frank

No

At this point the Senate acts as a legislative filter. Do you see that as advantageous? It was originally intended to protect small states from the do...

Yes. I don't really know how it works. Ordering fake plants for the aquarium because algae is covering the living ones I've devolved back to an algae ...

The plants with the long germination time flourished after the bad weather because 1. There was sufficient CO2 in the air to allow them to grow at all...

That seems to be trying to make evolution into a cause (of tree height). If we think of it that way, it's only one of many causes. The earth was once ...

obviously a Soviet attempt at infiltration

Probability doesn't tell us anything about unique events. It just tells us what happens when a procedure is repeated unless we're talking about logica...

There was a cartoon super-hero named Under Dog.

We'll never know what the content of oral traditions was, so it's irrelevant to the question of whether Genesis and Exodus depict the same divinity. S...

The prevailing scholarly view is that both Exodus and Genesis were written between the 6th and 5th Centuries, during a time of profound crisis during ...

Per Wikipedia they were written around the same time. Pfft.

Yeah, I don't know how a person could remember an experience of complete selflessness. If there was nobody there to experience anything, what's the me...

Sigh. You really need to read 1177: The Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric Cline. Get yourself up to date on the debate about the origin of the Hebr...

The story of Noah is from the epic of Gilgamesh.

I don't think you grasped the significance of the story of the origin of the Hebrews. They were an early Iron Age culture. Both Genesis and Exodus sho...

The area of the Promised Land was dominated by the Egyptians and the Hittites prior to the Bronze Age collapse. That places the story of the Exodus af...

Genesis appears to be the epic of Gilgamesh in mangled form. We don't know how the stories were transmitted to the early Hebrews because we don't real...

So how is the Abrahamic God different from the Mosaic one?

How is the God of Abraham different from the God of Moses? And since Jews have traditionally held that Moses wrote Genesis, how do they account for th...

Moses and Jesus are both honored as prophets in Islam. There is no such thing as a "mosaic" God.

No, it's because you're intelligent and good-hearted.

Cool. It's always nice to talk with you (even when you're mostly wrong).

It's happened before. The only thing unusual about this time is the speed of the emission. We're also just at the beginning. After the petroleum and n...

I hear you. I was just trying to drag you out for a broader and longer look at history. I've been fascinated lately with convergent evolution, where, ...

I dont think there's much he could do because his power is dwarfed by that of corporate interests. To have the power you seem to imagine he has, he wo...

True. You were looking to rank him by virtue of his apathy about global warming. You could do that if you could offer a reason to think he has the pow...

How specifically would any of that stop global warming?

What could he do to stop global warming?

:confused: You're just shoveling out warnings of dire consequences that haven't happened. I'm starting to think that you cant look at the situation ob...

So far they're acting like children. "Look, I seized your boat!" That doesn't show up on the Hell scale. Yes, Trump has diminished the standing of the...

Take a neutral stance for a second. By signaling encouragement to Syrian rebels, Obama played a significant role in the emergence of war in Syria. The...

Reminds me of a Tibetan thing: May I be free of fear May I be free of anger May I be free of craving and aversion. May I be free of suffering and the ...

Maybe HAL and Dave are aspects of consciousness. The fuel of consciousness is problems: unanswered questions for the mind, unredeemed sins for emotion...

I know. This is from my little song and dance: That stuff is an unconscious attempt to resolve a problem. But it also generates persona, so it's like ...

I'm sure you know more about it than I do.

Shut down means there's no emotion at all. It's bliss, btw. It can make a person wonder why we have to feel at all. What is so important about feeling...

You'll be fine. Just renovate one of those little rock houses and plant some potatoes.

A woman ignores it when she doesn't think she has the strength to leave the guy who is abusing her. A man ignores it when his culture doesn't allow hi...

But doesn't a baby give a damn? Enough to cry and scream? But I don't think they understand what it is they give a damn about. Aboutness comes later a...

:smile:

They always get quiet when humans come around because they don't want everybody to know there's such a thing as a plant party.

It's just how we speak. I believe that. Are we saying it wrong?

I'm waxing deterministic these days, so justifying anger isn't a thing. Is emotion a manifestation of something true and real about an organism? Maybe...

:up: :up: :up:

That was Dora, not Leonora.

I'm just the opposite. Surrealist philosophy is only slightly interesting to me. I don't think there is any pressing need to bridge the conscious and ...

I've become obsessed with this painting by Carrington. It's called And then we saw the daughter of the Minotaur. https://d7hftxdivxxvm.cloudfront.net/...

There's a misunderstanding here about what propositions are. People who talk about propositions can do so without reference to any sort of ontology. I...

:up: Did you know that most fish evolved from a fish that had a lung? They didn't use it, so it became detached from the esophagus and became an air b...

I believe in you.