A freshman philosophy class? I studied as a philosophy major for two years, but hey, I actually like school and I wouldn't mind going back. I am aware that there are ethic schools of thought that don't hinge on absolutes but I never claimed there weren't. I was giving examples of free thought that is religious-based. If you want to keep reading things that I never wrote, what's the point of the discussion?
While some sort of absolute morality sounds nice, because it'd take all the work out of people having to figure out the grey areas for themselves, I don't see how religion fills this.
Again, you totally misrepresent religion. Are you just reading what you want to read out of what I type and ignore what you don't want to read? There will always be gray areas. I thought I made that perfectly clear by emphasizing that our interpretations can be flawed. My contention is that grey areas are no proof to the lack of a God. If you've studies philosophy then I'm sure that you're familiar with Plato's alegory of the cave and his Meno dialogues. These writings are good thought experiments of why it does not automatically follow that grey areas disprove the existence of absolutes (in Plato's case, of what he called the forms).
By the way, why can't more than one book have some "holyness" to it? After all, the very basic moralities of most religions seem to coincide at at their lowest levels. Of course there are differences, but more often than not there are far more similarities. I have a belief that many books are divinely inspired, but not all are holy. I also believe that some books that we take for holy are not. Catholicism for example, accepts different religions with open arms far more readily than your average secularist.
Another annoying thing about religionists is how they assume that everyone who isn't religious is an atheist, and make wild accusations along those lines. There's a difference between spirituality and religion. I don't claim to be terribly spiritual either, but I can plainly see the difference: religion is where a group of people center on a system of beliefs, and then use that somehow (whether to justify killing other "unbelievers" or "infidels", or whatever).
Point well taken. If I made references that assumed you were an atheists, I apologize. By the same token, your average secularists always assumes that those that are religious are brain dead.
Being called an atheist is rather insulting to me, because to me, an atheist is also a religious person: they have faith that no god exists.
You seem to be arguing against semantics, an argument that you cannot win because words have definite meanings. By definition, even by your own definition, religion is organized belief in an entity that's greater than humans. Atheists generally don't believe in anything greater than humanity. I agree with you in that atheism is "religious-like", but I wouldn't call it a religion.
But you see, the point of religion is that it is faith. Faith by definition cannot be proven. If you expect proof before you believe, you'll never believe and you'll never experience proof. Proof may or may not come after you believe. It's just the very definition of the word "faith." That's why religion and science are two totally different things, which brings me to your next point:
Any inquisitive person seeks answers for how things work, why the universe is the way it is, etc. The best system that's been devised for this so far is the Scientific Method
You may need to think about your definition of science. Science never seeks to answer "why." The scientific method is designed to answer mostly the "hows" of our universe, not the "whys". The whys are first and foremost the realm of spirituality and metaphysics. You seem to commit a common fallacy in that you believe that science and religion are at odds which each other, which is the same fallacy that many religious fundamentalists commit. In fact,
Wars over religous differences? How many wars is that specifically. More wars than over secular differences (economics, territory, etc)? What's the percentage? Were the three largest wars in the history of the world caused by religous or secular reasons? (WW I, WW II, and the cold war) Or are you still referring to the good old 1,000 year old favorite pinata of the "enlightened" elites, the crusades?
How is it that you need to believe in some "higher being" in order to try to improve yourself? I would think most people would want to improve themselves for their own sake,
OK, so what's your standard for improvement, yourself? If so, then why do you need any improvement? If you don't see any improvement between religious vs. atheist then it's perhaps because you don't want to see it. Anyone who is better than you but is religous you perceive as being no better because he is religous. Cognitive dissonance can be a bitch, can't it? It also can be the beginning of bigotry.
But now you've convieniently have avoided my challenge. It's funny that you are the one that is the "free thinker" but yet you won't prove that by answering. It's your burden of proof since you're the enlightened one, not mine. I'm just a close-minded moron, remember?
But I'll answer just the same. Keep in mind that my answer comes from an "inferior" brain. To begin with, your question is heavily loaded. If you predispose that religion is just superstition and myths they you are not seeking to discover truth (once again, I recommend that you lay off the old, tired stereotypes for a change). It's the old "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" type of loaded question, the sort that comes from a closed mind.
Religion, above all, is a codified system of beliefs and norms more than it is "superstitions and myths." It's design allows standards that are higher than any one person. Whether you agree with the standards or not is not the point. At the moment I'm just giving you some background.
Those who seek religion seek answers. In particular, many of those answers pertain to those standards of ethics and morality and of good and bad. The one requirement for the whole system is belief that those standards are authoritative, in other words, a requirement on faith that God is the source of those absolutes. However, faith that our interpretation of those standards is accurate is misplaced faith. Therein lies the root of your attacks on religion. You seem to believe that because we, as humans, sometimes misinterpret them, fixed standards (as well as its source, God,) must not exists. It's akin to believing that because people rob banks, laws agains robbery are an illusion and don't really exist.
That is the reason why, in particular, in christianity, the Bible is read, re-read, and studied so much: Precisely because we want to get our understanding of it right, and precisely because our understanding is open to question. Not because we believe it isn't the word of God, but because we believe in truly comprehending something that comes from God. In this sense, faith requires both belief and an open mind.
In fact, I agree with you that those few close-minded fundamentalists zealots that take each word in the Bible literally are wrong. Except that I thing that they are wrong because they don't understand religion, a similar phenomenon of why you think that religion is wrong because you don't understand it.
If you put the concept of religion and free thought in a historical context, you'd realize that the church has embodied free thought throughout the ages. The Acts of the Apostles, a good read, records the free-thought process of the first chirstians as they struggled to make sense of the word of God. Further down the line we have the reformation, in which Martin Luther splintered from the Catholic church because of intellectual disagreements. Then we have the first scientists, such as Gregor Mendel (a monk). We also have some of the most influential ph
There's a lot more to marketing than prices. Item locations, arrangement, displays, coupon machines, floor plans, decor, quantities on-shelf, "look," etc. are all marketing elements and a store may like to keep that from being photographed by competitors.
Many stores have a "no camera" policy, including supermarkets. As long as those stores are private property, they are well within their right to place such restrictions.
Yeah, because I sure as hell haven't heard any criticism against the president from any sources.
I guess that all that you've demonstrated with that +3 insightful modded comment is that free speech doesn't go as far as disagreeing with the Slashdot hive-mind's beliefs.
Who says that religious people aren't doing any better? I certainly didn't.
If you read my post, it speaks about the nature of human beings, and says nothing about how well one group does in relation to another at managing that nature. It simply says that both secularists and religious people are human, and subject to the same flaws.
If you bothered to read past the first two sentences, you'd seen that I'm saying the difference is in attempting self-improvement. If you can't see religion as the attempt (and sometimes success) for self-improvement that it is, then maybe you need to review your pre-conceptions about who is not doing the thinking.
You talk about free-thought and about crutches, but it's funny how the grandparent is the one that mentioned the blanket stereotypes that you are defending with yet more boilerplate stereotypes. But, here's your chance to redeem yourself: Your homework is to post an explanation of why believing in a creator is antithetic to thought.
Well, if secularists don't claim the high moral ground, how can they call the religious camp "self-serving hypocrites?" Isn't calling someone a "self-serving hypocrite" implying that you are on a higher moral high ground? Isn't saying that you are a rotten human being, but you're not a hypocrite implying that you are in a higher moral plain that those you call "hypocrites"?
Are you seriously pretending that saying "I'm an ass, but I'm better than you because at least I don't believe in God" is an acceptable defense for anything?
BTW, I've yet to meet any seriously religious person that claims the moral high ground. Even my local priest won't claim that and will be the first one to tell you that he is deeply flawed. I've also met many elitist secularists that are full of themselves and see themselves as superior to those that disagree with them.
Personally I have not yet met that person. Most religious hypocrits only do what is good for them (hence the republican parties existence) and could care less about any one or any thing else. Some even actually admit this!
And all the seculars you've met are self-sacrificing "saints," right? I've got news for you: Most people, either religious or secular are self-serving hypocites. It's called Being Human (tm). Our first preocupation in life should not be on how flawed we are, but on what we do about it.
Please post comments about topics you actually know something about.
I suggest that you learn about what exchange rates are, how do they come about, and how do they impact economies. Comparing excange rates by themselves is like comparing two computers purely on the MHz rating of their CPUs.
As far as your first point, please read my response to 19thNervousBreakdown above, which will explain why a being that doesn't die is a hinderance to evolution (Hint: it has to do with environmental changes and resource-availability).
The answer to your second question is Yes. Death is most certainly hard-coded into biological systems down to the cellular level. When this hard-coded mechanism fails, we end-up with things like cancer.
As far as your point about failure, to each his own. Things like "failure" or "success" are loaded terms, but if by "failure" you mean that not being immortal is a disadvantage, so is reproduction if there is no death (and without reproduction there is no evolution). In reality, you need both reproduction and death acting in a dependable way in order for the whole process to work.
Your last point is a non-sequitur and evolution has little to do with existance. Evolution may shed just a tiny sliver of light into the "how" of existance, but it certanly has nothing to do with the "why". If you must know, I believe that God is my creator as well as the creator of evolution.
Excellent point. Without a programmed death reproduction may be a disadvantage.
In fact, things could be argued from a different approach. It could be possible that programmed cellular death is an adaptation for succesful reproduction. Without death we have the danger of overpopulation, a population crash, and the eventual death of everybody. Without reproduction we have the eventual extintion of the species as the environment changes but the species does not.
A population needs some sort of dependable death mechanism in order to keep it in balance with the environment's resources and it also needs reproduction in order to keep it adapting to changes on said environment. Without this "dependable" death, we would most likely not have ecosystems to begin with.
You're right. In the micro-sense of a single organism's life, death is "bad."
However, evolution is irrelevant when we talk about any single organism. Evolution involves many organisms and spans generations. Leaving aside religious and cosmological questions, in a strict sense the "purpose" of life is to perpetuate itself, and things such as death and evolution are the mechanisms that make that purpose possible.
The hangup is that nine times out of ten, illegal aliens can't get visas and that's why they become illegal aliens. Visas are very limited in number, and they aren't often awarded to the most deserving.
The visa system is a joke and should be overhauled, and though that's no excuse for breaking the law, you must admit that it takes huge cojones to risk you neck in order to sneak into a foreign country illegally, learn a new language, and hit a home run like these kids did. Ironically, very few things capture the American spirit of individualism, hard work, risk-taking, and a pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps attitude like stories such as this one.
Which talk show hosts are those? I listen to talk radio pretty much all day, and while I've occasionally heard from nutjob "vigilante" caller types, and the ocassional misguided host, I've never heard anyone use the term "crimaliens" anywhere. From what I've listened, I would say that the pro and con conservative hosts on this issue are roughly divided into 50-50 camps (you've got hosts like Prager, Medved and Hewitt on one side, and Ingraham, Limbaugh, and Schlessinger on the other).
For the record, I was also at one point an illegal alien. Now I'm a US citizen, and I live in California.
Hey, AC, put down your crack pipe and your tin foil hat for a minute and do some research on the subject. Hell, even the "Scientific American" magazine has dedicated an issue to debunking that crap.
1. The engine (or what was left of it) was found 300 yards, not six miles from crash site, in a direct line from the airliner's travel vector (i.e.- the engine part simply bounced across ground from the crash site until it came to rest).
2. There were indeed BIG scars in the ground. Just look at a few pictures.
3. Engines don't bounce 9 miles, but they certainly can bounce 300 yards and even substantially more.
4. When planes crash on the ground, especially if they still carry a substantial horizontal vector to their velocity (500 mph+ ground velocity), they will also break apart and spread debree yards or even miles forward of the impact zone (especially when there is also wind blowing from the 4 o'clock position from the plane's perspective).
And if you live in the West coast, there's the issue of coyotes and mountain lions, too. I've seen coyotes roaming the streets and busy avenues a few times, even in plain daylight and in rush hour.
In my neighborhood there isn't a single outdoors cat to be found anywhere. In the half-decade I've lived here, I've only seen a single cat outdoors, exactly once. I never did see that cat ever again.
That's interesting. I have a tank of African Chichlids, and some do seem to identify all of our family members.
When I and/or my wife and daughters at home the fish are usually swimming about, without a care in the world. When there is a visitor, say, a friend of mine that I haven't seen in awhile, the fish will hide and hardly show themselves. I've had some of those fish for nearly a decade (some chichlids can live for several decades), but I didn't start noticing that behaviour until a couple of years ago.
I don't think that chichlids are nearly as intelligent as octopi, but I'm still amazed that they seem to display that particular behavior.
Saddam was funded by a bunch of countries, each with its own set of selfish reasons (yes, including the US). However, if you actually read the timeline, you'd realize that Saddam was using WMDs just before and right at the time that the US began to influence the war financially.
Was that an unpleasant choice? Yes, but that also means that the WMDs Saddam used weren't American in origin, because he obviously had to have them before the US got involved on the whole mess (it requires time to build a WMD infrastructure, learn how to use it, train the troops, etc). But don't take my word for it, read the whole of the timeline yourself and you'll see that claims of American WMDs in Iraq just don't add up unless the US also had a secret time machine.
And what's with the Texas jab? If you can't discuss this without cheap shots, I'll stop taking you seriously.
How did this get modded up as insightful? The link points to a very extensive chronology of the Iran-Iraq war, but it doesn't seem to say anywhere that the US gave Saddam any WMDs.
Geez, moderators. Your rabid anti-Americanism is showing.
Weren't only 2 out of the 7 last US presidents Democrats? Clinton aside (who presided over the dot-com boom), maybe Democrat president's just haven't had much of a chance to damage the economy.
Yeah, but it's the same thing. A system (DVD player) is designed from simpler systems (electronic components). Such an argument can just as easily be used to support ID: Nature can be nothing more than a pre-designed set of systems. In this sense, we could only differentiate between man-made and God-made designs.
The argument of not knowning design vs. undesigned universes can only be applied to atheism or unintelligent design via a syntax trick: That concepts (such as "design") cannot be abstracted from the physical world. As you can see however, concepts can most certainly be abstracted and can exist by themselves (known as intellegibilia), so that's why I don't buy the argument that the universe can't be designed merely because we have no reference.
If you take away that "syntax trick" however, you do propose a very intriguing thought experiment, but one that can't be used as proof for atheist arguments.
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While some sort of absolute morality sounds nice, because it'd take all the work out of people having to figure out the grey areas for themselves, I don't see how religion fills this.
Again, you totally misrepresent religion. Are you just reading what you want to read out of what I type and ignore what you don't want to read? There will always be gray areas. I thought I made that perfectly clear by emphasizing that our interpretations can be flawed. My contention is that grey areas are no proof to the lack of a God. If you've studies philosophy then I'm sure that you're familiar with Plato's alegory of the cave and his Meno dialogues. These writings are good thought experiments of why it does not automatically follow that grey areas disprove the existence of absolutes (in Plato's case, of what he called the forms).
By the way, why can't more than one book have some "holyness" to it? After all, the very basic moralities of most religions seem to coincide at at their lowest levels. Of course there are differences, but more often than not there are far more similarities. I have a belief that many books are divinely inspired, but not all are holy. I also believe that some books that we take for holy are not. Catholicism for example, accepts different religions with open arms far more readily than your average secularist.
Another annoying thing about religionists is how they assume that everyone who isn't religious is an atheist, and make wild accusations along those lines. There's a difference between spirituality and religion. I don't claim to be terribly spiritual either, but I can plainly see the difference: religion is where a group of people center on a system of beliefs, and then use that somehow (whether to justify killing other "unbelievers" or "infidels", or whatever).
Point well taken. If I made references that assumed you were an atheists, I apologize. By the same token, your average secularists always assumes that those that are religious are brain dead.
Being called an atheist is rather insulting to me, because to me, an atheist is also a religious person: they have faith that no god exists.
You seem to be arguing against semantics, an argument that you cannot win because words have definite meanings. By definition, even by your own definition, religion is organized belief in an entity that's greater than humans. Atheists generally don't believe in anything greater than humanity. I agree with you in that atheism is "religious-like", but I wouldn't call it a religion.
But you see, the point of religion is that it is faith. Faith by definition cannot be proven. If you expect proof before you believe, you'll never believe and you'll never experience proof. Proof may or may not come after you believe. It's just the very definition of the word "faith." That's why religion and science are two totally different things, which brings me to your next point:
Any inquisitive person seeks answers for how things work, why the universe is the way it is, etc. The best system that's been devised for this so far is the Scientific Method
You may need to think about your definition of science. Science never seeks to answer "why." The scientific method is designed to answer mostly the "hows" of our universe, not the "whys". The whys are first and foremost the realm of spirituality and metaphysics. You seem to commit a common fallacy in that you believe that science and religion are at odds which each other, which is the same fallacy that many religious fundamentalists commit. In fact,
That's very true. It probably has to do with other marketing issues, but you are right in that it's not because of the current styles.
How is it that you need to believe in some "higher being" in order to try to improve yourself? I would think most people would want to improve themselves for their own sake,
OK, so what's your standard for improvement, yourself? If so, then why do you need any improvement? If you don't see any improvement between religious vs. atheist then it's perhaps because you don't want to see it. Anyone who is better than you but is religous you perceive as being no better because he is religous. Cognitive dissonance can be a bitch, can't it? It also can be the beginning of bigotry.
But now you've convieniently have avoided my challenge. It's funny that you are the one that is the "free thinker" but yet you won't prove that by answering. It's your burden of proof since you're the enlightened one, not mine. I'm just a close-minded moron, remember?
But I'll answer just the same. Keep in mind that my answer comes from an "inferior" brain. To begin with, your question is heavily loaded. If you predispose that religion is just superstition and myths they you are not seeking to discover truth (once again, I recommend that you lay off the old, tired stereotypes for a change). It's the old "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" type of loaded question, the sort that comes from a closed mind.
Religion, above all, is a codified system of beliefs and norms more than it is "superstitions and myths." It's design allows standards that are higher than any one person. Whether you agree with the standards or not is not the point. At the moment I'm just giving you some background.
Those who seek religion seek answers. In particular, many of those answers pertain to those standards of ethics and morality and of good and bad. The one requirement for the whole system is belief that those standards are authoritative, in other words, a requirement on faith that God is the source of those absolutes. However, faith that our interpretation of those standards is accurate is misplaced faith. Therein lies the root of your attacks on religion. You seem to believe that because we, as humans, sometimes misinterpret them, fixed standards (as well as its source, God,) must not exists. It's akin to believing that because people rob banks, laws agains robbery are an illusion and don't really exist.
That is the reason why, in particular, in christianity, the Bible is read, re-read, and studied so much: Precisely because we want to get our understanding of it right, and precisely because our understanding is open to question. Not because we believe it isn't the word of God, but because we believe in truly comprehending something that comes from God. In this sense, faith requires both belief and an open mind.
In fact, I agree with you that those few close-minded fundamentalists zealots that take each word in the Bible literally are wrong. Except that I thing that they are wrong because they don't understand religion, a similar phenomenon of why you think that religion is wrong because you don't understand it.
If you put the concept of religion and free thought in a historical context, you'd realize that the church has embodied free thought throughout the ages. The Acts of the Apostles, a good read, records the free-thought process of the first chirstians as they struggled to make sense of the word of God. Further down the line we have the reformation, in which Martin Luther splintered from the Catholic church because of intellectual disagreements. Then we have the first scientists, such as Gregor Mendel (a monk). We also have some of the most influential ph
Many stores have a "no camera" policy, including supermarkets. As long as those stores are private property, they are well within their right to place such restrictions.
I guess that all that you've demonstrated with that +3 insightful modded comment is that free speech doesn't go as far as disagreeing with the Slashdot hive-mind's beliefs.
If you read my post, it speaks about the nature of human beings, and says nothing about how well one group does in relation to another at managing that nature. It simply says that both secularists and religious people are human, and subject to the same flaws.
If you bothered to read past the first two sentences, you'd seen that I'm saying the difference is in attempting self-improvement. If you can't see religion as the attempt (and sometimes success) for self-improvement that it is, then maybe you need to review your pre-conceptions about who is not doing the thinking.
You talk about free-thought and about crutches, but it's funny how the grandparent is the one that mentioned the blanket stereotypes that you are defending with yet more boilerplate stereotypes. But, here's your chance to redeem yourself: Your homework is to post an explanation of why believing in a creator is antithetic to thought.
Are you seriously pretending that saying "I'm an ass, but I'm better than you because at least I don't believe in God" is an acceptable defense for anything?
BTW, I've yet to meet any seriously religious person that claims the moral high ground. Even my local priest won't claim that and will be the first one to tell you that he is deeply flawed. I've also met many elitist secularists that are full of themselves and see themselves as superior to those that disagree with them.
On another note, why are you posting anonymously?
And all the seculars you've met are self-sacrificing "saints," right? I've got news for you: Most people, either religious or secular are self-serving hypocites. It's called Being Human (tm). Our first preocupation in life should not be on how flawed we are, but on what we do about it.
I suggest that you learn about what exchange rates are, how do they come about, and how do they impact economies. Comparing excange rates by themselves is like comparing two computers purely on the MHz rating of their CPUs.
The answer to your second question is Yes. Death is most certainly hard-coded into biological systems down to the cellular level. When this hard-coded mechanism fails, we end-up with things like cancer.
As far as your point about failure, to each his own. Things like "failure" or "success" are loaded terms, but if by "failure" you mean that not being immortal is a disadvantage, so is reproduction if there is no death (and without reproduction there is no evolution). In reality, you need both reproduction and death acting in a dependable way in order for the whole process to work.
Your last point is a non-sequitur and evolution has little to do with existance. Evolution may shed just a tiny sliver of light into the "how" of existance, but it certanly has nothing to do with the "why". If you must know, I believe that God is my creator as well as the creator of evolution.
In fact, things could be argued from a different approach. It could be possible that programmed cellular death is an adaptation for succesful reproduction. Without death we have the danger of overpopulation, a population crash, and the eventual death of everybody. Without reproduction we have the eventual extintion of the species as the environment changes but the species does not.
A population needs some sort of dependable death mechanism in order to keep it in balance with the environment's resources and it also needs reproduction in order to keep it adapting to changes on said environment. Without this "dependable" death, we would most likely not have ecosystems to begin with.
However, evolution is irrelevant when we talk about any single organism. Evolution involves many organisms and spans generations. Leaving aside religious and cosmological questions, in a strict sense the "purpose" of life is to perpetuate itself, and things such as death and evolution are the mechanisms that make that purpose possible.
Death is what allows evolution to occur in the first place. Without death, organisms couldn't be replaced by ever improving versions of themselves.
I'm just curious as to what kind of person would use a word such as that.
The visa system is a joke and should be overhauled, and though that's no excuse for breaking the law, you must admit that it takes huge cojones to risk you neck in order to sneak into a foreign country illegally, learn a new language, and hit a home run like these kids did. Ironically, very few things capture the American spirit of individualism, hard work, risk-taking, and a pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps attitude like stories such as this one.
Which talk show hosts are those? I listen to talk radio pretty much all day, and while I've occasionally heard from nutjob "vigilante" caller types, and the ocassional misguided host, I've never heard anyone use the term "crimaliens" anywhere. From what I've listened, I would say that the pro and con conservative hosts on this issue are roughly divided into 50-50 camps (you've got hosts like Prager, Medved and Hewitt on one side, and Ingraham, Limbaugh, and Schlessinger on the other). For the record, I was also at one point an illegal alien. Now I'm a US citizen, and I live in California.
Hey, AC, put down your crack pipe and your tin foil hat for a minute and do some research on the subject. Hell, even the "Scientific American" magazine has dedicated an issue to debunking that crap. 1. The engine (or what was left of it) was found 300 yards, not six miles from crash site, in a direct line from the airliner's travel vector (i.e.- the engine part simply bounced across ground from the crash site until it came to rest). 2. There were indeed BIG scars in the ground. Just look at a few pictures. 3. Engines don't bounce 9 miles, but they certainly can bounce 300 yards and even substantially more. 4. When planes crash on the ground, especially if they still carry a substantial horizontal vector to their velocity (500 mph+ ground velocity), they will also break apart and spread debree yards or even miles forward of the impact zone (especially when there is also wind blowing from the 4 o'clock position from the plane's perspective).
In my neighborhood there isn't a single outdoors cat to be found anywhere. In the half-decade I've lived here, I've only seen a single cat outdoors, exactly once. I never did see that cat ever again.
When I and/or my wife and daughters at home the fish are usually swimming about, without a care in the world. When there is a visitor, say, a friend of mine that I haven't seen in awhile, the fish will hide and hardly show themselves. I've had some of those fish for nearly a decade (some chichlids can live for several decades), but I didn't start noticing that behaviour until a couple of years ago.
I don't think that chichlids are nearly as intelligent as octopi, but I'm still amazed that they seem to display that particular behavior.
Was that an unpleasant choice? Yes, but that also means that the WMDs Saddam used weren't American in origin, because he obviously had to have them before the US got involved on the whole mess (it requires time to build a WMD infrastructure, learn how to use it, train the troops, etc). But don't take my word for it, read the whole of the timeline yourself and you'll see that claims of American WMDs in Iraq just don't add up unless the US also had a secret time machine.
And what's with the Texas jab? If you can't discuss this without cheap shots, I'll stop taking you seriously.
Geez, moderators. Your rabid anti-Americanism is showing.
Weren't only 2 out of the 7 last US presidents Democrats? Clinton aside (who presided over the dot-com boom), maybe Democrat president's just haven't had much of a chance to damage the economy.
Aren't only 2 of the last 7 presidents were democrats?
-Rome lasted 1,100 years? Check
The argument of not knowning design vs. undesigned universes can only be applied to atheism or unintelligent design via a syntax trick: That concepts (such as "design") cannot be abstracted from the physical world. As you can see however, concepts can most certainly be abstracted and can exist by themselves (known as intellegibilia), so that's why I don't buy the argument that the universe can't be designed merely because we have no reference.
If you take away that "syntax trick" however, you do propose a very intriguing thought experiment, but one that can't be used as proof for atheist arguments.