Moontanman

I think is a reasonable question and one I have given some thought to. Science tells us we have pretty good evidence that these phenomena are so long lasting that the 2.5 million years the light takes to get here is very small in comparison to the length of their existence... But it is also true we have no objective way to say they are there right now.... Even our eyesight can be said to be something that happened nano seconds ago. Everything we see is in the past, the sun we see in the sky is really what the sun was like 8 minutes or so ago, Alpha Centaurus is 4.5 years in our past, that galaxy is just 2.5 million years in our past...

Where I live there have been two, I think, maybe three violent daytime or evening home invasions in the last three years or so. None of the people were able to respond and violence was done to the people inside the house in all cases. Regular break ins, stealth type, happen more often but seem to usually result in no injury just a smash and grab type thing, usually by someone the victims knew. In none of the cases I'm aware of did the victims have dogs... I have to admit I am guilty of late of carrying my shotgun around with me in the house during the day, drug dealers are too unpredictable but I do listen to my dogs and when they run to the door and sniff and act restless i do check and see if anyone is walking around my yard. Four times I have accosted someone who was in my yard for no good reason but they were not obviously up to anything and the noise of the dogs seemed to concern them greatly.

ya might be a redneck if....

That is a reasonable reaction, children do change the mix, when i was little touching a gun with out permission was simply not within my behavior due to rather harsh training. I did not want to transfer that type of experience to my children so i did put trigger locks on my guns when my sons were young but I kept a single shot shotgun under the edge of my water bed with shells hidden between the mattress and the side board where i could get to them in a few seconds. The gun was in three pieces and I could put them together in the dark very fast. My dogs are always my first line of defense, they are aware of the slightest disturbance outside and let me know immediately, any one breaking in by force would be stopped long enough by them for me to get to my gun and a break in by stealth would be just as difficult. Try to sneak past a basset hound....

http://www.gizmag.com/bug-a-salt-salty-pest-control/23443/

You can make the claim that life couldn't have evolved by chance until the universe ends but that doesn't make it anything but a strawman argument that is meaningless... No it does not...

The Cap'n is right and the idea of a fire and an intruder being similar is a totally false analogy. I have fire detectors in my house, they squall quite loudly if smoke hits them at all. Since a fire is not intentionally trying to get me simply leaving the house is sufficient to protect my life and the lives of my loved ones. An intruder will not ignore you and go about his business if I simply leave, he certainly will not let me call the police. I have to figure that anyone aggressive enough to break in my house is willing to do me bodily harm, he gets one warning to drop to the floor before I help him drop to the floor. On the other hand keeping a loaded revolver under your pillow is just dangerous, people do weird things in their sleep, I couldn't justify the keeping of a loaded revolver under my pillow, they are just too easy to shoot accidentally... For me my dogs are a big part of the equation, no one is going to get by them with out them raising hell at least equal to the fire alarm and probably doing their best to stop him as well...

Alan, when are you going to stop with the strawman, life did not evolve by chance, you have been given several examples of this, to keep saying it over and over is obnoxious and will never make life had to evolve by change a real description of reality....

I take back what I said if he has a revolver...

Even though rigney dissed me yet again i am going to have to come down on his side in this, I am assuming he is talking about a semi automatic pistol, if so there not being a round in the chamber is just as good as a safety. my last pistol which was my fav had a safety and was configured so a round had to be manually chambered before it could be fired. I considered that a double safety... Much like my shotgun you could drop it out of a window and it wouldn't go off. I sleep far to restlessly to keep a pistol under my pillow to start with but I took rigneys words to mean he kept a round in the chamber as well, not a good thing IMHO but he clarified that he didn't keep a round chambered so my objection to that is satisfied... Oh and calling the police when an intruder is threatening you does about as much good as reciting poetry, by the time they get there the next call is going to be the coroner, if you get to call at all. Recent home invasions here involved cutting the phones lines before entering the house. My alarm system would have already been barking their fool heads off by then but calling is difficult when the line is cut. Yeah i know cell phones, I can't eve find mine in the best of times, under threat i would never find the thing... my last pistol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_%26_Wesson_Model_39

Under your pillow or someplace else easy to get to is cool but a round in the chamber and safety off is begging for a accident rigney, at least put on the safety.... buy a noisy dog to warn you

To prevent the shot from going through walls you use #5 shot in 2.5 inch shells in a short barreled gun. #5 shot has less penetrating power and the smaller shell give it less energy but in a situation where you are in close proximity to your antagonist it is quite deadly.... You do not use 00 or 000 shot indoors because it will go through walls and has the potential to kill something quite far away.

Is this home work help?

So are you saying that being able to blame a god makes you fell better when these things happen?

I feel like the odd man out here, guns are dangerous, that can not be argued, being dangerous is the main reason for their existence. For the last 35 years I have kept at least one gun for home protection, I taught my sons that guns were dangerous but I also taught them how to use them, they can both take them apart and put them back together blind folded. They knew from the beginning that guns were not toys and not to touch mine but if they wanted to see them, handle them, all they had to do was ask me and I would let them do so. Same way i was raised is why i guess. I did keep trigger locks on my pistols, to me pistols are really useless, unless you are really good with one picking one up for defense opens a can of worms I am not willing to risk. But at a gun range they are a lot of fun and i made sure all my family could if necessary shoot one, my wife was an extremely good shot but pistols are not as useful as a shot gun so they were sold over the years in favor of shotguns. Now I have a Moss Berg 12 gauge magnum pump, short barrel and collapsible stock. It is loaded 24/7 beside the head of my bed but no round is chambered and the safety is on. I have to say that personally I assume that anyone breaking into my house is willing to do me body harm, I wouldn't shoot them with out seeing if they would stop and get on the ground but any aggressive move towards me will result in them eating #5 shot. I'm quite sure I am not prepared mentally to kill someone but i am even less prepared to allow anyone in my care to come to harm through my inaction either. Now I do have a hillbilly alarm system that is 100% effective in detecting and warning me about intruders, anyone who gets past my alarm system has to be serious enough to harm me and if he has harmed my alarms he is in deep shit anyway...

Rigney, please elaborate on what you think this means...

I am almost the opposite, I grew up in a culture of guns, but no formal training other than family members, the house had several shotguns, a couple of them loaded all the time. Yet we didn't lock our doors at night and the guns were never pulled out in anger that I ever saw. I asked my grandpa once why he didn't lock the doors, to be honest we were rather isolated, to get to the house required you cross the river on a boat or if the water was low a footlog, anyway he said that since everyone had guns and everyone knew it they wouldn't dare come in with out knocking. Several old hound dogs were his alarm system Now I have to admit those guns were often used and in a hurry, run off crows, or shoot groundhogs, but I never saw a person threatened. I do keep mine where I can get it immediately... childhood fear maybe?

Immortal, this is simply not a known factor, there are several proposed pathways that life could have developed from non life in a natural way and the idea that life contains information that cannot have come about through natural selection is simply not true. And yes, all the letters of the English language could indeed result in real knowledge even if the process was completely random if the ones that worked were conserved and the ones that didn't discarded... A good hypothesis... Life by chance?

UFO sighting yesterday, 22 July 2012...

I can't support a law that would result in civilians never having guns, I have kept hand guns for home defense, yes I live someplace where home invasions happen, not often, but often enough. Around here having a gun in the home has prevented home invasions from being successful but I have decided to take a stance against hand guns and things like assault rifles. Hand guns are just too dangerous in an emergency, you really have to be good with one to use it when your adrenaline is running high. I keep a pump shotgun, short barrel, to use indoors. I can make sure the shot is small enough not to kill someone a mile away if I shoot and hit a wall instead of the intruder. I do know people with "lots" of guns, collectors they call themselves, some do not even keep ammunition for many of their guns, most of them are very safe and worry me not at all. Sadly a handful have guns even though they shouldn't be allowed to own a sling shot. I have seen civilians exchange gun fire over silly crap that any sane person could have avoided easily. Nothing like having to dive under cars as two jackasses exchange pistol vs assault rifle fire in your apartment parking lot because they were drunk and one cut the other off in traffic.... Hand guns I can see being very hard to buy and requiring extensive training to own, assault rifles would seem to be a no brainer, but in my state obtaining a gun is difficult. They do a thorough back ground search and i am pretty sure there is a limit on the numbers of guns you can have with out a special permit. More to the point I don't see how someone in the theater crowd having a gun could have made any difference what so ever, I doubt it would have been a factor even if this person knew others had guns, once crazy comes to roost all bets are over. But I can see how someone who wanted to inflict mass casualties could easily do so with out guns, this particular guy seemed quite good at making bombs as well. several small pipe bombs thrown into the theater would have been just as effective. The bottom line is crazy happens and if we want to be sure no individual opens fire on innocents we need to ban all guns.... Then of course we will be subjects of the criminal element and have to rely on the police being nearby to call in the coroner to pick up the bodies of the innocent. The police most certainly will not be there in time to help and would be just as useless as having a hand gun in a smoke filled room.... I honestly don't see how banning guns would take guns away from criminals, only honest people... I know that's a cliche but it's difficult not see as logically true... To be even handed here cops have gone nuts as well and shot innocent people, as have military personnel, this guy was obviously nuts and his obsession with buying guns should have raised a flag or two IMHO.... Edited for content, I switched words....

Yes but how do we know which ones are "doing the dirt" how can we objectively choose? it's a sure bet that left or right has nothing to do with it and the ground is still rushing up to school us on our lack of knowledge...

Hubert Yockey? Really? The odds of how a modern cell or parts of modern cell are meaningless, life started out much simpler and DNA probably didn't come about for quite some time. http://www.livescience.com/3214-life-created-lab.html http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090109173205.htm Currently there are many avenues of how and where life or the parts of it might have formed, personally I think it was a synergy of several different avenues that came together to produce the first life forms but these were much more simple than what we know as life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis So you add one more strawman, you know that comparing a biological organism to a man made object is a strawman. Space shuttles can not reproduce or evolve... And so your point would be?

Damn rigney, we agree on something else, better get out the score card.... It's not just the liberals vs conservatives when it comes to politicians it's who is paying them.... Unbridled Capitalism is what is running this country to ruin, the airplane that is our country is in a nose dive and both sides only worry about how fast it spins to the left or right ignoring completely the ground as it rushes up... but no matter who is in charge the direction of the plane remains the same....