# Anyone want to read my essay for debate?



## dan3345

So in my english we having all these debates and the topic that we (the class) chose to debate was basically creationism vs. a world without a God. So heres my essay, its lengthy and I didnt pay much attention to grammar since I will only be reading my points and not handing it in. If you see any problems with my logic or info that is just flat out wrong please point it out. I am also open to critics. ;-)

The Case for Intelligent Design 

Most scientists I have read about all seem to agree that the thought of a God or creator of the universe or even just the notion the world isn’t random are disgusted by this. It is poisonous to them, an idea will catch on fast if backed up with FACTS. That said, Intelligent Design is backed up with many facts. 
1. Is your life worth something? Can you weigh it in gold? Of course not and yet there is something that is keeping you from killing another person or vice versa. So if you can conclude that your life is worth something, you must ask why it is. If there is no creator and no order to the world why should your existence mean something?

You see an atheist has no hope. God or God’s, means hope. It means you have a reason to get up in the morning and live out another day knowing a sentient being out there is out there, and for a reason you don’t know or understand it created the world for a purpose. If you are an atheist what do you have to look forward too? What meaning is your existence? Which brings me back to the above thought. Why are you here? Without an intelligence behind the universe and atheist has no reason to live besides to reproduce and carry on a species. But what is the point of that? If atheist are right then why is there not much, much more chaos in the world? Because you see if there is no designer than there is no purpose at all.
2.	Nature displays intelligence. If you look at a ice under a microscope for example what can you assume? On the surface the ice looks just like a block of frozen water. But at the molecular level you have molecules aligning themselves in the seconds it take to freeze water and becoming these beautiful and complex structures of crystal formations. How can any sane person look at the structure and say “This happened randomly.” It is true that every snow flake is different, so they do grow “randomly” but that said, the fact that they all grow into this crystal structure shows that something had to think it out, and align or give the molecules the properties to form this structure. And by the way, scientists know how the structures form but cannot explain why. It’s as if they were, oh I don’t know.. Programmed? 
3.	We have the same phenomenon with actual crystals. Quartz for instance is two silicon atoms bonded with one oxygen. Quartz is the second most abundant mineral on the planet. And under the right condition and given the millions of years it needs, it will align its atoms into crystal structures. The same structure you see with your eyes is a six sided point and a long shaft. Some crystals are double terminated meaning they have a point at the end of both points of the shaft. Shouldn’t you look at something like this and think that something planned this? How am I supposed to believe that this could happen in a random world?
4.	Again same with DNA. When Charles Darwin was writing his Origin of Species he couldn’t possibly have known how complex DNA and the simplest single celled organism really are. DNA and RNA are the building blocks for every single organism on the planet. It varies but each strand is made up of so many chromosomes and proteins. I could be wrong but I think in the human body alone there are 23 chromosomes to be shared with offspring and there are over 233 proteins to be split up and divided among cells for reproduction. If you didn’t already know proteins are bonds of chemical atoms. Each bond is 1 protein. Each single protein can be made up of many molecular bonds. Now imagine some random event bringing hundreds of just the right proteins together (let alone creating them in the first place) and then having enough energy to fuse them and create life. Now forget about the energy part. Scientists are still baffled at how life could arise from proteins fusing. Even once all have fused if they could randomly and are ready to go for life, you still don’t suddenly have a living organism. All you have now is a ludicrously complex combination of incomprehensibly small atomic bonds.
5.	Evolution at its core is the theory that all life forms change over time by making small adaptations per generation to suit their environment. Mutations, he is speaking of mutations. A mutation today is a baby is born, but this baby was doomed from the start because it was born an extra eye, or limb, or organ(s). 99% of the time when an animal is born with a mutation it does not live to breed. It dies young. And if it does live to adulthood two things can happen. The first being that other animals of the same species will not mate with it because the females know it is not right. Females in most species pick out there mates by the male giving a show of his strength, beauty, singing skills, hunting skill etc. A mutated animal could presumably have problems with any of these and thus a female of the species would overlook that one to mate with. The other thing about evolution is the history of bones found for species. Humans have examples that range back 3.2 million years. I would like to argue that this is just one fossil, out of about twenty or thirty. Twenty or thirty. I would be more inclined to believe evolution if they found hundreds or thousands of these. At least a few hundred though. I know how difficult of a feat that would be but if they are really that confidant about evolution they should search for the many more fossils of pre **** sapien. My last point about evolution which know one I know has been able to explain, is that if we did in fact evolve from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? If An animal evolves slowly over time then wouldn’t the less advanced species die off and the offspring be the evolved ones? Wouldn’t that mean the old species would be gone? 
6.	I believe since every person has some degree of a conscious telling them right from wrong that this conscious could possibly be derived from a sentient intelligence. Think of a conscious as a guideline. You can choose to follow it and do good, or ignore it and do bad. Since the majority of people seem to listen to their conscious as a set of thoughts for good behavior I think one could infer that programmed into the recesses of our minds are laws imprinted by a intelligence to keep us civil and orderly. Without the conscious there would not be basic laws instructing right and wrong. Which brings me to the fact that since there is a basic right and wrong imprinted in the vast majority of the population perhaps this is more evidence to suggest that a sentient creator left us with instructions on how to properly conduct ourselves. If there were no creator (Like the Christian Judeo God from the bible for example) than we would not have the same civil basic laws we have today. That is not to say to that other religions did not right the same or similar laws just an example, to reiterate my belief that without an authority (A God of some sort) we would all be killing, raping, stealing, savages. 
7.	I am a proponent of YEC. Young Earth Creation is the theory that A deity of some sort created the universe and everything in it in literally moments. Since I am a Christian I believe the Earth was created in six days literally. My theory for this is that if a God is powerful enough to create an entire universe (or multiverse) in the first place then there should be no reason why he could not create something with an old age from the second it was created. Example, the Earths inner crust is labeled by scientists to be 4.5 to 5.0 billion years old. I see no reason, why an all powerful deity capable of creating a universe should not be capable of creating the rock to be born into age. So a rock that would have been made just moments ago by God at the creation of space and time would also be billions of years old by intention. The reason behind this could be the same reason that fossils of ancient ape like humans exist. To throw us off. Albert Einstein believed in a God that created us, but wanted nothing to do with us. Obviously this idea does not fit into my own belief but it does if you look at it that through these fossils and ancient stones, God has placed them so that only the most devout and faithful will still believe. The bible does say there will be many tests and tribulations (and persecutions) on all who believe in Christ and the Old Testament God. Who I should point out is still the same as the New Testament God.
I am a Christian. I believe in the trinity. However I am not saying in this that my God is right, or real for that matter, I am just pushing the point that it is perfectly reasonable to assume based on logic that an intelligent designer is to blame for the existence of this world and us.


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## funlad3

Okay, I hate to be the one, but this is what your opponent will say (or at least what I would...).

Basically, you can mathematically prove that life would exist with or without a god. To put it simply, favorable outcome / possible outcome. In this fraction, favorable outcome are the odds that the Big Bang can randomly create the environment where life can flourish, and possible outcome are the total possibilities for other environments. The fraction is say, 1 in infinity - 1. Very unlikely. Now multiply that by the size of the universe, and you get more than 1. 1 is 100%, showing that there must be life in the universe, Earth. In fact, that number is is greater than 2, proving that alien life exists. It's greater than 3, than four, than 5! We can only speculate how large that number actually is, but alas, we have proven life exists. Now, is there a god? I don't think so, but again; that's only what I think. All that I can prove is that there doesn't need to be one.

I personally believe in chance, but not good luck. I think that (Laugh if you want) when we do something good or bad, our body gives off energy, be it good or bad. This energy can react with our environment, causing things to happen accordingly to that energy. So in a way, yes. I believe in karma. 

Now, you ask about the afterlife. We are not our body. We are not our brain. We aren't even our mind. (may be... I'm still undecided...) All I know is that we are our energy. The electricity that runs throughout our body. Our energy needs a home, and our body needs a driving force, so they work together. When our body dies, our energy simply moves to a new host, or into the world around us.

Now, I come to ghosts... When our energy is reluctant to move to a new host, it lingers near or within an object. When there is enough energy nearby, in lightning for example, our energy has the ability to project itself as an image of one of its past hosts. I think that this part was actually proven on Discovery Channels "Ghost Lab". Not sure though. 

This is merely my philosophy on life, and is merely what I believe. Don't ask me where the universe came from, it only hurts my brain. If you say from god, then where did god come from?

Your arguments are logical, but I just have to many preconceived notions to be swayed from my beliefs. I for one, do support evolution, as this is what is utilized by the breeders that give us fish for our tanks. In my opinion, everything fits together too well to be called merely chance. 

As for your alignment of molecules point(s), molecular physicists have proven why the molecules align in the way that they do.

What ever you believe, have a good night and good luck on your speech/debate.

- Funlad3


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## dan3345

funlad3 said:


> Okay, I hate to be the one, but this is what your opponent will say (or at least what I would...).
> 
> Basically, you can mathematically prove that life would exist with or without a god. To put it simply, favorable outcome / possible outcome. In this fraction, favorable outcome are the odds that the Big Bang can randomly create the environment where life can flourish, and possible outcome are the total possibilities for other environments. The fraction is say, 1 in infinity - 1. Very unlikely. Now multiply that by the size of the universe, and you get more than 1. 1 is 100%, showing that there must be life in the universe, Earth. In fact, that number is is greater than 2, proving that alien life exists. It's greater than 3, than four, than 5! We can only speculate how large that number actually is, but alas, we have proven life exists. Now, is there a god? I don't think so, but again; that's only what I think. All that I can prove is that there doesn't need to be one.
> 
> I personally believe in chance, but not good luck. I think that (Laugh if you want) when we do something good or bad, our body gives off energy, be it good or bad. This energy can react with our environment, causing things to happen accordingly to that energy. So in a way, yes. I believe in karma.
> 
> Now, you ask about the afterlife. We are not our body. We are not our brain. We aren't even our mind. (may be... I'm still undecided...) All I know is that we are our energy. The electricity that runs throughout our body. Our energy needs a home, and our body needs a driving force, so they work together. When our body dies, our energy simply moves to a new host, or into the world around us.
> 
> Now, I come to ghosts... When our energy is reluctant to move to a new host, it lingers near or within an object. When there is enough energy nearby, in lightning for example, our energy has the ability to project itself as an image of one of its past hosts. I think that this part was actually proven on Discovery Channels "Ghost Lab". Not sure though.
> 
> This is merely my philosophy on life, and is merely what I believe. Don't ask me where the universe came from, it only hurts my brain. If you say from god, then where did god come from?
> 
> Your arguments are logical, but I just have to many preconceived notions to be swayed from my beliefs. I for one, do support evolution, as this is what is utilized by the breeders that give us fish for our tanks.* In my opinion, everything fits together too well to be called merely chance. *
> 
> As for your alignment of molecules point(s), molecular physicists have proven why the molecules align in the way that they do.
> 
> What ever you believe, have a good night and good luck on your speech/debate.
> 
> - Funlad3


That sentence I highlighted is my point. NAd I will revise the molecular thing. I need to do more research into that then, last I heard which was years ago they said they were not sure. Thanks for the feedback, your thoughts are interesting and I will think about them. I may have to agree with you on the karma energy thing. And the ghost. Basically everything you said that spiritual seems very plausible to me.


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## funlad3

Why thank you!


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## dan3345

Not to be steriotypical but have you heard of crystal healing? You sound like someone who might believe in that. I have collected rocks and crystals and precious gems all my life and have felt anything from a single crystal i own. I have a favorite one I carry with me everywhere but thats just because I like it. Anyway this was part of our debate today, one which I stayed out of because it sounds like nonsense to me but who knows.

My thought on it is that it's just a placebo effect. If you really want to "feel" something from a crystal or object etc, your mind will make you believe it.


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## funlad3

It might have some effect on the energy and magnetic/electric fields around us, which changes the way our brain interprets our surrounding world. I do have good luck charms, but I doubt they do anything. But I think my earlier is an interesting point. There are different fields around us that affect how we interpret our surroundings. There may actually be objects that effect the fields, changing our surroundings as our brains interpret it. Now, if we were going off of my positive/negative energy theory from before, these objects might also effect our surroundings as well as how we interpret them. If this is to be believed, then we have just proven that there is such a thing as a good luck charm. 

Tonight, I'm even surprising myself at all of these ideas I'm coming up with. This is not only interesting, but increasingly fun for me.

Oh, and yes, I do believe in the Placebo affect, but there is something that goes beyond it. 

Also, an experiment for you.... Ask someone to tell you a statement where they are either lying or telling the truth. They should be statements that you don't know the answer to. Close your eyes, and have them repeat it to you a few times. If you feel a warm tingly feeling inside, (Great description, right?) they're probably telling the truth. If you feel nothing or a negative feeling, they're probably lying. Some people are better at this than others. My record outside (where I do better at this) is 24. The odds of me guessing all of those correctly are *5.96046448 × 10-8* according to my calculator. Chance? I think not. What this proves is my energy theory.


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## dan3345

Yeah this is fun.

About the crystals, if you photograph them using the kirlian method (I don't actually know what that it) but I hear it is basically adding a high voltage to something which enables the film of the camera to capture an electric fields corona. Crystals have an extremely powerful one for some reason. And our bodies have an electric field as well. Basically anything with electricity has one. So in a very hard to explain way I can see where crystal healers are coming from with the regard that they say that they're crystals put out energy, but whether or not this has an effect on the human body I don't know.

Honestly I would like it to be true and have something to this because how cool would that be if all you needed to feel good was carry a pretty little crystal, but I dont think this is the case. However another property of quartz in particular, is that due to its molecular structure it carries electricity in a strange dormant state forever. And when moved or held the electrons which are ordinarily stable when left alone get easily excited due to you holding them or moving them.

What I can understand from this is that, the electrons normal state is to rest. They rest in alignment, and when picked up, hit against something, or moved in a general way the electrons get active and they try and bring back order. Now unfortunately for them our own electric fields are also being altered by the crystal. So what ends up happening is that the crystal sort of changes your magnetic field to match its own.

Whether this does anything I have no idea at all. Also in a study that happened almost 20 years ago, scientists took 200 people at different times and handed some of them real crystals from supposed healing crystal dealers and asked them to carry them for a week and then say if it changed anything or if they felt different perceived things differently etc. 100% said yes. However another group of people were given fake crystals made from some sort of wax that hardens like a quartz crystal and looks like one. Those people also said they felt something. So this is a confusing but interesting thing in my book.


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## funlad3

There's definitely something gong on there, the question is what and why. It'd also be great to get some other thoughts on this other than yours and mine...


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## hXcChic22

Well, it somewhat goes along with evolution, being more related to spontaneous generation and the idea of "primordial soup" - the Scientific Law of Biogenesis - life must come from life. Yet people still try to say that a bunch of chemicals came together and just randomly sprouted into single celled organisms, in the name of science, but contradicting a Scientific Law. (Ha!)


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## hXcChic22

dan3345 said:


> Also in a study that happened almost 20 years ago, scientists took 200 people at different times and handed some of them real crystals from supposed healing crystal dealers and asked them to carry them for a week and then say if it changed anything or if they felt different perceived things differently etc. 100% said yes. However another group of people were given fake crystals made from some sort of wax that hardens like a quartz crystal and looks like one. Those people also said they felt something. So this is a confusing but interesting thing in my book.


The Placebo Effect is an amazing thing! I work in daycare and giving "a booboo a kiss" is enough to stop the pain, and I found while watching my little sister that her "headaches" and other ouchies would go away if I gave her a little cup with water dyed with red food coloring in it (making her think it was Tylenol). 

Heck, I mean if you think about it, HUNGER is the biggest mental thing in the world. Ever notice how you can be SO hungry that you feel like your stomach is eating itself, but the moment you take that first bite of food, you feel loads better? It hasn't even had time to reach your stomach and start being digested, yet we feel sated.


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## funlad3

As contradictory as that is, I do believe that is true, again, use my mathematic principle from before. Over 4 billion years, it's simply ignorant to say that a chemical reaction wouldn't have occurred spurring the creation of life as we know it. People have created organic matter from random atoms and adding electricity, but we still have yet to figure out how to make it alive.

Go Placebo!


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## dan3345

Thats a good point, I wonder if the thing about these crystals is really just that people feel good because they want too. Also Is pain just a mental thing? If so then couldn't you theoretically stop feeling pain all together if you had the right amount of training or right type? Im confused whether pain is a physical aliment caused by injury and the bodies reaction or if it is simply a mental thing to keep you from re doing the thing that hurt you.

And one of the things I forgot to mention in my above post about the crystals, is that they (being quartz) has a piezoelectric effect. This is what generates the current and excites the electrons when the crystal is moved or struck with something or aginst something. It is why quartz is used a time keeping oscillating device in mechanical watches. Because as long as the current keepes passing through it it will never stop "ringing." Also why quartz is used in computers as data storage. Or atleast it used to be. I don't know about todays computers.


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## DevinsFish

I will hold back my opinions on this matter, however; being the older brother of a 16 year old sister I did want to mention something. My sister, and all of her friends that I have met, don't really seem to care at all about such topics. After reading your posts Dan, I just want to say that I'm stoked to know that people your age are still asking questions. That is a great thing. Kudos to you man


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## hXcChic22

Well, have you ever seen those men that can break through concrete slabs and stuff like that? It should be humanly impossible and do things like break bones, but they come through them virtually unharmed. It's because they train and train, and then train some more, and it's not all physical training. They have to train their minds to tell their bodies to relax so they absorb impact rather than stop it. 

Kinda off topic, but you know how cats supposedly land on all fours all the time? I was reading a book about them and the reason is because their mind and their sense of equilibrium automatically stabilize and twist them midair so their feet usually hit first, and their brain also tells their body to relax so they can take massive falls and not be hurt, their whole body acting as a big shock absorber. I think the highest fall a cat ever took and survived was over 70 feet or something ridiculous like that...

I think a lot of pain IS mental, but the average person just can't overcome it. I know I can't. :/ Not looking forward to childbirth...


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## funlad3

Pain is an electric signal that travels from the nerve endings in body to your brain, which then registers as pain. Pain is basically your brain saying, "Don't do that! It's bad for you!" Some people can overcome pain by (correct me if I'm wrong) either hurting themselves to the extent that their brain decides it isn't bad for them, as they're not dead; or they can train their brain/nerves to ignore the electrical signals. Before anyone brings it up, lying on a bed of nails is only physics. Your weight is evenly distributed across the bed of nails, so that there is less than 1 pound of pressure (often mush less) on that one specific point.


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## dan3345

Uhh Thanks Devin  

Yeah those guys that slam their heads through concrete make me cringe. I don't even want to think about what your brain is doing on impact. Plus how does the brain physically cope. After-all your brain is floating, so such a hit should cause trauma but it doesn't. I Just assume there are things we won't understand. Interesting stuff though. Im messing with triboluminesence right now. Which is just simply, you take a rock (I am using two pieces of quartz) and you strike them together like lighting a match, and the force combined with the friction combined with the natural electrons in the crystals cause it to flash very quickly. It's a very simple thing to do but its very cool to see.


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## funlad3

I have to find some good pieces of quartz...


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## dan3345

funlad3 said:


> I have to find some good pieces of quartz...


so do I.... I am having a hard time finding some good pieces because I no longer live where I can just go outside and find it in the dirt. I have to order it, and the only places I can find are crystal healer stores.. Doesn't anyone just buy rocks for collecting anymore?


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## funlad3

I can find some great looking rocks on the Indiana side shore of Lake Michigan, and I add some of the better rocks into my FW. I can find tons of Quartzish looking ones, but I'm not sure...


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## dan3345

I am fortunate to have a few really fantastic pieces though. I have a geode that was cut open in half and then polished and it is from Madagascar. The quartz inside are really nice clusters. I have another cluster the size of my fists (both together, and trust me I have big hands lol) and my last piece I am not sure where it is from, Brazil, or Madagascar but it has a phantom crystal (carbon the got trapped inside while the crystal was forming) it has little crystals inside which are only seeable under a magnifying glass but seeing them is crazy because they are crystals in crystals! It has some inclusions which are little waves of crystal shards inside. Just trust me it looks fantastic. And when I bought it the guy who I bought it from didnt know what it was worth, so I bought a 60-130 dollar crystal for ten bucks.


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## funlad3

Also, just because cosmology encompasses this discussion, there is to be a massive meteor shower tonight at 1 am central time. I'll be watching!


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## dan3345

I guess I will miss that..


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## funlad3

Why? I'm setting my alarm and going to sleep now! 

Good night moon!!!


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## dan3345

URGh I miss everything living in LA. Oh well I hope the shower is spectacular!


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## funlad3

Yeah, not really. I woke up at 1 am. I saw one in fifteen minutes. And it was about six degrees outside without windchill. It should have also been over L.A., the Earth is moving through another cloud of debris in space. It should still be happening tonight, just not as high a frequency. (It might be higher tonight though, because different articles had different night when the whole thing was going to peak.)


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## emc7

Went to a rock and mineral show. Although there was a major focus on jewelry (raw rock, cutting supplies, etc), there were also rocks for rock collecting for sale and free admission. It was sponsored by a local rock and mineral club. They had every color of natural quartz. So my advice is the same as with fish. Find the local fanatics ask whats around you.


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## dan3345

emc7 said:


> Went to a rock and mineral show. Although there was a major focus on jewelry (raw rock, cutting supplies, etc), there were also rocks for rock collecting for sale and free admission. It was sponsored by a local rock and mineral club. They had every color of natural quartz. So my advice is the same as with fish. Find the local fanatics ask whats around you.


It never occurred to me people put on rock shows. But I will do that and start looking around. And and I don't think I will be able to see anything because i live right next to downtown LA but I will try.


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## emc7

Cats don't always land on their feet, but they always try. They twist half their body to 'foot down' and then the other half. Slow-mo video is cool. They are more likely to get hurt in short falls where they don't have time to turn and long falls where they hit so hard they break bones even landing on their feet. 

This world is awesomely perfect for us. Either is was made for us or there is 'observer bias'. 

If the earth were a little closer or farther from the sun, it wouldn't no good. If ice doesn't float on water, everything gets messed up. There are lots of easy examples why even the laws of physics were written to make things good for us. But because of 'observer bias', the arguments aren't enough.

Assume millions or trillions of world where life is trying to evolve and become self-aware. The few worlds where that happens would look 'made for us' from the point of view of the few successful intelligent creatures evolved over millennia to succeed on that world. 

The 'intelligent design' debate is almost painful to watch at times. The two sides just talk past each other. 

The Christians assume a creator and try to prove it. They general a few scientific points such as interdependent systems where there is "chicken and egg" type problem of things that wouldn't work if one were to exist without the other. But they aren't very good at logical thought and scientific method because they haven't got a solid scientific education and once you dispute whatever source they are parroting, they don't go get more evidence. They inevitably fall back on what they do study, which is how to justify things based on Scripture. They go on to belief, feelings, and other non-tangibles. Millions believe, ergo there must be something to believe in.

The other sides assumes the good Books are fiction and intangibles as not trustworthy. 
They knock holes in specific Christian teachings (the earth is young, there is no evolution) and provide possible alternate explanations for any 'miracle' or "intelligent design proof" that is presented. Even morals, beauty and love can be explained by evolutionary pressures. Believing God will punish you for wrong doing allows large groups of people to live together, trust one another and strive for common goals. This gives "God-fearing" peoples an edge over other peoples. Love of beauty and music are a side effect of the brain's need to recognize symmetry to pick a healthy mate. Love is a chemical reward for reproduction. Snowflakes, trees, and other amazing complex forms can easily be created by repeating a small fractal geometry instruction over and over with random variations on increasing levels of scale. This side makes a logic error is assuming that because something has a logical, scientific explanation there can't have been any other influence. 

If you look at few samples of fish from different times, they are different. But without context, the effect of natural, in the wild, evolution would be indistinguishable from deliberate, careful, selective breeding in a tank. 

IMO you can't disprove a creator or even intelligent design. But to say there is no such thing as evolution when the flu is constantly changing is just stupid. Students need to understand evolution (not believe it) to compete in the global economy. There is no real 'intelligent design' science to study, IMO its really just a counter argument to evolution (It looks like it evolved, but it could have been planned that way). IMO, it doesn't belong in science class and this is what we really should be debating. Not what is "TRUE" but what we should teach our children.


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## emc7

I will say that its more intelligent to believe in God and afterlife than not. Even if there is only a 1 in a billion change that your specific beliefs will get you to heaven if you follow them. The atheist has 0 chance of post-death reward.


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## emc7

On the piezoelectric effect, have you tried hitting wintergreen lifesavers with a hammer in the dark or crushing them with a plier? I understand any sugar crystal will do, but you can eat the lifesaver crumbs.

I have one of those 'microfleece' blankets that makes cracking noise from all the static electricity. If I wave it at my fluorescent lamp, the bulb will flash. It makes sense, the coating on the bulb is designed to emit light from electrons going to ground. But its still cool.


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## funlad3

No, we can't disprove the story of creation or whether or not there is god, but at the same time, we can prove that there doesn't need to be. We should be and are teaching evolution in schools, but only because it is the scientific principle of our time; not because it's guaranteed to be true. The life savers thing is awesome to do when you're camping, and now I have to try the light bulb blanket thing. Fun...


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## emc7

5. The counter argument for this point is simple. The latest theory of evolution and speciation are suggest that change happens in relatively quick bursts. You get a small population that is cut off for some reason and add in a strong selective pressure and you get a lot of change in a small amount of time. A strong selective pressure is something that kills a lot of individuals. So a plague, a predator, a harsh environment (like an ice age) something like that and a small group so that changes propagate quickly. No reason the originating species couldn't continue just fine as long as their environment didn't change. So maybe the monkeys are our third cousins that drove us out of all the best forests and humans were forced to evolve because we were living in less pleasant places (like savannas with lions and hyenas). But scientists never said we evolved from modern monkeys, just a common primate ancestor. Both sides of this debate waste time countering mistaken interpretations of the opponent's viewpoint and then announce they've won. But you can't argue effectively until you really know what the other side believes. 

But actually the "theory of evolution" is under attack from scientists also. Its not going away, but stuff like methylation turning genes on and off in response to environmental factors and the change being passed to the next generation means there are proven counter examples to the traditional theory (only selective death and breeding affect inheritance). IMO, there is evolution, but its not the whole story. The base DNA chain doesn't explain all the variances between individuals. 

A good counter to intelligent design is "unintelligent design". "Intelligent design" proponents find examples of beautifully functional parts of natural systems and say "could that happen by chance?". "Unintelligent design" proponents find flaws in natural systems and say "would you do that on purpose?". Like the way the human air pathways cross our food pathways so we choke to death with regularity. Neither one of these is a good argument. Anything wild supposition can be supported by cherry picking a few facts that happen to support it and ignoring the rest of the data.


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## JimW/Oscar

hXcChic22 said:


> Well, it somewhat goes along with evolution, being more related to spontaneous generation and the idea of "primordial soup" - the Scientific Law of Biogenesis - life must come from life. Yet people still try to say that a bunch of chemicals came together and just randomly sprouted into single celled organisms, in the name of science, but contradicting a Scientific Law. (Ha!)


The assertion you have just cited is not a law of science at all, it was the opinion of Louis Pasteur who was, though a great man, one of his own time as well complete with its ignorance of facts not yet discovered.


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## funlad3

No, they mean when life first formed on this planet; when it was just a chemical reaction that somehow started life as we know it.... This is a great paradox/contradiction...

EMC7, people are different because there is variation within every species. The reason we don't all look the same is because all of these variations work and aren't killing the person who has them. As for the esophagus trachea thing, my only explanation for that is that no one has ever had that trait?.?.?. that one's a bit out of my thought process. Finally, now many scientists believe that evolution can occur quickly (All short trees die, killing short necked giraffes; only the long necked giraffes live, nearly instantly creating the long necked population of giraffes) or over time. (the pH of a river slowly changes as a result of the global heating cycles, and only the fish/plants that can adjust do adjust, slowly and as their environment allows.)

But you do bring up a good point that every argument has a counterargument, proving that nothing can be proven... (another paradox )


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## emc7

"Scientific laws" are really only observations that are supported by available data. There is always an implied asterisk that is "as far as we know", "for this range of values", "or until proven otherwise". Macroscopic life comes from life, not spontaneous generation. But is a virus alive in its inert, crystal form? Its just a complex molecule that reproduces with the aid of another organism. 

Running electricity through simulated 'primordial' ooze will occasionally produce a self-replicating molecule. And it only takes one to make a lot more. One can theorize a path to more complicated self-reproducing molecules from there. If you restrict your life criteria to merely self-replicating, its almost got to be widespread. Once you get something like RNA, it can go on getting more complicated with every iteration over eons (only a teeny fraction need to change over long enough time) until you have something like a bacteria you can recognize as alive. We aren't anywhere near proving that it did happen, but there is some good evidence that it can.

IMO, the great strength of scientific thought is its ability to change and add on to adapt to new evidence. To find "laws' that work for new facts and old ones. And also to discard "laws" and theories that are shown to be incorrect by new evidence. A lot of the stuff in textbooks is well thought out nonsense that will be revised by future scientists. Remember they once taught 'spontaneous generation' in schools as the fact of where flies came from. 

The one place where I agree with the intelligent design crowd is that just memorizing a series of "facts" so you can do well on standardized tests is inadequate. Better to teach science as a useful method for understanding our world.


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## emc7

In your intro, you say scientists only accept facts as evidence. I think this is true and while plenty of scientist believe in God, they will only listen to rational scientific facts in a debate. So arguing Hope won't move them. You mention ID having supporting facts, get some.

However, I assume the target audience isn't scientists, but a class of English student? Can you test your arguments on a similar audience? Such as other students. Read up on strategies for effective rhetoric. Emotional appeals won't move scientists but may get you a good grade. In fact, take your yourself out of the argument and treat it as an assignment. Plan strategies and stockpile elegant phrases and "facts" as ammunition. Stay calm no matter what is said.

Also, you might want to clearly state your goal. Do you want people to believe? To keep an open mind? to teach ID in school? Stay focused on your main point. The more of your own beliefs you introduce the bigger your opponent's target is.

I'm not sure you should use the word "blame". Its all God's fault will get your fellow Christians upset.

I think the best argument for ID is that you can't disprove it. Ask your opponent to prove God had nothing to do with the big bang, didn't selectively breed people in a "Garden", and doesn't interfere with quantum phenomena merely by observing.


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## JimW/Oscar

dan3345 said:


> Most scientists I have read about all seem to agree that the thought of a God or creator of the universe or even just the notion the world isn’t random are disgusted by this. It is poisonous to them, an idea will catch on fast if backed up with FACTS. That said, Intelligent Design is backed up with many facts.


Hi Dan, good luck on your project, if I may offer a few marbles of knowledge?

Actually quite a few scientists, even those working in fields touching on evolution (Biology and Genetics, Paleontology, etc) partake of rich spiritual lives. And in fact many Christians, even theologians, don't take the Book of Genesis as literal natural history.



dan3345 said:


> 1. Is your life worth something? Can you weigh it in gold? Of course not and yet there is something that is keeping you from killing another person or vice versa. So if you can conclude that your life is worth something, you must ask why it is. If there is no creator and no order to the world why should your existence mean something?


I wouldn't look to biology for ultimate existential meanings anymore than I'd look to hydraulic engineering. Evolution is a biological process, it is the 'how' not the 'why'.



dan3345 said:


> You see an atheist has no hope....


No sorry, I don't see this at all, it isn't an axiom. In science all that matters is what the facts suggest and how well a theory can explain them all. Atheist/Evolutionist VS Christian/Creationist is what Philosophers Of Science call a "false dichotomy". Not all biologists working in evolution are atheists nor are all Christians creationists (in the literal YEC sense anyway).



dan3345 said:


> 2. Nature displays intelligence. If you look at a ice under a microscope for example what can you assume? On the surface the ice looks just like a block of frozen water. But at the molecular level you have molecules aligning themselves in the seconds it take to freeze water and becoming these beautiful and complex structures of crystal formations. How can any sane person look at the structure and say “This happened randomly.” It is true that every snow flake is different, so they do grow “randomly” but that said, the fact that they all grow into this crystal structure shows that something had to think it out, and align or give the molecules the properties to form this structure. And by the way, scientists know how the structures form but cannot explain why. It’s as if they were, oh I don’t know.. Programmed?


Ice is formed from water in accordance with known laws of Physics. On this planet water is paramount to Life's existence, though organic chemists have postulated how living systems on other worlds could utilize ammonia, silicon and other elements just as well.



dan3345 said:


> 3.....Shouldn’t you look at [crystal formation] and think that something planned this? How am I supposed to believe that this could happen in a random world? ....


I'm sorry I really don't see your point here. Ammonia is a liquid on some of the outer planets, atoms have various states. Most of the universe is wholly adverse to sustaining life, I'm not seeing evidence of planning here so much. What do you suppose the planned purpose of the planet Mercury was?




dan3345 said:


> 4.	Again same with DNA. When Charles Darwin was writing his Origin of Species he couldn’t possibly have known how complex DNA and the simplest single celled organism really are.....


Yet the discovery of DNA fulfilled one of Darwin's theory's chief predictions, a hereditary mechanism effectible by natural selection. In Science a theory is not just an 'idea' but a postulate based on observational facts which explains the connections between them, it must be at least possibly falsifiable (in other words no magical explanations - this is validity) and must be able to make predictions (this is reliability). All of the predictions Darwin's Theory of Evolution generated have come to be including transitional fossil forms. 



dan3345 said:


> 5.	Evolution at its core is the theory that all life forms change over time by making small adaptations per generation to suit their environment.....


Yes though you lost me with the rest of #5. Most mutations are neutral meaning they don't assist with survival nor do they impede it, so they are carried on down the line where at some point they might prove to be an asset, if they prove to be a detriment then they stop at that unhappy generation. Negative mutations, those that impede survival, get weeded out as the sad holders are killed off and the mutation doesn't propagate. Positive mutations, though very rare, are carried on and accumulate and accumulate and accumulate.



dan3345 said:


> .....The other thing about evolution is the history of bones found for species. Humans have examples that range back 3.2 million years. I would like to argue that this is just one fossil, out of about twenty or thirty. Twenty or thirty. I would be more inclined to believe evolution if they found hundreds or thousands of these. At least a few hundred though. I know how difficult of a feat that would be but if they are really that confidant about evolution they should search for the many more fossils of pre **** sapien.


I'm not sure I'm getting your meaning here Dan, but all hominid fossils from 3.2 million years ago are "pre **** sapiens" and in fact all **** fossils older than 180,000 years are not those of sapiens (btw it's "sapien*s*" not ever "sapien"). We now have many excellent examples of transitional fossil forms between our own species and earlier hominids. If evolution didn't occur what exactly was **** erectus? They certainly weren't just another race of sapiens, they were an entirely different species predating our own and perfectly transitional between us and still earlier more different hominids. 



dan3345 said:


> My last point about evolution which know one I know has been able to explain, is that if we did in fact evolve from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? If An animal evolves slowly over time then wouldn’t the less advanced species die off and the offspring be the evolved ones? Wouldn’t that mean the old species would be gone?


We didn't evolve from monkeys nor any extant (modern) ape, we and they share common ancestry (of course we share closer kin with the apes since they too don't have tails, can rotate their arms a full 360 degrees as well as sharing other traits with us monkeys do not). Your statement is analogous to the following.

"if my cousins and I came from the same grandparents why are my cousins still around?" 

We are cousins to the Great Apes and monkeys, they aren't our ancestors. 



dan3345 said:


> 6.	I believe since every person has some degree of a conscious telling them right from wrong that this conscious could possibly be derived from a sentient intelligence. Think of a conscious as a guideline. You can choose to follow it and do good, or ignore it and do bad. Since the majority of people seem to listen to their conscious as a set of thoughts for good behavior I think one could infer that programmed into the recesses of our minds are laws imprinted by a intelligence to keep us civil and orderly. Without the conscious there would not be basic laws instructing right and wrong. Which brings me to the fact that since there is a basic right and wrong imprinted in the vast majority of the population perhaps this is more evidence to suggest that a sentient creator left us with instructions on how to properly conduct ourselves. If there were no creator (Like the Christian Judeo God from the bible for example) than we would not have the same civil basic laws we have today. That is not to say to that other religions did not right the same or similar laws just an example, to reiterate my belief that without an authority (A God of some sort) we would all be killing, raping, stealing, savages.


All human civilizations have had to acquire basic civil laws governing the orderly protection of property, life, etc. Without these a society could never continue. I find it interesting that some modern moral givens, take for example the belief that slavery is wrong, exist nowhere in the Bible (nor Torah where laws of the Bible originated) There are biblical laws describing the proper treatment of slaves, but good luck finding anywhere in the Bible where it says slavery is not to be done, period. You might want to look into some of the ethics taught in the Bible before pronouncing it a source of modern morals. For example look into Numbers 31 where God tells the Israelites, when asked what is to be done with women and children captives of war, to kill all the women who have 'been with man' and keep the virgins for themselves - a little later it describes God taking 'his' share of the virgins along with captured cattle whatever that means :-(



dan3345 said:


> 7.I am a proponent of YEC. Young Earth Creation is the theory that A deity of some sort created the universe and everything in it in literally moments.....I am a Christian. I believe in the trinity. However I am not saying in this that my God is right, or real for that matter, I am just pushing the point that it is perfectly reasonable to assume based on logic that an intelligent designer is to blame for the existence of this world and us.


YEC is not a theory at all, it is based on no observational evidence, explains no observations of the natural world and in fact is wholly falsified by all of them. Your assertion of the Earth being made to look old and fossils being purposefully placed to throw us off would mean God lies.

I can't for the life of me see how you've shown your conclusions are based on logic or reason, sorry.


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## dan3345

Lol I got owned. I think you can all see how much thought and work I put into this whole thing.. I wrote it in about 10 minutes just to have something. But I think my point for atheist having no hope being partly correct or at-least plausible. If you think of a person with some form of religion basically what they are doing is trusting on really nothing that somewhere in some realm is a god who cares about them or at the very least has a plan for them. An atheist who does not believe in a higher being of any kind has no such feeling of hope. How could they? Im not saying atheists all live out horribly miserable lives of self loathing and unimportance Im just saying that even if god and gods aren't real and atheist still would have nothing to have hope for. Let's be honest the world we live in now is a random chaotic mess. At any moment while walking outside or driving a car or cutting your vegetables for a salad you risk injury or death. So while a religious person (lets say for the sake of argument a Christian) who is actually very religious dies randomly in some random act of violence or car crash injury at work etc. That religious person if they truly believe their faith would have nothing to fear from death. What would an atheist have from death? Well if I am right unfortunately that would be hell, but if I am wrong then death remains a mystery. And you could be reincarnated or just simply cease to exist. 

Now perhaps this is just what you say, that humans as a species want to believe that in this massive empty void of the cosmos we have a reason to exist and our actions matter, but it's difficult for me to imagine that after someone (anyone) dies there soul (if you believe in one) goes nowhere. But if you take it deeper, what about their thoughts? Their feelings? Their outlook on the world? Would a thinking person who dies, have their thoughts simply die with them? Seems an awful shame to me to waste such possibly unique thoughts. 

But this doesn't prove anything. All I have proved here is that I (or people in general) want to believe that my existence is not to just use oxygen and make waste and reproduce. You could argue that my existence and yours and everyone else is to perpetuate the species, and that in itself is why we should all continue. But I just can't help but to wonder, if that really is the only point, then that means Charles Darwin is right (if he is I will gladly convert from Christianity) and my existence is to advance the human race. Not a hard thought, but just very different then what I have to come to believe. Or want to believe.

And lastly I am not saying or meaning to say that Charles Darwin is totally wrong, because truthfully I do not understand enough about the theory of evolution to argue it correctly. And perhaps if I knew more I wouldn't be arguing it. I would be defending it, but the fact is like I explained in my debate is what I don't understand and what people have not been able to explain to me. I don't know if anyone else understands my question, or if I don't ask it right but everyone I ask who is well versed in evolution always seems to go off on some other part about evolution when I ask that one question.

So, How come they're are still monkeys if we evolved from monkeys? If every species evolves from the offspring then wouldn't that mean that given enough time monkeys would cease to exist because the offspring over time would be needed to be reclassified as a newer species? (Early human??)


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## dan3345

JimW/Oscar I didn't mean to call YEC a theory. It is not backed by any evidence of any sort, it is just an idea to argue against OEC which is more rightly based off of both the bible and what science and carbon dating etc tells us. And to the fact that God lies, its not a lie, its a fork. Lol. But no what it appears to me (AND I AM WRONG IM SURE) is that God wouldn't want everyone in heaven for some reason, so to get only the most faithful he has to put things in the world to shrug off the people who would be easily shaken in their *FAITH* You can look at this as a god who lies or my view or some other view I have not thought off, its all about perception with this one.


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## JimW/Oscar

dan3345 said:


> But I just can't help but to wonder, if that really is the only point, then that means Charles Darwin is right (if he is I will gladly convert from Christianity) and my existence is to advance the human race. Not a hard thought, but just very different then what I have to come to believe. Or want to believe.


You seem to be assuming Charles Darwin was an atheist. He was a lifelong member of the Church Of England and is buried in an abbey cemetary. He wrote his faith was shaken much more by the death of his beloved daughter than by his discovery of evolutionary biology.




dan3345 said:


> So, How come they're are still monkeys if we evolved from monkeys? If every species evolves from the offspring then wouldn't that mean that given enough time monkeys would cease to exist because the offspring over time would be needed to be reclassified as a newer species? (Early human??)


I already answered this question, perhaps with the length of my post you missed it. Humans didn't evolve from monkeys nor any present day apes. Ancestral species can become extinct as new species evolve but this isn't necessarily always the case, sometimes the daughter species evolves after having been reproductively isolated from the parent species in some way but the parent species also continues on with descendents more or less unchanged.

Monkeys and more so the Great Apes are our cousins, stemming from common ancestry.


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## TheOldSalt

Darwinian Evolution does not work. Period. It's simply impossible.

Evolution, however, exists and works just fine. Darwin was simply WAY off base on a few things.

If anything, I think that evolution serves as proof that God does ( or did ) exist and installed the operating system that runs this universe. It's only natural to assume that He'd want a system in place to allow for self-correction in all life forms to let them take care of their own problems in response to various environmental factors. Otherwise, it would just be work,work,work all the time, and I'm sure He's a busy man. The way evolution works simply defies all notions that it is random. There's no way it's random; if it were, then things would degrade and fail as often as, no.. considerably more often, than they progress. 
There is also the fact that the same sorts of things have developed in different evolutionary lines. For example, the eye has been "invented" no less than seven different times in widely different branches of the tree of life. My personal theory, and one that I'm pretty sure will be proven someday by some jerk who will take all the credit for it, is that a lot of the so-called "junk DNA" shared by all life on this planet is actually the "Operating System" software that controls all cellular function, AND contains within it several resource packages which can be used for evolutionary development. For example, "eyeball 1.101" could be a bit of coding that can be used to create a basic framework for the development of eyes if it should be activated.

Considering how extremely rapid evolution and speciation have been shown to work when they want to, I think that this theory explains that very well.

As for a Young Earth only 6000 years old... no.
Yes, it would be possible for an omnipotent God to whip everything up all at once and even artificially age things to conceal it, but why would he bother? Why do that and then TELL us he did it, rendering his efforts futile?
The kicker, though, is Eve.
Okay, so he whips up Adam and Lilith. Lilith turns out to be an epic failure, so it's back to the drawing board. ( apocryphal, but not really important )
He takes one of Adam's ribs and makes Eve.
Why?
If Adam was a perfect human male specimen with whom God was well pleased, it makes sense that making a perfect female version of Adam would give him optimum results. To do that, He needed Adam's perfect DNA and enough of his undifferentiated basal cells to let him cobble together a female version using X chromosomes from two cells and excluding the Y.
The best place to find such cells in an adult human is the active bone marrow. In an adult, only a very small amount of marrow is active in a few places. Of these places, the easiest to reach is in the... RIBS.

So, God cloned Adam to make Eve, Adam's perfect mate. The procedure itself is pretty much described in the Bible in a vague sort of way which makes perfect sense if you look at it this way.

BUT... why?
Why would a guy who could make the whole universe in a week, and artificially age the whole thing, ever need to go to the trouble of cloning anyone instead of just using his powers to whip up Eve in an instant?

My guess is that we might just be giving Him too much credit. Maybe he isn't so all powerful. Maybe his power works best while he is standing OUTSIDE of our universe, like a writer or programmer. Maybe having to enter our realm physically reduces his ability somehow?
Anyway, this is why I don't buy the Young Earth idea. It would just be too pointless for Him to bother, and if He could do all that, then why would He have to clone Adam to make Eve, which would be such a minor thing in comparison?

Oh, one last thing: We ARE apes. Why does everyone seem to have a problem with the possibility of our having evolved FROM them?


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## JimW/Oscar

Yeah, 'ape' isn't a scientific term but for all intent and purpose we are Great Apes. The other extant large Primates with no tails who can rotate their forelimbs 360 degrees etc referred to as "apes" are members of the old Primate Family Pongidae mostly due to their form of locomotion. Though recently geneticists have argued chimps and gorillas need to be in our own family, Hominidae, on the grouds of our close genetic relationships (while many argue orangs should remain in the Pongidae)

The story of using Adam's rib to make Eve most likely stemmed from the incorrect belief that women have one less rib than men. People have varying numbers of ribs. Personally I always suspect myths claiming women being 'born' of men, it's all Venus envy


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## JimW/Oscar

dan3345 said:


> JimW/Oscar I didn't mean to call YEC a theory. It is not backed by any evidence of any sort, it is just an idea to argue against OEC which is more rightly based off of both the bible and what science and carbon dating etc tells us. And to the fact that God lies, its not a lie, its a fork. Lol. But no what it appears to me (AND I AM WRONG IM SURE) is that God wouldn't want everyone in heaven for some reason, so to get only the most faithful he has to put things in the world to shrug off the people who would be easily shaken in their *FAITH* You can look at this as a god who lies or my view or some other view I have not thought off, its all about perception with this one.


Actually carbon dating is accurate only back some 50,000 years and is used in Archaeology as it is useless in Paleontology where such atomic based clocks such as Potassium/Argon or Uranium/Lead are used.

It seems clear to me planting fossils in the ground that aren't really remains of once existing animals/plants so scientists could find them is purposefully misleading - e.g. lying. I don't believe The Almighty lies, better to believe that all too human YECs lie if even to themselves.


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## dan3345

I had my debate guys, and I don't want to say that I won, because Im not sure how someone "wins" a debate. My side of four people including me was against the rest of the class of 27 students. And we "won" if you want to put it that way by presenting an argument for which the other side could not come back with. 

My argument which we used was that in Darwinian theory Charles himself stated that if a part of an organism can be found that is perfect in its design. I should note that in this case we used a flagellum as our device. Then if you remove a single part than that system can no longer work his theory is proven false. I think you all understand why this is, but basically all I argued is that a flagellum has many parts and if you remove a single part it no longer works so how could it evolve over time to work? That would imply that it evolved piece by piece to get where it is now. 

So maybe you can come up with an answer to that? I just know that in my last period (which was english where we had our debate) none of the students on the other side could counter argue that. 

My last point I made was that everything from where the Earth sits in the solar system, to where our solar system sits in the milky way, to the strength of gravity, to the gas in the atmosphere, is all too perfect. And when i did some more research the general answer I got was that the odds of life as we know it starting anywhere in the galaxy (or universe although thats a much more vague statement) are so slim, and everything has to be just right, that it is a very low chance that even one organism could form. That one organism would be single celled organisms. So perhaps by our existence we prove something else.

And Jim you actually brought me to an epiphany. Let me explain with some background info first. 

All my life my parents have dragged me to church every Saturday night. I loath church. I hate the people there. Well not really hate them, but I hate how brainwashed and how much they seem to be like sheep. It seems to me that all of them who I have spoken with and questioned always say that they believe in God simply through faith. Faith and nothing else. I have been an atheist myself for a long time. It was only a year ago that I changed my entire train of thought. I have always been curious of the world and how it worked and been draw-ed like a magnet to science. After-all science is conclusive, science has evidence, it has supporting arguments other than, "you must believe." Well to get to my epiphany it is that I have just realized that our point in the galaxy and solar system and our place on Earth all down to the gasses that make up the atmosphere to how we have this natural curiousness to explain our surroundings; all points to a God that wants us to know him, through his creation. If you think about it, we were placed in I believe Orion's belt of the milky way, and we are on the outskirts of the arm. So that leaves us at a nice vantage point to look out and see other parts of space, to view other galaxies, and stars, and such. Same with our solar system. It too seems to be methodically placed so that we can see other worlds in our own galaxy and our celestial neighbors.

You can argue this as chance, or whatever. But I don't think you will be able to change my opinion on that epiphany. It makes too much sense to me. If I may recite a verse from the bible which just started to stand out to me.

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world. 

This verse is the beginning of psalms 19. David is speaking of how God presents himself through his creation.

Argue what you will, this is what makes sense to me.


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## emc7

The delete one piece and it doesn't work argument is a variation on the chicken/egg thing. It implies a systematic big piece by big piece construction rather than slow change over time. An organism has a little flagellum and some other means of movement, like a water jet. Once the flagellum gets big and is obviously superior, if the water jet gets deleted, no biggie, the flagellum can get even bigger now. You really need to play Spore. 

IMO the elegance of the universe is obvious in everything from music to galaxies to microbes to quantum mechanically equations. It isn't irrational to believe in some manner of intelligent design (I'm with TOS on the young earth thing). Its only irrational to say organisms don't change, and to teach that in science class. 

The Bible never explicitly says the earth is young. Its a misinterpretation just to add up all the ages and begats.


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## JimW/Oscar

dan3345 said:


> My argument which we used was that in Darwinian theory Charles himself stated that if a part of an organism can be found that is perfect in its design. I should note that in this case we used a flagellum as our device. Then if you remove a single part than that system can no longer work his theory is proven false. I think you all understand why this is, but basically all I argued is that a flagellum has many parts and if you remove a single part it no longer works so how could it evolve over time to work? That would imply that it evolved piece by piece to get where it is now.
> 
> So maybe you can come up with an answer to that? I just know that in my last period (which was english where we had our debate) none of the students on the other side could counter argue that.


This is basically Michael Behe's Irreducible Complexity argument. You should check out the transcript of the Dover Trial where Dr. Behe testified on the behalf of The Discovery Institute (an I.D. organization) and where he was utterly destroyed on cross examination. He didn't seem to be aware of the fact that volumns of research has been published regarding the evolution of such biological mechanisms as bacterial flagellum which falsify his hypothesis about them being irreducibly complex. On studying the components of the flagellum we find they have counterparts in ancestral microbes which served other functions then transitioned to play their part in the flagellum function (some still maintain the older function as well). 




dan3345 said:


> My last point I made was that everything from where the Earth sits in the solar system, to where our solar system sits in the milky way, to the strength of gravity, to the gas in the atmosphere, is all too perfect. And when i did some more research the general answer I got was that the odds of life as we know it starting anywhere in the galaxy (or universe although thats a much more vague statement) are so slim, and everything has to be just right, that it is a very low chance that even one organism could form. That one organism would be single celled organisms. So perhaps by our existence we prove something else.


Well, our Sun is just one mediocre star among at least 200 billion in our galaxy alone and ours is a mediocre galaxy among at least 160 billion we can see (recent studies suggest twice that number). Every single star so far tested by new methods of planet finding has been shown to have planets orbiting them. Even with the vast majority of the universe being lethal to life as we know it and the chances for life arising being astronomically low at any specific given place we are talking about astronomical chances available in our universe, an astronomical number of places for it to occur and an astronomical amount of time available for it to happen in. Of course Earth is mostly supportive of life as we know it, it evolved here! It shouldn't be a surprise that the planet in our system most likely to be able to support life actually does.



dan3345 said:


> If you think about it, we were placed in I believe Orion's belt of the milky way, and we are on the outskirts of the arm. So that leaves us at a nice vantage point to look out and see other parts of space, to view other galaxies, and stars, and such. Same with our solar system. It too seems to be methodically placed so that we can see other worlds in our own galaxy and our celestial neighbors.


Orion's belt is made up of 3 stars on average 800 light years away. Our Sun is on a mediocre 'arm' of our galaxy about 3/4ths of the way out from the center. Anywhere we were in the galaxy we'd have interesting things to look at, though personally I'd rather be positioned somewhere I could get a better view of the galactic center. As it is a huge dust cloud blocks our view and we have to use xrays and other methods to see the effects of the supermassive black hole there.


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## funlad3

The egg comes first. Something that was like a chicken (Chicken Ancestor) laid an egg, and then out came that chicken that we know and love.

Also, just because the age of things is coming up a lot here prove that the Earth didn't just start yesterday! I'll prove why it could have within 24 hours.


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## dan3345

The counter to irreducible complexity is that they removed all parts to a flagellum and found that they had a TSS Secretory device, which is a means to implant harmful proteins into other cells. Supposedly this disproves the irreducible complexity argument because according to the scientists once you remove all the parts of the flagellum according to the intelligent design people then the flagellum should no longer work. And in this case it does. But it doesn't. The flagellum is not acting like a flagellum any longer. Its purpose was to create and allow for movement, but once removed it is used to spread disease and infect other cells. This is bad logic. How can anyone say it works as it should if it doesn't even do what it was intended to do in the first place any longer? 

I will say though that the people who wrote the irreducible complexity argument should not have said that the flagellum cannot work if any of its parts are damaged or missing. Because while that is true, it is also true that the evolutionists proponents would take that and twist it so that it would say "Well its missing some parts and we figured and saw that in other cells it was used to do something completely different. So that means it can still work while missing a piece or having a damaged component." And that's not really the point is it?

Look if it's all right with you guy Jim, I would like to end this argument it isn't going anywhere. You will not convince me, and I will not convince you. Although my goal was not to convince anyone in the first place. I am afraid this will only escalate to something worse and before that happens I think it should be ceased so that we don't get any hard feelings.


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## funlad3

I agree with Dan. No one is going to switch their beliefs. Not only do we all have strong roots in what we believe, we all keep fish; making us more stubborn than most other people. 

Before we end the argument though, The world may have just started five seconds ago. It could have just been created, with all of it's landscaping and such. We could have just been put here with predetermined memories that are created to match our our surroundings, so that we suspect nothing. Or, the world could have started now, and you only think you remember reading this post.

Is this ridiculous? Yes. Is it possible? Believe it or not, (No pun intended) yes. All that this does (other than confuse us) is prove how little we know and how ridiculous the truth might sound. Who knows what the answer is, just believe whatever makes you happiest, and you'll have a good life. ;-)


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## dan3345

yup.

Speaking of weird truths, anyone else play the Assassins creed series? I am a big fan of science fiction stuff, and the story plot for that game is so.. well.. its very interesting that's for sure. It makes you think, the whole game does which seems rare in entertainment in this day and age.


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## Revolution1221

emc7 said:


> I will say that its more intelligent to believe in God and afterlife than not. Even if there is only a 1 in a billion change that your specific beliefs will get you to heaven if you follow them. The atheist has 0 chance of post-death reward.


ill have to start with this because i am agnostic and i am open to the idea but will fully not believe in anything until it is proven to me. the way i see it is it does not matter if i go to church or "bow" down to god. if i live my life as a good person and do good things to other people then i should get into heaven if not and its the way everyone believes it to be where you have to "bow" down even if you are a serial killer or child molester and you repent your sins you will get into heaven but i wont then it is no god that i want to believe in. you say what is there to live for if you dont believe in god? there are plenty of things to live for. live for the experience base your life off of what you are doing now and stop focusing on what will happen when you die. just because you dont believe in heaven doesn't mean there is not another possibility to what happens when you die. to me life is far far far to complex for someone to have created it. and the biggest argument like stated before is where did god come from? did his god create him or was he born from the universe. if its so imposible to believe we came out of nothing then how is it so easy to believe he did. i also have a problem with how religion itself has evolved. dan said if there is no god then why is there not far more choas, and why do people not go around senselessly killing eachother. really the way i see it is if there is a god how can there be so much choas and senseless killing. people dont just have something in there body that tells them not to kill another person because they used to all the time but we created a moral understanding between whats right and what is wrong. the only sense we have is to not hurt ourselves. have you ever tried it, its pretty amazing. im not saying try to kill yourselve but just take a heavy object and try to smash your arm with it. you cant do it your brain wont allow you. people who commit suicide typically have a problem with that chemical reaction and there body doesn't tell themselves not to hurt their body. but as i was saying there wasn't always an understanding between right and wrong you may call it the devils work when people kill eachother these days but was religion also corrupted by the devil just look how it used to be and how it has evolved. they used to be murdering bastards themselves to anyone who did not believe in what they did. first the earth was flat, then it was the center of the universe again anyone was killed for believing otherwise. after that people discovered killing was wrong and imoral so this type of punishment is no longer practiced. but now the vatican is funding money for research into alien life. why? they do it all to keep people interested in religion. if god is reall why is he such a coward why doesn't he come forth and say look morons im real quit screwing up and do this or your going to hell. or perhaps he has just lost all faith in his creations and we are all going to hell. like an inventor gives up on something because it doesn't work right.

after everything i have learned in life the only supreme being i can believe in is mother earth. think about it, the earth is an inteligent living system. just like a tree without enough nutrients will sacrifice one leaf or branch at a time. just because it cant speak or move doesn't mean it doesn't have some form of subconcious inteligence. everything that is part of the earth is connected and is capabable of communication. when you talk about pain and the placebo affect. it doesn't end there. yeah you can trick your brain into thinking your cured but do you think thats the only way it can work no you can do it yourself without needing a placebo. and most of it can be done through meditation which wouldn't you know it is concidered taboo by religion. havn't u ever wondered how our bodys are so complex capable of amazing things but yet we have no control over it? 

other things i dont understand are things like. there are sooooo many religions why is yours right and nobdoy elses. why is it that all of the ancient religions like the romans and greeks that were around way before catholocism why were they discredited? and now they are just storys. they are just as believable as god. and why is it that people that have tons of writings in the bible had other writings of theirs excluded from it because they weren't seen fit and didn't work with what everyone wanted people to believe. you cant just exclude writings from the bible because you dont see them fit.

i have came across a few oustanding findings as to possibilitys of what happens when you die that i discovered while reading a few books. a few things that seem completely insane but make so much sense. but i will save that for another time unless someone is interested.


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## dan3345

well see when you said you thought of Mother Earth as a living being I kind of sighed a breath of relief. See I know for a fact the narrow minded hypocritical narcissistic a$$es at my church would roll their eyes at you and me for saying anything like that and probably even say "I will pray for you." But the funny thing is I believe in that stuff too. I believe everything in creation has a form of intelligence in one way or another, and no I don't mean your ipod or something like that. But the Earth, the moon the sun. They were all created to serve a purpose and through a way I cannot explain it seems like it would be totally rationale to assume they do have a persona.

A world without a god or belief in gods/goddesses/creator/great spirit w/e. The purpose is always order. And if no person had ever dreamed up or had their visions then a world without a religion of any kind might be insane. Just a thought.


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## emc7

About the flagellum, the problem is the "what is was intended for". You are assuming ID. Therefore, you believe it has a specific purpose and you can't use it for anything else or do its job with anything else. If your argument works only if your unproven fundamental assumption is correct, it doesn't prove the assumption, its circular reasoning.

The other side doesn't assume a purpose. Yes, we find legs useful for walking on. But if kid is born without legs, he'll walk on his hands. If is a kid has no arms, he'll pick things up with his toes. So everything alive has parts. If the parts are useful for one or more use, the creature has an evolutionary advantage. But living things don't use parts solely for the "intended purpose". Life isn't like soccer. You use whatever you've got for what you need to do. 

Again the arguments are missing each other because the fundamental assumptions don't match up.


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## TheOldSalt

Well, if you're going to keep harping on the flagellum thing, then it should be mentioned that it takes over 200 separate genes to make one. 200 genes all laid out in a row in such a precise way as to make the end result they produce become a wildly whipping hairlike strand.
Care to take a guess at how tricky getting this arrangement was? The evolution model generally currently accepted makes this utterly impossible. The odds of retaining all the required genes and keeping them in the proper order over countless eons while gathering up enough of them to finally make something useful... it's just not gonna happen. Genes would be lost or scrambled along the way as fast as they were acquired. Even if flagella arose from more primitve structures used for plasmid injection, those injectors didn't have a much easier time of forming.

No. Evolution may well somehow account for all this, but not the evolution we think we currently know. It has to work in a very, very different way than that to be effective.


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## Revolution1221

i forgot to mention the bible is a good thing but its been missused. i believe it was the greatest "story" ever wrote, it was never ment to be taken litteraly only as a way to lead your life and a guide to do good things.


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## dan3345

Ugh. Im going to remove myself from this whole thing because it seems it is getting out of hand. I really didn't want to start an argument or battles, and it seems to me this can only get worse. So please I apologize for my lack of forethought when posting my initial ideas. Number one they were not well thought out, and number two I should have known they would inevitably lead to an argument. 

So.. I don't care if you keep talking about this but I am going to stay out of it because this looks like its going to get ugly..


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## funlad3

First, thanks Rev. I tried your brain safe guard concept and ended up with a bruise. Yes, this is getting a bit ugly, but at the same time, it's interesting to learn what and why people believe it, and I'm all for it. 

TOS, you keep forgetting the to multiply the billions of years that the Earth has been around to your odds of correct evolution. 

Sorry, but I can't argue this now; as I'm too tired and need some sleep.

Until tomorrow, may God watch over you...


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## dan3345

Revolution1221 said:


> ill have to start with this because i am agnostic and i am open to the idea but will fully not believe in anything until it is proven to me. the way i see it is it does not matter if i go to church or "bow" down to god. if i live my life as a good person and do good things to other people then i should get into heaven if not and its the way everyone believes it to be where you have to "bow" down even if you are a serial killer or child molester and you repent your sins you will get into heaven but i wont then it is no god that i want to believe in. you say what is there to live for if you dont believe in god? there are plenty of things to live for. live for the experience base your life off of what you are doing now and stop focusing on what will happen when you die. just because you dont believe in heaven doesn't mean there is not another possibility to what happens when you die. to me life is far far far to complex for someone to have created it. and the biggest argument like stated before is where did god come from? did his god create him or was he born from the universe. if its so imposible to believe we came out of nothing then how is it so easy to believe he did. i also have a problem with how religion itself has evolved. dan said if there is no god then why is there not far more choas, and why do people not go around senselessly killing eachother. really the way i see it is if there is a god how can there be so much choas and senseless killing. people dont just have something in there body that tells them not to kill another person because they used to all the time but we created a moral understanding between whats right and what is wrong. the only sense we have is to not hurt ourselves. have you ever tried it, its pretty amazing. im not saying try to kill yourselve but just take a heavy object and try to smash your arm with it. you cant do it your brain wont allow you. people who commit suicide typically have a problem with that chemical reaction and there body doesn't tell themselves not to hurt their body. but as i was saying there wasn't always an understanding between right and wrong you may call it the devils work when people kill eachother these days but was religion also corrupted by the devil just look how it used to be and how it has evolved. they used to be murdering bastards themselves to anyone who did not believe in what they did. first the earth was flat, then it was the center of the universe again anyone was killed for believing otherwise. after that people discovered killing was wrong and imoral so this type of punishment is no longer practiced. but now the vatican is funding money for research into alien life. why? they do it all to keep people interested in religion. if god is reall why is he such a coward why doesn't he come forth and say look morons im real quit screwing up and do this or your going to hell. or perhaps he has just lost all faith in his creations and we are all going to hell. like an inventor gives up on something because it doesn't work right.
> 
> after everything i have learned in life the only supreme being i can believe in is mother earth. think about it, the earth is an inteligent living system. just like a tree without enough nutrients will sacrifice one leaf or branch at a time. just because it cant speak or move doesn't mean it doesn't have some form of subconcious inteligence. everything that is part of the earth is connected and is capabable of communication. when you talk about pain and the placebo affect. it doesn't end there. yeah you can trick your brain into thinking your cured but do you think thats the only way it can work no you can do it yourself without needing a placebo. and most of it can be done through meditation which wouldn't you know it is concidered taboo by religion. havn't u ever wondered how our bodys are so complex capable of amazing things but yet we have no control over it?
> 
> other things i dont understand are things like. there are sooooo many religions why is yours right and nobdoy elses. why is it that all of the ancient religions like the romans and greeks that were around way before catholocism why were they discredited? and now they are just storys. they are just as believable as god. and why is it that people that have tons of writings in the bible had other writings of theirs excluded from it because they weren't seen fit and didn't work with what everyone wanted people to believe. you cant just exclude writings from the bible because you dont see them fit.
> 
> i have came across a few oustanding findings as to possibilitys of what happens when you die that i discovered while reading a few books. a few things that seem completely insane but make so much sense. but i will save that for another time unless someone is interested.


I would be interested but I don't think this thread is the right place to talk about it. However I do often question myself, and others about how we could be so adamant about our faiths. Truth is, I don't know that I am right, or wrong. I just know that if I am right then good for me, if Im wrong well I guess Im wrong. And as for the books of the bible that were left out I don't know, I wonder why the dead sea scrolls were left out. 

I dont think all religions see meditation as evil. The Christian/Catholic religion see meditation as reading the bible and meditating on the words. I meditate every night before I go to bed by sitting completely still closing my eyes breathing really slowly and falling into deep thoughts. It sounds weird, but I have thought of many things while doing it. When I am meditating my mind becomes a very physical place, a place I can maneuver and search. My mind is very deep.. It reminds me of a library, except it seems endless. Weird huh? Anyone else ever delve inside their minds like this?


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## Revolution1221

funlad3 said:


> First, thanks Rev. I tried your brain safe guard concept and ended up with a bruise. Yes, this is getting a bit ugly, but at the same time, it's interesting to learn what and why people believe it, and I'm all for it.


i think you missed the big picture. thing is you dont have a broken arm lol i said break your arm not bruise it. sure anyone can bruise them self thats not causing real damage your body knows it can handle that. i mean sure if you really really commit to it you probably could pull it off but not without a fighting temptation to not do it.


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## emc7

The other religious thread went on for a couple years, so yea, you may have started something. But chill, we'll be civil or the mods will nuke the thread. You can stop reading it even if you started it. At least no one is quoting scripture yet. 

There is actual evidence that religion is good for you. People who attend church weekly live longer than never attenders. The logical explanation is that someone checks on you if you don't show up, and takes you to the doctor. I can't see any benefit to religious war. But its possible that religion is often just an excuse for tribal conflicts over finite resources. Farmers vs. ranchers fighting over water for example. Religion unifies and motivates potentially making armies more successful. It certainly seems like churches are effective at motivating people to go vote.

So you get emotional benefits from religion. Hope, community, confidence, etc. Your blood pressure drops when you take the pressure off yourself and give up control to a "higher power". Religion can be good for individual and societies (it would almost have to be, to get so widespread). But, to a scientist, none of that is direct evidence of ID or a higher power. It is only evidence that there is a benefit to believing in God.


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## Revolution1221

dan3345 said:


> I would be interested but I don't think this thread is the right place to talk about it. However I do often question myself, and others about how we could be so adamant about our faiths. Truth is, I don't know that I am right, or wrong. I just know that if I am right then good for me, if Im wrong well I guess Im wrong. And as for the books of the bible that were left out I don't know, I wonder why the dead sea scrolls were left out.
> 
> I dont think all religions see meditation as evil. The Christian/Catholic religion see meditation as reading the bible and meditating on the words. I meditate every night before I go to bed by sitting completely still closing my eyes breathing really slowly and falling into deep thoughts. It sounds weird, but I have thought of many things while doing it. When I am meditating my mind becomes a very physical place, a place I can maneuver and search. My mind is very deep.. It reminds me of a library, except it seems endless. Weird huh? Anyone else ever delve inside their minds like this?


im definetly not adamant about anything my beliefs could change at any time solid evidence is shown to me. the only reason i believe what i believe now is through research and what i have found just makes my brain tingle when i think about it and how it just feels right and seems to hold so many truths. and its something people truly know so little about. its just the experiences and how they relate to real life that make it seem the most truthful to me and yet it tells nothing of what will happen at death only serves as an explanation to how things work and gives life meaning. you are experiencing one form of mediation. delve deeper. the truest form of mediation is to free yourself from all thought which is one of the hardest possible things to do. your brain is always thinking your always talking to yourself. ive only been able to do it a handfull of times without falling asleep trying or driving myself mad. you have to lay perfectly still or sit. and you cant think about anything absolutely nothing and just when u think you do you realize you are thinking about not thinking haha. but when u finally get it your entire body just goes numb there are no thoughts u just experience it and its insane. other forms of mediation are to focus on only one single thing and object or an idea and to just observe it notice every detail about it. that i have never tried my mind wonders to much. another is to focus on something about yourself. i have done this and while doing it you can make pain go away. i had a broken hand and i tried it and i was able to cause my hand to go numb. there has also been cases where cancer pantients used mediation to help their bodys fight it and cure themselves without the use of traditional medicines. but of course this will never get the credit or the scientific research it deserves because there is no money in it. and as we all know healing yourself doesn't matter unless your putting money in the pockets of big corporations.


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## hXcChic22

Well, if you WERE to follow the Bible, you would assume that Christianity (or at least the worship of the Hebrew/creator-of-the-world God) WAS the first religion. I don't think Catholicism is the same thing, unfortunately. It came LONG after that time. 

I also don't believe that Adam and Eve were the only people to have been created around the time of Creation. They were just the first. It just makes no sense to me. It's how I think we have people of different skin colors/features around the world - it isn't necessarily a mutation of the genes from the two ONLY original people, they were created that way (*poof*) because it helped them in their environments. I mean, the Bible DOES say that when Cain was in trouble for killing his brother, he had a mark put on him so anyone finding him could kill him (indication of other people besides his family) and that he found a wife when he went into exile (also an indication). 

I have been in church my whole life and I can't believe in anything other than a divine Creator because of everything that has happened to me (both good and bad) and the world I see around me. It may not be logical but I don't believe it just happened. Like dan said, everything is just TOO perfect. That's not how random works. 

And TOS - I have heard of Lilith before but I don't believe she existed, at least not according to the Bible. Where do people get this, out of curiosity?


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## Revolution1221

hXcChic22 said:


> Well, if you WERE to follow the Bible, you would assume that Christianity (or at least the worship of the Hebrew/creator-of-the-world God) WAS the first religion. I don't think Catholicism is the same thing, unfortunately. It came LONG after that time.
> 
> I also don't believe that Adam and Eve were the only people to have been created around the time of Creation. They were just the first. It just makes no sense to me. It's how I think we have people of different skin colors/features around the world - it isn't necessarily a mutation of the genes from the two ONLY original people, they were created that way (*poof*) because it helped them in their environments. I mean, the Bible DOES say that when Cain was in trouble for killing his brother, he had a mark put on him so anyone finding him could kill him (indication of other people besides his family) and that he found a wife when he went into exile (also an indication).
> 
> I have been in church my whole life and I can't believe in anything other than a divine Creator because of everything that has happened to me (both good and bad) and the world I see around me. It may not be logical but I don't believe it just happened. Like dan said, everything is just TOO perfect. That's not how random works.
> 
> And TOS - I have heard of Lilith before but I don't believe she existed, at least not according to the Bible. Where do people get this, out of curiosity?


different skin colors in people is an adaptation to where they originate. also arnt dog breeds a form of forced evolution?(i used dogs because they have been selectively bred longer than anything) we hand pick the traits we want and breed them into them. these are adaptations you would see in the wild given enough time to observe it. they just happen much much much much slower and take hundreds of thousands of years before undesirable traits are bred out of animals and knew ones come in. where these days we can do it in a matter of years. we see some more inteligent animals will actually choose mates with the best traits. these are the animals that are bound to evolve or adapt more quickly. problems arise when we force traits out of animals obviously through inbreeding is one of the biggest reasons. but also breeding small dogs there body breeds small but internal orgins dont and vice versa. now if you were to spend a looooong enough time breeding them this way and keeping bloodlines pure then you could do it without so many negative side affects that we see in pure breds and such. the theory that animals evolve or adapt to their surroundings is easily to prove. not just breeding a small animal by taking the runt of the litter everytime or breeding animals in to small of an environment to cause stunted growth. and not by breeding new traits by cross breeding family members with similar traits but if you were to start out with a colony of animals enough to keep bloodlines pure and over time with each generation shrink their enclosures or make subtle changes in their environment i.e.surroundings, temperature, humidity and everything else. then you would see changes over a long enough period of time(not in your lifetime but far down the road) it would have to be very small changes like nature experiences naturally but you would do everything at an exelarated rate of course just not to fast that things wouldnt have a chance to evolve. im not saying this without a doubt proves evolution as i to think we have it wrong and we will probably never fully understand how things work but i mean it certainly proves that god didn't create everything in his image. when that image is subject to change at any time. you say everything is TOO perfect for their not to be a supreme being it can be seen as just the oposite that its too perfect to have been created by someone or something. and everything isn't too perfect anyways their are to many flaws to be perfect why do you think people get sick and die and things dont always work. a baby is born with a giant dent in its head or another major deformity. sure most of it is caused by polution and everything else we put in and on our bodys but things like this happened before the world was corupted by man made products that poison us. but everything is perfect enough that it works and the universe doesnt rip itself apart and if it wasn't perfect enough well then we wouldn't exist at all things just found a balance after however long the universe has been around and everything fell into order. if someone created us then why the hell did he make it so damn complex? if he is so powerful and infinite in his wisdom then why did he screw up so bad why is everything not perfect enough. why wouldn't he have made people solid shells of indestructableness. one of my biggest problems with the bible is that the people who follow it only follow the parts best suited for them. i watched an episode of 30 days where a gay guy when to live with a devoute catholic. the guy hated gay people he was always raised that way so was his family. but yet he was in the army? the bible clearly states that thow shal not kill. and it doesn't give under any curcumstance which killing is acceptable. yet people still claim to have god on their side when they go to war. it reminds me. i have a hospital about 2 blocks from my house so almost everyday there are people standing on the corner holding up signs that say pray to end abortion and pray for our troops... little bit ass backwards if you ask me. seems they dont even read their own book. the funniest thing about the whole situation and we have told them this multiple times is that the hospital their does not perform abortions. they have only been known to do it in very extreme cases where the mother nor the baby will survive if the woman goes threw with the pregnancy or that the baby is soooo deformed that it simply will not survive and could potentially harm the mother but thats its. you cant just walk in and say i dont want this thing. i am unbiased towards abortion its your choice thats what our country was founded on was free will. but i am sick of all the bilboards around town. ones that say did u know i had finger prints at 2 weeks.... soooo what does fingerprints have anything to do with anything. even the one saying my heart was beating at whenver. again sooo a heart is just an organ it doesn't make you who you are. they might as well have one that says did you know i had a kidney at whenver. IMO a baby is not a person until 7 weeks which just happens to be the earliest point in which the sex of a baby can be seen and also happens to be when the pineal gland forms and let me tell you if a person has a soal this is most certainly where you will find it. also budhists have always believed that it takes 7 weeks exactly for a person to be reincarnated after death....


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## emc7

From what I gather, Lilith is in the Jewish "myths" that are as old or older than the Bible. Adam's first wife, created from earth at the same time, the first divorce, a non-subservient (to men) female. Cast out of Eden, she become a "demon". Creating Eve from Adam's rib was supposed to insure obedience. I don't know why that would work, do your children obey you because you had similar DNA first? Are your younger siblings subservient to you?

According to wikipedia, Lilith first shows up in the Babylonian Talmud. So she might have been a Babylonian goddess that got 'demonized' by the newer religion. Certainly Noah's flood is a lot like the one in Gilgamesh. 

It you accept "holy" books as literature and not as the literal 'word of God', you'd expect them to be influenced by pre-existing well-known stories.

Lilith turns up in fiction a lot. Narnia's white witch is a decedent of hers. (its not in the Lion, but in one of the later books).


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## TheOldSalt

Yeah, that pretty much. She was one of the things left out of the Bible in it's final edit, but commonly known from the earliest writings.

Come to think of it, the earliest writings of human history/religion/science told a story quite mindblowingly bizarre and quite..er... not in keeping with everything since. I'm not even sure that mentioning it is a very good idea, but if you want to discuss the reasons for the various races of man, then it's certainly relevant. According to the really early stuff, Earth was once regularly visited by aliens from several civilizations, and these aliens fought with each other constantly over possession of this world. Unwilling to destroy this shining jewel in the process of trying to claim it, the aliens formed a peace accord and decided to put a new race of manufactured people upon it. Those people were to work the earth and evenly divide it's riches among the aliens in a neutral way.
Well, that didn't work out so well. Those people were lazy and docile and a bit rebellious. As such, they were kicked off the planet and exiled to another one in the Pleidaes. They were allowed to keep all their knowledge and technology, which was determined to be the cause of their uselessness in the first place.
So, time for a new plan.
This time it was decided to put new people on the earth, but this time to knock them down to the stone age and see how they developed. They were given certain traits which were hardwired into their brains in an effort to make sure they did what they were supposed to do, which was, namely, to try to take over the whole planet. Each race, you see, is a representative of one of the alien civilizations vying for this world, and the one which ultimately claims dominance over the earth will unwittingly claim this world for it's sponsored alien civilization, who will then win the prize and come to claim it.
Over the millennia since, a few of the aliens have tried to cheat. This is why sometimes they would come around and try to teach things to their representative races, or occasionally even try to meddle directly in human politics. This resulted in these ancient and primitive peoples knowing things that they should never have been able to figure out on their own in such detail, and many ancient peoples have recorded the fact that they were taught these things from the "sky people." There are a great many examples of such things which make perfect sense to those willing to accept such a wacky notion, but which are otherwise stupifyingly confounding.

All this sounds like something that some modern sci-fi writer came up with, doesn't it? Well, that's not the case. Most of this comes from the Sumerians, that ancient civilization of old, whose writings were among the first ever recorded, being from around the time of the Gilgamesh stuff.


Funlad3, I didn't forget the billions of years. To the contrary, they only hammer home the point. Billions of years is ample time for everything to be lost, and as fishkeepers, we all know that things go wrong a whole lot faster than they go right. The fact that life arose from the ooze and then didn't melt back down again is pretty amazing.


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## JimW/Oscar

dan3345 said:


> Look if it's all right with you guy Jim, I would like to end this argument it isn't going anywhere. You will not convince me, and I will not convince you. Although my goal was not to convince anyone in the first place. I am afraid this will only escalate to something worse and before that happens I think it should be ceased so that we don't get any hard feelings.


Whatever, I thought you wanted honest feedback prior to your debate. I really haven't offered any opinions or arguments I've just attempted to correct misconceptions and answer questions you said no one had answered. 

Like Lawrence O'Donnell says "you're entitled to your own opinions but you're not entitled to your own facts".

Looks like lots of other folks want to continue the discussion so I'll just respond to them should a good point come up


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## JimW/Oscar

Revolution1221 said:


> ill have to start with this because i am agnostic and i am open to the idea but will fully not believe in anything until it is proven to me. the way i see it is it does not matter if i go to church or "bow" down to god. if i live my life as a good person and do good things to other people then i should get into heaven if not and its the way everyone believes it to be where you have to "bow" down even if you are a serial killer or child molester and you repent your sins you will get into heaven but i wont then it is no god that i want to believe in. you say what is there to live for if you dont believe in god? there are plenty of things to live for....



I didn't reproduce your whole post but just wanted to say 'good one'


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## JimW/Oscar

TheOldSalt said:


> Well, if you're going to keep harping on the flagellum thing, then it should be mentioned that it takes over 200 separate genes to make one. 200 genes all laid out in a row in such a precise way as to make the end result they produce become a wildly whipping hairlike strand.
> Care to take a guess at how tricky getting this arrangement was? The evolution model generally currently accepted makes this utterly impossible. The odds of retaining all the required genes and keeping them in the proper order over countless eons while gathering up enough of them to finally make something useful... it's just not gonna happen. Genes would be lost or scrambled along the way as fast as they were acquired. Even if flagella arose from more primitve structures used for plasmid injection, those injectors didn't have a much easier time of forming.
> 
> No. Evolution may well somehow account for all this, but not the evolution we think we currently know. It has to work in a very, very different way than that to be effective.


Old Salt you are indulging in what has come to be known in some circles as the 'Lottery Fallacy". You're basically reasoning backwards, like when a lottery winner is incredulous over the statistics he won against, but for every winner there are millions and millions of losers.

Yes it would be statistically overwhelming if the way the genes aligned was the one only way to bring about the living system but this isn't the case. It is statistically for all intent and purpose impossible for any given system to have arose but merely unlikely when there are many possible ways coupled with deep time for a system to come about.

To me it just seems ridiculous to think a sentient creator would micro-engineer such things as bacterial flagella while not working quite so intelligently on such projects as, for example, our immune systems which are way screwed up (if you are an allegy sufferer you know this).

Since everyone keeps insisting on discussing religion and philosophy though evolution isn't a topic under these, I'll jump in too and reveal as a Deist I believe The Creator set up the laws of Physics and set the universe into motion for Hir own purposes but now also for Hir own purposes doesn't micromanage. Everything is unfolding according to plan.


----------



## JimW/Oscar

Revolution1221 said:


> i forgot to mention the bible is a good thing but its been missused. i believe it was the greatest "story" ever wrote, it was never ment to be taken litteraly only as a way to lead your life and a guide to do good things.


I can't even accept that. If we followed biblical moral mandates slavery would be OK, the punishment for a rapist would be to marry his victim (or depending on the circumstance the rapist and victim would both be put to death), gay people would be put to death, I'm not seeing a lot of morality taught in the Bible.

Jesus' teachings in the New Testament are of course much more benign but then again he's also quoted as saying not one iota of the old law was to change and Christians do seem for the most part to still claim the Old Testament as part of their religious heretage.


----------



## JimW/Oscar

dan3345 said:


> Ugh. Im going to remove myself from this whole thing because it seems it is getting out of hand. I really didn't want to start an argument or battles, and it seems to me this can only get worse. So please I apologize for my lack of forethought when posting my initial ideas. Number one they were not well thought out, and number two I should have known they would inevitably lead to an argument.
> So.. I don't care if you keep talking about this but I am going to stay out of it because this looks like its going to get ugly..





funlad3 said:


> First, thanks Rev. I tried your brain safe guard concept and ended up with a bruise. Yes, this is getting a bit ugly, but at the same time, it's interesting to learn what and why people believe it, and I'm all for it.


Am I just delusional or what cuz I'm not seeing where this thread is getting ugly anywhere?! Seems to be pretty civil to me.


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## JimW/Oscar

hXcChic22 said:


> Well, if you WERE to follow the Bible, you would assume that Christianity (or at least the worship of the Hebrew/creator-of-the-world God) WAS the first religion. I don't think Catholicism is the same thing, unfortunately. It came LONG after that time.?


The Hebrew scriptures which became the Old Testament weren't committed to parchment until around 200 B.C., archaeologists have trouble finding evidence of how exactly old the Hebrew faith is but even taking the Jewish claim of 5,000 years the Hindu religion is that old per evidence from clay tablets. The first Christians were of course Jews and the first Bible was put together by the Council of Nicea 325 A.D. then further completed in 397 A.D. in the Synod of Carthage, with the members (who were Catholics) debating and voting on which books would be included and which rejected.



hXcChic22 said:


> I have heard of Lilith before but I don't believe she existed, at least not according to the Bible. Where do people get this, out of curiosity?


The story of Lilith was in one of the original Torah accounts but was removed by rabbis hundreds of years before The Council of Nicea decided which parts of the first book of the Pentateuch would become Genesis. If you honestly carefully compare Books 1 & 2 of Genesis you'll find they don't agree on some things involving chronology of creation, this is because they were two different books from two different sources which were fused together.


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## JimW/Oscar

Revolution1221 said:


> ....IMO a baby is not a person until 7 weeks which just happens to be the earliest point in which the sex of a baby can be seen and also happens to be when the pineal gland forms and let me tell you if a person has a soal this is most certainly where you will find it. also budhists have always believed that it takes 7 weeks exactly for a person to be reincarnated after death....


IMO a line needs to be drawn when directed brain activity begins, which usually is just before the beginning of the 2nd trimester. Before that there are no brainwaves indicitive of anything other than random neurological test-fires.

No brain, no person..eh?


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## JimW/Oscar

hXcChic22 said:


> I also don't believe that Adam and Eve were the only people to have been created around the time of Creation. They were just the first. It just makes no sense to me. It's how I think we have people of different skin colors/features around the world - it isn't necessarily a mutation of the genes from the two ONLY original people, they were created that way (*poof*) because it helped them in their environments. I mean, the Bible DOES say that when Cain was in trouble for killing his brother, he had a mark put on him so anyone finding him could kill him (indication of other people besides his family) and that he found a wife when he went into exile (also an indication).


The earliest modern humans (**** sapiens) we've found the remains of were in S. Africa some 180,000 years ago. Neandertals continued to co-exist on earth with H. sapiens up to 20,000 years ago and there is evidence of pockets of H. erectus direct descendents existing in Asia as well so there were other species of **** around with our sapiens ancestors. 

Apparently Eden must have been in S. Africa 180,000 years ago? I personally don't believe it's anything more than a story just like Athena springing from the head of Zeus.


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## emc7

Genesis has 2 accounts of creation. One simultaneous, Male and Female. The second, Eve from Adam''s rib. People who take the Bible literally have always been trying to explain the internal inconsistencies and Lilith explains this one.


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## emc7

Aliens vying for a winning human team like Earth was one giant game of Risk would pretty neatly explain polytheism and humanity's long history of wars

One explanation for the serpent in the second account is that is was written as anti-Ba'al propaganda. A snake was a wise counselor in the major, possible female-centered, competitive religion to the proto-Hebrews among the Canaanites.

One person's "Truth' is another myth. Any you will hardly ever change anyone's mind.


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## funlad3

This is way above me, so I'll drop out.

And Rev, I knew what you were saying. I just saw my tape dispenser and thought, "Why not?" I know what you mean, but again, why not?


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## JimW/Oscar

funlad3 said:


> This is way above me, so I'll drop out.



Oh I doubt it's above you, but if you aren't interested it's our loss.


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## JimW/Oscar

emc7 said:


> Genesis has 2 accounts of creation. One simultaneous, Male and Female. The second, Eve from Adam''s rib. People who take the Bible literally have always been trying to explain the internal inconsistencies and Lilith explains this one.....
> 
> .....One explanation for the serpent in the second account is that is was written as anti-Ba'al propaganda. A snake was a wise counselor in the major, possible female-centered, competitive religion to the proto-Hebrews among the Canaanites.


Yep



emc7 said:


> One person's "Truth' is another myth. Any you will hardly ever change anyone's mind.


Yep, "Truth" and 'Fact' are not always synonymous.


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## dan3345

JimW/Oscar said:


> Yep
> 
> 
> 
> Yep, "Truth" and 'Fact' are not always synonymous.


What do you mean by this? Don't truth and fact go hand in hand?


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## JimW/Oscar

dan3345 said:


> What do you mean by this? Don't truth and fact go hand in hand?


Not always, sometimes Truths can be subjective and open to interpretation. The late great Carl Sagan suggested the creation story in Genesis might constitute truth if viewed as a metaphore of humanity having to leave an easier life in the forest when we had to develop larger brains to survive on the rougher savanah. For example the Genesis teaching that women bare children in pain due to having eaten of the tree of knowledge means because our brains got so big they have trouble getting through the narrow birth canal of a biped our females suffer through labor more than about any other animal. 

Seen this way Genesis can be a 'truthful' though not a factual account of natural history.


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## dan3345

thats interesting. I know the reason the bible says woman have great pain through birth. But what does science say? 


Sorry that is a really dumb question, but I honestly don't know..


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## JimW/Oscar

dan3345 said:


> thats interesting. I know the reason the bible says woman have great pain through birth. But what does science say?
> 
> 
> Sorry that is a really dumb question, but I honestly don't know..



Sometimes in the evolution of life trade offs have to happen to acquire a new trait which supports better survival. For example the human trachial structure retains the newborn form in adults because it gives better control over breathing enabling us to produce more sounds for language but it also makes it much easier for us to choke on solid foods.

Being bipedal (walking on two legs) afforded us many survival tools but the hip bones between our legs had to narrow to make this possible, unfortunately this reduces the size of the birth canal which has to travel between those bones. On top of this the human brain has more than doubled in size over the past 2 million years making human birth even more difficult. To partially solve this problem we humans basically give birth to fetuses which continue their brain development outside the mother's body.

You'd think if these structures were designed as is by some intelligent creator they'd have been done better, all evidence instead points to development from earlier structures.

There is a large nerve (the vagus) which runs in all vertebrates from the brain to the heart, in fish it has a straight shot but in giraffes, with their long necks, it has to loop clear down the wrong direction before doubling back to run the distance to the brain. It's obvious the giraffe evolved from ancestors without such a long neck. It's an aweful design otherwise.


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## hXcChic22

I personally think that imperfection is just a way of life... There is a reason for everything. In our case, I think the reason humans are born so helpless in comparison to other species is because God knows we will take amazing care of them (most of the time) and not let anything happen to them if we can help it. 

Most animals just don't have that kind of power. Some mothers will fight to the death for their babies and kudos to them, but others will birth and leave because their babies can fend for themselves, while others will attempt to protect their young but if something happens, it happens. 

We humans having a conscious (IMO, lacking in all other creatures) does not usually allow us to abandon our children. Before you say it - I KNOW there are exceptions. Some people are just less "human" than most. 

And I think the reason human childbirth is as painful as it is because of Eve sinning. From all indications, childbirth would have been a cakewalk had she not disobeyed God (and we might not also have an inborn fear of snakes!)


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## JimW/Oscar

hXcChic22 said:


> And I think the reason human childbirth is as painful as it is because of Eve sinning. From all indications, childbirth would have been a cakewalk had she not disobeyed God (and we might not also have an inborn fear of snakes!)


We really don't have an inborn fear of snakes, that's learned. My 12 year old daughter has a pet ball python. Neither her mother nor myself have any fear of snakes whatsoever.

It seems pretty unjust to me that an alleged 'good' God would punish all the generations of women because Eve was fooled by a supernatural creature that God himself made and set loose. Then again if you believe the story of Noah's Ark is a good one to tell children (with all those little babies and toddlers drowning to death along with all the innocent land animals) you likely won't see the problem. I wonder why God just didn't smite all the bad adults so they dropped dead all over the world?

It just boggles my mind that modern otherwise apparently intelligent people believe in talking serpents and magical fruit bestowing knowledge or immortality.


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## emc7

truth with a small t is what you know to be true. You don't bother discussing it because you think that its obvious. Or you don't mind discussing it because you like to argue: The sky is blue, no its not its clear it just looks blue, what do you mean by "the sky"?

Truth with a capital T or "Truth" is what you believe because you are told to believe. Truths are spelled out in sacred texts. To doubt a Truth is to invite damnation or at least excommunication by your religious authority. You argue your Truth is true in order to enlighten other and save their souls by putting them on the 'right' path. You go to war or get martyred rather than admit your Truth is a falsehood or even just a myth. Truths can be unsupported, self-contradictory, illogical, or just silly sounding, but you are supposed to "take it on faith".

Scientists have a few of there own undoubtable Truths and some of them have been show to be false or incomplete once people listened to evidence rather than the "authorities". Widely accepted theory is hard to change because to find evidence, you have to look for it. If we are sure we know it all, we study something else.

Every quaint Greek, Roman, Celtic or any other "Myth" was some people's (successful, literate people or we wouldn't know their story) sacred narrative that told them how the world worked and why. And most would be very unhappy with someone who tried to convince them their patron deity is a myth. 

My story is "Truth", yours is "Myth", his is heresy. Its all a point of view. Every religion believes its got the whole "Truth".

Its really amazing that you can say "the Bible is a work of fiction" or "the Bible is metaphorical propagandist literature" is public and you will get called disrespectful, but not killed or jailed. Separation of Church and State is a wonderful thing.


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## dan3345

God didnt punish people. Their sins condemned them. God did not let loose Satan either, angels like people have freedom. Satan and all the other angels that chose to leave were free to do so. But God warned what the consequences would be, those consequences if I remember right are in the book of Daniel, and in the book of revelation.

The story of Noahs ark happened because the bible tells us that every single man woman and child had turned completely from god. Except for Noah and his family. God had planned for man to not completely turn against him this early in fact we weren't supposed to do so for another thousand years or more (no-one knows how soon or late). 

The argument that people say "How can I believe in a God that would allow evil in the first place" is essentially what you are saying. The answer is this, If there was no evil what would you be? You would be good, you would only do good. But since there is evil you have a choice, you can do good, or you can do bad. God gave you a choice. Simply put it is too preserve your freewill. Now I assume your counter will be "Why does a good God then still send people to hell?" 

Well the answer to that is that God doesn't send people to hell, their crimes do. And your crimes are written in the ten commandments. The ten commandments are impossible to follow. It is inconceivable that any man (besides Jesus) could follow to the letter all of them. So for the Jews I believe their way to heaven was through sacrificial lambs and obeying the laws. But when Christ came this changed to simply worshiping the son the father and the holy spirit. 

Now back to Noahs ark. As I said, the people were evil beyond belief. They had ventured away from God far sooner than ever planned. You can argue that a God that would kill all those people is evil and thus contradictory to his own existence or you can agree that he did what was right. I don't expect you to agree. But understand that God gave the people many chances and tried many times to get them to repent and seek shelter from their sins and they did not. He wants us to obey out of freewill. Our love is meaningless to him if it is through slavery.

Also I think someone may have asked who came before God. And I thought about this, and came up with this. 

You are not thinking of God as what he is. Obviously we cannot be certain at all but we can infer that God does not live in time. Time and space are a dimension in which we inhabit. However we are just humans with humans minds, we cannot comprehend what a everlasting always existing god really is. He exists outside are realm of logic. Untouched by time and space. He lives in a realm of eternity. Heaven as it is called din the bible is such a place. Also I would like to point out that "heaven" while stated in the bible as place of wonder and perfection for man becuase it was designed for us by God, does not mean it is what the apostles and the Jewish priests wrote it out to be. For instance God seems to have spoken in a way that modern man would more understand, and that a less evolved (in a intellectual sense) man would not understand. Or atleast they would not have the words to describe. So heaven could be a literal place in a infinite world. God could be nothing more than a being from this world who being from another world could take his abilities with him, to create ours, so that one day we could join him and the rest of the "angels." 

If you get what I am saying.

I am trying to say that God could be ET. It sounds crazy but we don't know, and their are things to day that I read in the bible and go "That doesnt sound at all like what the apostles thought it was." 

I would elaborate but I think I have said enough :chair:


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## dan3345

EMC7 I do agree 100% that every viewpoint claims to be right, every worldview sees him/herself as correct and tries (sometimes) to see the world in another point of view and the fact is that no-matter how hard one may actually try the fact of the matter is they are all narrow-minded. 

All I can say once again, is that through my faith I do not hurt anyone, I like to think by acting accordingly to the bible in some extremely tiny way I make a very tiny difference in the people I come in contact with. And besides as i said before, If I am right then I go to heaven and good things happen. If I am wrong then I am wrong, and if I am reincarnated or see you in some afterlife of any kind, I will seek you out Jim and EMC7 and give both of you high 5's for being correct. And I will bring cookies.


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## emc7

The argument that the serpent tree story was a dig at Ba'al worship also explains the childbirth curse. Ba'al and his mother/consort Asherah were who women turned to help with 'women's problems' such as menstruation and childbirth. Stopping women from seeking succor from pain from the Goddess was a problem for the wannabe mono-theists. If a patriarch prevented "his" women from observance of Her rituals and they complained of suffering, he would have scripture to say they "deserved" to suffer for their sin.


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## Revolution1221

this joke is perfect for this descusion! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd3XUF4DvBc
the version from his comedy central show was better when he says would u still love me if i lost a leg. he said ladies if your dating me and heaven forbid you lose a leg. there is one thing you can be sure of. I will push you over.... YOU AINT NO WEEBLE WOBBLE!


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## JimW/Oscar

dan3345 said:


> God didnt punish people. Their sins condemned them. God did not let loose Satan either, angels like people have freedom. Satan and all the other angels that chose to leave were free to do so.


Actually Revelation says God "loosed" Satan on the world.

Yet there was Eve having to deal with a supernatural being, not even just a regular foe lying to her (which would have been bad enough because I'm not sure as portrayed she even understood what a lie was at that point). Even worst to think her daughters from there on have to suffer for her error, the whole idea is just breath-takingly ridiculous to me. 

It's just like the babies and toddlers who died in the supposed flood (there absolutely was never a universal deluge - this is completely demonstrable - so the point is moot) how can you possibly believe they were evil?

This sure isn't a description of MY god.

Bad things happen because they happen. God doesn't intervene because there are reasons we don't understand, this is the Deist tenet of faith. But with this I have to give up on the idea of miracles as well, God doesn't intervene to inflict damage or fix things. It's the only way I can make sense of the existence of a Creator, either this is the case or there just isn't one.


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## dan3345

I see your points, and admittedly you do have me there. 

And as for miracles, remember when that plane took off from New York and then had engine troubles and had to land on the frozen lake? And everyone survived? the plane should have broken in two but it didnt becuase the pilots were able to land it at just the right angle. 

I consider that a miracle, even if it wasn't by my God.


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## JimW/Oscar

dan3345 said:


> I see your points, and admittedly you do have me there.
> 
> And as for miracles, remember when that plane took off from New York and then had engine troubles and had to land on the frozen lake? And everyone survived? the plane should have broken in two but it didnt becuase the pilots were able to land it at just the right angle.
> 
> I consider that a miracle, even if it wasn't by my God.



I'd consider it skill of a heroic human


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## TheOldSalt

Jim, that talking serpent that people believe in was no mere serpent, but Lucifer in the guise of one. That's why he could talk. Whether you look at it literally or merely as fiction, it's covered either way, so that explains that.

As for design flaws in various species, well, that's evolution at work. Things have drifted a bit since their original inception, and things don't always go right, it seems. The earliest shortnecked giraffes probably didn't have such problems. My own view is a bit Deist on this; any Intelligent Designing would have happened at the beginning and then things just happened as they would after that. Actually, I doubt that the Giraffe was ever intentionally designed at all, nor most other modern species, either. I think that the system of evolution was installed on the software that runs all life on this planet, and then things took off on their own. A possible exception might involve the huge bursts of speciation which occurred a few times after the mass extinctions following the asteroid hit. Those were kinda freaky. I can't help but wonder sometimes if they were the result of direct meddling by someone.

As for the flood, there does not seem to have ever been a huge global flood. HOWEVER, a huge regional flood over that part of the world does indeed seem to have literally happened. Mt Ararat has an "anomaly" on it that may or may not be the remains of a big boat, but the next mountain over from it definitely has some leftover big boat parts on it, way, WAY above anywhere that a boat should ever be. Just one of those things that make you go Hmmm...


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## JimW/Oscar

TheOldSalt said:


> Jim, that talking serpent that people believe in was no mere serpent, but Lucifer in the guise of one. That's why he could talk. Whether you look at it literally or merely as fiction, it's covered either way, so that explains that.


I really don't see the idea of a fallen angel disguised as a talking creature to be any less ridiculous than just a talking creature but that's just my opinion.

The name "Lucifer" actually comes from a misinterpretation of Isaiah 14:12, supposedly the devil's archangel name was Samael. I do find this stuff all fascinating but I certainly don't believe any of it to be non-fiction.



TheOldSalt said:


> ....A possible exception might involve the huge bursts of speciation which occurred a few times after the mass extinctions following the asteroid hit. Those were kinda freaky. I can't help but wonder sometimes if they were the result of direct meddling by someone.


Yeah those events were pretty spectacular, though they too took scores of thousands of years...still being "bursts' in geologic time.




TheOldSalt said:


> As for the flood, there does not seem to have ever been a huge global flood. HOWEVER, a huge regional flood over that part of the world does indeed seem to have literally happened. Mt Ararat has an "anomaly" on it that may or may not be the remains of a big boat, but the next mountain over from it definitely has some leftover big boat parts on it, way, WAY above anywhere that a boat should ever be. Just one of those things that make you go Hmmm..


Genesis describes "the mountains of Ararat" and we have no idea where the author was referring to. The mountain we now call Ararat was named that some 900 years ago. I've seen the photos of the supposed boat on the side of Ararat and I honestly can't see anything in the photo, according to NASA it's a rock formation most of the believers are pointing to (though different groups point to different spots on the mountain).


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## dan3345

urh I was just reading something that said they found where those mountains were! It was on 33 degree longitude line of the Earth. But I can't remember what it was called. It started with an H and I think it was near Afghanistan.


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## JimW/Oscar

dan3345 said:


> urh I was just reading something that said they found where those mountains were! It was on 33 degree longitude line of the Earth. But I can't remember what it was called. It started with an H and I think it was near Afghanistan.


That would be news to me, in any event I can never decide whether these groups going up what is now called Mt. Ararat looking for Noah's Ark are sad or entertaining. A minimal search of history will reveal that mountain in Turkey has been called Ararat for only 900 years.

In any event even though there seems to be some evidence there was a massive flood in the Middle East some 10,000 years ago Genesis clearly states Noah's Flood covered the whole world above the highest mountain and all flesh on the land perished except that which was in the Ark (I assume they figured the fish & whales didn't have to be in tanks on the Ark but I've always wondered what happened to the plesiosaurs - maybe they're in Loch Ness {not really it's way too cold for a marine reptile and since they breathed air we'd be seeing them much more}). 

So now claiming Genesis meant a local flood which seemed the whole world to the witnesses is changing the meanings, not that this wouldn't be the first time Christians and Jews have done this. In Galileo's day the then Church fathers insisted the Earth can't be moving because the Bible in several places states it doesn't. They imprisoned Galileo for trying to teach Copernicus' observations and threatened him with death if he didn't recant. Eventually Christianity had to get used to the idea that the Earth moves because, well, it DOES....but of course instead of admitting the Bible is simply wrong they explained only their interpretation was wrong (including the allegedly infallible interpretation of the Pope) and when the Bible says "the Earth moveth not in her place" it really means, well, something else poetic or something.

Modern day young earth creationists certainly accept the Genesis Flood to have been world wide and base their bizarre geology on this, and bizarre it is.

I'd love to see a YEC explain to me how the Australian marsupials got to the Ark from there and then got back home after the flood. In standard geology and paleontology we know there were only marsupial mammals on the Australian continent because that was the only kind of mammals around back when Australia was connected to Africa (they're still moving away from each other). After Australia moved away placental mammals evolved and out-competed most marsupial species on the connected greater continents. This process took a hundred million years.

I'd also like to see a YEC explain to me how the top soil in N. America and Europe/Asia (which was laid out by the progressing and receding fresh water glaciers) wasn't totally destroyed by the inundation of sea water, and what about all the fresh water flora and fauna in the rivers and lakes?


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## Revolution1221

ive always wondered how big that boat must have been to fit two of every animal in the world? how would these animals survive on a boat for 40 days without proper care or food? if any body owns reptiles and amphibians you will know how specific they need their temperatures/humidity or they can die pretty quick. how is it that one family in the entire world was the only ones who didn't lose faith? and how did they repopulate the earth? through massive inbreeding? this is an estimation of how many species of animals live on the earth please someone explain to me how you fit these on one boat?(excluding the fish of course) 
Animals: estimated 3-30 million species
|
|--Invertebrates: 97% of all known species
| `--+--Sponges: 10,000 species
| |--Cnidarians: 8,000-9,000 species
| |--Molluscs: 100,000 species
| |--Platyhelminths: 13,000 species
| |--Nematodes: 20,000+ species
| |--Annelida: 12,000 species
| `--Arthropods
| `--+--Crustaceans: 40,000 species
| |--Insects: 1-30 million+ species
| `--Arachnids: 75,500 species
|
`--Vertebrates: 3% of all known species
`--+--Reptiles: 7,984 species
|--Amphibians: 5,400 species
|--Birds: 9,000-10,000 species
|--Mammals: 4,475-5,000 species
`--Ray-Finned Fishes: 23,500 species


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## emc7

There is lots of evidence for large regional floods long ago. Esp. after the ice age, breaking ice dams and tilting continents (from being relieved of the ice's weight) could produce walls of water, suddenly reversing rivers and other disasters to the people who lived there.

To say that the BCE use of "worldwide" is the same as today's global is kind of silly. No hint of the "new world" is there in the books. A few Ancient Arab astronomers may have corrected figured on a round world and estimated its diameter and some sea-faring peoples may have mapped the entire Mediterranean, but most people of the time would have considered the nearest ocean "the end of the earth". And the whole world that mattered to them were peoples and lands close enough to conquer or be conquered by them in one human lifetime. If every place you've ever seen or heard of was underwater, you say the whole world was flooded.

Just keeping 2 of each commonly kept domestic animal would be enough of a chore for any boat. And it would be much smarter to take 6 of each (for genetic diversity).


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## Revolution1221

even better question where did all this rain come from to cover the entire plannet? did all the polar ice caps melt? that drastic of a change in water chemistry in the oceans probably would have been enough to kill of millions of species in the ocean. then why didn't it? obviously had the earth flooded all lakes would have become salt water wouldn't they?


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## JimW/Oscar

Revolution1221 said:


> ive always wondered how big that boat must have been to fit two of every animal in the world? how would these animals survive on a boat for 40 days without proper care or food? if any body owns reptiles and amphibians you will know how specific they need their temperatures/humidity or they can die pretty quick. how is it that one family in the entire world was the only ones who didn't lose faith? and how did they repopulate the earth? through massive inbreeding? this is an estimation of how many species of animals live on the earth please someone explain to me how you fit these on one boat?(excluding the fish of course)
> Animals: estimated 3-30 million species
> |
> |--Invertebrates: 97% of all known species
> | `--+--Sponges: 10,000 species
> | |--Cnidarians: 8,000-9,000 species
> | |--Molluscs: 100,000 species
> | |--Platyhelminths: 13,000 species
> | |--Nematodes: 20,000+ species
> | |--Annelida: 12,000 species
> | `--Arthropods
> | `--+--Crustaceans: 40,000 species
> | |--Insects: 1-30 million+ species
> | `--Arachnids: 75,500 species
> |
> `--Vertebrates: 3% of all known species
> `--+--Reptiles: 7,984 species
> |--Amphibians: 5,400 species
> |--Birds: 9,000-10,000 species
> |--Mammals: 4,475-5,000 species
> `--Ray-Finned Fishes: 23,500 species


Not to mention the arthropods, I read somewhere once that even given just two individuals of the flying insects they'd have to take turns swarming and landing on the Ark's surfaces because there'd be not enough room for all of them to land at once.



Revolution1221 said:


> obviously had the earth flooded all lakes would have become salt water wouldn't they?


Take note I did ask this question in my last post along with the problem of salt water effects on the Northern Hemisphere's top soil, which in reality was laid down by glaciers which are fresh water.

And yes I agree that much fresh water added to the oceans would likely threaten many sensitive salt water species.


----------



## JimW/Oscar

emc7 said:


> To say that the BCE use of "worldwide" is the same as today's global is kind of silly. No hint of the "new world" is there in the books. A few Ancient Arab astronomers may have corrected figured on a round world and estimated its diameter and some sea-faring peoples may have mapped the entire Mediterranean, but most people of the time would have considered the nearest ocean "the end of the earth". And the whole world that mattered to them were peoples and lands close enough to conquer or be conquered by them in one human lifetime. If every place you've ever seen or heard of was underwater, you say the whole world was flooded.


Though the claim is the Bible contains revealed knowledge from God, you'd think God would know about the American continent.



emc7 said:


> Just keeping 2 of each commonly kept domestic animal would be enough of a chore for any boat. And it would be much smarter to take 6 of each (for genetic diversity).


Actually 7 pairs of every 'clean' species was taken on board according to Genesis


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## Revolution1221

i also want to make it a point so everyone knows that no matter what is descussed here it does not change my opinion of any of you. you are all good people from what i have experienced over my time here on fish forums. we are all entitled to our own beliefs and its never a bad thing to fight for what you believe. i am merely stating my own opinion and the questions that have i come across in the search for my own beliefs.


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## Revolution1221

JimW/Oscar said:


> Take note I did ask this question in my last post along with the problem of salt water effects on the Northern Hemisphere's top soil, which in reality was laid down by glaciers which are fresh water.And yes I agree that much fresh water added to the oceans would likely threaten many sensitive salt water species.


like u said the affects of salt water on the top soil. i mean it would have litteraly wiped out all plant species on earth. when the rain stopped where did the animals go? they wouldn't have had an ecosystem to go back to.


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## emc7

I think "divinely inspired" makes a lot more sense than a literally taking of dictation from a divine speaker. I doubt the truth as God knows it is something humans understand or even have words for. If you assume human writers with divine inspiration, you expect the text to be filtered and possibly distorted by human minds and hands; filtered and influenced by the culture, the language and the times of people who wrote it down in the same way things are "lost in translation". Add in the fact that humans translated the text again and again, and IMO, to consider any 2k year old document "True and perfect" takes a lot of faith. 

Even a great translator distorts a text moving into another language. There are words that mean almost, but not exactly the right thing and sometime no right word. there are choices to make among words with the same definition but different connotations. 

You could assume God predicted how the thing would be written and translated and how the meaning of words would change over time and He watched over every transcription and translation and inspired perfection. But it seems an awful lot of trouble. 

And people today, reading the same passage, interpret it differently.

I was impressed by how closely the Dead sea scrolls and modern transcriptions agree. Oral histories can be shockingly accurate. Not necessarily accurate history (which is subjectively recorded), but accurately passing a story unchanged down though the generations.



> God would know about the American continent


Yes, but would He tell? He would know idiots would get into little boats and go drown themselves.

I can see it raining for 40 days and 40 nights once in all of history. Not globally, but maybe over a whole subcontinent. Once you get a volcano or something the fills the air with dust and you get weather like the "year without a summer", 1816. If the land were mostly flat (much of the glacial scoured earth was), a lot could flood. Especially if the rain eroded a natural dam and released the contents of a large lake. But the Gilgamesh flood is only 6 days and nights with a strong tempest. I think you'd need the storm to sink all the other boats that happened to be afloat with people on them with the flood came. To kill people fast a Tsunami-like wall of water is more effective than a slow rise. Though flood survivors could be expected to starve for lack of crops and animals.

In any case, its an incredible short time, geologically. Not something that would be easy to find evidence for unless you hit evidence of mass extinctions. At this point, I think it would be difficult to prove there was never a global, shallow flood. Noah's flood of mountain height water is harder to believe. But does the Bible say it was deep everywhere?

Where did the water come from? How about a huge comet made of ice? It would vaporize in the atmosphere, but might increase the humidity enough to make rain, esp if it boiled a patch of ocean. That would qualify as "sent from heaven".


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## JimW/Oscar

emc7 said:


> He would know idiots would get into little boats and go drown themselves.


HAHAHAHA



emc7 said:


> I think it would be difficult to prove there was never a global, shallow flood. Noah's flood of mountain height water is harder to believe. But does the Bible say it was deep everywhere?


I think it says "over all the Earth" or something to that effect. Actually I've read the works of geologists who say such a flood would leave strong evidence everywhere.



emc7 said:


> Where did the water come from? How about a huge comet made of ice? It would vaporize in the atmosphere, but might increase the humidity enough to make rain, esp if it boiled a patch of ocean. That would qualify as "sent from heaven".


Personally I wait for a story to have some form of supporting evidence before I labor over trying to explain how it happened.


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## emc7

The problem with waiting for evidence is that you have to go look for evidence. It's easy to accuse archeologist looking for biblical places of being biased. They will likely see what they are looking no matter what they find. But if you aren't looking, you don't find anything. 

And random, rampart speculation isn't exactly a labor. Just killing time on the net. And if you have the evidence, hopefully you'd have some more clues.


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## dan3345

I have to agree with EMC7 on explaining how people wrote the bible. They were God inspired. And whatever that means to you, it means to me that they didn't truthfully know what god meant. 

Obviously if God said or mentioned another large continent on the other side of the Earth people would attempt to go, and of course they wouldn't have the technology and they would never make it. 

And as for the ark carrying two of every animal, I cannot explain that. It is hard to believe but you know why i believe sooooo.. And I also cannot explain the re-population. The only explanation is that they did in fact inbreed. However I can't help but feel if the bible is right and world and people are still young (based on adam and eve) then it would seem to me that genetic defects would not be present. Doesn't it take generations of inbreeding to produce problems? And if inbreeding was there only option then I am sure God would have done something to keep their young from having problems. 

On a sidenote: Isn't the reason a plesiosaur could not exist in the loch ness because their isnt enough bio mass to sustain such a large creature? And there would be a lack of space. And yeah it would be really cool, but the biggest problem I see is the lack of food.


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## JimW/Oscar

dan3345 said:


> On a sidenote: Isn't the reason a plesiosaur could not exist in the loch ness because their isnt enough bio mass to sustain such a large creature? And there would be a lack of space. And yeah it would be really cool, but the biggest problem I see is the lack of food.


I don't know, it really isn't a big enough area to sustain a viable population of such large animals IMHO. To me the biggest issue (besides the cold) is them being air breathers, if Nessie really is a plesiosaur we'd be seeing them surfacing for air all the time.

It's too bad, it would be soooo cool.


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## Plecostomus

Ok, I just started reading this. Replying to post #107, if God told us about a continent on the other side of the earth and wanted people to go there, they would make it there regardless of what technology they had-and they did!


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## Plecostomus

Oh, and can I go back to talking about the original essay? I do not think any amount of million year old fossils from humans could convince you or I that humans evolved from apes.


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## JimW/Oscar

Plecostomus said:


> Oh, and can I go back to talking about the original essay? I do not think any amount of million year old fossils from humans could convince you or I that humans evolved from apes.


I don't really think it's a good thing you admit no amount of evidence will convince you of anything.


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## hXcChic22

JimW/Oscar said:


> I don't really think it's a good thing you admit no amount of evidence will convince you of anything.


If the "scientific" evidence goes against our faith, we should by no means be required to believe it. No one believes in our ideas, why should we believe in something that is at BEST all guesswork?


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## dan3345

not to mention the fact that there simply isnt enough evidence to call human evolution as truth. There are still far too many holes in the theory about how we got here, and the gap between ancient ape man and modern man. 

Seems to me with the lack of fossils they have found that the ones they did could have just been anomalies of various sorts.


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## emc7

I can't believe this thread is up over 100 posts.

Is the absence of evidence evidence? I doubt we will ever have a "complete" fossil record even if we excavate globally and the polar ice melts. Decay without a trace is the rule, nature recycles. Fossils, mummies, amber, etc. are rare exceptions.


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## Revolution1221

emc7 said:


> Fossils, mummies, amber, etc. are rare exceptions.


and little do we have of these. no way ancient man was capable of such things. there is the rare cases where skeletal remains were preserved through random luck and we have tiny little pieces of mans evolution. i wouldn't call them abnomolies because we dont see skull structure in abnomolies like we do in the skelatal remains that have been found. they are far to perfect to be an deformation of any modern human. and they typical are carbon dated back to far bc


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## Revolution1221

i mean say what you will about evolution. i mean like i said i think we have it wrong and how it all works but how can u debate carbon dating of skelatal remains that were before adam and eve? it goes against everything the bible stands for.


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## JimW/Oscar

Revolution1221 said:


> i mean say what you will about evolution. i mean like i said i think we have it wrong and how it all works but how can u debate carbon dating of skelatal remains that were before adam and eve? it goes against everything the bible stands for.


Carbon dating can't be utilized for paleontology questions, carbon dating is only accurate back some 50,000 years. It's very useful for archaeological questions.

When paleontologists are dating far older samples they rely on such isotope decay methods as Uranium/Lead, Potassium/Argon, and Stronium. These methods all agree where they cross and are based on solid laws of Physics.

What would be before Adam & Eve? Modern humans have been around 180,000 years, before that there were only **** erectus and before that earlier less sapiens-like Homos and before that still earlier separate Genera of Hominids like Australopithecus and Ardipithecus.

It is very difficult to recover primate fossils, they rarely live in areas conducive to fossilization. The only reason we find such fossilized species is because they were around for millions of year so even though unlikely we ended up with a few good fossils. This is why we have so many dinosaur fossils, they were around a long time ago but they were also around a very long time (160 million years) as a Class of vertebrates.

Not only do we now have a good accumulation of fossil evidence regarding human evolution but the modern science of Genetics has given us the strongest evidence yet of our relationship with the Great Apes. We share nearly 99% of our DNA with pigmy chimpanzees, more genes than donkeys and horses share with each other and they can produce mules. Among the genes we share are known as hoc mutations which are random patterns in the genome that are passed down, the only way to share the same pattern is through common ancestry and we share hundreds of such mutations with the Great Apes.

Evolution is a fact with a theory trying to explain it, just like atoms are facts and not "just a theory" because there's an atomic theory.

The state of education in our country really makes me sad sometimes.


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## JimW/Oscar

hXcChic22 said:


> If the "scientific" evidence goes against our faith, we should by no means be required to believe it. No one believes in our ideas, why should we believe in something that is at BEST all guesswork?



So many people don't seem to understand the scientific method at all. Science isn't in competition with beliefs but I couldn't maintain beliefs in competition with known fact.

I think I at some point already mentioned the example of Galileo imprisoned for trying to teach the Earth moved by people whose faith insisted it didn't. Christians had to get used to the idea the Earth moves, eventually they'll have to get used to the idea life evolves and we share common ancestry with the other lifeforms of this world, because it's fact.

If you don't know the reality of God's creation how can you really know God? From a book written by men?


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## dan3345

Ok, it was the Catholics who tried to imprison Galileo. Other Christian men were aware of how the world worked before Galileo (supposedly) thats what the bible makes them out to be. And they were ancient man to begin with. Of course they didn't know how the world their God created worked. But if you read some parts of the bible there are verses that sound like modern astrology and science (including nuclear physics) that the ancient man could never have understood. But today we look at these verses and ponder "Was that meant to sound so closely related to a cell phone?" You know things like that, could just be a coincidence but some verses sound like God or someone in the bible without knowing is describing some modern invention. And every time I read one of these verses it is always in the contexts of prophecy.


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## dan3345

JimW/Oscar said:


> The state of education in our country really makes me sad sometimes.


Who is this directed at and why?


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## emc7

I agree with Jim on this. Its sad that there is even a "debate" to be had. I can't believe we even consider not teaching evolution. But many places just leave it out because they don't want deal the ID movement. Likewise leaving out sex ed because of religious objections doesn't compute. Facts are facts. Prevailing scientific thought, even if it could eventually be proved incorrect or more likely incomplete is still a necessary part of a decent, competitive education. You can teach your children not to believe science in Sunday school or home-school them, but watering down the public school curriculum to a 'no one is offended' level is bad for the country. And I put all of the other 'interest group' meddling in the same category. The Atheists who'd leave out the religious reasons for immigration, the PC word police that are so afraid of offensive words they won't let kids read historical accounts and literature, the self-esteem police who don't want children to feel bad about bad grades and on and on. Instead of new non-offensive textbooks every year (new offended groups keep popping up), we should refine texts based on student achievement. Use the books kids can learn from. There is this whole movement to implement objective measures in teacher pay, lets start evaluating the merit of teaching methods and materials.


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## Albino_101

I'm worried this thread will end up like that proof god exists thread.


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## JimW/Oscar

dan3345 said:


> Ok, it was the Catholics who tried to imprison Galileo. Other Christian men were aware of how the world worked before Galileo (supposedly) thats what the bible makes them out to be. And they were ancient man to begin with. Of course they didn't know how the world their God created worked. But if you read some parts of the bible there are verses that sound like modern astrology and science (including nuclear physics) that the ancient man could never have understood. But today we look at these verses and ponder "Was that meant to sound so closely related to a cell phone?" You know things like that, could just be a coincidence but some verses sound like God or someone in the bible without knowing is describing some modern invention. And every time I read one of these verses it is always in the contexts of prophecy.


I assume you meant 'astronomy' not "astrology".

Catholics are Christians the last last I knew. Yes Copernicus was a Christian and it was his theories Galileo (also a Christian) was trying to teach. You've totally missed my point that interpretations of biblical texts have been completely wrong in the past and then Christians have simply changed their interpretations. 

I'd have to see examples of anachronistic (out of place in time) scientific knowledge in biblical verses because I sure don't know of any. According to awesome biblical scientific knowledge...
showing animals stripes will make them breed striped offspring (Gen 30:37)
the bat is a bird (Lev. 11:19, Deut. 14:11, 18); 
Hares chew the cud (Lev. 11:6);
Some fowls are four-footed (Lev. 11:20-21); 
Some 4-legged animals fly (Lev. 11:21);
Some creeping insects have four legs. (Lev. 11:22-23); 
Conies chew the cud (Lev. 11:5); 
Camels don't divide the hoof (Lev. 11:4); 
The earth rests on pillars (1 Sam. 2:8); 
The earth won't be moved (1Chron. 16:30); 
The rainbow is not as old as rain and sunshine (Gen. 9:13); 
A mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds and grows into the greatest of all shrubs (Matt. 13:31-32 RSV); 
The world's language didn't evolve but appeared suddenly (Gen. 11:6-9) 
The moon is a light source like the sun (Gen 1:16) 

This is not to mention the primitive barbaric biblical laws regarding women's menstruation and circumcision (and don't even try and claim circumcision is a healthy practice because I can throw you enough research falsifying that to choke an unclean animal).




dan3345 said:


> Who is this directed at and why?


It was directed towards anyone who tries to frame such strongly founded facts as biological evolution and common descent of life as guess work or equivalent to faith based ideas void of any evidence. Then again as was stated by one poster if you won't change your position irregardless of how much evidence there is how can you ever learn anything?


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## dan3345

Starting from the top when i looked up Leviticus 11:19, it was about animals that you should not eat..

the hare does chew cud. http://www.comereason.org/bibl_cntr/con055.asp

OK look I don't have the time right now to go through all of these with you, but I would have expected you of all people to see that these are translation errors. The bible often will state a single animal (in this case lets say a chicken) that walks on two legs, as a four legged creature. This is because the bible in Hebrew would have called this a shemmit (spelling is wrong) and a shemmit is any creature that hangs out in usually a group or kept in a group. Chickens are kept in coops with other chickens. So here the chicken has four legs meaning there are two chickens present. I will not debate this any longer because this is simply translation errors. Nothing else.


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## JimW/Oscar

dan3345 said:


> Starting from the top when i looked up Leviticus 11:19, it was about animals that you should not eat..
> 
> the hare does chew cud. http://www.comereason.org/bibl_cntr/con055.asp



From this website:_
Rabbits and hares, however, do not have a chambered stomach such as the cow. They also do not regurgitate their food. What they do perform is a function named cecotropy_

Chewing cud is a process involving regurgitating 'cud' (pre-digested vegetable matter) which rabbits do not do. They kind of look like that's what they're doing because they chew a lot before swallowing, but it's simply an error to state they chew cud thus the Leviticus author was simply in error.



dan3345 said:


> OK look I don't have the time right now to go through all of these with you, but I would have expected you of all people to see that these are translation errors.


So you agree there are factual errors in the Bible? A translation error would still be an error. Though actually in point of fact none of these examples are translation errors.



dan3345 said:


> The bible often will state a single animal (in this case lets say a chicken) that walks on two legs, as a four legged creature. This is because the bible in Hebrew would have called this a shemmit (spelling is wrong) and a shemmit is any creature that hangs out in usually a group or kept in a group. Chickens are kept in coops with other chickens. So here the chicken has four legs meaning there are two chickens present. I will not debate this any longer because this is simply translation errors. Nothing else.


There are no flying creatures on earth with 4 legs, the Bible says there are, this is in error, translation or not.

How do you know the Book of Genesis isn't filled with translation errors then?


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## dan3345

I don't, but for the sake of my faith I choose to accept a bible which was written by man as spoken by God, I do not think the bible has errors of any kind, other than errors of translation and interpretation by people.


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## TheOldSalt

NO flying 4 legged creatures?
Oh, tsk,tsk... and you were doing so well up til then, too.


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## JimW/Oscar

TheOldSalt said:


> NO flying 4 legged creatures?
> Oh, tsk,tsk... and you were doing so well up til then, too.


If you count gliders there are of course some exceptions, draco lizards have modified ribs which they use as air foils. This is only further hard evidence for evolution since, rather than the thing having an entirely novel 4 walking limbed + flight limb, sports an ADAPTATION of pre-existing systems, it's ribs used for a purpose its ancestors didn't use them for.

No insect has 4 feet either, there are six legged beasties among the Arthropods which also have wings, but no quadrupeds.

Somehow I'm reminded of one of my favorite biology class stories. The famous biologist J.B.S. Haldane was once asked if he'd learned anything about the mind of God from his lifelong study of Nature to which he replied, "He’s inordinately fond of beetles" (because there are so many millions of species of them - I know if you have to explain a joke you ruin it).


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## TheOldSalt

There are lots of gliders, yes, but I was referring to the true fliers.
I suppose this one is tricky, since one would rarely get a chance to observe it, but when they fold down their wings, the wings of BATS are plainly seen to actually be legs, with the skin between the toes forming the wings. 

( unless you would argue that they are "arms" instead, but then we'd have to get into what makes an arm an arm instead of a leg, and I don't see any real difference. )

At any rate, most bats can walk around on all four legs fairly well when not flying, and some are especially good at it. Ever watch a Vampire sneak up on a cow?


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## JimW/Oscar

TheOldSalt said:


> There are lots of gliders, yes, but I was referring to the true fliers.
> I suppose this one is tricky, since one would rarely get a chance to observe it, but when they fold down their wings, the wings of BATS are plainly seen to actually be legs, with the skin between the toes forming the wings.
> 
> ( unless you would argue that they are "arms" instead, but then we'd have to get into what makes an arm an arm instead of a leg, and I don't see any real difference. )
> 
> At any rate, most bats can walk around on all four legs fairly well when not flying, and some are especially good at it. Ever watch a Vampire sneak up on a cow?


Too bad the Bible says bats are fowl 

With the exception of the draco lizard's adapted ribs vertebrate wings are all forelimbs.

Dragons are often drawn with 4 walking limbs and wings to boot, but since all vertebrates arose from tetrapod common ancestors the flying ones had to utilize forelimbs for wings. 

You'd think a designer directly engineering lifeforms wouldn't have to follow an evolutionary pattern.


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## dan3345

the bible does not say bats are foul. Would you stop making these claims, they are based on nothing, the verse you are stating in your defense is being miss interpreted. The bible does not say bats are foul. Can you just let this thread die now?


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## JimW/Oscar

dan3345 said:


> the bible does not say bats are foul. Would you stop making these claims, they are based on nothing, the verse you are stating in your defense is being miss interpreted. The bible does not say bats are foul. Can you just let this thread die now?


The English Bible that you read says they are foul fowl, unclean birds.

LEV 11:13 And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the *fowls*; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray,
LEV 11:14 And the vulture, and the kite after his kind;
LEV 11:15 Every raven after his kind;
LEV 11:16 And the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind,
LEV 11:17 And the little owl, and the cormorant, and the great owl,
LEV 11:18 And the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle,
LEV 11:19 And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, *and the bat.*

DEU 14:11 Of all clean *birds* ye shall eat.
DEU 14:12 But these are they of which ye shall not eat: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray,
DEU 14:13 And the glede, and the kite, and the vulture after his kind,
DEU 14:14 And every raven after his kind,
DEU 14:15 And the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind,
DEU 14:16 The little owl, and the great owl, and the swan,
DEU 14:17 And the pelican, and the gier eagle, and the cormorant,
DEU 14:18 And the stork, and the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, *and the bat*.

Now I'm certainly willing to accept that the Biblical authors were not dividing creatures in accordance with modern biological taxonomy and the translators' use of the closest word they could find to the original Hebrew ran afoul 
but you cannot state your English Bible doesn't say bats are fowl and birds because it does say that.

The comparison between bats and birds serves up even more evidence of evolution by common descent. One of the anatomical traits all birds (including the dinosaurs) share is hollow light yet sturdy bones. For the huge dinosaurs this enabled great size with reduced weight to come about and for the smaller dinosaurs this afforded a good advantage for powered flight. Mammals, on the other hand, have heavy thick bones. Even though ostriches never fly they still have the hollow bones of birds because they descended from them. Even though bats fly they have the heavy thick bones of their mammal ancestors. Of course bats fly fine enough to get their batty business done but you have to wonder if The Designer shouldn't have given them the lighter bird-like bones. The actual explanation would be mammals simply never had access to that homologous mutation nor never developed an analogous one of their own.

Either way I say "rock on bats! represent us fat-boned mammals in the air"


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## dan3345

right I understand what you are saying, and I agree, but the bible itself does not define the seperate taxonomy of the animal kingdom, when it was written I believe there wasn't one. And it simply has not been changed. Or maybe it has. I don't know for sure.

I do know the bible was written by man as spoken by God. The bible is belief by faith. So I apolagize you that don't understand and I understand why. The bible was written by man, as spoken by god. I choose to believe what man could not understand. Most of the bible was not understood by the men who were writing it except for maybe the Jewish high priests and Jesus's closest disciples. 

Now can this topic be put to rest? Getting sick of arguing for nothing.


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## TheOldSalt

So you've learned your lesson then, Dan?
Never start religious or political threads on unrelated forums. No good ever comes from it.


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## JimW/Oscar

dan3345 said:


> Now can this topic be put to rest? Getting sick of arguing for nothing.


No one is forcing you to continue posting or even reading the thread, if you find the content disconcerning you are free to not participate.

Ultimately the entire forum is merely a form of entertainment just as is the hobby of fish keeping, though we can learn very useful things and grow even from hobbies. Though it's up to us to take advantage of opportunities.

Personally I was enjoying the thread and as long as folks continue to post I'd continue to read it and respond if I felt a pertinent point coming on.


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## funlad3

"Making someone believe your right does not make you anymore right or make them anymore wrong, so if all it does is satisfy some obsessive emotion, then why bother?" - Albino_101


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## TheOldSalt

I have seen a LOT of these threads over the years, and the one thing that never fails to amaze me is the sheer level of obsessive fanaticism displayed by.. the atheists. 
The heathens, without fail, show a far more intense passion for their view than do the biblethumpers. I'm not sure why, but I've always found it amusing.


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## Revolution1221

TheOldSalt said:


> I have seen a LOT of these threads over the years, and the one thing that never fails to amaze me is the sheer level of obsessive fanaticism displayed by.. the atheists.
> The heathens, without fail, show a far more intense passion for their view than do the biblethumpers. I'm not sure why, but I've always found it amusing.


thats not always true. given im not athiest but i think it depends on the person more than anything. i mean in personal experience i see far more people get super emotional about someone not believing in god and they kind of freak out about it while athiests will still argue tho dont get obset and so judgementa. while the athiests or what have you nots want you to believe what they believe but really it doesn't matter either way cuz if they are right the same thing is gonna happen to you as to me when no the same is true for bible thumpers. dont get me wrong i have met those people that are like oh you believe in god screw you i hate you lol. maybe its luck of the draw and who ends up on here. i dont want to come across as super intense and passionate about dissproving god i just want do discuss fact over philosophy. and obviously science does not have everything right by any means and i may argue points that cant be proven beyond a resonable doubt and that 10 years from now they could be disproven but thats how it goes. its like comparing it to something that also cant be proven its just the words of someone who said it was told to them by god. no reason to get upset about all of it


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## JimW/Oscar

TheOldSalt said:


> I have seen a LOT of these threads over the years, and the one thing that never fails to amaze me is the sheer level of obsessive fanaticism displayed by.. the atheists.
> The heathens, without fail, show a far more intense passion for their view than do the biblethumpers. I'm not sure why, but I've always found it amusing.



"Heathen" and 'pagan' were names the pre-Christian Romans called the non-Romans they considered ignorant and uncivilized, when the Roman Catholic Church took over Rome they continued to consider themselves the non-pagans and non-Christians became the pagans and heathens. So I guess since I worship neither the Roman pantheon including the god Saturn (whose birthday was celebrated on Dec. 25th) nor Christian one I guess I am by both definitions a 'heathen'. I'm not sure who the atheists are on this thread, not me to be sure, but I don't see any intense passion coming from anyone supporting the scientific position over a 'faith before fact' one.

I've always been amazed at how religious fundamentalists start these threads with intent to 'prove' their position (or in this case the claim was a desire for proof reading of the reasoning) but when fellow posters easily falsify key points of the initiator s/he complains s/he doesn't want to play anymore.

I've known atheists who come off as shrill sometimes, probably because in their perception they are surrounded by crazy people trying to insert their irrationality into our laws affecting the atheists as well. There's also the oft repeated exchange in the evolution/creationism situation between someone who's spent years of hard work learning a scientific field having to deal with challengers who haven't even begun the work necessary to enter the field yet believe they have superior knowledge and are given equal status by the media. I can see how that too could make someone a tad shrill.

When I see atheist groups trying to take rights away from others like I see religious groups doing all the time I'll judge them just as harshly. 

Good grief, I've learned so much more from my errors being exposed through interactions with others than I have just on my own.
A full cup cannot be filled, religious fundamentalists believe they have no need for any more knowledge than they think they already have.

If posters dealth with fish issues on this forum like creationists do issues of science you'd likely ban them. Can you imagine someone insisting on using only a book from hundreds of years ago full of outdated claims on proper fish keeping and not allowing any new info from newer books or modern breeders if it didn't agree with the old book or parts of the old book couldn't be somehow re-interpreted to fit new information?


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## hXcChic22

Whether atheist groups try to take away is rights or not, they can still be very hateful and offensive to those that believe, and that's what we get upset over. Maybe you heard about the billboard that an atheist group sponsored that said "You know it's a myth" with a manger scene near the Lincoln Tunnel in NY? Now was that necessary?

Of course, there are always the groups like Westboro Baptist that give "Christians" a bad name but I guarantee you can ask practically anyone besides them and you'll be told they are nutjobs and not Christians at all. They preach hate, the Bible preaches love.


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## dan3345

TheOldSalt said:


> So you've learned your lesson then, Dan?
> Never start religious or political threads on unrelated forums. No good ever comes from it.


This^^

Jim -- I would debate you more but admittedly I don't know enough about evolution itself or biology. Your 49, I am 16. You got lots of years on me. 

I am able to take AP Bio next year though. Should be fun I look forward too it. An who knows maybe I will see some ignorance in myself in the years to come and change, but right now this is who I am, and debating it isn't worth it.

This whole topic was created over my stupidity.


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## funlad3

Okay, please; as interesting as this thread is, someone should lock it before too many people get offended. I've read enough of the old threads to understand that there was some huge mutiny and that a bunch of people left. Let's not let this thread be the reason for another... :-( 

This started out as Dan and I talking about other possibilities to God. Nothing was about disproving anything, only talking about alternatives. If I recall, some even went along with God! Now this has turned into (and I really do hate to use this phrase, but it's only what this has become) a religious crusade. 

Please Moderators, lock or shut down this thread before someone gets hurt.


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## TheOldSalt

That's the brightest idea I've heard all day.


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