>> ^Jesus_Freak:
"Well, we're here, so how we got here is irrelevant."

That's what I mean about lazy.. you just don't want to get it. It's like looking at a river valley and saying.. "it's a good thing these hills come together to form a perfect vessel for this mountain snow melt." It is that simple. The river runs there because it is the lowest point. The valley is formed because the river runs there and makes the valley deeper.

That's exactly why humans use oxygen. It's why some people from northern climates are really pale and people from really sunny places have lots of pigment. God didn't make some people black and some people white. They all "started out in his image". Or is that microevolution.

The garden of eden and Noah's flood are simply oral traditions from nomadic tribes that got assimilated into modern culture. Your Bible has been arbitrarily modified for thousands of years. It's been a political device capriciously modified and edited as the ruling powers saw fit.

I do take exception to how off-handedly dismiss the Bible, though. The Bible has been validated through historical accuracy of events depicted, is a unique document in all of human history, and is validated through the fulfillment of prophecy over time.

Studies have verified that the transcripts have held up without material alteration according to the earliest known records.
The type of forgery necessary to corrupt the Bible we know today is a feat I doubt would be possible even in this day and age. You'd have to destroy every prior copy and convincingly alter remnant copies, all the while leaving no historical footprint to tell the tale.
I posed a scientific question to see how entrenched you all were about the notion that God could not exist. I'm still not impressed with the answers.


You obviously don't know much history about your religion. You can't honestly believe that what we call the Bible was just a filtered set of gospels. And then even certain aspects of those were shaped, such that original Christian sects allowed women to hold honored positions, and even preach. All references to such things were removed by non-holy means.

How can you say there is no alteration? Really old greek, latin.. always interpreted. Heck, wasn't there usually margin notes up until the King James which has it's own history. Aren't there like four or five "King James" Versions.. The wording is different in them all.

You really can't be serious. "Studies have shown"... ok.. "It's been proven that".

---------------
You are not impressed because it's your job to think for yourself. It's not anyone else job to make you believe something. Making someone believe is childish. You have to want to discover new information, think for yourself, be open to new ideas. You refuse to look and even try to see the other side.

If you had tangible, observable, logical evidence in your ideas, people would listen. But you don't have anything to bring to the table. You only have a belief and faith. There is not competing idea, just this never ending game religion plays where they find an area of human understanding that is lacking, and say God did it. Thousands of years ago it was rain, lightning and crop yields... Now it is before the big bang, and primordial ooze. Since it is hard to "prove" or demonstrate millions of years of time and natural forces, religion jumps in there and say, "you have to teach both sides".

They don't have another side or theory or evidence or progress. Intelligent Design should be bringing scientific discovery and break throughs and new inventions. Especially since they have God and prayer and holy water and host wafers. Shit, I forgot about all the prophecies. Certainly that would be a HUGE advantage!

Can you not even concede that Christianity declared the world flat and sun went around the Earth. These were equivalent to the modern Creationist meddling with a competing theory. But instead of proof or science... Religion just demands equal treatment, just because. Just because they have faith they must be right. How many years of scientific progress was stiffle or murdered over the Sun going around the Earth based on measurements and THEORIES. Do you really think the theory of planetary orbit is any different from the theory of natural selection?

>> ^ShakaUVM:
It's often said that liberals can never be hypocrites because they don't actually believe in anything ethical in the first place.
It's amazing to see someone actually making that argument.

No, we do have our morals, that was my point, but we dont see it as morality to decide what goes on in other adults beds. As I tried explaining, morality is entirely man-made, it is entirely an abstract, arbitrary concept, it evolves over time, just like animals are and do. and religions are and do..

The fact that some of us acknowledges this fact, however, doesnt mean we live in a world where anything goes. If we compare it to biological evolution, for example, it is a known fact that we humans share ancestors with other apes.

If you go backwards on the human timeline and the chimp timeline paralell, the two lines will meet a few million years ago, which means that at some point in the past, our ancestors looked alot more like monkeys and other apes than we do, so, when exactly did we become "humans"? a hundred thousand years ago? two hundred thousand?

The answer is that there is no clear moment, it happened gradually, and its still happening gradually. Our local existence in this timeline allows us to name animals that live now something specific, but in reality, its all just arbitrary, there is no "fixed" human form, or shrimp form, or monkey form. The way we see life today is simply how life looks at this moment.

Yet, even as I realize this, and accept it as a fact, that there is no clear, ultimate distinction between species, I am still obviously capable of seeing the difference between a giraffe and a whale, or a human and a chimp, in the same sense a creationist could.

Morality works somewhat the same way, just like animals, it has evolved over time, and even differently in different places. And what seems to me to be perfectly obvious, say, that pigments in our skin shouldn't decide whether we are slaves or slaveholders, may seem inconceivable in some other time and place, as indeed it did. Some time in the future, people might look back at us and be unable to fathom how we could breed large, obviously somewhat intelligent animals, treat them the way we treat them and then slaugher them or exploit them for food.

Epic theological fail.

Epic explanatory fail. Care to cite chapter and verse, or are you simply wrongly crediting the bible for the very moral evolution I am talking about?

Even though the punch of the Mantis Shrimp is very impressive and most talked about, I think its eyes are most impressive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp#The_eyes
Mantis shrimp possess hyperspectral colour vision, allowing up to 12 colour channels extending in the ultraviolet. Their eyes (both mounted on mobile stalks and constantly moving about independently of each other) are similarly variably coloured, and are considered to be the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom. They permit both serial and parallel analysis of visual stimuli.

Rows 1-4 of the midband are specialised for colour vision, from ultra-violet to infra-red. The optical elements in these rows have eight different classes of visual pigments and the rhabdom is divided into three different pigmented layers (tiers), each adapted for different wavelengths. The three tiers in rows 2 and 3 are separated by colour filters (intrarhabdomal filters) that can be divided into four distinct classes, two classes in each row. It is organised like a sandwich; a tier, a colour filter of one class, a tier again, a colour filter of another class, and then a last tier. Rows 5-6 are segregated into different tiers too, but have only one class of visual pigment (a ninth class) and are specialised for polarisation vision. They can detect different planes of polarised light. A tenth class of visual pigment is found in the dorsal and ventral hemispheres of the eye

The word "Hippopotamus" comes from Greek for "River Horse." The Greeks though them to be a relative of the horse, but recent research shows that their closest living relatives are actually whales.

I'm not terribly surprised that a hippo raised from birth around humans could be reasonably tame. Even though they are known to be very aggressive, they're still very intelligent.

>> ^rougy:
Hippos are pretty quick on their feet.


That they are, although the they aren't exactly distance runners, you'd still need a head-start on them.

>> ^Wikipedia:
Even though they are bulky animals, hippopotamuses can run faster than a human on land. Estimates of their running speed vary from 30 km/h (18 mph) to 40 km/h (25 mph), or even 50 km/h (30 mph). The hippo can maintain these higher speeds for only a few hundred meters.


Other neat facts:

On the National Geographic Channel television program, "Dangerous Encounters with Brady Barr", Dr. Brady Barr measured the bite pressure of an adult female hippo at 1,821 lb (826 kg)

...

Their skin secretes a natural sunscreen substance which is red-colored. The secretion is sometimes referred to as "blood sweat," but is neither blood nor sweat. This secretion is initially colorless and turns red-orange within minutes, eventually becoming brown. Two distinct pigments have been identified in the secretions, one red (hipposudoric acid) and one orange (norhipposudoric acid). The two pigments are highly acidic compounds. Both pigments inhibit the growth of disease-causing bacteria; as well, the light absorption of both pigments peaks in the ultraviolet range, creating a sunscreen effect. All hippos, even those with different diets secrete the pigments, so it does not appear that food is the source of the pigments. Instead, the animals may synthesize the pigments from precursors such as the amino acid tyrosine.


Cool!

>> ^archchef:
When did the US become filled with so many pussies? Seriously, they are enemy combatants why do sissy left wing twats want to give them a room at the Hilton and a spa treatment?


Cause we're better then that. We that aren't ignorant and heartless can empathize and realize that inflicting excessive pointless panic or pain is WRONG. Morally.
Aren't Conservative republicans all about morality and faith and what jesus would do? Did Jesus water-board his enemy combatants?

Think about the hundreds of innocent people picked up of the streets of Iraq or caught in the wrong place.

If you were:

mistaken for an enemy.
profiled cause of your pigment and religion.
detained indefinitely without trial.
and subjected to near drowning multiple times a day.

Wouldn't you want think that's a bit unfair?

If some other country were doing this to Americans. What would your comment be then?
..twat

Wow they should have Attenburough narrate that shit:

"And here we have the feral-teenage-drunk-slut performing her traditional hang-over dance. Notice the lack of modesty brought on by delusions of beauty and an inflated sense of pride. Her strategically placed mating pigmentation will guide any lower IQ males in the vicinity towards her bursting-with-anger genitalia. Those with higher functioning brains steer clear and avoid eye contact, lest the crazed gaze causes them to vomit a little."

Is no one else offended by his use of the phrase "White boys"? I prefer pigmentally challenged youth, or "don't let it out in the sun, it ain't done yet"... but "White boys"? WTF man, seriously.

I find it amazing how much crap allegations Obama has to deal with. I must admit, I haven't followed a presidential election as closely as this one, but I don't remember any other candidate having to put up with as much really laughably irrelevant stuff as Obama. Makes the impression that most of this stuff isn't party politics but boils down to cover ups of skin pigmentation issues...

First, I'm arguing based on the assumption that it is a genetic condition. I am ignoring all homosexuals that are the result of environment. I don't contradict myself in my statements above for this reason. Homosexuality, if it is genetic, is a complex, multi-gene condition. You're miss-understanding what that means in terms of genetic inheritance. You can have two hetero parents with little bits and pieces of what can sometimes add up to a homosexual child when the genes mix right. The same occurs for height, hair color, skin pigmentation and skin conditions, cancer susceptibility, mental illness susceptibility, bone density, muscular development, cholesterol maintenance, glucose maintenance, ... I could go on all day here. In MANY of those cases, you get two parents that have offspring with very different characteristics... Still, those characteristics are based on what polymorphisms are present in what genes (or gene duplications/mutations/etc.), so in evolutionary time, if tendencies toward homosexuality lead to fewer homosexuals producing progeny, then those polymorphisms will slowly be lost from the gene-pool.

Since at least as I see it, sexuality isn't purely genetic (as I was assuming in my arguments for the sake of discussion), extinction is the wrong word, but at some point far in the future, the genetic component will be lost unless we intervene, which we almost certainly will by then anyway.

As promised, here is the transcript, to the best of my transcripting abilities. I've shrunk the text size to keep it from being any more gigantic than it has to be. Copy and paste it if it's too small to read.

It's interesting when people speak of areas of evolution for which we have no explanations. All the fundamental concepts of the evolutionary process are understood at least at some fundamental level. Now, are there gaps? Not gaps in the sense that people think. People, now, speak of gaps, for example, in the record. You know... we don't have fossils from before the Camrbian Explosion, but so what? The record is complete; it's not complete by means of fossils. You see in Darwin's time the only way to reconstruct evolutionary history was by studying fossils, by comparative anatomy, comparative embryology, biogeography. It was 150 years ago; science has advanced tremendously. We can now reconstruct evolutionary history with much more powerful methods; the methods of molecular biology, by looking at DNA, by looking at proteins and with these methods we have reconstructed the record completely. We can go back to the organisms, a group of organisms, called LUCA ('L' 'U' 'C' 'A') for the Last Universal Common Ancestor. We can find the common ancestors of all animals, common ancestors of all plants, of all fungi, of all bacteria. We can find the... we can reconstruct the histories of the common ancestors of plants and animals and fungi and bacteria going back to the very beginning. We don't know all the details, because who wants to know all the details? If you are studying the Rocky Mountains, you don't want to have, necessarily, a map where every st.. every tree and every rock is there. If you want to know the details of a particular area within the Rocky Mountains you can go there and study as much as you want and find every little rock, every little leaf, every little tree, every little plant there. The same with evolution. We can now look at any area of evolutionary history and we can understand it with as much detail as we wish. The methods of molecular biology are so powerful, are so quantitative, and also so redundant, we can study anything we want with as much detail as we want. Now there another way in which the people who propose.. propound intelligent design speak of as... about, um... you know, gaps in the record. How did the eye come about? Well we understand now at the genetic level [unintelligible], we actually understand that at almost every other level, they make the unwarranted and erroneous assumption that if something is complex, and every part depends on every other part, that it could not have come about by evolution. It's like a watch. It does not help to have one little piece, or the other piece, or the other piece. You have to have them all or you don't have a watch, but that's not so with organisms. So we have in mollusks today, these are snails and clams and so.. and squids, we have an example.. an example of eyes which go from the simplest to the most complex. I'm going to speak about eyes because the eye is one example they use, unless you have everything, unless you have the cornea and the lense and the retina and the... and the optical nerve, having one part of this alone doesn't help. Well in mollusks, and in some mollusks called limpids, they have something that you can call eyes. They're just a few pigmented cells linked to single neurons, nerve cells, which carry the information to the primitive brain of these creatures. Just a few pigmented cells. Then we have mollusks which have more pigmented cells and some of them forming a kind of cup which allows to detect the direction of the light. Then we have what are called pinhole eyes which are this cup, still a little more extreme and a little more sensitive-to-light cells, and more nerve cells, and then you have... we have animals, still speaking about mollusks, which have just simple refractive lense as well as the sensitive... light-sensitive cells which eventually in advanced organisms they advanced to the... gave rise to the retina. And you go all the way to octopus and squids which have an eye very much like ours: has cornea, has a lense, has a retina, has muscles to move it, has a.. a optic nerve. Curiously enough the eye of the squid is better than ours in that we have a substantial imperfection that they don't have. For historical reason, that's for evolutionary history of how the human eye came about, the neurons that register the signals in the retina are inside the eye. So for those signals to go to the brain, these nerve cells get collected in the optic nerve, the optic nerve has to cross the retina so we have a blind spot. Now squids and octopuses have the nerve cells connected to what is the retina from the outside. So they collect into what is the optic nerve and they send the signal to the brain without having any blindspot. Well the... the point I am making is that there are complex organs and functions that we may not know in detail, but any time we investigate one of those we discover the details. And it's again, I'm going to put it bluntly, blasphemous to try to think of a God who is there waiting for something from time to time to come and intervene: "now I'm going to make an eye". Primitive organisms don't have eyes so God waited a few thousand million years - 2 and a half, 3 thousand million years - in order to have organisms with eyes, then later on did this and that. This is what the theologans in the old times called the "God of the gaps". Heresy, trying to justify God to account for things we don't know. You know, fill in the gaps. For things we don't know and aren't knowlegable by scientific research... we have science, we should do scientific research. We should not be putting this God as an engineer that is trying to fix little things from time to time. What sort of vision of God is that? Moreover there is another problem and it is that the implication of intelligent design is that God is a very, very bad engineer. Think of the example that I was telling you a moment ago, of the human eye. I mean, an engineer that could have designed an eye with the optic nerve having to cross the retina would be fired. You better do it the octopus way. An engineer that would have designed the human jaw would be fired. Our jaw is not big enough for all our teeth, so we have to pull the... the... the wisdom teeth and very often have to straighten the others and the orthodontists make a very good living straightening the teeth because we have too many teeth, too large for our jaw. An engineer that would have designed the jaw that is not big for the teeth would be fired. God making these trivial, obvious mistake in a universe of design. Well their God does these things, certainly not mine. I don't want to have to worship a God that did this... um, not smart enough to do as well as a human engineer.

WHITE POWER!!!!

This isnt about pigment difference in us mammals, its about the insane death-cult of Islam, that, if followed after the doctrine, will turn you into an intolerant lunatic. You need only to open a random page in the Qu'ran to see how hostile Islam is to "the others" ie: people who do not give up their brain,heart and soul to the will of Allah and submit UTTERLY to this god and doctrine. In the eyes of Islam, you MINK, as well as me, and anyone else who doesnt do their best to follow this half-assed bible-copy, are just about the lowest form of life there is, we're even lower than women and dogs, I think.

This has nothing to do with race, there are certainly decent muslims out there, but thats because they mostly ignore the insane teachings of islam,(this can and does only happen because sanity and secularism has grown in the teeth of religion) and adopt a secular, moderate view, there are also heroes, apostates, that almost all of them live under threat of death, because they have done the brave and sensible act of leaving the insane cult of Islam entirely.

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

If you are an atheist feeling oppressed by religious communities, you are paying far too much attention to other people's business.

I happen to live in a similar place, and I'm glad thats the case.

But, I am also a world citizen, and religion is poisoning this world, there are millions of children, who are raised and labelled a particular religion every day, and because we have stood idly by and just smiled for so long, they arent gonna stop, non-believers need to speak up, if for no other reason than to show we exists, and we are not monsters. many people who are raised [insert your religion] are never shown the alternatives, they are never encouraged to think for themselves, and sometimes even willingly deceived, just to prevent them from being "lured by the devil" etc.

We feel the need to speak up, voice our concerns, and rock the boat a little. I know I wont convert people into my world view, I just want to spark some thoughts, thats all.

I believe the entire human race will benefit from an honest quest for truth, and morality, and the only way to get there, is by understanding the world better. Things like racism, just to take an example, become meaningless, not because some holy book says it should be, but because we understand we are all mammal primates with different skin pigments living on the same cooling surface of a rock, separated by a difference in DNA so small it cant even possibly count. This knowledge allows us to assess, with confidence, that we, all humans, should be considered equals. Compare that to the time when Europeans thought all blacks lived near the edge of the flat earth, and that somehow this pigment deviation meant all the difference in the world..

People who say science has nothing to do with morals or values, could not be more wrong. What we know about the world, directly affects our attitude towards it.

Jesus never saw the world map. Think about that for 2 seconds.

An interesting fact I picked up the other day, just in case you wondered why your shit is typically brown:

The brown colour of feces is due to the action of bacteria on bilirubin, which is the end product of the breakdown of hemoglobin (red blood cells)

Bilirubin is a useless and toxic breakdown product of hemoglobin, which also means that it is generated in large quantities. In the time it takes you to read this sentence aloud, roughly 20 million of your red blood cells have died and roughly 5 quintillion (5 x 1015) molecules of hemoglobin are in need of disposal.

In the liver cells (hepatocytes) the bound bilirubin reacts with glucuronic acid to form conjugated bilirubin. Most of the conjugated bilirubin is secreted into the small intestine with the bile. In the large bowel, bacteria convert bilirubin into the yellow-brown pigment (urobilinogen) that gives feces its characteristic color. Some of this pigment re-enters the blood from the colon and is removed by the kidney into the urine (characteristic color).

They forgot Modigliani, he was an Thujone lush....why you think those guys painted crookedy faces on people???? Oh that and the lead in the pigments.....don't suck yer brushes, kids.....

This guy should spin himself, then leave his ketchup masterworks on the tables at McPollops' all around the country, pretty soon he'll get a commission from the purveyors of death by diet, and he can retire and stop playing with his poison, and eat more nutritive lead-based pigments......