Just because the universe might be eternal, does not mean that God is the automatic solution, nor the simplest explanation. That's just the one that makes sense to you. I would say that an eternal universe filled with rocks and gas is a little less complicated than an eternal, thinking, feeling, all-powerful being. But again, that's just my opinion. Those are large concepts, and the rules of physics, or even the seemingly bizarre rules of quantum mechanics do nothing to help explain them.

To me it is simply a probability argument. If you say that everything is equally unlikely, then if you strip away all other concerns, you just have the question..was the Universe deliberately created? The answer is either yes or no. You have evidence that perhaps there is design, which implies an intelligent (and powerful) creator. You have evidence that perhaps it could have happened by chance, by naturalistic processes. From there, you have to figure out what explanation best matches reality. You could ask, does something as wonderful as life and as amazing as the Universe just happen by itself? You could ask, am I just a bunch of atoms moving through space or is there something more to me than that?

Is an eternal God hard to grasp? Yes, but easier I think than something from nothing. If it is something from nothing we will always be ignorant of the initial conditions. If God created it, He will (presumably) educate us about the mystery of His existence. He promised this:

1 Corinthians 13:12

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

It is basically saying that God promises full disclosure when His Kingdom is established on Earth..

Occam's razor is simply a pragmatic way to find a solution, it does not prove anything, but just suggest what a likely answer might be. People use that argument about the complexity of universal laws all the time, but the fact of the matter is, we still don't understand 99.99999999% of the universe or how it works. We can see that if we "tweaked the dials", it would probably look much different than the universe we know, but there isn't a scientist out there in this world that could tell you with any certainty what would happen. Only that on a large scale, things might fall inward or burst outward faster, or that water might not congeal the same way.

Well, just in the initial conditions of the Universe, you have several values which just defy any naturalistic explanation. Even atheist scientists have to admit that a straight forward explanation indicates a designer:

Fred Hoyle, Astronomer said

"A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."

This has major implications for scientific theories, because it isn't simply a matter of it being incredibly unlikely, it is also matter of contradicting the predictions of standard models. I think you'll enjoy this article:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0208/0208013v3.pdf

Speaking of complexity, here's an exercise for your brain: Think about a mountain, on part of that mountain, pressure builds up, and a rock slide starts to fall. When it finally settles, the rocks, all the little pebbles and large boulders and particles of dust are arranged in just a certain way. Even though it's just a pile of rocks, it contains within it an inconceivable amount of complexity. Nowhere else in the entire universe, will there ever be a pile of rocks that have the exact specifications of this one. And even if it did, it wouldn't be composed of the same stone, And even if was, the elements that make up the stone wouldn't be arranged the same way. Nor would it be the exact same temperature, unless it was in the exact same relative position in the universe with an identical sun, with all the particles of gas and dust in between them arranged in exactly the same way.

In a way, the pile of rocks, when you think about it, is an impossibility. And yet it exists. There is no simple solution to explain it. An eternal creator, or the laws of physics? Either way, the true meaning is something that neither of us can comprehend. And to say that either one is "simpler" than the other is merely a statement of faith. Not fact.

Sure, taken by itself, such a thing is astonishing to behold. Divorced from its circumstances, it is perplexing to say the least. Yet, either explanation for the origin of this impossibility leads to a definitive conclusion. If it was naturalism, there is no meaning to it. It just happened that way and at best you can invent a meaning for it and decide to believe it. If it was created, however, it was created for a purpose. It has meaning because of that purpose; it is invested with meaning. In naturalism, you are practically looking at something alien. It is cold, dead, inexplicable, and doesn't care about you. Under creation, you are at the least staring this quote from Einstein dead in the face:

"I'm not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations."

I go a step further because I believe God has revealed a bit about his Dewey Decimal System, but essentially, I am in staring at this in awe and wonder. I think those rocks are amazing and startling, but I also praise God for making them that way.

>> ^Ryjkyj:
We love you too. (but it's a rough, heathen love)
Just because the universe might be eternal, does not mean that God is the automatic solution, nor the simplest explanation. That's just the one that makes sense to you. I would say that an eternal universe filled with rocks and gas is a little less complicated than an eternal, thinking, feeling, all-powerful being. But again, that's just my opinion. Those are large concepts, and the rules of physics, or even the seemingly bizarre rules of quantum mechanics do nothing to help explain them.
Occam's razor is simply a pragmatic way to find a solution, it does not prove anything, but just suggest what a likely answer might be. People use that argument about the complexity of universal laws all the time, but the fact of the matter is, we still don't understand 99.99999999% of the universe or how it works. We can see that if we "tweaked the dials", it would probably look much different than the universe we know, but there isn't a scientist out there in this world that could tell you with any certainty what would happen. Only that on a large scale, things might fall inward or burst outward faster, or that water might not congeal the same way.
Point being, just because we can tell that the universe would be different, doesn't mean that it was designed. It just means that it is this way.
Speaking of complexity, here's an exercise for your brain: Think about a mountain, on part of that mountain, pressure builds up, and a rock slide starts to fall. When it finally settles, the rocks, all the little pebbles and large boulders and particles of dust are arranged in just a certain way. Even though it's just a pile of rocks, it contains within it an inconceivable amount of complexity. Nowhere else in the entire universe, will there ever be a pile of rocks that have the exact specifications of this one. And even if it did, it wouldn't be composed of the same stone, And even if was, the elements that make up the stone wouldn't be arranged the same way. Nor would it be the exact same temperature, unless it was in the exact same relative position in the universe with an identical sun, with all the particles of gas and dust in between them arranged in exactly the same way.
In a way, the pile of rocks, when you think about it, is an impossibility. And yet it exists. There is no simple solution to explain it. An eternal creator, or the laws of physics? Either way, the true meaning is something that neither of us can comprehend. And to say that either one is "simpler" than the other is merely a statement of faith. Not fact.

We love you too. (but it's a rough, heathen love)

Just because the universe might be eternal, does not mean that God is the automatic solution, nor the simplest explanation. That's just the one that makes sense to you. I would say that an eternal universe filled with rocks and gas is a little less complicated than an eternal, thinking, feeling, all-powerful being. But again, that's just my opinion. Those are large concepts, and the rules of physics, or even the seemingly bizarre rules of quantum mechanics do nothing to help explain them.

Occam's razor is simply a pragmatic way to find a solution, it does not prove anything, but just suggest what a likely answer might be. People use that argument about the complexity of universal laws all the time, but the fact of the matter is, we still don't understand 99.99999999% of the universe or how it works. We can see that if we "tweaked the dials", it would probably look much different than the universe we know, but there isn't a scientist out there in this world that could tell you with any certainty what would happen. Only that on a large scale, things might fall inward or burst outward faster, or that water might not congeal the same way.

Point being, just because we can tell that the universe would be different, doesn't mean that it was designed. It just means that it is this way.

Speaking of complexity, here's an exercise for your brain: Think about a mountain, on part of that mountain, pressure builds up, and a rock slide starts to fall. When it finally settles, the rocks, all the little pebbles and large boulders and particles of dust are arranged in just a certain way. Even though it's just a pile of rocks, it contains within it an inconceivable amount of complexity. Nowhere else in the entire universe, will there ever be a pile of rocks that have the exact specifications of this one. And even if it did, it wouldn't be composed of the same stone, And even if was, the elements that make up the stone wouldn't be arranged the same way. Nor would it be the exact same temperature, unless it was in the exact same relative position in the universe with an identical sun, with all the particles of gas and dust in between them arranged in exactly the same way.

In a way, the pile of rocks, when you think about it, is an impossibility. And yet it exists. There is no simple solution to explain it. An eternal creator, or the laws of physics? Either way, the true meaning is something that neither of us can comprehend. And to say that either one is "simpler" than the other is merely a statement of faith. Not fact.

I believe the Big Bang Theory because I have faith in the scientific community.

There is a faith aspect to "science". I have faith that E=MC^2. I've never checked, but I have faith that the scientific community have checked. However, this is not blind faith. I could, if I was sufficiently motivated, read up on the science and prove this to myself.

Well, this is only half the story. There is a certain amount of faith in science as a whole. This is because science doesn't actually prove anything:

http://www.digipac.ca/chemical/proof/index.htm

To believe in science you must have faith in empiricism, which says that all knowledge comes from sensory experience. Yet there are many truths empiricism cannot account for. Science itself is predicated on a series of unprovable assumptions called "brute givens" which presume the operations of the Universe have remained constant in the past and will continue to do so. Here is a good dialog on the matter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkBD20edOco

Please ignore the title, it was just the best clip I could find. Also, check out this conversation between a physics major and a bunch of physicists and mathematicians about him losing faith in empiricism:

http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-184699.html

Another reason why "science" isn't a religion is that if something is shown to wrong, it gets corrected. If those neutrinos sent from CERN disprove E=MC^2, then my mind is open to change. If something is shown to be wrong in religion, the people who show it up get in trouble.

This isn't always true. For instance, the scientific community at large consider evolution to be "proven" and won't tolerate any dissent on the issue. A scientist who even breathes the words "intelligent design" will be totally ostracized, have their reputations ruined, be unable to publish scientific papers and lose their ability to get grants. It is nearly impossible to do any work on intelligent design for that reason. Evolutionary theories are the sacred cow of science, and they religiously defend it, even to the point of suppressing any debate on it, and also by propagating this view into our political and education system. They also file lawsuits to keep intelligent design from being mentioned in classrooms. This has clearly gone beyond the bounds of mere scientific inquiry. If scientists had taken this same attitude on classical mechanics, quantum mechanics may never have been discovered.

The key is that I don't "believe this nonsense without question". I believe this with question and with the readiness to believe something else if something else is proven. I believe in facts because they are self-evident, and I believe in doubt because I believe we don't know everything and that we should strive to know more and to prove more. Denying proven without offering an alternative which can be backed up at all* just isn't reality. Do I feel I have a claim to rationality and logic? Well, that is what my beliefs are based on. There is proof for Earth being 4.5 billion years old, rational and logical proof.

Well, you have to realize that some of things you seem to consider facts, aren't. The Big Bang theory is not a fact, it is totally unprovable. Not only that, but the theory itself doesn't even really work..it has a number of problems, from how stars and planets form, to the lack of observable matter and energy to make it work, to what they call the smoothness problem:

"These structures must have arisen from tiny variations in the energy density in the early universe. Where the densities were greatest is, presumably, where gravity caused matter to collapse into the structures we see today.

The problem is that to explain these structures seems to require a universe that was created in an incredibly smooth non-chaotic manner. This seems extremely unlikely."''

I like the last bit. It isn't unlikely if you consider the Universe was created by an omniopotent being. The basic problem with big bang cosmology and evoltuion is that they are not real science. You can't observe and test them, they are speculation and assumption about things that happened in the past. It is mere interpretation of data, and there are many ways to interpret it. We are both looking at the same facts, but interpreting them in different ways.

Of course, you presumably do believe that Christianity can be backed up, which is where we've even less chance of agreeing on anything. Every argument I've heard for religion is ultimately circular or illogical.(I don't understand the crutches thing, from either side.)

I don't preumse I can prove to you that Christianity is true. I can show you that there are good reasons to believe there is a God, and that there is good evidence for Christianity, but I cannot prove my experience. I can however tell you this is something you can prove to yourself. If you ask God for the evidence, He will provide it to you. You can do this by praying something like this: "Jesus, if you're real, I want to know about it. If you're God please come into my life and I will give it over to you" If you can pray those words and mean them, you will get an answer. He promised to reveal Himself to those who seek Him dilligently.

As far as the crutch thing goes, what I am speaking about is sin. Those who don't know God are in a servitude to their passions and desires. Meaning, the first priority is a fulfillment of these desires, which the intellect first assents to, and then seeks out a worldview that justifies this fulfillment. Meaning, the atheist naturally doesn't want to believe that which contradicts the fulfillment of his natural desires, and will resist believing it. Admitting that God exists also means that you have a responsibility to obey Him, which further means that you can no longer live according to fleshly desires. So, an atheist will resist the knowledge of God so they can continue to live as they please, doing that which they know by their conscience is wrong, but being unable to resist these things. It has virtually nothing to do with evidence; our sinful nature is just naturally inclined to be in rebellion against Gods authority and will continue to operate this way on any pretense that seems even remotely plausible.

>> ^Quboid:
I believe the Big Bang Theory because I have faith in the scientific community.
There is a faith aspect to "science". I have faith that E=MC^2. I've never checked, but I have faith that the scientific community have checked. However, this is not blind faith. I could, if I was sufficiently motivated, read up on the science and prove this to myself.
Another reason why "science" isn't a religion is that if something is shown to wrong, it gets corrected. If those neutrinos sent from CERN disprove E=MC^2, then my mind is open to change. If something is shown to be wrong in religion, the people who show it up get in trouble.
The key is that I don't "believe this nonsense without question". I believe this with question and with the readiness to believe something else if something else is proven. I believe in facts because they are self-evident, and I believe in doubt because I believe we don't know everything and that we should strive to know more and to prove more. Denying proven without offering an alternative which can be backed up at all just isn't reality. Do I feel I have a claim to rationality and logic? Well, that is what my beliefs are based on. There is proof for Earth being 4.5 billion years old, rational and logical proof.
Of course, you presumably do believe that Christianity can be backed up, which is where we've even less chance of agreeing on anything. Every argument I've heard for religion is ultimately circular or illogical.
(I don't understand the crutches thing, from either side.)
>> ^shinyblurry:
The problem with Bill Maher and his cackling hyenas, and most atheists in general, is that they seem to think that they have some sort of claim to rationality and logic above theists. Yet, as you pointed out, they are no less dogmatic about their faith than anyone else. Though you seem to think that they are in the superior position. I would say that you shouldn't forget about the religion of scientism which teaches that nothing exploded, and that this explosion magically produced order and complexity, and from this rocks became alive and turned into soup which turned into monkeys and then into you. These are metaphysical beliefs taken on faith. I find it amusing that people actually believe this nonsense without question and then have the nerve to call me irrational.
The fact is, everyone worships something. Every person has something which they bow down and kiss. Whether it is money, or celebrity, or power, or nature, or themselves, atheists are no different than anyone else. I also find it funny that you talk about crutches, as if atheists don't have crutches? What about drugs, alcohol, pornography, cigarettes, food, sex, etc? How many atheists do you know who use those crutches to get through life? Knowing Christ removes crutches from people, and being a Christian is freedom from crutches, not enslavement to one. Anyone who sins is a slave to sin, but anyone who knows Christ has been set free from that bondage.
So, I appreciate your attempted voice of reason, though you couldn't seem to manage it without condescension towards me, and Christians in general. Perhaps you feel you have to denigrate us in order to be socially accepted here. I think though that you see the futility of anti-theism, and the blind ignorance and hatred it produces in people. You know a tree by its fruit, and that fruit is rotten to its core.

I want to know if there is nobody in the Lounge but Siftbot...is he still a dirty bird???

Now THAT...is Quantum Mechanics!!

The guy who made this video thinks he understands quantum mechanics, and I think we all know what that means.

>> ^syncron:

Wrong. Alive or dead is not a quantum state.

It is if the cat's being alive or dead is dependent on a quantum event: if the Geiger counter in the box detects radiation from the decay of the radiactive source, a mechanism will release the poison that kills the cat. In any case, Schroedinger intended his thought experiment to be a reductio ad absurdum of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, and he never intended to present the idea of cats in quantum superpositions as a real phenomenon. It's a satire.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

>> ^dannym3141:
@GeeSussFreeK i don't like it either, but it's one of those things you have to accept is true - just like quantum mechanics Your mind's desire to slot it into a jigsaw puzzle will have to go unsatiated.

You can't really talk about something unless you have an idea of it, just like you can't talk about circular squares or some other such construct that doesn't point to a real idea. I am still considering what @Ornthoron was saying and wondering if we are talking about the same thing or not. Get back to this later, have to ponder, I think this is a problem of ontology vs abstraction. @Mikus_Aurelius I am very familiar with the idea of a limit, taken many years of calculus and dif. EQ back in the day. My argument isn't that you can "use" things, but if those things represent actual things in and of themselves. I do think that there is an inherit realness to numbers outside of complete abstraction. The idea of a single object relating to itself is always true, regardless of a formal number system to represent it. The relation of 2 objects against 1 object is also still a real distinction that exists outside of a formal numbering system. The realness of elements of counting are, seemingly (and I need to think more on this) tautological true; an analytically true statement in other words.
I need to ponder on this more though, perhaps I am mistaken. Or perhaps I was talking about a different aspect of it than everyone else. Time to grease down the mind with beer!


But you DO have an "idea" of it. You know how it behaves. You may not understand why it does that but you can prove to yourself that it does. You might find that it crops up more often in nature than you like - as i said, quantum mechanics is counter-intuitive which unfortunately only goes to tell us that our intuition is wrong.

My lecturer's example was always to take electric charge - we have a name for it, we have a set of characteristic rules for electric charge and interaction between charges but when it gets right down to it 'electric charge' is just a name. We have simply defined and described a set of rules for a phenomenon that we have observed. And the same goes for quarks - we have up, down, top, bottom, strange and charmed. Those are just words too, we're just more familiar with electric charge as a term so we think we understand it.

I don't necessarily think you do need an idea of something to talk about it; anything more in-depth than "it exists, and here is how it behaves" comes after you analyse it, and presumably talk about it if only to yourself conceptually.

>> ^dannym3141:

@GeeSussFreeK i don't like it either, but it's one of those things you have to accept is true - just like quantum mechanics Your mind's desire to slot it into a jigsaw puzzle will have to go unsatiated.


Refusing to accept received "truths" is exactly how science advances. The Ancient Greeks thought infinities and infinitesimals were dumb and irrational numbers, well, properly irrational. Now we "know" they're just numbers like every other number. Same thing with the square root of minus one. Ultimately though, they are just tools and we will use them until they no longer suit our purposes. There are already many number systems in which 0.(9) doesn't equal 1. Who knows when they'll be useful.

But I think the real question is, what of the transfinites? No one ever thinks about the transfinites.

Some ideas are intuitive to me and others are not. I don't think that makes my declarations of what's "real" or not any more than personal opinion. The idea that we see 3 cats and 3 goats and associate the same number 3 to each is an abstract construction. If I have one piece of chalk and another piece of chalk, does that mean I have two pieces? What if I break one in half? Or could I place them so close together that they are one piece of chalk again? We can't talk about one of a thing being inherently different than two of a thing, since no two identical things exist in the universe.

You are comfortable with the idea that we can count things and that the numbers we assign to quantities of different objects are comparable. In some remote places of the world you'll find people, adults, who see this idea as unnatural. The idea that you would quantify any group bigger than 5 is alien to them.

1+1=2 because we have defined a number system in which it is so. Conveniently, we can understand real objects in terms of this system. We arrived at this system through a combination of intuition and abstract manipulation. No one has ever sat down with 1350 oranges in one pile and 6723 in another and counted the sum to see that they got 8073.

Similarly, the sum 9x10^(-k) = 1 because we have defined infinite decimals to work this way. Conveniently again, this allows us to understand physical phenomena. We also arrived at this system through a combination of intuition and abstract manipulation. The fact that it doesn't feel intuitive to you doesn't give you any real argument against it.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

>> ^dannym3141:
@GeeSussFreeK i don't like it either, but it's one of those things you have to accept is true - just like quantum mechanics Your mind's desire to slot it into a jigsaw puzzle will have to go unsatiated.

You can't really talk about something unless you have an idea of it, just like you can't talk about circular squares or some other such construct that doesn't point to a real idea. I am still considering what @Ornthoron was saying and wondering if we are talking about the same thing or not. Get back to this later, have to ponder, I think this is a problem of ontology vs abstraction. @Mikus_Aurelius I am very familiar with the idea of a limit, taken many years of calculus and dif. EQ back in the day. My argument isn't that you can "use" things, but if those things represent actual things in and of themselves. I do think that there is an inherit realness to numbers outside of complete abstraction. The idea of a single object relating to itself is always true, regardless of a formal number system to represent it. The relation of 2 objects against 1 object is also still a real distinction that exists outside of a formal numbering system. The realness of elements of counting are, seemingly (and I need to think more on this) tautological true; an analytically true statement in other words.
I need to ponder on this more though, perhaps I am mistaken. Or perhaps I was talking about a different aspect of it than everyone else. Time to grease down the mind with beer!

>> ^dannym3141:

@GeeSussFreeK i don't like it either, but it's one of those things you have to accept is true - just like quantum mechanics Your mind's desire to slot it into a jigsaw puzzle will have to go unsatiated.


You can't really talk about something unless you have an idea of it, just like you can't talk about circular squares or some other such construct that doesn't point to a real idea. I am still considering what @Ornthoron was saying and wondering if we are talking about the same thing or not. Get back to this later, have to ponder, I think this is a problem of ontology vs abstraction. @Mikus_Aurelius I am very familiar with the idea of a limit, taken many years of calculus and dif. EQ back in the day. My argument isn't that you can "use" things, but if those things represent actual things in and of themselves. I do think that there is an inherit realness to numbers outside of complete abstraction. The idea of a single object relating to itself is always true, regardless of a formal number system to represent it. The relation of 2 objects against 1 object is also still a real distinction that exists outside of a formal numbering system. The realness of elements of counting are, seemingly (and I need to think more on this) tautological true; an analytically true statement in other words.

I need to ponder on this more though, perhaps I am mistaken. Or perhaps I was talking about a different aspect of it than everyone else. Time to grease down the mind with beer!

@GeeSussFreeK i don't like it either, but it's one of those things you have to accept is true - just like quantum mechanics Your mind's desire to slot it into a jigsaw puzzle will have to go unsatiated.

It has been theorized for a LONG time that neutrinos could exceed the speed of light. Very cool to see it backed with some solid evidence. The finding itself, to me, isn't as fascinating as what can come FROM the discovery. It opens up routes to other huge questions, namely where does Einsteins theory of relativity break down? Where does it apply? Where does it not apply? It's another data point to hopefully bridge the gap between traditional physics and quantum mechanics. The more data points, the closer to a unified theory science can hopefully get. Its quite cool. I'm going off on the edge here. But what I'd ask is: Does it really exceed the speed of light? Imagine if it really doesn't exceed the speed of light, however from our frame of reference it does. How to explain that? Some sort of dimension tunneling (lets fly off on a crazy whim here, think hyperspace or tunneling through extra dimension(s)). As theory goes, everything is relative. So while a particle in of itself may not exceed the speed of light in it's frame of reference at that speed, it may actually go faster from our dimensional perspective. Who knows why. Space-time, the speed of light, and particles can do some very strange and interesting things.

Personally I find it hard to reconcile what I know about physics with the existence of consciousness to begin with. Perhaps a better thought question would be something along the lines of Chalmers' zombie world arguments. That is, could a person appear outwardly to perceive and act in the world normally and not be conscious? That is, could they just be some sort of robot, or cascade of known biochemical processes? Alan Turing, in his own way, was interested in the same question.

Therein lies the problem. If there is no satisfactory physical test for consciousness, how can we be so sure about how consciousness is anchored to matter? Frankly, I see little hope of unifying an understanding of consciousness with an understanding of physics without invoking quantum mechanics. Even that just feels like punting to the physics equivalent of magic.

Personally I'm on the lunatic fringe with consciousness. I can't derive consciousness, but I'm overwhelmingly convinced of its existence. So, instead of dealing with all the paradoxes I just assume consciousness is present in all matter. There are varying experiences, or "degrees" of consciousness however. The nice entropy reducing capabilities of our nervous system make our particular conscious experience substantially richer than that of, for example, a rock. So I guess my thought is that the experience sort of fades towards the experience the matter would have without the metabolic energy necessary to support neuronal conduction. Honestly, I don't think it would be possible to obtain data on it, but I imagine it to be somewhat like fading to gray. I suppose it would be equally likely to be like fading into chaos.

Ah, this is an example of the observer effect in quantum mechanics. You know, the paradox of how systems behave differently when observed. So I am thinking that is why blankfist sees both posts as duplicates...yet Sifty sees each one as unique.

This stuff cracks me up.

Scientific advancement in computing tech, nanotech, quantum mechanics, air and space flight, genetic engineering, new medicines, ag science...

But, put a remote control in someone's underwear, and they're cheering.

(The loudest, coming from the guy gettin' his cowboy on, are clearly the result of realizing he's getting to see some at a fashion show his wife dragged him to. "Yeehaw, couldn't talk the wife into the titty bar but this'll do!")