warri0r45

1) Tool 2) Death 3) Faith No More 4) Opeth 5) Cynic 6) Decapitated 7) Atheist 8) A Perfect Circle 9) Suffocation 10) Porcupine Tree Roughly accurate for the moment. I'm more of a "favourite album" kinda guy to be honest.

We're all cowards to an extent in that we're basically selfish about our survival - we all want to survive. That's not to say we can't learn to be brave or courageous and sacrifice ourselves for others, though. Having said that, a form of courage that probably won't die out is self-sacrifice for your family, especially a mother giving their life for their offspring. Doing that doesn't really eliminate their genes from the gene pool as they survive in the immediate offspring. This is called kin selection. I think you'd have to first prove that bravery and courage is genetic for your argument to hold any water. Chances are, if a behaviour seems counter intuitive to natural selection, it's learned, not hereditary.

How can you murder something that is not life? It most certainly does NOT begin at conception. Both the medical and scientific community agree that the actual "life" phase does not begin until somewhere around week 27-28. Only the uber-religious believe life begins at cell division. Meh. Don't like abortions? Don't have one. Meantime keep to your own body. All the pro-life activists who argue that life begins at conception are 100% right, and trust me, I'm not even one of them. Biologically, the zygote is alive from the moment of conception. From then on, it's all just stages of development. It's also of the human species, so you could call it a human life. The contention between pro-life and pro-choice activists is when you want to grant this life rights or "personhood", if you like, and whether this life should take precedent over the wishes of the mother. I think what you're referring to is viability, or the ability of the fetus to survive independently from the mother, but then you'd be a few weeks over.

I'm sorry to say this but brown snakes are extremely poisonous and can easily kill a human. I hope the snake isn't anywhere near you right now, because if it is I'm more worried about you than your dog. I do hope your dog makes it though. I've got a dog that I love a lot too, had her for 14 years.

Akeldama by The Faceless (album). Reccomended for people who like tech death and don't mind some deathcore influence. The title track is a rediculously good progressive, instrumental masterpiece. The whole album is great, too.

Focus by Cynic (album). :thumbup:

So people who use contraception only serve to muck up society? While we should aim for a utopia of sorts, simply trying to do that without considering stopgap solutions is seriously irrational. I mean really, just expecting abstinence to work by telling kids not to have sex is ridiculous. You said it yourself - a bunch of teens break their vows and succumb to their primal nature. Why then wouldn't you want kids to have a proper education of contraception? It's a great fall-back in case they decide to ignore their vows, and it's a great way to prevent unwanted pregnancy and therefore abortion (that is what you want, right?). Not to mention how condoms in particular can help prevent STDs like HIV. Beside that, I think we have different views of what "utopia" entails.

Hence why contraception is a necessary fall-back system. In a perfect world abstinence would work 100% of the time, but that's simply unrealistic.

Sorry to butt in on a tangent, but that's not true. Social laws and rules seem to be based on biology. Take social exchange (reciprocation) as an example. This paper suggests that, although humans are usually poor at following the violation of conditional rules ("if P, then Q"), they're significantly better at it when it takes the form of a social contract. Consider "if you travel to Boston, you use a cab" as an ordinary conditional rule, while "if you protect my family, I'll give you food" is a social contract. Logically they're identical, but for some reason we notice the latter form much better. Why can we recognise the violation of the latter much better? There has to be some reason, and that's because it's hardwired into our brains to detect cheaters. There's a significant disadvantage when we can't detect when a fellow human rips us off, so natural selection favours the ability to detect them. This paper I linked to looks at the consistency of the effect, and it finds that Amazonian hunter-gatherers detect cheaters at a level indistinguishable from Harvard students, indicating an overarching, learning-independent neurobiological phenomenon. Fascinating stuff.

The problem is that he's not. He hardly scored anything for Queensland just recently. I don't even know why they let him come back and play aside from his status. I think I'm starting to loose patience with Symonds. I've always been a big fan of how he plays, but his personality off-field has been detrimental to his performance on the field. I just don't think he has the right mindset to be a good player any more, let alone a productive member of the Australian team. On balance I think it was the right choice to leave him out of the South Africa tour. For his sake I hope he proves me wrong and comes back bigger and better than ever.

Nearly every philosopher of the last thousand years calls BS on this sentence. Hence the need for government, or at least at the lowest levels, religion. I think thats a question for biologists, not just philosophers. Modern biology has used evolutionary theory as a means to account for moral principals like the golden rule. See this article for an interesting read. If we have an innate sense of reciprocity geared towards survival, then we will tend to avoid violence or killing others. Those lines could be blurred based on what you or I see as our in group, but given the existence of things like war and racism, evolutionary theory would account for those blurred lines all the same. I disagree. I think we would tend to group together and work as communities if there were no religion, because thats more beneficial to survival than everyone just fending for themselves. There was a binding force before religion, and thats biology. Besides, if a society cast off religion these days, that doesnt necessarily mean it will degenerate into anarchy. Think of the trends in Scandinavian countries and some other western countries like Australia. Religiosity is down, but were far from anarchy. Personally I think religion is more of a means to an end of sorts rather than the direct source of morality.

Here's the vid: [yt]iBv4gq72p4M[/yt] It's interesting how his gloves are right over, if not a bit in front of the stumps. That doesn't usually happen, so I have to say I'm suspicious about it. Judging intent is a hard thing to do, and I'm not about to charge Haddin with being a cheat, but it does look bad for him. Vettori was within his right to question the dismissal, but if I were him I wouldn't have jumped to the conclusion that Haddin is a cheat.

Interesting you would bring this up. It's a pretty big fallacy when people say that western society is based on Christianity, considering moral principles like the golden rule were around centuries, even millennia before Christianity even existed. Greek philosophers like Plato and Socrates were among the people who wrote about it.

I like that philosophy. Although it's great to have hopes and dreams for the future, it's the journey and just living in the moment which is half the fun.

Despite some negatives it has had a benefit to humanity in terms of being a solid moral foundation. Moral principles seem to have an added weight when phrased under the banner of religion because its all there in one place and can be passed easily from parent to child. The nature of gods, prophets, etc, adds extra weight to the morals too, being seen as divine and unquestionable. Having said that, it seems that these properties also allow the justification of what would otherwise be considered morally wrong. I think that a few societies these days are capable of existing and prospering while religion takes a back seat, but on the whole humanity just isnt ready to get rid of it completely. Added, I think the trend in some countries towards questioning conservative religious beliefs wont necessarily kill it off completely, but it will see more liberal forms of the religion take over. Whatever form the theology takes, religion seems to be an inextricable part of the changing moral Zeitgeist.

I agree Jem. It's times like these you can see how valuable Matty Hayden was as an ODI player. He was agressive as hell, and punished any bad ball with a boundary. I especially loved his straight drives.

I think Watson is still out because of stress fractures in his back. Gotta feel for the guy... much of his career has been marred by injury of some kind.

Our summer has been falling apart, especially over the past few one dayers. I have to say that Warner has been massively underwhelming ever since that 20/20 at the MCG. I think people bought in the hype a bit too much.

I've not thought about it that much, but I don't see how it can be wrong considering how cause and effect works. I don't let it bother me.

Stop there. Why is it wrong? He already said his view is pretty much groundless outside of religion. I think that's a pretty forgone conclusion by now, and there's no need to belabour the point any further.

Just try and ignore it. I wouldn't know how to deal with thinking sonething is lucky/unlucky, though, because I never really think that way. I think some people are just more prone to believing in superstitions than others. Edit: I agree with the suggestion to take a course on statistics/probability. I'm actually doing that right now, and it does help you understand probabilities and natural variation in data better.

It's a semantically contradictory statement. You can't have an unstoppable force if there exists an unmovable object and vice versa.

Akeldama by The Faceless (album). Truly awesome tech-death/core.

Thanks for the vid, pureprayer. Looks like I was wrong. It certainly does seem counter intuitive, but when you break the scenario down between swapping and not swapping, it makes much more sense. :thumbup:

Yes, but I thought science was all about seeking patterns to find out the universal truths. So far science has yet to discover a method that mimics the creation of life from something completely inorganic. There are actually some plausible mechanisms to the creation of life from non-life (abiogenesis). I'll be happy to post some links if you're interested. Perhaps PM is a better way to do it, though.