Moontanman

Brain washing, indoctrination, potato/potatoe, the fact remains that we are awash in our own society and it's beliefs, as a child you no choice in the matter. As an adult you have more of a choice but it's more deciding to swim up stream in a strong current. It's damn difficult to undo the brain washing/indoctrination you get as a child... I can absolutely remember believing in things like the easter bunny, tooth fairy and santa when I was a kid but adults admitted when i questioned the evidence of these things that they were not true but when I questioned religion I got my ass beat....

No, it is not faith, it is the brain being fooled into producing endorphin, faith has nothing to do with it. The patient might have faith in his doctor but it's faith in a lie in this instance.

Does the algae have to eliminated completely or is simply restricting it's growth acceptable? If the it is later then you could employ snails to eat the algae and keep it trimmed back somewhat.

I think we need large movable habitats in space, they could take very slow orbits from one asteroid to the next, refining the minerals on then and build copies of themselves and send refined metals or what ever the earth needed or sell and trade back and forth between colonies. This concept would work better than sending out disposable probes and would be a stepping stone to colonies on the surface of planets. I think that once we begin the process of living in these freely orbiting colonies we will loose interest in planets...

I can't make any real sense of this, what does free choice have to do with believing in something with no evidence? God however is quite capable of providing evidence of his existence with out violating freewill. As for god being love... wow... I'd like to see some proof of that but it would have to be in another thread. I require evidence to believe in something someone tells me... God has preformed miracles in the past, why not now? Stopping the sun in the sky would be pretty impressive, he did for one group of sheep shaggers so they could kill another group of sheep shaggers. Why not do something impressive now? Swap the orbits of Mars and Venus, take over all our satellite broadcasts to tell us all what is really needed or demanded by him. Why is it up to the confused and contradictory writings of a group of bronze age primitives? No we are brain washed almost from birth by the society around us, the decision to believe is drilled into us from an early age. In a very real way we are robots that have been programmed to believe something not real...

What we have HEA'AH IS A FAIL URE TO communicate.... At no time have i said there is some universal point to anything, life exists to procreate, if it did not procreate life would not exist. Virtually everything we do is geared toward either personal reproduction or a social effort to support a society that supports the sexual reproduction of humans, so yes even when it comes to humans sex is the point of life. it has no bearing on the point of the universe or the lack of a point to the universe.

Indeed...

I didn't suggest some outside force was forcing any meaning on anything, life exists to reproduce, life forms that do not reproduce leave no offspring to wonder what the meaning of life is...

I have read that in tiger country when a tiger is a man eater wearing a mask that makes it look like you have a face on the back of your head will prevent a tiger from ambushing you, not sure what he does when he figures out you were shining him on....

Actually I am quite prepared to defend that one word. Sex, DNA, replicating chemicals, even though some individuals might not be having sex or even desire sex virtually everything we do is connected to sex in some way. That and hydrogenation of Carbon Dioxide....

One word.... Sex.

Most people don't understand the ideas behind it enough to really know one way or another. I would think a scientist who didn't believe in human caused global weather change would be suspect, if my limited understanding of it is even close to correct... I have read some interesting "ideas" that human caused weather change could be preventing us from sliding into another glacial age. Something about the current arrangement of continents favor intermittent ice ages and we are over due or something like that. Anyway you look at it polar bears are toast....

If a person, as many believers do, claim that the bible is true then yes. Many people of faith delicately ignore the psychopath parts, and only hold to the parts they personally agree with. But they still use parts of the really bad stuff to persecute others, gays specifically but people of other "beliefs" as well. They use parts of it to justify almost anything and when that doesn't work they make up new parts. Now I do understand that there are people who simply believe in a higher power of some kind but the people who believe in the Abrahamic god either ignore the parts they don't like or the priests simply never give those parts as reading material for the week but they are there and if you use the bible as your guide to god then yes you have to believe that or lie to yourself. In the USA these religions are mainstream, the fringes are far more scary... To really believe in the Abrahamic god requires that you be broken in some way.... the other ones are no better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pKaTzf7HBI

Brain transplants, will it ever be possible to do it? Probably, but you are your brain, if you want your brain transplanted into a new body it would be you. not the person the body came from. If you wanted a new brain and transplanted it into your body it would no longer be you, it would be who ever the brain came from, you are your brain! Why is this so difficult? For a really odd take on this read this book by Robert Heinlein. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil

I have stayed out of this discussion since It was asserted that I was off topic but I have been reading all the posts and I have come to a conclusion. God is real, he exists and is a raving psychopathic monster, a deceiver, if you believe in the Abrahamic god this is absolutely true. You can quibble over the details of how to properly worship him but if you use the evidence at hand then he is a monster. I don't understand why godflys don't understand this. As for the other gods, i am not as well versed in their supposed actions but from what I see they are at best insane as well. The most probable thing is that men wrote about what they thought god was and the men at that time thought things like genocide, rape, pillage, slavery, and child molestation was ok so they wrote that god thought it was too. Belief is one of those words like the word theory, there are beliefs and then there are BELIEFS. If someone told me there was an alligator in my yard down by the ditch I would probably go look to make sure but it would be a reasonable assertion. Alligators are common here. If someone told me a huge bird swooped down in my yard and carried off one of my dogs, the dog being missing would not be proof enough, my dogs all weight around 60 pounds. It's unlikely... If someone told me he saw a fairy sitting on a mushroom fairy ring in my yard I would want to see it my self at least. The fairy ring would not be enough. If someone told me that Angelina Joelie was in love with him and sending him telepathic messages of her undying love I would suggest he be looked at closely and probably medicated. If some one says an angel appeared in the church sanctuary during services, around here it might be dangerous not to nod and agree. You could at best be ostracized from the neighborhood at worst get your ass severely kicked... Religion does get a special pass, the religious, especially fundamentalists can claim revealed truth about anything. The earth is 6006 years old, of course. Dinosaurs were all vegetarians until the fall? Oh yes, absolutely true, the entire earth was covered by water, yes no doubt. The fountains of the deep sprayed water into space and formed all the craters on the moon and other celestial bodies as well as all the comets... yes it's reveled truth. Yes anyone who believes this bullshit with no reservations has mental problems of some kind, no doubt... it doesn't have to be belief in god it just has to be belief in something that has no evidence... god just happens to be one of those things...

I seem to remember a post by "someone" explaining how 11 dimensions can be visualized... I'd post a link but I can't seem to find it...

The short answer is no. No other planet or moon in our solar system is capable of supporting human life with out some artificial support. There is no reason to think humans cannot evolve, over long periods of time and isolation I think it would be inevitable that humans would evolve to fit their environment. But there are limits, if the habitat on another planet is instant death to a human then no we wouldn't be able to evolve to live there with out some environmental support.

If we are i want my money back, this ride sucks...

Dingle berries...

Please show me where I have said i hate anyone because of their religious beliefs?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens His opposite numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Hovind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Comfort http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirk_Cameron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Ham These series of videos point out exactly why fundamentalists are broken, I know you won't watch them rigney because to you the messenger is far more important than the message but here they are if you can climb out of the box you are hiding in.

Rigney, creationism is a lie, it's easy to show that there was no Noah's Ark, that genesis is wrong, both versions, Creationists use lies to try and denigrate science. I spent most of my life trying to worship god, in the end it's a hollow lie. I have tried to show you why this is true but to you the person giving the argument is more important than their argument. If you don't like the person the evidence is given by then the evidence must be false? Does veracity mean nothing? Does sympathy for the person making the argument mean more than the veracity of his argument? Don't insult me by saying I have never looked into the counter argument, have you ever read the bible? Really read the monstrous atrocities in it, the absolute lies? Saying i have not looked at both sides is personally insulting, besides the fact that you cannot possibly know what i have looked at or when.

Rigney, for every person you can show like Hitchens I can show you 10 fundamentalist theists who never got their hands dirty (unless you count snorting coke off a gay prostitutes ass just before giving a big sermon about the evils of being gay) and yet they seem to have popularity even though their arguments are almost to a letter lies. Hitchens made a point in his career not to lie and if got the data wrong he was the first to stand up and say so. Creationists must lie to support their beliefs. Their favorite thing is to lie and misrepresent science, in fact they cannot exist with out lying. They claim things they know are not true and want to indoctrinate these lies into our children. If for no other reason science wins over creationism because lies and faith are not allowed in science and in creationism and ID lies are required to support their stance.

This actually depends on how you encounter the quicksand, such "sand" is common where I live. If the quick sand is shallow and you are able to walk out into it you will not drown if you don't panic but if the quicksand is very deep and you step out onto it your momentum will cause you to go under much like stepping out onto water so you go under even though you can float, the problem with quick sand is that it impedes your rising back to the surface. You can go under but not come back up. Around here in many places is a thick layer of organic silt, it looks solid, plants can root and grow in it but it is not much more dense that water and is often very deep, step out onto it and you disappear but it's viscosity is enough to prevent you from coming back up. Sometimes this solid layer will be covered over by fine sand. the sand appears to be solid when you step out onto it but as you walk it starts to shake like jello and down through the layer of sand you go into the silt. Coming back up is more difficult than going under, going under you have gravity pulling you down, coming up your buoyancy is not enough to propel you back up.