birdlike

If the typical unfit parent were wise enough and intelligent enough to know that he/she should not be creating a child, then he/she would probably then be able to be a fit parent. You are actually counting on the idea that unfit people would abort rather than bring about children they can't properly raise? Why aren't they doing that now? Abortion is legal! Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

If more women were able to make the choice... you would not have the criminal. Or, randomly, you would not have the doctor, the statesman, the paramedic, the schoolteacher... Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

Especially those retards. They have such funny laughs, usually. And lots of times they have funny faces and teeth. Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

I don't find it offensive, because I have a sense of humor. Except when someone makes fun of my right to keep and bear arms. Then I get irate and hostile. By the way, I plan to see Tropic Thunder on Sunday with a friend. She works at the theater and she gets us in for FREE!! YEEHAAA!!!!

The question is why God didn't intervene. God is supposed to have historically intervened to trump humans' "free will" all the freakin' time! Didn't he drown the pursuers of the Jews in the Red Sea? Wasn't that thwarting their free will, which presumably was to catch the escaping Jews? You did your share of distorting when you made it seem that God can't exercise his Godly will any time it would thwart the free-will of humans. Whatsisname did not say that God caused the deaths of the Jews in the gas chambers--we all realize that was up to the Nazis' free will. But God did not SAVE the Jews from them. Why? God clearly has used his power to rescue certain people from the murderous free will of certain others. Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

Sort of like the entire Bible is all made-up, written in order to illustrate points? Is there a teachers' edition of the Bible that people like you use to be able to tell the literal parts from the figurative parts? Or are we supposed to just treat it ALL as fictional? Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

Wait, countries PUT other countries into their desperate and dangerous states? Well, sweet! Now we can start looking around the world for the country we can blame for us being dependent on foreign oil, being big polluters, being in a bad economy... AWESOME! It's not our fault for doing it to ourselves after all!!

We democratically choose people to decide to lead us to war, to tax us, to tell us what we may or may not do recreationally. Why is it such a stretch that we would choose to have those people make these decisions? They already make life-and-death decisions based on the presumption that they are trying to do what is best for the greatest number. Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

So now the Left is perfectly ok with a criminal suspect being killed without benefit of a trial. I see. Cops are allowed to be "judge, jury and executioner" when they are responding to anyone who murdered -- oh, sorry, "is believed to have murdered" -- a Leftist huh? When did a jury have time to deliberate on the facts and find this guy actually committed the murder of Mr. Gwatney? And what happened to the Left's opposition to the state, or any arm of the state, killing criminals? It's too bad that the suspect wasn't Mexican: the Left would have swooped in and rescued him from the cops, maybe even would have taken bullets for him, and handed him a cellular phone with the Mexican consulate waiting on the line. Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

HEY! Don't you DARE go blaspheming and taking the name of my god in vain, lest he smite you with His Noodly Appendage! As for the "personal revelation," I think that anyone who had one that convinced him he had been talked to by God is free to either take it at face value, or wonder what the true origin of the contact had been. We can tautologize and say that if an all-powerful God revealed himself to a single individual in a personal revelation, he would have the magic necessary to cause the person to know that it was genuine, and not a hallucination or delusion. But then you can always ask, how does he know that that is not itself a delusion? Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

How do you know there isn't any evidence? There may be such a thing as private revelation. Can you prove that God has not made His existence known to an individual? No, but neither can that individual prove to anyone outside himself that he's had anything more than a delusion, right? How many lunatics in the insane asylums of the world claim to be Jesus Christ? Are we really obligated to consider that maybe Jesus decided to come back en masse and none of them are actually crazy, because they're all part of the "Legion Jesus"? Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

An accident that had billions of years to turn into what we see today? Versus a human being who's been around for less than the blink of an eye, and expects that in the same 100 year period of even discovering DNA we'd have it all figured out? You bet it's unreasonable to think that humans would have beaten the mystery by now. Have you considered how short a period it's really been that we have been studying this? Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

SCORE! That point is unassailable. Nice job! Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

Using the word 'assume' is an insult to Speedracer. Reading his posts over the years, I think he believes there is a god out there. He's entitled to that belief as much as you are entitled to yours. Especially since this God he believes in left us all here to wallow in violence as we FIGHT OUT whether he exists at all! Quite a shitty, dick-ish thing to do if you're all-knowing and all-loving. Thanks a fuckin' lot, "God." Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

This is hilarious. You somehow don't realize that the same exact challenge can be made about the god you believe in, and when atheists/agnostics make that challenge, believers dismiss it. Now you're using it?! Why can you sit back and say that God has always existed, but we can't claim equally that there's no God, and there was no necessity for one to create the universe because the universe has always existed? I didn't say you couldn't. What I'm knocking is that you're so definitively positive that there is no way there is a God. Then your mistake is lumping me with the rest of the people who might be saying that. I avow that I am an agnostic, not an atheist. I strongly feel that there is no God, but I don't claim that "there is no God." The latter would be a claim to KNOW, and I do not claim to KNOW. Believers claim to KNOW there IS a God, while agnostics say that there can be no proof either way. (I suppose that means that many lean toward belief that there isn't one.) And when believers confront non-believers and claim that, "Hey, sorry, my faith demands that I try to make a believer out of you, or kill you"? What then? We need an answer, because throughout history, that's been how it works. What do we do when the believers won't leave us non-believers alone? You talk a good game about, "You believe your thing, I'll believe mine," but when it all comes down, rarely if ever do believers live up to that assurance. I don't actually believe that science proves nothing. I just recognize that scientific pursuit does not claim to provide proof. It really just analyzes and weighs possibilities, and discards those that it finds cannot be sustained as true explanations of things. If someone wanted to claim that duck farts are the source of all atmospheric nitrogen, science would disprove that hypothesis in short order, but would not claim to have proven what does produce atmospheric nitrogen. Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

I think, "No, we will never be able to all get along." If we were to get along, we'd have to all be so alike that we look at others and see ourselves. That's not going to happen--it requires ultimate homogeneity. OR, "getting along" would simply require that each group of those who are alike would have to live in isolation from the others. What I mean by that is each country, or culture, would have to occupy a geographic area and stay there, not interacting with others. But that can NEVER happen, because what society is willing to forget that the rest of the world ever existed? What if one culture somewhere started to do some really really horrible things to the world, like extensive, repeated above-ground nuclear testing, and the others realized it? Bye bye "everyone getting along." We are MADE to compete, not to get along. That's our reality; it may end up being our doom, but hey, we were not in charge of choosing our makeup when we came into being. That was thrust on us as-is. Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

The irony of that is stinging. It was the ultimate sin, to try to be like God. But God makes it clear that he is all that is good, all-forgiving (as we are told to be), containing the ultimate truth. Why, then, is it bad to try to emulate God, or to "try to be like him"? You'd think God would like that. Or were Adam and Eve supposedly eating fruit that they believed would make them God's equals or something? Like, usurpers? Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

You don't find compelling cause to just wonder how "all that is" ever came to be? I sure do! The question is the most fascinating one in existence! I just don't have any confidence that anyone alive has the correct answer, and I don't have any confidence that anyone will really get that answer--particularly not in my lifetime, if ever. That's one of the things I've had to come to accept. It's rather like enjoying a delicious pint of ice cream that you find in your freezer inexplicably. You know you didn't obtain it yourself, but it's there, and no one you can find can either explain it or owns up to providing it. You have lingering, gnawing questions about who provided it, paid for it, etc. Life is learning how to enjoy the ice cream without having to have those answers. Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

You are predicting that they will drive vehicles that exist only as a concept? What is a zero-emission car? Where is a zero-emission car? If a car does not emit any pollution, then it has to have been charged with the energy that will push it around, and that energy will have come from somewhere If it came out of their wall socket, you have to look at what their local power plant burns to make that energy. Is it coal? Oil? Nuclear? Wind? If it's wind, fine, then yeah, we got the energy clean and for free. But if it's anything else, there was pollution involved, even if it does not come from a tailpipe. Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

No, my point was that we are cutting our own throats when we try to keep more and more people alive. I'm referring to trying to end the starvation and disease that plagues Africa, for example. Imagine if we did succeed and greatly mitigated the rate at which people are dying over there... Instead of becoming corpses that consume nothing, they would remain living people who consume and pollute, added to the rest of us who were not previously starving or dying of malaria and dysentery, etc. Well, it's one way of addressing it. Think of the extra work we'd be creating for ourselves (not so much work, but impossible difficulty) if at the same time as we work to consume less, or find better sources for what we do consume, we are actively working to keep people around to be consumers longer. Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

What disappoints me is people arguing for the "value" of the life of a person who brings nothing but death and despair. Not every life is of equivalent value to every other life just because it's a life! Is the life of a guy who dedicates it to robbing and murdering worth just as much to you ("sanctified"?) a the life of a blood donor who's a disease-curing doctor and a pilot for Angel Flight who tutors schoolkids for free in his spare time? Come on. Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

Well, yeah, take a look at how the whackos in California were trying to get Susan Atkins, who murdered Sharon Tate as part of the Manson family, and had her death sentence commuted to life in prison, released so she could die in comfort with her family around her. (She's terminally ill.) They tell us to compromise, to accept "life in prison" instead of executing these monsters like we ought to; and then when we do, they won't even honor their part of the compromise, and suddenly letting the monsters out before they die is back on the table. Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

If God is God and knows all eventualities, knows the future, why would he ever have to make a "bet"? He knows what the outcome would be ahead of time! I guess he'd never lose a bet, then. Just more evidence of the unvalidity of the concept of God, I guess. Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

I would more satisfied having him alive in ma 4 foot by 4 foot room with no winodows and no communication with other humans., Now that's suffering. Death is the easy way out for assholes like this guy. But you know that they won't do that if they keep him in prison for life. So why wouldn't that make you sway back to favoring execution for him? The same liberals who won't let a guy be executed also would never let us make prison harsh like you are asking for. No way in hell. Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire

Come on. It's cheaper only because we force ourselves to make execution more expensive by granting years of appeals. So you add all those court costs to the cost of keeping them in prison for the years they're there, and then compare that cost to the simple cost of having them live in prison, so of course the death penalty cases cost more per inmate. Spirits fly on dangerous missions Imaginations on fire