kimmy

Read about it here. So... your view is that since there are no actual pitchforks involved, the enforced indoctrination is acceptable? In many communities transit companies refused to carry those ads. In the community I live in, the ads were stolen off the buses before the buses even left the garage, and no suspects were ever charged. Meanwhile advertising for any number of religious groups adorns buses regularly and goes without comment. In Afghanistan being a Christian might be dangerous, but here in North America Christians are the most coddled faith group there is. Time spent reading important articles is not time wasted, it's time well spent. I was already reading those articles and they reminded me of Dre's post so I added them to this thread. Time spent responding to you is time wasted, and there's a limit to how much time I'm willing to waste. Why is it that you insist I deal directly with the questions you ask, but when you yourself always deflect with questions? "w-w-w---- HOW TALL IS ARARAT ANYWAY???" Betsy has the balls to speak for Dr Craig and some creationist websites she cut-and-pastes from. The times when Betsy actually produces an original idea are few and far between, but when it happens... the result is usually amusing. -k

An ongoing story that illustrates the point: US Army Spiritual Fitness test No, not religious! "Spiritual!" It's completely different! And it's completely optional! (that's what we'll tell the judge...) -k

I have a full-time job and a part-time job, as well as hobbies and a busy social life. I'm not always available to tend to your follies. You, judging from the amount of time you spend posting your inane arguments and watching Dr Craig videos, seem to be a shut-in that has virtually nothing to do other than visit websites. Shouldn't you be out ministering to the homeless or something? -k

First you stated that in using the term "New Atheist" you were referring to Dawkins' movement. Next you've come up with a list of insulting characteristics that you rather arbitrarily assign to "New Atheists". And then, completely disregarding your initial premise, you proceed to declare people at your discretion to be "new atheists", thereby assigning them the insulting characteristics you've associated with that term. So yes, despite your attempts to dress it up, this is just an ad hominem attack on people you disagree with. -k

hmm? Which key arguments? -k

The more I read about this guy and Michelle Bachmann, the more I believe that they're real live hardcore religious fruitcakes. -k

This is it in a nutshell. Betsy's search for pieces of the Bible that coincide with scientific facts is like a psychic hotline caller figuring out ways the psychic could be talking to her. "A tall man... I DO know a tall man! Mike from accounting! You really ARE a psychic!" At one point Betsy proposed that when Genesis mentioned darkness, it could be talking about dark matter and black holes... which tells you all that need be said about Betsy's thought process. Another thing that illustrates Betsy's thought process: earlier on she was berating another poster and claiming he wasn't a real Christian for daring to believe that Genesis is allegorical. But when it's demonstrated that Noah's flood couldn't have happened the way it's described in the Bible, she's completely willing to accept that it was allegorical. And now that Dr Craig has told her that it's completely reasonable to believe that the Bible's account of creation is allegorical, suddenly she's decided it's OK for Christians to believe it. I guess Canadien can be a real Christian again, thanks to Dr Craig. -k

I like how earlier in the thread Betsy explained that "New Atheist" referred to Dawkins and his associates, and people in their movement... but now "New Atheist" is basically an ad-hominem attack against anybody Betsy disagrees with. -k

Pretty much. John Q Public is always mad about something, and BC politics is pretty wack to start with. John Q Public hates Gordon Campbell, hates taxes, and was only too happy to buy into the disinformation spread by "the Zalm". "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore and my cup of Tim's costs 8 cents more than it did 2 years ago and I'm going to teach them a lesson!!!" Yippee! We taught 'em a lesson! Now we just have to give $1.6 billion back to the feds, saddle our businesses with the costs of the PST, and then we can sit back and enjoy the 8 cents we're saving on our coffees. Life is good. -k

Well of course. "God can do whatever he likes" is certainly an adequate answer for most people who believe in God. But Betsy is trying to portray the Bible as a science text, and it's her rules (cut and pasted as they are from some Intelligent Design website or some crap like that) that we're discussing here. -k

Indeed. Only in the worst cases do restaurants actually do anything. Some parents-- dre's comments here make it clear that he's one-- don't see what the big issue is because it's just kids being kids and that's what kids are like and they don't think they're inconveniencing anybody else. Customers are reluctant to complain until the situation becomes unbearable. And the restaurants are reluctant to turf a paying customer, especially if they've already made the food. So the net result is that everybody grins and bears it. The whole idea that restaurants should let everybody in and just deal with problems case by case is flawed because the actual dealing with problems is rarely done and certainly not in a timely fashion. ... -k

He would probably say that changing conditions (likely the availability of prey) led to an environment that was unfavorable for large predators, resulting in declining numbers and finally extinction. Why would you imagine that the disappearance of creatures like mammoths or sabretooth tigers would be such a "gotcha" for evolution? It makes me wonder if you actually understand what you're even talking about. -k

Ok, let's keep that in mind for a little later. You have listed "a finished creation" as a fact. But that "fact" is contradicted by the events described in Noah's flood. So either your "fact" is wrong, or the account of Noah's flood is wrong. That's utterly inane. There's no way for a regional flood to float a boat onto the tallest mountain in the region. The flood could only be global in nature. We're discussing "fact: a finished creation" here, and asking how Noah's flood could have happened if God was finished creating matter after Creation was done. All of this is irrelevant, because the volume of water required to get a boat to the top of Ararat is so immense that it would require the whole planet to be flooded. You can ask things like ... "b-b-but what if there was a drought somewhere else?" or "b-b-but what if there was another sea that was empty until the flood?" but all you are doing is demonstrating that you have no understanding at all of just how much water we are talking about. To reiterate: Noah's flood would require the sea level to raise by thousands of meters. But there is only enough water in *the world* to raise the sea level by 60-75 meters. If every glacier melted and every drop of moisture in the air rained into the seas, the sea level would raise by no more than 75 meters, and yet Noah's flood requires the sea level to raise by *thousands* of meters. And as I've just explained, the hydrological cycle can't account for all that water. The clouds contain only the most miniscule fraction of the water necessary to float a boat onto Ararat. If it happened, then God must have created all of that water, then destroyed it later. -k

The people I know who were most in favor of the HST are business owners. It's funny, people often talk about how stupid it is that government makes life difficult for businesses, but when the government does something that makes life easier for business, suddenly people are mad because a coffee at Tim's costs them 8 cents more. The people I know who were most opposed to the HST happen to all be dummies, mooks, idiots, and the sort of cranky old people who are mad about everything and shout at clouds if there's nothing else to complain about. These are inevitably people who struggle to come up with examples of stuff where the HST actually cost them more money; the ones complaining about the cost of dining out going up are usually people for whom "dining out" is their monthly trip to Burger King. As I understand it, the province is on the hook for that money, so it's coming out of our pockets one way or another. -k

If the information in the Bible came from divine sources, then all of it must be correct, yes? So let's continue to look at this flood thing. It can't have been a localized flood, for reasons I just explained. Follow along: -the mountains of Ararat are by far the tallest thing in their region. -you can't create a flood that reaches the top of the mountains of Ararat without also flooding everything lower in the region. -you can't flood everything lower in that region without the water flowing into the Black Sea -you can't flood the Black Sea without the water flowing into the Mediterranean -you can't flood the Mediterranean without the water flowing into every other ocean Therefore: you can't create a flood deep enough to float a boat to the top of the mountains of Ararat without raising the sea level by at least 10,000 feet. There's no way to argue that it could have been anything other than a global flood. Since we know that it had to be a global flood, yes, we know what happened to other parts of the world at that time. After any normal flood, the water just flows back into the ocean. If the water from Noah's flood flowed back into the oceans, the sea level would be at least 10,000 feet higher than it is right now. The water can't have gone where other water goes after floods. Maybe God created the water for the flood then took it away later, but that would contradict your "fact". -k

It doesn't matter: there's no "region" that could contain enough water to create a flood deep enough to float a boat to the top of the mountains of Ararat. To illustrate the point: imagine placing a rubber ducky (representing the Ark) and a bar stool (representing Mount Ararat) in your bath-tub (representing any hypothetical region that might have been flooded around Mount Ararat). Like the bar-stool in the bath tub, the mountains of Ararat are by far the tallest thing around. Can you float your rubber ducky to onto the bar stool? When you turn on the tap (representing 40 days and 40 nights of rain...) the flooding begins. But... water starts flowing over the top of the tub before the water is deep enough to float the ducky onto the stool. Can you float the ducky onto the stool? Only by flooding your whole bathroom. There is no possible region around the mountains of Ararat that could have been flooded deep enough to put the Ark where the Bible says without the water flowing into the Black Sea and then Mediterranean Sea and then all of the oceans. So that leaves only two possibilities: EITHER: the Bible is lying about where the Ark came to rest. OR: the entire world was flooded to a depth of several thousand meters above the current sea level. But there is only enough water in the entire world-- even if you melted all the glaciers and drained all the moisture from the air-- to raise the sea level by 60 to 75 meters. For Noah's flood to have happened, God must have created an enormous volume of water, then destroyed it later. But that contradicts one of your "facts", the "finished creation". You missed the point: Eve weighed at least 100lbs. A rib weighs less than 1lb. If Eve was constructed from a rib, we've again created at least 100lbs of matter. I'm more interested in looking at the contradictions between your "facts" and other "facts" reported by the Bible. An explanation of where all the water from Noah's Great Flood went would be fascinating to hear. -k

And if it were a local flood, why do they seem so convinced that the ark ended up on Mt Ararat? A local flood couldn't have floated the ark to the top of the highest peaks in the region. Did we ever get "facts" explaining the Adam's Rib story, or how Lot's wife was spontaneously transformed into a pillar of salt? These Bible stories certainly seem to contradict one of betsy's earlier "facts", a "finished creation" where matter can not be created. -k

1. Contingency "God is the best explanation for why anything at all exists." rofl 2.Cosmological "God is the best explanation for the origin of the universe." rofl 3. Design "God is the best explanation for the fine tuning of the initial conditions of the universe to support intelligent life." rofl 4. Moral "God is the best explanation for the existence of objective moral values." rofl 5. Ontological "The very possibility that God exists implies that God exists." rofl 6. Personal Experience "We can know that God exists by personally experiencing him." rofl -k

Since the Conservatives proposed this legislation long before they were a majority government, and since the bulk of the new seats will be in Toronto and Vancouver, which are traditionally areas of strength for the Liberals and NDP, I think your attempt to paint this as an attempt at gerrymandering fails badly. -k

"The new atheist" is pretty much like "the old atheist" in that he does not give a crap about Dawkins et al, TalkOrigins, or any of this crap, and doesn't care what other people believe in either as long as they're not trying to teach about the 6000 year old earth in biology class or inflict religious mores upon public policy. -k

Their whole argument boils down to "Quebec will be angry if their share of seats in parliament decreases!" so the description of "pandering to Quebec" is pretty reasonable. -k

I doubt it. Most people are capable of recognizing that many people succeed because of their merits and not because of some advantage or favoritism. I think this whole thread is an exercise in building straw-men. -k

Who's demanding any of that? Equality of opportunity, not equality of results. I don't know of any notable political movement in our country that is intent on guaranteeing equality of results. -k

One type of dark matter has already been shown to exist-- neutrinos. There's nothing in science that precludes the existence of heaven, hell, or "the man in the sky". Not on the terms insisted on by Biblical literalists... This is just "God in the gaps" again. "Science hasn't answered this question yet! God must have done it!" And when science does answer the question, people will find something else that science hasn't explained yet and that's their new proof of God. -k

"More study". Here's Jack Layton's stance on the issue: In other words, if ON/BC/AB get more seats, QC has to get more seats to maintain its current over-representation, so the only increase in proportional representation for ON/BC/AB is a slight increase that comes at the expense of the North, SK, MB, and the Maritimes. -k