Well, actually, breaks down into tears. But in a funny way.
Month: November 2009
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Zdenny has two modes: fail, and fail harder
Our favorite troll is back. And here I am feeding him yet again. He has posted on this thread, however it’s not only wholly incorrect, my reply is too bloody long to make a proper comment, so I deleted the original comment and publish it here in its entirety.
Darwinian evolution is a worldview that says that nature began itself and then designed itself. Theistic evolution is a worldview that says nature was created and then designed by mind.
Evolution itself does not disprove Christianity as Genesis 1 explains the the world was created through a process. It doesn’t say that God created everything in one day; rather, six days emphasizing this process. Ironically, the process is almost identical to current scientific theory.
More below the fold…
Continue reading “Zdenny has two modes: fail, and fail harder”
‘Religion’ of Evolution
A common assertion you’ll see in debates of creation vs evolution, is that those that put more stock in scientific discovery than in the foundational texts of the various religions (especially the Bible, as creationism is primarily a fundamentalist Christian belief — though Islam is catching up) are as dogmatic and religious about their own personal religion, being Darwinism, which is in the complainants’ minds a synthesis of the scientific knowledge of the day as revealed by the Prophet Darwin. This is an obvious and execrable mischaracterization of those that take the side of evolution in these debates. Religions like Christianity have traditionally only had to deal with other religions eroding their flock — but science is a completely different animal. It is the attempt by intelligent human beings to discover the truth behind this universe’s principals of chemistry, physics, and ultimately the biology that results from the two former fields given enough time.
FFreeThinker, one of the better science Youtubers, has put together a short open-letter video asking that the theists that use this tactic, think better of it. I honestly doubt that anyone as prone to such thinking as creationists would abandon a tactic that is not only dishonest but also gets under the evolution-boosters’ skin, but it’s worth a try. If they can cry out for civility time and again, we can maybe ask them to stop lying about us in turn.
Remembrance Day
My grandfather was a war veteran. I didn’t get to say goodbye before he passed away, from long-standing health concerns that finally caught up to him. I was in Toronto at the time, and was actually in the process of saving up to make a visit back to Nova Scotia when I got the news. I arrived two weeks after his burial.
I miss him. My familial neglect at the sunset of his life is going to haunt me for a long time.
FOX Busted Again
Jon Stewart calls them out on “We Invent, You Accept:”
Say it with me. FOX Is Not News.
Hat tip to Media Matters.
Our planet and its resources
It’s a common theme among conservatives and theists that our planet’s natural resources should be exploited with little regard to either the environment, the finite nature of those resources, or the sustainability of that exploitation. In some cases it is pure greed — the profit motive of grabbing and selling and using everything in sight ASAP is extraordinarily high, with the downside only becoming readily apparent in future generations. In other cases, as with the theists enraptured with the Rapture, those “future generations” aren’t going to be around anyway, because of some repeatedly-hypothesized judgment day that has yet to materialize.
Continue reading “Our planet and its resources”
Animal testing saves children’s lives
Youths afflicted with adrenoleukodystropy – ALD – have a measure of hope for overcoming their condition and living a full and normal life, thanks to gene therapy as developed on mice.
It took more than a decade to refine the therapy, in which stem cells taken from the boys’ bone marrow were hacked with healthy copies of the gene, then returned to their bodies. Without them, the boys would soon be dead.
“They would now be unable to speak, to walk, to communicate, to sit, to eat. They would be in an advanced stage of the disease, in a vegetative state,” said Patrick Aubourg, a pediatric neurologist at France’s National Institute for Health and Medical Research who led the treatment’s development. “Instead they go to school. They live a normal life.”
[…]
One of the children — their identities remain confidential — received the treatment two and a half years ago. The other received it three years ago. Their story is described in a paper published Thursday in Science. In both, the disease has stopped progressing. Their brain scans show myelin damage that has stopped, and their new genes are active as ever.The results are as striking as any previously delivered by gene therapy, a biotechnological technique that after nearly two decades of anticipation has largely failed to deliver on its lab-bench promise — though that may be changing.
“There is reason to think that this will last for the rest of their lives,” said gene therapist Nathalie Cartier of NIHMR, the study’s lead author.
I certainly hope so. These children deserve a chance to live as much as any human being. Even despite the cost of some mice, so long as they are dealt with humanely. And I am sure they are not tortured, nor are they expended in any way but judiciously and sparingly.
I am convinced that the anti-testing crowd are so privileged with a life devoid of any evil that they see saving children at the expense of lab mice as evil simply out of lack of anything to compare against. Honestly, had these people lived through, say, a war, or famine, or any sort of hardship at all, I’m sure they would not see saving infinite children’s lives at the expense of a few mice is such an evil thing.
Pale Blue Dot
There are theists that claim atheism is a hopeless and small worldview. On the contrary. We are a small and hopeful species and we inhabit a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, a tiny fraction of a fraction of the enormous universe as a whole.
If anyone thinks reality is insufficient and magical thinking is necessary to realize your part of a transcendent larger stage, they need to watch this video. They need to watch it and understand that this world, while insignificantly small, hosts a species that is capable of reaching out beyond it to learn about the larger stage. That dot was not created for us. It was not “created” at all. It is one of billions of planets around billions of stars in each of billions of galaxies. And yet, we have started to reach out and attempt to understand the vastness of this universe, to learn what it is really like. The worst, most heinous travesty of our time is making ludicrous assumptions, such as the Biblical assertion that the earth is a lump of land in a disc of water held up by four pillars and surrounded by a sphere of fixed stars. Whatever imagined inventions were borne of a fevered, uneducated and potentially diseased mind thousands of years ago, pale in comparison to the objective study of this majestic and completely non-anthropocentric universe.
I wish I could have met Carl Sagan. I would have shaken his hand and thanked him for his efforts in understanding this universe.
Epic weekend was epic
We had a very busy weekend. Way too busy. And with another overnight job unceremoniously dumped onto my lap tonight, I’m thinking tomorrow I’m going to sleep pretty well until Jodi gets home from work.
Somehow we managed to pick the busiest time I’ve seen in a while, to do our groceries, wherein all the old people were out in force to block aisles with their silly-looking two-tier grocery carts while they labored to stoop to get their cans of spaghetti sauce. We got the car fixed — our mechanic replaced the right front strut assembly. And while we were there, I fixed Samo’s computer. And again the next day. Continue reading “Epic weekend was epic”
Happy birthday CyberLizard!
CyberLizard turned 35 on Saturday, and I was too much of an ass to get on Twitter and say “happy birthday”. He apparently got two cakes though, so it’s all good.
In lieu of a birthday gift, here’s a heartwarming comic that I didn’t write, draw, or anything.
