BNR32FAN

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I've marked the video to watch. In the meantime, I'll try to address your points (although there are a lot of them, so I might have to split up the responses! I've gotten more responses to my OP than I thought - it's hard to keep up with! :blush:).


Actually we do have tons of intermediate forms in the fossil record, and we see transitions by the thousands in the genetic record.


The early life forms don't survive. They change. Chemical process after chemical process, going on and on, slowly, very slowly, becoming more complex because of tiny random changes and filtering.


The early "life forms" aren't that fragile - they're very, very simple, and as conditions change, so do they. If they don't, they die. Only the ones that were adapted stayed around.


This is exactly what would be expected. The complex forms that are similar didn't evolve in a bunch of places exactly the same way. Rather, the successful forms reproduced and spread. And in that process, they changed. That means that mistakes (ones that didn't significantly affect an organism's ability to reproduce) also got transferred. One example is that the most common version of the eye has the optic nerve exiting the retina from the inside, producing a blind spot. A properly designed eye would have the nerves leaving the retinal cells from behind, thus avoiding a blind spot. If I remember correctly, the squid has the "correct" version. But ours was good enough, and spread.


I disagree - there are tons of design "mistakes" all over the place, and lists of them can be found online. Examples include the poor design of the eye, mentioned above, the human appendix, poor set-up of the human spine, using the same passage to swallow and breathe, and many, many others, making the whole thing not look intelligently designed, but looking exactly like a "good-enough" product to be expected by a slow evolutionary process.



I'll have to get to the rest a bit later. I can see that all these discussions will be interesting and fun. But a lot of them! :screamcat:
I've marked the video to watch. In the meantime, I'll try to address your points (although there are a lot of them, so I might have to split up the responses! I've gotten more responses to my OP than I thought - it's hard to keep up with! :blush:).


Actually we do have tons of intermediate forms in the fossil record, and we see transitions by the thousands in the genetic record.


The early life forms don't survive. They change. Chemical process after chemical process, going on and on, slowly, very slowly, becoming more complex because of tiny random changes and filtering.


The early "life forms" aren't that fragile - they're very, very simple, and as conditions change, so do they. If they don't, they die. Only the ones that were adapted stayed around.


This is exactly what would be expected. The complex forms that are similar didn't evolve in a bunch of places exactly the same way. Rather, the successful forms reproduced and spread. And in that process, they changed. That means that mistakes (ones that didn't significantly affect an organism's ability to reproduce) also got transferred. One example is that the most common version of the eye has the optic nerve exiting the retina from the inside, producing a blind spot. A properly designed eye would have the nerves leaving the retinal cells from behind, thus avoiding a blind spot. If I remember correctly, the squid has the "correct" version. But ours was good enough, and spread.


I disagree - there are tons of design "mistakes" all over the place, and lists of them can be found online. Examples include the poor design of the eye, mentioned above, the human appendix, poor set-up of the human spine, using the same passage to swallow and breathe, and many, many others, making the whole thing not look intelligently designed, but looking exactly like a "good-enough" product to be expected by a slow evolutionary process.



I'll have to get to the rest a bit later. I can see that all these discussions will be interesting and fun. But a lot of them! :screamcat:

What are your sources in reference to the missing link? I know there have been several claims of finding it but I'm not aware that any of them have been substantiated.
 
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DennisTate

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Hi grahamsnumber

My name is Occam’s Barber and I am the totally unofficial and absolutely unauthorised meeter and greeter for new atheist members of the Forum .

Firstly – Welcome to CF, The natives are friendly. Within CF you will be restricted to certain areas and will be expected to refrain from criticism of the teachings of various denominations. You are a guest. Please leave the toilet seat down.

For those areas you cannot enter you will be able to look through the bars and watch the Golden Ones at play. Please do not poke the occupants or attempt to feed them.

In the event you run into a Christian while wandering the deep, dank, corridors of CF there is an accepted protocol. With eyes downcast, bend forward in a small bow acknowledging the superior status of your Christian interlocutor. Extend your right hand, palm down. When you feel the Christian licking the back of your hand you can be assured that no attack is imminent. Back away quietly.

There is a group of Superior Beings you may encounter in CF. Known as the Moderators or Mods or They Who Will Be Obeyed, these Divine Creatures came to Earth with Powers and Abilities Beyond Those of Mortal Men/Women. They can be recognised by their blinding radiance and a tiara.

In the unfortunate event you encounter one of these Heavenly Creatures the protocol is strict. Do NOT speak. Do NOT attempt eye contact. Prostrate yourself face down, full length on the floor with arms by your sides. Raise your head and tap it gently but firmly on the floor three times while repeating the following mantra:

“I am the stain beneath your feet. I am the toe jam of your camel.”

If you hear a deep, guttural rumbling sound this is the Magnificent One expressing its approval of your abject abasement. Raise your body slowly and shuffle out backwards on all fours.

Occasionally you will come across gaunt, decrepit individuals dressed in soiled garments and cowering in foetid corners. Do not be afraid. These are your fellow atheists.
OB

Aha... then you are the poster that I should be talking to about:

Do you want to see Intelligent Design taught in universities and schools?
 
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BNR32FAN

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DennisTate

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LittleLambofJesus

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Hi - nice atheist here

Hi and welcome to CF. With the exception of a few *cough cough*, most of us are pretty nice on here, including myself.
Were you ever a Christian or any other religion?

269600.jpg


Hi & bye ...... you are ignored.
^_^
Kinda grumpy aren't ya?
 
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DennisTate

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God Evolved
Alpha First Beginning


Isaiah 44:6
“This is what the Lord says— Israel’s King and Redeemer, the Lord Almighty: I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God.

Isaiah 48:12
“Listen to me, Jacob, Israel, whom I have called: I am he; I am the first and I am the last.

Revelation 1:8
I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.”

Revelation 21:6
He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life.

Revelation 22:13
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.

The proof that God exist is in the fact that spontaneous evolution of life is not possible in this universe. God evolved, then He created. From the Subatomic and the primordial Dark Matter. A type of nothing, because it has no atomic bonds to form anything. God created gravity and gravitons to form the atomic elements of this Universe.

Dark Matter is undifferentiated material which has no atomic bonds, this would make it of no particular substance. In other words, it is Nothing. And if you are willing to accept it, it is primordial, and God's store house for creating the universe from "Nothing."

Dark Matter is accepted by the mainstream scientific community. The existence and properties of dark matter are inferred from its gravitational effects on visible matter, on radiation, and on the large-scale structure of the universe. The presence of dark matter in the universe, including gravitational lensing of background objects by galaxy clusters such as the Bullet Cluster, the temperature distribution of hot gas in galaxies and clusters of galaxies and, more recently, the pattern of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background.

According to cosmologists, dark matter is composed primarily of a not yet characterized type of subatomic particle.

The belief that God created from nothing comes from the Ramban comments on Genesis: www.sefaria.org/Ramban_on_Genesis.1.1?lang=en&layout=lines&sidebarLang=all

Dark Matter: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter


The missing links are missing because life did not evolve in this Universe.

Isaiah 43:10. "You are my witnesses," declares the LORD (Yahwah), "and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am He. Before me no god formed, nor will there be one after me.


The key is the word "formed." Absolutely anything that has no beginning does not exist. God says that He is the FIRST AND THE LAST. Therefore He Began. That is why His name means "Life Began."


Astronomers detect dark matter though the effect of its gravity on the path that light takes as it crosses the Universe. As light travels through a region of dark matter, its path gets distorted by gravity. Instead of taking a straight line, the light is bent back and forth depending on how much dark matter is passes through.

Astronomers can map out regions of dark matter in the sky just by looking at the distortions in the light, and then working backwards to figure out how much intervening dark matter would need to be there to cause it.

After the creation of the Universe the Earth was later created by God. Before there was a firmament it was a formless body of water. The bible does not state how much time had passed before the creation of the Earth.


God says that no god formed before Him. He also states that none will form after Him, meaning that the element to the forming is no longer available. The word "form" would not have been used if it were not a condition.

May I simply copy and paste this entire response over to:

Do you want to see Intelligent Design taught in universities and schools?
 
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DennisTate

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A number of authors have done extensive analyses of the UFO phenomenon. What I've seen is that the vast majority are hoaxes or misunderstandings. Humans make incredibly lousy witnesses, to a degree that most people have no idea about. Because of this, stories get exaggerated tremendously, and not on purpose. After repeating a story, we tend to believe it ourselves, even if it contains slight exaggerations. This problem gets repeated over and over, and the story eventually grows on its own. Every time I've seen an investigation of a story, the story turns out to be false. A great example is the so-called Roswell Incident in 1947 (I think). We have a great understanding of what happened there, but over the years the story got exaggerated repeatedly, until in the 70s the story had grown to the point that there were bodies recovered. This continued until the current day, by which time the story in the popular culture is way, way bigger than the original. Another famous case occurred in Ohio some years ago, in which two police officers chased for almost 80 miles an object that turned out to be Venus. The human brain can be fooled very easily once it has decided that what it is seeing is a recognized object, and from then on significant details will be filled in automatically.

A good place to start in UFO discussions is, I think, to look at the details of your favorite case, to establish what the basic facts are.


An online friend of mine for over three years claims to have met an alien species during his work for the CIA. Would you like me to send you a personal message with a link to a public post of his on that?

The man happens to write in such an off the scale brilliant manner on so many topics that CIA people would tend to know about.... that I personally take his claim very, very seriously!
 
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AV1611VET

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An online friend of mine for over three years claims to have met an alien species during his work for the CIA.
I've got an alien species in my house! Lettuce that's been in the hydrator drawer since July! :eek:
 
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DennisTate

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I've got an alien species in my house! Lettuce that's been in the hydrator drawer since July! :eek:

LOL!

A near death experiencer made a statement about aliens that especially caught my attention:

allaboutchristian
.com/spirituality/
What about beings from other planets, do you think they visit here?

Yes I do. And I think those who have been permitted to cross over into our world have been doing so for a very long time now (for a very important purpose) as Divinely arranged by Heaven. Since my NDE, because of a few things I was shown, it is now my deep belief that some of the more phenomenal events depicted in the Old Testament (such as the Great flood of Noah, the parting of the Red Sea for Moses, the mass explosion of Sodom and Gomorrah, etc) are not only very true, but were moments in time which were orchestrated and performed by beings of a much higher order and intelligence than our ownwho may have volunteered their technology and understandings or even sent to help guide and shape a culture within humanity during a pressing time within its development and evolution." (Christian Andreason, chapter 2)
 
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DennisTate

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Hi, Apostle Joseph. What are Holy Ghost fireworks?

I think I might be able to answer that.........

I got angry at God back in 1990 after beginning to read near death experience accounts.......

While I had believe in "soul sleep" I was quite enthusiastic with the Christian and Jewish Bible... .it seemed humane but as I began to read NDE's ... .I concluded that the Soul Sleep doctrine was a false understanding of many scriptures which.........

put me into a pretty serious ethical dilemma.........

How could somebody as obviously brilliant as Rabbi Yeshua - Jesus settle for a paradigm of 'many called / few chosen"...... "a broad way leading to destruction and many there be who go in thereat and a narrow way leading to life and few there be who find it"...... and an all too real hell or purgatory higher dimensional environment??????????



So I went and did something kind of dangerous and got myself into some pretty serious trouble......

I summarized what I did to my online friend Sanhedrin Rabbi Yeshayahu Hollander here:


My conversation with the Rabbi.....

Anyway....... I ended up being kind of a mess from 1990 to 2000......

I can identify more so with the guy who had the Legion than most other characters in the New Testament.... but in the year 2000 I wrote an e-mail to my soon to be wife.........

She is a gifted Pentecostal / Charismatic Christian from Ecuador......
she was somehow told that I was going to be her husband and that she should fast and pray for me for 35 days........

She obeyed.... for four weeks, 3 days / week only fruit jucies....
for the fifth week seven days in a row... only fruit juices and Messiah Yeshua - Jesus woke her up and got her to pray for me most mornings.....(maybe all of them)..... but anway.... I was 3000 miles away basking in the most astonishing peace of mind that I had ever had in my entire life...........

My wife has gifts that I still don't comprehend even 17 years later............
 
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DennisTate

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Thanks - I've brought the document up in a browser tab (that's one way to have a to-do list :), and will read it. It may take a bit, as things get busy at work (I'm writing this at 12:30 am).

Mellen Benedict made some astonishing assertions that I personally believe.......
how could I really argue with him?

It took me years after I returned from my near-death experience to assimilate any words at all for the Void experience. I can tell you this now: the Void is less than nothing, yet more than everything that is! The Void is absolute zero; chaos forming all possibilities. It is Absolute Consciousness; much more than even Universal Intelligence. The Void is the vacuum or nothingness between all physical manifestations. The SPACE between atoms and their components. Modern science has begun to study this space between everything. They call it Zero point. Whenever they try to measure it, their instruments go off the scale, or to infinity, so to speak. They have no way, as of yet, to measure infinity accurately. There is more of the zero space in your own body and the Universe than anything else!" (Mellen Benedict, near - death. com)

That phrase....."chaos forming all possibilities" has huge implications.


I have a good friend whom I've known for 40 years who was a long-time member of the WWCG, and became very disillusioned after the death of Herbert W. Armstrong.

Yes..... I haven't read his book yet but obviously Pastor Dan Samson is on a very different page than when he was assistant pastor in Halifax, N. S. , Canada.

https://www.amazon.com/God-Evolution-Implications-Darwins-Fundamentalism/dp/0977604446

God and Evolution? - The Implications of Darwin's Theory for Fundamentalism, the Bible and the Meaning of Life Hardcover – 2006
by Daniel J. Samson (Author)
 
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BNR32FAN

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They don't say AD and BC anymore, they call it the common era or some such.

Yes they changed it it not too long ago. But despite their attempts to remove Jesus' from the calendar it is still based on His birth year. :)
 
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mark kennedy

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Yes they changed it it not too long ago. But despite their attempts to remove Jesus' from the calendar it is still based on His birth year. :)
I know, I'm just saying, they don't see it as before and after Christ even though it is. They want to call it the common era but I haven't seen a lot of reason for that except to remove the name of Christ from the calendar.
 
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DennisTate

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LittleLambofJesus

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DennisTate said:
An online friend of mine for over three years claims to have met an alien species during his work for the CIA.
Probably brainwashed from watching "MIB" too many times........

c5d77c4f054c0b237828e8e1850d1344.gif


....................................

I've got an alien species in my house! Lettuce that's been in the hydrator drawer since July! :eek:
Ha.
Will come in handy during a famine.......

Luke 21:23
"Woe to the ones in belly having and the ones suckling in those the days!
For shall be distress great upon the Land and wrath upon this people..


The Destruction of Jerusalem - George Peter Holford, 1805AD

......The day on which Titus encompassed Jerusalem, was the feast of the Passover......

Meanwhile the horrors of famine grew still more melancholy and afflictive.
The Jews,...................
In the depth or this horrible extremity, a Jewess of noble family urged by the intolerable cravings of hunger, slew her infant child, and prepared it for a meal ; and had actually eaten one half thereof, when the soldiers, allured by tile smell of food, threatened her with instant death if she refused to discover it......

Reve 18:8
by this, in one day shall be arriving the blows of Her, death and sorrow and famine;
and in fire She shall be being burned, that strong Lord, the God, the one judging Her
 
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grahamsnumber

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Hi, Graham! Welcome to CF! :wave:

Have you been an atheist all your life?
Hi, there. Sort of - I grew up in a house that wasn't religious. My mom was mildly religious, and would have called herself a Christian, but really that was a bit of a stretch; mostly she called herself that just because that was what the American culture commonly "told" you to be. When I was a kid, she took me to a non-denominational church regularly, and I even got prizes for memorizing the most scripture :innocent::grinning:. But my dad was an atheist, and I got exposed to some of both sides. Most of my extended family wasn't religious either, but also wasn't aggressively anti-religious. I did have three very religious aunts, and a number of religious friends. I started doubting things at around age 12 or so.
 
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grahamsnumber

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I watched the video, and have a few comments.
  • It is said, a few minutes into the video, that belief in evolution is based entirely on faith, and that no "true facts" have ever been found in support of it. Here I must strenuously disagree. A very common misunderstanding of the scientific community is that scientists are deathly afraid of accepted theories being disproved. In fact, the very opposite is true. In academia, the way you get ahead is exactly by changing or significantly extending current theories. You get a Nobel Prize by showing that something long accepted is wrong. Every physicist out there would be delighted to be the one who showed that Einstein's theory of gravity, General Relativity, was wrong. He'd be famous for centuries. The same holds true for evolution. No one has "faith" that evolution is true, and everyone would love to be the one to overturn it if it were false. However, the evidence for it is absolutely overwhelming. For example, it has been pointed out by biologists that we actually have more evidence for evolution just in genetic and chemical studies than we do that the Roman empire existed! And notice - this is not including the fossil record. Think about that. How do you know that the Roman Empire ever actually existed? It all comes down to evidence. Now, we have tons and tons of evidence that it did exist: we have many physical structures all over the western world, and we have lots and lots of written evidence from the time. But there is still some probability, some tiny, tiny probability, that it's all false - forged or misunderstood. Nothing has a probability of true zero. So maybe there's a 1 in a trillion trillion trillion chance that the Roman Empire didn't exist. Well, the chance the evolution isn't true, based only on genetic and other biological evidence, is less than that number. Throw in the fossil record, and the number drops way, way lower. Another misunderstanding I see a lot is that evolution is now at the same state that it was in the 19th century when Darwin first proposed it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many scientists, over decades and decades, have tried to disprove it (that's what scientists do, all the time: try to disprove things) and have failed. What has happened is just the opposite: evidence has done nothing but accumulate at an ever-increasing rate. Remember, we now no longer even need the fossil record to prove evolution - that's just how the theory got started, and the vast majority of critics, such as are shown in the video, seem to be stuck arguing the evidence that was presented in 1859. Not only is it not true that "no true facts have ever been found that support it", in fact, no true fact has ever been found that doesn't support it.

  • The Wall Street Journal article he quotes, from 2014, uses the long-disproven "fine-tuning" argument, which basically sees the apparent fine-tuning of the universe to support life as evidence of a supernatural intelligence. The article was not written by a scientist, but by a religious writer. Now, obviously, that's not a problem in itself. But it does frequently mean that the understanding of complex scientific ideas may not be completely accurate, and we do indeed see that here. For example, we really don't know all the factors that would be required for life to exist. Rather, we have some idea of the factors that would allow life as we know it here on Earth to exist. And even that understanding is limited because the process is so complex. It has been pointed out that this really is an example of life being fine-tuned for the environment in which it evolved, rather than the other way around. Another claim the article makes is that since we haven't discovered any life anywhere else, the theory of evolution is shot. One problem here is that although we haven't found life yet, we continue to find planets around other stars that seem like they'd be capable of supporting life of some kind, and we're finding them at an increasing rate. The search continues, but even if no life is found, it is not a disproof of evolution, but rather a statement of something we already know - that the process itself is complex and takes a long time - maybe complex and slow enough that it just hasn't happened anywhere else in our part of our own galaxy (remember, there are over a hundred billion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars). And quoting Fred Hoyle, a physicist, not a biologist, on evolution is a weak version of the argument from authority, in which an expert is found and cherry-picked, rather than looking at the overwhelming number of actual biologists on the other side. Being an outsider is fine, and the arguments are interesting and valid to have, but you can't use the one person you can find who agrees with you and plop him down on the table as if it vastly bolsters your case. Because I'll find thousands of academics, every bit as qualified as Hoyle (much more qualified, actually, since they are experts in the biology itself) to say the opposite.

  • Farther in, the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics are brought up in a way that has long been shown to be based on a faulty understanding of those laws. One argument he makes is that the radioactive elements such as uranium must all have come into existence in the beginning, since they've been decaying ever since. However, this is false. The big-bang model states that originally, only energy came into existence (but even this is hard to understand, because a common version of the theory has time itself starting at the same event), and eventually you got only one type of atom: hydrogen. All the other atomic varieties come into existence through fusion taking place in the center of stars, and the heavier elements like uranium are created when a star explodes in a supernova, and the vast forces involved end up making the heavy elements by fusing together lighter ones. This happens continually. Physicists like Lawrence Krauss have talked a lot about the "nothing from nothing" idea that is so counter-intuitive to humans. His book A Universe From Nothing is a very good popular-level discussion of the issue. A subtle and oft missed point, I think, is that the word "theory" in science and math doesn't mean the same thing that it does in everyday English. When we use the word in our daily life, we mean something more like a hunch or an idea. Scientifically, the word refers to a solid body of work that has a consistent model and has been vetted by different experts for a very long time. The "theory of evolution" isn't just some armchair-based speculation that happened over a beer by a couple of dudes having a good time. Rather, it is a consistent model of an enormous body of data that has been examined from every possible direction and tested over and over again in every possible way for over a century by hundreds of thousands of scientists from all over the world. Another point is that it is tempting but disastrous to use your everyday visualizations when trying to understand physics that is outside our everyday experience. Those visualizations are very useful for living on Earth as a biological being of our size. But they can lead you far astray if you rely on them when thinking about the huge scale, like cosmology, or the tiny scale, like quantum mechanics. In both of those areas, you have to cast aside your preconceived visualizations of how things work, and rely solely on the mathematics. This is because visualizing things like a 4-dimensional curved spacetime are impossible to directly do. But understanding them is not impossible if you use mathematics. You might not be able to "see" a curved spacetime, but you can work with it and apply it successfully by using the math, and that leads to a certain kind of understanding. This is all the more true when trying to talk about the origin of the universe, where time itself becomes highly nonlinear - something that is utterly foreign to us.
Haha, well, this post got a bit longer than I thought it would. So I'll shut up now. :wink:
 
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grahamsnumber

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An online friend of mine for over three years claims to have met an alien species during his work for the CIA. Would you like me to send you a personal message with a link to a public post of his on that?

The man happens to write in such an off the scale brilliant manner on so many topics that CIA people would tend to know about.... that I personally take his claim very, very seriously!

Sure!
 
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