Ignorance in, ignorance out. Old comments make great fodder.

So one of my old posts got a comment a couple days back on the issue of climate change.

And on top of that the hipocrit has a global warming sticker on a Ford F-350. It's ok thought we all know Global warming is a load of shit. What ever happened to all the talk about the hole in the ozone in south America? Oh yeah that's right the Democrats couldn't find any way to make money from it!!!

We're polluting the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases... it's getting hotter; the computer models are not optimistic.

The ozone hole was around the poles and has just started to shrink after a major global effort to completely phase out CFCs 20 years ago.

Ah, the comments sections well worth the fodder...

Rosanna of Juliannie's blog (which as far as I can tell is completely lifeless). Posted a comment on my copy of Jesus Loves the Little Zygotes by Frank Zindler.

Well... lets see what the crazy fairy left us!

Jesus WAS a zygote. God (Jesus) was a human embryo. He placed himself in the hands of humans whom he loved so much that even though he loved them they killed him because they would have no other king but Caesar.

A zygote is a single cell made of two gametes. Unless Jesus was a massive fertilized egg, this is funny. People would have no other king but Caesar. Caesar was an emperor and there were plenty of kings. Finally, most of the Jesus story is probably fiction.

Pontius Pilate knew Jesus was innocent and places a sign above Jesus on the cross that read "King of the Jews" but the Jews told Pilate to write "Jesus SAID 'I am the king of the Jews'" and Pilate said "I have written what I have written." Pilate knew who Jesus was, but even he valued the opinion of the people more than doing what was right.

That's not a part of the original text. And where it is, that part of the gospel makes no sense at all. Everybody is acting out of character for no apparent reason. If you were a trouble-maker you get nailed to a stick for everybody to see what happens to trouble makers. You stay on that stick until you're good and rotted. You don't get a trial, you don't get some vote to let a prisoner go, you don't get any of that. - You get nailed to a stick, and if anybody else is around they get nailed to a stick too! If nailing you to a stick could get people to see that you don't fuck with the Romans, you got nailed to a stick.

So Jesus (God) died. God knows all about death and suffering. And he established his church that we can now collect as a family and do something and work together. But as you can see we still have the free choice to say no and do bad things, further making the world a worse place than we made it with the original sin. Sin has cosmic effects, primarily death. Diseases are death at small scale: cells die first, then the whole body. But sin first kills the spirit.

Why? Why couldn't all powerful God have come to a different conclusion as to what to do given the situation? Some creation of God acted in a way God didn't approve of, even though God should of known exactly how they would have acted, and thus their children (I know not how this is fair) are cursed for their wrongdoings. God find that this is unfair and in order to fix the problem God sacrifices himself to himself in order to create a loophole in his set of rules?

As far as diseases are concerned, I wonder why humans are the only creatures who cook their food.

This is remarkably a good question in a sea of stupid. If you were to name one quality of modern life that is nearly impossible to do without: cooking! As far as adaptations go cooking food is exceedingly important. Not only is it the best way to tenderize food it also pretty much opens up every other niche on the planet to human colonization. Cooking food is the best adaptations humans have. Some speculate that cooking is primarily responsible for humans position in the animal kingdom, and I tend to agree. If you watch Survivor, the first thing you do in camp is get a fire.

And the domestic animals who we feed cooked food to die also of the diseases that we have: arthritis, cancer, immune disorders.

Those diseases are common in animals well beyond their prime. Previously humans died far sooner than we do today. If you keep an animal alive in a domesticated fashion such as dogs or humans they will start to suffer these ailments having been spared from other things. If starving is off the table, there's few other things to get you.

Why do humans have long intestines with pockets in them, our stomachs produce light acid, while carnivores like dogs have intense acid that can separate flesh from bone and they have short intestines that are smooth so the meat they eat doesn't putrefy before it's eliminated.

Because humans cook their food. Some species of carnivores (carnivoria) can eat putrid meat, as in rotten meat which would easily kill a human. This is because they are evolutionarily adapted in a way to allow them to eat the food they do eat.

As a whole, we humans don't actually go along with natural law very well.

We have been domesticated for so long that it has had a major impact on our diet and our ability to consume food. Rather than forcing our jaws to eat raw meat (don't let a chimp bite your finger), or our stomachs to extract nutrients from hard things, we typically just cook all of our food making it fairly mushy and often tasty (though 'tasty' might be evolutionary preference for cooked food). The fact is, cooking and society are evolutionary products, they are not exceptions to nature.

My second trollish response! WOOHOO!

I'm on a roll. I usually have to steal trolls from other sites and the dregs of the internet: obscure forums, creationist wikis, the Washington Post, or hidden in various nooks and crannies (filled with kooks and ninnies of course). But for the second time, I've managed to get a negative post on my blog. It brings tears to my eyes (not really).

Anonymous writes (in reply to my blog about Giuliani's debate response where he he accepts the bible to be figurative):

Yeah yeah yeah, like the frigging Democrats will do anything differently.

Different than equivocating about religion to suppose large amounts of the Bible are false without bothering to admit that it's all filled with lies? I didn't say the Democrats would do anything different, in fact, in this respect the Democrats do worse. They seem much less sincere with regards to religion, the reason they are getting my vote.

The leading candidates have already said they aren't getting out of Iraq.

True, they teeter about removing the last 5% after having removed all the major troops really early on. Frankly, yes I find that to be pathetic. However, I don't find the idea of a working surge or there forever to be at all amusing.

Thats why I believe the end is near, delivered by the nukes developed by atheistic scientists (Dawkins tells us most scientists are atheists.)

That doesn't follow. Simply because somebody says most scientists are atheists doesn't mean that most scientists are atheists, nor does it mean that the particular scientists involved in the Manhattan Project were atheists. That said, Dawkins is right as one can tell by surveys concerning religious faith within the NAS and Royal Society as well as general surveys to working scientists. Noting that the majority of top scientists 90% or so, are atheists doesn't preclude the idea that the Manhattan Project was staffed with atheists. That said, it was staffed pretty much with atheists, at least in this country. Due to lack of sharing and other secrets acts the atomic bomb has been reinvented a number of times.

The God Damn atheists are going to destroy the world.

How? With atomic bombs? By making atomic bombs and giving them to religionists? Because we have no morality? -- I guess I won't know. But, I can speak for myself. I I were running the country, I wouldn't use an atomic bomb even if atomic bombs were in route to destroy the country I was running. I would certainly claim I would, simply because the threat of retaliation is required for MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) to function, but even soon to be vaporized I wouldn't give the order due to moral restrictions against vaporizing folks. Secondly, why the hell would any atheist want to destroy the world? Really, this is the only life we get and it is precious.

I will die cursing them.

It's probably more likely that you won't. However you will die and be gone and that's it. Though the idea that not accepting the proposition that "God exists" is enough to warrant your curses. Personally I despise aSanta Clausists, they are neither Jolly and all they love is coal.

Yeah! I just got my first creationist. I feel so special.

So, my blog finally hit paydirt. I received my first creationist comment.

In my post Well I'm stumped. Evolution must be a lie. I managed to hook a creationist.

I took a comment from Shalini's Scientia Natura: Evolution and Rationality (a blog worth a visit to be sure) about how, if we evolved from monkeys why are there still monkeys (an argument so stupid even Answer in Genesis rolls its eyes). AiG discourages its use for the reason I encourage it: it's fish in a barrel.

She, unlike myself, has plenty of interesting comments as fodder. Until now:

Ronald L. Cote writes:

Tatarize, As a biologist with 20 years experience in applied science, I can assure you that evolution is , not only a lie but one of the greatest deceits in our history.

*DING* *DING* *DING* - We have a winner!

Not only is he a creationist, he pretends to be a biologist... with 20 years of experience in applied science. This could mean anything as far as creationist go. Mr. Cote could be a 15 year old boy, he could be a chemistry teacher, he could be a dentist. One of the few things he certainly is not is a biologist. If he actually were a biologist, that credential alone would make him pretty much a posterboy for creationism in general.

Being in computer science, I find it hard to conceive that the order and precision and sheer awesomeness doesn’t cause you pause that this couldn’t possibly be the result of random chance over time.

Well certainly there's a notable difference between:

for (int i = 0; i < 100; ) if (rand() % 10 != 0) exit(1);

and

for (int i = 0; i < 100; ) if (rand() % 10 == 0) i++;

You see, the first is going to move on to the next line once in googol tries! Literally, 1 in 10^100 However, do the limits of the seed number (starter input for a pseudorandom number / the input can only produce random numbers of the same number of bits as the seed number and the seed number doesn't have a googol's worth of bits) it is likely that it is impossible. What are the odds of the second one moving on to the next line? 1 in 1! It will only take a bit of time. There is nothing unlikely about evolution, in fact, the core of evolution is that it makes odds and chances moot and simply takes a while.

Being in computer science, and moreover considering my experience in evolutionary algorithms, I am less surprised than most that engineering projects can be accomplished by a blind, mindless process, knowing absolutely nothing about the world, and solving unfathomable complexity. One of the interesting properties of evolution is that complexity cannot phase it. Considering no variables it can manage to find a result which could only be found by considering thousands of variables. Failure, is not an option and only the best approximation of success will survive.

To me the most convincing aspect of evolution is not that monkeys still exist, but that , after unearthing countless millions of fossils to the point that museums are giving them away and that even ebay has 3,000 for sale, there still does not exist a comprehensive and true “fossil record”, that could, would and should give us an incontrovertible and foolproof record of species and how they changed getting from point A to their present form. Of course, no such thing exists but should if the hypothesis was sound.

Um. The fossil record is actually really good for most organisms. I'm not even sure what the is suppose to mean. You want all the fossils leading from man to our chimp ancestor? There's a pretty good set. We can trace a number of species pretty much step by step until they meet their common ancestor. For biological evolution the fossil record is fantastic evidence for evolution. The argument here seems to be that even though there are tons upon tons of fossils there aren't enough to satisfy his definition of "comprehensive"?

Additionally, the process of evolution is ,from all accounts ongoing. If so, why are we not able to observe plants and animals in varying stages of transitioning from something to something else.

Usually the generations are pretty small, but you can still see the effects. Humans have pretty good records for our changes in gene frequency, but the better results are the ones with the shorter population times. For example, over the 20 years this fellow claims to be a biologist (*eye roll*) we have seen TB transform from a serious infection to a multi-resistant and even extreme-drug resistant strains. You cannot fight TB with typical antibiotics. It has long since evolved resistances to those. In fact, there are some strains of TB which if you have them the government is right to lock you up and physically stop you from going about your day. As was the case of the lawyer who was diagnosed with TB and still flew to Italy and back. Luckily he turned out to have MDRTB rather than XRTB, and nobody caught it from him.

Also, I daresay the best and most effective way to finally wipe out malaria is to genetically alter a gene in mosquitoes making them immune. The immune mosquitoes by all accounts would be evolutionarily better off than others. The gene frequency of the malaria immunity would skyrocket and without altering the mosquitoes as a whole. We save millions of lives with evolution.

Surely, where there are millions of animals being physically observed , as in Africa, something must be in the process of change that would be evident. Again no such thing occurs.

You know in those nature videos when you see the lion kill the slow wilderbeast? Well, assuming there's any genetic aspect to make that one guy slower than the rest, guess what you just saw?

Asking us to observe evolution in megafauna is like asking us to observe atoms in a glass of water. You can do it, but you aren't going to see what you'd expect (the water would require some large molecules and brownian motion).

Instead, evolutionists feed the masses with cockamamy, inconsequential trivia usually clouded in carefully couched terms as “possible” explanations for proof of evolution.

Um. Mountains of evidence for evolution, aren't cockamamy hunches. Scientists are careful with their words, unlike creationists who proudly proclaim "God did it!" without reservation or a basic understanding about what they are discussing.

The whole theory is collapsing because it is a myth. If it were true, the weight of the evidence would be so overwhelming that there would be no cause for controversy!

There isn't any controversy. There's a couple idiots who think it contradicts their God. It does contradict their God. But, that doesn't actually make it false. Considering the great evidence for evolution and the complete and utter lack of evidence for their God... so much worse for their God. A mindless, powerful, amazing process made all life on this planet. Your God doesn't even have dominion over fungus. Not really sure what that God thing was suppose to do anyhow. We have everything covered, and where we don't we're at least trying.

As you state, a large measure of faith is essential to be a believer.

I was being sarcastic. The idea that a person has 'faith' in science just as one has faith in religion is absurd. The only things science requires is that ideas can be proven false, and new ideas (whether false or not) can be crafted. If we use our old ideas as the building blocks for new ideas, science will proceed along its path inevitably and unavoidably explaining as much as we can know about the universe. Whether some things are unknowable by science is unknowable, because we cannot know if we have the perfect solution; we only know that this solution is better than our previous solution. However, the comparison between a leap of belief taken to avoid a greater leap of non-belief, to the monumental leap of accepting the infinitely ridiculous, with no evidence, on a parent's order, is patently dishonest, grossly ignorant, or, perhaps, forgivably naïve.