Evolution? How?

Some a you guys need a purge:

That's quite a complex question, but i'll try to answer it as succinctly as possible. There are things which i believe based upon my experience, and which are demonstrable. I cannot describe in detail the operation of a bi-phase asynchronous generator, nor the transmission grid, but my experience of light switches is such that i can be reasonably confident that a light will come on or go off when i flip the switch. Belief in a deity, however, requires that one stretch credulity, and indulge in all manner of intellectual gymnastics to establish a claim that ordinary events are the product of a supernatural power. In the particular case of christianity, the scriptural canon is rife with contradictions, which despite the best efforts of the earliest church propagandists and editors, have never been eliminated. The greatest contradictions come from descriptions of a childish, vicious and violent deity who exercises a capricious and abritrary power in a thoroughly scurrilous manner, and in a manner forbidden to adherents of the superstition. The alleged savior behaves in deplorable manner on more than one occassion (destroying for no apparent reason the livelihood of the swineherd whose Gaderene swine are destroyed on a whim; blasting a fig tree for having no figs when figs are not in season--and there are others). I don't care to hear lame excuses about the salutary lessons to be learned from such occassions, so please spare me that. The general belief in a deity and the specific adherence to christianity require a suspension of ordinary belief and a credulity with regard to unsubstantiated events and persons which are not just unreasonable, but far too often the source of bigotry, hatred and violence which put the worst tyrannical monsters of history to shame.



I do not treat you any differently because of your choice of superstition than i do anyone else i find to be credulous, and credulous to the verge of endangering the peace of the community. The racist has an unfounded belief in his or her superiority based upon a myth of racial superiority. (There is but one single race, the human race, and no artificial category authorizes even the most casual and seemingly harmless adherence to a belief in racial superiority.) I see no distinction between that unreasonable belief and the unreasonable and unreasoning belief in one possessing an exclusive truth based upon an unfounded belief in a supernatural being--and such belief can lead to precisely the same crimes and excesses as racism. Is that discrimination? Certainly--i always hope to be able to reasonably discriminate between that which is harmful and that which is not.

I think you're a good fellow, Set.

Given your superstition of choice, i can only bow to your superior mastery of tommyrot . . .

Set,

A simple I hate God would have sufficed.

I have no reason to believe that there is a god, so it is foolish to attempt to assert that i hate that which i have no notion exists . . . i see that neither are you able to resist the urge to get nasty . . .

I see you've been showing the love your own self . . .

Nasty? I wasn't being nasty, Set. That is what I gather from your posts. You appear to hate God by what you post. If you were indifferent to God then you wouldn't use the harsh words you use. I honestly was not being nasty.

As i know no god to exist, it is folly to suggest that i hate your imaginary friend.

By the way, it is characteristic of the religionists to quickly move to ascribing hatred to those with whom they disagree. It is always useful to demonize the "enemy," isn't it.

I honestly did not mean that in any nasty way, Set. If you were to speak of another person the way you speak of God, I would discern the same thing, that you hate that person. I am sorry if I offended you by the way I stated that.

Dang it Set! I didn't mean anything by that! Why is it that you and others can use the words you use and expect us to not flinch? Then, someone does something you perceive as some kind of attack, we then get accused of that?

Could you explain how you know no God exists? If I said I know God does exist I get jumped on.

Yeah, but your opinion of religion boils over into a vilification of the God you believe we worship.

Not criticizing. I believe I understand.

Hi Englishmajor,

Well, of course they don't really expect a man to emerge from the primordial glop, but they do often suppose a single living cell did.

The utter failure of anything close to proving this, however, has many of them in an absolute tizzy, as we have often seen.

Of course if you really want them to reach for the bottle of anti-depressants, just ask where the matter that supposedly 'exploded' in the Big Bang originally came from.

It is not offensive, it is just silly. It is also revealing, though, that you ascribe hatred to the criticism. There is a profound inability on your part to step away from your belief set and comprehend that the criticism is of the man-made religious doctrine. A buncha nomadic loonies in Palestine thousands of years ago conceived of the cartoon character god described in the Bobble--and it is that which i despise and hold in contempt.



Go over the concepts agains slowly: I know of no god which exists. Therefore, what i vilify is the man-made religion, with it's inherent bigotry, leading eventually to oppression, violence and murder. That i despise and condemn. So you trot out some nonsense to the effect that i hate your imaginary friend. I don't see that as an attack, but rather the technique of demonizing those with whom you disagree (those damned atheists, they hate god), which is a preparatory step to identifying someone as the enemy, for whom it is appropriate to suspend ordinary rules of conduct (burn her, she's a witch ! ! !).



I didn't say that i know that no god exists. I said that i know of no god which exists. There's a profound difference in those two statements.

No, it boils down to a vilification of the man-made deity as evinced in the scriptures. Don't blame me for the consequences of priest-craft.

real life , from yesterday said

Oh but it is. Modifications start within the existing morphology and then are changed, bit by bit via selection. Sooner or later these changes are incorporated into a new type of organism that has no affinity (as in natural breeding) with the rootstock. Thisis almost the very statement that DArwin uses. I see that the newspaper cartoonists have hhad a good day quoting our president who, when he speaks of the "War on Avian Flu" he stumbles over the word "Mutation" so he doesnt imply evolution.

Opportunistic mutations within disease pathogens are a perfect example of the process of evolution. The virus or other pathogen (klike Rickettsia in Rocky Mtn fever) have evolved new "strategies " in order to infect more easily, develop a streamlined host sequence , or reducing lethality.


Englishmajor, you argue at the level of most Creationists in that
you imply that , once a mechanism is discovered, we should immediately try to duplicate it in the lab. The Miller and Urey experiment is routinely repeated by labs with increasingly more sophisticated analytical equipment and by adjusting conditions as they were in the early PreCambrian.
The only thing that has us unable to reproduce the creation of exact replicants is extreme ignorance of how. However, that doesnt mean that this ignorance hasnt spurred on research. 15 years ago, Creationists were arguing that no intermediate fossils exists and therefore evolution couldnt be modeled. Today, we have filled in most of the fossil gaps (in major phyla ), so the Creationist argument has been lost forever.
Weve already been able to create replicating molecules in the lab and discrete sections of nucleotide chains and even helices.
If you guys would only read the popularized (or professional) scientific literature rather than remaining obstinately ignorant by repeating the same lame statements which show a purposeful misunderstanding of what all these discoveries have proven, we would be much farther down the pike. But no, you wish to grab us and drag us back into the time when science had to hide and be approved by papal authority.

And , Id appreciate that you and your buddies would not try to legislate your fairy tales into the science curricula of our schools. If you guys wanna believe in evil spirits and magic floods and other preposterous moral tales, be my guest. Just please dont mess up our school systems any further.

I see that georgeob got the ID thread shut down and locked. We need to find some more socially acceptable means to sublimate these raw passions , especially about Jimmy Carter. I had no idea that george was ready to leap off a bridge over that subject.
I believe its his "Niagara FAlls"--"Slowly I turned..."

I hadn't noticed . . . he sure did go over the edge pretty damned quickly . . . although i might be the culprit--i reported his post in which he inquired whether or not i was prepared to kiss his posterior . . .

QWell, for what its worth, and since the case went to the judge, and the judge has proised a verdict by January 06, I believe that, whatever the outcome, we will have a PHASE II case that will go to the District Appellate and then probably the USSC.

I believe that the ACLU attornies did an excellent job of exposing ID as nothing more than a modern version of Creationism just dressed up in a lab coat.
The trail of evidence that ties the IDers to te BAptist Convention and the key words of the Discovery Institute's Charter will, if nothing else, show that this is just one more cynical attempt to subvert the "establishement clause and the Free exercise thereof clause"