Demons/ghosts and religion

[jschild]

Originally Posted by DrRansom

Coming from a family with a good portion of Jewish family members, I must respectfully disagree with the bolded statement. I agree with the rest of what you said though. Hitler hated most people that disagreed him. Pacifist Christians, gays, political opponents, but he did persecute just one religion more emphatically than any other group.

What I said was indeed overall correct. He was anti-semitic. They were anti-Jewish, yes, but they were not anti-religion. They were big proponents of their own twisted version of Christianity. I guess the most accurate statement would be the Nazi's were pro-Christian and anti-all other religions.

[DrRansom]

Originally Posted by delphic

Ransom -
Just because a political ideology claims to be based on science does not make it true. ...

We're not in disagreement to that my friend. It just highlights the point evil men will use whatever "great thinker" (as Marx inspires the USSR and PRC, and Nietzsche inspires the Third Reich) or religion to kill Christians, Jews, atheists and anyone that opposes their agenda.

To blame atheists, Christians, scientists, thinkers and Jews (or any subset of good-faith pursuants of truth) is to promote the same group-think, witch-hunting mindset that we all agree is evil. And more pertinently, this kind of thinking doesn't help you or I come to any helpful resolution in a discussion, it just enflames more counter-witch-hunting. Agreed?

[DrRansom]

Originally Posted by jschild

I guess the most accurate statement would be the Nazi's were pro-Christian and anti-all other religions.

Whoa.. speedy typer. see my edit. And well said. Although "Christian" is a broad stretch as many Christians were also killed for when their belief contradicted the man.

[jschild]

Originally Posted by DrRansom

Whoa.. speedy typer. see my edit. And well said. Although "Christian" is a broad stretch as many Christians were also killed for when their belief contradicted the man.

The main difference here is that they fully considered themselves to be full and proper Christians - those Christians they killed were not killed because they were Christian but because they opposed them. That they were Christian was irrelevant to Nazi's (sadly blind to the reason that they opposed them because of there convictions in their belief of Christ).

EDIT: If you are tired btw, forget this thread tonight and enjoy yourself or get some rest. This isn't the best way to relax after a long hard day

[DrRansom]

Originally Posted by jschild

The main difference here is that they fully considered themselves to be full and proper Christians - those Christians they killed were not killed because they were Christian but because they opposed them. That they were Christian was irrelevant to Nazi's (sadly blind to the reason that they opposed them because of there convictions in their belief of Christ).

Hitler was not a born again Christian. He had been a nominal Roman Catholic with tolerance to Protestantism for as long as he could milk it politically. Eventually he tried to create his own religion using Jesus' name but abandoning most Christian teachings in an attempt to manipulate the religious folks but when it did not work as he hoped he abandoned it.

Most revealing quote and I believe the most honest one to his personal beliefs: "We do not want any other god than Germany itself. It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for Germany." - Adolf Hitler

Regardless, he would have promoted any philosophy that helped him retain power. I don't fault Nietzsche or the Pope for that. Evil people use whatever they can.

[DrRansom]

Originally Posted by jschild

EDIT: If you are tired btw, forget this thread tonight and enjoy yourself or get some rest. This isn't the best way to relax after a long hard day

Haha.. man. You win. My wife is like... what are you doing? I'm like.. SOMEONE on teh Internets is Rong!

Gnight. Nice chatting with ya.

[jschild]

Night!

[Wolfman18]

I have missed a lot, still need to type up some stuff that I have on the Israelites and Egyptian history... but I ran across this link and thought that there are a lot of people in this thread interested in evolution/origins.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0609092055.htm

"We aren't suggesting that dinosaurs and birds may not have had a common ancestor somewhere in the distant past," Quick said. "That's quite possible and is routinely found in evolution. It just seems pretty clear now that birds were evolving all along on their own and did not descend directly from the theropod dinosaurs, which lived many millions of years later."

"The implication, the researchers said, is that birds almost certainly did not descend from theropod dinosaurs, such as tyrannosaurus or allosaurus. The findings add to a growing body of evidence in the past two decades that challenge some of the most widely-held beliefs about animal evolution.

"For one thing, birds are found earlier in the fossil record than the dinosaurs they are supposed to have descended from," Ruben said. "That's a pretty serious problem, and there are other inconsistencies with the bird-from-dinosaur theories.

"But one of the primary reasons many scientists kept pointing to birds as having descended from dinosaurs was similarities in their lungs," Ruben said. "However, theropod dinosaurs had a moving femur and therefore could not have had a lung that worked like that in birds. Their abdominal air sac, if they had one, would have collapsed. That undercuts a critical piece of supporting evidence for the dinosaur-bird link.

"A velociraptor did not just sprout feathers at some point and fly off into the sunset," Ruben said.

The newest findings, the researchers said, are more consistent with birds having evolved separately from dinosaurs and developing their own unique characteristics, including feathers, wings and a unique lung and locomotion system.

There are some similarities between birds and dinosaurs, and it is possible, they said, that birds and dinosaurs may have shared a common ancestor, such as the small, reptilian "thecodonts," which may then have evolved on separate evolutionary paths into birds, crocodiles and dinosaurs. The lung structure and physiology of crocodiles, in fact, is much more similar to dinosaurs than it is to birds."

[jschild]

Actually, many people have a problem with that piece of work...

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dino...bird-brouhaha/

The chicken on the table, the pigeon on the street, the parrot in the zoo: all of them are living descendants of dinosaurs. Over the past ten years a flood of fossil evidence, from evidence of bird-like breathing apparatus to remnants of pigments in preserved feathers, has confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt that birds are dinosaurs. Tyrannosaurus and a turkey have more in common with each other than either does with a crocodile or lizard.

But some scientists are not pleased with this consensus. Way back in the 1920s it was thought that birds and dinosaurs were independent offshoots of a more ancient common stock. This hypothesis eventually was tossed out, but some researchers still believe it is true. This week in the journal PNAS, for example, scientist John Ruben says not only that birds evolved independently of dinosaurs, but that some creatures we now call dinosaurs were actually descendants of early birds.

While Ruben’s article has been much ballyhooed by media outlets, it is actually only a commentary, or the equivalent of an opinion piece. In it Ruben states that the discovery of the feathered Deinonychus-relative Microraptor refutes the idea that birds evolved from feathered dinosaurs, as Microraptor appears to have been adapted to jumping out of trees to glide. Other dinosaur specialists have previously hypothesized that flight evolved in dinosaurs that ran and jumped off the ground. If creatures such as Microraptor represent how flight evolved, then, dinosaurs that lived on the ground would either become irrelevant to understanding bird origins or, as Ruben argues, would have to be considered birds that lost their ability to fly.

Despite the credulous repetition of this story, however, Ruben’s argument is cut down by several flaws. The first problem is that we cannot be sure that Microraptor is a good example of how flight evolved. By the time it lived, 120 million years ago, there had been birds for millions of years, and it lived at the same time as early birds like Confuciusornis. Combined with what we know about its close relatives, it appears that Microraptor was a unique kind of specialized raptor that independently evolved the ability to glide, and perhaps even fly. Whether its mode of gliding can inform us about how birds evolved flight will depend upon which group of feathered dinosaurs turns out to be most closely related to the first birds (which may be strange forms like Epidexipteryx).

Secondly, the “trees down” versus “ground up” debate about the origin of flight is no longer useful in addressing the evolution of birds. So many feathered dinosaurs have been found, and continue to be discovered, that paleontologists are continually having to reassess ideas about how the first birds evolved. Perhaps some of the old hypotheses will turn out to be correct, or perhaps flight evolved in a way we did not expect, but framing things in terms of two mutually-exclusive hypotheses hinders discussion over avian origins rather than helps it.

Furthermore, there is no compelling reason to regard dinosaurs such as Velociraptor as flightless birds. This proposal has often been made by critics of the “dinosaur-bird” connection in order to made sense of the many feathered dinosaurs that have been found. It is a sort of taxonomic reshuffling that removes anything bird-like away from dinosaurs despite all the characteristics these animals have in common with other dinosaurs.

Simply put, Ruben’s hypothesis does not stand up to scrutiny, but what I find even more frustrating is the repetition of such fantastic claims by news outlets. In this increasingly fragmented media landscape, knowledgeable science writers who recognize a fishy story when they see one are getting outnumbered. More often, websites and newspapers simply reprint press releases issued by universities and museums (science writers call this “churnalism”), and this policy sometimes lets questionable science slip through the cracks.

What is even more interesting is that all that he wrote is not from the study at all, but the commentary, which is odd. If that was the findings you would think they would have put that in the actual study.

And more....

In recent years Ruben and colleagues have made a career of publishing papers in which they assert that 'birds cannot be dinosaurs because of [whatever, blah blah blah]'. Quick & Ruben (2009) assert that non-avian theropods were fundamentally different in abdominal morphology from extant birds, and they hypothesise (note: hypothesise) that the sub-horizontal avian femur and its associated musculature might be required to prevent collapse of the lateral abdominal wall: non-avian theropods evidently moved their femora a lot during normal locomotion, and hence, say Quick & Ruben, could not have had abdominal air sacs. All of this is extremely questionable or just flat-out wrong (sternal movement etc. almost certainly was present in non-avian theropods, the 'mobile thigh inhibits abdominal air sacs' just doesn't make any sense, and the authors ignore evidence for abdominal pneumaticity in non-avian saurischians): if the authors have set out to demonstrate anything, it is that evolution cannot happen.

As for James & Pourtless (2009): these authors use cladistics to test the hypothesis that birds are deeply nested within coelurosaurian theropods, and argue that they use an unbiased approach where non-dinosaurian archosaurs and other reptiles are included too (they include Longisquama among archosaurs for some reason, and even imply that it's a proto-bird [p. 37]). The paper is full of really weird claims (e.g., that theropods can only be diagnosed by their intramandibular joint) and does a lot of stuff that's bound to skew the results: they coded all characters of disputed homology as 'unknown' (p. 14), for example (and, as usual among those disputing the theropod affinities of birds, they ignore evidence showing that the disputes about homology are erroneous anyway). This is wrong because it makes an a priori assumption about homology, and it introduces loads of new question marks in the matrix for character states where we do have data. Furthermore, the choice of taxa is weird: it's wrong to analyse theropods and other archosaurs without including at least some non-theropod dinosaurs. Finally, the trees they generated are entirely uninformative (they are mostly polytomies) and don't provide support for any hypothesis, so quite how the authors can say that they found weaknesses in the 'birds are theropods' hypothesis is really not apparent. As an impartial test of archosaur phylogeny, this study fails miserably.

Indeed, any real scientist does not release major findings like this in commentary's and press releases. You actually submit a study, like the one he had a commentary on, except the commentary wasn't about that. It reeks of publicity seeking.

Also, his comment about birds not being knee runners is false - Re: Ostriches.

This series of posts rip it pretty hard as well.

http://dml.cmnh.org/2009Jun/msg00066.html

A nice dissecting of its logical flaws and technical flaws...

Many point out (among many other flaws) what we discussed earlier... The argument of the paper goes somewhat like:

Birds have abdominal air sacks that are useful for flight.

Theropod dinosaurs could not have had abdominal air sacks, because of the flexibility of their femur.

Therefore, birds could not have evolved from theropod dinosaurs.


Now, regardless of whether the argument is sound (and it's not, since it ignores many other possibilities and evidence), The paper proceeds to effectively negate it: They admit that avian lung sacks appeared late in Aves, and the earliest birds didn't have them! If birds themselves did not have the feature early on, then how does its -supposed- abscence in theropod dinosaurs make it impossible for birds to have evolved from them?

The paper just doesn't make sense.

BTW, a commenter points out that, for the comparison between a bird skeleton and a theropod skeleton, the paper uses a 1916 reconstruction of T.Rex! Apparently one of those where it was almost erect, and dragged its tail?

And finally, a very nice article dealing with all the issues from the commentary. Indeed, if you read anything, this is what you need to read.

http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzool..._dinosaurs.php

EDIT: The best logic fail however, is this....

I still have trouble understanding how they can claim to the press that birds couldn't have evolved from theropods, since the latter did not (supposedly) have abdominal air sacks... And also claim that abdominal air sacks were not present even in early birds, up to the late Cretaceous.

[Wolfman18]

Thanks JS.

[jschild]

Originally Posted by Wolfman18

Thanks JS.

I've learned one thing over the years and that is Science Journalism sucks. Any publicity hound can say they've made Cold Fusion, yet they won't publish the study in a peer reviewed journal.

Essentially, beware of major claims of any kind if they say they'd overturned entire paradigms, press releases, pushing their new book (full of claims they never bothered to put up for peer review in a scientific journal), etc.

Also beware of any single study, especially if it is a small one (think Andrew Wakefield and the vaccines cause autism BS).

Paradigms can be overturned, studies can upheave conventional thought, but only if they can stand up to scrutiny and have results that can be reproduced. It's a challenge to tell the junk from the good - all I can really recommend is to research what everyone is saying in that field, what critiques are being leveled against it and why. Even then, I'll admit, its hard to tell - most of the time, you just have to wait for more studies and more evidence to determine what is most likely the correct (or more correct) theory.

[SuperflyTNT]

John, you have to consider that some people (like yours truly) don't really care about the "standard way of doing things". For instance, these guys in Italy, if they have what they say they have (a NiH>Cu convertor) and they really are running these powerplants in series in a factory as they say they are, it doesn't matter if its reviewed. Maybe they're just not good enough physicists to explain it, but it works on a fluke...

At the end of the day, many incredibly important inventions were discovered on accident, and many others we don't understand how they work, even today. Look at anasthesia...we have NO IDEA why it does what it does. Many drugs we use on an ongoing basis work, but we have no idea how the mechanism works.

So, in short, you have to realize that there are reasons why people don't want to play ball with "the establishment". It doesn't mean they're wrong.