It’s all over the news! It’s confirmed! California’s Proposition 8 has been ruled unconstitutional, violating both the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Read the entire decision document here:
Prop 8 Ruling (it will pop up, and you can expand it)
This is a tremendous victory for gay rights!
Jul 28
I finally added a new page dedicated to my steadily growing quote collection. Topics covered include:
I tried to avoid clichés and other over-cooked wordaphernalia. Use my contact form if you have some favorites you think are worthy of that sort of list. In other words, don’t tell me “Atheism is a non-prophet organization” thinking I’ll find it original and witty. It’s not.
Enjoy!
I wager that the British can unleash more gleefully scathing insults than anyone else in the world. No one else gives as much robust verbal flavor and intellectual ass-whackery to those they wish to take down a notch or two. Take the delightful and brilliant author, scientist, and loud-and-proud atheist Richard Dawkins and his recent commendation of Pope Benedict XVI in the wake of many critiques and criticisms concerning child abuse in the Roman Catholic Church:
“Should the pope resign?”
No. As the College of Cardinals must have recognized when they elected him, he is perfectly – ideally – qualified to lead the Roman Catholic Church. A leering old villain in a frock, who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds; a man who believes he is infallible and acts the part; a man whose preaching of scientific falsehood is responsible for the deaths of countless AIDS victims in Africa; a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence: in short, exactly the right man for the job. He should not resign, moreover, because he is perfectly positioned to accelerate the downfall of the evil, corrupt organization whose character he fits like a glove, and of which he is the absolute and historically appropriate monarch.No, Pope Ratzinger should not resign. He should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice – the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution – while it tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears.
In the words of some college student somewhere… “Oh snap!”
(source)
Photo by The Cambodia Trust (flickr.com)
There is no god. Even if there were, it clearly doesn’t give a damn about you missing some bodily tissue. If it did, it could fix it! How do we know this? Science!
The fabulous website whywontgodhealamputees.com is based on the challenge that if a god is all-powerful, all-loving, and promises to answer prayer, then why won’t this god heal someone who has a missing limb? It’s never happened, and we know it never will. At least, not through prayer.
An exciting landmark has been reached in regards to a gene that may regulate tissue regeneration in mammals (that means humans too, Creationists!). This ability to replace damaged flesh with healthy, scar-free flesh seems to be triggered by the loss of the p21 gene. When the p21 gene is lacking, cells behave more like embryonic stem cells rather than adult cells.
“Much like a newt that has lost a limb, these mice will replace missing or damaged tissue with healthy tissue that lacks any sign of scarring,” said the project’s lead scientist Ellen Heber-Katz, Ph.D., a professor in Wistar’s Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis program. “While we are just beginning to understand the repercussions of these findings, perhaps, one day we’ll be able to accelerate healing in humans by temporarily inactivating the p21 gene.”
[Andrew Snyder, Ph.D. stated,] “In normal cells, p21 acts like a brake to block cell cycle progression in the event of DNA damage, preventing the cells from dividing and potentially becoming cancerous,” Heber-Katz said. “In these mice without p21, we do see the expected increase in DNA damage, but surprisingly no increase in cancer has been reported.”
(Read the rest over at PhysOrg)
If it may work on a mouse, could tissue regeneration be available to humans in the future? Do you think this would encourage or stifle the superstitions about divine healing?
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