Posted on 12/17/2005 3:58:48 AM PST by PatrickHenry
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
-C. S. Lewis
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
-C. S. Lewis
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
-C. S. Lewis
A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
-C. S. Lewis
Evidently, they've been rather quiet since that last one.
They accuse me of wanting to gun down people, etc. Far be it from the truth. I'm warning them they are headed down the wrong road, one which will inevitably lead to conflict. The current state of affairs is such that they are becoming the dictators they claim to despise so much. Their talking points are ripped right from the pages of the left wing media establishment, yet they claim to be vanguards of conservatism.
They have what one might call a narrow intelligence, they can only see what is in front of them, yet they lack an important ingredient-vision.
It is pointless to debate with such dishonest people. They pretend that people such as myself are in the minority of thinkers, when my local YMCA has more members than their Libertarian Party.
Let them continue in their way. In the end they be sitting there saying, "What just happened?"
Similarities have zero to do with it. When you don't know, you can't rule out what you don't know. Yet you want to rule out anything you don't know that doesn't support your theory. That isn't science. And that is the core point. You aren't dealing with evidences, you're dealing with assumptions in place of evidence and modelling based on assumptions. That is the base point of your position - the weakest link. And at that level, your construct is only as good as your assumptions and then only one possible option in a pool of infinite possibility. You chose a fiction you liked and adopted it. Bully for you. But that isn't science.
Inference or assumption is all the same thing. What you observe is one thing. Assuming what you observe has always been that way is as valid as looking at Mt St. Helens and assuming it's always looked the way it looks now. I use that as an obvious example because we know it has not. On the other hand, there are countless regions we could look at and make any number of assumptions about - any of them could be valid or non of them. Picking one and pontificating on it doesn't make it valid - it just makes that assumption the one you like.
Biblical literalism has zero to do with it. Taking the Bible seriously is rather the issue. And it isn't "Biblical" literalism many of you have a problem with.. it's language literalism you eschew - wanting to change the meaning of language to allow you to say something the language doesn't contextually support.
As for the "serious consequences" you speak of for variable rates, you assume you know what you're talking about. If you don't know the environ and how it all happened, you can't possibly speak to the impact of a variable rate. Ie, pull the other one. You're trying to tell us that wind speed is a factor in bullet travel even when the bullet travels through a vacuum as it were. Wind doesn't exist in a vacuum, therefore, it would not affect the travel of the bullet. You also don't know the rate of change if it did happen. Without knowing rate of change or environment, you sit there and say it's impossible. How big a moron do you take the planet for?! This is part of what we speak about consistently. You don't know, therefore you pontificate what you'd like to be the case in ignorance hoping everyone lets you get by with it. We're not ignoring reality, we're just ignoring your spin.
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