Phi for All

If it gets in the lungs, it can be fatal.

OK. I get that. Just be careful that your focus may be too broad. Problems seem insurmountable until we break them down to doable steps, with clear resolutions. Specific actions are what will help most here, like banning the hunting of female mountain lions. Does it solve the problem outright? No, but it's a nudge in the right direction. Enough nudges gets the job done, and may even help us deal with the changes more efficiently. But if you insist that all hunting must cease to make things right in your book, then you're doomed to fail, back to facing that insurmountable problem with no solution. I hate to see you do that to yourself, is all. Nudge something tomorrow, see how it feels.

Buy a dog if you don't have one. Call me if he starts barking for no reason.

I don't want to go off-topic here too much, but I wanted to point out this example of what I meant earlier. You've declared what we're doing (or what nature is doing) is WRONG. You've declared further that our methodology, "the way this world works", is also WRONG. You claim we need to "develop out of this mess" as quickly as possible. You don't say what is RIGHT, which leads us to assume it must be the opposite of what we're doing now. This means changing just about everything about us, the way we live, where we live, what we eat. And you give us no boundaries or goals to reach, just this nebulous, impractical, development out of a false dilemma. Using your argument, we have no way to satisfy what YOU think is RIGHT. I've seen this all my life. You're a well-meaning person with a dream for mankind, but you've either over-defined what needs to happen to the point where it will never happen, or you haven't defined RIGHT at all, so you can just keep shifting the goalposts no matter how much good mankind can achieve. The mountain lions need a better plan from you.

I didn't see any mention of how far inland the eastbound tidal wave will travel, just that it will be 700 miles wide. Not to be too doom and gloom here, but could a major quake in the Pacific Northwest like this trigger the Yellowstone supervolano?

If I don't need religion for morality, I don't see why I need it emotionally. Emotions have their place, and it's almost never when I need to be rational. I used to be what some would call religious, but it never helped me emotionally, and always hindered me rationally. I think this boils down, for me at least, to a possibility of an afterlife, a continuation of my consciousness after my body stops supporting the emergence of life. Is there a chance, without jumping through the "Hoops of Sin", that after my brain stops supporting thought, that I'll become aware again, this consciousness in another vessel? Or no vessel, just pure thought? In a case like that, do I need religion, or just a consciousness that can figure out life in a different body?

To get back to the OP, maybe reconciliation isn't the best option. The OP claims that he's disinclined to relinquish his religion, but feels a need to be more rational. This sounds a bit like staying in a bad marriage, hoping something will change, or doing it for the kids. If religion isn't productive, and science is, reconciling a love for both may be a bad thing.

You are misinterpreting what people are replying with. We ask for substance, we ask for evidence to support your idea, and you claim we're "dismissing ideas that [we don't] understand without making a genuine attempt to do so". You make up definitions for words we know by other meanings, and when we ask for more clarity, you once again point to your idea to substantiate itself. Now you're even quoting your past posts, which is just about the worst thing you can do when nobody understood it in the first place. The questions you haven't answered all revolve around supportive evidence and experimental mechanisms. How do we test this? What can you point to as something which verifies what you're saying, other than you just claiming it? And how in blazes are we supposed to make a genuine attempt to understand your idea in a scientific sense when you are redefining science, and then criticizing us for asking why?

We don't do very well with ideas that don't have a lot of science in them. You're assuming you can take a trip through a black hole, and from what we know right now, that's very unlikely. You mention traveling to another dimension. You can't travel to a dimension, a dimension is like length, width, height, time, they give perspective to each other. They aren't other universes. Much of what you're stating is very speculative, and much of it is opinion. We try to stick to concepts we have supportive evidence for. You make a lot of assumptions that aren't necessarily true, yet you phrase them as if they are ("As we know,..."). So we can discuss this, but you're going to get a lot of criticism on the mistakes in science, and the claims you've made but have no evidence for. Do you still want to discuss this?

I can only stomach so much self-loathing. This "man-is-unnatural" argument is lazy and self-fulfilling. With this thinking, no amount of good works or ethical treatment is EVER going to be enough. Frankly, I think arguments like this are horrible. If you think something is wrong, fix it. Why walk around hating yourself based on criteria you've purposely placed out of your own reach?

In about a billion years, our sun is going to start burning more of the helium it's been converting from hydrogen, and the Earth will get about 10% more sunlight. This will basically turn us into another Venus, and our oceans will evaporate into space. Eventually, when the sun goes red giant in a few more billion years, the sun's corona will be out past Mars, so the inner planets will be gone. We need to find another star, but we'll be using this one for quite a while. We probably don't need to worry about the sun as much as keeping our own ecosystem viable until we figure out how to remain off planet.

Yeah, you're screwed.

Again, I think we're seeing the results of not having a formal science education. tonylang has obviously read quite a bit on various subjects, but without the formal study, he has no way to connect all the links, the bits of data he needs to convert to usable information. He has to rely on making up terminology, which is frustrating for people who use common definitions. A good education helps forge all the little links together into a chain. What we've got here are a few metal links connected with some kite string and wishful thinking to make a concept only one person on the planet understands. And since there are several obvious errors, one really has to wonder if tonylang would still think this way if he knew the mainstream science better. I don't think he would.

Banks are entitled to do this, but they want that money. I think, as long as you wrote out the amount in words on the legal line, that's what the bank would fall back on, regardless of the equation you put in the little courtesy box.

For confirmation purposes, banks usually require you to print the amount in words so they can see if the numbers and words match. If they don't, the written words usually take precedence.

! Moderator Note We can't keep discussions involving "souls" and other spiritual and religious concepts in the Psychiatry and Psychology section, unless the subject is discussing the pathology. Further, the non-mainstream references to parts of the personality require we move this discussion to our Speculations section. Please take the time to read the special rules we have for discussions here. Note further that if you want to bring deities into the discussion, we'll need to move again, to Religion. Please cite references when making claims. Stating things as fact when they aren't usually gets you called out. No need to respond to this note, but if you have to talk about it, Report it and tell me why.

We're a discussion forum. Just join in if something interests you, or start your own discussion about a specific topic. We'll get to know you, you'll get to know us, and that's the best way to make friends. Welcome!

You could joke that your brother and sister-in-law are honeymooning at the Pritt Glue Factory, or The Wax Crayon Museum.

According to the wiki article, Muslims recognize that evolution is real. They have more of a problem with not being able to claim Adam as the first human. It seems many Muslims are willing to attribute processes science knows to exist to their god. And apparently, they have no young Earth creationists, so they've got that going for them. Which is nice.

! Moderator Note Some day, not today, you may eventually see that it's not the concept that has been dismissed. You were asked in multiple threads on your anomalies to show where you ruled out more mundane explanations, and when you refused to offer that, it was explained why it's important. You still kept insisting what we were seeing were either aliens or an undiscovered terrestrial species. Now you've just sunk to persecution claims, and it's just not true. We were asking for more rigor in your methodology, not telling you there was nothing to see in your videos. In any case, it's obvious you're just phoning it in now, not even bothering to read replies, just responding with "Help, I'm being repressed!" So we're left with just this: your blurry UFO videos are all you seem to want to talk about, and nobody really wants to hear you make claims you're unwilling to support, so you can pick a different subject, or be more rigorous in your science, or even stop making claims and just discuss your UFOs, ask questions instead of make assertions you have no evidence for. If you can't do any of these, I think you should move on from here. It's not productive to come here, where we ask for evidence, and refuse to give us more than blurry videos as proof of plasma beings in the atmosphere. This thread's closed.

It reminds me of Bush II and giving military operations Islamic names (Operation Infinite Justice), blowing up mosques, and in general being the best recruiter of new terrorists the world has ever seen. The Donald's depth of knowledge in this area has obviously been sprayed on.

I think there should be. If we agree to the laws governing our particular part of society, and also agree to be a functioning member of that society, we should benefit from some rights that can't be taken away. If your country can ask you to die for it, isn't there something profound it can do for you?

Most of the help comes in the form of finally, after decades or centuries of fighting it and preaching against it, admitting that science was right about a particular theory. Evolution and the Catholic Church come to mind.

Does religion need to bring science to a complete halt for it to be an impediment?

So it would work if you threw in some other subjects. Maybe not Physics and Chemistry for primary school, but History and Music work. There's a good joke in there somewhere about giving grades to each other. Could get bawdy, or you could mention how they'll probably grade for household chores, cooking, clothing choices, etc. "I know for a fact my brother is going to flunk bathroom cleaning". There will never be a pencil around their house when you need one. Irony, that. On the other hand, before they have their own kids, they'll have a refrigerator full of artwork. Of course, the best thing about all of this is that, as they're teaching our children now, they'll also be passing along educator genes to their own children. Teaching evolution as they evolve more teachers! It's yours. The Best Man should get a gift.