Bevets:

God is the foundation and essence of goodness. They are inseparable. Everything that is good comes from God.

Rent is too damn high:

So essentially, if God said "go forth and rape and murder all you want", it would be perfectly morally correct to rape and murder. Got it.

You don't have it. You are suggesting a scenario that could not happen by definition. There are no married bachelors, there are no square circles, and God would never command a corrupt moral law.

Bevets: Bevets:

God is the foundation and essence of goodness. They are inseparable. Everything that is good comes from God.

Rent is too damn high:

So essentially, if God said "go forth and rape and murder all you want", it would be perfectly morally correct to rape and murder. Got it.

You don't have it. You are suggesting a scenario that could not happen by definition. There are no married bachelors, there are no square circles, and God would never command a corrupt moral law.

Yet he chooses to leave his omnipotentcy on the sideline and let it play out. Classy.

eggrolls: We're basically a middle-class Boston suburb on the North Shore with a damn clever Board of Tourism. Nobody has 'runes' on anything, and except for a small (but welcome) minority of Pagans

Compared to other places where no one has any bind runes on anything. I counted some 20 plus houses, which is amazingly high number for anywhere. I never said they were the same people. And from where I have lived, seeing that many people, new agers, pagans and whatever you want in one small area being treated nicely is amazing feat. I never said there wasn't tourism based on it, and more power to them. But trying to get rid of that for nautical tourism is loony.

Even if you have it mostly tourists, if you have one pagan or Wiccan place of worship, that's huge for this country.

I think you are having more of an argument with someone else and putting my name on it.

stuffer: Because that single cell life was present so soon after the creation of the earth, It was probably seeded by a comet

Define "soon". Because the best estimates suggest that Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago, and the earliest evidence of cellular life is 3.8 billion years ago. That's 800 million years total, which is longer than pretty much the entire existence of complex multi-cellular organisms (at least, according to the fossil record; though genetic evidence seems to be suggesting that multicellularity may be a billion or more years old). Even the "short" range of time spanning from the end of late heavy bombardment, when the Earth's surface could finally settle down and be more stable, starts at 4.1 billion years ago, giving at least 300 million years (which is equal to about the entire time that reptiles have existed on Earth, or about 3/4 of the total time there have been land vertebrates)

Panspermia seems an interesting hypothesis, but at the moment it is superfluous (because that is more than sufficient time for abiogenesis by most models of it), and will continue to be so until extra terrestrial life is discovered, to which we can make a comparison. One of the biggest problems with panspermia is the evidence which suggests that the first main divergence of life (into the domains Archaea and Bacteria) occurred *before* cellular life existed (i.e. the divergence seems to have occurred during pre-cellular times before or around the time lipid synthesis was evolving - this is evident in both the very different membrane phospholipids [and metabolic pathways to make them] as well as more fundamental differences in DNA organization and packaging between the two domains).

So, for panspermia to work, either the hypothesis which explains those difference, i.e. the hypothesis that life diverged into two domains while in a pre-cellular state, is wrong, or Earth was seeded by two different forms of life that shared a common origin somewhere out there in the universe.

Just sayin'.

More on topic: I've lived in and visited several places around the world, including living in the USA (where I was born and raised), Japan, Morocco, and now Thailand. Nowhere have people bothered so much to find out about my religion and then condemn me for my atheism as much as the United States.

JWideman: Your God liked rape, murder, pillage, and rape.

You said pillage once.

JWideman: Your God liked rape, murder, pillage, and rape.

No, see, that was *BEFORE* Jesus came along and abolished the laws and prophets of the old testament. He did abolish the laws and prophets, right? Let's take a look...

*reads Matthew 5:17*

Oh... well, this is awkward. :-/

imfallen_angel: I'd say that regardless of their beliefs, I'd simply say that most people don't like having a self-righteous pompous arrogant douche-bag around. And so far, most stories pertaining to atheists, are due to the "atheist" in question fitting that description.

I understood your point until you said that atheists are the ones that fit that description. Well it's not the atheists who are going around telling everyone that they would be immoral unrepentant sinners if they weren't constantly threatened with eternal damnation.

stuffer: from raw elements to single cell seems like a proud accomplishment and most of the "earth is the center of the universe" theories are usually wrong

Well, to be fair, abiogenesis theory is not exactly an "Earth is the center of the universe" theory. Some of the convincing supporting data are the discoveries of amino acids and other complex organic molecules forming abiotically out there in the universe. It seems that complex organic molecules form fairly easily if you have an energy source and a few inorganic precursors, and the universe seems to have quite a lot of that.

The difficulty is getting those organic molecules, simple or complex, concentrated enough to react and perhaps become biochemistry. Luckily, there is a model for that. ^{(^)}

/that model, if it is essentially correct, makes me think that the best bet for ET life in this solar system is Europa, which has liquid oceans under its ice and may have volcanic activity due to tectonic action from tidal forces with Jupiter
//agree, though, that finding any ET life would be huge and awesome; it would answer so many questions (while posing so many more) :D