FTR, I liked Prometheus a little bit, but I felt that way too many questions had been built into the movie that didn't have any coherent, or non-retarded answers. Also a bunch of the characters are completely idiotic and incomprehensible. It's a curious mishmash. The thing is, a lot of the questions that people do have are actually answered in the film, if you look hard enough. Others clearly aren't, and this video isn't nearly as plausible as it seems to think it is.

^Fairbs

I do not get my information from Youtube, it's great for entertainment - not so much for accurate Information.

Here are some relevant points I found from a Washington Post article dated April 6, 2012 entitled "Why Ron Paul rallies never translate into votes".

Ron Paul recently held a rally at UCLA, and between 6,000 and 10,000 people attended. The rally itself was a complete success. Yet while Ron Paul has consistently attracted larger, more enthusiastic crowds than his GOP competitors, those events always fail to translate into victories at the ballot box. Ron Paul has never won a presidential primary or caucus.

The media bias argument is nonsense. The media could never hate Ron Paul with the pure passion and ferocity that they despise Rick Santorum. The liberal media loathes social conservatives. They love Republicans who bash other conservatives. This is how John McCain in 2008 and Jon Huntsman in 2012 became the darlings of the liberal media. The media will end up despising whomever the GOP nominee is, and Ron Paul has suffered much less abuse than Newt Gingrich. Every day there are calls for Gingrich, and now even Santorum, to drop out. Dr. Paul does not face those calls.

As for election fraud, the GOP should just agree to give the Virgin Islands and Maine to Ron Paul in exchange for a vow of silence from the movement. The Paul movement uses complaints as their oxygen. All the voter fraud in the world cannot explain Florida, Illinois, and many other big states where Dr. Paul was rejected by more than 90% of the voters.

For those Paul supporters who are still unable to understand these repeated, huge rejections at the polls, the answer can be found right in front of their faces. The Ron Paul movement consists of too many supporters who are completely certifiable. They run up and down the hallways of GOP conventions screaming about revolutions. Decorum is replaced with degradation and debasement.

They shout down speakers they disagree with. They have zero interest in freedom and liberty for anybody except those who agree with them. Decent human beings would just accept this under the rule of "live and let live." The verbal carpet-bombers in the Ron Paul movement consist of some intolerant zealots who will harass, bully, and intimidate anybody just for thinking differently. The same hypocrites who are against undeclared wars engage in undeclared wars against their fellow Americans just for not worshipping Ron Paul. It makes the David Koresh movement look moderate.

Tell a Ron Paul supporter you disagree with his candidate. The responses will be:
1) You just do not understand. You're an idiot.
2) You are an uninformed tool of the political machine.
3) You don't care about the Constitution, freedom or liberty.
4) You are corrupt, bought and paid for, a shill for the status quo or some other powerful, mythical, nefarious entity.

These lines of thought are pure bile. The idea that a person can be decent, well educated, intelligent, have a sophisticated gift of analysis, be a clear thinker, and reject Ron Paul is totally incomprehensible to his supporters.

blah blah blah written by shinyblurry


So, how long did it take you to pass the fourth grade? Because it looks like you have it down now, congrats. Now just wait until you make it to seventh, it is a real eye opener.

And anyway I am sure that many of us have believed in Christianity at one point and that is why we are not open-minded to it any longer. We evolved, we learned, we grew. There is stuff out there, it exists where humans cannot go or see... if there is any proof of a God it is so incomprehensible that no humanly tome could ever express it because it would be so far beyond our earthen lands that we evolved and adapted to that we would have no knowledge of how to communicate or even perceive what it is, what we are made of and what the hell is going on in this vastly complex universe. Point being, if God communicated to Moses, Moses would not understand one fucking word. And if he did understand his mind would probably have physically imploded... like Grahams Number, his head would have imploded into a blackhole.

All religions are bullshit, not just Christianity. Your welcome.

For a follow up, the man planned to clutch his chest while experiencing radiating arm pain, muttering incomprehensibly while falling to the ground.

The Louis CK vid set in a bagel shop would have been the most hilarious if incomprehensible scene in comedy history.

Has hangover, needs coffee. Not mutually exclusive.

Loved it. But yes, it's more surreal than the trailer would have you believe, but not to the the point of incomprehensible insanity. watch it though, it's... jarring.

In Toronto, Canada - perhaps it was a little over a year..
Actually, I almost missed it! The show started with a warm-up band. We assumed it was the warm-up band from the ticket and the next band (the real warm-up) was the Weakerthans. The second warm-up band was terrible. They said nothing, the set was short and the sound was almost incomprehensible. Everyone seemed to split directly after the last number. So, standing in an empty hall with the lights on watching people hauling gear away, we thought, 'oh, well.. win some, you lose some' and we left the venue. Flagging a cab we had second thoughts... That REALLy didn't sound like the Weakerthans from their albums .. what if...

So we went back and lo and behold -- they were in the process of resetting the stage for the real Weakerthans! After a very long break they came on and played an awesome show with great sound -- we nearly missed it! One of the best shows I've seen.

Why does she sound so skeptical? Lady, shit happens, sometimes trucks just flip over and the only thing you can do is crack open a cold one an savor the incomprehensibility of it all.

You mean somthing like Cockney Rhyming Slang?

"telephone" is replaced by "dog" (= 'dog-and-bone')
"wife" by "trouble" (= 'trouble-and-strife')
"eyes" by "minces" (= 'mince pies')
"wig" by "syrup" (= 'syrup of figs')
"feet" by "plates" (= 'plates of meat')

Resulting in...
"It nearly knocked me off me plates—he was wearing a syrup! So I got straight on the dog to me trouble and said I couldn't believe me minces."

Throw in a bit of an accent and there you have it, pure gibberish.

Totally lemon right mate?


>> ^Phreezdryd:

It's not just the accents, but the different lingo or slang you may not be familiar with that can make what they're saying sound incomprehensible.

It's not just the accents, but the different lingo or slang you may not be familiar with that can make what they're saying sound incomprehensible.

I’m going to respond to your last comment in two parts. The first part regards the god argument in which you have mischaracterized me as being closed minded and of having a bias. I can easily show that I am neither and this is my view on the whole god thing so you can at least understand my view if for nothing else. The second part I will address my primary contention against your methods of argument.

I am willing to listen, however, on its face the statement "I don't care about the whole god argument" indicates both bias and closed-mindedness. It also shows an intellectual incuriousity.

I admit that I don’t believe in a god or gods, or even advanced aliens. I just don’t see any reason to believe any of it. This doesn’t mean that I am saying that god doesn’t exist; I’m saying “I don’t know, but I highly doubt it and I don’t buy it.” What do you find confusing about that?

We have no real reason to suppose from direct evidence that a god, or gods, exist. Do all effects have a cause? Do all causes have an effect? If yes, why do you suppose it’s a god who caused all of the effects that you attribute him to such as the “fine tuning” or “the appearance of design”, why can’t it be something else? By resting on a god hypothesis as the answer to mysterious phenomenon, you are precluding all other answers that are just as good as a god, that have the same amount of direct evidence.

Scientific evidence indicates that time, space, matter and energy all had a finite beginning, making the cause of the Universe timeless, spaceless, unimaginably powerful and transcendent. Those are all attributes of God, and fit an unembodied mind. The fine tuning, information in DNA and appearance of design all point to a creator. Logic itself tells us that the first cause of the Universe must be eternal because nothing comes from nothing and you can't have an infinite regress of causes. Frankly I think it is ridiculous to believe that Universes just happen by themselves, and especially, as the greatest minds of our time are suggesting, out of nothing. Can't you see that when someone says that, it means the emperor has no clothes?

Does the god that you believe in have a cause? If not, how so? By what mechanisms does your god exist but without having had a cause? How can your belief be proven and why should anyone believe it based on rational information? What evidence is there that compels you to believe that your god indeed doesn’t have a cause? These are the kinds of questions that I think you should be asking for yourself. If you resort to “just needing to have faith” as an answer then you are actively avoiding exercising critical thinking faculties.

God is eternal, and He has no beginning or end, so no He doesn't have a cause. A God that was caused by something else wouldn't be God. My evidence is from logic which demands an eternal first cause. Otherwise, you're left explaing how you get something from nothing, which is logically absurd.

Unlike you, I don’t see the appearance of design in the complexity of biological systems or in anything found in nature. I study evolutionary biology, astrophysics, and chemistry for myself because I find it the mechanisms fascinating, not because I’m trying to disprove god.

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved.

Francis Crick Nobel Laureate
What Mad Pursuit p.138 1988

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.

Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker p.1

Even hardcore skeptics concede there is an appearance of design.

There is inherent beauty in all of it and it’s a shame that most people are ignorant of what we do actually know. While I’m open to the idea that a god designed the system then put it in motion, there just isn’t direct phenomenological evidence that suggest that’s what happened.

The information in DNA is direct evidence that a higher intelligence designed the system.

There is enough information that we do know about speciation to suggest that evolution through natural selection does happen, is happening, and will continue to happen. The genetic code is enough to suggest common ancestry between all living things in a tree like family lineage.

natural selection can weed out some of the complexity and so slow down the information decay that results in speciation. it may have a stabilizing effect, but it does not promote speciation. it is not a creative force as many people have suggested.

Roger Lewin Science magazine 1982

The genetic code also suggests a common designer. As far as your tree claim, you need to research the cambrian explosion. It is quite a let down for gradualists, unfortunately. All the major body types, including the phylum Chordata (thats our phylum), were there from the beginning. We actually have less diversity today, not more.

(on the cambrian explosion)
And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists.

Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker 1986 p.229

Certainly, we do not know yet exactly how the whole process of DNA or RNA reproduction started, but if we postulate that a god started the process without sufficient evidence, only on the basis that there is no better answer, then we can also postulate that it was an advanced inter-dimensional race of ancients who populate planets with the seed of genetic mechanisms. If we don’t have the answer to how the mechanism got the whole thing started, what’s the difference between those two different origin hypotheses?

I don't postulate that God 'started the process'. I postulate that God spontaneously created everything. You rule out God apriori and thus you accept this just-so story about how life got here. In your eyes, it must have happened. Interpreting the evidence to fit the conclusion isn't very scientific, is it?

Also unlike you, I don’t see what you call “fine tuning” and I also study all sorts of physics, my favorite being astrophysics personally. The term “fine tuning” implies that something above the system changed some dials to a perfect goldilocks range to support what we have right now. This is an interesting idea however I find it to be more prudent to see it the other way around; that what has formed, has only formed because the conditions allow for it, that the environment dictates what can exist. Wherever you look at an environment and find life, you find life that fits into that environment and we also see that when environments change, so to do species change to adapt to the new conditions. We never see an environment change to fit the species.

I don't think you're understanding the fine tuning argument. Many of those finely tuned values, if even moved an inch, would make life impossible in this Universe. Not just improbable, but impossible. The fine tuning is extremely fortuitous to an incomprehensible degree. The odds of these values randomly converging is virtually impossible. For instance, for physical life to exist, the mass density of the Universe must be fine tuned to better than one part in 10 to the 60th power. For space-energy density, it is 10 to the 120th power. That's just two out of dozens of values.

You claim that we haven’t seen macro-evolution taking place? Are you sure about that, how exactly do you know this is true, where did you read this? How do you know that what you are calling macro-evolution is the same thing as what evolutionary biologists call macro-evolution? The fact of the matter is that the fossil record has nothing to say about the most recent research on macro-evolution. It’s a fascinating material and I would suggest that you get out there and find it for yourself. Talk Origins has as list of the studies done on macro-evolution, you can start there if you like.

Yes, evolutionists are trying to dump the fossil record in favor of genetic evidence because the fossil record is actually evidence against their theories. As I've said, common genetics also indicate common designer.

Darwin made a great discovery, that creatures can adapt to environmental conditions. That's something that has hard scientific evidence. What didn't have any evidence was his extrapolation from that to the theory of all life having a common ancestor. He was counting on the fossil record to prove his case but it didn't, which is why he said this:

innumerable transitional forms must have existed but why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? ..why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?

Geologoy assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain, and this perhaps is the greatest objection which can be urged against my theory.

Charles Darwin
Origin of the Species

Here we are 150 years later with billions of fossils and there still isn't any evidence. If Darwin was right, we should have indisputable proof that one species changed into another, but we don't. All we have is a smattering of highly contested transitionals which are all "more or less" closely related, but no true ancestors. When the facts don't match the theory it is time to throw that theory away, but the theory of evolution is the cornerstone of the secular worldview, and it isn't going to die without a fight, no matter how loudly the facts cry out against it.

The question becomes, if there was/is a designer, what was designed first, the creature or the environment? To me, you are suggesting that humans were designed first in the mind of god, and then the environment was finely tuned in order to sustain the idea that god already had for us. Don’t you think this is a little bit too egotistical of a view? If that’s true, what makes everything else necessary? I don’t know if you study astrophysics or astronomy at all but there is a massive amount of stuff out there that has nothing to do with us and if we’re a part of god’s plan, he sure did create a lot of waste.

I'm saying He created all of it at the same time, in six days as Genesis describes. Why is the Universe so large? It could be for a number of reasons, such as that it gives us room to grow. If we were just hitting some sort of wall in space, it would also be a wall in knowledge that we could acquire. If it wasn't as large and complex as it is, we wouldn't be where we are today. Why are solid objects actually mostly composed of empty space? Isn't God wasting all of that space? Or is it integral to His design? Does the fact that almost everything is made up of empty space reduce the significance of solid objects? The size of the Universe doesn't say anything about our importance relative to it. The Heavens also declare the glory of God:

Psalm 19:1-2

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.

To me, if the Christian beliefs are the most accurate representation of reality, god isn’t a very good designer. There millions of ways that he could have done a better job if he is all powerful. Of course, you can revert back to, “we can’t know the mind of god”, or “god works in mysterious ways”, but those aren’t answers, they are just ways of maintaining a pre-existing belief by silencing further inquisition.

Have you ever created a Universe? If not, how then would you know what a superior design would look like?

“Unless you can demonstrate a purely naturalistic origin of the Universe, you have no case against Agency.“

Agency needs to prove itself and so far it isn’t doing a very good job. Science as a whole isn’t making a case against agency and neither am I by suggesting that there are likely to be naturalistic causes. Agency simply isn’t necessary. That is what I think that you don’t understand. It’s that I don’t accept the case for agency until agency can be proven. A suspended judgment is better than an accepted unverifiable and untestable claim.

You can rule out the necessity of Agency when you can explain origins. To say that it is not necessary when you don't know what caused the Universe is not something you can determine.

If you are in any way the kind of person who culturally relates to Christianity then there is nothing that anyone can do for you. It is very difficult to have an intellectually honest conversation with someone whose basis for belief is deeply tied to a sense of culture or social belonging. Challenging your beliefs is synonymous to asking you to become someone else if your beliefs are tightly woven into your identity. The only thing I can ask of you is to ask yourself if what you believe determines how you will process new information that comes to you.

I'll give you a little background on me. I grew up without any religion, and until a few years ago, I was an agnostic materialist who didn't see any evidence for God or spirit. Growing up, I hoped to become an astronomer. I have studied all the things you have mentioned, and although I am just a layman, I know quite a bit about biology, astronomy, physics, etc. Like you, I assumed because of my indoctrination in school and society, that the theory of evolution and other metaphysical theories were well supported by hard evidence. When I became a Christian, I was willing to incorporate these theories into my worldview. It is only upon investigation of the actual facts that I was shocked to find there not only is there no real evidence, but that much of what I had been taught in school was either grossly inaccurate, intentionally misleading, or outright fradulent.

So, you're not dealing with someone who grew up outside of your worldview, who feels threatened by it and is trying to tear it down. You're talking with someone who was heavily invested in it, and even willing to compromise with it, and has turned away from it because of my research, not in spite of it. If it was true, I would want to know about it. Since it isn't, I don't believe in it.

At the very least, you can see now that I am not diametrically opposed to the idea of a creator or agency behind everything. The notion is interesting but I don’t believe that there is enough real credible information to suggest that it’s true.

You are more openminded than I originally gave you credit for, but you definitely have a huge evidence filter made out of your presuppositions.

There are enough logical arguments against the idea of a god or gods existing that the whole notion is worth dismissing.

The only logical argument of any value that the atheists have is the argument from evil, and that has been soundly debunked by plantigas free will defense. Feel free to bring one up though, because I have never seen an atheist offer any positive evidence for his position. "Worth dismissing" = close minded and biased, btw.

If there is as god or gods, they aren’t doing a very good job of making themselves known or knowable.

Do you think that is why 93 percent of the world believes that God exists?

The simple fact is that naturalistic explanations are more useful ideas than any god concept because they provide both predictions that we can verify and help us make decisions about where to study next. No god hypothesis has ever provided either, therefore, in the pursuit of knowledge; the idea of god is useless.

Did you know that the idea that we can suss out laws by investigating their secondary causes is a Christian idea, based on the premise that God created an orderly universe governed by laws? Did you know that modern science got its start in Christian europe? Doesn't seem so useless to me. Science now must assume a little thing called "uniformity in nature" to even do science without the belief that there is a Creator upholding these laws. How do you get absolute laws in an ever changing Universe? What is the evidence the future will be like the past? Can you explain it?

Now you see why naturalistic explanations are predominate in science as the default standard.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the unitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin, Harvard
New York Review of Books 1/9/97

No evidence would be sufficient to create a change in mind; that it is not a commitment to evidence, but a commitment to naturalism. ...Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it.

Steven Pinker MIT
How the mind works p.182

I have faith and belief myself... I believe that nothing beyond those natural laws is needed. I have no evidence for this. It is simply what I have faith in and what I believe.

Isaac Asimov

I see why you say that, and now you know why you believe that, because those who teach you these ideas are doing exactly what I have been saying all along. Suppressing the truth.


>> ^IAmTheBlurr:

You know it's getting bad for hardcore right wingers when they're coming up with ridiculous, incomprehensible names like "TrogLibDytes". Are those liberal followers of the almighty Trogdor, who looks to spread burnination among all peasants and their thatch-roof cottages?

Or is that a typo for "ProgLibDytes", which is similar, but with less majesty?

I can't tell anymore. You should just keep the name calling to terms like "Communist" and "Socialist". It's easier for people without a brain to follow you.

As for obsessing over one economic statistic, which economic statistics should we be focusing on? Unemployment rate? Which one is going to paint the economy the way you want it to be, not for how it is. You can't just pretend severe economic inequality doesn't exist just because the policies you favor led to it.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

Sigh.
ProgLibDytes really need to get over thier obsession with the GINI index, which was created by a fascist as a trick to gin up the sheeple masses. The whole "Income Gap" is just a new label to a decades old fascist propoganda tool. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together sees such naked hate-mongering exactly for what it is. Obsessing over a single economic statistic is like using one pixel in a 24,000,000 pixel image to describe a whole thing.
People like Cunk and all the TrogLibDyte acolytes that slurp down all his verbal diarrhea love to talk about nothing but the income gap because it is one of the rare few economic stats (out of thousands) that strikes a chord with the masses who are ignorant of real economics. Same motive as the reason the fascists created the GINI index. Get people mad at a small target and they are easy to manipulate. Hows it feel, ProgLibDytes, knowing that you are so easily suckered in by the same tricks used by the Nazis? Obama's mentor - Saul Alinsky - would be proud as he literally wrote the book on methods for flim-flamming the slow and the stupid. Change one word in his rant, and you can't tell the difference betwen Cunk and Gobbels.

>> ^marbles:

Don’t Blame Capitalism for Wall Street’s Corruption and Lawlessness:
When Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought about Western civilization, he answered:
I think it would be a good idea.
I feel the same way about free market capitalism.
It would be a good idea, but it is not what we have now. Instead, we have either socialism, fascism or a type of looting.
If people want to criticize capitalism and propose an alternative, that is fine . . . but only if they understand what free market capitalism is and acknowledge that America has not practiced free market capitalism for some time.


think you'll find that it's the move towards a more free market that made things worse, from deregulation in the 70's onwards. governments and presidents Preached about the reduction of big government, and letting the market do what it wants.
Granted, its never strictly speaking been, a free market, because you still had government taxing (though as Wolff has pointed out in the video, shifting the burden completely away from business, and therefore, the market) but what you can say is this:

history now tells us that the more free the market, the worse things become....what makes you think having a 100% free market would make things perfect?
It would be total anarchy. The wealth divide would become incomprehensible.

It's all there, in history. The proof to end all these arguments is there, because it's already happened. Regulation, after the great depression, immediately improved things for America, taxing the wealthy, using that money to put in infrastructure that made america a superpower.
Deregulate everything, and watch the western worlds decline (for the majority).
That is what happened, you cannot argue a situation that actually happened.

All you need is a government that isn't corrupt, that doesn't pander to the free market and peoples desires to win elections, but instead holds certain ideas to be true. The death of idealism was supposed to make individuals free, instead it produced a new kind of control that made things a lot worse for the majority of people.
I believe science will ultimately find out the definition of 'human flourishing' and therefore create a new idea of what is actually best for a society.

I prefer channel ideas that inspire furious debate of incomprehensively strongly held views - please correct.

This idea is simply a good one - shame on you.