came across this lecutre (or alternatively you can read the transcript) in a class from yale on moralities of everyday life:.
a history of violence edge master class 2011some excepts:.
"believe it or notand i know most people do notviolence has been in decline over long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence.".
I read the first link, I wonder if you have actually read the second one?
I am not qualified to comment on whether the data support the view that humans are becoming less belligerent or not. If you have read 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' in full you will know that it is full of evidence for an improvement in the human condition which is unaffected by any errors in statistics.
It is a compelling book that any ex-JW would benefit from reading.
today is my birthday :) in happy to be able to say that guilt free!
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Belated Happy Birthday Morph
hi does anyone know any good articles or videos about how old mankind and the earth are and carbon dating?
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i've just started looking into it but there seems to be a lot of conflicting ideas over accuracy so i'm unsure what to think.
I'm not sure you will get a definite answer on this. However, you can make your most educated conclusion yourself - scratchme
Actually the science is very good on these questions. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. The total mass of the universe has even been calculated. Earth is 4.5 billion years old.
Life first appeared around 3.8 billion years ago - although if you want consensus you can go for 3.4 billion years when the evidence is not disputed. The origin of Homo sapiens is less exact because there was no such thing as the first human (see video above) so there that date is open to debate depending on how we categorize ancient hominids.
i recently made the decision to stop studying with my study conductor, due to a situation i found myself in that led to a high possibility of my unbaptized publisher "rights" being taken away from me.
i have since told my study conductor i have joined a new church (to which she dropped me like a hot rock, of course).... last time i posted on here, i was progressing nicely towards baptism, and was well into it.anyhoo, i like my new church, very hillsong-esqe.
so just wondering if anyone else has stayed the course of christianity after leaving the jws, and if so - where did you go?
I became a xtian for about 9 years after leaving the cult.
I am now convinced that there is no god.
hi does anyone know any good articles or videos about how old mankind and the earth are and carbon dating?
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i've just started looking into it but there seems to be a lot of conflicting ideas over accuracy so i'm unsure what to think.
@Venus. Shepherdless is correct. The earth's population was very stable for most of human history. More than once our species came close to extinction.
If you are going to talk about science please try reading an actual science book first.
hi does anyone know any good articles or videos about how old mankind and the earth are and carbon dating?
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i've just started looking into it but there seems to be a lot of conflicting ideas over accuracy so i'm unsure what to think.
The speaker was probably misunderstanding a couple of different facts about our ancestry.
In a nutshell ancestors are much rarer than descendants. All humans alive today can trace their mitochondrial DNA (passed on only by females) to a last common ancestor sometimes called 'mitochondrial Eve' who lived in Africa about 100,000 - 150,000 years ago. Please bear in mind that she was only one of a population of many thousands who no longer have living descendants.
Similarly all men have a Y-chromosome that can be traced back to a single individual - also one member of a large population - who lived at approximately 180,000 years ago. Having said that different studies have come up with different results for those dates but none of them are less than 100K. These are examples of genetic bottle-necks but it is highly unlikely that they occurred within mellennia of each other or in the same population.
hi does anyone know any good articles or videos about how old mankind and the earth are and carbon dating?
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i've just started looking into it but there seems to be a lot of conflicting ideas over accuracy so i'm unsure what to think.
That's a huge topic FR!
Modern humans have been around for perhaps 200,000 years but there was no 'first human'. The evidence for the origins of our species comes from a variety of scientific disciplines including comparative anatomy, paleontology and genetics. You will find a number of examples in this index of threads...
There is a good article here about radiometric dating by a scientist who is also a christian and who hopes to help other christians who doubt the evidence.
Dates are confirmed by multiple independent radiometric 'clocks' that move at different speeds. Radiocarbon dating is only useful for artefacts up to about 45,000 years old.
If you have any specific questions please let us know.
a friend and client and former politician just called me.
he knows people in the media and had offered a few months back to see if anyone would be interested in doing a story on what i'm doing through my podcasts this jw life" and "shunned".
of course i was excited but things take time and you never know if they'll pan out.
Outstanding! Please keep us posted.
so mrs cofty and i went to see the new movie last weekend on the gospel story told from the perspective of mary magdalene.. the first ten minutes are excellent and then jesus turns up and it's all downhill from there.
it was pope gregory who decided in 1591 that mary m was a penitent prostitute, even though the gospels contain no such reference.
was she the mary from whom seven demons were cast or was she just unlucky to share a name with a different mary?
overall, would you recommend the film? - LUHE
No to be honest I wouldn't. I lost interest in it about 30 minutes in and it it didn't get better. If it ends up on TV then watch it but save your tenner.
I just disliked the Jesus character a lot. An egomaniacal wimp!
This is a feminised Jesus who I suspect will be disliked by men and women. I guessed the script-writers were female and I was correct - Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett.
if we eliminate all the controversial and confusing verses attributed to jesus we will get the crystal clear truth from him because his source was (1) god which can be seen from his habit of early morning talking to god in prayer (mark 1:35; john 8:1, 2) which would not have been for material blessings (mathew 6:8; 16:24), and (2) also observance of people.. 1) jesus who said judgment is based on whether we acted humanely or not (mathew 25:31-46) would not have spoken about god’s people and pagans (which means bulk of the things found in gospel had not been spoken/done by jesus).. 2) another important truth he said was about the real key to our happiness which he said is with each one of us.
(luke 17:21).
from his observance of history, he knew there are people from adversities who made great contribution to the world; and there are people from all abundance who lived a life of wastage accomplishing nothing; and there are people who are mixed in varying degree.
we are much more than our mind which is just a tool used by our very essence, the immaterial entity within, which is not in the time-space continuum
All the evidence from neuroscience shows that we are our brains. There is no 'ghost in the machine'.
