Thanks for sharing. The special bus will be here soon to take you back to the care facility. It's crap like your post and its sub-kindergarten lolcat English - hell, you can't even spell "bollocks" - that gets up people's arses and gives non-believers a really shitty name. Sod off.Shots, Flymike, I'm certainly not interested in "saving" anyone from wasting their lives (I don't think Dawkins is either, ftr) or de-converting people (it would be the height of hypocrisy, for starters). My reasons for my big, stupid posts aren't because I want to disprove religion. I just want people to know why non-believers don't believe their claims (basically, since religion makes big claims, the burden of proof is on them, it's not on non-believers to disprove them). I want for people to be aware of the reasons they believe things and also give their kids a chance to figure their own beliefs out, rather than just soak them in their own particular set from birth so they have no choice in the matter. It's up to you, as adults, what you choose to believe so why not give your kids a chance to make the same choice when they're old enough to think about it properly?
A big thing that riles me is when atheism gets mischaracterised as a completely immoral life choice which leads to anarchy and "sinfulness" and lawless behaviour, and when non-believers get drawn as unfeeling nihilists with no care or appreciation for anything because they don't draw their morals from scripture. I always get a strong urge to debunk such fallacies, which are still unfortunately very popular and inevitably get trotted out in discussions like this.
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I've only owned one wheel (bought in late 2002) and it still works really well: the Momo Racing (or Momo Black). I can only go by what I've tried, and the ol' Black is pretty sturdy and a good first wheel. Here in Oz they're going for less than $150 AUD at the moment. Just be careful with the paddles, they don't last.
Aw yeah, Trackmania ftw :up: Nice to see a new one coming out 
OP: in my experience, if you behave you won't get banned from any decent servers 
Do you actually get banned so often that you forget where you're banned from? Maybe you should adjust your behaviour 
Do you actually get banned so often that you forget where you're banned from? Maybe you should adjust your behaviour Don't know where you drew that from dude, that's quite an extrapolation - and it's utterly backwards! All I'm saying is that you'd be as good as you are right now, with or without the thought of god looking at you. Why? See third paragraph.
Stupid? Perhaps not. Ancient societies were as intelligent as we are, pretty much. They just didn't have the toys we use to observe and confirm things. Ignorant through no fault of their own when it came to the world? Absolutely. So why anybody should continue to take their words as divinely revealed truth, especially after everything Genesis claims can be denied, is utterly incomprehensible to me.
That's the thing. It's not JUST dumb luck. The random part comes in the form an undirected mutation - it's the selective pressure of the external environment which reveals if the mutation is neutral, negative or positive for the individual. So it's not just pure luck. And yeah, I guess it would suck to be B - but it doesn't have to. B could have another mutation which may not make it survive better in the current environment, but perhaps its difference allows it survive better elsewhere, like down on the plains instead of the treetops, or simply further down the tree, instead of up in the canopy.
Look at Madagascar with its many species of lemurs - there are barely any natural predators to eat them, so there are lemurs there occupying almost every conceivable evolutionary niche: nocturnals, diurnals, insect-eaters, strict vegos, all different colour schemes. They all have a long-ago common ancestor but are all distinct species which have evolved along separate paths over the millions of years they've been isolated on that island.
I think it's common sense to assume that any society without some of chosen or appointed leadership will degenerate - but it's still not to say that morality is something handed down from above, either from a centralised government or elsewhere.
Funny how people can look at anything as a parable. I once read an Asimov story where two AIs had a conversation in which they reasoned, quite logically and within the three laws of robotics, that the best thing they could do for humanity was to eradicate it. Should I now distrust the work people are doing in AI research? Should I always unplug my PC from the outlet at night, just in case? Or should I just regard that as another great Asimov story?
What, so remove god from people's heads and they graduate from tax-cheat and bad driver to serial cannibal rapist? How does that even begin to approach common sense?
So, what holds morality? The same thing that's always held it - humanity, empathy, our combined, innate social responsibility. The same thing that makes troupes of chimps, meerkats, prairie dogs & flocks of birds & schools of fish looking out for each other. Keep the group alive & safe and that increases your own individual chances of staying alive & safe.
Humans had morality and laws and prohibitions against certain behaviour long before the religion of Abraham formed the 10 commandments out of common sense rules (don't kill, don't lie) and local religious by-laws. You think pre-Jewish people were just running around in complete immoral anarchy? The ancient Athenians, Persians, Babylonians, Chinese, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, NZ Maoris, Celts, Gauls, Goths etc. all had codes of conduct and laws they lived by, long before Moses, which all had the same things at their core: don't murder; be honest; don't steal from your kin.
But you simply don't need to be religious to know that theft, murder and dishonesty are bad things. It'd be no surprise to me to find that as humans developed language & other ways of communicating our thoughts, we started talking about what's good for the tribe and what's not good. Mating with mom = bad. Make ugly child. Eating red berries = good. Make Ugg mate with female from next valley all night. Killing father = bad. Make mom mad. She hide berries.
May I say "amen" to that?
I've seen & heard the word "atheist" followed or preceded by words like "fundamentalist", "militant" and "evangelist" so many times I'm wondering if the people who use them have actually looked them up to get a proper definition.Put simply: atheism is a religion as much as "bald" is a hairstyle.
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No point having traps until they add the sodding squid!
Oh, my first numpty! 
I'm so proud! I just want to thank go- hang on ...
I'm so proud! I just want to thank go- hang on ...Right, my mistake! Oops :zombie:
Guess I answered it a little too much didn't I...shite...oh well, now edited and slightly fix0rd so as not to be a rant at you
Guess I answered it a little too much didn't I...shite...oh well, now edited and slightly fix0rd so as not to be a rant at you
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8 hours in bed? Guess I'll beat the odds then, I only get 7 at the most.
Eesh.
Can't believe people actually equate sickness and infection with the devil, like it's 1408, not 2008! Are we meant to accept that god, in his infinite mercy, wisdom, compassion & power, could or would even allow a force to exist that plagues mankind with illness & suffering? What kind of theological non-logic is that? "Disease exists and we don't like it at all, therefore god's nemesis is responsible"? Anybody who truly thinks diseases come from "sin" are likely the kind of people to sit down and pray really, really hard while their young child slowly & painfully dies instead of seeking medical help. Anybody who clasps their hands and asks god to save their sick child instead of taking that child to a doctor is a dangerous, retarded lunatic and should not be trusted with care of either the bodies or minds of anyone, much less those of children. Disease is caused by organisms & processes within our natural world and it is by treatments developed in this natural world that we cure & manage them.
"Good" and "bad" bacteria are in the eye of the beholder. For example, if you get the "good" bacteria from your intestines onto an open wound (for example by not washing your filthy, filthy toilety hands), they can infect the wound, cause sepsis and, if untreated, can kill you whether you pray or not! Then, when you die, it's not "bad" bacteria (hiding in the corners of your attic, waiting for your heart to stop beating, fangs dripping with saliva) that turn your guts into liquid as they eat you from the inside. It's the good guys that live in your gut and help you digest your food (the ones that live on you start munching as well)! Once you die, they start starving because there's no nurtitional input from you (bad, dead dad. Bad!). They're free from the mechanisms that stop them eating you while you're alive, so they do what they do naturally - consume whatever food's there, which happens to be your intestines and then everything else they happen upon, all the while exrecting delicious-smelling gases like methane and hydrogen sulphide - the same stuff that escapes from your butt while you're walking around scratching it. There's no such thing as "good" or "bad" bacteria my friends - just bacteria that is - according to us - in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Bad" bacteria is actually good for some animals - the disgusting septic saliva of the Komodo dragon contains that much "bad" bacteria that it can quite easily kill you, just by biting you and infecting you with the dangerous bastards that live in its mouth. But the Komod dragon has a developed immunity to the effects of those bacteria and uses them as a defence/hunting mechanism: he bites you; you go off and die of sepsis after a few days; he then finds your rotting carcass and eats you, adding to the pool of nasty toxic bugs living in his mouth.
If you're talking about the perfection of Eden, well, again, Genesis is no place to be looking for facts.
If god was going about installing failsafes in his creations "just in case", clearly he's nowhere near a perfect designer as his ghost-writers would like people to think, and was acutely aware of his own fallibility (and if he's fallible, why call him God?). If he is/was the creator of everything, why even choose to create disease-causing organisms in the first place? If disease is the punishment god inflicted on man for Original Sin (a ridiculous, hateful, anti-human doctrine by the way), why give us a way to fight it at all? It's utterly insane - like a crazed villain who hunts humans for sport on his private island saying: "I have all the power - a number of huge guns, a complete map of this island and many crazy friends who will all try to kill you in various ways - but I'll make it sporting and give you an hour's head-start and a small pointy stick. Now go!"
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Reason : effed up & edited
It's up to the person making the claim to provide the evidence, not the other way around.
For example: you say you have a dinosaur in your garage. Fine. I say "show me the dinosaur." If you can't or, for some reason, won't show me the dinosaur, I can only assume, based on the evidence, that you don't actually have a dinosaur. There's no reason to believe that what you're saying is true. Showing me a book you say the dinosaur told you to write doesn't count as evidence either.
In court, it's up to the accuser to prove his case, to prove the guilt of the accused person. All the defence has to do is cast doubt on the evidence for the crime.
In science, it's up to the scientist to prove his theory with research and experiment and verifiable & falsifiable results. He can't simply say "this fossil is between 50-75 million years old" or "this gene controls eye colour", he has to show his results. Not just that - he must show how he found those results, so that others can follow the same steps in the same way and either verify or disprove his experiment.
So, if someone says to me "there is a god" and I don't believe them, it's not my job to prove them wrong. If they make a positive assertion that "X exists", they have to convince me of the existence of X. Why should I be required to prove the non-existence of something I've seen no evidence for to begin with? Not believing things is the default position for humanity, it's why we require proof for everything, whether it's someone claiming their car is the fastest, their dog is smartest, that they love us or if someone is accusing us of murder.
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Depends on who you believe and why you believe them. That question just raises more questions: do you think you have a choice in this belief; was it impressed on you as a child; have you examined it in light of the facts of the world; have you considered what it would take to change your belief, etc? Other questions arise to do with the many, many flaws in the apparent design of humans and other species (a lot of which make it appear as if we're all still in alpha-testing phase, rather than ready to compile and ship as finished products) but they can wait.
Sounds like you read a different "God Delusion" than most people. I never took Dawkins to be that combative (no more combative than the average creationist - usually less so - and at least Dawkins has verifiable fact on his side), but he's certainly nothing if not forthright & honest and not one to mince words. Perhaps you should read TGD again, approach it objectively, dispassionately and actually consider what it has to say, rather than take personal offence - but taking offence is likely to happen if you've already decided you're right and everything in the book contradicts you
Perhaps read Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" or "The Blind Watchmaker". They're both awesome resources for learning about evolution and come without any of his now-famous atheist arguments.Better still, read someone else. Dawkins isn't the only atheist to write a book about religion and *gasp* some atheists actually disagree with him on many points. Dan Dennett's "Unweaving The Rainbow" or "Breaking The Spell" would probably be a little less confronting and he approaches the topic from different directions to Dawkins (but with no less a convincing argument). Michael Shermer & Victor Stenger are good places to start too. But if you really want to be offended, read Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens' books on atheism. They'll make Dawkins seem like a fluffy little bunny with candy in his pocket.
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You sure you're not a Bronze-Age desert scribe? 
What's the source of this fable about a hot ginger JoHo trying to convert me in my front room? I was there, it didn't happen like that.
She was a brunette from Amway. Wanna be a rung on my ladder to success?
She was a brunette from Amway. Wanna be a rung on my ladder to success?
The reason this section was created in the first place was to keep all the crap off the front page. You can't stop people posting and re-posting crap but you can restrict where they do it. In my experience the best way to approach this section is to skim the title threads for five seconds and just bail, knowing that the usual suspects will do their usual work on anything silly 
You're reading it right if you're reading it in English
What's your point?I won't get into that extremely simplistic version of evolution (dumb luck, in the form of random, undirected mutation is barely even half the story) as others have answered that more than adequately.
That sentence about your morality worries me though. Am I to take it that if you didn't believe god was looking over your shoulder you'd fall into a disgusting pit of immoral behaviour and do whatever you please with no thought of the consequences or the effects on other people? What would that say about you or the way you were raised? I'd much rather give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you'd be as good as you currently are if god suddenly slipped from your mind. A moral atheist is that way because he believes it's the right thing to be. Simple as that. The concept of the Golden Rule - "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" - doesn't, in my opinion, need any religious weight behind it for it to be valid.
Taking anything from Genesis as even remotely true is, to me, one of the largest mistakes a person can make. The Earth was made in six days? Well, no, it quite clearly wasn't (there are centuries of evidence, then centuries of Popes attempting to squash scientific discoveries and the people who made them). If a supposedly divinely-inspired (or dictated) and infallible book made such a massive error about where we came from, I have trouble seeing how anyone can trust it to tell us where we're meant to be going
Doubts about the bible's implications, guessing, maybes, hunches about god's thought patterns ... I don't mean to pick holes gratuitously, but if that's as definite as the bible allows you to get, it doesn't seem all that infallible to me.
Chemical reactions have to take place somewhere. Biological chemical reactions - especially the kind that make our lives possible - can't happen in a vacuum. Without the infrastructure of the body (circulatory/digestive/reproductive/immune/neural/skeletal/muscular etc) regulating the separation, interaction and precise timing of our biochemical activity we simply couldn't exist. Of course, if consciousness itself is something other than the patterns of billions of neurons firing away when we're awake (and our reactions to them) and could be ascribed to something non-physical, there'd be something in that. However, noone's been able to keep a person consciously alive without a working, physical brain just yet. Theoretically it might be possible, but right now it's science fiction.
Now, go and rest. Trust your immune system and help it out with a little ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) and the odd cup of tea (stimulant, diuretic, plenty of antioxidants) - those little chemical reactions could save your life...actually, they do, every minute of every day
I didn't find anything offensive - but I did find the content of every single email that's been forwarded to me and every digg photo topic over the last 3 years
Duh, print them on ANTI-MATTER vinyl. Sheesh!
Arox, you get picked on because that thread you linked to wasn't your first (or last) re-post. It's not like scania isn't a suggestion-addict either, but lucky for him people seem to be in a good mood today
Sometimes these threads get soaked in sarcasm and abuse, other times they get side-tracked and hi-jacked with squid-related matters. It's a combination of luck of the draw and someone's previous posting history as to what reaction they get
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Don't forget: each sticker you apply adds -5kg weight!
Because it's stupid and ridiculous and immature and this is a serious design competition. 8WD. Bah!
+ FOUR HUNDRED BILLIONThere are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.
There's no "of course" about it. Noone can know for sure, but you can look at the evidence, or lack of evidence, and decide for yourself what you think is more probable.
Squid-navigated Ferrari rally car. 9000hp (it's a big squid) eight-turbo X-32 12L engine, 4WD, neutral downforce. That's Schuey driving it.
For me, though it might've been posted already in which case I wouldn't have seen because I can't view vid here at work, nothing can beat the transforming dancing Citroen in the car park
And here I was thinking crappiness was coded into the demo to give people an incentive to cough up for a license already
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG