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Everything posted by ZeroZero

  1. Whatever way you look at it the Church is a bogus operation, its founded on claims which simply are not true. Over centuries it has shimmy shammied, to try and keep itself credible, but its fundamental ideas are false. The fact that many people hold these ideas in earnest (and maybe are otherwise nice people) does not change the fact that it is built on the idea that are false. When we begin to realise these ideas are ridiculous or worse, the Church sidesteps the issue. Have you noticed, for example, how it "forgets" to remind the faithful that... Leviticus 20:13 “If a man practices homosexuality, having sex with another man as with a woman, both men have committed a detestable act. They must both be put to death, for they are guilty of a capital offense
  2. Strange. Try not to think in stereotypes it limit's your intelligence severely. This is the real case of a real woman facing a death sentence for blasphemy ,all because Muslims would not drink from the same water bowl.
  3. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6269297/Islamists-rally-Pakistan-death-sentence-Christian.html
  4. I accept that many people are decent people and believe in religion, I think they are being deceived often for profit and power. I am attacking the ideas, not the people. I stand against Islam because I want these people to be free - I feel for them and want their minds unshackled. There are many horrible things that happen in the name of faith and where a religion controls it can impose terrible penalties on those that disagree. You call me a bigot, but look at the bigots in religion, holding positions of power and suppressing the ignorant with false promises of rewards of an after life, "miracles" and other things that are is never delivered. Only today Leading Pakistani humanist campaigner, Gulalai Ismail, was arrested in Pakistan. Suppression and bigotry is rife in such countries. All over the world people are arrested, flogged, tortured and killed for daring to question faiths. This same intolerance is found explicit in the texts they reveer. Those followers that, as you rightly point out are good people are guilty of disobeying the more horrible commands of these ancient texts. https://skepticsannotatedbible.com/int/long.html . Such a God is no example to mankind, he is a vengeful intolerant despot. In many islamic countries like Suadi, Pakistan and Afghanistan children are taught in Mosques that the final word on everything is the Quran (what utter piffle). Women are suppressed under Sharia and are not even allowed out of their houses without permission from a guardian. To a Muslim, any unbeliever is an inferior citizen, not worthy of friendship nor even of looking a Muslim in the eye. They are destined to be dragged to hell by Allah the Merciful's torture Angels, where they will be given molten metal to drink and devil's fruit to eat, whilst their skin is burned of with fire, . Quran (9:73) -when their skin is cremated Allah the merciful "peace be upon him" will helpfully replace it again and again, into eternity. It is religion that is the bigot.
  5. Clinging to ignorance is terrifying, that's why I used the word. What i find terrifying is how human beings can follow a charismatic leader whether there is truth or not. I find it terrifying to think of how many humans have spent their whole lives supporting a religion that promises them a life after death and various other dubious benefits with no end result. What a waste of humanity. Such humans can often despise and even destroy those that don't hold their ridiculous notions. Given a chance religions can act as a tyranny and snuff out any objections with fear, guilt, punishment and even executions. 13 countries punish apostasy with death, try thinking objectively and publishing your work in Saudi, Afghanistan or numerous other Islamic countries - at the very least you will get ostrasized, at worst you will be tortured and executed People should be free of these tyrannies.
  6. I have come across claims that early hominids and apes have thicker enamel to help them eat hard vegetative materials. If the body hardened enamel when it changed diet, this argument might be invalid
  7. Being male, it's not in my repertiore. I should have said child... apols My question is does teeth enamel harden and/or thicken with use
  8. If a modern human baby was given a diet of hard foods, such as canes, twigs, hard fruit and root vegetables, would the thickness of their enamel increase?
  9. In studies of ancient skeletons prior to say 500,000 years ago I often come across people talking about brain size as if it were clear indication of human development. Brain sizes in the human race vary enormously according to age and other criteria. My wife is very petite and has a smaller brain than I am of average height and have a very large hat size. Now I realise that we are talking about brain size relative to body size, and sometimes we have other bones to calculate body size, and I know that scientists can guesstimate the age of a skull from the plates of the skull and their fusion. However, surely in order to make statements about human development from periods where we have very little actual material (sometimes only enough to fill a shoe box), one would need more representative samples? Are palaeontologists guilty of overstating the evidence?
  10. Reilly: I have been observing him and Fox news. He was recently sacked for sexually abusing his staff. Reilly was in the right place with Fox, the channel has no interest in the truth and is a mouthpiece and propaganda channel for Trump who also has no interest in the truth. If you subtract the number of people in America that claim to believe in evolution but claim this was created by God, you arrive at a figure of about 16% evolutionists. This is a terrifying figure, comparable with Islamic countries. America is loosing the plot. I have seen the interview and read most of Dawkins books including the ones cited here. Personally I think Dawkin's treatment of the proof of God, using criticisms of the ontological argument, argument against the teleological or "design" principle (Paley), and so forth, misses the point. Most believers have not even read the bible/ Quran etc, they just "feel something deep inside" and attribute this to God. This is supplemented by internal "revelations" and "visions" during that weird thing they do called praying, and perhaps elsewhere in their lives. Of course only Christians see the holy Mary, only Hindus Vishnu, this is because they are artefacts of our culture. Because these revelations are potent, they believe that they therefore MUST be true. If you believe something with all your heart this makes it true does it not? The stronger the belief, and the more people i n your community that support this belief, the more likely (they feel) their assertions are true. Of course this is completely wrong, at one time Egyptians believed that Ra the Sun God travelled across the sky every evening and one could find millions of people that "believed" this with all their heart. Whole industries were developed to support these ideas, ceremonies for the dead, pyramids and many other practices. A tidy profit could be made. Yet who would give credibility to such ideas today? They have vanished into the sand Evolution encourages us to share/imitate the views of our social group and has no interest in the truth. If knowledge was revealed to organisms by evolutionary processes all creatures would know about micro-organisms , the size of the Universe, DNA, mathematics and so forth. Beyond a very small scope, creatures are given no knowledge of the universe, beyond what they need in order to survive and procreate. It is human endeavour that creates knowledge and nature does not give up her secrets easily For aeons humans have existed in a world of delusion and error. If such humans are successful at procreating they survive, along with the delusions they share. This is the "natural" order of things. If a person wishes to change that order, they are frequently met with hostility and ostrasization - the very mechanisms that lower chances of evolutionary success Evolution is true, it's a fact. It is evidenced by the study of morphology, DNA, animal behaviour and archeology - this disciplines are completely different, but they concur. The thesis that Donald Duck created the universe, or "God" is not supported by facts, it does not qualify as an explanation.
  11. I find it very intriguing that someone can actually argue that "Donald Duck created the Universe" is an explanation. Sound like a Jehovah' Witness kind of reasoning to me. Ha Ha.
  12. In philosophy, there is a concept called "an argument from authority". it is a weak proof. Evolution makes it so that we emulate our elders, particularly when we are young. If your elder tells you "don't put your hand in a fire", it is better that you listen, evolution favours those that do listen to such a statement. However, this does not mean that everything, or indeed most things. your elders tell you are true. My mother told me that opening an umbrella inside, or cracking a mirror, brought seven years bad luck, she would scream if/when such an event happened and we would have to leave our umbrellas outside in the rain. Not so good. When, and only when, a person develops a sound ability to exercise critical reasoning (which is for the most part a learnt skill) then they can re-examine claims made by their elders. If no ability to weigh and gather evidence is present, criticising their elders leads only to chaos and simple delinquency. From observations, it seems there is a time period in adolescence where children reflect upon what they have learnt and generate their own conclusions - this can go rightly or wrongly
  13. Wow so much confusion in one post! Beecee has done much of my work for me. Here is my response. Claiming something is "a miracle" is no explanation at all, it says nothing about how something happened. In fact ALL the evidence that Jesus was the "son of God" (whatever that mumbo jumbo means) is not actually evidence at all. Walking on water, changing water into wine (likely a cheap party trick), claiming to feed thousands with a few loaves and fishes, and all the rest of it are all "non sequiturs" - the conclusion does not follow from the argument. Even if they were all true (and not hyperbole introduced by ignorant scribes not there at the time) , they STILL ALL don't prove that Jesus was the son of God. Lots of good party tricks but that's all they are. The times were ignorant, if Jesus had a simple electric torch, which he could switch on and off, no doubt everyone would have gone "wow this guy really must have the power of God he can create light itself!" . God himself is complicit in all this mumbo jumbo, he himself does not seem to understand what evidence is, his "proofs" through various acts and revelations are not in fact proofs at all. He seems to be uneducated and pretty stupid. Many of his acts pointless others are jealous and selfish and horrible. Take Jesus's curing of lepers. First science has cured a lot more lepers that Jesus ever did. Jesus and God only cured a few, the rest they let to rot. God, whom it is claimed created everything, created leprosy, along with a lot of other horrible diseases, and various torturous forms of suffering that go on every day for all creatures with God. presumably, whistling Dixie and proclaiming "tell them I work in mysterious ways". God is Love, God is Omnipotent, God is Omniscient, Christians claim. Yet the facts of life are ignored, just like they ignore the uglier passages of the Bible. the bible, the Quaran and most other religious texts are the psychobabble of peoples that had no grasp of what is true and what is not true, what is verifiable and what is not. Visions and revelations are nowadays treated with antipsychotics. They are not 'proof' of anything.
  14. I accept all that you say above, but I still claim that the probability of a tested sequence of DNA being "useful" is better than simple random mutation, probably by a significant factor
  15. Thank you. When you say that the introduced code is likely "gibberish" of course I agree, but this is the point, random mutation IS gibberish, whereas sequences introduced by other organisms (perhaps endogenous retroviruses) are more likely not to be gibberish, even if it is still true that mostly they WILL be gibberish, or will be silenced by gene defence mechanisms - or possibly (I guess) epigentic meachnisms such as methalisation, or some other form of defence. Even though this is the case, it's still more likely that such a sequence is more useful than a random mutation because it has spent generations of development in it's original host. In short random mutation could be called "pure gibberish" and transfer of gene materials from other species (see I did not use the world alien ) could be called "partial gibberish" as it makes sense in fragments Thank you all for the helpful input
  16. Yes, not little green interplanatery men. thank you. I shall research horizontal gene transfer. Essentially I am looking at the possibility of DNA sequences (snips) transferring from one species to another, at any level and by any mechanism. It seems to me that this would have a powerful effect on evolution if this occurred. An analogy If you were to make a comparison to a computer and compare DNA to machine code. In a computer you have machine code - this is binary bits (AKA sequences of DNA) . These collections of bits are collated into useful functions or "procedures". From these basic building blocks the higher behaviours are built. If there were random mutation in a similar way to machine code, every so often a "procedure" might occur that was useful, and this could be incorporated into future generations. This would be metaphorically equivalent to "random mutation". Now if there were a mechanism that could pass a whole procedure from one species to another, this would have an additional advantage over simply randomising bits. The procedure would already possess functionality at some level, as verified in the original organism, and would have a much stronger chance of being useful to the new host. My analogy obviously does not bear too close scrutiny, but I think it's enough to show my thinking. In short, can sequences of DNA code be transferred between alien organisms? Possibly via endogenous retroviruses, possibly by other means?
  17. I am not sure if you understand. A virus is itself an alien to the host. Retro viruses that insert themselves into germ cells are called endogenous retroviruses, because they can, via the germ cell pass their DNA code onto future generations
  18. Evolution is a fact, not a hypothesis, just like it's a fact that your mother begat you, this is not a hypothesis too. Perhaps before we understood how DNA functions and correlates with with Linnaeun classifications of species, nowadays biological morphology classification of genus, before we understand the genome and it's history, then we might say that Evolution was a hypothesis. There are now simply thousands of facts, independent experiments and perspectives which confirm in broad sweep the FACT of evolution. This does not mean that we cannot improve our understanding of this fact
  19. Just for the record, it's a serious question and does not infer little green men
  20. The "God did it" sargument is actually no argument at all. How? Did he use his little leggies? or his arms? Where did he get the materials? Maybe he had some form of factory? But where did the factory come from? Obviously I am being facetious, but the argument stands, no religious thinker can actually give an explanation as to how god did anything, they just say things like "God works in mysterious ways" which translates to "how on earth do I know". So, actually they do NOT know what they are talking about, on any level. Not only do they start from a position of utter ignorance and then try to defend it, but they then claim that religious "knowledge" is some kind of equvalence to science. This even though they fail fail to make even the most basic observations about nature. There is a total conceit in religious thinking in the fact that there is never any actual measurement, never any calculation, verification
  21. Does anyone know about academic work on the role of retroviruses in evolution. I am thinking that these viruses could insert preformed code into alien species and thereby alter their path of evolution. I cant seem to find much material about this in the literature
  22. Can I suggest you actually read the book (and maybe watch the film) before holding judgement. Your comments are way off mark. You need to study more.
  23. I am looking for a site or/and a magazine that would keep me up to date with human evolution. Topics included would be ancient history, anthropology, human behaviour, evolution and biology. I am seeking to avoid all the stupid conspiracy theory stuff - e.g. "proof of ancient technology and space contact" etc... The magazines I have found tend to only cover the topic occasionally Any worthy sites or magazines?
  24. Your explanation is a good one and is accepted. I wonder if there are any perfect shapes at the level of a wave, or perhaps at the level of quarks?
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