ScottSA

We can be certain that Iran does not yet have nukes, because Israel has not yet attacked Iran. But Israel would be brain dead if they did allow Iran to get the capability. And brain dead is something Israel has never been. There is a bad moon rising....... Very bad. I believe we've been in the winter war of WW III for several years. It's almost a given that a major war involving Israel in the absence of cold war stasis would suck in the global powers. With the exception of France, of course, which would pre-emptively surrender to Denmark.

In other words, you don't have an answer to the second question? Of course I don't have an answer to the question. Duh. Who do you think I am, God? But the fact that I don't know something doesn't mean there isn't an answer. To argue as an atheist that unless someone can find the creator of the creator, the creator doesn't exist always struck me as one of the most foolish tautologies in existence. It's like demanding to know where the universe ends, and claiming that if the answer isn't forthcoming, the universe must not exist.

Just trying to get an answer from you. What is your solution to the problem you identify? You say Muslims are a scourge. So what is to be done about it? The solution? The same solution we used against Nazism and Communism. Stomp out Islamism wherever we can, and hold it off wherever we can't. Make Islamic revolution an extremely unpleasant undertaking. Put Islam under the microscope, and especially when it's in our own countries.

That's pretty much what I figured you'd say. Your culture is superior, and everyone else's is inferior. At least you're are honest about it, I'll give you credit for that. It's neither honest nor dishonest. It's objectively true. Name another culture, now, today, that is superior to that of the west.

I'm not going to re-enter this repeat of what has been explained countless times before, just because Hollus is too lazy to read up on past threads.

The US was already at "war" with Saddam's Iraq long before 9/11. Did Canada and the rest of NATO also have "PNAC" motives for invading Afghanistan? Must have something like this, eh? "Hey, I have a great idea. Let's write our manifesto for world domination, publish it, and then invade Afghanistan....wait a spell, then invade Iraq." Nobody will notice! Brilliant! Devilishly clever plot, I must say. Do you have anything to contribute to this thread? I think you should re-write your signiture as it is quite out of line with your actual behavior. Sorry. Were you expecting me to be serious in this ridiculous ever-repeating and apparently never-ending bit of nonsense? Planes fly into buildings in front of 6 billion witnesses while their occupants give live play by play to folks on the ground while it all happens, both the mastermind and the culprits confess on camera, and the entire world media crawls all over the story for 6 years without finding one shred of evidence of anything else, and I'm supposed to keep a straight face while "debating" whether or not it is a figment of mass hypnosis or some such? Yup, ok, I'll get right on it...now, are we still talking about deathrays and footprints, or have we moved on to Martians and missiles yet?

My understanding, and I could be wrong, is that the morning after pill kills or destroys the fetus by preventing it from gluing to the uterus. If this is correct, then it is exactly the same thing to the mind of someone who believes that life begins at conception. And no, I'm not avoiding any questions...I just don't see the logic to claiming that if an individual doctor refuses to do something, that no other doctors exist in the universe who can.

Who created these life forms, and where did this creator come from? That's two questions, the answer to the first of which is self-evident from the second, and the second is the usual tautology.

I didn't realize we were making such broad distinctions. You say all Muslims are a "scourge" so it shouldn't matter to you whether they are republics or whatever. I was speaking of countries with majority Muslim populations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_countries I'm afraid I don't agree with your holy war on Muslims. Is that what you think needs to be done? A culling? No, I think a focussing of your mind and a good beating of swords strawmen into plowshares brooms is in order. Holy war on Muslims? Are you still beating your mother?

I am not talking temperature, I am talking CO2 concentration. Why is it higher, and why is it increasing faster, than any other time in the last 600 000 years? Well, if it is, and that's very much up for debate, it begs for the question of why CO2 concentration was higher before 600,000 years ago?

Just like "we" integrated with the Natives. Not at all. We had a superior culture to the natives. They had a stoneage culture and we had a modern industrial culture. You can argue the cultural relativism line if you want, but it's a losing proposition outside the ivory towers. We also have a superior culture to the cultures coming here...by several orders of magnitude.

The countries I listed are all considered Muslim countries. You don't think they are? No. Muslim countries are countries run by Islamic law. Most of the countries you listed are republics of one sort or another. To call the majority of them "Muslim" is like calling Spain a "Catholic" country, or the Netherlands a "Dutch Reformed Church" country. Nonetheless, even in the countries you mentioned, Islam can be found at the bottom of most of the political shenanigans that go on.

Only two of the countries I mentioned have Muslim majorities? You better run off and so some research. Having fun dragging the goalposts around the field? A minute ago we were talking about Muslim countries and now all of a sudden we're talking about Muslim "majorities?"

Alrighty then. Next?

Of course, because enlightened and cultured Europeans would never fight each other on racial, ethnic or cultural grounds....as long as you forget about the first and second world war, the holocaust, catholics fighting protestants in Ireland, ethnic cleansing, separatists attacks, etc, etc What are you talking about? What does any of this have to do with multiculturalism? Because Europeans fought each other, we ought to introduce a whole new level of conflict? Are you ok?

Many theists don't believe that a life form as intelligent as human beings could have evolved. I'd like to know, then, how a species "a lot more intelligent than us" could have evolved. I'm not even sure I get the purpose of this question. Obviously if one believed in creation and extraterrestrial life simultaneously, one would believe that both life forms were created regardless of their relative intelligences. Was that a serious question?

The near death experience concept relies on the body having a spirit. If you want to know if this is true, visit a hospital and observe a patient who's oxygen level is being slowly deprived. You'll observe the personality of the patient changes, drastically, to the point the 'spirit' of the person you knew, no longer exists. Utter nonsense. You're simply making up a false premise and jamming a conclusion into it. The spirit, by definition, has nothing to do with the brain. Actually no, I'm not making up a false premise. I'm speaking from witnessing my father 'change' next to death due to pnemonia, then, watching his personality return as antibiotics enabled him to breathe properly. The spirit has everything to do with the identity of a person. Identity will change with a slow deprival of oxygen. A spirit, if true to its definition, would not require oxygen to exist and would not change if oxygen were to be deprived. You're arbitrarly equating spirit with personality and "identity." Why? On what grounds?

Such as? You are either posting in the wrong thread or haven't bothered to read it.

The terms "organization", "economy" and "politics" are ultimately composed of individuals. So before you start using kitsch, pseudo-sophisticated terms such as "macro factors", you better have a good grasp of how the individual matters.My point was to say that I wouldn't judge, after the fact, the relative importance of a navigator in a bomber over Germany and a tank commander on the Eastern front in the defeat of the Nazis. Both individuals contributed a small, almost imperceptible effort. It was the collective result of these individual efforts that finally defeated the enemy. But that's like saying that a human body doesn't really exist because it's a collection of atoms, molecules etc. Sure, it's marginally true I suppose, but the body in question would probably argue the case with you.

So, you think it's perfectly acceptable for doctors to tell your wife, after she has been raped and there's a very good chance she will conceive, that she should allow the child of a rapist grow within her for 9 months and she should go through the agony of giving birth to this baby? Would you be comfortable enough to tell your wife, daughter or mother that she has to let a rapist's seed grow inside her for 9 months because it is wrong to interrupt conception with the morning after pill? You're asking two entirely unrelated questions underneath all that emoting and fluff: 1 Would I find it acceptable for a doctor to refuse the morning after pill? A: Absolutely, if the doctor felt that he was committing murder by prescribing it. Would you find it acceptable to club a kid to death because its mother found out its father was a rapist? You see, you have to understand that there are different positions on conception and life in order to see where the doctor is coming from. You can try to discredit it if you want, but it is every bit as valuable an opinion as your's. And in a negative growth birthrate situation, it may just carry more weigh even from a humanist perspective. 2 Would I find it acceptable for a woman to have a rapists baby? A: I don't know, never having had to deal with it, but the answer to that question has nothing whatsoever to do with the first one.

You can't put it more clearly. Or be more wrong. You should meet my Jewish atheist friends. According to you, they don't exist. The only reason they are considered Jewish is because of the religion. Take away the religion and there would never have been any Jews. Ergo, even Jews who no longer practice judaism, are still only jewish due to religion. Obviously no matter how clearly things are spelled out for you M&M you still have comprehension issues. It doesn't matter what the origins of the name are...that's an unrelated argument. The fact still remains that Jewishness today refers to both a race and a religion. To a linguistic purist, the term "anti-semetic" refers to a bias against Palestinians and Jews alike, but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks that's what it means. And it doesn't mean a bias toward those who worship in synagogues. It means a bias toward Jews. Hitler didn't round up only those Jews who went to temple, he rounded up Jews, whether they were secular, agnostic or atheist. His laws didn't refer to "half-Jews" because they went to temple half the time; they meant that they were genetically half Juden. This argument is kind of silly, really, since you're tilting against windmills by evoking the origins of millstones.

Where exactly did I say anything remotely like that? Are you saying that pink elephants should fly only on starlit nights, and only when one tenth of the sky is covered in cloud? Lets try to avoid the strawmen for just a second, ok? If a doctor feels that they took an oath to do no harm, or however it's worded, and believes that the morning after pill is harm, by virtue of a belief that life begins at conception, then it seems to me that he or she is honor bound NOT to give someone the pill. Leave legality out of it...honor is not the same thing, even though it seems out of vogue these days.

Perhaps you can show me where exactly in the modern version of the Hippocratic oath it specifically says "I will not give morning after pills to women who were raped" and then prove to me that this particular doctor actually took that oath, and that the oath is legally binding. Then you might have a point. How silly. That's like asking me for a specific legal citation stating that men cannot slit their wives throats with 10" knives, and arguing that the absence of such a citation means it's legal.

There are many Muslim countries will stable governments, no rebellions and who pose no threat to rest of the world. I realize that you believe that all Muslims alone or in groups are a threat to you but I'm afraid I just don't see it. I have several Muslim friends. You should try it some time. You have Muslim friends? Oh, well then, I stand corrected...you are clearly an expert on Muslim friends. All I did was grow up watching Muslims torch Hindus and Sikhs. Silly me. And of course I've never had a Muslim friend, what with the teeming millions of them around me all the years I grew up beside them. The idea that someone wouldn't be able to distinguish between the particular and the general, the individual and the mass, is something that never actually struck me as worthy of explanation. Do you really not see the difference between Islam and your "Muslim friends?" Do you imagine that all Nazis were growling beasts, or do you think it possible that a few of them might have been...well...nice guys? If that is possible, does it mean that Nazism is a nice philosophy? Are your "Muslim friends" representative of the ideology of Islam? I hardly think so. You claim these countries exist, but of the countries you cited, only two are Muslim and both of those are awash in oil, while the rest of the world stands by waiting for the revolutionary nightmare when they run out of it. So you just develop your friendships in enlightened bliss while I continue to call Islam a global scourge.

They're not? Isn't that why we have elections? Is that a serious question?