That's exactly what I was thinking. Who says that they actually even talked with someone from McAfee, or if they did, that this is what McAfee said? If China's running a massive cyberwar and a security company calls you out for it, what else would they do but claim to have spoken with the security company and gotten a denial? This reeks of Chinese propaganda.

Yeah... you're kind of equating the two. One group of scientists is being paid to do science; the other is being paid to be whores.

Protip: Smokers are in the minority. Any business that pushed for the needs of its smoking customers over its non-smoking customers would take a huge financial hit. Apart from cigar bars and the like, you probably *won't* see businesses clamoring to allow smoking in their bars.

I'd be more concerned if they bothered thinking about whether or not it's possible for non-ionizing radiation of these wavelengths to cause cancer at all. (Hint: it's not. This is a political move.)

There are several major problems with what you just said.

First is the idea that nonbelievers will naturally be more inclined to immorality, or that society can't exist without a "scaffold of morality that is constructed of faith and held together by religion." This is empirically disproved by the examples of nations like Denmark and Sweden where the majority of the nation is secular and they enjoy more stability than most religious nations, including America.

Second is the idea that it's valid to build a moral code around fiction. If there is no God, any theistic moral code is simply an arbitrary construct built around a convenient concept. There's no guarantee that this kind of moral code will provide good moral standards - just a moral standard. Why not just excise the good moral concepts from the supernatural nonsense and the hordes of bad moral concepts (e.g., stoning homosexuals, enslaving foreigners, killing purported witches, etc.)? Not to mention that such a system, based on fiction, would be without grounds to say that dishonesty is immoral, seeing how it would require massive amounts of dishonesty just to assert an absolute source for the moral code.

Third, there is no real-world benefit that a religious moral system can provide that a secular one can't. None. However, there are many damaging things that organized religions have promoted that couldn't be justified by a secular system. The indoctrination of children with incredible amounts of false information, for example, or religiously-motivated bigotry, or holy wars, or any number of other things that spring quickly to mind. Fourth, you seem to be implying that the solution to intellectual laziness is dishonesty. If people aren't willing to think things through, you're saying it's better to lie to them about the reason something is right or wrong than to give them a reason to think about it. A moral system based on organized religion, when there is no god, is simply an arbitrary set of rules. Many of these rules would necessarily involve performing the will of a nonexistent being, and lying to the people who are too intellectually lazy to think things through. There are no benefits to such a system that couldn't be gained without the lies.

"both sides are claiming superior "knowledge" while actually relying solely upon faith"? Really? Do you understand the concept of a logical contradiction?

No, and neither has any god ever answered a prayer.

Exactly. There can never be any supporting evidence that bigfoot does not exist, so abigfootists who claim with certainty that there is no bigfoot are first class fools. They go around talking about the null hypothesis and scientific process as if that somehow validates their irrational belief that there is no bigfoot, when in fact the truth of the matter is they just don't know. TROLL HARDER NEXT TIME

This is utter idiocy. It's like saying that if the world is really 4.6 billion years old, then the people who say the world is 4.7 billion years old are just as wrong as the people who say it's 6,000 years old. You're making absolutely no distinction in the kind of reasoning here.

You just did even more magical hand-waving. Thanks for proving my point.

You're invoking "allowing enough time and research" as a magical solution to the fact that this is something that ONLY WORKS ON THE SUBATOMIC SCALE, and thus scaling it magically upward to the classical scale.

LOL! I love that you think experiments involving subatomic particles TODAY have anything AT ALL to do with something 61 YEARS AGO.

"All I can offer for empirical proof is the testimony of several of Christ's contemporaries, most of whom went to their deaths defending their statements."
We have no such things. None of the identities of the Gospel writers have been agreed upon by Biblical scholars, and there are no extra-Biblical contemporary accounts of his life.

Nitpicking time!
"Historically, we can demonstrate the existence of Jesus, due to the historical events of Pontius Pillate and Ceaser and other shit happening around that time lining up, and something about some annoying beggar-preacher that they executed. "

Not even that much. There are no events in the life of Jesus that can nail down any dates. Even the census that was supposed to be going on while he was in utero was supposedly taken by a guy (Cyrenius) who wasn't in the right position of power to do it for at least another decade after Jesus was supposed to have been born.
Carry on...

"it's as easy to explain hatred in the oil-poor parts of the mideast as collateral damage of feuding jealous gods"

"Easy" does not mean "right." Right means right. And if we want to find out what's right, we need empiricism.