After much mentation over the surveillance apparatus' true colors concerning the human population here's my revised take on talking about anything "nefarious/illegal/contentious" in chats, emails, forums like these, etc over the internet:

I use and deal drugs:
I don't pay income taxes:
I speak openly concerning anarchy and swift and violent/non-violent revolution:


I give a fuck because I have nothing to hide. I despise law enforcement because of how it has mutated, I despise government for the private club she has become. Our intelligence community's function is not there to protect her citizens from enemies, but to create an apparatus which can monitor all actions with a view to creating a machine that works for the wealthiest and most powerful cunts on the planet, the same who should be crucified, displayed prominently along roads leading in and out of the D.C. metro area.

Nike says it best-her credo should be applied to the next televised revolt against this beast...Just Do It.

I'm inclined to fall in the middle here.
Smoked a pack a day for 20 years and got lung cancer? That's a victim that took a risk and lost. BUT...
It's impossible to eliminate cancer risk entirely. Cancer is semi-random with an off-on trigger. Risk is cumulative, and while incidence can be correlated with risk across populations, incidence is not directly correlated with risk for a given individual. Some people will tan for years and never experience the specific set of mutations and biologic failsafe failures that results in melanoma, while others will trigger that specific set of conditions rapidly, even when the starting biologic conditions\predispositions are the same.
So, yes, I believe some people "get credit" for their cancer (or other illnesses) because of their behaviors, but others are just unlucky.
Even setting aside the randomness of incidence, we're constantly bombarded with a significant cancer risk factor in the form of ionizing radiation, and not just from avoidable sources like deciding to live in a brick house or eating bananas.
I also disagree with the idea that more money wouldn't help eliminate (contrast with "cure") cancer, because many organizations funding cancer research are looking at identifying risk factors, which leads to opportunities for educating populations about avoiding those risk factors. Cervical cancer can be caused by HPV? Get your kids vaccinated, don't have unprotected sex, etc. Lung cancer can be caused by smoking? Stop smoking! It isn't just about finding a magic medication to reverse cellular mutations or target mutated cells, although that would be fantastic.

Well, they could mean a specific, known mutation. Also, it isn't clear that all of these physical attributes are a consequence of genetics.

Isn't "caused by a mutation" redundant? Aren't all aspects of our genetics "caused by a mutation"? Ok, maybe an exception would be some kind of gene capture from another organism.

True but the Atheist also holds the "belief" that there is not GOD. So which belief is more correct? For me to get into a biblical debate with you and the atheist sift community would be pointless. It's like the saying you can bring a horse to water but you can't make him drink. So this makes me search the web for other ways to argue the point. Here is 1 of them.

Mathematically speaking evolution falls flat on it face..
Lifted from site: http://www.freewebs.com/proofofgod/whataretheodds.htm



Suppose you take ten pennies and mark them from 1 to 10. Put them in your pocket and give them a good shake. Now try to draw them out in sequence from 1 to 10, putting each coin back in your pocket after each draw.

Your chance of drawing number 1 is 1 to 10.
Your chance of drawing 1 & 2 in succession is 1 in 100.
Your chance of drawing 1, 2 & 3 in succession would be one in a thousand.
Your chance of drawing 1, 2, 3 & 4 in succession would be one in 10,000.

And so on, until your chance of drawing from number 1 to number 10 in succession would reach the unbelievable figure of one chance in 10 billion. The object in dealing with so simple a problem is to show how enormously figures multiply against chance.

Sir Fred Hoyle similarly dismisses the notion that life could have started by random processes:

Imagine a blindfolded person trying to solve a Rubik’s cube. The chance against achieving perfect colour matching is about 50,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. These odds are roughly the same as those against just one of our body's 200,000 proteins having evolved randomly, by chance.

Now, just imagine, if life as we know it had come into existence by a stroke of chance, how much time would it have taken? To quote the biophysicist, Frank Allen:

Proteins are the essential constituents of all living cells, and they consist of the five elements, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulphur, with possibly 40,000 atoms in the ponderous molecule. As there are 92 chemical elements in nature, all distributed at random, the chance that these five elements may come together to form the molecule, the quantity of matter that must be continually shaken up, and the length of time necessary to finish the task, can all be calculated. A Swiss mathematician, Charles Eugene Guye, has made the computation and finds that the odds against such an occurrence are 10^160, that is 10 multiplied by itself 160 times, a number far too large to be expressed in words. The amount of matter to be shaken together to produce a single molecule of protein would be millions of times greater than the whole universe. For it to occur on the earth alone would require many, almost endless billions (10^243) of years.

Proteins are made from long chains called amino-acids. The way those are put together matters enormously. If in the wrong way, they will not sustain life and may be poisons. Professor J.B. Leathes (England) has calculated that the links in the chain of quite a simple protein could be put together in millions of ways (10^48). It is impossible for all these chances to have coincided to build one molecule of protein.

But proteins, as chemicals, are without life. It is only when the mysterious life comes into them that they live. Only the infinite mind of God could have foreseen that such a molecule could be the abode of life, could have constructed it, and made it live.

Science, in attempt to calculate the age of the whole universe, has placed the figure at 50 billion years. Even such a prolonged duration is too short for the necessary proteinous molecule to have come into existence in a random fashion. When one applies the laws of chance to the probability of an event occurring in nature, such as the formation of a single protein molecule from the elements, even if we allow three billion years for the age of the Earth or more, there isn't enough time for the event to occur.

There are several ways in which the age of the Earth may be calculated from the point in time which at which it solidified. The best of all these methods is based on the physical changes in radioactive elements. Because of the steady emission or decay of their electric particles, they are gradually transformed into radio-inactive elements, the transformation of uranium into lead being of special interest to us. It has been established that this rate of transformation remains constant irrespective of extremely high temperatures or intense pressures. In this way we can calculate for how long the process of uranium disintegration has been at work beneath any given rock by examining the lead formed from it. And since uranium has existed beneath the layers of rock on the Earth's surface right from the time of its solidification, we can calculate from its disintegration rate the exact point in time the rock solidified.

In his book, Human Destiny, Le Comte Du nuoy has made an excellent, detailed analysis of this problem:

It is impossible because of the tremendous complexity of the question to lay down the basis for a calculation which would enable one to establish the probability of the spontaneous appearance of life on Earth.

The volume of the substance necessary for such a probability to take place is beyond all imagination. It would that of a sphere with a radius so great that light would take 10^82 years to cover this distance. The volume is incomparably greater than that of the whole universe including the farthest galaxies, whose light takes only 2x10^6 (two million) years to reach us. In brief, we would have to imagine a volume more than one sextillion, sextillion, sextillion times greater than the Einsteinian universe.

The probability for a single molecule of high dissymmetry to be formed by the action of chance and normal thermic agitation remains practically nill. Indeed, if we suppose 500 trillion shakings per second (5x10^14), which corresponds to the order of magnitude of light frequency (wave lengths comprised between 0.4 and 0.8 microns), we find that the time needed to form, on an average, one such molecule (degree of dissymmetry 0.9) in a material volume equal to that of our terrestrial globe (Earth) is about 10^243 billions of years (1 followed by 243 zeros)

But we must not forget that the Earth has only existed for two billion years and that life appeared about one billion years ago, as soon as the Earth had cooled.

Life itself is not even in question but merely one of the substances which constitute living beings. Now, one molecule is of no use. Hundreds of millions of identical ones are necessary. We would need much greater figures to "explain" the appearance of a series of similar molecules, the improbability increasing considerably, as we have seen for each new molecule (compound probability), and for each series of identical throws.

If the probability of appearance of a living cell could be expressed mathematically the previous figures would seem negligible. The problem was deliberately simplified in order to increase the probabilities.

Events which, even when we admit very numerous experiments, reactions or shakings per second, need an almost-infinitely longer time than the estimated duration of the Earth in order to have one chance, on an average to manifest themselves can, it would seem, be considered as impossible in the human sense.

It is totally impossible to account scientifically for all phenomena pertaining to life, its development and progressive evolution, and that, unless the foundations of modern science are overthrown, they are unexplainable.

We are faced by a hiatus in our knowledge. There is a gap between living and non-living matter which we have not been able to bridge.

The laws of chance cannot take into account or explain the fact that the properties of a cell are born out of the coordination of complexity and not out of the chaotic complexity of a mixture of gases. This transmissible, hereditary, continuous coordination entirely escapes our laws of chance.

Rare fluctuations do not explain qualitative facts; they only enable us to conceive that they are not impossible qualitatively.

Evolution is mathematically impossible

It would be impossible for chance to produce enough beneficial mutations—and just the right ones—to accomplish anything worthwhile.

"Based on probability factors . . any viable DNA strand having over 84 nucleotides cannot be the result of haphazard mutations. At that stage, the probabilities are 1 in 4.80 x 10^50. Such a number, if written out, would read 480,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000."
"Mathematicians agree that any requisite number beyond 10^50 has, statistically, a zero probability of occurrence."
I.L. Cohen, Darwin Was Wrong (1984), p. 205.

It's quite difficult to get your head around the scales involved with evolution. Billions of years and many trillions of individual organisms all mutating in positive and negative ways, producing weaker and stronger offspring.

It's only absurd if you can't envision those scales, which admittedly is quite a mind bender at times.

Recent history teaches in the U.S., Russia, China, central Europe, that peeps without guns get slowly (or quickly) fucked by the people they think they elected or believe to be sovereign or otherwise appointed by God. All of these man-created entities, societies, governments, all mutate, collapse, etc.-What is the ultimate end of everyone being armed? Who cares. There will never be a time when this is true.

Look, it's real simple for me. Wealth and power and the abuse of both have brought humanity to the brink before-The fucks who have bankrupted the United States would that nobody looked their way for payback, would that their children (fuck everyone elses) will inherit their influence and power and wealth, and that this machine will continue until power is consolidated into the hands of a few-This shit hasn't changed for thousands of years-Walls protect from invasion, sharp sticks puncture eyeballs of the guy with a rock in his hand.
The negative externalities of there being a shitload of guns in a country?? What, these children being shot by a whack job? Again, address the cause of the cancer don't simply bombard the body with radiation.
You will never be able to guess when someone will snap in our society but there are definite warning signs to clue the somewhat lucid in, and NONE of that shit has to do with why Johnny should or shouldn't be able to have a weapon. Anything may be used as a weapon, including automobiles, but you don't see everyone up in arms to ban cars whenever a CRAZY FUCK, careens through a crowd of peeps on Rodeo Drive.

Historically, the worst atrocities with firearms are perpetrated by governments gone bad, now mine is inching again towards taking mine away??
Again sir, fuck that shit.

No, they are not the same thing, and they are not creationist terms.

Yes, they are in fact the same thing, and yes, I know creationists didnt come up with the terms, predictably, since they have never come up with a single useful term or idea in the history of everything. They can be useful terms to describe the short-term and long-term effect of evolution, but creationist use the term to shield themselves from admitting that they deny reality. Lets just take one example: genetic variation, according to creationists then, genetic variation is real and actually happens, your genes are slightly different from other human genes, ie: there is variations within a species.

But this is the same kind of variation there is BETWEEN species, its the SAME FREAKING THING, but when the difference is large enough, individual organism can no longer breed to produce fertile offspring. That is in fact the definition of "species". Conceptually, there is no difference between the genetic difference between you and me and the genetic difference between you and a tomato, its just MORE difference.

I honestly dont know how to respond to this time=miracle nonsense, the point is that because there is variation and mutations, speciation will happen over long stretches of time, now you might say "biologists sure needs lots of time for evolution to work" but the thing is that other, unrelated fields of study, like chemistry, physics and cosmology have independently reached conclusions about how old the universe is, and its billions of years old. We KNOW that, not from inventing a number large enough to allow evolution to work its "miracles", but because its the only logical conclusion based the available evidence.

The correlating data you are looking at is a hall of mirrors. Radiometric data is based on uniformitarian assumptions. The light travel time is based on similar assumptions. Embedded in all of the estimations of an old age are unprovable assumptions that have no empirical evidence to prove they are true. They are in fact unknowable.

Everything in that paragraph is wrong. These things are NOT based on assumptions, but empirical evidence, calculations and experiments. In fact, the knowledge has not only been confirmed by experiments and evidence, and as I tried to explain earlier, YOU ARE RELYING ON TECHNOLOGY BASED ON THAT KNOWLEGDE TO READ THIS SENTENCE. It is literally being proved right in front of your eyes.

At present this concept of design is just castle-in-the-sky nonsense. Empty piffle. A complete non-starter.

This is why the "mere mention" of "design" will get you "banned" from peer-review, because you could just as well have made a "mere mention" of Bigfoot and the loch ness monster in your zoology report, it's a big tell to your peers that you are a nut who fails to understand the nature of evidence and science, and a big sign that you are in for some fuzzy logic and dumb assumptions instead of solid science.

Design is a better hypothesis for the information we find in DNA, and the fine tuning we see in the physical laws. The reason design is a non-starter is because the idea this Universe was created by anyone is anathema to the scientific community:

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."

S. C. Todd,
Correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999

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

After essentially nullifying and disproving everything we have learned about biology the last 200 years, you still have all the work ahead of you, I'm afraid. You now have to build a completely new framework and model for every single observation ever made in biology that makes sense of it all and explains why things are the way they are. Shouting that a thing is "complex" is not cutting it, I'm afraid. You need a new theory of DNA, Immunology, Bacterial resistance, adaptation, vestigal organs, animal distobution, mutation, selection, variation, genetics, speciation, taxonomy... well, as Dobzhansky put it: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" That quote is more relevant than ever.

Your error here is conflating micro and macro evolution. Creation scientists believe in micro evolution and speciation. That is part of the creationist model of how the world was repopulated with animals after the flood. Macro evolution, the idea that all life descended from a universal common ancestor, is not proven by immunology, bacterial resistance, adaptation, animal distribution, mutation, seclection, variation, speciation, taxonomy etc. The only way you could prove it is in the fossil record and the evidence isn't there. They've tried to prove it with genetics but it contradicts the fossil record (the way they understand it). So Creationists have no trouble explaining those things..and common genetics points to a common designer.

You dont have to trust scientists, most of the EVIDENCE is RIGHT FUCKING THERE, in front of you, in your pocket, in your hand, around your home, in every school, in every home, in every post office or courtroom, in the streets. ACTUAL REAL EVIDENCE, right there, PROVING, every second, that the universe is billions of years old.

Every scientist since Newton could be a lying sack of shit, all working on the same conspiracy, and it would mean fuck all, because the evidence speaks for itself.

The earth is definately NOT ten thousand years young.

Have you ever heard of the horizon problem? The big bang model suffers from a light travel time problem of its own, but they solve it by postulating cosmic inflation, which is nothing more than a fudge factor to solve the problem. First, it would have to expand at trillions of times the speed of light, violating the law that says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. There is also no theory compatible with physics that could explain the mechanism for how the Universe would start expanding, and then cease expanding a second later. It's poppycock. See what secular scientists have to say about the current state of the Big Bang Theory:

http://www.cosmologystatement.org/

As far as how light could reach us in a short amount of time, there are many theories. One theory is that the speed of light has not always been constant, and was faster at the beginning of creation. This is backed up by a number of measurements taken since the 1800s showing the speed of light decreasing. You can see the tables here:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/cm/v4/n1/velocity-of-light

And here's the real question. Name one current product based off of any hypothesis/theory that was posited and proven by 'Creation Science'. Too hard? What about any process, maybe based on the geology or biology research.

Read the above link.

That link does not provide evidence of any usefulness of "creation science" it simply mentions that some real scientists are also creationists. I think what Hatsix was asking for was if there has been any progress made because creation was assumed or discovered via actual science. Lets say a creationist that solves a particular problem in biology because he or she used creationism or "creation science" instead of, or in addition to, just, well... science.

At present, the very best we have seen of "creation science" are rather pathetic attemps at poking holes in evolution by people like Michael Behe who keeps yapping on about how something is "too complex" to have evolved. Even if these people had been completely successful of bringing down Darwin once and for all (they arent even close), that wouldnt be ANY help whatsoever to actually justify calling it "creation" science (or intelligent design).

After essentially nullifying and disproving everything we have learned about biology the last 200 years, you still have all the work ahead of you, I'm afraid. You now have to build a completely new framework and model for every single observation ever made in biology that makes sense of it all and explains why things are the way they are. Shouting that a thing is "complex" is not cutting it, I'm afraid. You need a new theory of DNA, Immunology, Bacterial resistance, adaptation, vestigal organs, animal distobution, mutation, selection, variation, genetics, speciation, taxonomy... well, as Dobzhansky put it: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" That quote is more relevant than ever.

crazy mutation, baby!

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

Natural selection and mutation over millions of generations in biological systems produces ordered results. On a cosmological scale, physical forces draw bodies into stable relationships. Science can easily explain how these phenomena occur.

But you don't really want answers.

"Tide goes in, tide goes out. You can't explain that.">> ^lantern53:

>> ^KnivesOut:
Certainly not by reading children's stories meant to scare simpletons into conformance. Observation, hypothesis, prediction, experiment, conclusion.>> ^lantern53:
Atheists believe order comes from chaos.
How do you defend that?


Many, if not most religious traditions use analogy to explain ultimate truths.
But explain to me how order comes from chaos?

You know what, I dont even care what is in their meat and I am not surprised that they create deceptive marketing campaigns lie this. Even though McDs is bad for the world and environment Ill go there every now and again and get my Franken burger AND ENJOY IT IMMENSELY. I accept whatever weird mutation of a burger and a fry that they have for what it is. If I wanted a real burger I would have gotten a real burger at a real burger restaurant, or shit, made one myself with organic beef or just spent twenty minutes driving to In and Out for a better fast food shit burger... but McDs burgers arent as bad as people make it out to be, its their footprint on the environment that is terrible. But, those burgers are rife with unbeef, know what Im saying?

@hpqp
Good points, all.
However, the "cognition is sacred" (as opposed to "human life is sacred") viewpoint has a hole in it about the size of human consciousness. (Oh man, tangent time!) Some loudly proclaim the presence of a divine soul or spirit, but there is certainly something else there, aside from the physical form.
Obviously, human (and for that matter animal) experience and behavior is influenced by the physical brain and its processes. Damage to it predictably and reproducibly changes behavior and perception. As much as some of us would like to think otherwise, the physical structure and function of the brain influences who we are and what we do as individuals. I would honestly have no problem accepting that the physical universe as we've modeled it functions precisely as it has, autonomously. (Right down to fruitless debates between individuals on the Internet.) Evolution is a real thing. The brain has developed as yet another beneficial mutation that promotes the propagation of its host organism. Input in, behavior out, feedback loop. Click click click, ding.
But the problem is that we experience this. Somehow this mass of individual cells (and below that individual molecules, atoms, quarks) experiences itself in a unified manner, or rather something experiences this mass of matter in a unified manner. No matter how far down you track it, there's no physical accommodation for consciousness. To give a specific example, the cells in the eye detect light (intensity and wavelength) by electrochemical stimulation. The binary "yes\no" of stimulation is routed through the thalamus in individual axons, physically separated in space, to the visual cortex, where it's propagated and multiplied through a matrix of connections, but all individual cells, and all just ticking on and off based on chemical and electrical thresholds. The visual field is essentially painted as a physical map across a region of the brain, but somehow, the entire image is experienced at once. Cognition is necessarily distinct from consciousness.

What this means, practically, is that we must attribute value to cognition and consciousness separately.
Cognition may not be completely understood, but we can explain it in increasingly specific terms, and it seems that we'll be able to unravel how the brain works within the current model. It absolutely has a value. We consider a person who is "a vegetable" to have little to no current or expected quality of life, and generally are comfortable making the decision to "pull the plug".
Consciousness, however, is what we believe makes us special in the universe, despite being completely empty from a theoretical standpoint. If sensory input, memory, and behavioral responses are strictly a function of the material, then stripped of those our "unified experience" is completely undetectable\untestable. We have no way of knowing if our neighbor is a meaty automaton or a conscious being, but we assume. Which is precisely why it's special. It's obviously extra-physical. Perhaps @gorillaman's tomatobaby (that is, the newborn which he says is without Mind) has a consciousness, but it isn't obvious because the physical structure is insufficient for meaningful manifestation. I have difficulty accepting that consciousness, empty though it is on its own, is without value. "So what," though, right? If you can't detect it in anyone but yourself, what use is it in this discussion? Clearly, there IS something about the structure or function of the brain that's conducive to consciousness. We are only conscious of what the brain is conscious of and what it has conceived of within its bounds. So the brain at least is important, but it's not the whole point.
Anyway, there's that tangent.

The "stream of potential life" argument has its limits. Any given sperm or egg is exceedingly unlikely to develop into a human. For a single fertilized egg, the odds shift dramatically. That's why people seek abortions, because if they don't do something, they're probably going to have a baby. The probability of "brewin' a human" is pretty good once you're actually pregnant. The "potential for human life" is very high, which is why you can even make the quality of life argument.

Obviously, you realize how those on the anti-abortion side of the debate react when someone who is...let's say abortion-tolerant ("pro-abortion" overstates it for just about anyone, I suspect) says that they're considering the "quality of life" of the prospective child in their calculus. They get this mental image: "Your mother and I think you'll both be better off this way, trust me. *sound of a meatball in a blender*"
I appreciate that we're trying to minimize suffering in the world and promote goodness, but I think it's over-reaching to paint every potential abortion (or even most) as a tragic tale of suffering simply because the parent wasn't expecting parenthood. Quality of life is much more nuanced. Many wonderful humans have risen from squalor and suffering and will tell you earnestly they believe that background made them stronger\wiser\more empathetic\special. Many parents who were devastated to learn they were pregnant love their unexpected children. And holy crap, kids with Downs, man. What's the quality of life for them and their parents? Terribly challenging and terribly rewarding.
No, I'm not trying to paint rainbows over economic hardship and child abuse and say that "everything's going to be finnnnneeee", but quality of life is a personal decision and it's unpredictable. Isn't that what "It Gets Better" is all about? "Things may seem grim and terrible now, but don't kill yourself just yet, you're going to miss out on some awesome stuff."

Hrm. Thus far we've really been framing abortion as being about "unready" parents, probably because the discussion started on the "mother can choose to have sex" angle.
You've got to wonder how confused this issue would get if we could detect genetically if a fetus might be homosexual. Would Christians loosen their intolerance for abortion if it meant not having a "gay baby"? (Even if it would fly in the face of their belief that homosexuality is a choice.) Would pro-choicer's take a second look at the availability of abortion? Would it still be "one of those terrible things that happens in a free society"?

On western aid, you're spot on. It's so easy to throw money at a problem and pretend we're helping. Humanitarian aid does nothing if we're not promoting and facilitating self-sufficiency. Some people just need a little help getting by until they're back on their feet, but some communities need a jump-start. As you say, they need practical education. I've only been on handful of humanitarian missions myself, so I give more financially than I do of my sweat, but I'm careful to evaluate HOW the organizations I give to use the funds. Are they just shipping food or are they teaching people how to live for themselves and providing the resources to get started? Sure, some giving is necessary. It's impossible for someone to think about sustainable farming and simple industry if they're dying from cholera or starving to death.