Yes, primitive technology. Not like the advanced technology we have now with spell checkers and search engines and so forth anticipating what you want all the time. Why, it works so well it frequently leaves me wanting to scream and tear my hair out in delight.

Considering that the fiddle wasn't developed for the greater part of a thousand years after he died, it probably wasn't Nero. He probably wasn't playing his lyre either, since the historical records that aren't crazy conspiracy theories place him out of time when it happened. It is fairly historically certain that he introduced building codes to help prevent that sort of thing from happening again after the fire, however.

You do have to wonder about those who are highly devout, but not particularly concerned about the specifics of what they're devoted to.

Reminds me of a bit from _Good Omens_ featuring the angel Aziraphale, psychic (and part time dominatrix) Madame Tracy and her next door neighbor Shadwell who leads the Witchfinder Army (which consists of himself, one new recruit, and a large number of fake log entries) :

"Average", yes. Are you suggesting that it was also uniform?

But if life caught and spread in that very early universe, there could have been life waiting in the wings to fill in areas that were sterilized later. Between areas too hot for life and too cold for life, you get areas where life can thrive, or, at least, cling on to existence by its fingernails, or even die but leave behind materials that are much more likely to become life again than random material. So, the idea here is that life develops and spreads in the early universe and then gets scattered across it as it ages.

As for the problem of interstellar distances, and working under the assumption that life can't be preserved frozen for millions of years, you have to realize that interstellar distances are a temporary problem. You imagine life travelling on rocks taking millions of years to cross the vast gulfs of space between stars. The thing is, those vast gulfs aren't always so vast. Consider Barnard's star. At present, it's moving towards our sun at .04% of the speed of light. That's pretty fast. In just 8000 years it will have moved about 2.2 light years closer to Earth and will be closer to Earth than Proxima Centauri is now. In 33,000 years, Ross 248 should be 1 light year closer to Earth than Proxima Centauri is now. It should be obvious from this that, over the course of billions of years, many stars make really close approaches to other stars. Galaxies are giant stellar blenders. When stars make really close approaches, the odds of life surviving a transfer becomes significantly greater.

Well, yes, but the whole point of this article is that, once upon a time, space was tiny compared to what it's like now, but still had just as much actual matter in it, with a staggeringly larger part of that existing in conditions that could foster the origin of life.

What have you got against Hortas? They're perfectly nice as long as you aren't butchering their children to make paperweights.

Well, there is the problem of forced heirship. In the US though, I think that only takes the form of some portion of the estate statutorily going to children, and then only in some states. In the case mentioned, a will would have been a really good idea, but many people don't have them. When they're a male/female couple and either married or otherwise recognized by the law, the will isn't needed. So, this is still an example of a lack of equal protection under the law.

The people I've known who self-identified as satanists have been very clear that they're not the same thing as "satan worshipers" and that they're really following more of a philoshophy of rebellion and individualism than actually worshiping supernatural entities. Most of them had read the LaVey Satanic bible (parts of it anyway) and liked some of the philosophy, but never bothered with the rituals (which are essentially self-actualization exercises anyway).

That's not to say that all satanists are the same any more than all christians are the same. There are true believers as well and, as you point out, they are, in terms of religious beliefs, sometimes exactly in line with christians (or jews or muslims, etc.) they just disagree on who to worship from the "pantheon" of the ostensibly monotheistic religions.

Interesting. If George W Bush isn't actually a Christian, then his statement makes sense. If he is, however, and believes that Jesus/God is omniscient, then things get more complicated. Philosopher literally means something like "lover of wisdom/knowledge", but the standard connotation is someone who seeks knowledge. An omniscient being, by definition, does not seek knowledge. There would be no reason to.
On the other hand, many of the ideas espoused by Jesus in the bible do constitute a philosophy. So, as the central figure of the philosophy, Jesus could sort of be seen as an honorary philosopher.

So, only fertile couples can get married? What about couples who thought they were fertile and found out later that they weren't? Does that annul their marriage, or do they have to get divorced? Or is it just too late for them and they need to be stoned to death as adulterers?

First, it seems to me that you did make such a claim when you replied to an AC near the start of this thread:

Then you went on to try to be snarky and insulting and holier-than-thou by saying that the AC was an animal, but that you personally were something better. Anyway, unless there's invisible extra text in there that I need magic diamond glasses to read, you're saying that you reject the AC's categorization of humans as animals and claim that humans are nefesh chaya instead. This makes no sense since humans and other animlas are both either nefesh chaya or posess nefesh chaya depending on exactly how you translate and interpret nefesh chaya: "living soul" or "animal" (from the Latin: Anima, meaning "breath" or "soul") or perhaps "organism". A "living soul" could be a descriptor saying what something is, but could also be an attribute that something posesses depending on point of view and exact translation. Either way, it's not something that differentiates humans and other animals.

In the context we're using, humans are clearly a subcategory of "living souls". The set of "living souls" is the set of all animals. You believe that humans possess special properties that make them stand out from the set. So what. Many members of the set have special qualities that make them stand out from the set, they're still in the set. I mean, for crying out loud, as I pointed out earlier, the word "animal" comes from a latin word which literally means virtually the same thing as "living soul"/nefesh chaya.

Ok. So, to be clear, you're definitely either 100% pro-choice when it comes to abortion (including late term abortion) or you're a vegan, right? Because if you're in agreement with that article, you have to be one of those things since it's very clear that, until the moment of birth, a human is no different than any other animal. So, you should only object to abortions at any point before birth if you also completely object to killing animals for any reason, in which case you should be a Vegan to remain philosophically consistant.

Aside from that, what about all the animals that can reason, even if not better than the average human? There are animals that can reason better than a minority of humans (not to mention infant humans whose reasoning capacity is dwarfed by that of nearly all other mammals). Then there's speech, which is also posessed by a number of animals, either through sign languauge or outright ability to form audible words. Then there are those who posess some form of speech and also some reasoning capacity. So, is that the way it is? Humans, parrots and gorillas on a pedestal, raised up above the scum that are the rest of the kingdom animalia? Sure, the chimpanzees can't get into the club because they bite (and human children never, ever, ever do that), but what are you gonna do, you know?

P.S. I'm interested by your signature, which is an excerpt from the gospel of Mary Magdelene. It seems an odd contrast here with your rigid and orthodox view of humanities place among (or not among) the other animals.

Whoziwazzit now? Weight divided by height squared? What a sad, pathetic world we live in where this is considered in any way meaningful. It's meant as a statistical tool for populations, not individuals. Sure, a very high BMI will always be obese, and a very low BMI will be emaciated, but it's utterly meaningless through most of its range. I mean, there isn't even a different formula for men and women. Honestly, a simple visual inspection gives more meaningful information. It disgusts me that doctors use it.

Confused about that one. How is sucrose, which is a disacchiride composed of a glucose molecule and a fructose molecule, simpler than glucose?

The term "Mach's principle" was coined by Einstein, who was crediting Mach for the basic idea, even though Einstein came up with the specifics.