uhhh, any of you guys ever lived in Iran??? You know the place, it's where they beat women on the street with sticks if the religious police don't think they are dressed properly...
She clearly has an agenda, and can't be taken at face value, but anyone that listens to the media without questioning their agenda is nothing short of foolish...

And for some unknown mysterious reason America beat the ever living pants off of the USSR through that entire development period...

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

It's from here:
This quote is attributed to Nobel laureate Baruch Blumberg. In a late 80s PBS documentary, he said half of all human deaths 'may' have been due to malaria.

While it sounds astounding, it's plausible when you think about it. 93% of all humans ever born are dead. But it's a highly speculative business starting from how many people have ever lived.

Prof Carl Haub has come up with an estimate of 108 billion people since 50,000 BC. And only 6.5% of these are alive today. How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?

So did malaria cause the death of roughly 54 billion people? We can speculate. More than 96 billion of these 108 billion lived between 8000 BC and 1900 AD. For malaria to have caused the death of 54 billion people, it should have kept up a phenomenal rate of 5.4 million deaths per year in the last 10,000 years.

WHO estimates of 650,000 deaths per year now seem wildly off the mark. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded a study to find out how many deaths occur due to malaria in today's day and age. The number was 1.24 million in 2010! http://www.bbc.com/news/health-1...

So it's certainly plausible that malaria could have killed five times as many in an age pre-dating modern medicine when most of the world lived as communes along with their cattle and herds.

Also, the longevity of the parasite plasmodium, which causes malaria. Studies have revealed that it's been around since the time of the dinosaurs. And certainly been around from the beginning of our story. http://www.malaria.com/questions...

Entirely plausible!

https://www.quora.com/The-Human-Race-and-Condition-Is-it-true-that-mosquitoes-have-killed-more-than-half-of-all-the-people-who-have-ever-lived

It follows exactly. We are accountable for the things we do and for the things we would do if circumstance allowed.

Were I to tell you I was, say, pro-choice, you would be in a strong position to guess at my attitude toward a particular ethical question. If you then learned that I'd had no abortions personally, would you therefore label me a pro-lifer in spite of my stated position?

Well then, what if I tell you about an infamous tyrant of my acquaintance, a monster who committed every crime against humanity he had the means to commit, and whom I believe to be the very best person who ever lived. I tell you I intend to follow the shining example of this nightmare, shall we say religiously, for the rest of my life. Do you really presume to claim that no negative inference can be drawn about my character whatsoever? What guess would you make about my propensity for insane, vicious murder?

I have yet to have an abortion, it might be said largely in consequence of my lacking certain procedural necessities. Yet I remain pro-choice. The majority of muslims in civilised countries, the minority in muslim countries, have committed no great atrocities. Yet they remain muslim.

If God doesn't give you any revelation of His existence then the scripture is broken and you would have an excuse when you stand before Him. I would be the first to say that this is unfair. However, we're all human beings and I know that people willfully reject God. Not only from my own personal experience, but the bible itself is littered with accounts of people who know better and fall into rebellion against God.

God has made the truth of these things so clear to me, and I believe He is faithful to do the same for you. If God sent Jesus to die on the cross for you and me, He is faithful to let us how we should respond to that.

I think it's clear that an infinite being suffering an infinite punishment is infinitely worse than a finite being suffering an infinite punishment. The finite being has a finite experience, eternally or not. Adding up everyone who ever lived, it is still only a finite experience of suffering, whereas the infinite being has an infinite experience of suffering. Qualitatively, an eternity of suffering of a number of finite beings does not equal even a moment of suffering of an infinite being. Whether you think that is debatable or or not, God the Father considered the sacrifice greater than the punishment, and that is what counts.

Jesus was doing what His Father wanted Him to do, which was to reconcile the human race to Himself, who are alienated from God and spiritually dead because of sin. As far as whether the sayings of Jesus are authentic, we have the manuscripts to prove that they were not made up over a period of centuries or even decades. We have around twenty five thousand manuscripts of the NT alone, which is about 24 thousand more manuscripts than any other ancient text. We have manuscript evidence even going back to the first century, and using all of the manuscripts there is a science called textual criticism that can reconstruct what was in the original manuscripts from that pool of evidence. The idea that the bible is patched together from centuries of retranslations and additions is demonstratably false.

Even if we didn't have any manuscripts, from the writings of the early church fathers alone we could reconstruct the entire bible except for 7 verses in the first 250 years. Even before that, we have the prophetic writings from the Old Testament which show that Jesus did exactly what He was prophesied to do. He did not speak anything different than what had been written thousands of years in advance. If you understand the bible as you a whole, you will see it is one story and it is all saying the same thing. The fact of its internal consistency, considering it was authored by 40 people over a period of 3000 years is another proof of its authenticity.

There are many reasons to believe Jesus is the Christ, but the biggest one is Gods personal revelation, which He is faithful to give to you. If you want to know whether Jesus is the Messiah, simply pray and ask. If He isn't, you've wasted a couple of minutes. If He is, you are avoiding an eternal consequence. God bless!

#1 that is NOT a safe distance... bringing me back to my point, you probably don't realize how bad of a driver you are. That is NOT a safe distance AND they are passing on the right... that is TWO wrongs.

#2 many states don't have a cell phone law for driving. Including mine. Although that did not stop me from honking the ever living shit out of a driver I saw who had a black berry mounted on his windshield and was trying to type on it while driving.

Hi Poolcleaner,

I think you're arguing from a false premise, that a belief in Creation science does not contribute to what you call true science. Some of the greatest scientists who ever lived were creationists. Here is a list of a few of them:

http://creationsafaris.com/wgcs_toc.htm

Their belief that God created an orderly Universe based on laws (which is the reason we call them laws) highly influenced and inspired their exploration of the cosmos. Here are a couple of quotes:

When with bold telescopes I survey the old and newly discovered stars and planets when with excellent microscopes I discern the unimitable subtility of nature’s curious workmanship; and when, in a word, by the help of anatomical knives, and the light of chemical furnaces, I study the book of nature I find myself oftentimes reduced to exclaim with the Psalmist, How manifold are Thy works, O Lord! In wisdom hast Thou made them all!

-Robert Boyle, Chemistry

The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator.

-Louis Pasteur, Medicine

Creation science is a collection of data which supports the idea that the Earth is young. Some of the theories within creation science are testable and predictive, but as a whole you cannot put it in a lab and perform a measurement any more than you could do so for macroevolution, because they both concern what happened in the past. You cannot observe macroevolution happening anywhere nor can you subject it to empirical testing. You can make observations and inferences based on a theory, but that is subject to interpretation.

how can some of you NOT see the obvious?
you think this is about law and permits?
fucking seriously???

this is a politically targeted strategy to remove the eye-sore that is a homeless person from the tender eyeballs of over-privileged fuckheads.
the ever changing laws are CREATED to do just that,and chaos is so right,most cops HATE having to be the ones enforcing these demeaning,dehumanizing laws.

at least hard-core right wing nutbags have the balls to openly despise the poor,but treehugging liberals just cant stomach seeing the wretched openly walking their streets.
they know they exist...
they fret,weep and wring their hands for those poor souls but to actually SEE them?
well,that kind of reality is just too much for their tender sensibilities.
so they criminalize being poor.

hypocritical assholes..the lot of them.

i have lived all over,from boston to san diego and broward county is,by far,the richest i have ever lived in.

but it is mainly a tourist city,so they cant have bums sleeping on the sidewalk or begging for change at the intersections.what would the vacationing swedish family think?
i mean...the horror..the absolute horror!

so they create laws to criminalize the poor in order to sweep them under the rug.just like your momma used to make you clean your room before aunt florence came over.

it is morally bankrupt and ethically repugnant.

god DAMN this pisses me off to no end!
/rant OFF

safety issues?
permits?
fuck me,the dumb is strong here...........

a) I really hope this kid was rockin' a diaper. Otherwise, WTF Dad, get him to a toilet!
b) This kid ain't ever living this down when he gets older. This is some serious blackmail footage.

The A10 may not get to combat as quickly as an F35 - but when it arrives, it's tailor made for the job. Not a "square peg in a round hole" F35.

Designed with input from Hans Ulrich Rudel - best ground attacker pilot to have ever lived. The man was a prodigy in the air.
(note : the Ju-87 G2 that he flew, had ammo for only 24 cannon shots total. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_101I-655-5976-04,_Russland,_Sturzkampfbomber_Junkers_Ju_87_G.jpg)

I really recommend reading his wiki page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Ulrich_Rudel

-scheherazade

Why would the acknowledgement of a designer be a depressing dismissal of the human spirit? Some of the greatest scientists who ever lived, like Johannes Kepler and Issac Newton, said their search for truth through the scientific method was enhanced by their faith in a Creator. Check out some of these quotes:

http://www.newlife.org/node/362

If you came to a beach and you found the message "Drink Coke" drawn out in the sand, would you assume that this was the product of wind, waves, and erosion? It would be obvious to you that it was the product not of natural processes, but a mind. The message in the sand doesn't contain information, it is information. It has a semiotic meaning, and the information in DNA is no different than that. You can derive information from natural processes but the information in DNA is organized for a purpose. It is a genetic language with features that far outstrip anything even our finest minds have developed.

I would also add that the truth does not care for our personal preference. We need to follow the evidence where ever it leads, and if it leads somewhere we don't like, we need to adjust our way of thinking. To do otherwise would only be to deceive yourself.

Firstly, I wouldn't presume to know all of the accents in any country I've ever lived in, so I'm shocked you do. And yes, I know the difference between a rural Irish accent and a Dublin accent, although let's face it, if Gillen had put on a true rural Irish accent, most people would have had a hard time understanding it. Also, he is an eccentric doctor who probably puts on airs to seem more mysterious, sounds like a solid character backstory to me.

Secondly, in the trailer and movie, you actually hear a mashup of different actors' voices in the confessional to specifically cloud who might be the culprit. If you re-watch (say, by downloading it) it you might hear one voice at first and then another a few seconds later. While I do agree the identity of culprit may not drive the plot of the entire movie, it isn't irrelevant as every encounter with a new person has you wondering "is this the guy?"

As for watching it in a cinema, let's open up that discussion. Movie theatres are run by cheap dickheads and I am refusing to reward them by not going. Case in point: Popcorn is sold at 12.75x cost, pop at 4-6x cost, other fast food joints within the place are up to 3x more expensive than outside and you couldn't bring your own food if you wanted to because they won't let you. Tickets are more expensive than a cheap motel room. I have to sit in a room with 100 other people (who might have kids with them depending on the movie) who will no doubt find a way to ruin my movie-going experience. The theatre plays up to 30 minutes of commercials and trailers for things I could easily see at home on my own goddamn time. In some countries movies have intermissions like I am watching a five act Shakespearean play and not a dumbass Michael Bay movie, and then they play more commercials before they restart.

Movie theatres are dumb and should be reserved for those movies that deserve them, not just because you save money but also because every penny you don't give to theatre owners is for the betterment of society.

when it comes to emotion,
makes me start choking
so I, sit by the ocean
spent my last buck on a bottle of whiskey
drunk and broke
sittin' here in history
I made my mind up
I'm going
I got no where to go
don't know where I'm going
I do know one thing
one thing that is true
wherever I go, I'm gonna need you
we just cant let each other go now
were too close, to ever slow down
the only one who keeps my chin up
when you touch my lips we're like two dogs stuck
cold, cold beer
don't you ever worry I am right here
never live without you
don't care what I amount to, no.
talkin' bout cold cold beer
don't you ever worry, I am right here
can't ever live without you
I pick you up
I take you home
sit on my couch, turn off my phone,
cuz I love your taste, love your smell
who would ever thought that we could do so well
hell, I guess we're meant for each other
sorta like the microphone and my buddy Bruce Buffer
I can't really express my joy
sorta like a scrap between Osgood and Patty Roy
I cant take my eyes of you
went to rehab, thought that I lost you
but now we're are back together, with a vengeance
must be my little, Irish decendance.
it feels pretty good, to get this off my chest
even though people sayin, Jesse's obsessed
well maybe I am, maybe their right
one thing that I know, it was love at first sight.
Yeah, cold cold beer
don't you ever worry i am right here
can never live without you
i wouldn't even want to
cold, cold beer
don't you ever worry
i am right here
never live without you
you don't care what I amount to
Well I'm sitting on my stoop feelin' kinda lonely
me and Brenda fightin' so I call up the homies
but guys busy hangin' out in front of Sobey's
there's only one little fella who really knows me
he comes in a little brown, bottle or can
sits in my hand til I can barely stand
he's part of the family, he's part of the team
Took me under his wing when I was just a teen
every time he comes around he always,
takes me back to when I had a fake ID, and a little dirt stash
he rope soak cold pop 2 4 white pop pop top swish top tall boy, cold shot
BEER, cold, cold beer
don't you ever worry, I am right here
never live without you
you don't care what I amount to,
Oh cold beer,
don't you ever worry,
I am right here can't ever live without you
I wouldn't even want to

Hi voodooV..sorry it took me so long to reply.

you're committing another logical fallacy here. Argument from ignorance. just because you can't think of any other reason for morality doesn't prove god did it.

The fallacy you mentioned doesn't apply. The argument isn't for Gods existence, the argument is that atheism is incoherent because it has no foundation for morality, among other reasons. Ravi asked the question, without God what are the Ontic referrants for reality?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontic

To answer your question though. Survival...pure survival is pretty much the foundation of morality. what behavior ensures a long, prosperous and happy life? That's your morality right there. And it's all based on logic and reason, not an imaginary god.

is it better to be a dick to someone or is it better to work with other people. hrm...which ensures a higher probability of success in your endeavors.

is better in the long run to help or to hurt. Which ensures a greater likelyhood that people will be willing to help YOU out when you need it.

virtually everything that we consider moral today is the evolution (gasp) of instinctual rules we've learned over the millions (not thousands) of years that ensure a longer, happier life.

What you're talking about is pragmatism, which is to say that if it works then it is the best way to do things. Yet plenty of people have led long, prosperous and happy lives by exploiting other people for their gain. That's what works for them, so why shouldn't I emulate that standard of behavior instead of being self-sacrificing? Some of the most successful people who have ever lived got there by being terrible human beings. Basically, your standard of survival isn't about what is right, but what is right for me and that is entirely arbitrary. It also is an incoherent standard for morality.

Which is why only two of your commandments still hold up as secular laws.

I forget where I learned this but even biblical morality can be traced back to rules that made sense, at the time, that ensured survival. I think it has been shown that many of the biblical rules involving not eating certain foods can be traced back to diseases or some other logical reason, but hey, we didn't have an understanding of these pesky little things called bacteria and microorganisms back then so when you ate a certain food and died, that wasn't science, it was your imaginary sky god who was angry with you.

What's really interesting about that is that Moses was educated as an Egyptian prince, which was the most advanced country in the world at the time. He would have certainly been exposed to their medical knowledge, but you won't find a shred of that in the bible. The Egyptians were doing things like applying dung to peoples wounds, whereas the Laws of Moses detailed procedures for disease control, like hand washing and quarantine procedures, as well as public sanitation, and dietary laws which prevented the spread of parasites. They were thousands of years ahead of their time; we only started washing our hands to control disease in the past 200 years.

Even your fear and hatred of homosexuality and abortion can be easily explained by survival. When your village only numbered in the hundreds or maybe thousands and simple diseases and winters wiped out LOTS of people, discouraging homosexuality and abortion is actually a pretty good idea when the survival of your species is at stake. But when you've got advanced medicine and we've got the whole food and shelter thing dealt with and our population is now 7 billion. the whole "be fruitful and multiply" thing just isn't necessary anymore. In fact, it's becoming a problem. and Once again, survival will dictate our morality. If we do nothing to combat overpopulation and resources become an issue, I guarantee you that large families will eventually have a negative stigma attached to them until the situation is resolved.

You're talking to a former agnostic who once approved of homosexuality and abortion. I am not afraid of it, and I don't hate the people doing it. This is a clash of presuppositions; if there isn't a God then I couldn't give you an absolute reason why people cannot have homosexual relationships or murder their unborn children. If we're all just glorified apes contending for limited resources, then in that paradigm it may be necessary to cull the herd. I think the appropriate response though to someone contending we should eliminate vast swaths of the human populace to save the planet is, "you first".

But God is in control and this is His planet, and since He is still creating human beings, He will provide the resources to take care of them. It's the iniquity of mankind which is limiting the resources when the truth is that we have way more than enough to take care of everyone. Take for example the fact that over 30 thousand people starve to death every day. Is that because we don't have enough food? Actually, we have more than enough food yet we waste about 1/3 of the world food supply every year. The gross world product in 2012 was over 84 trillion dollars, more than enough to feed, clothe, house and vaccinate every single person on the planet. Those people die not because there isn't enough, but because the wickedness of man.

Don't ask me though, ask an anthropologist or sociologist. They've been studying this stuff for decades. I'm sure you could even find an anthropologist/sociologist that believes in god and they'd still say the same thing. our understanding of reality changes....as does morality. no one takes seriously the old biblical rules about stoning unruly kids, working the sabbath, and wearing clothing of two types of fabric anymore. So why should we listen other outdated biblical rules that don't apply anymore. As countless others of sifters have already informed you, you have the burden of proof and you haven't met it yet.

Call me when someone discovers a disease or some other problem that arises when you mix two fabrics and we'll revisit those rules k?

God has three kinds of laws, moral civil and cermonial. The rules you're referring to were civil and ceremonial laws for Israel and not for the rest of the world. They have no application today because they were connected to the Old Covenant God had with Israel. God has a New Covenant with the whole world that doesn't include those laws. The moral laws of God do not change with time, or ever. And although we fancy ourselves as more enlightened today, the reality of the world we live in tells us that human nature hasn't changed one bit. Human nature is every bit as ugly and self serving as it always has been. If you peel back the thin veneer of civility you will find a boiling pot of iniquity.

Stop committing basic logical fallacies and you might learn this stuff for yourself You haven't ever said anything that isn't easily invalidated by a simple logical fallacy or hasn't already been debunked long ago.

It's easy to speak in generalities; if I have committed a logical fallacy, then specifically point it out. The one that you detailed earlier did not apply.

Do you watch the Atheist Experience videos Shiny? because every time I watch one of the videos and listened to the same old tired theist "arguments" over and over again. I'm always reminded of you because you just aren't saying anything new. If you're serious about understanding why your ideas just don't pan out and you're not just trolling, you should seriously watch those.

I've watched the show, and again, I was a lifelong agnostic before becoming a Christian. I was pretty far left and would have probably fit in well with the lot of you not too many years ago. So, this is all to say that I understand where you're coming from and why you think and believe the way you do, because I used to think and believe in the same ways. Your mindset isn't a mystery to me. What I've learned about it is that God has to reveal Himself to a person before they will know anything about Him. Everyone gets some revelation and it is up to them to follow it. I received the revelation that there is a God and I pursued that for many years until He revealed Himself to me through His Son Jesus Christ. He has revealed Himself to you and everyone else on this website in some form or fashion. You would be shocked to hear some of the revelation people have received and turned away from, or rationalized away later. Statistics show that 10 percent of self professing atheists pray, and that is because they are unable to within themselves completely deny the revelation that they have received. I guarantee you there are atheists on this board who wrestle with all of this but since it isn't something atheists talk about (or would admit to publicly) you would never know it, that you're all keeping a lid on the truth.

Joan is one of the funniest women to ever live, she is ridiculously brutal at times and I love her for it. But she looks like a cartoonist interpretation of nightmares.