How do we know that Christians are Delusional?

I agree, c.i. Religionists are necessarily closed-minded in regard to their faith. I remember being told that it was dangerous to consider alternatives to Catholicism. I have since learned to be especially skeptical of such warnings. Oddly enough, I think the good values I learned from the Church -- responsibility, honesty, sincerity, even loyalty -- actually helped me to transcend that way of thinking.

This is what we now know about the evolution of cats.

January 6, 2006
DNA Offers New Insight Concerning Cat Evolution
By NICHOLAS WADE
Researchers have gained a major insight into the evolution of cats by showing how they migrated to new continents and developed new species as sea levels rose and fell.

About nine million years ago - two million years after the cat family first appeared in Asia - these successful predators invaded North America by crossing the Beringian land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska, a team of geneticists writes in the journal Science today.

Later, several American cat lineages returned to Asia. With each migration, evolutionary forces morphed the pantherlike patriarch of all cats into a rainbow of species, from ocelots and lynxes to leopards, lions and the lineage that led to the most successful cat of all, even though it has mostly forsaken its predatory heritage: the cat that has induced people to pay for its board and lodging in return for frugal displays of affection.

This new history of the family, known as Felidae, is based on DNA analyses of the 37 living species performed by Warren E. Johnson and Stephen J. O'Brien of the National Cancer Institute and colleagues elsewhere.

Before DNA, taxonomists had considerable difficulty in classifying the cat family. The fossil record was sparse and many of the skulls lacked distinctiveness. One scheme divided the family into Big Cats and Little Cats. Then, in 1997, Dr. Johnson and Dr. O'Brien said they thought most living cats fell into one of eight lineages, based on the genetic element known as mitochondrial DNA.

Having made further DNA analyses, the researchers have drawn a full family tree that assigns every cat species to one of the lineages. They have also integrated their tree, which is based solely on changes in DNA, with the fossil record. The fossils, which are securely dated, allow dates to be assigned to each fork in the genetic family tree.

Knowing when each species came into existence, the Johnson-O'Brien team has been able to reconstruct a series of at least 10 intercontinental migrations by which cats colonized the world. The cheetah, for instance, now found in Africa, belongs to a lineage that originated in North America and some three million years ago migrated back across the Bering land bridge to Asia and then Africa.

Dr. O'Brien said the cats were very successful predators, second only to humans, and quickly explored new territories as opportunity arose. Sea levels were low from 11 million to 6 million years ago, enabling the first modern cats, in paleontologists' perspective (saber-tooth tigers are ancient cats), to spread from Asia west into Africa, creating the caracal lineage, and east into North America, generating the ocelot, lynx and puma lineages.

The leopard lineage appeared around 6.5 million years ago in Asia. The youngest of the eight lineages, which led eventually to the domestic cat, emerged some 6.2 million years ago in Asia and Africa, either from ancestors that had never left Asia or more probably from North American cats that had trekked back across the Bering land bridge.

Sea levels then rose, confining each cat species to its own continent, but sank again some three million years ago, allowing a second round of cat migrations. It was at this time that the ancestors of the cheetah and the Eurasian lynxes colonized the Old World from the New.

Chris Wozencraft, an authority on the classification of carnivorous mammals, said the new cat family tree generally agreed with one that he had just published in Mammal Species of the World, a standard reference. Dr. Wozencraft, a taxonomist at Bethel College in Indiana, based his classification on fossil and zoological information, as well as on DNA data already published by Dr. O'Brien's laboratory.

Cat fossils are very hard to tell apart, because they differ mostly just in size, and the DNA data emerging over the last decade has helped bring the field from confusion to consensus, Dr. Wozencraft said.

Despite their evolutionary success, most of the large cats are in peril because their broad hunting ranges have brought them into collision with people. "With the exception of the house cat and a few other small cat species, nearly every one of the 37 species is considered endangered or threatened," Dr. Johnson and Dr. O'Brien write in the current Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics.

Fewer than 15,000 tigers, cheetahs and snow leopards remain in the wild, they estimate, and pumas and jaguar populations have been reduced to about 50,000 each.

THE MIACIDS

The various creodonts that have thus far been described shared their function of early Tertiary predators with still another group of carnivores, the miacids. These carnivorous mammals appeared in Paleocene times, and like many of the creodonts they continued through the Eocene epoch to become extinct at the close of that phase of geologic history. They had certain primitive characters, such as the general archaic structure, with a low skull, elongated body and tail, and short limbs. The miacids, however, were progressive in some very important features. For one thing, they seem to have had a proportionately larger and more highly developed brain than the typical creodonts, a feature that would have been of great advantage to them as beasts of prey. Of particular importance is the fact that in these carnivores the carnassial teeth were more anteriorly placed than in any of the other early Tertiary carnivores, for they consisted of the fourth upper premolar and the first lower molar. The molar teeth were tribosphenic in form, and the last upper molar was absent. These are exactly the conditions typical of carnivores, and for this reason the miacids are regarded by many authorities as the most primitive representatives of the Order. However, two primitive characters distinguish the miacids from the later carnivores to which they were ancestral. In the first place there was no ossified tympanic bulla that in later carnivores (and other mammals) forms a chamber that encloses the bones of the middle ear. And secondly the bones of the wrist were all separate, whereas in later carnivores there was a fusion of the scaphoid and lunar bones to form a single element. These may seem like small features of carnivore anatomy, but they are important in determining relationships, the details of the basicranium being particularly crucial.

The miacids were small carnivores of weasellike form. They were probably forest dwellers, preying upon small animals that lived in the dense undergrowth or in trees. Viverravus and Miacis were characteristic Eocene genera.

The Big Bang is the cosmological model of the universe whose primary assertion is that the universe has expanded into its current state from a primordial condition of enormous density and temperature.

The term is also used in a narrower sense to describe the fundamental "fireball" that erupted at or close to time t=0 in the history of the universe.[1]

Observational evidence for the Big Bang includes the analysis of the spectrum of light from galaxies, which reveal a shift towards longer wavelengths proportional to each galaxy's distance in a relationship described by Hubble's law. Combined with the assumption

that observers located anywhere in the universe would make similar observations (the Copernican principle), this suggests

that space itself is expanding. Extrapolation

of this expansion back in time yields a state in the distant past in which the universe was in a state of immense density and temperature. This hot, dense state is the key premise of the Big Bang.

Observations now place the age of the universe at around 13.7 billion years.

Theoretical support for the Big Bang comes from mathematical models, called Friedmann models. These models show that a Big Bang is consistent with general relativity and with the cosmological principle, which states that the properties of the universe should be independent of position or orientation.

The theory of Big Bang nucleosynthesis predicts the rates at which various light elements are created in models of the early universe and gives results that are generally consistent with observations. The Big Bang model also predicts the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), a background of weak microwave radiation filling the whole universe. The discovery of the CMB in 1964 led to general acceptance among physicists that the Big Bang is the best model for the origin and evolution of the universe.

And the PROBLEM with Macro Evolution still rests within the BIG BANG PROBLEM. Where did the little dot of matter that everything else came from, COME FROM?

Anyway, I was linked to this the other day:

Zeitgeist Movie

Hamal wrote:

Anyway, I was linked to this the other day:

Zeitgeist Movie

Interesting movie. Very long though.

How can we discuss things reasonably if you switch back and forth between two different topics.

Occam's razor (sometimes spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae ("law of parsimony" or "law of succinctness"):
" entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, "

which translates to:
" entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. "

This is often paraphrased as "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one," or alternately, "the simplest explanation tends to be the right one." In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood.

IT TAKES MORE FAITH TO BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION, THAN TO BELIEVE IN GOD.

What was more interesting in the film were the other gods before Christ who were also of virgin births with 12 disciples, and how all of them relate to astronomy. Even the cross is a pagan symbol representing the cross of the Zodiac.

Finally, that there are no other mention of Christ by any of his so-called contemporary historians.

I don't doubt that Christianity is a blend of Jewish and pagan beliefs but it seems like an overkill by those trying to discredit Christianity.