I once printed out this discussion becuse my Dad wanted to read it and he doesn’t like these “new fangled computers”. It was about 180 pages long at the time!

“09 January 2009

A test tube based system of chemicals that exhibit life-like qualities such as indefinite self-replication, mutation, and survival of the fittest, has been created by US scientists. The researchers say their perpetually replicating RNA enzymes take us a step closer to understanding the origins of life on Earth, as well as to how life may one day be synthesised in the lab.”

Full story:

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2009/January/09010901.asp

When will we see THIS in the Creation Museum?

Well, look what turned up on the BBC website yesterday
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7675193.stm
For the benefit of any Creationists who might be reading this blog with a view to educating themselves the term ‘young earth’ refers to an age approximately two billion years ago and not 6-10,000 years ago.

Another gap gone, soon there will be nowhere to hide!

A woman who wants to be the Leader/Deputy of the the most powerful nation in the world. One who believes in talking snakes and that the earth was formed just 6000 years ago.

This is not my personal message but I endorse every word of it.
It was sent to me by a YouTube friend Windham666
Sarah Palin Supports the Aerial Hunting of Wolves

This video was done by a fellow YouTuber. I would like to say that in the past centuries, man has killed off 19 different species of wolf from North America and this Religious Right Wing Bitch wants to kill them off even more. She wants to outlaw abortions in the case of incest and rape on one side but then rapes and destroys nature by killing Polar bears and wolves. This authoritarian book banning whore must never be allowed in the White House.

“Traces of a dinosaur found at a German quarry suggest the creatures may have been 15 million years older than previously believed.”

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,573226,00.html

Welcome Jennifer, yes that’s a great discussion in the mainstream news. We need to see more of it happening. People must question their beliefs. They must ask themselves – where/how did they get them? If the answer is “parents” and/or “school”, then it’s not good enough to just accept that form of education. What if you were born in India? Or Iran? Or Brazil? Being born into a religion does not make that religion the right one! They can’t all be right. But they CAN all be wrong.

WOW!

With that sort of stamina you could represent Oz in the Olympics! Running the marathon. They could do with some success in athletics ;o))

Sorry, had to get that bit in; of course Stu might delete this post!

I must admit that I do like Rookie’s comment when she says that she is married to ‘an ancient historian’. Is this someone who studies ‘ancient histroy’, or did she marry her ‘history Professor’?

It’s good to see rational points being made in discussion. Here in the UK all the main stream political parties seem to have mislaid their national and cultural identities; pandering to the desert warriors is not a good sign for the future.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/god-goes-up-for-debate/2008/08/18/1218911572829.html

Reader comments are here. Sounds like Australians have a lot of commonsense.

http://blogs.smh.com.au/newsblog/archives/your_say/019786.html

I personally know several Jehovah’s Witnesses, many of whom don’t know that I know. On the outside they are quite normal and friendly but many of them home teach, and one that I know has over £500,000 worth of debt!!!! Much of that I suspect spent to protect their children. That I find particularly sad.

Incidentally this was the 2nd visit from their missionaries in 2 months and I hope for more.

You know I forgot to ask these two if they were of the 144,000.. The previous one’s weren’t but they were quite happy that they weren’t going to HELL.

They don’t need to go anywhere to find HELL! This is England in Summer and my garden is flooded, and it’s quite cool. Ah well!

I too have had the Watchtower people at my door. Did you know their kids are miserable? No birthdays, no Christmas.

I don’t know why they are bothering door-knocking. They believe only 144,000 people from all time will go to Heaven.

A Google Search of the terms “Jehova’s witness” and “cult” brings up around 100,000 hits. Here’s a good quick place to start:

http://www.cultwatch.com/jw.html

Yesterday morning I had a slightly surreal experience. My wife had gone shopping with a friend and the door bell rang. I thought they had come home early because the weather was lousy, but when I opened the door there stood a man and a woman, and the woman was holding a copy of Watchtower under her arm

What’s the relevance of Watchtower? Well it’s the ‘magazine’, for want of a better word, of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And, I opened the door to talk with them. Why? Because I was hungry and ‘needed’ a meaningful conversation. Plus it was pouring down and I was dry and standing in the porch and they were outside in the rain and they only had a small umbrella. They decided that spreading their message was more important than than staying dry. Who am I to argue; no doubt that God was looking after them, although he didn’t provide them with a bigger umbrella. It would have been impolite not to indulge them.

They always amaze me. They insist that they have studied the modern world and can counter any argument with The Bible. The problem arises when you talk about time and get away from Isotope dating methods and get onto such things micro-deposits such as those that lead to the building of stalactites and stalagmites such as those that are found in the Carlsbad Caverns which have been growing for over 11 million years after the cavern was formed. Sorry that should have been 6 thousand years ago.

They were somewhat confused when I pointed out that the Bristlecone Pines in California were nearly twice that age.

They also get hung up on the fact that there are no ‘transitional fossils’ lying around in the streets. And, because fossils such as Tiktalik aren’t mentioned in Genesis they doesn’t exist.

Cain’s wife was his SISTER, it MUST have been so otherwise GOD would have decreed that it appear in the Torah that there were other people; and they accepted that was incest but couldn’t explain why there is now such a wide spread variance in DNA around the World, but God must have arranged it so.

At the end of the day the God of the Gaps struck again. Every time I raised something that wasn’t in their script it was, ‘Well we believe that the Bible is the Truth’.

I even offered them my copy of The Ancestors Tale by Richard Dawkins, which is nothing really to do with God but a reverse journey through evolution, so that they could discover for themselves when Mankind and the anthropoid apes split form each other. But as they said they had everything they needed in the Bible.

It was, as I said , a slightly surreal conversation. 2 intelligent, well meaning, people, trying to save sinners like myself from going to hell, or was it Darwen. Anyway it was warm. They were so hung up on these Bronze age myths and fables it was unbelievable. But the thing that I found strange was the fact that their faith was, in my opinion, so weak that they refused, point blank, to do research on the net or in any other reference book, for fear of finding verifiable evidence evidence that would have shown the ‘facts’ in the Bible for what they really were.

I do so hope that they will come back.

As Christopher Hitchens pointed out, you would have thought that if God had placed the Salamanders in the cave system he would not have left vestigial eye sockets.

On the other hand is it just possible that because the Salamanders have been living in total darkness for untold millenia, their eyes were of no practical use, the energy needed to maintain this system could be put to better use.

This is not an adaption but Salamanders evolving.

http://richarddawkins.net/article,2889,Losing-Sight-of-Progress,Christopher-Hitchens—Slate

The concept of Heaven is very different to the concept of God and is very dangerous. We see Muslim Jihadists blowing themselves and fifty innocents up because they “know” they’ll go straight to Heaven – because God told them so. Is this the same Heaven you’ll be going to? Either Christianity is wrong, or Islam is. They can’t both be right.

BUT – They can both be wrong.

You couldn’t make it up could you.

If you can wade through the following, which would be even more hilarious if it weren’t for the fact that it happened, you will probably find that this teacher has probably read learned a few tricks from the one and only Harry Potter Esq. Unless of course the reacher in question is the one and only Professor Snape

http://richarddawkins.net/article,2544,n,n

http://www.local6.com/news/16169506/detail.html?rss=orlpn&psp=news

Yes, a teacher in a school does a magic trick in class with a toothpick, then suddenly gets called in because he’s been accused by a parent of “wizardry”. Thank You Creation Museum.

This is a short video about CERN.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/253

Elegantly presented by the man described as the ‘Rock Star Physicist’.

As he says, ‘We now know what happened 1 billionth of a second after the Big Bang.’

The Creationists will be pleased to point out. ‘Ah, but you don’t know what happened at the VERY BEGINNING though do you? And you don’t know who, or how, it happened, do you? Therefore GODDIDIT.’

These infuriating gaps are getting mighty small ;o)

Just pulled this off You Tube.