WIP

Of course you do, since you want to live in your own little relativistic world where you can make up any bullshit and call it truth.

I don't know much about B.C. issues except that the inverse relationship on environment illustrates why proportional representation is needed to break up the stranglehold of party politics. Specifically, what I find ironic is that the normally rightwing B.C. Liberal Party adopted the Carbon Tax (likely when it seemed it would be a popular, minimal risk idea to win green votes) and so what does the left wing NDP Party do! They toss environmental issues over the side in a naked grab for power, and promise to end the carbon tax. So much for the presumption many people have that left wing parties will take care of the environment! Political expediency trumps everything. This is a reason why there are many pessimists on the climate change issue who do not believe that any meaningful actions can be taken in time to prevent a future disaster. Many people will resist any new tax, and political parties can be counted on to do what wins the most votes, rather than what is best, and take the lead in staving off an environmental disaster.

I'll assume you won't respond at all, and instead, start another brushfire creationist thread!

Blasphemy, worshipping other gods, breaking the sabbath, would all be crimes -- punished by public stoning, as would dishonouring ones father and mother. Actually, all of the ten commandment rules would have carried a death sentence, except maybe for stealing. Anyways, it's an archaic law code, likely borrowed from the Sumerian priest/king Hammurabi's code of laws. Most of the fundamentalist Christians who claim that our laws come from the ten commandments, can't even name off the first two. A little while back, Stephen Colbert punked a Republican congressman who sponsored legislation to display the 10 commandments in the Capitol Building.....and like most great advocates for the Ten Commandments, he couldn't name more than two of them! http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/17/ten-c...dments-con.html

Yes, slavery and Indian wars were quite a blemish! And they should be added in whenever attempts like these are made to mythologize history. The rightwing propaganda you've absorbed about our Christian forefathers ignores the reality that Christian values of two hundred or three hundred years ago were not quite the same values that televangelists talk about today! And exactly how do you classify those rules as "Christian," when they are found in modern and primitive societies around the world, and throughout history? These rules are based on principles that are part of human nature and the fact that they are found in unchristian societies, led Thomas Aquinas and the Catholic Church to dig up Aristotle's theory of Natural Law, to explain why the heathen could have very similar ethical rules as Christians without first learning about the superior Christian system.

I don't think you've made a clear statement since you joined this forum. Just pointless nonsense like this:

Not since the peculiarities of Quantum Mechanics were discovered, that add uncertainty to subatomic particle interactions and provides probabilities rather than a causal chain of events taking a particle from one state to another. Cause and effect works fine in the world of everyday experience we deal with, but why should we assume that the universe was an event with a causal chain, if it began as a tiny singularity that would have been subject to the rules of Quantum Physics? Keep in mind that String Theory is not an actual working scientific theory (at least at the present time). It is more properly called an hypothesis, since its predictions cannot be tested at the present time. The 11 dimensional multiverse is one of the predictions of the M-Theory proposed by physicist Ed Witten, to harmonize the five existing string theory models that did not previously work together. So Witten's idea has gathered a lot of enthusiasm as a possible way towards a grand unified theory of physics -- but it is still in the speculation stage, so 11 dimensions cannot be taken as a fact of nature. Things that exist outside of space and time (like the proposed intelligent designer) need some pathway to interact with time and space. If a God is timeless, then it would be aware of anything and everything that had ever occurred in the universe, but it would also have no capacity of awareness of causal events that occur in the passage of time. In other words, this conception of God denies him the capacity for personhood, since he cannot act with deliberation and decide between different options as we do in our day to day lives. He cannot intervene and change the course of events in our universe. That could be harmonized with a deistic, uninvolved god, but the transcendent, personal god of Christianity cannot exist if he is outside of space and time.

All of these creationist threads you've started should be rolled into one to prevent this common tactic that others use of starting multiple threads on the same subject, whether it's Jew-baiting or denying global warming, to try to leave some propaganda hanging out there that doesn't get responded to. Now, since I put enough time in this thread, I'll wait for your responses there, rather than dealing with the same subject here.

Those "Christian settlers" also believed in slavery, the inferiority of the natives, and the need to either marginalize them, banish them, or even exterminate them if nothing else worked. Are you going to take credit for these viewpoints that the Christian settlers also possessed?

NO, scientists shouldn't be open-minded! That would result in any stupid idea coming in and distracting them from the theories they are trying to advance. A scientist should follow where the evidence leads, and if he has strong opinions about his theories and the rival theories of others, he should give it up if the evidence goes against him. But scientific progress doesn't depend on the open-mindedness of a scientist! Scientists who refuse to change their theories when an avalanche of new evidence falls on them, end up being marginalized as the majority of their colleagues leave them and their outmoded ideas behind, no matter how highly renowned or what great discoveries they had made previously. Do a search for Fred Hoyle, for example! Hoyle advanced the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, which explained the percentage makeup of elements in the Universe. But, on the downside, Hoyle refused to accept the Big Bang theory, and kept promoting his own Steady State Theory as an alternative. At first, he had some followers, but evidence like the cosmic microwave background radiation sealed the deal for most cosmologists -- except for Hoyle! Like the dogged creationists, he kept concocting excuses for how a static universe could give the appearance of expansion, rather than really be expanding -- and unlike your creationist sources, he ended up in the end as the lone advocate for his theory. And you are attacking Richard Dawkins's credentials as a biologist, and science in general, since you cannot take an honest look at the evidence for evolution. I can distinguish between Dawkins the biologist, and Dawkins the philosopher. He is passionate about all of his beliefs, but most atheists and humanists who have done much study of the existence of God or the merits of religious belief, prefer to go to other sources on these subjects. Richard Dawkins does not have the expertise or possibly even the temperament to be a good philosopher, and that's why the theists focus on him rather than atheists such as Richard Carrier, Michael Martin, Quentin Smith, Julian Baggini, Paul Kurtz and others, who have much lower public profiles, but do a better job than Dawkins at answering modern theistic claims of the likes of William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, Ravi Zecharias, and the other stars of the God Squad.

The creationist article you pasted as a refutation of ERV insertions being proof of common origins, did not even deal with that subject! The articles in your link are from a creationist who uses the different scales of genetic similarity between chimpanzees and humans, as somehow being proof that they are unrelated!!! If you didn't get the question, here's a transcript of Zachary Moore's episode on endogenous retroviruses, the source where I first learned about how the human genome can also serve as a record of where we came from and our relatedness with other animals. Now, find me a creationist link that refutes the creationist's dilemma of trying to explain away why humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and other primates, which show genomic evidence of infections from the same virus. There seem to be only two options: 1. God or some "intelligent designer" inserts viral DNA into human and other animal's genomes (8% of the entire human genome is from endogenous retroviruses), and inserted the same viral code into different animals such as humans and other primates.....or.... 2. Humans, gorillas, chimpanzees and other related primates had a distant ancestor who was infected by a virus during the fertilization stage -- managed to survive the infection early in its life -- and as its descendents diverged down different evolutionary pathways through the process of mutation and natural selection, the non-coding DNA code of that virus was left behind in the permanent record of all of its future offspring. So which scenario is the more likely one? And are there any creationists who even attempt to answer the question? I am going to pull the plug here, since the 2nd, so called scientist he quotes from is a shill for the Discovery Institute, and he admits that the 70% similarity that he quotes is mere speculation on his part. Now, the creationist who pulled out the genome study arguing for a greater degree of differentiation, is based on using different categories of genes for comparison. The 98% number, like the 96% numbers that are often quoted, are based on protein-coding genes in the genomes -- the ones that do the actual work to design the organism. The mainly Japanese research group that called for a larger divergence, were arguing that the insertion and deletion patterns of "mobile" genes called introns (one of a large group of mobile genes that can literally change their positions within the genome). The research referenced by the creationist has nothing to do with determining human/chimpanzee relatedness -- they are trying to determine a connection between intron insertions and susceptibility to viral diseases. As they say in the report - by studying the degrees of similarity of junkDNA, a better scale of relatedness can be made, since the closely related protein-coding genes of humans and chimps don't explain why the two species have developed so differently, after they diverged from a common ancestor about six million years ago. Now, the first red flag that goes up when I read your creationist source, is that once again he claims to be making a creationist argument based on his scientific knowledge (in his case, he reveals in a back forth with a critic who posted several comments that he is "studying" physical anthropology, not genetics or molecular biology, which would provide him some grounds to present an expert opinion on the evidence -- although I do give him credit for posting negative comments; most creationists and ID advocates delete tough questions that don't fit in with their plans. At the end of that creationist article he says: So my conclusion is that even though at first the 98.5% similarity between chimps and humans appears to vindicate Darwin’s theory, it seems to me that to assume that this is proof of common descent is just an over-simplification made by people that want Darwin’s theory to be true. in other words, even if there was 98% similarity of junkDNA also, he would still not accept it as evidence for common morphology! And yet he thinks he is making a case for humans and chimps being separate creations: But why should there be genetic similarity at all if we and other species are not from a single common ancestor? — There’s really no problem for either Creationism or Intelligent Design here. The truth is that similarity is actually a necessity to survive. Biochemically, even to have food we need to have the food available we have to be genetically similar to other animal groups, or we couldn’t live. (Click here) So similarity is not proof of evolution, but rather it is proof that we, like other species and organisms, are living beings with certain necessitie Is that supposed to prove something? Maybe god just decided to use the same building blocks! If he was really trying to advance a scientific theory, he would explore it further (which he does not) and do an analysis of what some other similarities say about design or evolution. A good place to start would be Protein Functional Redundancy: Cytochrome C is a ubiquitous gene that is found in all organisms, including animals, plants, and bacteria. It’s an essential gene for cellular metabolism, and helps to provide energy for all life processes. Cytochrome C fulfills the prediction of ubiquitous proteins- that is, it is extremely functionally redundant. Many different amino acid sequences have been shown to fold up into the basic structure required for Cytochrome C function, and in fact among bacterial strains, completely different amino acid sequences are redundantly functional. Experiments in yeast show that if you remove the yeast’s own Cytochrome C protein, you can replace it with Cytochrome C from humans, rats, pigeons, or even fruit flies, and it works fine. A study was published that shows there are, in fact, over 10^93 different possible amino acid sequences for Cytochrome C. That’s more possible sequences then there are atoms in the Universe. So, Cytochrome C is very functionally redundant, and it would be possible for every single different organism to have a completely different amino acid sequence, if evolution is not true. So, this essential gene that all living organism on earth use for cellular metabolism could have 10 to the 93rd power possible protein formulations -- enough for the "designer" to give every plant, animal, bacteria etc. on earth their own unique cytochrome C protein, and as the article points out, experiments have shown that any Cytochrome C can be used for metabolic function by any plant and animal. In other words, God could have given everything a unique combination, or used one single version for every living thing; so what did he do? So what do the sequence comparisons show? Let’s compare humans and chimpanzees. If evolution is true, then chimpanzees are our closest relative, but if evolution is not true, we’re no more related to chimps then we are to crickets. But if you compare the amino acid sequence of humans and chimpanzees, you see that they are exactly the same. Exactly the same. And when you compare human Cytochrome C to that of other mammals, you find that there is only about 10 amino acids difference between them. The chance of this happening without shared heredity is about 1 in 10^29. If you compare human Cytochrome C with the organism the least related to us, outside of bacteria, you find that there’s only about 51 amino acids difference between us. The chance of this happening without shared heredity is about 1 in 10^25. Well, for some crazy reason he decided to follow relatedness patterns that would occur if plants and animals have a common morphology! So, why does God leave evidence of evolution, instead of leaving evidence that he designed and created all life separately?

That's all I need to hear! Patrick Henry drummed up fear about Indians and slave revolts to promote military action against the British. Not surprising you would quote from him rather than Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin, since he was a state's rights advocate who rejected the Constitution, and only came to his senses and stopped calling for more revolution after seeing how the French Revolution started to go bad. He ended up a little more pragmatic and a little less idealist in later years than the zealot who gave the "Give me liberty, or give me death" speech.

Actually I specifically ignored the spelling errors; my attack is on your mythologizing of your own nation's history. It has already been mythologized enough, without adding rightwing BS about personal greatness to the laundry list of false attributes. You are posting this on a Canadian forum, so guess what: our history teaches some of the other side of the story, since the impetus for founding our nation was provided by the United Empire Loyalists (bet you never heard of them) who made up almost one third of the population of the American Colonies, and moved north, like my father's ancestors, because they preferred to remain British Subjects rather than live in the new revolutionary nation. It was not a matter of killing Hessians and defeating the British Army -- the American Revolution was also a civil war that divided families and took many years to sort out. The messy aspects of the war are glossed over in the mythology that has been created to celebrate the event. So, now you want your children and your children's children to be marching off to fight battles in foreign lands for dubious causes. Why not let the dust settle on the present conflicts -- see how things work out as the present generation of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are re-absorbed into society and civilian life, before asking for more.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Richard Dawkins cannot impose his will on the biological sciences community as is the case in religion, where the leader (pope, denomination leader or televangelist) can use his position of authority to remove conflicting ideas and the people who hold them. If you actually read anything besides your religious propaganda sites, you would discover that, as I said before, Dawkins does have his detractors who think he's pushed too hard on his gene-centered mechanism for evolution; but, those who advocate species and group level evolution have not yet made an adequate case to add their ideas to evolutionary theory. Some alternative ideas like Symbiogenesis have been partially accepted -- in this case, it's proponents have been able to convince the scientific community that the mitochondria power plants of one celled organisms actually started out as a separate independent life form, but joined together in primitive eukaryote cells for mutual advantage. However, the symbiosis advocates have not been able to prove their larger claim that cooperation is the main catalyst for evolution, rather than competition. And that's the difference between science and religion. Religious truth is whatever the leaders feel like making up at the time, and unless a powerplay within the religious hierarchy knocks them off, or they get caught with a gay prostitute like Ted Haggard, they can spout whatever nonsense they want and the flock will have to accept it. But science doesn't work that way. Even the most highly accredited and renowned leaders in the field have to answer challenges based on new evidence. Religion can ignore empirical evidence and pretend the world is 6000 years old -- but science cannot!

So, you're what they call a "moderate" American! I guess the Right has totally lost their marbles now that they've lost control of the levers of power. And "personnel greatness!" Spelling errors aside, is that taken from the Founding Fathers, or is it the new revised American Constitution as revealed to Rush Limbaugh and other rightwing radio hacks? Yeah, that's what you need a little more of -- War! If things wind down in Iraq and Afghanistan, the multi-billion dollar arms business will go into recession. It's one thing to have the car industry shutting down, the real crisis for Republicans is if defense contractors have to halt production! BTW since you are so gung-ho about fighting for freedom, are you presently a member of one of the armed services, or intending to enlist in the near future? I used to despair that I lived in a country that does so little flag-waving and chest-thumping nationalism -- after the events of recent years, I'm coming to a conclusion that patriotism and nationalism do far more harm than good, and the fewer flags I see waving -- the better!

But, the hard reality is that prayers do not stop disasters or aid recovery efforts. The recovery comes from real people working to rebuild shattered lives. I'm not going to slam people for the time they spend in religious contemplation in a situation like this, unless it reaches the point where prayer, religious observance takes an excessive amount of time and energy( and money) I can think of many situations where prayer and hope have encouraged passive fatalism rather than taking action to improve their lives. A good example would be slaves who were taught the admonitions of the Apostle Paul to be obedient to their masters and store up their treasures in heaven. In other words, put up with indignities and lack of freedom in the hope that they would have a better life after death. And the free will argument to explain why benevolent god allows suffering and evil does not explain natural evil, like natural disasters that kill indiscriminately, or the basic predator/prey relationship in nature. Also, if free will leads to occasions where evil exists, why doesn't this duality exist in heaven? Why do heavenly creatures apparently have free will and yet commit no evil?

And that's why I've stressed the limitations of objectivity. Intersubjectivity is close to the definition I'm looking for, since it based on shared cognition and arriving at some consensus.

Does that mean devil worshiper? It's the most important game of all. Otherwise there is no point to politics and economics.

Two words: parochial altruism -- the capacity for people to confine their benevolent feelings to those who belong to the same group that they do, and show hostility to those on the outside. In most cases, it means that they are only interested in helping those who share their religion, nationality, political affiliation, race etc.. So Stephen Weinberg's quote may not be exactly right, since there are other social forces that divide populations and lead people to consider those outside of the group to be something less than human. But one thing religious belief does that nationalism and racism cannot, is to provide divine sanction for war or committing atrocities like suicide bombings. You can bet that the 19 bombers on 9/11 did not think they were committing murder -- instead, they were fighting a holy cause and fighting for their people. The other dangerous incentive that religious belief can do, is to offer supernatural rewards for killing on behalf of God. Stalin couldn't play that card. The best he could offer was to place the fallen comrades portraits in the hall of the heroes of the revolution.....pales in comparison to 72 virgins for all of eternity!

Really! YOu think that laws against murder, rape and theft are "Christian." Maybe you could explain why social anthropologists have noted for years that every tribe in every part of the globe has had rules to prohibit these antisocial behaviours. There is an obvious evolutionary benefit, since a society that didn't establish a social order would be less able to survive. Since you are invoking Christian values here, it needs to be stressed that these values don't protect unchristian people, as some detainees in secret U.S. prisons have been finding out in the last five years. These moral rules only protect those within the group, and if I can flip through the pages of my Old Testament to find examples of where your god ordered his followers to rape, murder and plunder the wealth of enemies of the Israelites. Right now, we need to establish a clear set of secular moral principles that the majority of people can agree with, regardless of religious beliefs, to deal with issues like abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, polygamy etc.. We should not allow a situation where every church or religious group can create their own laws for their own communities. Then why do you bring it up? Freedom of speech is not a Christian principle, and atheist ads on buses would be one of the first things to go if you and your friends got your dream of a biblically-based society. You haven't read any of his books! You aren't even aware that he has only written one book specifically about religion. His other books have been about genetics, evolutionary theory and the history of life on Earth (The Ancestor's Tale). I have four of his books, and I wish they had something like this when I was in high school taking biology. If you had read The Blind Watchmaker, you would realize how weak the creationist attacks on evolutionary theory really are! Instead, you choose to stay cocooned in creationist propaganda, and the only thing you know about him is the attacks on him by simpletons who want to believe that we live in a 6000 year old universe. But your okay with these prosperity gospel hucksters you shill for, getting rich!

For someone who claims to be an atheist, you sure carry a lot of water for the Christian Right. I guess your a "Karl Rove" type of atheist! That aside, we have to care what these people say since they have so much political and economic power. They are a destructive force that has ruined your country and is in the process of using the same strategies up here where I live. Talk about carrying water! This is exhibit A for the religious right's claims to higher moral standards. They teach adherence to a rule, whether it causes greater harm or not, and third trimester abortion is the best example, since most of the women who have these difficult to perform operations do so after learning that their pregnancies are either life-threatening or their fetus has severe birth defects. Rigid application of a moral law here would only cause potential deaths of pregnant women and the birth of severely deformed babies, many of whom will not survive anyway. So what good is this morality? Real morality should be based on principles like trying to provide benefit or reduce harm, not arbitrary laws written in dusty old religious books. And a principle that torture should not be used, regardless of the excuses, is one that should have been followed. What many of you rightwingers fail to understand is that once the genie is out of the bottle, there's no telling how it may be applied. Who says torture will only be used against bearded Arabs accused of being members of Al Qaeda. If it's allowed, there's nothing stopping the torturing of suspected drug dealers at home and eventually political enemies.

Totally irrelevant since the strength of objective standards is that they allow an independent comparison that is not dependent on our own subjective sense of ourselves and the world around us -- both of which can be errant and even subject to delusion. When someone who is mentally, such as a schizophrenic, finally reaches the stage where they are able to accept critical opinions of others, they are finally aware that they cannot put all of their trust in their own perceptions and beliefs. The main problem with religious truth is that it is presented as revelation, somehow having all of the answers already when it is first learned. The power of dogma rests in the confidence that adherents have in it. And that's why it cannot be self-correcting! Every revision or alteration can potentially call into question the rest of the dogmatic assumptions made by the religious organization. So there is a strong incentive to resist new knowledge from outside of the dogma, even violently. The scientific method begins with a few basic a priori assumptions of the world and a method for determining reliable from unreliable information, to continually progress towards greater understanding. So it's no surprise that a point in history would arrive where religion and science bumped into each other. First with the theory of a heliocentric solar system, and then with the theory of evolution. In both cases, religious authorities divided on how to address the challenges. The more liberal leaders decided to try to accomodate and try to incorporate the new science, whereas the hardliners dug in their heels, and in the case of evolution, are still digging in their heels, rejecting evolutionary theory while neglecting to create their own testable creation theories. They are in the end, enemies of science and learning, since both Christian and Muslim fundamentalists have chosen to attack science and academia, and weaken the education standards for their own children, so that literal interpretations of their religious mythology will be carried on.

The great irony is that those people who are suffering, believe in God more fervently after disasters such as the Tsunami have left them homeless and without surviving family members. The more God doesn't answer prayers, the more they hope that he will answer their prayer next time. It's almost the same mentality as people who are addicted to buying lottery tickets. For many people like myself who gave up on religion, it was this problem of why would an all-powerful god allow evil and even build a world that depends on suffering to function.

Dawkins and the people like philosopher Daniel Dennett, from whom he draws most of his theory about religion and religious belief, fully recognize that religious belief have provided comforting messages of assurance and organized religion helped to solidify bonds between unrelated peoples in the first city-states; the question now is whether religion and religious belief has outlived its purpose. The forces that drive religion are still very powerful, and men who have spent their lives learning rituals and working their way to the top of religious orders, are going to do everything in their power to keep adherents from leaving their organizations. And that is the primary source of the condemnation of people like Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. The religious leaders are always on alert for anything they can take offense to and use as ammo to convince their people that they are being persecuted.

It has been gradually growing for several decades, but right now Israel may be coming to a point where it will no longer function as true democratic state. For years, secular Jews have chafed at increasing demands of the Orthodox and increasing costs to support their religious education and organizations. The zealots who are expecting the Messiah, see the wars and conflicts with Arabs as a sign from above that they are carrying out God's Will, the secular Jews see a never-ending war, and after doing their time in military service, they are more and more demoralized at the prospect that their children and their children's children will have to enlist and fight the same battles that they did. The end result is secular Jews who look towards human solutions of problems feel like leaving, while the Messianic Jews are encouraged by wars and bloodshed. Final result is I believe most of your condemnations of Israel's conduct up till now, are biased in comparison to the conduct of the Arabs; but in the future, as Israel becomes more of a theocracy, they will act no better than theocracies of other religions.