I hear you shinyblurry, but I feel that your argument meanders back to the original appeal to authority that most believers resort to when justifying their positions. I also find that the related video links provided by TheGenk provide a valid refutation of the idea that God is The One who put values of good and evil inside each of us.

In my mind, Zacharias' incoherence with the atheist's ability to love and live morally is influenced by his own understanding of the source of moral truth. Because he defines the origin of pure love as Jesus' sacrifice on behalf of mankind, it is unfathomable to him that love could be found as a result of human survival/selection based of traits of cooperation, peace and mutual benefits of our social structure. His logic is therefore coloured and his mind is closed to certain ideas and possibilities.

Indeed, moral foundations can and must change with the times. As our understanding of empathy, personal freedoms and the greater good of mankind develops with our societal and cultural evolution, so too must our standards of morality. This is most evident when concepts such as slavery and revenge (an eye for an eye) are seen as commonplace and acceptable throughout old scripture where modern society has evolved a greater understanding of the need for equality and basic human rights and policing and corrections as a measure of deterrence and rehabilitation for those individuals that stray from the path of greatest utility.

This is why slavery is no more, why racism is in decline and why eventually gay rights and green thought will be universal and our struggle to stifle the rights of gays and exploit the planet's resources to the point of our own self-extinction simply will be seen by future historians as sheer ignorance. Leviticus still pops up when people try to brand gays as deviant, even though most it is itself incoherent by today's standards. Remember that "defecating within the camp was unacceptable lest God step in it while walking in the evening." Well, today we just call that sewage management.

Paedophilia will never emerge as acceptable because it violates our basic understanding of human rights and the acceptable age of sexual consent. I know this is a common warning about the "slippery slope of a Godless definition of morality," but it's really a red herring. Do you honestly think society would someday deem that it carries a benefit to society? I just can't see it happening.

For the most part, I don't get worked up over (or involved in) this subject due to the below 2 paragraphs.

If an ethicist historian mediator came up with the most reasonable coexistence plan while gaining as much respectable balance between the opposing views, I doubt the fighting would stop. Another reason or another enemy would be identified immediately or shortly after by one or all parties.

Unfortunately there is a lack of coexistence, as turning to violence is accepted as the means to a solution too quickly for rational discourse to occur or even maintain stability for a long enough term to allow such reasonable positions focused towards permanent/fair resolutions to be taken.. and given that there are usually multiple factions on any side, it only takes one to kick it all off again.

@messenger Gorilla Warfare (in conversations) is a hard thing to prevent/combat when your opponent practices it so consistently. Good luck.

I hope that this momentum continues so that future historians will look back and see this time as a second Enlightenment. The fundamentalists, Cassandras and superstitious holy-rollers need to lurch back into the dark from whence they came.

>> ^L0cky:


I'll put that one down to ignorance rather than sarcasm, since you didn't check the box.
Some light reading.>> ^Yogi:
How much do you think it would cost to invade Ireland? Isn't it like tiny compared to Iraq? Heck we could probably get Britain to do it. Lets Abort this Country!



HAHAHA I know more about the Troubles than most US Historians. I was of course kidding but I'm getting sick of bombing brown people. We need to kill some white people already. COME ON WHO'S WITH ME?!?!

>> ^Murgy:

>> ^hpqp:
>> ^PostalBlowfish:
In the sense that Creationism is basically a fairy tale, it is appropriate for children. Unfortunately, it's not treated like that. It becomes part of an indoctrination that discourages critical thinking, and there is no question to me that such indoctrination is abuse.

I would not want my kids to be read the kinds of "fairy tales" found in the Bible. The Grimm tales are dark enough, without adding incest, genocide and mass genital mutilation to the mix. The Bible is more like Ovid's Metamorphoses; an important piece of literature you don't put into small children's hands.

Having read through Metamorphoses, I can honestly say I found far less basic ethical transgressions present than in the Christian Bible. Modern day societal value inconsistencies were about equal between the two books, assuming one accounts for the differences in length.
Now don't get me wrong here, I don't consider myself a literary historian, but when spending a day sick in bed one will find Wikipedia taking them in strange directions.


I agree 100% about the nonequivalence in moral transgressions. My point of comparison between the two was more how they both are cultural milestones whose influence permeate much of human artistic production and in that sense are an important part of adult cultural baggage, but not childhood teaching tools (Ovid perhaps more for the wtf-ishness).

>> ^hpqp:

>> ^PostalBlowfish:
In the sense that Creationism is basically a fairy tale, it is appropriate for children. Unfortunately, it's not treated like that. It becomes part of an indoctrination that discourages critical thinking, and there is no question to me that such indoctrination is abuse.

I would not want my kids to be read the kinds of "fairy tales" found in the Bible. The Grimm tales are dark enough, without adding incest, genocide and mass genital mutilation to the mix. The Bible is more like Ovid's Metamorphoses; an important piece of literature you don't put into small children's hands.


Having read through Metamorphoses, I can honestly say I found far less basic ethical transgressions present than in the Christian Bible. Modern day societal value inconsistencies were about equal between the two books, assuming one accounts for the differences in length.

Now don't get me wrong here, I don't consider myself a literary historian, but when spending a day sick in bed one will find Wikipedia taking them in strange directions.

the negative comments i've read here make me laugh so hard
you can plainly see the irony mess the poster's hair as it goes right over their head
many different times, in many different ways

Die Antwoord is brilliant, catchy, and riding a big wave of success

ain't gangsta enough? seriously? because real gangstas troll the sift/youtube right? keep it real
armchair hiphop historians lol
its called growing old, or being out of the loop... learn to cope

There's no doubt increased broad based spending by the middle class would help the economy. The notion that the super wealthy are "hoarders" is erroneous. They are profligate spenders, and by doing so, promote the economy. The owner of a very successful software company built a $12,000,000 home recently, that I toured. It was the epitome of excess. However, by his excess he put contractors, roofers, plumbers, masons, landscapers, etc to work, not to mention the people his own company employs. Basically, he pumped that $12,000,000 right back into the economy. As historians Will and Ariel Durant (The History of Civilization, a 10 volume work I dare anyone to get TOTALLY through, wow), noted, "Perhaps it is one secret of their power (bankers) that having studied the fluctuations of prices, they know that history is inflationary, and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard." In the 18th century, Adam Smith coined the unintentional benefits of profligate spending by the wealthy, for his own wants and desires, the "invisible hand" that promoted the welfare of society at large. It's human nature that even when equipped with the essentials for living, they will envy the privilege of the few super wealthy among them and some wealth will be redistributed to the poor, in order to keep the peace.

At the time of his suicide, Hitler's official place of residence was in Munich, which led to his entire estate, including all rights to Mein Kampf, changing to the ownership of the state of Bavaria. As per German copyright law, the entire text is scheduled to enter the public domain on January 1, 2016, 70 years after the author's death.[19] The copyright has been relinquished for the Dutch and Swedish editions and some English ones (though not in the US, see below).
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf

>> ^EvilDeathBee:

>> ^Sagemind:
In Canada, We have Indigo Books, Indigo Books also runs Chapters bookstores, Coles Books, Worlds Biggest bookstore, Indigospirit, SmithBooks and The Book Company. It's the biggest chain in Canada, practically a monopoly, but not quite. It's our equivalent to Amazon books combined with Barns & Noble in the US, in fact, Amazon even owns stock in the Canadian book chain. It also retains a 57.7% share in Kobo Ink. (968.9 Million in yearly Sales.)
Heather Reisman, Indigo's CEO and owner banned "Mein Kampf" from all the stores. Although not casual reading material, Mein Kampf is required reading in quite a few university and college's. It's an important book for historians and students of history and politics.
You can find critiques of the work in her stores but not the book itself. Heather herself has, admittedly, never read the book. Being Jewish, she sites it as hate literature and doesn't want anyone to see it.
Heather's stance is that she is not Banning the book, she just doesn't carry it. It just so happens she doesn't have any competition. (other than college book stores and few straggling independants)
So my point is, if she is blocking this historical book, which other publications is she blocking? And what can we do, when the book stores filter the books we can see?

Out of curiosity, if someone were to buy Mein Kampf, where does the money go? Who publishes it? Or would it be in the public domain now?

>> ^Sagemind:

In Canada, We have Indigo Books, Indigo Books also runs Chapters bookstores, Coles Books, Worlds Biggest bookstore, Indigospirit, SmithBooks and The Book Company. It's the biggest chain in Canada, practically a monopoly, but not quite. It's our equivalent to Amazon books combined with Barns & Noble in the US, in fact, Amazon even owns stock in the Canadian book chain. It also retains a 57.7% share in Kobo Ink. (968.9 Million in yearly Sales.)
Heather Reisman, Indigo's CEO and owner banned "Mein Kampf" from all the stores. Although not casual reading material, Mein Kampf is required reading in quite a few university and college's. It's an important book for historians and students of history and politics.
You can find critiques of the work in her stores but not the book itself. Heather herself has, admittedly, never read the book. Being Jewish, she sites it as hate literature and doesn't want anyone to see it.
Heather's stance is that she is not Banning the book, she just doesn't carry it. It just so happens she doesn't have any competition. (other than college book stores and few straggling independants)
So my point is, if she is blocking this historical book, which other publications is she blocking? And what can we do, when the book stores filter the books we can see?


Out of curiosity, if someone were to buy Mein Kampf, where does the money go? Who publishes it? Or would it be in the public domain now?

In Canada, We have Indigo Books, Indigo Books also runs Chapters bookstores, Coles Books, Worlds Biggest bookstore, Indigospirit, SmithBooks and The Book Company. It's the biggest chain in Canada, practically a monopoly, but not quite. It's our equivalent to Amazon books combined with Barns & Noble in the US, in fact, Barns & Noble even owns stock in the Canadian book chain. It also retains a 57.7% share in Kobo Ink. (968.9 Million in yearly Sales.)

Heather Reisman, Indigo's CEO and owner banned "Mein Kampf" from all the stores. Although not casual reading material, Mein Kampf is required reading in quite a few university and college's. It's an important book for historians and students of history and politics.

You can find critiques of the work in her stores but not the book itself. Heather herself has, admittedly, never read the book. Being Jewish, she sites it as hate literature and doesn't want anyone to see it.

Heather's stance is that she is not Banning the book, she just doesn't carry it. It just so happens she doesn't have any competition. (other than college book stores and few straggling independants)

So my point is, if she is blocking this historical book, which other publications is she blocking? And what can we do, when the book stores filter the books we can see?

I have this feeling like this is going to define America going forward more than 9/11. It won't be one of the things taught in history books, but historians of the future will be able to trace enormous shifts back to this Assange case.

@ChaosEngine

Oh sweet irony, I'm being called wilfully ignorant by a young-earther.

I'm not going to refute you. I don't need to; @BicycleRepairMan has already done an excellent job of it.

An excellent refutation? He cherry picked one sentence out of my reply, a reply where I had demonstrated the fallacy of his argument from incredulity by proving his assumption of the constancy of radioactive decay rates was nothing more than the conventional wisdom of our times. Is this what passes for logical argumentation in your mind? He posited a fallacious argument. I exposed the fallacy. He ignored the refutation and cherry picked his reply. You seem to be showing that in your eagerness to agree with everything which is contrary to my position that you have a weak filter on information which supports your preconceived ideas. Why is it that a skeptic is always pathologically skeptical of everything except his own positions, I wonder?

@BicycleRepairMan

...and to see an exampe of such a racket, check the flood "geology" link.

Seriously, you cant see the blinding irony in your own words? So, things like radiometric dating, fossils, geology, astronomy, chemistry, biology are all just parts of a self-perpetuating racket confirming each others conclusions in a big old circlejerking conspiracy of astronomical proportions.. well, lets assume then that it is. So they are basically chasing the foregone conclusion that the universe is over 13 billion years old and that life on this planet emerged some 3,6 billion years ago and has evolved ever since. But where did these wild conclusions come from? Who established the dogma that scientists seems to mindlessly work to confirm, and why? And why 13,72 billion years then? Why not 100 billion years, or 345 million years?

The thing is, what you have here is an alleged "crime" with no incentives, no motivation.. Why on earth would all the worlds scientists, depentently and independently and over many generations converge to promote a falsehood of no significance to anyone? it might make some kind of sense if someones doctrine was threatened unless the world was exactly 13.72 billion years old. Or if someone believed they were going to hell unless they believed trilobites died out 250 million years ago.. The thing is, nobody believes that.

The truth is pretty much staring you in the face right here. The conclusions of science on things like the age of the earth emerged gradually; Darwin, and even earlier naturalists had no idea of the exact age of the earth, or even a good approximation, but they did figure this much: It must be very, very old. So old that it challenged their prior beliefs and assumptions about a god-created world as described in their holy book. And thats were nearly all scientists come from: They grew up and lived in societies that looked to holy books , scripture and religion for the answers, and everybody assumed they had proper answers until the science was done.If scientists were corrupt conspirators working to preserve dogma, they be like Kent Hovind or Ken Ham. Ignoring vast mountains of facts and evidence, and focus on a few distorted out-of-context quotations to confirm what they already "know".

Not only was your prior argument fallacious, but I refuted it. Now you're ignoring that and cherry picking your replies here. Seems pretty intellectually dishonest to me? In any case, I'll reply to what you've said here. I was going to get into the technical issues concerning why scientists believe the Universe is so old, and the history of the theory, but so far you have given me no reason to believe that any of it will be carefully considered.

Instead I'll answer with a portion of an article I found, which was printed in "The Ledger" on Feb 17th 2000. It's interview of a molecular biologist who wanted to remain anonymous

Caylor: "Do you believe that the information evolved?"

MB: "George, nobody I know in my profession believes it evolved. It was engineered by genius beyond genius, and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book! Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise."

Caylor: "Have you ever stated that in a public lecture, or in any public writings?"

MB: "No, I just say it evolved. To be a molecular biologist requires one to hold onto two insanities at all times:
One, it would be insane to believe in evolution when you can see the truth for yourself.
Two, it would be insane to say you don't believe evolution. All government work, research grants, papers, big college lectures -- everything would stop. I'd be out of a job, or relegated to the outer fringes where I couldn't earn a decent living.”

Caylor: “I hate to say it, but that sounds intellectually dishonest.”

MB: “The work I do in genetic research is honorable. We will find the cures to many of mankind's worst diseases. But in the meantime, we have to live with the elephant in the living room.”

Caylor: “What elephant?”

MB: “Creation design. It's like an elephant in the living room. It moves around, takes up space, loudly trumpets, bumps into us, knocks things over, eats a ton of hay, and smells like an elephant. And yet we have to swear it isn't there!”

Here are some selected quotes:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. 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, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin

"In China its O.K. to criticize Darwin but not the government, while in the United States its O.K. to criticize the government, but not Darwin."

Dr. J.Y. Chen,

Chinese Paleontologist

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

"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,
Professor of Psychology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA., "How the Mind Works," [1997]

"Biologists are simply naive when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with its predictions. These facts will invariably be ignored and their discoverers will undoubtedly be deprived of continuing research grants."

Professor Whitten,
Professor of Genetics, University of Melbourne, Australia, 1980 Assembly Week address.

"Science is not so much concerned with truth as it is with consensus. What counts as truth is what scientists can agree to count as truth at any particular moment in time. [Scientists] are not really receptive or not really open-minded to any sorts of criticisms or any sorts of claims that actually are attacking some of the established parts of the research (traditional) paradigm, in this case neo-Darwinism. So it is very difficult for people who are pushing claims that contradict that paradigm to get a hearing. They find it hard to [get] research grants; they find it hard to get their research published; they find it very hard."

Prof. Evelleen Richards,
Historian of Science at the University of NSW, Australia

Speaks for itself, I think..

THIRTEENTH CENTURY, guys. Good lord. Trumpet this fact one end of this country to the next!

Didn't start in the 1970s.

Excerpt: Despite constant debunking, this old husbands’ tale has endured for centuries. “The legal position that pregnancy disproved a claim of ra
pe appears to have been instituted in the U.K. sometime in the 13th century,” the medical historian Vanessa Heggie wrote in a blog post for The Guardian on Monday. She explained that one of Britain’s earliest legal texts, written in about 1290, included a clause based on this bit of folk wisdom: “If, however, the woman should have conceived at the time alleged in the appeal, it abates, for without a woman’s consent she could not conceive.”

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/myth-about-rape-and-pregnancy-is-not-new/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2_20120821

'Despite constant debunking, this old husbands’ tale has endured for centuries. “The legal position that pregnancy disproved a claim of rape appears to have been instituted in the U.K. sometime in the 13th century,” the medical historian Vanessa Heggie wrote in a blog post for The Guardian on Monday. She explained that one of Britain’s earliest legal texts, written in about 1290, included a clause based on this bit of folk wisdom: “If, however, the woman should have conceived at the time alleged in the appeal, it abates, for without a woman’s consent she could not conceive.” '

Thirteenth century. THIRTEENTH CENTURY.

Excerpt from: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/myth-about-rape-and-pregnancy-is-not-new/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2_20120821