What Rug Thinks

I have been to fighting keep religious teachings out of the public school systems for a long time now. One such part of religious teachings is creationism. Many creationist have been trying to get Intelligent Design taught in science classes for years. Even though every time it has been taken to court it has been proven wrong, not to be science, and violating the constitution. A part of my fight is to keep track of creationist posting on the internet. This allows me to know what their arguments are so I can be well prepared. However, when I came across J. Warner Wallace post today over at  christianity.com . I got a little irritated by the second line of this post. Therefore, I thought it would be nice to do a thorough point by point debunking of this quote mined rhetoric. Mr. Wallace starts off showing bias and ignorance right from the start when he quotes Richard Dawkins.  "Much has been written about the evidence for design in biological organisms. In fact, the a...

Way back in April of 2015 at the RSA Conference in San Francisco Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson made some interesting comments. You can read the entire thing here . I'm going to quote a bit of his talk here and then give my view on it. "The Department of Homeland Security has both the cybersecurity mission and a law enforcement/counterterrorism mission for the American people. We have feet in both camps. I therefore believe I have a good perspective on this issue. The current course we are on, toward deeper and deeper encryption in response to the demands of the marketplace, is one that presents real challenges for those in law enforcement and national security." I agree, the people demand stronger encryption and the most talented of the encryption tech community responded in kind. While it may never be perfect, the encryption techniques in use today are the best that have ever been used. However, law enforcement would have a much harder time seeing the da...

What is intelligence? What makes someone intelligent? Are you intelligent? Can someone become intelligent when they weren't before? These are questions I have asked myself over and over. I think I finally have the answers. What is intelligence? This question is as simple as looking at a dictionary. According to the dictionary intelligence is "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills." Most people tend to think someone that knows a lot of facts is intelligent. According to the definition however, they are wrong because that is knowledge not intelligence. Memorization does not make someone intelligent because there is another component to it. The ability to apply the knowledge you have. This is the ability to string facts together, apply these strings of facts in such a way to accomplish something, or to figure something out. This boils down to the use of logic. Adding logic to knowledge is the basis of intelligence.  What makes someone intelli...