darrenpollok

Yeah!!! Another fanboy!! Keep 'em coming!! ALLEGORY.....goodness, I'm starting to have less faith in God with you goobers.Really Lord?!? The amazing thing is that, as much as you guys try to dispell the possibility of God, the more you open the door. If you choose to ignore Him, that is your choice. Just accept it. In the meantime, accept the fact that you are a minority, and most people realize that the "scientific" explanation is lacking. Most people realize that there is much more than what can be seen or observed. The question is, when they reach out to you, how will you react?

Ribuk, the Bible's creation story is largely allegorical and extremely vague. So vague, in fact, that if it didn't mention that God was doing it, you could easily resolve it with what science knows (not construes) as fact.dsayers, speaking of hard to follow....I'm not sure where you're going there. If you had said that treating others is more important than the origins of life, I whole-heartedly agree with that. However, Stefan has stated that teaching a child religion is "dare I say child abuse". How can you reconcile that? It is hard for me to keep up with what all you Molyneux fanboys throw at me, because it is like a 6 against 1 game. Again, after his last comments, I have no more use for Stefan Molyneux. The very virtues he claims to espouse, he hypocritically rubs in the dirt when it comes to religion. Being that the existance of God is something he cannot disprove, he nonetheless claims moral superiority by making the "child abuse" claim. That is not the ways of someone I wish to emulate, be it on the theist or atheist side of the debate. If "live and let live" is still not good enough, it is obvious that the one who has a problem with that is the problem.

My whole point is, you have to have a certain amount of faith in science the same as religion. Neither can explain the origins of the universe or the origins of life. Therefore, we truly are just spinning our wheels trying to prove either. No one truly knows where we came from. To state that you certainly know how it did NOT happen is also taking a leap of faith. So to state something as arrogant as "teaching religion to children is child abuse", you enter a realm of untrustability. That is exactly why I no longer have a use for this website. I always thought that atheists might be more open-minded than most religious zealots, but I was absolutely wrong about that.

LolGuy, thanks for at least admitting that there is a lot out there that is hard (read 'impossible') to understand. We all do out best, yet science consists of mostly theories and very few laws. Try as anyone may, we cannot see the recent past well at all, much less the distant past. For instance, I'm sure many of you would argue whether or not Jesus or Nazareth was an historical figure. How, then, can you be so certain of the evidence of life's origin? It is largely guesswork.I, for one, do not pretend to know the origins of the universe. Neither the explanations that science offers nor what most religions offer truly account for all that we see. The biblical account is mighty vague and short (and most likely an allegory). The scientific explanation has holes in the origins of the energy that created the amount of matter that exists (E=mc2=dayum, that's a lot of energy!!). So I certainly don't pretend to know how this all happened. I just like to be open-minded to all absurd possibilities.Kevin, I have no idea what you're saying.Ribuk, again, a refrigerator is a simple machine. Life is just a bit more complex. For instance, where did the first single-cell organisms get their organelles from? Even Darwin stated, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."--Charles Darwin, Origin of SpeciesI think that comparing life to a refrigerator or a mousetrap is really an insult to the complexities and intricacies that life exhibits. Even using the billions of years that life is supposed to have existed on Earth, I find it hard to explain how something as complex as the human immune system or nervous system could have evolved by natural selection.Lastly, I'm not trying to talk you guys out of your faith in the absence of a higher power. I'm truly glad that we can have this discussion with relatively few attacks of "ignorance" and the like. I just find this faith quite interesting, being that science is so terribly limited in what it can explain. With that, I'll leave you to your own devices, and God bless you all.

Oh, my bad, LolGuy, I had no idea a court was now a place of scientific proof. I guess I just need to go back to my silly fantasy of creation being designed by a creator, and you can go back to your "science" of an explosion out of nowhere creating order from the smallest quarks and leptons all the way up to solar systems and galaxies. In the meantime, I need a new car, so I've got a stick of dynamite and a pile of scrap metal....hey, if it worked once..... Funny how the most faithful atheists still need to resort to ad hominen attacks, even when you feel your opinion is superior. Ribuk, so a refrigerator is on par with the Universe? Wow, that might be oversimplifying things a bit, huh? So if we put energy into a refrigerator to get work (order) out, then who put energy into the Universe to start that process?

Aww, TheRobin, how absolutely ignorant of you to pretend to know everything. That is what you claim, when you claim to know the non-existance of something infinite, no?Also, what is not a closed system, the Universe? What is putting energy into the Universe.....oh......

I dare not speak of the properties of God.

Nope, I meant entropy. How does it not apply? If everything within a closed system tends towards disorder, how can order of the magnitude seen be explained? Granted, it is not a perfect rebuttal because I realize that we are talking about heat within a Carnot cycle as the basis for the law. However, life itself has yet to be "created" in a laboratory setting. Not to say that it couldn't, but it hasn't. I guess that's why science has to use the crutch of billions and billions of years to account for this. Those who approach this question of origins with the dismissive attitude that "science says" seem to me to be missing how truly amazing life is. So far, it has not been discovered existing anywhere else in the universe. It hasn't spontaneously started in any observable place that it did not exist before. Science watches and waits, yet it cannot duplicate. Perhaps there were conditions before that cannot be replicated, but my feeling is the jury is still out as far as definitive proof of where life came from.

From what I read, the kid had an electronics screwdriver...in other words, probably about a 2-3 inch shank. Secondly, the family's story said that the other two officers had the boy calm and possibly subdued, when the third officer came in yelling to taze the boy and shortly after is when he was quoted as saying, "We don't have time for this." and shot the boy. Supposedly, he was lining up for a second shot when the father pushed the officer out of the way to get to his son. I really think it would be hard to argue "policy" or "self-defense", but after seeing the Kelly Thomas verdict earlier this week, I'm not so sure.

"Honestly, it amazes me that people still do not understand why I am an anarchist."Someone is going to have to come to your house to take your guns from you, and it won't be the politicians who passed the law.

This discussion really opens Pandora's box. I really enjoy reading all the discussions, but always find it a bit alarming when individuals find the need to use a theory to prove their worldview, or moreover, to disprove someone else's. To me, it is dishonest to pretend to know how life came about on Earth. There were no surviving witnesses. Also, any evidence is quite old and often contradicts other evidence. I have a hard time myself discrediting the idea of a higher power when there is a very natural, observable rule called entropy that life somehow defies. LIfe is special in this way. However you decide to explain it in your own mind, you must at least admit that life is vastly different from anything else in the observable universe. The second problem I have with explaining away life on Earth as some cosmic "accident" is the idea of irreducible complexity. Some components of living beings seem quite improbable to have developed by natural selection, since they have several parts that rely upon one another. Since an apparatus that fits this description has never been observed to have developed during the short time of human history, it is still a very valid argument in my mind against natural selection as the only means of diversifying life. I personally enjoy discussing the idea of where we came from, but I feel that it is really a matter of faith when all is said and done.

Yeah, I read that article and imagined that it came about something like this:Editor: "Hey Edwin, you know I'm gonna need an article from you by Friday, right?"Edwin: "Yeah, but I'm just having a hard time coming up with ideas. All the good 'Tea Party is Evil' and 'Obama is the Savior' article have been written."Editor: "How about giving us some personal pespective? Have you voted for Democrats your entire life?" Edwin: "Actually, no. One time a friend of mine had me listen to a Ron Paul speech about the evils of US foreign policy and it really clicked with me. I even voted for Ron Paul that election."Editor: "Dude, go with it. That practically writes itself. Make sure you get a good picture of yourself now showing how happy Obama has made your life."Edwin: "Got it, boss!"