mistermack

You're right ! I looked on youtube, and they seem to be all pure bred collies. It's totally changed from what I remember. I was remembering watching one man and his dog more than thirty years ago, and the best dogs back then always seemed to be collie crosses. Now the ones on youtube are nothing but regular collies. I'm guessing that it's down to the price of puppies. Farmers like to make money wherever they can, and that includes their dogs. You will get a heck of a lot more for a litter of pure bred collies, than a bunch of mongrels, so it's obvious what to get, if you want a sheep dog. A well bred pup will sell for about £500 and you could get six or even eight in a litter.

There's one big difference between religious writing and history. And that is the level of invention. People often compare Caesar to Jesus for documentations. But it's like comparing chalk and cheese. When it comes to religion, people invent, hallucinate, lie, change old stories, repeat things wrongly, and just generally don't care about any truth. And that's obvious when you look at the hundreds and thousands of gods, and the thousands and thousands of stories about each. Storytelling and religion are merged into one, there is no dividing line. That was true 2,000 years ago, and it's still true today. And people especially lie and invent when it's something that they WANT to be true. History in contrast suffers far less from invention and storytelling, and it's usually fairly easy to tell which is which. The old truism popularised by Carl Sagan should come into play with religion, but it doesn't. And that is, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". David Hume said much the same. So a man rising from the dead needs to be ratified beyond doubt. Not beyond reasonable doubt. We use that for cases of theft. Rising from the dead needs evidence that can't possibly have been faked. Especially when you look at what you are supposed to do with your life, if you believe it all. The question of "was there a real Jesus" I admit does require lesser evidence. Not because it's necessarily any more likely, but because it doesn't really matter. A fanatical Jew getting crucified 2000 years ago was no big deal then, and is even less of a big deal now, so it really doesn't matter that much whether you get it right or wrong. There's no real cost either way, unless you buy into the rest of the religious stuff. I'm just guessing that there was no human originator. I have to concede there might have been, but I haven't seen good evidence either way. And that's not so surprising, 2,000 years later, in the minefield of religious invention.

Sometimes, too many people getting involved makes a simple explanation almost impossible. I had a situation a couple of days ago, when my friend asked me to help him work out how to set the tappets on his old Triumph Thunderbird. It's a really simple process, but another friend of his happened to be there, (a former bike mechanic) and it turned into a nightmare, because three people were seeing it from a different angle. As soon as his friend left, we did it in no time. He knew what he was doing, but saw it a different way.

If I had to have a designer dog, if there were no proper mongrels around, my dog of choice would be a cross between a long-coated black and white border collie, and a greyhound. I saw one once on the local common, and it was just beautiful to watch it run. It had the full coat of the collie, but was a bit taller, and more graceful, and boy could it move. Funnily enough, the owner said it was all collie, but I've been around collies all my life, and my family have had greyhounds, and it was obvious what it was.

I've seen that video, it's a classic : I still think the right person could tame a wildcat if kept from a kitten, but I wouldn't expect it to be as tame as a domestic cat. It would probably disappear, if it got free, or be unpredictable around strangers. My sister's cat was hilarious. She'd let people stroke her, and even purr on their lap, and then bite and jump off suddenly when she'd had enough. Not enough to cause damage, just enough to keep you nervous the next time. A bit like this one : vLittle girl and grumpy cat-.mp4

I've seen no evidence that they can't be tamed. So, no I'm not in agreement. What I said was that I don't believe that they can't be tamed. If I saw some good evidence to the contrary, I'd be likely to change my mind. I was expressing an opinion, not a conviction. In any case, you would have to define tame. Which is a grey area. My sister's cat is supposed to be tame. But most of the family are scared of her. She's kept my niece hostage upstairs for ages in the past. Just by sitting at the bottom of the stairs.

Since the domestic cat was bred from the European Wildcat's VERY close relative, the African Wildcat, I would say that the evidence is everywhere that wildcats can be tamed. The general consensus now is that there are probably no Scottish Wildcats left that don't have some domestic cat dna, so it's probably too late to try to find a purebred tame one.

I don't believe that a wildcat kitten can't be tamed. Leopards, Lions and Tigers have all been hand reared and tamed, and they don't have a domesticated close relative. It's a well known fact though, that wildcat shit is a cure for baldness.

You don't see shepherds or Inuits with "Champion Marmaduke Churchill the second" in the reins, or running up and down Snowdon. Actually, any time I've watched sheep trials, the better dogs were very obviously mixed breed, nothing like a show border collie.

The whole pet thing is a mystery to me. I had some goldfish a few years ago by accident, and I kept them out of curiosity. I got some pond weed off freegle, and there must have been eggs on it. I like cats but don't want one. Other people's cats are near enough. And I certainly wouldn't want one that had a shrunken nose. How people can live with their consciences buying shrunken-nose animals escapes me. I'd like to start a mongrel register, where people could post their dog's details, only including dogs that have not been a recognised breed for more than three generations. Or preferably no breed history at all. People could buy a mongrel in the knowledge that it's not just a cross between two different pure breed dogs, but a genuine no-breed mongrel. And they could find a mongrel mate for their dog, so that the pups were genuine mongrels as well. You could allow a bit of choice, like in size and coat, for mating with your dog, to get the kind of pups you were hoping for, and give the buyers a rough idea of what the pups might look like when they grow. But really, it would be better if it was like having a baby. You don't know what you're going to get, and end up loving them anyway.

He's probably read Bart Ehrman's book and accepted his arguments. There isn't a great wealth of stuff from Bible scholars arguing that there was no Jesus. But that's hardly surprising. Most are in it because they are religious, Ehrman and Carrier are two of the few who aren't. You're not going to start favouring the no-Jesus scenario, if you're a Christian. I would imagine that in the future, there will be less consensus than there is now. Dawkins must be accepting stuff from the gospels as history, if he describes Jesus as a great man. We have no contemporary words or deeds of Jesus at all. He's taking a lot on trust. Or faith.

The reason that the Painted African Dogs haven't been domesticated might be that they are too efficient as predators. Their hunts are up to 90 percent successful. It's rare for them to scavenge, so they are not likely to hang around human settlements, stealing scraps, like a hungry wolf might do, so they wouldn't get accustomed to humans in the same way that a wolf might.

Dawkins is just going with the consensus. There's no doubt that the consensus thinks there was a Jesus. For Dawkins to call him a "great man" he has to be accepting material from the Gospels, which is a bit naive. But it's up to him what he accepts or doesn't. He doesn't profess to be any kind of expert in scriptures. And neither do I. I'm just commenting on what I HAVE read.

My guess is that they are impurities on the surface, supported by surface tension. As the drop creeps a tiny amount, the surface tension rapidly adjusts, and the surface spots race around as the surface skin tries to regain equilibrium. Then the drop creeps another hundredth of a millimetre, and it all shoots off in another direction.

When you add religion, it generally gets very nasty. Which is why establishing a Jewish nation was so fundamentally wrong. Two types of Muslims can't even coexist peacefully, and nor could Protestants and Catholics throughout history. Things might have calmed down a bit, now that people are getting less religious. But where religion is strong, so are the tensions. A little place called Myanmar comes to mind, the British moved in hundreds of thousands of Muslims and now there's a bit of bother. Then the Nazis killed six million Jews, for being Jews. And the Christians slaughtered Muslims to glorify god during the Crusades. Peace and understanding might come eventually, when Jews stop being Jews, and Muslims stop being Muslims. In the meantime, it's better to keep them apart.

From memory, going on the last time I read up on this, if you want to produce 1g, without problems from rotation in the inner ear, the minimum diameter of a station needs to be about 200 metres. The 1g figure might not be important for a trip to Mars, but if you want people living and reproducing healthily in space, then you have to aim at 1g. Because nobody knows what the effect of lower gravity would have on the development of embryos or children. And who's going to be the first to perform that experiment? You don't need a huge station to get to the 200 metre figure though. You could have two living capsules, rotating connected by a 200 metre tether.

True. But not knowing that you're dead doesn't make you alive.

It was flippant. Nelson would have lined up his ships and blown them out of the water. (that was flippant too !)

It's a semantic difference. To me, they are semi-feral. They aren't truly wild. There are no bears, wolves or lynx or eagles to kill them. Or wild cats to compete with. The wild doesn't really exist in the UK any more, except in some remote corners, or micro-environments. But other people can consider them feral, it's a free choice.

Not so. You can't be living in a wild state, in a major city, travelling the underground, begging for scraps and raiding bins. Even your own link called them homeless dogs, not feral. To qualify as feral, they need to be living in the wild and descended from domesticated animals.

I've already had one bash at that :

That's interesting, but I wouldn't call them feral. (they're not living in the wild) My example of the dingo is probably not the best, I think they were probably pretty similar when the arrived in Oz, not having been intensively bred like modern breeds. Looking at the problems that modern dogs get from inbreeding, I would have thought that if all humans died tomorrow, dogs would initially evolve very quickly. Bulldogs would be extinct in weeks, as would pekingese etc. Poodles would die from embarrassment, and Yorkies would just get killed by the others for being annoying. The dogs that survived the first few years would be the more athletic types, that stood a chance of catching something to eat. I don't think it would take long to get back to a wolfish mongrel.

Israel is like what happens, if Hitler won the war. Let's all work together in harmony. Maybe the Muslims could be encouraged convert to Judaism.

The rocket attacks are no different to the pathetic puny bombing raids that Churchill sent to Germany at the start of WW2. They had no military effect, and Hitler used them to justify his blitz on London. The Israelis are constantly using Hitler's tactics, of always blaming the victims. Funnily enough, nobody blames Churchill now for the German blitz on London. He's Britain's heroic leader. Double standards.

It's not likely that Peter wrote those epistles. But thanks, I've enjoyed your posts and hope I haven't given a wrong impression in this thread. I think you regard me as wedded to one notion, but I'm not. I'm reading the relevant stuff quite hungrily looking for something definite that you could call good evidence, and I would switch to arguing the other side in an instant, if I found good stuff to argue with. I really don't mind if there was an actual real Jesus or not. I would rather be on the right side of the argument, and would argue the opposite of what I have done just as enthusiastically, If I thought it was probably right. Basically, it interests me, and I'd rather get it right than wrong. Having said that, I'm a very firm atheist, and it would take a hell of a jolt to change that. And I'm not craving any such jolt. I'm just interested in whether the Christian religion had an actual man at it's root, or not, because of the indoctrination I got as a kid, and the fact that millions are still followers.