If I present to you two pills. Both have been exposed to ebola but one has been put into a chamber which is linked to a computer. 97% of the time when I hit the enter key on the computer the chamber is flooded with gamma radiation killing every living thing in there. I hit the enter key, remove the pill and give both to you. I now through some form of compulsion require you to take one of the pills. Which one are you going to take?

There are lots of problems with your question. A big one is that person 1 is a logical contradiction and cannot exist. It is not possible to 'believe in' evolution any more than it is to believe in the hypothesis that the historical Jesus drank wine. Jesus drank wine is very likely to be true given the culture he existed in and there is evidence to suggest as much. There is no faith or trust involved here, it is a descriptive statement. Institutions, people, articles of faith, statements with spiritual components, these are things you believe in. I believe in my family. I believe in western democratic institutions, at least compared with the alternatives. I believe in the scientific establishment, again at least compared with the alternatives. I believe that the modern synthesis of the theory of evolution is the best explanation for the observations of the natural world that we have. I don't believe in evolution, evolution isn't the correct kind of noun for someone to believe in. A person who 'believes in evolution' is a square circle or a married bachelor. So if my only options are 1 and 2, I will take 2 because 1 doesn't exist.

The normative component of your question is a silly strawman, to see how it is a silly strawman work out why this characature of religious folk is stupid, then apply the same reasoning to your person 1:
2. Good party-line believer who recites a firm belief in YHWH but has shaky hands.. but who cares, after all your brain is just material and your spirit is eternal, so why should it matter? Don't you BELIEVE in YHWH?

See how stupid that is? See why it is stupid. Well now you know why your question is stupid. I don't think religious people are stupid, I think they are wrong about one very specific part of their belief system. I do however think your arguments are weak and that it is best to engage people with an open mind and as much respect as practical, especiallly if you are looking to convince them. In this regard your efforts here have failed utterly.

There are experts on various scriptures, they are things like academic historians, philosophers, scholars in theology. Of course most of them say that the widely held interpretations of those holy books are questionable.

You can. For me the primitives are a pain to work with compared with matplotlib. Not that anything I've used has good 2D primitives for plotting, just gradations of less crappy.

Sorry but I use both R and python in my work as a biomechanist and while I love working with python and hate working in R, R is not only less verbose for this task, but it is more consistent, intuitive and better documented. Very few languages beat python for simple, easy to read code, but it is not up to the task of doing general purpose statistics. To see why this is the case consider a problem with that blog post. All the diagnostic plots I need to do to check the regression are missing, no qq, no cook's, not even something simple like fitted vs. residual. Now consider what happens when I notice that while the fit is decent the residuals depend on what subject I'm looking at and I need to vary the error term. Or need to switch to a mixed effects model because there is clearly a dependence on the intercept by subject.
Seriously when i say I hate R, I mean it. The code is ugly, it can be hard to read and woe betide the poor git who makes the mistake of needing a plot more complicated that something lattice can do. It is still better than python for statistics.

I'm opposed to the death penalty on pragmatic grounds and I agree it is basically classist and racist as applied, but your opening argument is just daft. Why? Well you said:

"If it is illegal to kill, it should be for the state as well"

The same argument works for:

"If it is illegal to restrict someones freedom of movement, it should be for the state as well"
"If it is illegal to take money from someone, it should be for the state as well.

Your argument suggests prison and fines shouldn't be possible. Part of the point of having a criminal justice system is to provide a careful way for the state to violate certain rights of those people who have failed to respect the rights of others for reasons including deterence, rehabilitation, punishment, recompense and prevention. The reason to be opposed to the death penalty is that it sucks for many those things.

I don't disagree with your summary, I'd say the comparative peace of the C20th and C21st are a result of nuclear weapons and perhaps the comparatively large number of democratic states which are not in the habit of going to war with one another. The US is more like the old greek democracies than the Romans in their later imperial days, the Mongols or the British. But the AC I replied to is still wrong in their use of dates and in their interpretation of the idea of the Pax Americana.

You do realise that the Pax Americana is typically held to have started in 1945 right, with a few (but not many) historians arguing for 1918. And it isn't a statement about freedom but about the comparative absence of violence.

Great, which journal is it in? And why do you think this is relevant?

British living in the US and I cant drive. Sure our rail and public transport system sucks compared with the rest of Europe. It is still way, way, way, way, way better than the crap that passes for public transport in the US, even in the big cities.

The tradition is you make an accusation after you have evidence, not before so you get sued and can go hunting through someones correspondences looking for muck to rake. If there is evidence that the emails not being released here are relevant to some ongoing legal action then you might have a point, but there is precisely no evidence Mann has done anything other than do a PCA in a way which might have introduced some ambiguity. This was corrected in numerous later publications which validated his findings. If you suggest I'm a murderer with no evidence then you may find yourself with a lawsuit and you can be sure I'm not going to let someone who throws around frivilous accusations have access to my correspondences without a court mandate.

Credit reporting agencies aren't about reporting credit, they are gangs who job it is to record which of the peons isn't being compliant.

For fixed wing aircraft, yes. For birds in the specific context of analysing the flap phasing within the V, not so much.

It's almost as though theorists saying something is so isn't enough to convince engineers and experimentalists. This clear breach of the scientific method, where whatever theorists say must be so and experimentalists have to live with it whatever they mesure, has gone unpunished. Until this study we didn't know that this is why birds do this. Even after this study we don't know if this is why birds do this (the energetics could be a co-incidence). You sir, are an insufficiently skeptical moron.

Are some conferences in physics, maths and astronomy like that, sure. They tend to be the big, high impact ones, which I usually skip back when I worked in physics. If I wanted to read someone's paper, I would just read their bloody paper. I go to conferences to hear what people are working on now, where they are and how I can wiggle my way onto their grants and papers by providing analysis and collaborating. There are lots of conferences in physics like that, even if they tend to be the smaller ones.