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[Paphitis]

Australia is also a multicultural society but will never allow the implementation of Sharia Law, no matter how limited. Migrants who choose to adopt a new country, must also learn to adopt that nation's legal and cultural institutions IMHO.

So is Australia less tolerate than Britain, or does Australia have reasonable expectations of conformity for new arrivals within its very own cultural, ethical and legal structures?

The fact that Britain has legalized Sharia Law, in a limited manner, could also mean that in your eagerness to appear most "liberal", then you are opening the possibility that these restrictions could be removed down the track, as the Muslim community becomes larger and larger and more influential. Is this going to pave the way to stonings, amputations, and beheadings?

Talisker wrote:

Never say never! I'm sure post-WW2 UK citizens are amazed at the changes that have occurred in British society even within a single lifetime. Personally, I believe that tolerance within the UK population is both it's greatest strength and weakness. Immigrants to the UK should have been encouraged, nay forced, to integrate far more, and then we'd have less issues with imposition of laws for this vocal minority.

Australia tries to encourage integration much more. We don't have ethnic ghettos in our cities. But on the whole, I would say Australia is probably less tolerant or liberal than Britain.

Australia won't introduce Sharia Law. Such a thought would be abhorrent to the mainstream. There is more chance that Australia will formally accept Aboriginal Tribal Law for some crimes, but that is about it.

Just last week, I was in Cairns. I caught a taxi from the airport, and the driver was a Saudi engineer that had worked in the Oil and Gas industry. He also held a PhD. He was a very likeable chap. The guy seemed to be very frustrated and angry about Australia. He was unable to find work, apart from driving cabs, despite his excellent qualifications. I asked him if he thought this had anything to do with his background? The answer was a resounding yes. He even asked me what I would do. I told him that I would return to Saudi Arabia or try and migrate to UAE. I did not tell him that Australian corporations could be somewhat racist, but do believe this to be the case. Obviously, this discrimination has much to do with the current political climate and the 'war on terror' and the recent arrests in Australia. It will eventually dissipate, but it might take 10 years.

Such a shame that we have individuals like that wasting away in cabs.

I keep forgetting that the Daily Telegraph is considered a neoconservative paper with somewhat strange, one sided and prejudiced views. In Australia, we also have a Daily Telegraph. This newspaper is more 'straight shooting' and less conservative if you will. Both papers are owned by Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch.

Media bias is a very interesting topic. As you may know, my wife was a journalist and worked for News Limited, the world's biggest news empire owned by Rupert Murdock. She, on occasion, wrote some high impact pieces which ended up on the front pages of other News Limited newspapers and magazines all over the world, one of which was also Britain's Daily Telegraph. Is my wife conservative? No she is not. She is just a simple GC girl. Is she biased? No I don't think so, except when it comes to Cyprus.

I should also point out, that the UK's Daily Telegraph is on my hit list due to an article they published about EOKA, not too long ago...

Anyway, all of the above is just a side note, and I have digressed from the topic.

Talisker wrote:

Actually, you're wrong about ownership of the UK Daily Telegraph - it is not owned by Rupert Murdoch (in the UK he owns The Times, and the tabloids The Sun, and The 'News' of the World). The DT is owned by the reclusive Barclay brothers (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3412517.stm) who use their immense wealth to force change where it suits them. Just to give some info - they live on a small island adjacent to the Channel island of Sark (http://www.sark.info/), a unique place within the UK in forbidding car ownership and use, thereby attracting a certain type of resident and visitor, and definitely having a different 'feel' to the other Channel Islands (I've visited on a sailing holiday and loved it!). For their own interests the Barclay brothers forced through a democratisation of the feudal system that existed there for hundreds of years which has resulted in many individuals losing their livelihoods on Sark (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/guernsey/7779135.stm).

Thanks for that.

It is difficult keeping track of what Rupert Murdoch owns these days. His empire is so vast. I thought the UK DT was his. I know that the Australian DT belongs to News Limited. But my main point was that the UK DT and the Aussie DT are not to be confused. They are very different.

But one of Rupert's most disgusting media outlets, would have to be Fox News in the US. He owns a few tabloids like the Sun, amongst others as well, but also owns some excellent publications such as the Times, The News of the World, The Australian, SMH, The Age, and many more.

Some of his assets have an agenda, such as Fox News, others range from average to excellent. He also owns Sky News and an array of newspapers, magazines, and TV channels in Australia, US, Canada, Italy and who knows where else.

Parents do indeed want their children to fit in to their own respective societies by passing on to them their own misconceptions, and belief structures. This in essence does breed some intolerance, because practitioners of a certain faith believe that their own dogma is correct, when in actual fact there are dozens more, and also the proven scientific facts preached by Charles Darwin's Natural Selection and Richard Dawkins' philosophy, amongst many others. This raises another very interesting question. If all religious practitioners believe their own dogma is the only correct belief structure, then which dogma is correct? There can only be 1 correct religious dogma if God does exist, so which one is it? Who is correct and who is wrong?

Talisker wrote:

I don't subscribe to the view that any particular religion is 'right' and all others 'wrong', and indeed that they have 'different' Gods. If there is a God, and that is what we are discussing within this thread, then God can appear in different guises to different peoples and religions. So, to me this is a facile argument. God sits above religions, which after all are dictated in structure and content by humans - e.g. the Bible as I mentioned previously (and Piratis has also noted) is a collection of stories written by human beings - in fact, if I remember correctly from my youth when, at parental insistence, I attended church, the first four books of the new testament tell the same story but the different authors, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, provide different descriptions and interpretations in telling that same story. I don't believe the Bible to be the direct word of God.

What you are saying is that God is a human construct, and does not necessarily exist in reality, but does as far as many the practitioners of religion are concerned. This is why they call it faith.

There is no evidence whatsoever that God does exist. He is a manufactured entity that some need to fill in the gaps for things they do not understand about the universe, or about our existence, and the 'afterlife'. Fortunately, science is tearing down these human inadequacies bit by bit....

Religious practitioners are always trying to influence change and are always telling us what we should be doing and thinking. Many of these influences are very regressive when you consider the fundamentalists stance against stem cell research, abortion, same sex marriages and their insistence that God is something that should never be under any sought of scientific scrutiny, because we humans are unable to comprehend such grandeur(also GR's very dismall and pathetic argument ). But I think you would agree, that when someone asserts that the universe was magically created by an omnipotent God, and that God created earth 6,000 years ago, then these beliefs, amongst others, should be scrutinized by science, and either be proven as fact or be totally dismissed. Many religious fundamentalists still insist on creationism and dismiss all scientific facts as all religious texts are accepted for their literal meaning. This for me, could potentially lead to a crazed religious zealot, gaining the ascendancy in the US (George W Bush) and instigate an apocalyptic tragedy, because for some fundamentalists, the end of life on earth is something to look forward to.

Talisker:

Even if it is proved that every word within the Bible is bollocks, such as I believe science and Darwinism is doing to 'The Creation Story', this does not disprove the existence of God. Similarly, for all other religious texts - incremental discrediting does not mean there is no God. That requires definitive proof. We can't predict what science will unravel - the different dimensions within the Universe are slowly being discovered and understood, but there is still a long way to go before the existence of God is definitively proven (or not) by science. Even as a trained and practicing scientist I find it a worthwhile exercise to stand back and think about the number of major examples where science has got it completely wrong (still occurring today and costing thousands of lives). Recommend you read 'Bad Science' by Ben Goodacre - a truly excellent book. Also a good website at: http://www.badscience.net/

As I stated earlier, there is no scientific data that proves God does not exist. There is also no scientific data that proves Zeus, Athena, Aphrodite, or Thor don't exist.

Furthermore, it is only a matter of time before science unravels the remaining undiscovered secrets of our universe.

And of course, science has made some big mistakes. Scientists are only human, and will therefore make many more errors in the future.

In Greece, a religion has been re-established which believes in the dogma/myth of the Ancient Greek Gods. Who am I to say that their beliefs are nothing more than myth?

At least some Greeks are doing something about resurrecting the Hellenic culture, because the rest of us are just 'Jewish converts'.

Talisker:

My issues with Dawkins are his tendency to focus on religious extremists to make his point - he ignores the fact that many societies are supported by an integral religion, and on the individual level many people draw huge comfort from their faith.

Can you blame him?

Religious fundamentalists pose a significant danger to us all. Many of the worlds current problems are as a result of religious intolerance, as well as racial. Even in the 20th century, millions of humans were murdered, due to their religious beliefs (holocaust).

Talisker:

We've already discussed fundamentalists, or extremists as I prefer to call them, of any religion, and the dangers they pose to us all when they gain power. The moderate majority must ensure extremists are kept on the margins of society, and are not allowed to 'lead'. Hence my relief that GeorgeW is not in the White House any more.

The moderates will always fail, because it is the extremists that are most willing to do anything. This is why people like Stalin, Hitler, George W Bush et al will always prevail. The key IMHO, is to tear religion to shreds...

Furthermore, humans don't require religion for their moral guidance. Thou shalt not kill is accepted as the norm by both the religious and non religious. In fact, the ten commandments are still widely accepted as very normal ethical principles. So an atheist is just as likely to adhere to good moral behavior as a religious zealot. I wold even say, that the Agnostic or Atheist, are probably more moral as they are probably better equipped to not discriminate against homosexuals or women. They have a raised consciousness.

Also, I have not stated that there is no God. I can't prove that God does not exist because so far we don't have the scientific data. However, I do strongly believe that it is only a matter of time when you consider the pace of scientific development in the 20th and 21st century. Imagine what science will uncover over the next few centuries. It is quite difficult to comprehend, and perhaps the scenes we see on the big screen from Star Trek and such like might become a reality in the not too distant future. I also believe that religiosity will go through a slow and gradual demise over the next few generations, particularly in the liberal west. The poorer east will surely follow, but they will lag behind. Faith, as we know it today, will evolve into something entirely different, and into something more acceptable to our modern times and be less insulting to our intelligence, or a belief in an omnipotent spirit will die even before scientific data finally proves its non existence.

Talisker wrote:

Afraid I laughed at your idea that non-religious individuals have a raised consciousness compared with individuals who have religious beliefs. I think that is complete nonsense! For all we know the future may bring about spiritual enlightenment to mankind, with increased religious activity! Currently in terms of numbers Christianity is in the decline in 'The West', but numbers of humans worldwide practicing religion of one sort or another are probably pretty stable (I'm not including the new religion of consumerism in this general supposition!).

Then why is it that it is almost always the religious bigots that preach so much inter religious hatred, discrimination against gays and even women?

You don't hear about a group of atheists or agnostics doing the same. Sure, we may have our own personal prejudices, but these are never expressed as a result of some atheistic 'dogma'. We don't seem to care all that much about the religious beliefs of moderates, even though we do believe they are mythical. I truly believe that Richard Dawkins would not be so outspoken against religion if religious extremism did not exist.

Religion is on the decline in the west and there is a perfectly valid reason why this is the case. The same will occur in the poorer east over time, once the same socioeconomic changes occur and as illiteracy is defeated.

I will now re-phrase the question. Which of the above remaining 5 options do you subscribe to, as a Libran, considering your present personal circumstances as they stand now?

Talisker wrote:

OK, having given this thought, at the moment I am completely within a 'sit on the fence' phase regarding the existence of God so have to go for 'God's existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable'. But, like I stated earlier, I do vacillate on this.........and could go either way.

Thanks!

[Get Real!]

Would you call an active volcano "alive"? Is something which has some movement and some chemical or nuclear reactions going within it "alive"?

Planet Earth is very much alive itself and that’s why her volcanoes are able to live and die too, and everything else on the earth. If the planet was dead so would we...

If you equate universe with a "God", then why you feel the need to give it another name? Why not just call it universe?

Because everyone has been treating them as two separate things whereas I just see "Universe" as the noun and “God” as the status/title.

Also, as I said earlier, what seems "miraculous" is something you do not understand. An eclipse 20.000 years ago seemed miraculous. Take a TV and go back 500 years ago and show it to people of that time and they would think of it as a miracle. Just because we can not fully understand something it doesn't mean there must be something magical to it.

There are serious limitations to what man can do and understand, so don’t assume that your discovery of the petty eclipse is just the beginning of you discovering everything pertaining to the universe!

I’ve heard of optimism but this is ridiculous!

[Paphitis]

A Search for Extra-Terrestrial Genomes (SETG): An In-situ Detector for Life on Mars Ancestrally Related to Life on Earth

PI: Maria Zuber

The Search for Extraterrestrial Genomes (SETG) Project will test the hypothesis that life on Mars, if it exists, shares a common ancestor with life on Earth. There is increasing evidence that viable microbes could have been transferred between the two planets, based in part on calculations of meteorite trajectories and magnetization studies supporting only mild heating of meteorite cores. In addition, microbial life has been discovered in Earth environments exposed to high levels of radiation and extremes of temperature, demonstrating the incredible adaptability of microbes. Based on the shared-ancestry hypothesis, this project will look for DNA and RNA through in-situ analysis of Martian soil (or ice) samples. Using molecular biology approaches including Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), we aim to develop an instrument that can isolate, amplify, detect, and classify any extant DNA or RNA based organism, even at extremely low abundance. In our first ASTID grant we made substantial progress, including demonstrating the core amplification and detection technology. Here we propose to develop several components of our instrument including a microfluidic module that will permit sequencing in-situ, on Mars. By returning precise genetic information, SETG virtually eliminates false positive results: sequences from likely contaminates are immediately identified, whereas any system of life isolated from that on Earth over geologic time will be evident from phylogenetic analysis. This, combined with ultraclean techniques and single-molecule sensitivity, make SETG arguably the most sensitive and specific detector of life, and an essential component of a comprehensive life detection strategy.

http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/astid/proj ... tector-for

[Paphitis]

SETI and the Search for Life

In written testimony to the House Subcommiteee on Space and Aeronautics, astrobiologist Christopher F. Chyba notes that in the past decade scientific revelations have dramatically increased the prospects of finding life elsewhere in the universe. Organic molecules—the raw materials of life— are now known to be abundant in interstellar space. Dozens of planets have been found orbiting other stars. Signs of liquid water, an essential ingredient for life, are turning up in various places in our solar system. Water seems to have flowed on the martian surface. in the geologically recent past. Three moons of Jupiter—Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede—may hide oceans under their frozen crusts.

Chyba's organization, the SETI Institute, conducts a wide range of astrobiological research, but is best known for its attempts to listen for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. Although its equipment is extraordinarily sensitve the SETI Institute has only monitored a tiny sample of our galaxy so far—a thousand nearby stars out of nearly half a trillion. If it does one day detect a transmission, there is no telling how difficult it will be to decipher. And any dialogue will take place slowly, with each dispatch taking tens, hundreds, even thousands of years to cross interstellar space. Nevertheless, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence remains extremely popular, with literally millions of volunteers participating through the SETI@Home project.

http://astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov/news/e ... cfm?id=981

[Tim Drayton]

Don't you guys think everything on earth is perfectly designed? From the human face to the hands....How the food we need grows out the earth! What about the trees that give us the oxygen we need to breathe, our senses, or the way we reproduce and how good it feels to "do it".....I'm sure you could explain why it feels so good and what chemicals are involved, but when you think outside the box it's just such a coincidence how everythings so perfectly "set up". What about the universe and how finely tuned it is!?!

There are two very different ways of looking at this, as the following quote shows:

http://encyclopedia.farlex.com/Anthropo ... +principle

anthropic principle

The assertion, occurring in several different formulations, that the universe is in some sense constructed in a way that makes it suitable for the development of intelligent life such as human beings. It arises from the observation that if the laws of science were even slightly different, it would have been impossible for intelligent life to evolve. For example, if the strengths of the fundamental forces were only slightly different, stars would have been unable to burn hydrogen and produce the chemical elements that make up our bodies. Such a remarkable coincidence requires an explanation. One such explanation is that the universe has been intelligently designed, but this does not satisfy the desire for a scientific explanation. An alternative explanation is that the universe we inhabit is only one of a stupendous number of universes, or ‘multiverses’, with a spread of values for the fundamental constants. In the vast majority, the properties of the universe are unfavourable to life; we necessarily find ourselves in one of the few where the physical constants are favourable to life, so that the universe presents the illusion of having been adapted from the beginning to our needs.

[Tim Drayton]

The existence of a multiverse is not even a premise for stating the "anthropomorphic principle" that the universe appears perfectly designed to us simply because the universe developed by chance along lines that lead to our evolution and could equally well by chance have developed in a different direction that would not have led to human existence and would therefore never have been known to humanity. Roger Penrose has developed a theroy that the expansion of the universe automatically creates the conditions for the next big bang; as I understand it, according to this theory, the universe creates the conditions for its own destruction and then emerges as a new universe like a phoenix from the ashes:

http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/in ... 01377.html

This is a lecture by Sir Roger Penrose that I was lucky enough to attend. Here is the flash presentation of it:

http://www.newton.cam.ac.uk/webseminars ... 7/penrose/

From what I can understand his theory is that the big bang happens after the end of the universe, starting a new one. The universe can end because eventually all matter falls into blackholes and blackholes evaporate into energy. So the universe ends up being nothing but energy at very high entropy. He says that when there is no longer mass in the universe time no longer applies. This is because there is only energy left and energy perceives infinite time as no time at all. So the end of universe is infinitely in the future but with only energy left that infinite time is reached. At that limit of infinity only energy and the gravitational waves left by the blackholes are left and the waves translate to density variations in the next big bang. In the beginning of the next Big Bang (which is also a limit that mass cant approach but energy can) only energy is there with density variations based on the gravitational waves from our current universe. What happened before the Big Bang is happening now!

If the universe keeps recreating itself in perpetuity, this may mean that every once in a while it develops in a direction that leads to the evolution of intelligent life and this creates the illusion of intelligent design for that intelligent life because whenever the universe develops along a different path there is no intelligent life to perceive it.

[Bananiot]

Richard Dawins would have included Deists and Pantheists in the poll.

[zan]

Well I'm still not convinced! I still think what some people suggest is no different to what I said about finding a watch and presuming that it just happened out of nowhere.

All scientist have done is explain how that watch functions and nothing more....it's like they're saying "this turns that and in turn that turns this and through thousand little steps it's now 8 o clock..."

Don't you guys think everything on earth is perfectly designed? From the human face to the hands....How the food we need grows out the earth! What about the trees that give us the oxygen we need to breathe, our senses, or the way we reproduce and how good it feels to "do it".....I'm sure you could explain why it feels so good and what chemicals are involved, but when you think outside the box it's just such a coincidence how everythings so perfectly "set up". What about the universe and how finely tuned it is!?!

It's too perfect for it to be chance, I'm sorry.....no amount of science is going to convince me all this wasn't supposed to happen. Look how far we've come with all the materials we found on earth!!!! It's like we're in a really futuristic version of a goldfish bowl!

PLUS, isn't the odds of all the elements required for life, being there at the same, the same as winning the lottery like 10+ times in a row? Were we really that lucky?

Napang be gardas.....Where you been???

I think you are getting bogged down with this "Perfect" thing TC....And as Oracle said, you are looking at the end product rather than how it got there. We live in a universe that has finite rules. We don't really invent, we discover. We discover what it takes to keep a plane in the air and then make a machine that fits perfectly to that criteria. We take that plane to the moon and it does not work, let alone another universe. So this perfectly designed watch you find on the floor is like a jigsaw puzzle that only fits not only to our universe but also to our planet. It would behave differently on Mars with it,s gravity being greater. It would also behave differently by the speed you are traveling at. so that watch is only really relevent to us and to a specific planet.....Not that perfect, in the grand scheme of the universe, after all...

The trees also....They did not just appear and produce oxygen just for us....Their beginning was just as agonising as ours...First you have the volcanoes spewing out gasses that can only sustain certain "Life forms". They take these gases and use what they want from it and the by product might sustain some other lifeform. Not really an accident but a natural process. Natural and specific to our planet and our universe. Someone asked if there was a god before the big bang....Steven Kawkings says it doesn't matter.....We would not be able to understand the workings of another universe because we would not be able to exist in it to do the simplest of experiments. We will never know. We can never know.

[Paphitis]

Richard Dawins would have included Deists and Pantheists in the poll.

He does offer an explanation about Deism and Pantheism in his book.

But he only concentrates on Christianity, Islam and Judaism which preach for an omnipotent all interfering God and not a supreme philosophical God that does not divinely intervene into human affairs.

Deism is the belief in a God who created the universe but is not omnipotent and does not concern himself with humans or does not interfere in our lives. They don't believe in 'divine intervention'.

Pantheism is basically what GR is preaching. It is not necessarily theistic. The basic principle behind Pantheism is that nature and the universe are synonymous. God is basically synonymous with nature, but is not a supernatural being.

Therefore, since GR is a Pantheist, he believes that nature is synonymous with "God" and that the supreme being does not necessarily exist. There is no omnipotent, all interfering supreme entity.

I think that Richard Dawkins does not find them confronting, and hence he does not concentrate much of his efforts towards Deism and Pantheism.

[Oracle]

... There are serious limitations to what man can do and understand ...

Only for the present. But with continuous evolution, who knows?