Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Yes, we know Pope-pie-ass' thoughts are always incomplete and he always has to explain himself. He's tried now to explain himself. The Pope taking over my mind? About as likely as Luxembourg taking over the USA.

Anyway, gave thought to a bit of sarcastic humor.

Turns out, though, that it's just an attack of terrifying paranoia over the thought of tough feminists emasculating the P-P-A.

Maybe that's where the dildo ends up.

Pope-pie-ass, heeh heeh, weve given birth to a new monicker.

. Spendi, dearest, we must consider language in its fullest extent whenever we make utterances that can be viewed variably. Next time you will have to think things out further. On second thought, forget about it, you are more entertaining when you treat us to your free associations with Mrs Malaprop.

Don't scold him too much -- he makes a great straight man! Literally!

Maybe I really meant illiterately.

Hell, he doesnt mind. Hell probably come up with some crap about how he was really testing your intelligence and somehow he won. HEs not a humble guy. His view of his own worth has no bounds

Where does ultimate human egoism lie? In the clergy.

The Earth is still the center of the Universe, humankind is divinely unique, their God loves all of us, et al, to them and to their devout constituents.

My old sig line was "The Gods dont make demands, the priests do"

They never broke the banks though or placed the world's entire financial system under threat of catastrophic failure.

Constituents who are brainwashed by the clergy are in command at the US banking and investment banking operations. Presidents, CEO's, et al, who are just common folk who take advantage of the Peter Principal and ruthlessly step on other people to get ahead. That's the result of the egoist teaching of the clergy. Evolution can't do that.

Evolution teaches that and nothing else. Which clergy are you referring to? It is a very comprehensive term.

That "evolution" is Social Darwinism which I have little to agree with. You obviously don't know what the Peter Principal is or that clergy is a group ordained to perform pastoral or sacerdotal functions in a Christian church. It also goes down to the lower echelons of the church including the primarilly volunteers who are the teachers in the Sunday School.

My Mom taught me at home about evolution, the dinosaurs, science and bought me books appropriate to my age. They weren't even teaching any of that in grammar school, even if I was a precocious kid and thirsted for knowledge. It was my Grandmother who was trying to expose me to religion in the Unity Church (who, incidentally, called their buildings temples). She knew nothing about evolution but did not even attempt to steer me away from being exposed to that knowledge. I liked the Unity Church in downtown LA -- it was glitzy and theatrical, taking pages out of the Catholic Church for that presentation. That's why there are so many gays in the Episcopalian and Catholic church. They just love the Papal drag. Kissing rings and kissing feet are right up their alley.

You sound a bit like Truman Capote LW. The early years.

It must be immensely reassuring for you that I 0bviously don't know what the Peter Principle is. I even know how to spell it actually. It has variations too. A less preciously humorous one is that in a bureaucratic hierarchy people seek to rise to levels where they no longer come into personal contact with the subjects with which the bureaucracy deals except possibly for publicity reasons as at elections. The introduction of incompetence as the principle by Dr Peter and Mr Hull is a mere literary conceit because incompetence is not measureable. Sure it happens but not in a well run organisation which avoids nepotism and other forms of corrupt practices unless an ideal view is taken of competence and one which nobody can exercise. Basically it is a dim view of human nature and misanthropic and hence is popular with a segment of readers who have a similar bent.

Clergy are ordained. They go through years of training in theological colleges and are not allowed to marry or claim parentage of children. But it's just a word out there where you are and where anything goes. Volunteers for Sunday School teaching would never class as clergy where I come from. I have heard the Immams and Mullahs referred to as clergy as well.

I didn't know that homosexuals went in for kissing rings and feet. I thought that sort of stuff was the preserve of those unfortunate men who idolise the ladies.

I also didn't know that there were many homosexuals in the Catholic Church. There certainly aren't here. But it is an easy charge to level and if it is mean't to be a smear then it is obviously homophobic.

I don't know if you remember "Golden Books," which were usually standard fairy tale and popular story fare. One often saw them in grocery stores or variety stores, in a display of their own. We had a "Golden Book," though, which was several hundred pages, was the size of a large book rather than the small ones sold for the kiddies, and which was a natural history. There was absolutely no controversial discussion about evolution, which was more or less assumed without emphasizing the theory. The book began with a description of the cosmos, proceeded to a description of the solar system and the sun, then focused in on the earth, beginning with geology and oceanography, and then proceeding to the rise of life and the development of life forms. Later in life, i was surprised that Golden Books had produced such a book. They probably got away with it because there was not at that time a controversy about evolution boiling away on the back burner as there is now.

Much of it was information which would now be considered out of date, of course, but it appears in retrospect that it was the best information available in the early 1950s. It was sufficiently detailed and made its explanations in plain simple language, that when i encountered science education in the schools, i was often struck by how much less information we were getting in school, or how silly some of it was. We once had a discussion of the sun, and we were each given a passage to read and comment on. In mine, i saw "What would happen if the sun stopped spinning." This seemed straight forward enough to me, as i already knew that the sun rotates on an axis. But i became more and more confused about what was being said, because it just didn't make any sense in regard to what would happen if the sun stopped rotating.

Well, i'm a little dyslexic, and it was somewhat worse then, so what in fact the title had actually stated was "What would happen if the sun stopped shining." When i figured that out, i was offended. It was just plain stupid, and the answers were, of course, all rather obvious. I got in trouble with my teacher for pointing out just how stupid it was, and commenting that a child in first grade ought to know all of this.

That Golden Book was quite a valuable resource to me when i was in school, because it provided the context by which i was later able to understand astronomy, geology and the life sciences. Once again, in retrospect, i'm rather surprised that Golden Books had published such a book.

I did not know Truman until he was older and had bought a house in Palm Springs. Since I can't "sound" like Truman at any age as we are communicating on a forum with no audio, did you maybe mean showing good judgment or sense?

The economic meltdown is just confirming that the Peter Principal works, that the more inept one is, the higher up one gets in the company, but in addition includes the more illegal or extra-legal one is, the higher up one gets. I've observed this in action working with small companies or corporations never, ever wanting to work for a huge conglomerate corporation where I know company politics stinks even more. Usually, upper management would reaching a conclusion for a promotion which would include that the person will make less of a mess than as a common worker. "Don't let him touch anything on the production line, he will only **** it up."

Since clergy is a generic term used to describe the formal religious leadership within a given religion, you are binding it to strictly narrow Catholic bent. Protestant clergy can marry and have children. Even the head of Scientology, considered in the US as a religion, is a clergyman.

Kissing rings and feet is such an obvious reference and it was merely flippant humor.

Oh, I'm sure that the Catholic priests who are gay cannot possible be masculine, rather than prissy, and announce to you when you meet them that they are gay. You're bordering on a religious psychosis as I suspected.

There was a Golden Book opn space travel which I helped the author Jack Coggins) illustrate. I was like in 7th grade and was one of his art students. I have a neat collection of Golden books and the one about volcanoes is so loaded with scientific junk that its amazing that kids derove anything from it.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Tomorrow Night. BBC 2. 16.00hrs. New York time.

Golden Books were in my childhood library. The old books did scientifically fall over the edge sometimes. I met Chesley Bonestell several times as Sci-Fi conventions, the international as well as the California Westercon, and he's still the father of authentic astronautical art. As soon as I saw Willey Ley's "The Conquest of Space" (1949), my Mom bought it for me for Christmas:



Wow, we're veering off topic again, but isn't it refreshing?

AHHHH, the Spandrels of San Marcos....yadda yadda....
Dennets book (and the vdeo) is over 10 years old and precedes the genome project, so its a non-scientific approach (a mathematical o0ne) to Darwin. No real problems other than its not up to date.

This "Darwin's Dangerous Idea?" You're really slipping.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%27s_Dangerous_Idea

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=Darwin%27s+Dangerous+Idea&sourceid=navclient-ff&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2007-26,GGGL:en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=A_-uSfWrKJHItQPW-KS1Dg&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title#

He was really great with airbrush. I nev er met him but Mr Coggins (I still called him that till the day he died.) had me take up airbrushing for the works I was to do for his Coggins Books.
Go and google Jack Coggins. He has a mess of these kiddie type books that were Golden and other Pubs.
I learned my first steps in egg tempera from him (stuff I promptly forgot after a few years).
So what if its off topic. As long as it makes some sense. ANYWAY we can blame it on SET, he started the Golden Book stuff.

I believe this is the same as the series titled in the US "Evolution" presented on PBS and only used the title of the book and was, of course, vastly updated from ten years ago. I believe it includes a section on the Genome Project.