On the other hand, several billion people around the world were already celebrating that fact. So a tweet or two about something else that happened on that day that was significant to the world and interesting to anyone who isn't so wrapped up in their own beliefs that they can't see straight certainly could be allowed to pass by without a ruckus, right?

He didn't alienate anyone who wasn't already. Anyone who can't handle being told that something else happened on their precious holiday wasn't going to listen to him on other topics. And for those who are willing to deal with the reality that they don't have the sole claim to any particular day on the calendar, they might have learned something new.

We have to get away from the idea that religion can't be criticized, examined, prodded and gently picked on. If someone's belief can't stand up to a bit of gentle teasing that's their problem.

That might be true of conservative individuals. I think most Americans if you just sit them down for a nice chat are reasonable people. We tend to understand that there is room for improvement and solutions might not be simple or comfortable for everyone.

Politics is a whole 'nother thing though. Politics in America is about nothing more than hot-button issues and campaign posters now. No one wants an actual solution to any problem in Congress. Why? Because if something gets solved, it can't be used as a wedge issue for the next election. Or worse, the "other side' might get the credit for solving something. No one in our government wants solutions and they aren't working towards any.

Until the 80% of Americans who are reasonable people wanting real solutions get up and get involved, things will continue to deteriorate. With voter turnout of 40% or less, we're letting the extremists make the decisions and we're getting exactly the government we deserve.

My guess is they mean more sending your kid to sit in their room and supposedly think deep thoughts on whatever they did that led to being stuck in their room and how to act better next time.

Generally, I don't think the child is devoting any time to any such thing and it's more to inconvenience the child. Much like spanking, it's about hoping the child does what you want in order to avoid you doing something to them that they don't like. I'd call time-outs a step above physical violence (spanking) but I think every parent should be willing to listen to and evaluate research that suggests there are even better ways of teaching children how to behave.

I definitely agree that teaching kids not to act out in anger without giving themselves time to calm down and think rationally is a good lesson. But I'm not sure that's the exact thing the paper refers to as a "time out."

The problem with your unregulated utopia is that psychopaths exist who would quickly corrupt it and turn it to their own benefit. Human nature will ruin any attempt at a pure "free" market. We've already seen the effects of businesses being able to do whatever they want in the pursuit of profit. The Cuyahoga river caught on fire 13 times.

The happiest countries in the world today have governments that put social safety nets in place so that the psychopaths who get rich off the labors of others can't grind them into the dirt too. Restrictions exist to level the playing field between those who will do anything for wealth and power and those who just aren't cut-throat by nature. Personally, I'm not interested in seeing the end result of your "free" market.

A threshold of x number of deaths per hour indeed. As if profit seeking should ever be more important than life.

If you educate yourself on the issue, read the papers and have questions about the methods or conclusions reached then you are a skeptic.

If you fail to understand the science and just "can't imagine it's true" or "can't believe humans can have so much impact" or just plain don't want to have to think about changing your lifestyle and therefore must deny anything that implies you really should... then you're a denier.

The science can always be questioned - by understanding the methods, data and calculations and making a scientific evaluation about their merits. Could different experiments have been run? Was the data gathered accurately and completely? Was the data evaluated properly and does it support the conclusions drawn?

The problem in America these days is that people think that having no understanding at all about the science still qualifies them to be skeptics rather than deniers.

It isn't only about what the pharmaceutical companies stand to gain by selling it. There is major loss of productivity from the folks who suffer from pain like this. Lost work hours, opiates that barely work on the pain but are addictive and damaging, wrecked families due to pain and depression... there's a multi-billion dollar impact alright, and a high personal cost as well.

I dispute trying to claim that it makes sense in a logical argument to claim that the universe couldn't have come form nothing but a supreme being could have. You win no logic argument by saying things can't exist without a cause, therefor god exists without a cause. Or that the universe is too special, complex or perfect or whatever but somehow a god isn't too much of any of that to have come from nothing.

I really hate when religious folks try to use science and logic to prove their magical thinking as though scientists and atheists somehow just forgot how those things worked and are going to be completely stumped by it. "You can't have something without a cause, therefor god" is not a logical argument. If you believe in a supreme being or beings of some sort, I don't care. Trying to argue that one is necessary to explain the universe when logically that just leaves you having to explain how an even more complex supreme being came from nothing is not persuasive to anyone who isn't already persuaded.

Republicans plainly and publicly announced their intention to make Obama's a failed presidency. They voted and still vote against just about anything that might make him look good. Including approving appointed positions. At this point, American politics depends on nothing getting fixed because both sides then use those issues as talking points. If something got fixed, not only might the credit go to the "wrong" side, but then it couldn't be turned into a wedge issue to try to distinguish otherwise mostly identical (sold-out greedy bastard) candidates.

Personally, I think it's fairly obvious that it's the result of the insane marriage between the financial and social conservatives. The super-rich really don't have to care about draconian rules that stem from the social conservatives - they can send their daughters anywhere for an abortion. But the rural poor care a great deal about those issues and will vote against their financial interests if it means electing someone who will at least pay lip service to their religious ideology.

Well, the bible was written by people who were able to observe their world. It would be ridiculous to think that they would get nothing right. Harry Potter books have train stations and owls and school kids in them which are all provably real things. Just because some reality happens to be mixed into your fantasy it doesn't make every word true, though.

Even if you could somehow prove that the beginning wasn't a massive but happy accident, you would still have zero proof that the "uncaused cause" had anything to do with a personal god. And anyway, why can your "uncaused cause" not need a cause but everything else does? You can't have a logical argument when you're willing to break your own rules to justify your beliefs.

No one said DNA just happened; they say that small chemical changes from simpler molecules happened over millions or billions of years that led to DNA. Your alternative is that some sort of highly intelligent, powerful being just happened. That does not solve your logic problem.

We're not "Darwin supporters," we're people who can look at scientific evidence and form conclusions that don't require magical thinking. Darwin isn't right because he was Darwin, he was merely the most recognizable person involved in elucidating those ideas. Religion argues from authority, not science.

It affects people who aren't there by promoting faith above knowledge. For any random individual, I really don't care if they choose to be ignorant, but apparently ignorance loves company as much as misery. These folks want to impose their beliefs on others via laws and school boards. If they want to curl up in bed at night thinking happy thoughts about their religion I don't care, but I care very much what laws they want to pass and what subjects they want to suppress in our schools. Every time they get an official outlet for their nonsense they get more bold. So it is in the best interest of those who advocate education, freedom and separation of church and state to speak out against them when possible.

Many of them couldn't evolve fast enough and simply died. Others became birds.

Let me start by saying thank you for an intellectually interesting conversation that doesn't involve name calling, finger pointing or ranting. I have a tendency toward snark, don't take it too personally :)

Sure. Because we continue to learn new things about relationships between living and dead creatures. But it IS possible that you could find something that simply could not be explained away. We haven't yet. But it could happen. There could be data out there waiting to be found that cannot be accommodated by the theory. You could find that rabbits are genetically almost identical to some new species of lizard and that would blow the theory out of the water.

It sounds like your complaint here is that the theory so well describes the world that there is room in it to accommodate previously unknown data without breaking the model. Similar to the anthropic principle which you are not persuaded by... a scientific theory must account for all data and be contradicted by none. The fact that it has been honed over the years with new data without breaking is an indication of how good it is as a scientific theory, not somehow invalidating it by your notion of un-falsifiability.

No, not any. Like I said, you could find that horses are more closely related to whales than donkeys and that would be a huge problem. Or that the genes have no similarities at all and that would be a huge problem. You are apparently put off by the notion that small rearrangements in our knowledge about the so called tree of life can be accommodated by the theory without it breaking. That is its strength not its weakness. But, I maintain very strongly, that there are findings that could break it. It IS falsifiable, but it is also flexible and not dependent on us being absolutely correct in what is related to what and how closely. We can learn new things about how closely chipmunks are related to squirrels without breaking the idea that they ARE related and that if you go back far enough you can find the great-great-x grandparent of them both. However, if you went back and somehow figured out they were actually descended from crocodiles rather than primitive rodents you would have falsified the theory.

Your model is accurate sure, but not thorough. The theory of evolution goes much further than that. It says not only that they are currently living in places they can live but that they had ancestors. And that those ancestors may have had other offshoots which would share genetic/physiologic similarities with other "cousins" as it were. Before the study of genetics existed, you could use the theory of evolution by natural selection to predict that mammals should have things in common with each other, and that the more similar the mammal the more similar the genes should be. This seems obvious now, with our growing understanding of genetics but it wouldn't have been so in the early days of the theory. It was a prediction that would NOT have had to be true if species didn't evolve from more primitive species via mutations in their genetic code. This was a falsifiable prediction stemming from the theory that was borne out once we learned to to read the genetic code.

You can also predict from the theory that creatures that look similar aren't always as closely related as they seem. Because we've said that natural selection is important you would actually predict that different "branches" of the tree could generate similar physiological attributes if they live in similar environments. Insects, birds, bats etc developed wings because flight was an advantage in their respective niches. It isn't in any way a cop-out. Again, the flexibility is part of the beauty and truth of it, not an invalidation of it.

I already mentioned finding the fossil of a modern horse from 2 billion years ago.

If you read my statement carefully, I said that it would be indistinguishable from a directed process that did the same thing. If we somehow become so skilled at gene manipulation that we leave no trace of our involvement, well then, we've left no trace. What I meant is that you could propose that a causal figure waved a wand and slowly slowly slowly over many generations caused the legs of kangaroos to get longer and more adapted to jumping. I can say that natural selection accomplished the exact same thing in the exact same time frame due to some advantage that being able to jump gave the kangaroo's ancestors. You can ALWAYS say that whatever is found was purposely put there to be found in exactly that way by a sufficiently powerful causal figure. Talk about un-falsifiable.

You also can't tell the difference between living and being in a perfectly accurate model of life in a computer simulation.