John Cuthber

Who knows- maybe I will. But there is still no necessity to kill criminals. That is objective:.It is based on a simple couple of facts. There is no need. and Plenty don't. You might want to, but that's not the same as needing to.

I nodded off fora bit there. Did I miss the explanation of the fact that the "chain of begettings" only includes something like 10% or 1% of the people it should have*, and yet the rest of the book should be regarded as essentially correct and complete? * It explains about 6000 years, but we know that there have been people for something like 10 or 100 times longer (depending on what you actually count as "people")so something like 90% or 99% of it is missing with no note of this fact, nor any explanation. Of course, the other problem is that the "chain" only goes back to the first human. The first life goes back a few thousand times longer. But, according to the Bible we were all made within a week or so. So the "chain" needs to go back not just 6000 years but nearer 3,000,000,000 So 99.98% of it seems to be missing. Seems a bit shoddy for the "word of God".

I presume there's some really good reason why you couldn't respond to what I wrote.

I said "So you are simply wrong." Not very nice- not remotely veiled- not really derogatory. Feel free to leave the debate, but don't kid yourself that you won any argument. Killing people unnecessarily is still wrong. Most of the civilised world has recognised that it is unnecessary to kill criminals.

Not, I fear, a profitable future doing so.

Interesting. The OP says "Fundamentalism: a movement characterized by a strictly literal (empirical) interpretation of religious texts" "And in theory atheism is just about empiricism." Well, My empirical interpretation of religious texts is that they are words in old books, and often wrong. Does that make me a religious fundamentalist ? (NB, just to forestall a pointless debate: atheism is not a religion, don't even go there.)

There is a choice to kill murderers; but there is not a necessity. There is an alternative- typically life in prison. So you are simply wrong. It is not subjective. Saying you are going to bow out because we are working from different sets of axioms is fine. But just check whether you are actually basing your decisions on a set of assumptions that are not backed by the facts.

The only statement we have about how much he has is " Peter does not have enough money to buy 5 pens" And that would be true if he had no money at all. Since we can't exclude the possibility that he has no money, we can't exclude any statement of the type "he can't afford...". Nor can we be certain of the truth of any statement along the lines of "he can afford..." basicly; we don't know.

It's wrong for us, as individuals, to kill unnecessarily. Doing it by proxy using the government doesn't change that.

Crikey! 14 pages of discussion on the question "Should we kill people when we don't really need to?". How long would the discussion go on if the question was actually difficult?

Table two here http://www.imp.lodz.pl/upload/oficyna/artykuly/pdf/full/Smol10-02-01.pdf shows that plants do a pretty good job of excluding cadmium uptake. Plants, on the other hand are very good at picking up potassium- they typically accumulate something like 4% by weight (on a dry weight basis) from soil that contains a lot less (Something like 200 ppm available potassium). As I said. they really are good at this.

Is this book part of the world?

It would be interesting to coat "lithium sand" with polythene and then you could put it in a cloth bag to use as s float. The failure of a small number wouldn't matter much. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja01856a501

Underneath my mouse it's pretty dark- except for the light from the mouse itself. That's red. My mouse can not logically distinguish a white background from a red one (both reflect essentially all the light) Nor can it tell a green background from a black one (where both absorb essentially all the light.) I can offer it a notionally perfectly black background to "look at" by simply moving it away from anything reflective and holding it in mid air. It doesn't work in those circumstances. I can also give it a "perfectly" reflective "mouse mat" by using a mirror. That works poorly too. (It turns out that you need a jolly good mirror to show this) It's not the colour that matters; it's the pattern. it turns out that the folk who make mice have made them such that they are pretty good at working with just about any surface.

"Or to put the question differently, why are all current land animals smaller than dinosaurs were?" It's a valid question. A possible answer is "the mammals waited till they were asleep (and cold) then ate them." (really big mammals have a different problem- they tend to overheat) Another possible answer is " I haven't a blessed clue". No answer to that question makes any difference to the other question i.e "why-it-was-possible-for-dinosaurs-to-exist". The answer to that was evolutionarily (or divinely, if you insist) good engineering. The answer was not " The laws of physics went up the Swanee and some 'magic' that I made up, but can't explain can't explain made gravity smaller"

I think there's a problem... "Dear sir, I saw your product advertised on the web. Please send me 500 watts worth of radioactive material. I'm not too concerned about the half life. Kind regards John Smith PS I'm definitely not a terrorist seeking to make a dirty bomb- certainly not- the idea would never even occur to me"

When science first looked at bumblebees they saw there was a problem; how did they fly? And so they studied some more, and they answered that question. The same happened with the dinosaurs. You have been told the answer- repeatedly. yet you ignore this and pretend there's still a problem. You are the oner "running away form the problem". The problem is that we know they walked and we know the Earth's gravity was the same. You keep trying to run away from those facts. Your ideas don't hold up to scrutiny- whether or not they are "pseudoscience" isn't the point. They are wrong. Things have moved on a lot since you did your studies in the 70s. They have moved on a lot since the 90s Since dinosaurs were built like birds- light + strong- there isn't a problem.

How can you know that? It's not recorded anywhere is it? And, most of these "heroes and Godly people" only get 1 mention in the Book- and that's for the "begetting" they did. There's nothing very heroic about getting someone pregnant. Why not face the fact that you made that bit up in an attempt to cover up for the stupidity of the Bible?

Just like Christianity- especially during the crusades. It seems to me to be better to focus on what's bing done, rather than the ""label" it is done under.

In the unlikely event that I met this situation, I'd get my girlfriend to write letter with long words and tongue twisters,

It is noteworthy that he has been given the job of Foreign secretary. But others have been given the jobs of sorting out the brexit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Davis_(British_politician) and building the new trade deals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liam_Fox Presumably that's because they don't want Boristo f*** it up twice.

Matter of definition: it says "Additionally, John Maynard Smith, a noted biologist with a strong background in aeronautics, has pointed out that bumblebees would not be expected to sustain flight, as they would need to generate too much power given their tiny wing area. ". It's beside the point. The idea that "according to my calculations, bumblebees can't fly" is still simply an assertion that you have not got the right calculations. The same is true of your idea that a dinosaur couldn't walk. It seems you still have not cottoned on to the fact that you are simply wrong. The conditions today are very similar. in particular, gravity can't have changed by more than a small fraction. so, if you say they couldn't walk today then you are actually saying they couldn't walk when, in fact, they did.

Well, since you start off by being wrong, I stopped reading. My assertion does not say "All people" does it? It is true that there are people on death row who appeal against their sentence. That makes it true that people on death row do so.

Reminds me of a problem set by a maths teacher when I was at school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_fours

You can't prove it. That's because there is no evidence. But it can buy you a lifetime. And the Bible is the simple answer "Goddidit". It's science that's complicated- and beautiful.