General Chat

[Chindie]

If you think my responses are completely un-scientific then fine that's your opinion. However if there was nothing to worry about Cloned meat why all the commotion? I merely stated that's it's like GM food...we simply don't know.

All the commotion is down a couple of things... mainly one you're exhibiting.

a) Ignorance - people don't understand what 'cloned meat' is and immediately think it's bad because they're ignorant to what cloning involves.

Its a moral issue. Some people have problems with 'playing "God"', or the standards of care/raising that cloned animals encounter.

c) it got into the Daily Heil...

and d) it made the news at all because the FSA announced it because the guy had done it without licence to do so.

Actually I have Lurpak lighter...because it was the only lower fat spread that isn't full of a list of chemicals. We have graves disease in our family & the doctors have warned to avoid injesting chemicals eg mono-sodium glutamate, which like aspartame is very often used as a filler. Presumably they'll be the non scientific doctors too! Who cares?!!

IT IS FULL OF CHEMICALS! IT HAS TO BE! IT'S MADE OF CHEMICALS! It contains sodium chloride, dihydrogen monoxide... And because it isn't classified as organic the constituent parts of it will have encountered some form of unnatural additive... most likely the rapeseed oil in it.

Your doctor will have warned you to avoid 'chemicals' because it's never quite possible to know the exact effect of dietary intake on people who may be prone to certain conditions so, to er on the side of caution, they advise to be wary. Chances are you'd be as fine as the millions upon billions of people consuming these additives day in day out.

It's a bit like the oncologists who warn women diagnosed with breast & other cancers not to dye their hair, particularly using dark colourants. I've known about this for at least 15 years, since someone in my family was diagnosed. I've also spoken to a number of other women who've been told the same also. If they're telling cancer patients this Chindie...why aren't they telling the healthy public?!! I suspect it's all in the name of big business.

Same story, er on the side of caution if likely to be in a position that may be affected.

Also that appears to be a myth, or only relevant to people encountering the dye constantly over long periods of time, i.e. hairdressers, and even that seems far from confirmed.

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

or the standards of care/raising that cloned animals encounter.

If a human were cloned, would we consider them 'lesser' than us?

It's not the same thing obviously, we are more complex, but the idea is the same. Would a farmer look upon a cloned animal and think of it as something different? As you only have to look at snobbery within dogs, some people demand pure breeds and see mongrels as lesser, to see what problems could arise.

It's getting into Phillip K Dick territory but it's interesting.

[BOF]

Hmm, this isn't the first time you've sided with big business Chindie. You do seem to adopt the stance that if it hasn't been proven to be dangerous then it's safe until they do. That's a very dangerous standpoint. I don't know anything about this hair dye thing but to say something is "far from confirmed" would certainly not be a glowing endorsement to plough ahead and use it as a general rule. Regarding cloned meat, I don't think there's anything wrong with it but I think it's a normal prejudice/defence mechanism to be at the very least suspicious of new foods or methods of creating food. After all, the ignorance of which you speak is on both sides of the coin. Even the scientific community are often not sure about the long term side effects of many things they set in motion. I'm reluctant to go back to the artificial sweetener example but it is a good example of something where the jury is still very much out and there is enough doubt to warrant people not consuming it.

After all, for example, I'd rather avoid something and find out 20 years later that it was safe all along, than consume it out of blind faith or big business propoganda only to find out it is a large contributory factor towards cancer after it's too late.

[JulieB]

And for the record I'm just about sick and tired of these snide comments & being told because I have a belief in a Creator I'm somehow ignoring the scientific facts..

One of the founding fathers of Atheism died in April of this year Anthony Flew

What made him...like me change his mind on the existence of an intelligent designer??!!!....Like Soccratees advised... he followed the scientific evidence. And when it became apparent that the DNA of even simple cells showed there being more likely a necessity of complex pre-existing elements, he had to admit to himself that a pre-existing design process was more than likely at work.

Interestlingly enough he rejected the established Churches view of Creation, God & religion as I did when I was much younger.

Professor Antony Flew, the rationalist philosopher who died on April 8 aged 87, spent much of his life denying the existence of God until, in 2004, he dramatically changed his mind.

Published: 6:08PM BST 13 Apr 2010

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Photo: JOHN LAWRENCE

Flew always described himself as a "negative atheist", asserting that "theological propositions can neither be verified nor falsified by experience", a position he expounded in his classic paper Theology and Falsification (1950), reputedly the most frequently-quoted philosophical publication of the second half of the 20th century.

He argued that any philosophical debate about the Almighty must begin by presuming atheism, placing the burden of proof on those who believe that God exists. "We reject all transcendent supernatural systems, not because we've examined or could have examined each in turn, but because it does not seem to us that there is any good evidence in reason to postulate anything behind or beyond this natural universe," he proclaimed. A key principle of his philosophy was the Socratean concept of "follow the evidence, wherever it leads".

When Flew revealed that he had come to the conclusion that there might be a God after all, it came as a shock to his fellow atheists, who had long regarded him as one of their foremost champions. Worse, he seemed to have deserted Plato for Aristotle, since it was two of Aquinas's famous five proofs for the existence of God – the arguments from design and for a prime mover – that had apparently clinched the matter.

After months of soul-searching, Flew concluded that research into DNA had "shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved". Moreover, though he accepted Darwinian evolution, he felt that it could not explain the beginnings of life. "I have been persuaded that it is simply out of the question that the first living matter evolved out of dead matter and then developed into an extraordinarily complicated creature," he said.

Flew went on to make a video of his conversion entitled Has Science Discovered God? and seemed to want to atone for past errors: "As people have certainly been influenced by me, I want to try and correct the enormous damage I may have done," he said.

But believers waiting to welcome this most prodigal of sons back into the fold were to be disappointed. Flew's conversion did not embrace such concepts as Heaven, good and evil or the afterlife – let alone divine intervention in human affairs. His God was strictly minimalist – very different from "the monstrous oriental despots of the religions of Christianity and Islam", as he liked to call them. God may have called his creation into existence, then, but why did he bother? To that question, it seemed, Flew had no answer.

Antony Garrard Newton Flew was born on February 11 1923 and educated at Kingswood School, Bath. His father, a Methodist minister, encouraged his son to take an interest in religious questions, but he lost any religious faith at the age of 15.

Flew's studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war, in which he served in RAF Intelligence and was later attached to the air ministry. In 1942-43 he was a state scholar in Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

After the war, he concentrated on Philosophy, winning an exhibition, then a scholarship, to St John's College, Oxford. He graduated with a First in Greats and scooped the University Prize in Philosophy – the John Locke Scholarship in Mental Philosophy – in 1948. The following year he was appointed lecturer in Philosophy at Christ Church.

As an undergraduate, Flew had become an enthusiast for the new linguistic analysis approach to philosophy propounded by JL Austin and Gilbert Ryle and, as a lecturer, was considered one of its leading advocates. In 1955 he edited Logic and Language: First Series, an influential anthology that popularised the new approach.

He soon began applying the new technique to religious questions and, with Alasdair MacIntyre, edited New Essays in Philosophical Theology (1955). In his study of religion, Flew was greatly influenced by David Hume, on whom he became a leading authority. His Hume's Philosophy of Belief (1961) became the standard study of the philosopher's Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Flew's interests were prolific and wide-ranging, and he applied his linguistic analysis approach to studies of psychoanalysis, psychical research, crime and evolutionary ethics, among other topics. In political philosophy, Flew defended classical liberalism against the fallacies of egalitarianism, arguing that socialism and social democracy are based on assumptions about the world that are demonstrably false. He became a leading critic of the Harvard philosopher John Rawls, who had attempted to reconcile liberty and egalitarianism in his critically acclaimed Theory of Justice. In Politics of Procrustes: Contradictions of Enforced Equality (1981), Flew rejected Rawls's claim that, since people do not acquire their natural talents through moral merit, these talents stand at the disposition of "society". Moral qualities, Flew argued, are not needed to entitle us to profit from our abilities.

In Sociology, Equality and Education (1976), Flew attacked the malign influence of the egalitarian ideology in education. In the 1990s he was the author of a series of pamphlets for the Adam Smith Institute calling on the then Conservative government to return to educational selection, to widen parental choice and to embrace a more challenging curriculum for brighter children.

In 2002, in reference to the Labour government's target of getting more working-class children into higher education, he observed that in 1969, when the grammar school system was still in place, the education minister Shirley Williams had proudly boasted that "over 26 per cent of our university population and 35 per cent of students in all institutions of higher learning are of working-class origin". This, he pointed out, was almost double the level of the second-best European performer, Sweden.

From Oxford, Flew went on to lecture in Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen University before being appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Keele in 1954. In 1973 he transferred to Reading University, where he remained until taking early retirement in 1982. Afterwards, he worked on a half-time basis for three years as Professor of Philosophy at York University, Toronto.

Flew was the author of some 23 works of philosophy, including God and Philosophy (1966), Evolutionary Ethics (1967), An Introduction to Western Philosophy (1971), The Presumption of Atheism (1976), A Rational Animal (1978), Darwinian Evolution (1984), Atheistic Humanism (1993) and Philosophical Essays of Antony Flew (1997).

Flew's volte-face on the existence of God was all the more remarkable given the volume of his writing in the atheistic cause and his vehement denial of internet rumours in 2001 that he had renounced his atheism. His response was entitled Sorry To Disappoint, but I'm Still an Atheist! In 2007, however, he was able to publish There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind.

He was at various times a vice-president of the Rationalist Press Association, chairman of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society and a fellow of the Academy of Humanism. In addition to his permanent academic posts, he held several visiting professorships at universities around the world.

Antony Flew married, in 1952, Annis Harty; they had two daughters.

I'm not debating this with the VT brand of Atheists for reasons already stated and I'm sure you'll all just dismiss Flew's opinions.

At the end of the day people beleive what they want to beleive... People don't want to believe in a Creator because they want to do exactly as they wish. That's their choice and up to them.

I'm different. Get Over it!!

[kidlewis]

well hang on a sec,

cloned meat or not they blabber on constantly that red meat, coffee, dairy products and bbq food gives you cancer.

I don't give a damn to be honest, the only food you ever read about being 100% good for you are strawberries, chilli and garlic. Not exactly Gordon Ramsey cuisine with those 3 ingredients, and even if you just ate those three you'd be on Imodium the rest of your life.

It's not like they have been giving us foot and mouth steaks is it? that would be more worrying.

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

One of the founding fathers of Atheism died in April of this year Anthony Flew

What made him...like me change his mind on the existence of an intelligent designer??!!!

It reminds me of a short story I wrote back in school, about a religious man and an athiest. They got in a car crash. Both of them barely survived. The atheist man found faith and thanked god for his survival. The religious man turned against god because his injuries led him to never walk again.

Faith is fickle, all it takes is a little push one way or the other.

[Meath_Villan]

Tea anyone??

[JulieB]

It's a bit like the oncologists who warn women diagnosed with breast & other cancers not to dye their hair, particularly using dark colourants. I've known about this for at least 15 years, since someone in my family was diagnosed. I've also spoken to a number of other women who've been told the same also. If they're telling cancer patients this Chindie...why aren't they telling the healthy public?!! I suspect it's all in the name of big business.

The is the first I've heard of this.

Which is both surprising and worrying, as my wife has (a) had breast cancer, ( dyes her hair on a regular basis (but has never been warned against it by any professionals) and © is a fairly obsessive web researcher on such things and has never mentioned seeing the subject mentioned.

EDIT: Just done some Googling. No statistically relevant links.

Example:

I've just had a client of 60 whose just been diagnosed for the 2nd time with breast cancer and I know she has dark hair & regularly dyes it, so I emailed her what I've been told.

I have a very interesting conversation with the Body Shop over this a while ago, they've had to take their natural hair dyes like henna off the shelves because of their refusal to test it on animals. The girl in the shop in B'ham had heard of exactly the same advice been given to cancer patients also and I said to her it was scandalous that the public weren't been warned. It's big business like BOF says though.

Lush apart from the internet appear to have the only natural hair dyes on the market. I'm lucky I'm 40s & have hardly any grey whatsoever however I use the Lush stuff cos it makes my hair shine & gives it a lovely glow.

For the record I won't ever use synthetic dyes on my hair.

[Chindie]

Hmm, this isn't the first time you've sided with big business Chindie.

I take issue with that. I'm not 'siding with big business', I've no reason or desire to. I'm siding against ignorance, the likes of which Julie spouts with Old Faithful like regularity on anything even vaguely health related.

You do seem to adopt the stance that if it hasn't been proven to be dangerous then it's safe until they do.

I take a stance that if there is no evidence of something, and it has been tested (correctly, before the aspertame rears is ugly head again) to prove that their is no evidence, then it is safe to assume that there is nothing to worry about. Things are tested quite rigorously, and repeatedly, especially in the food industry. If I were to worry about every additive, in anything, or avoid it, I don't think I'd be able to do alot. I wouldn't be able to wash, brush my teeth, eat more or less anything, go outside, drink anything... just in case later on it's found that maybe it might have some problem with it, in a small amount of cases, usually when connected to another issue, as things that affect healthy populations tend to jump up sharpish in laboratory testing.

That's a very dangerous standpoint.

I'd say my actual standpoint, and not the one you've assumed, which is different in a small way, is one of compromise, and logic. Nothing is entirely safe. Chocolate in big enough doses will kill you, so will bananas, water is poisonous in high enough doses... and so on. I make a considered compromise.

I don't know anything about this hair dye thing but to say something is "far from confirmed" would certainly not be a glowing endorsement to plough ahead and use it as a general rule.

As Mike has shown above, theres not a statistical connection. Thats good enough for me to say, if the fancy ever takes me to die my hair, that it's ok to do it. Million upon millions have done so, I don't see lawsuits falling of Garnier's arse for cancer victims.

Regarding cloned meat, I don't think there's anything wrong with it but I think it's a normal prejudice/defence mechanism to be at the very least suspicious of new foods or methods of creating food.

I'd rather people weren't ignorant of such things and decided to use their initiative to discover if their suspicions are unfounded or not, than simply accept that 'People are like that'.

After all, the ignorance of which you speak is on both sides of the coin. Even the scientific community are often not sure about the long term side effects of many things they set in motion. I'm reluctant to go back to the artificial sweetener example but it is a good example of something where the jury is still very much out and there is enough doubt to warrant people not consuming it.

We did aspertame to death, every example that supported your own theory on it was flawed in their science, as I told you. One of them was feeding rats enough aspertame to sate a T-Rexs sweet tooth for a year, and was allowing them to go to full natural death which introduces so many variables to the equation I'm loathe to call it a valid study. Good science isolates variables, not creates them and try to justify it's findings on such.

After all, for example, I'd rather avoid something and find out 20 years later that it was safe all along, than consume it out of blind faith or big business propoganda only to find out it is a large contributory factor towards cancer after it's too late.

Fair enough, but I'd rather enjoy my life and not worry. If I live long enough (unlucky with my lifestyle to be frank but **** it, I'll have enjoyed it), I'll get cancer, and so will you, and so will everyone else, even if we all eat the freshest, cleanest, most natural products on the planet, and lived in perfect environments, because cancer is a flaw of our genetic makeup. Some things exacerbate it, like smoking (although even that isn't a forgone conclusion - you may well be able to smoke 60 a day for 40 years and you could be fine, it isn't guarenteed) and those are confirmed, and have been tested.

And so far, most products that have been on the market long term will have been cleared too. If they did have an issue, they'll have been pulled, because you don't want to kill your market for a start and you also don't want the lawsuits, and you also don't want the short sharp shock of government chastisement too.

I'll take my chances, and to be honest, I think they're in my favour.

[mjmooney]

Time for those who don't like the religion threads to leave, NOW.

After months of soul-searching, Flew concluded that research into DNA had "shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved". Moreover, though he accepted Darwinian evolution, he felt that it could not explain the beginnings of life. "I have been persuaded that it is simply out of the question that the first living matter evolved out of dead matter and then developed into an extraordinarily complicated creature," he said.

For a philosopher, Flew could be surprisingly dim. Or perhaps not so surprisingly.

"Almost unbelievable (sic)" complexity.... therefore "intelligence must have been involved".

It's very complex, and I don't understand it, so it can't be true?

Oh really? No Tone, not really.

Perhaps if instead of spending months "soul-searching" (whatever that means) he'd made the effort to understand the science, he wouldn't have found it so baffling at all. It's true that we don't KNOW how life evolved from non-life, but it's far from "out of the question". There is a wealth of scientific literature on the subject, my personal favourite being A. G. Cairns-Smith's Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story

Still, looking on the bright side:

But believers waiting to welcome this most prodigal of sons back into the fold were to be disappointed. Flew's conversion did not embrace such concepts as Heaven, good and evil or the afterlife – let alone divine intervention in human affairs. His God was strictly minimalist – very different from "the monstrous oriental despots of the religions of Christianity and Islam", as he liked to call them.

By the way, he wasn't "one of the founding fathers of Atheism". Atheism isn't a movement and doesn't have "founding fathers".

[JulieB]

Tea anyone??

good idea & then I have work to do!

[AVFCLaura]

Tea anyone??

Looks like we'd need a whiskey in it today! And I don't drink!

[mjmooney]

It reminds me of a short story I wrote back in school, about a religious man and an athiest. They got in a car crash. Both of them barely survived. The atheist man found faith and thanked god for his survival. The religious man turned against god because his injuries led him to never walk again.

Faith is fickle, all it takes is a little push one way or the other.

My sister-in-law used to be a churchgoer. But when her dad died (heart attack, in his 70s), she decided there couldn't be a god after all, and she became an atheist. I mean, WHAAAAT? I still can't work THAT one out. :|

[Chindie]

It reminds me of a short story I wrote back in school, about a religious man and an athiest. They got in a car crash. Both of them barely survived. The atheist man found faith and thanked god for his survival. The religious man turned against god because his injuries led him to never walk again.

Faith is fickle, all it takes is a little push one way or the other.

My sister-in-law used to be a churchgoer. But when her dad died (heart attack, in his 70s), she decided there couldn't be a god after all, and she became an atheist. I mean, WHAAAAT? I still can't work THAT one out. :|

Obviously thought her dad was Methusaleh, and felt short changed.

[mjmooney]

What's the Hindu take on this?

We don't do beef , pal :winkold:

You a practising Hindu then, McGrass?

I had you down as an agnostic.

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

Some peoples inner need to believe just isn't as strong as others, I have members in my family who have lost husbands/wives when they were in their 30s, and some still believe and some dont.

I don't see 'god' as an overbearing lord above us, I understand it as a humanites desire for an answer. Something that is in all of us. Some people see god as that wise man in the sky, others see god as money or science. Whatever gives us an answer and reassurance of their own existence. Whatever gives us purpose. That is what god really is imo. Religions are just a mask. Governments are just a mask. Our inner desire to have some form of meaning/purpose leads us to believe in one thing or another.

Of course that is what I think and because of that I don't believe in any of it. We are just as we are.

Pseudo-intellect ftw.

[MrWeedMcGrass]

What's the Hindu take on this?

We don't do beef , pal :winkold:

You a practising Hindu then, McGrass?

I had you down as an agnostic.

No , not exactly practicing but I don't do ANY meat , so the question of beef is a moot one :winkold:

[mjmooney]

What's the Hindu take on this?

We don't do beef , pal :winkold:

You a practising Hindu then, McGrass?

I had you down as an agnostic.

No , not exactly practicing but I don't do ANY meat , so the question of beef is a moot one :winkold:

Oh, OK.

What is your rationale for being a veggie, out of interest?

[MrWeedMcGrass]

What's the Hindu take on this?

We don't do beef , pal :winkold:

You a practising Hindu then, McGrass?

I had you down as an agnostic.

No , not exactly practicing but I don't do ANY meat , so the question of beef is a moot one :winkold:

Oh, OK.

What is your rationale for being a veggie, out of interest?

I adore animals , cannot even contemplate eating them.

Plus , all of my family members are vegetarians with the exception of my mum. I am simply used to vegetarian food , I love it, no complex religious beliefs or anything. :winkold:

[mjmooney]

What's the Hindu take on this?

We don't do beef , pal :winkold:

You a practising Hindu then, McGrass?

I had you down as an agnostic.

No , not exactly practicing but I don't do ANY meat , so the question of beef is a moot one :winkold:

Oh, OK.

What is your rationale for being a veggie, out of interest?

I adore animals , cannot even contemplate eating them.

Plus , all of my family members are vegetarians with the exception of my mum. I am simply used to vegetarian food , I love it, no complex religious beliefs or anything. :winkold:

Gotcha.

What does your mum do? Sneak off for a juicy steak every now and then?