Both. He has big opinions and can be an asshole about them, as in you're a moron if you disagree. He occasionally tries to couch them in humor, but the ego and mean spirit shine through.
I take Genesis to be a observational record not mythology.
That's because you're indoctrinated and have fallen into the black hole called faith, where no matter how untenable the position you have to come up with some twisted way to retain your belief.
Noah's arc is the most stable designed for a vessel in water, it's so good that the dimensions are used by super tankers.
Your appeal to modernity doesn't address the obvious issues that anybody with a modern understanding of the world (or even a primitive one) could come up with even a tiny bit of thought, like how Noah managed to gather all the animals in the first place, how it is that they didn't eat each other, or how to explain how he had room for the vast number of species, or the lack of a global flood in the geological record. Wikipedia has a good writeup.
Now what is unscientific about a scientist putting to sleep a man, taking a sample of his tissues and cloning him but without the Y gene.
What's unscientific about it is that it is based on a childish myth invented by primitive people to explain their origins, and is no different than any of the other childish origin myths in existence. What's also unscientific about it is that the fossil and genetic record completely refute this childish story.
Define the word evolved please. Do you mean that it is changing? Creationist believe that happens. Natural Selection, Mutations & Gene duplication attest to that.
They believe that can happen, and there's a natural progression of species in the fossil and genetic record, and yet they can't believe in evolution as the origin of species. Gee, I wonder why? Could it be their childish Bible stories holding them back?
Do you mean it is increasing in complexity from Bacteria to something which is not a bacteria? Natural Selection, Mutations says that can't happen. Where does this magical information come from? What phenomena produces it?
You just said it earlier, and now you dismiss it as impossible. I'm confused by your logic.
Where are the links between these phylum? If it is so clear to you, (but not the experts) show me the transition fossil showing the half bird half dino, half reptile half tutose (showing the ribs being inverted to match), half whale half Pakicetus.
It's funny, you see a bird with teeth and you say "still a bird", and if you see a dinosaur with feathers you will say "still a dinosaur". What you want is every link to be filled in, ad infinitum, while ignoring the clear progression of the fossils we do have.
Gould said: The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.
Gould's position was one of "punctuated equilibrium", in that species would undergo rapid evolution and then remain fairly static.
Could you clearify what you mean by "Of course your ancient religious text makes no mention of this kind of "design", and includes ridiculous stories which contradict it"
You mention cells later on. What does the Bible say about them? Why does the fossil record show a progression from single cells, to multicellular, to plants, and to animals? Why does modern man arrive so late on the scene? Why can we find other human-like species before man came around? Why do we share so much genetic information with chimpanzees?
Is it wrong to point out the major holes in the evidence you proclaim to support your views, do not exist?
There's nothing wrong with it, but it is wrong to ignore the evidence which does exist, and it does not support your childish creation myth.
As a basic question, tell me how did the first cell came about?
And by "see it in action", would that amount to seeing it fly by? Were you part of the operational team that helped run it? In what capacity would you actually be able to acquire secrets that would "make your skin crawl"? Or more likely you just heard a story passed on from some airman.
From the christian view we live in a fallen world now, God created the Earth to be very good, but it is not good anymore.
That's ancient Hebrew mythology, where you'll also find ridiculous stories such as Noah's Arc and Eve being created out of a rib from Adam. And even if you want to believe in such fairy tales, I question worshipping a god that let's babies and children suffer in extreme agony because of some slight that happened hundreds of generations ago.
So once a virus, bateria, fungus, etc had a useful perpose, they many currently dont serve the original design but can only do what the degraded form allows them.
In other words, they evolved to be efficient parasites.
The fossils show a clear example of creation. Every kind (phylum) shows up in the fossil record perfectly without intermediates.
What creationists have done is to demand evermore fine-grained transitional fossils. The number we have already is large, and it shows a clear path of evolution, from single cells to the complex organisms you see today.
Of course your ancient religious text makes no mention of this kind of "design", and includes ridiculous stories which contradict it. Yet the path through time and the progression of species is so self-evident at this point you have to be willfully blind to ignore it.
As I said... legitimate, well reasoned and rational differences on a topic should not disqualify a candidate for one's support.
Of course it should. Like I said, I find that Ron Paul has the most integrity out of any candidate running, but I'm still not going to vote for him because I find his positions on gold and isolationism disastrous, though his reasons are at least defensible, even if I resorted to calling them looney earlier.
More importantly, in the short term the point is to communicate to politicians that those not making rational votes, not offering defendable positions, are going to be voted out, that they have no loyal base who will overlook indefensible votes.
The problem with your plan is that the voters are not a uniform block that are going to agree with your criteria, hence you're trying to "boil the oceans". Your "long term strategy" just doesn't work because you can't get enough buy-in for the short term.
It's like when Nader was running in 2000 and 2004. All he did was serve to bleed off votes for the left, and they ended up with Bush in tight elections. Nader's position was that both sides were so similarly bad that it didn't matter, and he even got Michael Moore to agree with this and campaign for him in 2000, but in 2004 he was literally on his knees begging Nader not to run. That's real-world politics.
You can not escape the fact that loyalty to a platform makes 2/3rds of voters irrelevant. Ignored by their party because their vote is safe, ignored by the other party because their vote is unobtainable.
True to a certain extent, but also wrong because what tends to happen is that when the base is upset they just stay home instead of voting due to apathy or don't encourage others to vote. That's why political pressure from the base works to get many issues pushed through.
This is why I think a change to the voting system from majority, winner-takes-all to some other system like borda voting is an attainable strategy to kill the stranglehold of the two-party system. It's a simple process issue voters can get behind and get enacted via referendums.
You could gain a little bit of credibility by saying in what capacity you were able to witness firsthand events. However, I suspect you did not work on this project in any capacity and would be either forced to admit it or make something up which could, in theory and probably in practice, be verified.
If you want to talk about bad design just look at all the numerous congenital defects that humanity and other species suffer from. If you want to argue about a creator designing stuff then why are these defects there? Consider every disgusting parasite or disease on the planet, and now explain why those were created.
Please explain the fossil and genetic record, which shows a clear path of evolution. Go ahead, look at your creation sites, but they are all bullshit arguments that have been debunked over and over again.
But instead we have this rather strange and peculiar universe where scientists still have difficulty explaining the very first observation they make (self/consciousness).
I don't see how "God did it" helps resolve these type of questions. The simple fact is that the brain is a machine, we understand a lot more than we used to, and we've even simulated some aspects of evolutionary behavior that we associate with feelings. As to getting a satisfactory answer of consciousness, it seems like one of those impenetrable questions, but science sheds more light than Hewbrew mythology (and the many "prophets" like Jesus that followed) on the matter.
Did Jesus really need water in the jars to fill them with wine? So why did he do things that way?
Because it's a legend/myth, that's why, no discernable from any other legend/myth. Typically stories like these arise out of a grain of truth, like maybe what little wine they had was watered down and shared. Seriously, who knows, it's just an unverifiable story. Jesus is better understood as a philosopher/activist/cult leader than a truly divine being.
How does one become convinced of the existence of omnipotent beings?
Typically by being raised that way, and also based on analogy (you find a watch in a desert, you assume a watchmaker made it). Evolution is the blind watchmaker, but it isn't an obvious theory and it's easier to think of some intelligent, supernatural force.
Why would anyone want to be?
A sense of purpose and a promise of life-after-death.
"A fan can't change the temperature of a room; it can only accelerate air movement, and will accelerate the body's overheating."
The latter statement is only true if the air is hotter than body temperature. It also doesn't take into account cooling through evaporation. Also note that the South Korean fear is based on being too cold, not too hot, along with some concerns about asphyxiation.
So you're trying to equate people who were forced at gunpoint to move to specific locations and achieved success generations later by embracing gambling... to somebody who was able to find better economic opportunity elsewhere? By that logic, you're an idiot.
It's probably spoken that way to match the text. See the Charles Dickens example in my reply to your Anonymous Coward sibling. At some point not too long ago your "proper" British English language had the month first.
Middle-endian dates like MM-DD-YYYY are still meritless and perverse, though.
They correspond to spoken English. People say "June 4th", not "4th June", and this probably comes from the common practice in English to switch words around: "house of dog" becomes "dog house", and similarly "4th of June" becomes "June 4th".
Reddit moderation is feel-good, idiotitc group think. Not that Slashdot moderation doesn't have its problems, but it wouldn't be better served by following the reddit model.
It is hard and no amount of hand-waving is going to change that. A politician is going to have to make decisions on a wide spectrum of issues, and some of those they're going to vote conscience, some they're going to consider the electorate, some they're going to consider their corporate sponsors, and sometimes they're going to vote to compromise to get something rather than nothing.
About the only candidate who is consistent is somebody like Ron Paul. Are left-leaning Democrats going to vote for him, given that he is generally against government assistance? No. Are Republicans going to vote for him, because he is anti-regulation of drugs and isolationist in military stance? No. Am I going to vote for him, given that I have a Libertarian bent? No, because I think his position on gold is looney and I'm afraid pulling our military out of everywhere will have a destabilizing effect.
So now in the current election, the only real choices are Obama and Romney. If you vote for somebody else, you are throwing your vote away. Until you change the winner-takes-all, majority rules system nothing is going to change that.
But even if the system was changed, you are always voting for the lesser of evil, because there is no perfect candidate who is going to behave to your criteria consistently, and other voters have different criteria.
What a dumb post. You're going to end up spending an inordinate amount of time re-writing what the framework already gives you. Requiring that it exactly matches what you want to do is just an excuse to start from scratch and write your own in classical Not Invented Here fashion.
he had no actual useful part in it other than not telling them they couldn't do it.
That's a bullshit way of spinning it. He was the one who had to authorize it, and would have owned the failure if it had gone wrong, like Jimmy Carter's failure with the Iran hostage rescue.
It kind of was a terrible idea that should be stomped on. Not the most terrible idea we've had, but still pretty darn bad.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell was a good compromise for the times and a halfway step to the full solution we have now. The time was right to change it, and the Republicans can't even use it as a political stick because the majority of Americans are for it.
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Both. He has big opinions and can be an asshole about them, as in you're a moron if you disagree. He occasionally tries to couch them in humor, but the ego and mean spirit shine through.
I take Genesis to be a observational record not mythology.
That's because you're indoctrinated and have fallen into the black hole called faith, where no matter how untenable the position you have to come up with some twisted way to retain your belief.
Noah's arc is the most stable designed for a vessel in water, it's so good that the dimensions are used by super tankers.
Your appeal to modernity doesn't address the obvious issues that anybody with a modern understanding of the world (or even a primitive one) could come up with even a tiny bit of thought, like how Noah managed to gather all the animals in the first place, how it is that they didn't eat each other, or how to explain how he had room for the vast number of species, or the lack of a global flood in the geological record. Wikipedia has a good writeup.
Now what is unscientific about a scientist putting to sleep a man, taking a sample of his tissues and cloning him but without the Y gene.
What's unscientific about it is that it is based on a childish myth invented by primitive people to explain their origins, and is no different than any of the other childish origin myths in existence. What's also unscientific about it is that the fossil and genetic record completely refute this childish story.
Define the word evolved please. Do you mean that it is changing? Creationist believe that happens. Natural Selection, Mutations & Gene duplication attest to that.
They believe that can happen, and there's a natural progression of species in the fossil and genetic record, and yet they can't believe in evolution as the origin of species. Gee, I wonder why? Could it be their childish Bible stories holding them back?
Do you mean it is increasing in complexity from Bacteria to something which is not a bacteria? Natural Selection, Mutations says that can't happen. Where does this magical information come from? What phenomena produces it?
You just said it earlier, and now you dismiss it as impossible. I'm confused by your logic.
Where are the links between these phylum? If it is so clear to you, (but not the experts) show me the transition fossil showing the half bird half dino, half reptile half tutose (showing the ribs being inverted to match), half whale half Pakicetus.
It's funny, you see a bird with teeth and you say "still a bird", and if you see a dinosaur with feathers you will say "still a dinosaur". What you want is every link to be filled in, ad infinitum, while ignoring the clear progression of the fossils we do have.
Gould said: The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.
Gould's position was one of "punctuated equilibrium", in that species would undergo rapid evolution and then remain fairly static.
Could you clearify what you mean by "Of course your ancient religious text makes no mention of this kind of "design", and includes ridiculous stories which contradict it"
You mention cells later on. What does the Bible say about them? Why does the fossil record show a progression from single cells, to multicellular, to plants, and to animals? Why does modern man arrive so late on the scene? Why can we find other human-like species before man came around? Why do we share so much genetic information with chimpanzees?
Is it wrong to point out the major holes in the evidence you proclaim to support your views, do not exist?
There's nothing wrong with it, but it is wrong to ignore the evidence which does exist, and it does not support your childish creation myth.
As a basic question, tell me how did the first cell came about?
And by "see it in action", would that amount to seeing it fly by? Were you part of the operational team that helped run it? In what capacity would you actually be able to acquire secrets that would "make your skin crawl"? Or more likely you just heard a story passed on from some airman.
From the christian view we live in a fallen world now, God created the Earth to be very good, but it is not good anymore.
That's ancient Hebrew mythology, where you'll also find ridiculous stories such as Noah's Arc and Eve being created out of a rib from Adam. And even if you want to believe in such fairy tales, I question worshipping a god that let's babies and children suffer in extreme agony because of some slight that happened hundreds of generations ago.
So once a virus, bateria, fungus, etc had a useful perpose, they many currently dont serve the original design but can only do what the degraded form allows them.
In other words, they evolved to be efficient parasites.
The fossils show a clear example of creation. Every kind (phylum) shows up in the fossil record perfectly without intermediates.
What creationists have done is to demand evermore fine-grained transitional fossils. The number we have already is large, and it shows a clear path of evolution, from single cells to the complex organisms you see today.
Of course your ancient religious text makes no mention of this kind of "design", and includes ridiculous stories which contradict it. Yet the path through time and the progression of species is so self-evident at this point you have to be willfully blind to ignore it.
As I said ... legitimate, well reasoned and rational differences on a topic should not disqualify a candidate for one's support.
Of course it should. Like I said, I find that Ron Paul has the most integrity out of any candidate running, but I'm still not going to vote for him because I find his positions on gold and isolationism disastrous, though his reasons are at least defensible, even if I resorted to calling them looney earlier.
More importantly, in the short term the point is to communicate to politicians that those not making rational votes, not offering defendable positions, are going to be voted out, that they have no loyal base who will overlook indefensible votes.
The problem with your plan is that the voters are not a uniform block that are going to agree with your criteria, hence you're trying to "boil the oceans". Your "long term strategy" just doesn't work because you can't get enough buy-in for the short term.
It's like when Nader was running in 2000 and 2004. All he did was serve to bleed off votes for the left, and they ended up with Bush in tight elections. Nader's position was that both sides were so similarly bad that it didn't matter, and he even got Michael Moore to agree with this and campaign for him in 2000, but in 2004 he was literally on his knees begging Nader not to run. That's real-world politics.
You can not escape the fact that loyalty to a platform makes 2/3rds of voters irrelevant. Ignored by their party because their vote is safe, ignored by the other party because their vote is unobtainable.
True to a certain extent, but also wrong because what tends to happen is that when the base is upset they just stay home instead of voting due to apathy or don't encourage others to vote. That's why political pressure from the base works to get many issues pushed through.
This is why I think a change to the voting system from majority, winner-takes-all to some other system like borda voting is an attainable strategy to kill the stranglehold of the two-party system. It's a simple process issue voters can get behind and get enacted via referendums.
You could gain a little bit of credibility by saying in what capacity you were able to witness firsthand events. However, I suspect you did not work on this project in any capacity and would be either forced to admit it or make something up which could, in theory and probably in practice, be verified.
If you want to talk about bad design just look at all the numerous congenital defects that humanity and other species suffer from. If you want to argue about a creator designing stuff then why are these defects there? Consider every disgusting parasite or disease on the planet, and now explain why those were created.
Please explain the fossil and genetic record, which shows a clear path of evolution. Go ahead, look at your creation sites, but they are all bullshit arguments that have been debunked over and over again.
But instead we have this rather strange and peculiar universe where scientists still have difficulty explaining the very first observation they make (self/consciousness).
I don't see how "God did it" helps resolve these type of questions. The simple fact is that the brain is a machine, we understand a lot more than we used to, and we've even simulated some aspects of evolutionary behavior that we associate with feelings. As to getting a satisfactory answer of consciousness, it seems like one of those impenetrable questions, but science sheds more light than Hewbrew mythology (and the many "prophets" like Jesus that followed) on the matter.
Did Jesus really need water in the jars to fill them with wine? So why did he do things that way?
Because it's a legend/myth, that's why, no discernable from any other legend/myth. Typically stories like these arise out of a grain of truth, like maybe what little wine they had was watered down and shared. Seriously, who knows, it's just an unverifiable story. Jesus is better understood as a philosopher/activist/cult leader than a truly divine being.
How does one become convinced of the existence of omnipotent beings?
Typically by being raised that way, and also based on analogy (you find a watch in a desert, you assume a watchmaker made it). Evolution is the blind watchmaker, but it isn't an obvious theory and it's easier to think of some intelligent, supernatural force.
Why would anyone want to be?
A sense of purpose and a promise of life-after-death.
You can't just ignore the particulars and pretend they don't matter. Well you can, but it makes you look stupid.
"A fan can't change the temperature of a room; it can only accelerate air movement, and will accelerate the body's overheating."
The latter statement is only true if the air is hotter than body temperature. It also doesn't take into account cooling through evaporation. Also note that the South Korean fear is based on being too cold, not too hot, along with some concerns about asphyxiation.
You're right, I wouldn't. It stinks of stories you heard instead of firsthand experience.
So you're trying to equate people who were forced at gunpoint to move to specific locations and achieved success generations later by embracing gambling... to somebody who was able to find better economic opportunity elsewhere? By that logic, you're an idiot.
It's probably spoken that way to match the text. See the Charles Dickens example in my reply to your Anonymous Coward sibling. At some point not too long ago your "proper" British English language had the month first.
No, they correspond to spoken Dumbarseyankish.
Is that so, Mr. Snooty Anonymous Coward? Have some Charles Dickens:
"May 12, 1827. Joseph Smiggers, Esq., P.V.P.M.P.C. [Perpetual
Vice-President--Member Pickwick Club], presiding. The following
resolutions unanimously agreed to:"
In English, people say "4th of June".
I speak English, and I don't say that.
Middle-endian dates like MM-DD-YYYY are still meritless and perverse, though.
They correspond to spoken English. People say "June 4th", not "4th June", and this probably comes from the common practice in English to switch words around: "house of dog" becomes "dog house", and similarly "4th of June" becomes "June 4th".
Reddit moderation is feel-good, idiotitc group think. Not that Slashdot moderation doesn't have its problems, but it wouldn't be better served by following the reddit model.
Do you actually believe this nonsense? You can pick any random three times in history and point out some "revolution" that was occurring.
Actually its not so hard.
It is hard and no amount of hand-waving is going to change that. A politician is going to have to make decisions on a wide spectrum of issues, and some of those they're going to vote conscience, some they're going to consider the electorate, some they're going to consider their corporate sponsors, and sometimes they're going to vote to compromise to get something rather than nothing.
About the only candidate who is consistent is somebody like Ron Paul. Are left-leaning Democrats going to vote for him, given that he is generally against government assistance? No. Are Republicans going to vote for him, because he is anti-regulation of drugs and isolationist in military stance? No. Am I going to vote for him, given that I have a Libertarian bent? No, because I think his position on gold is looney and I'm afraid pulling our military out of everywhere will have a destabilizing effect.
So now in the current election, the only real choices are Obama and Romney. If you vote for somebody else, you are throwing your vote away. Until you change the winner-takes-all, majority rules system nothing is going to change that.
But even if the system was changed, you are always voting for the lesser of evil, because there is no perfect candidate who is going to behave to your criteria consistently, and other voters have different criteria.
no, r u?
What a dumb post. You're going to end up spending an inordinate amount of time re-writing what the framework already gives you. Requiring that it exactly matches what you want to do is just an excuse to start from scratch and write your own in classical Not Invented Here fashion.
But I can't imagine doing anything substantial with it.
Right. It would be unimaginable if sites like Facebook or Wikipedia were based on it.
he had no actual useful part in it other than not telling them they couldn't do it.
That's a bullshit way of spinning it. He was the one who had to authorize it, and would have owned the failure if it had gone wrong, like Jimmy Carter's failure with the Iran hostage rescue.
It kind of was a terrible idea that should be stomped on. Not the most terrible idea we've had, but still pretty darn bad.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell was a good compromise for the times and a halfway step to the full solution we have now. The time was right to change it, and the Republicans can't even use it as a political stick because the majority of Americans are for it.
The problem is we need a phase where all politicians who are not truly serving the public's interest are thrown out.
Please define "truly serving the public's interest" in a way that the public agrees on for the whole range of issues that politicians deal with.