Keenidiot

Yeah, they're pretty cool.

Watched a video where a fellow made one using string and chalk.

Posts on forums are not articles.

The pictures only seem to show regular rocks, probably quartz, with some pareidolia that makes it look slightly humanoid.

Reminds me of the dragons of New Zealand.

Yeah this so well illustrated by the link I provided. (sarcasm)

 

Which I read. My point was they didn't support organised religion. I personally disagree that deism itself is part of the Christian religion, but that's me.

It's important to note that fundamentalists are attempting to remove Jefferson from the books. There's also constant battles to teach science versus religion in class.

Which is our point of contestion it appears.

Isn't it wierd how most private schools not only meet but surpass the standards.

 

 

In certain subjects. In my own experience the science classes tend to be lacking and the religious classes tend to be skewed. I pulled the statistics, which does back your statement.

I do note that it doesn't seperate religious from non religious private, but religious is majority so I don't think it'd affect it much.

My point still stands, so long as they meet standards, there're no problems with religious schools teaching ID in their classrooms. It can't, however, be taught in public schools unless all other creation stories are included.

This doesn't quite answer my question. Can you be a little more specific on HOW Reagans institution of the year of the bible had a negative affect on the teaching in schools.

 

 

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/how-ronald-reagan-affected-tod.html

Ronald Reagan had a serious affect on education. His "Year of the Bible" probably didn't, but it was a product of the same thought that brought about the SAT.

The problem is nto about schooling, but that it set preference for one religion over another.

Why is it so difficult to believe that the founding of this country was influenced by religious beliefs?

 

I said:

While arguably they were affected by The Christian values of their home country, they were also (and rather obviously) influenced by many of the current philosophers of their time.

 

...

The founding fathers had a range of religious and political views, to be sure, with a variety of influences. The greatest majority were deist, and most were vocally against organised religion.

 

The Founding fathers had more influences than just religion.

That's all I'm saying, this includes religion as well as the ideals of the Enlightenment and the philosophers of the time.

I can keep repeating this if you'd like.

The fact is though that the founding fathers were religious and were influenced by judeo-christian beliefs.

Dunno if deism, strictly speaking, is a religion as such. Thomas Jefferson was almost certainly an atheist, and many of the founding fathers were very critical or religion.

While arguably they were affected by The Christian values of their home country, they were also (and rather obviously) influenced by many of the current philosophers of their time.

The glenn beck link was just to prove that there are two sides to this argument

As presented by a whackaloon conspiracy touting television pundit?

If that's a legimet alternative, then you have got to hear about how the Royal family are lizards...

The founding fathers had a range of religious and political views, to be sure, with a variety of influences. The greatest majority were deist, and most were vocally against organised religion.

As to creationism, I pretty well stand with you on the subject Keenidiot, but I don't see why religion can't be included for a better understanding of how things came about.

What special insight does religion give?

Seriously. If we go with the Bible, bats are birds, rabbits chew cud, humans were created from dirt and descended from two singular ancestors without concern of inbreeding.

Again, history class is fine, religious class, is fine. It doesn't really have a place as anything more than a footnote in modern science books. The real issue is the people who try to pass it off as still valid science, instead of religion.

Okay let me ask the forum this... In '83 when Reagan anounced a year of the bible, what bad things came of it. Did muslim and jewish kids convert to christianity in mass? Was there another inquasition?

 

Um... Ronald Reagan was one of the first presidents to my mind that ran with a strong religious message as part of his platform which helped lead to the modern GOP of right wing religious nutters.

Currently the US rates lowest (except for Turkey) in science education, while ranking the most religious of the first world nations.

He of course isn't all to blame, but he certainly helped usher in the many problems we're having today.

The real problem that we have is the people pushing to get religion taught as a valid alternative to science in science class, in the public schools.

Whatever they want to teach in private schools is fine, providing they meet standards.

The idea of omnipotence would seem to call the entire myth of the garden of Eden into question.

As well as the idea of him being benevolent, when he apparently cursed theentire human race for the sins of Adam and Eve, as well as snakes.

The all powerful and all benevolent idea would cause problems when you think of the flood, with the destruction of all living species and people save those saved on the ark.

Then there's the idea that God apparently created you to be the person you are, as well as bits from the Bible like Him "hardening the Pharaoh's heart," would seem to be something only there when someone needs it to be.

Evolution is a cornerstone of biology. It's a well attested scientific theory, like Cell theory.

Creationism is part of religion. It is only controversial to those of strong, literalist, religious beliefs. It has no part of a class on science, except to be mentioned with vitalism, spontaneous generation, and similar past concepts.

The Theorum states that the hypotenuse of a triangle with a right angle is equal to the measure of each side squared and added together:

a²+b²=C²

So, for example, if you have a right triangle with two sides that measure 4 and 5, then you'd plug them into the formula above.

a²⁺b²=c²

4² + 5²=c²

Which would simplify out to:

16 + 25 = C²

41=c²

You'd then take the square of 41, and that would be the measure of the hypotenuse.

So, what's your question?

They don't appear in the middle of the ocean, they appear on the edges of tectonic plates, when one plates is forced down by another plate. The other plate is also pushed up slightly.

 

It would be awesome if you could answer them as best you could.

 

I’m less qualified than others, but I’ll give it my best shot.

 

• Do you believe in God? If so, briefly explain your view.

See no need to believe in the Judeo/Christian god, or any other for that matter. If I can ask you in turn, why do you not believe in Zues?

 

• How do you think the universe began?

All of the matter in the universe was created in the event we know as the Big Bang, though I’m not to deep into physics to know more about it. It should be noted this is not related to the theroy of evolution, which I only concerned with the diversification of life.

How do you think life originated?

 

Not sure, we have some good examples on how it might have happened, but there’s still work to be done.

The two I’m aware of is the idea of the primordial soup, and an idea about repeated freezing and thawing helping clump together different organic compounds.

Again, this is a somewhat separate science called abiogenisis, which is the study of how life developed. Evolution is the study of how life adapts after it develops.

 

 

 

• Explain how you believe life forms evolved?

When animals reproduce, you get copying errors in the form of mutations in DNA. Most of these are harmful, many are indifferent, and a few are helpful. Those helpful ones provides benefits to the creature with those characteristics and are usually passed on to the next generation.

 

• How old do you think the earth is and why?

Current estimates put it up to 4.5 billion years ago, this is a combination of several factors, like the luminosity of the sun, radiometric dating, I forgot the term, but the measurement of age based off of impact craters on surfaces like the moon and Mars, among others.

 

• Do you believe in life on other planets, aliens, and UFOs?

I think there is probably life out there, probably intelligent life out there. It may be rare, but space is really big and really old. We already know of a few places in our own solar systems that seem to be hospitable for life, and several exo planets that seem hopeful.

However, there’s no good evidence for visitation, or or proof of life elsewhere. I suppose you could say I’m agnostic on the subject.

 

• Is evolution still happening, and if so, what do you think will be the end result?

Yep, in fact, humanity is now an active factor in the process due to the way we damage habitats. Humans are still evolving as well, though it’s less driven by natural selection and more by sexual choices now.

What might be the end result? Dunno, evolution has no goal in mind and no direction.

(Look at animals like the platypus. It evolved away from having a stomach.)

 

• Do you believe in life after death? Explain.

No, except in the sense that we are survived by those who knew us and remember us.

No real reason to suppose an afterlife.

 

• How do your beliefs in origins and evolution affect your sense of purpose for your own life?

They don’t, so far as I can figure.

Also, it’s not a belief. That’s a weasel word. I accept the evidence instead.

Evidence points to evolution.

 

• Any other comments.

Yes, is this one of those schools that attempts to teach student how to side step science?

Does your school have hang ups about the classification of bats as mammals instead of birds, as according to the Bible? Or of the moon as a light source, instead of a reflector?

If your school concludes that God created the world in such a state as to implicate an ancient universe, why then is God such a trickster then?

It seems in the past faith was not required, yet now is.

What does your school teach concerning the other gods?

Are you a fan of Kent Hovind?

You can't know that.

 

There are many things that science cannot explain and probably will never be able to fully explain, not even in 100,000,000 years from now. Besides science has discovered some really strange things like dark matter, dark energy, black holes and invisible particles passing right through the body.

Yeah... so?

Those are not equal to a fellow claiming he's not eaten for 70 years.

In terms of likelihood, we're looking at a simple scam. It's up to him to prove it's not.

 

Admitedly this is a bold statement, but on the other hand, can anyone think of an example of religion furthering the advancement of science?

 

Well, the Church helped provide education to a number of people, so that's worth something. Keep in mind, a number of scientists (in the past, to be sure) had background in religionin some form or another.

It's popular to cite the Galileo example of religion holding back scientific progress, but it's worth keeping in mind it had as much to do with Galileo's work presenting the Pope as an idiot.

It seems fundamental religion does have a tendency to suppress freethought, but certainly in cases were religion has been more lax science has progressed under it's auspices.

Look at Ancient Greece and Rome, for example.

( I say this with full expectation of being soon to be corrected.)

Or it was cause by sexual selection rather than natural selection. That is, our ancestors thought lack of fur indicated a better mate. The question becomes why would that be?

My apologies for vague sentence structure. I meant that in aquatic species, hairlessness was linked to size and thermo regulation. Thanks for the correction.

One idea that I did hear on this quite some time ago was different.

 

Our ancestors weren't the big strong cavemen until relatively recently, for most of our history we were more prey than predator. Did we start to have a semi aquatic existence to avoid predators? This would also explain the rudimentary webbing between our fingers and toes.

 

It's just a thought.

Escaping to the water to escape land predators ignores the number of aquatic predators and aggressive herbivores.

Many aquatic or semi aquatic mammals retained their fur (like for example otters, seals, ect.) which is part of the biggest claim of the aquatic ape hypothesis. Hairlessness is not linked to being aquatic. If anything, it's linked more to body size and thermo regulation.

Our skin doesn't support this idea either. If it were to be believed, we'd see similarities between our skin and the skin of aquatic mammals that provide adaptions to an aquatic life. Yet, we don't.

Most animals have the webbing between their digits, this a result of cell death of skin cells that connects digits together at a early stage in development.

Aquatic Ape Hypothesis

Aquatic Ape Critique

I would like to see what you think because i am not sure what my ethnicity is. well the thing i know is that my ancestors moved and migrated from all around the world and there is no one place i can call home.

Might have to do with why you ethnicity is problematic?

I'm terrible (somewhat purposefully) at picking out ethnicity, but you certainly look of latin descent.

Speciation is a gradual process, it doesn't occur immediately. As generations go by, you end up with an organism descended from a species that can no longer interbreed with the original species, but can breed with the generations that preceeded it.

A good example of this is ring species.

In ring species, you have populations that are spread out (the two examples I can think of were along a coast) and the population varies as you move from population to population.

While they can successfully interbreed with populations near to them, there's a point where it cuts off as you move further away from that population, and at either end you'll have completly seperate species that cannot interbreed.

Now, species itself I understand is a somewhat vague. It's used to mean any organism which cannot successfully interbreed in nature.

However, there are animals that can successfully interbreed, though will not do so naturally.

Their offspring will be viable, and can produce later generations.

However, they are two separate species.

The monotheistic religions are pretty much all worshiping the same God. The polytheistic religions were mostly created to explain stuff like thunder or the seasons. Jesus is historical fact. That seems to lend more credibility to Christianity than most other religions. But, yes, they may be right and I may be wrong. That is a very true possibility. I don't claim to know the truth.<br style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; background-color: rgb(248, 250, 252); ">

Sort of true, sort of not. Judaism has evolved over time, from a early, polytheistic style religion to what we know of it as today. There are still traces of this in it's practices and texts.

Christianity branched off from Judaism, and the existence of the Biblical Jesus is in doubt.

Islam branched off from Judaism and and Christianity, as well as taking with it parts of the more tribal religious elements. Mohammad is well attested to in the historical record, unlike Jesus.

While there are similarities due to this branching, there are also some rather definite differences in the different religions. To say that they all pretty much worship the same god rather glosses over this.

As for the sacrifice, if it occurred... how much does it mean to sacrifice if the sacrifice is then reversed?

Yes, well.

Obviously I'm new and hardly used.

not much I can say about myself. Just started studying Biology at the college level, have had a long standing love triangle with science and history since I was a kid.

I consider myself neither extraordinary nor necessarily competent in skill, though hopefully I'll reach competency in a few years.

As of the moment, and likely sometime into the future I remain a Keen Idiot.