Silly E. coli

Doesn’t this stubborn bacteria know that evolution is false, and all species, including microscopic ones, were created in their present forms by God 6,000 years ago?

E. coli caught in the act of evolving:

E. coli bacteria growing in a flask in a lab for nearly 25 years have learned to do something no E. coli has done since the Miocene epoch: eat a chemical called citrate in the presence of oxygen. Evolutionary biologists Zachary Blount and Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing and their colleagues describe the molecular steps leading to the feat online September 19 in Nature.

The work demonstrates that although new traits seem to emerge in the blink of an eye evolutionarily speaking, those traits are actually the product of thousands of generations of genetic tweaks.

“The ability to be able to not just talk about how genes evolve, but to see it in action is just awesome,” says Bruce Levin, a population and evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta. “This is really getting at the nitty-gritty of evolution.”

Check out this simple evolution simulation.

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Purpose driven pastor

Here is an interesting profile of Saddleback Church pastor, Rick Warren, and author of the best selling book, “The Purpose Driven Life.”

Warren seems to be attempting to make a resurgence by taking advantage of the 10-year anniversary of the work’s publication, which outlines the five “purposes” that people, specifically Christians, have in life. He is releasing a new edition of the book with a couple new chapters and well as some accompanying links to extra audio and video content, no doubt hoping to add more millions of dollars to the surge of book sales (and related instructional material) that he got from the first publication.

I was still a believer when “The Purpose Drive Life” first came out, and I can still rattle off the five main “purposes” off the top of my head: worship, fellowship, discipleship, evangelism and ministry. Indeed, my particular church had purchased long-wise banners that were hung around the sanctuary walls, almost like — cough — a graven images.

In any case, at the time, I was really struck by this purposefully vague and simple first sentence of the book and continue to be, if only for a different reason and in a different context:

It’s not about you.

Now, obviously from a Christian perspective, the sentence takes on a spiritual nature, reminding believers that they should not adopt the faith exclusively for their own gain but that they should approach Christianity looking outward to find ways to reach out to their community by way of discipleship, evangelism, ministry, etc. But from a secular perspective, the idea behind this opening can’t completely be scrapped. While I realize putting a secular spin on it would lift it completely out of the context I just mentioned, perhaps we can rework the sentence to read something like:

“Live selflessly” or perhaps “Leave the world a better place than you found it.”

This is, in my view, the more noble cause than the one purported by Warren because living with other’s people’s interests at heart does not need to be muddied by the auxiliary goals of trying to coerce people to believe in the Christian god or wasting time in worship and squandering resources that could be used to feed hungry mouths. The marriage of secular goals like helping the poor, feeding the sick and bolstering communities with spiritual ones is really an unholy union of counter-playing ideals because there’s no secret which goals take absolute precedent from the Christian worldview: if people are bound for hell, what difference does it make whether they have their carnal needs met?

I realize there are plenty of faith-based organizations feeding hungry people regardless of their “spiritual condition,” but reaching people for Christ is the mandated purpose of Christians based on the Great Commission. If their primary goal is anything else, they are simply not living up to the commands in the New Testament. Thus, while Warren’s PEACE Plan (Promote reconciliation, Equip servant leaders, Assist the poor, care for the sick, Educate the next generation) and others like it may have some laudable goals, the work that will make concrete differences in people’s lives must necessarily take a back seat, and that is the danger of any Christian-based ministry, no matter how benevolent it may seem.

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Freethinker Tweets of the day

[tweet https://twitter.com/NullGodPointer/status/275838337556811776]

[tweet https://twitter.com/GodlessAtheist/status/275836582584532992]

[tweet https://twitter.com/JakeFarrWharton/status/275828618251337729]

[tweet https://twitter.com/sean_quinton/status/275827916200374272]

[tweet https://twitter.com/sean_quinton/status/275827292457029632]

[tweet https://twitter.com/FlyingFree333/status/275819607011491840]

[tweet https://twitter.com/truthfulheretic/status/275818006205050880]

[tweet https://twitter.com/ChristianBurket/status/275812285237309440]

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Classic Hitchens

For the first 97,000-98,000 (years) of this, heaven watches with indifference. ‘Oh, there they go again. That whole civilization’s just died out. Eh, what are you gonna do? They’re raping each other again. They think that the other tribe has poisoned the wells, so they’re going to kill all their children.’ Just watch all that. Three thousand years ago it’s decided that, ‘No, we’ve got to intervene now.’

You have to believe it. You have to believe it, and revelation must be personal. It has to appear. So, we’ll pick the most backward, the most barbaric, the most illiterate, the most superstitious and the most savage people we can find in the most stony area of the world. We won’t appear to the Chinese, who can already read. … No, we’ll appear to this brutal, enslaved, hopeless, superstitious crowd, and we’ll force them to cut their way through all of their neighbors with slaughter, genocide and racism and settle on the only part of the Middle East where’s there’s no oil. And all subsequent revelations occur in the same district and without this, we wouldn’t know right from wrong.

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