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Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant (Religion bashing alert)
Times Online UK ^ | May 21, 2005 | Richard Dawkins

Posted on 05/25/2005 3:41:22 AM PDT by billorites

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To: RightWingNilla
He thinks he's Marilyn Monroe. He tells people he's Sparticus.
381 posted on 05/25/2005 2:39:07 PM PDT by Gumlegs
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To: The_Reader_David
though once one vacates 'random variation' the way the definition at http://evonet.sdsc.edu/evoscisociety/what_is_evolution.htm does) and leaves natural selection as a tautology

I am at a loss as to why we are "abandoning" random variation, and I don't believe I can cut through this thicket of verbiage to get at it. But I am not quite ready to toss it in the trash bin, and I don't believe most biologists are, either.

We obviously have random variation to provide a base population upon which selection operates. We are recently noticing that our centuries-old assumption that the randomizer had a uniform initial distribution before selection started whittling on it, might have been off the mark.

382 posted on 05/25/2005 2:39:08 PM PDT by donh
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To: Junior

Awesome.


383 posted on 05/25/2005 2:39:40 PM PDT by RightWingNilla
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To: billorites
In response to the headline I will say this...

I appreciate any gifts God gives me, because compared to Him I am certainly and unfailingly ignorant.

Okay, carry on.

384 posted on 05/25/2005 2:40:30 PM PDT by pollyannaish
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To: narby

As I stated, pegleg and all.


385 posted on 05/25/2005 2:41:54 PM PDT by AndrewC (Darwinian logic -- It is just-so if it is just-so)
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To: RightWingNilla
[I'm Sparticus.] I thought you were Marilyn Monroe?

Yeah, so?

386 posted on 05/25/2005 2:43:49 PM PDT by PatrickHenry (Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. The List-O-Links is at my homepage.)
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To: Junior
Because "evolution" only applies to the development of life, remember? It can't be used to consider an all-encompassing explanation for the universe
387 posted on 05/25/2005 2:45:34 PM PDT by Tribune7
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To: ArGee

He was writing to the people of Corinth, which was quite some distance from the Holy Land. Hell, people back then believed stories of dog-faced men in Africa and that one-eyed giants inhabited some of the islands of the Mediterranean.


388 posted on 05/25/2005 2:47:53 PM PDT by Junior (“Even if you are one-in-a-million, there are still 6,000 others just like you.”)
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To: Tantumergo
This Wikipedia article has a couple of speculations, with links, at the very end. One is that certain amino acids actually bind selectively to certain codons, even without tRNA. I'm interested, if rather skeptical. More likely is the second paper, whcih suggest that the number of amino acids was once significantly smaller, and that the codon - amino acid links branched. I find this much more plausible, since it gives one an evolutionary pathway from a simpler genome.
389 posted on 05/25/2005 2:49:32 PM PDT by Right Wing Professor
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To: Junior
Manticore

The manticore was first described by the ancient Greek traveller Ctesias. He tells us that the manticore had a lion's body, human face and ears, three rows of sharp teeth in each jaw and poisoned spines in its tail, which it could shoot like a porcupine.

Oddly, I believe I've seen the same description used in these posts, but about each other, not manticores.

390 posted on 05/25/2005 2:52:15 PM PDT by Gumlegs
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To: donh
Galileo was expressing a technical opinion about the nature of the universe in disagreement with the church . . .

His disagreement was with most of the scientific world of his day, which was, and is today, welcomed by the church insofar as science aims for the truth. Galileo was defending the views of a Catholic priest who also happened to be a scientist.

391 posted on 05/25/2005 2:54:20 PM PDT by Fester Chugabrew
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To: Right Wing Professor; RightWingNilla
"Why has our society so meekly acquiesced in the convenient fiction that religious views have some sort of right to be respected automatically and without question?" Dawkins asks. "If I want you to respect my views on politics, science, or art, I have to earn that respect by argument, reason, eloquence or relevant knowledge. I have to withstand counter-arguments. But if I have a view that is part of my religion, critics must respectively tiptoe away or brave the indignation of society at large. Why are religious opinions off limits in this way? Why do we have to respect them simply because they are religious?"

"Religion is the opiate of the masses." Karl Marx

Dawkins is not a Marxist.

Your opinion, I don't share it. His views are remarkably similar to Marx vis a vis religion and he is an economic lefty to boot.

Please retract.

Not in this or any other lifetime.

Richard Dawkins is a Eurotrash leftist who happens to hate religion and love the TOE. Deal with it....

Or not.

And for a bonus:

"Dear Mr Bush (I'd say President Bush if you had actually been elected),

I've been asked to give advice to you on touching down in Britain. It is this. Go home. You aren't wanted here. You aren't wanted anywhere else either, but you may have been misunderinformed that Britain was the one place where you would be welcomified. Wrong. Well, presumably your best pal Tony welcomes you. But that's about it. Your motorcades, your helicopters, your triggerhappy guards will try to protect you from the people of Britain, who would otherwise spoil the photo-ops for the folks back home. But be in no doubt. We despise you here too. After you and Jeb stole the election (by a margin smaller than the number of folks you executed in Texas) you were rightly written off as a one-term president: a fair advertisement for Drunks For Jesus but otherwise an idle nonentity; inarticulate, unintelligent, an ignorant hick. September 11 changed all that. Not that you covered yourself with glory that day. You are said to admire Churchill. Can you imagine Churchill, at such a moment, panicking all around the country from airbase to airbase? Even nasty old Rummy bunkered down where he belonged.

Never mind, your puppeteers from the Project for the New American Century recognised the opportunity they had been waiting for. September 11 was your golden Pearl Harbor. This was how you'd get elected in 2004 (not re-elected, elected). You would announce a War on Terror. American troops would win. And you would be the victorious warlord, swaggering in a flight suit before a Mission Accomplished banner.

It worked in Afghanistan. But then those puppeteers moved on to their long-term project: Iraq. Never mind that you had to lie about weapons of mass destruction. Never mind that Iraq had not the smallest connection with 9/11. The good folks back home would never know the difference between Saddam and Osama. You would ride the paranoid patriotism aroused by 9/11 all the way into Iraq, and hand out oil and reconstruction contracts to Dick Cheney's boys. That escapade is now backfiring horribly, as many of us said it would. No wonder young American travellers are sewing Canadian flags to their rucksacks. What we in Britain won't forgive is that you have dragged us down too. Go home."
Richard Dawkins
Scientist

This leftist puke is all yours. Congrats.

392 posted on 05/25/2005 2:56:08 PM PDT by jwalsh07
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To: Junior
Bite me.

Written by the future Veteran of a Thousand Bites, no doubt.

393 posted on 05/25/2005 2:57:29 PM PDT by Fester Chugabrew
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To: Fester Chugabrew

His ankles can take it.


394 posted on 05/25/2005 2:58:47 PM PDT by Gumlegs
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To: Junior

frightening speed.


395 posted on 05/25/2005 3:01:08 PM PDT by King Prout (blast and char it among fetid buzzard guts!)
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To: King Prout

I must confess, I wrote these and several others some time ago (I keep them on my website). Occasionally I get the opportunity to trot them out again.


396 posted on 05/25/2005 3:04:02 PM PDT by Junior (“Even if you are one-in-a-million, there are still 6,000 others just like you.”)
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To: Gumlegs

Now thats funny!


397 posted on 05/25/2005 3:04:39 PM PDT by L,TOWM (Liberals, The Other White Meat [Born in California, Texan by the Grace of God.])
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To: ArGee

Why should it matter what Galileo's motives were, or why should it matter whether he was right?

The supression of ideas by authority is the greatest single crime that can be committed. Worse than rape or murder, because crimes against the body affect a limited number of people. Crimes agains free speech are crimes against the mind, the greatest gift we have.


398 posted on 05/25/2005 3:06:12 PM PDT by js1138 (e unum pluribus)
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To: L,TOWM

Thank you.


399 posted on 05/25/2005 3:08:15 PM PDT by Gumlegs
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To: Junior

ah. cheater. I approve.


400 posted on 05/25/2005 3:09:45 PM PDT by King Prout (blast and char it among fetid buzzard guts!)
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