Discovery Channel Guy
 

http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/09/02/....html?hpt=Sbin

It's the ultimate arrogance of mankind to think that out of all that stuff out there, we're the only ones and we're somehow special. In the big picture, our dinky little solar system isn't even anything special.

I agree with your statement. For me, because I believe it is not an indication that I think "we're the only one and we're somehow special." I am not posting this in the spirit of "one upping" you are trying to change your belief system. I am trying to convey that although we may not share the same belief system about a God existing, it does not rule out the possibility that we do hold similar beliefs in all of this.

There's the 3 cops in Pittsburgh. We recently had some guy get in to a shootout with the Oakland PD while on his way to attack the Tides Foundation in SF. I'm sure that there are plenty more.

It's a lot, but expected. The nutters come out of the woodwork every time a Democrat moves in to the White House, and now that the man there isn't white, it's much worse than usual. What pisses me off is that the media and the authorities refuse to call these people terrorists.

I'll not take it in the spirit of "one upping" :) Completely outside of the scope of religion, I've never understood why the prevailing assumption is "we're the only ones until we can prove otherwise" instead of "there's gotta be others, let's go find them".

I heard this the other day and thought it was interesting.

Is Believing In God Evolutionarily Advantageous?

These supernatural agents, Bering adds, might have very different names. What some call God, others call Karma. There are literally thousands of names, but according to Bering they all have the same effect.

"Whether it's a dead ancestor or God, whatever supernatural agent it is, if you think they're watching you, your behavior is going to be affected," he says.

.......

Why would the human brain have evolved to work in that way?

For Bering, and some of his friends, the answer to that question has everything to do with what he discovered in his lab — the way the kids and adults stopped cheating as soon as they thought a supernatural being might be watching them. Through the lens of evolution then, a belief in God serves a very important purpose: Religious belief set us on the path to modern life by stopping cheaters and promoting the social good.

At least not until the electric company payment is 60 days late, anyway *wink*

The ACLU shows activity way up. The Secret Service reports record level threats. It hasn't been this bad in modern times.

*cough bullshit cough* Churches are stuffed to the gills with folks who pray on Sunday and then go out and hate, extort, abuse, lie, cheat, etc. I'd bet that pretty much all of those CEOs that laid off tons of folks and then gave themselves big pay raises have a religious belief. Glenn Beck spouts god and lies in the same sentence. It takes about two minutes of looking at the history of the Catholic church to see the destruction caused by people with those beliefs. I've spent a lot of time online arguing with folks who spout god and love and compassion and stuff but then show an incredible lack of compassion for anyone who doesn't live up to their behavioral standards.

If there were one thing that I wish I could communicate to everyone on the planet it would be this: all that we hold dear, all that we are so rightfully impressed with ourselves for, is not even a blink of an eye in the life of the universe. To give you a sense of perspective (I have one of those history of the universe in a year posters in my home office but I'm not at home while writing this so I'm working off of memory):

If the Universe begins on January 1, the Milky Way forms in March, our Sun and the planets form in August, the earliest life shows up in September and stays single-celled until November, vertebrates and land-based plants show up around mid-December, dinosaurs show up right around Christmas eve, mammals show up Christmas day, birds show up a couple of days after that. A couple of days before the end of the year, dinosaurs disappear from the planet. Around mid-morning of the last day of the year apes (us, chimps, bonobos, orangutans) show up. Hominids hit on the trick of walking upright between 9 and 10 on the 31st. About five minutes before the end of the year anatomically (but not behaviorially) modern humans show up. With about 20 seconds left in the year, agriculture and writing are invented. With about 10 seconds left in the year, the Pyramids are built in Egypt. One second before the end of the year, Columbus sails from Spain.

The last 500 years you need an Olympic quality stopwatch in order to track the time. The last 100 years you need an atomic clock because no stopwatch is accurate to within hundreds of thousandths or millionths of a second.

I love that image because it puts us in perspective. We are a very brief species--whose tenure on this planet is only measured in tens of thousands of years--living on an ordinary rocky planet, orbiting a perfectly pedestrian yellow-dwarf star, at the outer edge of an absolutely ordinary spiral galaxy. That said, we are also the legatees of an unbroken lineage going back to about half-a-billion years after the planet formed.

Cheers
Aj

this just seems really ugly to me. :/

which part?

I find the entire post pretty hateful really. My mom goes to church, my brother goes to church, my grandparents go to church, some of my friends go to church, I occasionally go to church (though I'm not Christian), I grew up going to church, my ex husband goes to church, my coworkers go to church, some people I very much admire go to church - and none of those people who go to church deserve to be painted as the most horrible people who also go to church. There are definitely people who "hate, extort, abuse, lie, cheat, etc." who also go to church, and there are people who do that without going to church too. The Christians I know are not monsters.

Don't get me wrong - I am extremely bothered by the bad things churches and individual Christians do and have done - but I think it's extremely inaccurate and insulting to paint all Christians(?) or people of faith with the same broad and ugly brush. Also, since we're in a community that does comprise quite a few Christians and those who love them, it just seems like a very attacking and community-dividing stance to take.

Active minds delay dementia but speed decline once it hits

Poring over crossword puzzles, reading and listening to tunes may slow or delay brain decline at first, but being mentally active might speed up dementia once it hits, new research suggests.

"The person who has had a more mentally stimulating lifestyle may have more signs of disease in his brain, but the brain has been able to compensate for it better," says study author Robert Wilson, professor of neurological sciences and behavioral sciences at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center, whose research appears in Neurology this week.

The 12-year study evaluated mental activities of 1,157 people 65 years or older without dementia at the start. Participants were assessed at baseline, and then for Alzheimer's at the six-year mark. Then, every three years, they answered questions about how often they participated in activities such as listening to the radio, reading, playing games and going to a museum. They were rated on a five-point cognitive activity scale. The more often people participated in mentally stimulating exercises, the more points they tallied.

The study found that the rate of cognitive decline in people without dementia was reduced by 52% for each point on the cognitive activity scale. For those with Alzheimer's, however, the average rate of decline per year increased by 42% for each point on the cognitive activity scale.

"The rationale the authors are using is somewhat similar to what people call 'cognitive reserve,' " says Ron Peterson, director of Mayo Clinic's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.

He says the theory is that in the active mind, the brain creates new neural pathways when damage occurs to circumvent the problems.

Alzheimer's expert Steven DeKosky, dean of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, uses this metaphor: The active brain is like a piece of good wood that's been varnished and revarnished over the years. The inactive brain has fewer coats or lower-quality varnish, he says.

"You don't get symptomatic until you sand down to the bare wood," DeKosky says.

Wilson says researchers don't fully understand why active-minded people suffer such a rapid decline once they develop Alzheimer's, but the study shows the advantages of using your brain because of the early benefits.

That the active-minded person spends less total time in a cognitively disabled and demented state is "a universal good thing," Wilson says. "It's good for the affected person, good for their family and friends and good for our public health system."

Ut oh! Something I suspected all along. I live in my head. Hey, I think you should post this over in the Bromosexual thread. Mister Bent and EzeeTiger could give their Bromosexual analysis of this piece. I think theirs is a unique perspective that deserves to be widely read and discussed. Even better, they are funny.