Moontanman

I just caught it, good one...

I think some of the posts have become a pulpit for proselytizing...

Has this ban taken guns from criminals? Has it caused the gun crime rate to drop? has the black market in guns increased? John you do know that is only for hand guns don't you? Tell that to the guy who was killed recently in a home invasion because he couldn't just sit and wait it out while his wife was being abused by home invaders. I'm not sure what you mean by that rigney, please elaborate...

Agreed, banning guns would only lead to a black market totally unsupervised. I was once asked why i supported legalizing drugs, not really the way it was asked, I was asked why i support using drugs, but despite the subtle insult, it is a legitimate question and I answered thusly. If I could snap my fingers and make all illegal drugs vanish I would do so, but the black market, desires of individuals to use them and their availability make sure that drugs will be available and I don't think that locking up otherwise honest citizens who use drugs is a fair way to eliminate drugs... Same with guns, if I could eliminate all guns I would do so but creating a black market and turning other wise honest citizens into criminals is hardly the way to do it.

Sarcasm Trip? yeah, ten minutes is a eternity when you are tied up being abused by a home invader... Guns are designed to kill, not necessarily kill people and i kinda hope that home invaders might surrender before I have to kill them when i confront them with my 12 gauge... Not at all, public transportation could be used to eliminate all need for personal vehicles if we really wanted to... Yes but it would leave others vulnerable to those who had guns and criminal intent... Again, not a fair comparison, you have to know that banning guns would not remove them from the population. It is quite true that banning guns would mostly affect honest people not criminals... I agree, has to be a middle ground in there some place, I would not willingly give up my guns, but then again I wouldn't go out and shoot people for no apparent reason either... You are wrong John... there were 16 mass shootings in the US in 2012... http://www.thenation.com/blog/171774/fifteen-us-mass-shootings-happened-2012-84-dead# I still say that a licensing procedure like we use for driving a car would go a long way toward minimizing this problem, every few years a comprehensive test to make sure you haven't gone nuts and can still use your gun safely. The amount of training necessary and the depth of the test should not be up to individual states like driving is but I think this would be better than an out right ban...

My personal take on this, and it is my personal take, no science involved, I think that the beginning of the universe is similar to atomic decay. Nothing, or what ever existed before what we see as the universe came into being, this before the beginning state, is unstable and decays into a big bang. I have no idea how stable or unstable it is and it might not matter. Much like an unstable atom, the decay is random and cannot be predicted, but it evidently does occur... it may well be true that only one space/time like universe exists or it might be true that space/time like universes come into being regularly due to this decay but we cannot see them or detect them... so far... I know, flame me...

I think we need to look at this problem from another perspective, stop thinking guns and think alcohol. If a society allows the use of alcohol they also must allow for people getting drunk. Being intoxicated can lead to the death of innocents. In fact there is no doubt alcohol kills far more people than guns. If a drunk had intentionally plowed into a group of school kids would be debating whether or not alcohol should be legal? No, we making driving cars while intoxicated illegal and prosecute the individual. In fact a car can and sometimes is used as a deadly weapon with intent by deranged people, do we debate the legality of owning a car? What I am trying to say is that if we as a society are going to allow guns then we must logically assume at some point some individuals are going to commit crimes with those weapons. I think all we can do is closely regulate who has a gun and require at least the amount of training we require for driving a car... all though the equivalent of an airplane license would be a bit more to the point i think... I really don't see any way to remove guns from our society at this time or the foreseeable future... I would like to add that IMHO home defense and hunting are legitimate uses for guns but putting a gun into the hands of some one who doesn't know how to use it safely or the hands of a crazy is... crazy... Ben Stein, for the record, is not a legitimate source for anything but stupidity...

I think it should be pointed out that the Pirahã people could count, the missionaries were able to teach a few young children to count. To me this appeared to be a cultural thing. Numbers were simply not part of their culture and counting was actually ridiculed by adults when the children tried to learn.

Yes this is true, air must be moved through the carbon for it to work effectively. Yes carbon can release the very stuff it absorbed if it becomes saturated but in most cases this would not be a large problem. Commercial products using AC are available, duplicating them would be of doubtful value. Yes AC is safe, unless you inhale it as fine dust. What are you trying to do with AC?

Has anyone else noticed the similarity of Immortals stance and that of conspiracy theorists? He accepts nothing that disagrees with him and continues to cite misrepresented scientific theories as support for his position no matter how many times he is told they do not support his own biases and his constant appeals to authority to make everyone else look as though they are ignorant of the "real" evidence...

Immortal, please show us these facts established from experiments, show us the experiments, show us the data! So far you have failed to do anything other than show your faith in what you assert. Yet another appeal to authority with a meaningless quote about emotions and feelings... Your interpretation of contemporary physics is not evidence of god, you have shown no kernel of truth in religion, and your claim of false analogy is a fantasy...

Why should we? Because some guy thinks they should be? This has been the stance of religion from the beginning, they are always just in need of reconsideration and yet our entire first world culture is based in empirical reality, no new anything but reconsideration of the same old tired meaningless texts on what some bronze age people thought about how they thought the world worked from religion. Little or nothing of substance has ever come out of the ancient wisdom, science in a couple hundred years, relying on a study of reality through empirical evidence has brought us untold riches both as a species, as a culture, and as individual human beings. I honestly think at this point your assertions have become extraordinary and for this you need extraordinary evidence not weakly circumstantial evidence...

I thought it was interesting that the Pirahã people did see spirits... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people

Why not?

No, actually it is the way science works, you keep saying investigate while ignoring anything that doesn't agree with you, that is not science it is faith...

Yeah as soon as I sell the old jeep I've been trying to restore i am planning on it... in three years I've managed to put about 1000 miles on it, have to get my priorities straight...

Well dragon didn't work either, probably forces at work here I should avoid.... I guess i could call my ISP and ask WTF... I don't think so... my fans will just have to miss me... my computer is so old and slow updating my viral program pegs out the cpu... at some point the struggle becomes futile...

Thanks, I'll give that a try, i have no idea what is going on but i down loaded firefox and it set up in Russian language and refused to change... I had to uninstall it and run hitman then it down loaded correctly...

So far you have failed to show how religion is any different than any other belief, and so far you have shown no reason to assume religion is anything but ordinary. I understand that you personally take exception to this but you have shown no reason why you should be granted any special say on this issue... Quite the contrary it is nothing more than a story people tell, people tell many stories and the age of the story has no bearing on it's veracity... For a historical account to have any meaning at all it has to be confirmed by more than one source and those sources must not be people who have a stake in the account being true... I agree, that is the cusp of the issue and so far you have failed to show any reason to accept these "indirect evidences" as anything but unconfirmed assertions... I rather like that, it's very much why i do not accept your assertions... Why does the age of a text have any bearing on the truth of that text? Your religious scholars could be pouring over the ancient equivalent of Harry Potter for all you, they, or the evidence shows... You ask for one but you reject any that doesn't confirm your own prejudices, your second demand negates the first... until an investigation agrees with what you want to believe you will always say that it has not been investigated thoroughly enough... I agree, we should discuss this more, first you should give us some reason other than your own need to confirm what you want to be true and then we can discuss the empirical evidence, so far i see none... Questioning a conclusion is not the same as claiming the person to be a liar... In fact no, I see no reason what so ever for this to be true, it necessitates a completely unsupportable assertion that is complex and unlikely over a far more likely and simple explanation... I'll let someone else judge that, but i suggest you stop to consider if it's a good idea to throw rocks when you live in a glass house... I have to point out that you are assuming this to be true despite the actual assertions by "ancient" Christian scholars that lying to support god is the correct thing to do... did you know that? Immortal, please google empirical evidence and get back to us on that...

It's been going on for about 2 or 3 months, hasn't been a big priority lately but today i had some time and I thought I'd try to figure it out. So far it's beyond me...

I have done a little investigating, it looks like it might be a chrome problem, but it has spread to AOL as well and IE on my computer. Firefox is supposed to work better but I don't have it. It started on chrome but now it does it on AOL and IE, only one site is a regular site for me and I still receive mail from there. My ISP could be at the heart of it but I honestly can't see why but you never know...

Immortal, which do you find more compelling.... That a god some place out side of reality, a being that has no measurable effect on reality but still communicates with people in all sorts of obtuse ways that make little or no sense and have no useful information in those communications, this god exists and has supernatural powers... or Human beings all share a similar brain, so similar that not only do they share similar hallucinations when under the influence of similar drugs but also that similar illusions generally work for everyone the same way and result in the same sensory mistakes. Meditation has been shown to be capable of causing hallucinations in people, very similar hallucinations.... Doesn't this make more sense than an immaterial god outside of reality that cannot be detected in any way other than by the human mind in a fugue type state? “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, but illusion of knowledge.” — Stephen Hawking

Hard to say, it has popped up on SFN a few times but some sites are 102 all the time, some come and go, sometimes a reload is all that is needed. One site that I get this notice all the time from, it started about two months ago, I get mail from them all the time, PM notices, notices from the site, but two months ago i started getting a 102 error message, at first it was just occasionally but now it is all the time and other sites seem to be doing it more often as well.

They are a well documented group, normally I would agree it is a bit less than objective due to the "freedom from religion" aspect but I don't understand why not having numbers is a problem... Possibly a less biased link... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people