Posted on 07/04/2002 9:49:26 PM PDT by Phil V.
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:40:29 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
A fossil previously mistaken for the remains of an extinct fish turns out to hold the earliest known creature to have emerged from the Earth's waters and walk on land some 350 million years ago.
This ancestor of every four-limbed, backboned animal living today -- the first creature clearly designed to walk on land, with forward-facing feet -- fills a major gap in the evidence for the evolution of vertebrates from sea to land, scientists say.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Now, "procreation" would be more like it!
Tell us again you are not an atheist. I need a good laugh. Tell us again that evolution is not an attack on Christianity. Seems every time you get bored you spew a filthy attack on Christians [by posting pics of stonings, the heresy trial of Galileo, the burning of Bruno, and Nazi book burnings.]Observe the problems with the above post. First, and incredibly, there is clearly a reflexive defense of stoning, the persecution of Galileo, the burning of Bruno, and Nazi book burnings. My pointing out these historical crimes is labeled "an attack on Christianity" which proves -- or so it is claimed -- that I'm an atheist (the implication is that only an atheist would oppose such activities). Second, in prior posts when people like Jim Jones have been mentioned, a certain blue-posting creationist has always claimed that such an evil person couldn't possibly be a Christian. So he rejects Jim Jones, while embracing and defending some of the worst crimes in history.1602 posted on 7/15/02 9:02 PM Eastern bygore3000
Gallileo wasn't brought before a Catholic Inquisition?
Bruno wasn't burned?
Are book burnings sanctioned by scripture?
Would you, or would you not feel comfortable casting the first stone against an evolutionist?
The nerve of some people to post facts...
In a way, I can almost understand the vehemence and imagined persecution you display on these threads. You have predicated your life on the certainty that a particular concept is literally true. The inflexibility of your faith is no one's problem but your own. Fortunately, science does not march to the beat of your Bible.
That being said, you have the manners of a muskrat, and no excuse for your willful, obstinant, unreasonable, and generally pig-headed behavior. Perhaps it's time to display some of those positive Christian traits you continually claim are being impugned.
He's messed up so badly that his only hope is to get the whole thread pulled, so he can then deny that it ever happened.
I am in awe of your facility to bring forth the very images that I could only imagine heretofore. Very nicely done.
(You did, however, leave out the snake-handling, as well as the Thorazine tablet vertical boundaries....but that is a trifle in comparison to your having captured the preponderance of my vision with actual images.)
Speaking of which, the proof of your assertion that "No, a circle is not an ellipse...." is strangely absent from this thread....
.... as is your apology for insulting "Junior's" knowledge of Astronomy, your retraction of mis-characterizing the planets as having "wildly elliptical" orbits, and your retraction and apology to PH for wrongly asserting, without supporting evidence, that he has been suspended more than once.
But you've been told this at least 1720 times, yet you never respond when your mistakes and bad behavior are pointed out.
Is there some reason you feel you shouldn't be held accountable for your mistakes and wrongful accusations?
As for snake-handling, some of the creationists here may very likely be snake-handlers, so to be respectful of their sect, I thought it best to leave that denomination alone. And as for the other, I just can't visualize it.
Comparing G3k's manners to that of a muskrat is an insult to the muskrat population..... ;-)
I'm starting to wonder if anyone actually hits the abuse button on LBB. Most of his "victims" probably agree that it's more fitting to let him self-destruct in public than to cover up for him by replacing his insanities with Blue Spew number 17,453 removed by Moderator.
Your use of understatement as a literary device has my deepest admiration.
I recall two exceptions offhand in three years of this. No-Kin-to-Monkeys, whose bona fides were questioned by other Cs on that very basis, and That Subliminal Kid, who wanted f.Christian to go away and stop embarrassing him. He claimed to be more of a troll than a C, however. Thus, the possibility remains that no "true" C will ever criticize another "true" C.
BTW, that's one thing that made me chop my legs off on that "Can this Freeper be Saved" thread speaking up for EsotericLucidity. (Thanks a heap, "Gutterboy!") I had noticed Subliminal, who had never impressed me as adding much to the discussion, is back already and EL was still gone.
[I wrote]
CONCERNING PATRICK HENRY:
The real Patrick Henry was a CREATIONIST!
Patrick Henry (1736-1799), was an American Revolutionary leader and orator, who spoke the now famous phrase, "Give me Liberty or give me death!" He was Commander-in-Chief of the Virginia Militia, a member of the Continental Congress, a member of the Virginia General Assembly and House of Burgesses as well as having helped to write the Constitution of the State of Virginia. He was the five-time Governor of the State of Virginia, (being the only governor in United States history to be elected and re-elected five times).
Patrick Henry was offered numerous positions by President George Washington and Congress, but declined them all, including: Secretary of State, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, U. S. Minister to Spain, U. S. Minister to France and U. S. Senator.
Prior to the Revolution, in 1768, Patrick Henry rode for miles on horseback to a trial in Spottsylvania County. He entered the rear of a courtroom where three Baptist ministers were being tried for having preached without the sanction of the Episcopalian Church. In the midst of the proceedings, he interrupted: "May it please your lordships, what did I hear? Did I hear an expression that these men, whom you worships are about to try for misdemeanor, are charged with preaching the gospel of the Son of God?"
On March 23, 1775, the Second Virginia Convention had been moved from the House of Burgesses to St. John's Church in Richmond, because of the mounting tension between the Colonies and the British Crown. It was here that Patrick Henry delivered his fiery patriotic oration: "For my own part I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery... It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country... Sir, we have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt.... An appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts is all that is left us!.... Sir, we are not weak, if we make a proper use of the means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. Three millions of people, armed in the Holy cause of Liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us.
Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battle alone. There is a just God who presides over the destines of nations; and who will raise up friends to fight our battle for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.... Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
CONCERNING DARWINIAN EVOLUTION:
The first hint that Darwin was a racist can be seen in the subtitle selected for his “Origin of Species.” The words chosen were: “The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” This subtitle has been eliminated from all modern printings of the book, but it’s in bold letters on the original. If there is any doubt that Darwin was a raging racist, these words should leave no doubt: “At some future period (Darwin writes), not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes (the black race) ... will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest Allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as the baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.” (Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man 2nd ed (New York: A. L. Burt Co., I 874), p. 178).
“No rational man (writes Thomas Huxley, a contemporary evolutionist, and follower of Darwin), cognizant of the facts, believes that the average Negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man. And if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favor, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried out on by thoughts and not by bites” (Thomas H. Huxley, “Lay Sermans, Addresses and Reviews”
Huxley was arguing that blacks could not compete intellectually with Caucasians, even under equal and fair conditions. A half century later, Darwin follower Henry Fairfield Osborn writes: “The Negroid stock is even more ancient than the Caucasian and Mongolian, as may be proved by an examination not only of the brain, of the hair, of the bodily characters, such as the teeth, the genitalia, the sense organs, but of the instincts, the intelligence. The standard of intelligence of the average Negro is similar to that of the eleven-year-old youth of the species Homo sapiens (Henry Fairfield Osborn, “The Evolution of the Human Races,” Natural History, Jan./Feb. 1926. Reprinted in Natural History 89 (April 1980): 129).
Before Darwin’s works, many racists had questioned whether blacks were of the same species as whites, but they had no scientific foundation for their predjudice. Things changed once Darwin presented his racist evolutionary schema. Darwin stated that the African race could not survive competition with their white near-relations, let alone be able to compete with the white race. According to Darwin, the African was inferior because he represented the ‘missing-link’ between ape and Teuton (John C. Burham, Science, vol. 175 (February 4, 1972) p.506). It should come as no surprise that the secularist movement of the day quickly espoused Darwin’s racist evolutionary theories. Later, educational theorist John Dewey, playing off the fallout from the Scopes trial, made Darwin’s theory the mantra for public education in America. The fact that America was substantially racist in the 1920’s and 1930’s allowed him to get away with it. We are now (hopefully) in the post-racist period in America. Thinking people cringe at Darwin’s hatred for the African peoples. Thinking people view it as a disgrace that his racist-based theories are still being taught in the public schools, in America, right now! biology is one of the most spectacular examples in history of how highly speculative ideas for which there is no really hard scientific evidence can come to fashion the thinking of a whole society and the social and moral transformation it caused in western thought, one might have hoped that Darwinian theory … a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth” (p. 358). 2. “Evolution is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless” (Professor Louis Bounoure, Former: President of the Biological Society of Stassbourg, Director of the Strassbourg Zoological Museum, Director of Research at the French National Centre of Scientific Research, writing in “The Advocate,” March 8, 1984, p. 17).
Well, notice none of the regulars are coming to his defense this time? Even they recognize a lost cause when it starts to smell.
The only people left defending him are a couple of OBVIOUS shills, and of course, Capt. Distraction, leader of the Thorazine Thugs, who furiously has been pumping out voluminous SPAM from AiG, instead of linking it like a normal person would, interlaced with his usual incoherent sentence fragment babbling, in a blatant attempt to distract the lurkers from his hero's "self-destruction."
Great point. The Theory of Evolution is the most often "proved" theory in the history of the universe, hands down.
Problem is, every time it is proven, the proof turns out to be either deliberat fraud or leaping to unscientific conclussions as result of wishful thinking on the part of leftist academic humanists desperate to justify their denial of the existence of God.
Pseudo-Patrick Henry mistakes personal insults for reasonable arguments. There are only 50 to 100 of these "snake-handling" churches in the U.S., with a few thousand members, of which only a minority handle snakes. This subject, however, has nothing to do with the subject of the origin of life on earth.
We live in a culture which has been politicized and polarized. Consequently, we are tempted to respond favorably to the “applause lines” delivered by people who are on “our side,” and to dismiss with contempt those who have said something with which we differ. We may often take sides in such a process, but it cannot be called thinking. People can say many true things couched in atrocious arguments, and they construct valid arguments in the cause of error.
Relevance fallacies are those arguments whose premise contents are irrelevant in supporting the conclusion, though they may appear relevant at first glance. One relevance fallacy is the abusive ad hominem fallacy in which one attempts to discredit a person’s conclusion by discrediting their person. But someone can have a terrible character and yet have a wonderful argument; the two can be distinct. If the conclusion has nothing to do with the person’s character, then discrediting their character is not relevant to the argument.
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