Posted on 02/08/2011 9:57:23 AM PST by Natufian
A 95-million-year-old fossil is helping scientists understand how snakes lost their legs through evolutionary time.
Found in Lebanon, the specimen is one of only three examples of an ancient snake with preserved leg bones.
One rear leg is clearly visible but researchers had to use a novel X-ray technique to examine another leg hidden inside the fossil rock.
Writing in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, the team says the snake records an early stage in limb loss.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Or maybe, just maybe, that's a story made up by a bunch of superstitious primitive people with no clue about scientific methods to explain why snakes don't have legs. If you have no history of science it's pretty easy to credit everything to an invisible man in the sky.
Nice reply, well done.
Or maybe you are incredibly wrong. I grew up under a heavy science interest. At the time, so many thousands of years ago, there wasn’t even an inkling of evolution. No idea that snakes may have perhaps changed from legged ancestors. Why would Moses, undethe guidance of the Holy Spirit, pen something that suggests that snakes may have had legs? God told Moses what had happened.
Because he liked making stories up to amuse people or to keep them in line?
God told Moses what had happened.
Moses said that God told him. Nobody was there to confirm it.
Hide your face from truth if you wish, that is your perogative.
I sincerely doubt Moses account of the non-evolution aspects of a serpent losing its legs is there ‘to keep people in line’.
So you discount that God is the author, opine that Moses lied. Yet the accounts given in Genesis all have ‘witnesses’. The plagues in Egypt. The Red Sea parting, etc.
What you are doing by attempting to discount Genesis, is to discount the Bible and/or God. In so doing you remove the unalienable rights granted you by your Creator. In so doing, you remove the basic foundation of what made this country great for so long. Good job.
My inalienable rights come by virtue of me being a sentient human being. I don't need an invisible man in the sky for that.
Yet the accounts given in Genesis all have ‘witnesses’.
Really. Who witnessed "In the beginning Earth was void and without form"? Who witnessed "and on the 7th day God rested"?
The plagues in Egypt. The Red Sea parting, etc.
That's not the Book of Genesis. That's in Exodus. Try actually reading it.
Read the founding documents for the country Lurker. Become educated. Your rights are granted, per the founding, by your Creator. Which is why man (i.e. the Gov’t) can not take them away.
True, the book of Exodus, the writer being the same man (Moses) being led by the Holy Spirit. My own failure to recall the correct book does not render the truths therein untrue.
Without that ‘invisible man in the sky’ you are but a cosmic accident, worth nothing compared to any other form of life, and of no consequence.
Strange why gods need human messengers to convey, huh? Man's faith in a god can only come after his faith in a human prophet, because of this convenient arrangement.
I have.
Your rights are granted, per the founding, by your Creator.
So your position is that if there is no God, we have no inalienable Rights? Does that about cover it?
Which is why man (i.e. the Gov’t) can not take them away.
Really? Let's ask those 6 million Jews the Nazi government murdered if their Rights were taken away or not. Let's ask the 20 million or so that Stalin murdered if their Rights were taken away by the Soviet government or not.
My own failure to recall the correct book does not render the truths therein untrue.
Your own words do. You said the events in Genesis were 'witnessed'. I said they weren't. I was right. You were wrong.
The difference between people like you and me is that you need something outside of yourself, real or not, to validate your life, your worth, and your inalienable Rights. I do not.
My Rights exist because I exist. I don't need any invisible, all seeing, all knowing, all forgiving entity for that.
Now you have a nice day.
L
At least, if the messengers were all on the same sheet of music, maybe there would be some credibility to their stories, but when you take the sum total of all "revealed" religions and "inspired" interpretations on earth, they are like night and day. Of course, each claims its book is the only true one...and all others are wrong.
You and Lurker (along with most other libs) may choose to believe that. No skin off my nose. Those of us who do know and believe, well, we’ll pray for you regardless.
Real Christian of you to toss around insults like that. Is that what they teach you in the Church of your choice?
Just calling wrong wrong. You are wrong, and as I said, I will do that Christian thing and pray for you.
Christian is as Christian does. I seem to recall something in the Bible about motes and beams. Does it ring any bells with you?
You may delude yourself into thinking that the American republic can stand without that cornerstone assertion as the basis for our claim to rights, but the evidence is everywhere around us that it cannot.
The further we get from those principles, the principles that Frederick Douglass rightly called the "ringbolt of our nation's destiny," the closer we come to the total dissolution of this Union.
As John Adams said:
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other."
So, if there’s no God we have no inalienable Rights?
You imply I do not pray for myself?
Your words are eerily similar to the lib tactic of trying to silence a Christian. Won’t work here.
The thread regarded Snakes, their lack of legs and evolution. The ridicule happened toward me, toward the account in the Bible, and blatantly mocked God.
There is also something in there about “God will not be mocked”. It is not in your shoes that I would wish to be. As I said, you are in my prayers.
Of course not. Without God there is no external standard. It's all dependent on the whim of the individual.
The result of which is that every man is a law unto himself...doing what is right in his own eyes.
Which always leads to the destruction of the rights to life, liberty and private property. Always. Without fail.
The very word “inalienable,” or “unalienable,” as you please, implies the existence of God by the very nature of its use in connection to rights.
The word came from European property law, in which everything was owned by the sovereign, but he granted the use of it to whomever he pleased. The receiver of that loan of property had full use of it, but could not rightfully have it taken from him by any man, nor could he rightfully give it away.
The founders used that word quite deliberately, knowing full well its implications.
So, again, no, there are no unalienable rights apart from God. It’s all dependent on the rule and the whim of of men, not of the natural law, as instituted by Nature’s God.
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