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Mr Firefist. Wow i was drunk last time i posted here. Fond memories...

I really do disagree with that. If 90% of the worlds terrorists are Islamic then that earns Islam the reputation of being a religion that blows stuff up with bombs. I'm not saying its a deserved reputation or thats it should be used to discriminate against Muslims but there wouldn't even be this cartoon if Islam hadn't got a reputation as being hostile. Christianity for me has a reputation of big light shows with sermons where the speaker talks in a strange tone of voice as if he's quivering in the cold but is really just trying to sound more holy than the other speakers at other big light shows.

hi perni, i agree with what you said and would like to add that some reputations are earnt and unfortunately the reputation of Islam reflects what the cartoon is saying. If responses to this cartoon had been something like "the cartoon is false but shows the paranoia of the West over the actions of a small percentage of extremists" then i would have applauded them. The reactions I have seen from many Muslims have been quite hostile and only serve to show that alot of Muslims are actually not that far from being extremists themselves given the right trigger. It's rather sad to see. I listened to this guy called Michael Savage on the radio last night and he is quite blatently a Nazi Isolationist who believes non-Americans are sub-human. I think most of the world would be insulted by this man so maybe we should transmit some of his broadcasts to Saudi Arabia and Egypt so they can see what Americans have to deal with. It was funny listening to him comment about how a company from the UAE is controlling most of the Eastern ports in America... it's quite obvious he believes everyone from the UAE is a terrorist and must be stopped just because they're an Arab country. Although America isolating itself might not be such a bad thing in some respects, they'd at least stop interfering in the business of the rest of the world.

Well i always make my ultimate intentions clear on the issue of religion. The solution isn't simply eradicating all belief in supernatural causes through extermination and war, its a process of education whereby an understanding between both sides is sought. In the end though i would like to see the demise of every organised religion.

Well said Aileron. Jesus didn't kill the devil, he ignored the temptations; Jesus was anti-censorship. Temptations aren't exactly the same as insults but its the same basic principle in that Christians shouldn't go round trying to censor everything they find offensive or vulgar. Islam is like Christianity 500 years ago, unfortunately we have to wait for it to catch up, although i don't think there are such clear examples of anti-censorship in the koran. Its hard to say whether or not one should be offended by these images. If someone put a picture of one of your deceased family members in the newspaper with a horse humping their face then you might feel offended. The love and belief of Muslims for the prophet Mohammed is probably similar to that of a deceased family member. They have a right to believe what they want even if that belief is a set of irrational !@#$%^&*umptions drummed into them by the society they were unfortunate enough to be brought up in. Its such a difficult question as to whether these things should be censored or not. I'm gonna swing to the opinion that they shouldn't be censored simply because its not that big a deal to see a cartoon Mohammed carrying a bomb. A real life picture (if there was one) might be a different issue because it wouldn't be someone elses personal representation anymore.

Hey! You're not supposed to agree with Aileron! You may be right though, i'm not a biologist and your knowledge of simple organisms may well be more extensive than mine. I just think that the range of complexity in life is at least an indicator that life in itself is not that special.

I would say that life has a very broad range of complexity and that humans are at the very end of the scale. Plants and bacteria are life and its not hard to imagine them coming into existence through random chemical processes. If humans were the only form of life then i might give your comments more thought but the links are there between life and the material world, humans just hit one end of the range.

If god mentioned "falling theory" in the Bible then i wouldn't be surprised.

Overall crime rates are almost the same. So the only reason the UK has more !@#$%^&*aults and muggings is because the USA has a murder rate three times higher. I'd rather be punched in the face a hundred times in the next ten years as opposed to being shot dead at the end of it. Instead of one gun-brandishing thug you have two unarmed thugs. Instead of a murder you have two !@#$%^&*aults. I can live with that although its certainly not 200% (like you said). As for rape it has gone down by about 10% in the last year (BBC) which is a massive decrease when you think about it for a country of 60 million. So i sincerely doubt you get more rapists in an anti-gun society.

Monte's on the ball again with this one. It's a common opinion that overall crime is an indication of how civilised a society is. It may be of interest that the overall crime rates (independent of population) for the USA and UK are almost identical. Yet when one looks at the murder rates the USA is three times higher. Bear in mind that this is overall murder rate, the firearm homicide rate in the USA is 27 times higher. For me this proves one simple theory: Guns elevate crimes that would have been mere !@#$%^&*aults to the status of murders. With identical crime rates you're three times more likely to be murdered in the USA and about 67% of these murders are with a firearm. The following graph indicates this to be a high percentage with the USA being far to the right of the trendline: http://www.nationmaster.com/plot/cri_mur_w...ir/cri_mur/flag All stats are from: www.nationmaster.com

The point is that the price of guns will go up cutting out most of the thugs on the street. Unless someone is going to buy a gun and then sell it at a massive loss then i don't know what you're getting at.

Its impossible to say how many guns reach the black-market from the legal process but the number is significant. 1. Stolen Guns. 2. Straw-purchases. 3. Gun-Shops selling illegally. Are three common ways of guns getting into the hands of criminals that wouldn't exist if guns were illegal. I do think guns are useful in the hands of ordinary citizens but its not much use if the criminal uses his gun to threaten you because you can hardly pull yours out. A gun is useful against a criminal with a knife or bat but that would only encourage the criminal to get hold of a gun after. The question is whether the sacrifice is worth making. Criminals will always get guns through imports but this will force the price right up and will likely take guns out of the hands of the thugs you're likely to meet on the street. The professional criminals with the money and connections to import a gun will not be mugging you on the street with it. As for taser guns, well you have to consider the weather, multiple targets and range. In the home they would be useful because there will likely be one attacker within range in good conditions but outside is a different kettle of fish.

Why is it whenever i post in a thread it gets trashed?

Sleep by the Dandy Warhols is a good one.... naturally. Classical music is also good. Almost anything by Chopin works because he does the best gentle piano music. I wonder if listening to music affects the dream state? I always seem to get outside noises affecting my dreams because i usually sleep until about 2pm. Its certainly an interesting subject because it may become possible to completely manipulate a persons dreams based on external noise...

Exactly, so what observations are there for Intelligent Design? Obviously when you found philosophy "too easy a subject" you didn't choose to venture beyond high-school physics. Look into the work of good old Albert Einstein who proved Newton wrong. Today, if you walked into a physics convention and claimed that Einstein was wrong I guarantee they'd listen to you just like they did to Einstein a hundred years ago. Scientists never impose certainty. We can find out whats very likely but we never assume absolute certainty because then we'd never find out if we were wrong. As for your whole Entropy argument... please pick up a text-book and read it before buying into the garbage thrown at you by Christian and Catholic websites. Do you understand the word system? Do you understand that the system doesn't have to be uniform in its level of complexity? Okay rather than proceeding down a route of humiliation (i'm a nice guy really) i'll just ask you how you get ice from water when this is an apparent drop in entropy.

I'm pissed that 17th didn't die when i left. You people got no respect.

...but i still get the last word. The End.

Ah i see, so similarly it was the Iraqi soldiers and not Saddam who commited the atrocities in Iraq. Obviously not. What you've said here is not entirely true either. Galileo was condemned for heresy and placed under house arrest for the last 10 years of his life. This was fully justified by the Church as a body who believed Copernican theory to be false. In 1992 Pope John Paul II gave an address on behalf of the Catholic Church in which he admitted that errors had been made by the theological advisors in the case of Galileo. He declared the Galileo case closed, but he did not admit that the Church was wrong to convict Galileo on a charge of heresy because of his belief that the Earth rotates round the sun. The whole point of religion is to impose certainty. The whole point of science is to acknowledge doubt. Throughout history those who have doubted the certainty imposed by the church have been executed under heresy laws. Science is the study of the unknown but the Church already had their own set of answers sent down by God. Scientists were heretics whenever they investigated something that the Church called certain. Life does not gravitate towards the simplest arrangement. The birth of a child is not the simplest arrangement for the molecules that have bonded together to form that child. Life is complex but what other than your pre-conceived ideas of God's existence makes you think that complexity is something that cannot be reached without a designer? More importantly, what makes you think life is complex? Where is your scale? Yes. We have ample evidence that planets always form into spheres or near-spherical shapes due to angular momentum laws and gravity. But this is not an analogy because we do not have evidence that life always forms in a particular way (Gods way). We have no reason to assume that life is too complex to be understood by physical laws. There are no reasons to believe that life is "unentropic". We can grow human ears and clone sheep whilst obeying the laws of entropy. What actually makes it likely? There is nothing to suggest a God made life other than a lack of evidence for something else. Did God make the water molecule? Did God make amino acids? Did God make the first blade of grass Did God make the first bacterium? .....Where does your scale of complexity require God to intervene and why? If proven true it would disprove atheism. Atheism is not a scientific theory though. Science does not discount God, it merely puts it on the proper footing as a probability requiring evidence. Since there is no evidence FOR the theory of ID/creation it is not taught in science classes and is regarded as no more relevent than Santa Claus existing. Atheism makes the !@#$%^&*umption that God doesn't exist and is just as unscientific as religion. Not at all, I am almost bored of studying physics now and am venturing more and more into philosophy. Philosophy gave birth to science 2500 years ago and it was philosophical thought that inspired scientific exploration. Philosophy is for each and every one of us. It tells us to use our own experiences and logic to find justification for the way we live by choosing definitions for all the things that influence and govern our lives. It is a path towards clarity in thought. Religion is someone elses philosophy. Great Philosophers tend to have incredible mathematical skills as well as a healthy knowledge of religion. It is a subject that is never clearly defined and is renowned as one populated by intellectuals. So for this reason you are probably right to assume that many people do go into the subject because it sounds clever. However the reasons for this are clearly due to the reputations of philosophers otherwise there would be no cause for them to do it.

SNOo grew a heart and Tex grew a penis. The End. Until next Christmas.... DUN Dun dun!

Sex before marriage is a sin! Fear God's invisible wrath! I bet he's standing behind all you sinners right now pulling faces and giving you the finger, but what do you sinners know... you're all going to !@#$%^&* In Bible land we deprive ourselves of pleasure in this life because we are promised eternal existence in blissland with 100 virgin-wives and our own set of purly white gates to keep out all the homosexuals, muslims, blacks, animals and INFIDELS that will try and break in whilst boiling in the lake of fire. It doesn't matter that every being on this planet fears death, it doesn't matter that this could be all in my head for good reason, what matters is GOD PWNS YOU so deal with it! You wanna know why i believe? Because a man who i've never met before said so thousands of years ago when he claimed he was spoken to by God. If you question me then you question God and i'll have to exact God's wrath on you because he works through me and makes me so much more perfect than you. Jesus died for our sins!!! It doesn't matter how this is supposed to work. EDIT- Ah who am i kidding, i'll save you a seat next to Mussolini.

Well Said Astro. If a faithful account was rendered of Man's ideas upon Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word 'gods' has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of the natural, the source of known causes, ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing it to his gods.... When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon ... does he, in fact, do any thing more than subs!@#$%^&*ute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?" Paul Heinrich Dietrich von Holbach (12/08/1723 – 01/21/1789) The German Philosophers always said it best.

Saying matter always existed is a common Atheistic belief that coincides with the belief that God doesn't exist. We don't know if matter always existed because we don't know if God exists. I would say Atheism is no better than Christianity because both make irrational !@#$%^&*umptions for unanswerable questions. Matter may have existed before the Big Bang for the purpose of causing the Big Bang which is why there is no reason to assume either way. We have a complete lack of evidence. The correct answer is: we don't know - Just like we didn't know what the stars were thousands of years ago. The only way we find the answers is by not making !@#$%^&*umptions.

I think Ducky meant adaptation in the form of natural selection. The faster birds will outrun the predators and so will survive to produce birds of similar genetic advantages. There's no mutation here just an overall adaptation to the predators. On the other hand a random mutation can yield positive or negative consequnces that are passed on to the offspring based on how succesful those mutations are in surviving. So adaptation and mutation are both succesful through natural selection although its sometimes hard to see how mutations influence a spieces over millions of years. All we have for that is fossil evidence.

You're confusing the origin of life with the origin of the universe. Life can (probably) evolve from basic-building block materials and so that scientific law is not a law at all. You're right when you talk about the origins of the universe, but life can come from whatever basic particles came from the Big Bang. Life and the origin of the universe are not connected in that way. The argument i think you're getting at is: there must have been a first cause to start everything going. This first cause does not need to create life, it only needs to create energy and matter. We don't know anything about what came before the Big Bang, it is possible that there were many causes prior to the Big Bang that existed in a universe with completely different physical laws. Theorising about it is impossible because we have no evidence. This is the ultimate unknown question and it doesn't surprise me that Christians now turn to this "lack of evidence" and call it evidence for God. The actual evidence for God is zero in this instance. I was talking about the randomness of mutation as a factor in evolution. A Blue Jay may not lay an egg that hatches as a chicken but it may hatch as a mutated jay. The mutations can be remnants of past cells that have become dominantly active. From looking at the world around us we can see that habitat is a factor in evolutional mutation (as Ducky said). Penguins have adapted to conditions in the Antarctic. We know that Antartica never used to be at the south pole and we know that penguins are birds with extremely thick body fat and wings that are half-way to being flippers. Penguins cannot survive without land so they must have adapted to the southward movement of the antarctic plate. Its not concrete but are we to assume that God just "magicked it the way it is"? There are countless other examples similar to the penguin that fit with our ideas of evolution through habitat change.

Another Bible site? It is possible to form complex organic macromolecular compounds within the conditions that are thought to have existed billions of years ago on Earth. Just like you can grow a plant with the right conditions. It's not certain that this is how life came about but it's the only evidence we have. How often do you see human beings born with webbed fingers and toes? Exactly, no-one teaches science as absolute fact. We say: "we don't know, but this theory is pretty convincing so here is an experiment you can do to convince yourself". The Bible has the capacity to be wrong, therefore it is misleading a child to tell them God exists, Jesus died for our sins, good and evil are easily distinguished, and heaven and !@#$%^&* exist. I am all for teaching religion in secondary schools as an informative subject where you learn about the !@#$%^&*umptions made by each religion. I don't know about anyone else but i was repeatedly encouraged to convert through visits to churches, holy communion classes, school hymms, readings from priests etc in my childhood; These were all people who told me they spoke the truth. They all lied because they only gave me their !@#$%^&*umptions. This is what i'm against.