Octopod wrote:And some animals do rape. Ducks for one.
Did you guys seriously miss this for two pages? No one questioned this at all?
Or is this supposedly common knowledge and ducks just rape each other at the local K-Mart regularly?
Ducks mate when the male swims over to the female, holds her head under water, and has his way with her. I used to work at a wildlife shelter and it was always a bit of an odd observation.
EDIT: DAMMIT, this post is getting so long. I read your post and thought for a minute it was the last one and responded. I didn't realize a bunch of other people had already. Sorry. Back to the novel.
Last edited by vash23n on Mon Sep 13, 2010 7:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Ack wrote:The lesson? Both sides have crappy elements within their ranks, but I don't feel either side's all bad. Let's just try to live and let live.
I agree with a lot of the comments posted that evolution takes as much faith or even more faith than believing in a Creator God or intelligent design. Evolution, or more accurately Darwinism has no evidence, not the tiniest shred, it is a THEORY or hypo-thesis. It's based on assumptions and wild guesses. On the other hand, the EVIDENCE of intelligent design is all around us for those that wish to see it as it plainly is. As for the so-called links between stages of "evolution" - show me a single example of it? Little known fact is that Darwin himself was the biggest doubter of his theory, he even admitted it in his "Origins of Man".
Let me briefly illustrate a few examples of the evidence of Intelligent Design: The clock-work precision design and workings of the Universe and the Earth itself, which operates in a very precise and meticulous manner could not have happened by chance; The Earth's location relative to the sun and our exact position in the Milky Way Galaxy; The fine-tuned Earth with all the laws and processes of nature highly inter-dependent on each other to enable life to exist; Even the moon has a major role to play for life to work on Earth; The Earth's exact proximity to the Sun (if the Earth were only a few thousand kilometers closer or farther from the Sun, life would not have been possible); The complex make-up of animals in general and humans in particular (evolved from a single cell ? Wow, that is solid faith for you); The human eye, so astoundingly, perplexingly complex and a true miracle that it even exists and works it’s regarded by most honest scientists, even Darwinists are having trouble explaining this one, is a distinct impossibility to have evolved because all the different parts had to be there at exactly the same time for the eye to have worked or else it never would have!
And, the one thing that really sealed it for me personally, is the intricacies of the human cell. Only recently have science been able to explore the cell right down to its super-microscopic level and scientists were totally blown away and awe-struck with what they found. The cell, as small as it is (can only be observed with a microscope), has even many more infinitesimally small parts that work like an assembly factory that the best robotic human factories or a world’s best computer pales in comparison - everything plays its part in absolute clock-work precision or it will not work at all, and therefore life would not have existed.
Yes sadly, as expected and for unknown reasons, the cell and eye discoveries did make headline news so that people can be enlightened to make up their own minds as to how such absolutely mind-numbing complexity and precision could have evolved from whatever Darwinists say it evolved from.
God, in his holy Word, says plainly that he created everything and there is NO EVIDENCE to suggest otherwise. But He also cautioned in His Scriptures that the world at large will be deceived and blinded and not believe the plain truth that is all around them. Even the religious establishment has succumbed to the unsupported theory of Darwinism.
Think about this, do you really want to believe that Darwinism is true and that you are here today and gone tomorrow forever more ? It is a small wonder that whole world is not desperately depressed at the prospect of never living again. But I believe that in their hearts most believe that this is not it or the end of the road and that the Creator Himself will reveal Himself and His truth to everyone despite His truth having been rejected in this age.
Science and intelligent design is not opponents, except for "Evolution". Science discovered, observed and explained a lot of exacting, flawless and absolute natural laws that is the building blocks of life. God is the Creator that designed those very laws to make physical life a reality. If God did not create those laws, where did it originally come from ? Out of nothing ? I refuse to believe that nonsense!
Darwinism will die a dishonorable death at some point, it's just a matter of time. Just a pity it is taught as “fact” in our schools, while the Almighty God has all but been banished from schools and all public life. Darwinism is the single-biggest thing to ever turn people away from God and see where the world is today. We're heading downhill all the way. Jesus prophesied all these things, it's in the pages of your Bible. But He will return to save us from ourselves. I pray your Kingdom come!
I'd say that's all bad. Ok ok, maybe the dude's a good person. Maybe he's never harmed a fly and he works down at the soup kitchen every weekend. But argh! Just. . . argh! I have to side with the "extremist" atheist in these situations. The logic is all around us. It's plain to see that this guy holds a view, that if believed by the majority of people (about 40% is the number I usually see) would be extremely dangerous to the progress of our civilization. I guess I'm going to say that the guy who refutes this perspective, deserves the high ground. The person who thinks gays have the same rights as the rest of us, deserves the moral highground moreso than the person who would deny them rights (and I'm not just talking about technical stuff like gay marriage or don't ask don't tell, I'm talking about people who truly believe that gays are inferior and don't even deserve the rights they hold now).
Regardless of what he thinks, why don't you feel he has the right to think whatever he wants?
Ack wrote:Regardless of what he thinks, why don't you feel he has the right to think whatever he wants?
The problem isn't what he thinks, it's that he's trying to get our kids to think the same. As has been mentioned, his argument has many deep flaws in it. Let's phrase this in a different way. Let's say you have two people, one who thinks the world is flat and the other who thinks it's round. Clearly one is right and the other is wrong. Now, the flat world guy is free to think what he wants, but I see no reason to give him equal deference I would to the round world guy. And if he wants to have us teach his views to our kids he's going to need to back it up with some evidence.
Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.
He can think whatever he wants. It's when that bleeds over into other people (as in his last paragraph) that it's an issue.
The problem is placing his "thoughts" at the same level as rational ideas. We say that people have the freedom to think whatever they want, but that doesn't mean that every idea thrown out there is valid or useful. I wouldn't want the guys who participate in the red bull flugtag on the engineering panel for boeing. And I wouldn't want someone who thinks the earth is 6000 years old on the schoolboard planning the science curriculum. Religion is fine on its own, but when rational and good ideas start disproving "biblical fact" the religious get nervous, and they try to pass religion off as science.
MrPopo wrote:There's also the whole "we can't figure out how this happened, so it must be God" theme running through his essay, which always entertains me.
This is called "God of the Gaps".
Hobie-wan wrote:
MrPopo wrote:Arbitrarily throwing up your hands like that is not the way to get science done.
It won't help you make a neat gun either.
It certainly won't help the people who are still alive.
Ok ok I know I said I wasn't going to dissect this guy but Mr. popo mentioned one part and said it was the easiest to point out, but I'd say this part is:
"As for the so-called links between stages of "evolution" - show me a single example of it? Little known fact is that Darwin himself was the biggest doubter of his theory, he even admitted it in his "Origins of Man"
Err. . . has he even looked? A single example? How about hundreds of examples. It's like me saying "As for the so called palmtrees, show me a single example of one" as if they don't exist. It's that blatant. Walk into a damn museum! Look it up online! Read a book!
I kept in the second part because it doesn't prove anything. Even if Darwin was the "biggest doubter of his theory", that's like saying "Pythagorus was the biggest doubter of the pythagorean theorem". Ok. . . but that doesn't make it any less true.
Ok, certainly his views are distorted, and yes, I wouldn't want mistruths taught to my children either, but they're going to be taught regardless. Why fixate solely on his?
I ask because in school I heard many distortions of fact, such as Christopher Columbus being the first white man in North America, or whether the Civil War was fought over slavery (I heard both yes and no in school).
Eh, I'm getting away from the point of this thread, but I have to ask: are his incorrect beliefs unacceptable because they're springing from his religion, or is his religion unacceptable because it holds incorrect beliefs?
Ack wrote:Eh, I'm getting away from the point of this thread, but I have to ask: are his incorrect beliefs unacceptable because they're springing from his religion, or is his religion unacceptable because it holds incorrect beliefs?
Somewhat of a loaded question there Ack. The first choice implies that all religious beliefs are bad, and the second condemns religion for having a few wrong beliefs. I actually have more respect for the people who take every word of the bible literally than I do for people like him. As has been pointed out there are a lot of things in the bible that most creationists agree aren't true, or are simply poetic devices. So if we've established that not everything in the bible is correct, doesn't that make the whole thing suspect? Now I'm not saying there aren't true things in the bible, but they're going with "Creation happened" without evidence to back it up. At people who take every word as gospel are consistent.
Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.
