WooHoo! More idiots running the gub'ment.

Hi Taz. You're welcome. I looked for a thread where Cavediver was posting about how somehow matter equates to math if my recollection is correct. I was unable to find what thread this was in. Perhaps I've got that wrong and someone will correct me.This site appears to be an objective one on what I've alluded to. There is an admission of when the math breaks down, though from my POV, the math, relatively all of the way back assumes a relative uniformitarian model which, imo, is no more falsifiable than the ID creationist Buz model for an eternal (perpetual machine, if you will) universe. http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/...n/GenRel/BigBangModel.htmlEdited by Buzsaw, : Update Message Title

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

I'm sorry, I'll get back to you after I've recovered...Edit.Ok, seeing how you've consistently shown to not really understand the nature of science and scientific inquiry, let me take this slowly. In science, one could argue that there is no absolute truth, something that you people seem to keep demanding. Unlike religionists, the scientific community doesn't claim to have a monopoly on truth.What you can find in science is a body of knowledge, each individual part has its own varying degree of certainty. Some things have high degrees of certainty and some parts have low degrees of certainty.The kicker is these degrees of certainty are ever changing. I would argue that the degree of certainty about gravity nowadays is several magnitudes higher than the degree of certainty about gravity 200 years ago.Let's specifically look at the atom. It's model went through several modifications before it got to where it is now. At each step of the way, the degree of certainty for those models, from the greek model to the plum pudding to the borh to the nuclear, etc. Each step of the way, scientists took painstaking experiments and lots of facepalms to achieve a higher degree of certainty.Please tell me you understand what I've said so far. Again, let me take baby steps. We'll get specifically to what you said about the singularity and all that good stuff.Edited by Taz, : No reason given.Edited by Taz, : No reason given.

You brought up atheist values, but you have yet to give us one atheist value.I brought up my values to show that atheist values are no different than most anyone else's values.Please show us they horrendous atheist values.

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Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

How is this a value?

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Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

It's been a few days, so I'll just assume that you've read my post and understood what I was saying. So, let's take the next baby step.In the real world, we are surrounded by many phenomena, most of which we can't explain by common sense alone. What scientists do is they try to come up with a model that best fit the observed phenomenon.Let's take a look at one of the more famous cases in history. For centuries, the geocentric model was embraced by the church because it conformed to the teachings of the church about man being the center of god's creation. But many astronomers over the years noted discrepencies in their observations that the geocentric model couldn't explain. Some scientists began to try to come up with a new model to better explain the observations. The heliocentric much much better explained what astronomers for centuries had been pulling their hair out over.When Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and other like minds tried to present their evidence for the heliocentric model to their peers, they were met with criticisms. Like what true scientists ought to be, criticisms were welcomed, but only criticisms that made sense. Instead, they were met with nonsensical criticisms that could be easily debunked by anyone in any time period. And most of the criticisms came from people who had never spent a day studying astronomy.I remember Kepler noting that someone criticised the heliocentric model because if the Earth moved then why weren't things being blown all over the place.We now realize that the sun isn't in the center of the universe. It's not even in the center of the solar system.I'm sorry for explaining the basics like this, but I feel that only baby steps will bring us anywhere with you.

This might help compare Christian values with non-Christian values. While the non-Christian values are not exclusively atheists' values (ie, non-atheist non-Christians also share them), they are quite different from Christian values.A couple years ago, I had stumbled across this documentary film's site: No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.divorcinggod.org. The film examined the conflicts between evangelicals' Biblical beliefs and the harsh realities of divorce; this is a particularly important subject since evangelicals have a divorce rate much higher than the general public. The site used to also have personal stories by people who had themselves gone through that experience, but they're no longer there. I did save a poem while it was still up, which I'm reposting here since it contrasts several Christian and non-Christian values:

quote:

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Defining Friendship

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When I left my husband, my Christian friends gossiped and judged.
My non-Christian friends loved and accepted.

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My Christian friends said things like, We have the right to know why you’re doing this.
You are taking advantage of God’s grace.
I love you but I don’t agree with you.
You will loose everything you ever worked for.
I’m sorry that you gave up your place in eternity for this.
My non-Christian friends said I’m here for you no matter what.

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My Christian friends forwarded emails about my personal business.
My non-Christian friends asked me about my personal business.

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My Christian friends said This is not OK.
My non-Christian friends said Are you OK?

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My Christian friends left me out of their weddings and parties.
My non-Christian friends let me into their homes and lives.

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My Christian friends need to surround themselves with other people just like them to justify their own insecurities.
My non-Christian friends value people different than them because they have room in their mind to learn from others.

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My Christian friends think they know all the answers.
My non-Christian friends know we don’t have the answers.

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My Christian friends called me ‘selfish.’
My non-Christian friends called me ‘honest.’

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My Christian friends want everyone to like them.
My non-Christian friends want to like themselves.

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My Christian friends are scared it could happen in their own marriage.
My non-Christian friends are secure with their spouses because they did not choose them based on spiritual delusion.

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My Christian friends were unhappy for themselves.
My non-Christian friends were happy for me.

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My Christian friends haven’t called me once since the divorce.
My non-Christian friends won’t leave me alone.

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God forgive me if I’ve ever been a Christian friend.

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This is a subject that has puzzled me for years now. It's not just the evangelicals that have a much higher divorce rate than everyone else, it's the conservative states that have much higher divorce rates than the more liberal states. It also puzzles me that the states that currently ban gay marriage also have the highest divorce rates in the country. And in contrast, the states that are most accepting of homosexuality, especially those that allow gay marriage, have the lowest divorce rates in the country.You would think that it's the ones that are preaching morality and family values and all that good stuff should be the ones leading the example, not the other way around.

And I've also heard it reported that the group with the lowest divorce rate is ... atheists. Though I cannot cite the source of that report.So why do the evangelicals, conservatives, and anti-gays suffer the highest divorce rates? I would be inclined to attribute it to their not caring about other people, putting ideology above people. My friend, who takes a far dimmer view of the Right than I do, might attribute it to their heavy and virtually sole dependence on fear. But, compelling as those answers may be, we may both be missing the true reason.Rick Warren's Saddleback Church is practically in my back yard (ie, we're both in the same county). They have a very large singles ministry, about 15,000 strong, with a large contingency of middle-aged divorcs, a number of them being friends and acquaintences of mine. At a party, one of them told me about having read some of Dr. Neil Clark Warren's books in which Dr. Warren also described the statistics of evangelical Christians having a much higher divorce rate than the general population and cited that as his reason for creating eHarmony.com. Dr. Warren's explanation for their higher divorce rate was that evangelicals rush into marriage too young, too quickly, and far too often to the wrong person. One reason given for such rash behavior (I forget whether by Dr. Warren or by someone else) is that those young people are living in such a sexually repressive subculture that their only recourse is to marry, too young, too fast, very often to the wrong person.BTW, one of the common complaints I kept hearing from my friends at Saddleback was that the church had no idea what to do with all these single people. It was like there were these two groups -- married couples & families vs the singles -- and they didn't have much to do with each other. For a while, the church had a Friday night country dance for everybody (the singles ministry had had their own dances and dance classes long before that), but the leading pastors only wanted there to be line dancing, no couples dancing, out of mortal fear that a married person might end up dancing with a single person. The person running the dance had couples dancing anyway, without the top brass even knowing about it. The attitudes of those Baptists about dancing are just crazy! And I've seen other "true Christians" in their own forums viciously villifying Rick Warren for allowing dancing at his church. What a hoot!But, yeah, what they preach and claim about marriage and family values and what they actually practice are two different things. If they were really concerned about preserving marriage, they'd be trying to do something about the divorce rates, which does truly threaten marriage, instead of diverting everybody's attention away towards a distinctive non-threat, gay marriage.

I notice rather lot of self-righteousness and a marked inability to admit errors amongst the fundamentalists I've run into on the internet. A refusal to consider other people's positions and a tendency to invent motivations for others, too. If these attitudes carried over into personal relations then a high divorce rate would be predictable.Also, I understand that "saddlebacking" is a term that derived from the Saddleback church. It's more than just dancing that goes on.

It is not really all that surprising.I am currently following a thread at another forum, on the question of whether successful marriage is possible today. Sorry, it's not a publicly accessible forum, so I can't give a link.Reading that thread, it is clear that the people having trouble are the ones who prefer the old fashioned ideas of marriage, with the woman almost having the status of a house slave. The ones with successful marriages are those who make marriage an equal (more or less) partnership.Since conservatism is pretty much the preference for older traditions, it isn't particularly surprising that conservatives carry that over into their marriages.

I was about to ask for a definition, but then I remembered my second favorite axiom, "When in doubt, Google about!" -- search keywords are saddlebacking definition; it's even in Wikipedia, which is normally the first place I look. Not only did I find the definition, but there's apparently an entire site devoted to it. And, yes, I've long heard of young evangelicals engaging in that as well as in oral sex so that she could still claim to be a "virgin", albeit disingenuously.BTW, if you look it up in Wikipedia, you'll get a more complete story of the term's origin, defined by Dan Savage's readers in response to "Stephen Colbert's comment that saddleback sounded like a sex act".But Saddleback segregates its singles by age groups (gee, there's an awful lot of segregation going on there!) and most of my contact was with the 40's-and-above group, so I have no immediate exposure to that practice.I had thought that you were referring to the word on the street that the women are some of the easiest lays in the area. They'll put up a good talk at first, but they're no match against the human nature that they deny so strongly. I also have no immediate exposure to that, since I would not wish to take advantage, but within the dance community I know some of the men who have dipped their toes into that pond a number of times. The irony is that Christian singles are such a large block of clientele and there is so much competition among dance teachers here (the real OC has more dancing per capita than anywhere else in the country) that many teachers are afraid of saying anything that a Christian could possibly construe as off-color so as to take offense and pull her friends along with her as she storms out.Sometimes it's worth hanging out with them just for sheer entertainment. Like the time that they were denouncing the Calvary Church people (Chuck Smith's folk, derived from Orange County's 1970 "Jesus Freak" movement) for being too judgemental.

This explains a lot of things I heard while in college. Now, not to brag about this fact, but I was one of the few evangelical fundies that actually kept my virginity until marriage. So, sex was more or less a mystery to me. To me, sex is sex no matter if it's vaginal, anal, oral, or whatever else that one can conjure up. Going through college, it always puzzled me why these christians I knew claimed to be virgins while admitting that they had previously engaged in oral and anal sex with other people. Hell, I had never even seen a girl naked in real life and there I was listening to these christian teens talking about their previous experiences with oral and anal sex and condemning homosexuality in the same conversation.But anyway, thanks for the word "saddleback". Learn something new everyday.

Thanks for sharing Dwise. This is exactly what happened to my sister when she divorced her first husband about 10 years ago.She lost most if not nearly all her Christian-friends and even estranged some family members.I will not go into the details due to privacy reasons, but let me just say that she was rather miserable in this one-sided, abusive relationship to an ordained Christian minister.She is now married to a loving husband, best friend and great father to their 3 year old boy.I have not seen my sister this happy for quite some time. Thankfully she was able to divorce her first jerk of a husband. And thankfully she has friends now (almost all of which are not Christians) who genuinely care about her well being.Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given.

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One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. - Carl Sagan, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe." - Carl Sagan"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

Hey Percy. I have a friend who lives in Texas and he emailed me the other day about this. He was lamenting the shameless acts of the conservatives in his state lately, and -- get this -- is really considering home schooling his children should this gain significant ground.It seems to me that the whole "Reasons Why Home Schooling Is The Way To Go In A Darwinist Society" argument could be turned on its fundamentalist head if rational, reasonable-minded folks up and yank their kids from the public schools because of "conservative bias." Have a good one.

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"My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. J.B.S Haldane 1892-1964

la vengeance se mange trs-bien froide

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One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. - Carl Sagan, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe." - Carl Sagan"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World