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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Martini who wrote (17794)	6/20/1998 4:15:00 PM
From: Father Terrence	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 39621

Don: Most supposedly christian morals are actually very immoral. Christianity is based on anti-life which is the most supremely immoral thing a life form can follow. It also promotes altruism, another evil, and in many cases leans towards socialism, yet another evil that must be destroyed. Christianity's ethics and morals -- based on tradition and mysticism -- are like the Hydra, a head seething with vipers waiting to strike out and poison a rational mind. Evolution is not my religion -- retract that because it is a lie, unless you want it to be known that you are a christian liar. I follow no religion because it is all mysticism. Objective thought and rational reasoning are the basis for my philosophy, ethics and morals -- which are of a much higher standard than any individual's who follows any of the world's major religions. FT

To: Don Martini who wrote (17794)	6/21/1998 4:13:00 AM
From: Chuzzlewit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 39621

Don, you have some serious problems with your understanding of science. Scientists routinely admit that they do not understand things. Seventy five years ago science was baffled at the identity of the genetic substance. Fifty years geneticists were ignorant of the mechanism for replication of genetic material, forty years ago they were stymied at understanding the genetic code. We add to our knowledge in small steps. The first step in science is problem definition. The mechanisms behind the origin of life are thorny. Admissions of ignorance are not weaknesses. They are strengths. Life obviously had an origin, whether divine or otherwise, and professing ignorance about its details is a necessary first toward understanding. You make some basic biochemistry errors. There is no problem in linking amino acids together to form dipeptides, and they do not rapidly break down in aqueous solution as you suggest. In fact they are quite stable. Thermodynamics makes no such prediction about the hydrolysis of peptides. Gelatin and human hair are good case studies for you you. Provided that they are free of bacterial contamination these proteins (which are large polypeptides) are indefinitely stable. Evolution is not a religion. It has no dogma. That's like saying that gravity or disease is a religion. Evolution is an observed fact, much like an apple falling from a tree. The history of science is replete with theories of evolution (explanations of the facts) that are in conflict with one another. But proof in the form of observation and experimentation have winnowed those theories and changed the surviving ones. When is the last time that a religion purposely subjected itself to that kind of scrutiny, debate, experimentation and observation and ultimate rejection based on those results? Those are the hallmarks of science, and those are the steps that occurred, and still occur in evolutionary science, just as they occur in every other area of scientific endeavor.