Misguided questions about stuff including...

you mean to tell me in all your "geriactric" years you never experienced a moment that you could not explain? Had I been there a second too late etc. Perhaps you consider it luck? It's not all you, chance and perhaps a God is looking after you.

I'm also guesing that our exsitance and placement, gravity perfect and all that came from luck? No such thing as a free lunch man.
 
No offence Cheryl, but where else would we be than here?

We've evolved WITHIN this system and adapted to better survive it - of course it's going to look like a freak chance that conditions are perfect for us.

Eon
 
Okay. First I have a question. Evolutionists say God screwed up on the eyes, wiring them backwards. Have you ever heard that argument? Well, if not or if so, our eyes are perfectly designed. IF they had been wired to the front, instead of how they are right now, we would step outside and in a couple hours become completely blind because of the sun's intensity directly on the wiring of our eye. How could random chance, an elastic combustion, or a thermonuclear chain reaction within a pool of amino acids KNOW that that would happen?
On another issue: how could evolution know the refraction of light? How could evolution know what our eyes could see? That's not adaption my friend. I hear in evolution we're supposed to take greater leaps FORWARD. If so, how come in age, we all slow down? How come we experience entropic effects? Because of our advancement towards the Aryan eugenic? What?
How did our atmosphere know what humans liked? Did our atmosphere, too, evolve to suit our needs? Do the osteoclasts and osteoblasts evolutionarily know where the bones are?
So.....if evolution is right, and this is all great luck, my life means nothing. I can better human life, but that would all be by luck. I might as well go out and kill myself and get all my friends to do it, too, because we're nothing but luck. That's a great way to look at man.
Our credit was never ours. Why give it up to the bearded dude? Your worldview, Damar, is very secular, and it doesn't surprise me a bit. Half the world thinks how you do: it's all ours, no one else's glory. I put myself here. In the Bible, there is an account of one man, named Nebuchadnezzer. I don't know if we've ever proven his existence, or must refer to the Bible to know about him, but this dude looked at his kingdom and said: "Look at what I have done." And then God cast him out of his kingdom and made him like an animal for seven years until he gave God the glory. That's man's credit.
Or, to put it in a nicer way: man made every schism to date. We have no credit but to ourselves. We cannot attribute this war but to ourselves. We cannot blame anyone else. The evilness in man can be blamed on no one else. That brings to mind a hopeless existence. Sure, we can make a new toaster oven, or invent a cool laser beam, or make ICBMs, and rule countries, but look at the evilness of man. Or is that, too, all just luck? Crimes? Law? Consequences? Luck?
Or, just for instance, let's look at something else: we were designed. We were made. Chance had nothing to do with us. Chance did not make the Golden Gate Bridge. But chance made man? That's iffy.
Then say the designer liked us. Then say something bad happened that put a kink in man's genetic perfection, and in a few thousand years, sent him spiraling down into what we are today. So hard to contemplate?
 
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But it is no more divine than my computers spitting out query results when I run a few lines of T-SQL against a database. It's analysis. It's chemistry. And it's all YOU.

Now, you can always choose to write the enlightenment to the bearded man in the clouds, but why give up the credit when it's due to YOU?..

That's what Uncle Damar has trouble getting his geriatric brain around...

Damar, I have a feeling you think too highly of yourself.
Rolling out the carpet, uncle damar, geriatric brain?
If I may ask, how old are you.

Independence is something I stuggle with, I'm not keen on reliance. But apart from my success whether it be making a living or completing the current post production, I have to take into account the fact that our universe is balanced on a razor's edge. The ratio of this universe being a life sustaining to a life prohibiting is 1: an astronomical number I can't type out for you and this ratio is being regulated every second of our lives. So sure, I can pat myself on the back for re-compiling the kernel on my system properly but also acknowledge the fact I am dependent of this universe to do so.
 
<looks confused>

So what you're saying is that our Genetic code is degenerating at SUCH a speed that we got from Methuslah to 75 year life expectancy in a couple of thousand years - yet nothing measurable is happening to our genetic code now?

Way to prove your point. Or mine, should I say?
smile.gif


I'd be the first to admit that Archaeology doesn't have all the answers - but even they can do better than that!
 
Firstly, how old I am is nobody's thrice-rotten business. For all intents and purposes I'm older than the hills. I am also an immature teenager high on testosterone, and a middle-aged professional who succeeded and takes pride in it, and half a dozen more things, and maybe I belong in a sanitarium, but I'm not there, right?

Secondly, I *DO* think highly of myself, and believe that I earned every ounce of pride I take in what I did and do. I'm THAT DAMM GOOD, or maybe I'm just a conceited ####### with nothing to show for my panache, but you'll never know what I am really.

Thirdly, about improbable situations. I've seen more than I could count. When someone gets shot a day before he's discharged, that's an improbable situation. When you take one of four toll gates and a big rig slams into the one next to you, that's improbable situation. But to me it's all a roll of cosmic dice. I live today, I might die tomorrow. I've no regrets or fears plaguing me. My secular view awards me the comfort of realization that when I die, it's all over...

Gotta go now, more later.
 
A couple thousand? Just a few more, anywhere from 6 to 10 thousand. There's something to our genetic degernation: it's caused by somethign called sin. I will say it again, I never get tired of it: "The wages of sin is death" Even back then in the primitive times before science was really encouraged, people knew the effects of sin, but couldn't really walk into their stone house, whip out their electrophoresis machines, gel a sample, and check out the DNA strands, and tell us their genetic problems and heredity. But they knew we were dying thanks to sin.
Ehh, Eon, my point neglected to mention the fact that God limited us to around seventy years. Now, don't jump up and down in glee and point out the octagenarians and the rare centenarians as disproving God. No doubt you notice that most people these days don't live past sixty or seventy...Coincidence? I think not.
Is it so hard to contemplate? When do the results of inbreeding show? Around the sixth or so generation? What happens in inbreeding? Bad stuff, right? Genetic screwups, right? What did man do in the beginning? Inbreed, right? If you noticed, the ages began to drop from the 800 to 900 range to 950 with Noah, to about 175 with Abraham and 127 with his first wife Sarah to 137 with Ishmael! Geez. That's a drastic drop.
As to you Damar, do you consider it pure luck that you were born? If so, then you have no credit due to yourself. It was your parents' choice that brought you bawling into this world. So, to sum up your entire existence: you are worthless exempt from your parents, and to sum up their worth, according to your worldview, they are as valuable as my neighbor's cat's dung without their parents, and ultimately that goes straight up to the beginning of our heritage, which, also, was just pure luck...you're nothing in your worldview.
Your end will come, and I doubt you'll be unprepared for the end. You've so far lived your life as you've related to me so perfectly for yourself that the end is nothing than just bad luck, so that when you shut your eyes, that's the end. Have fun.
 
And, of course, as our genetic pool widened you saw the life expectancy return towards nominal for our genome?

Oh no - wait THAT'S wrong too, isn't it?

Never mind the fact that scientists have SEEN the death trigger that we're all born with, Such and such a number of cell replications and the cell dies. No sign anywhere that this number got smaller due to inbreeding.

Eon
 
Inbreeding played an attribute to the supply of life in the beginning, and that attributed many flaws into the genetic system.
But I think the most affecting factor ni our life span is this: the atmospheric and world change that the Flood brought with it. Check out even the Sumerian King List which basically gives the records of so many kings, from the beginning to the writer's time. ALL the kings show insane amounts of lifespan, into the thousands, which, you know, goes along with the Biblical accounts of the ages of say, Adam and his descendants, at least six of them over nine hundred years. Then after a recorded flood that their deities made, the kings' lifespans were drastically shortened, even to 126 for our Uruk warrior king Gilgamesh.
To my next point, we must begin with the Sumerian deities: they freaked over the noise the humans were making below them, and thus decided to wipe them out with, gasp, a flood. So Ea, being the deity of wisdom and all, decided to warn Atrahasis about it and to save himself by making a boat and to save animals and the boat's craftsman, so he tears his house down and makes a boat out of it, in which he saves animals and the craftsmen of the boat. So after a week of rain, the gods subside their wrath, because they are fed by the people's sacrifices.
Wowza! God wiped us out for wickedness, and saved those who were righteous. The Sumerian gods wiped out the humans for their noise, but saved some for service. The parallels are eery.
And then, according to both texts, our lives were shortened...related? I think so.
I think our lifespans were significantly longer pre-Flood. Obviously, so do the Aztecs, and the Aztecs also think that a man came on a boat during a great flood that wiped out the world, and he gave life back to the world. Hrmm. The Aztecs, the Babylonians, AND the Hebrews all agree, along with about 2000+ other cultures. This is getting scary.
Most of these cultures all agree that after these great devastating waters, the years of man went down. Maybe due to atmosphere? That cloud canopy, protecting from harmful sun rays, a misty atmospheric irrigator, near-direct genetic descendence from the first man, and a life span of 900 years, are all connected. Something catastrophic completely changed what man was used to. Even God said prior the Flood, "My Spirit will not contend with man forever." Something was going to happen to alter this near-millennial age limit set to his people. Something happened.
 
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