Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Christine O'Donnell needs a civics lesson... STAT!

Christine O'Donnell questions First Amendment

8:06 a.m. ET
O'Donnell disputed whether the Constitution prohibits government from establishing religion.


   Why is this woman even in politics when she doesn't even know the basics of our Constitution? How did she even win her primary with Mike Castle? Does Sarah Palin really have that much pull? If so that is really scary that such a doofus, no matter how cute and sweet on the outside but is so twisted and inane on the inside.
   To me if you can not even state even some of the amendments especially the FIRST one, then either you are fully ignorant and should be disqualified for running for office just for being too stupid and you should be drummed out and laughed at for even trying. And yes Christine, take a lesson from (Dr.) Laura, getting called out for being an imbecile is allowed in the First Amendment.
   So here Christine is the First Amendment. READ it again and again.

   "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."


   THIS is where there is separation of church and state. This is what our Founding Fathers INTENDED. They did NOT want to see this country become a theocracy. They wanted the people to be free to say what they wanted to, pray or not as they wanted to and for the press to and assemblage to be uninhibited.
   I wish more of our government officials would get that there needs to be a separation and they need to keep their religions unto themselves and to not keep trying to insert their religion upon the rest of us who do not follow that persons religions. Even if one is a Christian, you cannot assume that just because you are a protestant that all Christians are going to believe and want the same things as you.  And sadly too many forget that this is NOT a Christian nation. There are a lot of differing religions to be found on our shores and percentage that does not believe in any at all. And we are tired of these people who keep wanting to tell us how to live and control our lives with their religions.
   But for anyone to be voted into such an important office as a state representative in congress then you should at least know the basics of our American government.

Monday, October 18, 2010

Matt Ridley And Richard Dawkins Discuss What Extraterrestrial Life Would...

Future Televangelist‘Fossil’ mountains entombed by ice

Cold temperatures have preserved rugged Antarctic range
Web edition : Friday, October 15th, 2010
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UNDER ICEAntarctica’s Gamburtsev Mountains may have been protected from erosion by the ice sheet that covers them, preserving jagged peaks for the past 300 million years. Above, the mountains are shown in a slightly exaggerated view based on radar data.Michael Studinger/Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory
Buried deep beneath East Antarctica’s ice sheet, the Gamburtsev Mountains are the world’s most invisible range. New research suggests that overlying ice like that hiding them from view today could have preserved their rugged topography for the past 300 million years.
The work bolsters the counterintuitive notion that glaciers, rather than just carving down young peaks into eroded hills like a buzzsaw, could sometimes protect high jagged terrain.
“It’s feasible for topography to be preserved,” says Stephen Cox, a graduate student at Caltech and coauthor of a paper scheduled to appear in Geophysical Research Letters. A supercold cap of ice could have allowed the ancient Gamburtsevs to look like the Alps instead of the highly eroded Appalachians.
Russian scientists first identified the Gamburtsevs in 1958 as part of a survey during the International Geophysical Year, and geologists have been puzzled ever since about how the range came to be. The mountains are in a stable part of the continent that hasn’t seen much tectonic activity — usually the way mountains are born — in more than 500 million years. “The Gamburtsevs are either really old, or some big part of the tectonic puzzle is missing,” says Cox.
His team tackled the question by looking at how quickly the mountains eroded over time. Because the range is buried, researchers have to study it indirectly — in this case by probing mineral grains at the bottom of Prydz Bay in East Antarctica, where pieces of rock washing off the Gamburtsevs ended up.
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SOUTHERN PEAKSThe Gamburtsev Mountains in eastern Antarctica.E. Feliciano
Grains of the mineral apatite preserve a record, known as a cooling age, of how fast the mountains were eroded. Cox’s team analyzed the apatite in two ways — the amounts of uranium, thorium and helium it contained, and the number of “fission tracks” left by decaying uranium — to build a cooling history of the Gamburtsevs.
The team concluded that over the past 250 million years, mountains inland of Prydz Bay eroded just 2.5 to five kilometers — an order of magnitude slower than modern erosion in places like the Alps. Earlier studies had suggested slow Antarctic erosion
over the past 118 million years, but the new study takes it farther back in time and supports the idea that the Gamburtsevs really are ancient.
Cold glaciers or ice sheets atop the mountains could have protected them from wearing away, Cox suggests.
A paper published in Nature last month describes how glaciers could similarly be preserving topography in the southernmost Andes today.
“When you get to colder climates, glaciers are actually frozen to the rock,” says geologist Stuart Thomson of the University of Arizona in Tucson, a coauthor of that paper and a member of Cox’s team. “They flow a little, but they don’t erode much at all.”
Radar surveys of the Gamburtsevs conducted in 2008 and 2009 confirm that the range is unusually rugged, with V-shaped valleys rather than the U-shaped ones that are characteristic of glacial erosion.
Still, another Antarctic expert warns against drawing too many conclusions about ice atop the Gamburtsevs, especially over the past few tens of millions of years. The new work can’t reveal anything explicit about when big ice sheets or smaller mountain glaciers were actually present, says John Goodge, a geologist at the University of Minnesota in Duluth.
Yet studying erosion rates could help researchers better figure out the history of Antarctic ice, says Thomson. He is now working on more detailed studies of erosion over the past 34 million years, when the great East Antarctic ice sheet is thought to have started growing.
“We’re trying to look at where sediments come from and what they tell us,” he says. Then researchers who use computer models can include those data and see whether current ideas about how Antarctica got icy are correct.

Future Televangelist

Via Unreasonable Faith http://unreasonablefaith.com/

In The Beginning

Hello, I am a bit new to the blogosphere. I have had to resort to blogging because FaceBook took my page away. I am fighting to get it back. Sadly there policy is that pages are only for be used to promote a business or other commercial, political, or charitable organization or endeavor (including non-profit organizations, political campaigns, bands, and celebrities), and apparently not for causes such as ours.
Basically this is for, as titled, a place for those of us who do not believe in gods. Not in Jesus, Yahweh, Shiva, Allah, Zeus or Odin. we believe that the need for supernatural forces has gone by the wayside. That religions are inherently evil and that there has been too much evil done in the name of religion. Not all evil, we get that nationalism, greed, money and and just plain, power hungry tyranny has a lot to blame too.
But today, in this day and age that the need to believe in gods that actually prevail in our everyday, personal lives has gone by the wayside. That to believe in creationism, to believe that evolution is wrong, to believe that the earth is only 6000 years old is wrong.
In today's world, with the science we have, the many transitional fossils being found daily, haw can anyone not see what is obvious, this planet is very old and we did not come from Adam and Eve. To me if you actually believe that, you are seriously misguided and deluded.
Any rate, i have something to say and since i can not get FB to restore our page, i am going to have my say here. I will not be shut up and i know a lot of folks feel the same way. We want a secular world. We want and end to the atrocities that are done in the name if religions. We would like a world where we can be free from the forces of religions. Where we can live in a place where one is not demonized for not believing in any gods.
I live in America where the First Amendment guaranteed certain rights and that we have the right to be free from religion as those that believe have the right to practice their religion. We feel that our government is already infiltrated with those that want to impose their beliefs on the rest of us.
I am tired of those that keep calling this a 'Christian Nation'. It is not any such thing. A christian majority yes but there are many who believe in other religions or no religions at all. We firmly believe that religions has NO right to be in our public schools unless it is set up as either a social studies or a literature program that includes ALL religions past and present.
I am going to use this forum to keep spreading the word. We must become more vocal and let folks known that just because one does not believe, that does not mean that we are going to just sit quietly any longer. We vote and we have a voice and the more voiced raise the stronger our voice becomes.
I fully understand that religions are not going away anytime soon but right now if we can get people to see that fundamentalism is not the way. This is a global world not and extremist views should not be tolerated. Hatred and intolerance in the name of gods must end. If one is a moderate believer and does not stand up to the Fred Phelps's and the Bin Laden's out there then you are part of the problem and not the solution.
There is going to be a bunch of mistakes and tweaking with the sight as it is developed it but it will continue and any feedback and insights are greatly welcomed. We are going to mainly focus on news and blogs towards promoting the atheist pount of view as well as sciences that are found to be interesting.


Suzan