Hey, I know the headline isn't grammatical! It was to get your attention regarding this post by Bob Cesca on Huffpo. Cesca makes the point that "Bring em on!" cost who-knows-how-many deaths, while Kerry's recent gaffe was but a gaffe. It must be surreal to be criticized by a speaker…
This annoys me. In 1971, Dick Van Dyke starred in a movie called Cold Turkey. It was a comedy about a dying town attempting to win a prize sponsored by a tobacco company that was betting against any town remaining "smoke free" for a certain length of time. Van Dyke…
One of the many miscommunications between people of science and Creationists is the assumption that the universe was created for man. If so, the engineer behind this place was wa-ay off the mark. The universe is nowhere near human scale, and the vast majority of it has nothing to do with Man.
We only began to understand the heavens when some very careful measurements were made using precision instruments. Copernicus had to note the precise movements of dots in the heavenly sphere for a long time to be sure enough that they were centered on the Sun, not the Earth. It was easier for Galileo, who polished some chunks of glass to see that even these dots had smaller dots in orbit around them. Dots that couldn’t possibly be seen by, nor affect, the average human.
Then Leeuwenhoek ground some smaller lenses and noticed that there were complete creatures too small to see, and that they were everywhere! He opened up the microscopic revolution in which it turned out that humans (and other creatures) are not made of continuous stuff, but rather each organ is composed of colonies of lesser lifeforms, cells. In fact, each organ is an ecosystem. Our skin (our largest organ after birth) is host to an abundance of microbes, mites, bacteria, and fungi that ideally coexist peacefully to maintain the health of our skin. These “parasites” are essential to our well-being, but they do not share our DNA.
When Mendeleev worked out the periodic arrangement …
An evangelical acquaintance recently wrote me a letter arguing that the pro-stem cell research proposal (Missouri Amendment 2) A) is geared to financially enrich its sponsors, B) that it will invite reproductive cloning and C) that poor women will result in poor women selling their eggs. She urged me to oppose the Amendment and oppose various promising forms of stem cell research.
For information on the proposed amendment, see here.
Even before receiving this letter, I knew that my acquaintance believed that a one-minute old fertilized human egg in a Petri dish is a baby that deserved full legal protection and priority over the children with horrible illnesses who occupy hospital beds. My acquaintance indicated that she was part of an organized effort to defeat Missouri Amendment 2.
I am not thrilled with my response (see below), but I couldn’t think of anything better. If anyone has any ideas as to a more effective way to deal with those who oppose stem cell research on religious grounds, I’m all ears.
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Dear [Acquaintance]
I realize that you feel hurt and attacked by my previous email. In this e-mail, I will attempt to put our recent exchange of e-mail in perspective.
The technology for making insulin is currently based on recombinant DNA techniques; the human gene which codes for the insulin protein is cloned and then inserted in bacteria. I want you to assume for a moment, though, that my religion holds that both the cloning of genes and recombinant DNA …
Here they are, as published in evilbible.com. This list succinctly describes many of my concerns with fundamentalist Christianity. Here are my three favorites of this list of ten. You are a fundamentalist Christian if: #9 - You feel insulted and "dehumanized" when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms,…