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The point is that their motivation is a religion which is against lying.

Actually, as many theologians and historians have pointed out, the text says (KJV):

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

This says little about lying in general. It just forbids lying to harm another person. It would be difficult to argue that the ID proponents are doing this, even when they lie about their motivations in court. They aren't lying about any neighbor, but about their personal motivations. Hiding your own thoughts from another isn't forbidden by the bible. You can't hide your thoughts from God, but you can hide them from other people. You aren't obligated to bare your innermost thoughts to any passerby who asks, much less to any agent of a court of law.

Some have pointed out that the bible does condone lying in certain circumstances. Consider the commandment to "Honor thy father and mother". Suppose one knew of a crime committed by a parent. This happens to some people. If you testify against them, you are certainly dishonoring them. So this commandment requires that you lie about what you know. One might consider silence, but in many circumstances, that would be taken as agreement with the charges, so that might not be an option.

It would be easy to understand a religious person thinking of this, and deciding that agreeing with Darwin (or tacitly agreeing by not speaking against his theory) would constitute dishonoring God. After all, Darwinism is a "godless" theory that explains the universe without reference to any guiding intelligence. In that case, one could easily justify lying about one's personal thoughts in a court, as people did in this case. The bible seems to condone such lying, although indirectly.

So there's really no credible irony here in their hiding their motivations from the court. They are merely doing their duty to honor their God for what they believe He did.

For you Darwin haters: that godless organization known as PBS has a list of about 100 links that provide evidence of evolution. All of these are supposed to be created by scientists (but don't come crawling back complaining if you find out that one of them wasn't - it doesn't invalidate the evidence, it invalidates my statement that they are scientists).

You Ignorant fucks!

The video game indsutry is solely responsible for every bad deed done
by anyone under 21! The Video Game "community" are all hethenisitic
dyke liberal gang members!

The Japanese are doing far worse than they ever did to us at Pearl Harbor
allowing this godless filth onto our hallowed land! Kids are helpless to
resist the lures of these MURDER SIMULATORS! I will sue every gamer and
game maker on the planet to insure my religious beliefs are upheld and to
ensure that no parent ever have to take any kind of personal responsability!

Charity? Please! These peons are nothing! I donate several 10's of dollars a
year to charity, and my money isn't BLOOD MONEY! They are merely trying to
make sure the next generation of children are as demented as these perverts are!
Anyone who responds negativly to my rant will be arrested and sued, in an order
to be determined later.

Yours,
        Jack Thompson
        Video Game Bible lawyer

You Ignorant fucks!

The video game indsutry is solely responsible for every bad deed done
by anyone under 21! The Video Game "community" are all hethenisitic
dyke liberal gang members!

The Japanese are doing far worse than they ever did to us at Pearl Harbor
allowing this godless filth onto our hallowed land! Kids are helpless to
resist the lures of these MURDER SIMULATORS! I will sue every gamer and
game maker on the planet to insure my religious beliefs are upheld and to
ensure that no parent ever have to take any kind of personal responsability!

Charity? Please! These peons are nothing! I donate several 10's of dollars a
year to charity, and my money isn't BLOOD MONEY! They are merely trying to
make sure the next generation of children are as demented as these perverts are!
Anyone who responds negativly to my rant will be arrested and sued, in an order
to be determined later.

Yours,
    Jack Thompson
    Video Game Bible lawyer

vi is the best.

vi isn't so great - vim is the best.

Vim is a godless bastardization of the One True Editor. Even worse it pretends to be vi, but it is not vi. Most people that like it only like it because of some of the defaults they see when they use vim on linux, which actually only take advantage of features which are available in the real vi. Meanwhile vim flagrantly acts differently to the original vi in subtle insidious ways that you will only find when it is too late.

"Today, December 14, 2005 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by 311e7 hax0r forces of Godless Commie Bastards of People's Republic of China..."

Maybe I'll be able to explain my stance after all - it seems you *are* reading, but are also being rather selective in choosing which parts you reply to. :-)

Which scientific evidence can you quote which is going against pink unihorns, magic, and astrology? None that I am aware of. Therefore those things all fall into the same category as the religion, and deserve - from the logical point of view - the same attention.

It's a matter of common sense, not of faith, to filter out ideas for which not even the most fiery supporters are able to present anything resembling some evidence (or even a coherent argumentation). We are filtering information from noise constantly - if we didn't, we'd overload in matter of days. I don't see which criterion one can use to decide not to filter out the religion together with magic, astrology, pink unihorns, and similar.

I understand that some people can feel the need for a religion. It is their good right to do so. However, when they try to somehow put their personal beliefs, i.e. the fruits of their imagination, in such a close relation to science, or when they try to force their beliefs upon schoolchildren, then they shouldn't be so surprised when they face the resistance from a small but vocal (not vocal enough, if you ask me) scientific community.

I did read that, actually, and it still comes down to a matter of belief. I appreciate that you have taken the time to write back, but you are not talking to a person who is blinded by faith! Rather, you are talking to a curious person with a desire for understanding and a lack of knowledge, which is quite different.

"It's not worth giving it the doubt that "I don't know" expresses" is a belief, an opinion, and personally I no longer think it's a very well-founded one. Disbelief in pink unicorns, magic, astrology and so on is quite sensible, given the scientific evidence against them, but science really has nothing to say on the subject of God.

Have a nice day, too!

In the part you chose not to relpy to, I explained pretty well what I meant with "not even worth contemplating". It seems you are not even reading what I took so much time and effort to write. It's a shame, really - you could've learned a thing or two.

Have a nice day.

Please understand, that the lack of belief does not mean a belief in opposite. If I say I lack the belief that a god exists, I am not saying I believe there is no god. I am saying "the idea is not even worth contemplating".

I think that "the idea is not even worth contemplating" is a belief.

The two points that I have been trying to get across here are that (a) atheism shares some of the flaws of religion, and (b) it's not very scientific to make absolute judgements about untestable hypotheses. (b) is particularly interesting because atheists tend to think that their beliefs are backed up by science.

Anyway, thankyou for replying - it's been interesting, but I'm not convinced.

Atheist is a well defined word. You can not re-define it in accordance to what you think it should mean, sorry.

Please understand, that the lack of belief does not mean a belief in opposite. If I say I lack the belief that a god exists, I am not saying I believe there is no god. I am saying "the idea is not even worth contemplating".

Let me clarify this. The followers of the idea have not yet managed to present even the slightest shred of supportive evidence, therefore I have absolutely no way to say "yes, the god exists". On the other side, with absolutely no logic behind the idea, I can't think of a way to disprove the existence of a god, therefore I also can't say "no, there is no god". PLEASE NOTE, however, that exactly the same can be said of millions upon millions of other theories out there (invisible pink unihorns, dragons in a garage, or the flying spaghetti monster). Why am I not simply saying "I don't know"? For the same reason I'm not saying "I don't know" to the question of the existence of invisible pink unihorns or flying spaghetti monsters. It's not worth giving it the doubt that "I don't know" expresses.

Finally, it is not rational to assume the existence of something (in this case, an immortal soul, or whatever it is that you assume to exist beyond our physical presence) based solely on the wish to be more important than you (we) actually are.

I don't think so. I think it is faith in a godless Universe. You cannot prove there is no God, therefore you have faith that there is no God. If you had no belief on the subject whatsoever, you would acknowledge that you do not know.

Look, you said, some posts ago, that you changed your atheist mind and became a religious person because the religion gave you the answers you were looking for. Which answers would that be?

I'm not a religious person, I am a person that does not claim to know whether there is a God or not.

When you ask an athiest something like "what am I?", "why do I perceive the world in the way that I do?", or "what happens to me when I die?", you'll get answers that are perfectly correct. However, the answers are profoundly unsatisfactory from my perspective, because they explain only what happens to the physical part of me - the only part that an athiest will acknowledge the existence of. The wrong question has been answered, because I think there is more to me than that. At least religion addresses the question that I actually asked, even if it doesn't answer it.

It's important that we think about these things, because we may otherwise find ourselves making poor assumptions. There is nothing worse than bad science. You may say that religion is full of poor assumptions. Well, we can find plenty of rubbish religions, but that is not proof that all parts of all religions are always rubbish.

Science has been finding that you don't need $DEITY for the Universe to work.

Once a physical law is explained, a good theory is presented, a model is proposed, one can pray as much as one wants but nature will be perfectly explainable with those and other tools without needing an invisible hand.

That is what horrifed Darwin so much about his theory. He found a godless mechanism to explain how life changes. He did not put his sights in doing so, he was a religious man, but observation took him to the only reasonable conclussion, and that troubled him so much that he delayed the publication of his book until it was completely impossible to keep doing so (since others were arriving to the same conclussions independently).

Science can't stop when it steps in the toes of religion, that would be a dereliction of duty. By explaining how, in many ocassions science is implicitly explaining the why and religious people are not finding comfort in the answers.

The terms are much debated... some say Agnostic means we have no way of knowing, some say it means we cannot possibly know... I got tired of the word games, and just assumed 'godless heathen' :)

Answer me this, how can you (or any of these poor threatened heathens) justify removing GOD from our Nation under God?

I'll bite.
When we accepted the term "One Nation Under God", it was because we were fighting godless communists, and if godless communists say that phrase they burst into flames and are consumed by fiery death. It worked for awhile... as in, until 9/11. The phrase no longer protects us because our enemy loves God. It's the only thing they live for. It's no longer applicable in exposing our enemies, which is the only reason "One Nation Under God" was created as a pseduo-motto for America

Also, since the primitive founding fathers never uttered the phrase or forced others to, we are unsure of the effect it would have had on the British. The best they had was some pathetic pluralistic catchphrase..."E Plurbus Unum". Those simpletons won on luck alone with that motto.

what, are you kidding. thats exactly what one of those godless queers
at the university would do to besmirch the name of our lord jesus
christ.

why he deserves...hey, joey, get your baseball bat...dont ask any
questions, just do it.

Eh, I'm a godless heathen and I don't consider it a "belief"... it's a lack of one. It's the old "if atheism is a religion, then health is a disease" thing.

I have a certain level of trust in science because it seems to work very well, but to use "belief" is probably not fair.

It is interesting that even non-believers have chosen to break into sects (agnostic, deist, non-theist, soft/hard/strong/positive atheist). Says a lot about the human psycge, I think.

All this in the country that owns the ".cx" domain - Christmas Island is an Australian territory. We don't go mad over a nipple being exposed on TV, but we still have our loonies.

The extra cost doesn't matter to the single issue loonies that push this line - anything and everything should be done "for the children" - apart from educating and feeding the poor ones of course, because their version of God only likes rich people.

You know what? I actually agree with you about the medieval theocracy thing. These Christianity-abusing extremists are causing the slow collapse of society. School systems requiring intelligent design? The far right trying to win votes in elections by accusing the other side of being "godless lib-er-als" and succeeding? This is abuse, and I am conservative and Christian! If they want to find someone who really is evil, they ought to examine Bush's number 2 and the events leading up to the Iraq War. But they're too afraid of finding planks in their eyes.

This has also shown up outside of politics. Anyone who has been keeping up with The Amazing Race: Family Edition knows how the Florida team will loudly proclaim their religious faith but act absolutely rotten to everyone else. It's these sorts of people who fuel my loathing for hypocrisy. And the "energy is liberated through blasphemy" troll isn't making anything any better.

What's worse, society is allowing these things. Remember the Dixie Chicks saying that Bush makes them ashamed of being from Texas? Do we hear them on the radio anymore? How about Janet Jackson and the Superbowl? We want to shoot CBS for that but commercials can push erectile dysfunction and natural male enhancement drugs at all hours? "Will someone please think of the children" indeed!

Examine the fall of the Roman Empire and compare it to modern American society. It sure frightens me.

You by no means deserve this troll moderation, and this is coming from someone who has you marked as "foe". Just thanks for giving me the opportunity to vent this frustration that has been building up for a while.

I find it rather ironic.

A rather nominally religious America allied itself with Saudi Arabian rabidly religious fundamentalists in order to help throw the godless communist Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. The government that replaced the Soviets in Afghanistan were directly aided by both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, were also rabidly religious funamentalist, and could have been considered unsigned allies in the USA's "war on drugs(TM)".

A continuing presence in, and influence upon Saudi Arabia subsequent to a secular dictator's invasion of Kuwait and threat to invade Saudi oil fields prompted these rabid religious fundamentalists to attack the USA, both overseas and at home. One of these domestic terrorist attacks helped to consolidate the USA's rabid religious funamentalists in power, as well as launch an invasion of Iraq. (The Ba'athist Parties of both Iraq and Syria have longstanding ties to Nazi Germany, as well as a rabid hatred of Jews and Israel.) The USA has militarily largely abandoned Saudi Arabia for Qatar, thus complying with one of Al-Queda's demands. The Dubya regime has turned Iraq into something Afghanistan could never be -- a training ground, weapons depot, and jumping off point for any and all Islamic terrorists worldwide, partially funded with Saudi and Iraqi oil money.

The USA is beginning to realize that if you wage a war, reconstruction, and a peace badly enough, a civil war will result instead of the first blushing blossom of democracy. Of course, the three primary "actors" in the Middle East that surround Iraq have a vested interest in seeing a fractured and powerless Iraq, and to date the rabid Sunni religious fundamentalists appear to hold the key to control the future of Iraq. The USA has acted, or by ommissive action, done far more to support those three Iraqi neighbors positions than the objectives built upon shifting sands by the Dubya regime.

The USA, in the convoluted process of gathering strength to fight the "war on terrorism(TM)", has forsaken those very constitutional principles that separate us from the typical tyrannical government in the land of the eternal egg-timer factory. Our founding fathers would be turning in their graves if they could...