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I agree 100%. But that in no way implies god exists. Merely that religion may have some positive attributes. But that doesnt imply that it doesn't also has negative attributes. For example, I have no doubt that religion makes death more palatable. This can help people in their greif. However making death more palatable increases the likelihood of people willing to die eg war .

"How about love? Do you have faith that it exists? Because it is certainly not logical. Do we know it exsists? Can we prove it exists? Do you have faith that it exsists? " Why is love not logical?IF social animals develop feelings like empathy and love , they will be able to care for their offspring and hence improve their gene survivival and they may increase co operation benefiting their survivial As for proof, really that is only found in mathematics. Certainly there is strong evidence that love exists, we can observe behaviour and brain chemistry to verify this . Even on an individual level we look for evidence of love, not just act on blind faith. I believe my wife loves me becasue of her bahaviour towards me. If her bahaviour towards seemed to change, lets say she didn't want to spend time with me, was having an affair etc etc then I might begin to doubt that she loved me. Love is not without evidence. Unlike god.

"For me it is much more logical to pin the singularity that started this whole experience on an existing God than the god of chance occurrence" why pin it in on any kind of god? You appearntly conclude god exists to start But more logical thinking doesnt start with its conclusion. How do you know you "profound pyschologicla coping skills" came from god?

"It is the Wisdom and Reality of God. Who is the creative and sustaining force of the universe. It is antithetical to the wisdom and reality we create when God is removed from our lives. " Conisder what happens when I change one word in your sttament: It is the Wisdom and Reality of Thor . Who is the creative and sustaining force of the universe. It is antithetical to the wisdom and reality we create when Thor is removed from our lives. I think we would agree that this is not a very serious statement. As there is no more evidence for god as there is for Thor then your statment hsould not be seen any differently.

There is no evidence of a sould existing in the traditional sense hence the question is meaningles.. However if we redefine the soul as the mind then the question become smore meanigful. But there is still a problem, it assumes there is a single moment of creation of the mind. Isn't it more likely that its more of a continum? After all a new born human child has less congitive abilities than an adult chimpanzee. Similarly as old age sets congitive ability is often lost in humans too.

"If the awareness of spiritual truth was ever removed from our consciousness, " what is spiritual truth?

"Lack of faith is a disregard of self control and being responsible for ones own actions. So, why should non-beleievers be treated with any respect? " If i refuse to believe a conclusion based upon insiffcient evidence why does imply anyhting about my self control? Notice also my attack is on the concept of faith, not people of faith. Yet your attack is on the non belivers themselves.

Faith is just intellectual laziness. Believing somehting without evidence, why should it be treated with any respect?

So you are saying the basis of astronomy is sun cycles? No it isnt that either . Also what would this have to do with the utterly stupid film Zeitgeist? THye were on about astrology. I dont know if you are an atheist or non theist etc. But if you are I would emplore you not to discredit our arguments with the nonsese that is dressed as a serious argument in Zeitgeist. This film is a paranoid fantasy. Why not try serious scholarly arguments against Christianity instead. You will find many google" internet infidels". good luck.

"The basis of asrology is about the sun's cycles and how it effects us everyday, season to season year to year. " Really, my understanding is that astrology is thousnds of years old and the discovery of solar cycles was made in the 19th century. Ive never heard of an astologer consulting Nasa's space weather, nor have I heard of any evidence of someone being able to prepdict human behaviour on the basis of sun cycles. Perhaps you can show us the evidence. Zeitgeist is for the tin foil hat brigade only.

I saw the Zeitgeist movie a while ago, it is a huge collection of ignorance and stupidity. I was reccomnded it , by a few friends and below is a copy of the emial I wrote in reponse : “Zeitgeist”. This is a movie I’m already familiar with as it really is just a copy and paste from well known conspiracy theories. In particular they are repackaging anti Semitic tract known as “The Protocols of the Elder of Zion” you can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion But the bottom line is some anti Semitic Russians created a hoax document whereby they laid out an international conspiracy of Jewish bankers in control of the world. Despite it being easily shown as a forgery, it was widely used by anti Semites across Europe in the early to mid part of the 20th century including the Nazis. After the war the Protocols were still believed in, but they have also mutated and reproduced into new conspiracy theories. Below is a conspiracy theory generator : http://www.publiceye.org/conspire/generator.html you can replace the word Jews with space aliens lizard people, Opus Dei, the Free Masons etc The story is always the same with a few variations. Apart from their anti Semitic origins, the real problem with conspiracy theories is that they collapse under their own weight. Just think, only a few people had to know about Watergate but yet it got discovered; only two people had to know about Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and yet it got out. History tells us that governments suck at keeping secrets. As G Gordon Liddy (the man who broke into the Watergate offices) famously said “three people can keep a secret as long as two of them are dead”. Yet conspiracy theorists ask us to believe that hundreds possibly thousands of people are in on unbelievable secrets yet no real evidence has come out. This stretches plausibility beyond breaking point. More importantly still is the way conspiracy theorists present their case. Here I would recommend Bob Park (Prof of Physics at Uni of Maryland) excellent essay on how to spot bogus science from the real thing: http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i21/21b02001.htm He presents 7 red flags one should look out for. Right at the top of the list is the discoverer pitches the claim straight to the media. Real researchers present their findings for peer review. Other experts in the field go over their work with a fine tooth comb looking for flaws and errors. Anyone who has ever been involved in academia knows how high the level of scrutiny is when you submit research for publication. Notice that conspiracy theorists don’t submit their research in peer reviewed journals, the reason is they wouldn’t survive the scrutiny, they be laughed out of the editors office quite frankly. So they bypass the scrutiny and present their “evidence” to the general public who won’t know how to challenge their ridiculous claims. Fortunately, there are people that do subject these conspiracy theories to some proper scrutiny and of course they do not stand up. Here is some web site you might want to look at showing how easily most conspiracy theories are debunked: The Moon Hoax Conspiracy: http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html Or http://www.clavius.org/ The JFK Conspiracy http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/home.htm Or try this book: http://www.reclaiminghistory.com/ 9/11 http://www.debunking911.com/ Or http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html or even better still watch the fantastic documentary screw loose change here: http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-3214024953129565561 or read through it here: http://www.loosechangeguide.com/LooseChangeGuide.html Onto zeitgeist the movie. Firstly there is a very comprehensive analysis of this movie on this web site: http://www.conspiracyscience.com/ But its quite long so I thought Id give you just a few top 5 reasons to doubt this movie in some of the sections. Part 1 Origins of Religion This section I have the most sympathy with. They bash religion and good for them. But there is a right way to make the case against religion (and the Abrahamic religions in particular) and there is a wrong way. They pick a very wrong way. If you want to read a serious critique of these religions I would recommend: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/donald_morgan/ As an atheist, I find Zeitgeists critique embarrassing. I recognised it within seconds of the section starting., although they don’t credit it in their web site, It seems to me they have copied and pasted their argument from a book called” The Worlds Sixteen Crucified Saviours” by Kersey Graves . Serious scholars who do take the view that Jesus never existed do not take Graves seriously. Have a look at Columbia Universities Richard Carrier essay on why here: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/graves.html Their basic argument is just data mining. They are looking for comparisons and so they find them. Whilst there are some legitimate comparisons, the idea of a death and resurrection is correct, they are wildly exaggerated in the film. As promised my top five problems: 1 Horus is portrayed as the Sun god, an image of a solar disc over his head is presented. The problem is, this isn’t Horus, this is Ra, check him out here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra Nor was Horus born on Dec 25th, baptized or anything similar. I think the film makes just made it up. One could just as easily make comparisons to Osiris who was resurrected after being murdered by Set. But then resurrection was a common belief, so what? 2 The filmmakers imply the phrase “sun god “has been mistaken for “sun of god”. The problem with this is these two phrases only sound similar in English. Since modern English is only a few hundred years old, the comparison is meaningless. 3 The filmmakers state that Jesus had 12 disciples because of the Zodiac but they have no evidence for this motivation. They just state it as a matter of fact. Sure 12 is repeated in the bible, so are lots of numbers, it’s a big book. 40 is used quite a lot - 40 days on the ark for Noah, 40 years in the desert for Moses, 40 days in the desert for Jesus. One could probably say 1 is important- 1 god, 1 day of rest , 2 is important 2 first humans, the animals went in two by two, 3 is important the holy trinity, 3 angels visited Lot. One could find any number important and that makes the comparison meaningless. 4 The film makers claim that Mary was made a virgin in the story to link here to Virgo. In my opinion this is just stupid. The author(s?) of the gospel of Mathew gives away their reasons for inventing the Virgin birth myth in 1:22 when they say it is the fulfilment of Isaiah 7:14. They mistranslated the Hebrew word alma which means young woman into the Greek word pantheos meaning virgin because they were trying to make seem it like a prophecy fulfilment. This is a consistent theme for NT authors. It has nothing to do with astrology. 5 The film makers think fish are important because they represent the age of Pisces. A simpler explanation is the local people were fisherman and ate a lot of fish. Similarly the ram is important because it represents Aries. Again a simpler explanation is the people kept rams and Abraham used it as a substitute sacrifice for his son. Part 2 9-11 Here the film makers rehash the much debunked nonsense that the US government was responsible for 9-11. . Again ask why they don’t publish this stuff in peer reviewed journals? It’s because it doesn’t stand up. Rather than pick out salient points, this has been debunked so many times I would rather you take a look at http://www.loosechangeguide.com/LooseChangeGuide.html And maybe just pick a few points to examine. Part 3 Banking conspiracy Here the film makers reconstitute the old anti Semitic tracts that Jewish bankers control the world. Fortunalty they’ve dropped the word “Jewish” but the arguments are just as wrong as they were when they were in their racist clothes. Top 5 points: 1 As a professional debt trader I had to laugh at this part of the film. The Fed does not issue US debt that is done by the Treasury. The Fed is not like a private company, they have a degree of independence but they have oversight by Congress, those that make decision on monetary policy are the Governors and they are appointed by the President and approved by the Senate. The shareholders in the Fed (the banks) therefore have no say whatsoever in the running of the Fed. Know of any private companies where this happens? Furthermore the banks that hold stock in the Fed are paid a fixed rate on interest on their stock, so they have no incentive to influence fed policy becuase of their shares. More importantly the Fed reutrns any interest payments to the Tresury at the end of they year. The claim in the film is just simply wrong. 2 There is nothing inevitable about increasing debt. The debt is issued by the Treasury, not the Fed, to meet shortfalls between spending and revenues. If the government spends less than it earns, the debt will go down, this did indeed happen under Clinton. The opposite is happening under Bush. 3 Its claimed that Rockefeller profited from the crash of 1929. Apart being untrue, this is also ridiculous in the extreme; any wealthy person including Rockefeller would have their net worth massively reduced by a crash, what on earth would be the point of buying assets cheap if your net worth goes down by the same amount? Only someone that is not involved in trading would suggest something so ridiculous. 4 The film implies the Fed can control the supply of money. Not really, of course it can do this by printing more or less money. But in the modern world money is not just notes and coins. Money can take many forms. In the early 1980’s several central banks tried to target the money supply as a way of controlling inflation. What they found was that every time they targeted a particular form of money (in the UK we moved between m0, m1 m2 m3, £m3, and m4) money would move between one measure that was being targeted to one that was not. This became known as Goodhearts Law.Central banks found it impossible to control the money supply and so they decided to giveup and use interest rates as a proxy, they just don’t have the level of control over the economy that the film implies. 5 The film implies the sinking of the boat Lusitania was done for the purpose of leading the USA into WWI, but this happened 2 and half years before the US entered the war. The idea that bankers make more in war than in peace is simply false. Thinks about it, most banks assets are in loans to their customers and they secure that with things like houses, business etc. So the best way for a bank to make money is a booming economy, house prices do not tend to go up during war. Right now we have one of the worst banking crises in history and we have two wars going on, this argument makes no sense. Spending trillions of dollars on a war like Iraq is not good for the economy, you might as welll as just burn all that wealth, which is what Bush has done. If the banks control the world why are they in such a shit state now? Lets not forget many bankers died in 9/11 . Anyway there are so many more flaws in this film it would take a long time to go through them all. That’s why I would point you again to this site: http://www.conspiracyscience.com/articles/zeitgeist/ which does actually take the time to make more specific criticism and basically rip the film to shreds. Nothing less than it deserves given its pseudo science/pseudo history approach.

"Maybe using mercury in vaccines is detrimental to a newborn's immune system. Again, most people don't realize that this is the case with many vaccinations. But do you even realize you have a choice as a parent? Most people don't. " ------------------------------------------------ and maybe faireies are in the bottom of my garden talking to the elves.But like your vaccine example there is no evidence to support either conclusion. The mercury vacine scare has been blown up by irresponsible journalists, promoting the idea that thimerrosal in vacicines was leading to increasing autism rates. This has effectivley been disproved because as a precautionatry measure it was taken out of vaccines in 2001 yet autism rates have still increased. There were also a number of detailed studies that reviewed the data and found no link eg: Doja, A., and W. Roberts. 2006. Immunizations and autism: a review of the literature. Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences 33(4):341–46. Parker, S.K., B. Schwartz, J. Todd, and L.K. Pickering. 2004. Thimerosal-containing vaccines and autistic spectrum disorder: a critical review of published original data. Pediatrics 114(3):793–804. "Maybe the leading cause of polio outbreaks worldwide is the vaccinations themselves. "You can choose to believe that statistic or not, " what statstisitc? you didnt quote any . You just made a ridicilous supposition. Here are some actual statistics, look at the incidence of disease pre and post vaccines here: HIB http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.immunisation.nhs.uk/swfalt/hib.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.immunisation.nhs.uk/Vaccines/DTaP_IPV_Hib/The_diseases/Hib/How_common_is_Hib&h=300&w=530&sz=29&hl=en&start=1&tbnid=RmHEfv84F41rqM:&tbnh=75&tbnw=132&pre mumps http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://blog.vcu.edu/cbuttery/mumps06.jpg&imgrefurl=http://blog.vcu.edu/cbuttery/immunizations/&h=300&w=638&sz=26&hl=en&start=22&tbnid=aYKEEgwO-6obNM:&tbnh=64&tbnw=137&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dvaccine%2Bintroduced%26start%3D18%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D18%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Dactive%26sa%3DN Polio http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.ott.zynet.co.uk/polio/lincolnshire/library/bollenbach/images/biologyvfig1.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.ott.zynet.co.uk/polio/lincolnshire/library/bollenbach/biology6.html&h=295&w=502&sz=4&hl=en&start=9&tbnid=ZvZehlqLPY5edM:&tbnh=76&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dpolio%2Bvaccine%2Bintroduced%2Bcdc%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Dactive and some more here etc: http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/c/c2/180px-Rubella-us-1966-93-cdc.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.answers.com/topic/mmr-vaccine&h=123&w=179&sz=5&hl=en&start=14&tbnid=5TT7NZQH51BsVM:&tbnh=69&tbnw=101&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dimmunisation%2Bintroduced%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Dactive%26sa%3DX Yes any medical treatment has risks but its not the same as skydiving. If you dont go skydiving that doesnt harm other poeple. If you get a contagious disease that does harm other people. Sorry the two are not analagous.

I m going to be in Vegas this weekend and have been trying to get hold of the tunnel. But the phone just goes to answer machine and no one replied to my email . Are they still open for business? Anyone got any tips on getting hold of them?

Saw this as on Science daily: [url]http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080519092205.htm To quote "Researchers in Wyoming report development of a low-cost carbon filter that can remove 90 percent of carbon dioxide gas from the smokestacks of electric power plants that burn coal and other fossil fuels." Its my understanding that a large proportion of carbon emmission come form power plants so this should be huge news. But I havent seen it reported anywhere else, so either the media are shit or this isnt going to have much effect, anyone know which ?

So are you saying truth is of no relevance? That may be ok for those that asses each prophets words on their own merit, but most religious people dont do that.

"It is wise to keep an open heart with regards to God, while you dont know his existance, you dont know his non-existance either. " I wonder how you would feel if someone said : "It is wise to keep an open heart with regards to Thor, while you dont know his existance, you dont know his non-existance either." ?

Just read this book on alternative medicine: [url]http://www.amazon.co.uk/Trick-Treatment-Alternative-Medicine-Trial/dp/0593061292 One of the authors previosuly worked at a homeopathic hospital. He was appointed the Uk's 1st Professor of Alternative Medicine. But having reviewed the evidence his views have become increasingly antaganistic to alternative medicine. Never the less this is really an excellent read and I would reccomedn anyone interested in this subject to check it out.

"Maybe not if you're talking about a crap game, but the way politicians use the term, 'the less fortunate, winners in life's lottery, etc' insinuates that someone has been smiled on from above. " So you agree that in a craps game one can get winners and losers by chance without the intervention on any kind of spirit or god. yet you refuse to accept that life as a whole can show similar patterns. For every story you can tell me about a baby being caught from a falling window , I can tell you many more of babies that die in horrible circumstances. Thats exactly what you would expect if there was no intervening spirit.

"The fact that you use the term 'good fortune' alludes to the possibility that there is some force at work over which we have no control. " It certainly doesnt imply any consciouss force.If we bet on a random outcome , say a coin toss. One of us will win and one of us will lose. We do not need to assume any angels, demons gods or god to expain why one of us was "lucky" and the other wasn't. In a purely chance game there will be winners and losers, thats just statistics, its not any kind of spirit.

Some people have good fortune in their lives, others seem to have the opposite.. Why is that in any wat relevant to the debate on god?

Atheism literally means without belief in god. God is usually defined as a perosnal being that created the univrese, althoguh some definitons are more elaborate than that. For example involving god being omipotent and omnipresent etc. Whist it its technically possible to believe in an after life and be an atheist , its pretty unheard of. If you are interested in atheism I would suggest reading "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins or "Losing Faith in Faith " by Dan Barker . See if what they say gells with you .

It seems to me that some people on this forum think there are serious negative moral consequences for societies that abandon belief in god. If that is the case why is a society like the USA which is the most religious country in the western world so ridden with violence? whereas the countries with the lowest levels of religiosity such as Estonia, the Czech Republic and Sweden have very low levels of violent behaviour. The data simply doesnt fit the conjecture.

“I do admit that it is possible to answer 1 without answering 2. But I tend to be much more comfortable with the answer to 1 when I see the answer to 2 as well.” So we are agreed , uncertainty as to when human and chimps split does not represent uncertainty as to whether or not it happened. The evidence for the latter conclusion is overwhelming. “I tend to continually say, in essence--yes, evolution may explain this but is there a third theory--neither evolution nor "creationism" that does even better?” Well of course that is a possibility but there is no candidate third theory at the moment. Furthermore we don’t need a third theory because the evidence for evolution is so strong. That doesn’t mean we know all the details of the evolutionary story, we don’t. But that’s why we do new research, to help fill in the gaps in our knowledge. Most scientists don’t deny that such gaps exists; if they didn’t there wouldn’t be any point in doing science. Why look for answer when we already know everything? Of course we don’t know everything and that’s why we do science. In the case of the human chimp split we do have a good idea when it happened, about 5mya +/- 1 mya. Scientists admit their error bars and are open to revising these date in the light of new evidence, so the humility you seek is indeed there. But that does not extend to whether or not we evolved form a common ancestor. Doubting that is taking scepticism to absurd levels. To give another example, scientists don’t fully understand gravity yet that doesn’t mean we doubt that gravity exists. Onto the issue of trading, we are not talking about errors but rounding. If I round a 960 lot Eurodollar position to 1,000, this is not an error but a practical way of trading. The reason is most deals in the OBS markets are done in round amounts. As we trade in and out quite quickly there’s no point in hedging every position down to zero because one might switch from long to short in seconds. If I have been given 10000 lot Euro$ position say through an IRS and then someone does an FRA deal to hedge it with me and I’m left with 40 lots delta, sure I could hedge it but what’s the point? Someone else may give me a position the other way in a few seconds. If the market is not that busy it would cost me a spread to hedge and that would not be a good way to trade. The point of all of this to suggest that 4 % difference may or may not be considered important, it all depends. If astronomers revised their distance to Vega by 4% that’s no reason to cast doubts on the scientific method.

We can be sure (not 100% ) because our theoreis make very specific testable predicitons. When those predictions are shown to be exactly right we justifiably have great confidence .

It seems to me you have misunderstood two separate points about human evolution. 1. Did humans evolve from a non human ancestor? 2. What is the date and sequence for that evolution? In a similar way we might ask 1 did a murder take place? and 2 who committed the murder? Lets assume we cannot answer question 2, that does not in any way imply that we cannot answer question 1 . You are creating a straw man , our ability to identify when we were descended from which species has nothing to do with our ability to say whether it happened. We have so many independent lines of evidence that it happened, that there is no reasonable doubt about it. When it happened is an entirely different issue. As to my boss’s so cavalier attitude, I can only assume I work at an institution that makes a lot more money than yours. 40 lots of Eurodollar futures has PV01 OF $1000 , last year I alone made several tens of millions of dollars trading so I and my boss would certainly consider that sort of position so negligible that we would ignore it. Perhaps for someone that makes very little money that might be considered a big position , for us, it is peanuts. I guess that backs up my point that 4% difference is not necessarily a big deal, it all depends. Again I feel I need to repeat the point . if we cant pin down when human and chimps split to within 4% difference that would have no bearing on whether or nor it happened.