Moontanman

I agree, here is mine, "Uh oh, do farts have lumps?"

I think it should be pointed out that most of the problems of the "conflicted girl" are due to religion, quite specifically in this case Religion of the male dominated controlling monotheistic type. The conflicted young girl is conflicted due to religion telling her things that conflict with the feelings inside her. You can't have sex, that's the basic message, but her desire for sex is quite high, the pressure on her to have sex from boys is quite high, her very biological being screams for sex. So to full fill this biological imperative and serve God she gets married early and has babies like door steps most of her life. (no masterbation either BTW.) Or she can, as most eventually do because the conflicted girl is indeed an intelligent human being, use birth control! yes, modern science has solved the dilemma of unsafe sex! She can hump to her hearts content until she decides to have a baby! Religion cannot deal with this of course so birth control is immoral as immoral as the pregnancy in the unmarried girl and the abortion she needs to have to get her lives potential back. But in the eyes of God her main job is having those babies. Even in married couples, no birth control, only abstinence and pregnancy are the allowed possibilities. BTW marriage without birth control would be a very special type of hell to me B) I think it's relevant that the people who are against abortion are also against birth control, i think this is because in the over all world view of religion females are basically less human than males. keep em bare foot and pregnant, that's what they are for. Birth control gives sexual freedom and what freedom is more basic than sexual freedom? Religion opposes freedoms, especially sexual freedoms. I think life begins when you reject religious control of your self, if not for the twisted religious moral views abortion would be a rare thing, taken care of quickly and early but most unwanted pregnancies could be avoided before when life begins becomes a problem.

So what constitutes murder is entirely subjective and any Moral code that prohibits murder is simply the morals of that society and have nothing to do with a God given moral? So if society can adjust it's morals to allow murder then why not abortion? BTW, no murder is not always a moral problem in all societies, even your Catholic inspired world view is full of justifiable murders. There is no god giving morals, all morals are part of what a society considers moral at any one time. Your Religion simply hijacks the morals of the society and does it best to control that society through control of morals. Religion is nothing but a means of control by power hungry individuals and seems to be particularly interested in the control of the reproductive systems of the people under their control. No birth control allowed, all sex acts must be able to produce children and all children must be born. It would be much easier for me to get behind the notion of restricting abortions if birth control as touted as a good idea when people have sex but no your church cannot allow sex with birth control. That seems totally disingenuous to me. Then of course there is the idea of whose god to follow, Jesus, Yahweh, Allah, Gaea, Monotheistic, Pantheistic, it's very confusing and no way to really tell which on is the real one or even if there are many. Whose God's Morals do we follow? Who decides? In exactly what context are you using the word practical? The above quote makes no sense... Can you back up this outrageous assertion with anything other than your own self serving religious views? Not to mention the new myths and legends like catholicism and all other monotheistic religions. For you maybe but why is not believing your way the rejection of all truths? How can it reduce life to nothing but a series of sensual experiences? And how does embracing these "truths" change the fact that when you're dead you're dead and 50 years from now only the famous will be remembered at all and the faceless throngs will not be remembered no matter who's truths they embraced. Bullshit, but if so who's god? But God does nothing better than hiding the truth from us hence the discrepancies between the bible and reality. You are welcome to believe what ever you want as long as you don't require me to follow your truth but then that what the catholic church is all about isn't it? Making others follow your truth by means of control and fear???

I would have to say that is probably true 99% of the time anyway.

I got this from google, it appears it hasn't ever been used outside of medical facilities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing

It's relevant because we are talking about what a human life is, is this creature, a clone, a human being? Is it a human being if it is specifically grown with no brain? other animals have been cloned, i see no reason humans could not be cloned. But there is an even more artificial way to make a life from, make up the genes from stock chemicals that were not already alive and place them in a cell and have it go on about it's business like nothing had happened. Eventually it will be possible to do this with complex animals and of course humans are animals... So would this totally artificial being be human? Some people think it's a life from the time of conception and i am cool with what ever the other guy wants to believe as long as he doesn't make me follow his beliefs. But what if there is no conception? all human cells have the potential to be humans. does this make very cell precious? Or does it show that a cells potential is not fixed, all fertilized eggs do not go on to produce a fetus, when does it become a human being? and what makes it a human being? I think it's human being when the brain becomes active and when that activity ceases it ceases to be human.

Well, as a matter of fact there are people do think so, but not everyone acknowledges the same creator. As I said there are no human actions that have not been justified by morality usually by one religion or another. There are some religions even older than the Christian one and yes they are still around, true and lasting? What do you mean by this? The religion that was SOB enough to kill anyone who disagreed with them, the religion that destroyed civilization after civilization? Even to go so far and destroy the cultures by destroying all the records and forcing them to speak another language? Which religion would this be? Actually i do believe that Murder and Rape are Immoral but there are as you know always exceptions, most religious texts are full of these exceptions, I think that's very telling.

Ok, that is at least a definition with no sliding scale but, let's say i harvested a cell from your body, skin will do, then I grew that cell into a culture and took one of the cultured cells and grew a new human being, lets say an artificial womb (it will happen) would this body be a human being? What if you grew it with no brain, could it just be harvested for organs or would it be a human with all the rights and privileges everyone with brains does? What makes us human, our conscious brain or our shape?

Which God? Which Gods morals? Funny how these "handed down morals" seem to conform to the societal norms of the times isn't it? I believe it's demonstrable fact, 100 years ago the morals of society were different than today, 500 years ago they are even more different, 1000 years ago, 3000 years ago, 10,000 years ago? The so called "Handed Down Morals" are nothing but a reflection of the morality of the times. There is not one human activity that has not been Moral at one time or another, these morals are always supposed to be handed down or up or what ever by superior beings of some kind and even rape and murder has been morally supported by one religion of another... I think that humans who are in good mental health have an instinctive feel for right and wrong, of course there are people who do not, they are called psychopaths.

Wouldn't infinite speed require being in touch with every point in the entire universe all at once?

So... you are a pragmatist then? Morals are fixed? By who? Who's morals do we go by? Our own? Isn't that a bit self serving? Humans had civilized communities and moral values long before even the idea of monotheism much less your idea of it. Even in the bible the morality is the religion mirrored the morals of the time not the other way around. Intrinsic to what? I doubt you could get three people to gether at random and have any two of them agree on what is moral in many areas and the smaller the areas become the more different their moral values can vary. Our morals are similar to pack or troop behavior in other animals, just more complex and often quite self serving to the people who want power.

Needimprovement, while I am not a big fan of abortion, being a parent makes the idea of an abortion particularly difficult to justify... most of the time... However I have to say that the objection to abortion on moral grounds seems kinda weak coming from people who think birth control is also immoral...

Yes and then there is all that misdirection and.... that river in Egypt... Seriously, can anyone equate an add from 45 years ago with the constant bombardment of nearly every communication medium with about as many different FUDs as you can imagine now days? But I have to say, it';s as disgusting from one side as the other. When ever i hear a FUD about a subject I generally tend to be sympathetic to the group who is a victim of the FUD.

Larry Niven wrote about human life in zero G in his novel The Integral Trees Humans living in a smoke ring around a neutron star. He describes in detail what it would look like to see the magnetic effects of the neutron star close up. (The steam powered rockets the humans made were cool, I think that was in the second book)

I live near the ocean, I see examples of this all the time. A stiff off shore wind can result in tides that are a few feet below normal or with an onshore wind few feet higher than normal. Most of the time we only notice the extra high water since it comes up in road ways and houses but it does happen both ways...

Looks like a Dog to me, do you have the group pic?

I agree that the left has probably done the whole FUD thing but I get at least 2 or 3 FUD e-mails a day, average, some days i get several some days none but most days i get a couple at least. I always answer back to the sender (if i know them) and show them a snopes article that shows their wonderful Revelation is actually not true. But so far (years, several) I have never received a Progressive FUD e-mail, but hundreds, at least, of conservative FUD e-mails. I know it's anecdotal but still indicative of the problem and how it's aligned with the conservatives ...

Living longer in less gravity is very difficult to confirm, do you have any evidence of that? It's a little bit amazing how little info there seems to be about vertebrates living long term in space.

Why would trophic level be more important than the PCB, pesticide, and heavy metal content? Whales are very long lived creatures, even baleen whales eat fish, they have a very high food intake, and they build up very high levels of environmental toxins. And then there is all that whale poop! http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101012101255.htm

Yeah, active sex life, dark beer, lots of hot peppers in my food, i did it and still....

Spam alert! But I will say that i am a chronic pain patient, the doctors have tried almost everything on me and Tramadol is a joke, not even equal to hydrocodone.

Not exactly... http://articles.cnn.com/2000-07-26/nature/toxic.whalemeat.enn_1_whale-meat-international-whaling-commission-iceland?_s=PM:NATURE http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST6359120070801 Whalemeat in Japanese school lunches found toxic

And as I pointed out the conservatives seem to operate best at that sort of FUD and do it far more often and nasty. BTW trying to equate republicans as always being conservative by invoking Lincoln is in it's self disingenuous. The party of he conservatives changes places with the part of progressives every few decades and during the time of Lincoln, he was a progressive big time, ending slavery was a progressive stance not a conservative stance...

Why not grow wood as a fuel, turn it into pellets, use them to power steam cars and homes even power plants. just regrow them to recycle the carbon...