the universe show that it has negative curvature. BY DEFINITION this means that the net energy density of the universe is negative. This is dark energy.

 

I think politics impact religion at least as much as religion impacts politics.