Moontanman

The chasm dividing them is an artificial one created by biblical literalists who cannot understand that the bible doesn't have to be absolute truth for god to exist. For them it's either God creating with out evolution or evolution with out god, they are simply worshiping a book instead of the idea of god, i would call it idolatry. I so look forward to debating this with you, I would love to read of just one instance of actual Irreducible Complexity, just one is all I want, I await your reply with baited breath....

Progress was quite modest until secular governments gelded religion and secured the rights of humans over the word of god, only then did we begin to progress and only after the scientific method was worked out did we really start to progress at a rate comparable to what we see now. I may be slightly over the top with my assessment but I take full responsibility for what I say and in no way demean anyone who wants to believe and allow others to believe their own way a idea that was conceived by man and the right to do so is BTW the result of mans laws not god's. BTW if god is the supreme being of anything i have to admit he is the supreme being of fairness, "he/she/it" unambiguously ignores everyone with complete fairness.

Their hands were never concerned with my pockets Rigney, i happen to be intimately acquainted with the dirty little secrete of fundamentalists, metal, physical and sexual abuse of true believers, adults and children, spouses, read that as women and the cover up by inducing fear of going to hell if you say anything that might keep others from believing. The bending over backward of both male and female clergy and parishioners so far their heads come out of their own mouths to insure the sheep never know or never tell. The biblical literalists are nothing but self inflated bags of hot flatulence. They are all jackasses who would cover up anything no matter how bad to keep the money flowing and the people mesmerized by their lies and bullshit. The instill fear of god into everyone and indulge themselves in every way on the backs of the people who fear god. As long as the sheep give their money to the shepherds the bullshit will continue to flow out from the sheep to the shepherds and the stench will fill the air and choke us all. Right now the battle lines are being drawn, I just watched face the nation and the leading female republican tell how god tells her to run for president so she can protect the constitution and make sure Christians rule, Conservatives have aligned themselves with the fundamentalist Christian right. Again we will be be asked to choose between God and what is right and again i suspect we will choose God and the blame for all our woes will be laid at the feet of Progressives as the Conservatives do their best to ignore the mistakes of 8 years of Conservative rule and try to make the rich richer and the poor poorer and make sure the word of God and the fear of hell fire backs up their bullshit. If you love freedom and respect the founding fathers you will vote democrat, not because they are correct but because they will allow you to be wrong if you want but if you believe that God and government is the same thing and should be totally intrusive and unaccountable then vote Republican, they'll get around to screwing you in one way or another but if you play their game you might be allowed to enjoy it. I want to know why the hell my spell checker always suggests Conservative be capitalized but not liberal or progressive??? Can anyone say conspiracy???!!! So irony is totally lost on you? I thought it quite witty and that answer has confounded many a creationist over the years

The only obvious thing I can think of that's added to honey to increase the weight is honey comb, you can't eat it, it's nothing but wax, I never buy honey with the comb in the bottle. Wild honey or as we called it wild mountain honey is rare now days, mostly due to the same diseases that are harming domestic bees. With no one to take care of them wild bees are simply dying out, the European honey bee is a domesticated animal, it's presence in the new world is as an invasive exotic, Native Americans called them "white man's flies" their elimination from the wild will help bring about a resurgence in native bees few of which make honey or sting for that matter.

Honey is supposed to be very difficult to synthesize, I have kept bees, i have seen "bee farms" millions of hives are used to insure crops are pollinated all over the world, yes Dekan, honey bees and honey are real.... there are however lots of different kinds of honey, from pure clover honey to the tupelo honey of song, i prefer the dark almost black honey from the main hive that is aged several years in the presence of bees, it's very dark, almost black and has a harsh bitter sweet taste but I do love it. When i was young i used to follow wild bees, yes it is possible to do this, to their tree cut it down and harvest the honey, very dark black honey often mixed with mashed bee larvae, we called it "wild mountain honey" nothing better on your morning toast... The ancient liquor Meade is supposed to be based on honey but I am not sure the modern version is.

Ahh relaxation (whirls his double bladed ax over head as neighbor calls police....)

Another point that should be made is or has to do with medicine, a great many bio-active compounds are found in nature, if we had to discover these compounds by simple trail and error it would take millions of years to just find one compound. Life on Earth is a invaluable resource of bio-active compounds, most of which we have yet to even know of much less test. You cannot know or even pretend to be able to predict where the next life saving bio chemical will come from, the cure for almost anything can be waiting in the venom of a tiny rare cuttlefish (actually this little guy is under investigation for it's possible medicinal qualities) or some other rare or odd animal, compounds found in sponges have been found with medicinal qualities, acidians, echinoderms, a great many fish can be health giving just by eating them. We cannot say how small the ecology can be and us still live but we do know that every time something becomes extinct a whole zoo of bio active chemicals goes extinct with it.

So all the evidence you have is your wife confirmed it? Interesting I admit but hardly conformation. The forefront of the research you assert is still sucking hind tit to real science, I'll stick with real science, there are worldwide conferences on creationism too, they release papers in their own journals too, doesn't make it any more likely the Earth is 6,000 years old, it just means a lot of people believe it, belief does not equal evidence. I am talking about believing in God instead of reality, if you read the Christian bible you will find very little limits to what can be justified by saying God wanted it to be done. The 10 commandments are a joke when it comes to what god wants, about the only one God will not allow is have no other gods before me, the rest are completely conditional. We live in the first and only civilization based on science, everything around you is based in science, from the computer you are on right now to the aircraft flying over head to all the food and water, power, medicine, everything that keeps you and me alive. Take away science and billions of people would die within days if not hours. All we have is based in a falsifiable reality, no amount of praying or belief will provide for us unless we want to go back to preindustrial civilization, that would necessitate the removal of most of the people on the earth. Try praying to make the electricity come on, or to make the water flow or to heal the sick, there is a reason no faith healers are employed by hospitals, have faith the sewage system will operate. Our entire world is based on the assumption that we can know reality and it is the same whether or not you believe it is real or not. You cannot pick and choose which parts of our science you want to keep and which parts you do not believe in, your belief no matter how strong will never change reality. Civilization as we know it developed because of science not in spite of it or parallel to it or separate from it, science and the scientific method is why were are here having this conversation, with out it most of us would never have existed to have this debate. Belief is not what our civilization is based on, belief is the greatest threat to our civilization, once you actually believe your god is the only true god and his word as written is the only truth then everything falls into chaos and war and destruction, religions never bring people together, the more than 30,000 Christian sects demonstrate this quite well, they only fractionate into smaller and smaller groups that hate each other because they do not "believe" the correct way. They only believe that if everyone would just believe the way they do then we would all have peace but history shows this to be false, only when religion was gelded by secular governments did civilization prosper and advance, science has done more for humanity in the last 100 years than religion has done in all of history, i think quite it telling that god never once has pointed out antibiotics, or pain medicine, nothing what so ever but hate and division under the disguise of peace and love. Christian fundamentalists are the least of it, far more Muslim and Hindu creationist types are under our radar but just as dangerous, if the creationist mind set ever takes hold in our society we will experience the greatest fall of civilization the world has ever seen, the fall of Rome will be a bad weekend during spring break compared to the number of people who will die if our civilization falls. We cannot allow biblical literalists to take hold of our technology or our civilization, they would use it to end all freedoms as we know them or possibly worse just turn "it" off and let the world die. Now you know how i feel about religion, literally

This apparent discrepancy would seem to be the result of a sampling bias, "the low hanging fruit" so to speak. The ones we have discovered so far are the easiest ones to find, big planets close in the star are easier to find than small planets close in with big planets far out like our solar system. Once we get the ability to find the smaller planets close in we will know more about how the "average" planetary system is, it may very well be there is no average planetary system or that ours is odd but we just don't have the data to say for sure yet. There is some evidence that our own planetary system was at one time wildly different than it is now with planets migrating in and out from the sun as they formed, there is just not enough data yet to know for sure.

I got news for you Marat all women love me, I know it's true, so far only a few have realized this and for most of them it was a surprisingly short Revelation but I know it's true.... I'm sorry this male bovine excrement is just getting too thick to take seriously....

Hmmm... primal therapy, I have a double bladed ax, I am quite attached to it, it's just like the one my grandfather used to chop down trees. I like to split wood, I like to split the wood as fine as possible and as accurately as possible, each stroke brings me pain but it also brings the satisfaction of splitting the wood in an exact manner, balancing the piece of wood is a challenge as well, each stroke becomes easier and harder at the same time in different ways, does this qualify? It does make me feel good in an odd way....

I don't know about IQ, last timed i checked my IQ it was 145 ( I think it's not as as meaningful as most people think anyway) but when I was injured 14 years ago the doctors assumed my pain was all in my head and they put me on several drugs that didn't help, eventually they put me on oxycontin. My creativity suffered a big loss, before the rounds of drugs i wrote poetry and short stories regularly but after the drugs i lost the ability to write almost completely. Now writing stories and poetry is a struggle, almost not worth trying. i can feel a big difference in my ability to think abstractly, it's very frustrating to go back and read stuff i had written and feel it is over my head by a wide margin, almost like it was written by some one else.

Body Temperatures of Dinosaurs Measured for First Time: Some Dinosaurs Were as Warm as Most Modern Mammals Caltech geochemists Rob Eagle (left) and John Eiler adjust equipment used to analyze the isotopic concentrations in dinosaur teeth and reveal the body temperature of the extinct creatures. (Credit: Caltech / Lance Hayashida) ScienceDaily (June 23, 2011) Were dinosaurs slow and lumbering, or quick and agile? It depends largely on whether they were cold or warm blooded. When dinosaurs were first discovered in the mid-19th century, paleontologists thought they were plodding beasts that had to rely on their environments to keep warm, like modern-day reptiles. But research during the last few decades suggests that they were faster creatures, nimble like the velociraptors or T. rex depicted in the movie Jurassic Park, requiring warmer, regulated body temperatures like in mammals. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110623141312.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Ftop_news%2Ftop_science+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Top+News+--+Top+Science%29&utm_content=Yahoo%21+Mail

A bird called the jungle fowl came first, we domesticated them into chickens....

Once you can assert belief in god as the truth then all limits to behavior are removed. If you believe god says all redheads are evil and should be killed and you think that is the truth and your god demands it then what is to stop you from doing just that? Once you believe something to be the truth with no evidence to back it up then civilization fails. Our entire civilization rests on the premise of the truth being verifiable fact, not something some one believes. Throw that out and anything is possible as long as you believe it. BTW, cosmic consciousness, telepathy? If you don't mind A Tripolation, I'll stop disagreeing with you and concentrate on GIA....

Do you really expect me to rehash a one hour and 17 minute video blow by blow? he starts out by claiming a plesiosaur is a dinosaur and goes down hill from there. The idea that gravity could account for the days of genesis being billions of years long was just silly, his made up times line of life had very little connection with reality and his assertion that trilobites were ancestral to insects was stupid. If you want to ask questions about anything he said specifically let me know, i assure you he claimed nothing that was in any way not trivially falsified.

So as not to be misunderstood this is exactly what I said I stand by what I said, if you assert your belief is the truth then it bothers me, it should bother any rational human being. Again, this is exactly what i said I stand by what I said, discussing the effects of religion on society or individuals is what this forum is for, not proselytizing or for that matter bashing religion either, far to many threads are only here to evoke emotional responses not discussions. I know of very few religious individuals who would say the same but for those who do i apologize. But as i specified people who take the bible literally then what i said didn't apply to you did it?

I had never seen a Jewish creationist so i watched the entire video, it is rather long and wordy and he does come up with some stuff i had never heard from other creationists. Sadly his witches brew of lies, misrepresentations, half truths, fabrications, spiced with a few facts is no different than Christian, Muslim, or Hindu creationists. His shameless distortions of Einsteins work is new but the results are the same, he lied to support his religious convictions, his violations of the 9th commandment are rampant and his lack of knowledge about well known facts puts him in the same category as other creationists, he is simply a liar, a rather good one I admit but a liar none the less. it's sad that people need to lie to support their beliefs, why can't they simply believe? I'd rather hear them say God did it and I believe and that settles it, i can respect belief but lies are inexcusable. His claim of two PHD's makes his lies all the worse. Although a PHD doesn't make you all knowing I would think he should know the simple things that even an uneducated person like me knows and I suspect he does know but since the truth doesn't support his agenda that means he is knowingly lying, I have no idea why anyone would lie to support what is supposed to be the truth but creationists seem to think it's necessary. I guess the money they make from their books and speaking tours is the incentive, i doubt converting people to believe in god has anything to do with it. Rigney, can you send me a link to that video?

My first post to this thread was a simple "yes" That was the most simple and accurate response I could give. I understand that many people believe in God, some believe strongly enough in god to kill in his or her or their name, this in it's self is is disturbing. Belief does not equal truth no matter how strong your belief it does not equal fact. In the middle ages one of the prominent discussions of religion involved how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, like most discussions of religion it might as well have been how many fairies can fit up the ass of a unicorn. Now I will admit i cannot disprove God or most of the religious beliefs surrounding the concept of God or Gods, I do not know that a female deity gave birth to the earth and all of the creatures inhabiting nor do i know that a male deity called everything into existence out of nothing simply by uttering the correct incantations, nor can i disprove any of these things but not being able to disprove it doesn't make it any more probable. I struggle not to insult believers, not because i fear they may be right but because I like some of the people who believe in God, some of them are quite intelligent and contribute much to other discussions but i have to be honest and say that their belief in superstitions and fairy tales bothers me, it's difficult to understand how otherwise intelligent people can assert any religion is the truth when it is obviously just belief backed up by nothing but belief. I see that some of the people who post in the religious forum are actually proselytizing as though they hope to convert me and others to their belief system, some actually equate religion and science as though they are the same thing and seem to believe that both are on equal footing when it comes to evidence. More disturbing is the lies told by believers to try and convert those who are less than knowledgeable about the facts and use this lack of knowledge to convince others that science is not only lying but actually actively trying to mislead them away from god. I have never seen a believer who was both knowledgeable and honest when it comes to any interaction concerning religion and science. Literalists, fundamentalists or creationists are either ignorant of the truth or dishonest about the truth, no other possibility exists. This forum "religion" was supposed to be for discussing religion and it's effects on society but it has degenerated into at best nothing more than arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or open proselytizing. Discussing the effects of religion on society or individuals is reasonable and I have no problems with it. I don't think that open discussion about the whether God or gods are real can be discussed in a forum that demands evidence, there is no evidence of the existence or non existence of god so any discussion about this is by definition speculative nonsense.

New video of my paddlefish, now one year old, on my you tube channel

yes

I think it's important to point out that saucer shaped UFOs is just a subset of the group UFOs, most UFOs are not flying saucers.

Thanks for the correction, i wasn't sure off the top of my head which one it was.

Paint the walls to the pool black, add a few more lights, fiber optics should be able to even light up individual windows on the craft, you could use this as special effects in a movie! I remember back when STNG was very popular there was a model that came out that used fiber optics to light up all the individual windows on the NCC 1701 D model, all the engine lights worked as well as the deflector dish light. It was very cool and very expensive but such a model or a similar one in a blackened pool maneuvering around would be outrageous for sure. The things you can do with a talent and money, lol There was a submarine show (Sea Quest I think) around that time as well, a detailed model of it would be interesting to build and "fly" in a blackened pool. I wonder if the NCC 1701 D had any "invisible" fins to help it maneuver, the video of Voyager looked like it had clear plastic fins helping it maneuver.