er..only in every circustance you mentioned it's been an attempt to stop a group (nation's army) that was using force to impose their terms on another country's soil: no quite the same 11 or so people hijacking a passenger aircraft.
The original quote, as written, makes no distiction at all between situations. It simply says, flat-out that: "any group using force to project its terms is a terrorist group". Certainly the Allies in World War 2 or any other conceivable war, no matter how just, fits that definition. At the very least, the original statement needs to be amended in some way. Maybe it needs the caveat "under certain circumstances, it's okay to use force when the other guy does it to you first" or something along those lines? I could come up with other exceptions to this rule. Thus, the simplistic statement, "Any group using force to project its terms is a terrorist group" is very obviously false when there are no qualifiers to that statement.
> Any group using force to project its terms is a terrorist group.
Indeed, that's why all World War 2 vets are actually terrorists. It doesn't matter if your enemy is the loathsome Nazis or headed by a self-proclaimed deity on earth (Imperial Japan) who invaded China and killed millions of Chinese. Imposing force is always terrorism. For that matter, when cops impose force on me after robbing a bank - they're terrorists. When will people learn that a big peace rally would've stopped the Nazis dead in their tracks?
Amuplex is not technically a parasite, but something known as an exoparasitoid. In other words, a free-living adult lays an egg outside a host, and then the larva crawls into the host. One could easily imagine the ancestors of Ampulex as wasps that laid their eggs near dead insects--as some species do today. These corpse-feeding ancestors then evolved into wasps that attacked living hosts. Likewise, it's not hard to envision an Ampulex-like wasp evolving into full-blown parasitoids that inject their eggs directly into their hosts, as many species do today.
Once the wasps started attacking the roach hosts, there some selection pressure for the wasps to keep the roaches alive as long as possible. Ultimately, evolution favored the ones who stung the roaches in the brain in this manner.
I happened to do a websearch on this. Came up with something interesting:
The complete quote (as produced by Malkin):
"Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I'm writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances. I don't regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark."
In bold are the sections that the NY Times used:
"Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I'm writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances. I don't regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark."
In a Bush speech two months ago, Bush quoted Starr as well. In bold are the sections that Bush quoted in his speech:
"Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I'm writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances. I don't regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/11/20 051130-2.html
I had to smile at the symmetry of the distortions. The NYTimes used one section of the quote and ignored the rest, and Bush ignored those sections and used only the rest.
>I've always found it perplexing that the ID crowd and the Evolutionist crowd can never seem to get along. It seems to me that there is no real conflict of interest: is it not possible that God created evolution?
And a great number of people do take that position. (See Ken Miller's "Finding Darwins God".) There are some (like Dawkins) who want to say evolution disproves God's existence. And lots of ID advocates that use ID as a lever to *prove* God's existence. That's the problem here: ID advocates and creationists need their God to be necessary. Evolution means that God might exist and might not - which is clearly not good enough for many religious people.
> That seems to satisfy both camps if they just let it.
No, that satisfies a lot of evolutionists. (Most scientists identify themselves as "theistic evolutionists" which means that they believe God got things rolling using evolution.) That idea is hated by the ID and creationist crowd.
> "When you do things right, people won't be sure if you did anything at all."
Exactly right. BTW, did you know that I secretly prevented you from being in a car accident earlier today? I did it right, and that's why you never even knew I did anything at all.
The article talks quite a bit about fossil evidence, but what about the genetic evidence? If you look at the variability of human genetics, you find that europeans aren't very genetically diverse. Similarly, American Indians aren't very genetically diverse, and Asians aren't either. Africans, on the other hand, are very genetically diverse. What this indicates is that the human race' history in Africa goes back much further than anywhere else. It appears that a subset of Africans left Africa and colonized the rest of the world. Here's a short article that talks about human genetic diversity compared to their location:
http://info.med.yale.edu/genetics/kkidd/point.htmlhttp://www.umich.edu/news/?Releases/2005/Oct05/r10 1805
> Sometimes to reach a gloablly optimal path, you have to take a locally suboptimal path. So long as one mutation doesn't completely destroy an organism, the mutation, even if immediately unhelpful, can serve as a stepping stone to future, more helpful mutations or advantages in changing environments.
(nod) Actually, you might be interested to know that the researchers on the Avida program (which does digital organism evolution) have noticed this phenomena in their work - an organism would gain a slight detrimental mutation which puts it in place to gain a much larger benefitial mutation.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 1
I hope you realize how much you sound like those people who stayed in New Orleans when Katrina hit. See, the Gulf Coast gets hit all the time. Yet, people were saying that under the right conditions, there would be a disaster. Well, you get hit by a few light hurricanes and you think "it's all sensationalist media". But, eventually it happens - something big hits.
That's the problem here: you get lulled into ignoring all warnings because of false warnings. You point to the false warnings and erroneously conclude that all warnings are false warnings. I'm not saying H5N1 will be the big one. It probably won't. But, sooner or later, it's going to happen.
Re:There's is a reason
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
> That's one of the reason we didn't see a Ebola pandemia
Actually, the reason we don't see an Ebola epidemic is because ebola is spread by contact with blood and/or secretions of an infected person. I'm sure you're aware that flus spread easier than that. The one thing ebola had going for it was the fact it caused people to bleed. Other than that, it's not much more virulent than AIDS.
I'd also point-out something else: the Black Death killed very quickly - most people died four to seven days after infection, which is about the same amount of time that H5N1 takes to kill a person. Your "whole family drops dead the same evening" scenario is not realistic given what we already know about H5N1.
The Black Death is believed to be carried by fleas on rats. The rats (along with lots of other mammals) were dying from the Black Death as well. So, your "if a flu virus like H5N1 can both cross infect birds, but is almost harmless to them, and humans, and is highly lethal," scenario doesn't need to be true in order for H5N1 to be a big problem.
So, the Black Death was killing its hosts and doing it quickly, but that didn't stop it from wiping out a third of europe's population within a few years. In many cities, it wiped out 50-60% of the population. So, the Black Death had the attributes (according to you) would've caused it to burn itself out too quickly to be a real problem. Yet, it killed 1/3rd of europe's population.
The danger will be if a flu virus like H5N1 can both cross infect birds, but is almost harmless to them, and humans, and is highly lethal, then there's some chance of such a "everyone drops suddenly dead" scenario....
I don't think this is the danger. We're talking about the possibility of millions of deaths, which is less severe that your "everyone drops suddenly dead scenario", but also more likely to happen.
Except that the Vatican has a long history of compromising key articles of faith to keep the peace. A compromising faith is the folly of much of catholicism, sadly.
Well, the catholic church is trying to make peace with reality - trying to reconcile their religion with the facts. Once you become fully aware of the evidence for evolution, you realize that something has to give. You can't simultaneously believe in a six-day creation 6,000 years ago and constantly be confronted with the geological and biological evidences of an old earth (assuming you are in a position to see those things) and feel good about it. The fundamentalists, on the other hand, are actively denying the facts - hence there is no need to reconcile their faith with them.
I would suggest that you read some good books on evolution. I would also suggest that you avoid sites like AIG who are trying to confuse the whole subject. I went to a Christian college, and I saw a LOT of professors struggling with the evolution debate. They would just flat out say, "Look, there's a LOT of evidence for evolution. You can't just wish it away." I don't know of any of them that were six-day creationists. They have every reason to deny the reality of evolution, but, being very aware of the relevant literature, they were actively seeking ways to rectify the evolutionary evidence with their faith. They were not ignorant. They were not bullied into teaching evolution. They really, sincerely knew there was major problems with six-day creationism and that some sort of very old, big-bang, evolution-of-life theory was plainly better. I came to the same conclusion on my own. I think fundamentalists, on the other hand, are entirely disconnected from the relevant literature and lulled into a belief their their six-day creation ideas valid by demagogues who see their fight against evolution as a holy battle to save souls. And I say that as a former six-day-creation Christian fundamentalist.
It's this watering down of basic Christianity that has allowed the really dangerous belief systems to infiltrate (PC-veilied Pantheism in the US and pacific, and Islam in Europe, Africa and the former Soviet countries).
Think the dark ages were bad? Wait till you see what's around the corner.
That reminds me of something someone once said about the creation/evolution debate. They said, "Ask a creationist what they think will happen if evolutionary theory becomes more widely accepted." He went on to say that creationists inevitably go on to list a number of horrible societal consequences. It struck me, then, how the debate was not about the facts or evidence for evolution and creationism, but rather that there was a large amount of fear that was being pushed into creationist minds. This fear prevents any critical analysis of the facts whatsoever, but rather, provokes the fears in the minds of creationists to fight, fight, fight against evolution or "the world is doomed!"
It varies from place to place. Most protestants don't view Catholics as non-Christian. However, you don't have to look very far to find examples of protestant anti-catholicism.
"...there are still over 50 million precious people in just the U.S. alone that are deceived by Roman Catholicism's false 'gospel' and are headed for eternity in hell. World wide there are one billion looking to the pope, his Virgin Mary goddess, and their wafer god for salvation." http://www.chick.com/reading/comics/0112/albertosd eath.asp
Well, yes, "per capita" might arguably be a "fair" way to look at things. However, if China's pollution, per capita, equals that of the existing developed nations (e.g. Western Europe, US, Canada), we'll really have a huge pollution problem. Keep in mind that China has more people than the US, Europe, and Russia combined. So when you say, "Let's talk per capita. Because that's really what matters.", the fact of the matter is that "per capita" isn't at all what "really matters". What really matters is the absolute amount of pollution. And China is rapidly modernizing. So, no, China is not polluting more than it "should be" for it's population, but if China ever gets to the point of "polluting as much as it should for its population" the world will have a huge pollution problem.
Re:Scientists need to stop playing God!
on
The Los Alamos Bug
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· Score: 1
Am I the only one who is slightly disturbed by this trend for scientists to attempt to usurp the powers of our Almighty Creator?
Indeed. And this whole medicine thing -- we have usurped from the Almighty the decision of whether people live or die.
Is direct purchasing enough of an incentive for your average gamer to shell out money on something he's never heard of before?
Well, you may want to provide a free demo version. That's what I'm planning to do with my game. That way people aren't making a completely blind decision whether to buy or not.
Based on the moderation that followed, I would say that "some people" don't like it when popular theories get questioned. Which just goes to show you--once a scientific "fact" has been established, our attachment to it becomes as dogmatic as any theological notion...
You're exactly right. This is also why our scientific ideas - like our theological ideas - haven't changed in thousands of years.
I'm going to switch to this as soon as I can. If someone else comes up with something better in two or three years, I'll just move all my documents over to the new system... uh. wait. oh crap.
That may be, but there are problems with saying that day = long period of time. First, you'll note that plants are created before the sun. Now it might be plausible to say that plants survived without the light of the sun for 24 hours, but if you start saying "one day = millions/billions of years", you run into trouble. Also, there's the heat issue. Without the sun, the temperature of the earth would be near absolute zero. (Although if you believed in literal 24 hours, you might get away with saying that God heated up the earth until the sun arrived 24 hours later.)
Gen 1:11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, [and] the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed [is] in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
Gen 1:12 And the earth brought forth grass, [and] herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed [was] in itself, after his kind: and God saw that [it was] good.
Gen 1:13 And the evening and the morning were the third day. ...
Gen 1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: [he made] the stars also.
Second, the sequence of creation is wrong when compared to evolutionary history. The Genesis story has sea creatures, whales, and birds created on the fourth day. It has land animals created on the fifth day. But, evolutionarily speaking, birds and whales are descendents of land animals - they should not appear until after the land animals.
Gen 1:20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl [that] may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
Gen 1:21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that [it was] good. ...
Gen 1:23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
Gen 1:24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
In the end, I don't think you can get by saying that "day = millions/billions of years" because it does not resolve the differences between Genesis and evolution.
The "Great flood of 1656"? I guess you mean the flood of 2350 BC (based on a literal reading of Genesis would put it around 2350 BC - which is during the sixth Egyptian dynasty - which was, strangely enough, never interupted by a flood!) I suppose you're going to tell me that the spider was preserved in the amber because the world was actually flooded by amber rather than water, too?
Actually, you're right. At the beginning of Genesis the earth is "formless and void". However, A literal reading of the Bible does come up with a date of somewhere around 4000 BC for the *six days of creation* (where God creates the sun, stars, plants, animals, man - but not the earth). The date of 4000 BC is based on the Genesis information of each person's age when they "begat" a particular descendent. Using historical and Biblical information gives dates around 4000 BC for the six days of creation, and 2350 BC for the global flood (which, BTW, conflicts with known history which shows Egyptian dynasties going back to around 3000 BC, and plenty of pyramids predating 2350 BC).
... so this is potentially a very big market.
Assuming, of course, that you successfully convince them that they are too stupid to use a real computer. Good luck.
All the revenue-generating applications these days are on the Internet.
Really? I'm tech savy. The only "internet application" I've paid any money for in the past few years is online-taxes. And next year, I don't think I'll even be doing that. So, if "all the revenue-generating applications these days are on the Internet", then I guess very few people are actually making money.
Games are one of the big exceptions, but even PC games these days have to use the Internet in some way to be commercially viable.
What does "use the internet" have to do with the argument? "Use the internet" is a very far cry from throwing my "relic" PC away and replacing it with a thin client. It's not the least bit relevant.
Slashdot Mirror
er..only in every circustance you mentioned it's been an attempt to stop a group (nation's army) that was using force to impose their terms on another country's soil: no quite the same 11 or so people hijacking a passenger aircraft.
The original quote, as written, makes no distiction at all between situations. It simply says, flat-out that: "any group using force to project its terms is a terrorist group". Certainly the Allies in World War 2 or any other conceivable war, no matter how just, fits that definition. At the very least, the original statement needs to be amended in some way. Maybe it needs the caveat "under certain circumstances, it's okay to use force when the other guy does it to you first" or something along those lines? I could come up with other exceptions to this rule. Thus, the simplistic statement, "Any group using force to project its terms is a terrorist group" is very obviously false when there are no qualifiers to that statement.
> Any group using force to project its terms is a terrorist group.
Indeed, that's why all World War 2 vets are actually terrorists. It doesn't matter if your enemy is the loathsome Nazis or headed by a self-proclaimed deity on earth (Imperial Japan) who invaded China and killed millions of Chinese. Imposing force is always terrorism. For that matter, when cops impose force on me after robbing a bank - they're terrorists. When will people learn that a big peace rally would've stopped the Nazis dead in their tracks?
Read the article:
Amuplex is not technically a parasite, but something known as an exoparasitoid. In other words, a free-living adult lays an egg outside a host, and then the larva crawls into the host. One could easily imagine the ancestors of Ampulex as wasps that laid their eggs near dead insects--as some species do today. These corpse-feeding ancestors then evolved into wasps that attacked living hosts. Likewise, it's not hard to envision an Ampulex-like wasp evolving into full-blown parasitoids that inject their eggs directly into their hosts, as many species do today.
Once the wasps started attacking the roach hosts, there some selection pressure for the wasps to keep the roaches alive as long as possible. Ultimately, evolution favored the ones who stung the roaches in the brain in this manner.
Yeah, if you pay a guy's paycheck you should have the right to control the information. Now, who paid that paycheck? Was it the taxpayers?
I happened to do a websearch on this. Came up with something interesting:
0 051130-2.html
The complete quote (as produced by Malkin):
"Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I'm writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances. I don't regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark."
In bold are the sections that the NY Times used:
"Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I'm writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances. I don't regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark."
In a Bush speech two months ago, Bush quoted Starr as well. In bold are the sections that Bush quoted in his speech:
"Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I'm writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances. I don't regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/11/2
I had to smile at the symmetry of the distortions. The NYTimes used one section of the quote and ignored the rest, and Bush ignored those sections and used only the rest.
>I've always found it perplexing that the ID crowd and the Evolutionist crowd can never seem to get along. It seems to me that there is no real conflict of interest: is it not possible that God created evolution?
And a great number of people do take that position. (See Ken Miller's "Finding Darwins God".) There are some (like Dawkins) who want to say evolution disproves God's existence. And lots of ID advocates that use ID as a lever to *prove* God's existence. That's the problem here: ID advocates and creationists need their God to be necessary. Evolution means that God might exist and might not - which is clearly not good enough for many religious people.
> That seems to satisfy both camps if they just let it.
No, that satisfies a lot of evolutionists. (Most scientists identify themselves as "theistic evolutionists" which means that they believe God got things rolling using evolution.) That idea is hated by the ID and creationist crowd.
> "When you do things right, people won't be sure if you did anything at all."
Exactly right. BTW, did you know that I secretly prevented you from being in a car accident earlier today? I did it right, and that's why you never even knew I did anything at all.
(Ha! You can't prove I didn't.)
The article talks quite a bit about fossil evidence, but what about the genetic evidence? If you look at the variability of human genetics, you find that europeans aren't very genetically diverse. Similarly, American Indians aren't very genetically diverse, and Asians aren't either. Africans, on the other hand, are very genetically diverse. What this indicates is that the human race' history in Africa goes back much further than anywhere else. It appears that a subset of Africans left Africa and colonized the rest of the world. Here's a short article that talks about human genetic diversity compared to their location: http://info.med.yale.edu/genetics/kkidd/point.html
http://www.umich.edu/news/?Releases/2005/Oct05/r10 1805
> Sometimes to reach a gloablly optimal path, you have to take a locally suboptimal path. So long as one mutation doesn't completely destroy an organism, the mutation, even if immediately unhelpful, can serve as a stepping stone to future, more helpful mutations or advantages in changing environments.
(nod) Actually, you might be interested to know that the researchers on the Avida program (which does digital organism evolution) have noticed this phenomena in their work - an organism would gain a slight detrimental mutation which puts it in place to gain a much larger benefitial mutation.
I hope you realize how much you sound like those people who stayed in New Orleans when Katrina hit. See, the Gulf Coast gets hit all the time. Yet, people were saying that under the right conditions, there would be a disaster. Well, you get hit by a few light hurricanes and you think "it's all sensationalist media". But, eventually it happens - something big hits.
That's the problem here: you get lulled into ignoring all warnings because of false warnings. You point to the false warnings and erroneously conclude that all warnings are false warnings. I'm not saying H5N1 will be the big one. It probably won't. But, sooner or later, it's going to happen.
> That's one of the reason we didn't see a Ebola pandemia
...
Actually, the reason we don't see an Ebola epidemic is because ebola is spread by contact with blood and/or secretions of an infected person. I'm sure you're aware that flus spread easier than that. The one thing ebola had going for it was the fact it caused people to bleed. Other than that, it's not much more virulent than AIDS.
I'd also point-out something else: the Black Death killed very quickly - most people died four to seven days after infection, which is about the same amount of time that H5N1 takes to kill a person. Your "whole family drops dead the same evening" scenario is not realistic given what we already know about H5N1.
The Black Death is believed to be carried by fleas on rats. The rats (along with lots of other mammals) were dying from the Black Death as well. So, your "if a flu virus like H5N1 can both cross infect birds, but is almost harmless to them, and humans, and is highly lethal," scenario doesn't need to be true in order for H5N1 to be a big problem.
So, the Black Death was killing its hosts and doing it quickly, but that didn't stop it from wiping out a third of europe's population within a few years. In many cities, it wiped out 50-60% of the population. So, the Black Death had the attributes (according to you) would've caused it to burn itself out too quickly to be a real problem. Yet, it killed 1/3rd of europe's population.
The danger will be if a flu virus like H5N1 can both cross infect birds, but is almost harmless to them, and humans, and is highly lethal, then there's some chance of such a "everyone drops suddenly dead" scenario.
I don't think this is the danger. We're talking about the possibility of millions of deaths, which is less severe that your "everyone drops suddenly dead scenario", but also more likely to happen.
Except that the Vatican has a long history of compromising key articles of faith to keep the peace. A compromising faith is the folly of much of catholicism, sadly.
Well, the catholic church is trying to make peace with reality - trying to reconcile their religion with the facts. Once you become fully aware of the evidence for evolution, you realize that something has to give. You can't simultaneously believe in a six-day creation 6,000 years ago and constantly be confronted with the geological and biological evidences of an old earth (assuming you are in a position to see those things) and feel good about it. The fundamentalists, on the other hand, are actively denying the facts - hence there is no need to reconcile their faith with them.
I would suggest that you read some good books on evolution. I would also suggest that you avoid sites like AIG who are trying to confuse the whole subject. I went to a Christian college, and I saw a LOT of professors struggling with the evolution debate. They would just flat out say, "Look, there's a LOT of evidence for evolution. You can't just wish it away." I don't know of any of them that were six-day creationists. They have every reason to deny the reality of evolution, but, being very aware of the relevant literature, they were actively seeking ways to rectify the evolutionary evidence with their faith. They were not ignorant. They were not bullied into teaching evolution. They really, sincerely knew there was major problems with six-day creationism and that some sort of very old, big-bang, evolution-of-life theory was plainly better. I came to the same conclusion on my own. I think fundamentalists, on the other hand, are entirely disconnected from the relevant literature and lulled into a belief their their six-day creation ideas valid by demagogues who see their fight against evolution as a holy battle to save souls. And I say that as a former six-day-creation Christian fundamentalist.
It's this watering down of basic Christianity that has allowed the really dangerous belief systems to infiltrate (PC-veilied Pantheism in the US and pacific, and Islam in Europe, Africa and the former Soviet countries).
Think the dark ages were bad? Wait till you see what's around the corner.
That reminds me of something someone once said about the creation/evolution debate. They said, "Ask a creationist what they think will happen if evolutionary theory becomes more widely accepted." He went on to say that creationists inevitably go on to list a number of horrible societal consequences. It struck me, then, how the debate was not about the facts or evidence for evolution and creationism, but rather that there was a large amount of fear that was being pushed into creationist minds. This fear prevents any critical analysis of the facts whatsoever, but rather, provokes the fears in the minds of creationists to fight, fight, fight against evolution or "the world is doomed!"
It varies from place to place. Most protestants don't view Catholics as non-Christian. However, you don't have to look very far to find examples of protestant anti-catholicism.
4 .asp
d eath.asp
Case in point: Jack Chick, probably the best known Christian-tract publisher, has several tracts that are very anti-Catholic.
http://www.catholic.com/library/sr_chick_tracts_p
"...there are still over 50 million precious people in just the U.S. alone that are deceived by Roman Catholicism's false 'gospel' and are headed for eternity in hell. World wide there are one billion looking to the pope, his Virgin Mary goddess, and their wafer god for salvation."
http://www.chick.com/reading/comics/0112/albertos
Well, yes, "per capita" might arguably be a "fair" way to look at things. However, if China's pollution, per capita, equals that of the existing developed nations (e.g. Western Europe, US, Canada), we'll really have a huge pollution problem. Keep in mind that China has more people than the US, Europe, and Russia combined. So when you say, "Let's talk per capita. Because that's really what matters.", the fact of the matter is that "per capita" isn't at all what "really matters". What really matters is the absolute amount of pollution. And China is rapidly modernizing. So, no, China is not polluting more than it "should be" for it's population, but if China ever gets to the point of "polluting as much as it should for its population" the world will have a huge pollution problem.
Am I the only one who is slightly disturbed by this trend for scientists to attempt to usurp the powers of our Almighty Creator? Indeed. And this whole medicine thing -- we have usurped from the Almighty the decision of whether people live or die.
So, what you're saying is that if Microsoft, Sun, etc didn't have lawyers, they'd be engaged in actual armed combat with each other?
Is direct purchasing enough of an incentive for your average gamer to shell out money on something he's never heard of before? Well, you may want to provide a free demo version. That's what I'm planning to do with my game. That way people aren't making a completely blind decision whether to buy or not.
Based on the moderation that followed, I would say that "some people" don't like it when popular theories get questioned. Which just goes to show you--once a scientific "fact" has been established, our attachment to it becomes as dogmatic as any theological notion...
You're exactly right. This is also why our scientific ideas - like our theological ideas - haven't changed in thousands of years.
I'm going to switch to this as soon as I can. If someone else comes up with something better in two or three years, I'll just move all my documents over to the new system... uh. wait. oh crap.
That may be, but there are problems with saying that day = long period of time. First, you'll note that plants are created before the sun. Now it might be plausible to say that plants survived without the light of the sun for 24 hours, but if you start saying "one day = millions/billions of years", you run into trouble. Also, there's the heat issue. Without the sun, the temperature of the earth would be near absolute zero. (Although if you believed in literal 24 hours, you might get away with saying that God heated up the earth until the sun arrived 24 hours later.)
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Gen 1:11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, [and] the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed [is] in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
Gen 1:12 And the earth brought forth grass, [and] herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed [was] in itself, after his kind: and God saw that [it was] good.
Gen 1:13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.
Gen 1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: [he made] the stars also.
Second, the sequence of creation is wrong when compared to evolutionary history. The Genesis story has sea creatures, whales, and birds created on the fourth day. It has land animals created on the fifth day. But, evolutionarily speaking, birds and whales are descendents of land animals - they should not appear until after the land animals.
Gen 1:20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl [that] may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
Gen 1:21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that [it was] good.
Gen 1:23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
Gen 1:24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
In the end, I don't think you can get by saying that "day = millions/billions of years" because it does not resolve the differences between Genesis and evolution.
The "Great flood of 1656"? I guess you mean the flood of 2350 BC (based on a literal reading of Genesis would put it around 2350 BC - which is during the sixth Egyptian dynasty - which was, strangely enough, never interupted by a flood!) I suppose you're going to tell me that the spider was preserved in the amber because the world was actually flooded by amber rather than water, too?
Actually, you're right. At the beginning of Genesis the earth is "formless and void". However, A literal reading of the Bible does come up with a date of somewhere around 4000 BC for the *six days of creation* (where God creates the sun, stars, plants, animals, man - but not the earth). The date of 4000 BC is based on the Genesis information of each person's age when they "begat" a particular descendent. Using historical and Biblical information gives dates around 4000 BC for the six days of creation, and 2350 BC for the global flood (which, BTW, conflicts with known history which shows Egyptian dynasties going back to around 3000 BC, and plenty of pyramids predating 2350 BC).
... so this is potentially a very big market. Assuming, of course, that you successfully convince them that they are too stupid to use a real computer. Good luck.
Quite a few people have commented on octopus being predators. Here's a video of an octopus attacking a shark:
e rs_blue/shark_lo.html e rs_blue/shark_hi.html
(Sorry, realplayer only.)
(Low Bandwidth)
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/octopus/media_play
(High Bandwidth)
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/octopus/media_play
WMV of an octopus blending in with its surroundings (which is pretty amazing to watch). http://www.big-boys.com/articles/octopus1.html
All the revenue-generating applications these days are on the Internet. Really? I'm tech savy. The only "internet application" I've paid any money for in the past few years is online-taxes. And next year, I don't think I'll even be doing that. So, if "all the revenue-generating applications these days are on the Internet", then I guess very few people are actually making money. Games are one of the big exceptions, but even PC games these days have to use the Internet in some way to be commercially viable. What does "use the internet" have to do with the argument? "Use the internet" is a very far cry from throwing my "relic" PC away and replacing it with a thin client. It's not the least bit relevant.