God and the Universe Episode

Yes they've definitely taken the STALL tactic to a WHOLE NEW LEVEL by telling us about 3 times that they've got QUESTIONS they want to ASK us that never get ASKED.



At what time does the AFTERNOON end? About 5pm?

Something tells me the DEGREE they claim they have is one of those things that one sends for in the MAIL ... whenever one wants to PRETEND to be a MINISTER ... so they can perform a MARRIAGE CEREMONY.

To get one no other form of schooling is required.

You just fill out the form, send in the money, and presto you're a MINISTER who can marry other people.

On the other hand, we are/were both required to do lots of HARD WORK in order to earn the degrees that we now have ... or in your case the degree that you'll eventually have one day.

That's probably also the reason why our messages are full of FACTS that this other PERSON LACKS.

And it's also the reason why those FACTS get attacked and called IRRELEVANT.

Because those FACTS we've posted also PROVE the POINT of what we've said, whereas this other POSER has PROVED ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WHATSOEVER.

They probably also don't even UNDERSTAND the PROCESS involved with proving one's point, or how one is REQUIRED to post EVIDENCE of what one says in order to BACK UP and support one's claim.

And that's probably also the reason why they refer to the EVIDENCE they've been given as some kind of a weakness by calling it copying and pasting.

But what's been COPIED and pasted in the message also includes DISCUSSIONS about the info that is in the links as well.

But the accusation put forth also suggests no such DISCUSSION or EXPLANATION regarding the copied and pasted parts is there.

In other words, the copy and paste ACCUSATION that's been put forth is also DISHONEST, like most of the rest of whatever else this person has had to say.

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I'd consider the afternoon over by 5:00 pm. I don't expect to hear from him.

The thing is, to be religious, you have to deny everything science is based on, including uniformitarianism and methodological naturalism, to the peer review process.

They don't understand that the only reason they are a member of the faith they are is because of the place they were born and to whom they were born to. It has nothing to do with truth, just geography. As I heard my religious grandfather say, "don't bother me with the facts, I've already made up my mind".

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Looks like you're right about not expecting to hear back from this hcc person again, who probably had NO INTENTION of ever asking any QUESTIONS, and MAINLY posted that last message as a way to ATTACK and BASH what was said ...

by using those SILLY and very CHILDISH AD HOMINEN ATTACKS that they've used ...

as a way to try and DIVERT ATTENTION away from the FACT that they have NO FACTS to offer us ...

as a way to REFUTE what's been said.

But regarding what else you've said ...

about place and to whom you've been born or know being a MAJOR INFLUENCE ...

perhaps you can also explain the reason why there are *almost* as many NON RELIGIOUS PEOPLE on the PLANET as there are RELIGIOUS people???

Because doesn't that also seem to indicate that's NOT the case?

Here's a BREAK DOWN of the MAJOR RELIGIONS and the PERCENTAGES of people who belong to them:


http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html

Major Religions of the World

Ranked by Number of Adherents

(Sizes shown are approximate estimates, and are here mainly for the purpose of ordering the groups, not providing a definitive number. This list is sociological/statistical in perspective.)

Christianity: 2.1 billion or 33%

Islam: 1.5 billion or 21%


Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion or 16%


Hinduism: 900 million or 14%

Chinese traditional religion: 394 million or 6%

Buddhism: 376 million or 6%

primal-indigenous: 300 million or 6%

The rest amount to LESS than 1%:

African Traditional & Diasporic: 100 million

Sikhism: 23 million
Juche: 19 million
Spiritism: 15 million
Judaism: 14 million
Baha'i: 7 million
Jainism: 4.2 million
Shinto: 4 million
Cao Dai: 4 million
Zoroastrianism: 2.6 million
Tenrikyo: 2 million
Neo-Paganism: 1 million
Unitarian-Universalism: 800 thousand
Rastafarianism: 600 thousand
Scientology: 500 thousand

The LINK also contains a PIE CHART so you can better see at a glance the distribution.

So ...

IF GEOGRAPHY plays such a MAJOR ROLE in one's FAITH, then how do we account for the FACT that there are almost as many NON RELIGIOUS PEOPLE as there are CHRISTIANS and people of the ISLAM FAITHS ( which are also the 2 MAIN RELIGIONS WORLDWIDE)?

With the NON RELIGOUS CATEGORY being THE 3RD most popular category listed ...

surely something else ...

another VARIABLE besides one's GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION and upbringing ...

(or WHO ONE KNOWS)...

must also need to be taken into consideration as well ???

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Not only do you have to look at the amount of adherents of a particular faith, but you must look at where these adherents are located. For example, nearly all Muslims are situated in the Middle East. It is rare to find a Muslim in, say, Australia. If there is a Muslim in Australia, it is most likely because he was born to Muslim parents. Most Christians are situated in America and some are dispersed throughout Europe. You won't find many Christians in the Middle East. This is purely a geographical issue. Religion is the result of social and cultural indoctrination; if you're fed it from the time you were born, and all your friends believe it, chances are you will believe it to.

The nonreligious group has been growing steadfastly lately, and is extremely popular among the youth due in large part to the Internet making a wide range of information freely accessible. No longer are children forced to take their pastor's word as fact. This is, I believe, the reason why atheists are spread out quite evenly among the developed world; it is a stance taken due to critical and rational thought instead of a form of indoctrination. Even so, a child born to atheist parents will have a much greater chance of remaining an atheist, much like a child born to Janist parents will be more likely to become a practitioner of Janism. It is quite unlikely that a child born to atheist parents will convert to Janism later in his life.

Take a look at this map - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Main_religion_by_country_-_World_map.svg?uselang=fr?uselang=fr

If religion was based on free choice, we would see different religions spread evenly across the globe. This is not the case. This IS the case with atheism, giving credence to the belief that atheism is a position assumed by people later in life, rather than atheism being learned due to certain cultural or social factors (although this demographic is changing, especially in western Europe, where atheism is quickly becoming the largest subset of the population).

In conclusion, it seems that the religion individuals adhere to is based almost solely on social and cultural factors rather than rational ones. Atheism, on the other hand, seems to be the preferred stance taken by rational thinkers across the developed world.

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nearly all Muslims are situated in the Middle East

Most Christians are situated in America

If you check out this map:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religions_by_country

You'll see MOST MUSLIMS are LOCATED IN AFRICA (not in the MIDDLE EAST).

You'll also see how MOST of the *LEAST and LESS RELIGIOUS* are LOCATED in the US ...

and in CENTRAL and SOUTH AMERICA ...

one also finds a MAJORITY ...

or that MOST of the CHRISTIANS who FIT into the *MOST and MORE RELIGIOUS* Category are situated there in that GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION ...

and MOST of the ORTHADOX CHRISITIANS are also located in the NORTHERN part of EURASIA or in the area of NORTHERN Europe and Asia ...

which also COMPLETELY CONTRADICTS what you've said.

And here's a couple of other maps ...

Maps showing the distribution of MUSLIM POPULATIONS ...

so that you can see how much the GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATIONS have changed over the course of TIME:


http://euroheritage.net/islampopulation.jpg

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2648353/posts

So ...

how did MOST of the MUSLIMS and MOST of the CHRISTIANS END UP being where they're located now SB???

Doesn't some other VARIABLE or some other kind of situation also seem to be AT PLAY here???

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Excuse me, most Muslims are situated in the Middle East and North Africa... That was exactly my point. My point is that there is not a mix of religions in the Middle East (or anywhere else). There is a monopoly. That is exactly what all religion maps show. I left it up to you to fill in the blanks when I said things like "Christians are located in 'X' location". I thought it unnecessary to mention every single place that Christians are located, as my point is where one religion is present, the others are drastically repressed. This is not due to people coming finding their own religion later in life that they think is true. It's a form of indoctrination. Of course there are other variables at play, I thought that obvious as well. I was pointing out the most important variable. Are you really doubting that someone born in Iraq is equally likely to be a Mormon as to be a Muslim? This seems to be an untenable position.

I never stated that this situation was the same throughout history, so you have deployed a bit of a red herring yourself by asking about how populations change over time. Westerners aren't converting to Islam, Muslim immigrants are migrating to Europe. I only stated that the other factor was the parents you are born to. Are you doubting that a child born to Zoroastrian parents has the same chance of practicing Zoroastrianism as someone born to Christian parents?

Proof - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_children

"Children usually acquire the religious views of their parents, although they may also be influenced by others they communicate with such as peers and teachers."

As I said, social and cultural indoctrination.

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Basically speaking the MUSLIM religion kinda reminds one of the TIDES ...

due to the way they FLOW into an area such as SPAIN back in the MIDDLE AGES ...

then FLOW away again ...

and now are FLOWING back into that area again (along with their FLOWING into FRANCE and BRITIAN as well).

So YES IMMIGRATION was definitely also one of the other VARIABLE'S that comes into play ...

but there's also WARS that CONQUER an area and then FORCE the population into accepting whatever their religious beliefs might be.

And there's also MISSIONARIES that get sent out to TAME what they see as the INFERIOR CULTURE and turn them into what they feel is a more righteous one.

Central and SOUTH AMERICA are examples of this with their having been introduced to the CATHOLIC RELIGION.

NORTHERN EUROPE and NORTHERN ASIA are also examples of this process as well.

Because PRIOR to the time they get CONVERTED to being a CHRISTIAN CULTURE, that area, like most other areas of the world, was also a MATRIARCHAL SOCIETY as opposed to being a PATRIARCHAL one that the CHRISTIANS INTRODUCE.

In FACT throughout MOST of HUMAN HISTORY most societies were MATRIARCHAL, as opposed to being PATRIARCHAL, and they were also much more PEACEFUL and LESS WARLIKE CULTURES as well.

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I do have a master's degree, good guess. However it is not in anything close to what we are discussing. Also, it is not from a private university or religious institution. I really like how Xxpo reads way too much into something, like the ten pages of material that is not even directed towards him. Stealersfball, I apologize if you took any offense to anything I have put on this board. I have been sincere about every nice thing I have said regarding you. Xxpo, is trying to get you to believe anything he states, by wasting time breaking down everything I say, which is totally baseless. Xxpo, you can say anything you would like, however it is impossible to upset me. However, you should treat others like you want to be treated and you obviously have some issues you need to tend to. I do not think anything I state in my post will matter with your type of personality. I really am wasting time addressing your baseless claims all the time, so you can continue while the big boys talk. I say this because I hate ignoring people, however you are really giving me no choice. I can take criticism in a professional way, however my guess is that you have no idea what you are talking about or you get on here when you are drunk or something. Who in their right mind analyses my sentences, I think this, I do not this ect..ect. and whatever other drivel you posted. I honestly read maybe one paragraph of your 5 page reply. I am taking it that you do not have many friends.


1st Question to Stealer:

Meteoritic dust, which contains cobalt, nickel, and other heavy metals falls on our planet earth at the rate of about 14 million tons per year. If our planet was as old as 5 billion years, which is proposed by evolutionists to this day, there should be over 182 feet of this dust covering the planet earth. Even if we allow for the case of erosion, there still is not enough cobalt, nickel, and other heavy metals on our planet to indicate an ancient age of our planet. So, given the amount of meteorite dust on the surface of our planet, the evidence points to a much younger earth; maybe a few thousand years old. So respectively Stealer, can you explain why there is a shortage of this material? Stealer, I will await your reply. I know this may have been debated in the past, however, no one has ever given a clear answer to why this cannot be explained.



"Yeah well, you know, that's just like your opinion man."

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Hicc says:

I do not think anything I state in my post will matter with your type of personality.

************************

xxpo replies:

So the IMMATURE AD HOMINEM ATTACKS that you were using before still continue ...

even though it has also already been pointed out to you how we are AWARE of the reason why you chose to use them to PERSONSALLY ATTACKING your DEBATE OPPONENT ...

which is because YOU also HAVE NO COUNTER ARGUMENT to OFFER US to PROVE we are WRONG???

RIGHT HICC???



***********************

hicc again:

I really am wasting time addressing your baseless claims all the time,

***********************

xxpo again:

OH REALLY???

Exactly WHERE and WHEN did you ADDRESS any CLAIM that was made???

YOU HAVE NOT.

ALL you did was tell us of your intention to do so ...

but YOU HAVE NEVER ADDRESSED ANY CLAIM that was made or put forth.

Instead, what you've done is PERSONALLY ATTACK your DEBATE OPPONENT with the use of ARGUMENTUM AD HOMINEM and RED HERRINGS.

So IF you want to continue playing that kind of a GAME with us, then how about if we also PLAY along with you and ATTACK you back again???

FAIR ENOUGH???

PLEASE NOTE the OBSESSIVE USE of FIRST PERSONAL PRONOUNS that have been used ...

while you are busy making your PERSONAL ATTACKS of xxpo:

I do
I really like
I apologize
I have
I have been
I have said
I say
upset me.
I do not think
I state
in my post
I really am
I say
I hate
giving me
I can
my guess .
my sentences,
I think this,
I do not
I honestly
I am

PLEASE ALSO NOTE what this has to say about someone who CONSTANTLY makes USE of FIRST PERSON PRONOUNS the way you've done hicc:

http://samvak.tripod.com/journal34.html

In the narcissist's surrealistic world, even language is pathologized.

It mutates into a weapon of self-defence, a verbal

fortification, a medium without a message, replacing words with duplicitous and ambiguous vocables.

Narcissists (and, often, by contagion, their unfortunate victims) don't talk, or communicate.

They fend off.

They hide and evade and avoid and disguise.

In their planet of capricious and arbitrary unpredictability, of shifting semiotic and semantic dunes -

they perfect the ability to say nothing in lengthy, Castro-like speeches.

Their speech is impregnated and dense with first person pronouns ("I", "me", "my", "mine").

Narcissists, therefore, never talk to others - rather, they talk at others, or lecture them.

SOUND FAMILIAR???

Since SB isn't around please also allow me to ANSWER this question for you:

taking Meteoritic dust, which contains cobalt, nickel, and other heavy metals falls on our planet earth at the rate of about 14 million tons per year. If our planet was as old as 5 billion years, which is proposed by evolutionists to this day, there should be over 182 feet of this dust covering the planet earth. Even if we allow for the case of erosion, there still is not enough cobalt, nickel, and other heavy metals on our planet to indicate an ancient age of our planet. So, given the amount of meteorite dust on the surface of our planet, the evidence points to a much younger earth; maybe a few thousand years old. So respectively Stealer, can you explain why there is a shortage of this material? Stealer,

I will
await your reply.

I know

this may have been debated in the past, however, no one has ever given a clear answer to why this cannot be explained.

The ANSWER IS THIS:

HEAVY METALS were CREATED at the TIME of the LAST EXPLOSION ...

when the OTHER STAR that created the HEAVY METALS in our SOLAR SYSTEM went SUPER NOVA.

At that time all of the HEAVY METALS that would form in our SOLAR system were formed in the EXTREMELY HOT TEMPERATURES that took place during the explosion, which is also the reason why there are NOT very many HEAVY METALS in existence now, which also need EXTREMEMLY HIGH TEMPERATURES TO FORM.

So even before the COLLAPSE of the HEATED GASES in the NEBULA which formed our SUN and the rest of our SOLAR SYSTEM ...

ALL of the HEAVY METALS that would exist in our SOLAR SYSTEM were also already in EXISTENCE at that time in the NURSERY or in the NEBULA or Nuclear Waste material that was left over from the EXPLOSION of the SUPER NOVA from which we we were formed.

So it is also back to the DRAWING BOARD AGAIN for you hicc.

And you need to try and find another LAME EXCUSE for the EXISTENCE of your GOD.




FYI:


http://www2.astro.psu.edu/users/caryl/a10/lec18_2d.html

Lecture 18 -- Formation of the Solar System System

There are some obvious questions associated with the Solar System. The first might be ``how old is it?'' Stellar evolution theory says that Sun about 5 billion years old, but that depends on how well we understand how stars work.

Is there an independent way of estimating the Solar System's age?

Yes, there is, and it has to do with nuclear fission. The metals in the solar system were formed from previous supernovae, and, included in those metals are certain radioactive elements, such potassium-40, rubidium-87, or uranium-238. (The number refers to the total number of protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus.

Potassium-40 and uranium-238 are unstable -- left alone, they will spontaneously decay into other elements. (In the three examples above, potassium-40 will decay into calcuim-40 or argon-40, rubidium-87 will decay into strontium-87, and uranium-238 will decay into lead-206.)

Now radioactive decay proceeds in a very specific fashion. It is characterized by half-life. For example, the half-life of uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years. So, if you start with a block of uranium-238, then after 4.5 billion years, half of it will have turned into lead. If you wait another 4.5 billion years, then half of the remaining uranium-238 would also have turned into lead, so the ratio of uranium-238 to lead-206 will be 1-to-4. In another 4.5 billion years, the ratio would be 1-to-8 and so on.

Other radioactive decays proceed in a similar fashion; the half-life of potassium-40 is 1.3 billion years; that of rubidium-87 is 47 billion years. In their examination of meteorites and moon-rocks, geologists looks for inclusions of these radioactive elements. They then measure the ratio of the parent isotope to the daughter isotople. This defines the age of the rocks. Moon rocks and meteorites give an 4.6 billion years for the age of the solar system. (The oldest rocks on earth are a bit younger, 3.9 billion years, but the earth has been surfaced due to ancient lava flows.)

In addition to LAVA FLOWS and plate techtonics that change the surface of the EARTH ...

back when the Earth was still a PROTO PLANET ...

when our SOLAR SYSTEM also had several other planets besides the 8 we have now ...

Earth was also hit by another planet ...

which formed out MOON ...

and that colliion is also the reason why we have a much bigger CORE than Mars has at the center of our planet ...

because during the collision the core of the other planet that hit us also merged and combined it's CORE with OUR CORE.

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He was using this 'argument':

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/moon-dust.html

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Thanks for the link SB ... will try to check it out later on ... don't have time to do that now.

Meanwhile ...


YOU both seem confused:

Because HERE'S the QUESTION that he put forth:

there still is not enough cobalt, nickel, and other heavy metals on our planet to indicate an ancient age of our planet. So, given the amount of meteorite dust on the surface of our planet, the evidence points to a much younger earth; maybe a few thousand years old. So respectively Stealer, can you explain why there is a shortage of this material?

As you see, He obviously wasn't talking about the REGOLITH on the MOON or the MOON dust.


He was asking about THE AMOUNT of HEAVY METALS that we have HERE on this PLANET ...

as being an INDICATION of the AGE of OUR PLANET.

NOTE the way he says:

GIVEN the AMOUNT of METEORITE DUST on the SURFACE of OUR PLANET

But in your RESPONSE back to him, you QUOTE passages about the REGOLITH or the MOON DUST, which also DOES NOT address his question about the SURFACE of THIS PLANET.

See what I mean???

As for his other LAME CLAIM that what he's been told was COPIED and PASTED ...

once again HE LIES ...

because EVERYTHING that was said was SAID IN MY OWN WORDS ...

and NOTHING whatsoever that was SAID in response back to him was COPIED and PASTED the way in which he tries to suggest that it was:

The ANSWER IS THIS:


HEAVY METALS were CREATED at the TIME of the LAST EXPLOSION ...

when the OTHER STAR that created the HEAVY METALS in our SOLAR SYSTEM went SUPER NOVA.

At that time all of the HEAVY METALS that would form in our SOLAR system were formed in the EXTREMELY HOT TEMPERATURES that took place during the explosion, which is also the reason why there are NOT very many HEAVY METALS in existence now, which also need EXTREMEMLY HIGH TEMPERATURES TO FORM.

So even before the COLLAPSE of the HEATED GASES in the NEBULA which formed our SUN and the rest of our SOLAR SYSTEM ...

ALL of the HEAVY METALS that would exist in our SOLAR SYSTEM were also already in EXISTENCE at that time in the NURSERY or in the NEBULA or Nuclear Waste material that was left over from the EXPLOSION of the SUPER NOVA from which we we were formed.

So once again this person with the MILE HIGH EGO tries to LIE and COVER UP the way in which he is NOT ONLY WRONG about this HEAVY METAL claim he's put forth ...

but he also still has NO OTHER CLAIM to put forth to REFUTE anything else we've previously said ...

even though in the last message he also tried to PRETEND as if he had said something to REFUTE our claims:

I really am wasting time addressing your baseless claims all the time

So Other than this last QUESTION that he's ASKED about HEAVY METALS ...

a question which has also been REFUTED now by both of us ...

apparently all This DISHONEST person with the BIG EGO can do is use FALLACIES like the ARGUMENTUM AD HOMINEM and RED HERRINGS ...

as a way to try PRETEND as if he's ADDRESSED the previous CLAIMS we've made

when he HAS NOT addressed ANY of the CLAIMS whatsoever that were put forth.

Poor silly FOOL.

Still pretending as if he's WON THE DEBATE with us ...

by PRETENDING to have a DEGREE ...

that is MOST LIKELY also one of those things one sends for in the MAIL ...

which states that one has MASTER of DIVINITY ...

when one has probably also NEVER EVEN STEPPED FOOT into a COLLEGE or a UNIVERSITY before.

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The link I provided relates to dust on the Moon AND the Earth. Both are easily refuted:

"His target is the meteoritic dust argument as applied to the Moon. However, since the measurements used by the young Earth creation scientists are Earth based, then the argument is equally applicable to the Earth (and has been applied to the Earth by young Earth creationists)."

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Ok. Took a brief glance at that link you posted.

And This ISSUE of DUST ACCUMULATION was also already ADDRESSED back in the OTHER MESSAGE ...

IN MY OWN WORDS ...

when this was said back in response to him:

In addition to LAVA FLOWS and plate techtonics that change the surface of the EARTH ...

back when the Earth was still a PROTO PLANET ...

when our SOLAR SYSTEM also had several other planets besides the 8 we have now ...

Earth was also hit by another planet ...

which formed our MOON ...

and that collision is also the reason why we have a much bigger CORE than Mars has at the center of our planet ...

because during the collision the core of the other planet that hit us also merged and combined it's CORE with OUR CORE.

THE LAVA FLOWS (from VOLCANOS) would obviously ABSORB the DUST.

PLATE TECHTONICS ...

the process where LAVA FLOWS ...

would also ABSORB the DUST ...

and the COLLISION with the other PLANET which FORMED our MOON would also ABSORB the DUST when OUR PLANET MERGED with the other PLANET to form an EVEN BIGGER CORE than it had before.

But apparently this PERSON also has NO KNOWLEGE of any of this ...

and is under the impression that OUR PLANET sat around COLLECTING DUST from METEORS for 5 BILLION YEARS ...

If our planet was as old as 5 billion years, which is proposed by evolutionists to this day, there should be over 182 feet of this dust covering the planet earth

like the case has been with the MOON ...

which has NO LAVA FLOWS ...

and has NO movement of it's CRUST from the process involved with PLATE TECHTONICS ...

and it also hasn't had a COLLISION with another PLANET where it forms an even BIGGER CORE than it had before.

And that's also just some of the reasons why the MOON is FULL of DUST whereas THIS PLANET is not.

See what I mean???

This person who claims to have a DEGREE obviously DOES NOT ...

because how on EARTH would this HICC person ever be able to get a LEGIT DEGREE ...

without ever having taken a COURSE where he studied BASIC SCIENCE ...

which is also a PREREQUISITE ...

or a REQUIREMENT at any LEGIT SCHOOL ...

before one can enter or attend a GRAD SCHOOL program.





FYI:

PLATE TECHTONICS:

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/geology/tectonics.html

The progress of the earth sciences and the advancement of technologies associated with the understanding of our planet during the 1940's and 50's have led geologists to develop a new way of looking at the world and how it works. This exhibit explains the history of our new understanding of the Earth and provides a brief overview of the theories behind it.

COLLISION that FORMED our MOON:

Moon – Facts and Information about the Earth's Moon | Space.com


www.space.com/55-earths-moon-formation-composition-and-orbit.ht...


Scientists say a giant impact knocked off the raw ingredients for the moon off the primitive molten Earth and into orbit. SPACE.com has an overview of Earth's ...

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Exactly. Even if his numbers were true, plate tectonics would take care of it. That's why the Earth has so few craters compared to the Moon. But that explanation isn't even necessary seeing as how the numbers were completely off; there isn't 14 million tons of meteorite dust landing on the Earth per year, there is only about 20,000 tons, leaving erosion and plate tectonics to easily take care of the rest.

To believe in plate tectonics, you must believe that the Bible is wrong, and thus not the word of the creator of the universe (despite it claiming the contrary). It clearly states in the Bible that God made the Earth "immovable", paving the way for Galileo to get threatened with torture and excommunication by the Church for claiming a heliocentric cosmology. Why do religionists pick on evolution and not plate tectonics? You also have to deny that light comes from stars, seeing as how light was apparently created before any light source (not to mention the Sun, a population II star, being created before all other stars). You also have to believe that the stars (not including the Sun) are small enough to fall to Earth on judgment day (according to Revelation). We now know that most stars are millions of times bigger than the Earth, and capable of destroying it without even having to travel anywhere near it. Why don't religionists criticize the size of stars? They also have to deny gravity, which causes stars and planets to form, because according to "the word of God" they were created by magic. The reason dogmatists don't deny these issues is because they have no basic knowledge of science. If they did, they wouldn't be religious (at least not an honest religious person, as there are religious scientists).

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One reason why HICC might chose to pick on EVOLUTION and STEARS CLEAR of PLATE TECHTONICS would be because we're dealing with a SENIOR CITIZEN ...

or with someone who is TOO OLD to be AWARE of or to have studied PLATE TECHTONICS ...

which is also a fairly NEW SCIENCE.

They also suspect our SUN is a 3RD GENERATION STAR that's been RECYCLED 3 TIMES instead of just 2 times.

As you may know, the BIGGER STARS that have the SUPERNOVA EXPLOSIONS also don't LIVE or LAST as long as our SUN does (which will also turn into a RED GIANT before it becomes a RED DWARF and NOT result in a SUPERNOVA EXPLOSION).

And since the UNIVERSE is almost 14 BILLION YEARS old ...

that's also why it makes more sense we'd be a 3RD GENERATION STAR or one that's also already been RECYCLED 3 TIMES before.

And that's also the reason why the CREATION MYTH from the Book of GENESIS ...

where the NARCISSISTIC DEMIGOD or DEMIURGE who had NO FATHER and also NEVER knew he had a MOTHER (SOPHIA) ...

says NARCISSISTIC CRAP like:

LET THERE BE LIGHT

makes LESS SENSE than this other much more POETIC and non Narcissistic NATIVE AMERICAN CREATION MYTH does which comes much CLOSER to the TRUTH regarding what REALLY HAPPENS:

At the BIRTH of the SUN and his brother the MOON

Their MOTHER DIED ...

So they gave her body to the EARTH ...

and from her BREASTS they drew forth the STARS ...

and threw them into the SKY ...

to FOREVER remind them of her SOUL.

DANIEL DAY LEWIS also recites this in a film called THE LAST of the MOHICANS.

So as you can see, the NATIVE AMERICAN CREATION MYTH also comes CLOSER to the TRUTH ...

due to the way OUR SON and our MOON are also THE STEP CHILDREN of another OTHER SUN that WENT SUPERNOVA ...

which is also how the MATERIAL INCLUDING HEAVY METALS were DISBURSED that leads to our CREATION.

MOST STARS are also what they call RED DWARF stars, because the LARGER STARS also BURN OUT FASTER and SOONER than a MIDDLE AGEd/MIDDLE LIFE STAR like our STAR which could also fit about ONE MILLION EARTHS inside of it.

And YES you are also right about ACCRETION or the CLUMPING PROCESS where GRAVITY attacts pieces of ROCKS TOGETHER which is what FORMS our PLANET instead of some kind of an IMAGINARY SKY FAIRY.




And Believe it or not, there are also PREACHERS or MINISTERS or PRIESTS who have a DEGREE in PHYSICS who still also continue to believe in the SKY FAIRY.

Because one of them was also on one of these UNIVERSE episodes discussing SCIENTIFIC THEORIES.

So EVEN with a good grasp and an UNDERSTANDING of SCIENCE, sometimes that's still also NOT ENOUGH to change their mind about what they believe or do not believe.






FYI:

http://www.kidsastronomy.com/stars/red_dwarf_star.html

Red Dwarf stars are smaller than our sun. And since they are smaller, they also have less mass. Because of their small size, these stars burn their fuel very slowly, which allows them to live a very long time. This also causes these stars to not shine as brightly as others. Some red dwarf stars will live trillions of years before they run out of fuel.

Why are red dwarf stars red?

Because red dwarf stars only burn a little bit of fuel at a time, they are not very hot compared to other stars. Think of a fire. The coolest part of the fire is at the top of the flame where it glows red, the hotter part in the middle glows yellow, and the hottest part near the fuel glows blue. Stars work the same way. Their temperature determines what color they are. Thus, we can determine how hot a star is just by its color.


Red dwarf stars are by far the most common type of star in outer space. However, very few stars that you see in the sky are red dwarfs. This is because they are so small and make very little light. Imagine standing on a mountain. Pretend that there are one million kids 5 miles away holding flashlights, and 20 miles away there is a lighthouse for ships. You will most likely not see any of the flashlights, while you will very easily see the lighthouse. If the flashlights all glowed as brightly as the lighthouse they would blind you. Likewise, if all the red dwarf stars glowed as bright as the bigger stars, our nighttime sky would be very bright.

SO even though RED DWARF STARS are the MOST COMMON type of STARS ...

we also can't see them very well ...

not without using other SCIENTIFIC EQUIPMENT to be able to see them ...

(like using some of the other BIG TELESCOPES that we have launched into SPACE).

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Do you know about the religion of Jainism? This is a quote from Jinasena (kind of like the Jain version of a Pope), in the 'Mahapurana' (kind of like the Jain Bible):

"Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected.
If God created the world, where was He before creation? If you say he was transcendent then, and needed no support, where is he now? How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say He made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression ... Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end."

Note that this was written in the ninth century, which is amazing to me, as this argument is still extremely strong.

I was mistaken about the Sun being a population II star, it is actually population I (it is a counter intuitive label). There is a difference between a population 'x' star and a generation 'x' star; population II stars were the first stars, containing only hydrogen, left over from the Big Band, and fused helium in their cores. Population I stars are created after population II stars go supernova, spreading the first heavy elements across the universe:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/%E2%80%8Chbase/starlog/pop12.html

Also, the Hindu creation myth is much more accurate than the biblical one. They wrote that this is not the first or last universe (most cosmologists believe the universe goes through multiple expansions and regressions, with multiple Big Bangs happening). They also believed that universes lasted for over 4 billion years, close to the age of our solar system. Most amazingly, they also said that there are "innumerable" other universes; most scientists now agree that there is a multiverse. It is quite evidence that the biblical creation myth is one of the most errant of them all. It is a shame if there had to be a dominant religion, that it wasn't one of these better ones.

It is hard for me to even comprehend that a minister or pastor could have any science degree. Did he buy it or something? How can you deny the Bible, in the process deny the supposed "word of God", and still claim to be a Christian? If the universe wasn't magically created, with Adam and Eve being poofed into existence, there is no original sin, and thus no need for a savior. It makes Christianity completely superfluous. This people are obviously too deluded to even reason with.

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Thanks for the explanation of Janism. Interesting. No never heard of it before, but have heard about the other HINDU's CREATION MYTH which was explained in a show on PBS by Joseph Campbell.

And yes that MYTH where a new world gets created each time some God opens and shuts his eyes as he lays on a lotus leaf is also interesting as well.

But this other stuff about the way STARS are CLASSIFIED (which is also a NEW CONCEPT for me) still also has me confused.

Here's what the link you posted says:

Population I stars include the sun and tend to be luminous, hot and young, concentrated in the disks of spiral galaxies. They are particularly found in the spiral arms. With the model of heavy element formation in supernovae, this suggests that the gas from which they formed had been seeded with the heavy elements formed from previous giant stars. About 2% of the total belong to Population I.

Population II stars tend to be found in globular clusters and the nucleus of a galaxy. They tend to be older, less luminous and cooler than Population I stars. They have fewer heavy elements, either by being older or being in regions where no heavy-element producing predecessors would be found. Astronomers often describe this condition by saying that they are "metal poor", and the "metallicity" is used as an indication of age.

Ok. So you say P II Stars were the FIRST STARS, but that doesn't seem to be what this link says.

The link says P II Stars tend to be OLDER STARS ...

found in GLOBULAR CLUSTERS ...

AT THE CENTER or NUCLEUS of a GALAXY ...

and have FEWER HEAVY ELEMENTS ...

due to being older ...

or being located in regions where no HEAVY ELEMENT PRODUCING predecessors would be found.

Since GALAXIES are also being FORMED and REARRANGED all the time ...

including OUR GALAXY ...

which will also MERGE with the ANDROMEDA GALAXY in 3 BILLION YEARS ...

at which time our entire SOLAR SYSTEM could be torn apart and FLUNG out into SPACE ...

HOW can one come to conclusions such as this regarding these STARS???



Our MILKY WAY GALAXY has also already MERGED with several other GALAXIES to become what it is now ...

and once we MERGE with the ANDROMEDA GALAXY we will also be an ELIPTICAL SHAPE instead of the SPIRAL SHAPE that we are now.

And IF the GRAVITY of the BLACK HOLE at the center of our GALAXY MERGES with the BLACK HOLE at the center of the ANDROMEDA GALAXY ...

then how do we know WHERE the STARS in both GALAXIES will end up?

Would the HEAVY MASS of the LARGER STARs also mean they'd end up at the CENTER of the NEW GALAXY (MILKOMEDRA)that forms after the MERGER???

And if so, how do we know the LARGER STARS in our Galaxy would be the SAME AGE as those in the ANDROMEDA Galaxy???



As for the P I STARS ...

which it also says are located in the SPIRAL ARM AREA ...

what about once we MERGE and become the ELIPTICAL SHAPE???

Or what about the other 2 TYPES of SHAPES that other Galaxies are also already composed of???

Since they don't have SPIRAL ARMS does that mean they have NO P I STARS, or that once we MERGE and become an ELIPTICAL SHAPE, then we will also no longer have any more P I STARS???



Are you familiar with BRANE THEORY or MEMBRAME THEORY which thinks the BIG BANG happens each time 2 MEMBRAMES come together ???

The FIRST PART of the BIBLE, THE OLD TESTEMENT, also has NOTHING to do with one being a CHRISTIAN.

It's only the 2ND PART of it, or the NEW TESTEMENT, that deals with CHRISTIANITY, which is also the reason why the JEWISH FAITH doesn't deal with it or recognize it.

The CATHOLIC FAITH also deals with and recognizes other BOOKS of the BIBLE that the PROTESTANT FAITH does not.

And they've also recently found still other BOOKS of the BIBLE that have been missing for several centuries that also CONTRADICT what other parts of the BIBLE have to say.

The BOOK of THOMAS, for example, has JESUS saying things about Mary and women that are not found elsewhere in other books of the BIBLE. And what he does is DEFEND HER against the others when he says he will MAKE MARY like the rest of the DISCIPLES who are putting her down.

But of course this BOOK and this part of the BIBLE is also DELIBERATELY HIDDEN AWAY and BURIED so that SEXIST MALES who had a PATRIARCHAL AGENDA could continue to keep treating WOMEN as being INFERIOR to them.

As for ADAM and EVE being the FIRST HUMAN beings, or the other ARK STORY where they claim ALL the ANIMALS on Earth were killed, and then REPOPULATED again by using ONE PAIR to replace them ...

we also have DNA EVIDENCE to PROVE how that's NOT POSSIBLE ...

due to the way in which the CHEETA'S are also in DANGER of going EXTINCT ...

due to their NOT HAVING enough difference or VARIETY left in their GENETIC MAKE UP to SURVIVE.

So if the CHEETA'S can't survive due to GENETIC DEFECTS caused by INBREEDING, then it's also HIGHLY UNLIKELY the OFFSPRING of ADAM and EVE would survive without their also being able to BREED with another group that would give them the kind of VARIETY that they'd need to SURVIVE.

And here's still another QUESTION:

As for the EXISTENCE of this so called PERFECT SKY FAIRY ...

IF HE/SHE was a PERFECT BEING ...

then WHY would this PERFECT CREATURE have a NEED to CREATE the rest of us other HUMAN BEGINS???

Because doesn't CREATING US also indicate there must have been some kind of a LACK in their life if they FELT the NEED to CREATE US???

And IF THEY WERE ALREADY A PERFECT BEING ...

then WHY WOULD THEY FEEL as if they were LACKING SOMETHING???

PERFECT BEINGS shouldn't FEEL as if they NEEDED or LACKed something.

SHOULD THEY???

IF you are already a PERFECT BEING, then why on EARTH BOTHER MAKING another GROUP of UNPERFECT CREATURES like the rest of us???



As for the people who are RELIGIOUS LACKING REASON ...

they'd probably also just tell you RELIGION deals with having FAITH ...

which also has NOTHING to do with REASON???

So the guy with the degree in PHYSICS probably also still clings to his FAITH that there's some kinda SKY FAIRY inspite of what REASON tells him???




ALSO FOUND THIS:

http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/first.htm

First Stars / Population III

On July 31, 2008, a team of astronomers (led by Naoki Yoshida) announced that new simulation results which indicate that the first stars formed within 300 million years after the Big Bang. First, "seed" proto-stars formed from the collapsing core of gas clouds that go through a stage as a flattened disc, with two trailing spiral arms of gas. Despite having only only 0.1 Solar-mass, the proto-stars quickly "bulked up" on surrounding gases into behemoths of at least 100 Solar-masses within 10,000 years. After a million years as a very bright star, some of these massive stars may have become supernovae -- depending on their mass (CfA press release; and Stephen Battersby, New Scientist, July 31, 2008).

On December 3, 2007, a team of theoretical physicists (including Katherine Freese, Douglas Spolyar, and Paolo Gondolo) released the results of a paper which suggests that the first proto-stars could have been powered by the annihilation of opposite forms of dark matter (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles or WIMPs, such as neutralinos). In theory, each dark matter particle should have its own anti-particle. When such particle pairs meet, they would annihilate each other, whereby one-third of the resulting energy is produced as neutrinos which escape, one-third becomes gamma-ray photons, and the last third becomes electrons and positrons.

Still another link says this about them:

POPULATION 3 STARS:

NO LONGER EXIST anymore

contained very little or NO METALS

Which also seems to further CONFIRM WHY and how OUR STAR would need to be a 3RD GENERATION STAR???

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I see xxpo already took a stab at your question, but I think he missed the exact point of what you were asking (he explained where the heavy elements came from, not why we are not overrun by elements from meteorites), so I will also refute it.

Yes, this question has been answered multiple times (not to mention this 'argument', if I can dignify it with that word, is over two decades old), and unsurprisingly, the creationist perspective is vastly flawed. In fact, creationists themselves have given up on this argument, admitting the true amount of meteorite dust is in accordance to our current knowledge of the age of the Earth. For a complete and in-depth refutation see:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/moon-dust.html

To sum up why this argument is disgustingly fallacious:

"Much more accurate measurements were available, from satellite penetration data (no possibility of earthly contamination), by the time Morris published Scientific Creationism. These more accurate measurements give the value of about 18,000 to 25,000 tons per year. These measurements agree with levels of meteoritic dust levels trapped in sediments on Earth. (That is, they are verified by an independent cross-check.)

Morris chooses to pick obsolete data with known problems, and call it the "best" measurement available. His calculations are based on a figure that is nearly three orders of magnitude too high. With the proper values, the expected depth of meteoritic dust on the moon is less than one foot."

"There is a recent creationist technical paper on this topic which admits that the depth of dust on the moon is concordant with the mainstream age and history of the solar system (Snelling and Rush 1993). Their abstract concludes with:

'It thus appears that the amount of meteoritic dust and meteorite debris in the lunar regolith and surface dust layer, even taking into account the postulated early intense bombardment, does not contradict the evolutionists' multi-billion year timescale (while not proving it). Unfortunately, attempted counter-responses by creationists have so far failed because of spurious arguments or faulty calculations. Thus, until new evidence is forthcoming, creationists should not continue to use the dust on the moon as evidence against an old age for the moon and the solar system.'"

Do you actually think the Earth is only a few thousand years old (LOL)? I'm trying my best not to laugh at your arguments, as you have clearly been indoctrinated to believe these ridiculous lies, but that is so wrong that it is making my head spin. So the fossils that we have found to be millions and billions of years old are some sort of illusion? All forms of radiometric dating are flawed in the exact same way, giving us the elaborate hoax of old age? Mountains and ancient river beds somehow form at ultra speeds, unknown to the human intellect? Ancient sediment layers are some sort of detailed mirage, so abstruse that it has fooled the entire scientific community? Come on... You can't seriously buy this creationist nonsense...

On a side note, let's pretend all our scientific knowledge was proven irrefutably to be false. This still DOES NOT PROVE MAGIC!!! Even if we were in a void with no knowledge of anything, THERE IS STILL NO EVIDENCE FOR SKY FAIRIES!!!

Let me propose a counter question: why, in the history of humanity, has there been no evidence for any supernatural occurrence? If real, don't you think that in the 13.77 billion year history of the universe we would have found at least an ambiguous piece of evidence? Seeing as how in 13.77 billion years, there has been no evidence of anything supernatural, shouldn't that be a good indication that nothing supernatural exists? Even if it does exist, it is by definition outside of our realm of knowledge, thus making it ridiculous to deny natural explanations for supernatural. This is why science works on methodological naturalism; nothing ever observed has a supernatural explanation, thus the natural explanation is most likely the correct one. To restate my question - why are dogmatists so obstinate in the face of demonstrable evidence? Why deny perfectly good natural explanations for supernatural nonsense?

I look forward to your response.

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Stealer, thanks for your reply. I have read your reply and will try to respond to it tonight when I get home from work. I see xxpo is still at his copying and pasting BS. XXpo, you are the first person to be on my ignore list. Congrats:)

"Yeah well, you know, that's just like your opinion man."

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[deleted]

You are right about our Sun being a GENERATION III star, but you are confusing GERNERATION III with POPULATION III. The Roman numeral indicates how early the star formed, meaning the higher the numeral, the earlier the formation, and thus lacking heavier elements. For example, a population III star (which I just heard of from you) would be the oldest in the universe containing no heavy elements, while a population I star, such as our Sun, is a relatively new star that does contain heavy elements. Here is a good explanation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallicity#Populations_III.2C_II.2C_and_I

"Are you familiar with BRANE THEORY or MEMBRAME THEORY which thinks the BIG BANG happens each time 2 MEMBRAMES come together ???"

I am somewhat familiar with it (I still need to read Stephen Hawking's knew book 'The Grand Design' which I believe discusses it in depth), but haven't looked into it in detail. I think it is a branch of string theory that is the most widely accepted hypothesis about what caused the Big Bang, and apparently every time the branes collide, a knew universe is created. It is extremely complicated so I'm mastering my older physics first before I get into the latest discoveries (right now I'm reading Cosmos by Carl Sagan).

"And they've also recently found still other BOOKS of the BIBLE that have been missing for several centuries that also CONTRADICT what other parts of the BIBLE have to say."

Even more suspicious, the canonical Gospels are only four of the OVER A DOZEN Gospels that were written and discarded! What could those other Gospels have contained that the Church was so worried about? Could it possibly be worse than the current Gospels, that advocate the eternal torture of most of the people who have ever existed?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gospels#Controversial_gospels

Even so, none of the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses (the earliest comes decades after the supposed death of Jesus and is written in Greek when Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic). Combine this with the fact that there is not a single contemporary account of the life of Jesus, how can anyone possibly be gullible enough to believe that he was some sort of human-sky fairy hybrid? Every account we have of Jesus is pure hearsay, all seemingly based on fiction.

"As for ADAM and EVE being the FIRST HUMAN beings, or the other ARK STORY where they claim ALL the ANIMALS on Earth were killed, and then REPOPULATED again by using ONE PAIR to replace them ...

we also have DNA EVIDENCE to PROVE how that's NOT POSSIBLE ..."

There are so many holes in the flood myth that I don't even know where to begin. They only reason they believed that much water could magically appear on the Earth then disappear was because they believed the universe was in a firmament surrounded by waters separating us from Heaven. With so much water on the Earth, the pressure in the oceans would have killed every sea creature! Where did the over 8 million species of animals use the bathroom? What did they eat for 40 days? How did one family build such a large boat, and where is it? Why is there no geographical evidence for a global flood? Why did almost every religion have their own flood myth? Why would an all loving being ruthlessly murder nearly every living thing on the planet for being how he made them? Wouldn't all the predators start eating everything, including Noah, as soon as he released them? How did he get animals separated by continents? How did so many different cultures all over the world (Incas, Chinese, Africans) originate from one family a few thousand years ago?

"And here's still another QUESTION:

As for the EXISTENCE of this so called PERFECT SKY FAIRY ..."

Again, there are so many flaws in the whole "perfect being" 'argument'...

If he has perfect omniscience, how can we have free will when he knows what we will do before we do it, making it impossible to do anything else? Can an omnipotent being create a rock so heavy he can't lift it (using the law of contradiction, we can conclude no omnipotent beings exist since the very existence of such a being results in contradictions)? If he is omniscient, then he knows is own future and thus can't change it, but if he's omnipotent he can do anything, so how can he be both? In other words, if he's omnipotent he CAN change the future, if he's omniscient he CAN'T because it's already set; he can't be both. If he's omnipotent, he already knew Adam and Eve would disobey them before he even made them! He made them to disobey them (if he didn't want them to, he would have made their brains differently)! Also, if Adam and Eve had no knowledge of good and even before they ate the fruit, how would they have known disobedience is bad?? The story doesn't make sense!! How is it moral for every human to suffer for the 'mistake' of their ancestor? Why would a perfect being want the love of some lowly humans anyway? It would be like us desiring a virus to love us, only to torture it when it doesn't comply. This faith is a joke...

To quote Epicurus, who summed up the absurdity of the "perfect being" 'argument':

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

"So the guy with the degree in PHYSICS probably also still clings to his FAITH that there's some kinda SKY FAIRY inspite of what REASON tells him???"

Exactly. Reason cannot coexist with faith. When you have reason, there is no use for faith, and if you need faith in something you don't have a reason to believe it. To quite aronra:

"We either base our 'confidence' on reason (evident probabilities, past experience, competence, etc.) or we base our beliefs on faith, which is blind by definition. Faith is the most dishonest position it is possible to have, because it is an assertion of stoic conviction that is assumed without reason and defended against all reason. If you have to believe it on faith, you have no reason to believe it at all."

"Faith can be accurately defined as a complete and unwavering conviction; a positive belief --which is not dependent on evidence, and will not change because of evidence. Science is completely opposite in every respect. Rather than any need-to-believe, science is driven by a desire to understand. And the only way to improve your understanding of anything is to seek out errors in our current position and correct them. You can't do that if you claim your initial assumptions are already infallible, and you can't even begin to seek the truth if you won't admit that you might not already know it, or that you don't know it all perfectly already."

"The methodology of science was designed to be the antithesis of faith because it requires that all assumptions be questioned, that all proposed explanations be based on demonstrable evidence, and that all hypotheses be must be testable and potentially falsifiable. Blaming magic is never acceptable because miracles aren't explanations of any kind, and there has never been a single instance in history when assuming the supernatural has ever improved our understanding of anything. In fact such excuses have only ever impeded our attempts at discovery. This is one of many reasons why science depends on methodological naturalism; because unlike religion, science demands some way to determine who's explanations are the more accurate, and which changes would actually be corrections. Science is a self-correcting process which changes constantly because its always improving. Only accurate information has practical application."

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What did the HICC say that he's DELETED NOW???

Did he have another HISSY FIT???

Did he post still more ARGUMENTUM AD HOMENIM ATTACKS again where he tried to DISCREDIT everything xxpo said again???


Since he also claims to have placed me or IGNORE,

did he also PERSONALLY BASH and ATTACK you this time as well???

Because if he PERSONALLY ATTACKS me again, defended himself, and tried to claim his DEGREE wasn't one of those FAKE DOCUMENTS one sends for in the MAIL, then that would also explain the reason why he's deleted his LATEST round of IMMATURE HISSY FITS.

Because in the process of BASHING and ATTACKING XXPO again, then he would also have REVEALED how he's LIED to us again, about having placed xxpo on IGNORE when he HAD NOT.



RE: POPULATION STARS


Since the link says P III STARS were the FIRST STARS, doesn't that mean the way in which the system is set up is PROBLEMATIC???

Because once our STAR runs out of FEUL and becomes a RED GIANT and GOBBLES us up before it becomes a WHITE DWARF, then what comes next???

A POPULATION ZERO star???

If you begin with a P 3, then you have a P 2, and we're a P 1 STAR, then what comes next???

And what if we get SUCKED into the BLACK HOLE of the ANDROMEDA GALAXY when we MERGE with it???

We also wouldn't KNOW what happens then would we???

Or if the BLACK HOLE is a WORMHOLE that leads to still another UNIVERSE???

So we might also become NUCLEAR WASTE that SEEDS still another UNIVERSE if we get SUCKED into the EVEN BIGGER BLACK HOLE that will become a MERGER once the BLACK HOLE at the center of the MILKY WAY MERGES with the one at the center of the ANDROMEDA GALAXY???

Or if we got FLUNG OUT into SPACE to become a ROUGE PLANET, then the GRAVITY of some other MASSIVE STAR we pass by might also GOBBLE US UP so we'd become part of it's NUCLEAR WASTE when it goes SUPERNOVA???

SPACE is definitely a FREAKY PLACE.



*******************************

RE: RECENTLY FOUND BOOKS of the BIBLE:


In addition to the BOOK of THOMAS, an account that they believe was also WRITTEN by the TWIN BROTHER of JESUS, there is also the BOOK of JUDAS, and others which also describe the life of JESUS as a young boy who misbehaves and does BAD THINGS with his MAGIC like making another kid fall off a ROOF and making clay birds into real birds on the SABBATH or something.

So naturally they'd also EDIT OUT and GET RID of stories like that where JESUS is being a BAD BOY as a CHILD???

Same way as they EDIT OUT and GOT RID of stories where WOMEN had EQUAL STATUS with that of THE MALES???

When one has an AGENDA to make themself TOP ALPHA DOG ... the EDIT PEN comes out ... and anything has to GO that does not fit in with one's NARCISSISTIC OPINON of oneself.

*****************************

RE: NOAH'S ARK and MARK TWAIW's LETTERS from EARTH:


Have you ever READ LETTERS FROM EARTH by MARK TWAIN???

http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/twainlfe.htm

It's a SATIRE and AN EXTREMELY FUNNY account of the FLOOD STORY where NOAH forgets a FLY and has to go back to get it.

It also talks about all of the other MICROBES that NOAH and his family would need to have STORED inside of their INTESTINES so they could survive.

It has me LMAO each time I've read it.

TWAIN definitely put the NOAH TALE into it's proper place.

*****************************



RE: ADAM and EVE and WHY the FALL was a FORTUNATE THING to have happen:


THE GARDEN of EDEN MYTH is also obviously a story about MATURITY, GROWING UP, and taking RESPONSIBILITY for oneself.

Because The GARDEN is also basically a NEST or a WOMB LIKE SITUATION ... due to the way the temperature is CONTROLLED so they have no need for CLOTHING ... and all the food they consume is also automatically provided for them (the same way as it is inside the WOMB).

But to remain INSIDE of the WOMB FOREVER and NEVER COME OUT would also be an UNNATURAL STATE to remain in.

So after EATING the FRUIT of the TREE OF KNOWLEDGE, what happens???

THEY MATURE and become AWARE they are SEXUAL BEINGS, due to the way they HIDE their NAKEDNESS.

In other words, they are also now CREATURES who are READY TO LEAVE the NEST or the WOMB like situation to go forth and CREATE other NESTS of their own where they will also MAKE other CREATURES of their own.

And that's also why the SNAKE told EVE the TRUTH when he said if she EATS the fruit them she would be LIKE GOD ...

meaning EVE would also be able to CREATE other CREATURES in her OWN IMAGE the same way as the SKY FAIRY had done.

But what the HEBREWS do is take the SUMERIAN CREATION MYTH and DISTORT it into this other ACCOUNT in the BIBLE ...

where the MAIN MESSAGE about becoming MATURE and taking RESPONSIBILTY for oneself ...

by TILING the SOIL to grow your own food ...

has gotten PERVERTED and LOST amoung all of the other STUFF and NONSENSE about EVE being CREATED from ADAM'S RIB ...

when the FIRST ACCOUNT of the creation of the FIRST WOMAN also has her CREATED at the SAME TIME as ADAM and she's also CREATED FROM the CLAY in the GROUND the same way as ADAM.

But the HEBREW MALES also had their PATRIARCHAL AGENDA to make women their SLAVES, so they also INVENT the RIB RUBBISH, as a way to MAKE them INFERIOR to them.

And we also KNOW this due to what JESUS says about WOMEN in the BOOK of THOMAS that was written by HIS TWIN BROTHER who KNEW HIM BEST.



****************************

RE: FAITH:


FAITH does also have it's place as well.

What if NO ONE had any FAITH in our ability to WIN the WAR against HITLER ???

Reason might have told us we had NO NAVY after PEARL HARBOR, and we had no way to fight back against HITLER'S already FORMED MILTARY FORCES, but fortunately people also still had enough FAITH left in themselves and in their ABILITY to FIGHT BACK against him???

So sometimes having FAITH in something can also play a VERY IMPORTANT ROLE in the OUTCOME of something as well???



LETTERS FROM EARTH:


Letter V

Noah began to collect animals. There was to be one couple of each and every sort of creature that walked or crawled, or swam or flew, in the world of animated nature. We have to guess at how long it took to collect the creatures and how much it cost, for there is no record of these details. When Symmachus made preparation to introduce his young son to grown-up life in imperial Rome, he sent men to Asia, Africa and everywhere to collect wild animals for the arena-fights.

[b]It took the men three years to accumulate the animals and fetch them to Rome. Merely quadrupeds and alligators, you understand -- no birds, no snakes, no frogs, no worms, no lice, no rats, no fleas, no ticks, no caterpillars, no spiders, no houseflies, no mosquitoes -- nothing but just plain simple quadrupeds and alligators: and no quadrupeds except fighting ones. Yet it was as I have said: it took three years to collect them, and the cost of animals and transportation and the men's wages footed up $4,500,000.

How many animals? We do not know. But it was under five thousand, for that was the largest number ever gathered for those Roman shows, and it was Titus, not Symmachus, who made that collection. Those were mere baby museums, compared to Noah's contract. Of birds and beasts and fresh-water creatures he had to collect 146,000 kinds; and of insects upwards of two million species.

Thousands and thousands of those things are very difficult to catch, and if Noah had not given up and resigned, he would be on the job yet, as Leviticus used to say. However, I do not mean that he withdrew. No, he did not do that. He gathered as many creatures as he had room for, and then stopped.


If he had known all the requirements in the beginning, he would have been aware that what was needed was a fleet of Arks. But he did not know how many kinds of creatures there were, neither did his Chief.

So he had no Kangaroo, and no 'possom, and no Gila monster, and no ornithorhynchus, and lacked a multitude of other indispensable blessings which a loving Creator had provided for man and forgotten about, they having long ago wandered to a side of this world which he had never seen and with whose affairs he was not acquainted. And so everyone of them came within a hair of getting drowned.

They only escaped by an accident. There was not water enough to go around. Only enough was provided to flood one small corner of the globe -- the rest of the globe was not then known, and was supposed to be nonexistent.

However, the thing that really and finally and definitely determined Noah to stop with enough species for purely business purposes and let the rest become extinct, was an incident of the last days: an excited stranger arrived with some most alarming news. He said he had been camping among some mountains and valleys about six hundred miles away, and he had seen a wonderful thing there: he stood upon a precipice overlooking a wide valley, and up the valley he was a billowy black sea of strange animal life coming. Presently the creatures passed by, struggling, fighting, scrambling, screeching, snorting -- horrible vast masses of tumultuous flesh! Sloths as big as an elephant; frogs as big as a cow; a megatherium and his harem huge beyond belief; saurians and saurians and saurians, group after group, family after family, species after species -- a hundred feet long, thirty feet high, and twice as quarrelsome; one of them hit a perfectly blameless Durham bull a thump with its tail and sent it whizzing three hundred feet into the air and it fell at the man's feet with a sigh and was no more. The man said that these prodigious animals had heard about the Ark and were coming. Coming to get saved from the flood. And not coming in pairs, they were all coming: they did not know the passengers were restricted to pairs, the man said, and wouldn't care a rap for the regulations, anyway -- they would sail in that Ark or know the reason why. The man said the Ark would not hold the half of them; and moreover they were coming hungry, and would eat up everything there was, including the menagerie and the family.

All these facts were suppressed, in the Biblical account. You find not a hint of them there. The whole thing is hushed up. Not even the names of those vast creatures are mentioned. It shows you that when people have left a reproachful vacancy in a contract they can be as shady about it in Bibles as elsewhere.

Those powerful animals would be of inestimable value to man now, when transportation is so hard pressed and expensive, but they are all lost to him. All lost, and by Noah's fault. They all got drowned. Some of them as much as eight million years ago.



THE PART about NOAH going back for the FLY that he forgot and the OTHER MICROBES that they carry in their GUTS IS EVEN BETTER!!!

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I have no idea what his deleted post said. All I know is that I got an email saying he replied to my message and when I went to check I see two deleted posts. Maybe he copied and pasted another decade old creationist argument that has been refuted into oblivion?

About the population stars; that's what I meant when I said it's a counter intuitive label. It seems like the sun would be a population III star rather than a population I star, because, like you said, what happens when the sun dies and other stars form out of the remnants? Do we change the Sun to population II and the oldest stars to population IV, leaving room for a new population I group? It seems like the numbers are backwards.

I actually hadn't read that by Mark Twain, but I'll definitely be getting it for my Kindle Fire HD (they have all his works for $2 on Amazon). A great book along the same lines as Twain's is 'Some Mistakes of Moses' by Robert G. Ingersoll (who completely and utterly destroyed the book of myths known as the Bible). Also, 'Why I am not a Christian' by Bertrand Russell and 'Atheism: The Case Against God' by George H. Smith are both fantastic philosophical destructions of theism.

A short description of Ingersoll's book from Goodreads.com:

"Ingersoll was widely known as the greatest orator of his time and could soundly thrash any challenger in a debate-especially in a debate on religion. His logic was impeccable and his mind was as sharp as a whip. Many religious beliefs have no logic in them at all and Ingersoll was a master at exposing the outright cruelty, stupidity and foolishness that religions, through their dogmatic and outdated precepts, force us to embrace. This book covers the Old Testament, worshipped and revered by Jews and Christians alike, which supports things like slavery, warfare, polygamy and the idea that women should be treated as property. He asks many pointed questions. For example: If you find slavery upheld in a book said to have been written by God, what would you expect to find in a book inspired by the devil? Also, why would God tell me how to raise my children when he had to drown his own in the flood? He also presents an interview of two men at the gates of heaven-one an honest and loving family man, the other a despicable thieving businessman. Based on their beliefs, guess who gets into heaven and who goes to hell. This book will truly make you think. It is meant to demonstrate how religion can control and affect our lives in ways that are quite contrary to our own moral fiber, modern logical reasoning and ethical conscience."

And Russell's:

"Dedicated as few men have been to the life of reason, Bertrand Russell has always been concerned with the basic questions to which religion also addresses itself -- questions about man's place in the universe and the nature of the good life, questions that involve life after death, morality, freedom, education, and sexual ethics. He brings to his treatment of these questions the same courage, scrupulous logic, and lofty wisdom for which his other work as philosopher, writer, and teacher has been famous. These qualities make the essays included in this book perhaps the most graceful and moving presentation of the freethinker's position since the days of Hume and Voltaire."

Even in the Gospels that the Church didn't try to hide, Jesus is far from some ultimate paradigm of morality that believers are fooled into accepting. He threatens all that do not hear is word to eternal punishment - what kind of monster would do such a thing? As Ingersoll said:

"If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men.... What right have you, sir, Mr. clergyman, you, minister of the gospel to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine, neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena."

"I cannot believe that there is any being in this universe who has created a human soul for eternal pain. I would rather that every god would destroy himself; I would rather that we all should go to eternal chaos, to black and starless night, than that just one soul should suffer eternal agony."

Faith has ABSOLUTELY NO PLACE to a rational person. In your example, you confuse trust with faith. Faith, at least in a religious sense, is the belief in impossible feats without evidence, and often in the face of contradictory evidence. We had REASON to believe we could win WWII. The Soviets had the Nazis stalled to the east at Stalingrad. If you need faith in yourself, that means you have no REASON to believe in yourself. People believed in themselves because they knew that they could overcome tyranny; faith had nothing to do with it. (I do see your point about faith when it is used as a synonym for trust, but like I said, faith in the religious sense is completely useless.)

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Thanks for the WIKI LINK. This definitely clears up lots of QUESTIONS.

But WATCH OUT ...

because THE HICC will also probably BASH and ATTACK you for having posted what he sees as being a worthless WIKI LINK???


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallicity#Populations_III.2C_II.2C_and_I

Stellar populations are categorized as I, II, and III, with each group having decreasing metal content and increasing age. The populations were named in the order they were discovered, which is the reverse of the order of their formation. Thus, the first stars in the universe (low metal content) were population III, and recent stars (high metallicity) are population I.

While older stars do have fewer heavy elements, the fact that all stars observed have some heavier elements poses something of a puzzle, and the current explanation for this proposes the existence of hypothetical metal-free Population III stars in the early universe. Soon after the Big Bang, without metals, it is believed that only stars with masses hundreds of times that of the Sun could be formed; near the end of their lives these stars would have created the first 26 elements up to iron in the periodic table via nucleosynthesis.[3]

Because of their high mass, current stellar models show that Population III stars would have soon exhausted their fuel and exploded in extremely energetic pair-instability supernovae. Those explosions would have thoroughly dispersed their material, ejecting metals throughout the universe to be incorporated into the later generations of stars that are observed today. The high mass of the first stars is used to explain why, as of 2010, no Population III stars have been observed. Because they were all destroyed in supernovae in the early universe

Since 2 MESSAGES were posted here that he's DELETED,

and you only got an email regarding ONE of them,

most likely one of the 2 messages he posted was another HISSY FIT filled message that contained still more of his NON STOP AD HOMINEM ATTACKS.

So ONE was posted back to YOU ...

and the other was posted back to me ...

which would also mean HE LIED AGAIN ...

about having placed xxpo on IGNORE.

But when he WISED UP and realized how his HISSY FIT proves HE LIED ...

then he DELETES the EVIDENCE he'd posted here PROVING how he LIED.



RE: THE SKY FAIRY:

Thanks for the heads up regarding the works written by these other guys. Sounds interesting.

Did the book also talk about how people have searched the DESERT where MOSES was suppose to have WANDERED AROUND for 40 years, but NOTHING was ever found that PROVES this???

NO BROKEN pieces of POTTERY ... no bones ... NOTHING was ever found to indicate people were there???

So once again SCIENCE is used to PROVE the story about MOSES in the DESERT was also most likely a LIE.

Or what about this:

God orders Abraham to kill his son Issac ...

changes his mind and backs down at the last moment ...

then KILLS his own son later on for the SINS of everyone else???



Or what about the way GOD ALLOWS SATAN to TORMENT JOB ...

simply because GOD MAKES A BET with SATAN ...

that JOB will still LOVE GOD after SATAN KILLS all of JOB'S FAMILY ...

and all of his LIVESTOCK ...

and DESTROYS everything else that JOB had worked so hard to achieve.

What kind of A SKY FAIRY CREATURE would do that ...

MAKE a BET with someone and then let them DESTROY everything a person they RESPECT had or owns???

RE: FAITH vs TRUST

Not sure if having FAITH is the same thing as having TRUST in oneself.

When THE WOMEN went to work in the FACTORIES to make planes (instead of AUTOMOBILES) while the MEN went overseas to FIGHT the war,

did the WOMEN TRUST themselves that they could build these planes and make the AUMUNITION the MEN needed to fight with???

Or did they BUILD the PLANES and make the AMUNITION because they had FAITH

and HOPE and BELIEF ...

that in the process of making the planes there would also be a much better chance the men could WIN the WAR they were fighting against HITLER and JAPAN???

TRUST just doesn't seem like the appropriate way to describe the situation.

Why would the WOMEN working in the FACTORIES NOT TRUST themselves??? Why would the men fighting on the front lines not TRUST themselves???

More likely they WORKED and FOUGHT so hard because they also had HOPE and FAITH in what they were doing and that what they did would also enable them to WIN the WAR against the ENEMY ???





LETTERS FROM EARTH cont:

Letter VI

On the third day, about noon, it was found that a fly and been left behind. The return voyage turned out to be long and difficult, on account of the lack of chart and compass, and because of the changed aspects of all coasts, the steadily rising water having submerged some of the lower landmarks and given to higher ones an unfamiliar look; but after sixteen days of earnest and faithful seeking, the fly was found at last, and received on board with hymns of praise and gratitude, the Family standing meanwhile uncovered, our of reverence for its divine origin. It was weary and worn, and had suffered somewhat from the weather, but was otherwise in good estate. Men and their families had died of hunger on barren mountain tops, but it had not lacked for food, the multitudinous corpses furnishing it in rank and rotten richness. Thus was the sacred bird providentially preserved.

Providentially. That is the word. For the fly had not been left behind by accident. No, the hand of Providence was in it. There are no accidents. All things that happen, happen for a purpose. They are foreseen from the beginning of time, they are ordained from the beginning of time. From the dawn of Creation the Lord had foreseen that Noah, being alarmed and confused by the invasion of the prodigious brevet fossils, would prematurely fly to sea unprovided with a certain invaluable disease. He would have all the other diseases, and could distribute them among the new races of men as they appeared in the world, but he would lack one of the very best -- typhoid fever; a malady which, when the circumstances are especially favorable, is able to utterly wreck a patient without killing him; for it can restore him to his feet with a long life in him, and yet deaf, dumb, blind, crippled, and idiotic. The housefly is its main disseminator, and is more competent and more calamitously effective than all the other distributors of the dreaded scourge put together. And so, by foreordination from the beginning of time, this fly was left behind to seek out a typhoid corpse and feed upon its corruptions and gaum its legs with germs and transmit them to the re-peopled world for permanent business.

From that one housefly, in the ages that have since elapsed, billions of sickbeds have been stocked, billions of wrecked bodies sent tottering about the earth, and billions of cemeteries recruited with the dead.

It is most difficult to understand the disposition of the Bible God, it is such a confusion of contradictions; of watery instabilities and iron firmness; of goody-goody abstract morals made out of words, and concreted hell-born ones made out of acts; of fleeting kindness repented of in permanent malignities.


However, when after much puzzling you get at the key to his disposition, you do at last arrive at a sort of understanding of it. With a most quaint and juvenile and astonishing frankness he has furnished that key himself. It is jealousy!

I expect that to take your breath away. You are aware -- for I have already told you in an earlier letter -- that among human beings jealousy ranks distinctly as a weakness; a trade-mark of small minds; a property of all small minds, yet a property which even the smallest is ashamed of; and when accused of its possession will lyingly deny it and resent the accusation as an insult.

Jealousy. Do not forget it, keep it in mind. It is the key. With it you will come to partly understand God as we go along; without it nobody can understand him. As I have said, he has openly held up this treasonous key himself, for all to see. He says, naïvely, outspokenly, and without suggestion of embarrassment:


"I the Lord thy God am a jealous God."

You see, it is only another way of saying,

"I the Lord thy God am a small God; a small God, and fretful about small things."

He was giving a warning:

he could not bear the thought of any other God getting some of the Sunday compliments of this comical little human race -- he wanted all of them for himself. He valued them. To him they were riches; just as tin money is to a Zulu.


But wait -- I am not fair; I am misrepresenting him; prejudice is beguiling me into saying what is not true. He did not say he wanted all of the adulations; he said nothing about not being willing to share them with his fellow gods; what he said was, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."

It is a quite different thing, and puts him in a much better light -- I confess it. There was an abundance of gods, the woods were full of them, as the saying is, and all he demanded was that he should be ranked as high as the others -- not above any of them, but not below any of them. He was willing that they should fertilize earthly virgins, but not on any better terms than he could have for himself in his turn. He wanted to be held their equal. This he insisted upon, in the clearest language: he would have no other gods before him. They could march abreast with him, but none of them could head the procession, and he did not claim the right to head it himself.

Do you think he was able to stick to that upright and creditable position? No. He could keep to a bad resolution forever, but he couldn't keep to a good one a month. By and by he threw aside and calmly claimed to be the only God in the entire universe.

As I was saying, jealousy is the key; all through his history it is present and prominent. It is the blood and bone of his disposition, it is the basis of his character. How small a thing can wreck his composure and disorder his judgement if it touches the raw of his jealousy! And nothing warms up this trait so quickly and so surely and so exaggeratedly as a suspicion that some competition with the god-Trust is impending. The fear that if Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge they would "be as gods" so fired his jealousy that his reason was affected, and he could not treat those poor creatures either fairly or charitably, or even refrain from dealing cruelly and criminally with their blameless posterity.

To this day his reason has never recovered from that shock; a wild nightmare of vengefulness has possessed him ever since, and he has almost bankrupted his native ingenuities in inventing pains and miseries and humiliations and heartbreaks wherewith to embitter the brief lives of Adam's descendants. Think of the diseases he has contrived for them! They are multitudinous; no book can name them all. And each one is a trap, set for an innocent victim.

The human being is a machine. An automatic machine. It is composed of thousands of complex and delicate mechanisms, which perform their functions harmoniously and perfectly, in accordance with laws devised for their governance, and over which the man himself has no authority, no mastership, no control. For each one of these thousands of mechanisms the Creator has planned an enemy, whose office is to harass it, pester it, persecute it, damage it, afflict it with pains, and miseries, and ultimate destruction. Not one has been overlooked.

From cradle to grave these enemies are always at work; they know no rest, night or day. They are an army: an organized army; a besieging army; an assaulting army; an army that is alert, watchful, eager, merciless; an army that never relents, never grants a truce.

It moves by squad, by company, by battalion, by regiment, by brigade, by division, by army corps; upon occasion it masses its parts and moves upon mankind with its whole strength. It is the Creator's Grand Army, and he is the Commander-in-Chief. Along its battlefront its grisly banners wave their legends in the face of the sun:

Disaster, Disease, and the rest.

Disease! That is the main force, the diligent force, the devastating force! It attacks the infant the moment it is born; it furnishes it one malady after another:

croup, measles, mumps, bowel troubles, teething pains, scarlet fever, and other childhood specialties. It chases the child into youth and furnishes it some specialties for that time of life. It chases the youth into maturity, maturity into age, age into the grave.

With these facts before you will you now try to guess man's chiefest pet name for this ferocious Commander-in-Chief? I will save you the trouble -- but you must not laugh. It is Our Father in Heaven!

It is curious -- the way the human mind works. The Christian begins with this straight proposition, this definite proposition, this inflexible and uncompromising proposition: God is all-knowing, and all-powerful.

This being the case, nothing can happen without his knowing beforehand that it is going to happen; nothing happens without his permission; nothing can happen that he chooses to prevent.

That is definite enough, isn't it? It makes the Creator distinctly responsible for everything that happens, doesn't it?

The Christian concedes it in that italicized sentence. Concedes it with feeling, with enthusiasm.

Then, having thus made the Creator responsible for all those pains and diseases and miseries above enumerated, and which he could have prevented, the gifted Christian blandly calls him Our Father!

It is as I tell you. He equips the Creator with every trait that goes to the making of a fiend, and then arrives at the conclusion that a fiend and a father are the same thing! Yet he would deny that a malevolent lunatic and a Sunday school superintendent are essentially the same. What do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you think there is a human mind.

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Well he did say that he'd reply to my retort last night, and it is now the next night with no response... Maybe he has seen the light of reason?? I doubt it.

About your sky fairy point; so God CHANGES HIS MIND about Abraham - how can a perfect being change is mind?? If he's perfect, that means he is incapable of making a mistake; changing his mind implies that he made a decision he wasn't satisfied with, and thus renders him imperfect. The Bible disproves their own god! This is one of the most telling verses in the Bible in my opinion:

1 Samuel 15:35
And Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul. And the LORD regretted that he had made Saul king over Israel.

Wait a second... So an omniscient being, one who already knows all outcomes before they occur, REGRETTED something??? How can an omniscient being feel regret?! He would have been able to see all outcomes and obviously chosen the outcome that pleases him the most, seeing as how he's supposed to be omnipotent, thus rendering it impossible for a perfect being to feel this negative emotion.

You are right that having faith IS NOT the same as having trust, but many people get the terms confused. In your example with the women... Why would the women need faith? Did they not have machines and supplies to help them build? The US Government and population on their side? Life experiences to give them confidence in their abilities? All of this and more amounts to REASON to believe. Only if they were in a total vacuum would they need faith. If the ONLY WAY possible for the allies to have been victorious was supernatural intervention THEN they would have had to have faith. If they could get the job done by natural means (which they did), then they have reason instead of faith.

It's like the whole "I have faith in my wife/husband" argument. If you are close enough to marry your significant other, THEN YOU DON'T NEED FAITH to trust them. You obviously have reason, and a lot of it. If your partner was an alien from a distant galaxy, then you would need faith to truest it. If it is a human being whom you have a deep relationship with, faith is irrelevant.

Does that make sense?

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This is being POSTED again due to the way the TOPIC TITLE also indicates you've MISSED IT:



LETTERS FROM EARTH cont:

Letter VI

On the third day, about noon, it was found that a fly and been left behind. The return voyage turned out to be long and difficult, on account of the lack of chart and compass, and because of the changed aspects of all coasts, the steadily rising water having submerged some of the lower landmarks and given to higher ones an unfamiliar look; but after sixteen days of earnest and faithful seeking, the fly was found at last, and received on board with hymns of praise and gratitude, the Family standing meanwhile uncovered, our of reverence for its divine origin. It was weary and worn, and had suffered somewhat from the weather, but was otherwise in good estate. Men and their families had died of hunger on barren mountain tops, but it had not lacked for food, the multitudinous corpses furnishing it in rank and rotten richness. Thus was the sacred bird providentially preserved.

Providentially. That is the word. For the fly had not been left behind by accident. No, the hand of Providence was in it. There are no accidents. All things that happen, happen for a purpose. They are foreseen from the beginning of time, they are ordained from the beginning of time. From the dawn of Creation the Lord had foreseen that Noah, being alarmed and confused by the invasion of the prodigious brevet fossils, would prematurely fly to sea unprovided with a certain invaluable disease. He would have all the other diseases, and could distribute them among the new races of men as they appeared in the world, but he would lack one of the very best --

typhoid fever; a malady which, when the circumstances are especially favorable, is able to utterly wreck a patient without killing him; for it can restore him to his feet with a long life in him, and yet deaf, dumb, blind, crippled, and idiotic. The housefly is its main disseminator, and is more competent and more calamitously effective than all the other distributors of the dreaded scourge put together. And so, by foreordination from the beginning of time, this fly was left behind to seek out a typhoid corpse and feed upon its corruptions and gaum its legs with germs and transmit them to the re-peopled world for permanent business.

From that one housefly, in the ages that have since elapsed, billions of sickbeds have been stocked, billions of wrecked bodies sent tottering about the earth, and billions of cemeteries recruited with the dead.

It is most difficult to understand the disposition of the Bible God, it is such a confusion of contradictions; of watery instabilities and iron firmness; of goody-goody abstract morals made out of words, and concreted hell-born ones made out of acts; of fleeting kindness repented of in permanent malignities.


However, when after much puzzling you get at the key to his disposition, you do at last arrive at a sort of understanding of it. With a most quaint and juvenile and astonishing frankness he has furnished that key himself. It is jealousy!

I expect that to take your breath away. You are aware -- for I have already told you in an earlier letter -- that among human beings jealousy ranks distinctly as a weakness; a trade-mark of small minds; a property of all small minds, yet a property which even the smallest is ashamed of; and when accused of its possession will lyingly deny it and resent the accusation as an insult.

Jealousy. Do not forget it, keep it in mind. It is the key. With it you will come to partly understand God as we go along; without it nobody can understand him. As I have said, he has openly held up this treasonous key himself, for all to see. He says, naïvely, outspokenly, and without suggestion of embarrassment:


"I the Lord thy God am a jealous God."

You see, it is only another way of saying,

"I the Lord thy God am a small God; a small God, and fretful about small things."

He was giving a warning:

he could not bear the thought of any other God getting some of the Sunday compliments of this comical little human race -- he wanted all of them for himself. He valued them. To him they were riches; just as tin money is to a Zulu.


But wait -- I am not fair; I am misrepresenting him; prejudice is beguiling me into saying what is not true. He did not say he wanted all of the adulations; he said nothing about not being willing to share them with his fellow gods; what he said was, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."

It is a quite different thing, and puts him in a much better light -- I confess it. There was an abundance of gods, the woods were full of them, as the saying is, and all he demanded was that he should be ranked as high as the others -- not above any of them, but not below any of them. He was willing that they should fertilize earthly virgins, but not on any better terms than he could have for himself in his turn. He wanted to be held their equal. This he insisted upon, in the clearest language: he would have no other gods before him. They could march abreast with him, but none of them could head the procession, and he did not claim the right to head it himself.

Do you think he was able to stick to that upright and creditable position? No. He could keep to a bad resolution forever, but he couldn't keep to a good one a month. By and by he threw aside and calmly claimed to be the only God in the entire universe.

As I was saying, jealousy is the key; all through his history it is present and prominent. It is the blood and bone of his disposition, it is the basis of his character. How small a thing can wreck his composure and disorder his judgement if it touches the raw of his jealousy! And nothing warms up this trait so quickly and so surely and so exaggeratedly as a suspicion that some competition with the god-Trust is impending. The fear that if Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge they would "be as gods" so fired his jealousy that his reason was affected, and he could not treat those poor creatures either fairly or charitably, or even refrain from dealing cruelly and criminally with their blameless posterity.

To this day his reason has never recovered from that shock; a wild nightmare of vengefulness has possessed him ever since, and he has almost bankrupted his native ingenuities in inventing pains and miseries and humiliations and heartbreaks wherewith to embitter the brief lives of Adam's descendants. Think of the diseases he has contrived for them! They are multitudinous; no book can name them all. And each one is a trap, set for an innocent victim.

The human being is a machine. An automatic machine. It is composed of thousands of complex and delicate mechanisms, which perform their functions harmoniously and perfectly, in accordance with laws devised for their governance, and over which the man himself has no authority, no mastership, no control. For each one of these thousands of mechanisms the Creator has planned an enemy, whose office is to harass it, pester it, persecute it, damage it, afflict it with pains, and miseries, and ultimate destruction. Not one has been overlooked.

From cradle to grave these enemies are always at work; they know no rest, night or day. They are an army: an organized army; a besieging army; an assaulting army; an army that is alert, watchful, eager, merciless; an army that never relents, never grants a truce.

It moves by squad, by company, by battalion, by regiment, by brigade, by division, by army corps; upon occasion it masses its parts and moves upon mankind with its whole strength. It is the Creator's Grand Army, and he is the Commander-in-Chief. Along its battlefront its grisly banners wave their legends in the face of the sun:

Disaster, Disease, and the rest.

Disease! That is the main force, the diligent force, the devastating force! It attacks the infant the moment it is born; it furnishes it one malady after another:

croup, measles, mumps, bowel troubles, teething pains, scarlet fever, and other childhood specialties. It chases the child into youth and furnishes it some specialties for that time of life. It chases the youth into maturity, maturity into age, age into the grave.

With these facts before you will you now try to guess man's chiefest pet name for this ferocious Commander-in-Chief? I will save you the trouble -- but you must not laugh. It is Our Father in Heaven!

It is curious -- the way the human mind works. The Christian begins with this straight proposition, this definite proposition, this inflexible and uncompromising proposition: God is all-knowing, and all-powerful.

This being the case, nothing can happen without his knowing beforehand that it is going to happen; nothing happens without his permission; nothing can happen that he chooses to prevent.

That is definite enough, isn't it? It makes the Creator distinctly responsible for everything that happens, doesn't it?

The Christian concedes it in that italicized sentence. Concedes it with feeling, with enthusiasm.

Then, having thus made the Creator responsible for all those pains and diseases and miseries above enumerated, and which he could have prevented, the gifted Christian blandly calls him Our Father!

It is as I tell you. He equips the Creator with every trait that goes to the making of a fiend, and then arrives at the conclusion that a fiend and a father are the same thing! Yet he would deny that a malevolent lunatic and a Sunday school superintendent are essentially the same. What do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you think there is a human mind.

So the QUESTION is WHY do these CHRISITIANS keep TRUSTING this MALEVOLENT JEALOUS GOD???


RE: FAITH vs REASON


ARE you familiar with NOTES from UNDERGROUND by DOSTOEVSKY???

You can read it ONLINE for FREE.

http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DosNote.html

It's an INTERESTING DEBATE regarding FREE WILL vs DETERMINISM or RATIONALISM and REASON.

And the never named UNDERGROUND MAN who NARRATES the TALE also tells us this:

STUPIDITY PRESERVES INDIVIDUALITY

An example of this would be if you want to eat a YUMMY HOT FUDGE ice cream SUNDAE with a CHERRY on top ...

but REASON tells you doing so will CLOG your ARTERIES and lead to HEART DISEASE ...

and make you FAT ...

and ROT your TEETH ...

but STUPIDITY also comes into play and RULES the DAY ...

when YOU STILL use your FREE WILL and CHOSE to eat it anyway.

See what I mean???

REASON vs FREE WILL is some VERY TRICKY stuff.

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I think the free will issue is pretty obvious. The only reason I'm writing this sentence right now is the neurological makeup of my brain. If my brain was wired differently, due to a different set of genes, I would be a completely different person. This seems to me to be irrefutable. Your genes control who you are; it doesn't seem to be able to reduce any further than that. Scientists can know what you're going to think before you are consciously aware of it. The most obvious evidence that our genes are in control is the fact that we can't know what we're going to think next until we think it. In other words, thoughts just spontaneously appear in our minds, making us think that 'we' are the ones who initiated the thought, when in reality the brain initiated the thought before we were even consciously aware of it. Check out this talk by neuroscientist Sam Harris on the topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g

(Ignore the creationist idiots in the comments. I will handle them later :))

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The point is these others who have degrees in PHYSICS ...

and have studied SCIENCE and the SCIENTIFIC METHOD ...

and still CHOSE to believe in the SKY FAIRY ...

are still also FREE to do so.

Same as we are also FREE to CHOSE NOT to believe in such a thing.

See what I mean?

So whereas we may find their FAITH or their belief in this SKY FAIRY to be a STUPID thing,

they are also still FREE to CHOSE to BELIEVE what they believe ...

same way as we are also FREE to CHOSE to EAT that nice YUMMY HOT CHOCOLATE FUDGE SUNDAE for DESERT even though we also KNOW doing so is a STUPID thing to do.

And OUR GENETIC MAKE UP also doesn't have that much to do with the DECISION we make.

The decision we make is based more upon our being IRRATIONAL when we make the choice to IGNORE our REASON which tells us EATING the DESERT is a BAD THING to do.

But we still CHOSE to do it anyhow, same way as these others also still CHOSE to believe what they do about the SKY FAIRY regardless of what REASON tells them about him.

See what I mean?

This is also the reason why REASON isn't always the BEST CHOICE one can make.

Because if a human being is NOTHING but a PRE PROGRAMED set of RESPONSES ...

then what is he???

He becomes a MACHINE and not a HUMAN.

Right???

Without FREE WILL or FREE CHOICE we basically become a PUPPET who has their PUPPET STRINGS pulled to always do what's REASONABLE.

And sometimes the best choice we can make is to chose to do what is NOT REASONABLE.

RIGHT???

Because what would LIFE be like without DESERTS and other TREATS like that to eat and enjoy???

What would it be like to ONLY ever EAT what is GOOD for us or what REASON DICTATES to us that we should eat???

In that case wouldn't OUR REASON also become a TYRANT ???

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"The point is these others who have degrees in PHYSICS ...

and have studied SCIENCE and the SCIENTIFIC METHOD ...

and still CHOSE to believe in the SKY FAIRY ...

are still also FREE to do so.

Same as we are also FREE to CHOSE NOT to believe in such a thing.

See what I mean?"

I see what you mean, but you have to look at WHY they believe that nonsense and why we don't. The only reason they believe in fairy tales is because they were born with the genetic makeup that coded for proteins to develop their brains to respond better to faith rather than reason. We were born with more rational minds. So while we have the illusion of free will, at bottom, we are what our genes and our life experiences make of us. For example, if I had the exact same genes and life experiences as you, I WOULD BE YOU, exactly as you are (and vice versa - to any person on Earth). There is nothing extra to separate people besides genes and life experiences. So to recap; the only reason we 'choose' not to believe in fairy tales, and some people 'choose' to believe in fairy tales is our genes which code for the neurological makeup of our brains. I could not choose to believe in ancient myths even if I wanted to - I could not make myself believe, which makes the doctrine of eternal torture even more ridiculous.

"The decision we make is based more upon our being IRRATIONAL"

Some people are born with the disposition to be more irrational that others. While some may give in and eat the yummy ice cream (like myself), others may choose not to. What is the difference between the person who chooses to eat and the person who doesn't? GENES. It is the only thing. We are only as free as our genes allow us to be.

"Because if a human being is NOTHING but a PRE PROGRAMED set of RESPONSES ...

then what is he???"

A Vulcan? ;)

"Without FREE WILL or FREE CHOICE we basically become a PUPPET who has their PUPPET STRINGS pulled to always do what's REASONABLE."

But the fact is WE DON'T always do what's reasonable. Like I said before, some people are born with the disposition to be more rational than others. What is the difference between me saying we don't have free will and you saying we do if not our genes?

"Because what would LIFE be like without DESERTS and other TREATS like that to eat and enjoy???

What would it be like to ONLY ever EAT what is GOOD for us or what REASON DICTATES to us that we should eat???"

I don't think it's quite that black and white. Reason would not tell us in every circumstance "do not eat tasty food if it is not perfectly happy". On the contrary, if unhealthy, tasty food makes us happy, where if we didn't eat it we become depressed, the reasonable thing to do would be to eat the food (then exercise)!

Albert Einstein "Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper."

Everything in the universe relies on causal relationships. Why would little human beings be any different?

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YOu said:

if I had the exact same genes and life experiences as you, I WOULD BE YOU

My reply:

THIS is NOT SO. Because we also have SEVERAL SCIENTIFIC STUDIES of IDENTICAL TWINS or even QUADS who have the SAME GENES and LIFE EXPERIENCES, yet are still NOT the SAME PERSON.

If one TWIN has a certain condition, for example, sometimes there's only a 40% chance the other one will also have it.

So something else besides GENETICS and what we experience in life is also at play.

Anyhow, the point of what THE UNDERGROUND MAN is saying is that SOMETIMES ...

EVEN WHen we KNOW what is the MOST REASONALBLE THING to do ...

the MOST ADVANTAGEOUS ADVANTAGE would be to do what is NOT REASONABLE.

Because that's the way in which we maintain our INDIVIDUALITY ...

by doing what is NOT REASONABLE ...

even though by doing what is NOT REASONABLE makes what we do a STUPID THING to do.

Hence the reason why he also says:

STUPIDITY PRESERVES INDIVIDUALITY.

Smoking is still another example of this.

People also still continue to keep doing that even though they also know it has CONSEQUENCES that can kill them.

But we still also have no right to DICTATE to them whether or not they need to STOP doing it or not.

Right???

So if HICC wants to believe in THE SKY FAIRY, he also still has the right to CHOSE to do so???






http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/19376

“What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, consciously, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, wilfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness. So, I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter to them than any advantage...

The fact is, gentlemen, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to almost every man than his greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical) there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than all other advantages, for the sake of which a man if necessary is ready to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason, honour, peace, prosperity -- in fact, in opposition to all those excellent and useful things if only he can attain that fundamental, most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all. "Yes, but it's advantage all the same," you will retort. But excuse me, I'll make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words. What matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every system constructed by lovers of mankind for the benefit of mankind. In fact, it upsets everything...

One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy -- is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms.

And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.

Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of ours, may be in reality, gentlemen, more advantageous for us than anything else on earth, especially in certain cases… for in any circumstances

it preserves for us what is most precious and most important -- that is, our personality,

our individuality.

Some, you see, maintain that this really is the most precious thing for mankind; choice can, of course, if it chooses, be in agreement with reason … It is profitable and sometimes even praiseworthy. But very often, and even most often, choice is utterly and stubbornly opposed to reason ... and ... and ... do you know that that, too, is profitable, sometimes even praiseworthy?

I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! … And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don't know?

You will scream at me (that is, if you condescend to do so) that no one is touching my free will, that all they are concerned with is that my will should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic. Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that!”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground



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Why did you delete your message?

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The newest studies show that identical twins DO NOT share identical DNA (though it is very close):

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=identical-twins-genes-are-not-identical

They also DO NOT have identical life experiences. Even something seemingly small, like an event that happened to one of them as a baby that didn't occur to the other one, can shift brain development drastically.

"Smoking is still another example of this.

People also still continue to keep doing that even though they also know it has CONSEQUENCES that can kill them."

People who smoke typically are not the smartest of people.

http://phys.org/news189351441.html

If humans were completely rational beings, then yes, no one would smoke. But we are far from completely rational (thus we have people believing in sky fairies) due to genetic differences.

"But we still also have no right to DICTATE to them whether or not they need to STOP doing it or not."

Sure, if they insist on doing something extremely unhealthy and unsightly, we shouldn't be able to lock them up in a cage so they can't slowly kill themselves. All we can do is show them the evidence of all the harm smoking does and hope they make the rational decision.

"So if HICC wants to believe in THE SKY FAIRY, he also still has the right to CHOSE to do so???"

He does have the right to do so, but that right comes with consequences. More than likely he is going to tell his kids that the sky fairy exists, that we live in some sort of magical realm not bound by nature but by magic men, that science cannot be trusted, and so on. Many of them go on to try to force schools to teach magic in science class. The belief in a sky fairy has help humanity back for thousands of years. In its most basic sense, it thwarts the human instinct to understand with facile religious explanations. We have finally answered that age old question of "what are the stars", yet religious people deny that which humanity has sought for so long. And it's not like they are 'feely' choosing to deny science for ancient myths; most likely if they weren't brainwashed to believe in fairy tales since birth, they would rejoice in the wonders of the Cosmos. As Neil Degrasse Tyson says:

“Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.

I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos. That makes me want to grab people on the street and say: ‘Have you HEARD THIS?”

But no, they don't want to hear this. They have been conditioned since birth to deny this because of religious dogma. Our ancient Greek ancestors would be disgusted...

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This is what the link says:

such variation is a natural occurrence that accumulates with age in everyone.

"I believe that the genome that you're born with is not the genome that you die with—at least not for all the cells in your body," he says.

Charles agrees. Genetic variations can arise after a double strand of DNA breaks when exposed to ionizing radiation or carcinogens. "It reminds us to be careful about our environment because our environment can help to change our genome," he says.

Plus, these variations may predict age-related diseases. Lee adds: "As you age … your chances for having a genomic rearrangement that causes a certain disease increases all the time."

The differences between identical twins increase as they age,

because environmentally triggered changes accumulate.

But twins can also begin their lives with differences

It says the Variation between the TWINS ACCUMLATES with AGE.

It says they BELIEVE the way someone is born isn't the way they die.

Saying THEY BELIEVE this also isn't giving us any FACTS to back up or PROVE that this is so.

Because BELIEF in what they're saying places what they say into the SAME CATEGORY as RELIGION.

But even before reading about how the CHANGES were a result of RADIATION from the ENVIRONMENT ...

(which is also not a change which is DUE to our DNA ... but is a change that has an EFFECT on our DNA),

one also already KNEW that to be the case ...

due to the way the ASTRONAUTS also have DNA damage done to them whenever they go into SPACE.

So this also isn't really saying anything NEW by saying IDENTICAL TWINS aren't IDENTICAL when they are CREATED.

What it's saying is after their CREATION the ENVIRONMENT DAMAGES their DNA ..

something that can also happen WHILE they are STILL IN THE WOMB ...

even before they are born ...

due to the way SUNLIGHT can also PENETRATE into the WOMB area ...

even if the mother is wearing clothing.


So these DIFFERENCES are MAINLY due to ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGES and NOT DUE to the way our DNA is created.

And we also have NO DATA or PROOF listed in this link that IDENTICAL TWINS aren't CREATED EQUAL.


Because all it says is:

THEY CAN BEGIN their lives with DIFFERENCES ...

which also means they can also BEGIN their lives WITHOUT THEM.

It also doesn't CLARIFY what it means when it says BEGIN their lives.

Does it refer to their BIRTH and their EXIT from the WOMB?

If so, then that would also EXCLUDE their CREATION inside of the WOMB ...

the place where they would still also BEGIN THE LIFE CYCLE as being IDENTICAL ...

prior to the time when exposed to RADIATION from the SUNLIGHT ...

or to radiation from XRAYS the mother has if she's not aware she's pregnant ...

or if she has them anyway by being ZAPPED by a TRAFFIC COP ...

or when exposed to POLLUTION that she injests from other CHEMICALS and PESTICIDES found in food and water, or in the medicines she takes, or in the air she breathes, etc. which also has an effect on them and their development while they are still inside THE WOMB.

Anyhow, the differences are also still so SMALL as to render them almost NON EXISTENT ... if one also needs a MICROSCOPE in order to find them ... which also doesn't have an effect on still using them for the SCIENTIFIC STUDIES of IDENTICAL TWINS.

AND what you say also doesn't PROVE the POINT you made previously that IF we had the SAME DNA and same LIFE EXPERIENCES then YOU WOULD BE ME EITHER.


Because you could also be MY IDENTICAL CLONE, but you also still wouldn't BE ME in that case either.

RE: FREE WILL:

PEOPLE DOING STUPID things is also the POINT of what the UNDERGROUND MAN is saying.

Because he's saying EVEN if you show someone how what they do or BELIEVE is STUPID ...

a person will still CHOSE to do it or BELIEVE it anyway ...

if for no other reason than to SPITE YOU ...

as a way to SHOW YOU that they ARE NOT OBLIGATED to THINK the way in which you want them to.

See what I mean???

That's what makes us HUMAN.

The ability to CHOSE to do or BELIEVE STUPID THINGS ...

which includes the BELIEF that BETTING on a BALLGAME means you can win some money or that buying a LOTTERY TICKET could make you RICH, and therefore a more HAPPY person as a result of being rich, etc.

[b]The BELIEF in SKY FAIRIES is also NOT due to GENETICS.


Raise ONE TWIN in one ENVIROMENT with one set of ADOPTIVE PARENTS who are RELIGIOUS, you'll MOST LIKELY get a RELIGIOUS TWIN.

Raise the OTHER IDENTICAL TWIN in another ENVIRNOMENT with another different set of ADOPTIVE PARENTS who are NOT RELIGIOUS, you'll MOST LIKELY also get a NON RELIGIOUS TWIN.

And didn't you also PREVIOUSLY state OUR RELIGIOUS VIEWS were MOSTLY due to OUR GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION???

MANY VARIABLES go into making us WHAT WE LATER BECOME.

EDUCATION can also play a ROLE in MAKING US what we BECOME.


KIDS who have RELIGIOUS PARENTS often end up being NON RELIGIOUS ...

thus also giving us PROFF that what you say about BEING CONDITIONED from BIRTH

IS NOT SO.



You definitely also have a TENDENCY to GENERALIZE too much by making these kinds of BLANKET STATEMENTS or these kind of SWEEPING GENERALIZATIONS.

Being CONDITIONED since BIRTH to believe RELIGIOUS DOGMA is NO GUARANTEE the child won't grow up to be an ATHEIST.

And being CONDITIONED since BIRTH to be an ATHEIST is also NO GUARANTEE the child won't grow up to be RELIGIOUS either.

BUT either way ...

the KID would still also HAVE THE FREE WILL to CHOSE to BELIEVE or NOT BELIEVE whatever it is that HE WISHES to BELIEVE.

See what I mean???

EVEN IF it were a STUPID thing to believe.

Because that's also a part of what makes us a DEMOCRACY ...

The right to believe what we CHOSE to believe ...

thus also making what your other LINK has to say about FREE WILL being AN ILLUSION INCORRECT.

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If we have free will, why do we not consciously decide what to think (which would require us thinking something before we thing it)? How can you say we are free when our consciousness is practically nothing in the grand scheme of the brain?

http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/brain-scans-can-reveal-your-decisions-7-seconds-before-you-decide

You say we choose but you are ignorant to the unconscious processes that go into making these choices. If not genetic differences that influence the structure of our brains, what is causing me to deny free will and you to believe in it?

"Because you could also be MY IDENTICAL CLONE, but you also still wouldn't BE ME in that case either."

If I was your clone, right down to the memories in your head, I may not be you, but I would be exactly like you, which is the point I'm trying to make.

"[b]The BELIEF in SKY FAIRIES is also NOT due to GENETICS.


Raise ONE TWIN in one ENVIROMENT with one set of ADOPTIVE PARENTS who are RELIGIOUS, you'll MOST LIKELY get a RELIGIOUS TWIN.

Raise the OTHER IDENTICAL TWIN in another ENVIRNOMENT with another different set of ADOPTIVE PARENTS who are NOT RELIGIOUS, you'll MOST LIKELY also get a NON RELIGIOUS TWIN."

Why are you ignoring that I said genes AND LIFE EXPERIENCES? This does nothing but strengthen my point...

"You definitely also have a TENDENCY to GENERALIZE too much by making these kinds of BLANKET STATEMENTS or these kind of SWEEPING GENERALIZATIONS."

You have a tendency to turn statements like "the main factor of religious belief is the parents and culture to which you were born" into "the ONLY factor of religious belief is the parents and culture to which you were born" into"

OF COURSE THERE ARE SOME EXCEPTIONS!!!

If I said "most planets in our solar system harbor moons, therefore most planets in other solar systems will most likely harbor moons as well", you would say "nuh uh, Venus doesn't have a moon!" (as if finding a few exceptions proves the entire argument wrong, despite overwhelming evidence).

"Being CONDITIONED since BIRTH to believe RELIGIOUS DOGMA is NO GUARANTEE the child won't grow up to be an ATHEIST.

And being CONDITIONED since BIRTH to be an ATHEIST is also NO GUARANTEE the child won't grow up to be RELIGIOUS either."

I never said it guarantees anything, thus making YOU commit the informal fallacy of a straw man. "The biggest factor for religious belief is parents and culture" DOES NOT EQUAL "the ONLY factor for religious belief is parents and culture".

Is this line of 'argument' not extremely fallacious?

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This QUESTION was already ANSWERED for you. Your QUESTIONS have also been ANSWERED by THE UNDERGROUND MAN ... who begins by telling you about how he has a TOOTH ACHE ...

and he KNOWS he needs to see a DOCTOR ...

but he still REFUSES to see one OUT of SPITE.

WHY?

Because even though he KNOWS he's being UNREASONABLE ...

he still gets PLEASURE out of making the MOANS he makes ...

and the way in which those MOANS upset the other people who hear him making them.



Like the case with MARK TWAIN telling you about the FLY that NOAH goes back to get ...

The UM is a VERY FUNNY MAN who does whatever it takes to PROVE to you how he still has FREE WILL ...

no matter how SILLY or STUPID it may be.

And this is the PART of it you still don't seem to comprehend or get yet SB.

How HUMANS will be IRRATIONAL ...

or do IRRATIONAL and UNREASONALBE things ...

or BELIEVE in them ...

just to PROVE to you they are still HUMAN.




So it is also YOU and that other guy in your LINK who seem to be IGNORANT of the GOOFY way in which the HUMAN MIND works.

On the other hand, THE UM and xxpo are well AWARE of the UNCONSCIOUS PROCESSES at play or the fact that HUMANS will still be UNREASONABLE with you and the REASONS why they will ...

which is to PROVE to you they are NOT PRE PROGRAMED ROBOTS or PUPPETS who DANCE TO THE PULL of some already PRE DETERMINED set of strings.

See what I mean?

You're so OBSESSED with REASON and with being RATIONAL that you OVERLOOK the way in which BEING IRRATIONAL also plays a part in our BEING HUMAN.

You also previously mentioned the ANCIENT GREEKS.

It's the OLD APOLLO vs DIONYSIS issue: ORDER vs CHAOS

RE: CLONES:

Even if you had the SAME GENETIC MAKE UP and MEMORIES, you would STILL NOT BE ME.

DOLLY the CLONED SHEEP also already PROVED the reason why when she only LIVED HALF as long as her PARENT SHEEP.

Dolly also had many other HEALTH ISSUES as well that the PARENT SHEEP did not have.

If you were my CLONE, you would suffer from the same ISSUES DOLLY DID ... and you'd also only live HALF as LONG (assuming each of us didn't have an accident and we lived out the full life span we had available to us).

RE: TWINS:

Did you or did you not previously also say the MAJOR ISSUE was GEOGRAPHY that determines what RELIGION a person would be???

Now you say it is GENETICS and/or LIFE EXPERIENCES?

Does this not also PROVE the POINT being made that it is MANY VARIABLES that go into making a person RELIGIOUS or NOT???

This issue can be solved easily enough.

Where are the STUDIES that PROVE your point ... that it is MAINLY this or that FACTOR which decides whether a person will be RELIGIOUS or not???



When one says MANY VARIABLES are involved ...

that is also NOT saying only ONE ISSUE is involved.

MANY VARIABLES means MANY SITUATIONS ... not ONE SITUATION ... are at play.

Are you familiar with the use of CATEGORICAL SYLLOGISM???

If not, then Perhaps this may also be helpful to you:


http://www.logicalfallacies.info/presumption/sweeping-generalisation/

Sweeping Generalisation Fallacy

Explanation

A sweeping generalisation applies a general statement too broadly.

If one takes a general rule, and applies it to a case to which, due to the specific features of the case, the rule does not apply, then one commits the sweeping generalisation fallacy.

This fallacy is the reverse of a hasty generalisation, which infers a general rule from a specific case. [/b]

Example

(1) Children should be seen and not heard.
(2) Little Wolfgang Amadeus is a child.

Therefore:

(3) Little Wolfgang Amadeus shouldn’t be heard.

No matter what you think of the general principle that children should be seen and not heard, a child prodigy pianist about to perform is worth listening to; the general principle doesn’t apply.

Has this been helpful???

Do you see what I mean???

The SPECIFIC FEATURES of a case also need to APPLY as well whenever one mentions an ISSUE.

So for one to be ACCURATE about what one is saying ...

one would also need to say:

With the exception of VENUS, MOST PLANETS in our Solar System have moons

if one wants to MAKE a statement that is NOT a SWEEPING GENERALIZATION.




Part I

Chapter IV

"Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next," you cry, with a laugh.

"Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment," I answer. I had toothache for a whole month and I know there is. In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point.

The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan. It is a good example, gentlemen, and I will develop it. Those moans express in the first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same while she does not.

They express the consciousness that you have no enemy to punish, but that you have pain; the consciousness that in spite of all possible Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to your teeth; that if someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, and if he does not, they will go on aching another three months; and that finally if you are still contumacious and still protest, all that is left you for your own gratification is to thrash yourself or beat your wall with your fist as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing more.

Well, these mortal insults, these jeers on the part of someone unknown, end at last in an enjoyment which sometimes reaches the highest degree of voluptuousness. I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache, on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan, not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and European civilisation, a man who is "divorced from the soil and the national elements," as they express it now-a-days.

His moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha'porth of faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently, more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all these recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure.

As though he would say:

"I am worrying you, I am lacerating your hearts, I am keeping everyone in the house awake. Well, stay awake then, you, too, feel every minute that I have toothache. I am not a hero to you now, as I tried to seem before, but simply a nasty person, an impostor.

Well, so be it, then! I am very glad that you see through me.

It is nasty for you to hear my despicable moans:

well, let it be nasty; here I will let you have a nastier flourish in a minute. ..."

You do not understand even now, gentlemen? No, it seems our development and our consciousness must go further to understand all the intricacies of this pleasure. You laugh? Delighted. My jests, gentlemen, are of course in bad taste, jerky, involved, lacking self-confidence. But of course that is because I do not respect myself. Can a man of perception respect himself at all?

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Stealer, so I take it that you believe the earth and universe are billions of years old. I really do not subscribe to that belief; however I do understand why you believe it. I will be honest with you and tell you that although that is not my belief, I really do not have a real problem being wrong on the age of the universe and admit that it is possible that the universe is approximately 14 billion years old. I read a book in college in my spare time, which stated that there are literally billions of different places in the universe where time is indifferent. Take an object for example, like a planet; time depends on the velocity and mass of that planet. The book states that if you could hypothetically place a clock on the moon and one on the earth at the same time, the clocks would not move at the same rate. There are a billion different examples of this and I believe you get the point. Do you disagree? See, I do not have a problem admitting that I do not know everything; nor does any scientist on this planet. There are some things science simply cannot explain.

I know that I will never be able to convince you there is a God and you will never be able to prove to me that there is not. However, I would still like to think we can have a friendly conversation. You are in a field that is fascinating and I am truly grateful that I have someone like yourself to ask certain questions. Once again, I will respect you as long as you treat me with respect. You can have character throughout our discussions or when you are finished with me, subsequently you can call me an idiot. I understand that you hate the idea of a God and I have seen some of your posts on other threads where you have went out of your way to say there is no greater power; (Paul Newman post) when they were not even debating God’s existence. Btw, I did not go through much, simply because I do not care; nor have the time. Also, I did not point that out to bust on you, it just made me curious. You must really hate the idea of a God and that has me curious. I do not hate or despise Atheists or go out of my way to put them down. Everyone has a right to their opinion. I would just ask you to be a little open minded. Feel free to share why you feel the need to despise the idea of God. I am wondering if your parents forced you to believe or you have a real problem with something it states in the scripture.

So are you ready for my next question? Btw, I did try posting something the other night and it would not work for some reason. So, my apologies for not getting back to you sooner.

Btw, I hope you have a good weekend.


"Yeah well, you know, that's just like your opinion man."

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"Stealer, so I take it that you believe the earth and universe are billions of years old."

Yes, as does every other scientist, religious and irreligious alike.

"I really do not subscribe to that belief; however I do understand why you believe it."

The overwhelming evidence?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe

"The age of the universe is defined in physical cosmology as the time elapsed since the Big Bang. The best estimate of the age of the universe is 13.772 ± 0.059 billion years (4.346 ± 0.019 *1017 seconds) within the Lambda-CDM concordance model. The uncertainty of 59 million years has been obtained by the agreement of a number of scientific research projects, such as microwave background radiation measurements by Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and other probes. Measurements of the cosmic background radiation give the cooling time of the universe since the Big Bang, and measurements of the expansion rate of the universe can be used to calculate its approximate age by extrapolating backwards in time."

This is not some sort of "belief" (I know religious people love to pretend science works on the same assumptions as religion), but one of the most strongly supported facts in science.

"I read a book in college in my spare time, which stated that there are literally billions of different places in the universe where time is indifferent. Take an object for example, like a planet; time depends on the velocity and mass of that planet. The book states that if you could hypothetically place a clock on the moon and one on the earth at the same time, the clocks would not move at the same rate."

Yes, this is part of Einstein's theory of relativity (it's called gravitational time dilation). Time and space are interconnected, and gravity has a small influence on the flow of time. Your Moon and Earth example were correct; since the Moon has less gravity, time would flow slightly faster, making you age slightly faster than on the Earth. In this case, the difference would be so small to not make much of a difference, even if you lived your entire life on the Moon (because the difference in gravity is so small). To truly 'change time' (but only the PERSPECTIVE of time, you would need to be near the event horizon of a black hole. This has absolutely nothing to do with the true age of the universe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Gravitational_time_dilation

Here are answers to your questions about time dilation and the age of the universe:

http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=301364

"See, I do not have a problem admitting that I do not know everything; nor does any scientist on this planet."

This is true. The only sources claimed to be infallible are ancient religious books.

"There are some things science simply cannot explain."

For the moment, yes. Are you trying to use the god of the gaps argument?

"I know that I will never be able to convince you there is a God"

Actually, it would be quite easy to convince me there is a god. The only thing it would take is a suspension of the natural laws; something that could only be done by supernatural intervention. That would at least give some credence to the notion of a god.

"and you will never be able to prove to me that there is not."

WOW, so you are admitting that your mind is irreversibly made up? It is hard to have a rational discussion with someone who is so obstinate - "I believe in magic with absolutely no evidence, and nothing can ever change my mind!" Richard Dawkins would call this line of thought a disgrace to humanity; it is the complete antithesis to how science works. Imagine if all humans thought this way - we would still be living on a flat Earth that was the center of the universe... It reminds me of the quote by Carl Sagan:

“In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”

"You can have character throughout our discussions or when you are finished with me, subsequently you can call me an idiot."

I would not do that. I don't think religious PEOPLE are idiots (at least not all of them), but their religious BELIEFS are idiotic. I realize the only reason you are a member of a certain religion is cultural and social indoctrination; for example, if you were born in the Middle East, more than likely you'd be discussing the validity of Allah and the divinity of Mohammad.

"where you have went out of your way to say there is no greater power"

I certainly do not the deny the fact that there are MANY greater powers than puny humans. Stars, black holes, etc. I deny that there is some sort of SUPERNATURAL magical entity living outside of time and space (just like I deny that there is an invisible, immaterial unicorn living in my basement).

"Feel free to share why you feel the need to despise the idea of God."

The idea of god, in its broadest sense, including all myths and superstitions, has held back humanity for thousands of years. How many people have died in the name of something that doesn't exist? How many have been tortured? How long has human progress been quelled by the supernatural? Imagine how far we would be if everyone shared the same curiosity of the Cosmos. The human instinct to understand has been thwarted by facile religious explanations for almost as long as we could ask "what are the stars?". Robert Ingersoll - "Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?" Look up the Ionian Greek scientists. More advancement to humanity occurred during the Ionian enlightened than anytime in human history. Why? Because they rejected mythology for natural explanations. To this very day people deny scientific facts such as evolution because it contradicts ancient myths. They are denying the natural for the supernatural, and it sickens me. Not because it is their choice, but because they have been conditioned to be anti-science, anti-reality since birth. I don't have a hard time imagining a united, peaceful world in a world without religion. It has divided mankind for too long. Robert Ingersoll again sums it up:

"We have already compared the benefits of theology and science. When the theologian governed the world, it was covered with huts and hovels for the many, palaces and cathedrals for the few. To nearly all the children of men, reading and writing were unknown arts. The poor were clad in rags and skins -- they devoured crusts, and gnawed bones. The day of Science dawned, and the luxuries of a century ago are the necessities of to-day. Men in the middle ranks of life have more of the conveniences and elegancies than the princes and kings of the theological times. But above and over all this, is the development of mind. There is more of value in the brain of an average man of to-day -- of a master-mechanic, of a chemist, of a naturalist, of an inventor, than there was in the brain of the world four hundred years ago.
These blessings did not fall from the skies. These benefits did not drop from the outstretched hands of priests. They were not found in cathedrals or behind altars -- neither were they searched for with holy candles. They were not discovered by the closed eyes of prayer, nor did they come in answer to superstitious supplication. They are the children of freedom, the gifts of reason, observation and experience -- and for them all, man is indebted to man."

"I am wondering if your parents forced you to believe or you have a real problem with something it states in the scripture."

I wouldn't say my parents forced me to believe; I have actually convinced them to become agnostic. I have a problem with nearly all biblical scripture, from condoning slavery, genocide, rape, oppression, and most importantly, eternal torture.

"If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men.... What right have you, sir, Mr. clergyman, you, minister of the gospel to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine, neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena."
-Robert Ingersoll, "The Liberty Of All"

"So are you ready for my next question?"

Ready when you are.

All the best

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionian_Enlightenment

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TSK. TSK.

The HICC is back and he is also telling MORE LIES again.

Hicc says:

I do not hate or despise Atheists or go out of my way to put them down.

He claims he doesn't go out of his way to PUT you down after also having said this about you:

Stealersfball does not have enough intelligence or facts to support anything, including what boiling temperature is.

Saying YOU DON'T HAVE ENOUGH INTELLIGENCE or FACTS to SUPPORT ANYTHING, including what the BOILING Temperature is was definitely a PUT DOWN.

WHY must he always LIE to try to make it look like he HAS NOT LIED???

And where's HIS FACTS to SUPPORT what he's said???

There ARE NONE. He's presented NONE to us.


Instead of giving us FACTS to SUPPORT what he says ... what he does is PROJECT his own inadequacies onto US by saying we have NO FACTS to support what we say.

HICC continues to PUT you DOWN:

He just has his one liner material and I am looking for a deeper conversation that includes facts and material.

Also, I have a theory that I would like to discuss with you xxpo.

After saying you don't have enough intelligence to BOIL WATER ...

and he hurls this other LINER MATERIAL accusation at you ...

then he also claims to be looking for a DEEPER CONVERSTATION that includes FACTS and MATERIAL.

But when he's GIVEN FACTS and MATERIAL that DISPUTES what he has to say, what does he say???

He says HE HAS NO TIME to READ IT or ADDRESS IT or GO THROUGH it SIMPLY because HE DOESN'T CARE.

Btw, I did not go through much, simply because I do not care; nor have the time.

So after telling the LIE that he is LOOKING for DEEPER CONVERSATION that INCLUDES FACTS and MATERIAL ...

and we both GIVE HIM the FACTS and MATERIAL he claims he wants from us ...

then we get this CHILDISH RESPONSE that HE DOESN'T CARE about the FACTS he's been presented with ...

and he displays the same kind of an IMMATURE ATTITUDE that was previously mentioned before ...

about HOW he BEHAVES like a SPOILED BRAT on the PLAYGROUND who GRABS his BALL AWAY from us and RUNS HOME with it ...

because he's been BEATEN ...

by having PLAYED the BALL GAME with us ...

that he now NO LONGER wants to play with us anymore???



PLEASE also NOTE how the NON STOP CONSTANT use of FIRST PERSON PRONOUNS continues:

I take.
I really do not
I do understand
. I will be honest
not my belief,
I really do
I read a book
I believe
I do not
I do not know everything;

I know
I will
to me
I would
I am
I have
I will
treat me
with me,
call me an idiot.
I understand
I have
I did not go
I do not care
I did not
made me
has me
I do not hate or despise Atheists or go out of my way to put them down.
I would
I am wondering
my next question
I did
my apologies.

I hope

i, i, i, i, i,
me, me, me,
my, my, my

Their speech is impregnated and dense with first person pronouns ("I", "me", "my", "mine").

This PERSON OBVIOUSLY has NO INTEREST in FACTS or in discussing them with ANYONE.

In the narcissist's surrealistic world, even language is pathologized.

It mutates into a weapon of self-defence, a verbal

fortification, a medium without a message, replacing words with duplicitous and ambiguous vocables.

Narcissists (and, often, by contagion, their unfortunate victims) don't talk, or communicate.

They fend off.

They hide and evade and avoid and disguise.

In their planet of capricious and arbitrary unpredictability, of shifting semiotic and semantic dunes -

they perfect the ability to say nothing in lengthy, Castro-like speeches.

Their speech is impregnated and dense with first person pronouns ("I", "me", "my", "mine").

Narcissists, therefore, never talk to others - rather, they talk at others, or lecture them.


Any ATTEMPT one makes to try to DISCUSS an ISSUE with the HICC is obviously a MAJOR WASTE of TIME.

Nevertheless, here's some other ISSUES that also need ADDRESSING:


In YOUR POST back to HICC you said this:

[quote]
nothing ever observed has a supernatural explanation, thus the natural explanation is most likely the correct one. To restate my question - why are dogmatists so obstinate in the face of demonstrable evidence? Why deny perfectly good natural explanations for supernatural nonsense?

But what about the results of the

THE DOUBLE SLIT EXPERIMENT

Where the OBSERVATION of WATCHING the particles travel through the SLITS actually SUPERNATURALLY CHANGES the outcome of the kind of PATTERN that will be left distributed on the back wall or on the screen behind the SLIT screen???

And that will also happen even if the OBSERVATION being made is with a CAMERA that records what happens.

So how do we account for the FACT that OBSERVATION itself can SUPERNATURALLY CHANGE the RESULT of something like in this DOULBLE SLIT EXPERIMENT?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMqtiFX_IQQ

Or how about The FACT that the brains of people who PRAY are DIFFERENT from the brains of those who DO NOT PRAY to the SKY FAIRY???

There's a VIDEO in this link from THROUGH the WORMHOLE that also explains more about this matter:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765613388/Study-shows-how-prayer-meditation-affect-brain-activity.html

Dr. Andrew Newberg uses brain imaging to examine how spiritual beliefs affect our health and behavior.

How do we explain the way the BRAINS of people who BELIEVE react differently from the brains of those who are ATHEIST and DO NOT have a BELIEF system???

OR what about the other issue of QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT or what Einstein calls SPOOKY ACTION at a DISTANCE

where info gets teleported in some kind of a SUPERNATURAL way??




http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/spooky-action-distance.html

Every age develops its stories or metaphors for how the universe was conceived and structured. According to an ancient Indian creation myth, the universe was created when the gods dismembered the primordial giant Purusa, whose head became the sky, whose feet became the Earth, and whose breath became the wind. To Aristotle, the universe was a collection of 55 concentric crystalline spheres, the outermost being heaven, surrounding those of the planets, Earth and its elements, and finally the seven circles of hell.

In 1947, eight years before his death, Einstein wrote to a friend that he could not seriously believe in quantum mechanics because "physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky actions at a distance." He was referring to quantum entanglement, one of the quantum world’s most bizarre attributes

With Newton and his precise, deterministic mathematical formulation of motion, the description changed again. The universe was likened to an enormous, grand clockwork: After being wound and set into its initial state, the clockwork universe ticks from one moment to the next with complete regularity and predictability.

Einstein’s special and general relativity pointed out important subtleties of the clockwork metaphor: There is no single, preferred, universal clock; there is no consensus on what constitutes a moment, what constitutes a now. Even so, you can still tell a clockworklike story about the evolving universe. The clock is your clock. The story is your story. But the universe unfolds with the same regularity and predictability as in the Newtonian framework. If by some means you know the state of the universe right now—if you know where every particle is and how fast and in what direction each is moving—then, Newton and Einstein agree, you can, in principle, use the laws of physics to predict everything about the universe arbitrarily far into the future or to figure out what it was like arbitrarily far into the past.

Enter quantum weirdness

Quantum mechanics breaks with this tradition. We can’t ever know the exact location and exact velocity of even a single particle. We can’t predict with total certainty the outcome of even the simplest of experiments, let alone the evolution of the entire cosmos. Quantum mechanics shows that the best we can ever do is predict the probability that an experiment will turn out this way or that. And as quantum mechanics has been verified through decades of fantastically accurate experiments, the Newtonian cosmic clock, even with its Einsteinian updating, is an untenable metaphor; it is demonstrably not how the world works.

Something that happens over here can be entwined with something that happens over there.

Quantum entanglement brings to mind voodoo (here, a voodoo idol from Benin, West Africa). But the scientific evidence that it exists is overwhelming, Greene says

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Nothing you mention has anything to do with the supernatural (outside of the universe). No mystical force from outside our universe forces electrons to act as both a particle and a wave. In fact, physicists are devising ways to work around the uncertainty principle.

http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/03/04/1438254/physicists-discover-a-way-around-heisenbergs-uncertainty-principle

Different neurological makeup of individual's brains has nothing to do with the supernatural, either.

'Weird' does not equal 'supernatural'. I don't think any physicist would say that quantum entanglement proves a supernatural realm.

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Remember the other FALSE ACCUSATION HICC HURLED my way when he said all xxpo does is COPY and PASTE stuff from links???

That explanation now applies to you SB. Because not only have you NOT explained what is in this link, but you also don't even QUOTE anything from it here.

So WHY do you think what it says applies to what else was said???

In what way do you think it applies or PROVES what was previously said is NOT SO???

This LINK mentions the use of a TRICK:

The direct measurement technique employs a 'trick' to measure the first property in such a way that the system is not disturbed significantly and

So in what way does using a TRICK help???

Aren't TRICKS also something that a MAGICIAN would use???

Aren't you also AGAINST the use of MAGIC as a way to solve SCIENTIFIC problems???

It also talks about a WEAK MEASUREMENT vs a STRONG ONE:

information about the second property can still be obtained. This careful measurement relies on the 'weak measurement' of the first property followed by a 'strong measurement' of the second property

WTF does this mean???

WTF are they talking about???

This stuff sounds like GIBBERISH.

A bunch of RUBBISH.

Where's the DATA to back up this WEAK vs STRONG claim???

RE: The mind of BELIVERS vs NON BELIEVERS

Did you watch the VIDEO???

Neurological makeup isn't the ISSUE.

The ISSUE is how the use of PRAYER HELPS to better the HEALTH of a BELIEVER ...

whereas the use of MEDITATION DOES NOT help to better the HEALTH of A NON BELIEVER.

In other words, SCIENTICFICALLY SPEAKING the NON BELIEVER also puts themselves at RISK by refusing to BELIEVE in another POWER that is HIGHER than themselves.

So if a NON BELIEVER would get CANCER, for example, SCIENTIFICALLY SPEAKING, there's also a BETTER chance the BELIEVER would survive than would the NON BELIEVER.

See what I mean???

The one who PRAYS to the SUPERNATURAL BEING is BETTER OFF.

Dr. Andrew Newberg uses brain imaging to examine how spiritual beliefs affect our health and behavior

And that is also a SCEINTIFIC FACT one CANNOT IGNORE.


RE: SPOOKY ACTION at a DISTANCE:

Do you really UNDERSTAND this process???

Or how particles that are CREATED at the BIG BANG ...

get SEPARATED ....

so that one of them also SITS over on the OTHER SIDE of the UNIVERSE ...

or several TRILLION BILLION MILES or LIGHT YEARS AWAY ...

will still be able to tell what the other one is doing ...

and REACTS to what it's done ...

even though they also HAVE NO WAY TO COMMUNICATE or KNOW what the other one is doing or has done???

This is very similar to the other stories one HEARS about how IDENTICAL TWINS also seem to have a SPOOKY ABILITY to KNOW what happens to the other TWIN when they are SEPARATED at a great distance from one another.

And no one said anything about PROVING the EXISTENCE of a SUPERNATURAL REALM.

What was said was these things:

* THE DOUBLE SLIT EXPERIMENT

* THE BRAIN IMAGES of BELIEVERS vs NON BELIEVERS

* QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT or SPOOKY ACTION at a DISTANCE

all REQUIRE a SUPERNATURAL EXPLANATION as a way to describe and explain them.



And the way you dispute this also places you into the same postition as you say HICC is in when you previously posted this:

science is driven by a desire to understand. And the only way to improve your understanding of anything is to seek out errors in our current position and correct them.

You can't do that if you claim your initial assumptions are already infallible, and you can't even begin to seek the truth if you won't admit that you might not already know it, or that you don't know it all perfectly already."

Blaming magic is never acceptable because miracles aren't explanations of any kind, and there has never been a single instance in history when assuming the supernatural has ever improved our understanding of anything. In fact such excuses have only ever impeded our attempts at discovery.

Science is a self-correcting process which changes constantly because its always improving. Only accurate information has practical application."

So who is the one USING MAGIC now by POSTING this link that says it USED a TRICK???

And who is the one USING DOGMA and refusing to UNDERSTAND???

Who is the one with the attitude that what they say is INFALLIBLE??

Who is the one who refuses to SEEK the TRUTH or ADMIT they might not already KNOW what you don't KNOW SB ???

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No offense, but I'm really starting to think you're crazy... I understand why he put you on his ignore list...

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Oh dear. Here we go again.

Of course you mean to be offensive SB.

Why try to deny it ... by suggesting what's been said is CRAZY?

And aren't you also being JUST AS SPITEFUL and as IRRATIONAL now as THE UNDERGROUND MAN.




Because you've also resorted to using the SAME FALLACY or AD HOMINEM kind of PERSONAL ATTACKS that HICC previously used ...

instead of giving an ANSWER to the QUESTIONS that you've been asked.

WHY is so hard to TELL US in YOUR OWN WORDS WHY what is said in the LINK you posted MAKES SENSE.

IN what WAY does what it says MAKE SENSE?

And WHERE is the DATA to back up what it says???

All one sees in that LINK YOU POSTED is STUFF and NONSENSE about some kind of TRICK that involves some kind of WEAK and STRONG stuff.

WHY can't you EXPLAIN this WEAK and STRONG stuff for us???

You had NO previous PROBLEM explaining the POPULATION STARS for us.

Did you???

So WHY is there a PROBLEM explaining this OTHER STUFF???

Maybe this is because YOU CAN'T EXPLAIN IT???

Or you simply DON'T WANT to ...

because you'd rather TRY to PRETEND your DEBATE OPPONENT is CRAZY ...

when you are the one who is being just as DOGMATIC as HICC ...

due to the way in which MOST of your COUNTER ARGUMENTS include stuff that YOU COPY and PASTE???

WHY is it so difficult for you to SPEAK to us IN YOUR OWN WORDS SB???

When one CONSTANTLY QUOTES stuff that OTHERS say back in one's replies ...

imo, this is what SOUNDS CRAZY ...

or as if you are NOT ABLE to SPEAK to us IN YOUR OWN WORDS.

Because it also makes you sound LIKE A JESUS FREAK ...

or like some other kind of a RELIGIOUS FANATIC ...

or like someone who will CONSTANTLY QUOTE ONE BIBLE PASSAGE after another one BACK to you again ...

EACH TIME you ASK them a question ...

rather than ANSWER you DIRECTLY with their OWN WORDS.

See what I MEAN???

In other words,

This FEELING that you've expressed regarding MY MENTAL HEALTH is also a MUTUAL one.

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Thank you for reinforcing my point.

Just so you know, I'm not bothering answering your questions since you are too obstinate to change you mind (much like religionists). I pretty much gave up on you when you said a neuroscientist doesn't know about the brain, and when you used the straw man fallacy in every post.

I do find it amusing that somehow you relate me to a Jesus freak and a religious fanatic, LOL.

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WHERE and when was YOUR POINT REINFORCED???

It was NOT.

By refusing to ADDRESS or ANSWER QUESTIONS put forth ...

What you demonstrate is you are being the OBSTINATE one.

Because THE POINT is you have NOT OFFERED us an EXPLANATION IN YOUR OWN WORDS.

And What EXACTLY is it that you want to CHANGE???

What EXACTLY is it you think my mind is too OBSTINATE ABOUT???

Did we not already establish the fact that we both DON'T believe in the SKY FAIRY???

And Where was a STRAW MAN introduced??

What EXACTLY do you mean???

WHERE did anyone say a neuroscientist doesn't know about the brain ???

Please SHOW US where that happened.

Because NO SUCH THING was EVER SAID.

You'll find NO PROOF whatsoever to back up that claim.

And Since you also claim this STRAW MAN situation happens IN EVERY POST, it also should be EASY ENOUGH for you to QUOTE the place it takes place and SHOW us more illustrations of PRECISELY what you mean???

RIGHT??

Think of it this way:

What if you were writing a TERM PAPER, and then you handed in one that had NOTHING but QUOTES in it, or things that other people said, with NO EXPLANATION whatsoever regarding what's been said in those QUOTES ???

You'd get an AUTOMATIC F for a grade.

Right???

Well this last time not only did you NOT BOTHER to EXPLAIN anything for us, but you also didn't even BOTHER to QUOTE what was said.

As a student getting a DEGREE ...

YOU SHOULD ALSO KNOW this is a BIG NO NO ...

to assume others will AUTOMATICALLY UNDERSTAND something you say without an EFFORT being made to HELP THEM understand the point you're attempting to make.

SO WHY not make the EFFORT instead of RESORTING to the FALLACY AD HOMINEM and this other PERSONAL ATTACK that you have???

PEOPLE can't READ YOUR MIND SB.

They have NO WAY of KNOWING what you think or the reason WHY you think it if you don't EXPLAIN this to them.




As for the way in which you behave LIKE a RELIGIOUS FANATIC ...

LOOK at YOUR OWN QUOTE:

the only way to improve your understanding of anything is to seek out errors in our current position and correct them.

You can't do that if you claim your initial assumptions are already infallible,

and you can't even begin to seek the truth if you won't admit that you might not already know it

Are you or are you not behaving as if what you've said is INFALLIBLE???



Because here's an article that seems to COMPLETELY CONTRADICT what your link has to say:

http://www.livescience.com/18567-wacky-physics-heisenberg-uncertainty-principle.html

in the microscopic world, there truly is a limit to how much information we can ever glean about an object.

For example,[b] if you make a measurement to find out exactly where an electron is, you will only be able to get a hazy idea of how fast it's moving. Or you might choose to determine an electron's momentum fairly precisely, but then you will have only a vague idea of its location

This probabilistic nature of particles means there will always be imprecision in any quantum measurement, no matter how little that measurement disturbs the system it is measuring.

"This has nothing to do with error or disturbances due to a measurement process, but is a basic fundamental property that every quantum mechanical particle has,"

Sulyok told LiveScience. "In order to describe the basic uncertainty together with measurement errors and disturbances, both particle and measurement device in a successive measurement have to be treated in the framework of quantum theory."

One of the most often quoted, yet least understood, tenets of physics is the uncertainty principle.

Formulated by German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927, the rule states that the more precisely you measure a particle's position, the less precisely you will be able to determine its momentum, and vice versa.

The principle is often invoked outside the realm of physics to describe how the act of observing something changes the thing being observed, or to point out that there's a limit to how well we can ever really understand the universe.


In other words, IN THE QUANTUM WORLD you CAN'T PRECISELY MEASURE ANYTHING, because of the way in which it can be HERE or THERE or even NO WHERE or EVERYWHERE ... all at the SAME TIME.

If you Watch the first 40 SECONDS of this VIDEO you'll also see what I mean:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Due4fbAdSSU

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"And Where was a STRAW MAN introduced??"

I already pointed it out, but I'll try to make it even more clear to you.

#1 You said:

"Did you or did you not previously also say the MAJOR ISSUE was GEOGRAPHY that determines what RELIGION a person would be???

Now you say it is GENETICS and/or LIFE EXPERIENCES?"

I said where you are born and who you born to are the most important factors in deciding one's religion. I never said genetics/ life experiences were anywhere near as important. I did say the difference between two people raised in the same culture by the same parents that happen to choose different religions is a result of genetics/ life experiences (such as one finding quotes by Thomas Paine and the other one not having Internet connection). I never flip flopped as you claimed I did.

#2 You said:

"When one says MANY VARIABLES are involved ...

that is also NOT saying only ONE ISSUE is involved."

Yet I never said only one issue was involved, I said there ARE TWO MAIN VARIABLES. "MAIN variables" DOES NOT MEAN "ONLY variables"! I also provided a geographical chart showing how all religions are isolated and a link to studies showing how a person's religion is decided by a young age and is dependent on their culture, which I guess you ignored since you said I didn't back up my claims.

I took these two examples out of just one of your posts, so if you want more of your straw men I'll be glad to post more.

"WHERE did anyone say a neuroscientist doesn't know about the brain ???

Please SHOW US where that happened.

Because NO SUCH THING was EVER SAID."

You said:

"So it is also YOU and that other guy in your LINK who seem to be IGNORANT of the GOOFY way in which the HUMAN MIND works."

You specifically stated that a man with a PhD in neuroscience and has written books on the subject is ignorant on the topic.

"SO WHY not make the EFFORT instead of RESORTING to the FALLACY AD HOMINEM and this other PERSONAL ATTACK that you have???"

I felt like I was wasting my time since, no matter what I said, you would bring up a topic that has absolutely no relevance to what I was talking about (red herring). For example, you kept on talking about how people do stupid things that aren't rational... So? I never said they didn't.

It doesn't help when you claim that scientists use magic and that quantum mechanics is proof of the supernatural.

Also... Why are you talking like Gollum? "Didn't tell us... Didn't explain to us". Is it because you don't want to sound like hcc and use first person pronouns?

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Ok. Saying you were IGNORANT of the GOOFY WAY the HUMAN MIND works IS NOT the same thing as saying the NEUROSCIENTIST is IGNORANT.

What it is saying is he HAS NOT taken into account what DOSTOEVSKY is saying through his UNDERGROUND CHARACTER ...

that people will behave IRRATIONALLY OUT of SPITE if you tell then they are some kind of a PRE DETERMINED PUPPET who DANCES to the PULL of A SET of PRE DETERMINED STRINGS.

Since I also have a BUDDY who has a PHD in PARTICLE PHYSICS ...

and you REFUSE to EXPLAIN this article you posted a link to ...

how about if I email my friend and see what he has to say???

He also knows BRIAN ... the other dude in the YOUTUBE LINK ...

the guy you see POPPING IN and OUT of EXISTENCE in the GARDEN ...

because they both also use to work at FERMI LAB for a while.

Perhaps whatever he says will also help to RESOLVE this matter for us???

Here's the proposed email:

Does this article DISPROVE the DOUBLE SLIT EXPERIMENT???

http://www.rdmag.com/news/2013/03/physicists-make-first-direct-measurements-polarization-states-light

researchers have applied a recently developed technique to directly measure the polarization states of light overcoming some important challenges of Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle and demonstrating that it is possible to measure key related variables, known as 'conjugate' variables, of a quantum particle or state directly.

Does this mean one can now MEASURE the illusive SUB ATOMIC PARTILES that Brian says can be EVERYWHERE all at the same time in the first 40 SECONDS of this YOUTUBE clip???

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Due4fbAdSSU

IF you have a BETTER WAY to word the QUESTIONS put forth ...

please let me know.

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You have a friend who knows Brian Cox?!?!?!?

It doesn't disprove the double slit experiment, it answers some of the questions that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle propose there are (namely that you can't observe an electron directly without interrupting it).

What you should ask him, because this is the point I was arguing, if the double slit experiment or quantum entanglement prove that the supernatural exists, and also ask him if the scientists in the link I gave you are using magic, as you claim they are. That should give him a good laugh.

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I've already sent the EMAIL ...

but since both BRIAN and my other buddy are also both UNAPOLOGETIC ATHEIST ...

one also doesn't need to ASK them the other question that you have proposed.

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I already knew about Brian, but I'm glad your friend has also decided to join us in reality.

Oh, aren't you going to apologize for saying that you didn't create straw men (basically calling me a liar) when you really did?

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Please show us the place where you were called a LIAR.

Before one offers an apology one needs to have done or said something wrong.

Right???

Since NO EVIDENCE has been put forth that PROVES any of the ACCUSATIONS you've made ...

one is still at a loss to see the need for one???

Here's what my PP BUDDY said in reponse back to someone about BRIAN in his TWITTER ACCOUNT:

Brian is cool. I worked with him while getting my degree at Fermilab as he was working on diffractive theory.

Now all we need to do is wait for the reply back to the email that was sent???



Last week he also corrected another mistake that had been made when a report was filed regarding having seen a METEOR:


THE PHD:

Looking at the website it seems that it might have been a Chinese satellite launch vehicle from last spring coming back into the atmosphere.

There are usually a few thousand fireballs each 24 hour period (mostly meteroids or man made debris). 2/3 of them are over water so don't get observed, and of those that are over land, 1/4 end up over uninhabited areas, so when we see them, they seem rare, but aren't really - it is just the intersection with observers that is rare. So it is pretty awesome to see a big one like that.

***************

xxpo's reply back to the PHD:

Well that definitely helps to explain the reason why it lasted for so long and looked more like a SPACE SHIP invasion.

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Does this article DISPROVE the DOUBLE SLIT EXPERIMENT???

> http://www.rdmag.com/news/2013/03/physicists-make-first-direct-measurements-polarization-states-light

> researchers have applied a recently developed technique to directly
> measure the polarization states of light overcoming some important
> challenges of Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle and
> _demonstrating that it is possible to measure key related variables,
> known as 'conjugate' variables, of a quantum particle or state
> directly_<http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130303154958.htm>;.

*******************

I don't think so. The Double Slit experiment has to do with the particle/wave duality of photons or electrons - if you don't measure which slit it goes through, you get an interference pattern. If you do measure which slit it goes through you just get two bands corresponding to each slit.

The uncertainty relationship has to do with knowing information about conjugate variables (x and p) or (E and t) for instance. The Heisenberg uncertainly principle says that the better you know one value of a conjugate pair, the more uncertain you will be about the other: e.g. if you know where a particle is at any moment in time, you have no idea where it is going. If you know where it is going, you have no idea where it is.

The article is interesting if they are able to somehow get around this limitation, although I tend to be dubious about such PR pieces as they tend to oversell what the actual article says.

********************

> Does this mean one can now MEASURE the illusive SUB ATOMIC PARTILES
> that Brian says can be EVERYWHERE all at the same time in the first
> 40 SECONDS of this YOUTUBE clip???

> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Due4fbAdSSU
> *:-? thinking

***********************

The whole idea behind virtual particles popping in an out of existence is sort of predicated on the conjugate nature of Energy and time (the more energy the particle popping in has, the less time it can hang around) but doesn't really have much to do with the Uncertainty principle directly. The biggest problem is that even for negligible energies, the amount of time they can still around is so small that they hardly move anywhere at all and hence pop back into the vacuum before there is any chance to directly measure them. However, we know they have to exist because we need them to make QF calculations that have then been measured to extremely high precision, they are also the basis of Hawking radiation around Black Holes and the Casimir Effect.



OK. So ANY further QUESTIONS???

WHAT should I SAY back to him or ASK HIM about NOW???

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I really have no idea what you should ask him

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Well SB ...

he definitely seems to have made it CLEAR ENOUGH for you that the article you posted is most likely some kind of a DUBIOUS PUBLIC RELATIONS STUNT.

RIGHT???

And he also explains how the ARTICLE you posted the LINK to also has NOTHING to do with the DOUBLE SLIT EXPERIMENT.

CORRECT???

So which one of us was the one who was making use of a STRAW MAN ARGUMENT???

Straw Man is one of the commonest of fallacies. It is endemic in public debates on politics, ethics, and religion. A straw man argument occurs in the context of a debate; formal or informal;

when one side attacks a position; the "straw man"; not held by the other side, then acts as though the other side's position has been refuted.

This fallacy is a type of Red Herring because the arguer is attempting to refute the other side's position, and in the context is required to do so, but instead attacks a position not held by the other side.

Why are you talking like Gollum? "Didn't tell us... Didn't explain to us". Is it because you don't want to sound like hcc and use first person pronouns?

Even though HICC claims he placed xxpo ON IGNORE ...

since the debate also began with his being INCLUDED in it ...

one also still still behaves as if he can still SEE what is being said ...

(which was also explained way back when HICC first made his claim ...

that placing xxpo ON IGNORE would still not STOP xxpo from REFUTING whatever he had to say ...

which was also the reason why xxpo IGNORES the claim about having been placed on IGNORE and ANSWERED the QUESTION he asked about the HEAVY ELEMENTS).

So the reason why xxpo sounds like GOLLUM to you is due to the way xxpo also still includes HICC in the discussions between us whenever xxpo says US or WE.

See what I mean???



PS:

Probably The reason why they don't have 3 CATEGORIES of POPULATION STARS is because by the time our Sun becomes a RED GIANT and GOBBLES US up ...

there will also be NO WAY to pass on the INFO we know regarding the 3 CATEGORIES to the NEXT CREATION that becomes whatever comes next ???

So we may as well stick with the 3 CATEGORIES for that reason???




PSS: Even though the PHD majored in SCIENCE and PARTICLE PHYSICS ...

Guess what the DIPLOMA says at the top of his PHD DEGREE ...

IT says he has a DOCTORATE of PHILOSOPHY.

Interesting situation.

Isn't it SB.



He also said this:

Got into a debate with someone over the Double Slit experiment
> ... and the way it appears something SUPERNATURAL occurs whenever
> the particles are OBSERVED or NOT OBSERVED.

The use of the term "observation" in the Copenhagen Interpretation is unfortunate. What is meant by the terms isn't that some conscious being must make a measurement but rather that the macroscopic world is interfering with the microscopic world via any method.

> Also mentioned QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT issue as well ... or SPOOKY
> ACTION at a DISTANCE as Einstein called it ...

Quantum entanglement is fascinating. Einstein's problem with it is that it seemed to allow communication faster than the speed of light, where his theories said no information can be transmitted faster. We have now come to learn that it seems you can't really send any meaningful information via quantum entanglement, and it is hard to keep particles entangled over any meaningful distance anyway, so it ends up being and interesting and measured effect of quantum mechanics that isn't necessarily terribly important.

> then this other person posted that link back as a reply ...
> without offering any further explanation ...
> which contained stuff I didn't understand ...
> or understand HOW or WHY it REFUTED the Double Slit experiment.
> So after repeatedly asking them what it meant, only to be told I was
> CRAZY for asking, your help has definitely been VERY MUCH APPRECIATED.
> *:) happy

Sounds like someone who doesn't necessarily understand quantum mechanics, just the new age appeal to quantum mechanics.

But then, nobody really *understands* quantum mechanics, some people just know how to use it to make calculations. :o)

So we probably also shouldn't feel bad about NOT understanding it???

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You do realize I was posting that link because I thought you'd find it interesting, and not to refute anything you've said (especially the double slit experiment)? Thus it wasn't a straw man, as I wasn't even arguing anything.

I wouldn't say he refuted it - "I tend to be dubious about such PR pieces as they tend to oversell what the actual article says."

He says PR pieces TEND TO oversell, not that they ALWAYS oversell, or, more specifically, he didn't say that this particular article oversold anything (although I admit I don't fully understand it either). From what I can tell, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that you if you observe a sub atomic particle, you interrupt this particle and thus can't observe it anymore (or something along those lines). In other words, it's impossible to know, say, both its location and direction (only one of the other). You also can't directly look at it, or its location and direction will change. This article seemingly says that scientists have found a way to directly observe some parts of the sub atomic particle without disturbing it.

I see why you sounded like Gollum now. I thought you had some sort of double personality or something. Frankly, I don't think hcc is intelligent enough to understand any of this. (Why else would he invoke magic to explain natural phenomena?) This is not meant to be an ad hominem, just a simple observation.

The only problem I had with your stance is that you said quantum mechanics is supernatural, and that scientists use magic to understand it. I didn't bother refuting these claims as they are untestable and falsifiable, and thus unscientific, and thus not worthy of a response.

The only explanation I can think of as to why his science degree says it is a doctorate of philosophy is because the first scientists were called natural philosophers. Maybe they haven't changed it, or left it that way out of respect?

*interesting note* - if you time in "the first scientists were" on Google, the common search item that comes up is "the first scientists were CHRISTIANS". That is just embarrassing. Do these idiots really think no one tried to understand the universe before someone invented the Jesus myth??

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No I did NOT realize the reason why you posted the link. That's the reason why you were REPEATEDLY asked to EXPLAIN it and what it was saying. So THANK YOU for FINALLY making that attempt to do so.

Because IF someone DOES NOT understand something, they are also NOT going to be able to find it interesting.

Are they SB???

And if the reason why you posted the link was for that reason ...

and NOT TO REFUTE the DOUBLE SLIT EXPERIMENT ...

then this was also bringing in another SUBJECT that had NOTHING to do with the one we were discussing.

Right?

Or if there is a CONNECTION, then it is also up to you to MAKE that CONNECTION and explain why it is RELEVANT to the discussion at hand.

Correct?

But instead of doing this all you did was post a LINK with the assumption that your debate opponent would UNDERSTAND it which they DID NOT.

My degree is in LIT and/or LIBERAL ARTS and the HUMANITIES (the ARTS not the SCIENCES).

Most of what I've learned about PHYSICS has been with the help of this PP buddy (who also use to be on a DEBATE TEAM and debated at the UN) or from WATCHING programs that they air on TV (such as THE UNIVERSE series).

Anyhow, he also tends to be very DIPLOMATIC back in his responses, whereas xxpo the Grad School drop out is not.



So when he says this is more of a PR STUNT, he's also saying it LACKS enough VALIDITY to take seriously by the Scientific community.

Even Steven Hawking got SHOT DOWN by his PEERS at one conference when he gave a presentation that had NO PROOF to back up what he'd said.

I don't think hcc is intelligent enough to understand any of this. (Why else would he invoke magic to explain natural phenomena?) This is not meant to be an ad hominem, just a simple observation.

The REASON WHY HICC INVOKES MAGIC to explain things is the SAME REASON as the UNDERGROUND MAN with the TOOTH ACHE behaves in the IRRATIONAL way that he does ...

BECAUSE HE CAN.

This is what you still don't UNDERSTAND.

Being IRRATIONAL is also a PART of BEING HUMAN.

So HICC is also being HUMAN when he refuses to let you REASON with him.



You yourself have also ALREAY ADMITTED that YOU would also EAT that YUMMY HOT FUDGE SUNDAE even though you also KNOW it isn't good for YOUR TEETH or for your HEART etc.

RIGHT???

In other words, you also CONFESSED that from time to time you also do IRRATIONAL things that go against your REASON.

RIGHT???

This is also what HICC CHOSES to do ... be IRRATIONAL and UNREASONABLE even when you give him PROOF that what he says MAKES NO SENSE.

However he also did ADMIT that YOU MIGHT BE RIGHT about the AGE of the UNIVERSE being nearly 14 BILLION YEARS OLD ...

so he's also NOT being TOTALLY UNREASONABLE with you.

Is he??? [/b]

And No one said QM is SUPERNATURAL or that SCIENTIST use MAGIC to explain it either. You also have a TENDENCEY to REWORD things in such a way where you make sound as if someone said something they DID NOT SAY.

What was IMPLIED was this:

the DOUBLE SLIT EXPERIMENT/

the BRAIN IMAGINING of BELIEVERS vs NON BELIEVERS/

and QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT or SPOOKY ACTION at a DISTANCE/

all SEEMED to REQUIRE a SUPERNATURAL explanation of some kind to UNDERSTAND THEM.

But QE or SPOOKY ACTION has also been better explained for us now as well when he explains how the AMOUNT of INFO that is sent is also LIMITED.

The only time MAGIC was mentioned was when YOUR LINK said they had USED a TRICK, and it was pointed out how MAGICIANS also USE TRICKS.

RE: A SCIENTIST having A PHD in PHILOSOPHY:

The reason why he has a DEGREE in PHILOSOPHY is because like EVERYONE ELSE who gets a DEGREE ...

from the time he was a FRESHMAN or AN UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT ...

he was also REQUIRED to take SUBJECTS in other FIELDS of study ...

so that by the TIME he gets his PHD he also has THE SAME WISDOM as anyone else who would get a PHD in PHILOSOPHY.

In other words, the DEGREE SYSTEM is also SET UP to make the person who gets it A WELL ROUNDED person or someone who doesn't just STUDY ONE FIELD of study.

RE: CHRISTIANS being the FIRST SCIENTISTS:

Most likely what this is in REFERENCE to is SCHOLASTICISM.

HUMANISM (MAN centered STUDIES) grew out of and comes from SCHOLATICISM (God Centered Studies).

Whenever you say someone is a SCHOLAR ...

that's also a reference to SCHOLASTICISM ...

an ANCIENT TRADITION ...

where the MONKS use to sit and COPY other ANCIENT DOCUMENTS by HAND ...

like the writings by ANCIENT GREEKS like PLATO ...

as a way to PRESERVE THEM.

So it is also THANKS to them that we now KNOW what we KNOW about the other ANCIENT CULTURES.

But at one point HUMANISM also BROKE away from SCHOLASTICISM, when he it realized the same thing as you have, that there probably is NO GOD or SKY FAIRY.

But even so, that still doesn't mean one shouldn't be GREATFUL to those MONKS or to those SCHOLARS who sat there and COPIED those other ANCIENT DOCUMENTS so that we could be able to KNOW what is written in them.

See what I mean???

In other words, We still also owe them debt of GRATITUDE for what they've done for us, inspite of the way in which the IGNORANCE of their POPE held us back and prevented PROGRESS when he threatened the LIFE of GALILEO ...

for the discovery of what HE KNEW ...

about HOW the UNIVERSE really works. [/b]

So all one can do now at this point is FORGIVE THEM ...

FOR THEY KNEW NOT WHAT THEY DID????

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You mention Galileo; did you know the Church MURDERED Giordano Bruno, a scientist that proposed that the Sun is just another star, and that there are other planets with life on them? They burned him at the stake for heresy. They also sliced the tongue off and burned Italian freethinker Lucilio Vanini for proposing an early theory of evolution (albeit a pretty racist one) in the early 17th century.

Galileo isn't even close to the worst crime upon humanity that the Church has been a part of in its infamous history.

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The CHURCH has LOTS of SINS to answer for there is NO DOUBT about that.

Have you read THE MYTH of SISYPHUS by CAMUS???

It' an ESSAY where he discusses what he calls the MOST IMPORTANT PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTION of all ...

TO BE OR NOT TO BE ...

and he says the decision GALILEO made was the RIGHT ONE ...

because what does all the rest of the stuff matter ...

when it comes down to this question.

And that kind of a decision made by GALILEO also seems to be in CONTRADICTION to the one SOCRATES made when he drank the HEMLOCK???



Anyhow, the SCIENCE CHANNEL is also showing some more EXPANDED UNIVERSE programs now, and also thought you'd find this interesting as well:

CONVERSATIONS with the PHD CONT:


THE PHD:

No, any new star will also be Population I since it will be formed from the materials of existing Population I stars going nova and sending their metals out.

**********************

ME:

But OUR STAR won't go NOVA. Right??? So what happens to then??? The END of the Population CYCLE???

**********************
HIM:
It is just as things go along, newer stars will have higher and higher values of metalicity as all of the stars in the Universe convert hydrogen into metals through fusion. But there is no upper limit to the metalicity of a Population I star.

*******************

ME:

SINCE we won't go NOVA ... what then???

********************

HIM:

The numbering came about because the first thing we could study was our Sun, then as we started to look back in time we found stars with lower metalicity, so we broke things into the categories as we found them with Population I being the stars with high Z and Population II being those with low Z. Then as the Big Bang theory was developed we postulated the existence of Population III stars early on after the Big Bang when there weren't very many metals at all to be incorporated. We have only been able to observe Population I and Population II stars. Population III are hypothetical but should have existed in the past.

*****************
ME:

Yes I get this part, but what is Z???

*********************

HIM:


So all Population IIIs have died, and their death produced Population IIs. The early dying Population IIs created the first Population Is. Now any dying Population IIs and dying Population Is create new Population Is.

*************************

ME:

But how can OUR STAR create another P 1 STAR when it won't go NOVA???


> But then one also comes to the realization that it probably won't
> matter anyway ... with our NOT being able to communicate with them
> after our STAR turns into a RED GIANT and GOBBLES us up???
> But what about other P 1 STARS like ours??? Are there any that have
> already SEEDED a P 0 (Zero) STAR yet ... or the next Star that comes
> after a P 1 STAR like ours??? This is the reason why things might
> need to change if any of those 4th GENERATION STARS are around now???
> What does Sol mean???

HIM:


Population I stars are of many different ages, just relatively recent with respect to the Big Bang and compared to Population II stars. There are young Population I stars and old Population I stars. Any new stars forming today are still Population I stars, even if they themselves are being formed from the dust of novaed Population I stars or Population II stars.

> > Cas some other guy who believes in the SKY FAIRY also mentioned the
> > lack of HEAVY METALS as being proof that our planet wasn't 4.5
> > BILLION years old.

>
> The earth is made up of only rock and heavy metals so why does he
> say it has a lack of heavy metals? What does he think it should have?
> 　

> Here is his question to the Philos Major:


> Meteoritic dust, which contains cobalt, nickel, and other heavy
> metals falls on our planet earth at the rate of about 14 million
> tons per year. If our planet was as old as 5 billion years, which is
> proposed by evolutionists to this day, there should be over 182 feet
> of this dust covering the planet earth. Even if we allow for the
> case of erosion, there still is not enough cobalt, nickel, and other
> heavy metals on our planet to indicate an ancient age of our planet.
> So, given the amount of meteorite dust on the surface of our planet,
> the evidence points to a much younger earth; maybe a few thousand
> years old. So respectively Stealer, can you explain why there is a
> shortage of this material? Stealer, I will await your reply. I know
> this may have been debated in the past, however, no one has ever
> given a clear answer to why this cannot be explained

THE PHD REPLIES:


Unfortunately, he is relying on an outdated value quoted by Morris in 1974 based on a mountain observation by Hans Petersson who estimated 15 tons but said himself this was likely to be an over estimate. That's because any measurement made of dust falling within the atmosphere will be made up of meteoric dust falling in and planetary dust that has been kicked up and then settles with the majority likely being made up on planetary dust.

We have now made satellite penetration measurements that exclude the possibility of planetary contamination and get a value around 18000 to 25000 tons per year (three orders of magnitude less) which is in good agreement with the levels of meteoric dust found in sediment. So with the proper value, the 182 feet becomes .182 feet.

Using the most recent values, it comes out to around 66 cm of meteoric dust over the past 4.5 billion years ignoring compression.


> *********************

> 　
> Here is My reply back to him (but he also already claims to have
> put me on IGNORE at this point):

> 　
> HEAVY METALS were CREATED at the TIME of the LAST EXPLOSION ...

>
> when the OTHER STAR that created the HEAVY METALS in our SOLAR
> SYSTEM went SUPER NOVA.
>

> At that time all of the HEAVY METALS that would form in our SOLAR
> system were formed in the EXTREMELY HOT TEMPERATURES that took place
> during the explosion, which is also the reason why there are NOT
> very many HEAVY METALS in existence now, which also need EXTREMEMLY
> HIGH TEMPERATURES TO FORM.

>
> So even before the COLLAPSE of the HEATED GASES in the NEBULA which
> formed our SUN and the rest of our SOLAR SYSTEM ...

>
> ALL of the HEAVY METALS that would exist in our SOLAR SYSTEM were
> also already in EXISTENCE at that time in the NURSERY or in the
> NEBULA or Nuclear Waste material that was left over from the
> EXPLOSION of the SUPER NOVA from which we we were formed.

>
> ***********************

> How did I do??? Does it sound ok to you???

************************

HIM:


You are right in what you say that the source of the heavy metals that goes into the planets and meteors is coming from whatever was formed in stars that went Nova. That was the starting point for the Sun as well, although via fusion it is now creating heavy metals of its own.

His argument is that the Earth should be further enriched over time by the influx of heavy metal meteors, but his expectation of the rate of accretion is vastly overstated. So his initial premise on the rate is false, thus invalidating his argument. I've provided the correct influx value above.

ME:

Thanks for the INFO!!

This stuff is really facinating!!!

So how much is .182 Feet???

If you were to put it into a measuring cup, for example, how many CUPS would that be?

Or PINTS or gallons or whatever it is that one would use as a way to measure DUST???

THE METRIC SYSTEM also still remains a MYSTER to me.

So if one were to try to STORE 66 cm of DUST in something ...
how many DUMP TRUCKS would one need???

> So how much is . 182 Feet???

It is around 2 inches.

> If you were to put it into a measuring cup, for example, how many
> CUPS would that be?
> Or PINTS or gallons or whatever it is that one would use as a way to
> measure DUST???

That is a value of volume. We have taken the estimated density of the dust, time's it's volume, spread over a sphere to estimate the thickness of the shell in the calculations.

> THE METRIC SYSTEM also still remains a MYSTER to me.
> So if one were to try to STORE 66 cm of DUST in something ...
> how many DUMP TRUCKS would one need???
> *:-? thinking
> PS: The Science Channel is also showing EXPANDED EPISODES of their
> UNIVERSE programs now.

You would need to calculate the volume of a shell with the radius of the Earth and a thickness of 2 inches to find the volume of the dust, and then you could convert that into your volumetric measurement of choice.


> *********************

ME:


> What do you mean you're a reductionist? Is that compatible with
> being a HUMANIST???


Reductionism just means the understanding of complex things by reducing them to their constituent parts. As a particle physicist, that is exactly what I do. :o) In general, science is a reductionist endeavor where new knowledge rarely overthrows old, but merely subsumes it.


It is fully compatible with being a humanist since it doesn't allow for a dualist interpretation of conciousness but rather a mechanical one - i.e. conciousness is purely a function of the operation of the brain; there is no secondary soul.



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What a SHAME it is that HICC placed xxpo on IGNORE and he can no longer SEE the ANSWER to the QUESTION about the AMOUNT of METEORIC DUST that he previously put forth.

Huh SB???

SO ....

do we have MATH WIZZES out there who can figure out how many DUMP TRUCKS we'd need to load up this DAMN DUST???

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