Gwazi Magnum

♘Evolution vs. Creationism☼

ActRaiserTheReturned said
Chinese history cannot be damning towards the Creation hypothesis. The Chinese don't exactly like to share their mythology/religions and the entirety of their culture with the rest of the world.

China in history was actually a big lead in science. Largely with the how well the kept records of discoveries and observations. Places like China and Arabia although not scientific power houses today were the ones to set the ground work for places like Europe to pick up from later.

Evolution like MMO?

Yes. But roles like League aren't an exact science like WoW where say lacking a healer means death. League offers more flexibility and improvising which would compliment a game where players essentially evolve into different roles and specialities.

♘Evolution vs. Creationism☼

Jorick said I probably wouldn't call 8% a significant amount, but significance is relative so whatever.The problem with intelligent design is that while it's a plausible theory in its own right, it gets co-opted by creationist turds. Most of the people fighting for ID to be taught alongside evolution are actually creationists trying to crack open the door with what appears to be reasonable scientific things, but only in order to then be able to shove their religion wholesale into public schools. The actual idea in and of itself is not problematic, it's the people who try to use it as a tool for bad things that make it a problem.

8% I wouldn't shrug off as being that small.
It's not huge, but it's still big enough to cause a good amount of resistance and halt scientific progress.

As for religion in schools, I don't see the possible good in it if it's "Teach ______ Religion". Since then it's really just one Religion trying to force themselves on others.
I think it'd be more appropiate to have a generalized religion course, teaching about multiple religion's from a neutral, observing standpoint. Something which I believe England already does.

xAsunaWolfx said I guess it all boils down to what appeals to you more strongly & What your parents may have told you:Science or Faith? Both have facts. Science is appealing because......debatable facts, Faith is appealing because it seems to take away the fear of death.

No they both don't.

Science has facts, faith's very model is belief without facts. If it had fact's it would no longer be faith.
Just because something comforts you from an unfortunate fact of life doesn't suddenly mean it provides facts in itself.
It doesn't do so anymore than say an Imaginary Friend has facts because it helps you get over getting bullied in school for example.

Lastly for how parents raise you... That's not a 100% confirmed way for your own beliefs.
For example my parents are Christian and raised me Christian, but I became atheist through my own observing and questioning of it.

Evolution like MMO?

xAsunaWolfx said
/.\ hope im welcome here since i created that topic, but i just came in here to say i love spore!!! lol you should also look at sims and project spark ^.^. there are games out there but i'm sure a new one made with evolution would be always popular.

(/'-')/ _|__|_

No! You started a science vs religion debate! Get out! *Teasing*

You're not suddenly not going to be welcomed because you brought up a controversial topic. :P
People here do that all the time.

Kestrel said
MMO's work because people have roles to work within during a fight or raid. A lot of people choose their roles very carefully. Going by the holy trinity (dps, tank, heal) when I roll a tank, it's build and equipment will be completely different from a dps. However, dps are pretty much always the most popular role, so chances would very likely be that if I'm in a raid and my healer disconnects, my character, a few minutes later, revives as a dps with more HP but no way to hold aggro. There goes all my effort in building my character for the role as tank, and to top it off, I'm not even a valid DPS.Also, this would feel like a cheat because player skill can keep a shitty character alive longer than a n00b with godlike settings. If there's randomised stats, there are seriously people who will spend a day reseting until they get the right starting stats (thankfully most games don't have this feature anymore.) The idea sounds interesting on paper, but unless you've got a heavily modified system around it, I don't see it keeping players for very long before they move on.

Some MMO's like Guild Wars don't rely as much on such roles.
The MMO would have to break away from typical team combat like that and allow for people to be more independent but still encouraged to work as a team.

Once that happens there shouldn't be much concern with roles.

Though I'm looking at this more from a "This would be cool to see/watch" standpoint than a "This would make a good game" standpoint.
Though, those who spend a day resetting for good stats would be kind of silly if it randomizes again each death anyhow.

Evolution like MMO?

The Evolution topic just got me thinking, it's be kind of cool if there was a game that worked off it kind of.

Like say for example a standard MMO, but it's a 1-life only kind of game.
All character's spawn with pretty basic/all around stats, with slight variations among them.

Then when a person dies they spawn again, but their base stats are based off the base stats of two players who are still alive?
It would be interesting over time to see what kind of feature's, abilities, builds etc. (More if they expand this to powers, class types, races etc.) they turn into over the life-span of the MMO.

♘Evolution vs. Creationism☼

xAsunaWolfx said
I typed that message when i was half asleep. still on the go (and half asleep sadly), but to be quick, here is the article i was speaking of. Later on i'll sit down and read the longer portions of which others have stated since, life ;-;.Now that i study it more in depth, it seems....more unbiased than most articles but i guess still could be considered "pro-evolution". I'm curious. how would you interpret this?

For most of that article I was going to say "Seems like someone whose very ignorant as to how Evolution works trying to take a neutral/non-judging stance of the topic".
But then with the last paragraph saying "The human body is the perfect machine" (*Barf*) makes me think this was a creationists who either is just very ignorant and trying to be neutral, or is a creationist trying to be passive aggressive in attacking evolution.

This kid

♘Evolution vs. Creationism☼

Brovo and Jorick already did an amazing job arguing my point here.
But I'll give in my two cents anyways.

First I feel this need's to be divided into several topics in order to cover...

Why Religion doesn't work

To start with, the very model of it is broken.

-Exhibit A) It makes a claim (God exists) and then seeks evidence to prove it.
That is a flawed way to prove anything because all your study and research will have bias to it.

-Exhibit B) It relies on faith.
Faith meaning willingness to believe in it without proof or evidence. So it already outright claims it can't prove itself, therefore should be held to the mantle that science is.

-Exhibit C) Circular arguments.
Mainly the "God is real because the Bible says so. The Bible is true because God says so" situation. You can't prove something with another thing that still needs proving itself. Especially if the thing it is proved by it in fact needs to prove itself first.

If hypothetically we were to ignore that though, there's no way to make sense of Religion itself either.
Note: For this example, we will take the Bible literally. For the "It's meant to be metaphors" argument, that will wait until later.

Now, if you want the long version of this just go to DarkMatter2525's Channel and watch any of his videos. Each one highlight's a contradiction in the Bible where the only thing you need to disprove the Bible is in fact the Bible. But for those of you not in the mood to go through one, several or many videos I'll make a summarizing list below.

-Exhibit A) Numerical Contradictions.
Depending on the Bible you can even find issues of them getting the number's wrong of stuff like "How many horsemen raided X town". You could try to claim it's a typo... But if this was Gods words, would a typo even be there like that?

-Exhibit B) God is almighty/all powerful and all knowing, holy, just, innocent & loving.
Now if God is all powerful, why does he allow so many evil and cruel things to happen? He either lacks the power to stop them, or does and allows them. So he already can't be both all powerful and all loving. Unless if you argue something such as he gives us free will. But look at cases like this more closely, Rape, Murder, Theft. Yes human's are granted the free will to sin and commit these acts, but isn't the free will of the victims taken away? They're ability to choose to live, keep their belongings or not have sex is taken away from them. All that happens here is free will is taken away from the victim rather than the attacker. So it would be more accurate to say "God loves murderer's, rapists and thieves more than their victims", which would contradict with being holy, innocent, just etc.

If you want another example. One humorous example that DarkMatter used was asking God "What's it like to snort cocaine off a hookers ass?". Well if he knew the answer to that question then he's not innocent, but if he doesn't know the answer to that question then he's not all knowing.

-Exhibit C) Sin's are changing.
There are quotes/passage's saying eating shellfish, having short hair etc. are sins.
But then other area's where it's totally fine, or may be a sin to have long hair even.

For more extreme examples... Let's go back to Murder and Rape.
The Bible supports this, I've had people try to argue this on this site before... But when they're defense becomes like "Well... The Bible only supports Rape _____ times!" well... you've already lost. :P
Now anyone could bring up quote's where these are sin's, but there are also several times where God allows, if not outright tells his followers they are allowed to murder and rape.

-Exhibit D) Cherry Picking
We see this all time. I mean with basically every last religious person on this planet we see it. If that wasn't the case, then the majority of the human populating would be getting killed for working on a certain day, wearing certain clothes, eating certain foods. Or doing stuff such as killing their child for disobeying, enslaving people, not letting women speak in Church or hold any kind of authority.

-Exhibit E) Is it even your God?
Even if by some magical chance you've found a way to argue away all of these other points, basically every other Religion is in the same boat, hundreds of thousands if you include denominations. You still need a way to prove that specific Religion over any other... and this is even before we bring science into the mix.

Why Science does work

-Exhibit A) We have proof and evidence.
What Science says is not based on what one person wrote in a book many years ago and did not let anyone question it. It is based on thousands of years of observation, studying, experimenting etc. If Science ever needs to prove itself it has mountains of evidence to back it up with.

-Exhibit B) Science is Humble.
While Religion claims to know everything, Science admits it does not. And rather than hide that it doesn't it is open with it and tries to find it out.

-Exhibit C) Science can admit they are wrong.
If proof ever shows Science to be wrong, they accept and absorb that new info to better advance society. They don't ignore it and cling to their original beliefs.

This is honestly a rather straight forward/short section... It proves it self, it changes to new info. There's no much else to say.

Why Science and Religion do not mix

Exhibit A) 6000 Years VS Trillions of Years ago

Exhibit B) Flat Earth VS Round Earth

Exhibit C) Earth is the Center VS Sun is the center

Exhibit D) We all started off as we were VS Evolution

I'm sure you can add in many others.
The general point is basically:

TLDR: Religion on it's own disprove itself. Science on it's own proves itself. Put the two face to face, and they disagree on almost every turn.
And when such a disagreement happens, with one side having no proof or evidence (in fact it tells you to listen despite the fact they have none), while the other has almost all of human knowledge and evidenced to support it which one are you going to side with?

Suicide, Tragic or Selfish?

Gat said Hatred, no. Contempt maybe.Let me ask you a related question mate; Are you Pro-Abortion?If the answer is yes then I suppose I see where you're coming from, you simply don't place the same value on life as Kad any myself. Life is the most precious 'commodity' so to speak on the planet because one its ended you can never get it back.

I'm Pro-Life. I take that stance cause I don't think it's right for a mother to end the life of their child. A child is who when the topic of abortion comes up never has a say in the matter.
Now there are a ton of counter argument's to that which were all highlighted to me in the Abortion & Feminism thread's and I agreed that I couldn't argue with or disprove them. But that's a different topic for those respective threads.

Suicide however, is when the individual whose life is being lost is the one making the choice. Not another person making the choice because the person being alive is an inconvenience to them.

Gat said As has also been stated in the thread many times, the majority of suicides never try to seek help, they keep it all bottled up until they snap and off themselves. Oh sure others have brought up that they cant get help becuase parents etc don't want to hear that the person wants to commit suicide etc. but lets be frank here, how many parents want their children to die before they do, thats simple parental instinct. Despite that, at least here in the western world there are numerous options beyond parents one can seek help from.

Most parent's do not, you are correct there. But this is also assuming all parent's accept and treat depression and the want to kill one self as actual medical conditions, rather than simply being something selfish that people can simply 'snap out of'. Many parents have proven to be the kind who simply treat suicide as a selfish act and/or see depression as something that people can just snap out of. So many parents will deny help to their child up to the point the child kills themselves, simply because the parent is not treating it as the serious issue that it is.

In terms of not seeking other ways of help, we have to remember part of depression is feeling hopeless. Some of those symptoms could be not seeing the use in getting help, or in some cases denying their's a problem to begin with. Especially if those people either:

a) Were/are a very strong and independent kind of person
b) Were hurt in the past by someone using depression as an excuse, and becomes reluctant to admit to having the same thing
c) Was simply raised to see things as Depression as something you can 'snap out of' or is selfish.
-We know a ton of communities and people are still like that, it's one of the main reasons Depression often isn't treated with the same priority as physical conditions.

Now, do I personally agree with the individual not seeking help? No, I think everyone should be looking for help when in such a situation.
But it's not something I'm going to call them selfish for, or speak ill of them once their gone if they don't do it.

Gat said Another clarification. not all suicides are the result of depression, in addition not all supposed depression is actually a medical condition. If you had actually read the thread btw you would see that both Kad and myself agree that euthanasia is acceptable for severe quality of life effecting illnesses and conditions. Neither of us see even clinical depression as qualifying for that because you can medicate it just fine and the person can live a normal life.

Obviously, but in this situation the topic had been focused on suicides as a result of Depression. So I addressing it as strictly on that stance.

Also, I am very well aware that people will self-diagnose themselves with depression and do not actually have it, simply using it as an excuse for their actions and as a result hurt those that care for them and everyone who actually do suffer from depression. But if you are the point you are killing yourself, you are either saving someone or something you value every highly or you are not mentally stable. Something has happened to either make you see depression as a positive thing, or your life is simply so bad that suicide is the lesser of two evils.

May you both agree with euthanasia is acceptable or not though (which is something we agree on), is irrelevant to this topic. This topic is more on seeing Depression as something to qualify for that, where you two seem to take the stance of never. While I take the stance of it can be depending on the individual and the severity of it.

Suicide, Tragic or Selfish?

Kadaeux said
No. Suicide is not a "result of a mental condition" suicide is a result of people deciding that that condition is too much for them. I don't "act as if I know for a fact" whether i'm right or wrong. I DO know for a fact. I suffer from severe clinical depression. I've considered suicide before, and every time discarded it as weakness.

So you are acting you know for a fact then? Having Depression doesn't mean you now know the exact case, conditions or situation each person with depression has, you just have a little bit more to relate with. I can tell this is a very personal/built up hatred for those who killed themselves you have though, one that is not going to be changed in conversation until you are actually willing to listen to other points of views and consider other opinions, so I'm going to stop this specific discussion now cause it is apparent that it is going no where.