There wasn't any holding back here. Here's an excerpt from Mayor Rocky Anderson's speech: Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism. A patriot does not tell people who are intensely concerned about their country to just sit down and be quiet; to refrain from speaking out in the name…
Christians who declare their belief in Biblical creationism leave all sorts of unanswered questions in their wake. Here are a few.
Question 1: Why are there so many near-human animals?
Let’s say Darwinian evolution is “just a theory” and that one of the Bible’s two creation stories (yes, there are two in Genesis) correctly explains the origin of life on earth. Why, then, do apes and monkeys exist? Why did God create animals — especially chimps and bonobos — that are almost genetically identical to humans? If God created us in his image, wouldn’t it have made a lot more sense for no other animal on earth to be even remotely similar to us? Why would God create so many other primates — ANIMALS — that share over 95% of our DNA? Moreover, why would God give them social behaviors nearly the same as ours; language skills nearly the same as ours; emotions, the ability to use tools, even bipedalism, compassion and self-awareness all nearly the same as ours? Indeed, if we look at virtually any metric of mental ability, the average rhesus monkey behaves more human-like than did the brain damaged Terri Schiavo, whom President Bush and many Republican Members of Congress rushed to “save” because they believed she displayed human consciousness. Assuming that no species on our planet arose from evolution, but from instantaneous creation by God, why are there so many near-human animals? Why would God do this?…
63% of Americans say that the Bible is literally true. Those who rely on the Bible to condemn and harass gays often point to the book of Leviticus. If that is a worthy strategy, let's follow everything the Bible teaches us, including everything from Leviticus, right? The following excerpts are…
To optimize next-generation action-items, it is important to enable leading-edge models to enable one-to-one solutions thereby facilitating aggregate robust portals. Of course, to benchmark front-end paradigms and thereby embrace user-centric architectures is probably a better way to engineer leading-edge metrics.
If you’re wincing at the above paragraph, please forgive me. I’m just having a bit of fun, thanks to a site called “Web economy bullshit generator.” Whenever you press the “make bullshit” button, the site gives you an impressive sounding phrase. This site has many “uses.” For instance, see the comments to the site:
The Web Bullshit Generator is phenomenal…my resume never looked so good!
—Cory L.This is a great job interview prep tool and provides fodder to use on chicks at the bar. I’m also going to use this in preparation for my high school reunion.
—Ryan F.
No one could ever fall for such stilted, meaningless and concocted gibberish, right? Not so fast! Using big words and proper syntax goes a long way to making something appear meaningful. For example, the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, a leading journal of cultural studies contained an article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The author was Alan Sokal, a real life physicist at New York University. As indicated here, in an article by the Skeptical Inquirer’s Martin Gardner:
…[Sokal’s] paper included thirteen pages of impressive endnotes and nine pages of references.” But Sokal had actually submitted these 13 pages
As reported by the St. Louis Post Dispatch, conservatives got together for a large rally in St. Louis this week. One of the speakers, Catholic Archbishop Raymond Burke, argued that it was “the legalized destruction of human life.” A radio executive chimed in: “Have you ever noticed that when the devil tries to sell you an evil idea, he usually wraps it in a lie?”
To what were they referring? The killing of “babies,” they argued. The speakers were arguing that a research procedure called “somatic cell nuclear transfer” (SCNT) was literally killing babies.
Never mind that the 5-day old babies they were talking about are microscopic clumps of cells (containing valuable stem cells). Never mind that they can’t really be considered individuals; they could still split into more than one baby (until 12 days of age) or they might not grow into any baby at all (“God” himself spontaneously aborts hundreds of thousands of these babies every year).
Donn Rubin, the chairman of the Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures, the group promoting a ballot proposal promoting stem cell research in Missouri, condemned the conservative rally. The Coalition’s website describes the Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative in detail. For another description, see also here. Rubin reminded the crowd that the ballot proposal has the support of more than 100 groups, including research centers, health care groups and patient groups.
What is SCNT? Is it really killing babies? According to the International Society for Stem …