Somalia Social Experiment

The example of Somalia shows why religion almost always becomes the pre-eminent authority of a society. In a situation of complete anarchy, thieves and bandits will take whatever they want. Murders will followed by revenge.

Then protective groups will form, as people pitch their allegiance geographically to get some relief from the bandits and murderers. But in the absence of a strong philosophy these groups will end up fighting each other, since they will usually be lead by bandits and murderers who are only protecting their people to get more of what they want.

Finally, a group filled with religious fervor will inspire a righteous energy in its followers, who will believe that their group should lead because it is blessed by God. This belief is infectious and it offers the promise of social stability, hence the religious group will continue to gain adherents, and in the end even most of the bandits and murderers will join in.

Religion IS a means of controlling the masses, but contrary to what many think it doesn't come down from the top, from the wealthy who wish to control the masses for their own ends. Religion is the masses means of controlling the masses.

Of course, it can be later hijacked by the wealthy who wish to control the masses for their own ends, but that's another story.

Want to live better and healthier?

Want to live better and healthier?

Shoot your television. Read or learn to play an instrument - even a cheap Casio keyboard.

Use your car sparingly. Use a bike instead.

Move closer to work or into a city.

Don't eat fast food or processed food.

Avoid candy.

Cook balanced meals at home with fresh or fresh-frozen vegetables.

Avoid food with a lot of preservatives.

Don't work more than 40 - 45 hrs a week if you can avoid it.

Take vacation.

Open your windows instead of using the AC unless it is really hot.

Go outisde and play.

Get enough sleep.

Don't be suckered into consumerism. Be a citizen instead.

Don't get jealous when your neighbor puts himself deep in debt to buy an expensive new toy.

Make friends in your neighborhood.

---
From a Yahoo message board

Volcanic CO2 .vs. Man Made CO2

Burning fossil fuels puts 150 times as much CO2 into the atmosphere as volcanoes do annually.

http://www.gaspig.com/volcano.htm

We know exactly how much fuel we're burning, and it's easy to calculate that this burning puts 26 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. We know that the atmosphere contains about 2800 billion tons of CO2.

Yet I have seen global warming deniers claim that volcanoes spew hundreds of times more CO2 into the atmosphere than humans. If that were true, then we would expect volcanic CO2 production to exceed 2600 billion tons - little less than the current amount of atmospheric CO2 each year.

Clearly this is a mind-bogglingly ridiculous argument. Even if volcanoes put out the same amount of CO2 as people do, then they would have already put out the equivalent of the current atmospheric CO2 over the past 108 years!

This might be reasonable if there were some sink into which that much CO2 would go, sequestering it and taking it out of the atmosphere much like what happened to the fossil fuels we are now burning. But there isn't, at least not one that big.

Evolution Of The Eye

I quote:

"This is the quintessential example of the argument from incredulity. The source making the claim usually quotes Darwin saying that the evolution of the eye seems "absurd in the highest degree". However, Darwin follows that statement with a three-and-a-half-page proposal of intermediate stages through which eyes might have evolved via gradual steps (Darwin 1872).


photosensitive cell
aggregates of pigment cells without a nerve
an optic nerve surrounded by pigment cells and covered by translucent skin
pigment cells forming a small depression
pigment cells forming a deeper depression
the skin over the depression taking a lens shape
muscles allowing the lens to adjust

All of these steps are known to be viable because all exist in animals living today. The increments between these steps are slight and may be broken down into even smaller increments. Natural selection should, under many circumstances, favor the increments. Since eyes do not fossilize well, we do not know that the development of the eye followed exactly that path, but we certainly cannot claim that no path exists.

Evidence for one step in the evolution of the vertebrate eye comes from comparative anatomy and genetics. The vertebrate âã-crystallin genes, which code for several proteins crucial for the lens, are very similar to the Ciona âã-crystallin gene. Ciona is an urochordate, a distant relative of vertebrates. Ciona's single âã-crystallin gene is expressed in its otolith, a pigmented sister cell of the light-sensing ocellus. The origin of the lens appears to be based on co-optation of previously existing elements in a lensless system.

Nilsson and Pelger (1994) calculated that if each step were a 1 percent change, the evolution of the eye would take 1,829 steps, which could happen in 364,000 generations. "

Faith

Maybe it really DOES require more faith to believe in evolution than in the Bible.

Then it seems it would also require more faith to believe that the Earth will continue rotating and thus present a currently dark side of itself to the light of the Sun (assuming the Sun will still be shining by that time).

And it would require more faith to believe that a quantity of liquid H2O would perfectly fit itself into a random hole in the ground that it was poured into.

And it would require more faith to believe that every electron in the Universe is exactly the same as every other electron in the Universe.

We scientific believers must be more full of faith than any Bible believer could ever be!

How Could There Not Be Global Warming?

Anthropogenic global warming, I mean. We know that we are adding 26 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere each year. That's enough to double the amount of atmospheric CO2 in 108 years, since the atmosphere already contains about 2800 billion tons of CO2.

We've known about the greenhouse effect of a planet's atmosphere since 1824. Without our atmosphere, the average surface temperature of the Earth would be about -18 C, whereas in fact it is about 15 C.

We know that CO2 is responsible for about 26% of the greenhouse effect on the Earth, and we know that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increased from 313 ppm in 1960 to 375 ppm in 2005, an increase of 20%. The only way to get this out of the atmosphere would be to increase the Earth's plant biomass by 20% - is that happening?

These are just the facts, no matter what you think of global warming, these are facts you cannot dispute. Therefore the burden of proof is on the naysayers. If someone is going to deny anthropogenic global warming, then they need to come up with some reason why we WOULD NOT have global warming in light of the clear facts which we know to be true.