Everything you wanted to know about.. RELIGION

[Twirly]

Like I said, Evolution is a religion, nothing more. A belief. A theory.

With the difference that this "belief" makes some sense.

 

[Guest]

;D

 

[Jason]

My belief is that I will be stoned within the next few hours, is that a religion?

According to Silverwind... yeah.

"Like I said, Evolution is a religion, nothing more. A belief. A theory."

Actually, Evolution isn't a religion...

"Hey mam, I'm going to the church to learn about evolution, seeya later !"... just doesn't cut it, does it...

Evolution is a theory.

Religions are beliefs.

Theories CAN be proved (They can also be disproved).
Beliefs CANNOT be proved

It's like me saying that I believe that a giant seventy three armed pink elephant with a lime green penis flies around the word, painting the rainbows with its multicoloured farts.

You can't say I'm wrong, since you have no proof against me, and it's something I believe, so I MUST be right...

For all we know, the bible(s) could have been written, maybe in the 1600's or something, and all these stories about all the so called witnesses, could have been made up by a group of six writers in a room, and they told it to their friends, it spread by word like that...

HOWEVER, now onto science, bones etc. from prehistoric animals and obviously dinosaurs have been found, meaning we have proof that there was indeed life before man, and to be honest, a set of bones proves a whole lot more than a book labelled "Bible"...

Lets take a look at Charles Darwin now, shall we ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist who realised and presented compelling evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors, through the process he called natural selection.

Okay, so in order for something to be true, you need proof, evidence, and Charles Darwin brought back enough evidence to prove that evolution and natural selection does indeed exist, let me give a simple example;

Spoiler: Example

A tribe of people named only as "A" get bored one day, and decide to explore the world...

The tribe splits into two groups, known as B and C.

Group B go and live in the desert (Don't ask why, lol)

Group C go and live in the ice caps (Again, don't ask why...)

Group B, over time, learn to adapt to the intensive heats of the desert, while Group C over time, have learned to adapt to the extremely low temperatures of the ice caps, meaning they have both adapted to their environments.

This means, that the tribe has evolved into two "sub-tribes" as you will, or as we know them to be, sub-species, as they're the same species, however, they have adapted to a new environment, taking on new advantages and traits over each other.

Now surely, this is a form of evolution, is it not ?

 

[mawk]

this thread has become so horrible. a lot of you know fuck-all about religion, scientific theories, or the violence in the middle east, but that's hardly stopping anyone.

 

[silver wind]

@ jbrist: the Evolution Theory is a religion in the sense that it functions as an excuse for people to be atheists.

I should have been more clear.
I don't argue against Natural selection / Adaptation to the environment: I think they've been proved beyond any doubt. However one species turning into another species, we have no proof for that. It's still (200 years since Darwin's theory and 300+ years since the idea of evolution have been brought up) a theory.
The first two are micro-evolution, a very misleading name, and I'll explain:
If there are 2 kinds of butterflies in a certain species and the white survives because it has camouflage in his environment, that's not evolution- The white butterfly already existed! Nothing new has been created here.
There are also many kinds of dogs, created by selection (of humans selecting who to breed with who).
However, they are all dogs, they didn't turn into a new creature- they can still breed. If you breed many kinds together, you'll get back a normal dog, not a bulldog/ rotviler within a few generations.
All the 'new' properties already existed in those dogs but were enhanced by natural selection. Now, if a dog suddenly grows scales, or gains the ability to eat grass, that's evolution- a totally new species created by mutation.
The thing is, the mutation will not hold. Like I said if you breed that dog with other dogs, the offspring will not have this mutation.
Do blind woman give birth to more blind kids? Or is this anomaly fixed eventually within the species?
Lastly, be honest for a second: Did you ever see a mutation which created something good? Mutations only create crippled, disabled beings.
If you examine this with 'religious eyes', you'll see why: the animals were created perfect and therefore any small change makes them worse, not better.

@wyatt, I'll give some names of 'ape-man' species etc, and some pictures.
Also, could you please explain the propaganda thing you spoke about.
1. The ape-man 'Java'
"proof" it existed: a leg bone, 2 teeth and a broken skull cup.

Spoiler

2. The ape-man called 'Nebraska Man'
created by a single tooth (of a pig). search it up.
3. "Lucy" (Australopithecus afarensis) The most completed ape-man skeleton ever found- no skull was found(!) but there are numerous 'reconstructions' and paintings of her. How can they know she had monkey-like face or monkey-like fur?? without the skull, one can easily claim she was a normal human.

Spoiler

4. Neanderthal man
For years they have been drawn as furry, ape-like creatures. The same bones today, are drawn as a creature that looks surprisingly human:

Spoiler

5. Lastly, a shocking discovery:
Otta Benga, The African man held in a zoo, as well as a 'scientific' sketch showing black people as the 'link between man and ape'

Spoiler

 

[mawk]

Lastly, be honest for a second: Did you ever see a mutation which created something good? Mutations only create crippled, disabled beings.
If you exmine this with 'religious eyes', you'll see why: the animals were created perfect and therefore any small change makes them worse, not better.

this is a really stupid statement and I hope you see why.

I'm not even ragging on you for the bit about religion. it's just incredibly misinformed to assume that every mutation is detrimental.

 

[MCsephiroth13]

Mutation does not mean crippled. It just means that something genetically different occurs in an organism's offspring.

 

[So fist]

Fossils of basic life forms have been dated to 3.8 billion years ago. Therefore it is now believed that life had a 'window' of 500 million years to develop (I dunno how they calculated that, because 4.5 - 3.8 = 0.7...).

Water is necessary for life as we know it. It didn't exist on earth the moment it was form. Their window starts at the earliest point of water existing on the earth's surface.

That's a big number: 500,000,000
Life could have been created as an accident from simple materials, right?
Let's use a scientific tool: Statistics. what is the chance of getting a set of 52 cards in a certain order?
52 x 51 x 50 x 49 x 48...........x 3 x 2 x 1
I stopped calculating at 30, and it's already a chance of 1 to
265252859812191058636308480 million

The math of your hypothesis is assuming that life only has one chance to occur once per year. A more accurate measurement would be measure the probability against the number of nanoseconds that would occur in 500,000 million years giving you an astronomical number of chances for your hypothetical complex collection of 52 cards to fall in order. And those nanoseconds would be further multiplied by each microscopic instances where the materials are gathered for it to be possible for proteins to germinate into pre-prokaryotic forms. In short probability is actually the friend of this theory. Not its enemy. Also we are complex organisms that's consist of millions of eukaryotic cells so of course we have dna that consists of millions of entries. However when you are talking about early life you are talking about prokaryotic single celled organisms who have one one thousandth the amount of dna of a single eukaryotic cell.

3) You believe human evolved from monkeys, with thousands of middle stages. Not a single whole skeleton of 'man-ape' was found. Only one tooth here, one broken skull cup there. Once a whole species of 'man -apes' was created on a single tooth, later they discovered it was a tooth of a pig..
65 million year old dinosaur skeletons where found by thousands. But a single skeleton of 4 million year old 'man-ape' ? Nope.

Hello I am Australopithecus afarensis. I was a bipedal pre hominid that existed 3.9 million years ago. Though I wasn't much smarter than the other primates I was fully bipedal and had dexterous hand functions that would further my toolmaking behavior to possibly more complex ones.

You do realize that dinosaurs were like by and large huge fucking creatures. Like huger than a sixteen wheeler on average per adult. Then of course there is the fact that people love dinosaurs because they catch the imagination. So when they are found their is simply more fanfare about it than when someone finds some old ape bones. Your perception of the lack of hard evidence is due to your ignorance of the archaeology out there not the lack of archaeology on the subject. Also most dinosaurs (which are huge masses themselves) are rarely to almost never found whole and fully preserved. Its a rare completely special circumstance that you get a full skeleton. The lack of a totally complete skeleton is rarely cause to claim a species doesn't exist or that it isn't preman as long as enough of it exists to back up hypothesis. Australopithecus makes a pretty good case in that matter.

1) You believe fish evolved into lizards, and there have been thousands of 'middle stages'. Where are they? One ancient fish (Litemeria, I think) was claimed to be the link, but later discovered to be a species still alive today, which DOES NOT have legs and hands like previously said.

I'd like to break in that you really love straw men. You like to tell everyone what they believe in in a full display of ignorance and then refute it in an unsourced and tersed manner. I don't even know where to begin. Life began from prokaryotic cells and evolved into eukaryotic and then multicellular organisms. But there are still prokaryotic bacterias not too different from their fossilized ancient brethren. Species don't evolve into other species like an evolved pokemon. They branch out into subtypes of a species and then eventually become so specialized that they are a complete species on their own. Extinction isn't a matter of outdated DNA its a matter of whether that species can survive its environment regardless of its age.

Aside the process of new adaptations being formed through evolution there is also the process of simplification. Man for example is losing his wisdom teeth and appendix since his lifestyle no longer calls for the necessity. It is not surprising that an ancient amphibian or fish with a leg like appendage would lose it if it were part of the branch that decided not to be amphibious at all and stay in the water. Once again though your ignorance of the matter is really showing and I would suggest you do some of your own study of the actual science rather than just leaping off of small tidbits put out by outfits determined to prove evolution is fraud and that god hand made their special frame.

I never quite why the more orthodox and conservative religious persuasions have such a problem with evolution. Personally I think it stems from a wretched desire to be special without having to do anything other than exist. I mean not being part of the master race/chosen people/correct religion/political persuasion/hand made by god might mean I would actually have to achieve something to feel like I have worth and dignity. That would be horrible.

 

[silver wind]

I've edited my post with much more info.
About my 'ignorance', you misunderstood me. I didn't say 'there are no skeletons' , but 'there are no complete skeletons'. You yourself admit there are full skeletons of Dinosaurs found, even if few. But dinosaurs are 65 million years old according to your claims. Why have their bones survived better than 4 million year old man-apes? Your example of 'full skeleton' is 'Lucy' in my edited post, and it doesn't even have a skull, nor it can be called 'completed'.
You say the mutations are small, this is exactly my claim: if the process takes millions of years, there should be thousands of middle stages, so WHERE are they? Show me (fossil of) an ancient fish slowly adapting legs. Show me a lizard slowly adapting wings.

 

[mawk]

Show me (fossil of) an ancient fish slowly adapting legs. Show me a lizard slowly adapting wings.

yes because evolution takes the flipbook method.

 

[mawk]

p.s. what does number five have to do with the subject at all

"see guys science is corrupt it objectifies black people"

 

[silver wind]

I mentioned it earlier, and since I was asked for sources, I brought the source for that too. What does flip of a book even mean? If you have answers for me, go ahead and post them, don't tease/mock me.
Edit: mutations are all bad, if you guys know something I don't, please 'enlighten' me.

 

[Ellie]

Lucy is not the only "full skeleton", in fact there have been actual full skeletons.

Scientists have for the first time constructed a fully articulated, or jointed, Neandertal skeleton using castings from real Neandertal bones.

The reconstruction, which has been part of several exhibitions, presents a striking visual image of what the Neandertal (often spelled Neanderthal) looked like, experts say.

"At last I felt that somehow I had actually met a Neandertal," said Ian Tattersall, the curator of the Department of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City.

The skeleton was reconstructed by G.J. Sawyer, an anthropologist at the AMNH, and Blaine Maley, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Anthropologists have long debated the skeletal differences between Neandertals and modern humans. The reconstruction suggests some strong differences in the form of the Neandertal's rib cage and pelvis compared to those of modern humans.

The research is reported this week in the science journal The Anatomical Record.

Disappearance

Neandertals lived in Europe and some parts of Asia from 300,000 years ago. The last of them mysteriously disappeared in present-day Spain and Portugal 28,000 years ago. Modern humans, many scientists believe, arose in Africa less than 200,000 years ago and appeared in great numbers in Europe starting about 40,000 years ago.

The relationship between Neandertals and the early modern humans, commonly known as Cro-Magnon beings, is fuzzy. The two groups overlapped in Europe for 10,000 years.

The reconstruction could provide scientists with a more complete picture of the stature differences between modern humans and Neandertals.

"It gives the public and scientific community a more grounded basis for comparing this archaic group of Homo to modern humans," said Maley, one of the two authors. "The emotional responses to these differences are much more pronounced than when looking at an artist's conception or comparing individual bones."

The reconstruction was based on a skeleton called La Ferrassie 1, which was discovered in France in 1909. It is a well-preserved and fairly complete fossil skeleton, though missing a complete rib cage, vertebral column, and pelvis. For the reconstruction, the researchers had to obtain these parts from other individual skeletons.

WHOLE at last. The first reconstruction of a complete Neanderthal skeleton reveals more clearly than ever the similarities and differences between us and them.

The reconstruction makes clear their larger, bell-like chest cavity and wider pelvis. Their bodies were also very compact and dwarf-like in shape, with effectively no waist, possibly as an adaptation against the cold.

Gary Sawyer of the American Museum of Natural History in New York city and Blaine Maley at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, wanted to shed light on the anatomy and stature of this cousin of modern humans, which died out nearly 30,000 years ago. They assembled the skeleton by taking casts of the most complete skeleton available, the La Ferrassie 1 specimen found in 1909 in the Dordogne valley in France. Then they filled in the blanks using casts taken from other Neanderthal collections from the same period, approximately 60,000 years ago (The Anatomical Record, Part B: The New Anatomist, vol 283B, p 23). "It's the first time any human 'ancestor' has ever been fully reconstructed," says Sawyer.

Meanwhile, the oldest fossilised primate protein to have been sequenced, taken from a Neanderthal, was last week found to be identical to the human equivalent (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0500450102).

Also note: (with pictures)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hu ... on_fossils

 

[mawk]

Edit: mutations are all bad, if you guys know something I don't, please 'enlighten' me.

you are an idiot.

 

[mawk]

What does flip of a book even mean?

okay this one I can kind of understand maybe

 

[Guest]

;D

 

[Guest]

;D

 

[j4kl1ng3r]

This was good, though.

Good job guys, good job arguing.

 

[silver wind]

The full skeletons are of Neanderthals which, according to evolutionists, are not our ancestors but a different branch. How can they prove we come from monkeys, I'm not sure.

you are an idiot

Yeah.. thanks for that.
Listen, English is not my first language, I'm simply not familiar with some expressions, like 'flip a book'. Maybe I'm an idiot, but not because of my bad English :p
@││█║▌│║▌║ ▌│║▌║ ▌││
No it's not. what's with the weird question?
@wyatt
What's with the stupid propaganda >.<

 

[Ellie]

You said (before my propaganda bit) that people aren't stupid enough to believe things that aren't real.

By propaganda I probably could (and should) have explained better.

Just erm... wikipedia propaganda or something. It's a way of getting people to believe what you want them to believe. Hiding the facts, while pushing your own "facts" as truth, until they believe them completely. I apologise for an utter bastardisation, but take the following example: people fought for Hitler because they believed that the Jews were the reason for the November retreat. People followed Stalin because they believed he was a god.

Not meant as analogies in any way, merely a way of debunking the "people aren't stupid enough to believe things that aren't real" argument.