You bet it did! Actually, the Earth moves whether or not you are having sex. The only real question is figuring out how far the Earth moved. Luckily Quirkology has provided you a calculator that allows you to customize input to figure out, in miles, how far the Earth actually…
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, is a runaway bestseller. Dawkins is a relentless one-man religion wrecking-crew. He carries a sharp knife for the many arguments that religions are somehow useful or worthy.
But isn’t religion sometimes good? Doesn’t religion sometimes heal the sick and feed the poor? When it comes time to complement religion, Dawkins tends to give only backhanded complements. When people are good, they are not really good because of religion. To the argument that religion makes people happy, Dawkins cites George Bernard Shaw’s words: “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.” (Page 167). Indeed, Dawkins really doubts whether religion is worthwhile at all:
It is hard to believe, for example, that health is improved by the semi-permanent state of morbid guilt suffered by a Roman Catholic possessed of normal human frailty and less than normal intelligence. . . . . the American comedian Kathy Ladman observes that “All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.”
When it comes time to applying evolutionary theory to religion, Dawkins doubts that religion is an evolutionary adaptation. He suspects religion is only a wretched byproduct of evolution.
…Moths fly into the candle flame, and it doesn’t look like an accident. They go out of their way to make a burnt offering of themselves. We could label it “self immolation behavior” and, under
Last year, I took my kids to see Onondaga Cave located in Leasburg, Missouri. The state of Missouri runs this site. The park rangers present visitors with detailed descriptions regarding the geology of the cave. These descriptions often include time frames that run in the hundreds of millions of years. Here’s a sample, from the Onondaga Cave website:
About a billion years ago, the Ozarks were a hotbed of volcanic activity centered about 45 miles to the southeast, in Iron and Reynolds counties. The igneous remains of this activity formed the surface of granites, rhyolites, felsites and basalts that are exposed there. These rocks are the basement layer here, about 1,000 to 1,500 feet below the cave. This basement layer is not flat but tilted. About 600 million years ago, this volcanic activity calmed and the region cooled, condensing great amounts of water vapor, which formed shallow (about 200 foot deep) seas. These seas were the birthplace of the Eminence and Gasconade formations of dolomite, chert, sandstone and shale in which Onondaga Cave is formed. It is believed that the Ozarks were uplifted above sea level (or the seas retreated, take your pick) four times before they fell for the last time about 280 million years ago. One final major uplift (of dry land) took place 50 million to 7 million years ago.
For those who enjoy exploring large case, Onondaga is a terrific place to visit. It is a place to see a spectacular natural wonder and to learn …
Is it beautiful to see spores sneak into an ant's trachea, then creep into the ant's brain where they take over, driving the ant to insanity, causing the ant to crawl to the top of a blade of grass, where the fungi destroys the remainder of the ant's brain, then sprouts fruiting bodies…
In an article from the Washington Post we learn that the United States has slipped in the ranking for life expectancy in the world to number 42. Douglas Adams aside, this is not a good thing. The article lists a good many factors contributing to this fact, which seems paradoxical…