Wow, America is... different from Canada in this regard. You don't call anybody an Indian up here unless they are from India. The whole insistence on westerners to continually, and incorrectly, refer to the people originally here as Indians long after confirming this certainly wasn't India is considered racist in Canada. You want to get in trouble fast, walk onto a reserve and start referring to people as Indians rather than Native or Aboriginal.

Unfortunately things aren't so simple.

My understanding is that the land in question is traditional Native land which was never surrendered to Canada.

Rulings by the Supreme Court of Canada and lower courts have established a duty to consult and accommodate aboriginal people when development is considered on their land, even non-reserve traditional lands. This was either not done, or wasn't successful.

There is also some suspicion that one of the individuals who set fire to the police cruisers is an RCMP informant. But I haven't found satisfactory evidence of that yet. If true, it would not be the first instance of police provocateurs infiltrating protests in Canada.

Amazing stuff.

0:12 "all known cultures have used archery as a weapon".

No. E.g. Australian aboriginals never used archery. I'm sure there are other examples.

I find her repugnant and not because she's a woman...

A bit more info on the case:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/09/speaker-australia-parliament-resign-text-message

Gillard has consistently used personal attacks (some of the certainly accurate) against Abbott to deflect attention away from her governments ongoing snafu's.

The slipper case is just the latest gigantic fuck up in a long line with Gillard's name all over it. This wonderfully outraged woman has steadfastly refused to fire the speaker knowing it would deprive her of another vote in an already slim minority government. The same guy that would say things like:

"Look at a bottle of mussel meat! Salty Cunts in brine!" he continued in his text message to former staffer James Ashby. "Been to thw (sic) fish shop yet to buy the bottle of shell less mussells (sic)?"

I'll be the first to admit that Abbott is neither a likeable person or good prime minister material, but with no viable third alternative, I'll take him and his misogyny over Roxon's 1984-esque data retention scheme and continual attempts to increase the states right at the expense of the citizens, Conroy's 'see no evil' compulsory internet filtering and the extension of the confounding NT 'intervention' scheme that continues to pump money in to a bottomless pit but doesn't actually result in better lives for the Australian Aboriginals it's supposed to help...

Gillard's character is plainly on display. She ignores the blatant sexism of the man she, and her AG Nicola Roxon, defended and refuse to hang out to dry, but when he is revealed to be exactly what she despises, she invokes her dead father and plays the "they're picking on me cos I'm a woman" card to try and divert attention from the trainwreck that is her government. She's not even a toenail clipping from Maggie Thatcher who took to the game of politics as if men had never owned it, never hiding behind the fact she was a woman.

I live in Alberta. Thankfully, 800 kms south of this stuff. There is a huge drug problem in Ft. Mac as well.

Here is an interesting documentary that was produced by my friend's brother. It is called "Downstream" and speaks about the Aboriginal community of Fort Chipewyan that lives near the Athabasca River that flows through the Tar Sands. The entire thing is on Youtube if this site is region blocked or whatever.

http://intercontinentalcry.org/tar-sands-documentary-downstream/

We enjoy an advantage in Alberta for having such vast proven reserves. Some new technology that refines the sands "in situ" using steam-assisted gravity drainage with special catalysts looks promising, like at the Suncor Firebag site. I used to work for Suncor, and am happy to not anymore.

WhyatI never understand is why we have high gas prices here just like everyone else. You'd think since we make the stuff, we would give ourselves a little break at the pumps.

The giant trucks and huge scoops up there is quite interesting. Brobdingnagian.

http://www.convictcreations.com/history/aborigines.html

As usual, the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes. Read with an open mind and lack of hate in your heart and come to your own conclusions.

Oh yeah, and for those that would reflexively say the site is just pro-white propaganda

http://www.convictcreations.com/referencing.htm

You're more than welcome to critique the author apparently...

Whelp, if we're going to quibble over 'original land owners', then I guess we better find the descendants of the Phillistines and a whole bunch of other guys and give them their land back...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e8/Levant_830.svg/545px-Levant_830.svg.png

Meanwhile, we should give the UK back to the descendants of the Picts, the US back to the Native American's, Australia back to the Aborigines et al...

Playing a two thousand year odd old "dibs" card is bullshit. They lost it, and with America and the UK standing behind them, they took it back. There is no ancesteral right, there is only conquest. As legitimate as Germany's conquest of Europe prior to being forced back by the allies. The only question is do people believe that might makes right? \= |

Back on topic, those workers need a trained attack pig, should work perfectly for scaring off those nasty cawing assholes...

The claim for Arabs right to the land is stronger because they did not leave the area (as a group). They are also not as diluted genetically from their original ethnicity(s) (shared with Jews, who are of multiple ethnicities, but mainly of Arab decent).
Zionism is the support of the Jewish state, not necessarily the support for it's expansion (although that support is strong in Israel). That means all Israelites are Zionists, unless they are traitors to their own country and are working to end the Jewish state, there aren't many if any of those people in Israel, they would be stoned to death. I'm not sure what definition of Zionist you are working with, it must be different from mine. Not all Zionists are expansionists, and there is nothing in the word that requires poor treatment of others.
To answer Boise_Lib: Because these children are required to serve in the army, actively supporting the state, they are Zionist, whether by choice or by birth. They have the right to leave AFTER their service, or before if their parents leave Israel, so like any child, they are at the whim of their parents and forced into their belief system whether they believe in it or not. This means I was partially wrong in my statement and I will revise it..., all adult Israelis are there 100% by choice.
I love the 'you are just wrong, I can't be bothered to tell you why' mindset. It really doesn't help your argument or help sway my ideas, it gives the impression that you really don't have anything to point at as 'wrong' you just don't like what you read. If you really can point out any inaccuracies I would like to know so I can learn or clarify, but I think you are simply reading in what you want to argue against.
I'm flabbergasted by your idea that (to paraphrase) 'we only send $2.5 BILLION a year, that's not much'. It shows clearly that you aren't being logical or reasonable in the least. If we are going broke fast (and we are), why should we be sending 2.5 BILLION to ANYONE? Especially if your contention, that it isn't a large part of their budget and they don't need it is correct, why bother sending them a dime? There are certainly others we could send that money to and do FAR more good, like Africa.
Anti-Zionism might help, anti-Semitism probably not so much. Pro-Zionism is certainly hurting things by supporting one sides expansion while ignoring the atrocities that causes the Palestinians. As I previously wrote, anti-Semitism often is a by product of anti-Zionism, where the anger at the Zionists is misapplied to only and to all Jews. Therefore, Zionism creates anti-Semitism, rightly or wrongly. I am not an anti-Semite, I am an anti-Zionist...being human, sometimes the two are confused or convergent but not intentionally on my part.
The BEST solution in my eyes is a diplomatic one that stops the expansion and solidifies borders, and one that gets us OUT of the conflict as a nation (if the nutjob born agains want to send their own money, that's their business). I don't see that as the ONLY solution, and obviously neither does Israel, since they are not negotiating in any serious way, and instead continue to expand and provoke, expand and provoke. The Palestinians on the other hand have been pushing for solidified borders for decades and continuously agree to them only to have "settlers" (invaders) move into the land as soon as the treaty is signed. This gives them the moral high ground to me, but does not mean we should be involved.>> ^mxxcon:
>> ^newtboy:
Yeah sure, we're all 'Africans', but that designation intentionally ignores the evolution of the species and differentiation since the second great migration, (the first was the aborigines, genetically different from the second wave) and so intentionally ignores 'ethnicity' as a concept.
True, the scattering of the 'Jews' (ethnic term intended here) has changed them from the other 'Arabs' they originally were to the mixed ethnicity they are now, making them slightly different from the Arabs of the region today. Shouldn't the fact that their ethnicity has been diluted also dilute their claim to their ancestral lands (as if such a claim should hold water anyway, if your ancestors lost the land, it's lost, right)?
anti-Semitism is what results from the miss-application of anti-Zionism in many cases (including for me sometimes). For me, it is NEVER an ethnic issue, always a religolitical (religious/political)issue that causes the dislike of the group.
All Israelis are Zionists by definition and action, I suppose this is not true for ALL Jews (of either definition) but is the public position of their 'church' and their ethnic leadership as well. I feel fairly safe saying it's the position held by nearly all Orthodox Jews, but that might be wrong, I don't know many. That makes them a completely different animal from the Chinese, where many in China actively don't support their government or even their system of government, but are forced to stay in China and work for it. No Israeli is forced to live in Israel, it's 100% by choice.
I do understand that in large part, the 'fundamentalist Christians' (and also American Jewish Zionists) are to blame for us funding and supporting Israel, I hope I misread and you don't think they foot the bill too, we all do.
Can we agree that religious justifications for ANY otherwise bad act are wrong, and reinforce the idea that religion itself is wrong and bad?>> ^hpqp:
@newtboy
If we go back far enough, we are all Africans; ethnic distinctions happen to take the history of peoples' migrations into account. Yes, ethnic Jews are Arabs (or vice-versa) just like most Australians, Americans and Canadians are Europeans, except instead of colonisation it is the Jewish diaspora that is the cause for their break from their "land of origins".
Antisemitism is racism against Jews (ethnic group), whether they be religious or not. I fully disagree with Israel's politics and their funding by Americans (speaking of which, you do know, I hope, that they are above all funded/supported by fundie evangelicals, don't you?) for the purpose of colonisation, but to lump all (ethnic) Jews/Israelis (that's a nationality btw) together saying that they support this is about as ridiculous as saying that all Chinese in China and around the world support the communist government in China just because they're Chinese.
That being said, I agree entirely that the religious justifications over land - from both sides btw - is ridiculous and dangerous. "My prophet died here so it's my land!" Ugh.

Also very broad and inaccurate generalizations.
You can read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_ethnic_divisions for a pretty detailed explanation.
Dilution of ethnicity and claim of their ancestral lands can just as easily apply to 'Arabs' there.
And just like Jews, "Arabs" is a general term for various ethnic and religious groups.
So whose land it is is a very subjective topic of how far back in history you want to go.
Not all Israelis are Zionists. The word Zionist have many various meanings and definitions, but you seem to have a totally wrong understanding of what it is. There's a sizable portion of Israel Jew's population that is against those settlements and treatment of (to call it broadly) non-Jewish populace.
There are also many other wrong assumptions and generalizations in your post.(right now I'm too tired after work to elaborate on them all).
Needless to say the whole Israeli conflict is a very complex and messy situation. There are guilty parties on both sides. Cutting funding/aid to either side will not move things for the better. Over the last 10 years US aid to Israel was about ~$2.5billion/year. That is about 1% of Israel's $217billion GDP economy. While sizable, cutting that aid will not be a significant hindrance.
External boycotts, protests and especially antisemitism will not help things either. That will only make them more stubborn and have justification for potential threat to their sovereignty and survival. The only real solution is a diplomatic approach to change governments' policies.

>> ^newtboy:

Yeah sure, we're all 'Africans', but that designation intentionally ignores the evolution of the species and differentiation since the second great migration, (the first was the aborigines, genetically different from the second wave) and so intentionally ignores 'ethnicity' as a concept.
True, the scattering of the 'Jews' (ethnic term intended here) has changed them from the other 'Arabs' they originally were to the mixed ethnicity they are now, making them slightly different from the Arabs of the region today. Shouldn't the fact that their ethnicity has been diluted also dilute their claim to their ancestral lands (as if such a claim should hold water anyway, if your ancestors lost the land, it's lost, right)?
anti-Semitism is what results from the miss-application of anti-Zionism in many cases (including for me sometimes). For me, it is NEVER an ethnic issue, always a religolitical (religious/political)issue that causes the dislike of the group.
All Israelis are Zionists by definition and action, I suppose this is not true for ALL Jews (of either definition) but is the public position of their 'church' and their ethnic leadership as well. I feel fairly safe saying it's the position held by nearly all Orthodox Jews, but that might be wrong, I don't know many. That makes them a completely different animal from the Chinese, where many in China actively don't support their government or even their system of government, but are forced to stay in China and work for it. No Israeli is forced to live in Israel, it's 100% by choice.
I do understand that in large part, the 'fundamentalist Christians' (and also American Jewish Zionists) are to blame for us funding and supporting Israel, I hope I misread and you don't think they foot the bill too, we all do.
Can we agree that religious justifications for ANY otherwise bad act are wrong, and reinforce the idea that religion itself is wrong and bad?>> ^hpqp:
@newtboy
If we go back far enough, we are all Africans; ethnic distinctions happen to take the history of peoples' migrations into account. Yes, ethnic Jews are Arabs (or vice-versa) just like most Australians, Americans and Canadians are Europeans, except instead of colonisation it is the Jewish diaspora that is the cause for their break from their "land of origins".
Antisemitism is racism against Jews (ethnic group), whether they be religious or not. I fully disagree with Israel's politics and their funding by Americans (speaking of which, you do know, I hope, that they are above all funded/supported by fundie evangelicals, don't you?) for the purpose of colonisation, but to lump all (ethnic) Jews/Israelis (that's a nationality btw) together saying that they support this is about as ridiculous as saying that all Chinese in China and around the world support the communist government in China just because they're Chinese.
That being said, I agree entirely that the religious justifications over land - from both sides btw - is ridiculous and dangerous. "My prophet died here so it's my land!" Ugh.

Also very broad and inaccurate generalizations.
You can read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_ethnic_divisions for a pretty detailed explanation.

Dilution of ethnicity and claim of their ancestral lands can just as easily apply to 'Arabs' there.
And just like Jews, "Arabs" is a general term for various ethnic and religious groups.
So whose land it is is a very subjective topic of how far back in history you want to go.

Not all Israelis are Zionists. The word Zionist have many various meanings and definitions, but you seem to have a totally wrong understanding of what it is. There's a sizable portion of Israel Jew's population that is against those settlements and treatment of (to call it broadly) non-Jewish populace.

There are also many other wrong assumptions and generalizations in your post.(right now I'm too tired after work to elaborate on them all).
Needless to say the whole Israeli conflict is a very complex and messy situation. There are guilty parties on both sides. Cutting funding/aid to either side will not move things for the better. Over the last 10 years US aid to Israel was about ~$2.5billion/year. That is about 1% of Israel's $217billion GDP economy. While sizable, cutting that aid will not be a significant hindrance.
External boycotts, protests and especially antisemitism will not help things either. That will only make them more stubborn and have justification for potential threat to their sovereignty and survival. The only real solution is a diplomatic approach to change governments' policies.

Yeah sure, we're all 'Africans', but that designation intentionally ignores the evolution of the species and differentiation since the second great migration, (the first was the aborigines, genetically different from the second wave) and so intentionally ignores 'ethnicity' as a concept.
True, the scattering of the 'Jews' (ethnic term intended here) has changed them from the other 'Arabs' they originally were to the mixed ethnicity they are now, making them slightly different from the Arabs of the region today. Shouldn't the fact that their ethnicity has been diluted also dilute their claim to their ancestral lands (as if such a claim should hold water anyway, if your ancestors lost the land, it's lost, right)?
anti-Semitism is what results from the miss-application of anti-Zionism in many cases (including for me sometimes). For me, it is NEVER an ethnic issue, always a religolitical (religious/political)issue that causes the dislike of the group.
All Israelis are Zionists by definition and action, I suppose this is not true for ALL Jews (of either definition) but is the public position of their 'church' and their ethnic leadership as well. I feel fairly safe saying it's the position held by nearly all Orthodox Jews, but that might be wrong, I don't know many. That makes them a completely different animal from the Chinese, where many in China actively don't support their government or even their system of government, but are forced to stay in China and work for it. No Israeli is forced to live in Israel, it's 100% by choice.
I do understand that in large part, the 'fundamentalist Christians' (and also American Jewish Zionists) are to blame for us funding and supporting Israel, I hope I misread and you don't think they foot the bill too, we all do.
Can we agree that religious justifications for ANY otherwise bad act are wrong, and reinforce the idea that religion itself is wrong and bad?>> ^hpqp:
@newtboy
If we go back far enough, we are all Africans; ethnic distinctions happen to take the history of peoples' migrations into account. Yes, ethnic Jews are Arabs (or vice-versa) just like most Australians, Americans and Canadians are Europeans, except instead of colonisation it is the Jewish diaspora that is the cause for their break from their "land of origins".
Antisemitism is racism against Jews (ethnic group), whether they be religious or not. I fully disagree with Israel's politics and their funding by Americans (speaking of which, you do know, I hope, that they are above all funded/supported by fundie evangelicals, don't you?) for the purpose of colonisation, but to lump all (ethnic) Jews/Israelis (that's a nationality btw) together saying that they support this is about as ridiculous as saying that all Chinese in China and around the world support the communist government in China just because they're Chinese.
That being said, I agree entirely that the religious justifications over land - from both sides btw - is ridiculous and dangerous. "My prophet died here so it's my land!" Ugh.

@TheGenk @Skeeve @Boise_Lib @gwiz665 @packo @IronDwarf @MaxWilder @westy @BicycleRepairMan @shuac @KnivesOut

Evolution is pseudo-science. It exists in the realm of imagination, and cannot be scientifically verified. At best, evolution science is forensic science, and what has been found not only does not support it, but entirely rules it out. I don't think any of you realize how weak the case for evolution really is. None of them quotes, as far as I know, are from creation scientists btw

No true transitional forms in the fossil record:

Darwins theory proposed that slow change over a great deal of time could evolve one kind of thing into another. Such as reptiles to birds. The theory proposed that we should see in the fossil records billions of these transitional forms, yet we have found none. When the theory was first proposed, darwinists pleaded poverty in the fossil record, claiming the missing links were yet to be found. It was then claimed that the links were missing because conditions conspired against fossilizing them, or that they had been eroded or destroyed in subsequent fossilization.

120 years have gone by since then. We have uncovered an extremely rich fossil record with billions of fossils, a record which has completely failed to produce the expected transitions. It has become obvious that there was no process that could have miraculously destroyed the transitionals yet left the terminal forms intact.

The next theory proposed was "hopeful monster" theory, which states that evolution occurs in large leaps instead of small ones. Some even suggested that a bird could have hatched from a reptile egg. This is against all genetic evidence, and has never been observed.

The complete lack of transitional forms is not even the worst problem for evolution, considering the big gaps between the higher categories, and the systemic absence of transitional forms between families classes orders and phyla.

"I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader?"

Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History (and a hardcore evolutionist), in a letter to Luther Sunderland, April 10, 1979 admitting no transitional forms exist.

"Contrary to what most scientists write, the fossil record does not support the Darwinian theory of evolution because it is this theory (there are several) which we use to interpret the fossil record. By doing so we are guilty of circular reasoning if we then say the fossil record supports this theory."

Ronald R. West, PhD (paleoecology and geology) (Assistant Professor of Paleobiology at Kansas State University), "Paleoecology and uniformitarianism". Compass, vol. 45, May 1968, p. 216

"Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed. But, as by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?"

-Charles Darwin

"In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another."

-Evolutionist Stephen M. Stanley, Johns Hopkins University

Fossil record disputes evolutionary theory:

According to evolutionary theory we should see an evolutionary tree of organisms starting from the least complex to the most complex. Instead, what we do see in the fossil record is the very sudden appearance of fully-formed and fully-functional complex life.

If you examine the fossil record, you see all kinds of complex life suddenly jumping into existence during a period that evolutionists refer to as the "Cambrian explosion".

None of the fossilized life forms found in the "Cambrian period" have any predecessors prior to that time. In essence, the "Cambrian period" represents a "sudden explosion of life" in geological terms.

Evolutionists try to disprove this by stretching it over a period of 50 million years, but they have no transitional fossils to prove that theory before or during.

"The earliest and most primitive members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous series from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed"

-Paleontologist George Gaylord

What disturbs evolutionists greatly is that complex life just appears in the fossil record out of nowhere, fully functional and formed.

A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth's geological formations. This record has never revealed traces of Darwin's hypothetical intermediate variants - instead species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God.

-Paleontologist Mark Czarnecki (an evolutionist)

"It is as though they [fossils] were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. Both schools of thought (Punctuationists and Gradualists) despise so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil record. The only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation and both reject this alternative."

-Richard Dawkins, 'The Blind Watchmaker', W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1996, pp. 229-230

Evolution can't explain the addition of information that turns one kind into another kind

There is no example recorded of functional information being added to any creature, ever.

"The key issue is the type of change required — to change microbes into men requires changes that increase the genetic information content, from over half a million DNA ‘letters’ of even the ‘simplest’ self-reproducing organism to three billion ‘letters’ (stored in each human cell nucleus)."

Species just don't change. Kind only produces kind:

"Every paleontologist knows that most species don't change. That's bothersome....brings terrible distress. ....They may get a little bigger or bumpier but they remain the same species and that's not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don't change, its not evolution so you don't talk about it."

Evolutionist Stephen J. Gould of Harvard University

Not enough bones:

Today the population grows at 2% per year. If we set the population growth rate at just 0.5% per year, then total population reduces to zero at about 4500 years ago. If the first humans lived 1,000,000 years ago, then at this 0.5% growth rate, we would have 10^2100 (ten with 2100 zeroes following it) people right now. If the present population was a result of 1,000,000 years of human history, then several trillion people must have lived and died since the emergence of our species. Where are all the bones? And finally, if the population was sufficiently small until only recently, then how could a correspondingly infinitesimally small number of mutations have evolved the human race?

"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless."

-Professor Louis Bounoure, past president of the Biological Society of Strassbourg, Director of the Strassbourg Zoological Museum and Director of Research at the French National Center of Scientific Research.

Try to debunk this if you can
http://www.youtube.com/watchv=tYLHxcqJmoM&feature=PlayList&p=C805D4953D9DEC66&index=0&playnext=1

More fun facts:

There are no records of any human civilization past 4000 BC

"The research in the development of the [radiocarbon] dating technique consisted of two stages—dating of samples from the historic and prehistoric epochs, respectively. Arnold [a co-worker] and I had our first shock when our advisors informed us that history extended back only for 5,000 years . . You read statements to the effect that such and such a society or archeological site is 20,000 years old. We learned rather that these numbers, these ancient ages, are not known accurately; in fact, the earliest historical date that has been established with any degree of certainty is about the time of the First Dynasty of Egypt."—*Willard Libby, Science, March 3, 1961, p. 624.

Prior to a certain point several thousand years ago, there was no trace of man having ever existed. After that point, civilization, writing, language, agriculture, domestication, and all the rest—suddenly exploded into intense activity!

"No more surprising fact has been discovered, by recent excavation, than the suddenness with which civilization appeared in the world. This discovery is the very opposite to that anticipated. It was expected that the more ancient the period, the more primitive would excavators find it to be, until traces of civilization ceased altogether and aboriginal man appeared. Neither in Babylonia nor Egypt, the lands of the oldest known habitations of man, has this been the case."—P.J. Wiseman, New Discoveries, in Babylonia, about Genesis (1949 ), p. 28.

Oldest people/language recorded in c. 3000 B.C., and were located in Mesopotamia.

The various radiodating techniques could be so inaccurate that mankind has only been on earth a few thousand years.

"Dates determined by radioactive decay may be off—not only by a few years, but by orders of magnitude . . Man, instead of having walked the earth for 3.6 million years, may have been around for only a few thousand."—*Robert Gannon, "How Old Is It?" Popular Science, November 1979, p. 81.

Moonwalk disproves age of moon:

The moon is constantly being bombarded by cosmic dust particles. Scientists were able to measure the rate at which these particles would accumulate. Using their estimates according to their understanding that the age of the Earth was billions of years, their most conservative estimate predicted a dust layer 54 feet deep. This is why the lander had those huge balloon tires, to be prepared to land on a sea of dust. Neil Armstrong, after saying those famous words, uttered two more which disproved the age of the moon entirely "its solid!". Far from being 54 feet, they found the dust was 3/4 of an inch.

Evolution is a fairy tale that modern civilization has bought, hook line and sinker. Humorously, atheists accuse creationists of beiieving in myths without any evidence..when they place their entire faith in an unproven theory even evolutionists know is fatally flawed and invalid. Evolution is a meta physical belief that requires faith. Period.

Evolution is false, science affirms a divine Creator
http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Books,%20Tracts%20&%20Preaching/Tracts/big_daddy.htm

Though most of this is undisputable, I'm just getting started..

@dgandhi

I don't understand why all self-reported data is "bad" data. Yes, self-reporting by itself is unreliable data. The problem with self-reporting is that you can't be sure the reason people checked a box on the survey is the reason the researcher thinks they checked the box. That's why it is so crucial to triangulate your data--for example with follow-up interviews and observation of how people actually behave (which, for example, Gallup doesn't do). Self-reported data is not "bad" so much as it is incomplete if that's all you're going to work with.

Case in point, in the article you linked to it turns out many people who only attended church once or twice a month reported themselves as attending "regularly." Yet these same people did not in fact differ in commitment to the religion as those that attended weekly--which is why they chose "regularly." So basically the Gallup poll provided an incomplete picture of what was going on (as did the weekly church attendance count--people going to church less often didn't necessarily mean people abandoning the religion entirely). In my comment to you, I was criticizing not the article you linked to but the polls cited by this video which were only surveys and not triangulated in any sort of way. Those are the ones I find unconvincing--for the same reasons the article you linked to found the Gallup data unconvincing. Sorry if I didn't make that clear. Also, have you read Ecklund's research? I would be interested in hearing your critique of the methodology used.

As to your second point, I disagree with several of your statements. You can in fact be religious and not believe in the existence of a good deity. Most Buddhists sects have been doing it for thousands of years. There was another Sift on here a while back about an aboriginal group that had only one deity--and it was evil. It basically existed to torment them. Are they not religious?

I also disagree that belief is binary. What empirical evidence do you have that belief is binary? Does anything in neuroscience support this? "Kind of" believing in something sounds a lot like agnosticism to me... you're not sure something is out there, but you're also not willing to rule out the possibility that it exists either. This guy explains why belief can't be binary a lot better than I can.

Now, the information in this video is questioning what would happen if we deported all atheists. It seems clear from the examples of atheists they show that they are referring to self-proclaimed atheists. The atheistempire poll cited by this video clearly states that 7% of the people polled described themselves as either atheist or agnostic. It's not the pinnacle of research by any means, which is why I asked if you have any other data about self-proclaimed atheists. That was the reason I was asking you to keep things simple, by the way. It's not that I don't believe there aren't a lot of hypocrites out there who claim they are religious but act in a different way--I most certainly do believe that. For the purposes of commenting on this video though, I'm completely unconcerned with them.

As an end note (to what unfortunately became a rather lengthy post--sorry), let me just explain that the only reason I commented on this video was because I was disgusted by how completely half-baked most of the sources were and at the completely unjustified conclusions it came to. Now, in your original reply to me you suggested that 10% was a conservative number for the number of atheists in the U.S. And I took that to mean self-proclaimed atheists, which I found hard to believe (which is why I asked for a source). But it's clear to me now that when you say "atheist" you are referring to everyone--the non-practicing Christian who only shows up for Christmas and Easter, the hypocrite who doesn't practice what he preaches, etc.--into the term atheist. And I agree with you--if you lump all those people together, yeah, you'll get more than 10%. But I don't agree with lumping them all together any more than I agree with your "binary" definition of belief.

>> ^Aniatario:

Heh, Lorne Cardinal. Probably the first instance ever of a native actor getting a non native-specific role. It's a shame really, so much native talent out there and yet there's only a handful of celebrities out there. Adam Beach, August Shellenberg, Graham Greene, and even those prominent three are lost on most people.
Oh btw, that little brown kid with a pretty face, "Jacob Black" from the "Twilight" series. Yeah, his native lineage is dubious at best. Sadly just another tragic instance of another opportunity taken from us. I guess not much has really changed from the olden days of the "Spaghetti Westerns" when courageous cowboys gunned down droves of galloping Indians, many of whom were played by olive-skinned Italians.
Ofcourse, it's refreshing to see guys like Lorne, breaking the the barriers of racial type-casting. Saw him work as an MC at the Aboriginal Achievement awards awhile back, seems like a really chill guy.


I'm not sure what qualifies as "non native-specific role" and it's been a long time since I've seen it, but what about Jesse (Pat Johns) from Beachcombers?