Recent Content by Aurora

"You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do."
-Olin Miller

This quote is a little misleading, because what people are really concerned about at all times is themselves and how they fit in. So every time you share your feelings or opinions, they feel a little threatened that it may mean their opinions and feelings are not so important to you. That's why you get the brush off. It's exactly the opposite of what you think. Your opinion is worthwhile and amazing, and because they don't get to hear it so often, shocking. So much so they don't always know how to react. It's easier to just laugh than it is to actually debate or even agree with you because they're so unsure of how you will take their response, they don't want to take a chance of sounding stupid or silly.

Following your heart and feelings no matter what they are is certainly foolish. No question about it. Your heart can tell you you hate someone and every emotion you experience for a while may be tainted with the impulse to crack that person's skull open with a crowbar. Is it wise or moral to follow these impulses? Of course not, or humanity would have eaten itself alive and into extinction millennia ago.

Yet neither is it wise to stomp down on those emotions and pretend they do not exist. The more we pretend that there wasn't at least one moment where we wanted to bash someone's head in, the more we lie to ourselves and others around us. Admitting we want something is one of the things we are told as Catholics not to do. The thought is as good as the deed, it is said, which is why confessing impure thoughts to a priest and doing penance was necessary before one could accept communion.

No-one wants to go back to the old days where merely thinking someone had a nice *** would get you a night on your knees saying Hail Marys on the Rosary, do they? So let's move on to what people are actually doing because of these feelings.

Do some people have sex with anything that moves, just because they feel they want to? Yes. Is it wise? Hell, no. Does it really matter which gender it is or what they are doing, in particular, when it comes to it being a bad idea? No, it really doesn't. You can get hurt and ruin lives just the same whether you're sleeping with a ton of men or women or both.

Do some people suddenly decide mid-life that homosexuality is wrong and they want to be straight? Yes. I have an Aunt who did that and is married now with a stepson. But I bet there's at least an equal number that live their lives straight until suddenly one day they realize they don't need to LIE anymore about who they are and what they want.

'The Celestine Prophecy' was number one on the New York Times' Bestseller list a few years ago. Harry Potter books also sell a lot of copies, but I don't see this groundswell of religious movement overtaking the world based on faith that either is absolute fact.

If you could give us some examples or stories to back this statement up it might help your argument.

Sometimes I suspect certain members of the APA would like there to be more 'disorders' to research and provide therapy for. This is one of those times, and I'm glad they did not follow the same course of action as Korea and China or even the Smith & Jones Addiction Consultants in Amsterdam.

Apparently in Korea and China, treatment can be forced on an individual by relatives or the government, and therapy often includes the same techniques used in mental institutions for other serious illnesses: administration of anti-depressants, yelling, or electro-shock therapy. In other countries the same 12 steps that Alcoholics Anonymous gave us are used to get 'addicts' to quit. And just like in addiction programs for alcohol, heroin, crack cocaine and other drugs, the old maxim still applies: Once an addict, always an addict. You can never be 'cured'. You will have urges to 'use' and will have to control your responses to these actions for the rest of your natural life.

My contempt for the ineffectiveness of the 12 steps in treating any addiction aside, I feel that mental health practitioners are dancing on the edge of a very slippery slope. Instead of treating the root causes of obsession and addiction of any kind, they are choosing to focus on a trendy new money-making scheme designed to cater to the fears and control fantasies of an older generation that has not come to terms with the new medical and digital realities.

In other words, they fear us and our ability to visualize and manipulate the possibilities of the so-called Digital Age the same way they feared HAL or Skynet out of science fiction. They think we are all agoraphobic troglodytes with acute social phobias leeching off of Mommy and Daddy and look down their noses at friends and lovers that we choose online as somehow being not real. They fear what they do not understand.

So they institutionalize us, cut us off from games and gamer culture cold turkey, make us scream with group therapy, medications, and electro-shock seizures. And while our mouths are open, begging for the pain to stop, they stuff faith in a higher power down our throats until we choke to death and are 'born again' into a new life they are both capable of understanding and controlling down to the last detail.

I agree. Either that or "Evolution vs. Intelligent Design". Although I've yet to hear from many people involved in this debate who are not Christian. I'd like to hear more from those of you who have other religious or spiritual beliefs.

Repliku, LOL! Satanism is a disease of Christianity! I couldn't agree more. I'm tired of the slave morality of the Judeo-Christian tradition that teaches us that suffering is the way to salvation when the salvation being sought is not to be found in this world, but the next! I much prefer the Buddhist interpretation of suffering, which allows us to also enjoy the pleasures of this life without feeling guilty about it!

Yes, I think choice has to be the ultimate answer here.

It's just the point people tend to always bring up adoption as the ultimate answer. But if a baby isn't adopted immediately adopted as an infant, its chances get slimmer and slimmer as it gets older. The adoption process in the US is such a grueling battle of red tape and takes a determined person with a certain lifestyle (steady job, opposite-gender spouse, upper middle-class income where one spouse is always home to care for the child, etc.) that no-one just walks in to an agency and out with one less than six months to a year or more later. This is why so many go overseas where criteria is less selective. But even then the process can be extremely difficult, and when all else fails, people pay money to 'buy' babies that are either kidnapped or voluntarily given up by mothers who are in dire straits financially or just want cold hard cash on the black market.

It takes a certain kind of person to adopt an older child, because everyone thinks that if you raise a kid from an infant, they're just naturally more likely to take after you. And let's not forget where these kids came from. Their mothers obviously had reasons to give up their child, reasons that it was 'unwanted', and some of that might have to do with it either being born with special needs they couldn't cope with. That doesn't just mean birth defects or mental ******ation, it can mean the child was addicted to drugs as a result of the mother's addiction and will have behavioral and emotional problems the rest of its life. It takes an even more unique and compassionate person to raise a child like that.

Wow. It's kind of funny what a response the original statement "God created language" generated, because the arguments I've heard are far more thoughtful and factual than anything that person said. I am happy to read elaborations and explanations like yours, Repliku, but I think Happyman is right:

Some people on this forum are simply not capable of appreciating yours and other peoples' sincere efforts to analyze this issue. Seriously, I don't mind breaking down an argument and explaining myself to someone who disagrees but is interested in why I think the way I do. But after a while, statements like:

get really frustrating after a person has gone to great lengths to put the information in front of the person like a little kid's storybook for goodness' sake. Especially when a person takes the time to actually use the spell check feature in the reply box so that those reading the post don't have to wonder if our school systems are really letting the kids get away with 'somtimes', 'miricl', 'somthings' and 'myshelf'. I hate to pick on people's simple spelling errors but wow! I find it insulting someone cannot take two seconds to read over their post and check out what all those red lines underneath their words really mean!

And you thought I scared you with "Woodstock" lyrics? I haven't even begun terrorizing the forum. :guns: The lyrics make no sense to JedininjaAZ because this person does not even know his own Bible enough to realize 'we've got to get back to the garden' refers to all of us getting back into a more innocent frame of mind. Like in the Garden of Eden. Before we started assigning blame and killing one another off; before we needed to pray to God to 'forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us'.

Yeah, it is a song that tells us to hold hands and sing corny songs like kumbaya, I guess. :kiss: Hey, it's a heck of a lot better than dropping napalm on your neighbor and watching them scream and burn to death in agony. Make love, not war, and all that jazz.

But I guess I shouldn't be surprised that some bible-thumpers just can't envision a world where we're all human and made from the exact same stuff, no matter whether we believe that stuff came from the hearts of stars or the hand of God, and each of us deserves the respect and dignity that implies. It's not like Christians haven't ignored the Golden Rule before: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Or maybe I'm wrong and they're not ignoring it, they're all just masochists who like having disrespect shoved in their face like fecal matter, and assume everyone else is too.[/end rant]

Back on topic: I'm really curious what people think about the geophysicist who is employed by our government to construct models of the Earth's interior processes. Apparently he does have scientific proof supporting Creationism. He's a devout Christian whose program churns out definitive proof that the Earth and all its fossils are less than five thousand years old because there was a massive explosion from inside the Earth's core! Should I assume four years of education were completely wasted because the guy has fit Jesus into his model and is assuring me that the theory of Evolution cannot possibly be true? I don't know, guys. I'm reaaaalllly lacking the faith necessary for this.

I'm waiting for them to bring up Babel now, and how God punished us then in the Old Testament for thinking we could build a building that was high enough to touch Heaven. According to the Bible, one day the residents of Babel woke up and none of them could understand each other when they spoke. So there's why there's different languages around the world.

However, since the first written languages seem to be recorded in the cuneiform writings of Mesopotamia, the hieroglyphs of Egypt, and the carefully drawn symbols on ox shoulder blades in China, the Bible's timing seems just a tad unrealistic.

Repliku is the anthropologist/archaeologist though so I'm waiting to be corrected on the details. :) Still, I don't think many people are going to argue that the story of the tongues of Babel is literally true. I know I'm not.

'Luck' in this case, is biased. The 'luckiest' thing that ever happened was the pure chance of life forming on the Earth at all. The raw materials for any life we're aware of are carbon and liquid water, which 4.6 billion years ago just were not present in the environment in sufficient quantities to form organic compounds. Whatever theory you like about how this changed and single-celled life arose, whether a comet possessing these ingredients crashed into the earth or a lightning storm set off a peculiar chemical chain reaction, the fact that it happened was the most random occurrence in the whole history of evolution.

From then on, we see how the odds are stacked in favor of an organism that survives long enough to reproduce. The most important reason we have sexual reproduction occurring in organisms is because it increases the odds that the particular code of DNA will be random enough within a specific set of boundaries so that an organism will wind up being as different as possible from its parents while still possessing all of the characteristics that made its parents able to survive long enough to reproduce. In other words, it's like a combination lock. They all possess a case, a locking mechanism, and some method of inputting a numerical code that unlocks it. The most successful locks will be those whose codes cannot be easily guessed and whose mechanisms are tough enough to defeat attempts at tampering with them physically. One thing that is absolutely necessary is that each lock has a unique combination. Otherwise, once you guess one lock, you can guess another, and ultimately perhaps discover some pattern that unlocks them all. When applied to organisms, unlocking all the combination locks means species extinction, because the agent doing the unlocking could be a natural disaster such as a meteor strike or a virus that is able to invade cells and reproduce so well that it finally kills all hosts with the same kind of immune system defenses.

What this genetic lottery does is produce organisms that may vary within their species by physical appearance, immune system, blood type, sensitivity to environmental hazards, etc. And as long as the individual's chromosomes remain compatible with those of other members of its species, it can engage in sexual reproduction and its characteristics are passed on.

So let's say we do have a monkey from a species whose brains are much smaller than ours. He has a few more brain cells in his frontal lobes than his relatives because of a chance mutation. This allows him the curiousity to find out whether the lions are on to something with eating antelope, so he goes out and sees how good the marrow inside their broken bones tastes. He decides it doesn't taste so bad, and he doesn't have to eat as much fruit that day because the marrow was full of protein and calories. He has just gained an advantage over the other monkeys in his group, and doesn't have to compete with them as much for fruit. He passes on this trait and the habit to his offspring and they benefit greatly by both. The more of these offspring that survive and reproduce, the more chance their descendants will have random mutations that further increases their brain mass.

When discussing a certain characteristic, it may seem really improbable for it to evolve because of its complexity. But the truth is, a patch of photo-sensitive cells on a creature's body can quickly develop into an eye in less than 500,000 years because the survival advantages of having an ability as crude as sensing time of day are so great. In the meantime, every stage of the process of turning from a patch of skin cells to a camera-like eye is recorded in fossil data. And this is across species, so we know that it such mutations occur independently. It's not just a freak possibility because humans are definitely not the only ones with eyes, nor with large brains capable of making sense of the information gathered by them.

What is unique to humans is our overgrown frontal lobes. That's where our decision making takes place, where we reason through the raw information our senses and emotions give us. Other creatures' brains may be more massive than ours yet they don't have language or reasoning abilities quite as sophisticated. This tells me not that having mutations that eventually produces them is not that amazing. It just doesn't always turn out that reasoning and language sophistication are less costly than some other feature like a keen sense of smell or the ability to run 40 mph. In fact, they're a -lot- more expensive than other characteristics in terms of a long period of helplessness in childhood, for example, or needing enormous amounts of calories to fuel the working of the brain. And it took 3 billion years to produce the right environmental circumstances and genetic combinations for beings with overgrown frontal lobes to evolve that could use them to offset the losses incurred by having them.

The existence of the modern human brain was never a foregone conclusion. It was never inevitable, nor was it impossible. It was about as unlikely or improbable as the elephant's trunk to evolve.

Or they could be the next serial rapist/killer, if you want to be even more dramatic. And feeding them could mean the death of another, already living person elsewhere who could find the cure to cancer. It's impossible to know, or to judge based on this kind of argument.

For myself, I doubt I could ever have an abortion. Am I willing to restrict other women from making this choice on the basis of what their unborn fetus could/would/should be? Absolutely not.

Whether people like to believe it or not, infanticide has been practiced for as long as there have been humans who had to choose between survival of the mother or death by famine in times of need. It's still practiced today by adults who kill a young girl's dreams and future by imposing their view of sexual morality on her by forcing her to bear and care for a child she may never have even known she could have.

There are way too many unknowns. This is not something you can simplify with a statement like 'it's wrong'. And until you walk a mile in a pregnant teenage girl's sneakers, don't be so quick to judge how she got there or what she should do about it.

No-one ever considers what a price women pay when they have a baby in terms of their health. For nine months, you have what essentially amounts to a parasite in your body taking a third or more of your nutrients away from you. That's whether you eat right or not, because with some vitamins like folic acid, it has to be present in enough quantities in the mother for a year BEFORE pregnancy to prevent deficiencies in her or the fetus.

All kinds of things happen to a girl's body besides her 'getting fat'. Some are reversible, like breast enlargement. Others, like diabetes and its effects, are not.

As for leaving your baby at a fire station anonymously....uh WHAT? Do you think it's somehow easier to leave your born child who is maybe a few days old with complete strangers than it is to take a morning after pill or have an abortion a month into the pregnancy? Have you held a baby in your arms before? They're cute. Insanely cute and cuddly. It's like the Pringles' commercial: Once you pop you can't stop.

Or is it just that I'm forgetting that all women who would give up their children in the first place or choose not to have them at all are just necessarily cold, unfeeling, heartless ****s? I am sorry, but there is no such thing as a 'maternal' instinct that all 'good' females have, telling them to nourish, nurture, and socialize every infant or young person they lay eyes upon. There is a 'parental' instinct, which most normal people of either gender possess, despite how people think guys are supposed to not have it because they're supposed to be tough.

Think about that next time you see a guy put himself between two kids duking it out or checking out that pregnant chick in the mall. It's not just him being 'macho', although it could be. He's thinking 'boy if that were my kid, I'd spank/hug/yell/be so proud.'

I judge myself no better and no worse than any other human being in this world. I ask 'why should I trust you' in order to hear your reasons, not as an accusation of guilt for some crime.
Saix and others have already done the work for me in posting the same arguments and pictures I would have in order to explain why 'underwater insects' and their evolution have anything to do with this discussion. So I will try another method, that of song, hoping that it will appeal to the readers of the forum as a whole, regardless of where they stand on this issue.
I'm still a scientist. And yes, still a rabid critic of organized religion of any kind. I think it hampers us and holds us back from true spirituality and compassion in society. But it does not mean that I do not smile on my brothers and sisters, and look past our differences to see our common humanity.



Well I came across a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him tell where are you going
This he told me

Well I am going down to Yasgur's farm
Going to join in a rock and roll band
Goin' to get back to the land to set my soul free

We are stardust, we are golden
We are ten billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

Well then can I walk beside you
I have come to lose the smog
And I feel like I'm a cog in something turning
And maybe it's the time of year
Yes and maybe it's the time of man
And I don't know who I am
But life is for learning

We are stardust, we are golden
We are ten billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers jet planes
Riding shotgun in the sky
Turning into butterflies
Above our nation.

We are stardust, we are golden
We are ten billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

"Woodstock" by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

The 'it's not natural' argument is a powerful statement that hits right at our deeply ingrained perceptions about the world and how it works. I do remember the first time I saw a guy kiss another guy in public, and wow. I was shocked, and, I am ashamed to say, horrified. It's one thing to be raised in this American society and say to yourself 'I don't hate gay people'. But it's a whole other ball of wax to see it happening right in front of you, with nowhere to run.
I have good news, though. I got over it. As it turns out, the shock wore off the way it wears off after the first time you are forced by your mom to eat spinach, or when you touch your friend's python and realize it's not going to bite or strangle you to death.
And by the time Madonna and Christina Aguilera locked lips at their nationally televised New Year's Eve show, my reactions had completely switched around. I gasped and laughed, and my mother gasped and said "Sick!". I asked her why she felt it was more sick to see two girls kiss than all the guys and girls kissing and practically having sex on prime time television every night.
And her answer was that she didn't really like that either. But she didn't say it was sick. And she really didn't have much to say about it after, either. So I think I got my point home to her, or at least made her think about it.
My answer to your question is this then: Be free. Don't be a slave to others' phobias. Love and compassion have no boundaries that we do not impose on them, and therefore the only thing unnatural about gay marriage/relationships is the blind hatred people have for what they do not understand.
Yes, there is a political issue. Personal IS political. Especially when we are talking about marriage, which is sanctioned by the government. Married people in the U.S. get tax breaks and when one spouse dies, the survivor is eligible for social security pension benefits and all sorts of other money. This, to me, is what the real issue is. Our Congressmen know this, and they keep denying the rights of an individual to pursue happiness because it will very quickly start infringing on the rights of others to pursue money. Meaning, there just isn't enough money for us to have to start paying those benefits to both straight and married couples.
I say, too bad. Change the laws. Change the way the money flows. It's not like we don't have to do that anyway with Social Security ready to collapse when the baby boomers reach retirement age. Our generation is screwed by theirs, and it's time they moved the hell out of the way and let the people who are going to have to clean up their messes start making the rules.
That includes close-minded, bigoted, right-wing Christian Bible thumpers that oppose gay rights of any sort. Your time is over, you rich, white, old men that think you're going to leave some kind of important legacy for the future. You begat the sons and daughters who will clean up the disasters you visited on this world, your so-called legacy of oil spills, slash and burn farming, and chemical wastes in our waters. And they're going to work their butts off to do it while they have the power to vote, while they're having sex before marriage, or sex with another person of the same gender, or both, and while they're paying taxes that pay for your retirement, not theirs!!

What possible reason could you have had to subconsciously want to drop your tray, waste your lunch money, get laughed at and have to go to the principal for causing a ruckus? Seriously, you must have demolished the lunch line with your one tray and made such a mess that people were covered in food. Otherwise, why would this send you to the principal? Do you have a history of dropping your lunch tray every day in school? What the heck is going on in your principal's head?

JedininjaZC, gravity is a fact because it has been witnessed. Anyone can observe this phenomenon by themselves without help from their priest, shaman, or pastor. All they have to do is toss a baseball up in the air and watch it fall.
Conversely, not everyone can see, hear, taste, touch, or smell 'God'. His phone number isn't listed in my telephone book. I have never seen his picture in the paper, nor shaken his hand. He has never kissed my lips so I knew what his breath tasted like. No, the general populace encounters 'God' by going to church, hearing a sermon, reading the words of the Bible, holding the beads of a rosary in their fingers, tasting the communion wine, breathing in the scent of candles and incense. We're asked to 'have faith' that these things all represent 'God' and have all kinds of instructions on how to 'see God in everyday life'.
I just do not have this 'faith', and if it makes me a sinner, so be it. At least I will be sinning against a God who hides his face and cloaks his actions in inscrutable parables and tells stories through men who have an interest in consolidating their power over their neighbors by appearing as a 'mouthpiece of God'.

People telling me they are a witness of 'God' and insisting that I believe their testimony without any proof whatsoever that they are even a moral being that possesses the faith they are preaching does not work for me. I certainly don't believe the used car salesman on television when he tells me to trust him with my hard-earned money just on 'faith'. I doubt anyone else would either if they had any sense. They would want to see some proof that what he's selling actually is worth the price they're paying.
In this case, the 'price' you pay with 'God' is your eternal soul, right? What if your faith is wrong, and the 'true God' is actually Vishnu, or Allah? You're screwed.
So no, I'd rather just explore the incredibly beautiful world around me, with all its life, beauty, and diversity. I can appreciate its beauty the more so when I'm not blinding myself to the hideous parts as well. And by far, the most hideous thing I've yet beheld is within human nature itself. This tendency to blind oneself to the facts, such as that millions of Jews were killed in the Holocaust, yet many were faithful believers in 'God'.
Which brings me to RayeofSunshine's response to my earlier post. My first reaction was, what does George Washington and the American Revolution have to do with this discussion? But then I realized that people are taught all kinds of myths about the 'founding fathers' of America in our schools, and that the use of God's name in reference to the Revolutionary War is nothing new under the Sun. So there is little use in being shocked in how people toss phrases like 'freedom of religion' around and yet will be more than eager to send teenagers to go kill in a foreign land, not because they are murderers, but because they support people who are murderers because they have put their faith in a 'God' of a different name. This is no different than when Spain drove out the last of the Moors in the days of the Inquisition.
Whether or not George Washington was a religious man is open for debate. I have heard from many reliable sources that he actually was a man who did not believe in a 'God' that intervened in human affairs. So tales of him kneeling in the snow, praying to 'God' for victory against the British are concocted by Christian historians who are committed to legitimizing American independence from Great Britain as some sort of divine judgment on an evil empire.
Now if 'God' and the Angel of Death had descended on the British in full view of thousands of witnesses and slain our enemies on videotape, I might give this idea some consideration. But until we catch Jesus returning for the Rapture live on the eleven o'clock news, I'm going to be very skeptical of anything like Judgment Day ever happening.
Therefore, denying the facts of evolution because the idea is 'stupid' and 'sounds like Harry Potter' is not a very brilliant defense. If a 'day' can mean anything 'God' wants it to, as you said, then anything else written in the Bible can mean anything we want it to. I could say 'the meek shall inherit the Earth' really means that someday, humans will be extinct and cockroaches will take over the world. I mean after all, we just don't know what He meant, do we? So who are you to deny me my interpretation of the Bible if I think that when he wrote 'day', he literally meant 'one complete revolution of the Earth' and not 'one thousand complete revolutions of the Earth around the Sun' or 'one thousand complete revolutions of the Sun around the Earth' because everyone knows the universe revolves around the Earth, right?
Why should I just believe you when you say

Who are you that I should just take your word for anything, much less something as important as whether 'God' exists?

you ask, and I have already told you. I have 3.8 billion years of rocks with fossils out there, and just because you have never seen a fossil in a rock, does not mean it does not exist. I have held them in my hands. I have seen the record like a picture book open up for me in rock outcroppings not 5 miles from where I live. It's not my fault you've never been to a museum, or your science teacher in school never showed you a dinosaur bone.
Here, I'll save you the trouble of actually going out and investigating things for yourself. Here is a picture of a fossil, some trilobites to be exact, which were very successful arthropods that existed in the world's oceans in various forms for over 300 million years. That's a heck of a lot longer than the 2 million or so years that humans have been around, or the 200 million that mammals themselves have even existed.

Eyeless trilobites from the Devonian Period (approximately 400 million years ago)

By the way, did you know that every state in the Union has a fossil, just as it has a state flower, or bird?
The one for New York is Eurypterus remipes. as a matter of fact, it happens to be a kind of trilobite that lived during the Silurian.
Click on the picture to find out more about it.


Or just find your state fossil here.