₦airaland Forum

Uyi Iredia: Then the brain is also "is nothing but a tool for the rich and elite to subjugate the poor and foolish" since religion is a product of the brain. Agreed ?

That makes no sense and you know it. Don't squander all the respect you've managed in this forum by posting this type of obtuse nonsense.

If you turn into one of those rétårds that keep on lowering the intellectual standard of every discussion I'll just start skipping over your posts like I do for 90% of people who post here.

@Olaadegbu.

Interesting pic. Funny that it didn't mention Abraham and Jephthah

Deleted. Double post.

davidylan: The problem with Mike Huckabee and other "conservative" republicans is the disgusting hypocrisy.

Its funny that they are so quick to defend life yet unborn yet care nothing for that life once it is born. Yep Mike Huckabee claims to believe that "all people are created equal" but ONLY when they are still in the womb. The same Huckabee supports a party platform that:

1. Is presently debating cutting food assistance to the poor while gifting farmers and big companies tax subsidies.
2. Has recently cut funds to the head start program that is meant to assist children from low income families
3. Has voted 37 times to defund, repeal and kill a healthcare program geared towards providing affordable healthcare to the poor.
4. Voted to cut government funds to planned parenthood - the only place poor or minority women get affordable access to reproductive healthcare.
5. Opposed allowing health insurance pay for birth control pills so women dont end up pregnant when they can least afford it.

Sorry if i do not for one second believe anything Mike Huckabee says. True christians are not just those who whine about abortion...

Epic post!

I never imagined I could ever agree completely with anything Davidylan said. The world must be coming to an end.

That's the problem with religion in general. It encourages people to act in stüpīd and irrational ways against their own common sense. It may seem harmless most of the time, but its not. Religious people regularly delay or refuse to do the right thing because of their faith even though deep down they know they're wrong.

This ranges as from things like sitting at home and "praying for Nigeria" instead of taking concrete action; to people refusing life saving treatment for themselves, their children or their helpless relatives.

Tragedies like the one OP described happen everyday. Its not that the woman's family didn't know that what they were doing was wrong. It was that their minds had been conditioned for so long to believe that if they overruled their common sense and did something that seemed like foolishness, then magic would happen and everything would be alright.

Non-Jehovahs Witnesses who are abusing the woman's husband should stop being hypocrites. The fact is the man behaved in exactly the way the bible said he should. He stood on his faith and his wife died as a result. Anybody who has ever given offering in church despite not having enough money for his child's school fees has done the same thing.

Both Christianity and Islam teach people that believing in things that have no rational basis is a kind of virtue. They have made ignorance and credulity into an ideal. If you try to argue logic with a pastor, he'll likely tell you that its not good to be "too smart" and that you should "have faith" and "just believe, even if it doesn't make sense".

All faith-based religions pervert their member's thinking processes and turn them into irrational mõrøns just like the husband in OP's story. The sooner religious people realize this, the better for all of us.

Most of these jobs require at least 5 years post fellowship experience. They're for experienced consultants, not junior doctors. I'm pretty sure most of the people posting here don't qualify.

Why can't Nigerians learn to respect other people's culture, religion, and personal choices? Must everybody conform to you narrow-minded views of what is right? What happened to "strength in diversity"?

So what if these people chose to live like this? Are they harming anyone? How is this any worse than the many silly and ridiculous things people do in the name of Christianity and Islam?

So much self loathing among Nigerians. The oyimbos really did a number on us!

Why can't Nigerians learn to respect other people's culture, religion, and personal choices?

So what if these people chose tponlive like this? Are they harming anyone? How is this any worse than the many silly and ridiculous things people do in the name of Christianity and Islam?

So much self loathing among Nigerians. The oyimbos really did a number on us!

Are you a naturally annoying person?

[img]http://3.bp..com/_-qF6CbJo2vY/TIgQHEi4u2I/AAAAAAAAJnE/ojhFlm3lhb4/s1600/religious+flowchart.png[/img]

https://zerobs.net/media/hitler-atheist.jpg

https://truth-saves.com/images/hitler.jpg

[img]http://diagorasofmelos.files./2010/09/fuehrer_vs_atheism_en_800.jpg[/img]

https://media.moddb.com/images/groups/1/6/5319/Atheist_Motivational_Poster_Hitler.jpg

https://images.sodahead.com/profiles/0/0/2/2/9/1/9/7/7/hhhhh-57072832678.jpeg

https://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/wp-content/blogs.dir/470/files/2012/04/i-90614e02cd1053a8f3ab97f69e415df4-hitlerloveschristians.jpg

https://www.maybusher.com/pics/AtheismPics/hitler-and-church.jpg

[img]http://coelsblog.files./2011/11/hitler_cardinal4.jpg[/img]

Sango...ooo!!!

[img]http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.se/wp-content/images/christianity-my-god-has-a-hammer-your-god-was-nailed-to-a-cross.jpg[/img]

Facebook God is the best god

https://i.imgur.com/25k2JJR.png

His priorities passeth all understanding.
https://i.imgur.com/pPIV4jp.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/QrLjJ.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/jgYoi.jpg
[img]http://s0.wp.com/imgpress?url=http://i.qkme.me/359gg6.jpg[/img]
https://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m307rohH4C1rs8v5oo1_500.jpg

A Christian recently gave this testimony on facebook:

How awesome is our God?!! He cares about the littlest things in our lives... I needed 2/3 cup of milk to make my recipe tonight... And this was all the milk in the carton... Exactly 2/3 cup... EXACTLY! I mean, EXACTLY!! Wow! God is GOOD!

https://i.imgur.com/EmqgRtl.jpg

[img]http://i.qkme.me/3tudwe.jpg[/img]

Paul was the founder of christianity. All the main doctrines and tenets of christianity including the divinity of Jesus, the atonement and the rapture all originate from Paul's writings. The gospels were all written after Paul's death so any of Jesus's statements that seem to align with Paul's are just as likely to have been made so because the people who wrote the gospels were influenced by Paul.

Early christians were originally divided into many opposing groups, all believing in different things. But by the end of the first century, one thing all of them had in common was that they all revered Paul and his letters.

It is instructive to note that Paul never met Jesus, or heard his teachings or interacted with him in any way, aside from the claimed appearance on the road to Damascus, which sounds suspiciously like a cooked up story. In fact, he was a member of the pharisees, a sect that vigorously opposed preachers and holy men like Jesus and John the baptist. Yet, Paul managed to hijack the leadership of the early christian movement from those who actually knew Jesus when he was alive.

The new testament is mostly composed of Paul's writings and those of his imitators. The synoptic gospels (Luke especially) and acts of the apostles were written by his devotees. Only the gospel of John, a few of the minor letters and the book of revelations seem to be free of his influence.

Most definitely, Paul is the founder of Christianity and its main prophet. Jesus was basically just a conveniently obscure (and dead) mascot Paul used to give his teachings more credibiliy

They should just get rid of the ten commandments and end this silly farce.

Religion and government are a deadly combination that should never be allowed to mix. Just because some ignorant American Christians have failed to understand this despite their founding fathers basically spelling it out for them doesn't mean that better informed people shouldn't take action to stop their country from going to the dogs.

Anybody who thinks he has "won" because his government supports his religion is a mɵrɵn. You people need to read up on the history of Europe during the dark ages and stop supporting this nonsense.

Emusan: @firstbold-please is there any fossil evidence for plant-like ancestor?

Yes there is. And even better, there are organisms alive today representing every step in the transformation from unicellular heterotrophs to unicellular photoautotrophs to colony-forming autotrophs to simple multicellular autotrophs to complex multicellular autotrophs, commonly known as plants.

I just can't stop laughing.

You really should try and stop. You're just making yourself look silly.

Always remember that for organism to evolve and have a different physical look it needs a gain in genetic information not a loss in genetic information.

Please, stop! This "increase in genetic information" stuff is nonsense. Genes and even entire chromosomes get added, deleted and duplicated all the time in nature. Polyploidy in plants like apple trees, bananas and wheat is just one example of how this can happen. Please stop reading creationist nonsense. If you want to learn science, read materials written by scientists, not religious fanatics promoting an agenda.

@secondbold-if they exist why can't we see common ancestor to form from them?

The question doesn't make any sense. Please rephrase.

Emusan: I agree with you they are unicellular but answer this simple question. Did animal evolve from plant?

No animals didn't evolve from plants. I don't know where you are getting this idea from.

Both animals and plants evolved from more primitive ancestors. Most likely, plant-like protozoans first appeared when an ancestor organism fused with a cyanobacteria it was living in symbiosis with to form a photosynthetic eukaryote. The cyanobacteria would then have become an endosymbionte, i.e, the green chloroplasts we see in all plant cells. Multicellular plants then evolved from colony-forming photosynthetic protozoans. (Examples of living organisms at all these stages exist today in case you want to start arguing, so don't bother).

This would explain why chloroplasts have their own DNA and reproduce independently with their own RNA and proteins. It also explains why chloroplast DNA is so much more similar to that of cyanobacteria and eubacteria than it is to the regular plant DNA.

Incidentally the same applies to the mitochondria that exist in each and every eukaryotic cell known. We all have tiny bacteria living inside our cells. And there is no way we can survive without them.

OP is tinking backwards. The earth is not designed or adapted to support life. Rather its life that has adapted itself to survive in the conditions it finds itself. That is what natural selection does, it allows life to adapt.

We know that there has been life on earth for at least 3.5 billion years. There have been several times during that period that conditions on earth were drastically different than they are at the present. There was a long period where there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. [url=news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/03/100304-snowball-earth-ice-global-warming/]There were several periods where the entire surface of the earth was covered in ice, even at the equator.[/url]

Yet, at all times life existed and adapted. If you had lived during those periods you could have argued that trheearth was perfectly designed to support the forms of life that were present at those times.

The earth is what it is. It isn't specially made into accommodate anything. Rather it is life that has adapted itself to survive on earth. And natural selection definitely applies here.

I haven't been to church for years and I've never had the slightest inconvenience from it.

I used to use Sunday mornings to get some extra sleep, or do some reading. But nowadays I go the gym. Its a much more productive way to spend the day in my opinion.

The problem with euthanasia is that some elderly or sick people may be pressured by relatives to take their own lives when they don't want to. Its not uncommon for very old people to have children who want them gone for their inheritance, or just to avoid the stress of taking care of them. I've actually been approached once by a useless guy who asked me if I could make his aged mother (my patient) pass on faster. Allowing euthanasia would give scumbags like him a legal way to get what he wanted. Old and sick people are the most vulnerable to suggestion, manipulation and pressure. It would be terrible if such people start being made to feel that they are being selfish or inconsiderate to their loved ones just by being alive.

Of course, I understand the need to help those who are suffering with terminal illnesses go out with dignity and without pain; but we should always be mindful of unintended consequences.

The Nigerian military has a long history of commiting atrocities and murdering civilians. We know their antecedents: Odi, Zango Kataf, Maiduguri. There are dozens of youtube videos of soldiers shooting unarmed hausa men and boys in cold blood. We allow them to kill Nigerian citizens at will, and once they label a corpse as a Boko Haram fighter, nobody asks any questions, nobody asks for proof.

When the army invaded Baga, many of the people who lived in the area claimed that the army had been burning houses and killing civilians but nobody listened. The army denied the allegations, but they refused to allow journalists to enter the town to verify the truth even though the battle was over and Boko Haram was supposedly totally defeated. Yet Nigerians showed little interest. Human Rights Watch got satellite pictures that clearly showed at least 2,400 burnt houses and 80,000 square metres of scorched earth, but army claimed that the pictures were fake without offering any proof or allowing anybody to actually enter the town and check. The US government has its own satellites and they have made it clear that they are not happy with the way the amount of collateral damage. Now we have a Nigerian soldier sticking his neck out to complain that too many of our people are dying and Nairalanders are condemning him.

I think it is time for us to stop deceiving ourselves. The truth is that our military is commiting grave atrocities in this fight against Boko Haram. The truth is that the army and police have killed far more innocent Nigerians that the terrorists they are supposed to be fighting. It is sad that some oyimbos diplomats and Al Jazeera journalists care more about Nigerian lives than we do.

I think the apathy we are seeing is just more evidence of our culture of selfishness and tribalism. We don't care about what is happening because it's happening in somebody else's village. After all they're just abokis, so who cares if they die. But what we've forgotten is that when you allow injustice in one place, it spreads to others.

Maybe one day, the army will find a reason to come to your village. Then you'll learn why soldiers shouldn't be allowed to kill people and burn houses with no questions asked.

Uyi Iredia: @ Evil Brain: Why didn't you reply me ?

Sorry. The posts were getting too long and too tedious to write. Plus I've been busy.

Besides, you said you're not a creationist anymore so you're not really the enemy. My problem is not with creationists per se, but with the irrational, bible centred way they think.

Evolution is a big idea with huge implications and its perfectly natural to be skeptical of it at first. You've shown enough signs here that you can think rationally so I'm pretty sure you'll come round to accepting it eventually. No need for me to grind you into submission.

I might still post a reply after work today though.

musKeeto: And the agnost?

Agnostics are atheists. There is no shame in admitting you are not sure. Especially since it is impossible to disprove something when nobody can even agree what its properties are. Agnostics are simply being honest with themselves.

I've said here in the past that atheism and agnosticism are not mutually exclusive, but simply answer different questions. If you ask "Is there a god?" then the answer is "probably not, there's no evidence of one but I can't be totally sure some won't turn up in the future". If you ask "Do you believe in god?" then is answer is a definite no.

Deists are similar to atheists in the sense that they recognize that the judeochristian/Muslim god doesn't exist. But they still insist that some sort of deity must still exist even though they aren't sure what it looks or acts like. I dont know whether its because they want to believe that the universe has a purpose. Or maybe they find it hard to let go of the stuff they were indoctrinated with in childhood.

I suspect that many deists are on their way to becoming atheists. Like they're slowly lowering themselves into a cold swimming pool instead jumping in all at once. I went though the process once so I understand how it feels.

Plus since deists are more tolerant, less fanatical and less annoying than regular religious people, I can't say I have any problem with them.

Uyi Iredia: Poor examples.

They were your examples though.

You started out by making the claim that huge information can be extracted from a tooth. Here is a case that fails at that and you exclaim 'Good examples'.

Please don't misrepresent me. I stated clearly that the conclusions of the original scientist in the Nebraska man case were wrong. And BTW, it was by examining that same tooth that other scientists were able to determine that it wasn't human, and identify the correct animal. A huge amount of information can be extracted from a tooth. That you don't know how its done doesn't mean it isn't possible. It just means you don't know how its done.

Your words.

"If you'd bothered to read any of the original papers describing such fossils, you'd know that scientists go to extreme lengths to support every little detail of their
claims with evidence. Whenever they make guesses, they
always clearly indicate so."

Do the examples I cited follow this supposed claim ? Clearly not. You see that. Instead of owning up to the error of the case in point, you brag about how science caught the errants - after years had passed in a system that supposedly has 'zero tolerance for hidden conjectures'. You claim a victory that was at best, pyrrhic, at worst, a failure.

In both cases, the scientists involved did back up up their claims with evidence as I stated earlier. In the Nebraska man case, the scientist who examined the tooth failed to consider other possible explanations for his findings and thus failed to realize that all his evidence was inconclusive. There was evidence, just that it was too weak to meet generally accepted standards. He may have been too eager to publish due to the magnitude of what he thought he had discovered. Or maybe he just was't competent enough. In any case, his paper was immediately torn to shreds by his fellow archaeologists who quickly exposed all its flaws. The Nebraska man was never accepted by the scientific community and was conclusively debunked within 4 years which, by the way, is extremely fast given what it takes to gather data, analyse it, make conclusions, then write, peer review and publish a scientific paper.

The Piltdown man skull was an extremely well done hoax made by someone who had significant knowledge of human anatomy, knew how to age bones to fool archaeologists and spent a considerable amount of time and effort to make the skull look real. And even in that case all the conclusions drawn from the skull were backed by evidence. The problem is that those conclusions were all based on the assumption that the skull was real, while it wasn't. You can blame the scientists for being too naive and not looking hard enough for signs of forgery, but you cant blame them for a fraud perpetrated by someone else.

Anyway, thanks to the Piltdown man, every major new fossil find is now assumed to be fake until proven otherwise.

Actually, I am well aware of the opposition and even I am aware that without gaining like-minded supporters the theory couldn't possibly have flourished. Group think is the similarity in the thoughts of a group of people on an issue. That is needed to propagate any theory. Darwin proposed the theory, Huxley is popularly known to have gained support by aggressively promoting it,

You are throwing around a word like groupthink yet you clearly don't know what it means. A group of people of disparate opinions coming to accept a new idea which has stood up to intense scrutiny and experimental testing is not what Orwell meant when he coined the term. Groupthink is more like when a bunch of people believe that the ancestors of all land animals were once stuffed in a tiny boat for a year because a bunch of other people believed it going back all the way to some bronze age goat herders in the desert. Groupthink is when the group discourages individuals from questioning commonly held beliefs or exploring alternatives. If you want to see groupthink in action, tell your pastor that you're starting to doubt whether Jesus really worked miracles and watch how fast your fellow church members rally round to herd you back unto the beaten path.

the result is the brainwashing of generations of humans including fellows such as yourself

I'm sorry, is Pastor Chris an evolutionary biologist? What about TB Joshua? Those are two foremost brainwashing experts in Nigeria and I doubt the evolutionists could have succeeded in washing so many brains without their input.

State the testable predictions made by Darwin.

This question deserves a separate post. Hopefully, I'll get round to answering it today. Meanwhile, why don't you try googling it? There are plenty of online materials covering this.

Of course, you wouldn't state anything about Freud because his theory was a fraud.

I wouldn't go so far as to call Freud a fraud. After all, he didn't steal anybody's money. He just made too many unsupported assertions is all.

Since you claim psychology isn't a science, don't let me catch making silly statements on how morality and religion evolved, since their explanations are derived from evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary psychology is not derived from mainstream psychology, it's from evolutionary biology. An organism's behaviour is simply another aspect of its phenotype as determined by its genes. You should read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and The Extended Phenotype.

Artists also work for science journals, magazines and textbook publishers so that's not an excuse. The discovery of the Nebraska man along with claims of it being the remains of an ancestral species were published in Science. Verify this on Wikipedia. So as you can see in this case, scientists can publish flawed conclusions. While your points on the media are note-worthy, this in no way precludes the fact that scientists give them a free rein by not correcting them, using the media which they also have access to, or even make mistakes of their own.

You're telling me to "verify on Wikipedia", but if you had take your own advice and read the wikipedia article, you'd have seen that the picture of Nebraska man was published not in Science, or any other scientific journal, but in a British newspaper. Also the scientist involved complained about it and publicly dismissed the picture as made-up bullshiat (not his exact words); yet the picture is still heavily associated with his work. Creationists like you are dishonestly using the picture to accuse scientists of making things up when you know fully well that it was an unscrupulous British newspaper artist that did so.

I have stuff to do tonight. I might post more later if I have time.