WIP

And that's why debating a creationist is an exercise in futility. They are not interested in advancing alternative scientific theories, and they never will! You won't find any creationist site with an explanation for the geographic differentiation of plants and animals, phylogenetics, or why 99% of the animals that walked the earth are now extinct. There are no creationist or intelligent design explanations for these factors, and they won't bother dealing with them at all, and stick to attacking the only working theory that does explain these features of the natural world. They are only concerned with destroying presently accepted theories, not creating alternatives like they still claim to be trying to do. Creationist books on biology, genetics, and the history of life on earth will remain short and simple because they don't have an alternative scientific theory to teach. But, it doesn't matter to them since they would just as soon demolish science in the same way that they are demolishing science education in many Christian and Muslim countries where creationism is being taught as an alternative to evolution. Problem is - how can you teach advanced biology courses today without teaching evolution? It can't be done, and fundamentalists don't care because they believe all the knowledge that is needed is found in their bibles, so any new learning raises suspicions since it might overturn tightly guarded religious dogmas......welcome back to the dark ages!

NO, the only thing in doubt is too what degree physical factors like genetics and hormones, determine sexual orientation; your side is making the claim there are NO physical factors involved in someone being a homosexual, so you have to prove that there are no physical causes of same-sex attractions to justify a position of discrimination against gays, and psychotherapies like reversion therapy, that is supposed to turn gays straight.....in theory, that is. I'm not up to speed with everything that gay rights activists are saying, but people who are rejected by their families, communities, and face verbal abuse and possible physical attacks, are not always the happiest people to be around...so some of the bad attitude you are perceiving may have come from unpleasant life experiences. And you are trying to limit the evidence for physical causation with that zygote claim since no one claims that sexual orientation is determined at the fertilization stage. There seem to be many factors involved in sexual orientation; for example, one non-genetic physical determinant may have been identified a couple of years ago in a major study that links birth order to the odds of male homosexuality. In brief, the more older brothers a man has, the higher the odds are that he will be gay. The exact reason is still unknown, but the leading theory is that during pregnancy a mother's immune system identifies male fetuses as foreign tissue and creates "maternal anti-male antibodies". The effect is cumulative with the birth of each male child, so the odds are much greater that these antibodies will affect the area of the brain which determines sexual orientation in the latter male children. http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/200.../27/1672798.htm I can see a parallel with the discrimination that blacks faced in the South, when even "an ounce of negro blood" made the person a negro regardless of their appearance. I'm not familiar with the story, but "not ideal" means something less than good, so what harms does she identify that are caused by gay people raising children. I know of two lesbian couples that are raising children, and a gay co-worker who had been married before coming out of the closet, and gets to see his children on alternate weekends. I'm not aware of anything harmful or abnormal going on in the few examples I am aware of. If that's true, I'm surprised that a school curriculum would choose such a narrow option of allowing two gay guys to create the plan without any review or oversight to remove errors or add pertinent information that was left out. It must be false analogy day! Remember those identical twin studies? approx. 50% of sexual orientation may have biological causes....well what does that infer other than the fact that the other 50% of our sexual orientation is open to environmental factors. The child who learns that sexual orientation is just another one of those complicated things in life that have many contributing factors, is not going to be harmed or cause harm to others. It's the ones who are brainwashed that homosexuals have chosen a life of sin, and god help the ones who turn out gay and have had to grow up inside a system that fills their heads with the thought that every sexual desire they have is a sign of their depraved nature.

I do not have the obligation of defining God. That is the obligation of those who are proposing a God as a first cause or creator. My non-belief in God is no different than my non-belief in unicorns -- as soon as someone provides evidence for them, I'll take a look at it and decide whether it is a useful theory. Until then, I can't accept that gaps in knowledge about origins of life and the Universe are enough reason to attribute them to forces that cannot be examined or studied further. The difference is that Godditit is a dead end, that shuts off further investigation since the supernatural is declared to offer no method to physically examine them. On the other hand, the correlations between mental activities and brainwave patterns show a causal link between mind and brain that can be studied further. When studies of volition and intentions demonstrate over and over again that we are not consciously aware of making decisions until after a brief period of patterned responses in various regions of the cerebral cortex have decided a course of action -- then we are stuck with the conclusion that our conscious sense of self is also an effect, and not the contra-causal origin of our thoughts.

Take another look at those studies! The proposition is not that behaviour and likelihood of disease is 100% physically caused, but the criticism of twin studies focuses on factors that cannot be avoided, such as limited sampling size. Face it, there just are not a lot of identical twins for us to study. And some twin studies that were done years ago would never be able to pass an ethics panel to get approved today, such as a series of studies of children put up for adoption in the 1960's, where identical twins were deliberately separated at birth and given to different families, so that the researchers could determine what factors in their lives were genetic and which were environmentally determined. That kind of research is only a stone's throw from the Nazi medical experiments of Dr. Mengele! But these limitations only reduce the odds of accuracy of the findings, so that a study of a limited sample of identical twins showing a 50% correlation on sexual orientation, should be understood as placing the physical factors at somewhere between 30 and 70%; whichever end of the scale we accept, it still will demonstrate a physical causal link to sexual orientation, and the objections to twin studies cannot be used to categorically dismiss them entirely. I don't know what you're trying to say here! What sort of progress and exploration is being shut down? Most researchers who do an honest study of sexual orientation have come to the conclusion that it is not an on/off switch: some homosexuals are exclusively gay and cannot get aroused or perform sexually with someone of the opposite sex; a lot of people are somewhere in a bisexual middleground, showing varying degrees of preference for men or women; some people cannot relate to being sexually attracted to members of their own sex at all, and I can't recall ever having such feelings myself. I think that's why I felt free to bash homosexuals when I was younger. It was not only a behaviour that was condemned by my religion, it was something I couldn't relate to on a personal level. But I could relate to the more minor problems I encountered by being left-handed in a right-handed world. Hand preference, which is really side preference, is also determined early in life, mainly from physical factors. The fact that I could not easily write with my right hand or throw a ball, or even kick a soccer ball with my right foot, gave me a little perspective of what it feels like to be more comfortable wanting to do things differently than 90% of the people. If my left hand was cut off in an accident, I would have had to learn, but being left-handed would always be my first choice. BTW there was a time when being left-handed was a sign of being under the influence of the devil and greatly increased one's likelihood of being burned at the stake for being a witch! So, no one who is taking an honest approach to this subject is going to say genes = destiny, but those on the other side are still causing unnecessary suffering by teaching gays in their religious communities that they have to go through reversion therapies to take the queer out of them.

You fixed nothing! Just demonstrated your preference for wallowing in ignorance rather than learning. Ask yourself: if homosexuality is a "defect," why has it been in the human population since prehistoric times, and still represents the same significant minority whether they are accepted or persecuted. Since people who are strongly attracted to members of their own sex will also reduce the likelihood that they will produce offspring, homosexual orientation would have been removed by natural selection if they really did provide no benefit to society as a whole. Now, it is time for you conservatives to put on your thinking caps and ponder the question of how has "gayness" benefited the human race and remained a significant segment of human society even though they do not produce many, if any offspring themselves? You make no bones about calling people "defects" because they are different; the only difference between you and religious conservative leaders who still promote this viewpoint, is that they feel the need to pretend to show concern for these aberrant, defective people, whereas you and the rank and file conservatives do not! The real defects are the people who ignore evidence and demand the teaching of the same old lies and misinformation. Like they say 'never let the facts get in the way of a good argument.' In actual fact, if the percentage of homosexuals in the general population is 5% or as high as 10% according to some; the results from studies of identical twins over the years, that show the odds are roughly 50% that a twin will also be gay, is clear evidence that homosexuality cannot be a totally environmental phenomena, as the religious right and believers in psychoanalytic theory still contend. http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/global...ient/twins.html http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/17/science/...html?sec=health http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_caus4.htm The religious right gets stupider by the day! One of James Dobson's flunkies writing for his Focus on the Family magazine, makes the inane point that the correlation would have to be 100% to demonstrate a physical connection to sexual orientation. A totally assinine comment considering that other twin studies of diseases show even diseases with strong genetic links, like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, do not show 100% correlations between twins! Neither do studies of left and right handedness that similarly show a genetic link. No genetic correlation can be 100% because even among identical twins there are differences in gene expression that will cause the two people who share the same genetic blueprint, to develop differently as they grow older. The fact that the twin studies demonstrate the likelihood of being gay as ten times the frequency as the general population is a clear enough indication of how much our sexual orientation is determined by physical factors that we do not have control over. Trying to pretend that this is all personal behaviour has caused untold hardship and anguish for people who believe this and tried to hide their nature from others, living in sham marriages, filled with self-loathing etc. Now that we know better, it should be high time to allow people to live lives that will be meaningful for them without being subjected to loathing and condemnation. So! It doesn't matter what your beliefs on evolution are; you still believe that a parent's right to brainwash their children should take precedence over the state's obligation to educate and teach children the most accurate information available! So, should those parents also have the right to teach their children that the white race is the most highly developed, and that blacks and indians are the stock of inferior races? Are you denying them that right? Shouldn't they also have the right to refuse blood transfusions and/or vaccinations for religious reasons? Many countries allow any exemption to just about any law if it violates someone's stupid religious dogma!

No, "God" effects are not known, since there has been no physical effects that can be connected to God or any other supernatural force. Claiming that God exists in the remaining mysteries of mind/brain function, the origins of life, and the origins of the Universe, only tells us that there are questions that remain open and don't have adequate explanations. Saying "Goddidit" doesn't answer the question any better than its previous applications: explaining the motions of the planets, earthquakes, volcanoes, lightning, and wind, were all believed to emanate from God, Gods, or spirit forces. Natural explanations were found for these phenomena once we learned more about the world we live in -- why should we assume anything different for the remaining mysteries?

I noticed while I was searching around earlier, that there are new possible tests being thought up that could give the experimental physicists something to work with and test these G.U.T. theories. I'm sure that eventually, M-Theory and LQG will be tested.....I hope one of them is on the right track because there doesn't seem to be a lot of other proposals to incorporate gravity with Quantum Mechanics. One thing that surprises me is that the religiously minded people who want to talk about atheists or scientists working by faith (just like they do) are missing one clear a priori assumption that is faith-based: the concept that the Universe is understandable, and that we will eventually be available to grasp all of the physical laws that govern our universe. This is certainly a faith-based position, since it might turn out that we will never understand how gravity functions and create a theory of everything. Then again, if we are not able to understand the universe, the philosophy of science does not allow the option to just give up. The search for the T.O.E. will go on, even if it's an endless search. But, my question is: how much information does the average, curious reader need, to grasp the basic concepts and understand why this work is important in the first place? I have two books by String Theory advocate - Brian Greene, and one thing that is unusual about "The Elegant Universe" and the "Fabric Of The Cosmos" is that he provides a skip-ahead option for the reader who doesn't want to get too bogged down in technical details. Greene, Michiou Kaku, Neil de Grasse Tyson, and some other physicists, have said that the reason they are writing general audience physics books and doing as many interviews as they can schedule in, is because the physics community has ignored the public for too long, and now basic physics research is in jeopardy, since it is dependent on voters who don't understand why billions of dollars should be spent on pure scientific research, let alone super collider projects like the L.H.C.. The alarm bells went off back when President Clinton killed the U.S. supercollider project that was being built in Texas, mainly to spite the previous president - George H.W. Bush, and there was very little objection raised from Republicans, Democrats, and even the politicians in Texas! The S.S.C. would have made Texas the hub of activity in high energy physics and attracted the scientists, many of whom have left the U.S. entirely. Instead Texas has become the hub of the creationist movement, that has a governor who keeps banning evolution from his state's schools and openly discusses turning Texas back into a Republic! I've come across that point previously that we only have a general working understanding of time, so explaining it as the 4th dimension of General Relativity is only a limited explanation. I'll have to get back into this stuff when I get through my neuroscience and philosophy of mind books. I should have mentioned that the concept of Dark Energy that I was referring to, was taken from some articles I read a year ago by Neil Turok regarding his model of "Cyclic Universes." The understanding of dark energy depends on the type of theory they are working with; but even among multi-universe string theorists, there are many radically different models for how new universes are formed and how gravity is incorporated. I recall reading another article by a mathematician from Russia or the Ukraine a couple of years ago ( I wish I could remember his name) who contends that there really isn't actually a positive force of Dark Energy, and that the acceleration of our universe is being caused because gravitons are close-looped strings (unlike all the others that form particles) and since they are not attached to the dimensional walls of our universe, they are able to escape into the 3D brane of another universe. Instead of a positive force driving our universe apart, he is theorizing that gravity is leaking from our universe. I wonder if this idea is going anywhere, and anyone else has taken it up and is trying to develop it further.

There is a growing suspicion that a U.S. owned factory farm near Mexico City is responsible for this three-headed mutated virus. If this turns out to be true, will Americans take the blame for creating this pandemic, and causing death and suffering in Mexico through their negligence?

First of all, parents' rights over children are not absolute, and should be considered a guardianship, not ownership! In ancient times, a father could kill any of his children without facing any form of state intervention. Today, many governments already give parents too much jurisdiction over their children, when they allow religious lunatics to refuse vaccinations and blood transfusions to their children for religious reasons. Parental authority should not give them the right to harm their children physically, mentally or emotionally; and much of what fundamentalists teach their children could qualify as psychological abuse. Even the more moderate religious zealots want to indoctrinate their children, rather than teach them how to evaluate evidence and make their own decisions. And those of us who are old enough, can remember a time when it was okay in some U.S. states to teach that race mixing, integration and especially intermarriage, were also bad things. Is that okay to teach also? Conservatives never came to terms with their racist past; they just brush it off as a mistake and proclaim that they are colour-blind today. And whether the fundies like it or not, gays are the new civil rights issue, since twin studies and other research, have long identified genetic and/or hormonal factors in gender identity and sexual preference. This means it is not "choosing a life of sin" as religious demagogues have hammered away at since the first stone tablets were carved in the deserts of the MiddleEast. So, it's time for conservatives to give it up and admit that they are wrong, just like they were wrong to discriminate based on race and gender. Let the ever-present minority of the population who are attracted to members of their own sex, live life as they choose, and let those who want to teach that homosexuals are depraved, keep it in church along with teachings that blacks are the cursed descendents of Noah's youngest son - Ham. The religious whackos who proclaim that the world was created 6000 years ago have decided to live in total ignorance of modern science. In the U.S., the takeover of schoolboards, even in non-fundamentalist jurisdictions, has led to students graduating from high school biology classes not knowing anything about evolution. If they want to study biology in university, they require remedial education to learn what they should have been taught in high school. If they are considering careers in bioinformatics, epidemiology and the new field of evolutionary developmental biology -- areas where evolution is a real and active part of their research. Is it any wonder that foreign students are taking over the science classes in the universities! Denying evolution comes with a price, and the price tag is a society that is increasingly ignorant about basic science and unable to provide the incentive for their children to take any interest in science. And all of the fancy new gadgets that science-based technology has provided, cannot keep coming our way if basic scientific research in physics, biology and chemistry is also being outsourced to India and the Far East. In the future, the West will become as nostalgic about our "Golden Age" as the Muslim World is today for their past, when they were they were the world leaders. In both cases, progress and modernization were shut down by religious idiocy from people who were afraid their children would learn things that would cause them to question the myths they were teaching them.

Right now, we have real evidence by mutation and natural selection coming at us in the form of a possible flu pandemic; so religious authorities who are trying to keep the dark ages alive are guilty of criminal negligence, in the effects they have had in dumbing down science education both in the U.S., and now here in Canada, in the form of creationists he is putting in government to appeal to his religious conservative wing of the Conservative Party. It's tragically ironic to have a creationist put in charge of science funding at a time when there are so many issues that require improving science funding and education, instead of trying to destroy it like they have done in some Muslim countries like Turkey!

Gravitational effects are not elusive; if it was, you might be hurtling off into space right now. Gravity waves have not been detected, as the graviton particle also remains elusive, but gravity has a real effect on our world. Now, whatever you are describing as "God," where is the evidence for this force acting in the natural world? If you insist on conceptualizing the universe as a three dimensional object, you are going to be assume that there has to be something out there giving up room to allow the universe to expand. But the universe is 4 dimensional, not 3, and the expansion is of space-time itself. It's not as if galaxies and gas clouds are flying apart -- the space between them is expanding. From our vantage point, it would be more accurate to describe the universe as stretching, rather than expanding. The universe has no center, and it has no edge, and we are trapped inside the dimensions of this universe, so we have no capacity, even in the distant future, to escape from this universe. The picture of the universe since the discovery of Dark Energy, is that our universe is "open" or has a negative curvature of space-time. An open universe is un-bounded and infinite. It will expand forever -- unless theorists who believe there is a limit to how low the density of the universe can drop, are correct. If they're right, at some point in the distant future, our accelerating, cooling universe will disintegrate, and that vacuum energy of our big, empty universe will provide the seed to create a new universe or several new universes, depending on which theoretician is on the right track. Before anything supernatural becomes the subject of serious scientific investigation, it is up to the proponents of: intercessory prayer, souls, ghosts, psychic powers etc. to present some evidence that the forces they believe in are leaving real evidence behind in our world. A theory of natural/supernatural interaction would be helpful, but so far, all that is offered up is misleading pop physics like quantum mysticism and claims they exist in other dimensions. I don't see anyone who is approaching the supernatural either from a religious angle, or arguing for psychic phenomena, showing any interest in developing any real theories. So, a memory of something hot or cold is non-physical? Not that brain function is completely understood, but there are correlates between psychological memory tests and fMRI studies that indicate regions of the brain involved in various types of memory encoding and retrieval, so even recalling a memory leaves behind a physical trail of evidence. http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/pn/cabeza

I know! But, if you're a physics student, I assume you are aware that both theories make predictions that could be tested if the technology is available. There have been a few stories in the news over the last couple of years that the new Large Hadron Collider can produce high enough energies to test string theory predictions involving the decay of heavy W-boson particles and the decay of mini black holes - if they can be produced. There are other testable predictions involving gravity waves if the L.I.S.A. space array is able to detect them; so it's not a metaphysical debate; someone will be able to devise a test to either confirm these predictions or send all the theoretical physicists and mathematicians down another road to look for the theory of everything. Thanks for the info on Loop Quantum Gravity, but I don't need to know all of the technical nuances of the theory. I'll just read the summaries and assume that the peer review process will take care of fleshing out the accuracy of each theory's predictions and how reliable they will be for describing the real world. if you've read any of my thoughts on the subject, I am not going to spend hours learning the math that these theories are based on. I'll just take the summarized versions and assume that peer review will take care of One of the theories about the nature of Dark Energy - which is causing the universe to fly apart, is that this vacuum energy of empty space is providing the positive energy to make the universe fly apart. It's sort of a revival of Einstein's Cosmological Constant, except that he was trying to use it to produce a model of a static universe. I know there are other theories about dark energy, but this one seems to be more popular than other alternative explanations so far.

Whatever, but dark energy, whatever it is, is a property of space-time that applies a negative pressure which causes expansion and works in opposition to gravity. About 3.5 billion years ago, the universe expanded to the point where dark energy started to overtake gravity and cause the expansion of the universe to accelerate. You're not paying attention! The rate of expansion of the universe is accelerating, not slowing down. Until this dark energy force was first discovered in 1998, the debate was over whether the expansion was fast enough to continue forever, or whether gravity would slow the expansion enough to cause the universe to contract together -- that scenario flew out the window with the discovery of dark energy! The universe expands faster and faster, and it already passed the point billions of years ago, where gravity was able, in theory to cause the universe to slow down. No it isn't! It still means nonbelief. Until recent times, there was no concept of the supernatural, even in religion. God was up there, above the firmament, and hell was underneath the earth. Souls were our breath, and the soul left the body when we stopped breathing. Scientific discoveries in astronomy and about the human body have created the need to push God and supernatural entities like souls, ghosts and spirits into a "supernatural" realm, so that they cannot be examined through natural means. The problem is that people believing in these effects have no explanations for how they interact with our physical world. Are you telling me that sensing hot and cold is a nonphysical experience?

Yes, the search for grand unified theories is belief-based, not evidence-based; it's from an assumption expressed first by Albert Einstein, that everything had to be in a simple unified state at the beginning of the universe. But it may be a faith-based assumption, since it was so easy to unify electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces, and gravity just doesn't seem to provide an easy way to be incorporated into a grand unified theory. Some physicists have expressed concern that every university in the world is chasing some form of string theory, and putting all the eggs in one basket, while very few are trying to develop alternatives like Loop Quantum Gravity.

I forgot to look up the first link. So, Cardiologist Michael Sabom seems to be a write a lot of books on this subject, and one of his books: Light and Death features the story of one of his patients - Pam Reynolds, a singer/songwriter from Georgia, who's NDE story seems to be the focal point of her career now, rather than her music. Sabom's account of Pam Reynold's description of events after her operation, are used as evidence of some sort of non-physical conscious awareness, because the claim is made that she described events that occured while in a state of "standstill" where the body is cooled to 60 degrees to stop breathing and the heart from beating. The issue of contention is whether her NDE, or even part of the NDE occurred while in this state when it is assumed that there would be no brain activity going on. Philosopher - Keith Augustine, who writes many articles for Internet Infidels, did a detailed examination of Sabom's book, and his chart of the events: Two mischaracterizations of this case are particularly noteworthy, as their errors of fact greatly exaggerate the force of this NDE as evidence for survival after death.[15] First, in their write-up of the first prospective study of NDEs, van Lommel and colleagues write: Sabom mentions a young American woman who had complications during brain surgery for a cerebral aneurysm. The EEG [electroencephalogram] of her cortex and brainstem had become totally flat. After the operation, which was eventually successful, this patient proved to have had a very deep NDE, including an out-of-body experience, with subsequently verified observations during the period of the flat EEG [emphasis mine] (van Lommel et al. 2044). Second, in his Immortal Remains—an assessment of the evidence for survival of bodily death—Stephen Braude erroneously describes the case as follows: Sabom reports the case of a woman who, for about an hour, had all the blood drained from her head and her body temperature lowered to 60 degrees. During that time her heartbeat and breathing stopped, and she had both a flat EEG and absence of auditory evoked potentials from her brainstem.... Apparently during this period she had a detailed veridical near-death OBE [emphasis mine] (Braude 274). But anyone who gives Sabom's chapters on the case more than a cursory look will see two glaring errors in the descriptions above. First, it is quite clear that Pam did not have her NDE during any period of flat EEG.[16] Indeed, she was as far as a patient undergoing her operation could possibly be from clinical death when her OBE began.[17] Second, she had no cerebral cortical activity for no longer than roughly half an hour. Both of these facts are nicely illustrated in Figure 1 below. http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/kei.../HNDEs.html#pam So, the belief that Pam Reynold's story proves life after death, doesn't come from Sabom's book directly, but instead from the writings of other NDE proponents who have misinterpreted Sabom's timeline, and it seems Sabom is responsible for leading the average reader of his book to this conclusion: Despite accurately reporting the facts, Sabom himself has encouraged these misrepresentations.[18] Though he informs the reader that Pam's experience began well before standstill, he reveals this incidentally, so that a careful reading of the text is required to discern the point. For instance, just after describing Pam's recollections of an operating room conversation, he notes, almost as an afterthought, that "[h]ypothermic cardiac arrest would definitely be needed" [emphasis mine] (Sabom, "Light" 42). He then goes on to assert that the very features of her experience which cannot be timed happened during standstill. At first, Sabom only implies this by describing the cooling of blood leading to standstill prior to describing the remainder of Pam's near-death experience (42-46). Then Sabom turns to a discussion of whether Pam was "really" dead during a portion of her standstill state: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/kei.../HNDEs.html#pam One thing that leads people to believe that these stories are supernatural, is an assumption that any event recalled while under GA must be evidence of an OOBE. I have only had one major operation in my life that required general anaesthetic, and all I remember is going under and then waking up in the recovery room. But Augustine points out that, although "anesthesia awareness" is a rare phenomena, it does occur in many patients -- and the vast majority of them did not flatline or have flat EEG's during the operation, so it wasn't a matter of a soul floating out of the body and watching events: About one or two in a thousand patients undergoing general anesthesia report some form of anesthesia awareness. That represents between 20,000 and 40,000 patients a year within the United States alone. A full 48% of these patients report auditory recollections postoperatively, while only 28% report feeling pain during the experience (JCAHO 10). Moreover, "higher incidences of awareness have been reported for caesarean section (0.4%), cardiac surgery (1.5%), and surgical treatment for trauma (11-43%)" (Bünning and Blanke 343). Such instances must at least give us pause about attributing Pam's intraoperative recollections to some form of out-of-body paranormal perception. Moreover, for decades sedative anesthetics such as nitrous oxide have been known to trigger OBEs. http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/kei.../HNDEs.html#pam Many of the events described in the book that are supposed to correlate with actual events, such as the partial head-shaving, a nurse declaring that her veins are too small etc., either cannot be confirmed, or evidence indicates that they did not actually occur. Another chief claim, that ear plugs placed in her ears during the operation would have made it unable for her to hear are also challenged since they do not block all external sound. The conclusion is that none of the events described occurred during the one hour period that no brain activity would have occurred, and the events described fit well within the perceptions that could have been available during anesthesia awareness. It's interesting that Sabom is careful enough to guard his professional reputation by not making outlandish claims, while he has used language in a book to lead others to make those conclusions.

Newtonian mechanics is accurate enough for the world of "middle dimensions" as physicists call it, so it works fine for everyday use. General Relativity is needed for scales where curvature of spacetime becomes a factor, and quantum mechanics is needed to describe physics at the subatomic scale, but attempts to incorporate gravity with subatomic physics, which is what string theory is attempting to do, are in a developmental stage, and there are no ways yet to test them. It's not a matter of right or wrong theories. They work in the areas they are intended for. The reason why a unifying theory is needed, is to understand events like the Big Bang, when the universe was in a state of high mass and energy, compacted into a tiny space. The discovery that the energy of empty space is greater than zero, and this dark energy is now causing the universe to accelerate, and fly apart, ultimately means that the universe was not the beginning of time, and there were universes before the one we are living in. I've been trying to get across to you the concept of trustable theories as opposed to 100% absolute certainty, but you can't seem to tell the difference between them!

I already gave you sources in my last response! There is nobody in that group who even claims to be a scientist: http://www.bible.ca/seek-about.htm They use selective misquotes likely taken from other creationist groups to mislead their young-earth creationist audience, and mislead them about the original message of the writers of those science articles. I recall that there was debate about whether archaeopteryx was the transitional form between reptiles and birds; but there was no debate over whether archaeopteryx was capable of flight and had feathers -- therefore, it was a transitional fossil even if it didn't lead to the birds we have today. And likewise, it doesn't matter whether Lucy is our ancestor or not because there are many other hominids who are candidates for being ancestors of ours. You are accepting their claims that they would disprove evolution by natural selection, even though there is no dispute regarding whether Lucy was a bipedal ape. All of the other hominids discovered died out millions of years ago; the only branch that survived was the one that led to modern humans Look at the dates on the articles they list as sources (but do not provide links for) 1981, 1983 -- a little stale don't you think? And I've seen the one about Stephen J. Gould many times before; these groups portray him as someone who is on their side. Gould argued that there were not enough transitional fossils to make a case for Punctuated Equilibrium (evolution by rapid adaptation, that would change too quickly to leave transitional forms. But, Gould's theory was weakened by the discovery of more and more transitional fossils in the years since then. That wikipedia link I provided has the most up to date list if you want to check it out. Anyone who's really interested in finding where the evidence leads should check out Tiktaalik -- a transitional form between fish and amphibians. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalik Not only is Tiktaalik a clear example of a transitional species with fish and amphibian characteristics, it also has the distinction of being a fossil that wasn't discovered by accident, as most fossils are. Instead, it was found by paleontologists searching the strata of rock (375 million years) that they expected the first amphibians to appear in the fossil record. They were using the evolutionary theory to find this needle in a haystack, and it was right about where it would be expected to appear in the fossil record.

Who first proposed holding tea party events? When did major conservative organizations get involved? And how much support have they gained along the way? The answer to the first question is "FreedomWorks." The answer to the second question is "right from the start." And the answer to the last question is "less than you'd expect, given the months of hype." The first tea-partyish events occurred in February in Seattle, WA, Denver, CO, and Mesa, AZ around the time President Obama signed the stimulus bill into law, but they didn't have an explicitly tea-based theme. If they had a theme of any kind it was "pork" and government waste. Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin wrote a post about the Seattle protest called "From the Boston Tea Party to your neighborhood pork protest." And in Denver, protesters shouted, "No more pork!" By and large, though, the events lacked a unifying issue. That all changed on February 19, when CNBC commentator Rick Santelli erupted in anger on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, and proposed a "Chicago Tea Party" for traders to protest the government's plan to provide mortgage assistance to distressed homeowners. The idea took hold and on February 27, a handful of cities across the country hosted gatherings that involved genuine tea (or at least the use of the word "tea"). One of those tea parties occurred from 12:00 to 2:00 p.m. on Friday February 27, in Tampa, FL, organized according to the website Tampa Bay Online, by "John Hendricks, a Tampa-based consultant." John Hendricks turns out to be John Hendrix, who by phone earlier today described the events as completely spontaneous. "These are independent groups, not coordinated," he says, "and most of the people, including myself, have never done anything like this." He even said that two distinct groups in Tampa emerged simultaneously--both called the "Tampa Tea Party," each unbeknown to the other. I asked him where the idea came from. "Tom Gaithens," Hendrix said. "He's with FreedomWorks." "Oh really?" "He sent an email out with his network of contacts to see who could help." The event, Hendrix said, drew somewhere in the ballpark of 200 protesters, and there were, by his count, 88 people on hand at peak. That's not very many people. Henke may be right, in a sense, about the distinction between astroturf events and genuine protests--but this appears to be, at best, somewhere in between the two. There was certainly not enough burning furor about the stimulus bill or the bank bailouts in Tampa to drive residents into the streets without the help of Dick Armey's 501 group. An email to Gaithens, and a call to Brendan Steinhauser, also of FreedomWorks, were not immediately returned. Over time, the Tea Party Protest Movement (or whatever you want to call it) has grown. There were larger tea parties in March, and if you've been watching Fox News, you know that tomorrow (tax day!) Tea Parties are scheduled to occur in cities across the country. That growth has been facilitated in part by such favored grassroots techniques as robocalls, which readers have been tipping us off to for nearly a week, and early estimates suggest that the largest of tomorrow's parties will draw about 5,000 people That's more than 200--and certainly enough to look impressive on a television screen--but significantly smaller than the March 2003 Iraq war protests, which occurred in cities around the world, and resulted in thousands of arrests in the United States. All of which raises a question nobody seems to be asking: What will the media say if FreedomWorks hosts a bunch of Tea Bag Parties and nobody comes? Late update: Additional tax-day teabag coverage here and here. http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/04...-teabagging.php

You really need proof that Foxnews has been promoting and beating the bushes for this movement? And all of the noise machines that owe their livelihood to the small handful of media companies that own most of the radio stations. This was all Beck, O'Reilley, Hannity and Limbaugh had to talk about in the weeks leading up to the big day. Where would this movement be without Foxnews and rightwing radio's free promotion of it? This page on Thinkprogress has a lot of links showing Freedomworks fingerprints on this "grassroots" movement. And: The Tea Party Movement: Who's In Charge? Here is the organizational landscape of the April 15 tea party movement, in a nutshell: three national-level conservative groups, all with slightly different agendas, are guiding it. All are quick to tell you that the movement is a bottom-up affair and that its grassroots cred is real................. http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/04/th...s_in_charge.php Yeah, that looks like a real grassroots movement of ordinary American millionaires.

I'm a little dubious about buying into the concept of Quantum Consciousness. There are still a lot of missing pieces to figure out in the neurochemistry and function of neurons ans synapses -- there seems to be a lot of possibilities without invoking quantum mechanics. I've noticed that most of the neuroscientists writing on this subject are skeptical about quantum effects creating consciousness since the Uncertainty Principle and wave/particle duality work at the subatomic level and not the scale of size that make up the microtubule structures in the neuron would seem to be too large for quantum effects. The other objection I've heard about quantum consciousness is how would we avoid a conscious freeze-up, since entanglement is another property of quantum mechanics that seems to keep fouling up efforts made to design quantum computer chips. Every time subatomic particles find themselves in the same state they become entangled, and the quantum chip is unable to function. If our brains were like quantum computers, how would we avoid having the same thing happening to us? I don't think there is any way around understanding our higher consciousness as a manifestation of brain function, but the particles which we are made of, along with the rest of the universe may have some sort of conscious properties at a very simple, basic level. I am not sure whether property dualism is needed to explain consciousness, or if one of the materialist theories would be the way to go. Right now, there is just not a good enough understanding of what consciousness means to settle on one theory.

What it tells us is that the concept of embodiment that has always been assumed to be the default way we view ourselves and the world, is something that has to be created and maintained on a continual basis. Instead of having a natural sense of embodiment, that small area of the brain has to keep generating an internal map based on sensory information to identify where are body leaves off and the rest of the world begins. When it is shut down, we don't have an intrinsic sense of where our consciousness is. But, if you believe these perceptions are evidence of leaving the body, ask yourself what sensory organ is seeing the world? If it is not the eyes, but instead some sort of spirit sensory organ - why is processing visual information in the same manner as the eyes would? In other words, why do these spirit or astral bodies see the same spectrum of light that they eyes and the visual processing areas of the brain do? Why can't the astral eyes see electromagnetic radiation that is too low or too high a frequency for our physical senses to see? Add to that the problem that people doing astral projection usually describe themselves as breathing and being able to touch things around them, and I got to ask why a spirit needs to breath and how it can feel hot or cold. Except that your switchboard theory doesn't provide any evidence that there is an outside agent interfacing with that switchboard. And where exactly in the brain is this switchboard that enables a supernatural agent to have physical effects on the body? Descartes thought he found it in the Pineal Gland at the base of the brain; and of course that idea was discarded long ago. The fact is that arguments for mind/body dualism are dependent on the gaps in knowledge about how the brain functions, in much the same way that creationists depend on evolutionary gaps to try to insert divine intervention. Every time a gap gets filled by a new scientific discovery, it is another stroke against supernatural agency. I find it far more plausible to believe that remaining gaps will be filled by naturalistic explanations rather than being a permanent mysterious void that can only be filled with supernatural answers that will never explain how it works. Well, we will cross that bridge when we come to it! Since you are claiming that some sort of phenomena outside of the physical universe is having physical effects in our world, then this supernatural agent must leave some trail of evidence to connect it with the natural world -- therefore, there would be some way to study its effects and learn something about this mysterious force. The difference between the scientist and the priest, is that the scientist would keep pushing the envelope and find ways to learn how it works, whereas the priest would consider that to be a sacriledge and declare it to be something to be worshipped, rather than examined. Nonsense! I am not following an ideology or a dogma. I am making my own choices about what and what not to believe. This is my argument! General agreement based on prior experience and from comparing your experiences with others can get you to a point where you have confidence that you can trust your beliefs. But that is not 100% absolute certainty, and just wishing and claiming to be certain does not make it so!

The grandiose title of the page you are quoting from is "DARWIN WAS WRONG! ". Well, first of all, to be accurate, Charles Darwin wasn't aware of Archeopteryx or Australopithecines to begin with. The group of young earth creationists who created this fantasy site misquote Stephen J. Gould to make him appear to have been an opponent of evolutionary theory -- not that this is a first; just about every creationist site quotemines Gould because he was proposing a radical theory of rapid evolutionary change he call Punctuated Equilibrium. Gould's theory has been pretty much scrapped because fossil evidence of the last 20 years, along with evidence from genetics, has strengthened the theory of evolution by mutation and natural selection (The Modern Synthesis), as opposed to Gould's theory. These two transitional fossils are old news; do they have anything to say about transitional fossils discovered in the last 30 years? As for Archeaopteryx not being a direct line descendent of modern birds -- that does not prove their claim that it is not a transitional fossil. Archaeopteryx had feathers and according to detailed examination of its wing structure and other body features, it was still capable of flight -- so that makes it a bird, even if its descendents died out and didn't lead to the line that modern birds are from. Another pointless claim from a sham creationist site! They don't seem to be interested in challenging the conclusion that Lucy was an upright walking hominid, like the creationists used to do with earlier Australopithecine fossils, since Lucy was one of the few fossil finds that provided a complete skeleton with no missing bones. Again, what difference does it make whether or not Lucy was an ancestor of modern humans? There is no denying that her group had left the jungles and evolved into a bipedal ape -- long regarded as the first step towards the evolution of tool-making, larger brained apes, one of which was our ancestor. This page at Talkorigins has a list of hominids -- they don't all have to be our ancestors, and there are likely many more that became extinct and haven't been discovered yet. They all serve as evidence for evolution by mutation and natural selection, and that makes the people writing for this site a bunch of total asses!

Any time a Christian, or a Muslim too I suppose, is confronted with the evil committed by devout zealots of their faith, expect the "what about the atheist communists" card to be played rather than any acknowledgment of the dangers of dividing people by their beliefs. The problem is that the arguments over which religion is most dangerous and whether atheism is more dangerous than religion -- are trying to compare doctrines and scriptural texts. To get to the root of the issue, you have to first determine if a group has beliefs or doctrines that are not open to alteration or whether the members are allowed to question basic doctrine. On this basis, the other thing that Pol Pot and Stalin had in common was Marxist ideology that was declared to be ultimate truth. On the other hand, Secular Humanism has had three major revisions since the movement began, and has no doctrines that are declared unalterable. So atheism only describes what is not believed; a little more information is needed to determine whether an atheist movement is dangerous or harmless, since there is a big difference between a Marxist and a humanist. Another feature that needs to be determined is whether the group promotes parochial altruism - which encourages members to make sharp distinction between those inside the group and those outside. Nationalism certainly promotes in-group/out-group behaviour, and so can political ideologies, racial and ethnic identification. As far as religions go, Buddhism doesn't turn up as a catalyst of religious wars or genocides. Not that Buddhist nations haven't been involved in either - the difference is that the religion's dogma is concerned solely with personal development, and not with salvation or establishing rules of government. Among Christian sects, Unitarian/Universalism does not seem to be a likely candidate for harm, not just because modern U/U's have adopted a lot of pacifist ideology -- the main reason is because they are one of the few Christian sects that doesn't divide the world into sheep and goats -- those who are saved, and those who are damned. Once a religion makes that distinction, even efforts they consider to be helpful can cause conflict -- like all of the problems created by missionaries using deception, intimidation and forced conversions to "save" heathen souls destined for hell. And the division between saved and unsaved made the persecutions and attempts at eradication of Jews in Europe a continual threat, since they were labeled as obstinate "Christ killers" who were headed to hell anyway. How big of a step is it to convince someone to take part in killing people who are going to hell anyway? The attitude towards the unsaved can range from benign indifference to outright efforts of eradication, but the first step is to make the religion the in-group, and encourage separation from those outside of the group.

The question wasn't about small business -- it was regarding your claim that the richest 2% are the ones who invest capital and create manufacturing jobs. If they are creating manufacturing jobs in China, this not only does not provide manufacturing jobs in the U.S., it has secondary effects on those small businesses that provide parts and services for the large manufacturer. Add to that the problem of depressing wages in a sector of the economy that's already in decline, and the lesson we can draw from supply side economic theory is that the claims that cutting taxes on the wealthiest citizens will trickle down to the middle class in capital investment - is for the most part a fraud! The rich have gotten richer, and made their capital investments overseas, and even moved larger and larger shares of their wealth to tax havens in the Caymen Islands and elsewhere: Over two decades, the income gap has steadily increased between the richest Americans, who own homes and stocks and got big tax breaks, and those at the middle and bottom of the pay scale, whose paychecks buy less. The growing disparity is even more pronounced in this recovering economy. Wages are stagnant and the middle class is shouldering a larger tax burden. Prices for health care, housing, tuition, gas and food have soared. The wealthiest 20 percent of households in 1973 accounted for 44 percent of total U.S. income, according to the Census Bureau. Their share jumped to 50 percent in 2002, while everyone else's fell. For the bottom fifth, the share dropped from 4.2 percent to 3.5 percent. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/08/13/...ain635936.shtml Interesting to note the coincidence that the growing income gap started just after Ronald Reagan started cutting taxes on the richest Americans. And that's because you have put the "small plastics manufacturer" in the position of having to compete head to head with countries that have no environmental regulations and no workplace safety regulations - who are working for less than a dollar an hour, and possibly even less, considering that countries like China have prison camp-labour making consumer products destined for Western store shelves. If they are doing so much public good, how is it that they are driving off with all the gold?: Income inequality grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans — those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 — receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows. The top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000, also reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression. While total reported income in the United States increased almost 9 percent in 2005, the most recent year for which such data is available, average incomes for those in the bottom 90 percent dipped slightly compared with the year before, dropping $172, or 0.6 percent. The gains went largely to the top 1 percent, whose incomes rose to an average of more than $1.1 million each, an increase of more than $139,000, or about 14 percent. The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/business/29tax.html You see! All of that economic prosperity from lower taxes and cutting government spending has only benefited the people at the top of the pyramid. What good is economic prosperity if most of the people are working longer hours and taking home less money for their efforts? Now, back to the Tea Party - since the movement is a coordinated effort of FoxNews and rightwing radio personalities that have been financed and organized by big business advocacy groups: FreedomWatch and Americans United for Change, what other conclusion is there to draw from this tempest in a TeaPot other than it being another scam from those richest 1% who are afraid of even paying a little more for the benefit of their nation? The tragedy is that they are able to sucker so many "Joe the Plumbers" into fighting on their behalf for benefits that only a few will enjoy!

I used to believe in life after death stories because many people have them and believe that they are real. I worked for a guy 30 years ago who reported an out-of-body-experience while having heart surgery. He believed it was real, and that belief seemed to be beneficial to him, since he stopped acting like a hypochondriac - running to his doctor or the hospital every time he had an ache or pain; the NDE seemed to give him peace of mind that was missing previously. That said, I am inclined to believe now that his experience was a fantasy. Research done in the last few years has even identified the region of the brain (right angular gyrus) that is responsible for our basic sense of embodiment -- without it, we can feel like we are floating anywhere that is within our field of vision -- and that is one of the troubling features of this being a real experience: if it's real, why do people reporting OOBE's just float up to the ceiling? Why don't they float out of the hospital, and off into space....explore other planets etc. People researching OOBE's a hundred years ago, like one Sylvan Muldoon, reported that his subjects reported seeing a "silver" umbilical cord tying their souls to their bodies; why is this astral umbilical cord no longer a feature of OOBE's today? As for the links: 2nd one first -- this Titus Rivas doesn't include any biographical information on his Yahoo page for some reason. He claims to have degrees in philosophy and psychology, but his bio page is all about his work in parapsychology. It doesn't say anywhere that he has expertise in neuroscience, which should be a qualification for making an assessment about whether lack of EEG measurements indicate brain death and the experiences reported qualifying as from a source outside the brain. Leaving aside the fact that he, like no one else who believes in souls that are separate from the body, doesn't provide any theory of agency as to what a "soul" is and how it is animated to continue functioning, and how the soul interacts with physical bodies -- like everyone else I read who is a substance dualist, he doesn't offer up a theory of mind/body interaction. In fairness, no philosopher seems to have bothered taking an honest stab at it since Rene Descartes proposed that the Pineal Gland was the interface between the brain and the soul 300 years ago.....anyway, since Rivas does not have technical expertise in neurology to give an informed opinion as to whether lack of EEG readings indicate brain death - which he bases his followup conclusions on, I'll turn to someone who does: my favourite go-to-guy in neuroscience of late is Stephen Novella, who writes the popular Neurologica Blog and hosts the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast: Also, keep in mind that EEGs are not routinely performed during CPR. It would not be feasible to place EEG electrodes on the scalp during CPR. Therefore we only see the EEG during CPR when the EEG was already in place. I am personally aware of only one case in which this occurred - the patient’s heart stopped while being EEG monitored (and it was not detected for some time, so there was no CPR). Brain waves rapidly decrease but do not instantly disappear when the heart stops. They maintain a low level of function. In fact, there are reported cases of using bispectral index (a form of EEG that is used to monitor level of consciousness during anesthesia) to monitor the response of brain function to CPR. Effective CPR was able to maintain brain activity as measured by bispectral index - therefore the evidence suggests that CPR is capable of maintaining measurable brain function. Generally speaking, if someone survives CPR and later recovers consciousness then it could not have proceeded for very long - 30-60 minutes at most. During this time brain activity will not have completely vanished. So the first premise of Dr. Egnor’s anecdotal claim is not true - that there is demonstrably no brain activity during mental activity. The second premise is also not true - that the memories later reported of a near-death experience occurred during CPR, or during the time of minimal brain activity. If someone has a sufficiently prolonged CPR that their brain activity is diminished, then it also must be true that their brain will take time to recover - hours to days. It is not like in the movies where someone comes back from cardiac arrest, their eyes flutter open and they are completely conscious. Rather, CPR survivors will slowly regain brain function and will be delirious for an extended period of time. During this time of delirium they are forming confused memories, and have very poor time sense. It is simply not possible from any documented case to time any memory later reported by a CPR survivor to the time of their CPR - the time when their brain activity was most decreased. Therefore, Dr. Egnor’s two necessary premises for his point - that there is no brain activity, and there is mental activity during this time - have not been established. http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=481#more-481 As a cardiologist, Dr. Michael Sabom may be able to give an informed perspective, but I'm out of time right now; I'll have to do a followup tomorrow about his claims.