The History of Mankind

As one who believes that God created the universe and all things therein, including man, just wondering how long the evolutionists on FreeRepublic believe man has existed on the earth and why.

Thanks for the help; I'll remember those!

You are correct - the hand may indeed have evolutionary uses as a weapon; we obviously put it to good use in that regard at present. I was talking more specifically about it not being all about holding weapons, but tool use in general, which includes holding weapons - the use of a fist as a weapon is another story, and I'd agree, it does suit a certain pattern, though I have my doubts about it being the only influence.

I suppose I may have been mislead, and appreciate the link to the write-up on religion; I'll give it a more through read-through before I reply about it if that's ok. For what it's worth, I don't entirely like the modern "conservative = Christian" views; I think we're missing out on important demographics if we do things that way.

I get the impression that I don't really know enough about sports statistics to be able to say whether or not religious schools do better, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt there. However, as you said, correlation is not causation.

Team sports as practice tribal warfare is not an uncommon view - I think the anthropologists you disparage would agree as well - indeed, I see football as a mock-up of trench warfare itself. Games, by and large, act to teach various lessons, be it strategy or craftiness or - as you suggest - not giving up at long odds. Though if I may say, I think basketball is a better example of the latter.

Dealing with military spending, I agree entirely; many great inventions were developed for military applications first, and later adapted for domestic use. However, what I must point out is that this is not so much a matter of the military being a better investment than it is about necessity. This is one part of your argument that I certainly agree with - war is motivating, a driving force, and the search for force multipliers has indeed brought about a number of advancements, especially when it comes to materials and ballistics. However, there is back-and-forth in this; in many cases, the military says "we need something that does X", and they turn to recent non-military research to get an idea of how to do that, then pour money into researching that aspect. Not only that, but to a certain extent the military can be seen as advantaged in terms of funding in a more literal sense - just for the sake of comparison, in 2012 the Department of Defense research budget was $79.1 billion, where as the National Science Foundation got $8.2 billion. But I digress.

As to paychecks, yes, absolutely! People in general have this weird notion that they're going to elect a politician who will both lower their taxes and somehow also fund all the social programs they want; it's ridiculous, and folks don't get that progressive taxes are, generally, falling onto the middle-class; the "1%" of not-too-recent fame are still very good at not paying large taxes. At the same time, while I agree that simply distributing wealth from those who are capable of producing to the government to be further distributed is a poor move, the whole idea of trickle-down economics was rather a bust as well. To be frank, solving this sort of economic conundrum may be beyond my ability, but my impression is we will benefit from less tax and less regulation in general, though there might be specific caveats and loopholes that need to be plugged before we can manage that.

And yes - I plan on working with as little red tape as I can manage, and I would love to be privately funded. Thanks for talking this out, by the by; it's been fun.

Sorry for the delay in replying, I’ve been hiking.

I’m sure a full bibliography of everything I’ve read and studied and a list of my life’s experiences would be too extensive and too boring to list here.

Suffice to say, I have seen and studied enough to appreciate that science provides us with a framework supported by billions of data points that allows us to understand (more or less) the natural history of our planet and (to a much lesser extent) the universe. None of the evidence suggests that the supernatural has been a factor.

That data has been generated by millions of scientists in every field (archeaology, paleontolgy, biology, chemisty, physics, geology ec., etc., etc.)and betweem whom there is widespread agreement.

The evidence shows that the planet earth does not rest on the back of a giant turtle, that life was not all but extinguished in a giant flood 4,000 years ago and that death has existed for as long as life has and for eons before modern humans appeared on the scene.

Does any of this mean that a Creator of the Universe has been shown not to exist? Of course not but no evidence of it’s existence has been found either.

That doesn’t make me anti-Christian. Far from it and I’m not interested in supporting fellow atheists who insist on stygmatizing anyone who professes a faith.

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