Moontanman

In the USA religion and politics are inextricably intertwined, no conservative could be elected to higher office who thought that evolution is the best answer to the biodiversity we see around us. In fact everyone of the current republican candidates are creationist, or at least claim to be. It's very sad that you have to lie or believe a lie to be in political office... but i guess it's always been that way to some extent...

If it was me I'd go for the most challenging project, it is more likely to give you a higher grade and you will learn more...

Open message to the OP, you say you go to bible college, i am going to assume that means you are religious, your use of the word evolutionist, suggests you are not only religious but a fundamentalist. I wonder how you would react if some one went to a religious forum and asked questions about the beliefs of Creatards? Yes, the term Evolutionist is insulting, so is Darwinist, they both suggest that not only is evolution a religion but that to believe evolution is the best explanation for the biodiversity makes you an atheist and that evolutionism is the religion of atheism. It is not, you are being systematically lied to by the people you are trusting to direct your education. Who, i would like to ask you, is the author of all lies?

The term evolutionist is a term coined by Creationists to make people who ascribe to the theory of evolution seem to be worshiping science instead of god. The Creationist camp declares quite enthusiastically that evolutionism is the religion of atheists or scientists which is generally the same thing in their tiny minds... Sometimes they use the term Darwinists in the same way, they cannot conceive of someone not having a religious belief so they hang those terms on anyone who thinks that evolution is a realistic way to explain biological diversity over deep time. Of course they have picked up a few names of their own, creatards is my favorite...

How do you explain altruistic behaviors in animals, a great many animals from elephants to gophers display very altruistic behaviors, some more pronounced than others but real none the less. Wolves are a good example, even better are the dogs that evolved due to the influences of living near and with humans. There are even examples of cross species altruism, the female gorilla that helped a child that fell into her enclosure, wild dolphins helping a human floundering in the water, or even more spectacular are dolphins that help humans fish and actually cooperate with and help humans of their own free will. Altruism is a part of mammalian behavior... it might be most highly developed in humans, although that is debatable, it certainly exists.

Dinosaurs had respiratory systems like birds, they do not draw air in and right back out like mammals and reptiles do. Air is circulated around and out instead of in and out, it means that oxygen better extracted and CO2 is exhausted. http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/birdrespiration.html

While I know I'll be feeding the lie of religion, specifically creationism I will answer your questions with complete honesty I I will do my best No, I see no evidence of god or gods. I don't know, right now the evidence points to an expansion of space time which released energy that coalesced into the the universe we see today. The early earth was a cauldron of reacting chemicals many of which were organic, through natural processes replicating catalysts began to become more complex, this process eventually resulted in life... Natural selection acting on mutations. Approximately 4.5 billion years old, radiometric dating show this to be true. I'm not sure what you mean, but i think it is probable there is life other planets... Yes evolution is still happening, the end result will be survival of the fittest, at some point in the distant future the Earth will be sterilized by the expansion of our sun's death. Until then evolution will continue to favor the fittest organisms... No, I see no evidence of this. They do not affect sense of purpose other than making me aware of how we need to do what ever we can to have a positive influence on Humanity. I suggest you look past what you are being taught, you do not have to be an atheist to understand why things like evolution are true, most people who believe in evolution are theists... You are welcome

I was trying to spell secret, I has drunk...

But not drinking it isn't as much fun, and btw, it must have been typo, I can't spell, what did I do wrong? I would love to have the birthdays and ages of all members to do a little bit of analysis, it is interesting that 129 people were born on my birthday but just 20 some members were born today...

So humans with the aid of technology are more powerful than gods? We can prevent lighting from striking, if it is due to a god that makes him pretty weak as the concept of god generally goes...

Just drink water, lots of it, before you consume alcohol and and after, no big secrete

Nope, no hangovers for me, i learned how to avoid them a long time ago, used to make my buddies so mad I could get up after a night of hard drinking and just take off like nothing had happened...

I like the nonstampcollector too. those first five commandments seem a little bit superfluous to me.... 7 and 10 are bit iffy too...

I know this looked like a shameful plea for birthday greetings but i won! i won! Too many margaritas tonight...

While I hesitate to even post after iNows eloquent post, i am going to tell my somewhat simple idea of the concept of god and possibly have something to say why it seems to bring out both the best and worst of us. I really have to go back far before the ancient Greeks to really give the concept some frame of reference but the idea of god i think started out very simple, things like birth, death, weather, tectonic movements, predators, the simple vagrancies of life begged for explanations. Humans have been human a very long time, the stories that were told about how and why things worked were generally attributed to powers above humans because humans had no control over them. This is what the idea of gods come from. Religion on the other hand is something else and closest to what I think Athena is thinking about. Religion was the stories passed around the camp fire. The way children were taught to behave, how to obey the rules of the tribe and how to survive the life they would lead in the tribe. This inevitably came to be tied into the powers or gods and these were imaginary or really to these people as real as anything we know in their frame of reference. This was human culture, the behaviors, skills, and beliefs it took to live that life. Morals were also evolving at this time, right and wrong were slippery concepts compared to what we feel today. The "stories" were the human culture of that time, how we acted when we met strangers, how we conducted the hunt, how to kill and bleed animals, how the work was shared and who did what, this was for lack of a better word the human Zeitgeist... this school of thought or meme really evolved as human culture evolved. the humans with the most successful zeitgeist prospered, the ones who ignored the stories probably did not. This over all code of conduct was part of this and behavior that agreed with the general population was what people thought of as good. At this stage what Athena is proposing would have been realistic as long as your behavior was in line with the rest of the population. but then men learned to write, the stories were carved in stone if not literally then figuratively, there lies the disconnect with the morals of the time we now live in and the time the stores were written down. But now it's no longer something you know from having a common heritage with the people around you but an artificial construct, made by people who are thousands of years out of touch with the zeitgeist, as a culture it's a split personality, part of us knows what's right, and part of us is being bombarded with this frozen concept that no longer serves us as little more than a source of insane behavior. the fact that humans have managed to use it for anything good at all is not testament to god but testament to the inherent moral behavior of sane human beings... This is why there is such a disconnect between what Athena "feels" about god and what most people "think" about god... Best i can do...

If you really want a "psychological" sensation swap a liberal amount of liquid Blis-to-sol on your scrotum... I'm not sure if there is a sexual component but it is a sensation...

It looks like 129 other people on this forum shared my birthday today, but I am the oldest... yeah! i win...

So, either he is getting his "energies" from a Sun God, in a way that cannot be explained except as supernatural instead of chemical energy like all other animal life on the earth. Or he is a fraud... I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say... lock him in a closed room for about 90 days and see how holy his corpse is when you go back to see him... Seriously, if he is real he should have no problems with it...

This is so cool, a retro dirt bike! Take everything good about, 70's dirt bikes and add modern technology! I loved to hill climb back then... http://www.gizmag.com/husqvarna-concept-baja/21181/?utm_source=Gizmag+Subscribers&utm_campaign=a064634896-UA-2235360-4&utm_medium=email

The most obvious thing that changed between now and the time of the dinosaurs is the CO2 content of the air, it was much warmer then, although not during the entire age of dinosaurs, I'd like to see some evidence it was 120 on average at the equator but it still got cold near the poles. Not cold enough to support permanent ice caps but it was very cold in the winter, cold enough for ice and snow, and yes dinosaurs flourished there as well. I'm not sure about the air pressure being 2X what we have now, that would be difficult to explain, but I would be open to mechanisms for this drop in pressure. As for mammals, it should be noted that dinosaurs had much longer to evolve large land forms than mammals have and that dinosaurs seem to have been pre-adapted for large size to some extent due to the way they are put together and hollow bones and a more efficient respiratory systems might have helped as well. I don't think it can be argued that humans have not had a huge negative impact on large animals around the earth, both by killing larger animals and by introducing animals and their diseases outside the native range of these animals. I think that some of this effect also had to do with minor extinction events like super volcanoes and meter impacts as well but the science on their effects is not clear, it could have just been humans in the last 35,000 years or so or it could have been a just natural disasters or more likely it was a synergy of both... here are some links, some supportive and some not so supportive... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesozoic http://www.dinodatabase.com/dinoage.asp http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/archive/ci/30/i12/html/12learn.html http://www.lakepowell.net/sciencecenter/paleoclimate.htm

Genetic manipulation has produced some crops that can live in brackish water but this might be a faster way... http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2009-05/01/irrigation-system-can-grow-crops-with-salt-water

It is exciting news that this is promising enough for NASA to look into it but before I get completely erect over this I'll wait for the results from NASA.

No, use the quote button.... Word of god or the word of bronze age goat herders? Please explain your logic, are you saying that when the bible says days it means something else? BTW the genesis myth was borrowed from other cultures nearby, it is not unique to the bible and the other cultures predate the bible by quite a bit... First of all Noah's ark is impossible, it could have been as big as a nuclear powered aircraft super carrier and not been big enough. we can show that all animals on the earth did not go through a genetic bottle neck 6,000 years ago or 100,000 years ago. How did Noah get all the animals from say Australia? How did he get them back? where did all the water go? and finally really the death toll for that particular myth, echinoderms, cephalopods, and salamanders, along with thousands of other animals they completely falsify Noah's ark. If you can't explain how they and all the other plants and animals survived your Ark is simply not possible. Do you understand that most animals are unique to the continents they live on? Do you understand that South American animals are not the same as African animals? Or North American animals or Asian animals? The ark would not have been big enough to hold all the land animals much less their food supply for the time required for the water to.. well go where ever it went, it's a myth dude, a myth... nothing more stranger things have happened, unlikely events do happen, it does not prove god is real....

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Dude, learn to use the quote button, while I don't agree with Athena, this is her thread and she is getting her point across so I think we need a new thread for your ideas... Then why did you reply derisively? Dude, have you ever read Genesis? It does indeed say the earth and everything else was made in six days, read it then come back to me and tell how it didn't say six days... No it doesn't make sense, neither does Noah's ark... but it is what the bible says... As do I...