Moontanman

As much as I disagree with certain individuals in this thread I would like to point out that religion causes poverty in the same way that sex causes syphilis. Religion takes advantage of the despair of poverty to proliferate it's meme... I doubt it could be demonstrated that religion causes poverty.

And what book specifically would that Golden rule have originated in? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Rule Please point out some specific truths that secular text books lie about....

WHAT! Women fake orgasm? Please God tell it's not true!!!!! No! Wait! Do lesbians fake orgasms?

Outrageously good post, i was too lazy to look it up for people who are unlikely to care....

The argument that atheism is morally superior or inferior to theism is a straw man, first you have to show that atheists believe in an common morality much less an objective morality then you have to show that the theists objective morality is somehow superior and then you have to show things like genocide, murder, war, plunder, rape, slavery and such are moral... I think I'll stick with atheism... so far not believing in an objective morality based on a bronze age book about myths associated with supernatural beings has served me quite well....

Seriously dude, you should live where I do for a while and see the constant turmoil of school boards trying to teach creationism as science.... or teachers refusing to teach evolution... or asshats knocking on your door every Saturday afternoon wanting to tell you why the bible it literally true and that homosexuals are possessed by demons and you are going to burn in hell... the MBE goes on forever.... they get torqued completely out of shape over a bill board that suggests that if you don't believe in god you have company but there must be hundreds of bill boards claiming everyone is going to burn in hell if you don't believe my version of a damn fairy tail..... They get pissed off and claim they are being assaulted in some way if I answer merry christmas with happy holidays, I seriously expect to see religious violence in my life time started by these stupid fundamentalists.... And yes there are lots of them and more moderate religious people are afraid to stand up and be counted because they know they will be persecuted as though they are atheists and oh yeah, you don't want to admit to being one of those immoral father rapers for sure... I am sorry A Tripolation but we live in different worlds no doubt....

I can quite easily show that in the USA a large percentage of the religious are working to establish the US as a christian nation and to teach the bible as science. Care to point out a few of those atheistic anti-science regimes? I've never heard an atheist say a unruly child should be stoned to death, or an adulterous woman, or that homosexuals should be killed , do you really want to say that religion is morally superior? Superior to what?

Please name your claimed secular culture. Again please provide some substantiation that the huns and barbarians were non-religious. Please show some evidence they promoted the furtherance of scientific study....

Another great song set to great imagery... This movie and this song literally changed my life.... How about some of that wild guitar you play dude?

Great song.... Absolutely beautiful imagery...

Ok, I'll tell the story... I was out with two other men floundering, a type of fishing you do at night from a boat by using a light to show flounders in shallow water, they come into shallow water and night, you use a spear that is known as a gig. It was 02:30 am or so and we were coming back to the boat landing speeding along in a 14 foot aluminum boat. Have you ever seen the picture that was popular on the internet that showed a boat that hit a piling head on and and split into two part back to about 5 feet from the bow? Well that was what we did, we hit a piling. Except we were in an aluminium boat. I was thrown from the boat (as was another man who was uninjured) and my left foot and lower leg practically destroyed. I sank to the bottom in about 25 feet of water, remember this was at night. I was unconscious on the bottom for an undetermined amount of time, my first memory was drifting along the bottom and feeling oyster shells scraping my back. I remember being very content to just drift along and fade away. Then I heard a voice that said "get up!" I opened my eyes and the ocean bottom was lit up bright was day all around me, again I heard the voice and it said, "getup, it's not your time, you will have a son who will be important" I tried to swim but my left leg was just flopping around but I struggled to the surface at which time the light vanished and a real nightmare began, the water was full of blood from my wounds and the pain, after I was dragged back into the boat is difficult to describe, while I was in the water I felt no pain, it took me 18 months to recover and many surgeries and i still lost my ankle and my leg is 2" shorted that it was. Now more context, my wife and I had been discussing having another child, she wanted a boy and I wanted a girl, the voice was feminine and the light could very well have been the natural phosphorescence that occurs in the ocean. i am a trained scuba diver and most of my dive time was at night and I had observed this light many times before. My diver training and the natural mammalian response to being under water unconscious kept me from drowning. Three years later we did indeed have a another son, that was 3 years later than we had planned but the accident shelved our plans for more kids at the time. And yes I was an atheist at that time.... One more point, when I first opened my eyes i remember looking down at myself laying on the bottom of the ocean.

I know for most of us the NAZI's were just evil men, psychopath is possibly too mild a word for the leaders who were really in charge but what if there was a method to their madness? What if they were really trying to practice necromancy? This short story by David Brin while totally fiction does raise the hackles on my neck.... http://www.davidbrin.com/thor1.htm

I'm gonna assume you will argue til the cows come home if I try to show the specific scripture in tiny bits and peices you'll say it's out of context or something similar, so here it is in not a bunch of small sips but an entire pitcher full of knowledge, try to drink it slowly and don't choke, if you dare of course, I am betting you have no interest what so ever in truth.... Stories you say, stories about people being healed and I assume that your almighty god can heal anything right? How about those amputees? Why doesn't god grow back their limbs? Stories, how droll, I have visited Saturn's Moon titan, I've see the vast cities made of ice as hard as granite, I've been there, it's my story.... More unconfirmed stories? I've read many near death experiences, had one myself, they prove nothing and are usually a reflection of the spiritual bias of the individual, in other words Muslims see Allah, Hindu's see Krishna, most people see nothing. You basing your belief system on what some body with an agenda tells you? Again i ask you to rise above your ignorance and educate yourself, read your holy book, really read about the psychopath you worship...

You made the assertion, you look it up, google is your friend....

That's because you failed to give a unit of measure.... 1 000 000 000 000 what? PSI, cubic feet, what?

Well then by your line of reasoning catfish should be able to hybridize with salmon, they are both fish...

First off, only creationists claim something from nothing, science does not make that claim. The same assertion that something cannot come from nothing can be made about God, where do gods come from? What created gods? I think humans created the concept of god. I want to know, you obviously are getting your information from videos on youtube, I watched yours did you watch mine, remember not to violate the 9th commandment in your answer. I'm getting a bit tired of your assumption that atheists are making these assertions as though all theists agree with you, I ask you directly, give me some evidence of your god, yes your god, why is your god real and all the others not real? You could win a lot of respect by answering that with something other than I just know. Do you have any testable empirical evidence of any god much less your tiny idea of god? You are ignorant of the concept of god, ignorant of the concept of science, ignorant of the writings of your god, where do you get your information from? Have you ever actually researched any of this or do you just swallow after sucking up anything you agree with? Asking what was before the big bang is like asking what is south of the south pole, the most honest answer is we just don't know where the universe came from.. as of now, but the investigation goes on and no God is not the default position.... God of the gaps, as the gaps get smaller god gets smaller, how small will god have to be before you admit you are just wrong? You still haven't addressed the flat disc shaped earth under a crystal dome, how can god have been so wrong?

The various blacktip sharks are rather closely related, hammer heads are very distant from great whites, I wouldn't expect them to hybridize...

I've raced, trust me it is far more exciting that playing a video game.... I get the impression not a lot of experienced bikers here... riding motorcycles is a skill set not everyone can master, they are dangerous but also safer, I sounds like a contradiction but it's very true. If you know how to take advantage of the advantages a motorcycle has it can be safe and fun... till some a-hole pulls out in front of you and you t-bone him.... BTW, motorcycle racing is about as fast as it can get with the technology available to the builders, at this point tire wear seems to be the most limiting factor.... The rear tire on a powerful motorcycle looses traction quite easily and spends a lot of time spinning faster than the front tire. Superbike racing is dismissed? Not by motorcycle fans, it is far more serious racing than the whole NASCAR go fast turn left crap....

WHAT! There is a post of the month contest and I haven't won it yet, it's obviously rigged....

No problem dude, if all theists were like you i would not have any problems with them. Ok, i know that in the Catholic church you can't just decide not to follow the rules of the church, I know lots of Catholics, birth control is a big problem for them. while you are correct that right now, for most of the christian religion but not by a large majority, birth control for married people is not a problem. less than 100 years ago it was illegal for anyone to buy sell or posses a condom, even married people, such unnatural birth control was not only illegal but considered immoral. And i think you better check with your theist friends, committing one sin will indeed send you to hell if you do not ask for forgiveness and never do it again. Honestly if I have to explain that we cannot possibly be on the same channel.... In the US it is preached and in some states illegal to teach any other way of birth control, i was not suggesting you personally preached it. While I agree with you I know enough about human nature to know that would not fly... how about after a divorce, could a woman not have another child? the idea is a five gallon bucket full of worms, worms with dangerous bites... Tell it to the inquisition.... It's quite possible for religious fundamentalism to be on the rise as atheism is on the rise as well. Atheists are still a small percentage of the population in the US, religious people are a much bigger part of the population than atheists and religious fundamentalism is a bigger portion of theists and much larger portion of the population than atheists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_right http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creationism

What always amazes me is that the most religious read their holy book the least, the most they do is read cherry picked bits and pieces given to them by their religious leaders and fail to really read the book and what it says, it's a horrifying tail of a psychopathic god that demands murder, genocide, pillage, slavery, child molestation, and yes njaohnt, the bible does indeed say the earth is a flat disc covered by a crystal dome under water. The sun and the moon are just lights under the crystal dome, your ignorance of scripture is sadly not unique and most people do not even know the basics of the bible much less the details and when you try to tell them they stick their fingers in their ears and scream LA LA LA LA LA, willful stupidity is a very sad thing, I have a lot of respect for the many theists we have on this forum, I might disagree but at least we can agree on where our disagreements lie, you sir just don't care to see reality, fairy tales are more important to you and that is why you are not getting any respect on this site,... OH MY GOD, YOU'VE CONVINCED ME, I SEE THE LIGHT HOW COULD I HAVE BEEN SO STUPID JESUS IS THE SON OF GOD... no wait, it was just a mini stroke... Good God man, if you are going to believe something at least know wtf you are believing....

Um, a subset can be a majority, i suggest you look up the meaning of the word subset... They can disagree and be excommunicated too not to mention the whole burn in hell part as well... You cannot be a Catholic and use birth control other than abstinence and... wait they have a word for people who follow it.. I think they are called parents... Nothing that beats it? Was that meant to be funny? Abstinence is about as likely to be a successful form of birth control as holding your breath is successful to get your way, humans are going to have sex, you know it and I know it, preaching abstinence only is just silly. Yes, if you could enforce it, forced abortion is about the only way to enforce that, good luck with that btw. It seems pretty damn important to them, so important they tell third world cultures that condoms spread aids... What I was trying to show is that religions change and evolve due to factors outside the religion, given the freedom to do so religion would be back torturing people for eating meat on Friday pretty quick, only secular laws prevent this. On the other hand the subset of Christians who are fundamentalists is smaller than the subset that is not fundamentalist but the fundamentalist movement is growing in both numbers and political power. That cannot be ignored... I agree, except they are often the same people....

If you fall off a motorcycle at 20mph (32kph) it's likely to hurt you badly, I have been on bikes at over 180mph (290kph), it was a quite thrill the first couple of times but my tolerance to adrenaline is quite high, mostly due to doing crazy stuff on motorcycles for fun. it's very difficult to go fast on a motorcycle in terms of power applied, the faster you go the harder it becomes to accelerate. Motorcycles are not very aerodynamic, it takes a a lot of hp to go 120mph (193kph), about 100hp (73kw)will do it if the bike is relatively light. to go 150mph (241kph) takes about 180hp, 200mph (330kph) would take a lot more than 200hp (146kw). Chrysler made a motorcycle with a V10 engine, the tomahawk, it was estimated to be able to go 300mph+ (480kph), it had over 500hp (372kw), as far as I know no one ever really tried to see how fast it would go, the bike was considered so dangerous it was delivered to it's owner in a non running state and was considered as work of art and could not be licensed to ride on the highway. Of course a fairing changes these estimates quite a bit but most 200hp motorcycles are still incapable of going more than about 185mph (297kph) or so. One commercial motorcycle was said to be able to break the 200mph (330kph) barrier but Suzuki put a governor on them, so they can't go much past 180mph (290kph) or so, far too many people would buy then and die on the way home. I think officially 180mph (290kph) is the limit and most bikes are now limited by governors to less than 180 mph (290kph) or so. Although many bikes top 200hp easily. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-472004366476459286

Not really true, or at least not true in the USA, a subset of Christianity called fundamentalism, often personified by evangelicals but also present in other sects of Christianity do indeed oppose modern science and adhere to a strictly absolute truth interpretation of the bible some even refuse medical treatments. A large percentage are pushing to have "Creation Science" taught in the classroom as reality. On the other hand a great many Christians do indeed go with the idea that the bible is really parables instead of absolute truth. No, actually the idea of birth control not being a sin is quite recent, less than 100 years ago it was illegal and a sin, the Catholic church still says it's a sin. Ummm like what? Abstinence? Oral sex? Get real.... Religion in the US is in a huge battle to restrict even sex education to nothing but abstinence... It's just one more way to control people and their sex lives, i think basic human rights is indeed important... many people are totally unaware that Christianity was gelded by the enlightenment, and religion has been fighting tooth and toenail to get their testicles back and regain absolute control of the people ever since. What we see as the Christian religion today is afar cry from what it was before the enlightenment.