Atheist Richard Dawkins Mocks Mitt Romney

The Right's dismissal and rejection of science and facts is simply amazing to me. I took a quick, unscientific poll of my own family members and friends who wouldn't be here had it not been for medical science and was astonished. More than half had experienced medical issues that would have been fatal in times past.

I suppose Dimwitt Wrongley would like' to go back to the days when infant mortality was 60 or 70%. Or when something as simple as a broken arm could kill you.

Behind Romney's scientific ignorance is, very likely, his abiding religious faith.

It is my assumption (perhaps somewhat erroneously) that religious zealotry tramples on scientific appreciation.

And so, underneath it all, I suspect that Romney's hiding his true fervor for Mormonism--and this obscures his appreciation for Science.

He ought to take a critical lesson from Dr. Francis Collins, the director of NIH, who reconciles his strong Christian faith with Science, quite `nicely', for himself.

It might be a good idea to consider equipping jet aircraft with some windows that roll down for emergency ventilation of cabin smoke. Obviously one doesn't need to open all of the windows creating too much negative pressure etc, just a few controlled by the pilot.

Instead of rolling the window down it would be a power window with just an emergency manual operation in case some of the hydraulic systems don't work.

An aircraft with an onboard fire or poison gas emission from some unexpected source hasn't much time to exhaust the bad air if the people are to remain alive. Sure they have masks with bottled air however it is possible that it might not work.

I just finished reading an interesting book named 'The War After Armageddon' in which electronics in military aircraft did not work with jammers and even armored vehicles were ineffective with electronic reactive armor down. It doesn't hurt to be prepared for the unexpected systems failures that can occur and exploit fundamental physics such as opening a window a little to draft out smoke. Obviously some safety design features would need to be adapted for the device to work safely.

Dr. Dawkins sometimes present more than a little bit of an air of supremacy. perhaps he has evolved to a higher plane in his own mind at least such that he is expert on all subjects beyond his biology niche.

Gary

I just finished reading an interesting book named 'The War After Armageddon' in which electronics in military aircraft did not work with jammers and even armored vehicles were ineffective with electronic reactive armor down.

Ahhhhhh Gary, you do realize that you were reading a syfy fiction novel, don't you and you do realize that to base reality on fiction is not realistic, don't you ??? See where I'm going here Gary ,,,,,,,,,,

Not so syfy fiction: China, tahnks to GWB has the MONOPOLY on rare earths whish are an important component of any electronic item we have, displays, phones, TVs, cars, planes, weaponry, tablets, starters, medical tooling, calculators, etc. etc.

*facepalm* Gary, was 8th grade science your last science class? Did you even pay a blind bit of attention in THAT class?

My biggest gripe with religion is the insistence that many religions have on teaching astronomy, cosmology and biology as well as moral and ethical philosophy. The moral teachings of Christianity, for example, are noble, and in many cases workable. But if I am to believe that the Bible is the word of God, and am to take all of it as fact, then I must agree that the world was created in six days, that Noah managed to get breeding pairs of every species of animal on board the Ark (even those that did not live in the Middle East) and other Biblical "facts" that just do not work. Many apologists for this Biblical certainty about the physical world say that, no, six days are a metaphor, that it really means six million, or six billion years. If this is the case, and God speaks in metaphor, why is the rest of the material in the Bible not metaphoric as well? If we can't pick and choose, then let's not pick and choose.

Many scientists are highly religious. One of the most devout Christians I ever knew was Raymond Alf, a biology teacher at my prep school. "Raybo" was fond of shouting "Laudate Deo" (fervently, if ungrammatically) at the discovery of a fossil. He was a scientist... hard evidence, hard fact. He accepted the teachings of Christ, but was well aware of the fact that Christ did not teach about the evolution of uintatheres and smilodons. To Ray, a God who could create the system of evolution through natural selection was a far more powerful God than one who created all species simultaneously (well, over a few days, anyway) with a mighty "Shazam!" The Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne KBE, FRS is a particle physicist (author of the 1979 book The Particle Play among many others) who left his post as Professor of Mathematical physics at the University of Cambridge the year he wrote that book to become an Anglican priest. The Belgian astrophysicist Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966), who posited the expansion of the universe before Hubble and proposed the Big Bang theory of creation, was a Catholic priest, as was the paleontologist and geologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ.

It is fundamentalism -- Christian, Jewish, Muslim... even Zoroastrian, I suppose -- which creates the either/or, with us/against us dichotomy.

Pete ........... Okay, if you say so.

I am God... and I approved this message.

lmao

Open airplanes are fine...just don't fly high.

One of my best laughs of the month!

GWB and the reare earths and now this. America should raise taxes just for education (LOL)

Just for gits and shiggles... here's what really happens if you open a jet's window at 30,000 feet. People die, and they die REALLY fast. Might ask Payne Stewart and his pilots about that... well, you could ask the particles that didn't meld with the plane and the soil anyway.