I have been thinking about this.  Who can one name, who is not in jail, and who would be eligible to be President, who would actually be worse than this moron, to lead the country through this crisis right now?  Someone who is even more self-centered, who knows less about the world, less about proper management, who has had more business failures, who is even more divisive, who has more staffing problems, who is more petty, more insulting to reporters asking tough questions, and who generally would fuck things up even more than him?  This is truly not an easy question to answer. Any suggestions?  I am seriously finding it hard to name someone.

The republicans sure picked a doozy.

Alan seemed to insinuate in my last thread that I didn’t explain WHY I think skeptics are full of hot air.  So, in order to do so in a manner in which hopefully he can better understand, first I think I should start with a list of who these skeptic mouthpieces are, and then I can perhaps later fill in some of their statements, some of their backgrounds, and some of their beliefs.  I hope this will ease Alan’s concerns.  So, off the top of my head, here are some of the top ones I can think of.  Sort of a Hall of Fame of atheist windbags. Guys who know everything about the universe, because they tell you so. Should be a useful database that we can refer back to later in other conversations. More added later:

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Several years ago, at the beginning of 2016, on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe forums, there was a thread about driverless cars.  All the skeptics were going on about how great it was going to be, how it will be here in two years, five years at the most, how we will overcome all the “small” problems by 2017, maybe 2019 at the latest, blah, blah.  And at the time, I had told them, well, you may want to hold on a while, its not quite as easy as you think.  And how was that met?  By a barrage of insults, of you ridiculous troll, what do you know about anything, if you wouldn’t be so ignorant and just learn, can we just block this guy moderator, on and on it went… (typical skeptic fare).

That thread was viewed 117,000 times.  There was exactly ONE person who was adamant that their time frames were wrong, that we still have a long way to go.  And boy, they sure didn’t like that.  Looking back now at the litany of nonsense the skeptics spewed kind of makes me laugh now.  Its the same nonsense you see here at TSZ every day.  Now, in 2020, some of the most ardent skeptic cheerleaders have reluctantly finally started to admit, ok, yea, you was right, it was a a lot harder than we all said.

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BruceS’s link to a series of discussions with the leading atheists of our day, about emergence, reductionism, and mostly just about how to make naturalism sound believable to the gathered masses the atheist preachers exist to proselytize to, is a rather entertaining bit of folly to indulge in. Its the end result of what you get when you band together the most well known atheists, each who consider themselves to be solely the smartest person in the world (due wholly to the history of their lucky accidental mutations which have no meaning, they will remind you over and over) and get them all to agree that they believe the same thing, and then listen as they all try to figure out what it is they believe. Madcap slapstick ensues.

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Here is something that is worth arguing over.

In another post, recent contributor TomMueller stated that GPS satellites use relativistic synchronization to match up their clocks with earthbound clocks.  I explained to him that this was not so, even though its easy to believe, if you don’t think critically, that it is.

Tom followed my post to him with a litany of ad hominem, “Oh, you are a moron, you are a troll, creationist idiots,  I read about it on a credible site, I talked to a physics professor about it…” and on and on he went with his insults and denial.

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Since there are quite a few Pommies here, I wonder what you all think about the Madeleine McCann story?

The parents are innocent, or are they evil?

The story has so many parallels to the Jon Bennet Ramsey story.

In an early post John, who wants to be called doctor, urged readers to take a look at a little paper by Dan Nilsson and Suzanne Pilger. He says it is a good conceptual example of how natural selection acting on variation can gradually create a new feature.

Gee, that must be quite a paper.  He says it can’t be beat!  So what does their paper actually show?  The paper is called , “A Pessimistic Estimate of the Time Required for an Eye to Evolve.” Well, that does sound interesting! Continue reading →

Arcatia has stated that before any thought can occur, first there must be a chemical change in the brain.  So if before any decision is made, we first need a chemical change, then it is not really a decision, now is it?  It is merely a response to that chemical change, for which we have no control over.

On several occasions keiths has ducked and dodged away from this problem.  Arcatia now seems to want to run away from it, as has every other materialist here on this forum.  About the best you can hope for is some kind of obfuscated rant about what is meaning, what is will, how do we know we know, what’s the epistemological  nature of the epistemology…and on, and on the deflections to anything that could be considered an answer go.  Generally people here pretend that if you stick the suffix “sian” at the end of any name, you have said something profound.

So it deserves it own thread.  Let the bullshit answers speak for themselves.  In the end we will see if anyone actually tries to address it.  Its the toughest question for materialists to wiggle out of in my opinion.

Remember when I said that you can’t have genes switching on and off without a code, and how the sequence of DNA wasn’t the only code Keiths?

Read and learn:

http://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-improve-understanding-of-dna-folds-2016-6

http://mashable.com/2016/06/02/elon-musk-simulated-reality/#sdLXHm2_jsqB

This is all Darwinian evolution really says in the end.

In the topic of morality, Allan, Neil, Lizzie and others use the same old con of claiming that morality is not accidents, its….and then they just trail off into a non-answer.  I find this a very frustrating and telling habit of the materialist.

There is no “other” thing there.  Unless you want to include an intelligence, or a destiny into the theory (which destroys the theory of materialism) you aren’t left with another aspect to why things are.  You have accidents, that somehow formed a durable combination.  Its such a dishonest aspect of materialism that when its not convenient they don’t want to admit this part.  But in not admitting it, they struggle with saying anything to counter it.  They can use words like emergence, or nature did it, but that’s meaningless.  The materialist theory is that it is simply accidents that breed well.

Every time a materialist tries to claim there is more to it than that, when they need to have a stronger arguing basis, don’t be fooled by the dodge.  That is all they have.  Accidents.  Sorry, to force them to accept their own reality.

I read an article on Salon, about a woman who gave birth to a premature baby that didn’t survive. The point of her article was tell everyone how much she hates when people tell her her baby is in Heaven.

But actually her point is more than that. Her point really is to make sure you know that she is atheist. And to tell you, that you are dumb for not being one. Because this is what good atheists do. They talk about how the “great thinkers” like DeGrasse Tyson and Sagan give her comfort, when they reassure her that you are just a tiny speck in a much bigger universe (that has no purpose). Continue reading →

So, here is the link to a paper which Keiths claims says something about income inequality, and I say is another example of the proliferation of shoddy science.

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/03/19/0956797614567511.abstract

The highlight of the paper is this claim:

“We found that of the 40 search terms used more frequently in states with greater income inequality, more than 70% were classified as referring to status goods (e.g., designer brands, expensive jewelry, and luxury clothing). In contrast, 0% of the 40 search terms used more frequently in states with less income inequality were classified as referring to status goods.”

Where does one begin to critique the ridiculousness of this claim? 70% of the majority of searches are for luxury goods in some states, 0% of the most searched items in other states?

If one claims the difference in search patterns from one state to another is that dramatic, shouldn’t ones bs detector already be ringing alarm bells?

And what is considered a luxury good? What is the cut-off for equal states and unequal states? Did they decide the luxury terms before or after they viewed the data? Who do they claim is doing all this searching for luxury, the haves or the have nots?

The red flags are everywhere. Isn’t it likely that they had a conclusion that they wished to reach, and that they fulfilled their own prophecy?