Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I also notice when " science lovers" refuse to engage in studies on racial intelligence and can't bring themselves to admit being gay is probably a choice even though evolution and natural selection would logically dictate it.

Everybody has a God. Everybody worships something... Their body, sex. , alchohol , relationships , work, hobbies , their appearance , politics. There is a hole in people meant for God that will never be satisfied by the things of this world . I notice it and it makes me believe. On the deathbed , it is your only hope... Why not believe? ... There is no downside , not to believe is stupid and suicidal.

This is an excellent argument for belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What's the downside? Not to believe in Him is stupid and suicidal.

Bah! You know nothing. In fact, to anyone but the most stubbornly self-destructive human, it is an argument for belief in Neptune. Sure, you may say to yourself that He may not exist. And that's fine, but what if He does? There is no downside, not to believe is stupid and suicidal.

Not the PP, but there is a downside - several, in fact. I can't force myself to belief in Jesus or Allah or Yahweh, any more than I can't force myself to believe in Amenhotep, Zoraster, and Zeus. My heart will never be in it. It's all the same to me.

Additionally, which faith or god do I choose to believe in? They have many similarities, but differences in the details. Do I choose the one that tells me to not touch my husband while I'm on my period, or the one that tells me not to pray when I'm on my period? Or the one that tells me to engage in spiritual cannibalism of my god? How do I choose? No matter what I choose, I can still be wrong - I can still pick the "wrong" one.

The most important thing for me is to have integrity, have sincere belief, and make good on my word. So I believe in being kind, honest, helpful, fair, loving, supportive, and generous. To me, those are the most righteous things to believe in - if you want to call those beliefs "suicidal" and "stupid," well then, we are too different to carry on further in this discussion.

Anonymous wrote:>No. Only if they don't impede reproduction as much as not getting a boner for a female.
I get the simplistic argument that being gay might make your genes less likely to be passed on --- that makes sense to me (even though gay people do have kids all the time, and probably did more so throughout human history). But this is not really about what you or I think make sense, or the stories we can invent to explain the facts. The fact is that many researchers have checked the DNA of people who identify as gay and those who identify as straight, and objectively they have found a very strong correlation between that identification and certain genes. They have also found a tendency for gay and straight identification to run in families. This is not a matter of opinion, it just is. Now, we can invent theories to try to explain this objective reality, but whatever else is true, this finding is inconsistent with the idea championed by homophobes that people "choose" to be gay.

a new study, published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, found a correlation between gay men and their mothers and maternal aunts, who are prone to have significantly more children compared to the maternal relatives of straight men.

Researchers led by Andrea Camperio Ciani, from the University of Padova in Italy, say that the findings of the link between homosexuality and female fertility strongly support the "balancing selection hypothesis," which suggests that a gene which causes homosexuality also leads to high fecundity or reproduction among their female relatives.

The team noted that the "gay man gene" may not get passed down directly, but instead survive through the generations through future generations making their male inheritors gay.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I also notice when " science lovers" refuse to engage in studies on racial intelligence and can't bring themselves to admit being gay is probably a choice even though evolution and natural selection would logically dictate it.

Everybody has a God. Everybody worships something... Their body, sex. , alchohol , relationships , work, hobbies , their appearance , politics. There is a hole in people meant for God that will never be satisfied by the things of this world . I notice it and it makes me believe. On the deathbed , it is your only hope... Why not believe? ... There is no downside , not to believe is stupid and suicidal.

This is an excellent argument for belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What's the downside? Not to believe in Him is stupid and suicidal.

Bah! You know nothing. In fact, to anyone but the most stubbornly self-destructive human, it is an argument for belief in Neptune. Sure, you may say to yourself that He may not exist. And that's fine, but what if He does? There is no downside, not to believe is stupid and suicidal.

Not the PP, but there is a downside - several, in fact. I can't force myself to belief in Jesus or Allah or Yahweh, any more than I can't force myself to believe in Amenhotep, Zoraster, and Zeus. My heart will never be in it. It's all the same to me.

Additionally, which faith or god do I choose to believe in? They have many similarities, but differences in the details. Do I choose the one that tells me to not touch my husband while I'm on my period, or the one that tells me not to pray when I'm on my period? Or the one that tells me to engage in spiritual cannibalism of my god? How do I choose? No matter what I choose, I can still be wrong - I can still pick the "wrong" one.

The most important thing for me is to have integrity, have sincere belief, and make good on my word. So I believe in being kind, honest, helpful, fair, loving, supportive, and generous. To me, those are the most righteous things to believe in - if you want to call those beliefs "suicidal" and "stupid," well then, we are too different to carry on further in this discussion.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I also notice when " science lovers" refuse to engage in studies on racial intelligence and can't bring themselves to admit being gay is probably a choice even though evolution and natural selection would logically dictate it.

Everybody has a God. Everybody worships something... Their body, sex. , alchohol , relationships , work, hobbies , their appearance , politics. There is a hole in people meant for God that will never be satisfied by the things of this world . I notice it and it makes me believe. On the deathbed , it is your only hope... Why not believe? ... There is no downside , not to believe is stupid and suicidal.

This is an excellent argument for belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What's the downside? Not to believe in Him is stupid and suicidal.

Bah! You know nothing. In fact, to anyone but the most stubbornly self-destructive human, it is an argument for belief in Neptune. Sure, you may say to yourself that He may not exist. And that's fine, but what if He does? There is no downside, not to believe is stupid and suicidal.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I also notice when " science lovers" refuse to engage in studies on racial intelligence and can't bring themselves to admit being gay is probably a choice even though evolution and natural selection would logically dictate it.

Everybody has a God. Everybody worships something... Their body, sex. , alchohol , relationships , work, hobbies , their appearance , politics. There is a hole in people meant for God that will never be satisfied by the things of this world . I notice it and it makes me believe. On the deathbed , it is your only hope... Why not believe? ... There is no downside , not to believe is stupid and suicidal.

This is an excellent argument for belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What's the downside? Not to believe in Him is stupid and suicidal.

Anonymous wrote:I also notice when " science lovers" refuse to engage in studies on racial intelligence and can't bring themselves to admit being gay is probably a choice even though evolution and natural selection would logically dictate it.

Everybody has a God. Everybody worships something... Their body, sex. , alchohol , relationships , work, hobbies , their appearance , politics. There is a hole in people meant for God that will never be satisfied by the things of this world . I notice it and it makes me believe. On the deathbed , it is your only hope... Why not believe? ... There is no downside , not to believe is stupid and suicidal.

Anonymous wrote:>Nice try but the gay trait to not reproduce it the first one discarded right
>before gills on land. Lol. So many words .. So little intelligence.
So you believe that anything that has a genetic cause must be adaptive in order to be passed on? You do realize that by that logic genetic diseases would not immediately be "discarded", right? Also, it sounds like you believe that fish are gay. Can you explain that?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I also notice when " science lovers" refuse to engage in studies on racial intelligence and can't bring themselves to admit being gay is probably a choice even though evolution and natural selection would logically dictate it.

Everybody has a God. Everybody worships something... Their body, sex. , alchohol , relationships , work, hobbies , their appearance , politics. There is a hole in people meant for God that will never be satisfied by the things of this world . I notice it and it makes me believe. On the deathbed , it is your only hope... Why not believe? ... There is no downside , not to believe is stupid and suicidal.

I assume this is trolling, but in case it's not...

>I also notice when " science lovers" refuse to engage in studies on racial intelligence
I think you confuse rejecting certain racist ideas with being unwilling to look at race as a factor in social science. Much popular literature on "racial intelligence" is politically driven, racist claptrap. On the other hand, real science studies race/ethnicity/SES in all kinds of contexts from educational outcomes to work achievement to medical issues and acknowledges that there are all kinds of issues with the ideas both of "race" and of precisely defining "intelligence." And, how does this relate to religion?

>can't bring themselves to admit being gay is probably a choice
Science has actually found a very strong genetic component to being gay or straight. Did you choose to be straight? I did not --- it's just who I am. I think that gay people sometimes choose to try to deny who they are and live as straight people (and I guess the opposite is possible too), but I think that often doesn't go well --- they end up having to leave congress after being arrested in a bathroom or from their ministry after being caught with a male prostitute. And again, how does this relate to religion?

>Everybody has a God.
I don't.

>There is a hole in people meant for God that will never be satisfied by the things of this world .
I'm glad that you can find comfort in your faith, but please don't assume that everyone else shares your experience. I do quite well without believing things for which I find no convincing evidence, whether it be Wicca, Zoroastrianism (sp?), Voodoo, crystals or the divinity of Jesus. And I do even better when other people don't try to impose their beliefs or their need for some comfort from those beliefs on me.

>Why not believe? ... There is no downside
The question is, why should I believe your particular myth? I'm guessing that you would find the beliefs of Wicca unconvincing, and that you don't believe them. Your rejection of those beliefs --- because you have seen no convincing evidence that they are true --- is just like my lack of belief in your God. I don't particularly feel strongly about it or need for you to agree with me, I just find it utterly unconvincing --- like stories from the Bagavad Gita, the Quran or Paul Bunyan. It's not really a very important question for me --- just like whether or not you believe in Ganesh is not important for you. It only becomes important when you or your co-religionists want to make laws or spend my tax money based on your beliefs in God or Allah or Shiva or Zeus the Goddess.