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Originally posted by SergeantX:
This one's kinda fun too:

http://www.bibleufo.com

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Originally posted by Spinland:
That just opened up the image of a whole raft of Book/Jayne/Inara interaction that I've decided not to pursue.

Well, now you've done it.
My inspiration kicked in the other night, and delivered hald\f of a genius idea, the setup for a whole genre of jokes:

"A mercenary, a Companion, and a Shepard walk into a bar--".

Unfortunately, that's where inspiration quit. I've got some ironic but not funny punch lines, and no middle story.

Anybody out theregot a follow-up?

NewOld
" This is why we lost, you know...superior numbers."

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However, Christianity is not a blind faith. It is the only religion that can prove itself, and a main source of that proof is the Bible.

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..and then would have suggested skeptics to actually read the bible from Genesis to Revelations,...

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Originally posted by midori:
Revelation 22:13 I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End."

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Originally posted by AURaptor:

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..and then would have suggested skeptics to actually read the bible from Genesis to Revelations,...

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Don't have to. The Bible is less than 2 thousand yrs old. Dinosaurs became extinct 65+ Million yrs ago.

" They don't like it when you shoot at 'em. I worked that out myself. "

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Originally posted by AURaptor:
It is only thanks to the woeful lack of education and a host of inaccuracies recycled through pop culture that such nonsensical notions of humans living along side dinosaurs is able to persist.



" They don't like it when you shoot at 'em. I worked that out myself. "

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So, to scoff at people who believe that humans and dinosaurs may have lived at the same time, is to forget that occasionally, we are surprised by our ignorance. Certainly, there is no evidence that vast dinosaur populations roamed the earth at the same time as humans… but it is not outlandish to suggest that a few groups of 'extinct' creatures may have survived to perplex and frighten early man.

The Bible, incidentally, never speaks of a crypto-zoological creature more clearly, and with more detail, than is done in Job. Here is God, rattling off a list of real world creatures and creations… and he throws in some kind of sea-dwelling dragon. At the very least, Job himself was supposed to be familiar with this creature. It suggests that, at the time that the story was first told, humans believed that such creatures existed. That's not proof of their existence. It's just another clue that bears keeping in mind.

We just might not know everything yet.

--Anthony

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Originally posted by AURaptor:

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We don't know EVERYTHING. But that's not the point. We never WILL. But we DO know a great deal more than we use to. And we can use what we DO know to put much into context as we try to uncover more information about our little planet and its history.

As for Crypto-Zoology, I have this to say. The oceans are vastly under explored, so relevations of unknown species should not surprise us much. Deep water critters are far more likely to reamin hidden to science. Squids are well known, so one which is really big shouldn't rock the scientific world all that much. Nor should the discovery of a Coelacanth. But a large aquatic animal in a confined area, say a Loch, is quite different.

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Well, a couple of observations. One, Deep Water creatures ARE more likely to remain unknown to Science. I expect countless new discoveries in the years ahead, simply because we know so little about our Oceans.

That having been said, saying that a Giant Squid ought not to surprise us, is like saying that Giant Lizards or Giant Birds ought not to surprise us. They ought not to, but they do. Both Giant Lizards and Giant Birds have been objects of cryptozoological inquiry, and both have been scoffed at. So yes, giant versions of known animals surprise the bejeezus out of us. Anything previously unknown seems to.

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Loch Ness was utterly covered by glaciers which retreated during the last ice age, 10-12,000 yrs ago. That's long after the Plesiosaurs ( which most believe Nessie of being ) became extinct. And as for Plesiosaurs, all the fossils we've found suggest they were fond of warm,salt water, not the deep, cold fresh waters of a Loch. Now, there might be a yet unknown animal which lives in or frequents Loch Ness which has no family ties to any Cretaceous species. That would be very interesting on its own right, but as yet, no such animal has been verified.

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And while something unexpected may yet turn up in the Loch, I don't expect it to. I threw in the Loch Ness monster as the sort of oft scoffed crypto-zoological creature that is usually accompanied with confirmed hoaxters. Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman has been tainted the same way.

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When it comes to land animals, the problem of concelement becomes much more difficult. Especially larger animals. All animals need to eat, mate and reproduce. For larger land animals, this requires lots of space. Much more space if the animal happens to be a carnivore.

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And yet, large land animals continue to be discovered by science long after humans have seen them. One of the premises of crypto-zoology is that people have seen the buggers, they just haven't been able to produce scientifically verifiable evidence of them. New Gorilla species are often reported by natives and locals before a scientist ever gets around to 'discovering' them. It's also notable that while much of our land has been explored... some of it hasn't, or has been so lightly explored as to remain much of a mystery. Crypto-zoologists rarely suggest marauding colonies of animals, but rather small groups of hold-overs and survivors, usually in secluded or lightly populated areas. And most obviously, crypto-zoologists deal with animals that have been seen, just not scientifically verified.

I will throw this timber on the fire as well, for those who tout Science's flexibility over Religion. Any scientist who has ever proposed a truly revolutionary idea will find, despite hard evidence to support his theory, that there is a great deal of Faith in the Evidence based world of Science and Scientists. New ideas tend to be resisted until they are irresistable, most especially by proponents of the Old ideas. Admittedly, this likely has more to do with human nature than the Scientific method.


--Anthony



"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner

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HILOHILO....have you seen this shocking news!!

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Originally posted by fivver:
Folks, pick your answer but understand that both are faith based.

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All of the discussion we as a nation have had on this topic have changed exactly 0 minds.

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It makes up for the shortfalls of science. And yes, there are shortfalls, according to a recent textbook, and many biologist friends, evolution is not such solid fact... So, it basically comes down to whether we believe that science has explained everything sufficiently, or not

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SergeantX:
That doesn't seem to jibe with my understanding of the term 'faith', but for the discussion, if that's the case, what would you say is the difference between science and religion?

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Originally posted by fivver:

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SergeantX:
That doesn't seem to jibe with my understanding of the term 'faith', but for the discussion, if that's the case, what would you say is the difference between science and religion?

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By faith I meant believing in something you can't prove.

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By faith I meant believing in something you can't prove

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Originally posted by SignyM:
I guess scientists would like to examine something other than "self-report" because it is essentially subjective?

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:

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Originally posted by SignyM:
I guess scientists would like to examine something other than "self-report" because it is essentially subjective?

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But that doesn't make it "wrong." On the contrary, to my mind, it makes it "likely."

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Originally posted by SergeantX:

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:
But that doesn't make it "wrong." On the contrary, to my mind, it makes it "likely."

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But, HK, it does make it much more likely to be an experience that originates in the mind.

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:
See, now here's a totally unprovable assumption of materialistic thought: something called "the mind" is located in a thing called "the body." And yet there is no varifiable organ or location. The mechanism for feeling heat is located in heat-sensing nerves in the body which send information to the brain which relays the information to an extremity to pull it out of the fire, for instance, but where is the mind?

What if "mind" is a universal field of which we only "pick up" certain frequencies? Unable to sense the field as a whole, many people imagine that the field is a few billion localized entities. Others have some inkling of it, but it comes and goes very unreliably, so they call it "God." Still others of us perceive the larger field on a daily basis and call it the conscious world.

EDITED TO ADD: the concept of God as a partial perception of universal mind accounts nicely for the phenomenon of holy wars. People perceive that God exists within a local or national population and that those outside of that locality or nation have no God, meaning that they have no mind, meaning there is no stigma in killing them.

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Anyone who claims that "shortfalls" in scientific knowledge invalidate the scientific method clearly doesn't know anything about science! Scientists do not claim to know everything, nor do they make the claim that all hypotheses are correct.

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