I, too, will have a problem if the breast were 40+ years old.

No way; it should read: Hollywood's Growing Obsession with Phallic Dick

I personally think that all this talk about metaphysical stuff like divinity and free will is confusing me. Can we please stick to concepts that do not reside purely in the human minds of those who choose to, I mean, happen to believe in them?

Ah! I know this place! Dante invented it. He called it Libido. I mean, Limbo. The more fiery parts of Hell are reserved for his political enemies.

Let me assume that you mean the community of scientists, professionals and journals, along with their corpus of work, when you speak of "science". True, there exists people who dogmatically worships their publications. True, people make mistakes with their hypotheses and on occasion, the rest doggedly follow. And true, there can be abuses of science by deviants like the upper class and their eugenics.

But when you make such an argument representing science as a divorced dogmatic institution akin to the Catholic Church, it is immediately obvious that you are spoon-fed the religious spin of your brethren. For the doctor you go to when you are unwell is a person who worships "science". The engineer who built your buildings unquestioningly believes that the the more arcane portions of the physics he employs is correct. The doctor and the engineer, whom without modern society would be lapsed back into Medieval times. While the frontier of science is uncertain and suspect to the ethos of the Circle of Eminent Scientists Colloquially Called Science Itself, as evidences are acknowledged and cumulated, once enough eyes are poured over it, the bugs of the Scientific Canon are ironed out.

Now, you can't do that with your Biblical Canon, can you? Oh, no, wait; you can! For in Early Christianity the Gnostics, once regarded as the most prestigious of Christian communities, were deemed heretics; for in their rare insight they thought the God of the Old Testament to be too cruel to be the God whom Jesus spoke of as benevolent and forgiving. Goodbye Gnostics, your wisdom, and your literature! A millenium later, when the Protestant Church was excommunicated, they threw away the canon that they deemed unreliable. Goodbye beloved Apocrypha! Every church has their own impeccable canon. The ridiculousness of it! But what no church can do is to reach a consensus as to what the definitive canon is. Without the evidence of countless experiments and studies given to canonical scientific models by "science", even mainstream churches have irreconcilable differences. Ultimately, the religion that you devotedly worship is but a text, a tradition, and a specific, geographically-bound set of dogmatic interpretations of that canon in its happy apologiae. Science, on the other hand, is universally practiced, and the mainstream never fail to debate, listen, comment and adapt, and provide ideas for engineers to improve our quality of life.

But I digress. By far the most important line of separation between science and religion is that the science, as an institution of many specializations provides us with choices and freedom while religion, in its many diverse institutions refining the sole spiritual, or shall we say, behavioral aspect of life, strives to limit the freedom of its adherents. This is perhaps the point that leads many moral men to be atheists. Take abortion for example. Science had allowed women to have safe abortions, giving them an option and the freedom to not bear a child whom they may not love or be able to provide for due to the grim realities of life. A woman can still choose not to abort. The Catholic Church, however, begs to differ. Its hierarchy of celibate and sexually frustrated priests does not sympathize with their plight, even as it attempts to cover up its molestation scandals. The devout is left to live in grievous sin, shall one decide to abort; or in shame or poverty or suffering, shall one choose the other.

Can you still call science a religious institution?

And that's the reason why Christianity never really caught on among the native Americans. For they already had a paradise waiting for them full of women and sex.

No, you've just been doing it wrong. A lot of the humanities require one to imitate, study and analyse the work of masters. It's like programming; without looking at some good code and studying the logic and design patterns, anything non-trivial that comes out of your keyboard is going to be a lump of mud. Don't let the ethos that the humanities are 'soft', magical, arbitrary things; they are art in the sense of Latin ars in their very technical essence; they are founded on great skill, practice, and a tradition of heroes who strive to attain aesthetic perfection.

and let's not forget aerodynamics. A light car with a good aerodynamic shape can actually grip the road better than a heavy one at high speeds. Think F1.

Not only has he to live with such a dull name, his brother is a moron and he is accused of theft. Well, that is unless he is an accomplice.

We have two Jumbo Onion pizzas, Onion juice, and Onion rings. Merry Christmas!

I'd say that with every company that decides to no longer do business with China, there are 2 who have decided not to start business with China, 3 who decide to do business with China, and 4 who are contemplating the possibility, and 5 who are happily doing business with China. So I think that's a fantasy of yours.

Taiwanese on Wikipedia uses a romanised script. That is how much their language is different from Mandarin. Not to say that Taiwanese is like a language that has no distinctions of its own. In fact, Taiwanese resembles Middle Chinese, the prestigious language of antiquity, in a manner that Mandarin can only dream about. As Mandarin evolved, it took characters to be used as grammatical ones out of context. For example, shi4, originally meant straight, but was taken to mean yes. The reason why this can't work with Taiwanese is because no two people can agree on the Han character to be used. But of couse, with Mandarin the prestigious language, Taiwanese is sure to become just another dead "dialect".

I shall attempt to do the courtesy, to point out at least the more obvious American illnesses apparent to a person who has never been to America. Here goes the usual disclaimer that as with all opinions, there are as many misconceptions and fallacies of perceptions and biases as there are truths.

• America still ranks as a country with one of the highest rates of stds, teenage pregnancies and abortions among secular
• Much of its population find fundamentalism easier to accept than the theory of evolution, refined and augmented by evidence.
• The two party system leads to polarisation and (you are either with me or you are with them) tactics rather than a discussion. Notice how so many American discussion ends up in enmity, scare tactics?
• Perhaps as a reflection of how easily you guys succumb to FUD, remember how Bush's guys and their lies convinced you somehow that Iraq was a threat to America.
• Corollary: everything gets politicized. Anti and pro health reform. Anti and pro life are just two. With two camps of opinions, myths and exaggerations abound. The ones who abide by a more restrictive code will not allow others their freedom. Those whose gods do not like abortion think that that their god's opinion is more important than the freedom of a non-believer to undergo an induced miscarriage or one to marry same-sex. Obviously, they would rather play the bully than the Christ-like who would attempt to convert instead. Pressured, the government would succumb to this significant mass to further its own agenda than protect the freedom of these people.
• Your fucking love-hate obsession with sex. You cry out at the slightest "indecencies" and yet you produce and consume a shitload of porn which isn't even enjoyable.
• Your military is a secular institution with God's soldiers.
• The fact that The Company Rules means that social change is very difficult. For example, even as the "incompetent" government tries to promote racial quality, marketing and ads, the cornerstone of your ideology, undermines that. With blacks in general not as rich as the whites, why sell them luxury goods? Why target them? The vicious cycle of oppression and underachievement is not yet gone.
• In my opinion, a government with more power to redistribute wealth will be good. While a person's freedoms are important, brotherhood and a willingness to share is also crucial for a just and creative society. But these two things are nearly absent in your country. Too many too caught up pursuing their own success and tending to their lives to trust even as they grow increasingly disconnected.

What were the editors thinking?

Japanese is very unique in that it leaves out the subject, and sometimes object of a clause when the meaning is understood in context. This is, however, very frustrating for machine translators. In addition, Japanese has a topic for its sentences, which function is very ambiguous in an English language.