Let's be realistic, most of the work our war planes do has collateral damage. We don't simply use them on 'the bad guys', but again that is a simplification to allow you moral latitude.

Non-smokers are no better than smokers, I know since I used to be a smoker. Just because I decided that I no longer wanted to smoke doesn't mean I feel the need to go up to someone smoking and start telling them how much better I am that I quit. Again, I'm not any better of a person than they are, I just chose to do something different. That is one of the things you can't seem to grasp, because you continue to say that morally you are more good than someone who does not practice a vegan lifestyle. You aren't.

As far as the functional capacity for feelings, of course animals feel pain, it is a stimuli that helps in their survival instinct. That instinct is what drives them to avoid pain because it means they might not survive. It doesn't mean that they have the logical thought capacity to relate pain to more than an instinctual response. I am pretty sure that no pig ever felt pain and said to itself, I feel pain therefore I exist as a being, they felt the pain and instinct told them to get away from it. Plants even have stimuli that they will respond to in order to grow or try to avoid damaging forces, but they aren't self-aware. Neither are animals until you get to a certain level of intelligence, like dolphins or great apes.

I grew up in the country, I have seen first hand and used my hands in regards to the butchery you speak of. Never once have I had a pig who had seen another be slaughtered do anything that would give me the belief that they were responding in any other fashion than a "shit, flight time since I might be next" natural instinct that is in all prey animals. Factory farms may not be totally humane, and that should be reformed, but all they are doing in the end is killing prey animals on a much larger scale than I did growing up.

I know you're a big ole troll, shiny, about as christian as my left shoe, but to indulge you for a moment, those two quotes in particular, if you are an -actual- Christian who believes that Jesus -was- in fact God, then you know that the passage from John has no particularly stronger meaning than being with the deity is important to your life's salvation. That's nothing particularly unique to Christianity.

With regards to that other out of context Luke quote, who the heck knows what you mean by quoting it, other than Jesus wanted you to feel bad for doing bad things. Not exactly exclusivist. Pretty sure that thought has been around since the first inkling of empathy happened in the great apes..

Domesticated/altered plants spread back into the wild all the time, and chimps have been here as long as we have, IOW, they have learned to recognize and eat bananas by quite literally reaping our fruits, so to speak. And even if you find a chimp/great ape or even a monkey that has never seen a banana, my bet is that its going to figure it out pretty quickly, they are curios and fast learners

>> ^shinyblurry:

I'll give you an example of the ridiculousness of evolutionary theory. Many evolutionists claim that the wings of an ostrich are a vestigal part. Despite the fact that anyone with a brain could observe that ostriches use their wings for quite a number of things, evolutionists claim that its on its way out. Well, the oldest ostrich fossil we have is around 50 or 60 million years old. Guess what? Its exactly the same. So even though the ostrich wing is supposed to be a vestigal part, it hasn't changed in 60 million years. Yet, scientists claim that humans evolved in the last 4 to 5 million years. See anything wrong here? With the enlightening commentary you've already produced, im guessing no.


A quick google search will prove this wrong, the earliest ostrich-like fossil is more like 40 million years old, and more importantly, it's nothing like a modern ostrich, but a distant ancestor of ostriches, As with humans, like all other species, there is no one thing called ostriches, there are many subspecies, and even more extinct relatives and ancestral lineages


As for its vestigal wings, well, nobody is saying htey are useless, just that they are useless for FLYING. in other words, they are a perfect example of the very kind of evolution Behe says isnt possible in the video, namely that just because something seems useless for what it is usually used for (such as a non-flying wing or a non-rotating flagellum-like protein structure) it can have other uses for that animal or bacteria.

Humans didnt evolve in full over 4-5 million years, we, along with every other modern animal, have evolved for 3 billion years. We share ancestors with chimps, and these ancestors lived around 2 million years ago. And to us they would probably look rather chimp-like, they would be four-legged, tree-dwelling apes, some populations would stay behind in the forest, basically maintaining and perfecting the lifestyle, and some populations were gradually driven into more open savannah, where they developed bipedalism and eventually larger brains. But from evolutions perspective, the majority of the work (in creating us) had been long since done. 4 million years ago we were already great apes, and if an alien came to this planet they might say "oh they're basically still the same ape, larger brains and bipedal, maybe, but basically the same"

These differences make a massive difference to us, of course, because they separates us from everything else, but in the grand scheme of things, they may not be the evolutionary miracle we think they are.

Cute turtles cause Great apes to help them.

The mirror test huh? Besides humans the only ones who pass the mirror test are the great apes, which thankfully are the same order as humans so we know you aren't a cannibal. That leaves the other 18 orders of animals in the class of mammalia free to eat including veal, lamb, dogs, cats and every other pet you can conceive of. Well, except monkeys and I knew a guy with a pet monkey but it's rare so we won't put them in the pet category. So the mirror test is a pretty shitty test of what someone will or won't eat.

You just sound like another PETA member trying to convince billions of people that we aren't the top of the food chain and we should care about what we eat. Alive or dead a vast majority of animals don't have the same pain receptors we contain for the simple fact of being eaten alive. They have touch receptors in the extremities for movement and awareness of surroundings. You can look that up in any science textbook about animal nervous systems. You can believe and preach what you want about cruelness to animals. Either way it is still going to be eaten.

Even still, crushing an animal to death and having it die in seconds in your mouth as compared to being boiled alive over minutes is still less cruel. You should think of the alternatives of how the animal might die before you say eating it alive is cruel.
>> ^Gallowflak:

>> ^kronosposeidon:
It's a mixed bag for me. I'm completely inconsistent. This makes me squeamish and therefore seems cruel to me, but then I remember that I eat lobster from time to time, and lobster is prepared by boiling it alive. Cockles and mussels are also cooked while they're alive. A lot of the world includes insect protein in their diet, and insects are rarely dispatched humanely before preparation. Some are roasted alive before consumption. (I'm not even sure if there is a way to humanely kill an insect anyway. Decapitation?) And how about the way we treat animals before they're killed? How about veal? And has anyone seen film of modern chicken houses? Meat consumption is littered with ethical issues. I think about it often while stuffing Big Macs in my face.>> ^Fusionaut:
I don't know if biting into something that is still alive is all that wrong under the right circumstances. It happens in the wild all of the time. Dunking it in a hot, pepper sauce before the first bite seems cruel to me though. However, I did eat a live mayfly once. Grabbed it out of the air and then CHOMP! The wings got stuck in my teeth. Now you know a weird fact about me.


Right, but I'm not sure that typical meat consumption is comparable to consuming an animal alive for no purpose other than... whatever the purpose is. It's grotesque, it's excessive and it shows casual disregard - and perhaps even contempt - for the suffering of species that don't have our gawking faces. The fact that animals are eaten alive in the wild just isn't relevant, either. We're able to make the choice. Maybe I'm just a bitch. One of my overarching directives is to minimize the amount of suffering that I'm responsible for. This is just fucking awful.
It's not relevant but I don't eat veal or lamb, nor lobster or crab and certainly not octopus. I won't consume the flesh of any animal order that contains creatures which pass the mirror test.

I say monkey, but I mean hominid aka great ape aka filthy monkey.
>> ^shuac:

>> ^gwiz665:
Monstrously more evidence. People choose not to believe it because they don't like that humans are a type of monkey and for their religious programming overriding their basic reason. It's sad really.
>> ^BoneyD:
DL Hughley doesn't believe in evolution?! There's even more evidence for that than there is for climate change.


Well, to put it more accurately: monkeys and humans share a common ancestor. You could just as easily (and wrongly) say that monkeys are a type of human.

But yeah, we're apes not monkeys, great apes. But I guess the word ape doesn't hold the same gravitas as monkey. I do think humans hold themselves way too highly and it's part of a denial that's a mental sickness, together with denial of death and therefore belief in religion amongst other things.

Then again I'd rather compare humans by behaviour to sheep or cattle, as most are insanely boring and easily manipulated, monkeys however are pretty cool.

I workout quite a bit and I see some older dudes at my gym that put all of us young pups to shame. Epic beard man falls into this category. He's probably been lifting weights for a solid 40 years, and that means he's got good, mature, dense muscles. I would not want to be on the other side of his fists, dudes like him are incredibly strong. I can also notice the signs of roid rage when I see them. He is clearly raging in the second video. I've been there. It takes a lot longer to decompress after an altercation when you have testosterone pumping through your system in doses more akin to a great ape's. I think that cop knows it as well. How often do you see an cop let someone destroy newspaper boxes and swear in public? He knows he can't take him down on his own, nor could he with 3 other officers. You just don't confront an angry gorilla sized man that has been exercised for decades, that is on steroids, and that now has adrenaline raging through his veins. You just don't do it.

*quality

This is kind of off on a tangent that is separate from the question of whether gay marriage should be legal (and the answer to that is obviously yes unless you're an authoritarian theocrat):

The USA was founded on equal rights for "the people", except originally only educated white people were considered part of "the people" or citizens. The in-group always had arbitrary boundaries and always trended towards expansion. The meaning of "All people have equal rights" is a function of your definition of a person. The idea that all humans have rights and other great apes don't, is on the same continuum as racism. So your 10,000th cousin has rights, but your 1,000,000th cousin doesn't? There's a fairly smooth continuum, with the smartest apes being more aware than than some mentally retarded humans, and a vast variety of species and individuals all the way down to the simplest organisms. There's no good place to draw a thin line and say full rights on this side, vastly less rights on the other side.

Bipolar Disorder. Schizophrenia. OCD. A vast array of pseudo-scientific crap spewed by the psychiatric/psychological professions (frikkin' witchdoctors, in reality).

Now, I'll proceed to argue for both sides...

Alright, to be fair, some animals may well suffer from these, but we have no way to tell (even in humans, most of these are "diagnosed" mainly based on self-reporting). It's fairly easy to believe that most animal's brains are enough simpler than a human's that such imbalances are far more uncommon, or even non-existent. The great apes, though, are all so close to human level complexity that I don't think you could argue a meaningful difference.

As for dolphins, they live in a world that is so wholly alien that I seriously doubt we'll ever be able to be sure of anything about their mental processes.

"It's often said that an adult chimpanzee weighing in at 150 pounds is three to seven times stronger than a human being."

What's the story? Not a lot was known until recently about this issue, but a study published this April in the journal Current Anthropology explored the issue at a new level of detail.

Our surplus motor neurons allow us to engage smaller portions of our muscles at any given time. We can engage just a few muscle fibers for delicate tasks like threading a needle, and progressively more for tasks that require more force. Conversely, since chimps have fewer motor neurons, each neuron triggers a higher number of muscle fibers. So using a muscle becomes more of an all-or-nothing proposition for chimps. As a result, chimps often end up using more muscle than they need.

Our finely-tuned motor system makes a wide variety of human tasks possible. Without it we couldn't manipulate small objects, make complex tools or throw accurately. And because we can conserve energy by using muscle gradually, we have more physical endurance—making us great distance runners.
Great apes, with their all-or-nothing muscle usage, are explosive sprinters, climbers and fighters, but not nearly as good at complex motor tasks.

In addition to fine motor control, Walker suspects that humans also may have a neural limit to how much muscle we use at one time. Only under very rare circumstances are these limits bypassed—as in the anecdotal reports of people able to lift cars to free trapped crash victims.

"Add to this the effect of severe electric shock, where people are often thrown violently by their own extreme muscle contraction, and it is clear that we do not contract all our muscle fibers at once," Walker writes. "So there might be a degree of cerebral inhibition in people that prevents them from damaging their muscular system that is not present, or not present to the same degree, in great apes." Source

Great Apes are nothing to mess with unless you know for damn sure that they trust you. Any one of the species of ape could tear your limbs off without breaking a sweat. Tickling is a very intimate activity between hominids and apes alike, so if you are ever in a position to try that you better know that the level of trust between you and that ape is really that high.

>> ^dag:
I feel bad for Kanzi having to do all of these ridiculous things like some kind of trained monkey.

I don't quite agree. I think Kanzi has the opportunity to show that verbal communication is possible with an ape. That's why the keeper wore the mask, so it would be certain that he didn't respond to facial ques. It doesn't seem like Kanzi isn't enjoying the experience, he gladfully cooperates with the instructions. The bond between the keeper and Kanzi seems quite strong. You should look up more videos on Kanzi, it's really quite eye opening. Few quotes from wiki:

"Given matches and marshmallows, Kanzi snapped twigs for a fire, lit them with the matches and toasted the marshmallows on a stick."
"Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has observed Kanzi in communication to his sister. In this experiment, Kanzi was kept in a separate room of the Great Ape Project and shown some yogurt. Kanzi started vocalizing the word "yogurt" in an unknown "language"; his sister, who could not see the yogurt, then pointed to the lexigram for yogurt."
"Kanzi's accomplishments also include tool use and tool crafting. Kanzi is an accomplished stone tool maker and is quite proud of his ability to flake Oldowan style cutting knives. He learned this skill from Dr. Nick Toth, who is an anthropologist with the Stone Age Institute in Bloomington, Indiana. The stone knives Kanzi creates are very sharp and can cut animal hide and thick ropes."
"In one demonstration shown on the television show Champions of the Wild, Kanzi was shown playing the arcade game Pac-Man and understanding how to beat it."

Tragically these apes are showing us how closely are related to us and might even to be able to grasp aspects of our culture and bring meaningful interaction between human and another species. I mean tragically because of how these creatures have been seen and treated in the past up to now.

At first, I thought this would be a dude in a gorilla suit, but it turns out its real dancing gorilla. Shows you how coordinated these great apes really are.