Moontanman

that seems more than a bit harsh, that might be true in some small percentage but I don't think such a broad assertion can be supported. This i agree with.

Can anyone say B R O K E N ? My point is that Berkowitz's murders were in fact religious in nature, his religious insanity made him believe in the religious mythos so strongly that he believed Satan Was commanding him through a dog. Dog is God Backwards....

this is not true, few mirrors are perfect enough to reflect a high energy laser, even a nearly perfect mirror would still absorb some of the laser and eventually degrade. Such a mirror might take two or three shots in the same place before failing at best. if the object was the same color as the laser wave length it would be difficult to damage but again some absorption would happen, degradation occurs and in a couple shots or so the laser penetrates. Regular mirrors would be worthless as would paint of the same color. the target would have to be the right color in a more fundamental way than paint. But anyway you look at it a laser that cycles over a range of wavelengths including infra red and UV pretty much defeats any defense. But the free electron laser might be the phaser we are looking for if the energy to run it can be generated in a small enough package.

So where is the cut off point? A great many religious people kill at gods command, i would say significantly more than people who kill because a dog told them to. Didn't he also claim that the dog was Satan or something similar or that Satan was talking to him through the dog?

They already exist in prototype stage, the main problem now is energy source, hard to get that much energy all at once over and over. They had a big airliner with a powerful laser in it and they had to carry huge tanks of highly volatile chemicals to power the laser. lasers small enough, solid state lasers, can be made very powerful, some say soon enough they could be used on a fighter plane to defend against missiles and to shoot down other planes. the laser can be made small but still requires huge amounts of energy, more than a fighter could carry or generate. I may have over stated the problems... http://www.gizmag.com/northrop-grumman-laser/22472/ http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/04/08/navy-showboats-destructive-new-laser-gun/

If it was not sexual slavery or at least included sex as a part of their bondage why was being a virgin so important? A good luck piece? What about the virgin boys? Oh yeah I forgot that would be wrong... Are you seriously suggesting the virgins were lucky? lucky they weren't killed? and how the hell does all this killing make it right? thou salt not kill... why does any religion, much less Abrahamic religions take credit for this to begin with?

Murder, rape and pillage of the Midianites (Numbers 31:7-18 NLT)

feel free to read the links in this thread http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/66874-god-and-abiogenesis/page__pid__683087__st__40#entry683087

Is it ok to test military personnel to make sure they believe in god?

No it's not, children were in at least one instance given to the troops as sex slaves... after everyone else had been killed at the demand of god...

Since it was obviously ignored by the OP here is another illustration... The largest land mammals that ever lived, Indricotherium and Deinotherium, would have towered over the living African Elephant, as shown in this diagram image provided by the journal Science. The Indricotherium towered over mammoths and even many dinosaurs, it was more than 4.5 meters at the shoulder, it's head would have towered to well over 5 meters.... As the illustration shows the mammoth was not the largest land mammal. In fact not even close, being considerably out sized by another elephants relative and a rhinoceros relative as well...

So you didn't bother to even look at the links i provided? Dinosaurs were not "cold blooded", they were not crocodiles, predatory dinosaurs did not hang out in swamps waiting for a kill to come to them they were active predators that suppressed "warm blooded" mammals for something like 150 million years. Whales show you are incorrect, "warm blooded" whales have to eat vast quantities of food to maintain their body heat but they still out grow all cold blooded sea vertebrates. This is not a black and white thing, warm blooded and cold blooded are far too inaccurate to apply to mammals or dinosaurs... and as my link showed there have been land mammals much larger than elephants... larger in fact than many dinosaurs... and dinosaurs did indeed live in the polar regions which even back then did indeed experience protracted periods of darkness and cold, ice and snow...

I think it should be pointed out that cold blooded is really far too inaccurate to mean anything. Endothermic and exothermic is a better metric but as characterized in the OP mammals are not all warm blooded. Some mammals vary their body temperatures on a daily basis as many as 30 degrees (some birds do as well), some mammals body temps are pretty much the same as their surroundings, others are far higher. Elephants were listed in the OP somehow as big as land mammals can be when in fact there have been mammal's bigger than elephants by quite a bit. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40373523/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/dinosaur-die-off-cleared-way-gigantic-mammals/ Elephants, due to their large size and the fermenting vegetation in their large stomachs can be said to be endothermic but they have many similarities to gigantotherms in reality. Elephants are not good at maintaining their body temps and their closest living relatives the Hyrax while quite small still retain this characteristic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyrax Sauropod dinosaurs were probably giganto-therms, the gigantic vats of fermenting vegetation that were their stomachs no doubt produced large amounts of heat, enough for them to live near the poles. The very active theropod dinosaurs were probably closer to bird endothermy or mammal endothermy than the giant sauropods and if you consider the wide range of endothermy in mammals it's not difficult to see that dinosaurs might have been endothermic across a wide spectrum as well. One thing that is certain is that dinosaurs did live in cold areas, yes the very large and the very small and to categorize them as cold blooded or warm blooded is far too simplistic. On a side note, if indeed dinosaurs required sunlight to warm up so they could live think of how long a 50 ton monster would have had to bask to raise it's body temps just a few degrees... a few days of cold rain would be enough to make them completely torpid and easy prey for endothermic carnivores until they warmed up, a process that could take days...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjKF7aQthcQ

This is more appropriate... Or maybe this one...

Money is the real problem

You are correct of course, except they do not or did not use genetic engineering. If dogs are an example of the best we can do then it's out of the question.

Can you give us some idea of how far your understanding goes? Both mutation and evolution have very basic definitions that are simple but I get the feeling that's not what you are looking for.

Pot kettle black rigney...

The box with a vinyl record on it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIDaBF8LILk

In the back ground of this music video is an odd musical instrument, what is the name of it? Could that have ever been cutting edge? great video though...

Well... since the Earth will not exist forever, not even close, i would say that this was said by bronze age people who believed it because the priests told them to... Says who? When? Was it even eye witness? No it was not.... I say that bad things and good things happen to everyone and that belief in any god much less your god does not confer any particular good or bad on anyone.

you say 'baseless theory of relativity" I say you are actually asserting a "baseless theory of god" how about baseless theory of a Brobdingnagian creature that eats dark matter and excretes universes? I was looking forward to seeing this be a battle of actual evidence then you made the assertion that somehow atheism and world view had something to do with reality.... evidently you are trying to allude to the idea that atheists have to be dishonest? Then in the above quote you claim that you have evidence of the existence of god... your god i would assume... So this is really an open challenge to disprove god and assert some kind of conspiracy to hide the truth from everyone?

I am not trying to convert anyone from their chosen beliefs, which don't matter to me what anyone choses to believe but I think that anyone who choses to degrade a chosen believe by telling others its not true in their own words should at least have a deep enough understanding of the subject to make a sound judgement on it first, then if that person chooses to disbelieve then just say I don't believe it and leave it at that. It is also possible that when people write about a chosen religion that by writing as the author above did could give people the impression that they too should disbelieve the written information, therefore should you not have said something along the lines of; Please feel free to read such a section of such a bible and please give me your view point and understanding of it, then you can read between the lines on what a person believes or not We must remember that Satan does not want anyone to get to know the true personality of the Almightly, so he will use anything at his disposal to make ends meet. This is not a conversion process but to try to get people to read information themselves then they can make their own informed decisions on what they choose to believe, without being lead. No, you are proselytizing, you are assuming your god is real and then asserting that others are wrong by this assumption. Before you can claim your god is real you have to show some evidence of the existence of a god or gods then you have to show evidence for your personal version of god. You will find many here who have a deep understanding of the idea of gods, and the so called word of gods. I suggest you check out all the threads that already exist here before you start asserting your god or any god is real... You will find that while you are welcome to your beliefs asserting them as facts will result in them being degraded to the simple fairy tales they really are. This would be a prime example, do you have any evidence that either satan or your god is real? if not them why assert their existence? BTW the Holy Bible is evidence of nothing, it is hearsay at best...