Since there are good , scientific reasons to believe that the embryo is a human being, then there is a strong case to be made against embryonic stem cell research.
If that's true, then there's an even stronger case to be made against in-vitro fertilization (aka test-tube babies, aka reproductive therapy).
To save money, the doctors always make a bunch of embryos at once, then implant them one at a time until one starts growing. Once the pregancy is going well, the leftovers are just thrown out. MURDER! And it's hundreds of times as common as stem-cell research would be. We must ban it right away!
AC: For thousands of years nearly every culture on earth has understood, at least in general terms, that first comes conception and then nine months later a baby pops out.
Not quite correct. Many cultures don't even consider the baby a person until well after she's born, and allow the parents to quietly dispose of an unwanted child without fuss.
Ceremonys like baptism are often when the infant becomes officially "born".
Orthodox rabbis, for example, won't hold a funeral for a baby who died after less than a week. They think it'll make everyone feel more comfortable to pretend it was just a kind of miscarriage, and not a dead person at all.
is a *statement*, so I might as well vote with the candidate whose views most closely align with my own
But you still have to choose what statement you want to make.
By voting LP, you (and 100s of others like you, I'm assuming) give them a fraction of a percentage point higher in national polling, which will be ignored and forgotten by Nov 4th.
By voting Kerry, you might be able to push him up to winning the popular vote, even if he loses the electoral college. That will both reduce Bush's effectiness in office (because he'll be percieved to lack a mandate), and encourage future election reform in the USA (such as abolition of the Electoral College)
So it depends on whether you put more priority on a pro-Libertarian or anti-Bush message.
The fact is that "assault weapons" aren't any more dangerous than hunting rifles or any other semi-automatic firearms. In fact they're *less* powerful than many hunting rifles.
So if you had 10 friends, and you all decided to kill 1000 kids in a school, you'd prefer hunting rifles above AK-47s?
It's bizarre that Bush can claim to be the strongest anti-terrorism candidate, when he's allowing terrorists to buy these excellent tools from right inside the USA.
False. Americans have been killed by terrorist anthrax. That attack wasn't prevented, nor was the perpetrator caught.
You might say "That was just a few people, that's barely anything"... but the fact remains that Sep01 was not the most recent terrorist strike on USA soil.
I don't think you do! I suspect that most people prefer to see their enemies at the most laughable, and would rather watch the defeat of yet another hapless strawman then face the discomfort of a serious challenge to their beliefs. At least, judging from ratings, that's what viewers want...
and since there is no known way to prove or disprove the existence of a God
Certainly there is, for a specific definition of God.
Gods in general, when defined only as "beings tremendously more powerful than any human can hope to be", cannot be disproved. But if one makes a more precise claim, such as "God is good and powerful and loves me and is watching over me", then it can be tested.
In the case of that definition, you just need to tear out the claimant's intestines with a pitchfork. If God jumps out and stops you, then he exists. If not, then either God isn't good, or he's not powerful, or he wasn't watching, or he just doesn't exist at all. Any of those 4 interpretations means that God, as defined, doesn't exist.
It also demonstrates that either Superman doesn't exist, or he wasn't within x-ray vision range at the time. Otherwise, he'd have stopped you. And it further demonstrates that a SWAT team wasn't watching you with infra-red googles from outside your window, or they too would've stopped you.
Observing that any evil exists in the world is sufficient to disprove the simplistic Christian definition of God. If heaven were a possibility, we'd already be there.
I wish threads like this didn't mod down to zero so quickly...
One also has to remember that creationism as depicted in Genesis does not outline the specific rise of life on our planet
Oh yes it does. Genesis states that for a few days the universe and world was made, and then for each following day a new category of life-forms was created.
nor does it rule out evolution as a post-creation process, nor does it rule out evolution as a mechanism of creation.
Yes it does. It states that human beings were artificially created by God a mere 24 hours after chimpanzees, but were not descended from apes in any way.
"Creationism" is not the belief that the universe, planet, or forms of life were artificially created by a deity. That's too general. "Creationism", as used by those who call themselves "creationists", is a belief in the literal accuracy of the book of Genesis.
It appears that several posters in this thread have made the mistake of confusing creationism with the belief that a God created the universe (and then prehaps stood back and let nature fill in the details). That's quite different.
I'm more interested on why people assume that it has to be creationism OR evolution.
Evolution: All known animals share a common ancestor species (or at most only a handful of different predecessors)
Creationism: All animals species were created in approximately their present form within the same week, all independently from each other. One week there was nothing, the next week the earth had a population of plants, animals, and exactly 2 humans (one of whom was a clone of the other)
Re:Actually Bush stands to lose the "Christian Rig
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Bush vs. Kerry on Science
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
illegal alien amnesty
Illegal aliens are demographically Christian and more actively religious than the general USA population. Maybe the voting bloc called the "Christian Right" disapproves of them (for racist reasons?), but aliens are heavily Christian.
equivocation on supporting Israel
Bush seems pretty strong in support of Israel's administration. He brags he's been the first President to support a Palestinian state... which is funny, because he tries to spin it like that's pro-Palestine or pro-peace, when really it's just formalizing that the "Palestinans" will never be allowed back to the land conquered from them in Israel's "War for Independence"
Does the media's view accurately reflect the view of most Christians?
That's irrelevant. The question is, "does the media accurately present the Republicans' views?"
And at least in limited (but important) cases, they do. For example, Republicans are pro-war (and have attacked Kerry for calling himself "anti-war"). But no Christian, ever, should claim to be pro-war.
1. What is the price of a loaf of bread in your home city? Milk?
In the late 80s, reporters started springing these Qs onto candidates for fun. So today, their staff always reminds them the cost of bread, milk, and gas at the beginning of each new election. You'd have to be more creative to catch them. Try asking about a large pepperoni.
(Plus, on a smaller scale, the street price of milk is set by government regulation)
But whoever wrote it clearly isn't a scientist for they think that fusion produces electricity and "Hydrogen."
Fusion produces heat, which can be converted into electricity. Run some electric wires into a bottle of water and you get hydrogen. If you had cars that ran on hydrogen, they could therefore be powered by fusion plants, without needing Iraqi oil.
The details might not work out, but it's a plausible idea.
That's quite wrong. Lincoln wasn't a fighter at all. He even had a reputation for personal cowardice by avoiding brawls as a young man. And as a president, he stayed far away from the details of the Civil War, leaving that all to the generals.
Everything the guy has done has been to favor either corporate power-grabs, or his own re-election.
Not everything. He rushed into invading Iraq without waiting for a UN ultimatum, and that actually hurt his re-election.
If he'd allowed the UN time for one more go-around, then the war would've started in April 2004, and would just be winding down now. People are really unlikely to vote against the standing president while heavy military actions are still ongoing.
The first Pres Bush lost re-election because he invaded Iraq too early in his term. His son made the same mistake, although it looks like he'll still squeak by to 4 more years.
He's responsible for his decisions, not for his spelling.
Bush has no spelling mistakes on record- he has people to spell for him. USA politicians have been careful not to spell anything in public since the Quayle potato fisasco.
Clinton never went after Bin Laden, that was the problem.
Then why did he publish rules like this? Clinton at least had Al Quaida and the Taliban listed firmly as enemies, a policy Bush reversed.
Bush supports research/development and deployment of a missile defense system. Seeing as how he started this shortly after getting into office it seems
False. The national missile defense project was actually started by Congress during the Clinton administration. Oh my, if people can be this ignorant about topics they supposedly care about... there's not much hope for them, really.
It's guys like you who make me think the USA deserves another Bush administration.
and slams the President for trying to deploy these systems rapidly.
Which is correct, because anyone with a smidgen of aerospace or military knowledge can tell that they just won't work. Kerry allows for ongoing research on the possibility that someday we might come up with a way to make them work, but deploying them today is just throwing away dollars that could be used for REAL defense. (Like some of the new soldiers Kerry wants to hire, to go around and shoot terrorists)
North Korea HAS nuclear weapons NOW,
Yeah, and knowing that North Korea has nuclear weapons, Bush decided to go and invade... Iraq? Who we KNEW had none. Brilliant!
Woodward interviewed Bush privately. No transcript was released, and there certainly wasn't any video.
The point remains that Kerry has avoided the press for over a month.
Wha? He gives unsolicited speeches anytime he wants. Neither of them is avoiding reporters.
Besides, the topic is about seeing the candidates in unscripted settings, like debates. Kerry is really pushing for weekly debates, and Bush is evading the challenge.
But, when he says that "You've got a democracy in Pakistan" he implies that there is some kind of "good", satisfying or preferable situation in Pakistan.
Worse than that, he implies that his policy actually caused that. When really, Pakistan's government is in the same form as it was in 1999. And if anything, Bush has slowed Pakistan's democratic reforms, by allying with Musharraf's dictatorship for military support in Afganistan.
More likely, we'd rescind the mutual IP treaties, and allow companies here
That comment is incomprehensible without knowing where you live. Otherwise, the words "we" and "here" are complete mysteries.
It is true that it'd be silly for the USA to allow "importation of drugs from Canada", when they could just "import drug prices from Canada", skipping the pointless extra shipping.
reverse-engineered drugs
No such thing. Drugs are patented. As such, their secrets are published by USPTO, and reverse-engineering is needless.
Re:Not to self-aggrandize...
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Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
So a system that fails to give a minority what they want is a failure?
No. A system that gives a minority what they don't want, because they voted for what they want, is flawed. Any system which encourages non-sincere voting is imperfect.
If the majority of Republicans vote R->L->D,
False. Prehaps this math error has been underlying most of your other objections*. If the majority of Republicans pick RLD, the Democrats still win! It's only if all Republicans go for Libertarian second will the problem be avoided. (And nobody should expect unanimity!)
Step back from the RDL designations and just consider parties A,B,C. A & B are very similar, and have about 25% support. C is very different from them, and has 49% support (1% other/undecide). An A supporter would be happiest with A, but tolerate B (and vice-versa).
In the current USA system (highest count wins), if everyone votes for their favorite, C will always win. Either A or B will need to decide to give up and endorse B or A, to prevent the C landslide. The fact that so many people are forced to vote against their preference is considered a problem.
Now, if IRV were in place, what happens? Nothing's actually different. C always wins, unless the campaign for either A or B decides to drop out early. So IRV isn't actually too different from the current system- so why bother changing?
Under Concordet (or "pairwise") voting, on the other hand, all A supporters could confidently vote for "A>B,B>C,A>C", knowing that either A or B will win (since they collectively have 50% approval to C's 49%). Thus, political parties lose in power... there isn't the need for like-minded groups to have a "primary" election beforehand to avoid splitting their vote in the general election. 2000 could've had Bush, Gore, McCain, and Nader all in the election together.
* Your other fundamental error is assuming that Australia not being a "republic" has any bearing on how their votes work. A republic can be a 1-party dictatorship, for crying out loud!
Slashdot Mirror
WTF is wrong with leaving the details to generals?
Nothing's wrong with it. It just means that they're the fighters, and not you.
Since there are good , scientific reasons to believe that the embryo is a human being, then there is a strong case to be made against embryonic stem cell research.
If that's true, then there's an even stronger case to be made against in-vitro fertilization (aka test-tube babies, aka reproductive therapy).
To save money, the doctors always make a bunch of embryos at once, then implant them one at a time until one starts growing. Once the pregancy is going well, the leftovers are just thrown out. MURDER! And it's hundreds of times as common as stem-cell research would be. We must ban it right away!
AC: For thousands of years nearly every culture on earth has understood, at least in general terms, that first comes conception and then nine months later a baby pops out.
Not quite correct. Many cultures don't even consider the baby a person until well after she's born, and allow the parents to quietly dispose of an unwanted child without fuss.
Ceremonys like baptism are often when the infant becomes officially "born".
Orthodox rabbis, for example, won't hold a funeral for a baby who died after less than a week. They think it'll make everyone feel more comfortable to pretend it was just a kind of miscarriage, and not a dead person at all.
is a *statement*, so I might as well vote with the candidate whose views most closely align with my own
But you still have to choose what statement you want to make.
By voting LP, you (and 100s of others like you, I'm assuming) give them a fraction of a percentage point higher in national polling, which will be ignored and forgotten by Nov 4th.
By voting Kerry, you might be able to push him up to winning the popular vote, even if he loses the electoral college. That will both reduce Bush's effectiness in office (because he'll be percieved to lack a mandate), and encourage future election reform in the USA (such as abolition of the Electoral College)
So it depends on whether you put more priority on a pro-Libertarian or anti-Bush message.
The fact is that "assault weapons" aren't any more dangerous than hunting rifles or any other semi-automatic firearms. In fact they're *less* powerful than many hunting rifles.
So if you had 10 friends, and you all decided to kill 1000 kids in a school, you'd prefer hunting rifles above AK-47s?
It's bizarre that Bush can claim to be the strongest anti-terrorism candidate, when he's allowing terrorists to buy these excellent tools from right inside the USA.
Let's get this straight. First, you think that Kerry never did much in government:
Exactly what is his record on producing such legislation. Name 10. Name 9. Name 2
And then you decide to support the Libertarians, who don't want government to do anything:
I am voting LIBERTARIAN. With overriding moral platform of LIMITED Government
Sounds like Kerry is the man for you! With him leading the government, it won't do anything!
littered with hopes that a weapon will make a war "more humane"
The submachinegun made war a lot more "humane". It became possible to keep surrendered prisoners alive, instead of killing them all.
One could also argue that the lengthy war between the USA and USSR from 1951-1989 was relatively humane.
and none have gotten through yet
False. Americans have been killed by terrorist anthrax. That attack wasn't prevented, nor was the perpetrator caught.
You might say "That was just a few people, that's barely anything"... but the fact remains that Sep01 was not the most recent terrorist strike on USA soil.
I believe I speak for many of us when
I don't think you do! I suspect that most people prefer to see their enemies at the most laughable, and would rather watch the defeat of yet another hapless strawman then face the discomfort of a serious challenge to their beliefs. At least, judging from ratings, that's what viewers want...
and since there is no known way to prove or disprove the existence of a God
Certainly there is, for a specific definition of God.
Gods in general, when defined only as "beings tremendously more powerful than any human can hope to be", cannot be disproved. But if one makes a more precise claim, such as "God is good and powerful and loves me and is watching over me", then it can be tested.
In the case of that definition, you just need to tear out the claimant's intestines with a pitchfork. If God jumps out and stops you, then he exists. If not, then either God isn't good, or he's not powerful, or he wasn't watching, or he just doesn't exist at all. Any of those 4 interpretations means that God, as defined, doesn't exist.
It also demonstrates that either Superman doesn't exist, or he wasn't within x-ray vision range at the time. Otherwise, he'd have stopped you. And it further demonstrates that a SWAT team wasn't watching you with infra-red googles from outside your window, or they too would've stopped you.
Observing that any evil exists in the world is sufficient to disprove the simplistic Christian definition of God. If heaven were a possibility, we'd already be there.
Why are you afraid? If it is sham science then it will have no evidence and be obvious.
Creationism, if handled honestly in a science class, will be absolutely demolished.
Therefore, requiring public school students to attend that class will consitute an infringment of their religious freedoms...
I wish threads like this didn't mod down to zero so quickly...
One also has to remember that creationism as depicted in Genesis does not outline the specific rise of life on our planet
Oh yes it does. Genesis states that for a few days the universe and world was made, and then for each following day a new category of life-forms was created.
nor does it rule out evolution as a post-creation process, nor does it rule out evolution as a mechanism of creation.
Yes it does. It states that human beings were artificially created by God a mere 24 hours after chimpanzees, but were not descended from apes in any way.
"Creationism" is not the belief that the universe, planet, or forms of life were artificially created by a deity. That's too general. "Creationism", as used by those who call themselves "creationists", is a belief in the literal accuracy of the book of Genesis.
It appears that several posters in this thread have made the mistake of confusing creationism with the belief that a God created the universe (and then prehaps stood back and let nature fill in the details). That's quite different.
I'm more interested on why people assume that it has to be creationism OR evolution.
Evolution: All known animals share a common ancestor species (or at most only a handful of different predecessors)
Creationism: All animals species were created in approximately their present form within the same week, all independently from each other. One week there was nothing, the next week the earth had a population of plants, animals, and exactly 2 humans (one of whom was a clone of the other)
Oh, that would be adult.
I don't see any tigers around, do you?
illegal alien amnesty
Illegal aliens are demographically Christian and more actively religious than the general USA population. Maybe the voting bloc called the "Christian Right" disapproves of them (for racist reasons?), but aliens are heavily Christian.
equivocation on supporting Israel
Bush seems pretty strong in support of Israel's administration. He brags he's been the first President to support a Palestinian state... which is funny, because he tries to spin it like that's pro-Palestine or pro-peace, when really it's just formalizing that the "Palestinans" will never be allowed back to the land conquered from them in Israel's "War for Independence"
Does the media's view accurately reflect the view of most Christians?
That's irrelevant. The question is, "does the media accurately present the Republicans' views?"
And at least in limited (but important) cases, they do. For example, Republicans are pro-war (and have attacked Kerry for calling himself "anti-war"). But no Christian, ever, should claim to be pro-war.
WWJB?
1. What is the price of a loaf of bread in your home city? Milk?
In the late 80s, reporters started springing these Qs onto candidates for fun. So today, their staff always reminds them the cost of bread, milk, and gas at the beginning of each new election. You'd have to be more creative to catch them. Try asking about a large pepperoni.
(Plus, on a smaller scale, the street price of milk is set by government regulation)
But whoever wrote it clearly isn't a scientist for they think that fusion produces electricity and "Hydrogen."
Fusion produces heat, which can be converted into electricity. Run some electric wires into a bottle of water and you get hydrogen. If you had cars that ran on hydrogen, they could therefore be powered by fusion plants, without needing Iraqi oil.
The details might not work out, but it's a plausible idea.
Lincoln, all of these were fighters.
That's quite wrong. Lincoln wasn't a fighter at all. He even had a reputation for personal cowardice by avoiding brawls as a young man. And as a president, he stayed far away from the details of the Civil War, leaving that all to the generals.
Everything the guy has done has been to favor either corporate power-grabs, or his own re-election.
Not everything. He rushed into invading Iraq without waiting for a UN ultimatum, and that actually hurt his re-election.
If he'd allowed the UN time for one more go-around, then the war would've started in April 2004, and would just be winding down now. People are really unlikely to vote against the standing president while heavy military actions are still ongoing.
The first Pres Bush lost re-election because he invaded Iraq too early in his term. His son made the same mistake, although it looks like he'll still squeak by to 4 more years.
He's responsible for his decisions, not for his spelling.
Bush has no spelling mistakes on record- he has people to spell for him. USA politicians have been careful not to spell anything in public since the Quayle potato fisasco.
Clinton never went after Bin Laden, that was the problem.
Then why did he publish rules like this? Clinton at least had Al Quaida and the Taliban listed firmly as enemies, a policy Bush reversed.
Bush supports research/development and deployment of a missile defense system. Seeing as how he started this shortly after getting into office it seems
False. The national missile defense project was actually started by Congress during the Clinton administration. Oh my, if people can be this ignorant about topics they supposedly care about... there's not much hope for them, really.
It's guys like you who make me think the USA deserves another Bush administration.
and slams the President for trying to deploy these systems rapidly.
Which is correct, because anyone with a smidgen of aerospace or military knowledge can tell that they just won't work. Kerry allows for ongoing research on the possibility that someday we might come up with a way to make them work, but deploying them today is just throwing away dollars that could be used for REAL defense. (Like some of the new soldiers Kerry wants to hire, to go around and shoot terrorists)
North Korea HAS nuclear weapons NOW,
Yeah, and knowing that North Korea has nuclear weapons, Bush decided to go and invade... Iraq? Who we KNEW had none. Brilliant!
You didn't address Woodward, that's fine.
Woodward interviewed Bush privately. No transcript was released, and there certainly wasn't any video.
The point remains that Kerry has avoided the press for over a month.
Wha? He gives unsolicited speeches anytime he wants. Neither of them is avoiding reporters.
Besides, the topic is about seeing the candidates in unscripted settings, like debates. Kerry is really pushing for weekly debates, and Bush is evading the challenge.
But, when he says that "You've got a democracy in Pakistan" he implies that there is some kind of "good", satisfying or preferable situation in Pakistan.
Worse than that, he implies that his policy actually caused that. When really, Pakistan's government is in the same form as it was in 1999. And if anything, Bush has slowed Pakistan's democratic reforms, by allying with Musharraf's dictatorship for military support in Afganistan.
More likely, we'd rescind the mutual IP treaties, and allow companies here
That comment is incomprehensible without knowing where you live. Otherwise, the words "we" and "here" are complete mysteries.
It is true that it'd be silly for the USA to allow "importation of drugs from Canada", when they could just "import drug prices from Canada", skipping the pointless extra shipping.
reverse-engineered drugs
No such thing. Drugs are patented. As such, their secrets are published by USPTO, and reverse-engineering is needless.
So a system that fails to give a minority what they want is a failure?
No. A system that gives a minority what they don't want, because they voted for what they want, is flawed. Any system which encourages non-sincere voting is imperfect.
If the majority of Republicans vote R->L->D,
False. Prehaps this math error has been underlying most of your other objections*. If the majority of Republicans pick RLD, the Democrats still win! It's only if all Republicans go for Libertarian second will the problem be avoided. (And nobody should expect unanimity!)
Step back from the RDL designations and just consider parties A,B,C. A & B are very similar, and have about 25% support. C is very different from them, and has 49% support (1% other/undecide). An A supporter would be happiest with A, but tolerate B (and vice-versa).
In the current USA system (highest count wins), if everyone votes for their favorite, C will always win. Either A or B will need to decide to give up and endorse B or A, to prevent the C landslide. The fact that so many people are forced to vote against their preference is considered a problem.
Now, if IRV were in place, what happens? Nothing's actually different. C always wins, unless the campaign for either A or B decides to drop out early. So IRV isn't actually too different from the current system- so why bother changing?
Under Concordet (or "pairwise") voting, on the other hand, all A supporters could confidently vote for "A>B,B>C,A>C", knowing that either A or B will win (since they collectively have 50% approval to C's 49%). Thus, political parties lose in power... there isn't the need for like-minded groups to have a "primary" election beforehand to avoid splitting their vote in the general election. 2000 could've had Bush, Gore, McCain, and Nader all in the election together.
* Your other fundamental error is assuming that Australia not being a "republic" has any bearing on how their votes work. A republic can be a 1-party dictatorship, for crying out loud!