901. Welsh Hindus fight to save Shambo the sacred bull

Comment #39263 by steveroot on May 10, 2007 at 8:30 am

"We could no more allow the slaughter of Shambo than we could the killing of a human being. Ultimately, we will be willing to defend his life with our own."

The monkeys are willing to stand up for another animal. Nice.
Steve

902. Ape gestures 'show human links'

Comment #37377 by steveroot on May 4, 2007 at 9:46 am

Don't believe a word of this. Everyone knows that Adam and Eve spoke English and that the Tower of Babel is why the U.S. is now a bilingual nation. ;-)
Steve

903. The Damned

Comment #37028 by steveroot on May 3, 2007 at 7:40 am

11. Comment #36860 by MarcusA on May 2, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Do I get a tea bag with my boiling water?

18. Comment #36872 by quork on May 2, 2007 at 3:10 pm
"Nations marked by high levels of organic atheism - are among the healthiest, wealthiest, most educated societies on earth."

What is "organic atheism"? Is it high in bran?

904. Huge rally for Turkish secularism

Comment #35987 by steveroot on April 29, 2007 at 6:12 pm

9. Comment #35978 by BaronOchs on April 29, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Adolf Hitler got elected democratically?

they did receive necessary support in the elections but they were not properly elected to the position they actually assumed.

905. Sam's Flea!

Comment #34573 by steveroot on April 24, 2007 at 2:46 pm

251. Comment #34556 by SRWB on April 24, 2007 at 1:26 pm

...why do any of us have to confess to an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God in the first place. Wouldn't (s)he already know?! The other thing that's always confused me about this tale is why didn't God just go the extra mile and wipe out man's supposed innate predisposition to sin when we were created? Why allow sin in the first place?

23. Comment #34212 by Corylus on April 23, 2007 at 2:10 pm

1) So one can enjoy it in the privacy of one's own home, glorifying in the sense of one's own moral rectitude... possibly with a box of tissues close to hand?

906. 'The Day They Kicked God out of the Schools' & Rebuttal

Comment #34558 by steveroot on April 24, 2007 at 1:39 pm

23. Comment #34212 by Corylus on April 23, 2007 at 2:10 pm

1) So one can enjoy it in the privacy of one's own home, glorifying in the sense of one's own moral rectitude... possibly with a box of tissues close to hand?

907. Street Evangelist Saves 300 Souls From Enjoying Park

Comment #33876 by steveroot on April 22, 2007 at 11:26 am

43. Comment #33871 by JDAM on April 22, 2007 at 10:50 am
Oh good heavens, people...
The ONION is a leading American satire magazine. They simply make this stuff up for each issue and much of it is an absolute Hoot...but it's not to be taken seriously or as the actual truth.

908. Pope says science too narrow to explain creation

Comment #33874 by steveroot on April 22, 2007 at 11:09 am

While Chamber's medications are being considered ;-), he did say something I thought was quite correct:

143. Comment #33835 by chamber on April 22, 2007 at 4:15 am

Holy Books are the interpretations and explanations and catalogue of the world and universe.

909. Where Is Atheism When Bad Things Happen?

Comment #33482 by steveroot on April 20, 2007 at 10:12 am

A couple of days ago I read on the "On Faith" site a clergy person's statement that the VT slayings were the result of the shooter's "sin", and that all he had needed to do was ask god to help him.

This provides some useful information: how many deaths it takes before god will intevene on his own. The answer obviously is "32". I can just imagine the old gray bearded one saying to himself, "1, 2, 3, 4... come on, guy, ASK ME... 5, 6, 7, 8... what's the matter with you? 9, 10..." and so on.

Luckily, he stops short of the number of the beast.
Steve

910. Sam's Flea!

Comment #33458 by steveroot on April 20, 2007 at 8:07 am

"You are a hodge-podge of neuron-firings looking into an abyss which you only think you understand. You don't really understand it because you are not thinking at all, but rather doing what chemicals always do under those conditions and at that temperature" (p. 99).
I prefer the argument from the Gary DeMar show where I'm a can of soda pop fizzing at another can of soda pop. That explains all the flies that hang around when I try to think! Thanks for the explanation.
Steve (Dr. Pepper)

EDIT: Sorry, Hip Priest, I didn't see your post along the same lines. Say, are you also a Dr. Pepper- or some other variety?

911. Gay hate church to picket VT gun rampage funerals

Comment #33414 by steveroot on April 20, 2007 at 3:50 am

9. Comment #33404 by k1mgy on April 20, 2007 at 3:08 am
The headline should read "Virginia", not "VT" which abbreviates Vermont. Although Vermont has a rather liberal gun law it has not suffered this level of violence.

912. Doctors Opposing Circumcision: An Appeal for Misha

Comment #33120 by steveroot on April 19, 2007 at 10:03 am

203. Comment #33115 by Amyers on April 19, 2007 at 8:28 am
(I assume many of us, circumcised or not, do feel a bit uneasy whenever one is told).

913. Christians at Bible publishers have their throats cut

Comment #32941 by steveroot on April 18, 2007 at 7:17 pm

Ah, yes, the religion of peace!
Steve

914. Flea Circus!

Comment #32927 by steveroot on April 18, 2007 at 6:13 pm

Comment #32920 by Barnacle on April 18, 2007 at 5:47 pm
What's up with that apostrophe?

915. Doctors Opposing Circumcision: An Appeal for Misha

Comment #32566 by steveroot on April 17, 2007 at 12:10 pm

Comment #32510 by Philip1978 on April 17, 2007 at 8:13 am
Steveroot, I am not having a go, I am simply curious,why did you think it was important for your son to be circumcised?
...look at franciebrady's message, were you ever worried your son would grow angry over what you decided?

916. Doctors Opposing Circumcision: An Appeal for Misha

Comment #32504 by steveroot on April 17, 2007 at 7:42 am

Speaking as a circumcized male who is the father of a circumcized son, I can tell you that
1) it has no apparent influence on function or enjoyment,
2) my son doesn't seem bothered by it, and
3) I don't lose any sleep over it.
Ours were not done for religious reasons, and though mine was done at a time when it was "standard practice" in the U.S. (1950), my wife and I spent quite a lot of time considering whether our son should be circumcized. When the procedure was done, I stayed with my son and comforted him afterwards (he cried for about 30 seconds). It was an intense experience, but my wife and I have never regretted it. Of course, this doesn't mean we did the "right" thing. Nevertheless, I think male circumcision in the perinatal period is a relatively innocuous procedure.
Re-read that last sentence. There are two critical distinctions to be made:
1) Female circumcision is a completely different thing; it is a violent and disfiguring procedure that impairs normal physiological and psychological function. I am personally appalled that it happens at all.
2) (This is the key distinction in this case)The proposed procedure is to be forced on a near-adult against his will. How this could even be seriously considered is beyond me. This is like the difference between aborting a blastocyst and a late-term abortion.
I hope the boy is able to be protected from his deranged father.
Steve

917. Irish poll shows parents no longer want to force religion on to children

Comment #32306 by steveroot on April 16, 2007 at 8:00 pm

That's OK! It made sense the way I read it. Welcome to the "fold"!
Steve

918. Irish poll shows parents no longer want to force religion on to children

Comment #32304 by steveroot on April 16, 2007 at 7:52 pm

When you wrote:

It is a babtist chruch

919. Genie shows barred by Islam, clerics say

Comment #32273 by steveroot on April 16, 2007 at 3:17 pm

Wow. I would love to know what goes through the mind of someone who cannot see such fantastic irony. This is beautiful stuff.

920. Genie shows barred by Islam, clerics say

Comment #31881 by steveroot on April 14, 2007 at 9:12 pm

"We don't want to promote a belief in the supernatural and in superstition, which we do not know about."

Good one!
Steve

921. Dawkins vs Haggard: the Python Edition

Comment #29963 by steveroot on April 5, 2007 at 6:49 pm

Here's a very funny (though in *awful* taste!) commentary on the Haggard affair:
http://www.bettybowers.com/nl_nov2006.html
Steve

922. Kansas State School Board Bans Pokemon Due to Evolution Content

Comment #29794 by steveroot on April 4, 2007 at 6:35 pm

This is a sort of kinder, gentler version of Landover Baptist satire (see www.landoverbaptist.org).

The site about the burning of the Harry Potter books is pretty spooky. Can people (actual Homo sapiens) really be so stupid?
Steve

923. Mormons miffed over coffee-swilling angel image

Comment #27637 by steveroot on March 25, 2007 at 10:04 pm

Speaking of Mormons and pants in the same breath, check this link ("parody"):
http://www.landoverbaptist.org/news0704/mormonunderwear.html
Steve

924. The God of the Bible is No Delusion!

Comment #26475 by steveroot on March 19, 2007 at 3:03 pm

863. Comment #26425 by Theo

Theo, that little parable made it so clear for me. What was I thinking?
Steve

925. Yanoconodon, a transitional fossil

Comment #26211 by steveroot on March 17, 2007 at 5:18 pm

The evolution of the human head and neck is very interesting. Here's a book I read when I was in dental school. It was written as a sort of response to the Scopes "Monkey Trial".
Steve


Our Face from Fish to Man

FOREWORD

BY WILLIAM BEEBE

A FOREWORD to a volume such as the present one of Dr. Gregory's is as superfluous as would be the retention of the third eye, the Cyclopean one, of our ancestors, in the center of our forehead today. No more wonderful subject for a volume could be imagined than the evolution of the human face, and no more competent author than William K. Gregory. The result seems to me eminently satisfactory.

If the reader's interest is real but cursory, let him do nothing but look at the illustrations. They will ensure a thousand percent interest to every walk along Fifth Avenue or Regent Street. If pressure of other interests permits only an hour's perusal, or complete lack of natural history knowledge requires facts to be strained through the mesh of popular language, read but the preface and the first few paragraphs of each chapter.

Taken as a whole this is not a "popular" book in the sense of a superficial one. The details of evolution of our eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth--these are too delicate, too intricate for words of one syllable. Yet to read and understand this volume requires no more concentrated attention than the remembrance of the highest diamond in the ninth trick, or to what Steel Preferred fell in the Autumn of 1914.

I advise no Fundamentalist or Anti-Evolutionist to read it, for if he have no sense of humor he will not understand it, and if he have, his belief will be like Dunsany's King who "was as though he never had been." If with Bergson we believe that the origin of laughter was cruelty, then an S. P. C. to something should be formed to prevent the spectacle of a Fundamentalist's face functioning with the third eyelid of a bird, the ear-point of a deer, the honorable scars of most ancient gills, and with his lip-lifting muscles in full action as he sneers at truth. A moment's thought of these few characters presents a new viewpoint on what we are wont to call the "lower" animals, for if our third eyelid were more than a degenerate flap we, like an eagle, could look straight at the sun; if our ears could straighten and turn as once, the lives of pedestrians would be safer; if the ghosts of gills were still functional, drowning would be impossible, and if the fang-revealing sneer showed less degenerate canines, we might have a more physically wholesome fear of cavilers against the doctrine of Evolution.

The impregnable array of facts gleaned through the centuries of man's intellectual supremacy proves beyond all question the gradual rise toward human perfection of the various components of the face, and this confirms our precious organs of sense as most noble gateways of the human mind and soul. Kindness, gentleness, tactfulness, patience, can flow out through only these channels. It is a worthy thing to have written a book about them; it is a fortunate chance to be able to read it.

Source:
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=4920692
you can only see the first few pages, but you get the idea...

http://cgi.ebay.com/OUR-FACE-FROM-FISH-TO-MAN-BY-WILLIAM-K-GREGORY-1965_W0QQitemZ320091212975QQcmdZViewItem

926. Is Your Baby Gay? What If You Could Know? What If You Could Do Something About It?

Comment #26116 by steveroot on March 17, 2007 at 3:54 am

Surely if it is "biological" (and that's *only a theory*), then it must be god's will.

Shaker (#26115), I think you meant to say "desperately", not "deliberately"!
Steve

927. Does God answer prayer? ASU research says 'yes'

Comment #25940 by steveroot on March 15, 2007 at 6:14 pm

If there really were an all-powerful, omniscient being responding to prayer, there should be no doubt about it. "Consistently did better" and "statistically significant difference" don't cut it: the results should be BLACK and WHITE.
Steve

928. Does God answer prayer? ASU research says 'yes'

Comment #25902 by steveroot on March 15, 2007 at 3:26 pm

Regarding the reconsideration of previously obtained data, a wise person once told me:
"If you torture the data sufficiently, eventually it (more properly, "they") will confess."
Ring a bell?
Steve

929. Top Scientists Warn of Water Shortages and Disease Linked to Global Warming

Comment #25852 by steveroot on March 15, 2007 at 1:14 pm

#25849 Brian,
Don't bring peoples' weight or sexual orientation into the argument please! ;-)

"...massive dykes to push back the sea."
Steve

930. A 'Sad First' in the History of the Congress

Comment #25706 by steveroot on March 14, 2007 at 7:04 pm

See this essay:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martin-varsavsky/what-happens-when-a-count_b_43069.html
It may not be such a "sad first" after all!
Steve

931. Evangelicals battle over agenda, environment

Comment #25585 by steveroot on March 14, 2007 at 7:24 am

5. Comment #25525 by scottishgeologist on March 14, 2007 at 2:06 am
Hey,
"Dobson himself, Minnery said, is busy writing a book on child rearing."

I thought that was a Catholic thing. ;-)

On a more serious note,
7. Comment #25544 by stephenray on March 14, 2007 at 3:47 am

'Unborn child' is a weird phrase, to my mind. Nobody looks at a pile of metal and plastic and calls it an 'unmanufactured car'. It is the act of birth that creates an animal.

This is a poor analogy (sorry), because the animal (child) exists in a viable state for some considerable time before birth. Look at the incidence of "pre-term delivery". Furthermore, I doubt anyone seriously believes that a child delivered surgically is less human than one delivered naturally. Your analogy might be used to justify late-term abortion, which I consider repugnant even though it may be medically necessary in rare cases. The *real* issue with abortion in my opinion gets down to the belief that a blastocyst or even a trilaminar embryo has a "soul". It is this (unsupportable) belief that fuels the abortion (and contraception) debate and thereby contributes to overpopulation and all its attendant consequences.
Steve

932. 160,000-year-old jawbone redefines origins of the species

Comment #25492 by steveroot on March 13, 2007 at 5:41 pm

Dawkins himself gives a succinct explanation on the Q&A part of his appearance at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Steve

933. Mrs Darwin's diaries go online

Comment #25478 by steveroot on March 13, 2007 at 3:21 pm

"Has anyone else noticed that if you rearrange the letters of "Emma, Charles Darwin" you get "heard calm, wiser man"?

Maybe significant, maybe not."

I thought this site was about trying to get away from that sort of thing. ;-)
Steve

934. An apology to Peter Kay

Comment #25236 by steveroot on March 11, 2007 at 6:46 am

Here's more than you will (probably) ever need!
http://www.netlingo.com/emailsh.cfm
Steve

935. U.S. Mint goof creates 'Godless dollars'

Comment #24845 by steveroot on March 8, 2007 at 8:37 pm

The original motto of the United States was (is) "E Pluribus Unum". "In God We Trust" did not appear on a U.S. coin until the 1860s during the Civil War when the Union wanted to make a statement that they had divine help, so they put it on the 2-cent piece. (NOTE: the Confederates also thought god was on their side- it didn't appear to help them much). According to the U.S. Treasury web site, where I found this information, the IGWT motto appeared periodically on coins and paper money after the Civil War. In the 1950s IGWT became the "alternate" motto for the U.S. and apparently this was declared "constitutional" by the Supreme Court.

Some bible thumpers at my workplace were sending around an e-mail about the U.S. Treasury "trying to get god out of our lives", so I tried to enlighten them. These are dentists (mostly), and they didn't know what "E Pluribus Unum" means!
Steve

936. Atheists come in last

Comment #22935 by steveroot on February 24, 2007 at 5:58 pm

Perhaps a charitable way to look at B. Dawkins's statement ("I will say however that there never will be a conflict between the Biblical God and the Constitution. Considering that the Constitution is based on biblical concepts, there will never arise a contradiction between the two documents.") is to consider that both documents evolved under the influence of a "common ancestor", human ethics. Of course, this doesn't explain many of the weirdo parts of the bible, but it might help with the conversation.

Steve
"Hypocrisy is the vaseline of social intercourse"

937. God, sex, drugs and politics

Comment #22752 by steveroot on February 21, 2007 at 10:13 pm

Vaccination has, by and large, been a very successful public health measure. I must admit wondering about the necessity of vaccinating my 2 kids against hepatitis B, but what the heck- I'm vaccinated myself. I haven't started shooting drugs either.

The point that seems to be missing from the religious argument against the HPV vaccine is that the virus is not present in ONLY those individuals who *should not* be having sex. It is also prevalent, probably to a similar degree, in people who are in *appropriate* (married, hetero) sexual relationships. Why should the married female population remain at risk for the sake of letting ("god's-wrath-directed") nature take its course?
Steve

938. Memo: Stop teaching evolution

Comment #22751 by steveroot on February 21, 2007 at 7:01 pm

I can't believe that I got through a degree in a physical science (chemistry) without realizing that the stars really DO revolve around the earth. Those images of the star trails certainly cleared that up! Now, about those geosynchronous satellites- they're resting on the crystal sphere, aren't they? Would the tiles on the space shuttle be damaged by contact with the sphere?
It feels so good to finally understand!
Steve

939. Interview With an Atheist

Comment #22056 by steveroot on February 12, 2007 at 8:24 pm

If you haven't seen this Landover Baptist parody, you're in for a treat!
Steve
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-jk3VvjGoE

940. Evolution Debate - Pigliucci vs Hovind

Comment #20592 by steveroot on February 4, 2007 at 4:24 pm

I don't have the time or the patience of Dr. Pigliucci, so I'm bagging this after about 30 minutes. Hovind is a twit (even though he has a DOCTORATE- from a non-accredited institution, naturally); the sad thing is that so many people will listen to him.
Steve

941. The Bright Revolution

Comment #19755 by steveroot on January 29, 2007 at 7:10 pm

I'm new to the "Bright" identification, though not to atheism. In spite of being the grandson and nephew of two Presbyterian ministers and having spent five years in a Methodist choir, I have never seriously believed in god. When I talk to others about my religious affiliations, I just say I am a "non-believer". This seems to work well for me, and seems generally to be interpreted in the way it is intended and not that I don't have ANY beliefs.