how long did i swear that i would ban?

oh wait, that was for 98-99-100th post , daaaamn :P

Jurgen:

I think that either God invented evolution or Satan started it and God turned it to redound to his own purposes.

ok, fair enough skrum

I respect that you think there is a god to have started evolution for it to make sense. It would be a great step forward if religious leaders could give up hardcore creationism dogma's and try to make it less conflicting with knowledge acquired by science. In my mind, you really aren't doing people any favors by teaching them science and at the same time enforce old stories upon them that conflict with reality. Again, better to keep the positive messages from the bible and "modernize" some parts where you clearly see they were told in a time when people didn't even know the earth was round.

For me, evolution makes sense without the need for higher powers.

In fact, they are still doing experiments to recreate the conditions on earth in which the first supersimple forms of life evolved (from the primordial soup). The problem is that (in the scientific world - you'll disagree about it being a random event) these conditions went on for thousands of years in very large portions of the earth. so because of the huge number of random tries that nature had it is hard to reproduce in a lab. If you start making it more favorable to speed it up, skeptics might argue you "helped" too much.

there are a few scientific things I would hope to see in my lifetime:
-to see that experiment work is one of them, proving life is created by a series of random events without the help of a god
-other things are the discovery of extraterrestrial life (but that would prove the first thing too since life started and evolved independently)
-nuclear reactors of the 4th generation that are supersafe and have no long living radioactive waste
-commercial flights to the moon :D

id love to see scientists understand how a sperm+egg turns into a ~128 cell being, which then goes through the magical process of cell selection, and develops into a zygote eventually. ive talked to geneticists (atheists, fwiw) who are just in wonder of the process. would be awesome to understand it, hopefully it will be done within my lifetime :)

I hear you monte, some things that happen just are amazing

god or not, some things are practically a miracle...yet it's probably just our scientists that haven't discovered the mechanisms yet

I have also been baffled by some studies where some of those pluripotent cells are removed and still the cells are able to compensate and form the entire organism without any lacking parts. There is so much amazing information stored in our genes, we have only begun to discover the delicate processes that happen.

molecular biology is so fascinating, its part of the reasons why I wanted to become a bioengineer

Let's change the subject to stem cell research and get the religious side of the argument against such research.

hmmm, sounds like a 300 thread then

sweet, but this time im not gonna wuss out at post 295 and miss the opportunity to nab the 300th post.

i dont know much about stem cell research, which means im probably a good person to comment on christians viewpoint on the matter, since most of them know less than i do, and we usually just vote according to our fears.

scientists really need to get better PR people to convince us cavemen that their experiments will not destroy potential future babies. that about sums it up. the schizo christians are 100% against abortion because dammit that there fetus could one day be a person like me. and why draw the line there? that there zygote could one day be the same. that there stem cell too.

except in most cases from what i understand, stem cells cannot one day become a person like me. common misconception among neanderthals who have equal voting rights as the rest of us.

i think overall though, we tend to be uneasy when it comes to playing with life on such a small scale that could potentially be extremely close to making us creator gods. like my wife (who is not nearly as intentional as i am in christianity) was talking to an acquaintance who is trying for her 2nd kid, and hadnt been able to get preggers for like a year. in christian circles, this means you pray a lot, your close friends pray a lot, and you wait for "Gods timing". but this acquaintance and her husband def dont care about christian stuff, theyre pretty big science people. so they went the obv route of having a specialist choose a handful of her eggs for insemination. when she told my wife about this, she said that the specialist said that he chose the best 6 that he saw. my wife had no clue how to respond. and i could tell that even retelling the story to me, she just felt sick about that.

sorry for the tangential anecdote, im just trying to push us to 300 now. what im trying to say is, christians are really uneasy about our new ability (from good science) to get closer to playing God and choosing our offspring, or eliminating what we brand as weaknesses.

i think what really bugged my wife was that in the process of selecting the best 6, the specialist discards a lot more which he/she didnt think were the best. and the discarded eggs are destroyed.

doesnt matter how clearly you explain to her that, honey, once every month, one of your eggs gets destroyed anyways, whats the difference. she just really doesnt like that. i appreciate her emotions on the subject, and i know, for us, we would just keep trying to get pregnant every month, and if time started to go by too much, wed start applying for adoptions. but thats just us.

My wife and I went to a fertility clinic and pondered the idea of artificial insemination before we FINALLY got pregnant 3 months ago. The problem she had was the freezing of eggs for reuse in future months, followed by the questions of what she wants done with the leftover eggs after she got pregnant (donate/sell/destroy).

In the end we were against it for some of those reasons, as well as the fact that it cost about $19,000 per month for the work the clinic did.