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Yes, and those Christians have slaughtered tens of millions of "unbelievers" over the centuries. Hitler had nothing on the Roman Catholic Church when it comes to body count.

Actually, no. Mainly because there weren't tens of millions of people in the world where the christians had influence. However, Between Hitler and Stalin, the godless leaders of the 20th century sure proved that lack of religion is no panacea, either.

According to the [authors], this is not because the idea of imminent carbon-driven catastrophe is perhaps a bit scientifically suspect. Rather it is because people classed as "egalitarian communitarians" (roughly speaking, left-wingers) are always highly concerned about climate change, and become slightly more so as they acquire more science and numeracy. Unfortunately, however, "hierarchical individualists" (basically, right-wingers) are quite concerned about climate change when they're ignorant: but if they have any scientific, mathematic or technical education this causes them to become strongly sceptical.

So, what it is saying essentially, is that to effectively combat global warming we must educate left-wingers and keep right-wingers in the dark. Encourage the home-schoolers, and tell the god-fearin', gun totin', gay haters that academics really will turn them into a godless, muslim-loving, pot-smoking, tofu-eating, pagan-worshipping, Birkenstocks-wearing, tree-hugging, cross-dressing, PETA-supporting, anti-life, hybrid-car-driving, homosexual, lesbian who reads the New York Times.

If you had not said it the way you did, then someone else would have (and have repeatedly through the thread). I do appreciate the thoughtful and articulate response. Honestly you bring up some great points, to bad this is not the correct format to debate some of those out.

I would have agreed this statement 30 years ago. "While science doesn't disprove God, it doesn't aim to. ". Maybe it's the same now as then, and I'm just old enough to have paid attention, but on TV (NG/DSC/TLC), numerous magazines and science web sites I see quite the opposite. The most famous example would be Hawking in his TV series claiming that there is no God and no need for a God based on his theory of the Multiverse (after years of proclaiming there had to be a God because the Universe is too complex and perfect to have been created accidentally but this perspective was never publicized.)

Numerous publications have warped Einstein's similar thoughts into one of a Godless Universe, and theory after theory gets published with text related to discounting God. It may not be the intent of the Scientist, and not the intent of the "Science", but it is being done.

Then we have the fringe that reads headlines and continually bash those that are not conforming to the atheist belief. Seem to be familiar to anything else in history?

I'm mostly concerned with the bias that your initial post showed. No, I probably won't be able to change the world but that should not prevent me from trying.

Growing up very religious in a small town, I really thought that I knew what evolution was, and why it was wrong. It seemed so silly to me that 'scientists' could believe in this conjecture,er 'theory' full of 'missing links'. Clearly it was a conspiracy by godless atheists (where I now seem to comfortably fit in) to drown out the 'Truth'.

Then at age 18 I got the internet and began to discover that I never, in fact, had ever been taught what Evolution really was. I had been taught a fantasy, an imaginary concoction that nobody actually believed in. As we all have seen, Creationists create a straw man simplification of evolutionary theory and then attack the straw man, rather than attacking the real thing.

So I set out with my newly acquired knowledge. Surely, I though, now that I know that we've only been taught a mistaken notion of what evolutionary theory is, I can convince some people. Boy oh boy was I ever wrong. The first responses I got was, quite literally, "how dare you accuse our religion of LYING to us. They wouldn't lie to us". And so forth. I learned a lot about logical fallacies. The straw man. The fallacious appeal to false authority (look, this 'scientist' says evolution is fake, therefore it is). The argument from ridicule ("Man was made from monkeys, what kind of nitwit believes that"). It was a fascinating and revealing time in my life, and the clear intellectual dishonesty I saw compelled me to change my life. Within a couple years I went from being a homophobic creationist to going out to queer parties, not because I was gay, but because I discovered many of my friends were queer, and hadn't told me for obvious reasons.

I am reminded of this Salon article talking about how social conservatives basically assign a lot of emotion and identity to their belief. They think it is rude if others challenge their beliefs, yet they desire to push their beliefs on everyone else. http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/the_ugly_delusions_of_the_educated_conservative/

In the end, you cannot convince people who do not want to challenge their presuppositions and assertions. What will happen in the future, is that we will continue to move on and embrace exciting new advances, technologies, medicines that stem from biology, while those who do not understand it will simply be left behind.

lefties are all godless blasphemers who want to destroy the natural order of the world by allowing women to go around with their heads uncovered or even drive cars.

As far as I can tell it's lefties that wish to make sure that countries are free to treat women as they wish, and in fact prevent anyone from driving a car by making up the price of gasoline to the stratosphere.

I could really care less if you are godless, I would think that would be more your concern as if there were a God you'd obviously be going to Hell for screwing people over.

You left out the bit about how lefties are all godless blasphemers who want to destroy the natural order of the world by allowing women to go around with their heads uncovered or even drive cars.

Well, the lefties do seem to get awfully upset whenever anyone criticizes the biggest-by-far group of people who believe those things. The word "Islamophobia" comes to mind for some reason.

You left out the bit about how lefties are all godless blasphemers who want to destroy the natural order of the world by allowing women to go around with their heads uncovered or even drive cars.

I know, and as an American, I'm certainly rooting for us to beat those Godless Commie Bastards ;), almost as much as I'm rooting as a human interested in progress of exploration by whothefuckever, but the fact that the record's about to be broken makes GGP's ignorance of the current holder all the more inexcusable.

The Americans and the Russians each have a two-person base on the moon. The Americans have had to keep replacing their astronaut teams because they quickly go crazy; they have been using only male astronauts on the unspoken assumption that this would avoid any possibility of impropriety. The Russians, as godless Communists, are under no such constraints, and their male-female team has remained well-adjusted. At the start of the film, a male and female American astronaut team is sent up to replace the sex-starved all-male team. The government insists on them being married first to preserve morality. Most of the story revolves around the eventual consummation of this marriage of convenience, and around their relationship with their Russian neighbors, who keep casually dropping by.

Capitalism is a practical attempt to combine social progress with physical restraint under the assumption that men are selfish, greedy beings.

To sell it to those who are not selfish and greedy - i.e. to prevent the conclusion that humans can cooperate to improve the lot of humanity but that you're perversely forcing them to compete - your propaganda will try to argue that capitalism has other purposes. It will argue, for example, that the rich make financial decisions which are better for everyone ("trickle down"), or that capitalism is God's will (vs "godless commies"), or something similar.

Sometimes, of course, the argument is limited to arguing that the basis for capitalism does not exist, without explaining why. This is the worst sort of pro-capitalist argument: "the winners of capitalism aren't as nasty as, err, that guy over there!" What is that argument trying to achieve? Rather than supporting practical capitalism - which is a compromise of human nature vs society's needs (it's not that Edison was a good man, but that he could have done so much more evil under other systems) - it appears to remove all justification for capitalism.

I've been modded down by a persia-loving, america-hating, godless commie.

More importantly, GOD will look after ALL our needs here in the US.

Quantum teleportation will only look after the "cryptographic needs" of the godless Chinese and other primitive science-believer cultures.

You say that now, but how about when the godless communists stop buying our debt and have enough domestic capital to meet their own needs but lack sufficient space to grow enough food? We all know they're focused on developing international commerce with 2nd and 3rd world countries and that they're competing with us everywhere for everything. But what happens after the U.S. has quietly shrunk itself into a position where we're required to undergo the same austerity measures that have led to political revolts in Canada and France?

What then... what if the right-wing religious whackos return to their 'conservative' war-mongering roots and we put another Bush-Cheney-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Feith-esque administration in possession of the oval commander-in-chief football case?

I'm not saying it'll happen next year or the year after, but what if it happens in a couple of decades when the temperature in Washington D.C. is over 110 degress farenheit during the summer recess, and the president is suffering from heat stroke while trying to learn to read Chinese?

Then what Mr. Smarty Pants!

There's a story that in WW2 the Russians trained dogs to run under tanks by placing food there. Then, they released them in front of the enemy with bombs attached to their backs.

However the dogs only associated food with friendly tanks - and they were smart enough to tell the difference. An own goal was recorded.

Some might say it served them right, the godless commie bastards.

Yes, but the reason they believed religion needed to be eradicated was not so much because they were atheists as that it was competition for the loyalties of the people they ruled over.

This can be said for "religious" wars. Do you know any war where the rulers reason for participation was really religion and not power gain? However claiming religious reasons has often helped getting support by the people. But this also worked for Stalin and Mao, see e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Militant_Atheists

Also I think the power gain theory is not strictly true. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 Stalin shut down the League of millitant godless, anti-religious periodicals and reopened churches to gain more support by the people. So for power gain the extremely antireligious activities were actually counterproductive and Stalin apparently knew this and continued until he felt he needed the support of religious people to not lose the war against Nazi-Germany.

For Hitler power gain as motivation behind his antichurch activities sounds more like likely. He used antireligious persecution against religious entities which he could not control, changed the protestant church to the "German Christians" and tried to appear as regular Christian in public while his private opinions were different.

Nope, Mao, Stalin, and Hitler have a combined death toll that is hard to beat.

The line that religions killed more people is simply a lie. The godless commies saw to that.

You're telling me they wouldn't be able to understand the simple sentence, "this may have permanent future consequences?"

Absolutely not, any value of understanding worth having (the recitative norms of schooling being a prime example of a six foot pole vault).

Juvenile cognition is hugely compartmentalized. Why is this a surprise? Few adults are ruthlessly rationale. Even among scientists of godless intellectual meritocracy, completely loony views are maintained about what the general population is willing to sacrifice for the sake of the environment further down the road.

Brenda Brathwaite: Gaming for understanding

It turns out there are two levels of understanding the Middle Passage in a young child.

The problem is that children with responsible parents first of all have a view of adults as prudent care-givers. Black teenagers in America understand sooner than white urban teenagers that the strong nuclear force drops off at the fourth power.

They understand it, whether they pay attention to it or not is up to them and their parents.

Economists have a notion of expressed preference. If I explain the rules of a very abstract game to you and ask you to choose door A or door B, and your choice of door A results in your immediate execution (to which you fully consented as per the fine print), do we conclude that you A) wished to die, or B) would benefit from improved cognitive skills?

One view smacks of sociopathy, the other of socialism. This is why ideology makes for such a poor path-finding algorithm, and why brain preservation leads to superior life outcomes.

Ask the Greats where they got their inspiration from.

Dylan stole records and spent his time in listening booths as a youth. He is unabashed when adopting these songs as his own. He still currently does, but no copyrights are owned on them.

Music belongs to the impoverished and is sung and created by the impoverished.

There is a truism: Rich men have no music.

Another truism: Rich men can't read.

Another: Rich men don't pray.

We are dealing with godless bloodsuckers, black coats.

Corporations are people too, so suck it, you godless socialist atheist communist fascist Islamist!

Haw they would rather face the nukes than the public opinion on this one.
Let's see who we can go after.
The 92 year old widower WWII Vet that spent 30,000 of his own money to send DVDs to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Or the Chaplins that distributed them to the troops?

So do you want to take on an old man that risked his live in WWII fighting Hitler or the Japanese and that spent his own money to help the troops?
Or do you go after the Chaplins?
In an election year where it would be easy for people running for office to want to take on the rich cocain drunk godless heathens in Hollywood for Good and country?