Dave,
let's stay away from politics as it may limit the knowledgeable people involved.

 

Still not sure why we haven't patched the ozone hole yet... Ozone isn't hard to make either. Those ion air purifiers produce ozone. Sadly at ground level it is horrible for us. Just get a plane with like 1000 of those puppies running full blast and circle around the ozone hole for a few weeks, and voila!

 

i don't think that's reason to not, though. i'd eventually like to debate on all iffy, controversial and intelligent ideas. i've been called racist, sexist, communist, a **** even. i really don't care about what other less intelligent people think.

 

start er up then...

 

before the thread dies...I just wanted to say that I have never read a book, on my free will, in my life!

This was a good one to start with. I loved it!

I think someone should start a thread discussing the topics of this book...I wanted to but the "probablity" of it turning into the ongoing circle this thread went into...is...you know.

I LOVE SL!...and this book.



I think reading this book made me dilusional and my eyes hurt.

 

oh yeah, and seattledave? you remind me of the "avatar" in this book. haha...hope you read it.

 

So yeah just got done reading page three all over again because I haven’t been following this thread from day one(hint of sarcasm) and none of you more intelligent people have answered any of the questions posed in this discussion. I mean really answered them like you want us to answer your questions. Not tiptoe around it and revert back to a question you know none of will be able to answer.

I will be patiently be waiting for you more intelligent response!

 

I totaly get what you are saying and it makes sense. I consider myself a very logical person. I know other people that are in on this discussin dont belive it but I usually want as much informatin on the topic I am learning about so I can debate about it then study some more before I make up my mind and even them if someone comes along with more information that can sway me then I will start all over again.

But however I know what I know and how I feel about the topic at hand to say to my self and only my self that I believe it is true. I don’t have to sit around and try to force it upon anybody. That is why I wasn’t getting involved in this discussion during the last 25 pages but when people go around saying that I am not as smart or open minded as they are because I believe in God I couldn’t stand by and let them go on about how much better they are them us Crazy Christians.

 

I will stick around watching and occasionally post here, but for now I am going to leave my final thoughts.

We as humas are all given a choice of what we want to choose to believe. I personally choose to believe there is a God who is ruler over the earth, and sent his son Jesus to die on a cross then rose again three days later. His blood was to be a perfect sacrafice to cover the orgnal sin Adam commited in the Garden of Eden, and we can choose to have eternal life in Gods presence by admitting we are sinners and have fallen short of perfection, believing Christ died and rose again, and commiting are lifes to following him.

I believe that you guys who are debating the side of athiest, yet have studied and are looking to see a tangible proof, might be in the best position to he a tangible proof, if what us christians call the rapture happens before the end of the world. You will be in a position to where maybe some context of what you have read will take root and you will then be able to lead others to the truth about God, showing and teaching them his love.

For me, I like to live life to the fullest, it is an adventure as Seattledave said. This summer I plan on doing a few trips up to the top of some mountains, checking out some of the greatest views of creation. Other days I will be cruising overhead in the heavens looking down upon the earth from my pearch in the mid 30 to low 40 thousand feet above sea level. Going to church to remind myself why I need to be outside of the church walls living life and praising God, not just because of some songs, but because I am giving thanks to hos wonderous creation, and getting to experine it first hand with my eyes and not through a photgraph.

 

ok, your question is prove evolution is 100% correct. I can show you tons of evolving species, horses, primates, reptiles, sperm whales. Look at a sperm whale's skeleton, it's got fully developed legs and hip, and yet uses neither. it's obvious to anyone who studies biology, that this thing evolved from a land animal. there are lots of these one animal to one animal evolutions.
now if you want a step by step instruction booklet for going from proteins to single celled organisms to man, that process is not complete. and there is no irrefutable proof of the big bang, you and me aren't going to find it aren't going to find it. But we can see the universe is expanding around a void center and through that and many other things we can build a model that reverses that expansion and see it collapse on itself. that's about as good as anyone's gotten so far.

what i can do, is show you how the bible is actually incorrect in many different ways. If you did read it all, comment on the discussion of the 76 generations between adam and jesus, the flood, the days 4 & 5 of creation. I know you got your idea, like most theists from a book that is easily seen as false. Just read the bible like you would any other book, and do it without bias towards automatically trusting everything, and if it still all makes logical sense to you, explain those things to me. But I doubt you have studied your own religion half as much.

If you are as logical and smart, explain those things we touched on, and give evidence, or even a plausible theory for: (76 generations between adam and jesus, the flood, the days 4 & 5 of creation). If you're theory amounts to "god is magic and magic can do anything", that's not intelligent, nor logical and we both know it, right?

 

Dinosaur research backs link to birds

WASHINGTON - Researchers have decoded proteins from a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex, the oldest such material ever found. The unprecedented step, once thought impossible, adds new weight to the idea that today's birds are descendants of the mighty dinosaurs.

"The door just opens up to a whole avenue of research that involves anything extinct," said Matthew T. Carrano, curator of dinosaurs at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

While dinosaur bones have long been studied, "it's always been assumed that preservation does not extend to the cellular or molecular level," said Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University.

It had been thought that some proteins could last a million years or more, but not to the age of the dinosaurs, she said.

So, when she was able to recover soft tissue from a T. rex bone found in Montana in 2003 she was surprised, Schweitzer said.

And now, researchers led by John M. Asara of Beth

Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston have been able to analyze proteins from that bone.

The genetic code that directs the development of living things is the DNA, but that is more fragile and they didn't find that.

"But proteins are coded from the DNA, they're kind of like first cousins," Schweitzer said

What Asara's team found was collagen, a type of fibrous connective tissue that is a major component of bone. And the closest match in creatures alive today was collagen from chicken bones.

Schweitzer and Asara report their findings in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

"Most people believe that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but that's all based on the architecture of the bones," said Asara. "This allows you to get the chance to say, 'Wait, they really are related because their sequences are related.' We didn't get enough sequences to definitively say that, but what sequences we got support that idea."

"The fact that we are getting proteins is very, very exciting," said John Horner of Montana State University and the Museum of the Rockies.

And, he added, it "changes the idea that birds and dinosaurs are related from a hypothesis to a theory."

To scientists that's a big deal.

In science, a hypothesis is an idea about something that seems probable, while a theory has been tested and is supported by evidence. Previously, the bird-dinosaur relationship was based on similarities in the shape of bones, now there is solid evidence of a relationship at the molecular level.

Horner, who found the bones studied by Schweitzer and Asara, said this is going to change the way paleontologists go about collecting specimens — they will now be looking for the best preserved items, often buried in sand or sandstone sediments.

This summer, he said, his museum is organizing nine different field crews involving more than 100 people to search for fossils in Montana and Mongolia.

Asara explained that he was working on a very refined form of mass spectrometry to help detect peptides — fragments of proteins — in tumors as part of cancer research.

In refining the technique, he had previously studied proteins from a mastodon, and when he heard of Schweitzer's finding soft tissues in a T. rex bone he decided to see if he could detect proteins there also.

He was able to identify seven different dinosaur proteins from the bone and compared them with proteins from living species. Three matched chickens, two matched several species including chickens, one matched a protein from a newt and the other from a frog.

Co-author Lewis Cantley of Harvard Medical School noted that this work is in its infancy, and when it is improved he expects to be able to isolate more proteins and seek more matches.

"Knowing how evolution occurred and how species evolved is a central question," Cantley said.

The Smithsonian's Carrano, who was not part of the research teams, said the report is an important confirmation of Schweitzer's techniques and shows that "the possibility of preservation is more than we had expected, and we can expect to see more in the future."

Matt Lamanna, a curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, called the finding "another piece in the puzzle that shows beyond the shadow of a doubt that dinosaurs are related to birds." Lamanna was not part of the research team.

So, does all this mean that a T. rex would have tasted like chicken? The researchers admit, they don't know.

Both research teams were supported by the National Science Foundation and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation. Schweitzer had additional support from

NASA and Asara had added support from the Paul F. Glenn Foundation.

 

I dont think you are really understanding how science works. See my above article for an example of what science does and does not do.

 

Haha, I read about this recently as well and that was one of the first things I thought...
Wish I could have been on that research team. That must've been cool as hell to work on.

 

thought this thread was kinda cool so i grabbed this from a website
"Naturalism, logic and reality
Those arguing against creation may not even be conscious of their most basic presupposition, one which excludes God a priori, namely naturalism/materialism (everything came from matter, there is no supernatural, no prior creative intelligence).2 The following two real-life examples highlight some problems with that assumption:

A young man approached me at a seminar and stated, ‘Well, I still believe in the big bang, and that we arrived here by chance random processes. I don’t believe in God.’ I answered him, ‘Well, then obviously your brain, and your thought processes, are also the product of randomness. So you don’t know whether it evolved the right way, or even what right would mean in that context. Young man, you don’t know if you’re making correct statements or even whether you’re asking me the right questions.’

The young man looked at me and blurted out, ‘What was that book you recommended?’ He finally realized that his belief undercut its own foundations —such ‘reasoning’ destroys the very basis for reason.

On another occasion, a man came to me after a seminar and said, ‘Actually, I’m an atheist. Because I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in absolutes, so I recognize that I can’t even be sure of reality.’ I responded, ‘Then how do you know you’re really here making this statement?’ ‘Good point,’ he replied. ‘What point?’ I asked. The man looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘Maybe I should go home.’ I stated, ‘Maybe it won’t be there.’ ‘Good point,’ the man said. ‘What point?’ I replied."

 

oh and btw, i thought the thread was Atheist vs Theist (Debate) , not everyone against the christians

 

Had to say that I LOVED this book. One of my favorites. But take it for what it is.
Afterall he wrote another book that said that gravity wasn't real and the universe was expanding to meet the objects as they were in the air. Scott Adams is a funny, funny guy that likes to write about stuff that can make you think.

 

Pretty much the reason I stopped posting my man. I was waiting for the "Yo mama" cracks to start.

 

Or how about "your god" jokes...

"You're god is soooooo fat, he jumped up for joy and got stuck!"

 

I'm highly offended.... Ok, not really, honestly I laughed. But I wish I could act offended! haha.
So wrong Tito

 

it is an atheist v theist thread.
The only reason we are talking about christianity so much is that so far. every theist who has contributed has been a christian. Therefore, the ideas and beliefs about god are all of christian influence.

not picking on anyone, but a wiccan would have very different views from a christian. They would disagree with the christians too on many core issues.